foodhackery

[foodhackery]

Southern Dinner Rolls

This recipe is loosely based on the Sally Lunn bread recipe in the Lee Brother's Southern Cookbook. Enriched, slightly sweet breads were a staple of my childhood, and dinner rolls with that flavor profile is what I yearn for in a good roll. As bread-making goes, this is a pretty easy recipe. Technique-wise, this will feel a bit like making brioche to those with baking experience. The rolls are yeasty, slightly sweet, buttery, and feather light when properly proved, and I gotta say are the perfect vehicle for gravy from a Sunday roast.

Ingredients

240g milk, preferably whole, but 2% is probably fine. Don't bother with skim. You can use water instead if that's all you've got.

115g of honey. Use good, organic stuff.

7g of active dry yeast. That's one package or 2-1/4 tsp.

3 large eggs at room temperature. You can put them in a bowl of hot tap water for 15-20 minutes if you're pulling them out of the fridge, or just leave them on the counter overnight with your butter.

625g of flour. This is more or less right. But I always fiddle around with it a bit. You'll be fine if you don't though.

10g salt.

120g of room temperature butter. Unsalted. I prefer Plugra, but any European style butter will do.

Combine milk and honey in a sauce pan and heat to 95-105 degrees Fahrenheit. Pour into a bowl and whisk in yeast until dissolved. Let stand for 10 minutes or so, at which point you should see signs of life from your yeast. Add 3 eggs and whisk to combine.

Combine flour and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix briefly with a dough hook to combine. Pour in wet ingredients and mix until combined. (This is the point where you can add more flour if you think the dough is too wet. It should be very wet and sticky though, and you don't want to add too much.). Add butter and mix until combined.

Mix the dough with the hook attachment on medium speed for 8 minutes. The dough will still be wet and sticky, but you should see "strings" or "sheets" of dough starting to stretch and pull away from the bowl. That's a sign that you're getting good gluten development which will be important for proving, and for the texture of the rolls after baking. If you don't mix long enough you won't get this gluten development, and your rolls will likely be dense.

Transfer to a lidded container (get yourself some Cambros) or a clean bowl covered with plastic wrap. Put in the fridge and allow to proof slowly for 4-6 hours until roughly doubled in size. If you are in a hurry, you can proof at room temperature, which will go pretty fast given the amount of yeast and honey in this dough. You'll miss a bit of the complex flavor that slower proofing yields, but, your rolls will still be good.

Punch your dough down and divide into 70g portions. (70g portions ought to yield 16 rolls. You can adjust the size of your rolls up or down as you see fit.). Now, this is the bit where you should just go watch a Youtube video. Josh Weissman does a nice job showing how to form rolls. Take each dough portion and shape into a ball by folding the edges up and pulling them to the center and pinching together the seam where they meet. This step gives you a smooth top surface for your rolls. Now, with the seam down on your cutting board or counter, cup your hand over the dough portion and roll the dough into a taut ball. Seriously, go watch a video. It's easier than it sounds.

In a greased, rectangular baking pan (or 2), place your dough balls in a grid with a bit of space between them. Your baking pan should have walls to help the rolls to rise. Set pans aside, covered with a damp towel, in a warm place to proof for 1-2 hours. When doubled in size again, brush the tops with a bit of melted butter (and sprinkle with a bit of salt if you like), and bake in a pre-heated oven at 375F until risen and golden brown. I never keep track of time. This maybe takes 20-30m in a home oven. The way to know for sure if they're done is to insert a hypodermic thermocouple probe into the middle of a roll to see if the internal temperature is >190F.

Remove from pan, and enjoy warm.

[foodhackery]

Orange Almond Cake

I love citrus flavors in almost everything, but especially in desserts. You'll see that theme even in the recipes that I've collected here. Lemon Basil Ice Cream. A very citrus-y Mrs. Walthall's Poundcake. Lemon Pie. And so on. Alas, one of the citrus desserts that I've tried to make a whole bunch of times--because it sounds so good on paper, but has been pretty disgusting-tasting in practice--is the orange almond cake.

The primary conceit of most orange almond cake recipes that I've seen is that they're simple. You have four ingredients: oranges, almond flour, sugar, and eggs. Maybe some baking powder for a bit of leavening. You boil the oranges whole until soft and theoretically less bitter, turn them to pulp in a food processor or mill, stir together with the remaining ingredients, and bake until set and golden brown. It sounds amazing given how well orange and almond pairs.

But. Every time I've tried to make one of these recipes, it turns out inedibly bitter to my taste. Now, to be fair, my bitter receptors seem to be more sensitive than other folks'. What to me yields a super intense bitter sensation on the back of my tongue that lingers for minutes, might only seem "a wee bit bitter" to my wife. So that's definitely part of the problem. But the other part, IMO, are inadequate techniques in most recipes for dealing with the bits of the orange that are bitter.

In theory, boiling the oranges helps to make them less bitter. But how bitter an orange is varies by a bunch of factors, from the variety of the orange, to where and how it was grown, to how ripe it is. In January in California where I live, I have lots of ripe-looking oranges on my trees. But they all have very thick layers of pith between the skin and the flesh of the orange. This pith is one of the bitter parts of the orange. And I can tell you from experience, you cannot boil the bitter out of the piths of these unripe Winter oranges.

I have however come up with a technique that gets rid of, not all, but much of the bitterness even in my Winter oranges. I use a vegetable peeler to remove the peels from the oranges, taking as little pith as possible. I boil the peels for 10 minutes, change the water, and repeat once more. I juice the oranges (to get rid of most of the pulp, seeds, and pith), add sugar and reduce the juice to half of its original volume. I then puree the boiled peels and the reduced orange syrup until completely smooth. I then add salt and any other flavorings I want to the orange puree. The salt is pretty important because it helps to additionally suppress bitterness. And then I use the puree to make the cake.

And damn what a delicious cake this is. There's still a hint of bitter to my overactive taste buds. But it's very nicely balanced which lets me revel in the citrus-y, almond-y goodness.

For the puree:

Peel and juice some oranges. You'll need 300g of puree for the cake, and 25g for the glaze which requires maybe 4-5 oranges. I usually make this in larger batches because I make more than one cake, and then use the puree to make ice cream.

Boil the orange peels in water for 10 minutes. Drain and replace the water and boil again for another 10 minutes. Remove from heat, drain, and put peels in the pitcher of your blender.

Add juice of oranges and 1C of sugar to a sauce pan. (Use more sugar to taste if you are making a bigger batch.) Reduce by half or until the liquid is syrupy in consistency. Don't go past syrupy. You're not making caramel or orange candy. Add orange syrup to the blender over the boiled peels and puree until smooth. Add 5g of salt. (More salt, obviously if making a bigger batch.)

Chill down completely before making the cake. The puree will keep for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator and can be frozen.

Ingredients

300g almond flour

50g almond paste

300g of orange puree + 25g for glazing after baking

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp of Grand Marnier

4 whole eggs

Combine all of the ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer with paddle attachment. Beat together until everything is incorporated, and you have a smooth batter. Things whose measurements I've indicated in volume, not weight, I eyeball so feel free to add as much or little as you like. Things whose measurements I indicate by weight, you should try to be exact or you risk getting a different texture, needing different timing, etc. than this recipe anticipates. It's fine, by all means, to change this recipe, but hard to judge what those changes might do until you've made the thing once to see what you like or don't like about it.

Place batter in a greased 9" ring form pan with parchment on the bottom. Cook for 30 minutes at 320F. I have a combi oven, so I steam my cake for 10 minutes and then cook for 20 minutes at 320F with 100% humidity. If you don't have a combi oven, 30 minutes at 320F in a normal oven ought to work. You'll want the cake to be set, approximately 190F internal temperature, and light golden brown on top. If you overcook the cake, it could dry out, and worse, be bitter where things have over-browned.

Remove from oven. Brush remaining 25g of puree on top of cake. Cool completely before serving.

I like to serve this with lightly sweetened whipped cream, with ice cream, and/or with candied orange peel.

[foodhackery]

Sub Rolls

Some people, like my wife, could be happy never eating another sandwich.  Me, I love sandwiches so much, that it’s hard to imagine what life would be without them.  I don’t crave 3-Michelin-star food.  I dream of what can be done with good fillings and condiments stuffed artfully within good bread.  I love breakfast sandwiches, from Hardees or Biscuitville biscuits to bodega-style egg and cheese on a roll.  I love the fare of my childhood, PB&J or bologna or sliced canned meat between two slices of white bread.  I of course love hamburgers, chuckwagons, patty melts, tuna melts, hot brown sandwiches, croque monsieurs, and oh-my-god the corned beef and pastrami with slaw and Russian dressing on rye from the now closed Artie’s Deli on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

But the sandwiches I love most are sub-style, those beautifully architected ensembles of meat, cheese, veggies, and sauce on a sandwich roll longer than it is wide.  Whether it’s a  Bánh mì, a Cubano, a Po Boy, a Philly Cheese Steak, a French Dip, a meatball sub, or a good old fashioned Italian hoagie, I love them all.  (My favorite sandwich of all time might very well be the Italian sub from La Villa Delicatessan in Willow Glen, California.)

The foundation of a good sub-style sandwich is the roll.  And unfortunately, appropriate rolls are hard to find.  Supermarkets these days tend to have very good artisanal bread.  These breads are delicious, but more often than not have crust and crumb that’s too chewy for a sandwich where you want a harmonious balance between all ingredients versus the bread dominating.  Needless to say, the stuff from the big commercial bakeries sold in plastic bags can’t hold a light to the bread used by great sandwich shops.

Which means that if you want really, really good sub rolls appropriate for your homemade Cubano or Po Boy, you’re probably going to have to make your own.  I’ve been experimenting with recipes to try to find something that’s close to the sub roll of my dreams, one with a golden brown crust, deep yeasty flavor, and an elastic but soft crumb that has enough structure to hold up under heavy ingredient load, but that doesn’t require so much force to take a bite of that you have the sandwich payload squeezing out of the back.  After lots of experimentation, I think that I’ve found it.

As with any recipe, this one has some essential elements:

It is 65% hydration.  In other words, the water added is 65% the weight of the flour.  This seems to give me the right balance between tenderness and structure.  With sufficient kneading, this dough is also very easy to handle.

It uses an 18-24 hour poolish for flavor.

It uses both amylase and diastatic malt powder to help with rise, flavor, softness, and staling.

It uses a bit of vegetable shortening to enrich the bread.

It is kneaded for what most home bakers would consider a long time (15 minutes or more) to develop the dough’s gluten structure.

This recipe makes 1.1kg of dough that I split into 6 or 7 rolls.  It scales up or down pretty easily.  (If you’re going to scale by just multiplying all of the weights by a constant scaling factor, make sure to scale both the poolish and the dough by the same factor, otherwise you will not end up with 65% hydration.)  The rolls will easily keep a week in a plastic bag.  

In my opinion, these rolls are easy to make.  They require a bit of time to make, but not a lot of actual work.  With the poolish, which is almost zero effort, you get those rich flavors and aromas associated with long fermentation times.  Which means that you can do your bulk and final fermentations really fast if you have a warm and humid environment.  

My rhythm when I make these is: start the poolish on Friday morning.  On Saturday morning, I throw together the dough and let it knead in a stand mixer while I’m doing chores.  Once kneaded, I throw the dough into an 85F 100% RH combi oven for an hour to bulk ferment.  While I wait, I read the news, watch videos, or catch up on e-mail.  I then shape the loaves and pop them back in the oven for a final one hour proof, and do some more chores, work, goof off, or make breakfast for the family.  I then heat up the oven and bake the loaves for 15 minutes and then rest for 20.  Et voila.  I have outstanding sub rolls before lunch on Saturday that I can bag and use throughout the week for no more than 30 minutes of actual work.

Ingredients

Poolish

150 g bread flour

150 g water

2 g yeast

Dough

450 g bread flour

240 g of room temperature water (75-85 degrees)

12 g salt

9 g yeast

12 g diastatic malt powder

4 g amylase

100 g vegetable shortening

For the poolish, mix flour, water, and yeast in a small container.  I use 1 quart plastic take out containers for this.  Place a lid on the container and the container in a warm place for 18-24 hours.  At the end of the fermentation period, the poolish will have more than doubled in size and very much alive.

For the dough, combine the flour, salt, yeast, malt powder, and amylase in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Mix with a dough hook for a few seconds to combine.  Add all of the poolish and the water. Mix until everything is combined and the dough has pulled together into a coherent, shaggy mass.  You might need to scrape down the side of your mixer bowl a few times to get everything integrated.

Add vegetable shortening, and knead for 15 minutes.  At the end of the kneading, you are looking for a very smooth dough that isn’t sticking to the side of the bowl and that is very stretchy.  It should pass the window pane test if you are so inclined.

Turn the dough out into a greased pan and place somewhere warm and damp to proof.  I put mine uncovered into an 85F, 100% relative humidity combi oven.  If you don’t have a combi oven or a proofing cabinet, you can cover your container with a damp towel and put it some place that’s relatively warm.  Proof until doubled in size, which should take 1-2 hours depending on your conditions.  (Warmer and higher humidity will result in a faster proof.  I wouldn’t recommend proofing faster than 1 hour.)

Turn the proofed dough out onto a floured work surface and divide into 6-7 pieces.  6 pieces ought to be approximately 190g each, and 7 will be approximately 160g each.  Now, this bit is a bit difficult to explain without pictures, so you might want to find a video online to see this in action.  Press each ball of dough into an oblong circle or rectangle.  Tightly roll the flattened dough to form a cylinder about 6-7 inches long.  Pinch the seams shut.  Starting with your hands at the center of each cylinder, roll the cylinders out while moving your hands toward the ends.  You’re trying to lengthen the cylinders to 10-11 inches, keeping them a uniform diameter throughout.  (These are not baguettes where you want tapered ends.)

Transfer the formed loaves to a lined sheet pan.  You can use parchment as your liner.  I like these Silpats designed for bread and pastry.  Dust with flour, semolina, or corn meal depending on your taste.  Place back in your warm, humid place and proof until doubled.

Pre-heat your convection oven to 375F (or 400F if you don’t have convection).  If your oven has a relative humidity feature or can inject steam, get the oven compartment as close to 100% relative humidity as you can muster.  If you don’t have a fancy oven, you can put a cast iron pan into the oven as you preheat, and then toss some ice cubes into it right after you put the bread in.  Slash the loaves down their full length with a lame or a super sharp knife.  Put the bread in the oven, and bake for 15 minutes until deep golden brown and a thermometer registers 200F when poked into the center of a loaf.

Remove from oven and allow to cool on a rack for at least 20 minutes.  

[foodhackery]

Buttermilk Biscuits

I’ve posted at least one other biscuit recipe here in the past, but realized that I don’t have the foundation of my continually tweaked biscuit recipe documented anywhere.  Over the years I’ve had a bunch of fun tweaking this recipe, which is very forgiving and very amenable to improvisation.  Don’t have buttermilk, then use a combo of milk and sour cream or milk and white vinegar.  Want a biscuit that’s usable for dessert, add more sugar and a bit less salt.  Want to turn this recipe into cinnamon rolls, slather a paste of softened butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar onto the dough after you roll it out flat, then roll into a log and slice cross-wise.  Need dumplings for chicken and dumplings, then use this dough, or make it slightly wetter and add to simmering broth.  Want southwestern-inspired biscuits, mix in pickled jalapenos and cheddar.  On and on.  This base can handle all of this.

There are five things that are important in the foundation: a 3-2-1 ratio of flour to liquid to fat; adding 3-5% of the weight of the flour in baking powder; grating the butter and rubbing it into the dry ingredients to create small thin sheets of flour coated fat versus pea-sized chunks that other recipes call for; making sure that your liquid is slightly acidic; and very carefully kneading the dough.  I’ve found that if I get these five things right, a bunch of other stuff that folks sometimes fixate on don’t matter at all.  And here it is:

Ingredients

300g AP flour.  I don’t use self-rising so that I can control my leavening agent.  And I use White Lilly when I can get my hands on it, but have literally made hundreds of batches of biscuits with or without and don’t think slightly softer wheat is what makes or breaks a great biscuit.

200g of buttermilk.  If you don’t have buttermilk, I very frequently get to 200g of liquid by doing 125g of milk and 75g of low fat sour cream, or 150g of milk and 50g of white vinegar.  You can totally play around with this ratio to tune the amount of acidity, although you want to target a mixture that’s not too much more viscous than buttermilk.

100g of unsalted butter.  I prefer good, European style butter like Plugra.

15g of double-acting, aluminum-free baking powder.  This is 5%.  You can use as little as 3% if you like.  Some baking powders can have a metallic after-taste, and some folks are more sensitive to that after-taste than others.  So feel free to dial down to 3% which will still get you a good rise unless your baking powder is completely broken.

7g of salt.

25g of sugar.  This is barely enough sugar to taste and won’t make your biscuits sweet.  Adding this helps a bit with browning and balances out the salt and baking powder.  You can omit and be completely fine.  Or as I already mentioned, you can add more to get a more dessert-y biscuit for, say, strawberry shortcake.

Oil or butter for the pan and biscuit tops.  Butter adds a bit of flavor.  This is otherwise entirely to promote browning.  My grandmother used vegetable oil.  Some folks like butter.  I use PAM or a Canola Oil spray to avoid dirtying a pastry brush.

Preheat a convection oven to 400F, or non-convection to 425F.

Combine dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, baking powder) in a large bowl.  Use a box grater and the medium-sized holes to grate 100g of cold butter.  Add the grated butter to the dry ingredients using a shearing motion between the heel and palm of your hands.  You are trying to create thin little sheets of butter-coated flour, not crumbs.  Add liquid.  Stir in with a fork until you have a shaggy ball with the liquid absorbed.  Knead** the dough until all of the flour is absorbed and you have a disc that’s neither sticky nor crumbly.  Roll out to roughly the size of the pan you will bake your biscuits in.  Cut out biscuits.  Place biscuits in pan.  Coat the biscuit tops in your fat of choice.  If necessary, combine scraps to make additional biscuits.  My kids love the mini-biscuits that result from scraps.  Waste nothing!  Bake in a hot oven until risen and the tops are golden brown.  I typically start the biscuits on the bottom rack of the oven and move them to the top rack just as they begin to get color on the top to promote even browning between the tops and bottoms of the biscuits.  Whether or not you need this will depend on your oven and your preferences.  

The biscuits will be risen and golden brown on top in 15 minutes or so.  Remove from oven and eat immediately.  They don’t need butter, but, butter and homemade apricot jam are our favorite accompaniments.  Or a slice of vine-ripened summer tomato.  Or some good country ham.  Or with ladles full of short rib hash on top of them.  Or.  Who am I kidding?  They are great with almost anything.  And they’ll keep super well for a few days and are almost as tasty as they were fresh from the oven with 20 seconds in a microwave on high.

**Perhaps the most important part of this recipe is kneading.  While you don’t want to overwork your dough (which results in tough biscuits), underworking the dough is worse and will yield a crumbly, cakey, tart-crusty thing that is not a biscuit.  Those things might be delicious, but they’re not biscuits, which by f***ing definition are flaky, multi-layered, golden brown, tender miracles with the tiniest bit of chew.  The difference between a real biscuit, and a biscuit-like baked thing is more a function of how you knead the dough than anything else.  If you are afraid of over-handling your dough, you won’t get good biscuits.

The technique that I use works the dough enough to create the gluten structure necessary to promote rising and layers, creates layers through folding, and is quick so that the heat of your hands doesn’t melt those delicate little butter sheets you spent time forming earlier.

Start by pulling the dough together with your hands, and then folding in half, turning ninety degrees, and folding again.  While doing this, pick up any remaining dry bits between folds.  I know when I’m done by feel, and it’s really hard to describe what that feel is in precise way.  I typically do 8-10 folds and turn steps, at which point all of the dry bits are absorbed, and I have a disc that’s not sticky, still cool, and that has enough strength that it holds together nicely.  I then dust my bench and the top of the dough with a bit of flour before rolling to make double sure that nothing sticks.  If for some reason your dough feels too wet and sticky, you can add flour while kneading.

The easiest way to get the feel for this is experimentation.  I make these biscuits at least once a week, sometimes more.  And I’ve been making biscuits for 35 years.  So I’ve had lots of practice, and lots of chances to make batches of biscuits that had room for improvement.  If your biscuits are too crumbly, don’t rise, or have too few layers, you probably need to knead them more.  If they are at all tough or too chewy, you’ve kneaded too much.  In any case, don’t be afraid of your dough.  If you pay attention to what you’re doing and are willing to experiment, your biscuits will get better and better.

[foodhackery]

Chicken Tikka Masala

A lot of my cooking is born of necessity.  When I don’t have access to a particular cuisine that I or the family enjoy, I tend to make more of that cuisine.  We’re on Maui this summer, which has many delightful culinary things we can’t get in California.  But one of the things that there isn’t much of here is Indian food.  And that’s a problem because we love Indian food.

I have had chunks of time in the past where I’ve cooked a lot of Indian food.  It was one of the first cuisines outside of my Southern repertoire that I got super interested in as a young adult.  A bunch of good Indian friends in college were generous and patient enough to teach me about their food, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  Although I will have to confess I had gotten rusty in recent years because most of the Indian I ate had been from excellent restaurants and friends.

So, this summer, with our lack of proximate restaurants and good take out, I’ve been trying to get my mojo back.  I’ve been reading a bunch of cookbooks, watching a bunch of cooking videos, and practicing a lot.  One of the things in particular I’ve been trying to dial in is Chicken Tikka Masala.  (And yes, I know that CTM may not even be an authentically Indian dish.  But it is delicious nonetheless, if not authentically Indian at least Indian adjacent, and most importantly, my two kids who once only ate mac & cheese and Dino Nuggets can’t get enough of it.)

One of the very interesting things about Chicken Tikka Masala is that like many of my favorite Southern dishes there is no one right way to cook it.  Everyone seems to have a slightly different take, which means there’s lots to explore, and lots of opportunity to find a variation that is faithful to the idea of CTM, but that’s dialed into the tastes of the loved ones for whom you’re preparing it.  What I’ve zeroed in on is a richly-spiced, tangy, bright Chicken Tikka Masala that has a strong gingery finish.  It’s good enough that my kids demanded I write it down so that they can use it one day as a jumping off point for their own experimentation.

So, here it is:

Ingredients

2 tsp Kashmiri chili powder

1 tsp hot Indian chili powder

2 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp whole cumin

2 tsp turmeric

2 tsp garam masala

2 tbsp fenugreek leaves

3 green cardamom pods

1/2 cinnamon stick

2 cloves

1 bunch of cilantro, leaves and stems

20 Unsalted, whole cashews, preferably raw

1/4 c milk

1/4 c heavy cream

1/2 c Greek yogurt

1 diced onion

1/2 frenched onion

1.5 inch of ginger cut into fine julienne

4 tbsp ginger garlic paste**

2 tbsp tomato paste

1 400g can diced tomatoes

1.5 - 2 lbs of Boneless, skinless chicken thighs (can substitute tofu, mushrooms, paneer, etc., for a veggie option)

Neutral oil

Honey

Salt

Combine yogurt, 1 tsp each of Kashmiri chili powder, coriander powder, cumin powder, turmeric, garam masala, 2 tbsp of ginger garlic paste and 1 tsp salt and place over chicken in either a ziploc bag or a sealable container.  You can add 1 tbsp of mustard oil if you have it, but not necessary.  Let the chicken marinate for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight.

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F.  Place marinated chicken flat on a baking sheet.  (I use a silpat so that the marinated chicken doesn’t stick.)  Roast chicken until deep golden brown.  The marinate may get very dark, which is ok.  This will take about a half hour.

While chicken is in the oven, place a heavy skillet or Dutch oven on a high flame.  Coat the pan with a generous film of a neutral oil.  When the oil is shimmering hot, toss in the whole cumin seeds, cardamom pods, cloves, and cinnamon stick and reduce heat to medium.  Cook the whole spices for a few minutes until the cloves puff up and the cumin seeds are dark brown, but not burned.

Toss diced onions and a pinch of salt into the oil and over that medium flame cook until the onions are a deep golden brown.  This may take 15 minutes or longer.  Be patient.

When the onions are golden brown, add the remaining 2 tbsp of ginger garlic paste and cook until it begins to caramelize.  This shouldn’t take long in a hot pan, and you’ll know you’re done when the paste starts to leave a sticky, caramelized film on the bottom of your pan.

Add 2 tbsp of tomato paste and cook for 2-3 minutes.

Add 400g of diced tomatoes and the rest of your spices / herbs: 1 tsp of Kashmiri chili, 1 tsp hot chili, 1 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp turmeric, 1 tsp garam masala, 1 tsp of salt, diced cilantro stems, and 2 tbsp of fenugreek leaves.  Stir to combine and add chicken and any of the pan drippings.  Scrape any of the yummy caramelized bits from the baking sheet and add to the curry.  Cook for at least 10-15 minutes.

Combine cashews and milk in a blender and blend on high until you have a smooth paste.  Add paste and heavy cream to the curry and stir until the color becomes a bit paler and the sauce thickens.

Toss in frenched onions, julienned ginger, and chopped cilantro leaves.  Adjust salt, and add honey if your tomatoes are more acidic than sweet.  And you’re ready to serve!

This is some damned good stuff, and totally worth the effort, which honestly isn’t that much.  You can substitute a number of other things for the chicken because the sauce would make drift wood delicious.  And you can make big batches of this to either freeze or to have for leftovers the next day.

** Ginger garlic paste

Place equal amounts of peeled ginger and garlic by weight to a blender with a splash of water.  Blend until you have a super smooth puree.  Add more water if necessary to get a smooth texture.  I make jars of this at a time because it is the base for so many Indian dishes.

[foodhackery]

Beans and Cornbread

Growing up without a lot of money can sometimes lead to surprising innovation in the kitchen.  One of the ways that my Mom would stretch a dollar when we were growing up was to make these delicious beans in the slow cooker that she would serve with cornbread.  The beans were usually dried pintos, which can be had now for $1.50 / lb, and I’m guessing much less 40 years ago.  This whole meal could easily feed two adults and two kids for $2-3.  Even though I’m not cash strapped now, I still crave this meal because it is absolutely delicious.  Here’s my take on beans and cornbread.

Beans

1 lb dried pinto beans

1 yellow onion, diced

1 red bell pepper, diced

1 jalapeno pepper, diced

2 tablespoons of tomato paste

3 tablespoons of chicken base

4 sprigs of thyme

water

salt and pepper to taste

Place the onion and peppers into a hot saute pan with a bit oil and a pinch of salt.  Saute until the onions are caramelized and the peppers are soft.  Place into a pressure cooker along with the beans, tomato paste, chicken base, thyme, and 9 cups of water.  Season with a bit of black pepper.  Cook on high pressure for 1.5 hours.  You could also do this in a slow cooker and cook on low all day.

The beans will come out savory, and super tender, and will have broken down enough to start thickening the cooking liquid a little.

Cornbread

200g of AP flour

200g of corn meal

50g sugar

15g baking powder

10g salt

3 large eggs

100g sour cream

300g milk

1 stick of butter, melted

Add ins: chives, jalapenos, cheddar cheese, etc.

Place a 9″ cast iron skillet in a 400F oven with 2 tbsp of oil.  (I use olive oil).  Let heat for 15 minutes.

While the oven and pan are heating, whisk together the dry ingredients.  Place wet ingredients in a mixer, and blend until smooth.  One minute before the pan is finished preheating, combine wet and dry ingredients with a whisk.  Batter will be thin.  Add in any mix-ins that you would like.  I enjoy 2 tbsp of finely chopped chives and 1c of sharp cheddar cheese, but adding nothing is totally acceptable.

Pour batter into hot pan, and return to oven.  Cook 15 minutes and then lower temperature to 350F.  Remove from oven and serve immediately.

If eating with beans, crumbling some of the cornbread up and sprinkling it over the beans so that cornbread chunks soak up some of the bean cooking liquid is a pro move.  Enjoy.

[foodhackery]

Best Oatmeal Cookies in the Universe

When I worked in San Mateo 10 years ago folks would often go by the bakery at Draeger’s, a local grocery chain, and bring back delicious things to snack on.  The most delicious of all of these delicious things were the oatmeal raisin cookies, whose texture was a sublime combination of crispy and chewy, with a haunting flavor profile I’ve never experience in other oatmeal raisin cookies.  Even though I haven’t had one of these cookies in a very long time, today I was reminiscing and could almost taste those cookies.

So I decided to take a crack at replicating them.  I think that I got pretty close.  And even if I didn’t, what I wound up with was, by consensus of the few lucky souls who got to try them before I gobbled them all down, f***ing awesome.  There’s a technique thing that I did to get that crispy/chewy texture combo, and the boost to a normal oatmeal raisin cookie flavor profile was the addition of Grand Marnier, almond extract, ground cardamom, and orange peel in addition to the traditional vanilla.

Ingredients

240g AP flour

5g baking powder

5g baking soda

5g salt

1 tsp ground cardamom

200g brown sugar

240g sugar

225g unsalted butter (Plugra if you can get it), room temp

2 large eggs

1 tsp almond extract

2 tsp vanilla extract

3 tsp Grand Marnier (or another orange liquer)

1.5 cups of raisins

2 cups of oats

grated peel of one orange

Heat oven to 375F, or a convection oven to 350F.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and ground cardamom and set aside.

Combine brown sugar, sugar, and butter in a mixing bowl and beat until light and fluffy.  This will take a while.  If your butter isn’t room temp, give it a blast in the microwave for 30 seconds to soften it.  Don’t melt the butter though.  The texture of your cookies will be off if you do.

Once the butter and sugar mixture is fluffy, add the extracts and Grand Marnier.  Mix until thoroughly combined and the mixture is still fluffy.  Then add the eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating and maintaining previously attained fluffiness.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet in two batches, mixing until just combined.  You don’t want to over work your dough at this point.  If your mixing bowl isn’t large enough, transfer to a large mixing bowl.  Then add the raisins, oats, and orange peel, and gently fold them into the dough.

Using a #16 scoop (1/4c) portion dough onto a cookie sheet or half sheet pan (with the pan greased or topped with a silpat) about 2.5 inches apart, approximately six cookies per pan.  If you avoid excessive sampling and portion in level scoops, you should get 18 cookies.  Slightly flatten the domed tops of each cookie with the back of a spoon.  At your discretion, you may sprinkle each cookie with some Demerara sugar before putting them into the oven.

Bake for 12 minutes until golden brown around the edges and brown but slightly paler in the centers.  Turn the pans around at the six minute mark so that the cookies brown evenly (unless you have a really awesome commercial convection oven with epic airflow.)

Remove from oven and allow to cool on a rack for at least 10 minutes before eating.

Boom!

[foodhackery]

Mrs. Walthall’s Pound Cake

For years, one of my guiltiest and favorite pleasures from back home in Virginia was a pound cake made by one of the ladies who went to church with my mother.  Mrs. Walthall knew how much I loved her pound cake and made sure to make one for me when she knew that I was going to be home from grad school, or overseas, or wherever it was that I was coming from.  Mrs. Walthall passed away a number of years back, but not before she shared her recipe with me.  My little girl is now a big fan of this cake too.  Here’s the recipe:

8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick) at room temperature 1 cup Crisco brand vegetable shortening 3 cups sugar 6 large eggs 1 cup milk 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 tsp orange extract or orange liqueur 1 tsp lemon zest 1 tsp coconut extract 3 cups all purpose flour 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350F.

Sift together flour, backing powder, and salt either onto parchment or into a mixing bowl.

Combine butter, shortening, and sugar in a large mixing bowl and beat until sugar is fully incorporated and the mixture is light and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time, fully incorporating each before the next addition. Add the vanilla, orange, lemon, and coconut flavorings.

Add approximately 1/3 of the flour into the mixing bowl and beat to fully incorporate. Add the milk and beat to fully incorporate. Add the remaining flour in two more batches, fully incorporating each before the next addition.

Pour batter into a buttered and floured bundt pan. Bake at 350F for 1 hour and 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Although a bundt pan is the traditional choice, you may also divide the batter into two 9″ cake pans and bake.

[foodhackery]

Pork Belly Tacos

I don’t know what inspired the following, but I’m glad that the inspiration struck.  I recently bought a 14.5 pound Duroc pork belly from Heritage Foods USA.  To be perfectly honest, the pork belly was an afterthought.  I had been on the Heritage Foods site to reserve my Thanksgiving Turkey.  I’ve sourced my birds there for years, and the big ones go quick, so I order months in advance.  

With this year’s order I decided, why not order something other than just a Turkey?  We’ve been out of bacon for a couple of weeks, and on my culinary todo list for this weekend was buy a pork belly to cure.  So I thought I’d buy a really nice one for once, and ordered a Duroc belly.  It arrived on Friday.

We had friends coming over on Sunday for dinner, and by Sunday afternoon I still had no idea what I was going to cook.  I did know that I needed to get the belly curing.  The last thing I wanted was a $140 piece of pork to go to waste because I got too distracted with other stuff to tend to it.

As I was prepping the belly for my standard bacon cure (1% brown sugar, 2% salt, and 156ppm sodium nitrate) I thought to myself, perhaps I should borrow a bit of this belly for dinner.  I expropriated a 2.5 lb chunk and reserved it while I finished rubbing cure into the other 12 lbs and got it into the fridge to rest for a few days.

With the 2.5 lb chunk, I wanted to put a rub on it, crisp up the outside in a roaring hot oven, and then let it braise for several hours at low heat so that it would be falling apart tender.  For the rub, I combined brown sugar, salt, smoked paprika, cumin, fennel, Padron chile powder, Guajillo chile powder, and  roasted tomato powder.  With the belly liberally coated, I gave it 15 minutes at 500F in the combi oven, 5 minutes with the skin side down, and then 10 minutes with the skin side up.  I then poured two beers into the roasting pan, covered with foil, and let go for 4 hours at 250F.

The pork belly was going to be the primary filling for pork belly tacos.  To accompany the pork belly, I vacuum pickled some frenched red onions and jalapenos (vinegar, salt).  I made a crema from sour cream, lime zest, lime juice, salt, and minced jalapeno.  I made a slaw from finely sliced cabbage and a dressing of sour cream, lime juice, salt, Turbinado sugar, cayenne, and cilantro.  I made a sauce from the pork belly braising liquid by adding some chicken stock and thickening with Wondra.  I made a fresh tomato salsa from Love Apple tomatoes, yellow onions, minced jalapenos, cilantro, and salt.

Finally, I made some beans by sauteing diced yellow onion until golden, adding jalapeno, then diced tomatoes, followed by several tablespoons of the pork belly rub, pinto and kidney beans, and cilantro.  When the beans were heated through and the sauce thickened, I took off the heat and added in raw chopped onions and raw minced jalapeno, covered the beans, and allowed to sit for 30 minutes.  This allows the onions to mellow a bit without losing all of their crunch.

Served on corn tortillas, this was some good business.  Not the fanciest cooking that I’ve ever done, but a really good reminder that Mexican-inspired food is freaking awesome, and that I should be cooking like this more often.

[foodhackery]

Lemon Basil Ice Cream

It’s no secret.  I love lemon.  Lemon cookies.  Lemon pie.  Lemon pound cake.  And since I was a little kid, lemon sherbet and ice cream.  One of my favorite lemon-centric flavor combos is lemon and basil which I’ve used a gazillion times on chicken, pork chops, and steaks.  Yesterday, I asked myself, “why not lemon basil ice cream?”

Why not indeed?  This turned out to be one of the better ideas I’ve had in a while.  One of those that you kick yourself for not having earlier, and curse fate for depriving you of for so many years.  This is some no-shit, good business.  In fact, as soon as finish writing this post, I’m going to go finish off what’s left in the freezer.

Ingredients

500g whole milk

175g heavy cream

140g granulated sugar

90g egg yolks (from ~5 large eggs)

50g non-fat milk powder

5g Cremodan 30

300ml limoncello

10 large basil leaves

Peel of 2 lemons

Heat a water bath to 82C.

Place limoncello in a small sauce pan and reduce to 100ml.  The resulting mixture should be the consistency of simple syrup.

Combine milk, cream, sugar, yolks, milk powder, and Cremodan in a blender and thoroughly mix.  Pour into a vacuum bag and add limoncello syrup, lemon peel, and basil leaves.  Seal and place in water bath for 20 minutes.

Place bag of ice cream mixture into an ice bath (or blast chiller) and cool to 4C.  Open bag, and remove lemon peel and basil leaves.  Pour into Pacojet beakers and freeze overnight (or for a couple of hours in a blast freezer.)  Pacotize and return to the freezer for a couple of hours to firm texture.

Serve to friends and watch them get that WTF-this-is-delicious look on their faces.   

[foodhackery]

Canelés de Bordeaux

Canelés are quite possibly my favorite pastry.  Prepared correctly, they have a crispy, caramelized exterior that is right on the border of bitter, and a creamy, sweet interior.  Once you’ve practiced a few times and have dialed the recipe parameters in for your equipment, they’re super easy to make with highly reproducible, predictable results.  My recipe is almost exactly the ChefSteps recipe with two changes: I use bourbon instead of rum; and I cook them for 41 minutes in a 375F Rational combi oven instead of the 45 minutes called for by ChefSteps.  I also get my molds very, very cold before brushing butter into them so that the butter solidifies immediately and you can ensure that you have a complete coat of fat on the mold interiors.

Here’s my (only slightly modified) version of the ChefSteps canelés recipe.

Ingredients

20 2″ Mauviel copper canelés molds

750g whole milk

70g butter

350g sugar

225g AP flour

100g egg yolks (from ~6 large eggs)

70g bourbon

4g salt

Butter as needed to grease molds

Preheat a combi oven to 375F at 100% relative humidity.  Place molds on a sheet pan, and the sheet pan into a blast chiller or freezer to chill.

Place whole milk and butter into a sauce pan and heat until butter is melted.  Remove from heat and allow to chill below 120F.  (Blast chiller helps with this.)

Place sugar, flour, egg yolks, bourbon, salt, and warm milk / butter mixture into a heavy duty mixer.  Mix until fully-combined and smooth.

Remove chilled molds from the blast chiller.  Brush melted butter onto the inside of each mold.  The butter should solidify immediately giving you a good indication of any un-buttered surface you need to cover.

Place sheet pan containing molds onto a scale.  Tare the scale.  Dispense 70g of batter into each mold, taring the scale after filling each mold.  I do this with a sauce gun which makes the whole process go super fast.

Place filled molds (on sheet pan) into the oven and bake for 41 minutes.  If you like more bitter notes in your canelés crust, you can go longer.  The ChefSteps recipe calls for 45 minutes.  You may need to experiment with temperature and timing based on the particulars of your oven.  For example, if you’re not working with a commercial convection oven, you might need to increase both temperature and time to get good results.

Remove canelés from oven.  Invert each mold over a cutting board and give them a sharp bang on the board to unmold the canelés.  Allow the canelés to sit uncovered for 5-10 minutes to all the crust to crisp up.  The canelés, IMHO, are best eaten within the first hour of coming out of the oven.

With a blast chiller, I can hammer this whole recipe out in about an hour, start to finish.  So, even though these are rather unique little treats, they really are not that hard to make.

[foodhackery]

Modern Chicken & Dumplings

Chicken and dumplings is one of my favorite dishes, and one of the best things my mother would make for me as a child.  Her chicken and dumplings, more often than not, was chicken and broth prepared all day long in a slow cooker with Bisquick dumplings tossed in a few minutes before serving to be poached in the delicious cooking broth.  I have a variation on this dish that I do in the pressure cooker that is a present-day favorite of my wife.

Given how well the flavors of this dish come together, I thought that it might be especially conducive to a modern treatment.  For shits and grins, I came up with a chicken & dumplings recipe that involves: chicken thighs cooked sous vide with herbs and chicken fat, followed by a turn in a searing hot skillet to crisp up the skins; dumplings in the fashion of gnocchi Parisienne infused with chicken fat and sage, poached in salted water, and crisped in a hot skillet; and a rich chicken broth, thickened ever-so-slightly with xanthan gum to tie everything together.

Today, I’m just going to document the dumplings, which are very easy to make and that can be made ahead of time, par-cooked, and refrigerated or frozen until you need them.  I have a bag of them now sitting my freezer where they will keep for a few months.

These dumplings are crazy awesome, and can be used in chicken and dumplings as well as other applications.  They are light and crispy and smell like thanksgiving due to the chicken schmalz, sage, and butter.

Ingredients

250g AP flour

1 tsp kosher salt

1.5 cups of water

85g butter

85g of chicken fat

2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh sage

5 eggs

In a 4 qt saucepan, combine water, butter, chicken fat, and salt and bring to the simmer allowing the fats to melt.  Add flour all at once and stir aggressively to combine while still on the heat.  Continue to stir and cook the flour mixture for a few minutes until a film starts to form on the bottom of the pan, the mixture appears to have a sheen, and you can begin to smell cooked flour.

Transfer mixture to the bowl of a stand mixer.  On low to medium speed add one egg at a time, incorporating eggs fully after each addition, scraping the sides of the mixer bowl as necessary.  Add chopped sage and mix until thoroughly dispersed.

Transfer dough to a pastry bag fitted with a plain #12 tip.  Pipe dough into a large pot of boiling salted water, cutting off each dumpling with a sharp knife at the pastry bag tip.  Dumplings should be about a half inch in length, although exact size isn’t important and some variation is a sign to your diners that these are hand made.  The dumplings will cook quickly, in about 30 seconds, and are ready as soon as they float to the top of the water.  

When the dumplings float to the top of the water, remove them from the pot with a spider strainer or slotted spoon and place them on a sheet pan to dry.  For the amount of dough called for in this recipe, I actually do several batches of pipe, cook, strain so that the gnocchi don’t overcook.

At this point, you can proceed to the next step of the recipe, or, refrigerate or freeze the gnocchi.  They will keep in the refrigerator in a plastic bag for a few days, and in the freezer for a few months.

Right before service, place a saute pan over medium-high heat.  Add a generous tablespoon of butter.  Add half the dumplings and saute until golden brown.  At the last minute add additional finely chopped fresh sage and season to taste with salt.  Repeat with the remaining half.

This recipe makes enough dumplings for 8 generous portions.

If you’re making these dumplings as part of a batch of chicken and dumplings, you’ll want to place them into a wide, shallow bowl for each person, then topping with a crispy-skinned chicken thigh and chicken broth, and finally dressing with some chopped chives and Maldon.  Yay!

[foodhackery]

Blueberry Cobbler

It’s blueberry season again.  One of the easiest and most delicious things that you can do with beautiful fruit is a cobbler.  We had an abundance of wild blackberries when I was growing up, and the default cobbler and weekly stalwart on our summer menus was the blackberry cobbler.  With this recipe, I’m trying to replicate my memory of this wonderful childhood dessert with blueberries instead of blackberries.

The three things with a cobbler are using only fresh, seasonal fruit, getting the consistency of the filling right, and making sure that the texture of the topping is right.  

Right for the filling is best described as “jammy”.  You don’t want the filling to be super soupy, nor do you want to use so much thickener that the filling is gummy.  I get the result that I’m looking for by using 3% (by weight of berries) Wondra and 1.5% slow methoxyl pectin.  The resulting texture is about the consistency of jam, and works really well for cobblers, pies, and can be used as a spreadable sauce.

Right for the topping is “cakey”.  You want the topping to have a moist crumb and for it to soak up the filling.  I achieve the perfect texture by using 3 parts AP flour to 3 parts heavy cream, 1 part butter, 1 part granulated sugar, 0.5 parts egg yolk, and 0.08 parts baking powder.  This is some rich business, but, seriously delicious, with a super moist crumb, and the ability to soak up plenty of juiciness.  And it heats up great.

For the topping:

300g AP flour

100g granulated sugar

8g baking powder

100g butter (Plugra is best), cubed

300g heavy cream

50g of egg yolks (2 yolks)

Combine dry ingredients.  Add butter and pinch into the flour mixture until the largest chunks of butter are about pea sized.  Add wet ingredients.  Topping will be somewhere between the consistency of dough and batter.

For the filling:

1.2 kg of fresh blueberries

180g granulated sugar (can be adjusted up or down)

36g Wondra

18g slow methoxyl pectin

2g malic acid (can be adjusted up or down, or eliminated)

5g kosher salt

Combine the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.  The malic acid is to balance out some of the sweetness.  You can leave it out altogether if you like, replace with a bit of lemon juice, or, adjust up or down to your taste.  Toss berries in dry ingredients.  Place in a baking dish.  Spread topping evenly over top of berries.  Place in a 350F oven for about an hour until the filling is bubbling and the topping is light golden brown.

[foodhackery]

New Kitchen Lab

We just moved into a new house that is almost finished.  The last thing to be completed, a tantalizing week or two away, is a kitchen lab.  Some folks have crafting rooms or studios loaded with tons of gear and supplies to make art.  Some folks have wood shops loaded with gear to make furniture.  Some folks have auto shops loaded with gear to help them work on or mod their car or bike.  I have a kitchen lab.  It’s about the size of a middling-sized wood shop, approximately 600 square feet, and it’s loaded with gear and supplies to help me experiment with food.

I had a smaller lab at my last house and it was awesome.  I’m pretty excited about the new lab.  It has extra space that will allow me to add a few new pieces of gear that should make projects go more quickly and efficiently, and a few new pieces that will allow me to do things that I could not do before.  I’ll also have enough space to leave camera gear set up and at hand so that I can better record some of the stuff that I’m doing.

First order of business once the lab is functional will be rebuilding my staples.  I’ll be curing and smoking some bacon, which is nothing new.  That said, the new lab has a temperature and humidity controlled curing chamber which will allow me to try out Sean Brock’s bacon technique which calls for dry aging after smoking.  I’ll also be putting up a rib roast for a 30-day dry age.  Much, much more to come on this front.

I also need to replenish my supply of stocks and demis which I like to make in big batches and freeze.

The big summer work of the lab, however, will be dealing with the deluge of fresh fruits and berries that are now starting to come in from the garden and orchard.  Blueberries, cherries, and apricots have just hit peak ripeness, and we’ll have plums quite soon.  There are going to be literal shit tons of jellies, jams, compotes, pies, cobblers, tarts, and crostadas coming in short order.  I’m also going to try out some non-obvious ways to make use of this bounty.

Very exciting.  But perhaps, the most exciting thing, is that I’m going to try to document, both in pictures and writing, some of what I’m doing, if for no other reason to save the good bits for posterity for my kids.

Yay Summer!

[foodhackery]

Mrs. Walthall’s Pound Cake

One of my Mom’s church friends and neighbors, Mrs. Walthall, was famous for her poundcakes.  Even though poundcake sounds like super-deliciousness from the perspective of a recipe, they often turn out leaden and dry.  Mrs. Walthall’s secret touch was using vegetable shortening for half the quantity of butter normally used.  Since shortening is softer at room temperature than butter, Mrs. Walthall’s poundcakes were always tender, moist, and delicious.  Here is her recipe, translated from volume measures to weights.

Ingredients

125g butter

125g vegetable shortening

600g sugar

6 eggs

360g AP flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp orange extract

1 tsp lemon extract

1 tsp coconut extract

Make sure that the shortening, butter, and eggs are at room temperature.  Cream together butter, shortening, and sugar.  Add eggs, one at a time, incorporating each fully before adding the next.  Add flour, baking powder, and salt, and mix.  Mix in half of the milk.  Finally, add the extracts and the rest of the milk.  Pour into a greased tube pan and bake at 350 for 1 hour and 20 minutes.  Cool on a rack completely before turning out.

You can do all sorts of variations on this cake.  I often substitute the zest and juice of a whole lemon for the orange, lemon, and coconut extracts for a distinctly lemony poundcake.  You can play with the extracts at will.  Vanilla and almond is a good combo, for instance.  You can glaze the cake with a traditional sugar glaze, or a jam-based one.  The base is good foundation, so feel free to go while improvisations on it.

[foodhackery]

Thanksgiving 2014

We had a pretty fantastic Thanksgiving this year with great food and the company of our family.  I suspect that some of the things that we tried this year will become traditions to be enjoyed for years to come.

For the third year in a row, we bought a heritage turkey from Heritage Foods USA in Brooklyn.  Compared with the birds to which I'm accustomed, these heritage breed turkeys are amazingly flavorful without a whole bunch of futzing around.  This year, I think that we've homed in on the technique that I'm going to use going forward.  I broke the bird down into three parts: breast; back; and wings, thighs, and legs.  

I rubbed the breast section down with copious amounts of kosher salt and allowed it to dry for a couple of days in the fridge.  I then rubbed the breast with olive oil and more salt immediately before roasting it for 15 minutes in a 425F convection oven and then reducing the temperature to 300F until the internal temperature of the breast meat rose to 150F.  I then pulled the breast out of the oven and allowed it to rest for one hour before serving.  To serve, I took the breasts off the bone and sliced across the breast so that each piece had a bit of crispy skin.

I placed the legs, thighs, and wings in a large, deep cooking vessel, coated liberally with salt, rosemary, sage, thyme, and garlic and allowed to sit overnight.  I then covered the dark meat pieces with duck fat.  For the bits that came off of my 18.6 pound bird, I used about a gallon of duck fat.  I then covered the vessel with aluminum foil, and cooked at 225F for 4 hours.  I then removed the confit turkey from the oven, allowed it to cool, and then popped it into the fridge.  About a half hour before ready to serve, I warmed the confit pan up until the duck fat melted, removed the pieces of turkey whole, removed as much fat as possible, and then popped them in a 425F convection oven for 15 minutes to crisp up.  I then allowed the crispy confit turkey to rest for 15 minutes before adding to the platter with the breast slices.

I used the back, along with 3 lbs of chicken wings, to make stock.  I coated the back and chicken wings with olive oil and salt and placed in a hot oven until they were a deep golden brown.  I then placed them into a pressure cooker with a couple of leeks, thyme, and 8 liters water, and cooked at high pressure for 2 hours.  I allowed the stock to cool overnight in the fridge, and removed the fat cap before placing on the stove to reduce to about 1.5 liters of concentrated stock.  I then use this stock to moisten my stuffing and to make my gravy.

In addition to turkey, we had Sally Lunn dinner rolls, a simple sausage ciabatta stuffing, mashed potatoes (sous vided, boiled, double-sieved, and loaded up with butter and cream), creamy Brussels sprouts and Gruyere gratin, my patented gravy, sweet potato pie, bourbon pecan pie, and salted butter caramel ice cream.

We've had our usual round of leftovers from this feast, but one new, interesting thing that we did this morning was a Thanksgiving frittata.  I sauteed half a diced yellow onion until golden then added some stuffing and chopped up turkey.  I sauteed everything until warm, poured over four beaten eggs with a pinch of salt, grated some wensleydale cheese on top and popped in the oven until the eggs were puffed up and set and the cheese had melted.  These ingredients would have worked equally well in an omelette.  Delicious for sure.

[foodhackery]

Thanksgiving Casserole

I have this habit, after Thanksgiving every year, of making something that I call Thanksgiving casserole from the leftover turkey, stuffing, and stock/gravy that I have laying around.  These casseroles are typically ad hoc, and pretty simple.  Chop up some turkey.  Toss the meat in with stuffing and some mirepoix that I've sweated down.  Add some herbs, typically sage, rosemary, thyme, and parsley.  In recent years, I've been adding a dollop of shiro miso to add a bit of extra savoriness.  Moisten everything generously with stock or leftover gravy.  Top with grated parmigiano reggiano and bake until the top is golden brown and the filling is bubbling.  

No freaking joke, this is some good business.  It is good enough in fact, that I get requests for it for Thanksgiving celebrations before Thanksgiving.  Which is problematic because it is a leftover casserole.

For a couple of years running now, I've devised a fairly quick and easy doppelganger for my leftover casserole.  The following recipe makes a full 2.5" hotel pan of casserole which is enough to feed a small crowd as a side dish in a potluck.  I've given weight measurements which can be easily scaled up or down as needed.  And yes, it calls for boxed stuffing mix.  Please feel free to make stuffing from scratch if you're feeling all purist and full of culinary integrity.  IMO, Stove Top is plenty good for this recipe, and will save you a crap ton of time.

Ingredients

3kg turkey breast

5L turkey stock (chicken stock will also suffice)

200g shiro miso

1.3 kg Stove Top Stuffing mix (6 eight oz packets)

1kg diced onions

450g diced carrot

450g diced celery

100g finely chopped flat leaf parsley

10g finely chopped rosemary

7g finely chopped thyme

7g finely chopped sage

salt and pepper to taste

grated parmigiano reggiano (enough to lightly cover top of casserole)

extra virgin olive oil

Coat turkey breast(s) in extra virgin olive oil and a liberal amount of salt.  Roast in a 350F oven until the skin is golden brown and a thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast reads 160F.  Remove from the oven and allow to rest until the meat is cool enough to handle.  Remove breast meat from bones and trim excess fat and gristle.  Cut meat into big chunks (I do 1/2" cubes) and place into the bottom of a hotel pan or large casserole dish.

Coat the bottom of a heavy bottom dutch oven or stock pot with a film of oil and sweat onions with a pinch of salt over medium heat until they just start to become translucent and slightly change color, approximately 10 minutes.  Add carrots and celery and sweat until the carrots are tender.  Add parsley, rosemary, thyme, and sage and cook for another 10 minutes.  (You should be doing this while the turkey breasts are roasting.)  Remove from heat and transfer to the hotel pan containing the turkey.

Stir shiro miso into turkey stock until dissolved.  Now, taste your stock.  Salt it.  Taste again.  Add more salt.  Taste.  Repeat until your stock tastes good.  If you're using homemade stock, you'll be surprised at how much salt you will need.  If you are using boxed stock, you might not need to add any salt at all.  This step is crucial.  If your stock doesn't taste good because it isn't seasoned properly, your casserole will taste flat and lifeless.

Add 2/3 of the stuffing mix to the hotel pan with the turkey and vegetables and toss everything to combine.  Add 2/3 of the stock to the hotel pan and mix thoroughly until the mixture is very moist.

In a separate and large bowl combine the remaining 1/3 stuffing mix and 1/3 stock.  Mix thoroughly.  Top the casserole mixture in the hotel pan with this moistened stuffing in one even layer.  Grate parmigiano reggiano over the top of the casserole.

Cover hotel pan with foil and bake in a 350F oven for 20 minutes.  Remove foil and bake for 10 minutes uncovered until the top is lightly golden.

(This recipe yields about 9kg or 20lbs of product, which is a decent-sized main serving for 40 people.)