Rice can be Nice

MFO roasted a little pork tenderloin the other day, and last night she had meetings after her stint at the Historical Society, so another night of cold sliced tenderloin was in the offing. I decided to come up with a different side dish ("and now for something completely different" - extra credit) than our standby rice.  Since I had some extra kitchen time available, I hunted around for a different rice recipe, something like a Pilaf or Soubise.  In looking through my collection of recipe sheets (Pastas and Grains) I found a recipe for Soubise (passed along by somebody named “Alanna”) from the net, attributed to Julia Child.

Note: this is a post preparation image of the recipe I used, hence the bits of onion and spills.  Indicates a real recipe!

Here’s a better shot of just the ingredients

Right away it caught my (wannabe) Chef’s eye that the ingredients calls for one half cup of rice, but TWO pounds of onions sliced very thin… Seemed kind of out of balance with my visions of a rice and onion dish although she does call the recipe “Onion and Rice” i.e., Onion listed first..

What the hell, I decided to see how it was.  The first task of Mise en Place was to produce those two pounds of sliced very thin onion.  I cleaned out MFO’s hydrator bin which produced two softball and one tennis ball sized onions.  In a case of having the right tools, I unboxed my Mandoline that I have used for years, which is very useful.

Note that it isn’t a high end one of steel and so forth just plastic which does the job very nicely.  

On the thinnest setting I soon had a huge pile of thinly sliced onions - which kind of look like protozoa under a microscope!

Which still weighed only about 1.92 pounds, but figured close enough!

So finished Mise en Place and assembled the ingredients (notice the huge amount of the onions)

  

Done with the assembling phase, I launched into the “method” phase

I prepared a pan for cooking the rice and the dish for the butter and onions

That Dry Manhattan was not called for in Julia’s recipe, but I added that essential ingredient myself

Boiled the water and added the rice which was to cook for “precisely” 5 minutes.

And then drained immediately

chef’s note; you will see that it is not the common “white rice” but is something that MFO found called “whole grain” rice and NOT brown rice; but prep is same as white rice)

So began putting heat under the onions/butter and cooked it down a little

And then stirred in the drained rice – which seemed to get lost in the onions

And committed it to the oven for 60 minutes at 300°, pulled it out, and incorporated the Gruyere and heavy cream

Voilá!

So plated up the sliced pork, and added a dollop of the Soubise.

Well, as expected the onions overwhelmed the scant (IMHO) portion of rice, and although the cheese added some kick, it was mostly a pile of cooked onions.  Tasted good, but I was hoping for more of a rice forward dish.

So on a whim (and afterthought), I decided to make sure the recipe was "correct", and consulted the bible of French Cooking

And sure enough, on page 355 was the original unaltered, original "Julia" recipe. 

I noted that in the above "Mastering" version there were half as many onions and no mention of the heavy cream and cheese called for in the "Alanna" version the recipe.  Perhaps I should have looked before using the Internet version.

And after a little more research I uncovered another recipe for Soubise by the other icon of (Modern) French cooking, Jacques Pepin: 

Which is more aligned with my vision of a Soubise (less onions, more rice)

Next time we’ll use that.

So, of course when MFO came home, we got

DFD’d for dinner, and in the digs, there are absolutely

NMMJ!