José Restaurant, Dallas

We considered several options to get to San Angelo TX to visit with Carter for his 25th birthday. The most efficient proved to be to fly to Dallas, rent a car, and drive the four hours to San Angelo. With a return flight to Oregon at 10am on Monday morning, we decided that we would return to Dallas on Sunday evening and camp out at a hotel near the airport, especially given the inefficiency of the rental car system at DFW.

This schedule left us with the opportunity to have a nice dinner in Dallas on Sunday night, a night when many restaurants are not open. Of all the places we could have gone, we chose José near Love Field in north Dallas, an easy drive from our hotel near DFW. José is known for its elevated Guadalajaran-inflected food and drink, a celebrated female chef in AQ Pittman, its use of house-made masa from corn brought in from Mexico, and a segment on "Taco Chronicles," the Netflix show that you do not dare watch if you are remotely hungry or trying to lose weight.

The Very Handsome Floor-to-Ceiling Back Bar at José

As a chef, when I go to a restaurant, I just want the kitchen team at that restaurant to show me what they do well. The restaurant knows far better than I do what they do well. So, why should I order off the menu if I have the option to let my hosts decide? It's a rare restaurant that will roll with a request to just order for Ann and me (there are some technical POS issues, but that's more a cop out than anything), so when I e-mailed asking if they would just order for us, I was pleasantly surprised to get an affirmative response from GM Victor Rojas within a short while.

Just as we were seated, a runner dropped off a basket of totopos and a couple of salsas, one red and one green. The green salsa was one of the standouts of the night. It was almost identical to the usual salsa verde I make at home, except that it was smoother and less rustic. I really enjoyed it. It's the small things for me that make an experience.

Within a couple of minutes of our being seated, Victor appeared at our table bearing amuses and introduced himself. He would take great care of us personally for most of the evening and we greatly enjoyed chatting with him.

Blue Corn Sopecito with Blue Crab Salad

While we were munching on the tiny sopes and contemplating the cocktail menu, I had a chance to look around the spacious dining room of the building that was once a dry cleaner. The industrial steel clear span framing gives a large open interior and high ceilings that leave room for an immense custom floor-to-ceiling back bar that is the focal point of the room.

Back to the table, the star of the sopecitos was not the crab, but the blue corn masa from which they were made. One of the primary reasons we selected this restaurant is because they nixtamalize their own corn and grind their own masa. Nixtamalization is the process of soaking dried corn kernels in a basic solution that dissolves the hard outer shell, the pericarp, of the kernel.

It is a process that my great grandmothers would have used to make the hominy (posole) so prevalent to the Scots-Irish Appalachians. When I was a boy, I would often see ash hoppers at country auctions. People would fill these hoppers with ashes from the fireplace and the rainwater would filter through the hopper and drain into a bucket below. The solution in the bucket would be lye, potassium hydroxide. Today, rather than using lye, we use refined hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide) called cal to nixtamalize corn.

Victor helped us choose cocktails. I had a riff on a Manhattan called the The José Way Manhattan, a dark complex mixture of mezcal, amaro, Banane du Brésil, vanilla, and Angostura bitters. Ann had a smoked tequila Old Fashioned of reposado, agave, and a couple of bitters. We really enjoyed our cocktails; they are similar to what we are making currently at our home bar where Ann's Oaxacan Old Fashioned will hang with anybody's.

Ann and Her Smoked Tequila Old Fashioned

The José Way Manhattan

Victor also brought us small glasses of the house mezcal and said that he had gone to Mexico to help make it. After smelling its unusual fruity nose similar to an eau de vie or schnapps, I asked how it was made. It is a pechuga of 100% espadín piñas. The pechuga used in the redistillation came from things that he sourced at the market: apples, guavas, and chile chilhaucle. I have had pechugas flavored with all sorts of things, but this was the most unique mezcal that I have ever tasted, a smooth and highly refined spirit that I enjoyed.

Arugula with Peaches, Fresnos, Grilled Okra, and Goat Cheese

Next up was an arugula salad course, the standout of the meal for me. The salad was plated on a spread of goat cheese from fairly local (Waco) Pachi Pachi Farms. The best parts were the fresh salad ingredients: sliced peaches, sliced mildly spicy Fresnos, and the revelatory ingredient, sliced grilled okra. I also loved the crunch of the toasted quinoa sprinkled on the salad.

As a southerner, I have grown, harvested, and cooked okra all my life. Even though I have cooked it myriad ways, I never thought to grill it gently. The smokiness from the grill enhances the small tender okra without activating any of its slime. In the highest form of chef flattery, I may rip this off, if I can ever find some tender baby okra out here in Oregon where it is essentially non-existent. 

Champagne Telmont

Our cocktails were done after the salad, so wanting a wine that would be able to stand up to anything that might come next, we went the sparkling route, ordering a bottle of Champagne Telmont. A label that we have not had before, it was a fine all-purpose wine with lots of red fruit dominating the nose, the palate balanced by a healthy addition of Chardonnay.

Dobladas de Pollo Enmoladas

Our first course with the Champagne was a plate of dobladas covered in mole. I detected chicken thigh meat, poblanos, and a white melting cheese inside the fresh tortillas and the top had a good sprinkle of queso fresco. To be honest, I wasn't expecting mole in a self-styled Jaliscan/Guadalajaran restaurant, but I have never met a mole I did not like.

Victor referred to the mole as "aged mole," meaning that each new batch contains some of the previous batch, old school, the way it has always been and should be done. He regaled us with the story of the line cook who thought to put the final batch of mole before COVID into the freezer to be used as a starter on the far side of the pandemic. Good looking out!

The mole on these dobladas was a fairly dark, fruity, complex sauce that in my world I would call a mole poblano. As much as I loved this mole, I cannot help but wonder how this combination of chicken, poblanos, and cheese would respond to a mole verde or pipián.

The star of this dish was neither the mole nor the filling. To quote Ann, “that tortilla though!” She would have been content with a stack of those tortillas and a ramekin of that excellent salsa verde. As would I.

Carne Asada, "Patatas Bravas," Salsa Roja

The Carne was an Excuse to Snack Fresh Tortillas!

We would get more awesome tortillas with our next dish, a cast iron dish of carne asada, onions, and peppers, served with whole roasted potatoes tossed in spice ("patatas bravas"), and a beautiful salsa roja. The eye opener from this dish was the salsa roja, an intense concentrated tomato sauce. The sauce was enhanced with smoky chile morita. The texture of the sauce and the smokiness reminded me in the best way of a beautiful roasted eggplant sauce.

Again, while the meat was awesome (sous vide tenderloin, I think), the tortillas and the salsa roja stole the thunder. Ann and I asked for more tortillas with which we polished off all that delicious sauce.

Coconut Flan with Candied Amaranth and Pepita Topping

Neither Ann nor I are dessert eaters because sweet flavors are not really our thing. Flan is so often cloying and pedestrian, but not so in this case. The pastry chef had a deft hand with the sugar and the addition of coconut milk made this flan much more interesting than usual. 

After dinner, Victor brought us little glasses of dark, barely sweet Fernet-Vallet as a digestif, a nice parting gesture. We thanked him profusely for his hospitality, the willingness to order for us, the excellent staff training, and of course, a delicious meal for which I would like to thank all the BoH team, especially the prep cooks and dishwashers who never get any credit, but without whom, nothing would happen.

The stand-out components of our meal were none of the star players. The glory goes to the supporting actors: the masa, the grilled okra, the salsa verde, and the salsa roja.

I compliment Victor, a consummate hospitality professional, and the service team on their attentiveness. I always love going to a restaurant where the entire service team takes responsibility for all guests, not the usual "not my table, not my problem" attitude. The FoH staff at José are well trained. Not a lot of guests would notice this, but then, I'm not an average guest, having owned, cooked at, and run a fine dining restaurant for a very long time.

Father's Day 2023

Ann set up a dinner with Rob and Dyce on Father's Day in which she planned to make risotto-stuffed poblano peppers. I love it when she cooks. Rob and Dyce volunteered to bring some cheese and wine to kick off the evening. I ended up making a Margarita sorbet for dessert. All in all, a great evening.

Ann's Risotto Stuffed Poblano with Lime Crema

Rob and Dyce went way overboard with the cheese, including artfully arranging the three cheeses on a board with grapes, figs, dried apricots, Marcona almonds, a jar of chutney, and three types of crackers. The three cheeses were a Comte, a locally smoked Cheddar, and the star of the show, a super runny Quinta from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. This is a bloomed rind cheese similar to Vacherin Mont d'Or and was so ripe that we sliced the top off and scooped out all the yumminess from inside.

Rob and Dyce's Cheese Board

Poblanos, Peeled, Seeded and Ready to Stuff

Early in the day while Ann was out, I torched the poblanos, then peeled and seeded them. The procedure for this is outlined in a post from a few years back. Also, I sliced some fresh corn from the cob for Ann's risotto. Later in the day, Ann took over in the kitchen and made the risotto base, then stuffed the poblanos, and readied them for the oven.

Kitchen Queen Making Risotto

Once the risotto base was done, she stirred in some fresh corn kernels, a bit of chipotle adobo, and a big handful of grated pepperjack cheese to make the filling for the poblanos. The peppers got a sprinkle of cotija cheese on top before going into a hot oven for 40 minutes, followed by five minutes under the broiler to brown a bit.

Poblanos Rellenos Just Out of the Oven

After dinner, I started up the venerable ice cream machine on a Margarita sorbet base that I made earlier in the day, recipe below. I have never made such a sorbet before and took a wild guess at how to make it. The end result was awesome, so I wouldn't change a thing. It is somewhat expensive to make, however, requiring a lot of fresh limes and most of a bottle of tequila. The results though!

It Takes a Lot of Limes to Make Sorbet

My Venerable Musso Ice Cream Machine

Part of the reason for the success of the sorbet was that I made a different one each night at the restaurant and so I have a lot of experience at it. But a bigger part of the success is down to the machine in which I made it, my 20-year old Musso machine from Italy. Weighing in at nearly 70 pounds, this beast is barely portable from the garage where I store it to the kitchen where I use it. It will knock out a half gallon of sorbet in about 20 minutes and will keep doing it all night long, witnessed by its use in the restaurant where it ran for the better part of each night, churning out intermezzo course after intermezzo course for over a decade.

The Margarita sorbet recipe follows. I have divided it into two parts for ease of explanation.

Tequila Simple Syrup

The following recipe yields about 2 liters of syrup, a bit more than you will need to make a 2-liter batch of Margarita sorbet. Save any leftover tequila syrup for your bar where you can use it in tequila and mezcal cocktails. I have specified a liquid volume of sugar because I am lazy: I use a single one-liter measure to measure the sugar, then the liquid ingredients, limiting the amount of dishes that I have to wash.

500 ml reposado tequila
1500 ml water
500 ml granulated sugar

Add the three ingredients to a 3-quart or larger saucepan, stir well, and bring to a slow boil. Once all the sugar is incorporated into the syrup, turn off the heat and let the syrup cool before using. Syrup can be stored at room temperature for a couple of days. For longer storage, I put it in a squeeze bottle in the refrigerator.

Margarita Sorbet

This is a base recipe for 2 liters (basically a half gallon) of sorbet. 

juice of a dozen limes (about 500 ml)
enough tequila simple syrup to make 2 liters (about 1500 ml)
one shot of Curaçao (about 50 ml)

Mix all the ingredients and taste for sugar-acid balance. I like mine on the tarter side. Add more lime juice or tequila syrup as you see fit. Refrigerate until cold before putting it in your ice cream machine. Adding the bit of alcohol in the Curaçao will help to lower the freezing point of the mix and will help ensure a smoother sorbet with smaller ice crystals. It will also extend the freezing time by a bit (in my case, 25 minutes versus 20 minutes). You can transfer the sorbet to a freezer for a half hour or so to fully firm up.

Hatozaki Small Batch Whiskey

We finished the evening with a nightcap of Hatozaki Small Batch whiskey. I'm a devoted Scotch drinker, but recently I have been branching out to taste malts from other part of the world. I find this whiskey, like almost all Japanese whiskey, smooth and mellow. I prefer rougher and tastier Scotch, but it is no real hardship educating myself on the worldwide differences in malts. Happy Father's Day to me!

Cinco de Mayo

Time to celebrate! Ann and I are now three weeks or so past our COVID booster shots and we feel relatively safe to socialize in small groups outdoors with others who have also been vaccinated. To better get to know our neighbors, from whom we've been at a considerable distance over the last year, we're embarking on a series of porch parties, the first of which we held on Cinco de Mayo.

Unlike a lot of previous affairs, we kept this one really simple and now that we're retired, simple will be the model going forward. I made refried black beans with salsa fresca as a chip dip and a large bowl of rajas con crema, creamed strips of poblano chiles with corn, for tacos. Liz brought a platter of pork quesadillas and Sandy brought a black bean salad. Annie made tequila-lime cupcakes for dessert.

Annie was in charge of décor, arranging everything just so and picking some flowers for the bar. Libation-wise, I made a batch of margaritas and put cheap Mexican beer and white wine on ice. Easy.

After everyone left, Ann and I cleaned up from dinner (disposable plates and cups, not very Oregon eco-blahblah, but easy) and then went back outside on the patio to enjoy the first really beautiful night of the year.

This was the most normal we have felt in a very, very long time. What a relief! Maybe the light at the end of the COVID tunnel is not a train after all.

Grilled Tequila Lime Chicken with Mango-Chipotle Salsa

For me, the hardest part of making dinner is deciding what to cook. Fortunately, Annie is pretty good about throwing out ideas, such as the tequila lime chicken she mentioned last week. I decided to do the chicken as tacos topped with mango salsa. Mangos are 48 cents each right now, so we have a bunch in the house. Recipes below.

Tequila Lime Chicken Tacos with Mango-Chipotle Salsa

You can use whatever chicken you want. I have no use for chicken breasts, so I always buy thighs. I boned out 6 chicken thighs for this dish, using the skins and bones for making chicken stock. And then putting the skins in Charlie's dinner to try to put some weight on him. His tumors are making him really skinny.

Grilling Marinated Chicken Thighs

Tequila-Lime Marinade

Mix the following ingredients and place in a seal top bag. Add the chicken and marinate for at least an hour and preferably overnight. The sugar in the agave syrup will really help give you great grill marks on the chicken, as you can see above. This would also be great for shrimp.

zest of one lime
juice of one lime
1-1/2 ounces tequila
2 tablespoons agave syrup
6 cloves garlic, finely minced
stems from one bunch of cilantro, finely minced

Mango-Chipotle Salsa

Mango-Chipotle Salsa

This is about as simple as salsa gets. Mix all the ingredients. The quantities below are for your benefit. You don't actually think I measured anything, do you?

1 ripe mango, diced
juice of half of a lime
3 green onions, sliced
1/3 bunch of cilantro, chopped
finely minced chipotle, to taste
salt to taste

A Tale of Two Shrimp Seviches

If there's a summer must-have for me, it is seviche. I've made a lot in my life (see scallop seviche here and yellowtail snapper here), but not so much lately. Here in the über-agricultural Willamette Valley, we have all the vegetables you'd ever need for a great seviche, but opportunities to buy fish that you would willingly consume raw are slim. How paradoxical that we are just barely inland of the vast Pacific Ocean!

Tequila Shrimp Seviche

In the absence of fish, there's always vegetable seviche and I've made plenty of that in my life, but I need seafood for the dish to feel authentic. What to do without sushi quality fish? I have been using cooked shrimp and it's working to the extent that some seviche is better than none, an acceptable compromise.

Recently I have made two shrimp seviches, the first a more or less traditional seviche and the second based on mango, a little more non-traditional.

The first, pictured above, contains whole shrimp, tomatoes, cucumber, celery, orange pepper, poblano pepper, red onion, red jalapeño, and cilantro, dressed with lime juice and a shot of tequila. You might think that celery is bizarre in seviche. You'd be right that it is a bit unorthodox, but a yucateco line cook was showing off his chops to me once and gave me some of his seviche containing celery. I've been hooked ever since.

The citrus needs time to work. I took the photo above about 15 minutes after assembling the seviche. It was much better the next morning after hanging out in the refrigerator and coming together.

Shrimp, Mango, and Chipotle Seviche

The second seviche contains diced shrimp, mango, sliced red onion, tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, chipotle, salt, and lime juice. The photo above shows it after sitting in the refrigerator for five hours. I truly love the flavors of mango and chipotle together: they are a pair whose sum is greater than either of the parts. In fact, we used to make mango-chipotle sorbet for an intermezzo at the restaurant.

Why no recipes?

You don't need a recipe for seviche, just the basic procedure and a few tips.

The basic idea is to gather and chop your vegetables, fruits, cilantro, and seafood. Juice enough citrus to bathe everything in, then mix all the ingredients in a non-reactive bowl. Add your favorite spice and salt to taste. Refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

For spice, anything goes. I've had fiery snapper seviche from the Yucatan with habaneros. I have had tame scallop seviche with a sprinkling of dried chile flakes and some lemon zest. Fresh chiles, dried chiles, canned chipotles in adobo, sambal oelek, Tabasco sauce: they all work, depending on the flavors and spice level you want.

The acid in the citrus juice denatures the proteins in the seafood, yielding the firm quasi-cooked texture of seviche. Lime juice is not required: any citrus or combination works great. I love both yuzu and Seville oranges aka bitter oranges in seviche. Grapefruit is fun for a change and in a pinch, vinegar can be effective (think escabeche).

Finally, because fish is so expensive, I use a lot of vegetables and fruits to stretch the fish. A quick list of vegetables and fruits: tomato, red/white/yellow/green onion, shallot, garlic, celery, jicama, citrus segments, mango, papaya, watermelon, dragonfruit, avocado, corn, cucumber, red/green/yellow peppers, radish. The list is practically endless.

Cooking Shrimp for Salads

My favorite way of cooking shrimp, so that it is flavorful but not soggy and overcooked is by poaching it in a court-bouillon. To chefs, that's the classic French term for a broth of water, an acid (white wine, vinegar, lemon juice), and flavorings in which you poach seafood, sweetbreads, and so forth.

Shrimp in a Court-Bouillon

Into a pot large enough to hold the shrimp, put sufficient water such that the shrimp will be submerged when added. Then add a splash of white wine vinegar, 2 or 3 bay leaves, a few celery or lovage leaves, a couple parsley springs, 15-20 whole black peppercorns, and salt to taste. The bouillon should taste good to you. If it does not, adjust it. If I use white wine instead of vinegar, I usually drop in a half a lemon for acidity.

For most smaller sizes of shrimp, I like to add the raw shrimp to the boiling court-bouillon and immediately turn off the heat so that shrimp poaches gently in the hot broth. Bring the court-bouillon to a rolling boil and let it cook for 2-3 minutes to extract flavor. Then add the shrimp, turn off the flame, and check the shrimp every couple of minutes until they are just set. The shrimp will change color as they cook.

By smaller shrimp, I mean 16-20 and smaller. That is, shrimp that measure 16 to 20 (or more) per pound. For the really large prawns, it is generally necessary to keep the water at a slow simmer to cook them through. Then again, the really large prawns are probably better suited to the grill than to seviche.

Post Script: What's in a Word?

Years ago, a customer reprimanded me because on my menu, I spelled seviche with the letter S as I do in this post. He was unbudgingly certain that it is spelled ceviche with the letter C. "What about cebiche?" I asked him, having seen it spelled that way in much of South America. By the way, all three spellings are pronounced identically, because Spanish speakers pronounce the letters V and B the same.

It tickles me sometimes when people think that every word has a single absolute spelling, ignoring regionality of dialects, differences in pronunciation, differing systems of transliteration, and just plain old spelling preferences among countries. Think flavor and flavour. If you think of spelling as our feeble attempt to record sounds on a sheet of paper, you might be more open to variant spellings.

My references for spelling are Mr. Webster and the OED and both of them preferred seviche when I was learning to spell. For consistency, I continue to spell it that way and index this blog that way.

But I am under no illusion that everyone spells it this way. For giggles, I generated a couple of Ngrams showing the frequency of use in books of the three spellings since 1950. The first chart shows the frequency in English-language books, the second in Spanish-language books. You should take this with a grain of salt: while spellings in books represent careful language as a result of editing, they are sometimes inconsistent with spellings in more casual media. And the results are limited to the set of books that Google has scanned. Click to enlarge the graphs.

Seviche/Ceviche/Cebiche Distribution in English

Seviche/Ceviche/Cebiche Distribution in Spanish

Things that I find interesting:

1. Despite Webster and the OED preferring seviche when I was a kid, the English-speaking world seems to have adopted ceviche. Now if you look up seviche in Webster's dictionary, you see that it is a variant spelling of ceviche.

2. The Spanish-speaking world prefers cebiche, but also uses ceviche.

3. In English, seviche and ceviche were running neck and neck until about 1982 when ceviche started to gradually assume the lead over the next 20 years. I learned how to spell seviche long before 1982. Cebiche never gained any traction.

Who knew?

Language is never constant, but I bet seviche is around for as long as there are citrus and seafood on this planet.

Más Guadalajara

Two Mondays ago, we visited Taqueria Guadalajara, a newish Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town, with Billy and Shawn and we were favorably impressed enough to return.

Ann Loves Her Margaritas

Monday was a chilly, dreary, rainy evening and we were tired. After work, Ann and I had a meeting with our financial adviser and then Ann had a board meeting to attend. We just weren't in the mood to cook, so we decided to go for a late dinner and see if the teenage offspring was of the frame of mind to be seen in public with his parents. He said he would go out with us, a bit to our surprise. I was looking forward to a family dinner rather than just date night for a change. We parents really don't hate teenagers as much as they suppose we do.

Decent Beer in a Mexican Restaurant

Last visit, I saw that they had Sneaky Pete Imperial IPA from Laughing Dog brewery on their menu. It's a beer we sell a lot of at the restaurant and a beer that I really like, so I got one when Ann ordered her margarita. Ann also asked for chips and salsa, which you can see that they make an effort to present nicely. The salsa was much, much better on this visit, with a nice charred flavor. It still needed salt, but the salt shaker was handy.

Chips are OK; Salsa is Really Good

For some reason, Ann decided she wanted to have an empanada as an antojito, so she asked the server to bring one with the filling of her choice. The server picked carnitas, I guess so as not to risk offending Ann, but with a carnitas-stuffed burrito as a second course, she might have chosen something more interesting, such as birria.

Really Large Empanada, Stuffed to Order

Carnitas Burrito

Ann and the offspring had carnitas burritos for dinner, while I had a big bowl of posole. When it is dark, cold, and dreary out, I can think of nothing better than a hearty soup or stew for dinner, such as posole, menudo, caldo de pollo, or caldo de mariscos. This bowl of posole was pretty good. I've never ever had a bad bowl of posole; I'm not sure such a thing exists. I would grade this about a B+. The fatty cubes of pork in it were outstanding; the posole itself was kind of so-so.

The brick red salsa that they serve in squeeze bottles, always accompanied by a mild green tomatillo salsa in a sister squeeze bottle, has a great chile seco flavor coupled with some intense spice. It seems to be based on chiles de árbol, but with something else added for heat. A healthy dose of this earthy spicy salsa, cilantro scavenged off Ann and Carter's plates, and raw onions and lime from the garnish tray really perked this soup right up. I was a happy camper.

Posole, Ungarnished from the Kitchen

And, then there was Carter. At 5:00, he was all gung ho to have dinner with us. When we were ready to leave, we called him out of his pig sty. He came down and asked where we were going. When Ann told him we were going to Guadalajara, he scowled, "I don't want Mexican!" When given the choice to stay or come with, he chose to come with anyway, but made us pay for it in the usual teenage manner. He was especially offended when his mother told him to put his cell phone away, that there would be no phone during dinner. This isn't a new or even unusual thing, but what's a kid to do if he can't bitch via text to his friends about having to have dinner with his parents?

In Full-on Teenage Jerk Mode