Content about Main Course
October 25, 2011
Rules for success, including porchetta
Ed. note: This is the third post in a "Repertoire" series on the interplay of food and style, with our friends The Midwestyle. We're helping their readers learn a few recipes, and they're teaching us a few things about doing it in style.
To say you’re an accomplished person is putting it lightly. That time you summited Kilimanjaro during a snow storm. The month you took a vow of silence. The day all the...
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October 13, 2011
An Argument for Grains and Vegetables
I’ve worked enough days in my life, from my desk at home to mind-numbing office temp gigs, to have developed some theories on lunch. To me, the working lunch is a series of balances: it should be fast, yet not fast-food; it should be a break from work, but not so indulgent you can’t get moving again; it should be fulfilling, but not a cause of sluggishness. Lunch should work for you, but so often it’s the other way around...
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August 22, 2011
Saving andouille from the supermarket.
This didn't start off as a gumbo mission, though I did end up there (more to come on that front soon.) No, the saga began simply: about three weeks ago I needed andouille for a Dinner Tonight. All I could find at the grocery store was a product that claimed to be the right stuff, but had all the character of cheap bologna and about as much spice as, well, cheap bologna. I was angry.
Then I drank too much whiskey and started to dream...
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July 22, 2011
No offense, but you're probably doing it wrong
There's a lot of misconception when it comes to "barbecue." The problem is the word itself. It's used as a synonym for grilling, refers to the grill itself, or to the meat being grilled; it also has a sauce named after it; and sometimes it's just the word for the party itself held outdoors in somebody's backyard. What, actually, is "barbecue"?
American purists see things a little differently. To them...
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July 8, 2011
Cooking from Chicago's New Dose Market, Happening Again This Sunday
The Italian bean salad has been with me a long time, and for good reason. I've made some variation of beans, herbs, and olive oil dozens of times over the past few years and I never get tired of it. When it comes to the relationship between deliciousness and effort, this one gets it exactly right. It's about as easy as mixing the ingredients together and letting the flavors develop, then it's ready to bring to...
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March 15, 2011
A quicker, easier process than the whole brisket
Corned beef is one of the more basic and surprising kitchen experiments. But I think that people still think it's pretty nuts. I'm staying in California for a couple weeks, and had to buy the ingredients, cook, photograph, and eat this project while staying at someone else's house (sorry for the lack of pictures). First of all--it's really tough cooking somewhere you don't have all your familiar tools! But I...
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February 28, 2011
From Bone Marrow to Saffron
Learning how to make risotto at home was one of the more liberating experiences of my early culinary career. The idea that I could create a perfectly legitimate risotto by just buying arborio rice and stirring like mad, was enough to make me wonder what else I couldn’t cook. I’m not going to say it single-handedly helped launch this blog and my writing career, but it was crucial. It was the moment that I looked around the...
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February 17, 2011
And: Should Risotto Spread?
If you’re a Top Chef junkie like me then you probably remember that Tre got kicked off episode 8 this season after serving a risotto that didn’t “spread.” At least, that’s what judge Tom Colicchio said. It’s always hard to know exactly why contestants are booted off the show when you can't taste the food, but this was one of those cases where you could visibly see that his risotto sat up in a bowl...
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January 25, 2011
What's your favorite way?
Having roasted many, many chickens in my cooking life, I've come to the opinion that there is no way to roast a chicken without some kind of opinion. You may get away with tossing an untrussed chicken into the oven with a shower of salt, maybe a lemon in the cavity, and calling it dinner, pretending to be as careless as possible. But that's still an opinion. So is planning days ahead of time brining it and messing around with...
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December 14, 2010
How to make chopped (not pulled) pork
Just add sauce...
Does anyone have the recipe for Allen and Son's barbecue sauce, because I'll lay down a sizable chunk of change to get my hands on it. It's one my favorite barbecue restaurants in the country, and it's almost all down to that tangy, vineger based sauce. It doesn't coat the meat like a thick Kansas City-style sauce, but seems to disappear into the meat, making each bite acidic, spicy, and addictive....
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November 8, 2010
Thailand-style fried chicken
The crackliest chicken you can imagine.
I caught your attention with that title, didn't I? Well, the same thing happened to me, when I stumbled on a recipe in The Atlantic.com's food section in a post about Bangkok street vendor fried chicken--the recipe for which the author cajoled from the street vendor, then scaled down for use in the kitchen. And yes, he called it better than Southern fried chicken here in the U.S.
Bangkok is...
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October 5, 2010
The kiwi could change everything
The kiwi that could change everything
I keep returning to Korean barbecue, and once I get it in my head, nothing else interests me. The amazing flavor of the meat--beefy and complex and sweet--and the unique butchering and cooking method, which renders the normally tough short rib into a grillable pleasure. These things are crack to someone who loves to eat and is fascinated with cooking.
So here's what we know about Korean-style...
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September 29, 2010
Tweaking the classic Chicago hot dog (aka The Superdawg)
Though it pains me to say this, the Chicago hot dog has one little flaw. It’s not always an issue, but it’s there just the same. Most of the seven toppings which make up a proper Chicago-style Hot Dog can be had at any time: mustard and relish are condiments, celery salt is a seasoning, the sport peppers and pickle come from a jar, and onions can be freshly cut up at any time of the year. No...the flaw is that damned red tomato...
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July 9, 2010
Or, the best carne asada tacos we've ever had
As far as I know there are only two kinds of ways to make carne asada. The first method is to take thinly sliced flank or skirt steak, sear it over mad charcoal fire, chop it up, and then stuff it into warm corn tortillas. It's almost always great. The second method is the kind that most taquerias use, which is to scoop some bits of raw steak, plop it on a grill, and sauté until it is cooked. This one is almost always bad. The...
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June 11, 2010
A mixture of tofu, ground meat, and chile bean paste suspended in a bright red and dangerously spicy sauce
Had you put a gun to my head a few years ago and asked me what my least favorite kind of food was, I'd have A) asked you why wanted to shoot me, and then B) probably said Chinese. Bad broccoli and beef, greasy fried rice, those strange orange packets of sauce--these were my impressions of the entirety of Chinese cuisine and what a billion people ate for dinner. Though I probably knew better, I couldn't block the mental image of...
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June 1, 2010
Tackling Mexico's national dish
You can shave truffles over a dish and call it special, but it's not; it's just expensive.
- Rick Bayless
I've been a fan of Rick Bayless since this blog started over four years ago, but it wasn't until he blurted out the above statement during the Top Chef Masters finale last year that I really figured out why. I already knew that I loved so many Mexican dishes because they balanced fat with acid, and layered spices...
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May 11, 2010
"The bacon of fish" elevates this simple pasta to transcendence
You may remember awhile back my lamenting post about a favorite ingredient I couldn't find in Chicago. The ingredient that Claudia at Cook Eat Fret christened "the bacon of fish." Something relatively undiscovered and very difficult to find in the U.S. A secret ingredient, you might say. Well, I'm done lamenting. Because I have found bottarga, the cured roe sack that's pressed and dried to become the density of hard...
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The original celebrity chef helps us out with this French classic.
A variation on meunière sauce with almonds
In one of the opening scenes of My Life in France, Julia Child experiences an early meal in France with her husband, Paul, a lunch at La Couronne, a medieval house turned restaurant built in 1345. After oysters, she goes on to describe an early culinary epiphany, apart of what would become "the most exciting meal of my life."
Paul had decided to order sole meunière....
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April 15, 2010
Make these ethereal little bites at home.
I'm pretty sure the word "gnudi" wasn't on anyone's radar until they were served at The Spotted Pig in New York, which was when they became a food dork household name. In Italian, "gnudi" means what it sounds like in English: naked. It refers to little pasta-like dumplings that are "naked" of their pasta wrapper, raviolis without anything to enclose them. Gnudi are a bit like gnocchi, but they have...
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March 30, 2010
How to make better bangers
As I was digging into making my own British bangers for my Full English Breakfast challenge, I kept stumbling onto the same sad story which may or may not be complete bullshit: During the early 20th century thanks to two World Wars, meat was scarce in England and pork sausages were padded with some grains and extra liquid to help stretch the meat reserves. When cooked, these padded sausages had the tendency to burst out of their...
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March 23, 2010
Sometimes you need to start with the basics.
I was recently bumming on a friend's membership to Costco, arms full of inexpensive bulk yeast and Dijon mustard for salad dressing, when I discovered the can of tomatoes you see above. It seemed like the deal of a century. For $3.89, I walked away with a can of San Marzano tomatoes weighing almost 7 pounds. That's the price you sometimes pay for a single 28 oz can of them.
I immediately contemplated the massive pot of tomato...
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February 24, 2010
How to save the oyster while cutting up chicken.
The chicken oyster. It sounds strange. But also intriguing enough to suggest deliciousness. I've heard other people talk about this elusive piece of meat hidden somewhere on the chicken. Only smart cooks know about it, like Thomas Keller, who mentions it in his recipe for "My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken" in the Bouchon cookbook. When the chicken is done roasting, the skin golden and fragrant, he locates the oyster on each...
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February 19, 2010
Not all pesto is created the same.
I've been eating pesto with pasta since I knew how to boil water. That dense, fragrant, herb-y concentrate tossed with hot noodles -- it's magic. Even when I had no idea how to cook and bought pesto in a jar, it was wonderful and my favorite dinner. It provides that burst of freshness in the middle of February, and it's delicious enough that the flavor stays in my brain for days.
The only problem I've ever had with pesto...
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February 12, 2010
Great pizza doesn't have to cost much.
If you're not down with pizza stones, it's time. Bread-bakers and home pizza afficionados praise them for their heat-retaining, moisture-wicking ability to imitate the floor of a brick oven. You put it in your oven and it not only provides a rustic surface to bake the bread on, but it also keeps the heat of the oven steady. Especially when it comes to pizza, that ever-important underside char and blistering (sometimes known as the...
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February 4, 2010
Focaccia becomes the base of this pizza.
Good pizza means good bread. For me, there's just no other way around it. Good bread is the soul of good pizza.
But baking has never been a subject I'm comfortable with. Give me a skillet, some pasta, and a well-stocked pantry and I can improvise countless meals. But if I'm supposed to bake something, I freeze. I immediately picture failure, a leaden cracker or a gummy mess. I hate the confusion of baking, the way it never...
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January 26, 2010
This fishy roe is a meal in itself.
My Chicago is about life as a cooks and eaters in our home city. Markets, restaurants, secret finds, really tasty bites--or just a great story. We're lucky to live here.
Bottarga would handily win the award for "foodstuff with least correlation between attractiveness and deliciousness," if such a thing existed. It is a brown, firm lobe, and, poor thing, really quite ugly. A cured, pressed, and dried fish egg sack. How...
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January 14, 2010
Can steamed duck legs tasted better than ones poached in duck fat?
The question about whether a steamed duck leg tastes as good duck confit has been boggling my mind for months ever since I read this article in the New York Times. Finally, last night, after spending the previous three days hacking up two ducks, rendering loads of fat, and figuring out what to do with the heads (Jonathan Gold actually sent me some interesting options on Twitter), I finally sat down to a blind taste test.
A...
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January 12, 2010
Can great pizza be made at home quickly?
Idea Lab is where we explore topics before we head into the kitchen. We welcome your thoughts, opinions, and ideas, so please leave them in the comments!
Though I once praised the virtues of the broiling pizza on Serious Eats, I'm now over it. I'm tired of broiler antics and pre-heating cast iron pans to make approximations of Neopolitan-style pizza at home (I've already ruined one baking stone in the process). The fact is, a...
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January 5, 2010
Can you really leave behind all the fat??
Welcome to the Idea Lab, where we explore topics before we head into the kitchen. We welcome your thoughts, opinions, and ideas, so please leave them in the comments!
Is duck confit a lie? According to Dr. Myhrvold, who runs Intellectual Ventures in Seattle, the technique is actually rather pointless.
...confit, the French technique of cooking slowly in fat, is supposed to impart a unique taste and texture as the fat penetrates the...
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December 11, 2009
Where to start your Sichuan obsession.
For awhile now, I've been looking for a way into Chinese cooking. The whole business of it feels impenetrable. Strange flavors, ingredients, and cooking techniques, and no ability to rely on what I've already learned about Western cooking and improvise. Then there's the problem that you can't accurately call anything "Chinese cooking," because China is made up of provinces with different recipes and methods. They...
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December 4, 2009
How to transform cheap meat.
This is why beef chuck roast cooked in a 131°F–140°F (55°C–60°C) water bath for 24–48 hours has the texture of filet mignon.
- Douglas Baldwin, A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
After my experiments with sous-vide chicken resulted in one of the finest birds I'd ever eaten, I immediately set off on a crusade to transform the cheapest cut of beef I could find into filet mignon. I know this...
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November 25, 2009
A little holiday help
We're signing off for the week, ready to see family, drink some of our homemade hard apple cider, and fatten ourselves on turkey. We hope you're off to do the same! But before you do, please direct your attention to this week's Time Out Chicago, were you will discover a cheesy picture of your humble correspondents (above).
A month ago we met up with the dashing food folks over at Time Out to have a little dinner...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
