Cookthink blog

Happy Independence Day

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:00:40 -0500

We're cutting out early today for long weekends in Alabama, North Carolina, Delaware, Maine, Montreal and Paris. Have a great weekend. Exciting news next week about the new Cookthink homepage.

Root Source Challenge #22: Pastis

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:53:31 -0500

I still have the Ricard that I got after touring the company's pastis factory near Marseilles, in 1993. Pastis is the refreshing, anise-flavored apéritif popular all over France but especially in southern France. Usually, you just dilute it with a little water and drink over an ice cube or two.

But pastis is also interesting to use as an ingredient for its licorice-y aroma and clean flavor. Do you have a favorite recipe or cocktail that uses pastis? Send it to us for the Root Source Challenge #22.

Our favorite recipe will be featured in the Root Source and published on Cookthink.com. The author will receive a copy of of Ralph Brennan’s New Orleans Seafood Cookbook. Submissions are due by 12pm EST Tuesday, July 15.

Send us an email to rootsourcechallenge [AT] cookthink [DOT] com with your name, email address, blog URL and a permalink to the recipe. Please put "Root Source Challenge #22: Pastis" in the subject line of your email. Click here for the complete rules and to see past winners. Good luck!

(Thanks to The Lisa Ekus Group for providing us with books for the Root Source Challenge.)

I'm craving a Mediterranean marinade for pork tenderloin

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:30:18 -0500

I just got down to the North Carolina coast for the fourth of July. Tonight, I'm breaking in the grill with a marinated pork tenderloin. The marinade is inspired by Italy and southern France: I chopped together the zest of a lemon, 2 peeled cloves of garlic, and the needles from one big sprig of rosemary. I put the mixture in a ziploc bag and added in a quarter cup of olive oil and the juice of the lemon. I seasoned it with kosher salt, cayenne and freshly ground black pepper. As long as I don't overcook it (meat thermometer ready), it should be pretty good. Tomorrow, it's ribs.

Bee by bee: the epidemiology of colonly collapse

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:01:37 -0500

If you missed it in Monday's NYT, be sure to read Jonathan David Farley's op-ed on using mathematical models to help figure out why bee colonies are disappearing "and how many more colonies stand to vanish."

Good Couple: Watermelon and Mint

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:04:34 -0500

In editing tomorrow's Root Source: Watermelon -- subscribe here if you haven't already -- I realized that we neglected to mention how well watermelon goes with fresh mint, another staple of summer.

Mint makes a natural garnish on any kind of fruit salad, including a simple dish of chilled watermelon and cantaloupe balls. And while you most often see basil paired with watermelon, mint is an equally suitable herb to use in this watermelon, tomato and feta salad, for example, or in Coconut & Lime's watermelon agua fresca, which is featured in this week's Root Source (and which could be spiked with another mint-loving drink, bourbon).

A marinade, a rub and a glaze? Really?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:54:11 -0500

Over the weekend, I was catching up on Steven Raichlen's show Barbecue University, gearing up for the Fourth of July. Raichlen definitely has a way of making standard barbecue dishes -- ribs, chicken, big cuts of pork -- interesting. He uses a lot of Asian and Mediterranean flavors and isn't afraid to serve a lot of vegetables alongside his meat. I like that.

Anyway, one of this weekend's shows featured baby back ribs. First, he marinated them. Then he made a rub for them. Then he made a glaze for them. As I was watching I found myself wondering: are all three of those necessary, or is he just trying to squeeze as much barbecue showmanship as possible into one recipe? What about just a rub or just a marinade? Or, at most, a marinade and then a glaze? At what point do the marinade, rub and glaze make each redundant or -- worse -- conflict with each other?

Last night I decided to look into it.

First, I made a chimichurri marinade. I nestled a rack of baby back ribs inside a ziploc bag, covered them with the marinade and refrigerated them for a couple of hours. When I was ready to start cooking, I pulled them out and patted them dry to get them ready for the rub.

I didn't follow a recipe for the rub. I just combined a few spices I had on hand in roughly equal parts -- ground cumin, ground ginger, ground coriander, cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper. (I went easy on the salt, figuring my glaze would be salty.) I sprinkled the rub over the ribs -- not too much -- and patted it in on both sides.

I got the hardwood charcoal going in my Big Green Egg, adjusted the vents so the grill was pegged at 325F, put the ribs on the grate and got to work on the glaze.

I didn't want too strong a glaze, just a little caramelized sweet, salt, sour and umami taste -- something to keep the ribs moist. I mixed together equal parts kecap manis, Dijon mustard, ketchup, and apple cider vinegar. The resulting sauce was really flavorful and balanced, but not overpowering.

Glaze in hand, I went out to the grill, flipped the rack of ribs and basted the cooked side with the glaze.

After 30 minutes I flipped and basted them again, and let them go until the meat seemed to be pulling away from the bone, about an hour total.

I think it's tough to screw up ribs, but I was pleased with how they turned out. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where all the flavors were coming from, but for now, I'm thinking that Raichlen didn't overdo it. The marinade, rub and glaze can each do their part to make the ribs better, as long as you watch the salt and keep a good balance of taste and flavor in mind.

Like Chip, I'm headed down South today. While I'm on the road I may experiment with some different flavor combinations. Suggestions always welcome.

Cookthink at The Kitchn

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:14:49 -0500

We loved The Kitchn when it was a mere twinkle in Apartment Therapy's eye, so we were delighted to see Emma's post about Cookthink on Friday. Thanks for the love, Kitchn, and for really helpful posts like this one about which foods you can carry on the plane. We're flying south tomorrow--our first trip since Angus has learned to crawl and snatch--so the food we take also needs to have very few moving parts. Suggestions?

Impromptu: Spaghetti with peas, bacon and fried almonds

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:08:27 -0500

This summer, Cookthink's been really lucky to have two excellent interns from Smith College. Corinne and Sam have been busy researching, entering and (mostly) analyzing recipes for us to publish on Cookthink. We'll post a proper introduction soon, but I wanted to mention one exciting side effect of having them come a couple of times a week.

Since Brys does most of Cookthink's recipe testing and photography down in DC, I don't end up doing a whole lot of cooking during the day. When I do, it's usually fast, haphazard and for one. And even though Elizabeth and I use Cookthink.com to come up with some ideas about what to cook for dinner every night, we don't do much in the way of recipe development. Occasionally, when we need a second or third look at a particular recipe, we'll give it a test up here. But generally, we approach the site as users.

Anyway, one of the great, unintended consequences of having Corinne and Sam here during the day is that we tend to take a very Cookthink-ish approach to our lunches. Though I've tried a few times to plan for their being here, we've mostly winged it with whatever we happen to have in the kitchen. (They've eaten a lot of scapes.) We've made braised chicken breasts, frittatas, salads, sandwiches and pastas, the best of which came last Thursday.

Our neighbor Becky was heading off to Vermont for a few weeks to play bassoon with a traveling symphony. Before she left, she stopped off with a bag of fresh green peas she'd just picked from another neighbor's garden. (She also brought homemade strawberry jam.) Those peas were pretty much all we had in the way of vegetables. We decided to keep it simple, but as Corinne and Sam got to shelling, I found a few strips of bacon, a chunk of parmesan and a little bag of raw almonds.

We threw a few cloves of garlic into the pasta water and as the pasta boiled, we cooked the bacon and then let it drain while we fried the almonds in the bacon grease. We drained the pasta so that a quarter cup of so of the water was still in the pot and then mixed everything together for a minute over high heat so that some of the peas were warm while others were still crisp and raw. A little olive oil, a little lemon juice, a little black pepper.

I'm not sure it merits a recipe, but I definitely want to make it again.

Nothing beats the heat like heat

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:56:17 -0500

We're going out of town on Tuesday and have begun the pre-vacation fridge purge. This morning, I unearthed a jar of sambal oelek from the back. There were a few tablespoons left, enough to cover some bone-in chicken breasts with a thin layer of marinade. I'm hoping I'll be able to grill them, but if the humidity finally breaks into rain, I'll turn the oven way up, pull up a chair with a Festina Peche and just sweat it out.

Recipe: Sambal-Roasted Turkey Breast (Cookthink)
Reference: What is sambal? (Cookthink)

Daring Bakers Challenge: Danish Braid

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:08:44 -0500

My last few Daring Bakers challenge posts have been tales of woe—crushed cakes, broken batards, etc. But I am happy to report that this most recent challenge, one of my first forays into pastry, went exceptionally well!

The Danish Braid recipe from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking, chosen by Kelly of Sass & Veracity and Ben of What’s Cookin’? was a laminated yeast pastry, meaning that it had yeast and needed to rise, but also that it has alternating layers—in this case, of dough and lots and lots of butter.

I was lucky that I happened to be at my parent's house in Philadelphia when I worked on the challenge, which meant I had a stand mixer at my disposal. The dough came together in a snap, and then I mixed up the butter block—two sticks of butter with a 1/4 cup of flour.

The dough was rolled out into a large sheet, two thirds covered with the butter, and folded into thirds. To distribute the butter through the flour and create the layers that would make the pastry puff, the dough was rolled out and turned five more times, before being cut and filled with caramelized apples. The braiding is surprisingly simple, just left over right, and makes the pastry look so impressive.

I guess there was one woeful part of the tale. I finished the pastry the night before I had my wisdom teeth removed, which meant that I couldn't actually taste it fresh out of the oven. But it was soft enough for me to have a piece two days later, and still delicious.

The recipe made enough dough for two braids, and I froze half for later. Any suggestions for other fillings?