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Parmigiano-Reggiano is an unyielding behemoth of a cheese.
The eighty-eight pound monster you see above is two and a half years old, and took approximately 550 liters (145 gallons) of raw milk to produce. Portioning one of the Kings of cheese takes skill and time, both of which have been compacted for your viewing pleasure.
After sitting out at room temperature for 18 hours, the Parmigiano is ready for prepping. A blue-green mold (the true sign of a healthy wheel) covering the entire cheese will have formed during the two-year-old's time in trasit. This must be scrubbed off. Then the rind is rubbed with extra virgin olive oil, to give the wheel a lustery shine.
Then you quarter it, eighth it, and take a break.
Guest cameos (Alex’s minions of Darkness): Jason, Constance, Gerry, and Janine.
After many successes and failures in beer cookery; we've determined what might just be the perfect cooking beer. Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier is a rustic brew with a long history of intensity. It's one of the few remaining breweries to exclusively utilize open flame drying techniques for roasting malts. For us, this technique poduces a beer that we enjoy reduced to sauce, instead of a means to getting sauced. In the past, we've worked our way through bottles almost grudgingly; not because the beer is bad but because the specificity and intensity of the flavors can verge on cloying.
The smokiness of Rauchbeer comes from the ancient technique of drying malts over open flames. While according to wikki, this technique used to be utilized by most brewers, its largely been replaced by kiln drying techniques which don’t require actual fire, thus no smoke. American versions have been made all across the states and taste more like a black lager with a little bit of smoke...Schlenkerla's brew tastes more like a stack of sourdough pancakes fried in butter on an ancient cast iron surface doused in tree blood from Vermont.
We'll be posting some recipes in the coming weeks with the 'ol Rauch, but we encourage you to hunt it down and play with it yourself. Because the bulk of the flavor in this beer resides in its maltiness, it won't turn bitter when subjected to prolonged cooking, and the smoke flavor really works wonders with just about any application you can think of.
Our Uses Thus Far
1. Baked Goods: substitute Rauchbeer for any liquid called for in any recipe. Use instead of water for breads, or sub out half your oil in a pancake recipe.
2. Cooking Greens: throw a 1/4 cup of smoke beer in with any sautéed kale, collards or chard after the pan gets hot. Cover the pan and the beer will steam the greens: it rules.
3. Starting soups: cover the browned beginnings of any soup, stew, or stock with Rauchbeer and reduce before you add water or veggie broth. This technique works wonders for beans.
Soundtrack: Dre, Snoop, Nate "Next Episode"
Diary Pairy: Idiazabal, a smoked raw sheep’s milk cheese from Navarra, Spain.
With any luck, Lake Sharp’s widely popular and totally informative vimeo has all you Hot Knives devotees bottling your own pro-biotic elixirs and feeling rad. For those of you that did, you probably have huge, intimidating fungi festering in cabinets verging on frightfully successful sizes; we have another project for you.
After a somewhat passive attempt to grow a vinegar mother from a prodigious looking organ at the bottom of a favorite bottle of acid failed miserably, we asked Lake for a snippet of her Kombucha mother. While we were all a little skeptical that the mother would take to wine, after approximately five weeks we struck liquid gold: home made pro-biotic vinegar. This stuff has all the awesome powers that a bottle of Braggs boasts, with the added bonus of deep and savory wine vinegar flavor. As authentic vinegar geeks, we must declare that we’ve never tasted anything quite like the Oedipal fruits of this shot in the dark d.i.y. Endeavor. While tart enough to evoke all that is needed from store bought acidified wine, this liquid has a low-end that has n’aer to for been experienced. Sherry vinegars mixed with 50-year-old vintages don’t have this kind of bottom line: sweetness of the original liquor is balanced by the almost meaty bi-product of the living organisims feeding on the leftover sugars from the decanted wine. Umami city. All you need is a strong starter mother, ~13 bucks to spend on wine, and 5 weeks worth of patience.
We aren’t stopping here and neither should you. In February we’ll be reporting on Prosecco, Tripel and Stout experiments of the same nature.
Ingredients
A piece of healthy Kombucha Mother
3 bottles of red wine
Equipment
The largest glass jar you can find
A kitchen towel
Twine
1. With clean hands, give the Kombucha mother a nice rinse, and place in your giant jar.
2. Gently add the wine one bottle at a time. When it comes to selecting wines, make sure it something you like to drink. We set a cap at $4.99 per bottle, which usually will find you some decent appellations at the old Trader Joes.
3. When all of the wine has been integrated, give the jar a soft stir with a wooden or plastic spoon. REMEMBER: METAL KILLS MOTHERS, so don’t use any instruments made of metal.
4. Top the jar with a kitchen rag, and tie a piece of twine around the lid. Place the jar in a dark corner of a cupboard that doesn’t experience temperature or moisture variation. Under your sink? Not the best idea. You want to have a stable hospitable environment for your mother to flourish, without encouraging other types of mold to grow.
5. Wait for five weeks.
6. Thirty-five days later, taste your vinegar, using a wooden or plastic spoon. IF it has a pleasant acidic sting, then it’s ready. If not give it another week and try again.
If you take this plunge with us, keep us posted on your progress, and your problems. We’re on our third batch and can answer any questions you have. Take five weeks and never buy vinegar again!
Soundtrack: Five weeks of Ethiopiques
Beverage: Avery’s Old Jubilation
Just last year, some mad hot pepper professor stumbled upon the Bhut Jholokia, now nicknamed the ghost chile. Subsequent lab tests have revealed that the little fucker is officially the hottest chile pepper in the world — nearly double the amount of "Scovile Heat Units" as the habanero. Apparently, the ghost chile is a naturally occurring species native to North Eastern India, where it's not unusual to use them as weapons. Armies in India and Myanmar use ghost chiles to make tear gas. It’s also not unusual to gnaw on one in between bites at the dinner table.
We think this is nuts. We know because we obtained a bag of the things and spent a recent Friday night passing a pepper around the room just barely licking it or, at the most, nibbling on it. (This is also about the time when we lamented the fact that “chile in my eye” was not an easily searchable phrase on the Internet).
So, after careful consideration, we came up with one simple recipe recommendation for you real chile heads out there: a ghost chile syrup that we’re calling Ghost Killah. Now you won’t find this pepper in your neighborhood store just yet, but don’t fret, you can order bags of them (we are being serious) from the Chile Pepper Institute: (505) 646-3028. But be prepared for the sting, they run more than $30 a pound!
Ghost Killah
2 cups agave nectar
1 ghost chile
1. Using latex gloves, slice open the chile and remove all seeds.
2. Put a small saucepan over medium heat and add agave nectar.
3. Toss in chile pieces and simmer for 10-15 minutes.
4. Fish out chile and serve with fresh fruit or baked goods.
Beverage: Port Brewing’s Hop 15
Soundtrack: Mogwai’s “Acid Food”
Our first kitchen mentor, a bear of a man named Joe Parks who instructed us in the college mess hall, used to describe any sub par ingredient from the freezer saying ‘Not bad… for a frozen product.” It’s a mantra we’ll always remember. Consequently, this site has possibly never championed a frozen, dried, or freeze-dried product. It’s fresh or nothing.
So consider this a milestone of sorts when we say that we give some fat-ass props to a particular Trader Joe’s product that keeps popping up in our recent reppiez: Dried Wild Mushrooms ($1.99). This package is a rough mix of forest shrooms: porcinis, oyster, shitakes and weird seaweed-like floppy ones. Meaning this mix is probably not appropriate to sub for real mushies (except in a quick fix) but it works wonders in other ways. Reviving these guys from their dried-out state is simple:
1. Bring 2 cups of water to boil. Empty packet into a large bowl, add a pinch of sea salt and top mushrooms with hot water.
2. Place a lid, or plate, on top of the bowl and let sit for 15 minutes.
3. Strain over another bowl to separate shrooms from water. Tear mushrooms into big chunks or duce super fine, depending on use.
What you have now is both revived wild mushrooms that, while nowhere near as good as fresh, are pretty good for meals where mushrooms are secondary and you also have a killer mushroom broth to use for rice, noodles, soups, vegetables or even other fresh mushrooms! And unless you live in Vancouver B.C., you’re not going to find a cheaper patch of wild shrooms short of picking them yourself. Not bad for a dehydrated product, huh.
Fresh truffles are ridiculously expensive. The ones you are looking at go for $2000 per pound, approximately $350 each. Why in gods name would anyone pay so much for something that looks like a blonde dirt clod? What do they even taste like anyway?
"They taste like blood! They taste like sex! They taste like DEATH! "
(the actual words of one of Alex's truffle customers)
In the height of white truffle season, culinary maniacs the world over break their banks for the chance to shave these weird pseudo-fungi over their scrambled eggs, risottos or their oiled naked bodies. In the States underhanded truffle peddlers will try and swindle Chefs with false truffles from Hungary or Croatia. European truffle hunters will go so far as to poison their competition's truffle sniffing dogs and hogs to get a competitive edge.
Here's a few demystifying bullet points in the event that you are confronted with these diamonds in the rough, either on your plate or at your favorite gourmet shop:
1. "True" truffles come from two places. Black truffles form Perigord, France, and White truffles from Alba, Italy. There are "alse" black truffles cultivated in China, Australia, and Oregon, but their perfume and flavor are super mild. False white truffles from Eastern Europe are likewise: weak sauce.
2. Truffles aren't mushrooms. They're a tuber, like a potato, that basically grows like a pungent tumor on the roots of an Oak tree. They smell like sweet genitalia and taste like blood, sex and death...
3. The reason for the insane price has to do with the rarity of truffles and the short length of their season. Whites are only harvested from mid November to mid December, blacks from mid December to mid January. Ain't no shortcuts with truffles. You wait for an entire year and hope that the elements have aligned to make these little stinkers. There are also extreme and fixed import tariffs on truffles. Sadly, if your truffles aren't fucking pricey, they prolly aren't real.
Obviously truffles are intimidating in price, but if you buy them yourself you'll get to play around with a few dishes instead of spending the same amount of your paycheck on one plate of risotto at a restaurant. If you buy a truffle, keep it wrapped in a paper towel in a sealed plastic bag. Change its "diaper" every day, and shave it over your favorite dishes...or yourself.
6 medium sized ripe tomatoes
2 Tbs. pickled horseradish
2 Tbs. mustard flour
2 Tbs. caraway seeds
1 Tsp. celery seeds
2 Tbs. sea salt
1 Tbs. ground black pepper
1+3/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 Tbs. chopped fresh dill
1. Slice the tops off your tomatoes and carefully peel, then trash the skin and finely chop them. When chopped, dump all the into a fine mesh sieve over a bowl to catch their juice
2. Now, with a mortar and pestle grind all the salt and spices together. Add the spices, horseradish, and vinegar to the chopped tomatoes and mix.
3. If you have a food processor, pulse the mixture for thirty seconds. Strain the mixture again until the sauce has a dippable consistency. The extra liquid can be whisked into the tomato juice to make a great salad dressing, a fine compliment to an all fried food meal.
Soundtrack: Friends of Old Time Music, Disk 2
Beverage: Port Brewing's Avante Guard
Granted, this is merely an imitation of the kind of shredded cheese that gets sprinkled on enchiladas or chili or something. It's the classic trio: mild cheddar, Monterey jack and cheap mozzarella. Much like the real thing, the imitation is rather dull, even inedible, by itself and cold.However -- and this is essential really -- the stuff melts as well or better than shredded dairy cheese. Under a broiler, in a microwave or merely folded into a warm dish, Soy-Sation gets gooey and stays that way. When you pull a fork-full of food away from the plate, the cheese actually strings. What this is great for then, are dishes where the taste of a sharp or tasty cheese is unnecessary but the texture of pillowy melted cheese is desired.
Here's a recipe for western-style hangover hash browns that is perfect example of what Lisanatti can help you do with a little soy.
In grade school, Andrew Mueller and I were inseparable slackers who smoked things out of coke cans in his backyard, and dabbled in vegetarianism together. After high-school we parted ways, but every once in a while we bump into each other and bond over increasingly strange, but endearing, things: tequila, botany, pickled eggplants stuffed with goat cheese balls.
The last time we hung out, a couple months ago, he pulled this hot sauce out of the side door of his fridge and made me slather it on a stale cracker. My mind--along with a few million taste buds--were blown.
Matouk's Hot Calypso Sauce is best filed under the "tropical habanero" category. The first ingredient, naturally, reads "pickled Scotch Bonnet peppers." The staying flavor, however, is more of a fruity mustard. Strong vinegar with spices and a hint of papaya flavor make it that rarest of rare hot sauces, with such a tantalizing flavor that you actually end up eating far more of the stuff than you should.
The Scotch Bonnet being the hottest variety of habenero, the proverbial fire level on this baby is high, but the lime tartness and banana sweetness temper it. Matouk's makes those weak African simmer sauces that white people are so fond of look like Pace "picante." As a hot sauce, this stuff works on nebulous levels. As a marinade, it's infectious. You can douse veggies in it, then char grill them--the sweetness stays, the heat burns off. Or simmer the shit out of some black beans with a couple Tbs. of it dumped in at the beginning. Or even plate a piece of seared tuna with trails of Matouk's and Sriracha crisscrossing for both taste and decoration.
If you don't have an Andrew Mueller in your life, who scours weird Trinidad food stores, your best bet is online.
**posted by Evan**
Cock Sauce Verses
Squeeze drop on a chip
Try triangle of hot love
Forget Trader Joe's
Sun ripes the chile
Rooster wakes me in the morn
Sauce-a-doodle-doo!
