I love to cook. Be it alone, where I find an afternoon of solo chopping to be quite therapeutic, or tackling major menus with friends, there’s nothing better than wielding the knife with some music blasting (dub-step was a popular cooking choice of mine this year) and a cold beer next to the cutting board. I’ve learned much more, but have so far to go. I mean, I’ve never done a souffle! Or a standing rib roast! I want to learn Indian cuisine, and how to clean and filet fish, and charcuterie, and…the list goes on. For now, here are a few of my favorite cooking lessons from 2011.

Pasta dishes like aglio e olio, cacio e pepe, and carbonara made many appearances this year. Simple enough in design, to obtain the perfect texture and sauce consistency requires experiential timing and touch. I finally feel like I can make a proper pasta. Beautiful fresh pasta nests like these definitely help.

My favorite pasta all year was a quick pan sauce of salty pasta water and ‘nduja, a hot Calabrian spreadable salami I obtained from Jason at Cured Meats. I must have made that dish four times that week. I did spare a little to make a stunning grilled cheese with basil.

Cooler sous vide – I finally got my pastured pork at that exact right temperature.

Flannery beef. Still the reigning champ of steak in my book. So expensive. But so good. Look at the marbling on this strip!

Lasagna. My ultimate comfort food. I made many in 2011, including a few vegetarian versions so Katie could enjoy it along with me. But my heart belongs to Bologna. I made the bechamel (which I’ve finally nailed) and meat ragu version a couple of times, including once with calf livers, which made it extra funky and interesting. Lasagna for breakfast (with an espresso, in this one photo) is the best. Marone!

Soups. I’m making them quite regularly these days. They used to intimidate me for whatever silly reason, but now I know I can dig around my fridge and pantry and make SOME sort of soup. The Vitamix helps (understatement). This soup below is a mix of frozen peas and water and herbs. Nothing more.

Over the last week I’ve knocked out cheese sauces. I had a mac and cheese break (greasy, grainy) a few weeks ago, so I spent some time researching why this happens, then played around with a few variations of recipes. I wanted a cheese sauce that could take a real sharp cheese, melt smoothly, and hold up even when reheated. I’ve found my easy, no cream method – bechamel held with xantham gum. Mix in small quantities of grated cheese over very low heat.

The veggie plate. Chili oil marinated squash. Gently simmered pink eye peas. Yuzo kosho mashed cauliflower. Tomatoes with chives. No recipes, just preparing things simply and properly and seasoning in a way that makes sense.

Homemade biscuits. Buttery (but not soggy), flaky, crusty on the outside, made with buttermilk and frozen butter. Maybe not the prettiest, but I nailed the texture. It made my day.

Porchetta. Or a version thereof. This one was a picnic pork shoulder, with herbs, roasted for hours, the skin finished under the broiler.

2011 was the year I broke the oven in my kitchen. I began cooking my pizzas at 800F+ on the clean cycle, which is a process that requires some trial and error. I became a little more familiar with making, aging, and working with doughs, though I still need lots of practice there.

Moving on to other people’s food – my brother made some extremely impressive gougères. Better than the last time I tried the French Laundry recipe, and better than any I’ve tried outside of my meal at Per Se.

My friend Brad and I tackled a Momofuku meal. While I wasn’t overly impressed with the dishes, it was once again a great learning experience. This time we got to break down a whole pig’s head, debone chickens, and assemble this dish with meat glue.

And while I learn a lot by trying to follow complicated recipes word for word, my friend Rowdy continues to rock it in the kitchen and be an inspiration with his freewheeling style. I still can’t touch his hot chicken. How did he know that dish of cured, but uncooked bacon with a thyme dressing would be brilliant at 1:30 in the morning? I don’t think he did. But he just gets in the kitchen and experiments, and more and more I think that’s the way to do it.

I quite enjoyed this ramen at Sushi Huku the other day, though I wasn’t clear on the origin of the style. I asked chef Jay and he said it was a pork broth, though it’s not the creamy tonkotsu style where the marrow is released and the collagen breaks down to gelatin and emulsifies with the broth. It was a relatively clear, lighter broth, which was a nice break from heavy tonkotsu ramen. Though, this dish isn’t completely free from sin – the thick, braised pieces of pork shoulder contained a lot of great fat that melted away with each bite.

I don’t know enough about ramen, does anyone know if this is a regional style of ramen, or just a quick and easy take on tonkotsu?

While this ramen definitely constitutes a full meal for less than $9, I couldn’t help but sample a few pieces of sushi. Huku continues to impress. The ikura and uni gunkan maki…oh my.

Earlier today I thought of this lunch when reading Eric Asimov’s article on Sushi Yasuda, his last as NY times restaurant reviewer. He discusses the experience of dining on sushi alone, how it can change and improve the experience, a point I completely understand. The meal turns into an isolated conversation between me and the sushi master. When I’m not screwing around on my iPhone between courses (gotta check those tweets!).

This past weekend was the third session of what I’ll call the “educational and aspirational” meals I’ve cooked with my friend Brad. Meals where we’ve invested ourselves (and our cash) in planning a meal from a particular cookbook which require an inordinate amount of research and planning. The first time we tackled The French Laundry. Next was our dinner from most recent Le Bernardin cookbook On the Line. This time we dug into David Chang’s Momofuku, a cookbook I’ve mentioned a few times.

I’ll say this right up front; this meal was the most disappointing of the three. Not bad, mind you, but the return on time invested was not there. And this is not the first time I’ve been unhappy with results from this cookbook. I’ll admit some flaws in execution, but a good cookbook should set you up for success with its direction, and I don’t think this one does a good job of that. Some recipes don’t flow well, and I’m left making assumptions or changes that I think are necessary, but go unmentioned by the book. And while I appreciate the introduction to certain techniques, flavors, chemicals, and sustainability, some flavors just don’t work, and there is such a thing as an unnecessary “improvement”. I love this cookbook as reference, and the stories are great, but to me it’s not to be followed blindly, and I do not plan on attempting any more of the tedious or expensive recipes. That said, here’s what we ate.

The meal began with the English muffins, my second attempt. They were halved and griddled in a pool of bay leaf infused, whipped mix of rendered Benton’s bacon fat and butter. Garnished with Maldon salt and chives, they are excellent. This recipe is actually forgiving, the only difficult part is trying to make them pretty.

Next was the Riverview Farms pig’s head torchon. Brad boiled the pig’s head for a few hours, then we had a fun time digging our paws inside the pig’s face, pulling out chunks of meat and fat anywhere our fingers could go. A layer of fat is layed down, then seasoned meat, then wrapped in plastic wrap into the cylindrical torchon shape. Fried in panko, it was served with cherries and a mustard/mayo sauce. It was goooood, and porky, but again, I wasn’t happy with the instruction and think it could be improved. The texture was too dense and chewy, the fat was not quite where I wanted to be, and the book mentioned nothing about the size of the pieces needed to form the torchon. We chopped them to the size that made sense to us, but looking back it could have been a finer mix.

The “brick chicken” is a deboned chicken half, sprinkled with transglutaminase (aka “meat glue”), then wrapped onto itself to form a brick shape. Wrapped overnight, the glue causes the meat to adhere to itself, creating a single entity of white and dark meat. Pan roasted on the stove top and the oven, the chicken skin was initially crispy, but somewhat rubbery by the time I could cut and plate the dish. The skin was my fault. The chicken was tasty, with plenty of moisture lent to the white meat by it’s soulful cousin, the thigh. I think the chicken should have been brined first though.

The oyster mushroom with pistachio-dashi puree was ok, but the puree is a waste of time if you ask me. I would have been just as happy simply with a side of mixed, sautéed mushroom in butter.

I enjoyed the flavor of the cereal milk panna cotta, which was rich with the savory flavor of corn flakes, though a friend said it was “disgusting”. The hazelnut/chocolate served with it was amazing. We left out the avocado puree, as we agreed it was weird for weird’s sake, and our particular avocado was less than stellar.

Not pictured (bad blogger!) is the famous Ko Egg, which we had before the torchon, and I did thoroughly enjoy. Visually stunning, and slightly less delicious than that, it’s a fine egg preparation, and who doesn’t enjoy caviar? The extra potato chips were a pleasing snack too. I would recommend this dish, as it’s beautiful and elegant, a great way to start a meal. Picture from Bon Appetit below (ours more or less looked similar).

** UPDATE ** Brad sent me a photo of the egg. So the photo below is our Ko Egg dish.

More Links!

Brad’s account of the Pig’s Head in Creative Loafing.

My first attempt of the English Muffin
The Pork Belly Ssam
The Fried Chicken
Chicken Wings (best recipe in the book!)
Pork Buns

I made this porchetta a week or so ago, one of the easiest, most excellent, and least expensive things I’ve cooked lately. The most difficult part is waiting for it to cook while the pork and herbs permeate the air of the whole house.

I cooked it for almost an hour longer than the recipe specific. It could have gone longer.

This was the pork shoulder “picnic” from Whole Foods.

After it was done I cut the skin/fat cap off and broiled it.

Then sliced some pork off, cut up some crunchy pork fat/skin, and got all up in there. Some of the skin popped up like chicharrones. Those pieces were the best.

On my current work expedition through North Carolina, I realized I’d be passing through Lexington, home to a very particular and infamous style of BBQ. In this part of the country, BBQ is equivalent to pork, and the trademark offering is a chopped sandwich.

I sampled five sandwiches in an hour, the first twenty miles south of Lexington in Salisbury, the other four being within a few miles of each other in Lexington. I could have chosen from maybe ten places in a five mile radius, so my selections were somewhat blind. Everything was quick, though I could have probably had my four sandwiches in twenty minutes if I really tried. Three of the four restaurants offered curb side service, all you have to do is park in a certain area and honk your horn.

The Lexington chopped sandwich is defined by it’s minced smoky pork shoulder, mixed with bits of bark, a “red” vinegar based sauce (each place apparently has their secret formula), and mayonnaise-less chopped cole slaw.

Chopped isn’t my favorite pork shoulder product, I think chopping it up results in loss of moisture and they tend to be too lean. By no means would I say this is life changing BBQ, but this is a sandwich about balance between the components and subtle differences, in a tiny town with a firm BBQ identity.

The sandwich below at Smiley’s may not look like much, but it was my favorite. In general, they all look the same, even arriving in the same white lunch bag at each destination. But this one was moist, noticeably smokey, non-mushy texture (which I saw elsewhere), with just enough sauce and crunchy cole slaw, but the real difference maker was the large amount of densely flavored bark mixed in. There was twice as much of it as the next competitor.

Now, I think this is where luck is involved. There is only so much bark on a smoked shoulder, and the person making the sandwich is going to decide how much to disperse in your particular sandwich. A guy I met in Raleigh told me if you know the person making the sandwich and you call in your order, your more likely to get more of the good stuff. As far as the secret sauce formulas went, I didn’t notice much difference.

In Salisbury I tried a “sliced” sandwich, which is the term they use for pulled pork. It was decent, but there was no fat and no bark, so it was dry and without enough flavor. I did like it better after dipping it in the thin vinegar sauce though, a style of sauce I enjoy as it’s not too sweet and cloying. It was a fun food learning expedition.

Full set of photos here.

I love taking photos in natural light at lunch time, it makes me look like I know what I’m doing with this big camera. On occasion wait staff will ask me if I’m a photographer. Sometimes I tell them I just like to take photos of my food, other times I reply, “No, I’m in construction”, offering nothing else but a blank stare. It amuses me.

These are the smoked wings from Moe’s Original BBQ, the chain out of Vail, Colorado (by way of Tuscaloosa). This was my first visit to the former Kool Korners locale; of course the original building has been completely replaced, so the few month old BBQ restaurant is new and clean and surprisingly spacious, with a number of tables and booths, a long wood bar, and a nice elevated deck by the parking in the rear.

The menu has all the usual suspects. The wings were good. Not close to touching Fox Brothers smoked wings, but they were smoky and tender enough. I had some corn and collards as sides, both of which were fine too.

I also shared some ribs (below), which were also good enough. Tender, meaty, a bit of pink under the bark, but fairly uninspiring. Again, nothing offensive, but I haven’t given them another thought until today. On the other hand, I day dream of Heirloom BBQ every time their daily specials show up in my Facebook feed.

I think Moe’s would satisfy a BBQ craving if you are in the area, better than Pappy Red’s or Billy Jack’s.

A few weeks I was invited to a dinner at the home of Emile DeFelice, owner of Caw Caw Creek Farm, which I seem to talk about all the time. Emile’s product (pork) is amazing, but he’s also one of the few people in Columbia that I can call a friend. Being that I’ve worked in SC two days a week for almost five years, it’s nice to know a few people beyond the Hampton Inn check-in staff (shout out to my girl Jan). To be invited to someone’s home during my travels is a rare treat, and I was flattered that I was included.

The impetus for the dinner was two-fold – the winner of the Food & Wine home cook superstar contest, Sarah Simmons (below), is a friend of Emile’s and was passing through town as she cooked and ate her way across the country. It was also a chance to try out some blended pork/beef burgers he has been thinking of offering.

Emile’s kitchen had recently been remodeled, and while not massive, I could tell it was put together by someone who enjoys spending some time in the kitchen. I liked his warning to kitchen predators.

The side dish with our burgers would be okra “fries”. Split lengthwise, tossed with beef suet, then broiled for a long time until they were very crispy with no hint of sliminess remaining. I really liked the preparation; I’ve already recreated them at home twice.

The pork, beef, and onion mixture had been hanging out for a day in the fridge so the flavors could “get together”.

Below is the finished open-face burger. The juicy, medium temp burger sat on a griddled corn cake instead of a bun, and is topped with Georgia cheese, crispy fat back and bacon, and local micro greens.

I’m not usually a proponent of pork/beef blend burgers. The pork does add some nice flavor, but they are usually cooked to 160F+ and end up having a grainy/packed texture and is reminiscent of a meatball. This was my first time having a burger blend with pastured pork cooked to medium, so it was still plenty pink (but not mushy red) in the center. It wasn’t dry, the flavor was great, and it’s definitely a burger, a damn fine one at that.

You’re a little squeamish about pink pork? Get with the times. Even the USDA is saying it’s cool.

Also, Emile gets +100 points for drinking Woodford Reserve out of a Plains, Georgia “Home of President Jimmy Carter” coffee mug.

Last week I was traipsing all over South Carolina for work, a trip that took me almost a thousand miles across five cities. But I don’t mind too much, as an opportunity to dine Charleston and hit the beach in Savannah (Tybee) leaves one with few complaints. On my journey I look for a lot of “road food” and hole-in-the-wall type of places in small cities, but Charleston always has the most exciting restaurants, and this year was no different. I eagerly looked forward to my meal at Husk, the new-hotness, hyper-Southern restaurant from James Beard winning chef Sean Brock.

If you follow food (and let’s face it, you’re reading a second-rate food blog, you must be a fan), you’ve heard about Husk. They only use ingredients available South of the Mason-Dixon line, local and micro-production purveyors are used whenever possible, and long-lost heirloom grains from the Civil War era have been revitalized in their kitchen. All set in a highly manicured version of your grandmother’s dining room. I’d call it Southern comfort food wearing a Billy Reid vest and a bow-tie.

Much of my intrigue started around their Bourbon heavy cocktail program, so on this Wednesday evening visit I started with the Julian cocktail. They had to change bourbons because they were out of the Van Winkle (15) they had been using, oh well. It was very well balanced and refreshing, though I did drink it in about the same amount of time it took to make it. Did I mention it’s already a steam bath in this part of the country? And it’s only April.

The bar (which is in a building off to the side of the main restaurant) only offers a limited snack menu, and the main restaurant doesn’t have a bar, so I had to put my name down for a table for one. I don’t enjoy dining at a table by myself, especially as I often feel the server is disappointed when they instantly realize they won’t be making quite as much in tip. This evening was no exception.

While I waited almost an hour for my name to be called, I had another cocktail and ordered the trout dip. The dip was nice, but the sweet and crisp homemade wheat thins won me over.

The bar was also featuring “Surryano” ham, which I sampled, and was quite good. I’m not sure if it’s worth the premium over other Southern artisan hams, but it’s still much less expensive than Italian ham options. The bar does rotate producers; I was told they had just finished a Caw Caw country ham.

Once I had settled nicely into my buzz, the restaurant called over to the bar to let me know my table on the front patio was ready. Having only six tables or so, this open air porch on the second level was the prime spot for what had turned into a very nice Carolina evening. After quickly ordering a glass of Sancerre from the quirky, soil type categorized wine menu, I selected the soft shell crab and the clams as starters. I guess the kitchen wasn’t told this was for one person, as they brought both appetizers out at the same time, so I had to quickly decide which one I’d eat while the other went cold. Starting with the hot, fried crab made sense.

I did enjoy the crispy, large offering of crustacean and would order it again, but I’m a sucker for soft shell crabs. There’s something savage about eating them, I feel like a cruel giant among the ocean dwellers as I rip through their soft exoskeletons with each bite. Looks like you should have found a better place to shed your shell, my poor delicious friend.

The wood fired clams with pea shoots and country ham in a parsnip broth was my other selection. It sounded damn fine on paper, but the broth was salted past the point of being edible. I picked out the clams, but can’t say I enjoyed those either due to the contact with the broth. I considered sending it back, but I didn’t see my server until my entree came out.

As I was unaccompanied, I was provided with ample time to take in the scenery and the crowd at Husk, and I can’t say I was really enjoying that. There was one guy at the large table at the end of the patio in flip flops and a t-shirt who was hammered and was yelling and cursing loudly. He thought he was quite hilarious, as did his two lady friends, though they did try to quiet him down when he became especially loud.

I don’t feel like I’m one to get too bent out of shape about that sort of thing, but I do believe he was bothering everyone on that side of the porch as it made it difficult to for them to converse at a normal level of volume. That didn’t affect me obviously, but I was sitting facing his direction, so I had nothing to do but sit there and watch this jackoff for an hour. Occasionally he’d try to crack jokes to people at tables next to him or attempt to hug waitresses…it was fairly annoying. Due to all of the press and the local familiarity with this type of cuisine, is this the sort of crowd Husk gets day in and day out? God I hope not.

Which brings me to my main course – Fudge farms pork chop with Caw Caw pig ears and blizzard grits. Cooked to perfection, this large hunk of amazing pastured pork was inexplicably doused in hot sauce. I guess I get a pork chop/hot sauce connection, but that’s something I’d expect on a greasy-spoon fried pork chop sandwich. The spicy vinegar aromas were so strong, it’s all I could smell and taste through the entire dish, ruining my potential love affair with this swine. I did think the pig ear and pole bean salad and the large, vinegar laced grits were brilliant.

I pushed the uneaten portion of the pork away from me, and my server quickly took it away, mentioned some desserts, but I wasn’t really listening as I’d had enough then she brought the check. I walked back to my car a few minutes later, slightly dejected. I understand the excitement of Husk, that what Chef Brock is doing is seminal, the importance of local products, and I love the suppliers they support, but the miscues were disappointing. I really don’t care too much about how local the shellfish is if I can’t eat the dish because it was too salty. Know what I mean?

I guess one could chalk it up as a bound-to-happen aberration on an generally spotless record of execution – not everyone’s perfect. That’s something a true critic would quickly discover through numerous meals, but I’m just a traveler who gets to pass through Charleston once a year. And as someone in that position, a bummer of a visit like this definitely leaves an over-salted, over-porked, over-spiced taste in my mouth.

You could seal up vegetables in vacuum sealed plastic and cook them in the microwave (there’s a video of Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio explaining and demonstrating this), and this would in fact be sous vide, even though you are not using a water bath.

But to really geek out with sous vide, you need a water bath with precision temperature control. The product touted by Richard Blais on TV, the Sous Vide Supreme, was the first “affordable” product marketed for home use, but it’s still $500 and you are limited in the size of the water bath. Fortuitously, last year the Seattle Food Geek posted instructions on how to build your own immersion circulator for under $100, though it did require programming a CPU and soldering wires, and let’s just say handiness is not my forte. A friend in Atlanta and I decided to build them together, and long story short, his works, and mine doesn’t for reasons I can’t figure out (and Seattle Food Geek understandably got tired of answering my emails. He did, however, publish an article in Make magazine that further details this process which will hopefully help me when I can find someone with the tools I need.)

So until I can wrap that project up, I’m sous vide-less but still interested and I want to learn more about this cooking method. Which is where the cooler method comes in, one of a few sous vide “hack” methods I’ve read, but the first I’ve attempted. The downside is that I don’t have the ability to lock in an exact temperature for exceptionally long periods of time (imagine being able to cook short ribs at exactly medium for over two days), and the water doesn’t circulate so there’s the potential for uneven cooking. But it’s inexpensive, easy, and still provides the convenience that comes with sous vide, maybe the coolest attribute of this cooking method. Timing the final push of the meal prep becomes much less hectic.

Depending on size, a steak will be ready in 45-60 minutes (from what I’ve read, no expert here), but you have some leeway with that. Need to leave them in twenty minutes longer? Should be no big deal. Just pull them out of the bags anytime within an acceptable range of time, sear, and serve. It’s even possible to cook the steak earlier in the day, then warm them back up in water later in the bath. Restaurants will have you believe they primarily use sous vide because the food will be exceptionally tender/flavored/cooked evenly, but I think the best benefit provided to the kitchen is the ability to conveniently time and prepare meals in a consistent and efficient manner.

Geez, get to the pictures already. I cooked a  Caw Caw chop last week. The marbling (intramuscular fat) on these beauties make them look like prime beef. It’s amazing.

If you’re going to ghetto sous vide, may as well use a dirty cooler to keep it real.

I heated up some water to 145F on the stove then poured it into the small cooler. I went 5 degrees over my desired cooking temperature as the temp will drop due to the cold chop, which I’d brined in a 5% solution (by weight) for 12 hours. I used a regular Zip Loc, though they do offer a sous vide bag that comes with a pump and a port on the bag so the air can be easily removed. I used a sugar based dry rub on the chop, with some other dry spices like cumin and paprika. I also threw in a couple tablespoons of butter in the bag at the last minute.

The temp settled around 143F after a few minutes. Over the next fifty minutes the temp dropped to 140F, a loss of only three degrees, and I probably opened the cooler a half dozen times to check the temperature out of curiosity. One person on twitter told me they used a large, high quality cooler wrapped in a towel and they lost two degrees in three hours. Quite efficient.

After I took the steak out I let it rest for a few minutes then I seared it, let it rest again, and cut into it. It was cooked to 138F, a couple of degrees below my desired temp. With high quality pastured pork like this, I have no problem eating a chop at the lower end of the recommended spectrum (though the FDA will tell you to cook this guy to a dry and chewy 160F). The chop was unreal tasting, and so easy.

I used the butter/spice mixture left in the bag along with ketchup, molasses, Worcestershire, and a few other ingredients to make a quick BBQ sauce. The carrots were also sous vide, but forty-five minutes wasn’t quite enough for those.

I tried a Morgon Beaujolais that night, of the heralded ’09 vintage. A deep violet color I didn’t expect, I found it to be very wound up and quite tart; not very enjoyable. It opened up slightly in glass but wasn’t really doing anything worthwhile until the next night when the flavors were much more round and meaty. Makes me wonder if many of the ’09 are going to need some time, ala the “near perfect” ’05 vintage in Bordeaux.

Decatur is a solid 30-35 minutes from my place on the Westside, so I don’t get there often, and I had not tried Community Q BBQ until a week ago.

That’s a long way to drive for BBQ, so it had to be fairly excellent to warrant another long lunch journey like this one.

I wasn’t super impressed, but restaurant BBQ is fickle. Consistency on any scale is difficult, but I think even more so in this genre. The BBQ has already been cooked/finished, and at the point it comes off the smoker a lifespan has begun counting down in either minutes, hours, or (hopefully not) days. You catch it at the wrong point in this process and it can be dry, mushy, or some other unpleasing adjective. Maybe flacid. Yeah, that’s not too appealing.

Anyways, here ya go:

Liked – the people that work there, the space, the vibe, the large variety of sides, the bark on the brisket, the collards, the sauces, the fact that they sell farm fresh eggs and offer a knife sharpening service

Not super excited about – the brisket fat (a bit rubbery instead of meltingly good fat), black eyed peas, overly sweet tea, and the pork, which I found to be unfortunate. It was dry, no smoke, no bark, not much flavor. You could have told me it was chicken and it’s possible I would have believed you.

If I’m in the area, I’d stop by, but I didn’t find that what I ate would warrant such a long drive. Heirloom is only ten minutes away from me, and so far I’ve only had wonderful experiences there. But I think the fact that they are so small works to their advantage.