Crust: regular homemade. Thicker than usual because it dried out a little in the fridge, so I couldn't get it as thin as I like.
Sauce: half roasted tomatoes from my mother's garden, half roasted cherry peppers from my garden, pureed and strained, seasoned with Pecorino Romano, fennel pollen, and marjoram.
Cheese: local smoked mozzarella, a few shreds of gouda, Pecorino Romano.
Toppings: Beet greens (blanched, chopped, and under the cheese) and Italian sausage.
My spice cabinet includes sumac, pebrella, Mexican oregano, and three kinds of smoked paprika, but I don't have any black pepper. It's not a distaste or anything, I just never seem to get around to buying any - I haven't got a pepper grinder and keep putting off buying one I'll like. But you know, what I DO have gives me a lot of options.
This isn't an ad or anything, but I have to praise The Spice House. A lot of people are familiar with Penzey's, and order their spices there - Penzey's is certainly excellent, and I've got nothing bad to say about them. I originally placed an order with The Spice House - owned and run by members of the Penzey family, but I don't remember the exact relationship - because they carried cassia buds, which Penzey's didn't and which I wanted for a bitters recipe. I ordered other things because I always order spices in batches, in order to offset the shipping cost, and I've stuck with the Spice House ever since.
For one thing, they carry a lot of things that you not only won't find in your supermarket - I know Penzey's fans usually become aware of Ceylon cinnamon pretty quickly, for instance, and one of the things I like from both stores is crushed jalapeno peppers - little flakes like the crushed red peppers you put on pizza, only jalapeno. Online, it's also easy to find things like arrowroot, an assortment of curry powders, file powder, fennel pollen, saffron, epazote, grains of paradise, poppy seeds, and Sichuan peppercorns. Weirdly, while other areas of the supermarket expand, I've noticed the spice selection at my local supermarkets is remarkably small, concentrated on a just a couple brands and actually offering a smaller variety of spices than they carried twenty years ago when I was shopping in the same damn town. Whether this is related to the enormous growth of bottled marinades and the condiment boom of the 1990s is left as an exercise for the reader or graduate students in local culinary history.
When it comes to those slightly uncommon items, or even the same items you see in the supermarket, you're going to find higher quality online - whether you're looking at The Spice House or Penzey's - because everything is fresher. But you're also going to save money. The other day I was out of ginger, so I grabbed some in my normal supermarket run - one of the little jars the size of a Zyrtec container. Cost me six dollars. That same amount in a glass jar from The Spice House would be $3.50 - in a reclosable bag, $2.50.
It's just like with my coffee: I spend a lot on a coffee order, but that's because I buy it 10-15 pounds at a time, and I'm saving nearly as much as I'm spending, and getting better coffee in the process.
But the other thing is how much The Spice House has that hardly any other spice vendors have. The cassia buds I already mentioned. Truffle salt is another thing I pick up sometimes. Citric acid, which previously I had to buy from wine or specialty chef stores, which meant a separate shipping charge. Molecular gastronomy components like sodium alginate, xanthan gum, and some of the Texturas line. And they've started carrying black garlic, which there were only a few online vendors for before, which always meant paying a separate shipping charge. All of this stuff is lightweight, so you're almost always going to be paying $10 or less for shipping on a large order, and the savings absorbs that easily.
(This is why I sometimes go without ginger or cinnamon for a long time, though - I'm waiting to run out of other things so I can place an order.)
Like I've said a bunch of times, the quality of your cooking mostly comes down to the quality of your ingredients and your ability to use them to your best potential - that's why I've become so dependent on places like this.
Depending on how many cop shows take place where you live, you've either had (3 or more cop shows) or will have in the next few years (0-2 cop shows) Korean fried chicken. The way Korean fried chicken is made, it's lightly floured and fried twice, and then sauced. Double-frying - the same technique, minus the flouring of course, that you should use for French fries - results in a crispier final product that is more likely to stay crispy even when it's not piping hot, and furthermore is better able to stay crispy when moist.
The combination of the super-crispy chicken with sauce creates a texture you're familiar with from Chinese joints - not the ones that put the thick batter on everything they fry so that the sweet and sour shrimp is like big sponges soaking in sauce (goddamn you, food court), but places like P.F. Chang's that lightly batter and fry chunks of chicken before saucing them. Same basic deal. In Korea, whole chickens are chopped up into chunks and fried - but Korean chickens aren't factory-farmed like in the US of A, so they're smaller and better suited to, well, cooking and eating. In the US, chicken parts make more sense, and those factory farms result in large, meaty wings, a chicken part that was usually discarded or used for stock until World War II.
Really, despite the transglutaminase and calcium alginate, despite the bacon beignets and coconut curry ice cream, what I think about the most, what I always circle around, is hamburgers, pizza, chicken wings, fruit, and cheese. That's always been my way. I'm not an embryonic pseudo-chef, I'm just a home cook who plays around with a few things. At some point I expect I'll have a long entry on hot wings.
But right now, since I have this deep fryer, I wanted to try the Korean fried chicken method. Specifically the method - Korean fried chicken is usually sauced with a gojujang sauce, which is cool, but I wanted to divorce the method from the flavor here. I wanted to deal with the method on its own.
So I made red wings.
I started by "brining" the wings overnight with hibiscus. I literally did nothing more than put chicken wings in a Tupperware container with a handful of hibiscus flowers, and cover it all with water. The splotches you see are where the wings were touching each other or the sides of the container. The color is otherwise quite magenta.
The wings after their first fry. They have more color than it looks here; this time of year I don't have much sunlight in the house until much later in the day (it's 1pm as I type this and the sun hasn't hit my deck yet). That said, in the end the hibiscus didn't contribute anything of note.
The wings after their second fry, with sauce.
The sauce is very very red. I pureed watermelon chunks with watermelon rind that had been pickled with Kool Aid; strained that, and cooked it down until it was a thick sauce; strained that, and added Tabasco sauce, ginger, allspice, and cinnamon. The result is a bright red sweet and sour sauce with a burn that is primarily ginger with other spice notes and a little chile heat.
Fried chicken livers and pigs' ears; caramelized watermelon and Tabasco pepper jelly.
Finally the watermelons in my mother's garden are ripe - and seeded, which is harder to find these days, especially if you live somewhere where most of the watermelons are brought in from elsewhere. Seedless watermelons may be more convenient, but are less flavorful.
One of the luxuries of a deep-fryer is fried chicken livers, one of the cheapest proteins in the store. I've mostly had them at roadside stops like the Frog City Travel Plaza in Rayne, Louisiana. At home I usually serve them with watermelon pepper jelly, but this year I took chicken livers (and pigs' ears) out of the freezer to make room for other things, and didn't have any watermelon pepper jelly on hand - so I made a sort of a la minute version, by chopping some watermelon straight into a pan on high heat while the livers fried, and stirring it as it browned. Removed it from the heat, added a spoonful of Tabasco pepper jelly which reduced quickly in the hot pan, and tada.
The thing to remember about cooking watermelon is that it's related to squash, and that vegetal flavor can become pronounced when it cooks. Strong flavors cover it up, which is why it works fine in pepper jelly, and why watermelon-based barbecue sauce works better than watermelon-based pizza sauce.
My aforementioned novel Low Country features chicken-skin sandwiches in an early scene, which Caitlin and I decided to have over Labor Day weekend. What I ended up making, though, isn't much like the sandwiches in the book, but instead crossed over with French fry poboys - the original poboy, a sandwich of nothing but French fries and gravy.
Deep-fried chicken skin (just skins from chicken thighs dropped into the deep fryer at 375 for about 4-5 minutes), French fries, rich beef gravy, and goat cheese, on a homemade baguette. Mine has hot sauce, hers didn't.
I have to tell you ... my full review of Presto's Cool Daddy deep fryer is coming up sometime this month after I've had a chance to see how it handles larger quantities ... but just based on what I've done so far I consider it well worth the ~$50 price, and I didn't really expect to. Deep fryers come in three basic price points - the cheapest ones with no temperature control, the ones at the $50-80 price point that usually have temperature control and a few other features, and the high-end ones at $200. I expected there would be a good chance that a $50 deep fryer would be finicky enough that it would be really high maintenance and a pain in the ass to use, which is why I'd never bought one. But it's handled everything terrifically.
Also of note: we decided to get ice cream at Dairy Queen on Friday because of Labor Day being the end of summer and all, and I ordered a marshmallow malt. DQ just makes their shakes by combining their sundae toppings with soft-serve, so the options are a little different than usual. Now, I'm usually a creature of habit with shakes: any time it's an option, I get a cherry malted; if it isn't, I get a vanilla malted; if I'm somewhere without malt powder, then usually a coffee shake. But I just thought, fuck it, I'll try a marshmallow malted - and it was damn good. It was almost like a vanilla malt with an aftertaste like Lucky Charms.
There was a sale on beef shoulder clod a couple weeks ago. $1.69 a pound. When's the last time you saw a boneless, gristle-less cut of beef for that little a pound? Two weeks ago at my supermarket. That's when.
So I bought the smallest piece, used some of it for chili, and cured the rest of it before smoking it today. It's kind of pastrami. You can think of pastrami as corned beef that's been smoked - it usually uses the brisket but didn't always, and they use basically the same seasonings.
This one isn't brisket, and doesn't use those seasonings. But it is cured smoked beef, and there's not another word for that.
No, instead of the usual pastrami seasonings, I used the Baharat mixture from The Spice House, which is a fairly spicy Middle Eastern mix that I'm actually at a loss to describe, except to say that if you get an accurate sense of the flavor from the list of ingredients at that page, your mental palate is better than mine. In any case, it's one of my favorite blends from my favorite internet spice purveyor, but this is my first time using it with non-ground beef (it's my go-to for lamb, and I've used it with chicken and meatballs).
I'm curious to see how this is going to be on a sandwich with cheese. Good good stuff.
