pulled beef bbq grits

Grits are not something that I normally go to as a side dish. I have my New England upbringing to blame, but a recent trip through the Carolinas may have changed that.

I have long wanted to visit the city of Charleston SC for various reasons. The food, the flora, the antebellum architecture, the colorful history– all compelling draws. Underlying these was a romanticized curiosity about a city that had spawned and/or inspired many of my favorite authors– and sustained me through the 850 mile drive.

We arrived in Charleston late on a Sunday night. My husband, who had driven the entire way, opted to hang back in the hotel while I went out, hungry and restless, in search of local flavor. I found an old, established restaurant not far from the hotel and ordered a Dark 'n Stormy and Shrimp and Grits. The cocktail was an antidote to my road-weariness. The Shrimp and Grits, though lacking finesse in presentation and execution, was soothing and comforting.

Strolling back to the hotel, I was hyper-aware of my surroundings. Flickering gas lanterns lit the cobbled sidewalk. Soft breezes carried the mingled scents of decay, gardenias and salt marsh and the sound of soulful blues drifting from a distant nightclub. Was it my overactive imagination or the rum that caused me to believe that I could feel the stirrings of the ghosts, angels and demons that haunt the city? The whole time, I was thinking about the Shrimp and Grits– not about it's flaws– but about how eating the dish was like riding a bullet shot straight into the heart of a place.

I ordered cheese grits for breakfast the next day and noted how comfortable they were with eggs. I ordered them again, two days later in Asheville NC, with some excellent BBQ and marveled at how perfectly they foiled the tangy/sweet/smoky sauce and succulent meat.

The trip continued with stops in Virginia and Pennsylvania, where I picked up more memories of places, people, and food. I indulged in extraordinary tasting menus that were masterful, poetic, and delicious. I returned home weary from travel, yet revitalized, and– strangely– craving grits with BBQ sauce.

beer-braised pulled short ribs

bbq grits

purple snow pea salad

rau ram

To make bbq grits: Bring 1 cup of beer to a boil. Stir in 1/4 cup corn grits, reduce heat to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until beer is absorbed and grits are creamy. Stir in 1/4 cup bbq sauce and 2 Tablespoons smoked butter.

bbq sheet

This is a 12" x 20" sheet of dehydrated bbq sauce.

Sweet Baby Ray's– straight out of the bottle. Spread on silpat, 130F. 8 hours.

Pliable when warm, brittle when cool. Fun stuff.

I'd love to see what an artist/sculptor could do with this.

scallop fennel bearnaise

What would you do if you were served a broken bearnaise?

Would you think that it was a mistake and send it back to the kitchen?

Or would you recall that Fernand Point wrote in Ma Gastronomie "It takes years of practice for the result to be perfect" and chalk it up to inexperience?

What if you learned that it was broken intentionally?

Would you be curious to know why?

Or outraged that someone would mess with 170 years of tradition?

Can something be fixed if it's not broken?

Or does it need to be broken to be fixed?

scallop mousseline

fennel: bulb, fronds, green seeds, pollen

smoked bearnaise

caviar

smoked butter

When you start at the source, the possibilities are endless.

Heavy cream smoked over hickory chips.

Smoky butter and buttermilk: two products for the price of one.

Full, deep penetration of flavor: priceless.

A few tips that I've learned about making butter:

cream must be thoroughly chilled before churning– overnight is best.

after churning, turn cream out into sieve and let drain thoroughly at room temperature (the fat globules will stick together easier when soft).

tossing and pressing on the fat globules while they are draining will also make it easier to cream and eliminates the "washing step". With infused cream, washing with water seems to dilute flavor and wastes buttermilk.

ICC 2009: the dishes

The 4th annual Starchefs International Chefs Congress took place last week in NYC. Once again, it has proven to be a fountainhead of creativity for chefs, mixologists, and industry professionals. I could wax on at great length about the ideas and inspiration presented there, but instead, I'll let you see for yourself.

Richard Blais Workshop: Breakfast, in B Minor

smoked corned beef hash sausage, buckwheat pancakes, whipped maple, iced coffee, brown butter.

David Bouley Paris to Tokyo: French Cuisine, Japanese Techniques

miso black cod, black onion powder

Yoshihiro Murata The Quest for Umami

Modern kaiseki; an homage to autumn.

vegetables with kuzu jelly and aromatic kombu dashi.

April Bloomfield Pig, Pig, Pig

slow poached St-Canut suckling pork belly, onion puree, deep-fried garlic confit, fried pig ears, puffed skin.

Pierre Gagnaire Creativity a la Minute

Le maitre de Cuisine takes on a mystery basket of American ingredients. He prepares 3 dishes plus 3 alter-dishes from leftover components.

top: duck and shrimp sauteed in duck fat, teardrop tomatoes. alter-dish: langoustine bouillion, kale, beet and asian pear puree, micro-greens butter. bottom: almond and toasted flour crumble, salmon belly, scallions, pequeno cucumbers, fresh dates, thyme, honey.

Johnny Iuzzini, Sam Mason, Alex Stupak Three Men and a Dessert

Actually, three men and three desserts.

top: Alex Stupak's "Apple Pie" (sauteed apple mosaic tiles, pecan shards, whipped cider, vanilla ice cream with liquid caramel center. bottom: Sam Mason's "Jello Shot" (bbq sauce-infused whisky, watermelon) missing: Johnny Iuzzini's "Dirt Pot" (chocolate pudding, soil, and agar noodle 'gummi worms')

Jose Andres American Cuisine Through a Spanish Lens

"Tom Collins" carbonated spheres

Masaharu Morimoto Hook, Line, and Sinker

raw fluke, cooked eel

Rohini Dey and Maneet Chauhan The Deal with Fusion

India meets Latin-America

Tandoori Skirt Steak, sauteed spinach, fried plantains

Juan Mari Arzak Techniques From Arzak Laboratory

top: seared tuna with blackened tuna skin emulsion. bottom: "Lunar Rock" orange, passionfruit, milk chocolate, black sesame, red wine. Last picture shows the dish glowing on a custom LED-lighted plate.

Sean Brock Getting Down with Lowcountry Cuisine

top: "the garden" bottom: "hoppin' john"

Rick Tramonto The Birth of Modern American Cuisine

lavender lamb loin with toasted almond espuma and chocolate-red wine sauce

Nils Noren and Dave Arnold High-Tech Delicious

Mokume-Gane fish and lamb, pumpernickel ice cream, curried apple and fennel

The descriptions of the dishes are from memory (which sometimes fails me). I would appreciate any corrections/clarifications.

For a day-by-day wrap up, go to starchefs.com

For more photos and descriptions, check out docsconz's blog. John photographed everything.

tomato summer pudding

Summer is over and I'm feeling remiss in not having made summer pudding– a great use for day-old bread and soft, juicy fruits and berries. There are many variations of this old-fashioned British dessert, but essentially it involves filling a bread-lined mold with sweetened fruit, then weighting it down to compact the fruit, causing the juices to flow and saturate the bread. I've always viewed it as a sort of unbaked pie; the only instance where I can forgive a soggy crust.

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are fruits, yet they are rarely treated as such. Their high levels of glutamate give them an umami flavor that is read as savory. Umami has a synergy with sweet that may explain our affinity for sweet/savory combinations and why a ripe tomato, with its addition of acid, is such a complete gustatory delight.

tomato summer pudding [honey almond bread, heirloom tomato confiture]

olive oil ice cream

perfect apple pie

A standard of perfection is as fluid as the emotions that define and measure it. Because it is an arbitrary judgement, it evolves with time and varies from person to person, with no one being wrong.

I thought that the very first apple pie that I made was perfect because it looked like the picture in the cookbook. It came out of the oven all golden and full of promise. Everything but its appearance was a disappointment.

I had piled the apples high in the center and carefully draped the top crust over them, but when I cut into it, the top crust collapsed into the cavity that was left by the shrunken apples. And although the crust was crisp on the outside– inside, it was pasty from the steam created by the cooking apples (even though I had cut vents in it). The filling, too, was a disaster. I had used the wrong apples (this was before I understood the difference between a cooking apple and an eating apple) and had sliced them too thin, causing them to break down into mush. And even though I had followed the recipe precisely, the juices turned into starchy glop.

In all of my subsequent attempts at achieving my vision of pie perfection, I came to the realization that tossing a bunch of ingredients into a sealed crust, with no way of adjusting the texture and flavor as it cooked, was a leap of faith.

At one point, I thought that I had found the perfect apple pie when I tasted Tarte Tatin: crisp, flaky pastry; crisp-tender caramelized apples, cooked only in butter and sugar. It set a new standard in texture and flavor, but it wasn't really a pie– not in the American-as-apple-pie sense.

Later, I discovered that blind-baking the bottom crust ensured that it would be crisp and flaky all the way through, and that caramelizing the apples separately allowed me full control of their texture, But then there was the problem of the top crust. Not wanting to compromise the perfectly cooked apples with further cooking, I topped the compressed apple filling with pre-baked streusel crumbs. By my standards, I had created the perfect apple pie, but it was a Dutch apple pie– not the double-crusted, golden-domed, All-American apple pie.

I don't know what took me so long to figure out that the top crust could also be pre-baked and then 'glued' to the bottom crust to produce the iconic form with all of the components cooked separately to their respective states of perfection, but I'm glad that I did. It reinforces my belief that techniques are sometimes perpetuated because of tradition, not because they are perfect, and in the search for perfection– everything needs to be reexamined.

peach melba pie

frozen raspberry ice cream… cold peach curd… warm peach compote… all wrapped up in flaky pastry…

How?

corn cake

Autumn always catches me off guard.

Summer lulls me into a false sense of permanence. The world feels right and full of possibilities when the days are filled with warmth and sunshine that extends late into the evening. I'll certainly miss the seamless transitions from indoors to out and the sound of birdsong in the morning and crickets at night. My feet will miss the freedom of flip flops. Most of all, I'll miss the flavors of summer.

For today, at least, there are ears of corn from the farm up the road. There are oxheart tomatoes from my mother's garden. There are blackberries from the brambles in the woods. And there is a bushel of peaches from a generous tree. Summer's last hurrah.

microwave corn cake

peach pudding

tomato meringue

brown buttermilk

blackberry

calendula

Download recipe: Microwave corn cake

caramel corn donut

In the last post, Larry P. left a comment describing Johnny Iuzzini's deep-fried chocolate ganache "doughnut". I assumed it was from his book Dessert Fourplay, which I own, but have only read cursorily. Sure enough, I found it on pages 170 & 171. I really need to get to know this book better.

As Larry pointed out, Johnny Iuzzini's doughnut features a creamy ganache blended with methylcellulose to hold it together while frying, and sodium alginate to allow it to be encapsulated in a calcium bath. The doughnut are then dipped in egg, coated with panko, and deep fried. Larry successfully executed the doughnuts in this post.

After succeeding at producing a cake with the frosting baked inside, my thoughts immediately turned to an old donut fantasy. One of my most gratifying achievements in baking was making a yeast donut that rivaled those found in donut shops. For awhile, I became a bit obsessed with the idea of making a filled ring donut. I abandoned the idea when I couldn't achieve the desired results.

Revisiting the idea with new hope and armed with a viable technique, I set out to encapsulate the filling and layer it between yeast dough. Then I reasoned that encapsulating might not be necessary as the dough itself would act as a capsule, and that adding methocel to the filling would stabilize it and help it keep it's shape.

The good news is that it worked.

The bad news is that the textures suffered in the process.

The filling– popcorn-infused cream and fresh corn juice, reduced and enriched with butter– lost it's fluid creaminess and became more of a custard. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I preferred the texture before heating. The yeast dough, which is very soft and wet and a challenge to work with, but produces the most ethereally light and fluffy donuts, turned out sodden and heavy. I suspect that the weight of the filling inhibited the final rise and that the moisture that escaped during cooking became trapped inside the dough.

As a control, I fried a round of dough (without the hole) and filled it with the cream (without the methocel) post-cooking by piping it in through a hole poked in the side. The textures were notably better: thin, crisp crust gives way to pillowy-soft dough; creamy filling spills out. This is the recipe that I am including here because, at least for now, I can't improve upon it.

Download recipe: caramel corn donuts