Hell Of Tasty

Last Day

2011-03-08T20:28:00.003-05:00

Last day of work tomorrow before I move to China to start teaching English, eating awesome Chinese food every meal, every day, and hopefully staging at a few local restaurants (learning to make la mien tops the to-do list). As always, it feels weird to be parting, probably forever, with a place that I have become part of and has become part of me. So many great friends made, good and bad times had, many things learned, and of course a few new scars (including one big keeper). Whenever I'm in this situation, I always promise myself I won't lose touch with the people I'm leaving behind, but it always seems to happen anyway.

A huge part of my life and my identity, gone after tomorrow.

But sometimes to have a new beginning, you have to start with an ending.

Brussels Sprouts + Mint

2011-02-22T20:15:00.003-05:00

At work, we've been roasting brussels sprouts with mint and garlic and using it as the garnish for a sunchoke soup. Brussels sprouts and mint is the kind of surprising combination that tastes obvious.

Beet and Oatmeal Lace Cookies

2011-02-20T17:53:00.006-05:00

I had a bunch of beet puree left over from making beet risotto for an early Valentine's Day dinner, so I folded it into the batter for these oatmeal lace cookies. Not as crispy as I wanted.

Lemon Tart

2011-02-12T07:54:00.003-05:00

This lemon curd is AMAZING. I first made it for my family's Christmas dinner in...2007? It is light, rich, velvety, super-lemony, balanced. The recipe is Pierre Herme, via Dorie Greenspan.

The recipe

Rethunk

Unsolved Mystery: Wasa Crispbreads

2011-02-11T09:01:00.002-05:00

I think Wasa crispbreads are super delicious, but I still don't know how to make them. Totally crisp and dry, sour, leavened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisp_bread

I must attempt them soon

This Tonight

2011-02-09T18:42:00.002-05:00

http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/cumin-spiced-red-lentil-burgers

Nice! Would also be great deep fried.

Expanding Horizons

2011-02-06T10:44:00.002-05:00

Buy something unfamiliar every time you go to a grocery store.

Roadkill

2011-02-03T19:13:00.001-05:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2283223/

With slideshow!

Twisted Fish

2011-02-03T18:31:00.001-05:00

I was fileting rockfish today at work, and came across one specimen whose body bulged out unnaturally behind the gills and then narrowed into a comically skinny tail, giving the fish cartoonish proportions. I figured immediately that the poor guy had had some kind of spinal problem, but its exterior appearance didn't fully depict how twisted the backbone would turn out to be, twisting and contorting in all directions. My first reaction was to anthropomorphize the thing, telling Tameka that other fish had probably made fun of this guy in the high school locker room because of his scoliosis. Then I got to thinking about how the nature of the spinal problem. Whether the defect was genetic or due to some trauma (I can't escape the image of a young little fish slamming into a wall at full speed and collapsing into a snake-like S shape forever), the problem must have arisen early in the fish's life, because its tissue growth was so bizarrely warped. Maybe the little guy's growth was slowed because of his spinal problem, which would mean that he had to survive in his farm much longer than anyone else in his weight class (which is how fish are sold in the business). Or maybe that was ridiculous. Who knows. In any case, thinking about that fish's life reminded me about how little I think about the many animals I butcher every day. It seems that it takes an exceptional animal, which is to say one with some sort of defect, to make me think a little about the lives these creatures lived.

Real Family Meal

2010-12-27T14:20:00.006-05:00

Parents' newly renovated kitchen

Any cook who is in the business because they really love cooking will tell you that their favorite kitchen is the one in their home. We love the comfort, the relaxed pace, the control over the menu. Holiday feasts are perfect opportunities to apply (show off?) our technique; they give us an excuse to make as many dishes as we want, with as much fat and salt and expensive ingredients as we want (it's a special occasion!), and force it on a bunch of people who might even consent to doing the dishes later! I was talking to another cook the other day about how much we enjoy cooking big holiday feasts at home. His wife, a good cook herself, always rushes about trying to get food on the table so the meal can start, just like we have to do at work. For me, and I'll bet for many others, it is the cooking itself that is the real event, the great challenge and celebration, while the meal itself (and for my family, its attendant hours of sitting and chatting) is the denouement. I didn't cook a big Christmas feast this year - I was at work, unsurprisingly. I did, however, take charge of dinner on the 26th. I only made a few dishes, but it was still one of the most enjoyable parts of my short, happy stay with my family. Forget the music, the gifts, the lights, not to mention the Christ part of Christmas, and give me instead a few hours (or a few days) in the kitchen, doing what I do every day anyway, but loving it much more.

Dad and John with Pan-Roasted Chicken with Dijon-Sage Sauce, Roasted Garlic Mashed Yukons, and Asparagus and Broccolini in Brown Butter, Walnuts

Tackling the Monster

2010-11-06T21:36:00.004-04:00

Finally tackled a large Blue Hubbard Squash we bought at Eastern Market a few weeks ago for $2. Pretty easy to cut into, not too hard to peel (though I had to go at it with a knife - too big for a peeler), appealing bright orange flesh that tasted pretty good too! Roasted it and tossed with roasted chickpeas, brown rice, wild rice, wilted winter greens of some sort from the Adams Morgan farmer's market, parsley, and olive oil. Tasty picnic lunch for tomorrow Shenandoah trek.

Pancetta, Weeks Later

2010-11-06T21:23:00.006-04:00

After weeks wrapped in plastic in the fridge, the pancetta's moisture levels have evened out significantly and stopped dropping. It's perhaps a bit dryer than it should be, which happily means it's easy to slice. When cooked, it's less sweet and more aggressively porky than when it was younger. The meat has been sitting in my fridge for somewhere near two months, so even though I know the curing has probably made it quite safe, I'm not up for trying it raw any more.

English Muffin Success?

2010-11-05T16:06:00.005-04:00

Haven't tried them yet, but they look great!

Followed this recipe, mostly. Where I went off the reservation: used 50% whole wheat flour, proofed/rested the dough for a few minutes after I rolled it out and again after I cut the muffins out, and I used somewhat lower heat in the pan (still burned a few).

Edit: SUCCESS!

Burgers That Don't Rot

2010-11-05T10:22:00.002-04:00

From the same guy who brought you "How To Make Peking Duck At Home" comes an experiment in using hamburgers as vector for mold growth.

A bunch of websites/people have kept McDonald's hamburgers around for ill-advised amounts of time under ill-advised refrigeration conditions to demonstrate that they don't grow mold. The lack of mold is said to in turn demonstrate that said burgers are not "real food," but in fact some kind of chemical-laden horror show. Perhaps they are, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt demonstrates that it's not chemicals that are inhibiting mold growth, but low moisture levels. It turns out that a similarly-shaped burger made at home from freshly ground beef, sans preservatives, also does not mold, whereas the larger 1/4 pound patty does grow some mold. Moisture loss rate is the difference. The regular McD's burger, and presumably the home-made version of the same (though moisture loss information was not provided for all specimens), lost moisture far faster than its larger cousin.

Yum.

Recent Tasty

2010-11-05T08:48:00.002-04:00

Steeped some ginger batons in thick coconut milk the other day for dinner, ended up with a delicious breakfast the next morning:

Coconut milk + ginger + yogurt + pear + mango + crispy-crunchy cereal.

Pajeon Success At Last!

2010-10-27T20:43:00.000-04:00

Recipe here. Never should have doubted Di.

Yay Bread!

2010-10-27T17:55:00.005-04:00

Using this recipe and this mixing technique (the French Fold), I made some beautiful rolls and a braided loaf that was not quite as perfect. I was hoping the folding technique would make kneading feel less onerous, but I still got bored and frustrated at times. Perhaps with practice...

Also, the pastry chef at work and I have started a little series of cooking competitions with each other. Of course, as the first contest I proposed an item straight from the sweet side of cooking: cinnamon rolls. Needless to say, hers came out much better than mine, though I was pretty happy with my results and I learned a lot from watching her work (which was the whole point for me). Lessons learned: proof the rolls right up against each other and the walls of a pan to limit the outer surface area, which will get dryer and brown; put some brown sugar-cinnamon mix under the rolls so they get extra-gooey; baste with lots of butter that white glaze is important to the overall cinnamon roll experience. I actually preferred my bread to hers because it had a little chew, whereas hers was almost like cake. I used this brioche recipe, which I must try again, but only with a stand mixer: the dough took forever to mix, and was very stiff.

Ginger

2010-10-20T21:28:00.002-04:00

I like the technique shown in this Marco Pierre White video for making ginger batons palatable: simmer for a few minutes in water with a bit of lemon juice to preserve the ginger's color, then drain and cool.

Szechuan Green Beans

2010-10-20T20:22:00.004-04:00

This doesn't taste like anything I ate in Szechuan, but it does taste pretty good...

Szechuan Green Beans
Serves 4 as a side. Feel free to multiply or divide

Ingredients
250 g Green Beans, rinsed and trimmed
6 g Sesame Oil (the roasted, strong, Asian kind)
16 g Unseasoned Rice Vinegar
24 g Yeo's Sweet Chili Sauce (or ketchup, maybe with a little sambal oelek or cayenne mixed in)
48 g Soy Sauce
25 g Chee Hou Sauce or Hoisin Sauce
5 g Ginger, grated
11 g Honey or Agave Nectar (if you're a vegan) or Corn Syrup (if you're a soulless corporation)
2 g Szechuan Peppercorn Oil; I got mine at a store, but you could make your own.
One or two drops Vanilla Extract
.13 g Xanthan Gum (optional in the extreme)

Process
Bring a large pot full of well-salted water (the water should be salty like the sea) to a boil. Have a bowl of ice water or an extraordinarily large bowl or pot of very cold water nearby. Also have a spider or strainer handy. Boil the beans in the salty water for a minute or two or three until they taste how you want them to, texture-wise. Plunge them into the ice/cold water to stop them from cooking further. Let them chill out there for a while.

Combine all the other ingredients. You can do this with a fork or whisk, in a bowl. If you care about the oil and the water not separating, you can slowly emulsify the oils into everything else. If you're a real stickler for emulsion stability, you can put everything in a blender, put the blender on high, and shear in the xanthan gum until fully dispersed.

If the beans are completely cooled by now, drain them and toss them with the sauce. Refrigerate and serve cold or at room temperature.

Pancetta: First Tasting

2010-10-13T13:21:00.003-04:00

Tried my pancetta for the first time today. It's been drying in the fridge for about two and a half weeks. The outside constantly over-dried, so I ended up trying a bunch of methods to make it dry evenly. Covering the piece with parchment and rotating it frequently seemed like the best solution. It's now wrapped in plastic, so hopefully the moisture content will even out.

Predictably, I couldn't resist the urge to try the meat uncooked, but frankly it made for a pretty unpleasant experience. The meat was fine, though it had a too-strong nitrate flavor. The fat, on the other hand, was so chewy that I ended up spitting it out. No matter, just like with the duck bacon at work, rendering and crisping the pancetta brought out its porkiness and sweetness. I found myself looking a wider breadth of flavors, so next time I may dry-rub with spices, garlic, and herbs during the drying phase.

I'm interested to see what happens to the moisture level of the piece when wrapped, and with smoked bacon, Chinese bacon, and Lop Chong already sitting around, I'm also wondering what to do with so much cured pork...

Pig Skin Braciole

2010-10-10T16:08:00.001-04:00

Love it! Thank god for the internets, once again.

Pig Skin Braciole

The Great Dumpling Schism

2010-10-05T10:37:00.003-04:00

There's a war on out there for the soul of the soup dumpling. No, not the kind with soup inside. The kind that sits in, or maybe floats on top of soup. But to start at the beginning...

Yesterday, as I was making fresh pasta for dinner (very satisfying, served with a super-hearty tomato and vegetable soup), I got lazy on my last piece of dough and decided to roll it into a very long thin log and cut it into tiny pillow shapes instead of the fettuccine shape I'd made the rest of the dough into. The pillows, about 1 cm on each side, proved impossible to cook thoroughly - the starch on the outside of the pasta hydrated, gelated, and swelled, keeping the interiors from hydrating. I wasn't surprised. I had been hoping to find a super easy gnocchi substitute in these pillow-shaped pastas, and when they failed, I had one of those moments where my mind runs in a bunch of different directions at once to try to solve a problem. One track was to make a dough with very hot water, to try to hydrate the flour before it is even shaped. Another idea was to make a leavened batter and drop it into the hot water to cook. Yep, dumplings. The other ideas were probably stupid, because I've already forgotten them.

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first person to think of making leavened dumplings and cooking them in hot water or broth. In fact, Chicken and Dumplings is I guess pretty classic Americana, though I never ate it growing up. Too bad; I was missing out on a great culinary feud. This war is between supporters of two different shapes of soup dumplings: the sliders, or slicks, and the floaters. According to this book, the war is not based on lineage, not geography. Alton Brown agrees, and indicates that the two styles of dumplings have different roots in the Old World and are a epicurean manifestation of the Norman-Saxon conflict.

For now I've got to cuddle up to the floater camp because this whole jaunt is all about learning how to make light, fluffy leavened dumplings, not flat noodles. Alton's floaters are choux pastry, which is interesting and definitely worth exploring, but I'm looking to make a chemically leavened dumpling, not just the mechanically-leavened sort. According to that Appalachian Home Cooking book, you can get the fluffy sort of dumpling by gently simmering biscuit dough, but that's not exact enough information for me. This article has a recipe for something that sounds similar. From a whole different track and indeed a different part of the world comes the Czech/Sloval parená knedľa, basically a steamed yeast bread that is then sliced into 'dumplings.'

In the end, however, I want a super light, fluffy dumpling if possible, at least for the first try. Based on my experience with pancakes, light and fluffy means either baking soda to go along with the baking powder, or whipped egg whites. Naturally, there are plenty of recipes for buttermilk and baking soda dumplings like this one. Googling "egg white dumplings" returned this recipe and story of not-quite-success, which I think is worth a shot and some modification. Onwards to the tests!

Duck Bacon Results

2010-10-04T16:44:00.004-04:00

At work on Saturday, I pulled the duck legs out of their cure and smoked them. Total curing time was 12 days, first in the Ruhlman/Polcyn basic cure for 5 days vacuum-sealed and then 7 more days in a mix of equal parts by volume white sugar and salt with added brown sugar, garlic, and whole coriander, allspice, and black peppercorns, this time in a normal ziploc-type plastic bag. After the first cure period, I thought they weren't fully cured, so I decided to do another week in a cure with the brown sugar and spices that I didn't have time to add on the first try. I didn't have pink salt on hand, so I didn't vacuum-seal the legs for fear of botulism, but from the interior color of the final product I suspect nitrite penetration was quite thorough after the first week.

After 12 days curing, the meat was quite firm, slightly translucent, and wrinkling at the edges. The legs got rinsed, patted dry, and left for an hour to air-dry in the walk-in while the smoker got going. I hot-smoked them over hickory for about an hour and a half, but I think the smoker was only producing good smoke for about 45 minutes to an hour of that time. First I turned the burners under the smoker (just a deep hotel pan rig we use at the restaurant) too low and then fat rendering from the legs dripped down onto the woodchips, effectively forcing me to abandon the smoker and finish the legs in a low (250F) oven for another hour or so. I gave the legs a sniff before I put them in the oven, and the level of smokiness seemed appropriate, so I wasn't unduly worried.

After the duck came out of the oven, I crisped up a few small pieces and it was FANTASTIC. The smokey flavor was perfect and well balanced with the intense meatiness and saltiness, with the brown sugar taking the delicious up another level. I was slightly worried about texture, since duck legs sometimes get a dense sponginess if not cooked long enough, but the texture of even the un-crisped meat is pleasant - dense and a bit chewy in a good way. With some crisped skin and fat thrown in - the ratio of meat to fat is also excellent - these legs are really a great eating experience.

I'm still trying to think of good ways to feature this stuff in our family meals - pasta carbonara and pizza are the only things that have come to mind thus far.

Fresh Whole Wheat Pasta

2010-10-04T16:10:00.006-04:00

Inspired by all the fresh pasta making going on around me at work every day. In this case, meditative was the flip-side of tedious.

Recipe.

Mushroom and Tofu Dumplings in Miso-Genmaicha Broth

2010-09-27T13:35:00.006-04:00

For lunch, Di and I made simple mushroom and tofu dumplings in a shiro miso and genmaicha broth with bok choy. A fun little project and satisfyingly warming lunch for a dreary, rainy, cold Sunday.

Also a good reminder of how well seasoned dumpling filling needs to be to stand out in a bowl of richly flavored soup.

That's Some Well-Hung Meat, Sir

2010-09-27T13:26:00.004-04:00

Duck Bacon

2010-09-21T23:43:00.003-04:00

12 duck legs are in Ruhlman/Polcyn's Simple Cure (recipe here), hopefully I'll get to smoke them on Saturday, when there's more space in the kitchen. The last few Saturday's we've done more elaborate projects for family meal, and I hope to keep that new tradition alive.

On the home front, I've got a few pounds of pork belly I bought at a Chinese market in Rockville curing in the fridge for pancetta. I'll hang it somewhere on Saturday.

Duckcetta

2010-09-11T01:51:00.002-04:00

We have an insane amount of duck legs in our freezer. At least 100 pieces. Probably more than 150. I am allowed to use them for family meal, and I have. Am I allowed to cure them and hang them from the ceiling?

Flavor Purism

2010-09-09T11:50:00.002-04:00

Just another internal contradiction.

One voice inside of me is obsessed with purity of flavor. Some preparations, at least those that bear the name of a single ingredient, like 'apple puree' or 'chicken stock,' should taste like the concentrated essence of that ingredient, unsullied by other flavors. I want chicken stock to taste more like chicken-y than chicken does, and apple puree to punch me in the mouth with its clarity and force. Flavor enhancers are acceptable: salt, acid, spiciness, MSG are all fine by me. But ingredients that add their own flavors can bother me. I am always hesitant to add mirepoix to my stocks. I don't think a vegetable soup should be made with chicken, or even vegetable, stock. Black pepper has its own flavor: nix it. I am always most impressed when a flavor shocks me with its purity.

On the other side of my brain is a love of dishes with complex, even muddled, flavors. Braises, stews, curries. I love all of them, and I'm much better at making them and other rustic fare than at making clear, simple, bright preparations. Maybe the more complex preparations are inherently easier, or maybe it's just my lack of experience with the others. I've given up choosing one philosophy over the other, but I'm still searching for a balance, or a harmony.

Focus

2010-08-24T22:41:00.002-04:00

When my cyclical interest in cooking is at its most intense, I experience a sort of manic need to absorb food-related information across a ridiculously broad spectrum. I read Cooking Issues and 101 Cookbooks, stumble on interviews with food scientists (informative, illuminating) and make special trips to the library to browse through impractical cookbooks (my favorite kind). I get excited about everything all at once, but I don't follow through on any one of my possible obsessions. Even when my cooking powers and patience should be at their zenith, sometimes I still end up just throwing together whatever I happen to have in the pantry. I want focus; I want a specific passion. Maybe I should just read some more...

Turning Point

2010-08-24T18:10:00.005-04:00

DC Restaurant Week for me was a crucible of 6 13-hour days in a row. I had no idea what to expect, what my mise was going to be, or even which days I was working (pretty much all of them, as it turned out). The only thing anyone would tell me was that we were doing 200+ covers a night. This fact was relayed to me constantly by chefs, cooks, dishwashers, and food runners alike, with only the shades of dread and/or schadenfreude varying by source.

The Restaurant Week pickups were designed to be dead simple and blazing-quick. I had to deal with just four different proteins, all of which should either be already cooked or extremely fast to cook. Inevitably, hiccups arose and the whole endeavor turned into a slightly more complicated beast, but not by a degree that made it unmanageable. Nevertheless, by the end of the second day I was exhausted. The shear amount of new information and procedure, as well as the unusually hectic atmosphere of the kitchen, took its toll on me mentally. Of course, on Day 2 there's no stopping and there's no end in sight, so I just had to grit my teeth and dive in every morning, then slam some energy drinks before service.

Somewhere in the fray, I turned a corner, stopped being depressed and angry, and started performing acceptably. My mind cleared up a bit during prep and I was actually ready by the time we opened. I have no idea how that happened, but the energy drinks definitely helped.By Friday, service was boringly easy and heaping on another day of work didn't faze me. My sous-chef even went from being constantly frustrated with me to only being intermittently pissed off. Now I'm just hoping that week was a real turning point, not just a statistical blip.

Love

2010-07-28T14:45:00.004-04:00

A word my new chef throws around a lot is "love," and when he says that he means paying attention to details, going the extra mile, making it perfect. Pondering his use of that word got me thinking about my relationship with my old kitchen, which by the end of my stay had certainly evolved into "love" in one of the other senses of the word.

When I first started, I was, quite naturally, The New Guy. I didn't know what was going on, where things were, what I needed to do. I often felt incompetent and out of place. Even knowing one of the other cooks before I started didn't help me feel like part of the family. Despite the overall positive energy of that kitchen, there were times when I got so down on myself that I wanted to leave the job. Ironically, the night that my friend left our kitchen to move to another state was when I started to really become a part of the kitchen. I've never been able to figure out what about that night made it transformative; it could have been me loosening up and having a few drinks with everyone else or maybe it was just being part of that combination ceremony/celebration/parting of ways. After that night, I got more and more involved in keeping the kitchen going and trying to improve our food. I started contributing more specials and developing dishes. I became somehow emotionally invested in what we were doing, which naturally lead to giving more "love" to everything I did there. I don't think that kind of caring attitude can't be invented or imposed. For me, whether it develops or not has everything to do with love for the kitchen, which itself surely has unknowable roots.

Hi, I'm the New Guy

2010-07-25T01:47:00.003-04:00

I started a new job about two weeks ago on Monday the 12th. I changed restaurants because, though I loved my old kitchen to death, I felt that it would never take my skills to the next level of refinement. My new job, butchering and cooking all the proteins for one of the top fine dining restaurants in DC, is definitely already shaping me into a faster, more precise cook. I am shedding old habits and gaining new ones (especially keeping everything clean clean and neat neat!) and making a real effort to open my mind to everything I see and am told. It's far too easy to act receptive outwardly while in fact rejecting new ideas out of arrogance or laziness.

I believe my learning curve at the new restaurant is going to be different than at previous jobs. At my first real restaurant job, things were tough at first, and then I quickly got competent and lazy and my learning rate dropped steadily. The kitchen that I just left kept me learning because it had a great spirit of curiosity and valued experimentation. I learned about new techniques and products because we were all enthusiastic about educating ourselves and doing new things. At my new job, I hope the learning rate with stay high for months to come. Right now I am focused on learning how to be fast on the line. It sucks to be the one holding everyone else up. Tonight was the first super-busy day (almost every day is busy) that I really handled decently, so I'm hoping that I'll start focusing on improving my butchery skills. After I've mastered the butchery I'm responsible for, I hope to start learning the mise for other stations, because there's a lot of really interesting technique being applied elsewhere in the kitchen. People are always curing fish or making gels or doing other stuff that I'd be thrilled to be learning, but right now I'm too busy just trying to keep my head above water to get involved.

Agar Shots

2010-06-10T12:04:00.002-04:00

850g juice
200g vodka
juice from two limes (not much)
6g agar (around .6%)

boiled part of the juice with zest of 2 limes, dispersed agar (not all of it dissolved, since I have the flake kind - I think the powder would work better). Strained and combined with the vodka and the remaining juice. Only partially gelled; was edible, but will use slightly more agar next time.

Developments at Work

2010-06-10T10:30:00.003-04:00

Experimented with cooking some chicken sous-vide for the next. We have abandoned that for lack of knowledge and equipment.

Pork Belly is definitely going on the summer menu. My original idea was an app with a corn juice reduction and a mini spicy-sweet salad. Connor's (pretty much genius) idea was to put the belly on sliders with a bit of fruit-based BBQ sauce and some sort of tropical-tasting slaw. Right now we are putting the belly on a bed of garlic and shallots and a few vanilla beans, pouring in a bit of water or wine or stock, drizzling the fat (skin) side with some oil, and baking covered for about 4 hours. Super unbelievably delicious. The BBQ sauce will probably be peach and maybe whiskey, and the slaw right now is pineapple. We served the sliders as an app special on Tuesday, and they were absolutely delicious, though it seems like we're going to have to educate the front of the house on what pork belly is and how to sell it.

Katie has started us growing our own sprouts from a bunch of different seeds - alfalfa, chickpea, dill, lentil, and a few more. They are absolutely delicious and fast and easy to grow, but they unfortunately require attention several times a day, every day. I hope we can find the discipline to put the process into full production.

Still haven't made our own cheese, but I left my rennet supply at work, so hopefully we'll do it some day soon.

Today I'm going to start some mini burger bun recipes at home and bake them at work tomorrow. The commercial one's we've gotten so far are absurdly expensive, though also quite good.

Jacques Pepin Just Blew My Mind

2010-05-18T10:56:00.002-04:00

...by boning a whole chicken in an awesome way.

I think I will run down to Whole Foods, get a chicken, and come right back and do just that.

Great Success!

2010-05-18T10:41:00.003-04:00

Corn Many Ways

Inspired by a recipe from Under Pressure and a quote from The Flavor Bible, I took two ears of corn and made four preparations from them: cooked corn juice (what Thomas Keller I think called "Corn Pudding"), corn powder, cob stock, and husk stock. The corn juice was excellent, with a nicely coating (and totally adjustable) consistency and super corn flavor that needed no seasoning. I pureed the kernels and then pressed them in a paint straining bag to extract the liquid, then cooked the liquid for just 3 or 4 minutes in a pan until it thickened. I spread the pulp from the bag on a silpat and put it in a low oven for the corn powder, but it wasn't dried when I went to work, so I still haven't tried it. The cob stock was very corny on the nose, but lacked great corn flavor and was mostly just sweet. I used too much onion in the husk stock (half a small onion for 2 husks), so it ended up smelling like a New England Clam Bake, which wasn't all bad but grew tiresome quickly.

Chicken Ballotines

At work, I boned two chicken legs (badly), stuffed them with sauteed maitake mushrooms, dried cherries, pistachios, and panko (could've done without the panko), rolled them into ballotines, then poached them in our steam table (sous-vide style) at 140-145F for 2.5 hours. I ice-bathed one of them and deep fried the other. Slightly crisp, super super moist, a bit under-seasoned. Today I'm going to try deep frying the other from chilled to see if the stuffing comes up to service temperature.

I'd never boned and stuffed a chicken leg before, so this video was my guide.

Next stuffing: apricot, sage, some kind of nut.

Pistachio Semolina Crackers

Last week got great results with this recipe from 101 Cookbooks, so we made the same crackers again, but wanted to incorporate pistachios. Katie and I both had dreams of pistachios compressed by the pasta roller into beautiful emerald ovals, but it was not to be. Instead we ended up rolling the dough out to about the thickness of the pistachios, which luckily worked quite well. For a second batch, I pureed some pistachios with water, then mixed that into the dough, turning it a nice green color, then pressed more of the nuts into the rolled dough discs before baking.

Perfectionism

2010-05-12T09:31:00.002-04:00

I am not a clothing or cleanliness or anything else perfectionist. I am only a food perfectionist.

To me, making anything but perfect food is deeply disappointing. Obviously, that means I'm frequently (almost always) disappointed with my food. Whenever I taste something I've made, my attention inevitably focuses on the flaws as much as the successes. I might say "Good flavor, not great texture," when I'm really just thinking about the texture: how it is, how it should have been, where I went wrong, how it can be perfect next time.

Professionally, that means I taste everything on every plate of food that leaves my station, if it is at all possible, to make sure it's as perfect as I can make it. It also means that, though I never let it show externally, I rage inside whenever somebody shrugs "it's good enough" or serves food that's been sitting under the heat lamp too long, or commits one of a million peccadilloes that cooks and food runners and waiters are guilty of every day.

My perfectionism is also putting me in an uncomfortable spot career-wise (also, I feel like the word 'career' somehow cheapens what I hope is a journey towards knowledge, not professional advancement). My current kitchen is the great place that it is because everyone cares about what we're doing, and I'm no exception. I awkwardly left another restaurant an hour and a half into a trail last week because my chef called and asked me to come in and help solve a crisis brought on by our sous-chef caring too much about the job for her own health. I barely even had to think about that decision then, and I haven't regretted it since. So our level of dedication is not what holds us back from turning out incredible food all the time. The problem is that we're just not good enough to be perfect. To try so hard and still always fall short just about breaks my heart once every few weeks when I get to thinking about it.

Now I'm looking for a place where I can become a sick as hell killer cook. A place where they put out awesome food AND have a culture of perfection. One is not good enough without the other. I've trailed at a place where the cooks are super-focused and the chef inspects every plate before it goes out, and tastes many of them. I could see him boiling inside when someone handed him a salad with some yellowing arugula in it, and I identified immediately. Sadly, the food was very good, but not spectacular. Another place served what could be really excellent, exciting food, but the cooks lacked that perfectionist drive, and maybe the food that went out was all it could have been.

I'm still looking.

Early Low Temp Experiments

2010-05-10T13:39:00.003-04:00

Finally riding the "Sous-Vide" wave.

Using just a big pot, a steamer insert as a riser, and an analog thermometer, I've started doing some low-temp (or low delta-T) work.

First experiment was, of course, steak in a bag. Got a small bit of beef tenderloin from Whole Foods (not great quality), put it in a Ziploc using the water technique in a bath that I started at 120F and let creep up to about 123F. I think it was in there for 1.5 hours or so. Interior temp was 120F when I pulled it out. Perfect, adjusting for the quality of the meat.

Next up was "Shrimp Sausage" - minced shrimp, shallots, and lime zest, seasoned with salt and wrapped up with plastic wrap into a log. Poached for 1 hour (probably unnecessarily long) at 135F (maybe unnecessarily warm).

At work, we have a steam table that I am working on calibrating. I think I got 125F down yesterday, but I left it overnight to be sure. I'd like to do a several-day braise of one of our lamb shanks.

Recent Pastry

2010-04-30T10:46:00.003-04:00

I've slowly assumed more and more of the pastry duties at my restaurant. Most desserts are now collaborations between myself and Katie, another line cook. Recent triumphs:

Rum Whipped Cream
If you've had a dessert at my restaurant in the last two weeks, chances are you got some of this. We keep making too much and having to serve it on the next dessert. Good thing it goes so well with everything! Turns out that the secret to great rum flavor without terrible alcohol burning is maple syrup. Who knew?

Green Apple Peel Juice
Granny Smith peels, pureed with a bit of water and a bit of lemon juice. Super refreshing, with a unique flavor that is apple-y and yet not quite apple as you know it. Beautiful green color that fades under refrigeration, so I kept it frozen between services. If only we had some Pectinex Smash XXL.

Gingerbread Dust
This stuff started as an attempt to make some delicious leftover gingerbread into a crust for a cheesecake. When I ground the gingerbread into crumbs, I found they were far too moist to make a crust with the texture I wanted, so I dehydrated them in the oven overnight. Some got turned into a fragile crust (which I eventually bound together by pouring on a layer of caramel sauce) while the remainder was turned a fine powder in a spice grinder. Right now we just use it to dust the top of desserts, but really it's like having a whole new spice in our pantry - Essence of Gingerbread!

Also, the cheesecake this stuff went onto may have been overcooked. If a cheesecake is made of use a bunch of tiny curds, like this one, does that mean it's overcooked? Or is that normal? Or is it normal for cheesecake to be overcooked?

French Toast Crepes
Dwayne, another cook, told me about some guys on Future Food (terrible name!) turning cooked French Toast into crepe batter, so after brunch service one day I decided to give it a try. I took a few pieces of leftover french toast (fully cooked) and blended them with some milk, an egg, and a tiny bit of flour, adjusting the consistency as I went. The resulting crepes tasted (surprise!) just like cooked French Toast, which may be more exciting in real life than it sounds to be on paper. All of the spice flavors came through, of course, but there were the characteristic browned and cooked-egg notes also. The crepes were quite fragile, probably because the french toast they were made from was perfectly cooked, with that creamy inside. If I did it again, I'd probably overcook the toast and add some maple syrup to complete the flavor experience.

Still Looking

2010-04-21T12:32:00.003-04:00

Still in search of a good cookbook...looking at regional Italian right now.

"Cucina Di Calabria" sounds good...

In other news, following the French Toast Crepe Experiment, I plan to make pretzels and blend them into a pancake batter. Inspired by Pretzel Pancakes I saw (but did not order) in a restaurant near Minneapolis. Apparently they just put some pretzels in their pancakes as they cook.

An approximated recipe from that kitchen, that I have not tried yet:

Oaxaca-Style Relish

Lime Juice
Lemon Juice
Small Radishes, sliced thin
Red Onion, sliced thin
Habanero Peppers, gutted

Combine all ingredients, refrigerate overnight. Adjust seasoning.

I had this served on top of mini brauts with cabbage and avocado mousse (whipped cream). Tangy, spicy, and deceptively complex-tasting.

French Toast Crepes

2010-04-19T14:00:00.002-04:00

Success!

2 pieces cooked french toast
1 egg
milk to thin

vitaprep. crepe batter!

I Need a Cookbook

2010-04-16T12:38:00.002-04:00

One with lots of vegetarian options. Ethnic would be good. Focused on a cuisine or a place or a time or something. Not technical, not reference, just recipes.

The only cookbooks I have right now are once I use as reference materials When I have a specific question about technique, they serve me well, but they don't inspire me. My library reflects, and maybe informs, my mindset. Over the last half-year or so, I have grown more concerned with technique, theory, chemistry, equipment. I have lost interest in humble, earthy, accessible food, and even begun to dismiss it, in my own mind. A colleague cooked a bacon-wrapped stuffed chicken tender a few weeks ago. On the inside, I sneered at the lowbrow concept while admiring his perfect technique.

I haven't cooked a curry in months.

My cooking at home has suffered, as has my creativity at work. Uninspired, I've settled into a rut of making uninteresting food at home. Sauteed vegetables on pasta again. My technique is much improved: the vegetables are almost perfectly cooked. They are also the same vegetables I cooked yesterday, and I'm bored with the dish. I've gotten used to being bored with the food I make, and now it's hard to think of things I won't be bored with. Most of my own ideas I dismiss as uninteresting, tired.

So it's time for a fresh start. Time to get back to being open minded and exploring delicious peasant food. I need to continue educating myself about technique and theory, but without developing an arrogant mindset than denigrates anything. I think a new cookbook is a good start.

Aroma Molecules and Solubility

2010-03-04T09:46:00.006-05:00

Chef and I were talking last night about the possibility of unsaturated fats "absorbing" flavors better than saturated fats. I realized then that I don't actually know much about the chemical properties of aroma molecules and how they dissolve into water, oil, alcohol, or whatever. Reading McGee this morning, I learned that the different aroma molecule families have different characteristic structures, but they tend to be more similar to triglycerides, and so they are more soluble in fats than in water, although the family with the characteristic aromas of cinnamon and clove have an OH group that is similar to water, which is why those flavors last so long on the palate. I need to do some more digging and figure out the exact mechanist of these compounds dissolving into solutions of various things. Once again frustrated by my lack of chemistry knowledge, but happy that the information is so easy to access.

Hydrocolloid Experiments

2010-03-04T09:46:00.001-05:00

I've been doing a bunch of gel experiments lately, and I want to get my conclusions down before I forget them.

Whipped Gelatin foam: for powdered, 1% seems like a good concentration, though the resulting gel is quite fragile. About 2 or 2.5 sheets (gold I think) for a quart of sorbet base did well at work - much stiffer than the 1% powdered, but the mouthfeel was excellent. Whipping when the gel is more firmly gelled seemed to give larger bubbles and a more aggressive bubbly mouthfeel. Almost carbonated-seeming at times.

Agar: .5% worked well for a soft gel that melts quickly in the mouth. I had to add water to readjust the concentration before chilling because so much water evaporated during the hydration and dissolution process. Made a fluid gel around 1%. No structure without added starch, felt almost like water on the palate. A higher concentration lasted too long in the mouth in an unattractive way. A little added starch (Ultratex 8) gave an ok sauce-like mouthfeel and slightly more structure on the plate, but might change flavor release at a higher concentration.

Pine Mouth

2010-03-04T09:29:00.003-05:00

I have Pine Mouth and it is terrible. Everything tastes bitter and horrible. The sensation started yesterday morning with a bowl of homemade yogurt, and I almost threw the whole batch of yogurt out, thinking it was contaminated. Nope, just Pine Mouth. I made a pretty delicious-seeming lunch of sauteed sweet potato gnocchi and vegetables, but I threw half of it away because it tasted so bitter. The annoyance became a serious problem at work, because cooking things that taste good is hard to do when EVERYTHING TASTES TERRIBLE.

I hope it will be over soon. Fuck you again, China.

On the bright side, the butter & brown sugar candied pine nuts that I got Pine Mouth from were pretty delicious.

Playing with Cornstarch

2010-02-22T15:04:00.002-05:00

Last night, my Chef and I were wondering whether a cornstarch-thickened fluid would lose viscosity when subjected to shearing forces, so this morning I started doing some research. Unfortunately, my limited efforts turned up technical abstracts and youtube videos, and nothing much in between. On a side note, the youtube videos were pretty cool. "A Pool filled with non-Newtonion liquid" anyone?

So, I decided to do my own sloppy little experiment. First, I made a relatively concentrated cornstarch and water slurry and cooked that until milky-translucent and very thick. After noting the viscosity, I turned off the heat and started shearing the mix with a stick blender. The change in viscosity was obvious just from the way the blender worked. At first, with the blender submerged there was no movement on the fluid surface. After half a minute or so, the fluid was thin enough that immersing the blender caused great distortion even at the surface. Shearing had diminished viscosity considerably. Curious about whether letting the fluid sit would allow the gelling network to reform itself, I removed the blender and let the fluid rest in the still-hot cooking pot. it regained all or almost all of its viscosity in a few minutes. Unfortunately, I didn't design my experiment to separate the temperature and shear variables very well, so some of the thickening may have been due to cooling, rather than the absence of shear. I wondered about how further cooling would effect viscosity, so I transferred a small sample to a ice water bath. Both the sample in the ice bath and the sample in the pot cooled to a solid, soft, opaque gel that I could pick up with my hands.

A morning well spent.

Fine Dining

2010-02-15T10:35:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, I trailed at a very polished, professional kitchen putting out nicely plated, well-conceived food. I talked to a cook there about where I work now, which is a bar in Adams Morgan, a sort of gritty, wild-partying neighborhood. I talked a bit about the food we put out there, which I like to think of as often interesting and well-executed, especially for a bar. He said "well, it's not fine dining, is it." No question mark; a statement. I quickly agreed. A lot of our food is definitely pub grub and our prices are modest. We're a bar first and maybe last.

Last night changed my thinking. For Valentine's Day, we offered four special items, each featuring a game animal: a quail app, and entrees with duck, venison, and rabbit. Prices were still modest, though a bit higher than the regular menu. The quail app went for $7 and the most expensive plate, the venison, went for $20, which was probably still not enough to justify the food cost. The plates that went out, however, looked and tasted as good as the stuff coming out of that fine dining restaurant I trailed at. They could easily have fetched ten dollars more at a restaurant whose service, decor, and reputation matched the quality of the food. I don't think we'll ever do fine dining, but we served food on a higher level last night, and I couldn't be more proud.

Day of Chocolate

2010-02-06T18:58:00.003-05:00

I had two great chocolate successes yesterday: bacon-chocolate truffles and emulsified hot chocolate.

The bacon truffles I made at work by steeping two strips of diced cooked bacon in the cream from a normal truffle recipe. They came out beautifully balanced, delivering both bacon and chocolate flavors in a way that really made the eater think about how those two play together.

Emulsified hot chocolate started as a concept because I wanted to serve hot chocolate to a vegan. In retrospect, just melting chocolate into enough water probably works fine, but I was drunk and thought instead of the old 'chocolate and water are enemies' maxim. Of course, that maxim made me think of Heston Blumenthol's Chocolate Mousse, made of chocolate and water. In the end, I decided to think of making the hot chocolate as making a fat in water emulsion for something like salad dressing or mayonnaise. I first melted some bittersweet chocolate, then added hot water a drop at a time. At first the chocolate did seem to sort of 'seize,' getting dry and clumped very quickly, but as I added more water, it turned fluid again. In the end, I got a perfectly smooth drink and my friends were presumably duly impressed by the process (and by the amount of time it took me to make a few cups of hot chocolate).

Bean Stews

2010-02-04T14:11:00.004-05:00

The rustic nature of bean stews can keep me from making them when I'm consciously trying to produce food that is more challenging, technical, refined, or whatever. Luckily, the other day I needed lunch and my limited pantry was not inspiring elevated cooking, so I somewhat reluctantly prepared a bean stew. The result was one of the most complex soups I've ever had, and though I'm just a hair ashamed to be proud of it, that's not stopping me. Each bite offered a different flavor profile than the one before, as if the soup were constantly changing in the bowl. A few days ago, a coworker and I were talking about a dish of hers from our current menu that I am quite taken with. She said that it had been called one-dimensional or something like that, and I replied by saying (only half-jokingly) that we weren't good enough to cook in any more dimensions than one. Funny how this soup accidentally proved me wrong.

Ever-Changing Bean & Mustard Soup

Simmer onions, garlic, canned tomatoes, dried tomatoes, cannellini beans, pinto beans, bay leaves, and fennel seeds in water to cover. The idea is to make the beans creamy if they are not already, cook the onion and garlic, and leach the flavors of the bay leaves and fennel seeds into the soup. Fish out the bay leaves. Stir in steamed kale. Add water or reduce the soup for consistency - it should have some loose liquid, but not a huge amount. Season with black pepper and salt. Stir in a (TINY!) bit of Dijon mustard and some minced sage. Check seasoning and balance. No flavor should dominate the others.

Breads Breads and Pretzels

2010-02-01T14:53:00.003-05:00

Finally made use of the ready-to-go dough by fermenting it overnight and then baking some pretty decent rolls this morning. I feel like the dough held up quite well in the fridge. The outside of the dough ball oxidized despite being coated in oil, but the rolls had great wheat flavor and decent texture in the end.

In other news, starting a pretzel experiment right now

Gnocchi

2010-01-28T14:36:00.002-05:00

Made potato gnocchi for the first time yesterday. Slightly gummy, but still delicious when browned and sauced (nut and sage puree). Must try again soon.

Also, need to do this soon.

New Effort

2010-01-26T14:20:00.001-05:00

I need to start cooking at a much higher level at home, at least once in a while when I have the time and I'm not distracted.

Also, started the ready-to-go dough trial today.

Starter Dough

2010-01-25T09:36:00.002-05:00

I'm going to start keeping a big ball of hydrated and salted flour in the fridge for easy conversion into pizzas, breads, and flatbreads. I think having this 'starter' around will encourage me to make those items more, diversifying my grain diet a bit. In addition, keeping the flour pre-hydrated should mean I get more flavorful products. We'll see how it goes.

Rice Paper Wrappers

2010-01-19T10:09:00.002-05:00

Last night I tried wrapping rice paper around some marinated and baked tofu and then searing the packages on each side that I could reasonably sear - some were too small. I used medium-high flame, which I think was probably too high, because the thin rice paper went past golden-brown quite quickly. The end result was Not Delicious. Even the perfectly browned parts of the paper had little flavor of their own, so the coffee-like too-dark flavors dominated. More salt may have helped (the filling was underseasoned too), but it may also have just made it salty.

In looking for guidance on how to improve the technique before I experiment with it this afternoon, I came across this recipe from Ming Tsai, but his technique is essentially the same as mine, though he uses high heat and doesn't season the paper at all. This person baked the packages, which I will definitely try. Deep frying is the obvious alternative, but that would make this technique far less useful and I'm not willing to make that compromise.

What I Want

2010-01-18T12:11:00.001-05:00

Hojicha broth (with ginger? spice?), udon noodles, fish with crisped skin. Salmon?

Maybe some water chestnuts.

Molecular Mixology Source

2010-01-11T14:48:00.003-05:00

http://spiritsandcocktails.wordpress.com/category/molecular-mixology/

Great stuff, especially the videos on the Aviation, Vessel 75, and Rosewater Rickey

Simple Delicious (with Bacon)

2009-10-11T21:49:00.003-04:00

Bacon + garlic + canned tomatoes (seeded, chopped pureed, whatever you feel like) + fresh rosemary + cream = the perfect tomato soup to enjoy with some freshly baked rustic bread.

Bacon + Yeo's sweet chili sauce + a bit of hoisin sauce + a bit of soy sauce = instant, incredible glaze for meat or vegetables (if applying to meat, especially pork, you probably don't need the bacon) that reminded me of meaty and sweet char siu.

Gingerbread House (Library, really) Continues

2009-09-30T18:50:00.002-04:00

Seeing hours of hard thinking, cutting, rolling, and baking finally amount to tangible progress is cool. It's also cool to see all the 2D pieces I designed forming a 3D building.

Spending all of my precious bakery time on this one project is not so cool. Oh well.

Recently at the Pastry Shop

2009-09-24T08:04:00.002-04:00

Assembling a 3-tier wedding cake, rolling and coloring fondant, Chocolate Mousse Cups from start to finish, biscotti, cutting oddly shaped cakes, decorating cupcakes using frosting, planning and assembling a gingerbread house (library, actually).

Lunch Today

2009-09-15T16:54:00.003-04:00

Roasted vegetables: a medley of potatoes, beets, and winter squash that tasted of chestnuts. A handful of bitter greens from the garden, undressed.

Cakes Cakes Cakes

2009-09-13T13:48:00.004-04:00

Day 5: cheesecakes with marbled mocha topping, chocolate cakes, roll-out sugar cookies, dipping and filling eclairs, creme brulee.

Renewal

2009-09-08T21:12:00.002-04:00

"A Return To Cooking" - Ruhlman and Ripert. Successful chef seeks a path back to the essence of cooking, philosophizes along the way. A quiet night with a beautiful moon - low, big, hazy-orange. Where is this all going?

Introspection.

I have also gotten distracted from cooking. The REAL cooking; what I do at home, not at work or at an internship. The food that I make for myself and the people I care about. The process I control to the greatest extent possible. I've maintained my patience and my curiosity, but I've strayed in other ways. My perfectionism gets in the way of enjoyment. I examine and criticize technique and barely acknowledge success. I cook hungry, frustrated, snarly and inhale the meal, never relishing the simple enjoyment of food created, food shared.

It's past time to slow down, start smiling, and get back to enjoying cooking. Find new ingredients and better ones for inspiration. Snack while I cook. Maybe even drink. Do fewer things at once. Be kinder. Worry less and be happy with the results of my labors. They'll never be perfect, but they're almost always good.

Lunch Today

2009-09-07T11:17:00.003-04:00

Roasted Root Vegetable Trio: sweet potato, All Purples from Applewald Farm, beet from another other local farm.

Party Pies

2009-09-07T09:45:00.011-04:00

I baked two pies to bring to a co-workers outdoor party: Roasted Grape and Apple.

The idea for the Roasted Grape pie came one day last week I decided to roast some grapes to go along with baked cod and discovered that they tasted a lot like cherries.

I started the pie by washing and roasting two sheets of green grapes at around 425F. I lightly buttered one sheet and forgot on the other, but it didn't seem to make a difference. Which the grapes so crowded on the sheets, they spent most of the roasting time simmering in their own juices (which were a bit sweet, quite tart, and really tasty) before the bottoms dried out and started caramelizing.

On the second batch of grapes, I had thought to reserve their liquid before it evaporated, which didn't negatively effect the flavor of the grapes and gave me a delicious starting place for a syrup, which I finished with balsamic vinegar and sugar and thickened with a bit of cornstarch. I combined this syrup with the grapes, and my filling was assembled and fully cooked, except for the cornstarch, which I could have cooked in a pot, but I wanted the filling cool when I started doing the lattice design for the top crust.

I pre-baked the bottom crust, then filled it and laid out all the strips going across the pie and a double layer around the circumference to hold everything together, then baked everything together. At some point I decided the top wasn't cooking fast enough, so I turned on my broiler. The broiler was a good idea, but walking away to do something else while the crust cooked wasn't, and I ended up with a charred mess. Luckily, it was easy enough to pick off the top crust and the burned grapes, and I successfully broiled the same design the next morning, and the whole design took only 5 minutes the second time around. The little white thing on top is the remains of my spun sugar cloud, which was really easy to make and fun to look at, but stuck to the rice I used to try to keep it dry. Oh well.

This apple pie was just apple slices, sugar, and lemon juice, but putting together this design with the apple slices took 30 minutes or more. The design had two or three layers of apple slices, and I should have sprinkled each layer with sugar and lemon juice, because the bottom layers came out fairly bland.

I didn't pre-bake this crust because I meant to do an overhang around the edge, but then I decided that the overhang would hide the best part of the design. The bottom crust was not as crispy and flavorful as I thought it should have been. Instead of the overhang, I folded the edge under itself and over the lip of the pan to try to keep it from shrinking, which failed in some spots. I definitely need to get better at how I deal with the edges of my crusts.

For a glaze, I simmered the apple peels and cores in a simple syrup and reduced the syrup until it was very thick, then brushed it on the baked pie. A great byproduct of making a glaze that way is the skins, which turn into a translucent and sticky-sweet candy. Two strips tangled up with each other made an easy garnish (and one that looks a bit better in real life than in photographs, apparently).

Another Day, Another Lesson

2009-09-07T09:39:00.002-04:00

Day 4: Pie Dough, these delicate, airy cookies, coating jelly rolls in ganache, and marbled high-ratio white cake.

Internship Continues

2009-09-04T08:32:00.003-04:00

Day 2: Genoise Cake, Jelly Rolls, more things I can't remember

Day 3: Pate Choux, Biscotti, Blueberry Pie

Success, Failure, Disaster

2009-08-30T11:24:00.004-04:00

Successes: My first day at the pastry shop was great! We made tiramisu from start to finish, chocolate mousse cakes wrapped in a stenciled chocolate sheath, and mini fruit tarts. The chef is all about spending time imparting her knowledge to me, which is definitely not something I'm used to from my job as line cook.

Failures: Dinner last night was a bit of a nightmare. I spent a lot of time on it, got tired and hungry and frustrated near the end of the process, and wasn't too happy with the final results. The dish was baked cod with a lobster-broth sauce and purple potato and chive croquettes. I ate at the restaurant where Di works a while ago, and was very impressed by the sauce served with their pastry-wrapped fish (Cod? Haddock? can't quite remember). The menu called it a bouillabaisse, but it was refined and subtle and perfect with the mild fish. My idea was to make a tomato-heavy lobster broth some shells left over from the lobster dinner, then finish it with a bit of cream. As usual with stocks, I used too much vegetable, and the flavor ended up sweeter and less lobster-centered than I wanted, but it worked alright when finished with cream. The purple potato croquettes looked really beautiful before frying and actually ended up tasting just fine as mashed potatoes, but my plan for frying them in a tempura batter (I had no bread crumbs) failed miserably because the batter didn't stick to the potatoes. To top things off, I also let the cod overcook a bit. Oh well, lessons learned and a decent recipe idea stored away.

Disaster: Last week I cracked the inner glass panel on my oven while trying to create steam for baking baguettes. A bit of hot water splashed onto the panel and the glass cracked immediately. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about it.

I Suck At Baking Cakes, Part II

2009-08-26T22:17:00.002-04:00

Yep, I suck at that, so today I got an internship at a pastry shop in the same town as my line cook job. I'm really excited to start learning a lot of new skills again!

In other news, finished the Peach-Whiskey Ice Cream. Tons of peach flavor, not so much whiskey except for a subtle dark sweetness. Another struggle with the ice cream maker inconclusively completed.

Progress

2009-08-24T22:40:00.005-04:00

I've gotten a lot of cooking (and thus learning) done recently. Yesterday I made three separate batches of tortilla-like flatbreads using different techniques and flours. I've decided to go back to my old technique of starting the dough with 50% hydration by volume and then adding flour until the mix is workable. I feel that less mixing (and thus hopefully less toughening) happens this way, and I tend to be happier with the final dough. Also, sandwiching the dough between two Silpats helps make wet doughs less problematic to roll. Resting has a definite positive effect on the rolling process, and rested doughs can probably be rolled thinner. I am still uncertain, however, whether there is any effect on the texture or taste of the cooked dough. Baking on a pizza stone works fine, but it may not be any more effective than cooking in a pan, which is somewhat easier. Finally, I am starting to wonder if what I used to think of as an uncooked flour flavor in my flatbreads may in fact be simply a young dough flavor, and adding flavor, perhaps through a sweetener, might be a good solution.

Today I made a new batch of yogurt, mixed up a Roasted Peach and Whiskey Ice Cream, and baked the three baguettes pictured above. Di got me The Bread Baker's Apprentice for my birthday, and I finally made the defining recipe, Pain a l'Ancienne, starting the dough yesterday and baking today. The baguettes look quite pretty to the untrained eye, but I believe the way the dough split on the slash marks betrays their disappointing crumb, which had much smaller holes than I was hoping for. I think my actual hydration was somewhat lower than what Reinhart called for, or maybe I moved too slowly in getting the dough into the oven, or perhaps it was my failed steam method (following Bittman's advice, a cast-iron pot with rocks in it, pre-heated), or maybe even that my stone (a very thick slab of slate I used for the first time today) was not hot enough yet. Having so many variables is one of the most frustrating parts about bread baking. Anyway, the bread was still very tasty, so I'm still excited to try again soon.

Need A Good Head Shop

2009-08-23T08:18:00.004-04:00

This post on Ideas In Food about roasting dry pasta (and also about hydrating same in cold water) mentioned a smoke gun, which led me to this awesome post on Chadzilla about making your own smoke gun. I wonder how hot the smoke comes out. If it's too hot, I suppose passing it through some underwater hosing might solve that problem. Also, a story on Chow.com mentions using a vaporizer to create aroma instead of smoke. Finally, I can cold-smoke liquor like I've wanted to do for a while now!

I need a pipe bowl and filters, so it's too bad the Dancing Bear shop in Brunswick closed.

Lobster Dinner

2009-08-23T00:15:00.003-04:00

This was a meal Di and I improvised for two visiting friends. Boiled lobster, roasted sweet potatoes with rosemary, and brown butter polenta with corn and shallots. I used Cooks Illustrated's fast microwave method for the polenta.

And yeah, this stuff probably wanted white wine rather than red, but whatever.

Roasted Sweet Potato and Black Bean Soup with Purple Rice

2009-08-20T07:15:00.005-04:00

I made this dish for lunch a few months ago, before it got too warm and humid for hot soups. I roasted sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, and scallions (but mostly sweet potatoes), then pureed them and thinned with water until I got a nicely rich, rustic soup.

For the other components, I started by simmering some canned black beans in a bit of water to soften them (I like to cook canned beans - I feel it softens them a bit and exorcises most off flavors), then drained them and added the beans to the soup and used their cooking water to cook some jasmine rice, which turned the rice a light purple that contrasted nicely with the orange of the soup and the green of the roasted scallions I saved to use as a garnish. Cooking the beans in a small amount of water maintained the intensity of color I needed for the rice, but I think I could have done a better job and ended up with darker rice.

Simple, satisfying, visually appealing. Not bad for an off-the-cuff lunch!

Upcoming Projects

2009-08-18T13:51:00.003-04:00

"Old Empire" Gin - British gin (Bombay?) infused with spices. How do you make something taste dusty?
Agar-filtered melon consomme
Sourdough, again

I Suck At Baking Cakes

2009-08-17T12:06:00.001-04:00

I need to get better at that.

Around and around: Centrifuges and Rotary Evaporators

2009-08-13T10:28:00.004-04:00

'Cooking Issues' has two great articles on how and why to use two pieces of chemist's equipment in the the kitchen: centrifuges and rotovaps. Both separate a substance into its component parts: centrifuges by density and rotovaps by volatility. Cooks can use them to separate flavors into purer essences. Thinking about capturing the pure 'truth' of an ingredient led me to think also about the sous-vide technique, often used to cook meat while altering its flavor and texture minimally. Protecting the integrity of the ingredient seems to be the common theme, but what about other goals a cook can pursue? Does using a traditional process lend value to the final dish? I indeed find myself thinking in circles when I try to assign value to tradition, novelty, 'soul,' purity.

Sous-vide filet, rotovap'd red wine syrup, and root vegetable emulsion, or pot roast?

Brown Butter Consomme?

2009-08-11T13:51:00.004-04:00

I started Harold McGee's Savory Brown Butter Consomme today, and I'm not sure how it's going. The pre-clarification broth seems to have been taken over by the soy sauce and lemon juice, so I'm a bit worried that's how the clarified broth is going to taste as well. Also I used a measuring cup for blooming the gelatin, when maybe I should have used a much wider vessel for more surface area to sprinkle the powder on. I'll have to wait and see. The butter fat that I skimmed off the broth, on the other hand, smells and tastes like the most beautiful, full-bodied, sweetest brown butter I've ever tasted (not that I've tasted that many). To skim the fat, I used a skimmer that I picked up in Hong Kong whose power I didn't grasp until today; its very fine mesh makes it really easy to separate fat and water, probably because fat droplets are much larger than water droplets. It's just like this one, except it cost me maybe a dollar, instead of $24.00, and presumably I still got ripped off.

Chard with Mixed Summer Veg in Brown Butter Balsamic Emulsion

2009-08-10T14:27:00.002-04:00

Got rainbow chard and summer squash from the Brunswick farmers market last saturday. First time having rainbow chard - greens were very similar to beet greens, stems were beautifully colored raw, slightly less so cooked, but with a nicely robust texture. Sauce was delicious, though not well emulsified (problem: lack of effort); rich nutty butter + sharp balsamic (unaged, cheap) + mustard + sweet honey. Mixed vegetables were diced and effectively steamed in their own water. They lacked individual character, but were a serviceable bed for the chard. Dianne roasted some small red potatoes we also got at the market; delicious as always, with a perfectly fluffy texture inside.

On the Cutting (Weeping) Edge

2009-08-09T11:27:00.006-04:00

I've been fascinated by gelatin clarification, a relatively new 'molecular gastronomy' technique for a while, though I'm only now gearing up to try it. The method attracts me because it's not part of classical technique, works very well, and is totally accessible to the home cook. Gel clarification is at least 4 or 5 years old, which seemed new (and it is, relative to techniques in the classical repertoire) until last night, when I discovered another clarification technique that makes gel clarification look like a dinosaur: agar clarification.

Agar clarification was first written about on Ideas in Food less than a month ago and then explained and simplified on Cooking Issues and later applied there to alcohol. This method uses the same syneresis effect as the older gel clarification technique, but it works much faster because you don't need to freeze the gel; agar gels apparently do not 'melt' at room temperature.

It's really exciting to see these techniques being invented and refined in real time.

More Bacterial Magic

2009-07-05T09:48:00.001-04:00

It turns out making yogurt is really easy. In fact, the bacteria do all the work. You just have to give them a nice place to multiply, and pretty soon you get to eat them along with the delicious product they've made (transformed?) for you. I was still nervous, though, when I tried it out for the first time. I've ended up with decidedly mediocre results from projects that could be described in similar terms. The beer I invested over a hundred dollars in brewing was pretty pathetic. I was afraid to even try my preserved lemons, and abandoned them when I moved so that they're now a safe half-dozen states away. I've turned out a few inedible loaves of bread. But no matter! Making yogurt, as I said, is really easy. I have a 100% success rate.

These were the sources I used, the high and the low: a NYT article by Harold McGee (a culinary guiding light of mine) and a wikiHow entry. Both are highly recommended reading.

Special equipment: a large microwave-safe bowl (I used Pyrex or something similar). A thermometer with range of at least 100 F - 200 F. Either an oven or some kitchen towels.

I microwaved about a quart and a half of milk for around 8-10 minutes, until it reached around 190 degrees F. Using the microwave once more, I kept the milk between 180 F and 190 F for the next 15 minutes, then cooled it in a water bath to 115 F. The cooling happened surprisingly quickly - less than 10 minutes. I then mixed a few tablespoons of store-bought yogurt (a kind with a bunch of active bacterial cultures) with a similar amount of warm milk, and stirred the milk-yogurt blend into the warm milk. After that the idea is to keep the milk warm - around 100 F - for four or more hours. Luckily, the bacterial growth seems to be exothermic, so after failing to wrap the measuring bowl I had my milk in with kitchen towels, I briefly warmed up my oven until it felt around 100 F, then turned its internal light on and stuck the bowl in there. Harold McGee recommends letting the milk (or soon-to-be yogurt) sit for 4 hours; the wikiHow article wants you to start with seven hours. I didn't time my batch right, so it sat in my oven for almost 12 hours, and it still came out fine: pleasantly tangy and a bit sweet. After sitting, the yogurt needs to be mixed and refrigerated to firm up. The next night, I set some in a strainer lined with a paper coffee filter and put the strainer over a bowl in the fridge overnight, which gave the yogurt a super-thick and creamy Greek-style texture.

Garlic Broths

2009-03-24T14:08:00.003-04:00

I discovered the satisfying goodness of garlic broths when I put one more clove of the pungent stuff than I thought was reasonable into a vegetable and lentil soup a few weeks ago. The soup came out with a much more rounded, full flavor than I had anticipated, with garlic supplying a mellow low tone that surprised me. Garlic overpowering other ingredients in sauces is a common story, and an overbearing presence in tomato-based pasta sauces particularly irks me, but when simmered in soup it seems to have a different effect and perhaps a different flavor as well. Garlic can serve as a satisfying base flavor for a broth with other big flavors but doesn't distract from brighter herbal or citrus notes. Like so many ingredients, garlic is full of versatility, always ready to help you out with a new flavor or texture, if you let it.

Today, craving the Asian greens (mini bok choy or something similar) staring at me from the vegetable drawer, I decided to go for a garlic broth with other Asian flavors that wouldn't be out of place in a Thai or Chinese soup. First I sweated (well, browned by accident) minced shallots, then added sliced ginger, a good amount of minced garlic, and a few cumin seeds and szechuan peppercorns for complexity and an exotic tone. Once the mixture was fragrant, I added enough water for my bowl of soup and a few cilantro stems to help the ginger freshen up the otherwise rather "brown" tasting broth. Halfway through the 20-minute simmer (longer might be better here), I added ground black pepper. After simmering, I strained everything out of the broth and added plenty of salt. I find that soup takes a relatively massive amount of salt, to the point of actually tasting the salt just a bit, to bring out peak flavor. I simmered some quartered mushrooms in the broth for a few minutes, then brought the whole thing to a boil, added the greens (I boiled these in the broth to retain as much of their nutritional value as possible), and finished with sliced green onions and dried chili flakes.

Satisfying, nourishing, a little (too) spicy on the back of the throat. Good lunch. Next time: drop a beaten egg, perhaps tempered, into the hot broth.

Ideas from Charlie Trotter and Elsewhere

2009-03-23T22:43:00.004-04:00

Charlie Trotter's Meat & Game was the first cookbook I've taken a good look through in a few weeks. Maybe I missed the best parts of this cookbook (the treatments of meat and the game, of course) since I cook mostly vegetarian these days, but it still gave me a few great ideas and got me hunting for more.

Ideas to look into:

spice oils; I'm especially interested by clove oil
flavorful emulsions as sauce or second sauce
infusions of anything - got this from watching a clip from the TV show Heston's Feasts
homemade liqueurs, especially the ones with obvious flavors, like coffee or cocoa
that dim sum that's shrimp in a translucent rice flour wrapper
Chinese garlic sauce (?) or whatever Shanghai Teahouse puts on its tofu and cabbage dish

Quick Note: Clarification Via Gelatin and Freezing

2009-02-23T16:58:00.002-05:00

Quick Note: The Mathematics of Ice Cream

2009-02-19T18:56:00.002-05:00

Pastry Chef at Le Bernardin talks numbers on an ice cream recipe of his.

Quick Note: Braising Meat

2009-02-19T14:03:00.002-05:00

Summary of an eGullet experiment on braising meat

Quick Note: Butchery

2009-02-19T11:12:00.004-05:00

A few good links on cutting up dead animals:

Quick Note: A Dessert God On Chocolate Sorbet and Kimchi

2009-02-19T00:49:00.004-05:00

David Lebovitz: long-time pastry cook at Chez Panisse.

Recipes to try out:
His chocolate sorbet, via smittenkitchen.
His kimchi.

The Joys of Eating Unseasonally

2009-02-18T13:56:00.003-05:00

Eating seasonal food locally grown is great, but eating wonderfully ripe (and reasonably priced) berries in the middle of winter is better. Breakfast this morning: 100% whole wheat pancakes lightened by mixing in egg whites beaten to fairly stiff peaks (a Mark Bittman recipe from How To Cook Everything Vegetarian) with fresh blueberries (from Chile) and strawberries (California maybe?). The pancakes really are light and fluffy, ethereal even, but they become bone-dry and unpleasant tasting if overcooked.

Slow Cooking Beans

2009-02-18T11:54:00.006-05:00

Reading through David Tanis' "A Platter of Figs", one statement grabbed my attention and made me scratch my head a bit: "A bean soup needs gentle cooking and cannot be rushed." No explanation, just a terse pronouncement that assumes you'll take it on faith that the great Tanis would not lead you astray on this or any other point. Tanis' unadorned prose is certainly one of the great things about "A Platter of Figs," and it matches well the book's simple food that pays homage to fine ingredients rather than complex technique. Usually the text offers just enough information, but once in a while, as with the bean soup, it falls short.

"Do beans really need slow cooking?" I asked myself upon reading Tanis' unequivocal statement. I tried to recall what I knew about beans. Not much. What about slow simmering? You have to simmer meat at relatively low temperatures to keep it moist and tender, but that's because meat cells lose liquid at high temperatures. Meat stocks are also simmered slowly, to avoid emulsifying fat into the liquid end product. But surely bean cells are different than meat cells, and for bean soup the fat is probably a non-issue for various reasons. I've never ended up with tough and dry beans; I've always boiled them and gotten satisfactory results.

I probably should have turned to Harold McGee for resolution, but instead I googled and turned up this article by Chef Kelly Myers.

Salient points:

Slow cooking "breaks down gas-causing carbohydrates into digestible sugars."
"Boiling will eventually blow apart your black-eyed peas, flageolets, and cranberry beans."
Boiling might lead to unevenly cooked beans.
Simmering leads to "creamy and luxurious beans," though why is seemingly left to the reader to wonder at.

I pulled a few more interesting ideas from Myers' article:

use the 'stock' left over from simmering beans to add body to vegetable soups.
add fat (for flavor) to the beans after skimming the foam (which is a protein that comes in with the beans). This might mean sweating/sauteing your aromatics/herbs/spices/meat/whatnot in another pan, then dumping it all into the beans post-skim.

And finally, one fascinating point from McGee himself:

Acid, sugar, and calcium allow beans to cook for hours and reheat without disintegrating. So ingredients like molasses ( somewhat acidic, contains sugar and calcium) and tomatoes (acidic) preserve structure in slow cooking. Viz. baked beans.

The Bread Baker's Fawning Disciple

2009-02-03T19:09:00.008-05:00

Complicated, poorly understood topics generally sufficiently intimidate me that I can't sustain real interest in them. Programming was one example for a long time, until I found good teachers that made it easy. Beer brewing was another. There is, however, one such topic that draws me back to itself time and time again: bread baking. Making bread is an almost unbelievably complex process. I don't mean that it is hard to make good bread; in fact, I've found that very simple ever since my sister made me watch Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey's no-knead bread video recipe. Rather, it is understanding why the bread you bake is good or bad that may be an insurmountable challenge. Baking bread is a many-staged process and the way each step of a recipe is performed changes how every subsequent stage will play out. As do minute environmental factors. As do equipment factors. At this level of complexity, the production of even a relatively simple loaf becomes a web of interdependent factors and tasks. Figuring out if you're on the right track in the middle of a recipe can be difficult without experience, and figuring which factors went right and which wrong when looking at a baked loaf is often even harder. Despite these challenges, I find myself retaining deep interest in baking bread, even when my experiments (which I always hope to eat) are relative failures. Perhaps achieving good results with no-knead bread has given me hope of mastery, or the relatively pain-free nature of experimentation (I like kneading, recipes take only hours or a day or two, even mediocre results can be delicious) keeps me from being discouraged, or maybe baking and eating bread is just satisfying and comforting on a basic level. In any case, I forge on.

Lately I've been reading through Peter Reinhardt's Whole Grain Breads (at a bookstore; sadly, I don't own any of his books yet). In his bread books, Reinhardt somehow manages to convey adequately detailed technical information in a way that doesn't seem at all divorced from his obvious enthusiasm for bread, which makes even discussions of yeast strains and enzyme activity compelling. Reading in Whole Grain Breads about his new delayed-fermentation and soaker method has made me reexamine how little I know about my my no-knead doughs work so well. In the interest of organizing my thoughts and being able to refer to this information later, I'm going to note here my hazy understanding of the concepts involved. Don't go imagining any of the following is necessarily accurate.

Apparently, when you mix flour, water, and yeast together, there are at least two main activities taking place. The third, which I won't talk about because I know nothing about it except that it creates acidity for sourdough breads, is bacterial. The first, and the one that everyone talks about, is yeast leavening. Yeast, a type of fungus, break down sugar and sugar chains (starch) in the flour and produce alcohol, a small amount of acid, and carbon dioxide gas, which is what "rises" the dough. So yeast contributes some flavor (its own and some acid) and gas to the final loaf. The last activity, the one nobody talks about, is enzyme activity. Flour contains enzymes needed to break down its own starches because the grain it is milled from were originally intended for growth into a new plant, and that new seedling needs shorter sugars for food. In fact, everyone, including ourselves and yeast, like those broken-down sugars. Hydrating flour somehow activates or releases its enzyme amylase, which breaks down starch, and also protease, which breaks down protein. I have often heard that a long, slow fermentation makes no-knead dough more flavorful. It seems that that long period of time and probably also the high hydration level promote the amylase activity which is responsible for much of that flavor. In addition, protease weakens gluten strands, which makes the dough more extensible and easier to tear, allowing larger gas bubbles to form in the crumb during baking.

Reinhardt's method, which I don't yet understand very well, involves preparing two pieces of "pre-dough" the day before baking: the soaker and the starter. The starter is a pre-fermented, yeast-rich piece of dough. It seems that, as opposed to what I would have thought, the yeast in the starter is not meant to drive fermentation, though of course it does some of that. The starter is so much smaller than the complete dough, and the yeast concentration so low, that it would probably take a long fermentation period for the starter yeast to rise the whole loaf. I guess the idea instead is to give the yeast an opportunity to produce its characteristic flavors. The soaker, which makes up almost all of the eventual dough mass, is much simpler: it's just hydrated flour. The hydration activates the above-mentioned enzymes in the flour, and they do their thing without yeast getting in the way (which apparently is dangerous, because the enzymes can go too far and dissolve too much sugar, making the dough collapse into gumminess) or imposing a time constraint based on full rising. The soaker idea makes a lot of sense: a dough that is hydrated and seeded with yeast at the same time has two (three) processes happening at the same time that are all important, but in a way end up racing each other. If the enzyme activity goes too fast and runs away, you end up with gummy bread. If the yeast win and the dough is baked before the enzymes can do their job, you lose flavor. In the soaker, the enzymes are free to do their thing before salt (which slows enzyme activity) and yeast are added, so if the timing is right (and apparently this is a ballpark thing, like rising the no-knead bread), you know you've developed about as much flavor as you can. When the starter and soaker are combined, salt and quite a bit of commercial yeast is added. The large amount of yeast makes for a quick rise. Since the enzymes have already broken down a lot of sugars in the dough, you don't need a long rise to get good flavor!

The Baconic Aesthetic

2009-01-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

Friend, ex-coworker, and general "Good Dude" Bronson (BJJ/MMA blog, current post food-related) just linked me to this New York Times story about a 4-lb. grilled bacon and sausagecreation that has gone viral on the Interwebs. That story reminded me of the Bacon Cheese Baconburger, which led to my coining the word "baconic" to describe that characteristic while the BCB story has in greater quantity than the bacon-sausage roll. When I say baconic, I don't just mean "of, or relating to, bacon," though of course that is part of the definition. The term also references a bacon-centric (baconic - see how useful this word is!) aesthetic that seems to pop up regularly among foodies and on their blogs. Part of bacon's appeal among these people is doubtlessly its delectable smoke and pork and salt flavor, carried (and how cool is this?) by its own grease. That bacon taste of course traditionally enhances all sorts of dishes, from salads to soups to mashed potatoes, but it can also work well in strange places like desserts (with chocolate) despite its characteristic assertiveness.

So flavor is one reason why food enthusiasts love bacon. But just as bacon has complex flavor, the bacon aesthetic has many facets as well. One facet is that bacon is contrarian. In an era (and I'm talking here about a length of time measured in decades) that is decidedly anti-fat and anti-salt, bacon is pretty much wrapped in those gastronomic demons. Even smoke is, or should be, controversial because of its carcinogenic effects. Fresh, natural ingredients with clean flavors are another fixation of modern cooks, and deservedly so. Bacon is so heavily processed and distinctly flavored that the uninitiated would probably be unable to identify it as pork. And as a preserved food intended for long-term storage, it's not anywhere near fresh. So of course we love it and love talking about it, because we're all about the naughty stuff. Bacon is a smoky, greasy finger in the eye of conventional culinary wisdom, and the bacon aesthetic is all about going our own way with food, especially if it's the wrong way. Bacontakes a stand for everything that is forbidden us, and it does it in a brash, in-your-face way: when you put bacon in a dish, you simply cannot cover it up. It says, in a most baconic fashion, "I'm here, even if I shouldn't be. And you love it."

XLB Are For Suckaz

2009-01-28T09:46:00.000-05:00

This morning my waking thought was a remembrance of Xiaolongbao, a Shanghai specialty consisting of little thin-skinned dumplings filled with both pork or seafood filling and (here's the special part) a bit of pork broth. I first fantasized "Wow! I'll bet people in the States have never had soup in their dumplings! Culinary world, I am about to blow your mind and burn your tongue." Sadly, a quick google search revealed that not only does everybody and their mom know about XLB, but they were even a little food fad in the mid-90s. So much for my dreams of real originality. Or at least the appearance of originality here in the US.

My next thought was a remembrance of actually eating XLB in Shanghai. It took some doing, but eventually I got a seat at Xia Xia Xialongbao Tang, a well-recommended XLB shop in the middle of their neighborhood home to tons of restaurants and nothing else. I remember my eager anticipation of what surely would be a transformative tasting experience, and also the clear "do-not-care" attitude of the waitress (though the old guy who brought me a spoon when she forgot to seemed pretty ok). And the dumplings? The skins were substantial enough to taste, but not at all unpleasantly thick, and they had the tender texture you generally look for. The solid filling (I got the pork) was fine, though nothing stunning. And the crucial bit, the soup? Meh. The stock was delicious, but it felt like there was maybe half a teaspoon in each dumpling. And looking at the picture of the dumplings, I can't see why I expected any more to be stuffed into those things.

A little disappointed, I left the restaurant and started to head back to the hostel to collect my stuff and catch my train west. I was still hungry - those dumplings were expensive, for China, and one steamer basket's worth was surely not enough to satisfy me - so when I spotted someone frying more substantial-looking dumplings across the street, I leaped at the opportunity to get something more in my stomach. Nothing about Yang's Fry-Dumpling restaurant or the dumplings themselves indicated that the Shanghai soup dumpling scene was about to redeem itself in a moment that mixed a bit of euphoria with a bit of searing pain. There was a kind of ridiculous, but understated, yellow sign with poorly formatted english writing and a picture of an anonymous hand giving the thumbs up. In the window that opened onto the street, a big batch of dumplings the size of a child's fist were being shallow-fried in a huge pan. My experience with these fried dumplings was that the restaurants tilted the pan and only used enough oil to active fry things in one corner of it, so often half your dumplings were half cold. I should never have doubted Yang or his fry-dumplings. After buying a set of four, I was walking down the street towards a subway stop when I bit into the first one. I don't know what I expected, but I guess probably some kind of meat stuffing. Instead, steaming-hot (at the least) soup game gushing out, burning my tongue and splattering everywhere. It turned out there was at least like a gallon of soup in each of these things, and the whole deal was super-heated. The bottoms were awesomely crunchy, which of course left the tops a bit rubbery. There were sesame seeds and delicious grease and some kind of solid stuffing that I can't at all remember because of the soup. Oh my, the soup was everything I wanted: hot, delicious, and in quantity. I'd finished all four by the time I got down into the train station, the soup from each one burning my mouth in some new place. But I was smiling anyway.

So there you have it. Americans may think they know about Shanghai soup dumpligs, but they're eating the ones from the wrong side of the street.

The Winter Gods Are Anti-Burgin'

2009-01-27T14:42:00.000-05:00

So Chef John over at Food Wishes (a long-time inspiration to my cooking, and usually in more profound ways than this) put up a little video showing how to portion sliders with a muffin tin yesterday, which inspired me to make some sort of burger for lunch even though we're in the middle of winter, which is not exactly high burgin' season. I refused, of course, to absorb his lesson about even portioning or mimic the simplicity of his beef + pepper + salt burger formula; instead, I set out to make highly-seasoned, hand-formed pork patties.

Before starting any other prep, I put a non-stick pan on medium-high heat.

The overall plan to was to make a Sichuan-ish version of the pork filling I use most often for pot-stickers/wontons. I got out my mortar and pestle (more on buying kitchen supplies from laboratory supply companies in a future post) and ground together some black pepper, salt, and quite a few Sichuan peppercorns. On later examination, it didn't make any sense to grind the salt along with the peppercorns.

The spice blend was mixed with some decently fatty ground pork (ground at home a while ago then frozen, don't remember the cut), sliced scallions, minced garlic, grated ginger, and a drop or two of toasted sesame oil.

The mix looked like it had a great proportion of fat and smelled excellent, though it could have taken a few more Sichuan peppercorns. I formed two small patties by hand and of course they came out a bit uneven, but as soon as they hit the pan they smelled so great I couldn't make myself care. I cooked the first side for 4 minutes and flipped it over to find beautiful browning.

Then, suddenly, disaster! I was making a bit of sauce (Yeo's Sweet Chilli Sauce, a bit of soy sauce, a drop of sesame oil) for the burgers when out of the cabinet I was opening tumbled a glass jar full of some dried herb. The glass shattered and shards went flying onto the floor, into my prep area, and possibly into the cooking meat.

Goodbye, sweet burgers.

After cleaning up the glass, I found myself still desiring to feed on a hot mass of meat, but now I lacked ground pork. Luckily, I found a bag of half-frozen ground lamb in the fridge. I cut a portion of that off and did a quick-and-dirty defrost in the microwave (managed to only cook maybe 3-5% of the meat). In the de-glassed mortar and pestle, I ground up some cumin seeds, a few coriander seeds, cloves, black pepper, salt, and some fresh-ground cinnamon (what a different fresh-ground makes even with cinnamon, which I think is great pre-ground!) and mixed all that with the lamb.

The resulting patty fried up decently and tasted quite Hui-ish, but next time I should probably put in some sichuan peppercorns and a ton of ground hot chilies. Also, the lamb was far leaner than the lost pork, so the juiciness level was disappointing.

Random note: I guess the Chinese like burgers well enough, but they definitely like them some fried chicken. The familiar Colonel is EVERYWHERE over there.

Muslim Quarter Street Food, Xi'an

2009-01-23T11:38:00.001-05:00

One of the most kick-ass cities for street food in China is Xi'an, in Shaanxi province (not to be confused with neighboring Shanxi province, of course). In the northwest section of the walled city lies the Muslim Quarter, a super-touristy ethnic section of the best sort. The Muslim Quarter is home to a large concentration of the Hui ethnic minority (the majority ethnic group in China, as in Xi'an, is Han). These guys are ubiquitous in China's streetfood scene, always selling grilled meat or seafood on a stick and maybe some flatbreads too. In Beijing they sell starfish and sea horses and in Shanghai I ate minced lamb and vegetables on pancakes in a Hui restaurant, but the one item you always see is grilled skewered lamb with generous sprinklings of ground hot peppers.

In Xi'an you can get plenty of grilled lamb, but they also have a constellation of other tasty things to try: grilled breads, more kinds of dried fruit than you have ever seen unless you work in a fruit drying factory, some kind of rice pudding cooked in individual pots over a flame, roast beef sandwiches, goopy mutton stew with crumbled bread (Yang Rou Pao Mo), another goopy soup eaten for breakfast with twisted doughnuts floating in it, and the list goes on and on.

The food that most interested me (enough to buy it twice with so many unexplored options close at hand) grabbed my attention with a huge cloud of steam, in the midst of which a Hui man was shovelling portions of something redolent of Chinese five-spice powder out of a big metal tub. The food turned out to be some kind of starch, mashed or rolled very small, steamed with chewy mutton, and beautifully spiced. I ordered a bowl, but didn't manage to get any of the soft buns he also had steaming in his metal tub. When I brought some back to the hostel to ask the receptionists what the starch was, they said it was wheat. This was the most satisfying dish I had in Xi'an, but I can't figure out its name or how it's made, so if anyone can tell me what it is, please please post a comment!

East Asian Street Food

2009-01-23T03:49:00.000-05:00

Alright so a little while ago I spent a few months traveling through East Asia. Plenty of sleeping in backpacker hostels and trying not to get hustled on the street and eating weird unidentifiable sh*t off menus I couldn't read. As goes traveling in general, so too goes eating on the road: sometimes it's scary, sometimes it's fantastic, often it's a huge pain in the a**, but the overall experience tends to be enriching and positive and all that crap that means something but sounds mushy when you put it in words.

Surely the most hassle-free way of filling your belly in an unfamiliar place is street food, at least where such a concept exists in any meaningful way. You get to walk up to a stall and point at food that is at the least clearly displayed and often being cooked right in front of you. The transaction is entirely straightforward and the likelihood of getting ripped off slim, since you probably saw what someone paid for the exact same food a second ago.

In the street food category, China beat the hell out of the other countries I spent most of my time, Korea and Japan. Korea has some excellent stuff that I miss, especially tteokbokki (wonderful chewy rice cakes and other less important things in a moderately spicy red "curry" sauce that the Koreans incorrectly think is burn-your-a**-off hot) and gimbap (sort of Korean sushi rolls that are a lot better than that description makes them sound, but are more often sold as fast food in stores than from street stalls). Unfortunately, a lot of the street food is deep-fried something-or-other stuffed with red bean paste and though the variety isn't too shabby, it can't come close to what you can find in China. In any case, banchan, or little side dishes - pretty much always including kimchi - served alongside your other food, are the real fun of eating in Korea.

Japanese street food barely seems like it's trying, even when compared to Korea. In the Kansai region (Osaka and Kyoto and the center of the main island) you can get takoyaki (at its best, bits of octopus suspended in gooey pancake batter with a fried-crispy outer shell - you be the judge) and okonomiyaki (more pancake batter, this time in pancake form and with plenty of bland mayonnaise) and yakisoba (noodles, stir-fried) and whatever-else-yaki. That stuff can be pretty awesome, but it gets old real quick, and then what are you left with? Oh yeah, there's a 7-11 on the corner there, I guess you'll just have to pick up some onigiri (admittedly delicious sticky rice balls filled with something you can't read on the label. Good thing for you this is Japan and everything is color-coded). It's easy to come to the conclusion that street food is too filthy and disorderly for Japan, and maybe that's true. As some sort of consolation, a lot of Japanese fast-food establishments (another area of Japanese cuisine lacking in variety) combine the ubiquitous plastic food items with ticket-vending machines to make for an even more stress-free experience than eating on the street.

Rorshach Veesheeswahz, Pot-Stickers, Veggie-Burgers

2009-01-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

A three-course meal that I didn't think about very much and revised mid-preparation, which resulted in three dishes that didn't relate to each other and had to be served at different times, which is far too fussy for me.

First up, Sweet Potato and Leek Vichyssoise. I saw this dish in Williams Sonoma's New Orleans cookbook, then found it online at ReluctantGourmet.com (why reluctant? embrace your snobbery; it's what separates you from the inferior masses). This dish seems a bit contradictory, even in the name; as a cold soup, vichyssoise might be most appropriately served in summer, but sweet potatoes and leeks are fall or winter crops. Whatever.

First, I brought 4 cups of water to a boil in a pot, then plunked in 2 chopped large sweet potatoes. The recipe called for quartered sweet potatoes. I wanted them to cook faster, so I chopped them much smaller than that. I decided to use water instead of any sort of stock to protect the mellow flavors of leeks and sweet potatoes, the stars of this soup, from being muddled or even overpowered. The 2 chopped leeks I thought could wait until later in the cooking time, so perhaps preserve some of their freshness somehow. This idea may have had some validity, but in fact I forgot to put them in until a few minutes after I should have, so they were still a bit stringy when I removed the pot from the heat, which caused minor difficulties later.

After the potatoes and leeks were mostly cooked, but still had some texture, I removed the pot from the heat and let it cool a few minutes. At first I tried to use a stick blender to puree the vegetables into the water, but that lacked the power to get the potatoes to the even texture I wanted, and furthermore couldn't chop all of the somewhat stringy leeks. Luckily, the food processor worked fine and got the soup along with a bit of grated ginger to an even consistency. Added cream, then seasoned with kosher salt and ground white pepper. If I were to make this soup again, I think I might use water to thin the soup instead of cream, for lightness. Also, there's a bit of guesswork in the seasoning at this stage, since you're going to chill and age the soup, which changes its flavor. It might make sense to leave the seasoning until after chilling and be careful with the pepper, which wouldn't then have time to mellow.

After a few hours of chilling in the fridge, I garnished with a bit of cream (couldn't be bothered with anything else, but some green would have been perfect) and got Rorshach Vichyssoise.

Second course: Yao Choy and Fennel Seed Dumplings. Today I felt like making dumplings and also wanted some sort of green vegetable in this meal, so I put together this dish based on a kind of bao (Chinese steamed filled bun) I had in either Beijing or Shanghai. That particular bao was too salty and generally unpleasant, but I understood the green veg + fennel thing they were trying to get at.

I chopped up half a package of Yao Choy (or Green Yu Choy or whatever) in the mini-food processor chamber attachment for my stick blender, then mixed in minced garlic, minced shallots, minced ginger, freshly ground fennel and cumin seeds, a bit of ground hot red peppers, sesame oil, and some salt and ground black pepper. That stuffing went into round wonton wrappers, which were then folded in half and crimped. If I use this brand of wrappers again, I'll definitely roll them out a bit thinner and cut them in half; as they were, they were a bit too large and a bit too thick.

To cook the stuffed dumplings, I first browned them in a combination of canola and sesame oil, then poured a bit of water in the pan and covered to steam/boil them. Dipping sauce was just soy sauce with minced ginger, though I think they would have been better with the soy sauce-rice vinegar combination they serve with steamed dumplings in China.

Finally, Black Bean Burgers with Tamarind-Ginger Sauce. Probably needs a better name. My girlfriend and I saw a recipe for bean-based veggie burgers the other day and we vowed to make them eventually. Being a bit of a jerk, I jumped the gun. Grabbed this recipe off the Washington Post and kind of followed it. Sort of not really at all. Simmered a can of black beans for a while to soften them up while I got everything else together. Mixed some freshly ground cumin seeds with minced shallots, garlic, and cilantro. The recipe wanted panko bread crumbs, but I don't have anything fancy-schmancy like that (actually, I'd like to get some at a decent price), but my father is always making these "tortilla chips" by baking store-bought flour tortillas, so I just ground up a bunch of those in that darn-useful mini food processor bowl for my stick blender. They were dry and kind of sharp-ish, which is what I imagine panko is like. The beans got drained and half of them got pureed in the same food processor before the whole bit was mixed together with salt, ground black pepper, a bit of sesame oil, and two eggs, which turned out to probably be one too many. The whole mix was a bit slimy from the egg, so when I formed it into three patties about 3/4-inch thick, I coated the top and bottom of both with more tortilla-chip crumbs to promote trouble-free browning in the pan.

Most interesting to me was the sauce I put on these moderately-bad-boys, a tamarind juice reduction with ginger. I've never worked with tamarind before, though I've known about it for a long time and in fact had had this vacuum-sealed package of pulp sitting in the pantry for a long time. Well today I finally opened it up, took about about a third of the half-pound package, and mashed it into some boiling water. 10 minutes later, I had this thick, brown, slightly musty, sort of sweet, bracingly tart juice. Strained out the pulp (saved that in a bag for another soaking), brought to a simmer with some minced shallots and ginger. I reduced the liquid until it had a good concentration of the aromatics, then added brown sugar to further tame the tartness and a bit of cornstarch to bring it to the spoon-coating thickness I wanted.

Plated: rice + burger + avocado slices + sauce. The burgers were a bit bland, especially in contrast to the sauce, but their combination of crispy-brown outside and smooth pureed beans inside punctuated by a few whole beans and the other ingredients was excellent. I think next time I might form the patties a bit thinner. The sauce was wonderfully striking with its balanced tartness, but it might have used some more ginger to make the complexity of the sauce more apparent.

Welcome!

2009-01-15T18:22:00.001-05:00

First post! This blog is intended mostly as an informal group of notes on food to myself. I'm attracted to the idea of collecting my food-related thoughts, adventures, and discoveries in the cloud for my own convenience, but I also hope to contribute something to the food blogging community that has so inspired me in the past. The vain hope is that anyone who finds this mishmash will make sense of some small bit of it and come away with a new idea to explore.

Enjoy!