Burnt My Fingers

Recipe: Improved Fried Okra

Posted on September 15, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Fried Okra should look like this when done, golden brown with a bit of green showing through here and there.

For such a versatile vegetable, fried okra generates a lot of controversy. Soak in buttermilk for tenderness, or coat with beaten egg so batter will stick? Dredge in flour for a uniform crust, or cornmeal for a pleasing crunch? How about all of the above! We ran a fried okra recipe back in 2012, but this is way better. Serves 4-6 as a side dish.

Ingredients:
1 lb fresh okra (no brown streaks and definitely not slimy), stem removed and sliced crosswise into ¾ inch pieces
¼ c whole fat buttermilk (or skim buttermilk if that’s all you can find)
1 large egg, beaten
½ c all purpose flour
½ c cornmeal
¾ t salt
¼ t ground black pepper
½ t Old Bay Seasoning (optional)*
Neutral oil for deep frying

Method: soak the okra pieces in buttermilk for half an hour, turning from time to time so the pieces get equal exposure to the liquid. Add beaten egg and mix thoroughly. Heat oil to 375 degrees. Mix flour and cornmeal with spices. Dredge okra pieces in flour/cornmeal and fry a few at a time, turning with a slotted spoon so they brown evenly. Pieces are done when they are a golden brown but not dark. Drain on paper towels and serve hot.

Note: traditionally fried okra is served with black eye peas, collards and other Southern sides–doused liberally with pepper sauce, of course. If you want to get creative, the Jubilee cookbook has a recipe where they are used like croutons, in a salad with a tart lemon dressing.

*h/t to Dave Chang, who puts it in the southern-style fried chicken served at Momofuku Noodle Bar.

Posted in Eating, Recipes, Sides | Tagged Southern, southern cooking, Texas | 2 Comments

Recipe: Italian Seafood Salad

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Italian Seafood Salad

This Italian Seafood Salad, or Insalata di Mare, was inspired by Philip Nicolas on the Cook’s Cooks Community Forum on Facebook. It’s great if you have fresh seafood, but it’s nearly as good made with frozen because of the other strong flavors. Makes about 8 main course servings.

Ingredients
1 lb raw shrimp with shells on, fresh or frozen
1 lb scallops, fresh or frozen
1 lb squid, fresh or frozen, cleaned and cut into sections and tentacles
Dry white wine, for cooking
1 c chopped celery, including some of the leafy tops
1/2 c extra virgin olive oil
5 t lemon juice
3 large cloves garlic, finely chopped.
2 T Italian parsley, finely chopped
1 t dried oregano
1/2 t t crushed red pepper
Salt and pepper to taste

Method: prepare a cooking stock with 3 parts water to 1 part wine. Bring to a boil and cook the seafood one type at a time, starting with the shrimp. When they are just cooked, lift the pieces out with a strainer and plunge them into ice water. Peel the shrimp and return the shells to the cooking liquid. Cook the scallops, then the squid, chilling with ice water each time. Reserve the cooking liquid. Drain seafood and toss with other ingredients; add a bit of cooking liquid if it seems dry. Chill for least 2 hours (preferably overnight) then taste and add salt and pepper as needed before serving.

Posted in Eating, Mains, Recipes | Tagged Italian, Seafood | Leave a comment

Make your own vinegar pepper sauce at home

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Our well-used bottle of Trappey’s pepper sauce and the Cajun Chef which replaces it.

After we cooked up our batch of Southern-style collard greens the other day, we needed some pepper sauce to douse them with. We’re not talking Tabasco, or Frank’s Red Hot, or one of the many niche sauces that are everywhere today. In Texas and across the south, “pepper sauce” can only mean one thing: small, spicy green peppers that have spent a long time soaking in vinegar which is now flavored and ready to lubricate your foods.

A relentless survey of local supermarkets and gourmet boutiques established this product is unavailable in our corner of Upstate New York. There are many jars of peppers in vinegar, in respect to our strong Italian-American/red sauce tradition, and pouring out the liquid in those might work ok, but out of respect to our Benton’s ham juice we wanted the real deal. We’d settle for Trappey’s, the defacto brand that costs less than $2 for a little jar down south. But what we really wanted was Cajun Chef, the brand used at the dearly missed Highland Park Cafeteria.

Looks like we bought our last batch of Cajun Chef products from a company that is now out of business, possibly because they didn’t charge enough for shipping…

We found a bottle of Cajun Chef Sport Peppers for just under $10, shipped, at Amazon. We ordered it immediately, knowing the same thing would be just a couple of bucks down south. Then we discovered a dusty jar of Cajun Chef Jalapeno Peppers in our basement. Close enough and we cancelled the Amazon order. (It’s funny that the top Amazon review for Cajun Chef Sport Peppers is from a reviewer who doesn’t realize this is sauce and thinks you are supposed to eat the peppers; he talks of his difficulty in getting the peppers out of the jar and knocks it down a star.)

Are you ready to make your own pepper sauce at home? This recipe is probably closest to what we grew up with: peppers (artfully arranged in a shaker jar, since you know better than to try and pry them out), salt and vinegar. This one is a little fast and loose with the ingredients (garlic? sugar? rice vinegar??) but there are some good ideas in the comments. It does take a while for the peppers to release their flavor into the vinegar, so get started now while there are still good fresh peppers in the farmers markets.

Posted in Eating | Tagged South, Texas | 5 Comments

Food for Thought: Bill Buford’s Dirt

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Bill Buford is a lucky guy. He loves to cook and is good at it. But his true talent is persuading world class chefs to take him under their wing—as a student, a stagiare, a baker. He does the job well and puts up with long hours without complaint and also without pay—it is even possible (and certainly true in the case of the school, which charged three thousand euros for a short course in cooking fish) he pays out of his own pocket for the privilege. In the 1990s he did this in the kitchens of Mario Batali in New York and the result was Heat, our favorite cooking book of all time.

Bill Buford’s Dirt is just as good, though a bit less focused. At the end of Heat we left him in Tuscany, learning traditional butchery from the great Dario Ceccini, who became a tourist attraction with his own restaurant in part through Buford’s accolades. Now back in the U.S., Buford decides to finish the job and move to Italy and learn how to produce fine cuisine from the ground up. The problem is, every chef he talks to says he must go to France, not Italy, if he wants to learn to cook and specifically to Lyon, a gritty industrial city which is also the capital of French cuisine. And so he does, planning to stay one year but living there for five.

Bill Buford’s Dirt follows his adventures through the cooking school, then as apprentice to the local baker, then—the longest and most interesting section of the book—as stagiare at La Mere Brazier, a Michelin-starred restaurant. The kitchen is full of characters who delight in abusing this peculiar American writer, and Buford likes it so much he negotiates to stay on far longer than the 17 days he originally asked for.

Bill Buford’s Dirt is full of tips and trucs—if you want to taste from a firehose of food nerdishness pick up the book in a book shop and turn to p. 255, where he is making Bearnaise, or p. 300 when he and Michel Richard (the father of nouvelle cuisine) are on a train riffing about their various food experiences. There is also some wonkiness—Buford cannot let go his love of Italian cooking and becomes increasingly convinced that the French cuisine came from Italy, a claim which is derided by his French hosts who of course hate Italians. This only makes him dig deeper, reading historical cookbooks in the old languages and walking the route over the Alps by which Catherine de Medici allegedly brought her personal chef to Lyon in 1533.

If you have read Heat, then you know you have to read Dirt. (If you have not yet read Heat, you have two great feasts ahead of you so get that first.) Check it out.

Posted in Eating, Food for Thought | Tagged Mario Batali, Michel Richard, Paul Bocuse | 5 Comments

Recipe: Southern-Style Collard Greens

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Southern-Style Collard Greens

If you ordered collard greens (or mustard greens or turnip greens) at the now-defunct Highland Park Cafeteria in Dallas, the server would ladle them into a little bowl and add several spoonfuls of the pan liquid. This is the beloved pot liquor, a way to rescue the greens which have been cooked to the point that most of the flavor and nutrition has transferred to the juice. We have published a number of sautéed greens recipes on Burnt My Fingers using little or almost no liquid, but the deliciousness of our Bentons’s Ham Juice made us try a more traditional approach. To preserve taste and a bit of texture they are steamed rather than boiled, but you should end up with a generous amount of liquid and can add more if needed.

Ingredients:
1 bunch collard greens, coarsely chopped (about 4 c)
1 c ham juice or other rich, flavorful chicken, pork or ham stock
Salt to taste (the ham juice is plenty salty on its own)
1/2 c chopped ham bits and pieces from the ham juice
1 t sugar or honey (optional)

Method: add the greens, ham bits and stock to a large saucepan and cover; simmer 20 minutes, stirring occasionally and making sure the liquid doesn’t boil away. (Add water or more stock if it does.) Taste for seasoning and add more salt as needed; if greens are bitter add just a drop of sweetness. Serve in a bowl with the ham juice/pot liquor.

Posted in Eating, Recipes, Sides | Tagged greens, Southern, Texas | 4 Comments

Making ham juice with Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Ready for the stockpot: ends and pieces of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham

A gift of collards from a friend’s garden made me realize I was out of the odds and ends of a smoked ham needed to make rich, flavorful southern-style greens. Time for an order of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham. I had previously purchased HSCHDS which is a whole ham pre-sliced and cryovac’d in several packages; this time I decided to purchase HSCHDT which is deboned and trimmed but not sliced.

The unboxing: the tears in the butcher paper are because the cat got to it while I was looking for my boning knife.

In my previous post, I noted that this distinguished product is just as smokey and salty as you expect; it’s also an excellent value compared to some competitors. I later found out, when a reader ordered her own ham and had some problems, that Benton’s also has kind and generous customer service.

Bits and pieces of skin, fat and meat as they were retrieved from the stock pot. This is about half the total output; the cat and cook snitched the rest.

This time my ham took a week to ship but then just two days to reach me in upstate NY, and the package when it arrived was not chilled but not spoiled in any way. I popped the big chunk of trimmed ham in the fridge and turned my attention to the ends and pieces which were wrapped up in two sizable packages of butcher paper. The first thing you want to do is take a sharp knife and carve out a few morsels of meat as a treat, just as you would sitting in a bar in Spain. But the rest of one package went into a pot which was then covered with water and allowed to simmer for maybe 3 hours.

At the end of that time I fished out the meat and skin, which had mostly fallen off the bone, then trimmed out gristle and remaining bone bits to leave maybe 3 cups of savory bits to use for seasoning greens and black eye peas. The meat bits retained their salty flavor and the skin was chewy and rubbery but entirely edible when chopped into small pieces.

Ham juice after a night in the fridge, with jello consistency due to the collagen in the ham bones

The bones were discarded and the pot went back on the stove to be reduced by about 1/3 over another hour of simmering. We now had ham juice… a concentrated elixir which set up solid over a night in the refrigerator. This is the foundation of the “pot liquor” beloved of Southern cooks. How would we use it? To be continued….

Posted in Cooking, Eating | Tagged Southern, Texas | Leave a comment

Recipe: Smoked Salmon Roll-Ups

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Smoked Salmon Roll-Ups

Thanks to longtime reader and frequent commenter llcwine for sharing this recipe for Smoked Salmon Roll-Ups. It’s refreshing and summer-y and just right for a socially distanced porch party where everyone is served their own plate. Each roll-up feeds 1 as an entree, 3 or so if served with other hors d’oeuvres.

Ingredients (per roll-up):
1 burrito-size flour tortilla
Softened cream cheese
1 large scallion, sliced thin (including some of the green part)
1 T red onion, finely chopped
½ t dried dill weed or 1 t fresh
2 T capers
1 t Everything Bagel seasoning (optional)
¼ c smoked salmon trim, chopped fine
¼ c cucumber, seeded and peeled if necessary and chopped fine

Smoked Salmon Roll-Up Assembly

Method: spread cream cheese in a thin layer to cover the surface of the tortilla, then distribute the other ingredients evenly except salmon and cucumber. Place the salmon trim in a line down the middle (see picture) and top with the cucumber. Roll tight, jelly roll-style, and wrap with plastic wrap. Refrigerate until cheese stiffens, at least 2 hours and ideally overnight. Remove plastic wrap* and cut roll into 1 ½ inch sections. Serve cold or at room temperature.

If you like Everything Bagel seasoning, try sprinkling some on the surface of the cut rolls.

*Our first rolls were a bit loose when we unwrapped them, but we found we could carefully peel them open then re-roll without damaging the insides.

Posted in Eating, Mains, Recipes | Tagged appetizer, pandemic | 3 Comments

Trader Joe’s Salsa Autentica is the real deal

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

A bowl of tortilla chips goes nicely with Trader Joe’s Salsa Autentica.

One of the lost pleasures in the pandemic is the communal bowl of salsa at our favorite Mexican restaurant and the experience of filling up on dipped tortilla chips before our entree arrives. Trader Joe’s Salsa Autentica to the rescue! This stuff somehow has the perfect viscosity to coat a chip without making it soggy, even if you dump a cup of the stuff into your socially distanced individual bowl.

It also has just the right spice level for most folks, a kick of heat without being really hot. A minor quibble: previous jars had a hint of cumin (the signature spice of a Tex-Mex flavor profile) while now the flavor is more tomato-y. And indeed a look at this Amazon listing shows the ingredients as tomatoes, fresh yellow chile, distilled vinegar from corn[!]), salt, onion, spice while the ingredients in our current jar are tomato puree, yellow chili pepper, salt, distilled vinegar, dehydrated onion and garlic powder. But there’s an easy hack to fix this: just stir in half a teaspoon of cumin powder when you open a new jar.

At under $2 in our local store for a 12-oz jar, this is also one of the more affordable choices. The Trader stocks over 20 different salsas (we counted) including refrigerated varieties but this is the one to buy. Trader Joe’s Salsa Autentica is the real deal.

Posted in Eating | Tagged pandemic, Tex-Mex | Leave a comment

Recipe: Utica-Style Tomato Pie

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Burnt My Fingers

Utica-Style Tomato Pie

Utica-Style Tomato Pie is a gooey, unctuous treat made with lots of tomatoes and very little cheese; it is traditionally served at room temperature. We started with the Sal Detraglia recipe but did a lot of tinkering to get the balance we wanted: sweet juicy tomato topping on a sturdy but not over-bready crust. Makes one 11×17 pie; the recipe can be multiplied which you will probably want to do on future bakes after you taste your first effort.

Ingredients, for the dough:
1 ½ c all-purpose flour
1 c durum flour*
1 t sugar
1 t yeast
3 T extra virgin olive oil
2 t Kosher salt
1 ¼ c ice water, plus more if needed

For the sauce:
28-oz can crushed tomatoes, preferably San Marzano or another quality Italian Roma tomato
6-oz can tomato paste
Additional tomatoes (optional): 4 fresh Romas roasted until soft OR half a smaller (about 14-oz) can of crushed tomatoes**
½ t or so Kosher salt (depending on how salty your tomatoes are out of the can)
3 large garlic cloves, finely chopped (about 1 T)
1 T balsamic vinegar
2 T sugar
1/3 c finely grated Parmesan or Pecorino Romano
½ t dried oregano
Additional Extra Virgin Olive Oil as needed***

Method: add flours, yeast and sugar to the bowl of a orbital (eg Kitchenaid) mixer with dough hook, and run a few seconds on first speed to blend. With machine running, slowly add ice water and oil and mix until no dry flour is left, about 2 minutes. Dough should be cohesive but not sticky at the end; if needed add just a bit more water. Rest 10 minutes, then add salt and knead on second speed till dough is well developed, 6 minutes or a bit more. Transfer dough to a bowl liberally coated with olive oil and turn to coat all sides. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least overnight and as long as 48 hours.

Dough will rise slightly during its 90 minute rest

On bake day, take the dough out of the refrigerator and bring it up to room temperature. Make the sauce: mix crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, balsamic vinegar, sugar and salt in a saucepan and simmer 20 minutes until slightly thickened; remove from stove and reserve. Transfer the dough to a floured surface and form an 11×17 rectangle. You may need a rolling pin but you can probably push the dough to the edges with your hands. Transfer to a half sheet pan or silicone pad which has been coated generously with olive oil. Sprinkle a little more olive oil on top then cover with plastic wrap and rest 90 minutes during which time the dough will have a slight additional rise.

Ready to go in the oven

45 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 500 degrees and place a pizza stone on a middle rack. (If you use a silicone mat, you can preheat the half sheet pan directly, foregoing the pizza stone, then carefully transfer the formed dough on the pad into the pan [which you have temporarily moved to an insulated countertop surface] before adding the sauce.) At bake time, spread the sauce over the top of the dough, using a spatula to distribute it evenly, working with care to avoid deflating dough. Evenly distribute the cheese and oregano over the top, sprinkling with your hands.

The finished product

Place pie in oven, in preheated sheet pan or in cold pan on hot pizza stone, and lower the heat to 450 degrees. Bake 10 minutes, then rotate 180 degrees and bake another 10 minutes. Remove from oven when the bottom of the pie is an even golden brown. Cool until the tomato topping solidifies (at least an hour), then slice into squares and serve.

*Sal Detraglia uses semolina flour for a sturdy crust and he uses more of it, which in our earlier tests caused the dough to tear. We used durum flour which is very similar to semolina but a finer grind. You could also make the pie with only all-purpose flour, but the result won’t have quite as much chew.

**The contents of the 28-oz tomato can and the tomato paste will give you sufficient sauce, but adding a little more tomato will make it extra-rich. Sal wants you to roast the tomatoes in the oven with oil, salt and pepper which is a lot of trouble; cooked tomatoes in a can will work fine.

***Utica pie places tend to use a lot of olive oil, which makes the pie crispy but possibly a bit greasy. A light coating on the surface of the sheet pan/silicone pad and more on the top of the dough is enough for us. You might want to drizzle a little more olive oil around the very edges of the pan after the pie is formed; this will give some extra crispiness to the outside edges, a treat for those who prefer these cuts.

Posted in Eating, Mains, Recipes | Tagged Italian, red sauce, Upstate New York, Utica | 10 Comments

Burnt My Fingers

Recipe: Improved Fried Okra

Top non-recipe posts of 2020

Recipe: Italian Seafood Salad

Make your own vinegar pepper sauce at home

Food for Thought: Bill Buford’s Dirt

Recipe: Southern-Style Collard Greens

Making ham juice with Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham

Recipe: Smoked Salmon Roll-Ups

Trader Joe’s Salsa Autentica is the real deal

Recipe: Utica-Style Tomato Pie

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