Breaking the dam

I’ve been going through a culinary dry spell of late. My muse has just not been singing for the last two weeks. I’ve been rather content to rest on my laurels, professionally, (which, when I catch myself doing such a thing, infuriates me to no end) until I was faced with a challenge. One of my clients wanted mussels.

“Yeah, so? Cook them some mussels and get over yourself.”

I’m a lover of all things shellfish and make a mean cozze in bianco or a red curry broth for the mussels, but I needed to do something different, something that I’ve never done before-something to end the culinary constipation. I started thinking about flavors – the musky, gaminess of the mussels. What would go well with that? Well, ginger, garlic, maybe some lemongrass; but something was missing - the earthy funk of dried mushrooms.

OK, so I’ve got a broth, but it’s a little boring. What would liven the flavor up? Some heat, some tart, some sweet might be nice. But what if I put that into the broth? Would those flavors get muted and lost? I started thinking about oysters. Not the oysters that you get on the beach for $6.50 a dozen, with a side of cocktail sauce and some Saltines; the oysters that you pay $15 a dozen for in the fancy restaurants. What about the ubiquitous mignonette (for lack of a better description, an oil-less vinaigrette) that comes with them? What if I had the earthy broth, with a hot, sweet, tart dip for the mussels? All right, now I’m on to something.

Making the broth is pretty simple, there’s no need for a real recipe. I took 1 bottle of clam juice, a piece of ginger root about as big as my thumb and sliced it, 2 cloves of garlic- sliced, and 2 stalks of lemongrass – which I beat the crap out of with the back side of my knife and cut into 3 inch pieces. I put these together in a skillet, along with a fist full of dried mushrooms (I used matsutake mushrooms that I found at Oceanic Market). I brought this up to a simmer and then lowered the heat and let this steep for 20 minutes; just like making tea.

While the broth was steeping, I made the mignonette. For that I used:

Zest and juice of one tangerine
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 red jalapeno chili - stemmed, seeded, and minced
1 tablespoon minced shallot
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Mix these together in a bowl – you’re done.

After 20 minutes, I strained the broth. I didn’t have to, and you don’t either. I didn’t want the chunks of lemongrass and ginger in the finished broth, so I strained it. Put the broth back in the pan and bring it to a boil. Add 1 pound of mussels and slap a lid on it. Wait about 3 minutes and lift the lid. If the mussels are open, it’s done. If not, put the lid back on, wait one minute, and check again. When the mussels are done, eat them right out of the shell, with the broth, and dip them in the mignonette.

Now for the gotcha; I didn’t teach you how to make mussels. I taught you how to create a recipe. Start with a main item – mussels. Next, a technique – steaming. Finally, think about the flavors that the main item has, and flavors that will play them up and accent them in a way that you find pleasing. In my case, it took two different mediums to convey the flavor that I wanted. Most often, you can do this in one, but don’t limit yourself.

**Oh yeah, I finally posted something that can be cooked in 30 minutes.

A big steaming bowl of hate.....

I hate restaurant breakfasts. There, I said it. With few exceptions, including Kerby Lane in Austin and Mother’s in New Orleans, breakfast food in restaurants just plain sucks. It doesn’t have to, but it does. Mind you that my first leap from dishwasher to line cook happened when the entire line walked out one Friday night and I was the last person left working – flipping pancakes in a Perkins.

What brought on this tirade? Well, my wife and I spent this weekend in Daytona Beach, a stinky armpit of a seaside hellhole. (They’re my metaphors; I’ll mix them as I choose.) My hopes were far from high in regards to finding anything even halfway decent to eat in that run down tourist trap. But then, there’s this diner, an authentic 50’s came-on-a-rail-car aluminum diner. I perked up and turned away from the door of IHOP and thought, “surely a real diner has real food, it’ll probably be pretty good”. This particular diner has local ties that I won’t reveal and I’d never tried the food at the local version, so I was without proper forewarning as to the quality.

I judge breakfast by the quality of their biscuits and gravy. Yeah, a big steaming plate of clogged arteries. Locally, I’ve found exactly one place that serves a decent plate of them – Martha’s. This is such a simple freakin’ dish, it’s almost impossible to screw it up, but most do. Biscuits and gravy usually suck and I usually leave the joint in a bad mood. This place went beyond that, I didn’t finish a single thing that I ordered because it was just bad. This included the coffee.

Country gravy has the potential to be creamy, pork filled nectar. It’s usually a starchy, barely flowing blob with no flavor, save uncooked flour. With something so simple, why do people feel the need to cut even more corners? Christ, it takes 30 minutes to make, start to finish and it will be good. Guess that’s just not fast enough. Wanna make some?

Grab a tube of sausage, any sausage, like Jimmy Dean. Brown the sausage really well in a medium sized saucepan. Render the fat out of the sausage, the fat is flavor, you need it. Grab a whisk and add about ¼ cup of flour. Stir the flour into the fat and sausage until it’s smooth and about the consistency of wet sand. Let this cook for about 2-3 minutes, stirring pretty frequently to avoid burning. This is called a roux – which is French for fat and flour napalm.

Now add about 1 quart of whole milk. Stir this whole mess to make it smooth. Bring the milk up to a simmer and you’ll see the whole thing start to change. It’s going to start getting thick. If it’s too thick, add a little more milk, but this should be pretty thick. Let this cook for about 20 minutes, until the gravy loses its floury taste. Add some salt to taste, and an assload of black pepper- preferably fresh ground. Pour it over some biscuits, potatoes, eggs, a burrito, fill a coffee cup with it and drink it, whatever. That’s all there is to it. If you can make this non-suck gravy at home, why can’t some knucklehead in a diner do the same?

I'm big on the pig

“Dear benevolent, caring, handsome Mr. Meat,

I love a good rack of BBQ Ribs however, I am a miserable failure and throw myself at your mercy. I always seem to either A) burn them or B) not cook them through and then have to finish them in the oven. I like to use a Brown Sugar Rub and a Molasses sauce for basting.

Most Respectfully,
The Urban Eater”

huh, she said rack...(OK enough of the infantile crap)

Ribs… too much pork for just one fork. I love me some.

Brown sugar and molasses – both forms of sugar. Sugar can be sweet, caramel nectar, but most often in grilling, it transforms into wasted carbon – a wholly indigestible and rather unpleasant tasting element.

aww shite, another freakin’ science lesson

Sugar burns at the rather low temperature of right around 350 degrees. So the answer to the burning problem is to keep both the ambient (air inside the grill) and direct (from the fire or the grates) temperature below 350 degrees; preferably about 100 degrees below. This means banking a slow fire in your grill. You don’t want happy, glowing orange coals 3 inches from the meat. If the temperature never comes close to 350, it really can’t burn, can it? You can cook the ribs so long that there’s no moisture left and you have pork jerky, but it’s physically impossible to turn the sugars to carbon.

Now for the undercooking issue; to achieve that tender, fall off the bone quality that good ribs have, you need to bring the internal temperature of the rib meat to 180-190 degrees (well done pork is about 170 degrees). If you keep the temperature of the grill at about 250 degrees to avoid the burning of the sugar, this means that it takes no short amount of time to bring the internal temperature of the meat to 180-190. Simply put, it just ain’t gonna happen in 45 minutes. More like 2-3 hours. Patience, something that I’m rather low on, is your best friend in cooking ribs. Oh yeah, so is planning.

Insert some pun using the word "eggs" here

From a devoted reader:

“Dear benevolent, caring, handsome Mr. (Bad) Meat,

I've never been able to master the omelet, nor even make one successfully. I am ashamed. I am a miserable failure and throw myself at your mercy. Please help me.

Most Respectfully,
Dave”

Yes, it’s entirely puerile that I giggle at being called Mr. Meat, but it’s the simple things that keep me from looking my age.

Omelets are deceptively difficult to make. It seems easy; eggs, fillings, fold it, done. But physics, chemistry, and human error all come into play. It seems that I just cannot give a simple answer to much of anything, doesn’t it?

Let’s look at making a simple, cheese omelet, ‘kay?

You need a pan, preferably a non-stick pan. You need a heat source, preferably a stove. You need some eggs, preferably from a chicken. And you need some cheese, preferably dairy. I don’t make a classic omelet, but I make a pretty good one, I must say. OK, here we go.

Break 3 eggs into a mixing bowl. Add a bit of milk, cream, or even water. Just a splash; it doesn’t take much. Here comes the chemistry lesson. Have you ever tried to scramble an egg but whatever you do, you still have stringy whites running through it? The whites are mostly a protein called albumin, which is rather ropy. The milk, cream, or water helps break up the albumin and make a more pleasant texture. Season the eggs with some salt and pepper.

Put your non-stick pan on medium heat and add about 1 tablespoon of canola oil. This may seem like a lot of oil and contrary to classical technique, but I find that this much oil lets the eggs ride on top of the oil while they set. Now, while your oil is heating, grab a whisk and beat the ever-loving crap out of your eggs. The more air that you incorporate into the eggs, the lighter the omelet.

Is the pan hot enough? Take a DROP of water on your finger and throw it into the oil. If the oil reacts quite loudly, but is not yet smoking, your oil is hot enough. Grab a rubber spatula and have it at the ready. Pour the beaten and beleaguered eggs into the oil. The eggs will immediately start setting and getting fluffy around the edges. Take your rubber spatula and start pushing the edges in, allowing the unset eggs on top to become the new edge (trying to keep the omelet circular). Once there is just a thin film of unset egg on top of the set part of the eggs, it’s time to flip the omelet. This entire process should take no longer than 2 minutes.

Don’t worry if you can’t pull off the no-spatula flip. It is perfectly acceptable to invert your pan onto a plate and then slide the omelet back in. Let the omelet set for about 30 seconds. Now, pile your cheese in the middle of the omelet. Don’t try to add a half a pound; good flavor is all about balance. Let’s not fail to mention that too much cheese will add to the chances of the eggs being runny.

Fold the omelet in half, making the classic crescent shape, and slide it out of the pan and onto a plate. Lather, rinse, repeat.

See? It works

I've received my first "help me" post:

"Dear benevolent, caring, handsome Mr. (Bad) Meat,

I love a good cream-based sauce (not necessarily alfredo, but that's an example) however, I am a miserable failure and throw myself at your mercy. The damn thing always breaks. I do not want to resort to flour or other thickener. Please help me.

Most Respectfully,
joe positive"

Well Joe, I think that I can help you. There are a few things to consider.

First, what is cream? Cream is a combination of water, fat, and milk solids suspended in solution. This suspension is called "emulsification" How a cream sauce thickens is by boiling it. What's that steam rising from the pan? It's water, and the way that the sauce thickens is by reducing the water content in the cream, leaving fat and milk solids and thinkening the sauce. The "emulsification" is held in state by a proper balance of water to fat and milk solids.

"Thanks for the science lesson, you pompous bastard". (not from Joe, but from me)

How does this translate to how why your sauce breaks? You're cooking too much water out of the sauce. In making an Alfredo sauce, where you add cheese, reduce the sauce to almost the consistency that you want, and THEN add the cheese, stirring like your life depends on it. By adding the cheese too early, you're increasing the fat content of the emulsion, which means the sauce will break before enough water cooks out to make it thick. If not adding cheese, reduce the heat from a rapid boil to a simmer as the sauce starts to get close to the proper thickness. You'll have a better point of view and more control over the boil.

If all else fails, and your sauce still breaks, you can save it by pouring it into a blender, add a couple of drops of water (to get the balance of fat and water back) and set the blender on puree for about 10 seconds. Instant re-emulsification.

Hope this helps.

"I have abandoned hope on trying to make....."

I watch too much TV. Food Network has been on TV since I woke up this morning. Cleaning the house to Boy Meets Grill, cleaning litter boxes to the Barefoot Contessa (how appropriate)and now I'm making pizza to Diners Drive Ins and Dives. How else can I justify my cable bill as a legitimate business expense?

Well, from this much TV working it's way into my thought processes, I came up with an idea. I'm going to help you. By you, I mean you, specifically, the person reading this page. Have you tried repeatedly, yet failed miserably to make a certain dish? I'm here to rescue your kitchen failures. OK, so maybe I'm just testing the blog readership level. Mal Carne, it's a household name.

If you are in need of rescue, just post a comment to this post - something like:

"Dear benevolent, caring, handsome Mr. (Bad) Meat,

I love insert dish here however, I am a miserable failure and throw myself at your mercy. Please help me.

Most Respectfully,
hopeless reader"

Give it a try, you just might learn something.

Life in a vacuum

No, this isn't about living in Florida.

My job is a little different than a restaurant chef. In the course of my week, on a slow week, I make 35 different meals based on a client’s individual preference. Easy, right? Now add to the equation the questions of a) can the dish be frozen or refrigerated? b) will the dish stand up to reheating c) what kind of kitchen does the client have? and d) can I do 10-15 meals with a side in 3 ½ to four hours? In this, I’m always looking for new techniques that make my life easier and, more importantly, result in some kick-ass food. I finally had a chance to try a technique today that I’ve been curious about for a long time. Sous Vide. French for “under vacuum”.

This technique isn’t new, it dates back quite some time – possibly to post war France. It was devised as a means to prepare food in one location and serve it in another. Possible uses could be, say, preparing food in a restaurant kitchen and serving at a banquet on the beach. I first heard of it about 14 years ago, when the only people doing it were the French and those elitist nutjobs in NY.

I say “elitist nutjobs” in the sense of the time. Back then I was working on the west coast, and the east/west rivalry doesn’t only exist in the hip-hop world. These were the days before celebrity chefs - although names like Waters, Tower, and Trotter were well known, but mostly to those in the business. In fact, those of us who weren’t sweethearts of the media, who toiled away night after night to adoring crowds but to relative media anonymity, looked down their nose at those who were with a sneer (perhaps jealousy) and used the derisive term “glam chef” – as in “You don’t even cook anymore, you f*cking glam chef, poser.”

Whut, OK, I’m back. Anyway, I left the business for a while and found myself playing catch up when I got back in. Sous Vide is now so commonplace that you can probably find it in Iowa City. However, I missed those years and was eager to try it.

My Experiment

As the “vacuum” part implies, food is cooked in a vacuum, a seal-a-meal. The idea is to put a piece of protein in a vacuum package and cook the package in water under a controlled temperature. The vacuum, combined with seasonings on the meat, force the flavorings into the meat, resulting in a flavorful, tender piece of meat that cannot be over cooked because of the controlled temperature. In my case, I tried a plain, old boring chicken thigh.

I seasoned the thigh simply with fresh thyme, garlic, and salt and pepper. I sealed this using a Food Saver vacuum sealer. In a technique of cooking that is highly unnatural, direct heat is never applied to the food. I put a pan of water on the stove and brought it to 158 degrees. Why 158? Well, the recommended temperature for cooking a piece of chicken in this manner is 151 degrees, just enough to cook it. However, due to the force of the stove that I was using, at it’s lowest setting the coolest temperature I could attain was 158. So, anyway, at 158 degrees, I placed the bag in the water.

Here’s where the beauty of sous vide kicks in – by cooking the meat at this temperature, which goes no lower nor higher, you cannot over cook the meat. Over cooking comes with temperature, so if I put this into a pot of boiling water, sure, I would over cook the meat simply due to the ambient temperature of the pot, if I left it in too long. The meat would eventually reach a temperature of the water that surrounds it, which is way too much. However, at 158, the meat will never reach a temperature higher than 158, you following me? You can leave it in for days, and it will never over cook, because it’s not hot enough to over cook it. This is a stoner’s (or, like me, someone who’s easily distracted) dream. You can’t screw it up.

So anyway after 2 ½ hours in the 158-degree bath, I estimated the heat of the water had made its way to the center of my tiny chicken thigh. Proper experimentation process would probably dictate that I put a probe thermometer in the center of the meat to ensure accuracy of the 158-degree goal, but hey, I’m workin’ here. I don’t have time for such niceties and if, 28 years after I first set foot in a professional kitchen, I can’t judge the doneness of a piece of freakin’ chicken, I should get my ass out of the business.

The transformation was a bit on the strange side. Yup, there was a cooked piece of chicken, sitting in a vacuum sealed bag, but all of the juices that come out during the cooking process were surrounding the meat.

Now for the tasting… Will it be good, or will it be a freak show adventure into technique for technique’s sake……

Well, I can honestly say that the meat is incredibly tender, moist, and flavorful, thanks to the vacuum sealing and the pressure exerted forcing the flavoring into the meat. No weird texture, which was my biggest fear. It tastes exactly like a braised piece of chicken.

2 ½ hours for one braised chicken thigh? It’s good, but it ain’t that good.

This was an experiment in the technique’s most basic form. Expanding on the technique, I’ve read about chefs cooking a loin of lamb sous vide and then grilling or pan searing the meat for the Maillard carmelization. This sounds pretty interesting and stands some further investigation. Until then, I can only say that the results were good, but nothing deserving of it’s wide spread hype, and this might serve me well in my day to day work.

A bowl of red

OK, so three rapid fire posts and then nothing for a week. Well, a guy’s gotta work, and a guy’s gotta find proper blog fodder. My adoring wife/business partner/harshest critic got a hankering for chili yesterday; the light bulb came on in my head, my toy camera has a new rubber band, and I can bring you all more food that takes forever to cook.

Thankfully, I can draw no references from Thomas Keller in the world of chili. Although Friday night I did learn of his favorite Bay Area wine shop, but I’m not telling where it is.

Everybody’s got his or her favorite type of chili. The Airstream from Ohio, Texas, beans, no beans, hamburger, the list goes on. I like a Texas style chili, but I have to have beans, which could get me shot in some locales. 8 years ago, I’d never tried to make chili. I somehow thought of it as beneath me. What the hell was I thinking? I love chili, why should it be beneath me to make it? One day I took stock of my favorite flavors, consulted my father in law (who, according to my wife, made the greatest chili known to man), found that my ideas were on the right track, and set to work. The result needed little to no refinement.

There are four components to the chili that I make; meat, vegetables, beans, and seasonings. First for the beans. Never in my life have I had the forethought that I might be making chili the next day. Consequently, I never have beans soaked before I get the chili bug. Soaking the beans softens the beans and removes acids that cause the rather unpleasant side effects of consuming large quantities of legumes. To get around my lack of planning, I use the quick soak method. I put ½ a pound of beans in 2 quarts of water with a teaspoon of baking soda and bring them to a boil. As soon as they boil, I turn the heat off and let them soak for an hour. The baking soda counters the lime quotient of our local water. In not using the baking soda, I’ve cooked beans for 2 days without them getting soft.

Beans soaking, time for the meat. I used about 2 pounds of beef shoulder. Use any cut of beef that’s suitable for braising. I cleaned the shoulder and cut it into roughly ¾ inch cubes.


Next come the seasonings. In a rough approximation of a dry rub, I coated the meat well with chili powder, oregano, cumin, ground pasilla chiles, salt, and fresh ground black pepper. Normally, you don’t want to salt meat too early, because salt draws water from the meat, making it dry and tough. In this case, the meat is only going to sit as long as it takes me to cut my veggies.

For veggies, I use one green bell pepper, one medium onion, about 5-6 garlic cloves, 2 jalapeno peppers - with seeds, and two Serrano peppers – with the seeds and membranes removed (I try to keep the heat factor down to a point where my wife finds it still edible, but I want the flavors of the two chiles). Dice all of these up, put them in a bowl, and set them aside until needed.


I put a large pot on medium heat (about 6 on my electric stove) and added a film of canola oil. You don’t have to specifically use canola oil, but you do need some type of oil, and canola is cheap, has a pretty neutral flavor, and doesn’t smoke at such a low temperature as olive oil. Working in small batches, I added my beef to the pot and browned it well on all sides. Remove the meat as it’s done, and repeat. See the pork tenderloin post for why we brown the meat and why we work in small batches.

After the meat is browned and removed from the pot, add the veggies. Stir them around and scrape up all of the lovely brown bits off of the bottom of the pan. That right there is flavor, and you don’t want to waste it. If you want to know why you can’t add the veggies with the meat, you didn’t read the pork tenderloin post, did you?

At this point we can add the meat back to the pan along with the beans, a 28-ounce can of (good) tomato puree, and 2 quarts of beef stock, about ½ a bottle of Miller High life does well, too. It doesn’t take too much imagination to know what I do with the other ½ bottle. Flavoring this lovely broth is a process. At this point, add some oregano, chiles, chili powder, salt, pepper, and cumin. Let your individual taste guide you in how much of each, I can’t tell you exactly how much, because you might like a different amount of each flavor. What is important is that you add these ingredients in 3 different batches; once when you put the sauce together, once about 2 hours into cooking, and once about 30 minutes before the chili is done. Why? Complexity of flavors. As you add the seasonings and let them cook in, the seasonings go through physical changes and become part of the sauce. By adding them at 3 different points, you get the flavors of the seasonings at 3 different stages of cooking. If you want a flat tasting chili, season it once and call it good. If you want nice, sensuous, complex chili, put in the extra work.

Bring the pot up to a simmer, about 2-3 on my electric stove, but do not let it boil. Chili is essentially a stew; a braise. In braising, we want to gently simmer the meat in order to make it tender, flavorful, and moist. Boiling will make the meat tough, dry, and chewy. Simmer equals sexy; Angelina Jolie on your plate. Boiling equals all of the lust inducing charisma of Larry the Cable Guy. Your choice, your kink. Let this simmer for two hours before adding the second dose of seasoning.

About two hours after the second round of seasoning, check the texture of your meat. It should be pretty close to falling apart tender. Add your third round of seasoning and patiently wait for about 30 minutes. The sauce should be rich and thick (something that’s helped by the starches in the beans, so take that, bean hating chili purists) and almost brown, with an orange tint. At this point, you can serve it with your favorite accoutrements. I highly advise several cold bottles of beer as one of those accessories. I realize that I should have a pic of the finished product, but I ated it.

Yeah, it's Florida, but it's warm here

Winter in Florida, gotta love it. While the rest of the country woke up to the realities of tire chains and scraping windshields, I woke up to a chilly 59 degrees, and felt the tropics coursing through my veins. What does this mean? Well, to me, it means food. What better way to experience the tropics in a sub-tropical environment than to eat? So I set myself to cooking – a pork tenderloin cured with citrus and jerk type spices with a tangerine and green onion relish. This year has been declared the year of the bacon, but the pork tenderloin comes close enough.

Curing – wet or dry?

First, what is curing? It’s a method of partially cooking meat while infusing flavor. Bacon is cured before it’s smoked, so is salmon, prosciutto is only cured – without the smoke. It’s a good thing. There are two ways to cure meats, dry – like bacon, or wet – using brine. Dry curing tends to take much longer, packing the meat in a sugar and salt mixture with herbs and spices for flavoring. The curing process can take anywhere from 24 hrs to a couple of weeks. I don’t have a couple of weeks I want to eat now! So, I chose a wet cure, a brine. The advantage of the brine is that the salt and flavoring elements are suspended in solution, allowing for better, more uniform coverage and faster penetration (huh… he said penetrate) into the meat. My brine took about 6 hours to do it’s magic. Much better than the dry cure – but bare in mind that dry curing has its place.

To make my brine, I tweaked Thomas Keller’s excellent recipe to fit my needs. I cannot find a link on the web to it, but the recipe can be found on pages 325-326 of “Bouchon”. **Three posts and two mentions of Keller. I swear that I don’t have a man crush on the guy. But he is kinda cute.** For my brine:

1 gallon water
1 C sea salt
¼ C orange blossom honey
8 bay leaves
½ C garlic cloves, crushed, with skin left on
2 T crushed black peppercorns
1 T crushed allspice
2 cinnamon sticks
2 tsp cloves, crushed in a mortar and pestle
½ bunch thyme sprigs
2 ea oranges, zested and juiced
2 ea limes, zested and juiced
2 ea lemons, zested and juiced

Mix all of the ingredients in a large pot, bring to a boil for 1 minute, stirring to dissolve salt, and allow to cool to room temperature before using

Now it’s time to cure the tenderloins. For 4 people, I used roughly two pounds – or two pork tenderloins and cut them into 4 equal portions. I placed them in a large roasting pot, and covered them with the brine. Into the fridge for 6 hours and we’ll see you later.

6 hours later:

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Remove the pork from the brine, rinse them well, and dry them thoroughly. Why dry them? You know that lovely, crunchy, brown coating that all good roasted meat has? That’s a result of carmelization; in this case, we are not trying to carmelize sugars, but rather the protein of the meat. This is called Malliard carmelization, and it cannot occur in the presence of water. So there, that’s why we dry the meat.

Heat a large pan over medium heat, about 5-6 on an electric stove. Add just a thin sheen of canola oil and test the heat. Season your pork well with salt and freshly ground pepper. Grab one of your pork pieces, place a corner of the meat into the pan and see if you get an instant, loud sizzle from the pan. If not, get the pork out of there and let the pan heat a little while longer. When you get that sizzle, add two of the pork pieces. Why not all? Because of simple physics, adding all of the pork would drop the temperature of the pan, and what we want here is a quick searing of the meat, to lock in moisture and that lovely carmelization. If the pan is too cool, we’ll lose quite a bit of juices, which will make your meat rather dry, and remember what I said about the water up there in the last paragraph?

Don’t feel the need to move these around. It’s bad, it’s counter productive to our stated goals. Don’t do it. You’ll be able to see the edges of the meat getting brown and crispy. When you see this, turn the meat over and give it the same treatment. Remove the pork onto a sheet pan and repeat with the other two pieces.

After all of this work, we’re ready to roast the meat. Place the sheet pan of porky goodness into the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, until the pork, when tested with a thermometer in the thickest part, reaches a temperature of 140 degrees. Remove the sheet pan from the oven, and place the meat on a plate, or a wire rack is even better if you have one.

What we’re trying to do here is keep the meat moist. During the roasting process, all of the lovely, tasty juices rush to the outside of the meat, it’s just what happens, damn physics. If we cut the meat now, all of that moisture and flavor will be lost. By letting the meat “rest” we’re letting the juices return to their natural state, distributed throughout the meat. We won’t lose so much when we cut into the meat, and your meat will be good, versus bad if we went the other way.

While the meat is “resting” it’s time to make the tangerine and green onion relish:

2 ea tangerines, peeled and segmented, with the juice that runs out *(seeds aren’t necessary, nor desirable)
1 bunch green onions, sliced thin
¼ cup walnuts, roasted and chopped
½ ea jalapeno, minced
½ ea habanero, minced
1 T orange blossom honey
About the chiles – yeah, they’re hot. To get the flavor of the chiles without the heat, they need some work. Take a very sharp knife and ¼ the chile. See the seeds and that white membrane? The seeds have heat, the membrane has even more. Take the knife and more or less fillet the chile, removing the seeds and membranes in one fell swoop. Then mice them. It’ll be fine, I swear. Then mix the rest of the ingredients together.

Serve the hunk of porky joy with the tangerine relish. I'm in the tropics, now. Where's my damn pina colada?

Almost 10 things that make me hate a restaurant

I'm an easily irritated person when I go to restaurants. I expect a minimum level of competency and service for my dollar. All too often, I'm left disappointed, even with my relatively low expectations. Here is a list of a few things that just plain chap my ass when I go out to eat.

1)Choice of salad dressings - hey there Chef, it's your dish - finish it. Don't leave it to me to find the proper accompaniment. That's just plain lazy and/or outdated.

2)Dressing on the side - A salad is meant to be dressed. Ideally, the lettuce should be oiled to protect it, then seasoned, then flavored with acid and any other elements. You have bowls and tongs in your kitchen - I have too much crap piled into a too small serving vessel and a fork. Who's in a better position to toss it, me or you? Again, just plain lazy.

3)Saving my fork - When you clear my plate between courses, do not drop my fork on the filthy-ass table. Proper service would dictate that you bring a clean fork to replace the one that you just took if I don't have a clean one already set for me.

4)"Enjoy" - All servers are hereby allocated 4 "enjoy"'s per shift. Use them wisely.

5)Don't talk down to me when explaining dishes or wines - There's a really good chance that this writer knows more about the subject that you're condescending to me about than you ever will. Food is my life, you're just doing this while you finish school.

6)May I join you? - Please feel free to not sit down at my table while telling me about the specials. It's called personal space.

7)Hello, my name is..... - I don't care. This is a business transaction here. If I want to take this to a personal level, I'll tell you my name and then ask yours, as ettiquete dictates.

8)Touching - somewhere on the west coast back in the 90's someone came to the conclusion that touching a client on the arm makes a more solid connection between them and the client. It doesn't. See #7.


Most folks do a top 10. As I said, my expectations are low, I only have 8. What are yours?

A man, a can, and a plan

I wanted my inaugural post to be the antithesis of the alarming trend in American cooking - meals in 30 minutes or less. Sure, everybody's busy and finding time to cook rates just below clipping one's toenails, but there is more to life than "here's some evoo.....yumm-o". So with that in mind, I bring you some slow food - really slow food.

"THE PLAN"

I love BBQ. One rather nice Saturday afternoon in January, I craved it. I'm really picky about BBQ, though, so I don't eat it that often. There is an analogy about sex and pizza that gets drug out every so often. It's not true!! Bad pizza and bad sex are bad. Telling yourself anything different is settling for the lowest common denominator and makes you a bad lay. The same is true with BBQ. If I can do better myself, why would I pay for it?

While I can't help you with your sex life, I can try to help you make good BBQ.

Walking through my rather neglected back yard,one will find this beauty:



"THE CAN"

Yeah, it ain't pretty, but pure magic comes out of this can. My wife bought it for me for Valentine's Day about 6 years ago. She loves me. There are many different types of smokers out there, use what you like. I'm old school and really wouldn't like any other type of smoker. I'm stubborn like that.

The first step in smoking would, of course, be providing a source of smoke. Fire. I used a couple of hunks of oak that were lying in a neighbors yard and built my fire. For smoking, you don't want a classic cooking fire - hot coals, etc. You want a slow, smoldering fire that will draw indians from miles away.



While waiting for the fire to reach it's proper state, I turned my attentition to the chicken that I had in my refrigerator. What, doesn't everyone have a whole chicken in their fridge at all times? I rinsed the chicken, dried it well inside and out (smoking is a method of roasting - which means dry heat. Drying the chicken reduces steam, which is wet - as in not dry. See the logic here?), and trussed (tied) it. Thomas Keller has a great technique for trussing chickens, look it up. Learn it, love it, live it. The reason for trussing the chicken is quite simple; the breast cooks faster than the thighs, and the thin part of the breast dries out quite quickly. By tying the legs up to cover that thin part, you get a moister piece of white meat.

The next step in the whole process is a rub. Rubs add flavor to your meat while it smokes. They are very good things, unless you don't like flavor, which means that I don't like you. For my rub, I used
1 T garlic powder
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground New Mexico chiles

Do you have to use this? No!! get creative, let your tastebuds guide you. I don't claim to be the authoritative source on BBQ, I just happen to make some pretty good BBQ. This is simply a guide, a jumping off point. Play with it, make it your own.

The next step is to season the chicken really well with salt and pepper, then coat the chicken with the rub. Here's the trussed and rub coated chicken, and some country style ribs that I just happened to have on hand.



Out the back door and to the grill we go:



A BBQers greatest asset is patience. This is NOT a quick process. Seal the smoker, adjust the draft to allow for a nice cool fire with lot's of smoke and walk away. Smoking can dehydrate you, be sure to drink plenty of beer to avoid this. Make sure that your fire stays lit, stays cool, but don't do much else - leave it alone!!

2 hrs later:

Again, be patient and don't mess with a good thing. Liberally apply beer to yourself, read a book, do anything to not go open the smoker every 5 minutes. Your fire will get out of control from the introduction of more oxygen and the meat will cook too quickly. Which do you want; moist, tender, fall off the bone chicken or dry, tough, chewy leather worthy of the Colonel - but without that secret ingredient that makes you crave it fortnightly? If it's the former, then heed my words.

This doesn't have to be a marathon of cooking. 4 hours is usually enough to smoke a chicken. Here's the end product:



Yeah, I brought sexy back.

This same technique is applicable to almost anything that you want to smoke. Beef, pork, fish, vegetables, whatever. You simply need to play with the cooking time and temperature in order to fit your needs. Allow plenty of time, 4 to 16 hours, depending on what your smoking. As we can see, this is not a quick process. Don't do this on the spur of the moment. If you fail to plan, you'll be eating at midnight, you'll probably be too drunk to taste it after all of the liberal applications of beer, and you'll feel kinda funny the next day.