Empanadas

Boston isn't the largest city in the U.S. Not by a long shot. But being a college-town on steroids means that it's a cosmopolitan town that attracts scientists from around the world. Despite living the furthest from Latin America in all the years that I've lived in the U.S., there is plenty of Latin cuisine here. And that often means empanadas are served at potlucks.



We've taken the Argentine recipe from Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way and cooked them on the grill.

Here we go. Make the dough and the filling the night before you plan to serve these tasty critters.

For the dough:

2 cups water
1 ½ tbsp salt
3 ½ tbsp lard
6 to 7 cups all-purpose flour

Bring the water and salt to boil. Remove from heat, and add the lard. Stir until the lard melts, then transfer to a bowl to cool.

When it's cooled to room temperature, mix in the flour, a cup at a time, until you've added 6 cups. Flour a surface, and knead the ball of dough, adding flour until you have a stiff, dry dough.



Split the dough in half.



Wrap and place in the fridge to chill overnight.

Meanwhile, make the filling:

1 lb well-marbled sirloin
coarse salt and fresh pepper
10 tbsp unsalted butter
¼ cup lard
3 medium onions
1 tbsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp paprika
4 scallions, minced and separating green and white parts
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup fresh oregano leaves
3 hard-boiled large eggs, coarsely chopped
½ cup pitted green olives, coarsely chopped

Trim the most egregious pieces of fat off of the beef. Then chop finely. Think ground beef, but not quite that fine. That's why you do it by hand, you want it to still have some texture to it, but you want it pretty fine.



Chop the onions. Sauté the onions in the 6 tbsp of butter and 1 tbsp of lard over low heat. Cook until clear.



Add the dried spices and the white part of the scallions, sauté for a few more minutes. Your kitchen will smell ridiculous at this point. Remove from heat, and mix in the remaining scallions.



Meanwhile, brown the meat in the oil over high heat. Brown a little bit at a time, we're looking to sear the meat, not boil it (and if you liberate a ton of fluid, you'll end up making beef stew).



As you finish each batch of meat, set aside to cool. Don't make piles, we're not steaming beef here.

When everything has cooled, mix the beef, onion mixture, 3 tbsp of lard and the oregano (so glad we planted oregano in the garden this year, yum!).

Chill the mixture in the fridge overnight.

On day two, peel and chop the boiled eggs, and chop the olives.



Roll out the dough to ⅛" thick.



Cut out 3 ½" circles in the dough and set aside on a floured tray. Repeat until all dough is gone.



Get filling, butter, olives and eggs ready. Place a heaping tablespoon of filling in a circle of dough. Add a tiny bit of butter, olives and eggs.



Wet the outside of the circle of dough. Fold across the mid-line, and pinch shut with a fork.



Repeat. A bunch. If you're alone because Mrs. Dude is working late, continue folding for about an hour. Heat up your grill to 350°F. Cook each tray of emapanadas by indirect heat, using a bit of cherry wood for smoke. Cook until the empanadas are nicely browned.

Remove from heat and cool.



Serve. The lard creates a beautifully crunchy crust. And the salty, spicy, fat filling. In the language of the young folk. OMGWTFBBQ.  Really. It's that good.


By Bbq Dude

Charred & Scruffed-inspired ribeye

So with the imminent arrival of summer, we should be returning to lots and *lots* of smoked and grilled meat. And this summer, unlike last summer, we're not moving cross-country, so there will be nothing distracting the Dude family from plenty of bbq'd meat. Conveniently, the object of my man-crush (Adam Perry Lang) has published a new book. Charred & Scruffed. After his Serious Barbecue, I've been a huge fan.

Well, Charred & Scruffed is a bit more faddish. There are several silly techniques in this book. Rather than creating various heat zones on the grill, he advocates cooking your meat high off the grill (by creating towers of bricks on top of your grill), or cooking close to the coals. Okay, well... that's silly. I create crazy hot and less hot zones in the bbq (based on number of screaming hot coals). But, as always, his flavors are *on*. This steak is inspired by his "High-Low Boneless Ribeye".

We start with the rub:

2 tbsp kosher salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp fresh ground pepper
¼ tsp cayenne pepper

Mix the rub and sprinkle all over your boneless ribeye steaks (we've done this several times now, it's better if your ribeyes are dry-aged).



Let the rub soak in, while you get a crazy hot charcoal fire on your grill. Make a drink. A margarita, perhaps.



Also, make your basting butter:

¾ cup extra virgin olive oil
5 tbsp unsalted butter
½ tsp soy sauce
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tbsp dark brown sugar
1 tbsp grated garlic
½ tbsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
1 tbsp grated onion
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
½ tsp red pepper flakes
¼ cup cider vinegar
½ tbsp ketchup
½ tbsp yellow mustard

Combine all of these ingredients in a saucepan. Heat over low heat (there's something naughty about melting butter in olive oil). Mix frequently, remove from heat when everything is melted and well mixed.



When you get crazy hot coals, arrange the coals in your bbq such that you have a crazy hot space (high density of charcoal) and a much less dense space (for cooler grilling).

This recipe is backwards from many. Rather than using high heat to caramelize your steak, then cooling it down to finish it, you're going to slowly heat your steak over the cool coals, flipping frequently. This is just to get your steak hot.



After twelve-ish minutes, when your steaks are nowhere *near* cooked, remove them from the heat.



Baste them all over with the basting butter. Slather them with basting butter, and let them hang out for a few minutes. Given that the basting butter is a mix of fat of delicious juices, make sure you're mixing frequently as you're basting (this is no emulsion, it's a juicy fat-bomb).

Now, toss them back over extremely high heat. (Keep in mind, this method will not produce beautiful, perfect grill marks - but as our saviour Adam Perry Lang says - do you want those anyway? We aim for delicious.)



Alright, now flip every one to two minutes.



When they feel done, they're done. Medium-rare feels like that fleshy spot between your thumb and your hand when you make a fist. Drizzle a cutting board with olive oil, lime juice, chopped parsley and cayenne.



Toss your cooked steak onto the cutting board to rest.



After five minutes (if you can stand waiting) - serve.

This is Mrs. Dude's new favorite steak. I expect to make this many times this summer. Happy grilling.

EDIT: Many thanks to reader Joerg for catching a few typos. Please contact me with typos you identify.

By Bbq Dude

Buttermilk fried bunny

I am rather behind on my blogging. We haven't stopped cooking, eating, or snapping photos of our dinners. I've just been slow on doing anything with the files. Take this dinner - from Easter - that has been sitting on my hard drive. Since 1994, I've been eating rabbit for Easter. It just seems a propos. See, for example, our grilled rabbit. Or my personal favourite, inspired by Dr. Ricky, our chocolate Easter bunny.



This year, we tried something new. Inspired by one of my favourite blogs, we cooked up a buttermilk fried rabbit. Because everything is better fried.

Hank knows good food, so we didn't mess with his recipe much, other than to up the heat a little:

2 domestic rabbits
2 cups buttermilk
½ cup of mixed chopped fresh herbs (I used fresh thyme and oregano)
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp garlic powder
4 tsp cayenne
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
2 cups vegetable oil

Mix the buttermilk, herbs, paprika, garlic powder and cayenne. Dismantle your Easter bunnies (or get the butcher to do it for you), and soak the pieces in the buttermilk for 8 hours.



Mix the flour and salt. Drain the bunny bits, and then lightly toss them in the flour mixture, and set aside on a plate.



Heat your oil to 325°C. I find it easier to fry with a thermometer, you make fewer errors. Remember when frying, gently set your bunny into the hot oil. The closer you are when you let go of the bunny, the less likely you are to splash oil on yourself. Do not be afraid of the hot oil, and you won't get burned.

Fry about 12 minutes per side, or until the flour turns a nice dark brown.



Remove the fried bunny, and drain on paper towel. Mrs. Dude says this was her favourite bunny ever. Favourite. Bunny. Ever. She was tremendously excited by the fried bunny, and because it was fried, it was relatively low effort.



By Bbq Dude

Bo ssäm (pork brûlée)

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

Beef tongue with arugula, salsa verde and caramelized onions

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