Pho Sho

As a cold wages war on my body I’m in need of some serious sick food. Chicken noodle soup was the obvious answer. One of my favorite noodle soups, chicken or not, is pho. Pho is the perfect example of Vietnamese food combining some of the best flavors – salty, umami, sour, spicy, sweet… and so many more. Pho traditionally contains rice noodles but I didn’t have any around. I did, however, have soba – Japanese buckwheat noodles – which are a little more healthy anyway so I decided to give em a shot. Good move.

I made fried chicken this weekend and decided to de-bone all the chicken before frying so I had a nice sack of bones in the freezer ready to boil for my soup broth. Ideally you’d simmer it for a lot longer but I’m feeling sick and was hungry so I only simmered it for about an hour. In my opinion, the thing that really makes pho broth distinct is star anise. This stuff is intensely licorice-y and you don’t need much of it. It works amazingly well in this broth. Coriander is also great in chicken pho broth but I didn’t use any this time.

Pho:

Hot broth
Meat (or not)
Noodles
Super thin sliced onion

Basil
Cilantro
Lime (or lemon if you have to but it’s really not the same)
Fish sauce
Hot sauce

That’s all you really need… the thing though, that makes it great and special, is the broth. I’m too tired to go into it but there are any number of versions… different broth for beef, different one for chicken, etc… this is a simple version that’s easy to throw together any night of the week. My Vietnamese friends will probably not approve…

If you want to make a vegetarian version you can but it really won’t have the depth of a meat broth. If you want to read about why broth made from bones is good, click here.

Bones – you can roast them first if you want a deeper broth, but it’s fine to just toss em straight in the stock pot and get right to it. Like I said, this is a quick version, so just toss em in the pot.

Water – cover the bones. I used about 2 quarts but what’s important isn’t a certain measure of water or bones, but the ratio between the two. Not enough bones and your broth will be weak.

Onion – this broth also depends on some serious onion presence. I peel and quarter an onion and toss the whole thing in. If you have time to spare, char the onion’s skin first over your stove’s flame.

Spices:
1 whole star anise
1/2 stick cinnamon
1 bay leaf

You can also add ginger, rock sugar (or regular), cloves, cardamom, fish sauce, salt… experiment. I just use what I have around rather than worrying about making sure it’s exactly like it’s supposed to be the way someone else made it.

Boil it for the first few minutes and skim off all the skum that bubbles to the top. Simmer for about an hour, skimming more as necessary. Boil it longer if you have the time, but at very least an hour. I also simmered the chicken meat with the broth to cook it at the same time and flavor the broth even more. You can roast it separately or simmer it in the broth – either is fine.

To eat – load your bowl full of noodles, slice the meat, slice an onion super thin and toss both in with the noodles. Ladle on the hot broth and then top it off with some basil and cilantro. Squeeze in the lime, spice it up with chili sauce and season it with fish sauce.

Now, this is where you have to trust me, if you’ve never had fish sauce… trust me trust me trust me. You’re going to say “well that sounds gross but since I respect your opinion so much I’ll give it a shot.” Then you’ll get home and open that bottle of fish sauce and wonder why you ever listened to me when you smell it. And again you’re going to want to leave it out. But trust me, ignore what you smell and shake it in. You will not regret. For as bad as it smells, it tastes twice as good.

And enjoy.

 
With my leftovers I chopped everything up and made chicken salad to toss on a baguette for lunch tomorrow. Chopped chicken, lime juice, cilantro, basil, fish sauce, a tiny bit of sriracha… and I’m gonna tie it all up with some mayo.

*Update – the sandwich with the leftovers was almost better than the soup itself! I will definitely be making that again. I tossed what you see in the picture with some mayo, spread it on a split open soft french roll, and toasted it until it was all nice and hot and crusty. Topped it off with some sliced avocado and wow… mmm mmmmmmm.

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.

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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

Lentil Soup

Lentils are another amazing ingredient that I always forget about… last week I rediscovered them. This was sortof an Indian spiced lentil soup with kale and zucchini, among other things. Again – super easy…

I sweated a little bit of garlic, carrots and onion in some olive oil and after a couple minutes I tossed in a chunk of peeled ginger and some red lentils in and mixed it all together. While it was nice and oily, I added a nice little pile of garam masala and tossed it all to coat the lentils. When you’re using spices in a dish that’s got a lot of liquid, it’s best to add them to the dry ingredients before the liquid so that they can incorporate slowly – this way you won’t get big clumps of spices.

After the spices were good and mixed in, I covered the lentils with chicken stock and let it simmer for about 20 minutes or so. You could use whatever – vegetable stock, water… whatever you have.

While that was going, I chopped up my leftover kale and zucchini to bulk it up a little bit. I decided to wait to add them until close to the end so that they kept a little bit firm and added some texture. Sometimes I love my soup the consistency of baby food all the way through… and sometimes I don’t.

Because the red/orange lentils are so small and split, they cook up pretty quick. When they were getting soft… about 20 minutes (I think?) later, I added the zucchini and let it cook for a couple minutes and then mixed in the kale.

All said and done, under an hour for a great, easy meat-free dinner… booyakasha.

 
Lentil Soup
In order of appearance:

3 cloves garlic
1 small yellow onion
1 medium or 2 baby carrots
1″ chunk of fresh ginger
1 cup red lentils
2 Tbsp garam masala
2 cups stock (or water)
1 medium zucchini
1-2 cups chopped fresh kale (or other greens)
salt & black pepper to taste

Garlic, onion, carrots + olive oil. Simmer. Add lentils, coat with spices, add stock, simmer, add zucchini, simmer, add kale, season, eat.

Vegan(!!) Miso Veggie Stew

I know I know, I’m cracking up. I’ve gone bonkers over here… second day of no meat and tonight it was completely vegan! I think I might have to have a steak or some ribs tomorrow…

A lot of the time, especially when I’m just cooking for myself, I have a lot more than I need of something for a meal and lots leftover. Tonight I used some of the same stuff that went into my dinner last night and added a few other things I had around. I made sortof a vegetable stew with a miso soup base – except I didn’t add the bonito. This soup was super simple and actually really tasty and surprisingly filling.

It went a little something like this… First, I sliced sunchokes and boiled them for 15 minutes, according to the reccomendation in my Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer. It’s a pretty nice reference about vegetables organized by species that I picked up at a thrift store years ago for like a dollar… very informative.

I wasn’t super familiar with sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) but I did know they had a flavor and texture similar to artichokes. They almost look like little balls of ginger root, but when cooked they taste like artichokes. Weird shit… Apparently they can make you pretty gassy and boiling them ahead of time can reduce that.

So I boiled the sunchokes and then set them aside. Drained the water (to avoid the fart fest) and refilled with some new water that I simmered a couple of small pieces of kombu in. Kombu, if you don’t know, is the hard, thick, dried seaweed that’s one of the main ingredients in the broth used to make miso soup. Usually that broth, called dashi, also has bonito (dried, fermented and smoked skipjack tuna) flakes in it but I opted to leave them out.

So I basically just started with a mildly seaweedy broth and added to that some diced carrots first that simmered for a bit and then a pile of chopped kale, some of which I chopped a little more finely to add some color and texture to the broth. After that simmered for a couple of minutes I turned down the heat and added some miso paste. You don’t ever want to boil after you’ve added the miso because you don’t want to kill all that good bacteria. After that I tossed in my leftover cooked quinoa from last night (which wasn’t much and I could have used more), the cooked sunchokes and some finely diced jalapeno. The result, topped with some sliced scallions, was pretty damn good…

My idea with the sunchokes was that they’d add sortof a firm-ish potato-y texture to the soup without totally starching it out and mucking up the miso. You could try potato if sunchokes aren’t around but honestly I think it would have been just as good without em… they didn’t really bring anything amazing to the soup, just helped fill it up. I think they’re probably better to just eat on their own so you can enjoy the flavor.

 
Vegan Miso Vegetable Stew
In order of appearance:

2-3″ of kombu (not the end of the world if you can’t get it, just leave it out)
6 cups water
4 carrots
4 cups chopped kale
3/4 cup miso paste* (more or less to taste – treat it like your salt seasoning for the soup…)
1 cup cooked quinoa (I’d use more if you have it… 2 cups probably would have been perfect)
6-8 cooked sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes)
1 small jalapeno pepper

Chop it however you want, stew it all together, and rest easy knowing that no animals were hurt or even consulted about this meal.**

*When you’re adding miso paste it helps a ton to thin it out with a little bit of hot water in a small bowl before pouring it in – you’ll avoid fat chunks of undissolved miso in your soup.

Vegetarians/vegans stop reading here.

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**I’m sorry I just can’t resist – this would have been awesome if it was started with bacon… I’d simmer the water with the kombu in a separate pot. While that was going on, I’d sautee some chopped bacon in the soup pot. You could leave it in to really flavor the broth or remove it to use later as a topping. I’d then sautee the carrots with the fat (and bacon if you leave it in) for a minute before adding the hot broth and continuing from there.

Yay Area Borscht

I’d never made borscht before but it always seemed like an appropriate winter soup. It’s not as cold here as it is back in the motherland (no not mine, the Ukrainians’), but we still get plenty of cabbage and beets around here this time of year to make a nice burgundy stew. I’m gonna have to take another photo because this one really doesn’t do it justice… it looks so much better now that the beets have had time to dye everything else purple.

The base typically includes some mix of beets, cabbage, carrots, potatoes and some meat. I went with a beef shank and also had the butcher cross-cut me a beef leg bone into 1″ segments to make a quick stock since I was all out.

One of the first meals few meals I can remember ever having in Los Angeles was with my friend Mark at a place called Doughboys that, after a sad turn of events, shut down a few years back. Strangely I still remember that meal vividly because I was so impressed by the beef stew… it was awesome, cheap and I just loved how it looked and felt in my mouth because everything in it was diced exactly the same size. Potatoes, carrots, celery(I think?), beef, all about 1/4″ dice. Perfection. Every time I make beef stew or anything similar, I come back to that memory for some reason and I end up dicing everything like that. This stuff tonight was a little bigger, probably closer to 1/2″ but I still always try to keep it consistent. Not only does it look cool, it also ensures that your veggies will be cooked evenly and you won’t have some soft and some hard because you cut em all wonky.

Somehow avocados are always around and always cheap here… all year. I grabbed one to throw on top of the soup along with the usual sour cream topping. I hear dill is traditional but I’m generally not a big fan of dill so I didn’t hunt it down for this one. I also had a giant daikon that I was planning to pickle so I decided to dice some of that up in the stew as well. It’s great in Japanese and Korean stews so I figured it’d go well with this mix of stuff too. It has a great texture when it’s cooked and has a very mild flavor – great filler.

First step, simmer the shank in the stock with some onion. Since the stock wasn’t on for as long as I would have liked, I threw the bones in with the shank to try to drag out a little more flavor. This simmered for about an hour and a half or so until the beef was able to pull away from the bone easily but before it was falling apart. I wanted it to still have some shape so I could give it a nice dice to match up with the veg.

After the beef was ready, I pulled it out and diced it. In went the carrots, potatoes & beets (which I think next time I’ll use a little more of). This simmered on low for about 20 minutes or so until the veggies weren’t hard anymore, but before they turned to mush. After that I tossed in the daikon and the cabbage and simmered just until the daikon was soft, which doesn’t take long.

The soup is way better if it sits in the fridge for a day before you eat it. The whole soup turns deep purple and the beet flavor is a lot more intense.

Ingredients:
1 beef shank
4 or so cups of beef stock
1 yellow onion
3 medium carrots
3 racquetball(?) sized beets
2 medium red potatoes
2-3 fistfulls of shredded cabbage
Salt and pepper to taste

Sour cream and avocado to top

*Next time I’ll start it out with some bacon to give it a little bit of smoke. I think I’d render the bacon in the pan till it was crispy, use the fat to saute the onion in, and keep the crispy bacon to chop up on top with the sour cream and avocado. That’s exactly what was missing – the crunchy topping. You know I love a good crunchy topping… especially when it comes in the form of smoked hog.