Chinese New Year

Haven't updated my blog for a while. I made a few dishes to celebrate Chinese New Year.

A few appetizers. Shrimps in a ketchup sauce.


Drunken chicken:


Green onion cakes:

I made three "main dishes". The first one is roasted pork (with crispy skin) and some shrimp crackers.


Abalone, mushrooms, and lettuce:


Eggplant in a garlic vinegar sauce:


"E-mein": a type of noodle that has been fried first, and then it is stir-fried with Chinese mushrooms and oyster sauce. One of my favorite.


For dessert, a Chinese crepe with lotus seed paste (traditionally it's with red bean paste but my other half doesn't like that...):


Overall, a good meal and lots of fun. Not much "finesse" in the cooking, but still the flavors were good.

Birthday meal

It's actually been a month since my birthday, and I have just been too busy to post the meal that I cooked for the occasion. I decided that I was going to make a meal with all the stuff that I have wanted to try for a while, but have been too busy to do so. The menu consisted of:

- brandade on toasted garlic baguette
- roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, and carrots
- chocolate mousse

I have always wanted to try brandade but for some reason never had (except for the fried version which has been featured in this blog before). For the roast chicken dish, I am basically following the recipes in Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection series. Finally, the chocolate mousse recipe was from Herv´e; This.

First the brandade: I followed the recipe from Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. This was served on toasted garlic baguette. I had to recipe more than what the recipe called for to achieve the right consistency. Other than that, it was great.



The main course was the main show: slow roasted chicken. I have actually brined it first (different from the recipe) before roasting. The chickens were roasted in an 160F oven (the lowest my oven would go). After 4.5 hours they were at 140F and "done" according to the recipe.
But I was chicken (pun intended) and decided to crank it up a little until they reached 165F. The birds look pale on the outside. They were then quickly seared in a pan to crisp the skin. Unfortunately I was not able to do this successfully (see a bit of torn skin in the picture) and the skin was brown but not crisp. The chicken was extremely moist and flavorful. Despite the fact that there is virtually no drippings for a sauce because of the low oven temperature, there is absolutely no need for a sauce. It was a little bit strange, though, to eat pink chicken and have pink juice running out when the chicken is carved. Overall it was very good, though perhaps it would be even better to finish them in a turkey fryer (as he tried on the show).



I also made some carrots in butter, and also roasted potatoes according to his recipes. Unfortunately, I grossly underestimated how good the potatoes were and had barely enough. The method of boiling the potatoes (with a bag of skin) until they almost break up and then roasting them gives a very crunchy outside and creamy inside. The texture contrast was great.



The dessert course was chocolate mousse. I used the non-classical recipe of Herv´e; This,
which involved melting chocolate with water and then whipping the mixture at high speed over an ice bath. The result was a very pure tasting chocolate mousse. I used semi-sweet chocolate, and I did not add any sugar. So for me it was a bit too much chocolate. As a result, I paired it with a raspberry coulis (just a few drops in my case) and it worked very well. Still, I discovered that the proportion for this chocolate mousse has to be scaled back because there is much less air and a small bit is already a lot!



Overall, I think it was a great meal. I am definitely happy with how it went.

octopus stew, bacon ice cream, and other adventures

Some recent adventures:


I made Chinese BBQ pork again, this time using pork butt instead of tenderloin. This is now absolutely perfect: the little bit of fat in between the meat was giving the perfect texture.



Octopus stew: I followed a Greek recipe (thanks to a book from "K"). The octopus was stewed in onions, tomatoes, vinegar, and red wine. At the end it was a bit too sour for my taste, but adding a little bit of sugar made it much better. I cooked everything in a slow cooker for 8 hours, and the octopus is definitely tender.


The star of the show: bacon maple syrup ice cream. This was somewhat inspired by Blumenthal's idea of bacon ice cream, though it is definitely not the way he would prepare it (e.g. I made the custard the normal way without intentionally overcooking it). The bacon was roasted in an oven with maple syrup, and the resulting bacon bits was mixed into a maple syrup ice cream. It was certainly very successful. When it hits your mouth, you first get the maple syrup taste (which is very good by itself). Then the smokiness and slight saltiness of the candied bacon bits come through. The combination was more successful than I would have imagined. Certainly one of the flavors that I would make again. Maybe I should serve it with french toast.


For the meal, I also purchased a frozen durian. I have not had durian for a long time (maybe for 20 years...), and even though it is frozen it is definitely strong. It actually tasted a lot
better than I thought. Having said that, the smell is really something and there was no way we were going to eat the whole thing.

Chinese BBQ pork, water chestnut cake

I made a couple of Chinese dishes:



First I made the Chinese BBQ pork (char siu). The taste worked out just like the restaurant stuff, but I have chosen to use pork tenderloin instead. Since it is actually warm outside these are made on a real BBQ: that means good caramelization on the outside too. The pork is tender but very lean. The traditional BBQ pork has some fat in it. The next time I try this I will have to use the right kind of meat. As usual, plenty of red food coloring is added.





For dessert is a steamed and then pan-fried water chestnut cake. It is actually relatively simple to make because I just used water chestnut flour. After steaming and cooled, the cake is sliced and then pan-fried. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

I also attempted to make shrimp dumplings, but the dumpling skin was really hard for me to deal with and it was a bit of a disaster. My skin was either way too thick or it was too thin and the dumplings broke. I am too ashamed to show any pictures. I guess making shrimp dumpling is not that easy after all. Maybe I will try again some other time.

French onion soup

It's been a while since the last post...the only big project I have done since the last post is French onion soup. I followed Thomas Keller's recipe from his Bouchon book almost exactly, except for substituting balsamic vinegar for sherry vinegar (I can't find it in Lethbridge).

First, I made beef stock from scratch. Nothing new here, done that many times. In parallel, the onions were slowly caramelized for 5 hours. I am ashamed to say that I was slightly impatient for 15 minutes or so and turned the heat just a little too high, and I ended up with a few burned bits at the end. There is probably less than 0.05% of it, but since it is black it shows up in the soup.



We didn't have the proper soup bowls, so we toasted some baguette slices separately with Emmantaler cheese and put them on top of the soup. At the end it was excellent, definitely worth the trouble.

Chinese Roast Pork

If you live in a place with a significant Chinese population, it is usually not worth the trouble to make Chinese roast pork on your own---it will be cheaper and easier to get it at a Chinese BBQ shop. But here in Lethbridge there is not a single shop that sells roast pork, so there is really only one solution if I want to eat it.

I looked at many recipes on the web, and eventually followed this one (with small changes) and the result was absolutely great. Perhaps even better than many of the Chinese BBQ shops that I know in Edmonton.

First, I found some pork belly with the skin on from Mountain Sausage. I followed the recipe for skin preparation and also the rub, though the rub was perhaps a little too salty. Next time I will reduce that by 1/2.

Here is the setup I had for roasting: meat on a cake rack, and then a drip pan on the bottom.
I roasted the meat 5 minutes more than indicated by the recipe because the meat thermometer
still says 110F after 20 minutes. Then I switched to broil. You can see that the skin is just starting to blister.


I followed the advice from the recipe and broil the meat until the skin is actually almost completely charred. Because the oven perhaps is a little bit uneven, I rotated the meat a few times. At the end, there were still a couple of spots that were not charred. This is easily fixed with a creme brulee torch. This is what it looks like at the end:

Then the burnt parts are scrapped off with a knife, leaving a reddish crispy skin.

Perhaps I didn't leave enough space between the drip pan and the rack, so the seasoning paste at the bottom was still quite wet. I put everything on a nonstick pan to heat up and dry out a little bit:


After resting it for 15 minutes, I sliced the pork into strips:

and then chopped into pieces:



At the end it was a great success. The skin was crispy even after a day, and the flavor was almost right except that it was slightly too salty. The meat was tender too. Definitely will try to do that again.

Sannakji

I just came back from my trip to Seoul, Korea. Lots of interesting culinary adventures, but this one is the best: sannakji. That's live octopus, chopped up and served quickly. As is usual for Korean meals, it is served with a number of side dishes such as pickled radish, vegetables, soup, etc. It is served with two dipping sauce: a fermented chili soybean paste, and a sesame oil mixed with salt.





Of course, the pictures are not that helpful in the experience...here is a video that will help:


The octopus still moves around on the plate, and in fact the suction cups are still somewhat active. It is rather interesting when they stick to the plate, the spoon, the dipping sauce dish, and, even my tongue and the inside of the mouth. I did chew carefully to make sure that it doesn't get stuck on my throat.

Luckily I never had any "fear factor" to worry about. It actually does taste very good, especially with the sesame oil dipping sauce. The experience is very enjoyable, and too bad it is difficult to get it at home.