New Friends and Pulled Pork

While out at our favorite tap house last week, Ann and I met Taylor and Laura and invited them over for dinner. Laura has some really serious food allergies, so I wanted to plan a meal for her that would be a little bit special. While her allergy list is certainly daunting, I have faced much worse as a professional chef.

New Friends

As fate would have it, while out shopping earlier in the week, Ann had found pork shoulders at a terrific price and brought home a pair of them. With Laura's diet restricted to mainly meat and vegetables, I thought that pulled pork would be a great anchor for dinner. I'm not a professional pit master, but I like to think that as a chef, I can make some decent pig even without a smoker.

Butt Rub

The first step in making pulled pork is to make a decent rub for the pork. This rub adds seasoning but also helps create that really delicious bark on the outside of the meat. I have never been one for buying pre-mixed spices, preferring to make my own mixes to get just the flavor profile that I want. Also, because I have always dealt with a customer base with innumerable allergies, I like to know exactly what is in everything I make. Because I do not use a recipe, each batch is slightly different and I am OK with that. My home kitchen is not a commercial enterprise where consistency is imperative.

My all-purpose pork rub, which I call tongue-in-cheek Butt Rub, starts with sweet Hungarian paprika, salt, and crystallized sugar (not the stickier brown sugar found in so many recipes). Additional spice and heat comes from smoked paprika, Chimayo chile, cayenne pepper, black pepper, and ground mustard. Sweet spice, which lets me keep the sugar to a minimum, comes from allspice and nutmeg, ground at the moment of making the rub. Additional flavorings come from granulated garlic and a touch of cumin and Mexican oregano, ground to order.

Shoulders, Rubbed and Perched on a Bed of Onion Slices

Because I don't have a smoker, I make my pork in the oven. I don't get the smoke, which I really miss, but I do get some really sexy onions. Decades ago, I watched a French chef roast a pork tenderloin on a bed of onions and was intrigued, so I followed suit. Habitually now, when I roast pork, I put it on a bed of onion slabs. After the onions have slow-cooked in the pork fat, they may be one of the sexiest foods you can put in your mouth!

Pork shoulder cooking technique is pretty similar in an oven as in a hot smoker, except I have more temperature control in the oven. I started the pork at 8:30am, uncovered, at 300F for an hour to start warming the pork through. After an hour, the internal temperature was around 75F and I turned the oven to 250F for another hour. At this point, the pork was smelling really good and I turned it down to 225F.

My usual technique is to cook the pork uncovered until it comes up to a safe temperature, about 155F. At this point, the bark is very pretty and dark, and I wrap the butts in film first, then foil, and return them to the oven to steam-roast at 225F until the internal temperature comes up to 200F. At 200F, the pork is done and will fall apart if you look at it slightly wrong! I want to say that it came up to 200F by about 4:00pm and I turned off the oven and let it stand, still wrapped, until we were ready to eat around 6:00pm.

Sexy Pork, Ready to Fall Apart

Ready to Serve, No Forks Necessary!

Because Laura has both dairy and gluten allergies, I am sure that her starch diet is pretty limited, perhaps to rice and potatoes, probably in the form of fries. I wanted to make her a dairy-free potato gratin as something special, using a technique that I learned a long, long time ago from a French chef. The dish starts by concentrating chicken stock flavored with shallots and fresh thyme to a syrup glaze. This stock will be the cooking liquid instead of the usual milk or cream.

Reducing Chicken Stock with Shallots and Thyme

I make the gratin by thinly slicing skin-on yellow potatoes. I used a knife instead of a mandoline, but the tool you use to slice the potatoes does not matter. To build the gratin, I rub the gratin with olive oil, then put in a layer of potatoes and brush on a little of the flavored chicken stock reduction. A sprinkle of salt completes the layer and I continue in this fashion until the gratin is full. I bake it in a moderate oven, say 350F, covered under foil for 45 minutes to an hour to cook the potatoes. Then I uncover the dish and bake it on the top shelf until the liquid is evaporated and the top is nicely browned, say another 20 minutes. At the same time this weekend, I put in a sheet tray of asparagus to roast while the potatoes browned. When the potatoes were brown, we sat down to eat.

Gratin of Potatoes

Roasted Asparagus

Biscuits and Bloodies

Breakfast for dinner. Seriously, who doesn't love the occasional dinner of breakfast foods? Ann apparently loves breakfast for dinner so much that she invited Dyce and Rob over for biscuits with gravy and Bloody Marys for Saturday night dinner. I'm happy to cook whatever, so why not biscuits and gravy?

Split Biscuit Topped with Two Poached Eggs and Sausage Gravy

Biscuits are not something I make all the time, but are something I learned to make as a child by watching my mother, aunts, and grandmother make them often. It's a skill that takes practice because the dough is best made by feel; a dough that is rather wetter than drier gives the best results. After rubbing in the butter into the dry ingredients, I add buttermilk until I get a very wet dough that I can gently bring together without kneading. Kneading will develop the gluten and result in a less tender biscuit.

Cold Butter Cubes in with Flour, Salt, and Baking Powder

Lightly Rolled Out, Ready to Cut

Ready to Refrigerate

Out of the Hot 425F Oven

In making biscuits, you get more what we chefs call ovenspring (rise), if the dough is cold. The longer that the biscuit takes to reach temperature in the oven, the longer the steam from the butter and buttermilk and the CO2 from the baking powder will have to push the dough upwards. In short, if you can refrigerate your biscuits before baking them, you'll get higher and lighter biscuits. It's not necessary, of course, and nobody in my family did, but I'm the only pro chef in the family, and more to the point, for entertaining like Ann and I were doing, I'd rather have everything done in advance leaving more time for our guests.

For our breakfast masquerading as dinner, I ended up splitting the biscuits, one per person, topping each half with a poached-to-order egg and draping the whole in a blanket of sausage gravy. What makes for sexier meal than cutting into a just-so poached egg and have the yolk ooze all over the dish?

Bloody Mary
Pickles, Lime, Olives, and Spicy Chicharrones for Garnish 

Local Horseradish Vodka

Friday after returning from the grocery store, I put together some homemade Bloody Mary mix to mix with Kachka Horseradish vodka, a local vodka made for one of our favorite Portland restaurants and available at our local liquor store. I have to say that this batch of Bloody mix was not my best effort (I was playing around in the kitchen) and I promise to do better next time.

Start of the Gravy: Ground Pork, Herbs, and Spices

Gravy After Thickening

Making southern country-style sausage gravy is pretty much a snap, a simple béchamel sauce with sausage. I start with browning ground pork to which I add salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes, lots of garlic and sage, thyme, and a hint of rosemary. When the meat is cooked, I sprinkle over some flour and let it cook for a couple minutes. Finally I add milk, or in this case, half and half, and let it thicken. If it gets too thick, I thin with water. Just before serving, I taste and re-season. I often cannot get enough sage in my gravy.

Never fear about what to do with leftover biscuits. They're extremely useful to have on hand. For the four of us, I made a dozen biscuits, knowing that we'd probably only eat four of them. I made a enough gravy for a dozen biscuits as well. We sent home with Dyce and Rob all but two biscuits, which we set aside for dinner the following night. For that dinner, I split the two remaining biscuits, topped them with solidified cold gravy, and put them under the broiler. Once they were good and brown, I topped them with scrambled eggs and a tomato-pimentón sauce, for a very quick dinner of leftovers.

Leftovers: Broiled Biscuits and Gravy
Topped with Scrambled Eggs and Tomato-Pimentón Sauce

Doenjang Noodles

Ann has been feeling her kitchen oats a bit recently, coming up with dishes that she wants to make. And I could not be happier. She's a wonderful cook and I love the break from having to come up with dinner all the time. Well, that's a bit of a lie just now. My foot is just healed and out of the cast and I am starting to walk gingerly and I'm itching to get back into the kitchen. Despite my jones to be back in the kitchen, I'm still happy to sit at the counter and watch Ann work.

Doenjang-Gochujang Perciatelli

Last night being my first tentative foray into walking unassisted by crutches in almost three months, we decided to celebrate with a bottle of Champagne. As we were sitting on the sofa chatting over Champagne, Ann decided that she would make a dish for me that she has been planning for some weeks. The dish in question hails from the NY Times and is called quite unimaginatively Doenjang Noodles.

Doenjang Noodles is pretty much the recipe, too. The par-cooked noodles are finished in a sauce of a quarter cup of doenjang whisked into a pint of milk, end of story. The dish is garnished with a few grinds of black pepper and a grate or two of pecorino romano.

Measuring the Doenjang and Milk

While I believe that the idea of the NYT recipe was to be an umami-laden ersatz alfredo, we like a bit more flavor in our pasta. After tasting the pasta, Ann ended up doubling the inoffensive amount of doenjang in the original recipe along with adding a big glob of spicy gochujang. 

I Love This Woman!

What a really easy and tasty pasta for a quick meal!

Xi'an Cumin Lamb with Scissor-Cut Noodles

Now that my foot is almost better and I am in a walking boot, I can at long last get back in the kitchen and start cooking again. Ann showed me a photo a few times recently of a dish that is something of a current-day internet phenomenon, cumin lamb noodles modelled after the New York restaurant chain Xi'an Fine Foods.

Xi'an Cumin Lamb with Scissor-Cut Noodles

And so on our last foray to the grocery store, my first since early February (you don't know what a blessing it is to be able to do your own shopping until you cannot), we got some lamb to make the dish. We would have liked to have got some shoulder or loin, but that's really only available at the as-yet-unopened-for-the-season farmers market, so we settled for ground lamb.

Our original thought was to make some of our typical pasta dough (egg pasta of about half all-purpose flour and half semolina) hand-cut into wide flat noodles, but that egg pasta did not sit well with me because it is atypical in China. Meanwhile, I had been reading about various styles of Chinese noodles and decided to make some wonderful looking scissor-cut noodles.

Noodle Dough Resting

The noodle dough is merely a couple cups of all-purpose flour, some Kosher salt, and enough water to bring it together into a shaggy dough. I kneaded the dough just enough to bring it into a ball and let it rest on the counter under film for a couple of hours to hydrate. Then later in the afternoon, I kneaded the dough into a smooth paste to develop the gluten. I let it rest for another hour or so before we started on dinner.

Right after making the dough, I toasted the spices, one part Sichuan peppercorns and three parts cumin. At the same time, I heated a quarter cup of oil with a tablespoon of chile flakes to make some chile oil (which is much better made to order than in bulk because it goes rancid fairly quickly).

Toasting Sichuan Peppercorns and Cumin

Oil and Chile Flakes Becoming Chile Oil

When we were ready to eat dinner, Ann and I attacked it together. She started the lamb while I cut pieces of dough into a pan of boiling water. The lamb is a quick sauté of onions, spicy green chiles, and ground lamb seasoned with the ground spices that I toasted earlier. To finish the sauce, she added some soy sauce, chile oil, sesame oil, black vinegar, and a bit of sugar.

Ann Making the Lamb Sauce

Cooking the Noodles

In cooking the noodles, I treated them just like gnocchi or spätzle, removing them from the pan once they floated. It could not have been simpler. The final dish we garnished with (much) more chile oil, sesame seeds, and cilantro.

Delicious Xi'an Cumin Lamb with Scissor-Cut Noodles

We're definitely making these noodles again, one, because they are so easy to make, and two, because they satisfy our desire for pasta with body (you might guess by that, that we are no fans of capellini). The sauce needs work. We hewed closely to a recipe from the web, but now we feel free to make it our own.

Our next version needs to be spicier and funkier, plus I feel like I want a higher ratio of Sichuan peppercorns in the spice mix. I'm thinking of starting with fermented soy paste and creating a dish more akin to zha jiang mian. Good thing the farmers market opens in a week or so, giving us access to locally raised lamb shoulder.

St. Patrick's Day 2023

St. Patrick's Day arrived three weeks after my foot surgery this year and I was in a cast, in pain, and not in a mood to cook anything. [And here I am 7 weeks later, posting, not having been up to even blogging]. Ann and good friends Rob and Dyce conspired to put together a nice meal to cheer me up. It so did cheer me up and I truly appreciated it, having been confined to the house for a month and fully in the midst of going totally stir crazy, not to mention being pissed off at having to sit on the freaking sofa all damn day every day.

St. Paddy's isn't a big event at our house. Ann's full Napoletan on both sides and my family is from Wales and England. But what the hell: everyone is Irish on St. Paddy's Day!

Co-Conspirators

Sadly, the day of St. Patrick's Day, Rob was ill and elected to stay home. We probably would have cancelled the event had Dyce not been up since early morning putting the corned beef brisket on the smoker. In addition to the corned beef, Dyce also brought some Irish cheese, a bottle of Irish malt, a bottle of Chassagne, a loaf of soda bread, and a small lemon curd cake. He went way overboard as he does always.

Irish Cheddar with Porter

My First Irish Single Malt: Pretty Good

We started the evening with a little Irish Cheddar and a shot of Bushmill's single malt. Though I've been to Ireland a couple of times and consumed my fair share of whiskey, it's always been a mild blended whiskey and not a single malt. As a great fan of Scotch, I had never really taken notice of the Irish cousin and was pleasantly surprised. It's not super complex or peaty or smoky, but it is a good dram. Not having had a drop of alcohol in a month, I nursed mine very slowly.

A Seriously Delicious Chassagne

Dyce's Corned Beef, Smoked then Braised

With the beef that Dyce made, we had an unusual wine pairing: Chassagne-Montrachet. I might have picked a light fruity red (Gamay) or even a Riesling or a sparkling white to go with corned beef, but when somebody brings a bottle of Chassagne to my house, all bets are off! That bottle is getting opened!

Italian Girl Cooks Colcannon!

When Ann and Dyce were planning this dinner, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard Ann say, "I'll make colcannon!" Really, I had no idea that my Italian bride even knew what colcannon was, let alone would volunteer to make it. I thought cabbage was firmly on her no-no list. Live and learn! Day of, I hobbled over to the counter and seated at a bar stool with a portable cutting board, I finely sliced two leeks and half a cabbage for her. She then browned both of these in leftover bacon grease and added them to her mash of yellow potatoes. Delicious!

Ann Slicing "Irish Soda Bread"

Dyce scored a loaf of soda bread from a local bakery. I've eaten a lot of soda bread in Ireland, made a lot of it, and even have a handwritten recipe from Alice O'Sullivan, my innkeeper and damned fine baker from my final visit to Killarney. Bottom line, what we bought locally doesn't look like pound cake and it sure as hell does not taste like pound cake. Irish soda bread is not sweet, often has a good portion of whole wheat flour in it, and traditionally is shaped as a round loaf with a cross cut into the top. We were fairly put off by this so-called loaf.

Corned Beef, Colcannon, and Soda Bread

Damn Fine Lemon Curd Cake for Dessert

I cannot reiterate what a lifesaver it was for me for Dyce and Ann to put together this dinner. It so elevated my spirits.