Feb 11, 2007 By Jennifer Harr 8 min read

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Want to go around the world? Head into the kitchen and explore the cuisine of a new region. While food might not be a complete substitute for a balmy beach in a tropical paradise, taking a vacation with your taste buds will be gentler on your wallet – and you won’t have to wait for a passport.

At the recent Festival of Food and Wines at Lakeview Golf Resort and Spa in Morgantown, W.Va., chefs demonstrated dishes that took classes from Jamaica to Spain and from the Pacific Rim back to the state of California.

All of the dishes were tasted at a chef’s dinner that was part of the weekend, and were prepared and served by the chefs themselves.

Jamaican Spice

Executive pastry chef Charmaine McFarlane said the basic seasonings of Jamaican cuisine are ginger, garlic, allspice and hot peppers.

McFarlane also admits a fondness for rum.

“I put rum in everything. I’m not going to lie,” she said.

In both of her recipes – a coconut custard and the filling for a beef patty – McFarlane uses a low-proof dark rum for flavoring.

The beef patty is essentially a meat-filled turnover that focuses more on taste than presentation.

“This is nothing that’s meant to be fancy and highfalutin; this is down-home cooking,” she said.

She doesn’t crimp the dough when she makes the turnovers – just pats some water around the edge, squeezes out air and pushes the dough together with her fingers.

“People are going to eat these so fast they’re not going to look at the crimping,” she said.

McFarlane, the executive pastry chef for the Hotel Sofitel in Philadelphia, was going to college with the intention of being a doctor when she discovered a love of cooking and baking.

She said she dropped out of college and into culinary school.

She offered several tips during the class, and tried to demystify making the homemade piecrust that holds the turnover filling. At-home cooks making the crust by hand need to use chilled but pliable butter to make the perfect crust, she said. The advice is in opposition to other recipes that call for completely chilled butter.

McFarlane said she always uses unsalted butter in her cooking. Salt is put into butter to cover any rancidity, she said, so it’s not always easy to detect by smell that salted butter has gone bad. The other reason she uses unsalted butter is to control the salt content herself.

McFarlane said that vanilla beans, one of the key ingredients in her custard, are expensive. She said that is because “there’s a lot of love and care that goes into them.”

They have to be hand-pollinated, only grow certain times of year and are handpicked.

To get the most out of hers, McFarlane massages the pod before she splits it. Warming it up makes it easier for her to scrape the seeds from the inside. In this recipe, she added the seeds and the scraped pods to the custard to get every bit of flavor from the bean.

The price of vanilla beans goes up and down, McFarlane said, likening them to the stock market.

She advised that if they’re not going to be used quickly, they may be wrapped in plastic and stored in the refrigerator.

McFarlane said putting the delicate beans in the freezer will change the texture and make getting the seeds out impossible.

McFarlane said that cooking the custard in a water bath, which might seem like a pain, is really an essential step.

“That keeps the heat gentle, so you don’t make scrambled egg soup,” she said.

Tapas of Spain

Corporate chef Joseph W. Resick of the Frank J. Pasquweilla Conference Center, Harrigan’s Caf? and Wine Deck in Johnstown, educated the class about the “little bites” that are great accompanied by a glass of wine.

Tapas are relatively new, said Resick, a Champion native. He said one of the stories about how they came to be is that to keep fruit flies away from wine, a Spanish barkeep used a piece of cheese or meat to cover a wine glass. The barkeep noticed people drank wine and nibbled, so he started serving little bites of food with the drinks.

Over time, Resick said tapas expanded from a simple piece of meat or cheese, into more flavorful dishes, but they’ve retained their simplicity.

“Tapas are a real fun food,” he said.

To garnish his tapas, Resick said he uses homemade garlic oil, made simply by simmering garlic in oil. Resick said he maintains the cloves to use as garnish for the dishes.

His tapas ran the gamut – beef with a Spanish sheep’s milk cheese called Manchego, chicken in pomegranate sauce, potatoes and Chorizo sausage and a Spanish brushetta.

The brushetta, typically associated with Italy, uses a spicy Spanish ham called Serrano.

But if vegetarian is more your flair, Resick also offered pepper stuff eggplant slices. To get the eggplant nice and thin, he sliced it using a mandolin. He roasted both the eggplant and the poblano peppers used to fill it.

Resick said it was important to roast the eggplant until it is pliable, because if it’s undercooked, it will be bitter.

Pacific Rim Excursion

Matt Hill, executive sous chef with Charlie Palmer’s Steak in Washington, D.C., offered a Pacific Rim class that featured Thai snapper served over sushi rice.

Thai has “really, really bold flavors” of sweet and sour. “It hits the whole palate while you’re eating,” Hill said.

In the rice, Hill used Kaffir lime leaves, calling them “the bay leaf of Asian cuisine.” But since some grocery stores don’t sell the leaves, Hill recommended using lime zest to flavor the rice.

Although he made the dish with red snapper, Hill said it’s possible to use any type of protein – be it fish or meat – with the spicy coconut sauce.

To use the snapper, however, he kept the skin on, scoring it to get the marinade in. Scoring the skin of the fish also keeps it from curling in the pan when it cooks and crisps the skin better, Hill said.

In the sauce, Hill used unsweetened coconut milk, and although it called for fish stock, he said any type of stock would work well.

“A recipe is basically a guide,” Hill said.

If you see things that would compliment the tastes in the recipe, add them, he told the class.

To peel the ginger in the dish, Hill used his implement of choice – a spoon. He said that’s the easiest way to strip the ginger of its thin peel.

Hill said cilantro, another component of the dish, is very dirty, so it’s imperative to wash it well. He also said not to waste too much time pulling off individual leaves because the cilantro stems taste like the herb and aren’t tough. As for herbs like basil and rosemary, Hill said the stems have to be removed because they taste bitter.

Cooking his fish in a mix of olive oil and butter, Hill said it’s important to make sure the pan is heated and not overcrowded.

He said overcrowding the pan is the biggest mistake that home chefs make. Overcrowding cools the pan immediately and doesn’t equal good color development

“Overcrowding the pan is also the number one reason things stick,” Hill said.

An American tradition

Executive Chef Bryan Voltaggio of Charlie Palmer’s Steak in Washington, D.C., brought the class back to the West Coast with asparagus risotto and roasted scallops.

He made use of the entire asparagus spear, using peelings to make an asparagus butter that added a vibrant green color to the dish.

At this time of year, Voltaggio said good asparagus is hard to find, but it’s possible to do so if you know what you’re looking for.

He suggested looking for asparagus with tight closed buds that aren’t wet at the tip, that have a nice green color and are slightly purple at the tip.

To make the butter, Voltaggio peeled the bottom stems of the asparagus. He said doing that uses the entire product, making it an even better value.

Voltaggio said the risotto is done when the Arborio rice has a wave-like texture when stirred. He suggested using a wooden spoon or plastic spatula to stir it because a metal spoon in a metal pot will gray the rice.

Voltaggio suggested using dry-packed scallops for the dish. He said they’re more expensive than the wet-packed variety usually found in the supermarket.

The wet-packed scallops have liquid and chemicals added to them, said Voltaggio, so they won’t caramelize as well. The liquid packing also dilutes the flavor and you end up paying for liquid weight, which results in a higher price and a less meaty scallop, he said.

When putting the scallops in the pan, Voltaggio said to let them sear, moving them gently after several minutes. If the scallops don’t want to come off the bottom of the pan, don’t force them because they may still need some cooking time, he said.

He said good fresh scallops can be slightly rare.