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 | Aug 11, 2014 | Cocktails, Food, Recipes, Vegan, Vegetarian
I was in a bit of funk the other night so Ed cajoled me into walking it off to a nearby bar. It’s the sort of place thats a little too hot and little too crowded until the dinner crowd trickles off and you remember that they serve skillets of melted cheese and tiki drinks dressed up enough to lighten any mood. Nothing turns the night around like a tiny umbrella.
Ed’s grandma was celebrating her 91st birthday this weekend so we decided to give the gift that keeps on giving and bring a big bowl of tiki punch. We decided to keep it simple with the Jungle Bird.
Lesson 1: Exciting tiki mugs are a lot more hard to come by (and more expensive) than you may anticipate. Luckily your grandmother may already have some! We filled in the gaps with some lucky finds from the wonderful folks at Who New.
Lesson 2: You may need to more than gently remind party guests to Add. Plenty. Of. Ice.
If you find that your lime cups aren’t quite as impressive as you like, try adding a little grain alcohol.
by Maggie | Aug 3, 2014 | Dessert, Food, Recipes, Vegetarian
I was recently diagnosed with a rare blood disease. It sounds really intimidating, but there are several episodes of House and at least one Hollywood movie about it. If you’re going to get pinned with an incurable disease, at least its something glamourous, right? Anyway, the long and short of it is that every once in a while you get some belly pains and the extent of the medical advice thats been given to me has boiled down to “EAT CARBS”. Now I can feel totally justified to roll my eyes at all the bread-shamers out there while enjoying some guilt free indulgences.
I’m not typically a huge cake fan (I know, I’m a monster), but the balding female nutritionist I was sent to told me to try incorporating more sweets and pizza into my diet, so hey, doctor’s orders. Like most ladies my age, I have a pinterest and know my way around a search for “rustic cake.” All of the lemon cakes that caught my eye took me back to the same recipe, so we decided to use that as the base.
We had to double the recipe to make three 6″ layers. I separated half of the advised lemon zest and grabbed some rosemary and infused the olive oil in an ISI. You’ll want to discard the zest and rosemary after infusing, they’ll tend to lack much flavor. The result was brighter, if not a little subtle. Probably would have benefited from leaving the ingredients to mingle longer or started by infusing into alcohol and mixing that with the olive oil.
The recipe we started from seemed a little fussy, but the batter texture ended up beautifully fluffy.
We ditched the recommended glaze and took some inspiration from the frosting on cinnamon rolls we made for a recent family brunch (they were great, a recipe you should definitely try). I used a block of cream cheese and a 6 oz. container of creme fraiche. Use the whisk attachment to combine those with half a cup of powdered sugar. I tend to err on the side of less sweet, so you might want to add more sugar for a less tangy frosting.
The cake was dense and moist without being overly sweet. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have eaten enough of the icing in the process to cure you from wanting to indulge in more than a small slice, but your coworkers will thank you tomorrow. Safety warning: I can’t say for sure which of these flowers are safe for human consumption, but judging by the amount of times in my life I’ve been told not to eat berries off of bushes I’m going to assume that some of these are not.
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.
by Maggie and Ed | Oct 23, 2013 | Entrée, Food, Recipes, Sandwiches
We’ve been saying it to ourselves for months, but haven’t really gotten to it until now: We have to start doing some side by side sandwich comparisons. Today was pork. The main objective of this process is to create good recipes, but the other part is deciding where to place standards for what the deli will serve. We weren’t sure how many levels there were between that’s great and we nailed it and hoped that doing this would help us to figure that out. A sandwich can be great standing on one or two really tasty ingredients, with some others adding a bit, but not fully meshing. Thinking that we nailed it seems to come either by quite a bit of fumbling around and changing ratios, or more rarely by a chance risk or flash of insight. When it all comes together I can barely stop myself from pulling people off the street to try things. That’s about the point of all this.
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by Maggie | Oct 10, 2013 | Entrée, Food, Recipes, Sandwiches, Vegan, Vegetarian
Disclaimer: I am no banh mi expert. At best an “enthusiast”, but only because I had a political philosophy teacher in college that would moonlight as a food critic and had a pretty extensive section on his blog about his personal journey to find the best banh mi. So thats out of the way.
We’ve still been pretty hot on trying to nail down a contender for the perfect Steve’s Deli vegan sandwich. As far as sandwiches go, the banh mi is the perfect balancing act of flavor and texture. Sweet, spicy, refreshing, and piled high with pork. Forgive us for our trespasses as we attempt to ditch the hog and make it through to the other side with a dark horse for the menu.
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