I'm Just Here for the Food (36 page)

Pickled Ginger
(Gari)

Although most Americans know
gari
as the pink stuff on the side of the sushi plate, it can be consumed anywhere its sharp, sweet bite would be welcomed. I serve it with roast pork and fried chicken, and I’ve been known to chop it up in egg salad. When a brine has enough vinegar in it, we call it a “pickle.” The result in this case is clearly a pickle.

Application: Brining

Peel the ginger with the soup spoon. Thinly slice on the mandoline and place it in a 1-quart glass jar. Set aside.

Combine the rice wine vinegar, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Remove from the heat and pour over the ginger in the jar. Cool, uncovered, for 30 to 40 minutes, then place in the refrigerator. Cover after 1 hour in the chill chest. Refrigerate for 1 week before using. If kept refrigerated, the pickles will keep until the end of time…or at least a month.

Yield: 1 quart

Software :

1 pound fresh ginger root
2 cups rice wine vinegar
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons kosher salt

Hardware :

Soup spoon
Mandoline (or other thin slicer)
1-quart glass canning jar,
scrupulously cleaned
2-quart saucepan

Rhapsody for Red (Meat)

This is a good marinade to use before any cooking method, but I prefer it for pieces that require a longer cook time—like lamb shoulder, which I marinate, sear, then wrap tightly in aluminum foil and cook for 2 or 3 hours at 300° F.

Application: Marinating

Place all the ingredients in a lidded container and shake vigorously to combine. Place along with target meat in a large zip-top freezer bag. Seal the bag until almost closed. Insert plastic straw in remaining opening and suck as much air as possible from the bag. Seal the bag completely and refrigerate 2 to 8 hours.

Remove the meat from the bag—do not rinse—and cook meat as desired.

Note:
This recipe makes enough marinade for a single flank steak. For more or less meat, increase or decrease the amounts proportionately.

Software :

4 tablespoons soy sauce
4 tablespoons Worcestershire
sauce
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons teriyaki sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 cloves of garlic, left whole but
lightly crushed
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Target cut of meat

Hardware :

Lidded plastic container
Large zip-top freezer bag
Plastic straw

Spice Rubs

I recently bought a jar of spice mix. The jar in question bore a bright, shiny, full-color photo of a smiling celebrity chef. The back label (in black and white) listed six ingredients, the first of which was salt. I bought one jar of the chef’s mix as well as new containers of each of the spices listed in the ingredient roster. Once home, it took me about ½ hour to replicate the mix. Using a pharmacy scale, I then calculated the amounts of each spice I used and the approximate cost. Now I know why the chef is smiling. I guess the people who buy this particular product assume the celebrity chef knows something they can never know and that knowledge justifies a 400 percent markup (make that 500 percent; those glossy, full-color photos are expensive). With the exception of Old Bay, chili powder, and the occasional curry powder, I try to steer clear of prepared spice mixes.

Don’t get me wrong—I am a spice snob. I buy all my spices via the Internet or mail order. I know when I place an order with say, The Spice House or Penzeys Spices, I will get the best product available this side of the Spice Islands (see Sources). Sure, they might be a little pricey, but they’re potent, which means I’ll use less and therefore get more for my money. I avoid grocery store spices—there’s just no way to know where they’ve been or how long they’ve been there.

Whenever possible I buy spices in their whole form. Like coffee, the minute a spice is ground it starts to lose its potency, so the less time that passes between grinding and use, the better. Whole spices also have a much longer shelf life than ground, so less gets thrown away. To grind spices, use a clean pepper mill, or spice or coffee grinder (see
Spice Rules
).

If the spice in question is a seed (such as cumin, coriander, or sesame), I always toast them before grinding. This activates or “opens up” the essential oils that give the spices their distinctive flavors. To toast spices, heat a small sauté pan, preferably non-stick, over medium-high heat and add the spice. Keep the pan moving to avoid burning. Toast until the spice is fragrant, but not browned, and transfer it to a plate to cool thoroughly (if ground when hot, the spices can steam inside the grinder and get gummy).

HERBS AND SPICES

When the leaf of a plant is used as a flavoring agent, we call it an herb. Most herbs can be used in either their fresh or dry state. I’m not a huge fan of dry herbs unless they’re headed for a soup or pot of spaghetti sauce. That’s because I can add them near the beginning of the cooking process. Try that with fresh herbs and you’ll find that whatever good they have to offer will disappear. By the same token, adding dry herbs at the end of cooking doesn’t work because the pieces have to rehydrate before they can contribute anything in the way of flavor.

When the dried seed, pod, root, or bark of a plant is used as a flavoring agent, it’s a spice. Some plants render both. Cilantro, for instance, is a green herb most often found in Mexican dishes. The seed of the plant (technically fruit) is called coriander and most often finds itself in Asian fare…go figure.

ANOTE ON SALT

Don’t be scared by the amounts of salt in these recipes. Although salt will season the meat, its main purpose is to enhance the texture of the meat and make it more receptive to smoke; a key point in the barbecue world.

Although I’ll keep whole spices like coriander around for up to a year and star anise and nutmeg even longer, ground spices and dry have a six-month life span at best. Buy some little circular labels at your local office Maxi-mart (usually located right next to the Mega-mart), stick one on the bottom of each container with an expiration date that’s six months from the day you filled it. If the container’s still full when that day comes, you might reconsider that spice’s place in your kitchen.

And speaking of that place in your kitchen, proper storage of spices is key. That groovy spice rack with the retro glass vials may look spiffy but it’s lousy food science. Spices hate light almost as much as they dislike air—so keep them tightly sealed and keep them out of sight. You also should fight the temptation to store spices in a drawer or cabinet near a heat source like an oven or dishwasher. Volatile acids vanish quickly in hot environments.

The Rub

Marinades can be wonderful, but when it comes to getting a lot of flavor onto meat quickly, spice rubs are the way to go. This is especially true if the meat in question possesses a relatively high surface-to-mass ratio (flank steak, skirt steak, chicken breasts, and tuna steaks are all good examples). And unlike marinades, rubs don’t add to the preparation time of the meal.

Every single commercially available spice mix I’ve been able to get my hands on has listed salt as either the first or second ingredient. Salt content is a huge demon in the world of spice rubs and seasonings. Suppose you like the profile of a rub—say, its heat. You might think “I’ll add more rub to make my food spicier.” That seems logical, but it’s also going to make it saltier.

That’s why there is no salt in the ingredient lists of the recipes that follow. Add salt to the rub as needed—better yet, salt the food before you add the rub. Isn’t it great to be in control of what you eat?

ESSENTIAL OILS

Herbs and spices can bring flavor and aroma to foods because they contain powerful compounds referred to as essential oils, “essential” because they were once thought to hold the essence of the plant. These oils can be manufactured in just about any part of a plant: flowers smell pretty because of glands that produce oils in the base of the bloom; poison ivy makes you itch because of oils that spread out across the surface of its leaves. The flavor and aroma of spices are made possible by oil deposits in seeds (cumin), pods or fruits (nutmeg), bark (cinnamon), and even stems (sassafras).

In addition to flavorings, essential oils are used to odorize everything from perfume to paint. Essential oils also were the basis of many traditional medicines and were often used in dental products. (Remember the little bottle of clove oil Dustin Hoffman kept in his pocket after being “worked on” by Laurence Olivier in
Marathon Man
?)

Essential plant oils, whether from orange zest or coriander seeds, are highly volatile, that is they evaporate very quickly when exposed to the air. The problem is, you have to grind them to get their full flavor and aroma—and that’s about as exposed to air as you can get. What can you do? (See Spice Rules.)

There’s a reason why they call it a rub. Many recipes call for seasonings to be sprinkled onto the target food. But it’s not enough. Once you’ve liberally sowed the surface, massage that rub into the meat—work it into those nooks and crannies. Most of this “first strike” will seem to magically disappear. Let it rest for a few minutes and the salt that first went onto the meat will pull moisture to the surface, providing fertile ground for another strafing of goodness. Depending on the concentration of flavor desired, this process can be repeated up to five times.

The choice of rub depends not only on the target food but on the cooking method as well. For instance, I wouldn’t use the same rub on ribs that I intended to braise as a piece of tuna I intended to sear. For one thing, they have different flavor and texture profiles. The rub that is used on the
Blackened Tuna Steak
doesn’t need the assistance of fat to release its flavor, so it’s perfect for the relatively lean fish. The pepper and chile flavors in the rub for
No-Backyard Baby Back Ribs
not only foil the fattiness of the meat, but some of the ingredients (such as capsaicin, the hot stuff in chiles) are fat-soluble as well, so their flavor is actually activated by the fat as it cooks out of the meat.

If you intend to dry sear your target meat, you might want to avoid spices that turn bitter in the face of high heat, specifically black pepper and anything containing chiles, including bell pepper. Of course the blackening craze of the 1980s gave some folks a taste for burned, so if you like carbon…well, it’s your food.

These rubs are easy to make, but you don’t just get to throw all the spices together and be the hero. Most of the spices need to be toasted separately, then cooled thoroughly prior to being ground and mixed. This is a bit more work, but the result will be more pronounced flavors. Note that once toasted, spices will only keep for three months—and only if tightly sealed.

SPICE RULES

DON’T:

•
buy spice sets just because you like the packaging.

•
name music groups or any members thereof after spices.

•
buy spices in bulk unless you’ve got a darned good reason…like you own a restaurant, barbecue competitively, or are working on a remake of
Dune
.

•
store spices where you can see them.

•
store spices near heat sources.

DO:

•
buy whole (rather than ground) spices.

•
keep an extra pepper grinder around for grinding small amounts of spice.

•
keep an inexpensive electric coffee grinder around for grinding larger amounts of spice.

•
make your own spice mixes.

•
Mount the center grind shaft of a pepper grinder to a battery-powered drill or screwdriver. It’s a very effective way to grind spices.

Chicken Rub

Rubs really need high heat to “activate” their flavors, so this is best used with recipes for seared, grilled, or roasted chicken. Here’s one: rub a chicken breast with this spice mixture, then pan sear it, and slice the finished chicken into strips to serve over pasta.