Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitcheen Catastrophes, now with 50% more E, because that was definitely a bit, and not at ALL me making a typo. I’m your Comedian, Not Cock-Up, Jon O’Guin. And today’s post is probably going to be a little short, somewhat weird, and like, 50% non-meat. The RECIPE will be 100% non-meat, but we gotta talk about meat to explain what exactly is going on. Of course, some of you don’t care for explanations (or already got them and just want the recipe), so click this link to get to the goods. Everyone else, let’s go to Italy by way of pretension.

Got My Ear To The Ground to Hear them Truffle Tremors

Nduja is an ingredient/food that I have known about for some time. So long, in fact, that I wrote a post where I referenced that I didn’t think it was going to be catching on like Food Network thought it would almost exactly 2 years ago. If you don’t want to follow that link, let me give you a breakdown: nduja is a Calabrian (Calabria is a region in Italy) sausage that has a very loose texture, and is supposedly pretty spicy, being made with calabrian chiles and the parts of pork you normally use to make sausage. You know, “whatever you got, to the extent that Wikipedia contradicts itself about what meats you use over the course of two paragraphs”.

It’s been a while since we openly excerpted wikipedia, because one of our readers complained we made the text too small for their old eyes to read.
Happy Birthday, Katie! Enjoy your failing vision!

And the weird thing is, despite me talking about it 2 years ago, and buying it a couple times, I’ve never actually had it. The first time I bought it, it got shuffled around in the fridge during some confusion with visiting family and my father’s passing, and it was only fairly recently I picked up a longer-lasting version…but it’s in an airtight jar and says if I open it, I should eat the ENTIRE JAR within 3 days. And since the jar is….oh, only 600 calories? That’s not nearly as unreasonable as I thought.  Well, until NOW I assumed it was just too much for me and my brother to eat within 3 days (and potentially still is, we haven’t tasted it yet) the jar has remained unopened.

Soon, my pet.
Actually, I have until like, March 2021 to eat this stuff, so there’s time.

But the word/name have lurked in my mind for years now, as a “hey, maybe at some point we should look into that” thought like many recipes I’ve considered for the site, but not yet committed to. It’s been a tempting idea of something to try, and maybe make a post about. Especially because of its name: nduja? Starting with ND breaks both English AND Italian phonotactic rules! That has to have a fun explanation.

(I didn’t KNOW the explanation, because I strive to keep my revelations about food close to the time of writing, so I can discover the facts ‘with’ you guys. So it wasn’t until last that I looked it up. Turns out, it’s because it’s a broken loan-word. Nduja is a Calabrian attempt to pronounce Andouille, since Calabria became familiar with that sausage while ruled by a French noble house for a while. Which makes kind of perfect sense, if you remember the linguistic arc I described in the Chicken Parmigiano post: see, Andouille, while pronounced “an-doo-ee” in English, is pronounced “on-du-y(uh)” in French, meaning it ends in a consonant I, aka, the letter that most of Europe turned into a J, but Italy made into “gi”. Being ruled at the time by the French, Calabria went with a J…and then because of that, changed the Yuh sound to a Juh sound. And the N-D is just forgetting the first A, since nduja is a feminine noun, so you’d be saying “un anduja”, which over time becomes “una nduja”, much like how “a nadder” became “an adder” in English.)

I, too, enjoy sausage.

And then, around 5 weeks ago, a happy little accident ensued. 

An Almost-Christmas Quasi-Miracle

 It was the last couple days of my stay in Leavenworth, and I had decided to grab lunch at a sandwich shop that my friend works at. The way there passes by the only bookshop in Leavenworth, so I popped in to see if any of my Christmas book requests were there, so we could buy them ahead of time. (As I noted in my review of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, since my desire for cookbooks (well, books in general, but cookbooks especially) is very specific, it’s quite common for my extended family to not find the ones I want. So I often end up teaming up with my mother to hunt them down and gift them to myself in proxy.)  And I happened to see this book.

It was stored in a much nicer way at the store. I’m a monster who frequently rests book’s weight on their spines.

The name interested me, as “Umami Bomb” is a phrase I’d been hearing a lot in the Bon Appetit videos I watch (it’s generally used to refer to any ingredient or process that will give a lot of nuanced depth and salty flavors to a dish) , so I opened the book, and one of the FIRST recipes I saw in it was for Tomato Nduja, an idea that immediately spiked my interest to “There is now no force on earth that will prevent me from owning this”, since the idea of making the sausage myself rather than buying more (I actually hadn’t bought the new jar of Nduja yet. I found it in the Cheesemonger’s shop across the way a couple days later) seemed an even BETTER way of getting it onto the site. I read through the ingredients, to see how hard it would be…and discovered what precisely I was holding.

See, Umami Bomb isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a vegetarian cookbook! Mostly. It has one chapter of a couple fish recipes. Like, 3 recipes out of 80. So this recipe for nduja didn’t have ANY pork in it. In fact, while the cookbook as a whole is vegetarian, this recipe specifically was vegan. And that was appealing to me for several reasons:

• Firstly, because it was a cool thing I could share with my vegan readers, or readers like my brother Stephen, whose girlfriend is vegan, and he often finds himself in need of recipes of things to make for her.

• Secondly, it allowed me to approach the topic of nduja from a healthier direction, which would be great news to my doctor.

• And thirdly, unbeknownst to me, as I was looking at the cookbook, my brother Stephen and his girlfriend were CURRENTLY eating my store of vegan meal/snack options back at the house during a Christmas visit, where they announced their intent to become engaged in January. So I was about to be low on Vegan options, and Stephen’s need for more recipes was going to become something of a constant from now on.

So now I could approach this very fatty and spicy pork sausage from a healthier angle. And the recipe itself was a breeze. The only issue was the ingredients, and timing.  

All in the Timing

Now, when you’re a bougie son of a bitch like me, the ingredient list to this thing isn’t particularly troubling: it’s 2 solid ingredients, and then just a bunch of spices. Garlic powder, smoked paprika, sweet paprika, Cayenne pepper, all normal stuff. Black pepper, salt. Sure thing. Ground Fennel, that’s a weird one but I’m sure…Hmm. Not on the spice rack. Maybe it’s one of the uncommon ones we put on shelves in the pantry…nope. In my special box of weird spices I haul back and forth to Leavenworth because no one cares if I have them all? No. Alright, no GROUND fennel, but surely we have some…fennel seeds…

Alright, so to make this, I needed to buy sun-dried tomatoes, mild green olives such as Castelvetrano, and APPARENTLY Fennel seed. I’d also need a food processor for like, 15 minutes. I hadn’t the time or guaranteed access to a food processor during the holidays, so I set the idea aside for a while, until Stephen and Anna announced they were coming up to see the play Nate is in, and decided this was the weekend they would do that. So I decided this was the weekend I’d make the stuff, and resolved to pick up the ingredients Friday evening or Saturday to whip up the dish before the show. I then re-pulled the muscle in my back I messed up back in October, meaning I didn’t want to drive to get ingredients. (It’s much better this time than in October, though, since I didn’t make the mistake of icing it the first day) So we made it Saturday night. And because I had to rely on the kindness of others to go shopping, we only hit one store. And THEY didn’t have Ground Fennel either, so I bought a jar of fennel seed, and ground it myself.

I spent $4 on this jar for the top 3/4s of a teaspoon.

And, as a word of advice, get a spice grinder for this kind of job. Or a mortar and pestle. In my experience, trying to hand-grind powders in anything other than a mortar and pestle is a pain in the ass. My family has a $14 Krups coffee/spice grinder, that’s worked for years, that did the job just fine for this gig, and has done admirable work over the years. Mortars and Pestles can be found for $8. Trying to crush seeds in Ziploc bags on counter-tops just isn’t a fun time.

It really grinds my gears.

That out of the way, the most labor-intensive part of the process took 7ish minutes, and it was because I got oil-preserved sun-dried tomatoes, so I had to blot them dry with paper towels. I also learned that, contrary to what my math suggested, I only needed most of one jar of sun-dried tomatoes to get the cup the recipe called for. (I saw that it was a 7oz jar, and went “well, shit, I need to fill an 8 oz container!”, forgetting that the jar measurement was net WEIGHT.) So now I have an extra jar of sun-dried tomatoes I have to do something with.

Note that blotting the tomatoes was easily the messiest and longest part of making this. So if you can get non-oil packed, that would save you time.

Then you get 6 ounces of mild green olives, ‘press them dry’ in between paper towels, throw everything in a blender, and ‘pulverize until well-mixed’. I personally had some trouble getting the mixture to look as uniform , smooth, and spreadable as the picture in the book, so I just added some of the reserved oil from the tomato jar to help things along.  If you have a better food processor, or are content with a chunkier mix, this step can be done in like, 2 minutes tops. For me, because I kept fiddly with it, it was more like 8. The end result was undeniably red and smooth, however.

Perhaps too smooth.

I served it with some vegan chips, and everyone still up and about tried some: Anna, Stephen, Nathan, and myself. And the consensus was that it was pretty good. A solid snack option. It tasted kind of like pizza sauce, obviously, since it was mostly spiced tomato paste, but that wasn’t a bad thing. I think our cayenne is a little old, which could be why it wasn’t a very spicy mixture. And while the cookbook asserts that one of her vegan friends refused to eat it out of suspicion that it was truly meat, no one was going to make that mistake with this.  But in retrospect, that’s probably due to me in part to me adding the oil, which would logically increase the tomato flavor, without increasing the other flavorings.

I’ll probably take another run at this sometime soon, as it turns out we DID have a jar of Castelvetrano olives already, and I now have an extra jar of tomatoes, and a lot of fennel, and if/when I do, I’ll let you guys know if re-balancing the flavors makes it more deceptively meaty. But for a $10, 10-minute vegan snack option that can serve as small party, it’s a hell of an accomplishment for something I discovered on accident.

THURSDAY: WE MIGHT TALK MORE ABOUT THE COOKBOOK. IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE WE REVIEWED A COOKBOOK.

MONDAY: WE ATONE FOR OUR VEGAN FARE THIS WEEK WITH A DOUBLY-MEATY MEAL NEXT WEEK, AS WE MAKE CHILI DOGS IN PREPARATION FOR THE NEW SONIC THE HEDGEHOG MOVIE.

Recipe

Tomato Nduja

Makes 1.5 cups

Ingredients

6 ounces mild green olives (such as Castelvetrano), drained and pitted

1 cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained and blotted dry if oil-preserved

1 ½  tsps garlic powder

1 tsp ground fennel

¾ tsp kosher salt

½ tsp smoked paprika

½ tsp sweet paprika

½ tsp cayenne pepper

½ tsp ground black pepper

Sliced baguette or preferred chips for serving

Preparation

1. If necessary, press olives between paper towels to further dry. Add all ingredients to a food processor, and blend until well-mixed. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt if necessary. Can be served immediately, and will store for up to a week in the fridge in an airtight container.