I'm Just Here for the Food (33 page)

Application: Braising/Stewing

Heat up one tablespoon of the vegetable oil in a 12-inch sauté pan over medium-low heat. Then, add the onion, garlic, and a heavy pinch of kosher salt and cook until the onion is translucent. (We’re not looking for color here so drop the heat if things start getting crispy.)

When the bulb works are soft, transfer to the slow cooker. Crank the heat to high on the sauté pan, then add the remaining oil. When the pan just starts to smoke, add the pork and brown on all sides. (It’s tough to overstress the dramatic effect thorough browning has on a dish such as this one. Appearance and flavor will be lackluster without serious searage. I’m not saying you want to burn it but you want to come pretty close.)

When the pork’s good and ready toss it in the slow cooker with the hominy, chiles, beef stock, and oregano. Set the slow cooker to high and let it perc for 2 hours. Drop the heat to low and cook for another 2 to 3 hours, or until the meat is tender. Remove the ham hock, tear off whatever meat remains on it and add it back to the soup. Season with salt and pepper as needed. Serve the posole with the cilantro, cabbage, radishes, and lime wedges.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Personally, I’d sneak into the pantry and gnaw on it like a wild animal, but that’s just me.

Software:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1½ cups chopped onion
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 to 1½ pound pork roast,
trimmed and cubed
1 smoked ham hock
1 (28 ounce) can hominy, drained
2 dried chopped arbol or ancho
chiles
1 quart beef stock
1 teaspoon dried oregano
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper

For garnish:

1 small bunch cilantro
1½ cups thinly sliced cabbage
4 small radishes, thinly sliced
2 limes, quartered

Hardware:

Chef ’s knife
Cutting board
12-inch sauté pan
Crock-Pot or other 4 to 6 quart
electric slow cooker

Split Pea Soup

The Crock-Pot and other slow cookers have had a resurgence in popularity of late, and with good reason: this is a great device for holding foods at a steady low temperature for hours at a time. This is my take on classic split pea soup; the chipotle and the miso soup paste give it greater depth of flavor.

Application: Simmer

Combine all the ingredients in the slow cooker and set it to high. Cook for 6 to 8 hours, or until the peas have softened. Remove the salt pork before serving. Really, that’s it.

Yield: 4 servings.

Software:

18 ounces split peas
1 finger-sized piece of salt pork
1 chipotle chile in adobo sauce
1½ cups assorted aromatics, such
as carrots, onions and celery,
chopped
2 quarts chicken broth
1½ tablespoons miso paste

Hardware:

Digital scale
4 to 6 quart slow-cooker

Chili

For me, chili has to be all about the chiles. Once you come to grips with this seemingly obvious fact, you’ll be the king of chili.

Application: Stewing

Season the beef with salt, pepper, and chile powder. Heat the sauté pan, add some of the oil, and brown the beef, working in batches if necessary and removing the browned beef to a plate. In a heavy-bottom pot, sweat the onions and garlic in some of the oil until tender, but not browned. Add the remaining ingredients (except the beef) and simmer for 10 minutes. With a stick blender, purée the mixture, then add the beef to the pot. Cook over low heat (below a simmer) for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste and season with salt and pepper if necessary.

This chili is really good as is, but if you cool it and store it for a day or two it’s fantastic when reheated.

Yield: about 2 quarts

Note:
As far as the chile powder is concerned, there are many types available on the market. I prefer ones that are a specific type of chile with nothing else added. Paul Prudhomme has a whole line of them. You can use a mild one or a hot one depending on what you like.

To roast a pepper:
Cut in half from top to bottom. You’ll leave behind the core, seeds, and stem. Now you can go several routes:

1. Lay them skin side up on a pan and broil until the skin is totally blackened.

2. Lay them skin side down on a hot grill until the skin is totally blackened.

3. Using tongs, set or hold them over the open flame of your range until the skin is completely blackened (the pepper is left whole while blackening for this option).

Once blackened (they’ll look burnt), put them in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap to steam. Once cool enough to handle, peel away the black skin.

Software:

2 pounds chuck steak, cut into
½-inch cubes
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon chile powder (see
Note
)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1½ cups finely diced onion
4 cloves garlic
2 ancho chiles, split, seeds
removed, and roughly chopped
2 California chiles, split, seeds
removed, and roughly chopped
2 roasted red bell peppers (see
Note
)
1 chipotle chile in adobo (one chile,
not one can)
4 ounces canned diced tomatoes
¾ cup beef stock
¾ cup delicious beer (I use
Shiner Bock)

Hardware:

Sauté pan
Medium-sized heavy-bottom pot
Stick blender

Working under Pressure

The first pressure cooker, called the “ingester,” was designed in 1679 by French physicist Denis Papin. It consisted of a glass container to hold the food and liquid that was sealed before being placed inside a metal container. Water was then used to fill the gap between the glass container and the metal vessel, and a metal top was screwed on. The entire device was then heated on a fire. To ensure that the cooker didn’t explode, Papin included a safety valve to let out excess steam once the desired pressure had been reached. By varying the weight used to keep the safety valve in place, the pressure could easily be regulated. Measuring temperature, on the other hand, was not so easy. Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius invented their temperature scales after Papin had died. So Papin created his own way to check temperature. He had a depression in the top of the pressure cooker, into which he would place a drop of water. He then used a 3-foot pendulum, which swings in a period of about 1 second, to time how long it took for the drop to evaporate. Unfortunately, the ingester blew up a year later.

TARGET FOOD FOR PRESSURE

Lamb shanks

Beef oxtails

Veal shanks

Pork spare ribs

Pork shoulder (chunks)

Hard vegetables, such as carrots, rutabagas, and beets

Collard greens

Mustard greens (mature)

Swiss chard

Beef brisket

Mutton

Brown rice

Barley

In 1939, the first commercial pressure cooker (made by the National Pressure Cooker Company, known since 1953 as National Presto Industries) debuted in the United States at the New York World’s Fair. The pressure cooker was put on the back burner during World War II, when many manufacturers had to turn their attention toward war efforts. But after the war ended, pressure cookers were a hot item.

Today’s pressure cookers are both safe and efficient. The heat inside a pressure cooker creates steam, which expands, creating 15 pounds per square inch of pressure, which in turn raises the boiling point of liquid to 250° F. In this extreme heat, foods cook two-thirds faster than they would in boiling water.

All pressure cookers utilize a heavy pot or pan, a lid that locks, with an airtight seal and a pressure-control device. Noisy first-generation or jiggle-top cookers are reasonably priced but are problematic in that they lose a good deal of moisture via steam and require skillful handling. In modified first-generation cookers, instead of a weight there’s a sophisticated spring-loaded valve, which means less moisture loss and a quieter ride. The second-generation cookers have a spring-loaded rod that maintains the pressure. They’re quiet and work well, but are often expensive.

When you’re out there shopping, look for a 6-quart cooker with double handles for safe moving. And pick it up—heavy is good. Remember that the first steam engine was based on a pressure cooker: it’s a complex system, so be sure to read the manual.

The Chili Bet

Folks fuss over chili. True “red”-heads spend hours coaxing buckets of pricey and sometimes exotic groceries into alchemaic stews, which they give names like “mouth of hell” and then enter into chili contests.

Some friends and I were sitting around a buddy’s porch one afternoon bemoaning the silly seriousness of such endeavors and contemplating where it could lead (picture Texans on the set of
Iron Chef
, Colts drawn). Anyway, we sank into philosophy and came to the no-doubt accurate conclusion that the dish properly known as
chili con carne
is essentially a utilitarian field dish most likely concocted by chuck masters on the Chisolm Trail, who needed to make use of really lousy cuts of beef. Another buddy put forth that if this were indeed the case, the criteria for judging a “true” chili would have to include grocery receipts, for economy would have to be a factor.

There was a moment’s silence as we all considered what must be done. We had to hold a cheap-chili cook-off. I looked at my watch: 2:30 in the afternoon. We agreed to meet back on the very same porch at 7:00 P.M., which meant there wasn’t a moment to lose.

3:00 P.M.

I ran home and checked the pantry and fridge. Not a shred of meat in the house that wasn’t frozen into blocks—no time for even a speed thaw (you’d be surprised what you can do with a frozen chuck in the shower). I made sure that I had a small can of tomato paste, checked my supply of chili powder and ground cumin (my very most favoritest spice in the whole wide world) and headed to the market.
²⁵

3:17 P.M.

The cheapest stew meat I could find was $1.59 a pound. From the looks of the hunks, I’d guess it was chuck mixed with a little round, which was fine. There was also some lamb stew meat (unidentifiable, with lots of bone and connective tissue—shoulder, I’d bet) at $1.29 a pound. I bought 2 pounds of the first and 1 pound of the latter. (I could have gone with all beef, but why?) I wandered the market, pondering the next move and settled on a small can of chipotles in adobo sauce at $1.29.
²⁶
Total so far: $5.76.

3:39 P.M.

On the way home I stopped by my favorite Mexican restaurant and ordered the cheapest beer they had, a tapped item called “Los . . . something.” The beer came, along with a small basket of corn chips and a healthy bowl of hot salsa.

I poured the beer into my insulated coffee mug (hey, it was in the car) and the salsa into a zip-top bag that had previously housed an emergency supply of graham crackers for my daughter. Avoiding the suspicious gaze of the cantina keep, I made for home. Total spent: $1.00.

3:57 P.M.

Back at the house, I heavily seasoned the meaty cubes with kosher salt and placed my large cast-iron skillet over high heat. Two minutes later, I started adding the meat in small batches, turning the pieces every now and then with tongs to get as much surface browning as possible as quickly as possible.
²⁷
As the meat browned, I set it into a bowl so that I could capture all the meat’s juices.