The Messy Epicure

First Taste: Little Donkey

Jason Horn — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:38:57 +0000

What do you do after building a highly successful chain of barbecue restaurants? If you’re the people behind Jim ‘n Nick’s, you open a high-end Mexican restaurant.

I’ll admit, I didn’t have very high hopes for Little Donkey when I first heard about it, but one taste cleared away all my doubts. I was invited to the place on opening night last week for a media “preview,” and just about everything was fantastic.

The high point has to be the appetizers, chiefly the chilaquiles pictured above. Tortillas are coated with salsa and then fried, creating a unique soft-but-crunchy texture. A huge plate of this concoction comes topped with sour cream, queso fresco, and—here’s the best part—a pair of soft-poached eggs. Look, if you don’t like runny egg yolk on just about anything, there’s something wrong with you. And this might just be the dish to convert you.

There’s also an indulgent queso fundido with generous portions of chorizo and mild roasted chiles mixed in. And these come with a portion (too small a portion—four is not enough to scoop up all the cheese!) of tortillas.

Oh yeah, Little Donkey makes its own tortillas. As in they soak corn in cal, grind it in-house, and cook the things to order. Eating a fresh-cooked tortilla is one of the transcendent food experiences everyone should have, and now that’s real easy for Birminghamians.

I also got to try the house guacamole. As a lover of avocados, I am pretty easy to please with a bowl of guac, but what impressed me about this one is that the kitchen clearly put extra effort into it. There’s a super-smooth, creamy base with nice chunks of avocado, tomato and onion mixed in. I suspect they puree some of the ingredients and then mix in the larger pieces. It’s a simple step, but it makes a difference.

The entrees, while a bit weaker than the starters, were still pretty great. I ordered the chiles rellenos, which the menu described as two peppers stuffed with crema, cilantro, pickled onion, and cheese. I got the single largest poblano I have ever seen, stuffed with all of those things, as well as diced potato.

Not sure what happened there, but it tasted good. The pickled onions are an inspired choice, and the slightly-spicy tomato sauce it floats in is very nice. One qualm: The pepper itself was a little, err, crunchy. Usually, the peppers are roasted before frying in chiles rellenos, and I don’t think that was the case here.

My table also got to try a drunken hog torta and an assortment of tacos. The best of that bunch was the al pastor, a mix of smoked pork (not surprising that barbecue folks got that part right) and pineapple for a welcome note of sweetness. It’s a Mexican-food standard, done authentically and well. The torta was also quite nice, with pork, beans, and lots of cheese, plus a dish of meaty broth to dip it in, which reminded me a little bit of a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich.

The place also has a little bit of tippling royalty: Alabama native LeNell Camacho Santa Ana, who ran a Brooklyn liquor store that was at the center of the early-2000s craft-cocktail revival, created the drinks menu.

Her signature creation is the Donkey’s Daddy at left, a mix of both bourbon and tequila (the place is Southern and Mexican, get it?) flavored with hibiscus syrup and lime. It’s a lot stronger than it tastes, as the floral-sweet hibiscus covers up the distinctive notes of both spirits.

I was less impressed with the Paloma, a bubbly mix of grapefruit, lime, and tequila. It reminded me of just a so-so Margarita, the slight bitterness of the grapefruit adding a kind-of-unpleasant finish. I’m no stranger to bitter flavors—I love Negronis—but the other Palomas I’ve had were made with grapefruit soda, not grapefruit juice, and were significantly sweeter.

Regardless, I will most definitely be back, and frequently. The place has a lovely patio out front, and there are a whole mess of dishes on the menu I want to try, starting with the chile-spiked-buttermilk fried chicken. I’m also excited about the house-made aguas frescas, including my very favorite, horchata, a sweetened rice milk with cinnamon that is absolutely perfect with spicy food. And the chef told me in an interview for my Magic City Post preview that the rotating seasonal soups are his secret favorite dishes. Absolutely ordering one of those next time.

Recipe Rip-Off: Empire State South’s Boiled Peanut Hummus

Jason Horn — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:00:15 +0000

I went on a crazy, gluttonous weekend trip to Atlanta for my birthday last month, and I fell in love. Yeah, there were some great cocktails, and a really cool late-night Asian restaurant, and a stunning $2 banh mi (more details here), but it was one dish that’s been my obsession ever since.

The “In Jars” appetizer at Empire State South includes boiled peanut hummus. Boiled. Peanut. Hummus. Boom: Mind blown.

I have no idea why nobody had thought of this magical concoction before, but holy crap is it delicious. On bread, on celery, with your fingers, just licking the damn food-processor blades, whatever.

And my apologies to chef Hugh Acheson, but I had to rip it off.

(Yankees, you may not understand what boiled peanuts are, and for that I pity you. They’re green peanuts boiled in salted water and eaten hot in an explosion of salty, legume-y goodness, but only in the South for some reason.)

Thankfully, Birmingham has a local source for fresh boiled peanuts every day but Sunday: the Peanut Depot.

I knew the original dish contained tahini, but beyond that I had to wing it for this recipe. I figured the basic idea is to swap out peanuts for chickpeas in regular ol’ hummus, so I added some lemon juice, but I left out the olive oil since peanuts have plenty of fat on their own. Adding a little water and running the food processor for a good, long time yielded a nice, smooth puree, but something was missing. I think maybe my batch of peanuts had been boiled too long, as they were really salty and not, well, peanutty enough.

Enter unrefined peanut oil. This isn’t the flavorless, high-smoke-point liquid you might fry fish in; this stuff tastes strongly like roasted peanuts. You open the jar and the kitchen will instantly smell like ‘em. Just a little splash perfected my hummus.

Soon after I made this, I discovered that Acheson’s actual recipe was in Southern Living four-and-a-half years ago. Ah, well. I did a pretty good job—Acheson adds garlic and cayenne, doesn’t use peanut oil, and boils the nuts himself with Old Bay and star anise, but the basic bones are there. I dunno if garlic would really add much to this recipe, but pinch of cayenne might have been a good idea. My peanuts were also plenty salted to start with and didn’t need any extra added, though your mileage may vary.

Note that this recipe starts with a pound of boiled peanuts in the shells. I forgot to weigh them post-shelling, but I probably had about three quarters of a cup.

Boiled Peanut Hummus

1 lb. boiled peanuts, shelled
2 tbsp. water
2 tbsp. tahini
Juice of 1 lemon
1-2 tsp. unrefined peanut oil

Add all the ingredients to a food processor and puree until completely smooth, stopping periodically to scrape down the sides. If the mixture remains chunky, add up to 2 tbsp. more water, a little bit at a time.

Miso-Broiled Mackerel and Sustainable Seafood

Jason Horn — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:00:29 +0000

Our planet is running out of seafood, and it’s my fault. (It’s probably your fault, too.) There are a bunch of fish—sadly, most of humanity’s favorites—that are being overfished, global-warmed, and polluted basically out of existence.

The most serious of these is bluefin tuna, AKA toro, the kind of tuna that goes into high-end sushi all around the world. The delicious species is on the razor’s edge of extinction: There are only a few thousand left by some estimates. If you care about the planet at all, you should probably not eat any of it again.

And that’s not the only fish to steer clear of: For various reasons, Atlantic salmon, imported farmed shrimp, and freshwater eel (AKA unagi, my favorite sushi-roll ingredient) are all rated as “avoid” by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch guide.

But it’s not all bad. Wild-caught Alaskan salmon is an extremely well-managed fish, and you can eat as much of it as you’d like without worrying about the environment (your wallet, on the other hand, might take a beating). And shrimp from the US (like the Gulf of Mexico), whether it’s farmed or wild-caught, is fine as well. There are even several kinds of tuna that are safe to eat—it just depends on how and where they were caught.

The key is doing your research. Seafood Watch has a wealth of information (and even an iPhone app), which I use all the time and recommend highly. You’ll also have to ask questions at your supermarket: Where was this caught? Was it caught in a net or via longline? What kind of feed does the farm use? Yeah, it’s a pain, but the way things are going, you kinda have to.

And unfortunately, the way things are going, many of the fish you like today will be harder and harder to find in the coming years. I’ve found that many of the most sustainable fish deserve a reappraisal by American palates. These are oilier, “fishier” fish that lots of people consider icky—like sardines.

Lately, I’ve gotten hooked on another one of these: mackerel. The small, dark-colored fish is great on the grill, has awesome flavor, and it’s cheap! Plus, almost all of it sold in supermarkets is a Seafood Watch “best choice” (Atlantic mackerel caught in the US, as opposed to Canada, is merely a “good alternative.”

The key to mackerel is high-heat, quick cooking. All that oil in it is flavor, but the fillets are thin, which means they’re prone to overcooking. And as they have a strong flavor, they’re best partnered with other strong tastes. I love mackerel with miso, Japanese fermented soybean paste that has loads of salty, umami flavor with a little bit of blue-cheese funk. (You might be familiar with it in the rich soup that’s often served at sushi joints.)

Miso comes in two varieties, red and white. Really either one works for this recipe, but I happen to have white miso in my fridge. You just thin it out a little bit with soy sauce and rice vinegar, plus some honey for sweetness, then spread on the fish and broil. Since it cooks all the way through from the top down, the miso-coated side of the fish gets nice and crisp and highly flavored, leaving moist and tender flesh underneath.

Paired with rice and maybe some stir-fried vegetables, this recipe makes a nice lunch for two or dinner for one. It’s easy as hell, and you can even minimize the dishes—I’ll cook this in my toaster oven and eat it right off the broiler tray!

Miso-Broiled Mackerel

1/4 cup white miso
1 tsp. soy sauce
1 tbsp. rice vinegar
1 tbsp. honey
2 mackerel fillets (about 8 oz.)

Preheat the broiler. Stir together the miso, soy sauce, rice vinegar and honey in a small bowl. Place the mackerel skin-side-down on a broiler pan lined with aluminum foil and spread the miso mixture evenly on top. Broil until cooked through completely, about 5-7 minutes. (If the miso mixture begins to burn before the fish is cooked, move the pan further from the heat.)

Where I’ve Been

Jason Horn — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:17:31 +0000

The Messy Epicure is not dead!

Okay, I haven’t blogged in nearly four months. But I have excuses! Here’s what I’ve been doing since December.

I was planning FoodBlogSouth.

Last year marked the first FoodBlogSouth, a food-blogging conference I co-founded and help organize. This year’s edition in January was bigger, better and a huge success, but pulling it off was practically a full-time job (on top of my real full-time job) for a few weeks.

I was making cassoulet.

For Valentine’s Day, Nadria made me cassoulet from scratch, using this recipe. (Okay, this isn’t actually a reason I wasn’t blogging, since she was doing all the work, but I have this picture and intended to blog about it, and now I did.)

I was in Atlanta.

I spent my birthday weekend gluttoning it up in the ATL with Nadria. We ate some incredible food—late-night seafood at Octopus Bar, fancified Southern classics at Empire State South (including the awesome stuff-in-jars platter above, featuring a boiled peanut hummus whose recipe I will attempt to re-create on this blog soon), the best $2 banh mi ever at Quoc Huong, and amazing breakfast at West Egg Cafe—and drinks—the incomparable Holeman & Finch, the Twin Peaks (yes, Twin Peaks)-themed Book House Pub, and the aforementioned Octopus Bar.

I was throwing a tiki party.

I’ve decided 2012 is going to be the year of tiki. That means fruity rum cocktails and ’50s-style “Chinese” food: shrimp toast, sticky red barbecue ribs, cream-cheese (because it doesn’t actually contain crab) rangoon, and other greasy fried things doused in sweet & sour sauce. After the Atlanta trip, we made a bunch of these dishes, put on some Martin Denny, and had some friends over.

I know, none of these are in any way good reasons for a third-of-a-year absence from blogging. Mea culpa. But I’m back!

Charcutepalooza: The Meat Party

Jason Horn — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:26:21 +0000

Charcutepalooza is a yearlong project I’m participating in to make recipes from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. For more information, see my introductory post.

So this is it. The end of a year of meat. A lot of pig parts have passed through my messy kitchen on my journey from pancetta to peperone, and I feel like a much better cook for it.

I’ve always been into DIY, and I’d even done some charcuterie before this challenge got started, but it had always been a huge production, taking days of preparation and far too much expense for specialized equipment and obscure cuts of meat. And that’s so not the point.

Charcuterie is about preservation, whether that’s a poor farmer making the hog he slaughters in the fall last through the whole year or a high-end chef pickling some summer vegetables so she can use them in the winter.

And preserving food is a necessity. One cool thing I’ve learned from this project is that charcuterie is where all the world’s cuisines come together. German weisswurst, Polish kielbasa, French andouille, and American hot dogs are all essentially the same thing, the only difference being spices. So are Italian salami and Chinese lap cheong. Heck, the recipes for sauerkraut and kimchi are identical save for one ingredient!

Other things I’ve learned:

The KitchenAid meat-grinder attachment is great for grinding but the world’s worst sausage-stuffer. (I highly recommend the Jerky Cannon if you’re going to embark upon small-scale home sausagery.)
Hot-smoking on a gas grill is totally easy, and totally kickass. My two favorite Charcutepalooza items both used the technique. (For the record: smoked chicken and hot dogs.)
Homemade mustard is really, really pungent, especially if you let it stand for more than about 5 minutes before adding vinegar. But so worth it.
Contrary to classical French tradition, galantine is tastier hot than cold.

The final Charcutepalooza challenge was to throw a party using my newfound skills and recipes. And throw one I did.

Using the local lamb I came into recently, I made the lamb rillettes at left, along with hot-smoked lamb-and-pork andouille. Immediately after cooking, the rillettes was stringier than I would have liked, but after topping with delicious pork fat and chilling, it became much more spreadable. It was great on top of sliced, toasted Roasted Garlic Baguette (recipe below).

The menu also included peperone, sauerkraut, and a mess of pickles: dill, a sweet-and-hot Wickles-esque recipe, and sweet-sour beets. There was also some whole-grain mustard and Kale Salad with Pecorino and Lemon. Nadria even made vegan carrot-cake cupcakes with “cream cheese” frosting, to counteract all that meat, I guess.

And then there were the drinks. After I invited Angel Negrin, formerly of Bettola and one of Birmingham’s best bartenders, he volunteered to make cocktails. Armed with bottles of white, dark, and blackstrap rums, limes, simple syrup, and some Angostura Bitters, he shook up rounds of very traditional Daiquiris. The sourness of the drinks was the perfect foil to all that fatty, salty tastiness.

Roasted Garlic Baguette
Makes 3 baguettes

3 heads of garlic
Olive oil
2 cups warm water
2 tbsp. active dry yeast
24 oz. bread flour
1 tbsp. salt

Preheat the oven to 400°. Peel the outer layers from the garlic (do not separate the individual cloves) and slice the heads in half horizontally. Place on a sheet of aluminum foil and drizzle with a little olive oil. Wrap in the foil, sealing tightly, and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the cloves are soft but not mushy. Remove from the oven, wait until cool enough to handle, and squeeze the roasted cloves into a small bowl. Set aside. (If desired, you can store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.)

Add the water and yeast to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and let stand for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the flour, salt, and reserved garlic, and mix on low speed until the dough comes together. Increase the speed to medium and knead for 10 minutes, adding additional flour if the dough is too sticky. Remove from the mixer, knead briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface, and form into a ball. Place back in the mixer bowl, cover with a damp towel, and let rise for 1 hour.

Punch the dough down, knead briefly, and divide into three equal pieces. Roll each piece into a long log shape and place on a baguette pan or baking sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment. Turn the oven to 450° (the dough will rise a bitwhile the oven preheats). When the oven is hot (about 15 minutes), cut several slashes in the top of each loaf and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the loaves are nicely browned and sound hollow when tapped.

–

And that’s it. Charcutepalooza is done. No more grinding, curing, hanging, or smoking assignments to look forward to. (Unless I win the grand prize. Judges, vote for me!) Many, many thanks to Mrs. Wheelbarrow for putting this whole thing together, Food52 for hosting, Bob del Grosso for answering my desperate Twitter inquiries on the dreaded case hardening, and Michael Ruhlman for inspiring the challenge and being an all-around kitchen inspiration himself.

Vaguely Asian Slow-Cooker Lamb Chops (and a New Source for Local Food in Birmingham)

Jason Horn — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:28:22 +0000

The best part of being a food writer/blogger is that sometimes you get a free box of local meat.

In October, a couple friends of mine launched Freshfully, an online grocery store for local food in Birmingham. It’s a fantastic idea: Farmers, ranchers, beekeepers, dairies, and other producers offer their stuff online, and you get to buy it without being limited to a once-a-week farmers’ market. (Each vendor sets up pick-up or delivery on their own.)

The site’s picking up new vendors at a solid pace. It recently added Johnson Farm, which raises grass-fed beef, Berkshire pork, Katahdin lamb, and chicken in Elba, Ala., and the Freshfully folks offered me a box of lamb from the farm’s first Birmingham delivery to “review” on the blog.

Besides going home with ground lamb, lamb steaks, a lamb roast, and a couple beautiful rib chops, I also got to meet farm owner Drexel Johnson, a cowboy-hatted, pick-up-truck-driving, grizzled rancher who fits the part perfectly. (He also tells a hilarious story.)

On to the eating. I’m not a huge lamb-cooker, so my experience is relatively limited, but I’ve really enjoyed this lamb. The chops and steaks have nice marbling, and the meat has just a slight hint of gaminess that marks it as lamb without going overboard. The stuff’s not cheap, though: A six-pound box costs $56. (To be fair, you’re paying a big premium for local meat—and that price includes the cost of driving the stuff up from Elba.)

Since it’s been freezing outside, we decided to make something in the slow-cooker with a couple shoulder chops. And I love Asian flavors in everything, so I sort of created a hodge-podge of your standard root-vegetable-heavy slow-cooker braise with soy sauce, rice vinegar, mirin, ginger, and sesame oil. This is not a culturally authentic recipe by any means, so I’m calling it “vaguely Asian.”

It came out beautifully. With a little sweetness, heavily caramelized veggies, and fall-off-the-bone meat, it’s a perfect winter dish. It also cooks long enough that you can set everything up in the morning, go to work, and come home to steaming-hot dinner. (You can cook the rice when you get home, or cook it ahead of time and microwave to reheat).

Vaguely Asian Slow-Cooker Lamb Chops
Serves 2

1 to 1 1/2 lb. lamb chops (2 large or 4 small)
2 to 3 large carrots, halved lengthwise and sliced
1 to 2 large turnips or potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
2 small onions, roughly chopped
1 tbsp. minced fresh ginger
1/3 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp. rice rinegar
2 tbsp. mirin
1 1/2 tbsp. honey
1 tsp. sesame oil
1 cup chicken stock
1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice, hot

Heat a small skillet over high heat. Season the lamb chops on both sides with salt and pepper, and sear on both sides until nicely browned, about 30 seconds per side. Place in a slow-cooker and add the remaining ingredients except the rice. Cover, set the slow-cooker to low and cook until the lamb is completely tender, 7 to 9 hours. (If possible, turn the lamb over halfway through cooking and remove the lid for the last hour or so of cooking to let the liquid reduce somewhat.)

Divide the rice between two bowls and top with the lamb and vegetables. Spoon the cooking liquid over the top.

Charcutepalooza: Peperone and Odds-&-Ends Calzones

Jason Horn — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:01:55 +0000

Making fermented foods at home is kind of like taking a trust-fall.

There’s something deeply terrifying about leaving some perfectly good food out for days or weeks to, essentially, spoil, and then eating the results. Sauerkraut or yogurt is unnerving enough, but fermenting raw meat is something altogether different.

That’s probably why dry-curing ended up as the second-to-last Charcutepalooza challenge.

This time, I went with peperone. No, that’s not a typo; that’s the original Italian ancestor of the preservative-ridden junk we put on pizzas called pepperoni. In reality, the name difference is probably a good thing, as the two couldn’t be more different.

Real peperone has a lovely tanginess with a slight sweet-spicy backbone. It’s like some kind of magical cross between pork and a half-sour pickle. (Plus, you get to use something called Bactoferm F-RM-52, which sounds like the bacteriological agent that brings on the zombie plague in a sci-fi movie.)

I carefully weighed my finished sausages and had good control over the temperature in my drying room (AKA the closet of my spare bedroom), but I didn’t measure or attempt to control humidity. When my sausages lost the required 30 percent of their weight in a week—half the time it was supposed to take—I was worried I had screwed everything up.

But I tentatively cut a slice and ate it. It tasted good, and my peperone had a nice even, leathery texture, which means I managed to avoid the dread case hardening. And I’m still alive, so I didn’t breed any botulism. Hooray!

So what to do with peperone? A little goes a long way; I’ve been eating lots of mine on Ritz crackers, and it’ll definitely be making an appearance at the final-Charcutepalooza-project meat party I’m throwing in a couple weeks.

You could, of course, use it on pizza as well, but I took a slightly different tack and made calzones. These things are great fridge-clearers: You can throw in whatever’s lying around, from half a bag of wilted salad greens to sad half-onions in zip-top bags to random hunks of cheese you need to use before they go moldy to single slices of deli meat you don’t have enough of for a sandwich.

So that’s where my Odds-&-Ends Calzone recipe comes from. I used the dough from Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Serious Eats recipe as a starting point and just kinda went crazy.

Odss-&-Ends Calzone
Adapted from Serious Eats
Makes 4 calzones

1 tbsp. (or 1 envelope) active dry yeast
13 oz. (1 1/2 cups plus 2 tbsp.) lukewarm water
22 oz. bread flour
4 tsp. sugar
3 tsp. salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 oz greens (spinach, salad mix, whatever), chopped
4 oz. peperone, diced
1/2 cup olives, pitted and roughly chopped
1 (14.5-oz.) can diced tomatoes, drained well
6 oz. melty cheese (mozzarella, provolone, cheddar, whatever), shredded
2 oz. Parmesan cheese, grated

Combine the yeast and water in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment. Add the flour, sugar, salt, and olive oil, and mix on low speed until the dough comes together. Increase the speed to medium and knead for about 1 minute. Transfer the dough to a floured surface, knead by hand 1 or 2 times, and form into a ball. Return to the bowl, cover, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour.

Meanwhile, saute the onion in a small skillet over medium-high heat until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook about 30 seconds more. Transfer the onion and garlic to a large bowl and add the greens to the pan. Cook until completely wilted, about 2 minutes. Drain very well, squeezing to remove as much liquid as possible, and add to the bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Place a pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 500° F. (The longer you can let the oven heat, the better. Give it at least 20 minutes).

Punch down the dough and divide into four pieces. On a floured surface, stretch one piece into a rough circle about 8 inches in diameter. Place a quarter of the filling mixture on half of the circle, leaving about half an inch around the edge. Fold the dough over, crimping to seal the edge, and cut vent slits in the top. Repeat with the remaining dough to form 4 calzones.

Carefully slide the calzones onto the pizza stone. Bake until well browned and crisp, about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Vegan Cupcakes?!

Jason Horn — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 01:01:41 +0000

So Nadria’s been on a vegan kick lately. I’m always game for a challenge, so we’ve been experimenting with lots of animal-product-free recipes. (Discoveries: 1. Soy cheese is pretty terrible. 2. Soy cream cheese is actually pretty tasty. 3. Vegan butter is the most horrible abomination ever created by mankind.)

During this same time period, the good people at Lark sent me a copy of their new book Cake Ladies: Celebrating a Southern Traditionby Jodi Rhoden. The book profiles 16, well, cake ladies—a unique Southern phenomenon of women who aren’t professional bakers exactly but who are locally famous for their cakes and bring them to every wedding, funeral, and any other occasion—with recipes from each, of course.

Two of those cake ladies are the Cupcake Fairies, a pair of New Orleans women who opened a home-based cupcake business after Hurricane Katrina that tries to offer healthier option. Their recipe in the book is vegan red velvet cupcakes, colored with beets instead of food coloring and topped with vegan-cream-cheese icing.

Perfect, we thought. (Nadria loves red velvet anything.) We set out to Whole Foods for vegan margarine (ugh) and cream “cheese,” and followed the recipe exactly, with one exception—we used almond milk instead of soy milk.

It was a bit of a disaster. We ended up with rubbery hockey pucks. They didn’t taste too bad, but the texture was all wrong. At first, I blamed our using almond instead of soy milk, but as you’ll see, this recipe is just fundamentally flawed: I’m guessing the ratio of flour to fat is off somehow. (I’m not put off the cookbook entirely just yet, though; look for a post soon about another attempt with a more “normal” recipe from it.)

Undaunted, Nadria continued her vegan-cupcake quest. She discovered Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, which seems to be the best-regarded cookbook in the (surprisingly crowded) vegan-cupcake genre.

Not actually possessing a copy of this book, we found its chocolate cupcake recipe online and decided to pair it with the icing from this Vegetarian Times recipe instead of its own chocolate glaze to recreate that red-velvet flavor.

I’m a big vegan-baking skeptic, but that second batch was mighty convincing. (That photo above is a couple of the results.) It really got the moist, crumbly texture perfect. As in you-could-fool-a-carnivore perfect—even with almond milk instead of soy. I was blown away.

I wouldn’t say this recipe is any healthier than a normal cupcake, but if someone you know loves sweets and can’t eat dairy, this book is a goldmine. (And if you need a Christmas present for Nadria, consider this your official suggestion.)

Charcutepalooza: Galantine

Jason Horn — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:00:50 +0000

So it’s finally arrived. The Charcutepalooza challenge I knew was coming and dreaded above all. Galantine. It’s simple enough: a rich chicken pâté, flavored with warm fall spices like cinnamon and clove. But here’s the tricky part: The whole thing is rolled up in the skin of the chicken. Which means you have to remove a whole chicken’s skin in one piece.

I’m not sure why this terrified me so much. I mean, I’ve slaughtered and butchered a whole pig; this should not be a big deal. Maybe it’s the precision required. One poke of the knife and the thing is ruined. After all, I’m The Messy Epicure, great supporter of imperfection in the kitchen!

I did it! Whee!

But I managed. It’s a challenging task, but chicken skin is remarkably tough and much more difficult to pierce with a boning knife than you’d think. In reality, the biggest problem I had was that there was too much filling. I ended up have enough for a second galantine, which I wrapped in plastic wrap and poached in water instead of stock. (Honestly, I couldn’t taste very much difference between the two.)

So a few days before I made my galantine, I had the pleasure of attending a Four Coursemen dinner here in Birmingham. And what was the first course but delicious, made-fresh-that-afternoon galantine? To serve mine, I, well, shamelessly ripped off the Coursemen. Which is to say I made a persimmon jam. The sweet fruit is a perfect autumnal accompaniment to the galantine. And the pâté spice mixture you need for Ruhlman’s galantine is a perfect seasoning for the jam. (In my recipe below, I just used a pinch of each ingredient in the mixture.)

Now the beauty of a DIY food project like Charcutepalooza is that it lets you experiment with something chefs don’t normally mess around with. At a restaurant, you might pay twelve bucks for a couple slices artfully arranged on a tiny platter, but when you make one yourself, you’ve got half a damn galantine in the fridge and no idea what to do with it.

And that’s how I discovered pan-fried galantine. Snooty French chefs with medals around their necks will tell you you’re supposed to serve thin slices, ice-cold. But Nadria isn’t really a fan of chilled meat, and there was no way I would be able to eat three pounds of cold galantine all by myself before it went bad.

Look! I'm committing French-cookery blasphemy!

So on her suggestion (and feeling sinful the whole time), I pan-fried a few slices. And they turned out good! I was afraid the delicate chicken mixture would fall apart, but it didn’t. And the slices browned beautifully on both sides, becoming just slightly crisp. I even chopped some up and cooked it in a breakfast hash with some leftover butternut squash. (Actually, it was extra filling from Serious Eats’ squash, sage, and Parmesan pasties.)

And that led me to a ridiculous idea, which I sadly didn’t have the chance to try: Deep-fried galatine. Imagine it—tasty sausage, wrapped in what amounts to crunchy gribenes. (If you’re not familiar, gribenes is Yiddish for crisp-fried chicken skin, basically the Jewish version of cracklins.)

I’ll leave you to that Charcutepalooza fantasy while you check out my persimmon jam recipe.

Persimmon Jam

3 medium fuyu persimmons, peeled and chopped finely (or pulp from 3 medium hachiya persimmons, seeds removed)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp. maple syrup
1/2 cup water
Pinch salt
Pinch ground cinnamon
Pinch ground black pepper
Pinch grated nutmeg
Pinch ground ginger

Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally and adding more water if the mixture becomes too thick. Puree in a food processor to a uniform consistency.

The Four Coursemen, and Creating an Underground Supper Club in Birmingham

Jason Horn — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:22:03 +0000

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a Four Coursemen dinner here in Birmingham (at Little Savannah). The Coursemen are a group that started putting on underground dinners in Athens, Ga., a little more than five years ago. They’ve since gained national fame, including a Cooking Channel show, and their dinners routinely sell out in seconds.

These guys (there are six of them, and not all are trained chefs) are right on trend for the food world. They’re all about local ingredients and regional dishes. They spent two days before the dinner visiting farms and other food purveyors in the Birmingham area, tweeting enthusiastically about everything they found. And then they turned it into an impressive five-course meal.

The food was great, but more importantly, it was inspiring. More on that in a second, but first, the requisite rundown of the eats:

We started with a galantine paired with persimmon jam and an arugula salad with pink peppercorns and a honey vinaigrette. Ironically, the same dish was this month’s Charcutepalooza project, and I’m not ashamed to say I blantantly ripped off this presentation for my own galantine. (Said post will be up on Saturday; keep an eye out.)

Next came my favorite dish, a shiitake mushroom soup topped with whipped goat cheese and sage flowers. It was a pure taste of fall, really intensely mushroomy and nice and hearty. They used just a bit of ground nuts (either walnuts or pecans, I can’t remember) to thicken the soup, a very tasty idea.

After that were the main courses: Gulf tripletail (that’s a fish, non-Southerners—and a sustainable one at that) pan-roasted with broccoli, rapini, and black rice, and braised pork belly (left) with pink-eyed purple-hull peas, mashed turnips, and apple relish. I’ve been seeing lots of pork belly on local menus lately, and that’s a good thing. Properly cooked until totally tender but still holding together (which this was), it’s rich and unctuous and perfect, pretty much regardless of your sauce or sides.

Dessert was a poached pear with goat-cheese custard. Honestly, this was the weakest course, as the pear was a bit undercooked and not soft enough. But the custard was clever, and tasty—tangy and sweet and creamy all at the same time.

Sadly, the Coursemen went back to Georgia. But they were hugely impressed with Birmingham, and I hope they’ll be back soon.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. If an underground supper club can succeed in Athens, why can’t we have one here?

The beauty of the thing is that it cuts all the restaurant problems out of the equation. There’s no health department to worry about: To make everything legal, diners don’t pay for the dinner—they make a “suggested donation” for attending the event. And you don’t have to hire any staff: The cooks serve everything themselves.

And there’s certainly a community of die-hard foodies in Birmingham who’d be willing to spring for something like this. (Foodie Book Club, I’m looking at you…)

I may be a very experienced home cook, but I don’t think I could work a commercial kitchen, churning out a hundred or more covers during service. However, I could handle 15 or 20 folks for a dinner party (with help).

So consider this the birth of Birmingham’s newest underground supper club. I’ve got a friend on board to help plan, and things are in the works.

Now I want some opinions, locals. What kind of food would you want to see at an underground supper club? Where should it meet? Can we pull this off?

Watch this space for more.

Martha Hall Foose’s Peanut Chicken

Jason Horn — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:46:20 +0000

A confession: I did not take the picture above. But I did make the dish. (My far-crappier photo is below.)

I’ve now reached the level of blog-notoriety where I get free stuff! And so far, the best cookbook I’ve received is a copy of A Southerly Course: Recipes & Stories from Close to Home by Martha Hall Foose from the good people at Clarkson Potter.

What I like about this book is that it comes from the modern South. I don’t mean it’s modern Southern food—”deconstructed” pimento cheese sandwiches and the like are nowhere to be found. I mean it reflects the way people in the South actually eat. It’s not all fried chicken and black-eyed peas; Asians, Greeks, Mexicans, and plenty of other people live here and have made their mark on Dixie’s cuisine.

A Southerly Course presents dishes you’d expect, like crawfish bread, dirty rice, and custard pie, alongside chiles rellenos, kibbeh, Greek salad, and Korean-style grilled scallions. The recipes are elegant and just a touch fancier than most Southern cookbooks. And they come with fun stories and reminiscences that explain where they all come from.

I do have one objection: Not a single recipe in this book calls for okra. And I got my copy when a full pound of it was showing up in my CSA box every week. But that’s not really Martha Hall Foose’s fault.

The recipe that immediately lept out at me was the peanut chicken. I’m a sucker for anything peanut-flavored, whether it’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups or Ollie Irene‘s wonderful Tallulah cocktail. It’s an easy recipe: Coat a whole chicken with a paste made of peanut butter, onion, soy sauce, and vinegar, then bake. The mixture really perfumes all the meat nicely with a subtle, vaguely Asian, nutty flavor. (Leftovers make for a really interesting chicken salad, to boot.)

I had a couple CSA pumpkins on hand, so I also tried the book’s baked pumpkin recipe as a side. It’s also simple: Brush the inside of the squash with a mix of melted butter and maple syrup, and roast. Sounded good, didn’t really work. The sauce ends up pooling in the bottom of the pumpkin and you end up with three bites of deliciousness, plus a whole lot of bland pumpkin. Ah well. The chicken redeemed it, anyway.

Peanut Chicken
Adapted from A Southerly Course by Martha Hall Foose

5 tbsp. creamy peanut butter (use natural if possible)
3 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. rice vinegar
1.2 tsp. cayenne pepper
3 green onions, chopped, divided
1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken
1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled
2 garlic cloves

Preheat the oven to 450°.

Stir together the peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, cayenne, and half the green onion in a small bowl. Spread half the paste under the skin of the breasts of the chicken. Spread the remaining paste all over the outside of the chicken. Stuff the remaining green onion, the ginger, and the garlic into the chicken’s cavity.

Place the chicken breast-side-down in a roasting pan and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 325° and flip the chicken over. Bake until a meat thermometer inserted into the deepest part of the thigh reads 165°, 30 to 40 minutes more. Remove the chicken from the oven, cover, and let rest for 10 minutes before carving.

Charcutepalooza: Empanadas de Chorizo

Jason Horn — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:00:26 +0000

The recipe option that immediately jumped out at me from this month’s assignment was English Pork Pie. I mean, pork and pie—what’s not to love?

That third word, that’s what. Taking a closer look at the recipe, I found it to be, well, too English. Which is to say, bland. The pastry crust has no salt in it at all! The pork is seasoned with a little thyme and pepper and nothing else! No wonder British food has such a bad reputation.

So I went to Spain instead. Last time I made chorizo for Charcutepalooza, it was the spicier Mexican version. This time, I looked to Ruhlman’s Spanish-style chorizo recipe, which he uses to make a dry-cured sausage. Basically, it swaps various types of chile powder and cumin for smoked paprika, AKA pimentón, my most favoritest spice.

I love pimentón and its amazing smoky flavor so much, I also incorporated it into the pastry dough, just like I do in my greens pie. It gives the finished product a gorgeous golden color, as well as a nice subtle flavor that matches the chorizo filling very well.

Just beware; this is not in any universe a light or fresh-tasting recipe. It’s heavy, a little greasy, a bit spicy, and excellent. You’re going to want to eat more than one empanada in a sitting. This is a bad idea. You should probably serve these with a salad, one topped with a vinegary dressing. Nadria found this theoretically Spanish salad from a restaurant at Disneyland, which was tasty if rather labor-intensive and not particularly Spanish. (The recipe is quite adaptable: In order to use what we had on hand, we subbed rice wine vinegar, cheddar cheese, pears, and a mixture of pistachios and pecans.)

You could also make lots of tiny empanadas—15 to 20 instead of the six in the recipe—for an elegant New Years’ Eve-type appetizer. But don’t serve ‘em cold. That’s much too English.

Empanadas de Chorizo

Dough:
8 oz. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. smoked paprika
4 oz. (1 stick) cold butter, cut into pieces
4 oz. cold lard, cut into pieces
1 egg
1 tsp. milk

Filling:
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped, divided
12 oz. pork shoulder, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. smoked paprika
2 tsp. chile powder
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/4 cup chicken stock

Make the dough: Stir together the flour, salt, and smoked paprika in a medium bowl. Rub the butter and lard into the flour mixture with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Beat the egg in a measuring cup, pour half of it into a small bowl, and set aside. Add enough water to the measuring cup to make 1/2 cup and stir to combine. Add the egg-and-water mixture to the flour mixture and stir until the dough just comes together. Shape into a disc, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Stir the milk into the reserved half of an egg and refrigerate.

Make the filling: Heat a small pan over medium heat. Add the onion, 1 garlic clove, and a small amount of oil. Cook until the onion is soft but not browned, about 4 minutes. Scrape into a small bowl and refrigerate until cold. Combine the remaining garlic clove, pork, salt, smoked paprika, chile powder, and cayenne pepper in a small bowl. Grind the mixture through the small plate into the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the cooked onion mixture and mix on low speed with the paddle attachment for about 1 minute. Add the chicken stock and mix until combined, about 1 minute more. Cover and refrigerate until very cold, at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 425°. Divide the chilled dough into 6 equal pieces and roll each out on a well-floured surface into a rough circle 5 to 6 inches in diameter. Spoon one-sixth of the meat mixture (about 2.5 oz.) onto one half of each dough round and shape into a crescent shape, leaving about 1/2-inch border. Fold the dough rounds in half over the filling and crimp the edges to seal. Place the empanadas on a baking sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment paper. (At this point, you can refrigerate the empanadas for an hour or two—this will help keep the fat in the dough from leaking out during baking.) Brush the empanadas all over with the egg-milk mixture and cut three small slashes in the top of each one. Bake for 15 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 325°, and bake until the filling reaches an internal temperature of 165°, about 15 minutes more.

Cast-Iron-Skillet Baked Beans

Jason Horn — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 03:14:38 +0000

If you do much reading of this blog, you know I love to make things from scratch. Frozen, canned, pre-mixed stuff all makes me, well, uneasy.

So it should come as no surprise that my Labor Day barbecue yesterday featured homemade hot dogs and sauerkraut.

But one thing I’ve never really been able to adequately recreate on a DIY basis is barbecue sauce. It seems like it would be a pretty simple thing—vinegar, spices, and (depending on the style) maybe some tomato paste, sugar, or mustard.

The whole idea is to adjust to your own taste—everybody’s sauce is ever-so-slightly different—so it would seem like a no-brainer, right? But every time I try a sauce on my own, or even from a recipe, it comes out not quite right. I can’t put a finger on it; it’s just missing depth, or balance, or who knows what.

So when it comes to barbecue sauce, I’m a big cheater. I just stick with the bottled stuff. (The good bottled stuff, but still.)

Anyway, for my Labor Day party, I found The Pioneer Woman’s baked-bean recipe irresistible. It’s got bacon, brown sugar, and barbecue sauce—how could you go wrong?

Of course, I did make a few DIY changes of my own.

First, for some reason, Pioneer Woman uses cans of pork-and-beans; I went instead with, well, pork (extra bacon) and beans (plain ol’ navy beans, but you could use pinto, white, really whatever you like).

Second, she sweetens with brown sugar alone; I used half brown sugar and half sorghum syrup, for a little extra mineral complexity (and Southernness) along with the sweetness.

Third, she combines barbecue sauce, vinegar, and mustard; I happened to have some Butts Sauce, a friend of mine’s creation, and used it instead of the latter two ingredients. (It’s a South Carolina-style barbecue sauce, which means it’s made of mustard and vinegar anyway, plus extra delicious spices.)

And finally, the change that seemed most obvious to me. Pioneer Woman cooks her bacon and veggies in a big cast-iron skillet and then pours everything into a baking dish to bake. Is she insane? Why go to all the trouble of dirtying such a gorgeous pan and then not serve the beans in it? Serving anything in a cast-iron skillet leads to guaranteed oohs and ahhs.

Don’t have a cast-iron skillet? Buy one.

But until you do, you can bake this in a 9×13 baking dish.

Cast-Iron-Skillet Baked Beans
Serves 10 to 12

11 strips bacon, divided
1 onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
1 tsp. salt
5 (15.5-oz.) cans navy or pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup sweet tomato-based barbecue sauce (Western North Carolina-style)
1/2 cup mustard-based barbecue sauce (South Carolina-style), or 1/4 cup cider vinegar plus 1/4 cup Dijon mustard
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sorghum syrup

Preheat the oven to 325°.

Cut 8 of the bacon strips in half and cook in a large cast-iron skillet over medium-low heat until most of the fat has rendered out but the bacon has not started to brown, about 6 to 8 minutes. Remove from the pan and drain on a layer of paper towels.

Dice the remaining 3 bacon strips, increase the heat to medium, and cook, stirring often, until browned and crisp, about 5 minutes. Add the onion, bell pepper, and salt, and season to taste with freshly ground black pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened and beginning to brown, 7 to 10 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients, stir to combine, and cook until the liquid comes to a simmer.

Arrange the partially cooked bacon half-strips on top of the beans and bake for 90 minutes or until the bacon on top is crisp and the sauce is thick and sticky.

First Taste: Ollie Irene

Jason Horn — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 02:39:00 +0000

So remember Pianeta 3, the pizza joint in Mountain Brook Village that opened, oh, seven months ago? Yeah, it’s long gone. Such is the way of promising Birmingham restaurants.

But what replaced it just a couple weeks ago is the new spot I’m perhaps most excited about, maybe since I moved here.

Ollie Irene is an honest-to-God gastropub, a kind of restaurant we didn’t have any of before but which is wildly popular in bigger cities. Basically, you take a casual, comfy British pub-style atmosphere and serve high-end cocktails and food in it. Simple enough idea, and there are lots of famous ones around the country.

And now Birmingham is home to an excellent one. Which also happens to be run by a pair of extremely nice people who have their hearts in exactly the right place. And you should check it out.

I tried the place literally on opening night (it was two weeks ago already; sorry for the delay in posting—I’m a bad blogger), and it seemed to have its shit fully together already, quite a feat in and of itself.

We started with cocktails, of course. Now, I was a bit worried on this front: When I interviewed the owners for my Magic City Post story a week and a half before opening, they hadn’t yet hired a bartender and the drinks program was still kind of up in the air.

Well, in the intervening 10 days, they managed to find a mixological prodigy. According to the restaurant’s blog, the guy’s name is Zak, and that’s all I know about him, but the drink at left that he created is incredible.

It’s called the Tallulah. Y’know that weird Southern tradition of dumping salted peanuts into Coca-Cola? It’s that in drink form. Zak makes a peanut orgeat from scratch (usually made from almonds and used in tiki drinks, orgeat is a nut-flavored syrup) and adds it to Jack Daniel’s and Coke. Sounds simple enough, but words can’t really describe how delicious this cocktail is. Peanut is no subtle hint; it’s the main flavor of the cocktail, accented by caramel sweetness from both the cola and the whiskey. Ah-maz-ing.

Luckily, I went to Ollie Irene with a big group, so I got to try a bunch of items. We started with the ham plate, the boudin balls, and the chicken liver paté.

A plate of sliced ham is a pretty basic thing, so what really matters is the quality of the pork. This doesn’t disappoint, with an unctuous Surryano ham from Virginia (it’s a pun, get it?). The local melon helps, too.

The boudin and paté, both house-made, are definitely worth a try if you like either dish. Both come with pickled veggies—bread-and-butter cucumber for the former, cherries for the latter—plus savory mustard.

Then came entrees. For me, it was a tie for first between the catfish and the pork shoulder. The fish gets a dusting of cornmeal and a quick saute, so it’s not exactly deep-fried crunchy, but it’s still nice and crisp. It’s perfectly, perfectly seasoned and comes topped with corn, tasso ham, and lemon butter. (As I understand it, the accompaniments for the main dishes will change with the seasons, but the proteins themselves will stay the same.)

The pork is a huge chunk of shoulder meat, slow-cooked until fork-tender but not quite falling apart. It came with field peas and local peaches: The tart fruit was an ideal counterpoint to the savory meat.

A burger, topped with blue cheese, caramelized onions, and more of those bread-and-butter pickles, was very good (if perhaps a bit overpriced at $12), but the real highlight was the “pub fries” on the side. They’re more like potato wedges than fries, but they’re cooked exactly perfectly—crunchy on the outside and creamy within. They even stayed crisp after they got cold, perhaps the highest French-fry achievement possible.

The only miss I tried was the lemon-ricotta gnocchi. The pasta itself was fine—good texture, cooked well—but there was way too much lemon in it, making it unpleasantly sour. And it came with broccoli on top, which didn’t really pair well or make a lot of sense. But that’s small potatoes compared to everything else.

We were offered dessert, but everyone was too full to even attempt it. That’s on the agenda for next time, which should be very soon.

All in all, I can’t recommend Ollie Irene highly enough. Go there now, and order yourself a Tallulah!

Charcutepalooza: Saffron-Seafood Terrine

Jason Horn — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:01:38 +0000

Making a seafood terrine, especially this one, is an expensive proposition. Scallops, crabmeat, saffron: It’s like they picked out all the priciest items at Whole Foods. But the alternative for this month’s challenge was head cheese, and as much as I would have enjoyed doing that, Nadria made it very clear that no pigs’ heads were going to be allowed in our apartment. (Also, I have no idea where one can acquire a pig’s head in Birmingham.)

So seafood terrine it was. This is a seriously old-school dish, and everything about it reminds me of Driving Miss Daisy and ladies who lunch. But it tastes good, and it looks lovely. A platter of slices paired with a nice sauce (more on that later) make an impressive start to a fancy dinner party.

And the great thing about a seafood terrine is that it takes maybe two hours. This was the quickest Charcutepalooza project so far: No brining, no curing, no salting.

What struck me about this recipe is its texture. I made a half-recipe, which means that there’s all of one egg white to a full pound of seafood, but it comes out dense and rich and very omelet-like. The leek wrapper was also very cool: You boil the green ends of some leeks until they’re limp and use the verdant, ever-so-slightly oniony strips as the outer layer. It makes basically anything look gorgeous. I’m thinking maybe a wrapper for goat cheese-stuffed dates or perhaps tied in a bow around deviled eggs.

Having not ever really made terrine before, I was a bit trepidatious about modifying Ruhlman’s recipe. Thus the costly ingredients. Next time, I’d make this a little more Southern: Gulf shrimp instead of scallops, crawfish tails for the crabmeat, and cayenne-infused cream in place of saffron.

To go with something this rich, though, you need a luxurious sauce. I had an egg yolk left over and a pinch of saffron left in in the jar, so I immediately went to aioli. And I had a bunch of red peppers from my CSA, so roasted red pepper-saffron aioli was the obvious choice. I haven’t had the best luck making mayonnaise and mayonnaise-like substances at home: There was a terrible incident a couple years ago where my KitchenAid pulled itself off the counter, leaving a nasty gash in my kitchen floor and bending the machine’s switch. Luckily, I was able to fix the machine, and I made a valuable discovery. Mayonnaise is easier to make by hand than with an electric mixer. Really. Just pull out a whisk.

Roasted Red Pepper-Saffron Aioli

1 1/2 tsp. hot water
1/2 tsp. rice wine vinegar
1 tiny pinch saffron
2 small red bell peppers
1 egg yolk
1 clove elephant garlic (or 2 cloves regular garlic), minced and mashed into a paste
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. fresh ground black pepper
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Combine the water, vinegar, and saffron in a medium bowl and let stand for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the broiler. Broil the peppers, turning occasionally, until skin is blackened on all sides. Place in a small bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let stand for 10 minutes.

Add the egg yolk, garlic, salt, and pepper to the saffron mixture and whisk until well combined. While whisking constantly, slowly drizzle in the oil until it is all incorporated and the mixture is thick and creamy.

Under running water, peel and seed the peppers. Puree in a food processor until smooth. Stir into the aioli mixture. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if needed.

I’m the Best of the Web!

Jason Horn — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:01:11 +0000

Check it out: shopping blog (?) Be @ Home put The Messy Epicure in its Best of the Web roundup for this week. Neat! That is all.

First Taste: Shindigs Truck

Jason Horn — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:40:37 +0000

I think food trucks have finally hit the tipping point in Birmingham. Food trends seem to get to this town about five years or so after they break in New York, LA, and San Francisco, so the timeline is about right.

I’m not sure what critical mass is for a city this size, but we’re creeping toward having 10 trucks out on the road, and locals are starting to get interested. There are the two taco trucks (West Valley Ave. and Tarrant), Spoonfed Grill, Cantina on Wheels, the Dreamcakes cupcake truck, and the NOLA Ice sno-ball truck. (If you know of any others, leave a comment!)

And now joining that crowd is Shindigs. A catering company started by a pair local restaurant veterans, Shindigs joined the mobile-cuisine world a couple weeks ago with the truck you see above. It’s been catering to the UAB crowd during the week, parking on 20th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue South, and heading to Railroad Park on Saturdays.

Reading Shindigs’ menu and cooking philosophy gives me foodie goosebumps: It’s committed to using local, organic produce and humanely raised meats; its burger buns are custom-baked at Continental Bakery; there’s even a truck-made veggie burger!

So I had to check it out, and picked up lunch last Friday. The food is damn promising, but some of it, especially that veggie burger, could use some work.

The menu item that most excited me was the pork-belly steamed bun. I love pork buns, and there isn’t any place in town to get a good one.

Until now. This little number is a lovely chunk of crispy pork belly topped with hoisin sauce folded into a nice, fluffy steamed-bread wrapper. It comes paired, like everything else on the menu, with a selection of house-made pickled veggies, some of which (the baby leek kimchi and jalapeños) are better than others (the garlic and tomato), but all of which are tasty.

And the whole shebang is only $2.50. Sweet.

Next came the Chadillac, Shindigs’ chicken burger. It’s two slices of grilled chicken, pounded flat, with a generous layer of country ham in between, plus cambozola cheese and a magnificent caramelized-onion-and-fig mostarda. This thing is a winner, though the mild cheese kinda gets lost among all those other strong flavors. Honestly, they coulda left the cheese out and it would have been just as good. But I’m nitpicking.

But things went downhill with Nadria’s Lower Alabama, Shindigs’ veggie burger. Nadria is something of a Birmingham-veggie-burger connoisseur, so of course she had to try this one.

You can’t tell from the photo, but the patty itself is bright red in color, so it’s obviously made with a lot of beets, plus some grains of some kind (I think I detected brown rice and possibly oats but I’m not sure). It tastes pretty good (though there’s a bit too much beet sweetness), but the real issue is the texture. The thing doesn’t hold together as a patty at all—it’s like eating a mashed-potato sandwich. And the mushy patty, combined with the (quite tasty) avocado-tarragon puree on top unfortunately leads to a soggy bun after about five minutes as well.

All of this made Nadria a sad panda. I hope the Shindigs folks work on reformulating it; they certainly have the creativity to pull it off.

We also had an order of fries, which were good if not world-changing, and came with a tasty “Not 2 Fancy” sauce. The sauce tasted like a mix of blue cheese dressing and yogurt, with maybe a tiny bit of ketchup mixed in for color. It’s interesting, and goes well with the fries, and I was glad to get something other than a foil packet of ketchup from the truck.

And in the interest of completeness, we also grabbed an order of the Elvis bread pudding. (It’s peanut butter and banana, get it?) It’s very good stuff and peanut-butter bread pudding isn’t something I’ve ever seen before—more cleverness from the Shindigs chefs. But it was cold by the time we got to it and would have been better warm. My advice if you want dessert: Eat your main course first and then come back to the truck for bread pudding.

All in all, Shindigs is everything you could want in a food truck: innovative dishes made by quality chefs from sustainable ingredients and sold for very reasonable prices. (They even take credit cards!) If the line of people in scrubs in front of the truck at 12:30 on a Friday is any indication, Shindigs won’t be Birmingham’s newest food truck for long.

Biscuit Cinnamon Rolls: Baking for Cheaters

Jason Horn — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:37:57 +0000

Necessity is the mother of invention. The other day, Nadria asked for cinnamon rolls, one of her favorites. I didn’t want to run out to a bakery, and by the time your standard yeast-raised rolls would have been ready it would have been past lunch, so I came up with a cheating solution that tasted pretty delicious.

Homemade biscuits are stupidly easy to bake, thanks to the Chicago Biscuits in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio. (The ratio of flour to butter to liquid is 3:1:2; Chicago’s area code is 312. Get it?) And at some level, all dough is dough, right? So why not roll out some biscuit dough, stuff it with cinnamon and sugar and turn it into cinnamon rolls?

And it worked. Now, the fact is that these will never be as good as the real deal, but on the upside you could actually make them for breakfast in the morning on a weekday. Seriously: It’s maybe 10 minutes of work, plus 20 minutes of baking. Try it!

These were pretty tasty unadorned, but if you like a gooey glaze on your rolls, mix together equal parts lemon juice (or water) and powdered sugar, and drizzle on top after baking.

Biscuit Cinnamon Rolls
Makes 6 rolls

4.5 oz. AP flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
6 tbsp. sugar, divided
4 tbsp. butter, divided
3 oz. (1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp.) milk or buttermilk
2 tsp. ground cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 400°. Stir together the AP flour, baking powder, salt, and 2 tbsp. of the sugar in a small bowl. Cut 3 tbsp. of the butter into small pieces and cut into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or your fingers until the mixture resembles sand. Stir in the milk or buttermilk until a dough forms.

Knead the dough for 30 seconds or so on a floured surface, and then roll into a rough rectangle about 12 by 3 inches. Melt the remaining 1 tbsp. butter and spread evenly over the dough. Stir together the cinnamon and the remaining 4 tbsp. sugar, and sprinkle evenly on top of the butter. Roll up the dough lengthwise, pinching the end to seal.

Slice the dough roll into 6 equal slices and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a Silpat. Bake for 20 minutes or until the rolls just begin to brown.

Charcutepalooza: Hot Dogs

Jason Horn — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 07:00:36 +0000

When you get hardcore into sausage-making, there’s all kinds of crazy equipment you need. Grinders, stuffers, casings, pink salt, and all manner of herbs and spices of which you need about a quarter of a teaspoon per recipe.

I’ve been using my trusty KitchenAid grinder attachment for both grinding and stuffing, but as I mentioned last month, the thing isn’t the most effective. So I decided to go out and buy something else, and ended up purchasing the single greatest kitchen tool in history.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Jerky Cannon:

When you live in the Deep South, you have only one non-internet retail option for sausage-making supplies: Bass Pro Shops. These places are like enormous temples to killing animals. Imagine two Wal-Marts stacked on top of each other, except the only things they sell are fishing boats, guns, and camouflage, and you’ll have some idea of what this magnificent store is like.

Anyway, my local Bass Pro Shop had several sausage-stuffing options in the camping section, but the Jerky Cannon was the only one in my price range. (Plus, I couldn’t turn down anything with that name.) It sounds ridiculous, but it’s amazingly effective. Basically a caulking gun for meat, it features a long barrel with a plastic piston on one end. And it looks cool.

On to hot dogs. I grew up loving hot dogs. Excellent Chicago hot dogs: Vienna Beef at pretty much any greasy-spoon restaurant and franks from the now-defunct Best Kosher at home, plus occasionally the magnificent ones made by Hungarian Kosher Foods, which my grandfather would pick up as a special treat a couple times a year.

Birmingham is also famous for hot dogs, though completely different ones. Ours are made almost completely from pork and sold mostly by a small group of old Greek men, topped with chili or a thin, spicy sauce. Also good.

I learned this from this month’s project: Hot dogs are hard to make. You grind, cure for a day or two, add some spices, freeze, grind again, freeze again, run through a food processor, stuff into casings, and finally hot-smoke before you can eat the things.

I was worried stuffing the hot dogs; the color wasn’t right. More a pale peach than the bright red-brown they’re supposed to be. But then 10 minutes in the smoke-filled grill caused a magical transformation in the perfectly colored sausages you see above.

They made for a fantastic summer meal, paired with homemade pickles (using Charcuterie‘s simple recipe) and sauerkraut (using my even simpler one), yellow mustard, and fresh grilled corn on the cob. I went with a longtime favorite: Sunset‘s Honey-Chipotle Grilled Corn. You’ll wind up putting the leftover honey-chipotle butter on everything.

I didn’t expect homemade hot dogs to be exactly the same as the factory-made kind, but honestly the Charcuterie recipe makes an exact replica of the kosher dogs of my youth: The texture and flavor match my memories 100 percent.

And because I made them myself from locally raised meat, that makes these the best hot dogs I’ve ever had. Honestly. If you’re an aspiring home charcutiere, this is a great goal to reach for.

Eggplant Parmesan

Jason Horn — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 02:52:22 +0000

It’s July, which means my CSA is filled with far too many tomatoes. (Seriously. Even if Nadria and I both loved the things, four pounds a week is more than two people can possibly handle. If anybody out there wants some delicious heirloom tomatoes, let me know.)

But that also means it’s eggplant season. And that means I get to make my favorite deceptively easy dish. Eggplant Parmesan is pretty much idiot-proof and takes half an hour, but it’ll blow the mind of whomever you serve it to.

A few notes on my method:

I salt the eggplant and let it drain for a little while before cooking. Received cooking wisdom says this draws out bitterness. I don’t know if that’s true, but it does seem to soften the texture, and I like my eggplant Parm crisp on the outside and kinda mushy within. You can skip it if you want.

Don’t use white-skinned eggplant for this recipe. The skin is thicker than its purple or green cousins and becomes leathery when cooked. (If you only have white, you can peel it, but I can’t vouch for that.)

The combo of panko and Parmesan cheese gives the eggplant a lovely crisp crust and browns really well. Regular breadcrumbs seem to absorb more oil, and you’ll end up with a greasier end product.

So how to serve eggplant Parm? The simplest way is on top of some cooked pasta tossed with marinara sauce (there’s a recipe in my All-Purpose Tomato Sauce post) and topped with sliced fresh basil and grated Parmesan cheese. Or you can do the same with pesto instead. But the most decadent way to serve it is this: Toss two servings of cooked long pasta (linguine, spaghetti, whatever) with a generous amount of marinara sauce, then top with the fried eggplant slices and more sauce. Then cover everything with lots of grated mozzarella and throw it under the broiler unti melty and browned.

Eggplant Parmesan

1 large eggplant, sliced 1/4-inch thick
Vegetable oil, for frying
1/2 cup flour
1 egg
1 cup panko
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground pepper

Generously salt the eggplant slices and place in a colander in the sink to drain for 15 minutes. Rinse thoroughly, blot dry with paper towels, and set aside.

Fill a large skillet with a 1/4-inch layer of oil and heat over medium heat.

Spread the flour on a small plate. Beat the egg with 1/4 cup water in a shallow bowl. Stir together the panko, Parmesan, oregano, 1/2 tsp. salt, and pepper on a separate small plate.

Dredge the eggplant slices in the flour, then dip in the egg, then dredge in the panko mixture. Fry in batches for 2 to 3 minutes per side or until nicely browned. Drain on a wire rack set over paper towels.