Chicken 65

Back to the curry leaves one more time. This is a recipe from Hyderabad in southeast India. The name is, you might have noticed, kind of weird. There are a bunch of different stories about how it got the name--it originally had 65 ingredients; it was popular in 1965; truckers on Route 65 liked it--all implausibly reasonable. It's a general rule of thumb in etymology that if a word origin story makes any sort of sense, it's not true. Name aside, there's a good bit of variation in recipes and the one I picked was on the more complicated side but is still pretty easy. This version was posted to recipezaar by one Sarah Kamal who says she got it from a Hyderbadi neighbor. She posted it in hard-to-parse texting shorthand so I've reworded things (and made a few changes) for your convenience.

Chicken 65

50 min | 5 min prep

SERVES 4

1-2 cups oil, for deep frying
4 chicken breasts or thighs, sliced into strips

MARINADE FOR CHICKEN
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chile powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 Tablespoon soy sauce

BATTER FOR CHICKEN
1 egg, beaten
3 Tablespoons corn flour [I used plain-old wheat flour. I should buy some masa if corn flour is going to keep popping up in recipes I'm making.]

YOGURT MIX
500 grams yogurt, beaten
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chile powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic, finely chopped

FOR TEMPERING
3 Tablespoons oil
5-6 small hot green chiles
2 sprigs curry leaves


1. Mix the marinade ingredients, grinding the ginger and garlic into paste with a pestle. Add the chicken, mix well, and let marinate for at least an hour.


2. Mix the batter and add to the marinating chicken. Mix the yogurt mix ingredients. Heat oil and fry chicken until golden brown. When removing chicken pieces, drop them right into the yogurt.


3. In a small pan heat tempering oil over medium high heat until shimmery. Add chiles and curry leaves and they start to shrivel and color.


4. Pour oil, chiles and curry leaves into a large pan or pot over medium low heat. Add chicken and yogurt mix. Cook until the yogurt reduces, dries and forms a coating to the chicken. [Theoretically, anyway. I got worried when the yogurt started to stick to the bottom of the pan and threatening to burn so I stopped cooking it a little early.]


This manages to look even worse than the mango curry, but it's not half bad. The flavors are brightly spicy, tangy and tart. Some recipes specify sour yogurt in the ingredients so I have some confidence that that's intentional this time around. On the other hand, it's seriously lacking in bottom notes so it's not an entirely balanced dish. But you're supposed to eat it with naan and booze which probably would help with that.

The chicken is tender and moist, the yogurt coating creamy in a curdled sort of way. If you do a Google Image search you'll find a lot of pictures of much better looking Chicken 65, but if you click through you'll that those recipes use a Tablespoon or two of yogurt in the marinade, deep fry the chicken and serve. The ones with a cup or two of yogurt generally look just as unpleasant (although they usually add red food coloring which I left out). I really have no good reason for thinking that this sloppier version is any more authentic or any tastier. It was just more interesting to try making. The simpler ones do have a ring of simplification about them though, so I'm happy with my choice despite the unaesthetic results.

Gravlax - variation one

Since I knew I'd be baking bagels this weekend, I thought I'd make some gravlax that more closely resembled lox than my first batch.

To recap, gravax: take one fillet of salmon, sprinkle it with 1 Tablespoon salt and 1 Tablespoon sugar, add a big pile of dill (and optionally other flavorings), wrap tightly in plastic and press under a heavy weight in the refrigerator for three days, flipping every 12 hours. For this batch I ditched the dill and substituted a generous teaspoon of finely ground lapsang souchon smoked tea. I ground my own from loose leaf, but you could just tear open a teabag or use smoked salt or a few drops of liquid smoke. Or smoked sugar if such a thing exists.

Here it is after the three days were up:


And here it is sliced topping one of my mini-bagels:


The experiment was a success; the flavor is dead-on for lox. I was afraid the smokiness would be overwhelming--it certainly was in the run-off liquid. The amount of tea I added was a pure guess so a screw up was quite possible. But the flavors turned out nicely balanced between the smoke, salt and sweet (and fishy, of course). The smoke is, of course, the most important part, but as I looked up lox recipes the few I found called for brown sugar. I've been using the local organic stuff that, while not brown, is a bit underprocessed so it's off-white which I think has added a note of molasses now that I'm looking for it. I'll need to try full-on brown sugar at some point.

The texture is not quite the same as lox, though. Good quality lox is silky but can be sliced paper thin without tearing. My gravlax tears more easily and is rather denser and meatier. The real lox process is wet brining, freshening with a soak in unsalted water and then cold smoking. No pressing involved, but some drying from the smoke. The silkiness comes from all the retained moisture and it must be that last step that gives it it's structural integrity. I wonder if pressing for just the last 12 hours would approximate that. That's going on my to-do list, but only after I've tried some other fish types and adding other flavors. No reason to try reproducing what I can buy at the corner deli when there's a world of possibilities out there.

New York bagels (or some approximation)

Back in my Parisian bagels post I listed a handful of alterations to the recipe that would bring it closer to the New York version. Not that the Parisian version was at all bad, it just wasn't New York and that's what I want to try to make. Today I marked up the recipe with the modifications and gave it a try.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups bread flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
[Using whole wheat wasn't actually one of the modifications, but I bought some white whole wheat and I've been wanting to try it out. It's supposed to have the physical properties of whole wheat without the flavor. Now that I write it out, it doesn't sound like such a great thing.]
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast
3 Tablespoons malt syrup
[I found malt syrup at Whole Foods. It's not particularly sweet so I was generous with it and cut back on the water to compensate.]
1 Tablespoon salt
1 cups hot water

water for boiling
1 1/2 Tablespoons malt syrup

various toppings


I preheated the oven to 425 degrees--a little hotter than last time--hoping to get the bagels a little crispier.

I mixed the dry ingredients and then carefully added the wet just until the dough came together to make sure the dough stayed stiff. That made the 10 minutes of kneading a bit of a chore, but since I used the whole wheat, it needed the full time to get the gluten worked up.

Once it formed a tight ball, I put it in an oiled bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and let it rise. Some recipes only give it twenty minutes for this step, but since it's for flavor production I figured I should give it a full hour.

I punched down the dough and cut it up into pieces for the individual bagels. I decided to make eight 2-ounce mini-bagels this time so I can have a whole one for a snack. I tried rolling out a rope and making a loop to form them, but the dough isn't at all sticky and I was a bit over-generous in the oiling earlier so I have troubles there. Instead I gave each piece of dough a good knead to work out bubbles, let them rest a couple minutes, and then flattened them, poked a hole in the middle and formed them into a bagely shape. I think that worked well enough in deflating them, but they really don't want to be reshaped at this point they're not nice well-formed loops.

Once they were shaped, I boiled them in the malt-water for a full three minutes with a flip in the middle.


When I took them out of the water I skipped the egg wash and just dunked them into a bowl of mixed sesame seeds, poppy seeds, kosher salt and diced onions. It made kind of an ugly mess so I changed to sprinkling the mix over the top for the later ones.

They sat for ten minutes and then into a 425 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. I think I took them out at 22.

The toppings didn't work quite the way I had hoped. There's too much and since the onions aren't on top, they didn't brown. Well, I can always scrape off the excess.



The outside of the bagels have the appropriate chew, but they aren't crisp. I think that's because the excess toppings insulated it and because I skipped the egg wash, but another few minutes in the oven wouldn't have hurt.



The texture inside is dense, but soft. They seem more like soft pretzels than bagels. (Using too much salt in the toppings only increases the resemblance.)

The recipe for soft pretzels is almost exactly the same as for bagels. I wonder what the key difference is. Maybe the texture inside is like that because my misshapen bagels had lots of vents. A proper bagel's interior should be sealed inside a thick skin created by the boiling. But so should a proper pretzel. The fact that I made these bagels so small might have had some effect since pretzels are almost always thinner than bagels. This is going to require some more experimentation to find out. Any-which-way, it still beats light and fluffy.

The whole wheat must have had some effect too, although there's nothing in the texture and only the slightest hint in the flavor you can point to as recognizably whole wheat. There is a hint of the malt there, too. Malt also shows up in a lot of soft pretzel recipes and I think it struck me as part of the pretzely flavor. Maybe I've had more properly made pretzels than bagels in my life so that's where my memory of malt goes.



Overall, these aren't bad beyond the trouble with the toppings. There's some good texture on the outside at least and the flavor is about right, but they aren't quite what I was aiming at either. I think the first batch turned out better overall. I'll have to change some elements back to see if I can bring out the best of both versions.

After that, though, I see some bagel recipes that use a sponge for extra flavor. It's not clear, but that may be the Montreal style which I've been curious about. That's going on the to-make list.

Shrimp and mango curry

I was searching for "shrimp" and "curry leaves" when I came across quite a few mango curry recipes. I had no idea such a thing existed and I've got to admit to being skeptical. The shrimp and mango curries were the oddest of the lot--the others were really more glorified chutneys--so that's what I decided to try. But most of them called for ingredients I didn't have or I just didn't like the look of so I added shrimp to this vegetarian mango curry instead:


Mango curry
by Madhur Jaffrey

Serves 4-6 Vegetarian

mango
Preparation time less than 30 mins
Cooking time 30 mins to 1 hour

Ingredients

3 medium ripe mangoes, peeled pit removed and flesh cut into 1cm/½in pieces
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1-1½ tsp salt
55g/2oz jaggery or brown sugar, if needed
310g/11oz coconut, freshly grated
3-4 fresh hot green chillies, coarsely chopped
½ tbsp cumin seeds
290ml/½ pint natural yoghurt, lightly beaten
2 tbsp coconut oil or any other vegetable oil
½ tsp brown mustard seeds
3-4 dried hot red chillies, broken into halves
½ tsp fenugreek seeds [I'm all out. I need to restock.]
10-12 fresh curry leaves, if available

Method

1. Put the mangoes in a medium-sized pan. Add 250ml/9fl oz water. Cover and stew for 8-10 minutes over a medium-low heat. Stir occasionally. Add the turmeric, cayenne pepper and salt. Stir well. (If the mangoes are not sweet enough, add the jaggery or brown sugar to make the dish sweeter.)

2. Meanwhile, put the coconut, green chillies and cumin seeds in to a blender. Add 250ml/9fl oz water and blend to a fine paste.

3. When the mangoes are cooked, mash them to a pulp. Add the coconut paste. Mix. Cover and simmer over a medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture becomes thick. This should take about 10-15 minutes. Add the yoghurt and heat, stirring, until just warmed through. Do not let the mixture come to the boil. Remove from the heat and put to one side. Check for seasoning. [I didn't get the fine paste required in step two so I used a stick blender to smooth things out at this point.]

4. Heat the oil in a small pan over a medium-high heat. When hot, add the mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds begin to pop (a matter of a few seconds) add the chillies, fenugreek seeds and the curry leaves. Stir and fry for a few seconds until the chillies darken. Quickly add the contents of the small pan to the mangoes. Stir to mix.

For the shrimp, I peeled and deveined them (some of the shrimp curries left the shells on) and tossed them with the salt and spices to soak in some flavor as the mangoes cooked down. It's a good technique to bring out the shrimp's flavor and a lot faster than brining. I'll have to remember that.



And the end result is just as good as it looks: really awful. It's warm, vaguely sweet grainy gritty yogurt. You can't really taste the mango; you can't taste any coconut and there's barely a hint of spice. Strain it and cool it and you might have a decent lassi. But as dinner? Feh.

So what went wrong here? First off the mangoes. They were under-ripe and not very flavorful. That's my fault there. A lot of mango curries did call for green mango so I thought it might work, but I should have stopped the moment I cut into the first mango and found out how mild its flavor was. Also, these are probably the wrong sort of mango. From what I've been reading I gather that Indian mangoes are rather tart and even if these were ripe, they weren't tending in that direction. And third, how large are Indian mangoes? I may have used far too much or far too little fruit. I dunno.

Second, the coconut. There was way too much of it. I suspect a mistake in the original recipe. Maybe if the water to coconut ratio was higher it would have actually blended into the paste it was supposed to. Or maybe freezing does something to coconut that keeps it from doing that. And it was quite tasteless. I'll bet real freshly grated coconut would worked much better. You'd think I could get that more easily around here.

Third, the yogurt. Is Indian yogurt thick like Greek or thin? Is it supposed to be tangy or mild? I'm guessing thick and mild since thin and tangy sure as heck didn't help. ...I've just done a little more research and confirmed that. I'll have to strain the remaining yogurt to get the right consistency for the next dish I'm using it in. But I think I'll cook something without curry leaves first. I'm getting a little sick of them at this point.

Mussels steamed with white wine and curry leaves

After my last post I started searching around for recipes using more than a single sprig of curry leaves. I didn't find many; curry leaves are pretty powerful and you generally don't need a whole lot at a time. This recipe, though, called for a full quarter cup. Also, I've been looking for an excuse to have mussels again. They're pretty expensive here in Miami so I'm not buying them on a regular basis like I was back in New York.

This recipe is an Indian-fusion variation on how I, and everybody else, prepare mussels. Fry up some aromatics, add white wine (or beer you're Belgian) and mussels and steam until they're done. I usually used French herbs, Italian if I was adding tomatoes. Really, the only change this recipe makes is to switch the flavors to south Indian.

Mussels Steamed With White Wine And Curry Leaves
Adapted from Raji Jallepalli, Restaurant Raji, Memphis

TOTAL TIME: 30 minutes

Ingredients:
* 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
* 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
* 1 cup finely chopped, seeded plum tomatoes
* 1/4 cup fresh curry leaves (sold in some Indian markets) or cilantro leaves [despite my desire to use a whole bunch of curry leaves, I used three sprigs of each for a little extra complexity.]
* 1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds, crushed in a mortar
* Salt to taste
* 2 pounds scrubbed, debearded mussels
* 3/4 cup dry white wine

Preparation:
1. Heat the oil in a large lidded saucepan. Add the onion, tomatoes and curry leaves or cilantro, and cook, stirring, over medium heat until the vegetables soften.

2. Stir in the cumin, and cook a few minutes longer, until the onion starts to brown. Season with salt.

3. Add the mussels and wine, cover and cook over medium heat until the mussels open, about 8 minutes. Serve at once.

YIELD: 2 servings

* Originally published with American Palates Awaken To the Bold Tastes of India; As the latest fusion star, creative Indian cuisine vies with its Asian rivals.
* By FLORENCE FABRICANT, New York Times, March 25, 1998



I recall the European version of this dish as hearty and rustic, but I think I used a lot more chunky vegetables and went heavy on the basil, hot pepper and oregano. Here, the broth is light and the curry leaf, cumin and cilantro float aromatically above. I neglected to pick up naan so I served it over rice which may have been a mistake as it holds on to a lot of the broth making it hard to get a spoonful of it with a bit of mussel. I had a second riceless bowl and found that the flavors do match well. Specifically, there's a slightly challenging funky edge to both curry leaves and mussels that blend nicely together. If you've had both separately, you know what I mean.

I don't think you could make a satisfying main dish out of this no matter low large the serving or how much rice or bread you served with it. The flavors are too delicate and it leaves you wanting something a bit more substantial. Still, this is a lovely elegant appetizer.

Summer a la carte CSA number one

Actually this is the third time the Bee Heaven Farm ~ Redland Organics CSA has offered a la carte produce this summer, but it's the first time they've shipped up to Coral Gables and I'm still unwilling to drive all the way down to the farm for a pick-up. I really must either start coming to terms with Miami driving or move out of here.

But enough about me, now that I finally can get CSA produce, what did I get?


In the upper right corner is a pile of mangoes in various states of ripeness. There's enough there for me to make another attempt at mango ice cream. I want to try to concentrate the flavor this time around, maybe by roasting or just by cooking down mango pulp into a syrup.

Next to them is twice as many white sapotes as I was expecting. They're fairly small so that's probably a good thing. From my research, I was expecting cherimoyas, but these appear to be casimiroas. Both are called white sapotes and custard apples but they seem to be two closely related but distinct fruits. And custardapple.com.au is all about atemeoyas. They all look different on the outside, but the descriptions of the insides' textures and flavors all match pretty well so the distinction may be entirely botanical and not culinary. I'll probably try one of the recipes from custardapple.com.au and find out for myself.

Next over are four smoked eggs which I guess you eat straight or on top of a salad use to make particularly interesting egg salad for sandwiches. I've made pickled smoked eggs before and I've tried the Chinese-style tea-smoked eggs, but these aren't those so I'll have to try one to see what it's like and give some thought to the disposition of the rest.

Below the eggs is a much-easier-to-deal-with bag of arugula. A bit of salad, a bit of sandwich topping, a bit of pasta topping and that should do it.

To the right are curry leaves and plenty of them. Most recipes only call for one sprig so I've got a lot of south Indian and Malaysian cooking ahead of me to use this packet up. I've never made a dish with mangoes and curry leaves in it despite both being common in south India. I'm going to look for one of those.

And that leaves a bunch of garlic chives. They'll probably end up over pasta or in a quiche or somesuch.

That's a fair bit and I've got to admit I haven't much felt like cooking recently. I'm glad I don't have to try to use all this up in a week.

Graham cracker gooey bars

This is a recipe from the L.A. Times Culinary SOS column who got it from Julie Campoy of the bistro Julienne in San Marino, California, who got it from her mother Susan Campoy who got it from the Nantucket Open-House Cookbook by Sarah Leah Chase. No doubt there was some adaption along the line. At the last step in my kitchen they went from graham cracker chewy bars to gooey bars. I'm not quite sure if I undercooked them or if it was the humidity during this stormy weekend that caused the change. They went over quite well with the texture they had so I'm not going to call it a mistake, just a change that I'll need to experiment if I want to replicate.

Crust
3 cups graham cracker crumbs
[I like to crush crackers in a large bowl using the pestle from my mortar and pestle. That won't work well for most folks, but I've got a strange set with a big mushroom-shaped pestle that almost entirely fills the mortar. I doesn't actually work at all well which I probably should have guessed. When a design doesn't appear until 19,999 years into the 20,000 year history of a tool, there's probably a good reason. On the other hand, put the big pestle in a larger bowl and it works a treat for big batches of things that need to be crushed.]
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl with an electric mixer, or in the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the graham cracker crumbs, butter, sugar and flour until moist and well-blended. Press the mixture firmly and evenly over the bottom of a 13-inch by 9-inch baking pan. Bake until the crust is golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes.

Topping and assembly
2 1/2 cups brown sugar
[I may have gone a little heavy on the sugar. I ran out of brown sugar with a cup left to go so I ran some white sugar and molasses through the food processor to make a substitute. I know that when I make powdered sugar that way the volume reduces a fair bit so I put in a cup and a quarter which, as I said, may have been a little much.]
4 extra-large eggs
[Ah, my eggs were just large. That's what caused the change in texture. I should have added one more.]
2/3 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup pecans, chopped
[I crushed them instead by sealing them into a plastic bag, laying it out flat and whacking them with my crab hammer.]
1 prepared crust

Powdered sugar, if desired [I didn't desire. They're plenty sweet without.]

1. While the crust is baking, in a large bowl, whisk together the brown sugar and eggs to blend. Whisk in the graham cracker crumbs, vanilla, salt and baking powder until well-blended. Stir in the pecans.

2. Spread the mixture over the baked crust and return to the 350-degree oven until the filling is dark-golden on top and jiggles slightly when tapped, 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer the pan to a cooling rack and cool completely.

3. Sprinkle a light coating of sifted powdered sugar over the pan if desired, and cut into 24 bars. The bars can be made 1 day in advance. Wrap in plastic and keep at room temperature.



The first part of the experience is the sweet scent of graham and candied pecan wafting up from the pan even after it's completely cooled. And you can see the cut edges slowly oozing out. I don't think that's quite the texture it's supposed to have. I must have undercooked it a little; I couldn't test it for jiggliness when the top had puffed up so I just went by color and smell.



The pieces squish under the teeth, spreading into the mouth. The flavor of the brown sugar dominates, but it's colored by the pecan at first fading into the graham in the aftertaste and it's almost overwhelmingly rich from the butter and eggs. Even as the center spreads in the mouth, your teeth are crunching through both the bottom and top layers. The bottom's texture is a sugary crystalline crunch, not a cracker crunch. You get more of that from that top which crisped up nicely although it shattered when I cut out the squares. The soft inside is chunky with the larger pieces of pecan and gritty with the smaller shards. After the square has melted away, there's still a bit of nut to chew on and strong lingering flavors that demand strong black coffee, maybe an espresso, to cut through. Or maybe a glass of milk; that would work too. You could do a scoop of vanilla ice cream or some warm chunky stewed fruit, which would be nice, but these really don't need any more sweet no matter what other aspects are good contrasts.

Anyway, you can tell from my vaguely poetic attempts to describe them or even just from the picture that these are fabulous if you're up for a seriously intense dessert. Pretty easy to make, too. There are some pictures out there of the chewy version, but they don't look half as good. I'm tempted to blame the photography, though. Maybe I should make the recipe without my unintentional changes to see how it is that way.