Chris Hennes

Corn and Crab Beignets with Yaji Aioli (p. 205) This may be the simplest recipe so far. They are basic beignets with corn and crab. The Aioli is pretty normal, too, just incorporating some Yaji (a spice blend based on peanuts) into it. My only qualm is that the recipe says it makes 24 beignets, so I cut it in half. And ended up with about 24 beignets. I made them basically exactly the size the recipe calls for, so I think they just have the quantity wrong.

Fried Chicken and Waffles with Piri Piri Glaze (p. 196) On the next page is another fried chicken recipe from Melba Wilson, and it's another winner. It's actually the only recipe so far that apologizes for its complexity, which is sort of funny since it's not actually significantly more complex than anything else I've made from this book. Here's the breakdown: The boneless, skinless(!) chicken thighs are marinated in buttermilk and Frank's Red Hot for six hours. They are breaded in a flour, cornmeal, cornstarch, garlic and paprika mixture. The recipe calls for shallow-frying, but since I still had the setup from last night on the stove I deep fried. I was skeptical of the skin-off chicken for a fried chicken dish, but on the plate I didn't really notice the absence of skin, the breading worked well and had plenty of texture. And you can actually buy boneless, skinless thighs... unlike last night's boneless skin-on thighs, which required more work to prep since they don't come boneless. The waffles are whole wheat and sweet potato with a tiny bit of cinnamon and nutmeg: they are a little bit sweet, but not overwhelmingly so. They don't end up crispy, which normally I'd object to, but in this particular application that isn't a detriment. The chicken has plenty of crunch, the waffle didn't need it. The piri piri glaze is the piri piri marinade from p. 287 (shallots, garlic, ginger, habanero, paprika, and lemon juice) with some added honey and olive oil. It's got a good amount of heat, but also a well balanced sweetness. It made an excellent (if unconventional!) "syrup" for this dish. Finally, this is all topped off with a good dose of the "pikliz" quick-pickled vegetables, for an added crunch and balancing acidity. So, not trivial, but not any more difficult to make than last night's bird and toast, or the croissants and liver mousse, etc.

Bird and Toast (p. 194) From Harlem chef Melba Wilson comes this riff on Nashville hot chicken: chicken thighs brined, then seasoned with a combination of cayenne, berbere spice, paprika, garlic, and brown sugar. Deep fried and then glazed with a honey/soy sauce/fish sauce mixture (including a little of the spice mix). Served on toasted brioche that has been buttered and topped with a little of the chicken liver mousse I posted about up-topic, and finally garnished with a pickled peach. This took all day to make: obviously I made the brioche from scratch, and the pickled peaches, but the mousse was left over. The end result was delicious. I wish it was spicier, though. I think a lot of the flavor of Nashville hot chicken comes from the oil having been used for countless previous batches of spicy chicken: using fresh oil just isn't the same. I thought it was going to be insane, there is a lot of cayenne in there, but in the end it needed even more heat, IMO.

Yes, I am toasting the benne seeds, but I buy my sesame seeds untoasted and to that myself as well. That seems to be what they are saying, and is consistent with the Southern Exposure nomenclature. The do definitely still have their hulls, as you can see in the photo.

As another data point, I got the Southern Exposure seed catalog in the mail today, and they have Benne this year, saying And no, I did not order any. Seven foot plants!

Yes -- I have been thinking of them as a sort of "heirloom" sesame seed, but even that is probably not really accurate. For reference, here's a side-by-side of the Anson Mills "Benne Seeds" and my normal store-brand hulled white sesame seeds: (You should be able to click to get the absurd resolution version.) Unfortunately I don't have any unhulled sesame seeds to give a fair comparison: my bet is that a good quality unhulled sesame seed is essentially the same product as the Anson Mills "benne seeds."

Funny that this should pop up now, I actually had a salad for dinner tonight where raw collards were the primary green. Until tonight I'd never had collard uncooked, I honestly didn't know they were edible raw!

I should also mention that I bought the book, and don't regret it -- it's exactly my favorite kind of cookbook, full of recipes that always go the extra mile. While there are some mistakes in it, none of them have prevented me from achieving an excellent end result from the recipe. I'm learning how to incorporate a new set of flavors into my cooking repertoire, which is a huge part of the reason I approach cookbooks the way I do.

Those particular ingredients are both from Ansen Mills. Especially in 2020, I use a lot of mail-order sources, but I live a couple of blocks from a pretty good grocery store, and my local farmer's market is pretty impressive for certain categories of food (greens and strange cuts of meat, mostly).

Crispy Carolina Millet Salad with Cow Peas (p. 58) I have no idea how close I came to replicating this recipe from New York chef Adrienne Cheatham -- you see, the recipe is called "millet salad," and the ingredients list calls for millet. But nowhere in the instructions do you ever actually use the millet! So I'll explain the recipe, and we can theorize about what was supposed to happen here... First, it calls for a cup of cooked Carolina Gold rice, which you air-dry for four hours. That then gets fried until you have some crispy bits, then cooled again, and formed into a salad with collards, cowpeas, and quick-pickled yellow beets. This is tossed with a benne seed dressing, and topped with toasted benne seeds (they are very similar to sesame seeds, but maybe a little nuttier... or maybe that's my imagination). The ingredients list also calls for a cup of cooked millet. Which you do nothing at all with. What I can't tell is, was the original salad for rice, and it got converted to millet, but something got lost in production and the instructions for the rice version were included instead? Or is the millet supposed to be added to the rice and fried? Or just added at the end? Or something else entirely? Well, I already had both the cooked rice and the cooked millet ready to go, so I decided to combine them together and fry the whole lot. It worked well and I was happy with the result, but I could easily imagine the salad with only the rice or only the millet, too.

Over in the Food in the time of a pandemic discussion these services have come up a few times: they are marketing themselves as a sort of environmentally-friendly food delivery service, on the premise that they are selling you food (particularly produce) that would otherwise be discarded for being "imperfect." I can't speak to Misfit or any others that might be out there, but I subscribe to Imperfect and have been pretty pleased with the results. Honestly, I'm happy when they give me some kind of crazy mutant carrot (or whatever) because then their model makes sense to me. It's those not-so-imperfect avocados, etc. that I wonder about. What sort of similar services are out there? Are you happy with yours? Do you feel like you're actually reducing food waste, or is it just clever branding on a standard food delivery service?

I wouldn't really call it a success, though, I'll certainly never try it again. My most successful caccio e pepe pizza was my first, just adding Romano to the béchamel in a white pie and hitting it with a lot of black pepper at the end.

Yes, maybe chewy, but I though the real problem was more flavor density: sage is pretty intense, and a long julienned strip of it struck me as just being too much sage all at once.

Beets with Sage Leaf and Dukkah Spice (p. 116) The beets are roasted with sherry vinegar and olive oil, then tossed with a spice mixture of fennel, coriander, cumin, raw cashews, pistachios, and benne seeds, plus julienned sage leaves, onion, olive oil, and lime juice. This requires careful balance, the ingredients are all pretty aggressive: I think it was successful for the most part, but I'm not sold on julienned sage, next time I'd chop it instead.

Yeah, I made it again tonight, but switched out the roasted figs for pomegranate arils, and left the cashews whole. Still great. Those cashews roasted with berbere spice brown butter are fantastic, someone needs to package that up and market it.

I think something like 16, and yes, it could be halved as long as your stand mixer can grab onto the small quantity of dough well enough (or you want to mix it by hand).

The sufganiyot video I made for the library is live now: I have to agree with my colleagues on this one: Sheft's recipe is fantastic, these were delicious.

Boston Bay Jerk Chicken with Roti (p. 251) The chicken was delicious, but this is the first recipe where I thought they neutered it a bit for the home cook. The ingredients list only calls for 2 Scotch Bonnet chiles to make enough jerk seasoning for two chickens. For a similar quantity of seasoning, Willinsky's Jerk From Jamaica (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) calls for four to six. So while the chicken tasted great, I definitely missed the heat that I think of as characteristic of Jerk seasoning.

Well, the croissants came out of the oven at lunch time, so I guess I split the difference! And it was a bit decadent, you are right: there was a LOT of butter involved in that meal. Not the kind of thing you can do every day...

I'm glad I didn't, then! Yeah, I sort of cheated here (I knew that I was targeting a ~10°C temperature) -- I didn't use the fridge at all while rolling, the exterior temp here yesterday was right around 10°C (50°F), I just put the dough outside the kitchen door . So I tried to stay true to the recipe, but I admit I fudged things a little bit, having made croissants several times before. My kitchen was also relatively cold, so the real problems with the recipe resulted from the two first-thing-in-the-morning stages, where the dough was truly at refrigerator temperature. An intelligent cook would have let the dough (and more to the point, the butter!) warm up a bit before pressing on. I, however, am not that cook.

I just finished making Eric Gestel's Croissant recipe from The Rise: it has a couple of things that were unusual (to me) in it. First, it has two separate overnight refrigeration stages, one just after making the the dough and before doing the lock-in, and the second after all the folds are complete, but before shaping. These long cold-proofs give the dough a great flavor, but also give the croissant surface that bubbly texture characteristic of cold-proofs (and to me, uncharacteristic of croissants). The recipe also has you work with the butter much colder than I am used to, with 30 minute refrigeration in between every fold, plus rolling straight from the refrigerator in the morning both days. It seems to me it was developed for people working in a vey warm kitchen. I followed the recipe as written, but the layers of the croissants sort of blur together.

Chicken Liver Mousse with Croissants (p. 22) This recipe comes from Eric Gestel (a.k.a. "The Other Eric"), executive chef at Le Bernardin. The mousse is pretty nearly a compound butter: there is 3/4 lb butter to 1 lb chicken livers. There is also a pretty large dose of cognac. Needless to say, then: it's delicious. It's definitely the most refined chicken liver dish I've ever had! The croissants are classic, no frills or twists. I'm not really sure the recipe includes enough detail to do a proper job of them: there are a lot of "refrigerate for 30 minutes" steps, but no talk about the target temperature for the dough or butter. I decided to basically just follow the recipe exactly (including only giving it three turns): the croissants were good, but were not the flakiest I've ever made. This is almost certainly a temperature management issue, I think at several points the butter was too cold and fragmented in the dough. With only three folds this was not catastrophic, but if you decide to follow this recipe I'd let the dough warm up a bit before rolling.

Couscous and Roasted Figs with Lemon Ayib and Honey Vinaigrette (p. 102) Davita Davison of FoodLab Detroit brings us this recipe using Ethiopia's fresh cheese, Ayib. The cheese is easy enough to make, but you need four hours of lead time: the only ingredients are whole milk, lemon juice, and salt. Once made, for this recipe the cheese is tossed with lemon zest, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. The next component is roasted figs: I assumed that when the recipe said "halved mission figs" it meant fresh figs here, but my Instacart shopper showed up with dried figs. Oh well, they are just a topping component for a salad, dried figs are delicious too. These are tossed in honey and olive oil and briefly roasted. Obviously you're going to roast fresh figs for longer than dried! The next component is berbere spiced cashews, made by tossing cashews with Berbere Spice Brown Butter (itself a whole separate recipe, of course) and roasting them. Finally, the salad itself is couscous, small greens (I used baby arugula), mint, parsley, and lemon zest. To assemble, add the the cashews to the salad ingredients and toss with Caramelized Honey Vinaigrette (yep, another auxiliary recipe). Top with the figs and ayib, and drizzle with more of the vinaigrette. Phew. A lot of work for a side dish! But, as usual with this book, delicious. Complex enough to be interesting, familiar enough to serve to guests with diverse tastes.

I'm working on the croissants right now and I'm interested to note that Eric Gestel's recipe only calls for three turns (letter-style folds). My go-to recipe from Rose Levy Berenbaum calls for four. I know that with laminated doughs more is not necessarily better, but I'd bet that in the restaurant (this is Le Bernardin) they actually do three turns of the other style fold, whatever that is called. So maybe something was lost in translation to home baker quantities. I'll have to decide pretty soon whether to do the fourth turn here, so any advice is welcome.

I made sufganiyot at work on Monday - definitely no air frying involved!! I used Uri Scheft's recipe from Breaking Breads, and they got rave reviews from the librarians.