Tag: allspice

Categories
Poultry The Book

191. Spice-Rubbed Quail p.402


The recipe

I like to think of quail and lobster as perverse challenges on a Japanese game show. They’re complicated and messy to eat, but you’re challenged to do it in your finery with your peers looking on. I can imagine the quiet golf claps from the spectators as you deftly separate the leg joint, and the derision of the judges and jeers from the peanut gallery as you forget your manners and start gnawing on the wings. There are loads of public forums for messy lobster eating, where plastic bibs rule and squirting lobster juice into your dining companions’ hair is considered to be all part of the fun, but very few community organizations seem to throw an annual quail bash, so I prefer to keep small fowl eating confined to my home.

These quail are supposed to be semiboneless, where your butcher has removed all but the wing bones, and the drumstick. I’m sure that would make the eating a lot neater, but it probably costs an arm and a leg, so we ripped our meat off the bone with our teeth thank-you-very-much. The boned out quail are cut in half, rubbed with salt, pepper, cayenne, and allspice, then chilled for a hour, and cooked under the broiler. The quail are served with a gastrique made with chicken stock, lime juice, molasses, scallions, and butter.

The Good: These quail were just delicious. The spice rub did very nice things for them, quail are fairly flavourful birds, so they were able to stand up to the allspice and cayenne. The quick broiling they received was a really nice way to cook them. Unlike chicken you’ve got to cook them as quickly as possible to get the outside nicely crisped before the meat gets overdone, intense direct heat from the broiler seems to be the ideal solution. They’d probably work well quickly grilled over an intense flame.

The Bad: While there was nothing wrong with the gastrique, I thought it was more or less unnecessary. The quail were a complete package on their own, they weren’t begging for an acidic caramel sauce. I tried some of the gastrique with the quail, and it just covered up some of the bird’s deliciousness. Sometimes I think people make gastriques more because they look nice drizzled decoratively on the plate, or painted on with bold brush strokes than any underlying culinary theory. In this case they didn’t do much for the quail, so I’d skip it. However it might depend on what you’re serving it with, a sweet and acidic sauce like this can go a long way towards tying a meal together.

The Verdict: Make the birds, skip the sauce, eat with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about making a mess.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

150. Pumpkin Apple Bread p.599


The recipe courtesy of The Amateur Gourmet

A loaf is a dangerous thing. It hardly ever occurs to me to bake up some banana bread, or a lemon loaf. If you asked me to name my favourite desserts, no loaf would make the list. I don’t think about them, or go out of my way to get them, but the second a sweet cakey loaf comes out of the oven, I’m lost.

The insatiable craving that takes hold isn’t a conscious one. I have a slice with an espresso, dining companion and I chat about how nice it is, then I get on with my day. About half an hour later, I find myself back in the kitchen with the knife in my hand, and another reasonably sized slice on my plate. After all, it really is better when it’s fresh. I trick myself into the next slice with a lie about pumpkin and apples making it a healthy snack. It gets worse from there, I probably won’t have any appetite for dinner, and my dining companion may not get a second slice. These types of loaves are a triumph of marketing. They’re not cake, they’re bread! and look! they’re full of healthy fruits and nuts! At least a black-forest cake is honest, if you eat it for breakfast you know exactly what a bad person you are.

This particular temptress is made by sifting together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice in one bowl, canned pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs in another, and then adding the dry stuff to the wet stuff, and folding in chopped apples. The batter is divided between two loaf pans, sprinkled with the inevitable streusel topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter), and baked.

This bread is about as autumnal as it gets. Think pumpkin pie, now with carbs! If you’re a fan of the pie, this is the bread for you. Being in the house while it baked was a pleasure. Someone should distill it into a perfume. The bread was exceptionally moist, with a loose spongy crumb, and the barest hint of toothsomeness. The chunks of Granny Smith added a necessary textural counterpoint, and a little bit of bite to keep things in perspective. This topping worked better than some of The Book’s other efforts. In this case it was a flavourful glaze on the loaf, and not the overwhelming mess that sometimes results. I might toss in some crushed walnuts or pecans next time, but as it is it’s a winner

If you’re the sort of person who has a modicum of self control when it comes to baked goods in the house, I happily recommend this bread. For those of you who don’t, bake it and give it away, at least you’ll be able to enjoy the way your kitchen smells. Unfortunately I tried the second strategy, and for possibly the first time in human history a lab full of grad students was too busy to polish off free baking on the first go-round. I ended up with a third of a loaf on my desk for the afternoon, I’m not at liberty to say what happened next.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

127. Barbecued Chile-Marinated Spareribs p.490

There’s no recipe for this one.

These ribs are dead simple, but they take some forethought. The ribs are simmered in water for an hour, then marinated in sauce of New Mexico chiles, ketchup, garlic, cider vinegar, brown sugar, salt, tequila, vegetable oil, ground cumin, and ground allspice for the next eight hours. Half of the sauce is used for the marinade, a quarter to baste during cooking, and the remaining quarter as a dipping sauce at the table. A little more than an hour before dinner the ribs come out of the fridge and warm to room temperature, then they’re transfered to a grill over low flame for 35 minutes. They’re basted with more of the sauce for the last 15 minutes of grilling time, then they’re rested for a few minutes, and served with the remaining sauce.

The barbecue sauce was simple and delicious. It filled its three roles admirably, it was salty enough to penetrate deeply as a marinate, sweet enough to turn to glowing caramel on the grill, and the uncooked dipping sauce’s raw edge complimented and contrasted the cooked sauce on the ribs. I was very happy to find a barbecue sauce that has a good deal of complexity, and shows some restraint with the sugar. I often find that restaurant ribs are sticky pork candy without much going on beyond slightly spiced ketchup. The bit of the tequila in the dipping sauce was a nice touch, of course bourbon wouldn’t be out of place either.

I’d make the sauce again without hesitation, and slather it on pretty much anything destined for the grill. Unfortunately I don’t think the hour-long simmer did the ribs any favours. They were wonderfully falling apart tender, but I think they gave up a lot of their flavour to the water that went down the drain. I wonder if steaming the ribs, then reducing the steaming liquid and adding it to the sauce would have brought more of the porky goodness to the plate? I preferred the texture and flavour of the meat from the Chinese-Hawaiian “Barbecued” Ribs where they were slowly roasted in the oven. I can’t really see why that technique wouldn’t work with this sauce, and it’s probably worth a test.

Both of those recipes use the word barbecue without actually grilling anything low and slow. I don’t really understand why The Book avoids a long grill over offset heat? Even with my gas grill with few soaked hardwood chips for smoke, I’d bet that basting the ribs with this sauce for a few hours would result in some pretty good barbecue.

I was actually happy with the way these came out, but they could have been even better. The cooking technique literally threw the baby out with the bathwater. They still tasted very nice, but it was primarily the delicious sauce that came through. The pork was there, but not nearly as prominent as it deserved to be.

Categories
Poultry The Book

90. Chicken in Pumpkin Seed Sauce p.360

No recipe for this one.

I had a very mixed reaction to this dish. I made it for friends along with some of the other recipes listed under Mexican in the index. It makes a good deal of food, and we weren’t able to eat it all. On the night of the party I had the chicken and decided it was delicious, I had some leftovers the next day and decided they were gross and that I’d never liked it in the first place. Some time passed and my memories softened, I recalled the chicken fondly again but with a queezy uncertainty. I’d frozen some of it, so I pulled it out when I saw it was time to write the dish up. The verdict? slightly freezer burned. In the end I think there were some really strong elements to the dish, and some fairly weak ones.

A chicken is divided into serving size pieces, and simmered with garlic, onion, cilantro, salt, pepper, and allspice. The chicken is then topped with a sauce of toasted pumpkin seeds, cumin, allspice, cloves, pepper, tomatillos, serranos, onion, garlic, cilantro, salt, and a poblano. The whole thing is then baked and served.

The sauce has some excellent flavours, I really liked everything that went into it, and the combined beautifully. The flavours were really complex, but cohesive. There are a huge number of flavourful ingredients in this sauce, and marshaling their forces this deftly isn’t easy. The sauce’s flavour was the strong point of the dish, It’s texture and appearance were pretty much awful. A light beigey-green sauce over some beige chicken didn’t do much for visual impact. The pumpkin seeds and spices are ground to a powder before being added to the sauce, and the sauce is pureed thoroughly, but it still ended up mealy and unpleasant. I think I just don’t like the texture of ground nuts or seeds in sauces. Maybe passing this sauce through a Chinoise would have improved it, but I don’t have one, and the recipe didn’t call for it.

The chicken itself was a bit of letdown. It’s topped with a flavour packed sauce, but the meat is absolutely bland. It simmers in a broth for ~50 minutes, picking up flavour from the arromatics you added. Unfortunately the chicken flavour is escaping to the liquid at the same time. 3 1/2 cups of the liquid get added into the pumpkin seed sauce, but the other ~3 quarts went into the freezer. The Mexican inspired chicken stock was a nice little bonus from making this dish, but you wouldn’t’ serve your guests chicken you’d used to make stock with first, so why do it here? In the end you have an exhausted chicken covered with gooey boiled skin, yum.

I should emphasize that the sauce for this chicken was really delicious, everything else about the dish is wrong wrong wrong, but it’s almost good enough to make up for it. If I were to make it again I’d grill the chicken instead of boiling it, grind the pumpkin seed mixture into a nano-scale powder, puree the sauce obsessively, then pass it through a hepa filter.