Kirsten and Mandy Dixon Live at the Anchorage Museum

Tutka Bay and the Tutka Bay Lodge



How to spend a pleasant hour: listen to Kirsten and Mandy Dixon demonstrate how to make Alaska Pasta Carbonara at the Anchorage Museum. I went this evening to watch them cook for a small group of people, who took time out on a Thursday evening for food tips from two of Alaska's world-renowned chefs. The room on the fourth floor of the museum was scented with shallots sauteeing in butter, and the subtleness of fresh pasta boiling briefly. For nibbling ,while watching the demo, the Dixons provided little bites of bread with their smoked salmon with cardamom dip from Riversong Lodge Cookbook.

Smoked salmon-cardamom dip appetizers greeted guests at the Anchorage Museum cooking lesson.

 At the end, guests at the free event sampled small plates of fresh fettucine topped with a creamy miso sauce, salmon bacon, and shaved bites of hard cheese.

Alaskan Salmon Carbonara with fresh herbed fettucine.

I don't have a recipe for this specific dish for you, but here are recipes for the home-made pasta layered with fresh herbs, and the salmon bacon,. A creamy miso sauce is in Kirsten and Mandy's newest cookbook, The Tutka Bay Lodge Cookbook, at page 160.


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The Tutka Bay Lodge Cookbook

Kirsten discusses influences on Alaska cuisine.


The foods that Alaskans harvest -- the salmon, halibut and other seafoods, the vegetables that thrive in Alaska's summers, the sea plants, and the wild foods that can be foraged all affect what we cook. Styles and flavors have come from Alaska Natives, Russia, Eastern Asia, Scandinavia, and the Gold Rushers and early miners. The sample dish that the Dixons prepared -- salmon bacon, miso sauce, fresh pasta with herbs -- combined many of those influences into distinctly Alaskan tastes and textures.

Mandy breaks eggs for the pasta dough.


Kirsten and Mandy shared dozens of cooking tips with us:

• Use unsalted butter, because it's always fresher.

Ingredients and tools -- rolling pin, miso paste, shallots, unsalted butter.

• Make sure that you're getting extra virgin olive oil from a reliable source. They mentioned that Costco glass bottles of olive oil with the Kirkland label fit that description.

Kirkland extra-virgin olive oil. Mandy rolling out the pasta layered with fresh herbs.

• Make the pasta recipe with gluten-free flour, if desired. They recommended a mix developed by a friend called "Cup-4-Cup," available in stores around Anchorage.

• For the demo cooking, they used lightweight, butane-fueled burners that are available at Asian stores in town. Mandy noted that they're very handy for warming a soup to serve when you're outside grilling other foods, and for a variety of purposes.

Butane-fueled lightweight portable burners, with pasta water on one, and miso sauce on the other.

•  Use heavy stainless steel pans, and wooden cutting boards rather than plastic. They are easier to clean, and work well for both cutting and rolling.

The miso sauce. 

• Kirsten suggested that the sauce should be drizzled over the pasta rather than mixed into it because the fresh pasta will soak up too much and become soggy.

The salmon bacon -- slices of smoked salmon lox, brushed with a rhubarb glaze, and baked for a few minutes until crisp.

The fresh pasta with herb layer.

• Mandy rolled out one layer of pasta, spread fresh parsley, sage and other herbs on it, set another layer of pasta on top, and rolled it all through the hand-cranked pasta machine, before slicing it for fettucine.

The final dish -- herbed fresh fettucine, drizzled with creamy miso sauce, garnished with salmon bacon, fresh herbs, and shaved hard cheese.



Mandy runs La Baleine Cafe on the Homer Spit in the summer, and the Dixon family owns two wilderness lodges, described at Within the Wild.  They offer cooking classes, days and weekends, at the Tutka Bay Lodge.


Tutka Bay Cooking School, inside an old boat next to the lodge.

Makeyour own Alaskan sourdough starter: Learn from Alaska's master bakers

                              Sourdough starter, ready to use. [Teri Carns photo, 4/20/2013.]


Tangy sourdough bread was the perfect food for the gutsy would-be gold barons who poured into Alaska in the 1800s. They slept with their starters, lumps of flour and water alive with yeasts and healthful microbes, in pouches around their necks. In the morning they mixed a nugget of the starter with flour and water, let it rise in a bowl during the day, and baked it in a Dutch oven (a cast iron pot with a lid) over the campfire in the evening. The round, fragrant, golden-crusted loaves satisfied even the hungriest miners.

                        Sourdough flatbread, fresh from the oven. [Teri Carns, 4/20/2013.]

Few things are more immediately gratifying than buttering a slice of sourdough bread hot from your own oven. Simple and satisfying, sourdough is on CNN's list of the top 50 classic American foods. You can create a starter the same way that gold seekers did. Once your starter is thriving, you can make dozens of simple or complex recipes, from breads and flatbreads to pancakes and muffins. Depending on how often you feed it, the starter will taste sweeter or tangier. Below, you'll find advice from Alaska's premier bakers and a recipe showing how anyone can recreate the flavorful breads.

Sourdough starters are living colonies of yeasts and microbes that feed on the starches and sugars in grains, fruits, or vegetables. Water, oxygen, and the right temperatures keep them thriving. Like other living creatures, they need food and water every day or so, unless they are hibernating in your refrigerator.

Kirsten Dixon of Winterlake Lodge on Alaska’s Iditarod Trail creates a sourdough starter by slicing apples and adding them to a bowl of water with a little sugar. She sets the bowl in a warm spot in her kitchen until the yeasts and bacteria have begun to take root in their new home. Whether you start with apples or all-purpose wheat flour (the most common choice), yeasts and microbes that are always in the air or on the fruit and flour settle into the welcoming environment. As the culture grows, it should smell yeasty (not sour or moldy) and look bubbly and healthy.

Baking with your own sourdough starter makes each bite burst with complex flavors. Leavening dough with natural levains (sourdoughs) keeps loaves fresh for days, says Janis Fleischman of Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop in Anchorage. Your culture's yeasts and microbes grow so well that they prevent invading microbes from gaining a foothold.

Daniel Martin of Wild Oven Bakehouse in Juneau says that the warm, slow, mildly acidic fermentation of natural sourdough leavening releases nutrients locked in the grain, making the bread more digestible. Communities of wild yeasts and microbes accomplish this much better than a single type of commercial yeast. The bright tastes of naturally yeasted sourdough bread signal both a delicious meal and one that uses local ingredients to create healthier food.
   
Ways of making sourdough starters abound, with some cooks encouraging the use of prepared yeast to boost the activity of the wild yeasts, and others relying entirely on what's found in the air and on the flour that you're using. You can mix in plenty of water or leave the starter dough fairly dry. This straightforward and easy Exploratorium version uses only local wild yeasts. The website explains in detail how to keep your starter healthy and happy once it's going.

Mix 1/4 cup white flour with 2 tablespoons water in a small bowl until it turns into a dough. Knead for about five to eight minutes until springy. Cover the bowl loosely with a towel and let the starter sit in a warm spot for two to three days, until it's moist, wrinkled, crusty and smells sweet.

Throw away any crust, add ½ cup flour and enough water to make a firm dough. Cover and leave for one to two days.

The starter should look new and fresh. Remove any dried dough and add one cup of flour. Cover bowl with damp cloth and leave in warm spot for eight to twelve hours. The starter is ready to use when it looks like a regular fully risen bread dough, and springs back when you poke it with your finger.

                               Sourdough flatbread, ready to bake. [Teri Carns, 4/20/2013.]


Now you can use the starter in most sourdough recipes by breaking off a small chunk, mixing it with more water and flour, and letting it work its magic in the dough. The recipe  gives the correct proportions and directions for making loaves of bread. Many other recipes are available in books and on the Internet.

                             Sourdough flatbread, ready to eat. [Teri Carns photo, 4/20/2013.]

Save a small piece of the starter in the refrigerator, then refresh it again as above and use it in another recipe. Some starters are more than 100 years old; you can leave yours to the great-great-grandchildren in your will.

Foraging for a sourdough link

Lichens for dinner? Pine bark petit fours? Fireweed shoots and fiddlehead ferns? These appeared on the menu from Faviken Magasinet, as reported by FoodSnob blog, but could have been foraged from my backyard woods in the heart of Anchorage, Alaska which lies at nearly the same latitude as Jarpen, Sweden. Although no restaurant in Anchorage routinely serves lichens or fireweed shoots, many serve sourdough bread, also found at Magnus Nilsson's "superlocavore" Faviken Magasinet.

The sourdough appeared in a description of a May meal prepared by Mr. Nilsson. Many of the courses offered -- Wild Trouts Roe served in a Warm Crust of Dried Ducks Blood  for example, or pine bark petit fours for after dessert presented bits of nature that I don't usually think of as edible. The methods of preparation were equally unfamiliar. Shavings of Old Sow and Wild Goose featured thinly-shaved pork from a sow that had been hanging to dry for two years, and slices of goose that were aged for nine months. Many of the other ingredients saw their beginnings in previous years -- the "mature fermented mushroom juices from last year," and the duck egg and sour milk liquors. Some dishes, particularly the scallops, were still alive when cooked at the table before the waiting diners, or, like the fireweed, had been foraged earlier the same day.

Intriguingly, the sourdough bread was one of the few things served at the meal that would have been recognized and served without fanfare almost anywhere, especially Alaska. Made with 200-year-old sourdough from the chef's grandmother, flour from wheat grown nearby, and the grandmother's kneading trough, the end result was more about tradition than about emphasizing creative and minimalist presentations.  "Bröd och smör: Tove’s Bread and the Very Good Butter. As the bread was brought out, an old kneading trough was shown off. It was served with a story. This was the same tray that once belonged to Magnus Nilsson’s grandmother and her grandmother before her; it still harbours traces of the same sourdough culture she used – now over two hundred years old. The family connection does not end there: with this ancestral starter, flour from Järna near Stockholm and from an island in lake Storsjön processed together at a mill in Östersund, he uses his wife’s recipe to bake a pain au levain loaf that possessed a thin yet crunchy crust and dense, dark yet moist and fluffy crumb. It was simply excellent. The very good butter (its official name here), from close by Oviken and with a texture like melting cheddar, was superb too." [from the Food Snob blog review]

The degree of focus on terroir -- "the sum of the effects that the local environment has had" on the taste and qualities of a food, and attention to preparation of food found at Farviken Magasinet might seem limiting to most Alaskans, even those who work with the same principles of eating local foods. Kirsten Dixon, one of the state's better known chefs (she recently appeared on the Today show) and cookbook authors creates with foods found in Alaska, but happily combines raw seaweed pulled from the Tutka Bay beach with flax seed, sun-dried tomatoes, lemon juice and cayenne pepper into sea crackers that have their roots in half a dozen different climates.

From her perspective, Alaskan cuisine is based in the many cultures that have left their mark on Alaska -- the Alaskan Native peoples, the Russians, Asians, and the gold miners. She sees sourdough as representative of "hearty and determined pioneers." Swedish cuisine as re-imagined by Mr. Nilsson with his innovations at Farviken Magasinet draws on local ingredients and techniques that have been used for generations within that one country, including his grandmother's sourdough. And thus the sourdough bread that links the two cuisines is just as at home in the Alaskan repetoire as it is in Jarpen.