Cured Egg Yolk

Not much curing has happened in my household recently, something I mean to change, get my hands on a nice piece of pork to make some bacon, or should really stop faffing about and finally get around to making some homemade pastrami. But I’ve got to work my way back up to it, can’t just jump in headfirst, well I tell myself that, but who am I kidding, I’m just lazy, forgetful and easily distracted, ooooOoooo a kitty.

Anyway, I was in one of those moods, not really feeling like doing anything, TV wasn’t distracting enough and I didn’t feel like reading, so I thought I’d see what I could manage in the kitchen without actually producing anything to eat immediately, as I wasn’t really hungry. After staring at the pantry and then in fridge, and thinking ‘close the door, it’s not library, stop wasting power’ etc. I spied the eggs and ideas of the oft thought of but seldom produced cured egg yolk came to mind.


Pulling out the sacks of rock sea salt left over from the last egg curing madness that was kai kem eggs, I set about making a layer of salt in the bottom of a dish and digging through the draws for some cheesecloth, which I was sure was in the bottom draw, but now have no idea as I had rearranged the kitchen, disaster averted and cheese cloth in hand, a little rectangle was cut, slightly bigger than a yolk widthwise, and twice as long. An egg was cracked and carefully separated, yolk delicately placed on the cloth and wrapped gently, then placed on the salt bed, and buried in another layer of salt. The dish wrapped tightly in plastic wrap was placed in the fridge and left for 2 days.


Actually 24 hours should be enough, and quite truthfully I totally forgot about it, that is until I opened the fridge to dig about hoping to find something to eat, when I saw the bowl and remembered, oh yeah there’s a yolk in there, carefully unwrapped and salt ceremoniously (I said a little prayer at the wastage of salt) dumped in the sink, the yolk was extracted and unwrapped, placed on a pillow of kitchen paper towel and shoved with love and attention back in the fridge, where I’m sure it will be forgotten about again, not that it matters too much, the sucker needs to dry out.


Five days later, it had dried sufficiently enough for its purpose, being grated over some freshly made pasta. I set about getting the pasta sorted, two parts egg to three parts flour, mixed and kneaded and left to rest, wrapped, in the fridge for half an hour before being rolled, folded and run through a pasta machine until the desired thickness and cut into noodles. Cooked in generously salted boiling water, then drained and seasoned well with black pepper and good olive oil, dished up in a bowl and a little cheese grated over top, then finally finished with a good grating of the bright orange yolk.

“Does it taste like foot?” My partner asked as she poked her plate with her fork. Well no, be assured it is not a funky piece of dried egg with all the negative connotations one can take from eggs gone wrong, in fact it has no noticeable aroma, but the flavour is that of intense yolk, the curing and drying has concentrated all its rich wonderful flavour.

Fish Cakes

3 Medium potatoes (about double the amount of fish)
200 grams Smoked Kingfish
1 red onion (half)
Handful of Parsley
1 teaspoon Hot English mustard
1 teaspoon smoked sweet paprika
Salt to season

• Peel and boil the potatoes until tender.
• Finely dice the onion, and place half in a bowl, and set the other half aside for the horseradish creme below.
• Add chopped parsley, the mustard and paprika to the bowl, and flake in the fish, make sure you have some nice chunks.
• Use a mouli or ricer to purée the potatoes, do this in a separate bowl as you don’t want to add hot potato to the fish.
• When the potato is cool enough to handle, mix it into the fish and season with salt.
• Take a handful of the potato mix and push it into a floured ring mould, use the back of a spoon to pack it down.
• Carefully remove the cake from the mould and dust with flour, place on a sheet pan.
• Cool the cakes in the fridge for 10–15 minutes, so they can firm up.
• In a heavy pan pour enough oil to come up about 1 cm, I use rice bran oil as it has a decent smoke point and neutral flavour. When the oil is up to temperature, about 180ºC, carefully place the cakes in the oil and cook until golden on both sides.

Horseradish cream
Half a tub of Crème fraîche
2 Tablespoons Salted capers, rinsed
Half a red onion, finely diced
2 Tablespoons Horseradish
Juice of 1 Lemon
Salt to season

Dice up the rinsed capers and mix all ingredients together in a bowl, adjust the seasoning with salt and extra lemon juice if needed, let it sit for a 10 minutes or so, so the flavours can meld and develop.

Pickled Vegetables
Spring onion
Fennel Bulb
Cider vinegar
Olive Oil

Slice up spring onions, dice the fennel bulb, mix together in a bowl with a splash of cider vinegar and olive oil, easy huh.

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Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science public lecture series has started up for 2012, the videos of the lectures, past and present, are available on iTunes. They are informative and entertaining.

I’ve also been having good fun searching my way through google books and google scholar, it’s a treasure trove of cooking and food related information, from 60s magazine recipes to the 1825 treatise The physiology of taste: or, Transcendental gastronomy, which is an interesting read.

Spicy chicken wings

Nothing much can beat a humble spicy chicken wing, especially with cold beer chasing it down, even better if the weather is fine and you get to enjoy the sun beating down (not long now Wellington) as you guzzle down cold beers, putting out the ever increasing heat of the unctuous spicy wings. Well ok so the weather’s not quite up to par yet, and most of my spicy wing and beer consumption has taken place in the sheltered warm embrace of Fork and Brewer, but sometimes you’re stuck at home, and if like me, you’re out in the food culture wasteland that is Karori, where haute cuisine is the choice between Fush’n’Chips or plastic fantastic Subway. So we make do with the situation we have, too lazy to go out at night, we stay in, wrapped up against the cold warming ourselves with spicy, greasy, chicken flesh, thanking our lucky stars we stocked up on some decent beer and don’t have to rely on the local for our tipple.

You can cook these however you like, I oven baked them with the help of a little canola oil spray, you could deep fry them though if you prefer.

500 grams Chicken Wings, or as we call them nibbles
10 grams Cumin seeds
10 grams Coriander seeds
5 grams Sweet Smoked Paprika
5 grams Kosher salt
5 grams hot fine chili flakes
20 grams flour

Preheat the oven to 210ºC, and spray a sheet pan with cooking spray.


Grind all the dry ingredients, sans flour, using mortar and pestle, you could however use a blender if you’re inclined that way. When thoroughly ground, but not powdery, a little texture is a good thing, mix in the flour.


Pat the chicken dry, and very, very lightly coat in oil, and mix together with the spice mix, firmly pressing it into the wings.


Arrange the coated wings on a tray, then give it a light spray with oil, this helps crisp up the coating but is optional. Cook for 15 minutes, remove from the oven, turn over all the wings and cook for another 15 minutes. Serve up with some demonically hot chili sauce and lots of paper towels.

Two Weeks of Food Madness (Bliss?)

Wellington on a plate has wrapped up, two weeks of food madness finished, and many a oyster eaten. There have been, apart from all the great restaurant deals, some great events, and it ended appropriately for some food bloggers, with a two day conference held mainly at Le Cordon Bleu. Thanks to all of the sponsors and organisers of the conference, check out the list of the great people who made everything possible. Can’t wait for next year. Once I’ve had a decent chance to sort out all the photos I took, I will probably do a gallery post about the conference.

Le Cordon Bleu— The New Zealand Chocolate Festival— T Leaf T—Archer McRae– Alessandra Zecchini– The Dumpling House–The Gourmet Gannet–Grow from Here–HarperCollins Publishers–The Kitchen-Maid—L’affaire Au Chocolat–Moon Over Martinborough–My Darling Lemon Thyme—Peoples Coffee–Positively Wellington Tourism–Six Barrel Soda Co.–Viviane Perényi–Yellow Brick Road—Wellington on A Plate–Boulcott St Bistro–Coco–Fork & Brewer—Foxglove–General Practitioner–Hummingbird—Maginnity’s—Monsoon Poon–The Tasting Room—Ti Kouka—Floriditas–Floyd’s–Liquid Winks–Moore Wilson–Pop Dining–Regal Salmon–Little Penang–Omega Seafood—Bongusto—St Clair—Man O War—Neudorf—100% Nutz–All Good Bananas–Aroha–The Collective Dairy–EcoStore—Equagold–Kokako–Little Bird–Love Plant Life–R Qute–Holy Moly Ice Cream—Mad Millie—Intercontinental–House of Sabra–Eat & Greet–So D’Lish

I entered a couple of recipes in Stuff’s My Dish competition, and both of them won their category. Entrée (for Arbitrageur): pork hock with pickled rhubarb & Bistro Classic (for Boulcott Street Bistro): pork cheek confit with fennel and apple sauce. They ended up on the menu of the respective restaurants for a week, which is pretty cool, and awesome seeing someone else interpret my recipe. Check out the recipes, pork cheek confit and pork hock cake.

Last but not least, as I mentioned in my previous post, I was one of the presenters for the City Market Visa Wellington on a Plate event, Pecha Kucha: Imbibe. Well the videos are now on YouTube, I can’t embed them, but you can see my presentation here, and the playlist for the others here.

Hotdog!

Well, you would've thought after two days of food food food, the last thing I’d feel like is getting a little complicated in the kitchen, especially after a five course lunch! Simple intentions, nice 100% pork sausages in a roll with some sauerkraut, easy dinner. The thought of poaching sausages in beer sounded pretty good, but that would require a too much beer for a couple of dogs, beer I had plans on drinking! So then it happened, out came the zip lock bag, couple of sausages placed in there, and half a bottle of beer, now the trick is to fill up the sink with water, do up the zip lock bag except for one corner, then submerge almost to the top, forcing out the air, then seal the corner, you should have a decent air free bag of sausage and beer.


Fill a large pot with water, larger the better, as the more thermal mass you have the easier it is to maintain a constant temperature, it’s also a good idea to fill it with hot water, I know the water out of my hot tap is about 55°C, so it’s a pretty good starting point, as I want to cook the bagged sausages at 62° for an hour, with such a short cooking period and a large enough pot, you shouldn’t have to babysit too much.

The rest of it is pretty simple, slice open a couple of rolls, toast the interior with plenty of butter in a frying pan, heat up some sauerkraut with a little butter, make a bed of cheese in the rolls, brown the now cooked sausage in a hot pan with butter, and then place it in the roll, stuff one side with sauerkraut, pipe on some sour cream and mustard, and sprinkle with a little nigella seed.

It may all seem a bit too much effort for a humble hot dog, and I guess you’d be right, if like me you were only preparing one or two, but ramp up the numbers and this method will save you a lot of time and hassle, as you could prep the sausages early, have them pre-cooked and sitting in the fridge ready to pull out and finish in the pan.

Pecha Kucha: Images

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was one of the presenters for the City Market Visa Wellington on a Plate event, Pecha Kucha: Imbibe. The others were Tom Scott, Bella Kalolo, Barry Soper, Rex Morgan, Howard Greive, Nick Churchouse, Steve Joll, Angela Meyer, Katherine Smyth, Helen Masters, Nigel Greening, Paul Sinclair, and Mayatita Southerwood. Apparently there will be a video of each presenter put up on youtube, and I'm sure I'll reluctantly post it on here too, whether or not I can bring myself to watch my own video is another story. But until then, here are the 20 images I used for my presentation, so click the 'read more' to see them all.

1: The Crap Kitchen

Broccoli Quiche

Quiche done right is velvet smooth custard that practically evaporates when eaten, but cooked too long or too hot, the soft gel breaks, curdling and squeezing out the moisture ending up with a soggy acrid mess. So it is important not to cook it in too hot an oven, and keep an eye on it when the edges begin to puff up, once the centre just barely begins to puff, remove it from the oven, it usually takes about thirty to forty minutes in moderately slow oven (170°C), so it will require a little attention for the last ten minutes.

For the Pastry
200g Flour
100g Cold butter
2 tbsp Cream
Salt

• Mix the flour, salt and butter together until they resemble fine breadcrumbs, a food processor is handy, but not necessary.
• Incorporate enough cream to form a dough.
• Wrap and refrigerate for 20 minutes.
• Roll out to about 2mm thick.
• Place the pastry in a quiche pan.
• Line the pastry with baking paper and add some weights (rice, dried beans etc).
• Blind bake for 10 minutes.
• Remove the baking paper and bake for 5 minutes more.
• Remove from the oven and trim the edges.

Filling
1 Broccoli cut into bite size florets blanched for a couple of minutes
1 Onion Sliced and sweated in a pan until golden
A handful of grated melting cheese, havarti works well

For the Custard
4 Large eggs
300 ml Cream
200 ml Whole Milk
Salt to taste

Mix together being careful not to add too much air to the custard, but making sure to fully homogenize the ingredients.


The egg custard has just set.

To Assemble
Preheat the oven to 170°C.
Line the pastry base with the onion.
Arrange the Broccoli florets.
Sprinkle with the grated cheese.
Pour in the Custard, giving it a little shake to make sure it gets in every little gap.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, keep an eye on it near the end, as soon as the middle begins, or even looks like it’s thinking about rising, take it out of the oven. Let it rest on the bench for a few minutes before slicing.

Popcorn Grits

Well I managed to stumble my way through my allotted 20 slides, when my turn came up at the City Market Visa Wellington on a Plate event, Pecha Kucha: Imbibe. I won't lie, I was a bunch of nerves standing on stage, all eyes on me, and my slides, mouth dried up, but words managed to flow, I think, although it is a haze, I managed a joke or two, wasn’t booed or humiliated, not suffering from PTSD, in the end it was a lot of fun, and quite proud to be part of the 14 presenters who took to the stage that night. Well on to the regularly scheduled blog post.

I hate waiting for packages, the ten days between seeing “item dispatched” on my orders and the package arriving, I find myself checking the mail daily with growing anticipation followed by soul crushing depression, until it finally turns up. Having a magazine subscription, I get to go through this cycle regularly. The termination of the latest hope-sadness cycle was with Lucky Peach finally landing on my desk, and trying so hard to not to flick through it during work hours, but as soon as I got home I started devouring it page by page.

Flicking my way through the lastest issue, with Americana recipes inspired by the film Diner, which I have ever so vague recollections about, I came across Daniel Patterson's popcorn grits (Lucky Peach, Issue #4, page 83), and I knew I had to make it.


Ingredients
½ cup Popcorn Kernels
¼ cup Oil (something neutral, such as rice bran, rapeseed or canola)
3 cups Water
7 Tablespoons Butter, unsalted
Salt, to taste

• Over a medium heat, pop the corn in the oil. Be very careful not burn it, sacrifice a few kernels if you have to, but if you burn it, or it smells slightly acrid, bin it.

• Bring lightly salted water and butter to a simmer.
• Add a third of the popped corn to the water and simmer for 1 minute.
• Strain through a sieve, reserving the liquid.
• Pour the liquid back into the pot, bring back to a simmer.
• With the back of a spoon press the simmered popped corn through the sieve, scraping the underside into a bowl.
• Repeat with the other two thirds of the popped corn.

• Put the purée into a pot loosen with some of the popcorn ‘stock’, I used almost all of mine.
• Season with salt.

It sounds like it’s a more effort than it actually is, it really only takes a few minutes to prepare, and it’s totally worth it, there’s something odd about eating something with the texture of loose polenta and tasting exactly like buttered popcorn, odd but damn delicious. I sautéed chorizo and field mushrooms to pile on to the grits, spicy earthy flavours to cut through the rich buttery grits.

Corn and mushrooms are pretty good friends on a plate together, corn sweet and nutty, mushrooms earthy and can be meaty and nutty, heck even nature puts it together, and man puts it in a can, à la huitlacoche the fungal infected swollen corn kernels.

Pork Skin Puffs

Less than successful in my last attempt at a puffed snack, I was determined to get the next attempt right, I had a plan, well a couple, chicken puffs and prawn puffs, but then I saw a big packet of pork skin sitting in the butchery shelf, and I knew the next puff goodness would be, Chicharrón. Puffed pork skin, made by first boiling the ever loving crap out of the skin in salty water, chill it, scrape off all the fat, the better job of scraping the better the puff, then dehydrating the skin, and finally deep frying.


Boiling the skin is the easier step in the process, just bring a pot of heavily salted water to the boil, add the skin and boil for about an hour. The boiling process gelatinises the collagen in the skin.


Allow the pot to cool down before attempting to handle the skin, when it’s finally at a temperature that’s not going to give you 3rd degree burns, careful lay the skin on a sheet pan, and place in the fridge overnight.


Slice, and scrape off all of the fat from the skin, it’s a bit of a messy process, but the better job you do of removing all the fat the better puff you’ll get.

Slice the the skin into bite size pieces, remember that they shrink a little when dehydrating and will triple in size when puffed. Place a rack on an oven tray and line with some baking paper, and then lay the pork skin on it, leaving room for air to circulate.

Preheat the oven to 50ºC, place the tray in the oven and leave for a couple of hours, then turn off the oven, keep the door shut and leave it alone for another 10 hours. This will need adjusting depending on ambient temperature and humidity, in the end it should almost resemble plastic. You may have to deep fry a couple of test pieces to check if they are dehydrated enough.


Finally, deep frying, heat up oil to about 190ºC, and carefully place the skin in the hot oil and cook until puffed and golden. If they don’t puff too much and have a chewy center, you will need to dehydrate for longer, if they drop to the bottom, don’t puff and burn, I’m sorry but you’re screwed, they’re over dehydrated.

Risotto

There is something therapeutic about making risotto, taking very simple ingredients, rice and stock, and turning them into a velvety pile of soul warming goodness. The more attention you give, the better the results, taking time to finely dice and slowly soften the onion or even better shallots, then toasting the rice, slowly stirring in stock one ladleful at a time, patiently waiting for each dose to be absorbed, helping release the starch from the grains making a smooth sauce.

Risotto is best simple with uncomplicated flavours, but it can be embellished to your hearts desire. I have two favourites I like to make at home, extra cheesy with a good squeeze of lemon, or like the one I’ve made recently, mushroom. I don’t always finely mince the mushrooms, as I have in this recipe, if I had something other than field mushroom I would make a simple lemon risotto and top it with mushrooms sautéed in butter. However, it was the ever so common field mushroom I had my hands on, so they got minced.

I don’t have any real quantities to give you for the recipe, but the ratio is simply 1 part rice to 3-4 parts of stock, plus whatever else you’re flavouring the dish with, in this case a handful of mushrooms. So, get a pot on the heat and pour in some stock, my stock comes from the freezer and I like to ‘refresh’ it by simmering with the stems and peelings of the mushrooms, maybe a handful of herbs and let it steep for a while.

While the stock warms up, finely dice an onion or a couple of shallots. Peel the mushrooms and remove the stems (putting them in the stock), place the mushrooms in a food processor and pulse until very finely minced, tip into a bowl and stir in a spoonful or two of crème fraîche.

Add a knob of butter to a sauté pan over a medium heat, add the diced onion and sweat until translucent, make sure not to brown the onions. Next stir in the rice, gently toast the grains, they will become translucent, but still have a solid white core. Deglaze the pan with a splash of white wine, when evaporated add a ladle of stock and stir, when the stock has been absorbed repeat with another ladle of stock. The rice will take 15-20 minutes to cook, it should still have a bite and not be mushy. Stir through the mushroom mixture and heat through.

Serve in warm bowls, I topped mine with some thin slices of cacciatore sausage, but served plain is good too, or topped with some chopped herbs, or a few sautéed mushrooms.