CSA week 20 - Shrimp and celery escabeche

This is a recipe from Saveur that I found when I was looking around for pickled celery variations. The call it "Shrimp and Pickled Celery" which not only misplaces the "pickled" (since the shrimp is pickled too), but undersells the dish. The shrimp is cooked first so this is an escabeche, which is substantially more interesting than a straight pickle. That's why I chose to make it; I may not have done anything to prove it in the last year, but escabeche variations still intrigue me.

Other than halving it, and using most of a head of celery instead of two celery hearts, I didn't make any changes to their recipe. On their site, instead of reposting recipes from elsewhere, they just have a short description and a link. It would be rude for me rewrite their recipe here instead, I think. Here's the link for the full recipe, but it's pretty simple, really.

Throw together a bunch of herbs and spices with sugar and vinegar. Simmer to dissolve everything and cool.


Simmer the celery in flavored water. Remove to the brine. Poach the shrimp in the same water, cool, peel, clean, mix with the celery and let sit to pickle.

They give the range of soaking the shrimp and celery in the pickling brine for one hour to overnight. I found that even a few hours wasn't enough; it needed a full day. That may have been because there wasn't quite enough brine to cover everything so I added enough of the cooking liquid to get everything to float.

First off, let me recommend sticking with the original recipe's recommendation of using celery hearts instead of whole stalks. The outer stalks stay tough and stringy despite the simmer and soak. The heart and the leafy ends get nicely tender, though, and soak up some nice flavor from the brine and a little from the shrimp too. A good bit of celery flavor remains, though, so this is legitimately a celery dish. I wouldn't consider shrimp and celery an obvious pairing, but it's not uncommon. There's defnitely a synergy with the two together with the shrimp taking the edge off the celery's flavor and the celery underlaying the shrimp's light sweetness. Here, I think the sweet/tart/salty of the brine and dressing helps bring them together. I'm quite liking the dish, but it's best in small doses. Some appetizers you can make a meal of; this one's just too pickly.

CSA week 18 - Momofuku scallion noodles with roasted cauliflower and quick-pickled zucchini

Momofuku is such a hot restaurant and cookbook right now and this recipe so easy, it's all over the cooking blogosphere. Oddly, nobody really tries to describe what it tastes like. I suppose it seems like it should be obvious--ginger and scallion--but like the Chinatown scallion sauce this is a refined version of (which I talk about a bit at the bottom of this post) there is a profound synergy here that has an electrifying effect on whatever food you use it with. You can read the chef raving about it here, but there's no reason not to just try it for yourself.

Momofuku Ginger Scallion Noodles

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups thinly sliced scallions, greens and whites
1/4 cup peeled and finely minced fresh ginger
1 fluid ounce grapeseed or other neutral oil
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
1/3 teaspoon sherry vinegar
1/3 teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste
1/2 pound ramen noodles
Momofuku roasted cauliflower
Momofuku quick-pickled zucchini

1. Mix together the scallions, ginger, oil, soy sauce, vinegar and salt. Let sit for 15-20 minutes.

2. Cook noodles. Drain and toss with sauce. Top with cauliflower, zucchini and your protein of choice (I seared a handful of bay scallops). It's important to dress the noodles well. I found that the dish improved as a dug down into the bowl and got to where the sauce had dripped down.

Momofuku roasted cauliflower
[I just did a little more reading and found that the Momofuku cookbook just uses a simple pan-roasted cauliflower without the dressing. This works too.]

Ingredients:
1 small head cauliflower
1 drizzle peanut oil
2 Tablespoons Thai-style fish sauce
1 Tablespoon rice wine vinegar
2 Tablespoons sugar
juice of 1/2 lime
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small medium-hot pepper, seeded and thinly sliced
1 Tablespoon cilantro stems, finely minced
1/4 cup cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
2 Tablespoons mint leaves, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon shichimi togarashi [so-called Japanese seven-spice powder although it's mostly not spices. It's citrus peel, ground chilis, Szechuan pepper, sesame, poppy and sometimes hemp seeds and powdered nori]
[The stand-alone cauliflower recipe calls for toasting the shichimi togarashi onto puffed rice. I figured that would get soggy mixed into the noodles so I just added it to the marinade.]

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cut cauliflower into florets. Toss cauliflower with the oil and spread on a baking sheet without crowding. Put in over and roast for 30 minutes, stirring once. Check doneness; the cauliflower should be tender and spotted with brown bits.

2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine fish sauce, vinegar, sugar and lime. Stir until sugar is dissolved adding a little water if necessary. Add garlic, pepper, cilantro, mint and shichimi togarashi. Add a little more water if there isn't enough liquid to moisten everything.

3. When cauliflower is done, cool briefly and dump into the large bowl. Toss to coat and let drain as there should be excess dressing.

Momofuku quick-pickled zucchini
[The recipe originally called for cucumber, but zucchini is close enough and closer to hand.]

Ingredients:
1 cup zucchini, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Toss zucchini in sugar and salt. Let stand 5-10 minutes.



Like I said up top, the scallion and ginger merge into something more than the sum of the parts. It's fresh, sharp, a little tangy, a little salty. It's just gorgeous and it actually brings out the best of the noodles flavor rather than just using it as a vehicle. The zucchini doesn't add a lot, just some textural interest, really. It's interesting on its own but it's slight bite (surprisingly tart given the lack of vinegar) can't stand up to the sauce's intensity. The cauliflower on the other hand are sweet and earthy with a nice crunch to them. A really good combination of flavors and textures, really easy and using a lot of CSA vegetables I had on hand. Winner all around.

Gravlax variation two

I've been looking for ways to use up the frozen whiting I've got that doesn't involve just frying it up. It's not really good enough to eat without a transmutation into some more interesting form.

The more interesting form, as you may have gathered from the title, is gravlax. If you haven't seen my previous posts on this dish [variation one and variation zero], gravlax is a Swedish cured fish, most commonly made with salmon and flavored with dill.

Making it with whitefish isn't unheard of, though. I'm using two small fillets of the whiting here, for the cure a Tablespoon of sugar and a Tablespoon of kosher salt, and for flavoring a couple big pinches of dried fines herbes and the zest of half a lemon. As is traditional when you've got two fillets (as one traditionally does), I heaped the cure and flavorings on top of one filet and laid the other on top, both skin side out, wrapped it up and let it rest in the refrigerator for three days, flipping every 12 hours. I must say that the flipping makes more sense in this configuration than it did with a single piece of fish.

After that time, it's squished flat and nice and firm. The texture is rather like smoked herring and the flavor not too far from pickled herring. I'm thinking the lemon, which is surprisingly strong given how little zest I used, is reminding me of the vinegar while the salt and sugar are strongly reminiscent of salt and sugar. Both are a tad too strong, actually, so, after I peel off the skin, I'm going to soak the fish in clean water for a few minutes to try to draw a little out. ... OK, now the whitefish flavor is to the fore with subtle hints of the lemon and herbs. It's a more balanced flavor now, but honestly I think I liked it better before. A little finishing salt fixes it right up and now the flavor's popping again. I'm going to slice it up and eat it with cream cheese, red onion, tomato and, lacking pumpernickel bread, crackers. Mmm, tasty.

Cuban escabeche

Last time I made escabeche, back in September, '08 I mentioned that I wanted to make a Cuban version I had found and then I got distracted by the CSA. But now I've got free reign in choosing my recipes again so I've finally made it. I didn't make the recipe I had picked out back then. Instead, it seemed worth looking around to see what looks appealing to me now. That other recipe has some intriguing differences from what I settled on, so if I come back to the idea I may well give it a shot, but I found the inclusion of lime juice in the recipe I found at Chef4all.com interesting enough to give it the edge.

For those who haven't been reading since last Fall or have lives of your own so don't remember what I was posting about back then, I got interested in variations of cooked pickled fish after trying the Japanese version Nanban Zuke at Shiro's in Seattle.

I made a version of that myself and learned during my research that it evolved from Spanish and Portuguese escabeche dishes. So I made a few versions of that too using shrimp, mahi, and smelt with different results each time.

And now on to the Cuban version. Since I'm only serving myself, I used a single filet of tilapia instead of the two pounds the recipe is designed for. I quartered the rest of the ingredients and since the filet was a bit less than a half pound, I tossed in a few shrimp to make up the difference. Most of you are probably making more than one serving so here's the full unreduced recipe:

Ingredients:
2 cups sunflower oil [I used a light olive oil]
1/2 cup white vinegar
1 teaspoon green peppercorns [I used the pickled sort recommended by, I think, Russell]
http://russelleverett.blogspot.com/
2 bay leaves
1 cup sliced black olives [I considered kalamata since I've got some left over, but they didn't seem right. Instead I used the less briny niçoise.]
1 thinly sliced carrot [I had one tiny CSA carrot languishing in the back of my produce drawer so I used that.]
1 Tbsp. capers
1 tsp. oregano
2 tsp. salt
1 red onion, sliced
2 limes, juiced
1 tsp. sugar
1 cup flour
2 pounds of white fleshed fish fillets
freshly chopped parsley or dill.

1. Add everything but the fish, flour, herbs and half the oil to a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce temperature to low, cover and simmer 10 minutes.

2. Chop the fish into serving pieces, sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge in flour.

3. Heat the rest of the oil in a medium pan until shimmery. Cook the fish until golden brown and crisp on the outside and just barely cooked through. How long will depend on the thickness of each piece so use your judgment.

4. Line a lidded container with some of the solid bits from the marinade you prepared in step one. Lay out the fish (and the shrimp if you fried up some of that as I did). Add the rest of the solids on top and pour over the liquid. Seal the container and let sit in the refrigerator for up to seven days.

I only left it for one day and gave it a flip after 12 hours since the fish pieces weren't completely submerged. Unlike last time, the oil didn't separate out and solidify. There's nothing I recognize as an emulsifier in there so I'm not sure why that is.

When the day was up I pulled it out of the refrigerator and laid it out all pretty topped with chopped parsley.



This recipe is lighter on the vinegar than the last escabeche I made and I think that works well. The dressing is light and multidimensional--not overwhelmed with tartness. You can still taste the fish through it even though it's just a mild whitefish. The olives, capers, green peppers, even the carrots all contribute elements of flavor. I really like how they're all working together. The lime, on the other hand, is hard to find in there.

The fish have firmed up due to chemical cooking from the acid to a solid, somewhat chewy texture. It's something like canned tuna, but not dried out which helps a lot. The shrimp, on the other hand, got a little mushy. They didn't absorb the flavors as well either. Next time, poach out of the shell instead of a quick fry in the shell.

Shrimp aside, this is really quite lovely and, I've got to admit, rather better than I've come to expect from Cuban cuisine. If this is a legitimate Cuban preparation, I've written them off too soon. I guess I need to go out for a fancy Cuban dinner instead of just eating Cuban junk food from holes in various walls to see what I've been missing. Any recommendations?

Casamance Stew

This is another recipe that I downloaded from a recipe archive before the Web existed. It's different from the pork and tomatillo stew I made earlier this week in a few interest ways, though. First, because of it's much more unusual name it managed to almost fully colonize it's namespace on the web; all but one "casamance stew" you'll find online is this recipe. Second, I was able to definitely track it back to its origin. This is a variation on a recipe from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook printed in the October 24, 1990 issue of the New York Times. And third, there is no indication that anyone other than I has ever actually cooked it. Not one review, not one comment and the biggest change anyone has made in the recipe is adding paragraph breaks. OK, that's not true; one guy suggests a parsley garnish.

A little research that I really should have done beforehand reveals that Casamance is a region on the south coast of Senegal and that this stew is actually a tinkered up version of poisson yassa. And while I'm sure the good folks in the Moosewood Collective meant well, the yassa recipes look a lot better and there's one change that really screws up this recipe. Let's see if you can see it without prompting.

Ingredients:

Marinade:
1/2 cup fresh lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce (this is clearly a substitute for Maggi seasoning so I used that instead. Click on the Senegalese tag for more info on Maggi seasoning.)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
3 cloves minced garlic
2 or more jalapeno chiles, seeded, minced

Everything else:
1 1/2 pounds monkfish or other firm fish fillets (I used whiting. According to my notes on the recipe, I used sea bass the first time around.)
4 cups sliced onions
2 cups sweet potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 teaspoon peanut oil,
1 chopped red bell pepper
salt to taste

1. Combine marinade ingredients (1st 7 items).

2. Rinse the fish well and cut into serving size pieces. Layer about half the onion slices in a glass baking dish. Pour some marinade over them. Then add fish and rest of onions, pour marinade over them. Cover and refrigerate overnight or all day.

3. When ready to cook, set the fish aside. Pour marinade off the onions and set aside. Cover cubed sweet potatoes with cool, salted water, bring to a boil then simmer until just barely tender.

4. Meanwhile, in heavy pan, gently saute onions in peanut oil for 15 minutes. Add red bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. Combine onion, bell pepper with sweet potatoes and marinade and simmer 20 minutes.

5. While vegetables simmer, briefly broil or saute fish til lightly browned on both sides.

6. Add fish to simmering vegetables and continue to cook 15 minutes more. Salt to taste.

Serve in wide shallow bowls on steaming rice or millet.



Did you see the problem there? Someone changed the sensible hour marination to a full day. If you have much cooking experience you'll realize that a day in vinegar and lemon juice is going to do some serious pickling to that fish. And if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that's precisely why I cooked this. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that the recipe author knew something I didn't and what looked like a step that would ruin the dish would instead make it something unique and wonderful. I really should have known better.

The fish was badly overcooked chemically before any actual cooking that the recipe calls for. And even if it needed cooking, browning was clearly not going to happen as the fish was waterlogged from its lengthy soak. All the attempt achieved was prompting the fillets to break apart. The 15 minutes of extra cooking time was out of the question.

It's really a shame as, setting the fish's texture aside, the flavor combination is unusual, interesting and not bad at all. The tart sauce brightens up the savory onions and peppers and balances the sweetness of the sweet potato. My salvage attempt on the dish was to treat the fish like salt cod and break it up into chewy flakes. I found that the sauce gets caught up in the flakes so it's more of a hash than a stew at this point and each bite tastes mainly of fish and caramized onion moistened by the sauce. It really tones down the overwhelming vinegariness of the sauce and if the fish didn't taste like canned tuna it would be pretty good.

Doesn't mean I'm going to make it again, though. Next yassa I make is likely to be this one which looks to be different in some rather interesting ways.

Escabeche redeemed

This is my follow-up report on my attempt to make a palatable escabeche. You may recall (or you may have clicked on that link, or possibly scrolled down to my previous post) that my attempt at this dish earlier this week didn't work out because I used the wrong fish. Nothing wrong with the brine, though, so I tossed the mahi I used and fried up a smelt and set it to soaking. That's the before picture to the right and the after picture below. The difference in color isn't from the lighting, the brine seems to have bleached the browned flour coating.


It's had three days to pickle so it's time to pull it out and see what's what. The far less mild flavor of the smelt, compared to the mahi, lets it stand up against the pickling brine, and the oily texture means it absorbs less as well. The flavor balance is now much better. The experience is fish enhanced by the spicy vinegary sauce rather than the sauce with some chewy chunks of vaguely fish-flavored stuff. The flour coating, of course, can't retain its crispness after absorbing moisture from the brine. But the smelt's bones stay crisp which adds a lot of texture to the dish. It's, overall, pretty darn good. So that was a classic Spanish-style preparation. Now I want to try the Cuban version I also found with the olives, capers and cider vinegar.

Mahi escabeche

A while back, when I made shrimp escabeche, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. Oh, it was tasty enough, but my experiences with nanban zuke, the Japanese dish that evolved from escabeche, indicated that one important part of the dish was the interaction of the pickling vinaigrette and the yummy browned bits on fried fish. And since the shrimp was poached, it was lacking.

So, on a sudden whim I decided that today was the day to scratch that culinary itch and give fish escabeche a try. I chose this recipe, although if I hadn't already polished off my latest purchase of olives I would have made this one instead.

The procedure is pretty simple. First, skip the brining and just salt the pickling sauce. If you're going to let the fish soak for a while, it'll all work out the same.

Flavor the oil with the garlic, pepper and bay leaf.








Brown slices of fish.









Sweat the onion.









Cook down the sauce.










Combine and let sit in the refrigerator for a day or two.






It comes out looking nice (partially because I changed some settings on my phone-camera at my first attempt at deliberately making it look better than real life. Yes, my first food porn picture and it's still blurry. I think I need a proper camera if I'm going to keep this up.)

Mahi, it turns out, is definitely the wrong fish for the job. Something oily--swordfish or orange roughy, maybe sardines--would have both stood up better to the frying and had enough flavor to stand up to the vinegar and spices. The mahi turned into dry chewy bland fish-sticks. The pickling sauce I've got no complaints about. It's tart and rich and subtly spiced, but it needs something to bounce off of to work right.

I've got some spare smelt in the freezer. I'm going to fish out the mahi (I waited a day to do this and the mahi was much improved by the extra soaking time. The texture was a bit moister and flavors had become bright and citrusy. I'll have to give the smelt at least three days of pickling time to be fair.) and fry up a test smelt for some compare-and-contrast. Check back in with my in a few days for the results.

Shrimp in Escabeche

I mentioned a while back, after making nanban zuke, that I wanted to try making the European dish that evolved from, escabeche. I've been slightly sidetracked from that because when I went to buy the whitefish for the recipe I found that Publix was having a 2-for-1 sale on Greenwise shrimp. So now I've got three pounds of shrimp to get rid off. I suppose that doesn't sound like a lot but I'm not really a sit-down-and-eat-a-pound-of-shrimp sort of guy.

By the way, has anyone seen an investigation of Publix's Greenwise program to see if the animals actually get the humane conditions claimed? The website is high on marketing crapola and low on useful details. There's a lot of lip service paid to humane treatment in this sort of thing and even beyond any interest in the animal's welfare taking away antibiotics without improving living conditions has been shown to reduce safety of the resulting meat. None of which probably has any relevance to shrimp, though. Publix doesn't say anything more specific than that they're farmed in Thailand which isn't helpful as there's a wide range of qualities of farming practice over there. But since none of the places I shop offer certified organic meat or fish of any sort (except for some whole chickens at Whole Foods I think), Greenwise plus some wishful thinking will have to do.

Anyway, I found this recipe on Epicurious.com which it says is originally from a 2007 issue of Gourmet. It's attributed to Maggie Ruggiero but I don't know if she developed the recipe for the magazine or just typed it into Epicurious.

1 small red onion, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise
1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 Turkish bay leaves or 1 California
2 garlic cloves, smashed
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 pound large shrimp in shell (21 to 25 per pound), peeled, leaving tail intact, and deveined

Preparation
Toss together onion, vinegar, oregano, and 1 teaspoon salt in a shallow glass or ceramic dish.

Simmer oil, bay leaves, garlic, and peppercorns in a small saucepan 10 minutes, then let stand until ready to use.

Add shrimp to a medium pot of boiling salted water (2 tablespoons salt for 4 quarts water), then remove from heat and let stand, uncovered, until just cooked through, about 5 minutes. Drain well, then stir into onion mixture along with oil mixture.

Chill shrimp in escabeche, covered when cool, stirring occasionally, at least 12 hours. Discard bay leaves and serve shrimp cold or at room temperature.
__________

I used just a half pound of shrimp as I'm not cooking for a crowd here but I only halved the amount of marinade. I've found it to be a good rule of thumb in scaling down recipes to only cut down marinades by half as much as I cut the amount of stuff I'm marinating. It tends to be too skimpy otherwise.

Another important note here is that 21 to 25 count shrimp called for are not large as the recipe says, they're jumbo. I found a handy guide to shrimp sizes here. The actual large shrimp I had cooked through almost instantly. One thing I'm working on with my surfeit of shrimp is learning to properly poach them to get that nice tender texture boiling and steaming won't give you. I didn't get it this time as I was confused by the inaccurate "large" in the recipe, but maybe next time.

And a third thing, there's no emulsifier in the marinade so I found the olive oil tended to separate out and solidify over the 12 hours in the refrigerator. Got to watch that.


So, there's a nice garlic vinaigrette and some shrimp. I decided to poach a few extra shrimp at the last minute that just got a dunk and a drizzle for comparison to see if it's worth the twelve hour soak. I'm going to say yes. The marinated shrimp are infused with the marinade's flavors but not overwhelmed like a full pickling. There's a mild tang from the vinegar, the warm richness of the fried garlic and the aroma of the herbs all blended fully with the shrimp. The fresh shrimp the sauce just rolls off of.

So, on the whole, pretty good and not a whole bunch of trouble beyond the fact that you have to make it before heading off to work in the morning. Or you could have it for breakfast I suppose.

I still want to make a fish escabeche. I understand that most recipes call for the fish to be fried and I'm curious how those nice browned bit react to being pickled. Plus, this recipe wasn't suitable for storing for a month. I want something I can keep for a while.

Smelt nanban zuke

If that name looks familiar it's because it's one of the dishes I had at Shiro's while I in Seattle.
I liked it a lot when I had it there and it looked straightforward enough so I thought I'd try to make it at home. If you don't want to click through, basically we're talking about deep-fried pieces of smelt in a vinegary sauce topped with a garnish of onion and pepper. Luckily, my visit to Shiro's was a couple weeks back so I have no real recollection of how it tasted there. I wouldn't want to put my version up to a direct comparison.

I looked around a bit for a recipe right after I went to Shiro's and settled on this one I found at Chilies Down Under although I couldn't tell you why at this remove:
"Nanban Zuke

Marinade

• 2 tblsp light soy sauce
• 1 small chilli (serrano, birds eye, etc) seeded and finely chopped
• 2 tblsp sake
• 700g mackerel fillets, cut into bite-sized pieces
• cornflour
• oil for frying

Sauce

• 0.5 cup rice vinegar
• 0.5 cup sugar
• 0.3 cup water
• 1 teasp salt
• 1 tablsp sake
• 1 small chilli (serrano, birds eye, etc) seeded and finely chopped
• 1 tablsp light soy sauce

Garnish

• 2 spring onions, finely chopped
• 0.5 small green capsicum, cut into thin strips
• 1 cayenne chilli seeded and finely slivered
• a few slices frish ginger, cut into slivers

Combine the sake, light soy sauce and chilli in a bowl and marinade the mackerel in it in a fridge for around 20 minutes. Take out the fish and let it drain for a minute. Dust with cornflour and fry in the oil in a frying pan until golden brown.

Blend the sauce ingredients together, place the fish in a serving dish, and pour the sauce over the fish.

Pour boiling water over the spring onion, capsicum, and chilli, leave for 30 seconds, then drain. Sprinkle the spring onion, capsicum, chilli, and ginger over the fish."

The author calls it a "classic example of the Japanese style" but "nanban" translates as "southern barbarian" if you believe Wikipedia. This article (which is pretty interesting nanban aside) explains that this dish evolved from Spanish or Portuguese escabeche, another dish I need to get around to making at some point.

I made a few adjustments to bring this recipe more in line with Shiro's. First, instead of mackerel fillets, I used whole (well whole-ish, they'd been beheaded and gutted) smelt cut into bite-sized pieces. I was hoping to find fresh smelt somewhere as Florida is known for its smelt, but I only found frozen at Whole Foods so that's what I used. Where the recipe says "cornflour" I assumed it meant cornstarch not cornmeal. I used chili oil instead of fresh chili in the sauce to better distribute the flavor. And I substituted slivers of sweet onion for the chopped scallion. And finally, I made sure everything was deeply chilled instead of room temperature

Since I wasn't using fillets I probably should have lengthened the marination. Twenty minutes wasn't enough for more than a bit of heat to soak in. Wilting the onion probably wasn't necessary; I liked the crispness of the onions at Shiro's.

Shiro's served the dish alone, but I served it over rice. I made a last minute decision to sushify my rice (1 1/2 T rice vinegar, 1 T sugar and 1/2 T salt for each cup of uncooked rice. Rinse the rice well; sushi rice should stick together because of the additions not because of starch. You might add a piece of kombu to the rice cooker too if you're thinking that far ahead.) so I went light on the sauce to keep the dish from getting too vinegary. Overall, a pretty nice summer dish. Cool, light, tart and not too much time or trouble in the kitchen. A green salad with that Japanese style dressing and some hot sake would accompany it nicely.

Mexican-style hot pickled carrots

It's been a good while since I've done any pickling so I decided to pick up some likely looking vegetables last time I was at Whole Foods. I ended up with some petite carrots, actually thin carrots cut into short lengths. At least they weren't claimed to be baby carrots which I suspect are the same thing just whittled down to round off the ends.

There are a few different ways to pickle carrots--dilled, sweet and hot primarily. The particular variety I'm making is the sort of hot carrot you'll find bowls of in the better sort of Mexican restaurant which means they're probably unheard of in Miami. Ideally, they should have a strong vinegar bite, be eye-wateringly hot but still have carrot as the foremost flavor. I became fond of them when I lived in San Diego I've been meaning to try making them on my own for some time. I'm hoping this will prompt me to actually cook more Mexican food as somehow I never quite get around to doing so.

I found a promising recipe here. Pickling in general is pretty straightforward and this recipe is no exception. Put vinegar and water in a pot along with spices and usually plenty of salt and/or sugar. (There was no salt in this recipe which is quite unusual. I added a couple Tablespoons as the carrots I sampled for texture were tasting a bit blah.) Bring to a boil, with the vegetables in if they, like carrots and cauliflower, need a little cooking or not if they, like cucumbers and tomatoes, don't. Once the texture is at the point you're looking for, dump the vegetables into a jar, cool and let sit in your refrigerator for a month. I was surprised to discover that soaking in a vinegar brine doesn't change vegetables' textures very much. If you don't get them right at the start they aren't going to improve. On the other hand, the flavor slowly and continually changes. I've sometimes found notable differences even from the fourth to the fifth week.

Beyond the salt, my only modifications were to cut down the amounts to fit in one of my pickling jars (actually ceramic coffee containers) and, as I was one jalapeño short, using a chipotle which should add a nice smoky touch to the final result. Remind me in a month to tell you how they turned out.
--
Nobody reminded me, but I noticed in my stats that people are finding this page and, more surprisingly, actually reading it so I thought I'd better give you some closure. It's a bit over a month later and basic flavor and texture of the carrots are right on what I was hoping for, including the hint of smoke, but they're not nearly hot enough. It is the right sort of heat, though, so the solution is just to add more jalapeños next time. This batch, because the flavor isn't overwhelming, will make a nice condiment for fajitas or the like. I've got a good easy recipe from Jim Fobel's Big Flavors cookbook; I'll add a link once I've made it and posted about it. Here it is, although I forgot to use the carrots when the time came.

--

It's now three months later and I just found the carrots in their pickle jar in the back of my refrigerator. Surprisingly, not only were they still perfectly fresh, they're finally really hot just the way I wanted them and they taste great. So that's the key: three months aging. Plan ahead!

CSA week twelve - pickled squash

A little belatedly for my initial post I realized that this week's full boxes represent a bumper crop and call for the traditional response: pickling.

I looked around a bit and found some worrying info on the subject from Utah State University:
"There are currently no safe, tested recipes for pickling summer squash followed by
boiling water canning. ... The heat required to can squash results in the squash flesh turning into mush and sinking to the bottom of the canning jar. The compacted flesh will not heat evenly. Therefore, all process times and temperatures are unsafe."

Huh. I did not know that. Well, refrigerator pickling is still an option. For my refrigerator pickles I use ceramic coffee jars. They're big enough to hold a full pound of vegetables, have a good tight seal and don't take up flavors. No real need for mason jars if you're not going to be boiling them.

I'm rather suspicious of a lot of the recipes now because many call for the full canning process and others call for simmering the squash for ten minutes. There are some mushy-looking pictures too so I guess they don't mind. I'm using this recipe minus the twenty minutes cooking time which I know is way too long for squash in any application. Don't people test recipes before sharing them? Anyway, the flavor combination seems interesting and I like that it doesn't go really heavy on the salt. The whole Tablespoon of cinnamon seems a bit odd and makes the brine a rich dark brown you don't see much in pickling, but it didn't enirely overwhelm the other flavors in the brine and the squash itself ought to balance it out. Remind me in a month and I'll tell you how it turned out.

CSA week five - crock pickles

As I wrote I might in my initial post a week ago, I decided to try making crock pickles with this week's cucumbers. Crock pickles, unlike refrigerator pickles, use no vinegar. Instead they rely on the environmental bacteria to ferment the cucumbers, creating acid and the sour flavor.

The process is simple: make a salt water brine with dill, garlic, black and red pepper for flavor. Put the cucumbers in, cover loosely with a weight to hold the cucumbers under the surface and wait a week or so.

Here's the result. It didn't work out so great. From my reading, two things went wrong. First, these are the wrong sort of cucumbers. The traditional pickling varieties are more solid and they're picked young before the seed region gets watery. That watery part tends to dissolve completely in the brine; I made this a bit worse by cutting the bigger cucumbers to fit and giving the bacteria direct access.

Second, too high a salt level lets yeasts grow that produce carbon dioxide. This creates "bloaters" swelled hollowed out pickles with a somewhat off flavor. (Not nearly as bad, I read, as the cheesy flavor of pickles in an under-salted brine, though.) I suppose it's some comfort that the problem I had is common enough that there's a word for it. Must mean I got it nearly right.

Despite all that, the smaller and more solid cucumbers turned out OK. It's been so long since I've had a proper deli cucumber that I'm not sure how close these come in flavor. I presume I'd have a Proustian burst of memory when I took a bite if I hit it dead on so I'm pretty sure I didn't. But, like I said, they're OK. More tangy than than sour with plenty of salt and hints of dill and garlic.

On the whole, I think I'll stick with refrigerator pickles at least until I get my hands on some proper Kirbys and a real crock.