Indirect Heat

A lazy Saturday calls for...

2012-02-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

... a lychini.

A homemade cocktail inspired by lacking the ingredients I *really* wanted to make a martini.

3 oz vodka
1 oz lychee liqueur
1 zest of orange

Mix. Shake over ice. Serve.

Not a bad substitute for a real martini...

By Bbq Dude

Wordless Wednesday: Back to bbq

2012-02-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

By Bbq Dude

Bo ssäm (pork brûlée)

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so our Momofukubinge has reached its apex. Bo ssäm, baby. We've made this before, but we were inspired by the recent New York Times article to do it again.

Bo ssäm is the Korean equivalent of a pulled pork sandwich. It's got the slow-cooked, fall apart pork. It's got the crispness of the cole slaw (kimchi). It's got the acid bite of a tomato chili sauce (ssäm sauce). The parallels are almost perfect, and the combination of acid, fat and crunch is nearly perfect. Delicious.

We've modified the recipe a bit from Momofuku.

1 whole bone-in picnic ham (8 to 10 pounds)
1 cup white sugar
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon kosher salt
7 tablespoons brown sugar

Mix 1 cup of sugar with 1 cup of kosher salt. Rub it all over the pork.

Put in the fridge overnight. Fire up your smoker, to a nice temperature of 225°F. We smoked for four hours at this temperature, with wet hickory for smoke, then transferred to a 300°F oven for another 3 hours to finish. I'd like to say that was by design, but the snow was falling too fast to keep the temperature in the bbq. vaporizing snow takes a ton of heat out of your bbq.

While baking, prepare your accompaniments:

2 cups plain white rice, cooked
3 heads bibb lettuce, leaves separated, washed and dried
1 dozen or more fresh oysters (optional - we skipped this time, but for the last time)
Kimchi (available in Korean markets)
Ginger-scallion sauce
Ssäm sauce

When done baking, remove the picnic ham from the oven. This final step is what takes this recipe to the next level. We're talking pork brûlée. Caramelized sugar, all over greasy, delicious pork. Wow. Ok, mix the last tablespoon of salt with the brown sugar. Rub all over the hot picnic ham, and heat the oven to 500°F. That's right, you're going to melt sugar onto your pork. Yes. Transfer the pork to a fresh cookie sheet and place in the oven.

Okay, so if we'd had a slightly better fan, we would have left the pork in the oven about a minute longer (the sugar on the cookie sheet was starting to burn), but this was nearly perfect. This takes less than ten minutes to start melting the sugar all over the pork. Remove from oven when it's perfectly melted and caramelized, or when the smoke starts to overwhelm your smoke detectors...

Tear apart the pork, into little pieces. I use forks to pull them apart, you want small chunks of beautiful pork brûlée.

Okay, now you assemble your little bo ssäm, a lot like a burrito. Take a leaf of bibb lettuce, and place some of the pork, rice, kimchi, ginger-scallion sauce and ssäm sauce in there. Curl it up like a burrito, and take a bite. Oh. My. Gawd. The heavenly mix of fat, spice, acid and crispy kimchi is mind-blowing. One of the best bbq tricks ever. This might replace pulled pork as our Superbowl favourite. Yum.

By Bbq Dude

Ssäm ssauce

2012-01-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

And now, a quick post, to add a bit more Momofukuto your life.

A sauce that will go well with pork. Pulled pork, even. The ingredients are available at your local Korean market (I use H-Mart in Burlington, MA).

2 tbsp fermented bean-and- chili paste (ssämjang)
1 tbsp chili paste (kochujang)
½ cup plum vinegar
½ cup grape-seed oil

Mix the kochujang and ssämjang together. Add the grape-seed oil, and mix well until they're properly emulsified. Add the vinegar.

Serve, with pulled pork. Yum.

By Bbq Dude

Ginger-scallion sauce

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

We've stepped away from our good friend Momofuku for a while. Momofuku, by David Chang, preaches pork. It preaches Japanese/Chinese/Korean/American fusion, where kelp is served with bacon. And my favorite message, it preaches against authenticity as a principle. Authenticity matters not. It's taste that matters. Is it delicious? It has to be delicious.

Momofuku is always in my heart (we now use it frequently as an expletive while cooking - think Bruce Willis whispering "Yippy kay yay, Momofuku!"). But sometimes it takes a reminder to cook delicious Momofuku flavours, like this relish, published last week in the New York Times. I've adapted it slightly, in favour of deliciousness:

2½ cups thinly sliced scallions
½ cup peeled, minced fresh ginger
¼ cup grapeseed oil
1½ teaspoons light soy sauce
1 scant teaspoon splum vinegar
½ teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste

Mix all ingredients. Leave in the fridge for a few hours. Serve as a relish.

More Momofuku coming up...

By Bbq Dude

A lazy Saturday calls for...

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

...a Mandarin margarita.

I was inspired to create this cocktail for our New Year's Eve party. We started off the night with:

3 oz Herradura reposado tequila
2 oz Absolut mandarin
½ oz fresh-squeed lime juice
1¼ oz fresh-squeezed orange juice
¼ oz agave nectar (or simple syrup)

Rim a glass with tequila, and a mixture of white and dark salts. (The salts don't create any different flavor, but they do make it more beautiful to behold). Mix the above ingredients and pour over ice.

Serve.

By Bbq Dude

Beef tongue with arugula, salsa verde and caramelized onions

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to start this post with the above photo. That's a 4 lb cow tongue. You won't find that served in your average steak house. I first had cow tongue at Chris Cosentino's Incanto in San Francisco. It was a genius dish, served on top of a bed of arugula. The bitterness of the arugula played well with the meatiness of the tongue.

Well, how to re-create it? Mr. Cosentino's new book Beginnings looks to include little or none of the more challenging meats (like tongue). So I'm left to throw together something myself. I poked around the internets, and found several recipes.

I've thrown this recipe together, tweaking the braise from Edible Seattle, and the salsa verde from Chef's Under Fire. The result is simple and delicious:

1 beef tongue
1 yellow onion cut in half
1 whole bulb of garlic cut in half
5 black peppercorns
2 dried ancho chiles
½ cup white wine vinegar
3 tablespoons salt

There must be a real run on beef tongue right now, as we paid $5/pound for this tongue. Right. So, combine all of the above ingredients into a heavy stock pot. Add enough water to cover the tongue, and simmer for three hours.

Make sure the tongue stays mostly submerged. Turn it periodically over the three hours of cooking.

The broth will darken, and the outer layers of the tongue will spice up. Meanwhile, prepare the salsa verde:

1 bunch parsley
1 bunch cilantro
½ bunch fresh mint
4 cloves of garlic
1 tbsp capers
2 anchovies
¾ cup of extra-virgin olive oil
Black pepper
sea salt
juice of 2 limes

Combine all the salsa verde ingredients in a food processor. Pulse into a light paste. Set aside in the fridge.

Also, prepare:

Sweet-sautéed onions
arugula

When it comes time, you'll dress the arugula in salsa verde, and place the caramelized onions on top.

Alright, here comes the fun part. At the end of three hours of cooking, fish the tongue out of the broth.

You're gonna have to peel that tongue while it's still hot. Tastebuds should be tasting, not tasted. Right, so keep the squeamish out of the kitchen for this next bit.

So, make a shallow incision in the outer layer of the tongue, and pull it off the tongue.

It actually comes off very easily. I think it's fascinating that you can see the shape of the tastebuds in the underlying muscle. Right.

Once you've cleaned off all the outer layer, wipe off the outside of the tongue.

Starting at the end of the tongue that was attached to the base of the mouth (that doesn't have any of that skin on it), slice the tongue into ¼ to ½ inch steaks.

Heat some oil in a pan over high heat. When the pan is screaming hot, sear the steaks on each side, to give them a nice caramelized cover. Place the salsa-dressed arugula on a plate. Set one to two steaks per serving onto the arugula, place some caramelized onion on top and a dollop of extra salsa verde on top.

Serve while hot. The bitterness of the arugula, the brightness of the salsa and the deep richness of the tongue comes across as a pretty amazing combination. Next time, I might reduce the braising broth into a sauce of its own, but for this time, dinner was enjoyed by three out of four dining companions. (Mrs. Dude was very polite).

Yum.

By Bbq Dude

Lime-basil sorbet

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Way back in the distant past... 2009 to be exact... Dr. Ricky and I prepared a gigantic feast for our friends in San Diego. Between courses of sea urchin and gailan, we palate cleansed, leading to the quote of the evening:

"I could cleanse my palate all night!"

Well, we had a pretty meat-heavy menu here on New Year's Eve, (and the author of the above quote was a return guest), so we decided to serve another palate cleanser. A wee serving of lime-basil sorbet.

I modified the recipe from a citrus sorbet in The Perfect Scoop:

2¼ cups water
¾ cup sugar
zest of 2 limes
¾ cup freshly squeezed lime juice
2 tbsp vodka
1 large bunch fresh basil

Combine the water, sugar, and zest in a pot. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Crunch up the basil bunch to break the leaves, then toss into the pot. Cover the pot and remove from heat, allowing it to cool over an hour or so.

Add the fresh-squeezed lime juice and vodka, and pass the syrup through a fine sieve. Reserve the syrup in the fridge covered, overnight. I also placed small shot glasses on a tray, and set them in the freezer overnight.

The next day, run the syrup through your ice cream maker. With the KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker that means that you chill the ice cream maker in the freezer for two days, then add the syrup to the ice cream maker while it is mixing at low speed.

Churn for 10-30 minutes, until it reaches a desired consistency. Scoop the sorbet into the frozen shot glasses, cover, and chill in the freezer covered for at least 12 hours before serving.

When you serve, treat this as a light palate cleanser between heavy, flavourful courses. The bright acidity of it will reset your guests' palates, readying them for more.

By Bbq Dude

A lazy Saturday calls for...

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

...a vodka martini.

Simplicity at its finest.

4 oz. vodka
lemon

Shake vodka over ice, strain into a glass. Rub the wax off the lemon (or if you're lucky to live in southern California and have access to fresh lemons, use that). Peel as along a strip as you're able to from the lemon. Drop into your chilled vodka.

Serve. Ahhhh...

By Bbq Dude

Lobster bisque

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

In May of 2011, we were trying to decide whether or not to move to New England, leaving San Diego. Do we give up fresh lemons and avocados for lobster and rhubarb? Well, lobster and rhubarb won. So it's strange, then, that we've only had lobster twice since arriving in the Boston-area. How do we solve that? For New Year's, our friends from the great state of Maine brought down three 1½ lb lobsters.

We gave those lobsters the royal treatment, and turned them into my favourite lobster dish - lobster bisque. This recipe is modified from Gourmet.

3 1½ pound live lobsters
2 medium onion
1 celery rib
2 carrot
2 vine-ripened tomato
1½ head garlic
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon leaves
3 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme leaves
2 bay leaf
12 black peppercorns
¾ cup brandy
½ cup dry Sherry
¼ cup Port
6 cups fish stock*
½ cup tomato paste
¾ cup heavy cream
2 ¼ tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons water

The little ones in the house (Bbq Jr. and his friend), were both intrigued by these crickets-of-the-sea. There was a tiny bit of concern for the lobsters' ultimate ends by Bbq Jr.'s friend, Lego quickly distracted her. Get your biggest pot full of water, and bring the water to a boil. I keep the lobsters on ice or in the fridge during this period. It makes them sleepy and less frisky when you toss them in the pot.

Drop the lobsters into the pot headfirst. Continue boiling them at a screaming boil for 5 minutes. Fish the lobsters out of the pot, and set in a bowl to cool. Save 3 cups of the cooking liquid, and discard the rest.

Now crack open the tail and the claws, using nut crackers or kitchen shears. This is messy work.

Remove all the meat you can salvage, in as large pieces as you're capable. Reserve tomalley (the disgusting green paste).

Chop the meat coarsely, cover and place in the fridge. Meanwhile, get the oil screaming hot in a pot over high heat. Toss in the lobster shells. Stir occasionally, cooking until shells darken slightly, and the smell gets incredible.

While cooking, coarsely chop the vegetables, and cut the garlic crosswise through the head. Add the vegetables, garlic, brandy, sherry and port to the bisque. Continue stirring while most of the liquid evaporates. Before it all evaporates, add the reserved lobster death juice, the fish stock and the tomalley. Lower temperature. Stir periodically while the mixture simmers for about one hour. Your house will now officially smell amazing.

Sieve the broth to remove all the chunks. Mix in the tomato paste, and continue to simmer until the broth has reduced to a little over one quart (4½ cups).

Add the cornstarch to the 3 tbsp of water to hydrate it. Stir the cornstarch mixture into the soup, and watch it thicken over a few minutes. Add back the lobster meat, stirring constantly. Now you have to be fast. You want the lobster meat to cook through, but not overcook (this takes not more than a minute or two). Serve immediately, piping hot. Be sure to be ready to catch anyone who swoons.

By Bbq Dude

Dates with goat cheese and bacon

2012-01-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Planning a large meal can be tricky. How do you ensure that 10 or more courses all come out at the same time. It's important that you have a few dishes that you can make entirely in advance, and a few dishes that are quick and easy to make and assemble. As part of our appetizer round for our New Year's extravaganza, we whipped out an old standby. Dates with goat cheese and bacon.

This is a simple dish that has only three simple ingredients. That makes it critical that you find the highest quality ingredients you can. Dates in particular, which can readily be found in high quality in southern California, can be found stale in stores in Boston. They should be juicy and sweet. If they're dry or bitter, get new ones.

dates
goat cheese (like Bucheron)
bacon (I prefer to use homemade)

Execution is simple. Pre-heat the broiler in your oven.

Slit the dates lengthwise, and pull the date pits out. Schmear as much goat cheese into the dates. Wrap the dates with half-strips of bacon, and pin them closed with a toothpick.

Place on a cookie sheet, and bake in the oven. It takes only a few minutes for the bacon to crisp up, the cheese to soften and the dates to soften.

Serve hot.

By Bbq Dude

Poblano chili

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to Texas in 1997, I had never experienced peppers beyond the green bell pepper and the canned, pickled jalapeño. Imagine my surprise to discover stores like Fiesta that have a pepper section. My Ph.D. supervisor's husband loves to bbq, and would have us over frequently for brisket. And every meal would include a side of roasted poblanos. I learned to love these rich and sweet peppers. Their flavour is so fabulous.

Imagine how I reacted, when I discovered a recipe for poblano chile in Meat. Yeah. Well, on a cold, winter's night. We had to make it.

8 poblano chiles
3 lb boneless chuck beef
salt
pepper
5 bsp olive oil
1 large onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
5 lb canned tomatoes
1 tbsp oregano
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 chipotle chile in adobo sauce
3 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
sour cream

Put the poblanos on a cookie sheet and place them under a screaming hot broiler. Broil until they're nearly black. Turn them over and cook the other side. Really, it's hard to overdo these. You want them to look like this:

It's the only way to get the skin off, and trust me, you don't want the skin moving on to the next step. Having poblano skin in your chili is about like finding bits of saran wrap floating around in your stew.

Place the chilis in a paper bag, and allow them to steam in the bag a few minutes. Then, peel off the skin, and chop and seed the peppers. Set aside.

Chop the beef into nice mouthsize pieces.

Season all over with salt and pepper. Heat the oil.

Sear the meat on all sides to give them that delicious caramelized outside. You want that to travel into the chili.

Remove the meat from the oil and set aside. In a chili pot, sauté the onions and garlic until clear. Add the browned meat, the tomatoes, spices and stir well. Simmer for 2 hours, or until the meat starts to fall apart.

Add the poblano pieces, stir in. Simmer another 30 minutes. Serve in bowls, with sour cream and cilantro to garnish.

Perfect meal on a cold winter night.

By Bbq Dude

Happy New Year.

2012-01-01T16:21:00.000-08:00

2011 was quite a year. New job, new city, new house, new state, new foods. We're further from some friends and closer to others. And our New Year's tradition of cooking with Dr. Ricky was broken, however we still managed to have a good feed. This year, I cooked 10 dishes, focusing on dishes that were relatively simple to prepare while cooking solo.

I started the evening with a riff on a margarita, the mandarin margarita, rimmed with a mixture of white and black salts to add contrast.

We quickly moved into an old classic, feta with honey and peppercorns. The salty, sweet, peppery goodness, contrasts with the crispness of the cracker, and is a nice, light way to start a large meal.

Our good friends in Maine brought fresh scallops and lobsters with them. We think scallops require very little work to make them delicious, so I seared them in sesame oil and served them with fishy sauce.

We followed this with my favourite soup of all time. Lobster bisque (I'll be writing this one up as a separate post soon). I love this stuff, it makes the house smell heavenly.

Next up, quick roasted dates, stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in bacon.

In the interest of being healthy, we had a vegetable course. Brussel sprouts with garlic, roasted after being drizzled with lard, and seasoned with parmesan. Yummy.

Before we moved into the grilled courses, we cleansed our palates with a lime-basil sorbet.

I grilled a cheese sandwich using no-knead bread, caramelized onions and a mixture of fontina, Danish blue and monterey jack cheeses. Grilled over hot charcoal, it picked up a hint of smoke flavour. Yum.

Finally we grilled pork belly (holy flaring fat fire, batman!), and served it with a miso-garlic dipping sauce. I barely got a shot of this before it was devoured.

And for dessert, broiled blackberries with sabayon.

Not a bad 5 hour feed. At midnight, our local Boston friends served up grasshopper ice cream cocktails, and because I was off the clock I forgot to take a picture. A rich and decadent end to a lard-fueled evening.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had as much fun as I did for your own New Year's Eves, and that 2012 brings you good things to eat.

By Bbq Dude

Portzelky

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. These days, we celebrate New Year's Eve with a multi-course extravaganza. But as a child, New Year's Day meant one thing in our house. The Mennonite dish portzelky (pronounced por-tzell-chè - roll the r).

This dish is all about deep-fried, doughy goodness. Yes, nothing says "I'm going to lose weight this year" quite like deep-fried raisiny goodness. But really, I had you at deep-fried, didn't I?

This recipe is one quarter of the recipe my mother gave me. This recipe gave enough portzelky for my wife, my son, my mum and I, and gave me another 10 portzelky I could bring in to work the next day. What can I say, Mennonites are used to cooking for 15 young farm workers who know how to eat.

1 ½ tsp yeast softened in 1 cup warm water and a little sugar
½ cups milk, scalded and cooled
¼ cup cream, scalded and cooled.
2 eggs, well-beaten
¹⁄₈ cup sugar
pinch of salt
2 tbsp butter
½ lb. raisins
2 ½ cup flour enough to make a stiff batter
enough vegetable oil to deep-fry

Wake up the yeast in the warm water/sugar mixture for five to ten minutes. Mix in the other liquids, and the well-beaten eggs. Mix the rest of the ingredients, except the raisins, until you have a thick batter.

Beat with a paddle mixer for five to seven minutes, you want to build up the gluten. Then add the raisins.

Cover and let rise for two hours at room temperature.

Heat up a pot of oil to 350°F.

Scoop up a large soup spoon's worth of dough into the hot oil. You don't want too big a chunk of dough, or you won't get a properly crispy exterior to go with the cooked tasty interior.

Remember two things: 1) How much oil you heat up determines how many portzelky you can cook at a time. You don't want the dough to cool down the oil, so make sure the dough chunks are floating separately. 2) Remember, if you're acting scared that you're goinng to burn yourself, you're going to drop the dough from a high height and you're going to burn yourself. Be bold and lower the dough into the hot oil from near the oil.

Turn the dough in the oil as it browns.

You want a nice golden brown, crispy exterior.

Remove when golden brown. Serve with a bit of golden syrup, or a dusting of icing sugar.

These crispy, yeast-dough fritters are a tasty way to bring in the New Year. Happy New Year.

Chocolate-lover's angel food cake

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays. We're well into holiday mode here in the Dude household. We just had our holiday party, complete with eggnog and dumplings.

A common dessert we serve this time of year, and a perennial favourite of Mrs. Dude is the chocolate-lover's angel food cake from Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible. So here it is. Mrs. Dude's favourite cake, a fluffy light mix leavened entirely by fluffy egg whites:

¼ cup + 1 tbsp unsweetened, Dutch-processed cocoa
¼ cup boiling water
2 tsp vanilla
1 ¾ cup sugar
1 cup sifted cake flour
¼ tsp salt
16 large egg whites
2 tsp cream of tartar

Pre-heat your oven to 350°F.

Mix the boiling water and cocoa. Whisk until smooth and paste-ish. Whisk in the vanilla and set aside.

Meanwhile, mix ¾ cup of sugar, flour and salt together.

Finally, in a large mixing bowl, mix the egg whites at low speed.

When they're unwhipped, they're all splashy and splorshy.

As they build body, turn up the speed on the mixer.

As they yield soft peaks, whisk in the cream of tartar. Soft peaks are ones that may drop a bit when you remove the beater. The cream of tartar drops the pH of the egg whites, stabilizing the peaks.

Gradually add the remaining sugar to the egg whites, while beating.

Continue beating until the egg whites have increased to a ridiculous volume, and created stiff peaks. Stiff peaks don't move even a tiny bit as you pull your beaters out of the eggs.

Remove about 1 cup of egg white, and mix well with the cocoa mixture.

Then, gently fold in the flour into the remaining egg whites, ¼ cup at a time. I like to use a flat whisk. The book recommends using a "balloon whisk", but even the mighty power of the Googles doesn't return a result for that. A flat whisk works well.

Now, mix the cocoa/egg white mixture into the batter, very gently.

Mrs. Dude likes a bit of swirl to the cake. The trick is to stop when you think it has the right amount of swirl.

Pour the batter into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan. Stab the batter with a knife a bunch of times to remove holes in the batter. Plus, you know, cake-stabbing.

Place pan in the oven. Bake for 40ish minutes, or until you stab it with a toothpick and the toothpick comes out clean (often as much as 50 minutes when I bake it).

Remove the ridiculously large cake from the oven, and invert in a way that it can be supported on the top of the tube, without crushing the cake.

I've constructed pretty ridiculous structures to get this to work. The one I show here is a ¼ cup measuring cup inverted on top of an upside-down KitchenAid bowl. I've seen wine bottles recommended, but they don't fit my tube pans. Good luck.

Cool the cake completely, then cut it out of the pan, running the knife around the outside of the pan, and the outside of the tube.

Invert onto a plate, gently shake, and... tada!

Serve with whipping cream and fruit.

Delicious.

By Bbq Dude

Catfish sandwiches

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dude recently had another lovely birthday. She is more ravishing today than the day that I met her.

On her birthday, she can pick whatever she wants to eat. Some years it is complicated. Some years it is simple.

On this year, our year of moving, packing, unpacking, job-changing, settling in to a new city and all the excitement that has entailed, Mrs. Dude chose simple. She chose catfish sandwiches, bless her heart, a recipe that I first cooked for her in the late 1990s.

3/4 cup mayonnaise
3 tablespoons sweet pickle relish
1 ½ tablespoons drained bottled capers, chopped fine
1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, or to taste
a pinch of cayenne
1 tablespoon bottled cocktail sauce, or to taste

Mix the ingredients above to make the sauce.

For the sandwich:

all-purpose flour seasoned with salt and pepper for dredging the fish
2 large eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne
cornmeal for dredging the fish
four ½-pound catfish fillets, halved crosswise
vegetable oil for deep-frying the fish
8 soft sandwich rolls, split
soft-leafed lettuce for the sandwiches
2 tomatoes, sliced thin
16 slices of lean bacon, cooked

Slice the tomatoes.

Fry the bacon until crispy. Set aside the bacon on paper towels until ready to serve.

Make several trays. One with flour. One with the beaten eggs. One with the cornmeal.

Dredge the catfish through the flour, until thoroughly coated. Then dredge through the eggs. Again, thoroughly coat. Finally dredge through the cornmeal. You'll have a nice, layered catfish fillet at this point.

Put 2 inches of oil in a deep pot. Heat the oil in the pot to 350°F.

Set the fish gently into the hot oil. The trick with screaming hot oil is to not be afraid of it. If you drop the fish in from a height, you'll splash and burn yourself. Set the fish gently into the oil and you won't splash and won't burn. Really.

Cook a few minutes (1-3) per side, until nicely browned.

Remove from the oil after you've cooked on both sides. Set on a paper towel to drain.

Assemble the sandwich with a nice bread, sauce, lettuce, tomato, catfish and bacon. Mmmmmmmmm.... bacon...

Served with:

Happy birthday, beautiful.
By Bbq Dude

How food stylists make gnarly food look edible

2011-11-24T19:04:00.000-08:00

By Bbq Dude

Thanksgiving preparation: Volume 4.

2011-11-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

This is a re-post. As you finish your preparations for your turkey feast, don't forget the gravy. This is one you can mostly do in advance.

Smoked turkey provides a bit of a challenge when it comes to making gravy. How do you catch and maintain quality drippings and schmutz when you have your turkey on a grill? Clearly not insurmountable, but a bit of a challenge nonetheless. Well, why not skip that step entirely. A stock-based gravy, then. I use a small modification to Ruhlman's version of gravy, which you can make in advance, and if you're organized, doesn't need to be some crazy last step.

4 tbsp flour
6 tbsp butter
1 large onion
kosher salt as needed
heart and gizzards
1 cup white wine
4 cups turkey stock

Melt 4 tbsp of butter over medium heat. Add the flour, a bit at a time, whisking constantly. Continue to stir over medium heat while this roux darkens to a nice golden brown.

Remove from heat, and set aside the roux.

Meanwhile, finely mince the onion, the heart and gizzards.

Melt the remaining butter in a pan over medium heat. Sauté the onion until translucent. Toss in the heart and gizzard bits. Turn up the heat to medium-high. Continue cooking, until you start to develop a nice layer of brown schmutz on the pan and on the outside of the meat, about 8 minutes.

Deglaze the pan with the wine. Stir to remove any delicious brown stuff on the bottom of the pan. When you've removed all the schmutz from the pan, add the turkey stock. Add back the roux, a bit at a time, until the sauce reaches the desired consistency.

Simmer over low heat for thirty minutes, to reduce slightly and to meld the flavours. Serve.

This gravy is easily as rich and flavourful as anything you make directly using drippings from the pan. And the convenience of making it a bit in advance, combined with the sheer ridiculous flavour, makes it a no-brainer to add to your turkey feast.

By Bbq Dude

Thanksgiving preparation: Volume 3.

2011-11-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is a re-post. This is the real deal, getting ready to serve the bird for Thanksgiving.

I'm not much for the "traditional" ~~Christmas~~Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey is far from my favourite bird. It's not as flavourful as goose, and certainly more dry than a duck. But I have a deal with my wife. If I make her traditional Christmas dinner, that is, turkey, cranberry sauce, salad, veggies and rhubarb pie, then I'm allowed to cook whatever I want for the rest of the holidays.

Well, what better way to heighten the flavour of a turkey, than to brine it and smoke it. I start the night before with a fresh, unaltered turkey. Three points to keep in mind before you start. First is that most turkeys have been extensively injected with salty chicken or turkey broth. While that makes the flavour stronger, it also makes them fairly salty. If you brine a pre-treated turkey, you'll create an inedible salt bomb. Secondly, don't forget if you're starting with a frozen turkey, it'll take a day per 5 pounds to thaw it in the fridge, and it needs to be thawed (or nearly thawed) when you place it in the brine. We started thawing our 10 pounder a day and a half prior to brining. Third, smoking takes longer than roasting a turkey. That said, for food safety sake, don't stuff your turkey, and don't smoke a bird bigger than 16 pounds. You'll need thirty minutes per pound, so anything bigger than that will be too long in the danger zone, and you don't want to serve your family a big poultry bag of Campylobacter. You really, really don't.

Okay, the brine:

1 ½ gallon water
1 ½ cup salt (2 ¼ cups Kosher or coarse salt - Kosher salt is flaked to make it less dense)
¾ cup sugar
½ cup dried tarragon
1 ½ tsp black pepper

Boil the water to get rid of any chlorine in it. Let cool to room temperature. Mix in the salt and sugar until they're dissolved. Add the tarragon and pepper. Place in a large container. (I reserve a bucket just for brining a turkey every year - it's carefully labeled, to ensure we don't use it to bleach the floor):

Place in a sink, so that when you add the turkey to it it doesn't overflow all over the kitchen counter. Not speaking from experience, or anything. Nope. Nope. Didn't happen to me *ever*. (At least, not since the first time).

Remove the turkey neck and the bag with the guts in it, (I save the neck and heart for making gravy). Submerge the turkey in the brine, and place back in the fridge. Leave in the brine for approximately twelve hours.

The next morning, remove the turkey from the brine, briefly rinse in the sink, and pat dry.

When dry, rub the bird down with olive oil. This will crisp the skin up nicely, as there's not enough fat in turkey skin to make it nice. Truss or not. I won't discuss trussing, because my trussing skills are pretty rough (see the photos). Fire up your smoker to a toasty 225°F. Place the bird breast side up in your smoker. We're using indirect heat here. I use wet hickory for smoke (hickory that's been soaking a few hours in water) and charcoal (not briquettes - it's easier to control the heat with lump charcoal) for heat.

Smoke for thirty minutes per pound. Half way through, open up the smoker and and rotate the bird so the other side of the bird is facing the heat source.

This photo is at about three quarters done:

Sadly, photos taken after this point aren't beautiful (it got dark, and I had to use a flash). But look at that turkey deliciousness!

Take the bird down when a meat thermometer shows 180°F at multiple checked points (don't start checking too early, you don't want to put too many holes in this bird!). Let the bird rest 10-15 minutes before carving. Carve and serve.

These days, this is the only way I enjoy turkey. The smoke adds a reallllly great flavour, and the brine makes the bird salty and moist. Roast turkey is truly bland and boring in comparison. The other bonus point? Having the bird on the smoker leaves the oven free to make pie or bread or any number of other things. It's like having a second oven for the holidays.

Delicious!

By Bbq Dude

Thanksgiving preparation: Volume 2.

2011-11-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

As we prepare for Thanksgiving, we can't forget the appetizers. This is a repost of a delightful appetizer to serve your guests before dining on turkey.

I'm in danger of seeming a miso fanatic. But it's a tasty source of umami flavours, and, well... Umami!

We recently had the great fortune to dine at Morimoto Napa, while visiting the lovely wineries of Napa Valley. It's a pity I forgot my camera in the car, because in addition to being one of the tastiest meals of my life, it was also one of the most beautiful. But none of the dishes was more magnificent than the bagna càuda. It was an umami bomb coated in vegetable oil. A little blob of brown paste at the bottom of a ceramic container, covered in a deep layer of olive oil, and warmed by a candle underneath, this stuff was like heaven. Rich, sweet, delicious. A hot dip for the perfect and crisp vegetables that were served. And when I asked the server what it was, he said it was a dip made of anchovy paste, miso and dashi. Well here's my attempt to re-create that delightful umami bomb.

Traditional bagna càuda is (according to the Wikipedias) Piedmontese for "hot sauce":

The dish, which is served and consumed in a manner similar to fondue, is made with garlic, anchovies, olive oil, butter, and in some parts of the region cream.

I used the bagna càuda recipe in Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking as the starting point, and modified it, more olive oil (though most of it not mixed in), plus red miso - I had no dashi on hand for this attempt:

3 large heads garlic
1 cup whole milk
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp anchovy paste
½ tsp red miso
salt and pepper
veggies

Crush and peel the cloves in 3 large heads of garlic.

Cover with water, and bring to a boil.

Discard the boiling water, and retain the garlic. Repeat twice. These steps extract some of the stronger, bitter flavours of the garlic, and mellows it a bit. It also extracts a tiny bit of the color, resulting in pure white gloves of garlic.

Now pour in the milk. Bring the milk to a boil, and boil for ten minutes, or until the garlic is tender. Discard all but 1 tbsp of the milk. Again, this extracts some of the fat soluble bitter compounds. This is going to be some very mellow garlic.

Purée the garlic in a food processor until smooth. Add the anchovy paste, the miso, the reserved milk, salt and pepper to taste and 2 tbsp of olive oil. Purée until smooth. Refrigerate until ready to serve. When ready to serve, place some of the paste in a small serving dish. Heat in the microwave (or over a candle, if you have such an apparatus). Heat the remaining olive oil on the stove until hot and cover the hot paste with hot olive oil. Serve immediately with fresh chopped vegetables.

This was really great. Very tasty, but missing something. It wasn't as dark in colour or rich in depth of flavour as what we had at Morimoto Napa. Still, we all ate a ton of this. When I asked Mrs. Dude, "If what we had at Morimoto was an A+, and and F is the bottom grade, where does this fit?" She thought for a moment, "B-". Okay, well clearly I have some work to do to get this up to par. But really, if on any scale that Morimoto ranks an A+, I get a B-, I suppose I can't be too sad.

I'll be working on this recipe some more. Stay tuned.

By Bbq Dude

Thanksgiving preparation: Volume 1.

2011-11-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is a repost. So, we're getting ready for Thanksgiving here in the Dude household. I cook the Thanksgiving meal, despite the fact that I'm not the American in the family. But here we go, what do we prepare first? My dad's cranberry sauce. You have to have this sauce with your turkey. Get it ready early, it keeps in the fridge for several weeks.

I was 25 before I ever tasted canned cranberry sauce. Jiggly. Bland. Gelatinous. Yuck. I can understand why cranberry sauce is an afterthought for most folks. In our home, it's a centerpiece.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were enormous food events for my family when I was a child. My mother would make turkey, gravy, corn, salad, broccoli, bubbat and pumpkin pie. My father would make cranberry sauce. Cranberry sauce was a religious thing for him. He would make enormous pots of the stuff, and wouldn't only serve it for holidays. Cranberry sauce was a year round thing for us. And rightly so! This cranberry sauce will change your life.

Dad's cranberry sauce started with the recipe in the old version of the Joy of Cooking, but was refined to be less sweet and more bright. I think you'll amaze your guests with this recipe:

Sort the cranberries. While they ship well, I find fresh cranberries often contain as much as one fifth rotten berries. Wash them and measure them.

Use the following ratio:

1 ²⁄₃ cup water
⁴⁄₅ cup sugar
4 cup cranberries (sorted and washed)

Mix the water and sugar in a heavy pot. Bring to a boil, until the sugar dissolves. Then add cranberries.

Lower to a simmer. Continue to simmer for 30 or so minutes, stirring periodically. Use the spoon to crush the cranberries. You don't want a homogeneous mixture, but a nice lumpy sauce, with mostly broken berries but a very few whole ones.

Zest some lemons and oranges to make:

2 tsp lemon zest
3 tsp orange zest

You'll want to add the zest last, as the longer you cook it, the more the zest flavour dulls.

Stir in the zest, and taste. Adjust the sugar and zest to taste. Let cool, and serve at room temperature or cold. (We generally make this ahead of time, but it's not much work and can easily be done while cooking a turkey).

Thanks for the recipe, Dad.

By Bbq Dude

Hake

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed a small fish deficit on Indirect Heat. Do we have something against the fishies here? Do we dislike the taste of fish flesh?

No. It's just that fish doesn't photograph well. Chicken looks terrible raw, but looks pretty tasty when cooked. Fish - looks flaky and pale raw. Looks pretty gnarly cooked.

We've discovered something interesting here in the Boston area. We could purchase hake in Baltimore. We can purchase hake here. But hake is completely absent from the grocers and fishmongers of southern California. We didn't see it even once.

Well, we're loving having it here again. And we've had it several times since we got out here. It's a quick and easy dinner to make.

Pre-heat your oven to 300°F. Heat 3 tbsp of butter in a pan over medium heat.

Lay your fillets of hake in the pan and season with salt liberally (and a wee dash of pepper).

Meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil over high heat.

Flip the hake after 6 minutes. Sear a few minutes on the other side, and transfer the pan to the oven.

While it's cooking in the oven, toss a few arugula leaves in the boiling water. Wilt the leaves in the hot water for 30 seconds.

Fish the arugula out of the water, and set on a plate, arranged as a holder for hake.

Remove the hake from the oven. Place on top of the bed of arugula and serve.

So, sorry for that shot. It doesn't look all that great, but holy moley was it tasty. HOLY MOLEY! Squeeze a wee bit o' lemon juice on there. And serve with a nice white wine. We had it with this:

Yum.

By Bbq Dude

Roast beef

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

Life in the Dude household is still very busy. We haven't had the time to dedicate to a smoked brisket, for example. It's all been about speed. Utility. But we have done our best to not sacrifice tastiness.

So how about a quick roast? Not only is roast beef delicious, but if you whip up a quick loaf of bread, with some horseradish, leftovers are starting to look pretty awesome...

Okay, so it's Saturday night, you've been unpacking all day. Pull a

top-round roast

out of the fridge an hour and a half before you cook to bring it up to room temperature. Pre-heat the oven to 300°F. Liberally salt and pepper the roast. Roast for one to one and a half hours, until the internal temperature measures 125°F with a meat thermometer (for medium-rare).

Pull out of the oven. Let rest 20 minutes.

Slice thinly. Serve with horseradish on the side.

Quick. Simple. And tasty.

By Bbq Dude

Livestrong

2011-11-10T19:23:00.000-08:00

By Bbq Dude

Coq au vin

2011-11-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

We have family visiting our new abode in the Boston metro area. And for dinner, we needed something delicious. Relatively low effort. And comfort foody. Foodish. Foodly. Right.

Braised chicken fits the bill. Coq au vin, to be precise. French for rooster in wine, this is a rich, tasty preparation of chicken. I prepare it here with chicken thighs, as I simply don't know where to get a rooster. It's a good way to break down an older rooster. Much like bbq, braising softens tough cuts of meat.

I used the recipe from James Peterson's Meat:

8 large chicken thighs
1 bottle dry red wine
1 onion, sliced
1 large carrot, peeled and sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
bouquet garni (thyme, rosemary and parsley)
¾ pound thick-cut bacon
salt
pepper
1 ¼ pounds mushrooms
2 10 oz packages pearl onions, blanched
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
red wine vinegar

I chose a Côtes du Rhône for the marinade.

I marinated the chicken for four hours in the wine, onions, carrots, garlic and bouquet garni. Here's the obligatory shot of raw chicken in marinade. Avert your eyes. You've been warned. Raw chicken does not photograph well.

Chop the bacon into large chunks. Fry over medium heat until crisp.

Fish out the bacon bits and set aside. Retrieve the chicken from the marinade and pat dry. Fry in the bacon grease over medium heat until nicely browned all over. A few minutes on each side.

Place the browned chicken back into the marinade.

Heat over medium heat until the liquid starts to boil. Cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer for three hours.

During the cooking, remove a quarter cup of broth. In a separate covered pot, steam the mushrooms in the broth for twelve minutes until mostly cooked. Remove the mushrooms and cool.

Return the remaining broth to the chicken pot.

Remove another quarter cup of broth. Steam the blanched pearl onions until softened, about fifteen minutes.

Reomve the onions and set aside. Return remaining broth to the chicken pot.

Continue to cook until done, approximately three hours, until chicken accepts a knife easily. Go ahead. Stab it. When done, remove the chicken from the broth, and cover to keep it hot. Pour the remaining broth through a fine sieve. Heat until it is reduced to about one and a half cups.

Meanwhile, mix the butter and flour into a fine paste.

This is called a beurre manié, and is for thickening sauces. Add to the broth, a bit at a time, stirring, until the broth reaches a nice saucy consistency. I used about ¾ of it to thicken the sauce. Continue cooking the sauce a few minutes to eliminate the raw flour flavour. Season with salt, pepper and red wine vinegar to taste.

Assemble the coq au vin. Place the mushrooms, bacon and onions on top of a piece of chicken. Drizzle liberally with sauce. And serve.

The chicken will be stained internally with a nice red colour. And the flavour is very comforting. Warm and juicy on a cold day, this is good stuff.

By Bbq Dude

Blanched pearl onions

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

Starting to learn our bearings around the city. Turns out, we're not far from all kinds of deliciosity, including the lovely H-mart in Burlington. Naturally, we made a run out there to get the ingredients to make homemade ramen.

We like to add various veggies and leftover meats to our ramen broth when we serve it. A delightful veggie is pearl onions, but to prepare more than a couple it can be a pain. Unless you blanche them.

Cut the root end of each onion. Toss into a pot of boiling water, and boil for 60 seconds, no more, no less.

Remove from the hot water, and cool. Squeeze the onion out of the peel, out the cut end. Be careful, or you'll end up firing the onion across the room.

Use to garnish a salad, or toss in some ramen broth. Delicioso.

By Bbq Dude

Wordless Wednesday: Home-baked bread

2011-11-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

By Bbq Dude

Granola

2011-10-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

Last week, Bbq Jr. asked us why we weren't spending enough time with him. What with towers of boxes in our home, we've been spending nearly all of our waken ghouls unpacking and organizing our home. Quick runs to the hardware store aside, it's been a busy week.

Thank goodness for Oma. My mum flew into town to visit, help unpack, and give our little guy some much needed attention and TLC. The house is now starting to look like a home again and less like a loading dock. And while Oma flies home today, she left us with a few homemade treats to enjoy. Like her home-baked granola:

1 lb butter
1 tbsp vanilla
2 cups honey
½ tsp salt
2 lb rolled oats
½ cups sesame seeds
1 cups chopped nuts
2 cups grape nuts
1 lb coconut
1 cups sunflower seeds

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F. Heat the butter and honey in a large pot over medium heat.

When it melts into a large, runny slurry, turn off the heat and add the vanilla. Mix well.

Mix in all of the dry ingredients. Oma likes to do it one

ingredient

at a time.

Spread a thin layer of granola on a cookie sheet.

Roast the granola for less than half an hour, until golden brown.

Remove from the oven, let cool. We place it in containers, open overnight (to dehydrate) and then cover them up the next morning.

This is one of my favourite things to have for breakfast (and it's the only granola that Mrs. Dude likes). And it tastes like my childhood.

Thanks for the granola, Mom.

By Bbq Dude

Apple pie

2011-10-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

Another day, another visit to Tougas' Farm. It's apple season in Massachusetts, and we're taking advantage of that, so off to Tougas Farm.

What fun, then, to arrive and discover that they are growing at least three dozen different varieties of apple. After reading their apple literature (yes, they have apple literature), we zoomed in on a few snacking apples (Fuji, among them) and three pie apples.

Idared:

Cameo:

And Spencer:

We picked enough for one pie each (6-8 apples of each variety) and wandered through the snacking apple sections, nibbling our way through. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon, really. But we had to know which was the superior pie apple. So we did an experiment. For science.

One pie each. Same recipe. Same crust. Baked at the same time for the same amount of time. Sampled by several members of the Dude family. Again, for science. We were brave. Somebody has to do it.

We used a family recipe. For one 8 ½ inch pie pan, use one crust, as described in Mrs Dude's rhubarb pie:

6-8 apples, depending on apple size
2 tbsp butter

Start peeling the apples.

Pre-heat oven to 375°F. Shave the apples into small fragments.

Mix:

½ cup sugar
2 tbsp flour
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
pinch salt

Place a layer of apples in the crust. Layer about one third of the sugar mix over the apples, add a second layer of apples, layer another third of sugar mix on top, then a final layer of apples and the rest of the sugar on top. Lay the butter on top.

Cover the apples with a final layer of pastry crust.

Pinch it closed, and poke some holes in the crust to let steam vent out.

We baked three pies like this. Fifteen minutes at 375°F, then another hour at 350°F.

Upon removal, it was clear the Idared pie had a more aromatic scent. It was like smelling perfume pie, really quite striking.

Upon cooling, we discovered that the Spencer pie had become silky smooth, almost too smooth for pie (more an applesauce texture). The Cameo pie was rich in flavor and perfect in texture. The Idared was probably the most interesting flavour, bright and unique, but perhaps too bitter for pie. The hands-down favourite of all was the Cameo pie. Though if we were to do it again, I'd want a pie that was 75% Cameo apple, 25% Idared.

But really, what an experiment. For science!

By Bbq Dude

Settling in

2011-10-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

So, about a year ago, we started making a too-stupid-to-cook-chicken every Friday night. It's our little Friday night ritual. I fire up the oven as soon as we walk in the door, I get the chicken ready, and 15 minutes later it's in the oven.

Well, we're finally settling in our home in Arlington. Our boxes arrived on Monday, and we unpacked sufficiently this week that we could find a frying pan and some nice salt. I present to you, our first Friday chicken in the new home.

Cooking (and blogging) will return to it's regular frequency shortly...

By Bbq Dude

Speed demon

2011-09-30T07:34:00.001-07:00

I cannot yet confirm this works, but... damn!

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

Edit to update: @drricky forwards this post that describes how this technique may work. More as soon as I have a chance to attempt this technique.
By Bbq Dude

Lavender rice pudding with blueberries

2011-09-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

Holy moley, with Labour Day come and gone, the summer's over. And I didn't smoke any meat. The combination of moving cross-country and changing jobs means that I've eaten a lot of PBJ sandwiches this summer, and done precious little cooking (and even less blogging). But we have taken a little of the local delicousness into our (sub-let) kitchen. Fresh-picked blueberries. Lobster.

And as we frantically pack our things to move to our fourth temporary home in Boston, we empty out the remaining frozen blueberries from our picking trip. I modified a rice pudding with blueberry sauce recipe. For the pudding:

2 ½ cups leftover cooked short-grain rice
½ tsp salt
2 cups milk milk
2 cups heavy cream
½ cup granulated sugar
1 tsp lemon zest
½ tsp vanilla extract
¾ tsp culinary lavender, in a tea strainer

Mix the rice with all the other ingredients except the vanilla. Bring to a simmer.

Simmer gently for 20-30 minutes. It'll still be pretty soupy. That's okay, it will solidify considerably when you chill it. If you overcook it, it'll solidify into cement. Stir in the vanilla and remove from heat.

Pour into individual servings, and chill in the fridge, at least 2 hours.

Shortly before serving, make the blueberry sauce:

2 cups frozen blueberries
½ cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon lemon zest
½ tsp cornstarch mixed with 1 tbsp cold water

Mix the blueberries, sugar and lemon zest. Heat over low heat until they simmer gently.

Add the corn starch slurry, and continue to stir over low heat until you get the desired level of thickness. Serve hot over the rice pudding.

Delicious.

By Bbq Dude

Hurricane

2011-08-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

It seems topical, what with hurricane Irene visiting us here in Boston, to have a post on the Hurricane. The cocktail that anyone who has spent more than an hour in New Orleans has had.

I had my first hurricane in 1997. I was an impoverished graduate student, and I paid $8 for this drink, and when I first sipped it I was sure I had been ripped off. I couldn't taste a whiff of alcohol in it. 30 minutes later, as I staggered down Bourbon Street, I felt differently.

For one hurricane:

1 shot light rum
1 shot dark rum
½ shot Galliano liqueur
2 shots orange juice
2 shots pineapple juice
1 shot passion fruit juice
¾ shot lime juice
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Mix and serve over ice. This isn't exactly the cocktail I had in New Orleans (I'll let you know when I find the recipe for that) but it was a pretty popular cocktail to survive a hurricane that was toothless (by the time it reached Boston).

Happy Hurricane Sunday.

By Bbq Dude

Lobster

2011-08-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

My dad was the anti-foodie. Almost every dish my mother ever served was a "B+". He would stroll away from the dinner table, not full. Food was merely fuel. The enjoyment at the dinner table was found in discussion and debate, not on the plate.

There was only one food I can remember that made him excited. In the 1950s, he spent time in the Cape Breton region of Nova Scotia. It is there that he learned to love lobster. When he brought me there in 1989, he introduced me to one of the most fabulous sources of protein on earth.

I have spent as much as $40/pound to have the pleasure to cook lobster in some of my other homes. Imagine my surprise, then, to drive through southern Maine and see signs advertising $4/lb lobster. It turns out that those signs are teasers, to get 3 x 1.5 lb lobsters cost us $28. That's right, something a little more than $6 per pound. We suffer.

My wife picked up three lobsters on a Wednesday at the Maine Lobster Outlet. So after work, I heated up two pots of water (one per lobster - we're in a sublet and don't have a big pot). Each pot had:

4 quarts water
8 tbsp salt

Alternatively, you can use fresh seawater if it's handy.

Bring to a rolling boil while you play with your lobsters.

When the water is boiling, pick up the lobsters. Some people like to make the lobsters sleepy by having them hang out in a fridge for a while. Not necessary. You just need to act swiftly, so the lobster doesn't have time to think about his impending doom. Open up the pot, pick up the lobster and hold him head (and claws) pointing down. Then swiftly move him over the pot and drop him in. If you hesitate, all is lost. The lobster will sense the heat, and recoil. You want to drop him in there head-first so that he is killed instantly and has no time to react. The benefit here is that this is more humane, and it's less disturbing and wiggly to try to get the lobster in the pot if you do it quickly.

Let the pot return to boiling. As soon as it does, start the clock (watch carefully, there's nothing more sad than an overcooked lobster). A 1 ½ lb lobster does well with about 11 minutes of full-on boil time. Really, don't overcook the lobster. Overcooked lobster is tough and bitter.

Remove the lobster from the boiling water at the end of your counter.

Let cool a few moments. Serve with a dish of melted butter. It's not a terrible idea to wear a raincoat while dismembering the lobster. There will be a mess, be forewarned. Dab the meat into the butter. And don't forget, the claws have the best meat. The knuckles, second best. And the tail has the most meat (though a bit tougher).

This is a simple way to make lobster, and in Massachusetts, it even makes sense on a Wednesday night. Ridiculous.

By Bbq Dude

Wordless Wednesday: Chicken wings

2011-08-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

By Bbq Dude

Blueberry pie

2011-08-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

Blueberry bonanza! We got a little out of hand the other day picking blueberries. Nine pounds of blueberries. So we had to find a home for a few of them.

Classic summer bbq fare is blueberry pie (or pah as they say in Texas).

In our home, pie is the domain of Mrs. Dude. She makes a pretty amazing crust. I copy this one from her delightful description of rhubarb pie:

2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
⅔ cup Crisco (Bbq Dude is always trying to make me use use leaf lard, but I just can’t do it. I like Crisco)
⅓ cup very cold water (mix 1 cup water with some ice cubes and let sit, pour off the 1/3 cup when you need it)

Add the salt to the flour and mix. Add the 2/3 cup Crisco and mash into the flour with your fingers until you’ve made something that looks like the photo. Don’t handle it too much, it should only take about 2 min. This will make mess out of rings on your fingers or bells on your toes, so put them someplace safe. Add the 1/3 cup very cold water and mix with fingers till it all starts sticking together. Don’t handle it too much. Have 4 sheets of wax paper or parchment paper ready to roll the pie crusts out in. Place about 1/4th of the dough in between 2 sheets of paper and “roll like mad” as my Mom says. Move the rolling pin around to generate an at least somewhat circular shape. You want the dough to be about 2-3mm (1/10th inch) thick.

For this pie, form an extra high ridge around the edge of the pastry. And chill the crust while you're making the filling. We take a slight twist on the classic blueberry pie as detailed on Epicurious:

¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons (or more) sugar
¼ cup cornstarch
7 cups fresh blueberries
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Mix the all the filling components in a heavy pot. Heat over medium heat, stirring gently frequently until the blueberries liquify (a tiny bit) and make a thick, hot, bubbling mess.

You want largely whole blueberries, so be gentle. No one wants blueberry-paste pie.

Chill the pie filling for an hour.

Meanwhile, make the topping:

⅔ cup unbleached all purpose flour
4 ounces marzipan or almond paste
¼ cup (1/2 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
½ tsp salt

Combine all the topping ingredients in a food processor, pulse only until combined into a wet, chunky mess.

Ok, chill that, too. Now you've got crust, filling and topping in the fridge. After everything is cold (about an hour), fire up the oven at 400°F. Now you're gonna need to move fast, because you don't want the filling to soak into the crust. As soon as the pie gets assembled, you want it heading straight into the oven. Only a fool would pause to take the semi-assembled pie outside into sufficient light to get a good picture...

Ahem.

If you must, be quick about it.

Crumble the topping over the blueberries.

Put the pie on a cookie sheet. Yeah, it's going to bubble and splatter, especially if you put in a few too many blueberries. Bake until the topping browns, around 70 minutes (but start checking it at 45 - your mileage may vary).

Remove from the oven, and if you can possibly stand it, let the pie cool so the filling can gel. Serve with ice cream.

It's pie, dammit. It's good.

By Bbq Dude

Tougas Farm

2011-08-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

We're still living like tourists in Somerville, Mass. We cook in someone else's kitchen, with their kitchen implements (and my knives). All of our stuff is still in storage in San Diego (and will be until we move into our new home on Sep 24^th). But living like tourists has an advantage. We're still very much in the "exploring Boston" mode.

In that vein, we decided to explore what delicious things could be grown locally. In southern California, citrus and avocados were the specialty. Here, it's blueberries.

We spent the morning at Tougas Family Farm, west of the city. They have a broad variety of things they grow, but this time of year, it's the blueberries that are available for picking.

Their business model is a clever one. Get people out. Charge them to walk in the field ($3/person). Then credit that towards however many pounds of blueberries you rake in.

Very soon, they'll be selling blackberries.

http://www.tougasfarm.com/

Apples.

Pumpkins.

U-pick locations have an inherent conflict built into them. Pickers want to only pick from the easiest to reach branches with the largest clusters of fruit. Farmers want the highest percentage of their berries to end up being sold, which means the high branches, low branches and less dense clusters end up getting picked. I watched with dismay as pickers spent two minutes per bush, blowing past me to pick only the easiest-to-reach bunches.

After an hour of picking over a few half-picked bushes, we went home with nine pounds of blueberries for about $30, less than half of what you'd pay in a grocery store.

There are muffins and pancakes in our future...

Tougas Family Farm
234 Ball St
Northborough, MA
Hours vary

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By Bbq Dude

Asparagus mimosa

2011-08-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

As we settle into Boston, I'm cooking a lot of old standbys. Not worth posting on them. But this book Plenty that I've gotten my hands on... It's providing tons of side-dishes. Yes, it's a vegetarian book. But as the author says, "I suggested serving a salad with some barbecued lamb chops."

Yes. This is an excellent side-dish book (and occasional main dish book). Tonight, I bring you a quick-and-easy way to dial up asparagus.

2 eggs
½ lb asparagus
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp capers, drained
2 tsp large crystal salt
black pepper

Place the eggs in boiling water. Boil 9 minutes exactly, then transfer to cold water to stop to cooking.

When cool, peel the eggs.

Chop off the white ends of the asparagus. Add the asparagus to boiling water. Boil for three minutes, or until tender.

Remove from the water. Dress the asparagus with the oil, capers, pepper and salt. Grate the eggs over the asparagus.

Serve.

I served this next to a lovely fried hake fillet. As soon as I figure out how to make fish beautiful, I'll show you a photo. Until then, you'll have to imagine the perfect white flesh of the hake. With butter. And a spot of lemon and salt. Delicious.

And with a sip or two of a nice Riesling.

Provided as a going-away present before we left California. Not a bad 30 minute meal.

By Bbq Dude

Bourdain v. Colbert

2011-08-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

Too bad this segment isn't longer. Bourdain talks ortolan, The Olive Garden and obesity.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Anthony Bourdain

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

Food porn - now on video

2011-08-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Found via Reddit (of course):

3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage... all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ....into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films.....

= a trip of a lifetime.

move, eat, learn

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Chili garlic sauce

2011-08-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

Before our move out east, we gave away an ungodly number of condiments. When you cook and eat and can't keep the contents of your fridge, it makes unloading those things an enormous task. We hope they all found happy homes and happy stomachs, but in the meantime, we have to rebuild some of our stores! (There will be bacon, oh, there will be bacon. My bacon stores are empty. But I digress...)

We start with a hot sauce. Simple and tasty. I modified this from a blog I follow, Viet World Kitchen.

6 oz hot chiles, stemmed and chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
½ tsp salt
1 ½ tbsp sugar
1 ½ tbsp white wine vinegar

I used a mixture of chiles raided from a local grocer.

Remove the stems from the chiles. Toss in a food processor with the garlic, salt, sugar and vinegar.

Pulse to make a nice, coarse goop.

Andrea at Viet World Kitchen suggests tasting at this point, and adjusting the seasoning. One tiny tidbit of this lovely mess burned my mouth. Three servings of yogurt, a glass of water and an entire bottle of beer didn't make me feel better. I'm not sure I had the seasonings right.

Simmer on the stove for five to ten minutes. Add water as necessary to maintain consistency.

Remove from heat and save as a condiment to add a nice touch of heat to your dishes. But be careful. This is hot!

By Bbq Dude

Shakshuka

2011-08-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

So, as it happens, we've moved about as far as you can between two major cities in the U.S. San Diego to Boston. Southern Cali to New England. Fish tacos to lobster. So, I suppose even Indirect Heat has to make a few changes.

Well, I'm semi-bbq-less for the summer (I have access to a hibachi, but I've been too lazy to get charcoal and use it in our limited-space-sublet thus far). So I'm exploring my non-bbq options for a few days. And while I'm doing that, why not explore my meatless options. Yes. It's true. I'm cooking vegetarian tonight.

I found this book Plenty in the Harvard COOP (incidentally, the best food section of any bookstore ever - just sayin'). It's a vegetarian book. But it's my kind of vegetarian book. In the intro it says:

The New Vegetarian (the author's column) ... made some Guardian readers extremely unhappy to learn that the new vegetarian wasn't a vegetarian at all. A couple of angry letters to the editor stick in my mind and an incident where I suggested serving a salad with some barbecued lamb chops.

A vegetarian cookbook that suggests serving vegetarian fare next to lamb chops? This is my veggie book. Yes, yes it is. This is a book with bold flavours and fun dishes. I've already cooked several dishes out of this book, and will blog about them soon. This is a book of deliciousness.

Tonight, we serve Shakshuka. A delicious Tunisian mix of tomatoes, herbs and eggs. This one seems like it's going off the rails right up until serving time, when it comes together into a delicious mess of eggs and veggies. Yum.

We start with:

¼ tsp cumin seeds
¹⁄₃ cup olive oil
1 large onion, sliced into rings
1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
1 yellow bell pepper, cut into strips
2 tsp muscovado sugar
1 bay leaf
3 thyme sprigs, leaves picked and chopped
1 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped cilantro, plus extra for garnish
3 large ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped (or 6-7 small tomatoes)
¹⁄₈ tsp saffron threads
large pinch cayenne
salt and pepper to taste
water
4 eggs

Toast the cumin seeds for 2 minutes in a dry pan over high heat until fragrant. You don't want them bitter, so take care not to over-toast. Pour in the oil and toss in the onion.

Cook the onion 3-5 minutes. Add the peppers, thyme, parsley and cilantro and sugar. Cook over high heat for 5-10 minutes, or until the peppers and onions start to take on some colour. The browned onions and peppers will flavour this dish.

Turn down the heat to low. Toss in the cayenne, saffron, salt and pepper.

Toss in the coarsely chopped tomatoes and the bay leaf.

Simmer over low heat for 15 minutes. Add water to keep the consistency about a thick pasta-sauce consistency. Taste and adjust the seasoning as appropriate (I added a lot of salt to this to get it right).

Remove the bay leaf, and transfer to a shallow pan over low heat. Make 4 wells in the sauce and put one egg in each well. Cover, and continue to cook until the eggs set (about 8 minutes for me).

Garnish with chopped cilantro, and serve with a bright white wine..

This was surprisingly good. I've adjusted it to dial back the saffron a bit, but otherwise this is a fantastic dish. Bright and flavourful. Rich from the soft egg yolks. And messy. Really, really messy to serve.

We'll be serving this again.

By Bbq Dude

Chocolate panna cotta with vanilla rice pudding

2011-07-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Scientists move around. A lot. You do your graduate training in one city. Your post-doc in another. And finally you look for work, in a third city. Or fourth. Or fifth. And with super-specialized skills, at any one time there might be half a dozen jobs in the world that you're qualified for. Now, marry a scientist, and you've got a problem squared. You both have to find jobs, in super-specialized fields.

Many scientists spend their early careers living in different cities from their spouse. We didn't do that. We picked the three cities where we thought we both had a reasonable chance of getting jobs. San Diego. San Francisco. And Boston.

Naturally, many of our friends and colleagues have done the same. So when we arrived in Boston, despite the fact we've never lived here, we had friends here. And friends of friends here. So we've had more than a few invitations for dinner. Including an invite to a friend of a friend who had a pool (yay!). And celiac disease (doh!). We offered to bring dessert. Gluten-free dessert. Courtesy of Tartelette. We had a lovely time having dinner with our new friends, and look forward to having more good times with them.

We brought chocolate panna cotta with vanilla rice pudding. Slightly modified:

For the rice pudding:
1 cup rice (really the kind you like best)
1 ½ cups (315ml) whole milk (I used raw)
½ vanilla bean, split open
½ cup (60ml) heavy cream
¼ cup (50gr) sugar
Pinch of salt

Rinse the rice under cold water for a minute or two to remove the excess starch. Mix the milk, cream and rice in a heavy pot, and heat over medium until it starts to simmer.

Continue simmering, stirring occasionally, until the rice softens. If required, add water to the mix. You don't want this to turn into a cement mixture, you want a nice, soft consistency.

In the last minutes, chop the vanilla bean lengthwise.

Scrape the seeds into the rice pudding. Add salt, and remove from heat.

Pour the rice puddings into the bottoms of a few ramekins. Or if you're staying in a furnished sublet in Somerville, MA, add them to the bottoms of 6-8 coffee cups.

Now make the panna cotta.

1 tablespoon powdered gelatin (2 sheets gelatin)
¼ cup water
1 cup whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
¹⁄₃ cup honey
8 oz bittersweet chocolate
½ cup goat yogurt

Cocoa nibs, dusting of cocoa powder and fresh whipped cream (optional garnish)

Soak the gelatin sheets in ice water, or rehydrate the powdered gelatin in the ¼ cup water. I really prefer sheet gelatin. Even though it's slightly harder to get, it's really more reproducible and easier to use. You'll never screw up sheet gelatin. You might screw up with powdered. It's a crutch I approve of.

Okay. So while they're soaking, mix the milk, cream and honey.

Heat over medium heat until it starts to simmer. Squeeze the sheet gelatin to get out the excess water, then add to the milk mixture. (Alternatively, if you're using gelatin powder, pour in the hydrated mess). Stir until the gelatin dissolves.

Chop the chocolate. Or use chocolate bits. I like the bits, but I also chop. Another crutch.

Add the chocolate to the warm milk, a bit and a time. Stir until melted and mixed. Stir in the yogurt until blended.

Pour on top of the rice pudding. Let cool a bit on the counter, then wrap and place in the fridge, a good four hours is required to solidify these guys. (If it's not fully solid, tell your guests it's chocolate pudding on rice pudding - they'll never know).

Whip up some whipping cream as a topping.

Top with whipping cream, sprinkle on some cocoa. Serve. The kids hated it. But the adults ate the kids' leftovers.

A hit. A palpable hit.

By Bbq Dude

Raspberry-streusel bars

2011-07-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

We made it! Indirect Heat has crossed the country! I've started work (a month ago now) and the family has arrived (going on 7 days now) and we are on the hunt for animal parts. We are now getting our bearings in sunny Somerville, Massachusetts. And it is HOT. We're staying in a cute little sublet, and the main renters have left us a completely tricked out kitchen, complete with 1950s-era cooking technology. I think we're going to have some fun here this summer, while we find a real home, a school for Bbq Jr, a job for Mrs. Dude, and generally get settled in. No problem.

In the meantime, to calm us down (yes, I was hyperventilating there briefly) we return to comfort food. Food from our past that we associate with happy memories. Raspberry bars. This is a recipe that comes to us from a great friend from our days in Baltimore (hi, Cara!). I confess, I sometimes begged for these bars in a manner that was quite undignified. And in a time of stress, nothing is as calming as familiarity.

2½ C unbleached all-purpose flour
⅔ C granulated sugar
½ tsp salt
16 tbsp (2 sticks) plus 2 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into ½ inch pieces and softened to room temperature
¼ C packed brown sugar
½ C old-fashioned rolled oats
½ C pecans, chopped fine
¾ C raspberry preserves
¾ C fresh raspberries
1 tbsp juice from 1 lemon

Line a 9" x 16" pan with foil, and grease up the foil with butter. Preheat your oven to 375°F. If it's 95°F outside, wait until the last minute to preheat the oven. Really.

Chop the warmed butter into 1 tbsp chunks.

One tablespoon at a time, mix 2 sticks of butter with the flour, sugar and salt. I used the old school egg beater, and while it was a teeny bit messy, it was pretty fun to work with.

Mix the buttered up flour goop until it is moist all over. Save 1¼ cups of the moist goop. With the remaining goop, press it into the greased pan until it makes a nice even layer of goop.

Bake this in the oven 15 to 18 minutes, or until the edges just start to brown. While it's baking, go on to the next step.

Mix the raspberry preserves, the raspberries and the lemon juice.

Mix just enough to mash the raspberries a tiny bit, but not so much so it's a homegenous goo. You want some chunk to this.

Meanwhile, mix the 1¼ cups of crust with the rolled oats, brown sugar and finely chopped pecans.

Add the remaining 2 tbsp butter, and combine into a lovely streusel.

When the crust is cooked, remove from the oven and immediately smear on the raspberry goop in an even(ish) layer. It can't be totally even, as you left big raspberry chunks in it. Be gentle, the crust can be torn. When done, sprinkle on a layer of the oat streusel you created.

Bake in the oven 20-25 minutes, or until the raspberry goop is bubbling up through the streusel, and the streusel has taken on a nice golden brown consistency. To speed things along, I fired up the broiler for the last 3 minutes to add colour to the streusel.

Remove from the oven. Let cool 2 hours. Remove the foil from the pan, and slice into individual servings.

Serve, by itself or with ice cream. AAAAaaaaaa...

By Bbq Dude

A lazy crazy Saturday

2011-06-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

... calls for a nice glass of port.

As I entered my last frenzied 24 hours in San Diego, we sipped on a nice mellowed 2005 Mayo Zinfandel port. This was our last bottle of this port, and while I think we may have enjoyed it more last year, it was still a nice evening sipping drink.

We bought our bottles of this port on a visit to Napa, when Bbq Jr. was just 8 months old. Fitting that we should finish the last bottle just before departing California.

By Bbq Dude

Blind Lady Ale House

2011-06-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

We're down to our last few days in San Diego. And as such, we're doing our last visits to our favourite San Diego spots. Zumbar. Pizzeria Bruno. And Blind Lady Ale House.

Blind Lady is named after an old window blind store (run by a lady, apparently) that occupied the space where they are currently located. They serve beer. And pizza.

The beer is excellent and varied. Like Bear republic apex double IPA.

Or the lovely raspberry dessert beer St. Louis Framboise.

They used to get their hands on Knight Salumi products for appetizers. These days, we satisfy ourselves with marinated olives.

We always went to Blind Lady for the toppings. Their thin-crust is not my favourite, but the toppings... top-notch toppings. Cheese pizzas seldom get me excited, as commodity cheeses are generally not delicious. But the 4-cheese pizza at Blind Lady includes a delicious blue, and 3 other mystery cheeses that are, well, tasty.

But the pièce de resistance is the pizza that taught me to put egg on pizza. Bacon and egg pizza. Ridiculous. Soft yolk. Tasty bacon. And green bits that are tasty. Yum.

If you're in San Diego, hit Blind Lady Ale House as soon as you possibly can. Best pizza in town.

Farewell, Blind Lady.

Blind Lady Ale House
3416 Adams Avenue
San Diego, CA 92116
(619) 255-2491
T-F 5 p.m. - 12 a.m.
S-S 11:30 a.m. - 12 a.m.

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By Bbq Dude

Indirect Heat is moving to Massachusetts

2011-05-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

As Indirect Heat passes the two-year old mark, a recent opportunity is going to put Indirect Heat on the road. I've been offered a job at a synthetic biology startup in Boston, so off we go.

We leave behind a town that has an incredible array of ethnic grocers and 12 months-a-year smoking weather. We've roasted a whole pig, developed a tradition of 13-course New Year's dinners, consumed many, many quarts of homemade ice cream with our friends at work and acquainted ourselves with some pretty fabulous California wines.

We've made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun here over the last three years, both online and off. I confess, our departure is bittersweet. This is an incredible opportunity, and we have several dear friends in Boston. But leaving behind our California friends (and my baby lemon tree) was a hard choice.

And while there may be fewer posts the next few weeks while we move our household cross-country, stay tuned. I foresee lobster and clams in our future.

Thanks, San Diego! And see you soon, Boston!

By Bbq Dude

Wordless Wednesday: Let's invert some limes

2011-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

By Bbq Dude

Two years of Indirect Heat

2011-05-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, after I posted a few photos of bacon on my facebook page, Mrs. Dude suggested that I start a blog. On a whim, I did. And two years later, I've shared 250+ posts with friends, family and roughly 20,000 others who've stopped by.

The blog has inspired me to move past my regular rotation of brisket and ribs, and explore new cuts and new styles of cooking.

Meat.

Veggies.

Candied bacon seahorses.

And dessert out.

New ways to do old favourites.

And old ways to do new favourites.

Thanks for stopping by.

Here's to another year of good eating.

By Bbq Dude

Ginger-garlic half chicken

2011-05-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

A new grilling season is upon us, and it's about time. This time of year, I fire up my grill three to four times a week. Come home, fire up the grill, crack a beer and make dinner. Bbq Jr. playing in the backyard, Mrs. Dude lounging on the patio, it doesn't get any better than that. Particularly if you can find time to grill on a weekday.

Japanese grilling is particularly well-suited for a weeknight. The marinades are simple, the grilling is short and the flavours are really clean. Today, I feature a recipe from The Japanese Grill. It has the added benefit of being an excellent stress release. You get to rend a chicken. Yes.

We start with:

½ cup soy sauce
2 tbsp sake
2 tbsp grated fresh ginger
4 gloves grated garlic
2 tsp tobanjan
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1 whole chicken

The only hard-to-find ingredient in here is tobanjan.

This is a Japanese sauce preparation made with Chinese hot peppers. Think Tabasco, thicker and sweeter. Really tasty, though. Available at your local Japanese grocer, (I got it at Nijiya in San Diego).

Chop and peel the ginger. Grate the fresh ginger, into a smelly, disgusting pudding of gingerness. Yum.

Mix well with everything except the chicken.

Meanwhile, get out your cleaver, and rend the chicken down the length of the chicken. I found this tremendously satisfying, and very quickly accomplished.

Slather the marinade into every crevice and every surface of the chicken. This may take a few moments, but you're only marinating long enough to get the grill hot, so don't skimp on the slathering step.

Fire up the grill. You want medium hot, not too hot. You don't want to start a chicken-fat-fire, so really. Medium hot. Lay the chicken over the grill skin-side down.

Leave for three-ish minutes.

Flip.

Now you'll want to cook 7 minutes, flip, 7 minutes, flip, 7 minutes, flip... you get the point. For a total of about 35 minutes. Avoid flareups if you can. Baste frequently with the marinade (don't baste the last 7 minutes to avoid contaminating the chicken). Close the grill whenever you can to build up the extra heat, but be aware of flareups. You don't want flames putting soot on your beautiful chicken.

Meanwhile, enjoy your beer. And your family.

Remove from the grill. Let rest for five minutes. Cut up and serve.

This will produce the most sweet, moist chicken you've ever had. Beautiful. The marinade is slightly sweet and spicy (Bbq Jr. declared it "Spicy. But not too spicy."). And something you can get on the table in just over an hour. Serve with some rice and a salad, and you have a meal. Delicious.

By Bbq Dude

Happy Mother's Day

2011-05-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

We celebrated with a batch of Québécois breakfast crêpes and some family time. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there.

By Bbq Dude

Lemon poppy-seed cake

2011-04-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

What's a quick and easy Easter dessert? Cake. Lemon cake.

So, lemon poppy-seed cake, adapted from Rose's Heavenly Cakes:

2 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
¾ cup plus 1 tbsp sour cream
1 ¾tsp vanilla extract
2 ½ cups cake flour
1 ¼ cups superfine sugar
1 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
5 tsp lemon zest
¹⁄₃ cup poppy seeds
14 tbsp unsalted butter at room temperature
floured baking spray

Pre-heat your oven at 325°F. Meanwhile, prepare your fluted tube pan. Spray the floured baking spray over every surface in the pan. You can't overkill here. Trust me, you don't want to be stingy on this, or you'll destroy the cake, and spend an hour cleaning the pan.

Okay, prep the wet ingredients. Whisk together the eggs and egg yolks until light and fluffy. Mix in ¼ cup of sour cream and vanilla to make a delightful egg emulsion.

Zest the lemon.

Mix the dry ingredients; the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest. When well mixed, and the poppy seeds and gently mix.

Add the butter and remaining sour cream, and mix with an electric mixer until well combined and moistened.

Now, slowly add the egg mixture, while mixing. After everything is added, mix for another 30ish seconds. Scrape the batter into the floured pan.

Place gently into the oven, bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. While it's baking, make the syrup.

½ cup plus 1 tbsp sugar
6 tbsp fresh-squeezed, sieved lemon juice

I managed to get all the zest and juice I needed out of 2 lemons. Sieve the juice before measuring.

Mix the sugar and lemon juice in a microwave-safe measuring cup.

Microwave, for 30 seconds at a time, followed by mixing the sugar/lemon juice mixture. Stop when you've dissolved the sugar. You're aiming to create a lemon syrup.

Remove the cake from the oven when a cake tester comes out clean.

Let sit a moment, then stab it with a chopstick over and over. Gently unleash your rage on this cake. Then, brush one third to one half of the cooled lemon syrup over the cake.

Flip the cake pan over onto a serving plate. Brush on the remainder of the lemon syrup.

Serve.

Don't be surprised when guests go for a third serving. This cake will serve 6ish adults.

By Bbq Dude

Grilled rabbit with basil oil

2011-04-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

In 1994, I was in college, living in the dorm of the Faculté St. Jean at the University of Alberta. It was a fantastic place to live, a converted 150-year old monastery. Two kitchens shared by 100 or so students.

I decided (with a friend of mine) that a fun way to spend Easter would be to have rabbit. Cooking the Easter Bunny, so-to-speak. This has turned into a hilarious tradition. Something the Dude household does almost every year (I confess, in the last 15 years, I've missed one or two). Most years, though, we have Easter bunny for dinner. Like last year, when we served Chocolate Easter bunny.

This year I wanted to serve something that was more true to the ingredient. More fresh. And something that showed off the flavour of the rabbit more than I had in previous years.

I chose a grilled rabbit recipe, adapted from this one:

4 legs of rabbit, top bone of the thigh removed (ask your butcher to do this)
2 tbsp olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 very ripe sweet heirloom tomatoes, sliced into rounds
1 small bunch basil

It's hard enough to find rabbit, much less to find rabbit legs. So, purchase your rabbits.

Remove the rabbit legs. Apply a cleaver to the joint at the division between the spine and the leg. Save the remaining rabbit carcass for other stuff (posts coming soon).

Warm the rabbit legs to room temperature, about one hour.

Meanwhile, prep the sauce:

3 large bunches of basil
1 clove of garlic, peeled
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

Put the basil leaves into your food processor.

Add the garlic and sea salt. Grind more.

Drizzle in the oil, while blending. I like the basil oil as a thick gamish (close to a pesto). If you prefer it runnier, add more oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Now, back to the rabbit.

Heat up a grill. Hot. Really, really hot. Really hot. Can you make it hotter? No? Now it's nearly hot enough. Make it hotter.

Okay.

Season your warmed rabbit legs with a coarse salt and pepper. Put those seasoned legs on the hot, hot grill.

Cook five minutes on that side, until good and brown on one side. Flip.

Cook another eight minutes, until done. While finishing the rabbit, slice the tomatoes and put two slices on each plate. Slather on some basil oil and salt.

Rest the rabbit legs a couple minutes, then place on top of the tomatoes. Add a little more basil oil on top and a few basil leaves and serve.

You know how you sometimes hear people saying that they want the preparation of a food to be "true to the ingredient"? This is one of those preparations. It's simple, you can taste the uniqueness of the rabbit meat, but it has some tasty additions. Eat this today. It's delicious.

Serve with:

Enjoy.

By Bbq Dude

Kids' cooking show

2011-04-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

Why isn't Food Network like this? Oh. Oh. Oh. Nevermind.

Wordless Wednesday: Steak

2011-04-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

By Bbq Dude

Sticky buns

2011-04-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Work has been nutty lately. I've got deadlines that would have made me faint only a couple years ago. I'm making genetic constructs in twelve days that would normally take two months. But I have a lot of help, including an amazing group of technicians that are spending their weekends busting their butts. How do you thank someone for spending their weekend in the lab?

With sticky buns, that's how. These sticky buns had research associates damn near weeping with happiness. Truly, I've never seen people react better to *anything* I've ever cooked. These come from the infamous Flour. You'll love 'em. Make a batch. Now.

It's based off of a brioche dough. The buttery-delicious-cakeish bread. For the dough:

2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more if needed
2 ¼ cups bread flour
1 ½ packages active dry yeast or 1-ounce (28 grams) fresh cake yeast
¹⁄₃ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon kosher salt
½ cup cold water
5 eggs
1 ³⁄₈ cups softened, unsalted butter

Mix the flours, yeast, sugar, salt and water until wet. Add the eggs while mixing, one at a time.

Beat on low power for three to four minutes, until well-combined. Now add the butter, one small chunk at a time while beating. You want the butter to mix in well, so make sure it's good and soft before you use it.

Continue mixing the dough on low for ten minutes, until the dough is sticky and soft. You want it to pull away from the dough hook when you push your finger into it.

Put the dough into a bowl, and place in the fridge for at least six hours. This is partly to firm up the butter. Partly to get the yeast to ferment in the fridge, adding delicious flavours. Partly to allow the flour to hydrate. All of this is called "proofing". Tasty.

Meanwhile, make the goo:

1 ½ cup unsalted butter
3 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
²⁄₃ cup honey
²⁄₃ cup heavy cream
²⁄₃ cup water
½ tsp kosher salt

Melt the butter and the brown sugar over medium heat.

Continue stirring until melted and all combined.

Now add the cream, water, honey and salt.

Mix well. Set in the fridge to cool overnight with the proofing dough.

The next day, cut the dough into two halves. Roll out each chunk of dough into two 12" by 16" pieces.

Prepare the bun filling:

½ cup light brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 cup pecan halves, toasted and chopped

Toast the pecans in the oven. 400°F for about 10 minutes, until they start to give off a delicious smell. Let cool and chop them into small chunks. Mix the brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon and half of the pecans. Sprinkle this mix over the rolled out dough.

Meanwhile, pour the chilled goo into two 9"x13" baking pans (I use Pyrex). Sprinkle in the remaining pecans, half in each pan.

Roll both of the flattened-out doughs up into tight cylinders. Chop each cylinder into 8 pieces.

Plant 8 buns into each pan, equally spaced out.

Cover with a cloth towel, and allow to rise in a warm place for two hours, until doubled in volume.

Bake for 30-45 minutes at 350°F, until golden-brown and delicious-looking.

Let cool a few minutes. Scoop out the buns, flip over and serve with a bit of goop drizzled over top.

The reactions to this sticky buns were positively ecstatic. Sweet, delicious and high-calorie happiness. Fabulous.

By Bbq Dude

How to drink tea, English-style

2011-04-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

The Colbert Report

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Weeknight lamb kebabs

2011-04-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

So it turns out that if you walk into your local butcher, and ask for 2 lbs of boneless leg of lamb, they say, "Sorry, the smallest cut of leg of lamb that we sell is half a leg. That's 4 lb." So after making lamb steaks, we still had some lamb left over. So we have some lamb to eat. On a weeknight.

What's a quick way to prepare some lamb? How about this for 5 minutes of Tuesday morning prep cooking?

1 lb boneless leg of lamb
½ cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup water
2 tbsp chopped rosemary
2 tbsp chopped thyme
1 tbsp red pepper flakes
1 tsp cayenne
olive oil

Trim the lamb of extraneous fat and gristle. Chop the lamb into nice bite-size chunks.

Combine the lemon juice, sugar, water, rosemary and thyme (conveniently removed from the garden moments before), red pepper flakes and cayenne in a ziploc bag. Toss in the lamb chunks. Marinate in the fridge, and go to work.

When you get home, fire up the grill. Soak some wood skewers in water while the grill heats up. Meanwhile, make a salad. Steam some rice. Whatever.

Shortly before the grill is ready, skewer the lamb, leaving space between each chunk.

Don't do that wacky thing from the 1980s, where people skewered chunks of bell peppers in between chunks of meat. That's retarded. (Confession, I used to do this. Alot.) The bell pepper/onion/mushroom/whatever will cook faster than the meat. Only skewer similar stuff on a skewer together so it will all cook at the same speed.

Brush the skewered lamb with olive oil. Cook over crazy high heat. Turn every couple of minutes.

Lamb is best when cooked medium-rare, so don't over-cook it. Just a couple minutes per side. This is a fast, weeknight dinner.

Remove from the heat. And serve immediately (such small chunks don't need to rest).

You'll know it was properly cooked if it's still pink inside.

Serve with a lovely Mafalda (from Fratelli Perata if you can).

How's that for a weeknight dinner. Not. Bad. At all.

By Bbq Dude

Lamb steak

2011-04-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

Lamb.

Fresh, delicious, lamb. For the longest time, I thought I didn't like lamb. When it is improperly seasoned, too old, or overcooked, lamb is truly hideous. It's pretty hard to ruin beef. Beef can be bland or dry, but it really can't taste hideous.

Here's a quick, weekend lamb dish that requires very little preparation, but is quite tasty. I modify it from Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way.

2 lbs butterflied leg of lamb
coarse salt and fresh ground pepper
½ cup dijon mustard
½ cup packed fresh oregano leaves, finely chopped
1 tbsp chopped lemon confit
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Cut the butterflied lamb into 1" thick chunks that make sense as serving sizes. Peel off extra fat and gristle. Cover with a sheet of plastic wrap, and beat those chunks of lamb senseless with a meat tenderizer. It's quite therapeutic to watch the muscle spread and thin out as you whack it. Keep whacking until it's around ½" thick.

Chop the oregano.

Love the smell of that fresh oregano.

Chop the lemon confit.

Liberally season the lamb with salt and pepper. Slather both sides with mustard. Dust on the oregano and confit.

Meanwhile, get your grill screaming hot. Really, really hot. As hot as you possibly can.

Place a cast-iron pan over your screaming hot coals for a few minutes. Add the oil to the pan, and sear the lamb three-ish minutes.

Flip and sear the other side three minutes.

Remove from heat, and allow five minutes to rest. Serve.

By Bbq Dude

Yuzu mochi

2011-03-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

It seems Asian food has a far broader range of interesting texture than European or American food. Mochi has a slightly chewy texture, and while nearly flavourless, it takes on other flavours nicely. It's nice to gnaw on, and when sweetened and flavoured is very pleasant.

We first discovered mochi nearly ten years ago at Nobu in New York. It was delicately wrapped around little balls of ice cream. The chewy texture of the sweet rice mochi wrapped around a perfect globe of ice cream was sensational.

I purchased my microwave to be able to make mochi at home (several years ago). I present to you, my first success (in a long, long string of failures) to bring mochi-making into the Dude home. Modified from The Sweet Spot:

2 tsp oil
1 cup mochi flour
¾ cup sugar
1 tbsp yuzu juice
²⁄₃ cup water
3 tbsp potato starch
1 tbsp confectioners' sugar
¹⁄₈ tsp salt
lemon zest

Mochi flour (also called sweet rice flour and Mochiko) is available in most Asian markets. I've only ever seen this brand of Mochiko, available on both the east and west coasts.

I have only ever seen yuzu juice in Japanese grocery stores. It has a citrus flavour to it, but has a novel bite to it that distinguishes it from lemon. It's stronger than lemon, so substitute even slightly more lemon juice if you can't get yuzu.

Oil a small baking pan. Mix the mochi flour, sugar, yuzu juice and water in a microwave-safe bowl, until it forms a wet mess.

Cook for 3 minutes in your microwave on high.

Stir. Cook for 2 more minutes in your microwave on high.

Stir. The mochi is done when it starts to dry out (but before it becomes bubbly and hard). Your mileage may vary (the book suggested ten minutes, I was done in five).

Sprinkle with potato starch, and roll out with a rolling pin to form a layer ¾" thick. Use the potato starch to keep everything from sticking. Place in your oiled pan, let cool.

When ready to serve, sprinkle potato starch on your knife before slicing into the mochi. Sprinkle the mochi slices with the salt, confectioner's sugar and lemon zest. Serve.

This dessert is not super sweet. The mild-flavoured mochi makes a nice wind down as a second dessert after something bolder. Delicious.

By Bbq Dude

Walnut cookies

2011-03-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

It seems lately I'm focusing more on desserts than on barbecue, and this post is no different. I've been trying to make treats to bring in to work for my team. It's a good reason to try new recipes, and a way to save me from eating everything myself. Otherwise, these little dessert excursions could wind up making me a very large man.

I never knew how nice walnuts could be until I moved to southern California. I always associated walnuts with a horrible, bitter aftertaste. It wasn't until a vendor at the Little Italy Farmer's Market in San Diego offered me a taste of his fresh walnuts that I realized how pleasant they can be. The mild, smooth flavour is extremely pleasant. After a brief discussion with him about walnuts, he informed me that the bitter flavour that I associated with walnuts is actually rancid oil in the walnut.

Just like fishy flavour, the flavour I associated with walnuts is due to the fact that they've gone off. Well, now I only cook with fresh walnuts that I've purchased at the farmer's market. Today, I bring you walnut cookies from The Sweet Spot: Asian-Inspired Desserts:

2 cups walnuts
1 ¹⁄₃ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
¹⁄₃ cup sugar
½ tsp salt
¹⁄₃ cup packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

Toast the walnuts in a hot oven, briefly (ten minutes, max). You want to release some flavour and darken them. Just a tad. Cool the walnuts to room temperature.

Really, the big difference after toasting walnuts is the smell. You can smell that nutty flavour.

Cream the butter and the white sugar in a mixer until well mixed and smooth.

Add the brown sugar, the egg, salt and vanilla and continue beating until smooth.

Add half the walnuts, and continue mixing until the walnuts are well smashed and smooth.

Mix all the dry ingredients (baking powder, soda and the flour), and stir together with a whisk to get well mixed. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, and mix on low until all of the dry ingredients are nicely moistened.

Scrape the cookie dough into a bowl, cover and place in the fridge for a few hours, or over night. You want to harden the butter so that the cookies keep their shape. Also, cover the toasted walnuts so they stay fresh. When you're ready, preheat an oven to 325°F.

Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat baking mat. Scoop 1 inch balls of cookie dough onto the cookie sheet, keeping them roughly 2 inches apart.

Stab a walnut shard into each cookie ball. Bake in the oven for 15ish minutes, until the cookies have flattened out and are starting to turn a lovely golden brown.

Transfer to a cooling rack, and cool. Or not. These cookies stay soft and chewy for several days, but really are best straight out of the oven.

By Bbq Dude

A lazy Saturday calls for...

2011-03-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

...a Thai colada.

What is one to do on a weekend where one has made Thai sticky rice and one has a little leftover syrup?

Make a Thai colada.

2 oz coconut milk syrup from the sticky rice recipe
2 oz white rum

Mix well and pour over ice.

Ahhhhh...

By Bbq Dude

Mango sticky rice

2011-03-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago, my good friend Dr. Ricky stopped us at a stand at the Baltimore City farmer's market. It was a Thai sticky rice stand, and they served up a fabulous dessert. Slightly sweet and sticky, with the slices of fresh mango on top, it was a dessert that stuck with me. It had a truly unique flavour (that I would later learn was palm sugar) that had an unusual sweetness to it. I had to find a steady source of this stuff.

I did, from Pichet Ong's The Sweet Spot: Asian-Inspired Desserts. This recipe for Mango sticky rice is derived from that book:

1 cup glutinous rice
1 can (14 oz) coconut milk
²⁄₃ cup palm sugar
1 vanilla bean
1 tsp salt
1 pandan leaf
2 ripe champagne mangoes
1 tsp black sesame seeds

Glutinous rice is often sold as "sweet rice". When you crack open the bag, the grains look quite different from typical white rice. They're shorter and stubbier. And they are smoother with an ivory finish. You can find them at your Asian grocer.

Rinse the rice several times in water. The rinsings will be cloudy. After the final rinse, soak the rice in multiple volumes of water. Leave to soak for two or more hours, while you prepare dinner.

When ready to cook, drain the rice, and wrap it in cheesecloth.

Set the wrapped rice into a steamer, and steam for 20 minutes, or until properly cooked and soft. While cooking, you can prepare the "sauce".

Palm sugar (also called palm candy) is a pain-in-the-ass to work with. It's like a rock. If you can, buy the small rocks, rather than the large ones. It's easier to work with. Either way, you're going to end up smashing it with a meat tenderizer to get it into a measurable size.

Apparently coconut milk comes in varying quality based on the brand. I am assured by Dr. Ricky that this is the brand you want:

But otherwise, get the best kind you can at your local Asian grocer.

Mix the coconut milk, the vanilla bean (with seeds removed into the milk), the palm sugar, the salt and the pandan leaf (if you can get it). Boil over medium heat until the palm sugar has completely dissolved.

When the rice is done steaming, remove it to a bowl. Add the coconut milk mixture, and allow to soak 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the mangoes. Peel and slice them.

Check out those champagne mangoes. The green one is not ripe. The yellow one is nearly ripe. The yellow one with black spots is perfect. That's the one you want to serve.

Scoop some of the rice mixture into a bowl to serve.

Place the slices of mango on top, and sprinkle on the sesame seeds.

Serve immediately. This is a perfect, sticky, palm-sugary-sweet, delicious dessert. This should be a regular part of your dessert options.

By Bbq Dude

Wordless Wednesday: Leftover Morimoto steak sandwich

2011-03-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

Morimoto-style steak with garlic-soy jus

2011-03-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

The last 3 weeks of work have been positively brutal. In addition to working 14 hour days, this past week Mrs. Dude had to travel out of town for work. On queue, Bbq Jr. developed a fever of 102°F. Well, I'm pleased to say, we all survived. The hard work has paid off. Mrs. Dude is home. And Bbq Jr. is feeling better. This past weekend we decided to sleep in, relax and have a few glasses of wine.

Well, to enjoy a family dinner in total rest & recovery mode, steak is the perfect dish. It's fast. It's easy. And delicious. In this particular case, I decided to try Morimoto's recipe for steak from Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking. (I confess, I cheated because I used up all of my veal stock. I substituted out Better-than-bouillon.):

6 garlic cloves
3 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp Better-than-bouillon beef paste
½ cup soy sauce
½ cup mirin
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 small onion

Shave the garlic and ginger on a microplane grater. Grate the onion on a larger grater. Mix all ingredients in a small saucepan and boil for 10 minutes.

Set aside for the flavours to meld, at least one hour.

2 beef sirloin steaks
salt and fresh ground pepper
2 tbsp grapeseed oil
6 tbsp unsalted butter, cut up

Remove the steaks from the fridge a good hour before cooking.

Set a heavy pan on the stove (I use cast-iron). Add the oil to the pan, and heat the pan over high heat for up to ten minutes. You want a screaming hot pan. Crazy hot. White hot. From the book:

At my restaurants, I instruct my chefs to heat the pan for a full 20 minutes. Your kitchen smoke alarm may disagree, but heat it as long as you can.

Sear the steak for 2 ½ minutes per side. As the second side finishes, turn the heat down to medium, and add the butter to the pan.

As the butter melts and browns, spoon it over the steak.

Cook for about one and a half minutes for rare. (For more cooked than this, put the steak into a 450°F oven for a few minutes in between searing it on both sides, and adding the butter to the pan. Interestingly, Morimoto only offers instructions for rare steak).

Remove the steak from the pan, and spoon the browned butter over the steak. Let rest at least five minutes before serving. Spoon over with the jus (the onion/garlic/ginger gamish you set aside earlier) before serving.

I like this method for steak. The crazy hot pan, and the gingery/beefy goodness of the just is particularly tasty. Mrs. Dude said this was one of her favourite preparations of steak. Yum.

Served with:

Pain perdu

2011-03-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

On my recent visit to Woodfire Grill in Atlanta, there was one part of the meal that really sung. Sang? Singed? Right. There was one part of the meal that really knocked my socks off. The dessert. They made a pain perdu (what we call French toast in English). Except, they turned it into a dessert. I'd read about this before. Instead of a simple mix of milk and eggs, you first turn that milk and egg mixture into a custard. Then dip the bread in that and fry it. How could that *not* be delicious? At Woodfire, it was amazing. I do my interpretation of that dish here.

For the custard, I modified a crème anglaise from the Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft book. This will do enough custard to serve about 12 people:

1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
½ tsp salt
½ cup sugar
8 large egg yolks
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

This is just like all the other custards I do (what can I say, I love custards). The trick here is to thicken the custard without curdling the eggs into scrambled eggs. This is accomplished by being careful about not heating the eggs to quickly, and not heating them past 175°F.

So we start with mixing the egg yolks and half of the sugar in a mixing bowl. Beat the egg yolks until they're light and foamy.

Now mix the milk, cream, salt and the remains of the sugar. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. While mixing the eggs, slowly add the hot cream mixture. This is how you slowly raise the temperature of the eggs (tempering), by adding the cream slowly. Once you've added all of the cream, put it into a double boiler, and heat, stirring constantly. Now you'll want to watch the temperature. When it hits 175°F, immediately pour it through a sieve into a bowl.

If you start to make chunks in your beautiful sauce, you can still save it. Pour it into a blender, and blend in batches. Chill for a few hours.

Immediately prior to serving, start the banana topping. This is modified from a friend's recipe for bananas Foster:

6 tbsp butter
½ C packed dark brown sugar
fine zest of 1 lemon
¼ tsp cinnamon
4 ripe, peeled bananas, halved langthwise
¼ C dark rum
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the remaining material, save the rum, and cook over medium heat until the bananas are slightly softened, and the sugar is caramelizing.

Stir in the rum, and turn the heat down to low.

Slice 1 loaf of brioche and cut off the crusts.

Brioche is perfect for French toast, because it's so moist and spongy, and just sucks up the French toast liquid.

Pour the custard into a shallow bowl or plate. Heat some butter in a medium-hot heavy pan. Dredge the pieces of brioche in the custard, and place them gently in the hot pan.

Flip after a couple of minutes.

Cook 1-2 more minutes, until browned.

Serve hot. Pour some of the banana goo on top, and with a small scoop of ice cream.

This. is. ridiculous. While warm, this is a ridiculous dessert. It's essentially fried custard cake with bananas Foster on top. Simply amazing.

We served with a Pillitteri cabernet franc icewine. What an amazing end to a meal.

Brioche

2011-03-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

A recent conversation prompted a personal observation. I'm not much of a starch guy. Potatoes? Meh. Rice. A bit better. Pasta, now I'm getting interested, but still not my favourite part of the meal. But bread? Good, homemade bread? I can easily make a meal of a fresh-baked loaf of bread and some butter. My go-to bread is no-knead bread, because it's simple, requires only a few preparations and is obscenely delicious.

But it's not the only bread. I've tried a few different recipes for brioche and been completely unsatisfied. Until I found this recipe, from Crust and Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Bread Bakers. It's a keeper:

1 tsp instant yeast
½ cup lukewarm milk
1 cup unbleached bread flour

Mix the starter until moist. Cover and let rise for one to two hours. To the starter, add:

3 ½ cups unbleached bread flour
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
5 large eggs, beaten well
1 ¾ cups unsalted butter, softened

Mix on low in your mixer, until the flour is moistened. Then beat on medium with your dough hook until the dough is soft and smooth. It's stickier than regular bread doughs, but the butter should be well incorporated.

Mist lightly with a vegetable oil sprayer, cover with saran wrap, and place in the fridge for five to twelve hours. You're looking for the flavour to develop and the butter to firm back up. This will provide the proper texture and flavour for the brioche.

Remove from the fridge, and mold into three equal-sized round loaves.

Cover and let sit for 2 hours at room temperature to rise. Meanwhile, beat:

one egg

Preheat your oven to 375°F for at least half an hour. Brush the egg wash lightly on the loaves, and bake the loaves for 40ish minutes, until golden brown.

These loaves are almost cakish in texture, buttery and sweet. They're a fabulous soft bread that makes a nice change from the ordinary. And shaped into the fancy little brioche pans, they can be quite fancy to serve, with minimal effort. Huge success, and loved by all.

Wordless Wednesday: Tempura

2011-03-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

Chicken fingers

2011-02-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

Why is the kid's menu [in restaurants] the same as the bar menu? Have you noticed that? Bbq Jr's favourite restaurant item is the chicken finger. Processed, mealy chicken, breaded in some pasty, gooey mess. Salt. Protein. Fat. But no flavour. Bbq Jr has excellent taste for a five-year old, but he is just five. We're working on expanding that.

For his birthday, we gave him his favourite meal. But with a twist. I whipped up some homemade chicken fingers, but with chicken tenders (the meat next to the breast). And seasoned. And breaded nicely.

chicken tenders (boneless chicken cut adjacent to the breast)
milk
flour
salt
chipotle chile powder
paprika
eggs
panko bread crumbs
giant pot o' peanut oil

Make 4 separate bowls. One contains milk. Second contains flour, seasoned heavily with salt, chipotle, and paprika. Third, beaten eggs. Fourth, panko bread crumbs.

Soak the chicken tenders in the milk while you start heating the oil. You're gonna want the oil at around 375°F. When the oil is close to hot enough, dredge the chicken tenders in the seasoned flour. Shake off excess flour, then dredge in the beaten egg. Shake off excess egg, then dredge gently through the panko. One of the nice things about panko is the texture. Don't damage the texture.

Repeat with as many tenders as you plan to make (2-3/person is tons).

The trick with deep-frying is to not be afraid of the oil. Lower the chicken tender into the oil so that you don't splash the hot oil on yourself. Your fingers will end up pretty close to the oil surface. Be careful, but *do not be afraid*.

Cook until the chicken tenders are a nice dark brown, and cooked all the way through (I test 1 tender/batch by cutting into them). About four to seven minutes.

Use a slotted spoon to remove the tenders from the oil.

Further season with grey sea salt. Serve with plum sauce and homemade ketchup.

This was a hit with Bbq Jr. "Best chicken fingers, Daddy!" Goes to show, even bar food can be brought up a notch.

Intelligentsia Los Angeles

2011-02-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

These days, when we travel, we inform ourselves. Chowhound. Blogs. Friends. This is how we ensure we eat and drink well while traveling.

Take coffee. Steve at Zumbar has pointed us towards several coffee places that will blow you away. Like Intelligentsia in Los Angeles. Their coffee is superb. Not a hint of bitterness. Their latte is rich and foamy made from a perfectly pulled shot of espresso.

They warned us off the hot chocolate for Bbq Jr. "Kids don't like our chocolate. It's too strong." Hah! Bbq Jr. loved it. "This is the best hot chocolate, Daddy. You should make me this hot chocolate next year for my birthday."

Even if coffee isn't your thing, the location in Venice makes for interesting viewing. The coffee hardware looks like something out of an alchemy lab.

Everything is all steel and tattoos. I swear I'm not cool enough to hang out here, but the coffee is so good that I keep sneaking back in. One of these days, they're gonna check me for hipster i.d. and turn me back at the door. But until then...

They get their pastries from Breadbar. Their perfect, buttery, sweet, chocolatey, pain au chocolat.

You need to have a coffee here.

Intelligentsia Silver Lake
3922 W Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
323-663-6173
Sun - Wed, 6 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Thur - Sat, 6 a.m. - 11 p.m.

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Intelligentsia Venice
1331 Abbot Kinney Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
310-399-1233
Mon - Wed, 6 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Thur - Fri, 6 a.m. - 11 p.m.
Sat 7 a.m. - 11 p.m.
Sun 7 a.m. - 8 p.m.

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Ginger-plum sauce

2011-02-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

In the grand preparations for Bbq Jr's fifth birthday, there were sauces galore. My favourite was the plum sauce that we made to serve with his favourite meat (gonna keep it a surprise for now). This sauce was inspired by a previous sauce Dr. Ricky made for a whole pig that we cooked up in 2009.

I started with 7 each of:

lemon plums
red plumbs

Pit and halve them.

Also, shred finely:

3 tbsp ginger

Fry up the ginger over high heat until it's nice and soft. Throw in as many plums as will hit the bottom of the pan. Place them cut side down so that you get a nice sear on the plums. When they're nicely seared, add the rest of the plums and a tiny bit of water. Lower the heat, and simmer until the plums reach a nice saucy consistency (I like my sauces a tiny bit chunky, but you can simmer longer if you want to break it down further).

Add:

brown sugar

to taste. Cool and serve. Gingery, plummy goodness. Yum.

Ketchup

2011-02-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

When our son was a wee tot (think 1 ½ to 2ish), he was always delighted to have french fries and ketchup, a treat we reserved for our relatively infrequent restaurant visits. For the longest time I thought it was the fat and the salt of the french fries. Until one evening I discovered him dipping his french fry into the ketchup, sucking off the ketchup, and dipping it in again. "Moh ketchup pease!"

Turns out he is a ketchup (catsup? katsup?) fanatic. This year, we made him all of his favourite things for his birthday, including a delightful version of ketchup, adapted from a friend's recipe (who in turn pinched it from The River Cottage Cookbook):

6 lb coarsely chopped tomatoes
4 onions sliced
1 dried ancho chile, halved
½ cup brown sugar
¾ cup cider vinegar
¼ tsp dry mustard
one cinnamon stick
1 ½ tsp whole allspice
1 ½ tsp whole cloves
½ tsp ground nutmeg
1 ½ tsp celery seeds
1 ½ tsp black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
2 garlic cloves
pinch paprika
1 tsp cornstarch, mixed into 1 tbsp water
salt to taste

Mix the tomatoes, onions and dried ancho. Simmer all of that material until soft and gooey, about an hour. Push it through a coarse sieve, add in the sugar, vinegar and mustard. Tie the other spices into a nice cheesecloth pouch.

Toss the pouch into the pot of sieved tomato bits and simmer uncovered thirty minutes to an hour. Taste periodically, removing the pouch when it is spicy enough for your tastes. Continue to simmer until thickened. If necessary, use the 1 tsp cornstarch to thicken the ketchup. Cool, and serve with your typical ketchupy items (french fries, burgers, you name it).

The depth of flavour of this ketchup makes it a considerably more interesting condiment than your standard Heinz version. And it was close enough to the standard to delight our five year-old. Tasty.

Happy birthday, Bbq Jr.

2011-02-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

Once again, we're celebrating Bbq Jr's birthday. He's five today. Just like last year, I sat down with him and flipped through all the pictures of Rose's Heavenly Cakes. We ooo'd and ahhhh'd over the beautiful cakes, and I was getting excited to be baking an exciting new cake. I told him, "You can have any cake in here that doesn't have adult drinks in it."

Without any reminder of what I made him last year, my Valentine boy picked Rose's double-chocolate Valentine cake. "I want the same one as last year!"

Happy birthday, son. And happy Valentine's Day to the rest of you.

Sushi Kaito

2011-02-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

The first time I stepped into Sushi Kaito, it was nearly empty. Given their reputation, that was a bit of a surprise. We were delighted to be able to sit at the bar. We had heard that omakase was the way to go. When we asked for that, Kazuo-san said, "I can't do that for you. I don't know you. I don't know what you like."*

No menu, no sake list, you order based on what you see and what you like.

We started off with the live scallop, which he showed to us, still healthy in its shell. Shaved thin, it had a sweet flavour. And the outside of the scallop peeled off and fried. Perfect. With that, Kazuo-san asked, "What do you *not* like?" Me: "Nothing." My wife: "Eel". "Then I will serve you eel tempura." This guy has cajones. His second dish is something we've just claimed we don't like. The tempura was sweet and clean. Perfect texture, perfect flavour. While we were eating it, he explained, "Most places use frozen eel. I have fresh eel. That's why I serve it with the spine, to show you I bought it fresh." The spine had been deep-fried. It was crunchy and delicious. Delicious. To say that I'm surprised that eel spine was delicious... Well, I'll say it, you need to eat some eel spine. As soon as you possibly can.

What followed was the most amazing sushi meal of my life. Kampache. Crunchy, spicy roll (which might just be the best thing I've ever had in my mouth). The strong-flavoured mackerel (saba in Japanese). Dish after dish surprised and delighted.

The sushi at Kaito isn't just great by San Diego standards, this is great sushi by any standard. I've been spoiled for other places.

*these aren't exact quotes, but paraphrasing written as quotes for dramatic effect.

Sushi Kaito
130-A North El Camino Real
Encinitas, CA 92024
(760) 634-2746
Mon-Sat: 5 pm - close

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White sandwich buns

2011-02-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

The last few months I've been rather enamoured of the no-knead bread of Jim Lahey. It's almost the only bread I bother with. While it requires a bit of fore-planning, it's delicious. And low effort. But there are other ways to make bread. Today, I bring you my new favourite sandwich bun, altered from Crust and Crumb.

To start, we make the biga. A biga is basically just a pre-fermented bit of dough that gives a boost to the growth of yeast in the bread, and provides slightly different flavours than a younger fermentation. So, for the biga:

2 ¹⁄₆ cup (10 oz) bread flour
¾ cup water
1 tsp yeast

Mix the flour, water and yeast.

Let sit, covered, for three to four hours.

Now, retard the biga in the fridge for zero to twelve hours. Basically, by chilling the yeast, you're making it do different things metabolically, which will in turn make the yeast piss different combinations of lactic acid and ethanol into the dough. It results in a richer-flavoured bread. So you don't *have* to retard the dough, but it'll be better if you do.

After retarding the biga, mix it with:

3 ½ cup (16 oz) bread flour
2 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
1 ¼ tsp yeast
¾ cup milk at room temperature
½ cup softened unsalted butter

Knead for tenish minutes, until the dough softens. I couldn't do this one in my mixer, it really wanted to climb out and get gear grease all over it. So knead by hand it is.

Cover, and let rise 1-2 hours.

Knead again, let rise again, 1-2 hours.

Split into rolls, and pinch and roll balls of dough, about half the size of your fist. Think small, they're gonna rise a bunch, and expand even more in the oven. Place rolls on a greased cookie sheet, this batch made me 14 rolls.

Cover the rolls, and let rise 1-2 hours.

After final rise, pre-heat oven at 350°F for about half an hour. Bake the rolls for 20-25 minutes, until they make a nice brown crust, and rebound to a light touch.

Let cool. But not too long. These soft and delicious guys belong in something tasty like a pulled pork sandwich. Yum.

Spice Station

2011-02-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Clearly, I've been traveling more than cooking lately. But I've been finding some cool places in my travels. In Silver Lake in Los Angeles is a several block stretch of funky comic shops and our favourite coffee shop - Intelligentsia (can you believe I've never written about Intelligentsia? That will have to get remedied). On our most recent visit, we found a parking spot a couple blocks away, and pulled up in front of a bright blue and orange sign proclaiming "Spice Station". Well, you know I had to go in there.

This is a neat little spice and tea store. This is a place you can wander around and sniff the the individual containers, before requesting your order to be doled out in the back. I walked out of there with a bright red Turkish pepper called Marash.

With a bright, spicy smell, I'm sure this is going to be fun as part of a beef or pork rub. I also picked up urfa biber, another Turkish pepper with a smoky smell.

Both of these are new discoveries for me, and Spice Station lets you discover all kinds of spices, in easy open and sniff bottles. What fun. If that's your thing, they also have a website where you can shop, but really the best part of this place is that you can sniff each spice before you buy.

Visit them in Silver Lake.

3819 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026
323-660-2565
Open Mon, Wed, Thur and Fri 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sat 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sun noon to 5 p.m.

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Lucky Seafood

2011-02-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

San Diego has a large number of very high quality grocers, of varying ethnicities and types. There are loads of food blogs that review restaurants, and even a fair number that write about San Diego restaurants. My interests center around home cooking - so let's see if we can't stir up something a little original here. I bring you: SAN. DIEGO. GROCERY. STORES! (read that slowly in a deep, loud voice for the full effect)

I drove by Lucky Seafood a lot of times before I finally set foot inside. First off, the outside of the store looks a little grungy, and really, hygiene is key when looking for a fish place. But turns out, Lucky Seafood is not a fish place. Sure, they sell fish here, but it's a small counter in the back.

It's really a general purpose grocery store, with a focus on Vietnamese items. This is my go to place for pork necks and chicken feet (staples for making ramen), both available for cheap in large supply. Indeed, the meat counter has all kinds of cheap cuts, and is a fabulous place to get pork butt. I'll be picking one up this week for a batch of pulled pork sandwiches for the Superbowl this weekend.

The produce here is crazily inexpensive, and includes the various Asian greens and many Asian herbs. Every time we visit, the produce is in great shape, which to me means that they are good at keeping on top of things.

While many of them are pre-packaged forcing you to buy five thousand little Thai chiles, given that they sell for $1.82, it's really hard to complain. And when have you ever seen veggies that looked so good under plastic? Yum.

A nice selection of lovely canned goods adorn the aisles, from bamboo shoots to baby corn, load the shelves. In addition, a small selection of Asian cooking implements are tucked in the back, and a whole row of various Asian liquors are across the front of the store.

And while I haven't the faintest clue what pickled lotus rootlets are for, I kinda want to find out...

These days, Lucky Seafood is one of our favourite Asian markets in the city, partly due to its proximity to our own home, but also given the cost, quality of the meat and veggies and the lack of dense, angry crowds found at other markets in the city, we go here a lot.

This is an excellent, local Asian small grocer.

Lucky Seafood
9326 Mira Mesa Boulevard, San Diego, CA
(858) 586-7979 ‎
Open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day

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This post is not about meat. It's about not-meat.

2011-01-28T08:05:00.001-08:00

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Woodfire Grill - Atlanta

2011-01-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate enough to visit the Woodfire Grill in Atlanta last night. The head chef at Woodfire (Kevin Gillespie) was a contestant on Top Chef Las Vegas (2009). And quite frankly, as someone who hadn't tasted his food, I found his food the most interesting conceptually on that season of Top Chef. He likes smoke. He likes bbq. And he likes fun meats. Do you know anyone else like that?

I really wanted to like Woodfire Grill. But I confess, I didn't like it as much as I wanted to. I started with the wood-oven roasted honey mussels with house made chorizo, potato and spicy tomato broth with grilled bread. There's a new fad, I've noticed, to burn the bread that gets served. I don't mean leave black grill marks on it, but to full on burn the bread. I don't enjoy charcoal in my meal, I don't enjoy burned bread. This would be a minor annoyance if the mussels hadn't had grit in them and were served in what seemed a spicy Campbell's soup. This dish was a a beautiful failure.

I moved on to the wood-grilled Hudson valley duck breast with some sort of cabbage/veggie mush. I liked this dish. The duck, while simple, was perfectly prepared. The cabbage mush, while unappealing to look at, provided a nice acidic contrast to the duck. And the Pinot Noir – Van Duzer that was matched with it went extremely well.

The real success of the evening was the dessert. Banana pain perdu with vanilla ice cream, salted caramel, banana crème anglaise and candied bacon - as described by the waiter, "The best thing I've ever put in my mouth." That raised an eyebrow. And, you know, bacon. Pain perdu is essentially French toast. Except the French toast is soaked in a custard. So yeah, that was tasty. The candied bacon was a nice touch, but loaded on a little heavy. Served with the Tokaji Cuvée Patrícia - Királyudvar. That was magnificent.

A final note - you know that you're in the South when you read the reviews that say, "Good restaurant, but the servings are a little small". These servings were enormous. No way I could have tackled the tasting menu. I watched a man plough his way through the tasting menu, I could only have done it if I'd skipped all my meals today.

All in all, I'm glad I went. But this restaurant isn't Genius. It's merely a good meal.

Smoked tamarind ribs

2011-01-25T19:19:00.000-08:00

Update: Edited quantities after second run with this recipe.

Tamarind is not a flavour often exploited in Western cooking. As it turns out, it goes great with bbq, and we recently used it in our New Year's Eve extravaganza. This is a flavour you want to add to your cooking profile.

7 oz tamarind
6 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
6 tbsp soy
6 tbsp hoisin
3 tbsp sriracha
½ cup water
kosher salt (yeah, you're gonna use kosher salt on pork ribs - sue me)
1 rack pork ribs

Mix all the ingredients (save the ribs and salt) and bring to a boil, mixing to break up the tamarind chunks.

Cool over an hour, and sieve out the tamarind. Pour into a ziploc bag and add the ribs. Place in the fridge overnight, moving around periodically to ensure that the marinade covers all portions of the ribs.

Remove the ribs, and bring to room temperature. Meanwhile, bring your smoker to 200°F with hickory or cherry wood. You'll want lots of wet wood chunks, as these ribs can take a ton of smoke. Liber

Liberally salt the ribs. Place on the smoker, and close it up. Meanwhile, bring the marinade to a boil. Boil at least five minutes, but long enough to thicken the marinade into a glaze. Remove from heat.

Smoke the ribs for 4ish hours.

Paint on the glaze.

Smoke for one more hour at 200°F.

Remove, slice and serve.

This is a flavour you won't normally encounter on smoked ribs. But the flavour is rich and delicious, and was a huge hit the night of our New Year's Party. Delish.

Marrow bones

2011-01-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Here's an appetizer that'll blow people away. And it's crazy easy. As best as I can tell, there's only one disadvantage to this one. It's kinda nasty looking. So serve this by candlelight.

Marrow bones. You can either carve them off a beef shank, or special order them from your butcher. Either way, you shouldn't have to pay much for them. My recipe is modified from Bones.

4 shank bones
salt
bread

Yep, that's it. Simplest. Recipe. Ever.

In a small container, cover the bones with water. Add 2 tsp of salt. Soak for 12 to 24 hours in the fridge.

Remove your brined (and what looks like bleached) bones from the water, pat them dry and place them on an oiled cookie sheet.

Pre-heat your oven to 450°F. Bake the bones in the oven for 15 to 25 minutes. Until the marrow is bubbling slightly and it leaves goo on a tester inserted all the way through.

Spread the roasted marrow on a piece of toasted homemade bread. Sprinkle with fleur de sel. Serve.

You're really gonna want to serve this in a dimly lit room. It's, um, kinda grotey lookin'. But rich and delicious. I mentioned bone marrow to a colleague at work today, and he said, "Yeah. Bone marrow is rich and lusty." Well, I wouldn't say it that way. But I guess I don't disagree.

Smoke, tobacco and blackberry

2011-01-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

I've been rather enamoured of Grant Achatz' Alinea cookbook since it came out over a year ago. His cooking is quite novel, and for someone like me who is interested in smoked food, he incorporates smoke in some pretty interesting ways. The most interesting dish in the book, in my humble opinion, is Smoke, tobacco and blackberry (perhaps not surprising for a smoked meat fiend):

1 ½ cups cream
½ cup milk
¼ cup sugar
¼ tsp kosher salt
5 g cigar (about ½ of a short cigar)
10 blackberries
5 gelatin sheets
1 tsp long thai peppercorns (as described here)
1 tsp smoked salt
mint leaves

This dish uses the flavour of a cigar in the dish. What can I say? It's a novel use of smoke in food...

Chop up the cigar.

We're going to steep the cigar in cream, milk, sugar and salt to get the flavour of it out.

Bring the mixture to a boil.

When it comes to a boil, turn off the heat, and cover the mixture. Allow to steep for twenty minutes. Meanwhile, put the gelatin sheets into ice water to hydrate.

I prefer gelatin sheets over powder simply because they go into solution more easily, and you're less likely to find a chunk of non-dissolved gelatin later.

After twenty minutes have elapsed, remove the gelatin from the ice water and squeeze out the excess water. Stir the gelatin into the steeped cigar mixture, then pour the whole thing through a sieve, to remove the cigar chunks.

Line a half cookie sheet with cling wrap, and pour a thin layer of the gelatin mixture into the pan. Cover and reserve the rest of the mixture. And put a layer of cling wrap over the gelatin in the cookie sheet, being careful to keep it tight enough that it doesn't touch the cream.

Now, finding a perfectly level place in your fridge to solidify the gelatin can be challenging. Having failed at this on more than one occasion, I use the following technique: Put some ice cubes on one end of a large cookie sheet. Gently place the smaller cookie sheet in that pan, and pour some water over the ice, being careful not to get water into the smaller pan. Basically, you're creating a chilling space under the pan, so you can harden the gelatin on your level countertop.

While it is chilling, prepare the blackberries.

Surgically remove the base of the blackberries so that they are perfectly level. Gently set the blackberries onto a piece of paper towel, cut side down.

After the gelatin has solidified, remove the small pan from your chilling apparatus, and uncover. Pour the remaining liquid gelatin over the solidified gelatin, and immediately place the blackberries cut side down into the gelatin.

Cover, and place back in your chilling apparatus until the gelatin sets (after that, you can store in the fridge). Before serving, combine the smoked salt and thai peppercorns in a mortar, and grind into dust.

Using a small round, cut out each blackberry, surrounded by cream. Gently place on a plate, sprinkle with the salt and pepper mixture, and set a mint leaf on it.

Serve. What a unique flavour. Smoky and salty, with a bright blast from the blackberry. This is delicious, and much like Achatz' other dishes, best served one per person, as just a single bite.

Smoked salt

2011-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Whole foods charges a lot for smoked salt. Everyone charges a lot for smoked salt. And commercial smoked salt is, quite frankly, awful. The flavour is rather like licking the inside of an ashtray.

If you smoke meat, it's not hard to smoke salt. We start with:

10 tbsp salt (roughly)

Place salt in a non-reactive container. Like Pyrex or Le Creuset. Place in your smoker, while smoking something else. I always smoke my salt while smoking some other source of meat. Like pulled pork. Or brisket.

Smoke your salt at 200-225 °F, in the low-and-slow range for your brisket or pulled pork. 4-9 hours, until it reaches the smokiness that you prefer. You'll notice it picks up colour.

Smoke until you're delighted by the colour and the smell. Remove and cool. Remove any chunks of crud that have managed to land in your salt. Tightly seal the salt in a container. Smoked salt will add smoky, salty flavour to whatever you add it to (for example, chili or the outside of fish or chicken).

Bubbat

2011-01-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

Every culture has their special dishes. Some, like Italian and Thai food, have found their way into the mainstream. Others, like Mennonite and Ukrainian are less well-known. Well, I have the great fortune to bring to your attention some of the less-well known dishes from my mother's Mennonite family.

Holidays wouldn't be the same for me without bubbat. Not a cake, not a bread, bubbat is a leavened raisin dough that I absolutely love to eat. It's a marvelous thing when fresh, only make enough to serve the day that you're cooking. We serve it with turkey on Christmas and Thanksgiving.

¼ cup sugar
2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 cups raisins
2 eggs
¼ cup milk
1 cups heavy cream

Mix the dry ingredients, raisins and all.

Beat the eggs.

Slowly mix in the milk and cream to properly emulsify them. Remember, emulsification works best when done slowly. Especially in the early mixing stages, the slower the better.

Mix the wet with the dry, in a few swift strokes. Given that this is a baking powder-leavened dish, it is imperative that you mix as rapidly as possible, so the baking powder doesn't crap out. Pour into a buttered bread-loaf pan.

Bake at 375°F for 45 minutes to an hour. Like cake, we're looking for a batter that you can stick a tester into and come out clean. Serve screaming hot. Bubbat goes best when hot. And it *is* tasty.

Moist and sweet. The perfect carbohydrate complement to a turkey dinner.

Rack of venison with turkey-venison jus

2011-01-06T05:31:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dude and I have a deal. Over the Christmas holidays, she gets a traditional smoked turkey dinner (I'd rather have a goose or duck or squab than turkey). We make all the fixings. In exchange, I get to cook whatever I want for the rest of the holidays. I confess, I do end up going a little hog-wild. This year, I walked past the meat counter at Whole Foods, and the rack of venison spoke to me. I had to have it. As an impulse buy, I brought home that rack of venison.

I modified the rack of venison with jus recipe from Meat: A Kitchen Education. The basic recipe for the jus requires some meat schmutz (That is, the brown stains on the pan you get from browning meat). James Peterson supplies the extra schmutz by browning some veal stew meat. I provided it using some turkey schmutz I had from browning some turkey necks. Substitute whatever meat schmutz you have on hand.

1 rack of venison (1 ½ lb)
2 cups turkey stock
turkey (or other meat) schmutz from browning the meat
1 tbsp salt (sel gris)
pepper
1 shallot

Start with a beautiful rack o' venison. Look at that beautiful slab o' meat. Pull it out of the fridge an hour in advance to come up to room temperature.

After reading Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, I've been experimenting with more different finishing salts. In this particular case, I used a sel gris I got from Penzey's. It's a large crystal salt.

It makes a nice crust when you pat it on the outside of the rack of venison.

Dust the venison with fresh cracked pepper. Preheat the oven to 450°F. Slice the shallot, and place in the pan under the venison. Place the rack into the oven, bake for 25ish minutes, or until it registers 130°F when you insert a thermometer into the side, avoiding the bone. That'll give you a nice medium-rare venison.

Meanwhile, deglaze your schmutz with turkey stock. I heated the pan I had used to brown turkey necks for a few minutes with the turkey stock in there, scraping periodically.

When you pull the rack of venison out of the oven, transfer the rack to a cutting board and cover with foil to rest for ten-fifteen minutes.

Transfer the deglazed schmutz to your venison pan. Deglaze that schmutz over medium-high heat. Add turkey stock as necessary to keep the pan from drying out.

Look at that delicious stuff. Finally, pour through a fine sieve shortly before serving.

Once you've rested your venison, carve into individual ribs.

Bask in the wonder of venison.

Love that salt crust.

Serve with a little jus dribbled on top.

Delicioso. Two out of three members of the Dude family *loved* it. Mrs. Dude found the venison to be a bit gamy for her taste. I found different parts of the rack to have different amounts of gaminess, but I loved them all. And the turkey-venison jus complimented everything perfectly.

Served with:

Turkey gravy

2011-01-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

Smoked turkey provides a bit of a challenge when it comes to making gravy. How do you catch and maintain quality drippings and schmutz when you have your turkey on a grill? Clearly not insurmountable, but a bit of a challenge nonetheless. Well, why not skip that step entirely. A stock-based gravy, then. I use a small modification to Ruhlman's version of gravy, which you can make in advance, and if you're organized, doesn't need to be some crazy last step.

4 tbsp flour
6 tbsp butter
1 large onion
kosher salt as needed
heart and gizzards
1 cup white wine
4 cups turkey stock

Happy New Year.

2011-01-02T17:15:00.000-08:00

A tradition has developed in the Dude household over the last 3 years. Dr. Ricky comes to town from Houston and we have a kitchen extravaganza of sorts. This year we celebrated by serving 11 dishes to bring in 2011. If we continue on that path, 2020 looks to be a challenging New Year's Eve...

The menu:

You'll notice there are 12 dishes there. We included an extra so that we could drop one out and still reach 11. The 11 dishes we served:

Duck fat confited russet potatoes and miso glazed calabasita squash:

You know you're having fun when you are blowtorching a relative of zucchini. Indeed, guests walked in just as the blowtorch came out. A great visual to set the tone for the night.

Hamachi sashimi Peruian-style:

After slicing and seasoning the fish, hot oil was dripped onto the fish. Nice way to start the meal, I'm going to be cooking with sashimi quality fish more often.

Roasted brussel sprouts with mint and sambal olek:

Another surprise hit. Brussel sprouts and mint.

Smoked tamarind pork ribs with slow-roasted apple:

Ribs will get a post of their own in the future. But they were marinated in tamarind, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin and sriracha. Then smoked for 5 hours over pecan wood, and glazed with the reduced marinade. Yum. Served next to slow-roasted apple.

Bagna cauda with vegetables:

This one is becoming part of the canon. Dropped out the anchovy paste, and used whole anchovies instead. Delicious.

Two bacons with raclette on toast with shiso:

Two bacons were a home-made, home-smoked bacon, and a buckboard bacon from Cochon butcher in New Orleans, fried and layered onto a home-baked bread. Smothered in melted raclette cheese and served with a spot of shiso on top. Yum.

Deep-fried chicken liver with Sichuan salt and rhubarb sauce:

Comment of the night: "You keep making me eat things I don't like. Like chicken livers. And you make me like them!".

Savory huitlacoche cheesecake:

The hit of the night. This cheesecake compensated for being one of the most unattractive pieces of food I've ever seen. It's grey. The cheesecake looks like mortar. But what flavour. Corn truffles indeed.

Smoke, tobacco and blackberry:

Taken from the Alinea cookbook. An unusual mix of smoky, acid and salt.

Yuzu/Meyer lemon cream tart:

We used the same recipe as the lemon cream tart. Substitute yuzus (6) and Meyer lemon (1) for the lemon zest. Most of the juice came from the Meyer lemons, and we used a shortcake crust.

2003 Chateau Lafaurie Peyraguey Sauternes:

Brought by one of our guests. This sauternes provided a lovely break. Crisp, sweet and complex. Really, really nice.

Sahlep saffron ice cream:

A take on the Turkish ice cream dondurma. A lovely saffron flavour with an unusual texture.

Some of these will get full out posts of their own in the future. But for now, I wanted to share our New Year's Eve with you.

Happy New Year one and all.

Pepperoni bread

2010-12-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

We've been having our annual holiday party since 1998. In every city we've lived, we have a regular crew of friends who attend the party. And amongst our scientist friends, there are more than a few cooks (turns out, bench the skills that are required to succeed at bench science make for being good in the kitchen). One of regular attendees in Houston is a good friend, biochemist, genome biologist and fantastic Italian-American cook. His contribution, without fail, was his pepperoni bread. We left Houston in 2003, but this pepperoni bread is still a regular part of our party.

2 tsp dry yeast
¼ C warm water
1 C warm milk
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
3 - 3½ C all purpose flour
1 C thin sliced pepperoni
grated monterey-jack cheese

tomato sauce

Mix the water, yeast, milk and sugar in a large bowl. Give a few minutes to let the yeast hydrate and get all fired up. Mix in the flour bit by bit. Mix in the salt and oil. Flour a board and knead for 15 minutes by hand (or about 7 minutes if you're using a mixer). Put into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a cloth.

Allow to rise for two hours. Split dough in half, and roll into two balls on a lightly floured surface.

Allow to rise for 15 minutes.

Roll out each ball with a rolling pin into a rectangle, roughly five inches by twelve inches. Layer on the pepperoni, like a pizza (i.e., leave the edges clear).

Cover the pepperoni with a thin layer of grated cheese.

Roll up the dough tightly into a log. Pinch the seams shut.

Place the loaves onto an oiled cookie sheet. Allow to rise for another half hour while you preheat the oven at 375°F. Bake the loaves for 20-25 minutes until browned nicely.

Either slice and serve now, or let cool. This pepperoni bread is best served hot. Toast the loaf in the oven for 10-15 minutes at 300°F. Slice and serve.

Dip the slices of bread in briefly warmed tomato sauce. This bread is always a Christmas party hit, we get cleaned out within minutes of removing them from the oven. Greasy, salty, cheesy tastiness. Yum.

Wordless Wednesday: Smoked turkey

2010-12-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

Turkey stock

2010-12-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

I first started getting interested in cooking as an undergrad in the mid-1990s. Everything I had learned about cooking stemmed from my Mennonite family (good cooks, all) who wasted *nothing*. My mother and her family had survived the Great Depression in Canada (called the Dirty Thirties in that part of the world). So they know how to make the most of every scrap of food. Indeed, one of my favourite aunts would make a chicken noodle soup using the bones, necks and other cheap scraps of the chicken, and leave all of these parts in the soup. We knew frugality.

One of the first cooking resources that I used was Gourmet magazine. And when I found a recipe for a sauce that used chicken stock, I thought I would impress my girlfriend by making it all from scratch. I made the chicken stock, and was mortified at the last step where they suggest sieving out all the chicken bits. You just don't waste all that good stuff! So I added all of the chicken stock, bits and all into the sauce. Needless to say, the bits overpowered the sauce. I may as well have left out all the sauce components. It was like eating chicken necks and an over-boiled carrot poured over a boneless-skinless chicken breast. The effect was almost the exact opposite of what I had hoped. My girlfriend was polite, but... unimpressed.

These days, I make stock pretty frequently, from all sorts of critters, usually from the carcass of something I've just cooked. However, for Christmas dinner, I need turkey stock to make the turkey gravy. And I need it in advance of smoking the turkey. So for a couple bucks, I can a bag of turkey necks with the my turkey and make some stock.

4 turkey necks
2 carrots
1 rib of celery
1 onion, sliced in half
3 whole cloves
handful o' parsley
small handful o' fresh thyme
2 bay leaves

Pre-heat your oven at 400-425°F. Place the turkey necks in an oven-safe pot. Brown the necks in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.

Peel the onion. Slice it in half, and poke the cloves into the onion. Put everything into the pot. Cover with water.

Heat over medium-low heat to a boil. Boil for 3-4 hours. Sieve out the chunks. Really, you don't want this stuff in your sauces and gravies.

Cool the stock, and skim off the fat.

It's hard to photograph stock and have it look lovely. Sorry about that colour.

This turkey stock is great for soups, sauces and gravies. And cooking stock is so much fun. It takes 5 minutes to set up, and then you can feel like you're being productive while doing nothing but boiling a pot for hours.

Smoked turkey

2010-12-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

[In honor of the upcoming feast of Christmas, I re-post my Christmas post from last year.]

I'm not much for the "traditional" Christmas dinner. Turkey is far from my favourite bird. It's not as flavourful as goose, and certainly more dry than a duck. But I have a deal with my wife. If I make her traditional Christmas dinner, that is, turkey, cranberry sauce, salad, veggies and rhubarb pie, then I'm allowed to cook whatever I want for the rest of the holidays.

Okay, the brine:

1 ½ gallon water
1 ½ cup salt (2 ¼ cups Kosher or coarse salt - Kosher salt is flaked to make it less dense)
¾ cup sugar
½ cup dried tarragon
1 ½ tsp black pepper

The next morning, remove the turkey from the brine, briefly rinse in the sink, and pat dry.

Smoke for thirty minutes per pound. Half way through, open up the smoker and and rotate the bird so the other side of the bird is facing the heat source.

This photo is at about three quarters done:

Sadly, photos taken after this point aren't beautiful (it got dark, and I had to use a flash). But look at that turkey deliciousness!

Delicious!

Fried pork dumplings

2010-12-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

It's leftover season. What with the cooking for holiday parties, there's a fair amount of food floating around our house. What to do? What to do? How about fried pork dumplings?

Start with twice- boiled Chinese pork dumplings.

Pour one medium-sized splatter of sesame oil into a heavy pan, and heat over medium-high heat. When hot, toss in a few dumplings, far enough apart that they're not touching.

Sear on each side a few minutes, until nice and crispy.

Serve with mixture of soy sauce and sambal olek. This is a nice, crispy alternative to standard Chinese pork dumplings. Yum.