Cobb Salad

Here come the posts. They’ve been piling up for weeks now and I’m just getting around to sorting things out so bear with me. I made this cobb salad a couple weeks ago and it was pretty awesome. The whole operation takes a fair amount of prep but once you have everything ready it’s easy to throw together another one the next day or every day following until you run out of ingredients.

Key ingredients – some mixture of salad greens, bacon, chicken, avocado, blue cheese, tomato and hard-boiled egg.

I used these nice mixed cherry tomatoes just sliced in half.

A nice ripe avocado.

Some homemade bacon.

Some Maytag blue cheese – one of my favorites.

Some of my standard vinaigrette that was a little heavier on the mustard and had a little bit of honey in there to sweeten it up.

And some hard-boiled eggs.

And there you have the healthiest salad of all time. Ok, so maybe not quite… but it’s damn tasty.

GOT Pizza?

My all time favorite pizza topping combination is bacon onion and tomato. To me it’s the perfect combination of flavors on a pizza. It’s really all about the simplicity and the quality of the ingredients… for this one I used dough from Pizzeria Delfina, roasted garlic, Muir Glen Yolo Gold canned tomatoes, Calabro mozzarella, homemade guanciale, and scallions.

Let’s break it down step by step, one ingredient at a time in order of assembly…

 
Guanciale Onion Tomato Pizza

Semolina or cornmeal to dust the underside of your dough
Pizza dough – make it, buy it, whatever
Roasted garlic – not absolutely necessary but what isn’t better with garlic?
Tomatoes – canned, sauce, sliced fresh tomatoes… whatever you have – I prefer canned San Marzano or sliced heirlooms
Mozzarella
Guanciale – or bacon, pancetta… whatever
Scallions – whites to cook and greens for garnish
Pecorino or hard parmesan – optional but… great
Sea salt – large grain

 
Dough – the single most important part of the pie. You can’t make pizza without dough – everything else is replaceable.

When I have time I love to make the dough myself… maybe sometime soon I’ll share that one. Recently though, I found out something that’s pretty great when you don’t have time to wait around for your yeast to get it on – many pizza joints will sell you uncooked portioned dough that is ready to go. Just so happens that my two favorite spots for pizza in my hood sell their dough – one is Arinell’s, the best NY style pizza in SF in my opinion, and the other is Delfina, which is constantly touted as one of the best pizza joints in the city. It’s pretty great to grab a ball of dough to use yourself that you know was made right and can get the job done well.

 
Roasted Garlic – garlic always has a place on pie.

Some people call it garlic confit when they’re trying to make it sound fancier than it really is… it’s just roasted garlic. Whatever you call it doesn’t change the fact that it’s just plain good shit. It’s so easy to make and it transforms strong sticky pungent garlic into a smooth, rich, deep, caramelized garlicky paste

 
Tomatoes – if you’re making traditional pizza, probably the second most important ingredient.

I love to just use San Marzano canned tomatoes and crush em up with my fingers. This time I tried something else. It’s a pretty funny concept and honestly could be pretty brilliant marketing if it works… they’re treating these tomatoes like wine – Muir Glen Organic Yolo Gold 2009 Reserve. Really? Whatever…

 
Mozzarella – by no means the only cheese you can use but definitely the traditional choice.

In its many forms, mozzarella always seems to work well on pizza, one way or another. This time I chose this old fashioned Calabro mozzarella. It’s slightly softer than commercial mozz and has a smooth, mild flavor.

 
Guanciale – The bacon part of this equation can really just be any type of salted pig part… bacon, pancetta, guanciale, ham, prosciutto… the important part is that it’s salty and meaty.

Like bacon, guanciale keeps well for months frozen. Because it’s so fatty and pig fat is such an amazing and delicious substance, it goes from frozen to ready to use pretty much immediately. You don’t have to worry about having to thaw or anything… just take it out, slice it up, toss it in the frying pan and you’re rolling. The ultimate convenience meat – keeps well, tastes great and easy to use. I sliced it thin and fried it like bacon until it crisped up a bit.

 
Scallions – you can use whatever onions you have… green, white, yellow, red…

I used scallions because I had them – and because I love the versatility… white bottoms cooked onto the pizza and then greens on top after cooking.

 

I topped it off with a little bit of Pecorino Romano and some large grained sea salt and then, into the oven.

You can crank your oven as high as you want, it won’t ever be as hot as it gets in the ovens they use at pizza joints. So sit your baking stone on the floor of your oven and fire that baby up. If you don’t have a baking stone, flip a baking sheet over and use the bottom of it as a flat surface to cook your pie on. It’ll slide right off.

They gave me the dough in a to-go pizza box so I tossed it back in for a little photo shoot.

Oh and I top it off with Frank’s. I prefer hot sauce to crushed red pepper… it just works.

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: Snout-to-Tail, Stout-to-Pale

photo by Phil

When you see those blue Eating About Beer napkins, you know you’re in for an adventure…

 
Earlier this month I was selected to participate in Foodbuzz’s 24 24 24 event that showcases posts from 24 different bloggers on 24 different meals in a 24-hour period. My dinner theme was a head-to-tail pork dinner with beer pairings for each course. I got together with a couple of the other guys from Eating About Beer to help make it happen. Eating About Beer is a group of friends focused on elevating food and beer pairing and just general beer and food awesomeness. To read about our first dinner that took place last November, click here.

The idea for this dinner was to do a head-to-tail pork dinner focusing on some common and some less commonly used pieces of the pig and then pairing those dishes each with a beer to highlight the flavors of the dish. After loads of running around picking up random (surprisingly expensive) pig parts, beer and veggies and doing a lot of prep, we pulled it off last night and it was great. A lot of the pictures in this post are by my friend Phil again, whose photo blog you can check out here.

photo by Phil

I think there will have to be some more posts later explaining some of these dishes in further detail because some of them were worth remembering and recreating. In place of bread and cheese as a snack before the meal, we had a few bowls of pork rinds that we spiced up a little bit. We tossed one bowl of them with hot sauce and another with Meyer lemon zest and cayenne pepper. Goooood stuff.

 
And then came the real food…

 
—First Course—

We started off with fried pig ears over a salad of watercress and radish dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette.

photo by Phil

This was paired with Saison Dupont – a light, fresh and slightly sour Belgian farmhouse ale to complement the fresh spiciness of the salad and the crunchy fried ears.

 

—Second Course—

Next up was a fresh homemade bratwurst over homemade soft pretzels and Eric’s amazingly awesome homemade sauerkraut topped off with a beer mustard sauce and some pickled mustard seeds. Check out Eric’s blog about all things fermentation Awesome Pickle.

photo by Phil

Naturally, we had to pair this one with German style beer… it just wouldn’t have been right otherwise. We went with a Marzen from Gorden Biersch, here in town. Slightly caramel-y, bready and malty with enough hops to cut through. Marzen (meaning March beer – which was brewed in March to be served in September) is a traditional Oktoberfest beer and it was pretty much made to be consumed alongside large quantities of pork.

 

—Third Course—

Third round was trotters (pig feet!) in a Korean kimchi jigae-like stew with kimchi, daikon and rice cakes, topped with green onion.

photo by Phil

We paired this one with the Hitachino’s Nest Red Rice Ale from the Kiuchi Brewery in Japan. And not only did the flavor pair well, it was red too!

 

—Fourth Course—

Next up was the pork jowls. We did a classic Italian dish of pasta all’amatriciana. For this one we used the guanciale that I’ve had curing & drying here for around a month. We served the sauce over homemade pasta and topped it off with some Pecorino Romano.

photo by Phil

We paired this one with a Duchess du Borgogne, a Flanders red-ale style beer from Brouwerij Verhaeghe in Belgium. The slightly sweet, sour tanginess of this one really did a number on that sweet, tart tomato sauce.

 

—Fifth Course—

Finally the part you’ve been waiting for… the head! This was definitely the most fun part of all of this to prepare, but it was also the biggest shot in the dark because this was the first time I’ve ever dealt with a head of a pig… or any other beast, for that matter. I decided that I really wanted to do more of a roast than a porchetta di testa lunchmeaty type of deal so I decided to take it more the traditional porchetta route. I removed the face/jowls, trimmed it down a little, rolled it up and we roasted it pretty much all afternoon. Then to serve it we cut up a few little pieces of the different parts for each plate. The round one is snout! We served it with simple vinegar pickled vegetables and a spiced mango sauce dressed up to look like mustard.

photo by Phil

This one was paired with Russian River’s Temptation Ale. This one is a sour Belgian style ale that’s aged for almost a year in used French Chardonnay barrels. It has a really interesting and complex flavor profile because of that and it went really well with both the meat and the pickles. Nice slightly smoky malt flavors to compliment the roast pork but also some tartness to hook up with the pickled veggies.

 

—Sixth Course – Dessert—

And finally, dessert. I went pretty simple on this one but also had to keep the pig prominent. Chocolate creme brulee topped with candied bacon bits. The bacon I used was my homemade bacon.

photo by Phil

We paired this one with Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Breakfast Beer – an oatmeal stout brewed with coffee. Not really much explanation necessary… chocolate + smokey bacon + smokey stout + coffee = amazing.

 

And here’s the lineup of beers in order.

—————————————————–
That was the meal. Now for the fun part… some more of the process…

Ear Salad

Whole ears that were simmered for about an hour with the trotters. (I think longer would have been better because they were still pretty tough in the middle down that white stripe of cartilage you can see in the next photo of the slices.

photo by Phil

photo by Phil

photo by Phil

 

Sausage & pretzels

Soaking the intestines to be stuffed…

Israel fighting with my stupid stuffer while I just hang out and catch the sausage… I think this is really what they’re talking about when they say food porn.

Testing thermometer accuracy… the digital was way off. Could have killed our yeast!

Rolling out pretzels

 

Trotter Jigae

Trotters were simmered for about 3 hours until they were falling apart

We attempted to make trotter cakes (inspired by In Praise of Sardines) but they just fell apart in the end. Still delicious. They were seasoned with garlic, Korean chili flakes, sesame seeds and salt to throw a little more Korean flavor in the mix.

 

Tagliatelle All’amatriciana

Making the pasta…

 
Making the sauce…

Slice the guanciale

Dice the guanciale

Sweat some fat out of it and crisp it up a bit

Slice the onions super thin and sautee them in that fattyness until they’re soft

Reduce a bottle of white wine in it and then add a big can of San Marzano tomatoes and let it simmer for a couple hours really low and then season to taste

And we had to test out the pairing in the kitchen too, of course…

 

Pig’s Head Porchetta

This one was my attempt at creating something like a porchetta but with the head. After removing all of the meat and face from the bone (see previous post here) and seasoning it and letting it sit for a day and a half or so, we took it out and decided that this pig’s head was just way too big to roll into itself. So we cut off one of the jowls and saved it for later. Trimmed a bit off of the one still connected to the rest of the face to make it more even, and then seasoned it with rosemary, lemon zest, garlic, salt and pepper.

Then we scored it, rolled it up and tied it.

Rosemary, thyme and lemon straight from the back yard – super local.

After about 4+ hours of slow roasting, it was perfectly cooked inside but the skin was a little hard so we ended up not using it. How bout that snout??

Cutting some slices

photo by Phil

Plating it

photo by Phil

 

Baco-choco Brulee

Candied bacon… who would have thought? I got the idea from David Lebovitz’s recipe for Candied Bacon Ice Cream. Mine didn’t look quite like his because I cut it really thick but I did essentially the same thing… covered it with brown sugar and baked it. Sooooo good.

photo by Phil

 
Israel, Eric & me
photos by Phil

 
Menu Recap:

Fried Pig Ear Salad with watercress, radish and balsamic vinaigrette – paired with Brasserie Dupont Saison Dupont (Tourpes, Belgium)

Bratwurst, soft pretzel, sauerkraut, beer mustard and pickled mustard seeds – paired with Gorden Biersch Marzen (San Francisco, CA)

Trotter Kimchi Jigae with daikon and rice cakes – paired with Hitachino’s Nest Red Rice Ale (Ibaraki, Japan)

Pasta All’amatriciana – paired with Brouwerij Verhaeghe Duchess du Borgogne (Vichte, Belgium)

Pig Head Porchetta – paired with Russian River Brewing Company Temptation (Santa Rosa, CA)

Chocolate Creme Brulee with candied bacon – paired with Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast Beer (Copenhagen, Denmark)

Here’s a little gallery of closeups of each of the beers (click to enlarge)

photo by Phil

Success!

*All of the pork came from Range Brothers through Prather Ranch Meat Company. It’s pricey but some of the best pork I’ve ever tasted… and you can rest easy knowing that it comes from happy pigs.

 
Links to related pages…
Eating About Beer
Awesome Pickle
Phil – Clubantietam.com
Prather Ranch Meat Company

Head

Just a little preview of what’s to come… tonight I de-boned the head of what appears to have been an absolute behemoth of a hog. And boy was she a beaut. This pretty much means removing the skull while trying to keep everything else in one big butterflied piece. Fun stuff. It sounds way more gross than it really was. It’s actually pretty interesting once you get over the fact that it’s a massive head. I used Chris Cosentino’s Porchetta di Testa video tutorial as a bit of training to prepare myself…

This pig was a fatty. Fatty fat fat. The head alone weighed what felt like around 30lbs – no joke. And I won’t even mention how much it cost because honestly it was a little ridiculous, considering it’s a head. But judging by the amount of mud all over his face, I’d guess he was a pretty happy hog.

By the time I got it all disassembled (in once piece!) it started to look like a good amount of meat. I’m pretty excited about what this is going to turn into but also a little nervous because a lot of money has gone into this head and if it’s not amazing I’m gonna be pretttttty disappointed.

First step = giving the head a good shave all over to remove all the leftover stubble and the few big hairs that were still hanging around. I didn’t have a torch to burn off the tricky to get to ones so I had to just give it a proper shave.

In the end, it looked pretty much like this:

Ears on top, snout on bottom, holes where the eyes were and giant fatty jowls.

After that I seasoned with a little salt, pepper and thyme from the back yard and tossed it in a bag to marinate until Saturday.

 

And of course, in the spirit of not wasting and in the spirit of getting every drop of flavor out of every bit, I roasted the skull and am simmering it over night to make stock. Definitely the most hardcore looking pot of stock I’ve ever made…

More to come…

Baco Cakes

Vegetarians, read on. This is for you too and there’s nothing too too graphic… you can just ignore anything swine-related.

Since it’s almost the weekend, I thought some breakfast would be good inspiration. And this, seriously anyone can make. It was the first thing I ever learned to make from scratch in the kitchen – pancakes. I still remember making them every Saturday morning growing up. That was my job in the kitchen… and to this day, some 20 years later, it’s still the only recipe that I know straight off the top of my head. I even remember what page it came from in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. You know the one – the classic gingham patterned book that was on the shelf of probably just about every Midwestern kitchen in the 80′s.

In this photo – everything you need to make pancakes. Goood pancakes. If this is it, why do we ever use Bisquick? I don’t know. These pancakes are so good you’ll never use a boxed mix again, promise.

And then, as if they weren’t good enough already, I decided that since I had a fresh slab of homemade bacon hot off the smoker less than 24 earlier, what better way to put it to use than… in my pancakes. This is the first time I’ve added the bacon twist to these cakes but it definitely won’t be the last. I figured, we eat plenty of bacon with pancakes, why not just cut to the chase and stuff it inside. Kill two stones with one bird, no?

So the first thing I did was fry up the bacon and render off some of the fat. Now this fat – from these amazing hogs – is like gold. And you have to treat it that way… any of it that comes out, gets saved and used in some way later. This stuff is no normal bacon grease… no no no this is some special stuff. Flavor like you wouldn’t believe, and I plan on savoring every last bit – just not all at once. I’m saving up for a bacon fat milkshake…

So actually, after I fried the bacon and poured off the grease, I decided to substitute a little bit of it for about half of the oil that goes into the pancake mix. I also used it to grease the pan I was frying them in instead of butter like I usually would.

So, this is how they go:

Best Pancakes Ever
Adapted from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook circa 1988

Dry
1.5 cups flour
2 Tbsp sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt – just a nice little pinch

Wet
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 Tbsp oil (vegetable, olive, canola – or slightly warmed bacon fat)

Mix the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl.
Mix the wet into the dry.
If the mixture is too thick or too thin, adjust with more flour or more milk accordingly. The consistency can vary, depending on how thick you like your pancakes. I prefer mine nice and fluffy so I tend to make my batter about the consistency of… a milkshake. But not a thin runny one, a good milkshake… but not an extra thick one either. Just a perfect consistency milkshake. I love milkshakes.

This is when I added the chopped up bacon.

When you’re ready to go, heat up a frying pan (I prefer nonstick – it makes things so much easier) over medium heat. I test it by flicking a drop of water on it – If it sizzles, you’re ready to go.

There are a couple of crucial moves to ensure your pancakes are perfect:

1. Don’t overmix the batter. Only mix it until the ingredients are incorporated and relatively smooth. If you beat it forever, you’ll make glue.
2. Only flip once. EVER. None of that flipping and flipping until you have the right color. Get it right the first time. You cook it on one side, flip it and it’s done. End of story, no questions.

Don’t flip until it’s done on the first side and once you get to that point, it doesn’t take more than just giving it a little color on the second side to be done. You’ll start to see little craters forming and filling in on top of the pancake. When those start to slow and it’s golden brown on the first side it’s ready to flip. Usually it’ll take a couple minutes. Then on the second side all you have to do is give it a little color and it’s ready to go.

It’ll look something like this when they’re ready to flip:

And when they’re done, they’ll look something like this:

And then of course, the marriage between bacon and maple syrup is a very stable one, sure to produce many children and last a long long time. And I’m sorry, I don’t care what anyone says about real maple syrup… when it comes to pancakes, it’s just not for me. I’ve had too many years of Log Cabin and nothing satisfies me like it does… sometimes I just need to get my corn syrup on, sorry.

Pig Party, Part II

Following the natural progression of things in my kitchen this past weekend everything kindof linked together in a big sausage link-like chain. It’s hard to decide what order to explain them in but I’m choosing this one.

So after a bit over a week of curing in the fridge, my pork belly was almost baconized. I yanked it out, rinsed it off and tossed it on a rack to dry off and develop a little tackiness for the smoke to stick to. While this was happening, I fired up my smoker…

I used to do it on a Weber and I’ve even done it on a little hibachi. It’s not impossible, just takes a lot more effort to keep the temp low in such a small space and still keep the coals hot enough to make the wood chips smoke.

First you soak the wood chips for smoking (that you can get at the hardware store or wherever else they sell grill supplies, usually) in water for a little bit. Long enough that they’re not going to just flame up and burn when you toss em on the coals… you want them to smolder and give you lots of wet, hot smoke. There are other ways to do it, but I always just use charcoal… you don’t need much and if you do it right it’ll last the whole two hours, amazingly… the trick with charcoal is that you:

1. Don’t use matchlight. I don’t care how easy it is, it burns up three times as fast as real charcoal and just doesn’t burn the same.
2. When you put the lighter fluid on you have to wait until it soaks in or the coals are just going to burn out. This applies to all grilling, not just here. Wait about a minute after soaking with fluid and then light the coals.

After that, toss the bacon on the grill once you’ve got it warmed up and smoking and then pull it off two hours later and you’ve got bacon. Voila. Seriously, this shit is better than anything you’ve ever bought in a store. Do yourself a favor and give it a shot. It’s too easy…

 
I also finished the guanciale a few days ago… it took more than the 4 days I was expecting, but by about 6 days it was nice and firm so I rinsed off the cure and hung it up over the stove. You want somewhere cool and slightly humid so it doesn’t dry out too quick.

 

Pig Party

I decided to do a little bit of curing… I’ve been in a curing mood lately. I think it must be the season… it’s just natural to want to preserve things in the cold wintry weather. I had a couple of nice pig bits in the fridge that I wasn’t going to get to and it was long past time to do some bacon-making anyway. I had a belly and a couple of gigantic jowls. The jowls were over a pound each and beautiful pieces of meat… that’s right, I said it – those jowls were gorgeous. Range Bros Capay Valley pork never fails to amaze me… it’s always incredible.

Curing meat in this sense is so easy it’s kindof stupid not to do it if you really do love a good piece of bacon. It is one of the oldest methods of preserving food and pretty much every culture utilizes it in some way. The difference between this and store bought bacon is unbelievable. It’s so easy – you salt the meat, let it sit for a week, take it out and smoke it or roast it or hang it to dry and you have bacon or pancetta or whatever. The difference between bacon and pancetta is basically just that bacon is hot smoked after it’s been cured and pancetta is air dried. Guanciale is essentially pancetta made with the pig’s jowls. For some reason the cheeks of a lot of animals are some of the most amazing parts. Some of my favorites are beef cheeks, pork jowls and yellowtail cheeks. Broiled yellowtail cheeks are one of the best pieces of cooked fish you’ll ever taste… but that’s another story.

So with my belly and my jowls, I’m going to make a slab of bacon and a couple of nice chunks of guanciale. The essentials that you need – pig and salt. The things that help make it a little better are some sugar, garlic, brown sugar, herbs and sodium nitrite, a super common curing salt that goes by the name “pink salt”. You don’t absolutely have to have it but it definitely helps. The pink salt helps the meat keep its bright pink color and it helps prevent botulism in other applications… you don’t really have to worry about that here and that’s why it’s really just useful for helping maintain the color.

And salt… I love it. I love salt so much I wanna take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. It’s without a doubt the most powerful ingredient or tool in the kitchen. I swear by Diamond Crystal kosher salt. To me it’s the perfect texture and weight for cooking – nice big grains, but they’re soft and fluffy at the same time. Whatever brand it is, always use kosher salt for cooking… put that cannister of iodized table salt back in the cupboard and go to the store. Now. Save that shit for baking cookies and cakes.

It’s best to weigh out your ingredients when you’re doing something like this where you need specific ratios because the different consistencies of different salts makes it tough to get accurate volume measurements.

The recipes that I use for these and pretty much any charcuterie I do are all based on stuff from the book, not surprisingly titled – Charcuterie. It’s by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn and it’s really brilliant. It’s definitely one of the most used books on my shelf… most cookbooks I just read for inspiration but this is one of the ones that is really a reference I turn back to all the time.

Try it out…

Homemade Bacon

- Get a slab of pork belly(2-4lbs), and mix up some cure. Basically 2 parts salt to 1 part sugar and a little bit of pink salt. I think what I used ended up being about 1/4c of salt, 1/8 cup of sugar and about a teaspoon of pink salt.
- Slather it on the belly, toss it in a big ziplock bag in the fridge and turn it every day or so to redistribute the cure.
- After about a week, if it’s firm it’s done. If not, toss it back in for another day or two.
- At this point you just rinse it off and dry it and it’s almost ready to go. Right now you basically have half-cured salt pork. You can roast it in the oven for about 2 hours at 200F, or toss it on the grill with some wood chips and smoke it. After that you just slice it up and fry it and wallow in that fatty goodness.

*I like the smoking method it because it really tastes like bacon that way but honestly it’s a slab of cured, fatty pork belly… it’s gonna be good no matter what you do with it.

To see the finished product, go here.

 

Guanciale… maybe another day.

Chicken Fried Tonkatsu

 

I love pork. It’s no big secret, and it’s nothing new right? Everyone loves pork these days, it’s cool to like pork. But it’s actually a great thing that it is so hip to like pig because it means we can get amazing quality pork everywhere now.

One of my favorite things to make lately is a brined pork chop. A big thick hog chop brined over night and then pan seared and oven roasted. But you don’t always have time for all that nor do you always have a nice fat center cut chop just lying around. What you can find pretty much anytime anywhere are boneless shoulder and sirloin chops that are cheap and… usually terrible due to the large amount of connective tissue they contain. They just don’t cooperate – sear and sautee as you may, they always end up the texture of a twelve year old truck tire. Not any more. I’ve got the trick – beat it. Beat the shit out of that chop and then bread it and fry it or sear it or whatever you need to do to get it crispy – torch it, broil it(?) toast it, microwave it. I don’t think it matters… once it’s pounded and breaded you can do whatever you want with it – it’s gonna be good.

No no but in all seriousness – chicken fried steak, wiener schnitzel, milanesa, tonkatsu – every culture has their own version of breaded, fried, flat meat… it’s all good any way you fry it. Tonaktsu is usually just a piece of boneless pork breaded and fried. I like to take the chicken fried steak/schnitzel method to make sure it’s tender… you just pound it thin (around 1/4″), bread it and fry it. I’ve deep fried and I’ve pan fried… similar results. Pan frying obviously seems a little bit healthier. I’m not totally convinced that it is, but I’m no expert. You’re also essentially pounding out the meat in favor of having a much higher breading to meat ratio… so let’s be serious – the reason you eat fried food is for the breading so just give it up already.

I put a little bit of a Korean twist on this too… because German/Texan/Japanese just wasn’t enough. I spiked the breading mix with a healthy dose of korean chili flakes and garlic salt. Otherwise it’s just flour and an egg for dipping.

I pan-fried these until they were crispy and cooked and then tossed a little bit of the seasoned flour and a knob of butter into the pan for a quick roux. I poured in a splash of the Belgian style trippel I was drinking and simmered it for a minute to make gravy. Side note – beer makes great gravy. In many many cases, for whatever you’re cooking, you don’t have stock or broth but you do have beer – 90% of the time, if you’d be needing less than say… a cup of broth or stock – I’d say substitute away.

 

I ate the chicken fried pork steak with a soft-fried egg (like katsudon),beet greens (the tops left over from a bunch of beets that I pickled) and pickled daikon over 50/50 rice (half white, half brown).