Some Pig |

Top Scallop (and Top Secret Bacon)!

Tonight was the finale of Top Chef All Stars – it has been a great and at times frustrating season. Every season by the time I feel like I’m starting to know and like the contestants, the show is nearly over. This year we got to skip all that, and having so many familiar faces from the first episode was definitely a treat. The heartbreak of Top Chef—seeing great talent leave too early after a bad night, was also magnified this season. The eliminations of Jen, Tre, Dale (the good one) and Angelo (yes, I like him) were harder to take the second time around. Even more troubling as all this talent left the show was the thought that someone like Mike Isabella might win! I breathed a sigh of relief last week when Richard Blais seemed to find his stride again and won a spot in the finals. Maybe this season wouldn’t end in embarrassment.

So—what better to serve for a Top Chef dinner than scallops?
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Thursday, March 31, 2011 · · Tags: bacon, charcuterie, recipes, Top Chef

The Homemade Reuben

For last month’s Charcutepalooza challenge I made pastrami and sauerkraut, with the intention of putting together a mostly homemade Reuben sandwich. Last week the dream was realized.

I understand there is some debate about whether a Reuben should be made with corned beef or pastrami, and I think it is clear that I’ll always stand on the side of smoked meats. I sliced thin strips of pastrami and warmed them in the reserved braising liquid (also known as “magical pastrami jus”), and sautéed some homemade sauerkraut in a mix of stock and brine, flavored with a couple of bay leaves. I mixed up some mayo, using oil left from making garlic confit, and blended it with some ketchup for the dressing. All this and a couple of slices of Swiss were piled on a fresh baked loaf of deli-style rye. It is, without question, the most work I’ve ever put into a sandwich. A sandwich over two weeks in the making. Was it worth it?
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Saturday, March 26, 2011 · · Tags: Baking, Bread, charcutepalooza, recipes, sandwiches

Pastrami & Sauerkraut: Aromatic Highs & Lows In Charcuterie

The suggested preparation for this month’s challenge was corned beef. What’s the difference between corned beef and pastrami? Pastrami is smoked and coated in a crust of crushed coriander seeds and black peppercorns. Having learned this, it’s kind of confusing that anyone stops at corned beef—it seems half-finished. Is there a meat that wouldn’t be improved by smoke and coriander? I’ve previously mentioned my love for smoked meats (in my heavily-smoked homemade bacon), and I’ve been hooked on coriander ever since I first tried Michael Symon’s sriracha wings, which are coated in crushed coriander, cinnamon, and cumin (best wings ever). Coriander has an incredible aroma, sweet and fruity enough to bring to mind Froot Loops, but with a bit of tang to it that reminds me of a hoppy IPA. I had to make pastrami.
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011 · · Tags: charcutepalooza

Sicilian-Style Square Pizza

A couple of years ago, having read and loved Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, I picked up his book on pizza, American Pie. In the first half of the book, you follow the author across America and around half of Italy in search of the perfect pizza. Reinhart’s descriptions of coal-fired “mutz” pies in New Haven, focaccia in Florence, crisp pizza bianca in Rome, and the near-perfect pizza at Chris Bianco’s restaurant in Phoenix really stuck with me. I mean, I have always loved pizza (who doesn’t?), but after reading this book I found myself looking for something more than the ubiquitous chain pizza. Luckily, the second half of the book is filled with recipes! The neo-Neapolitan dough and sauce became my go-to recipe. The recipe makes enough for several small pizzas, which is great for build-your-own pizza night with friends. Even when I’m just cooking for the two of us, the leftover dough freezes wonderfully (just move the frozen dough to the fridge the day before you want to use it). My wife is crazy about the sauce, which is simple to make and has a wonderful herbal flavor from a mixture of oregano and fresh basil (one of my favorite ingredients), and I love the brightness added by a touch of red wine vinegar. I have been happily making pizzas based off this foundation for years—everything from a traditional margarita to stuff like Brussels sprouts and pancetta, sausage and dried cherries, and Buffalo chicken (the celery makes it, in my opinion, and I don’t know why everyone doesn’t use this on Buffalo-style pizzas). I even found a peel at the local restaurant supply place, although I usually end up using parchment paper for fear of the dough sticking to the peel and ruining a carefully prepared pie. Since my oven can’t compete with the heat put out by a brick oven (or any pizzeria’s oven), a relatively thin crust like this is ideal—the crust is done just about the same time the cheese is melted. I was very happy with this recipe, and haven’t tried a different one in years.
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Thursday, March 3, 2011 · · Tags: Ad Hoc at Home, best ever, pizza, recipes

Charcutepalooza: Bacon!

I’ll be honest – bacon was not my first choice. I wanted to make guanciale, a cured bacon-like meat made from pork jowls. I had not really heard of it (I’ve been buried in French cookbooks for the last several years and have mostly ignored Italian cuisine), but after finding out it is traditionally served in pasta all’amatriciana, a dish I have loved since I first tried it last year at Rain Uptown here in Lubbock (despite being listed on the menu as “pink sauce with bacon”), I was set on making it. Unfortunately, jowls are not as easy to come by as you might think. I found plenty of salted jowls, and jowls still attached to the rest of the face (thanks, Amigos, but I’m not that hardcore yet), but no plain old jowls. I even checked with the local free-range, organic, grass-fed rancher we have occasionally bought from, but he said they only sold whole heads.

Having failed to locate some cheek, and lacking the strength of will to break down a complete head, I decided to make some bacon. I was mostly disappointed because bacon is the “apprentice challenge” this month, while pancetta or guanciale is the real deal. I was confused when I read it, since I thought pancetta was basically unsmoked bacon—shouldn’t bacon be the more difficult recipe? This was cleared up when I read the bacon recipe in Charcuterie, which says that while bacon is traditionally smoked, the authors realized most people do not have a smoker, so they recommended just roasting it in the oven instead. While I’m sure that’s still delicious, I don’t think I would consider it bacon. No smoke? No way. Besides, I do have a smoker.
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Tuesday, February 15, 2011 · · Tags: bacon, charcutepalooza, recipes, Techniques

Carcutepalooza: Duck Prosciutto

I love charcuterie, and although I’ve made a couple of things from Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, they are more along the lines of preserved lemons and various brines. I’m certainly comfortable with smoking meats, but the whole salt-curing thing is still quite intimidating. You say this meat is uncooked and has been hanging in your garage for a week? Sounds delicious. Really, I know cured meats are incredible, and I would love to make them at home, but the fear of messing something up and giving everyone food poisoning has kept me from attempting anything serious so far—but now there is a challenge.

Charcutepalooza will pick a new meat-tastic challenge every month, based on the techniques in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie. On the 15th of every month (I predict mine will usually be more like the 20th), people will share what they’ve made (if you’re a twitter type, you can find all of these using hashtag #Charcutepalooza), and on the 30th of each month the challenge organizers will post a roundup. Sounds fun, right?

January Challenge: Duck Prosciutto

Thomas Keller’s Blowtorch Prime Rib

We once again got to spend New Year’s Eve with our friends Matt & Anna, who are the only people I feel that really “get” us when it comes to cooking. We tossed around a lot of ideas for the night’s menu, but I thought it would be cool to seize one of the rare opportunities for a big, celebratory meal in our own kitchen by making something extravagant and classic: prime rib.

I love prime rib. I first became interested in steaks when I was a teenager and my dad would take us to Charleston’s. I always ordered the sirloin, medium well at first, then moving down to medium. I knew enough from movies and such that medium rare was the classic way to order a steak—it had to me the same ring as James Bond ordering his signature martini—but I was too intimidated by the thought of mushy, chewy, uncooked beef to ever order it. Still, as I looked around the restaurant I would inspect the pinkness of our fellow diners’ steaks, looking for someone brave enough to order such a thing. One night I spotted something unlike any steak I had seen before. It was unbelievably pink. Pink all over. How rare did that guy order it? I wondered. Did they even cook it? Like most American teenagers, I knew almost nothing about food, and was something of an idiot. I’m sure you have guessed by now that what I was looking at was prime rib, as my father explained to me.
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Tuesday, January 18, 2011 · · Tags: Ad Hoc at Home, best ever, prime rib, recipes, special occasions, steak, Thomas Keller

White Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Rosemary and Dried Cranberries

Special guest post! Alisa also entered the Holiday Cookie Challenge, and I asked her if she would mind posting her entry as well. Cranberry and white chocolate is a combination you often see around Christmas, but I’ve never seen anyone throw rosemary into the mix. The hit of piney flavor from the rosemary reminds me of the smell of a fresh Christmas tree, in the best possible way.

I began making cranberry rosemary biscotti dipped in white chocolate about 4 years ago. Each year, it’s a Christmas-must and I often give it as gifts. It’s Christmas in cookie form! Red, Green, White and mixes sweet and commonly savory flavors. It’s PERFECT with hot tea and for this cookie contest, I developed it into a drop-cookie. I think I like them just as well as I like the biscotti. Enjoy!

Holiday Cookie Challenge: Irish Coffee Sandwich Cookies

I made these cookies for the Holiday Cookie Challenge Emilia Juocys over at Ruhlman’s blog set up. Emilia loves cookies, and fondly remembers the holiday cookie special that came in the December issue of Gourmet magazine. Gourmet stopped publishing late last year, but just last month released The Gourmet Cookie Book, which compiles the best cookie recipe from each of the magazine’s sixty-eight years.

The cold weather this time of year calls for some coffee, and the holidays call for a bit of booze. These cookies have a little of both. I also like turning something familiar and mass-produced like an Oreo into something homemade, which seems appropriate and inviting for the season. So while the FDA was busy banning caffeinated alcoholic beverages like Four Loko, I was mixing up a batch of these coffee and whiskey based cookies.
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Monday, December 6, 2010 · · Tags: Baking, christmas, cookies, holidays, recipes