loo loo loo

This combines a few recipes I've seen here and there, with my own addition of the liquor and ginger salt.

I had a few pears to use up, so, hey -- apple-pear coffeecake.

Grease a square baking dish and preheat the oven to 375.

1/2 cup sugar + 1/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon or more cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon Marx Foods ginger sea salt

A tablespoon or so of whiskey

A tablespoon or so of allspice dram (ignore if unavailable)

1 stick butter, divided into 5 1/2 TBSP and 2 1/2 TBSP

1 egg

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup apple cider

3-4 fruits (apples and pears), cored and sliced

Combine the 1/2 cup sugar with the cinnamon and set aside.

Cream together the 5 1/2 T butter and 1/4 cup sugar, beat in the egg, stir in the flour, baking powder, salt, and apple cider.  Pour half the batter into the pan.  Top with 2-3 layers of sliced fruit, sprinkling each layer of fruit with cinnamon sugar mixture, allspice dram, and whiskey, and dotting in between layers with pieces of butter.  Top fruit with the remaining batter, a little more cinnamon sugar, and the ginger salt.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, depending on how brown you want the edges.

The ginger sea salt, the latest of the Marx Foods salts I'm trying, is nice here -- desserts benefit from a little salt, and this doesn't make a noticeably "salty" dessert like salted caramel or something, but it adds a little crunch and interest to the topping, and the ginger obviously goes well with everything involved.

Also: I haven't had a chance to figure out why, but the photos are cut off on the right-hand side on the blog, which is a particular issue with the latest whiteboard post.  This problem isn't noticeable in the RSS feed.  In any case, you can always click on a photo to go to its Flickr page.

october

what a super-strong guy

I like Concord grapes, but the problem is that having had fox grapes this summer ... well, the Concords just make me miss the fox grapes.  It's the difference between farmed and wild salmon, let's say, or a decent burger and a really great burger.

Luckily I preserved some fox grapes in maraschino liqueur, which made a good addition to this cocktail:

3 oz tequila

1 oz lemon juice 

3/4 oz St Germain elderflower liqueur

12 Concord grapes

Muddle (smash those grapes up), mix, and strain.  Add a couple maraschino fox grapes.

My thinking was that the St Germain has a note that reminds me of white grape juice, and another that either reminds me of agave or just smells like it would go well with agave ... I can't decide.  Either way, this all gets along nicely.

they asked me how I knew

I have, and love, a Cameron Stovetop Smoker.  This isn't a piece of equipment you'll often find praised, because what it isn't is a substitute for a proper outdoor smoker (or an indoor smoker with its own ventilation).  If you want to make real barbecue -- a big hunk of pork or beef, or a chicken or turkey, smoked until it develops a smoke ring -- this is not the way.

However.

Many people, like me, can't use a "real" smoker without considerable inconvenience (there are a couple places in my condominium development where I could use one, none of them near my kitchen) and don't have the means to install a professional indoor smoker.  What's more, even a basic and not terribly great outdoor smoker is an expensive piece of equipment.

The stovetop smoker cost me $30.  It comes with enough wood chips that most people will never use them up, and if you do, refills are cheap.

The way it works is you put it on your stove, put fine wood chips inside, put the tray over those, add your food, and close it up.  The wood chips smolder, and after about twenty minutes begin smoking your food.  The smoke alarm will not go off.  Trust me, mine goes off during oven cleanings sometimes, while searing steaks, and so on, and the smoker has never once set it off.  That's an improvement on the way I used to smoke things.

Essentially, your food is cooking in a small, somewhat moist, low-temperature oven.  That's why it won't work for everything.  This isn't an ideal cooking method for everything, and it's a pretty slow cooking method.

That's also the strength.

It's excellent for fish (I don't think I've tried shellfish yet).  I love using it for smoked meatloaf.  It's great for cooking potatoes in the smoker and then mashing them to make smoked mashed potatoes -- though the potatoes take 2 to 3 hours to cook, rather than the 20-30 minutes if you simmered them.

But some things benefit from a slow cooking time.  I'm able to smoke butter -- I just put it in a small pie plate and put the pie plate in the smoker tray -- because it can sit in the smoke for a long time before coming anywhere near to burning.  Fresh mozzarella will take on some smoke flavor by the time it starts to melt.  

And grits ...

Grits apparently benefit tremendously from a slow cooking time.  Not only does the combination of smoke and salt give them a bacon-like appeal, but cooking slowly -- these took three and a half hours, maybe four -- makes them silky and luxurious without being mushy.  Ridiculously good.

I cooked 3/4 cup grits in 3 cups of water in the smoker, with just a little homemade celery salt for seasoning (I make crazy good celery salt, it's a weird thing to take pride in).  Once they were cooked, I added a pat of smoked butter, a little crushed red pepper, and a generous shredding of Pecorino Romano cheese.

The greens, well -- nothing goes better with grits than greens.  These are turnip greens, collards, and Swiss chard, simmered for about four hours in plain water with two bay leaves.  I then adjusted the pot liquor with a little demiglace (super-concentrated pork stock), Texas Pete hot sauce, that homemade celery salt again, homemade smoked turnip salt, and a dash of Worcestershire.

Bliss.

stupid winter

Man, it is chilly today.  If only we could do something about it.  I don't like the thought of putting the heat on, because it's still warm enough when it's sunny that I've been opening the doors to get some fresh air.  Opening the doors in one part of the day and turning the heat on in another part just seems counterproductive, you know?

I mean, I could make champurrado, I guess, that's this Mexican hot chocolate thickened with corn meal, and I've got some nice cinnamon and some whiskey --

-- what's that?  I should make the champurrado?

Well c'mon, gang, let's go!

Champurrado is an atole, a class of masa-thickened beverages which can be served thick enough to need a spoon or thin enough to barely coat the glass -- sort of the way milkshakes vary.  Chocolate and cornmeal are the constants with champurrado; milk (half and half in my case), spices, etc. all vary.

I ground up some Callebaut dark chocolate in the Cuisinart -- when your kitchen is cold, this is easy to do without the heat of the blade melting the chocolate -- and added yellow cornmeal, two kinds of cinnamon (Saigon and Ceylon), and a touch of chile powder, as well as a little sea salt you can't really see in the photo.

Ideally, you would combine this with hot water and/or milk using a special wooden whisk, but whatever.

I tried to use the espresso sea salt from Marx to rim the glass, but it just didn't want to stick -- so most of what's rimming it is actually just sugar.

from my head down to my legs

So those eggs.

Eggs are a good example of why I say to get to know your ingredients.  When you take the rote approach to cooking, just memorizing different methods, you don't really know what you're doing.  You're Berlitzing it, reciting phrases.  You know what you're saying, you know the meaning is getting across, but you don't apprehend the structures and grammar.

Everyone knows how to hard-boil an egg, most people know how to soft-boil an egg.  Everyone's got different tricks, you know, whether you start the eggs in the water before heating it, whether you let them cool in the water, how to peel the eggs, all that.  The thing to keep in mind is how sensitive eggs are to temperature, and how much the texture will differ between an egg cooked at a hard boil for thirty minutes and an egg simmered for 15.

These eggs, what I call unctuous eggs, similar to hot spring eggs, are neither hard- nor soft-boiled.  They never come out exactly the same, because there are too many variables and my kitchen is not a laboratory of controlled conditions.  But the idea is that the white comes out set but not rubbery -- nor even as solid as that of a nice hard-boiled egg -- and that the yolk remains unctuous.  It's not liquid like a soft-boiled egg.  But it has none of the chalkiness of a hard-set yolk, and may in some cases -- we hope for these -- remain orange and custardy.  This is not a hard-boiled egg.  This is not a soft-boiled egg.  This is some other egg.

You bring the egg up to room temp, or let it sit in warm water a while.  You bring your pot of water to a simmer.  You put the egg in the water for 6-8 minutes and then immediately plunge it into ice water, for the same reason you do with blanched vegetables: you don't just want to remove it from the cooking environment, you want to halt the cooking.  Otherwise that egg's going to retain heat and keep cooking the yolk.  Once the egg has cooled down, you can peel it, and you can marinate the thing if you like -- soy sauce is good, hot sauce is good, in either case I'd dilute some with water.  Eggs can suck up a lot of marinade, as you know if you've ever et a pickled one.  I didn't marinate my eggs because I don't want the marinade to clash with my lima beans.

You really can't tell from looking at these how custardy and unctuous the eggs are, particularly the yolks.  A minute less of cooking and they might have been too soft; thirty seconds less would probably be just right to keep the yolks completely orange with none of that canary yellow.  With the eggs, I'm having a lima bean salad, which is just cooked limas marinated with pecan oil -- nut oils in general are terrific for this kind of thing -- with smoked paprika, salt, sage, and a little homemade pepper vinegar.  It's best at room temperature or slightly warm -- I microwaved it a bit, because it's cold lately and room temperature's not what it could be.

On the eggs: Hawaiian pink sea salt, and more of the green chile salt.  The Hawaiian pink sea salt is nice and crunchy -- maybe the sort of thing you'd usually have with French fries instead of egg, but I dig it here.

shaky city

Two things:

First, this post features stuff I got for free.  That'll happen, you know, people send stuff to bloggers, bloggers review it.  I'll always point out when that's the case, and I won't ever rave about something just because I got it for free.  

So this time, what I've got is a sampler of the many sea salts sold by online fine foods vendor Marx Foods, and even if I didn't dig the salt, I'd've mentioned them in an eventual post on "Bill, where do you get the unusual ingredients you sometimes mention, and why aren't they in my supermarket," aka the online mail order post.  Marx Foods isn't cheap, but if you want turtle meat, they're the place to go; and they're the only place I know of with such an extensive selection of wild produce (not just ramps and fiddleheads, but miner's lettuce and wood violets).

I can't review a dozen salts at once.  So as I use them, I will point them out.  For instance:

Potatoes and pork cracklins, with green chile sea salt and fine smoked sea salt.

The number one change most home cooks can make that will make their food taste more like it does in the restaurant?  Use more salt.  I don't know if it's health concerns driving people to undersalt their food, or if it's always been this way -- I'm just saying, half the time you ask yourself "why does their version of this taste so much better than mine, I know I'm doing everything right," it's because they used more salt than you did.

Potatoes, pork, and eggs are the foods that I think benefit the most from salt -- in fact, shit, I need to go start the eggs I was planning to have later, they take a long time.  Hang tight.

Okay, so anyway.  The green chile salt is great.  There's a pronounced green chile flavor, distinguishable as such, not just generic heat.  This would be nice on a hot dog, definitely on a hamburger.

The smoked sea salt has less pronounced smokiness.  I can't decide how to feel about that.  It's probably good, in that it keeps the smoke flavor from being overpowering, but it's also easy to lose it completely.  One way to use it that would keep the smoke flavor from being lost would be to use it as a rimming salt, so that you're getting a hit of the salt before you get anything that's going to overpower it.

The second thing: sometimes when I take a photo of some food, especially if I take a second one because I see on the camera screen that the first one isn't in focus, I feel a twinge of guilt.  I don't like photograph-centric food blogs, or blogs that toss a photo of some meal up onto the internet without any discussion of it, any information.  It's pointless.  It benefits no one and only creates noise.  I think the prevalence of cheap reliable digital photography has made the blogosphere significantly worse.  Everyone's posing their sandwiches, snapping pretty pictures of their rack of lamb ... but who gives a shit?  It doesn't make them taste any better.  It's just mindless food porn, as bad as the nonsense on the Food Network.  Food doesn't need or benefit from Myspace angles.  Learn how to cook, not how to pose.