cookrookery

Dedicated fans may recall in October last year I attempted to start a batch of pork confit a la Paula Wolfert in my tiny studio kitchenette. For those too busy to click on the above link, I will re-quote Paula’s feelings on confit:

“Confit is one of those unique ingredients that permanently enlarge your awareness of flavor, and is one of the few things that can accurately be said to add another dimension to any dish in which it is used.”

Intriguing. So, I went through the long and uneventful process of rendering lard and simmering pork in it, and then the longer and even more uneventful process of letting it sit in my refrigerator for four months. Four months! Two pork chops in my refrigerator for four months! Terrifying, isn’t it?

Anyway, I figured if I waited any longer bad things might happen, so last night I put the pork confit to use, in a recipe invented by my wife. Was it good? It was spectacular.

Pork Confit Risotto

This is not the first risotto recipe I’ve published, so I won’t go into great detail here.

This was just meant to be a small dish, and I didn’t take accurate measurements. I suppose I used about half a cup to a cup of my confit pork, shredded. Last time we saw it, it was encased in lard, so I had to dig it out with a fork and separate the lard from the pork. It tasted delicious just by itself.

First, I fried a chopped up onion in olive oil and butter and a little of the lard. When it was good and browned I added some chopped garlic, and perhaps half a cup of Arborio rice. Damn, Arborio rice is expensive, isn’t it? When the rice was nice and slick with butter I deglazed the pan with white wine and then added dribbles of beef stock, stirring on and off, until the rice was done, about half an hour. Just before serving I stirred in the pork and let it heat through.

I  served this with some watercress, wilted briefly and then dashed with apple cider vinegar. This was an inspired guess. I like watercress, and I wish I lived near a stream where it grows naturally, because it’s bloody expensive, like Arborio rice. I thought: spinach with balsamic vinegar is good, and pork with apples is good, so watercress with apple cider vinegar with pork confit must be good. And guess what? I was right.

I made a kind of sauce by blending up some kalamata olives with unfiltered olive oil. I admit the end result won’t win any prizes for aesthetics, but it was great. Uncooked unfiltered olive oil is just nice. Topped the risotto with slivered parmesan, and there it was. Plates were cleared in under 10 minutes.

To continue with my love of all pork products, I give you the barbecue pork bun, hum bao in Vietnamese or char siu baau in Cantonese, which literally translates as “fork burn.” Barbecue pork buns are so damn good, and so damn ubiquitous, that I reckoned there had to be some kind of Chinese creation myth accounting for their existence, a kind of pork-centered Prometheus story, if you will. However, five minutes dedicated searching on the internet proved conclusively there was no such thing. Disappointed, I resorted to writing one myself.

Long, long ago, before the invention of chopsticks, a woodcutter was dozing by his forge when a wild boar wandered into his house, looking to eat up his children. Yes, woodcutters have forges. And wild boar normally live off acorns, of course, but they leap at a meal of human child any chance they get. Fortunately the woodcutter woke just in time and drove off the ravenous wild boar with his woodcutting fork. The boar stumbled into the forge, caught fire, and ran into the baker’s house, which was right next door, and rolled around in a pile of pastry dough to put out the flames. The candlestick maker immediately diced the boar into bite-sized pieces with his candle-trimming knife and tossed the bits into the baker’s large steamer. The woodcutter picked out one of the resulting white blobs and popped it into his mouth. “Mmm, good,” he said. “What shall we call this invention?” asked the tailor. But at that moment the woodcutter’s red-hot fork fell on the baker’s arm and he screamed “FORK BURN!”

Don’t be too chicken to try this recipe. It’s actually really simple. It requires a little planning, since the buns have to rise for 4 hours in total, but the actual work is only a few minutes. You can also double this recipe, or quadruple it, I suppose, if you have a big enough bowl. I don’t. Any leftover buns can be stored in the fridge after steaming and reanimated by steaming again for a few minutes. Or you can just eat them cold. Mmm. Pork.

PORK BUNS

Makes 12.

Dough ingredients:

One big teaspoon of dried yeast

½ cup lukewarm water

3 cups flour

1/8 cup sugar

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1/4 cup boiling water

1 tablespoon sesame seed oil

Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water in a big bowl. Mix in 1 cup of flour. Cover with a cloth and let rise 1 hour, until bubbles appear.

Dissolve the sugar and vegetable oil in 1/4 cup boiling water. Cool until lukewarm. Add to the yeast mixture, and stir in the other two cups of flour.

Knead the dough until smooth, adding more flour as needed so it is just on the edge of not-sticky. Clean and oil the mixing bowl, return the dough to it, cover with a damp cloth and let rise until double in bulk, about 2 hours.

Divide the dough in half. Roll each half into a long sausage and slice it into 6 rounds. These will then be flattened out and filled with the pork mixture.

Filling ingredients:

1 tablespoon oil

1 scallion, chopped fine

1 clove garlic, chopped fine

1/4 pound barbecued pork cut into small cubes

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

½  tablespoon sugar

½  tablespoon cornstarch, dissolved in 1 tablespoons water

Heat 1 tablespoons oil in a small frypan. Stir fry the scallion and garlic for 30 seconds.

Add the pork. Stir fry 1 minute. Add the soy sauce, oyster sauce, and sugar. Add the dissolved cornstarch, and fry quickly until the pork is glazed. Let it cool until you need it. I like to make the filling while the final rising is underway.

Grab a piece of dough. Flattened it in the palm of your hand, and put about two tablespoons filling in the center. Gather the dough up around the filling and squish the edges together. Repeat, eleven times.

Place each bun on a small square of aluminum foil on a steamer tray. Cover with the lid, and let rise 1 hour, until dough springs back when touched with finger. If you don’t have enough room in your steamer, you can cover the remaining buns with a towel.

Steam them over briskly boiling water 10 minutes.

It’s Chinese new year coming up on February 14^th, and it’s a particularly significant date for yours truly because it ushers in the Year of the Ultimate Badass Tiger, which is my Chinese zodiac animal. It’s also my brother’s birthday. Happy birthday, Patrick!

I can’t believe I hadn’t realised this was my year until the other day. I was always so proud of being a tiger when I was a kid, when all my friends were stupid oxen and rabbits and sheep and stuff. In case you don’t know, the Chinese Zodiac moves on a twelve year cycle, making your personal years few and far between. When I saw a calendar at Uwajimaya illustrated with a tiger I was completely thrilled. (And then my second thought was, ‘oh hell, that must mean I’m thirty-six.’) Checking the first random website I came across, I learned that tigers are “short-tempered, suspicious, adventurous, sensitive, emotional, and risk-taking.” What the hell? What is this crap? Who are you calling short tempered and suspicious??… Oh, wait. Yeah, that’s pretty much me in a nutshell. So break out the lion costume and start tossing small explosives about haphazardly, it’s a new year!

For Chinese new year, you need to eat tea eggs. I can’t remember where I first found the recipe for these, but I was pretty young. They’re an amazingly appealing dish and fun to make – perfect for kids. Here’s what you do.

Place four eggs in a saucepan and cover with about an inch of cold water. Bring the pot to a boil and let simmer gently for three minutes. Take out the eggs and cool them under running water, but don’t throw away the water in the pot.

Now take a teaspoon and crack the shell of the eggs all over. You can experiment with the force required to do this, but in general deeper and more plentiful cracks make prettier eggs. You don’t want to crack so hard, though, that the shell busts completely open. That would ruin everything.

Now put the eggs back in the saucepan, and add some or all of the following ingredients:

½ cup dark soy sauce

2 teabags of black tea (I used Russian caravan)

1 cinnamon stick

1 tbs Sichuan peppercorns (can be hard to find… they are very hot)

1 tsp sugar

2 star anise

½ tsp Chinese five spice

Bring the liquid back to a simmer for about 45 minutes. Take the pan off the heat, cover it, and let steep for a good long time, at least five hours. I left mine overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, or a few hours later if you’re from one of the impatient zodiac signs, carefully peel away the shell. The results can be quite striking.

Here’s a fun fact: in Taiwan, an average of 40 million tea eggs are sold each year through 7-Eleven stores alone. Happy new year!

Having a surplus of apples in my kitchen, I decided the first recipe out of my new Maida Heatter cookbook would figure them in as a primary ingredient, so the Apple Kuchen was a natural choice. Kuchen (pronounced koo-kən; think “kooky”) is the German word for “cake,” and there are many variations on it, even some with more pie-like properties. I’m a firm believer in coffee cake, and this is a delectable dessert or breakfast that’s made for coffee or tea, an old world comfort food that’s best eaten the day it’s made. And don’t be swayed by the number of ingredients and steps…it’s really quite simple to make.

Maida Heatter’s Apple Kuchen (8-10 portions)

Cake

1/3 c. currants (or raisins)

1 1/4 c. sifted flour

1 1/2 t. baking powder

1/2 t. salt

1/4 c. sugar

1/4 c. butter

1 egg

1/4 c. milk

1 t. vanilla

3/4 c. chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 400 and butter and 9 x 13 pan.

Place the currants or raisins in a small strainer over a saucepan of shallow boiling water. Cover and let steam for 3-5 min. Remove from heat and set aside.

Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Cut in butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

In a small bowl, stir the egg just to mix and stir in the milk. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla to the flour mixture, stirring with a fork just until the dry ingredients are thoroughly moistened.

Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan–it will be a thin layer. Sprinkle with the currants and nuts and set aside.

Filling

4 medium-large apples (MH suggests Rome Beauties or Delicious. I used Granny Smith.)

1/4 c. butter

1/4 c. sugar

1 1/2 t. cinnamon

Peel, quarter, and core apples. Cut each quarter into about 6 very thin wedges. Place them, overlapping, in three rows down the length of the cake. If there is space in-between rows, fill with additional apples.

Melt the butter and brush over the apples. Mix sugar and cinnamon, and sprinkle over the butter. Cover loosely with a cookie sheet or aluminum foil.

Bake for 35 minutes, removing cookie sheet or foil for the last 5 minutes. Prepare glaze.

Glaze

1/2 c. apricot preserves

2 T. sugar

In a small saucepan over moderate heat, stir together preserves and sugar and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil, stirring, for 3 minutes. Immediately brush over apples. Serve while warm or room temp.

From Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, published 1965.

————————————————————————————————————

I made this kuchen for a road trip to Conway, a little town just south of Mt. Vernon, about an hour north of Seattle. I rode up with Liv, Kim, and Mary, and we stopped at Pam’s place before heading up to Bellingham’s Whatcom Art Museum, which was showcasing a favorite artist of ours, John Grade. Click on the first link to read about his lastest installation work, The Elephant Bed. Even if you can’t go see it, the concept is quite mind-bending. If you can go see it, do.

After viewing the excellent exhibits, we headed back to Conway. All of us met a couple years ago in an art class, and we’ve been friends and mentors for each other ever since. Pam made Jasmine tea and we cut into the kuchen, and for a moment time was still within a moment shared, telling stories, giving advice, smacking our lips on the cake*…great friends and artists looking ahead to a new decade, and I, pleased that my first excursion with the great Maida Heatter, was a delicious success.

*with apologies to Kim, for having to abstain from the kuchen, because of my forgetting that ol’ nut allergy. I’m always embarrassed when I forget such things, so in the interest of resolutions for a new decade, I aspire to be a more conscious preparer.

Let me lay it on the line: I hate breakfast. Not the idea of it, I love the idea of breakfast: thick slabs of sizzling bacon, poached eggs with hollandaise sauce, toasted crumpets running with butter and honey, freshly blended smoothies… it’s just that by some quirk of metabolism I am unable to approach food early in the day with anything other than nausea. I suppose, given the high-stress go-getter lifestyle now fashionable, this is a perk of a kind, but it leaves me miserable. This isn’t to say I haven’t cooked some pretty amazing breakfasts – my poached eggs with blackened butter and wasabi caviar comes to mind – just that I haven’t cooked any before about 11am.

It came to me a while ago that perhaps I was just eating the wrong kind of breakfast. Breakfast, like time and space, is relative. Breakfast in Nigeria is corn porridge and ground bean paste wrapped in leaves and steamed. In Kerala it might be puttu (steamed powdered rice) with kadala (black curry) and bananas. In Malaysia it’s nasi lemak, an elaborate combination of coconut rice, dried anchovies, cucumber, peanuts, egg, and spicy sauce. In Nicaragua we ate gallo pinto (beans and rice) with hard cheese, sour cream, and tortillas. All of the above sound more palate tempting than pancakes and links to me.

Perhaps it’s been the notion of specific breakfast foods that has been putting me off. Why do I have to eat certain items at certain times of day? I don’t understand why chocolate cake is inappropriate for breakfast but fine after dinner, which is one of the few times I ever desire cornflakes. And so on.

And then I had it. I asked a Japanese friend of mine what a normal breakfast was at home. “Rice, miso, fish, pickles… pretty much the same thing as every other meal,” she replied. That sounded perfect to me, in particular the miso. Sweet, salty, spiky miso soup, easy to down and digest, the perfect appetite stimulant.

Day 1

Refrigerator Miso

Excited by my idea, which I had late at night, I prepared my first bowl of breakfast miso without having had time to shop for any ingredients. The only things I had in my refrigerator which were at all appropriate were:

“Marukome Boy” brand miso paste, “Koji” style. Koji is a yeast mold which is added to ground soy beans to ferment them into miso.

Instant dashi. Dashi is the fundamental stock of Japan and the beginning for pretty much all meals. It is traditionally made by simmering kombu kelp and fresh shavings of dried skipjack tuna together. Interestingly, both kelp and tuna have very high levels of glutamic acid, of which msg is the salt, which provides the taste sensation of umami. And if you’re interested, “umami” was named by Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo University, who isolated glutamic acid from kelp. I don’t have a block of dried bonito, nor the expertise to use it, so I do what nearly all Japanese do and make my dashi with instant granules.

Some dried shiitake mushrooms

Some baby cut carrots

Togarashi pepper blend

I made the stock by adding half a teaspoon of instant dashi to 1 ½ cups water, about double the traditional serving (I am, after all, a big Westerner, and not accompanying this meal with rice). I tossed in the shiitake mushrooms and sliced carrots.

While the stock was heating, I put two tablespoons of miso paste in a bowl and added a few spoons of warm stock. I then whisked this with a fork until it was smooth, and ladled it back into the stock. This step is necessary or the miso will not hang properly in suspension in the soup (or so Shizuo Tsuji, author of Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, informs me).

Just before the boil, I poured the soup into a bowl and garnished it with a few shakes of togarashi. Miso is never brought to the boil, though interestingly the reasons for this differ. In Japan it is believed boiling changes the flavour of the miso, whereas in the
West we believe boiling destroys the biological activity of the yeasts.

I learned a few things immediately. Soaking for a few minutes in warming stock is not a long enough time to fully rehydrate a shiitake mushroom, nor fully cook a carrot. I had used perhaps a touch too much dashi, which is potent stuff, and perhaps even a touch too much miso. In other words, it was too salty. And I won’t say it was the most aesthetically pleasing soup to look at. But I did drink it down to the last drop, so I’m counting that as a pyrrhic victory.

Day 2

Winter Miso

With a little more time to prepare, this time I laid in a stock of tofu, green onions, wakame seaweed, and a different miso from my local co-op. This time I used red miso, akamiso, which someone once told me is eaten in winter. I had high hopes for this batch.

I followed the same procedure, though with less dashi: 1 ½ cups of water with ¼ tsp of instant dashi. I also used two slightly smaller tablespoons of miso. The red miso was thicker and chunkier and harder to whisk smooth. While I was doing that, I broke up a little seaweed and cut up some tofu and put it in the stock. Added the smooth miso and reheated, not quite to the boil. I garnished with a sliced green onion.

It did not quite resemble the beautiful little bowls of restaurant miso I had drunk, with their cubes of tofu clustered at the bottom like tiny jewels, and green threads of seaweed winding around, but it was closer (once the tofu had become waterlogged). There was also a faint tang of bitterness, which I think might have come from the tofu. Try as I might, I find it hard to like tofu. And I might have overdone it with the green onion, first thing in the morning. But I was getting closer. And I had eaten breakfast two days running, which is probably a record.

Day 3

Restaurant Miso

Success! Using white miso (shiromiso), wakame seaweed, the green part of a green onion, and a little dashi, I created a bowl of miso soup worthy of Koibito, the second-best sushi restaurant in Olympia. I didn’t take a picture of it, but it was light, tasty, free of bitterness and uncooked lumps, and just downright satisfying.

The secret was a long slow simmering of the stock with the seaweed in it. Unfortunately, long slow simmering is not very practical for breakfast, especially if you work for a living. I think what I will do in future is rise, put on 1 ½ cups of water with a quarter teaspoon of dashi and some broken up wakame, and then go shower. Hopefully by the time I get back the seaweed will be softened and ready and I can go through the process of mixing up the miso paste.

Day 4

Redux

Since day 3’s miso was so good, I made it again, but this time I took a picture:

Day 5

Intermission

Having mastered the art of miso and successfully eaten breakfast four days running, I rewarded myself with a short break from my new routine and made udon noodles instead. I made a basic broth out of water, dashi, light soy sauce, mirin, and about half a teaspoon of sugar. I used packaged udon noodles from the supermarket, and garnished with a green onion. It was good, but would have made a better light lunch or snack. I miss my miso.

Day 6

Chinese cabbage

Called napa cabbage in the US and hakusai in Japan, Chinese cabbage is of a much more delicate flavor than a standard green cabbage. It is, in fact, creamy and sweet. This morning I sliced a few rounds off one and simmered it a long time in dashi, before adding the whisked up miso and a sprinkling of togarashi pepper mix. Very nice. Chinese cabbage is, incidentally, the basis for Korean kimchi.

Day 7

Repeat…

As I post it is actually still day 6, but I have decided to truncate this experiment because it is pretty clear to me that it is a success, and I already know what I am going to make for breakfast tomorrow (miso). I am very pleased with this discovery. I think eating breakfast has boosted my metabolism so that I am now more hungry in general, which is a good thing when you are a beanpole like me. I’ve been more alert through the mornings and feeling more energetic. All praise miso, the wonder food!