Culinary Pen

Black Snout Stout

2012-02-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

This is a "special edition" stout I brewed back in October as a little Christmas gift to my family. When I first started home brewing, my family suggested I make up my own labels for the different batches. I like the idea, but it would be a good amount of work, as I would have to soak and scrape off the old labels when I wanted to reuse the bottles for another batch of beer. But Christmas seemed like a special occasion, and with the help of my talented wife on the creative design end, we made up about twelve 22oz bottles of Bonne Bouche's Black Snout Stout.

Bonne Bouche is our 12 month old Golden Doodle, named after one of our favorite cheeses that has a particularly striking black ash rind. I brewed this beer in the style of a Russian Imperial Stout, which were originally made by Thrale's Brewery in England to be served for the Russian Imperial family of Catherine II. To make the journey from England to Russia, the beers were brewed to high levels of ABV, and loaded with additional hops, which preserve beer with alpha acids present in their buds/cones. Combined, these two factors helped the beer to arrive in Russian unspoiled, but also gave the RIS-style of beer the ability to age gracefully if stored properly.I used lots of debittered black malt and black patent malt in the recipe, along with roasted rye and wheat. The rye is to give sweetness, fullness, and a well-rounded flavor to the beer. The wheat also adds some fullness to the mouthfeel, but also helps to create a frothy, whipped head of foam on top of the beer. I also held back on hopping this beer too aggressively, as I do like the rich, full flavor of stouts and didn't want too much bitterness mixed in.

To start the beer off, I fermented it with a Irish Ale Yeast, which would help give me the rich, full profile I wanted. With so much malt and sugar in this beer, I didn't want the final product to be too cloyingly sweet, so after 4 weeks of fermenting with the Irish Ale, I added a Eau de Vie yeast, which can tolerate much higher alcohol %'s than the Irish Ale. This helped to eat up the residual sugars and dry the beer out, along with raising its final ABV.

Overall I'm very pleased with this beer. I did worry that added the Eau de Vie would give the beer an odd crispness or alcoholic rawness, but I think the naturally sweet flavors of the rye and wheat helped to keep the flavor in line. I'm very excited to see what it's like in a year from now!

Dry Cured Salami at Home

2012-01-29T18:11:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, my brother got me Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman. It has carefully and patiently guided me through making bacon, pancetta, sausage, and all manner of pates. Today, it helped me make my first dry cured salami.

Dry cured salami is a lot like cheese making. You take a highly perishable product, such as raw milk or raw meat, then add salt to help create an inhospitable environment for any pathogens. To tip the scale in our favor, the product (milk or meat) is inoculated with a pH raising bacteria that raises the acidity of the food farther out of the range that's survivable to harmful bacteria. Then the product dries out, reducing the moisture and extending the shelf life.

So for this sausage making experiment, I mixed ground pork meat and backfat with just some simple seasonings of black pepper and garlic, along with the bactoferm bacteria to help raise the acidity of the meat. To help feed the bacteria and make sure it's the dominant organism in this sausage, we added dextrose, which is just corn sugar. Dextrose is easily metabolized by by the bacteria, which will use this sugar to produce the necessary acidity.
Now they're hanging out in an unfinished corner closet of our house, which is unheated and stays about 50 F at this time or year. I've installed a hygrometer and digital thermometer in the closet to make sure things stay in a healthy range. But so far so good! We'll see where things are in 2-3 weeks!

Pierogies with Mom

2012-01-14T09:52:00.001-08:00

I can't say I grew up eating "ethnic food," but I have very strong memories about pierogies. I was raised in upstate New York, but sometime holidays we would find ourselves in West Virginia at my grandparent's house. They were my Mom's side and very much Polish and Lithuanian. I remember down in the basement, on my grandpa's work bench, my grandma, mom, and her sister would make dozens and dozens of pierogies. The work bench was the only place that had enough room to roll and fill them all, especially since the kitchen was full of other tasks, like frying kielbasa and making poppy seed roll and pizzelles.It always seemed very "old world" to me, down in the dark basement, surrounded by my grandpa's welding equipment, rolling out dough and plopping down potato or cheese and dill fillings. Not that I was doing any of the pierogi assembling, as I was a child. But now, my mom has been showing me how to make them on my own, although I've only done it once solo. And those were way too thick and doughy.

So for New Years, I wanted pierogies. My mom made the dough, showed me how to roll it out thin, and put in a proper amount of filling. And then we browned three sticks of butter as a sauce. In Northeast PA I once had terrible, dull, but properly-made pierogies. I couldn't believe they didn't brown the butter, they just melted it and poured it over. But it was at a church bazaar, and they last thing I wanted to do was argue with an old church lady about the proper way to make pierogi.I think you need the brown butter to give the pierogies that savory depth that makes them rise above just mild noodles stuffed with potatoes or cheese. To not have that brown butter made them taste flat and dull.
Now in 2012, although we were in my Mom's brightly lit kitchen, not in a WWII-era brick house in the hills of Appalachia ,rolling out the dough and sealing the stuffing in with eggwash and fork tines still felt like a tradition. Which is different from just making comfort foods. As my sister-in-law Youngjoo told my mom, "Noodle making is a family activity."

Bradley Home Smoker

2012-01-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, my lovely and thoughtful wife Carla gave me the most wonderful gift imaginable; a smoker. It's something I've wanted for a while, although it took some time to figure out which model would work best for my needs. We went for the Bradley smoker for a few reasons:

1.) Its ability to cold smoke products. As much as I tried to do low-temp smoking on my Weber kettle grill, it took a lot of effort, hands-on adjusting of the coals and meat, and still gave consistently uneven results.

2.) It was recommended by two trustworthy sources, Ruhlman's book Charcuterie and it was the smoker used by Mosefund Farm at Pigstock.

3.) Bradley has a very active online discussion forum. I know it sounds like a minor thing, but I found it very reassuring to see lots of smoking enthusiasts talking about recipes they'd tried, troubleshooting, and modifications for smoking larger volumes of meat at once. To me, this shows that Bradley has a happy customer base who regularly use their smokers and give feedback on the results.

Now on the condition of "if I got the smoker for Christmas," Carla made me promise that the first thing I would make for her was the cheese sausage I brought back from Pigstock. It was a mildly spiced pork sausage, finely ground, spotted with small cubes of young gruyere that become stringy and gooey upon cooking.These sausages just have a mild smoking, so we smoked them with hickory for about two hours. During the entire time the temp never went above 100 F. Carla's brother came up for the weekend, and it was great to have another set of hands for the sausage making. We also made venison sausage from an 8-point buck Carl shot. It was spiced like kielbasa, enriched with pork fat, then smoked for about 3-4 hours with hickory and maple wood.

For my first time using the Bradley, I'm really, really pleased. We easily fit about 10 lbs of sausage into the smoker. Now I'm curing some mangalitsa belly to hot smoke like bacon, along with future plans to smoke salmon and trout, pig jowls, and of course assorted chickens and ribs.

Duck Galantine with Prunes and Madeira

2012-01-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

After a rich dinner on New Year's Eve of lobster ravioli in a lobster cream sauce, we decided to take things down a notch with a duck galantine. A galantine is when you use an animal's body as a vessel for stuffing with forcemeat. The most famous galantine is a turducken, the nigh-mythical beast of turkey-stuffed-with-duck -stuffed-with-chicken.
For this galantine I spit the skin of the duck down the back, then slowly worked my knife around the body carriage, being careful not to pierce the skin. The concept was to keep the skin in one giant sheet, with the breasts still attached, and then stuff and roll it all back up like a big sausage. The hardest part was cutting through the joints, where the wings and legs met the body. It's easy to apply too much force with the knife, which can cause the knife to slip and make an unwanted slit in the skin. I've boned out the bodies of chickens before, and while the low, sloped-shape of a duck was a bit harder than a chicken, the skin on a duck is much thicker and more resistant to accidental piercings with the knife.
The forcemeat stuffing was a mixture of the leg and wing meat, chopped, then mixed with prunes soaked in madeira, sourdough bread, shallots, garlic, and thyme. Then roast as normal, which for me is 425 F for 30 min to get the duck fat running and the skin crisp, then down to 350 F. If I'm just cooking duck breasts, I'll do them medium, but for a whole duck I've never minded having the whole thing cooked through. It's a slightly stronger flavor than duck on the rare-side, but the duck has so much fat over the breast it doesn't taste dry.As you can see from the pictures, I could have added some eggs to help the forcemeat cohere a bit more. But the duck made up for the aesthetic issues with a great taste. The sweet flavor of the prunes and madeira acted as a contrasting foil for the rich, fatty duck. Plus I enjoyed playing with these silicon "butcher's twine" ropes my mom picked up. Although they don't have that rustic look (along with being hot pink), they're very easy to wrap a roast, wash, and reuse. But it's still hard for me to think of Richard Olney using them.

Happy 2012!

Lobster Sauce for New Years

2012-01-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

When I told my brother Mike what I planned to cook for New Year's, he was surprised, saying, "I normally associate you with more land-based foods, like pork, cheese, and vegetables, not seafood." Which is true, although I do love, love, love tins of oily sardines. But it's New Year's, which is certainly time to do an elaborate meal with some extra voomph!So on New Year's Eve my mom and I picked up two 1.5 lb lobster, a quart of cream, as well as a package of fresh lobster ravioli from the local Italian pasta shop. I've wanted to try making a lobster cream sauce for a few weeks now, ever since reading Sauces by James Peterson. It just sounds so rich and luxurious, as well as being major change of pace for my cooking. Normally I'll just introduce the fish to the hot pan for a minute, flip it, and serve with sea salt and olive oil.As Dean Martin played in the background, we stabbed the lobsters behind the eyes, then cut them into segments. After wiping out the lungs and tomally, we set the lobster meat and shells to simmer and infuse in the cream for about 30 minutes. Then came the fun of picking out the meat from the shell, along with eating any small pieces that needed a bit of quality assurance. While my mom and I picked and nibbled, the cream slowly reduced until it could coat the back of a spoon.
Now, aside from the labor of the shell picking, this was a very simple dish to make. And it was exquisitely rich and delicious. We thought about adding some sherry if the sauce was too cloying, but it was perfect. Plus, the lobsters only came to $22, which wasn't that bad spread over six main course servings. Not that you should normally replace your regular pasta sauce with a quart of heavy cream...

Pata Negra Iberico Ham Bone

2011-12-29T16:05:00.000-08:00

This is the remnants of a truly decadent ham party. Some colleagues of mine were celebrating over the holidays and one of them flew in from Spain with an entire leg of Iberico ham. This is the fabled ham - from black foot pigs fattened on acorns for the last few months of the lives. Converted from Euros, it cost him over $3K.But I missed that party. Friends being friends, however, they saved me the bone. It actually worked out very well; I loaned them my ham-carving stand and they returned it with the leftovers. The ham tasted intensely porky and umami-esque...with an odd peanut flavor to the meat. I'm guessing that's from the diet of acorns, but it was certainly unexpected on my end. After I nicked and scratched out as much meat as possible from the bone, I cut off the shank and made what may be the most expensive pot of ham and black beans ever.

But as I was slicing and nibbling, I was amazed at the number of tags, brands, tattoos, and seals affixed to this ham. Everything was there, from producer to region, to the months salted, aged, etc. I don't think my passport even has this much identification. I suppose before you shell out three large for a pig leg, you want to make sure you're getting your money's worth.(As one more aside, I also don't understand why they pulled off the back toenails, yet left the front nails on...you'd think they'd do it all-or-nothing.)

Low Cohumulone IPA

2011-12-29T14:48:00.000-08:00

As much as I learn about food, it always surprises me just how much more there is to understand. Often simple things turn out to be incredibly complex and nuanced once you cut past the surface. It's like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole and wondering if she'll ever hit bottom. That's how it feels like as I learn more about hops and hop varieties.On the surface hops are vines that produce little flowery "pine cones" that preserves beer and adds bitterness and flavor. Some are piney, some taste of citrus, others are coarse and earthy. Some are gently bitter and others are intensely bitter. But they also have different kinds of bitterness. The bitterness is created by different types of alpha acids: humulone, cohumulone, and adhumulone.

India Pale Ales (IPA) are some of the hoppiest beers available, and for several years people have been trying to add as many hops as possible to beer. Like a global brewers game of one-upping yourself over the next guy. But it's a balancing act to make a beer taste bitter and intense with lots of hops, but still taste good. The last thing you want is to spent $6 on a pint of beer that tastes raw, harsh, and uneven.

So now brewers and hop farmers are looking at creating hops with low-cohumulone counts that still have intense bitterness. Cohumulone is the alpha acid that's responsible for less desirable bittering flavors, so growers are trying to create varietals with low-cohumulone content, but still high alpha acids. Imagine a chile pepper with a bold, intense flavor, but only modest heat. All the flavor without the fire.

That's the draw behind low-cohumulone hops. Wicked bitterness with intense flavor and aroma, but no vicious finish. I've been on a bit of an IPA-kick lately, so I wanted to try a low-cohumulone IPA myself. I hedged my bets and used 2 ounces each of three popular low-cohumulone varietals, Amarillo, Columbus, and Chinook. I mixed them evenly and added 2 ounces at 60, 15, and 5 minutes on the boil time. The result is everything I was promised, a bright, floral, citrusy aroma, with a long, piney finish of well rounded bitterness. It's not the best IPA I've ever made, but after this experiment I think I can focus my efforts and make something really stellar.

Mangalitsa Tenderloin

2011-12-04T17:53:00.000-08:00

So Carla and I decided to do something fancy to celebrate this unseasonably warm December Sunday; we had the Mangalitsa tenderloin from my Pigstock weekend. Although it was much, much darker than most pork tenderloins, Christoph had told our group that the tenderloin would still cook up quick and tender, even with a two-year old sow.I cooked the actual tenderloin simply, first searing it in a hot pan, then banging the whole pan in a 425 F oven to come up to temperature. The flavor of Mangalitsa is just so rich and succulent, I didn't want anything to muddy that soul-satisfying porkiness.
To serve with the tenderloin, I sauteed a mess of sliced baby portabellas in Mangalitsa lard with garlic and rosemary. I also cooked up a pot of roasted cornmeal, which I've really been enjoying over regular polenta. Roasted corn meal was the de rigueur corn meal for the Pennsylvania Dutch, a fact I can thank William Woys Weaver's Sauerkraut Yankees for. Roasted cornmeal has a distinct sweetness over regular corn meal, along with the expected roasty toasty flavor. And you can use it anywhere you'd use regular cornmeal, from polenta to scrapple to rye n' Indian bread.
And as we found out tonight, the roasted cornmeal polenta is also a wonderful sop for all those delicious mushroom and Mangalitsa juices!

Reflections on Pigstock

2011-11-13T05:44:00.000-08:00

After we killed the first Mangalitsa at Mosefund Farm, Christoph cut out a piece of the backfat for us all to try. It was mild, clean-tasting, and didn't leave a film of grease in your mouth. Then we took out the liver and tried a small cube, still warm with the pig's body heat. It was the mildest liver I've ever tried from any animal, to say nothing that most pig liver is incredibly strong and coarse tasting. The next day, as we tried other dishes made from the pigs kidneys, lungs, and liver, I was again surprise how clean and mild everything tasted. In a way, I wonder if the American taste for offal dropped off because industrially raised animal offal just doesn't taste as good as old fashioned, slow-grown farm animals?

I've come away from the class with the opinion that this is absolutely the best way to raise animals. I've daydreamed about having two pigs like Hugh on the River Cottage, but now I need to make that a reality. The animals have plenty of space and live for 1.5 to 2 years, rooting and poking their snoots about for nuts and grubs. That's much better than the 4-5 month lifespan of commercial hogs. Then the animals are killed quickly and cleanly, in their own home. Christoph showed us how to check the glands in the neck. If they're light colored, the pig died quickly and without stress. If they're hard and black, the pig was under a lot of stress. Commercially killed pigs, whether from a large industrial farm or a small farm, are normally under a lot of stress. They're in an unfamiliar space with lots of other unfamiliar pigs. There's no established hierarchy, so the pigs fight all night until they're killed in the morning. This also pumps lots of water into the joints and silver skins, which makes the meat harder to cure and more prone to spoilage. I'm coming at the issue with the belief that I can give these pigs a much better life than what they'd have in a commercial lot. They can live a wonderful life, die painlessly, and then provide food for my family. It was a good experience, but it opened up a lot of questions that I'm not sure have an easy answer.

Mangalitsa Pigstock

2011-11-12T06:04:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I attended Mosefund Farm's Pigstock, which is a three day workshop focusing on slaughtering, cleaning, butchering, and cooking all parts of the Mangalitsa pig. The Mangalitsa is a heritage breed of pig from Austria and Hungary, raised for their delicious meat and prolific production of fat. If the last part sounds odd, remember that lard was the primary cooking medium for many parts of Europe, unless you were living in an olive grove on the Mediterranean. Mangalitsa are also called woolly pigs, due to their furry, sheep-like coats of thick, bristly hair. The breed almost died out a few decades ago, as even compared to other heritage breeds they take a long time to grow and require a large amount of food and land.The workshop was taught by Christoph Wiesner and his wife, Isabel. Christoph is the President of the Austrian Mangalitsa Breeders' Association. Both Christoph and Isabel took us through killing the pigs with a captive bolt pistol, then sticking them to bleed out. We then dunked the 300+ lb pigs in a tub of simmering water to help get the hair out. After scraping off the hair, Christoph took us through removing the organs and cutting the pig in half.I think sawing through 4-5 feet of pig spine was one of the most exhausting things I've ever done. Actually the hardest was sawing through the skull, after my arm and shoulder were already jelly from the spine. Needless to say, Christoph is a big guy from doing this for years and years.The next day Christoph showed us the principles of seam butchering, which is the process of removing all the bones of a carcass and not cutting through muscles, but removing them whole. Since Mangalitsa's have so much fat, you need to maximize the value of the meat and save every scrap of it. This is the opposite of most butcher shops, where they just run everything down a band saw.During this time, Isabel worked on cleaning all the organs and made many, many wonderful dishes, like spleen on toast, a heart and liver soup, kidneys with mustard and cream, brains with eggs, fried brains, and liver schnitzel. The third day of the class expanded this, focusing on teaching us to make headcheese, lard, greves, blood sausage, blood and tongue sausage, bratwurst, smoked sausages, liver sausage, and meat paste.
One thing that really impressed me is the level of intensity that both Christoph and Isabel have for butchering and cleaning the animals. Even though they've been doing this for years, every scrap of meat is still important and every cut should be perfect to respect the animal.
Christoph opened the class by saying our main goal as butchers and cooks is to not destroy the good. The Mangalitsa is a good breed, with the genetics to produce exceptional pork. They've lived outside for 1.5 to 2 years, eating locally raised barley and grains, while foraging for grasses, nuts, and seeds in the forest. The last thing we want to do is destroy that, either with sloppy butchering or careless cooking.

Cognac Pie

2011-10-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

This is another odd pie recipe I found a few years ago, but have never gotten around to making. But this autumn I've motivated myself into finally baking them, one by one. I've seen this pie called "Bourbon Pie" in the south, but I found this recipe attributed to a NYC restaurant in the 1970's. I find it funny, as changing the name to "Cognac Pie" makes it sound more metropolitan and sophisticated. Yet, it's pie, which to me is the epitome of homey desserts. Plus it's poured into a graham cracker crust, which makes me think of a dessert you'd make for a little kid's birthday party.At the root, I don't really consider a cookie-crust pie to be true pie. It's more like a giant bar cookie, baked in a concave shape. Key Lime Pie is still my #5 favorite pie of all time, but that's because it works so perfectly as to be faultless. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But that's the only exception I'll make. This cognac pie gets only a momentary pass because I got all the ingredients out before reading the line "pour into cooled, prebaked graham cracker crust."
I was also surprised to find this is a no-bake pie, despite all the egg yolks. Clearly, I should read recipes in greater detail before plunging in. It's an odd recipe, to say the least. Mix 4 yolks with sugar, then mix a packet of gelatin with 8oz cognac. Combine, whisking thoroughly. Whip up 8 oz of heavy cream, then fold into the cognac and eggs. Chill for 2 hours, then dust with cocoa.
After two hours, I gave the pan a wiggle to ensure it was firmly set. It sliced cleanly, although the cognac gelatin had settled to the bottom and the marshmallowy whip cream rose to the top. It tasted like an rumball crossed with custard. It's delicious, but also with the heady flavor and slightly hot taste of raw alcohol. For future pies, I think I would thicken the graham cracker crust, to give all that gelatinized cream some extra crunch and substance. It did have a nice flavor as well, although I wonder if this pie would benefit from being made with a milder, smoother alcohol, to round out the overall eating experience.

Fall Favorites

2011-10-16T18:44:00.001-07:00

With the cool weather really upon us, it's nice to find nature is dispensing lots of fall favorites just in time. We picked up these sweet little chestnuts at the farm stand by our old house in St. John. They were the perfect after dinner nibble to have with a gloriously sweet and jammy port from Bogle. I felt very lucky to get such prime chestnuts, as it seems like by the time they get to grocery stores about 1-in-10 have gone musty and moldy.

Sadly, they didn't have any chickens at the farm. Apparently the rising cost of corn made the owner skip out on raising any chickens over the summer, as he actually lost money feeding his spring chickens up to a proper butchering weight. He did have a little hot box full of new chicks, though, as he said feed prices were trending downward. They were cute to see, hopping and peeping about in their warm little den, but I was sad to think it would be a few months before I could eat one.

So for tonight, I'll just dream of chickens past.

Green Tomato Pie

2011-10-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

This odd sounding pie was originally described to me by Carla's Mom, who had it years ago at a party and was surprised it was a sweet, not savory pie. I found two recipes for it in the New York Times Heritage Cook Book. Why two, I don't know, as they don't differ in the slightest, except that one is ascribed to Oklahoma and one two Idaho. Plus Oklahoma is firm that you need exactly 8 green tomatoes, while freewheeling Idaho plays fast and loose with "6-8 medium sized green tomatoes." I decided to go with Idaho's recipe.Both recipes (along with a few I found online) instructed chopping the tomatoes into wedges, a la apple pie american. Then add the zest and juice of one lemon, one tsp cinnamon, and 3/4 cup of sugar. Simmer these for a few minutes to soften the tomatoes and get the juices running, then stir in some corn starch as thickener and allow to cool. Plop into your favorite pie crust, seal, and bake. I said a silent prayer as I spooned out what looked like chunky tomatillo salsa into my pie crust.After baking at 425 for 40 minutes, the pie came out, bubbling like any other proper dessert. A few hours later, once it had cooled, Carla and I took our first trepidatious taste. It was sweet! And oddly fruity. To be honest, it had that fleeting, slightly exotic taste you'd find in star fruit or milk apples. But it tasted like dessert. It didn't taste like apples, as some online commentators assured me, but it was a certainly fitting dessert pie. It even tasted good cold the next day. I'm not sure if I'll rush out to bake another, but a few recipes suggested including golden raisins to the filling, which might be a nice change of pace when I'm faced with another glut of green tomatoes.

Chicken Pot Pie

2011-10-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

I love the Gothic look of this pie. It feels very Elizabethan to me, in an odd sort of way, like a blackbird pie you'd find in some old wood block print by William Blake. To make this, I just prepared a regular chicken pot pie, then rolled out an extra thick crust on top. I saved the feet, legs, and thigh bones from a black silkie chicken and fed them through two slits cut in the crust. I baked the pie until it was brown and crispy, covering up the feet with foil in the last 10 minutes so they didn't burn.
The feet were still too cooked to eat, but they certainly added to the presentation. My Dad especially liked the look of it, although he remarked that it might have "too much chicken and not enough pie" for some folks.

Making Real Mincemeat

2011-10-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to make mincemeat for a couple of years now, but I usually think of making it during the summer, when it's more of a fall and winter pie. Well this year the stars aligned and my first batch is mellowing out in the fridge as we speak! I actually halved James Beard's recipe for "Our Fabulously Good Mincemeat" and still came out with what looks to be two gallons of pie-filling. Clearly the man had an insane appetite for pie. But I digress.
Mincemeat is an old English recipe of dried fruits (raisins, currants, and mixed candied citrus peel), minced lean beef rump and tongue, spices, and sugar. It's enriched with suet, the thick, flaky fat that encases beef kidneys. The whole mess is mixed together, then blended with sherry and brandy to preserve the mixture as the flavors mingle and coalesce in the refrigerator for 4-6 weeks. Supposedly the meat doesn't make the pie taste like beef, it just adds a certain richness to the pie. The way it has been described to me, it almost sounds like a bay leaf; although bay doesn't add a pronounced "herbal" flavor to dishes, it certainly does help to round out the entire taste of a dish and provide a husky background flavor.
Yet today's recipes for mincemeat usually omit the meat, substituting vegetable shorting or "meaty" things like chestnuts or walnuts. But if you're going to go to the trouble of doing something, you may as well do it right. Plus, my mom let me borrow her pressure canner, so I can put up a few quarts of mincemeat for use throughout the fall and winter. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall mentions that it's an excellent stuffing for roast pork. So look for my first pie-experience in about 3-4 weeks!

Green Pea Pie

2011-10-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

This is another recipe that John Thorne's Maine food chronicles inspired me to try in my own kitchen. It's an odd little recipe, but I love pie, sweet or savory. It's simple enough, a mixture of frozen peas (fresh peas get mushy before the pie is done), chicken fat, onions, and a small dash of herbs. All rolled up in your favorite pastry, and then baked. Plus you can make it year round, since you're not tied to fresh pea season. After all, if you DO have fresh, tender peas, there's no sense in messing around when they're so delicious on their own.Since Thorne explained that only frozen peas will produce a pie worth eating, I felt that the quality of the chicken fat would be the most important in producing a superior pea pie. So I clawed out the last little frozen tupperware tub of rendered chicken fat from the back of the freezer. When it heated up, it was still golden, fragrant, and carried a hint of rosemary and garlic.Mix together, secure peas in pie, bake. That's all there is to it. It's a satisfying, unusual dish that reminds me of chicken pot pie without the chicken. After eating it, I began to think you could make it even richer by filling the pie with a cream sauce that would bind all the rolly-poly peas together. But then I had to stop myself, as Thorne repeatedly scolds modern cooking for "not leaving well enough alone" and always having to add extra cream and butter, forgetting to enjoy foods simply and without excessive adornment.

Maine Baked Beans

2011-09-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

My mom gave me a copy of Serious Pig, by John Thorne, and I'm loving it. The first half of the novel (really a collection of essays) recounts his youth growing up in Maine, fleshed out with his experiences and observations on Maine cooking after returning there years later. One chapter in particular stood out, which focused solely on Maine's passion for beans. Really, I had no idea.But Thorne's explanation makes sense, as he describes the dish as one deeply rooted in the Maine psyche, when dried beans were one of the few consistently available foods in the Maine woods. So these homesteader recipes became family recipes, which continued as home garden crops, only slightly competing against potatoes as the Maine starch of choice. What surprised me the most was how Thorne, and the people he spoke to, were so specific on the best breed of bean to use in baked beans. It seems like the majority prefers Steuben yellow eyes, while the radicals stick to cattle beans.

I've always seen baked beans as a sticky-sweet dish of tiny white beans swimming in brown sugar and tomato sauce. But here they are, using heirloom beans! Usually my baked beans are just drained and tossed in either olive oil with herbs or chile paste and meat sauce. Thorne is clear, however, that Maine bean enthusiasts keep the bean front and center, with a very gentle hand on the spices (if any at all). It almost sounded like an Italian explaining that the noodles should be the focus of a pasta dish, not a seasoned red sauce.I had to try it. Well, technically I had to try it twice, since I had to try it once with Steuben yellow eyes and one with cattle beans. The recipe was classic camp cooking: simple and sparse, but with an aura of delicious promise. Bake the beans till tender, then add 1/4 C molasses, 2 tablespoons dark rum, 1 tsp mustard powder, then squeeze a generous block of salt pork or bacon into the middle of the pot. Cook for a few more hours until the beans are richly seasoned and the cooking liquid has evaporated into a thick, bean-coating sauce.

And they're delicious. They have the same flavor profile as a can of baked beans, but with a unusual depth and richness. But they also tasted lighter than the canned equivalent. Gone is the thick, candy-like sauce of ketchup and sugar shellaced over each bean. Instead there's a slight smokey, savory taste where the pork fat and molasses join into one. The mustard and rum are hidden in the background, but without them I doubt the flavor would be as smooth and rounded.

Pretzle-Crusted Catfish

2011-09-24T17:29:00.001-07:00

I love this dish. I remember the first time I made it was for my Dad when I had just gotten my first cast iron pan. I remember my Dad loved the crisp pretzel crust holding in the moist fish, all brought together with a little horseradish mustard for dipping. It's an easy way to get a crunchy crust that rivals a deep-fried crust, but without the effort or extra equipment. Since that day, I've made it several times, each with the same level of success. That winning-streak ended tonight.Since catfish have thickish, mound-like fillets, they hold up well to the knobby, uneven breading of smashed up pretzel pieces. Plus catfish is cheap, although it recently spiked from $5.99/lb to $8.99/lb. Still, it's relatively cheap, considering other fish prices. Just roll the fillets in seasoned flour (I use salt and mustard powder), dip in an egg wash, and then roll in crushed pretzels, patting them in to help them adhere. You should have a gently sloping hill of tumbling pretzel crumbs.My mistake was simple. It's true that a breading will best adhere to a fillet if you give it some time to rest before popping it in the pan. The flour soaks up the egg and helps to bind the coating to the meat. So I made these fillets and gave them an hour in the fridge while I cleaned up and got some sides together. In that time the pretzels softened and smushed with the damp egg wash, losing any remaining shred of crispy dignity. Carla put it best, saying "these taste like they were made with old, stale pretzels someone forgot in the back of the cabinet." Which was fair and true.

But in good news, we had two delicious sides of pan-fried new potatoes and a fennel and beet coleslaw with walnuts. But truth be told, I'm fighting the urge to rush out and redo this dish, just to prove that I can.

Fish Mousseline

2011-09-14T20:25:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago Carla and I took an amazing vacation with her family to the Outer Banks. I'm not a fisherman, but I loved cooking up all the fresh fish that her dad and brother caught. One day I made a fish dip, which was very loose and spreadable. I went down to the beach where Carla's family was sitting and mentioned they could have the dip as a snack whenever they were ready to come up to the house. Carla's dad asked, "Is the dip like a paste?" He then made a quick hand gesture, like spreading butter on toast.As small as it was, I kept thinking about that hand movement. The dip I made was very loose and spreadable, but it would be interesting to make a very firm dip, one that was almost sliceable. So then I decided to make a fish mousseline. A mousseline, or mousse, is just a thick custard of something, anything, bound with eggs and cream. You can make a fish mousse, a chicken liver mousse, or even a ham mousse. I fell in love with the concept and decided to make it as soon as possible.Then a storm came in and the fishing was terrible for the next two days. Undeterred, I bought some wild Atlantic salmon, which was actually very reasonably priced. Then it came to me that we were in a rental house, which has a kitchen stocked with two dodgy pans and half a rolling pin. So I ground the salmon through a pasta colander with my hands. And to be honest, I loved it. After that, it was easy. Mix in salt, cream, and three egg yolks. Combine, then pour them into an oven-safe baking dish to cook in a water bath. I didn't have a good dish, so I decided to cook the entire thing in a well-buttered pyrex measuring cup. I even got fancy and made a little dill mousseline as a bottom layer for contrast.And it almost worked. Aside from the fact that the mousse was too tall, so the weight of the denser salmon mousseline crushed and spread the custard-y dill mousse across the plate. But it was still delicious.

River Cottage Chutney

2011-09-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

With the end of summer rapidly approaching, I've realized I haven't put up any preserves or relishes this year. So first things first, I needed to make chutney. Two years ago I made Hugh's chutney from his recipe in the River Cottage Cookbook. It was fantastic and I actually went through a large batch pretty quickly. Much more quickly than the strawberry chutney I made, which sounded like a great idea when I had gobs of strawberries, but has turned out to be very limited in any kind of culinary application. I also love that Hugh's recipe is a great way to clear out the pantry/fridge/larder of our excess veggies from the CSA. It's a sweet and savory blend of overgrown zucchini, green apples, green tomatoes, onions, raisins, brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, and spices. Plus it can be used with all kinds of foods. We've had it plain with sharp cheddar, mixed with shredded gouda in a grilled cheese, topping pork sausages, as a dip for goose, on ham sandwiches, or as a condiment for pate and head cheese.

Updates in two weeks when it's ready to open!

Black Silkie Chicken Soup

2011-08-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip to the Pittsburgh strip district, Carla and I picked up another little Black Silkie Chicken. Despite not having a great deal of meat on its skinny frame, we loved the flavor of the chicken and the rich taste it gave to our noodles. This time I wanted to try to up the volume on my initial recipe. I cut out the spine and flatted the bird out onto a baking sheet, then roasted it for 20 minutes at 425 F. This cooked the small bird most of the way, and brought a nice roasted color to the bones. I separated the meat from the bones, then put the bones into a small pot of water for a light silkie stock with star anise, black pepper, and cubes of fresh ginger.
After this cooked for about 30 minutes, I brought another pot to boil and added two bundles of buckwheat udon noodles to simmer. They only took about 3 minutes to cook, so I added the par-roasted chunks of silkie meat to the bubbling broth to finish cooking. Out came the bones, in went the meat, and dinner was almost ready. I topped the noodles with silkie meat and broth, bamboo mushrooms (also called bamboo pith), wilted spinach, and fresh scallions.In a way I liked this even more than my first silkie dish, as I thought making a "quick stock" helped to really bring out the flavor of the bird. Plus I really liked the wispy texture of the bamboo mushrooms. Here's a less-than-flattering close-up:

Cheese Crocks

2011-08-26T08:24:00.001-07:00

Have you ever noticed that the more you get into a hobby, the more accessories and junk you begin to collect that vaguely relates to that hobby? I've been on the look-out for these old fashioned bail cap ceramic crocks for a few months now. I finally found a beautiful blue-and-white speckled set at the local Goodwill for only $2 each. My full disclosure is that I just want them for making my own cheese spreads.When you generate as much scrap cheese as I do, you're forced to find lots of recipes for using up odds and ends. Thankfully this is something prudent cooks have been doing for generations, so there's dozens of recipes for cheese spreads, pimento cheese dip, Hungarian liptauer, and fromage forte. Most are just a blend of old grated cheese, a binder of cream cheese/mayo,butter, spices, and then thinned out to a spreadable consistency with milk, wine, or vegetable broth.

Sure, I could just pack it into tupperware or a mason jar, but it wouldn't look anywhere near as old school and classy. All I need to do is get some gingham shirts and start growing my Amish beard again!

Pebble Beans

2011-08-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

Although it's been a long time since I've bought magical beans, these come pretty close. They look like a regular mix of beans, the amazing thing is that they all come from the same plant! Apparently a farmer in California found these growing on the edge of his property back in the 70's. The same plant produces an entire bean kaleidoscope of shapes, sizes, and shades. I haven't found a ton of information on them, so I'm not sure if it's a recent mutation, or just something that was overlooked or forgotten in the annals of bean history.
What I like about them is that they all cook at the same time, which is hard with bean mixes. Usually the supplier just blends a bunch of beans together, so the small ones overcook to mush, the medium-sized ones are perfect, and the big ones are underdone. But since these beans are all from the same plant, they cook evenly. I'm not totally sure why, as you'd think a bigger bean would take longer, no matter what. Yet it works!
Plus they look beautiful. Sadly some of the vibrancy fades after cooking, but they still have a nice, full flavor, and a smooth texture. They're also a great sop-up for the tomato sauce from braised oxtails and chiles.

Halloumi from Cyprus

2011-08-18T20:08:00.001-07:00

Last week Carla invited her colleague, Andrea, and her husband, Andreas, over for dinner. Along with bringing a delicious Key Lime Pie, they also brought me cheese! They're both from Cyprus, which makes an amazing cheese called halloumi. Halloumi is a semi-hard cheese that's had the curd worked and kneaded until it's firm and dense. What's remarkable about halloumi is that it will not melt. This might sound like a bad thing, but it gives halloumi the ability to be grilled, fried, or just seared in a hot pan. Think about making a grilled cheese, when the cheese runs out between the bread and fries in the pan, creating a crisp, crackling crunch of cheese crust. That's what halloumi is like.
But here's what's amazing -- they actually brought this from their family home in Cyprus! And it was a blend of goat and sheep's milk, while I've only seen sheep's milk here in the states. Andreas said this brand of halloumi is actually made in his home village according to the owner's grandmother's recipe. He also gave me the advice to rinse the halloumi before eating, which will help minimize the salty, feta-like tang of the cheese. I've never tried that before, but it really did help. We just pan fried the halloumi and had it on pita bread with an eggplant caponata I made with my mom. It was simple, delicious, and satisfying. You can really taste the slight lemony flavor of the goat's milk, which was a nice change from the usual flavor of sheep's milk.I'd love to get this cheese again, but Andreas said he's never seen it here in the U.S. He believes it's because most halloumi is exported by a trade organization that controls what "real" halloumi is. This created a big riff between producers who sourced their milk from cows and goats, as they would make halloumi from the milk of animals they raised. So it was a big to-do as different creameries argued for their own recipe and pushed to protect their personal interests. Now it sounds like several varieties of traditional halloumi are still made, but only "approved" sheep milk brands are exported. Sometimes you forget the politics behind everything, even cheese.

Three New Homemade Cheeses

2011-08-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

This past weekend Carla, Bonne Bouche, and I went to visit my parents. I brought three new cheeses, all made from raw milk. We had a cloth-wrapped cheddar, a small wheel of blue, and a stinky little washed-rind disc. The cheddar was my experiment to apply a thick coat of butter over the rind, along with two layers of butter muslin. I normally use a small amount of butter to help the muslin adhere to the cheeses, but I noticed Grafton uses a huge quantity of butter on the rind of their clothbound cheddar.

So I laid the butter on pretty thick, in hopes it would help to keep the cheese moist, but still allow the cheese to develop a full, earthy flavor you can't get with wax coating. And it seems to have worked! The cheddar was moist, flavorful, and flaky, but still melted creamily on the tongue. I made two 3lb wheels when I made this batch, so I'm going to let the other wheel go another 3 months or so to see how it progresses.The second cheese we opened was my blue, which has a furry gray rind from the addition of mycodore cultures. Mycodore was suggested to me as a way to keep my blue cheese moist and quickly develop a natural rind. Although I've later read that mycodore is very temperature and salt sensitive, which might be why it took 2 weeks to really "sprout" on my cheese. But the disappointment came when I opened the cheese, as it had very little blue veining throughout. It looks like the cheese really closed up, with few air pockets for the blue mold to bloom. This was the same problem I had with my first cheese, so clearly I'm not handling the curd correctly. It tasted great, but more like a fresh farmhouse cheese with a tangy flavor and only a slight blue bite. This was a cheese I also made a double batch of, so we'll see how the second wheel looks after another 2 months or so.Lastly, we opened my washed-rind cheese. This is my first cheese using PLA cultures, which are supposed to give a rich, gooey cheese with a noticeably funky flavor. I was a little worried, as it had a few small cracks in the corners of the rind, making me think it had dried out a bit. But when we cracked the wheel it had a luscious, runny rind with a firm heart. It was just what I was hoping for, and a great shot of confidence after the downer of my blue.

Roasting Pan Upgrade

2011-08-07T11:49:00.001-07:00

I've torn up a lot of cheap pans in my time. Even though I try to treat pans well, they usually start to crack and rust after a few weeks. So I am sooo excited about this Christmas gift from my folks; It's a giant All Clad roasting pan! They actually got it for me last December, but we haven't had time to meet and pass off the gift until now.

But it was worth the wait! It feels so wonderfully heavy and durable, I can see it still in use years from now. Plus I usually roast or braise something once a week, so I'm glad to finally have the right tool for the job. I also love that it's huge - I can scatter giant quantities of veggies and chopped up animals across the bottom, then splatter them with some stock or wine, and let the whole thing stew merrily away in the oven. Which is exactly what I did, as you can see in the side photo. Although we're still in the midst of grilling season, I'm very excited to see this pan with a big holiday goose or ham cradled in its shiny basin.

County Fair Pie Prep

2011-08-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

So in a few weeks the county fair will be in full swing. Unfortunately the county we just moved to doesn't have a category for homebrewed beer, so I need to try my luck on baked goods and pastry alone. Along with entering yeast bread and zucchini bread, I'm also entering an apple pie. While apple pie isn't my favorite pie, it's at least in the pie top five, behind blackberry, pecan, and peach. Apple moves back and forth with Shoefly, while Key Lime keeps a tight hold on the #6 spot.So how do I make a really, really good apple pie? And I don't mean that rhetorically, as I'm open to suggestions. I thought about adding complementary flavors, but I've settled on really trying to pack a ton of apple-intensity into one pie. I started with granny smith apples, because they hold up well to cooking and add a tart, sharp apple flavor. In an old apple chutney recipe they mentioned using boiled cider, which is cider cooked down into a thick syrup. Normally it takes 7 gallons of cider to make one gallon of boiled cider. But that's really hard to find outside of New England. But I did find some PA Dutch apple butter, which contains boiled cider, along with lots of cooked down apples.Instead of lemon juice, I used apple cider vinegar, and swapped out the white sugar for earthier, more robust brown sugar. And no cinnamon, just vanilla extract. The pie came out very tasty, although Carla spotted a slight tingly bite on the finish, which we're guessing came from the cider vinegar. So maybe back to lemon juice. Perhaps some more nutmeg, though.

I do want to try another test-recipe, as I had the idea to soak diced dried apples in apple cider, then mix them in with the fresh apples. My hope is they add a bit of extra flavor, along with a hearty texture to the filling. But then they might just be chewy little distractions of unhappiness. Updates to follow!

Sour Puss Pickles

2011-07-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

It's funny to me that the food world is so caught up with boutique pickles right now. One of the interesting things about the world of specialty food is just how random the "it" items are, from single origin honey to exotic sea salt to bacon. But I'm happy that pickles are having their moment right now. What I really hope is that people will realize how easy it is to make their own pickles and put up a few batches of their own.

But if if you're in need of a little inspiration, pick up a jar (or three) of Sour Puss pickles out of Brooklyn. They're doing some really interesting, super-seasonal batches of pickles, like ramps with cardamom, garlic scapes, and fiery little lantern peppers spiced with licorice root. The pickles have a great, flavorful brine, but they're never too salty or sweet. Just sharp and aromatic with lots of spices and herbs. At $7 - $12 a jar, they are a luxury item, but they do taste leagues above a grocery store jar of dill'd kirby cucumbers. Plus I find I'm actually using less pickles in recipes because these are just so flavorful to start with.

Better Chevre Packaging

2011-07-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. It rolls off the tongue much better than "make goat cheese easier to squeeze out of the tube and the world with beat a path to your creamery." But I still need to commend Alabama's Belle Chevre for their inventive packaging. Opening a package of goat cheese is about as messy as trying to unroll a flytrap. Gooey, crumbly goat cheese never comes out of its skin-tight vacuum seal looking anywhere near as pretty as when you bought it.
Yet this is so simple--just Grip&Tear! And the plastic used to seal the goat cheese actually seems thick and durable, which should keep the seal from blowing prematurely. Technically, I should be thanking Sealed Air, which is the company that makes Grip&Tear, but I've never seen it before and can't think of something that so desperately needs an industry-wide overhaul as fresh goat cheese packaging. So kudos to Belle Chevre for raising the bar! And for making delicious, delicious cheese.

A Southern Chicken in French Clothing

2011-07-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

In a rare feat of marketing, the packaging on a chicken was so confusing to me that I decided it was worth $14. Next to the organic chickens was an odd little sack of meat with a regal-looking label affixed to the front of its vacuum seal. The label's gold script said Poulet Rouge Fermier au Piedmont. From my time in the cheese world, I know "fermier" means made on a farm, but why is the French language advertising something from the Italian Piedmonte? And since when can we get raw poultry from France or Italy in the U.S.? Then I saw in tiny script down below that this Poulet Rouge is from North Carolina. The Piedmont region of North Carolina to be exact. So why is this English-as-a-Second-Language bird all decked out in French words when it's from the American South? And why is it "nearly boneless"? Why is a whole chicken sitting in Pennsylvania, advertising itself to me in French, missing all it bones probably back somewhere in the Tarheel state? I needed answers. So in the immortal words of the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, I bought the ticket and took the ride.

I plopped the boneless meat sack on the counter and decided to go the simple route. A $14 chicken should stand on its own as an entree, so I simply salted it and got ready to pan fry it. Looking at the little, frameless chicken, I couldn't help but think it looked like a naked chicken suit that my wife would probably buy to dress up our dog in for Halloween.Reading online about the manufacturer, Joyce Foods, I learned this was a French breed of chicken, which sort of explained why the label was entirely in French. The most interesting nugget was that this breed has a very thin skin, so they need to be butchered by hand, rather than by machine. Yeah, there are chicken butchering machines. Take it from a guy who once priced out a tripe-scalding tank from a company in China. So Joyce Foods found a group of elderly poultry men who used to work in manual chicken butchering shops in the 1950's and 60's who could train younger men how to process these new, fancy chickens. Talk about saving a dying skill, that's really impressive.

And once it was in the pan, the chicken was impressive as well. It cooked up beautifully, with crisp, succulent skin. Flavor-wise, it was ok. And I don't like saying that. I love that they found a rare breed of chicken, took the effort to let it grow to its natural slaughter weight (living outside and on a vegetarian feed), and even trained men on the traditional, natural way to clean chickens. But to be honest, it tasted good, but no better than a regular organic chicken. It didn't have the rich golden fat of the chickens I've killed myself, or the flavor. Plus, it was tough, which was weird. If I killed and cleaned a chicken, it would have tough meat if I cooked it the same day. But after the rigor mortis passed in a day, it was very tender. And my birds were big birds, much bigger than the Joyce bird.

So I'm not sure what to say. It tasted good, but at the price I would just save some money and buy an organic or Kosher bird. Or, if I had my druthers, I would just get a bird from a local farm. But I do hope we continue to see more progressive products like this in large markets.

Chesapeake Bay Ray

2011-07-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

I'm still waiting for someone to come back and tell me how delicious this is." That was the less-than-inspiring parting words from my local fishmonger, as he handed me 1.5 lbs of wild ray meat. I think he meant it as, "If you like this, please let me know." I took it as, "I haven't had any repeat customers for this fish." But my mind was set. I knew I was going home with that fish the moment I saw it there on the counter.

The ray looked like an overgrown skate wing crossed with tuna. Blood red, more like beef than tuna, with a thick, muscular-looking grain. In the photo to the left, you can see a fillet of wild salmon in the background for comparison. Although I'm teasing the fishmonger in the opening line, he actually was full of good information. "It's a major predator in the bay, without any natural predators," he explained. Apparently the rays were getting fat off bellies full of the Chesapeake's cash crops of oysters and clam beds. So they were trying to cut down the ray population by marketing it as a new, delicious dinner option. And the best part? $7.99 a pound for wild, unfrozen fish. I've only seen wild sardines for cheaper.But still, it looked scary. My fishman said the marketing information described it as more like meat than fish, with the final suggestion, "great on the grill!" Lugging my ray home, I thought it might be best to just pan-fry the ray and see how it tastes unadorned. There would always be other times to get fancy with it. The size and texture of the ray made me think it would be a tough piece of fish, but I didn't want to cook it rare like tuna, for worries that bottom feeders might be harboring any number of parasite. When the slices of ray hit the hot pan, the squirmed, flexed, then buckled into u shapes. Another challenge to deal with. I began to have more doubts than hope.
Upon first bite I realized how wrong I was. It was fully cooked, but tender and moist. But not fishy at all. Not beefy either. In fact, it didn't taste like much of anything. Afterwards, I read reviews that described the fish as being similar to veal. Tender and mild. During the meal, I told Carla (in a very unflattering but oddly accurate description) that "this tastes like a steak you get at Denny's." Modestly tender, but no flavor whatsoever.

But that's not going to deter me from trying this again. Anyone can cook an amazing scallop dish, as scallops taste great to begin with. You just plop them in a pan and get them out as quickly as possible. I think the challenge is taking a tough bit, like ribs, rump, or ray, and making it into something sublime and delicious. Plus, this is something we need to do to help the bay. It's the same thing as killing a cow. Eat the steak, but also eat the trip. So if we wake Chesapeake clams, we're going to need to eat a little ray now and again.

Naturally Fermented Pickles

2011-06-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

With much thanks to Euell Gibbon's Dill Crock, I think I've found the true calling for my sauerkraut crock. As much as I like sauerkraut, it's hard to eat my way through liter after liter of the stuff. But there's no reason I can't use it for a bevy of fermented vegetables. Unlike "regular" vinegar pickles, the crock allows vegetables to naturally ferment in a 5% salt solution. This inhibit bacterial growth, but allow lactic bacteria to preserve the veggies through a natural fermentation process.In their landmark book, Charcuterie, authors Ruhlman and Polcyn say they've had success fermenting everything from cucumbers to mushrooms. While any veggie can be pickled, you need to have a good broth of lactic bacteria going. Some vegetables, like cabbage and cucumbers, will produce this on their own. If not, you can buy a lactic "mother" starter, buy why bother when you can just chop up a head of cabbage?

Best of all, I can have my pickles and still enjoy sauerkraut. I just keep the cabbage on the bottom layer to ferment for 4-6 weeks, while I take the pickles off the top every 1-2 weeks. So far I've had the best luck with gherkin cucumbers, sweet and hot peppers, baby onions, cauliflower, and asparagus. There have been some less-than-delicious, results, too. Baby hothouse cucumber get super mushy and water-logged after a week. And while I like the flavor garlic gives to the brine, the garlic itself takes on a weird bland flavor with a hit of a horseradish bite right at the end. Odd.

Sweetbread Pate

2011-06-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

Carla and I are moving. As can be expected, a lot of worrisome thoughts have been floating through my head. For instance, I've become accustomed to grocery stores regularly stocking tongue, tripe, beef cheeks, and oxtails, as our current area has a large Hispanic population who still have the huevos to ask their grocers for the good stuff. The thought that I might lose that convenience makes me feel quite liverish (pun intended).But on a past house-hunting expedition, I found some hope. In the new grocery store's freezer section they had pig feet, sweetbreads, and tongue. I snapped up the sweet breads, ruminating how to best put them in my tummy.

Sweetbreads are the most white tablecloth of organ meats. If they were a steak, they'd be filet mignon; mild, tender, and a good crowd pleaser. Plus, you can fry them! And everyone loves crunchy, fried food. But since it's still hot, I needed a cold dish. So why not a pate? A little salad on the side, some chutney, bread... Oh, I should mention that sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of veal. Sometimes lamb, but I've never seen it for sale. Today I was dealing with the pancreas, which is shaped like a big lump. The thymus is shaped like a skinny sausage, since it's located in the throat.Sweetbreads are easy to cook, but like most organ meats require some cleaning. Toss them in boiling, salted water, then kill the heat and let them sit for a few minutes. This will firm them up and make them easier to handle. Trim off any hard bits of membrane. If you want to fry them, use a 16 oz can of tomatoes to press them for an hour or two, which will help to flatten them into a fry-able shape.

For this pate, I mixed a pound of veal liver (chopped), a pound of sweetbreads (whole), and a pound of pork country ribs (ground). This gives the pate a nice mosaic pattern, along with alternating textures. I mixed it with brandy, whole green peppercorns, nutmeg, coriander, clove, fresh thyme, heavy cream, and a small amount of garlic and onion.All in all this, pate really hit the spot. The pate wasn't too heavy, but a nice summertime entree for when it's too hot to fire up the oven. The sweetbreads were mild, but in a nice way to even out the liver-flavor. I couldn't find my chutney, so I paired it with some tiny pickled raisins for a sweet/sharp bite.

Cadbury Egg Ice Cream

2011-06-07T14:55:00.000-07:00

Wondering what to do with all those leftover Cadbury Eggs from Easter? Of course not. Anyone in their right mind knows that Cadbury Eggs are always the first to be eaten. Seeing that tell-tale foil-wrapped egg nestled into a cocoon of green Easter grass is like finding a white truffle in the oak forests of the Piedmont. So I had to carefully hide these chocolate jewels from my wife, least she find my Cadbury stash before it was officially hot enough for ice cream.

Yup. Cadbury Ice Cream. The idea came to me a while ago, when I was thinking it would be cool to put a whole Cadbury egg on top of a Sunday like a cherry. But why not swirl the Cadbury and its delicious white-and-orange innards throughout vanilla ice cream? My mind was set.

So Easter finally arrived, along with one of the coldest, wettest springs on record. Cold, damp weather was perfect for pie, but not for ice cream (although my father will contest the existence of a time that isn't appropriate for ice cream). But with the heatwave of the past two weeks, it's officially time to break out the ice cream maker! I made a basic vanilla ice cream to start, so as to not interferer with the deliciousness inherent in the Cadbury. Right when the ice cream had solidified to an even, creamy consistency I folded in four crushed Cadbury eggs. They made the most gorgeous Easter ripple through the ice cream.

Delicious? Oh yeah. But if it wasn't for my absolute love of Cadbury eggs, I probably wouldn't be so enamored with something that's little more than a riff on a Snicker's Flurry from Dairy Queen. Although I doubt any store-bought flurry could match this.

Watch out DQ, there's a new queen in town!

Four Thieves Vinegar

2011-06-01T15:14:00.001-07:00

I've been reading more about vinegar, so I couldn't help but to try out an interesting recipe I came across. Four Thieves Vinegar is an old, old, old mix that has as many origins as the name behind "shoofly pie." The most popular story is that four thieves were arrested while robbing houses during the black plague. They were promised their freedom if they would reveal how they could rob the homes of plague victims without getting sick. And this vinegar is their key!

Although some modern wizards speculate that mutations on the CCR5 gene may have provided resistance to the black death (and HIV-1), it's equally likely that vinegar packed with herbs and garlic is just as effective. Traditionally, you add four different herbs; one for each thief. If you're feeling particularly whimsical, go with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. I substituted basil and majoram for the parsley and thyme, but that's just what I had on hand. Besides the huge quantity of crushed garlic will most likely overwhelm any individual herbal nuances as they marinate in an acid bath of vinegar.

The vinegar itself is raw apple cider vinegar (complete with mother), along with some sweeter moscato vinegar to take the edge off. And while my odds of contracting buboes may have not have changed, I have been loving this garlicky vinegar on potato salad, beans, and lots and lots of spring greens that have been shooting up from the garden.

Homemade Pancetta

2011-05-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

This weekend I tried something different from my normal strategy when it comes to curing pork bellies. Rather than curing them with a dry rub of salt, molasses, and nitrites, I decided to make some pancetta. Unlike bacon, pancetta is not smoked. It's also normally cured with garlic, black pepper, bay leaves, rosemary, and some white wine. And unlike bacon, pancetta is traditionally rolled into a tight cylinder and hung like a salami to cure for 2-4 weeks. this helps to reduce the moisture and intensify the porky flavor.

But when you have a new puppy in the house, you have to make sacrifices. Hanging slabs of raw meat from your ceiling is one of them. So I straddled the fence and just left it uncovered in my refrigerator for 5 days to help dry it out. This isn't a long-term solution, as the low humidity of the fridge will eventually over-dry the surface before the inside cures. But I just wanted to give my pork a small nudge in the right direction.

Now time for a PLT sandwich!

M.F.K. Fisher

2011-05-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the problem with the current food media: you'd never see Rachel Ray say this:

Once I saw a corpse fished from a Louisiana bayou, and it was three times its size for the shrimps sucking at it; and another time I saw another corpse, off Brittany, stripped by lobster claws; and still I think without any qualm at all all that shrimps, and all their cousins, make one of the sweetest things in this world to put between my teeth.

-Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, 1948

Vinegar and Health

2011-05-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

Obviously food is linked to health, but there's always been that "other" realm, where healthy foods become "health foods." I never pay much attention to them, but they're always in the background of the food world. But today one of them finally made sense: vinegar.

I was finishing my morning coffee and reading Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens. Deep in the chapter on chicken care was a section on antibiotics. Antibiotics kill all biotics, good and bad. So the author recommended avoiding them and encouraging the growth of good microflora and probiotics in your chickens. She then explained that old farmers would put apple cider vinegar into their chicken's water to help their health. This is because harmful bacteria thrive in the pH range of 7-9, while probiotic bacteria live best in a pH of 5-7. So the vinegar would lower the pH in the chicken's body, making it less susceptible to the growth of pathogens.

It's amazing to find out the science behind all those old vinegar remedies and cures. Vinegar itself isn't a cure, it just encourages an environment that's both hostile to bad bacterial and beneficial to probiotic bacteria.

Smoked Tongue and Horseradish Slaw

2011-05-15T17:09:00.001-07:00

Carla went out of town this weekend, so I treated myself to a cow's tongue. We normally travel together, but when Carla and I do separate, I usually take the time to cook myself some items she's not a fan of. So Friday, while the beef tongue was smoking away on a hickory-chip loaded Weber grill, I also gorged myself on a large tin of smoked herring. Nom nom nom.

My point behind this post isn't to extol the virtues of a bachelor pad filled with kipper tins and skinned cow tongues, but to mention I've made the most delicious tongue sandwich yet! The problem with tongue is that its so dense and lean that it doesn't become tender and succulent, even when braised. Braising works wonders, but it's never as satisfying as a traditional beef chuck and shin stew. But how about a traditional London Broil? There you take a dense piece of meat, braise it, then slice it wafer-thin and cover it with a luscious sauce to make up for the dryness of the meat

It was a solid plan, but the warm weather had me in a grilling mood. So I smoked the tongue, rather than braising it. To help the smokey flavor permeate the dense meat further, I wrapped it tightly in plastic wrap and let it sit for 18 hours in a fridge. This is something I learned from Rogue Creamery. After they smoke their blue cheese, the wheels are vacuum sealed and stamped with a "Don't Open Until" date several weeks away. After the tongue had mellowed for a bit, I sliced it thinly with my meat slicer.

To add some moisture back to the dish, I made a creamy coleslaw of cabbage, carrots, and several generous teaspoons of grated horseradish. A few minutes in the oven gave me a hot, smokey tongue sandwich topped with crunchy, zesty slaw. The thin-slice really helped to counter the toughness of the meat, while the snappy horseradish flavor cut through the richness of the tongue.

Sorghum Molasses

2011-05-13T18:24:00.001-07:00

Time Life produced an amazing run of cookbooks back in the seventies. They chronicle an interesting time in American food life, when food was still very regional, and each region distinct. There was no "fusion" cuisine in today's glitzy sense, just a mash-up of immigrant dishes trying to adjust to the New World's produce and seasons. Each book is comprised of articles about each region's famous foods and peculiar tastes, with recipes following at the end of each chapter. I love the articles, but the photos are what keep running through my head. That's what first got me interested in sorghum molasses.

The picture was of an older, sunburned man feeding either sugar cane or corn stalks through a grinder. The grinder was powered by his horse, treading a slow circle around the man and his mill. That plant was sorghum, a "grass" just like sugar cane that's grown throughout Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, etc. After grinding the juice out, the man cooked it in a giant cauldron until it became a frightening, foaming greenish-brown syrup.

It's hard to find sorghum up here in Pennsylvania. Sorghum molasses production has been declining since the 1900's because it's so labor intensive to produce. I only saw one commercial bottle, which under closer inspection read "A sorghum-inspired syrup. Ingredients: Sugar Cane Molasses and Corn Syrup."

Thankfully, the web came to the rescue. A few days later I had a box of Jonas Yoder's Pure Sorghum Molasses from Marion, KY at my door. It did have a slightly yellow-green tint, just like in the Time Life book. Its texture was odd, like a cross between crystallized honey and smooth honey. The crystals would slowly melt on your tongue, releasing a sweet, husky flavor akin to buckwheat or chestnut honey. It didn't have the bitterness of chestnut honey, but instead a slightly smokey, barely perceptible astringent flavor. Like a green tea that brewed just a minute too long. You can only eat so much sorghum straight from the jar, so I took a cue from the Time-Life cookbook and made a pie.A custard pie with a cornmeal and flour crust was a delicious way to savor the unique and intense flavor of the sorghum. The cornmeal in the crust was my own addition, since I was on such a southern-themed roll. I also tried it as a glaze for seared duck breast, with the robust sorghum holding its own easily with the gamey flavor the duck's meat and the rich fattiness of the skin.

Pruneaux d'Agen

2011-05-01T05:12:00.000-07:00

In adventurous foodie circles, people like to talk about the most exotic things they've ever eaten. But no one really talks about their extreme adventures in eating dried fruit. Perhaps they're worried people will view them less as an adventurer and more of an Angela Lansbury granny-type. I understand these risks as I go forward with this post.The unsurpassed king of dried fruit is France's Pruneaux d'Agen. This is probably the only dried fruit I know of that has IGP status, protecting its name and place of origin. Named after the town of Agen, these prunes come from the Aquitaine region of France. The Aquitane is in the Southwest corner of the country, bumping up next to Spain and home to such classic cheeses as Abbaye de Belloc, Etorki, and Chaumes.

Agen prunes are prized for their luscious, creamy texture and bright, plummy flavor. Biting into one is like a gush of intense, plum jam. No one mentions that their skin is a bit firmer than regular prunes, though. This was a turn-off for Carla, but I didn't mind it. I actually think it helps the innards taste creamier, as they contrast with the slight chew of the skin. Like on a hot dog. Ok, no the best analogy.

So are they worth $20/lb? They were the best prunes I've ever had, with a more interesting, intense flavor than regular prunes. Whereas regular prunes only deliver a single, intense bite of deep flavor, these were a more complete arc of juicy sweetness, bright plum flavors, then a slow fade to heavy, traditional prune flavors. But at five times the price, I'm not sure if they were five times the flavor. They were a wonderful treat, so I see why there are so many gift boxes of Agen prunes available on French gift sites. It might be hard to pay that for your own cupboard, but they certainly would make an impressive gift. Especially to Angela Lansbury-types like me.

Puppy Yogurt

2011-04-23T05:46:00.000-07:00

No matter how much I may love a certain food, I worry it may not come close to the pleasure my puppy gets from eating yogurt.

Wild Mugolio Pine Syrup

2011-04-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

Growing up, our house had a small A-frame shed in one corner of the yard. My parents used it to store old ceramic pots, tarps, rakes, etc. When I was eleven I asked my mom if I could take over the shed for a summer. "Sure, if you clean it out you can use it as a playhouse." I wanted to correct my mom that it wasn't a playhouse, but it would become my secret laboratory, a fortress for my summertime experiments, but decided to keep my real motive secret. Actually, I was such a talkative little kid I probably told her anyway, then again in greater detail at dinner.

Looking back, my "experiments" were pretty close to the chores of a colonial housewife. I hung up plants to dry, sprouted potatoes in mason jars of water, and packed herbs into old wine bottles filled with canola oil and spirit vinegar. Then I forgot about it for the summer. When I came back to the shed in the fall, the experiments had taken on a life of their own. The oil had become cloudy and opaque, while the vinegar had developed a mother, a wild cumulonimbus cloud of bacterial spores that looks like a vinegar-born kelp plant. I threw it all away, but I wondered how it might have tasted? Today, I'm sure the oil was ripe with botulism, but perhaps the vinegar had become herbal and sublime.

Eleanora Cuancia was brave enough to try her summertime experiments. She's the one behind this Wild Mugolio Pine Syrup from Italy. When the mugo pine trees bud in early summer, she collects them and packs them in glass jars. Stored in the sun, they "sweat" out their essential oils and other goopy, syrups goos. In the fall she carefully scrapes all the gunk out of the jars and boils with sugar it in a big cauldron over a wooden fire, a la the Witches of Macbeth. Eleanora continues to cook it down until it becomes a chestnut-colored syrup.

This unusual, labor-intensive process creates the incredibly unique product found in this bottle. Tasted right off the spoon, it slowly unfolds with a resinous sweetness redolent of juniper and rosemary. Then a slight bitterness, like chestnut or buckwheat honey. Then it has the most strange, sweet finish that just lasts and lasts and makes you feel like you're in a deep dark pine forest out of a German folktale.Most of the serving recommendations involve thinning the syrup with some sort of cream, weather it be ice cream, ricotta, or goat cheese. Luckily I had two of the three. Mugolio splashed over vanilla ice cream was Carla's favorite, but I felt like the coldness dulled the intensity of the flavor. I really liked it with a fresh chevre, as the goaty tang of the cheese added a nice snap of bright flavor to the deep, mysterious sweetness of the pine syrup. Next I'd like to try it as a glaze for pork or game.

Italian Licorice Jam

2011-04-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a French confectioner, who was lamenting his struggle to break into the US market. "The tastes are totally different here," he explained. "Anise is my best selling item, but here no one will even try it." Which is true, as my wife Carla politely took a piece of anise-flavored candy that she knew she wouldn't like.

I don't really understand it myself. I really like the flavor of black licorice, but I have never met another person (minus my boss, who's from Northern England) who enjoys it as much as I do. It's much milder than something like cola, with a soothing sweetness that freshens your entire palate. My boss called them "Spanish sticks" growing up, and could buy licorice root as a candy to chew on after Sunday dinner.
As with many things, when you like something and it's hard to find, you can get a bit obsessive. So when I saw this jar of licorice jam, I knew I had to get a jar. Upon spooning it out, the jam is thick, pulpy, and black, smelling wonderfully of licorice and sugar. The base of this jam is basically an apple jelly, producing the pectin needed to set the gel, with ground licorice root cooked in.I first tried it on its own, before treating it like any other jam; the PB&J test. As a sandwich, the licorice was nice, and it was good to spread the intense flavor out with a fatty medium like peanut butter. But I don't think the peanut n' licorice combo was perfect, as peanuts have a very distinct and not very cooperative flavor, at least when playing with licorice. But certain sheep's milk cheeses have a slightly sweet, almost anise flavor to them. Perhaps a licorice and manchego melt?

This worked much better. The gooey, sheepy cheese was perfect as a foil for tasting that odd, beguiling sweetness of licorice. And who doesn't like a grilled cheese to chase down a PB&J?

Kvas: Bread Beer

2011-04-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

So let's say you have a lot of old, stale rye bread. You could make bread crumbs with it, or even a bread pudding. Or you could do as the Russian's do and brew a low alcohol beer with it! Kvas (or Kvass) is a 0.5 - 1.5% ABV beverage that's malty, tart, and refreshing. It's also a staple in rye-loving Eastern Europe to this day, where it's still a cooling summertime classic.

It's a simple beverage to make and there's little variation in the different recipes I looked at. Toast a vague quantity of bread, such as "half a loaf" or "8 slices," and pour on boiling water. Allow this to cool to body temp and then strain out the water from the soggy bread. Stir in some sugar or molasses, then sprinkle on bread yeast. Cover and allow to sit for 1-2 days in a warm place, then bottle. Wait for a week, then chill and enjoy. Or try the Baltic method of sweetening the kvas with strawberries or mint.

What's interesting about kvas is that it's tart, biscuity flavor works especially well in the kitchen. It's used as a broth for a number of soups, including the classic salmon and beet green soup Okroshka, which is actually what pushed me to brew my own kvas. That and having several stale pieces of rye bread lying around from my baking experiments.

Octopus with Chorizo and Fresh Oregano

2011-04-12T03:33:00.000-07:00

I saw the oddest thing on TV a week ago: octopus with boiled potatoes. It was just a glimpse of the dish, with no real explanation. I thought I saw lemon and roasted red peppers, too, but I'm not sure. It was odd, but I thought the combination might work. Taste-wise, potatoes are bland and so is octopus. Their strength is that they can take on so many great flavors with only a little effort. While they're similar taste-wise, the two couldn't be more different texturally. Boiled red potatoes are soft, smooth, and yielding to the jaws. Octopus will make you work a bit more, even when cooked correctly. So I thought I could give it a shot. To bring the two main ingredients together, I turned to the pig. In this case I went with chorizo, a garlicky, dry-cured sausage from Spain that's flavored with heaps of smoked paprika and garlic. It's nice to eat, but really shines when diced and fried. First I simmered the octopus for an hour to make it tender. Then the octopus came out and the potatoes went in to boil. In the meantime I sauteed the chorizo to get the fat running in the pan. Before long I had a glorious, bright red sheen of chorizo fat coating the bottom of the pan. In went the roughly chopped octopus, along with a big diced clove of garlic.

To set the dish off, I had room for one more "big" flavor. I worried the dish might be a little heavy as-is, so I went with a punchy herbal flavor. Fresh oregano is great with seafood, or dishes that need a flavor boost that you might not get with other soft herbs, like basil or parsley.

While it's not the same dish that originally got me thinking, I really like the way this turned out. Creamy potatoes, chewy octopus, all mixed up with spicy, smokey bites of chorizo and the occasional lemony/grassy smack of oregano. It's a nice Mediterranean dish that makes me wish it was actually warm enough for the first al fresco dinner of spring.

Rye Grains

2011-04-03T04:25:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot about rye lately. Rye was a major cereal grain for early farmers because it grows well in rough soil. That made it important for most of Europe when people didn't know much about land management or caring for soil. As farming improved, rye was still a staple for Eastern Europe, where the soil was inherently poor and the growing season short. That's why Eastern Europe and Scandinavia has such a strong history of rye breads and cookies. Russia even created a sweet-tart rye beverage called kvas, which is still a refreshing staple there in summertime. It's like making a low-alcohol drink out of stale bread, rather than making breadcrumbs.

Rye's role as a food source shifted when farmers found it could be used as a cash crop for distillation. By 1700 most farms in the German Rhineland had a home still that was fed most of their rye grains. Rye was replaced by buckwheat as a cereal grain, and slowly fell to the sidelines and the market for wheat grew and grew.

I just find it so interesting that what was once a major crop has become so marginalized. I wonder if it's because people lost the taste for rye, like the move away from offal as a normal meat source. There's not a lot of information on rye's history, so I've been piecing together what I can, along with picking up rye recipes and testing them out. In the photo you can see rye bread, whiskey, kvas, beer, and some assorted rye grains.

Serving Beef Brisket Confit

2011-04-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

We got about 1.5-2.5" of snow here, which was a bit of an April Fool's day joke on everyone who decided to live in Northeast PA. It's melted down, but the weather here is still chilly. Or damp. Or damp and chilly. So I wanted a nice warming dish, and what better than some confit with lentils. It has been about three weeks since I confit-ted a piece of beef brisket in duck fat. Since then, it's been maturing under a thick layer of fat. But tonight we're cracking the seal!

It always surprises me the intense effort it takes to free a piece of confit meat from the fat. It's like trying to pry off an octopus' suckers. But that's a reminder of why this works; the airless seal of the fat acts like a pressurized jar, protecting the meat from air and bacteria. If you don't count the hours of slow braising in molten fat, confit is a nice convenience food. Just pop it in a 400 F oven to warm it and crisp the surface, then serve on hot lentils dressed in a sharp vinaigrette. The acidity of the dressing is good for cutting the richness of the meat, so you can easily swap out the lentils for a green salad.

As a side, I made duck fat biscuits using the leftover fat that protected the beef during it's aging (or "mellowing") period in the fridge. They tasted good, but didn't rise to my usual respectable biscuit levels. I wonder if that's because all the water was cooked out of the confit fat, when normally the water in butter will help biscuits rise and get puffy. Or maybe it's been six months and my baking powder is dead.

Flavorwise, I liked the beef confit, but it was rather dry. It tasted like nice brisket, but it didn't have the wow-inducing "pop" that my lamb confit did. This was a good dish, but it didn't rise to be more than the sum of its parts, like corned beef or lamb confit. So next I think I'll make something foolproof, like pork rillets.

Jerusalem Artichoke Ethanol

2011-03-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a fascinating oddity: if you've ever wondered if you could convert Jerusalem Artichoke starches into ethanol, the answer is "yes." Sunchoke pilsner, anyone?

http://www.ehow.com/how_7452400_do-use-sunchoke-wine-making_.html

Smoked Cod Roe

2011-03-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

In researching pickled fish manufacturers, I found the mission statement of one Scandinavian company to be the most concise and oddly original. "Most people like eating seafood and are keen to do so more often. That’s where we come in" That's from Abba, (the seafood purveyor, not the band) who make everything from pickled herring and caviar to prawns in brine and tinned mackerel.

It's true; seafood is great but it's highly perishable and not well-suited to eating on the go. But what if you preserved it? So the Scandinavians started pickling the fish and smoking the roe. To make the rich-tasting roe easier to eat, it was often made into a paste and served like pate. But what if you only wanted a little bit at a time? Why, put it in a tube and dispense it fresh like toothpaste!

I just think this is so cool, albeit strange as an outsider looking in. It makes perfect sense, since the metal tube with keep the smoked cod roe fresh. You only squirt out what you plan to eat at that moment, preventing the insides from being exposed to the air. Then you can eat it as a sandwich filling, mix into deviled eggs, or top canapes and crackers. But what makes this so fascinating to me are the nuances of the packaging. Many manufacturers (and lots of companies in Scandinavia make a product like this) have a star-shaped nozzle to make it easy to create decorative patters in smoked fish paste. Others mix in dill for added flavoring and green-flecks of distinction. But the best is yet to come. If you like your Aquafresh toothpaste, with its layers of white, green, and red paste, you'll love the cod roe dispenser tubes that squirt out pink cod pate lined with layers of cream cheeses. And it still has the star-shaped extruder tip!

Bee Pollen

2011-03-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

I first tried Bee Pollen at the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival. A local NY bee keeper was displaying racks of honey, honey comb, and beeswax, with a few odd jars off to one side that looked like they were filled with yellow, red, and orange sprinkles. I asked him what it was, to which he opened a jar and said "bee pollen, it's good on cereal." He didn't mention any of the awe-inspiring claims most people use to pander their pollen, such as the idea that humans can survive on bee pollen ("a super food") and water alone, or the rumor that Iron Curtain-era Russians fed their Olympian athletes huge quantities of pollen to crush their opposition.

And it was good. The beeman explained that he used a device to collect pollen off the back legs of worker bees as they flew into the nest. It was "like a strip of Velcro" that lined the bottom of the entrance. As the bees flew it, the powdery pollen stuck to the "Velcro," allowing him to collect it later on. Originally, the pollen was saved as emergency rations to give the hive if they had an unseasonably cold spring and couldn't feed themselves. But then bee pollen developed its own market, appealing to both earthy, holistic herbalists and pill-popping supplement takers.

I bought a jar and was hooked. It became a staple for topping walnut porridge, yogurt, and occasional medallions of goat cheese. It might sound cliched to say it tastes floral, but considering how close the senses of taste and smell are, its not that far off as a description. Bee pollen has a dry, chalky texture, but that quickly melts into a creamy, sweet paste. Bees' roll the pollen into a ball with the help of nectar and honey, which helps accent both the sweetness and the floral flavor.

My Dad recently tried bee pollen from a local vendor, who offered him a minuscule sample with the warning that some people have an allergic reaction to it. That's because many bee's source pollen from ragweed, which about 5% of the population is allergic to. I like using bee pollen as a cool "finishing touch," especially as its an unusual product, but very easy for guests to enjoy. The one downside is that bee pollen rapidly liquefies in the presence of water, so as soon as you sprinkle it on ice cream or yogurt, you've only got about 1-2 minutes before it turns into little golden pools of liquid flowers. The good news is that it lasts for 1-2 years frozen.

Beef Brisket Confit

2011-03-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

So corning lamb shanks turned out ok. Confit lamb shanks turned out great. What about turning the equation back around and going back to my original corning ingredient, beef brisket? Beef brisket is dense, flavorful, and holds up well to extended braising. Just like duck legs and lamb shanks. Wouldn't it be easy to confit a large portion of brisket? It seems like a natural extension of the technique.

But what fat to use? I thought about using beef fat, but couldn't find much information on it. I passed on the idea out of worries it wouldn't properly preserve the meat, along with the difficulty of getting a large quantity of suet. Duck fat was traditional, and much easier to get ahold of. D'artagnan will sell you a ten pound bucket of rendered duck fat for $28. It'll last forever frozen.

After the fat was chosen, everything else was traditional confit. I salted the brisket for 12 hours, along with a seasoning of garlic, bay, and peppercorns. The next morning I rinsed off the excess salt and seasonings, then popped it in a casserole dish with enough duck fat to cover. I started it in a 350 F oven until it started to simmer, then turned it down to 325 F, then 300, then 250 for each consecutive hour.

Now it's just hanging out for the next two weeks or so to season in the fridge. The entire house smells sooo good and beefy!

Improving Homemade Cheese

2011-03-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

Another cheese making goal for 2011 is to better understand the aging process. I now feel that I can produce a good quality cloth-bound cheddar. But how long should I age it for? Up until this point, I've simply been holding on to my cheeses and breaking into them willy-nilly. If it looked good on the outside, I would chance it and crack the wheel open. But would it have been better to open it up at 3, 6, or 12 months? I had no way of knowing.

But this past November my parents gave me a 7 gallon stock pot, which will allow me to process larger batches of cheese. Coupled with this pot, I've purchased extra cheese molds. Now I can make two 3 lb wheels of cheese under the exact same conditions, but then try them at different ages. Today I made my first batch with the new equipment and I'm very excited. Hopefully onward and upward from here!

Sbrinz AOC

2011-03-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday's cheese plate reinvigorated my appreciation of Switzerland's bone-hard mountain cheese, Sbrinz. Every time I've tried it, Sbrinz has been exceptional. But then this cheese is coming from the hand-picked selections of Switzerland's foremost affineur, Rolf Beeler. Beeler himself states that Sbrinz is not named after a place of origin, like most cheeses and wines, but after the trade route that took the cheese to market in Italy. But once the Roman's got tired of lugging Sbrinz over the alps, they decided to make their own version of Sbrinz, calling it Parmigiano Reggiano. So they say.

I understand that Sbrinz has the advantage over Parm of being made from whole milk (not skim), so it has more flavor-holding butterfat. This would also explain why Sbrinz can age for 5-8 years gracefully, while many examples of Parm take on a sour, butyric flavor at 3 years and often become hollow and faded after 5 years. In fact, the only super-aged Parm I've really loved comes from the Vacche Rosse "red cow," which is famed for its butterfat rich milk.

And like everything else I love, I want to try to make my own. I bought Debra Amrein-Boyes' cheesemaking book as it was the only one I could find with a recipe for Sbrinz in it. In comparing the recipes for Sbrinz and Parm, they're modestly similar, but the details have unique differences. As mentioned before, Sbrinz starts with whole milk while Parm starts with skimmed. Sbrinz is ripened for 90 minutes, Parm for 45. Sbrinz is heated to 130 F, Parm to 124 F. Sbrinz also gets a shorter time in the brine bath.

The biggest difference is that the newly made wheel of Sbrinz is first aged at 65 F for 4-6 weeks, then aged at 50 F for the next several months/years. Parm goes right into the 50 F aging state. It's said that during this warming period, excess butterfat that cannot be held in the cheese's form will "sweat off" the surface of the cheese. But that higher initial aging temperature should also give the Sbrinz a boost of flavor development, I believe, while Parm's development is retarded by the cold temps.

So I think this will be my goal for the summer. I would like to try to make one smaller Sbrinz wheel (3-4 lbs) as a "tester" to try after 6 months or so. That would be just to practice the technique. Then, in June, when the cow's milk is at its richest from the fresh summer grass, I'll try a 6 pound wheel to age for a year. If that seems like I'm moving in the right direction, I'll make another wheel next summer and try to push it for 18-24 months.

Corned Lamb Shanks

2011-03-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

I love corned beef. Straight up, with boiled cabbage, or on a Reuben. I've corned briskets and beef tongues, but wanted to keep trying new cuts of meats. Corned beef is typically thought of as Irish, but I always think of lamb when I think of meaty Irish entrees. So why not corned lamb? Lamb, by nature, is tender. If it wasn't, it would be hogget or mutton. But lamb shanks still keep a tough chewiness to them, so they seemed like an ideal candidate for the long saltwater brine-time required of corning.To start with, I prepared my favorite brine, which is straight out of the River Cottage Cookbook. It's salty, slightly sweet, and wonderfully spiced with clove and juniper. The shanks hung out in the brine from Tuesday morning to Sunday morning, then flushed in a change of cold water for a day. Afterwards, I braised the lamb in vegetable stock for about 3 hours. In the last 45 minutes I added the classics; cabbage, carrots, celery, potatoes, and onions.The result was interesting, tasty, and odd. The "lamby-ness" of the shanks went down, but the corning spices weren't as present as in a beef brisket. They tasted good - tender, savory, and evocative of allspice and herbs. But the eating wasn't an elevation. Corning brisket creates a dish greater than the sum of its parts. This was good, but it didn't make you feel that the extra effort was rewarded. Also, I missed the ropey texture of brisket. The short, dense muscles of the lamb made for fragmented chunks of chipped lamb. Delicious, but still short of the mark.

Sweet Potato Brown Ale

2011-03-06T06:09:00.001-08:00

This isn't the most appetizing photo I've ever posted on my blog, but let me explain. What you're seeing here is the bottom of my fermenting bucket after I've siphoned off the beer. What's left behind is called the trub, which is spent yeast, hop sediment, etc. But the stuff that looks like pulled pork is what makes this beer unique.

My brother Steve is having a wedding celebration this summer and I wanted to brew a beer for the occasion. His wife, Youngjoo, is from Korea. I wanted to add something from Korea culture to the beer, while following a basic style they like (hoppy brown ales). Soju is a popular distilled alcohol in Korea, which is made from sweet potatoes. In October all the homebrew shops feature "pumpkin ale" recipes, so why not a sweet potato? That's what you're seeing at the bottom of the bucket right now.

To add the sweet potatoes, I baked two large sweet potatoes at 425 F for an hour. These were peeled straight from the oven, then added in the last 15 minutes of the boil. My goal is to get a medium-bodied, reddish-brown ale with some sweetness and a spicy, hoppy finish. I'm using Wyeast British Cask Ale to ferment. Here's the grain bill:

6lbs NB Amber Malt Extract
8 oz Caramel Briess 90L
8 oz Carared
4 oz Warminster Maris Otter
4 oz Weyermann Cararoma
4 oz Torrified Wheat (to help with head retention)

1 oz Palisade Hops (60 min)
0.5 oz Kent Golding (15 min)
0.5 oz Fuggles Hops (15 min)
0.5 oz Kent Golding (5 min)
0.5 oz Fuggles Hops (5 min)

We'll see how it goes when I bottle in a week! With a little tweaking based on Steve and Youngjoo's feedback, this may be what I brew later this summer for the actual wedding.

The New Puppy Cheese Plate

2011-03-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

Today Carla and I bought our first puppy! It's a golden doodle (golden retriever and black poodle mix) and he's very cuddly and lovey. To celebrate we had a special cheese plate with three of my favorite cheeses. First is Bonne Bouche, a soft-ripened goat cheese from Vermont with an ash coating and wrinkly, geotrichium rind. It's very creamy, almost to the point of melting lusciousness on the tongue.

Then we have Sbrinz, a hard, grate-able cheese from Switzerland. Sbrinz is what Parmigiano Reggiano aspires to be. Parm is made with skimmed milk and normally aged two years. Sbrinz is made with whole milk and aged 3-5 years. It's bone hard, savory, and intense, with flavors of broth, walnuts, and brown sugar. I love it. Only one Sbrinz maker produces Sbrinz this good (and then has the esteemed Rolf Beeler age it), and that cheesemaker is on the verge of retirement. I'm not sure what will happen to this cheese after he leaves the game, but I'm hoping he's training an equally capable successor.

And then we had Tomme Vaudoise, which is usually awesome with a hauntingly long finish. Sadly this little cheese had a bad run. It was totally over-ripe and ammoniated. Poor little cheese.

In the background you can see another loaf of bread using the Lahey method. This time I used 50% whole wheat flour and rolled it in wheat bran. The wheat flour didn't make the bread dry or dense at all, so I'm going to crank it up to 100% wheat flour next time and hope for the best. The wheat bran was a nice crust, but not as crisp and crunchy as rolling the dough in flour. Carla really wants me to try to make a dense pumpernickel with lots of walnuts, but that be better next time we have some smoked salmon or homemade gravlax.

It was a delicious spread, all the more because of the lovely little furball beside our feet.

Scrapple: The Document

2011-02-23T18:10:00.000-08:00

I think this book was written for me. Even though it was first published in 2003, it's just come to my attention. It follows the history of scrapple from the ancient Celtics to the Germans to the Pennsylvanian Dutch (Dutch like Deitsch). It's a well-written, fun read, although the author's prejudice did mar my enjoyment. He likes his scrapple made with buckwheat. I like cornmeal. He thinks that scrapple is already too carb heavy to deserve a sweet topping, so he likes green tomato relish. I'll stick with my maple syrup. One trick I do want to try is sealing the scrapple with a layer of melted fat, like with pate. I've never encountered that before, so I'm curious how it would make the scrapple taste/keep.

Bread with the Lahey Method

2011-02-22T03:21:00.000-08:00

It's rare to find a really exciting new technique in the kitchen. Most of my enjoyment comes from learning old techniques that have fallen out of favor for the sake of convenience. And aside from molecular gastronomy adding liquid nitrogen to ice cream and transglutaminase to pureed meat, when is the last time you learned a practical, new technique that hasn't been around since Escoffier?

But Jim Lahey, an Irish New Yorker obsessed with Italian bread, has done just that. Lahey has become the champion of a true no-knead bread, which is served up en masse at his Sullivan Street Bakery in NYC, on the tables of many restaurants smart enough to wholesale from Lahey, and in more and more homes as people read his cookbook, My Bread. Even my revered Jeffrey Steingarten loves his bread.

And it does work. Take super-wet dough (flour, yeast, salt, and water), stir it together to mix into a ball, and let it sit for 18 hours. When you preheat your oven, put in a large metal pot, like a cast-iron dutch oven or a steel soup pot with a lid. Dump the dough into the hot pot and bake with the lid on. The pre-heated pot acts as a mini oven, speeding the dough's cooking and trapping all that water in the dough. The water turns to steam, filling the air of the pot with tons of humidity so you get a chewy, fluffy loaf.

But what I find so cool about his method is the "how" behind the no-knead technique. Previously, I wrote off any no-knead bread recipe as a good way to make a crappy loaf of bread. But Lahey's technique works because of the 18 hours of fermentation and the high water content. Flour will try to produce gluten on its own, but it needs a lot of time (thus the 18 hours). But it also can't move on it's own, so you can help it by giving it a medium to move through (the water). So with the high water content, it's easy for the gluten molecules to align and form the chains that will become a sturdy, bready framework. And that water serves a double purpose by becoming the steam that helps puff the dough in the oven. All you do is mix the dough together enough to blend the water into the flour - less effort than making brownie mix.

And finally, the bread tastes great. Carla thinks it's ones of my best yet, next to my Rye 'n Injun Bread recipe that I ripped from Zingerman's. Googling "Jim Lahey + bread recipe" will give you a detailed recipe, but honestly it is simplicity itself. Delicious simplicity.

Boiled Cake

2011-02-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

I found an old Pennsylvania Dutch recipe for what has to be the oddest titled cake ever: Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake by Edna Eby Heller. I know the PA Dutch are known for their frugality, but this seemed to be pushing it. The cake was known as a boiled cake, which is an odd technique of boiling the fat, sugar, spices, and water/milk together before mixing with the flour and leavening. Normally these cakes have a large quantity of dried fruit in them, which is boiled along with the rest of the mixture. I'm not sure, but I think the boiling is used primarily to plump the dried fruit. I don't think it's for raising the temperature of the initial batter, as most recipes indicate the boiled mixture should be cooled before being added to the dry ingredients.

The PA Dutch recipe only had raisins, so I made it a bit more festive with half dark raisins and half golden raisins. Instead of butter, the recipe asked for lard, which I substituted with goose fat, as that's the only animal fat I had on hand. Spices were also minimal; cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Add in the flour, salt, and baking soda and that's the cake. Bake for 40 minutes and you're done. Easy peasy.

Honestly, it was really good. Carla described it as a giant raisin cookie, shaped like a cake. It tasted pretty close to a dense fruit cake. If I splashed brandy over the top I think it would have a good chance to pass as a traditional Elizabethan fruitcake. You didn't get any "animal-esque" flavors from the goosefat, as it's about as neutral as lard. While not dethroning my favorite Pennsylvania Dutch dessert, this one's enjoyable enough to qualify for a repeat.

Brawn (Headcheese)

2011-02-15T03:13:00.001-08:00

December is a busy month for me, so I usually load up the freezer in November in case I don't have time to go shopping. Afterwards, I need to find a use for all the random odds-and-ends I didn't get around to cooking. This past weekend I decided to use up a bag of five pig ears that was still hanging around.

Brawn, also called Headcheese, is like a pate, but rather than filled with pureed liver, headcheese if filled with a thick, gelatin-rich broth that sets to a firm jelly when chilled. This gelatin holds a matrix of the various meats from a pig's head, including the cheeks, tongue, skin, and ears. Since I wouldn't be using a whole head, I put in a set of pig trotters to ensure the broth would be set into a firm gel.

So in with the ears and trotters, I added a chunk of pork belly, carrots, celery, and onions. The broth simmered for two hours, then I strained the broth and set aside the meat. To condense the gelatin I reduced the broth from 5+ cups to just shy of two cups. As this simmered away, I shredded the meat from the feet and sliced up the ears and belly. Spiced with red wine vinegar, ground nutmeg, white pepper, and garlic, the meat was packed into a pate mold and topped up with broth.

The next day, I removed the brawn from the fridge and checked that it was set into a dense mold. To serve, we ate the headcheese with pickled Jerusalem artichokes and Triscuits. The rich jelly was nicely offset by the crunch of the pickles and crackers. Also, the sharp, vinegary pickles helped to lighten the fattiness of the pork skin and belly. If I were to make this again, I would make it with less ears and add in a tongue or more pork meat. Although it tasted nice, I think a texture other than jiggly jelly and crunchy ear cartilage would add more interesting contrast to the brawn. And I think mixing parsley or tarragon into the meat before setting in the jelly would add a nice herbal freshness to the dish.

Civet Coffee

2011-02-10T03:26:00.000-08:00

Civet Coffee? Don't believe it. That was the firm opinion of our Vietnamese guide, Tien, when we asked him about Kopi Luwak. Civets are cat-like animals native to South and Southeast Asia who feed on pulpy fruits, like the coffee cherry. When they eat the coffee whole, it passes through their digestive tract and is passed with the bean still intact. These beans are then gathered up and roasted like "normal" coffee. The coffee is so rare--and its flavor purportedly so unique--that it's currently the most expensive coffee in the world.

But Tien didn't buy it. As we walked past stalls of knockoff purses and sunglasses, he explained a lot of civet coffee was counterfeit. To meet the rising demand of coffee connoisseurs and curious tourists, the market had a few type of fake kopi luwak available. It might be completely fake, just regular coffee beans, but there was also an odd, gray-area of farmed civet coffee. Tien thought the farmed civet was the worst, because it wasn't true to the civet's natural habitat or diet.

So we passed on it. Until the last day. It was then that we stumbled across a large store that only dealt with coffee beans. When I say a large store, it was 8' x 8', which was remarkable compared to stores that were just a card table set up on the street corner. They had twelve different grades of farmed civet coffee and then "wild civet," which was $25 US for 3 oz (approx $130 lb). They had canisters of coffee on every free space on the wall, but the wild civet coffee was kept separately. When we ordered the wild civet, the owner pulled out a large plastic bag from behind her desk. Opening it, we saw a black, basketball-sized lump of coffee beans. They looked oily and slick, sticking together like...well...an over-sized dung ball to be honest. After using metal tongs to chip out a small bag's worth of beans from the dung ball, we had our coffee in tow!

When it came time to brew, we found the beans were still sticky and gummy. They didn't smell odd; just roasted coffee with a slightly sweeter aroma. We brewed the coffee in a French press and tried it black. The coffee was surprisingly smooth, with a slightly unusual fruity and chocolaty flavor. It was good coffee, not the best I've ever had, but there was still a strange, sweetish finish to each sip. It reminded me of when I first tried Jamaican Blue Mountain. I was surprised how "normal" it tasted. The coffee wasn't the fireworks on the palate I expected. But everything was exactly right. It was a perfectly balanced cup of coffee - the perfect cup of coffee. In comparison, the Kopi Luwak was a bit wilder. It was both recognizable as coffee, but still a bit strange, like tasting a wild crab apple next to a grocery store McIntosh.

Vietnamese Beef Pho

2011-02-08T03:45:00.000-08:00

Pho is a Vietnamese soup. In American, it's been popping up on the menus of fancy restaurants as a "fusion" dish a lot these past 3-5 years. You'll also find it in Vietnamese restaurants, for a much better price than the fusion shops. When I think of "soup," the mental image in my head is of something homey. Steamy broth, wide egg noodles, cubes of white chicken. Pho is interesting because it's the iconic Vietnamese dish, but almost completely relegated to street vendors. If grandma is cooking up a pot of pho soup, it's to sell on the corner rather than dish out to the grandkids.

Our guide explained that this was a matter of economics. Some people might make pho at home as a change of pace, but it will never taste as good. Unless you're making a giant pot to sell, most people cannot afford all the beef bones required to make the stock. And if you do scrape your money together for all those bones, you probably do not have enough cash leftover to buy the fuel required to bring a large pot of water to a simmer for hours. So when you want pho, you hit the street.

The pho shop we went to just did beef bo, although they did have the complete genitals of a bull hanging outside the shop for anyone who wanted to perk up their soup. An older man shredded cooked beef brisket, put it into a bowl with noodles, then passed it to a younger assistant. If you ordered "rare pho," he would put in a handful of raw beef. Boiling stock was poured in each bowl, slightly cooking the ground beef, but leaving the center pink and bloody. A fistful of cilantro and assorted herbs completed each dish.

At the table, you personalized your pho with fresh chiles, fish sauce, and pickled garlic in vinegar. They would also pass around bowls of fried dough strips to sop up the last of the broth. I was surprised how clear the broth was, but the flavor was extraordinary. Modestly beefy, but only after the combination of chiles, scallions, and lime juice faded from your tongue. The flavor of beef mingled with the warm spices of star anise and Saigon cinnamon. It was bright, then bold, while simultaneously warming and soothing your body like chicken soup.

Eating Balut in Vietnam

2011-02-04T06:38:00.000-08:00

Once you decide to eat beyond skeletal meat, a lot of culinary doors open for you. Not eating organs like liver and kidneys is like eating vegetables but never going past the salad section. You never try the refreshing crunch of raw jicama or the oddly artichoke-eqsue cardoon. To open up your culinary boundaries is to have a lot more fun at the table. So that's why I had no problem eating a cooked duck fetus. In Southeast Asia, ducks are everywhere, running semi-wild. Apparently the ducks have small branding tattoos so that you don't eat your neighbor's duck. Lots of ducks mean lots of duck eggs. Some of them are fertilized eggs (as factory eggs are never fertilized - the hens just lay sterile eggs), which grow up into ducklings. If you're hungry and have semi-wild eggs, there's a chance one might be "sprouting" inside. But with limited food sources, are you going to just throw away a perfectly edible food? Probably not.

Called balut or Hột vịt lộn, the duck eggs today are an everyday food for many people. Our Vietnamese guide, Tien, told us that balut was considered a good food to eat when you are sick. "Since the duck is so young, it's body is very simple, like a cell," he explained, "so this makes it easy for the body to digest and turn into energy."

After convincing him I was serious about eating one, he took me to his favorite balut restaurant. Which was just a child-sized plastic table with three seats. He told the owner we would like some balut, which she retrieved from a metal pot wrapped in several cloths to keep the steamed eggs hot. Sitting on tiny stools, we ate the balut with salt and fresh shredded ginger.

It tasted like a hard-cooked egg. Mild, eggy, and chewy, with a slight meatiness like boiled chicken breast. You could see the developing duck, but the bones were still cartilage and negligible to the chewing effort. Twice I bit into a juicy pocket, which I believe was the actual duck body, but again it tasted mild.

I felt very happy to have enjoyed what I thought might have been a challenging food experience. As we walked through Hanoi, our guide pointed out a second balut stand that was currently serving several middle-aged Vietnamese women. "More balut," he said, "except these women order them four at a time." So I guess just eating one balut still classifies me as a tourist.

Hachiya Persimmons

2011-01-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

I love dried fruits for their intense flavor, chewy texture, and concentrated sweetness. Dried fruit doesn't have a huge demand here in the US, so most of the fruit is soaked in simple syrup and encrusted in a crystalline sugar tomb. It's more candy than fruit, and it makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it. Dried fruit is already sweet to begin with, so why push it to such saccharine saturation?

Then I heard the rumors of the Hachiya Persimmon. Imagine a dried fruit that was hand-peeled and air dried for weeks, while constantly being massaged to coax out the natural sugars and supple texture. Such spa-like treatment is usually reserved for Japanese cattle, not dried fruit. But sadly only one fruit grower in the US carries on the Asian tradition of producing these unique dried fruit - making them exceptionally rare and expensive.

Then, in a moment of serendipity, I found myself in Korea for my brother's wedding. In winter. Right before the Asian New Year. Hachiya Persimmon's were everywhere! They were in gift trays, hung in beautiful clusters like edible chandeliers, even on braided rope like a chain of dried garlic! The first time I saw a vendor with a cart full of these delectable edibles, I rushed through traffic to investigate. Not knowing any Korean, I used the international symbol of running my thumb across my fingertips to inquire the price. With a bit of help, I purchased my first tray of Hachiya Persimmons!

They were like anything I've had in the US. The skin was leathery but tender, like a dried apricot. But when you bit through the skin, the center was like a pouch of persimmon jam. Creamy, sugary, and goopy. Some tasted smokey, others were bright and fruity. Some vendors sold them plain, others dusted them in fructose powder to keep them from sticking to one another. The only interruption of gastronomic indulgence was hitting one of the 2-5 seeds in each persimmon. But even that was a minor drawback to these insanely decadent fruits.

Kimchi Refrigerator

2011-01-25T03:37:00.000-08:00

With as much as I love fermented foods, it wouldn't be right to talk about Korea and not touch on the subject of Kimchi. To give a westernized definition, Kimichi is Korea's spicy sauerkraut. Take a few heads of cabbage, mix them with salt, and allow them to ferment in stone crocks for a few weeks. Lactobacillus bacteria ferment the cabbage, giving it a tangy flavor and an extended shelf-life.

What makes Kimchi unique is that it's made with Napa (or "Chinese") cabbage, is smeared with hot chile paste, and normally involves dried fish, shrimp, or raw oysters in the mix. I also find it interesting that the cabbage isn't shredded like sauerkraut. The oval heads are split in half, cored, and allowed to ferment as is.

And unlike sauerkraut, Kimchi is served at every meal, including breakfast. That means people go through a lot of Kimchi. So where do they keep it? Why in their Kimchi refrigerator! Looking like a top-loading deep freezer, this beautiful appliance was just hanging out in Youngjoo's family kitchen. Unlike a regular refrigerator, this fridge cycles air throughout the unit, helping to keep the bacteria happy and the kimchi fresher. It even has different temperatures for different types of Kimchi! You can select the temperature for cabbage kimchi, turnip kimchi, radish kimchi, etc...

I thought this was so amazing. I was curious how common it was in Korea. One refrigerator sales website said it's expected to be in 60% of homes in the next few years, although they didn't give a data source. It's also fantastic that so many people make their own kimchi, rather than just buying it from a bottle at the store.

If you're interested, this is a cool pdf on selecting the right kimchi fridge for your family's needs. It's in Korean, but has lots of internal views of the different models.

Sea Cucumber Sushi

2011-01-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

Eating sea cucumber was the most unique gastronomical experience I had in Korea. I'm not sure if it was the best, as Youngjoo's mother made us an amazing dinner after the wedding. That said, the taste and texture of sea cucumber was totally unlike anything I've ever had. The texture to me is like eating the cartilage of a pig's ear. Even after cooking a pig's ear for a long time, it still has a crunchy snap as you bite through the gristle. The sea cucumber was like that raw.

The shop owner had several oxygenated tanks with sea cucumber, sea squirts, and abalone wiggling around in them. There was also a tank full of odd-looking creature that looked like a cross between an earthworm and a colon. Youngjoo said there wasn't a name for them in English, but that they lived in the mud at the bottom of the ocean. We didn't try them, and I don't feel like I missed out.
To sustain us for the long day of shopping ahead, we ate one sea cucumber and one sea squirt with chile sauce. The shop owner quickly separated the edible parts of the animals from the indigestible. The creatures looked both prehistoric and alien, so I'm happy he knew which parts were good to eat. He simply sliced them into sashimi, leaving thin rings of sea cucumber next to blobby little globs of iridescent sea squirt.

The taste of the sea cucumber was salty and briny, like a strong oyster. For the first second it had a slightly slimy texture, but that quickly went away as you began to crunch into it. It tasted both fresh and slightly earthy, completely befuddling my tongue. The sea squirt was much milder with a very clean finish. The squirt had a texture like a sponge, so at first it was very wet and salty. After a few chews, the flavor became delicate and tasted like...an orange? I thought my palate must have been overworked until my mother independently announced that she thought the squirt also had a citrus flavor.

And this was only the beginning of our trip.

Seoul Fish Market

2011-01-21T05:28:00.000-08:00

Three weeks ago my brother Steve married his fiancee Youngjoo in Seoul, South Korea. It was a beautiful wedding filled with delicious food and delicious memories. Steve and Youngjoo are great hosts, taking particular care of my delicate appetite. At no point in the trip did we go more than two hours without eating something amazing. Youngjoo's parent's pulled the ace card, however, when they took us to Seoul's temple to the sea, the city's fish market that spanned a block.

Inside the warehouse, which was bigger than a football stadium, hundreds of vendors operated private stalls. The market seemed to be divided by the type of seafood.

One section focused on dried shrimp, squid, and various murky sauces; another on live 2-4 lb fish in oxygenated tanks; others showcases expensive and exotic shellfish; some only featured a single, giant fish like a swordfish or tuna.

Everywhere we went, people were eating. The vendors had small stoves to heat their tea and soup pots. Some would prepare the fish into sashimi right in front of you, then motion to a small table in the corner of their stall for you toenjoy the fish with a splash of chili sauce. Young men on motorbikes seemed to be taking orders of noodles to different parts of the market for delivery. We ate these eels raw, with the meat and crushed bones mixed together into little bundles.

Speaking of noodles, this stall (pictured here) confused everyone in my family. It was only when Youngjoo's mother told us it was shredded jellyfish that we grasped what we were seeing. The owner did not speak English, and I can only say "thank you," "I'm sorry," and "this is delicious," in Korean, so I don't have more information on this. I wonder how big the original jellyfish was? It looked like the fish was sliced like vermicelli, the salted and dried slightly. I think the stuff in bottles is a sauce made out of the jellyfish. We tried jellyfish twice in Korea, both times in a cold salad. One salad had a crippling sauce made primarily of horseradish, while the other was just a light vinaigrette. Both times I was surprised how mild the jellyfish tasted, as I thought it would carry a funky tang of dried/reconstituted seafood. It was like eating an al dente rice noodle.

While the wedding ceremony was the highlight of the trip, experiencing the fish market was a close second.

Rush Creek Reserve

2011-01-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

I don't think Carla could have found a better gift than this for me; Rush Creek Reserve by Upland's Cheese. Upland's cheese did the impossible this year, winning "Best in Show" at the American Cheese Society for their Alpine-style cheese, Pleasant Ridge Reserve. This is the third time Pleasant Ridge has been awarded Best in Show by the ACS, a feat no other cheese has won more than twice.

Pleasant Ridge has been in my top five cheeses for a while now. It's like a American, seasonal version of French Comte. Upland's only makes it with the milk from spring and summer. The rest of the year they sell their milk and focus on aging Pleasant Ridge. It's the only cheese they've made for years. But it's awesome. And now they've made a second cheese, with an equally impossible goal; to create a raw milk cheese based on the recipe for Vacherin Mont d'Or.

Vacherin Mont d'Or is next to Pleasant Ridge in my top five, and probably ranks as Carla's favorite cheese of all time. It's made in the coldest region of France, during winter. The cheese is soooo gooey that the sides are wrapped with a binding of spruce bark to keep the innards from pouring out. The bark gives the cheese a woodsy, mushroomy flavor, along with introducing some interesting microflora to the rind. To enjoy Vacherin, you slice off the top and spoon out the runny paste like a cold fondue. In the U.S. we can only import pasteurized versions, which are still very good. But they could be better.

And that's where Rush Creek Reserve comes in. Since there's little chance of the FDA/USDA deciding to let people make their own choices on raw milk, all raw milk cheeses must be aged over 60 days. So cheesemaker Andy Hatch has been playing around with creating a raw milk Vacherin-style cheese that won't be over the hill at 60 days when he can legally sell them to consumers.

Carla and I shared this amazing cheese for New Year's Eve. As soon as we tasted it, we knew we were experiencing something special. At first it hits your tongue with salt, then suddenly a wonderful, fruity sweetness opens up. Neither of us expected the sweetness, nor how long it would prevail on our palates. After the sweetness slowly mellowed, we could taste a slight, beefy pungency from the washed rind.

We tried to make it last, but I think we were scraping the insides of the rind of every last drop within about 20 minutes. What makes this cheese so exceptional is that it isn't a one-dimensional copy of Vacherin Mont d'Or. As Upland's cheese has proven time and again, they know how to make great cheese. So to simply copy an existing cheese isn't what makes Rush Creek Reserve so great. But to embrace the challenge of making a Vacherin-style cheese, while still making it your own unique product with its own individual nuances, is what I find truly thrilling about this cheese.

Charolais Chevre by Andante

2010-12-29T04:28:00.000-08:00

Carla regularly outdoes herself with gifts, with this Christmas being no exception. She picked up two amazing cheeses that I thought I wouldn't get a chance to try. I'll write about the centerpiece cheese in my next post, but I wanted to take a moment to review the amazing little goat cheese she purchased on an impulse buy.

Andante Dairy is located in California. If you're not in California, you'll probably never try her cheeses. Soyoung, the cheesemaker, primarily makes small, soft-ripened cheeses in the tradition of camembert, crottins, and banon. These cheeses have a short shelflife compared to harder cheeses. This fact, coupled with Soyoung's small batches, makes these cheeses notoriously hard to find. They are served at the French Laundry, a small California restaurant you may have heard described as "the greatest restaurant in America" by the press since 2000 through to the present day.

Carla remembered me waxing poetic about wanting to try her cheeses, so she picked up Charolais, a small, raw milk goat's cheese shaped like a tiny drum. It's about 4 oz, and looks like a giant crottin, the small buttons of chevre ubiquitous to french cheese plates. It's made of raw goat's milk, which is unusual to find in this country. Underneath the wrinkled, velvety rind, the paste had turned to a slightly runny cream, but the cheese still had a solid heart of firm, flaky chevre.

The cheese had a modestly goaty flavor, which I like, with a gamier flavor by the rind. The chevre tasted of lemon peel, hay, and finished with a sharp, minerally bite. To lift a good descriptor from another writer, this cheese was "flinty." It was very nice with a crisp, yeasty bottle of Duvel Belgian ale.

High Cotton BBQ

2010-11-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

Since Carla and I were getting married in North Carolina, we wanted to invite everyone to our rehearsal dinner. Most of our guests would be coming from Pennsylvania, with a few trekking in from New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Florida. A few guests came down early, but most drove in the day of the rehearsal dinner. We wanted a place casual enough that they could just roll into the dinner in their road grime clothes, but also a place that had awesome food to help make the trip worth the drive.

After looking at 5-6 places that didn't work out, we found a seafood place that seemed ok. It had been a long weekend of wedding planning on the outer banks, so we were pretty run down. This was in March and we were staying at the hotel were we would eventually have our reception. Needing a sustaining lunch to continue with our matrimonial strategizing, I put my snout in the air and caught a whiff of smoked pork. Piggy!

The aroma of hot pork called out to me like the siren song of a bewitched sailor. As my glazed-over eyes sparked back to life, I saw the source of this delicious smell: High Cotton BBQ. Right across the street from out hotel! How could our marriage not be blessed, to find the ocean on one side of our wedding, and BBQ on the other. We went in and ordered two platters.

The food was amazing. It was perfect. The meat was tender, well-seasoned, and deliciously smokey. Although some may roll their eyes at a Northerner spouting off BBQ pro's and con's, I've got enough pig heads under my belt to stand behind my beliefs. In the world of BBQ, my favorite is Texas-style, with big slabs of heavily smoked meat weighing down the table. The meat is so tender and intensely flavorful that you don't even need sauce. I think the midwestern BBQ's of sticky tomato and brown sugar sauces hide that delicious meatiness. On the East Coast, Carolina BBQ favors a thin, vinegar-based sauce that leaves behind the heavy, sugar-coated glazes. Squirting a bit of High Cotton's "pig pickin' sauce" was the perfect way to cut through the richness of the pork, while still savoring the smokey, juicy flavor.

The fried chicken was a revelation on how I should be making fried chicken. Rather than a thick, flour paste tomb of batter around the chicken, the segmented chicken parts are tossed in a light coating of cornmeal and fried to a crisp, bronze perfection. It was crisp and juicy, without having to bite through a dense crust of coating that immediately robbed your mouth of any chicken flavor. I felt enlightened and happily stuffed.

We spoke to an incredibly friendly man named Will about the idea of having our wedding reception there. As we chatted, he mentioned he was one of the owners. The awesomeness of High Cotton BBQ clears stems, in great part, from Will. Every member of the staff, from the wait staff to the cooks, was genuinely friendly and helpful. Still, Will is really cool. And he knows his cheese! I brought a big cheese plate with 4-5 lb wedges of three of my favorite cheeses. I think our reception was the first wedding reception to have a sheep's milk cheese from a benedictine monastery in the Pyrenees served as an appetizer to Southern BBQ.

Well, this post is running a bit long, so let me finish with the conversation that forever stamped me as a lifelong fan of High Cotton BBQ. Along with their indoor kitchen, High Cotton has several larger smokers for doing pigs and vast quantities of quartered chicken. When we dropped off the beer the morning of our reception we saw two such iron beasts smoking away behind the restaurant. I asked Will if they were catering another party tonight, as we had just ordered one smoked pig. "Yeah," he replied, "the second one is getting delivered to a guy later tonight. We gave him the propane smoker, your pig's getting cooked on charcoal." Now that's just being awesome.

Plus he gave me the leftover pig head to take home and eat. Num num num.

Raw Milk Stilton

2010-11-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, I cracked my first wheel of homemade blue cheese. Carla and I visited my parents for the weekend in upstate New York. Growing up, I remember my Mom always keeping blue cheese in the house. She would either crumble it in salads, or get a jar of blue cheese dressing and dunk in hard pretzels as a snack. Of all the cheese types, I don't eat a ton of blue cheese, so my parents graciously offered to help out with our experimental taste-test. My mom even went so far as to pick out a bottle of port.

This blue cheese is based off a recipe for Stilton. I expected a crumbly curd with a slight creamy texture and a sharp bite. I hoped that the raw milk (all Stilton must be pasteurized by law) would propel my amateur efforts into a nearly uncharted realm of deliciousness. The wheel was aged for 3 months, which seemed to be plenty of time for the blue veining to spread throughout the cheese.

As I cracked the wheel's stinky rind, I worried the cheese might actually be overripe. Looking at the cheese, I saw the complete opposite. Only a few whorls of fuzzy blue mold hovered in the pale yellow paste. The taste was mild, with a light grassiness you'd find in raw milk cheese. The finish was slightly "blue," with a brief tingle of acidity. All in all mild.

So here's what I think happened: My cheese cave is buzzing with stinky bacteria, after all the washed-rind cheeses I've made in the past. They stuck to the wet rind of the blue and created the super-strong rind. Sadly, I think I overworked/overpressed the curd, resulting in too few air pockets for the blue to grow. Even piercing the blue cheese with the steel spike only added marginal blue veining to the cheese. The one thing I did get spot-on was the acidity. Stilton isn't salted for a few days, allowing the acidity to build up. As soon as you add salt to milk, the souring stops, along with the acidity.

To end on a positive note, it's hard to be frustrated when you're eating cheese and thinking about making more cheese to solve your problems.

Black Silkie Chicken

2010-11-11T03:43:00.000-08:00

I really believe we eat with our eyes first. When food looks beautiful, or unique, it really gets your appetite going. I also have the bad habit of shopping with my eyes. Purple potatoes, orange cauliflower, white peppers, black garlic; an impulse buy is so easy when something is a cool new color. So when I saw the Black Silkie Chickens on last season's Top Chef Masters, I knew I needed to try it.

Silkies get their name because they look like a stuffed animal charged with static electricity. Their soft, silk feathers, puff up off their bodies in a soft, pillowy plume. Their feathers might be white or black, but their skin, meat, bones, and ligaments are all black. Well, the meat is a greyish color, to nit-pick. They're classified as a batam chicken, which means they don't get much bigger than 2-3 lbs. Also, food writers likes to tout that the breed has one extra toe than "regular" chicken breeds, but I don't think people are buying them because they have a spare pinkie.

This silkie came frozen from Canada, where it was slaughtered by Buddhists, exempting it from USDA inspections. That's about all I could glean from the packaging. Being so small, you don't get a ton of meat off the bird, so they're normally made into soups or stews to spread out the meat. I quartered the bird, then roasted the carcass and wings. The roasted carcass, leg bones, and neck were simmered in chicken broth to build up the body of the soup. I added some star anise and ginger for flavoring, along with a small amount of dried chilies.

Mixed into a soup of buckwheat noodles, savoy cabbage, carrots, and scallions, the tiny black chicken went a long way. The chicken didn't taste much different from a high-quality free-range chicken. It was good, but you're paying for the striking color.

I think I wouldn't mind raising a few black silkies, mixed in and among "traditional" meat birds, but I don't think they would go beyond being the occasional novelty on the dinner table. Speaking of, silkies are valued by poultry farmers because of their strong mothering instincts and tendency to brood. They'll try to hatch any egg they find, from their own, to a chicken, turkey, or quail egg. Now that's more interesting than an extra toe.

Durian Fruit

2010-11-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a landmark experience can be a pleasant surprise. The cheese Epoisses is considered to be the stinkiest in existence. Carla and I have found it to be a yummy bundle of gooey cheese wrapped in a stinky skin. But sometimes, no matter how excited you are to try a new food, you just hit a brick wall. Like with Durian fruit.

Lotus Foods in Pittsburgh's strip district was selling the Durian in their produce dept. I had read online that most Durian are exported frozen, then thawed at the market. When we picked our up, it was still frozen solid and didn't have much smell. After it had defrosted for a day on top of the refrigerator, it had only a mildly funky aroma. That all changed when I cut it in half.

Have you ever heard why we get carsick? It was explained to me that your mind knows you are sitting still, while the balancing organs in your inner ear register the car's momentum. You're moving, but sitting still. This disconnect between your mind and body results in nausea. That's what the durian was like. The smell was a pungent bodily odor, with the smell of fetid fruit that had been forgotten and left to rot. Inside the bark-like husk were three large chambers, each holding three ivory pouches of fruit. They were firm, plump, and had a slightly stringy outside like the fibers of a mango.

They tasted surprising sweet. Although sweet isn't the first thing I noticed When I took a small bite, the inside burst through with a marshmallow-like custard. Holding it next to my mouth, it was hard to deal with the intense smell and cottage cheese texture at once, so it took a few more nibbles to notice the sugary flavor.

The finish was all broth. Savory, meaty broth, like French onion soup. And some more stink. It was almost sensory overload. A repulsively pungent smell, in a stringy, creamy glob, with a sweet, fruity flavor, and the umami-like flavor of caramelized onions and roasted beef. As you might guess from the photo, Matt, Carla's brother, had a much larger serving than anyone else.

A Bad Sign

2010-11-05T06:47:00.001-07:00

An excerpt from Carla's description of her lunch at a recent seminar:

Carla: "For lunch I had their falafel."
Nick: "Falafel?"
Carla: "If it wasn't falafel, then it was the driest meat I've ever had."

Probably a bad sign about institutional food if you can't tell ground chickpeas from beef.

Sauerkraut Fermenting Crock

2010-10-31T10:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes dreams just come true. Also, sometimes if you whine, grouse, and constantly mention how much you want something, someone will take pity on you and get it for you. And I got my sauerkraut fermenting pot! Carla's family gave it to us as a wedding present! It's awesome. It holds a little over two gallons worth of sauerkraut. It also has a water lock lid, so the various fermenting cabbage smells won't trickle out and stink up the kitchen.

I used to ferment sauerkraut in 1 liter mason jars, but that was very labor-intensive and yielded mixed results at best. Plus, once I was done fermenting the sauerkraut, I had to can it if I wasn't going to use it in the next week or so. But this ceramic pot is great. It has two large weights I can use to keep the sauerkraut down in the salty brine. Once it gets the level of tangy bite that I like, I can remove some to eat raw or cook, then add a new head of shredded cabbage to the bottom of the pot and stack the ready-to-eat cabbage on top. Plus, I can save a cup or two of each brine to kick start the next batch of sauerkraut, just like a sourdough starter.

Plus, I can ferment anything in this. Pickled cucumbers, kimchi, carrots, mushrooms,turnips, etc. Or I can do a mix of produce. The instructional booklet came with an interesting recipe of shredded red cabbbage, carrots, parsnips, apples, and caraway seeds.

Clearly, this is something every home should have.

Hawaiian Purple Sweet Potatoes

2010-10-31T09:59:00.001-07:00

In the last year or so, I've really moved away from eating white potatoes. I still love mashed potatoes, potato pancakes, and potato gratin, but most of the time Carla and I have been eating sweet potatoes. They take a little longer to cook, but I love their sweet, honey flavor and thick, creamy texture. Plus they have a lot more nutrients than regular white potatoes. But mostly I think their sweet, creamy flavor matches a lot of my cooking. It offsets the heat of spicy chiles, or plays up the inherent sweetness of pork.

Sadly, the regular sweet potatoes have not been as satisfying as they used to be. Apparently Hawaii has been hogging the best sweet potatoes for ages. They're called (very descriptively) Hawaiian Purple Sweet Potatoes. Japanese expats call them "Okinawan potatoes," after the Japanese Island they are believed to be native to. When the Polynesians moved to Hawaii, they brought the sweet potato with them.

And they taste amazing. They don't taste different from a regular sweet potato, but all the flavors are incredibly intense. It's like tasting wild salmon next to farm raised. You can buy them in seed catalogs, but I wonder if the mineral content of Hawaii's volcanic soil is an essential component of the potato's flavor. We're looking into buying them online, but 30 lbs might be more sweet potatoes than even we could reasonably eat.

Hawaiian Produce

2010-10-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

Carla and I just got back from our honeymoon in Hawaii! We had lots of delicious meals and fruits, but especially loved visiting the farmer's markets and seeing tables full of exotic fruits and vegetables. All in all, Hawaii is a strange mash-up. Driving down the road, there would be a bunch of retirees playing golf on your left, while on the right field hands tied up bundles of cut sugar cane. There were fabulous hotels and run down homes with plastic sheeting for windows. Even the topography was strange, as the islands are basically the above-ground tops of otherwise underwater mountains. So while the beach was that *classic Hawaiian beach*, the land looked more like Arizona as you went up, complete with mesquite trees and lots of dry fields of scrubby grass and red dirt. Higher up, as the clouds dropped off more moisture, you had pine trees and ironwood, which made us feel like we were back in Pennsylvania.

As much as I'm used to seeing apple trees, I was still shocked to see many yards (rich or poor) had their own fruit trees. I just didn't expect to see someone picking grapefruit from their front porch, or avocados, guava, bananas, or limes. Unfortunately the grapefruit and avocados weren't ripe. Carla, the tropical fruit bird that she is, found out it was rambutan season! We ate about 3-4 pounds of rambutan from the farmer's markets, popping the clear, jelly like flesh out of the rubbery rind. The seeds looked like almonds, but we were told they were midly toxic if you ate too many of them.

Rambutans were the stars of our trip, produce-speaking, but we also gained a new respect for papaya. Most of the papaya I've eaten has been bland pap with a less appealing texture as supermarket honeydew melon and about as little flavor. In Hawaii the papaya was sugar sweet, spoonably tender, and remarkably consistent. Many restaurants also made a creamy salad dressing spiked with the papaya's peppery seeds. We also had tasty snacks made of rice beaten into a paste, then mixed with cassava, taro, or sugar. They were then wrapped in banana leaves and grilled. It had the texture of the Powerbar, but with a more natural flavor.

We also had wine made by a company that crushes Maui Gold pineapples and ferments the juice into a sweet, but slightly crisp, golden wine.

Oyster Stout

2010-10-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

Back when the oceans were pristine, oysters were a plentiful peasant food. They were often served in bars, where the salty little blobs whet the customers’ thirsts for another mug of ale. Today you get more cost-efficient bowls of peanuts and pretzels. This lead to a well-respected pairing of oysters and stout. Today the phrase "oyster stout" normally refers to stouts meant to be paired with oysters and shellfish, or occasionally ones that have a small quantity of ground oyster shell added to the boil water (to adjust the water's mineral profile). But every now and then, someone thinks, "why not brew with oysters?" This time, it was craft brewer Harpoon, situated in the seafood loving town of Boston, Mass.

The beer didn't taste like oysters, or even smell much like oysters. The Harpoon website said the oyster bodies were added at the beginning of the boil. During the sixty minute boil, the oysters cooked and burst, slightly dissolving into the stout. I would imagine any remaining hard little knobs of cooked oyster were strained out in the beer's transfer to the aging tank. Harpoon said that the oysters were not added so much for flavor, but for the thickening proteins their dissolved bodies would add to the beer. It would be like a thick oatmeal stout, but more oyster-ry. The head brewer went on, explaining that she doesn't taste much of an oyster flavor, but that some people say it's all they can taste. Maybe it's in their heads, or perhaps they just got an errant piece of unfiltered oyster body.

All in all, I liked this beer, but didn't notice anything spectacularly wild about it. It would be interesting to taste the same recipe of the beer without oysters next to the oyster-infused version to see how much thicker it actually tastes. In the future, it would be better to just treat myself to a nice plate of oysters and a stout, rather than this beer. It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure if they oyster juice is worth the squeeze.

Beeswax Cheese

2010-10-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

This is the first cheese I aged under beeswax. It's a simple, cooked-curd cheese. Heating the curd to 110+ F helps to create an elastic texture, which in turn makes for a great melting cheese. I used a "farmhouse culture," which is a blend of mesophilic and thermophilic cultures. Despite the smattering of eyes, it's not really a Swiss. The mesophilic produces a small amount of gas to push out the eye formations. I let it air dry for 4 days at room temperature, then waxed it and aged it in the cheese fridge for about a month. I love the smooth, delicate flavor of this cheese. It also has a nice finish that goes between buttery and floral (from the residual honey in the beeswax). Simple and sweet.

First Fresh Chicken

2010-10-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

Sunday I killed my first chicken. There is a farm stand a few miles from our house that sells vegetables, but also offers beef shares in the spring. They've always had lots of chickens running around, and last week I asked if they ever sell them. "Sure. Do you want us to kill it here, or are you taking it home alive?" The look on Carla's face told me that we wouldn't be bringing a chicky home that day.

A week later I went back to the farm and spoke to "the chicken lady," which is what the other employees call the 30-ish woman who looks like Tina Fey. She said most of her customers are Hispanic families who let the kids fish out a chicken from the barn as an activity, then the adults take the chicken home to kill and clean. The chicken lady recommended cutting off the chicken's head, as the heart would pump out the blood and leave the flesh (relatively) blood free. Although my idol, Hugh Fearnley-Wittenstal of the River Cottage, recommended breaking the bird's neck, she said that makes the blood congeal in the flesh and body cavity.

At home, Carla had three gallons of water reaching a boil. I brought the chicken home in a cardboard box. Previously, a friend named Jarret had explained to me that a chicken will get calm if you hold it upside down by its feet for a few seconds. As strange as this sounded, it worked. I tied it upside down by its feet from a post in the yard. Holding its head downward, I used a knife to cut its throat, but not to completely remove the head. This is considered a very humane way of killing a chicken, as it severs the major arteries delivering blood to the brain.

I knew the bird would spasm "like a chicken with its head cut off," so I kept hold of the head to keep the blood from spraying everywhere. The chicken didn't spasm at all, it was very calm the entire way through. After almost all of the blood had come out, the bird started flapping like crazy. This was actually a little frightening, as the bird became frantic 15-20 seconds after cutting. I held it firm as it kept beating its wings for the next minute. After that I just held on to the head, worried that if I poked it the bird would start flapping again. At this level of commitment, I wasn't going to let dinner fly away.

When I was sure the bird was quiet, I dunked it head-first into the pot of boiled water. A quick 45-60 second dunk would help loosen the feathers. Hanging the blanched bird back on the post, cleaning went very fast. The feathers came our quickly and easily. Then I hosed the bird down and set it on an outside table to clean. I took my time making the slit into the body cavity, so as not to puncture the intestine. After several shallow slashes, I made a small hole to gently pull out the internal organs. Then I cut off the head and fished out the gizzard from where it rested by the collar bone. This didn't go so smoothly, and it spilled out a mess of chewed corn and pebbles.

At this stage, I had a chicken like you would buy it cleaned in the store (except with feet). I cut off the feet and quartered up the bird into legs and breasts. While the grill was heating up, I salted the chicken and chilled the meat in the refrigerator. I grilled the feet and carcass first, to make a soup stock. Once the feet were burned and blackened, the tough skin easily flaked off. The cleaned feet act like pig's feet, thickening and flavoring broth.

The meat itself was very flavorful, dense, with a not-unpleasant chew to it. The fat was a beautiful golden yellow, like fresh butter. The biggest revelation was the skin. I always thought chicken skin could taste good, if crisped properly, but this skin was amazing. It was dark, thick, and crispy as any crackling. The first bite made me realize the religious fervor that a crispy shell of snap-ably crisp skin induces in poultry lovers.

Beeswax for Coating Cheese

2010-10-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Italian cheese maker Perenzin makes a stellar cheese aged in honeycomb wax. It's a dry and savory cheese like Montasio, but the wax adds a slight floral sweetness. Lately I've been having trouble with keeping a high humidity in my cheese fridge, so I wondered if coating them in beeswax would help me produce sliceable, creamy cheese, but avoid the blandness of regular waxed cheese. I tried this once (by pressing honey out of local honeycomb and saving the wax - way, way too much work), and the cheese came out perfect. Smooth, buttery, and just gentle honey flavors playing off the modest grassiness of raw milk.

So now I'm going in with both guns. I purchases two pounds of beeswax from an apiary in Seattle. They had a great price for cosmetic-grade bees wax. Some places just sell craft wax for candles and shining wood, but this is for people who make their own lip balms and salves. The wax itself smells like honey, but it feels cool and smooth. I made two basic cheeses this weekend to to test out the waxing. I'm still trying to perfect my cloth-bound cheddar and natural rinds, but this should help me when I need a mild melting cheese. With the winter holidays coming up, I worry I won't be able to make cheese until late January, so I would like to keep a few in reserve for cold mornings when I'm in need of a reviving slice of drippy cheese toast.

Wedding Cheese Cake

2010-09-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

So things have been busy, which has slowed my posting here. But the good news is that Carla and I are married! We tied the knot last week in the Outer Banks with lots of family and friends. It was a wonderful time and I feel like we really put our personal stamp on the event. Take the cake, for example.

Neither Carla or myself are cake fans. Every year as a child, I told my Mom that I wanted an Angel food cake for my birthday. Most cakes just seem so dry and bland, or coated in a thick, saccharine paste of icing. Personally, pie has everything cake doesn't. It's sweet, tart, crispy, gooey, delicious, and fruity. But pies cannot be stacked. Well, except for pork pies, but Carla veto'd that.

But then we saw a tiered "wedding cake" of Cypress Grove chevre cheeses at the NY Fancy Food show! It was perfect. Humboldt Fog is one of our favorite cheeses, made out of soft-ripened goat cheese coated in layers of ash. Plus, the white blooming rind makes it look surprisingly close to a traditional wedding cake. The actual tiers were made out of a 5 lb base of Humboldt Fog, then a 3 lb wheel of Truffle Tremor (goat cheese infused with ground black truffle), topped with a 1 lb wheel of Humboldt Fog, and finally crowned with a demure 8 oz Fog Lights.

While the truffle-infused Truffle Tremor was a bit of a show-stopper, I loved the opportunity to share Humboldt Fog with all of our guests. We sliced it just like a cake and served large wedges for each table on acacia boards with honey and chocolate-covered strawberries.

Oh yeah, the cake topper is a bride and groom made out of bent forks.

Homemade Cheese Cave

2010-08-31T04:05:00.000-07:00

I installed a small thermometer in the basement of our new house and it's been keeping at a steady 70 degrees for the past month or so. While this is a bit too warm for the long-term aging of most cheeses, it's perfect for storing a Swiss cheese for the first three weeks. The holes in Swiss cheese are the result of cultures eating milk sugars and releasing gas as a byproduct. For this to happen, the cheese needs to sit somewhere warm and dark for about three weeks so the air bubbles can bloom.

Also, our basement is a little damp, which helps the humidity from drying out the cheese. To help insulate the cheese's natural moisture, I'm keeping it in an old wooden cheese box. This also keeps spiders off it, to be honest. Not that I think spiders eat much cheese.

You can see the cheese has a whole range of molds on it, none of which seem to be anything out of the ordinary. The only one I worry about is "cat hair mold," a light, prickly black mold that can impart a bitter flavor. But thankfully that hasn't shown up since the first week. Otherwise the high salt content of the cheese and dominant cultures should keep any other pathogen's away.

Larval Blue Cheese

2010-08-31T03:24:00.000-07:00

This is the first blue cheese I've ever attempted. Right now it's still in its larval stage, before the blue molding has really begun to bloom. It's based on a recipe for Stilton, as I really like the dense, fudgey texture of Stilton, even though it can be a bit pungent at times. In July I was talking with a British cheese importer, who told me the best Stilton is always hand-ladled into its draining molds. Ladling a cheese into its molds is slow work that requires a lot of patience. Once the curd is set by the rennet, you take shallow scoops of the jiggly curd and ladle them into the mold to drain. This is different from the process of cutting all the curd into small pieces in the pot, then stirring them to agitate the whey out. The cheese sloooooooowly drains, gently dripping out the whey, and naturally shrinks over the course of several hours.

After that the cheese is broken into large chunks and turned several times to facilitate the drying off of the whey. Although that may sound counter-intuitive to what I just said above, it's actually a much gentler process that cutting and stirring in the pot. It's like the difference between chopping vegetables by hand versus throwing them into a blender.

So that's where we are now. The cheese is in its final mold, still drying. I flip it a few times a day and the curds slowly settle down. While it'll still have an open-texture, the cheese will shrink a bit more over the next 2-3 days of flipping. Then after a week or so, once I see some blue mold on the outside, I will pierce the cheese with a sterile needle to open the insides to air. That'll allow the mold to bloom on the inside with the characteristic veining you'd expect in a Stilton. Then I wait for the cheese to reach its delicious peak.

55% Alcohol by Volume Beer

2010-08-15T16:48:00.000-07:00

This was a wire article from July 25th that I read in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND - The strongest and most expensive beer ever created sold out within hours Friday, a Scottish Brewer said, as they courted controversy by packaging the bottles inside the bodies of stuffed animals.

BrewDog, the self-described maverick brewery, presented the beer - which contains a record 55 percent alcohol - inside the bodies of dead squirrels and stoats.

Animal rights activists rushed to condemn the stunt.

BrewDog said the limited edition Belgian ale - made with juniper berries and dubbed "The End of History" - was the costliest beer ever sold.

The squirrel bottles cost $1,081 each and the seven stoat bottles went for $772 a pop. END.

Ok - that's the end of the news article. Reading on their website, I found it interesting that they used roadkill for sourcing the animal bodies. It seems like a cool idea, but then they also mention that a good portion of the price tag is "simply how much custom, high quality taxidermy costs." Which makes one wonder - with only twelve bottles in circulation, how many people are actually going to drink this? It reminds me of The Billionaire's Vinegar, where rare wines often turned to vinegar because people appreciated the unopened bottle's rarity more than the quality of the wine inside.

Another interesting fact is that this seems to be an ice beer, or eisbock in German. BrewDog also makes a 41% abv beer, which they mention requires four bouts of freezing to reach the desired alcohol strength. This is also how early American settles made apple jack, an apple brandy. Not having any fancy distilling equipment, they would roll out a big barrel of fermented cider into the snow. Overnight the water in the cider would freeze, leaving behind a layer of concentrated alcohol at the bottom. Then a hole would be drilled into the bottom and the alcohol siphoned out.

BrewDog blog post on 55% ABV beer.

Soft-Shell Melt

2010-08-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

Carla went to her parent's for the weekend, so I was on my own for Friday's dinner. That's usually when I stop by the seafood dept to see what's come in for the weekend. A happy surprise was soft-shelled crabs! A perfect single-serving indulgence of crispy crustacean.

I like Wegman's seafood dept because they always keep the soft-shelled crabs alive until the moment you order one, unlike some stores that clean a whole tray at once and leave them faceless, dead, and rapidly decomposing. That day, however, the clerk forgot to clean the crab so I came home with a live bugger, little to my knowledge. I did pretty well cleaning him, but I must have ruptured something (in the crab, not me). As soon as he hit the hot saute pan, a thin, clear liquid came out, immediately turning a milky white and solidifying.

It reminded me of an egg's first moments in a hot skillet. The white quivers from clear liquid to opaque jelly to firm ivory in a matter of seconds. Then I got hungry for an fried egg. Fried eggs make everything taste better. Fried eggs complete bacon. Fried eggs turn toast into dipping sticks. Fried eggs make a steak delicious, with a rare yolk pouring out over the top. And a fried egg makes a croque monsieur into a croque madame!

So my plans of a crispy soft-shelled crab on a focaccia roll became exponentially more extravagant. Normally a croque monsieur is a grilled sandwich of Gruyere and jambon de Bayonne ham. The addition of an egg turns that monsieur into a madame. I was swiping out the ham for a crab, but still needed cheese. With no Gruyere in the house, I did find a small wheel of Brugge Jeune, a mild, creamy cheese from Belgium similar to gouda. To play off the sea food I was incorporating, I rubbed some prepared horseradish into the cheese, then popped it into the toaster oven.

Although I didn't plan it, this sandwich was pretty tasty. Overcomplicated? Sure, but it's fun for me to make the occasional Dagwood-esque monstrosity. Also. it worked in my favor to use such a mild cheese. The cheese and egg blended together to taste like a rich sauce spiked with horseradish, complimenting the crispy, sweet-briny flavor of the crab. Something like cheddar would have overwhelmed the crab, as was the dill pesto I momentarily considered. And who cares about a crab sandwich if all you taste is the condiments?

Cracking the Colby

2010-08-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

So here it is, about five months later from when I first made my raw milk colby. It looks a lot different from those initial pictures, like comparing a fresh grape with a forgotten raisin that went through the wash. Twice.

As a brief recap, I wanted to try to make a more artisanal version of colby; that weird, squishy cheese with the orange cow-print paste. So I made one out of raw milk, cloth-bound it, and aged it in my cheese cave. Over time it gently shrunk and wrinkled, but never got much mold on the rind. I wonder if bacteria didn't have much interest in the colby because I had washed away a lot of the lactose milk sugars in treating the cheese curds (Colby is a washed curd cheese, like gouda. Removing milk sugars creates a milder cheese and prevents them from becoming lactic acid). So perhaps I inadvertently removed most of the food source, which would explain the lack of molds on the rind.

The first photo is of the colby with its wrapping still intact. After that I peeled it off to expose the real surface of the cheese. The white spots are salt deposits, as salt inside the cheese migrates to the more humid surface. You can also notice the odd pinkish hue the cheese took on from the original orange colored-sections

The flavor reminded me of an aged gouda, but with a little grassy flavor from the raw milk. But very mild overall, with a dry texture. If I was going to compare it to another cheese, it would be close to Vella's Dry Jack, except without the rub of black pepper and cocoa powder they use. It's an interesting cheese to try, but I'm not sure if it's something I'd go back and work on. For the same amount of effort I think I would enjoy a clothbound cheddar even more.

Large Format Cheddar

2010-08-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

This is a cheese I made in late June - it's a five pound wheel of cloth-bound cheddar. I've really enjoyed my previous cloth-bound cheeses, but disliked fighting with the rind to give up every morsel of delicious cheese innards. So I've made a larger wheel (up from my standard 2 lb wheel) to ensure a better ratio of paste to rind.

Being a cheddar made with summer milk, this cheese has a lower fat content than winter milk. This should help the cheddar to age gracefully and not pick up any odd, gamey flavors. Not that odd and gamey are always bad when it comes to cheese, but I'm not a big fan of those cloth-bound cheeses that have an aroma of sulfurous egg whites.

As you can see in the photos, a good bit of natural mold is forming on the rind. As the cheese ages over the next eleven to twelve months, these molds will actually exhaust themselves and die off, leaving a rustic, burlap-like crust. One benefit of the double-cloth binding is that molds stick to the rind, but do not penetrate into the paste of the cheese. Some cheese makers suggest changing the bandages when the molds become too heavy, but I'm just going to see how this one rides out for the time being.

As a final aside, I've been surprised to learn that cheddars aged over two years are aged by being vacuum-sealed in huge plastic bags and aged under refrigeration. And that procedure is not even limited to industrial cheese makers. Many artisan cheese makers like Widmers and Shelburne age in plastic. A cloth-binding cheesemaker said most forty-pound cheddars reach their peak at 12 months in cloth; after that they begin to just dry out and become stale. Interesting, yes, but it takes some of the magic out of those four and six year cheddars.

Smoked Scrapple

2010-07-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Carla went away, so I used my free time to indulge in the manly summertime tradition of smoking a pig's head. The pig head has been in our freezer since this past winter (yes, it made the move with us to our new place!), and really needed some attention. Remembering how good my last (and first) batch of scrapple came out, I decided to cook up another batch.

Here in Pennsylvania, you see a lot of scrapple made with buckwheat, which I don't like because of the gummy, mushy texture. So I again chose cornmeal as the binder. That first batch was made with the head of a rotisserie bbq'd/smoked pig. I like the slight smokiness the head meat gave the scrapple, but wanted to bring that smokey flavor to the forefront. Also, as Carla informed me she wouldn't be joining me in my scrapple-fest, I added some diced chiles for a bit of heat.

The smoking itself was very straightforward; over low, indirect head for the better part of the day. I primarily used mesquite chips, as they bring an unmatched smokey, epazote-like intensity to anything they waft over.

Once the piggy was fall-off-the-skull tender, I put it into the largest pot I had and simmered it for about three hours. The head was alone for the first two hours, then I added some stock veggies for the last hour. This gave me a rustic pork and mesquite broth for reconstituting my polenta. As the broth came back to a boil, I picked the meat off the skull and chopped it roughly into bite-sized pieces. An onion, some garlic, and thyme completed my seasonings. In a separate pot (as I had more broth than I needed) I boiled the polenta until it became thick and viscous, then stirred in the chopped pork and seasonings. And voila!

After being chilled overnight in loaf pans, the scrapple was ready for breakfast. Sliced thickly like toast, seared in butter like a pancake, and you're ready to go! Add some scrambled eggs and you have the breakfast of champions! It might be more work than I usually put towards breakfast, but it certainly paid off.

Washed Rind Apple Lambic

2010-07-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

Along with aged, bandage-wrapped cheeses, I've spent a lot of my cheesemaking energy focusing on perfecting a stinky, gooey washed rind cheese. Carla loves Epoisses, a salty, savory cheese from France washed in a brandy called Marc de Bourgogne. What I've been trying to do is combine my beer brewing with my cheesemaking, where I wash the cheese with one of my own beers or meads.

So far it has been mixed results. Washing the cheese in an acidic, barnyardy lambic resulted in a very pungent cheese (a plus), but one that almost ripened too quickly. We enjoyed one perfect cheese, but less than five days later the second one ripped out of its fragile skin and pooled all along the bottom of my cheese cave. Washing in meade was fine, but left a slightly "odd" aftertaste. To counteract the runnyness of the cheese, I added a culture called geotrichium candidium, which results in a tight, dense rind. This is a culture used in other washed rind cheeses, like Normandy's Pont l'Eveque. This addition helped with the texture, but I felt the cheese took on a sour flavor.

Today I'm trying a new variation - same cultures (no geotrichium), but using a milder lambic. This is a beer I brewed with 1/2 the normal amount of malt, but added three gallons of apple cider to two gallons of water, compared to the usual 5 gallons of pure water. It also used a lambic yeast blend, rather than the intense lambic strain I used initially for my pure lambic.

So far they seem to be progressing well. Soft and smushy, but not threatening to burst at the seams. Well see how they hold up to a taste test in another week or two!

Mixed Milk Cheese

2010-07-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

This is another new cheese I've been fiddling with. I really love goat's milk cheeses, but rarely have access to much goat's milk to make my own. When Carla picked me up a gallon of raw goat's milk and a gallon of raw cow's milk, I decided to make one medium sized cheese out of both animal milks, rather than two tiny, separate cheeses.

Like my last post, this cheese is also uncooked and unpressed in an attempt to preserve the unique flavors of the raw milk. After they cheese had drained for about 24 hours, I let it air dry, at which point it started to smush out into a flattened pancake. I'm not sure if this is from the cultures I used acting oddly with the goat's milk, or my own fault for not working out enough whey before putting the curds to drain. To keep the cheese together, I bound it in a little corset of cheese cloth. Two loops of string helped to put the cheese back to it's original form, but you can see it's a bit lopsided in the side photo.

It kind of remind me of those wildly rustic cheeses of the Iberian Peninsula, which have a hard, leathery rind, a gooey pocket of innards, and a cloth cinch around their waist. I don't think this one will be runny on the inside, however, as I think most of those cheeses (Serra da Estrela, Azeitao, Torta del Caesar) are set with thistle rennet, which breaks down into a hot mess at the center.

Unpressed Uncooked Tomme

2010-07-08T19:19:00.000-07:00

If I had to spend my days only eating one cheese, it would be Gruyere de Comte. Hopefully one that had some nice age on it, but still maintained that characteristic nutty/savory flavor I love with only a tinge of cellar-funk earthiness echoing on the finish. Comte is a cheese that never disappoints me, whether I'm nibbling it as a snack or melting it on a potato.

That being said, most of my hard homemade cheeses have been of a Comte-esque style. I heat the curds to about 110 F to firm up the curds, then press the curds under modestly heavy weights for a dry, elastic cheese. This has made some nice cheeses, but I wanted to get a better feel for each step of the process. So I removed the process and made the most basic hard cheese possible.

When I took Artisanal's Master Class on cheese, I was amazed to see that the odd, spherical shape of such famous English cheeses as Spenwood, Berkswell, and Wyfe of Bath were from being drained in colanders. Pasta colanders! Apparently colanders are traditional, since cheesemaking was a homefront skill and you made do with what you had on hand.

So this is my first attempt at that style of cheese. After cutting the curds, I stirred them to firm up the curds, then drained the whole mess in a pasta colander lined with cheese cloth. Once the curds had dripped off most of the whey, I flipped the cheese to drain the other side. Once the whey draining slowed, I broke up the curds and mixed in salt to wick off more moisture. The flipping and draining then continued for about 36 hours, until I had a (somewhat) firm cheese. I let it air dry for another night, then added a dusting of salt to the rind and put it into the cheese fridge.

Along with not pressing this cheese, I didn't heat the curds, which should give a better representation of the raw milk's flavor. I'm hoping for something between "farmy" and "barnyard," but I'd be happy with "grassy."

The one downside is that not pressing the cheese allows these little dimples to stay in the rind. Pressing would smooth them out, but we're past that point. The small crevices allow mold to grow within the rind. It's not a bad thing, as it mostly seems to be the penicillium candidium from my aging Brie, and a bit of harmless blue mold. But it is a twist in my stocking, so to speak.

Back in Action

2010-07-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

So I'm back on the blogging trail, after a long absence of internet inactivity. Carla and I moved to a small cottage, which knocked us off the webgrid for six weeks. But now we're back and have a garden to boot! Regular updates will be coming soon, but here are some quick notes from our culinary compound:
- We dug a garden, which is sown primarily with beets (Detroit red and chiggioa striped). I think the only person who can eat more beets than me is Carla. Unfortunately they're rather expensive here, so we're cutting out the middleman to indulge our relentless hunger. Along with regular baked beets, we're looking forward to making a beet gratin, a savory hot beet and beef borsch, and a sweeter cold borsch.
- I've started working with mixed-milk cheeses, blending raw goat's milk into my raw cow's milk tommes. They're still aging, but updates to follow.
-I found a new hog farm that can get me pig offal at the end of the summer!
-Since moving, my mini-fridge cheese cave has been having trouble keeping its humidity up. I'm thinking of adding some sponges along the wall to help keep things moist.
- I'm almost ready to bottle two new beers, a molasses stout (which I took inspiration from East End Brewery's awesome version) and a new rauchbier. This rauchbier has twice the amount of smoked malt as my last version.

Fish Head Curry

2010-05-26T19:49:00.001-07:00

I have a few oddly specific cookbooks, but I think Bones by Jennifer McLagan is my favorite. When you think of bones for cooking, it’s satisfying to think of smoky pork ribs, oversized bone-in ribeye steaks, or stewing a chicken carcass for stock. Except fish bones. Everyone hates fish bones. They lurk invisibly on your plate, stick in your throat, and might kill your miniature schnauzer.

So when I saw she had a whole chapter on her book dedicated to bone-in fish recipes, I was pretty amazed. Most of the recipes are either for cooking fish whole, on the bone, to retain moisture, or feature small fish you can eat the bones of, like smelts. But her recipe for fish head curry really caught my attention.

I love cooking fish whole, especially because I know Carla won’t fight me for the head. All the meat around the collar, cheeks, and eye sockets just tastes so rich and delicious, like the dark-meat oysters on the back of a chicken. Perhaps it’s because the skull has more fats and delicious fishy oils that makes the meat taste so good. Either way, I was determined to cook up some curry!

Unfortunately salmon heads are hard to find. Not because there’s no demand, but because they’re in too much demand. The last few times I’ve gone to Wegmans, the fish dept has been out of stock, since the filets come headless and they only get a few heads on for making cross-cut salmon steaks. Those few heads that do come in are given away on a first-come, first-serve basis, and I was often out of luck.

Until now! With a generously meaty salmon head, I stocked up on curry paste and coconut milk. The recipe was a very straightforward curry, except that the fish head is cooked from the beginning. This gently leaches out the marginal amount of gelatin in the fish bones, making a quasi fish stock/fumet. Although the bones won’t make the broth turn into a jelly, it does gently thicken the cooking juices with a silken mouthfeel. So as my salmon stewed away I added some chopped zucchini, chickpeas, onions, carrots, ginger, and cardamom. The salmon gently flaked away from the head after about 45 minutes of cooking. A smattering of chopped chiles rounded the flavors out.

Tripe's Second Try

2010-05-17T18:39:00.000-07:00

Although I'm always thrilled when a recipe comes out perfect the first time, it's the recipes that fail disastrously that keep me coming back to the stove. Sure, my trout almondine was great, but have I made it in the three years since then? Tripe in marinara sauce was one of these utter failures. And don't think it's because I don't like tripe; an Italian deli by my job makes a great tripe in marinara that they sell by the pint (really) for $5. But my first attempt tasted like leather that had been vulcanized into rubber. It wasn't good.

In the depths of despair, men turn to God. In my anguish, I turned to God's gift to American chefs, Thomas Keller. Of all the offal I've cooked, this was the worst. So I went to the best. In his oversized French Laundry cookbook, Keller outlines his mode of success for tripe. In a giant pot, put a thin layer of tripe on top of lots of sliced onions, celery, carrots, leeks, and turnips. Add on another thin layer of tripe and more stock vegetables. Press all this down until you've got a tightly packed stock pot of vegetables that just happens to have some tripe in it. It's like making a vegetable broth with tripe. The sweetness of the vegetables will mellow the tripe and leach out any "off" flavors. Then braise or simmer it for up to 12 hours.

I maxed out at 11 hours. That's when it was finally tender. The next day I took out the tripe, scraped out any specks of fat or clingy membranes, and rinsed it with cold water. Now, it was time to bring on the sauce. Unlike last time, when it was all tripe, I hedged my bets by making a sauce with both tripe and cannelini beans. Also, to appeal to my personal preferences, I made it a spicy arribiata sauce by adding a good crumbling of dried chiles.

And it worked! The creaminess of the beans eerily mirrors the tender tripe, but I'm just thrilled my tripe is tender and not tough as a boot. The heat of the chiles is also a nice way to smooth out the lingering barnyardy finish of the tripe. As the flavor of the tripe fades, the rising burn of the peppers has your mouth watering for another bite.

Raw Milk Emmental

2010-05-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sunday afternoon I cracked open my second wheel of homemade Emmental. Emmental is the "real" name of what most people think of as Swiss cheese. It takes its name, like most cheeses, from it's birth place. In this case, it's the Emme Valley of Switzerland. My first Emmental was rather dry, with a waxy texture on the finish. I blame the dryness on the humidity troubles I'm constantly trying to adjust in my "aging cave" (read: micro-fridge). The blame of waxy texture is solely pointed at the use of pasteurized milk. I also think I heated the curd too high.

But here was my chance at redemption! I had a beautiful, golden wheel of raw milk Emmental, which I knew had been heated to a much more moderate temperature. As I pushed the knife through the rind, I hoped fate would be kinder on my second attempt. Regardless, I still held my breath.

And viola! Holes! My cheese has holes! If anything symbolizes Swiss cheese, it's the holes! While not the walnut-sized holes you'd find in the commercial product (although I've grown suspicious that they add powdered lactose to those cheeses, to give the cultures more milk sugars to eat, thus larger holes), my cheese was clearly of holey lineage.

Flavorwise, it had the typical tang of a Swiss, but had the full, well-rounded flavor of a raw milk cheese that I hoped for. Although a bit dryer than I would like, it was smoother than my first pasteurized version. It also melted much better than any of my previous pasteurized cheeses. All in all, a big step up. I'd like to try this in a slightly larger wheel, as I think that would give me more delicious insides and less rind.

Morels in Upstate New York

2010-05-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

I went to visit my parent's this weekend for Mother's Day. While there, they pointed out four dead sour cherry trees that they wanted pulled up. We've had great luck with fruit trees in our yard, but these may have been crowded out by bigger trees and died. Two of the trees were in a very shadowy area, where a row of pine and a large apple tree blotched out most of the light, resulting in damp, mossy soil. It was here that I found three wild morel mushrooms!

My mom has seen them sporadically for 6-7 springs, ever since we got a load of mushroom mulch from a gardening center. I suppose some of the spores were still active and found productive places in our yard.

While I've never "foraged" for mushrooms before, I've read a great deal about it. Morels are considered one of the best mushrooms for novices to pick, as there's nothing poisonous that resembles their distinctive honeycomb top. At least in North America. Surprisingly, the most common case of mushroom poisoning in the U.S. is of East Asian-nationals who mistake the incredibly poisonous Death Cap mushroom for the edible Paddy Straw mushroom that grows in abundance across south east/eastern Asia.

Doom and gloom aside, these mushrooms were wonderfully tasty, earth, and non-toxic. I wish there were more of them, but they still made enough for a tasty breakfast of eggs and morels.

Pink Peppercorn Brie

2010-04-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

Some people say they're "inspired," but sometimes people just downright copy another guy's good idea. I'm not sure which one I'm doing, but I know I was inspired by Coach Farm's Peppercorn Chevre to try my own spin on it. Their cheese is a tiny cone, shaped much like the Loire Valley classic chevre, Chabichou du Poitou (which sounds like a Fat's Domino song, shab-bee-shoe dew phwat-two). Along with being a beautiful, soft-ripened goat cheese in its own right, Coach Farms adds a smattering of zesty, whole peppercorns to the cheese. And I love the fact that they're using green peppercorns, which just remind me of so many classic French dishes that douse beef or pork in a sauce of cognac, demi-glace, and green peppercorns.

As my supply of goat's milk is spotty at best, I opted for raw cow's milk. I also love the fruity and fiery bite of Brazilian pink peppercorns, plus I thought they would stand out nicely in the white curd. I steamed the peppercorns for five minutes to sterilize them, then dropped a few between scoops of fresh curd as I ladled them into their hoops to drain.

Results to come in a few weeks of aging!