chadzilla

tropical delights, pt. 3

Here is the wrap up from the walk about at Tropical Delights.

I guess I assumed that the micros we get grow in green houses.  Wrong.  There are no glass walls or ceilings here... just rows on tables and a brief shading from the sun.  The rest of it grows almost wild... or as Andre pointed out new terminology to us, wild crafted... like the celery growing wild below the micro celery and cilantro.

These are what we call pea tendrils, as Andre also pointed out to us is wrong horticultural terminology.  Chefs and growers have different ideas about what a tendril is.

Bulk organic soil.

White sapote.  Abundant.

Lo quat tree.  This brought back more childhood memories.  We called them Japan plums.

The appropriately named ugly lemon.  Imagine how much zest you could get from this thing.

A super-potent South African pepper.  Can't remember the name.

Cuban long neck avocados... very Salvador Dali.

Sweet little tomatoes.  Some of these came home with us.

Mango tree.

Papaya tree.

A wild black raspberry.

Jack fruit.  Female on the left.  Male on the right.

A long mulberry before ripening.

Andre climbed this tree to pull some wax jambu (or java apple) down for us.  What generosity.

This is supposed to be like the tallest carambola in the whole freakin' world or something... not sure.  I just know it's pretty damn tall.  Check out the hyacinth bean flower vines in the forefront.

And some green carambola from a different tree.

And a palm (or palmetto... is there a relation) that is used to make beer somewhere.  I don't know the name of it, or the type of beer made, or what part of the world this happens but just the beer factor alone warranted a picture.

~fin~

tropical delights, pt. 2

... continuing on our trek through the farm at Tropical Delights with Andre.  There were so many pictures and names that I'm going to categorize a little here.  This post will consist of herbs, floral, and aromas.

Rosemary flowers.  Floral sweetness and pine flavor.

Cat mint and sage.  I had never heard of cat mint, which is different from catnip... but then again, there were many things here I had never heard of.

Rose grass.  This grass had a scent and flavor like rose petals, just not as intense.  Supposedly, this is used in the manufacture of perfumes more than actual rose petals are... makes me wonder about the rose water in our pantry.

I can't remember the name of these, but they are a rare sunflower.

Marigolds.  A substitute for saffron... although not a very good one I'm sure.

This is Jamaican mint, an extraordinary herb if you're not familiar with it.  The mint has a great flavor and is sturdier than your average mint due to its healthy thick little leaves and woody stem.

... and to show you how large the shrub can get...

Garlic flowers.  There is something justifiably profound about a flower the smells like garlic.  What a flavor as well.  I could have eaten an entire row of these.  The stinking rose...

Zahtar, the herb.  We have used the spice blend before, but have never come in contact with the herb itself.  The aroma and flavor was bitterly intense.

Thai basil.

and another variety of basil from the Orient.  I was not aware that basil originated in Indonesia (probably of a similar variety to this one).  It makes you wonder about Italian cuisine as we know it... if basil comes from the east, tomatoes from Peru, noodles from China (ok, that one is a fight-starter).  What was Italian food like before Marco Polo?

Wild mountain arugula.  This is an ancestor to modern arugula.  The bitterness reminded me of the first time I ever tasted arugula.  After years of loving it and eating it, it somehow seems like the flavor has mellowed.  This variety brought that 'ka-pow!' back... like a junkie looking for a stronger fix.

Micro cilantro... the same ones we get every week.  Notice the seeds hanging on to the tops.  Andre simply sprinkles his seeds over the top soil, not buried... maybe that's the mistake I'm making with some of my horticultural endeavors.

Mexican tarragon.  I was not aware that there was a Mexican variety of tarragon, but Andre assured us that it was not related to common tarragon.  This sparked an entire conversation on how finite and infinite flavors are.  How plants that are not related can have similar flavors.  I guess it's the randomness of nature... why else would combinations like white chocolate and caviar share similar dominant flavor molecules?  It's like we are putting together pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Chicory.

Hyacinth bean flower.  Roll that beautiful sweet bean footage...

Shell ginger flowers.  They'll be plucked once they open a little.  Vibrant colors inside.

A red leaf hibiscus, although not actually related to the hibiscus (another odd piece of the jigsaw puzzle).

Micro shiso.

... to be continued one more time.

tropical delights, pt. 1

One of the local growers that we depend on had invited us over to the farm many times.  We finally took up that offer and made the 1 hour drive (which got extended to about 2 hours when we got lost) to Homestead, Florida... land of farms, feed stores, and taqueria's.  Tropical Delights grows and delivers the microgreens that we use regularly between the restaurant and catering.  We are fortunate to be able to support them.

The farm consists of the rigging that makes a happy home for the micros, but even moreso the rest of the land which is a botanical zoo.  Andre walked us around the trees and garden beds and showed off his many rare specimens like a proud parent.  It was like taking a stroll with a living horticultural encyclopedia.  Like other growers in the area, Andre can point to any plant there and give you its name, scientific name, origin, and some fascinating story about it.

This will be a photo essay of the wonderful things we saw and tasted.  Most of it is Andre's words and descriptions within a margin of error equal to the capacity of my tea-stained memory.  Let's walk...

We started with a beautiful scent from a flower (and I cannot remember the name) whose sweet odor is one of the main ingredients in Chanel #5... and if it isn't, then it could be.

Baby Florida avocados... these are everywhere in Homestead.  We have been blessed to get some in season and fresh picked a couple of times.  The flavor is sweeter and lighter than the California variety, and although not as popular, equally good.  Imagine cutting into an avocado so fresh that it could sit in your fridge for almost a week before beginning to brown.

Mamay Sapote (sah-POH-tay)... Andre has at least 3 varieties growing here including the white sapote and the chocolate sapote... which is the flower in the following picture.

There is a grove of lychee trees scattered about the land.  Chef K volunteered us to help with the picking come harvest time for the lychees.  That should be interesting.  Here are some baby lychees in various stages (one covered in spider's web which insures there will be no bugs in them).

This is what a lychee tree looks like, to give you an idea of its size.

Andre speaks of the volunteers on his farm.  These are not extra hands that willingly come over to help with the chores... they are plants that decided to grow here on there own.  Sometimes he transplants them and helps them to survive.  Some of the volunteers are not native to south Florida and are not supposed to be capable of surviving the hot climate... but they grown anyway.  Maybe they're just happy living here with Andre.  He jokes about growing up with tropical fruit like mango, sapote, carambola, lychees, and how it gave him a love of 'plain' fruit such as apples and pears... which were appropriately exotic to him.  Here are some of the more ordinary specimens...

A peach tree... which is not supposed to grow in such hot weather.

Asparagus... these tasted so sweet... the best I've ever tasted.  Of course, it was only out of the ground for about 10 seconds which obviously had a lot to do with it's amazing flavor.

Wild celery.  The flavor of this variety is much more astringent than the supermarket type.  Great to chew on while walking around.  These grow out of the ground under the table rows where the microgreens grow.  These are also not supposed to survive here which probably partly accounts for their bitter flavor.

Brown Turkish figs.  Just being around a fig tree and smelling the aroma it gives brought back memories of my childhood.

And finally modern traditional fennel...

... growing right alongside a fennel plant that is the ancestor of the modern day fennel.

And an X-rated carrot...

The carrots are usually fed to the 2 dogs, Jack and Jill.  For some reason they love these.

To be continued... there is much more to see...

banh mi burgers

This falls into the home cookin' category... although not sous-vide home cookin'.

Vietnamese saigon subs with grilled pork have been one of my favorite sandwiches for years.  There was a bakery out in New Orleans East that sold them for under a buck each.  The sandwich is a simple balance of flavors, textures, and heat.  A few years ago, I decided to make banh mi burgers while barbeque'ing at home.  The simple idea was to make a burger patty of seasoned ground pork and serve it on a bun (instead of French bread) with the traditional dressings.

The is almost a universal rule among the apartments and condos of the greater Miami area that prevents anyone from barbeque'ing or operating a grill for fire-hazard reasons.  I've never lived in a place where this was a reality, but I'm slowly adjusting to my grill-less life.  To compensate somewhat for the loss of grill flavor, I used a smoke gun to put a little smoke on the raw pork patties before searing and cooking... but feel free to light up your grill and take this one outside if you live in a free country and not in Miami.

This is just like the traditional sandwich in every way except for the form of the meat.  Buy quality ground pork and mix it with minced onion, garlic, green onion, cilantro, fish sauce, oyster sauce, and a touch of sesame oil.  Shape the meat into burger sized patties.  The other sandwich ingredients can be arranged on the side... sliced cucumber, pickled juliennes of carrot (rice vinegar and salt), thinly sliced jalapenos, cilantro sprigs, shredded iceberg lettuce (not traditional, but it is a burger), and mayonnaise (kewpie if you've got it!) and soy sauce.  For the bread, I kept more with the traditional bread texture and went for Chicago hard rolls instead of softer burger buns.

This is really simple, and probably not totally post-worthy... but it is the beginning of summer, and if I had to submit a 30 minute meal for the season this dish would top the list.  Side items may consist of anything from a simple broth soup to an Asian themed slaw to green papaya salad and most definitely an ice cold Heineken or 33. 

The needle on the comfort meter is pegged out on this one.

sous-vide at home

Science versus Tradition.

I finally have my home kitchen set-up for sous-vide cooking.  This is something I hope to see a lot more of in the 'not so far off' future.  Even as chefs, we often draw a distinctive line between the food we can cook at work and the food we cook at home (at least it is if you utilize modern cuisine techniques at work).  Other labels are thrown on home cooked food such as comfort food or just good old home cooking... but what can be more comforting than an incredible piece of meat cooked using sous-vide methods.  Why should this experience be removed from the home.  True... there have been 'meal in a bag' type products in the past, but when we say sous-vide we mean controlled.  The ability to control a water bath to the degree is necessary.

So, what do you need to accomplish this.  Basically, 3 things.

A rice cooker or slow cooker as a heat source.  I am using this Black & Decker Rice Plus which has a great steam-lined look, holds 24 cups (ample water bath is important to control fluctuations in temperature as well as providing room enough to cook larger items when desired), and has a convenient little hole on top.  I tried a 'crock pot' type slow cooker before this one, and the rice cookers work better because the heating element is on the bottom and it can recover temperature drops more quickly.

The hole is important to the 2nd piece of necessary equipment... a PID (proportion, integral, derivative device).  This controls the amount of power going to the cooker while monitoring the temperature of the water bath.  The hole makes for a convenient place to slip the sensor wire.  The set-up allows the PID to keep the water at a constant temperature.  I am using a device called Sous-Vide Magic which I purchased from Fresh Meals Solutions.  Frank Hsu, who is president of FMS, went out of his way to back up his product.  He emailed me several times with information, and called me when I had minor issues with the device.  There is no lack of customer service at FMS.  Mr. Hsu also recommended the rice cooker that I am using above.

The last necessary equipment is a vacuum sealer.  In order to cook in a water bath, you must be able to seal foods in waterproof bags.  The Food Saver has made it's way into the American kitchen by being sold in most major retail stores (places that sell kitchen wares).  Although they promote it as a 'food saving' device (hence the name), hopefully we will see it used more as a vessel for preparing foods for sous-vide cooking.  Although the power on the Food Saver is not enough for compression techniques that we often use commercial vacuum sealers for, it does eliminate almost all of the air from around the food.

There is a certain appeal to what can be done with sous-vide once home cooks become familiar with the concept and practice.  It can even fall into the 'fix it and forget about it' category.  There is the power of control and 'fool proof' cooking that comes with this method.  There is the possibility of really reproducing restaurant food because you reduce certain uncontrollable factors.

This set-up can be added to your home kitchen for a small price.  $130 for the PID.  $50 for the rice cooker.  $100 for the vacuum sealer.  That's $280 for the whole system... when a Polyscience thermocirculator costs almost 3 times that.  It's tax refund time... go for it.  The home system actually does not circulate the water... but I've cooked several things in it already, and it does the job.  Imagine dropping eggs in before going to sleep and waking up to perfectly cooked eggs that only need to be pulled out of the water and cracked open.

So... with this leap, what are some other things that can be taken from the modern professional kitchen and brought into the home with interesting results?

... growing your own micro herbs and other edibles.

buffalo frog leg breakfast

This is a salute to Keith Micas.

Not that it's an unusual food preparation, but I was lucky that Chef K sent me a text message on my day off to let me know he had some seafood samples in the cooler.  One of the items was really fresh frog's legs.  Being from South Louisiana, and not having them for quite some time, I really just wanted to deep fry them.  The next thought after that was to toss them in buffalo sauce.  Although the idea is not strange or even original, it was home style food.

Any google hits to Keith Micas generate only references to country music artists, but Keith is no country musician.  He was an eccentric cook (one of a spectrum of strange characters) back in my early days working at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans.  We did seafood brunches every Friday, and Keith was most proud of his buffalo frog legs like it was the most original idea ever conceived.  He put them out there everytime the chef let him and showed them off to us PM cooks when we wandered in.  Sure, his mannerisms were strange and his use of language was unique (Ah Ah) and he became even stranger after his attempts at writing children's books about hippos and adventuring into stand-up comedy... but we all hope his life's calling finally granted him peace and happiness.  Never seen the routine, but I can only imagine what it consists of and the audience's reactions.

I guess days off send you reminiscing.  I don't think about individual characters from the past on normal days, but somehow Keith is responsible for my breakfast this morning.  There will probably never be a time or place in my career again that was so full to the brim with strange personalities as my early days in that kitchen were... or even in New Orleans in general.  Anthony Bourdain could write 3 more versions of "Kitchen Confidential" with some of the things we did and got away with back then.  It is ironic now... that there would be hell to pay if we caught any of our cooks today doing the same stuff.

fish market

Although we couldn't find a substantial fresh fish market around Miami (the kind that you walk through with many tables of fishermen with live fish and shellfish of all varieties), I did find a lone guy selling nice stuff on the roadside around Key Biscayne.  We watched him slice up fish and fight off the encroaching pelicans.  Bringing home some incredibly fresh yellowtail made the trip and the traffic worth it, even if we didn't get our 'fish market.'  He also had some fresh amberjack roe in the ovary, and I'm still kicking myself for not bringing it home.  Ming and I had been thinking a lot about whole steamed fish and these yellowtails were perfect.  Just a snip off of the tail allowed us to squeeze one of them into the little Sunbeam steamer that I picked up at a thrift store recently for $5.  We also used one of them for soup... there's nothing like fresh fish broth.

one last swim...

covered in ginger and fresh bamboo shoots...

Watch yer toes, crouching pelican!!!

beach buns

We used David Chang's recipe for steamed buns, but rolled them as filled buns instead.  I made an Asian spice brine yesterday for a pork roast, and let the pork cook slowly overnight.  The dough was mixed over Sunday morning coffee.  This was the second time I have made this recipe, but I used my Kitchen-Aid instead of kneading by hand as suggested in the recipe.  The dough was much softer and palatable this time. 

We're not pro's at this, but I had the technique 'passable' by the end of the dough.  I even learned little tricks like rolling the dough out increasingly thinner towards the outer circle, so that it would retain a more even thickness around the filling once I crimped the thinner ends together.

Good times at Hollywood, Florida beach.  I'm squinting because of the sun, not because the bun sucked... cause it was pretty good... of course, the ambience helps.  Pork filled steam buns and some fresh fried shrimp chips and a dipping sauce of Chinese chile sauce (which tasted unquestionably like 'Manwich' sloppy joe sauce... wierd).

And this damn bird wouldn't eat a shrimp chip... that's weird too.

pho ga & miso crab

Not to bore everyone with some home cooking again, but that's all I've had to do the past few days. 

Vietnamese pho is one of my favorite dishes, but the beef version takes a lot of time to prepare at home.  After perusing a recently discovered blog (steamy kitchen), I was drawn to the recipe for pho ga (or the chicken version of Vietnamese pho which was adapted from an Andrea Nguyen recipe and the blog author's experiences).  Although I never order it at restaurants 'cause I love pho bo with tripe and gan, I realized that it is a quicker, but still satisfying, type of pho that is more adapted to home cooking.

I used all dark meat (again leg/thigh quarters), making the broth as instructed in the recipe.  The interesting point made in the procedure was the roasting of the ginger and onion in the skins.  This added so much to my normal formula for pho.  There was the usual nuoc mam, star anise, sugar (using Chinese rock candy sugar), and cilantro... but the roasting of the ginger and onion set it off like nothing else.  The texture of the ginger was so impressive that I see it being utilized in other techniques very soon.  The soup was poured over bahn pho (rice noodles), cilantro tops, basil, and mung bean sprouts.  I added some chicken mushroom meatballs from the Asian market which led me to think in a new direction... what about adding chicken offal components as in the beef (pho bo) versions?  There could be grilled chicken livers, cocks combs, sliced chicken sausage Chinese style, hell even throw some pidan in it (it comes from a chicken), and what about that cool black chicken from Taiwan?  That totally sounds like comfort food to me.

And while I was at the market, I had to peek under the wooden crate with the wet sack draped over it that usually holds live blue crabs.  They are usually all female and for some reason seem to be packed full of eggs no matter what time of year it is... don't know how, but that's the truth I swear it.  I bought four of them to use in another dish... and also to get my quota of crab fat that every coonass needs.  It's even listed out on my RDA's.

These crabs met their fate after being blanched in boiling water for a few seconds.  Blue crabs may hold grudges against Chinese and Vietnamese, but dammit they really hate coonasses.  These girls were fighting.  I cleaned them and split them.  They were stir fried in sesame oil with ginger, shiitake, fresh bamboo shoots, some green vegetable that Ming told me there is no translation for (the leaves are spinachy, but with thick stalks and a nice bitterness to the whole plant), some white miso and mirin.  Of course, I reserved all eggs and fat from within the crabs when I cleaned them and added that as well.  Add a little water, cover, and steam for up to 10 minutes.

Yeah, crappy presentation but this is home!  The flavors were rich.  I like that bitterness of the greens with the fattiness of the crab.  Bamboo shoots and ginger were the overtones to that foundation.  We ate this over rice.  What else could have added anything... maybe chopped peanuts or peanut powder.  Wish I had thought of that earlier.  There's always left-overs.

Sorry if anyone's bored with this stuff, but I'm loving having the time to cook this stuff at home... and I'm sure the smells wafting out through the sun room windows are making the neighbors jealous.  All that and South Florida weather as well.  Nice.

the past week

This is a quick photo recap of the past week.  We hosted KU for Orange Bowl, and those boys ate.  The rest of the hotel was filled with KU fans and transient guests taken advantage of the great weather.  We've all came to accept that our new lot in life was to get our asses kicked for a living.  We stepped into the octagon, and came out without tapping out.  It wasn't all pretty, but it happened.  I believe there was blood on the ground.

soon to be weeded out

An 8 course meal for New Year's Eve...  not the best expediting situation... especially with the Miami crowd.

the Geno show

burnt pink peppercorns smell like sawdust... useless information from an accident.

banana run break

goat butter... white as lard.  I used to eat my raisin bran with goat milk.

Fabian, me, and Chef K.  It's good to be in 2008.  There's a lot of stuff to get done.

Now to get ready for the year of the Rat.