Read Bacon Nation: 125 Irresistible Recipes Online
Authors: Peter Kaminsky,Marie Rama
Bacon Nation: 125 Irresistible Recipes (6 page)
Making and Toasting Fresh Bread Crumbs
To make fresh bread crumbs, break slightly stale country white or Italian bread into 1- to 2-inch pieces or chunks. Place the pieces of bread in a food processor or blender and pulse until the crumbs are of the desired degree of coarseness. Untoasted bread crumbs can be stored in a sealed freezer bag or airtight plastic container in the freezer for up to six months. Toast them just before using.
To toast bread crumbs, preheat the oven to 350˚F. Spread the bread crumbs out on a rimmed baking sheet and toast them in the oven until lightly browned, 5 to 10 minutes. Watch the bread crumbs carefully so they don’t overbrown and burn. Or, put the bread crumbs in a dry skillet over medium heat and cook them until golden, 4 to 5 minutes, tossing the crumbs and shaking the skillet occasionally to prevent them from burning.
Serves 6
French chefs, who have the time, the skills, and most important, the staff, like to create flavorful but complicated poached fish stocks using the ground-up shells of lobsters, mussels, shrimp, and clams. For the rest of us, who don’t have the resources of these master chefs, we have found that adding just shrimp shells as part of a quick homemade stock lays a pretty solid foundation for poaching shrimp. We also found that tossing a thick slice of bacon into the poaching liquid produces a pleasant creamy smokiness for the poached and chilled shrimp. We like serving these poached shrimp as a prologue to a dinner of several courses; it’s a light appetizer that welcomes the heavier main courses that follow. Served with a salad, the shrimp make a light meal.
1 pound extra-large shrimp (21 to 24 per pound), deveined in their shells (see box below)
¼ cup dry white wine
¼ cup white wine vinegar
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 slice thick-cut bacon, cut into 2 inch pieces
2 large cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed with the flat side of a chef’s knife
5 black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
Salt
4 to 5 very thin red onion slices
Hot sauce of your choice
1
Remove the shells from the shrimp and place the shells in a large skillet with the white wine, wine vinegar, olive oil, bacon, garlic, peppercorns, bay leaves, and a pinch of salt. Add 1 cup of water. Cover the skillet and bring the mixture to a boil over high heat. Then, reduce the heat as necessary and let the poaching liquid simmer until the flavors blend, about 5 minutes.
2
Add the shrimp and cook over medium-low heat, covered, until the shrimp are opaque and no longer translucent, 2 to 3 minutes. (Turn the shrimp over in the poaching liquid once or twice to help them cook evenly but don’t let the shrimp overcook or they will toughen.) Using tongs or a slotted spoon, transfer the shrimp to a medium-size bowl, reserving the poaching liquid in the skillet. Cover the shrimp loosely with plastic wrap and refrigerate them.
3
Bring the poaching liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat as necessary and let simmer until the liquid is reduced to 1 to 1¼ cups. Strain the poaching liquid and discard the solids. Refrigerate the poaching liquid until chilled, about 1 hour. Pour the chilled poaching liquid over the shrimp, add the red onion, and stir to mix. Let the shrimp marinate in the refrigerator, covered, for a few hours, or overnight if you have the time, turning the shrimp in the marinade once or twice.
4
Before serving, season the shrimp with salt and hot sauce to taste, tossing the shrimp again in the marinade. Transfer the shrimp from the marinade to a serving platter, scatter the red onion slices on top, and spoon some of the marinade over all.
Shrimp Size Advisory
Supermarkets don’t have uniform names for shrimp. One pound of large shrimp in one store is one pound of jumbo shrimp in another. When shopping for shrimp, it’s best to ignore the size listed on the label and instead purchase the shrimp according to how many are in a pound. Colossal shrimp come ten to fifteen per pound. Jumbo shrimp have a count of sixteen to twenty per pound. Extra-large shrimp are likely to come twenty-one to twenty-four per pound. Large shrimp will have a count of twenty-five to thirty per pound. And medium-size shrimp will have a count of thirty-one to thirty-five per pound.
Makes 12; serves 6 as an appetizer
There are oodles of recipes that call for wrapping whole shrimp in slices of bacon before broiling, baking, grilling, or microwaving them. Often these recipes never live up to the promise of the ingredients. The shrimp, especially farm-raised frozen shrimp, may be overpowered by the bacon. To perk up the shrimp we have added a traditional Asian marinade of scallions, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, and brown sugar. The bacon is crisp on the outside with moist, flavorful shrimp inside.
2 scallions, both white and green parts, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
2 teaspoons finely chopped peeled fresh ginger
1 packed teaspoon light or dark brown sugar
1 large clove garlic, minced
⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper, or more to taste
12 jumbo shrimp (16 to 20 per pound), peeled (leaving the tail on) and deveined (see Notes)
4 slices bacon (see Notes)
1
Combine the scallions, soy sauce, ginger, brown sugar, garlic, and cayenne pepper in a medium-size mixing bowl. Taste for seasoning, adding more cayenne as necessary. Add the shrimp, toss to coat in the mixture, and let stand for 15 to 20 minutes.
2
Cut each slice of bacon crosswise into 3 equal pieces.
3
Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 450˚F. Cover the bottom of a large roasting pan completely with aluminum foil.
4
Remove a shrimp from the marinade. Working on a flat surface, press pieces of scallion, garlic, and ginger from the marinade onto the sides of the shrimp. Wrap a piece of bacon around the shrimp, securing it with a wooden toothpick. Repeat with the remaining shrimp.
5
Arrange the bacon-wrapped shrimp on the aluminum foil-lined roasting pan so that they are not touching and bake them until the shrimp begin to firm up and the bacon begins to brown and render its fat, 5 to 6 minutes. Remove the roasting pan from the oven and, using long-handled tongs, carefully turn the shrimp over. Return the pan to the oven and bake the shrimp until they are cooked through and the bacon is lightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes longer. Serve the shrimp immediately.
Notes
: Larger shrimp (ten to fifteen per pound) also work well for this dish. If your bacon is fatty, be sure to cut off the excess fat at the ends of each slice before wrapping the shrimp.
To make this recipe on the grill, instead of holding the bacon in place with toothpicks, thread the bacon-wrapped shrimp a few inches apart on metal skewers and grill them on the grill’s food grate set over a bed of medium-hot coals for 3 to 5 minutes per side.
Treat Gingerly
We have an unabashed culinary love for fresh ginger. Pungent, clean, crisp, tangy, spicy, warm, bright, intense: Ginger has all these qualities and few limitations as an ingredient. It’s one that partners so well with all the taste factors—smokiness, saltiness, meatiness, and a slight sweetness—found in bacon. Ginger brightens a dish like succotash and can punctuate maple syrup and pancakes, ice cream, and cookies. Its effect is most pronounced when it is shredded raw into a salad dressing or marinade. Ginger softens a bit when combined with garlic in oil—a mix essential to so many Chinese stir-fries. From Japan through China and India to Africa and the Caribbean, you’ll find ginger in stews, soups, teas, beers, cookies, and sauces. A great drink on a hot day is fresh ginger lemonade, made by simply adding grated ginger to that quintessentially American mixture of fresh lemon juice, water, and sugar. If you’re not a gingerphile, simply leave it out or reduce the amount we call for in our recipes. But we’ve found in our testing that fresh ginger works exceptionally well with bacon.
Makes 24 stuffed clams
According to legend, Clams Casino was first created in 1917 in Rhode Island at the Narragansett Pier Casino for a society lady who wanted a unique dish for her dinner guests. Good story but, like most food legends, probably not true. “Dishes are not invented; they evolve,” maintains the scholarly food journal Gastronomica. We tend to agree, especially when there are two ingredients—clams and bacon—that seem to cry out for each other.
While this dish has many variations, especially in good old-fashioned red sauce restaurants, its signature ingredients are still clams, bell pepper, butter, bread crumbs, and bacon. In our version we use bacon as an ingredient twice—once as a fat for sautéing and again in the topping. Instead of painstakingly (and often painfully) shucking clams, we steam them in a little white wine and water just until their shells start to open. We omitted the strong seasoners called for in a lot of Clams Casino recipes, for example Tabasco or Worcestershire sauce. You’ll find that our seasonings don’t get in the way of the intoxicating combination of clams and bacon.
3 slices thick-cut bacon, cut into ½-inch pieces (see box,
page 45
)
About 2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons diced green bell pepper
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons diced fennel
2 medium-size shallots, diced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
½ cup toasted coarsely ground homemade bread crumbs (see
page 32
)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Grated zest from half a medium-size lemon, plus 1 lemon (optional), cut into 6 wedges
Freshly ground black pepper
⅔ cup dry white wine
24 littleneck clams in their shells (each 2 inches or less in diameter), well scrubbed (see box,
page 38
)
1
Cook the bacon in a medium-size skillet over medium heat until the bacon is browned but not too crisp and most of the fat is rendered, 5 to 7 minutes, stirring often and adjusting the heat as necessary. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the bacon to a paper towel-lined plate to drain, reserving the bacon fat in the skillet. You should have about 2 tablespoons of fat. If necessary, pour off enough fat or add enough butter to the skillet to measure 2 tablespoons.
2
Heat the bacon fat in the skillet over medium heat. Add 2 tablespoons butter, green bell pepper, fennel, and shallots and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened, 4 to 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Transfer the mixture to a small bowl and stir in the drained bacon, bread crumbs, parsley, and lemon zest. Season with black pepper to taste and set the mixture aside.
3
Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 475˚F.
4
Add the white wine and ⅔ cup of water to a large deep saucepan or other heavy-bottomed pot big enough to hold all of the clams (a pasta pot works fine). Cover the pot and let the liquid come to a boil over high heat. Add the clams, cover the pot again, and let the liquid return to a gentle boil. Steam the clams just until they begin to open, about 5 minutes, depending on the size of the clams. Watch the clams carefully; if you cook them too long they will become tough (the length of time the clams will take to cook depends upon the size of the clams and the pot). Using tongs, transfer the clams from the pot to a large bowl just as they start to open. Discard any clams that do not open after about 8 minutes.
