in re:

I don’t have it too often (fortunately or unfortunately), but fried chicken is one of those foods that while seemingly incredibly simple and common, can and often is, so much more.  Thomas Keller makes it and so do plenty of gas stations, which makes it kind of democratizing meal of sorts – but rather than get too philosophical about the food (others have and its a topic worthy of it) I just wanted to write up a few recent fried chicken dinners I made here at home.

The first was a few months back and featured chicken that followed somewhat the recipes and techniques of Thomas Keller (from the Ad Hoc cookbook) and from Michael Ruhlman’s Twenty (Also see Ruhlman’s post on fried chicken here).  Ruhlman worked on the Ad Hoc cookbook and claims his is better – a bold statement (unfortunately we didn’t try making both head to head – I have made the TK version before and knew it was amazing).  Instead the recipe I used started with a brine mostly like Ruhlmans, one that has a lot of rosemary, the predominant flavor he likes in fried chicken.  In addition I had lemon and some other herbs (thyme and parsley), but not quite as much as TK uses.  The brine was left overnight before taking out the chicken to air dry on a rack in the fridge.  (The brine is really the biggest difference between amazing fried chicken and fried chicken and cannot be skipped).

After drying the chicken gets dredged in seasoned flour - I used a mixture of cayenne, paprika, black pepper (a bunch), salt, garlic powder, onion powder, and a bit of baking powder (TK doesn’t use BP, Ruhlman does)

Next is a dip in buttermilk and back into the flour mixture, before frying it up, and finally topping w/ some fried rosemary and some lemon zest.  (Actually some of it sat for a while in a 250 oven on a rack – dark meat especially actually benefits from this and lets you do the chicken in advance, something I should have done rather than frying huge batches of chicken with my friends standing around – oh well next time.)

Even though this chicken was of the American variety, I served it with some sauces that are somewhat asian if people felt like it (this chicken doesn’t need anything and really your just gilding the lilly, but I do like sauces…) One of them was Momofuku’s Octo Vin (a reverse vinagrette with a lot of garlic and ginger.  The sauce/dressing’s full name is shortened from Octopus Vinaigrette, and was intended to stand up to octopus and has the reverse ratio of a vinaigrette with the oil and vinegar amounts flipped, the stuff is amazing and goes with fried chicken amazingly well, among other things).  I also served a korean style sauce (discussed again below) and siracha honey which is amazing on fried chicken and is as easy as combining the two.

zesting a lemon onto the chicken

octo vin, siracha honey, korean sauce

Quick pickles (fennel, carrots, cukes), fried chicken and biscuits

[Thanks to Ham Sandwich Indicted for the above photos as well as for the amazing biscuits that featured homemade cultured buttermilk - those could have been dinner alone.]

Fast forward to yesterday and I tried out David Chang’s recipe for fried chicken in the Momofuku cookbook (which is not the fried chicken they serve at Momofuku I might point out as they serve a breaded version there – amazing I should also add – but the one in the cookbook has no breading and is sauced with the octo vin).  Anyway the gist of DC’s version is that the chicken is brined (simple sugar and salt brine for several hours) and then steamed for 40 minutes – thats right its fully cooked by steaming.  The idea is clearly inspired by Asian preparations such as crispy duck where hot oil is used at the end to get a crispy skin, but the steam is used to cook the meat and cook and render the skin so that it is ready to quickly crisp. After steaming the chicken, take the chicken out and put it onto a rack in the fridge to dry / chill.  After a few hours its ready to be fried and as you can guess it doesn’t need long. Word of warning have a splatter shield or at least be careful frying this chicken (I learned the hard way and was hit with quite a few large oil pops).  Not being a scientist I assume this has something to do with the way moisture was trapped in the cooked chicken versus raw chicken, but just consider yourself warned.

The chicken crisps up quickly probably takes only about 5 minutes or so at 375.  After draining it I tossed in the octo vin (and served more on the side of course).  I also tried dipping some of the chicken in a  thin (Korean style?) batter, basically cornstarch, AP flour, some salt/pepper, cayenne, garlic powder, and very cold seltzer water (I guess that part is maybe Japanese).  This battered batch I tossed with a sauce made from gochujang (the amazing fermented Korean chili paste), garlic, ginger, rice vinegar, soy sauce, honey and siracha.

The results were amazing and compared to the breaded versions a whole lot less work, way less mess and means you can essentially precook the chicken and fry it up at the last moment.  It isn’t quite the same thing however and is really its own dish as the intense chicken flavor that comes from frying chicken isn’t quite there due to the steam cooking.  Don’t’ get me wrong though this is a dish worthy in its own right, just not quite the same thing.  In case you were wondering I served this with some cabbage/fennel slaw and some beans from rancho gordo (Yellow Indian Woman – one of their heirloom varieties) that were cooked slowly all day with onions, celery and bay leaf, salt and pepper, which leads one not in the know to think there is meat in the dish as they are so rich tasting and flavorful.

Fried Chicken a la David Chang

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Okay, so been a Vietnamese kick recently as the post on Pho may have hinted at, today I’ll turn our attention to bánh mì:

Bánh mì in Vietnamese refers to bread – specifically the baguette that we can thank French colonialism for introducing to Vietnam, but the name bánh mì at least here in the States also speaks to the amazing sandwich that is served on the crisp airy baguette. The basics of the bánh mì tend to include pâté spread on to the bread on one side, mayonnaise on the other, some kind of meat or protein, and a variety of veggies- often cucumber, cilantro, pickled carrots and diakon radish and here in the US jalapeños as well as a splash of Maggi seasoning.  The sandwich may sound a bit odd if you haven’t encountered it before, but trust me this is one of the most amazing combinations of flavors and textures that is not quite like anything else.  If your in downtown Columbus you can get a pretty decent one in the North Market or if you head up to Mi Li you can get a really great one.

For whatever reason I haven’t ever really tried making my own, without really planning it out I suddenly found myself with the ingredients to make my own version.  It all started when I was cleaning out a chicken to roast for dinner and wanted to do something with the liver.  Having just made a fresh baguette that was still cooling on the stove (it was Presidents Day so I had the day off and had time to bake baguettes and roast chickens and make a bánh mì.  So back to the liver, I quickly whipped up a simple pâté using the liver in a mini food processor with some bread crumbs, milk, salt, pepper and a little duck fat.  I baked the tiny pâté in a ramekin in the toaster oven in a water bath for 30 minutes and then chilled it.

Meanwhile I made some pickled carrots by slicing match sticks of carrots and putting them in a vinegar, sugar and salt mixture to quickly pickle.  My bánh mì didn’t feature a main protein (and really it doesn’t need one I learned) and if the pâté was replaced with a mushroom pâté it would be a great vegetarian sandwich.

So once everything was ready, carrots having sat in the fridge for an hour I was ready to make the sandwich.  On one side of my freshly toasted baguette I spread the pâté, layered on cucumbers, a layer of pickled carrots, some pickled hot peppers from our garden, and a bunch of cilantro.  The other side got some Kewpie mayonnaise, I didn’t have Maggi seasoning so I put a few drops of soy sauce on top of the contents and combined the two haves together.  This improvised version of bánh mì  turned out pretty awesome and was pretty simple to pull off.

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The other day we went out into the garden which is still loaded with vegetables (although a lot of them are green tomatoes that may never ripen with the cool wet weather now) and harvested everything we could and pitched all the bad tomatoes into the compost bin.  (There were a lot of perfect looking tomatoes that sadly had a worm hole in them).  We ended up with a lot of tomatoes, banana peppers and a whole load of jalapeños without a super clear idea of what we’d do with them.

We couldn’t cook a whole pound of jalapeños into anything unless we were making poppers one night (not a bad idea actually) so preserving them came to mind, and jalapeño jelly sounded like the perfect destination.  Looked up some recipes on the internet and being fairly novice at canning tend not to stray from the tried and true ball recipes.  So using this recipe for jalapeño jelly from the Ball cookbook started up the water bath and washed some jars and got busy making the jelly.  The jelly is super easy as you may guess if you peaked at the recipe (jalapeños, sugar, cider vinegar, pectin), we departed from the recipe in not pureeing the jalapeños and instead leaving them in a small fine dice using the food processor and omitted the food color.

The results are amazing.  The huge amount of sugar and pectin as well as the 10 minutes of boiling the jelly mello the jalapeños to a really pleasant heat level where even the most timid of eaters could enjoy the mild punch.  The natural color looks kinda like a pickle relish – a muted green and the flecks of the jalapeño are suspended in the jelly.  The jelly is of course perfect on cream cheese and a cracker, but can bring back a blast of peppery summer throughout the winter to a number of dishes by mixing into sauces or using as you would a chutney.

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Korean Taco

Recently I taped the Kimchi chronicles on PBS, which oddly enough features Jean George Vongerichten and his wife Marja.  Well actually it’s not that odd because it turns out his wife is Korean and hence the TV show.  Watching them put together some Korean food got me excited to cook up some at home and the other day picked up some pre-marinated boolgoi at Trader Joes.  While I am sure there is better boolgoi out there of course, it’s a pretty easy way to whip up an easy meal, grill it real quick over a super hot fire and put in a lettuce wrap with some rice and some gochujang (I have heard you pronounce it with a bit of a K sound – more on this stuff later).

Okay well not having planned ahead I didn’t have too much to go with the boolgoi, or so I thought.  Rummaging around in the fridge found we had some small asian cabbages that while not the classic napa cabbage for kimchee, figured I could turn into a good quick kimchee.  I loosely followed Mark Bittmans recipe, after a couple of hours of salting and a thourgh rinsing I chopped up the cabbage and mixed with nom pal (fish sauce), some red pepper flakes and siracha, sugar, garlic, some leeks I had that I softened in boiling water and some ginger grated on the microplane of course.  I tossed that all together and put it in the fridge overnight.  After reading a couple of recipes that mentioned the one ingredient you could not substitute for and must buy when serving ssam or boolgogi is gochujang – Korean red chili paste.  I realized that I should get some gochujang to do it right so  I stopped at one of the Asian markets by my house (Yao Lee in Clintonville) , that I heard had some Korean stuff to grab a jar of gochujang and also grabbed some bean sprouts and cilantro (I also was looking for ssamjang, but they didn’t have any of that and actually only had one kind of gochujang, since then I heard to go to a store up near Henderson & High for Korean stuff).  For those who don’t know gochujang is made by adding powdered red chili peppers and glutinous rice powder to soybean paste, and aging this paste.  Apparently until somewhat recently every family in Korea would make their own and the stuff is used on almost as many things as kimchi is over there.  The gochujang has a complex, fermented flavor loaded with umami.  Some describe it as miso crossed with hot sauce.  The stuff is good whatever you call it.

Any back to the meal, the meal went as follows, made some quick pickled carrots with a rice vinegar, sugar and soy mixture with matchstick sized carrots, put on a plate macho, cilantro and the bean sprouts in nice piles for people to help themselves, made sticky rice using italian short grain rice, tossed with a little sugar, soy and rice wine vinegar.  I found a few flour tortilla, taco sized, in the fridge (not homemade ones, those wouldn’t have lasted) and also warmed those up after grilling up real quick the boolgogi.  The meal turned out great, but the tacos really shined.  The combination in one bite of the meat, cilantro, kimchi, bean sprouts, pickled carrots and the amazing gochujang in a soft warm tortilla is quite amazing – I can see why this is the rage in L.A. and other places.

I will be doing this again soon, but next time I will actually plan to serve tacos.  America is clichély a melting pot, but it truly is and things like Korean tacos are a great reminder of how good quirky fusions of cultures and cuisines can be.

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