Author: Ari LeVaux

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mole for Valentine’s Day

CREDIT: Ari LeVaux

It wasn’t Valentine’s Day when Tita prepared a mole (“mow-lay”) with chocolate, almonds, and sesame seeds in Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate. It was a mole that, if Cupid were God, would have been for her to eat alone with Pedro, the man she loved. Instead, the mole was for a banquet honoring the firstborn child of Pedro and his wife Rosaura, Tita’s sister.

“The secret is to make it with love,” Tita tells a guest who wants her recipe. And she means it. As Tita grinds the almonds and sesame seeds together, Pedro walks into the kitchen and is transfixed by the sight of Tita’s body ungulating as she works the stone with energy and grace. They share a passionate gaze and can no longer hide their love.

The word mole comes from molli, an Aztec word that translates into sauce, mixture, or concoction. There are as many ways to make mole as there are kitchens in Mexico, but essentially it’s a ground paste of roasted chile peppers, nuts, seeds, fruit, and spices.

Ari LeVaux

Ingredients for mole

Mole is a celebratory dish served at the best of occasions, where it often headlines the meal. The idea of chocolate in a main course might seem odd, but historically, chocolate was served bitter and spicy, like the Aztec brew Cortez drank from a golden cup. Sweet chocolate as we know it comes from Europe, while modern mole, in its myriad forms, incorporates many ingredients the Europeans brought to the New World.

I’m going to share a mole recipe that was inspired by Tita’s, though I’ve tweaked it for V-Day by increasing the chocolate, and served the mole with chicken instead of the walnut-fattened turkeys Tita used. This mole is spectacular with wild game birds as well.

Remove the skin from a chicken and simmer it with a carrot, an onion, and two stalks of celery, all whole. When the chicken is falling-apart soft (1-2 hours), remove from heat and let cool. Pull out the bones and stuff.

Meanwhile, heat a heavy pan on medium. Toast, and then set aside the following:

¼ cup pumpkin seeds, toasted until they start to pop; ¼ cup almonds; ¼ cup pecans; ¼ cup sesame seeds; ¼ cup cocoa seeds or nibs; and ¼ cup peanuts, all toasted until brown.

(If you want to follow Tita’s recipe more closely, omit the pecans, pumpkin seeds, and raisins, below.)

Remove the stems and seeds of 3 dried pasilla chiles, 3 dried anchos, and a mulato (or substitute with poblano or guajillo). Break the chile skins into pieces, and then toast in the pan until crispy, but not burnt. Set aside.

Toast the chile seeds until dark brown, set aside.

Add 1 tablespoon of oil to the pan, and fry a half-cup of raisins, stirring often, until they puff up.

Add more oil, sauté 5 cloves of garlic and a medium onion. Tear apart a bread roll, toast the chunks, and fry the chunks for 10 minutes with the garlic and onions.

With a mortar and pestle or spice grinder, grind 2 inches of cinnamon stick, 1 teaspoon each of black peppercorns and coriander, ½ teaspoon of anise seeds, and 5 whole cloves.

Put the roasted nuts and seeds in a food processor, run it until they’re pulverized, and begin adding the shards of chile. If at any point the food processor’s contents get too thick, add broth from the chicken pot. Add 3 tablespoons chocolate (double that if you couldn’t find cocoa seeds or nibs to roast). 

Add the fried onion garlic bread, and one-half of the ground spices. Keep adding just enough chicken broth so it all keeps getting sucked through the blades.

Tease apart the chicken flesh and reheat it in enough stock to cover it.

Scoop a cup of your mole paste into the cooking chicken and mix everything really well. After it’s simmered together for 10 minutes, taste it. Add more ground spice from the mortar and pestle if you want. Add sugar, one teaspoon at a time, stirring, mixing, and tasting, until it just starts to taste sweet. Mole, like love, is bittersweet, and its flavor depends on this delicate balance.

Salt to taste. Cook another half-hour, until it starts to thicken.

Chicken mole is often served with rice or tortillas. I prefer to tear a few corn tortillas into pieces and add them to the mole 5 minutes before it’s done cooking, and then serve it in a bowl, garnished with chopped onions. A glass of red wine makes a great accompaniment. The wine’s acidic earthiness enhances the flavors of the mole.

Or, you can skip the chicken, use water or stock to facilitate the food processor stage, and serve the mole any number of ways — including straight, with a spoon, or combined with equal parts mayo to make molennaise, a great spread, dip, or edible body paint.

Tita’s mole did not create the passion that she and Pedro shared but allowed it to surface. And so, too, will your interpretation whet the appetite of any passions, if indeed they exist, between you and your Valentine. Hopefully, this love will be less star-crossed than Pedro’s and Tita’s.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

What is “real” mayonnaise?

CREDIT: Ari LeVaux

As you may have heard, start-up food company Hampton Creek was recently sued over the branding and labeling of its egg-free sandwich spread, “Just Mayo.”

It’s not mayonnaise, complained the plaintiff, food giant Unilever, maker of Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise. Unilever, however, ended up backing down and the suit was dropped, thanks to a perfect storm of public-relations blowback it created. But the question remains, for those of us who care to ponder it: Was Hampton Creek wrong for saying, “It’s just mayo,” or was Unilever out of line for crying, “No, it’s not!”?

The debate comes down to the meaning of mayonnaise. And how it’s defined depends greatly on the context. There is a legal meaning under which a relative few materials would qualify, and there is a functional meaning, a street definition of mayo that is relevant at the table where it counts the most. Egg-free products like Just Mayo easily qualify for the latter category, as does the carrot mayonnaise I once encountered in the dining hall of a Brazilian commune.

Before I reveal the details of this carrot mayo, I should dole out enough mayonnaise theory to convince you that carrot mayo is real mayo. At least at my table.

According to the FDA, mayonnaise must contain at least 65 percent oil to qualify. The reason Miracle Whip isn’t mayo is because it doesn’t have enough oil. (It has added starch as a thickener.) One can be sure that if Miracle Whip were to call itself Miracle Mayo, Unilever would have its lawyers all over that infraction with squirt bottles blazing. The same definition also says that real mayonnaise must contain eggs. I’m no legal scholar, but based on that requirement, it’s hard to deny that Unilever had a good point, at least in a legal sense.

In the context of a food lab, meanwhile, mayonnaise is recognized as an emulsion of oil and water, two substances that don’t normally mix. They are coaxed into forming a stable partnership with the help of an emulsifier, which, in the case of mayo, comes in the form of various molecules in the egg’s yolk. The resulting emulsion has a thick texture and a fleshy body that’s sturdy enough to stand in a glorious, three-dimensional dollop.

As has been demonstrated by the toned bodies of Just Mayo and others like it — including my favorite fake mayo, Vegenaise — it is possible to make a fantastic oil in water emulsion with pea- and soy-based emulsifiers rather than yolk-based. These vegan emulsions are nearly as impressive as the ones formed with eggs. The one discernable shortcoming is that the vegan emulsions need to be refrigerated in order to retain their form, while mayo, amazingly, can hold its form at room temperature.

In practice, mayonnaise is less about the specifications of the product and more about a niche that needs to be filled. More than almost any other edible item, mayonnaise embodies lubricity, a quality that facilitates the chewing of food. Can you imagine trying to eat tuna salad without some mayo to lube it up and send it down smoothly? Plus, you need creamy stuff on your food.

Yet despite its all-around awesomeness, mayo is humble, mild mannered, and doesn’t try to steal the show. It is literally the glue behind the glitter of whatever dish it’s in, quietly getting the job done, dollop by dollop, on the noodles, on the meat, and even in the soup.

There are some rare cases when there’s actually no need for mayo. With Middle Eastern food, for example, hummus fills the niche. Hummus isn’t an emulsion, doesn’t contain eggs, and isn’t usually very thick. But it’s got the creamy lubricity we need from mayo, and everything it touches — or better yet, everything smothered in its silky embrace — becomes more delicious.

Along these lines, in the mountains of Bahia, Brazil, a chef named Jeu made a vegan potato salad that was held together by a substance that she called carrot mayonnaise. Even the Hellmann’s lovers at the table couldn’t protest.

Jeu agreed to show me how it’s made. It’s much easier than samba dancing, that’s for sure.

Real Carrot Mayonnaise Ingredients

5 medium-sized carrots, chopped into rounds

1 clove garlic

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup olive oil Optional: tablespoon or so of herbs, like oregano or thyme (omit if using herbs on the potato salad, as discussed below)

Steam carrots until soft. Let them cool to room temperature. Add garlic to a blender or food processor, along with salt, oil, and herbs (if using). Blend, adding the carrot rounds, one by one, letting each round liquefy before adding the next. If it’s not making a smooth, moving vortex add more olive oil.

The resulting sauce, especially if left overnight in the fridge, has the core strength to stand tall, rather than puddle. There are emulsifiers in the garlic and carrots, and they are at work in carrot mayo, binding oil and water as best as they can.

This flavorful binding lubricity, added to potato salad, is a winning combination. Sitting on the dining hall bench of a commune, after pulling weeds and funky yoga moves all morning, we happily gobbled it down. But if you’re stuck in more of an uptown mode, perhaps looking to impress or one-up a dinner guest, I suggest serving this potato salad deconstructed, as an artful pile of roasted potatoes alongside a dollop of carrot mayo.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Thanksgiving Puddings

CREDIT: Ari LeVaux

You probably got the memo that Thanksgiving, as it is currently celebrated, is a far cry from what probably transpired at the original feast. Rather than a cross-cultural love fest, the first Thanksgiving was more like a poker game where each player had one hand on his cards and the other hand on his pistol, under the table, aimed at another man’s lap. The party did not include a quick game of tag football while the turkey cooked, because there wasn’t even a turkey. Or a pumpkin pie. Or women and children at the dining table.

But who can’t get behind a holiday that, stripped to its bare essence, is about being grateful for what one has? In this sense, every day should be Thanksgiving, as far as I’m concerned. And there should always be pudding. Pie is optional.

Tapioca, Coconut, Squash Pudding

Little known fact: A tablespoon or two of tapioca will improve any pudding or pie filling immeasurably. Tapioca adds a toothy elasticity to the finished product, bestowing it with the body you’re looking for. My mother-in-law uses tapioca in apple pie, and since I started messing around with the tapioca trick myself, it hasn’t failed me. And for what it’s worth, tapioca has long been a food of indigenous peoples of Central and South America. So there’s an obtuse Thanksgiving Indian angle for ya.

This recipe also includes corn meal, which thickens the pudding, while adding more complexity to the flavor. It also adds a pinch of indigenous authenticity.

I use molasses here because I really like the dark, intense flavor combined with these ingredients. I opt for the extra-intense blackstrap variety of molasses, but if you’ve got a sensitive palate, you should probably avoid blackstrap, and perhaps skip the molasses altogether in favor of sugar or brown sugar.

Final note: This dish is unquestionably better after a night in the fridge.

Ingredients

2 cups cooked squash

(preferably kabocha), or 1 cup each

of cooked squash and sweet potato

2 tablespoons granulated tapioca

(aka cracked tapioca)

2 tablespoons cornmeal

2 tablespoons molasses

1 can full fat coconut milk

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

Combine ingredients in a food processor or blender. Whizz until smooth. Pour into a buttered baking pan. Bake at 300 degrees until an inserted knife comes out clean. Let cool to room temperature. Refrigerate overnight.

It’s not an overly sweet dish, but the sweetness of the squash/sweet potato and coconut combine with the molasses for an amazing pudding experience. Or pie, if you’re crusty.

Ari LeVaux

Apples and squash

Indian Pudding with Apples

This recipe comes from an old recipe booklet called Apple Talk that was published by the Northern Pacific Railroad in the early 1900s, apparently in an attempt to boost its apple shipping business. My copy of Apple Talk was found in an old homestead in Missoula, Montana, beneath a dusty stack of recipes. Apples, like squash, are in season.

When finished, the pudding will bear a black hue on top, as if you burned it. Don’t worry, it’s just the molasses.

Instructions

“Scald two quarts of sweet milk [also known as whole milk]. Stir in one cup of cornmeal until the mixture thickens. Remove from the fire. Add one and one-sixth cups of molasses, one teaspoonful of salt, one-half teaspoonful each of nutmeg and cinnamon and two cups of sweet apples, pared, cored, and quartered. Pour into a deep pudding dish and bake for four hours. [I went with 275 degrees, and it was perfect.] When the pudding has baked for one and one-half hours, add one pint of cold milk without stirring. Serve with cream and sugar and syrup.”

I’ve played around with variations like doubling the apples and corn meal, which makes it sweeter and thicker. It’s a forgiving recipe. Maybe not as decadent as your average serving of tiramisu, but it’s better for you, and closer to what may have been served in the original feast, for whatever that’s worth. Like the squash pudding, this pudding is exponentially better the next day, so plan ahead.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Debate of Grilling Bratwurst

CREDIT: Ari Leveaux

People from Wisconsin are generally a congenial, easygoing lot. Those Cheeseheads love their Green Bay Packers, their Friday Fish Frys, and their beer and bratwurst, and they aren’t big on drama. Until Scott Walker came around, there wasn’t much to argue about, except, well, beer and bratwurst.

Wisconsin’s largest ancestry group is German, and the original immigrants brought their bratwurst with them. Today, bratwurst are a defining characteristic of the local cuisine. And while brats — which rhymes with “pops,” not “rats” — are beloved by all Sconnies, there is quiet discord with respect to the purely Wisconsin ritual of bathing brats in beer. They disagree, for the most part politely, not only over when to do this, but also why.

The dominant sentiment among beer soakers, within and beyond Wisconsin, is that the brats should soak in hot beer before going on the grill. There is, however, a small but highly knowledgeable contingent of brat scholars, centered on the shore of Lake Michigan, that puts its brats in warm beer after cooking, not before.

Bratwurst is a raw, pork-based sausage that must be thoroughly cooked before serving. The idea behind soaking bratwurst in hot beer prior to grilling is that they cook all the way through ahead of time, so the grill master needn’t worry about serving an undercooked sausage. The pre-cooked brats spend a brief amount of time on the grill to get browned, and are then served. Less time on the grill makes the brat less likely to dry out, and some pre-soakers believe the brat soaks up enough beer to influence the flavor and juiciness. The beer also makes the sausage casings more pliable and less likely to split.

Once, when I told a bartender from Milwaukee that I wanted to try the beer bratwurst thing, he preached to me about the holy trinity of beer flavorings: garlic, onion, and black pepper. And before he would agree to fill my growler, he made me promise to pre-cook in Old Milwaukee, not the fancy microbrewed IPA he was pouring.

But in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, widely considered to be the capital of the bratwurst belt, many locals politely shake their heads at this pre-soaking business.

Chuck Miesfeld is a fourth-generation sausage maker and owner of Miesfeld Meat Market in Sheboygan. He agreed to speak with me about when to soak a brat in beer, and why, in hopes that it might help “straighten those people out.”

By “those people,” Mr. Miesfeld was referring to his countrymen in Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Madison, as well as further-flung wannabe Sconnies on the internet, who believe that pre-cooking brats in beer before grilling them is proper.

Ari Leveaux

Brats in a post-grill beer bath

“The whole deal with soaking them in beer,” Miesfeld told me, “is about keeping the brats warm until you put them on your hard roll. If you’re cooking brats on a charcoal grill, which is the only way you should be doing it, and there’s nobody standing there with a hard roll, there has to be a way to keep them warm.”

The hard roll of which Miesfeld speaks, the only Sheboygan-approved brat holder, is the antithesis of the soft hot dog buns upon which brats are too often served. Even at Miller Park in Milwaukee, the only baseball stadium in America that serves more brats than hot dogs, brats are served on those “squishy buns,” as Miesfeld calls them with disdain. If you don’t live within striking distance of a Sheboygan bakery, your best bet would be a German or Austrian bakery that makes a hard-crusted white dinner roll. In Sheboygan it’s customary to pack two brats into a single hard roll.

As for the idea that the pre-soaking results in a juicier brat, Miesfeld isn’t impressed. He says if a brat dries out on the grill, it was either overcooked or a sub-par product.

But while the primary purpose of a post-grill soak in beer is to keep the brats in optimal shape for serving, Miesfeld concedes that the submersion adds more than heat. 

Ari Leveaux

“You do grab some flavors from the beer, but that’s not the real point. If you were doing it for flavors you’d want to leave the brat in there a long time, but you don’t want to leave the brats in too long, because they get mushy. It’s just a half-hour thing.”

Miesfeld’s post-cooking brat bath includes butter and onions in the beer. And as the bartender from Milwaukee had advised, Miesfeld urged me not to use good beer. It should be kept at around 170 to 180 degrees, he said, which is not quite simmering. And there is no place for black pepper, despite what the bartender from Milwaukee says. “If you have to add black pepper, you’ve got a shitty brat.”

While he isn’t a pre-soaker, Miesfeld does drop the brats into cold water for five minutes before grilling, which softens the casings, making them less likely to split.

The key to the proper grilling of brats is to not have the fire too hot, he told me. Control any flare-ups with water and turn them often. Skilled brat chefs can determine with a squeeze of their fingers when a brat is cooked, but a meat thermometer, poked into the end of just one brat will do. When the internal temperature reaches 180 degrees, it’s done.

I followed Miesfeld’s instructions, mixing a can of cheap lager with a tablespoon of butter and half an onion, sliced. And against everyone’s advice, I couldn’t help making another beer bath with a high-quality IPA. I don’t cook with wine I wouldn’t drink, and I figured the same applied to beer, though it hurt to pour such good beer into the pan.

I compared brats that were pre-soaked in each of my two beer baths with those that were immersed after grilling. I also made a brat that was simply grilled, and without any exposure to beer (except in my mouth).

The brats placed in beer after grilling were noticeably juicier, with the first bite exploding awkwardly in my face. They had more of a beery flavor, and I’m sure the butter didn’t hurt. I preferred them. The pre-soaked brats were closer in flavor to the non-soaked brat but juicier, but they were less juicy than brats soaked after cooking.

As for any difference between the fancy IPA and the cheap lager, I couldn’t detect any. At least, on this point, we can all agree.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Potato Chip Scrambled Eggs

Migas!

There was a brief, glorious period in my life during which I thought I had invented a delicious breakfast dish that, it turns out, has long existed.

Migas translates from Spanish into “crumbs.” In Portuguese the word is migalhas. In both countries, “crumbs” are typically made with day-old bread, and a varying mix of meat, veggies, and seasonings. There’s also a Jewish version that combines old matzo with eggs.

The migas that I thought I had invented is a Tex-Mex dish made with leftover tortilla chips, or tortillas, and eggs, plus regional ingredients like salsa, cheese, beans, and avocado.

When my inspiration hit, I was standing in my kitchen, holding a near-empty bag of corn chips, wondering what to do with them.

The chips were all too small for dipping, but I still hated to waste them. Instead of tossing the tortilla crumbs to my deserving hens, I tossed them into a hot pan of bacon and grease. A few moments later, when the bacon was done to my liking, I tossed in some raw garlic, stirred it around, and then poured a couple of beaten hen eggs into the pan. After a couple of stirs, I turned off the heat, seasoned with salt and pepper, adorned with salsa, and christened my dish Eggs with Dregs.

By the time I first saw migas on a menu, in a northern New Mexico restaurant, I had already experimented with the dish several times. I read the menu description of migas with a mixture of disappointment and excitement. The notoriety that I had assumed was coming my way for creating Eggs with Dregs vanished before my eyes, but despite that disappointment I couldn’t wait to taste what this New Mexican cook would do with my recipe. It wasn’t much different, although being in northern New Mexico there was red chile mixed in. And being in a restaurant, whole chips were used, not dregs.

My propensity to experiment with chips and eggs reared its head again on a recent car camping trip. This foray lead to another version of migas that, after a spirited Google search, I feel I can legitimately call my own. Instead of corn chips, this dish incorporates potato chips-preferably Jalapeno Cheddar potato chips. As with migas, using crumbs is a good way to be thrifty, but whole chips are classier.

The idea for potato chip migas came while I was preparing a nice greasy breakfast in a cast iron skillet. As I contemplated the scrambled eggs that were to come, I noted, sadly, that it sure would be nice to have some potatoes sizzling in that bacon grease.

Not just potatoes, but cooked potatoes, already soft, cut into cubes or slices that were ready for the grease, in which a crunchy, pan-fried skin would be applied. Alas, I had no cooked potatoes and was miles from any place that sold them.

What’s worse, arguably, is that I’d also forgotten my bottle of hot sauce.

It was only after I had added my lonely eggs to the bacon pan that my eyes fell upon a bag of Jalapeno Cheddar potato chips in the food basket. That’s when I knew that my little culinary equation would be balanced. I added some of these chips to the pan of eggs and bacon, gave it a stir, and potato chip migas was born. It was great, but after spending some time with the recipe I now realize that I got lucky that first time. I had initially added those potato chips as an afterthought. It turns out that the last minute is the only acceptable time to add them.

Corn chip migas, by contrast, are more forgiving, primarily because soft corn chips, or corn tortillas, are as delicious, in a different way, as crunchy corn chips. But soggy potato chips are much less appealing. For potato chip migas to work, those chips must be crunchy. While corn chips can be added to the beginning, middle, or end of your greasy breakfast, potato chips should only be added at the tail end of the scrambling process.

In a way, this makes it very easy. All one must remember to do is scramble some eggs, and toss in potato chips, or crumbs thereof, when the eggs are nearly done. The outcome depends entirely on the quality of chip and your proficiency at scrambling eggs.

I follow the less-is-more school of egg scrambling. Less stirring and less cooking, that is. But I don’t skimp on the grease. Yeah, I like bacon grease, but olive oil is a great, if much different, alternative. If the bacon is too lean, sometimes I use both. Butter works too, but easily burns, and so it should be mixed with some other oil.

Heat the oil and/or bacon on medium-high heat. There should be enough oil to thoroughly coat the pan such that the eggs float on top when they are first added. We don’t want eggs touching bare pan, which can lead to the egg sticking and burning.

Before adding the eggs, you have the opportunity to add vegetables or spices, such as chopped garlic, garlic flower sections, asparagus, or other egg-friendly goodies. When these are properly done, pour in the beaten eggs.

Let the eggs set up briefly, then give it one quick stir. If using cheese, add it now. Then add the potato chips, stir again, briefly, and arrange the eggs in a pile, where they will stay warm, while any remaining gooiness is cooked firm.

Your potato chip migas are ready for consumption. I hope you enjoy it. And if anyone has already heard of this dish, please don’t tell me. Unless the recipe is really interesting.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Winning at Cheater’s Chicken

CREDIT: Ari Levaux

Cheaters never win, or so we’re taught. But I cheat at chicken all the time, and I never seem to lose.

To cheat at chicken, buy a roasted chicken at the store, bring it home, and use it as an ingredient in some other dish, like enchiladas or stir-fry.

Regardless of the final form of the meal, Cheater’s Chicken Soup is a given. A lot of chicken soup or broth is prepared as an afterthought from the leftover carcass, but Cheater’s Chicken Soup can be made as soon as the bird gets home.

Pull the flesh off of the bones, leaving a greasy pile of skin and meat, and cut the bones into small pieces. With store-bought, slow-cooked chicken, you can count on the bones being only marginally more rigid than the buttery flesh, and kitchen scissors should easily reduce the bones into inch-long sections. It’s especially important to slice through the wide ends of the long bones, where much of the marrow, nutrients, and general boney goodness reside.

Simmer the bone shards in a gallon or so of water. You can turn out a pretty quick soup this way, but it’s better to simmer the bones for at least two or three hours. Then, let the pot cool to room temperature, to let the leaching of nutrients from chicken to stock run its full course, and set the pot in the fridge overnight. The next morning, skim any fat from the surface of the stock, and strain out the bones.

The stock can be stored for a day or two in the fridge, or frozen. When you’re ready to make soup, reheat the stock and add carrots and celery, in large chunks, and a peeled onion, cut in quarters. Simmer for at least an hour, and season with salt, a little at a time, as the soup cooks. If you want a simple, brothy soup, salt is enough. If you want something heartier, add some of the chicken flesh, if you were able to set some aside while your family was pulling at that bird like a flock of vultures.

At this point, the soup, like a freshly procured chicken, is a blank slate. You can season the soup with herbs, like dill leaf or thyme. Garlic helps. Green chile helps. Maybe a pinch of lime.

I was at the store the other day getting supplies for Cheaters Chicken Peking Spring Rolls. The plan was to make chicken spring rolls flavored with scallions and hoisin sauce, Peking-duck style.

Alas, the only flavors of cheaters chicken available were unsalted and balsamic. Unsalted sounded terribly bland, but I wasn’t in the mood to roll the dice with balsamic-flavored Peking spring rolls, so I went with bland.

At home, the vultures dug into that bland bird like they always do, barely pausing to notice the lack of salt or any other seasoning.

As the bones simmered, I made my rolls.

I rehydrated a sheet of rice paper by dipping it in a bowl of water and spreading it out on a plate to soften. In the center of the sheet I placed chicken, scallions, and hoisin sauce, along with cabbage, basil, mint, and little dollops of mayo and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. I rolled and repeated, and then served the rolls with soy sauce.

The meal was great, but I couldn’t help wondering why I had paid three times the price for a bird that was simply heated. Maybe I was losing at cheating.

The next day I brought home a five-pound bird that, according to Whole Foods, had received regular spa treatment and occasional trips to Disneyland, yet cost only a few dollars more than the one-pound cooked birds in the deli area.

I rinsed my happy, dead chicken and put it in the oven at 350, unseasoned. The entire process took about a minute.

I really wanted to add a little seasoning, but for the sake of science I left it plain, wanting to see if it was possible to screw up a chicken.

But after a couple of hours I broke down. Having just flipped the bird to breast-down in the juices, I couldn’t resist sprinkling salt, garlic powder and thyme on the moist underbelly of the freshly turned chicken. Then, I lined the perimeter of the pan with large pieces of potato and carrot, before sending it back in the oven for more. I cooked it mostly with the lid on to keep in the juices, uncovering under high heat at the end for a few minutes to crisp the skin.

All of this hassle took another five minutes out of my day, and the result was spectacular, better than Cheater’s Chicken. The vultures were especially voracious around the bird that evening.

If you’re looking to bust out the cranberry sauce and whatnot, then you should probably do something a little more involved with your home-baked chicken. Brine it overnight in salt water to add flavor and moisture. Stuff it. Use a meat thermometer to make sure it’s perfectly cooked.

But if you’re just looking for a shortcut around the cheating process, either because you’re too cheap to cheat, or are just a better person, the most important ingredient is just a little foresight. Put the bird in the oven, and then get back to your life.

Because luckily, it’s really hard to screw up a chicken, unless you dry it out. And if you do, you can make extra chunky chicken soup.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mother of Umami

For millennia it was thought that there are only four basic tastes perceptible to humans: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. It wasn’t until about 100 years ago that another taste, umami, was proposed for inclusion in 1909 by Dr. Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Ikeda wrote, “I believe that there is at least one other additional taste, which is quite distinct from the four tastes. It is the peculiar taste that we feel as ‘UMAI [meaning brothy, meaty, or savory]’, arising from fish, meat and so forth. The taste is most characteristic of broth prepared from dried bonito and seaweed … I propose to call this taste ‘UMAMI’ for convenience.”

The power of umami was already long understood by cooks the world over. But nonetheless, it wasn’t taken seriously as an official fifth taste until glutamate receptors were discovered on the human tongue in 2000. This proved that humans are engineered to appreciate umami.

“The sequencing and functional expression of a human taste receptor for glutamate determined by these studies provides a first molecular basis for Ikeda’s pioneering work,” noted the Journal of Chemical Senses in 2002.

Several more of Ikeda’s observations on umami have withstood the tests of time as well. He noted, for example, that the taste of umami is enhanced with salt but muted with sugar. John Prescott, in his book Taste Matters, wrote that this is precisely why tomatoes, while fruit, are rarely found in fruit salads and other sweet dishes. There is no tomato shortcake. Rather, the high levels of glutamate in tomatoes make them more suitable for savory applications.

Some foods have naturally occurring high levels of free glutamic acid, which means more umami taste. Parmesan cheese and anchovies have helped Italian food get its umami on, while over in France they do it with veal stock, in which flesh and bones are simmered long enough to disassemble the tightest proteins, thereby freeing the maximum amount of glutamate. In Southeast Asia, umami comes via fish sauce. In America, look no further than a charbroiled bacon cheeseburger with ketchup.

When glutamate receptors were found, it not only proved that umami is a basic taste, but was taken as evidence that a taste for glutamate offered some kind of evolutionary advantage — otherwise the receptor wouldn’t be there. Subsequent studies found a similar glutamate receptor in mice. The mouse receptor was part of a clump of receptors that target a variety of amino acids. Because amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, having a taste pathway dedicated to their detection, the authors of one study noted, “probably had significant evolutionary implications.”

The multi amino acid receptor in mice is thought to encourage them to consume a variety of amino acids whenever they are available. The glutamate receptor in humans, by contrast, doesn’t bind to any other amino acids. This is curious because glutamate is a non-essential amino acid that our bodies can manufacture from scratch. Why would humans have multiple receptors for it?

Many experts believe that in humans, glutamate has become a signal for the general availability of amino acids. In Taste Matters, Prescott writes that because glutamic acid is an amino acid present in animal and vegetable protein, “umami taste may act as a signal for the presence of protein, with its effects on palatability therefore promoting consumption.”

But paradoxically, the umami switch is not triggered by the most protein-dense food of all: raw meat. As the glutamate is bound up in muscle protein, it isn’t free to impart its umami deliciousness. Thus, a taste for umami would not have enticed our ancestors to gorge themselves on a fresh kill.

The most convenient and delicious way of releasing free glutamate from meat is to cook it. The processes of heating and browning meat make glutamate, and other amino acids, available to the body, including its glutamate receptors.

Cooking also makes the calories in food more accessible, which offered clear evolutionary advantages to our ancestors. Many scientists believe that cooking, and the extra calories it made available, is what lead to a dramatic increase in the size and power of the human brain.

Perhaps a cultivated taste for glutamate helped seal the evolutionary deal between man and fire. From browned meat to umami-rich broth, fire has allowed the creation of some of the most savory, delicious foods we know. And we can thank our umami receptors for encouraging us to keep cooking.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Swell Kale

CREDIT: Zeetzjones | Dreamstime.com

Given the great love many people have for kale, it seems appropriate that a massage turns out to be the best way to prepare it. A good rubdown can enhance the kale’s flavor as well as preserve its nutrient content.

Because let’s face it, while kale is known as one of the world’s healthiest foods, when its virtues are enumerated, qualities like tenderness and sweetness aren’t usually emphasized. That’s why kale is usually cooked, as heat breaks down the plant’s cellular structure, tenderizing it, while turning complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, adding sweetness.

But this increased edibility comes at a cost. As the bluish green of a living kale leaf fades into a navy shade of green, some fragile enzymes are killed. Live enzymes are known to be healthy in many ways, including as a digestive aid. A raw vegetable like kale is composed of cells that are still alive. Cooking effectively kills the plant cells, destroying other sensitive nutrients as well.

Massaging kale results in a compromise between raw and cooked, in which the best aspects of both methods are preserved. As you inflict manual loving trauma upon the kale leaves, the cellulose architecture of the cell walls is crushed. In this mayhem, some of those enzymes are released, some of which go to work on the cell’s carbohydrate supplies, chopping them into simple sugars. As you rub, twist and knead the kale, it wilts down to a fraction of its former size, similar to what happens during cooking.

By the end of this preparatory procedure you have a massaged kale that’s great in and of itself but can also be a point of departure for the creation of many other, more interesting salads.

Any kale will work, and there are many to choose from these days. I like a mix of curly green kale and black kale, aka dino, aka Tuscan, aka Lacinato kale, aka the flat-leafed, extra dark kind. Wash the kale and shake it dry — there is no need for the salad spinner, as not much water will come out, and a little water doesn’t hinder the massage. Pull the leafy material off each stalk and put the spineless leaves in a big mixing bowl.

Before I massage in earnest, sometimes I attack the destemmed kale pieces with scissors, snapping the sheets down to smaller pieces in haphazard fashion. One could also chop the leaves with a knife, or carefully sliver them with scissors. Or just rip it all to shreds with your bare hands.

The massage’s effect is enhanced by the application of salt, oil, and citrus juice like lime to the leaves. These ingredients help grind up the cell walls as they work their way into the leaves, establishing their flavor. Vinegar, while acidic, makes a terrible substitute, flavor wise, for lime, lemon, orange, or grapefruit. And citrus, like kale, comes into full season in winter. I like to use a mix of citrus juices, any one of which could be used alone except for orange, which isn’t acidic or bitter enough.

For a decent-sized bunch of kale, use about one-fourth cup of olive oil, one half-teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons of citrus juice.

Mix these in, and proceed to squeeze, twist, wring, press, and maim the kale with your hands. The exact motions are fairly intuitive. The kale volume will shrink dramatically at first. The massage can end by the time the kale is holding steady at about one fifth of its original volume, or when your forearms are too tired to continue, or when it’s sufficiently beaten down to your liking.

You now have massaged kale, which you can start eating now, or use it as an ingredient in a more complex dish. After its massage, your kale is understandably loose and ready to go in most any direction you wish to take it. But if you want to start eating, simply adjust the seasonings and go. I highly recommend toasted pumpkin seeds sprinkled on top.

As a salad, massaged kale goes well mixed with parsley (non-massaged), and the fiery pungency of raw garlic and onions. Cooked grains like quinoa or bulgur can be added. I like to toss in thin slices of blood orange, peel and all. The bitterness of the peel bridges the flavors of the bittersweet orange and the bitter-ish kale, while providing a juicy, colorful contrast. And despite the fact that massaging adds sweetness to kale, a little more is always welcome. Grapefruit chunks are another way to add bittersweetness. Pomegranate is another fruit, also in season, that makes a beautiful, delicious splash in massaged kale salad. A tablespoon or two of pomegranate molasses adds nice tang and sweetness. Sweeter fruits like mango can be used, as can honey.

When your salad is assembled, taste and add more citrus or salt as necessary, and crush on some black pepper if you wish. Toasted pumpkin seeds are practically mandatory, they go so well, sprinkled upon each serving rather than tossed in.

Massaged kale can also be added to cooked food. Toss it on a hot dish and let it wilt, as is often done with spinach. Or toss it into a stir-fry at the last minute; it only needs to heat up, and can hold on to its raw, bright green color. You can also let massaged kale hang out in the fridge overnight, allowing it to soften and marinate.

In short, all of the many ways you have for enjoying your kale could be improved if you start by giving it a loving, tender massage. OK, it’s actually a rough, tenderizing massage. But let’s face it, kale responds well to tough love. So show your love is true with a good spanking. Then squeeze some acid on the wounds, and grind in some salt. It will be good for your relationship.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Take a Powder

CREDIT: Ari LeVaux

Many foodies look down on garlic powder — and its cousin, granulated garlic — as a stale, cheap substitute for the real thing. It’s a shortcut for lazy cooks, but not something the serious chef would consider.

I get the principle behind the sentiment. Fresh is better than preserved, as a rule of thumb. But taken as gospel in every case can approach sophomoric levels.

“After half a year at culinary school, a culinary school, mind you, where garlic was minced from fresh, cinnamon was ground from sticks, and nutmeg was grated from whole — always — I have been carefully trained to look upon garlic powder with great disdain,” wrote cookbook author S.J. Sebellin-Ross in The Oregonian. “And it makes sense to me. Garlic powder and all its many cousins (garlic salt, garlic paste, pre-peeled garlic cloves) may be great for the busy cook, but they are not nearly the taste treat [that] pure garlic clove is for the eater.”

 But garlic is a gustatory chameleon, depending on how it’s used. When fresh garlic is added early and allowed to cook, its bite is replaced by sweetness and mild, permeating pungency. If added at the end of cooking, that same fresh garlic contributes piercing fireworks. I often find myself adding fresh garlic at both the beginning and end of meal prep and sprinkling powder in the middle.

Chef Rob Connoley, who is putting Silver City, New Mexico, on the culinary map with his inventive, foraged meals at Curious Kumquat, told me via Facebook chat:

All dried spices are different than their fresh counterparts. They’re typically stronger in flavor and a bit off compared to what we’re used to. So when I use them, sometimes it’s because I don’t have access to the fresh ingredient and I adjust the amount to flavor, but often it’s because I’m looking for a more aggressive flavor in my dish. On my stove right now is the classic Indian dish aloo gobi. I have fresh turmeric in my pantry but I prefer the most biting flavor of dried turmeric in this dish versus many soups that I make which I want the more mellow fresh version.

Alas, the case for garlic powder hasn’t been helped by some unkind words Julia Child had to say about it, or the misquoting of Anthony Bourdain, by members of the online garlic-powder-hating community, as saying, “Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.” Sure, Bourdain said that in his book Kitchen Confidential. But a sentence earlier he noted: “Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars.”

I couldn’t agree more with Bourdain with regard to pre-chopped garlic in jars. Though billed as a convenient substitute for fresh garlic, pre-chopped garlic has lost its fresh bite, its clean, piercing flavor replaced by a foul sulfuriness. At best, it pales in comparison to the fresh version.

Curious about what Bourdain’s true feelings on garlic powder might be, I reached out to the esteemed muncher of warthog anus via Twitter, hoping for clarification. Alas, he didn’t get back to me. Some other food luminaries, however, did share with me their feelings on the subject.

Francis Lam, a food writer and food reality-show judge, tweeted back, smartly: “awful substitute, possibly decent as its own thing.”  Food writer, editor, and all-around icon Ruth Reichl was open-minded, though not a user. “I don’t really understand why you’d use an acrid industrial product when fresh garlic is so easily obtainable.”

I responded that I grow my own garlic and make my own garlic powder, to which she replied: “Homemade garlic powder! That’s an entirely different story. Sounds fantastic, actually. Just a dehydrator? I want to try it.”

If you consider garlic powder as its own ingredient and not a substitute, the importance of fresh can be applied to it as well. Fresh garlic powder is a different animal than stale. If you’re not up for making your own from scratch, gourmet spice companies such as Penzeys can express deliver, perhaps by drone before too long, garlic powder that will be almost as fresh as homemade. I’ve also seen garlic powder for sale at farmer’s markets — crafty growers know that you can make powder out of the leaves, at harvest time, too. To preserve its youth, large quantities of garlic powder should be stored in a cool, dry place or even frozen.

Unlike the dominating flavor of fresh garlic, powder is more the glue behind the glitter, adding a subtle fullness of flavor that may be more difficult to detect than with fresh, but nonetheless makes the meal taste better. I consider garlic powder like a (somewhat) less controversial version of MSG. Perhaps you can’t detect it specifically, but in a side-by-side comparison, the otherwise identical dish with added garlic powder will win. I have found little reason not to sprinkle it on practically everything, irrespective of how much fresh I use. If you add garlic powder, simply put, it will be better.

There are also times when garlic powder can be used when fresh garlic would be risky. Some high-heat applications, for example, where fresh garlic would burn. Or as a component of a dry rub or seasoned flour, where fresh garlic would gum up the mixture and won’t spread as evenly as powder. Garlic powder disperses more evenly in brine and performs better in some savory baked goods. Just don’t add garlic powder at the end of cooking, as it needs time to absorb moisture.

And if you grow your own, converting it to powder is a great way to deal with bulbs that are getting soft, or sprouting, as they do when it gets cold.  Three good-sized heads will make about a third of a cup of garlic powder.

Slice the cloves as thinly as possible and dehydrate them. If your dehydrator has a temperature control, set it at 125 degrees. When totally crispy with no soft pieces in the mix, let the pieces cool to room temp. Pulverize them in a clean coffee grinder or spice grinder. Store in a salt shaker. Sprinkle on food midway through cooking, just as MSG was tossed around Chinese restaurant kitchens in the 1970s. That is, on basically everything.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Fishy Thanksgiving

The original Thanksgiving wasn’t exactly the Pilgrim and Indian love fest we collectively misremember. But despite growing recognition of the degree to which the Thanksgiving story has been rewritten, the same analysis has not been widely applied to the holiday’s traditional foods. We still tend to cook the same dishes each year, dictated more by habit than history. The original Thanksgiving did not include turkey, pumpkin pie, and other contemporary Thanksgiving staples, like women, children, and football. But it did, according to historians, include a lot of seafood, thanks to the event’s location on the Massachusetts coast.

Likely foods included cod, oysters, and other shellfish, as well as venison. The first historical mention of turkeys at Thanksgiving was in an 1827 novel, Northwood, by Sarah Josepha Hale. The use of turkeys at Thanksgiving really took off in 1947, when the National Turkey Federation began presenting turkeys to American presidents in advance of every Thanksgiving. More recently, Tofurkey has met commercial success by allowing vegetarians and vegans to join in the modern ritual of using the turkey to celebrate what is sometimes referred to as “Genocide Appreciation Day.”

One part of the Thanksgiving story that’s true is that afterward the Indians did indeed help the Pilgrims through the winter, a fact that the Wampanoag tribe almost immediately came to regret. During the winter that followed the first Thanksgiving, the Indians so vastly outnumbered the Pilgrims that they could easily have wiped them out, forever changing the official start of the Christmas shopping season.

Instead, just two years later, a Pilgrim preacher named Mather the Elder was able to thank God for smallpox, which had by that point killed many Wampanoag. A few years later, many of the remaining Wampanoag died in King Philip’s War, which by today’s standards would be considered more of a massacre.

Compared to the holiday’s historical reality, looking at the actual food that was served at Thanksgiving is much less depressing to think about. While there was no pie, the Pilgrims might have contributed stewed pumpkin, along with boiled bread (dumplings) and cheese curd fritters. And there might have been sobaheg, a Wampanoag recipe still being made today by tribal members.

Sobaheg includes a trio of vegetables that are commonly associated with Native American farmers: corn, beans, and squash — aka the Three Sisters. Sobaheg also contains some kind of meat, like venison, or even turkey.

Indeed, centuries before European contact, Native Americans of the region had already domesticated turkeys. It just so happened, according to historians, that turkey wasn’t served during the original three-day bash. But if the historians are wrong and some turkey had somehow snuck its way onto the original Thanksgiving table, it could very well have been via the sobaheg.

Some sobaheg recipes include clam juice, which I find exciting. Clam juice is like a simple version of oyster sauce, which has become indispensable in my kitchen. Both clam juice and oyster sauce contain mollusk extracts, and both are umami donors. The simple fact that clam juice is more authentic to Thanksgiving than turkey is all the reminder we need that there is more to the Thanksgiving picture than what we’ve been fed.

Sobaheg

Ingredients (for a medium pot):

1 cup dry beans

2 cups hominy corn (dried, canned, or frozen); some recipes use corn grits

1-2 pounds turkey, white or dark meat

A pound of winter squash, trimmed and cubed

Two teaspoons each garlic and onion powder

An 8-oz. bottle of clam juice

Salt or soy sauce to taste

Optional: 1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds, pounded to a coarse flour or pulverized in a coffee grinder. This adds a unique flavor that some might find a little too unique.

Procedure

There is a lot of leeway in terms of how mushy you like your corn, beans, and squash. I like the beans soft but the squash and corn a bit more toothy. Adjust your procedure according to your own taste.

 Cook the beans in water until they’re nearly tender. If you’re using dried hominy corn — as opposed to canned or frozen ­— it should be cooked with the beans. While the beans are cooking, roast your turkey at 250 degrees until it’s browned. Turn the oven off and let the turkey slowly cool.

 When the beans are soft, change the water, and set cooking on medium. If using frozen hominy, add it now.

Add onion and garlic powders. When the turkey is cool enough to work with, pull it into pieces and add them to the pot. Let it simmer. If using canned hominy, add it now. About an hour before serving time, add the squash chunks. Adjust seasonings with salt or chicken bouillon. Add sunflower-seed flour, if using it, and stir it in.

It’s a simple yet texturally diverse pot of stew, full of complementary flavors. And if you want to take it even further, a dollop of cranberry sauce adds a refreshing zing — even if there weren’t cranberries at the original Thanksgiving.