Yesterday was the Georgia Tech vs. Clemson football game, a Thursday night game, which I think is one of the best attractions in all of Atlanta. The weather was cool and wonderful, and the backdrop of the Atlanta skyline can’t be beat. In addition, Georgia Tech and Clemson have had a heated and well-matched series for the last ten year, with most games being decided by just a few points.

The actual game is great, but a well planned tailgate might be just as much fun. I got out to our spot roughly three hours before game time, where my buddy Matt had already set up his turkey fryer. No one brought a grill this time, so it was deep fry only!

Matt fried some mozzarella sticks first, then some hot wings which he then lathered up with a mixture of Texas Pete and butter. I generally use Frank’s cayenne sauce instead of Texas Pete, but they are comparable. Just be sure to use equal parts melted butter and cayenne sauce for maximum awesomeness.

For my part of the frying, I first prepared some jalapeno poppers (not pictured). I took twelve large jalapenos, cut the stem out and used a thin knife to core the seeds and ribs from the pepper. Then I cut small pieces of Monterey jack cheese and stuffed the peppers. The coating was a 1/2 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of buttermilk, and 1 tbsp of Cajun seasoning. They fried for 2-3 minutes only. They came out well, though the oil was too hot so the coating was a little darker than ideal. Also, I’d recommend letting the batter drip off on a rack prior to frying.

I was going to try frying the sausage & cheese balls that I often see as a baked tailgated snack, but in a rush I forgot the sausage at the grocery store. I ended up mixing cheddar cheese with Bisquick and Cajun seasoning and throwing the wet mixture in the hot oil. You can see these “cheese fritters” below. The oil was also too hot for these, which only needed one minute to cook. They weren’t bad, but they were a bit burnt and were definitely missing the sausage.

I realized today that I’ve been deep and pan frying quite a bit lately. Apparently I’m not the only one. A blog I like, Macheesmo, put up a post the other day surveying his recent Deep Fry Party. Check out his deep fried Oreos!

Other adventures in frying

While the deep fryer gets the glory, a good pan fry can produce lots of greasy goodness, such as the Redneck Burgers by Rowdy below. He pan fried thin burgers in bacon fat on high heat, creating a wonderful crust on the exterior of the burger. I’ve been reproducing this at home and I’ve even produced a wonderful veggie burger in this manner, though something feels wrong about cooking a veggie burger in animal fat.

The main instigator of my fry-fest has been the cast iron Dutch oven I purchased a few months ago. Below I have some duck fat melting like butter. I’ve been using peanut oil from Costco (great buy) mostly, but I like the animal fat taste provided by the duck fat.

The duck fat can be purchased at Star Provisions. I think it’s $10 for a pound.

French fries have also been a frying project lately. The best results I’ve had have been very thin fries (almost as small as McDonald’s fries), soaked in water for 24 hours, then fried once at 300 for five minutes, removed, then fried again at 400 for just a few minutes.

I tried reproducing the JCT fries once too. These have been fried twice, tossed in white truffle oil, then I used my microplane to produce the light and fluffy layer of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

My most fried item has been hot wings. I bought a huge bag of frozen wings from Costco, which may or may not have been a good idea, depending on how you look at things. I use the aforementioned cayenne/butter sauce a lot, but mostly I’ve been using variation of the spice mixture used on Rowdy’s Sichuan Fried Chicken.

The first time I made the spice mixture, it wasn’t hot enough. I had some cheap cayenne, so I purchased the cayenne below online. To say this stuff is “spicy” would be like calling Rush Limbaugh “conservative”.

I vary the mixture, but below is garlic salt, salt, coriander, paprika, cayenne, ground/toasted Sichuan peppercorn, and black and white sesame seeds.

I threw in a few dried chiles with this batch and got my brush ready for basting.

When the wings are almost ready, a ladle out a few tablespoons of the boiling hot oil and pour it on the spices and stir vigorously. The spices should become very aromatic. Then remove the hot wings and brush the spice paste on them.

I served these with a sriracha/blue cheese dipping sauce. I wasn’t a big fan of the sesame seeds so I’ve stopped using them.

I made these wings for friends again last weekend, but with a bit more salt, less garlic powder, and more cayenne. They were fantastic, but so spicy I had the hiccups for about 10 minutes. When the hiccups start, they are hot enough.

One time I had the wings I drank this Riesling which I brought back from Washington a few weeks ago. Off-dry, with a hint of effervescence when I first opened it, light minerality, with plenty of honey and some tropical fruit. I enjoyed it, I think it could compete with some German Rieslings at the < $20 price point.

Phew, anyone else need to hit the gym now?

Hopefully this post will hold you over for a few days; I’ve been catching flack for not posting frequently enough.

The three new recipes I cooked for this meal are officially titled Chicken Slices in Sichuan Pepper and Sesame Oil Sauce, Hot-and-Numbing Dried Beef, and Lotus Root in Sweet-and-Sour Sauce.

I started with the chicken dish as that’s a cold appetizer that can easily be prepared ahead of time. To create the sauce, you start by violently chopping scallions, salt, and Sichuan peppercorn with a cleaver until it goes from this…

…to this. You can puree it in a blender/food processor, but the cleaver is the traditional method and it’s quite effective.

Then I grilled some chicken, which I purchased as already-thin filets. It’s a time saver, and we’re going to grill and shred it, so I don’t think there’s much flavor lost compared to using full breasts of chicken. You may recall a quick tip from the Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers post – if you’re going to shred the chicken, firmly smack the chicken with the flat side of your cleaver (or a mallet), and the chicken fibers will loosen up and it becomes easier to shred with a fork.

I assembled the rest of the sauce for the chicken, which consists of 3T of chicken stock, 2T of soy sauce, and 1.5T of sesame oil, and set it aside. Then I scrubbed and sliced my lotus root and placed the slices in water.

While the lotus was soaking, I blanched the moderately thin slices of ribeye. I’ve mentioned this before, but blanching meats is very common in Sichuan cooking. It is the attempt to remove the yi wei, or “peculiar smells” of the meat.

I cut the beef with the grain into strips, then across the grain into bite size pieces, which then went into a marinade of ginger, scallions, and Shaoxing rice wine.

Next up, frying the lotus root. I didn’t cut them into uniform slices, so some cooked better than others. In general, I should have fried them longer.

The beef gets dry fried in the wok for 4-5 minutes, until each piece gets a crispy exterior. I then removed the beef from the wok, added some oil, ginger, scallions, sugar, salt, soy sauce, and my reserved stock and brought it all to a boil. Then the beef is added back to the liquid and I simmered for about 30 minutes until the liquid had totally reduced and I was ready to serve.

While the beef sauce reduced I prepared the rest of the dishes. The chicken and sauce was assembled.

Then I prepared the sweet and sour sauce for the lotus. I stir fried some ginger and ginger, then added a combination of chicken stock, salt, sugar, rice vinegar, and corn starch, and brought it to a boil. Then I added the tomatoes, cooked for just a minute or so, added the scallions, and plated the dish.

And finally I plated the beef with some sesame seeds and cilantro.

I highly recommend the cold chicken dish. It had such a clean, simple chicken flavor, with the light scallion element, and a generous kick of Sichuan pepper that made it quite distinct. The lotus was good, not great. If I had fried it better that would have helped, but the sweet and sour tomato sauce wasn’t really doing it for me. But it’s a very unique dish and worth a try if you want to cook with lotus. There haven’t been many dishes so far in this cookbook that involve tomatoes either.

Everyone was giving the chicken high accolades until the beef dish came along. The hot and numbing beef was fantastic – it had the great fried dry fried beef exterior, but with loads of additional flavor and textural complexity from the reduced sauce. Just typing this sentence is difficult, because now I can’t stop thinking about how I wish I had some right now.

Is there anyone out there who isn’t convinced yet that you need to take up cooking Sichuan at home? What are you waiting for?

Luckily, I have a few posts queued up for this week so you won’t get withdrawals, or what I call the “Sichuan shakes”.

Today’s post is a dish that I was quite excited about – Dry-Fried Chicken. I’ve already taken on Dry-Fried Green Beans, but texturally it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting and I was more looking forward to dry-frying meats and seeing how that turned out.

To refresh your memory, dry-frying (gan bian) is a distinctively Sichuan cooking method, where food is generally cut into small or thin slivers, then stirred constantly in a wok with just a small amount of oil, until it’s slightly dried out or “fried”.

A vegetable, such as celery, leeks, or bell peppers is added near the end of the cooking, so they are slightly cooked, to add a wonderful crunchy contrast (and color) to the dish. Remember, textures are very important in Sichuan cooking.

I didn’t have celery on-hand, but I did purchase some Chinese cabbage from Love is Love Farms via The Local Farmstand. Yes, I mention these places all the time, and yes, I will continue to do so until it’s beaten into you – you should visit these people!

On to the pictures:

This recipe is fairly simple in appearance, though it does take some time. Of course, you need to get all your gear out and your food prepared before you start applying heat. I attempted to cut the stems of the cabbage into the “horse-ear” shape, which is where you cut the vegetable at an extreme angle. Only a few of them turned out as planned.

Don’t worry, I didn’t throw the cabbage leaves away, they were stored for later use.

Again, get your ingredients right next to your wok/heat source.

The cookbook instructs us to cut the chicken into one inch chunks. I wasn’t exactly sure if that meant cubes, so I attempted to cut them into strips of moderate thickness. The size/shape of cuts of meat are important in Sichuan, so maybe I need to try this again, following the guidelines more closely.

The chicken cooks for 4-5 minutes by itself to release moisture, then the chiles and the Sichuan pepper is added.

Here comes the fun part – now we turn down the heat, add red chili bean paste, splash in the Shaoxing rice wine and soy sauce, and dry-fry for 10-15 minutes. That seemed excessively long to me, but we have our orders…

In that 15 minutes, a few things happened. First, the bottom of my wok became covered by a thin layer of a dense, sticky, paste-like mixture of oil and chili bean paste that somewhat burned. Also, the Sichuan peppercorns appeared to pretty much totally char, which is not appealing. Even though the heat is medium, cooking those tiny peppercorns for 15 minutes, I don’t understand how any other outcome is possible. Finally, the chicken turned leathery in appearance, looking more like chicken jerky than what I was expecting.

After my 15 minutes was up, I added the vegetables for 1-2 minutes, removed it from the heat, then seasoned with salt and sesame oil and served.

With some consternation I sat down to eat. It definitely wasn’t what I was expecting in appearance, however, it did look decent. The taste? The crunch and color of the cabbage and the scallions was enjoyable, but the chicken, while tactilely interesting, was indeed somewhat leathery and tough on the outside. The flavor/depth from the red chili paste, with slight sweetness and more than moderate heat was appealing, and the chicken below the tough exterior was still surprisingly succulent. I still don’t think I was on target though.

I tried to search for other photos of this recipe and all I could find is here.

I intend on playing with this recipe a bit more. I think I will add some of the Sichuan pepper and chili paste later in the process. I also have been told by a friend that cooking larger pieces of chicken will result in a much juicier and more enjoyable dish, and that in general these cooking times are often odd. It’s tough to gauge how close my results are to the intent when there aren’t many resources online, and with such few restaurants to which I can compare.

I slowly ate each bite, scratching my head, challenging the authenticity, then I realized…well, I just ate and enjoyed the whole damn thing.

Fiordizucca – Tiramisu al pistacchio

Saveur: Potato Puree

Serious eats: Stuffed poblanos with black beans and cheese

the kitchn: stuffed artichoke

Food Network: Lady’s Fried Mac

Jumbo Empanadas: Baby TKO’s (Thomas Keller Oreos)

Bon Appétit, Fast, Easy, Fresh: Potato, Greens, and Goat Cheese Quesadillas

The Kitchn: Ad Hoc Buttermilk Fried Chicken

The Luna Cafe: World Famous Green Chile Mac & Cheese

Eat, Drink, Man…A Food Journal: Chili Con Carne

I’ve made a pledge to cook one fun/challenging/interesting/new recipe from Bon Appetit each month, then post it on this site. I’m tired of paying for a subscription and just looking at the photos and saying “that looks good” and never making anything, so this is what I’m doing about it. 95% of this site is personal accountability.

The last post was the Carbonara from January’s issue. Yeah, it’s March now, but I have a recipe from February to post - crispy black bean tacos.

This recipe is very easy, it’s something a little different than the usual tacos, frying is involved (always fun), and it’s vegetarian friendly.

I used BA’s recipe as inspiration but definitely didn’t follow it exactly. The biggest change is that I didn’t make coleslaw as a garnish.

First pour a few tablespoons of vegetable oil in a pan on medium heat for frying. While that’s warming up, I got everything else ready. Here I’ve got some lime, green onions, serrano peppers, cholula chipotle hot sauce, cilantro, and feta. Drain and rinse a can of black beans.

Mix everything except the feta and cilantro up in a bowl, then partially mash the mixture.

Once the oil is hot, drop a corn tortilla in the oil and scoop a generous amount of your mixture directly in the center. Cook for 1 minute, but keep an eye on it in case your oil is too hot.

Using tongs for assistance, flip over on side of the tortilla to create a shell shape.

Flip and cook for another minute.

Garnish with the cilantro, feta, and more hot sauce. Enjoy an awesomely crunchy, fresh taco. Repeat with next corn tortilla.

The mash is enough for 4 tacos.

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I’ve been craving Mac ‘n Cheese for a few weeks now,  so Sunday I ran a few extra miles to justify eating 1.5 pounds of cheese in one sitting. Some people workout to stay healthy, I workout so I can gorge and imbibe like a caveman. Yeah, cavemen eat a lot. Brontasaurus burgers and mead?

There is a buffalo mac recipe I saw in Bon Appétit last year, which I made and I thought was worth another try.  One area of concern – the original recipe had fried chicken in it, which doesn’t bode well with holier-than-thou vegetarians. So I decided to change up the recipe a bit and use tofu instead of fried chicken. 

The second part of the recipe is unchanged – cooking the mac, creating the roux, adding the cheese, etc. The only step I changed is that I didn’t use fresh oregano. 

So below is my recipe for the veggie equivalent of the fried chicken – buffalo fried tofu. It was great. I actually preferred the tofu by itself, rather than mixed in with the mac ‘n cheese. The crispiness was lost a bit in the baking and I could really taste the tofu and the seasoning by itself. 

Oh, and I didn’t take any pics of the mac prep, just a few poor shots of the mac after it came out of the oven. 

Buffalo Fried Tofu

• One block organic tofu – drained and pressed
• 3 tbsp Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
• 3 tbsp canola oil
• 1 tbsp cayenne
• 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp paprika
• 3 tbsp corn starch
• Salt & Pepper to taste

Cutting the tomatoes thin. The first time I made these I cut them too thick and wasn’t happy with the result. 

The prep “stations”. First the tomato goes into the flour with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Then it gets some egg, and finally some bread crumbs. 

Into the pan on medium heat – careful not to burn. 2-3 minutes each side. 

Plated and served with a relish of lemon and lime peel (and juice), corn, and jalapenos. I actually didn’t like this relish much. Having lemon/lime peel in it was a bit too much for me. It added a bitterness. Seasoning it with more salt helped balance it out a bit. 

Extreme close-up. Whooooaaaa!!!!

As mentioned yesterday in my latest pizza post, today’s post is on Pizzeria Fortunato. It was just a few weeks ago that I heard of this place, and it has only been around for less than a year. However, this short amount of time was all it took to earn the Critic’s Choice in the Creative Loafing Best of Atlanta. 

I’ve been eating my way into the depths of fine pizza creation and dining lately, and PZ is on my side of town (Westside, throw it up!!!), so I had to check this place out ASAP. 

Right up front, I have to say that after reading the menu, I was expecting something a little different (see Una Pizza Napoletana and Jeff Varasano).  Expectations can be funny though…something different isn’t always necessarily bad, and it’s great to add to your food repertoire. 

The pizza menu has all of the traditional pies, but they also offer some interesting ‘za, which includes a Greek Pie and an Eggplant Parmesan version, which I must go back to try some time. 

But what really got me was front and center. Top of the menu, appetizer #1. Pan Fried Provolone. 

I have never heard of this dish, and I couldn’t really picture what I thought this would be. Something about those three little words grabbed me and I was hooked. So Sunday evening we were off and running….

A big old glass of Peroni somehow seemed appropriate. 

They quickly brought out a few garlic/cheese rounds for us. An amuse bouche, if you will. They were very good. 

Checking out the menu. We went with the pan fried provolone and the Neapolitan Cheese, 20″ jumbo size. Keeping it “mad real”. You know, for kids!

Next time I will try a pie with fun toppings. 

After I had devoured the garlic bread and had pushed my hunger out of my mind, all of the sudden, our waitress appeared from around the corner, with what sounded like a tray of fajitas heading our way. Then I see she has a small cast iron skillet, filled with bubbling and spitting cheese. It was an awesomely intimidating presentation. The dish contained a roughly 1 inch thick layer of cheese, topped with tons of hot oil, basil, and quite a bit of red pepper. 

We almost let it cool enough, and dug in. This was better than I could have expected. It was soft and manageable on the inside, and the edges were fried to the inside of the skillet. The cheese was plentiful (this could be an appetizer for 4 people), it was stringy, chewy, and rich, had that fantastic sharp yet somehow subtle provolone taste, and the herbs and red pepper gave it great flavor and what might be too much heat for some people (not me). We had to stop ourselves because we had pizza coming, but I would get this every time. This is my new Italian equivalent of ordering cheese dip at Mexican restaurants. 

So at this point I was pretty much stuffed, but we had pizza coming. The large (they weren’t kidding) pizza came out and they had to set it up on a tableside stand. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting (more New York style than Naples) but it was very good. Not superb, but I still don’t think that Atlanta has any pizza places where I’d be apt to saying “you HAVE to try this pizza”. So I am not knocking this pie at all: it was very thin at the bottom and I couldn’t taste the dough much, but it was thick enough to taste it near the top and it had noticeable flavor and was good and chewy. Also, the sauce was definitely good – sharp and tasty, and I am a big fan of the sauce. 

The slices were huge, so we only ate three of them. Today is day #2 of leftovers and I just finished my last piece. It reheated fantastically. 

I was disgustingly full and happy at this point, but they talked me into getting a cannoli to go. And when I say talked me into it, I mean they said “Would you like a cannoli for dessert?”, and I said, “uhhhh, I dunno”, and she replied “We could make it to go”.  So yeah, that’s all it takes. 

The cannoli definitely met expectations, but was nothing out of the ordinary.  It didn’t taste prefilled and they had the chocolate chips on one end and the crushed pistachio on the other end, which is always a great mix. I recommend trying one if you never have. Paolo’s in Va-Highlands also has great cannolis. 

I always feel like I need to summarize, so to that end: The pizza was definitely above average – good to very good, but I am still on the search for the best pizza in Atlanta. The cannoli was totally acceptable and you should try it. The patio seating is pleasant and comfortable so check it out while it is still nice outside in Atlanta. It had a “fun” environment if that makes sense (I read they are or have made a bocce ball court). The wait staff was very friendly. BUT, for the love of all that is tasty, please go try the fried provolone. And call me up so I can join you.