noodsletter #.0042
Pizza, chicken, omg amazing fish counter/fish
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Today, we’re doing mostly links and a few recipe-like things.
All the recipes ever published in noodsletter have been archived in the very first noodsletter, which you can find here.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
In those days it was not enough for a product to be pleasant or nutritious, it had to be as useful as a jackknife in the hands of an Eagle Scout; consequently cheese spreads came in glasses equally excellent for breakfast juice, snack milk, homemade jellies, swallowing pills, and chasing whiskey. My favorite flavor was cheese ‘n’ bacon, I believe. The glasses were sometimes striped or polka-dotted, or decorated with red and white asterisks which stood out in front of the dark jelly like stars. What a universe, I thought, full of cranberry-clouded space and constellations designed to attract dimes.
In this part of the country autumn is the only season one can celebrate; and it is not simply that the land becomes violet and mauve and pink and gold, as if sunsets were its new cash crop and sprang freely from the earth; or because the trees turn, overcoming the eye with color and the soul with misgivings; or that the pumpkins and gourds are gathered, potatoes forked into unrinsed heaps; or even because the densely enclosing stands of corn have been cut, unshuttering space along the roads like a sudden shout. These things count, of course, as does the limpid blue we’re drenched by. This blue is what ‘azure’ means to a French poet; a palpable infinity, something in front of which one puts a rapturous O, and after which a point of exclamation. This time of year rain falls through a dry sky, while in the summer the wet air wets it, so the raindrops come down coated like pellets of moist dust. Flamboyance and poetry aside, it’s how this season goes to its death that is finally entrancing, and one feels compelled to “get out in it,” as if the season were a process one could enter and exit like a dance going on on a dance floor.
From The Tunnel, by William H. Gass.
Work Stuff
We published a pizza package this month, designed for home ovens (you don’t need any super pizza-specific tools, although a pizza peel is useful for the tavern-style pie) from some very pedigreed contributors: Andrew Janjigian (sign up for Wordloaf!), Kenji López-Alt, and John Carruthers.
As with a lot of packages, we included a parametric analysis of pizza doughs (you don’t need to be a subscriber to check it out, so do—I love these things),
We also published another couple installments in Matthew Woolen’s grand muffin crusade. (This is set to culminate in a master muffin mix recipe!) And his baklava recipe, which uses the fresh phyllo recipe and method he developed.
If you’ve been curious about subscribing to Studio Pass, you should sign up for our newsletter—we’re running deals all through the end of the year. Right now, there’s a deal for 20% off Studio Pass for people on the email list. It’s a great value, I think, but I’m obviously biased! We’re 100% subscriber supported, there’s no ads on the site, our stuff is amazing/unique, etc, etc.
If you don’t have the budget for it (totally understand!), you can also support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel and checking out (and “liking”!) or videos when we publish them. The latest video is for Matthew’s vegan foie gras pate, which is uncannily good and has a bunch of meatheads predictably upset about the fact it doesn’t use fatty duck liver.
Non-work recipe fiddling
Work has been fairly nuts (‘tis the season), so I haven’t had a chance to do much in the kitchen other than subsistence cooking. I’ve been playing around with this process/recipe for spice mix/method for approximating the fried chicken legs from Excellent Pork Chop House in Manhattan Chinatown, but using the air frying setting on my fancy countertop oven. It’s… okay. Not good enough to call a recipe, really, and it has some issues, but it’s pretty tasty.
I think the original version is marinated in soy and 5-spice, dried, then deep fried with, if anything, a dusting of starch. I’ve been scoring the meat down to the bone (to speed up cooking and keep all the skin on one—the top—side), salting the legs for a while, brushing them with tamari, then dusting them with an unconventional mix of spices—call it 7-spice, why not? After salting and brushing with tamari, I’ve been resting the legs on a rack, uncovered, in the fridge (first for ~50 minutes, then for 6 hours), to try to dry out the skin and cure the meat a bit to improve water retention.
To take advantage of the forced convection of the oven, I’ve been coating the dried, salted/tamari’d legs in oil before sprinkling on the 7-spice, which theoretically should improve the evenness of heat distribution and promote crisping. In practice, this hasn’t worked out so well in the crisping department; the skin crisps, but only briefly; thighs are just big blobs of fat and water, so that makes sense. Short of actually frying the dang things, I think the best solution is to extend the uncovered drying time for 24 hours after the tamari application…but at that point, I might just be fine with heating up a wok of oil and frying the suckers.
One other thing I have tried is dusting the skin (after applying tamari) with baking powder, which promoted crisping, but it was fussy and annoying to do, since I used a little sieve to evenly apply the baking powder. Better, perhaps, would be to mix the baking soda with starch and apply it and let it dry. Typing that out, I think that’s what I’ll do next time.
Here’s the “formula” for the 7-spice.
2 g Cassia
1 g Sichuan peppercorns
1 g White pepper
1 g Black pepper
1 g Star anise
1 g Cumin seed
0.5 g Fenugreek seed
Toast them, let them cool, grind them up into a fine powder. The idea here was to hit the warm notes of 5-spice, Sichuan peppercorns for the way they enhance the saltiness of things, and fenugreek for the heavy, back of the mouth meatiness it gives to, uh, meat. It’s really nice as a finishing spice for fried chicken wings, although I think it’s missing something. A work in progress, as it were. If you give it a try, let me know what you think.
New Fish Shop
If you live in New York City, then you must be aware that there’s a new Wegman’s in town. It’s located in the old K-Mart space in Astor Place, which is hilarious to me, because I’m pretty sure the exact same spot where I picked up at least 5 umbrellas in the old dark, depressing basement space is now the location best fish counter I’ve ever seen in the United States.
I was sort of losing my mind over how good the offerings were, so I neglected to take pictures, except for of the front display of sanma, or Pacific saury. A seasonal delicacy, they’re needle-like, oily fish, and they’re prized in all kinds of preparations. Historically, they were kind of a trash fish, cheap and good for grilling. Over the last 20 years, they’ve become super popular, and due to changes in fishing methods, they’re now eaten as sashimi in addition to cooked preparations.
While my favorite kind of sanma is the semi air-dried version—in season, fish shops in Japan will have racks and racks of the gutted guys hanging out outside their shop, drying in the full sun—super fresh sanma is cooked with its guts intact. The cooked stomach is deliciously bitter, possessing both an organ-y quality reminiscent of lamb or beef kidney but with all the omega-3-y fattiness we all love in mackerel and sardines. In the past, Sunrise Mart would sometimes have fresh sanma, but it never really looked fresh enough that I’d consider eating the guts. The ones at the Wegman’s fish counter? They were pristine. And so eat the guts I did.
Obviously I didn’t do the greatest job on the grilling here (they are, in fact, easier to cook in a broiler). But this little guy was every bit as delicious as I could have hoped for.
The selection at the counter is really impressive. If you can set aside your hangups on how obviously unlocal the product is, the operation is amazing and you should take advantage of it and try fish other than the salmon and tuna everyone is most comfortable buying. All the fish on display are whole, so you can judge their quality yourself, and the fish mongers will butcher them in an array of styles (they’re all helpfully laid out on a chalkboard)—they’ll give you the carcass, too, of course, and you should definitely grab it.
I picked up a seabass and had them fillet it, just to see how they do, and it was pretty well done. (In the future I’ll probably do it myself, because I like to do it, not because I’d be better at it.) But in light of their large and, for the US, fairly odd selection, I’m planning on buying other, more exotic kinds of fish and demonstrating some simple recipes that’ll work super well with them, like nimono (I have a nimono recipe I was working on back at Serious Eats that I can revive for this purpose).
If you do happen to go and get fish and end up with a fish carcass, here’s an illustration of the fairly odd method I use to make small quantities of fresh fish stock. I dunk the carcass along with some aromatics (peeled ginger, peeled garlic, scallions, maybe) and kombu and a dried shiitake in a big mixing bowl and cover it all with water, cover the bowl, then set the bowl on top of a simmering pot of water, and let it sit there for a couple of hours. The double boiler with cover set up regulates the temperature to 206 degrees F with no agitation, so you can make a fairly clear, gelatin-rich stock without fiddling with the gas hob or anything; just set it up and forget about it.
(I made ramen with it. My kid did not like it, even though it was, objectively, good.)
“News”
Eric Huang, of Pecking House, has started an interesting Substack. Check it out! (We’re doing some recipes with Eric in the very near future, too.)
On the biweekly debate of American vs. British food: “The problem is that Americans, for the most part, are a uniquely insular, incurious people, with the British taking second place.”
Dominique Crenn servings lab-grown chicken.
Liz Cook made the Mitt Romney microwaved salmon burger! Great idea, wouldn’t be able to do it myself.
These beautiful wee bonsai.
Marian Bull with a very thorough consideration of doing dishes. My take on it is doing dishes takes so very little time you should just grit your teeth and enjoy it, Sisyphus-style. Also, clean as you go, which does not mean clean after you’re done cooking. It means clean constantly: the boulder isn’t a solid, it’s non-Newtonian fluid.
Ryan Sutton has a zoomed-out view of Momofuku in light of Ko closing. I’ve always viewed Chang as being a deeply cynical persona (the fairness of which judgment I always question); transitioning the annoyingly successful branding of the restaurants to pantry goods seems like a smart move.
Rice is nice, but it’s also very easy to turn it into a biohazard.
This trend piece about chicken liver mousse at restaurants fails to emphasize… it is super easy (and inexpensive and tasty and elegant) to make it at home. Don’t go to restaurants for it, it takes like 10 minutes if you have a blender or food processor. Jacques Pepin’s one is basically livers and butter (you don’t need the pricey alcohol at all). Star anise is a good add, too.
On Jacques Pepin’s chicken art.
Climate change-resistant produce.
Food is so much better now, it is true. (Although since I grew up abroad, this doesn’t quite land for me as it might for others.)
This soba restaurant sounds great and everything, but the high-endification of all things Japanese is sad—give it to me good and cheap!
Andrew on sourdough baking. Just so.
Tammie on olive oil in desserts. Have you all made Stella’s olive oil cakes? Seriously good!
So… remember how ALL the snow crabs disappeared? Turns out they starved to death (and ate each other). This being science, though, there is still the possibility that there’s some other explanation, like they’ve retreated to their snow crab spaceship and are planning a counterattack for all the snow crab atrocities we’ve committed in the Beiring Strait deeps.
Wowza, that chicken prep looks super cool
lots of mentions here! Thanks, Sho