Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- This week on Milk Street, we travel to Portugal, where we begin with Madeiran pork with wine and garlic.

Then next up is a simple garlic and cilantro soup with chickpeas, and then we finish up with one of my favorite desserts of all time.

It's a Portuguese sponge cake, a simple but original dessert.

It offers a layer of custardy eggs just beneath the surface.

Please stay tuned as we travel Portugal to help change the way we cook.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sauted, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

- If you spend any time in Portugal, you realize that many of the desserts use a lot of egg yolks, and this is because hundreds of years ago in the convents, nuns used egg whites to starch their habits.

Egg yolks were left over, many of them.

They preserved them with sugar and used them in baking.

So you got soft, brioche-style buns stuffed with golden cream and one of the more famous desserts, pastel de nata, which is an egg custard baked into a flaky shell.

You'll see that in the windows of lots of shops.

Now today, we're gonna do a dessert I'd never had before, p�o de l-- this is a sponge cake.

Some versions we tried were totally liquid in the center-- you almost had to eat it with a spoon.

Others were more fully cooked.

So we needed an expert, and we ran into a home cook who was very well known for her sponge cakes.

Her name is Lourdes Varelia, and she makes a recipe handed down from her mother.

Now, she says her family likes her version more than her mother's version.

(chuckles) Her mother's was fully cooked.

Hers has just a layer of custard right under the top crust.

It's absolutely fabulous.

So let's go make one of my favorite desserts of all time, a Portuguese sponge cake called p�o de l.

- The Portuguese p�o de l is one of those cakes that every Portuguese home cook might proudly put in the center of the table for both friends and for guests.

This is a dessert within the Portuguese canon of desserts that focuses on eggs.

Now, the shape of this dessert is unique, and that is going to be aided by the way we put parchment paper inside the pan to line it.

We have a nine-inch springform pan here.

It's already been sprayed with cooking spray.

This will help the parchment stick.

And we have a very large 14-inch circle of parchment.

You can use a square or a round.

I'll put this right in the middle and then push down.

Now, hold the center steady and then start pressing the parchment out toward the edges of the cake, and you're gonna let all those folds and ripples stay there.

Resist the urge to press it up against the sides of the pan.

You want to see all those ripples and folds.

It's really what the shape of the cake is based on.

Now, this cake has very few ingredients.

Eggs form the base of the cake, but before we start with the eggs, we're gonna mix together the dry ingredients so they're ready to go when we are ready to use them.

We're using cake flour for this.

Cake flour is made from a softer wheat, so there's less potential for it to form too much gluten, and this helps give the cake a light, airy texture.

We're also adding a little bit of baking powder and salt, and then we will whisk those together.

Now, we have the eggs in the mixer.

This is four whole eggs plus four whole egg yolks.

We're going to add a little vanilla extract to this and whip these by themselves for about two minutes, just to get the aeration started.

And then we will start slowly streaming in granulated sugar.

The sugar helps stabilize the eggs and it allows them to triple in volume.

And then we're going to be making, at that point, an egg foam.

Egg foam is a classic beginning to a lot of sponge cakes, such as the genoise cake or a biscuit.

So once our egg foam has tripled in volume-- it's going to have a beautiful shiny, smooth surface-- we'll proceed with the rest of the recipe.

(mixer stops) Ah, this is a beautiful egg foam.

You can see that the volume has actually more than tripled.

It's got a gorgeous color, light and pale.

It's creamy, it's smooth.

The ribbon falls.

This is called a ribbon, by the way, when you lift it up and let it fall in a stream.

And when you do the ribbon test, it means, how long does that ribbon sit there on top of the surface before it goes flat?

Now, we're going to add the flour with the machine still running, but we're gonna turn it to medium-low so we don't get a lot of flour flipping out of the pan.

And then after the flour's incorporated spoon by spoon, we'll start drizzling in the olive oil.

You want to turn this off before the olive oil is fully incorporated, and we're gonna finish folding it in by hand.

Now, not every p�o de l has olive oil in it, and most of them don't, actually.

We got the idea to add it from a recipe by Nuno Mendes.

It's a beautiful addition to this cake, mostly because it adds moisture and flavor, of course, that fruity olive oil-ness.

But also, in Portugal, they're using farm-fresh eggs for their cake, probably from a neighbor down the road.

We don't always have that here, so our eggs can use a little help from the olive oil.

And I want to show you this texture again, too, because it's beautiful.

It's a thicker ribbon and it has all the air still incorporated.

And we'll finish folding the olive oil in by hand.

It's a little bit streaky right now.

We'll continue folding until there are no more streaks.

Now, we'll pour this in our prepared pan.

Remember, the parchment paper has all these beautiful folds in it.

You want to pour right in the middle and avoid getting any batter on the outside of the paper.

This is beautiful.

You can see the aeration, it's a light, fluffy batter.

So now this goes into a 375-degree oven, about 30 to 33 minutes.

During that time, the cake will rise quite a bit and the top surface will become a beautiful golden brown.

So the p�o de l, when it's in the oven after about 30 to 33 minutes, we talked about how it's going to rise dramatically and get a beautiful golden-brown surface.

The way to test doneness is not by pressing on the center, because we want to make sure we don't overbake this cake.

When we want the center to remain a little bit soft and undercooked, the best way to test doneness is, take a toothpick, insert it about two inches from the edge of the cake-- the outer edge-- and that should come out clean.

The center you want to be still wet.

Then when you take the cake out of the oven, put it on a wire rack to cool, and at that point, check to make sure that no batter has stuck to the pan on the outside of the parchment paper-- sometimes that happens.

Just loosen that with a knife before you let the cake cool.

And then after an hour, the cake looks like this when it cools.

It's a beautiful golden brown on top, but the center has deflated and sunk in the middle.

And that is supposed to happen.

That's part of the character of this cake.

It's that custardy layer underneath the crust that is heavy, and that's what's falling and causing the deflation.

The sides, however, are light and airy.

They've baked firm in a spongy texture, and that's what you want, the contrast between the firm, spongy sides and that really custardy layer underneath.

Okay, so we'll just loosen the sides of the springform and remove that, and then you have all these lovely folds of parchment.

Just very carefully peel them away.

You want to keep that shape of the cake sides.

It's kind of like unwrapping a gift very carefully.

There we are.

Oh, this is beautiful.

You can see the aeration in the sides of the cake.

So we'll remove this from the parchment.

Just slip a spatula underneath-- gently loosen the edges first.

There we go.

And then go all the way underneath.

Hold the paper, it'll help.

There we go.

Okay, then you can just pick this up and transfer this right to the platter.

Oh, look at that!

You can actually already see the custard in the inside.

A serrated knife is the best thing to use for this.

It gets through the crust really nicely.

Okay.

There you go-- a cake with beautiful, contrasting textures, light, spongy, and in this nice gooey, custardy, eggy texture.

What's also fun about this cake is that no two are exactly alike.

They each have their own unique shape.

The p�o de l is generally served just as is, and it's fantastic that way.

We here at Milk Street, we really love a little bit of extra virgin olive oil drizzled on top.

It sort of complements the olive oil that's been baked inside of the cake, so we just drizzle it lightly with olive oil.

You could also serve it with fresh fruit and whipped cream.

And we use a little bit of finishing salt, a little sea salt flakiness, to add a little bit of crunch and extra salty tang.

This is our Portuguese egg cake known as p�o de l, a beautiful contrast of textures between the soft, spongy outside and the moist, gooey inside.

This cake has an unusually beautiful presentation for such a rustic homemade style.

It is definitely, most definitely, worthy of a centerpiece.

- So now we're gonna make a Madeiran pork with wine and garlic.

It comes, obviously, from the island of Madeira, off the coast of Portugal, and the Portuguese invented this dish.

Originally, it was pork and it was marinated a long time, and that's a way of, obviously, keeping the pork in a barrel with wine and vinegar for a long voyage.

And some of this ended up in Goa, in India.

And it was turned into a local dish with tamarind and cinnamon and cardamom.

And many years later, chili peppers came from the Americas and that combined in this dish, as well, and it became a very hot curry.

But this dish does start with a long marinade, with wine and vinegar and spices, and that's what we're gonna do now.

So we're starting with five pounds of pork shoulder, which have been cut into pieces and trimmed, and that goes into the pot, and then we'll get our flavorings.

We have ten bay leaves, a tablespoon of dry oregano, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, six cloves, then a teaspoon each of salt and pepper, and then six cloves of garlic.

And for the liquid, we're using two cups of wine and then a cup of cider vinegar.

And now we'll just make sure everything's submerged.

So now we want to put the top on, we'll put it in the fridge.

It needs at least an hour or two, but it's probably better for 24, up to 48 hours.

The more time, of course, the more you can taste the marinade and the slightly more sour it gets with the cider vinegar, which is actually a good thing.

So we let this marinate overnight.

It's up to simmer now, we'll put the top on, and this goes into a 325 oven for an hour and a half, and we'll stir once halfway through cooking.

So it's been an hour and a half, we stirred halfway through, and now we're gonna do some really odd things.

First of all, this doesn't look great, but it's gonna look great in just a few minutes, and second, we're gonna take the pork out and we're gonna put it on, believe it or not, a cooling rack.

The reason we're doing that is because we're going to let any of the liquid drop down through the rack and essentially air-dry the pork, so when we're gonna saut it-- and we're doing this at the end of the recipe, not at the beginning, which is quite unusual-- we'll get a nice browning to it, you know, the Maillard reaction with all the flavor.

So instead of this color, we'll have something really good-looking.

So I'm gonna let this sit for about ten minutes.

So now, the fat should have risen to the top.

We got a little bowl for that.

I like to use a ladle for this.

Get the fat out.

Now, we're reserving this fat, because we're gonna use that in a few minutes to saut this meat.

Just a nice way to add some flavor.

So now the not-so-secret ingredient, Madeira, of course.

We'll add that to the cooking liquid that's been defatted and we'll get this up to a simmer.

We're gonna simmer this for 15 to 20 minutes until it gets reduced to about a cup.

So while the sauce is reducing, we're going to saut the meat, as I said, at the end of the recipe instead of the beginning, which makes this pretty unusual.

So we reserved the fat-- some of the fat, at least-- from that sauce, and we're going to use that, and that's just going to add a lot more flavor, of course, instead of just using, let's say, canola oil.

And now we're gonna take the meat and do it in one batch in the skillet.

(sizzling) And notice, by the way, the meat has really dried out pretty nicely just sitting there.

So let me turn up the heat a little bit.

There's a lot of meat in this pan.

We're gonna need a lot of heat.

One other thing I did just a few minutes ago was, with my hands, I took off any pieces of fat that were attached to the meat-- there were only a few pieces.

We're gonna brown the meat, it'll take five to seven minutes while that's being reduced.

And when the meat's ready and the sauce is reduced, we'll put them all together.

So the meat's now browned.

It looks much better, doesn't it?

It has lots of rich Maillard on it.

And this has now been reduced.

A good way to judge, by the way, liquid when you're reducing it is to take the pan and tilt it away from you.

And you can see that you have about a cup right there.

So now we're gonna take the sauce and we're gonna marry it to the meat.

So we'll cook this down for three or four minutes.

We want the sauce to really coat the meat, because this is not a stew, it's not a soup.

It's really about the meat.

And we can serve this, for example, as part of a sandwich, which is what I'm gonna do now.

So you definitely want to get that liquid reduced down and coating each piece of meat.

This recipe is about resurrection, because we had pale gray meat ten minutes ago, and now we have this wonderful browned pork.

It's coated in this Madeira sauce.

But it's simple, right?

I mean, there aren't a lot of ingredients.

So you can do lots of things with this.

You can serve it just in a bowl, you can serve it with rice.

Traditionally, it's actually served really as a sandwich.

And so that's what I'm gonna do now, because a nice crusty bread with this pork, with all those juices...

Some fresh oregano.

We use dried oregano right at the beginning, if you remember.

So that's it, that's our carne vinha d'alhos.

This is Madeiran pork with wine and garlic.

It has a surprise ending, which means the meat is actually browned after it's cooked at the end, and married to that wonderful reduced Madeira sauce.

Carne vinha d'alhos.

Simple recipe, full of flavor.

Great on a sandwich.

- This soup, with its bright green broth, is our take on aorda alentejana, which is a Portuguese soup from the Alentejana region.

Now, depending on where you are, you might find it's prepared with a couple of different flavors, but we learned that it's more commonly prepared with cilantro, garlic, oil, eggs, and bread.

Now, we favored a preparation in which we make a bit of a pesto out of the cilantro, and we blend it into the broth right before we serve it.

It allows all of those bright, bold flavors to remain very, very present.

But my favorite part is the garnish that goes on top of this soup, which is a soft-cooked egg.

All you got to do is take two cups of water in a medium saucepot and bring it up to a simmer with a steamer basket set into it.

Once you see all the steam coming up, go ahead and drop your eggs into the basket and cover it with a lid to allow them to steam for about seven minutes.

After those seven minutes, though, immediately transfer them over to ice water to stop the cooking process, and what you'll be left with is a perfectly fudgy, gooey egg yolk that will actually help thicken the soup right at the end.

Now, to start our "pesto" of sorts, we need to break down this jalapeo.

Now, all we're doing is removing the stem.

We're leaving all of the seeds and the rib inside, which means we are containing all of that heat in this flavoring paste.

If you are sensitive to heat, go ahead and cut out all of the seeds and ribs and discard those, and work with the remainder of the pepper.

I'm just going to cut it in half lengthwise, put the flat side down, and just give it a very, very rough chop through.

The rest of the work's going to be done by the food processor.

As soon as you touch that jalapeo, go ahead and wash your hands, so that way, none of that capsaicin can go anywhere else but the pesto.

To this jalapeo, we'll add in two cups of very lightly packed but roughly chopped cilantro.

There's a lot of flavor in the stems themselves.

Because it's getting blended in a food processor, none of it is going to get stringy or tough on you.

We're also going to be adding in some brightness in the form of one tablespoon lemon juice, as well as one tablespoon lemon zest.

We'll also be throwing in half a teaspoon of smoked paprika for some nice earthy depth, along with half a teaspoon each of salt and pepper.

This last ingredient that we're going to throw into our food processor before we blitz is a quarter-cup of parmesan cheese.

Typically, when this is made in Portugal, you will see S�o Jorge cheese get used, but that's a lot harder to come by here in the States.

So we're sticking with the parmesan, and now we blend.

So now that everything is nice and broken down in here, I'm going to keep the engine running, and then I'll stream in about half a cup of olive oil, and that's going to thicken this pesto up and bring it together into a paste.

(processor stops) And that's that-- our pesto is ready for the end of this recipe, so now we can look at our bread.

Here I have some rustic bread.

It's been sliced into half-inch slices and then torn up into pieces.

And to that, I'll be adding in a quarter-cup of olive oil, which you don't want to skimp on.

That oil is what's going to give this soup its body.

In addition to the oil, we'll be throwing in half a teaspoon of smoked paprika.

And we do just want to give this a toss just to make sure all that flavor does get distributed.

We want the oil to absorb into the breadcrumbs, so that way, when we toast them in our pot, they are toasty and flavorful through and through.

Here I have an eight-quart pot that I have set over medium heat, and I'm just going to throw these in to toast for about six to eight minutes or until they're well-browned on all sides.

My bread not only is toasted, but because the paprika blooms in all of that oil, it lends it this really great orange color.

Transfer all of that out of the pan and back into the bowl.

I'm using a slotted spoon to reserve any of that flavored oil in the pan, and that way we can keep cooking.

Now that the croutons are out of the pot, we're starting the soup off with eight cloves of garlic that have been finely chopped, and we want to cook that through until it's aromatic, and that shouldn't even take a minute.

I can already smell the garlic, so we can now throw in two cans of chickpeas that have been drained off.

(sizzling) To make this soup actually soupy, we can go ahead and throw in six cups of low-sodium chicken broth.

If you wanted to make this vegetarian-friendly, you could totally substitute in veggie broth.

Now, here's the best part.

All we need to do now is bring this entire mixture up to a simmer over medium-high heat, and that should only take about three minutes.

We're only looking to warm this through.

So we're not going to be cooking this much further than the three minutes.

We're going to take it completely off heat and we'll go ahead and add in our cilantro mixture.

Give that little pesto a nice stir.

And now from here, we could start plating up, but I want to take care of that soft-cooked egg for garnish first.

Now that it's been chilling out after it's been peeled, we can go ahead and take it and cut it in half to show you just how fudgy that yolk became.

Oh, that looks really, really good.

Now, before I get too ahead of myself, I do want to taste our soup just to see if it needs any salt or pepper.

Can use a little bit of salt.

And personally, I like black pepper, so a little bit more is going in.

So now we can go ahead and plate up.

The first thing that goes into the bowl isn't the soup-- it's the croutons.

I'm gonna load it up with as many croutons as I want.

We can now ladle in all of this delicious broth over the croutons, which, thankfully, because we toasted them, they don't immediately dissolve into the soup.

I like to top this off with a little bit of extra parmesan cheese just grated right on top, a little extra pinch of paprika for that bright red color, and finally, those two jammy eggs, soft-cooked and ready to eat.

And that's that, a garlic and cilantro soup with chickpeas.

You can get this recipe, as well as all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sauted, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

- Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to be the first to welcome you to Tel Aviv... - Welcome to Oaxaca's airport.

- Welcome to Beirut.

(man speaking Hebrew) - (speaking world language) - Bonjour, je m'appelle Chris.

- We call it supa kanja.

It's the word for gumbo.

- Christopher, you have to make the authentic, original cotoletta alla Bolognese for me.

- So this is the Eduardo Garca blender.

- This is the no electricity.

- Next is dessert.

- That is really good.

I notice when you cook sometimes, you add a little bit of something, and then you just put the whole bowl in.

- I like to be generous with my food.

Generosity is important in cooking.

- That's true.

- Can start building bridges, and food is definitely a perfect common ground.

- This is a generational thing.

It's, it's something that you inherit.

- Yeah, that was great.

(woman speaking Mandarin) - What was this for?

What did she say?

- You get one more chance.

- Salute.

- How is it?

He's speechless.

- I'm speechless.

That's so good.