Given that I’m not exactly a person who is awash with cash, I have to find ways to save money on a regular basis. Since I don’t like to cut corners on the ingredients I use in my cooking, one of the places I have found I save a few bucks is in the world of my drinking. Again, since I have a palate that can taste the difference between good and bad wine, I know what I prefer, but I can also taste a good value.
My times at Rustico taught me about the joys of very good beer as well. The resident beer snobs were amazingly knowledgeable, and I learned a ton. But what I also learned was that for personal consumption, while these assorted brews from around the world were indeed preferable, they were not exactly affordable.
So it is left to me to find beers that are affordable enough for drinking in the mass quantities I enjoy, while at the same time being drinkable enough to actually swallow without vomiting. And over the years, I have narrowed it down to three beers that are not only way down on the cheap end of the spectrum, but are also quite drinkable:
Miller High Life (The Low Life)
National Bohemian (Natty Boh)
Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR)
While Natty Boh is one of the harder ones to come by as its distribution is basically only in parts of Maryland these days, it is one that I had a long and lingering love affair with in college, so whenever I have the means, I usually buy it.
But the question is: which of these really is the BEST? For this, we are going to need a blind taste test!
The method was quite simple. I had my assistant pour each of these beers into a similar glass, and had him keep track of which was which for me. Meanwhile I tasted away and determined which was the winner. Hardly the stuff of higher science, but still, it looked professional enough.
Maybe not scientific, but at least it looks professional!
Well, the tasting commenced, and armed with a series of sourdough pretzels to keep all the (lack of) flavor from blending together, I embarked on a tasting tour de force. I fully expected Natty Boh to be the hands-down winner followed by the Low Life, followed by PBR.
The results:
3rd Place: National Bohemian
This was a shock to me. I expected it to be the winner, and to win by a long shot. It was comparatively flat, thin and lacking in flavor that I would consider to be “beer-like”. I have always thought it was my favorite of the cheap beers, but in a side-by-side taste test, it really was not up to the challenge.
2nd Place: Miller High Life
This was not a surprise, I expected this one to be second place. Only, it came in second behind the one I expected to come in third! Anyway, there was a smooth, clean finish to this beer that I expected to find, but the really impressive thing about this beer was it had a head that persisted through the testing process. Hell, there’s still a head on what’s left in the glass as I type these results out.
The Winner: Pabst Blue Ribbon
I know, I’m as shocked as you. But really, with a name like “blue ribbon” how could it lose? (It was actually given it’s “Blue Ribbon” name after winning the title of “America’s Best Beer” at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago. To be fair, that was in 1893…) But there was no question that the biggest hops flavor and best “beer-like” taste was in this glass. It really was a run-away win. I confirmed this with other tasters I had on hand just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally gotten drunk in the testing process…
But it’s not fair for me to hand down the definitive answer, is it? Let me give you a chance to chime in. Here’s a list of cheap beers, feel free to vote on your favorite, or throw in some other nominations in the comments.
None of this will serve as the ultimate answer to this heated debate of course. But for my money, it looks like I’m personally going to heretofore relax with a Pabst.
Scooped! I know, it’s hard to believe, but the same day I work on this blog post, the Washington Post does the same thing on one of their blogs. And their results came out in the order I expected! (1. Natty Boh, 2. High Life, 3. PBR…) Though to be fair, at least my post gives you the chance to post your vote…
As a business, it is generally a good idea to “involve” your customers in the development of your product. It’s not only a good way to receive feedback about your product, but it’s also a great way to update your database with contact information on your customers so you can send them more ads.
You’re in the band now blue. You’re welcome.
Probably the most notable example of this that I can recall is when M&M’s had the election for a new color M&M. They did this twice actually, once in 1995 (blue won) and again in 2002 (purple won). Anyway, hundreds of thousands of people voted - and M&M/Mars got all their info. How brilliant. It made the customers think they had a stake in shaping the future of the candy that tastes the same no matter what color it is, and now M&M’s could do much more targeted marketing to their customer base.
When I worked at WWF, I helped do “voting” campaigns as well where people voted on their favorite animal (polar bear won), the cutest animal (panda won), and even the scariest animal (around Halloween - I forget which animal won). People had a lot of fun with it, and it helped us gather information on people who were interested in the work we were doing to protect endangered species.
So it was with great interest that I discovered Walkers Crisps (potato chips) is doing a campaign to pick a new flavor of potato chip over here in the UK. They had people suggest new flavors, then they developed a select set of them, and now they sell bags of these trial flavors that you can vote on through their website or by sending them a text message. Once again, it’s a truly brilliant campaign.
But as you are likely a regular reader of this blog, you know there is a big “however” that has to come in as part of this story. And yes, there is. The flavors they have developed are - for the most part - really quite disappointing and/or disturbing. I have tried them all at this point, and so I deliver now the list with some quick reviews.
I swear all of these flavors are real. I couldn’t make these up if I tried. Since I know some of them will be hard to believe, I’m providing links to each of the flavor’s “pages” on the Walkers Crisps website so you can see/vote for yourself.
This is what fish & chips are supposed to look like.
1. Fish and Chips. Well, this IS England after all. It makes perfect sense to sell a crisp that has the flavor of the most popular bit of pub fare. The problem is, the “chips” part of “fish and chips” is a fried potato. So basically that part of the flavor is handled by the crisp itself. So what you have here is a cod-flavored potato crisp. Dreadful.
2. Builder’s Breakfast. Again, this one panders well to the demographic as it has the flavors of a traditional English breakfast all on one crisp. Eggs, sausage, bacon and beans. A noble effort for sure, but the reality is that there are only so many artificial flavors you can cram onto a crisp at one time. The result tastes like powdered eggs with cheap beans, and the great meat flavors are nowhere to be found. Additionally, there is a reason English breakfasts are served hot. These flavors just don’t taste right at room temperature. Horrid.
Looks good huh? What’s missing? Oh right - no potato chips!
3. Chili and Chocolate.While I’m not a fan of the trend in the US to add an abundance of spice to everything, I think chocolate and spice have the ability to go together quite well. I thought maybe this one had a shot. One bite in, and I realized there were two elements to this flavor combination that are tantamount to enjoying their union. First, you have to use real chocolate and real hot peppers - not this artificial crap. Secondly, they can’t reside on a potato crisp. I have yet to find anyone over here who describes these crisps as anything but “awful,” so that will be my verdict as well. Awful.
4. Onion Bahji. England has a love of Indian food, so this is not as obscure as it would be were this to be offered in the US. (An onion bahji for the record is basically a spiced onion fritter usually made with chickpea flour, then pan-fried like a latke.) The take of this was to combine a mild sweet onion flavor with a mild curry flavor. The result is actually not bad at all on a crisp, which acts as the starchy base one would find in a bahji. Decent.
5. Crispy Duck and Hoisin. Anyone who knows me knows I absolutely LOVE duck. That being said, Peking duck, served with hoisin is one of my all-time favorite ways to enjoy the bird. So I really looked forward to trying this flavor. The problem was, at NO POINT in the tasting of these crisps did I come across a flavor that even remotely reminded me of “duck” or “hoisin”. They tasted like BBQ potato chips with a mild onion flavor. While all in all, this wasn’t terrible, it was not at all what I was expecting given the name on the bag. Disappointing.
And now for one that made my jaw drop when I first saw it. Arguably the total motivation behind this whole post:
No really, this bag is for real. It actually has a distressed looking squirrel on the fornt of it!
6. Cajun Squirrel. Seriously. How did this happen? Someone thought this flavor up, submitted it, the board of selectors at Walkers green lighted it, some dude in a lab worked on making an artificial flavor that tastes like… this flavor… they put it on a crisp, made bags for it, and distributed them. SOMEWHERE along this chain of events you’d think someone would have stood up, thrown off the chains of procedural inertia and exclaimed:
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING!?!”
But alas, nobody did this, and these crisps were born. Yes, I actually paid for a bag of them so you could see them. And yes, I actually tried them. The initial flavor of them was again similar to a BBQ potato crisp. It looks like they thankfully stuck with the “cajun” aspect of the crisp, and downplayed the whole “squirrel” part. I was actually almost disappointed that these weren’t as horrible as they could (should) have been. But when I stopped eating them, the aftertaste kicked in. Perhaps this is where the “squirrel” aspect - or how they envisioned it - kicked in. It was ghastly. Like I had eaten some kind of old meat. It was intense. So I ate an orange, to sort of wash the taste out. But no - now I was stuck with orange and… umm… “squirrel”… It was a mess.
Even if I could tolerate the aftertaste, and thought the “cajun” crisp was OK, I still would be uneasy about eating chips that were purporting to be “squirrel” flavored. If somebody handed me a delicious crisp with a wonderful salt and vinegar flavor, I would be happy with it. But if they then told me that this flavor was called “Rabid Howler Monkey in Vinegar,” I would assuredly spit it out. It’s all about the marketing, and on this flavor, all I can say is: What the hell were you all thinking? Give it a miss.
So now it’s time to vote. The most tolerable is the Onion Bahji, but still it doesn’t inspire me to go out and buy a bag of them. I will therefore abstain, which means the good people at Walkers miss out on this chance to get my mailing address, email and phone number. They’ll just have to enjoy the fact that no matter which one wins, I’ll still be buying the regular old salt and vinegar.
Update 5/18/09: The winner in this contest has been announced! If you’d like to see which flavor won, and what the winner got as a result, you can read all about it here!
So perhaps I’m ranting too much, and not saying enough in my story as of late. Simply put, I’m sort of stuck here in the US awaiting my UK visa so I can go back there and get on with the story. This limbo I find myself in has caused a major drag in developments in this blog, and I apologize for not making it more entertaining in the meantime.
Still a retard.
But since people seem to love it when I’m harsh on people in the cooking world, allow me to wax poetically on a pasta cooking technique that I consider to be one of the dumbest things I repeatedly witness in the kitchen. However, I’m a story teller first and foremost, so allow me to set the scene in the form of a true story that happened a few years ago.
I arrived at my friend’s house early because we were planning on watching something on TV, and as we tuned the flat screen to the appropriate channel my friend said, “Hey, I was thinking of making pasta for dinner, you in?”
“Why of course!” I replied. “You know I love pasta - it’s a requirement for all Italians!” (Aside: I think a celiac Italian would have to commit suicide.)
So my friend put the water on for the pasta, added the salt (to my pleasant surprise, enough salt for cooking pasta - an otherwise common mistake avoided) but then did something I hadn’t seen before. She poured some olive oil into the cooking water. Mind you, this story is taking place a few years back. Since this happened, I have seen many other people do this as well, and my reaction has always been the same as this first time though.
“Ummm… what are you doing?” I asked. (This was my first time remember, I really didn’t have any idea…)
“Adding oil to the water,” she replied as if I were not capable of understanding what happened when one tipped an open bottle of olive oil over a pot of boiling water.
“Well, no shit,” I said so as to confirm I understood this basic concept of physics. “Why are you doing that?”
“It keeps the pasta from sticking together.”
A silent contemplation washed over me as I thought through the implications of what I had just been told. The more I thought of it, the more laughable it became in my mind though. So what now follows now is my rant as to why this is a truly stupid idea, and basically is the lecture I give everyone who I see doing this.
Clip art, photoshop and too much time on my hands. A deadly combination. But hopefully this diagram gets the point across.
So we’ll start with an experiment you can do at home! Get a pot of salted boiling water going. Now pour in some oil. Where does the oil reside in the pot? That’s right, the top! Now, pour in a pound of pasta. Where does it reside? The bottom? Well mercy me! It seems like the pasta and oil AREN’T TOUCHING EACH OTHER! How can the oil keep the pasta from sticking if they are not touching?
No worries, let’s give the water a healthy stir - we can stir the oil in and make it combine with the cooking pas… oh wait, what’s that? The oil floats back to the top when you stop stirring? You mean OIL AND WATER DON’T MIX? Hmmmm…..
Well, not to worry! When the pasta is done cooking, we have to strain it out. We’ll just pour out the mix into a strainer and… oh wait, all the oil - on the top - poured out first before the pasta ever got a chance to touch it….
Somebody put a lot of time and effort into this stupid papier mache mask, so it would be wrong of me to make fun of it. But some things can’t be helped…
People, please, don’t waste perfectly good olive oil in your pasta water! If you want to throw money away like this, please send it to my PayPal account (matt1@finarelli.com) instead. Keeping pasta from sticking together is a real concern. The over-simplified chemistry of pasta cookery is that pasta is made from flour and is cooked in water. As we know from elementary school, flour and water makes glue. (Or terrible papier mache projects.) So if you just cook pasta and let it sit, yes, it will stick together and from a glob of truly sinister proportions.
So something needs to be introduced to keep the cooked strands/pieces of pasta from sticking together. The key word in that last sentence was COOKED. When pasta is uncooked, somehow it seems to not stick together. The threat of pasta sticking together is avoided during cooking by using rapidly boiling water, and by STIRRING. Oil in (on) the water will not help you here, and is totally unnecessary. AFTER it is cooked, you must add something - like oil! - to keep the strands apart. Tomato sauce also works well here! Using my over-simplified chemistry from before, the “glue” on the pasta is what will grip on to a sauce - of any kind - and make it part of the dish! And with all the “glue” on the pasta holding onto sauce, they will no longer stick to each other!
Does NOT approve of bad pasta cooking methods!
Pretty cool, huh? (Yes, this is dumbed down heavily, I know, but when trying to talk people out of putting oil in cooking water…) Which leads me to the other thing I see some people do.
Please, if you are serving your pasta right away - for the love of God, DON’T RINSE IT! Simply put (yet again) this washes the “glue” off the pasta, and the sauce won’t stick as a result. In fact, rinsing pasta actually pisses me off even more when I see it done. So why didn’t I write about that?… Hmmm… I have no idea.
Just be good to your pasta people - that’s all I ask. It’s not complicated, and you don’t need to throw it against the wall to see if it’s done. GAH! There’s another pasta peeve of mine!
A fabulous film, and of course it doesn’t hurt that it’s about Italians…
For those of you who don’t understand, “Big Night” is simply the best film ever made about what it is to be a chef. (Yes, even better than “Ratatouille”) Perhaps I am slightly biased in that it has to deal with Italian chefs, but regardless, it is still amazing. (Definitely better than “No Reservations”.) If you haven’t seen it yet, and have any interest in the culinary world, you must go rent it now. It is exactly what all chefs have to go through several times in their career.
To briefly explain for the poor souls out there who have not seen this film, it is about two brothers, one who is a fantastic chef who is unwilling to alter his cooking styles to match public tastes, and the other who wants to be a success with the public - even if it means making compromises on the food to sell people what they want. Simply put, it is about artistic integrity vs. selling out - from a culinary point of view.
At least I had been presented with the reality that this dichotomy existed before I was recently presented with it. I guess it helped me prepare for it on some level, but still it was amazing how it tore me in two directions so strongly.
Another cooking class up in Bedford, PA was coming up at LifeStyle and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. With the approach of spring, I wanted to teach a class on “Springtime in Tuscany”. It was going to feature lamb chops and grilled asparagus and a whole host of wonderful dishes prepared with the simple, straightforward style of Tuscan cooking. But the owners wrote back to me saying that while the class sounded great, they didn’t like how it used so few products from their store. Simply put, if they were going to pay me to teach a class in their store, I had to involve (read: “sell”) more of their merchandise.
So here it was, the integrity of my recipes and vision versus the need to follow the requests of those footing the bill. I was torn. On the one hand, it hurts to have a menu rejected like that. On the other hand, they had every right to make such a reasonable request of me since it is, after all, their store. I was not sure what I was going to do. Give up and tell them to find some trained monkey to hock their wares? Or maybe I should be more flexible in my menu seeing as how this is a great gig, and I don’t want to lose it just for the sake of my stubborn pride.
Cooking in the class with generous amounts of vinegar. As you can see, it makes me happy.
Photo by Ken Sepeda
Suddenly it hit me. I have always been a big fan of their selection of olive oils and vinegars, so I decided to alter my menu just a little bit, and turn the class into a lesson on how to cook with different vinegars. My menu was changed only slightly in the long run (lamb chops and asparagus remained) but now the owners were very happy that I was showing the class how to use so many of their products. Compromise wins again!
The class was an enormous success as the food was awesome and my students loved it all. It was such a hit, we have decided to re-run the class again later next month. Here is the menu of dishes I presented (and the vinegars I used):
Marinated Artichoke Hearts with Hazelnut Gastrique (white wine vinegar with cinnamon and nutmeg)
Italian Bean and Tuna Salad with White Balsamic Vinegar (white balsamic vinegar obviously)
Asparagus Vinaigrette (orange balsamic)
Candied Cranberries (red wine vinegar) (These were placed on the asparagus vinaigrette)
Lamb Chops Aceto (marinated in white wine vinegar with mint and lime, drizzled with fig balsamic after cooking)
Strawberries in Balsamic (chocolate balsamic vinegar)
It all turned out fabulously, and every dish had at least one person decree as the best on the list, which to me is the sign of a successful class. (And to tell the truth, I was more than a bit worried about the first one since it was my most avant-garde attempt by a long shot.) But because it turned out so well, I will share the recipe with you here:
Artichokes with Hazelnut Gastrique
What may at first seem like an odd combination, this dish works well as an appetizer to surprise your friends and family with. The sweetness of the gastrique plays well with the tartness of the artichokes and the vinegar flavors blend in with the naturally good flavor pairing of hazelnut and artichokes.
2 Tbsp water
2 Tbsp sugar
½ cup sherry
½ cup sherry or flavored wine vinegar
½ cup halved hazelnuts
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 can marinated artichoke hearts - drained
1 loaf Italian bread - optional
Combine water and sugar, and boil until sugar begins to take on an amber hue.
Add sherry, reduce until almost all liquid has evaporated.
Add vinegar, reduce by a little more than half
Pour mixture over hazelnuts, stir to cool.
Whisk in olive oil to form emulsion with liquid in bowl.
Pour mixture over artichoke hearts, serve on thinly sliced bread if you like.
This will teach my wife to go out of town and leave me alone for two weeks…
Some of my longer-term readers will remember the article I wrote on chef’s tattoos, and how I was interested in getting one myself after my boss had used a lunch break one day for the purpose of inking his forearm. Well, allow me to fill you in on all that has happened behind the scenes since then.
I went to my local tattoo parlor and showed them my original tattoo idea which had all of the modern cuts of pork listed on it, but I wanted the base of the design to be the old-style pig. They told me that this idea wouldn’t actually work, since there was so much writing and so many fine lines. The tattoo would bleed with time, and in a year or two would look like crap. My only choices for this tattoo were either to make it large enough to spread across my whole back, or to go back to the drawing board. I chose the drawing board.
Taking into account the fabulous the suggestions on my previous post from Swan and Ed, I thought about the hilarious Simpson’s scene wherein Homer asks Lisa about her newly-announced vegetarianism:
The sketch I put together in Photoshop.
Taking that clip into consideration, I now had a refined tattoo idea. I still wanted to stick with the old-time butcher-block print of the pig, but now I figured I would work in the phrase “A Wonderful, Magical Animal” into the mix - since that is how I feel about pigs given the wonderful cuts of meat we collect from them. And to fix the problem of crowding the pig with all the cuts, I would only highlight the cuts Homer mentioned - which happen to be three of the best cuts from the pig anyway. A chef’s tattoo AND a Simpson’s reference to boot! My return to the drawing board had resulted in pure gold, and I was ready to go forward with the project.
All I needed now was to make sure I had the money to pay for the honor of permanently scarring myself. I assumed something like this would cost around $300. So once I achieved salary status at Rustico, I knew I had a steady enough job locked in, so I might as well go for it. It was just a matter of waiting for the wife to go away long enough for me to do something stupid. (Usually five or ten minutes is plenty of time for me to get into trouble, but this would take a little more time…)
With the birth of my new niece, and my wife out of town for two weeks, I had my window of opportunity. I called my good friend Boutros from Nookie Cookie to accompany me along - since she said she really wanted to see me in pain - and she acted as photographer for the ordeal.
After about an hour wait, my artist arrived on the scene, and it was somewhat comforting to see that she was a serious veteran of the tattoo chair herself. I would dare say that there was a greater percentage of her epidermis that had been colored in than not. She turned my sketch into a drawing, and said it would only cost $250 (I was saving money already!) so into the chair I went.
No sooner had I sat down, and right before the needle made its first mark - as if on cue - my phone rang. I apologized and went to turn it off, but noticed it was a call from my mom. As if she sensed a tremor in the force, she called me at the exact moment I was about to start feeling pain. I half expected the voice mail message she left to be along the lines of, “I don’t know why I called, I just suddenly had the urge to see if you were OK…” (She was just calling to say “Hi” as it turned out later.)
For the uninitiated, the pain of a tattoo needle feels pretty much the same as slowly cutting yourself with a razor blade. Non-stop for a half hour. There’s no denying that it kinda sucks, but on the other hand, the pain is hardly “unbearable.” I think the following photo montage will sum up how it went for me in the chair:
The needle goes in, and the work begins. I am glad I could not see this as it happened, or I probably would have freaked, as I am not a fan of needles.
Though I couldn’t see the needle, I could definately feel it as it made my whole shoulder blade vibrate.
The finished product.
So now that I have a tattoo, I join the ranks of, well, all other chefs it seems, as I don’t really know any chefs who aren’t inked in some way or another. This is just another rite of passage that I have gone through on my way to becomming a chef.
I think the next step is to get beaten up by one’s wife, which I fully expect when she returns on Saturday.
I am sure some of you are wondering about the title of this post, and let me assure you; all will be explained. And no, I have not performed any violence against my mom. (Hasn’t she suffered enough already?…)
A plate of fresh fried chicken. As much a sign of summer’s arrival as fireflies.
In recognition of my need to provide y’all with more recipes, I’m offering up my fried chicken recipe since it is definitely that time of year. That and I think this recipe is really something special. Would you like to make fried chicken with super-crispy skin and a moist, juicy inside that is bursting with flavor? If so, today is your lucky day. (If you said “no,” then there is really something wrong with you…)
This is a recipe I developed back in culinary school actually. I was taking a food science course, and the practical part of the final exam was that each of us was given a chicken. Using what we knew of food science and how it related to cooking meat, we had to provide the chef instructor with a fully-cooked chicken that had a crispy outside and moist inside. Any cooking method was allowed – provided it ended up as requested.
Basically stuff moves in all directions across the cell membranes. For more information, visit the nice people who made this diagram: www.exploratorium.edu
The answer to this style of cooking is brining. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of brining birds, allow me to give you a crash course. (The rest of you can skip this paragraph.) Brining involves placing a bird in a salt/sugar water solution for a few hours before cooking it. While you may initially think this would dry out the bird (salt water draws water out of the bird) the result is actually the opposite. To get scientific about it, water is initially drawn out of the bird, and then the salt (and water) in the brine solution comes back into the bird. The salt then denatures the proteins in the bird meat slightly. This denaturing means that when the proteins are cooked, they can’t coil up as tightly - the action which squeezes water out of meat. If not as much water can be squeezed out, more stays in the bird. And with the extra water that came back into the bird in the brining process, the result is a much juicier end product. OK, lesson over.
Brining was obviously part of what I had to do for this exam, and I decided that a brined fried chicken would probably give me a super-crispy skin as well. (The fact that we had a large deep fryer on hand helped me make that decision as well…) But for this chicken, I wanted to add more flavor with my brine, so I brined it in buttermilk, which up until now I had only ever used in the coating. The result was a brine that stuck to the outside of the chicken as well - adding another layer of flavor under the crispy fried coating.
For the coating, my time in NC taught me that flour is the way to go. But there is no reason not to add some flavor in this step as well. I may not have a secret recipe of seven herbs and spices, but choosing flavors I like is not all that difficult, and of course you can adjust this to your preference as well.
In the class final exam, the recipe worked like a charm, and I presented my chicken to the chef instructor who agreed it was fabulous. (I received second place in the course behind what I personally thought was a horridly over-salted Guinness-brined chicken. But the guys who won were good friends of mine, so I was happy for them…) But after chef tried the chicken, there was another student from the class who took a bite as well. He loved it so much that after one bite he looked at me and said, “That’s so damn good, I gotta go home and slap my momma!”
The name of this chicken was immediately carved in stone for all eternity.
Slap My Momma Fried Chicken
Brine:
3 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup salt
2 Tbsp sugar
4 cloves garlic (chopped coarsely)
1 Tbsp paprika
2 bay leaves
1 tsp cayenne
1 Tbsp chopped fresh sage
1 chicken cut up into 8 pieces, or about 8 thighs and/or drumsticks
Coating:
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp baking powder
3 cups flour
1 Tbsp Old Bay seasoning
1 Tbsp chopped fresh thyme
1. Combine all the brine ingredients in a large non-reactive bowl, add the chicken pieces and allow chicken to soak in the brine for 3 hours in the fridge.
2. Take the chicken out of the brine, shake off excess brine (especially large pieces of garlic that may be sticking) and place on a rack on top of a sheet in the fridge, uncovered, for 2 more hours. (Don’t rinse or rub off the brine, you want that flavor to stick around.)
3. To coat, combine the egg, buttermilk and baking powder in one bowl, whisk well. Combine the flour, Old Bay and thyme in a large flat plate. Dredge the chicken in the liquid, coat with the flour and fry in a 350 degree deep fryer until done - about 3-5 minutes. (You can also fry it in a Dutch oven with about an inch or two of fat in there - you’ll just have to flip the chicken to cook both sides, and I would recommend a higher cooking temperature with this method - like 375 degrees.)
I doubt you will actually slap your momma as a result of eating this - in fact, I sincerely hope you don’t. But I’m sure you’ll want to call her to share this recipe. Because what good is a plate of fried chicken, if you can’t share it?
A few stories here that relate to other great blogs you should be reading. First off, to my good friends at the Rachael Ray Sucks Community I want to share this funny story. The other night in the kitchen, Dave (another chef) made a squirt bottle of extra virgin olive oil for use in dressing a new menu item. He is no fan of Rachael Ray’s either, but as a joke, he slapped a large piece of masking tape on the bottle and wrote “EVOO” on the bottle.
I took one look at that and was heard to proclaim, “Oh HELL no!”
Me with our newly-christened Extra Virgin Olive Oil bottle.
The offending piece of tape was quickly removed, and replaced by an even larger one that read: “EVOOMGSTFU!” In honor of the great acronym from on the RR Sux site, which of course stands for “EVOOh-My-God-Shut-The-Fuck-Up”! It is now the kitchen standard for our extra virgin olive oil bottle. (They also offer it on a T-shirt that I really need to buy…)
The funny part came as our dishwasher Greg saw the bottle last night and was looking at the label. He is not a chef of course, and I doubt he is a regular reader of anything to do with Rachael Ray - one way or the other - so this long acronym made little sense to him at first.
Finally he looked at Dave and asked, “So what does this mean? Does it stand for ‘Extra-Virgin-Olive-Oil-Mixed-Green-Sauce-Together-For-Us?‘”
It was quite some time before we all stopped laughing. Thank God it came during a quiet spell.
Any excuse to put a photo of bacon up is a good one!
Next, I want to give a big “Thank you!” shout-out to Heather of Bacon Unwrapped. She has been a fan of this blog for a while, and I have been a fan of hers as well, but she took the big step last night to come in to Restaurant Vero with some friends!
I should have recognized their order, as the three of them all ordered pork dishes…
But I was able to come out and meet her just before desserts, and it was great to finally put a face with the name. I shared one of my bacon band-aids (that I now carry on me at all times in the kitchen) with her as a gift to thank her for linking to me, and for making the trip all the way across the Potomac just to see me. Oh, and to enjoy our braised pork shank as well…
Thanks Heather! I hope dessert was great for you as well!
You ALL deserve this.
Thanks so much!
Finally, I also want to give a tremendous shout-out to all the great people out there - too many to name and count - who have been voting for me in the Best of Blogs Awards. There are just a few days left in the voting, and I would love to see your continued support. I wish I could list you all here, and give each and every one of you a gold star of your own. But I guess this one will just have to do as a collective one. Thanks everyone!
P.S. Also, I have to send a shout-out to Lia Bulaong at Serious Eats for picking up this story and sending hundreds of new readers to my site. You are welcome here Serious Eaters, and I hope you become regular readers!
I have done a lot of traveling in my days, and of course the thing I focus on most when I am visiting a new place is the local cuisine. It is from the observations I make of how people cook and combine flavors in different parts of the world that I feel I am able to become a better chef. And just to make this whole issue into a “chicken or egg” dilemma, it is perhaps these observations and experiences that led me to become a chef in the first place…
But I can’t help but think about how much better so many foods are in other countries I have been to. I know it is cliché and I may be beating a very dead horse here when I say this, but we Americans really just don’t do ourselves right by the food we eat. While I think the concept of the Great American Melting Pot is one that makes this country great, it leaves us with a sort-of garbled culinary tradition of our own. The result is often a lack of depth in the flavors that we are presented with, and an almost inarticulate sense of what constitutes a fine dining experience. So much of what we eat is shipped to us or grown in factory farms that the real joys of fresh meat and produce completely escape us, while our desire for fast and easy preparations don’t allow us the opportunities to see what cooking can really give to us if we just give it a little more time and effort.
Fresh off your own raspberry bush, there is almost nothing better.
In fact it was just today my mom swung by my house, and I was showing her how my raspberry canes were flourishing nicely in my backyard. Since that means I am expecting a very large crop this year, she of course begged me for any “overflow” that I may have because the raspberries in the stores these days are devoid of flavor. They have been cross-bred so as to make mold-resistant varieties, but at the cost of flavor. Personally, this is not a trade-off that I think is worth it. Paying $3.99 for a pint of fresh, flavorless raspberries makes as little sense as paying the same amount for a pint of rich, rotten ones, so we might as well just take our chances, right?
How to cook a Caribbean lobster.
Step 1: Go out and catch it…
When I was on a sailing voyage in the British Virgin Islands a few years ago, my uncle said that we had to swing by a place called “Sidney’s Peace and Love” for dinner one night. While I loved the name, I wasn’t sold on the concept until my uncle ordered dinner for us. On the radio from our ship. He radioed in the kinds of fish and lobster we wanted, and they were ready for us when we arrived later that night. They had gone out and caught the fish we ordered that morning, so it is hard to dispute the freshness of our meals! It was like this all over the islands, and the fish were truly some of the best I have ever had.
Being Italian, I have been to Italy several times, and I don’t think I need to convince anyone here of the freshness of Italian foods. Basil that was clipped seconds before being added to the pot and tomatoes so red that you’d think they were artificially colored were staple ingredients of the cooking I have both done and received in the land of my ancestors. And cheeses made from unpasteurized milk have a body and flavor that just cannot be matched by anything we have here in America with our pasteurization laws. There is a reason Italians grate fresh parmesan on almost all their pastas: Because they can.
The jamon in Jabugo was so good, we ordered another plate of it for dessert. No lie.
When my family all got together to rent a villa in southern Spain one year, we weren’t only treated to the great culinary marvels of the area like jamon from Jabugo, amazingly light Manchego cheese and the best olives I have ever had in my life, but we were also treated to a collection of lemon, lime and orange trees on the property of the villa. Every morning we drank copious amounts of fresh orange juice and lemonade with breakfast, and every night we enjoyed salads and grilled vegetables with citrus vinaigrettes that just exploded with flavor. It was there that I came up with my first rough concepts of my lemon-lime vinaigrette that we now use frequently at Restaurant Vero.
All of these stories show a facet of what is wrong with food today in America.
We place more emphasis on making sure the food can get to market rather than on the quality of the product that arrives there. So the fruit may be fresh, free of bugs, and every year is a bumper crop, but who wants a bumper crop of mediocrity?
We have to make sure we have plenty of everything in stock so that we can get exactly what we want when we want it. The concept of the “catch of the day” is long in our past as we instead deplete the oceans to make sure we have too much of everything on hand so that any order can be fulfilled.
Our collective fears of any sort of germ or bacteria ever coming in contact with our body has forced us to pass ridiculously extreme laws about how sterile our food must be, which destroys any strong flavor characteristics, and yet does little to address the real causes of food-borne illnesses. (Peter Pan peanut butter anyone?…)
And lastly, why doesn’t anyone grow their own fruits, vegetables and herbs anymore? If sunlight is touching your property, you can grow your own fresh food! Yes, it is more work, but so is good cooking. I firmly believe that in order to truly call yourself a “foodie”, you must also work to flex your own green thumb.
How can this photo be a surprise to anyone?…
I am certainly not the first to raise these issues and voice these complaints, nor do I hope I will be the last. This needs saying by as many people as possible who agree that we can do so much better with the food options we present ourselves with in this country. If we truly want to consider ourselves as the greatest nation, I think we have to first prove it by not being complacent when we are fed total garbage. If we work for, and demand the best, I think we will all be pleased with the collective culinary results.
In the meantime though, I think I am going to have to get myself a villa in Andalucía, Spain. You know, something near Jabugo of course…
I wrote a while back about how the humor in kitchens can trend a little more towards the “ribald,” and I am guessing that is about as mildly as I can put it. My own sense of humor tends to skew in this way as well, so I was actually looking forward to working in an environment that not only catered to my “low-browedness,” but one that would encourage it and allow it to blossom.
Imagine my disappointment (and that of my good friend Boutros) when my first kitchen job (Cafe Tirolo) was about as straight-laced as they come. I don’t think I ever once uttered so much a single bad word in that kitchen. OK, maybe I said something when I burned my arm, but I don’t really remember… In short the humor there barely made it to the “PG” rating, though Vic did tell me one joke that made me laugh out loud. Here goes:
A man is walking by a store one day and sees a sign in a window offering a $100 river cruise. He is intrigued by this idea, so he goes in to ask about it. The man behind the counter says absolutely, they have a river cruise for $100, and it is about to leave. So the customer pays, and is lead down to the dock out behind the store.
There, the cruise director punches the man in the face, and pushes him into the river.
Shortly thereafter another man sees the sign, and the same thing happens. He pays, gets punched and thrown into the river.
The two men are now floating down the river together, nursing their aching jaws, when one says to the other:
“So, do you think they’ll serve any food on this cruise?”
To which the other man replied, “I doubt it. They didn’t last year.”
Damn funny. So the humor was cute, but hardly the “blue” kind of humor you would expect to hear in The Aristocrats, or a professional kitchen for that matter.
The move to Vero brought me into a kitchen whose humor is definitely more “adult-oriented,” and no, I am not going to share the jokes/topics of conversation held there - you’ll just have to use your imagination on that one.
But this recent joke/prank played in the kitchen was just too funny for me to keep to myself. I am still laughing about it now, several days later.
To set the scene, it was last Friday night, and of course it was busy. Orders, as I have mentioned before, are coming in fast and furious, and we are doing everything we can to keep our heads above water. At this time, the owners, Joy and Veronica, had dinner in the restaurant with some friends. While it may seem like this would be a bad time for them to take up a table, this is actually a great time for them to be in the dining room. They can observe from the floor how everything is handled when the restaurant is at its busiest.
“I’ll have a half-double decaffeinated half-capp, with a twist of lemon.”
In addition to that, they like to place complex orders on these occasions - I am guessing both to test the ability of the server to take and communicate a complex order, and to test us in the kitchen with our ability to fulfill these orders. That, and why not get exactly what you want when it’s your restaurant? Sure, we are not happy to get such a complex order when we are at our busiest, but when is there a better time to test us?
So to cut to the chase of the order that actually pertains to the whole “humor” aspect of this story, (sorry for all the administrative notes on how to run a restaurant there…) Joy ordered her rib eye with a small salad and a grilled jalapeno pepper on the side. My efforts to organize the walk in fridge have not yet been absorbed into the behavior patterns of all my fellow employees, so there was a bit of a mad scramble to find a jalapeno to grill for her. The rib eye was placed on the plate, and the pepper leaned up against the steak, then the plate was passed to me so I could make a quick side salad for the dish. I was putting the salad together when Jay (Joy’s brother) came over and with a devilish grin said, “Wait, I got something for my sister…”.
For those of you who are having trouble visualizing what I am talking about…
He then took two grape tomatoes from my salad and placed them on either side of the jalapeno. The resulting arrangement of vegetables made an unmistakable phallus that was hilarious, but maybe subtle enough that she wouldn’t see it. We were thinking that we had a great inside joke that was a kind of “revenge” for her complex order. David then finished off plating the dish with sauce and a rosemary sprig garnish.
Out went the orders to their table, and we continued on with our work, but giggling to ourselves about our little prank. Yes, it was a proud moment for us all to laugh like 12 year olds.
The waitress returned from Joy’s table, and she was holding the rosemary sprig from the plate in her hand. She announced to us, “Joy wanted you all to have this. Since you sent her a dick, she wanted to send you a bush.”
I don’t think we stopped laughing for a full minute.
So yeah, she noticed. And yes, the humor can be a touch crude at times, but it’s what helps us get through the busy nights. If we couldn’t laugh like that when we are working our hardest, the job might just be unbearable. Maybe I’ll share the cruise joke with them tonight…
This story requires us to go back to several previous posts, so please bear with me regular readers (all four of you) as I recap for the newly-initiated. Back in December, we were reviewed by the Washington Post, and it was a very favorable review. However, seeing as how this reviewer visited Vero before I was an employee, I could hardly take any credit for the praise we received. Quoting myself:
“I want to be clear about this review though. I claim absolutely ZERO credit for this glowing review. All of his visits occurred before I was an employee, so there is no way my additions for the past two and a half weeks had anything to do with what Mr. Nicholls experienced at Vero.”
The business at the restaurant really picked up as a result of that, and I was proud to be working in such a well-liked and busy restaurant.
As time has progressed on though, I have had more ability to flex my own “creative muscle” in the kitchen, and come up with some of my own dishes to serve to the public. The first addition to the Restaurant Vero menu I created was a trout and persimmon salad in Belgian endive that, while good, was ordered by exactly nobody. The road that must be climbed to reach culinary recognition is indeed a steep one…
Fast forward now to two weeks ago, and you may remember the incident where I was actually able to start a fire in the kitchen using only a stove, a pan and some cranberry juice. Well, further down in that post I mentioned that the redeeming moment of the day was how I invented a spinach and mushroom stuffed calamari braised in a tomato-basil sauce that was served to some local restaurant reviewers. Quoting myself once again:
“One of [the reviewers] ordered my recipe for stuffed calamari. I was nervous of course, but all the same, I wanted to know how it would be received. After that round of dishes came back, the server reported to me that this particular reviewer said that the stuffed calamari “exceeded all his expectations”…I [choose] to believe that this meant he felt that my creation was really something special.”
This is another great review for our restaurant - and I especially liked the jab they took at the Post reviewer’s “wimpy palate”, with which I took umbrage as well. However, nestled in this review - if you don’t want to read it all - is the following comment:
“The special of SPINACH & MUSHROOM STUFFED CALAMARI Braised in TOMATO BASIL SAUCE with Endive, Watercress & Daikon Salad was also a gem with tender whole squid stuffed to perfection.”
I did an image search for “gem” and surprisingly, the results included zero pictures of squid…
Yes, this was my dish they were talking about, and I am still on cloud nine that the words “gem” and “perfection” were used in conjunction with a dish I invented, cooked and plated myself.
But again, I can hardly take all the credit for this. Look at all the other amazing dishes they mention, and the fantastic service as well! If you take no other point away from reading my blog, please take this one:
Working in a kitchen is a TEAM effort! Nobody can go it alone and expect to achieve any sort of success!
So while my one addition was well-received, and even achieved “gem” status, I give all thanks to my bosses for taking the chance to allow me to be creative, my fellow cooks for letting me - the salad chef - take up space on the stove and in the bain marie for the creation of this dish, and to the servers for getting it to the right people at the right time. The seeming success of one in the kitchen is really the success of all - which may be yet another reason why “celebrity chefs” annoy me so much.
The road to culinary recognition may be a steep one, but with the help of my great co-workers, I think I may have finally taken my first step!
P.S. Allow me to beat the rush of those of you who are going to ask me for the recipe and give you the recipe for these stuffed calamari here:
Again, these are not my calamari, since I didn’t have a camera on me in the kitchen, but this is what they should look like.
Spinach and Mushroom Stuffed Calamari with Tomato Basil Ragu
In one pan, sauté 2 cups of sliced mushrooms (a mix of them is nice) with olive oil, a clove or two of minced garlic and some chopped rosemary. Cook until most water is out of them, place in large bowl off heat.
In another pan, sauté a bag of baby spinach with oil and some more garlic until wilted down. Press excess water out in a strainer, and place in bowl with mushrooms.
To the spinach/mushroom mixture, add salt, pepper, lemon zest, parsley and finally some bread crumbs to give it a little “body”. You are not looking to turn this into a bread stuffing, but you want something there to bind it together.
In a large pan - like a Dutch oven - heat a few tablespoons of oil, sauté a minced garlic clove until fragrant, then add one can of whole tomatoes and their sauce. Bring sauce to a boil, and crush the tomatoes with a potato ricer/masher in the pan. (Can use a metal spoon for this too…) Add about 10-20 leaves of roughly chopped basil, a pinch of sugar, and let simmer gently while stirring occasionally for about 30 min.
While the sauce is cooking, stuff the calamari. This recipe should fill about 6-8 tubes of calamari, depending on their size. Make sure the “tip” of the tube is closed, and if it isn’t, close it off with a toothpick. Fill the tube only about 1/3 - 1/2 with the stuffing, and seal off the big end with another toothpick.
Slip the calamari into the simmering sauce, cover pot, and cook for a total of 45 min to an hour, flipping the tubes every 15 minutes.
When serving, please be sure to remove the toothpicks first - they could be a nasty surprise otherwise…
