the SIMMER blog

how a recipe happens

When you first start to cook, you follow recipes like holy writ. It's only natural. They're instructions, after all. The contract you make with the recipe writer or cookbook or poster on Epicurious is that if you do what they tell you in the order they tell you, it will turn out delicious.

But the world of cooking is both bigger and smaller than that.

Bigger, because there are thousands of recipes all for the same dish, any one of which you could follow to get a pretty good result, so the recipe you follow is only one of so very many options, not a scientific formula. Smaller, because if you learn the basic techniques, all the instructions about how long to brown something or roast something or melt something will seem extraneous and unnecessarily fussy. Once you cook enough, "8 to 10 minutes" becomes superfluous. It's done when it's done, and you can tell when it's done. In its way, it's magic.

And sometimes recipes just happen. Take, for instance, this chicken salad:

 

You can follow the recipe, but there isn't anything particularly "right" about it. It happened because it happened. It looks like this:

• 1 whole roasted chicken breast  (left over from musakhan)
• 2 ribs celery, cubed (required for chicken salad, right?)
• 1 T mayonnaise (ditto)
• 1/2 yellow pepper, cubed  (because I was roasting yellow peppers for something else and they all fit on the baking sheet except one half of one pepper)
• 1 T Trader Joe's garlic mustard aioli  (bought to serve with prosciutto and cheese, but how often do we really do that?)
• 1 red chili pepper, seeded and minced (trying to get through a whole 10-pack)
• 1 t Penzey's Mural of Flavor blend (which came free with my order last month)
• 3 cornichons, diced (same excuse as the aioli... and I used three because there were three left in the jar) 
• pinch of salt

So it's a delicious chicken salad, and I would give this recipe to anyone who asks what my chicken salad recipe is, but all told? It's a loose outline filled in with improvisation. As most recipes really are.

how color tastes

In the words of Anne Burrell, "brown food tastes good". Well, that's true as a guideline, but not a rule.

Because if you're serving guests, you're probably not going to want to slap this down on the table:

(it's the orange-star anise chicken thighs from All About Braising and it is utterly delicious, but you couldn't pay me to serve it to people I'm not related to; scallions, you're not fooling anyone)

Visual impact matters. I'll keep the lesson brief, because I don't want to get all fiddly about suggesting you buy fresh herbs just for a spot of green on your food, nor do I want to suggest that you should shell out twice as much for the purple potatoes just because they're purple.

But if you get the chance to play around with color, even if it doesn't affect the taste, it kind of feels like it does. Oranges in cardamom syrup over Greek yogurt: fabulous dessert. Doing the same thing with cara cara oranges, blood oranges, and clementines? Exponentially more fabulous.

 

the small world of the internet

So a few weeks ago, I made musakhan for the first time, thanks to a woman in the Netherlands who I've never met and wouldn't recognize in person.

 

There are any number of food communities on the Web -- from Serious Eats to Chowhound and beyond -- but my favorite is eGullet, and that's the one that has influenced my development as a cook the most.

So if it weren't for a woman in the Netherlands looking for ideas for her husband's birthday dinner, I never would have found Paula Wolfert's recipe for musakhan, which is awesome and delicious and wonderful for a party, and also a great way to use up the sumac I ordered from Penzey's for completely unknown reasons.

But if it weren't for me, she never would have served butternut squash and chickpea salad at the birthday dinner in question, since that was what I suggested when she asked for ideas for a warm vegetable side. So it's total fair trade. What goes around (toward Europe) comes around (back toward Philly).

Speaking of the internet, and things that go in two directions, today my Intrepid column is about... um, this blog. Hello! Welcome to the blog! I'm officially relaunching and trying to get on a semi-regular update schedule. Hopefully we can start drawing a crowd.

spatchcock!

Since I already have chicken on the brain, this seems as good a time as any to discuss my favorite food verb of all time: SPATCHCOCK.

Really, it's like butterflying, but you cut all the way through. Also known as "cutting a chicken in half."

But just saying "tonight's chicken will be cut in half" isn't nearly as evocative, is it?

SPATCHCOCK!

Incidentally, besides being fun to say, it helps the chicken cook much faster, and if you're going to serve the darn thing to two people, it's just as easy to cut it beforehand as it is to try to carve the thing afterward. You do need special equipment: a pair of poultry shears. I wouldn't try to hack through a chicken's backbone with your average chef's knife or santoku. The other thing spatchcocking enables you to do is to brown the chicken in a pan on top of the stove before putting it in the oven for roasting. I did a side-by-side test once and at least on my chicken, that step didn't seem to make a bit of difference. This isn't Mythbusters: try it for yourself.

(incidentally, those orange things on the side are carrots that I waffle-cut on the mandoline; that one I can save you the trouble on; don't bother)

no brine before its time

Picking up where we left off... ah yes, the magic of the brine.

So if you put sugar in your brine and you don't rinse it off before roasting, you get that icky burny blackness. Now, some amount of caramelization is good, in general. Roast peppers wouldn't be the same without the char, and just last night I had some out-of-the-world vegetables that had blackened beautifully at the bottom of a roasting pan with lamb at the center. But for chicken, you're not looking for black. You're looking for a gorgeous golden color. And if you can get it, golden and crisp is the goal.

Like this:

 

 

Mmmm, chicken porn.

(let's hope that none of you found this page by Googling "chicken porn"... dude, that's just wrong)

My basic brine for chicken involves 24 hours in the brine -- flipping over halfway through -- and then another 12 hours or so in the fridge uncovered. This air-dries the skin and helps it to get crisp during the roasting. Also helping the crisp factor: high-heat roasting, at 450 degrees.

And the basic brine?

• several cups hot water
• 1/2 c kosher salt
• 1 T peppercorns
• 1 t juniper berries
• 1 t allspice berries
• 6 cloves
• 6 cardamom pods
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 star anise
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 cinnamon stick

Like I said before, you can nudge the numbers all around on this. Tweak and see what happens. I was surprised, actually, with the dried habanero I added last time -- it didn't seem to have any effect at all in the flavor.

By the way, I apologize for the brine pun, and I promise to cut back on the puns, but hey -- that was pretty restrained when you consider that my brine recipe sometimes includes thyme.

 

brine of the ancient mariner

Yeah, I know. Pun titles. Pfft. But... couldn't resist.

When it comes to roast chicken, I'm a bit of a brine-a-holic. I rarely roast a chicken without soaking it in some kind of salt solution for 24-ish hours beforehand. And I'm not the only one. The interwebs are packed with brine-loving cooks, jostling and refining and experimenting to figure out the best brine recipe and technique.

So writing a post on brine is like writing a post on... I don't know, plot. Far too much to sum up. And for many, a matter of preference.

So this is more of a brine primer. Just the very beginning of the idea.

My usual brine has about a half cup of kosher salt in it, so even 24 hours in the juice isn't too much. A lot of people also put sugar in their brine, but this can be tricky: if you don't rinse the bird off before you roast it, the sugar burns. Then your bird looks like this:

 

Delicious, but burnedish.

I usually also throw in: cracked peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon, cardamom, bay leaves, and a sliced lemon.  I've also tried all of the following: mustard seed, fennel, juniper, allspice, vanilla, rosemary, tarragon. But it's fun to experiment with what you've got on hand. Tonight's brine has chunks of ginger and a dried habanero. We'll see how that goes.

enchiladas (un poco mas)

Okay, one more, then I'll shut up about enchiladas for a while.

Things I have put in enchiladas:

• canned black beans with shredded chicken and roasted red peppers

• Rancho Gordo yellow-eye beans, leeks, and leftover tarragon cream sauce

• homemade ropa vieja with leftover frozen Trader Joe's lentils

• BBQ chicken and homemade refried beans

• frozen corn and white sweet potatoes

• Rancho Gordo Christmas Limas and braised scallions

• leftover pot roast and fresh tomatillos

Things I would totally try putting in enchiladas given half a chance:

• pork shoulder cooked in sriracha and garlic (this is how I braise chicken thighs)

• string cheese

• leftover fried chicken (deboned)

• duck

• white beans and bacon

• did I mention string cheese? just, like, a whole slab of it.

Obviously there are also various amounts and types of garlic, hot peppers, cheeses, chili powders, and whatnot involved. And there's no reason the sauce has to be tomato sauce, but that's generally how it goes.