Hollandaise sauce

Mrs. Dude has a new gig and a new boss. Turns out he's a bit of a foodie, with home-raised chickens and bees. Our first big win? Fresh eggs. The shells are a lovely light green, and the yolks are sturdy. Separating them, I couldn't have easily broken them.



What to do with these lovely things? We started with a hollandaise sauce. I used the recipe from The New Making of a Cook, with only a few small modifications.

⅓ cup plus 2 tbsp water
3 tbsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice
½ tsp salt
white pepper
3 large egg yolks
½ lb unsalted butter, melted

Mix the lemon juice and ⅓ cup of water, salt and pepper. Heat over high and reduce to 2 tbsp. Remove from heat and let cool.

Whisk in egg yolks, then put over medium heat. Whisk over medium heat until it makes a nice foamy mess. Continue whisking, and slowly add in the melted butter. The trick to making a beautiful emulsion is to add the butter slowly. You really can't go too slowly. Occasionally, you can add a few drops of water from your remaining 2 tbsp of water. But keep whisking, and keep adding the butter. Slowly.



If you do it properly, you'll end with a nice, featureless yellow sauce. When everything is added, season to taste, and hold over low heat. Under no circumstances should you accidentally turn up the heat because you wanted to heat a different element. Really, don't crank it up, you might break the sauce and have to start over. And that would be sad. I'm just sayin.



Serve over eggs, or asparagus, or any delicious place. Yum.


By Bbq Dude

Ssäm ssauce

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

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 teaspoons plum 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

Thanksgiving preparation: Volume 4.

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

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.

Turkey gravy

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.

Turkey stock

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.

Lemon confit

One of my favourite bbq books, Adam Perry Lang's Serious Barbecue, has a very particular way for finishing meat. In many cases, he suggests zesting a lemon or lime onto a cutting board. You then drizzle a little juice on the board, with a bit of olive oil, and you have a delightful finisher for the meat. The bright flavour of the citrus oils really brightens the meat.

Seven Fires offers a similar technique. They call it lemon confit. The flavour it offers is a subtler, more muted citrus oil flavour, but it's just as delightful. We start with:

4 lemons
2 bay leaves
8 black peppercorns
extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tsp kosher salt

Juice the lemons. Save the juice for another application (lemonade, anyone?). Place the squeeze lemon halves into a pan with all of the other ingredients, and 2 tsp of the extra virgin olive oil.



Cover with water, and simmer over low heat about 35 minutes.



What you want is for the white pith of the lemon to loosen from the peel. Cool the liquid.



Remove the lemons from the liquid and scrape the white parts out of the peel.



Chop the peel finely.



Drizzle olive oil over top of the confit lemon. Cover. This will store in the fridge for a least a week. Use this lemon confit to dress up meat, and add a milder zest flavour to your meat.

Chimichurri sauce

'Twas my birthday last week. I only mention this because Mrs. Dude gave me a lovely new bbq book that you're going to be hearing about. Because it's awesome. So thanks, Mrs. Dude.  Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way has all kinds of deliciousness.

First up, a bright, traditional Argentine sauce, Chimichurri. Make this a day in advance, as the flavours will blend nicely as it sits in the fridge:

1 cup water
1 tbsp coarse salt
1 head garlic
1 cup packed fresh flat leaf parsley leaves
1 cup fresh oregano leaves
2 tsp red pepper flakes
¼ cup red wine vinegar
½ cup extra virgin olive oil

Boil the water and dissolve the salt in the water. Let cool.

Peel and chop the garlic finely. Chop the parsley and fresh oregano leaves finely. This part is awesome, as the kitchen smells of bright, fresh oregano flavours.



Mix all the herbs.  Whisk in the vinegar, then the oil and finally the brine mixture.  Let sit for up to a day before serving.



The fresh oregano flavours in this chimichurri sauce are really nice.  This has convinced me I need to add an oregano plant to our herb garden.  I'm looking forward to more Argentine fun.