West meets East

Ah, the chow of the Orient. Or, as it is called by the politically correct, Asian food. I’ve always loved it, though I’ve been terrified to cook it. I mean, who the hell knows really how to deal with lemongrass and ginger, right?

I’m not talking about God-awful General Tso’s chicken, which is sometimes passable but usually downright greasy. I’m talking about amazing Chinese noodles, hearty dumplings, and highly seasoned pad thai. I’m talking about grabbing takoyaki (fried wheat-octopus balls), which fellow Chef Arthur introduced me to in the East Village. I’m talking about using ample amounts of fish sauce, which is my new best friend. I’m talking about sushi-grade fish, baby.

Well, now thanks to some exposure to these culinary delights at school, I’m no longer terrified to dabble in Asian cuisine. In fact, most Asian food is fairly simple. It usually involves cooking with oil or ghee (over-clarified butter that has turned slightly brown and smells nutty), as well as curry pastes made from freshly toasted and ground seeds. Vegetables are thinly sliced for fast wok cooking, and proteins are red cooked (quickly cooked to “brown” the outside, then reserved, then added back in once everything else in the wok has cooked). Result: some of the most flavorful food ever. It’s no secret that fusion cuisine began with melding Asian and other regional cooking flavors.

My loins fortified by this new knowledge, two weeks ago I cooked up a flavorful Thai shrimp-and-snow-pea stir fry for wifey (it looks like Doc Holliday’s vomit, but it tasted awesome, due to the ample coconut milk and freshly made red curry paste). I also whipped up a few days later a nice chicken with plum sauce, which is about as easy as you can get. Here are the pics and the recipe:

Plum sauce

5 red plums, roughly chopped into 1 inch pieces
½ small white onion, medium dice
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 ½ piece of ginger, minced
1 tsp toasted coriander seeds, ground (you can simply smash them since they will get strained later)
1 dried chili, seeded and minced
½ piece of lemongrass, smashed and minced
½ cup Mirin (dry sherry works as well)
3 T brown sugar
1 tsp rice vinegar
2 T soy sauce
1 tsp cornstarch

Toss all the ingredients, except the plums, into a small sauce pot and bring to boil, then simmer for about 30 minutes. Add the plums and simmer for about another 30 to 45 minutes, until the liquid is deep red and the plums are very soft. Separately, mix the cornstarch with about an ounce of cold water. Add it gradually to the pot and stir to thicken the sauce.

Pass the sauce through a chinois or fine mesh strainer (or you can use women’s pantyhose, you weirdos). Drizzle over whatever you want; I sauteed some chicken breast and steamed bok choy, and garnished with a little orange zest, but fish would go great with it as well.

Fourth of July feast

They say that imitation is the best form of flattery. Screw imitation, I prefer out-and-out idea-theft. As in, I volunteered at the Fancy Food Show a couple of weeks ago, snagged a great gazpacho recipe from a top tapas restaurant, and passed it off on my own table for some friends on the Fourth of July.

Gazpacho, a Spanish soup made with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other vegetables, is easily one of my favorite soups (second only to that other cold soup, vichyssoise). To make it the “real” way, you are supposed to grind the vegetables using a mortar and pestle, and use soaked bread and olive oil to finish it. The authentic version is damned good, but I just use a blender and have dabbled with several variations over the years.

I once tried a habanero gazpacho, and forgot to wear gloves while handling the nuclear chilis. Result: some nasty burns near my eye when I scratched and itch there with my juice-covered hand. I made a pretty good watermelon gazpacho a few years ago that I should probably revisit. And now I have Mercat, an East Village tapas restaurant, to credit with a beet and strawberry gazpacho.

Beet and Strawberry Gazpacho
2 beets
8 strawberries, washed and sliced
3 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
2 cucumbers, peeled and chopped (plus some small dice for garnish)
½ carrot
1 red pepper, roasted and skin removed
3 celery stalks
1 white onion
Sherry or red wine vinegar
Extra virgin olive oil

Wash the beets, place in sauce pot, cover with cold water and bring to a boil, simmering until tender. Remove the beets when cool enough to handle, skin them and chop. Chop up the other vegetables. For the red pepper, put it over a burner on the stove to char the skin. Make sure it turns black all over, but take care that it doesn’t turn gray—a sign that you’ve potentially made the vegetable into a carcinogen.

Blend all the ingredients, with a dash of vinegar (the recipe calls for sherry but I cheaped out and used red wine) and a little olive oil. Season it if necessary. I thought the mixture was a little thick, so I put it through the fine-mesh strainer (or chinoise) and use a ladle to push out the liquid. Then I returned about ½ of the remaining pulp to the liquid and gave it a quick stir.

Refrigerate the mixture, and serve cold, with some croutons, small diced cucumber and thinly sliced strawberry. Drink copious amounts of beer and sit outside to enjoy sun.

Not so offal

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but what better way to jump back in then talking about one of the most fascinating types of food; something that sickens many and fascinates many more. Oh yeah, it’s offal time.

The varietal meats are a favorite of many other cultures, but not so much in the United States. Growing up my love of offal has come in leaps and bounds. As a tot I was a moderate fan of liver, having a bit of cheap chicken liver pate when visiting the grandparents for Thanksgiving. I then discovered foie gras, and became a pointy-toothed savage whenever it was around. I used to cringe at the thought of tongue and bone marrow, but now I realize just how flavorful that stuff is.

Offal can be easy to come by, too. Buy a packed duck and you get some liver. Buy a packaged rabbit and you get kidneys. Tongue is sold in pretty much every supermarket I’ve ever seen. They are usually well-used muscles or organs, so treat them like tougher cuts of meat (the shank or chuck, for example). Give ‘em the low and slow treatment, especially liver, which isn’t a muscle but which food science guru Harold McGee says is the most used of all land animal organs and has very little connective tissue.

My quest to consume every part of an animal’s body is now held up in the usual areas. I’m still not a huge fan of kidneys, I’m intrigued by the thought of eating brains (though never had the opportunity), and I’m not anytime soon going to be known as Mr. Lamb Fries.

A couple of weeks ago in class, we made sweetbreads—which are the thymus and pancreas glands—and it was my first time cooking or eating them. I wasn’t too enamored of them, to be honest, mostly because they tasted like nothing but the a la meuniere sauce served with them. But I’m dying to try the ‘breads at Jean-Georges or some other amazing restaurant to see what they do with them.

Jacques Pepin in his La Technique says that lamb and calf sweetbreads are the best, but that only calf sweetbreads are available in the United States (not sure if this is true, as I thought several U.S. restaurants have featured lamb sweetbreads).

If you’re looking for an easy entrée into cooking sweetbreads, here’s how we did it:
-- Take the sweetbreads and peel away the membrane, also taking care to cut away any bruised or bloody areas of the organ. Wash it off and dry it well. Ideally you want to press the sweetbreads down with weight overnight to remove liquid and to prevent rubbery end product.
-- Once pressed, run the sweetbreads through a breading mixture—flour, egg wash, bread crumbs—and sauté them briefly in butter. Reserve the sweetbreads and pour off any excess fat.
-- Put more whole butter in the pan, deglaze a bit with some lemon juice and throw in some capers to make a basic a la meuniere sauce. Once the butter is brownish, add some chopped parsley and pour a small amount over the sweetbreads.

Dinner with the parental units

This weekend the folks came over and I got to cooking a quick-and-dirty four-courser, consisting of an amuse bouche of watermelon scallop ceviche, a frozen watermelon vodka cocktail, oyster mushroom and fennel salad, poached halibut with onion cream sauce and orange-chili infused oil, and a strawberry-rhubarb crumble (as well as some bread that my folks brought, which looked like it had been purchased at Schnitzer’s).

The meal was pretty good, although it also taught me a little about adaptation. The “crumble” was really just a screwed up pie. I’ve never been much of a baker, and I dread taking the pastry module in school. I just don’t care very much about dessert…and I’m just as happy with a cupcake from Entenmann’s as I am with an elegant lava cake.

As it happens, I put too much lard in the damned crust, and overnight it turned too crumbly. So I crumbled it instead of attempting to roll out what amounted to a blob of giant flakes. Tasted good, but didn’t have that same awesome tiled look that a good ol’ fashioned pie should.

But the rest of the meal turned out pretty good. Here’s the recipe for that ceviche, which was cripped and mutated from several sources. I’m a huge fan of ceviches, ever having some great fish in Costa Rica several years ago.

Scallop Watermelon Ceviche
1 blood orange (or juicer orange), peeled and cut into segments
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 cup lime juice
2/3 small dice seeded watermelon
1/2 teaspoon finely grated peeled fresh ginger
1 1/2 tablespoons finely diced red onion
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh jalepeno
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 lb sea scallops, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
1 teaspoon cilantro

Dice up the watermelon and orange. Stir together with the orange juice, lime juice, ginger, onion, jalapeño, and salt in a large bowl.

Bring a small saucepan full of salted water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer (the water should be barely rippling). Add the scallops and poach for about a minute or until the pieces just begin to become white, about 1 or 1 ½ minutes. Put the scallops into an ice bath to shock them and stop them from cooking. Drain the scallops and pat dry, then add to the ceviche mixture and season with extra salt. Chill covered for at least an hour and serve in Chinese soup spoons.

Oh the steak's on the grill, and the silver spoon

Most chefs like to recall the moment they fell in love with food. I’m not sure when my moment was, but I do have a few happy food-related recollections from childhood. My mom making homemade pasta and pierogies, for one, and my dad grilling meat in the backyard for another.

This week in class we spent a lot of time on grilling—rib-eyes, flank steaks, shrimp kabobs, salmon tranches, etc. Despite the fact that I volunteered to clean the grills and ended up with a face full of soot, the exercise brought back some of those memories (cue the chorus from “Cats in the Cradle”).

I’ve always fashioned myself a pretty good griller, but like anybody who’s had too many Coronas while manning the grill, I’ve sometimes lost track of time and gotten tripped up by doneness, as has my dad. Countless parental fights were sparked by underdone meat.

Here’s a simple and widely used technique for determining doneness. Gently press your index finger into the center of the steak. If it is very spongy, it is rare (it will feel like the heel of your palm if you make a circle with index finger and thumb. Medium rare should feel like your middle finger and thumb, medium like your ring finger and thumb. If you have no sponginess, similar to the feeling if you squeeze your pinky and thumb together, the meat is well done.

If you’re going to marinate your meat, might I suggest one from Argentina, where gauchos still raise great cattle and grilling is near-perfect. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been to Argentina, but had my head filled with such propaganda in college, when I knew an Argentinean. Oh yeah, and also stuffing my face at a churrascaria one time.)

Grilled chimichurri flank steak
1 flank steak, trimmed and scored about 1/8 inch
2 fl. oz. canola oil 2 minced garlic cloves
2 fl. oz. extra virgin olive oil 1 tsp cumin
2 fl. oz. white vinegar 2 tsp granulated sugar
½ cup cilantro leaves ¼ cup oregano leaves
1 cup parsley leaves

Puree the ingredients and marinate the steak in half of the marinade for 1 hour. Serve the sliced steak with extra marinade.

And what would a good steak or lamb chop be without a nice compound butter. Here’s a recipe I improvised in class that turned out pretty good as an accompaniment to lamb.

Mint compound butter
1 pound whole butter, soft but not melted and cut up into small cubes
3 oz. mint, minced
2 oz rosemary, minced
½ lemon squeezed
1 tablespoon garlic clove, minced
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine ingredients in a blender and pulse to get a rough puree. Scoop out and roll in parchment paper, freezing for 30 minutes. Take out and cut into small slices, and serve with grilled lamb.

Infused oils

Since this is a cooking blog and I’ve been asked when I’m going to post recipes, here are two simple recipes for infused oils, which are used for vinaigrettes, sauces and marinades. My camera is on the fritz, so I can’t post pics of the first one, which I tried adding to mashed potatoes (result was too oily). The second one was taken home by a teammate, so no dice there either. Both are good, however.

Orange chili oil
1 pint canola oil or similar neutral oil Zest of 3 oranges
1 tablespoon of annate seed 1 stick cinnamon
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes 1 clove garlic
½ inch piece of ginger

Heat all the ingredients in a medium saucepan until they reach about 150 degrees; steam should begin to rise from the oil at this temperature. Then steep for about 30 minutes, allowing the oil to absorb all the tangy, spicy goodness from the other ingredients. To strain, fold four layers of cheesecloth and pour the oil through. Do not touch, let gravity do its work. Voila, you have an infused oil, which should be very red, due to the annate seed.

Basil oil
4 oz of Basil leaves 1 pint of olive oil

Blanch and shock the Basil. This entails quickly immersing the leaves in boiling water for maybe 10 seconds, then tossing them into an ice bath. The process keeps the green color vibrant. Next, dry the Basil well but try not to crush it. Place the leaves in a blender with half of the oil and puree until smooth. Add the remaining oil, give it a quick pulse in the blender (if you have room) and then strain through cheesecloth.

Infused oils that use green herbs and vegetables should never use hot oil, because it could ruin the beautiful green color of the final product. Red oils, however, are almost always cooked.