Chicagoans, I need your help.
For the last week I've been an outsider, taking trips down to the city while staying with my parents in the suburbs, the guy who has to find his way back north again when the night is through, spending cash on the Metra train, bumming rides back from friends. From my quiet vantage point up here I can just see a faint outline of the skyline.
Nick's a well-worn Chicagoan at this point, and he's showed off his city well, tempting me with the city's gorgeous architecture, its butchers, its hot dogs, and more than a couple wonderful bars.
But there's a reason he's been so eager to usher me around: my stint in Europe is over, I'm getting married in August, and Elin and I have some exciting news: we're moving to the Windy City. At long last, Nick and I will be in the same city again for the first time since Brooklyn, where we used to wreak havoc in the kitchen more than two years ago.
But! Elin and I don't have an apartment yet, and that's where you can help. Where we should live? Which are the best neighborhoods for eating and cooking? Nick lived it pretty fancy in beautiful Bucktown, which reminds us a lot of Brooklyn, so that's at the top of the list. But overall our priorities are good walkable options for cooking, since we don't have a car: grocery stores, produce, butchers, and cheese people. Sing the praises of your Chicago neighborhood!
(You might have to convince me that living next door to Stanley's Produce isn't the only option: that place is incredible. The Park Slope Food Coop was one of my favorite things about New York, with its superb and inexpensive selection of produce--but when Nick took me to Stanley's, where I saw artichokes the size of soccer balls for 2 bucks each, I fell in love. Even the lines were long, making me feel like I was right back in Brooklyn.)
So let's have it!
It's been a delicious week. I've been doling out my homemade bratwurst to close friends and making batches of 90 Minute, No-Soak beans just because I can. I know some people had some questions about both of these posts, and this week has given me a few more insights to both processes which hopefully will answer some of them. Also, Michael Ruhlman wanted to see my amateurish spreadsheet I created to find a bratwurst recipe. It's not the prettiest thing, but it is after the jump.
I was so astonished by the success of the 90 minute, no-soak beans that I threw up a post quickly after the first pot came out of the oven. My enthusiasm was genuine, but I probably should have done another batch to make sure all the kinks were worked out. For instance, I didn't know whether other varieties of beans would work, or whether I had just lucked out and that this wouldn't work for other people.
Since I made my first batch with pinto beans I've made two more pots, one with red beans and the other with black beans, and both have turned out extremely well. This last batch of black beans was especially successful.
Instead of just covering the beans with water, I decided to follow a recipe in Rick Bayless's Authentic Mexican for black beans with epazote. I've just recently discovered the wonders of using that herb. In the past I was reluctant to track it down, because I didn't know what it looked like or what it would do to my food.
Well, this is it. This one sprig imbued the pot with a faintly licorice and fennel aroma, which I absolutely adored. It's a great trick to cheaply adding flavor to beans. Along with the one sprig of epazote, I added half a chopped onion, one tablespoon of lard, 1/2 tablespoon of salt, and one pound of beans to a large pot. Enough water was added to cover by an inch and a half. The oven was preheated to 250 degrees. Meanwhile, the pot was brought to a boil on top of the stove. When bubbling, the pot was covered with a tight fitting lid, and tossed in the oven. They were cooked for 75 minutes, or until the beans were tender.
These beans were fragrant from the epazote, but also strangely meaty because of the lard. They are great on their own. But their real purpose in life is as refried beans. Here's a good recipe to get you to refried bean heaven.
As for the brats, I was dissatisfied with poaching them in beer and onions. They split open and took on a slightly bitter taste. I decided to follow the advice that a commenter had given me and grilled them over indirect heat. This solved all of my problems. I just mounded the charcoal on one side of my small grill and spread the sausages across on the other side. I cooked them for about 15 to 20 minutes, flipping occasionally, until they looked cooked. Then I browned them directly over the coals for a minute or two a side. They retained far more of their moisture and soaked up a lot more of the charcoal aroma. It's a great trick.
After the break is the infamous bratwurst ingredient spreadsheet detailing the absurd lengths I went through to settle on a recipe. As you'll tell, I didn't completely follow the advice. Both veal and white pepper showed up often, but I decided not to use them. What it was great at showing were what kind of spices my bratwurst should have. So, without further ado...
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Tagged as:
Beans,
Black Beans,
Bratwurst,
Mexican,
Rick Bayless
Barcelona was a wonderful city to be in, but leaving it was just as fun. Installed in a tiny stick-shift Citroen, we headed north from the city for Costa Brava, opting for the cheaper no-toll road that snakes along the coast and could take twice as long. Driving in Europe was harrowing the first time I did it, but I've since learned to embrace the speeding, reckless flow--I figure it's safe to go with it than stand in its way. Bright blue skies and palm trees swept by us as we headed north towards France and the mountains.
We wanted the Mediterranean, cold and rocky; we wanted to visit Cadaqués where Salvador Dali spent much of his life; and we wanted to eat really good seafood.
We also happened to be headed for the territory of El Bulli, one of the most expensive restaurants in the world. But our plans didn't include a stop there, though we did consider the idea of finding it and taking a photograph of the driveway, which apparently people do. No, our approach was different: we would instead eat where El Bulli's chef Ferran Adrià himself eats, at a tiny storefront in a town called Roses. There, a man named Rafa, who has named the restaurant "Rafa's" in a nod to simplicity that his food also embodies, unceremoniously cooks some of the best seafood in the world.
Rafa is essentially a fishmonger who also cooks your dinner. When we ate there, the concept of a salad or side dish was never mentioned during our exchange with his wife, who waits on the tables and takes care of pretty much everything but the scathing hot plancha where the seafood is cooked. We simply discussed what was on ice in the fish case--at one point she brought over a shimmering whole fish cradled in the bend of her arm for us to inspect--and then Rafa would scoop out big pawfuls of clams or gambas or a giant turbot and slap it on the scale.
The weight would determine the price, which was scrawled on a slip of paper, a series of which lined the counter for each table. Then dinner would find its way to the blazing hot iron plancha.
We had just begun to eat our almejas, baby clams that were sweet and tender, remarkably full and round in their flavor, when a guy came into the restaurant and started talking to Rafa. For some reason he looked really familiar. Hadn't we seen him at Inopia just a few days before?
A few moments later, another woman walked in who we recognized--but from where? Then Rafa and his wife began exclaiming "hola!" and a ruckus appeared at the doorway. That's when we looked up to see a whole group of people walking in--including a man wearing a t-shirt that read "In Ferran We Trust." Half the diners in the restaurant were staring or standing up to join in the greeting.
Moments later our dense heads finally got the picture: the man in the t-shirt was Ferran Adrià himself.
I almost choked on a clam.
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Tagged as:
Costa Brava,
eGullet,
Restaurants,
Spain
My little adventure with bratwurst reached its pinnacle after a tortuous three hour process of grinding, mixing, stuffing, poaching, and charcoal grilling. What I faced, fortunately, looked a lot like the bratwurst of my wildest fantasies. It was perfectly plump, gushing with juice, and absolutely haunted by charcoal smoke. I stuffed that sausage into a huge roll and piled it high with sauerkraut and grainy mustard. The meat was layered with spices like nutmeg and ginger, and had a major snap from the hog casings. My homemade bratwurst had worked.
Which isn't to say that the road to here had been easy. Last post I didn't have a clue where to start. My problem was that I didn't know there were so many styles of bratwurst out there. Finding any kind of "perfect recipe" was nearly impossible. But I did narrow my search, after realizing that the style that I was salivating over was Wisconsin-Style Bratwurst. The German style is richer and, from what I can tell, emulsified. The Wisconsin-Style is chunkier, and features no eggs or cream.
But I still didn't have a recipe. For help I questioned Mr. Hot Doug himself, and finally asked all of you for help. I received it in droves. In fact, I was intimidated by how much information I got. While trying to sort through the half dozen or so bratwurst recipes the number of suggested ingredients called for started to balloon to over 40. So I did what any normal person would do and created an Excel spreadsheet with the dozen recipes and every single ingredient. I sorted through the info, eliminating all ingredients that were only mentioned once, and finally came up with a kind of mathematical equation for what should go into a bratwurst. It was made with pork, pork fat, and a plethora of spices including nutmeg, ginger, coriander, and marjoram.
What I was left with looked an awful lot like the recipe that commenter P.M. left for me. Upon rereading the comment P.M. claimed he was a commercial sausage marker, and has "set up many people with formulas and procedures for making it commercially." Thank you, thank you, thank you. The only problem? Since he is a commercial sausage maker, the recipe was for a 100 pound batch! I was making a 5 pound one. So, first order of business was converting his mammoth recipe into ounces, which I did with a calculator and some handy Google converter program. That left some ingredients with insane measurments like 0.0025 ounces. So I decided to attempt to convert the ounces by weight into tablespoons and teaspoons by volume. Luckily, Michael Ruhlman listed many of his measurement in his Charcuterie book in both weight and volume.
Finally, I had recipe. But then I had to face the hassle of actually stuffing.
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Tagged as:
Bratwurst,
Casings,
Charcuterie,
Hog Casings,
Pork,
Sausage,
Stuffing
While Nick has been saving the world with quick no-soak-beans and investigating the roots of Wisconsin bratwurst (part of my family is from Wisconsin and I hope to weigh in with strong opinions on the subject sooner than later), I've been on the run, away from a kitchen, squeezing every trip out of Europe I can afford. Which isn't much at the moment. But a lack of cash didn't deter us from enjoying some of the best food Barcelona has to offer. This week Elin and I return to the States, and we have only murky plans to return to Europe, so we felt like this was our last chance--even if it would be on the cheap.
We arrived in Barcelona on a sunny day, and were immediately swept up. The energy of its streets, its stylish confection of modern and classical architecture, the big-heartedness of its people--and of course, the food.
Remembering our trip to Catalonia, the word generosity comes to mind again and again. George Orwell wrote all the way back in 1938 in Homage to Catalonia of the "essential decency" of Catalan people, "their straightforwardness and generosity," as well as something else, a "generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances." No doubt his romantic observations remain fundamentally true to this day.
What I loved about Barcelona was its mix of old and new, the Parisian-like architecture I associate with European cities animated with modern gestures, dreamy visionary buildings that add up to a slap-dash, energetic melange of style. There is a now-ness to everything that's invigorating.
To try and save a little cash, our approach to eating in Barcelona was to avoid full-on meals and spend our time grazing in tapas bars, aiming to try as much as possible. Because while generosity describes Barcelona's people and lifestyle, it also happens to describe the size of the prices. Our dinner was often a baguette, wedge of cheese, cured ham from the grocery store, and a bottle of 4 euro wine--which is nothing at all to complain about, especially the fact that a 4 euro bottle of local wine can be remarkably good. After a filling breakfast and dozens of little plates of food throughout the day, the simplicity of that kind of meal was perfect.
The following were our highlights from our time in Barcelona.
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Tagged as:
Anchovies,
Barcelona,
Catalonia,
Spain,
Tapas
I have been thinking about bratwurst for days. What started as an idea for a simple cookout on my little Webber Grill has now completely consumed me because I simply can't find the right recipe. The question eventually led me to walk into Hot Dougs on a recent Wednesday and ask Mr. Doug himself what was in the sausage.
But first, do you know? What is it, exactly, that makes a bratwurst a bratwurst? I know this sounds like an obvious question, but really...think about it. I've been eating them since I was a little kid and they've always been huge off-white sausage stuffed into a bun and slathered with mustard. I know what to expect when I eat one. And they certainly don't look like a hot dog. But I don't honestly know what it is that makes them unique. Is it the combination of spices, certain kind of meat, or the cooking method?
I thought the answer would be simple when I began this search. I started in the natural place, with Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie. His bratwurst recipe is a mixture of pork and veal with the "traditional sweet-spice bratwurst flavors of nutmeg and ginger". But as I read on I realized that there was something awfully different about the resulting sausage.
The ultimate fresh bratwurst, this is one of the richest sausages here, given it's generous use of cream and eggs.
Say what? I wanted the sausage that is stuffed into a casings, poached in beer, and then grilled until crispy on the outside. The more I looked into it, the more I realized he was probably describing the original German version of the sausage, which I'm absolutely sure is delicious. But it's not what I wanted.
I realized that what I wanted was a Wisconsin bratwurst, the kind that is stuffed in a big bun, and topped with sauerkraut and grainy mustard. You eat these fresh off a grill with a beer in your hand. Unfortunately, though there is loads of praise for the Wisconsin specialty, there isn't much talk about what goes into them. In fact, most recipes out there are for how to cook pre-made sausages, not how to make them from scratch. That's when my search really began.
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Tagged as:
Bratwurst,
Charcuterie,
Hot Dougs,
Sausage,
Wisconsin
It seems that in the past few years there have been a few monumental revelations of the "everything you thought you knew about cooking was wrong" variety.
- Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy", Executive Director, eGullet Society
When the timer sounded, I was caught off guard. I reached for a kitchen towel, carefully folded it around the hot handles of my dutch oven, and transfered the hulking pot to the top of the stove. I threw the towel over my shoulder, and contemplated how this batch of dried beans could possibly be done. They had only been cooking for a total of 90 minutes, and yet the Executive Director of the eGullet Society claimed that they would be ready. I trust this guy. He gave the world the Butter Steak. I reached for the lid, forgetting the towel, and scalded my right hand on the hot top. I cursed very loudly. After refocusing my thoughts, I reached for the towel, wrapped it completely around my wounded hand, and finally opened the lid.
The beans were cooked. Every single one was tender and ready to go. It had taken 15 minutes on top of the oven to bring to a boil, and then 75 minutes inside a 250 degree oven. I had not soaked the beans before hand. I didn't even bother to rinse them or sort through to see if any rocks had been hidden inside. How could this be? This question drove me mad, because I have been cooking beans nearly every week for the past year, and now I realize I've been doing it all wrong.
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Tagged as:
Bean,
Beans,
Dutch Oven,
eGullet,
Pinto Beans
My first bite of jerk chicken, fresh from two hours of mingling with smoke, was everything I wanted it to be. The rub of allspice berries and black peppercorns mixed with fresh ginger and thyme and created this incredible aroma --one that I couldn't help but adore. I was completely happy and content until quickly, and without much warning, the spice hit. A double dose of habanero cut through all of that complexity, ringing my lips with intense heat that unleashed the first of many small tears to drip down my face. I took a drink of wine, which only seemed to ignite the pain even more. I reached for a glass milk to squelch what I could, but it only delayed the onslaught. Against what should have been better judgment, I dug back in for another bite.
I had been interested in jerk chicken ever since watching Anthony Bourdain on No Reservations eat some out on the nighttime streets of Jamaica. These roadside stands cooked them in enormous old oil-drums that had been retrofitted into smokers. The chickens were rubbed with a jerk spice mixture of allspice berries and scotch bonnets (a relative of the habanero), among many other things, that turned the flesh a deep, dark brown, just one shade away from black. But when Boudain bite in, the flesh shone white and juicy. I wanted some.
For help I used this New York Times article that explored the jerk chicken available around Brooklyn. It was then that I found out what was in the spice rub. The predominant ingredient was allspice, something I don't really use that much. But it seemed to be absolutely crucial to the dish. In fact, on the island of Jamaica they use the wood from the allspice tree to cook the meat. Something, unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to use. Oh well. I used some nice and mild apple wood. The rub also included black peppercorns, thyme, ginger, garlic, scallion, and brown sugar. I could smell it already.
I also found this recipe from eGullet, and I loved how they traded the dried and ground spices for fresh ones. They toasted whole allspice berries with black peppercorns and then ground them fresh. What it honestly reminded me of was the care and patience that goes into a good barbecue rub.
But its insane heat sets it apart. Mixed in with all of these spices were two habaneros. The spice of these is unlike that of, say, a whole bunch of blunt jalapenos. Those are nothing. One of these little orange guys can completely change the feeling of a dish, and two, well, is just crazy. I thought about adding that third one, but I might not have lived through the experience had I gone through with it. Surely, this is not a dish for those who don't really like spice, or who think jalapenos to be a tad risqué. I shirk such thoughts. Give me more.
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Tagged as:
Allspice,
Barbecue,
Chicken,
Grill,
Habanero,
Jerk,
Smoking
Memphis has insanely good ribs, some so mouthwatering and juicy that they make most of the barbecue I've ever eaten fall of their bones in shame. The rub is better, the smoke more lingering, and the sauce more lip-smacklingly suited to the cause. What cause? Sublime barbecue. I wanted to see how good it could be. Which isn't to say that everything went perfectly or that every bite left me in awe. Over the Memorial weekend I made the long drive from Chicago to visit four of the most vaunted barbecue haunts in Memphis and I left with certain opinions --I certainly liked some more than others-- but not many declarations besides the one above.
Why ribs? Around the time I moved to Chicago last year I sampled some ribs that opened my eyes to this culinary artform. These were meaty, laden with smoke, and so much more inspiring than the barbecue I had eaten before, which tended to be greasy, droopy, sweet, and cloying. It made me wonder: If these places in Chicago were this good then what would the barbecue taste like down in Memphis? Could it possibly get even better?
For the past few months my goal was to locate the best barbecue joints in Memphis. But finding any sort of consensus turned out to be a nightmare. After consulting numerous blogs, asking people on Twitter, and obsessing about it to no end, I finally halted the process. I picked up Mike Mill's Peace, Love, & Barbecue, and decided to visit the four "shrines of barbecue" that he listed in Memphis. They may not be the best in the city at that particular moment, but they were the originals, the ones that have constantly pulled crowds for years.
That list included Cozy Corner, Rendezvous, Interstate Barbecue, and Corky's. That's a lot of barbecue to eat in what amounted to 40 hours in a city. But it's the kind of mission I can get into. Sure, I drove by Graceland and drank a Big Ass Beer on Beale Street, but I had a more important mission. This was my barbecue culinary education and I was going to take it seriously.
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Tagged as:
Barbecue,
Memphis,
Mike Mills,
Peace Love & Barbecue,
Pork,
Ribs,
Travel
After we spent our Saturday morning at the sprawling market in Apt, sampling cheese and charcuterie, the only task ahead of us was to find a tiny hillside town called Buoux by lunchtime. Exploring a mountainous countryside of hamlets and hairpin turns was all that awaited us. By the time we'd arrived a few hours later, the sun was falling lazily on a descent toward dusk; the air was fragrant with grass; and a sumptuous meal awaited us.
Eating lunch at Auberge de la Loube is a pretty straightforward affair: you submit to the chef's whims and order a wicker tray sagging with tiny plates of local Provencal fare, then eat cheese, then dessert. For the hungrier, there is also a second course of meat that can fit between the little appetizers and the cheese. The menu and other things on it can be ordered a la carte, but why demand a choice when it's unecessary? One of the things I miss most about childhood is the lack of choices. It was a luxury. Having full control of one's destiny--at least in some situations, especially food--is overrated. I always jump at the chance to put myself in a chef's hands.
And so we opted from the Provencal plates, cheese, and dessert, called for a pitcher of water, and sat back to enjoy the languorous afternoon.
Our tray came out within just a few minutes: served at room temperature, most of the food was already prepared. A basket of superb crusty bread was set down next to it, and we spent the next 5 minutes wondering where in the world to begin with the 17 or so dishes in front of us. I guess there were some choices to be made after all. But they were choices without consequences. Should I eat the braised artichokes first? Or maybe the marinated mushrooms? Whichever. Eventually I'm going to have everything I want.
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Tagged as:
France,
Provence,
Restaurants
