Some woes too

A couple of days last week were terrible food-wise. Maybe after the Singapore noodles, I got cocky and turned wannabe-pro, but i started making things up left and right in non-comfort zones, and it blew up. I'll give you a taste (by pun only) here:

My local grocery store somewhat rarely has lamb in the cut that we like, so when they have it, I stock up. I bought the lamb last week sometime, intending to use it over the next few days, but it got so busy that I didn't cook. Fearing that the lamb would go bad, and knowing that my disapproving mother would be visiting from Thursday through the weekend, I had to get rid of the lamb by Tuesday. First unwise choice of the week: I wanted to make something "inspired by David Rocco," outside of my comfort zone of Indian food, without following an actual recipe. Second, I wanted to throw in fresh herbs I've never cooked with before, because "they taste good in the lamb I have in restaurants." Third, the David Rocco recipe that I wanted to use as my starting point involved braising the meat in Chianti for 2 hours; the problem is, on the show he used REALLY GOOD Chianti. I went out and bought $13.99 Chianti on some liquor store schmuck's recommendation. Regarding cooking with wine, the good chefs always say don't ever cook with wine you wouldn't drink on its own. I obviously know this, so I don't know why I hastily came back home with this terrible stuff, but I just did. Narain didn't particularly care about the time; he was doing his own thing. I guess the thought of braising for 2 hours when it was already 6pm and I hadn't started cooking daunted me, as I was anticipating starting dinner around 9-10pm.

Basically the Chianti-braised beef recipe goes like this: fry some onions and garlic in olive oil. Dice about 2lbs. of meat into 1-in. pieces and sear with the garlic and onion. Then pour in about 2 cups of Chianti--just enough to cover the beef/lamb. Bring the wine to a boil, add salt, lower the heat to med-low and simmer for 2 hours. I substituted lamb, because I don't like cooking beef at home. But I figured, they're both red meats with similar flavors, so it'll be fine.

My maverick additions included adding a bunch of fresh thyme and Italian parsley. To me, Italian parsley is to Italian food what fresh coriander is to Indian food. The look and smell are very similar, so I figured its use must be just like coriander in Indian--that is, added liberally at the end of the cooking process. Of course, I wasn't completely right about when to add it, as I found some recipes online that put the parsley into the dish during the cooking process.

I was careful with the thyme, though, because I have added fresh rosemary liberally to dishes in the past and I HATE when it overpowers. Rosemary is a very strong herb, so since I didn't know much about thyme, I was careful. At the same time, I thought, I just had lamb with garlic and thyme at an Italian restaurant a week ago, and the thyme was all over it and it didn't taste bad...so maybe I could add lots of it and it will add flavor. The herbs thus went in with the searing lamb and garlic/onion. At first, I wanted to be artsy and left the thyme on the vine, but then I thought, well those vines are probably not pleasant to chew on, so let me rip the leaves off and spread it around. Ultimately, I don't think the herbs mattered. They certainly weren't overpowering and they did add flavor. The problem with the dish was the Chianti, which was so bitter that I couldn't truly enjoy the dish, although the lamb itself was lovely and tender after the 2 hour braising process.

The final taste was OK. It was edible. The biggest issue was the bitterness of the Chianti. Lesson learned is that you MUST use GOOD TASTING wine if you're cooking with wine as your gravy base. It's imperative. If your wine is too dry or bitter, then you're screwed. If you're just adding a glug or 2 for a kick, I think it's better than if you're adding a cup or more of the wine to boil down as a braising liquid. It's really really important. If I had used a better Chianti, this dish would have been really smooth. Even the liberal and amateurish use of herbs turned out FINE compared to this overpoweringly bitter wine.

Well that's all for my massive NOTE TO SELF.

Singapore Street Noodles with Fried Egg

This recipe was inspired by Ching-He Huang's Singapore noodles from Cooking Channel. I made it my own by using grapeseed instead of peanut oil, adding garlic and shallot, halving the turmeric, adding more fresh and dry red chilis, and adding the fried eggs at the end. The original recipe also uses bean sprouts, which would have been fantastic, but unfortunately, they didn't have any at the grocery store, so I had to mix it up.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons grapeseed oil
• 1 chopped shallot
• 1 tbsp. chopped garlic
• 1 tbsp. grated ginger
• 2 fresh red chilis
• 10 fresh shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tbsp. ground turmeric
• 3 1/2 ounces diced smoked bacon
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded and sliced
• 1 handful julienned carrot strips
• 3 1/2 ounces cooked chicken breast, shredded (lamb or beef would be awesome too)
• 8 ounces dried vermicelli rice noodles, pre-soaked in hot water for 10 minutes and drained
• 1 tbsp. dried chili flakes
• 2 tbsp. lite soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp. some kind of white vinegar (regular, rice, or cider vinegar)
• 1 egg, beaten
  
• Dash toasted sesame oil
• 2 spring onions (green), sliced
• 2 additional eggs fried sunny side up, as a side.

Directions

Heat the oil in a wok or pan, and when hot, stir-fry the ginger, garlic, shallots, red chilis, mushrooms and turmeric for a few seconds. Add the bacon, and cook for less than 1 minute. Add the red bell pepper, carrots, and bean sprouts and cook for another minute, then add the cooked chicken, and stir well to combine.

Add the noodles, and stir-fry well, for 2 minutes, then season with the chilis, soy sauce, oyster sauce and vinegar. Stir to combine. You have to work it quite vigorously to get all the ingredients mixed with the noodles, which overwhelm at first.

Add in the beaten egg, stirring gently until the egg is cooked through, less than 1 minute. The egg kind of disappears into the dish; you don't see strips or anything really, but that egg flavor is really good. Then, season with the sesame oil. Sprinkle over the spring onions.

Fry sunny side up eggs in a separate pan. Make sure the center is still a little uncooked. Serve the egg as a side to the noodle once you plate (not pictured). Add Sriracha sauce too if you like.

Response:

We LOVED this dish. It reminded me of hole in the wall Asian restaurant food. The most labor-intensive part is shredding chicken; it's really easy to do but time-consuming. Cooked chicken has a natural pattern of lines and you just pull it apart along its natural lines. It's also really fun to cook vermicelli noodles...you don't need boiling water, just hot water. It's great. This meal also made me realize that I need to cook with bacon more often! What got me really excited was that I got to try out my new Wusthof chef's knife,using it for everything from the chicken and bacon to the spring onion. Sliced through like a dream! This is a good dish for having friends over or to eat really really late night after a night out.

I think I'm going to use this dish to invent some chicken or lamb coconut semia. Semia is basically Indian-style vermicelli noodles. Cook it up upma style with some mustard seeds, green chilis, tomato, dry roasted coconut, OGG...it will be wonderful. Yum! Next time.

Happy Recipe-ing.

Indian Pulled Pork Sandwiches

Saturday, September 4, 2010
Indian BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich

One word: Yummmmmmmm.

My greatest hurdle of late has been weening myself off of the recipe book dependence. I think the most liberating thing for a home chef is knowing enough tricks to intuit a recipe without looking at the book! It boils down to (pun intended) knowing what combination of ingredients work; you are confident enough in your culinary learning that you can guess what will taste good. The most intimidating arena for the more-than-novice-but-less-than-expert cook, however, is fusion food. I know that ginger/garlic/onion/red chili powder/cumin/coriander is a no-fail combo in Indian cooking. But throw it in with bbq sauce, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and beer?! What's gonna happen? Well I know Indian spices always complement tomato. BBQ sauce is a sort of derivative of tomato (esp. if you have ketchup in there). Moreover, if it works in quesadillas with adobo spices--like smoked chili powder, cumin, onion/garlic powder, paprika...maybe it will work with Indian spices, like cumin/coriander/dry red chili powder. It seemed like there would be enough overlap for the combination to work. A total crap shoot, but it's only by being a little eccentric with these dishes, will I develop something great and unique. And by experimenting, I can take it even further and try other fusions too. Spices are pretty global after all. Cumin, for example, is used abundantly in Indian, Latin, and Middle Eastern cuisines. Chili powder of course, is incredibly diverse; people sun-dry chilis all over the world for fantastic smoky flavor in dishes. Types of chili vary by climate, so you get such a variety of flavors for what is essentially the same element. When I visit India, my grandmother always has hundreds red chilis laid out on a sheet, drying on the roof.

The combination rocks. We had the pulled pork sandwiches, with some chocolate cake I baked from scratch (including icing), and some sweet iced tea! It was totally southern, (with a little Indian fusion).

The recipe for the Indian pulled pork is as follows:

Ingredients:
1 bottle of light beer (anything you have in the fridge. I used Red Stripe)
2 tbsp. papaya nectar or canned papaya hand-crushed to equal 2 tbsp.
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 cup good store-bought or homemade BBQ sauce
1 tbsp. cumin seeds
1 tbsp. coriander seeds
3 dry red chilis
About 2 lbs. of pork tenderloin or 4 pork chops
1 onion roughly chopped
2 generous rounded tbsp. of roughly chopped garlic
1-2 tbsp. roughly chopped ginger
oil for frying
salt to taste
1 tsp. red chili powder
hamburger buns or whatever bread you like to eat with pulled pork
garnish with onions and chopped green chili if desired

Utensils needed:
spice grinder, blender, 2 saute pans, 1 big pot, 2 forks for pulling the pork

Pour the beer, papaya, ketchup, Worcestershire and bbq sauce into a big pot and cook on medium heat until well mixed and semi-boiling. In another pan, heat oil and saute onions, garlic, and ginger (OGG) until onions turn translucent. The more caramelized the OGG, the better. In another small pan, roast dry red chilis, cumin, and coriander seeds (meaning NO OIL), until they smell smoky and hot, and then put into a spice grinder. Grind the roasted spices and add 2 tbsp. of the grounds to the bbq sauce, reserving the remaining spice mixture for later. If your OGG are cooked, then put them into the blender and blend into a paste, oil and all. I know I said in an earlier post that I don't generally make pastes, but this is the exception, because there's already plenty of texture in pulled pork, and I like the sauce to be smooth, so the main texture comes from the meat.

Add the OGG paste to the bbq sauce. Keep that going on medium-high heat so it gets blended and cooked well. Chop the pork chops in half or so and add to the bbq sauce pan. Turn heat to medium-low and cover. Slow cook the pork for 40 minutes. After slow cooking is done pull out the pork chops and lay them onto your cutting board or a clean stain-proof surface. At this point, with your 2 forks, fork apart the pork (which should be tender enough to break apart), and pull it into linear pieces. Try to fork it into as thin as pieces as you can.



Once all the pork is forked apart, add the forked pork back to the bbq sauce. Stir and incorporate the pork back into the sauce until well-coated. Cook back on medium heat for about 10 minutes. In the same pan in which you fried the OGG, add a little oil and fry the remaining ground spices until aromatic. Add the fried spices to the pork. Add the additional tsp. of red chili powder, and salt to taste. Let cook for another 5 minutes and voila!



You can toast your buns or eat them at room temp. After toasting the buns (which we did), scoop a heaping amount of the pork onto your bun. Chop a little white onion and a green chili and put it on top of the pork. Enjoy.