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Mon, 20 Dec 2004
I went to a Chipotle for the first time last week. To my surprise, it was actually very tasty. I knew nothing about the place, except that it's a chain, it's owned by McDonald's, and it seems to have some health consciousness about their food and some contemporary ideas about presentation and architecture. It took me a moment, but I soon realized what their model is -- the California-style assembly burrito, where you move along a counter and tell them what to put in your burrito. (I'm told that the assembly-line is a Southern California invention, mostly likely from San Diego.) I like that better than (say) High-Tech Burrito or 360-Degree Burrito (two competing modern chains) where you have to give the whole mouthful of an order at once. Another good point is that it's quick since all the meats are waiting for you, precut (yet the turnover is such they're fresh and hot). And the dining room is McDonald's sized, not tiny-takeout sized, which is a plus.
Downsides: small menu, just 4 meat choices plus vegetarian. (HTB also has shrimp and fish, which I like, and real Mexican places have la lengua and los sesos as well, although Mad Cow probably got rid of the latter. I like lengua, though.) No choice of tortilla (HTB has 4 tortilla choices including low-carb whole wheat). No self-serve salsas out on the counter, in fact, no condiments at all. (The salsas may be available by request from the counter.)
I had a steak burrito, no rice, no beans, with mild salsa, sour cream, cheese, and guacamole ($1.40 extra) and I have to say it was pretty darn good.
Posted at 00:06 | permanent link
Fri, 08 Oct 2004
This is all about meat. Meat, meat, and more meat. So much meat that the restaurant has an Atkins Diet logo on its menu page. That makes me very, very happy.
The first person to tell me about churrascaria was one of my
doctors. Like me, he's a food guy (and like me, he tends toward
the low-carb end of things). He was in New York a few months back
and was taken to a place called Plataforma, in
midtown Manhattan, and was highly impressed. Basically, a
churrascaria is a type of Brazilian steakhouse, and the key
feature is that there's a lot of meat, and it is cooked in
particular cuts on
skewers over a fire and serving them sliced at the table,
a style known as rodidzio.
(There's a lot of historial background on
that, involving gauchos, grasslands, cattle ranching brought over
from Europe, and rustic yet filling meals on the free ranges of
southern Brazil, but I'm sure you get the idea.)
So, while I made a note to obtain a reservation at Plataforma
(since then they have added a second location in TriBeCa), it
occurred to me that there might be a churrascaria in the Bay
Area. And in the magical way these things happen, it turns out
that San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer had
published a review of such a place -- Espetus -- that very week.
That was good news and bad news: good news, of course, that there was such a place in town; but also bad news in that a favorable Chronicle review probably meant there would not be a table to be had there for some weeks. (Espetus, unlike Plataforma, is not a large place, and on my two visits so far, it's been packed.)
One of the knocks on all-you-can-eat buffets is that the food is mass-produced, and then sits out on steam tables or chafing dishes deteriorating until a patron scoops it up for consumption. There are a few ways to avoid that problem, which, sadly, only a small number of buffets bother to do (more on this in a future Berch on Food). But Espetus eliminates the problem by bringing the main course directly from kitchen to your table, occasionally on the run!
The system goes like this: after you are seated and drinks orders are taken, you make your way to a small (but densely packed) buffet alcove in the corner of the dining room. That's the home of salads, appetizers, and side dishes -- and they're not just generic salad bar fixings! There are some lovely salads, including an excellent hearts of palm salad, and in the corner, a lavish paella with prawns, fish, mussels, and sausage. Then a feijoada, the classic Brazilian black bean stew with smoked pork hocks and sausage. And a fish dish in a casserole. It is exceptionally important not to fill up on these treats. Yes, a salad, some paella, and a bowl of feijoada is, in itself, more than enough for a satisfying dinner, but that would be contrary to the central organizing principle of Espetus, which is the relentless onslaught of gaucho-clad waiters striding out from the kitchen with great sizzling skewers of grilled meat.
Each table is supplied with a small device which consists of a disc, half-red and half-green, mounted vertically in a holder, which is placed at the corner of the table. The rule is simple: displaying the green half causes the waiters to come by with each meat as it comes from the kitchen. Showing the red half will (in theory) get them to show mercy and leave you alone. You are, of course, permitted to switch colors repeatedly at your whim during the meal, and may feel free to change your mind at the last moment, in either direction. Did I mention that the waiters are (good-naturedly) pretty aggressive with those skewered meats?
And now to the meats. "Espetus" means skewer (think "spit", as in roasted on a), and the meats have been cut into either squarish chunks, or in the case of flat cuts, curved into a 'C' or 'S' shape and then spitted. Espetus's menu page illustrates this for several of the offerings -- picanha (sirloin steak), linguica (sausages), lombinho (pork loin), chicken breast, costela (pork ribs), alcatra (top sirloin), and a specialty, coracao de frango (chicken hearts). But this is just a start -- I have also seen at least two cuts of lamb, another cut or two of beef, giant prawns, and a beef sausage. With chunked meats, the waiter simply pulls it off the skewer onto your plate; sliced meats require a bit of finesse, so you are supplied with a small pair of tongs to assist. (First-timers will be graciously coached.)
Needless to say, this is not a place for a vegetarian or anyone on a strict quantity-controlled or low-fat diet. But it's one of my current favorites and I'm glad the churrascaria concept has caught on here. If you can find one in your area, and it's even half as good as Espetus (or as Plataforma was described to me), you're in for a treat.
There's a full bar, a decent but not outlandish wine list, service is exceptionally friendly and good-humored, and if I remember correctly dinner will run about $30/person exclusive of tax, tip, and beverages, on weekdays, and a bit more on weekends.
Espetus Churrascaria, 1686 Market St. (at Gough/Haight), San Francisco. (415) 552-8792. Reservations pretty much required.
Posted at 19:44 | permanent link
Mon, 13 Sep 2004
From time to time I run into a recipe with an interesting story behind it. This one comes from a movie, the enjoyable Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the final installment of Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy. In the movie, Johnny Depp's character eats a pork shoulder dish that is so good thathttp://www.berchonfood.com. well, that would be telling. In any case, it figures in the plot in an offhand way. On the DVD edition, Rodriguez invites the viewer into his home -- which is also his digital video and sound studio -- and recreates the dish on camera: puerco pibil, Yucatan-style pork shoulder.
Several web pages purport to have transcribed the recipe from the DVD, and each has made a few adaptations. This version is from a recipe site called TwigLeaf, and I am inserting the text here verbatim so you can review it for the discussion below.
5 lbs pork butt
5 Tbsp annatto seed
2 tsp ground cumin
1 Tbsp ground pepper
8 allspice seeds
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
5 lemons
2 habanero peppers
2 Tbsp salt
8 garlic cloves, minced
Splash of Tequila
Banana leaves for wrapping (or foil)A very nice slow roasted pork (adapted from Robert Rodriguez's recipe from the Once Upon a Time in Mexico DVD)http://www.berchonfood.comhttp://www.berchonfood.com.
In a clean coffee grinder (yes, a coffee grinder), grind the annatto seed, cumin seed, pepper, allspice, and cloves into a fine powder. Chop up the habanero peppers, removing the veins and seeds. If you want to kill your diners, leave a few seeds in. But these peppers are mucho caliente as they are. (Have your boys put a chopped piece on the tip of their tongues for proof.)
Mix the orange juice, vinegar, the ground powder and the peppers with the salt and the garlic in a medium bowl. Add that splash of tequila into the mix now. Stir it all up until it's somewhat smooth. Trim the pork butt and cut into roughly 2 inch cubes.
Place the cubes in a large ziplock bag and pour the mixture over the the meat. Seal and shake around to ensure the meat is thoroughly covered in the sauce.
Now, if you wanna be cool, you can line a large pan with banana leaves and then pour the meat/sauce concoction on top of that, pulling the banana leaves back across the top and holding it down with foil to make sure none of the flavor nor steam escapes. However, in the event that you live in a place where banana leaves are hard to findhttp://www.berchonfood.comhttp://www.berchonfood.com line the pan with aluminum foil, dump the meat/sauce, cover the whole deal with foil.
Turn your oven on 325 degrees and let this pork roast for 4 hours. (A little longer doesn't hurt.) You can serve this over white or mexican rice. I think white rice is the way to go since it creates such a great visual picture and that the flavor of the meat is offset so well by the rice.
Well. There you have it. There are a couple of issues with the recipe, the first being that 5 lemons are required, but never used; I took that to mean that the juice of the lemons was to be added to the vinegar and orange juice to be mixed with the spices. There's also no direction as to how long to let this marinate, but overnight seems right to me.
I presently lack a spice grinder (and did not want to spice up my coffee grinder, as it were), so I sought out ground spices. These are never as good as grinding your own, but I did find a supply of very fresh ground spices at the Mexican market I went to -- the name escapes me, but it is on Fruitvale Avenue in Oakland, about a block east of Everett & Jones BBQ. I also bought two kinds of peppers there: the specifed habaneros (dried) and some tinned chipotles.
Which brings us to the next item, spiciness. I cut up a habanero, removed the seeds and membranes, and tasted a tiny bit. Whoooah!!! Even a 2mm-square piece of seedless/membraneless habanero was enough to knock me for a loop. So, I opened the chipotles, and cut off a bit of same. Double whooooah! The combination of the two burned my mouth for a full 20 minutes, during which I attempted, tearfully, to continue the recipe, but had to resort to attempts at putting out the fire with water, bread, milk, and even beer. Nothing helped. I sucked on some ice, which seemed to do the best job. But it just kept on, and on, and on! Wow. That's quite a pepper.
So I radically downsized the chile pepper content of the dish. I de-seeded and de-membraned a single chipotle, diced it, and threw it in. As it turned out, I could have gotten away with a few more -- the slow cooking defused (and diffused) the pepper. There was a tanginess, but no real kick. Here's the raw concoction:
I used a glass baking pan, did not use banana leaf, and tightly sealed the top with foil. This worked very well, and the best evidence was that during the 4.5-hour coooking process, the house did not fill with delicious aromas from the oven. The foil kept the mojo in!
I opened the foil seal and was greeted with lovely steam and all that concentrated aroma:
The pork maintained its structural cube integrity for a photo, but immediately collapsed -- nay, melted! -- upon attack with a fork. So I spooned it into a shallow bowl, pulled it apart like pork shoulder barbecue, mixed it with the sauce, and dug in. I wanted to keep this a low-carb meal, so I skipped the rice, and served it with a simple green salad and a purposely bland side dish of cauliflower.
The interplay of flavors was intense and satisfying. The sauce was more liquid than I had expected (I was thinking it would end up more like a mole), and the predominant taste, as Maggie noted after her own production of the dish last week, was citrus, which is unusual and surprisingly good. The only table condiment I added was a little salt, which brought out the flavors. I had two helpings, and finished the rest for lunch today, accompanied by low-carb tortilla chips.
When I make this again, I'll definitely go ahead with more chile peppers, and amp up the garlic and maybe cut down a little on the total liquid. In any case, hats off to Robert Rodriguez!
Posted at 16:09 | permanent link
Thu, 15 Jul 2004
The first thing you need to remember is that I'm not one of those people that tends to like overly spicy ("hot") food. To me it's like pointing a video camera at the sun, or turning the amplifier up past 11: hot peppers simply overwhelm the signal to noise ratio of what I would like to think of as my delicate and highly sensitive taste buds. Hot peppers -- those with a fair amount of capsaicin, the active principle in much spicy food (although horseradish, mustard, and the piper nigrum [black pepper] plant also qualify) are certainly an attractive seasoning, but to me they work best in small or moderate doses, so as not to overwhelm the senses and mask the other flavours.
Needless to say, there are other schools of thought on this. There was a guy I knew in college who actually carried around a bottle of habanero sauce and dumped large amounts in essentially every thing he tasted, complaining about the "damned bland food out here", which was odd, since I think he was from New Jersey. And I once had a roommate whose diet consisted of, so far as I could tell, entirely of tinned Ortega brand jalapeno peppers and Olympia beer, as well as inhaled Dristan. (Really. I'm not making this up.) Both these guys reminded me of junkies who had to shoot up ever-increasing amounts of heroin in order to make up for the amazing tolerance that they had developed.
More reasonably, though, there seem to be a number of people with perfectly good taste buds who like pretty spicy food. I ascribe this to a combination of differing physiology of taste, plus a likely tolerance effect from regular ingestion. (There's also a somewhat overlapping, but not entirely congruent, faction that is primarily interested in spicy food as a producer of a natural, endorphin-driven "high". As an aficionado of endorphins in other contexts, I can't disagree in principle, although it just doesn't work for me with spicy food.)
The natural tendency, however, among spicy-food lovers is to divide the world into wimps and non-wimps, with a smugness about capsaicin tolerance ranging from the slight to the pronounced. Often the word "macho" comes up in this context. (I counter this with a mild smugness about ultra-sensitive and discriminating taste buds, which is usually met with eye-rolling.) So, then, when I was invited to my friends Scott and Roswitha's Hotluck last month, I was definitely honoured, but expected a bit of a rough time. However, I quickly learned that this year's theme was "Educate A Wimp", which meant that (a) there might actually be some easily-edible food as a sop to us sensitives; but (b) there was likely to be major smugness/macho involved.
I'm pleased to say that not only was there a huge variety of foods that were not beyond my palate's pale, but that there was no smugness/macho factor at all, certainly none at all on the part of our hosts. What's more, there were at least two things that were so good that I overlooked the pain factor in order to eat them and indeed go for seconds. Outside, dishes were arranged on three tables: the mild, the medium, and the hot, with little flags (green, yellow, or pink) in or near each dish as a further disclosure (plus the name and any details about the dish). Indoors, desserts filled a large table, but provided no automatic respite from the capsaicin onslaught; one of the spiciest and most painful dishes for me was a slab of dark chocolate bark. (I'm told by those who fancy both hot peppers and xanthine-laden chocolate that spicy chocolate is a serious and highly sensual thrill, and is probably illegal somewhere.)
Things began innocently enough with some non-spicy grilled thai beef made by my friend Eleanor from The Well. The assembled masses fell on it and it was gone in seconds. It was a tasty entrée for things to come.
So I noodled around the Wimp table for a while, where I found some nice chicken enchiladas, coconut chicken, and gruyere cheese puffs. The most interesting thing that had a green tag was an Alsatian cabbage soup with sausages that hit the spot -- and also possessed a bit more fire than its tag led me to believe. (The tag system, as you might expect, reflects both a rather broad spectrum as well as highly subjective perceptions.) There was also a Serbian bean soup, prepared by Roswitha, that had a deep and complex flavour.
I moved on to the Medium table pretty quickly, and at first was led on by an innocent tuna pate, which barely piqued my spice meter, but was followed immediately with an Asian shrimp salad which did. I took some tiny bites of hummus (good, but I'm not really a hummus person), a casserole which I didn't get the title of, and the last piece of some grilled chicken, which was very nice indeed.
But what this was all about lay at the repast's farthest expanse: the Hot table. Now, to be clear, there were some items that I was just not going to attempt, for the aforementioned pointing-the-camera-at-the-sun reasons: this included various dishes made of hot peppers themselves, a couple of Indian dishes, and, making the rounds at the notional dessert table, something called Demon Rum, prepared by a fellow named Mark, which was pure rum flavoured with Red Savina habanero peppers, and left to steep and infuse for an unseemly amount of time. This particular batch was 2003 vintage, meaning that the peppers had been soaking in the rum for over a year. Mark says it tends to lose its punch after a very long time (there was a six year-old vintage present as well), but after a year it was easily able to knock 'em dead. (This was generally considered the spiciest item of the day.)
One intriguing dish was the Pig Newtons, prepared by Scott himself, which looked like a giant fig newton, but is actually smoked pulled pork en croute, the enclosing dough containing ground Red Savina habanero material. Now, it's likely that I could have dealt with the filling, but I didn't get that far, since I just broke off a tiny bit of the croute and tasted it, and it knocked me for a serious loop. (Expectations count for something in the hot world; I was fully prepared for a spicy filling but somehow expected an innocent wrapper.)
After a brief recovery period I tasted the Asian slaw with pork sandwich which was actually a relief after the Pig Newton, and then headed back to the Mild table for a refresher of raita (Indian-style yogurt with onion, tomato, and seasonings) and some cucumber salad. That was a relief!
At this point I was hitting full stride, but I knew the best was yet to come -- there had been a smoker going full-blast since well before I'd arrived, and cooks' helpers were warming some barbecued meats in the oven. Soon they made an appearance. I looked at the smoked ribs, and said to myself, I don't care how hot those are, I'm going to eat them. And probably in signficant quantity. Well, Scott's Burning Ribs were indeed hot, but thankfully not to the point of masking the wonderful flavour of smoked and seasoned meat. The same was true of the Texas-style brisket, which was seriously seasoned and had the wonderful red color of smoked meat. I think I do better with spicy barbecued meat since typically the peppers are in a dry rub, or possibly a liquid marinade, and are thus limited to the surface or near-surface of the meat. Someday, of course, Scott is going to figure out a way to get the Red Savinas into the deep interior of the meat, and then I'm in trouble.
The barbecue pretty much took the remainder of my stamina, so it was time to hit the dessert table. Some items were completely innocent, others were traditional but with an added kick, and one -- the dark chocolate bark mentioned above -- was a complete surprise. It comes from Richard Donnelly Chocolates, and is made with smoked savina powder. Wow!
The point of the Hotluck, of course, is not merely the food, but the serious foodie schmooze. Roswitha and Scott showed food and travel photos on a large screen, provoking discussion about things like the origin of doner kebap and food sanitation in East Asia. And the hosts, besides documenting the event with a nice web page with photos, are also kind enough to supply the recipes. I won't be attempting the Hot Chocolate at home, or even the Pig Newtons, and don't want to even think about the Demon Rum, but I'm anxious to give the smoked meats a shot.
So after all of this I remain pretty reticent about spicy food. It's nice once in a while, but I can't help but think that almost all the dishes I tasted would have been just as good with a lower level of fire. They were almost uniformly delicious, the kind of food I'd line up to taste any day, but I think that's much more a testimonial to the culinary skill of the creators rather than the properties of hot red peppers.
Posted at 19:30 | permanent link
Thu, 27 May 2004
I'm at it again -- crawling the cheese counters of the Bay Area looking for new and different cheeses. (See Three cheeses below.) As you recall, I'm a fiend for blue-veined cheeses, and two of the three here I've had before, but never really contemplated and compared their flavours.
Fourme d'Ambert: This is a cow's milk cheese from Auvergne, France, and of the three is the one new to me. It has a long and storied history, beginning, according to tradition, with the Druids and Gauls. It's supposed to be one of the mildest of France's blue cheeses, but the portion I got was very, very ripe and the rind was almost too sharply piquant to eat. The interior was creamy and flavourful, and not at all sweet.
Gorgonzola dolcelatte: Gorgonzola is the Italian entry in the blue cheese department, and typical gorgonzola (known as "naturale") is strong-flavoured, robust, and crumbly, often making an appearance in salads or with sliced fruit. But dolcelatte (which, of course, means "sweet milk") is quite different, and is soft, creamy, and sweet. I wedge I bought was quite ripe, again with a puckeringly tangy rind, but the interior was almost runny at room temperature.
Roquefort (Societe d'Affinois): Roquefort, truly, needs no introduction, and to me it is the king of all cheeses. All roquefort comes from the Roquefort area of the Aveyron region of south-central France, and is made with sheep's milk from a particular breed of sheep (Lacaune). While the current producers are able to supply the world with enough roquefort to reach even chain supermarkets in the U.S., it's still made pretty much the old-fashioned way, and aged in caves in a highly specific cool and moist environment. Roquefort varies from crumbly to creamy, but always has a distinctive sweet flavour that makes it instantly identifiable. Thankfully, due to increased vigilance by the Roquefort brand protection people, all the roquefort now sold in the U.S. (and worldwide) is authentic; twenty-plus years ago, some domestic blue cheese producers felt free to label their premium cheese "roquefort" (just as some domestic sparkling wine producers labeled theirs "champagne"). Much of that cheese was entirely edible, and much of it went into so-called "roquefort dressing", but it wasn't roquefort. I'm happy to have the real thing so widely available, even if it does cost $22/lb.
If you try these three together, as I did, it's interesting to have them in the order presented, from savoury to mild-sweet to sweet. I don't bother with crackers or bread, but if you do, try something with a very neutral flavour. These three will stand up to almost any wine, including port, which makes a good accompaniment, as does black coffee.
Posted at 14:48 | permanent link
Mon, 17 May 2004
Every columnist or reporter dreams of having an actual occasion to use the headline above, and I'm no exception. It's supposed to indicate lack of understanding, and that's definitely the case here. Why does the San Francisco Bay Area have so few dependable Greek restaurants?
Most everywhere else I travel has no lack of Greek cuisine, at all price levels from gyros stands to elaborate estiatorion. The champions in North America seem to be Chicago, whose Greektown which offers a cluster of at least a dozen restaurants -- my choice is usually Parthenon -- and Toronto, with a rival Greektown with a dozen or so in the Danforth district, of which Mezes is my favourite. I'm told Detroit's Greektown is no slouch, and New York City has Greek restaurants all over the five boroughs. (I particularly like Molyvos, a relative newcomer, on Seventh Ave. in midtown Manhattan.)
But for some reason, San Francisco, along with cross-bay rival Oakland one of the world's great port cities, remains perennially poor in Greek cuisine. It's not a complete shutout; there are a couple of choices at the high end (people mention Kokkari, which I haven't tried, and Palo Alto's Evvia, which I have). And for casual food there are numerous gyros stands (some of which, sadly, seem to serve pre-cooked, pre-sliced gyros slices) and a few places like Yianni's with locations in SF's Mission district and in Burlingame. Yianni's is quiet, tasty, and serves the standards, with a few daily specials.
None of these places, though, seem to be able to muster the atmosphere of a place like Chicago's Parthenon or Delphi in the Westwood district of Los Angeles -- that is, loud, festive, and with a huge menu and even larger portions, and a loyal clientele of serious eaters (and serious drinkers) who all seem to know each other, and the staff and management. Kokkari and and Evvia are indeed fine restaurants, with an emphasis on innovative Mediterranean food in a refined atmopshere, but they're not by any stretch festive tavernas. Similarly, Yianni's in Burlingame serves pleasant food in a calm restaurant that's nice enough, but not the sort of place where anyone would ever yell "Opaaaaaaa!!!!" at the top of their lungs.
You can imagine my pleasure, therefore, when I learned that a new Greek place had opened in San Francisco -- Minerva Cafe, at Bush and Divisadero. The space used to be a sushi bar, the oddly-named Osaka Sushi Vallejo, which did not last long, and after a period of renovation opened up with a flourish as Minerva, offering the Greek standards. Well, I'm not giving up on them, but my first visit was somewhat underwhelming. The menu is somewhat minimal, not the multi-pages of places like the Parthenon or Molyvos, but most of the standards are there. The appetizers were excellent, including my personal favourite, taramasalata (fish roe whipped with cream or mayonnaise, lemon, and garlic) and dolmades. There were some problems getting the order in, and the kitchen was somewhat slow, which was odd since, sadly, we were the only party in the place at 7:45 on a Saturday evening. (More parties arrived later, and there was live music starting at 8:30, in the form of a two piece combo playing, well, Greek interpretations of popular show tunes.) The maitre d' and staff were very effusive and agreeable, and graciously brought extra retsina at no charge. So, maybe it's a place that really gets going late in the evening, which is fine by me, and I'll give it another try soon, with, say, a 9 pm start. In any case, I hope it gets its Greek buzz going soon.
So, why does the San Francisco area lack the generous Greek cuisine found in most North American cities? I've heard several theories, the most prevalent being that the pervasive Italian influence in San Francisco cuisine simply left little room for the Greeks. It's true that you can find an Italian restaurant on nearly every corner in San Francisco and its suburbs, and Italian cuisine (specifically Tuscan and Umbrian) was essential to the development of California cuisine. In traditional San Francisco, many hamburger joints, bars with food, casual restaurants, and corner stores, were Italian-owned, and every neighborhood had multiple pizzerias. ("Greek pizza", a staple in New England and elsewhere, is pretty much unknown in San Francisco.) And San Francisco's fishing fleet, based traditionally at Fisherman's Wharf, was historically Italian (though it is presently mostly Asian). The Wharf's restaurants are universally Italian seafood houses, and I don't think there's ever been a Greek restaurant on the waterfront, with the exception of the estimable but short-lived Samos, which came and went in 1998, and merely took advantage of the views along the Embarcadero.
If you have a theory about the disappointing variety of Greek food in the Bay Area, drop me a line.
Posted at 23:45 | permanent link
Fri, 26 Mar 2004
I love prime rib of beef, roasted medium-rare, and don't seem to get to eat it often enough. Not too many restaurants cook and serve it with confidence and consistency, and those that do tend to be "special occasion" type places. And in a small household there are not many opportunities to cook a large roast, except for a major dinner party.
So, the proposition: is it possible to treat a 1-bone, 2.25 lb. cut of prime rib as a standing rib roast, and cook it in time for dinner, when the idea just came to you while standing at the butcher's counter at about 6 PM? And if so, which of the two dozen algorithms for prime rib, typically written for 4-8 lb. roasts, will scale? I researched, and by way of synthesis, I ended up with:
- Preheat oven to 500F.
- Rub roast with Lawry's seasoned salt, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic powder. (For a big roast I usually use kosher salt, but I was out, and there was no time to go back to the market.)
- Roast on rack for 15 min./lb. = 34 min.
- Remove, allow to sit for 10 min.
- Remove bone (set aside to be eaten Henry VIII-style), slice in thick slices, serve.
It was delicious throughout, and tasted just like the prime rib the big boys roast down at House of Prime Rib and similar places.
Analysis of the roast showed the following: there was a definite crust around the edges, but it was dark brown, not black, and incredibly tasty, especially toward the "tail" of the rib cut (i.e., where the bone ends and it becomes narrow). Because of the overall shortness of the roasting period, though, the crusty/well-done portion went only a few millimeters into the surface, and the middle of each cut was pink/red. This suited me fine. Whether you find this desirable, depends, I guess, on how you like grilled or roasted beef. Given the temperature "medium rare", some people like a moist mahogany on the outside and pink/red in the middle; I like the cut nicely charred on the outside and pink/red in the middle.
Posted at 18:45 | permanent link
The RSS/XML feed has returned; it's in the left column. It's RSS 0.91 and should be compatible with most newsreaders. Please let me know if you have any problems with it.
Posted at 17:31 | permanent link
Fri, 12 Mar 2004
The Black Crow (13 February 2004)
This evening's dinner takes us to the small city of Beatrice, Nebraska, population 13,000. Beatrice is about 45 minutes south of Lincoln, and is a pleasant town with a traditional downtown and tree-lined residential streets, an old county courthouse of classic design, and, of course, a Wal-Mart. It is probably best known for being the original home of Beatrice Foods, which has long since been divided, sold off, merged and re-merged into large conglomerates like ConAgra and Parmalat.
Downtown Beatrice features at least one first-class restaurant, the Black Crow. It's a single, somewhat narrow high-ceilinged room in a block of brick storefronts, decorated unobtrusively with rich woods and mirrors, with a bar running much of the length of the room. On a busy night, in the middle of the dinner rush, with the clinking of glasses, laughter and pleasant conversation, you can lean back and imagine that you're in New York, London, or Paris, which is a remarkable achievement in Gage County, Nebraska.
We arrived a bit early and repaired to the bar to await the rest of our party, and ordered steamed mussels, which were classic and delicious, accompanied by a Nautilus (New Zealand) sauvignon blanc, 2001 (tasty, but a little less crisp than most). (It was a disquisition on mussels, you may remember, that planted the seed that launched Berch on Food years later.)
At the table we shared a smoked meat and cheese platter as a starter, and I went with the grilled venison chops with wild mushroom sauce as a main course. The medium-rare venison was a perfect counterpart to the rich sauce and the variety of mushrooms and the roasted potatoes. Not yet attuned to my current low-carb discipline, I shared a chocolate fudge ice cream sundae for dessert.
With the venison we drank an Australian shiraz, St. Hallett's Faith Vineyard, 2000, which was the nightly wine special, and its deep spiciness went perfectly with the venison and its sauce. (The Black Crow's chef is undoubtedly a game fan, since rabbit, wild boar, and venison are frequently on the menu.)
If you happen to be in southeast Nebraska it's worth a detour.
Posted at 19:47 | permanent link
Sat, 21 Feb 2004
The all-new Berch on Food - coming very soon!
I haven't mentioned it here, but a few readers might know that some years ago I started writing down nearly everything that I ate. At the time, it was for the purpose of monitoring a particular diet that I'd been talked into. (Specifically, that I would only eat red meat once a week.) The idea was that if I wrote things down, it would be easier to comply. Later, I went on a low-carb diet, and the dishes listed were analyzed as to their carbohydrate count, allowing me to keep track of that. More recently, it's been a good way of keeping track of special restaurants, dishes, wines, etc., and it's easy since I'm in the habit already.
So, after a couple of requests, I thought I'd share some of my daily notations with Berch on Food readers. From now on, things here will be a mixture of essays and notes on my quotidian consumption. I'm going to leave out much of the really boring stuff, like the eating of leftovers for lunch, and breakfasts consisting of nutrition bars, and the unavoidable fast food. Eventually I hope to post daily, and if not daily, then at least on a catch-up basis. And there will be some historical data as well, memorable meals from the "archives".
I'm also going to reinstate the RSS feed, for those who like news aggregators. Look for that shortly.
I'm going to begin with my recent trip to Nebraska, and catch up to the present.
Posted at 17:02 | permanent link
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