In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
Over the last few years, Korean barbecue has gained fresh relevance in the United States. Whether served on hot dog buns in Manhattan, tortillas in Los Angeles or rice in Korean restaurants around the country, the sweet, oniony flavors of bulgoki, japchae and galbi are incredibly delicious and increasingly popular.
When I was a kid, bulgoki (also spelled bulgogi, pulgoki, pulgogi and any number of other ways) was a staple in my house. My parents, who lived in Korea before I was born, loved the stuff and would cook it on an electric griddle at our dinner table. As my sisters and I got older, we got involved in the fun; some of my first cooking experiences involved flipping bulgoki with a pair of bamboo tongs.
I've played with amounts and ingredients, but my mother's basic bulgoki recipe is fantastic. In fact, my only major change is in the dipping sauce: while my parents used light soy sauce with a sprinkle of pepper, I prefer a more traditional garlic/vinegar sauce, which I've included below. Get the recipe for bulgoki after the jump.
Some cooks reach for Sriracha, the ubiquitous Thai hot sauce, in a pinch. Others swear by soy sauce. And then there are those who refuse to reveal (*cough, cough* butter) what made the dish you just demolished delicious. For our part, we've developed a tiny -- OK, midsized -- crush on an infused chili oil, and we need to talk about it.
Sid Wainer & Son's Domaine de Provence pepper-spiked oil is fantastic. A drizzle of the fiery goodness rescues storebought and homemade guacamole alike with a heady, late-blooming heat on the palate. According to owner Henry Wainer, it's also tasty on bruschetta. We plan to carry it on our person all summer -- potentially awkward in the 90-degree swelter -- using guerilla tactics to douse any crustaceans and pork we spy sizzling on the grills of party hosts. (Brooklyn, consider yourself warned.)
Wainer has been equally passionate about the oil since meeting its producer at a dinner in France 18 years ago. Such culinary serendipity, he declares, "enriches the world." Can't argue with that.
If you devour Terra chips and wonder why potatoes are the only veggie that gets such beloved treatment, or if you love everything fried, you must try yuca fries.
Yuca is that large, kinda scary looking vegetable that pops up all over the place now, but still isn't getting its culinary due. It's starchy, full of good calcium, and even a taste of Vitamin C -- basically a sweeter sort of potato with a slightly different flavor and texture. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy to prepare as our ol' potatoes. The skin is much firmer, and cutting it is more like a butternut squash than a potato.
Nevertheless, when you throw it into some hot oil, then spray it with salt and seasoning, it's french fries with a twist -- familiar enough that it's almost like old-hat, with a new and fresh flavor that ups the ante. Since it's quite a firm root, yuca is often boiled first, although the above fries were just thrown raw into some oil cooking away on med-high heat until they were crunchy. And of course, like potatoes, they can be made into some rather tasty chips.
As an eating and cooking culture, we're super-glued to our potatoes, and with good reason: They're delicious, versatile, and easy to prepare. But even as great as the taters are, sometimes other roots need their time in the spotlight.
My Culinary Degradation post, which ran in February, inspired a fair bit of competition among my readers. While I managed to come up with a few moderately-disturbing food choices, my readers really ran with the idea, suggesting outrageous beer and ice cream combinations and fried foods that bordered on blasphemy. Last, but not least, they also suggested some monster burgers that strained the imagination, not to mention the digestive system.
I'm no stranger to big burgers, having worked my way through Red Robin's entire menu, but the Heart Attack Grill's Quadruple Bypass Burger is far, far out of my league. With four 1/2-pound patties, four slices of bacon, three slices of cheese, lettuce, and tomato, it is estimated to contain 8,000 calories. While I can't think of a lot of reasons to visit Chandler Arizona, I may still have to make a visit.
One reader, Astin, recommended Dangerous Dan's, a restaurant in Toronto. Their "Colossal Colon Clogger Combo" contains 24 ounces of beef, a quarter pound of bacon, a quarter pound of cheese, and two fried eggs. For $23.95, it comes with a large shake and a side of gravy and cheese curd-laden fries.
In a recent marketing campaign, Oscar Meyer proclaimed that its "Deli Creations" flatbread sandwiches were "blogworthy."
I beg to differ.
Nobody likes to be manipulated, and I would argue that bloggers like it less than most. There's something about spending a few lonesome hours a day cranking out content that really ups the curmudgeon quotient and makes us a mite persnickety about our production process. While other blogs, including Gawker, might not be too picky about where they get their tips, I tend to get mighty cranky when multimillion dollar corporations tell me what is and is not blogworthy.
With that in mind, here's something that really is blogworthy: fried bologna sandwiches. For anybody who hasn't tried this backwoods delicacy, the concept may sound a little questionable. However, the combination of bologna and heat produces a dish that is incredibly delicious and startlingly different from a basic bologna sandwich.
We always think of the delicious potatoes falling into the sizzling hot oil, but what about apples?
Above you can watch Chef Jason Hill make apple fries. Oh yes, he takes apples, slices 'em like fries, fries 'em up, and tops them with some cinnamon sugar. Unlike potatoes, which benefit from the double-frying technique, these guys are simple and quick -- just a coating of corn starch and into the oil they go. The simplicity and speed of this makes it perfect for that wow-treat for company. It won't take hours to make, and your guests will get a pleasantly sweet surprise.
Hill pairs the fries with a quick sauce of marshmallow and cream cheese, but I'm thinking a delicious yogurt-based dip would be perfect with this.
From my great-grandmother (called MaMa by her descendants), an inimitable Southern cook and hostess, I inherited a wooden spoon and a set of Chantilly silver that she purchased for herself from wages earned on the Singer Sewing Machine sales floor. Recently, I found out that another piece of MaMa's kitchen is still in the family: her West Bend Deep Fryer, which she purchased in the mid-1970s and passed along to my mother when my parents bought their first beach condo.
As an over-active child, I paid no attention to the equipment my parents used to fry the bream and bass that my brother and I caught in a lake near our condo. Fast forward two decades, during which my family indulged in fried foods less and less. The fryer had fallen into disuse until a few weeks ago, when I decided to try my hand at homemade French fries to accompany some rib-eyes that my cousin sent for Christmas. I was spending a week with my family at our current condo on the Florida panhandle, and my mother mentioned that I could use the old deep fryer.
Heirloom silver and an old wooden spoon are one thing, but antique appliances? Between the fryer's advanced age and my complete inexperience with fries, I was apprehensive to say the least. Find a picture of the results after the jump.
I generally try to eat wisely and well. I avoid greasy foods, turn my back on excessively processed ingredients, constantly rail against high fructose corn syrup, and try to eat all my veggies. Unfortunately, however, just as my day-to-day dietary Dr. Jekyll is upright and intelligent, I also have a culinary Mr. Hyde, who comes out when I find myself confronted with particularly delectable deep fried delicacies. Generally, this isn't much of a problem, as the fried food in my neighborhood mostly consists of unmentionable pig parts and the occasional codfish pancake. Moreover, since I've moved away from Southwest Virginia, I am no longer tempted by the Salem Fair, a horrifying assemblage of rides, petting zoos, and oil-soaked goodies that used to be the highlight of my year.
Recently, however, I came across a website for Big Tex, the Texas State Fair. While I will always maintain a warm spot for the food options at Salem, it is painfully clear that Southwest Virginia's yearly orgy of deep-fried wonders pales in comparison to the pure, unrestrained genius of Texas' chefs. With items like "Chicken Fried Bacon," "Texas Fried Jelly Belly Beans," and "Fried Pop Rocks Fundae," the Lone Star state has staked an unquestionable claim to national fryolator dominance. I was particularly impressed by "Fire and Ice," a battered, deep-fried pinapple ring that is covered in banana-flavored whipped cream that has been dipped in liquid nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen? These guys are GODS.
Anyway, the fair is over for this year...but I'm looking ahead to next fall. Only 330 days to go!
There are a lot of different kinds of pots and pans out there, and everyone's singing the praises of one or the other. Ignoring makers, Harold McGee of The New York Times put the different metals to the test.
We know aluminum pans to be the cheapest and lightest. Stainless steel looks beautiful forever and functions well at very high heat. Cast iron holds heat longer and is safe for popping in the oven after you've done what you need to on the stove--and it's even rumored to add nutritional iron to foods! Copper, the usual cream of the crop; typically the most expensive and prettiest, conducts heat evenly and quickly. Most copper pots and pans are coated with stainless steel (older copper pans coated with tin or nickel may be harmful, check your pans).
According to McGee's home test, electrical or open flame on your stove doesn't make much of difference, but the pans definitely all behave differently. His conclusions? To each his own.
Nothing tastes like a good blackening. And it's not even hard.
Many people shy away from blackened foods, thinking that blackening means charring the meat, the vegetable, whatever is being blackened.
Au contraire! Blackening refers to what happens to the Cajun spices! The spices get really hot and kazaam! They explode in the heat, turning black and infusing your fish, meat, vegetables or what-have-you with their flavor. Cajun, delicious, and a lot better for you than frying.
Check out instructions on how to make two seriously delicious blackened catfish fillets after the jump.
"Fear of both fried food and the act of frying means that doughnuts are strictly outsourced," writes Kelly Alexander in the New York Times Magazine. But it wasn't always so. For centuries doughnuts (and crullers, and fritters, and beignets) were staples of home cooks, who weren't afraid of a little hot lard. And there's no reason you should be either, says Alexander - doughnuts, a combination of flour, eggs and milk with baking powder or baking soda, are easy to make.
The article includes recipes for churros (Mexican stick doughnuts) with bourbon-spiked chocolate sauce, basic powdered cake donuts, and Earl Gray tea flavored donuts.
With Cinco de Mayo right around the corner, my brain is buzzing with thoughts of Mexican food -- burritos, tamales, chorizo. But at some point, thoughts switch to faux Mexican dishes, the US concoctions that are more fusion than ethnic. This then leads me to my first forays into recipe creation. I've been cooking and baking since I was a little kid, but it wasn't until I hit puberty and got sick of those too-simple Old El Paso taco mixes that I discovered that recipes are nice, but not necessary.
My mother handed the kitchen over to me, and told me to make my own tacos, since I wasn't happy with the dry, plain mix. In a flurry, I was pulling out old spices that were covered with dust, sniffing, shrugging, and throwing them in. I scoured the fridge for anything that might work and added that. In a blink, I had a meal that was better than any powder or simple sauce. It was just as easy, there was no extra mess, and the result was so very worth it.
Check out the "recipe" after the jump, and let me know what your first unique creation was.
If you haven't discovered the joys of cast iron, now's the time to start. It's cheap, distributes heat evenly and, if properly seasoned, is nonstick. Seasoning the pan involves filling in the invisible cracks and pores in the pan's surface by sealing on a layer of grease. Here's a quick method for seasoning a new pan:
Heat the oven to 300 degrees. Rub pan with a thin layer of lard or vegetable shortening. Place pan upside down in oven with rack positioned beneath it to catch extra drippings. Cook for 2 hours.
Repeating this seasoning method several times helps create a better nonstick surface. Also, try to wash out the pan while it's still warm and dry with a paper towel to preserve the seasoning.
Not long ago I posted about an event at the Astor Center in NYC, the annual Head to Tail Dinner put on by Chris Cosentino of Incanto restaurant in San Francisco. I was lucky enough to attend and want to tell you all about it. We'll go behind the scenes in the kitchen before, and just prior to the meal; and follow all the way through the dinner itself. It all started three days prior when I was invited to join the chefs in the kitchen as they started prepping for the dinner.
Chris and his pal, Chef Jonnatan Leiva of the Jack Falstaff Restaurant in San Francisco had flown in on a red-eye after finishing work late the night before. With what little sleep they had on the plane, they went straight to work in the Astor Center kitchen, as they engaged on a three-day binge of Red Bull to keep them alert and local microbrews to keep them sane. Other chefs from around New York state showed up to volunteer and help put the event together.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
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I generally try to eat wisely and well. I avoid greasy foods, turn my back on excessively processed ingredients, constantly rail against high fructose corn syrup, and try to eat all my veggies. Unfortunately, however, just as my day-to-day dietary Dr. Jekyll is upright and intelligent, I also have a culinary Mr. Hyde, who comes out when I find myself confronted with particularly delectable deep fried delicacies. Generally, this isn't much of a problem, as the fried food in my neighborhood mostly consists of unmentionable pig parts and the occasional codfish pancake. Moreover, since I've moved away from Southwest Virginia, I am no longer tempted by the 
Nothing tastes like a good blackening. And it's not even hard.
If you haven't discovered the joys of cast iron, now's the time to start. It's cheap, distributes heat evenly and, if properly seasoned, is nonstick. Seasoning the pan involves filling in the invisible cracks and pores in the pan's surface by sealing on a layer of grease. Here's a quick method for seasoning a new pan:
Not long ago I posted about an event at the Astor Center in NYC, the annual 
Second Helping of Slashfood - June 19
Competitive-Eating Contest to Pit Humans Against Elephants
The Backyard Boom - The Hungry Bride
