The sincerest form of flattery: the "8 spice," reverse-engineered

The eight spices in the most whole, dry form I had on hand. One of a handful of photographic clues I left for myself  for reverse-engineering a popular cook's published recipe for an 8-spice mixture.

Home cooks have cooked from cookbooks for centuries. Modern cooks also cook from recipes found on the internet. I've been delighted and let down by recipes from both sources. There's a cookbook I still own with a recipe in it so bad that I consider the book to contain a kind of evil by its inclusion.

But I don't generally just hang on to cookbooks to prevent their evil from spreading further into the world. A problem I have with my hard media is that I am a generous, yet forgetful, evangelist. I loan out my favorites and then when I try to loan one out again, find it has already been loaned out, I do not recall to whom. And since it's been so long, I assume, since I've forgotten, I probably won't get it back and, until I buy another copy, will have to live without whatever recipe is in it that I was such a fan of that I loaned out the source.

Such was the case of a cookbook by Ming Tsai that Kevin got through one of those cookbook-a-month deals (in hardcover, even). I can't find it, and so it's either misfiled in the stacks, or I've loaned it out to somebody. Until it resurfaces, I will have to go on recreating from memory the two recipes I really liked out of it, one of which is this one.

I remember enough clues of Ming Tsai's 8-spice that I have confidently reverse engineered it at least twice since losing his cookbook, each time forgetting in my hubris to write down the secret eight. One clue was that five of the spices are in traditional Chinese five spice. I knew that I included salt and pepper, but that they were not counted toward the eight. And I remembered that two are cumin and coriander, a complementary pair of the earthy and the flowery that I associate with Indian curries. But what was the eighth spice?

I turned to the photographic clues I've left myself. Knowing that I'd want to blog about this recipe someday, and that I would likely forget to write down the eight spices, I took pictures. I took the picture above in March, 2011, and the one below, that I took in August, 2011, is very probably based on the one taken in March. I have been using one or the other of them as a "recipe" ever since.

You see that I like a challenge, because while I can see the seeds, I can't see the labels on any but the fennel.

I can never remember what the five in Chinese five spice are, but it's the kind of fact I can Google. They are, according to Wikipedia, today, anyway: star anise, cloves, Chinese cinnamon (meaning, not Chinese cassia, which most Americans accept as "culinary cinnamon," and which I probably have got here as well), Sichuan pepper, and fennel seeds. I can see from the pictures that I didn't use star anise either time I took photos, but substituted regular, tiny anise seed. However, I can remember making this with star anise, the first time I made it. On the other hand, I'm sure I've never had Sichuan pepper in the house, so I must have substituted black peppercorn for this spice every time. Perhaps Tsai made this substitution in his original, or else I have always made it.

Studying both photos, I see the same eight spices: cinnamon, fennel, cloves, anise (four out of the Chinese five spice), plus cumin, cardamom, coriander, and ginger. Salt and pepper (the fifth Chinese spice) are extra, resulting in a nine ingredient spice mixture, plus salt, in my recipe for 8-spice. Good thing I had photos, because that book is long gone, and Tsai's eight spice recipe is not on the internet.

Which left proportions to figure out. When I first made this, I sniffed and eyeballed and weighed spices in my hand, and combined this with my experience of spice ratios in recipes. Starting with a teaspoon, ground, as my basic unit, I cut back on cloves and cardamom, and amped up the cumin to give it more depth. I like a lot of ginger, so when I made braised lamb shanks using this spice blend yesterday, I cooked them in a mixture of softened onion, garlic, and fresh ginger with wine and lamb stock. I was trying to approximate a recipe in which I might have used tomato instead of wine, but again, it was a case of cooking without a recipe and then not so much documenting the results as being proud of them.

Another picture from the November photo shoot, reminding me that 8-spiced braised lamb shanks are delicious.

A note on salt in spice rubs: I don't usually blend the salt into my spice blends when I'm saving them for future use, but when I'm making them up to season a dish I'm going to cook, I mix in salt. To do this, I figure out how much spice blend I'll use on my dish, separate that out into a bowl, and then mix salt into it sufficient for the quantity of food I'm seasoning. Then, I use all of that salted spice blend to ensure the dish gets salted enough. This is especially helpful when I'm seasoning something I want well salted from the start, like meat or pulses.

I had had good results winging it with these approximations. There's a forgiving tradition of mixing together good quality spices to achieve deep flavor, and using that blend on various dishes as a signature flavor, like Emeril's "essence," various curries, and ras el hanout. My favorite use for this 8-spice blend is as a rub on lamb before braising. It is sweetly aromatic and a good counterpoint to strong meat.

Justin's Amnesiac Eight Spice Blend

Half a cinnamon stick, or 1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 T fennel seed
7-8 whole cloves, or 1/4 tsp ground cloves
One whole star anise, or 2 tsp whole anise seed, or 1 tsp ground anise
2 T cumin seed, or 2 tsp ground cumin
1 cardamom pod, or 1/4 tsp ground cardamom
1 T coriander seed, or 1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp dried ground ginger
2 tsp black peppercorns, or 1/2 tsp ground black pepper

Grind any whole spices you are using in a mortar or a small electric coffee grinder. Then, mix all ground dry spices together. You can store this mixture for future use.

To use the spice blend as a dry rub on meat, mix it with salt (see note above about salt) and rub it liberally on  raw meat. Allow to rest before cooking. The spice blend is also good mixed into sauces, cooked with onions and garlic into pulse dishes, and sprinkled over sweet and starchy cooked vegetables.

Soup for breakfast

Do you make your own soup? If not you, who makes your soup?

The summer farm share season is over. I’ve filled one of our freezers with baggies of blanched kale, green beans, sugar snap peas, skinned and seeded tomatoes, and tomato sauce. Kevin roasted pans of eggplant slices and froze them. Two of the four animals we’ve arranged to receive all or part of this winter have arrived and are in there, too.

I’ve had decreasing interest in cooking. It’s hard to explain. My interests have shifted. At the same time, Kevin is showing an increased interest in the cooking, and has been doing more of it. He’s fussier than I am and I am willing to let him take over. But now I’ve bumped against the bottom. This morning, I burned the soup he prepared this morning, warming it up to eat. I should have set a timer, because when I’m working it’s hard to get my attention from meat space, and forgot about it long enough for it to anneal itself to the bottom of the pot. When I’m so distracted from food and cooking that all I can get it up to do is warm (burn) soup and grill a sandwich once a day, that’s as far as I get. To let all of the shopping, farm share pickups, and cooking go, not even to wash the dishes afterward, is too far. It means I’m depressed. I’m just lucky that I have people who love me who will cook for me when this is the case.

If your soup comes out of a can, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be full of poisonous crap that you would never knowingly put into soup that you are feeding someone to make them well. It’s probably made from conventional produce, including the Dirty Dozen, so it’s full of pesticides. It’s got more salt, MSG, and “natural flavors” than anything you’d cook yourself.

Soup cans leach dangerously high levels of the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A, or BPA into the food. This synthetic, estrogen-like substance has been linked to a host of health problems, and a JAMA published study found that eating a can of soup a day for a week increased blood levels of BPA by more than 1,000 percent.

If it contains animal products, it’s very likely made from animals fed genetically modified grain, antibiotics and growth hormones. Yet the soup base is clearly not a bone stock, or when you opened a can of soup, it would be very thick and gelatinous, not a thin, pourable liquid, as is generally the case. Bone stock is full of minerals and protein from collagen, both good for you and absent from canned soup. Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist, makes videos showing you how to make different kinds of stocks, and what a properly gelled stock looks like. Here’s my own all-purpose stock post that includes variations for any kind of bone or fish stock, and vegan roasted vegetable stock.

Lately, Kevin makes me soup for breakfast. He started eating it about a year ago, when he made some changes to his diet. At first, I wasn’t interested in eating soup first thing in the morning, but it’s slowly grown on me. At first it was just weekends. Near the end, I was asking him to make smoothies, gluten-free pancakes, and chicken soup for breakfast on weekends: the “full breakfast.” Now we make our own smoothies (they taste best when perfectly fresh) and Kevin makes soup each morning and leaves half for me. The smoothie is frozen fruit---strawberries, blueberries, bananas---yogurt, and whole milk, blended. Soup is a fresh preparation of meat and vegetables with miso and kimchi. Sometimes he previously baked chicken thighs, or the occasional bit of pork, but recently it’s beef: something from the round, or some loin flap meat. Sometimes he’ll add minced pork fat, if the meat is lean. The vegetables usually include bell pepper and zucchini, in the summer, but he’s getting more flexible. Last winter I was buying bell peppers grown halfway around the world, and not feeling great about that, but ambivalent, because Kevin was so happily cooking his own food after years of letting me do all of the food preparation. He’ll still buy a pepper most weeks, and sometimes a quart of mushrooms, but most of the vegetables are from our winter share: turnips, carrots, parsnips, radishes (watermelon and daikon), rutabagas, sweet potatoes, delicata and butternut squashes.

Now, he’s taken on just about all the weekend cooking as well as our breakfasts, and because we share the responsibilities for making fresh food, I find our values are more in alignment around how we spend our time and money on what we eat. He’s oriented toward being economical and thrifty in following the seasons and our farm share, like I am, and takes pride in using what’s in the fridge to best effect. While I’m the king of the big batch, he is good at making something from a little of this and a little of that. Soup is right in the middle of that wheelhouse.

Some people call this “garbage soup” when they make soup from leftovers. We call it putting a cap on the cost of food, and valuing what we have. We say to each other, fairly often, that we are very lucky: we get to eat some of the best food we can even imagine. We eat far better than either of us did in childhood, maybe better than anyone we know. It’s definitely exactly what we choose.

Kevin didn’t used to like soup much. I don’t know what has caused the change: some coming together of several different ways in which he could suddenly perceive what he wanted, and feel confident in pursuing it. I know part of my adoption of breakfast soup has been phasing out coffee, and other things that upset my stomach. Soup, finished with another generous helping of kimchi, is flavorful, comforting, not acidic at all, and not too filling or daunting to digest.

And my husband makes it for me, so it’s full of love.

Roast vegetable lasagna

Lasagna: never the same twice

This is the lasagna of dreams: packed full of hearty and wholesome ingredients, it's a meal in itself. Not only does it make use of the late September harvest, it's a treat and a celebration. Lasagna's not just what's for dinner: the making of lasagna is an event.

How many people have ever walked into their kitchen and decided to make a lasagna without the benefit of a recipe? If you stick to the dense ingredients---cheese, meat, noodles---you'll probably do just fine. But then someone decides that lasagna's too indulgent and it needs some vegetables to redeem it. Crunchy, raw, watery, bland vegetables, stacked against the rich and tender joys of lasagna noodles, velvety sauce, and thick, molten mozzarella, make it look like a round of Good Cop, Bad Cop. It doesn't have to be like this. Roasted vegetables are a sought after delicacy, and a fine suitor for the layered marriage that is lasagna.

Just like when you wing it, I use no recipe. This is not a recipe for lasagna. This is a set of guidelines for making one kind of lasagna: the kind with lots of vegetables, meat, and cheese in it that eats like a meal.

The number one rule that new lasagna cooks don't seem to grasp is this: The lasagna doesn't cook your fillings for you. This seems so unfair. After all, you're going to bake the lasagna after you assemble it. Why can't you kill three or four birds with one stone?

There's no one good answer. It's a lot of answers, really, involving browning and moisture levels. If you're curious, get a subscription to Cooks' Illustrated, or watch some Alton Brown. The short answer is, meat and zucchini and spinach and onions won't all cook in the different ways they need to to taste their best, if you try to make them all do it from within the stuffy confines of a foil-wrapped lasagna. It's like trying to wash the bedding by taking all the layers off at once, from mattress cover to duvet, and throwing it all into the washing machine on High, only worse, because once you've made this bed, you have to eat it.

I made a very successful lasagna recently, using the abundance of our farm share: I managed to squeeze two large eggplants, a huge zucchini, and a bunch of other vegetables, including roasted tomatoes, into this lasagna. It came out creamy, dense but not heavy because so much of it is made of low-octane vegetables, and perfectly seasoned.

The way to ensure it all comes out is to make sure each layer is good before you assemble it. I figured out how to do it with as few pans as possible.

I start by preparing vegetables for roasting, following my usual instructions: don't fill the pan too full,  and expect it to take at least an hour to roast a big, full pan of vegetables at 350 degrees, tossing them every 20 minutes. I use a very large iron roasting pan that's about twice the size of the 9"x13" Pyrex pan I ultimately make a lasagna in, and filling it with a couple inches of cubed vegetables yields about the right amount for a lasagna. I started the pan out with eggplant and zucchini, and after 40 minutes added onions and tomatoes.

Roast the vegetables in small cubes---about 1/2-3/4"---for the maximum amount of surface available for roasting, quicker roasting time, and so the roasted vegetables will be tender, not crisp, and won't pull away from the lasagna when you're slicing it later. You want the texture to be all very similar throughout the lasagna: soft and dense, not crunchy or chewy.

While the vegetables are beginning to roast, brown the meat, if you're using it. I like to use about a pound each of ground beef and loose hot Italian sausage. Brown them together and drain it, reserving the fat drippings to saute onion and garlic in, or to toss with the roasting vegetables.

If you want to use a leafy green vegetable in your lasagna, chop it small, and steam or saute it until it wilts. Some other tender vegetables might be sauteed instead of roasted, such as white mushrooms and leeks. As with the roasted vegetables, make sure that it's chopped into small enough pieces that you won't be pulling it out of the lasagna when you slice or bite into it with the fork.

Make or procure a sauce. Traditional is a marinara or ragu.

When the vegetables are all roasted, they will no longer be watery. Taste for salt. If they're bland, flavor them up with a splash of balsamic vinegar, salt, grated parmesan cheese, and/or a handful of fresh, minced herbs: oregano, basil, and parsley are all good.

If you're using meat or greens, reserve half a cup of your tomato sauce and then blend the meat and/or greens into the rest. Taste that and adjust, especially for salt.

You can brown the meat separately, or to save a couple of steps and pots, do this: Break up the meat, if you're using it, and scatter it over the vegetables, and put it back in the oven to roast together for ten more minutes until the meat is well browned. You can also add the tomato sauce and greens to the roasting pan and stir it up, or mix the sauce and greens together as a separate layer.

The only ingredients I haven't yet addressed are the cheese and the pasta, which to some people, are the only components of lasagna that matter.  I think most people tend to go overboard on cheese, and it's often a compensation for watery or underseasoned fillings. An even coating of shredded mozzarella, a light dusting of parmesan, a dozen quarter-sized globs of ricotta per layer: that seems about right to me. You don't even strictly need cheese at all: roasted vegetables and noodles are very creamy, and contrasted against some kale or ground beef, it's all you really need. If you do want a cheese lasagna, you'll need a minimum of 8 oz of ricotta and a pound of mozzarella, and about an ounce of a good, hard grating cheese, for a modestly cheesy pan of lasagna.

When you're assembling the lasagna, start with a little bit of sauce on the bottom of the pan (the half cup you reserved), then a layer of noodles. I like to use the no-bake kind because they're so easy to use, but you can instead boil and carefully cool pasta, taking pains to keep it from sticking to itself.

On your first noodle layer, put down a generous, half-inch layer of roasted vegetables. Then lay down some cheese. Next, a very thin to quarter-inch or so layer of the sauce, depending on whether it's got meat or greens in it. A layer of noodles, and keep going. An 8 oz box of lasagna noodles will make one 9x13 pan of lasagna with three layers.Finish it with a layer of cheese so it melts appealingly on top.

Cover the pan tightly with foil and bake it at 350 for an hour.

Serves about 8.

Tacos al Pastor

Pork and pineapple tacos al pastor are gluten-free and simple enough for weekday fare. 

I never used to buy corn tortillas. I just didn't know how to make anything with them. My experience of so-called Mexican food was mostly of American fast food. When I moved to a new area and started seeing them in the supermarket, I didn't know what to make of a floppy corn tortilla. Aren't they supposed to be hard? Isn't that the difference between a flour tortilla and a corn one---soft vs. crunchy?

Tacos al pastor is sloppy, yet simple, fare for dinner

Only at the drive-thru, my friends. At the grocery store, corn tortillas come fresh. You can usually find them in the refrigerated case, or close by. They're paler than the yellow corn shells that come in taco kits at the supermarket. Look at the ingredients. You want a nixtimalized corn flour, and not too frightening a string of preservatives after that. A variety I can find locally, and which is made without preservatives, is Maria and Ricardo's. The ingredients are "ground corn treated with lime, water, and guar gum." The first ingredient, "ground corn treated with lime," is nixtimalized corn, which is what you want.

I like to get food inspirations from Cooks Illustrated, and then to pursue one of two ends: either to go back to the source and make the most authentic possible version of the dish described, as when I went back to the source, repeatedly, making cassoulet, or alternately, make the recipe even easier without losing too much of the quality. According to the author of a recipe for tacos al pastor I found in a recent issue, this is street food, and is typically grilled. Yet CI's tacos al pastor are a bit fussy for a sloppy crowd pleaser. I decided to dumb them down.

Braised, then broiled pork, tossed in the simmering sauce for serving as tacos al pastor

In simplifying tacos al pastor, I started my modifications at the cooking method. The "al pastor" in the name means, in the style of a shepherd. "Pastor" is "shepherd," like the pastor of a "flock" of church congregants. Why is it called that? Because when you get this in a real Mexican taqueria, it's cooked on an upright spit, a method borrowed from Arab-Mexican shepherds, and the same way lamb for gyros is cooked today in most restaurants.

Feel free to grill your pork for this recipe, but I find that, for my purposes, which is just to put a little color on some already braised pork and to warm up some fruit, I don't feel called to start a charcoal fire. I feel like braising on the stovetop or in the oven, or letting the crock pot do most of the work, and then finishing it off on the broiler.

Taco al pastor with a side of braised cabbage and carrots

Souza has you braise the meat on the stovetop, but you can also do this in a crock pot. He also makes quite the fetish of exactly what type and number of chiles to use, and again, I riff and take shortcuts, use what's on hand. My farm share has included a lot of fresh hot peppers of all varieties in the last few weeks: anaheims, jalapenos, serranos. I pureed the fresh peppers with tomatoes, garlic, and spices, added a drop of liquid smoke, and simmered sliced pork butt in it until it fell apart. Then I put the sliced meat and pineapple on a broiler and gave everything a few minutes, just to begin to brown, and served it on warm corn tortillas with garnishes of scallions, cilantro, and lime.

Spicy Pork Tacos (al Pastor) in Cooks' Illustrated (login required)

How to harvest the fruits of the field

Advice on picking beans, berries, tomatoes, and more this summer.

If you’ve got a you-pick as part of your farm share, or you’re planning to go to a commercial you-pick farm this season, you’ll want to be prepared to make the best of your time. Going out for the fun of berry picking or choosing a jack o’ lantern pumpkin is one thing, but if you’re out there to bring in a harvest of food for your pantry or freezer, you will want to make the most of your time.

Fruit or vegetable?
But what if I want vegetables? you ask right away, thinking of green beans, tomatoes. In fact, most you-pick fields are for fruit: tomatoes are a botanical fruit, not a vegetable, as are pumpkins, eggplants, peppers. Green beans are seed pods; not exactly fruit, but closer to the meaning of the word than vegetable, which is everything else: undifferentiated plant matter. When I think of harvesting a vegetable, I think of taking the whole plant, or at least the parts it’s using: leaves, stems.

It’s not that easy
My first job harvesting, I merely held the clipboard while my new boss, Terry, wielded the machete, decapitating cabbages neatly at ground level. I began to understand that harvesting is a skill, not something to stumble into and expect to be any good at.

The cabbage harvest came in January; it was in Florida, with growing seasons all year round. My next lessons in bringing in the crop would come with my mother-in-law, who took me with her to the strawberry you-pick fields. Here, I got lessons that could be more broadly applied.

Make hay while the sun shines
Make the time to pick when the picking is easy, or you will lose too much of your time to gleaning instead of getting a high return on your investment.

Bring containers
Bring containers to pick into that will protect easily bruised fruit. I bring stacks of plastic quart yogurt containers to pick berries and herbs into. Green beans are sturdy and can be picked into a cloth grocery sack. Tomatoes need sturdy-sided buckets to help prevent crushing.

Don’t be a redneck (unless you want to)
Wear a hat and clothing that will protect your neck from the sun. The term “redneck” comes from the burn a farmer gets across the back of his neck, working outside. If you pick shirtless, you may end up with your neck and shoulders blackened while your belly remains as pale as it started, because to pick, you must bend, kneel, squat, or otherwise get down as close as possible to plant level. Child labor begins to make sense, here.

Hide and seek
The fruits of most plants will hide under the leaves, if they can, to avoid burning in the sun. You can’t see the ripe fruit easily by standing over the rows and surveying the leaves. Your eyes will try to pick out the color of sweet berries, and will find only the sunburnt outermost leaves of plants, crisp against the sandy bed.

Push back the leaves so you can see the stems, and let your eyes adjust. It can take several seconds of focus on the inner parts of the plant before your brain can play the “Where’s Waldo?” game it was designed to play: find the food.

This focus is particularly important when the food isn’t bright red and round. Ripe green bean pods look very much like the stems of green bean plants. The critical eye you are developing in the field is for what the ripe fruit looks like, so it leaps to your eye.

Eat some
If it can be eaten raw, brush off any visible dirt and have a bite. It helps motivate you for the picking and processing, and if your body is pleased with the food, it may help you find it more easily while you’re out there in the field, picking.

Avoid waste
Don’t bother to pick the underripe, the overripe, the split and the damaged. Nothing gets bigger after it’s picked, and most fruit will not continue to ripen. Strawberries don’t ripen after you pick them; tomatoes, once they’ve reached mature green (a paler shade), tomatoes will ripen off the vine. Don’t pick more than you can clean and process before it begins to wilt. Don’t pick what you don’t like to eat.

Bottom up
Note where the ripe fruit is on the first plants, and continue to look in those places on subsequent plants. Tomatoes ripen in hands, or clusters, from the bottom to the top of the staked vine. Work your way methodically down the row, not skipping the first or last plants in the row, or those that have fallen over or been overtaken by weeds. In fact, gleaning after other you-pickers, who are inevitably amateurs, you find that these are precisely the places that the leery avoid. Some of the fattest berries are in the tall weeds on the edge of the patch.

Processing
When you get your haul home, clean and process it as quickly as possible. Enlist friends and family to help with the processing. It’s the most boring part, and the easiest for even the unskilled and uncoordinated to do.

Wash everything gently and thoroughly. Discard anything you’ve brought home that isn’t fit to eat. Remove tips and strings from green beans, hull berries, blanch and skin tomatoes … research the food you’re going to put up before you even set out, so you know what will be involved after you come home from the fields.

Clean up and plan something easy for dinner.

Rest.
You earned it.




Read more on "Getting the best from your farm share"

Kimchi Soup (Kimchi chigae)

Spicy Korean kimchi soup is just the thing for a hot, hot day.

Recently, I’m really into this spicy Korean soup of pork, tofu, and kimchi called kimchijigae, or kimchi chigae. I started ordering it from a Korean restaurant in Northampton, SooRa, and then I had it at Gohyang, the Korean restaurant in Hadley, the next town over, for comparison. I liked the SooRa experience more, possibly for sentimental reasons, because they were nice about how weird Kevin and I were the first time we went in there, on one of our post-bicycling food adventures, famished and just mowing through the banchan, pickles that accompany a traditional Korean meal, to the point of needing a whole round of seconds.

Kimchi chigae is principally flavored by kimchi and another traditional fermented ingredient, a savory fermented paste of soybeans, rice, chili peppers, and salt called kochujang. This is a flavor that was not familiar to me before I started eating more traditional East Asian foods, and one I would describe as almost yeasty. An ingredient that is commonly used instead of kochujang, doenjang, is another fermented bean paste with that same earthy, yeasty essence. On my second visit to SooRa, the restaurant that introduced me to kimchi chigae, I ordered a different soup, the doenjang chigae, which the waitress described as quintessential Korean dish, and it was sour and savory, without the brightness of kimchi.

Kimchi chigae is made very sour and spicy from the kimchi and a finely ground red pepper. The bulk of the soup is usually made with fresh cabbage as well as large amounts of fermented cabbage in the form of kimchi, and small amounts of pork and tofu. It’s eaten with rice and some sides of pickled vegetables. Each time Kevin and I made our way to a Korean restaurant, I sweated and slurped through my bowls of kimchi chigae and swore to learn how to make it myself.

I like to have food security, and one way I feel food secure is being able to make the foods that I really love to eat. I don’t like having to rely on someone else to provide a food I want. For a little while, I love the thrill of having favorite dishes that I can only get in certain restaurants, but pretty soon, I need to be able to replicate it at home. This is how my repertoire becomes peppered with recipes. For a while, I had access to a good Indian grocery and cookbooks, and learned to make several dishes, starting with what I loved to eat at my favorite Indian restaurant and then expanding into other dishes that used ingredients I wanted to cook. Now I can also make a handful of East Asian dishes, mostly what qualifies as “junk” or snack food, and so is familiar from restaurants: Pad Thai, phô. A copy of The Take-Out Menu Cookbook has made its way into my home, and while it does not include Korean, it is of an ambitious breadth, including such items as bagels from scratch and your own Thai curry pastes.

To learn how to make this new soup I was crazy about, I looked for recipes for kimchi chigae online, letting Google lead me to the proper name for “korean pork and tofu stew,” which I’d forgotten, finding several and amalgamating them to come to an idea of what a typical kimchi chigae consists of. When I wanted to learn to make phô, I did the same thing, studying different recipes until I had a platonic ideal of it in my head to riff off of. There’s no point in precision when it comes to dishes like this: every household will make it differently, and it’s made from living ingredients and leftovers, so it resists exact duplication. That’s the art part of cooking, separate from the science.

The one ingredient that has proven difficult to find is the kochujang. I’ve been scouring every store in bicycling range for this ingredient, and come up nearly empty-handed. Even Tran’s International Market, which seemingly has a whole aisle dedicated to bean pastes, did not have exactly what I was looking for. A national brand, Annie Chun’s, did not inspire, either, because like the only variety of kochujang that I did find at Tran’s, it contained wheat flour, making it unsuitable for my gluten-free husband. Also, because they were all shelf stable, I can only assume they were not living.

What I should have found was something like what I ended up substituting, which was miso. Every place I’ve shopped, looking for kochujang or doenjang and kimchi, have all had selections of misos in their refrigerated cases. We’ve been using some red miso plus a healthy shot of Sriracha sauce to get the kochujang effect in both the kimchi chigae I’ve been making about once a week for dinner, and in Kevin’s breakfast soup.

The other main flavoring in the soup is the kimchi, preferably kimchi that’s been sitting around in your fridge for a while, because it has more beneficial bacteria in it and a stronger flavor. Real kimchi is cultured, as are all traditionally made pickles. When shopping for kimchi, sauerkraut, or any kind of pickle, look for it in the refrigerated case. The ingredients should include only vegetables, salt, and water. There’s no vinegar in a real pickle.

A local company called Real Pickles in Greenfield, MA describes their traditional pickling processes on their website. They make an “Asian style cabbage” pickle available at River Valley Market. (The prices from their online store are comparatively high; it’s expensive to ship glass. Another reason to buy local.) It’s a more refined version of the kimchi I have eaten elsewhere, make of very coarsely chopped cabbage and streaky red with chili peppers. The Real Pickles variety of kimchi is fairly mild, light in color, contains leeks, ginger, and garlic as well as cabbage and peppers, and the pieces are more finely minced than other varieties of kimchi I’ve sampled. I prefer its flavor to several other varieties I've tried, though because it varies so much from the standard I've come to accept, it somehow doesn't seem as authentic. It's at least as authentic as last summer's moussaka: the real thing is always subject to change, including relocation.

Gohyang has an attached grocery store where they make their own kimchi. I’ve missed them being open before---I’ve stopped there a couple of times during the day, only to be reminded by their posted hours that they only do a dinner business. But there is another local flavor to add to my cooking pot when I get the chance.

Read more about living foods on my other food blog, Tin Foil Toque.


Photo credit: charlie applebottom/Flickr

Braised pork foreleg and belly

We are eating the last bits of the half a pig we bought late last year. This week, I braised two forelegs and the last two pieces of pork belly that were in the freezer.

There are two challenges to working with this pig, both challenges that I relish. One is to use as much of the pig as possible, while minimizing the overwhelming porkiness. I put whole pig’s feet from this farmer into a pot of split peas, once, and ruined them, because these are not my father’s pig’s feet. I wrote a micro essay for Meatpaper in which I described the way my father would eat the pig’s feet that my mother would braise in tomato sauce. Even as a child, trying to eat one of those fatty trotters was a disappointment. There’s no meat on them, just bone and connective tissue, which are great for making silky, rich sauces, but on a pastured pig, there is also nothing porkier. The scent and flavor are strongly musky, almost human. And there lies the second challenge in working with this pig: being pasture raised, it ate a rich diet that makes it taste more like a pig than grain-fed pork raised in commercial operations, like what you buy in the supermarket and what my mother bought to put in her sauce.

My farmer tells me there are several factors that make a pig porkier tasting, including breed, diet, and exercise. This pig foraged in woods, ate bugs and roots, and had room to run around. The color of the animal’s skin is supposed to speak to the depth of flavor, too, with red pigs having redder, stronger-tasting flesh. Our pig has white skin, which I removed this time before cooking. I’ve braised some belly before with the skin on, and decided I could do with a milder flavor. Besides, I was also going to braise the forelegs, which I was sure would be stinky.


Previous experiments with this pig have proven that the best approach to the tough and flavorful bony cuts, like the ribs, has been to marinate the meat in a mojo criollo type of mixture (OJ, oil, and garlic is the barest-bones version of this), then rub it with dry spices, sear the ribs, then braise, finishing it with a barbecue sauce in the last hour or so of cooking. I’ve also had excellent results braising pork belly with strong spices and aromatics. The cooking is the same for the ribs as for the belly: sear, then braise. I decided to bring my simpler belly process to the forelegs, and braise everything together until the forelegs fell apart.

 

I worked from a recipe for Chinese Braised Pork Belly, made a couple substitutions (brown sugar for rock candy, jarred minced ginger for fresh), left out the eggs, and added water as necessary to braise. I have a giant, extremely heavy cast iron roasting pan that deserves some of the credit for the excellent results I get using it to roast vegetables and meat. The steady heat that it holds, and how hot the surfaces get, all do an amazing job. One of the disadvantages of cooking in a typical home kitchen like mine, compared to the kitchens in restaurants and on cooking shows, is that their stovetops and ovens can get much hotter than mine. Iron helps even the score.


To take the skin off, you want a very sharp knife. I sharpened my knife twice during this process, because taking off skin requires sharpness, and cutting through tendon and hitting bone will dull the blade considerably. After taking the skin and foot off one foreleg, I needed to sharpen up again for the next.

Taking the skins off the squares of belly is not unlike skinning a fish fillet or taking a chicken breast off the bone. I hacked the shit out of these bellies, like I did the first few times I filleted salmon. Not that anyone cared after it was cooked.

I cut a long incision in the skin, worked the knife under it, and kept the tension on the skin as I worked, in order to remove as little fat as possible, and no meat. 

To take the feet off, I cut through the skin around the foot at the "wrist," just above the thumb-looking toes. There are strong connective tissues on the front, rear, and sides of the joint, and running through the middle of the bones. After cutting through the outer connections with a knife and clearing the way between the bones, I used a pair of kitchen shears to cut the ligament in the middle.

After searing the meat in the roasting pan, I added the other ingredients from the recipe, including water, and began to braise at 250 for several hours, turning the pieces over every hour or so, to allow for browning above the liquid.

Each of these forelegs was good for more than one generous serving of meat. We ate the braised foreleg and belly together, which was a good combination because the fat content averaged out nicely between the fairly lean forelegs, which are a lot like turkey legs in the amount of connective tissue and the leanness of the meat, and the extremely fatty belly.

In the picture above, the sliced belly is between three and five o'clock, most of one foreleg is from five to nine, and along the top is the remnants of another foreleg after we'd already savaged it.


We ate from these for a few meals, eating bits of the foreleg and belly over lentils and rice. This morning we finished it off for breakfast with pancakes. It was so good that Kevin started singing “Pork and Pancakes” to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus in Handel’s Messiah.