Home-Made Beverages
For all y’all beer/liquor/home cooking/vintage cookbook enthusiasts out there, here’s a PDF of Home-Made Beverages, an anonymous book by A Practical Brewer, published in 1919. It has recipes for beer, cordial, liqueur, and many alcoholic liquids. The PDF I’ve uploaded is a scan of a copy of a faded booklet from 1919, so while it’s legible, it’s less than crisp and clear. Right-click, save as, and wait for it to finish downloading– the file is 137 MB.
Oxtail Soup
I’ve been doing a lot of cooking in the past couple of weeks (risotto alla salsiccia, lobster soup, baked pastas, cornbread muffins, and Earl Grey tea muffins, among other things), whether because the weather is (nominally, if not actually) changing and I cook more often in the fall and winter, or because I have more free time or what. Anyway, one of the things I tried last weekend was ggori gom tang, oxtail soup. The NYT published this recipe by Momofuku’s David Chang a while back, and I’d been meaning to try it ever since.
Now, the primary reasons that I don’t cook much Korean food are that I never learned from my mom and that I still haven’t found a good cookbook. When I do find a cookbook, I’ll flip through it and find that either (a) none of this stuff is what my mom makes or (b) that’s not how my mom makes it! Fail. Chang’s recipe falls into category (b), but I figured it was worth a shot, anyway. Even though it’s not how my mom makes gom tang, it’s a basis for experimentation. All bolding is mine.
Time: About 4 hours
2 1/2 pounds oxtails, trimmed and cut in 2 1/2-inch pieces
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large onion, sliced thinly WTF? Onions? My mom doesn’t use onions.
1 sheet konbu (dried kelp, available in specialty food markets and health food stores) WTF? My mom doesn’t use konbu, either. Is this Korean?
1 large daikon radish, about 1 1/2 pounds, peeled and cut into 1-inch-thick rounds Ok, my mom used to use daikon (or some other tuber radish thing, they’re all called moo as far as I’m concerned).
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce, or as needed
2 to 4 tablespoons thinly sliced scallions, for garnish
Cooked white rice for serving (optional) Optional?! Bap is not optional for gook! Half the point of making gook is so you can dump bap in it!
I decided to give the onion a try, since the scallions had tiny onion bulbs at their bases and I had some leftover onions. Passed on the konbu, because I didn’t have any on hand and regarded it with suspicion as an interloper, anyway. Passed on the daikon, because I don’t like it and always picked it out of the soup when I was little (hence my mom used to, but no longer does, use daikon in gook) – I thought about using it in to add flavor and then throwing it out, but that felt wasteful.
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Season oxtails liberally with salt and pepper and place in a roasting pan. Roast until golden brown, about 30 minutes. Transfer oxtails to a plate (do not turn off oven); add sliced onion to unwashed roasting pan. Roast onions until tender and golden, about 15 minutes. Allow onions to cool, then cover and refrigerate until needed; leave oxtails at room temperature. I don’t recall my mom roasting the oxtails, let alone roasting onions in the drippings, but it’s an excuse to use the roasting tray and it can’t hurt, right? The onions smelled delicious.
2. In a large casserole or stockpot, bring 10 cups water to a simmer. Add konbu and simmer for 4 minutes. Discard konbu and add 1 tablespoon salt and daikon. Simmer until daikon is tender but not falling apart, about 30 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove daikon and set aside. Add oxtails and simmer, covered, until tender, about 2 1/2 hours. Using a slotted spoon, remove oxtails to a sheet tray and cool, reserving liquid in pot. Turn off heat. I skipped the konbu and daikon, so basically I simmered the oxtails for two and a half hours. Brought back memories of my mom making soup and leaving the pot on the stove for hours.
3. Reserve some of the meatiest oxtails (one or two per serving) for presentation; cover and keep warm. Pick meat from remaining oxtails, discarding excess fat, and set meat aside. Um, yeah, no. I left the meat on the bone so that the bones would add flavor, and kept the fat in for the same reason.
4. Add roasted sliced onions to broth, bring to a boil and reduce by a third. Return oxtail meat and daikon to broth and heat through. Season to taste with soy sauce and black pepper. Ladle into bowls and garnish each with reserved oxtails and a sprinkle of scallions. If desired, serve with white rice. Forgot the soy sauce, oops, and used salt instead. If the broth tastes bland or dull, it’s not salted enough.
Yield: 2 to 4 servings. Depending on your appetite; this will make a hell of a lot more than four servings for me, especially as I’m diluting the soup with more water (see below). 10c of water made for a soup that was quite flavorful but too thick for me (Korean soups are usually quite thin until you dump the rice in.).
In the end, it tasted great. Not quite like how my mom makes it, but still good. The roasted onions added a tinge of distinctively cooked-onion-y sweetness and roasting the meat made the soup much, much darker in color than I expected, although that didn’t affect the flavor. It’s easy to make and once you have a big pot of it, you can eat it for days (perfect for a quick dinner after a long day). I think that next time, I’ll roast the meat but skip the onions (the sweetness was nice, but it’s not how I like my gom tang), and add extra scallions for their tangy taste, which acts as a nice counterpoint to the rich, meaty broth.
Miscellaneous note: the soup is very, very fatty. If that matters to you, you can trim the meat before roasting or chill the soup overnight and skim the fat off. I left all the fat on and didn’t bother with the skimming step. What I’m doing instead is saving the bones and chunks of fat and throwing them back into the soup pot with some more water, then simmering the soup so as to stretch the broth for as long as possible. The meat’s nice, sure, but my favorite part is eating rice in the broth. It’s rich, warm, and good, and feels like kitchen love. It’s also cheap.
Another note: when it cooled off, the soup congealed, due to the gelatin in the bones. It looked disgusting, but it turned back into a liquid after being heated up. I don’t recall that ever happening when my mom made soup, so perhaps it’s a function of the roasting or maybe she just used a higher proportion of water to meat.
Chicken Stock
Stock is a handy thing to have on hand, be it chicken, vegetable, beef, or some mishmosh of leftover vegetables and meat bones. I suspect that’s how it originated, as a way to extract every last bit of flavor and nutrition from food: boil some water with the bones from yesterday’s meat and the leftover fluffy tops of vegetables and voila, that’s another meal squeezed out of your food! I don’t need it often, but when I want to try a soup or a risotto or something else that requires stock, it’s nice to be able to pull some out of the freezer. Canned stock is usually laden with preservatives, chemicals, and tastes too salty, and although it’s cheaper in terms of cash than making stock from scratch, that’s because the costs are hidden from the consumer and passed onto the population at large as externalities. Food politics aside, though, I like making things from scratch. There’s just something comforting and fulfilling about making a risotto from start to finish, and having a pot slowly simmering on the stove for hours gives the kitchen a warm, homey feel.
Stock recipes vary by cuisine, with each cuisine using it for different dishes and using different ingredients based on what’s indigenous to the area. The recipe I usually make is an Italian one from the excellent cookbook Pasta Fresca, by Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman. Quite frankly, it’s a bit on the sweet side and is a funny brown color rather than being perfectly clear, but I suspect that’s because I didn’t put enough salt in and was too lazy to strain it more than once.
Utensils:
Stock pot, 8-10 qt
Spoon, to skim off the scum and fat
Colander or sieve, clean dishtowel, and big mixing bowl to strain the stock
1 2-3 pound whole chicken, with feet if possible
1 pound chicken backs and necks
Water
1 carrot, trimmed of its leafy top (or not)
3 stalks celery, trimmed (or not)
3 sprigs parsley
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 bay leaf
salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper or a few peppercorns
On the meat:
1. If you buy meat often, one thing you can do is get a whole chicken, eat the breasts/thighs/wings/whatever, then toss the neck, back, and other bones in the freezer until you want to make a stock. In the long run, it’s cheaper than buying meat pre-cut, as you get more meat with the bones as a bonus.
2. Bones: both local butchers and the meat counters at grocery stores have backs and necks on hand, and they’ll bag some up for you if you ask. Even the Shaw’s in New Haven, which is not an upscale Shaw’s, had marrow bones, and they were helpful and nice when I wandered in last year saying, “This cookbook says I need…marrow bones? For…beef stock?”
3. If you don’t want to deal with a whole chicken, you can make up the weight with odds and ends: more necks and backs, wings, etc. This is what I did, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying a whole chicken.
On the vegetables:
You can trim them of their leafy bits if you like, but if you don’t have another use for them, I figure you might as well toss them in as not. Rinse them well, making sure to get all the dirt off the skin and out of the crevices, particularly the celery. There’s always dirt on the bottom of my celery.
Wash the chicken carefully, rinsing out any blood that remains in the cavity, and gently pull off the extra fat attached to the breast and tail areas. Place the whole chicken and necks in a soup pot. Cover with water so that it is 4 inches above the chicken and bones. Bring to a boil, and carefully skim off all the scum as it rises to the surface. When there is no more scum, add all the remaining ingredients, lower the heat, and simmer, partly covered, for at least 1 hour, or 2 hours for a richer broth. The more slowly the broth bubbles, the clearer the soup will be. Strain the broth, reserving the chicken and vegetables or discard them, if desired. Either use the broth immediately or refrigerate it for later use. If you do refrigerate it, remove the fat from the top when it has congealed.
Straining the stock: stick the big mixing bowl in the sink and place the colander or strainer in or above it, lined with the clean dishtowel. Slowly pour the stock into the colander; go too fast and it’ll overflow. Once it’s all transferred, strain it back into the pot, and again if you want the stock extra-clear. Store in medium-sized tupperware, which thaw more quickly than large ones and have the added benefit of being about the right amount of stock for one meal (for me; I cook for one person). I stuck out a tupperware of stock to thaw last night, and it was mostly melted with a sizable chunk of ice floating in the center this morning. It had to be heated for the risotto anyway, so I dumped the whole thing into a pot, covered it, and turned the heat on low to gently warm it through.
Making stock is usually a weekend project. It doesn’t require much attention, but it takes time and a relatively uncluttered stove top and sink. Once it’s done, however, I have enough tupperwares of stock to last for months, depending on how often I use it.
Dinner: fava beans and bruschette
I cleaned out my fridge of its usual standbys before going to my parents’ house for the holiday and didn’t go grocery shopping when I came back. Today, I came home from work to
One heel of stale bread
Three pods of fava beans
One overripe persimmon
One bulb of garlic
and the usual inhabitants of the refrigerator: butter for baking, eggs for pasta, pecorino romano and parmigiano, the jar of salsa I keep forgetting about, crushed chili flakes, half a roll of salami from Mastrelli’s in the Ferry Building, and lemons from the tree in my parents’ back yard. The problem with waiting to go shopping until the Tuesday farmers’ market is that Monday nights require dinners, too.
Bruschetta
Slice the stale bread into slices about 1/2″-3/4″ in thick, place in a stainless steel frying pan over low heat. Cover with a lid to retain moisture, softening the bread. Check frequently to see that it’s toasting and not drying out or burning.
Peel a clove of garlic and rub it on the bread.
Drizzle olive oil over it or dip in olive oil.
Fava beans
Mince a clove of garlic and mix it with olive oil in a frying pan or sauce pan. Leave it to allow the garlic to flavor the oil.
Peel the fava beans out of the pod, then shell them out of their individual skins. Stick your fingernails in them and pull away until you can see the bean inside; the skins are surprisingly thick.
Put the frying pan on low heat until the garlic begins to sizzle, smell, and turn golden.
Toss the fava beans into the pan with a bit of crushed red pepper and a grind of black pepper and a squirt of lemon juice. Mix it all around, toss in a spoonful of water, and cover the pan. The water will steam and cook the beans.
After a few minutes, take the cover off and let the rest of the water steam away. Stir the beans around until they look tender and the skin blisters a bit, but before the garlic burns, and eat the beans with the oil and herbs.
That’s pretty much the story of my post-thesis eating habits last term: bruschetta and a random vegetable: Swiss chard or spinach sauteed with garlic, boiled soy beans, baby carrots, salad. It was hot and I was tired of cooking, so I went for something simple and low fuss, yet tasty. Bruschetta, with really powerful garlic, really good bread (it has to be the right kind for toasting–french bread is too light, pugliese is too heavy and thick, and ciabatta is just right), and flavorful olive oil. I like the Rustic Rounds from Acme Bakery in SF and olive oil from Stonehouse California Olive Oil. Stonehouse’s House Blend is a little fruity and has a strong taste of ripe olives at the end. It’s a refreshingly olive-y olive oil and it’s reasonably priced, given its quality – a 750mL bottle for $16.
