This Viennese Gadget Can Instantly Whip Cream, Pickle Cucumbers, and Carbonate Juice

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By    –   Grub Street

We asked chef Elise Kornack, she of the Michelin-starred Carroll Gardens restaurant Take Root, what her favorite kitchen appliance is. Here’s what she told us:

I first encountered the iSi cream whipper, which is from this Viennese company founded in the 1800s, when I was making whipped cream at a pastry station at one of my first jobs — it’s just a canister that you put a liquid in that you want to aerate or carbonate. Charge it once by screwing in a nitrous-oxide canister to the top, wait until you hear the canister make a “pop” sound, and it’s ready to go.

When I first used it, I thought it was awesome that the iSi could make whipped cream right off the bat. A few years later, when I was working atAquavit, I figured out it could do more than that: We were making a hollandaise but wanted it to be very airy and to hold a significant shape, so one of us just threw the finished sauce into the canister, and it ended up coming out as this really beautiful, light hollandaise, kind of like an egg custard. So we started to play with a bunch of other ways you could aerate a sauce, and saw that you can use the iSi container to concentrate flavors and processes into a shorter number of steps and get better quality. You can make a light fruit mousse out of just fruit purée (no cream or eggs), or a vinaigrette that’s frothier and has a stronger taste. You can even quickly pickle or marinate vegetables in it — drop in cucumbers, a little bit of vinegar, and some spices and herbs; charge it once; and they will marinate and become all wilty and beautiful. You can also carbonate any juice into soda without a SodaStream: Add the liquid, charge the canister, and you’re done. It’s God’s gift to the universe. It’s also just a fun thing to have around.

Perfect Pickled Peppers

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  by Jim Bailey –   The Yankee Chef
pickled-peppers

On top of burgers, warmed and sitting on top of that juicy steak, as a side to your favorite meal, a spicy addition to any salad as well as topping off a bowl of chili, pickled peppers are as versatile in its presentation as it is in making them. If you want a little kick in the pants, add some extra jalapenos, cherry or hotter peppers to the mix.

1 small onion
1 each yellow and red
bell pepper, halved and
seeded
1 jalapeno pepper,
halved and seeded
1 cup apple juice
1 cup apple cider
vinegar
1/2 teaspoon minced
garlic in oil
1/2 teaspoon chili
powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

Peel and cut the onion in half. With cut-side down, julienne it, along with bell and jalapeno peppers; set aside.

In a large saucepan, bring apple juice, vinegar, garlic, chili powder, salt and vanilla to a boil over high heat. Remove from heat to cool to room temperature. Add vegetables, stir to combine well and transfer to a container. Cover tightly and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Bourbon tasting to mark distillery anniversary

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By MEGHAN PIERCE
Union Leader Correspondent

 

Spicy, comforting jalapeño cornbread

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Jalapeño Cornbread
jalapeno-cornbread

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 25 minutes

Yield: 12

Ingredients

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup cornmeal
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 tbsp honey
  • 3 jalapeños, 2 seeded and diced, 1 sliced for topper
  • 1/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. In a large bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, baking soda and salt.
  2. In a separate bowl, whisk together melted butter, eggs, sugar, buttermilk, and honey.
  3. Pour wet ingredients over the dry ingredients.
  4. Mix gently with a rubber spatula until just combined.
  5. Over mixing will result in too much air and dry cornbread.
  6. Add in diced jalapeno and cheese. Gently fold until just combined.
  7. Scoop batter evenly into greased muffin tins, about 1/2 – 3/4 of the way full.
  8. Place a sliced jalapeno on top of the batter and gently press.
  9. Bake in a 375 degree fahrenheit oven for 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
  10. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
  11. Enjoy!

Nueske’s Jalapeño Corn Dog Bites

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BY NUESKE’S MEATS.

Ingredients:

15 oz. box corn bread/corn muffin mix

1 egg

2/3 cup milk

1/3 cup melted butter

1/3 cup canned diced jalapeños

2 Tbsp juice from canned jalapeños

1 ½ Tbsp agave nectar

2-3 Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Jalapeño Bacon Cheddar Brats, ?” – ¼” sliced

Directions:

Heat your oven to 375°F and coat a mini muffin tin with non-stick spray (or use a silicon mini muffin tray; no spray needed).

In a medium bowl, stir together the corn bread mix, egg, milk, melted butter, jalapeños, jalapeño juice, and agave nectar until the mixture is well-blended.

Use a small spoon to place spoonfuls of the mixture into each mini muffin compartment. Do not over-fill; leave about ?” space between the top of the batter and the top of the muffin cup. Insert a thin slice of Jalapeño Bacon Cheddar Brat, upright, in the center of each muffin.

Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown. Allow to cool completely before removing from pan.

Birthdays at Texas Tito’s

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There’s no end to our love of peppers and pickles here at Tito’s.  While we do enjoy cake and ice cream instead of jalapenos and pickles for birthdays and special occasions  there’s still some subtle references.

A festive jalapeno birthday cake at Texas Tito's.

A festive jalapeno birthday cake at Texas Tito’s.

Recipe: Mi Tierra’s Puerco en Salsa Verde

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Puerco en salsa verde had been the top-selling item at Mi Tierra for years, thanks to the spices mixed by Chef Salazar. Photo: Courtesy Mi Tierra Café Y Panaderia

Puerco en salsa verde had been the top-selling item at Mi Tierra for years, thanks to the spices mixed by Chef Salazar. Photo: Courtesy Mi Tierra Café Y Panaderia

 

Makes 6 servings

2 pounds tomatillos, husks removed

1 medium chile poblano, stem removed

1 jalapeño, stem removed

2 pounds pork shoulder, cubed

8 green onions, trimmed

¼ bunch cilantro

3 cups water

3 tablespoons chicken base, preferably Knorr

1 teaspoon garlic powder

¼ teaspoon salt

Crumbled queso fresco, for garnish

Diced avocado, for garnish

Minced cilantro, for garnish

Finely diced white onion, for garnish

Instructions: Heat oven to 425 degrees. On a baking sheet, place tomatillos, poblano, and jalapeño in a single layer and roast in the oven, turning regularly, for approximately 30 minutes or until chiles and tomatillos are brown in spots.

On another baking sheet, place the cubed pork shoulder in a single layer. Sprinkle with the ¼ teaspoon of salt, and roast in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes.

Devein and peel the poblano, then place it in a blender. Add the tomatillos, jalapeño (unpeeled), green onion (root ends removed), and any juices left on the baking sheet from roasting the vegetables. Blend until smooth. Lastly, add the ¼ bunch of cilantro, blend and reserve.

In a Dutch oven, add the water, chicken base and garlic powder, then bring to a boil. Add the roasted cubed pork and cover with a lid. Let it simmer for 1 hour on medium heat, or until completely tender.

Once the cubed pork is tender, add the blended tomatillo mixture and let the mixture simmer on low for 5 minutes.

Serve as tacos in tortillas, as a hearty stew, or even over nachos.

Per serving: 503 calories, 34 g fat, 136 mg cholesterol, 2,370 mg sodium, 12 g carbohydrates, 4 g dietary fiber, 37 g protein.

Summer’s heat gives pepper lovers sweet abundance

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And the ways cooks can preserve both hot and sweet ones are equally bounteous.

By CHRISTINE BURNS RUDALEVIGE   –   Portland Press Herald

Peppers love heat so this summer's steamy temperatures have led to an abundance of the veggies in all colors and varieties. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Peppers love heat so this summer’s steamy temperatures have led to an abundance of the veggies in all colors and varieties. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Peppers are very hot right now, even the sweet ones.

At my favorite Friday morning farmers market in Brunswick, I counted 18 different varieties. I bought a bagful, let them sit beautifully in a bowl for a day, and then had to figure out what to do with them.

Those over 80-degree summer days (21 in July, 20 in August here in southern Maine) were just the right temperature for Capsicum to thrive, says Source’s own garden guru Tom Atwell. Roberta Bailey of Seven Trees Farm in Vassalboro has been growing all sorts of peppers since the 1980s. She confirmed this summer was indeed a great year for peppers, more so for sweet than hot, but both are bounteous.

Bailey cultivates Czech Black (her favorite!), Fish, Hidalgo serrano (her other favorite), Matchbox and Thai Hot for seed for Fedco Seeds in Waterville. She removes the seeds from her peppers, steams the flesh, purees it with garlic, and mixes it with the same amount of either cooked carrots or sweet potato to make a hot sauce akin to a Thai Sriracha.

Another way to preserve the 2016 pepper season would be to save seeds from this year’s fruit to plant next spring. Make sure your peppers came from open-pollinated parents if you’d like to reproduce the very same kind of pepper, Bailey warned. If your pepper is a hybrid, you can still save the seeds and plant them, but you could very well get a plant resembling any of the varieties crossed to produce the hybrid you liked, she said.

Grey Goose Gourmet pepper jellies are made in Wayne with primarily local peppers, owner Sandra Dwight-Barris said. The company’s Original Pepper Jelly, crafted from a recipe Dwight-Barris’ mother gave her 25 years ago, includes bell peppers, as well. “This coming year we will be using 100 percent local peppers,” said Dwight-Barris, in part because of the bumper crop and in part because she bought a new freezer, as the five she filled last year with processed pepper jelly starter didn’t meet demand.

To freeze the peppers, she washes and stems them, deseeding some to keep the heat in check. She uses a powerful blender to make a pulp, which she then freezes in containers measured out for her batches of jelly. Freezing them diminishes neither the flavor nor the heat, she said.

Homesteader and blogger Rachel Arsenault says her hot peppers – the Anaheim, jalapeño, Hungarian wax she grew from commercial seed and the experimental ones she collected from dried de arbol, japones and guajillo chillies – are all coming off the plants much hotter than they were last year. She dries her fair share in a dehydrator and stores them in jars, but she also likes to blister them on the grill as a key ingredient in huge batches of salsa, which she then freezes.

To freeze the King of the North bell peppers she grows, Arsenault slices them into strips before placing them in freezer bags for use in fajitas during the winter months. She freezes jalapeño peppers whole, explaining that they are easy to chop when partially frozen.

Portland’s Sur Lie chef Emil Rivera is partial to pickled peppers. He uses a house brine of Champagne vinegar seasoned with black pepper; and coriander, mustard and fennel seeds to pickle mild cherry bomb and shishito peppers, which softens the texture of the flesh and adds an obvious sour note to cut rich dishes like the restaurant’s braised short ribs.

Rivera also juliennes jalapeños to sauté very lightly with local mushrooms and butter and stuffs poblanos with whatever strikes his fancy on any given day.

As is traditional in a tapas place, Rivera also serves grill-blistered Padrón peppers sprinkled with sea salt. Eaters play a Russian roulette of sorts with these, because they don’t know which ones are mild and which ones are numbing. Rivera says this summer’s weather has increased his diners’ chances of getting a hot one by threefold.

I am a self-proclaimed heat wimp, so I won’t be playing with Padrón. I like to manage the heat of my preserved peppers, tasting a tiny bit of each one as I slice them for jars of Candied Mixed Peppers so I can balance the really hot ones with a calming selection of the sweeter ones.

To each his own, I guess. Fortunately for pepper eaters this year, we do not want for choices.

Christine Burns Rudalevige is a food writer, a recipe developer and tester, and a cooking teacher in Brunswick. Contact her at: cburn1227@gmail.com.

Poem: My Car is Constructed of Pickles

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By Kenn Nesbitt

My car is constructed of pickles.
It’s wonderfully crunchy and sweet.
If ever I’m hungry while driving
I pull off a pickle to eat.

The engine is made out of gherkins.
The dashboard’s an extra-large dill.
The windows and wipers are kosher
as well as the bumpers and grille.

The hood’s made of hamburger slices.
The gas tank is brimming with brine.
The doors are delectably salty.
The stickshift is simply divine.

There’s one little problem I’m having.
I’m sure you would know what I mean
if ever you saw this contraption;
my marvelous pickle machine.

I guess I’ve included my auto
in just a few too many meals
and now it won’t budge when I start it.
I shouldn’t have eaten the wheels.

I can pickle that, but can I ferment it?

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Written by Barb Randall   –   Lake Oswego Review

My favorite farmers market vendor had pickling cucumbers this week. I didn’t buy any, but after my sister bragged that she had made a batch of our Grandma Fanny’s dill pickles, I knew pickling was in my future.

And when my friend, Austin Durant, founder of the Fermenters Club and organizer of the Oregon Fermentation Festival, sent a release about the second-annual Oregon Fermentation Festival happening Sept. 10, I knew I’d be pickling this weekend.

Are pickles fermented? I called Austin for clarification.

“All fermented foods are pickled, but not all pickles are fermented,” he said.

He explained that vinegar, which is a fermented food, is used to make pickles, and the lactic acid of the vinegar is the preservative in pickles, and will keep out pathogens. Since vinegar is shelf-stable and distilled, pickles do not have live bacteria, in other words, there are no probiotics in pickles.

“Fermented foods are made with a brine, a mixture of water and salt,” he said. “Which naturally produces lactic acids to preserve the foods, which encourages the growth of probiotics, or good bacteria and nutrients.”

So what’s the difference?

There are two types of pickles:

n Quick, or unfermented, pickles are made in one or two days by adding acid in the form of vinegar to vegetables. It is critical to add enough vinegar to prevent bacterial growth.

n Brined, or fermented, pickles require several weeks of “curing” at room temperature. During this period, colors and flavors change. A brine made of water and salt reacts with the starches and sugars in the foods, and is converted into lactic acid by bacteria. The lactic acid production is what gives fermented foods their unique sour smell and flavor, and is also what makes fermented foods live, nutritive superfoods.

During the fermentation process, probiotics, or healthy bacteria are produced. Probiotics are known to be effective in treating a variety of conditions, and more and more is being discovered about the link between the bacteria composition of our bodies and overall health.

Probiotic-rich fermented foods have a variety of health benefits: They aid digestion, enhance the nutrient availability of food and ward off harmful pathogens in the digestive system. They also help to enhance immune system functioning, affect lipid metabolism, have cancer-fighting effects and other benefits.

Want to learn more? You can by attending the second-annual Oregon Fermentation Festival from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10, at Kruger’s Farm, 17100 N.W. Sauvie Island Road, Portland. Tickets are $19 general admission and $30 for the Ambrosia Garden ticket, for those 21 and older, which allows holders to sample 10 tastes of local and regional beer, wine, cider and mead — all fermented foods.

The festival includes a number of presentations, workshops and an opportunity to make a jar of pickles, live music, vendor samples and a marketplace to buy fermentation and pickling equipment.

If you cannot attend the festival this weekend, attend Oregon State University’s Fermented Foods class from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 22, at the Clackamas County Extension Office. Seating is limited; get more information and register by calling 503-655-8631. They offer a variety of food preservation classes through the fall.

I have fond memories of making Grandma Fanny’s dill pickles. As a safety factor, my sister and I have had the recipe reviewed by OSU Extension, to ensure it is up-to-date with food safety guidelines. On the website extension.oregonstate.edu/community/food-preservation you can find a wealth of information about pickling and fermenting, as well as recipes for how to pickle just about anything.

If you still have questions, call the OSU Food Preservation and Safety Hotline, 800-354-7319. It is open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday through Oct. 19.

I am sharing their recipe for Quick Kosher Dills today. It’s simple and will give you tasty results.

Bon Appétit! Make eating an adventure!

Quick Kosher Dills

Yield 6 to 7 pints or 3 to 4 quarts

4 pounds pickling cucumbers, about 4 inches long

3 cups water

3 cups vinegar (5 percent acidity)

1/4 cup pickling salt

14 garlic cloves, split

14 heads of fresh dill

28 peppercorns

2 teaspoons hot red pepper flakes or 14 whole chiles (optional)

Wash cucumbers. Cut 1/16-inch off blossom end but leave 1/4-inch of stem on the other end. Cut in half lengthwise. Heat salt, vinegar and water to boiling. Pack cucumbers into sanitized pint or quart jars, adding 4 garlic halves, 2 heads dill and 4 peppercorns per jar. Add 1/4 teaspoon chili flakes or 2 chiles per pint, if desired.

Pour hot vinegar solution over cucumbers leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace, if needed. Wipe rims and process as follows.

If at an altitude of 1,000-6,000 feet, process pint jars 15 minutes and quarts for 20 minutes.

(Recipe courtesy from “Pickling Vegetables” on the OSU Extension website, extension.oregonstate.edu/community/food-preservation.)

Randall welcomes your food questions and research suggestions. She can be reached at 503-636-1281 ext. 100 or by email atbrandall@lakeoswegoreview.com. Follow her on Twitter @barbrandallfood.