This is not so much a recipe as so much as a series of directions, but then again, what is a recipe!! Writing this up for a friend who’s asked for a solution to the many Meyer Lemons she’s gifted from other people’s trees.
Ingredients:
- lemons
- salt, ideally Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
Tools:
- wide mouth mason jar– 12-15 normal sized lemons fit preserved into one 32 oz jar
- pickling weight–I love glass wide mouth pickle weights like these. They’re easy to use. Alternatively, if you don’t pickle often you can fill a small plastic bag with 5% salt brine and use that.
Technique:
- Wash all lemons. Set two aside for adding extra juice.
- Cut lemons lengthwise in half but do not cut all the way through. Leave a little attached at the base.
- Then make another cut the other way as if you were cutting the lemon into quarters, but also not all the way through.
End result should look something like:
- Salt all exposed edges of the lemon generously, enough so that you can mostly see salt and not see the lemon flesh itself. For an average sized lemon, this usually takes ~1 tablespoon of diamond crystal kosher salt
- Gently open the lemon and squish it down into your mason jar cut side down. Sprinkle some additional kosher salt on top.
- Repeat cutting and salting and squishing steps with all remaining lemons. As you go, you can tamp the lemons in with the bottom of a spatula. The goal is to encourage the lemons to produce juice.
- When done with lemons, place the pickling weight on top and squish some more. Wait an hour or so for more lemon juice to develop from salting.
- IMPORTANT: After waiting an hour, if the lemon juice does not fully cover the lemons and the weight, take the lemons you set aside at the beginning and juice them. If you run out of lemon juice to cover the lemons, you can use a 5% salt brine. It is very important that the juice/brine covers the lemons and weight entirely! Everything else is flexible!
- Loosely cover with a cheese cloth and check every day or so to make sure the juice still covers the lemons. The first few days, if it doesn’t cover completely, you can squish the weight down some more with your hands until the juice covers the weight. If it doesn’t stay there, add more juice/brine to cover.
- Preserved lemons are ready in 2-6 weeks, depending on the ambient temperature. You know they’re ready if the color has deepened and the liquid has become slightly viscous to the touch (similar to sugar syrup in texture). When they’re ready, you can remove the pickling weight and store for 2+ years in the fridge.
Inspired by Kin Khao’s Nam Tok beans. Never got the texture/seasoning to taste quite as crispy, so let’s just call these larb beans shall we? Very tasty, very savory, we’ve been making them regularly and they never last long.
Ingredients:
- Cooked beans, a few cups cooked. Hearty beans with a thicker skin work best. Scarlet runner beans are great. Cranberry beans might work but are a little soft.
- 1-2 shallots, thinly sliced
- 1-2 cloves of garlic, minced
- Fish sauce
- Jasmine Rice, 1-2 cups
- Oil
- Dried pepper flakes (ancho/ghost/whatever)
- 2-4 limes
- 1/2 cup chopped mint
- 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
- Optional: chopped chives, green onions, chopped hot peppers, chopped pickled carrots/onions
Technique:
- Toast rice in a wok/cast iron pan by placing rice in the hot pan, dry, with no oil and stirring constantly over medium-high heat until evenly golden brown. This step can take 15-20 minutes, beware.
- After toasted, grind in a blade grinder and set aside. The rice powder will last indefinitely in a closed container in the cabinet, and you can make it ahead of time or in smaller batches.
- Brown sliced shallots and garlic in oil in the pan.
- Add cooked beans and 2-3 tablespoons fish sauce and dried pepper flakes.
- Add 1/2 cup toasted rice powder and stir until incorporated. Cook over low-medium heat for a few minutes, stirring constantly until the rice powder and fish sauce are well absorbed and incorporated.
- Remove from heat and pan (removing from pan is important as cast iron/woks react to acid) and add squeezed lime and fresh chopped herbs/pickles as you choose to use them.
- Taste for salt/spice/acid, and add more to taste, as well as more rice powder. Stir.
- Eat on lettuce leaves / chard leaves or on rice.
We’ve been on a cassoulet kick this summer in the foggy Inner Richmond. The first few times we made it with duck confit. This last time, we had run out of duck confit on hand, but still had some of the jelly that sinks at the bottom of duck fat when you render it yourself, so we used that instead.
This recipe is riffing off of a few sources, and I don’t really consider it something that I’d tell other people to do (you’ll see why in a moment). Kenji’s cassoulet recipe is faster end to end, and Elizabeth David’s cassoulet recipes in French Provincial Cooking all call for mutton shoulder (!!?!?) which honestly I’m not even sure you can easily buy mutton (older lamb) in the U.S. these days. I also watched the video on Rancho Gordo’s cassoulet bean page. I’ve wanted to make cassoulet since I first read about it, it’s always felt really romantic to me. Now that we’ve made it a few times, I think it’s more delicious than I originally thought, but less romantic: it’s basically just sausage and beans.
Ingredients:
- Cassoulet beans (1/2 lb) from Rancho Gordo
- Aromatics: 1 celery rib, 1 carrot, 6 bay leaves, black peppercorn
- 4 ounces guanciale / pancetta
- 2 pork sausages
- 1 white onion, diced
- 1-2 pieces duck confit with a few tablespoons duck fat OR
- 1-2 chicken thighs and some duck confit jelly / duck fat jelly / duck fat
- (optional) Knox gelatin
Note this recipe doubles or quadruples well.
Recipe:
- One or two days prior to cooking (lol), soak the beans. Room temperature is fine if your house is <75 degrees, if over, place them in the fridge to soak. If you accidentally end up soaking them too soon, you can always keep them in the soaking water in the fridge for up to 3-4 days.
- Parcook the beans. Add beans to cold water with the aromatics and a few tablespoons of olive oil / duck fat. Bring water to a boil and then lower to the lowest setting possible. Cook for 3-4 hours. Yes. 3-4 hours. Add salt at the end of cooking, turn off the heat. Store in the fridge if you’re not continuing to make cassoulet that day. They can store in their bean broth in the fridge for another 5 days.
- If using duck fat jelly, add it to the bean broth on the day you’re cooking the cassoulet. Taste the resulting ‘stock’ of bean broth and duck fat and duck jelly. If needed for more body, add additional Knox gelatin packets to the warmed up broth. Resulting ‘stock’ should taste slightly less salty than you’d like in a soup.
- In the dutch oven you plan to cook the cassoulet in, ad guanciale / pancetta pieces (diced very small) to pan with two tablespoons of duck fat. Let the fat render until the pieces get crispy. Remove the pork.
- Brown the chicken thighs / duck confit on both sides–add them dry to the pan with some black pepper. It’ll take 5 minutes on both sides to brown. Remove chicken.
- Brown sausages. Remove sausages.
- Add diced onion. If there’s not enough fat at this point in the pan, add more. Salt onion just a little. Cook until onion is translucent.
- Add in beans and all the meat and cover it with the bean broth / duck fat jelly combo. Liquid should just barely cover the beans and the meat. Thighs should submerge the sausages and beans. If not enough liquid, add more water.
- Bring to a boil, then move to the oven at 300 degrees fahrenehit. Let cook for 2-3 hours, occasionally breaking the crust to encourage crust formation.
Adapted from the recipe from Black Jet Baking provided to the WSJ
Ingredients:
- 9 oz (about 3 cups) unsweetened large-flaked coconut (aka chips)
- 9 oz (about 4 1/4 cups) unsweetened desiccated coconut
- 3 sticks unsalted butter
- 1 lb (about 2 cups) granulated sugar
- 6 eggs
- 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (optional)
Directions
- In a bowl, thoroughly combine both types of coconut.
- Combine butter and sugar over medium-high heat in a heavy-bottomed 4 quart pan. Bring the mixture to a medium amber caramel, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon so that the mixture does not burn, 20-30 minutes. When it has achieved desired color, stir in salt and vanilla extract. Add half of the coconut mixture to the caramel and stir to incorporate. Remove the caramel-coconut combo from stove and let sit 5 minutes.
- In a large bowl, whisk eggs and fold in the other half of the coconut mixture.
- Working rapidly, stir the coconut and egg mixture into the caramel-coconut combo with a wooden spoon. It is imperative that you move quickly so that you do not cook the eggs.
- Stirring constantly return pot to medium heat until the mixture comes together, about 15 minutes. The result should be thick and medium-brown.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Completely cool the mixture in the refrigerator, then use an ice cream scoop to place the unbaked macaroons on a parchment-lined sheet pan. Bake until the cookies are a dark golden brown, 15-30 minutes. Let cool before serving.
Writing this up so that Buro can make it too. <3
Ingredients
- 1 pound ground pork
- 1/2 cup - 1 cup white jasmine/sticky rice (not for serving!! it’s part of the main dish)
- 1-2 limes
- fish sauce
- few tablespoons grapeseed oil
- 5-6 dried arbol chilis (optional)
- 2-3 fresh thai chilis, sliced (optional)
- 1 finely sliced shallot (optional)
- 1/2 bunch green onions, chopped (optional)
- 1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped (optional)
- few sprigs mint, chopped (optional)
- lettuce / chard leaves for serving (optional)
Tools
- 1 wok / cast iron pan
- 1 blade grinder
Technique
Ingredient Prep:
- In dry pan, toast rice until all grains are evenly light brown. Stir frequently over medium heat.
- Remove rice from pan, grind coarsely in blade grinder. If you have one, you can use a granite mortar & pestle instead. Set aside ground rice.
- If using chili, toast in the dry pan. Grind finely in blade grinder. Set aside.
Larb Cooking Time:
We made and canned this jam in May, which is just about the height of Bay Area
jam season. It’s a relatively low-sugar jam using a full tray
of strawberries (6 ventilated pint containers, about ~4.5 lbs) and Pomona’s
pectin.
- ‘Hull’ strawberries. That is: using a paring knife remove the green, leafy
top and the pale white flesh immediately underneath.
- Add strawberries to a non-reactive pot, heat gently and then mash.
- Add to pot and stir until incorporated:
- 2 cups sugar
- 4 tsp Pomona’s pectin
- 4 tsp Calcium water (prepped from Pomona’s pectin instructions)
- Bring to a full rolling boil and then add:
- vinegar (we used about 1/3 cup of sherry vinegar)
- salt (to taste, 1 teaspoon)
- Cook at high heat until frothing subsides and the top is glossy, about 10
minutes.
- Check that the jam has ‘set’ by cooling some on a plate. It shouldn’t move
much when cooled.
Notes:
- You can vary the amount and type of sugar, salt, and acid to your own
preference.
- If canning, this amount fills about up about 4-5 pint Ball jars.
