MooMooFoodie

NY Times: Backyard Bulgogi

 

 

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June 1, 2011

Backyard Bulgogi

By MARK BITTMAN

In looking to create a menu for an early-season barbecue that would appeal to everyone — meat lovers, vegetarians, culinary thrill-seekers and whoever else might show up — I realized that such a menu already exists. It’s just that it isn’t what we think of as “American food.”

Still, it is American to not fuss about the origin of recipes, especially when the menu spotlights both intensely flavored grilled marinated meat and a bunch of quirky, flavorful and mostly meatless side dishes.

In this case, the source is Korean. And with a little planning and advance work, you can make beef bulgogi and banchan (the name for the little tidbits either served first or as accompaniments) at home. And you’ll make them as well as or better than you’ve eaten them on 32nd Street in Manhattan or wherever your local joint might be. In other words, you’ll kick off the grilling season with an appealing, exotic, even exciting menu that will make most others seem dull.

The exoticism and excitement derive from both the ingredients and the techniques. Many of the ingredients you’ll need can be found at any halfway decent grocery store, but there is one important exception: gochujang, or Korean chili-bean paste. This combines the salty, complex tang of miso with a mild fire, and it’s an absolute must as a condiment for the beef. (If you’ve eaten Korean barbecue, you’ve been offered it.)

Gochugaro, Korean chili powder, which contributes heat to the kimchi and scallion-salad recipes, is also difficult to find in most supermarkets, but a substitute of red-pepper flakes or not-terribly fiery ground chili powder will give you a similar effect. Depending on where you live, you may well be able to find mung bean sprouts (which star in a simple salad), daikon radish (pickled along with cabbage in kimchi) and hijiki (which is soaked and then stir-fried in what is quite possibly the best seaweed preparation I’ve ever had) in your local supermarket.

The instantly recognizable profile of Korean food, however, comes not from obscure ingredients but from the relatively mainstream ones: sesame (both seeds and oil), garlic, soy sauce, garlic, rice vinegar, garlic, sugar and scallions. And garlic. I’ve more than once called Korean food “Japanese food with guts,” not as a slight against Japanese food (wonderful in its own right) but as an endorsement of Korean cuisine’s vigorous, muscular, completely unsubtle flavor profile. Korean food’s aggressive seasoning is really just right for grilling, where attempts at nuance are usually in vain.

Some elements of this barbecue are familiar but tweaked. (Some of that familiarity comes from the American presence in Korea, now going on 60 years.) Korean potato salad, for instance, is similar to American potato salad in that its dressing is mayonnaise-based, but the Korean version sometimes uses julienned rather than chunked potatoes and also contains carrots, peas, scallions and chives. It’s far from conventional and far from bland.

I will not (and cannot) claim that every element of this menu is legitimately Korean. In fact one recipe, the plum-and-herb cocktail, is plain made up: a sangrialike concoction of white wine, gin, rosemary-infused simple syrup and fresh plums. I see it as a tribute to the sweet plum wine so often served in Korean restaurants. (If you want to be authentic, drink soju — it will get you drunk in a hurry — or beer.) But if my cocktail isn’t authentic, it is good and, like the rest of the menu, very potent.

Beef Bulgogi
Time: 45 to 150 minutes

1 bunch scallions, roughly chopped

8 or more garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped

1 tablespoon sugar or honey

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 cup soy sauce

1 tablespoon sesame oil

2 pounds sirloin, rib-eye or skirt steak, thinly sliced, or 3 to 4 pounds beef short ribs, boned and thinly sliced

Boston or loose-leaf lettuce leaves for serving

Gochujang (Korean chili-bean paste) for serving.

1. Combine the scallions, garlic, sugar, pepper, soy sauce and oil in blender and purée, adding water as needed to form a smooth mixture. Toss the meat with the soy mixture and marinate for 15 minutes to 2 hours. Heat a grill with the rack 4 to 6 inches from the flame; the fire should be as hot as possible.

2. Remove the meat from the marinade, and grill until browned outside but still rare inside, no more than a couple of minutes per side; do not overcook. Serve the meat wrapped in lettuce leaves, with gochujang for dipping.

Serves 4 to 6.

Sesame Spinach and Tofu
Cook 1 tablespoon minced garlic in 2 tablespoons sesame oil over medium-high heat for 1 minute; add 1 pound chopped spinach and cook, stirring occasionally, until it begins to wilt. Crumble in 1/2 pound extra-firm tofu and stir until warmed through. Stir in 1 tablespoon soy sauce, a pinch of sugar and 1 tablespoon sesame seeds. Serve hot or warm.

Korean Potato Salad
Cook 1 pound julienned or shredded potatoes and 1/2 pound julienned or shredded carrots in salted boiling water until barely tender, about 5 minutes; add 1/2 cup fresh or frozen peas for the last minute of cooking. Drain and rinse with cold water. Whisk together 1/2 cup mayonnaise and 3 tablespoons rice vinegar; toss with the vegetables, 1/2 cup chopped chives and 1/4 cup chopped scallions. Garnish with more chopped scallions and chives, season with salt and pepper to taste and serve.

Grilled-Scallion Salad
Brush 1 pound untrimmed scallions with 1 tablespoon sesame oil; grill over moderately high heat, turning once, until charred and tender, 5 to 10 minutes. Roughly chop and toss with 1 / 3 cup rice vinegar, 1 to 2 tablespoons gochugaro (Korean chili powder) or less if using red-pepper flakes, 1 tablespoon sesame seeds and 2 teaspoons sugar. Serve immediately.

Kimchi
Layer 1 small green or white cabbage (separated into leaves) and 1 small-to-medium daikon radish (cut into 1-inch cubes) with 1/2 cup coarse salt in a large bowl. Let sit until the cabbage is wilted, about 2 hours, massaging and weighting it if needed to help soften. Rinse and dry well. Roughly chop and toss with 15 to 20 chopped scallions, 1/4 cup fish (or soy) sauce, 1/4 cup minced garlic, 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons minced ginger and 1 to 2 tablespoons gochugaro (Korean chili powder) or less if using red-pepper flakes. Serve immediately or refrigerate for up to a week.

Fried Hijiki
Soak 1 ounce dried hijiki in 2 cups hot water. When it’s tender, about 5 minutes later, drain, squeeze dry, remove any hard bits and chop. Cook 1 tablespoon minced garlic and 1/4 cup chopped scallions in 1 tablespoon neutral oil (like grapeseed or corn) and 1 tablespoon sesame oil over medium-high heat for 1 minute; add the hijiki and cook until browned and beginning to shrivel, 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in 1 tablespoon each soy sauce and sesame seeds and a pinch of sugar. Serve hot or warm.

Plum-and-Herb Wine Cocktail
Cook 1 / 3 cup sugar, 1 / 3 cup water and 1 sprig fresh rosemary or thyme over medium-low heat until the sugar dissolves; cool and remove the herb. Combine 1 bottle not-too-dry white wine (like Riesling), 1/4 cup gin, the juice of 1 lemon, 2 to 4 chopped plums and 1/4 cup of the rosemary syrup. Chill for at least 2 hours, taste and add more syrup if you like and serve.

NY Times: Ribs Without Smoke

 

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April 5, 2011

Ribs Without Smoke

By STEVEN RAICHLEN

CONVENTIONAL wisdom holds that pork ribs taste best when cooked outdoors on a grill or smoker. Conventional wisdom hasn’t experienced the sweet-sour balsamic-glazed St. Louis-cut spare ribs at Animal in Los Angeles. The restaurant’s chefs, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, prepare them in a way that most barbecue purists would never order, much less eat: baked in the oven.

“I’m a firm believer that you can’t have barbecue without fire,” Mr. Shook said. “But in California, the health department is a giant pain, and a smoke-scrubbing ventilation system that complies with environmental regulations would have cost more than $1 million.” (For the record, he and Mr. Dotolo spent less than half that sum to open Animal.) “If we can’t do it right, we don’t want it.”

The two men have been obsessed with ribs from the moment they met at the North Miami, Fla., campus of Johnson & Wales University. Longtime devotees of Tom Jenkins Bar-B-Q in Fort Lauderdale, they took their obsession with them to Los Angeles. They began experimenting with an alternative technique to true barbecue: seasoning the ribs with herbs and grapeseed oil, wrapping them in foil and roasting them low and slow in the oven. The process made the meat supernaturally tender but not quite soft, with the deep, sonorous flavors a Southern pit master would achieve with a half-day’s cooking in a wood-burning pit.

For most people, ribs aren’t complete without barbecue sauce. At Animal, this takes the form of a bracingly acidic slather designed to play the sharpness of balsamic vinegar, grainy mustard and Tabasco sauce against the sugar rush of honey, brown sugar and ketchup. The chefs sizzle the sauce into the meat under the broiler, which gives the ribs a spicy crust. “Some bites even get a little charred, as they would on a grill,” Mr. Shook said.

Animal’s owners are among the growing number of chefs who work wonders with pork ribs by braising. Michael Mina has made bourbon-braised Kurobuta pork short ribs a signature dish at the restaurant in San Francisco that bears his name. “We brine the ribs in cider vinegar and carrot juice, then cook them sous vide at 160 degrees for a day and a half,” Mr. Mina said.

The final step is to braise the ribs with a bourbon peppercorn mixture in a copper pot in the oven. “The low slow heat keeps the alternating layers of fat and meat visible and intact,” he said. “The ribs become really tender, but still firm enough to eat with a knife and fork.”

Tim Cushman, the chef and an owner of the sophisticated Japanese restaurant O Ya in Boston, uses a 48-hour process to cook his tea-brined baby back ribs. The meat is marinated in yuzu juice, light and dark brown sugar and black tea before it is braised for three to four hours in an enameled cast iron pot on the stove.

“Our oven space is limited, so early on, we figured out that we could achieve a steady temperature of 190 degrees by placing the pot over the pilot light on the stove,” Mr. Cushman said. “It’s just like setting the dial of a smoker for 200 degrees.” The ginger-mirin-sake-soy sauce braising liquid imbues the ribs with rich umami flavors analogous to the taste wood smoke imparts to traditional barbecue, he said.

The most surprising example of braised ribs may well come from Extra Virgin in Kansas City, Mo. “I respect the local barbecue tradition so much, I would never want to compete with it,” said Michael Smith, the chef and an owner. Instead, he sears baby backs on the restaurant’s wood-burning grill for a few minutes to lay on a light smoke flavor before gently braising them in the oven for three to four hours in a Peruvian-inspired glaze made with guava marmalade, citrus juice, coffee beans and fiery aji amarillo chilies. “In this part of the world, people like their ribs sweet and sticky,” he said.

Until recently, barbecue connoisseurs in places like Kansas City would have considered ribs cooked in the oven little short of blasphemy. In barbecue country and elsewhere, the technique had a miserable reputation that, in truth, was often deserved. Some restaurants baked ribs with overly sweet commercial barbecue sauce. Others, to avoid drying them out, would cook ribs in boiling water. As with braising, the idea behind boiling ribs is to tenderize them before tossing them on the grill or under the broiler to caramelize and crisp the exterior.

The problem with boiling is that it’s a flavor-removing, not flavor-enhancing, cooking method. (When you make stock, you boil bones with the express purpose of transferring the flavor from the meat to the water.) By contrast, braising in the oven adds flavor, because you’re cooking the ribs in a small quantity of flavorful liquid in a sealed environment.

Many restaurants made matters worse when they slathered boiled or baked ribs with barbecue sauces pumped up with artificial smoke to compensate for lackluster flavor. The result? Ersatz barbecue and a lost generation of rib eaters, especially in traditionally non-barbecue regions like the Frost Belt and the Northeast, which came to confuse liquid-smoke-flavored oven-cooked ribs for true pit barbecue.

The chefs who are now rescuing oven ribs from their lowly reputation take a profoundly different approach. “We’re not trying to fake true barbecue,” said Mr. Shook of Animal. Instead, he and some of his colleagues around the country are deploying the braising technique, which he said builds layers of flavor utterly different from those that can be achieved in a smoker.

To further explore the premise, I went back to one of my notebooks chronicling a remarkable meal of milk and honey spare ribs at the Osteria dei Cacciatori in Albaretto della Torre, a hamlet perched among steep Barolo vineyards in the Piedmont region. My visit was eight years ago, when Cesare Giaccone still ran the osteria that’s been in his family for more than 120 years. (Today, his son Filippo mans the stove.) In those days, his guest book read like a “Who’s Who” of marquee chefs, with Ferran Adrià and Charlie Trotter visiting the month I was there.

I can still taste those ribs in a vivid rush of flavor. Marinated the previous night with rosemary, sage and garlic, they were roasted with acacia honey, porcini mushrooms and milk, an ingredient that was unprecedented in my experience of rib dishes. Mr. Giaccone claims to have gotten the idea for the latter from a local priest, who in turn claimed it would render the ribs more tender. (It does.) This dish could be made year-round, but as Mr. Giaccone explained in a recent e-mail, “the pig is eaten more gladly in the winter.”

I tried to replicate his milk and honey ribs on a charcoal grill back home in the United States, tossing a handful of soaked hickory chips on the coals. (Old habits die hard.) The smoke overpowered the delicacy of the meat, milk and honey, and the ribs fell short of what I remembered having in Italy.

To understand some of the physics involved with cooking ribs in the oven, I caught up with Nathan Myhrvold. Dr. Myhrvold is a scientist, an inventor and now the author of the five-volume culinary manifesto, “Modernist Cuisine.” He also has abiding passion for barbecue. In 1991, Dr. Myhrvold was a guest member on one of the most decorated barbecue teams in American history, steering the team to victory in the meatless “Anything But” category, for smoked fettuccine noodles paired with cream sauce flavored with Vidalia onions and barbecue rub.

According to Dr. Myhrvold, three things happen when you cook meat with hot air, as you would on a grill or in a smoker. First and most obvious, you transfer heat from the hot air to the meat. Second, the hot air evaporates liquid from the surface of the meat, which fosters flavorful browning, but also has a tendency to dry out the meat. Paradoxically, this evaporation causes the temperature of the meat to drop during part of the cooking process, a phenomenon that veteran pit masters call “the stall.”

The most important thing that happens is that the heat breaks down a tough connective tissue in the meat known as collagen into softer, more easily dissolved gelatin. This process works best at lower temperatures in a moist environment. This is why barbecue is so well-suited to tough, inexpensive cuts like brisket and ribs.

Low-temperature oven braising works on ribs for the same reason, and it offers a few advantages of its own. By cooking baby back ribs wrapped in foil in the oven, as do the chefs at Animal, you reduce the evaporation and the tendency of the meat to dry out. (To compensate for the loss of the cooling effect of evaporation, the chefs cook their ribs at an unusually cool 250 degrees.)

As for Mr. Giaccone’s milk and honey spare ribs, Dr. Myhrvold calls the process “open pan braising.” The cooking starts around 180 degrees, he said, and as the milk evaporates, the temperature rises, browning the meat, lactose and milk proteins. It is also adding color, flavor and sweetness. “It’s a little like making sweetened condensed milk,” he said.

And Dr. Myhrvold’s preferred method of cooking ribs? It’s a four-step process that involves smoking the ribs for four hours, then cooking them sous vide, in a sealed plastic pouch, at 140 degrees for 48 hours, followed by a bath in liquid nitrogen for 45 seconds to flash chill them. The final step is a plunge into a deep fat fryer to crisp the exterior.

Thanks, but when I hunger for heresy, I’ll simply cook ribs in the oven.

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Sweet-Sour Balsamic-Glazed Ribs

Adapted from Animal, Los Angeles

Time: About 21/2 hours

 

For the ribs:

2 spare-rib racks, the smallest you can find (5 to 6 pounds total)

2 tablespoons grapeseed or canola oil

Kosher salt

4 large flat-leaf parsley sprigs

4 garlic cloves, peeled and gently crushed

4 thyme sprigs

For the barbecue sauce:

1 cup balsamic vinegar, or to taste

1 cup ketchup

6 ounces ( 1/2 can) your favorite beer

1/4 cup honey

3 tablespoons grainy mustard

1 tablespoon molasses

1 1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce, or to taste

1/4 cup dark brown sugar, or to taste

1/2 red onion, diced

1 large clove garlic, minced

Salt.

 

1. To prepare the ribs, heat the oven to 350 degrees. If the butcher has not removed the membrane on the back of each rack, gently pry it up by sliding a sharp implement (like the tip of an instant-read thermometer) under it, then lifting gently. Grab the membrane with a paper towel and peel it off.

2. Spread a 24-inch sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil, shiny side up, on a work surface. Place one rack on top, rub it all over with oil, and generously season both sides with salt. Place 2 parsley sprigs and 2 garlic cloves under the concave side of the rack and 2 thyme sprigs on top. Wrap the ribs in the foil, pleating the edges to seal well. Repeat with the second rack. Place the rib packets in a large roasting pan.

3. Roast the ribs for 30 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 250 degrees. Cook 1 1/2 to 2 hours more, until the meat has shrunk back from the ends of the bones by 1/4 to 1/2 inch and the ribs are tender enough to pull apart with your fingers.

4. Meanwhile, prepare the barbecue sauce. Place the balsamic vinegar in a large nonreactive saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until reduced by a third. Add the remaining barbecue sauce ingredients with 1/4 cup water, bring back to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer until thick, 30 to 40 minutes. If the sauce starts to thicken too much, add a little water. The sauce should be highly seasoned; adjust to taste by adding vinegar, brown sugar or salt.

5. Remove the ribs from the oven and let cool briefly, then open the foil, being careful of the escaping steam. Transfer the ribs to a baking sheet. Turn on the broiler or raise the oven to 450 degrees.

6. Slather the ribs on both sides with the barbecue sauce. Broil the ribs until the sauce sizzles and browns, 2 to 4 minutes on each side. Alternatively, bake in the oven 8 to 12 minutes. Baste with the barbecue sauce and serve at once with any remaining sauce on the side.

Yield: 4 servings

More recipes for Ribs

NY Times: Chasing Stingray All Over Town

 

November 2, 2010

Chasing Stingray All Over Town

By JULIA MOSKIN

KOK FYE SEETOH shot me a warning look.

I was jammed into a restaurant kitchen in Queens with the pre-eminent translator to the English-speaking world of the food of Malaysia and Singapore. I had serious doubts about a sauce.

A sweet sludge punctuated by large pieces of raw shallot, it was presented by the restaurant’s Malaysian owner as “popular with Americans.”

As the owner turned away to put the fish in the fryer, I asked Mr. Seetoh under my breath, “Would you really eat this in Singapore?”

“We’ll talk outside,” he said, tersely.

Mr. Seetoh, a former photojournalist who now publishes exhaustive guides to street foods in Southeast Asia, was my wingman for what may have been America’s first stingray crawl. Its goal: to mine Mr. Seetoh’s expertise by choosing one popular dish from the alluring, often bewildering menus of New York’s Southeast Asian restaurants, and chasing it all over town.

In sunglasses, he strode into kitchens with the imperious confidence of Keith Richards and judged them with the tender harshness of Gordon Ramsay. He rode waves of enthusiasm and dropped into valleys of despair, pleasantly surprised by the juicy fish at one place but tormented by the careless spicing at another.

“They make too many compromises here,” he said flatly as we left, dismissing the offending sauce as not authentic and, worse, just not good. Ikan pari pangang, stingray coated with a spicy sambal and grilled on banana leaves, was the test he chose for local cooks. (Stingray is known on our tables as skate; the French call it raie).

Originally a dish for fishermen and peasants, made with what was considered a “trash fish” but deliciously aromatic from the spice paste and toasted banana leaves, ikan pari pangang is now a classic outdoor dinner and an accompaniment to cold beer. As the moist heat suffuses the fish, it should take on a tangy, dry crust but stay juicy near the central spine. (The flesh slides off easily after cooking.) Served with wedges of lemon and rings of onion, with lots of juicy bits to poke at with chopsticks and swipe through the sauce, it makes a pleasant, indolent meal, like picking at a whole barbecued pork butt.

It is a dish with Malay roots, which sets it apart from the many popular Chinese- and Indian-influenced snacks that the region is famous for, like curry-rich roti canai (pronounced CHEN-nye), Hainanese chicken rice, kangkung belachan (water spinach cooked with shrimp paste) and savory stir-fried Chinese-based noodle dishes like char kway teow, a crunchy, savory tangle of rice noodles, bean sprouts, shrimp, pork and chili paste.

But grasping those flavors, especially from far away, is not easy.

Southeast Asia covers a huge area, in both culinary and geographic terms. Singapore, with a slightly smaller landmass than New York City, is a dot in the huge stretch of islands that swirls off the coast of Vietnam — including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Singapore’s history as a free port under the British empire, its central location on trade and spice routes and recent decades of high-speed economic growth have made the cuisine there a heady international brew. And Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s ever-expanding capital city across the Strait of Johor, has a food scene almost as intense.

In New York City, “Southeast Asian” restaurants try to cover a range of food from Malaysia and Singapore, often stirring in popular dishes from Thailand and Vietnam; some have hundreds of items on the menu. Most restaurant owners here are ethnically Chinese: noodles, rice, stir-frying and steaming are fundamentals, and even kung pao shrimp may appear on the menu. But dishes with chilies, lemon grass, galangal, coconut, curry spices and funky fermented seafood products like belachan (shrimp paste) are signs that the food isn’t just arriving from China.

I knew that Mr. Seetoh, whose Makansutra guidebooks contain detailed culinary analysis of individual dishes, down to the perfume of the duck broth and the springiness of the fish balls, would be able to answer my lingering questions: What makes one dish Malaysian and not Singaporean? Why are some dishes called by Malay names, and others Cantonese? And most important for a food lover, does this dish taste as good as it is supposed to, or was the flavor lost in translation?

Malaysian food leans more toward tangy flavors, and Singapore food toward the richness of peanut and coconut, Mr. Seetoh said, but other than that, the distinctions are usually traced to individual cooks.

At Coco in Elmhurst in Queens, where David Lim, the chef and an owner, serves a local crowd of Southeast Asians, Koreans, Chinese and Latinos, the stingray was sweeter and less redolent of dried shrimp and shrimp paste. At Sanur in Chinatown in Manhattan, Mr. Seetoh was impressed by Sun Chen Lai’s hack: to adapt the method from an outdoor grill to a basement stovetop, Mr. Lai, the chef and an owner, deep-fries the fish first, then enfolds it in a round lotus leaf and tosses the packet deftly in a hot wok until it is good and charred.

But Mr. Seetoh was not entirely satisfied with anyone’s sambal, the cooked sauce that acts as a cooking medium and a table condiment. “When they gentrify the food, it’s understandable, but it is completely the wrong idea,” he said.

Barriers of language and culture, he said, prevent many immigrant cooks in the United States from presenting their best food to outsiders. “In traditional culture, selling food on the street is one degree above prostitution,” he said. “We need to learn to be proud of what we have.”

It is a given for Mr. Seetoh, a first-generation Singaporean whose parents were born in mainland China, that hawker versions are always an improvement on the original dish: more savory, richer, better balanced.

“I went to Hainan to taste the chicken rice,” Mr. Seetoh said, referring to the island off southern China that was the birthplace of Singapore’s unofficial national dish of steamed chicken, white rice, cucumbers and chili sauce. “It was totally boring,” he said, pointing out that in the Singaporean version, the white rice is gilded with chicken fat and butter, and scented with the sweet, vanilla-like pandan leaf.

Hainan chicken rice is a main dish of the region, making it a subject of frequent squabbles between Malaysia and Singapore. Last year, Malaysia’s tourism minister staked an official claim to the dish for his nation, bringing simmering cross-Straits resentments to a boil.

Singapore is especially reliant on food hawkers, according to food historians, because it was initially populated by young, mostly Chinese men, who could not afford their own households. The thousands of food vendors (in Singapore they are gathered into “hawker centers,” and in Malaysia a food stall is a “warung”) tend to specialize in a single dish or a small family of foods, refining it over the years to try to grab a bigger piece of the market share. Thus, Mr. Seetoh said, the best food always wins.

“Food is the greatest democratic institution in Singapore,” he said. “There is truly no bland food and no bad restaurants.”

Even by New York standards, Singaporeans seem to be obsessed with food. “I have tried to cook Singapore food in Brooklyn, but at the end there was always something missing,” said Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a writer whose memoir of “food and family” will be published in February. When she left Singapore to attend Northwestern University in Chicago in 1993, she said, she missed the food of home so much that she would trek through snow to the computer center to gaze at Internet photos of her favorite dishes. “A lot of what you love in Singaporean cuisine is the flavor of the hawker center,” she said. “It might be MSG, it might be the heat or the humidity or the sweat, you just don’t know.”

Continuing the crawl solo at Overseas Asian in Chinatown, I found an ikan pari that seemed too wet to my Seetoh-trained palate. (But the best roti canai I’ve had in New York: fluffy, yeasty, lightly sweet.) The last stingray was the best: an excellent, smoky version at Redang Island in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, where the fish is rubbed with spices and steamed before the final cooking.

One of Mr. Seetoh’s primary goals is to preserve such dishes, which he sees as a product of diverse, resourceful and often desperate communities. The hawker food will be lost, he fears, as the population becomes affluent and aspiring cooks can afford Western education — culinary or otherwise. Asian cooks are opening French and Italian restaurants in the cities now, he said, and the traditional hawkers are aging. “They are old, and their sons are old, and their grandsons go to Harvard,” he said.

Just as many hawkers have transcended street life and the day-to-day grind, Mr. Seetoh himself has become more than a food guide. He appeared on “Top Chef” last season and has taught Martha Stewart to make laksa, the iconic meal-in-a-bowl of the region. Now he is a global entrepreneur, working with real estate developers to build self-contained hawker centers, populating them with his favorite cooks and tailoring the food to its neighborhood. “In a business district, you don’t want noodle soup — too messy for office workers, and it takes too long to eat,” he said.

Over all, he said, Southeast Asian food in New York City is about 50 percent as good as at home. To lift that number, he hopes to bring a hawker center here. “Like Eataly, but with hawkers,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Some places to taste Southeast Asian food in New York:

CAFE ASEAN 117 West 10th

Street (Sixth Avenue), Greenwich Village; (212) 633-0348 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (212) 633-0348      end_of_the_skype_highlighting, cafeasean.com.

COCO 82-69 Broadway (Elmhurst Avenue), Elmhurst, Queens; (718) 565-2030 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (718) 565-2030      end_of_the_skype_highlighting, cocoasiancuisine.com/elmhurst.html.

OVERSEAS TASTE RESTAURANT 49 Canal Street (Ludlow Street), Chinatown; (212) 925-3233 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (212) 925-3233      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

REDANG ISLAND 5112 Eighth Avenue (51st Street), Sunset Park, Brooklyn; (718) 686-6680 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (718) 686-6680      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

SANUR 18 Doyers Street (Pell Street), Chinatown; (212) 267-0088 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (212) 267-0088      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

TASTE GOOD 82-18 45th Avenue (Broadway), Elmhurst, Queens; (718) 898-8001 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (718) 898-8001      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

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November 2, 2010

Sambal Stingray in Banana Leaf

Adapted from K. F. Seetoh

Time: 1 hour

 

FOR THE SAMBAL

1 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried red chilies

2 ounces (about 1/2 cup) dried small shrimp (available in Asian markets)

10 to 12 large garlic cloves

8 to 10 shallots, peeled

3-inch piece ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped

3-inch piece lemon grass, white end, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon belachan (shrimp paste, available in Asian markets) or 2 teaspoons fish sauce

1 tablespoon tamarind paste or lime juice, more to taste

2 tablespoons light brown sugar, more to taste

1/4 cup raw peanuts

2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for fish

 

For the fish

1 whole, skinless skate wing, 1 1/2 to 2 pounds, or firm fillets like snapper, about 3/4-inch thick

3 banana leaves (available frozen at Asian and Latin markets)

Slices of lemon and white onion, for garnish

Sprigs of cilantro, for garnish.

 

1. Make the sambal: In separate bowls, soak the chilies and the dried shrimp in water to cover for 10 minutes, then drain. Remove and discard stems and seeds from the chilies.

2. In a blender, combine the chilies, shrimp and remaining sambal ingredients, except the oil, with 1/2 cup water. Blend until finely chopped but not smooth. Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat and add the sambal. Cook, stirring often, until it is moist, thick and dark red, adding water 1 tablespoon at a time if needed to prevent scorching.

3. Cook the fish: Rinse and dry the fish and sprinkle it with salt. Heat a grill to high, or place a heavy skillet (with a lid) over medium-high heat. Spread one side of the fish with a thin layer of sambal. Place a banana leaf on grill (or in skillet), drizzle lightly with vegetable oil and place the fish on top, sambal side up. Cover grill or pan and cook about 8 minutes, until the banana leaf is toasted and the sambal is dry and fragrant. Remove the leaf and fish from the heat. Place a new banana leaf on grill or in pan, drizzle it with oil, flip fish onto it and spread more sambal on top. Cover and cook another 6 to 8 minutes, until cooked through.

4. Place another leaf on a platter. Flip the fish onto it, spoon more sambal over the top and garnish with lemon and onion slices and cilantro sprigs. To serve whole skate, slide the fish off the spine with a spoon.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

FT: We ate late but it was worth the wait

We ate late but it was worth the wait

By Rowley Leigh

Published: July 31 2010 00:57 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:57

The closest town to where I am holidaying in southern Umbria is a 20-minute drive away. It has a garage and a pizzeria at the bottom of the hill, a baker halfway up and at the top in the old centre there are two bars, two grocery shops and a little butcher’s shop, tucked into an alley. We entered this boutique one evening last week. Two years ago it was run by a small old lady who was both kindly disposed towards us and deceptively adept at handling large pieces of meat. This time it was a lady I imagined to be her daughter who sat in a corner of the room. She rose languidly as I reviewed the contents of the display cabinet. This did not take long as, barring a small tray of what may have been rather dry fresh sausages or fairly fresh salami, the cabinet was bare. “Carne fresca?” I inquired in the little Italian that I can muster. A long and definitive “si” issued from this formidable matron and she disappeared into the small coldroom behind the counter, reappearing with a large but uninviting piece of silverside. I asked for something else, lamb or pork perhaps. No. She barred my entry to the coldroom but managed to extricate the real prize, a massive rib and loin of beef. I had little choice but to be wildly enthusiastic.

We asked for large chops. She cut down between the ribs with a large knife and then wielded a huge cleaver with frightening deliberation and produced two large chops some 4cm thick. We considered them and decided, big as they were, they were not quite enough for 12.

We asked for another. She acceded gladly and then produced another huge chop some 12cm thick and at least twice the size of the other two.

Here in Umbria we eat well. We are not burdened by excessive choice and buy what we can. A head of good leafy celery is gratefully seized upon but we are never short of good tomatoes, peaches and melons. The night we bought the beef we ate late but better than ever.

Rowley Leigh is the chef at Le Café Anglais

rowley.leigh@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/leigh

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Steak and chips, Umbrian style

There is no great trick to grilling a large piece of meat beyond a large bag of charcoal and an equally large degree of vigilance. Patience, also, is an asset: our big joint took one hour and 20 minutes on the grill and 20 minutes to rest, three times as long as the smaller chop. The care taken was well rewarded. Serves eight.

Ingredients

3kg charcoal

1 X 3kg rib of beef, attached to both rib and backbone

Salt and pepper

3kg long, oval new potatoes

2 bulbs garlic

Rosemary

350ml olive oil

Method 

● Bring the beef to room temperature, removing it from the fridge a good two hours before cooking. Light the charcoal with the help of newspaper and kindling and build up a good fire for 40 minutes. Spread out the coals to produce a good radiant heat. There should be no flames remaining. Place a grill over the fire some 20cm above it.

● Season one face of the beef well with coarse salt and freshly milled black pepper. Place the seasoned side down on the grill. At the right temperature and at the right distance, it should take at least 15 minutes to sear the surface of the joint. Season the second face equally well and turn.

● Continue to cook the beef, watching carefully that it does not burn, lifting it away from the flame if necessary and cooking it on the fat side opposite the rib and for a good quarter of an hour standing on its side on the backbone. After 50 minutes, start to probe the meat regularly with a thin skewer placed in the centre of the meat. Test the temperature by placing the skewer against the lips. It should be taken off the grill when the centre ceases to be cold and is at blood temperature (37°C) in order to achieve an even, rare cooking. Leave the meat to rest for a minimum of 20 minutes.

● When the meat starts to cook, peel the potatoes and cut them lengthwise into thick, chunky chips. Place these in cold water with a handful of salt and the separated but unpeeled cloves of garlic. Bring to the boil, simmer for a minute and then drain. Heat a very large frying pan gently with the olive oil and add potatoes and garlic. Let these fry very gently, turning occasionally for up to half an hour, adding the rosemary after 15 minutes. Drain in a colander and then on paper towels, sprinkling with sea salt.

● Once the meat has rested, take a thin carving knife and remove the meat from the bone. Lay it on a board and carve into thin diagonal slices and serve with the potatoes. No sauce is necessary but a sharp green salad may be served.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: The latest must-have chef's toy

The latest must-have chef’s toy

By Nicholas Lander

Published: July 31 2010 00:32 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:32

Enthusiast: Mark Hansell-Dixon at the Josper in the Akeman restaurant

Over the past few years, amateur cooks have equipped themselves with more gadgets – breadmakers, ice-cream makers, Japanese knives – but professional chefs still like to go one better.

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Until recently the “chefs’ toy” of choice was the £3,000, Swiss-made Pacojet, which purées food in a frozen state while concentrating the flavour of the raw ingredients. The Pacojet is emblematic of a cooking style that manifests itself in mousses and foams, an approach that is becoming less fashionable. Now, in its place at the top of many chefs’ shopping lists is the Josper oven, despite a price tag of up to £18,000.

Burning top quality charcoal, the Josper is, in layman’s terms, the hottest indoor barbecue available. It has a front door that, when closed, ensures none of the natural moisture or flavour escapes from the food cooked in it. More often than not, a Josper is described as an oven, though its primary role is as a grill.

I encountered my first Josper five years ago in Moscow at Goodman, a steak restaurant serving exceptional meat. One was then installed in its London outpost.

Raphael Duntoye, chef at La Petite Maison in Mayfair, was an early enthusiast. The dishes cooked in it have proved such a hit with customers that his only regret is not having bought two. Every chef who has come to his kitchen to check out the Josper has ended up buying one, he says.

A top-of-the-range Josper can accommodate about 30 pieces of fish or meat simultaneously. The bars of the grill, at a normal setting of 300°C, mark the meat or fish attractively and cook it swiftly.

Despite its recent rise in popularity, the Josper has been around for 40 years. It was created in 1970 by Josep Armangue and Pere Juli (who subsequently gave their names to the company), a year after they had opened their 1,000-seat restaurant Mas Pi in Pineda de Mar, close to the Mediterranean in north-east Spain. What they designed had two adjustable draughts: one at the bottom to draw in air and one at the top to let out smoke and combustion gases. It operates in a similar fashion to the mechanism behind the Aga cooker, once a staple of English country kitchens.

Josper’s UK importer reports brisk business with about 100 ovens installed and orders from several high-profile restaurants. The second branch of Hawksmoor, which specialises in serving British meat, will have one when it opens in Covent Garden in October, as will Heston Blumenthal’s kitchen at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge.

I discovered quite how powerful these ovens are when I visited chef Mark Hansell-Dixon in the open kitchen of the Akeman, a restaurant in the market town of Tring, Hertfordshire.

On the tray by our side were a whole sea bream and a 28-day aged British sirloin steak, seasoned, anointed with olive oil and, in the case of the fish, covered with lemon juice. Opening the Josper’s door released the first blast of heat, a sensation that was to be repeated frequently as each item was turned promptly. The fish was taken to be finished off in a conventional oven for five minutes while the steak was put on the top rack, where the temperature hovers between 60°C to 80°C, until ready to be served.

Hansell-Dixon said it had taken him about a week to adapt to the Josper’s fierce heat when some items got “cremated” if he wasn’t paying attention. But, overall, he was wildly enthusiastic about it. Grilling fresh sardines was a particular favourite while two items, slow-cooked pork belly and roasted tomatoes, had found their way on to his menu after he had experimented with leaving both on the top rack for up to 12 hours. Opening the lower door, Hansell-Dixon showed me the V-shaped tray that holds the charcoal. “This burns about 10kg of charcoal a day. Over a year this comes to about £5,000.”

Peter Borg-Neal, the Akeman’s owner, is installing Jospers at two of his other restaurants – The Old Post Office in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, and The Red Lion in Water End, Hertfordshire. He said: “It allows me to achieve two very different goals. Firstly, to use a cooking technique normally associated with the more expensive West End restaurants and, secondly, to use it to cook such a wide range of food. We even cook the chicken breasts on it for the chicken Caesar salad and they’re the best I’ve ever tasted.”

The Akeman, www.oakmaninns.co.uk

Josper, www.josper.es

nicholas.lander@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/lander

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

NY Times: A Boost for Beer-Can Chicken

July 16, 2010

A Boost for Beer-Can Chicken

By MELISSA CLARK

A FEW years ago, I tried to make beer-can chicken. The recipe called for balancing a whole chicken on a half-empty can of beer, then grilling it over indirect heat. The steam generated from the beer was supposed to keep the chicken moist, while the indirect heat bronzed the skin without turning it black.

I’m an ardent fan of roast chickens, and this seemed like the perfect way to cook a chicken on a hot day when I didn’t want to turn on the oven and heat up the house. The bird could cook outside with the mosquitoes while I stayed inside with the air-conditioner.

But my grilling skills back then were sorely lacking. My chicken ended up a pale, rubbery mess, probably a result of not adding enough coals as they burned down.

It was so disappointing that I might never have tried beer-can chicken again. But then I got a gas grill, which can provide consistent heat, making the recipe less prone to human error.

So I picked up a can of beer and a chicken, game for another round.

One of the other problems I had last time was a very dry bird. I tried to think of a way to avoid relying on the steam from the beer to keep the chicken moist. I decided to bring out the big guns — a tub of mayonnaise, perfect for preventing the flesh from drying out. It could also act as a vehicle for adding spices (and color).

I could have used any spice mix, either purchased or homemade, but chose Madras curry because I love its earthy, intense flavor. A squirt of hot sauce gave the mixture a happy jolt. I slathered it all over the bird, including inside the cavity, and plopped it on the grill.

That wasn’t all I did. Usually, when I roast a chicken, I add potatoes and carrots to the pan, creating a one-pot meal. So I coated some fingerling potatoes with the spiced mayo, adding them to the grill about halfway through the cooking. Instead of carrots, I sliced up some orange bell peppers to grill over direct heat while the chicken was resting.

When I brought everything inside, the chicken was steaming, golden and succulent while the kitchen was pleasantly cool — and so was the cook.

===

Spice-Rubbed Beer-Can Chicken with Potatoes and Sweet Peppers

Time: 20 minutes plus 75 minutes cooking

1 3 1/2- to 4-pound chicken

Kosher salt and ground black pepper

1 cup mayonnaise

1 1/2 tablespoons madras curry powder or your favorite spice mix

Hot sauce, to taste

1 can beer

1 pound fingerling potatoes, halved lengthwise

2 large red, orange or yellow bell peppers, quartered and deseeded

Olive oil

Lime wedges, for serving

Chopped basil, for serving.

1. Prepare grill for indirect heat: if using gas, heat one side to medium high for 10 minutes, leaving other side off. If using charcoal, mound and light coals on one side.

2. Season chicken generously inside and out with salt and pepper. Mix mayonnaise with spices and hot sauce to taste. Slather all but 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise mixture over chicken, including cavity.

3. Open beer and drink or pour out half. Lower chicken over can so that can is inside chicken cavity. Chicken should be upright. Place chicken on unlit side and cover grill. Cook for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, toss potatoes with remaining mayonnaise and a pinch of salt. Toss peppers with olive oil, salt and pepper.

4. When chicken has cooked for 30 minutes, set potatoes on grill, also on unlit side. If using charcoal, add more coals. Let both cook for 30 minutes more. When done, potatoes should be soft and golden; chicken skin should be brown (around 75 minutes, depending on your grill). If necessary, move both to lighted side to brown further.

5. When chicken is done, very carefully remove can (hold chicken with tongs and use an oven mitt to pull out can). Let chicken rest for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, grill peppers for about 2 to 3 minutes each side.

6. Carve chicken and garnish with lime wedges and basil before serving with potatoes and peppers.

Yield: 4 servings.

NY Times: Restaurant-style Spareribs in Your Backyard

July 5, 2010

Restaurant-Style Spareribs in Your Backyard

By SAM SIFTON

Zakary Pelaccio, the chef and restaurateur, was in Malaysia recently, continuing his research on the flavors that have brought him relative fame in the food world of New York City, what he called in an e-mail message the appeal of “strong cocktails, chili, palm sugar and smoky fat.”

In March, Pelaccio opened Fatty ’Cue, a restaurant in Brooklyn that embraced those very elements. I wrote about the place a couple of months later, in my job as restaurant critic for The Times, and I continued to think about it after the review was published. Pelaccio and I corresponded about this during his trip. I was fishing for a recipe.

I wanted to make the restaurant’s barbecued pork ribs. They are lacquered in a mixture of palm syrup and fish sauce, and are vaguely Malay in aspect and flavor, sweet and fatty with a lingering pong of fishiness, a salty thrum below their caramelized crust.

There are precious few reasons to pity the lot of the restaurant critic. (Though as the joke goes, he has nothing but reservations himself.) But here, perhaps, is one: He cannot be a regular at any restaurant. This is not simply because he dines anonymously, under cloak and toupee. It’s also because once he has finished writing about a restaurant, at least until such time as he feels the need to return to check up on it, he has finished writing about it. Other dining rooms beckon. Deadlines loom. There’s always a new place in Flushing to try, a revamped Italian kitchen in Murray Hill, an Alsatian boîte on the Upper East Side. That master of fish you used to hear so much about: shouldn’t we be seeing if that fellow is still on his game?

Still, I managed to squeeze in another visit to Fatty ’Cue — after another meal in another borough — for some ribs. I ate at the bar, alone, quickly. I felt a bit like one of those pilgrims that Gourmet used to feature, who would drive 75 miles out of the way to eat the apricot scones at a particular bed and breakfast in Somewheresville, Ohio. I sucked at my fingers and thought. Then I wrote to Pelaccio.

And so here we are, setting off on a weekend adventure, a project recipe to thrill family and guests. You do have Indonesian long pepper in your larder, yes? And Three Crabs brand fish sauce? (Not Two Crabs, please!) You have a smoker that can hold at 220 degrees for five hours? You’ve got some palm sugar? We’re set, then. You may proceed to the recipe below.

If, however, Indonesian long pepper is not something stocked at your local Krogeror Buehler’s Buy-Low, do not despair. You can always head online, where things like long pepper and fish sauce and dependable smokers are generally available at big outfits like Amazon and Cabela’s and at little ones like Kalustyan’s and AmazingRibs.com.

And of course you can cheat, cut corners, make do. Except for the fish sauce, much about Pelaccio’s recipe is open to home-cook interpretation.

Start with the brine. At Fatty ’Cue, Pelaccio cooks alongside the pitmaster Robbie Richter, who generally does his magic with oak smoke and dry rubs. Here, however, before smoking he plumps and scents the pork with a mixture of sugar and fish sauce, the Southeast Asian condiment made from fermented anchovies.

Pelaccio and Richter recommend a base of Three Crabs, a Thai sauce processed in Hong Kong. It has a beautiful label and a strong, salty umami punch. But I made the brine with two other brands and could not detect an appreciable difference. Go with what you can get.

Then obtain a couple of racks of pork spareribs, trimmed and clean. Submerge these in the brine, cover well and refrigerate overnight.

On the matter of smokers, you can use a gas grill with wood chips soaked and placed into an improvised bag of aluminum foil pierced with a fork. I rigged up a kettle grill with a low charcoal fire on one side and the ribs on the other, which ran a little hot, and then a little cool, but generally was low and slow enough to make the meat collapse in the braise of the smoke, and to impart the telltale sign of real American barbecue, whatever its accent: a dark red smoke ring around the edges of the meat. (In a pinch, you could even use a low oven and a dash of Liquid Smoke.)

Pelaccio and Richter recommend dusting the meat with freshly ground toasted Indonesian long pepper before cooking. Long pepper, the fruit of a flowering vine, is a hotter, more pungent cousin of black pepper, and a spice with a rich history.The Greeks and the Romans loved the stuff; it was their black pepper.

To use it, if you can find it, you will need a spice grinder. My effort to pack a standard pepper mill with the elongated nubs was an unmitigated failure.

Far less unsuccessful was my attempt to use plain round black peppercorns instead. The loss of heat was not terribly significant, particularly if I increased the dusting of pepper to what you’d see on a classic steak au poivre.

A final cheat came in making the sauce, which you paint on at the end of the process, giving the ribs a sticky-sweet sheen of remarkable flavor.

Pelaccio makes a simple syrup of water and palm sugar, then mixes this with fish sauce. Palm sugar, made from the sap of palm trees, is a common ingredient in Southeast Asia. It generally comes in molded cakes, with a flavor that’s somewhere between molasses and brown sugar.

But if it doesn’t come at all, or if your desire to make these ribs outstrips even a rush order from an online outfit, feel free to make a mixture of — yes — brown sugar and molasses to approximate it. Chefs and restaurants love to put unfamiliar adjectives in front of common nouns. It helps menus sell. But at home you can cheat. “We’re American,” Pelaccio had written me. “So we have our own filter.”

Recipe: Fatty 'Cue Spare Ribs

2 cups fish sauce (preferably Three Crabs brand; see note)

6 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed

1 medium shallot, peeled and sliced

1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup sugar

2 racks pork spare ribs

2 tablespoons toasted and ground Indonesian long pepper, or to taste (see note)

6 ounces palm sugar (see note)

White toast for serving.

1. Combine 1 1/2 cups fish sauce with the garlic, shallot, black pepper and sugar in a large pot. Add at least a gallon of water, then cover and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove from the heat, place in a nonreactive container and chill. Place the ribs in the brine for at least 6 hours and no longer than 12.

2. Remove the ribs from the brine and dust lightly with ground Indonesian long pepper.

3. In a grill with a cover, build a small fire to one side, making sure all the wood or charcoal becomes engulfed in flame. When the flames begin to die down, leaving flickering coals, place the ribs on the grill on the side without fire. Do not let the flames touch the meat at any time.

4. Cover the grill, vent slightly and cook, checking the fire every 30 minutes or so and adding a bit more fuel as necessary, for about 5 hours at around 220 degrees, until the meat recedes from the bone and its internal temperature is at least 170 degrees but no more than 180.

5. Meanwhile, make a glaze. Combine the palm sugar and 3/4 cup water in a small pot over a medium flame, and heat until the sugar melts. Combine that simple syrup with the remaining 1/2 cup fish sauce.

6. When the ribs are ready, glaze heavily and serve, with white toast on the side. Serves 4 to 6. Adapted from Robbie Richter and Zakary Pelaccio.

Note: Three Crabs fish sauce, long pepper and palm sugar can be found at Amazon.com or Kalustyans.com.

NY Times: For the Best Cuts, Here Are the Rubs

August 22, 2007

The Minimalist

For the Best Cuts, Here Are the Rubs

By MARK BITTMAN

SOME people believe you can improve on a good grilled steak: the Italians use lemon and olive oil, the French compound butter or even béarnaise.

But with true American chauvinism most of us believe that because our beef is better it needs nothing but salt and pepper. That may be true of the absolute best meat, but if you’re going to tinker — and it’s a good idea to do so when using subpremium meat — you may want to think about a rub.

A rub is a dry spice or spice and herb mixture used to coat the meat before grilling, adding not only strong flavor but a bit more crunch, especially if you toast, mix and grind the spices yourself.

My favorites are basic: chili powder, with mild chilies; fragrant curry powder; jerk seasoning, which contains fresh garlic and ginger and is quite powerful; and five-spice powder, which, when homemade, is unlike anything you can buy in a store.

Using any of these is straightforward: rub a good teaspoon or more into each side of the steak, then grill over slightly lower heat than you would normally use, so the spices don’t burn.

As good as rubs are, they may be unnecessary if your shopping is successful and your grilling technique solid. If you begin with a good piece of meat, the battle is more than half won. At one time a butcher could have guided you, but these days you’re lucky to get the attention of the guy behind the glass in the supermarket, and he probably knows less than you will after you read this article.

If you can buy prime beef (this essentially means it is fat-laced, or well marbled), you are ahead of the game. Fat means flavor. But a good cut of choice grade is often the equal of prime. Aging, of course, also improves flavor and tenderness. But even if you find prime meat that is well aged, and even if you spend a lot of money on organic, natural, specialty or so-called gourmet steaks, you won’t be eating anything special unless you buy the right cut.

So, what is the right cut? To some degree it’s a matter of opinion. Some people will argue for flank, but I don’t believe any steak that must be sliced thin to be chewable qualifies as terrific. Others (myself included) like skirt, with the caution that it is easy to overcook. But almost everyone agrees that sirloin strip and rib-eye are best.

Sirloin strip, also called shell, club, New York or top loin, is cut from the loin, usually boneless and a wonderful individual steak. The loin also yields T-bone (or porterhouse, or the famous Italian Fiorentina), a bone-in steak comprising the top loin and the supremely tender but nearly tasteless tenderloin. The advantages of the porterhouse are that it has the bone, it can be cut thick and it serves several people.

To me, the ideal is rib-eye. The center of the rib, it is tender and often nicely fatty, and it can be delicious even when it is from a commercial, anything-but-special animal.

Which brings us to grilling, the way to perfect or ruin a steak. But before delving into a 20-year-old argument about gas versus charcoal, let’s get that steak ready for the grill.

If you like a steak with crust — and who doesn’t — it is best to start with a dry exterior. You can get one by putting the steak on a rack over a pan in the fridge, uncovered. Leave it there, turning it once a day or so, for a couple of days. I like this method, which might be described as passive-aggressive: you don’t have to do much, and it’s very effective. (Alternatively, pat it dry with paper towels before grilling.)

For fast, even cooking, it also helps to have the steak at room temperature before grilling. If you’re using a rub, put it on at the last minute. As for timing, you can’t cook by a clock, but most one-inch-thick steaks started at room temperature will brown in three to four minutes a side and be cooked to medium-rare after seven or eight minutes.

For greater precision, you have three options, in order of preference:

¶ You can gain experience and cook by touch and sight.

¶ You can use an instant-read thermometer: 125 degrees is rare, 130 degrees is medium-rare.

¶ You can cut into the meat and check. This is inelegant, but not all that bad. Meat is not a balloon that pops when cut into; you may lose a little juice, but it’s better to cut into a steak, which causes minor damage, than to overcook it, which destroys it.

O.K., now: gas versus charcoal. Charcoal gives you a better crust, and hardwood charcoal is preferable to briquettes. But it’s also more of a hassle, and once you start the fire you’re committed to a cooking time. Gas is more convenient. And to my surprise I found the results were not that different. If you use charcoal you can sear the steak beautifully. If you use gas you must cover the grill, and the crust is not nearly as attractive. But the timing is about the same. Either way, the taste is terrific, as long as you start with the right cut.

WSJ: The Grill Looks East

FOOD & DRINK

MAY 14, 2010

The Grill Looks East

Asian techniques are shaking up American BBQ; making much of small servings

 

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

When the Slap Yo' Daddy BBQ team arrives at 10 barbecue competitions over the next four months, it will come armed with a stash of secret ingredients, designed to make classic American ribs and brisket taste authentic, but with a mysterious kick. In its arsenal: Indonesian palm sugar, used to marinate chicken; Korean powdered honey, for a sweet finishing touch on ribs; and Philippine tamarind powder, for a citrusy note in poultry.

That's all the team's pitmaster Harry Soo will reveal, though he says he uses as many as 30 Asian ingredients to differentiate his barbecue. To learn his tricks, "my competitors go through my trash," says Mr. Soo, who originally hails from Malaysia and who last year placed 24th out of 4,612 teams competing in the Kansas City Barbeque Society circuit.

Teriyaki glazes have appeared next to barbecue sauces on supermarket shelves for years, but today one of the biggest trends in American barbecueing and grilling is trying to capture the complex and authentic flavors of the grilling traditions of Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and other Asian countries. New cookbooks from American grillmasters like Steven Raichlen include recipes for everything from Thai grilled chicken to Korean barbecue to Singaporean beef saté.

These flavors are migrating to outdoor grills from high-end restaurants and streetside food trucks. Sandwich shops and carts serving Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches—crispy baguettes stuffed with vegetables and roasted or grilled meats—have cropped up in cities around the country. New York's Momofuku chef David Chang, currently one of America's biggest food stars, serves all-American barbecue items, such as a BBQ rib sandwich, on the same menu with Korean-style pork butt wrapped in lettuce leaves at Momofuku Ssäm. On the opposite coast, Roy Choi has turned the "Korean taco" served from his Kogi BBQ food trucks into a famous L.A. dish.

Food companies and chain restaurants, always looking for new flavor trends, aren't far behind. Chili's Grill & Bar, a 1,499-unit chain owned by Brinker International, is developing banh mi sandwiches and Korean barbecue quesadillas. Cammie Spillyards, director of food and beverage innovation, says the chain began noticing the popularity of Asian street foods about a year to a year and a half ago. Chili's wants to be "first to market" among casual dining chains with these items, Ms. Spillyards says.

Asian grillmasters are experts at using food science to create big flavor experiences out of small amounts of both meat and fuel—two expensive commodities in historically poor societies. Learning just a few of these techniques can help American grillmasters cut down on calorie intake, cost and energy while maximizing flavor.

It's common in many parts of Asia to grill meat that's been cut into thin strips, about 1/8 to ¼ of an inch thick. Slicing meat thinly serves to shorten meat fibers, which helps tenderize even tough cuts, says Mr. Raichlen, who studied grilling in 53 countries to write "Planet Barbecue," published this month. The technique also maximizes the surface area of the meat exposed to fire, upping the "grilled" factor per bite. Many marinades call for palm sugar, extracted from a variety of palm trees, or fruit juice, which help caramelize meat surfaces quickly, intensifying the grilled taste, he adds.

Another way Asian grillmasters make the best of a small quantity of meat is with marinades and sauces rich in umami, or amino acids that provide a meaty taste, such as soy sauce, fish sauce and ground dried shrimp.

Zakary Pelaccio, like a growing number of chefs of his generation, has cooked and traveled throughout Asia. In March, he opened an Asian barbecue restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y., called Fatty 'Cue. Mr. Pelaccio serves lamb coated with a Malaysian fermented shrimp sauce. Sniffing a container of fermented shrimp might provoke the question, "What died in here?" he says, but mixing the shrimp with lemon, wine and chilies results in "a deep salinity, a roundness and richness."

At Cheesecake Factory Inc.'s RockSugar Pan Asian Kitchen, a 240-seat Southeast Asian restaurant in Los Angeles, 20% of the menu consists of grilled dishes, according to corporate executive chef Mohan Ismail. Cheesecake plans to replicate the concept around the country.

Grills in many parts of Asia tend to be just big enough for the meat-filled end of a skewer to lay over extremely hot coals, Mr. Raichlen says, adding that a small Hibachi is a close approximation. On a gas or charcoal grill, the wooden end of a skewer should be set over a piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil laid on the grill to protect it from burning.

It's a flavor mass marketers want to capture. For years packaged-food makers have rolled out Asian-influenced sauces to U.S. supermarkets, but now they're developing far more sophisticated products, to try to capture the essence of the Asian grill. A year ago Singapore-based Thomas Chai, the Asian regional executive chef of multinational fragrance and flavor company Givaudan, began working on creating a flavoring that would capture the "charcoal note" of Asian grilled food. A sausage company that sells in various Asian countries had asked Givaudan to develop this new ingredient, Mr. Chai says.

Alex Farnum for The Wall Street Journal

Pitmaster Harry Soo performs a taste test

He started by marinating thin slices of meats in typical Asian sauces, such as a Thai lemongrass-accented marinade. Then he grilled the slices over charcoal, and Givaudan scientists used dome-shaped gear to capture the air around the grilled dishes. The scientists analyzed the flavor and fragrance molecules coming off the grilled meat, and recreated those molecules in the laboratory to make a flavoring. The sausage maker adopted the "charcoal note" product, Mr. Chai says.

Jeff Peppet, Givaudan's head of marketing communications, says that in the last five or six years, an increasing number of new flavorings developed for the Asian market are making it to the U.S.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com

 

===

GRILLED CILANTRO CHICKEN WITH THAI HOT SAUCE

Chef Mohan Ismail, of RockSugar Pan Asian Kitchen, uses this recipe in his Asian grilling classes.

Servings: 4

Advance preparation time: 4 to 24 hours for marinating

INGREDIENTS:

1 head garlic cloves, peeled
1 bunch cilantro stems, leaves removed
4 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
4 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 chicken breasts, butterflied
½ cup canola oil

1. Add the garlic to the bowl of a food processor and pulse until finely minced. Add cilantro stems, soy sauce, water and salt and purée until semi-smooth. Pour marinade into a large plastic freezer bag and add the sugar and the pepper, then mix. Add chicken breasts, press out air and seal. Refrigerate for 4 to 24 hours.

2. Prepare a gas or charcoal grill. Brush the chicken with oil. Over high heat, grill each breast 3 to 5 minutes per side, basting frequently with the oil and the marinade. When cooked through, remove from grill. Serve with hot sauce.

Thai Hot Sauce

2 red jalapeno peppers (if unavailable, substitute 1/2 a very red bell pepper and 1 tsp cayenne pepper)
2 green jalapeno peppers, roughly chopped
1 green Serrano chile, roughly chopped
½ head of garlic, cloves separated and peeled
4 Tbls lime juice (2 limes)
4 Tbls orange juice (1 orange)
3 Tbls sugar
2 Tbls fish sauce

Place peppers and garlic into the bowl of a food processor and pulse until finely chopped. Add juices, sugar and fish sauce and pulse until smooth.

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SINGAPORESE BEEF SATÉ

Adapted from "Planet Barbecue," by Steven Raichlen

Advance preparation time: 2 to 12 hours for marinating.

INGREDIENTS:

1.5 lbs rib-eye steak (about ½ inch thick)
3 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons ground coriander
1 tablespoon turmeric
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons fish sauce or soy sauce
3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1. Cut the steaks, including the fat, into ½ inch cubes and place them in a mixing bowl. Stir in the brown sugar, coriander, turmeric, cumin, pepper, fish sauce and oil.
Marinate the beef in the refrigerator, covered, for at least 2 hours; 12 is ideal.

2. Drain the cubes of beef, discarding the marinade. Thread the beef onto bamboo skewers, leaving the bottom half of each skewer bare for a handle and ¼ inch exposed at the pointed end. Alternate between one piece of lean beef and one piece of fatty beef for the best flavor.

3. Prepare a gas or charcoal grill. Over high heat, brush the grates with oil. Fold aluminum foil by thirds, like a letter, and place over the grill where the exposed ends of the skewers will rest (this will keep them from burning). Grill the sates until cooked to taste, about 2 minutes per side for medium.

Serve with Singapore Cucumber Relish; the tip of the skewer can be used to spear pieces of cucumber from the relish.

Singapore Cucumber Relish

2 Kirby cucumbers or 1 medium-sized cucumber, cut in half lengthwise and seeded, and cut into ¼ inch dice
1 shallot, minced (2 to 3 Tbls) or 1 scallion, both white and green parts, minced
1 small, hot chile, such as bird or cayenne pepper, stemmed, seeded and minced
1 Tbls rice vinegar
1 Tbls sugar
Kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Combine all ingredients and toss. The relish can be made up to two hours before serving.

ScienceNews: Better BBQ through chemistry

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Better BBQ through chemistry

A few timely tips for late-summer grilling

By Sid Perkins

Web edition : Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

 

Some complicated chemical reactions take place on the grill, scientists say. Finding the right blend of cooking temperature, spices, marinades and sauces can make barbecuing a challenge.

Credit: shalamov/iStockphoto

WASHINGTON — As summer winds to a close, backyard grillers may be looking back on their last barbecue and asking some rather pointed questions: Why was the grilled chicken so dry? Does eating charred meat really cause cancer? Why did Uncle Fred pucker and cringe after each sip of beer?

Answers to these posers, and others, come courtesy of the American Chemical Society, which as part of its semiannual meeting staged a chemistry-themed barbecue reception August 17 for reporters and other guests. A good time was had by all — even, remarkably, by those who tried the barbecued tofu.

“You can take any food you want and cook it on a grill,” said Sara Risch, a food chemist and consultant based in East Lansing, Mich. “Even vegetables.”

Cooking is as much a science as an art, so understanding the chemistry that happens on the grill helps ensure barbecue success. The heat of a fire triggers “browning reactions” in which amino acids and sugars — either those already present in the food or those added via sauces or marinades — combine to yield the color change that signals a dish is done. But grill something for too long or at too high a temperature, she noted, and the end result is the dreaded “blackening” reaction.

“Unfortunately, if you ask the [food] safety people they’ll tell you to cremate everything,” said Shirley Corriher, a food chemist and cookbook author from Atlanta. Meats should be cooked long enough to kill bacteria, she noted, but they don’t need to be cooked beyond medium to be truly safe. For one thing, carcinogenic chemicals called heterocyclic amines form when creatine — a substance found in muscle tissue — reacts at high temperatures with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The amount of HCAs formed in grilled meats typically triples if meats are cooked well done rather than medium well, she noted.

Other research-proven tricks for reducing HCAs, as noted in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, include using marinades, garlic and onion, said Risch. A marinade of red wine, for instance, can reduce the formation of HCAs by 88 percent, she noted. Although scientists aren’t sure exactly how these techniques work, moisture from marinades may ensure that the meat directly in contact with the grill remains at a relatively low temperature, she said.

Understanding how the human sense of taste operates can help hosts pick the right thirst quencher to accompany their barbecue. Just as food changes the way wine tastes, one bite of food affects how the next mouthful tastes, said Corriher. Salt tends to suppress bitterness. Similarly, eating or drinking something sweet intensifies the taste of the next mouthful. So, she noted, serving a bitter beer with food swaddled in a sweet barbecue sauce might not work out too well.

To maintain meat’s moisture, grillers can marinate it in a mildly salty solution, said Corriher. One reliable recipe for brine — good for barbecue but also good for presoaking a Thanksgiving turkey — includes 1 cup of salt for each gallon of water. Chemical reactions between the salt and some proteins in meat cause the proteins to unfold and absorb water more effectively. While unbrined meat may lose up to 30 percent of its moisture during cooking, meat marinated in brine can lose as little as 15 percent. “Just be sure to rinse the meat before you cook it,” she warned.

The flavor chemistry of barbecue varies from region to region. One of the biggest debates among barbecue connoisseurs, for example, involves sauce. Across large swaths of the Midwest, cooks prefer ketchup-based sauces. But in some locales, such as North Carolina, people mix sauces using only vinegar, salt and pepper “and they think it’s an outrage to do anything else,” Corriher said. In some parts of the Southeast, heaven forfend, grillers add mustard to their barbecue sauces.

During the question-and-answer session after their presentations, both Risch and Corriher proclaimed a preference for ketchup-based sauces. When pressed on the issue, however, neither could cite any scientific studies bolstering the notion that people who favor ketchup-based sauces have, as a group, slightly higher IQs than those who prefer vinegar-based sauces.

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/46562/title/Better_BBQ_through_chemistry