Chris Hennes

As discussed here, Fuchsia Dunlop has a new book out, The Land of Fish and Rice. Tonight I made one of the quicker recipes from it... Chicken with Young Ginger (p. 106) This is a straightforward chicken stir-fry with a large amount of ginger and a soy sauce and Shaoxing glaze. Lacking access to "fresh young ginger" I simply used the ginger I had on hand. Not great, I know, considering that the whole point of the dish is the ginger, but I was hungry and this dish was fast.

I've had the pork belly -- I thought the cheese on it was superfluous, but otherwise liked the sandwich.

How long do you want to make the ribbon? Is it supposed to surround the cake, or go on top?

Came home to find this at my door today...

Mediocre. Not worth any kind of commute, but if you are next door you could do worse.

As promised, tonight a member participating in this topic was randomly selected to receive a free copy of the book, courtesy of @gfron1. Drum roll please.... The winner of the free book is @Mmmpomps! Congratulations! Rob will be in touch with you shortly to arrange the details.

I'm heading back to Mexico City in October, and would love to hear any dinner recommendations (as mentioned above, last time there we ate at Quintonil, Pujol, and Biko). We'll go to Pujol again, but would probably like something different for the other nights we are there. Any suggestions? Preferably walking distance from Museo Nacional de Antropología since we are staying near there.

A favorable PW review is generally enough to get a requested book onto our library shelves where I work. No review = no book at our system.

I had the same reservations about the book as @Anna N (not that it stopped me from pre-ordering it, mind you). I too am glad to see some non-seafood recipes in there. Thanks for the link.

I agree -- I think we've hit a point where there is a third burger category. I used to think of burgers as being either the sort of thing you got cooked to order (e.g. a thick burger cooked medium rare) or one that was basically assembly-line processed, was always well-done, and was by definition very thin. Now we've got all these hybrids like Shake Shack and Five Guys, where the burger is thicker and slower-arriving than a typical fast-food burger, but still stylistically very different from a burger at, say, a steakhouse.

I'd think that you run exactly the same risks with nibs as with nuts, and maybe even more so. Your safe bet is definitely to add after cutting, I'd think.

It is used industrially for just that purpose, actually, though I'm not sure it's correct to state that it is doing it "without weakening the gluten." L-Cysteine is what's called a "reducing agent," which breaks some of the disulfide bonds in the gluten (and between the gluten molecules). Excruciating detail available here.

Leek fritters (p. 36) These were good fritters, but all told not really worth the time. If they had taken 30 minutes to make I'd recommend them wholeheartedly, but they just weren't interesting enough to warrant the hour they took to prepare. On the plus side, the flavor was good, and the huge amount of baking powder and whipped egg white made for very light, fluffy fritters. On the minus, I thought the leek pieces were too large and could have benefitted from a much smaller cut. Overall good, but not great.

Roasted parsnips and sweet potatoes with caper vinaigrette (p. 16) Fantastic, one of the best recipes in the book. It's another one of those dishes that you could easily serve less adventurous guests (just tell them it's "roasted vegetables") but that will still satisfy the food nerds at the table as well. The flavor balance is wonderful here, with the lightly roasted tomatoes complementing the caper vinaigrette exceptionally well to add an extra dimension to the roasted parsnips, sweet potatoes, and onions. There is nothing exotic here, but everything works together so well, giving a final dish that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I've started toasting nuts in the microwave, which works very well, doesn't require babysitting, and only takes a couple minutes. I haven't tried it with spices.

I've never tried to make a grilled cheese with chevre, but I supposed it would just wind up held together by the gouda. Other than that, I don't see why you couldn't make the garlic, chop it roughly, and scatter it on. I didn't find it to be all that heavy, it was fairly typical for a tart. It's pretty thin.

Caramelized garlic tart (p. 38) This delicious tart used up the last of my homemade puff pastry from last week, and it was worth it. You begin by cooking the garlic with balsamic vinegar, sugar, rosemary, and thyme until the garlic is cooked and the sugar caramelizes. This is layered into a tart that's already been filled with a half pound of cheese (4 oz chevre and 4 oz goat gouda). There's just enough custard to hold things together. The result is an intensely cheesy tart with pops of caramelized garlic accented by a crisp, buttery crust. It's a bit involved in terms of steps, but the finished product is excellent.

Spicy Moroccan carrot salad (p. 14) Sweet potato cakes (p. 32) Ah, jalapenos. Some weeks they are pathetic. Other weeks... not so much. This week they are intensely spicy, which made the carrot salad, though delicious, a bit over the top. The recipe calls for "2 medium green chiles, finely chopped" which I, fool that I am, blindly followed because normally I like food on the spicier side. Ouch. Obvious moral to that story is don't be stupid, add half the called-for chile and taste-test before going whole hog. Other than that the taste was quite good, if not overly exciting. I've had variations on this salad before and this was one of the tastier, more successful of those I've made. The sweet potato cakes were delicious. Nothing really unusual to them, the ingredient proportions just came together nicely to give a very good final product. They are pretty friendly, with only a little bit of heat, and enough sweetness to satisfy most palates, I think.

I think all of those ideas are probably good, definitely go for it, and let us know what you thought.

With sourdough we're basically talking about optimizing the growth of certain strains of microorganism while suppressing the growth of others. I think it's perfectly reasonable to state that there is an optimum technique, and that some techniques espoused by some bakers, no matter how successful they seem, are at best "not that damaging." As another example, with any sort of bread, for a given style, you are looking for a particular crumb. That's going to depend on a number of factors related to gluten development, moisture content, ingredient distribution, etc. Instead of just guessing at what's going on at a microscopic level to yield the desired results, we're actually going to get to see it. I think that's really cool, and I think it will help us get at the best technique to yield a given style of bread.

I don't know that they will be saying it quite like that---more like "what you thought you were doing is not in fact what you are doing." I mean, I've got something like ten or twenty different cookbooks that talk about sourdough bread, and in every one of them the author has a pet theory about the best way to create a starter. I'd rather have a situation where you could choose a desired end product and have a definitive reference for the best way to get there.

Considering how long humans have been making bread in one form or another, and the vast accumulation of misinformation and old wives tales over that time (especially regarding sourdough), I'd guess that the MC team's aim is something along the lines of "unassailable comprehensiveness." For example, I expect a tremendous amount of information on the best way to begin and propagate a natural yeast starter, backed up by a wealth of tests and observations. Their use of a scanning electron microscope is sort of an emblem of the approach they appear to be taking---they want to make sure that no one can say "yeah, but famous chef X said the best way to begin a starter was by using blah, and I tried it and I got a sourdough, so it must be right!" Presumably their answer will be something like "actually, what is really happening is that the yeast from famous source X is out-competed in Y hours by Candida humilis (or whatever).

Castelluccio lentils with tomatoes and Gorgonzola (p. 222) I actually used Puy instead of Castelluccio here, I just couldn't stomach paying $20/lb for lentils. Can anyone comment on whether there is enough difference between the two to make the Castelluccio worth trying? That aside, I enjoyed this dish. I found the Gorgonzola bits to be a nice surprise whenever one appeared in a bite, though to be honest a slightly less aggressive cheese (or maybe just a less aggressive Gorgonzola) would probably have been better. There is plenty of flavor in the rest of the salad, but the Gorgonzola sort of stole the show when it made its appearance. Don't get me wrong, I love the stuff, but I think in this context something that plays nicer with the other flavors might be called for.

Almost certainly safe -- if you're concerned about mold growth you could always wipe it down with a vinegar solution, but I don't see anything to worry about in that photo.

Lentils with broiled eggplant (p. 116) Once again the key here is getting the various ratios correct: the lentils are really flavored only with red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper, so it's worth futzing with the quantities to get things to your taste. Invariably for me this means adding a bit more vinegar and a ton of black pepper. The texture of the still-firm carrots was a nice contrast to the eggplant and creme fraiche, and I particularly liked the use of the dill here. This recipe is much easier to make than many of his others, so if you are looking for something relatively quick for a weeknight dinner, I think it probably took me 45 minutes to an hour to make this, start to finish.