When my friend Justin opened a restaurant in Maine, I fixated on his strategy to train kitchen staff: cooks would learn the best one or two ways to prepare each vegetable, so they’d be optimally equipped to deal on the fly with unpredictable supplies of local vegetables and a daily changing menu.
Let’s try this method together – and make perfect creamed spinach like skilled professionals.
Spinach can deserve its reputation, but it’s delicious when done right. Plus, it’s a nutritional powerhouse.
Why creamed spinach, specifically? Because it’s emerald green and perfect with a steak. And because, like the names of our great-grandparents, food like this is coming into style again.
Thank you to the New York Times Cooking section for providing me the hankering and the recipe for creamed spinach. And to Justin for helping me make that original recipe more awesome and for taste testing.
–Bethany Fleishman
Creamed Spinach
Recipe adapted from The New York Times Cooking section
Ingredients
About 2 pounds of spinach (from a local farm or garden – that’s the whole point!)
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour (gluten-free flour is fine as long as it has some thickening power)
1 cup milk (ideally whole, but use what you have)
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Bay leaf (OPTIONAL)
1 clove of garlic (OPTIONAL)
A healthy sprinkle of grated Parmesan or other sharp cheese (OPTIONAL)
Directions
1. Pick over the spinach to remove any debris, tough stems, and blemished leaves.
2. Rinse the spinach and shake dry.
3. Stuff the spinach into a saucepan with a quarter cup or so of water and cook on medium heat, stirring, until the spinach has wilted and turned bright green. You’re doing a combination sauté and steam here. (I like this method because it’s quick, and I have a completely unfounded suspicion that it preserves the most nutrients.)
4. Run the spinach under cold running water until chilled.
5. Grab the spinach by the handful and squeeze out the liquid. This is important to prevent watery creamed spinach.
6. Thoroughly blend the spinach in a food processor or blender. Set aside.
7. Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour, stirring with a whisk.
8. Add the milk, stirring rapidly with the whisk. For extra flavor, add a whole clove of garlic (or minced if you like a lot of garlic flavor) and a Bay leaf.
9. Add nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste. Cook on medium heat, stirring constantly, about 5 minutes until it thickens.
10. If you used them, fish out the Bay leaf and garlic clove (unless you minced it), and add the cheese (if using).
11. Add the spinach. Stir to blend. Heat
and serve with more ground black pepper.
You’re building your skills: Did you know that the sauce you just made for the spinach is called Béchamel sauce, and is one of the five “mother sauces” in French cuisine? You can use this for the base for cheese sauce and so much more.
