Pork adobo

Unlike like difficulties with African recipes, I've been pretty happy with my excursions into Filipino cuisine. It generally doesn't require a lot of hard-to-find ingredients and its vinegar-intensive sauces make it unlike anything else out there. I wish I had some good story about why I've been trying them, but I just found a stash of Filipino recipes on-line and they looked interesting.

This particular recipe is a Philippine staple--one of the dishes that has a million variations. The only universals seem to be soy sauce, vinegar, plenty of garlic and an odd cooking technique. I tried to stick close to the Platonic ideal I grokked from the range of recipes I looked at.

Ingredients:
1 pound pork butt or similar cut, cut in 1-2 inch cubes (or chicken)
1/2 head of garlic, minced
1/2 small yellow onion, diced
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup vinegar
1 cup water
1/2 teaspoon paprika (most recipes call for black peppercorns, but I liked the paprika idea)
2-3 bay leaves
1-2 Tablespoons sugar (optional. Only a substantial minority of the recipes include it.)
2 Tablespoons cooking oil

1. Heat a medium saucepan on medium, add 1 Tablespoon oil and sweat the garlic and onion for a few minutes until softened.

2. Add soy sauce, vinegar, water, paprika, bay leaves and pork. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 30 minutes. If using, add sugar at 15 minutes.

3. When the pork is tender heat the other Tablespoon of oil in a large frying pan. Remove the pork from the sauce, drain it well, and add it to the pan. Turn the heat up under the sauce and boil until it is reduced in volume by half. Meanwhile, brown the pork over medium high heat.

4. When both are done, serve with rice.

The traditional way to serve pork adobo is to leave the meat dry and pour the sauce over a scoop of rice. Garnishes are unusual, but I'm big on garnishes so I looked for exceptions and found that tomato wedges and/or hard boiled eggs are not entirely unheard of.



The meat has caramelized well, which I attribute to the sugar I added, and has absorbed some flavor from the sauce (plus it's lying in a shallow pool seeping from the scoop of rice) so the pork flavor is prominent, but nicely accentuated by tart and salty notes. The pieces are crisp and chewy--rather more dried out than most Western palates are used to, but I gather that that's how they're supposed to be. I know a lot of Indonesian recipes call for meat cooked to this texture so it's not too surprising to find it called for in the Philippines. The sauced rice--deeply savory, slightly sweet and brightly tart--is the real star here. The meat is almost dispensable. The tomatoes are a great match with the sauce--salt and vinegar bring out tomatoes' best. The eggs, on the other hand, I could take or leave. I do like the richness a bit of yolk dissolved in the sauce brings. Maybe whisking in a raw yolk to thicken and enrich the sauce just before serving would work.

Not quite Thomas Keller's salmon rillettes

[Edit: For all you googlers looking for Keller's actual recipe, it's here. It's worth coming back to read my variation too unless you're dead set on making an exact replica of his dish.]

So, I was watching The Best Thing I Ever Ate, a Food Network show where TV chefs you don't recognize rhapsodize about food you'll never eat from restaurants you'll never go to. That part's annoying, but they do go into the kitchens to show a bit about how the dishes are made and you can pick up some good ideas that way. Usually there's some obscure ingredient or restaurant technique that keeps you from reproducing the dish exactly, but the rillettes aux deux saumons from Bouchon Bistro were surprisingly straightforward, particularly for a Thomas Keller dish. Probably because it's from Bouchon, not the French Laundry (he says as if he's eaten at either).

It's just fresh salmon gently steamed in pernod, diced smoked salmon, shallot, crème fresh, olive oil, egg yolks and lemon juice. I've got most of that in the house. There is a Bouchon cookbook, so I could have looked the recipe up and tried to reproduce it exactly, but salmon rillettes isn't something Keller invented. There are plenty of variations and I wanted to come up with my own.

First, I decided to use gravlax instead of the smoked salmon; It was about time to make another batch. I also wanted to substitute in some other flavoring for the pernod. I'm not going to go out and buy a bottle of a liquor I don't really like for a single recipe. And anyway, it's a liquor I don't really like so I'm probably not going to like how it tastes in the dish.

First step, the gravlax. I kept the dill flavoring, using dill stems I had stored in the freezer, but made some changes from previous batches that I've been meaning to try. I went with the more traditional 2:1 sugar to salt ratio instead of the 1:1 lox-simulating ratio I've used previously. I used demerara sugar which still has a lot of molasses in it for some added interest. And I didn't add weights so I could see what sort of texture I'd get without the compression.


As it turns out, that texture is dense and meaty, but a little mushy on top where the salt was. The flavor is sweeter than previous batches, of course, and has a bit more depth from the molasses. Interesting. I still like lox better, but I grew up with that.


Next step, I steamed another salmon fillet over plain water until barely cooked through, flaked it into a bowl along with the chopped gravlax and mixed with finely chopped shallot, a dollop of crème fresh, a little olive oil, one egg yolk and a squeeze of lemon juice.


That goes into a container and is topped off with a layer of butter to seal it off. I was supposed to use clarified butter but I neglected to check my notes. That goes into the refrigerator to let the flavors blend for a day or two. When ready to serve, crack open the top and spoon onto crostini.


The flavor is in the neighborhood of bagels with cream cheese and lox, but with a richer more complex salmon flavor with shifting undertones of sweet, tart and savory. It's pretty complicated and I'm having trouble pinning it down with words. Sorry. It does seem to be lacking a little something. Maybe it could use some herbs or capers to round it out. (Or maybe not. Adding scallion makes it taste too much like just salmon salad, suitable for a sandwich. No more than a little chives would be best, then.)

After the fact, I've looked up Keller's recipe to see what he did differently. The big difference is that the ingredients are supposed to be mixed into generous amounts of whipped butter. That's what makes it rillettes--preservation in fat. Mine really is more of a salmon salad. Serving with a chunk of the butter layer goes some way to reconciling the differences, though. He also does use chives so that was a good impulse on my part. From the picture, his looks much less chunky, but I can't see in the directions how that came about. Odd.

I've still got half a batch left. Maybe I'll chop it up fine and mix it with some butter just to try it out. ... OK, I did that. Actually, I tossed it into the food processor with a couple Tablespoons of butter. The result was really good. The flavors stayed complex and intense but with a lot of added richness and a smooth spreadable texture. Compulsive eating with a loaf of good bread and a little bit of chives, parsley or herbs of some sort to add a little freshness in counterpoint.

Southwestern ham and shrimp potstickers

I can't really explain how this dish came to exist. I started with a recipe for corn and prawn fritters, tweaked it a bit, tweaked it some more and ended up making something else entirely. I haven't really got a recipe; I just threw things together that seemed to make sense.

The potsticker filling has two components: solid bits and a creamy medium for them to float in.

For the solid bits I used finely chopped ham (actually Canadian bacon browned to get the best flavor), scallions, cilantro, hot pepper and corn. About a half cup of each.




For the medium I used half a small Florida avocado, five extra large shrimp, one egg, salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin blended until smooth.


After I mixed them together I got concerned about how the texture would react to heat so I decided I needed to add some cheese as an extra binder. Monterey Jack would have been the proper choice, but havarti was the only melty cheese I had on hand so it sufficed.

Dollops went into potsticker wrappers (store bought even though I could probably make them without much trouble now that I've got a well-functioning pasta machine). Because the texture was a little loose I had trouble using a full Tablespoon as I could with a traditional meat-paste filling. I ended using about half that most of the time and still having trouble keeping it all in.

Practice makes passable, so I managed. They aren't the prettiest potstickers around, but they'll do. And they cooked up fine in the traditional reverse-braise method.



Here's a look inside:

You can see how the filling's solidified nicely. Better than I had hoped. And now to try one...not bad at all. A little eggier in flavor than you'd expect and a bit noodly where the dough's separated from the filling, neither of which are really bad things. Otherwise, the Southwestern flavors come through with the corn and ham up front, some herb and spice, and maybe just a hint of the shrimp. Tasty and not nearly as fusion-cuisine weird as I feared. Could use a dip, though. A fresh tomato salsa or a remoulade would be just the thing. I'll have to remember that for when I cook up the rest.

I just did a little research and found that Southwestern potstickers are not an unheard of bar food, but, from what I can see, they're just tradional meaty potstickers with different spices. My conconction is a different thing entirely. Well, good. Maybe I should give them a different name, though.

Zom

I've been wanting to cook some more African dishes while we're still experiencing serious tropical heat here in Miami. I don't often match action to thought on this, but I think cuisines are best experienced in the climate that spawned them. This particular dish is from Cameroon. I found it while looking for alternative sources for African recipes since my latest not-entirely-satisfactory experience working from the Congo Cookbook. I found one version at the Fair Trade Cookbook and another in Celtnet's collection of world recipes. Both call for spinach, but that's probably substituting in for the local green, bitterleaf, so I'm going to use callaloo instead. Unfortunately, I got a small bunch from the CSA this week so I'm using under one pound to replace two pounds of spinach, but callaloo won't wilt away nearly as much, so I think I'm still in fair shape.

Ingredients:
2 pounds beef suitable for stew, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
4 Tablespoons cooking oil
1 large onion, thickly sliced
1-2 pounds medium weight greens, coarsely chopped
2 medium tomatoes, chopped or 1 can diced tomatoes, drained
2 Tablespoons tomato paste
2 Tablespoons natural peanut butter
chili pepper flakes to taste
salt and black pepper to taste
a squeeze of lemon for each serving

1. Season the beef with salt and, using as much of the cooking oil as necessary, brown in batches in a large pan. Remove the beef to a pot (I used my slow cooker), salt a little more and cover with just enough water to cover, approximately four cups. Bring to a boil and simmer for around 1 1/2 hours, until the meat is just starting to get tender. Drain the beef broth you just made. Reserve two cups for this dish and keep the rest to use later (bonus!).

2. Add the remaining oil to the pan you browned the beef in, heat to medium and add the onion. Fry, browning slightly and scraping up the stuck on beefy bits. When the onion is soft, add to the pot (deglazing the pan with the reserved beef broth if necessary), along everything but the lemon. Stir a bit to get the tomato paste and peanut butter dissolving. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, until the beef is tender and the tomatoes are falling apart. Adjust seasonings and serve over rice or millet.

And here it is:


I dunno. It's not actively bad but it's not great either. Maybe it's me; I keep getting exciting about trying regional African cuisines but peanut butter and tomatoes are just peanut butter and tomatoes, not some revelatory experience. The flavors just don't blend into anything excitingly synergistic. I can say that the callaloo works well with that combination and stands up to a half hour in the stew pot better than spinach can. That's the best I can say for the dish, though.

I've done a bit more research, and I think, instead of Cameroonian zom, I should have made Tanzanian mchicha. According to a few different sources, amaranth is common in East Africa. A few even say mchicha is the Swahili word for it. The recipes I've found call for spinach, but I'm comfortable saying that they're substituting for callaloo. They also add coconut milk and curry powder to the mix, which I think will help the peanut butter and tomatoes get along better. That certainly sounds much better than how the zom turned out, but then the zom recipe sounded better than how the zom turned out too. Next time I've got some callaloo, I'll just have to try it and see.

Roasted avocados

I know I promised more serious cooking, and I do have a half dozen post-worthy recipes lined up, but I was delayed by having to go into work on a day off and then unexpectedly finding a pork shoulder at Whole Foods. I was tempted to do something new with it, but decided to make rillettes the same as last time as I appreciated the flexibility the minimalist seasoning gave me for altering flavors after the fact.

I got home from work today too late to start the lengthy stew I had planned, but I did have time to try the kitchen science experiment I mentioned last time. I kept things pretty simple. I used one of the Tonnage avocados I got at the CSA yesterday. This cultivar is smaller than your usual Florida avocado, but no improvement in flavor or texture. I cut it in half, removed the pit, placed in cut-side-up in a baking dish, sprinkled with salt and chili powder, spritzed with olive oil and baked at 350 degrees. I checked at 15 minute intervals for changes, ending at 45 minutes. There wasn't much change visually, but there were notable changes in both flavor and texture.



Compared to a control avocado, the flavor has lost the bright high notes and is now warmer and more complex--roastier, I suppose. It's no more intense, but because the meat has softened to a silky panna cotta consistency, it coats the mouth. You get more flavor per bite and rich lingering aftertaste. The traditional accompaniments--the spices, lime juice, cilantro--are all high notes so I found the roasted avocado a much more synergistic pairing. The one webpage I found with information on cooking Florida avocados warned that they might turn bitter, but I didn't experience that at all. Overall, I found it to be a substantial improvement at least for Mexican flavors; I don't think it would work in sushi so well. But maybe it's just me. Someone else ought to try it and see what they think.

OK, a real interesting recipe next time.

Messing about with crêpes

The first time I made crêpes, after I got the hang of it, I found them to be remarkably easy to make and store and versatile enough to go with most any ingredients you'd want to pair them with. And so, of course, I went nearly a year without making them again. Don't read that sarcastically; I'm serious. The blog demands kitchen drama and crêpes just don't deliver.

It was only this weekend, when I said screw the blog and cooked a bunch of basics to stock up the freezer, that I came back to them. I'm talking about them now so, obviously, I found something of interest, but you've seen the last few posts--it's not much.

That first time I made crêpes I used the Good Eats recipe: mix 2 large eggs, 3/4 cup milk, 1/2 cup water, 1 cup flour and 3 tablespoons melted butter, blend for 10 seconds, add salt and herbs or sugar and liqueur, let hydrate for an hour and then cook.

The blending at least is clearly non-traditional so I did a little research to see if there were other versions distinct enough for a post of their own. I didn't find much--a crêpe's a crêpe all across Europe.
Vietnamese crêpes are interesting, and pretty tasty too, but it's too soon to go shopping again and I haven't got the necessary bean sprouts on hand. They're on the to-do list, though, so you'll be seeing a banh xeo post at some point.

I did find something interesting in a guest post on the Bitten blog, though. Edward Schneider suggested mixing the flour and eggs together and then adding milk until getting to the right texture. He says that this magically eliminates lumps from the batter, which is a nice plus, and I like the idea of being able to judge the amount of milk to compensate for how packed and/or humid your flour is. There was something else of interest in the comments. It seems that the necessity of letting the batter sit for an hour was a point of contention between Julia Child and Jacque Pépin. She said to do it; he said it was unnecessary. When experts disagree, it's best to see for yourself.

So I gave it a shot. Here's the mixed eggs and flour: 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour and 1/2 cup all purpose.

Once the flour was fully incorporated, I added a cup of milk, whipping away to break up that doughball, and then switched to another quarter cup or so of water. (I don't use a lot of milk so I buy those 1 cup shelf-stabilized boxes and didn't want to open another one.) Lump-free it wasn't, but they were doughy lumps, not floury lumps. I could imagine them falling apart if I had let the batter hydrate. But I didn't so they didn't.

Oh, one other suggestion from that post, melt the butter for the batter in the frying pan to save cleaning one more bowl and to get the pan nicely coated for the first crêpe. If nothing else, that's a trick worth keeping.

Here's the first, lumpy crêpe.



No good obviously (although it tasted fine), so I blended the batter and the crêpes turned out nicely thin, light and tender after that. They're a little on the eggy side, though, since I'm using extra-large eggs instead of the called for large. I should add a little extra of the other ingredients to compensate next time. I'm not getting the crisped browned edges I want, but with a non-stick pan, that's difficult to achieve. It's a trade-off.

For the filling, I fried up some cabbage, scallions, ham and added a little chicken stock to moisten and melted in some Havarti cheese for a binder.


Notice how the crêpes are paper thin, but rolled up easily without any tearing. I filled some more with apricot preserves for dessert. It looked about the same except a little lumpier. Both were pretty good. The crêpes themselves were pretty neutral, but that was my choice. I wanted to leave them open to possibilities so I didn't mix any of the accoutrements I mentioned up top into the batter. If I were making them for some specific dish, I would certainly do so.

As for the hour's rest issue, I let the second half of the batch sit while I ate dinner before making the extra crêpes for storage. I can't say I noticed any difference before and after so I'm going to say the rest isn't necessary. Myth busted!

I'm getting a bit tired of all this basic cooking. I should have something more substantive to post about soon.

A meatloaf experiment

I did a good bit of cooking this weekend, but nothing much worth posting about. I made a pot of chicken stock, a mess of beans, a batch of scallion buns (I took out the bacon and chives that messed up the last batch and instead just added a little cabbage. That worked very nicely.) and, as you can see from the post title, a meatloaf.

I hadn't planned on the meatloaf being particularly interesting either, but I had a thought that brings it just barely into range. If you read my last post you know that's a pretty low bar, but the results promise possibilities to come.

So, meatloaf. In my last post about meatloaf included a schema that I stole from somewhere for a generic meatloaf. Here's a bit more detailed version:
2 pounds ground meat
1 1/2 cups finely chopped starch (but not too finely. Breadcrumbs, not flour)
1 cup somewhat more coarsely chopped vegetables
2-3 eggs
1/4 - 1/2 cup dairy of some sort
copious seasonings

mix everything, pack it into a loaf pan and decant it into a baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for around an hour until the inside reaches between 140 and 160 degrees depending on who you ask. If you're going to glaze, wait until the last 10 minutes.


Now you could fuss about making sure your choice of vegetable matches nicely with your choice of meat and starch, or you can throw together whatever you've got and count on the seasoning to smooth things out. I went the latter route this time around.

The actual experiment was how far I pushed the definition of "starch". Usually, that means bread crumbs or sometimes oatmeal or crushed croutons. Instead I, while looking at the remnants of the chicken stock cooking process, wondered if mashed carrots and turnips might do. (I also had a good bit of well-boiled chicken. I put that in the beans.) I thought I'd have the full cup and half, but after sqeezing the soup out of the vegetables, they had compressed down to only half a cup, and that's including the bits of onion I left in the there. On the plus side, it had the texture of squished white bread which a lot of meatloaf recipes use. I filled out the rest of the volume with half panko bread crumbs and half oatmeal. (My homemade breadcrumbs went grotty with all the humidity recently so I had to toss them out and make due with what I had left in the house.) I ground those together with the carrot/turnip mush and ended up with this promisingly mealy-looking stuff:


For the meat, I used a pound of ground beef, half a pound of pork and a few Argentinean-style chorizos. I usually buy the Venezuelan-style ones, but I thought I'd try Argentinean this week. I dunno, though. They smell like cheap hot dogs and they're full of fat and gristle.


For the vegetables, I used cabbage, red and yellow sweet peppers, some past-their-prime cremini mushrooms and carrot tops. I fried them up to add a bit of flavor from browning and to drive out some moisture so they can absorb meat juices later.

For the dairy, I used about a third of a cup of well-crumbled goat cheese and the whey it came packed in.

And for the seasoning, adobo con sazon, Pickapeppa sauce and Crystal hot sauce.

Here it is all mixed and molded.




And here it is afterward. I did a simple glaze of ketchup, brown sugar, hot sauce and white vinegar.





It holds together nicely without being tough or crumbly. I should have chopped the vegetables more finely and there's some sinewy bits from the sausage, but otherwise, the texture's very nice.



The flavor is a bit more carroty than perhaps one might wish and I went light on the salt, but otherwise, the random assortment of ingredients I threw together work well enough. It's not great, but random assortments rarely are. [It's tomorrow now and I can report that the flavors work rather better cold and I've decided that I quite like the textural interest of the vegetable chunks. So I'm happier with the results than I was yesterday.] The interesting bit is that the soup vegetables have vanished entirely into the meat mix and I do think they had a beneficial effect on both texture and, subtly, on the flavor.

I wonder how other vegetables with a similar texture might work. Mashed potato or yam should be comparable. I'd be surprised if there aren't recipes out there that already use them, but it's tough to search for them as they're often mentioned as side dishes where they're not ingredients. Going further afield, might an avocado, with much of the moisture squeezed out, work? Or a roasted canistel? Canistels firm up to a yam-like texture when roasted. Now I'm thinking about roasted avocados. There are a bunch of recipes out there, but they're really just warming the avocados through and melting cheese on top. What does happen to avocados when you roast them long enough to affect the texture? Have any of you tried?