Shrimp Etouffee With Tasso Ham (Two Ways)

When I learned that April’s CharcutePalooza challenge would be tasso ham, I was both frightened and excited because I had no idea what tasso ham was.  However, once I read that tasso ham is a typical Cajun ingredient, I felt a little more comfortable as I’m somewhat familiar with the cuisine.  At that point, I decided to make an untraditional version one of my favorite Cajun dishes: etouffee.

Since etouffee is traditionally served over rice, serving it inside a baked bao would qualify as untraditional.  The idea of stuffing a bao with etouffee came to me in a somewhat convoluted fashion.  When I started thinking about the ingredients for etouffee, the taste of celery from the holy trinity kept persisting in my mind.  I think this happened because I’m not a fan of raw celery, and that prejudice may have unconsciously carried over to cooked celery.

Regardless, the combination of celery and pork took me back to grandma’s baked char siu bao.  Her version of the classic Cantonese barbeque pork bun uniquely contained sauteed celery, and that became the catalyst for my etouffee baos.

Out of all the CharcutePalooza challenges thus far, tasso ham required the least amount of time to prepare and could be done in a single day.  After curing for a few hours, the pork had to be smoked.  Since I didn’t have any existing smoking equipment, I opted to buy a small stovetop smoker.  In hindsight, I probably would have been happier spending a little extra more money on the larger model.

The smoker came with some alder wood, which I read is commonly used to smoke seafood.  As such, I decided to use that as the source of smoke and make my etouffee a shrimp etouffee.  After reading through the manual, I was surprised to learn that the smoker is designed to create a 375 degree smoking environment.  Since the hot smoking recipes in Charcuterie call for a 200 degree smoking environment, I started the process on a medium heat stove for about 10 minutes in order to get the wood smoking and then transferred the smoker to a 200 degree oven.  It took about an hour for my 1-inch thick slabs to get up to temperature.

With the tasso ham done, I turned to making pork-shrimp stock for the etouffee.  Using the pressure cooker method, I was able to make a nice pork stock from fresh meaty pork bones in about an hour.  Once the pork stock was strained, I added it back to the pressure cooker with the heads and shells from the shrimp I peeled for the etouffee and boiled it at pressure for about 10 minutes.  I made sure to squeeze every ounce of shrimp head goodness when straining the stock for a second time.

As the pork-shrimp stock cooled overnight in the fridge, something odd happened.  What looked like tiny mountain ranges of amazing pork and shrimp fat congealed at the top.  Usually the fat congeals flat, but not this time.

With all my mise en place finished, I started making the etouffee.  Despite having set out to eat the etouffee in bao form only, I simply couldn’t control myself.  Once it was done, I had to have a plate over rice right then and there.  Luckily for me, my Asian heritage pretty much guarantees that I’ll have leftover rice in the fridge 6 out of 7 days of the week.  The spices from the tasso ham melded nicely with the sauce and the smokiness from the alder wood definitely went well with the shrimp.

With my plate of etouffee over rice devoured, I turned to thickening the sauce a little more so I could fill the baos without making a huge mess.  I could have easily just used more flour in the roux when making the etouffee sauce, but I wanted to experiment with xanthan gum for the first time after being inspired by the use of it in pasta in this post.  One gram of xanthan gum thickened the sauce enough to the point where I could easily portion the etouffee onto the bao dough, but it did make it a little clumpy.

In the end, the etouffee baos were good, but I preferred the etouffee traditionally over rice because it had a higher sauce to starch ratio.  Although this is something easily remediable for next time, this meant there was simply more flavor in each bite when eaten eaten over rice.

As for the tasso ham, the smokiness heightened the etouffee a lot.  Being a fan of American barbeque, especially Chicago style rib tips, I can definitely say that I’ll be using my new smoker a lot this summer.  The only issue is that it makes my home smell smoky and savory for a good 4 or 5 days, which isn’t a necessarily a bad thing.

 

Shrimp Etouffee (adapted from here)

Mise En Place

1. 75 g (~0.17 lbs) onion, diced
2. 75 g (~0.17 lbs) bell peppers, diced
3. 75 g (~0.17 lbs) celery, diced
4. 175 g (~0.39 lbs) tasso ham, diced
5. 490 g (~1 lb) shrimp, peeled
6. 355 g (~1 cup) stock
7. 113 g (1 stick) unsalted butter
8. 16 g (~2 Tbsp) flour

Method

1. Melt butter in a large pot over medium-high heat
2. Add the flour once some of the liquid has evaporated from the butter.  Stir to make a  thin roux.
3. Add the onion, bell peppers, and celery and stir until softened, about 5 minutes.
4. Add the tasso ham and shrimp.  Simmer until thickened, about 5 minutes.
5. Serve over rice.

Rice-Butter-Maggi-Egg

Everyone has fond memories of their favorite comfort foods growing up.  For me, one of those comfort foods is what my family refers to as “rice-butter-Maggi-egg.”  The dish is exactly what it sounds like: rice topped with butter, Maggi, and eggs with a dash of black pepper.  Rice-butter-Maggi-egg was my mom’s go-to dish whenever she needed to whip something up fast.  It has since become one of my emergency meals when I’m feeling too lazy to do any actual cooking or when I have no produce or pantry items to work with.

For anyone not familiar with Maggi, I’d describe it as zingy soy sauce with more depth.  It’s easily found at any Asian grocery store, but the trick is to find a place that sells Maggi that’s made in Europe (Germany if I recall correctly).  The bottles with the yellow tops are made in China and are perfectly fine, but the bottles with the red tops that are made in Europe taste so much better.  The European version has more depth and punchiness than the Chinese version.

When it comes to the butter in rice-butter-Maggi-egg, I tend to use Bretel.  It may seem odd to get butter out of a can, but it’s seriously really good and melts in your mouth.  I first discovered Bretel maybe 10 years ago at my aunt’s house where a petit dejeuner of bread and butter is common for breakfast.  The baguettes come from a Vietnamese-Belgian bakery and the butter from France in the form of Bretel.  Canned butter is so popular in Vietnam that counterfeit brands exist.  My mom and uncle have told me stories of how people in Vietnam unwittingly buy Bertel instead of Bretel.

The egg component of rice-butter-Maggi-egg typically consists of a sunny side up egg.  However, in my ongoing experimentation with sous vide eggs, I decided to sous vide the eggs at 63 C (145.4 F) for an hour.  The yolks turned out creamy and runny like I wanted, but the whites turned out a little too runny for my taste.  Texturally, a custardy and slightly runny egg white doesn’t sit well with me.  To remedy this, I put the eggs in boiling water for about 30 seconds to firm up the egg whites.

Once all the components are on a plate, one of my favorite things to do is to break the yolk and mix it with a little of buttered rice and Maggi.  This humble dish will always be a winner in my book and I can’t see myself ever getting tired of it.

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.

Lamb Heart/Tongue Biryani

I absolutely love South Asian food.  The bold and diverse flavors of Desi cuisine make it arguably my favorite cuisine.  My love for South Asian food probably stems from the chicken curry my mom used to always make in my youth.  It's one of my favorite things to eat in her repertoire and although it's more of a Vietnamese/Malaysian hybrid curry, those heavily spiced bowls of goodness did well to prime my taste buds for South Asian flavors.

One of my favorite things to eat of all time is biryani.  I'd eaten a few times growing up, but it wasn't until college that I really got addicted to biryani: specifically the lamb biryani from Blue Nile.  Their balance of the spices, texture of the rice, and tenderness of the lamb was spot on and pretty much set the standard for which I judge all biryanis against.

Also, because Blue Nile was a Middle Eastern place, each order of biryani came with a side of tahini sauce which gave the dish an extra dimension of flavor with its slight acidity and helped cut some of the meat’s fat.  Slathering biryani in tahini sauce has become my preferred method of eating biryani over the years, and I honestly could drink an entire pitcher of tahini sauce because it’s so good.

After a few years of cultivating my taste for biryani, the time finally came for me to try making some myself.  Lamb tends to be my preferred meat of choice for biryani, so I decided to go with a combination of lamb heart and lamb tongue for the protein.  The heart and tongue both had a nice level of lambiness/gaminess, which is why I like lamb so much.

Recipes for biryani can be highly variable due to regional differences, but they’re plentiful and can be easily found online.  I opted to adapt a recipe that called for heating whole spices and ginger in ghee to awaken them.  I then combined the spices with the meat that was slowly braised overnight in homemade beef stock and biryani spices.

The braising liquid was then used to par-boil the rice, and the meat and spices were folded into the rice.  After a good sprinkling of freshly ground saffron to the top of the rice, the biryani was left to bake in the oven.

As I said before, I love to eat biryani with tahini sauce and made some myself by combining tahini, olive oil, salt, and lemon juice.  I opted not to use garlic in my tahini sauce as I didn’t want it to compete with the numerous spices already in the biryani.  The acidity from the tahini was pretty much a required condiment in order to cut the natural fattiness of the tongue.  Overall, I found my first stab at biryani to be quite a success.  The next time I make biryani, I’ll probably opt for some type of game bird as the main protein.