by Maggie and Ed | Sep 12, 2014 | Entrée, Food, Recipes, Uncategorized
Last year we did a pork sandwich test, one with ground cherries was the clear winner. We’ve been waiting anxiously until ground cherry season to try it again. It seemed like a fun exercise to try to adapt the sandwich into a main course and practice some plating with it.
We decided to do pork belly and shoulder. The pork belly was spiced with Benton’s country ham, which is now about two years old, star anise and xx. The shoulder was spiced with cumin, coriander, white pepper, smoked paprika, cayanne, and molasses. I used the modernist cuisine recommendations and cooked for 48h at 65C.
I vacuum bagged a lemon with some Pectinex Ultra SP-L, a pectin destroying enzyme. I put some slices on the lemon’s skin, but I don’t think that’s necessary. Left out for a few hours all the pith and rind fall away and leave perfect supremed lemon slices. Maggie made a greek yogurt, mint coriander, lemon sauce. Lots of mint. Lots of coriander.
The runoff in the bags was reduced by about 50% and thickened with xanthan. The belly and shoulder were portioned and seared off on the hottest pan we’ve got. We realized that we had forgotten to make a crispy dark grainy cracker to put with them, so we toasted some triscuits until they were burned and smashed them up.
We had a plate-off, I tried to make a somewhat natural looking plating with lots of herbs. Maggie went for a saucy cross thing.
After waiting a year to try this again, we were just as excited as last time. The mixture of the pork belly exploding on your tongue then the lemon and mint and fruit salady ground cherries then dark spices doesn’t get old. It’s not a combination that reminds me of anything else. I really don’t use ground cherries enough.
by Maggie and Ed | Aug 21, 2014 | Entrée, Food
They’re not on tortillas. I’m pretty sure that’s a requirement for being a taco.
It was a pretty lazy morning and I saw a video of a lady making moo shu pork. I was in the mood for pancake food, and it looked pretty easy, so I thought I’d make that for dinner. I had some other stuff to do and thought it would take about an hour for an informal dinner we were hosting. Then I saw another video where people were eating yakitori and started thinking about chicken wings.
So I ditched the moo shu pork and decided to make a vaguely asian tacoish dinner instead. I thought I’d bone out some chicken wings, layer them with thai basil and glue them together into a vaguely rectangular block to slice off onto the pancakes. Add leeks, jalapeno, and kimchi. Use the chicken bones to make a stock. Mix some dashi stock that with the chicken stock and reduced into a sauce. Ideally, I’d have liked to set the chicken block overnight and then cook in the reduced dashi sauce, but I didn’t have time and had to let it set in the circulator instead.
It took a bit of time to debone the three pounds of chicken. I’m hardly an expert at this, but by the end I was getting pretty quick. Chop out the cartilidge from the connected end of the wing bones, run the knife through one side of the skin along the smaller bone, unfold, then run the knife around the bone by the meat and spin it out. Attempt to repeat for the other side. I don’t think I had much of a strategy for the drumsticks. Just try to make the meat as much like rectangular sheets as you can.
Then start to layer wings. I tried to keep skin sides on the top and bottom. Just layer, dust with activa rm, layer, dust, etc. I think I ended up with 5 layers of chicken. Hopefully you’ve got bags bigger than I do. Getting the chicken rectangle into the bag was a pain. I considered tubing it and slicing it on a bias. That may be easier. Mine went straight into a bag and into the circulator at 70C. Yours should go into the fridge overnight.
Put the bones go into a bag with some water, then into a 70C water bath for as long as you can stand, preferably 6 hours. After 6 hours, make a dashi stock. Soak kombu, simmer for 10 minutes, add bonito, strain. Strain chicken stock and mix with dashi, about 50/50. Add soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, liquid smoke to taste. Reduce by ~80%. Store in fridge.
About an hour and a half before serving, start to make the pancakes. I followed the method from here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge03lCabmZM. Get four cups AP flour in a bowl. Add two cups boiling water and stir. Add cold water until dough comes together. Let rest one hour. Roll dough into a tube and roll out half dollars. Coat one side in sesame oil and roll out. You will cook them in sets of two. Get a pan fairly hot and they’ll take about a minute. Just enough time to roll the next one.
Heat a water bath to 70C. Cut open your chicken bag and reseal with half the sauce. Cook for 6 hours.
Once the chicken block is done, sear the hell out of it on your hottest pan. Let rest while you prep the leek and jalapenos.
I used a Rene Redzepi technique to cook the leek and jalapeno. I think I saw it on that David Chang TV show. Slice a leek and a jalapeno in half. Get a heavy skillet as hot as you can. Add sesame oil and cook until black. It should take less than a minute. You want to burn the outside but leave the insides mostly raw. Then seal the vegetables in a bag or in a quart container or something for about 10 minutes. They will continue to steam and cook themselves the rest of the way, making them right on the edge of raw and cooked but still with a nice charred taste. I’ve had pretty great luck with doing vegetables like this.
Slice up the vegetables, cut slices of the chicken and layer onto pancakes. Add kimchi and sauce. Serve with some sriracha.
These were crazy good. All of us were licking our plates. The chicken turned out great., the thai basil really seasoned it well. I got the feeling that I got from eating a pork bun for the first time, where I was worried about running out after the first bite. These were enough to make me dream about making a tacoish shop next.
We had a lot of pancakes left over, so we decided to make a mushroom stuffing for them.
Shittake mushrooms, butter, onions, spices, 75C for an hour or so.
This is mainly here because I like this picture. It looks like a Rorschach test.
ASIAN NOT-TACOS
Author: Ed Hyp
Recipe type: Entree
Cuisine: asian
- 3 lb chicken wings
- 1 bunch thai basil
- sprinkles of activa rm - meat glue
- 1 leek
- 2 jalapenos
- some kimchi
- about 4"x4" Kombu
- ½ cupish bonito
- 2 T soy sauce
- 2 T mirin
- 1 t rice vinegar
- 1-3 drops liquid smoke
- 4 cups AP flour
- 2 cups boiling water
- 2 cupsish cold water
- sriracha
- debone chicken wings
- layer ⅕ of wing meat into rectangle, skin side out
- sprinkle activa onto chicken with a strainer and layer in thai basil
- repeat layers until you run out of chicken
- put chicken into vacuum bag, or wrap tightly in saran wrap. you want to compress it together
- put in fridge overnight
- take chicken bones and seal in vacuum bag, or ziploc bag
- cook in circulator at 70c for 6 hours
- simmer kombu in water for 10 minutes
- take off heat, add bonito, let sit 10 minutes then strain
- strain bones from chicken stock
- mix stocks, add soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, and liquid smoke to taste as you reduce by 80%
- put in fridge
- cut open your chicken block and reseal with about half the sauce
- cook for 6 hours at 70C
- watch that youtube video on how to make these
- put AP flour into a bowl
- add two cups boiling water and stir
- add cold water until dough comes together
- let rest one hour
- roll dough into tube and cut half dollars
- roll out and do the sesame oil sandwich thing
- cook in hot pan for about 1 minute, then separate
- reserve in oven
- cut jalapeno and leek down the middle
- sear jalapeno in very hot pan with sesame oil until blackened
- seal leek and jalapeno in tupperware or vacuum bag
- once the chicken block is finished, sear the outside of it
- slice up leeks and jalapenos
- put a slice or two of chicken block onto flour shell
- put some sliced up jalapeno and leek
- put on some kimchi
- drizzle some sauce
- drizzle some sriracha
I made these a while ago, and kept track of what I did and what ingredients I used, but not specific amounts of things especially for the sauce, so use your best judgement on some of it.
3.2.2929
by Maggie and Ed | Jul 31, 2014 | Entrée, Food, Recipes, Vegetarian
We didn’t do too well with tomatoes this year. In my old apartment I had a pretty big garden and could plant twenty or so plants to guard against about a third of them not really producing too much fruit. Here there’s not much room for any of that. We were going to build a raised bed planter and started doing that, but found out that dirt is surprisingly expensive and got a couple large pots instead. So, I’ve got two tomato plants and a hankering for gazpacho. Not willing to use every tomato that we’ve grown in one bowl of soup. I had to buy them.
Well, at least we’re bookended by farmers markets these days. Oops I missed the Thursday one, better wait until the Saturday one right next door. Or sometimes you miss both of them and you just go to the grocery store. Oh well.
I thought I’d try making a vegetable stock sous vide, tossing some olive oil with basil and olive oil with red pepper flakes and smoked paprika into the circulator, and doing the ideas in food cryo blanch trick to the tomatoes (There’s a seriouseats article too). I cut up onion, celery and carrots browned them a bit, then put them in a bag with a few ice cubes (since things were hot and I didn’t want the water to boil out in the vacuum machine) and some savory. I put that in the water bath at 70C ish. Also put in the flavored oils.
The tomatoes went into the freezer in a bag, salted. I waited about an hour, took the tomatoes out and thawed them a little then back to the freezer. This is to create large ice splinters that pop the tomoato cells and let you get more of the tomato taste out. I didn’t do a side by side or anything to see if it’s worth it. It’s not really that much extra effort, I was waiting for the stock anyways.
After about three hours I pulled out the stock, strained it, thawed the tomatoes in the circulator water. Put both into the blender, strained, strained, added a dark piece of toast and some cream, blended then seasoned, blended again. I probably put some fish sauce in there too.
Bowl soup, drizzle oils, plop with greek yogurt. The oils made it rich, and varied the flavor bite to bite. The tomatoes tasted fresh and bright. Then the nearly burned bread and smoky paprika brought it all together. It was pretty great. Suggested pairing: spicy grilled cheese and vernors.
