My New Chili Standard

Chasen's Chili - a classic, but not historically accurate. There was a video made by my sister some time ago when I was maybe 11. You won’t find it on YouTube; it was filmed on Betamax and remains in that format. In it, I play a young fellow named Dennison who is a fan of canned chili. I eat a bowl of Hormel’s and the sounds of flatulence (and hilarity) ensue. As a fan of videography, my sister went on to become a successful director. As a fan of canned chili, I went on to become a successful glutton with a blog nobody reads. Back then, I knew of two types of chili: with beans and without beans. From those two cans, I formed my concept of what chili was. As my palate became more sophisticated in college, I learned to make my own chili, substituting fancy little black beans instead of vulgar kidney beans, and ground turkey meat instead of industrial grade beef. It’s a pretty basic recipe: ground meat, browned with some onions and garlic. Add some cooked beans, canned tomatoes, chili powder, cumin, maybe a little cocoa, more chilis, fresh peppers and some liquid (a beer and some bean juice) and after an hour of simmering, you’ve got chili. I was eating lunch at the school lab when a woman from Texas scoffed at my Tupperware bowl saying, “Real chili doesn’t have tomatoes or beans.” I shrugged through a mouthful of deliciousness, “So?” I kick myself that it’s taken me 20 years to get to the root of what she meant. As it turns out, the roots of chili are found in 19th century Texas, where it was made as a stew from cheap meat. Similar stews were made previous to that but it wasn’t until the 1850s that there were reports of a “brick chili” made of pressed mashed chile peppers, beef and spices that was often reconstituted and eaten on long journeys. This happened to emerge at the same time that there was an influx of Polish immigrants into Texas. Coincidence? I think not. Think of how paprika was such a big deal in Europe thanks to Columbus and subsequently, the influence of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. The immigrants came here and used the next best thing: Mexican chiles. The chili vendors of San Antonio To be honest, I’m totally talking out of my ass. I have no evidence to back up the Eastern European roots of chili but it kind of makes sense, right? Goulash? Chili? Both are bowls of red? I now continue with my out-my-ass history: Chili became popular in Texas and then traveled northward to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. In its six-month run, 27 million people attended the fair and witnessed firsts like the Ferris Wheel and alternating electrical current (yes, I read Eric Larson’s Devil in the White City). Those same millions also had the chance to try “San Antonio Chilley” at the Texas exhibit. From there the dish slowly gained in popularity. "Cincinnati Five-Way" or "Five More Reasons to Never Visit Ohio" In 1902, William Gebhardt began selling Eagle Brand Chili Powder (now owned by ConAgra. Yay!) and nine years later was the first to distribute canned chili nationwide. In 1922, the Empress chili parlor opened in Ohio, which helped popularize the Cincinnati style of chili, which is a tepid, blandish version served over mushy spaghetti. But there were other Midwestern versions that predated them, like in 1913, Chili John’s opened in Green Bay, Wisconsin where it still exists today. Their only other franchise is in Burbank, California, where they serve hot and mild ground beef chili as well as a bean variant. It's a slightly gutsier version of the Cincinnati style (as gutsy as a spicy dish from Green Bay could be). But the ground meat tastes so institutional. My guess is that the ground beef so popular today came out of laziness – it takes a long time to stew chunks of meat vs. ground meat. And beans came out of cheapness. These were lean times in American history and the spices married pretty well with beans. Why not add it to stretch out the beef? Gladwell on Moskowitz (if you haven't seen this, you should) Thus it’s no surprise that chili took off in the canned food revolution, from which, thanks to food expert, Howard Moskowitz, we have 12 varieties of Hormel’s chili, 12 of Stagg and 9 of Dennison’s. Not to mention all the other generic and froofy chilis. This explosion of made up varieties is when I entered the chili fray. But to me, the different cans all tasted basically the same – fine, but vaguely dog-foody. The Los Angeles regional fast food version of chili is a pasty goo slopped from a metal spoon glistening with bright orange grease on a shriveled hot dog. Maybe edible at 2AM while you’re trying to sober up, but it’s not what you would call “good.”

As appetizing as it looks In the face of all these less than tasty versions of chili, my recipe for black bean and pasilla chile chili became my ideal chili. Until I learned more about true Texas chili.

The basic recipe is take a few pounds of beef chuck (or sirloin or something similarly stew-friendly), slice it into 1 to 1 ½ inch cubs, season and brown them in batches. At the same time, toast 2-3 ounces of dried chiles on a hot pan on all sides. I used ancho, which are pretty mild. I might mix them with a couple hotter ones for a little more kick next time.Every braise starts with a good browning. Stem and seed them then toss them in a blender with some water, garlic, oregano, a bit of sugar and toasted cumin seeds. Back in the main pot, sauté a finely chopped onion, then add the browned meat, the chiles, some beef stock and a couple tablespoons of corn meal (for thickening) and simmer for a couple hours. After that, taste it, adjust the seasonings (add cayenne for more heat, or whatever) and add a tablespoon or so of white or cider vinegar to liven things up. Cook it another few minutes and adjust seasonings and thickness (add more water if it’s too thick). I usually cook it a day ahead of time to give time for the sauces to permeate the meat.

My new chili standard The result is stunning for such a simple preparation. Where my ground meat chili is all about secret spice blends, fresh peppers, exotic beans, outrageous hotness, weird meat mixes and other culinary obfuscations, this Texas chili is just about the beef and the chile. That’s all you can see and taste. This past weekend I made it for a campout and I spent most of dinner just sopping up the sauce with cheap white bread. It was a revelation.

Out-Chef Chef Boyardee!

How can anything tasty fit in those itty-bitty things? I almost never order filled pastas at restaurants. Growing up eating dim sum and xiao long bao I’m used to a large ratio of filling to wrapper. Comparing shiu mai to a dinky tortellini is like comparing…something really juicy and delicious and pork-filled to something that isn’t. A menu item like Asiago pumpkin ravioli always sounds yummy and flavorful, but inevitably it just tastes like a wad of pasta because of a paucity of filling and too-thick pasta. Mozza gets it right The exceptions – like Mozza Osteria’s Fresh Ricotta & Egg Raviolo, whose filling includes an entire oozy egg yolk – are reminders that the problem with most filled pastas is in the execution, not the concept. So when I make ravioli, I don’t mess around. I don’t make them obscenely large or overstuffed but I don’t want people to say, “Uh, I think I can taste the mushrooms.” Fillings-wise, I’ll occasionally do the ricotta-based ravioli. It’s ricotta, some Parmesan, a pinch of nutmeg, sometimes parsley, and then whatever sexy foodstuff I have in mind: minced mushrooms, roasted butternut squash, chopped prosciutto, ground meat, etc. But I’m more inclined to fill it with just the sexy foodstuff. I’m a big fan of braised meats in ravioli, like shredded short ribs, or I’ll do seafood. Last night, it was crab. I’ve steamed and shelled my Dungeness crabs before, but it’s a huge pain in the ass. I have to drive a ways to get the live ones, then I have to go through the ordeal of cooking the poor little things and then it takes me a good hour to shell two crabs. It’s so much easier to walk down the street to Trader Joe’s, grab a one pound can of Chicken of the Sea claw meat and pop it open. Plus, it costs less than half as much and tastes almost as good. Blue swimming crab ain’t no Dungeness and its sustainability is in question, but we can't all be Alice frickin' Waters. I forked up the crab, added some green onions, red pepper, lemon zest and a little egg white, which probably isn’t necessary but I had it leftover from the salad dressing. And that’s it. I suppose it really doesn’t matter how you season it so long as the crab is good. Some sort of vegetable is helpful to add texture.Make sure it's the refrigerated kind I’ve retreated to my Asian roots and used gyoza wrappers for my ravioli many times but last night I was feeling show-offy and brought out my pasta roller. I had that thing for a couple years before I actually used it. It seemed like such a messy headache. But it’s actually a pretty easy and forgiving process. And my mess factor was greatly reduced once I got a pastry scraper. If you don’t have one, you should get one. Remember Steve Buscemi’s leg in Fargo? I’m no pasta expert and there are probably a thousand better instructions for making it but here’s how I do it. The basic ratio is 3 large eggs for every two cups of flour. You make a little well in the flour, crack your eggs in it, mix it with a fork while doing a mad dash to keep egg goo from dripping out the well and onto the floor. Eventually, you get a doughy ball that you start kneading to incorporate the rest of the flour. It’ll be hard and rough looking but that’s fine.Cut it in fourths (with your trusty pastry scraper) and start feeding it one of the fourths into your pasta machine (set at 1, the widest setting). It’ll come out ugly, but after you fold it and re-feed it, it will knead into something smooth and manageable. At that point, you feed the pasta through the machine a successively higher numbers on your pasta machine. By the end, you should have a long, wafer thin ribbon of pasta. For once, not cut with a dog food can Time is of the essence as the pasta will dry out and crack within a few minutes so you should have your filling close at hand. I use a pastry ring whose diameter is half the width of the pasta sheet but I’ve also used empty soup cans, dog food cans or whatever works. I lay out a strip of the pasta, put out spoonfuls of filling on the bottom half, using the pastry ring to space them apart. Then I wet the pasta around the filling with water (not egg wash) and fold the top half over. Press to seal the ravioli and cut ‘em out with the pastry ring. At this point, I take each one to check the seal and ensure there’s no air in the ravioli. Air pockets are bad. Then I layer the ravioli with parchment paper and store them in the freezer to keep them from getting mushy. If you store them for longer than a couple hours, make sure they're in an airtight container or they'll dry out and crack. Two cups of flour should make around 60-70 ravioli, which should match a one pound can of crab. Let them eat kibble I rarely sauce ravioli with marinara because tomatoes are pretty dominating. Browned butter is delicious but in small doses. I usually stick with broths or cream sauces so that the flavors in the filling can stand out. For the crab ravioli, I sautéed some shallots, added some cream and saffron, cut it with a little white wine, and cooked it until it turned yellow and fancy. I suppose you could strain it but I think the orange saffron strands are cool looking plus it lets everyone know that you used the real thing. Note the exquisite and rare saffron stamens Boiling the ravioli is a critical step. Once you put them in boiling water, you want to make sure it doesn’t boil violently or your ravioli will rip. A slow bubble works just fine. It should only take a couple minutes and then you plate, sauce and garnish. Or...open a can of this.

On Authenticity

I have a subscription! During a summer dinner for friends I served gazpacho. It was a warm evening and I had tons of tomatoes, so it seemed like the perfect starter. It’s pretty simple: you chop tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions and a bit of garlic, then add some vinegar and olive oil and mushed up bread and tomato juice. Give it a two second pulse from the hand blender et voilà. One of the more cosmopolitan diners looked at the chunky soup and said, “Oh, so it’s not real gazpacho.”

True Andalusian gazpacho is mashed in a mortar and pestle (or at least a blender). It’s smooth and velvety; not like my coarse, vulgar slop. The thing is, I knew my soup wasn’t authentic and I even thought about introducing it with that caveat. But I didn’t because I don’t need another reason to be labeled a “foodie,” a.k.a. “food-douche.” I served it all chunked up because that’s the way my mother made it from some Sunset magazine recipe when I was a child. And I prefer it that way. It has texture. Each bite has a different ratio of tomato to cucumber. It looks more appetizing than the pink, pasty appearance of the “authentic” version. The current Sunset recipe but back in the '70s it was chunky. It was! Yet it still irked me that I was called out on my bastardization of a venerated Spanish tradition. Stuff like that bugs me all the time. Like how when I mention my affection for Abbot's Pizza, die hard New Yorkers will scoff, “They use bagel flour in their dough. It’s not real pizza.” To which I say, “It still tastes better than 95% of the pizza that I ever had in Manhattan. So suck it!” Maybe I don’t say those exact words, but I’ve thought them.

I've never eaten lutefisk nor have I wanted to Why is authenticity so damned important? I suppose it’s a connection to history, just like chunky gazpacho connects me with my childhood. But if not for culinary innovation, we’d still be eating charred meat, nuts and berries. At some point, we have to acknowledge that sous vide whitefish, a modern preparation, tastes better than lutefisk, a preserving method involving lye that dates back to the 16th century. Not surprisingly the editor of Cook's Illustrated There is a limit to bending tradition. If you read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is this pedantic culinary bi-monthly where they supposedly show the better way to cook. Their mission is, “to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.” Their definition of the “best version” is based on some borg-ian concept where they measure the amount of time it takes for a vinaigrette to separate. Their recipe held its emulsion for a whopping 1 ½ hours! But…can’t you just shake up the dressing right before you pour it? Who takes 90 minutes to eat a salad?

If you don't use unbleached organic parchment paper, it's not true en papillote This past spring they presented their improved version of cooking en papillote, a method where you bake vegetables and fish in a paper wrapper. The crack staff of Cook’s Illustrated contends that aluminum foil seals better than parchment paper and that the recipe works best if you parcook vegetables beforehand. But the whole point is that it’s a quick and easy way to cook fish with a dramatic presentation. If you have to cook the vegetables beforehand and serve it in foil, you’re spending too much time to serve what looks like a fancy TV dinner. Their complaints of too much juice or slightly undercooked vegetables are what I consider to be the characteristics of the dish.

Fold it in half and crimp the edges tightly in a semi-circle Basically you create a bed of small chopped vegetables for a lightly seasoned fish fillet upon which you add a little butter or olive oil. You wrap it in some parchment paper and cook it in a 375º oven for 20 minutes and then put it on a plate. Everyone oohs and aahs as they unwrap their gustatory gift. Maybe the kale is a tad crunchy or the zucchini juices accumulate on the plate but it still tastes really good and you only spent 15 minutes preparing the thing.

This was just for me on a Tuesday night so it's not as sexy looking as it could be So what’s my point? I dunno. Don’t make such a big deal of things? I mean, I have respect for authenticity and tradition; I’m more likely to buy a raw milk Brie de Meaux than some Wisconsin cheese product called “Bree.” But I’m also a huge fan of Rouge en Noir, a Sonoma cheesemaker who makes a perfectly delicious Brie that’s often cheaper than its Frenchy counterparts.

I’m also grateful to the nerds. I do get some value out of Cook’s Illustrated. They’re the dorks who will make scores of batches of biscuits to find out the perfect ratio of butter to lard. They are like the not-quite-as-smart cousin of Harold McGee who doesn’t know quite when to shut up. You kinda take the basic concepts from them and then tune out all their extraneous efficientizing bullshit. So, yeah. That’s where I stand. Thoughts? Anyone? Anyone?

Sausage Hang

I think I mentioned Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Reading it makes you want to run off to a Tuscan villa and eat handmade pastas from homegrown wheat all day long. Lately I’ve been obsessing over the salume chapter. How great would it be to make your own prosciutto? Pretty awesome until you read how you have to hang your salted and massaged pork leg in a 40° humidity-controlled room for six months after which you need to clean it and coat it in kidney fat (available at most 7-Elevens) and Italian rice flour and let it hang in a 50° cellar for another six months before it’s ready to eat. Sadly, my temperature and humidity-controlled rooms are in somebody else’s house right now. So I decided to start out on a culinary bunny slope by making fresh sausage. It’s pretty straightforward and requires relatively simple climate control. Thank you, Mr. Pig The first step was buying an 8-pound pork shoulder. Most recipes call for extra back fat but this shoulder had a fair amount of fat through it and it’s not the easiest ingredient to find. Food nerds like McGee say that the back fat has a better texture and melting point but the idea of trimming shoulder fat out and replacing it with back fat seemed wasteful and, more importantly, labor intensive. Of course you need a meat grinder, too, like the attachment for a trusty KitchenAid. But I also needed the sausage stuffing attachment which I picked up at nearby Sur La Table. The store was right next to a bookstore so I poked my head in and perused through Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie. Taken with a spy camera in Barnes & Noble His recipe for hot Italian sausage seemed oddly spiced – i.e., no sage – but who was I to question such a fancy looking cookbook? Back home, I was still dubious. Spice overkill? I decided to mix my spices using the dry weights provided in the recipe, thinking that would be more accurate. But when I mixed my spices with the meat before grinding, it seemed very well…spiced. Again, who was I to question a book endorsed by the great Thomas Keller? Play-Doh for grown ups The grinding was lots of fun. There’s something incredibly satisfying about sending chunks of meat through whirring steels blades. Very Fargo-esque. I probably made a mistake to make sausage on a 100 degree day as you’re supposed to keep everything cold, but it went by pretty quickly. After that it was into the paddle mixer where you mix the meat until it’s cohesive and sticky. Then it was time for a taste. You’re supposed to check at this point to adjust for seasoning but the sausage was spiced and salty I almost went out to buy another hunk of pork to dilute it. I even used less seasoning than the recipe called for. But checking the recipe again, I noticed that their volume-to-mass conversions seemed off. The 8 grams of coriander they called for seemed to be substantially more than the one tablespoon equivalent in the recipe. Turns out, a tablespoon of coriander barely weighs 3 grams. All of weights were heavily overstated. How the hell did that happen? I can’t take out the salt they told me to put in. Who's to blame? Who can I sue? But I soldiered on and got my sausage rig on the mixer and started stuffing away. Here I hit another snag: the KitchenAid attachment sucks ass. The idea is to cram a steady stream of meat into the machine so you can have nice, even sausages but what actually happens is that occasional bits go through the mixer and the rest comes oozing back around the edges of the crammer. At the same time, the sausage casing fills up with air bubbles. More comes out the top than into the casing The other big flaw with the sausage stuffer is that the sausage comes out a foot off the counter which means you constantly have to hold all the sausage as it comes out. You can’t just let it dangle. Vacuum sealed by my lips But after much sweating and hassle, I managed to cram all 8 pounds into pig intestines, packed them in Ziploc bags and got them in the freezer. In the end, they turned out O.K. I still think they’re on the salty side and the coriander is very prominent but everyone seems to like them. They’re juicy, too, so I don’t think I lost anything from omitting the back fat. Maybe it’s not the 30% fat that most recipes call for, but I’ll say it’s in the high-20s. Sliced when frozen makes it perfect for pizza So what are the lessons I learned? Trust Bartoli over Ruhlman. Don’t feel bound by the recipe. I think any kind of seasoned fatty pork will taste pretty good as long as one doesn’t overdo it. Most importantly, I imagine it’s much easier as a two-person operation; one to stuff the meat hopper, the other to handle the sausage. It’s really, really frustrating to do it on your own. And if you can afford it, get a real sausage maker. Screw you, KitchenAid. On my Christmas list

Pig Tastes Good

My friends are shocked to know that I watch “Hell’s Kitchen” over “ America’s Top Chef.” I get it: “Top Chef” entails actual culinary skill whereas “Hell’s Kitchen” is more about how to be a glorified line cook. But that’s kind of the appeal; these people are unstable and uncreative which somehow makes me feel better about my own cooking. Does that make sense? It's kind of like how watching “The Biggest Loser” makes you think, “Damn, I ain't that fat.” And I also do like Gordon Ramsay’s cooking philosophy. He’s all about simplicity and quality of ingredients over presentation. Such a philosophy demands less skill. The clip in question comes at around 32:10 But in last week’s episode, one of the contestants blasted another over serving undercooked pork. She said something to the effect of, “if you serve raw pork, it will make you seriously ill,” and Ramsay agreed. This made me choke on my screwtop sauvignon blanc. This is utter pigshit. Pork is happy to be served medium rare. It’s true, growing up we were told that we shouldn’t eat raw pork and that it will lead to trichinosis. So here’s the down-low on trichinosis, a.k.a., trichinellosis: It’s a parasite caused by eating the eggs of the Trichinella worm. They’re found in pork, horse, bears and whatnot and once they incubate inside you, symptoms include nausea, diarrhea and other icky stuff. It sounds awful except for that over the past couple decades there have been around a dozen instances of trichinosis per year and most of those cases were related to wild game and not farmed meats. Meanwhile Americans suffer from around 30,000 incidences of salmonella and 70,000 incidences of E. coli food poisonings annually. But salmonella occurs more frequently in poultry and E. coli occurs more frequently in beef. So why does pork get a bad rap? My guess is that it’s just a pervasive old wives’ tale like how searing meat seals in the juices. The bottom line is that I’ve been eating medium and medium rare pork for my entire adult life and have never had any resulting illnesses. And most importantly, it tastes better. I have fond memories of my mother’s pork chops that were marinated in soy sauce and honey but the truth is, they were broiled to a crisp and dry like particle board. But when I had a medium rare pork tenderloin at Café Bizou, it was a revelation. How could this be the same meat as that brittle, dusty chop I had as a child? I’ve been resistant to buying pork after seeing that special on HBO where they showed sick pigs being shoved around by a forklift and Food, Inc., where they showed other ovine abuses, but over at Harmony Farms they sell Beeler pork. It’s not organic or wholly sustainable, but the pigs are raised in the open and piglets nurse with their mothers so I feel I can eat it a couple times a month without crippling guilt. They even have a movie to demonstrate the happiness of their pigs. I appreciate this isn’t an ideal situation, but it’s not completely barbaric. Relatively happy Beeler pigs So I bought a couple pork chops and marinated them in a manner that my mother would have approved of – ¼ cup of sugar (or honey), 1 clove of garlic, ¼ cup low-sodium soy sauce, 2 tbsp. dry sherry, some green onions and ginger, blended together. After an hour I brushed them off and grilled them at high heat for a couple minutes a side so that it was medium rare in the middle. Still pretty yummy To be fair, they did better when they were medium in the middle (while the tenderloin is better rare to medium-rare as it's more tender), but they suck when they’re cooked anything beyond that. And if you have a tenderloin, don’t be a sucker – keep it medium rare. Unless you’re Ted Nugent and killed a wild pig with a blow dart.

An Occasional Carnivore

My favorite cut of beef is the ribeye. It’s tender and it has the most marbling of any of the steak cuts. And marbling = fat = decadence. When you get a ribeye from a Wagyu cow, it’s uber decadent. Of course, this is the breed used for the famous Kobe beef, which is massaged with sake and fed beer (though this may be superfluous). The real deal can cost several hundred dollars per steak but I managed to procure some Australian stuff at Harmony Farms for under 20 bucks a pound. Here they call you "Ma'am" and "Sir" Of course grain fed beef from halfway around the world is not very carbon friendly – it takes 11,000 pounds of grain on the feedlot for the cow to add another 700 pounds of cow flesh, not to mention the diesel used on the freight journey. But I’ve already admitted to being a hypocrite in the previous entry and I had a tough day. Most of all, I’ve never actually cooked Wagyu before and I thought it was my duty to give it a whirl. So how to do it proper(ly)? Aussie Wagyu @ $20/lbTrue Kobe @ $135/lb If I were in Japan, I’d slice it super thin and dip in boiling water shabu-shabu style. But what is more uninteresting than boiled beef? There is a reason that Ruth’s Chris cooks their steaks at 1800 degrees and not 212. My sister insists that shabu-shabu is worth it for the sauces to which I say, gimme the sauces but grill the meat. Win-win. But slapping my steak on the Weber isn’t necessarily the best choice, either. Wagyu has a lot of unsaturated fats which means that they melt at a lower temperature. I don’t want to drain out all the good stuff so I had to figure out a way to cook it at a low temperature while still getting all the caramelized goodness of a well cooked steak. It is heat-safe. Enter sous-vide. Basically, it’s the fancy pants version of boil-in-a-bag. You take your food, dump it in a plastic bag and cook it for a long time at a low temperature. Though it’s exploded into the culinary zeitgeist over the past few years, it’s been in use in haute cuisine since the 1970s. It’s great because it cooks food while giving it a very tender, luscious texture. If I were to do it like food nerd/consultant, Dave Arnold, I would get a vacuum sealing machine and then comb eBay for a thermal circulator that some lab is trying to get rid of. But since I’m cheap and lazy, I use a Ziploc bag and a big pot of tepid water. The goal is to bring your meat to around 125 degrees internally, so my thought was to sous vide-ify my beef at around 110 degrees and sear it in a hot pan afterwards for a minute a side. I lightly seasoned my beef with salt, pepper and mustard powder out of reverence to my carnivorous grandfather. I popped it into the pot for around 15 minutes. At this stage there is no real fear of overcooking it since you’re cooking it basically at the temperature of a cow with a fever. A NOTE: Sous-vide translates from French to be “under vacuum,” meaning that there is no air in the plastic bag that holds your food. Vacuum sealers have air pumps that do the job for you but humans have a God-given air pump that works just as well. Just use a decent zip lock bag, close it 90% and, too paraphrase Lauren Bacall, you just put your lips together and suck. If the seal is good, you should get all of the air out and you won’t suck in any beef juice.No air bubble via sucking So after pulling my sack of beef out of the McGuyver-esque sous-vide set-up, I slapped the beef on a hot, dry pan and seared it for two and a half minutes on one side, a minute on the other. It still felt pretty soft pulling it off but after letting it rest for a few minutes, it was clear that I screwed up and overcooked my precious Wagyu. Good but not great Don’t get me wrong. It was still delicious and luscious and tender – almost to the point that it had the soft texture of liver – but the meat was medium and I, like any rational, respectful beef eaters, am a medium rare kind of guy. After my tears dried, I had a cursory self-debriefing where I determined that my method was correct (duh) but my meat was cut too thin. For a half inch thick piece of steak, either I should have done it sous-vide and eaten it all lukewarm and unbrowned, which is weird, or I should have just grilled it without that hoity-toity sous-vide business. Next time, I’m keeping the technique the same and doubling the thickness. Sorry, cow.

I Am a Big Fat Hypocrite

It turns out I’m completely full of crap. After all my talk about organic this and sustainable that, I’m just a big glutton destined to be a future pity contestant on The Biggest Loser. This weekend I went on a little outdoor excursion and when I reached civilization again, it was necessary to refuel. After eating two days of freeze-dried crap, I deserved, nay required, real food. While on the return trail, I had fantasies of poaching some wild salmon with chopped fresh tomatoes or defrosting a grass-fed ribeye. But once we got to the parking lot, hunger overwhelmed me and I manhandled our caravan to the nearest Black Bear Diner, one of a growing chain of restaurants on the West Coast. They specialize in comfort food in large quantities and do it well. So well that we decided that they must be owned by the same foreign conglomerate that started The Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang’s – just one more cog in the international conspiracy to make Americans even more obese. But what could I do about it? Once my eyes settled on the menu, I couldn't help but focus on the appetizer sampler platter, the one with the quesadillas, chili cheese nachos, garlic fries, chicken tenders (yes, chicken), and onion rings. What wasn’t deep fried was covered in cheese. Wait, everything was deep fried and covered in cheese. Anyhow, the point is, the seductiveness of their offerings eclipsed my political correctness. When the platter arrived, I took the prison posture where I protected my plate with my left hand while shoveling food into my mouth with the right. It was impressive. But what earned me true hypocrite/glutton status was my ordering a side of macaroni and cheese on top of the appetizers. Who cares that it was mediocre? My calories per dollar ratio was off the charts. Thus, I feel it’s my responsibility to blog this great shame. All my talk of boycotting poultry means nothing. And I’m sure there was nothing on that plate that didn’t involve genetically modified crops and/or high fructose corn syrup. So you should stop reading this blog, toot sweet. I can’t be trusted.

Summer Surplus

I’m harvesting way more tomatoes than I can eat (unless I wanted to do that awesome tomato diet). But it’s been my pleasure to give them away. I’m rather proud of my tomatoes; they’re all flavorful and sweet. All except for the Romas, which are mealy and characterless. Romas are a paste tomato whose high pectin content makes it good for cooking. In a sauce they come alive and you can really taste their tomato-y goodness. My ego prevents me from letting people eat the Romas I give them raw. God forbid they think I grow bland tomatoes. And I only would be giving them enough for a half cup of marinara. What's the point? So I’ve been keeping them, which leads to another dilemma: My one Roma plant has yielded a dozen or so every days which is substantial but not enough to start canning. What to do? From the first harvest I made a salsa, which, while not cooked, tastes amazing.

Salsa Fresca (adapted from Two Hot Tamales) 6 paste tomatoes, halved (around a pound?) ½ medium onion 2 cloves garlic 2 tbsp cider vinegar 1 handful of cilantro ½ dried chipotle chile (or to your heat tolerance) A healthy dose of salt and pepper Put everything in a blender and blast it. FYI, using canned chipotle is fine but they can get super hot. Also, slicing tomatoes can be used but your salsa will be more watery.

maybe enough for a few cups of sauce With the next harvest I had a lot more tomatoes, but still not enough for sauce. I seemed to remember Mario Batali roasting tomatoes so I tried it. I sliced them lengthwise and sprinkled them with salt and sugar and olive oil, added a couple cloves of garlic and put them in a 275 degree oven for a few hours. I guess the sugar might be considered cheating, but whatever. It's only a couple teaspoons and it tastes better. Some people add herbs but I just want pure tomato flavor. Your results may vary – oven fluctuations, tomato size – so after a couple hours, it’s best to check on them periodically. You’re looking for something that’s dried but pliant with just a tiny bit of juice. You don’t want a sun-dried tomato. Pack them in olive oil and store them in the fridge. Put them in pasta, salad, sauces, sandwiches, or whatever. At least, that’s what I read. So far mine haven't made it beyond the antipasto plate.