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.

Pho-Spiced Corned Beef Banh Mi With Purple Yam Fries

I really enjoy foods that are briny and pickle-y, so I was ecstatic when I read that this month’s CharcutePalooza challenge would be corned beef.  Simply making corned beef hash or straight up corned beef with braised vegetables would’ve been perfectly enjoyable for me, and although a Reuben is one of my favorite sandwiches of all time, those options all felt a little uninspired.

During a recent conversation with my mom, we got on the topic of pho as I told her about the mighty fine bowl I had at Pho Kimmy.  With the aromatic scent of star anise, cinnamon,  fresh herbs, and beef broth permeating her childhood memories, she recounted the times she spent at the pho place her grandpa owned and operated in Vietnam.  However, her fondest memory of the eatery was not of a succulent bowl of pho but of a comforting impromptu sandwich her grandpa would make for her whenever she visited.

The sandwich consisted of only four ingredients: tender brisket straight from a cauldron of simmering pho broth, Maggi, pepper, and a baguette.  Simplicity was the key to keeping his grandkids happy and satiated.  This story gave me the idea to make some sort of sandwich using pho-spiced corned beef as opposed to traditionally-spiced corned beef.  Rather than brisket, though, I decided to use beef tongue because I appreciate the amount of fat and flavor it has.

Despite the fact that I’ve worked with tongue many times in the past, I opted to try my hand at skinning it raw rather than cooked after seeing a video of someone doing it masterfully.  This probably wasn’t the best idea.  It took quite a while to do because I failed to skin the top part off in one fell swoop.  My enthusiasm for trying out a new butchering technique threw a wrench in what was otherwise a no-brainer recipe.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far from doing these CharcutePalooza challenges, it’s that basic charcuterie is really easy.  The amount of active time spent in the kitchen is very minimal, and the tasks required are not complicated.  Corned beef is no different: make the brine, stick the meat in the brine, wait a few days, cook.

When it came to making the brine, I used charred onion and charred ginger for the aromatics and yellow rock candy instead of sugar.  These ingredients are essential to any pho broth and help give it its distinct flavor.  After the brine worked its magic for a few days, I turned to Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure and put my sous vide setup to work.

After 24 hours in the water bath, the meat was super tender and moist.  The flavor was distinctly that of a cured meat, but the aroma and undertones were  undoubtedly that of pho.  In its chilled state, the amount of visible fat marbling found in the beef tongue was enough to make my mouth drool and my arteries cry.  Now that I had easy part done, I had to think of what I wanted on my sandwich.

When conceptualizing the sandwich, I tried to work in as many pho components as I could.  Thai basil, cilantro, green onion, and Sriracha were all shoo-ins, but without any hot pho broth, I needed something to cut the fattiness of the tongue.  Luckily, I still had plenty of pickled radish and carrot from when I made pancetta.  The acidity and crunchiness of the pickled vegetables also served as a substitute for the squeeze of fresh lime and bean sprouts that are commonly added at the table to a bowl of pho.

As for the hoisin sauce, I decided to force myself to find a way to incorporate its flavors into a side dish.  Setting constraints like this can lead to some great ideas that may have otherwise gone untapped.  However, I first had to figure out exactly what hoisin sauce was made of.  To my surprise, the main ingredient in hoisin sauce is sweet potato.  At first, I considered a sweet potato puree, but thought sweet potato fries would be a more appropriate accompaniment for a sandwich.  Furthermore, I opted for purple yams because I was curious to work with them; I’d only worked with the powdered form of purple yam in the past.

The sandwich as a whole came out well.  With each passing bite, I couldn’t help but think of it as a pho banh mi, hence I’m labeling it as one.  Although the purple yam fries didn’t taste exactly like hoisin sauce, the flavor was familiar enough and did a decent job of adding sweetness to the plate just like hoisin sauce does.

When it comes down to it, my pho banh mi simply can’t compete with my great-grandpa’s ad hoc sandwich due to the sentimentality surrounding his, but if it can evoke just a single cherished memory in my mom’s mind (or anyone for that matter) then I’d consider it a success.  The ultimate success would be if new memories are formed and those thoughts percolate into yet another inspired creation.

 

Spice Ratio For Brine

Mise En Place (By Weight)

1. Two units cinnamon
2. Two units star anise
3. Two units fennel seed
4. Two units coriander seed
5. One unit clove
6. One unit Sichuan peppercorn
7. One unit black peppercorn

Method

1. 40 g (1.41 oz) of spice for a 1.27 kg (2.8 lbs) beef tongue in 2.4 L (2.54 qts) of 5% brine

Aromatics Ratio For Brine

Mise En Place (By Weight)

1. Three units onion
2. One unit ginger

Method

1. Char onion and ginger over open flame or under broiler
2. 500 g (1.1 lbs) of onion and 167 g (0.37 lbs) ginger for a 1.27 kg (2.8 lbs) beef tongue in 2.4 L (2.54 qts) of 5% brine

Pho Banh Mi

Mise En Place

1. Pho-spiced corned beef, chilled and thinly sliced
2. Thai basil, stems removed
3. Cilantro, stems preferably removed
4. Green onions, diced
5. Your favorite pickled vegetable
6. Mayonnaise, preferably homemade
7. Sriracha (optional)
8. Hoisin sauce (optional)
9. Baguette

Method

1. Heat baguette in oven
2. Construct sandwich to taste.  Sometimes structural integrity can be improved by placing garnishes on the bottom beneath the meat.

Dulce De Leche Brownies

Dulce de leche is a rather recent discovery for me.  A couple years ago, I helped organize a few international movie nights at work and had the idea to bring in some food from each movie’s country of origin.  For example, I made samosas for the Bollywood movie night.

When it came time to watch the Argentinian film Nine Queens, one of my favorite movies, I turned to the advice of my friend from Buenos Aires because I had no clue what the cuisine of Argentina was like.  She suggested I make alfajores de dulce de leche: a sandwich cookie with dulce de leche in the middle.  I was hooked on dulce de leche from that point on and frequently found myself eating it straight up by the spoonful.  Simply describing it as “caramel” doesn’t really do it justice.

The first time I made dulce de leche, I used the stovetop method of simmering a can of sweetened condensed milk for a few hours.  This method works fine, but now that I have a sous vide setup, I thought I’d try it that way and hold it in a 185 F water bath for about 14 hours.  As a side note, I would not recommend the microwave method of making dulce de leche unless time is an issue.  It’s too much trouble compared to the simmer-in-a-can method.

Recently, I’ve been making chocolates and chocolate pastries featuring dulce de leche.  The rich and creamy caramel-like flavor of dulce de leche (as I said before, not doing it justice) goes nicely with the bitterness of chocolate.  The brownie recipe I’ve been tinkering with is from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home and I found the recipe’s method of preparing the butter interesting.  Not only does it call for a artery-clogging 3 sticks of butter, but it calls for melting half the butter and using that to melt the other half.  This results in a very creamy emulsion that I’ve never seen before with butter.

As for the dulce de leche, I portioned out 100 grams of the confection and popped it in the freezer to harden so I could chop it up into small, even chunks and add it to the batter.  This probably wasn’t the best idea as the distribution of the dulce de leche didn’t turn out very well and I ended up just scooping dulce de leche onto the finished brownies.

Instead of using a traditional baking vessel, I decided to use a silicone mold that I originally bought for making chocolates.  Incidentally, the mold is actually marketed as a brownie mold.  The mold worked well enough and helped each square develop a nice texture on the top edge much like the rim on a muffin top.  Brownies with a muffin top rim?  I’ll take it.

Another success was serving the brownies with a side of crispy homemade pancetta.  Alternating between sweet and salty extended the addictiveness of an already crack-like dessert, and I’m a big fan of a little saltiness with my sweets to balance things out.

Dulce De Leche

Mise En Place

• One 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk, label removed

Method

1. Submerse the can completely in a pot and simmer (do not boil) for 3-4 hours.  A longer simmering time results in a thicker dulce de leche.  Alternatively, submerse the can in a 185 F water bath for about 14 hours.
2. Cool for about 15 minutes.  At this point, the dulce de leche will be like a thick sauce and be used as such if desired.
3. Refrigerate.  It will harden as it cools.

Brownies

Via Ad Hoc at Home

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.