Tag: cayenne

Categories
Poultry The Book

191. Spice-Rubbed Quail p.402


The recipe

I like to think of quail and lobster as perverse challenges on a Japanese game show. They’re complicated and messy to eat, but you’re challenged to do it in your finery with your peers looking on. I can imagine the quiet golf claps from the spectators as you deftly separate the leg joint, and the derision of the judges and jeers from the peanut gallery as you forget your manners and start gnawing on the wings. There are loads of public forums for messy lobster eating, where plastic bibs rule and squirting lobster juice into your dining companions’ hair is considered to be all part of the fun, but very few community organizations seem to throw an annual quail bash, so I prefer to keep small fowl eating confined to my home.

These quail are supposed to be semiboneless, where your butcher has removed all but the wing bones, and the drumstick. I’m sure that would make the eating a lot neater, but it probably costs an arm and a leg, so we ripped our meat off the bone with our teeth thank-you-very-much. The boned out quail are cut in half, rubbed with salt, pepper, cayenne, and allspice, then chilled for a hour, and cooked under the broiler. The quail are served with a gastrique made with chicken stock, lime juice, molasses, scallions, and butter.

The Good: These quail were just delicious. The spice rub did very nice things for them, quail are fairly flavourful birds, so they were able to stand up to the allspice and cayenne. The quick broiling they received was a really nice way to cook them. Unlike chicken you’ve got to cook them as quickly as possible to get the outside nicely crisped before the meat gets overdone, intense direct heat from the broiler seems to be the ideal solution. They’d probably work well quickly grilled over an intense flame.

The Bad: While there was nothing wrong with the gastrique, I thought it was more or less unnecessary. The quail were a complete package on their own, they weren’t begging for an acidic caramel sauce. I tried some of the gastrique with the quail, and it just covered up some of the bird’s deliciousness. Sometimes I think people make gastriques more because they look nice drizzled decoratively on the plate, or painted on with bold brush strokes than any underlying culinary theory. In this case they didn’t do much for the quail, so I’d skip it. However it might depend on what you’re serving it with, a sweet and acidic sauce like this can go a long way towards tying a meal together.

The Verdict: Make the birds, skip the sauce, eat with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about making a mess.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

185. Tomato Barbecue Sauce p.479

There’s no recipe for this one on Epicurious.

This barbecue sauce is meant to accompany Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue, which we’ll get to next time. It’s apparently the style of barbecue sauce popular in Lillie’s part of North Carolina, and is best served slathered over chopped pork barbecue. It probably works well on most grilled meats though. This sauce is unlike most of the barbecue sauces I’ve known. It’s very vinegary, and fairly sweet, without a whole lot of heat, and not a lot of depth.

The recipe has a fair list of ingredients, but since you just stir them together and simmer for five minutes it’s not too much trouble. You just combine tomato purée, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, apple juice, pineapple juice, brown sugar, dry mustard, salt, chili powder, Tabasco, cayenne, celery seed, and cinnamon in a saucepan, simmer, and apply to the protein of your choice.

The recipe is really heavy on the vinegar, 3/4 of a cup compared to 1 cup of tomato purée. The rest of the ingredients are in tablespoons and teaspoons, so this ratio really sets the tone of the recipe. Cider vinegar is a little sweeter, and less acidic than many other vinegars, but that’s still makes for a very sharply flavoured sauce. The recipe describes this as a particularly sweet sauce, but compared to the BBQ sauces available on grocery store shelves it’s certainly not pushing the boundaries of sugar content. It’s a sauce to be applied near the end of cooking, or over offset heat, it will burn quickly if exposed to direct flame, but it’s by no means a candied glaze.

My main issue with this sauce was a lack of depth. The ingredients mostly contributed to sweetness, acidity, or heat, precious few give the sauce body, richness, or complexity. Specifically many of my favourite BBQ sauces have a slow simmered tomato base, or include smoked peppers, and more spices. The recipe is counting on Worcestershire sauce to cover most of those bases, and while it’s a wonderful product, it just wasnt quite able to do the job on it’s own.

This sauce was by no means bad, the identically named Tomato Barbecue Sauce, and Coffee Bourbon Barbecue Sacues on page 898 seem much more promising. I made a hybrid of those two recipes a couple of weeks ago to great results. If lots of vinegar, moderate sugar, and modest heat is your ideal BBQ sauce, then this is a perfectly decent way to go. It’s just not my personal preference.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

169. Sweet and Spicy Bacon p.656


The recipe

The food blog world has been swamped with recipes for caramelized bacon with a kick, so I decided that now would be a good time to see what all the fuss was about. After trying this recipe I’ve decided it’s just a gimmick, and not a worthy treatment of bacon. I get the concept, and can see the appeal, a dish that’s simultaneously sweet, smoky, salty, and spicy could be the holy grail of addictive breakfast treats. Alas, that’s not how this dish turned out.

The method is simple, but just because it’s easy to do a thing, doesn’t mean you should. You cook thick-cut bacon on a broiling rack in a 350 oven for 20 minutes, flip it over, and spread on a mixture of brown sugar, cayenne, and black pepper, then continue baking for another 15-20 minutes.

In re-reading this recipe I realize I missed the whole thick-cut bacon instruction, and used the normal stuff. That meant that my cooking time was significantly shorter, and I had proportionally more of the sugar-spice mixture than the recipe intended. Consequently my bacon was sweeter and spicier than it should have been. I think I’ve decided that any amount of sugar and spice on my bacon is too much. The flavour wasn’t bad precisely, it still tasted like bacon, but my palate had to filter out distracting brown sugar and cayenne flavours to get to it. Most of my guests thought it was sort of OK, but one just hated it, I think he found this dish personally offensive.

If there’s one thing the internet doesn’t need it’s another ode to bacon, but it’s pretty well understood that bacon is near perfect all on its own. You can use it to make other dishes better, but trying to improve the bacon itself is a fool’s errand.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

152. Herbed Lima Bean Hummus p.15


The recipe

Hummus is a staple of my diet, and although I rarely make them, I quite like lima beans, so, I figured this lima bean hummus was a good bet. I’ve been doing some serious damage to the bean spreads in the book, and this was one of the last ones that really appealed to me. In the end it wasn’t the dip I was hoping for. It took some very nice ingredients, did some very silly things with them, and resulted in a muddy confused mess.

You start this dip by simmering frozen limas, onion, and garlic in water, then stirring in cilantro and parsley and letting the herbs steep. You then drain off the water and transfer the solids to the food processor. They then go for a spin with cumin, cayenne, lemon juice, olive oil, fresh dill, and fresh mint. The dip is then allowed to cool, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, drizzled with olive oil, and served.

There were a lot of big flavours going into this dish, but the preparation did them a disservice. The onion and garlic are boiled along with the limas in this dish. Boiling doesn’t do much for aromatics unless you’re making a soup. I’d much prefer to sweat them to take off some of the harsh edges, in exchange for a little caramelization. As it was most of the onion and garlic flavour, and that of the cilantro and parsley, ended up in the liquid the beans simmered in. Five minutes later that liquid went down the drain, and the exhausted remnants of the aromatics went into the food processor. The beans were still very hot at this point, fresh dill and mint were added. Both of those herbs are wonderful when they’re crisp and cool, and they lose something when heated. By the time the dip had come together and cooled to room temperature is was a bland mush. I tried to overcompensate with lemon juice and salt to bring things back to life, but once the flavours are gone they’re gone. I added toasted pine nuts in a last ditch effort to save this dip, and they did moderately improve things, but no one was really thrilled and I had to plow through three days of leftovers.

Beyond the counterproductive cooking instructions, I think there was too much going on in this dip. Between onions, garlic, four different types of herbs, cumin, and cayenne, there were a lot of flavours competing for attention. Granted they were all washed out imitations of themselves, but it was still a busy dish. In fact there was so much other stuff in there, that the lima beans weren’t really a player. They were puréed, so their texture wasn’t an issue, and other than adding a little starchiness they weren’t a big flavour contributor. You probably won’t like this dish, but it won’t be because you don’t like lima beans.

Altogether this dish was entirely forgettable. It wasn’t particularly bad, just another bland mush. It’s only truly frustrating when you’re the one making it. You put fresh fragrant ingredients in, and methodically set about discarding or destroying their goodness, you then serve what’s left.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

151. Deviled Eggs p.27


The recipe

The next few recipes are from a cocktail party we held in honour of a friend’s thesis defense. We invited her to celebrate her accomplishment, and be called Doctor a lot, at an intimate soirée at our place. I was planning a menu around her favourite dishes, and counting on eight to ten people. The day before the party, I was informed that it was going to be more like thirty, and possibly up to fifty people, and that I knew almost none of them. My first reaction was to start dusting.

Most of the time I’m pretty relaxed about the state of the apartment, and the mounting pile of dishes bothers me not at all. The second I hear that company’s coming though, I start channeling my mother. I worked myself up into a right state, gave up on the food, and decided that the best I could do would be to provide an empty and clean space for these hoards to descend upon. Then I thought that even if I wasn’t providing any food, I should really have ice, lemons, and limes on hand. From there I sold myself on baking a congratulatory cake, and decided reprising a couple of the great appetizers from The Project wouldn’t be too hard. The day of I convinced myself that adding a (soon to be blogged) dip would be in the realm of the reasonable. Once the guests had arrived I remembered that we had eggs in the fridge, and couldn’t think of a good reason not to devil them. I spent a good chunk of the evening in the kitchen cooking, but that worked out well as it wasn’t really my party. My dining companion and our newest doctor of philosophy entertained the twenty or so people who showed up, and I catered in the background.

This was a by the book deviled egg recipe, no fancy flourishes, just straight to business. First you hard boil a bunch of eggs, cool them, peel them, and halve them lengthwise, then you remove the yolks mash them up with mayo, Dijon, and cayenne, and pipe them back into the waiting egg whites. You may then garnish with smoked paprika and fresh chives.

Since this was a last minute hors d’oeuvre, I decided to skip the pretty star tip, and just pipe them with a ziplock minus a corner. Chives are lovely with deviled eggs, but the vegetable drawer had run dry, so no chives for you. All in all these were some pretty messy slapdash deviled eggs on my part, but they were devoured before anyone had a chance to notice. As is almost always the case with deviled eggs, they didn’t garner much praise, but they disappeared. If I’d asked people to tell me what they ate, they’d probably have forgotten to mention the eggs, but there was a peculiarly disappointed look that crossed the faces of our guests when they scanned the table and found the tray empty.

Are deviled eggs hopelessly outdated? probably, but who cares? They’re awesome, and I know I’m pleased to see a plate of these on a buffet table. The recipe was very standard, but totally solid. It’s very comforting to know that with a dozen eggs and a jar of mayonnaise I can put out a universal crowd pleaser with only slightly more effort than making an egg salad sandwich.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

143. Fried Oysters Rémoulade p.329


The instructions for the oyster’s don’t appear online, but the rémoualde is the same one used in this recipe.

I tried a fried oyster for the first time about six months ago at a very posh restaurant. It was brought out as an unexpected treat between courses, and served with a fiery salsa. It had a crackling exterior that gave way with a burst of the the ocean, and revealed a delicately chewy, and still mostly raw oyster. We ate some wonderful food that night, but I think the impromptu oyster was my favourite part. I was hoping to match that experience with this recipe. In then end I didn’t quite succeed, but it’s a strong base for further experimentation.

For this recipe shucked oysters are dredged in a mixture of milk and egg, then coated with crushed saltine crackers. The oysters are deep fried for a couple of minutes, and served on their shells and topped with a rémoulade. The rémoulade is a simple mixture of mayonnaise, mustard, tomato paste, minced shallot, dill pickles, and scallion, with a dash of Worchestershire sauce, old bay seasoning, minced parsley, sugar, red wine vinegar, and a pinch of cayenne.

The rémoulade is absolutely excellent, and I’ll hear no word against it. It draws in a broad spectrum of ingredients, and covers its bases. It’s creamy, acidic, herbaceous, arromatic, and just a little bit spicy. It would be an ideal counterpoint to many simply flavoured seafood dishes. The use of Old Bay seasoning was intriguing. The Book doesn’t often call for prepared spices, particularly not a proprietary blend like Old Bay. I’d never tried the stuff before, and never seen it in stores here. Alton Brown is apparently in love with it, and I’d been interested to find out what the fuss was about. I was lucky to be cooking at my parent’s place, as it turned out my mother had a container in her pantry. Speculating on how old it was, would have been looking a gift horse in the mouth. I wasn’t blown away by Old Bay, but it certainly wasn’t bad. I was expecting it to be like those flavoured salts Food Network stars like to sell, but it seems to be more of an herb and spice blend. It was a worthwhile experience, but I’m not sure I’ll add it as a pantry staple.

The oysters in this recipe had some problems. I heated the oil to 375, and began the frying process. The recipe says they should cook for one-and-a-half to two minutes, but after about 45 seconds they were getting quite dark. By the time I got the oysters out they were much closer to mahogany than golden. The previous oyster recipe called for large oysters, so it was my fault when they overcooked, this one just calls for oysters in general. We have no way of knowing what size of oysters they tested this recipe on, but they must have been larger than mine. When there’s such wild variation in the sizes and cooking times of oysters, it’s pretty bad form not to give some indication of how that will affect the recipe. My oysters came out overcooked on the outside, which wasn’t a big deal, but they were cooked all the way through and mostly dried out on the inside. The fine texture of the oyster was lost, and replaced by chewiness. They still had good flavour, and the coating was nicely crisp. I’d certainly try oysters like this again, but I’d be sure to get them out of the oil significantly earlier.

These would work well at a cocktail party, or as a first course. The book suggests that they could be a main course as well, but I think they were a bit too rich to make a meal of. This recipe had its problems, but overall they were very enjoyable. With a little tweaking of the oysters and cooking time I think they could have been fantastic.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

142. Oysters Rockefeller p.52


This recipe from Epicurious is similar to The Book’s version, but the linked recipe has slightly different proportions, and makes twice as much topping. I didn’t read the recipe very thoroughly, and used little Malpeque oysters for the recipe, instead of the “large” oysters the recipe called for, so I had more than enough topping.

We used to get Oysters Rockefeller about once a year as children. My parents would pick up a case of Oysters for themselves, or get a few cases and invite friends over for an oyster party. Us kids were totally grossed out by raw oysters, and dared one another to try slurping them. Inevitably one of us would take the bet, and then gag on the slippery salty oyster, and spit it into the sink. My parents quickly realized this game was a waste of precious oysters, and started making Oysters Rockefeller for us, which we devoured. As I grew up I came around on the raw oyster, and ended up preferring them raw with just a little squeeze of lemon juice, or a dash of hot sauce.

During my late teens and early twenties I was a volunteer firefighter, and our department had an oyster and beer bash every fall. Mostly people came to the party to shuck and slurp raw oysters at long tables all night long, but we prepared oyster soup and oysters Rockefeller too. I would spend the afternoon shucking oysters and saving the prettiest shells. I never got the department’s recipe, but they did an especially fine version of the oyster Rockefeller. Even though I prefer my oysters without adulterations, I certainly wouldn’t say no to one.

Unfortunately this recipe doesn’t live up to either my Mother’s or the department’s version. Using the wrong oysters threw the whole recipe out of whack, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. You start by making a mixture of chopped Boston lettuce, baby spinach, scallions, parsley, celery, garlic, and bread crumbs. You then wilt this mixture in a skillet with butter, and add Pernod, anchovy paste, cayenne, salt, and pepper. The mixture is allowed to cool, while you crisp and crumble some bacon. You then add an oyster and some of it’s liquor to a cleaned oyster shell, top with some of the vegetable mixture, bacon, and more bread crumbs. The oysters then get stabilized on a bed of salt crystals, and go into a 450 oven for 16 – 18 minutes.

My main criticism of the recipe is that there were way too many bread crumbs. The crumbs soaked up all of the oyster liquor, and overwhelmed the oysters with their sandy texture. Even if I’d used gigantic Pacific oysters that would have been a problem. Using the smaller oysters also meant that they were overcooked and dry by the time the the tops were browned. Unfortunately my little oysters got completely lost under a mountain of spinach and bread crumbs. I could almost detect a hint of the sea in this dish, and I thought I found the oyster in a couple of them, but it could have been a clump of bread crumbs. Given the excess of topping, I was surprised at the lack of bacon, you could easily have doubled it without going overboard.

Done right, oysters Rockefeller have a just barely set oyster, with a good deal of liquor left at the bottom, and a flavourful crunchy topping. They can compliment and accentuate the oyster, leaving it as the star of the show. My oysters were, dry, didn’t taste like oysters, and didn’t even try to compensate with bacon. It’s hard to give the recipe a fair rating, because I messed things up. I’m sure that the topping had too little bacon, and too many bread crumbs, I would have liked the anise flavour of the Pernod to come through a little more clearly as well. My final product didn’t taste too bad, but I would have saved an hour, and enjoyed myself more if I’d just slurped the oysters raw.

Categories
Soups The Book

126. Mexican Corn Soup p.87


There’s no online recipe for this one.

I just don’t know about summertime soups. The Book has dozens of cold soups based on fresh sweet fruit and vegetables. I can’t say that they appeal to me very much. In part it’s the dissonance of cold soup that bugs me, but I’m not even a huge fan of hot soups. When I ask myself what I feel like eating, the answer is almost never soup, especially not in August. For a cold soup, this was fine, but I won’t go out of my way to make it again.

You start by sweating garlic, onion, jalapeños, carrot, and celery with cumin, coriander, salt and pepper. Then stock, water, and both corn kernels and cobs are added and simmered. The cobs are discarded, and the soup is puréed in the blender. Once the soup has cooled to room temperature, some whole cooked corn kernels are stirred in along with roasted red bell peppers, cilantro, and cayenne.

A significant amount of effort went into building flavours for this soup, and they were well balanced and subtle, but they faded to the background almost instantly. I picked up the ingredients for this recipe a few days before I got around to making it, and by then the dew-kissed market-fresh corn I’d chosen wasn’t looking as lively as I would have liked. If I’d had really stellar corn maybe the other flavourings’ camouflage act would have been a positive, and I’d be going on about them not getting in the way of the corn ambrosia. As it was my corn could have used a bit of help.

I had leftovers of this soup for a few days, and it was much better on day three than in the beginning. A footnote to the recipe suggests that you can make it up to a day in advance, but I’d ignore that and give it at least two days to come together. We at this soup as our main course with a chunk of baguette and a simple salad. The soup just wasn’t interesting enough to anchor a meal. It might work as a first course, or better yet as an appetizer soup shooter. Those first couple of bites were good, so why not just stop there?

There wasn’t anything spectacular about the soup, but it wasn’t bad either. I used all the leftovers for lunches, instead of letting it moulder in the back of the fridge. It was solidly average. If I made it again I’d add more jalapeño and less cayenne. More of the jalapeño’s fruity complexity would have been welcome, instead of the straightforward cayenne heat. Stirring in a bit of sriracha chili sauce on day two or three improved matters.

Every summer I feel guilty about not eating enough amazing Quebec corn, especially when you can get a dozen ears for a dollar. Making corn soup seems like a great way to use up that summer bounty when you can’t face another ear of corn on the cob. Unfortunately I forget that I’m replacing the problem of the twelve ears of corn staring at me from the vegetable drawer, with five liters of left-over soup.

Categories
Poultry The Book

110. Moroccan-Style Roast Cornish Hens with Vegetables p.392

The recipe

This was my first experiment with Cornish hens, and I think I’m in love. I watched an episode of Freaks and Geeks the other night. In one scene the mother roasts Cornish hens, and serves them to her skeptical family, who use the hens as puppets for a dance routine, and complain that they want normal food, like chicken. Two things, 1) Cornish hens are chickens, and 2) that show was awesome, it really bugged me when they canceled it. That episode was poking fun at the status of little birds as icons of the ’70’s and 80’s food revolution, for both good and ill. My dining companion’s mother talks about fancy dinner parties in the early 80’s where the women wore long gloves, and were asked to pick apart quail with a knife and fork. She remembers going home hungry a lot. Game birds are often considered exotic or fancy food, but at least for Cornish hens, they’re just conveniently sized chickens.

This dish emphasized how casual and delicious a Cornish hen can be. You start by making a spice mixture of caraway, salt, garlic, honey, lemon juice, olive oil, paprika, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, cayenne, and pepper. Then you cube zucchini, turnips, red peppers, butternut squash, and onions, toss them in with half the spice mix, chopped tomatoes, and chicken stock. You then take the backbones out of the hens and halve them, toss them in the spice mix, and lay them in a roasting pan on top of the vegetables. The whole thing goes into a 425 oven covered in foil for an hour, then uncovered for the last half hour to let the birds brown up.

There were a lot of ingredients to the dish, but most of them were in the cupboard. There was a good deal of prep work to be done, particularly taking a rock-hard butternut squash apart, and peeling turnip, but nothing too complicated. The results were absolutely fantastic. The use of smaller Cornish hens makes this dish possible. A full sized chicken might not get cooked through before the veg turned to mush, but with little birds everything comes out together. The juices drip off the birds and flavour the vegetables, which in turn perfume the hens.

I’ve been pretty harsh to the middle eastern / north African dishes I’ve made thus far. I just can’t get behind sweetened meat dishes. This one however, had dollop of honey, carefully balanced with lots of spice and some more harshly flavoured vegetables like the turnips. The little sweet note of honey was much appreciated, it was present but not too assertive.

This dish was just delicious, I couldn’t get enough of it. I couldn’t wait for lunch time, so I had some left-overs for breakfast. The Hens were perfectly roasted with an amazingly crisp skin and juicy tender inside. They were dense and meaty, with a deep chicken flavour. The vegetables roasted wonderfully, and the spice mix was an excellent compliment to all the flavours in this dish. I’d happily make this again and again. Moroccan-style roast Cornish hens with vegetables, you’ve earned your five mushroom rating.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

88. Jicama and Cucumber Chili Spears p.27


The recipe

Jicama isn’t the easiest thing to find in Montreal. I went to every grocery store, fruiterie, and Latin themed shop I could think of. In the end I tracked one down at a Mexican grocery store about a block from my place. I had no idea it was there. For all the effort that went into finding it, I wasn’t overly impressed. Jicama looks cool, kind of like a gigantic radish, but I didn’t like the flavour much. It’s a bit sweet, but also very raw potato starchy. It left me with an unpleasant tingling in the back of my throat and a slightly numb tongue. I’ve never had jicama before, and I don’t know anything about it. Perhaps I ate it under-ripe? Or maybe that’s just what jicama tastes like? My dining companion has tried it, and says she preferred it cut up into little matchsticks tossed into a salad. The big spears were a bit overwhelming. I remember Harold on the first season of Top Chef was obsessed with the stuff, so I was happy to try it, even if I don’t see what he was going on about.

I find it hard to rate this recipe, because it’s principal ingredient is so unfamiliar. Luckily this dish also included cucumber spears tossed in lime juice, chili powder, cayenne, and salt. I thought this treatment worked pretty well for the cucumber, and made them a fairly addictive little snack. It did little to improve the jicama in my mind.

I appreciate the simplicity of this dish, the lime, chili powder, cayenne, salt dressing packed a big flavorful punch, and the dish can be put together i well under 10 minutes. I think I’d put the cucumber spears out at a summer garden party, but I’d drop the jicama.