Hello. You may have noticed that the blog hasn’t been updated in a while. You might even say that it really never got off the ground in the first place. Well you would be right. I’ve been delinquent, though not for a lack of things to post. I just have done a lousy job. But I hope to change all that and post some more of what I have been up to. Here we go…
This weekend, I smoked some fish. I had been wanting to experiment with smoking food for a long time, but never attempted to do it. I worried about not having a smoker and screwing it all up while improvising on the grill. But then I saw a Good Eats episode a few weeks back where Alton Brown smoked some trout fillets, and that got me over my worries, even though he pointedly did not use a grill and instead made a smoker out of an old piece of army equipment. Still, I was inspired.
First, the fish. I also chose trout. I wish I could say I caught them, but I didn’t. The trout season is closed, and my skills are far too unreliable to make sure there would be an end product. So thank you Costco, where I got four nice farm-raised rainbows for about $9.50.
I put the fish into a brine of 1/2 cup of kosher salt per quart of water. This was what Mr. Brown used on the show. My research turned up more complex brines, with aromatics and sweetners, but I wanted to keep it simple for my first attempt. The fish stayed in the brine for 3 hours in the reefer. After that, I placed them on a rack to sit uncovered in the fridge for about 20 hours, propped open with some toothpicks. This resting period is to make the exposed surfaces of the fish tacky so the smoke will stick to it. The sticky layer is called the pellicle.
After the brine, and ready to go on the grill
Can you see the pellicle? Me neither.
The next day, I tackled my smoke problem. The general idea was to make a fire on one side of the grill, put some wood chips on the fire to make the smoke, and put the fish on the other side of the grill to smoke. My big worry was making too hot of a fire and cooking the fish more than smoking it and drying it out. Most of the sources I found suggested around 200 degrees. I took a throw-away pie pan, dropped about 10 coals in it, and sprinkled some apple wood chips on top. The temperature never really got above 180, at least at the top of the grill where I positioned the thermometer. But in the end, I don’t think it mattered. The fish, three hours, two more batches of chips, and a few additional coals later, was really tasty. Very moist and really a good amount of smoke flavor, but not overpowering.
Happy fishes
About to put the lid on the grill
Here are some photos of my last day of ice fishing, about a month ago. The lakes are now ice free and have been for a bit. I went off of Olin Park, on Lake Monona, and fished in about 20 feet of water. I caught just four, and other fisherfolks weren’t doing so hot either. Oh well.
That’s a Coach ad from the Sunday New York Times fashion section underneath. I thought of Gwen when I cleaned the fish, and wondered if anyone had ever before cleaned fish on the Times Fashion section. Here they are cut up. I fried them just in butter with salt and pepper, but stupidly didn’t take any pictures.
I do not, however, believe the Gray Lady is good only for gutting and scaling fish. Later that weekend, inspired by this article about cube steaks, I made chicken-fried steak. Before:
(counterclockwise from top left: flour, cube steak, eggs, and breadcrumbs; not pictured, French President Nicolas Sarkozy).
After, with hashbrowns (which froze very nicely, btw), and pan gravy which turned out a bit thin, but ok:
The cube steak article is good reading, if for no other reason that it’s very Wisconsin-centric. The reporter quotes with a woman from Fort Atkinson who talks about eating cube steaks just pan fried in butter with salt and pepper (which is how my mom used to make them), and the owner of a meat market in Cumberland on some of the finer points of making cube steaks. Good reading and good eating in these economically-troubled times.
I’ve been promising photos of my cooking and fishing exploits from almost two weeks ago, but haven’t delivered. They’re still coming. But I was just thinking that my kitchen may be turning into a deli. Coming by good deli food is not always easy where I live (although the pastrami at Gotham Bagels is too good for words) so I like taking a stab at making some of my favorites. Right now, for example, I am having whitefish salad on a bagel and it is very tasty. I made the salad last night. It has all the usual stuff in it, eggs, onions, celery, mayo — you know, like tuna salad but with all the oily and smoky goodness of great lakes whitefish.
I also cooked quite a bit (five pounds!) of corned beef last night. I brined a farmer’s market brisket last week in anticipation of St. Patrick’s day, but now that it’s done, I really only want to eat it on sandwiches. That might have something to do with the fact I somehow have two loaves of pumpernickel in my house right now. And I a jar of sour pickles left that I made last fall that amazingly are still crunchy. All I need now is some lox and matzo ball soup and my head may explode.
I had some hash browns for breakfast today. What led me to make them was noticing last night that the five pounds of potatoes I bought last week were spouting eyes and I wanted to use them before they started shriveling. Anyway, my hash brown technique is stolen from the truck stop that I worked at in high school, which I think has the best hash browns I have ever tasted. And just to be clear, hash browns are shredded, fried potatoes. Fried potatoes in chunks are american fries or home fries or cottage fries even, but they aren’t hash browns.
Here’s what I did: First, I roughly peeled the potatoes, mostly to get rid of the eyes. Then I boiled them whole in salted water until they were cooked through a little more than halfway. I pulled them out of the water and put them in the fridge to cool overnight. This morning, I shredded them in the food processor, rendered some fat from some of my homemade lardons, and fried a bunch of the potatoes in the fat. They were good, but a little too browned to be perfect. I had the temperature too high and used too little fat.
A few notes. Parboiling the potatoes is important. If you use raw ones, in my experience, they tend to be greasy, burned, and limp, not to mention they will start to oxidize and turn an unappetizing brown. If you have ever had a french fry that hasn’t been blanched, think of that and you’ll know what I mean. Hopefully you never had such a fry, and I will say more about that if I post about making fries.
Anyway, you want to shoot for a potato that is a little more than halfway boiled through. Cut one in half (not lengthwise, but widthwise, if that’s a word), and you can see how far the cooking has progressed. Eight to ten minutes for an average sized russet is about right.
Letting the potatoes cool completely before shredding is also important. Shredding them while hot will result in very undefined mushy shreds. So plan ahead.
Finally, make sure you use enough fat. I didn’t this morning and the end result suffered a bit. Anything is fine, butter, oil, bacon grease or, if you really want to live it up, duck fat. The truck stop protocol was to use about 4 ounces of margarine per order. I would say maybe that might be a bit much, and there are all sorts of reasons not to use margarine, but those hash browns were tasty and never greasy.
As for the temperature, today I went a bit higher than medium heat on my electric range with my cast iron skillet. I think it was a bit too high. But everyone’s stove is different. Just don’t crank the heat up too high.
And I made way too many potatoes, so I tossed the rest with canola oil and froze them on a sheet pan, and then tossed them in a ziploc bag. I don’t know if this is going work, but I’m hoping it will be the homemade equivalent of frozen hash browns in the supermarket.
Hi. I have decided to leap boldly into the late 1990s and start a blog. It will be mostly about things like my experiments with food, my adventures in fishing, and maybe book and movie reviews. I am an amateur, and perhaps even a dilettante, in all of these areas, so you should be able to check back for a good laugh now and then.
I hope to avoid discussions of politics, although I suspect when it comes to food I will certainly betray my all-too-trendy preference for local, organic, blah blah blah. I won’t be preachy about it, promise. I just really don’t want to talk about the president, congress, the supreme court, or any of their state and local counterparts. I have nothing intelligent to add to the vast amount of stuff already out there. The same could probably be said for the topics I have identified, but, well, that’s what I’m going to write about.
So, it’s late February. It’s still mostly cold. In terms of fishing, that means cutting a hole in the ice. I like ice fishing, but I haven’t really done too much this winter. I may try to get out yet. And the early trout season starts soon, and my meager trout-catching skills are something I want to work on this year. I’d also like to take a stab at some river walleyes during the spring run.
As for food, there’s still time for cold-weather stuff. I’m thinking about cassoulet; I have some duck confit to use up, and want to see if I can make something approximating saucisses de Toulouse. I have two jars of sauerkraut in the fridge that I made last fall, which I think means I should make choucroute garnie or ribs. Or maybe just just some hot dogs. Also, St. Patrick’s day is not too far off, which means I should corn a beef.
