Rabbit, pickles, tesa, and more

Although I'm not particularly religious and certainly don't follow Christian holidays I do enjoy using them as an excuse to cook an awesome meal.  With Easter earlier this month I did just that.  Jessica and I decided to make a feast of sorts from the Kokkari, which is a pretty amazing Greek restaurant in San Francisco.  Feeling adventurous and wanting to cook a themed meal with something we never had cooked with before we settled upon rabbit.  Of course we didn't realize the irony behind cooking a rabbit on Easter until we planned the whole.  This wasn't really thought through before we bought it since it inevitably was put upon me to break it down.  Into individual pieces.  And then take off the meat.  Did I mention that it was a cute little rabbit?  But, always wanting to master special techniques in the kitchen, such as butchering, I took one for the team.  It proved a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.  I've broken down a couple of chickens before, which are fairly easy especially with the number of helpful guides online (thank you YouTube for telling me how to de-bone a lamb leg for Thanksgiving!).  However, a rabbit is a lot smaller making things more difficult (maybe I shouldn't go into pediatric surgery...) and has a thin layer of "silver skin" surrounding its meat that needs to be removed before cooking.  But, after about an hour it was all done and I was quickly looking forward to trying out another Greek rabbit recipe that involved braising, which does not involve taking the meat off the bone...that I did here on accident.  I also need to try it out before Jessica gets two dwarf lionhead rabbits that I will feel too guilty cooking their cousin in front of them.   

I also got the chance to try out some new pickles that had some Mediterranean  flavors.  I chose some vegetables that were available at the farmers market: Persian cucumber, cauliflower, and carrots.  The brine was simply 2 cups: 1 cup: 1 tbls: 1 tbls white wine vinegar, water, salt, and sugar.  Then the spices were your basic dill, garlic, peppercorns, bay leaves, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, and the new to me Greek oregano.  These were heated up to dissolve and poured over the vegetables.  I think these pickles turned out really well after sitting in the fridge for 3 days and I'll definitely be making them again!  I haven't played around with oregano (let alone Greek oregano) or white wine vinegar in a pickle yet so these were a nice change. 

The rest of the meal was roasted/fried potatoes with lemon, spicy feta dip, flat bread, brown butter orzo, watermelon feta salad, and grilled rabbit.  

Tesa update: I think this turned out really well considering it was my first time curing a piece of meat!  I'm not entirely confident the cure penetrated all the way to the center of the meat, which it is supposed to do.  Having a class or instructor would be handy since I could be told first hand what to look for.  We've mostly been using it to fry and then through some vegetables in the pan with it.  I think it would be really great in carbonara or a base for bolognese!  After making this at home I definitely want to try to cure some more things since it was so fun and nice to make something at home that you usually have to buy in a specialty store - I just need an environment (i.e. wine fridge) that is nurturing and safe for curing, which a LA apartment definitely is not.  

Tesa

Ah, pork.

More specifically: ah, pork belly. This cut of meat from the pig offers itself perfectly to curing whether it is bacon, pancetta, or, as in here, tesa. While bacon is often, though not always, smoked both pancetta and tesa are unsmoked pork belly. Tesa differs from pancetta in that it is not rolled up and remains flat during curing, which gives it its name which means "extended".

Ready for the refrigerator

Tesa is a salt cured pork belly. The purpose of curing any meat, whether it is fermented or salted, is to prevent it from spoiling, which was particularly useful before refrigeration. Here, salt is used as preservative that essentially enhances dehydration of the meat. Microorganisms love water and most need it to grow thus by speeding up dehydration one is preventing those microorganisms from taking over. Most cured meats also need nitrate in order to be correctly preserved, though. This often comes in the form of what is called "Insta Cure no. 1", which is a mixture of salt and sodium nitrate. It is an effective inhibitor of bacterial growth (including the infamous botulism), but also changes the flavor and color of the meat. Nitrate is converted by bacteria (not bad) in the meat to nitrite that can then react with myoglobin giving cured meat the distinct color we associate with it.

Curing is quite the precise process - requires an accurate scale

I followed the recipe in Paul Bertolli's "Cooking by Hand". The seasonings called for include red pepper flakes, juniper berries, allspice berries, black peppercorns, cloves, and nutmeg. Wine is used to help encourage the salt rub to enter the meat. I was excited when I found this recipe because you only needed a refrigerator that was at least below 40 degrees. Many cured meats require a precise temperature and humidity range for the fermentation and curing process, which calls for a specialty curing chamber or, if you're lucky, a basement with the right conditions. All I needed to do was rub the salt with the spices over the pork belly, sprinkle some wine on it, and leave it in the fridge for 7-14 days until the salt has penetrated to the center of the belly.

Serious nutmeg grating concentration

Tesa is great in all the applications that you usually associate with bacon and pancetta: building sauces, fried by itself, sandwiches, and lardons in salads.


We'll see how it turns out soon!

Tomato chili jam and more

After taking an exam this week I couldn't think of a better activity to wind down with than dicing cups upon cups of ginger, garlic, and scallions along with making some tomato chili jam. I think one thing I'm jealous of restaurants is that they always have sauces or bases to dishes that they can quickly throw together. I realize there are only two people living in this small apartment, but I can dream of having that can't I? Well, the next best thing is for me to whip up a a batch each of fish sauce vinaigrette, ginger-scallion oil, and octo vinaigrette from the Momofuku cookbook, which I've all made before. I love having these sauces around to just quickly throw on something.

I also got a chance to try out a recipe for Jess' place: tomato chili jam. Pretty much exactly what it sounds like and is amazing. We've been enjoying it on some bread with goat cheese or just on the bread alone. I'm sure it'd also go well with some grilled meat!

Rhubaaaaaaarb!

Ah, yes. I think I'm unnaturally in love with rhubarb. Especially in compote form with strawberries. Yum.

It's a rainy day and we had rhubarb and strawberries so Jess thought she might make a compote out of them with some sugar and lemon juice. Once I smelled that cooking I thought that a crumble might be a nice addition. One of the best things about having a professional pastry chef in the house apartment is that if you suggest something to them to make you often receive an enthusiastic, "OK!" followed by researching exactly what would be the best combination of ingredients for the perfect crumble. Horrible, isn't it? I swear I try and not abuse it. Well, a combo of flour, baking powder, sugar, Demerara sugar, some lemon zest, and butter was settled upon since we already had all of those.

The result was a tasty crumble for a delicious compote!

Kimchi revisited

Kimchi Soup

Previously, I've attempted to tackle kimchi using David Chang's recipe from the Momofuku cookbook.While I'm perfectly OK with a departure from traditon, which Chang definitely does in his recipe (e.g. addition of sugar, ect.), I just wasn't happy with how it tasted. To me, it was a quick and easy introduction to kimchi, but just wasn't enough. The December issue of Fine Cooking  had a kimchi recipe that got me thinking again. Me being me I scoured the internet for traditional and authentic recipes for kimchi. One small problem was that kimchi is a household staple for Koreans. Many make it at home with passed down family recipes that, of course, live on via word of mouth. And being a family recipe, there are a multitude of variations. I finally settled on a mixture of the Fine Cooking recipe and a quick blog post I found integrating some of the Fine Cooking ingredients (e.g. anchovy paste and a touch of sugar) with the more traditional (e.g. grated apple, onion, and rice flour/water paste) along with some of my own (e.g. fish sauce) since I forgot to, um, pick up dried shrimp on my ingredient run. After combining all of the above with some napa cabbage, scallions, daikon, garlic, and ginger I let it ferment for 3 days at room temperature. Normally, this would result in an extremely funky kimchi, but since my apartment is SO cold (even in Los Angeles) it resulted in a nice mellow funkiness, which I prefer in my kimchi. Following this I let it age in the fridge for a week. I was very happy with the resulting product and will probably use the same ingredients again, but maybe trying some additions such as dried shrimp and sweet rice flour instead of regular rice flour. The end product was eaten plain and made into delicious kimchi friend rice and kimchi soup from the No Recipes blog.

Valentine's Day at Home

Amuse bouche: watermelon, pealed cherry tomato, basil, basil oil ala el Bulli

Valentine's Day is notoriously one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants. Reservations are booked and special V-day fixed menus are designed temporarily nudging the regular menu to the side for the night. Because of this I thought what better way to celebrate than to cook a nice dinner at home. I wanted to make a four course meal and settled upon a soup of some sort, something that could use a beurre blanc, a market salad, and butternut squash gnocchi.

Soup: I heard about an amazing carrot soup that was served at the French Laundry at one point and was describe as a carrot explosion in your mouth. Sounded great and I even found the recipe online from Saveur. This was served with a "fine herb" mousse, which was whipped creme fraiche with some chopped herbs folded in. Think of a creme fraiche whipped cream in terms of texture and a hint of herbs. It was a really nice complement to the silky soup.

Carrot soup with fine herb mousse

Scallops with a clementine beurre blanc: I really wanted to try out making a beurre blanc since I think mastering, or at least learning, classic saucing techniques can really improve a dish. Translating to "white butter" a beurre blanc is an emulsified sauce consisting of wine, vinegar, or both along with shallots and butter. It is often finished with some type of citrus such as clementines (one clementine down from the 50 or so in the bag!). It is a notoriously difficult sauce to make since the emulsion often breaks when the butter is whisked into the reduced wine/vinegar mixture over low heat. I wanted to do a twist on this and foam the sauce so I jumped at the chance to use Jess' iSi whipper. After I made the sauce (it didn't break!) I added some into the iSi canister, charged it with some nitrous, and shook vigorously. Sometime during that process I realized that the releasing the pressurized nitrous into the canister is a very cold process (think the carbon dioxide canisters for cleaning your keyboard) and that this was mixing with my butter sauce. Uh-oh. Sure enough when I tried to dispense it the sauce was now solid! Oh well. Luckily I save extra in case anything went wrong. Jessica promptly informed me that I could keep the charge canister in a warm water bath until I was ready to dispense it next time...sometimes it pays to consult the professional. Anyway, I served the clementine beurre blanc with seared diver scallops.

Scallops with clementine beurre blanc

Market salad: Simple. All I wanted was something from the market that went with prosciutto and a sherry vinegrette. I decided upon blanched shaved aspargus and shaved colored carrots with leeks.

Market salad: prosciutto, carrots, asparagus, greens

Butternut squash gnocchi: For long time I've wanted to make gnocchi. I've read over and over again about how hard it is to make perfect gnocchi as alight as a pillow and not dried out. I chose to butternut squash since, for some reason, this seems easier and less technical than the traditional potato gnocchi. The problem with the recipe was that it called for a 1-1.5 lb butternut squash. In terms of making a dough with flour this seems like quite the range...but it was all I had to go on. While they turned out really good (served in a sage butter sauce) they were a bit "mushy" - definitely could have used more flour.

Butternut squash gnocchi with butter sage sauce

Overall, I was quite happy with the meal and learning a new sauce (and having it technically work out well).

Steamed Filled Buns (Zheng Bao)

For awhile now I've been lusting after Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More by Andrea Nguyen. I first found out about this book through her blog Vietworldkitchen.com, which I had been following for awhile. Once I found out about this book I knew I couldn't pass up it up. I mean it's entirely dedicated to dumplings! After realizing how easy it was to make the filling for dumplings awhile back (while, admittedly, using store bought fresh wrappers) and at the same time how great it was to have a stock of frozen dumplings for a quick dinner in the freezer I finally bought the book.





















I started off by making a simple, Asian chicken stock consisting of chicken, onion, and ginger that I could use for some of the fillings of the dumplings. Not being one of those good people who slowly accumulate chicken bones in the freezer I just bought a whole chicken and used that. This, of course, left me with an entire chicken's worth of poached meat. Well, let's look in the book for something that I could use this for! Hm....Curried Chicken Bun Filling for steamed filled buns? OK! The filled buns were something I wanted to try eventually anyway so I thought this would be a good use. The recipe has you make a curry paste and cook the chicken with it along with coconut milk. Filling, check. The buns are a risen yeast dough, which slightly intimidated me since I'm, well, not so great baking (odd since I work in a bio lab...). Luckily, I had a professionally trained pastry chef in the apartment to assist! The dough was easy enough to make, but the hard part was shaping them and figuring out how thick to role them since they have a second rise after filling them. For a first try I don't think they turned out too shabby. We thought we had done something wrong at first after we pulled them from the steamer since they looked raw, however we soon realized that restaurants use a special rice flour that makes their buns a brilliant white.

These were good, but both of us thought that the dough could have been lighter and fluffier. Not sure if that was because of how it was mixed or shaped, or if that is just a function of the recipe. I'll either use this recipe again, try adding in some baking powder for a second levener, or try out David Chang's bun recipe from the Momofuku cookbook.

These were a great start! Next filling to try: Char Siu Pork (I think this is the red pork I normally associate with steamed buns)