Roasted Bone Marrow

If there’s one thing that can make or break a bowl of pho, it’s the broth.  One of the keys to making good pho broth is having a good amount of bones, preferably beef marrow bones, in addition to whatever cut of meat is being used.  When I make pho, I typically use marrow bones to fortify an oxtail base.

 

Sometimes, though, I go a little overboard with the amount of marrow bones that I buy for pho.  It’s easy to do when they’re only $0.29/lb.  The Chinese butcher that I get my marrow bones from takes fresh, whole leg bones and saws them down to 2-3 inch chunks upon ordering.  Unused bones usually go into the freezer for a future batch of stock, but this time I thought I’d roast them off and spread the marrow on some bread.

After about 15 minutes, the marrow started to pull away from the bone.  Based on the “recipe” I followed (I mean, all you have to do is stick bones in the oven), the marrow was ready.

I may have pulled them a little too soon because there were some parts that were pink, but I was afraid if I left them in the oven for too long the marrow would simply melt away into the pan.  Spread over a piece of bread and salted to taste, the bread tasted like it was dipped in rendered beef fat.  Essentially, that’s what it was.

As tasty as rendered beef fat is, I regret not waiting until I had some lime and cilantro on hand.  That would’ve done well to cut the fattiness of the marrow.

Roasted bone marrow

1. Beef marrow bones => oven ~15 mins @ 450 F, cut side up, until marrow is soft and pulls away from bone
2. Harvested marrow + bread + something acidic + something bright + salt => eat

Bretzel

 

I have a minor complaint to file against Hannah’s Bretzel.  I can get over their hipster/yuppie-friendly “organic” marketing plastered everywhere because they do make some pretty good sandwiches, albeit at a premium due to the organic hype machine.  What really annoys me is the slogan on their signage: “Twisted and tasty since 1477.”

Now to most people, I would imagine that translates to something like “founded in 1477 and operating ever since.”  Well at least that’s what I thought, but I was skeptical that a German sandwich shop (I assumed it was of German origin) of such longevity would bother opening up an outpost in the Chicago Loop.  I googled and found out from their website that 1477 actually corresponds to the year that their style of bretzel was founded, and not the actual shop.  I’m not really sure how you can “found” a bread, but apparently you can.  Misleading marketing if you ask me.  I liken it to if I opened up a Chinese restaurant that served grilled meats and had the slogan “Peking and primitive since 400,000 BC.”

 

In any case, I’d never had bretzel before going to Hannah’s, but after my first bretzel sandwich, I became a fan.  The flavor and texture are much like a soft pretzel, but the form typically takes the shape of a roll or baguette.  My coworker’s attempts to replicate bretzel as good as Hannah’s inspired me to give it a shot as well, following the same recipe with the intent to use the bread for banh mi.

As part of my ongoing experimentation with bread, I departed from the recipe a little and decided to allow for delayed fermentation of the dough and added salt directly into the dough.  Obviously from the picture, I could’ve done a better job storing it in the fridge.  I wrapped it way too tightly, and as it slowly expanded overnight, it busted out of the plastic wrap and formed a funny, monster-looking shape (the 2 small balls are the eyes and the big ball is the nose).

Similar to bagels and soft pretzels, the dough is boiled slightly before baking to give it a dense and chewy interior.  The recipe called for boiling the dough in baking soda, and I made the mistake of dumping the baking soda in boiling water all at once, which produced a huge overflow of bubbles.

   

The bretzel came out with great texture.  Dense, chewy, and soft on the inside with a yielding crust.  The flavor, while still pretty good, was no match for Hannah’s.  For one, I don’t think I added enough salt to the dough and had to add salt to the bretzel on the outside to bring out more flavor: something I wanted to avoid since I was going to use the bretzel as a sandwich vessel.  Also, the delayed fermentation did little to add any flavor.  Hannah’s is simply tastier than what I could produce on my first try.

On the plus side, it made a good vessel for the banh mi that I made.  The natural sweetness of the bretzel did well to compliment the general banh mi flavors, and the yielding crust of the bretzel alleviated my main gripe against banh mi: the hard crust of a baguette tears up the roof of my mouth when biting into it in sandwich form.  I’ll definitely be playing around with baking more bretzel in the future as it’s pretty tasty, even when baked by a novice like myself.

My Last Meal and Shoti

I love to watch Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Bourdain’s cynical attitude is so infectious and entertaining. Every now and then, he’ll ask someone on the show what their last meal would be if they were going to die the next day. I ponder the question myself every time I hear him bring it up. One would think that I’d simply choose whatever is my favorite food is, but different foods can evoke different emotions and memories. My favorite food (the jury is still out on this one) may not carry the sentimental significance as other foods.

   

The things that would typically come to mind are pho, bot chien, cha gio, murgh makhani, dosa, my grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey, my mom’s “Rice, Butter, Maggi, Egg” (exactly what it sounds like, the egg cooked sunny-side up), jook/congee/chao with fried donut and 1000 year old egg, my grandma’s vegetarian pate chaud, moussaka, unagidon, hummus, and baba ghanoush. (pictures via http://www.mightysweet.com/mesohungry and  http://www.flickr.com/photos/goincase/)

 

Then I heard David Chang’s response to Bourdain when he was asked “what’s food porn for you?”  Chang’s response was “bread and butter is probably my favorite thing.”  That’s when it hit me.  Bread and butter.  Nothing more. Nothing less.  That’s what I want my last meal on Earth to be.  Whether or not the butter is salted or not is still up for debate, though.