The Study of Thin-skinned

Dear Tamar:

I saved the onion skins from the sole onion I used for mirepoix for a pot of lentils. It’s now cooking, along with some leek greens, with the lentils. My question is: How do I easily remove the onion skins once the dish is cooked? On a recent trip to a restaurant supply store, the owner and I walked around for a long time in search of something to solve this need. We eventually settled on a mesh turkey stuffing bag. It's still in the drawer, though. Seems too big and cumbersome for this purpose. Any advice would be welcome.

-Thin skinned

Dear Thin-skinned,

I have so many—sometimes contradictory—answers to your question. Some are short and practical. Others are digressive and anecdotal. I think I’ll take you by the hand and meander through, beginning with the digressions. Please trust that along the wending path, there will be benches in the shade where we can park to catch our breath.

When I was learning to supreme citrus as a cook at Chez Panisse, I was given instruction I’ll never forget by Jean Pierre Moullé. He watched my knife work and explained that when an orange or grapefruit had been disrobed by a knife, it should still be round. In other words: though I was using a tool with a straight edge to vertically remove swatches of citrus peel, my goal should be to maintain the fruit’s natural appearance—ideally, each orange would still be orange-shaped; each grapefruit would look like a bald grapefruit. A correlate: when we served pizzas out of the wood oven in the Chez Panisse cafe, they didn’t have to be round. We could serve pizzas of any shape the dough chose, as long as they were properly topped, cooked to blistered, and delicious. Those two ideals—citrus looking like citrus and pizza being allowed to take any shape it wanted—could be read as contradictions. To me, they were logically consistent, and can be distilled into: Food should look like what it is.

I find an unimprovable beauty in things as-they-are. I prefer used clothes to new, tarnished brass and silver to shined versions. I find calloused hands inviting and soft ones off-putting, except in old people—in whom I love them for suggesting that the time for work has passed. I have never been able to concoct a culturally-appropriate distaste for stains. Before becoming a cook, I may not have been able to articulate it, but the rules for oranges and pizza helped me find words for my aesthetic belief system: There is no other path to a certain kind of beauty than leaving things be.

If you haven’t made the connection yet (and there’s no rational reason you would have) this perspective is enormously helpful in the kitchen. Through it, I’ve avoided pointless stress over divots in peeled eggs, uneven browning on chicken skin, knife wounds in the fish where I checked for doneness. The egg was peeled when it was too fresh to have been, which made it all a bit messy; the heat under my chicken pan was uneven because all the burners were in use; checking with a knife is how I know fish is done. I spend (almost) no emotional energy wishing any of these circumstances were different, and no physical energy trying to fix them. In other words: cooking is less work than it would be if I prized fancy knife work or artifice.

We’ve gotten to the first bench, which hopefully you saw coming: I serve lentils with the onion peel among them. If whoever is serving lentils scoops the peel up, I point to a dish near them, and tell them to deposit it there. If they seem uneasy, I tell them to push it aside and get at the lentils, then I remove it when it’s my turn with the lentil spoon. In the same lentils or beans, you may also encounter: a bunch of herb stems, a bay leaf, a garlic clove or skin, a carrot nub, a fennel top. I don’t apologize for the…rusticity of this. If I were more finicky, I’d serve people dinner less often. If I were more finicky…well, I don’t have to worry about it, because I’m not.

You, however, may find my behavior appalling. Now that we’re through the thicket: a length of cheesecloth is a simpler thing to keep and use than a turkey bag. Cut a square, wrap the bits you don’t want bobbing, and then remove the whole bundle when it’s time for dinner. Or buy teabags. This was the brilliant idea of a new friend of mine, Stephanie Jenkins, who packed a whole bunch of fresh dill into several, cooked beans with them steeping in it, then removed the dill sachets and served a pot of creamy white beans, uncorrupted by the filaments of dill that would have inoculated every bite if I’d been at the pot. Even a bit of butchers’ twine, if you wrap it around whatever herb stems and other long-ish scraps you include with your onion skin, will make it easier to pluck out the whole unseemly knot than letting each bit float around on its own as I do.

Dear cook, thank you for accompanying me on this ramble. I’ve learned from it that though I may be sensitive in some areas of life, I’ve got the skin of an ox when it comes to what diners think of my presentation. I hope that whatever the thickness or thinness of your skin, one of these approaches will be as useful to you as an onion skin is, at each and every stage of its miraculous life, to all that are blessed to know it.