noodsletter #.0044
Stacked chicken thigh skewers, horse mackerel
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Today, we’re making “THE BEST” grilled chicken thighs, and talkin’ fish.
All the recipes ever published in noodsletter have been archived in the very first noodsletter, which you can find here.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
And no small talk even at dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants. The menu her muse:
“Oh, look,” she said, “look at the menu!” They were in the Penrose Room at the top of the old building with its view of the Rockies beyond a solid wall of glass. “Feel it. The paper like a certificate of stock. Blue chip. If you look close you can see the tiny colored threads that run through it like a precious aspic of lint on money.”
“I can look close but I can’t feel it,” Ben said.
“Look at the cursive font distinctive as a signature, the prices like distinguished addresses.”
“My hand.”
“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s as if printing costs determine the range of one’s appetite and fix it forever. Movable type and the destiny of hunger. When this menu was designed, it was designed once and for all. The chef and the man from graphics in consultation. Preordained, don’t you see, by what would look good on the document, for that’s what such a menu becomes—a document—legal and binding. Yes. A contract, if you please. ‘What do you do best?’ the graphics man must have asked. ‘Decide now, because you can’t change your mind later. The cost of this thing is like putting out a magazine.’ And he would have to have told him. Don’t you see what it means? Image and printing costs are responsible for the tradition of mediocrity in American restaurants.”
From The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin.
The best way to grill chicken thighs
Apologies for this bit of superlative tomfoolery, but a) it is the best and b) it’ll be easier to remember and search for in the archive.
The image at the top of this email is the “kashiwa,” or chicken thigh, skewer from Torien (I wrote up a meal I had there a while back for paid subscribers). There are a lot of ways to grill chicken thighs; there are also a lot of ways to grill chicken thighs while staying within the expansive umbrella of yakitori thigh preparations. When I was served this skewer at Torien, it immediately “clicked” for me; my layman’s familiarity with the various muscle groups of a chicken thigh descended like an overlay on the stacked chicken thigh pieces, revealing the mystery of their preparation.
I’m no chicken savant, so it isn’t all that mysterious. It was more that, upon eating the skewer, which was delicious, I was immediately convinced I could replicate the form at home, even if it wouldn’t have the flavor of a skewer cooked over binchotan. Having skewered a hundred of these over the last year, I’m certain that you can replicate it, too. It doesn’t require any special butchery skills, since you can buy boneless skinless thighs, and it’s a little like stacking Lego blocks or some other quasi-crafty endeavor, and it can be as neat or messy as you like; it’ll still taste great.
The most interesting aspect of this skewer is the way it reorders the geometry of the thigh’s muscle groups. Typically, when you bite into a chicken thigh, whether you’ve cut it off a whole roasted bird or you’ve cooked them, bone-in or -out, on the grill or under the broiler, your teeth cleave through several muscles stacked in layers. In this preparation, your knife does that bit of cleaving, and then you turn each stack on its side and insert a skewer through each layer, exposing the cross section of muscle groups to the direct heat of the grill. (If you were skewering the sliced chicken thighs in the photo above, the skewer would pass through the plane of the cutting board.)
On the one hand, the benefits of this structure should be obvious: Increased surface area should yield superior Maillard browning and, if you’re using tare, more crags and divots in what amounts to the surface of the skewer for the tare to pool and caramelize. On the other hand, yakitori—at least good yakitori—doesn’t resort to min-maxing of browning and caramelization like other traditions of grilling and smoking. Just look at the kashiwa from Torien: it isn’t particularly browned or charred; it sits on the blonde side of the brown spectrum, even though it’s been doused in tare.
The main benefits are the change in the texture of the chicken thigh when eaten in this way—it’s more tender, basically. It can actually be a little too tender, particularly since, when stacked in this way, you can cook the thigh pieces to a rosy 150 degrees F while also rendering a lot of the intramuscular fat because it’s exposed to the direct heat of the grill. It ends up scanning as a little “raw” when you eat it (or, at least it does for me). Which points to another benefit: As with other chicken thigh preparations, you can “overcook” these and they’ll still be “juicy” and they won’t be tough. If you try this, I suggest cooking at least one skewer to 150 F, just to see what it’s like, and then cook the rest to 160 F or above.
The process for cooking these is similar to the one used for the flats: Dip in sake, season both sides generously with salt, throw them on the grill. However, since there’s no skin to crisp, and browning is less importance than caramelization of the tare, I like to give each side of the skewer two exposures to the heat of the grill (direct, hot) before dipping it in tare. That would be something like 4 minutes per side, 8 minutes total, but flipping the skewer every 2 minutes.
To caramelize the tare, I then dip the skewer in the tare pot, and put it back on the grill for 30 seconds, dip it back in the tare pot, 30 seconds on the grill on the other side, then dip it back in the tare and put it on a plate.
Since this seems like one of those preparations that should be transitive—it’s similar to, say, stacking thin cutlets on a trompo or the vertical roaster used for shawarma—I’ve also been fiddling with using it for chicken thigh skewers with an Indian-ish spice-and-oil rub. (This rub is, if I recall correctly, made up of kasuri methi, cumin, coriander, Kashmiri chili powder, black salt, husked green cardamom, and salt, mixed with just enough oil to form a loose paste.) The iteration pictured here is in fact a bad one, but it illustrated something interesting about this method.
I’d decided to “marinate” (not really a marinade, but whatever) boneless skinless chicken thighs whole in the spice-and-oil rub, thinking it would be easier and neater to then slice them into planks and skewer them. But as the pictures clearly show, the result was that the marinated parts were squished up together on the skewer, buried in chicken thigh, and the parts of the thigh exposed to the heat were almost entirely devoid of spice mix (they had some argent-hued oil on them, that’s about it). This made for some gritty, un-bloomed-spice eating—no bueno. It would’ve been far better to cute and skewer the thighs, then marinate them in the spices.
One note about the size of chicken thighs (and of the skewers): If you can find little chickens, like the ones typically sold at halal butchers (this is what I like to use), you can easily stack an entire thigh onto a skewer, and it will be all right (as in these Indian-ish skewers), but it’s far better to split the thigh vertically and then create two stacked skewers—it’s way tastier this way, and more tender, since you’re mouth isn’t dealing with excessively long strips/planks of thigh. If you use a big 4.5-5 lb roaster from the grocery store, I suggest doing the same, but also trimming the uglier edges off either side. Use them for something else, or just thread the little bits and bobs onto a skewer as best you can and then grill the heck out of it. Bigger is definitely not better when it comes to yakitori-style skewers.
That Wegman’s Fish Counter, the Controversy
Before I get into the actual aji-ing, I’ve written in the past two noodsletters about the new Wegman’s new Japanese new fish new counter, despite having mixed feelings about it. Mostly this has to do with the manifest sustainability issues with the operation—jetting in high-quality whole fish from Tokyo on the regular when very few people know what to do with it raises a lot of questions, none of which are likely to have great answers. (Would I be fine with it if someone, somewhere, ended up eating ALL that fish … maybe!?)
On the other hand, I’m selfishly enthusiastic about the idea of being able to buy good fish in season (even if that season is taking place halfway across the world), because fish like sanma are delicious, etc. Of course, if your only options are buying high-quality stuff with sustainability issues or the low-quality stuff at American supermarkets (which also have sustainability issues! albeit less acute and obvious), you’d be forgiven for patronizing the Japanese fish counter.
But that’s not the case with the Wegman’s fish counter. Yuji Haraguchi, the founder/owner of Yuji Ramen/Okonomi and Osakana has been posting angrily on Instagram about the Wegman’s counter because he thinks it constitutes a trademark violation. (I am skeptical of this claim, since it seems to—my Japanese is bad, so maybe I don’t have it right—rely on the idea that people can’t tell the difference between “Osakana” and “Sakanaya”—literally “Fish” versus “Fish Shop.”) Regardless of the merits of the legal claim here, Haraguchi is right to be angry: He runs an excellent fish store and he sources his excellent fish locally. The brand-spanking-new shiny fish counter at Wegman’s is, in comparison, a juiced-up, corporate-money-backed shop that ships in crazy Japanese seafood as a loss-leader to sell tuna and salmon sashimi.
All of which is to say, if you live near an Osakana outlet, you should definitely patronize it. The prices are good, the quality of the fish is excellent. Used to be (it’s been years since I bought fish from Osakana because … I moved to the end of the NYC Earth [Bay Ridge]), you could call them and order whole fish, if that’s your bag, and they’d butcher it for you and age it if you liked.
That’s not to say you should feel bad about going to Wegman’s. They have some stuff there that’s unique, at least in the city, like the nice himono (semi-dried fish) they carry in the freezer section.
Horse Mackerel (Aji)
Ok, enough of that. (There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.)
For those of us who live at the ends of the earth, and even for those of you who do not live at the end of the earth, there is another, possibly better option than either of these two things (although it has some inherent sustainability issues, too): E-fish. I picked up 5 lbs of Pacific mackerel and 2 lbs of horse mackerel, or aji, from them recently. They just signed up a new fisherman on the West Coast, and as soon as they offered it, I put some in my cart (my kid is a salted mackerel nut).
I’ve posted frequently about mackerel, which I just gut and salt overnight, then freeze and cook the fillets from frozen. But I'd never worked with aji before, and it was a trip! First off … I didn’t know they had scales!
They aren’t the kind of scales you bust out a scaler for; just scrape them with the side of your knife and they slough off. But they also have this weird strip of harder scales right on the tail on either side (you can see my bad job of removing it above). And you really should remove it! I didn’t for a few, just because it was a hassle, but it means you have to be very fiddly when eating that section, and you can’t eat the skin. To remove them, you have to use a quick, shallow, sawing motion with a sharp knife, working against the “grain” of the scales.
There’s also a line of bones along the dorsal side that you should probably remove for cleaner eating. I did not do that for the aji I salted for grilling, and it is super annoying.
The stuff from E-fish is so fresh that you can eat it raw (if it’s safe to eat that specific fish raw). I’m not sure if these fish were superfrozen on the boat, but even if mackerel is super frozen, you want to be careful about eating it raw. The main danger is scombrotoxin, and there’s no way to tell if the toxin has been produced; the only way to be sure is to have a HAACP-type system in place where the temperature of the product is guaranteed to have been within a certain safe range from the time it comes out of the water.
Not so with horse mackerel, which can be eaten raw as long as it’s quite fresh. And these babies were fresh! So I had to try it. Prepping fish for sashimi is not my strong suit, but I did my best. With horse mackerel, that means pin-boning the fillets and skinning them—you can literally use your fingers to peel the skin off the fillet (it’s quite satisfying). Then just slice on a bias.
I should note that I think pin-boning the horse mackerel is atypical (not 100% sure). It might be more efficient and neater to just use a V-cut along the line of pin bones and remove them that way. Next time I get some horse mackerel (there will definitely be a next time, they’re crazy good), I’ll do the V-cut. Because while the cooked salted aji is very tasty, aji raw is out of this world.
The mysteries of the Guerilla cookie.
The mystery of the article about the Guerilla cookie’s popularity.
Ramen in space! (Possibly the worst food to eat in zero G.)
Always startling to see a bowl of Momofuku’s ramen. It just looks … shambolic.
Maybe cringe to have a “favorite” government official, but Yellen is good.
I am going to try Andrew Janjigian’s recommendation for continuous sourdough starter maintenance. I stash mine in the fridge, and the recovery/replenishment process have become so annoying (basically because my starter is DYING each time.)
This Bengali spot looks good. Which reminds me of the weird street cart war going on in Jackson Heights over the first fuchka.
Tea and mortality rates in eighteenth century England.
McDonald’s is opening a new chain called CosMc’s? This has to be a joke.