Grub
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Kung Pau Chicken from hzrt8w's excellent pictorial thread. I deviated from the recipe a bit, so it doesn't look as nice as the original, but tasted great.
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That's a great pictorial, hzrt8w! It looked so good, I just had to try it myself...
Unfortunately, there were a few things I did not have, such as Sichuan peppercorns and ShaoHsing cooking wine, so I used regular white wine, and left the peppercorns out. Also, I didn't have the bean sauce, so I used Sichuan chili sauce instead -- and an onion in place of the bell pepper (which I added sooner than the bell pepper would have been). That's a fair list of substitutions, but it still turned out really nice.
Again, I'm reminded of how important it is to have some nice color contrasts... I bet carrots would work...
Great recipe -- and appologies for not following it completely (but the result was still very good). Thanks!
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I read somewhere that a good deal of the Kobe/Wagyu beef sold in Japan is actually raised in the US, since it is more cost-efficient. Some website described the travails of a guy who tried to order said beef, but couldn't even do it, even if he bought an entire animal. The farmers would only fill orders that amounted to a certain number of carcasses.
From that, it would seem that the Japanese ban on beef import from the US would pretty much cripple these farmers.
Is this stuff not true? Or has anyone heard anything about this?
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Sharing food is one thing, but I seriously doubt you could get away with SELLING it... I'd love to see someone try it though. In Manchester, England, they had a nutty woman who'd hawk her snacks out of a big basket, going from pub to pub in the evening, screaming at the top of her lungs: "PRAWNS, CRABS AND SEAFOOD!!" and scare the Bejeesus out of non-locals. I'd like to see her humping down the aisles doing that... These days, she'd probably get shot by the Airmarshalls, though.
I've flowned a bit, and while the food in first and business is vastly better, I've never had a meal on a plane that I'd consider memorable. I mean, it's just not a good atmosphere, or location for a good meal. It's noicier than hell. Dry air. You got this little dingbat tray to balance all your crap on, rather than a proper table. And these days, you're eating with plastic utensils like you're Special Ed or something.
Bad airline food might be a cliche, but gourmet airline food makes no more sense than gourmet food to eat in your car.
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I'm generally not a boastful kinda guy, but man, it's hard to be humble when you suck this bad -- I take pride in my disasters...
Pork chops with purple sauce, voila:
I think this was supposed to be "Pork chops with a chive sauce." The plan was to fry it in a saute pan, and use the drippings for a lovely sauce. Well, the chops were insanely thin -- like for veal saltimbocca or something. I swear they tripple-stacked them or something, because it just never occured to me that pork chops could be that thin.
The irony of it is, the only way I could have had any hope of cooking them in a halfway decent way, would be to do it over extremely high heat -- anything less, and they'd develop very little brownage, and be cooked all to hell... Well, I heated the pan up good and proper, but when I put the oil in it started smoking like CRAZY, so I chickened out and turned the heat down... Of course, I'm not sure if it would have gone much better on high heat, because they started curling up like bacon anyhow.
Then, the sauce. Now that's a keeper -- the recipe called for Sherry, but I figured Sherry, Schmerry, I'll just open this bottle of red wine that I'm gonna use for dinner and use that instead (besides, that way I could enjoy a glass of wine while I'm cooking -- cook's prerogative, right?). I'm not too familiar with sherry, so I kinda just thought it was red, but of course it's a white thing.
And then I just further screwed it up by making the sauce super thick. So it came out looking like blueberry yogurt or something.
Oaurgh.
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Colcannon -- Irish mashed potatoes with a few additives:
Salmon with dill sauce:
And spicy fish fillets almondine:
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The camera seemed to malfunction -- flash didn't go off, and it ended up with a really long exposure time. But here's sort of what it looked like, btw:
That's the vindaloo over rice with a naan at the top -- a store-bought ocra side dish at the bottom (just picked up with the storebought naan. Local, tiny Indian restaurant does a fantastic ocra dish that they for some reason don't have on the menu. I need to ask what it is called, and how to make it, hehehe).
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Homemade cranberry jam smeared on French bread with heaps of leftover South Carolina-style (mustard vinegar-based) pulled pork.
Beats peanutbutter & jelly, fo shu.
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Thanks Grub! I will get back to you after I try any of the vartiations, but I think you and Wazaa have it down. Let me give you some info that I probably will use for myself. There is a cut of pork called cushion meat. It's not generally available at grocery stores. It's a "restaurant cut". But at the higher end stores, it can be ordered ahead. It is only less than two bucks per pound. It's low in fat, but tender. It comes from the shoulder area but it's not a picnic or butt. It comes in about 2 pound chunks, and my store has to order a 5-chunk bag at a time. He uses it in his home-made sausages. Anyway, I use it for chile verde. I think I'll try it for vindaloo.
Until later, John S.
Well the cold weather all this talk about Vindaloo inspired me to make another one last night... Again, I made a few unintentional, accidental changes which weren't too bad, but did have a negative effect on the dish -- but I did learn a few things. It is starting to both scare and impress me that unless I do this dish exactly the way it is described, it doesn't turn out the absolute, optimal way. But the more I cook this dish, the more I feel I begin to truly understand it, and the mechanics of the cooking process.
The Vindaloo was great, but it lacked -- I don't know quite how to describe it -- the DEPTH that I had in other attempts. The heat was there, and there was also flavor, but it wasn't as rich and multi-faceted or whatnot. I'm not sure what could have caused this, but these were the things I did differently this time:
First off, I added the turmeric to the marinade, rather than halfway through the cooking process (this was just a stupid mistake made because of poorly made handwritten notes that I hadn't updated on the computer). I'm not sure what effect this had on the process, but seeing that this would leave the turmeric in during the bhuna process, it could have had a negative effect on -- maybe turmeric doesn't stand up to that slightly more "brutal" cooking process.
Secondly, during the first "Bhuna" process, moved the meat and onions up the sides of the wok, so that the liquids would drain into the middle and evaporate there. I did this because I was pressed for time -- which is NEVER a good situation to be in, with this dish. You can't hurry this thing up, at all. This could have affected the taste, because the meat should be in there, being cooked, rather than just staying warm on the side of the wok. Very stupid thing to do.
Thirdly, during the end of the bhuna process, I spent very little time letting it cook in the dry stage. I realize now, that this stage is very important -- the foodstuff starts taking on an appealing, dark color during this process, so I think it's imporant to let it go for a while here -- even if you have to watch it like a hawk and continually stir to avoid it burning. This probably affected the taste also, because it would kinda caramelize the meat and onions somewhat, creating a deeper flavor.
The last thing I did wrong, was to add TOO MUCH water. I added way too little another time, and hearing you doing the same thing, I went overboard. This probably watered out the taste somewhat.
Well, live and learn.
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All of your comments are right on. I'll use pork next time. Sturdier. I forget the cut you used... tenderloin?
I like hot chiles but the Thais added a bit too much flavor. I can back off of those with the added benefit being that others can eat it too! What a novel idea, right? Another thing for me to experiment with is using dried habaneros. I'd get the heat but not the volume.
On the dryness issue, I must have bhuna'd off too much water. Next time I'll leave some extra.
Again, thanks for the great photos. Couldn't do it without them!
John S.
I've used a few different cuts of pork. Waaza's original recipe just calls for "stewing pork," which I did use once, but I ended up not adding enough water so there wasn't enough sauce, and making a few other mistakes, so the end result wasn't quite as good. But the meat was fine, so I'm sure regular "stewing pork" is a good way to go.
The first time, I used some kind of sirloin (if that is the right word for it when talking about pork -- not the tenderloin part, but the bigger, not quite as tender part), and that time, everything just came together perfectly. So that'd be a good one also.
Then there's pork shoulder, which I thought would be perfect for such a slow-cooked dish, but that's quite a bit of work, cutting that thing up into stewing meat... Also, it has a lot of fat, which I tried to remove most of -- but not enough, because the end result was a lot of small, unappatizing pieces of fat floating around (which I painstakingly picked out -- adding even more work and time to an already time-consuming dish). I'm completely mystified why it didn't render out, with such a long cooking time. Perhaps they were pieces of sinew or something.
So I guess regular "stew pork" or some kind of sirloin-type cut is good, but not a shoulder cut or anything with too much fat and sinew tissue.
Tenderloin, I haven't tried. I suppose it would be okay -- it is tender, but should probably hold up better than fowl. If you do try this, I'd certainly like to hear how it worked out.
The chillies I use were bought in an Indian store, brand-name "Hanif's International Foods Ltd." from BC, Canada. The label name is "Chilli Whole Long" or "Chilli Entier." It's a big old 7 oz "Last you a lifetime" $1.49 bag. 10-12 of these makes for a fiery Vindaloo that I and a few others like, but as you say, I want others to eat it too, hehehe. They are basically just dried, red Thai chilies -- and there's some writing on the bag that I THINK is Thai, although I'm not familiar with that script.
I have no idea how Habaneros would affect the dish, but if you try it, I'd love hearing how it might affect the taste. Since the chillies I've got are working out just fine, I probably won't experiment with any other types.
Very cool to hear from anyone who tries this dish -- thanks!
And good luck.
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While I don't like the tendency of blaming society for all your ills, and a complete abandoning of any personal responsibility, I can completely sympatize with this one.
Marketing intentionally geared towards children should not be allowed, period. I saw some kind of documentary on human development that said children will pretty much eat whatever their bodies need, and no more from infancy -- overeating occurs at exactly the moment when they intellectually and emotionally become aware of their surroundings, enough to understand commercials. Children aren't personally responsible -- they're not supposed to be.
It's like trying to sell stuff to a person who is mentually challenged and incapable of making decisions, and if his guardian fails to stop the purchase of anything that's bad for the poor guy, then that's a failure on the part of the guardian. But the truly immoral act was for the seller to intentionally target the guy.
In England, they have an interesting rule/law about casinos: They are allowed to supply a need but they are not allowed to create a demand. Hence, you won't see a single advertisement for casinos, and unless someone tells you what to look for, you'd never think there were casinos there. This is not a bad idea. And that's for advertising that targets adults.
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Pinnekjøtt is awesome, but what about RIBBE? Pork ribs with loads of fatty meats, and the skin attached, which forms a crispy, crunchy snack-like thing? I would love to know how to order that in a butcher's shop... I've cooked loads of traditional American BBQ/Smoked ribs, and some utterly awesome Chinese braised ribs, but I've never dared to approach the Norwegian Christmas meal of RIBBE. Not to hijack the thread (if a moderator sees this, please feel free to separate this post into a new thread -- but I figured that possibly, there wouldn't be that many posts in a Norwegian Christmas food thread, heheh).
So, could anyone tell me how to order this from a butcher? I'm pretty sure I couldn't get such an order from a regular supermarket.
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Thanks for letting us know about this. I've been cooking with habaneros for years, and always wondered about Scottish Bonnets -- was it just a linguistic term (as is often the case with spices and herbs), or truly different thing. Good stuff. Me :heard: egullet, and its informed members.
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I have been looking at this thread for two months, off and on. Always wanted to cook my favorite Indian dishes. So using your great post Grub, I did it.
I used chicken. I like things really hot so I used twice the amount of dried chiles and at first they were overbearing, but after a couple days in the fridge, it was just hot and delicious upon reheating. This kind of dish definitely does not suffer from being a "leftover".
My question to you and Wazaa is this. The end product came out with not much liquid for a gravy. I would like more of the gravy with the finished product. How do I adjust the recipe and techniques for that?
The second question is: I had to do the last two bhunas much longer than I anticipated. This overcooked the chicken and made it fall apart in strings, as would stew meat in a beef stew cooked a long time. The dish didn't suffer in flavor, but why do you surmise I had to cook it all so long?
Thanks for a great thread, you all.
John S.
Hey, thanks for reporting back on that one -- it's really nice to hear about stuff like that... Mind ya, I must admit I cringed a bit when I saw the word chicken. How come people only want to do this dish with other meats like chicken or duck -- anything but pork? Will you quit hating on the pork already?!~
But seriously, I'm sure the dish is fine with chicken or duck -- just as long as you put the meat in later, because it just won't hold up as well as pork, structurally. Twice the amount of dried chilies?! Whoa, now that's ... man, that's nuts. This dish is hot as hell with the recommended amount. I guess it makes sense that the heat would decline as leftovers. In fact, I suspect that the best part of this dish, is as a leftover. My only problem is, the only time I truly nailed the recipe was the first time, and it was all eaten -- no leftovers...
The lack of gravy, I have experienced also. During the last bhuna stage, you are supposed to add enough water to completely cover the ingredients, but one time I somehow spazed out and just added a couple of cups instead, and the result was a very dry Vindaloo. I don't know if you did anything similar to this, but that's the best I can think of. I guess that the best thing you can do, is to stop the last (or penultimate, depending on how you count it) bhuna stage before too much liquid is evaporated -- I mean, that is your gravy after all. And if you're using chicken, that meat should be plenty tender by that time. Bhuna means cooking it dry, but perhaps the last stage shouldn't leave it completely dry...
The cooking time itself probably depends on the stovetop's capacity, as well as the amount of food that you're cooking. I've ended up spending anything between two and four hours on this dish in total -- prep and all. There's some magical middle-ground between cooking it low and slow enough to make everything blend just so -- and taking it too far and drying it up and making the meat fall apart.
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It sound like what you encountered was a mis-translation on the menu of the omikase experience -- which is the chef's choice of sushi!
I never heard of a Japanese restaurant running out of rice, however.
Well yeah that was kinda in the back of my mind, since I've been to places where I've asked the sushi chef to fix me up with whatever he thought I'd like -- but only in places where I've been a lot of times; where he'd have a fair idea of what I would like. I'm not familiar with omikase as a term, but it seems like an odd thing to offer this, unless the chef is familiar with you, and knows your preferences: your likes and dislikes, and the limits of your willingness to experiment.
I thought that concept was something a returning customer might be offered (or a returning customer might ask for). That's why I accepted the English translation, which seemed to make more sense, as offered on a menu for regular customers to order... Perhaps it really was a bad translation, and the wanna-be sushi chef wanted all his customers to be trustworthy clientelle who'd order omikase.
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We discovered a "hidden" sushi bar in the back of a decent Tepanyaki restaurant -- you couldn't even see it from the main part of the restaurant. You either had to know it was there, or accidentally walk into it through the back entrance (believing you were walking into a Tepanyaki place), if you parked around the back. No advertising, nothing. This "spoke" to me -- it surely would have to be excellent, to survive with no advertising, in spite of being attached to a successful Tepanyaki, right? Word of mouth, right?
Nope.
It was a complete mess. The only explanation I could think of is, the owner of the Tepanyaki place must been carrying out his horribly misguided dream of becoming a sushi chef back there.
I picked a "special" that from the English explanation led me to believe I'd get to pick and chose from whatever the chef was making. Not so. He'd just smack down whatever he was making onto your plate -- if you plate was empty. Every few minutes, he'd finish something and then lean over the counter like a hawk, and smack a few pieces down on whatever plates were empty. If you saw him making something you'd like to try, you'd just have to gobble down whatever you were eating, because if your plate wasn't empty, you wouldn't get none. No picking and choosing, in spite of the menu item's description.
My buddy didn't want the special, but asked to order ala carte -- which the menu obviously allowed. This caused a severe deal of trauma behind the counter. The chef didn't speak much English, but made a great effort of showing his displeasure with a series of grunts and grimaces that looked more like Belushi's Samurai Chef than anything else... A waitress came by to try and calm him down, but he got even more aggrevated.
A bit later, the chef stopped making sushi and started yelling at no-one in particular. The lady returned, and he started screaming at her. After a bit, she turned to us and announced that there was no more rice... Like what, you have RUN OUT OF RICE? Yup. The person who normally cooked rice wasn't there, so there'd been a snafu. No more rice.
My favorite restaurant experience, I think.
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Absolutely awesome. I'm showing this thread to everyone I know -- well, everyone who's into food, that is -- and it's like a bunch of teenage boys who've gotten their hands on their first issue of Playboy magazine or something. This is absolutely nuts. Fantastic job.
Even if I can't ever aspire to do anything even remotely similar, this is truly inspirational.
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Hey Grub... I don't think that looks bad at all. How did it taste?
Heh, you're too kind! It didn't taste exactly bad. It was okay, but I think food's visual appearance is just about as important as its taste and flavor, and this thing didn't look at ALL like what it should have. The Hollandaise looks right, but I was hoping a nice, caramelized golden crust on a deep, red salmon, which I figured would look good in contrast with the dill. Instead the salmon came out in a depressing, pasty pink color -- I mostly used to dill to just cover it up, to be honest.
But I learned something, if nothing else.
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Chicken and Hutspot Cakes.
Or, to use a slightly more honest terminology, Leftover Cakes. This meal was kinda out of control. Since I found egullet, I've been cooking more and more, and have gotten confident enough to start improvising a lot more too. Before egullet, I'd follow recipes to the letter, since any improvisation would result in utter disaster.
But now I'm feeling a tad more confident. I credit egullet. So, I heard that mashed potatoes could be fried up as some sort of mashed potato pancakes, and since I'd (very badly) made these Dutch mashed taters-carrots-onion-parsnip recipe, I figured I'd use that. And then I figured that hey, anything can be made into these cake-thingies.
So I made some chicken cakes from a leftover chicken breast (from a bbq'd ginger-garlic chicken) -- and went a little out of control on the breadcrumb filler... I got six big cakes out of a single chicken breast. But it tasted damn good, though, with onions and various spices. I just forgot about the celery, shoulda added that too, dang. I feel extremely frugal about that one -- I could feed an army on a single chicken with this thing, given enough breadcrumbs
The sauce was just basically just gravy -- tried to make it look like proper country gravy. Just drippings, butter and flour -- bechamel I guess. Milk, white wine, salt, pepper, cayenne. Oh and some rosemary. That's a great spice, that.
I wanna make more hutspot. It's just such a damn great name for a dish. Hutspot. Gimme some Hutspot Mit Klapstuk, biaatch. Unt eine tipee fur mein bunghole.
Actually, I think I've got some cornbeef leftover... Klapstuk here I come. Yeah.
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Oh boy... This was fairly close to an unmitigated disaster -- the Hollandaise sauce was pretty much the only saving grace, methinks... Okay, it looks like an unpleasant, unelegant blob -- but I liked how I got the sauce to increase in volume this time. The cookbooks all say this is what's ment to happen, but I've never managed to do this before (I used an immersion blender this time. Them things rule).
I love salmon, and probably cook more of that than any other seafood -- or any other food, for that matter. Its one of the few dishes I feel comfortable just knocking together; improvising, and feel confident that it'll turn out okay. I mean, it's cheap stuff, tastes great, and by golly, it's supposed to be good for you and all that.
Well this time, I got this expensive, free-range, wild übersalmon and for some reason, decided to do things totally different from any other time I've cooked salmon: I was gonna brown it in a skillet, skin side up, then flip it over, drizzle on some some soy-sauce and and finish it in the oven. I could have done this in a non-stick, not-oven-proof skillet, and used another container for the oven -- but I was just so eager to use this new stainless steel skillet (call it kit-feaver; boys and their toys, you know...). I mean, I wanted to do it like the big boys do...
Well, the stainless steel skillet didn't work too good. It's good quality and all, but the salmon was too wet, and so it stuck like crazy. No nice browning -- it all completely peeled off. So I'm like stabbing at the pan with a spatula, trying to free it, there's pieces of salmon sticking all over the pan -- and I wouldn't have felt so stupid if I'd done this with a $3.99 lb. salmon, but this stuff cost about the same as those Chilean sea bass things. Argh.
And then there's the Hutspot -- the Dutch mashed potato dish with carrots, onions and parsnips. It looks like some deranged Halloween thingie.
And I love the way I desperately tried to fix it by covering everything with dill. WTF?
This is what it's supposed to look like -- luscious, golden, rich & yummy... From this thread (Dinner).
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Couldn't agree more.
Dunno who came up with this joke, but first occurence I've seen was from Monty Python's live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, when they did the "Bruce" skit, and had everone drinking Fosters, tossing a few cans to the audience, and explained that they had to bring their own beer because American beer is like having sex in a canoe. Fucking close to water. Old joke, but oh so true. Of course, same thing goes for Fosters, mind ya...
<-- Lifetime CAMRA member...
Flavor Flav as expert witness? What a sad campaign!
Whaaaa...? I'm confused -- what does that mean, Flavor Flav? I know the guy's an old rapper, but how does that mean?
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Well there is no getting passed anyone on this board..
Since they are college friends I thought it would be good to remember the old days and try to cheap out on the beer.. While I am sure some of my friends will think I have gotten snobby if I serve anything other then bud.. I might try a Yuengling instead.. Thanks for steering me in the proper direction everyone..Dude, serving your food with Bud would be like a wine connoisseur accompanying his finest wines with spam and day-old KFC. I've never eaten your food, but from the pictures -- your food deserves a helluva lot better. I'm glad you've reconsidered!
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OMG Grub! MUST SHARE RECIPE NOW!!!!!
Ah, thanks -- I used this recipe from recipezaar.com. The recipe author says it comes from a friend who runs a restaurant, and it a five-out-of-five stars rating -- however, there are only three reviews, so I'm not sure if that is entirely justified. I'm not knocking it though -- it was good, but it was also a bit of work. It was fun to do, but I would probably do other dishes again, that gives more uh, payback for the efforts, before I made this again. I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe it looks a little better than it tastes, heheh.
The only thing I did differently from the original recipe, is that I added more flour (as much as 3/4 of a cup, actually) to the dough, because it was extremely wet...
The sauces were just improvised. The mint sauce wasn't very good -- it was just some plain yogurt and sour-cream with chopped mint and a touch of tumeric (mostly for the color) and the curry sauce was based on this thing from cooking.com: Satay Sauce, but I found the soy sauce to come through too strong, so I dilluted it with water and thickened it with a cornstarch slurry. It tasted pretty nice, but ended up looking more like a gravy than anything else...
The color of the filling was probably just the paprica, ketchup and the meat itself. It was left so simmer quite a bit, and also to cool off before the pasties were formed.
Edit:
Okay, I gotta say this -- maybe I undersold the taste of these pasties a little (possibly, because they took a bit of an effort to create, but also because they seem so obviously to just be a Jamaican version of Cornish pasties) -- I've tasted them as leftovers now, and whoa -- they make great leftovers!
Just make sure you pay attention to that habanero pepper... It makes for an extremely spicy pasty. I mean, the thing I put together was just 1.3 lb. worth of ground beef, and it made about 8 pasties (all bigger than the ones in the picture -- so it's a great way to food a lot of people!) -- but as much food as that made, that one single habanero pepper made it as hot as hell.
I'm thinking, this should be some excellent food to bring along for a camping trip. Make some more traditional pasties with potatoes and carrots and peas and such -- excellent convenience food. I mean, this is kinda slow-cooked, good-food, fast-food.
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Where's the Kobe Beef?
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
Well okay, but would you care to comment on this link, please? The article's author seems pretty knowledgeable.
I'm not concerned whether authentic Japanese Kobe beef is better than non-Kobe Wagyu beef -- I'm just curious if American bred Wagyu was/is shipped to Japan. The article was written in '98, and things have changed since then -- you can get Wagyu beef here now. The author, Tanith Tyrr, finally managed to find a small, independent producer who sold her an entire steer, after having banged her head on a wall, speaking to a number of Wagyu farmers who were pretty evasive about the fact that they shipped their stuff to Japan.