The concept of making cheese has always fascinated me, the idea that you can take milk and add a little acid (or rennet) to magically separate it into curds and whey. Milk seems like such a stable liquid, a wholesome elixir of childhood, but with a little citric acid, lemon juice, yogurt, or rennet it completely de-stabalizes into thin, watery whey and fat chunks of curd.

What you do with the curd presents endless possibilities. In Montreal they stud it into gravy-covered fries to make Poutine, a glorious dish I had the pleasure to sample in a search through Montreal. But usually what the curds become is proper cheese, pressed into molds to age with various bacterial cultures, becoming anything from Cheddar to Parmesan.

There are many cheeses, though, that require no aging or bacterial cultures: ricotta, for example, or Greek feta.

Though Nick has explored making ricotta cheese using citric acid tablets, I was on the search for something made more easily with household ingredients. Ricotta is sometimes made with lemon juice, and I thought about exploring that--but I've recently become fascinated by paneer, which is an Indian cheese that's heavily pressed into cakes and fried.  While ricotta is meant to be fluffy and creamy, all the liquid is mercilesly pressed from paneer to make a dense, crumbly cake. Its taste is clean and milky, and I love how it can be caramelized in a pan -- the combination of savory and dairy is intriguing.

A while back, a good friend of mine in New York from India had his parents in town visiting, and they cooked a lavish meal for a handful of friends. One of the dishes was Mattar Paneer, a simple curry with peas and  paneer (the literal translation is "Peas and Cheese"). His mother was kind enough to email me the recipe, both for homemade paneer and the curry.  The paneer recipe is the only one I've seen that uses yogurt instead of lemon juice or vinegar.

What follows is a step-by-step, fully photographed overview of the process.  It's pretty foolproof, and a lot of fun.

The ingredients needed are as follows:

• 1/2 gallon whole milk
• 2 cups plain nonfat yogurt
• 1 2-ft square piece of muslin or 4 layers of cheesecloth

Makes 8 ounces.

First, pour the milk into a 3-quart or larger saucepan, and heat it rapidly until close to boiling. It is important to stir it often as it heats. In the meantime, measure out the yogurt and whisk it until smooth.

Once the milk is nearing a boil, but before it completely boils and begins to spill over, stir in the yogurt. Continue to stir constantly as the milk begins to separate into curds and whey. Be patient, as this can take some time -- you want to be sure it's completely separated. On my first attempt, I drained off the curds before it had all really separated, so I had a depressingly small amount of curds. The whey should look nothing like milk anymore, and may have a slightly greenish hue to it. If the majority of the liquid in the pan still looks white and opaque like milk (like it does below) the separation process is not complete.

I ended up returning it to the saucepan, and once it heated up again, the remaining curds emerged.

Next, drain the whey from the curds by lining a colander with the muslin or cheesecloth and placing it over a large bowl. Pour the contents of the saucepan into the colander and allow the whey to drain for a minute or so.

With the curds still inside, pick up the corners of the muslin or cheesecloth and transfer to the sink. Tie the ends over the faucet and allow the cheese to continue draining for an additional 5-6 minutes.

Remove from the faucet and gently twist the cloth ends snugly around the cheese to squeeze out excess moisture, then place the cheese on a dinner plate in the sink. Place another dinner plate on top of the cheese and weight it down with a large pan or water or something quite heavy. More liquid is sure to drain off, so again, do this in the sink. Let it compress for 10-15 minutes.

Remove the cheese from the cloth and place on a cutting board. It should be compressed into a chunk. Cut into desired shapes, then store in an airtight container for up to 4 days in the refrigerator, or 2-3 months in the freezer.

I used my paneer immediately to make the dish I remembered, Mattar Paneer, a fairly easy and traditional curry.  The recipe is below.

What about the Whey?

My goal with this endeavor was to waste nothing and use every part of the milk, including the watery whey that is produced by the cheesemaking. So I did a little Google search of the phrase "What to do with whey?" and eventually stumbled on a suggestion to use it as the liquid for cooking rice, which I did. I didn't notice a huge difference in taste, but the whey is incredibly healthy, so it doesn't hurt. In baking, whey is supposed to be a good subsitute for any recipe that calls for milk, and supposedly makes great breads. I'll have to try that sometime.

Mattar Paneer

• 450gms/1 lb shelled green peas (or frozen peas)
• 250gms/ 1/2 lb paneer
• 2 medium onions (chopped)
• 6 cloves garlic (crushed)
• 1 tbspn grated ginger
• 1 small green chilli chopped
• 250gms/ 1/2 lb tomatoes (peeled and sliced)
• salt to taste
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon cumin powder
• 2 cups water
• 1/2 cup ghee or vegetable oil
•  
• To garnish:
• garam masala powder
• chopped cilantro leaves

1. Make a paste by grinding together the onions, garlic, ginger.
2. Heat the oil or ghee in a large skillet or saucepan and cut the paneer into 1 inch cubes. Fry the paneer to a light brown and remove to drain on a paper towel.
3. Add the onion/garlic/ginger paste to the oil, along with the green chile, and fry until the paste is golden brown. When it is golden, add the turmeric, coriander and cumin powder, adding oil if necessary to make sure the spices don't burn.  Continue cooking, stirring often, until the flavors marry, a minute or two.
4. Add the tomatoes and keep stirring until the tomatoes are blended into the paste.
5. Add salt to taste and the yogurt, and stir for 5-6 mins over low heat.
6. Add the peas and paneer and pour in the water. Simmer gently for about 20 minutes.
7. Serve sprinkled with garam masala and cilantro leaves.

There is no feeling in the world like popping open a batch of cider and realizing what you have created alcohol. It's really hard to describe. We've made all kinds of recipes before, including some meals that have taken days to prepare. But alcohol always seemed a little unreal, and dangerous. Making alcohol always felt too technical and lab-like. And if you're brewing beer, that's sort of true: you'll need a lot of ingredients, and don't you need hi-tech equipment and precision tools? The fact that we could make hard apple cider simply and humbly was inspiring.

We have have been attempting to make our own cider using a what amounts to a jug of $7 organic juice from Whole Foods, a packet of yeast, and equipment we bought from the brewery store for a grand total of about $2. Not sure what recipe to use, we decided to make four different batches, which we detailed on our last post. We plugged those guys up with airlocks and felt rather proud of ourselves. But when would they be done? Were they supposed to ferment for two days or two weeks? And of course, what would they taste like?

Yes, it got a bit serious when we realized that we actually had to drink the experiment. We went from hopeful of a heavenly brew to apprehension that the cider would simply be underwhelming, and then to a vague worry that this homemade cider might try to poison us.

Brian from Daily Ikuru, a brew guru, gave me this bit of frank advice: "Drinking it today, a week from now, or even two weeks from now isn't going to kill you, you know."

Yes, that was probably true.  And so we got our turkey baster out early this year, and plunged it in to have a taste.

We have lots of tasting notes from various stages, but it's all a lot of information. The jist is that three days in the cider tasted fresh and feisty, but low in alcohol and not terribly complex. In the beginning, the champagne yeast really tasted the best; our lager yeast was overly beer-like and funky. But after a week there was a dramatic change. Both batches made with champagne yeast (1 with some added sugar) were drinkable, with a nice apple flavor, but they turned out pretty dry for our tastes. They were a bit thin-tasting and had a small amount of unpleasant bitterness. Still, having tasted these first, were were pretty happy about our results.

But then we tasted the baches made with lager yeast, and there was an unbelievable jump in quality and drinkability. It was slightly fizzy, with a wonderful apple-y flavor. It made Strongbow taste childish. The batch made with Seedling cider from the farmers' market, which was sweeter to begin with, was complex and had the most depth. But suprisingly enough, it was the batch made with the cheaper Whole Foods juice that amazed us. Partly because of how cheap it was, but mostly because of its clean apple taste. We'd stack that up against any imported English cider for a taste-test.  If we had more time and expertise, no doubt the Seedling cider has more potential for flavor and subtlety, being fresher juice never heat-pastuerized.  But for our buck and the simplicity of the process, the Whole Foods batch is the big story here. It's cheap ($6.99), comes in perfectly sized bottles for fermenting, and makes a balanced, refreshing beverage in about 7 to 10 days. That's not bad.

Once the batches taste right, the next step is to "cold crash" them, which means you transfer the bottles to a fridge and let them hang out for 2-3 days. It halts the fermentation process, and all the yeast sinks to the bottom.

Then you get some siphoning equipment to transfer it to a second container, rinse out the yeast, and move it back to the original container. Now the cider can safely hang out for awhile: it can be bottled if you want to buy the appropriate equipment, or aged for months in the glass jugs.

Up until now, this whole cider making process has been rather reckless and carefree. Instead of taking classes, or making sure we had read every necessary resource, we decided the best way to learn was to try. That's true if you are also interested in making cider. But we hope this information, the availabilty of Whole Foods apple juice, and our very successful result has made the process that much more accessible.

Go forth and make cheap cider!

As we realized on our last post, it was time to stop talking emphatically about the cultural significance of cider, and start getting to the business of making it. Though we had read more websites, emails, and books than we could know what to do with, we were still confused, and more importantly, l didn't have a solid recipe. It was beginning to be a problem.

At its simplest, hard apple cider is pressed and strained apples that are left to sit around until residual yeast on the apples' skin turns the sugar into alcohol. That's the traditional way to do it, how it was done for a long time. But today, most people prefer to use packaged yeast: this ensures that the cider will taste right, rather than being subject to a wild yeast, and it is the only way to succeed if the juice has been pastuerized, which is usually the case unless you press your own apples.

The appeal of hard cider is enormous: all that's needed is apple cider, some yeast, and equipment to ferment it in. But the information available about each part of that process--the juice, the yeast, and technique--ranged from overly simplified to dorky and confusing. Finding good advice was proving difficult.

Our salvation came in two forms: first, the fact that Whole Foods Market carries 1-gallon glass jugs of apple juice, for $6.99, which would suddenly supply us with both the container and the juice to begin our adventure. And two, a confidence-boosting e-mail from a reader named Michael, who noted my tweet about using champagne yeast to ferment some cider, and who explained the process clearly via email.

And so we gathered four glass jugs, two kinds of yeast and juice, and some rubber stopper airlocks from the local Brew & Grow store near Bucktown. Our adventure would begin.

The Juice

Our juice decision once we'd found the Whole Foods jugs was easy: we'd experiment with that juice, knowing that a failure wouldn't waste much cash. But we also wanted to try some local, delicious cider from a farmers' market to see how it would differ. Seedling Cider is sold throughout Chicago, and is richly flavorful. It is also pasteurized using a UV light system that doesn't require heating the juice, and thereby preserving as much fresh apple flavor as possible. We went with their Mutsu Apple cider, which tasted the best at the market.

The Yeast

Most Internet sources suggest champagne yeast as the best option for cider-making, and that's what we first bought. Even the local brew store said it was the best. At that point, cider making seemed incredibly simple: toss in the cheap champagne yeast and off we go. But then a reader named Michael wrote us an email cautioning against champagne yeast. "I made my first two batches with Champagne yeast," he wrote, "thinking that this would help me create the crisp dry flavor I was looking for; instead I got a really high alcohol white wine essentially, that never carbonated, and is pretty unforgiving."

"Unforgiving" was not what we needed as amatuer cider makers. Michael went on to recommend ale yeast, which is (obviously) designed for beer-making. There are lots of suggestions at this page on Homebrewtalk.com about types of yeast to use with cider, most of which can be found in brew stores: Nottingham is a favorite, and Safale S-04 and Safale S-05 are mentioned.

But the overall jist was that using a beer yeast would give us a lot more flavor and would also be easier to work with.

The only mentioned beer yeast that our local shop had in stock was Saflager S-23, which is actually a lager yeast (Safale = ale; Saflager = lager). So we went with it.

The Equipment

The only equipment for the fermentation is a jug to house the cider, plus a simple airlock which allows the gas produced by the yeast to escape, while also sealing off the container from outside microbes and bacteria going in. The airlock can be as jank as a balloon with a pinhole in it, or any brewing supply store carries the two-chamber airlock device we used, which costs less than a dollar.

Where to house all that liquid isn't immediately obvious. We wanted to make multiple small batches, and most brewing supplies assume you want to produce 5 gallon batches of everything. The container must be food-safe plastic or, even better, glass. Though a jug of Carlo Rossi was discussed at some of our more desperate moments, with plans to dump it down the sink, we eventually found the Whole Foods 1 gallon glass jugs of apple juice, which meant we'd receive not only a good fermenting glass jug, but could use the very juice inside it for our initial experiments.

There are also tools to help you gauge the sugar levels, but we didn't have them, and it only gets more complicated from there. This is the point in time when our heads started expanding, and we stared out into space for about 5 minutes wondering what to do next.

Eh, forget it. We figured we should just get started. If the ciders failed, we'd loose all of 7 bucks.

The Batches

We decided to make four different batches. We'd have a super-simple control batch of Whole Foods juice plus champagne yeast, a similar version with added sugar to give the yeast more to munch on, then two batches with our fancier lager yeast with two different juices.

• 1. Whole Foods and champagne yeast.
• 2. Whole Foods Cider, 1/4 cup sugar, and champagne yeast.
• 3. Whole Foods Cider and lager yeast.
• 4. Market Cider and lager yeast.

The process is about as easy as you can imagine. With the Whole Foods juices, we didn't even need to sanitize the bottle: just mix the yeast with a little warm water, then dump it in, put the cap back on, give it a gentle shake to distribute yeast. Though the exact amount of yeast to use is not a critical issue (the available sugars in the juice won't change, so what's available to eat doesn't change), most packets are measured for 5-gallon batches. We measured accordingly.

Then, we topped each bottle off with one of the airlocks (you pour a little water into the chambers, which essentially seals off the inside while allowing bubbles to escape). Any homebrewer store should sell them. The plastic parts fit into a rubber stopper which varies in size; in the case of the Whole foods jugs the #6 stopper fit well. The whole contraption is less than 2 dollars.

And, well, that's it. The lager yeast needed a little cooler temperature, so we stashed those in an exterior hallway, about 50 degrees or so. The champagne yeast ones are living in the closet, which is just slightly warmer. We have no idea when they will be done or what they will taste like. But we potentially have cider on the way. We'll keep you updated.

Currently Blake and I have four gallons of apple cider fermenting in the back of his bedroom closet. The hope is that in a few days, thanks to some hungry yeast, we'll have something that might resemble hard apple cider. We're honestly nervous. We've undertaken ridiculous experiments before, but nothing that could potentially get us hammered. If it works, then we'll have made an alcoholic drink for less than it costs to buy a jug of Carlo Rossi. If it doesn't work then, well, we've got a lot of stank apple juice on our hands.

I suppose the first question to ask is "why cider?" It's one that has consumed Blake and I for a few weeks now. It started this fall when Blake was in Michigan, and ended up buying a bushel of apples for ten dollars. A bushel. Which, if you're not familiar, is more than 100 apples. They weren't excellent eating apples, and you can only make so many apple crisps. So we thought, why not make hard cider?

Of course, the turning of apples into juice is not the easiest process in the world: you need a fruit press or a juicer or some other specialized equipment which didn't exactly fit in our Chicago apartments. But we were still intrigued with making hard cider. So in the end, we ended up giving away lots of apples and opting to just buy apple cider to begin with.

What utterly fascinated us was that cider could be made quickly, easily, and cheaply from local ingredients. This same fact has also explained why we've never attempted to make our own wine or beer. About the most exotic ingredient we'll need is yeast, which we purchased from a local home-brewing supply store. Unlike beer, we can buy the main ingredient from the local farmers' market. That's really appealing.

There is also the fascinating history of cider, one that far more extensive than we ever realized. If you're interested in the wild history of cider in America, this article from Slate is a great place to start. In the article, author Brian Palmer uncovers this American drink. Cider was so commonplace in early American history, William Henry Harrison used a cider barrel, along with a log cabin, as his campaign logo in 1840. He won in a landslide. It was the every-man's drink. Farmers' could easily make it in their cellars and store it for months. It was, for a time, far more popular than beer. Cider became a quintessential American drink.

Cider's popularity was increased by a man named John Chapman--otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed--who collected seeds from local cider mills and spread them across the country. These apples were not particularly good for eating, but made very drinkable cider. So Johnny Appleseed's true mission was to plant orchards not for eating, but for cider-making. Again, we've stumbled on something quintessentially American.

The romanticizing of cider, though, flies in the face of one appalling fact that has kept me away from the drink for years: Most of the cider I've had is awful. It's usually overly sweet, fizzy, and cloying. After a few bottles, my stomach churns and my tastes buds feel assaulted. I beg for the dry sip of lager or ale afterward.

But I also remember some glorious pints in England, served in big sturdy glasses, that were utterly refreshingly, fairly dry, with just a hint of carbonation to enliven each sip. I've also had some luck with some bottles from Northern France that I purchased from my local wine shop Red & White.

For the past few weeks we've both been reading books and articles, searching online forums, and e-mailing people in the know, hoping to discern any secrets we could before we decided to make it. In the process, our heads began to swell with so much information, and so many different opinions, that we almost gave up in desperation. Making cider became serious and studious. How could farmers a hundred years ago deal with all this confusion?

Finally, we realized that It'd be best if we just started. We'd read enough and talked about it long enough. Just like our kimchi challenge, we realized that the best way to learn was to try. If we failed, we'd hopefully learn something along the way.

We're going to have a more technical explanation of our process next week, which hopefully details our successful alcoholic potion and not some acrid swill. If you've ever attempted to make cider at home, we'd love your comments and help. The jugs are currently under a blanket in Blake's apartment.

For those really interested in the history of cider, check out The American Cider Book by Vrest Orton and Cider: Hard and Sweet by Ben Watson.

After a tasting of both kimchi projects, the results are in. We have a winner!

It wasn't easy to decide: there were things about Nick's kimchi that were better, and things about Blake's Kimchi that were better. We went back and forth about who should take the title. We tasted, waited, tasted again.

First, the recipes. Though our recipes were similar, there were some crucial differences:

Blake used a lot more salted shrimp, kept his cabbage whole, and used an Asian pear for sweetness instead of sugar. He also salted the cabbage rather than brined it.

Nick used just a tiny amount of the shrimp, sugar, rice flour, and he chopped his cabbage into pieces. He also brined his cabbage rather than just salting it.

Tasting Notes

Nick's "sauce" was sweeter--perhaps too sweet--but had this wonderful texture to it that clung to the cabbage that was probably due to the rice flour paste that he used. It combined better with the vegetables, rather than feeling like a separate element. It was well-melded.

Blake's kimchi's "sauce" was a little too spicy, and it had a somewhat grainy texture to it that we didn't like, probably from the pepper flakes. It didn't adhere to the vegetables thoroughly, feeling like a separate element rather then a melded whole.

But on the texture of the cabbage itself, Blake was the clear winner. Nick's cabbage tasted too soft and pressed, with no crunch. It didn't seem to have fermented properly. But Blake's kimchi tasted like real kimchi, with that tender-yet-firm texture to the cabbage, a deep fermented taste, and just a hint of tang.

That ultimately helped decide our winner.

It was hard to decide. But from a platform of successful kimchi-making, Blake's batch seemed the winner. It was properly fermented, and had that deep sour taste. We both had problems with our sauce--Blake's too spicy, Nick's too sweet--which made us even. But though Nick was more successful with the texture of his sauce, Blake was more successful with the texture of the vegetables themselves, which we deemed utterly more important.

So What Did We Learn?

A lot, actually. The clear reason Nick's sauce was more melded with the cabbage is due to his use of rice flour, which gave a perfect "mouthfeel" to his dish. In the future, we'll probably stick to the rice flour process outlined in Nick's post.

We also learned about how to treat the cabbage. Blake's kimchi was made very carefully, treating the cabbage nicely and doing as little as possible to macerate and chop it up. Blake tore the halves apart carefully, salted them carefully, and left the quartered cabbage with its stem on, wrapped in the outer leaves.

Nick, on the other hand, cut his cabbage up into pieces and placed a plate on top, attempting to press out as much moisture as possible. But he probably went overboard, and ended up affecting the crunchy texture of his finished product, an integral part of good kimchi. So lesson number two: treat the cabbage nicely.

The final question is why Nick's kimchi didn't really ferment properly, while Blake's did. Fermentation is most successful in an environment without oxygen, as it's an anaerobic process. This means that you either need a very good seal on the fermenting vessel, or the kimchi needs to be submerged in liquid (either the drain-off from salted cabbage or fresh water, depending on how salty it already is). If the cabbage is in a jar with a bad seal and above the level of liquid, it's not going to ferment.

What actually makes the kimchi ferment is the Lactobacillus microbe which is present already on the cabbage. It thrives where there's no oxygen and when there's sugar to feed on, and it can survive with levels of saltiness where other bad microbes can't. All that said, we don't really know why Nick's didn't ferment as well. Perhaps his rougher treatment of the cabbage did it. Perhaps Blake's copious salted shrimp helped push things along.

In the end, the most important lesson we learned was that kimchi is like lots of things: easy to make a passable version of, but difficult to master. In the future, we'll pull elements from both recipes and hopefully come up with a master version. We have to humbly admit that neither kimchi is the best we've ever tasted, which was the whole point of this project. Honestly, the best bites were when we mixed pieces of both of our batches together. Their qualities seemed to finally balance each other. Still, neither is as good as the kind we can buy from the store.

The bottom line is that you can read about kimchi all day long, but until you get in the kitchen and start making it, you won't really know what it's like. Like any fermented food -- like, say, bread making -- you have to learn by touch, taste, and smell.

In short, this is not the last batch of kimchi that will emerge from our kitchens.

Though Blake was thrilled to jump right into this Kimchi-making process, I dragged my feet the whole way. It's not that I don't love kimchi. That's far from the case. It's just that I've been really happy with the jars of kimchi I've been buying from the Korean market. Uncovering the ways of kimchi, however enlightening the process may be, would sort of remove the magic from the whole experience and turn what had been a pure pleasure into an academic exercise. Kimchi is the one thing I never have to think about. It's always devilishly addicting, and can awaken a dish with ease. I sometimes just eat it straight out the jar.  

What kept me going was that, potentially, I could make a batch that was superior to what I had been buying. Of course, I feared the inverse could also be true. And no sooner had I started hunting for a recipe then I ran across this quote from Eat, Drink, Man...:  

People who say they got it down after the first couple of attempts are either a) lying, b) geniuses, c) don't really know what good kimchi tastes like or d) have low standards and expectations.

Great. Onward I went. I used a few sources, including Eat, Drink, Man, David Lebovitz, but mostly this incredibly detailed recipe I found from Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall's book Growing up in a Korean Kitchen. I wanted full-flavored kimchi, one that had the proper fermentation, and also that right amount of heat.

Unlike Blake, I embraced the use of sweet rice flour. I figured it was the best way of creating the proper paste to coat the cabbage leaves. It's an incredibly fun process. The rice flour thickens quickly, and is then mixed with salted shrimp and hot pepper powder. This could be my secret weapon.

But I'm pretty sure I made one crucial mistake. I don't own a jar large enough to store the quartered pieces of cabbage, so I followed the instructions laid down by David Lebowitz for leaf cabbage kimchi. But Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall wasn't happy:

There are two kinds of napa cabbage kimchi: whole cabbage kimchi and leaf cabbage kimchi. The ingredients are exactly the same...Whole cabbage kimchi has superior flavor, texture, and shelf life.

It was my only real point in the process where I gave in and took the easy route. I wonder whether it's going to come back to bite me.

Leaf Cabbage Kimchi

2 1/2 pounds napa cabbage, about one head
5 ounces kosher salt

Stuffing:
1 tablespoon sweet rice flour
1 tablespoon salted shrimp (saeu chot) , finely chopped
1/2 cup hot red pepper powder (koch'u karu)
1/2 pound Korean radishes, peeled and cut into 3-inch matchsticks
1 hot green Korean pepper or jalapeno, stemmed, seeded, and cut into 1/4 inch strips
3 scallions, white and pale green parts only, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1/2 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tablespoon fresh lemon juice 

Remove the tough outer leaves of the cabbage. Chop the cabbage into 1-inch by 1-1/2 inch pieces. Rinse the cabbage well in a colander. Toss them into a very large bowl. 

Dump in the salt along with 1/2 cup of lukewarm water. Stir well.

Place a plate with some weights on top. In this case, I placed a bowl on top of the plate, with an iron skillet on top. Weigh it down for about 4 hours.Rinse the cabbage several times to rinse off the salt. Drain on paper towels. 

While the cabbage is salting, make the stuffing. Pour 1/2 cup of water into small sauce pan. Add the sweet rice flour. Stir well until dissolved, then turn heat to medium-high and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, and stir often for 2 minutes. It should turn into a paste. Turn off the heat and let the paste cool slightly.

Add the paste to a bowl. Toss in the salted shrimp and hot red pepper.

Mix until it turns into a bright red paste.

Then add all the rest of the stuffing ingredients to the bowl. Toss with your hands. It will be very, very messy.

Add the salted cabbage. Toss very well.

Stuff the mixture into cans, making sure to leave at least 2 inches of space at the top of the jars. Double wrap in plastic. And then set aside in a cool room for about 2 days.  

Nick and I are currently in the middle of a fierce kimchi-making contest, in which we've both set off to do our own research and exploration, make a batch of the best kimchi we know how to, and submit it for a taste test. Neither of us have made kimchi before, but we both love the taste of it dearly. Tired of paying for it at the store and intoxicated by the possibility that homemade kimchi could taste even better than the commercial stuff, we challenged each other to a kimchi duel.

So Part I of the contest is my own post about what I did to make my kimchi. Nick will post next, and later this week--once the taste-test results are in--we'll finish with a report about who won.

For my methods, I turned to three major sources. Thanks to all your lovely comments on our announcement post, I ended up watching a video at Maangchi.com, and carefully reading Eat, Drink, Man's studious and learned report on the essentials to making it correctly. I also turned to Raymond Sokolov's A Canon of Vegetables, a recent gift, which I've been cooking out of a lot lately, and which serendipitously had a recipe for kimchi.

I'll admit, cooking from three sources was a little confusing. I was often left wondering exactly how much of everything I ought to be using. But with Sokolov's recipe as a backbone, culling helpful tips from my two other sources, I ended up with something on track.

My results are to follow -- and all this with the caveat that I haven't yet tasted my kimchi. Time will tell whether this recipe is the winner. But dang, it sure does smell good.

Blake's Homemade Kimchi

• 1 head Napa cabbage, washed
• 1 Korean radish
• 1 Asian pear
• 1/2 cup salted shrimp (from Korean markets)
• 1 head garlic
• 3 ounces ginger, peeled
• 1/2 cup Korean chili powder (Gochugaru)
• 2 bunches scallions

The first step was to prepare the cabbage. I removed the outer leaves, which would later be used to wrap the inner leaves for the fermentation, and made sure to rinse off any soil or dirt.

Next, I cut the cabbage from the root end about 1/3 up directly down the center. From there, you can gently pull apart the halves to split the cabbage in two: this avoids doing much damage to the inner leaves. I did the same to each half to end up with 4 quarters.

Next, I liberally salted the leaves (including the outer leaves) making sure salt was sprinkled between each layer. While some recipes called for brining the cabbage, I didn't have a receptacle large enough. With a proper fermenting crock you could pull this off, but plain salting was used in at least half the recipes I read, so it seemed perfectly fine. I left the cabbage in large bowls with a weighted plate on top for about 6 hours.

Some recipes called for 4 hours, others overnight. How do you know when it's been salted or brined long enough? The cabbage stem should no longer snap with you bend it back -- it should be totally flexible. It should lose its backbone completely. When it's done, it should be rinsed thoroughly a few times to remove the majority of the salty brine.

When the time was nearing for the cabbage to be finished, I made the paste which you paint the leaves with. The given ingredients are garlic, ginger, and Korean chili powder: you find those in every recipe. Often, though, there are other things like sugar, fish sauce, sweet rice flour, salted shrimp, onion, and in less authentic preparations, vinegar.

I weighed my options for awhile, and decided I didn't want to add anything extraneous, and to opt for natural ingredients over processed ones. This led me to avoid adding sugar and use an Asian pear instead for the sweetness, and to leave out the fish sauce in favor of the salted shrimp. I also opted against the sweet rice flour. It just seemed more authentic that way.

So into a food processor went the peeled garlic cloves, the ginger, peeled pear, and shrimp. Just a bit of water to make it into a paste, and it was ready.

Then I mixed the chili powder with water to make another paste, and combined the two in a large bowl. 3-inch lengths of scallions were mixed into that, along with the radish which was peeled and cut into matchsticks.

(A word on the salted shrimp: this stuff is crazy pungent. In Korean market I found a fridge full of different kinds of salted shrimp, and the stench was really something. It wasn't nearly as bad at home, though. Still, I decided to put the rest in the freezer so Elin, my wife, doesn't start throwing out the contents of our fridge in search of the culprit.)

Finally, the kimchi construction was upon me. Taking a quarter of the cabbage at a time, I rubbed the pasty mixture onto the leaves, making sure both sides of each leaf was well-smeared.

I didn't put huge amounts on, just enough to coat it nicely. This all got packed into a large mason jar, along with a little extra paste and pressed down well.

Then I pulled out my final trick: the raw oysters. This is a specialty kimchi made in coastal parts of Korea, where raw oysters are used, possibly as a fermenting agent. I wasn't planning on it, but when they had them at the market I impulsively bought a package.

The idea of raw oysters sitting around for more than a few hours is a little disconserting, especially to Elin, who keeps asking "but when do the oysters actually get cooked?" It's true: why the heck would you want fresh oysters to sit around and get funky?

Intrigued nonetheless, though not wanting to spoil my large kimchi batch, I used oysters with one quarter of the cabbage and put it in its own jar. They were rinsed in salty water then mixed into the paste.

And that's all there is to it, really. All that's left to happen is the fermentation process, where the bacteria starts its work and gives the kimchi its wonderful tangy flavor. To kickstart the process, most recipes say to leave the kimchi at room temperature for a day or two. I left mine out for two, then stuck it in the fridge.

Just yesterday, I opened up the jar to check on it, and heard that reassuring sound of gas escaping, proof that the fermentation is in progress.

And there in the fridge it waits, ready to be tasted.

We've never been all that great at championing ourselves, but it's an honor to be nominated as one of the "Top 100 Food Blogs of 2009" over at Chef2Chef.net.  We're among esteemed company. 

If you love what we do here on The Paupered Chef, and want to tell the world, consider voting for us on the ranking page. We need your help to move up the list!

Thanks, and have a wonderful weekend.

It's cold season, and everyone's coming down with something.  Chicken soup is a nourishing potion, one that seems almost automatic even though I've never really questioned why. Most of the time this tradition involves nothing more than opening a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup: somehow those minuscule pellets of chicken and mushy noodles are okay once your temperature is above 100.

But when my sick wife had asked for chicken soup personally after she woke up with a mad fever and a sore throat, I figured I should make chicken noodle soup from scratch.  

Some 5 hours later, my kitchen was covered in flour, I was sweating profusely from kneading dough, and my poor wife still didn't have anything to eat. How could a dish romanticized for its healing powers for the sick be such a horrible burden to the healthy?

Yet when the soup was done I wondered if I had stumbled onto the elixir of life. Rich, slightly sweet, robust, and very fatty, the stock was a whole meal in each spoonful. My sick wife ate this for dinner and then woke the next day cured. I kid you not!

When I started out, what I really wanted was my mom's chicken soup. Considering she's many hours away, I turned to Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking, looking for the ultimate healing recipe, a true shot of what they call Jewish penicillin.

Well, Schwartz is having none of it.

"To put it politely, hot soup, actually any kind of hot soup, promotes sinus and nasal drainage. If that's the case, then chili and vinegar-laced Chinese hot-and-sour soup does a better job."

Yeah, yeah. But my wife and I didn't grow up eating vinegar-laced Chinese hot-and-sour soup. We grew up with chicken noodle soup.

Luckily Schwartz does still have a soft spot for chicken soup, and in his book he explains exactly how to make the soul of chicken noodle soup: the broth.  With his advice in tow, I set off to create the healing elixir that resulted.

"Good home cooks add vegetables to their chicken soup for additional flavor."

I'm convinced that the most crucial element of the perfect chicken soup is the stock, and that almost exclusively means homemade stock. Stock is always made with vegetables, but it's the kind of vegetables that really sets this recipe apart. It wasn't just the usually group of carrots, onions, and celery. Celery is traded for celery root, and parsnips and leeks are added to the mix.

"To get the best chicken flavor and a golden color, I have to supplement a whole chicken with an almost equal weight of chicken wings, back, or feet, or all three."

That, my friends, equals a whole lot of gelatin-rich and fat-laden pieces of chicken, and an equally gelatinous and fatty stock. With these ratios, the stock comes out speckled on top with little shimmering bubbles of fat. Of course, you could carefully skim the fat off the top of the soup, but that would be criminally insane. The fat is what sets this thing completely over the top; it's where all the flavor lies.

"...all the flavor of the meat will be boiled out and transferred to the soup, and it is not worth salvaging. You have a choice: good soup or good chicken."

Just understand right now: you need to sacrifice a whole bird plus its weight in trimmings (the backs, necks, and wings) for the stock.  Then, they're discarded. You can, like me, attempt to salvage them and use them in some kind of chicken salad, but it will suck, and you'll toss it out. Once they're made into stock, their purpose is through.

That means if you want chicken meat in the soup, you'll need to start with fresh meat. For my soup I bought an extra breast of chicken, simmered it in some water with a little onion for about 14 minutes, then shredded it and added it back to the main pot.

This same rule is true with vegetables: get rid of them once they've done their work. Schwartz does say you can use some carrots leftover from the stock, but he advises against it. It's best to start with raw carrots, slice them neatly, and simmer them in a bit of the stock until they're tender. I also added some potatoes for a little more body.

The only missing piece of advice from Schwartz is on noodles. And that's, incidentally, where my efforts derailed. Not finding a recipe in his book, I picked up one from the Joy of Cooking, and since I didn't have rolling pin I used my pasta maker. The noodles that came out were fine, but they weren't great. My mom's noodles are so superior to the ones I made that I can't really face putting the recipe in here.

I'm just going to buy pre-made egg noodles next time and be done with it. That is, unless I can get my mom to make me some of her homemade kind.

The Best Stock for Chicken Noodle Soup

• 1 chicken (about 4 pounds),
• 3 pounds chicken wings
• 14 cups cold water
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 2 medium carrots, peeled
• 1/2 large celery root, peeled and hlaved
• 1 medium parsnip, peeled and halved
• 1 large leek, white part and a couple inches of green, halved and well washed
• 1 medium onion, peeled and halved
• a couple sprigs of parsley and dill

Toss all the chicken into a large pot. Pour in the water and the salt. Turn the heat to high and bring to a simmer. Then reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

During this time a lot of scum will float to the surface. Skim off with a slotted spoon.

Add the carrots, celery root, parsnip, leek, and onion. Simmer for 3 to 4 hours. With 30 minutes left add the parsley and dill.

Turn off the heat and let the soup cool. Then stick the whole pot in the fridge overnight. The fat will rise to the top. Skim off as much as you like. Not too much. Strain the stock through a colander to remove any vegetables or chicken parts.

Reheat the stock in a pot.

If you want to add some vegetables, simmer some sliced carrots or potatoes in some water until tender. It took me about 20 minutes.

Then add them to the stock and serve. 

To add noodles to the soup, either make some at home or do the sensible thing and buy some pre-made egg noodles. If you want a recipe check out the Joy of Cooking.

Boil them according to the directions on the packaging.

Add them to the stock and serve.

Recently Nick and I were in the gritty West Loop neighborhood of Chicago, after a long, pork-ridden meal at The Publican, where we fed on cracklins, rillettes, belly, shoulder, and all manner of sausages. We slipped out of the restaurant happy and stuffed into the long fluorescent shadows, in search of a good bar to aid all the oncoming digesting to be done.

We ended up at Matchbox, a slender little bar no more than 10 feet wide, but well over ten times as long. A shelf along the windowsill to the right of the entrance is just wide enough to hold a drink; the bar is on the left, and stools line up in a long row tucked under. Taking a trip to the bathroom is a real feat. Hilariously, the "Maximum Ocupation" sign near the ceiling reads "29."

Immediately, we noticed a good selection of whiskey, usually the drink of choice for both Nick and myself. Some of Kentucky's best bourbons were on display. But it was a warm night, and bourbon on the rocks just wasn't what we were after.

But when I spotted a bottle of Sazerac rye whiskey, it was a cocktail called the Tombstone that popped into my head. "Do you have a cocktail shaker?" I asked, not knowing what kind of joint it was. "Of course." "Bitters?" "Yep."

Enter the Tombstone cocktail.

As simple and delicious as cocktails get, it is just rye whiskey, bitters, sugar, and ice. The bare minimum of ingredients needed to call something a cocktail (the recipe is very close to the Old Fashioned or plain whiskey cocktail, probably the first cocktail ever invented, except it's shaken rather than stirred**). Together, these ingredients become something cold, sharp, aromatic, and delicious.

In fact, it's the perfect solution to conquer a whiskey craving on a hot night. Forget whiskey and soda, which seems to me just a watering down of perfectly good stuff, and don't ask me about coke or ginger ale.  The whiskey is the most important flavor, and the tombstone puts the taste of spicy rye front and center, opening up the flavors with a little bitters, softening the edges with sugar, and icing it down into a cloudy, refreshing elixir.

I might even call it my favorite cocktail, due to my love of simplicity. There's nothing extraneous here, and there shouldn't be.

Matchbox Bar seems like our kind of place -- intimate, gritty, smart bartenders, and a random mix of people. We're looking forward to heading back and trying their house infused liquors, like ginger vodka, which marinate behind the bar in epic Mason jars.

But we may just go back to order a tombstone.

**Tough even cocktail historians don't agree on the shaken vs. stirred question.  A drink that's stirred is clean and sharp; shaking a cocktail "bruises the spirits" and gives it that cloudy appearance. The man who "invented" this cocktail is none other than Dave Wondrich, author of the superb book Imbibe!, who admitted its similarity to the plain-jane Whiskey cocktail but defended it by telling the story of how it got its name: when a bunch of cocktail dorks got together and mixed up a batch while visiting the grave of Jerry Thomas, aka "The Professor" of cocktails, in the Bronx. The tombstone also uses demerera sugar rather than the white stuff, which gives it a little more depth. Call it a whiskey cocktail if you please; either way it's delicious.

Dave Wondrich's Tombstone Cocktail

Adapted from Imbibe! by Dave Wondrich

• 2 ounces rye whiskey, or spicy bourbon such as Bulleit*
• 1 teaspoon demerera simple syrup (combine 2 parts sugar in the raw to 1 part water)
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• Lemon peel for garnish (optional)

*Fresh out of rye whiskey, we used Bulleit bourbon, which is spicy as bourbons go. We were also lemon-less.

Combine the whiskey, syrup, and bitters in a shaker with cracked ice. Shake well for 8-10 seconds, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon peel if using.