Spiced caramelized pear ice cream

I have a mixed history with fruit ice creams. Banana works out great but other fruits tend to give grainy hard-freezing results. In an episode of Good Eats a few years ago Alton Brown talked about this: "the complex chemical composition of the bananas perfectly replaces the eggs that usually hold an ice cream together and provide it with a smooth mouth-feel." So, when I found a recipe in David Lebovitz's highly acclaimed and generally reliable The Perfect Scoop recipe book that uses pear the same way, I was pretty interested in trying it out.

On the other hand, I think Lebovitz made the recipe a little harder than strictly necessary and gave it a rather simple flavor profile. It's just pears, sugar and cream. Now if you've got perfectly ripe, heirloom pears whose flavors you want to highlight, why not? But I've got some fair-to-middling Bartletts from Publix so they could use a little help.

Here's my version:

3 medium ripe pears, peeled, cored and roughly diced in 1 cm cubes
3/4 cups (170 grams) sugar
1 Tablespoon (10-15 grams) honey
1 Tablespoon butter
2 pinches allspice
1 pinch cinnamon
1 dash powdered cloves
1 dash powdered ginger
2 cups heavy cream
1/8 teaspoon coarse salt
a few drops lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla


1. Spread the sugar in a large, nonreactive, heavy-bottomed saucepan or dutch oven. Add honey and butter. Cook over medium heat, stirring as butter melts and honey gets less viscous to moisten the sugar and help it to melt. (Lebovitz only used the sugar which requires a good bit of finesse to melt and caramelize without burning. The fructose in the honey and the fat in the butter break up the sucrose crystals in the refined sugar and get it in a liquid mood. The water in both helps dissolve the sugar too. They also buffer the impact of adding the pears which will cause straight sugar to seize up significantly worse than the mixture does.)

2. Continue stirring as the sugar melts until it is all liquid and the color has deepened to a deep amber. Stir in the pear pieces and the powdered spices. Some of the sugar will seize, but just keep stirring until it melts again. Cook for 10 minutes. The liquid won't be entirely evaporated but it should have thickened up a little.

3. Remove from heat, stir in 1/2 cup of the cream, then mix in the rest along with the salt, lemon juice (which is just to keep the pear from browning, not for flavor) and the vanilla.

4. Cool to near room temperature, blend until smooth and then pass through a strainer if you think you missed any tough bits when you cored the pears.

5. Chill to 40 degrees and then churn in your flashy new Cuisinart ice cream churn!

Before we get to how the ice cream turned out, take a look at the dashers in my old Deni and my new Cuisinart churns. It's a very complicated design and they're almost exactly the same. If Cuisinart doesn't own Keystone Mfg (who make the cut-rate Deni line of ice cream makers) they really ought to sue. Since the design isn't different, I'm hoping the higher quality manufacturing will keep it scraping down the sides of the bucket and mixing the frozen bits back in to seed the ice cream mix the way the Deni didn't (particularly as the design of the Cuisinart precludes me getting a spatula in there to do it manually.

After 20 minutes, here's the result. It's a good level of creaminess/firmness although I could have left it in a few more minutes if it wasn't a rather larger batch than usual and was threatening to overflow the bucket. The bucket was still solid at that point so a longer churn was an option. The dasher did a pretty good job of mixing in the frozen bits; there was just a little left to scrape out at the end. Straight out of the churn the pear flavor is mild and the spices a bit too forward for my tastes. But the real test will be both the balance of flavors and the texture after ripening.

After eight hours in the freezer it looks like this. It's nicely soft and scoopable, which is better than most of my fruit-based ice creams turned out. I think that's due to the incomplete caramelization that left a lot of sugar syrup to mix with the cream. The flavors re-balanced nicely with the pear holding its own against spices. But it isn't perfect, the mouth feel has a hint of the gummy texture of cheap ice cream as, like cheap ice cream it melts into a foam instead of liquid. I think that's the fruit pectin at work, or, in the cheap ice cream, guar gum and carageenan. I noticed this in the other fruit ice creams I've made, too. Well, that just means you should eat it fast which is hard not to do anyway when it tastes this good. And I think I've learned how to keep future fruit-based ice creams from turning into concrete so all's well that ends well.

Pork Estofado

This is a pretty simple (and very tasty) Filipino dish. I did look around for ways to complicate it, as is my wont, but I couldn't find any variants. Or rather, there were a lot of recipes by the same name--the term "estofado" is actually pretty generic--but the biggest variation of pork braised in sugar I found added a garnish of scallions to the recipe I had. I ended up making the cooking process more exciting by knocking my glass measuring cup over (with a quarter cup of soy sauce in it) to smash on the floor and then, rattled by the first mistake, over-adjusting my adjustable measuring cup and splooshing out half the sauce ingredients all over my kitchen counter.

The recipe I'm working from is Reynaldo Alejandro's The Flavor of Asia, a cookbook I have mixed emotions about. It has a great range of recipes from China in the North all the way down to Indonesia and it was my first introduction to many of the cuisines in between, but as I learned more about cooking and about those cuisines I discovered that many of the recipes have been over-simplified and there are a lot of areas of confusing vagueness. In this particular recipe Alejandro doesn't specify if the plantain garnish is supposed to be ripe or green. His previous cookbook was Filipino; He knows what it's supposed to be, he just doesn't say. In my research I think I found that it's supposed to be ripe and that it's substituting for saba bananas, whatever they are. I've used ripe before and it turned out well, but I'm using green today to compare and contrast. Luckily, the same skills that let me notice the cookbook's shortcomings also allow me to compensate for them so it's still usable. Here's how I figure this recipe ought to go.

* 1/4 cup vegetable or corn oil
* 2 tablespoons minced garlic (or 2 Tablespoons crushed)
* 1 pound lean pork, cut however you like (the low slow cooking will tenderize any meat. If the pieces are over an inch and a half cube add an extra half hour cooking time)
* 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
* 1/4 cup soy sauce
* 1/3 cup sugar
* 1/2 cup water
* 1 bay leaf
* 8 peppercorns, crushed
* 1 carrot, cut into 1-inch strips (It's not really a strip if it's 1 inch thick so I think this means 1/8-inch thick strips, 1-inch long)
* 2 ripe plantains, cut 1/2 inch thick diagonally and fried at medium high until cooked through and browned
* 2 pieces French bread, cut into 1-inch squares and fried at medium high until browned and crisp (that seems like a lot more plantain than bread so I think saba bananas must be smaller than the plantains you can get around here. Or maybe they cut their French bread into larger pieces. I use equal amounts of bread and plantain for each serving.)
2 scallions, shredded

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2. Add garlic and oil to cold dutch oven. Turn on medium heat, cook until garlic starts to brown. Remove.

3. Add pork cubes and brown in batches, about 3 minutes on each side.

4. Remove from heat. Let cool briefly and carefully add vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, water, bay leaf and peppercorns.

5. Cover. Place in oven. Cook for 1 hour.

6. Add carrots. Cook for another hour.

7. Remove dutch oven from oven. Remove pork and carrots from sauce. Reduce sauce on stovetop over high heat until it's reduced in volume by 3/4 and starts to get syrupy. Return pork and carrots and heat through.

8. Meanwhile, fry plantains and bread (a sprinkling of salt boosts the flavors nicely here) until crisp and brown.

9. Serve garnished with plantains, bread and scallions possibly over rice depending on just how much starch you want with your meal. But if you do make sure the croûtons have a chance to absorb some sauce before the rice sucks it all up.


At the end the meat should be fork tender, the carrots about to fall apart and the sauce richly sweet and vinegarly tart. The croûtons and plantains (Definitely go with ripe. The plantain chips I ended up making this time weren't nearly as good.) add extra flavors and crunch as well as bursts of the sauce as they release what they soaked up. It's an unusual combination of flavors and textures for many American palates, but very accessible so I've found it a good introduction to Filipino cuisine for the folks I've fed it to.

Abokado review addendum

I didn't look at any Abokado reviews before I wrote my own because I didn't want to be influenced by others' impressions. But afterwards I looked around and found a New Times review by Lee Klein who backs me up on a lot of my points and sums things up better than I did. Lee writes:

"The décor is accessible, comfortable, and utterly soulless. Just like the food."

"...the kitchen's consistently timid hand..."

"...numerous menu items here that seem to have been conceived according to how they read rather than how they taste."

"Why put jalapeño with hamachi? What good can it possibly bring to the fish?"

"Abokado, like other places of its ilk, proves satisfying to a majority of diners by playing things cute and safe."

What satisfaction is to be had came from some heartier main courses and the extensive beverage options so I missed them. Have any of you been to Abokado? What do you think? And if you're an Abokado chef who stumbled on this while ego-surfing please feel free to defend your dishes.

NOTE: a month after I posted this the Miami Herald published a much more positive review of Abokado. Maybe they're improving? Or maybe it all depends on your tastes. I think you'll have to judge for yourself.

Restaurant review - Abokado

MIAMI - ABOKADO BRICKELL
Mary Brickell Village,
900 South Miami Avenue,
Miami, Fl., 33130
T 305.347-3700
F 305.347-3777
Open Sun.-Wed. 12:00 p.m.-11:00 p.m.,
and Thu- Sat. 12:00 p.m.-midnight
http://www.abokadosushi.com
E-mail: abokado_miami_brickell@abokadosushi.com

I don't really get out much so maybe everyone already knows about Mary Brickell Village. I only heard about it last week. Tucked away at the east end of Calle Ocho, the mall is a bit hard to find and when you do its pretty unassuming until you get inside and see the central plaza laid out in front of you. There's a fair bit of shopping, but we're here to talk about food and Mary Brickell Village has a pretty impressive line up of restaurants:
Abokado Sushi Restaurant
Balans Restaurant
Blue Martini
Grimpa Steakhouse
P.F. Chang’s
Oceanaire Seafood Room
Rosa Mexicano
Kuva Restaurant & Lounge
Blu Pizza e Cucina

The standout here is clearly Rosa Mexicano which was mobbed fairly early on both the Monday and Thursday nights I was in the area. Tonight I wasn't planning on going there anyway, I was headed for Abokado.

On its website, Abokado describes its concept:
"Abokado’s Japanese Pan-Latin menu is born of the union of traditional Japanese and Latin American cuisines, preserving the natural balance, taste, aroma and texture of fresh seasonal ingredients from both worlds.

"The restaurant’s distinctive signature dishes - handcrafted to perfection by expert chefs - create a cuisine that redefines fusion presenting a true evolution of flavor. The menu incorporates and respects the distinctive character and essence of each cuisine and culture represented."

Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? I definitely thought so, so, with my waiter's help, I picked out a selection of dishes that you can't find anywhere else.

I tried
The Abokado "Nachos" - spicy tuna, avocado, cucumber and kaiware sprouts served on top of crispy shiso leaf,*

the tiradito sampler, which included:
Tuna Tataki - tuna, apple-daikon relish, aji-amarillo sauce *
Salmon - avocado, Asian pear, salmon roe with jalapeño and key lime ponzu
Hamachi - serrano, cilantro, avocado relish with chile-sesame ponzu *
Beef Filet - crispy shallots, jicama, micro arugula with yuzu truffle aioli,

and
the Viva roll- spicy tuna, avocado, cucumber, cilantro and jalapeño wrapped in warm flour tortilla, served with Spicy Crab Mix *

I'm sorry I don't have any pictures; I wasn't really planning to do a review after just one visit so I didn't bring my camera along. It's a shame as all of the dishes were beautifully laid out. I think I tried enough different dishes and saw enough of a pattern emerging that I can make a make something of a judgment. Just keep in mind that a) I didn't try any main dishes and b) I like big bold flavors. If you're the sort who's always finding food too spicy, you'll have a very different experience than I did.

Let's start with my waiter's primary suggestion, the "nachos". I was served tempura fried shiso leaves, each with a dollop of tuna paste dotted with tiny bits of diced avocado and cucumber. I can't say I noticed the sprouts. It's a fun idea and quite pretty with the vivid green of the shiso leaves contrasted with a bed of threads of deep red beets. Unfortunately, the tuna was extremely mild and a 5 millimeter cube of avocado doesn't add anything. This was finger food, so you pick up each leaf like a tortilla chip and take a bite. The flavor starts with a hint of tuna but that's quickly overwhelmed by the tempura batter. And that's all there was to it. If it wasn't trying so hard to be clever I wouldn't mind so much. I still wouldn't like it, but I wouldn't be actively insulted by the idea that I'm supposed to like it. Cleverness is never more important than flavor.

The tiradito sampler was a step up, but still didn't wow me at all. The tuna had a microgram of relish and a couple drops of sauce so it was just a piece of tuna with a hint of burn. That's something that particularly bugged me about all of the spicy dishes. (The ones marked with a star, theoretically.) The spice was always the heat of a raw slice of pepper; It was never incorporated into the dish to work with the other flavors. On the other hand, I did like how the tuna was marinated as a chunk and then sliced to mimic pieces of seared tuna.

My first impression of the salmon was that the pear was a puzzling addition that didn't make any sense. But the real problem was that it was undersauced. My waiter brought me a little sauce sampler dish and an extra drizzle of ponzu really tied the dish together. So this one was well-conceived but poorly executed.

The hamachi I liked just the way it was. The avocado relish (It was guacamole. Why couldn't they just call it guacamole?) paired well with the fish and there was enough of the ponzu for the chile and sesame add some extra notes.

The beef I liked as well, but it was essentially beef carpaccio with a bit of crunchy vegetable in a mayonaise. Nothing wrong with that, but in a blind tasting Japanese-Pan Latin is not going to be in your top ten guesses.

Finally there's the Viva roll which can best be described as a nice try. Again all the flavors of the fillings were so mild that the primary flavor was the carrying vessel, in this case, warm tortilla. I found myself wanting a salsa of some sort to finish the dish, to give it some character. But the real tragedy was the "spicy crab mix"; it had the unmistakable flavor of a scoop of school cafeteria crab salad.

And to drink I had a pot of nice enough darjeeling tea. Along with all the various booze options, Abokado offers nine teas. My waiter brought out a box with little vials of each of the tea blends to sniff. Other than the darjeeling, they were all strongly fruity or herbal which I like but I'd never have with a meal.

My overall impression is that not enough thought has gone into how all of the pieces fit together both in the individual dishes and overall. Everything from flavor components that don't balance to the host disagreeing with the waiter's recommendations to putting the dishwasher right next to the sushi bar so you can smell the detergent wafting out. It's those stupid little mistakes and the fact that all the flavors were so muted that add up to a dining experience that have no desire to repeat. And I suppose I should mention that, with tip, the meal cost me around $75, but I'd have felt a bit ripped off at half that.

So that was my first restaurant review. What did you think? What should I have mentioned that I didn't? I know I should have photos of the food and decor. The decor was nice enough, sleek modern and all that. The place was nearly empty and the service a bit over-attentive right up until I got my bill and then my waiter vanished.

[Note: The reviewer for New Times agrees with me. See excerpts and a link to the whole thing here. The reviewer for the Miami Herald doesn't. See the same link.]

If you really want Japanese-Latin fusion, Sushi Chef on Coral Way does a few dishes in that area and I think they do it better. The plates aren't laid out nearly so prettily, but their spicy tuna is actually spicy, their ponzu has a sharp citrus tang and their flavors actually work together. And isn't that what's important?

[Note of 8/14: My last visit to Sushi Chef was mediochre I've heard from a couple other people who weren't thrilled either. A couple of off nights? Or has it gone downhill? Tough to say. I stand by my disappointment with Abokado, though.]

Nutella and peanut butter ice cream (with pretzel bits)

I bought my first jar of Nutella in quite some time recently after realizing the bread I had bought for tuna salad/cucumber/squash sandwiches (sadly lost in the refrigerator debacle) needed to be re-purposed for room temperature applications.

As I mentioned a while back, I've decided that I need try unusual recipes from cookbooks for a while to pick up techniques and possibilities for my own purposes. Peanut butter ice cream was on my list as, like banana ice cream, the main flavoring also has thickening and structural roles. Putting that together with the half-a-jar of Nutella that usually sits neglected in my pantry after I get sick of Nutella sandwiches (or run out of appropriate bread), gave me the idea of a Nutella and peanut butter ice cream.

Google doesn't turn up any pre-existing recipes for such a thing, but there were plenty of peanut butter recipes to sort through. I didn't get far into that process before it occurred to me to search out Nutella ice cream recipes. I only found two and I was intrigued by this one which consists of a cup and a half of Nutella, a cup and a half of evaporated milk and that's it. The creator, Clotilde Dusoulier, found her first try too sweet and toned it down by using an all-natural organic knock off. I followed suit by switching out half the Nutella for natural, unsweetened peanut butter. Other than that I just added a dash of vanilla and a bit of salt and I was done.

I mixed in a large handful of pretzel nuggets (chopped in half) too, but they got a bit soggy so I can't recommend that. Maybe those really thin pretzel sticks would hold up better. Alternatively, you could mix in slices of frozen banana. I was tempted by that idea, but I want to find out what happens when I use all peanut butter and swap out the evaporated milk for coconut milk and I'm saving the banana for that. I'm torn over whether a dash of curry powder is going to make or break that recipe. Well, only one way to find out.

Hmm, I just did a quick search and discovered that you can buy commercially manufactured coconut curry ice cream (if you live in Luxembourg, anyway). At least theirs doesn't have any peanuts in it.

Anyway, back to the Nutella and peanut butter ice cream. It turned out like a dense rich premium ice cream. The fat in the Nutella and peanut butter must have compensated for the lack of it in the evaporated milk. It's somewhat healthier fats though. The flavors are Nutella and peanut butter, no surprises there, but nothing wrong there either. Some of my coworkers were quite excited about the idea of this ice cream; I wonder how they'll react to the reality. (The color balance in my picture of the final result went wonky and it ended up looking unappetizingly yellow. I'll try again tomorrow.)

Fergus Henderson's Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad

[Yes I saw this dish properly prepared on No Reservations too and learned that I overcooked it, rendering the marrow. That's probably why my marrow didn't have a lot of flavor to it. I've finally gotten my hands on some more marrow bones and made it again with rather better results. I bought a new camera in the meantime so I have much better pictures too. I'm going to put them in a new post so click here to take a look.]

If you watch any foodie-centric television (as opposed to the ever more downmarket Food Network) that name should seem familiar to you. Any time a foodie show travels to London they stop by Henderson's restaurant St. John and talk to him about his single-handed revival of country English cooking using all the other bits of the animal than what you normally eat. And if you've been watching reruns of Anthony Bourdain's old series Cooks Tour then just a few weeks ago you saw him calling this particular recipe his choice for his death-row meal.

Henderson popping up all over the place inspired my recent declaration that I want to cook and eat more organ meat (and my resulting disappointment at how little I've found available). Well, that and most of a bottle of wine. The latter is a general requirement for most of my declarations. Anyway, I'm pleased to have found that Whole Foods carries marrow bones and to have found Henderson's recipe on-line. So here's my chance to see what all the fuss is about. I'll let Fergus give you the details:

Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad
from The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, by Fergus Henderson

- serves four

twelve 3-inch pieces of veal marrowbone [the packaging my marrowbones came in doesn't actually say what animal it came from. It's about veal-sized though]
a healthy bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked from the stems
2 shallots, peeled and very thinly sliced
1 modest handful of capers (extra-fine if possible)

Dressing:
juice of 1 lemon
extra-virgin olive oil
a pinch of sea salt and freshly ground pepper
a good supply of toast
coarse salt

Put the marrowbone pieces in an ovenproof frying pan and place in a hot 450 degree (F) oven. The roasting process should take about 20 minutes depending on the thickness of the bone. You are looking for the marrow to be loose and giving, but not melted away, which it will do if left too long (traditionally the ends would be covered to prevent any seepage, but I like the coloring and crispness at the ends).

Lightly chop your parsley, just enough to discipline it, mix it with the shallots and capers, and at the last moment, dress the salad.

Here is a dish that should not be completely seasoned before leaving the kitchen, rendering a last-minute seasoning unnecessary by the actual eater; this, especially in the case of coarse sea salt, gives texture and uplift at the moment of eating. My approach is to scrape the marrow from the bone onto the toast and season with coarse sea salt. Then a pinch of parsley salad on top of this and eat. Of course once you have your pile of bones, salad, toast, and salt it is diner’s choice.
____

That's the way I like my recipes: conversational and explanatory. But enough of that, you want to know if it really was the exquisite experience I was promised. And the answer is: not really. The marrow didn't have much character and was usually overshadowed by the parsley salad. And by itself it paled beside a good butter. It wasn't bad, mind you, but a death row meal choice it was not. I suppose I might have got sub-standard marrowbones. They were previously frozen; maybe that affects the taste. If I'm going to stuff myself with toast and fat, I'd rather have the buttered breakfast turnips that I made last month. I don't think that's quite a death row meal either, but if I had a week left I think I could find a spot for it.

mafé - groundnut tomato stew

If you watched Top Chef this week you'll have seen one of the judges, Chef Tom Colicchio, repeatedly disparaging one dishes' combination of tomatoes and peanut butter as if he had no idea that it's a traditional West African combination (as traditional as an African combination of two new world plants can be, anyway). The chef who made it was clearly going for a standard chicken in peanut sauce--she served it over couscous so she knew the African origins and didn't just stumble on recipe independently--but if she explained that the fault lay in the preparation of the dish and not the conception, it didn't make it to air.

That's a problem I've had myself. I mean preparing a peanut-tomato dish, not malicious reality show editors making me look like a jerk. I've tried it a few different times and I've never come up with something worth eating. Colicchio's ignorance and/or lousy attitude was sufficient impetus for me to give it another shot.

I found a lot of different variations on the basic idea on-line, but I settled on this recipe for the Senegalese version, mafé, mainly because it hasn't been adjusted for American kitchens and sensibilities so I could do that myself.

I really wanted to use mutton or maybe goat but I've settled on buying my vegetables at Whole Foods in the CSA off season for lack of a better choice and their in-house butcher is more focused on semi-prepared meals for harried professionals than on offering a decent selection of meats or cuts. They didn't have any pork belly either so that dish is going to have to wait until I make a trip to Publix or maybe order something through the mail if I don't like the looks of what they've got. On the other hand Whole Foods does carry marrow bones so that should be a nice meal (and a post) some time soon. Anyway, I settled on beef given the choices offered. For vegetables, I've got a sweet potato and a carrot that should suit and my CSA yukina savoy survived all my refrigerator troubles fairly unscathed.

For the cooking method, I've discussed the better way to make stew in a Western kitchen (browning the meat and then a low slow braise in a 300 degree oven) before. You didn't get the full story then because that was a simple stew without any vegetables. Adding vegetables complicates things because they don't all take the same time to cook. For this recipe, I browned the beef, removed it from the pot, browned an onion and a couple jalapenos, returned the beef and stirred in two Tablespoons of tomato paste (I like the sort that comes in a tube) and a couple handfuls of roughly chopped cherry tomatoes. That would be two standard sized tomatoes if I could find any that taste anything like an actual tomato. And that goes into the 300 degree oven.




After an hour the tomatoes and beef juices have formed a rather nice sauce. The low heat keeps temperatures below boiling so it doesn't thicken and dry up. I stirred in the sweet potato and carrot and returned the pot to the oven.



After another half hour I added the yukina savoy.

After twenty more minutes I added a cup of fresh(ish)-ground unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter and enough water to thin the sauce out a bit. The original recipe says it's done now, but I put it back in the oven for ten minutes to let the flavors blend a little. Oh, and I should mention that the original recipe calls for Maggi sauce. From what I can dig up, that's an all-purpose sauce made from vegetable protein that tastes something like soy sauce. Whole Foods didn't carry it, but they did have a bottle of another brand of vegetable protein sauce at the salad bar. It seemed somewhere between soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to me. I used just a little soy sauce in the mafé and, as I neglected to replace the Worcestershire after the big refrigerator melt-down, some Pickapeppa sauce which tastes surprisingly similar considering its complete lack of fermented fish.

So how did it taste? Like peanut butter. The one cup I added walked all over the other flavors. The tomato had cooked down, mellowed and blended with the other flavors over the two hours of cooking so it had no chance against the peanut butter. Stews generally taste better the second day so I'm hopeful the situation will improve, but for now it's one more failure in my peanut-tomato recipe history.


OK, it's tomorrow. The overnight flavor-melding doesn't seem to have helped much, but on the bright side I was able to get my hands on some Maggi sauce. I think the comparison to soy sauce must be more by way of use than flavor. There is a slight resemblance but Maggi sauce has smoky, vinegary and meaty notes you don't find anywhere in soy. I can see why it's a staple in West Africa as it goes beautifully with peanuts. Mixing in a generous amount gives a result something like satay peanut sauce. I think it salvaged the dish and the lack of it at Whole Foods was probably why the chef who made peanut chicken on Top Chef ended up in the losers' circle.