Recipes
In central Minnesota it finally got warm enough to grill out, so I decided to make a cedar-plank grilled salmon. It was nothing too adventurous, so I wanted to find a recipe with a twist to it.
Eventually I found this recipe for a pinot noir infused cedar-plank salmon with some fresh herbs on top. The recipe calls for soaking the plank and wood chips in a pinot noir and water mixture before grilling. That sounded pretty good, and it is always a nice idea to start the grilling season with a lot of smoke to let the neighborhood know that winter is over.
I used a baking sheet to soak the plank in the wine-water mixture, and a measuring cup filled with the wine mixture and wood chips to weigh it down. I soaked everything for about 2-3 hours. The wood chips I used were organic golden alder chips that I bought from Maine Grilling Woods. They have a nice selection of wood chips for smoking and were featured in Food & Wine in June of last year. The Food & Wine article also gives 20 grilling tips, which are handy to review before grilling season really starts.
I pretty much followed the recipe to the letter, but I did marinate the salmon longer in the wine-water mixture and sprinkled some kosher salt and freshly ground pepper on the fish before putting it on the grill. Also, because I bought a rather large center-cut piece of salmon, it took around 20-25 minutes to cook instead of 15 minutes as the recipe calls for. The marjoram, thyme and rosemary were also a nice touch on top.
The end result was really amazing. I had never cooked with wood chips before, and I can’t say exactly how much the pinot noir influenced the taste, but it was so good that I don’t think I would change anything the next time. In the end the hardest part of the meal was sacrificing a bottle of red wine to season the wood, but the result was definitely worth it.
After browsing the eGullet forums, I found a post entitled “Cooking with Dog” and that simply demanded checking into. Of course, it doesn’t involve cooking dog meat, but instead features a Japanese woman cooking next to a grey poodle named Francis. The cooking instruction videos are for traditional Japanese dishes and there is narration in English along with subtitles.
The dishes are rather simple and inspiring, especially if you haven’t cooked Japanese food before. The videos can also be pretty funny at points. There is just something about a dog dutifully sitting next to a cook and staring into the camera that builds an expectation of humor. You kind of wait for the dog to be a dog, and every now and then the poodle host will get distracted when a fish or something else that smells good comes along.
Anyhow, it is definitely worth checking out the videos, and with all the celebrity chefs these days, it is a nice change of pace to have a dog ‘cook’ — even if only as a mascot.
You can find these videos on YouTube at the Cooking With Dog channel.
I am finally working on another one of my cooking goals for 2010. I have already made cheese and butter which were on my to-do list, and now I am making the pickled Korean cabbage called kimchi.
So far I have tried a recipe for quick kimchi that was in the late-great Gourmet magazine and featured in March of 2009. I am not trying to take the easy way out with something quick; it just worked out better with my schedule to start off with this recipe.
The kimchi I made was relatively quick at 3.5 hours preparation time, while other recipes call for days of pickling. With that said, I still don’t consider that I have made kimchi until I have tried at least one more recipe to compare it to, but it was a good start and I was very satisfied with the result.
Now for full disclosure: I really love kimchi but I absolutely hate the smell of Asian fish sauce, and I had my concerns about this dish from the second I opened that bottle. The result, however, was extremely good. Once mixed, the aroma of fish sauce blended, faded, and infused the Napa cabbage in a wonderful way — kind of like using anchovies.
After that, I also made kimchi quesadillas which was also a recipe featured in Gourmet last year, and now I am thinking of using it in some fish tacos. It is really amazing how useful it is to have kimchi around to add crunch and spice to dishes.
Anyhow, next week I intend to make my second round of kimchi, and it will be interesting to see how it compares. Regardless, I expect that I will be making more more of this spicy dish in the future. It takes a little bit of time to let the flavors come together, but it is still a really easy dish to make.
I found this recipe for roasted pears on the popular blog La Tartine Gourmande. I fell in love with roasted pears while living in France, but it took this French blogger to give the dessert some flair and really make it amazing. Just look at those pears. The photo is great, and the pears taste even better.
I especially like how the lemon grass, ginger, and vanilla bean seeds give the dish an exotic touch. Then the ground pistachios add a delicate crunchy texture. It was tart, yet smooth, and was almost like a tropical custard.
If I ever wanted to impress anyone with a dessert — and I mean anyone — I would probably make this dish. It is really tasty and I recommend it highly.
Via Lifehacker comes this post about Microsoft’s advanced recipe search on Bing. I’ve never used Bing before and only tried it out yesterday to see how the recipe search function worked, but here are my initial impressions of the recipe feature.
First of all, I must say that it is pretty impressive at first glance with all the features to refine your search. There are categories to sort by ratings (stars), convenience (time), cuisine (French, Italian etc.), main ingredient, course, cooking method, and occasion (season and holidays). They even include health facts for each recipe. The best part, however, is its ease of use. There is no going to a separate advanced search page; instead you just filter the recipes using the sidebar tools. It is very intuitive and easy to use.
With that said, it appears that most of the recipes come from delish.com and myrecipes.com. Delish is associated with Microsoft, so there is no surprise there, but at least myrecipes.com pulls their content from cooking magazines — albeit not from most of the big guns like Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, and Fine Cooking. Ultimately, I think the success of this recipe search engine will depend upon how they populate it with content. At this point, other recipe sites such as cooks.com, allrecipes, and Epicurious are still better and Epicurious even has a good advanced search function already — though not as slick as the one on Bing.
The Bing recipe search is still a long way from becoming the go-to site for recipes, but the easy-to-use advanced sorting features give it promise. I wish other sites would take a queue from Bing and improve their search functions, and it would also be great if these sites started tapping the world of food blogs.
It has been a holiday tradition in my family for years to serve the Norwegian rice porridge called risengrynsgrøt during the holidays. It is a simple rice dinner pudding that my grandmother made using a double boiler and some long-grain white rice, water, milk, and salt. It is normally served during the winter months and for holidays.
It is one of those dishes that as a kid (and surprisingly long into young adulthood) I thought was something everyone ate during the holidays. Later in life I learned that it was a Norwegian tradition along with lefse, krumkake, rosettes, berlinerkranzer, and julekake.
Because I live in Minnesota, I can still get many of these items in grocery stores and bakeries, but of course they aren’t as good as my Grandmother’s. The rice porridge, however, was my favorite and I have started to make my own version.
I must admit that I do not prepare it exactly as my Grandmother did. The dinner porridge is not served sweet. Usually cinnamon, sugar, and an eye of butter are added by the person eating it after the rice is on the plate, so sweetness varies depending upon the person.
Several years back I was in Istanbul and had some Turkish rice pudding in a restaurant that tasted very close to the Norwegian rice pudding I was used to, and then a couple of years after that I ran into this recipe for Moroccan rice pudding in Food & Wine. I decided it had promise, so I tried it out.
Compared to the Norsk risengrynsgrøt, this one is sweeter. Norwegians also make a sweet rice porridge call riskrem, but I decided that this Moroccan recipe would be my take on rice pudding. The hot version my family prepared was fine, but I wanted a more versatile dessert instead.
Many countries and cultures have a tradition of rice pudding, and the Moroccan recipe with slight changes tasted very similar to the rice pudding of my childhood. I simply cut back the sugar to 1/2 cup or even 3/8 cup. I also liked the use of arborio rice instead of long-grain rice. It made it creamier and the rice grains held together better during the second boiling, so it was less mushy.
I don’t add the almonds or orange-flower water called for in the Food & Wine recipe, but I do sprinkle the dish with cinnamon or some fresh ground nutmeg. During the summer months, I will also add blackberries or raspberries instead of cinnamon.
Regardless, of your holiday traditions, this rice pudding is a great recipe to try out, but I do recommend reducing the sugar and trying it with cinnamon. And now this has become my holiday rice pudding; the same tradition but just a little bit different.
For a traditional risengrynsgrøt, here is a recipe you can try.
The USDA has longadvocated cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, which cooks the meat to medium doneness, but now many chefs are cooking it only to 140-145 degrees, which is medium-rare. The concern for a long time has come from a parasitic disease called trichinosis that is caused when trichinae (a type of roundworm) infect the intestines.
Technically, this parasite is killed off at 137 degrees, so the lower temperature of 140 isn’t going to make you sick, but food safety concerns continue to linger.
Trichinosis, however, is not the problem it once was in the US. There are less than 50 cases per year nowadays, and many of those don’t come from pigs but other forms of game meat. Essentially, modern pork is a lot safer and less contaminated than it once was.
But you can even cook pork at lower temperature and still kill the parasite if you can ensure an even distribution of heat throughout the meat and maintain it for a longer period of time, but I wouldn’t recommend this for most home cooks. For instance, if you cook meat to 132 degrees and maintain it for 15 minutes, the trichinae worms will also be killed. Sous-vide cooking in a water bath achieves this type of heat distribution and control, but that cooking technique is not often in the repertoire of the the average home cook.
The reason for the higher recommended temperatures by the USDA and CDC (which recommends an even higher 170 degrees) is because most cooks can’t ensure an even distribution of heat and maintain it for a long enough period of time when cooking meat. Depending upon the cut of meat and cooking method, internal temps will vary, so a safer higher temp is recommended to ensure all parasites are killed. So in other words, the recommended cooking temperatures reflect our inability to cook and compensate for our ‘errors’. It is not, however, what is best for the taste of your food. At 170 degrees, you can kill everything off in a very short period of time, but there is also very little moisture left in the meat.
The main issue with foodies when cooking pork medium-rare versus medium, is about texture and moisture. Some cooks find medium-rare meat too chewy, but others find it juicer and more flavorful. The higher the temperature, the more the meat proteins shrink and expel moisture, so at lower temps moisture is preserved better.
But then again, not all cuts of meat are equal. Fattier cuts also preserve moisture and are more forgiving than lean cuts of meat when cooking. Heritage pork meat, for instance, is darker and fattier, so it is harder to overcook than exceptionally lean supermarket pork.
And then you can always artificially enhance moistness by brining your pork. Essentially you marinate the meat in a water, salt and sugar mixture to enhance both tenderness and moisture content. Cook’s Illustrated gives a couple recommendations for brining pork.
- For 4 bone-in chops (1 1/2 inches thick), combine 1 1/2 quart water, 3 tbs salt, 3 tbs sugar and let the chops soak for 1 hour.
- For a pork roast (3-6 pounds), use 2 quarts water, 1/4 cup salt, 1/4 cup sugar, and let the meat soak for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
What brining meat does is change the structure of the proteins. The ions from the salt force the meat proteins to adjust and they become more tender in the process, and the salty water is also absorbed into the meat through osmosis. Salty water evaporates less than regular water so the meat retains more moisture during the cooking process, and the end result is added moisture and more tender meat.
Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that the internal temperature of meat will rise as you let it rest after cooking. This happens because the exterior of the meat is hotter than the center, and that residual heat will have a ‘carry-over’ cooking effect even though it isn’t directly being cooked.
For instance, pork tenderloin recipes usually suggest letting the meat rest for 10 minutes after cooking, so you should actually take the meat off the heat before the internal temperature reaches your desired doneness. This allows some room for the carry-over cooking effect to finish your meat without over cooking it.
I personally take my pork tenderloin off at 135-140 degrees, which allows a rise of 5 degrees to 145. I like mine more medium rare as the tenderloin is very lean and will quickly dry out if cooked too much. At that temp, the loin ends are more towards medium and the center more medium rare.
I tried a couple of different dishes this week. The first was from Fine Cooking and it was an orecchiette pasta with Brussels sprouts, Gorgonzola, and brown-butter pecans. It was very good, and a nice hearty, rich pasta for a cold evening. Here is the recipe.
In the future, though, I might make some adjustments to the recipe. First, before roasting the Brussels sprouts I think I would add a bit of sugar along with the oil when coating them to enhance the browning and give it a slight sweetness.
Also, I wouldn’t add the pasta back into the same pot that it cooked in as the heat dried it out somewhat, and with all the Gorgonzola it became a bit ‘gummy’. There was no real need for a hot pot, and mixing it in a serving bowl would have been just fine.
I also forgot to reserve some pasta water, which I would make sure to do in the future. Instead I added some water to the cheese mixture pan, heated it, and used that for extra moisture. For the leftovers, I also added about a half cup of this water.
And though I liked the pecans in the dish, the next time I might try rendering the fat from a few slices of bacon and make some crispy bacon instead. Then I would use the bacon fat to saute the onions and the crumbled crispy bacon for a garnish instead of the pecans. If I did this, I would also probably reduce the Gorgonzola a bit. Bacon makes so many things better, but this dish is already rich with the cheese and cream.
The other dish I cooked was a beer-braised roast with onions that was featured in Gourmet magazine. Here is the recipe from epicurious.com.
I followed the suggestions from the website comments and added some carrots, smashed garlic, and then I also put in some leaks instead of a third onion.
The meat turned out a bit dry in my opinion, but that was my fault and I used the wrong type of roast and pan. The sauce, though, was absolutely wonderful. I wish I would have had a 5-1/2 quart Le Creuset dutch over for this dish.
Anyhow, it was a fun cooking week with some good results.
The other day I was at the grocery store and avocados were on sale. After picking out five for $5, a lady asked me how to tell if they are good or not. I told her that unfortunately most of them were too ripe. They were squishy to the touch, and not worth buying.
So how does one pick out avocados at the grocery store?
I eat an amazing amount of avocados, and now I can just touch them and tell if they are perfectly ripe or will be ripe in a day, two days or longer, so I usually just choose the ripeness according to when I think I will use them. If you want one that is ready to eat or close to it, you should try to buy an avocado that gives slightly when lightly squeezed. You want a firm tenderness; not rock hard or too squishy. But don’t squeeze them too hard or else they might bruise.
An avocado that is rock hard will probably take more than three days to ripen, but you can speed up the ripening process by sealing the avocado in a paper bag with a banana or apple. These fruits release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. If an avocado is already ripe and you are not ready to eat it, you can store it in the fridge for up to a week.
For instruction on how to cut avocados, I found three internet videos useful. All three are good, but I have only embedded the Epicurious.com one in this post. You can also check out Chowhound and Rouxbe for their videos on how to pit and cut an avocado.
Since avocados can be rather expensive, especially when not in season, preservation is also a key. Avocados, once cut, will quickly start to brown, so when I make guacamole, I squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the top so the leftover guacamole doesn’t brown.
If you are only going to eat half an avocado, you can also store the side with the pit in it in the fridge. A lot of people first squeeze lemon juice on it to prevent browning, but the Chowhound video below uses onions in a plastic container. It’s a good tip, and one which I will try the next time.
Avocados are often used to make guacamole, which is very easy to make in its most basic form. It is simply ripe avocados, salt and garlic, but a lot of recipes add other ingredients. Rick Bayless, the acclaimed chef and restaurateur, gives his recipe in stages so you can add different flavors as you see fit. Bayless also has his signature chunky guacamole that he serves at his restaurant, and you can find that version at The Recipe Link. If you search the web, you will no doubt find dozens of other guacamole recipes to suit your taste.
As for me, I often take the easy way out. I use Rick Baylsess’ Frontera Guacamole Mix
If you want to know more about Rick Bayless and how he came to be one the premier chefs for Latin cuisine in the US, you can listen to this story on NPR. The NPR website also gives his recipe for roasted tomatillo guacamole.
Fine Cooking featured the cookbook How to Roast a Lamb by Michael Psilakis in the Dec/Jan issue. Psilakis is an American chef of Greek heritage out of New York City, and his contemporary takes on Greek food have made him a rising star in New American cuisine. He has operated several restaurants in New York City, but his restaurant Anthos is one of only two Greek restaurants with a Michelin star, and in 2008 Psilakis was named Best New Chef by Food & Wine and Chef of the Year by Bon Appetit.
Psilakis is a self-taught cook, and this cookbook is his first. In it he blends personal essays with beautiful photographs along with contemporary takes on Greek food. Many of the recipes are rather complex and call for a lot of ingredients, but at 304 pages thick there are still a lot of dishes that are accessible to the average cook. If anything, it will inspire people to cook more Greek food.
The cookbook, despite its title, is not just about lamb, but I was initially attracted to it because of the lamb dishes. My local CSA is now offering lamb to its members, so I will be stocking up on my lamb cuts of meat this week and want some guidance for a great holiday lamb dish. I can’t wait.
You can purchase How to Roast a Lamb
