Our farmers’ markets here in Berkeley abound with Black Mission Figs right now, and I have been buying large batches of them on principle, knowing that it’s only this time of year when we’ll be able to bask in their perfect ripeness and sweetness. Other types of figs are also offered, for example the pale yellow-green kadotas. They are also sweet and delicious, and a taste comparison is highly recommended.
What to do with a fig? Well, obviously, “eat it” is one option. The “fresh, local” concept also relies on “minimal prep of great ingredients,” and this is about as minimal as you can get. I have a cookbook called A Platter of Figs by former Chez Panisse chef David Tanis, in which he makes the point that fresh food, perfectly in season, really needs little or no embellishment.
But we also have some recipes which feature figs as their main ingredient, and, though sweet, these dishes are not desserts per se, but what we actually have for dinner – or as part of dinner.
Tl;dr version:
I’m going to present three recipes:
- figs stuffed with sweet gorgonzola cheese, wrapped in prosciutto, and grilled, served over lettuce/arugula tossed in a light vinaigrette (shown above)
- an appetizer that could actually be dessert: sliced, marinated figs and aged goat cheese on toast, with a bit of basil (vegetarian)
- a fig and gorgonzola pizza with carmelized onions and arugula - (also veggie, but you can add prosciutto if you like).
I’ve made all three this fig season. At the end, I’ll add a note about buying figs.
Even if figs are not your thing, be sure to tell us
What’s for dinner at your house?
Gorgonzola-stuffed figs, wrapped in prosciutto and grilled
This was a scrumptious salad or first course I ordered at a long-ago-defunct Berkeley restaurant, which (with Google refreshing my memory), I think was called Bistro Viola. The photo of last Sunday’s salad is above. Here’s a cut fig about to be devoured:
Ingredients:
Figs, perfectly ripe – I use Black Mission – two or three per person
Gorgonzola dolce (or dolcelatte: “sweet milk”). I probably used an ounce for two people.
Prosciutto, cut very thin (the usual way prosciutto is cut) – ½ slice or more per fig
Lettuce, arugula, baby salad mix, or whatever delightful salad assortment amuses you. The arugula, I think, works especially well with these figs. I used about ½ arugula and ½ small garden lettuce leaves.
Prep:
Wash and dry enough salad mix to underlay the figs on salad plates.
Make a balsamic vinaigrette (about 3:1 or 2:1 olive oil:balsamic vinegar, salted and peppered to taste) (For the two of us, I probably used about 1 Tbsp oil and 1 tsp vinegar. You can see from the photo it was somewhat too much.)
Wash and dry as many figs as you want. Cut a small cube of the cheese for each fig. My cubes were about 1cm or 3/8” on a side, but you can guess this is not a precision exercise.
With a sharp knife, make a vertical slit partway down each fig, extending the slit perhaps ½ the length of the fig, and into the center of the fig – but not all the way through! Shove a cube of gorgonzola into the fig and close the sides of the fig over the cheese. The inside of the fig is soft enough that the cheese just pushes it aside a bit.
Pull a piece of prosciutto apart into two pieces, but not by a horizontal cut. In order to wrap around the fig, the long direction of the prosciutto should be maybe ¾ of the entire length – perhaps 8 inches? The thinly sliced prosciutto will actually stretch a bit to fit around the fig snugly. [Lab rats will recognize the behavior as being similar to that of parafilm.] Neatness doesn’t count. The prosciutto will probably stay in place without help. If the prosciutto is too thick to snug onto the fig, just stick a toothpick in it. Wrap the rest of the figs. (Duh. But recipes always seem to be explicit about such things.)
Cook:
Grill the figs. On my range grill, I do this on high, for a few minutes on one side, then turn. YMMV. If you don’t have a grill, I expect a very-carefully-watched broiler would work ok. Start the grilling with the cut side of the fig pointing down. This way, by the time the cheese starts to melt, you will be grilling the other side, with the cut side up, and the cheese won’t run out of the figs and all over your grill.
Serve:
Toss the lettuce mix in the vinaigrette, spread on salad plates, and arrange the warm figs over the top. Serve with fork and sharp knife. But you can also just grab the little stem of the fig with your fingers and take a bite!
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Another appetizer/small plate to die for (meatless)
Figs Marinated in Sherry with Aged Goat Cheese and Basil
From the cookbook Pintxos, by the great chef Gerald Hirigoyen
We made a recipe for visiting friends from this outstanding Basque/Californian cookbook, and they promptly decided we should all go off to Mr. Hirigoyen’s San Francisco restaurant Piperade. We were very impressed.
As written, this “makes 4 open-faced sandwiches.” I use steeply angled slices of a “tordu” – a twisted, baguette-like half-whole-wheat bread from a local baker (Eduardo Morrell), which makes each sandwich a bit smaller than in the original recipe, which uses regular-sized bread. I’m presenting the original recipe here, though with some chatter from me.
Ingredients:
4 Black mission or Kadota figs
4 slices rustic whole-wheat bread, ¾ inch thick (the tordu in the picture is more like 1/2” thick)
2 – 4 oz aged goat cheese. Monte Enebro is recommended by the author (“a salty, tangy aged Spanish goat cheese from an artisanal producer in Avila”), and is perfectly stupendous for this dish. We found Monte Enebro at The Cheese Board in Berkeley. I can imagine a good French goat cheese like Boucheron substituting well enough. Mr. Hirigoyen says that the most excellent “Humboldt Fog” from Cypress Grove (outstanding cheeses!) is a reasonable substitute, but it would certainly be a very different taste.
A few basil leaves
Sherry vinegar; sweet sherry (Mr. Hirigoyen specifies Pedro Ximenez, but we have not shopped for this brand yet); pepper
Prep:
More than an hour in advance, clean and slice the figs lengthwise, ¼”thick. I get about 4 slices from each little fig this way, excluding the very edge slices, which of course the cook is allowed to eat without counting any calories. Lay the fig slices in one layer in a small container.
Mix together 1 tsp each sherry vinegar and sweet sherry, and spoon over the fig slices. Allow to marinate one hour at room temperature.
Serve:
Lightly toast the bread.
Spread the goat cheese over the bread. The photo in the cookbook shows perhaps 1/8” to 1/4” slices of the cheese instead of spread cheese, and we have gone with that. A small bit of rind around the edge of the cheese is fine to eat (you can see it in the picture).
Top with the fig slices.
Make 1 Tbsp basil chiffonade (cut into very fine strips) and sprinkle over the top.
That’s it!
Again, serve with a sharp knife and a fork. Or for this narrower version — just pick it up!
Here is Mr. Hirogoyen on wine: “This pairing requires a leap of faith. Imagine a small – but not too small – glass of golden sweet Jurançon from the French Basque region that is full of fruit but not cloying, and has a racy acidity and exceptional body, such as the one produced by Clos Urolat.” We finally ran across a Jurançon at The Wine Mine and tried it with this recipe and loved it.
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Now a whole dinner:
Pizza with figs, gorgonzola, caramelized onions, and arugula (and prosciutto, for a not-veggie variant)
I had a pizza of this description at a nice little place in Berkeley called “Pizza Moda,” which we found when Mr pixxer, remarkably, suggested we try “all pizza all the time” for a bit, and see what was out there. I googled “best pizza in Berkeley” and Pizza Moda came up. We took one bite of our first pizza there and said “We’ll be back!” and indeed we have been back more times than to about any other Berkeley restaurant save one. [Riva Cucina, for the record.] The pizza we had on the first visit I’m guessing was virtually this same recipe, but with pears instead of figs, it having been January instead of September. I’ll have to confess that the pizza I made last week was not perfect, but a good start. Maybe someone has a suggestion...
Ingredients:
One pizza crust. I’ll link my own recipe, but you can use any crust that does not have too much of an opinion (by which I mean: NOT Boboli for this pizza!). I make a 12” to 13” or so pizza with my crust and the amounts presented work for this. Sourdough would be great, though.
Four or so figs
4 oz or thereabouts of part-skim mozzarella
2 or 2.5 oz gorgonzola dolce (are we seeing a theme here?)
Perhaps 2 cups very loosely packed arugula (I like the wild arugula we get at Berkeley Bowl, but if you stem the more common leaves, they will work great).
A pound or so of onion – preferably sweet. Mine weighed almost 2 lb as bought, but 1lb 6oz after trimming. I think it bordered on too much onion.
Prosciutto, if desired – a couple of thin slices. The pizza works very well with or without this.
Butter, olive oil, salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar
Prep:
Caramelize the onions: slice thin, and cook, in butter or butter and oil, slowly (med or med-low) for a very long time – could be 45 minutes – till sweet and getting darkened. Stir/turn from time to time. I used too much butter (3 Tbsp) and should have cooked longer on the pizza shown. Note the onions are not brown in the picture...
Wash, dry, and cut the figs into 8 pieces or so (I cut into quarters lengthwise, then across the waistline)
Wash the arugula and let dry.
Mix about 1 tsp each balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Consider salting this – I didn’t but maybe should have.
Grate the mozzarella
Cooking the pizza:
If you are serious about making your own pizza, you either already have a pizza stone and peel, or are on the verge of getting them. They make such a difference! The instructions here are for my oven and my stone and my pizza dough recipe, so you may have to vary them a bit, but there’s no reason this would not cook well at a variety of temperatures and times. The crust instructions included here include my most important personal tricks to making pizza cooking easy.
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees with stone inside, on an upper shelf of the oven.
Stretch out / pull / pat / push / toss the pizza dough into about a 13” disk. This is very thin, with my recipe. You can roll it with a rolling pin if you are more comfortable that way, but it’s definitely different. Poke your crust all over with a fork, so it doesn’t think it’s a large pita bread.
Lightly-to-moderately flour your pizza peel, making sure the leading edge is completely floured. Move the crust/dough onto the peel, and immediately slide onto the stone. If you are not using a stone and peel, you can ignore all this and put the crust onto your pizza pan. Let cook for 1 ½ minutes or so, till the dough has some integrity and is beginning to think it’s a crust. I use grilling tongs (i.e. LONG) to pull the crust VERY gently (it’s not a crust yet, just beginning to consider it) back onto the peel, and move it immediately back to the bread board (so the peel doesn’t get hot). I sometimes end up with the near end of the dough falling off the stone on the first bake, but just leave it (not that you have a choice). It won’t set completely till the second bake, and you will be able to arrange it easily then.
Now you can decorate your pizza.
On the slightly pre-cooked (1 ½ mins) crust, sprinkle about 2/3 of the grated mozzarella. Top with the caramelized onions, scatter on the fig pieces, and dot with small marbles of gorgonzola. Sprinkle on the rest of the mozzarella. Slide the pizza onto the peel and from the peel onto the stone (it’s easy now, right?), and bake another five or so minutes, till the edges of the crust are golden brown and the cheese is melted.
While the pizza cooks, toss the arugula in the vinaigrette. When the pizza is done, arrange the arugula over the top and serve. Alternatively, you can put the pizza back into the oven for 30-60 seconds to wilt the arugula. I think I prefer it this way.
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So that’s how we use figs during their late summer-fall season. What’s for dinner at your house?
Buying figs:
I’ll admit that up till recently, I have never trusted figs. When you get a good one, Wow, they are delicious – sweet and rich – to die for! But so often I was disappointed. There they sit, looking cute and tempting in their little square green plastic baskets… but are they sumptuous, or just half- heartedly semi-sweet? My solution, which may be open to some of you, is to give up on grocery figs and shop the farmers’ markets – and only the booths where you pick out your own figs from a big box, rather than having someone else basket them for you. Figs at their perfection are very soft. I have discovered that if you bring home a fig that is not quite super-soft yet, you can set it on the counter and it will ripen for you. I have had figs last for several days without refrigeration, and not complain about being in the fridge, either. However, our temperatures have been unseasonably cold (highs in the lower 60s!) so not sure what would happen if the house were really warm. Good luck finding some excellent figs!
Bonus links: My pixxer and I had tomato clafoutis for dinner on Thursday. This is tomatoes surrounded by an herbed egg custard/batter and baked. Mr p allowed as how he’d like to try a fig clafoutis. For this, there are recipes all / over / the / place!