Gene Simmons has nothing on a cow. When I was a wee aspiring rocker, rumor had it that KISS's bass player had a cow tongue surgically implanted. As an adult aware of physiology, I no longer believe a cow tongue could fit and operate properly in a human mouth.
The cow tongue is a huge organ. The one I bought from Bob's Meats in Columbia City weighed about 4 and a half pounds. It sat in my freezer for several months before I thawed it. Even that took the better part of an afternoon. Like a man losing his enthusiasm, the heavy club of flesh gradually softened up. And, as a man often does, I accomplished this in a cold water bath.
After thawing, it lay in the fridge until I had an evening free. In the mean time, I consulted the Larousse Gastronomique. In typical form, it suggested 12 hours of soaking, a careful peeling, and another 24 hours of resting. All this is to prepare it for four-and-a-half hours of braising. My mom's hip surgery didn't take this long.
Since this was a work night, I needed to try something creative and brief. Grilling was out. I don't have a microwave. I had read somewhere about engine block cuisine; wrapping meat in foil, wedging it against your engine, and driving around until it's done. But I didn't have anywhere to go.
Luckily, this still left my favorite piece of cookware. The 5 quart Duromatic Saucepan Pressure Cooker by Kuhn Rikon has proven invaluable time and again. Dry beans soak and cook in less than a half an hour. Beets and artichokes are ready in no time. Huge cuts of meat bow before me in tender supplication. And what is a cow tongue but just a tongue-shaped beef roast?
I rinsed the bloody beast in the sink, unfurled it into the pressure cooker, and bathed it in salt water, 3 bay leaves, green onions, and a dozen or so peppercorns. The salt water, I reasoned, would keep the meat tender while boiling. I brought the water to a boil and slid the lid into place. The tongue would be ready in less than an hour.
As I waited, the warm smell of well-seasoned beef spread through my apartment. I salivated with anticipation. My only concern was the strong scent of bay leaves. I didn't want beef tasting like a floral hedge. However, I concluded that strong flavors would only reside in the skin, which I'm intending to peel off anyways.
After 55 minutes has elapsed, I remove the saucepan from the burner and scan my brain, trying to remember the French word for "hunt". My parents recommended French hunter's sauce as a suitable accompaniment to beef tongue. Just as the pressure valve on the cooker hissed shut, I stumbled upon Chasseur in the LG.
Much like the Cacciatore, Chasseur developed as a sauce in connection with the mighty pursuits of the hunter. On his way home, after bagging some wild grouse or some such thing, he would pick some wild mushrooms on the way. Maybe he also gleaned a few tomatoes from some rich baron's acres, some white wine from the local vineyard, and a few other choice delectables. We can only hope he's as skilled at identifying wild mushrooms as he is at picking off the local wildlife. Chasseur is not intended to induce liver failure.
Back to the tongue. With great anticipation, I removed the lid and peered within. I'll be damned if it hadn't swollen even bigger. The tongue was coiled in repose like a fetus. As I cautiously removed it from the pot, as a surgeon might, a large section of skin sloughed off.
I was quite impressed at how easily tongue surrendered its skin, without losing much meat in the process. I could have rubbed it off with a butter knife. The tongue now resembled an odd-shaped roast. I sliced off the tip and delicately laid it on my own tongue. Its fragile lattice of flesh and fat melted like a beefy snowflake. It was one of the most tender and flavorful piece of beef I've ever eaten. Irony abound. I suppose it was the high fat content.
The Chasseur sauce was a fitting compliment. I sautéed some thin sliced mushrooms and shallots in butter, added some white wine and reduced. After a few minutes, I added chicken stock and tomato sauce and reduced further. Beurre manie, which is flour and butter globbed together, thickened the sauce for a few minutes. This creamed out the texture and painted it a lovely shade of pale red. Finished with another dot of butter and some parsley.
The slippery infusion of fat upon fat, when the butter met the ox tongue, which met mine, was like a warm blanket and a snuggle bear for the palate. I cleaned up the sauce with French bread and, for a few minutes, no other food in the world mattered.
I had overcome my fear of preparing tongue. For all its girth and swagger, the tongue sung a tender ballad. Maybe under all that makeup, Gene's not so tough either.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Gettin' Crabby at the Ballard Seafood Festival
No blood-thirsty Vikings pillaged the Ballard Seafood festival. But I valiantly, and artfully, skirted lumbering hoards of urban serfs bearing whiny children in tow. And it was hot. The opaque heat seared the blue sky gray. Bright hot, cranial-throbbing hot.
I've lived in the deep tropics. The kind of place that hits you with the smell of exotic molds, frying coconut oil, and food rubbish braising in heaps in the gutter. So with some authority, I can claim that when it's hot in Seattle, it feels hotter than anywhere on earth. Probably because it's Seattle.
So I developed a strategy of retreat and eat. Along the sunny Market Street corridor of food vendors, make a purchase, and scurry over to the shady sidewalk to eat. Right at the corner, I found Anita's Crepes. Young women poured the crepe batter onto a round griddle top, black and infernally hot like a wheel on Satan's chariot. How I thanked my lucky stars that, within minutes, I would be back in the shade. How did these women do it?
I quickly discovered, in my very hands, my very own smoked salmon crepe, with spinich and tzatziki sauce, a one-dish food orgy. Within the crepe's warm embrace, the sauce and the salmon got down and dirty. The dill in the tzatziki rested comfortably up front. The spinach hid in the background, where it belonged. Damn, this was good.
The crab cakes, from "Crab Cakes and Seafood Specialties" let me down. They were starchy, like a faintly fishy falafel, with middling flecks of crab meat. In their defense, my last crab cake was arguably the best America has to offer. Faidley's Seafood has been crafting crab cakes in Baltimore's Lexington Market since 1886. Faidley's crab cakes are pillows of near-perfection; lump blue crab meat gracefully held together by a light binder. Big as a baseball, no breading or heavy filler stands between the customer and the crab. Next to these, all others are judged unworthy. Most anyways.
After this, I needed a beer in a shady anonymous bar. After all, I came here to experience what Ballard does best.
I've lived in the deep tropics. The kind of place that hits you with the smell of exotic molds, frying coconut oil, and food rubbish braising in heaps in the gutter. So with some authority, I can claim that when it's hot in Seattle, it feels hotter than anywhere on earth. Probably because it's Seattle.
So I developed a strategy of retreat and eat. Along the sunny Market Street corridor of food vendors, make a purchase, and scurry over to the shady sidewalk to eat. Right at the corner, I found Anita's Crepes. Young women poured the crepe batter onto a round griddle top, black and infernally hot like a wheel on Satan's chariot. How I thanked my lucky stars that, within minutes, I would be back in the shade. How did these women do it?
I quickly discovered, in my very hands, my very own smoked salmon crepe, with spinich and tzatziki sauce, a one-dish food orgy. Within the crepe's warm embrace, the sauce and the salmon got down and dirty. The dill in the tzatziki rested comfortably up front. The spinach hid in the background, where it belonged. Damn, this was good.
The crab cakes, from "Crab Cakes and Seafood Specialties" let me down. They were starchy, like a faintly fishy falafel, with middling flecks of crab meat. In their defense, my last crab cake was arguably the best America has to offer. Faidley's Seafood has been crafting crab cakes in Baltimore's Lexington Market since 1886. Faidley's crab cakes are pillows of near-perfection; lump blue crab meat gracefully held together by a light binder. Big as a baseball, no breading or heavy filler stands between the customer and the crab. Next to these, all others are judged unworthy. Most anyways.
After this, I needed a beer in a shady anonymous bar. After all, I came here to experience what Ballard does best.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Aw Shucks!!!
Oysters Rockefeller are definitely off the menu. They're outrageously labor-intensive, hard on the heart (what, with all that butter) and I damned nearly took my hand off preparing them.
In April, I offered my culinary talents, such as they are, to the Graham Hill Elementary School auction. For the silent auction, I submitted a New Orleans Seafood Dinner for eight. This included four courses and wine. After the auction, the woman who bought the dinner and I got to talking. We agreed on four courses for ten, no wine included.
The centerpiece of the meal, if not the main course, was to be Oysters Rockefeller. The name conjures the roaring twenties in the big easy. A bejeweled flapper in a low-cut green velvet dress, a cultured pearl necklace, sipping champagne and contemplating half-shells atop platters of glimmering rock salt. How could you go wrong?
I first tested them at my apartment for my girlfriend and I. We started with 12 medium-sized oysters from Uwajimaya. After scrubbing them clean of sand and marine detritus, I commenced with the shucking.
Even when oysters open up easily, shucking is a messy job. It the end, I have one sopping wet dish towel littered with shell fragments, juice, and snotty oyster tissue And I did it with my bare hands, leaving a few minor nicks on my palms, like salty paper cuts.
After returning to the half-shell, they each earn a dollop of green herb-butter mixture and are tucked onto a bed of rock salt. Then, it's nighty night into a 500 degree oven for 15 minutes until the herbs brown a bit.
The herb-butter mixture is the trade secrets of several New Orleans establishments including Antoine's where the dish was conceived back in 1899. Variations of the recipe abound. Most call for spinach. Antoine's, otherwise mum about their recipe, uses no spinach. Parsley, celery, watercress, sorrel, and arugula are often used in combination, along with several dried herbs. Cayenne or Tabasco deliver a nice kick, but can be omitted. Some use salted butter, others sweet. Breadcrumbs, capers, anchovies, and Worcestershire sauce are all variables. What remains consistent is the use of an anise-flavored liquor, usually Pernot.
I'm fairly satisfied with my blend which I tested before dressing the oysters with it. The spicy greens, anise seed, and Pernot ring with a flavorful cacophony, like jungle birds in an argument. But the salt butter seemed to coax a bitter undertone from the herbs which burned the back of my throat. Would this persist after cooking, or would it redeem itself?
At my first taste as they left the oven, a savory revelation occurred: the salt was perfectly balanced. It shone in rays of green decadence. The salted butter and herbs fused perfectly, and the natural salinity of the oyster had been tempered by the cooking. This created a milder meaty vehicle for the audacious sauce it swam in. I couldn't have asked for a better dish.
Two months later, preparing a practice dinner for my family and friends, I wasn't sure it was worth it. With 45 minutes left on the clock, a salad half made, Creole court bullion unattended on the stove, I had a long way to go.
Two paper grocery bags were each packed full of the largest oysters I had ever wrestled with, had ever seen. They were South Pacific man eaters that divers get their leg stuck in while harvesting pearls. Sand, grit, and seaweed coated each of them. After scrubbing a dozen of them passably clean, I needed a rest.
By the time I finished, I was salty, wet, exhausted, and ready to feed them to the gulls. Shucking them only discouraged me further. I had assumed that larger oysters would be easier to open. Unfortunately, their beefy abductor muscles held closed for dear life. It was like trying to pry open a bear trap with a butter knife.
I had always opened oysters from the back hinge and worked my way forward. My Dad instructed me to first chip the edge midway up the shell near the abductor. Then I could work the knife around the top and then pry them open from the hinge. This worked slightly better. But still, bits of shell flew around the kitchen, as if I was sandblasting a coral reef. Stinky Clamato-like water saturated two more hand towels. In my impatience, I opened some of the stubborn ones with a sheet rock knife. This had my mother more than a little concerned.
It was inevitable. Haste and fatigue had caught up with me. The oyster knife slipped from the shell and found its way deep into my left hand, just above the thumb. I peered into the hole and, for a moment, it was only a hole. It reminded me of a baby's mouth, open in stunned surprise, just before he starts to cry. But my hand didn't cry, it just started to bleed.
I ran to the bathroom and thrust my hand into the running sink, watching the blood pulse and tint the water. It was time to delegate the rest of the dinner. I had shucked my last oyster for the night.
Somehow, all the oysters made it in the oven, and out. The salad completed, the fish poached in a red Creole sauce, the table set, the wine poured, the guests served. And somehow, as I write these words, I remember that first time I made them in my apartment. The delicately chewy texture. Sopping up the herb-infused butter with French bread. I would love to share THAT Oysters Rockefeller, THAT experience, with the ten people I'll be cooking for. So maybe they're back on the menu. That's a big maybe, mind you. And not without gloves.
In April, I offered my culinary talents, such as they are, to the Graham Hill Elementary School auction. For the silent auction, I submitted a New Orleans Seafood Dinner for eight. This included four courses and wine. After the auction, the woman who bought the dinner and I got to talking. We agreed on four courses for ten, no wine included.
The centerpiece of the meal, if not the main course, was to be Oysters Rockefeller. The name conjures the roaring twenties in the big easy. A bejeweled flapper in a low-cut green velvet dress, a cultured pearl necklace, sipping champagne and contemplating half-shells atop platters of glimmering rock salt. How could you go wrong?
I first tested them at my apartment for my girlfriend and I. We started with 12 medium-sized oysters from Uwajimaya. After scrubbing them clean of sand and marine detritus, I commenced with the shucking.
Even when oysters open up easily, shucking is a messy job. It the end, I have one sopping wet dish towel littered with shell fragments, juice, and snotty oyster tissue And I did it with my bare hands, leaving a few minor nicks on my palms, like salty paper cuts.
After returning to the half-shell, they each earn a dollop of green herb-butter mixture and are tucked onto a bed of rock salt. Then, it's nighty night into a 500 degree oven for 15 minutes until the herbs brown a bit.
The herb-butter mixture is the trade secrets of several New Orleans establishments including Antoine's where the dish was conceived back in 1899. Variations of the recipe abound. Most call for spinach. Antoine's, otherwise mum about their recipe, uses no spinach. Parsley, celery, watercress, sorrel, and arugula are often used in combination, along with several dried herbs. Cayenne or Tabasco deliver a nice kick, but can be omitted. Some use salted butter, others sweet. Breadcrumbs, capers, anchovies, and Worcestershire sauce are all variables. What remains consistent is the use of an anise-flavored liquor, usually Pernot.
I'm fairly satisfied with my blend which I tested before dressing the oysters with it. The spicy greens, anise seed, and Pernot ring with a flavorful cacophony, like jungle birds in an argument. But the salt butter seemed to coax a bitter undertone from the herbs which burned the back of my throat. Would this persist after cooking, or would it redeem itself?
At my first taste as they left the oven, a savory revelation occurred: the salt was perfectly balanced. It shone in rays of green decadence. The salted butter and herbs fused perfectly, and the natural salinity of the oyster had been tempered by the cooking. This created a milder meaty vehicle for the audacious sauce it swam in. I couldn't have asked for a better dish.
Two months later, preparing a practice dinner for my family and friends, I wasn't sure it was worth it. With 45 minutes left on the clock, a salad half made, Creole court bullion unattended on the stove, I had a long way to go.
Two paper grocery bags were each packed full of the largest oysters I had ever wrestled with, had ever seen. They were South Pacific man eaters that divers get their leg stuck in while harvesting pearls. Sand, grit, and seaweed coated each of them. After scrubbing a dozen of them passably clean, I needed a rest.
By the time I finished, I was salty, wet, exhausted, and ready to feed them to the gulls. Shucking them only discouraged me further. I had assumed that larger oysters would be easier to open. Unfortunately, their beefy abductor muscles held closed for dear life. It was like trying to pry open a bear trap with a butter knife.
I had always opened oysters from the back hinge and worked my way forward. My Dad instructed me to first chip the edge midway up the shell near the abductor. Then I could work the knife around the top and then pry them open from the hinge. This worked slightly better. But still, bits of shell flew around the kitchen, as if I was sandblasting a coral reef. Stinky Clamato-like water saturated two more hand towels. In my impatience, I opened some of the stubborn ones with a sheet rock knife. This had my mother more than a little concerned.
It was inevitable. Haste and fatigue had caught up with me. The oyster knife slipped from the shell and found its way deep into my left hand, just above the thumb. I peered into the hole and, for a moment, it was only a hole. It reminded me of a baby's mouth, open in stunned surprise, just before he starts to cry. But my hand didn't cry, it just started to bleed.
I ran to the bathroom and thrust my hand into the running sink, watching the blood pulse and tint the water. It was time to delegate the rest of the dinner. I had shucked my last oyster for the night.
Somehow, all the oysters made it in the oven, and out. The salad completed, the fish poached in a red Creole sauce, the table set, the wine poured, the guests served. And somehow, as I write these words, I remember that first time I made them in my apartment. The delicately chewy texture. Sopping up the herb-infused butter with French bread. I would love to share THAT Oysters Rockefeller, THAT experience, with the ten people I'll be cooking for. So maybe they're back on the menu. That's a big maybe, mind you. And not without gloves.
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