Free will and hot peppers

Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne are hanging around the former's apartment. Dennett goes to the kitchen, pulls a jalapeno from the coldest part of the refrigerator, and takes a bite out of it.

"Hoo boy, that's hot!!" Dennett exclaims.

Jerry impatiently corrects him: "No, Dan, it's not hot, it's spicy. Silly philosophers..."

Only the above little story is not really fair to Jerry. Really the encounter should take place in an alternate universe where, with the exception of food scientists and a handful of enlightened chefs, the vast majority of people believe with all their hearts that the chilled jalapeno really does have a high temperature despite being in the fridge all day, and find the suggestion that it might just be a heat-like sensation to be disturbing to say the least.

Capsacin really does exist, and the compound really does produce a sensation of burning in mammals when it comes in contact with their soft tissue, and it does this by stimulating sensory neurons that are involved in the perception of heat. In other words, even though there is no heat, the sensation of heat is, in a sense, real. Furthermore, the sensation is culinarily useful and it would be a shame if it were dismissed as just some silly illusion.

By way of analogy, I am increasingly of the mindset that what philosophers mean when they refer to compatibilism in the context of free will is very much a real thing; that as our understanding of neuroscience increases we will come to define its mechanisms in as much detail as we now understand the working of capsacin; that those same mechanisms are what is responsible for the sensation of libertarian free will that we all experience; and that the concept is extremely relevant and ought not to be discarded just because it creates an illusory sensation. In many ways, whether (and to what degree) an entity possesses free will in this compatibilist sense is a rather key litmus test as to what rights, etc., ought to be afforded that entity.

(This last point could be a post unto itself, so I'll simply terminate that line of reasoning right away rather than risk going into a several page digression.)

All that said, as a result of Jerry's posts as well comments from folks like Ben Goren, I am increasingly of the mindset that although all the above is true, it is confusing at best to give this phenomenon the label "free will", and at times the motive may even be deliberately obfuscatory.

In a world where people so desperately want to believe there is warmth in even the coldest jalapeno, referring to them as "hot peppers" -- even if us sophisticated foodies understand that we are simply referring to the presence of capsacin rather than some mystical ability to maintain a high temperature -- is going to be received by the vast majority of laypeople as a confirmation of what they already wish was true.

So after much deliberation, I think Jerry is right: We ought to call them spicy peppers, and we ought to start calling compatibilism by a name other than "free will".

An update on cooking steaks

From the blog Serious Eats comes a post similar to the one I did last month on cooking steak. It largely matches what I had to say, with three important divergences, all of which sound reasonable to me:

If you haven't salted yet and are going to cook your steak in less than 40 minutes, salt it immediately before it goes in the pan. You will have to read the Serious Eats article for the technical explanation of this, but it sounds completely reasonable to me. I imagine you could mitigate the problems of late salting somewhat by thoroughly patting the steaks dry with a paper towel immediately before cooking, but I won't assert that without trying. Still, with that one important caveat, the Serious Eats post confirms my conclusion that salting well in advance is best.

The butter and oil mixture I use might not quite be the best approach. In my previous post, I repeated the claim I had heard that combining equal parts butter and oil raises the overall smoke point. Serious Eats says this is crap, because the milk solids will still burn regardless of whether they are immersed in oil or butterfat. I had wondered about this from the get go, but was inclined to believe that it really did raise the smoke point, because a) I heard it from a trusted source, and b) experientially I have gotten excellent results with a one-to-one mixture.

I suspect there is still some merit in my approach, possibly because even butter with burnt milk solids still imparts a nice toasty flavor, and the mixture with oil allows it to keep cooking at a higher temperature even as the milk proteins break down. I absolutely disagree with Serious Eats that the best approach is to only use oil, but the technique they mention of adding butter to the pan at the last minute so that it doesn't have time to burn sounds promising. I will likely try this next time I do steaks.

Serious Eats has a lot to say about flipping, whereas I didn't even mention it. When I cook a steak, I flip it only once. I'm not religious about this, and in fact I didn't even mention it in my previous post. But Serious Eats insists that you must flip your steak every 15 to 30 seconds in order to ensure a good sear while minimizing the "grey zone" of overdone steak that often appears between the crust and the pink or red interior.

Before going further, I should mention that this is probably really bad advice if you are grilling or if you have not used sufficient fat in the pan. The reason is that under those conditions the steak will tend to stick until a certain amount of sear has been achieved -- and if the crust tears off, your steak will look bad and taste bad. But with the oil-sufficient pan-searing method both I and Serious Eats endorse, at the very worst frequent flipping should be harmless. So is it actually helpful?

Maybe. I find that I get a virtually non-existent grey zone anyway, even with the one-flip method. But then again I have a nice heavy cast-iron skillet, I have a gas rather than electric range, one of the burners is extra large with an absurdly aggressive flame (it is labelled "POWER BOIL"), and I exploit all of these advantages to the fullest in order to get a really high temperature going in the pan. Not everyone may be able to achieve such a hot cook surface with their equipment, however, and the frequent flipping method seems like it should at least in principle mitigate any issues created by a somewhat lower cook temperature.

So, I cautiously endorse the frequent flipping approach, with the aforementioned caveats about grilling or pan-searing with insufficient fat. It's far more important that the steak releases fully from the cook surface than it is to minimize the grey zone, so if it's sticking at all, just leave it until it's ready.

(Edit: I looked up the post on which Serious Eats bases this advice, and their conclusion turned out to be remarkably similar to what I wrote above. I quote: "[T]his testing doesn't take into account variables like cooking at a higher or lower heat, getting nice grill marks on an outdoor grill... And for all you single flippers out there? Well, you can keep doing what you're doing and it probably won't hurt your burgers none, but lighten up a bit, will ya?" In other words, what I previously believed turned out to be largely correct: Single-flipping can produce better appearance in a grill application, surface cooking temperature affects the usefulness of multi-flipping, and in the end it really doesn't make that much of a difference after all.

I had also mentioned in passing that I sometimes stand it up on edge to sear the sides but had downplayed the importance of this, while Serious Eats is insistent on it. They mention the "edge is often the fattiest, most delicious part of the steak," which I suppose is true depending on the cut, and when that is true making sure to get a sear on that and render some of the fat would indeed be important. So I buy all that, too.

On a side note, the Serious Eats post mentions that searing, contrary to popular belief, does not seal in moisture. They are absolutely correct. However, a properly seared piece of meat still tastes moister, because the complex molecules generated by the Maillard reaction cause you to salivate more. The only time that this knowledge has any practical value is when roasting. Some recipes for roasting have you start with a very hot oven to get a good crust (or crisp the skin in the case of roast bird) and then reduce the temperature, while others have you start with a moderate temperature and then crank it up at the end to get the crust/crisp effect. It doesn't actually matter which you do; those who advocate the former method on the grounds that it seals in moisture are just plain wrong. The latter method probably has some modest advantages in that it is easier to avoid burning the exterior of whatever you are roasting, but in practice I don't think it matters that much. I have used both methods and don't find that one is tremendously better than the other. (Edit: Serious Eats makes a convincing case that it matters a lot in the case of prime rib.)

There is one more thing I should mention which was covered in the Serious Eats article, but regrettably overlooked in mine: How do you tell when it's done? I had mentioned a couple of times that you take it out of the pan as soon as you have a good sear, and I more or less stand by that, but having some way to gauge doneness is important too. I'm afraid I overlooked this point because over time I've gotten pretty good at just telling doneness by feel -- somewhat ironically, my most important practice for this was from a summer job as a fry cook at the rather crappy family restaurant chain Perkins, where, despite the steaks I churned out being of relatively low quality and not cooked all that skillfully, the sheer number I cooked, and the time pressure which precluded any more involved investigative methods, helped me to hone this skill -- so I don't tend to consciously think about this issue very much. My bad.

Serious Eats' coverage of this topic is both fascinating (I would never have guessed the cut-and-peek method did so little harm to the steak!) and apparently sound. One very brief point I have to make: In the end, they endorse the use of a "good, accurate digital thermometer." My response to this is "Yes, but" -- yes, if you are willing to shell out the cash, a good digital thermometer is the best method for determining internal temperature; but if you intend to cheap out, as I did (twice), an inexpensive analog thermometer is superior to a poor quality digital thermometer. I used to own the latter and now own the former. Leaving aside that it would have been better to have not cheaped out in the first place, since in total I ended up spending almost as much as it would have cost to get a good digital thermometer, I am much happier with the analog one than I ever was with the digital one. The cheap digital one never seemed to be all that accurate, and if I attempted to use it in a very hot environment, e.g. on the grill, it had a tendency to glitch out sometimes. The analog one is accurate, trustworthy, and was dirt cheap. The only disadvantage of it is that it takes a few seconds to get an accurate read, whereas a good digital thermometer can give you an internal temp right away. Since I mostly use it for testing the internal temperature of roasted poultry (which can take on the order of an hour or more to cook) that few seconds is a non-issue. But if I were using it for pan-seared steaks (where you are cooking them on the order of a couple of minutes) that few seconds could become a problem I suppose.

Anyway, there you have it. In all honesty, Serious Eats is probably a much more reliable source than myself for these sorts of things, as testified by their rigorous experimentation (whereas I'm basing all of my B.S. on mere experience and accumulated knowledge). You'll notice, however, that there is significant convergence in our conclusions. Proper salting technique in particular is, I think, one of the most overlooked skills for most home cooks. So if there's one take-home from these two posts, I think that would be it.

(h/t Ed Brayton)

Tempeh parmesan

A friend asked for some vegetarian/vegan recipes on Facebook, and I realized in responding that I had never recorded my recipe for tempeh parmesan. Unfortunately I don't have pictures, which would be really useful for this recipe since the only real innovation is how I cut the tempeh. I'll try to do it with a diagram, but maybe I'll plan on making this sometime next week and then doing an update with pics. Without further ado:

Tempeh Parmesan

• One 8-oz. package soy tempeh¹
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup (approx.) flour
• 1/3 cup (approx.) Panko bread crumbs (or any bread crumbs)
• Vegetable oil
• Jarred tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
• 2 Tbsp chopped Fresh basil (optional)
• Freshly shredded parmesan (optional)

The key here is how you cut the tempeh in order to yield two rather convincing-looking "breasts". If you get it just right, then the appearance will be exactly like chicken parm, the texture will be exactly like chicken parm, and the other flavors will come through enough that you will barely notice it ain't chicken. If it looks complicated, that's only because I'm explaining it poorly; once you've done this one time, it should take you less than five minutes, tops, to carve the "breasts".

First, make a diagonal cut about a 1/3 of the way from each end of the tempeh to yield two identical right trapezoids, like so:


Next, place each trapezoid in turn flat on the cutting board, and make a lateral cut starting at the pointed end, about 1/4" or less from the cutting board, angled slightly up so that the cut finishes about halfway back through the "breast":


Round out the three corners to give it a less artificial look.


Finally, in a manner similar to the previous step, look for any sharp or artificial-looking edges that remain and trim just a teensy bit off where necessary to give it a nice rounded organic look. At this point, it's more art than craft: just do your best to "sculpt" it to look like what you think a chicken breast ought to look like. Discard the trimmings, or reserve them for a different use.

Place both "breasts" in a pot of boiling salted water for 15 minutes or so. Drain carefully -- don't accidentally break off the tips of your nicely carved "breast", as I have done on occasion! -- and pat dry.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Obtain three shallow bowls and arrange them left to right, with your "breasts" to the left of them and your stove to the right. In the first bowl, thoroughly beat the egg. The second bowl gets the flour, and the third bowl gets the Panko bread crumbs. On the stovetop, pour vegetable oil in to a medium heavy-bottomed skillet until it is about 1/4" deep, and heat over medium-high heat.

When the oil is up to temp, take each "breast" in turn and dip it first in the egg using your left hand. Then, using your right hand, dip it in the flour and shake off any excess. Again using your right hand, dip it in the bread crumbs and again shake off any excess. Try to get as many bread crumbs to stick as possible. (The point of using separate hands is to avoid inadvertently breading your hands, which is gross and makes it hard to work) Place the "breast" in the pan and quickly repeat the process with the other "breast". If increasing the recipe, work in batches of two so as not to crowd the pan.

Fry in the oil until bottom side is golden-brown, about 1-3 minutes. Flip and continue to fry until other side is done, another 1-2 minutes. Remove to a plate with a paper towel on it to soak up excess oil.

Place "breasts" in a shallow baking pan, and pour sauce over the top until both are covered. Sprinkle mozzarella cheese on top. Place in oven and bake until sauce thickens and cheese starts to turn golden-brown around the edges, about 15-20 minutes. Remove from oven, place each "breast" on a plate, and spoon any excess sauce from the pan on top. If using basil and/or parmesan, sprinkle over top just before serving.

Serves two, but can be easily increased.

¹I strongly recommend against grain or flavored tempeh for this recipe, as the nutty flavor competes with the breading, tomato sauce, and cheese flavors, making it seem less "Italian". The more neutral flavor of soy tempeh is a much better fit.

Bee-bim Bop!

I've been starting to try and pay a little more attention to, well, blog-whoring to put it frankly. One thing I noticed from Google Analytics is that while most of the traffic I get is obviously on the most recent post, the trickle of hits I get on older posts is predominantly due to cooking- or food-related Google searches. Even before I noticed this, I had been meaning to knuckle down and do more cooking related posts. So the goal for a little while here will be one post per day (except weekends, when I may or may not post) and alternating one atheism-related post with one cooking-related post. Yesterday I blogged about the whole "Tom Johnson"/Wally Smith mess, which was obviously atheism-related -- so without further ado:

One of my older son's first favorite books was Bee-bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park. The title refers to a Korean dish, generally rendered as "bibimbap", which translates literally to "mixed-up rice" or "mixed-up meal". Each line of the book ends with "Hungry for some Bee-bim Bop!" or "Time for Bee-bim Bop!" or some such. When Quinn was just first learning to say a few words, my wife or I would read it to him, ending each page with an anticipatory "Beeeee.... Bimmmmmm....", and then wait for him to shout "BOP!", much to both his and our mutual amusement.

Recipes and interpretations vary wildly, with the only commonality being that the ingredients are served without being mixed together, and then the diner mixes them together at the table inside their bowl. Park's version focuses on ingredients that can take the form of strips or strings (e.g. thinly sliced beef, bean sprouts, julienned carrots, egg "pancakes" that have been rolled and then sliced in a sort of chiffonade style, etc.) which are served in separate bowls, along with rice, allowing the diner to choose which ingredients they want to use. You choose the ingredients you want, spoon them on top of your rice -- and then, as the penultimate page of the book instructs us to do, "MIX IT! MIX LIKE CRAZY!"

I won't post the recipe here, because a) I feel it would be a genuinely unethical violation of copyright, and b) the only part of the recipe I follow religiously anyway is the marinade for the beef, and to be honest it's a fairly straightforward sweet-savory Asian marinade with sesame oil anyway, so I'm sure you can find a comparable recipe online. I will, however, show a picture of the spread we had set up for it Saturday night:


The two bowls on the left are white rice and brown rice. The remaining ingredients are, starting at the back row and going left-to-right and then back-to-front: Asparagus, pan-fried sliced red peppers, julienned cucumbers, marinated sirloin beef strips, "chiffonaded" egg pancakes, pan-friend julienned carrots, steamed mung bean sprouts, sliced scallions, and pan-fried quartered baby corns.

The asparagus was a spur-of-the-moment experiment. I've been itching for asparagus season to start, but unwilling to buy some that's been shipped halfway around the world so my fat American ass can have it in winter. But it occurred to me that for bee-bim bop, I would want really very thin stalks (which are the opposite of what I usually buy since I usually roast or grill them, in which case a nice thick stalk is good for getting some browning without totally draining them of any crispness) so that they would bend easily and be more suitable for this "mixed-up" meal, and that with all those other ingredients the quality wouldn't matter as much. It was a success, and I will probably do it again.

(If you'll pardon a brief digression... I just recently found out, from the excellent magazine Cooks Illustrated, that the thickness of asparagus stalks is not at all determined by when they are harvested, but rather by the age of the plant itself, which will yield stalks annually for a good five or six years. Young plants produce thin stalks, older plants produce thicker stalks. Wild, eh?)

The baby corn had been another spur-of-the-moment experiment, from the previous time I made bee-bim bop. I had been in the grocery store buying the ingredients, and saw that they carried fresh baby corn, as opposed to the frozen or canned kind. I took a gamble that this might give it a nice bright flavor (in contrast to the mushy blandness of your typical stir-fry baby corn), and that if I cooked them by themselves in a hot pan with some oil I might be able to get a little caramelization of the sugars going to further enhance the taste. I turned out to be right on both counts -- they came out crisp and bright and with that nice inimitable roasted vegetable flavor. The only problem was that the whole baby corns didn't "mix up" very well, so this time I quartered them lengthwise, which was a win-win since it also increased the surface area for caramelization.

The one part of Park's recipe I will directly paraphrase -- since I think it's a common technique but one I hadn't encountered before and really liked -- is the "chiffonaded" egg strips. You just beat up some eggs, put a little bit in a pan with some oil so that it forms a thin "pancake", flip it once, remove it from the pan, roll it into a tight little roll, and then thinly slice. When it unrolls, you get these nice little egg confetti things that are a great addition to bee-bim bop, and would probably work with pretty much any stir-fry, maybe even on a salad or something.

So there you have it. Nothing too special here, but a really fun meal, both to prepare and to eat. It takes a little longer than is optimal for a weeknight meal, since every ingredient has to be prepared separately (though you really don't need to do nearly as many as I did here, half as many veggies would have been fine). But as a special little family tradition, it's just fantastic.

How to Properly Cook a Steak

It turns out that cooking a goddamn good steak is really easy, but you need to know just a few important tips. Really, only three that are critically important, and a few more minor tips that help a little. None of them take very much time or effort (though the most important one requires you to spend sixty seconds with the steak a couple hours in advance) and none of them are anything that your average home cook should have trouble with -- and yet, so many people cook flavorless, overdone, rubbery steaks. There is no need. The perfect steak turns out to be ridiculously easy.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: Aggressively salt and pepper the steak at least one hour in advance, preferably two or three or more. Use kosher or sea salt, and use more than you think you should have to use. Do not skip this step. I don't care if you have high blood pressure and one too many milligrams of sodium might just kill you; if it's that much of a problem then just don't eat a steak.

Salting the steak in advance does two important things. Pundits will tell you that it creates a reverse osmosis reaction that tenderizes the steak, and this is more or less true... but far more importantly, it will allow salt to penetrate all the way through the meat, which means that you will actually be able to fucking taste it... and even better, because salt makes you salivate, this will make the entire steak seem juicier, even though the moisture content is unchanged.

Do this every time. I am not kidding. This is the #1 most important thing you can do to your steak. It is simple, it is easy, it costs nothing, it doesn't hinge on matters of personal preference, and it can make the difference between a bland hunk of cow versus a beautiful buttery bite of beef.

THE NEXT MOST IMPORTANT THING: Get your pan hot. Really hot. Like, as hot as you can get it. If you are doing it on the stovetop, this means using a cast-iron if you have it, or the heaviest pan you can find if not. Pick the biggest burner, and turn it on as high as it will go. Gas is best, of course. The pan should just start to smoke (you haven't add the fat yet either; see the next tip) before you are ready.

If using a propane grill, put an upside down baking sheet and/or foil over the part of the grill you intend to cook the meat on. This will superheat it, then remove it immediately before you put the steaks on to cook. Trust me, it's worth it. If using charcoal, buy yourself a chimney. Seriously, don't skimp on this. This is a whole separate topic in itself, but a charcoal chimney is indispensable. Pile the coals all in one corner as soon as they come out of the chimney, and cook your steak over that.

THE LAST CRITICAL TIP: This applies only if you are pan-frying your steak, as I prefer these days (though I will address grilling here too). Thou shalt use the following fats in thy pan: one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon vegetable oil. Not olive oil. A lot of cooks, myself included, like to use olive oil where many recipes call for vegetable oil, because it's healthier and more flavorful. Not here, folks. You want a really high smoke point, and all the flavor is coming from the butter anyway. (And dude, you are eating a pan-fried steak... you're worried about health?! Please...) Don't add the fat until the pan is just starting to smoke, as I mentioned in the previous tip. Then toss it in, swirl it around just until it coats the pan, and throw your steak in.

If you are using a grill, take a paper towel or a clean rag, splash some vegetable oil on it, grasp it with tongs and rub it on the part of the grill you will use to cook the steak right before you cook it. This is actually a good idea with almost any meat you cook on the grill. You can't really do the butter thing this way though (which is one reason I have started to prefer pan-fried steaks over grilled steaks).

THIS IS SO OBVIOUS IT DOESN'T COUNT AS A TIP: Cook your steak rare or medium-rare. Please. If you are going to cook it more than that, I say, Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Seriously, the way Biblical literalists feel about homosexuality, that's how I feel about well-done steak. It's a crime against nature. But anyway, I realize preferences differ, so the meat (har har) of this tip is how to get a good rare/medium-rare.

If your pan is as hot as I said it should be, this means about 2 minutes per side. If it is a particularly thick cut, like more than two inches, stand it up on the edge for just a bit, so that you can't see any pink when you put it on the plate (not only because it looks weird, but because there is a potential safety issue if the surface temperature has not hit 165F). In any case, make sure that the top and bottom sides have a nice crust -- which they should, if you got your pan hot enough and you used the butter-oil mixture I commanded you to use.

THE LESSER TIPS: All of these things matter if you want a really perfect steak, though they are less crucial. If you don't do the first three, you will have done violence to your steak for no good reason. If you follow them, your steak will taste like a damn steak, and that's worth doing. These remaining tips will help put it over the top.

Rewind all the way back to when you are buying the steak. Buy a thick cut. How thick is the minimum depends on your equipment. I have a nice Lodge cast-iron skillet, and one of the burners on my (gas!) range gives an unconscionably intense flame (the dial labels it as "POWER BOIL"), so I am able to get 3/4" cuts to cook up quite nicely. One to two inches is better, of course, and even thicker is even better. The thicker the cut, the more seared you can get the crust while leaving the inside nice and red.

The flip side of this tip is that if you are one of those "alternative steakstyle" types who likes it medium or above, buy yourself a thinner cut. I don't have much to say about this, as I consider it to be immoral in the extreme, but the point is that you want a certain amount of sear on the outside and then you want to take your steak out of the pan -- so buy the thickness of steak that will result in the insides being done to your liking at the point that the outside is done appropriately.

Now proceed slightly forward to when you were salting the steak -- depending on the cut, it's probably worthwhile to trim off any major external fat deposits while you're at it. If it's a filet mignon, probably not, any fat there will just turn buttery as you cook it. A strip steak, though, or a ribeye, or whatever, it's worth trimming off what you can easily get to without hacking too much meat off. Of course the diner can always cut it off at the table, but I'd rather take care of it in the kitchen. It makes a nicer presentation, and it allows the diner to just chow down without having to work around any inedible parts.

I've heard it said that you should let the steak sit at room temperature for 20 or 30 minutes before you cook it. This makes good sense, as raising the surface temperature means that you can get a good sear faster than you would otherwise, which means the center can stay appropriately rare. Cooks Illustrated even has a method (which I have used with some success, though I consider it ultimately unnecessary) where you cook the steak in a low oven before pan-frying it, thereby warming it and -- according to them -- activating enzymes which help to further tenderize the steak. I do not doubt the validity of all this, but I will say that, while following the remaining tips in this guide, I have never had a steak come out too tough or with too much of a "gray zone" separating the crust from the nice red innards. I mention all this because, though I think it unnecessary, I find the science sound: if you are concerned about getting a proper crust, or about getting a sufficiently tender steak, but all means, try pre-warming it.

Finally -- and this should almost be one of the Critical Steps, because it makes a pretty big difference -- when the steak is done, you should let it rest for a few minutes before serving. But don't let it just rest on a plate! Take a slice of bread, and let it rest on that. Then, depending on how juicy your steak is and how hungry you are, either eat the beef-sopped bread yourself, or else feed it to the dogs. Why do this? Well, if you listened to me about getting your grill really super hot, and about using a nice butter/oil mixture to fry it in, you should have a really nice crispy crust on both the top and bottom. You have to put one side or the other down, and, since you did such a good job keeping this steak nice and juicy, whichever side you face down is going to puddle in its own juices. If you do nothing to abate this, you will re-sog that side and obliterate that nice beautiful crust you just went to all this (not very much) trouble to create. Better to stand it on a slice of bread, which will soak up the drippings and allow the crust to stay intact.

So this post is a little longer than I meant, because I wanted to cover all the bases, and explain the reasons why in addition to just issuing the commandments. To summarize, here is a simple recipe that will guarantee you a better tasting steak:

1) Buy a thick cut to get a good rare/medium-rare (assuming you aren't one of those pervs who likes it medium or worse, in which case buy a thin cut).
2) Unless it is a very expensive cut like filet mignon, trim any visible fat.
3) Aggressively salt and pepper your steak at least one hour in advance, preferably more. Seriously, if there's one lesson I could leave to my sons, it would be to season your fucking steak in advance. It's so easy, and will make your steak taste 200% better than if you hadn't done it. Even if you ignore every single other piece of advice in this post, season your fucking steak.
4) Get the pan really hot.
5) Once the pan just starts to smoke, add 1 Tbsp butter and 1 Tbsp vegetable oil.
6) Toss in the steak and cook 2 minutes per side, or just until a crust starts to form. If it is a particularly thick cut, use tongs to stand it up on edge for half a minute or so until all the external pink is gone.
7) Set each steak on top of a slice of bread and let rest five minutes-ish before serving.

This is an absurdly easy recipe. You owe it to yourself to follow it, or at least to digest the information in it. Every time I eat a steak that has not been properly seasoned or has not been cooked at high enough temperature, I die a little inside. Please don't do that to me.

Alton Brown, say it ain't so!

One of my favorite TV chefs is apparently now a shill for Cargill. From today's NYT:

“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”

The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

"Briny kiss", yep, that's classic Alton. Yeesh.

Now, in fairness, there does not appear to be anything in that statement that I think Alton Brown doesn't really believe, and in fact I quite agree with that limited statement. The problem, of course, is that what I believe in and what Alton Brown (I think) believes in is appropriate salting by the home cook -- which in many ways is not so much about how much salt you add, but when you add it. A fear on the part of the home cook to employ salt properly can result in more salting at the table, resulting in the same sodium content but inferior food.

But salt used by home cooks is not the problem, nor is it what Cargill is worried about. Sure, Cargill wants home cooks to use salt, but not because that's a significant profit driver -- Cargill just wants to improve the public image of salt overall so that it can keep selling truckloads of it to the makers of processed food, who use quantities of sodium that are absolutely staggering. Few home-cooked foods will ever come close to equaling the amount of salt that is used in TV dinners, crunchy snacks, etc.

Alton Brown has to know this, and he has to know what it's all about. And it's weird that he seems so blasé about it, given his open disdain for most processed foods in his show and his writing (even as I'm sure that infuriates the Food Network execs, whose profit is largely driven by advertising for... processed foods!) I mean, this is a guy who's encouraging people to make their own marshmallows for chrissakes! And now he's shilling for Cargill??

Sad. Though, what do I know, maybe he's hard-up for cash. Maybe he's a secret gambling addict or something. In my financial situation right now, if Cargill wanted to pay me to sing the praises of salt, I'd ask where do I sign. Hell, if they wanted me to sing the praises of asbestos, it wouldn't take that much. But I assumed Alton Brown was well enough off to be judicious about his source of income. Apparently not. Or maybe he just doesn't care. Ah well...

It's a myth that all atheists worship seitan

Only vegetarian atheists.

Last night my wife made a stir-fry using seitan strips, the first time I had tried it. Yet another new texture to work with! I'm pretty excited about it. It had an almost pork-like texture. I have some ideas on how to use it, but it will take some experimentation...

Vegan cooking just about deserves to be called a "cuisine" in its own right

So the conclusion of this whole brouhaha with my wife about her going vegetarian and wanting our household to follow is that I am cooking all vegetarian at home, but still eating meat when I go out, and I'll probably still prepare meat at home on special occasions. I also went fully vegetarian for the month of January, but I'm back onto the meat now. Still, it was probably good to do it for a month, just to get me into the swing of things with cooking vegetarian.

I have to say, this has been incredibly worthwhile. I have worked with ingredients I had never even tasted before, prepared dishes I'd never done before, and it's pushed my culinary creativity quite a bit. Still, I would never be willing to give up preparing meat forever -- as I mused in one of my earlier posts on the subject, there is nothing in the world of vegetarianism that is anything like the experience of braising a tough fatty piece of meat full of connective tissue until it becomes a magically tender and delicious indulgence, and there are plenty of other examples like that of culinary adventures that are just irreplaceable. But being restricted for awhile has set me off on all sorts of different culinary adventures, and it's been exciting.

I came to the conclusion early on that the burgeoning world of vegan cooking (I don't think it really existed prior to the 20th century) is in many ways deserving of being called a "cuisine" in its own right.

What makes a cuisine? Well, certainly a multi-century history helps, but I'm not sure it is a requirement. Rather, I think a cuisine is defined by ingredients and techniques that are unique (or at least uniquely emphasized) apart from other cuisines, and by signature dishes or types of dishes. The use of lemongrass as an ingredient immediately calls to mind Thai and other Southeast Asian cuisines. Sauces based on the technique of emulsifying fat with eggs or other ingredients can only trace their lineage to traditional French cooking. And who else would call a dish "bangers and mash" except the British?

By these criteria, vegan food just about fits. It certainly fits the "unique ingredients" criterion. Tempeh might evoke memories of home for those who hail from Indonesia, but for most of us it calls to mind images of crunchy hippies at an organic co-op. And modern inventions like TVP and Quorn (a fascinating ingredient I intend to write a separate post about later) don't even exist in other cuisines.

The "unique techniques" criterion is more problematic, although the strong emphasis on substitution and imitation forces new twists on older techniques. For instance, my tempeh "Italian sausage" recipe below can not rightly be called a new technique, but employing the flavor profile of Italian sausage as a marinade/sauce rather than for seasoning meat is somewhat of a new twist, I think. Vegans eschewing of milk and dairy forces the development of alternatives for when those ingredients are used for their prolific chemical qualities, e.g. the use of flour as a binder in vegan burgers when a non-vegan recipe might use an egg.

I am not entirely qualified to talk about "signature dishes", as I am pretty new to vegetarian cuisine, and I'm doing a lot of figuring-it-out-for-myself as I go along. Certainly, veggies burgers have become an entire genre unto themselves, ranging from the mass-produced and passable to the truly inspired. It seems like Buffalo tempeh is a popular dish, and with good reason -- it tastes damn good. (Please don't call it "Vegetarian 'chicken wings'", though... it doesn't taste like Buffalo chicken, it tastes like Buffalo tempeh, and there's nothing wrong with that!) I'm sure there are many other signature vegetarian/vegan dishes that I am not aware of or not thinking of off the top of my head.

All of which brings me to an idea: "Vegan" fusion. Why not take the ingredients and techniques that define vegan cuisine, and mix them up with other cuisines without regard to the conventional restrictions of veganism or vegetarianism?

My current cooking practices already hint at this, in that I use vegan recipes but "unsubstitute" certain ingredients based on the looser dietary restrictions in our household (e.g. Buffalo tempeh is usually thought of as a vegan thing, but I use butter in the sauce and often either milk or eggs depending on how I am doing the breading). But I think it could be taken so much further. Can vegan cuisine's vast experience with imitation inform clever new twists on meat dishes? Could TVP be used in a non-vegetarian context to establish a certain unique flavor or texture? What kind of symphony of ingredients could be composed if one were free to make a "bacon veggie burger"?

Anyway, all reflecting out of the way, here's a couple of recipes I've come up with that really impress:

Tempeh Italian "Sausage"

• 1-2 Tbsp fennel seed
• 1-2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil (calibrate for healthy vs. tasty)
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 1 tsp crushed red pepper
• 1/4 tsp liquid smoke
• 1/2 package of tempeh, crumbled (not sliced) into bits about 1/4" in diameter

I'm still refining this one, so take the amounts and the technique with a heavy helping of salt (not literally please!). Place fennel seed in skillet over medium heat and toast, tossing fennel seed occasionally, until aromatic. Add extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and crushed red pepper, salt gently, and adjust heat so that garlic and fennel seed are just cooking but not burning. Cook for 5 minutes or so until flavors start to combine. Add liquid smoke, then tempeh, and combine well. Cook another 5 minutes or so and then remove all contents from skillet into a small bowl. Separate tempeh out from the other ingredients (some of the sauce will adhere to the tempeh -- this is a good thing!) and return to skillet. Increase heat to medium-high and cook, stirring occasionally, until tempeh starts to brown and superficially resemble little bits of poultry sausage. Return tempeh to bowl with other ingredients, stir to combine, and let it marinate until you are ready to use it.

You can use this on pizza, in pasta, or wherever. Unfortunately, the seasonings -- especially the fennel seed -- don't penetrate the tempeh very well, so you need to put some of the sauce into your dish as well as the tempeh itself. Alternatively, it might be possible to crumble the tempeh very finely in a food processor, and then before returning it to the skillet for browning, use egg as a binder and form it into the desired shape. That way you could make patties or whatever, and the seasonings would be well-distributed throughout... but I haven't tried this yet, so caveat emptor.

One creative use I came up with for it is to put it in sushi, along with a little bit of diced sun-dried tomato and crumbled feta. Yes, tempeh Italian "sausage" sushi! For real! Everyone is always extremely skeptical, but then they try it and are amazed. I usually coat my sushi with toasted sesame seeds, but for the "sausage" sushi, I toast an extra teaspoon or so of fennel seed and then crush it well, and then I dust the outside of the roll with a little bit of that instead of sesame seeds.

Speaking of wacky vegetarian sushi:

Buffalo tempeh sushi

• 2 Tbsp butter
• Frank's Red Hot to taste
• Dash of rice wine vinegar
• Cayenne pepper (optional)
• Half a celery stalk, very thinly sliced into thin ~4" long sticks
• 1/4 package of tempeh, sliced into ~1/4" wide ~4" long sticks
• Blue cheese dressing
• Sushi rice (whatever recipe you use) and nori
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 can or bottle of beer
• Enough vegetable oil to fill a deep skillet or Dutch oven to at least 1" deep

Melt butter in microwave in small microwave-safe bowl. Whisk in Frank's Red Hot until it looks and tastes like Buffalo sauce. Add the tiniest dash of rice wine vinegar. If you want it extra spicy, add cayenne pepper to taste. Construct a maki roll filled with tempeh, celery stalks, and a drizzle of the Buffalo sauce and a drizzle of the blue cheese dressing (maybe ~1/2 Tbsp each). Cut roll in half. (Do not slice it yet!)

Place flour in a shallow bowl. Open can or bottle of beer, and add enough beer to the flour so that it forms a nice beer batter. Drink the rest of the beer. Do not omit the previous step! Heat vegetable oil in deep skillet or Dutch oven until it gets to frying temperature, about 375 degrees. If you don't have a candy thermometer, you can tell it's ready when flicking a drop of water in it is likely to get your arm burned by splashing hot oil (if you remembered to drink the rest of the beer like I told you, this seems like a great idea and is not too painful). Dip the roll halfs in the batter, shake off any excess, and then deep fry them until golden brown, turning once, doing the halfs one at a time if you are working in a small-ish skillet so that the oil temperature doesn't drop too much. Place remaining Buffalo sauce and roll halfs in container with sealable lid and shake until roll halfs are well-coated. Slice the roll halfs as you would ordinary maki sushi. Arrange the roll on serving platter and drizzle a tiny amount of blue cheese dressing over the top.

If you want to make this one vegan, there are plenty of recipes on the web for making Buffalo sauce without the butter (use oil for the main fat, but there are other tweaks that help get the consistency right), and you can omit the blue cheese altogether without completely destroying the dish. But it's much better with it.

And sorry to post two uber-unhealthy recipes both with Buffalo sauce, but this last one was so stunning in its verisimilitude of the real thing that I need to post it:

Vegetarian Buffalo "Chicken" Pizza

• 2 Tbsp butter
• Frank's Red Hot to taste
• Dash of rice wine vinegar
• Cayenne pepper (optional)
• 2 Quorn cutlets
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup Panko bread crumbs
• Enough vegetable oil to fill a deep skillet or Dutch oven to at least 1/2" deep
• Pizza crust (purchased, or made according to your favorite recipe)
• Blue cheese dressing
• 1/3 lb or so of mozzarella, shredded¹
• 1/4 cup chopped red onion

Preheat oven to 450 degrees or whatever temperature you use to cook your pizza crust. Prepare Buffalo sauce and then heat oil as per previous recipe (since you are not doing a beer batter for this one and so might be completely sober, using a thermometer is strongly recommended). Beat egg well. Place Panko bread crumbs in shallow bowl or on plate. Dip frozen Quorn cutlets in egg, then place in bread crumbs and turn to coat. Fry breaded cutlets until golden-brown, turning once, doing them one at a time if you are using a small-ish skillet. Reserve about 1 Tbsp or so of the Buffalo sauce, and place the rest of the sauce and the fried breaded cutlets in a sealable container and shake until well-coated. Slice cutlets into 1/2" chunks.

Cover crust with thin layer of blue cheese dressing. Scatter Quorn chunks over dressing, then cover with shredded mozzarella. Top with red onions. Place pizza on center rack (or better yet, on a preheated pizza stone if you have one) and cook until cheese is melted and crust is cooked through, about 10-15 minutes. Remove from oven and drizzle reserved Buffalo sauce over the top. Cut into slices and serve.

¹Please, please, please buy a block of mozzarella and shred it yourself. It's cheaper, it tastes way better, and it takes like thirty seconds. If you don't have a box grater, get one. Seriously. The only possible excuse for using pre-shredded cheese is if you are cooking for a boatload of people, so that the shredding actually does become time-consuming. Otherwise, please, shred it yourself!

Cool new blog

ScienceBlogs just added a couple of new blogs, and one of them -- Tomorrow's Table -- is about organic and sustainable farming from a scientist's perspective.

What a breath of fresh air! Time and again I have been frustrated by the unholy connections between the organic/sustainable farming community and all matter of paranoid insanity, like anti-GMO, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, anti-vaccine, and government conspiracies of all types. I'm very interested to hear what Dr. Ronald has to say.

Kale chips

It occurs to me I haven't had a post about cooking in a really long time -- I haven't had a chance to do anything fancy, so it's just been run-of-the-mill everyday feed-your-family cooking. I'm sure nobody needs to hear me blog about boiling pasta and pouring store-bought sauce over it, or a stir-fry composed of whatever vegetables are leftover in my fridge.

So I thought I'd link to this article in our local newspaper, which was pointed out to me by my mother of all people. (I'd say thanks mom!, but I'm pretty sure if she stumbled on this blog she'd already have had a heart attack before she got a chance to read this, so...) Sounds like a neat idea, and I am pretty sure we'll probably get more kale from our CSA in the coming weeks, so I will most likely try it.

Hopefully after next week I will have an exciting new Halloween recipe to share, but I don't want to blog about it until after I try it, in case it winds up being a disaster.

First attempt at homemade baby food = FAIL

So I intend to make most of the baby food we feed our son from fresh local produce. It's not that hard anyway, and baby food made that way actually tastes like something you might actually want to eat.

My first attempt: Major FAIL.

I cut up and steamed some carrots, then blended them with some of the water from steaming them. The blend was probably a little coarse for a six-month-old, but I think that part was actually okay.

I was at work when my wife first tried feeding it to him. His eyes bugged out and he started coughing and spitting it out. She had to scoop it out of his mouth. When I got home, my wife related this story to me and asked me, "Why is it spicy?"

Spicy? Steamed carrots?!

I tasted it myself, and sure enough, it's got a real kick to it. WTF? Well, it turns out I had made a tex-mex rice bowl earlier that evening, and I had used the same knife to cut up some hot peppers... I thought I had washed it off, but apparently not thoroughly enough.

D'oh! Sorry, baby!

The evolutionary implications of our preference for the Maillard reaction

This is something that has been bugging me the last couple of days... As many of the foodies out there may know, the Maillard reaction (pronounced may-ARD) is that incredible magic chemistry that happens when you sear meat, roast coffee, or malt barley to make whiskey and beer. In a nutshell, heat applied to certain proteins causes them to get all jumbled up and rearrange themselves into literally hundreds of different complex flavor compounds. Okay, that was probably an imprecise lay explanation, but you get my point.

How can this delicious piece of seared meat help my genes to replicate themselves?

Make no mistake, the products of the Maillard reaction taste fucking good. In fact, it is so tasty that this is where the myth developed that searing meat helps to "hold in the juices". It doesn't, and in fact roasted meat that has not been seared will actually have very slightly higher moisture content than meat that has been properly seared. However, unseared meat will taste drier because the Maillard reaction is so (literally) mouth-wateringly good that it will actually make you salivate more while eating and make the seared meat taste tender and moister.

But here's the question: From an evolutionary perspective, why does it taste good?

I suppose its possible that a preference for cooked food was such a beneficial adaptation for us that we evolved a taste for charred meat in a relatively short amount of time, a hundred thousand years or so. I mean, our jaw structure definitely reflects the shift in selective pressures brought about by the advent of cooking, so it's not inconceivable. But I tend to doubt this explanation for a couple of reasons.

One is that there is a big difference between a modified jaw structure vs. the ability to detect and seek out a whole new class of flavor compounds. It seems the latter would take a lot longer to arise as a result of natural selection.

The other reason I doubt that this preference was selected due to cooking is because there doesn't seem to be any reproductive benefit to preferring charred meat over, say, boiled meat. I suppose our ancestors may just have used fire-roasting more than boiling -- but I have to imagine that the two techniques were invented around the same time, and if our ancestors did not already prefer the flavor of seared meat, I don't see why they wouldn't just boil it to save time, as well as to capture any rendered fat in a broth rather than letting it drip wastefully into the fire.

It seems most likely to me that we already had a taste for these flavor compounds prior to learning how to create them via cooking, and that it was a side effect of some other adaptation. But what?

The Wikipedia article talks about a similar reaction occurring naturally in our bodies... I wonder if that could have any bearing on it? I don't know, I am not an evolutionary biologist, or any kind of biologist for that matter. Anybody have any ideas?

Bad-ass chicken-killing mofo

I thought about titling this post "Severed Cocks", but I figure I already pushed the SFW-ness of my blog a bit far in my post on the sexy side of Sharia law. Oh well.

Anyway, yesterday I was lucky to have the opportunity to participate in killing and preparing five roosters. This is something I've really wanted to do, for a few reasons. One is my obsession with doing things from scratch, or as much from scratch as is practical. The other is that I feel it is ethically desirable for meat-eaters to participate fully in the process at least once, preferably more than that -- otherwise, one is open to the criticism of farming the dirty work out to others.

Our friend Christal and Mick have a bunch of chickens they use for eggs, but they haven't been doing it for long and discovered they bought too many roosters. The hens were getting basically gang-raped, and a lot of them were getting their feathers pecked out by overly aggressive cocks. So it was time to cull some roosters. Five of them to be exact.

I helped to catch them and held three of them down while they got the ax. I had originally planned on trying the choppy-choppy myself at least once, but we were having some issues with the log bouncing around when struck, and my ax skills are poor enough that I was confident neither of preserving Christal and Mick's fingers, nor of putting the chickens out of their misery in a timely manner. Still, it was less gruesome than I anticipated, and definitely less depressing than the time I had to club a baby squirrel to death after my dogs got to it but failed to finish it off.

I then helped pluck them, which was a bit tedious, but not as bad as everybody makes it out to be. I didn't participate in the cleaning other than to watch, mostly because I know my clumsy ass self would probably rip open an intestine and make a big mess out of everything. Still, it was extremely educational and a great experience.

Christal and Mick were very generous in letting us take home three of the birds for ourselves. They are in my fridge right now, with two of them bound for the freezer and the third destined to become coq au vin either tonight or tomorrow. I'm particularly excited about doing t hat, because the whole origin of coq au vin is to make the best out of an old rooster, which tends to be tougher and gamier than young birds. But braising turns this into an advantage, because extra collagen breaks down and becomes totally freakin' delicious. Even better to braise in wine!

An uninteresting post that fulfills the original purpose of this blog

The original reason I created this blog was as a convenient means of recording improvised recipes that my wife enjoyed so that I can reconstruct them at a later date. For the most part, when I've blogged about cooking, I've tried to post stuff that I think would be interesting or unusual, or at least provide tasty pictures.

This time, however, I just need to record something I whipped up last night from a combination of leftovers and pantry staples. It's nothing earth-shattering or interesting, but we enjoyed it, and I can pretty much always make this with stuff I have on hand.

So this post exists mostly so that I can Google my blog and find it later if I am looking for a tasty dinner. If my readers get anything out of it I will consider that purely coincidental.


Tomato and cannellini bean sauce

• 2 tsp olive oil
• 1/2 medium onion, chopped
• 1 celery stalk, thinly sliced
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 - 1 tsp chopped fresh herbs (oregano, savory, thyme, basil, etc.)
• 1 14.5-oz can cannellini beans
• 1 14.5-oz can chopped tomatoes¹
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
• salt and pepper

Heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onion, celery, and peppers along with a dash of kosher salt, and cook until starting to become tender, about 5-7 minutes. Add garlic and herbs and cook for additional 2-3 minutes. (If you are using a delicate herb like basil, wait until the end to add it)

Add beans with juices and simmer until it starts to thicken slightly, about 3 minutes. Add tomatoes with juices, scraping up any brown bits. Stir in crushed red pepper, and simmer for about 10 minutes for flavors to combine and sauce to thicken slightly. Salt and pepper to taste, and serve over rice or cous-cous.

¹I always stock my pantry with a copious amount of cans of whole tomatoes, because it is most versatile. If I want chopped tomatoes, I take them out of the juice and chop them. If I want diced tomatoes, I put the whole can in a food processor and pulse a few times until I get the desired fineness of dice. If I want crushed tomatoes... well, if I am planning ahead I will buy them, because blended whole tomatoes are not quite the same thing, but just pulsing it for longer in the food processor or putting it in a blender does a passable imitation for most recipes.

Beer can duck!

Mmmmmmm, duck...

In my fifth post ever on this blog, I promised I was going to try a variation on the ol' beer can chicken recipe by using it to cook a duck that I had sitting around in my freezer. Well, I finally got around to trying it last night.

There were some execution issues with using this technique on a larger bird, but all in all it came out pretty well. I still think my favorite way of preparing duck is a braise, though... that is the only method I have found that sufficiently breaks down the fat enough for my tastes. This was still delicious, though, and I can definitely recommend it if you like roast duck.

I almost never use my charcoal grill, but I decided to go for it this time. For one thing, the burner layout on my gas grill is not good for indirect cooking. For another, I thought the smokiness might give it a nice flavor. Mostly, it was because I had bought a charcoal chimney a month or two ago and still hadn't gotten a chance to try it out.

I had been worried that the lid on my grill wasn't tall enough to accommodate a fully-upright duck, but this turned out to be irrelevant, as it also turns out that a beer can in its ass is not sufficient support to keep a duck fully-upright. As you can see in the

My jury-rigged system for propping up the duck

picture to the left, I had to kinda prop up the other end with a second beer can. Maybe a stick or skewer or something may have been better here. I dunno. Anyway, it worked.

I think what really made this duck delicious was the marinade I used. It was loosely inspired by Alton Brown's duck recipe. The amounts in the recipe below are very approximate, because I did one of those "little bit of this, little bit of that" things, but it should be fairly tolerant to variations. I was extremely pleased with the flavor it gave to the skin. Probably the wood chips I used didn't hurt either.

Recipe and more pics below the fold.

Beer Can Duck

• 1/4 cup pineapple-orange juice
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp whole mustard seed
• 1 Tbsp black peppercorns
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 5-6 garlic cloves, smashed
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• one 5-lb. duck
• one or two cans of cheap beer
• sweet wood chips, soaked in water (optional)

Combine first seven ingredients and place with duck in a large freezer bag. Let marinate in refridgerator for 4-8 hours. Remove duck from marinade and scrape off any peppercorns or cloves that cling to it (if a few mustard seeds stick to it, that's okay).

A charcoal grill set up for indirect cooking

Set grill up for indirect cooking: For a charcoal grill, get the coals going good and then pile them all up on one side. For a gas grill, turn on only half the burners. If you have an actual indirect barbecue, you're way ahead of me, I'm sure you can figure it out.

When grill is ready, chug a third of one beer and shove it in the duck's cavity. Place duck on the cool side of the grill. If duck won't stand up straight, chug half of another beer and use it to prop up the other end of the duck. If using wood chips, place them in a wood chip box, or however you do your wood chips, on the hot side of the grill. Cover grill. Check duck after 20-30 minutes and if it is cooking unevenly, turn it appropriately.

Cook until duck reaches desired doneness, about 1 hour for medium rare (internal temp of 150F) or about 1 1/2 hours for a more done duck (165-175F). Remove duck from grill, tent loosely with foil, and let rest 5-10 minutes before carving.

More pizzas

We had our friends Kurt and Dar over for dinner last night and we made more pizzas. Heh, what can I say, it's cheap and a crowd-pleaser.

Along with a standard pizza with yer basic toppings, we did a sort of "shrimp pad thai"-inspired pizza and a beet, goat cheese, and pistachio pizza. The former was a big hit, the latter was alright but was kinda dry and seemed like it was missing something. Maybe some other kind of cheese?

Sorry, no pictures, but approximate recipes below.


"Shrimp pad thai" pizza

• 3/4 lb uncooked shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp peanut oil
• 5-6 garlic cloves, minced
• 3 Thai chile peppers, minced
• 3 scallions, chopped
• 4 Tbsp chopped cilantro
• 1-2 Tbsp Thai green curry paste
• 1 14-oz. can coconut milk
• 1 Tbsp fish sauce
• 1/2 cup finely chopped peanuts
• 3 Tbsp basil chiffonade
• 1 med. orange or red bell pepper, sliced into rings
• small handful of bean sprouts
• your favorite pizza crust

Combine shrimp, soy sauce, 1/4 cup peanut oil, half of minced garlic, and about a third of minced chile peppers in a medium bowl. Toss to coat. Place in refridgerator to marinate.

Meanwhile, heat remaining 2 Tbsp peanut oil over medium heat and add scallions, half of cilantro, and remaining garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic and white parts of scallion start to soften, about 3-4 minutes. Add curry paste and stir until aromatic, about one minute longer. Add coconut milk. If desired, dilute with some chicken broth (I kindof wish I had done this...). Simmer until flavors start to combine, about 5-10 minutes. Add fish sauce and 1/4 cup chopped peanuts, and simmer a little longer, about 3 minutes. Add basil and remove from heat. Set aside.

Preheat broiler. Remove shrimp from marinade and place on broiler pan. When broiler is ready, place shrimp six inches from heating element and cook until starting to caramelize on the outside, about 3-4 minutes per side. Remove shrimp and set oven to 425 degrees.

You will probably want to pre-cook the crust a bit, as the ingredients on the pizza don't really need to cook much and there is no cheese to melt. When crust is fairly close to done, spread enough of the sauce on crust to cover it, and then evenly distribute bell peppers, bean sprouts, and shrimp over crust. Top with remaining 1/4 cup chopped peanuts. Bake about another 5-10 minutes, being careful not to let the peanuts get burnt. Remove from oven and sprinkle with remaining cilantro.


Beet, goat cheese, and pistachio pizza

• mixture of extra virgin olive oil and minced garlic¹
• 2-3 medium beets, roasted and then chopped into 1/4" cubes
• ~3 Tbsp goat cheese, crumbled
• 1/3 cup finely chopped pistachios
• 1/4 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/4 cup chopped pea greens
• your favorite pizza crust

Spread olive oil and garlic mixture over crust to cover. Evenly distribute beets, goat cheese, and pistachios over the crust. Sprinkle Parmesan over top. Bake until crust reaches desired crispness. Sprinkle with pea greens just before serving.

¹I've started experimenting with mincing a bunch of garlic and putting it in a jar in the fridge with extra virgin olive oil -- you know, kinda like that jar you can buy at the supermarket, only way better because it's homemade from fresh ingredients with no preservatives or other funky shit. If you don't have this on hand, it should be fine to just spread the olive oil on the crust followed by a reasonable amount of minced garlic.


So, a couple problems with these recipes: The Thai pizza was delicious, but too heavy. As I mentioned in the recipe, probably it would be better to dilute the coconut milk with some chicken broth. Possibly also using low-fat coconut milk might be a good idea. Also, be warned, it's a bit spicy.

The beet pizza was interesting but a bit dry. Mariah thinks maybe adding some fontina cheese would have improved it. I had mozzarella on hand, but I think it would have been weird. Also, although I enjoyed them, Mariah didn't care for the raw pea greens on top. To each his own...

A new way to eat your greens

One of the challenges of belonging to a CSA is that you generally get a lot of greens. Like, a lot of greens. Kale, Swiss chard, mustard greens, various cabbages, some stuff I was unable to identify... You'll be eating greens at least once a week, often two or three times a week, so you'd better find a way of preparing them that you enjoy.

Cooked kale. What am I gonna do with this?

I'm generally fine with just cooking up my greens in a bit of olive oil and garlic, but that tends to get old after awhile, and in any case my wife doesn't care for it that way. She finds that it's almost impossible to get them seasoned to her liking, i.e. they are either too salty, or else underseasoned and bland.

We both enjoy beans and greens quite a bit. For those that don't know, you just take canned cannellini beans, cook them with the liquid from the can until it starts to thicken, then add your greens and some chicken broth, maybe a little seasoning too, and cook until the greens are done. It's delicious and filling, but this gets old too if it's your only way of preparing the copious amount of greens that come from a CSA.

So last night, faced with some kale that desperately needed to be used up, we set about to find a new way to prepare greens that we both would enjoy.

Inspired by a recipe we found online for a potato and kale puree, I came up with the dish that follows. It was a big hit with Mariah, and easy to make too.

Baked mashed potatoes with chopped kale

• 2 lbs. potatoes, cut into large pieces (peeled or unpeeled, your choice¹)
• one large bunch coarsely chopped kale, about 3-4 cups
• Kosher salt
• 1/2-3/4 cup milk (whole milk is tastiest, other milk is healthier)
• 2-6 Tbsp butter or oil (more butter is tastier, less is healthier -- duh)
• Pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup freshly shredded Parmesan

Mashed potatoes with kale. You could eat these just the way they are, but why not bake some cheese on top?

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Bring two pots of aggressively salted² water to a boil. Place kale in one, potatoes in the other. Drain kale when it is tender, about 5-10 minutes. Drain potatoes when they are soft enough to rice/mash, about 15 minutes.

Finely chop cooked kale. Pass potatoes through a ricer, or mash with potato masher or wooden spoon. Combine potatoes, kale, milk, and butter or oil in medium bowl. Do not overstir, or your potatoes will become gluey. Add pepper to taste, possibly salt if necessary -- check first.

The finished product.

Transfer potato and kale mixture to a casserole dish and cover top with parmesan. Place uncovered in oven and bake until cheese on top just begins to show some brown.

¹You may have heard that it is healthier to leave your potatoes unpeeled. This is a myth. While it is true that the skin is much more nutrient-dense than the flesh of the potato, think about it: the skin is paper-thin, while the flesh makes up something like 99+% of the potato. Sure, the skin is healthier, but do you think it is one hundred times as rich in nutrients? Nuh uh. Now, my family happens to prefer mashed potatoes with the skins, because of the rustic texture and earthy flavor. But if you don't care for it, don't feel compelled to leave them in for the nutrients. The nutritional benefit is insignificant.

Juniper wants to help!

²When you are boiling potatoes, cooking pasta, or boiling greens, salt the shit out of the water. Seriously. In my experience, the amount of salt the food absorbs is relatively independent of the salinity of the water, I think because it can only absorb salt so fast regardless of the concentration. Too little salt and your food will be underflavored. Too much salt, and... well, you can't really put in too much salt. I guess if you made like a brine or something, that might be too much salt. But don't worry about it. Put in what you think is enough salt, then put in some more just to be safe. You'll be glad you did.


To give credit where credit is due, I get the proportions I use for mashed potatoes from Alice Waters' book The Art of Simple Food.

As the main course, we had barbecue-flavored pan-seared chicken thighs. This is a recipe Mariah came up with. It's nothing fancy, but doing it this way will give you very tender flavorful chicken.

Pan-seared barbecue chicken thighs

• 1 lb. boneless skinless chicken thighs
• your favorite barbecue sauce
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper

Place chicken in shallow dish or bowl. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper, then coat with barbecue sauce. Let sit 15 minutes to an hour (if longer than 20 minutes or so, put it in the fridge).

Mmm, this chicken looks done.

Thoroughly heat heavy skillet³ over medium-high heat. Add olive oil, then chicken. Cook until barbecue sauce starts to carmelize, about 3-5 minutes, then turn over and repeat process on the other side. The FDA would like you to use a meat thermometer to verify that the internal temperature of the chicken is at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The nice thing about this recipe, though, is that in my experience, when it looks done on the outside, it's just right on the inside. Alternatively, cut into one piece and check it.

³I use a cast-iron skillet for this, but be warned: It makes quite a mess, and I am pretty sure that the tomato and other acids in the barbecue sauce is bad for your cast-iron unless it is really well-seasoned. If you have a ceramic-coated cast-iron skillet, that's probably ideal.

Update: My wife has pointed out the the chicken thighs we buy are the organic free-range boneless skinless thighs from Wegmans, which may be somewhat smaller than conventional chicken thighs. My comment about "when it looks done, it is done" only applies if your chicken thighs are the same size as the ones I buy... so be warned.

Pizzas everywhere!

Mariah's 30th birthday party was last Saturday. It was a great time! We had a keg, first time I've ever done that, our patented "booze piñata"¹, and six pizzas. We didn't have time to make our own dough, so we cheaped out and used Boboli crusts. Oh, and it was just storebought marinara sauce. But we got all kinds of compliments on them.

My favorite was a six- or seven-pepper pizza (I lost count!) that Mariah dreamed up. Bell peppers, jalapeños, Thai chile peppers, Hungarian peppers, serrano peppers, Fresno peppers, and I think one other type that I didn't recognize. I thought it would be way too spicy, and while it was definitely "hot", it was not at all inedible. Awesome!

We did two pizzas with fig, prosciutto, goat cheese, and blue cheese. This is one of Mariah's favorite flavor combinations: fig combined with bacon or prosciutto, with a strong-flavored cheese. It's just amazing.

Another popular one was spinach, white mushrooms, portabella mushrooms, and onions. We tried a classic Margherita pizza (garlic and olive oil base with sliced tomatoes, fresh mozzerella, and fresh basil) with the added twist of using heirloom tomatoes instead of plum tomatoes. It was tasty, but I think I sliced the tomatoes too thick and they released a lot of water which prevented the crust from cooking up. If I do a Margherita pizza again, I'll probably precook the tomatoes.

I had one leftover crust and a bunch of leftover mushrooms, bell peppers, and prosciutto, so I just through that all together for the last one.

All in all, it was a great, very tasty meal, it fed probably 20 people, and it was pretty cheap all things considered. The biggest expense was the crusts, and if we made our own we could have virtually eliminated that. We will definitely be doing pizza night again!

¹Yeah, "booze piñata." This is the third time we've done it. We fill a pinata with the usual candy and confetti and such, but also put in a couple dozen airplane bottles of liquor. It always takes the party to another level after that...

Oh, and sorry there are no pictures. I was too depressed about Stash to really think about that. I think I was a bit of a downer at the party, but hopefully not too awful...

Lamb Illustrated

Woo-hoo, I finally remembered to take pictures!

Last night we had quite a feast: roasted rack of lamb with sweet potato-miso mash and stir-fried snap peas.

The lamb recipe I use, which always knocks everybody's socks off, is based on the very traditional method where you put a thin layer of dijon mustard on the outside of the rack and then coat it with breadcrumbs. The twist is this: Instead of/in addition to passing it with a mint sauce, you mince up a bunch of mint and mix it right in with the breadcrumbs before coating the lamb.

Internal temp: 125 degrees F.
Fuck you, USDA!

I got the recipe from Epicurious.com, and it was originally published in Bon Appetit. The link also includes a recipe for a mint sauce on the side, but I never bother to make it. The first time I made the dish, I whipped up the mint sauce, and it was barely touched. I haven't made it since, and have had no complaints. If you're really into mint sauce, though, go for it.

I felt like I should have put salt and pepper on the lamb earlier (it didn't seem like the salt had penetrated all the way through, even though I applied it probably a good half-hour before I started cooking it), and I always feel like it needs to rest more like 10 minutes than the 5 minutes the recipe mandates. Also, I tend to use a much higher proportion of mint than the recipe calls for. Oh, and that's WAY too much breadcrumbs even for 3 lamb racks -- I used 1/2 cup for a single rack, and I still threw out at least half of it.

The sweet potato-miso mash is an old standby recipe for me that I like because it is an interesting twist, but actually really simple to make. Also, miso paste seems to last just about forever in the fridge, so I can bust this out on a whim whenever I want to do something a little different with sweet potatoes or yams. I am certain I got the recipe somewhere online a few years ago, but I can't for the life of me find it... So, with apologies to the original creator of the recipe, here is how I remember it:


Sweet potato-miso mash

• 2 pounds sweet potatoes or yams, peeled and chopped into large-ish cubes
• 2 Tbsp white miso paste (most any type of miso paste will do)
• Pepper to taste

Bring pot of boiling unsalted water to a boil. Normally, for something like this, I would demand that you use aggressively salted water under threat of a vicious beating with a live trout, in order to ensure that the world's first and best flavor enhancer penetrates deeply into the entire dish. However, in this case, the salty miso paste is going to provide pretty much all the salt we need. So leave the salt out.

Add potatoes or yams to the water and cook until tender enough to mash, about 15 minutes. Drain and transfer to bowl large enough for mashing. If not ready to serve, cover with foil.

When almost ready to serve, add the miso paste and pepper to taste. Again, do not add salt, as the miso will add plenty of saltiness! Mash sweet potato mixture thoroughly, stirring with spoon if miso paste does not fully combine. Serve immediately.

Notes: The reason for the foil over the bowl and waiting for the last minute to mash it is because, assuming your miso came out of the fridge, I find that it cools the potatoes almost immediately to a good serving temperature -- and that if you add the miso earlier and then don't serve it for ten minutes, say, then it is not hot anymore by the time it gets to the table. So I keep the potatoes as hot as possible until I am ready to add the miso, then serve right away.

This recipe makes about 4-5 side-dish servings. You can easily scale it however large or small you like by just maintaining the ratio of 1 lb potatoes to 1 Tbsp miso paste.


The stir-fried snap peas is still something I am sort of working on. I want to get snap peas that have a fair bit of browning on them yet still have a nice al dente crisp to them, but I also don't want them to seem greasy. The problem is, because the peas have a smooth non-porous surface, there is nowhere for oil or butter to hide -- so even a small, quite sensible amount of oil gives them a tasty-but-unhealthy-looking sheen, and interferes with the mouthfeel. Yet if I use too little oil, then they don't brown up the way I want them too. If anybody has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

I used garlic scapes this time, because as I mentioned in a previous post, we have some right now from our CSA. They were tasty, but chopped garlic would probably work too (though I might add it a little later in the cooking so as not to burn it). The snap peas were also from the CSA.

Stir-fried snap peas with garlic scapes

• a "handful" of snap peas (I guess maybe 1/3 lb is what I used? I didn't measure or weigh it, I just tossed in the bag we got from the CSA)
• 2 garlic scapes, sliced
• 1-2 tsp of peanut oil
• salt and pepper to taste

The snap peas cooking in the skillet.

Heat a cast-iron skillet over high heat. Meanwhile, combine snap peas and garlic scapes in a bowl and toss with salt and pepper. When skillet is almost smoking or just starting to smoke, add the peanut oil immediately followed by the snap peas mixture. Cook, stirring frequently, until some of the snap peas are starting to show little streaks of brown, about 5-10 minutes. Check the peas occasionally by picking one up and wagging it to make sure it is not getting too soggy. It is better that the peas don't get the sear on them than that they get soggy. When they are done, remove from heat and serve.


To go with the meal, we had Dr. Konstantin Frank Dry Reisling. Yeah, I know, a red wine

All plated and ready to serve.

would have gone much better with this meal, but we were in the mood for a white. Sue me, wine snobs!

Anyway, I don't generally like Reislings, but the Dr. Frank Reislings (both the dry and the semi-dry) are really fantastic. This bottle was even better than I remember it, which could mean that a) the 2007 vintage is a good one, or, as is more likely b) it's been a long time since I've had a good bottle of wine.

The price is right too: It was about $12 at Century Pittsford. They usually have it available chilled, but it was sold out (go figure) so we had to toss it in the freezer while I cooked.

Right before we sit down to eat.
(Sorry for the blurry photo)

This is a meal we've done a couple times now. We do a single rack of lamb and split it between two people, which makes it a reasonable amount of food. Next time, we'll probably replace the sweet potato-miso mash with Yukon Gold mashed potatoes (my wife likes yams better, I like regular mashed potatoes better, so being the awesome wife she is, she suggested we switch it up next time). The peas could be replaced with any spring vegetable, e.g. asparagus would work great. It's a great spring meal!