The Tandoor Project

Okay, I've gotta say one thing right up front here: I stole this idea, and the execution of it (nearly down to the detail), from Alton Brown. This is not my tandoor project, but rather my attempt to recreate Alton's tandoor project...

Alton Brown is, it's no exaggeration to say, the patron saint of my kitchen. I've learned as much from Good Eats as I've learned from any cookbook, any cooking class, or any nitpicky deconstruction of any meal or any menu I've ever encountered. The man is, simply, a gift to people such as myself who like to cook and want to work out how to do it better, more effectively and more creatively. I can't really compare him to the likes of Julia Child, Auguste Escoffier, Thomas Keller, et al, as he's not a chef per se (pun intended). I do, however, consider him to be in roughly the same league as Harold McGee, Shirley Corriher and Michael Ruhlman. A bit less academic than McGee and Corriher, and a bit less cultivated than Ruhlman, he shakes out as more or less the Bill Nye of food, i.e. very solid technique, with just enough whimsy to keep it interesting. Unfortunately, Alton Brown recently brought Good Eats to its conclusion, after fourteen seasons. I was really hoping his show would go on forever, but like all good things, it had its beginning, its middle, and now its end. Still, two hundred and forty some odd episodes leaves us with an awful lot of material to sift through. Thank you for your efforts, Alton, I am forever indebted.

So, because this Alton's thing and not mine, I'm not going to get into the details of what I did. If you're curious about that, you'll have to refer to his Curry episode, which can be found on YouTube, first half here, second half here. I will give you a pictorial run-through of the project, though:

First, I grabbed myself a large unglazed terra cotta flower pot. This one's 17.5" across at the top...


And then turned it over and drew a line 1 inch down from the bottom.


I took the bottom off with a hacksaw (you'll want a masonry blade for that hacksaw, btw, which doesn't look like a blade at all, but rather like a thick metal string embedded with bits of carbide; yes, you could use an angle grinder like Brown did on the show, but Brown is Cornelius Van Moneybags and I'm not, so I used a hacksaw)...


Hang onto that bottom section, btw. You can put it in the bottom of your oven to even out the temperature, or even use it as a baking stone...


I then soaked the pot in water for about 18 hours, let it dry for two, and set it on the bottom grate of my Weber grill. The standard 22 inch Weber kettle is perfect for this, btw. The Bottom grate is almost exactly the same diameter as the pot I used...


Next, I fired up some charcoal in a couple of chimney starters. I like lump charcoal for its lack of binders and other weird chemicals. It's a good idea for this project, btw, to have two of these, as you'll need a lot of charcoal to achieve the insane temperatures that characterize a tandoor (don't worry, the Weber can handle it).


I dumped a total of five chimneys' worth of charcoal into the pot, two at a time. This is about four or five pounds of charcoal. It got pretty hot, but I probably could've used a couple extra chimneys' worth...


Next, I made my friends wait around for dinner...


Then I made them wait around some more (Risa, by this time, had decided she wasn't hungry, and headed upstairs; everyone else stayed put)...


Despite the 18 hours of soaking, the pot cracked nonetheless. This is probably not such a bad thing, actually. In the future, the crack will allow it to expand as necessary (the crack closed up, btw, once this was all over and the pot cooled down). Sure, some heat will be lost through the crack, but a little extra charcoal will make up for that. As long as the thing stays in one piece, it should work just fine.


Here we see the first round of skewers, half of them lamb, the other half chicken (thigh meat), cooking away. These don't take long to cook, btw. Five minutes, tops, before they begin to char. The cooking time will become longer as the coals begin to die out (lump charcoal burns much faster than briquettes, so for extended lump grilling projects, you'll need to add more as time goes on)...


And here's an admittedly unflattering shot of the final product, over rice, with a very simple (and very tasty) tikka masala sauce...


While the cooking technique itself is interesting, even more interesting, by far, was the tikka masala sauce. I've thrown together a lot of curries over the past few years, including Saag Aloo Murghi and an Indo-Fijian curry famous among night shift workers at OHSU, as well as numerous improvisations, both successful and not so successful, and this one is up there with the best of them. Refer to the second YouTube clip for the tikka sauce. Definitely worth it for that alone.

I just smiled, and made me a Vegemite sandwich...

This is my take on an Australian kid-food tradition, the "Cheesymite." It's roughly analogous to the classic American grilled cheese sandwich, only the Antipodeans like to spread some Vegemite on the bread before slapping on the cheese. Now around these parts, we're famously afraid of Vegemite, and while you might not want to eat the stuff straight out of the jar with a spoon, it's not as scary as you might think. I was feeling a bit brave the other day at Freddy's and picked up a jar, and oh man, am I glad I did! Here's what I did with it...


First, I toasted a slice of some multigrain bread I baked a couple days ago. I rubbed the toasted bread with some garlic, and applied a very thin layer of the Vegemite (trust me, a little of this stuff goes a long way). To that I added a layer of Applegate Farms Black Forest ham, sprinkled on some shredded Beecher's Flagship cheese from Seattle, and set it under the broiler for a few minutes to melt the cheese. Then I sprinkled on some chiffonaded watercress, and had myself one hell of a sammy! The Vegemite made itself known, but did not overpower the rest of the players. Its malty flavor paired nicely with the rye and barley in the bread, and added a salty foil to the cheese. You wouldn't necessarily detect it if you didn't know it was there, but it would definitely be noticeable in its absence if you did... Overall, a very successful addition to an otherwise merely fancy grilled cheese sandwich...

Konbanwa! Okonomiyaki! Grasshopper, do not dishonor me! Sayonara!

I've been fighting off a case of the flu for the past couple of days, and what is it they say? Starve a cold, feed the flu? I think that's it... Anyway, I first found out about Okonomiyaki, a specialty of Osaka, Japan, a couple years back by way of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. Then, yesterday, I stumbled across a pretty funny YouTube video about making it, and decided this would be as good a way as any to try and knock the bug out of my system, and use up some of these eggs the chickens keep laying (aren't they supposed to be molting by now?) in the process. Some of the ingredients might be a little challenging to track down if you don't have access to a decent Asian market, but there's always the Internet, or in a pinch, substitutions can be made. Here's what you'll need:


Ingredients:
One cup Okonomiyaki flour
Two extra large, or three large, eggs
Enough dashi to make 2/3 cup of miso broth
Two cups cabbage, shredded
1/2 cup green onions, finely chopped
Seafood, chopped, about one cup
Bacon, finely chopped, about 1/2 cup
Nagaimo (Japanese mountain yam), grated, about 1/4 cup
1/2 cup Bonito flakes
Okonomi sauce
Mayonnaise
Salt and pepper
Canola oil

Okay, now for the substitutions, just in case you live in the sticks: For Okonomiyaki flour, you can substitute all purpose flour. Add a pinch of salt, a pinch of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of tapioca starch or corn starch; If you can't find dashi, you can use water with a little fish, chicken or beef boullion instead of miso broth; If you don't have access to Nagaimo, add a tablespoon of tapioca starch or corn starch to the flour; For Bonito flakes, there isn't really any substitute, so just go without, it'll be fine; For Okonomi sauce, you can substitute a 2:1 mixture of A1 steak sauce to ketchup, with a little sugar added.

First, heat about a tablespoon of canola oil in a large fry or saute pan, and cook the chopped bacon over medium heat. Place the bacon on a paper towel to drain, and reserve the canola oil and rendered bacon fat. Now, put the flour in a bowl, add the miso broth, grated nagaimo (this stuff, by the way, grates down into a really nasty slimy paste that begins to oxidize and turn slightly pink almost immediately; just giving you fair warning...) and eggs and whisk together until smooth:


Add the bacon, cabbage (I used Napa cabbage, but regular cabbage is fine as well), green onion and seafood (I opted for a mix of shrimp, scallops and squid), along with a little salt and pepper. Continue to mix until everything is evenly incorporated:


Now, it's time to get that pan hot again. Heat one tablespoon of the reserved canola oil/bacon fat to the pan over medium heat, and pour in enough of the batter to make one pancake (the pancake, by the way, can be as big or as small as you want; I went a bit on the small side for ease of flipping):


Using a spatula, flipper or pastry blade, manage the edges of the pancake and form it into a round shape. After four minutes, flip it:


Continue to cook for another four minutes. Then, plate it and top with the Okonomi sauce, mayonnaise and bonito flakes. And enjoy:

It's Indian, and it's green: Saag Aloo Murghi

"Saag Aloo" means spinach and potato curry, and "Murghi" means chicken. Spinach is a great vehicle for curry, as it pairs well with the spices and has a great deal of antioxidants and Omega 3s. And as the final product turns out pea-soup green, it looks kind of gross, which adds greatly to its appeal, if you ask me. I pulled the idea for this one from a recent on-line interaction, and looked to a recipe in a book I picked up not long ago called 660 Curries: The Gateway to Indian Cooking by Raghavan Iyer. I also found a saag recipe online, wound up averaging the two and made a few changes and additions of my own.

Ingredients:

2 lbs. of chicken (1/2 lb. pictured)
1 large red onion
6 cloves of garlic, minced
1 Tbsp minced ginger
1 Tbsp ground coriander
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 1/2 tsp salt
8 oz. spinach, stems removed
1 bunch of watercress, stems removed
7 oz. coconut milk (about half a can)
7 oz. plain Greek style yogurt
3 oz. tomato paste
1 1/2 cups of water
3 small to medium potatoes, cubed (yellow, red or Yukon Gold)
8 oz. paneer,* cubed
1 small head of broccoli, chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
Ghee, or canola oil and butter, for sauteeing

*or substitute any non-melting white cheese such as queso fresco

You probably want to see the mise on that... Here ya go:


Method:

Begin by cutting the chicken up into bite-sized chunks and sauteeing over medium-high heat in a large saute pan with a generous amount of ghee or oil and butter until it just begins to get some color (again, what you see here is a half pound of chicken, in a medium fry pan. When sauteeing two pounds, you'll want to do it in stages, as two pounds of chicken will be way too much for even the largest saute pan; the chicken will end up steaming instead of browning, which will compromise flavor development):


Set this aside, and clean out the pan. Saute the onion, with the spices, over medium heat until translucent, five to ten minutes. Add the garlic and ginger, turn the heat down to medium-low and continue to saute for another five minutes (here's that large saute pan I mentioned):


Add the salt, spinach and watercress to the pan, along with a half cup of water. Simmer for fifteen minutes. The spinach and watercress will fill the pan when you first add them, but as they simmer, they'll wilt and decrease greatly in volume:


Remove the pan from the heat, and allow to cool. Transfer the contents to a blender or food processor, add a half cup of water and puree. Set aside, and clean out the pan. Saute the potatoes over medium-high heat until they begin to get some color, about fifteen minutes. Add the paneer and let it get some color as well (stirring or shaking the pan occasionally), about another ten minutes:


Add the puree back to the pan, along with another half cup of water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for another ten minutes:


Add the coconut milk, yogurt, tomato paste, carrots and broccoli and continue to simmer, stirring occasionally, for another fifteen minutes (if it starts to look like it's getting a little too thick, you can add another half cup of water):


Add the chicken back to the pan during the last five minutes of simmering to bring it back up to temperature. Serve with some naan, roti or similar flatbread. Or serve it over rice, as I did (I like long grain brown rice, cooked with a mixture of chicken stock, water, butter and salt). This will serve about six. It's also a good recipe to do in advance and freeze in individual containers. If you do this, cook the chicken separately when you thaw and re-heat the saag.

Enjoy!

Pan Seared Scallops with Pumpkin Risotto and Sage Infused Brown Butter

Man, that's a crap photo... At any rate, I've been getting a lot of second hand produce lately from my girlfriend, who's having some trouble absorbing the bounty of her CSA. Recently sugar pumpkins have been factoring heavily into the mix, and having made my way through several of them last weekend by making a pumpkin pie, I decided to use up the rest and have Laura over for some pumpkin risotto (anybody out there like borscht, by the way? I've got like 37 beets...). No risotto ever suffered from the addition of brown butter, and brown butter, of course, attracts scallops, so I had my work cut out for me. Perhaps you'd care to follow along...

Ingredients

Diver or Sea Scallops, two per person
One sugar pumpkin, about six inches in diameter
Two medium shallots (or one really large one), minced
Three cloves of garlic, minced
One cup of Arborio rice
One stick of butter (8 Tbsp)
Two Tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
One cup of dry white wine (Pinot Gris or Chenin Blanc work well)
Four cups of chicken stock, kept warm on a burner
One cup of grated Parmesan, Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano
Two Tbsp of chopped scallions (garlic scapes or chives also work)
One handful of good sized sage leaves
One pinch of fresh grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Method

First, you're going to brown the butter. Place six tablespoons in a fry pan over medium heat:

Once it's melted, turn the heat down to medium low and add the sage leaves. The milk solids in the butter will sink to the bottom of the pan and begin to brown. When they've achieved a medium brown color, remove the sage (reserve it for garnish), transfer the brown butter to a bowl and place it in the fridge. You'll know it's time when you see this:

Next, cut your pumpkin in half, peel it and cut it into about 1/4 inch dice. Steam half of the pumpkin for about 20 min and puree it in a blender or food processor, or with an immersion blender. Reserve the other half.

Place three tablespoons of the brown butter in a large saute pan over medium heat. Saute the shallot and reserved pumpkin dice for a few minutes, then add the garlic and the rice:

Continue to saute for five minutes and add the wine and one cup of the chicken stock. Turn heat down to a simmer and continue to cook, stirring frequently and adding stock, a little at a time as the rice absorbs the liquid, until the rice is al dente (about 40 minutes). Be careful not to let the rice get too dry until it's cooked, at which point you can reduce down any excess liquid. Until then, you want to keep it looking more or less like this:

When the rice is almost cooked, add the pumpkin puree, nutmeg, scallions and cheese and start to work on the scallops.

Melt and/or warm the remaining brown butter in a sauce pan over low heat (if you want to get fancy with it, you can whisk in a tablespoon or two of the wine and a little bit of minced shallot, which will get you a sort of sage-infused, browned beurre blanc, but you'll need to multi-task or enlist some help, as this mixture needs to be whisked constantly while you're cooking the scallops). Place the remaining two tablespoons of unbrowned butter and the oil in a fry pan over medium high heat. Yes, you CAN saute with extra virgin olive oil, just don't turn the flame up all the way... When the oil and butter are hot, but not smoking, add the scallops, seasoned on both sides with salt and pepper, to the pan. Saute them for two minutes on each side. Plate them with the risotto, and drizzle the brown butter over the scallops or around the edge of the plate. Garnish with the fried sage and enjoy!

Romancing the Swine III: Pancetta

As kitchen projects go, curing pork products, while time-consuming, is easy and fun. This time around, I tried my hand at pancetta, a dry-cured preparation of pork belly which is basically an un-smoked Italian version of bacon. Sauteed pancetta makes for a great addition to salads and soups, and can be used as a substitiute for guanciale in Sugo All'amatriciana. Here's how it's done:

First, get your hands on a pork belly. I used a half belly, which worked out to a little over five pounds:


Next, prepare your dry-cure ingredients:


The dry cure is basically salt, pepper, sugar, herbs and spices. In this case, because the pancetta is dried at room temperature, pink salt is required as well, to ward off botulism. I'm not talking about the pink sea salt that comes from Hawaii here, by the way. This pink salt is sodium nitrite, and it's not naturally pink, but rather it's dyed to keep folks from mixing it up with regular salt. The reason for that is that sodium nitrite is not something you want to consume a lot of. It's been found to be carcinogenic in large amounts, and has been linked to lung disease as well. But for the occasional curing project, I'm willing to employ it, as botulism is really not to be messed around with. If you don't want to use the pink salt, you can always rig up a system for drying the belly in the fridge (see my guanciale post). If you do go with the pink salt, but can't find it in your immediate area, you can order it online from Butcher & Packer. I used the dry-cure recipe, pink salt and all, from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's book Charcuterie, which is an excellent reference. However, if the economy is doing you in and you can't afford bookstore purchases at the moment, the recipe can be found here.

Rub the belly with the dry cure on both sides and place it into a two gallon Ziploc bag (if you can find them, otherwise Glad oven bags work as well):


Put this into the refrigerator for one to two weeks, turning it over every other day to evenly distribute the cure. Once the belly is relatively firm to the touch, wash off the cure under cold water and dry it completely. Then coat the meat side with cracked pepper, roll it along its length fat side out and tie it up with butcher's twine:


Now you're ready to hang it at room temperature and let it dry. As I live in a funky old house with microbes and assorted vermin running about (even when we're doing our best to keep the place clean), I built a box out of 1X1s and masonite, covered it with hardware cloth and cheesecloth, hung the pancetta inside of that, and placed the whole thing in the pantry. I propped it up on bricks added a bowl of boiling water underneath it every couple of days to keep the humidity up. After three weeks, I ended up with what you see up at the top of the post. A small amount of white mold had begun to grow at the ends, which I trimmed away (white mold is all right, black mold is definitely bad). And that was pretty much that. Like I said, time-consuming but easy. Give it a shot if you're so inclined!

Dirty South Trad Meets Napa Valley Edge...

A seemingly normal fried chicken leg, right? Not much to look at when it comes right down to it, but this fried chicken is different. It's not overcooked as fried chicken can often be, and is in fact possessed of an unusually soft texture and weirdly "chickeny" flavor. How? Sous vide, my friends, sous vide...

Despite what fancy pants chefs - with their immersion circulators and physics lab vacuum rigs - may tell you, sous vide is basically boil in the bag, glorified. Except that you don't boil, you cook the meat for an extended period of time at whatever temperature is desired for "doneness." It's a technique that's been common in Europe for decades, but is only recently making inroads in North America. It's easy, if time consuming. Here's how it works with chicken:

Put said chicken into a plastic bag. It's worth noting here that the bag should, if possible, be free of PVC and plasticizers. I added 2 lemon slices, 2 Tbsp of butter, a couple bay leaves, a few sprigs of thyme, some chopped onion and several cloves of garlic. Next, use a straw to suck out all of the air, then double knot the bag for an airtight seal. Place all of this into another bag and again suck air and double knot:


I used Glad oven bags, which worked fine. I would advise against Ziploc bags, though, as they're far from airtight. Once your chicken is bagged (and yes, you should probably put each piece in its own separate bag set-up), place it into a stock pot of heated water. You won't get 100% of the air out of those bags, by the way, which means they'll float. You also don't want them to make contact with the bottom of the pot. I put a ramekin in the bottom of the pot, placed a small colander on it, put the chicken in the colander, and kept it submerged with a brick, keeping the top of the bag above water:


The temperature of the water will depend on whether you're using dark or white meat. For dark, you want to keep the temperature right around 170F, while white meat needs to be kept at 145-150F. If you're using white and dark meat, well sorry, but you're gonna need separate pots. Let the chicken hang out and be sure to check on the temperature frequently. Once it's been in there for about four hours, fish it out, remove it from its bag, rinse off the lemon and aromatics and dry it as completely as possible with paper towels. Heat up a couple Tbsp of butter and oil in a saute pan until almost smoking, and place the chicken in for just long enough to brown the skin. Again, remove and pat dry. Now you're ready to dredge it:


When it comes to cooking, I'm not one to subscribe to orthodoxy. But in the case of southern food, I'm generally willing to make an exception and acquiesce to tradition, which manifested itself here in a couple of ways. First, a girl from "Hotlanta" (everything they say about girls from the south is true, btw) recently told me that real fried chicken is done bone-in (!!!) and with the skin on. Okay, I'll buy that. Second, I used a pretty conventional dredge: dip the chicken in buttermilk, then coat it with seasoned flour (3 C flour and 1 tsp each of cayenne, paprika, salt and ground pepper). Do this two or three times, knocking off any excess flour and allowing the chicken to dry on some sort of rack for about 15 minutes after each dredging:


Next, we fry. Put enough oil of your choice (I used a combination of canola and peanut) to submerge the chicken halfway into a skillet and heat to about 350F. Fry the chicken parts just until a golden crust forms, a couple minutes on each side. Keep in mind here that the chicken is already cooked. You're only forming crust and heating the chicken up:


And that's about it. So was the extra effort of going the sous vide route worth it? Probably not. This was better than fried chicken I've had in the past, but only by a matter of degree. Sous vide is really a technique best suited to those tougher cuts of beef and pork which would otherwise require a braise. Of course, the journey being the destination and all, this was definitely worth a try.

Molecular Gastronomy Chowder... Sorta.

The "kernel," if you will, for this idea came to me when I was perusing Carol Blymire's blog, Alinea at Home, in which Carol charts her way through Detroit homeboy Grant Achatz' cookbook. She recently tried her hand at Grant's liquified version of caramel popcorn, and her description of the recipe immediately struck me as an interesting base for chowder (minus the caramel foam, of course). After sifting through a few chowder recipes online, I cobbled together a pretty good formula, which I present to you now...

Ingredients:
1/2 C popcorn
5 C milk
2 C cream
1 - 1 lb. salmon fillet, skin removed and coarsely chopped
1 large leek (white part only), chopped and rinsed
1/2 celery root, diced
1 small fennel bulb (or half a large one), chopped
1 large yellow potato, peeled and diced
1/4 lb. bacon, chopped
2 bay leaves
4 or 5 sprigs of thyme
Juice of half a lemon
1 Tbsp. salt
1 tsp. fresh ground pepper
Peanut oil for frying

Heat about 2 Tbsp. of oil in a large saucepan over medium high heat, until the oil begins to ripple, and add the popcorn:


Put the lid on the pot and let the popcorn do its thing. When this slows to a few pops per minute, remove from the heat. This is what you'll end up with:


Transfer the popcorn to a stockpot, and add the milk and the cream (henceforth referred to simply as "dairy"):


Heat on high until the dairy just begins to foam, back down the heat to low, and simmer for 20 minutes. While this is happening, heat 1 Tbsp of oil in a large saute pan over medium high. Add the bacon and fry until a good amount of the fat has rendered out. Remove the bacon, let it cool, and feed it to your dog. Add the leek, celery root and fennel to the oil and rendered fat and saute until just caramelized (I have to interject here to proclaim that leek, celery root and fennel are the new holy trinity. This combination of vegetables is nothing short of amazing):


Cover the pan, and kill the heat. While the vegetables continue to cook via residual heat, parboil the potato in another saucepan for ten minutes, or until just fork tender. Meanwhile, puree the popcorn/dairy mixture in a blender or food processor, or with a stick blender, and strain out the pulp through a cheesecloth lined strainer. Add the leek, celery root and fennel, along with the bay leaves and thyme, to the strained dairy, bring just back to the boil (beginning to foam), back heat down to low and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove from heat, fish out the herbs, and puree. Bring the dairy and vegetables back to medium, and add the potato, salmon, salt, pepper and lemon juice. Cook until the salmon is done, about five to seven minutes. Plate and eat.

So, how was it, you ask... Fantastic! The popcorn lent a nice subtle roasted corn flavor, as well as a lot of body from all that starch. It didn't have the briny quality of a typical New England clam chowder, and it was HELLA thick. I liked it this way, but replacing a cup or two of the milk with clam juice or shellfish stock to begin with would thin down the consistency a bit, and bring the flavor a little closer to a traditional East Coast chowder. So play with it, and tell me how it turns out...