nooldsetter #.0040

The sazón.

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No recipe or recipe-like things today, but a bunch of ideas. My apologies, as I thought I’d scheduled this to go out last week, but I apparently didn’t, and I was on a work trip to Seattle and didn’t have time to sort it all out.

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Book Bit

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, “Darling, let me dip into it,” to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: “Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”

From Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, tr. William Weaver.

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Work Stuff

As always, we’ve been publishing stuff at a rapid clip over at chefsteps dot com. (And, as always, I have been doing a bad job of highlighting that work here.)

Here’s a selection:

Tim Chin’s Hainanese Chicken Rice (don’t forget the Ginger-Scallion Sauce!).

Tim also graced us with homemade Hor Fun and a killer Beef Chow Fun recipe.

The final (for now?) installments in Jonathan Zaragoza’s mariscos package:

Caldo de Siete Mares (like a cioppino, but actually good) (deal with it).

Camarones al Mojo de Ajo (garlic shrimp, but the seasoning is turbocharged and it’s cooked in a wok over coals) (I have bullied my brother into allowing me to make this on his grill this weekend).

Mariscos Sazón (a spice mix used in both of the above recipes).

Pescado Zarandeado (whole, butterflied, marinated, grilled, do it).

In the time since I first drew up this list, we’ve also published Jonathan’s Cochinita Pibil recipe.

Matthew Woolen updated his Cherry Pie recipe…it’s the cherriest cherry pie that ever was.

He also made the blueberriest Blueberry Muffins that ever were.

Kyl Haselbauer has been doing funny things with pork and cheese products like Sous Vide Spam and Butter Burgers. (And, again, since I wrote this, we published his Microwave Pulled Pork.)

We did a whole package of stuff around building your own hibachi/konro/yakidai out of firebricks. Nicholas Gavin developed two excellent recipes: Adana Kebabs and Tsukune. Matthew pitched in and developed a lavash recipe to go with the adana…which is amazing, if you think about it. (Is there another publication that would do that?)

I was most impressed by the kebab parametric Nicholas did (no paywall on this). These parametrics are a ton of work, all around, but the quality of the work on this one is so high. Look at the cross-sections of the cooked kebabs! (This isn’t paywalled, so don’t be shy: Look!) Not just fascinating; the skill you need to get the ground meat to look like that, like the literal technical skill of chopping, mixing, forming, and cooking ground meat according to the processes outlined by recipes from various sources, from various cuisines, is…well, it’s a lot. And it reveals how different seemingly identical recipes (adana, seekh, and kubideh kebabs are very, very similar!) can yield visibly different results. (They obviously taste different because of the spicing.)

Finally, we’ve also sort of relaunched our YouTube channel. If you don’t mind, and would like to support ChefSteps, I’d very much appreciate it if you subscribed and threw our videos some likes. (All these videos—and a bunch more—are on the website for subscribers, of course.)

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The Mariscos Sazón-athon

Of all of Jonathan Zaragoza’s newest tranche of recipes, I knew I wanted to make the shrimp the most. Despite my continuing aversion to eating shrimp and making shrimp and recommending other people make shrimp, I figured if there was a shrimp dish to make, it would be his: He recommends putting a wok directly on a bed of coals!

Also, the sazón. I’ve been looking at that recipe for a while—these recipes are in production for far longer than you’d think—and it just seemed, well, crazy to me. It’s a got granulated chicken bouillon, Goya Sazón, ground dried shrimp, dried chiles…it obviously was going to taste good, but I was curious about the quality of that taste. Would it be as flavorful as all the flavor boosters suggest it would be? Would it be…too salty? What, in the end, did it actually taste like?

So I made the shrimp. And they’re nuts. The wok in coals thing is quite fun, but it isn’t entirely necessary; you could easily replicate the recipe in a wok on a stove just by extending the cooking times slightly and cooking in batches. The recipe is so interesting because, when scaled properly, the sauce does emulsify rapidly once you add the butter. I did it in two batches, as I used much smaller shrimp (I cooked them whole, didn’t split them), and the first batch (which I was more careful with) came out of the pan with a beautifully emulsified sauce. The second came out with a broken sauce.

[Josh Niland voice]: Shrimp, in a sauce of its bones.

That being said, that broken sauce is basically a pool of super flavorful liquid lying under garlic butter, so it’s still pretty incredible. I’d bullied my brother into letting me use his work and grill, and both of us could not stop eating until all the shrimp were long gone and half the sauce mopped up with bread.

But once I made the sazón, I still had it around. Thing I love about condiment/spice mix recipes is putting them to use in as many ways as I can. What was so interesting about the shrimp was how balanced the flavor was. Jonathan hit upon a great combination of liquid (water in the butter, the Valentina hot sauce, the Worcestershire sauce and soy, lime juice), fat (the butter, the oil for searing), and seasoning. That list of ingredients just sounds crazy, and crazy salty, but the result was…not. It was so nicely seasoned—definitely salty, but not overpoweringly so, and definitely MSG-y, but your lips and forebrain aren’t vibratin

So I started small—dipping cucumber slices in salt and sazón, because the sazón needs a little salt. Then I did lazy: I stole some of the mini bags of Goldfish and Cheez-Its we put in our kid’s lunch bag and showered the snacks with sazón and Valentina—the key is to do a little sazón, shake the bag, then do a little hot sauce, then shake the bag, and then repeat a couple times until everything is a squidgy sort of crunchy-soggy mess…delicious.

But then I also made some stir-fried Romano beans (blanched in salted water, shocked, patted dry), seared then sauced, pretty much in the same way as the shrimp, and they were outrageously good.

Since I had great farmers market cucumbers, and a lot of them, that led me to do a similar thing with them: seeded and cut into planks, then seared, then sauced with a mix of sazón, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and cucumber pulp. If you’ve never had a stir-fried cucumber, you have to try it: floral, charred, crunchy, and soft, all at the same time. (They do, however, require a fair amount of salty stuff—but it’s better to use salty liquids than salt, since salt makes cucumbers floppy…gonna write about this in another noodsletter.)

While I was doing that, I figured…why not let mariscos sazón fry some rice, and there you have it: mariscos sazón fried rice.

I still have a fair amount of sazón around, but the last thing I did with it was a burger—sazón in the patty and sazón in a fresh chili-spiked mayo—with American and Swiss and an (honestly) immoderate amount of thinly sliced red onion. I’m usually a smash burger guy, but this burger was very good. (In part, of course, because it had been infused with a seasoning mix that has three forms of MSG.)

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“News”

The rise and fall and rise of Ample Hills Creamery.

Chemical degreaser-flavored steak skewers. (Both parties are at fault! Don’t use dirty dishes! Don’t leave dirty dishes lying around!)

Since I have pointed out Sietsema’s bad photos, I should point out when he does a decent job, too.

Copycat cookbooks! (Funnily enough, I met Joanne Molinaro last week. Fascinating person!)

Not food-related, but fascinating essay by Charlie Savage about his role in the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz conspiracy theory/mashup.

Starvation cult suspect dies in custody after hunger strike

The idea that ozempic can quiet “food noise” is both intriguing and nightmarish. I don’t know if I like my food noise so much as I can’t imagine living without it.

Ramen shacks, taco stands, numbered pho houses the world over all serve a variation of their unique fare. The Midwest cafés are no different. In this case, mostly hot white, brown, and ashen green vegetables stewed in bacon fat. For spice, salt, pepper, garlic powder, bottled hot sauce. Unlike ramen, dim sum, the Irish pub, and the hamburger, this fare has never been exported — as yet. You’ll find xiao long bao in Cincinnati, but you won’t find a chili joint in Shanghai. Not just because in Shanghai, the bean is a sweet. 

The rest is equally incomprehensible.

Wish NYC had a simple, no-frills conveyor belt sushi spot that was good quality, but instead we get this thingamabob.

The premise of this article meant to get you to click on an Amazon link is quite odd: The father grills Costco steaks with just salt and pepper and they are incredible but the child cannot figure out how he does it. The father just got the product the child is hawking, which makes it easier for the father to do the thing that the child can’t figure out. What? Just say the thermometer helps you replicate your dad’s mid steaks!

I guess the whatever the thing was that happened in Russia between Putin and his pet general is over at this point, but this bit of the generals bio is interesting:

Born in 1961 when St. Petersburg was called Leningrad, Mr. Prigozhin was sent to prison in 1981 for robbery and other crimes, according to Meduza, an online investigative publication.

After serving his nine-year sentence, he opened a hot-dog stand, eventually leading to an entrepreneurial career starting restaurants and convenience stores.

This Washington Post article about ultra-processed foods is interesting all by itself, but it also shows how the NYT is leagues ahead of WaPo in their UX and graphics. It’s like different generations.

Pizza in Pompeii.

Ryan Sutton, formerly critic at Bloomberg and Eater, has started a restaurant review substack.

Gonna make this slow-roasted tomato recipe from Dorie Greenspan when the tomatoes start showing up.

Tunisians and tuna: a love story.

Stuart, Florida, where I had bought a copy from the Dead People’s Book Stall, a permanent stall in the flea market that inherited the collections of the recently deceased. I lugged it home along with a Hawaiian cookbook that suggested stirring chopped canned clams into a brick of softened neufchatel. I cannot remember whether he was alive or dead at that point; if he was alive, I was not his acolyte, but I liked the fact that he was there. If he was dead, I felt a brief stay in my own execution.

Not criticizing the author here, but vegetarian writers writing about lab-grown meat seems like a tricky proposition because you can’t really trust their taste?

Misophonia, or when you really hate listening to your partner eat.

What a funny story: Janet Yellen made a mushroom dish go viral in China.