a horse is a horse

BUT MR K, I hear you shouting, because you don't know how to pronounce my last name.  What about the chicken!?

Settle down, kitten.

The chicken-fried steak did indeed leave behind a poorly-lit skinless chicken:

And what can you do with a poorly-lit skinless chicken?  Not a fuck of a lot.  Roasting it would dry it out.  

But you've overlooked something:

That was way too little steak!

That's right, while you're all fussing over the skinless chicken, you neglected to think about the fact that a chicken hasn't got much skin to begin with, so I must have had some steak tips left over from the package.  What became of them?

They were ground up with paprika paste, scallions, pepper ketchup, and Activa, and then mixed in with goat cheese and rolled into a caseless sausage:

After cooking:

The sausage is on the dry side because the steak was leaner than you'd usually use for sausage, but that's okay -- besides, we're mostly testing technique here.  I sliced the sausage and had some of it cold with pea shoots and "stuffed eggs," another Activa experiment: I just made deviled eggs and then bound the two halves back together, and sliced them.  If you look at the egg on the far left, you can see that the Activa is visible -- Activa TG-RM includes a little protein in the mix to help make a bond, and because I used a little more than I needed to and couldn't get the eggs to stay perfectly flush against each other, the Activa sort of filled the gap like caulk.

In both cases, the result is functional but not especially exciting.  Though I expect to do more with sausage in the future.

NOW, what about the chicken?  Well, we gave it a different skin.  After marinating the skinless chicken overnight in slightly diluted hot sauce (we will discuss homemade pepper mash extensively in a future post), I bonded bacon to as much of its surface as I could:

This is a case where Activa is handy, but not necessary: berks bard birds with bacon all the btime, the Activa just helps it stay there, and keep from falling off when it cooks.  It DID work to keep the chicken from drying out -- the breast was nicely moist and flavorful.  

The fact that the bacon is cured doesn't interfere with the bonding at all -- in fact, salt helps a bit.  Cooked bacon wouldn't bond, but that's because of the fatty portion -- rendered fat has no protein, but when uncooked, the fatty portion still has a little.  Still, the bacon didn't make "as tight a seal," I guess you'd say, as the chicken skin had done.

And there you go, round one of the Activa experiments.  All in all, transglutaminase is a hell of an interesting thing to work with.

and shut my mouth

Believe it or not, I think the sweet potato is underrated -- that is, I think sweet potato fries have stolen some of the thunder of a plain baked sweet potato, the best savory preparation of the vegetable.  You do nothing to the sweet potato -- you just stick it in the oven, right on the rack if you like, at about 400 degrees for an hour or more.  It's hard to overcook, though it will LOOK like you've overcooked it, perhaps -- the skin may look a little scorched, the potato may look dried out.

It's not dried out.  The skin will peel away like paper, and the inside is soft and sumptuous, having lost its fibrousness.  It really needs nothing more than salt and maybe a pat of butter, but of course you can do other things to it:

Baked sweet potato with pecan vinaigrette.  Toasted pecans (just drop them in a hot dry pan for thirty seconds), pecan oil, malt vinegar, and a little sorghum to sweeten it.

Sweet potato bacon hash, with fried eggs and mustard.  

Must mention the bacon here.  Garfields Smoked Bacon, smoked over a blend of corncobs and hardwood, has shown up in various food magazines, as a selection of the Splendid Palate's Bacon of the Month Club, etc.  It happens to be made in New Hampshire, so for most of the year I have easy access to it, and it's fantastic.  I've had a pretty wide variety of great bacon -- fatty beef bacon in Louisiana, double-smoked Hungarian bacon, jowl bacon in Indiana, pancetta, ventreche, guanciale, and of course my own bourbon-cured country bacon -- and Garfield's is very very high on my list.  I would have to try it side by side with the best of the jowl bacons to decide between them.

Onward.  For one fairly large sweet potato, I used six slices of bacon -- thick-cut, remember.  This is two servings of hash, and most of the fat of the bacon doesn't wind up in the final product, thankfully.  Grind the bacon up in a food processor and cook it slowly over medium-low heat until most of the fat has rendered out.  Drain the fat (use for cornbread or biscuits), mix with the baked mashed sweet potato and diced hot cherry peppers, and cook slowly in cast-iron until a crust forms.  That "blackening" isn't burnt sweet potato, just the sugars caramelized.

(As a sidenote, remember the boiled peanuts?  Here's the latest use for them: a bacon cheeseburger, with mashed boiled peanuts on the bottom bun.  Fantastic.)

this little piggy

Normal blogging will resume in about a week, I'm still buried in work.

"Pink" in the kitchen ledger means pink salt, i.e. curing salt, which among other effects keeps cured meat pink.

Yes, this bacon was cured with Bulleit bourbon.

Yes, it is awesome.

(The date in the ledger is wrong, since this bacon is from 2009.  Don't ask me how I screwed that up.)

Because the bacon was cured the same way country ham is, instead of with a briefer cure, it's intensely flavorful -- the maple flavor is actually pronounced (and you can smell it when the bacon cooks), as is the bourbon.  It's very salty, and the hot-smoking gives the smoke flavor a real raw edge to it.  The streaks of lean have the sort of flaky texture of country ham, while the fat has the same gamy funk.  Lord, this is some fucking good bacon, especially for something I was winging (you notice there are no proportions in the ledger, I just tossed things together until it seemed right).