Tingly Lips...

I'm excited about cooking from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty, since I've always wanted to understand Chinese cuisine, and I'm hoping this will be the way I finally "get it".

The book is pretty well laid out, and a good portion of the book is taken up with a discussion of
technique, ingredients, customs and what-not. It's all interesting stuff, and Chinese cuisine
definitely differs tremendously from "western" food in many ways, so reading the background
material has been quite valuable for me.

The first recipe I made from the book was actually a "pre-recipe", and was the "chili oil" described in the "pantry" section, since the first dish I planned to cook was a rendition of dan-dan noodles, which requires chili oil.

Chili oil is a common condiment in Sichuan cuisine, and it couldn't be easier to make.
What you do is, you take 1/2 cup of red pepper flakes (I ran a bunch of whole chilis through my mini food processor to make the flakes), put them in a quart mason jar and add a couple of pieces of star anise.

Then you heat 2 cups of peanut (or canola oil) with a crushed piece of ginger (the recipe said until "smoking hot", but I just went to about 375-400degs, since I didn't want to burn the house down).
Once it's heated, you take it off the heat for about 10-15 minutes to cool to around 225-250 deg, and then (carefully!) pour it into the mason jar. Then you just let the oil sit for about a day or two, and there you go, homemade chili oil.




As I said above, my first dish from the book was a rendition of dan-dan noodles. Dan-Dan noodles are a famous streetfood from China, and like many "famous foods" from a particular area (like, say, North Carolina BBQ), there are as many versions as there are people. In Dunlop's book, there are 2 versions of dan-dan, and in our house we've enjoyed a different version, the recipe for which came from Cook's illustrated.

The Cook's version (which has been Americanized a bit) is interesting, b/c it shares so little
with the recipes in Dunlop's book (which have some common ingredients between them).
The Cook's version is something like this (I'm going from memory, since I lost the recipe long ago, and I just cook from memory on this one anyway):

Cook's Illustrated:
1/2 lb ground pork
2 tbsp sherry or shaoxing wine
fresh ground pepper
1 tbsp oil
4 garlic cloves minced
1 inch piece ginger, minced
1/2 - 1 tsp red chili flakes
3 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
4 tbsp creamy peanut butter
1 - 1 1/2 cups chicken broth
8 oz linguine or asian noodles
Bean sprouts
sliced scallions (white and green parts)
Combine the port with the sherry, 1 tbsp soy sauce and ground pepper, and set aside to marinate for 15 min.
Bring a pot of water to boil, and boil noodles according to package directions. They need to be "done", not just "al dente".
Meanwhile, combine oyster sauce, vinegar, remaining soy sauce, and the peanut butter in a bowl, and stir until smooth. Stir in chicken broth and stir until smooth. Set aside.
Heat a pan over high heat until hot, add oil, and stir fry pork until browned. Add garlic, ginger and red pepper flakes and fry for 30 secs or until fragrant. Add sauce, and turn heat down to low, and simmer until thickened to desired consistency.
Serve over noodles, garnished with bean sprouts and scallions

Land of Plenty:
8 oz dried chinese noodles
sauce:
1 tbsp peanut oil
4 tbsp Sichuanese ya cai or Tianjin preserved vegetable, diced small
3 scallions, green parts only, finely sliced
1 1/2 tbsp light soy
1/2 tbsp dark soy
2 tbsp chili oil (to taste)
1 1/2 tsp black chinese vinegar
1/2 - 1 tsp ground roasted sichuan peppercorns
topping:
a little oil
4 oz ground pork (I actually used turkey, b/c it was on sale)
1 tsp shaoxing rice wine or sherry
2 tsp light soy
salt to taste

Heat the 1 tbsp of oil, and stir-fry preserved veg for about 30 secs, until fragrant. Set aside.
Stir-fry ground pork, and as meat separates, add wine and soy sauce. Continue to cook until well browned, but not too dry.
Combine the fried vegetable and the rest of the sauce ingredients in a bowl and mix together. Cook the noodles according to the package, and add to the sauce. Sprinkle with the meat mixture, and then stir well to combine. Serve.


As you can see from the two recipes, there are slight similarities, but the (what I'm assuming is) "more authentic" version is much simpler, and lighter. It also had some ingredients that I'd never had before, like the "ya cai" (preserved mustard tuber) and some of the other sauce ingredients. The ya cai was actually pretty good, even though it looked kind of alien.
Note: whoops! This is NOT ya cai (which is actually mustard greens that have been preserved. This is sichuanese preserved vegetable, which is not the same thing. My bad. Please continue reading, and don't think less of me for the mistake).

It tasted sort of like a garlicky, chilified pickle, which I guess is what it is. The sauce also had black chinese vinegar in it, which is somewhat sweet, and not very high in acid. The other ingredient that I'd never had before was dark soy sauce, which is thicker than the light soy, and more intense.

So how'd the Dunlop version taste? They were good. Different from the Cook's version, primarily because the Cook's version has the peanut butter in it, which gives it a "saucy" texture. The LoP version is a simpler affair, and without the peanut butter to soften the flavors, it's a different experience. When the book first mentioned Sichuan peppercorns, the author made a point of saying that the peppercorns aren't really hot, but that impart a pleasant tingling sensation to the lips of the person eating. I can definitely vouch for that, b/c when I was done eating my noodles, my lips were a-tingling! (I was also sweating, that chili oil definitely is hot)
Here's a pic of the finished product:

So, I've gotten my feet wet on this cookbook, and I like it. It's got some weaknesses (for example, there's not a lot of detail on how to prepare certain ingredients, like the preserved vegetable(ya cai)), but overall, the subject matter is interesting enough to overcome that.

The next dish I'm cooking will be the salt-fried pork, which will be my first experience cooking
pork-belly, so I'm looking forward to this!

Stay tuned.

A trip to the market...

I've been trying to think of ways to spice up my blog, and one idea that appeals to me is doing my own version of "French Laundry at Home". If you're not familiar with this blog (and you should take the time to read some of the posts, it's a great read), the idea is that the author cooked her way thru the "French Laundry Cookbook", and wrote about it. That's a pretty impressive feat. I remember reading thru the book when I checked it out from the library and thinking, "wow, not a home cooking cookbook".

For my take on "cooking your way thru a book, one recipe at a time", I'm thinking about taking on Fuchsia Dunlop's "Land of Plenty", which is a pretty good cookbook focusing on Sichuan cuisine.
To that end, Bridget (my 5 year old daughter) and I took a trip this afternoon to the local Asian market to pick up some pantry staples.

Here in the Triangle, we have a very large Asian population, which we owe to the presence of 3 top flight universities (NCSU, UNC, and Duke) as well as a slew of smaller schools, and to the vibrant high-tech/biotech scene here. This presence translates to a pretty big Asian market here in Cary, called, fittingly enough, the Grand Asia Market.

I enjoy going to places like this, because it allows me to get some idea of what it's like to be both a minority and a stranger in a strange land. Walking in, you're confronted with signs in languages you (probably) don't understand, and very few people of your own ethnicity. Personally, I think it's good for you to experience this kind of dislocation, since it allows you to empathize at least somewhat with other minorities. For example, african-americans make up roughly 12% of the US population, so anytime an african-american walks into a room, it's likely that they will be the only black person in the room. Walking into the Grand Asia market, you know exactly how they feel.

But enough liberal guilt. Shopping at the Grand Asia market is definitely different from Krogering. I was primarily interested in pantry items, so I skipped the fresh fruit and veg area, but I got sucked into the fish and meat departments, and I gotta say, the next time I'm buying fish, I know where I'm going. They had a ton of fish, including live fish (which at least guarantees that it's fresh) and crabs, and it all looked pretty good.

Live fish:

Stone crabs: (they had turtles too, but I didn't get any pics of those)
Live blue crabs:


A broad selection of not-living fish, which was much more appealing than what you get at the regular grocery:
Next to the fish department was the meat department. Since I haven't tried any of the meat there, I can't say it's better than a usual grocery, but the selection was far more interesting. The only thing I bought was pork belly (which seems to be a hip kind of meat lately), but there was a ton of stuff that I can honestly say, I've never considered buying. But if I'm ever looking for fresh bung, I know where to go (snicker).

There was a great variety of cuts that you just never see at the regular grocery:

Next time you get a cornish hen, this is the "non-prettied up" version:


I'm open minded, and I can see eating testicles, but who eats uteri?

And, when you can't think of anything else to eat:
Please don't think I'm making fun of the meat selection. While I wouldn't eat some of the stuff I saw, I did see things I would eat, like pork liver and pork belly. Even though I think pictures of pork uteri are funny, someone is obviously eating it, since they're selling it fresh, and when you get down to it, meat is meat, regardless of where it comes from on the animal.

After the "pleasure" portion of the trip, checking out the meat and fish, we went and got the things I was really here for, which were the pantry staples. The hard part of shopping in a place like this is that little is in english, so you need to kind of parse what english is there to get an idea of what you're buying (or be familiar enough with the appearance of what you're buying to be confident you're buying the right thing. I think I managed to muddle thru alright, getting most of what I wanted.

Spices galore:

More noodles than you can shake a stick at:

My haul:

Pork belly, light and dark soy sauce, rice wine, rice vinegar, black vinegar, sichuan pepper corns, hot peppers, preserved vegetables, etc.

So, all in all, a good trip (we also went to a local motorcycle dealership for some parts for a bike I'm working on, and I think Bridget had more fun at the market than at the motorcycle dealership). I got most of what I needed, and I think I'm ready to take on Fuchsia Dunlop's very good cookbook. In the coming days/weeks/months, I hope to flesh out my plan a little better. I'm excited at the idea of cooking everything from a book, but it's kind of intimidating, especially since I'm sure there are things that I won't be able to find anyone to eat (and then I'll have to eat it!). Right now, I need to work out what I'm going to cook and when.

So keep reading!

Music notes:
I've been on a jag of buying lately. I picked up the new Blitzen Trapper album Furr, which is really really good. I went to see the Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady the other night here in Raleigh, and they totally kicked a**. I have all but one DBT album, but I only had one Hold Steady album (Stay Positive), so I went and bought "Boys and Girls in America". Awesome stuff. If you haven't heard the Hold Steady, you're missing out, and you owe it to yourself to rectify the matter. I also picked up "Boxer" by the National. It's an album that's hard to figure. Sometimes I listen to it and think "mellow", other times not. But all in all, a great album, that I've listened to repeatedly in the last couple of days. Regardless, three great albums in a week is a pretty good string of music.

New Music Wednesday (Wombats and Bon Iver)

I got a hankering for new music tonight, and since I still have a little cash in my bank account here at the end of the month, I figured I'd scratch that itch.
I picked up two new albums tonight, the first being a very excellent album by The Wombats, called A Guide to Love, Loss and Desparation . It's a pretty poppy album, that reminds me a lot of bands like Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys. It's good stuff, and I'm sure I'll be listening to it in the car a lot for a while. One stand out song from the album is this little ditty:




The other album I bought was Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. This album is definitely different from The Wombats, but of what I listened to tonight, it seems really good. I think I'll have to give it a least a couple of concentrated listens before I go up or down on it. Interestingly, Bon Iver (like Bright Eyes, I guess) is really a vehicle for one artist (in this case Justin Vernon, according to Wikipedia), and while that's not all that interesting, it is interesting that they released two albums while based in Raleigh(!).

Rather than embed a Bon Iver video, I'll embed a Bon Iver/Lykke Li video (I really dig Lykke Li. I have no idea why, but her music just gets me going for some reason):



Enjoy!

Deep fried fun...

Here in North Carolina, the State Fair just ended. One of my favorite parts of the fair is seeing what new thing that someone has decided to deep-fry. One year it's twinkies, the next it's oreos. I never end up getting deep-fried anything (I always look at the people cooking the stuff, and the people eating the stuff, and say "I don't want to be lumped into this group". Hey, I'm a snob on some things. I'm not ashamed to admit it), but the idea of deep-fried goodness is always pretty tempting.

Well today, I gave in to the temptation, and decided to take a shot at deep frying some candy bars.
If you google "deep-fried candy bars", you'll find lots of info on how to go about doing it, but it's actually pretty simple. All you need is:
1. a pot suitable for deep-frying (I used a 4 1/2 qt sauce pan),
2. some oil (I went with plain vegetable oil),
3. candy bars (in my case, I took a variety of snack-sized snickers, almond joys, kit kats, and reeses' peanut butter cups)
4. batter
5. and most importantly, a thermometer (you need one that will go up to ~400deg, not a regular meat thermometer)

I pulled a batter recipe off the internet, threw my candy bars in the freezer to get cold, and then after dinner, went to work.

The batter:
2 eggs
2tbsp oil
2 cups milk
2 tsp baking powder
2 cups flour

Whisk together the eggs, oil, and milk, and then add the baking powder and flour, and stir until smooth. Place in refrigerator to cool and thicken slightly.

After the batter was mixed up, I dumped about a half gallon of oil into my saucepan, and turned on the heat. Once the oil was at 375deg, I took out the batter and the candy bars, and made a little assembly line of candy bars, batter, oil, and paper-towel lined plate, so that I could have a relatively smooth operation.

From that point, it was pretty simple. You unwrap your candy bar (which should be close to frozen), dip it into the batter to coat it thoroughly, and then you drop it (carefully) into the hot oil. When the batter turns golden, it's done. Then you take out the candy bar and set it on a paper-towel lined plate to drain, and keep doing those steps until you're out of candy bars.

All told, it turned out about as well as I expected. I had some chocolate leakage, particularly with the peanut butter cups, but they all seemed to be edible when I got done. After plating up the candy bars, I dusted them with some powdered sugar and some cocoa powder, and the girls and I enjoyed a little taste of the state fair at home.

As for taste, they were pretty good, especially the almond joys. Those were nicely gooey, and I like coconut like nobody's business, so warm coconut and melty chocolate works for me. I thought the snickers were pretty good, too. The kids grabbed the kit-kats, and peanut butter cups before I could try them, but I was assured that they were good.

If I do it again, I think I'd add more flour to the batter, since it was a little thin. I'd also try dusting the candy bars with powdered sugar or something to get better adhesion between candy and batter. I think fruit would be good for this treatment, too, especially something like a banana (maybe chocolate dipped?) or an apple. Apparently, this year the big thing is deep-fried coke, and I have some ideas on that. And I'd have to try doing oreos, too....

Anyway, here are some pics of the whole thing:

The batter, cooling in the freezer:

The candy bars, next shelf down:

The oil (and thermometer!)

My assembly line:

The first candy bar, into the pot:

And several candy bars later, the oil is a little less clear:

I didn't make too many of these, since how many candy bars can you eat at one sitting?

Dusted with powdered sugar and cocoa:

Another view: (you can see part of Gretchen on the left and Bridget on the right)

A bite out of the almond joy:

And the snickers:

By the way, that's Bridget in the background.

Anyway, that's all I've got for today. Hope you enjoyed this post, and maybe you've even been inspired to take a shot at it yourself. I'm thinking deep-fried poptarts might be good...

Keeping in Tuna...

There are a number of recipes in my house that have been made so many times that they just come naturally. I don't need a cookbook, I don't need to think much, I can just pull it together because I've made it a gajillion times.

Tonight's dinner is one of those meals, which in my house we just call "Tuna Pasta". I originally got the recipe from the excellent Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, by Marcella Hazan. If you don't own this book, you should. The pasta section alone is worth the book, but everything in it is great.
Tuna Pasta is penne pasta with a simple tuna and tomato sauce. It sounds basic, and it is, but the flavors (garlic, tuna, tomatoes, parsley, salt and pepper) work so well together that it's just perfection. In the time that you can make something like spaghetti from a jar (if you count the pasta time) or tuna helper, you can have something really good.

Tuna Pasta:
1 lb penne pasta
4 tbsp olive oil
1-2 tbsp minced garlic
1 15oz can diced tomatoes
1 tbsp butter
2 cans olive-oil packed tuna, drained and flaked
chopped parsley to taste (I like 3-4 tbsp or more)
salt (coarse kosher!) and pepper

Begin boiling water for pasta. Heat olive oil over med/med-lo heat, and add garlic. Cook until golden and fragrant but not brown. Add tomatoes (with juice) and bring to a simmer.
When water boils, add pasta. A few minutes before the pasta is done, take tomatoes off heat, and add butter, stirring to melt. Add tuna, and combine. When pasta's done, drain and return to pot. Add sauce, and stir to combine. Add chopped parsley, fresh ground pepper and salt, and stir again. Serve.

Now that's a simple dinner, but again, it's really good, and it works perfectly when you're worn out from a day of working for the man, and you just want to get dinner on the table.
With respect to the parsley, I use italian flat leaf since I think it tastes better and has a better mouth-feel, but you can use the curly kind. The curly kind can have more sand in its nooks and crannies, so you probably need to wash it a bit more than italian, but if you wash it like you'd do spinach, you should be ok.
You may be tempted to substitute either vegetable oil packed tuna or water packed tuna. If you must (and you really shouldn't, since the tuna is the focal point of the whole shebang, and so you should get the best you can), go for the water packed over the vegetable oil packed tuna. The veg oil tuna is a little cat-foody in texture, if you ask me.

Some pics:


Finally, if you've made it this far, apologies for the lame pun in the title. It was either that or "you can tuna piano...", but I figured that one had been done to death.

On a roll...

I must be on a roll, because beer #2 is almost ready to have the yeast pitched, cooling off as I type this.
Tonight I made a "Columbus IPA", from the book Secrets of the Master Brewers, by Higgins et al. This trio also wrote the Homebrewer's Recipe Guide, which, as I've said before, I really dug.

The recipe was from Dan Gortemiller of the Pacific Coast Brewing Company, and one reason it appealed to me was that it was an extract beer, and at this point in my life I don't know that I'm all that interested in going all-grain. I think it'd be cool to say I'd made one, but the time involved, etc, it's just not all that appealing to me. So sue me.

Anyway, the recipe:
9 lbs light malt extract syrup
2 lbs crystal malt
4 oz columbus hops (13.9% alpha)
1 tsp irish moss
ale yeast
yeast nutrients

Steep grains for 20 minutes and discard. Off heat, add extract and hops, and boil for 20 minutes. Cool and pitch.

My brew store sells malt extract in 3.3 lb bags, so I went with 9.9 lbs of extract instead of 9.
I couldn't find columbus hops at my brew store, so I went with a combination of millenium hops (15% alpha) and Yakima magnum (13.1% alpha). I'm thinking "close enough". I also went with a smack pack of American Ale yeast, so there's my nutrients right there.
So, call it a "Yakima Millenium IPA", although it's probably not going to be very pale. For some strange reason, the recipe calls for 6 gallons of water, not the usual 5. I understand evaporation, but the boil is so short, surely a gallon of water won't get cooked off?

It's late, and there's not much more to write about, so I'll post a couple pics and that'll be that.

2 lbs of crystal malt:

4oz of hops (that's a lot of hops)

A taste of honey...

A reader (thanks Ian!) had a comment on my last beer entry, asking about using honey as the priming agent for your bottling. I originally started writing my reply as a comment, but figured it was a good topic for a blog post, so here's Ian's original question:

does the honey as the primer add flavor, color. I will be ready to bottle my first batch this coming week and i say the recipe and the honey primer sould neat

Ian,
I think the honey would add additional flavor, but I'm not so sure about color (considering you're adding somewhere around 1 1/2 cups of honey (plus water) to 5 gallons of beer).
The recipe I have for the bridal ale calls for 1 1/2 cups of honey as priming sugar, but I'm probably going to cut it back to 1 or 1 1/4 cups, since last time this beer was wayyy over-carbonated.
I have a book ("Designing Great Beers", by Ray Daniels) that points out some of the special concerns with honey. Honey has a delicate flavor to it (a good thing) and it has living organisms in it (not necessarily a good thing). So, you can't just add the honey to cold wort/beer.
This causes a problem, since boiling it for a long time would pretty much wipe out the flavors that honey imparts (and yes, I realize that the recipe I have has me boiling the honey right from the beginning. Next time, I'll add the honey later, so it doesn't boil as long). The Daniels book has a suggestion from the National Honey Board that is kind of impractical, but I'll post it anyway:
1. Dilute your honey to the gravity of the wort with water
2. Conduct a hold for two and a half hours at 176deg F under a CO2 blanket.
3. Add this directly to the beer at high krausen.

Like I said, a little impractical, since I don't think most people are setup to do the hold step (and I'm assuming "high krausen" means when your beer is fermenting hard).

But none of this addresses bottling. What I did for bottling was to combine my honey with about a cup of water in a saucepan, and I boiled it for a couple minutes. I figure that's long enough to kill whatever micro-organisms are present, and won't kill all the flavor. I'm using a "mountain honey" that seems to have more flavor than the kind that comes in the little bear bottle, so maybe that extra flavor will stick around.

I personally think a bigger issue with honey is that I wonder how it matches up sugar-wise with something like plain corn sugar. Typically, people add about 3/4 cup of corn sugar when priming for bottling. According to wikipedia, honey has 82.12 g of sugar per 100g of honey.
If corn sugar is "all sugar", then it's still not double the sugar of honey, so I don't know that my recipe's 1 1/2 cups of honey is right, if you're trying to carbonate a beer (and that would explain my over-carbonation problem).
This is a long winded way of saying, I think I'd go with about 1 cup of honey for my priming (which is what I plan to do), and I plan to boil it in a cup of water for ~5 minutes. That should do the trick, and next time, I'll play with the honey in the wort to see if I can keep it out of the boil for a while to better preserve the flavors).

One final thing I learned is that honey doesn't add much in the way body (since it's still mostly sugar), just some flavor and alcohol (more alcohol than the equivalent amount of malt, apparently).