As do we all. As do we all, my friend. Be at peace. Of cheese.
Edit: I was surprised to see that the chicken breasts that the wife purchased also had rib meat attached. Not a bad thing, but a large thing. So when I pounded them out, they were YUGE. Someone else who is not me, might cut them smaller. I did not. I beat the remaining life out of them. So eventually they were about 1/2" thick. And about the size of the things that attacked Spock in that episode of Star Trek. At this point I gave up on the idea of normal portions and went for it.
I used peanut oil because I hate to see smoking oil. And, well, here we are.
Nope. Sous vide for 24 hours, refrigerate overnight, smoked for 3 hours today to get a bark going. I refrigerate after the bath because apparently smoke adheres to cold meat better.
The trouble with tribbles, is that they are apparently more than 1/2 inch thick.
Matt, I live in NC, which is like, I dunno, we have way too much pulled pork. That plate looks awesome. I love that you crisped it up some, like carnitas. I also love that it’s naked. Prior to anything added, just the pork flavor, waiting to be caressed and held by just a touch of sauce of some sort.
No idea why this keeps uploading vertical since I have it horizontal on my PC, but whatever.
This is the endgame of my Cajun cooking this week: the crawfish-and-shrimp chowder, the red beans and brown rice, the chicken etouffee (now supplemented with sausage and ham) with white rice, some hush puppies, and some garlic bread.
Sauce #3 - Garlic Butter
4 cloves garlic
2 tp chives
1/2 cup unsalted Irish grass fed butter
Salt pepper to taste
Sauce #4 - Mustard Sauce
1/4 cup Mayo
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
1 tp hot pepper sauce
2 garlic cloves minced
Sauce #5 - Olive Sauce
1/2 cup Mayo
1/5 cup grated Parmesan
1 TB green olive chopped
1 TB Black olive chopped
Sauce #6 - German Green Sauce
1/2 cup Mayo
1/2 TB Grated lemon peel
1/2 TB fresh chopped parsley
1/2 TB chives chopped
Salt pepper to taste
Sauce #7 - German tsatsiki sauce
1 cup Greek yogurt
1 cup cucumber dried with salt in strainer to remove excess moisture
1/2 tp salt
3 cloves minced garlic
1 tp lemon juice
2 tp extra virgin olive oil
Garnish with dill
I’m forgetting one. We had more prepped food off to the side but we wanted to get eating so didn’t take pictures of everything else.
No issues, it worked perfectly. We had to refill it 2 times as the fluid boiled off, but I was prepared for that.
I should note I made way more of each sauce than was necessary. With so much variety, one really didn’t need much. But I didn’t know if they’d disappear fast if slathered on, or if a light dab would adequate.
I’ve noticed that while going to the Melting Pot restaurants. They give you sauces there, too, but you end up just eating a lot of the fondue plain. You’re trying different things IN the fondue, so adding different things ON those just makes for almost too much variety to worry about. It’s part of the fun, sure, but if I was preparing things, I would think differently, for sure.
Back to the Indian foods; I cannot advocate strongly enough for the “660 Curries” cookbook. It opened my eyes to the value of grinding spices as needed, making my own masalas, and the cooking technique of building flavor instead of adding it. You also get a f-ton of great curry recipes to boot!
If you don’t like Indian food check out Bertolli’s “Cooking by Hand” as an alternative for the technique part of flavor/spice development part of Iyer’s book.
Yes! Very much. I now apply many Indian cooking principles to by cooking in other cuisines. Slowly layering aromatics, then spices, then simmering liquids, then proteins, then final fragrant flavorings. . . a lot of recipes already kinda do a lot of this, but by moving the order of things around a bit, you get better results.
Of course, I also bring some outside influences to their food. I find a lot of Asiatic cuisines don’t bother building up Maillard reactions on meat, for instance, just dropping it in raw to boiling curries or steaming it or what have you. It usually adds a step or two to already complicated recipes, sure, but there’s a lot of difference, to me, between some really nicely seared chicken breast in a Thai Massaman curry and the standard method of just simmering it in the curry sauce at the end.
I think that one of the things I learned from folks like Alton Brown, was that techniques are more important than recipes. Once you understand core techniques, and why certain things work (which Good Eats was great at explaining) you can generally just make good food with whatever you have, and techniques from one cuisine generally work with ingredients from another.
Yes! I was caramelizing the onions in ALL of my curries for awhile, and aside from making things just take for-fucking-ever, it also really threw off the color and flavor profile of some dishes (e.g. korma). Definitely not one-size-fits-all :)
