Before we begin, please keep the following things in mind:

• I tend to cut as few corners as possible, which makes my food tend to NOT be a quick meal to prepare.
• I’m describing my personal style of burrito, and I don’t at all claim that these are authentic Mexican dishes, or that this is the only way burritos can be done.
• For each principal I’ll start with my best-case scenario and then describe some ideas for alternatives if you want to do something simpler.

Burrito Principal #1: Dry meat = Dry Burrito
In my view the meat is the flavor foundation of a good burrito. It’s the core in a literal sense as well because of the way I wrap them. This means that it HAS to be a meat with a LOT of flavor, and it needs to be juicy. Because of this, I never use ground beef in a burrito. If that’s my only option, I’d rather not have meat in it. Note that this doesn’t apply to tacos, that’s a different matter entirely. Grilled chicken works well, as does grilled steak, however I’ve lately fallen in love with pork shoulder. Here’s how I like to fix it:

Get a pork shoulder roast that is around 1 to 2 inches thick and large enough for however many burritos you want to make. Preferably one that has never been frozen. Defrost it if it’s frozen (hopefully it isn’t!), and then sear it in a pan. Remember that the searing step is NOT about “locking in juices” it’s about flavor. Color == flavor, so sear on HIGH heat with an oil with a high smoke point like canola or peanut, and don’t stop until there is nice caramel color on all sides. Get a stock pot and add half a gallon of chicken stock, and half a gallon of apple juice and bring to boil. Make sure to use good quality apple juice. Think locally grown stuff that is cloudy, not thin like water.

While the liquid heats you can go ahead and add the seasonings. Add a quarter of a cup of whole pepper corns (trust me on this one, believe it or not  it does not make the meat spicy), 6 allspice berries, two or three bay leaves, a tablespoon of lime juice, a large quartered onion (don’t substitute powder), four whole peeled crushed garlic cloves (don’t substitute powder), a quarter cup of packed brown sugar, a tablespoon of honey, and if you like a kick then add a bit of cayenne or red pepper flake.

Once the liquid is at a rolling boil put the roast in the pot and let it cook until it’s falling apart. I honestly don’t know how long this takes, but I’d check it every half hour. When the connective tissue really gives up and it’s falling apart, take the roast out, let it rest for 15 minutes (vital step!), then get a couple of forks and pull off any excess fat and then shred it all up. Taste it at this point. The meat may need to be salted depending on what chicken stock you used. If it needs salt then just sprinkle some over the top of the shredded meat and stir it in.

Lastly, to prevent the shredded meat from drying out, strain the solids out of the liquid from the boil, put the shredded meat in a container, and pour a good amount of the liquid into the meat. Keep it warm somewhere until ready to assemble your burritos.

If you don’t want to boil the meat, you can use the same recipe and cook it in a crock pot instead. You can also substitute chicken or steak in the boil for the pork, but they don’t shred as well so you might want to thin slice instead. If you don’t want to go through all that complication you can use whatever you like but make sure your substitute has FLAVOR! For example, get some Mexican chorizo and fry it up. Full of flavor, and still fast and easy!

Burrito Principal #2: The beans need texture
Beans are not just filler! It’s common to just open a can of re-fried beans and slap some on your tortilla, but you’ll have none of that on a Big-O burrito. I like the insides of my burritos to be a series of contrasting textures, but not to the point of having something be complete mush. To achieve this I like to start from dried beans, either pinto or black.

How much you should use varies entirely on the amount of burritos you need to make, but I like to have extra if you’re going to do the work of making dried beans anyway. Soak your beans overnight, but not longer than 12 hours. Most people use water, but that’s a missed opportunity to infuse more flavor! I often use apple juice for the soak, but if the meat was prepared with apple juice then sometimes I’ll go for a contrast and use vegetable stock. The beans will roughly double in size, so make sure that there’s enough liquid in there to account for that. You want them to stay submerged.

When they’re good and soaked, boil them. Lots of people say that you need to replace the liquid after the soak to avoid gas from the beans. Personally, I don’t really believe that, but even if it’s true I don’t feel the loss of flavor from that is worth it, so I just boil it in the liquid from the soak. To the liquid along with the beans add a couple of bay leaves, a quartered large onion, some cumin, some paprika, some salt and some pepper. Optionally you can add a sprig of a fresh herb, I suggest either Tarragon or Rosemary. These will probably boil for a few hours, until they are soft enough to eat and easy to squish, but still firm enough to maintain their shape when stirred around.

I realize that “some cumin” isn’t exactly a unit of measurement, but the quantity will vary depending on how many beans you’re making. I trust your judgment

Once the beans are cooked, remove the bay leaves and the herb stem, dig out any remaining large onion chunks and either discard them or cut them up so they will mix in. The beans can be used just like this, or if you want to get a more re-fried-like experience, then mash up a portion of them with a bit of milk, and mix the remaining solid ones into it.

If you don’t want to work from dry beans and you absolutely MUST use beans from a can, I suggest using cans of whole beans and following my advice from above to mash a portion of them with some milk and mix the rest into it, then adding similar spices as I mentioned above.

Burrito Principal #3: Rice needs flavor
Tragically, rice is often the most neglected portion of Mexican dishes when Americans try to cook them. All too often it’s either just plain white rice with very little flavor, or it’s so-called “Spanish Rice” which basically means filled with tomato sauce. Rice is a basic and simple grain, and I like to keep it that way, but it’s a great system for flavor delivery if you don’t miss the opportunity.

I prefer Jasmine rice. Cook it to package directions, but instead of water use chicken stock and a tablespoon of butter. After it’s cooked and fluffed with a fork, add some fresh chopped cilantro, and drizzle in some lime juice, then mix it up thoroughly but without turning it into paste. Done.

Burrito Principal #4: Assembly Required
At this point, with the addition of some shredded cheese, we have our insides ready to go so it’s time to assemble and fry! Yes, that’s right, I didn’t say anything about salsa or sour cream. Don’t worry, that comes later.

Before we start, I want to mention that the cheese is another great way to add flavor. A bag of shredded mozzarella will work fine, but if you’re feeling saucy, you can add a lot to the dish by finding some smoked mozzarella, or one of the various Mexican cheeses instead.

Now, please buy large burrito sized tortillas, it will make your life much easier. We are going to grill these on high heat and if your tortilla is too small the juices will leak out more and likely burn before the burrito is finished cooking. Preheat them just enough to loosen them up so they are easy to bend. You can just put each in a hot pan for a few seconds, or put the whole bunch, wrapped in foil, in a 200F oven for a few minutes. Remember not to actually cook them. That will harden them which will make it impossible to roll.

By far, the most common mistake when rolling a burrito is putting all the innards directly into the middle of the tortilla. You’ll find it very hard to get a good seal that way. As shown in the illustration below, put them off-center toward you. Next you fold the sides in along the dotted lines, then roll starting from the bottom up. If the edges start to flay outward as you roll, just tuck them in under the girth of the roll. If you are not getting a good closed burrito then you probably put too much filling in.

For assembly, lay out the tortilla then cover most of it with the shredded cheese. The cheese will end up filling all the cracks with goopy goodness so don’t be stingy. Next, sprinkle around some fresh chopped cilantro and drizzle some lime juice, then put down the rice, then the beans, then the meat. Add extra meat juice if it looks too dry, but don’t sog the tortilla.

Pretty much any hot pan will work for grilling burritos except Teflon (Teflon and high-heat don’t mix well, Google it) but I greatly prefer cast iron for this particular job, as the heat dispersion is a great asset when trying to get the right crispy texture. I use two cast iron skillets, one larger than the other, something like a 15″ and a 12″. Lightly oil the larger one with peanut or canola, and lightly oil the BOTTOM of the smaller one then crank up the heat on both of them.

Put your newly assembled burrito in the large pan with the seam down, then place the smaller pan on top of it. This will grill it from both sides at once. The smaller pan will always be less hot that the one on the bottom, so after a bit flip the burrito. How long this takes will depend on how hot the pans are, but shouldn’t take more than a minute or two on each side. You want to take it off when the top and bottom are a nice golden brown color.

If you don’t have cast iron to do this with, then any non-Teflon pan will work, just be careful not to burn it, and you’ll need to do a lot more flipping since you’ll be cooking only one side at a time.

Burrito Principal #5: Don’t fear the toppings
At this point you may be wondering where the salsa and sour cream are. My burrito philosophy is that you don’t want anything inside a grilled burrito that you don’t want cooked. Makes sense, right? Sour cream in particular loses it’s texture completely when heated, and it doesn’t do good things for most salsa either. Besides, if you keep them cold then the temperature provides a nice contrast to the hot burrito. Plate the burrito, cover with fresh salsa, dollop on some sour cream, and sprinkle on some fresh cilantro, and drizzle with lime juice. Yum.

After you have some fun with this kind of burrito, try making grilled fajitas, or a breakfast burrito with steak egg and potato, or even grilled enchiladas. The sky’s the limit!

So when I saw my mother pulling two still half-frozen pot roasts (about 1.5 lbs each) out of their hidden thawing spot around 3pm this past Saturday, I panicked for a moment.  My heart raced.  Surely she didn’t intend those for a slow cook!  We’d be eating at 9pm (not my favorite meal time)!  I quickly rescued the poor cuts of meat from their hiding spots and trimmed the excess fat (confirming two things in the process–first that my mother has not changed her habits with regards to sharpening knives since my last visit, requiring that I spend time tending to that task before I could actually trim the fat; and second that the meat was indeed partially frozen still).  The panic set in just a touch deeper.

I raided the spice cabinet and the panic went from ‘hey, this could be bad’ to ‘oh no, maybe eating out is easier’.  I talked myself down, grousing at my mother for the sad state of the spices selection (”Who doesn’t keep BASIL?”, I ask blithely; her response floors me, “I don’t really like basil”.  WHOA!).    I eventually wind up with my selection–a Cajun spice rub (I don’t generally care for premixed rubs, but this one is from a company I trust–and the reason it was there is because I had purchased it and sent it there in the not too distant past), cumin, and some garlic powder.   I set these aside for later in the process, since I plan to first take care of the little problem of half-frozen meat and about an hour and a half till dinner time (now).

I raid the fridge.  I’m not going to thaw meat in water when there is orange juice available.  I discover that there is also apple juice.  I put in about equal parts of these into what I’m guessing was a quart or maybe two quart pan (probably two quarts, but I didn’t check–it was enough liquid to cover the meat when I was done!).  This got heated to a roiling boil, along with two onions.  Mom’s spice cabinet didn’t include any whole fresh garlic,  but there was some minced garlic in a jar, so some of that went in as well…

Liquid heated, I placed the meat in a bowl, and poured it over…and the cooking process is started.  This also has the advantage of adding a lot of flavor to the meat.  Good flavors.  If I had done the same thing in water, the flavors would have been sucked out instead of being pushed in.  NOT what we want.

I take a break, go for a walk to clear my head and call Big-O (yes I did!).  We talk for a minute and he suggests boiling it.  As we talk, I realize he’s right, and decide to go this way.  Now normally I would cook veggies along with the meat, but I decide that in the interest of a swift meal, it’s better to just cook the meat alone.  What I lose in flavors I gain in speed.  Besides, most of the flavor is in the spices…

Speaking of which, when I get back to the kitchen I find that the spices I had set aside prior to my preparation have been put away!  Ack!  So I dig around again and find the random locations where they’ve been hidden, again grousing.    Spices recovered, I build a bowl full of rub.  I remove the meat from the liquid, find it nicely thawed (it’s now about 4:15–we aren’t going to be eating at 5, but close enough).  I rub the meat down and then sear each side in some oil.  It’s just standard vegetable oil (since that’s all that mom had…), but the cast iron dutch oven she had makes up for some of that.  Searing done, I pour the orange/apple juice concoction that I used for thawing the meat BACK over it and leave the heat on high.  VERY high.

I put the lid on, and away it goes.  45 minutes or an hour later it’s cooked fully, and reasonably tender (not yet falling off the bone, mind you, but it would have been soon).  At that point we had mashed potatoes, corn & other food.

Was it perfect?  No, but it was a dinner win instead of what COULD have been a complete disaster.  With just a bit more time it would have been a great base for chili or another bean-dish by shredding the meat.

Note that most of the liquid that I used ended up evaporating, which was fine–that just concentrated the flavor considerably, leaving a very tasty beginning that could have easily been used as the basis for a gravy, soup or other dish.

Moral of the story, the next time you find yourself in a hurry to cook a larger cut of meat, consider boiling it in something other than water…or better yet, learn to plan ahead!

(As a side note, my family has gotten into trouble several times because someone failed to plan ahead.  It is a well-documented fact that turkeys cook better when thawed–and thawing a turkey takes lots of time.  My family has proven this experimentally.)

I suppose that might sound narcissistic, but I promise that I’m not egotistical about my food. I’m proud of my creations, for sure, but the more I learn about food the more I feel like I’m just getting started. But, just like a musician tries to make every show better than the last, I’m in a constant pursuit of making better food.

This pursuit of excellence forms the basis of my personal “food philosophy” and drives everything I do where food is concerned. This is why I buy better ingredients, and more expensive brands. This is why I scour the internet looking for recipe ideas and video tutorials. This is why my Amazon wish list is filled with kitchen gadgets. This is why I was taking pictures of the meals I make long before I actually had a food blog.

Pondering about this topic has really opened my eyes to how much my personal food philosophy is at odds with the typical American kitchen. According to Mario Batali, in Italian cooking part of the base food philosophy is that they have a God given right to always have the absolute best of whatever is for sale at the market. This contrasts sharply with the American food philosophy which has nothing at all to do with the flavor of the food. It can be summed up in one word: Convenience.

I’ll give you an example. I recently bought a camp style dutch oven. The walls are nice and thick, and it’s designed in a way that makes it easy to put hot coals on the top and the bottom so that you can slow cook your food at an even temperature for hours. The dutch oven is the quintessential slow cooking tool and in my mind comes with images of rich stews, camp fires, and a time when cooking was an all day process.

When I got home I eagerly tore open the box and started the process of curing my new pot. When it was all set I took some time to read through the booklet that came with it. It was filled with dutch oven fun facts and other such nonsense that I could just look up on Wikipedia, so I skipped to the part that I really wanted to read, the recipes. Imagine my horror when I saw that nearly 2/3rds of the recipes in the book had the word “easy” in the title! It had such gems as “Easy Peach Cobbler” which literally had three steps: 1) pour in a few cans of peaches 2) pour on a box of yellow cake mix and 3) cook for an hour. Say WHAT?! That’s the kind of thing I would expect from a freaking Easy Bake Oven, not from the very icon of slow cooking.

This sad sad tale, is a great illustration of what I see all around me in American cooking. Value is placed on how fast a dish can be prepared, how little effort it takes on the part of the ‘cook’, and how cheap it can be purchased for. This is the reason behind the rise of fast food chains, as well as such monstrosities as “American Cheese”. Why is American cheese popular? Because it comes individually wrapped slices so that you don’t have to be bothered to use a knife. This was such as success that someone decided that peanut butter should be individually wrapped too. After all, who wants to dirty a knife, just to make a sandwich? And if you’re too lazy to open TWO WHOLE JARS for your lunch, you can buy your peanut butter and your jelly squished into a single jar. In the words of comedian Brian Regan “if you need to zap-fry your breakfast in three seconds, you might want to lighten up your schedule”.

So I invite you to take a few moments and think about your own personal food philosophy. Some people value being ‘green’ and organic. Others are Vegan, with all that entails. What is it that you value in your food? And is what you are regularly eating in line with what’s actually important to you?

You wouldn’t think that this would be a controversial statement, but then my wife sent me a link: http://www.fancyfastfood.com/ .  What is going on over there? Look, most of the food they are using to make the final dish is barely worth eating in the first place–how in the world can it be worth eating after you further mangle it? I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with you if you like KFC or other fast food restaurants, but let’s not pretend that it’s good food.  It’s not.  It’s barely worth calling food sometimes.  (As a note to you good people running the blog at fancy fast foods–nothing personal, after all your creations do take a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity.  I’m not trying to slam that.  I have a different goal.  All that said, I’m not attacking anyone personally.  This is just a rant about food after all, and my general peevishness in that regard.)

BAD FOOD IS NOT WORTH EATING!!

So often in this country we sacrifice quality in our food for convenience.  Restaurants try to cut costs in any way they can-often by hiring minimally competent ‘cooks’ who only know how to assemble a list of heated items onto a plate in reasonably presentable fashion–and that’s not even at the fast ‘food’ places where you won’t even get a plate!  There the individuals who prepare your ‘food’ are not even worth the title ‘cook’.  Sure they take the frozen meat/fries or whatever and stick it in the fryer, or maybe they warm the so-called burgers before assembling the sandwich you are served, but this is not true cooking.

In the same fashion, cooking at home is not about opening cans bought at the store, putting frozen ingredients in the microwave and then putting all that into a pot and heating it for a minute according to the directions on a package!  This is not cooking.  My seven year old can do that and better (he cooks his own eggs without supervision–and we have to be careful because he wants to do more and more and tends to make a mess)!  Cooking is NOT simply about heating up a bunch of stuff and putting on a plate.

I’ll focus on a specific example of bad food that’s really annoyed me recently: hamburgers.  I love a good burger.  I’ll admit it.  That said, I haven’t had one recently.   I had a decent one at my brother-in-law’s retirement party (army, 24 years), but they were doing them in bulk over the grill and so there was a limit on how good they could be!  The meat was good, but they were a touch dry.  Which is what I want to rant about.  The POINT of hamburger is to take what would otherwise be tough meat and grind it up so that it will be tender (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beef).  Grinding or mincing a tough cut does the rather difficult work of chewing before the meat is cooked…making it easier to chew again.  However if you pack it tightly and then dry it out you’ve essentially defeated the ENTIRE purpose of having a ground beef.  You might as well slap a whole steak on that bun!  Yippee!

Yes you do need to cook it enough to avoid concerns about food-born illnesses, especially if you don’t have a butcher that you know well and who will grind it fresh, but over cooking it is just as bad!  That’s what a thermometer is for people!

I also have decided that pre-formed patties are part of the problem.  People pull them out of the freezer the put them straight on the grill.  The meat has NO spices, no extra glue to hold it together, no flavorings, then it goes from FROZEN to being heated, so by the time the center is cooked the outside is BLACKENED and torn from sticking to the grill (the moisture and low temperature in the meat acts just like sticking your tongue to a flagpole on a cold winter day–see this movie if you don’t know what I’m talking about:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/ ).  In the end you have an essentially flavorless (preformed patties use the absolute dregs for grinding) burger that has been tortured, blackened and has no redeeming qualities.  I’m going to bet MONEY that you’ll then take that and put it on a bun that came from a package of eight buns that cost a total of seventy or eighty cents and slather it with the CHEAPEST condiments you were able to find and then try to tell me you love grilling.  NO! This is BAD food! It isn’t worth eating.  By the way, aside from being charred and blackened, this is EXACTLY what 99% of all fast food restaurants do–cheap meat followed with CHEAP buns and cheap, cheap toppings.  No thank you!

How to make a good burger

First please start with good ground meat.  That doesn’t mean you have to buy 96% lean whatever, and in fact, if you do, you are likely to end up with a very dry burger–lean meats cook more quickly, and you must be careful with extremely lean ground beef.  Next don’t just form patties.  Mix in some flavor.  Some spices, maybe some dices onion, garlic and similar stuff–whatever makes you happiest–and then possibly some filler (if you use filler, use some egg too) to make it go a touch further.  Not that using filler will make your burgers more like a meat loaf than a hamburger, but that’s okay.  The goal is tender & juicy meat with lots of flavor that you can then put on a bun.  It has to hold its shape well, which means that it can’t have too much liquid in it.  That means what ever flavor you add needs to be in the form of DRY herbs and spices (not dried, but dry) for the most part, rather than things like barbecue sauce, tabasco, or liquid smoke.  That’s stuff you would probably reserve for a meat loaf.

Second, once you have flavorized your meat, form patties.  Not huge thick things, but flat and reasonably round ones.    I mean come on, this is NOT rocket science people.  Make it too thick and it takes too long to cook in the middle and you’ll have a black burger on the inside while it’s nearly raw on the outside.  Too thin, and it’ll dry out almost immediately.  No, I’m not going to tell you how thick or how big around.  Do your own research on that.  PART OF THE PROBLEM WITH MOST RECIPES TODAY IS THAT THEY DON’T REQUIRE ANY THOUGHT OR EFFORT!  These so-called recipes that call for “1 medium onion” drive me insane.  Well that’s nice to know, anonymous recipe writer, but there is a LOT of variation in expected onion size, so what I think is a medium-sized onion is PROBABLY a LOT bigger than what SOME people would select as a medium-sized onion.  Twit.   Give me a real measurement: Onion, diced, 300 grams.  That’s what I want to see IN THE INGREDIENT LIST.  WHY?  BECAUSE IT PREVENTS BAD FOOD!

BAD FOOD IS THE RESULT OF BAD RECIPES!  BAD RECIPES ARE WRITTEN BECAUSE WE ARE CONDITIONED TO ACCEPT BAD FOOD!!!

I never finished telling how to make a good burger–last point of advice–use a thermometer, cook one burger on your grill at a medium-high temperature and see how long it takes to cook it through turning it ONCE about half-way through.  Practice this a few times.  Eventually you’ll get to the point where you can set a timer after you get all the burgers on, flip them when it goes off, and then set it again, and take them off the grill when it goes off again, confident that they’ll be perfect.   Charcoal grills will need a LOT more practice until you are much more comfortable with your temperatures are (hint, get a grill thermometer too)!

Back to the recipes!  In our culture we accept bad recipes that include a lot of imprecise measurements (a bag of this weighing an unspecified amount, an can of that of an uncertain volume, etc) and that use a lot of BAD ingredients (cream of chicken soup to make chicken enchiladas is my current annoyance–yes they taste fine, but while convenient it is NOT a recipe in the traditional sense–it results in BAD food).  If you find a recipe that doesn’t tell you how much you need of an item in precise terms–do yourself a favor and skip it.  If a recipe relies heavily on prepared stuff like cream of *whatever* soup, skip it.  Sure you might get a tasty meal, but then again you might not.  This is especially true of baked goods.  If you are baking and you have a recipe that calls for 3 cups of flour, either figure out how to convert that to a weight measurement, or skip it.  You are safer skipping it.  The sad thing is that for the MAJORITY of baking recipes you are going to end up with nothing to cook.  Why?  Because we don’t use weights in American cooking, even though we should.  But this leads to BAD food.

How did we get here?  Laziness.  We wanted our food faster and easier.  We didn’t want to spend all day on cooking a meal.  We didn’t want to think about dinner right after lunch, let alone the night before.  But truly great food from fresh ingredients requires that one magical ingredient that you cannot buy: time.  There are ways to speed things up, and as shown on Iron Chef in its various formats, you CAN do a lot in an hour, but if talk to those chefs, they’ll tell you that there are just some things that cannot be done in an hour, even with mystical machines like blast chillers and pressure cookers.  If you want truly GREAT baked beans, you are going to have to spend some time on it.  Don’t expect it to happen in 20 minutes or less–and don’t expect it to come from a can.

If you want great pasta sure you can buy it, but that’s going to be expensive.  Or you can invest some time and learn how to make it.  It’s labor intensive, true, but even though I’m just learning I already see that it’s cheaper and and better–and I can get flavors that I choose, which is something that would cost a LOT of money at a store.

So you can keep on eating bad food, working from BAD recipes, and wasting your time and money of worthless junk, or you can join me in standing up and saying “No more BAD food, no more BAD recipes, I want stuff that is worth eating!”.

This is good and all, but a lot of people don’t realize just how easy it is to make a quick sauce yourself! There are an endless number of recipes you can adapt it to, and it can easily turn into one of your most valuable tricks.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of milk
• 1 tablespoon of flour
• 1 tablespoon of butter (optional, see below)

And that’s it! Simple huh?

Method:

You want to use cold milk, and this is very important. Otherwise the flour will cook in lumps that are basically mini-dumplings and no amount of whisking will get them out. Just put the milk in a bowl with the flour and whisk together, then add to your dish. That’s it. You don’t necessarily need to add butter to it, but you’ll want some kind of fat to help with the texture. If you’ve already got bacon or some other kind of fat in the dish that you can just rely on that instead. Then cook on a medium heat till it’s the thickness that you want.

Now, keep in mind that this is a base, meaning that it’s not going to taste all that great on it’s own, the idea here is that you add things to it depending on your dish to get the flavor you want. Here’s some examples:

• Add two or three tablespoons of salted butter and you’ve got an awesome butter sauce.
• Add a half cup of shredded cheese and you’ve got a cheese sauce you can pour on brocolli or nachos.
• Make the cheese sauce and double it, add elbows and you’ve got mac ‘n cheese.
• Add it to rice to make a creamy rice side dish.
• Add it to sauted mushrooms and onions and pour it over a steak.
• Add cheese and mashed potatoes and you’ll get a cheesy potato soup.
• Double it and add sour cream, sauted mushrooms and onions, and cooked ground beef and you’ve got stroganoff.
• Double it and pour it in a skillet that you’ve just cooked ground sausage in and you’ve got sausage gravy.

This sauce is basically what the French would call a bechamel sauce, though my methods listed above are slightly different than how a traditional bechamel would be cooked.

Now, go experiment with it!

I made Grilled breakfast burritos with scrambled cilantro eggs, sauted onions and garlic, leftover steak from father’s day, and smoked horseradish cheese. For the record, there was nothing experimental about this, it’s just something that I’ve wanted to make for a long time.

I have two cast iron pans, one a 12 inch and one a 15 inch. Ever since I’ve bought them I’ve wanted to try grilling burritos with them, I just haven’t gotten around to it till now. I’m going to detail it below in what I call “recipe style”. It’s not really a recipe, because that implies instructions, and I wouldn’t insult your culinary intelligence like that. I’m just recapping what I did.

Ingredients:

• Tortillas, burrito sized
• All my leftover steak (half a pound or so) thinly sliced
• Half a large red onion, thin sliced longways
• Four cloves of garlic, hand pressed and rough cut
• 5 eggs
• A half cup or so of chopped cilantro, fresh from our garden
• Shredded smoked horseradish cheese
• Dashes of salt, pepper, lime, butter, milk and canola in strategic places
• A couple of glops of salsa and sour creme

Methods:

• First sauted the steak, onion, and garlic into a hot 12 inch skillet
• Scrambled the eggs with gentle heat with a bit of milk, butter and cilantro
• Heated up my large cast iron skillet and applied thin layer of canola, and warmed (NOT cooked) the tortillas on it
• Stuffed and rolled the burritos in this order: shredded cheese, then eggs, then the saute, sprinkling of lime, dash of cilantro
• Placed the burrito in the large pan, crease down, and covered it up with the pan I used on the saute (after oiling the bottom a wiping it down) which was still hot from before
• Flip and repeat.
• Plate with salsa (fresh if you got it!) sour creme, and more cilantro

I don’t want to sound trite when I say this, but I do believe this was the best breakfast burrito I have ever eaten. WIN.

Big-O's dinner on June 23rd, 2009

I did some things with the dinner that relate to some of our recent posts so I thought I’d detail a bit. The side dish was corn on the cob. Er, rather the *other* side dish was corn on the cob (in my house, mashed potatoes should just be assumed whenever steak is on the table). Corn on the cob is a long time favorite of mine, and I’m rather saddened to see that in America, most people have never had it any other way than just shucked and boiled. There are a lot of other ways to cook corn, and if you travel abroad a bit you’ll likely run into some of them. Corn has a ton of natural sweetness and boiling doesn’t do nearly as good a job of bringing that out as an open fire will.

But the thing that often surprises people is that corn is also a great target for a brine! I like to soak mine with the husks still on in a brine for several hours, and then toss them right onto a grill with a good portion of hardwood for smoke flavor. Leaving the husks on creates a similar effect to wrapping it with foil would, but the smoke of the grill on the husks actually adds more flavor to the corn. If done right, it will come out bursting with flavor and extremely juicy. Yum. Today’s brine is a couple of boxes of chicken stock, 1/4 up of whole pepper corns, 1/4 brown sugar, 3 tablespoons butter, and as much liquid smoke and smoked Spanish paprika as I thought it needed, then enough water to that to cover the corn.

Make sure that before you grill it, you cut off any stray husk or silk, but without exposing the corn.

Now, on to the steak! I’m doing a marinade this time. Yes. You heard me right, a marinade and not a brine. I realize that we’ve been gushing about the virtues of brine lately, but I’m just as much a fan of a good marinade, it’s just that most people are more familiar with marinade so it doesn’t often doesn’t make for as interesting a blog post

So what’s the difference between a brine and a marinade? When do you know which to use? There’s actually quite a bit of debate about that. Some say that a brine is for moisture, and a marinade is for tenderness, but others say that marinades don’t have the punch to actually tenderize. Sounds like an experiment is in order… but that’ll be another day (side note: marinades can also be used to completely “cook” meat, but that’s the topic of a different post. Look up ceviche if you want an example).

Consider, if you will, crock pot cooking. The slow cooking process does a fabulous job at making food tender, but it also has a tendency to dry it out. And although it is certainly possible to make a juicy dish from a crock pot, at times you can take a piece of meat out of the pot that has been completely submerged in it’s own juices for several hours, and by the time you put it on your plate and bite into it it’s dry as a bone. This is because the slow cooking process breaks down all the connective tissues between the meat proteins (like a marinade does) making it fall apart easily, but it also breaks down the cells enough that they can’t retain moisture and it ends up on your plate or in the pot instead of in your roast.

Because of this, brine is often used with dishes that will be slow cooked, like a whole turkey, because the brine will promote moistness to counteract the drying effect of the cooking time. Brine is also great for pork chops because thanks to fears about e coli and heart worm, you’re supposed to always cook them well-done, but if you toss them right on the grill they will likely end up dry because by the time they have cooked through all the moisture has run out.

Marinade however, when not being used strictly for flavor, is usually used for meat that you want to tenderize (much to the aggravation of the people that claim it doesn’t work). Small game is a great target, as it is often tough, but oddly enough, so is steak. Now after reading these explanations you might be thinking “but, why wouldn’t you use a brine for steak? Who doesn’t want a nice juicy steak?!”, and that is an excellent question.

First of all, there is nothing at all stopping you from putting your steak in a brine, it works fine and is tasty, however there are a few things to consider when choosing which method to use. The tenderness of steak is largely determined by a combination of two things:

1. The cut
2. The grade

Some cuts of meat are just more tender than others, without a doubt. This is why the Fillet Mignon is so expensive. Just by nature of the DNA of a cow, the fillet is very soft and it can take a lot of abuse and still come out tender. As you move away from the spine and towards the feet, the cuts get less tender though, and therefore cheaper!

Next up is the grade, and this is arguably the largest factor. I’m referring to the USDA ranking system that is a measure of how much marbling (or fat, tasty, tasty fat) is in the meat. This is why you can see a pack of New York Strip steak labeled “Prime” that is 4 dollars a pound more expensive than the New York Strip steak right beside it marked “Choice”.

Although I love a good New York strip steak, I usually don’t the money to buy it. When I’m on a budget (like today) I like to get a good Rib Eye steak. I like the big ones that are at least an inch and a half thick. They’ve got plenty of fat for the price and are much cheaper than a strip, or a fillet. When I went to the store I saw that the “Prime” rib eye was several dollars more per pound than the “Choice” was so I went for that. But knowing that the lower grade will tend to be less tender I’m making up for it by using a marinate. The best of steaks need no marinade at all, just a bit of salt and pepper, but it’s a good way to compensate when you’re cutting corners.

I got four thick rib eye’s and was feeling too lazy to make my own marinade, so I bought a bottle of a pre-made mesquite flavored one. I added a cup of Sprecher’s Puma Cola to give it an extra edge. You’ve probably not had Puma if you’re not in Wisconsin as it’s a local brewery, but it’s FANTASTIC! You can read about their soda’s, including Puma, here. Soda, especially cola, it great in a marinade. I don’t pretend to know the science behind it, but I can guess that the combo of the bubbles, plus acidic ingredients, helps to break down the meat further. Puma is a great choice because it has lots of bubbles, and has a hint of cinnamon in it that is just savory enough to match great with our beef.

I let it soak in the marinade for a bit more than 24 hours, then grilled the corn on indirect heat on the top rack while I grilled the steak on direct heat on the bottom.

The corn takes longer to cook than the steak so I had it going about 20 minutes before I put the steak on.

A fabulous meal to finish off a fabulous fathers day! The presentation may not be gourmet, but it was FULL of win!

I was the kid who would take apart all his toys, and then put them back together again. Usually some parts would be left over but somehow the toy still worked. This happened to everything from action figures to alarm clocks. I got my first Nintendo for Christmas of 1986, and by ‘87 (age 10) I had taken mine apart more than once, and was actually fixing Nintendo for other kids in the neighborhood.

My favorite toy of all, though, were Lego’s. Putting together AND taking apart! I doesn’t get any better than that!

Fast forwarding a couple of years, my parents run their own business. As you can imagine this sometimes led to long working hours for them. I would get home from school around 3:30pm or so, and they would usually not get home from work until after 5 or later. Owing to my insatiable appetite, and the lack of convenient snacks in the house, this led me to start cooking.

The first dish that I have memory of cooking for myself is Ramen Noodles. I liked them a lot and my parents knew that if I ate 5 of them they were only going to be out fifty cents or so. I would cook my self one (or two) when I got home from school before my parents came home. Once I had tried all the flavors the store had though, my urge to tinker started to take over. Having no kind of direction or instruction at all, I started raiding my mothers spice cabinet and experimenting with the flavors. Some times they ruined the dish, in which case I was only out a few pennies anyway, but other times they improved it quite a bit. Then I started branching out to raiding the leftovers in the fridge, and before long I had created my very first recipe. I believe it still exists on an index card in my mother’s recipe collection somewhere. The recipe was for Curry Cabbage Soup. You cook one chicken flavored Ramen per package directions, and add to the broth chopped cabbage, chopped cooked chicken, and curry powder. And you know what? I still think that’s a good soup!

Fast forwarding even more years, we come to my late high school era. Ben and I, having known each other our whole lives, were now living under the same roof (a story in itself, but one that belongs in another post, on another blog) and starting to experiment with food together. We were kindred spirits where that was concerned. In those days the primary focus of our experiments were breakfast cereals, sandwiches, and ice cream.

Cereal, especially Cheerios, would usually end up with peanut butter in them (and if the adults weren’t looking, some chocolate syrup), along with several other experiments over time. Ice cream got mixed with just about everything that wasn’t bolted down. The adults would wisely buy cheap ice cream because we went through it so fast, it was one gallon buckets of vanilla. Being that as plain as it is, we found ways to…improve (?) it.

But my personal favorite thing to experiment with in those days was sandwiches. They were massive affairs, involving several layers of bread and just about everything that could be found in the fridge. Ben’s mother (bless her kind heart, I have no idea how she put up with us) at first would see what we were doing and say “you can put whatever you want on it, but you HAVE to eat it”, thinking that would eventually be enough to discourage us. When that completely failed to moderate our consumptions (since we had no trouble at all eating our freakish sandwiches) she had to start putting more restrictions on us, simply on grounds of the cost of toppings we were consuming.

Ben and I parted ways for a couple of years after high school, and my experimenting continued. I spent a couple of years in California living with very little income with a series of roommates who were in similar situations. I found even more ways to cook Ramen. My favorite now is probably fried. I would microwave the noodles in water until it had softened but was not yet cooked, and then I would take it out and finish it in a frying pan, sprinkling on some of the flavor packet when it was finished. That makes a great side dish.

But the main thing that came from this era is potatoes. They are cheap, filling, and tasty. I learned all kinds of ways to cook them, but especially fell in love with frying them. I would make a “breakfast hash” for my roommates consisting of a skillet filled with fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, onions, and bacon or sausage. They would beg me to make it.

A few years later I was married and starting to raise a family. This is when I discovered grilling. I got my first gas grill and started grilling everything in sight.

So we come to today. I’ll let Ben speak for himself, but I think he has taken a very similar path as I have, culinarily speaking, and though we live in different cities now we’ve always kept in touch enough to swap food discoveries and talk about the latest thing we are cooking.

In the last year, I FINALLY convinced Ben to start using an instant messaging program, and our food discussions became nearly daily. We will discuss whatever food win we had the night before, and talk about the fail that is our cafeteria food at work. It was only a matter of time before this blog came about.

So there you have it, my complete food story. More than you ever wanted to hear, I’m sure. So I’ll just sum up by saying that experimenting with chefery is not just a hobby for me, it’s how I’ve lived most of my life. I find that it fills a deep urge to create that I find in myself, and I hope that this blog will not only let me share some of my creations with other people, but will alow me to capture it so that I can better reflect on it later, and not forget my own lessons.

Here we have the dough rising. I also used the standard recipie, and because I didn’t have proper set of round biscuit cutters (which has now been fixed) I chose a Long-John style shape.

They fried up nicely. And now I think it’s time for BACON! Rather than put the bacon right into the dough, I decided to do a filling. Which of course stars bacon:

The bacon pictured here is admittedly not very good bacon. Sometimes you gotta roll with what you got. But I highly recommend getting some good thick cut stuff for this.

Next, we need to sweeten it up a bit. We’re going to candy it with brown sugar! Mmm, tasty. Not only will that taste great, but the molases in the brown sugar will help to keep it moist.

I can’t decide what I like most about the above picture. The bacon, the sugar, or the incredibly well seasoned cast-iron pan. Next up we need some custard to mix the bacon into:

If you haven’t tried Ambrosia “Devon Custard”, you really should get some. It’s a native product of the UK, but it still can be had in the US. Usually in the larger chain stores in a specialty isle. If you don’t have that then I suppose vanilla pudding would work, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

You need to get something like a wide-mouthed food injector or one of those bag thing-a-mah-jigs that you squirt frosting with (yeah, I wasn’t kidding about the whole “I’m not a pastry chef” thing) and fill the donuts with our bacon custard.

Next up you need a glaze:

I used a pretty standard donut glaze recipe, but used a lot of Agave nectar in it. That’s become one of my favorite sweeteners. I find that normal cane sugar can just be…harsh…for lack of a better word. Agave is plenty sweet, but has a softer attack on the pallet, as well as a unique flavor. Besides, it’s what they make tequila from!

And lastly, we need a final touch as a topping to add some last minute texture and flavor:

Pictured above beside our bacon custard (and by the way I LOVE saying “bacon custard”) we have some chopped citrus flavored crasins. This will be to sprinkle on the top. Like I said, the idea was to add a final touch of texture and flavor. With that in mind, if the cranberries don’t appeal to you, you could use a chopped nut of some kind, but I thought the tartness of the citrus and the berry would add balance to all the sugar we are sloshing on it.

And finally the finished product!

Now, personally I thought it was amazing, but I didn’t have the same kind of luck Ben did with the rest of my family. I was the only one who really liked this format better than the normal donut. I think it may have been too high-brow. Have I created the first uppler-class donut?! Perhaps not, but I’ll tell you this: no one complained about the bacon!

There are a few rules that I’ve learned about brining.  First off, add the salt last.  Brines need lots and lots of salt, but that messes with rule two.  So I say add the salt last.

Just what is rule two?  If your brine isn’t tasty to start with–throw it out!  Seriously.  You are about to add that flavor in massive doses to your meat, so if it doesn’t taste good now, cooking it isn’t LIKELY to help.  Most likely its just going to make it worse.  BUT!!!  And this is very, very important: brines need to be salty, and if you taste the brine WITH the salt, you are going to hate it.  Get a nice tasty brine, THEN add the necessary salt.  You will get a lot better results that way.

So, with those two very simple rules in mind, I’m going to describe the experimental brine I made today.  Our protein is chicken, which is nice because it takes on flavors very nicely.  I started the brine with about 2 cups of pressed Apple Juice (the kind with pulp, not the clear stuff).  This is the kind you like to spice and drink hot.  You might see it sold as apple cider, but whatever.  Good stuff, and a bit headier than the clear stuff.  Also less sugary.  But I’m getting off track.  To this I added about two tablespoons of honey (yum!), two tablespoons each of lemon and lime juice and six thin slices of fresh ginger (no, I didn’t weigh it or measure it with a spoon, sorry–I’ll do that next time!).  All this went into a pot on the stove to get nice an hot, then once I was happy with the flavor (see rule two), I added about four table spoons of salt (see rule one).

So what did I do with this yummy chicken (actually, I’m guessing it wasn’t too yummy until I cooked it, but whatever!)?  I took some tortilla chips and grated parmesan, and put that in the food processor until very smooth, poured that into a large bowl.  Then I beat four eggs in a different bowl.  Once the chicken had brined for about 2 hours (and was completely thawed!), I sliced it into strips, dipped it in the egg once, coated it in the parmesan & chips mixture, then fried it in peanut oil.  I’m extremely pleased with the result.  My oldest son loved it (he had about 8 of the chicken strips, so that’s a good sign!), as did my wife, so I’m happy.  The ginger & the apple flavor both came through very nicely, and the chicken was very moist and tender, just like it should be.

This is experimental chefery at it’s best–a completely untested idea, created and executed on the fly, but with solid basic cooking techniques underpinning it.  Now go out and brine something!