Gutter Butter – Hot Knives

Kitchen Contraband

Hot Knives — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:05:00 +0000

The other day we came home to a care package from a dear buddy who’s been traipsing through distant Chinese cities. We sliced through the wrinkled, brown-bag wrapping. Three small plastic baggies of nubby brown husks and fine orange powder fell to the kitchen counter.
The stash was mostly whole, unadulterated and, presumably, illegal Sichuan peppercorns. Let us explain, officer!

Yes, sichuan pepper became illegal the same year as LSD – back in 1968, the FDA banned it because of fears it would infect our citrus with a rare canker disease. That ban was lifted because the stuff imported to the U.S. is now treated with a blast of bacteria-hating 160-degrees heat.
Not this stuff: there were no signs that the spices we were holding had ever been near a customs officer, let alone a sterilization blaster. Kitchen contraband. Score!
So what exactly are Sichuan peppercorns? Funny thing is, they are not related to black pepper or hot chilies at all. The spice is actually the outer seed pod of a tiny low-hanging fruit that Chinese and Tibetan cooks have been working with for centuries. Known for a mild and anesthetic heat that makes your mouth numb in large enough quantities, the stuff powers hot pots and sizzling woks. Even though the spicy cuisine that gives these little balls their name is synanomous with “searing pain,” don’t expect Sichuan peppercorns to spice up your cooking. Prepare for the opposite, in fact.
Sichuan pepper numbs your buds. Think the gummy numbness of high-powered cocaine rubbed sloppily on your teeth and lips.
Throughout the week, we’ve experimented with the best way to harness this weird fruit. We cracked it raw on salad and brussels sprouts. We threw it into sauerkraut. And toasted its dust for hot nuts. But far and away the best way to cook up with this shit is to purely infuse your oil. The first thing we learned is that the citrusy, perfume it gives off only comes out in food if you toast Sichuan peppercorns. Here’s a play by play of how to get numb.

4 Tbs. Sichuan peppercorns
4 Tbs. grapeseed or canola oil
fine mesh strainer or coffee filter
1. Toast
Place the whole peppercorns in a saute pan on medium-high heat. Once you smoke, lower to medium and toss every minute for about 5 minutes. Do not burn. Once fragrant and well toastes, remove from heat and rest for a few minutes.

2. Grind
Dump peppercorns into a mortar and pestle and pulverize for one minute, until just coarser than a dust. If chopping by hand, set peppercorns on a cutting board and chop well.
3. Infuse
Put the fine peppercorn dust back into the pan, return to a medium heat and drizzle in the oil. Let cook for another 3 minutes or until you see tiny bubbles where the oil is frying the pepper. Remove from heat and let sit 5 minutes to fully steep.

4. Strain
Place snugly a coffee grinder into the lip of a small bowl or jar and slowly scrape out pepper oil into the filter. It should slowly drip a mostly clear liquid, catching the pepper grounds.
5. Use
Use 2-3 tablespoons of this frying oil in recipes in place of normal olive oil.

Booze Infused

Hot Knives — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:10:09 +0000

Like discoveries in other experimental fields, the ones that happen in the kitchen are often rooted in mistakes. When way too many black peppercorns got dumped into hot oil for a pre-bean fry, it seemed they were lost. What to do with a pile of soggy greasy peppercorns?
We got to thinking about pepper and what it is: the aged berries from an epic spice tree originating in Indonesia. Black peppercorns are actually sun cured green peppercorns, and white ones are just black peppercorns that have been soaked, skinned and dried again.
While we didn’t follow through with the initial idea to make our own white pepper, we figured we could re-dry the soggy dudes in a low oven to revive them. The result ruled: the pepper reabsorbed the tasty oil and intensified its new and improved flavor. Ever vigilant for ways to put liquor we love back into the food we eat, we postulated that we could do the same with Bourbon, Mescal, and just about any other type of liquor.
The result is the same; by investing a pony of your favorite sauce, you can elevate the contents of your pepper mill to dizzying heights. You also will make your house smell like a distillery for an hour or two, and your roommates, if you have them, will be wandering round looking for phantom whiskey spills, but this technique will make soups, salads, fresh cheeses and eggs have that hair-of-the-dog flavor that you’ve been missing. Booze infusion is the new Umami!

Liquor’d Black Pepper

Ingredients
3 Tsp. Whole Black Pepper
1 Shot Booze
Equipment
Small Sauce Pot
Baking Sheet
Parchment Paper
1. Heat the sauce pot on medium heat and lightly toast the pepper for 3 to 5 minutes.
2. Dump in your shot of booze. We’ve had great success with Bourbon, and Mescal but use whatever you like. The liquor should begin cooking off immediately, but you don’t want it to burn, so turn the heat as low as you can to keep the liquid bubbling.
3. When the liquid is completely evaporated and absorbed, turn off the heat. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper (do yourself a favor and go buy a roll its really indispensable) and spread the peppercorns out evenly.
4. Bake in a low oven, around 250 degrees, for thirty minutes. You want the pepper to be completely dry. During the infusion process the peppercorns will swell with liquid and loose their dried look, when they’ve dried completely they will look exactly as they did before you subjected them to a whiskey bath.
5. You’re done! Let the pepper cool and find something to put them on!

Pistachio Hummus

Hot Knives — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 18:36:09 +0000

Over the last week we’ve been experimenting with pickling and sprouting, two ways to make awesome components for whatever you like to eat. Techniques are still being formulated, so those recipes are forthcoming.
With our first batch of pickled onions we made a sprightly little white bean hummus, flavored not with tahini, but a roasted and spiced pistachio puree. The sweetness of the spice and all the niceties of the nuts really make a rad platform for the briny crunchy onions, a recipe we’ll post soon.
We made a little sandwich of the hummus in between two tiny tortilla chips, and topped it with the pickled onion, some cumin sprouts and veganaise. This stuff’s perfect for a midday snack or as a component for a clever canapé for the next time you’re friends wanna hang.

Spiced Pistachio Hummus

¼ cup pistachio meat
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 Tsp. Ground Cinnamon
1 Tsp. Ground Cumin
1 Tsp. Ground Coriander
½ Tsp. Ground Cardamom
6 Mint leaves
¼ cup cooked (or caned) cannelini beans
¼ cup parsley
¼ cup grape seed oil
2 Tsp. Salt
1. Heat a small frying pan on high heat. Throw in the pistachios and cover with the olive oil. When the nuts begin to sizzle turn off the heat. Add the spices and let cool for about fifteen minutes.
2. In a food processor, combine the now cool nuts, the beans and the herbs and puree until the mixture stops “moving.” Slowly add the grape seed oil, and continue pureeing until the mixture has a smooth consistency. If you’ve added all your oil, and the mixture is still not smoothly pureeing, add small amounts of tap water until it does. Salt it.
3. Serve with our aforementioned accoutrements, or on whatever needs souping up.
Beverage: The Bruery’s Saison Rue
Soundtrack: The Brian Jonestown Massacre; “Free and Easy”

Alex’s Weekly Workout

Hot Knives — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:43:39 +0000

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.

Liquid Smoke

Hot Knives — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:47:45 +0000

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.

Bad Mother

Hot Knives — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:11:59 +0000

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

Riding the Ghost Chile

Hot Knives — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:02:49 +0000

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”

De-High Shrooms

Hot Knives — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:43:21 +0000

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.

Über Tubers

Hot Knives — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:44:46 +0000

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.

Ketchy Centennial

Hot Knives — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 19:44:19 +0000

For our third and final ketchup recipe we decided to take a step back in time. 101 years ago, a mysterious Sister Alice Trimmer sketched a formula for her cold catsup. Staying true to her words we “did not put anything hot about it,” so this ketchup is both concocted and served cold. After converting her quantities into more manageable figures, from pecks and teacups to regular cups and teaspoons, we whipped up our version of this unique sauce. This is unlike any ketchup you will have ever tasted: it has no sugar and it’s raw. It’s reminiscent of a proto American salsa, without the heat of course. We served with an assortment of fried roots (recipe forthcoming). You can serve it with just about anything that you would normally serve ketchup with: eggs, other fried things…um, etc.Hotknives’ Sisters’ Cold Ketchup
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