noodlsetter #.0038
One of ten billion tuna salads; spring.
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One recipe riff and one recipe today; they’re at the bottom. Remember, all the recipes ever published in noodsletter have been archived in the very first noodsletter, which you can find here.
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Book Bit
The first time I had jerk chicken a guy at the intersection of Constant Spring Road and some other road came up to my care and shouted, Boss, you ever have jerk chicken? before I could find that broken-off handle to wind up the window. He was tall and skinny, in a white undershirt, huge Afro, shiny teeth and shiny muscles, too many muscles for one kid, but the man, boy really, smelled like allspice so I got out of the car and followed him back to his shop, a small shack, wood tacked together with a zinc roof and striped in blue, green, yellow, orange and red. The man grabbed the biggest fucking machete I ever saw in my life and sliced off a piece of chicken leg as if he had just cut through warm butter. He handed it to me and as I was about to eat it, he closed hise eyes and nodded no. Just like that: firm, peaceful and final. Before I said anything he pointed at a huge jar, kinda translucent like it’s been standing there awhile.
From A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.
Working hard (not hardly working!)
Believe I’ve said this before, but the frequency with which we publish stuff on ChefSteps outstrips my ability to keep up with it in this newsletter.
Here’s a (small) handful:
A big honking Macau egg tart (a Tim Chin special)! (Homemade Chinese puff pastry, whaaaaat!)
Another Tim Chin special: Homemade yuba, and this fantastic yuba salad!
Sous vide cottage cheese! (I am wondering if this is the way I “get into” cottage cheese.) (Also, if you do it, do not forget about these whey-braised cippolini.)
We’ve also got some great grilling stuff coming out, like this tsukune recipe from Nicholas Gavin:
Spring sprang sprung
Well, it’s here. For us.
Spring and food, always confusing. since all the images in food media starting in March are flooded with asparagus and fava beans and artichokes and snap peas and strawberries and rhubarb and all that good spring stuff but it’s still like a 50 degrees out. Doesn’t help that spring actually occurs around April for a lot of countries that aren’t the US; when I was in Japan two months ago, we were eating spring mountain vegetables and spring katsuo sashimi, but then I came to New York and was eating Brussels sprouts and supermarket broccoli rabe.
But now, in NY at least, spring produce season’s started, just in time for summer. The greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza is just starting to take off; the bigger stalls run by the bigger farms all have their asparagus and snap peas, the shell peas and favas, and their big beautiful strawberries that aren’t half as tasty as Driscoll’s. (Speaking of, we were at the Pride festival in Park Slope this weekend and Driscoll’s had a stall where they were handing out free berry cups—the quality of the berries was literally 200% better than the Driscoll’s you buy in stores, a scandal!) I picked up some favas and peas just to feel something (spring), but they’re not the best quality, kind of starchy. They all require cooking.
However, Evolutionary Organics has had their amazing little tart-sweet strawberries for at least two weeks now, and they’re harbingers of actually good shelling peas, actually good snap peas, and actually good favas, the kind you can stuff in you mouth by the handful raw, the kind you can drizzle with olive oil raw and toss with chunks of Pecorino or Parmigiano (raw, of course). The good kind! And I can’t wait.
To tide us over, we’ve got the Evolutionary strawberries, and Willow Wisp has started laying out their greens: Mustard spinach, broccoli rabe that tastes actually “green,” all the heads of lettuces, the arugulas. Never thought I’d feel joy at dropping fifty bucks on leafy vegetable matter, but it is the high point of my week. Lettuces!
I’ve also picked up their rhubarb, but I don’t have anything to compare it to. Made a rhubarb strawberry crisp that was pretty good, even if I’m not the biggest fan of rhubarb’s odd flavor. I’m going to pickle some using our brand spanking updated sous vide pickles recipe later today; will update you all if/when it turns out amazing.
I try to do as little as possible to great produce, at least at the beginning of the spring produce season, just to marvel at vegetables and fruit that actually have flavor. For the unfortunate spring stuff that’s kind of waxy, however, blanching is a requirement, and then further cooking is probably warranted. For example, with a mess of shell peas and favas I carted home, I podded them, blanched them in heavily salted water, shocked them, drained them, peeled the favas, then sautéed them with good olive oil and spring garlic and spring onions, a heavy sprinkling of salt, and some pepper. They were very tasty, but they didn’t taste exactly spring-y.
With snap peas, I’ve been using this simple miso dressing my aunt used on all the spring mountain vegetables: sugar, miso, vinegar…that’s it. I use a little water to thin it out, so my current ratio is:
1 tablespoon awase miso
2 teaspoons rice vinegar
1 teaspoon water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
You can toss the (blanched) snaps in this, or just dip them in. I’ve been fiddling with using this dressing with other blanched stuff, adding in some good fruity olive oil, too, and it can be delicious. With blanched broccolini, very good; with raw broccoli stalks, shaved, it was…not good. Give it a try and let me know.
The strawberries we’ve basically just been eating with whipped cream. There isn’t anything better, but even with very good, sweet, in-season strawberries, I think you have to macerate them in a little sugar (and a pinch of salt) for 20 minutes. And the whipped cream? Try brown sugar whipped cream!
“News”
The lobster taco in this main photo is something else.
BuzzFeed’s Botatouille, an AI kitchen assistant. (More like botapfui.)
Tammie, continuing to do work for the people, found a new spot for pastrami.
Obviously of more interest to me than many of you, but this meditation on the anxieties of recipe-writing has its moments. Although a quibble: a PB&J is very different from a PB&J Uncrustable.
Incredible that this Horses story is old enough (three weeks) that I forgot about it, and I’m gobsmacked all over again! (If you don’t know what that sentence means, you have to click on this story.)
Green Onion Bae is the hero we need!
Saw a snippet of a…TikTok? YouTube? Reel?…the other day that was about a guy drinking a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and there’s this story about an influencer drinking himself to death for content. Not really sure what to think about how frequently I very casually witness people dying while surfing the internet, but it’s not good!
Thank me for not putting a screenshot of this isopod ramen here. (I would not eat it, not even for science.)
I empathize with people who dislike paying a lot for bad food and bad service when eating out, but this story about restaurant patrons getting huffy about tips and service fees post-pandemic makes me just empathize with restaurant servers.
This story is very behind the times at this point, since the Beard Awards happened, but the Beard Awards…phew, what a mess.
And this on the record denial from a WaPo article on the Beards is…chef’s kiss? Love to patronize restaurants that have a strict no-cocaine policy, okay.
He denied any use of cocaine or whippets. He says he has a strict no-cocaine policy in his restaurant.
(Congrats to all the Beard winners on their messy medals, restaurant and media folks.
Brexit may have killed the Irish fishing industry.
Loved this installment of The Year I Ate New York on credit card whales and where they go to eat.
Food poisoning caused by sick restaurant workers 40% of the time.
This recipe for a “dirty pasta water martini” says pasta water gives the drink a similar texture to an emulsified pasta sauce, which…is impossible because you can’t create an oil-in-water emulsion, stabilized with gelatinized starch, unless you have…oil…in…your…martini. It also should be “dirty pasta-water martini”?
I think Robert Sietsema should just be unleashed to do stuff like this all the time. Far more interested in him walking around trying a bunch of places than his more formal reviews.
A decent dosa in Park Slope? Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Vittles continues to be the best written food publication on the planet:
I don’t want to know what I could be saving if I grilled my own chicken breast, thanks.
On the chicken tender shortage situation at Taylor Swift’s concert.
I gotta get my act together and start striper fishing in Brooklyn. This is right up my alley!
Taco omakase sounds good; taco omakase in the bottom of Grand Central sounds…sweaty.
I don’t get much, if any, hate online? (Fingers crossed!) The one time I blocked somebody on IG was because they noted I shouldn’t chop my fried rice with a wok spatula. They were right! And now I feel bad I blocked them, they were trying to help, and they did! (I was in a sensitive mood or something?) If this rings a bell for any of you, let me know; I can’t remember what account it was. I’ll unblock that helpful person!
Update on those enchiladas that no one wanted to make. Somebody made ‘em!
Did you know the gilda was meant to resemble the body of Rita Hayworth? I have had two separate conversation with people in the last month about Txikito, and how it’s so, so, so good. Still! In fact, I think it’s better than it’s ever been. It’s a little pricey, but the food is flawless.
The writer who wrote the pitch-perfect profile of the pair behind The Drunken Canal also wrote about being constipated.
The Tuna Salad This Time
The whole the-air-is-burning-do-not-leave-your-homes preview of the coming apocalypse last week had us kind of stuck in the house for the first time since the last apocalypse (yup, COVID), and not so coincidentally it made us think of tuna salad. We didn’t want to brave smoke inhalation to pick up pasta or something.
I’m not against tuna salad in any way whatsoever, but for whatever reason I just don’t eat it frequently. We just don’t eat the mayo-holding-everything-together type salads. Shrimp salad? Nope. Tuna salad? Very rarely. Egg salad? Once I understood what mayo is, I turned my back on egg salad forever—it’s just hard boiled eggs napped in emulsified eggs. There’s better way to eat a whole mess of eggs, even in a sandwich.
I was surprised that this newsletter hasn’t already had a tuna salad recipe of some kind. It’s simple to put together, and I have thoughts about tuna salad, the main three being: It’s got to have fresh green chilies, and a lot of them; it’s got to have celery, and a lot of it; and it’s got to have a ton of pepper on top, a lot of tons.
I imagine if I keep this newsletter up, there’s gonna be a bunch more tuna salads, so let’s just call this tuna salad the one I threw together this time, with what I had on hand. The only ways I’d probably change it if I had the opportunity to go to the store would be to add some chopped parsley, maybe some chopped cornichons; I thought about adding an anchovy, which I had on hand, but I was just feeling a squidge lazy. All of these things would be good in this or, really, any tuna salad.
For no reason that I can tell, I felt it was very important to cut the vegetables quite small, maybe because I was trying not to think about the orange sky outside my window. As with most things, I think consistency is more important, and some thought should be given to the architectural elements of a sandwich/salad. Little bits of vegetables are more likely to stick to the mayo sticking to the tuna; large bits are more likely to slough off, unless they’re long and quite thin. I often find it easier to mince than slice thinly, so here we are.
Tuna salad is one of those few sandwiches (grilled cheese, patty melt) that requires a sweet-ish milk bread, and as such you’ve got to make the tuna salad saltier, to account for all that sweetness and milk. (This salad is pretty salty.) I like to also just toast one side, with the soft side acting as a pillow upon which you nestle the salad. Crust off, of course.
Yield
Enough for, what, 3 open-faced sandwiches?
Ingredients
Two cans tuna (I sorta like the skipjack tuna better than albacore, but only the slightly fancier cans)
1 medium shallot, minced
2 celery ribs, fine dice
1 Persian cuke, seeded (really!), fine dice
1 small bunch celery leaves, (20-30) minced
2 thin scallions, thinly sliced
4 Thai chilies, thinly sliced (you can skip these, but at least use one for that grassy chili flavor)
Juice of 1 lemon, plus half the lemon’s zest
2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon capers, minced
1 teaspoon
1/2 teaspoon sugar
5 tablespoons mayonnaise (that’s 1/4 cup plus a tablespoon, if that helps)
Black pepper, to taste
Combine everything but the mayo in a medium mixing bowl and mix well to dissolve salt and sugar, breaking up the tuna into chunky shreds.
Add the mayo and stir until combined.
Dollop generous amount of tuna salad on the soft side of milk bread toasted on one side. Generously cover with freshly ground black pepper. Serve with a lemon wedge.
That quiche is amazing and I'm deeply inspired!!!!