Bresaola Pintxo

This being the second to last CharcutePalooza  challenge, I couldn’t help but start counting the days until the winner is announced.  That slightly unsettling feeling of anticipation also permeated the November curing challenge.  Time was the name of the game this challenge, but good things come to those who wait.

 

Although a lot of my recent cooking has been influenced by my trip to Spain a few months ago, I decided against making chorizo for this challenge.  I wanted to make something I'd never had before, and after flipping through the options in Charcuterie, I found bresaola to be the only option that would satisfy both the CharcutePalooza parameters and my own personal quest to try new things.  However, that's not to say the final usage of the bresaola didn’t reflect some of the things I experienced overseas.

 

 

Having done all 12 challenges at the time of this writing, I can definitively say this was the easiest challenge in terms of the difficulty of producing the meat product and difficulty of producing the final composed dish.  When you boil it down, the manual labor involved in curing something is minimal: salt the meat, wait, rinse the meat, hang the meat, wait.  Easy on the muscles, but tough on the brain.

 

 

 

During the period the meat was hung out to dry, several things ran through my mind:

• This thing is going to taste so awesome.  I can't wait!
• Oh cool, some small specs of white mold have started to develop.  Hopefully that keeps the bad mold away.
• Wait a second, does that small white spot look sort of fuzzy?  I don't think so...I think it's ok...
• Crap, what if that spot really was fuzzy?
• What the heck, how is half of the surface area suddenly covered in fuzzy green mold??
• Wiping the fuzzy green mold with a brine solution seems to have gotten things under control.
• Will I get botulism?
• Great...fuzzy green mold is back again.  Time to try a vinegar wipe down suggested by a fellow CharcutePaloozer.
• Phew!  Two weeks of no fuzzy mold!  Vinegar > brine solution.
• What??  Fuzzy white mold one day before I plan on cutting into this baby...
• Oops...the meat has lost 45% of its mass.  I hope that doesn't have any adverse effects.
• Hopefully the vinegar in the pickled pepper and salt in the olive kill any pathogens.
• Here goes nothing...
• I'm not dead or incapacitated!
• Curing is magical.

 

Like I said: easy on the muscles, but tough on the brain.  The final composed dish, or more appropriately pintxo, was inspired by the pintxos found in the Basque country.  I also figured I should make something simple so the bresaola could shine.  I didn’t want all that waiting and worrying to be in vain.  One of the most popular pintxos in the Basque country consists of fresh anchovy, olive, and I believe pickled piparras peppers.  At one particular stall at the Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid, this pintxo served as the basis for a wide array of pintxos that all followed a similar template: a protein, a pickled something, and an olive.

 

From this template, I made a pintxo of bresaola, pickled banana pepper, and an olive.  Salty, briny, and sour in one bite.  I did plan to use olives that I’d recently started curing from fresh, but sadly they were still extremely bitter.  I was genuinely surprised how much herb flavor came through in just a thin slice of meat, and that herbal flavor was nice in the bite.  Overall, I was happy with how the bresaola and the pintxo turned out and found myself eating the bresaola plain after running out of olives.

 

Bresaola Pintxo

Mise En Place

1. Thinly sliced bresaola
2. Pickled pepper
3. Pitted olive

Method

1. Skewer one olive, one slice of bresaola, and one pickled pepper onto a toothpick

Banh Bot Chien: Vietnamese Fried Rice Flour Cake With Pancetta

I may be in the minority here when I say this, but I don’t like bacon as much as most other people do.  I don’t swoon over it, and I’m envious when I hear someone exclaim “everything’s better with bacon!” because I wish I enjoyed something so much that it made whatever I was eating instantly better.  As an outsider looking in, bacon is the MSG of meats.

It should come as no surprise then that I’ve always preferred my breakfast eggs with sausage because I enjoy the spices typically found in breakfast sausages.  Bacon always seemed like a crunchy strip of salt to me.  So when I learned that the second CharcutePalooza challenge would be pancetta, a cousin of bacon, I was somewhat deflated.  However, I saw this as a chance to give salt cured pork belly a shot at winning me over as my preferred egg accompaniment.  Immediately, I knew the egg dish that I wanted to make: bot chien, or Vietnamese fried rice flour cake.  This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve used an Italian ingredient for a Vietnamese dish.

Bot chien is by far my favorite savory egg dish.  Sadly, I was only introduced to it a few years ago at Tan Tan Restaurant in Houston.  The first time I had bot chien, I loved it so much that I angrily asked my mom why we never ordered it in the past or why she’d never made it at home.  According to her, bot chien is a rarity in the States and to some extent Vietnam.  She reminisces about having to hunt down bot chien vendors in dingy back alleys of Saigon for an afterschool snack.

Essentially, bot chien consists of fried rectangular pieces of steamed rice flour cake bound together by eggs and topped with fried shallots, dried radish, and raw scallion.  It’s served with a side of soy sauce mixed with vinegar for dipping to which I usually add some Sriracha, sambal oelek, pickled pepper, or old dry mom sauce to (David Chang recently declared old dry mom sauce as the best sauce on No Reservations, and I couldn’t agree more).  The resulting bite is a symphony of texture and flavor.

You get sweet and sour from the dried radish, salty and sour from the dipping sauce, sweet from the fried shallots, savory from the egg, bright and pungent from the raw scallion, and spicy from the hot sauce or pickled peppers if you’re so inclined.  If that wasn’t enough to seal the deal, you get crispy from the fried rice cake and fried shallots, crunchy from the dried radish, spongy from the egg, and slightly chewy from the inside of the rice cake.

I thought it would be worth mentioning that I used black radish and pickled them with some carrot in place of dried radish.  I saw black radishes at the market and had never used them before, so I thought I’d give them a whirl.  They turned out to be very similar to daikon in flavor and got the job done well.

The process of making the CharcutePalooza meat of the month was again very simple and straightforward: salt and season, wait a while, rinse, hang, wait a while, enjoy.  One thing that I found funny was the presence of nipples on my pork belly.  I’ve worked with pork belly many times in the past, but only noticed the nipples this time.  However, upon closer inspection, it looks like the pork belly I used for thit kho also had nipples.

My spare bathroom paired with a humidifier was once again used as the meat hanging area.  Due to unforeseen time constraints, I decided to make the flat version of pancetta as the time required to hang is considerably less than that of rolled pancetta.

For my bot chien, I substituted the crispy fried shallots with crispy fried lardons of pancetta.  The rendered fat from the lardons was used to fry the rice cake and eggs and added an extra layer of flavor.  As for the actual pancetta, I could distinctly taste the garlic, thyme, bay leaf, and pepper that went into the cure.  This wasn’t simply a piece of salt disguised as meat like I was accustomed to.

Overall, I would say the pancetta itself and the bot chien with crispy fried pancetta were both great successes.  The pancetta turned out much better than I expected.  It’s climbed up to the number 2 spot on my breakfast meat list and bumped up bacon’s spot in the process as well.  Thanks to CharcutePalooza, I see nothing but a bright future with pancetta in my life.

Steamed Rice Flour Cake

Mise En Place (makes enough for at about 4 bot chien)

• 113 g rice flour
• 25 g tapioca starch
• 1 Tbsp. oil
• 414 g (1.75 C) water
• 2 g salt
• 2 g sugar

Method

1. Mix all ingredients and place into a heatproof vessel such that the depth of the slurry is about half an inch.
2. Steam over medium heat until a toothpick comes out clean, about 45 minutes.
3. Let the cake cool and firm up.

Banh Bot Chien

Mise En Place

• 100 g steamed rice flour cake cut into 1 inch by 2 inch rectangles
• 55 g pancetta lardons
• 3 large eggs, beaten
• Handful of diced scallion
• Your favorite pickled condiment
• Soy sauce
• Vinegar
• Your favorite hot sauce (optional)

Method

1. Crisp lardons in a pan over medium-low heat.  Set aside, leaving the rendered fat in the pan.
2. Fry both sides of the rice cake over medium-high heat until golden brown.
3. Add eggs to the pan, agitating slightly to distribute the egg.
4. Flip the bot chien once the bottom has coagulated enough.
5. Plate the bot chien and garnish with the pancetta lardons, scallion, and your favorite pickled condiment.
6. For the dipping sauce, mix soy sauce, vinegar, and hot sauce (optional) to taste.

Meatball Banh Mi

There was a time when I strongly considered naming this blog “Beng, Me.”  It was a play on banh mi, but I quickly realized that most, if not all, non-Vietnamese speaking individuals pronounce banh mi as “bawn mee” rather than the correct pronunciation that most closely sounds like “beng mee” or “ben mee.”  For the linguist, the official IPA pronounciation is [ɓǎːɲ mî].  I find it funny how the Western world can get the pronunciation of pho down pretty well (approximately “fuh”), but butcher banh mi.

Pronunciation aside, my favorite style of banh mi is the classic combo typically filled with cold cuts, headcheese, pate, homemade Vietnamese mayo, and the standard fixings.  However, I was craving some Vietnamese meatballs and decided to make meatball banh mi and use the bretzel that I made that day instead of a baguette.

The meatballs consisted of freshly ground pork shoulder seasoned to taste with garlic, fish sauce, and sugar.  If you’re unsure about the seasoning levels and don’t like the idea of licking or consuming raw pork, simply take a small blob of meat and microwave it a little until its cooked and taste it.  The meatballs can be grilled or broiled in the oven on a broiler pan.

In addition to the bretzel, another departure from tradition was the use of giardiniera in place of jalapenos, pickled daikons, and pickled carrots as I love giardiniera and sometimes find raw jalapenos overpowering.  Also, I garnished the sandwich with avocado to add a rich creaminess in lieu of fresh Vietnamese mayo.  Unfortunately, I was out of eggs that day and unable to make Vietnamese mayo.  If you’ve never had Vietnamese mayo, it tends to be eggier and richer than your typical mayo.  I personally much prefer Vietnamese style mayo.

So in the end, my Vietnamese-German-Italian hybrid banh mi turned out well.  Usually the hard crust of a baguette tears the roof of my mouth up when biting into the sandwich.  The bretzel totally eliminated this problem and added another layer of sweetness to each bite.  The giardiniera and avocado were worthy substitutes for classic fixings, but I there is just not competition when it comes to using fresh Vietnamese mayo versus something from a jar.