Tangled Branches: Satiated

riveting tales of how we sustain ourselves

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Hot Pepper Jelly 1.0

I think it was Ki who planted the idea in my mind. I never even tasted Hot Pepper Jelly before I made it yesterday so I didn't really know what to expect. However, the flavor I imagined was hotter than the reality of this batch. And if I had followed Ki's lead and used Habaneros I might have gotten the heat level I imagined. As it was, I intended to use 100% red ripe Serranos instead of the bell peppers plus 10 Jalapeños the recipe called for. I used the recipe from the leaflet in the Sure-Jell package (and on their website). They wanted a total of 4 cups of finely chopped peppers to 1 cup of vinegar, 5 cups of sugar and a packet of Sure-Jell. I thought by using all Serranos, seeded, I'd a have a pretty red jelly with pieces of pepper suspended in it (no seeds to ugly it up) and that surely 4 cups of Serranos, even seeded, would be enough heat. And maybe it would have been, but I only had enough Serranos for 3 cups and had to make up the final cup with ripe chocolate bell pepper plus a few assorted others.

The color is pretty, just like I hoped for. Taste, well I don't know. I'm not all that keen on sweet sweet things and this has almost a cup of sugar in every jar. It does taste of peppers, with just a tiny little tingling of capsaicin. I tried it on toast this morning, and I'm not about to give up my hibiscus jam for this. I think it might have a future as an ingredient and not something to eat on its own. For lunch today, I mixed it with mayonnaise and coarse mustard as the dressing for a shrimp salad. I expect it would make a good base for a BBQ sauce, or a ham glaze, or maybe even for the sweetening in a mustard recipe I plan to try. Any other ideas?

Labels: canning, jam, peppers

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Multicultural Fish Tacos

Some would say that Fish Tacos are already multicultural, speculating that they may have originated when Japanese tempura met Mexican tacos. Last night we mixed it up even further, adding Trinidad Pepper Sauce and Salvadoran Curtido to some cornmeal-crusted cod for some very tasty tacos.

First off, I made a small trial batch of Nicole's sister's Trinidad Pepper Sauce. I didn't grow Habaneros this year, but I thought I could approximate the taste by combining Ají Dulce peppers (which taste like Habaneros with no heat) with the hottest peppers I had available - Lemon Drop, Prik Ki Nue, Bellingrath Gardens Purple, and Purple Cayenne. I was trying to stay with ripe peppers, but not enough of the very hottest ones are ripe yet so I had to use a few green ones as well. And I was afraid that too many green peppers would muddy the color of the sauce, so I used some of the less hot varieties - Serranos, Czechoslovakian Black, and Fish - which were ripe. This is the 4 ounces of peppers needed to make the recipe at 1/4 the original amount.

This turned out to be a hot sauce, but not as hot as it would have been with all Habaneros. And that may have been a good thing because we used it somewhat generously on the fish tacos and thought it was just right. I plan to make another batch when I can fill the hot pepper quota with ripe Lemon Drop and Prik Ki Nue peppers, and that should be closer to the habanero heat level.

When we were first introduced to fish tacos, they were topped with thinly sliced raw cabbage, but one of our favorite Mexican restaurants serves marinated cabbage as a side dish with their fish tacos. I assume it's the same as Salvadoran Curtido. My version was a little different in that I used very little vinegar. I thinly sliced one quarter of a small head of cabbage, salted it and left it to drain in a colander for about half an hour. I then rinsed it, squeezed it as dry as I could, and mixed it with thinly sliced yellow onion (about 1/4 large onion) and one green Serrano pepper, sliced paper thin using a Benriner mandoline. Then I added just enough rice vinegar to moisten, and a small amount of sugar. This mixture stayed almost as crunchy as raw cabbage (even overnight) but much more flavorful.

The fish got a Southern US treatment - dredged in cornmeal and deepfried. I cut a fillet of cod into strips about 1/2 inch wide, patted them dry and coated them with cornmeal. Nothing else. Sometimes I season the cornmeal, but this time I just salted the fillets lightly after they were fried.

The final step for the cook was to heat some corn tortillas. Around here each diner is responsible for his/her own tacos after that, assembling them with one or two pieces of fish, some hot sauce and the marinated cabbage.

Labels: cabbage, fish, hot sauce, peppers

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Seeking Inner Beauty

...This is a continuation of a post I started over on my garden blog...

Inner Beauty is a hot sauce with a large crowd of admirers. Just Google Inner Beauty sauce and you'll see what I mean. I don't remember exactly when I first tasted Inner Beauty, but it was probably in the late 1980s. I saw it on a store shelf and thought it was cute. It followed me home. We didn't really know what to do with it. Tasted it and thought it might be good as a sauce for grilled meat. The first time we tried it out, we used it as a basting sauce for grilled chicken. And the second time and the third time and ... I don't think we ever used it any other way, except that the chicken was sometimes pork chops. Time passed. The sauce disappeared from the store where we'd been buying it. A few years later we spotted a bottle again (somewhere), but it didn't look quite the same. Label change? We weren't sure, not having bought any in a long while. Well, we bought it anyway, but it didn't taste quite the same either. Maybe it changed, maybe we changed, but at any rate we never bought another bottle. And then we forgot all about it.

Until a couple of weekends ago when we were talking about spicy condiments and one of us said "Hey, remember when we used to put Inner Beauty on chicken and pork chops on the grill? I wonder if we can still buy that stuff?". No. But supposedly the recipe is in a book (Big Flavors of the Hot Sun) by Chris Schlesinger, the originator of Inner Beauty. Well, yes, except that recipe isn't the same as this other recipe by the same cook and author. And neither one is the same as the list of ingredients on the label of the bottled sauce according to this post on eGullet.

But I don't usually follow recipes to the letter anyhow, so I took those as suggestions and started blending. No wait, first I went shopping. I don't usually have papayas around the house, but I'm lucky to live near a Korean/international supermarket and they have 2 or 3 brands of tropical fruit purees in the freezer case. And I picked up a bottle of pineapple juice concentrate. And some orange juice. Now stocked with tropical fruit juices, concentrates and purees, I got the rest of the ingredients from the garden and pantry.

I didn't grow any habaneros or scotch bonnet peppers this year, but I do have Ají Dulce and Lemon Drop and Prik Ki Nue. I assumed those would give the flavor (from Ají Dulce and Lemon Drop) and heat level (Lemon Drop and Prik Ki Nue) I was aiming at. Then, I added a few other pepper varieties for good measure - Czechoslovakian Black and Aci Sivri because I like their fruity flavors and Fish for additional heat and color.

These are the ingredients and quantities from my notes:

4 Ají Dulce peppers (ripe)
2 Lemon Drop peppers (green)
2 Prik Ki Nue peppers (green)
1 Czechoslovakian Black pepper (ripe)
1 Aci Sivri pepper (green)
2 Fish peppers (ripe)

3 to 4 oz. frozen papaya
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup pineapple juice concentrate

2 Tbsp. light brown sugar
2 tsp. dark brown sugar
1 Tbsp. molasses
3 Tbsp. Plochman's mild yellow mustard
3 Tbsp. rice vinegar

1 tsp. peanut oil
1/2 tsp. Penzey's Hot Curry Powder
1/4 tsp. ground ancho chile pepper
1/4 tsp. turmeric
1/4 tsp. ground allspice

1 tsp. Japanese sea salt

Chop the chile peppers fine in a blender. Add fruit juices and fruit and continue blending until mixture is fairly smooth. Add sugars, molasses, mustard and vinegar and blend. Since this was an experiment, I tasted and took notes while measuring and adding ingredients until I thought it tasted good.

I couldn't stand the idea of putting raw curry powder and turmeric into this or anything else, so I heated a small amount of oil in a small frying pan and sizzled the spices in it for a few seconds as in the Indian cooking technique of tarka or phodina. As soon as that was fragrant and sizzling, I poured the spice mixture into the blender, added the salt, and blended until I thought it was as smooth a mixture as I was going to get.

So how did it turn out? It was more fruity and less mustardy than we remember the bottled sauce. And I'm ambivalent about the ground spices; I didn't think they were really necessary so I used them in token amounts which had very little effect on the finished product. The sauce was not blazingly hot, but I don't remember the original bottled sauce as being all that hot either. For the first use, I marinated some pork chops in it and we grilled them without additional basting and found the heat level just about right. Last night though, I used it as a sauce for chicken wings, and we thought it would be better if it was hotter.

But here's my problem. It's not the same as the bottled sauce, but my spouse says it's better than the bottled sauce. Now what do I do? Keep making it this way to please the spouse? Or try to get it closer to the bottled product? I may taste some of the supposedly similar commercial products for reference. I'm thinking of Lottie's in particular. Anybody else have a favorite hot sauce?

Labels: hot sauce, peppers

Monday, September 10, 2007

Thai-ish Stir Fry with Chile and Basil

This little experiment exceeded my fondest hopes - really good Thai food at home. I noticed there weren't too many ripe tomatoes in the vegetable patch, but chile (chilli?) peppers were abundant and the basil needed to be cut back. Hmmmm, chiles and basil, chiles and basil....oh yeah....pork with chiles and basil!

But I didn't have all my cookbooks with me in the country, so I'd have to improvise. Checking Chez Pim for inspiration, I found a stir-fry made with nam-prik pao, which is made with dried chiles and shallots and shrimp paste - all things I didn't have. So I made a paste consisting of 1 'Pinocchio's Nose' pepper, several (3?) 'Serrano Tampiqueno' peppers, 1 'Czechoslovakian Black' pepper, 1 'Bellingrath Gardens Hot Purple' pepper, 4 medium cloves of garlic, and the lower stems of some basil sprigs (the basil tops get added later). All the peppers were the reddest, ripest ones I could find. I chopped all this as finely as possible (not quite a paste) using an electric mini-chopper.

I sliced 3 thin-cut boneless pork chops, several New Mexico-type peppers, and part of a red onion (lengthwise) into thin strips.

Now we're ready to cook. I heated some oil in a large non-stick saute pan. When it was hot I added the chile paste and fried it for a short time (until the whole house smelled of chile and garlic). The I added the sliced peppers and onions, and 4 'Bellingrath Gardens Hot Purple' peppers (whole, but crushed with the flat side of a chef's knife). I stirred the vegetables around for a minute or so, and then added the sliced pork. Kept cooking and stirring just until all the pork pieces looked cooked. Then I added several splashes of fish sauce, tasting until I got the saltiness the way I wanted it. At the very end, I tossed in several sprigs (just the top 2 or 3 sets of leaves) of various basils - 3 or 4 sprigs of Thai basil, 2 or 3 sprigs of 'Mexican Cinnamon Spice' basil, 2 sprigs of 'Sweet Petra Dark' basil, and 3 or 4 sprigs of lemon basil.

I expected this amount of food would serve 2 with leftovers, but we ate it all! And it would have been fine without the Bellingrath Gardens Hot Purple peppers, but with them it was incendiary - just the way we always ask for it in Thai restaurants and hardly ever get. Oh yeah, I should also mention that it took a long time with the range fan, ceiling fans, and open windows before the chile fumes cleared out of the house, but we dined on the deck and it was a nice evening to have an after dinner glass of wine outdoors.

Labels: basil, peppers, thai

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Pepper and Egg Sandwiches

Tuesday's gazpacho (below) was served with fancied-up pepper and egg sandwiches. I think soups and sandwiches just automatically go together, although sometimes I just serve soup and bread (not as austere as it sounds).

What I did:

Sliced into long strips (about 1/2 inch wide) one and a half green bell peppers and some mixed (mild and hot) New Mexico style red peppers. Sliced half a yellow onion lengthwise, and a clove of garlic crosswise. Heated some olive oil in a non-stick skillet over fairly high heat and sauteed the vegetables quickly, so the peppers were cooked through, but not limp and soggy. Lowered the heat and stirred in 3 beaten eggs. Cooked until set, seasoned with salt.

Then (here comes the fancy part) I split and toasted some squares of La Brea Pain Rustique, drizzled a small amount of leftover Rosemary/Garlic-Flavored Olive Oil on the bread, and arranged the peppers and eggs into a sandwich.

This turned out really well, and it was serendipitous. Trying to clean out the fridge, spotted the leftover flavored olive oil, and thought "Hmmmm..."

Labels: eggs, peppers, rosemary, sandwiches

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Alsatian Gazpacho

I never really liked gazpacho in its original form. Tomato puree thickened with bread is a waste of bread and tomatoes, if you ask me. But the gazpacho at L'Auberge Chez Francois is a very different thing, and I always order it when it's on the menu. (We don't go there very often - it's been our Occasion Restaurant for many years.) Their gazpacho is more like a slightly chunky version of V-8 juice. The recipe is in The Chez Francois Cookbook, but I've adjusted it to suit our tastes. For us, this amount serves 2 with leftovers.

3 cups fresh tomato puree, from peeled and seeded tomatoes

How you get the fresh tomato puree is up to you, but I just bought a food mill, and I think that's the way to go. I cut up some very ripe Striped Roman tomatoes and put the pieces in the food mill, mashing them slightly so the food mill could do the rest. A few turns of the handle, and you have perfect fresh tomato puree.

Mash 1 clove of garlic with salt in a mortar and pestle. Or you could just put it in the food processor in the next step, but the mortar and pestle will give a smooth paste.

Chop the next ingredients very finely in a food processor:
1 carrot, peeled
1 small pickling-type cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 stalk of celery
1/2 of a medium sized yellow onion
1/2 of a green bell pepper
1 fresh red New Mexico-style chile pepper, seeded
1 tiny red Czechoslovakian Black Pepper
I realize that if you're not growing your own, the last two peppers are going to be difficult to obtain. I think you could substitute a very small amount of any fresh hot chile pepper, to your taste, or leave them out entirely.

Add the tomato puree and the mashed garlic to the food processor and pulse a couple of times, just to blend everything. Remove the mixture to a bowl, and stir in by hand: salt to taste (I use something less than a teaspoon; the original recipe called for a tablespoon), 1 teaspoon or less red wine vinegar, several tablespoons of olive oil, and a small amount of freshly ground black pepper.

Taste and add more salt if needed. I had to add a tiny bit of sugar to this because the tomatoes were tart and the teaspoon of vinegar pushed it too far.

Labels: gazpacho, peppers, soup, tomatoes

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