Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

On Wings of Chickens

Time for something a little different.

For a while now, I’ve been a member of the website Food52, a collaborative site created by food writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs that highlights the recipes of home cooks. The idea is this: every week, the site runs two contests, each featuring a different dish or ingredient. Any site member can submit an original recipe. Hesser and Stubbs choose two finalists from the list of recipes; voting opens at this point. Any member can vote for one finalist. The winner receives a spot in the Food52 cookbook, which will be published by HarperCollins.

A recent contest called for Your Best Chicken Wings, and it was pretty open-ended: Korean-style, Buffalo-style, you name it. As part of the Food52 process, and to help foster a sense of community, Hesser and Stubbs invite members to test certain Editors Pick recipes. One of the chicken-wing recipes up for testing was for scrumptious sounding Longhorn Tequila Wings, by a home cook and small farm owner named Tom Hirshfeld.

The process is a little involved, but man, the results are worth it. First you brine the wings in a mix of tequila, lime zest, salt, and water. After the wings brine for about 90 minutes, you remove them from the brine and dry them on a rack in the fridge. Dredge them in a mix of flour, masa harina, chili powder, and other spices. Fry, and then toss in a dressing of tequila, onions and garlic, peppers, cilantro, and lime.

When I saw the recipe, I knew I wanted to make it, so I called dibs to test it for an Editors Pick. So I whipped them up as a Sunday app, and paired them with shots of tequila and sangrita. Oh my yum.

photo by Jennifer Hess

The wings were great. I chose not to make them overly hot because frankly, I’m kind of a wimp with spicy-hot foods. I like just enough spice to know I’m alive, but not enough to wish I weren’t. Tom calls for them to be served with home-fried tortilla strips, which were addictive. The wings themselves carried the earthy sweetness of the agave juice, well balanced with the heat of the pepper, tang from the lemon, and piquancy of the onion and garlic. The masa gave the coating a nice tenderness, and it’s a grace note I’ll want to play with the next time I fry chicken.

Hirshfeld recommends pairing the wings with a Shiner Bock, in keeping with their Lone Star State inspiration, but I went with the classic tequila/sangrita pairing, and it was fabulous. I want to do this for a cocktail party some time.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

What’s pig got to do with it?

What’s pig, but a foodie-blog emotion?

I know, this ain’t a cooking blog, but one thing I do want to discuss here is using spirits in cooking. I’m just a novice here, but it should be fun to discuss what works well for us and what fails miserably.

One night last week, my lovely wife brought home a couple of nice pork chops from the Greenmarket. We had planned on grilling them over hard-wood charcoal, but the rains had other plans, so I started prepping them for the iron skillet. Jen recommended a bourbon reduction to glaze the chops, but as I seared the chops, I had another idea: pork chops and applesauce.

Now, it happens that we had no applesauce, but we do have Laird’s Applejack. What’s more, we had a small Mason jar in the fridge with fresh cherries steeping in Applejack. I meant them for cocktails, but Jen had also brought home more fresh cherries that night, so what the hell.

Here’s what I did:

1. I seared the chops on both sides in olive oil, salt, and pepper.
2. As the chops cooked, I pulled the jar of applejack-soaked cherries from the fridge. I removed six cherries and muddled them up with some of the applejack from the jar. I also added a splash of Angostura and a splash of rye.
3. I removed the chops to a platter and tented them with foil.
4. Then, I deglazed the skillet with the applejack-rye-cherry mixture. I stirred up all the crispy bits from the pan and let the alcohol reduce a bit.
5. With the alcohol reduced by about half, I added two teaspoons of butter and cooked until the pan sauce thickened. We served that over the chops.

Yum! The pan sauce captured all the flavors of the applejack, cherries, bitters, and rye, without any flavor overpowering the others. What made this work was that, in mixing drinks, I had already started thinking about blending applejack, cherries, and whiskey. The only question was, how would it play with pork? I think it worked out very well.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Bittered gelato!

Jen just noticed the following ice-cream flavors on the website for il laboratorio del gelato:

aromatic bitters
orange bitters
peach bitters

Wow, those sound great. I doubt il laboratorio has them always available, but I swear on the graves of Bruce Wayne’s parents, I’ll not rest until those killers are safely imprisoned in my belly.