pork carnitas baguette

Inspiration from Xoco (Rick Bayless's new takeout Mexican place with wood fired oven):

Ahogada: Golden pork carnitas, black beans, tomato broth, spicy arbol chile sauce, pickled onions. (Dine-in Only) 9.50



My version (horrifying photo):

The name 'ahogada' refers to a really crusty bread served in a spicy vinegar broth. My version is a sweeter/soggier americanized take that is more closer to a Chicago style Italian beef with Mexican flavors and pork. The ahogada bread is traditionally a hard sour dough torta which is great, but I couldn't even find torta's local (well I could but, lazy) and went French bread.

Maybe this is more Asian? I wanted the correct sweet pork/sour vinegar to be more balanced. I took a pork shoulder from the butcher and parboiled it with chicken stock, garlic, onion, cumin, coriander, sea salt, bay leaves, paprika, dry tamarind, black pepper and a red pepper vinegar slosh I keep around.

I sauteed the onions and banana peppers in the pork fat broth from the parboil with extra butter (this is the sweet). I also cooked some black beans in the same.
The final sandwich is French baguette with a smear of black beans topped with sour cream and onion/pepper mix on top. Add the chopped up pork shoulder after you cook off extra fat on a baking sheet. This is pretty caramel like on it's own with the pork fat. I took the stock from cooking the pork shoulder and skimmed the oil off and then added tomato paste, oregano, lime squeeze and cayenne pepper to create the broth. Add some fresh cilantro.

I worried mine would be too hot and was conservative on the heat but I think it makes more sense to create a 'hot' cooked down version of the tomato broth on the side to drizzle on your bites.

Conclusion: Nick loved it. This is a hard meal to fuckup.

ai weiwei

Recent China detainee Artist Ai Weiwei.
Sign the petition for his release here.

neapolitan oven step by step

This is Donatella's in NY. The final result got kinda crapped out in my opinion.


From the oven master via nyt:

Her mentor will be Enzo Coccia, 48, a third-generation pizzaiolo who began working with his father at age 8 and now runs Pizzeria La Notizia on Via Michelangelo da Caravaggio in Naples. Mr. Coccia will soon travel to Manhattan to build the oven.

“Now, only a few families know artisanal oven-making,” Mr. Coccia said in a telephone interview, “brick by brick.” Pizza has been made this way, Mr. Coccia said, “for more than 250 years in Naples, in a way that is very specific to us. Everyone asks about the secret formula, but it’s mostly not about the ingredients. It is the construction of the oven, and a sensibility — a feeling, from years and years of making the dough and understanding the process.”

This will be buffalo-milk-mozzarella pizza, San-Marzano-tomatoes-grown-in-volcanic-soil pizza, pricey-high-protein-Italian-wheat-flour (grade 000) pizza. There is also water, yeast and sea salt: the dough is (lovingly!) hand-slapped, cut, pulled. Verboten: the churn-and-burn pizza — where the yeast rises quickly. The dough requires small amounts of yeast and a long fermentation time — some 10 hours — “which prevents bloating,” he said. “That is why we run out of dough. We can only prepare so much.”

Pizza must cook from 60 to 90 seconds only — “to achieve the proper softness and lighteness,” Mr. Coccia said. The center of the oven must be 869 Fahrenheit (465 centigrade) — “no higher, or it burns,” he said. But the oven must accommodate a different temperature for the center interior, “where the tomatoes are,” a feat that he said required indigenous volcanic-mud bricks.

He declined to answer most questions about how he will build the dome — the right thickness and the correct mixture of “sand from the beach that absorbs the heat,” he said. And he forbids photography of that part of the construction.

He did allow that the oven “coupola” — the dome — will be more compact than most, “since the heat needs to be concentrated,” Mr. Coccia said. There is the relatively small mouth of the oven — a third the diameter of a garden-variety oven — to keep the heat from dissipating. Only the most skilled pizza-makers can push pies (no more than four at a time) in and out of the constricted space.

ovens i like

I like the design of this. More like a bread oven than traditional pizza oven.

Lucali's in NY.

chicken curry soup

I think my version of this can compete.

zucchini bread

My version of Zucchini bread, which is not that different than anyone else's except
the top is a kind of road gravel I make from mixing together and then chopping up pecans, brown sugar, cinnamon, pumpkin spice and lemon peel.

The bottom pic is a 6" loaf and the top is a 3" square (Nick lunch bag size).

l'atelier des chefs

I've become hooked on these. I did not know what chefs did with a pairing knife until watching these. I also may be slightly taken by the studious French girl in the video.