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A cooking journal. Lightweight. Portable. Semantically versioned.

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Preserved Lemon Scarlet Runner Bean Salad

Post date: 29 Mar 2020

My friend Stumm was encouraging me to write up more food posts, so here’s one for him, a fellow Rancho Gordo bean fan.

Ingredients:

  • 1 pound Rancho Gordo (or other) dried scarlet runner beans. You can substitute other beans here, but you’re looking for something meaty and substantial.
  • two or three preserved lemons and some preserved lemon juice. Preserved lemons are super easy to make at home, so if you’re reading this in winter, I encourage you to try! They last for years in the fridge.
  • olive oil
  • salt
  • celery (optional)

Steps:

  • Cook the beans. An instant pot is fine for this application, add a glug of olive oil to the cooking broth, but do not salt. You want the beans to not be falling apart and still be sort of firm, as this is a salad.
  • Chop up the preserved lemon into small 1cm x 1cm dice
  • Dice celery into similar sized dice, if using.
  • After beans are room temperature or cooler, mix all ingredients. Add extra preserved lemon juice and olive oil and salt to taste.

Salad is super savory and stores well and tastes even better the next day and the next.

-Maggie

P.S. and I know it’s not the usual in these blog posts, but here’s an image of our scarlet runner bean plant from last summer:

scarlet-runner-bean-plant




Cook a 10 lb Pork Shoulder

Post date: 29 Mar 2020

Ingredients:

  • 10 pound pork shoulder, or other pork roast cut
  • 1.5 cups of Diamond Crystal kosher salt
  • 0.5 cup granulated sugar

Recipe: At large American grocery stores you can usually find a 10 pound pork shoulder in plastic packaging. Sometimes it’s labeled “pork butt”, “picnic”, “shoulder”, “blade roast”. These are all subtly different parts of the pig and cut differently. Rather than get into American animal husbandry practices, let’s continue with the cooking, yah?

The day you bring the pork home, and at least 12 hours before cooking, salt the roast aggressively with ~1-1.15 cups of salt. Depending on how I’m feeling, I may also use half a cup of sugar. Let hang out in the fridge. You can either cover it in plastic wrap or just leave it open in a bowl. If you choose to wrap it,make sure to put it in a bowl as well, as it will leak liquids.

Let this hang out in the fridge.

On the day of cooking, remove all liquids and pat the roast dry. Place on a wire rack on a roasting pan (it’ll leak fat as it cooks!), and roast for 6-8 hours at ~300 degrees fahrenheit. It’s done when you can push a fork into it and twist easily.

OK, now what do you do with it?

You can serve the roast, as is, bo ssam style. Great for a dinner party. Read more here.

If you’re cooking during quarantine, you may think, what can I do with a 10 pound roast and no friends? Here are some things I like to do:

  • Chop up a smaller portion–fat and solid meat, and fry (no need to add more fat) in a pan. After it’s crispy, add some apple cider vinegar and some hot sauce and maybe some water. Let the liquids boil off, stirring the meat. Taste and add more salt, etc. Eat by itself, or on top of lettuce leaves or in tortillas.
  • Another way to use a smaller portion. Let it fry and warm up in its own fat. Place at the bottom of a very large bowl. Chop up some lettuce/kale/chard/any form of greens. Boil some chinese noodles / ramen packet. Place noodles and hot water in bowl. Season with soy sauce, chili oil, chili crisp, etc. to taste. Soup noodles, yum.
  • Use as the base for making congee.
  • Chop up and stir into stir fried vegetables.
  • You get the picture. It’s endlessly versatile.

-Maggie




Lacto Hot Sauce

Post date: 05 Mar 2020

We made and bottled hot sauce to give as gifts to Maggie, Trina, Hilary, and Sharlene at the 2018 GetUp! graduation. The hot sauce itself is ‘lactofermented’, meaning that it uses natural fermentation from lactobacilli to break sugars down into lactic acid. This lactic acid provides same delicious, sour flavor you get from kosher dill pickles and kimchi; it also extends the shelf-live of the produce.

Thankfully, if you’ve grown vegetables in your garden or purchased them at a farmer’s market, it’s easy to ferment at home: there’s plenty of natural bacteria from the soil! The key technique is this: submerge vegetables in a 5% salt brine, weigh them down to prevent exposure to air, and then wait for bubbles to form. Bubbles=fermentation!

This recipe takes a weeks from start-to-finish, but could take longer based on your microclimate and house temperature.

Equipment:

  • glass or ceramic weights
    • These weigh down the produce and prevents exposure to oxygen
    • If you don’t have any, you can substitute a ziplock bag with salt brine inside. Shove it in the mouth of your jar!
  • a non-reactive container for fermentation, like a ceramic crock or glass jar of any size. Your pickling peppers and other ingredients will live here while they’re fermenting.
  • kitchen scale
  • gloves
    • To protect your fingers, etc. from residual oils in peppers, which can burn your eyes and other soft issues.
  • metal or glass non-reactive bowl
  • food processor to puree ingredients
  • optional: 5oz glass bottles for storage/serving, food mill for making smooth

Ingredients:

  • salt
    • Needs to be a non-iodized salt, like Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt. Anything iodized or with additional chemicals (like anti-caking agents) will inhibit natural fermentation.
  • carrots
    • Adds sweetness and body
  • garlic
  • peppers
    • We used habaneros, but you could easy use other hot peppers. Whichever pepper you use, you want something deeply colored and aromatic

Steps:

  • Make a 5% salt brine, by weighing a few cups of water and adding 5% of that weight in salt.
  • De-stem peppers. Weigh the product, and add 5% salt by weight in your nonreactive bowl. Let sit on the counter to sweat water out of the produce, up to overnight. When you’re ready, move the produce+accumulated water to your jar, and your weights (if using) or your ziplock bag (if using that), and cover completely with your 5% salt brine. No peppers should be exposed to oxygen when you’re done.
  • Repeat with carrots and garlic. We recommend fermenting the carrots and garlic together, but the peppers separately since they may take longer to finish.
  • Weight-wise, we recommend a 6:2:1 ratio of carrots, garlic and peppers, but you find yourself adjusting
  • You can keep this fermenting for a very long time! People do so for years. We usually in our San Francisco kitchen let vegetables ferment for 6 weeks to get to a good sourness, but in a warmer climate, as short as 4 weeks is sometimes enough.
  • When ready, food process / puree the ingredients together. Add more salt (or pepper brine) if needed to taste, or anything else you think might go well. If you have one, a food mill is great for making a smoother, less chunky product, but isn’t necessary.
  • REFRIGERATE!

-Buro + zmagg




Winter Squash Panzanella

Post date: 28 Nov 2019

I made this salad for a Thanksgiving potluck at Mapbox, wanting to make something vegan with the bounty of butternut squash from our CSA. Panzanella is definitely a ‘pattern salad’: a base of toasted (or stale) bread moistened and combined with other stuff. You can (and should!) replace the primary vegetable, toppings, and dressing with whatever is currently in-season. This recipe itself is based on the panzanella in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (which is tomato and anchovy-based), and suggestions from friends at the Garden for the Environment at an event the night before the potluck.

The salad components can be prepped the day before, except for the vegetable toppings (radishes, etc.). Prep those at the time of serving.

Salad dressing

  • 1 cup olive oil
  • 2 tbsp sherry vinegar
  • 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 4 tbsp salt-packed capers
  • 2-3 cloves of garlic, mortared with the capers
  • 1 tsp whole-grain mustard

Squash

  • 4 whole butternut squash, cut in-half and sliced into 1/2-inch half-moons
  • Toss with salt, olive oil, white pepper
  • Roast on parchment at 400F until caramelized at the edges

Bread

  • 1 loaf sourdough, cut into 1-inch cubes, tossed lightly in olive oil, and broiled to golden brown. I used a whole Tartine country loaf, but any substantial, high-gluten broad loaf works.

Toppings

  • shallots, sliced and macerated in apple cider vinegar
  • radishes, sliced
  • chives, diced
  • arugula, washed
  • roasted Whole Hazelnuts, chopped

After making the dressing, squash, bread, and toppings, assemble the salad 30-minutes prior to serving:

  1. In a large mixing bowl, toss and roughly combine the bread and the squash. Add salad dressing and let sit for 10-15 minutes.
  2. Add arugula and mix, followed by shallots, chives, and half of the hazelnuts.
  3. Adjust seasoning with salt and white pepper.
  4. Cover with remaining hazelnuts and radishes.

-Buro




(American) Pie Crust

Post date: 28 Nov 2019

  • In a food processor with a coarse handle, mix together:
    • 2/3 of 350g all-purpose flour
    • 5g salt
    • 25g sugar
  • Cover the dry-mix with:
    • 2 1/2 sticks cold, unsalted butter (sliced)
  • Pulse until combined, combine with:
    • 1/3 of 350g of flour
  • Transfer to a bowl, add 85g of water and press flour into a ball.
  • Split into two 4-inch disks, wrap, and refrigerate.
  • To bake, roll out and parbake bottom crust under pie weights at 350.



Stone Fruit Aachar

Post date: 28 Jun 2019

This is a Bengali variant of a fruit aachar/preserve that can be made with unripe, local stone fruit. Mangoes and olives variants work well too, although I haven’t tried them yet. The recipe itself a based on some commentary from an aunt, whose aachar is quite popular within my extended family.

  • Add unripe stone fruit (e.g., peaches), washed and cut coarsely, and some water (~ 1/2 cup) to a small, heavy-bottomed pot. Bring to a simmer.
  • Add sugars, about half weight of stone fruit, to pot:
    • Brown sugar
    • 3-4 tbsp, honey
    • 1 tbsp, pomegranate molasses
    • OR Nolen gur
    • For sourness: tamarind paste (whole)
  • Simmer fruit and sugar and let reduce. Cool some on the back of a spoon to test final consistency and aim for something jam-like.
  • Fold in spices:

I eyeballed this the first time I made it, and the volume measurements are calibrated for about 400g of fruit (with cores removed).

-Buro