Hello everyone,

This week, The Tribune has given On The Table (OTT) the opportunity to bring you, their beloved readers, something a little different.

I’m Johann, and for the past three years, I’ve been developing recipes at McGill’s oldest culinary magazine, OTT. This week I’m bringing you some of my work, as part of our magazine’s new partnership with The Tribune. Just as The New Yorker has Bon Appetit Vox has Eater, now The Tribune has OTT.

Since our founding, OTT has aimed to do three things:

1. Distribute beautiful print magazines freely to McGillians.
2. Create content about, surrounding, and that is food, inspired by cooks and journalists from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt to Anthony Bourdain.
3. Help McGillians feed themselves better, through teaching skills, recipes, and where to eat.

Coming very soon, you’ll be able to find our past print issues digitized on The Tribune’s website, as well as individual articles and recipes.

A lot of OTT’s content is niche. We nerd out on food history, chemistry, showcase unknown cuisines, and sometimes just write odd journalism which only barely excuses itself through the notion of “food content”—but I really think you’ll like our stuff!

The bulk of this piece is meant to give you a taste of the content we make at OTT. As the days are getting shorter, I’ve developed two soup recipes to keep you warm. Far from being just recipes, they also teach you some food chemistry theory and techniques.

The first recipe is a velvety lentil soup, with ridiculously good Brussels sprouts which you should make even by themselves. Here, I’m teaching you how to use alkalinity to your advantage. You’ll feel like a mad scientist as you vapourize lentils in a foaming cauldron.

The second recipe is a light and intensely savoury mushroom soup, with a crispy ginger-leek topping and infused oil. Here it’s less about technique than theory—I developed this recipe to be the most umami possible! I explain the chemistry of “umami,” and there’s a fun little exercise for you to taste the chemistry of umami as you cook.

Of course, I don’t actually expect that many of you will cook my recipes to the letter. In fact, I don’t really think you should!

To me, cooking is like jazz. It’s important to be able to play the standards, that’s for sure, there’s nothing wrong with following a recipe rote—you learn what works well, and why it works. But in my recipes, what I want is to teach you techniques to improvise with. So take whatever suits you, and go make some stomachs happy!

– Johann Pacheco-Veissière, November 2024

P.S. If you wanna send OTT a recipe or article, we got a form on instagram. @onthetablemag.

Lentil Soup!

Ingredients:

• 1+½ cups split red lentils
• Baking soda
  • ½ tbsp for lentils
  • 1 tsp for Brussels sprouts
• 500g Brussels sprouts
  • Halve, then cut off root. Keep loose leaves
• 2 medium onions (red preferred)
  • Halve, peel, cut off root, slice ~4cm thick. Make slices parallel to root, like latitude lines
• 1 red bell pepper
  • Halve, remove stem and seeds, slice thin. (cut with shiny side down to avoid injury)
• 6 cloves garlic
  • Lightly crush, then peel, cut root off, roughly chop
• ½ inch ginger
  • Peel (spoon works well), mince
• Spices (any you enjoy, my choices below, I would not omit cumin or whole mustard)
  • 1 tbsp whole cumin
  • ½ tbsp whole mustard seed
  • ½ tbsp coarse chili flakes
  • 2 tsp gochutgaru or Kashmiri chili
  • 2 tsp turmeric
  • 2 tsp paprika (add separately)
  • 2 tsp coriander
  • Seeds of 2 cardamom pods
  • Fresh-ground black pepper (grind until your forearm hurts)
• 2+½ tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tbsp apple-cider vinegar
• 5 dashes fish sauce (for veg, soy sauce)
• Salt to taste
• Olive oil

Steps

1. Soak lentils in ~5 cups of water for a total of 30 mins. While soaking, do steps 2-4.
2. Cut all vegetables (see ingredients).
3. Prepare Brussels sprouts:
   1. Off heat, in a large pan, pour a generous amount of olive oil (~2cm / ½ inch). Lay all Brussels sprouts cut side down, sprinkle loose leaves on top. (If you want to minimize dishes, you can do this in the soup pot, although you’ll likely need multiple batches.)
   2. Mix 1 tsp baking soda into ½ cup warm water.
   3. Place pan (3.1) uncovered on high heat. When you begin to hear sizzling: Add 1 garlic clove, alkaline water (3.2), then immediately cover.
   4. Listen closely: At first you will hear simmering, then boiling. When it begins to sound like frying, remove cover. (Another good cue to remove cover is the smell of browning.)
   5. Carefully flip over one sprout. If the cut side is already deeply browned, remove pan from heat. If not, turn heat to medium low, and fry until brown, then remove from heat.
   6. Lift sprouts out of oil, keep oil, set sprouts aside.
4. Prepare aromatic base:
   1. Return pan with oil (3.6) to burner, set to medium high.
   2. Immediately add onions and ginger. Sautee until onions are soft.
   3. Then, add garlic and spices (except paprika or herbs). Sautee until onions or garlic begin to brown around edges. Remove from heat.
5. Soup chemistry:
   1. Drain lentils (1).
   2. Add drained lentils (5.1), then five cups boiling water to a large soup pot. N.B. It is important the lentils and water do not reach more than 3/5ths up the pot. With the soda, the pot will foam until the lentils dissolve (think baking soda volcano). In a small pot, the foam could overflow. If your pot isn’t quite big enough, you can stir nonstop, which prevents a buildup of foam.
   3. Add the oil and aromatics from the pan (4.3) to the pot, as well as paprika or herbs (if desired).
   4. Add ½ tbsp baking soda to pot.
   5. Cook on high heat, stirring frequently, until lentils almost completely disappear (~6-8 minutes from boil).
   6. Neutralize soup pH by adding 2+½ tbsp tomato paste and 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar.
6. Finishing:
   1. Add Brussels sprouts (3.6) and sliced red bell pepper to pot.
   2. Add 5 dashes fish sauce.
   3. Cook until red bell peppers are tender.
   4. If consistency is thicker than you would prefer, adjust with water before salting.
   5. Salt the soup! This is the last step, and you can taste to see if it’s missing anything: More pepper? More salt? Maybe more olive oil? (Note from Italian proofreader: there’s never enough olive oil. Add more olive oil.)

Blurb

In this recipe, the main lesson I aim to transmit is how to use alkalinity in cooking. The higher the pH, the faster two things happen: The breakdown of plant matter, and browning.

The first point is useful in a lot of contexts, but most of all when cooking legumes. Legumes can take hours to reach a toothsome texture, and even longer to completely fall apart. It’s common to add a touch of baking soda to cook lentils a touch faster, but to showcase the effect I developed this method. By upping the pH a lot, everything breaks down a lot faster—the pot foams up and the lentils and onions essentially dissolve. At the same time, I wanted to keep some ingredients toothsome, for which we need to back-adjust the pH (with tasty acids) before adding the rest in.

The Brussels sprouts are a perfect example of browning. By dousing them with alkaline water, the sugars and amino acids dissolve into the water, the base saturates the leaves, and the liquid softens them. As soon as the water evaporates, they caramelize deeply and quickly. You can use the same methods to caramelize onions twice as fast! I also recommend trying these sprouts on their own—just add salt and some chili flake after it’s done cooking.

All these lessons about alkalinity work in reverse when it comes to acidity. Adding acid to plant matter will make them cook slower, and acid will prevent browning. So, always add acid to legumes at the end of cooking, and if you don’t want a brown crust on something (e.g keep a cake very pale), add a touch of acid.

Umami soup with leek infused oil and crispy leek topping

Blurb

This recipe is less about food chemistry techniques and more so about food chemistry theory: Specifically, the theory of umami. Using chemical principles, I developed the umami-est soup possible. You can taste the chemical theory along the way. As a little bonus, I put in a new technique with the microwave oil-infusion.

“Umami” is a Japanese word which has been wholly incorporated into the English language. It’s the fifth flavour to sour, sweet, bitter, and salty—which remarkably English lacked an exact word for, although “savoury” approximates it. It’s that flavour for meaty-savoury-salivatingly-yummy which is chemically manufactured to sprinkle on Doritos. For this, we thank Kikunae Ikeda, who discovered what umami is at the molecular level.

Glutamate, discovered in dashi (in the recipe, step 2.7), is the chemical that activates the receptors in our tongue for “umami”. Glutamate is like a key to a keyhole in your tongue; when it fits in, you experience umami. Kombu, half of dashi’s major ingredients, is one of the most glutamate-rich things in nature, although many other things contain it, such as yeast extract, tomatoes, and parmesan.

Although, glutamate is not the only chemical which plays a role in tasting umami. Some things can “open up” the keyhole to make glutamate bind better, particularly inosinate and guanylate. Basically, when these chemicals combine, things taste MUCH more umami. Dashi, which has been made for much longer than the chemistry has been known, uses this synergy.

Dried fish, like katsuobushi, contains inosinate, as does most seafood, chicken, and nori. For vegetarians, all hope is not lost—guanylate, found in mushrooms, also synergizes with glutamate. Not all mushrooms have guanylate, but enoki and dried shiitakes are particularly rich in it.

I hope from my recipe you consider stocking the ingredients for dashi. A stock makes any soup vastly better, and dashi is one of the few stocks which one can make entirely from shelf-stable ingredients. It’s more neutral than you’d think—it’s essentially umami-tea. It’ll enhance the flavour of most soups.

If you want to play around with umami synergy, check out the Umami Information Centre. On www.umamiinfo.com, there’s a guide on which ingredients have what chemicals.

Also, you can do the oil infusion trick with a million different things! The classics are shallot and garlic, but I’ve also done it with capers, oregano, and scotch bonnets—all amazing additions to a bowl of ramen.

Ingredients

• 2x 10cm sheet (10-14g) of kombu
• 3 handfuls of katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes)
• 10g dried shiitake (any mushroom works, shitake is ideal due to high guanylate concentration)
• 4 chicken thighs
  • Make into thick strips by cutting into thirds, lengthwise.
• Marinade / Seasoning:
  • 2 tbsp soy sauce
  • 2 tbsp mirin
  • 1 minced garlic clove
  • ½ inch minced ginger
• ½ head of cabbage
  • Quarter, shred by cutting thin strips lengthwise or
  • Quarter, shred with box grater
• 150g enoki mushrooms
  • Cut off end, separate
• 2 carrots
  • Peel, then halve, cut into very thin half-moons
• 1 inch ginger
  • Peel, cut into matchsticks
• 1 leek
  • Cut in half, wash, separate white from green, remove root, slice white into half moons, as thin as reasonable to your knife skills
• 1 bunch green onion
  • Separate white from green part
  • Remove root from white, cut in half
  • Slice green into rounds, as thin as reasonable to your knife skills (as close to serving as possible)
• ½ cup peanut oil

Steps

1. Marinade (Make up to 1.1 even if not using chicken, as it is added in 3.1)
   1. Combined minced garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and ginger in a small bowl.
   2. Place chicken thighs in a Ziploc, pour contents of bowl over the chicken thighs.
   3. Close the Ziploc almost the whole way, squeeze air out from open corner, close, then massage thighs.
   4. Marinate two hours, up to three days.
2. Broth (Mushroom Dashi)
   1. Fill a pot with five cups cold water, add kombu. (Optionally, let sit for 1 hr). If making leek oil, also add leek greens, because why the hell not?
   2. Heat the pot on medium low heat until it begins to simmer.
   3. In meantime, prepare vegetables (6-11).
   4. When a steady simmer is reached, remove kombu and leek greens, discard kombu. [1]
   5. Ladle ~2 cups of hot liquid over dried shiitakes in a bowl.
   6. Add katsuobushi to pot (2.4), raise heat to medium, boil 8 minutes. After 8 minutes, turn off heat.
   7. Let katsuobushi infuse for another 8 minutes. After, strain, discard used katsuobushi, place liquid back in pot [2]
   8. Add liquid from bowl (2.4) into strained Dashi. when cool, squeeze liquid out of mushrooms into pot. Slice re-hydrated mushrooms, set aside.
3. Soup
   1. On medium high heat, add marinade and the chicken, if used.
   2. Add carrots, simmer 5 minutes.
   3. Add white of green onions, enoki, chicken, simmer 5 minutes.
   4. Add cabbage, re-hydrated mushrooms (2.8), simmer 5 minutes.
   5. Turn off heat.
4. Flavoured oil
   1. In a heat safe container (e.g., Pyrex), add sliced leek whites, ginger matchsticks, and half a cup of oil.
   2. Microwave on full power for 5 minutes, remove, stir.
   3. Microwave on full power for 2 more minutes, stir. Repeat until leeks are crispy.
5. Serving
   1. In the bottom of the bowl you’ll eat in, add leek oil, ladle soup on top.
   2. Top with green onion greens, crispy leeks.

Notes:

[1] As a way to see the chemistry of umami in action, reserve a little bit of the pure kombu stock.

[2] With this liquid, compare the (2.4) kombu stock (glutamate), the (2.6) kombu+mushroom stock (glutamate+guanylate), and (2.7) kombu+katsuobushi (glutamate+inosiate). Which tastes the most savoury? Rinse your mouth with water between tests. Compare to 2.8.