Mexican Style Horchata

My wife and I typically hit up Anna's Taqueria whenever we're in Allston and want a quick, cheap bite to eat. We were in the area the other day and decided to grab lunch there. We each grabbed a super quesadilla with carnitas, and my wife ordered a side of horchata for us to share. I've had horchata a number of times before, but it's been a while and drinking it again the other day reminded me just how much I enjoy it.

When I got home, I found a number of recipes for horchata online. Spanish style horchatas are made from chufa nuts, but they're incredibly hard to find. Almost all of the Mexican style recipes I found called for white rice, water, cinnamon stick, sugar, and milk. These are all ingredients already in my pantry, so I decided to give it a go.

Using my Vitamix, I first blended about a cup of long grain white rice until it was a fine powder.

I emptied the rice powder into a small container and then added about three and a half cups of warm water to it along with one cinnamon stick. I stored this mixture in my fridge for about 24 hours to allow the cinnamon and rice flavor to infuse.

 

After the mixture finished steeping, I removed the cinnamon stick and then blended everything together until smooth. A lot of recipes recommend straining out the rice solids using cheesecloth at this point, but I didn't have any and even the finest strainer I had didn't make any difference. I finally added about a cup of sugar and 2-3 cups of whole milk, stirring until incorporated.

Add a dash of ground cinnamon when serving. Here's the final result again, which was pretty close to Anna's version:

Note: you can add a shot of espresso to the horchata to mix things up and add an interesting spin on the traditional version.

Sous Vide Pork Loin, Five Spice, Hoisin BBQ Sauce, Gailan

This past weekend my wife and I picked up a pork loin from BJ's for around $3 a pound. We decided to go Asian and do a riff on the roast pork you often find at Chinatown BBQ joints. Chinese roast pork, also called "siu yuk" or "sio bak", is typically pork belly that is marinated with Chinese five spice and then roasted to perfection until the skin is crisp.

With the pork loin we purchased, I rubbed the meat all over with Chinese five spice powder and let this sit for about 24 hours in the refrigerator. After coming back home from work tonight, I seasoned the meat with salt and then sous vide it for about an hour and a half at 144 degrees. After taking the meat out of the immersion circulator, I dried off the exterior of the meat and seared it in a hot pan with some oil.

As I was sous viding the meat, I cooked up some plain white rice and blanched some Chinese broccoli tips in salted boiling water. I also made a quick Asian barbeque sauce of sorts, combining in a small sauce pan a quarter cup of water, a half tablespoon granulated garlic powder, and around 4 tablespoons each of hoisin sauce, ketchup, and honey.

The meat was incredibly tender and moist and had great flavor from the barbeque sauce, which was savory from the hoisin, sweet from the honey, acidic from the ketchup, and fragrant and aromatic from the five spice blend.

 

 

Sous Vide Miso Chicken, Garlic Tofu Emulsion, Carrot Puree, Celery

I'm a big Top Chef fan, and the most recent season in Seattle just finished up with Kristen Kish emerging as the winner. Kristen dominated all season long until that one week where she got screwed by Josie and got voted off unfairly, so I was glad to see her battle through Last Chance Kitchen and come back all the way to win. She also works for Barbara Lynch at Stir, so it was also great to see a chef from the Boston area succeed and represent!

A few weeks ago during the elimination challenge of Episode 9, Kristen put a twist on a familiar classic - chicken pot pie. She put together a deconstructed version and added some Asian flare to the dish by marinating the chicken breast in white miso and making a garlic and tofu emulsion as the "gravy". I thought it was a really creative way to reinvent the dish, and I was inspired this weekend to make it myself at home.

After my wife and I had lunch today in Quincy at Pho Countryside, we stopped by Kan Man supermarket to grab some groceries. We picked up some celery, carrots, white miso, chicken breasts, tofu, and garlic. Later in the afternoon, I started preparing dinner.

The chicken takes longest to cook, so I started with that first. I mixed together some white miso with  chopped herbs like rosemary, thyme, and parsley and then smeared this all over the chicken breasts. I sealed the breasts in a Ziploc bag, removed as much air as possible using the water displacement method, and then dropped the bag into my Sous Vide Supreme at 140 degrees F for about one hour.

I then put together the carrot puree, first simmering some peeled and chopped carrots until fork tender and then blending in my Vitamix with some carrot juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.

I also brought some chicken broth up to a boil and then poured the hot broth over some celery that I finely sliced using a mandoline. I let the celery poach in the warm broth until I was ready to plate.

For the garlic and tofu emulsion, I first cleaned a head of garlic and then blanched the cloves in boiling water six times, replacing the water each time. The blanching of the garlic helps remove the sharp, raw garlic flavor. I then added some half and half (Kristen uses soy milk), salt, and tofu, simmering the garlic cloves until they were tender. All of this went into my Vitamix to be blended together.

After the chicken breasts cooked in the immersion circulator for about an hour, I took them out and put them in a sautee pan over medium-high heat. I added in some agave syrup and some of the chicken broth the celery slices were soaking in. The syrup and broth combined with some of the miso on the exterior of the chicken to form a nice glaze. After a few minutes in the pan, I took the chicken breasts out of the pan to rest to let the juices reabsorb and redistribute before slicing.

With all the components prepared, there was nothing left to do except plate up and eat! Overall, I thought the flavors combined well and were subtle yet sophisticated. The chicken which was sous vide was incredibly moist and tender. My favorite part was the miso glaze. There wasn't much to complain about but if I had to criticize one thing, I would say that there weren't many contrasts in texture. The chicken, carrot puree, and soy garlic emulsion all were velvety and smooth in consistency. There was some crunch from the celery but not much as they were lightly poached. Kristen's dish includes olive oil dumplings, which I did not make, but that wouldn't have added any texture either. Overall though, the dish was very refined and tasted great. Here's the final dish again.

Braised Rabbit, Red Wine, Oyster Mushrooms

This past weekend while grocery shopping, I noticed some rabbit available at C-Mart. I don't think I've ever seen rabbit sold at any of the mainstream supermarkets around Boston, so this was a bit exciting for me (I know, a very food geeky thing to say). A few months ago on our honeymoon in France, my wife and I enjoyed a rustic rabbit dish, and with the rabbit I picked up, I decided to recreate something similar.

Since it's not widely available, I haven't had a chance to cook rabbit before. The rabbit I purchased was whole, which required some butchering to disassemble the different parts. A few videos I found on YouTube were very helpful, as was an article I found on Saveur's website.

The first step was removing the front legs...

Then removing the hind legs...a helpful tip one of the videos gave was using your hands to manually crack the hip joint and then slice through the joint.

After removing both sets of legs, I separated the loin and saddle and cut them into smaller pieces. A Chinese cleaver is helpful with this task, but a regular chef's nice will do the job as well.

After butchering the rabbit, I seared the pieces in some vegetable oil and then removed them to a separate dish...

 

I then sweated down some chopped onion, carrot and celery...

 



I added back the rabbit pieces with some thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, chopped garlic, and oyster mushrooms. I also deglazed the pan with some red wine and poured in a few cups of chicken stock and tomato puree.

The whole pan then went into a 350 degree F oven for about 20-25 minutes.

And here's the final dish again. This was a simple, rustic preparation of rabbit that was easy and quick to prepare and very tasty. The dish brought us right back to France and reminded us a lot of the rabbit we had at L'Ardoise. The only thing I would do differently next time is braise the legs and dark meat (as we did this time) but save the loin and saddle, which are leaner and can dry out, for a different preparation (e.g. roulade via sous vide).

Momofuku Style Pork Shoulder, Soba, Poached Egg

 

I've only been to Momofuku Ssam Bar in NYC once, but the one time I did eat there, the food was great. One of Momofuku Ssam Bar's most famous dishes is the Bo Ssam, which essentially is a slow roasted pork shoulder. Over the weekend when I saw pork shoulder boston butt available at BJ's, I thought of Momofuku's version and wanted to try to recreate it.

The NY times has a recipe posted online for the Bo Ssam, and it basically calls for doing a cure on the pork shoulder, then slow cooking it in the oven for several hours. In making my version, I decided to change a few steps in the process.

Instead of rubbing the salt and sugar curing mixture on the pork, I created a brine using Modernist Cuisine's basic brine recipe of 7% salt and 3% sugar. I figured the brine would allow the sugar and salt to penetrate the meat more quickly. Before work in the morning, I removed the bone from the pork shoulder and put the pork into the brine.

Here's a picture of the pork shoulder I purchased from BJ's...

 

Deboning the pork shoulder...

 



Measuring the water for the brine (although I really didn't end up needing this much)...

 

....and measuring the salt (not pictured is the sugar)...

 

 

 

Brining the pork shoulder in the fridge...

 

When I came back home from work later that night, I removed the pork pieces from the brine, rinsed them off, and placed them in new Ziploc bags. MC recommends letting any protein rest for a period of time after brining to let the salt finish diffusing throughout the meat, but I just skipped over this step as I wanted to get the cooking started so the pork would be ready for dinner the next day.

Instead of roasting the pork in the oven, I decided to sous vide it for a couple of reasons. One, I had other things to do (e.g. sleep, go to work, run errands) and didn't want to have to baby sit a hot oven. Two, the low and slow cooking of sous vide would really benefit the tough cut that is pork shoulder. So I set my Sous Vide Supreme to 160 degrees F and then dropped the pork in to cook. I put the pork in around 6pm and let it cook for the next 24 hours, taking it out the following day to eat for dinner.

Pictured above is what the pork shoulder looks like right out of the water bath. As you can see, a lot of liquid and fat has been expelled by the pork.

Don't throw away all of the accumulated juices in the bags. The fat can be skimmed off, and the remaining pork liquid can be used later as a pork broth or base for a soup (e.g. ramen, other type of sauce).

 

I took the sous vide pork shoulder and then placed it in a roasting tray. I covered the pork with brown sugar and then blasted it in a hot 500 degree F oven for 10-15 minutes until the pork was nicely caramelized and brown, as shown below.



 

After the pork came out of the oven, I shredded all of the meat and mixed it together with the sugar and juices at the bottom of the roasting pan.

As I was preparing the pork, I prepped the other ingredients for the dish. David Chang recommends eating the pork shoulder with lettuce cups and all kinds of different condiments, but the pork is very versatile and I decided to use the pork for a noodle dish instead.

Here's what I used for the noodle dish - lime, scallions, oyster mushrooms, one thai bird chili (seeds removed), two garlic cloves, soba, and a few eggs (to be poached).

Soba cooking in boiling water...

Slices of garlic being fried in oil and then reserved for garnish...

Oyster mushrooms being sautéed in the garlic infused oil left over in the pan...

After poaching the two eggs in some simmering water and white vinegar, I plated up the dish. I mixed the soba noodles with some ponzu, sesame oil, and rice vinegar and piled a mound in the center of a deep bowl. On top of the noodles went the scallions, sauteed mushrooms, chili, fried garlic slices, and poached egg. I placed some pork next to the noodles and then microplaned some fine lime zest all over the top. Here's the final dish once again: