Dill pickles

Bbq Jr. is big into the pickles. Whenever we're out at a restaurant, he asks if he can have a pickle with his dinner. So, to attract him to cooking, we've been making pickles together. We started with an old standard - dill pickles.

There are two reasons to pickle. One is long-term preservation. That's harder. You need to sterilize jars. Probably should hot pickle your veggies. The other reason is deliciousness. There, you need clean jars. And you need to keep your pickles in the fridge when you're done. They're good for a couple of months in the fridge. I pickle for deliciousness. If you need to learn how to store your pickles at room temperature, look to The Preservation Kitchen, or other pickling references. If you pickle for deliciousness, read on.

I used the recipe in The Preservation Kitchen, although most dill pickle recipes are about the same. Add a tiny bit of sugar to make it sweeter. Add a tiny bit of crushed peppers to make it hotter. But, basically the same:

5 ½ cups water
3 ½ cups champagne vinegar
2 tbsp kosher salt
1 tbsp sugar
5 tsp dill seeds
10 dill sprigs
10 garlic cloves
4 ½ lb pickling cucumbers

We picked a couple types of cucumbers, and chopped them together.



Knife skills are important to develop at a young age.



Pack the dill, dill seeds, garlic and chopped cucumbers into your pickle jars.



Boil the water, vinegar, salt and sugar, until the sugar and salt are dissolved and the liquid is boiling. Pour the hot brine over the packed veggies.



Allow to cool to room temperature. Cap, and place them in the fridge. Strictly speaking, they're pickles now.



But they improve with age. They peak at about 3 weeks. Eat as a condiment, or as a snack. Tasty.



By Bbq Dude

Chokecherry syrup

On a recent visit to my home in southern Alberta, we arrived in the peak of chokecherry season. I wanted to give my son a taste of home, so we planned an excursion into the river valley to collect chokecherries.

Even in Alberta, few people my age know what chokecherries are. They are plentiful berries that hang in clusters, and have a very large pit relative to the berry. And they're really not that tasty. They have an astringent quality, similar to rhubarb, that makes your lips and teeth feel unpleasant. But when cooked with lots of sugar, they're quite delicious.



We were able to easily find large areas of chokecherries growing in a park in Lethbridge, and they were largely undisturbed. We could have picked there all day, but the kids quickly grew tired, so we returned home with a few buckets of cherries.



While picking we talked about food and cooking, and the flavours that I can't get in Massachusetts. And I told my 74-year old mom about foraging, and how terribly hip it is. "Well, I guess I've been hip all my life" she said. "We've always picked chokecherries, saskatoons and gooseberries."

We spent several hours de-stemming the cherries and chatting with my mom and her sister about the foods of old, and what they ate when they were very poor in the 1940s and 1950s.



Chokecherries, rhubarb and damson plums were inexpensive (free) and readily available. Today, they're a local luxury that too few people take advantage of.

Chokecherry syrup:

Mix equal volume:

cherries
chopped apple (for thickening)

Cover with water. Boil cherries (low simmer) for approx 1 ½ hours.

When the chokecherries have bleached, pour them into a colander lined with cheesecloth placed over a pot to catch the juice.



When we got to this step, my mother turned to me and put on a very sombre face. "You have a choice. Most recipes say at this stage not to press the chokecherries, because it releases all kinds of stuff that makes the syrup not be clear. I press the cherries to release all that flavor. What do you want to do?"

What would you do? I did it Mom's way. We squeezed the cherries, for a turbid syrup that was as delicious as I remembered from my childhood. Measure out the syrup you recover, and mix with an equal volume of:

sugar

Boil for a few minutes, until sugar is dissolved and syrup thickens.



I was surprised by how simple her canning process is. She uses cleaned old jam, jelly and pickle jars, rinses them with boiling water. She boils the lids for a few minutes, adds the boiling syrup to the jars, and then applies the lids. Take your own canning precautions.



We use this syrup for pancakes, crêpes and waffles. The flavour is bright, and unique. Unlike anything you can get commercially. Delicious.

By Bbq Dude

Pickled serranos

I recently discovered how hard it is to do home microbiology when the weather heats up. I wanted to try my hand at pickling a few other items, beyond sauerkraut, but sadly the heat led me to grow a lot of fungus. I'll have to wait until fall.

But dinner does not wait, and acidic condiments are the perfect counterpoint to greasy, smokey meat. Think coleslaw with pulled pork, and kimchi with bo ssäm.

So let's make a bright and spicy condiment, quick pickled serrano peppers.



I modified Lisa Fain's recipe, over at Homesick Texan. I substituted the vinegar in her recipe for sherry and rice vinegars. They make an uglier pickle (the vinegar is darker) but in my opinion and tastier one.

½ lb serranos, chopped
½ cup sherry vinegar
½ cup rice vinegar
½ cup sugar
1 tsp mustard seed
½ tsp whole cloves
½ tsp whole allspice
1 cinnamon stick

Mix the vinegars and seasoning. Bring to a boil.



Pack the peppers into the smallest non-reactive container you can fit them in.



Pour the hot pickle juice over the peppers, and allow to cool on the counter.



Then cover and place in the fridge. Serve as soon as 24 hours later. These quick pickles are bright, sweet and spicy. They are fantastic on sandwiches and on pizza, or next to a smoked brisket. And I'm trading them for some homemade Vietnamese hot oil. Not bad for 15 minutes of work.



Next time I'm throwing in a few spears of asparagus to soak up the pepper juice. Yum.

By Bbq Dude

Thanksgiving preparation: Volume 1.

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

Chili garlic sauce

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

Ginger-plum sauce

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

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.

Smoked salt

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).

Korean red dragon sauce

Another exciting condiment from the delightful David Chang of Momofuku. You're gonna love what we do with it (post coming soon). And really, get the book. It's awesome.

½ cup water
½ cup sugar
¾ cup ssämjang (fermented bean paste and chile sauce)
2 tbsp usukuchi (light soy sauce)
1 tsp sherry vinegar
1 tsp toasted sesame oil

Okay, I got the fermented bean paste and chile sauce mix from Nijiya, one of the local Japanese grocery stores (thanks KirkK for putting me on to that place). The paste looks like this:



And looks like this when you squeeze it out:



Yumminess!

Okay, so boil the water and sugar until they dissolve. Cool, and mix in the rest of the ingredients, stirring until dissolved.

Spicy and salty, this is really nice. Try it anywhere you'd put hot sauce. Yum.

Roasted onions

I'm kinda loving the new Momofuku book. Loving it. I mean, umami bombs of ramen deliciousness? Sign me up!

Well, had to try his version of roasted onions, as it's required for numerous dishes (and, it's gotta be good, because roasted onions go great with stuff like bratwurst). So even a failure here would probably be a pretty nice success.

So we start with

3 onions

neutral oil (I used canola)

So, chop the onions. I like to have big pieces, so chop them on the axis to give lots of rings of onion delicioiusness.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan over high heat and toss the onions in there.

As the onions start to sizzle, turn the heat down to medium. Toss the onions with a pinch of kosher salt. Now, stir the onions, only occasionally.

And continue to cook the onions, approximately an hour, until nicely browned and totally softened. Don't mistake the photo (the flash makes it appear lighter). You want a really nicely browned onion.

This is deliciousness. Caramelized and yummy, this will go great in a sandwich, on a brat, or chopped and tossed into any dish that enjoys onions. Love it. More soon.

Dad's Cranberry Sauce

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.

Worcestershire sauce

Of interest to barbecue fans everywhere:

After more than 170 years, the original recipe for Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce has been revealed. It was found in notes dating from the mid-1800s that were dumped in a skip by the sauce factory. Brian Keogh, a former Lea and Perrins accountant, discovered the notes, which were neatly written in sepia ink in two leather-bound folios, and rescued them.

As it happens, Worcestershire Sauce is related to Asian Fish Sauce. They both use fermented fish. Go figure.

The recipe?

Mayonnaise

Homemade mayonnaise has very few ingredients in it. It's basically a vegetable oil and egg yolk emulsion, so it's all technique. Some would have you believe it's difficult, but it's not. It's just a matter of adding the oil slowly enough...

I used the recipe from David Lebovitz, and I love it. It's silky, garlicky goodness. Delish. (Warning, don't proceed if eating raw egg yolks disturbs you in the slightest).

3 cloves of garlic

½ tsp salt
1 large egg yolk
1 cup (250ml) extra-virgin olive oil

Take the egg out of the fridge and warm the egg to room temperature. Room temperature eggs emulsificate more easily. Mash the garlic in a mortar and pestle or food processor until it's properly turned into a paste.

Mix the garlic into the egg yolk, and then *VERY* slowly mix in the oil. EXTREMELY slowly to start, and quite slowly towards the end. If you add the oil too quickly, you will break it - i.e. the oil will separate from the egg yolk, and you'll have globs of egg floating in oil. You don't want that. I took about 5 minutes to add one cup of oil.

Beat in all the oil, then beat in the salt. That's it. You've just made mayonnaise, and it'll be delicious on your sandwiches. Thick. Creamy. Salty. Yum.