Affordable food porn

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Tuna Tartare by Mandi F

Affordable food porn: fried rice paper sheets* are the base for tuna tartare at Noodle in a Haystack.

We don’t worry too much about food presentation here at Burnt My Fingers, as you may have noticed. But sometimes you want to gild the lily just a bit. And we got thinking about affordable food porn… ways you can make your dishes look impressive without breaking the bank.

Deviled Eggs by Christina W

Deviled egg with caviar at Noodle in a Haystack.

We were inspired by Yelp photos from Noodle in a Haystack, a restaurant in San Francisco which charges $175 for an omakase tasting menu built around ramen and is sold out for the remainder of 2023. Here are a few examples, with attribution if you click on the photos to see the titles.

Caviar. Nothing says luxury like a few fish eggs draped over a food product. And you can get 2 oz of lumpfish red caviar cured in vodka for under $15 at Amazon. (Affiliate link!) That’s enough for a lot of garnishing.

Cucumber Pickle by Bob K

Quick pickled cucumber with hijiki garnish.

Seaweed. Dried hijiki and dulse are available in bulk at my local co-op or online. They’re expensive on a per-ounce basis, but you just need a few strands as an accent. And you can’t go wrong sticking in a leaf of nori from one of those snack packs.

Custard by Alice K

Custard with black sesame seed garnish.

Black sesame seeds. Sprinkle a few on a light colored dish (like the custard example here). They’re dramatic and exotic, yet I can buy a little bag at my local bulk bin for under a dollar.

Ramen with Kamaboko

Ramen with Kamaboko (fish cake).

Fish cake (kamaboko) and pickled radish. Two colorful accents you can find in the refrigerated section at your Asian market. Kamaboko is a pressed cake made from surimi (fake crab), often with a pattern in the middle. Dan-muji is a yellow Korean radish pickle with a sweet/sour flavor. Both can perk up a dish with mixed ingredients, included or on the side.

Do you have ideas for affordable food porn? Please share. And here’s a loving article from the SF Chronicle that almost makes me want to spend $175 on a bowl of ramen and accompaniments. Almost.

*Fried rice sheets are those rice paper circles used for making Asian dumplings, fried so they puff up. Haven’t tried doing this yet.

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Reviewing McDonald’s new condiments

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
McDonalds New Condiments

McDonalds’ new condiments: Mambo sauce and Sweet & Spicy Jam.

McDonald’s has recently introduced two condiments, Mambo sauce and Sweet and Spicy Jam. Although the advertising suggests you should try them one at a time, there is nothing to prevent you from adding 2 of each to your mobile order at $0 each, which is what we did.

Mambo Sauce McGriddle

Mambo Sauce on our $2 McGriddle

The Mambo sauce has a flavor that is instantly recognizable to anyone who eats Korean food. It’s gochujang! Well, a little sweeter and a little more viscous than the Korean red pepper paste but a very reasonable facsimile. We tried some on our Egg and Sausage McGriddle, which IMO is the best thing on the menu and also a very reasonable $2 on a breakfast mobile special. It did not disappoint. (Digging deeper, turns out this is actually based on “Mumbo Sauce”, a regional specialty of the DC area. But we stand by our Korean comparison.)

The Sweet and Spicy Jam is a pepper jelly we would be more likely to use on a spread of savory items, as we have done with jalapeño jelly in the past. We put it on a cracker with cream cheese, though you could also use brie or another mild spreadable cheese. Or simply put a few dabs of the jelly on a platter and let guests decide what to do with it.

Sweet & Spicy Jam

Sweet & Spicy Jam is a cheerful Cajun orange with flecks of red pepper.

Kudos to the Clown for coming up with two grownup new condiments and making them available for free, when you place an order of any amount. We are going to hoard Mambo sauce and Sweet and Spicy Jam as we did with McDonald’s Grape Jelly and serve them to unsuspecting guests on our charcuterie platters this fall.

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Top 5 recipes of 2023 on Burnt My Fingers

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Halal Guys Sauces

On the left, the original Halal Guys White Sauce; on the right, our adaptation.

Another year, another clips post with the most popular recipes in the past 12 months as measured by clicks. A few changes if you compare to 2022 and 2021.

  1. Recipe: Halal Guys White Sauce. Once upon a time, people would read about our efforts to duplicate the legendary food stand white sauce, but not bother to read the actual recipe we developed. Frustrating! We’re gratified that now the research and recipe posts are almost exactly equal in clicks.
  2.  Recipe: Thai Chili Vinegar. Do you actually need a recipe for this simple condiment? Yes and no. Nice that so many readers want to recreate the sauce that’s on the table in every U.S. Thai restaurant.
  3. Special Recipe: Bone Bread. Oh, come on now! Bone bread is like stone soup: a novelty in which we introduced an alien ingredient just for kicks. The post originally ran at Halloween, of course. The recipe will actually make a perfectly decent soudrdough loaf, but we hope you’re going to check our other sourdough recipes like this and this.
  4.  Recipe: German-Style Head Cheese (Souse). Maybe this recipe is popular because it includes a video of half a pig’s head bubbling in a giant vat. It’s a solid head cheese recipe, but if you’re into offal try our transcendent Amish-Style Pickled Tripe in Aspic.
  5. Recipe: Buttermilk Cheese Grits. This is an East Texas Texas staple which we’ve doctored up with herbs and lightened with buttermilk instead of cream. Enjoy with some of Allen Benton’s ham.

So what didn’t make the cut? The Colonel’s KFC Three Bean Salad, for one, which has been on every top 5 list until now. And Vincent’s Garlic Cole Slaw which at one time was our most popular recipe of them all. Maybe folks do as we do, and download favorite recipes rather than continually revisiting them. If you’re a newer reader of Burnt My Fingers, do check out these old standbys.

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Five most popular non-recipe posts in 2023 on Burnt My Fingers

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Best Mayonnaise Taste Test

Best mayonnaise taste test lineup.

Each year at this time we do a recap of our posts that have garnered the most clicks in the past 12 months. The world has convulsed with conflict and climate change yet our most popular posts, and even their order ranked by views, are exactly the same as in 2022. We find that reassuring but predict it will never happen again. Here goes.

  1. Best Mayonnaise Taste Test: Hellman’s vs Dukes vs Kewpie. This post was originally published in April 2021 and has quietly swelled into a juggernaut. (Which, by the say, is not a German term as you might expect but related to Hinduism.) Seems like everyone has an opinion on the favorite sandwich lubricant, including us.
  2. The Halal Guys white sauce mystery… SOLVED! Yes, we cracked the code… and with no help from Kenji Lopez-Alt. We’re gratified that the actual recipe for the sauce now garners almost exactly as many hits as the editorial post (as you’ll discover in our recipe clips, coming up next).
  3. Galbi vs Bulgogi… which Korean BBQ entree is better?  Like our mayo taste test, this post was originally published in 2021 and has steadily grown in popularity. Folks seem to want to express their opinion but not necessarily make the dish, as the actual recipes are not that popular. KBBQ at your local grill!
  4. The sauce that made Mr. Durkee famous. This evergreen post, first published in 2011, has been revised several times as the Thanksgiving staple has migrated from one producer to another. Clicks surged recently when the product appeared to be discontinued. Good news… it’s back, at least on Amazon. (Oh crap, the first batch has sold out. Check back for a link!)
  5. Hacking the Salt & Char Ribeye Cap Steak. Celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who proclaimed this the best thing he had eaten, bought a house in Saratoga Springs for $1.8 million and sold it for $3.2 million two years later. Smart investor. So he’d probably prefer our hack vs the Salt & Char offering which is currently a 7  oz Wagyu version at $150.

Next time: 2023’s most popular recipe posts.

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Perfect hardboiled eggs in the Instant Pot

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Hardboiled Eggs Shelled

Instant Pot Hardboiled Eggs.

We tend to tune out a lot of the fan chatter about the Instant Pot, especially when folks start talking about how to cook something in the IP that has no business there—like prime rib!—or something that would be just as easy and good cooked in a more traditional way. Thus we paid no attention to the many posts and comments praising the IP’s prowess with hard boiled eggs.

But guess what… it works! We previously detailed this method which has an 83% success rate (as in, 10 out of 12 eggs were intact after peeling). But the IP after two tries was at 100%, 12 out of 12 huevos perfectos.

Here is the very straightforward technique for Instant Pot hardboiled eggs:

  1. Pour 1 c water in the IP inner container.
  2. Add the included trivet or other element (like a cheap collapsible steamer from Target) that will keep the eggs from direct contact with the water.
  3. Carefully add the uncooked eggs above the trivet, spreading them out to avoid too much direct content. (Our eggs were at room temperature but I’m not sure it matters.)
  4. Set IP to high pressure, 5 minutes. Monitor the IP as it heats up to be sure it seals properly. (The pre-heat takes about 5 minutes which is why some call this the 5-5-5-5 method: preheat/pressure cook/cool down/ice bath.)
  5. After the pressure cooking is done, leave the eggs in the sealed pot till the timer reaches 5 minutes. Release the pressure (there will be some residual steam) by pressing the valve with a slotted spoon, NOT your hand.
  6. Use slotted spoon to remove eggs to a bowl of ice water (prepared in advance).
  7. Cool eggs for at least 5 minutes. The cooler the better! If you have room in your freezer stick the bowl of eggs in there,
  8. Crack shells by rolling eggs on a hard surface. (This works—much better than cracking in one spot).
  9. Peel and enjoy.

Can you get equally good results by refrigerating the cooked eggs in their shells so they last longer, then peeling before use? Something to try next time. Our instant pot hardboiled eggs are all gone!

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Why do refrigerators have freezers on the top?

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Top Freezer Refrigerator

Here is the top-freezer fridge in the place I’m currently staying. I hate this thing.

Every time I have had the option to purchase a home refrigerator in my life, I have chosen a refrigerator with the freezer on the bottom. It’s only logical since you will access the refrigerator many more times in a day and will probably be seeking several items each time you open the door. Putting the refrigerator at the top gets the contents at eye level. And a bottom freezer is almost always a drawer you can pull open to quickly find what you need.

So why do most smaller home refrigerators have the freezer at the top, causing you to get down on your hands and knees to seek out the more obscure necessities in the nether regions of your refrigerator? (And as you might guess, I have lots of sauces, pickles and condiments squirreled away in those nether regions.)

I assumed it was pure profit motive; top-freezer refrigerators must be much cheaper to manufacture. But it’s actually something more insidious: physics. As in, hot air rises and cold air falls below the hot air. So the cold air in your freezer will interact with the warmer air inside your fridge and make it more efficient. You can test this for yourself. Just put your hand on the ceiling of the interior of your refrigerator, to note the temperature difference. Then compare the floor and the walls of your top-mounted freezer to notice the temperature difference there.

What, you say you found no such thing? That the temperature on the ceiling of the fridge was the same as on the walls, and the temperature of your freezer was the same on both its floors and its walls? (The temp at the very top of the freezer will indeed be warmer, but that’s because of the exhaust fan.) What’s next? McDonald’s selling sushi?

Bottom Freezer Energy Guide

Quel horror! A bottom freezer fridge will cost you $70 per year in energy. (Less in Canada, presumably because it’s colder there.)

The reason that modern refrigerators appear to defy the laws of physics has another explanation: better insulation. So that delicious warm air rising up in your fridge never gets to encounter the icy air descending from the freezer, and vice versa.

According to this energy use label found at lowes.com, a 22.1 cubic foot refrigerator with a bottom freezer will use 584 kWh of electricity per year, at an estimated cost of $70. While a 20.5 cubic foot (closest comparison we could find) refrigerator with a top freezer will use 436kWh, at an estimated cost of $52. So congratulations. By putting up with daily inconvenience and contortions, you’re saving $18 in a year’s time. That will pay for a lot of chiropractor visits.

Here, by the way, is a very helpful comparison of refrigerator designs by an appliance dealer. I wish the contractor at my current residence had checked such a guide before ordering dozens of top-freezer fridges.

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Recipe: Spicy Caponata

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Spicy Caponata

Spicy Caponata.

Ordered some caponata at a venue the other night and it was pleasant but bland. Our Spicy Caponata is anything but. It’s borrowed from an Ottolenghi recipe which is online but has never been published in any of his books. The key is the sweet/sour balance with a touch of heat. Makes 6-8 appetizer servings.

Ingredients:
1 medium eggplant, about 1 ¼ to 1 ½ lbs
¼ c Kosher salt
2 T good olive oil
½ c celery, finely diced; use the tender inner stalks and some leaves are ok
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
½ red bell pepper, peeled, seeded and finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
3 T tomato paste
½ c water
½ t harissa or red pepper flakes
2 T capers
¼ c tart olives (kalamatas or green), pitted and chopped
½ t sugar
1 T red wine vinegar
¼ c golden raisins
1 t lemon juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Method: chop the eggplant into cubes no bigger than ¾ inch square. (Remember that this and all ingredients will be served over toasts, though they will shrink and soften as they cook.) Toss with salt and allow to drain for at least 30 minutes. Wash off the salt and thoroughy dry the eggplant cubes with a towel.

Heat the oil in a large skillet or sautier and cook the celery till soft, then add and sauté onions, garlic and red pepper in that order. Add the eggplant cubes and sauté until tender, 10 minutes or so, turning frequently. (They probably won’t need oil but add a little if the pan dries out.)

Now comes the fun part: building your sweet/sour/spicy flavor profile. Add the tomato paste and water and stir till you have a nice gravy. Add the harissa, capers, olives, sugar, vinegar, raisins and lemon juice and salt and pepper as needed (It might not need any additional salt after the initial salt cure), tasting and adjusting proportions as you go. When the sauce is so delicious you want to drink it out of the pan, you’re done.

Serve caponata cold or at room temperature with bruschetta, sourdough or sturdy crackers. It will be better the next days and for several days to come and can also be frozen for future use.

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Recipe: Mediterranean Okra Stew

Posted on September 24, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Mediterranean Okra Stew

Mediterranean Okra Stew (over Freekh).

My friend Suzanne has been supplying delicious okra in late summer, creating the good problem of finding new ways to cook it. This Mediterranean okra stew recipe is from the New York Times and makes a bonus amount of gravy which is a good thing, with a nice flavor balance. Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a main over rice or other grain.

Ingredients:
1 lb okra
Kosher salt
½ c red wine vinegar
3 T good olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled, cut in half lengthwise and sliced thin into half-moons
2 or more garlic cloves, chopped fine
1 jalapeño or other semi-hot pepper, seeded and chopped (optional)
½ pound tomatoes, seeded and chopped, or 8 oz canned crushed or chopped tomatoes
1 T tomato paste dissolved in ¼ c water
½ t ground allspice
½ t sugar
2 T lemon juice
2 T chopped parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

Method: trim stems, leaving the rest of okra whole, and place in a bowl. Toss with salt, then vinegar, then leave to macerate for half an hour and rinse. Heat oil in a medium saucepan and add onion and garlic and sauté till translucent; add drained okra and cook over low heat about 10 minutes till it softens somewhat. Add tomatoes, plus jalapeño if you like a bit of heat, and simmer till tomatoes break apart and reduce. Mix in tomato paste in water, allspice, sugar and lemon juice, Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper as desired. Toss with chopped parsley just before serving.

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Whatever happened to olive loaf?

Posted on September 20, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Dietz & Watson Olive Loaf

Dietz & Watson Olive Loaf

Does olive loaf still exist? I will say yes based on my experience at BJ’s, my local big box store which is a pale simulacrum of Costco. I had a $2 off coupon on their house brand and went for the cheapest item to maximize my savings, thus Dietz & Watson Olive Loaf for $4.98 reduced to $2.98/lb, walla!

Taste is as I remember. I’m sure there is some food chemistry magic happening in the background but it’s basically bologna with olives added plus an acid element that is like the juice in a container of pimento stuffed olives.

How to eat olive loaf? This is not a subtle foodstuff. My mother used to send me off to school with olive loaf sandwiches on Mrs. Baird’s bread and that is probably the best way to go: soft crumb, a little mustard and mayo and you’re good.

Oscar Meyer Olive Loaf is the brand our mothers trusted with and it’s available at Walmart and many other sources. Boar’s Head tries to claim the high ground with a statement that their product is “a blend of select cuts of beef and pork that is studded with imported pimento-stuffed Manzanilla olives, this European-style bologna has a rich, subtly tangy taste. Boar’s Head Olive Loaf packs authentic Old World flavor in every savory slice”  but we’re not buying it; still tastes like bologna with olives added, to us.

 

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Recipe: Chicago-Style Beef for sandwiches

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Chicago Style Beef Sandwich

Chicago-Style Beef for sandwiches.

Chicago-style beef for sandwiches is a big winner: rich, beefy, juicy and fall-apart tender. Drench it in jus, add some of our Chicago-style giardiniera and maybe a bit of provolone, and you’ve got just about the perfect sandwich.

Ingredients:
3 lbs or so beef chuck roast*, separated into several chunks
2 t ground coriander
1 T dried oregano
1 T smoked paprika
1 T fennel seed, ground in a spice grinder or crushed with a mortar and pestle
1 T Kosher salt
A few grinds of black pepper
2 T olive oil or neutral oil
3 cups beef broth
1 large carrot
2 celery ribs
1 medium onion
6 or so garlic cloves

Method: mix spices and beef in a large bowl, working the pieces with your hands to thoroughly incorporate seasonings. Cover and refrigerate 48 hours (ideally) or (at least) overnight. Sauté in 2 T oil over medium heat until all sides are browned. Add beef stock and veggies.

Instant pot method: seal the pot and pressure cook on high for 50 minutes with natural release. Conventional method: cook on stovetop over low heat, or in a 300 degree oven, for at least 6 hours. When done, meat should be so tender it separates into strands (like pulled pork) when you pick it up with tongs. Strain the jus and drizzle on sub rolls (or dip the rolls in the jus, depending on your preference for messiness) and add a few slices of provolone if you like. Garnish with Chicago-style giardiniera and maybe a few extra chopped peppers for heat.

Chicago Beef Sandwich Open Face

A little provolone can’t hurt. Also, note our beef is shredded, not sliced.

*This Eater article has an excellent round-up of Chicago beef sandwiches in the wild and you’ll note some have shredded chuck per the above and others have thinly sliced bottom round. We used the stew meat that was left over from our chuck eye experiment, but you could probably substitute bottom round for a similar result.

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