chadzilla

hog head cheese

Tate and I finished the hog head cheese that we started a couple of days ago.  We were able to pull quite a bit of pork meat from the pieces we boiled.  The meat was chopped up and added to the heated re-strained broth.  We then decided to go full-on cajun with it by adding in cayenne, paprika, granulated garlic and onion, and black pepper.  After adjusting the salt, the flavor was perfect while not too spicy.

Because of the parts used in the boiling process (the head, feet, and random other bones), there was really no need to add gelatin.  The John Folse recipe that we used as a reference called for additional powdered gelatin.  Ours feels very natural instead, and melts perfectly in the temperature of the human mouth.  To maintain some degree of homogenous particle suspension, we cooled the mix in an ice bath until it reached 60F or lower.  The meat still settled down a bit, but as you can see it is pretty well mixed.

We eat this the traditional way... on saltine crackers with hot sauce.  Yeah, cher!

manifesto destiny

If anyone out there has not yet read the "International Agenda for Great Cooking," then click it and do so immediately.  As simple and obvious as it sounds, it was done out of necessity.  Just as chef celebrity has sliced a crude cut into the belly of the world of gastronomy with a Rachael Ray Furi chef knife, reality shows and misinterpretations of the new cuisine are doing more harm than good.  This manifesto featuring the words of Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, and Thomas Keller penned by Harold McGee put the foundation of modern food into 4 beautiful and concise guidelines.  If you are not cooking by these guidelines, whether you are making Nuoc Mam ice cream or your grandma's pot roast, then put the spoon down.

The widespread reality of people's interpretations was summed up to me at the SOBE wine and food festival.  We were using a pipette filled with papaya piri piri as a skewer to merguez sausage.  One woman kept asking, "Is this that molecular gastronomy?"  There was obviously no way to deliver a short diffusing answer to that inquiry.  "I know what this is... it's that new molecular gastronomy."  Why?  Just because the sauce is held in a little plastic tube... that's not what it's about.  Nevermind that we're serving homemade sausage here that we made from great sourced ingredients and spiced with a blend that we carefully measured out and toasted to increase its umami and flavor.  What about the spiced coffe mixture that we are foaming on top and dusting with ground cocoa nib croquant to resemble African soil?  That's the world that has been created.  Everyone is consumed with appearance and not with process.

Without making this longer than the manifesto itself, I just want to add in one point that McGee writes... The new approach to cooking is more evolution than revolution.  The revolution is led by the misguided.  The evolution is led by the enlightened.

sobe wine & food 2007

Sunday was an intensely long day as we participated in the last day of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival.  It has grown to become one of the largest wine events in the United States drawing massive crowds to the Miami area.  TV's Food Network is largely involved with the festival.  This is a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because of the increased publicity.  A curse because... well, imagine sitting through seminars given by Rachael Ray or Paula Deen... you get the idea.  We ended up catching the last bit of Bobby Flay's presentation and had to listen to audience questions like 'what's your favorite color?'  I think I tuned out at that point.

Our dish featured a homemade Merguez sausage brushed with African barbeque sauce, skewered with a pipette of papaya piri piri, topped with berbere spiced coffee foam and African dirt (course ground cocoa nib croquant).  We later switched to a tamarind and poppy seed rice pudding with whipped mango soup.  All in all, we served about 2000 portions.  No pictures this time, and no left-overs.

After everyone else bailed, Chef K and I went to Yakko-San Izakaya and pigged out on Japanese chicken livers, monkfish liver, fried oysters, black pork belly, toro, and dried trigger fish while drinking Sapporo.  Good food to eat after a wine festival (ironically and appropriately we only drank beer that day).

whole hog

At the risk of offending anyone with this picture, I just cannot write this post without showing its starting point.  With our lastest delivery from Four Story Hill Farm, we received the head from one of Sylvia Pryzant's much sought-after Berkshire pigs.  What else can we do but make hog head cheese.

For anyone not familiar, hog head cheese is a mixture of cooked down pieces of pork that are boiled down with aromatics and allowed to set into a gelatinous 'cake' which can be sliced and eaten on crackers.  It is believed to be descended from classical daube glace.  This dish has been eaten throughout the south, and definitely in the Cajun country of south Louisiana for generations.  The modern version (especially in areas like New Orleans) consists only of pork shoulder cooked down with seasonings (usually spicy) and set in gelatine.  We were going for the gusto!

The only basis for the technique that we used came from a downloaded John Folse recipe and memories of my grandfather.  Pop used to boil the whole head in a cast iron pot on a wood fire in the yard.  I cannot recall what it was seasoned with, but he used to actually pull the head up and scrape everything off with a spoon.  I do not believe that he ever added gelatine.  The result was pans of grayish jelly setting in square aluminum pans in the refrigerator.  This is cajun food history and almost a lost art.  More the reason to attempt it.

Without a cast iron cauldron, we used a tilt skillet.  Here is the head boiling with our added spices... onion, celery, garlic, bay leaf, arbol chiles, paprika, peppercorn, and crab boil seasoning.  We also added in about 5 pounds of Berkshire pork shoulder along with 3 of its feet (without a saw, we broke a cleaver doing this).  The next step after removing all of the meat and reserving the strained broth is to chop all of the meat and lay it into pans.  The gelatinous power of the broth will have to be observed and adjusted with more gelatine if necessary.  At this point the broth will be reheated, seasoned further, and poured over the meat to set.  We should be eating it by Tuesday.

I hope to spark curiosity from people with this.  It actually fits in perfectly with the modern growing restaurant trend of serving more offal and non-traditional cuts of meat.  For me, it fits in with the cajun mentality of not wasting anything.  When my grandfather butchered a pig, there was literally nothing left afterwards.  It should be a sin not to use every piece of an animal if its life is taken for food.

merguez

This year we were stumped on what to do for South Beach Wine & Food on Sunday.  In the last week, we opted to go all out African.  Most of our base recipes are coming from Marcus Samuelsson, including an African barbeque sauce, chile harissa, piri piri, and berbere.  The highlight of all this is our merguez sausage.

We ground up the meat in a ratio of 75% lamb to 25% chicken thigh meat.  I won't give exact ingredient amounts here because we stuffed 40 pounds of sausage, and it would have to be scaled down quite a bit.  The meat is flavored with fresh mint, parsley, garlic, chile harissa, cumin, coriander, and cayenne.

Chef Mike and I ran the meat into pork casings.  The only regret is that we only have one smaller sized die for our new grinder attachment.  A larger coarser cut would have given the sausage a more characteristic look.  I'll try to post a photo of the finished item.  We are planning to skewer the sausage with a papaya piri piri-filled pipette and serve it with spiced coffee espuma and ground cocoa nib croquant.  Due to the size of the event, we are trying to get 1600 portions.

fried chicken confessions

There was one recipe left out of Heston Blumenthal's "In Search of Perfection" that would have certainly been included... if he were from the land of Dixie and not a full-blown yankee.  That staple of the American Southern table is of course, fried chicken.  Although he took many classic dishes from the family table to the laboratory in search of the perfect recipe or method for them, I just cannot help but feel the desire to see that blue-footed Bresse chicken fried up to a crispy golden brown instead of roasted.

Why fried chicken?  Maybe it's some subliminal pull of the Mardi Gras season.  You just can't go see a parade without carrying a piece of Popeye's spicy in your hand.  I've eaten far too many of them.  As with the many changes in my life, fried chicken has changed with me.  I now only eat home-fried chicken as most fast-food versions are disgustingly greasy and offer no satisfaction.  As a result of this, I have been putting a lot of attention to frying better chicken.

This is Big Mike.  He can undoubtedly fry chicken better than any of us, and when he stands over the fryer people just start appearing out of the woodwork.  That doesn't mean that Chef K or myself can't hang.  I never feel the lack of confidence to put my chicken on the table.  We do all have one thing in common, and that is the method that we use.  We all do what can be labelled as New Orleans style fried chicken.

New Orleans style chicken is found in almost every hotel kitchen, and is the method used by every creole cook I've worked with.  It consists of first seasoning the chicken (usually with salt and cayenne only), adding eggs to the chicken (no dairy or buttermilk here), allowing for a marination period (always better after 24 hours), and frying in seasoned flour (again, only salt, cayenne, and maybe some granulated onion and garlic).  Each batch fries at 340F for about 15 minutes.  This is typical.  There are some other versions, as with Austin Leslie's method of using standard frying method instead of an egg marinade.  He also uses evaporated milk in his egg wash.  Although I haven't tried his method, the standard New Orleans technique yields great chicken.

Here are my confessions.  There are 2 additions to my recipe that may amount to fried chicken blasphemy.  The first is that I add a substantial amount of cornstarch to my seasoned flour.  This has more to do with getting a crispier crust that sticks and reheats well (I love left-over chicken) than with the fact that my wife is Taiwanese.  The second violation is the use of cumin.  Now, I know that most people think that cumin spice has no damn place in New Orleans fried chicken, but I use it for one reason.  Because I use granulated onion and garlic in my method, a 'small' amount of cumin acts as a bridge flavor between these... just as fenugreek acts as a 'binder' in Indian spice mixtures.  You can't taste the cumin in it, it only makes the flavor smoother.

There is a constant belief in people that great fried chicken has some secret ingredient.  The real secret is exactly opposite of this.  Even Austin Leslie's recipe (hailed as the Godfather of Creole Soul and fried chicken) has only salt and pepper.  For the record, the Colonel is way off base and 7 or 11 herbs and spices is garbage.  The crust isn't even good.  Simple is better here.  Great fried chicken comes in the technique.  It also helps to buy great chicken that is free-roaming and added-hormone free.  You want that natural farm-house chicken flavor.

This is my home fryer full or wings.  I only use peanut oil.  Stay away from canola!  Peanut oil has a nice high smoke point and it is as important to fried chicken as sesame oil is to Japanese food.  Most people fire up little barbeques on their balconies and grill food.  I stand outside and fry chicken.  It's just my thing.  I openly encourage anyone from the south to buy a cheap deep fryer.  It may be the second most important appliance after your rice cooker.  The fryer just makes everything so easy, and since fried fast-food is garbage... it only makes sense to straighten up and fry right.

tamarind restaurant

Ming and I finally had the opportunity to eat at Tamarind, Vatcharin Bhumichitr's Thai restaurant here in the Miami area.  I believe the original is in London.

Even though I love Oriental foods, Thai has not been one of my favorites.  The flavors do not speak to me in the same way that Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, or Korean flavors do.  However, no one can ever deny good food no matter what the cuisine may be.  That is what Tamarind offers... good food.

We tried the chicken satays, the roti, basil and chile fried rice, and the whole fried snapper.  Although everything was good, the snapper and the roti stood out.  Ming requested the tamarind sauce with it.  I could not stop eating the skin of the fish... it was so crisp and tasty with that great flavor of fish fat that increases near the outer edge beneath the skin (of course, omega3 fatty acids always taste better when they are fried!).  The lighting was too dark for photos, but I did manage one clear shot.  Please disregard the huge obnoxious orange slice covering the fish's head.

I also have to say that the peanut sauce here is phenomenal, although a touch too sweet.  A good peanut sauce recipe is something that every cook should keep in his repertoire.  You will eventually and repeatedly need to make it again and again for various events.  I plan to take the recipe from Vatch's Thai Kitchen (the book that goes with the restaurant) and modify it for my recipe folder.

lamb 'cetta'

For anyone curious about the lamb 'cetta' we made 3 weeks ago...

We had to actually move our hanging meats from the pastry kitchen to our produce walk-in.  There suddenly appeared a fear of contamination when we noticed a couple of flies in the area.  The rolled lamb belly hung for 2 weeks and we had earmarked 18 February as the day to pull them down.

The aroma is that of nice lamb fat with a slight 'pastrami' odor above it.  It seemed to have dried fairly well in the cooler which gives me hope for our hams in there.  The cure/drying process is not something that any of us are overly familiar with.  The only assurances we can afford are to depend on our sense of smell.  The key here is to train your nose to pick up even the slightest 'off' or spoiled aroma.  Here are some slices.

... and again here as bacon and eggs (our recurring theme).  2 quail eggs sunny side up with lamb 'cetta' bacon.  The full fat flavor in this meat is great.  Notice that the meat turned brown.  I imagine that a little potassium nitrate could be added to the original cure if a red cooked meat is desired as with most store-bought pancetta.

louisiana foods

In honor of Mardi Gras day to all of us misplaced New Orleans people.  Today is the day to sing "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?"  Ironically, this is probably the first Mardi Gras day that I've had off in many many years... and I'm in Miami.  There's a huge cosmic joke in there somewhere.

Tate had recently made a trip to LaPlace, Louisiana and brought some incredible foods back.  There was some homemade andouille sausage from his uncle's butcher shop and smoke house.  It has been a very long time since I have seen andouille like this... especially in Miami.

This is truly a beautiful thing.  Look at that smoked casing.  It brought a tear to my eye.  Eating a slice of this sausage was like eating a piece of perfectly smoked pork with a hint of pepper that lingered in the mouth like a ghost.

There was also some of the best hog head cheese that I have ever eaten.  The label says Don's and it only lists 6 ingredients.  How amazing is that?  This stuff was spicy!  The experience of eating it has led us to procure a Berkshire head from Sylvia Pryzant in the near future and attempt to make traditional head cheese.  Ironically, almost all hog head cheese in the New Orleans area is made from other parts of the pig (mainly the shoulder), and I should add that it isn't actually cheese (just to clarify with those unfamiliar).  My grandpa used to make it from a hog's head, and he used to cook it in huge cast iron pots over wood fires.  Sadly, I was too young and finnicky to taste it back then, so I may never know that true hog head cheese flavor.  His was grey in color and contained a lot more than pig meat.  This stuff will have to do in the meantime.

There was also some incredible boudin that sadly got eaten before it could be photographed.  The liver intensity of the boudin was more than I had ever tasted.  We will probably all end up at the doctor after eating all of this rich food.

mignonette gelee

There are certain recipes that a chef should always keep in his folder to be accessed at an any point.  These recipes must be tried, fool proof, and reliable.  They all become part of one's repertoire.  They may be borrowed, adjusted, or completely from the mind of the chef.  Usually, these are component recipes.  One such item is the mignonette jelly below.  The ingredient proportions are perfect, and it can be made ahead and cut into cubes (or whatever) and served with a variety of seafoods for quick appetizers or small courses.  I added some kick to the traditional mignonette by adding touches of hot sauce, horseradish, and lemon.  This version is so good that I keep finding myself eating the jelly without accompaniment.

Mignonette Jelly (served here over oysters)

• 2 Cup merlot vinegar
• 4 Cup red wine vinegar
• 1 Cup shallots (minced fine)
• 3 Tbsp cracked black pepper
• 2 each lemons (juice and minced zest only)
• 3 Tbsp Crystal hot sauce
• 1 Tbsp prepared horseradish
• 30 each gelatin sheets

Bloom the gelatin sheets in cold water.

Heat the vinegars and hot sauce in a pan with the bloomed gelatin until the gelatin melts.  Pour the liquid into a mixing bowl set over an ice bath.  Add in all of the other ingredients, and slowly whisk until the temperature goes down to 60F.  Quickly and carefully pour the jelly onto a plastic wrap lined half sheet pan (or full if you want a much thinner jelly) and let it set on a level surface.  Refrigerate.

It is very important to let the mixture cool to 60F before pouring into the mold to achieve the proper suspension of particles in the jelly.