this week's pizza: the chorizo oddball

The thing is I'm very busy.

So I must not have been paying much attention when I mixed the pizza dough, because it was very wet.  Very very wet.  It poured out of the mixing bowl like ... well, like a pizza dough wet enough to pour.  It couldn't be pulled or shaped at all.

Let's see what happens, I thought.

The first pizza I made with it was all right.  The crust tasted good - it came out cracker-crisp on the bottom, bready on top.  But I thought, hm, I have an idea.

The second pizza became the Chorizo Oddball:

I took the dough and mixed chopped chorizo and grated Pecorino Romano in it, and let it rise until it just wouldn't rise no more.  Instead of pouring/draping it into the hot cornmeal-dusted cast-iron like I had with the first one, I dumped it quickly onto the pan and then pulled it from the center to the sides using two spatulas - which is why the dough is sort of heaped up around the rim.

Blasted it at 500 for a few minutes with no sauce or cheese, which meant I sort of made my own Boboli shell here.

Topped it with the same sauce as before, and the same local cheese I used in my last pizza post (I forget the name).  Added more chorizo.  Blasted it again.

This works better.  Blasting the crust by itself improved the texture a lot - there's a crunch to it that I really like.  The Pecorino's sure not hurting either.

Baby duck eggs, as sold by Asian markets, aren't laid by baby ducks - they contain them.  Thanks to Fear Factor and other horseshit reality shows, most people have heard of balut or embryonic eggs, but "fertilized egg" should be thought of as a genre of food, not a specific food item.

I always hated those shows in the first place, but especially that aspect of those shows: ohgrossethnicfood.  Cheese is pretty fucking disgusting if you didn't grow up in a culture that takes it for granted, and the idea of drinking milk from an animal ought to weird you out a little.  I've never liked "oh God look at the things the rubes and brown people eat" television/web sites/etc, and I don't think adults have any business using words like "scary" or "gross" for real food that real people eat.  That doesn't mean everyone is obligated to like or even try everything - but understand that food is food, that there is a reason other people like and eat it, that your lack of appreciation doesn't reflect some actual real-world standard of good and bad.

I'm not crazy about eggplant, century eggs, sweet deviled eggs, flying fish eggs, or fertilized eggs that have developed past a certain point - but I'm not enough of an asshole to think that's a statement about the world instead of a statement about me, you know?

It takes a little over three weeks for a fertilized egg to develop and hatch, and there's a wide variety of possibilities beneath the shell in those three weeks.  Most people have probably had an egg with a red spot in the yolk - there's your day one.

When they're let to develop more than that, though, developed deliberately and sold as food products, they're boiled and served warm to eat, sometimes seasoned with hot sauce, soy sauce, etc.  

Fertilized eggs are a snack throughout Southeast Asia, with the cook date varying from place to place, ethnicity to ethnicity.

Personally, my fertilized egg preference is, if I remember right, around the two-week mark - still almost entirely a hard-boiled egg, but with a richer yolk, a small piece of meat that isn't yet recognizably anything, and a flavor like the whole thing has been cooked in light duck broth (... which it has).

... this egg is a bit more advanced than that, but short of the 21 day mark when the egg contains mostly developing baby duck, with bones you need to crunch through when you eat it.

In the first photo, you can see the yolk material at the top of the opened egg, and the developing duck about the size of a silver dollar (duck eggs are about, what, half again as big as a "jumbo" chicken egg) curled up beneath that.

Taking the shell off gives you another view: we've still got the duck, with the yolk directly above it, and the rest is egg white, most of which is hard and inedible.

Clockwise from nine o'clock: the little duck again; the mostly inedible white; the yolk.

The yolk is actually very good, but this isn't the stage of fertilized egg I'd seek out - the embryo is just a little too developed for me at this point.  That said, there isn't a strong flavor - with your eyes closed, there's nothing strange going on here.

Those unlaid eggs ...

... are so awesome.

They're firmer than the yolks of laid eggs.  They look like raw yolks at first, but press on them and they're as firm as gum drops - I guess from whatever it is that would eventually develop into the shell.  Cooked, they're like rich egg yolks - they reminded me of the creaminess of duck egg yolks, though these are from chickens.

What we made was a sort of pho.  I simmered the upper body (breasts, back, and wings) of a small leghorn chicken with about half a pound of chopped okra and a pound of Chinese watercress, for six hours.  The next day, I cooked that stock down until it was just enough to fill two bowls, and seasoned that with salt (don't skimp), ginger, and culantro recaito (culantro, cilantro, onion, and garlic, minced in the Cuisinart and then cooked in a little olive oil).  We put unlaid eggs and chopped black garlic in the bowls, poured hot broth over them to cook the eggs, and then topped with chopped ngo orm ("rice paddy herb," with a musky sort of cumin-lemon flavor) and bean sprouts.

Delicious.  Seriously, just ... a hell of a successful soup.  Certainly the stock helped - the okra and watercress contributed not only the green color you see there, but a lot of rich vegetal flavor, without overwhelming everything - but the eggs were great. Little orbs of yolk, soft enough to burst, but rich and creamy instead of runny and thin.

There aren't photos of dinner last night: spare ribs, pork belly, and Chinese broccoli braised with culantro, garlic, cilantro roots (which have a strong cilantro flavor), holy basil, chile, and cincalok (a Malaysian fermented shrimp paste - think of it as a substitute for fish sauce or miso, that's all), and then shredded, sprinkled with lime juice, and served on pita bread like tacos.

Highlights of a trip to Little Cambodia:

Longan.  Similar to lychee or rambutan, a longan is easily peeled, with a mild, firm, juicy fruit inside.

Makok.  Spondias dulcis - a member of the cashew family.  Extremely fragrant, exotic rind with a lot of tartness to it; mild, crisp fruit.  Very very good. 

Unlaid chicken eggs.  When a hen is slaughtered, it often has eggs it hasn't laid yet, in various stages of development.  There are a number of uses - in the South in the old days, these would have been served in the soup made from the hen.

This morning we had a "kitchen sink" breakfast using things already on hand combined with things from Battambang in Little Cambodia - sweet Chinese sausage stir-fried with okra, tomatoes, culantro, sweet potato leaves, and garlic, with fried eggs.  (We're assuming these are sweet potato leaves, at least - the label says "potato leaves," but I thought those were poisonous.)

Other acquisitions, apart from the usual herbs and meats - a couple of trays of unidentified fruit sold with sugar or salt to dip them in; "baby duck eggs" (balut); lychee black tea; sugar cane juice and roasted coconut juice; and durian candies and cookies.  Caitlin and I are basically taking the weekend and just seeing what we think of to make with all this.

I have to point out how much of my cooking this summer owes a debt to my mother and her garden. There's been a bumper crop of excellent tomatoes and okra, and I haven't had to buy cucumbers, celery, beet greens, corn, broccoli, or squash all summer.  This was particularly helpful since half of my garden pretty much failed because the sandy, rocky soil in my front yard finally gave up the last of its nutrients.

But look, for instance, at some young celery from her garden - later in the season it was much thicker and just as leafy:

You don't see this in stores - celery with this much leaf to it.  They trim it down.  But the leaves have a hell of a lot of flavor, and although the texture when raw isn't what you'd like (dry and tough), I've been adding them to greens and minestrone - and they'd be great in any soup, so I froze several Zip-Loc bags full of them.

The stalks themselves get tough pretty soon into the season, and by the end of the season they're just flat-out too tough to eat raw and take a much longer time to soften when cooking.  But the flavor is intense - and I don't think you usually think of celery as a flavor that can BE "intense" - and even picking a single bunch of celery and putting it in the car with all those other vegetables made the car smell like celery for an hour.  Again, I chopped some up and put it in the freezer, most likely for gumbo, maybe minestrone.

Because the flavor was more pronounced than regular celery, I also used some in this year's hot sauce: cayenne peppers, celery, onion, and a little tomato, pureed with salt ... and normally that's the point at which I would let it lactic-ferment for a few months ... but because of a brief-lived housefly problem, and the fact that the flies kept buzzing by the bottle, I wasn't comfortable letting it continue to ferment.  I mean, it was covered in cheesecloth - the flies weren't going to get in there!  But because I was trying to get rid of them, I didn't want to leave anything out they were attracted to.  So it only aged for a week instead of a quarter, and was then blended with vinegar and strained.  But it's a nice, nice hot sauce.

-- I barely know her noodles

Apple cider orbs and noodles.

When punctured, the orb starts to ooze apple cider seasoned with cinnamon and ginger.

More later.

with shoes on

There are a lot of bean varieties that look like this: dragon's tongue, cranberry, borlotti.  Up here they just sell them as "shell beans," and I don't know anything more than that.

Cooked, they lose those speckles and become uniformly ivory.  The texture is creamy, which is perfect for minestrone, for instance.  A little large for chili, maybe, which doesn't stop me - until I discovered Rancho Gordo, shell beans were my default chili bean for as long as I had them in the freezer.  I don't know if I've ever made cassoulet with them - I'll have to do so, especially since I don't think I've made cassoulet yet for this blog (the result of the rising cost of duck).

They make a terrific bean dip when pureed with a little of their cooking liquid, olive oil and salt, and whatever seasonings appeal to you, from preserved lemon and thyme to sage and black truffles to garlic and chives.

The nice thing about fresh beans is that although you do have to cook them - shell beans aren't for eating raw - they cook faster than dried do.  Less than an hour, as little as twenty minutes - it seems to vary every year for me, depending probably on just when the beans were picked.