Tag: lime juice

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

200. Roast Pork Shoulder Cubano: Puerco Asado p.477


The recipe

Very few things in life are as good, or as simple as roast pork. The bachelor party tradition among my group of friends is to spit-roast a pig over charcoal. We recently went in on a roaster and put it through it’s paces before my wedding. Spending the afternoon hanging out and watching the pig spin is as near a perfect Saturday as I can imagine. The beauty of roasting pork is that you really don’t have to do much of anything to it, you just have to be very patient and let it get there in it’s own time. Even if you only rub it with salt, it will be fantastic. A few well chosen herbs and spices can make it even better, but you don’t want to overwhelm the awesome goodness that is roast pork. This recipe comes pretty close to replicating what I love about a whole rotisserie pig. If you don’t happen to have a giant roasting pit, or twenty friends to help you eat a whole pig, an oven roasted pork shoulder is a good way to go.

In this recipe starts with an 8 lb skin on picnic shoulder. The higher end grocery stores in my neighbourhood never carry these (one of them doesn’t carry any part of a pig or cow forward of the tenderloin), but they’re a staple at the more budget minded stores. At a dollar a pound, I can’t afford not to cook with pork shoulder. You start by stabbing 1 inch incisions in the skin with a very very sharp knife. This is by far the hardest part of the recipe, but it’s a nice way to get some aggression out. You then fill these incisions with a mixture of lime juice, garlic, salt, oregano, and cumin. More of the mixture gets rubbed onto the meat not covered with skin. The pork goes into the oven, with lime juice drizzled around it. The recipe asks for a roasting pan, but I used a dutch oven, which worked out just fine. After 30 minutes water and vinegar are added to the pan, and it’s left to roast covered for two hours, basting halfway through, and making sure not to get the precious cracklings wet. You then separate the skin from the meat, and roast uncovered for another hour and a half, basting under the skin every 20 minutes. When the skin is crackly and crisp you remove the roast and let it stand for 20 minutes, then carve. It’s served with the defatted pan juices, and cracklings.

The Good: This tastes absolutely fantastic. The meat is rich and succulent, mildly flavoured by the spices, but not so much as to distract you from the porcine bullet to the taste centers of your brain. The cracklings were out of this world. They turned a perfect mahogany, and with an extra sprinkle of salt became the perfect indulgence. Other than getting through the pig skin, the recipe was dead simple, used very easy to find ingredients, and even the poorest students can afford to make it.

The Bad: Preparing this can be a little dangerous. If you don’t have wickedly sharp knives, they’re likely to turn on you when trying to get through the skin. I nearly cut myself. A double edged knife, dagger, shiv, or any other type of stabbing weapon would probably be a lot safer. This recipe also takes quite a long time (count on five hours from start to finish), and sitting around the oven drinking beer has less appeal than the hypnotic rotation of a pig on the spit. That said, there’s very little intervention needed on your part. Making this again I would try to slice it. It kind of fell apart and came away in chunks. It’s basically pulled pork, so why not pull it? Next time I’ll pull the meat, and toss it with a little of the pan juices.

The Verdict: Eight dollars resulted in a fantastic dinner, and out of this world sandwiches for two for most of a week. Beat that. There are amazing things that can be done with pork shoulder, but a lot of them require special equipment, or more intervention on your part than this dish. If you do have a charcoal grill, this dish would probably be even better with long slow offset cooking, regular basting, and some smoke. But turning on the oven sure is a lot simpler, and nearly as delicious.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

193. Beets with Lime Butter p.523


The recipe

This was a very simple, and highly effective preparation for beets. My dining companion is mildly obsessed with beets, and we certainly eat more of them than the average couple. We tend to stick to Ukrainian, or Eastern European preparations, or pair them with goat cheese in salads. This week a friend brought an Egyptian preparation of beets in Mediterranean yogurt to a pot luck which was just delicious. We’d never considered trying this recipe’s method before, but I think we will again. The beets are shredded, simply sautéed in butter with lime zest, then tossed with a little more butter, lime juice, salt, and pepper, and served with chopped scallions.

The Good: This was remarkably simple, and unexpected. Beets don’t make me think of limes. Beets and some type of acid makes perfect sense, but limes have got such a particular tropical floral scent that I’d just never considered them working with beets. In the end the sweetness of the limes and of the beets played very well off each other. There was just enough butter to make this dish cravable, but it remained quite light, and although my picture doesn’t really do it justice it was a very striking dish. I was very pleased that this took all of fifteen minutes to make.

The Bad: I have nothing bad to say about the final dish. It was simple, satisfying, and very tasty. The only downside to the preparation is that grated beets tend to stain. Beet juice comes off counter and floors nicely, but clothes can be a bit of a problem. I would also recommend using a plastic cutting board. It’s actually a good check to see if your cutting board is getting too old and scarred, the beet juice will rinse right off the surface, but any deep groves will be stained purple.

The Verdict: We’re fond of beets and serve them to all comers at our house. We’ve had several guests who were kind of tentative about beet eating when they arrived, but most of them have become converts. If beets aren’t one of your pantry staples this is a nice introduction. I thought it was a bright, fresh, and wholesome, take on one of our favourite vegetables.

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
Poultry The Book

121. Duck Breasts with Orange Ancho Chile Sauce p.396


The recipe

This recipe was a show stopper. It’s the only recipe for duck breast in the book, and that’s a real shame. Magret de canard is one of the staples of the Québécois culinary scene, a distinctive take on the seared duck breast is de rigueur for any restaurant interested in cuisine de terroir. Fusion may have been the dining buzz-word of the 90’s, but it’s certainly alive and well. It would seem that every third restaurant to open in the city has a _________ inspired menu playing on Québécois classics, most likely in tiny, tapas style portions. This Mexican influenced magret would fit in beautifully.

The duck breast is seasoned with salt and pepper, and simply seared. The skin renders enough fat that oil isn’t necessary. The sauce is made with a purée of Ancho chiles, and garlic which is added to a caramel of orange and lime juices, then finished with butter. The sauce had a lovely balance of sweet, acid, and heat, which complimented the powerful flavour of the duck. Duck does wonderfully with a slightly sweet sauce, and the orange caramel fit the bill, the rounded smoky Ancho flavour tempered the sweetness and played up the depth and body of the duck.

Lots of people think they don’t like duck, and avoid it, or have only ever encountered it in Chinese preparations. A simply seared duck breast might be a revelation for them. My dining companion’s mother told us over dinner about her childhood experiences of eating duck. Apparently her family got it’s duck from local hunters, and they risked a mouthfull of buckshot with every bite. She recalls that it was too gamy and intense to be enjoyable, so she avoided it for the next twenty years, but these days she’s a fan. The duck we get today is raised on farms much like chickens, and the flavour appears to have mellowed. People deplore the fact that pork doesn’t taste like pork anymore, but no one complains that duck has lost its muskiness. I’ve never had duck from a hunter, but I’d like to compare some time.

Looking at that beautifully pink duck breast is making my mouth water. It occurs to me though, that duck is the only poultry you’d ever consider cooking to less than well done. A medium-rare chicken breast brings on gasps of revusion, not delight. Duck really does taste best when pink though.

If you’ve never tried a magret de canard I absolutely encourage you to, and the sauce The Book has paired with this one is a wonderful compliment. I loved that the sauce showed off everything I enjoy about duck breast, without trying to show it up. Duck Breasts with Orange Ancho Chile Sauce you’ve earned your five mushroom rating.

Categories
Poultry The Book

114. Foolproof Grilled Chicken p.363


The recipe

The blurb before the recipe says that the secret to perfect grilled chicken is to brine it then toss it in a vinaigrette once it’s done. I’ve never really had a problem with my non-brined, non-dressed grilled chicken, but this version does have its charms. Brining makes things taste good by saturating them with salt, sugar, and extra liquid. They remain moist and get the flavour enhancing goodness of salt all the way through the meat. Unfortunately that means brined dishes are really salty. If it’s done right it doesn’t taste all that salty at the time, but I inevitably wake up parched in the night after a dish like this.

We made this dish for some friends we were visiting. They live near San Francisco, which means I got to have my first Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s experiences. Other than amazingly priced wine I didn’t really get what the big deal about TJs was, Whole Foods really was worth they hype though. On the one hand it’s just like every other megalomart, only expensive. On the other good quality organic stuff was everywhere. We just don’t have an equivalent in Montreal, and one opening here would be a big deal for me. We’re taking a mini-break and visiting different friends in Brooklyn this weekend, I’m anxious to get back to a Whole Foods and do a little exploring. Incidentally that means I’ll be away tomorrow through Sunday, so no updates ’till Monday.

I picked up the chicken and herbs for this dish at Whole Foods, and most of the rest of the ingredients for dinner from a cute farmer’s market in Palo Alto. I brined the chicken for three hours instead of the recommended six. I also misread the recipe and added a bunch of lime juice to the brining liquid, it didn’t seem to affect anything, so no harm done. I then made a Thai style vinaigrette of lime juice, garlic, cilantro, mint, red pepper flakes, salt, and oil. I left out the two tablespoons of fish sauce, which the recipe promises won’t make the dish taste in the least fishy. My dining companion’s superpower is detecting fermented fish at even the lowest concentrations, so I decided not to include it.

The Book offers extravagantly detailed instructions on how to grill the chicken. It comes down to searing it for a few minutes, then moving it to indirect heat and letting it cook slowly until it’s done. The breasts will take longer than the leg pieces. Once the chicken is done you remove it and toss it in the vinaigrette. You then put halved limes cut side down over the hottest part of the grill for a few minutes to develop some grill lines. I’m not sure that the grilling of the limes served any purpose, but they did look cool. You can imagine that heating them makes them easier to juice, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a gimmick.

This method did produce a very fine grilled chicken, I’m not sure it was worth the extra effort though. The vinaigrette worked wonderfully, and I’d be happy to try it again as well as the alternate Mediterranean vinaigrette it gives as an option. The brining enhanced the flavour of the chicken, but it really was quite salty. I have a hard time deciding how much the brine actually improved the chicken, because I rarely buy organic, which is naturally more flavourful. I was a very poor scientist to vary both my ingredients and methods at the same time, I’ll need to do some control experiments to figure this out.

I’ve never found grilling chicken to be all that error prone or difficult, so I think I’ll skip the brining step in future. The vinaigrette added nice acidity, and aromatics to the chicken. It was simple to prepare and fragrant, a definite keeper. I liked serving grilled limes with the chicken, they were fun, looked cool, and I liked being given the option of adding as much or as little acidity as I’d like. This was a fairly good grilled chicken recipe, but I don’t think I’ll give up my home-brewed technique.

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.

Categories
Soups The Book

87. Tortilla Soup with Crisp Tortillas and Avocado Relish p.95

The recipe

This soup was a revelation for me. A few days ago I mentioned that I was falling for dried chiles this year. This dish was phase one of the seduction. In this recipe a pretty standard soup base (stock water, onion, tomato, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper) is transfigured into one of the more delicious things I’ve ever tasted with the addition of two ancho chiles, and two guajillos. The soup becomes rich and thick when corn toritllas are fried crisp, and crumbled into the soup. This dish would be delicious if you stopped here, but it gets so much better with the addition of the avocado relish. This relish is a much better guacamole than The Book’s official guacamole recipe, and it compliments the soup perfectly. Everything that is deep sultry and comforting and warm in the soup is bright, clean, shining and crisp in the relish. The soup has a satisfyingly hearty texture, which is mirrored in the relish. A few fried tortilla strips added just before serving give a nice crunchy counterpoint.

The recipe suggests that you fry your own corn tortillas, but as the tortilla place in my neighborhood does this on site I just bought a bag of their fresh made tortilla strips, and saved myself the trouble.

This recipe came together easily, and was completely delicious. I thought the final presentation was very attractive, and the dish just made me happy. This soup absolutely earned its five mushroom rating.