Blog
Fried, Stuffed Jalapenos
At a certain age, a variety of destructive and obnoxious acts, most often drink-related, are more or less acceptable, or at least, considered the next morning with little more than a regretful smirk. Lying down on the street, stumbling through crowds, even committing minor larceny such as skipping out on a cab fare or ripping off a sack of Doritos. (Occasionally, unlucky offenders run across the too-often jilted cabbie, his front seat stocked with an assortment of tire irons and a comfortable relationship with off-label use of said repair tools.)
No matter the level of drama, all evenings culminate in the same fashion: a bellyful of fried or otherwise greasy food: pizza, wings, nachos, and so on. Better yet, a random pile of fried and un-fried selections from behind the smudgy display of a smudgy pizza place: zeppole, slice, garlic knots. And a coke.
As time goes on, we demand less and settle for more. Evenings shorten, booze consumption (at least in binge form) declines, and the word “indulgence” creeps into the vocabulary: to wit, deep-fried food. And we own stuff, like pots and pans, and whisks and oils and salt and pepper, and shop for vegetables and meat and chicken and read about restaurants and think about what to feed the kids. And so we deep-fry at home.
Home deep-frying is not as simple as you’d think. A restaurant fryer comes equipped with a temperature dial, whereas a potful of oil is accompanied by little more than a pesky flame and a basket of potential nightmares. If you don’t overfill the pot, you’ll avoid a volcanic surge of boiling oil streaming over the oven and floor.
Think about risotto and the conventional, near-religious instruction to stand and stir like a Tuscan grandma, her kitchen filled with the clucks of backyard chickens.
Such vigilance is a joke compared with that necessary for deep-frying. Like race car driving, you’re dealing with exact measurements; a hair too fast and you hit the wall, a shade slow and you limp sadly over the finish line. With success comes something well-fried and, naturally, delicious. Keep handy a spray bottle of stovetop cleaner, for this is your life; no more leaving behind a wake of littered empties. Or splattered oil.
Fried Stuffed Jalapenos (from the BLT cookbook)
Serves 6
15 large jalapenos, halved, seeded, cleaned
8 oz cream cheese, room temp
2 ¼ cups flour
1 ½ teaspoons sea salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
12 ounces beer, preferably dark lager
1 egg, lightly beaten
Canola oil
1. Stuff each half chile with about one tablespoon of cream cheese and refrigerate for 20 minutes.
2. In a large bowl, whisk 1 ¾ cups of the flour with the salt and baking powder. Add the remaining ½ cup flour to a plate or flat tray. Whisk in the beer and egg till smooth but not tough (i.e. don’t over whisk).
3. Heat about 4 inches of the oil over medium high heat to 350-375.
4. Remove jalapenos from fridge. Roll a bunch at a time (4 or a 5) in the remaining flour and tap off any excess. Carefully add to oil, fry till golden, about 2 minutes, and drain on paper towels. Season with salt and serve.
Steakhouse Sides: Creamed Spinach
In sport, victory and defeat are measured by inches. If the ball hadn’t hit the crossbar, the puck sail a hair over the net, the finger slicing through the pool curl at the wall, the ball catch the wind just enough to miss the white line. It’s a matter of course worth the attention of any diligent steak house chef.
Until say, the 1970s, the steakhouse chef was a revered fellow on the culinary scene. A steak and perhaps half a broiled lobster sat atop the food world, symbolizing luxury and skill. But, as with cars and computers, we improve, or at least vary stuff, hence the contemporary menu. Left behind is the guy who can cook a good piece of meat, but-at least in the general mindset-little else. He’s befuddled by a bunch of kale, a bucket of sweetbreads, or even a packet of yeast.
Lost in the shuffle is respect for execution. I’d rather have a perfect steak than a crummy kale salad, for instance. And the chef who can execute excellent sides (for me, the decisive mark of quality) is someone who can cook anywhere. The prime offenses: stringy creamed spinach or a plate of barely browned, diced potatoes labeled hash browns. The former should be smooth and properly seasoned, the latter a crisp cake whose potato interior is light and buttery and steaming hot.
Once you master the sides, you don’t even need the steak. Or you can cook it for hash the next day, also kind of a side. Until eventually you become an eater of primarily side dishes and turn into a side dish snob and never enter another steakhouse. And sit at home in your jammies eating homemade creamed spinach and hash. Today’s post: creamed spinach.
(NOTE: To gratinate this sucker lay several slices of gruyere over the top and broil.)
Creamed Spinach (via food.com)
yield: 4
2 (10oz) bags spinach
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup flour
¼ cup minced onion
1 bay leaf
1 clove
2 cups milk
salt and pepper
- Cook spinach in boiling water a few minutes till wilted, drain under cold water in a colander, squeeze out as much moisture as possible, chop coarsely, transfer to a food processor and process to a slightly chunky puree. Reserve.
- Melt half the butter in medium saucepan over medium heat.
- Add flour, stir till golden, about 7 minutes.
- Stir in onion, bay leaf, and clove, whisk in milk, simmer till thickens, about 10 minutes, reduce heat to low, cook a few more minutes, whisking.
- Add spinach to warm sauce, simmer a few minutes, stir in remaining butter, season and serve.
Medieval Times
If you’ve been to Medieval Times you’ll grasp the true meaning of finger food. The place-our local branch is virtually across the street from the Meadowlands-is both hoky and depressing. Unlike Disneyworld and its ilk, the offshoots of artistic inspiration, Medieval Times is little more than a weird business idea housed in a pile of stucco off the Jersey Turnpike.
Kids, however, whose taste veers to the half-assed and slapped together, seem to like the place, and ours was no exception. Of particular appeal was the food (or “feast” in Medieval-speak), though I believe part of the joy lay in screaming for the “serving wench”. Everyone eats the same stuff: tomato soup (“bisque”) a Frisbee-sized round of bread, a half chicken accompanied by a spare rib, finished with an apple turnover, all washed down with your choice of Coke, Sprite, or slushie.
And so we put on our crowns and ate. As everyone knows, the fare is served sans utensils-even the soup, which one eats by gripping a handle welded onto the side of a pewter bowl. For canned soup it was pretty good, though to ask the small child on my left you’d think it contained the ripest seasonal heirloom tomatoes and herbs grown in the back next to the horse stalls.
He polished off the whole thing: dunking the bread in the soup and slurping every last drop. Despite scalding my fingertips breaking down our two half-chickens, the entrée wasn’t bad, and we both munched along to the sounds of swords crashing on shields. Needless to say, he filched my turnover, so I can’t report back on the dessert.
The lack of utensils, it turns out, is Medieval Times’ lone stroke of inspiration (the show is pretty lame). For a few hours, your customs are inverted, and that’s pretty cool. Until afterward, when you step into the winter night and negotiate the famous Holland Tunnel bottleneck, which isn’t so cool and you wonder whether it was worth the trip just so you could eat chicken with your hands. And come home only to realize you’re still wearing a paper crown.
Today’s post: an experiment in finger food. Otherwise known as hors d’oeuvres.
Zucchini Chips
2 zucchini
olive oil
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 225.
- Use a mandolin to slice up the veg thinly (not tissue paper, but pretty thin-1/16 inch).
- Generously splash some oil on a baking sheet and use your fingers to spread all over. Lay the zucchini in rows over the oil then flip to coat both sides. Season well with salt and a bit of pepper.
- Bake for about 1 1/4 to 1 ½ hours. Check after an hour. If they’re browned on the bottom, flip over. They’re done when browned, not burnt (duh). When you shake the tray, they’ll move like chips. Remove and store in an airtight container for as long as you can resist.
Yeast Donuts
Sunday began in cold and ended in cold. Soccer with the kid on the roof of Pier 40; bleak and gray, haunted by the storm, the place feeling even more rickety and about to drift off its moorings into the sea than it usually does. Even the vending machines, source of the traditional post-soccer breakfast of champions Kit-Kat, were beaten down by Sandy, wiring drenched, unable to dispense candy.
Step two-the warm part of the day-was a long postponed plan to sell donuts and hot cider on Broadway. It was a new effort, but with the Joy of Cooking as our guide, we already had a few batches of dough proofing in the fridge, ready to be rolled, cut, fried, and sugared.
The donuts tasted like real honest to goodness awesome donuts. You definitely need to pull out the candy thermometer and gauge the oil temperature, or they’ll brown too quickly before cooking on the inside. However, no one ever suffered at the hands of an underdone (or overdone) fresh donut.
And back to the cold. Downstairs on Broadway, where we tried to sell our piles of donuts with a cup of hot cider. We learned a few lessons: kid-run food stands are designed for the suburbs, and it’s best not to sell pastry and cider next door to a Starbucks. Still, despite the kid eating half the inventory, we made a few sales, enough to feel good about the effort, before heading upstairs and out of the cold.
(NOTE: get a thermometer if you don’t have-keeping the oil at 325-350 is important and the therm. will tell you when to adjust the heat. Adding donuts reduces the temp., which will soon rise.)
Yeast Donuts (straight from The Joy of Cooking)
Makes about 20
1 cup warm water
2 envelopes instant yeast
4 ½ cups flour
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup butter, softened
3 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
oil for frying
2 cups cinnamon sugar (about 2 cups sugar tossed with a tablespoon or so cinnamon)
- In standing mixer bowl (you can use a standard bowl), whisk yeast and water, cover and let stand 10 minutes.
- Whisk in 1 cup of the flour, cover with plastic and let stand at room temp till bubbly-about 30 minutes.
- Whisk in the remaining ingredients except flour (standing mixer or elbow grease). Using the paddle attachment on standing mixer, beat in the remaining flour. Cover with plastic and let rise for 2 hours.
- Punch down the dough, remove from bowl, wrap in plastic, insert into a large ziplock bag, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or up to 16 hours.
- When ready, roll dough on a lightly floured surface to about 1/3 inch thick. Cut the donuts with a 3 ½ inch cookie cutter and cut out holes with a smaller (1 inch or so) cutter. Roll scraps and repeat. Rest the donuts for at least an hour until they rise.
- Meanwhile, using a candy thermometer, heat several inches of oil in a large pot over medium-high heat to 350.
- Set up a frying station: line one baking sheet with paper towels to drain oil and set next to a second baking sheet spread with the cinnamon sugar.
- Carefully slide the donuts (about 6 at a time) into the oil without crowding. Using a fork or, ideally, a pair of chopsticks, cook until golden brown on each side – about 1 ½ minutes each. Remove, drain on towels, shift to second tray and roll in sugar. Eat.
Lahore Chicken and Potato Curry
Sometimes you have to know the bad to achieve the good. To wit, a variety of dictators and inky newsprint, and for our purpose, lousy curries.
You easily can grab the wrong Indian takeout menu and end up with a quart of protein morsels floating in greasy sauce reminiscent of the hot line at a Korean deli. The line between good and bad Indian food is hardly razor thin: the place near us in Tribeca is great; the one a few blocks down is terrible. It’s a pattern as reliable as the cycles of the orbs..
From my experience, the finest Indian food is that produced inside an Indian household. However, I’m a great believer that Indian food is well-suited to any home.
The critical step one is a pantry; raid a good Indian grocery and overpurchase: bags of cardamom, cloves, dals, jasmine rice, cinnamon sticks, fenugreek, asoefatida, garam masala, coriander, cumin, curry, mustard oil, mustard seeds, unsweetened coconut, curry leaves, fresh and dried chilies, ghee, jaggery, tamarind extract or blocks, and any powders you may or may never need. It becomes an addiction, but you can hooked on far worse. Unless you start going on regular Kingfisher and betel leaf binges.
Once you possess the tools, you can cook anything. Because these mostly quick preparations make for easy weekday meals, you’ll gain a pretty deft hand in no time, your fingers acquainting themselves to the feel of a pinch of this and a pinch of that, your ears attuning to the pop of mustard seeds, your instincts developing a comfortable sense of timing and how to work with your newly minted pantry.
In the manner of Indian home cooks, we like to keep the curries simple, healthy chunks of a few vegetables or meats touched with spice and, if called for, an appropriate amount of sauce. Here we made one with chicken and potatoes, but as with a good movie script, the star of the show isn’t the chicken or the veg, but the foundation, your stocked and fragrant pantry.
(NOTE: pay attention to the salt-it’ll need assertive seasoning. Also, don’t be fooled by the chicken, the potatoes may take a bit longer to cook. I’d rather have slightly dry chicken breast (it’s in a flavorful sauce anyhow) and tender potatoes than perfect chicken and undercooked veg.)
Lahori Chicken with Whole Spices and Potatoes (from Suvir Saran’s GREAT book Indian Home Cooking)
Serves 4
2 ½ pounds chicken breasts and thighs, skinless (or a large whole cut up bird), in 1-inch chunks
3 large red potatoes, peeled, quartered
¾ teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon cayenne
salt
1 ½ medium onions rough dice
5 garlic cloves
2 inch piece ginger peeled, halved
3 tablespoons canola
1 inch piece cinnamon stick
12 green cardamom pods
9 cloves
10 black peppercorns
3 whole red dried chiles
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
½ teaspoon cumin seeds
1 fresh hot chile, halved
2 large tomatoes, chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste
¼ cup plain yogurt, whisked
1 cup water
½ cup chopped cilantro
juice 1 lemon
- Combine chicken, taters, turmeric, ¼ teaspoon of cayenne, pinch of salt and marinate in a bowl.
- Puree onions, ginger, garlic in a food processor and set aside.
- Heat oil with the spices (cinnamon stick to cumin in the ingr list) in a medium pot over medium high heat. When cinnamon unfurls, 1-2 inutes, add onion mixture, chile, and a pinch of salt, cook, stirring till veggies brown, about 8-10 minutes.
- Remove cinnamon and chile (we kept in the chile for heat), stir in remaining turmeric and cayenne. Add tomatoes and tomato paste, stir 5 minutes. Puree in blender or processor until smooth.
- Heat remaining oil in the pot, add chicken and taters, cook stirring 2 minutes to thicken a bit.
- Add pureed tomato mixture, bring to a boil, stir in water, return to a boil, reduce heat and partially cover, simmer about 30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the taters are tender. Stir ever few minutes to prevent sauce sticking. Uncover, reduce to thicken, stir in cilantro, lemon juice and season with salt if necessary (SEE NOTE).
Braised and Fried Lamb Shoulder
The darkest area of a blacked out city is one’s stairwell. And so when Sandy hit, I nearly broke my neck navigating my way down to the first floor. But we landed safely in a powered-up section of the ‘burbs for a 4-day encampment.
I rarely find myself in a super-sized grocery store. New York lacks the necessary real estate. But when a storm upends an enormous city, you find yourself in strange places. Like the meat dept. of a giant Stop & Shop.
Precisely portioned, wrapped, and useful, the meat could be dried beans, ketchup, or paper towels. From a naturalist’s viewpoint, it may be worth a field visit: where else is cow like a chicken and a chicken like a pig? It reminds me of my brief stint in a restaurant where the salad guy applied his dressings by color. The mega-mart should organize the meat similarly: red here, white there.
This is meat ready to assemble like a child’s toy: take home and inject with enough heat to make it safe and edible.
We’re lucky to have an honest to goodness butcher in the neighborhood. Not a Chelsea Market or Brooklyn hipster butcher sprung from the pages of the Times Dining section and food tv. Rather, Pino has been manning his sawdusty shop on Sullivan Street forever, in a postage-stamp sized corner of Soho not yet snatched up by clothing stores.
Most of the time, Pino hauls out half an animal from the fridge and lops off whatever I want or he suggests. (Usually, no pricier than superstore meat mind you.) As opposed to superstore meat, which parachutes from the sky, stuff from a good butcher is on a meandering journey, with pauses along the way to smell the coffee, the finish line being the kitchen table.
You unfold the butcher paper and consider the flesh. A high-quality burger or a slab of liver are headed for a hot, oiled pan, as would a homemade sausage or hangar steak. You may have picked up some pork belly or shoulder for braising or roasting. We decided the other day on two sections with which I rarely cook: lamb shoulder and lamb belly.
We braised, shredded, and fried the meat for a tasty lamb taco. I’d rather have an elevator than a butcher, but in case this all sounds snobbish, I’d rather have a butcher than a wine store.
Braised Lamb Shoulder
(serves 4-6)
2 bone-in lamb shoulders
olive oil
a few Spanish onions, peeled and cut in eighths
6 plum tomatoes, seeded, chopped
a few sliced chilies
5 sprigs rosemary
½ cup Madeira
½ cup port
1 cup fresh orange juice
2 cups chicken stock
1 head garlic, halved widthwise
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 375. Season lamb well, heat oil in a large sauté pan and brown the shoulders all over. Remove to a large roasting pan.
- Add onions to the pan and fry until lightly browned, then add tomatoes, chili and 3 of the rosemary sprigs. Stir and add alcohol. Bring to a boil, reduce a bit, pour over lamb. Pour orange juice and stock over the lamb. Cover loosely with parchment paper, transfer to oven and braise until the meat shrinks from the bone, about 1 ½ hours.
- Remove lamb, let cool completely in pan, lift from pan and refrigerate an hour or more. Strain the liquid into a pot and reserve vegetables.
- Boil juices to a saucelike consistency, add the veg and keep warm. Remove lamb, slice shoulder in large pieces and fry in a large pan with olive oil, the halved garlic and remaining 2 rosemary sprigs until browned and crisp. Serve with the sauce.
Mini Sausage Burgers
Greater effort yields lesser outcome. A comment not, I’m sure, destined to be tacked on the walls of a high school locker room. However, it’s a pretty useful rule for the home cook. Be realistic about your actions. From cone-shaped tuiles, to emulsified sauces, the kitchen is a minefield of sure disaster. Yes, practice makes perfect, but unless you have the time or professional necessity, expect needless devastation in the form of broken, oily sauces, burnt chips, unfolded roulades, and so on. Forget about dried sausages, a potentially life threatening product useful only to slip into an enemy’s drink.
Even years of practice will only yield a shadow of the real thing, Peking duck being exhibit A. We’ve made the stuff many times: rendering with hot, flavored broth, hanging for days, roasting at just the right temperature. And then we sit at Peking Duck House, where a chef in a long white lab coat carves slivers of fat, meat and skin from a cartoonishly golden bird, and stuff ourselves with unctuous, fatty, crispy pancakes. An experience wonderful and dispiriting at the same time.
Some DIY (a loathsome term) projects are, happily, worth the effort. Take the pig in a blanket. Per square inch, a pig in a blanket is a remarkably efficient, compact delivery vehicle for every dopamine triggering, mouth-watering sensation in the human body. The very sight of the things on a tray weaving through a crowd makes us slobber and shove people aside like New Yorkers looking for a cab on a rainy day.
The problem with pigs in a blanket is twofold: you end up with a case of horrible hot dog breath; they’re expensive and pointless to make yourself.
Worst of all, pigs in a blanket are one-note in flavor. They taste merely of, well, tiny hot dogs. The wrapping adds little more than a limp, fatty crunch. And so we arrive at the true benefit of the feasible DIY kitchen project. Not, as it is commonly thought, a feeling of homemade satisfaction, but rather, a superior product. I wouldn’t say the same about, say, homemade cheese, something better left to your local “monger”, but this one is not only doable, but better.
(NOTE: Payard’s book is loosely accurate. To that end, you may have to beat the dough longer as well as scrape down from the sides several times.)
Homemade Sausage and Peppers (See a recent post)
1. To complete the sandwich, warm the buns and sausage separately. Spread on a bit of mustard. Close, insert a toothpick, and serve.
Mini Burgers (from Payard’s book)
Makes about 50 burgers
2 teaspoons active yeast (1 pkg)
3 tablespoons tepid water
2 ½ cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
- Sprinkle yeast over water in a small bowl and let bloom for 10 minutes until lightly bubbly.
- In bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook, add flour, sugar, salt, and 3 of the eggs. Mix on low speed for a few minutes then add yeast mixture. Beat on medium speed for 5 minutes, add butter and beat 5-10 minutes (see NOTE). Remove dough to a lightly floured table, cover with a damp towel and let rest 30 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 400. Roll dough in all directions to form a circle ½ inch thick. Using a small ring cutter (about ½ inch), cut out the dough.
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Arrange burgers on the tray, beat the remaining egg with 1 tablespoon water and brush egg wash over the rounds. Bake 15-20 minutes or until very lightly browned. Remove and use immediately or let cool slightly and save in an airtight container.
Coconut Soup with Butternut Squash and Chile Sauce
Most cultures have a signature stew. I think of stew as a warm winter retreat, but even hot regions possess hot stews, leading me to ascribe equal cultural significance to stew as, say, bread or grain dishes. And since stews are liquid based, it stands to reason said liquid would be something indigenous. Hence the French – if only as an excuse to drink while cooking – use wine, and Thai/Vietnamese favor coconut milk. The latter is of interest to us today.
Not only is coconut milk rich, but the truly authentic curry recipes go a step further, calling for coconut cream. Cream or no cream, these curries never contain just “a touch of cream”, as waiters like to say. Rather, as with a true New England clam chowder, to eat these dishes is to consume spoonful upon spoonful of straight, simmered cream.
A good chef has a delicate relationship with his can of coconut milk: not too much, not too little. A poor chef looks at a can of coconut milk and sees an excuse not to cook and develop flavors but rather a shortcut in a can. And so you find the clumsy bowl of greasy white milk requiring some considerable fishing to locate a morsel of chicken or floret of broccoli.
The exception is coconut soup, a perfect representation of the phrase “it is what it is”. The soup is flavored simply with fish sauce and garnished with a healthy handful of veg (we used butternut squash), preferably something colorful enough to offset the white broth. Ironic that the perfect embrace of coconut milk exists in soup, rather than stew form, but cooking works in mysterious ways.
As a not inconsiderable aside, whatever you make with coconut milk needs a sharp condiment (unless it’s dessert) to fend off its richness. Here we made a simple chile sauce, but pickled cucumbers, herbs, and so on, would work well.
(NOTE: If you don’t live near a Thai grocery and thus can’t bike over for a few handfuls of tiny bird chilies, use whatever hot chile you can find.)
Coconut and Butternut Squash Soup
Serves 4 (with rice)
2 pound butternut squash diced (1/2 inch)
2 cups coconut milk
2 cups chicken broth
3 tablespoons fish sauce
Chile Sauce (below)
1. Combine squash, coconut milk and broth in a pot and simmer until the vegetable is tender. Season with fish sauce and serve with Chili sauce.
Chile Sauce
½ cup scuds (tiny Thai chilies) or a few Serrano chilies
1 cup fish sauce
1. In a food processor (a mini one works well here), pulse the scuds (seeds included) to a slightly chunky paste. Add to a bowl and pour over the fish sauce. Serve. Stays covered in fridge for quite a while, decreasing in heat over time.
Fried Oysters, Fried Pancetta, and Grits
Oysters take me back to summer in Truro. While I’ll take a dozen raw ones over shaved ice any day, come summer we eat them Cape-style, i.e. fried. Fried oysters are the king of fried seafood: good oysters taste supremely of the sea, and so, rather than an excuse to eat fried stuff, a fried oyster is actually a fresh, oceany bite. Which happens to be fried.
There are two factors at play when considering the fried oyster: coating method, and plate construction. The former is a matter of taste. For a pure burst of oyster goodness, dust simply with flour and fry. From there, you move up the crust level, with increasingly thick layers of encasing crunch. Dip them in buttermilk, then flour, or your standard flour-egg-flour process. We went with a double dip: flour-buttermilk-flour then a return to the buttermilk and flour and into the oil.
Plate construction is a fancy way of saying accompaniments. I imagine that in the beginning, in seaside towns such as Truro, people ate their fried seafood Mediterranean-style: dropped in oil and devoured tableside by the water. Over time the dish took a distinctly American turn, and cooks created the “basket” or “dinner”. That is to say, an enormous salad of fried food served in a basket or on a frisbee-sized plate. And so, in Truro, my fried oysters arrive aside a high pile of French fries (and limp salad).
French fries-I eat them all, of course-are a poor foil for fried oysters; they dull the palate and dilute the sharp oyster flavor. It’s also an overdose of fried food. Better to munch on them with a simple tartar sauce or, as we do here, a plate of grits. And a few discs of fried pancetta because, well, fried pork never hurt anyone. At risk of violating seaside food history, French fries don’t necessarily improve a dish. Fried oysters, however, are always delicious and deserve a proper environment.
Fried Oysters, Fried Pancetta, and Grits
Serves 4 as an appetizer
1 cup grits
2 cups milk
16 oysters, shucked
12 slices pancetta
3 cups flour
2 cups buttermilk
oil for frying
salt and pepper
- Bring grits and milk to boil in a small pan, simmer till done, stirring, about ½ hour (add milk or water as needed). Season with salt and pepper. Keep warm
- Set at least 3 inches of oil in a medium pot over medium high heat. Set up two bowls, one with flour the other buttermilk. When the oil hits 325, start dredging oysters: flour then buttermilk, back in flour. Repeat, shaking off excess flour. Fry until golden, about 1 minute. Season with salt. Drain on a paper towel.
- When done, fry the pancetta a few slices at a time for about 30 seconds. Divide grits, oysters, and pancetta among 4 plates and serve.
Homemade Sausage and Peppers
Thomas Keller says he keeps two things on the stove at all times: salt and acid, acid being citrus, or more likely, some kind of vinegar. Rather than, say, pepper, which adds a unique flavor, salt and vinegar act as a welcome air current to bird, carrying and intensifying existing flavor. A pinch of cumin makes a dish tastes a bit like, well, cumin. But a splash of balsamic can balance, or round out the picture, cutting through the fattiness of a steak or creamy sauce.
In addition to vinegar, Keller also savours publishing the occasional punishing recipe. Like a tennis serve, the mechanics may seem simple, but take a long time to master. Such is the case with his famous salmon tartare cones, which took me about a year to conquer. (A tip: when the butter starts bubbling, it’s ready to flip and mold.)
A perfect sausage is a like a speedy, accurate, tennis serve, requiring more than a little practice. We make our own fresh sausages around here, thanks to Pino the butcher, the Meat Hook’s cheap casings, and a streak of ocd. Usually we encounter the occasional split casing, or, more typical, a puff of meat popping out from both ends while in the frying pan.
Only yesterday did we produce flawless links. Way back, we learned about pricking out air holes, but the final key, it turns out, is to spin the ends vigorously while forming fresh links. That ensures a nice tight tip guaranteed not to burst.
But while it’s nice to master tricky recipes, it’s even nicer to broaden your touch, your food aptitude. Which is where the vinegar comes in. We stole this sausage dish from Andrew Feinberg via the doorstop-sized CoCo cookbook, down to the sautéed peppers served alongside the fried links. Sausage and peppers is pretty common, but, due to a tiny splash of balsamic, these peppers were perfect. The vinegar lightened the pork and brightened the whole plate. Keller (and, of course, Feinberg, would approve.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s not to be discouraged by tricky recipes. Having salt and vinegar within arms reach is half the battle.
(NOTE: get a kitchen scale. Curing salt optional, but they retain freshness and color. These freeze well. Also, when you grind, run through large, then fine die. Also (#2) make sure the butcher (if you’re making links) gives you casings packed in salt-they last a year. If you already possess a Kitchen Aid and have a bit of time, don’t be a schmoe: get the grinder/stuffer accessories. We added a bunch of directions on the processing-the book is sort of for the already-chef.)
Homemade Sausage and Peppers (From Coco and adapted from Andrew Feinberg)
Makes about 20 links (or a bunch of patties)
For the sausage:
Hog casings
4 ½ pounds fatty pork butt
½ pound pork belly
1/3 pound chopped parmesan
4 cloves chopped garlic
2 tablespoons salt
black pepper
5.6g curing salt
1. clean casings (see NOTE). Soak in a bowl of running water and run water through them several times. Make sure not to tangle.
2. Grind ingredients (see NOTE). Stuff casings – this probably takes 2 people – one to feed, the other to hold.
3. Prick all over with a sharp needle or some such device to pop air bubbles. Twist into links-turn several times. Freeze or use as desired.
For the peppers:
2 red bell peppers, cleaned, in ½ inch dice.
Olive oil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
To finish:
1. Warm about 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large pan over medium high heat. Add peppers and let fry, untouched until lightly charred, then toss and cook till soft. Add balsamic vinegar and toss until peppers are coated, season and remove.
To finish:
- Preheat oven to 350.
- Fry 4 or 5 sausages in a large pan (don’t overcrowd or they’ll steam), rolling gently to brown all sides. Remove to oven for a few minutes. Serve with peppers.
