Essential Ingredients -- Mirepoix

Sauteing mirepoix

In cooking, like in life, there are essential building blocks I return to time and time again -- practices that consistently prove to form a solid foundation for achieving whatever particular goal it is I have in mind. 

As a voice actor, I have a combination of ingredients in the right proportion that I need to perform well -- like vocal warmups, hot tea and Claritin -- that keep the pipes lubed and clear. When I’m cooking, I often turn to mirepoix as an essential, along with other techniques and practices I find fundamental to the way I approach my love of the kitchen.

As these are winter months and I’m engrossed in a lot of sauces, soups and stews, I’m using mirepoix a lot. Since my goal in this blog is to journal life in my kitchen through the year and mirepoix is at the fore so frequently, it makes sense to me to spend some time in the early days of this blog covering basics. That way if I refer to something in later posts, I can link back to it.

Fundamentals of Mirepoix

Traditional mirepoix is a combination of onions, celery and carrots, also known as aromatics, that are the basis of countless stocks, soups, stews and many other dishes. Although the term originates with the French, variations are commonly found in all kinds of cultural cuisines. It is also called the Holy Trinity in some cooking cultures.

There are a two basic guidelines to mirepoix:

The proportions are 2/1/1 onions, celery, carrots. So for every cup of onions you want 1/2 cup celery and 1/2 cup carrots.

When cutting, you want all the pieces in a uniform size so they cook evenly. Sometimes this means a rough chop, a dice, or a mince, but all three ingredients should be cut to similar size in a given recipe.

Mirepoix is almost always sauteed gently over medium to medium low heat in some kind of oil or fat at the beginning of a recipe, usually for about 5 minutes stirring often until the aromatics soften and become fragrant. You don’t want them to burn, so resist the temptation to raise the temperature in order to hasten the process.  If you are in that much of a hurry, go make a peanut butter sandwich. Sometimes mirepoix is added in later without pre-cooking it, sometimes it’s roasted in the oven along with other things. Each recipe will detail the specific cooking process.

The pre-minced garlic you can
buy is poor stuff; but I do love
the convenience of the pre-peeled.
The Melissa's brand, in a resealable
bag, offers a number of smaller
air-pack sealed pouches each contain-
ing a number of cloves.

Here, I'm adding the minced
garlic to the mirepoix saute
after the vegetable have
softened.

Often garlic is added to a mirepoix saute. Use the flat side of the knife to smash the garlic, then mince. Always add the garlic in the last minute of cooking. It burns easily and becomes bitter if sauteed too long. 

MIREPOIX DICING TECHNIQUE

Since we are dealing with dicing onions, celery and carrots let’s talking about dicing each. For heavens sake, invest in decent cutlery. That’s knives. Look for knives where the tine -- the metal part -- runs all the way through the handle of the knife. Use the proper tool for the job, which in this case is either a chef’s knife or Satoku knife. You want a wide bladed knife for dicing up vegetables. And keep them sharpened. You can get an inexpensive sharpening tool even at Walmart, but they are corporate asshats, so I am boycotting them. Trying to dice vegetables with a dull or tiny knife, or worse a dull tiny knife, is a tedious process.

CELERY

Yup, I'm a lefty, so this is how I slice,
left to right. I'd like to take this opportunity
to point out how challenging it is to be your
own food photographer.

A bunch of celery consists of stalks attached to a root bulb, from the thicker more mature stalks on the outside to the more tender inside shoots referred to as the celery heart. All of it, including the leaves, is delicious. When I buy celery, I wash it as a whole, keeping the root bulb intact, and drying it as thoroughly as possible, storing it in a plastic bag with a sheet of paper towel to absorb extra moisture. I tend to use celery frequently, so rarely does a bunch grow so old it grows limp. Older vegetables are perfect to use in stock and soup bases.

Anyway, I know most people probably pull off a stalk at a time when they use celery, but unless I’m stuffing stalks (which is usually only at the holidays,) I use it from the tip end down, slicing through the whole thing, in think slices, and dicing it from there. I think this is a more efficient way to use it and it saves time when doing a lot of chopping/dicing/mincing. Plus I get the flavor and texture benefits of both outer and inner parts.

CARROTS

You don’t have to peel a carrot (or an onion, when making stocks and broths, but you do for pretty much everything else. Certainly mirepoix. Carrots are tricky to dice -- I’ve cut myself many a time, so take care. They are a hard vegetable, and round to boot, so it’s easy for the knife to slip. To avoid this, here’s what I do: Once peeled, cut the whole thing across in the middle, so you have two pieces about 4 inches long. Then carefully slice each one down the center, trying to keep the halves  about the same size. Once you have done that, you now have 4 quarter carrots, each with a flat side. Put the flat sides down on the cutting board (you are using a cutting board right? So you don’t ruin your countertop?) and this makes them much easier to then slice without the damned things rolling around and nicking yourself with a sharp knife. Slice each quarter lengthwise 1, 2 or more times, depending on the size of the carrot. Now you have what are known as matchsticks. Then it’s easy to line these up and slice across several at a time, producing a dice. Whatever hand you use to knife, your slicing motion should be down and away from you, toe to heel of the knife. In your other hand, hold the slices of vegetable together with the tips of your fingers curled under. With practice you can get faster and make short work of dicing.

ONIONS

The quicker job you can make of cutting up onions, the less chance of making your eyes tear up. Onions range from strong to sweet in flavor, and the stronger the onion the more intense are the chemicals released when the membranes are crushed. 

So, to dice onions and avoid the tears, let the layered structure of the onion do some of the work for you: first slice the onion in half lengthwise, from tip to root bulb. Lay each half flat side down on the cutting board, and take a small slice off the tip end (not the root). Pull the thin papery peel back off toward the root. 

Holding the onion at the bulb end with fingers curled under, make a series of even vertical slices about 1/4 inch apart from tip toward the root, never cutting through the root end. 

Then make another series of horizontal slices from the tip to the root end, again leaving the root intact.

Now cut across the onion side to side starting at the tip end and working down to the root, with closely spaced slices. Voila! Diced onion. No tears.