by Nick Kindelsperger on September 1, 2010
The Al Pastor was way better...
We travel to be surprised, right? While picking my favorite five dishes took some deliberation, coming up with five different foods or dishes that surprised me on a trip to Mexico should have taken me all of five minutes. But for some reason I wasn't expecting this. I have a vertiable library of Mexican cuisine in my condo courtesy of Rick Bayless, Diana Kennedy, and Susana Trilling, and have researched and cooked as many authentic dishes as I possibly could in the past three years. So how come I was wrong about so many things? Almost everywhere I turned in Mexico I was bewildered by some detail I’d never thought about, and which shattered my expectations. Luckily, they all turned out to be those good kind of surprises--cases where my preconceived notions actually hid something more intriguing and delicious.
1. The Tacos
Carnita Tacos at Mi Mercado in Coyoacan
I expected to find some kind of insight about the taco during my two weeks in Mexico. By seeing it in its homeland, I’d formulate some kind of hypothesis on the correct proportion, contents, and preparation to create some kind of Grand Taco Manifesto. But I can’t. While I ate tacos nearly every single day on my two week trip through Mexico City and Oaxaca, I left more confused than when I came.
Goat, Al Pastor, Chorizo and Potato, and Chicken Tinga Tacos
I found them tiny and rolled, like the petite little al pastor tacos found at El Huequito. But I also encountered huge, generously filled ones from Tacos Gus in Condesa, where dozens of great cazuelas of stewing meats and vegetables were open for examination. Some were fried like taquitos, and others were housed in unnaturally soft and pillowy corn tortillas.
The fillings were just as diverse. I ate thinly shaved versions of Al Pastor, juicy hunks of carnitas, and tongue so tender it nearly disintegrated in my mouth. But I also ate rajas with queso, mushroom with crema, and vegetable guisados stuffed with squash and corn. The possibilities for tacos are endless.
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on August 30, 2010
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.
Chickpeas and Chorizo
The result is satisfying, flavorful, easy to prepare, and very economical. And makes great leftovers.
Alice Waters' Gazpacho
The bread thickens the soup and makes use of what would otherwise be stale. The rest of the soup is pretty much summer incarnate--what Waters calls "a liquid salad."
BLT with Avocado and Shrimp
This is no replacement for the classic BLT, but if you're like us and have basically been living on these sandwiches while tomatoes are in season, then this is a great variation.
Fusilli with Sausage, Kale, and Sungold Tomatoes
The sweet, intensely bright flavor of tomatoes are the perfect acidic foil for this traditional winter dish.
Pork Chops with Mint Julep Glaze
The mint julep name is sort of a misnomer. Sure it contains bourbon and mint, but the beef broth adds some meatiness and a sprinkle of allspice on the chops helps balance the sweetness.
by Blake Royer on August 27, 2010
There isn't much argument that summertime is the peak season for cooking. It never gets easier than in August: the produce is top-notch, everywhere, and cheap. Locavores are finally settling down and enjoying themselves instead of passing judgement on the rest of us for buying zucchini out of season. You can make dinner by cutting up tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and calling it a masterpiece. My CSA vegetable delivery is overflowing with watermelon, cucumbers, and of course, tomatoes.
It's also the time when ambitious cooks get into things like pickling and canning to preserve the harvest. Which is how I ended up looking through old bookmarks and re-discovering a post on Food with Legs for Tomato Conserva, adapted from the very excellent Cooking By Hand, written by California chef Paul Bertolli.
The process was appealing for two reasons: one, and I am leaving town today for San Francisco, and I had a bag of tomatoes to use up. But more importantly, I've been trying to convince my wife for about a year now (which is as long as we've been married) that registering for a food mill was an absolutely necessary thing to do for our wedding. Our anniversary has come and gone, and it hasn't left its box. So it was time to use the damned thing, if for no other reason than to bolster my own arguments.
Tomato conserva is like homemade tomato paste, except it has none of the metallic edge, and it has a fancy Italian name. The flavor is exceptional, super deep and tomato-ey (sorry, that's the best word there is) and if you keep it in the fridge under a layer of olive oil, it will last for quite some time, according to Bertolli. You use it like a condiment: spread on grilled slices of baguette with fresh goat cheese, dolloped into a nice bowl of white risotto, or used anywhere you might employ tomato paste to add a richer, fuller flavor to a sauce. Bertolli also mentions an intriguing idea, stirring it into the dough for fresh pasta to make a red-hued noodle.
But when I saw this, what I had most on my mind was homemade ketchup.
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by Nick Kindelsperger on August 25, 2010
I went to Mexico to eat, and I handpicked the region of Oaxaca specifically because I figured I could eat there best. It’s a place where chiles, chocolate, and tomatoes have been growing for thousands of years, and where the holy trinity of corn, beans, and squash make up the local diet. Forget Italy, France, or Spain. Oaxaca is where my favorite food in the world comes from.
I spent two weeks walking its old colonial streets while studying Spanish, eating way more than any one person possibly should. I waited for my appetite to wane, and for some crazy hunger pangs for some other cuisine to hit, but it never happened. I rode away on that bus fourteen days later convinced I had only scratched the surface. I still had more to eat, and more to explore.
Excuse the overly dramatic title, but I can attest to the fact that I ate out twice a day for fourteen days. While nothing was even remotely bad, these are the five things I can't stop thinking about. Now, if you'll follow me into the smoke filled mercado...
5. Chorizo and Carne Asada Tacos - Mercado 20 de Noviembre
Literally, there was smoke.
I could see the smoke from the street, which billowed out in one long cloud of evaporated fat. How could I resist? I slowly strolled into the haze of the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, unsure of what was going on. Dozens of little stands were grilling all sorts of meat and onions over charcoal. But there didn’t seem to be any reason as to what was going on. Each vendor was cooking the same kind of meat, but there were no signs for how much things would cost. At the end of the hallways were a few tables. Unsure of what to do, I simply sat down and waited to see what they wanted me to do.
Finally, a waiter appeared and showed me some salsas. He then handed me a large tray with spring onions on them. I was supposed to hand this to one of the grilling stations, and then go from there. I randomly picked one, said “Mixto,” which I assumed would give me a sampling of everything, and handed them my tray. They threw the onions straight onto the charcoal, and then told me to sit down. An old lady came by to sell me tortillas.
The market, the salsa, the meat, and the final result.
A few minutes later, beautiful slabs of carne asada and fatty hunks of orange-tinged chorizo came for me. The tortillas were fragrant and soft, while the salsas were bright and spicy as hell. But it was the distinctly charcoaled cooked the meats that won me over, and helped make these the best taco of my trip.
4. Chiles en Nogada - Casa de los Sabores Cooking School with Pilar
I didn't eat all of these by myself...
My trip was a collection of fortunate accidents. I didn’t come to Oaxaca with many plans other than to learn a little Spanish and eat everything in sight. In fact, it was only the day before I left that I ended up at Casa de los Sabores cooking school with Pilar Cabrera.
At the same time I’d been trying to track down a perfect version of chiles en nogada, a celebratory dish in Mexico featuring poblano chiles stuffed with a meat and fruit mixture, and topped with a walnut sauce and pomegranate seeds. Though it’s much more of Pueblan dish than a Oaxacan one, I figured there would be one place that could satisfy my craving.
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on August 23, 2010
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.
Chicken with Tomato-Saffron Vinaigrette with Mixed Greens
Paprika and saffron help give a vivid orange-red tinge and a round, mellow flavor to this simple summer salad.
Summer Succotash with Bacon
Lovely, lovely bacon fat and a shot of sherry vinegar help wake up this classic dish.
Eggplant Caponata
This is essentially an Italian variation of ratatouille, but with briny capers and golden raisins to give it a little kick.
Grilled Mustard Chicken with Fresh Corn Polenta
The sharp taste of the mustard is muted, leaving just a trace of its fragrance and a wonderful crust on the chicken. It's pretty much guaranteed to be among the most flavorful chicken off your grill with summer.
Sizzling Spicy Rib Eye Steaks
Usually we just opt for a simple coating of salt and pepper for our ribeyes, but after finding a good deal on these, we wanted to see if a dry rub would help add dimensions of flavor and actually improve the taste of the great cut of meat.
by Blake Royer on August 19, 2010
When I think of Mexican cuisine, I think of balance. Mexicans love acidity in their cooking, and that's what makes it so appealing to eat. Though it's a function of living in a warm climate--the same reason Thai cuisine is also fond of citrus, it's a necessary form of preservation--the culinary benefit has outlasted the necessity.
When you have something rich and heavy in your taco--like, say, hunks of pork shoulder that have been slow-cooked in lard to become authentic carnitas--it is always accompanied by a bright, refreshing salsa to counterbalance it. That's something that's unfortunately lost in translation with so much Americanized Mexican food: the acidity. Americans aren't as fond of it. The typical Mexican restaurant, like the one in my college town of Greencastle, Indiana, serves rich, heavy food that sits in your stomach for hours. Cheese, beans, ground beef, all of it flavorful but nothing to set it all in relief. Your tongue just gets tired.
A well-made guacamole is a perfect example of this necessary balance. Avocados are wonderful things, creamy and rich, and when you add salt their flavor deepens and becomes round. But a guacamole really sings with a proper squeeze of lime juice. I've written before about the importance of acidity in seasoning, as important as salt itself, and Mexican cuisine intuitively understands this.
I'm taking a cuisine of Mexico class right now in culinary school, and one of the things chef continues to refer to is the frugality of Mexican cooking. The frank reality is that most of Mexican cooking was developed by people who didn't have a lot of money. They made use of everything, including the seeds from dried chiles (they can be charred until black and crumbled into salsas to add a complex smokey flavor). And one of the biggest surprises was that the acidity in their cooking doesn't always come from limes.
Limes and Mexican food seem inseparable, but the reality is that a lime tree can be a luxury, and most families didn't traditionally have more than one. Yet every dish needed that crucial acidity. So what did they do? They made fruit vinegar.
At the start of our class chef brought in a huge plastic bucket full of homemade pineapple vinegar, and we have used it for many of the dishes as a seasoning. The process of making it is simple: you simply combine the peels of a pineapple with water and brown sugar (actually, the tradition is to use a Mexican sugar called piloncillo, but brown sugar works just as welll) and allow it to become vinegar over the course of a couple weeks. Once you have the "mother," which is the good culture that has hence developed, it can be used to transform more water/sugar into yet more vinegar. It becomes an ever-replenishable well of acidity to be used without much worry of cost.
My own homemade back of vinegar has just finished, and I just bottled it up. Here's a documentation of the very simple process...which is basically to dump everything in a container and wait around.
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on August 16, 2010
by Blake Royer on August 11, 2010
Spiaggia isn’t the sort of restaurant you waltz into on a whim--you have to wear a jacket to eat there, its gorgeous dining room has floor-to-ceiling windows, they have a cheese cave, and, oh, it’s really, really expensive. But the secret is that Spiaggia also has a cafe. It’s casual, intimate, and the food is superb. The attention to detail that is expected of a high-end restaurant like Spiaggia filters down to its more casual cousin, but the prices don't follow.
I was lucky enough to be invited to an unveiling recently of Cafe Spiaggia's redesigned menu and decor, and I was totally impressed with the food (oh, and the decor is nice, too). And it’s no easy feat to create truly impressive Italian food--its so common and done everywhere. Lots of people can make a decent wood-burning oven pizza, put out some good olives, have a local farmer friend with great heirloom tomatoes. Though I think cooking chops are a big part of it, what takes the food to the next level is the quality of the ingredients.
Tony Mantuano, Spiaggia’s chef, was at the event keeping a watchful eye on the food, and it shows. The room was abuzz with prosecco when I walked in, platters of housemade foccaccia, various crostini, wood-fired pizza, and silvery, bright sardines ferrying by on platters. And a great block of ice filled with creamy gelato.
Above all I was excited about one particular dish they were serving: house-cured sardines. I’ve already publicly declared my love of sardines on the site, so it’s no secret. But these were easily the best I’ve ever eaten: they ship them in every couple days from Portugal (or the West coast if they’re lucky and the season is right) then cure them in-house in salt, sugar, white wine vinegar, and herbs. They are like fish candy, if you can imagine that being a good thing: they have an clean, oceanic sweetness with less, but just enough, of the funk. They were the best sardines I’ve ever eaten in my life.
A restaurant like Spiaggia succeeds not just on the prowess of the cooks, but also on the fact that they can source ingredients unavailable to the average schmo. You will not be having your own sardines shipped in from Portugal anytime soon, and neither will I. And that’s why we will go to Cafe Spiaggia, and that’s what makes paying for food like this worth it.
More pictures after the jump.
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on August 9, 2010
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.
Hong Kong Salt Shrimp
Dropped into bubbling oil and coated with spices, these shrimp pack a punch--but strangest of all, you can eat the shell, too.
Pasta with Corn, Prosciutto, and Burrata
Though burrata cheese is a luxurious touch--it's an even creamier version of mozzarella--the interplay between corn and chiles is most intriguing in this dish.
Angrezi Bhutta (Corn and Tomato Curry)
Armed with a handful of tomatoes, Nick looks beyond the obvious Italian inspiration and heads to India.
Farfalle with Summer Squash
An abundance of squash and an old collection of LA Times recipes leads to this dead-simple dinner.
Tlacoyo Masa Pockets
Working with store-bought masa is incredibly simple--as are these riffs on pupusas, stuffed with a simple bean-and-cheese filling.
by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on August 2, 2010
