Cebolla. Comino. Caldo.

Taco night in our house is serious business, and a lot of that stems from the fact that I found a great Mexican pulled chicken recipe that I have been using with tremendous success for the past few years.  From this recipe and several others, I've stumbled upon the secret holy trinity of Mexican cooking: onions, cumin and chicken stock.

Sure, onions in their many varieties are ubiquitous across cuisines of the world.  No, cumin is not unique to Mexican food and is probably more immediately thought of as an Indian staple spice.  Chicken stock is commonly used in any cuisine that features the chicken (yeah, that's right, all of them).  But somehow, when you mix the three of them together, the magic of Mexican food is born.  Add some tomato salsa and ground red chiles and you've got yourself a party, er, fiesta.

After about 20 minutes of simmering, these boneless, skinless, boring chicken breasts will hit 165 degrees and be bursting with flavor.  Take them out of the liquid and let them rest.  We all need to rest after we party.

Time to reduce.  You want to concentrate the flavor and thicken the sauce.  Water isn't welcome at this party. Water isn't really welcome at any party.  I like to squeeze in a little lime juice at this point to give the sauce a little tart kick.

Once the chicken is rested, it's time to pull it apart.  Almost every recipe I've seen for pulled anything says to use two forks.  Nuts to that.  I was picking up dinner from City Barbecue one night and saw a dude there pulling meat with a dough scraper.  I filed it away and used one the next time I made pulled chicken.  So much faster and easier.  As long as the meat is tender (which your chicken should be if it's cooking in liquid), all you need to do is drag the blade against the grain and the strands should separate without much effort at all.

Once the meat is pulled and the sauce is thickened, it's time to mix those two back together. You should have enough liquid to coat all of the chicken liberally.

While the chicken was simmering, I made some Mexican rice and refried beans to go along with our tacos.  Guess what went into those?  If you said "onions, cumin and chicken stock," congratulations: your short-term memory is just as good as your reading comprehension skills.

Bison burgundy: too good to share.

Dan called me out of the blue and said he was bringing something over to the house.  When he arrived, he handed me a pint container of something brown.  We're friends, so I immediately ruled out poop.  "Bison burgundy," he said before I could make a joke about poop.  "From Kitchen Little.  I didn't have enough to keep and it's too good not to share."

That's where Dan was wrong.

Beef burgundy, aka bœuf bourguignon, is a traditional stew of tough beef braised in red wine and beef stock.  From French peasant roots elevated by Escoffier* (and brought back to us American peasants by Julia Child), it truly is an amazingly flavorful dish.  Dan's preparation swapped the beef for bison, a leaner, robustly flavored meat.  I guess we could call it "buff bourguignon" if we were being clever and/or cute, but this masterful dish deserves more respect than that.

The reason that this picture shows a half-full bowl of bison burgundy is that I was hoarding it all for myself; I wanted to make sure I got as much as I wanted before I stopped guarding the bowl like a hungry dog long enough to snap a photo.  The rich, intense flavors absolutely overwhelmed my manners.  Great food, even a refined dish like this, still has the ability to bring out the animal instinct to defend it with your life and share with no one.


*As with most food origin stories, the notion that Escoffier popularized bœuf bourguignon is disputed.

Bees are on the what now?

Noted.  Bees love baklava.

Learning Chinese: Bachelor = 單身漢 (Dānshēnhàn)

 
Before I got married, I lived in an apartment above a video store near downtown Columbus.  The video store is long gone, but the Chinese restaurant next door that I used to call "The Crappy Dragon" still exists.  You know what these places are like - Americanized-Cantonese/faux-Hunan fare, often shoddily prepared - and chances are the closest Chinese restaurant to you is one of them.  These are the greasy spoon diners of American "ethnic" restaurants; a few brilliant pearls in an ocean of mediocrity.  Still, occasionally nothing hits the spot like sausage gravy and biscuits.  And, like diner fare, sometimes nothing else will do the trick like General Tso's chicken.

I used to hit The Crappy Dragon once every 2 or 3 weeks, usually on a night where there was nothing going on and I was too lazy to cook or tired of whatever leftovers were in the fridge.  My go-to Chinese comfort food meal was General Tso's chicken with white rice, a cup of hot and sour soup, and a couple of crab rangoon if I was feeling sassy.  Totally classic fat white guy meal.  The thing is, the food from The Crappy Dragon, like many of these ubiquitous Chinese restaurants, wasn't very good.  But it was close, fast and cheap, so they got my business.

My wife was out of town last night and the refrigerator was getting bare: best option was some quinoa macaroni and cheese (well, Velveeta) and a lettuce-only salad.  It was payday, so I decided to revisit my old bachelor ways.  I wasn't going back to The Crappy Dragon - it sucks and they've taken enough of my money - but I did make a carryout order with another similar Chinese place that I've had slightly better food from in the past.  Same old thing: General Tso's, hot and sour soup, crab rangoon.  Pick up in 10 minutes.

I've learned one very important rule about these kinds of Chinese restaurants: if they have hot and sour soup, try some before you order.  If it's good, the food will be good.  If it's not, go somewhere else.  I shit you not, this rule will steer you right damn near every time.  It's a foolproof indicator of a chef's talent if a dish has multiple flavor dimensions in a pleasing way.  If your hot and sour soup is not both hot and sour (or worse, neither), don't spend another dime.  Just get up and go.

I've had the soup from this place before and it made the cut last time.  Unfortunately for me this time around, my soup was bland and, in adherence to the rule, the rest of my food was craptacular as well.

Crazy thing is I don't regret my decision, even though when I walked into their empty dining room at 6:30 on Friday night I had a feeling that disappointment was inevitable.  Chinese food isn't quite in the pizza and sex "even when it's bad, it's good" category, but it does fill a nostalgic need for me every once in a while.  Just me, a plate full of greasy chicken and rice and Star Trek re-runs to keep me company, thinking about how things used to be and how much better they are now that I'm not living alone, above a video store, next door to The Crappy Dragon.

An apple a day may cost more than a doctor visit.

A late spring freeze has decimated the Michigan apple crop.  It's estimated that the crop deficiency will cost Michigan apple growers upwards of $110 million dollars and means fewer jobs for pickers and processors.  Just a friendly election year reminder that politicians don't have absolute control over the economy.

Fakeout

Here's an addendum to the pulled pork post.  Several of my friends are vegetarians and, rather than rub meat in their faces like a savage, I try to come up with an alternative entree for them to enjoy.  Often I'll try to simulate the main course I'm preparing, but a lot of that relies on factory-designed meat imposters that should be embarrassing to anyone who markets them as "food."  Anymore, I'm happy to dress up a vegetable, fruit or grain in a delicious way than lean on these paltry substitutes.

Enter the jackfruit.

I went searching for vegetarian alternatives to pulled pork and found this recipe for pulled jackfruit, an Asian staple that hasn't made it big in America because, well, it looks really weird and doesn't taste like much.  The outer section of the jackfruit has a stringy texture, almost like the spore parts of a portabella mushroom, that lend themselves to being pulled apart with forks, simulating the appearance of pulled pork.

I started by coating the separated jackfruit (the inner section is too dense to pull) in the same spice rub that I had put on the pork.  The original recipe then called for it to be toasted in a pan, but since I had the smoker running outside with the pork shoulder in it, I decided I'd top rack the jackfruit for about an hour to get a nice smokiness without overpowering the spices.

Jackfruit has a very neutral flavor, at least out of the can (I'm told fresh jackfruit is sweeter), so you have to impart it with other strong flavors.  After pulling them off the smoker, I throw them in a pot on the stove top with equal parts water and peach-chipotle BBQ sauce and let it simmer for about 30 minutes until the jackfruit softened up, at which point I started pulling the pieces apart to make them look stringy.  What came out, I have to admit, at first glance looked a little bit like pulled pork slathered in BBQ sauce.

Let's set the record straight: despite what the recipe implies, this isn't going to fool anyone into thinking that it is actually pulled pork.  It passes the eye test when pressed between a bun, but as soon as you take a bite you'll know you've been had.  That said, the jackfruit does an admirable job of absorbing flavors and this particular batch got really spicy really fast due to the intensity of the chipotle in the BBQ sauce.

The vegetarians in our party seemed to really enjoy it, so I'd probably make it again with a few adjustments to the rub and sauce to make it a little more savory and less spicy-sweet.  After all, you don't win friends with salad, but you might keep friends with jackfruit.

Create and recreate

I learned a very simple culinary rule a few years back: If what you're doing isn't adding flavor, it's probably not worth doing. Obviously we can debate that some techniques are more for textural or aesthetic enhancement and don't add much flavor (boiling pasta in water, for example), or that there's a breaking point when flavors are too complex and obscure each other as they vie for your attention. But as a general rule, if you can bolster or complement a food's flavor during the cooking process, do it; maybe you want to boil that pasta in chicken stock instead? This rule especially holds true for foods that lack naturally robust flavors, like a pork shoulder, for example.

For the competition pork, Dan and I took six opportunities to add flavor to the meat:

• Brine (pineapple juice, grenadine and smoked salt)
• Rub (Hawai'ian salt, paprika, black pepper, mustard, secret hobo spices)
• Smoke (cherry wood)
• Braise (pineapple juice)
• Sauce (we played around with a coffee BBQ sauce, but ultimately decided to omit it)
• Garnish (white balsamic & red pepper coleslaw, hickory-smoked cherries)

Good enough for a panel of foodies to give us second place; not bad for bringing in simple pulled pork and coleslaw when other contestants were slinging beef hearts and smoked ice cream.

I wanted to recreate the dish exactly, but - damn you, passage of time - fresh cherries are out of season.  I really wanted to smoke a fruit* so I settled on peaches which are at the tail edge of their ripe season right now.  This would necessitate a few changes to the recipe from the competition version.

First, pineapple juice makes a complete exit.  We had a lot of problems with pineapples during the development - they tend to want to dominate over other flavors - so we relegated them to brine and braise, where they wouldn't be as overpowering.  With peach being the featured complement, pineapple got kicked to the curb.  I started with a brine "tea" of a quart of water, 3/4 of a cup each of kosher salt and sugar, plus a few splashes of apple cider vinegar, grenadine and dried chile de arbol.

Added that to 3 more quarts of water and chilled to 38 degrees.  Pork shoulder went in and sat in the brine in the refrigerator for about 18 hours.  Probably could have used another 18 considering it was a 9 pound roast; file that little nugget away for next time.

Morning of the cook, I pull the roast out and dry it with paper towels.  It sits for an hour at room temperature and gets a slather of yellow mustard (to promote crusty "bark") and a mostly salt-less rub similar to the competition rub (the brine should have imparted enough salt to the shoulder).

Once the smoker is up to temperature - 220-230 degrees is right around magical - the shoulder goes in and stays with the lid on for 5 hours, at which point I add my fresh peaches to the smoker.  BBQ wisdom: "If you're lookin', you ain't cookin'."  While that's going, I make a peach-chipotle BBQ sauce (inspired by but not faithful to this recipe) and some side dishes (mac & cheese and a tomato cucumber salad).  After 6 hours, a few stokes of the fire and cherry log additions, it looks beautiful when I finally take it out.**

If I were in an actual barbecue competition I'd finish this roast on the smoker (adding moisture softens the bark), but since this is an attempt to replicate past glory I opt to pull the shoulder and braise it in diluted apple juice until it comes up to 190 degrees.  Problem is, I've got hungry people infiltrating my house and the shoulder's not done in time.  I slept in too long and didn't get the smoker going at the crack of dawn like I should've.  I have to make a quick fix, so I hack off a couple big chunks, chop 'em up and throw them in the oven with some of the braising liquid until they come up to temp.  Upside is I served everybody at a reasonable hour, downside is I didn't get the stringy muscle fiber consistency I wanted.  Flavor is dead on, though.  Let's eat.  Note Dan getting first dibs on the pork while my lovely wife heads straight to the mac & cheese.

There's still about 6 pounds of pork in the braise and I make sure that I get the consistency I was going for with that.  You can't rush barbecue, ever, which I think is why I'm drawn to it.  It's a throwback to a point before life got all "on-demand" and "just-in-time" and "instant gratification."  Good things still come to those who wait.

*C'mon people, it's 2012.  That's not funny anymore.
**That's still funny.

Doesn't that just pull your pork?

A few months ago, my buddy Dan told me that the Food Experiments cooking competition was coming to town and that the event's theme was "smoke." I've had decent success as an amateur backyard BBQ chef, so when Dan told me I should sign up I jumped at the chance (as long as he would be my teammate at the cook-off).
Long story short, Dan and I painstakingly tested our entry over the course of the month leading up to the competition, a turn on Hawai'ian kalua pig that we called "Pulled Pork Will Be My Constant": pork shoulder brined in pineapple juice, smoked salt and grenadine, rubbed with red Hawaiian salt and smoked paprika, smoked over cherry wood for 7 hours, then braise-finished in the oven with more pineapple juice. We garnished it with a balsamic vinegar and red pepper coleslaw and chopped hickory-smoked cherries. It looked a little something like this:

In addition to the jury panel of esteemed Columbus chefs, critics and food celebrities, there was also an audience vote among the 200+ attendees of the event. Our dish ended up winning second place in both categories and was the only dish of the 17 entries that placed in the top 3 of both the jury and the audience. A pretty neat trick, even if Ricky Bobby might disagree.Fast forward to present day, when our mutual friend and ex-bandmate Mike came to town. He asked us for details about the dish and the competition and it occurred to me that we had not documented our process. I decided the best thing to do would be to try to replicate the dish and keep a record of it. Hence, the birth of the Braise Jebus food blog. More back story than you ever could have wanted. Sorry.
I promise I'll get to the actual cooking shortly...