About Bad Cookbooks and Amazing Pulled Pork

Feast of Sæhrímnir

Sometimes, I cheat.

No, not on my other half, naturally!  Pfft!  I cheat with spice mixes.  I have done so since one fateful day, many years ago, when someone with the best of intentions gifted me with a 7kg hardcover book of world cuisines – glossy, beautifully published and in full color.  It proudly lives in my storage as I reckon it’s the 2nd worst cookbook I’ve ever owned.  Or perhaps it ties for first place with “Spicy” by Marie Claire magazine  (which is the worst cookbook I ever spent wasted any money on, and I heartily recommend you to not waste money on, by the way – I regret the £1 I’ve shelled out on it in a charity shop to this day).

Anyway, about that first awful cookbook – I received it as a gift for a birthday sometime in my early 20s, and I tried, a couple of times, to cook something from it.  Except – and this is what scarred me – there is no way I could have done that properly without actual electronic chemistry-lab sensitive scale and a spice grinder.  How else would I get 17g of coarsely ground spice X and mix it with 24g of Y, and… you get the idea.  And the result was that to cook Indian, I tossed the book onto a bottom shelf, visited an Indian store, bought a few varieties of their curry powders, and that was that.  These days, I don’t touch cookbooks which prescribe ingredients in such a manner, and I buy good-quality spice mixes whenever I can.  And use most of the spices to eye/taste anyway.  So you see, this story is not so much about cookbooks I hate, but about spice mixes:  I love them.

But wait, you say, didn’t you write about how you hate the spice packets and never-ever buy them if you can help it?  Yep, I did.  But, the two are really, really not the same thing!  The pre-prepared spice packets pumped full of sugar, salt and additives and starch are the subject of much loathing.  The nice carefully blended and pre-mixed and packaged spices in pretty tins or jars, sometimes with a bit of salt but usually without sugar, and without any added unwanted stuff – those are the stuff of dreams.  Lazy, lazy dreams.  But wait, there is more to the indulgence – on a fairly recent visit to Essencefabriken, I’ve bought a baggy of their propritary Cajun spice mix – and visiting a proper spice shop, sniffing all the spices and mixes they have, and then telling them how much of each you want, and getting it all weighed out for me on an antique balance-scale in polished brass – this is the posh life of a spoiled home cook.

But I could talk about spices and spice shops for hours, and I’d promised a recipe for pulled pork.  A fair warning to you – this will be long.  You I can’t really describe the process and all the details shorter.  You may be able to, but not me.  I like my instructions to be on the exhaustive side, so please bear with me here, ok?

So, here we are finally getting to the pork in question – pulled pork is easy to make.  The hardest bits are mixing the spices (or not, see above!), and resisting the temptation to cook it at a higher temperature than the recommended 130C, and for a shorter than the recommended 6-12 hours (and that time varies wildly).  I freely admit to being lazy, but there is an ingrained, in all of us who cook, tendency to want to check on food and keep seeing if it’s ready yet, which is very, very counterproductive when trying to make pulled pork.

After approximately 6.5 hours in veeery low oven.

And yes, the slow lazy cooking process which takes many hours and during which the oven and meat appear to be barely doing anything, it is very counterintuitive to the modern in-a-hurry cook, with our tight schedules and deadlines and tendency to think that any meat which is cooked longer than an hour must end up overcooked.  But fear not, as not all meat is meant to be eaten bleu (barely warmed up by searing), and while it may not look like there’s a lot going on during that time, trust me, while you wait (and you’re better off reading, working, bathing, sleeping or walking outside in meantime), magic happens in that oven.

To sum this up in short – you brine your cut of pork overnight submerged in brine entirely, and then you place it in a Dutch oven or a baking dish, stick a meat thermometer in it, place it all into that oven and forget about it for the duration.  Which goes against the “oh my god it’s going to burn if I don’t check it yet again!” instinct (which is right in about 19/20 dishes you I cook).

How-to is first here, because the how is more important than the “what spice mix” in this case:

Note:  If you do not own a meat thermometer, buy one.  Trying to cook this without one is near-doomed to failure.  I’m serious, and I am the one who routinely cooks meat by eye – slow-cooking meat in the oven requires one and there is no way around it.  If you cook tens of them every week and they are in a uniform weight from same pig farmer, or if you are good with a smoker on a barbecue, maybe, but not in the oven.

Note 2:  This process must be started 2 days in advance.  So plan ahead accordingly.  No, you cannot make it less, and no, there are no shortcuts around that I know of which’d not make the end result worse.  On the other hand, these 2 days are really not spent making efforts – it is just the time which is needed.

• Add your brine ingredients (recipe follows) to a pot large enough to hold your meat submerged, and bring to a boil.  Stir, remove from heat and cool to lukewarm or completely.  I stuck the pot out on the balcony  for an hour or two – October night in Stockholm works fine as a refrigerator.  Don’t be tempted to put the hot pot of brine in your fridge.  Bad for fridge, bad for your food and thus just a Bad Idea™!
• Rinse the pork shoulder (karre, Boston Butt – I used boneless, but bone-in works fine for this too), and pat it dry.
• Once brine is cooled, submerge the meat in the brine, cover and place in the refrigerator for a min of 12 hours, up to 24 if your cut is larger than 2kg (~4lbs).
• After brining time is done, preheat your oven to 130°C (270F).
• Take the meat out of brine (use your hands, they’ll get wet and messy later anyway!), rinse it lightly under running water to remove excess salt, and discard the brine (do not reuse, ew!).  Pat the meat dry, and rub it all over with a sufficient amount of spice mix (see recipe and suggestions below) to coat all sides.
• Lightly grease a baking/roasting dish.  For very large cuts (over 2kg), I recommend a roasting dish with a rack, but for a smaller piece like mine (just over 1kg), no rack is really needed.  Place the meat into the dish, and insert a meat thermometer into the thickest part of the pig.  Note that about halfway through cooking, the thermometer may need to be pushed deeper in, as the meat will change shape somewhat.
• Place the dish in the oven, and set timer for 3 hours if it is a small cut, or 6-8 hours if it is large.  This is not necessary but if you are at home, it’s not a bad idea to check at that point, possibly to push the thermometer deeper in.
• Roast meat until it reaches internal temperature of 90°C (195F).  Yes, it’s way beyond what is considered “done” for pork, but that is the temperature you want to roast to (and yes, I am the one saying it, the woman who likes her beef barely-warmed and her lamb red-to-pink).  Note that the temperature advance will plateau at 75-85°C (170-185F) and will crawl up very slowly from there.  It’s normal, due to fat rendering and collagen turning into gelatin – see details below.
• Remove from oven, cover in foil, and allow to rest for 1-2 hours before arming yourself with 2 forks and shredding the quivering (and it’ll quiver by that point!) piece of meat into pulled pork strands.
• Serve with your choice of bread (I baked a part-wholemeal long-ferment sourdough which I should possibly blog about at some point, but any good crusty bread will do – or just, any fresh bread really!).  The dripping off the meat can be either made into a sauce of your liking and choice, or used as-is (don’t forget a food warmer candle underneath to prevent it congealing into unappetizing slab of lard at the table).

Now, the recipe, such as it is, and some answers:

You need a fatty, tough cut of pork, which may be counterintuitive when you are going for a final result of such melting tenderness.  But yes, do not touch that pork loin and put down the tenderloin.  Get the cheap, fatty shoulder – you need that fat and collagen which the loins do not have to create this.  The cut usually recommended for this is shoulder – bone in or out – top “butt” or arm; karre in Swedish.  I don’t honestly know if the ham (back leg) would be as good in this, but different cuts of meat are used for this in the USA, and I imagine any similar cut of pig would do.  My boneless shoulder cut was small but it worked just fine – a very large cut of this sort can be cooked very well (even better imho) but it will take a long, long time.

1.2kg cut of pork fed 3 very hungry people to stuffing.  Would have worked for 4 too, really.

The amount of brine depends on the size of your cut.  Make enough brine.  You can measure the meat by putting it in the pot before making brine, to see how much brine you’d need to cover it.  Remember that meat will initially displace it, at least in the 1kg:1L ratio.

Brine recipe:   Per 1 gallon (4L) of water, use:

• 1 cup (2.4dl) coarse salt without iodine (sea salt is great)
• 1/2 cup (1.2dl) molasses sugar (farinsocker)
• 4 heaping tablespoons of whatever spices you want to use.  I used Essencefabriken’s Cajun mix.  Just make sure your spice mix is a mix of spices, and does not containg significant % of salt.
• 2 teaspoons of red chili flakes (optional, for those of us who love the heat)

Scale the recipe as needed, put in the pot, boil, cool, ready to submerge meat.  Roasting fowl really benefits from this treatment too – just remember that if you use a whole bird rather than a cut of meat, it needs to be taken out of the brine 2-4 hours before cooking to allow the meat to absorb the brine from skin’s inside.

I used about 3 heaping tablespoons of Cajun spice mix on my 1.2kg piece of pork after brining.  This will depend on how large the cut is and how thickly you coat.

The meat will stabilize at certain temperatures, most notably the 75-85°C range mentioned above.  It is because once a certain internal temperature is reached, first fat, and then collagen, will begin to liquefy.  You want this to happen in order to make the meat tender and shreddably soft – collagen is what makes the meat tough so you want that gone, and the melting fat is what keeps the meat from drying.  Both good things.

If you attempt to speed the process up by cooking at higher temperature, the meat will probably be pretty good, but it won’t be as moist or as soft.  Minor changes to temperature advised are no risk – it’s a very flexible cooking process, but if you up the oven temperature to 170°C or above, it’s a whole different kettle of fish.  Or a different pan of pork, as it happens.

Different cuts from different pigs will take different amount of time to cook.  It is because they have different ages, different amount of collagen content, different fat marbling, etc.  This is not a dish you should expect to be done by hour X unless you have a pretty good idea and have done this many times.  A small cut like mine could take 5 hours to cook – or it could take 8 or 9.  It is not unheard of for the cooking process to take 20 hours for the larger cuts (over 3kg).  So, if you want to serve this to your guests, cook it overnight and let it rest, then shred and if needs be, cover in foil and reheat gently before they arrive.

Long cooking will make the meat shrink.  Depends on what else you feed your guests or how much of a meat-eater they are, you may want to allow +1 or 2 people in your calculations.  Besides, leftovers from this are fantastic in soup, pasta, sandwiches, tacos, Tex-Mex in general, and a thousand other things.

So, with all of this in mind, the time and wait and the reading of this post which got hugely long, the results are amazing and they are worth it.

Rustic Sourdough Loaf

We devoured ours with about half a loaf of bread between the three of us, and no other sauce than the drippings from the pork itself, and a fruity light white wine to wash it all down.  And it was amazing.  And I will make it again and again, and you should too.  Unless you are Jewish or Muslim.  But then, I heard that this method works really well on fatty lamb shoulders and legs too.  Just so you know!

And I know that you know you want it.

Stockholm Sourdough 2.0

As those who have been reading this with any sort of regularity will know, I’ve been happily cultivating a sourdough starter and trying to learn how to bake real artisan-style naturally leavened (sourdough) bakery bread for several months.

Moreover, I’ve been trying to perfect my sourdough recipe for everyday, standby bread that would go with most things and that T would absolutely love (it’s an important criterion!).  My first decently successful attempt was eaten happily some weeks ago, however as I’ve mentioned back then, it wasn’t really a recipe, but rather a work in progress – progress which continued through the purchase of a banetton, a trip to the Stockholm Essencefabriken to buy some traditional Swedish bread spices, and a rummage through my dishware for the appropriate cast-iron dutch oven to bake it all in.  Then there was the frantic posting back and forth on sourdough forums with questions regarding proofing, and then there was another attempt…

Without further ado, I proudly present to you – Stockholm Sourdough 2.0:

Stockholm Sourdough 2.0 in all of its 1.3kg-loaf glory

First of all, yes – it is large.  And yes, the crust is crunchy but not too thick, and the crumb was lovely and open and fluffy and fantastically aromatic.  I’d not used bread spices before, and I have to say that I now know why they are so popular in Sweden – the bitter orange peel gave the bread a gorgeous golden tinge, and the smell is simply amazing!  I have to pronounce this one a success, and since this time around I’ve documented the recipe as I went along (and I am retesting it today, and again later this week), I am happy to share it.

This bread uses a three-stage sourdough process, which is a lot less work than it sounds, but it does mean you have to start it a couple of days in advance.  On the up side, stage 2 (levain) can be refrigerated up to a week after initial fermentation, and the final stage can be performed on the same day you pull it out of the fridge.  Timing of first two stages is none too strict, and can certainly be worked around a study or work schedule.

What you need:  (Makes 2 large loaves over a couple of days – or on the same day if you insist)

• A living sourdough starter (if yours is frozen or dried, you will have to reactivate it first – if it is refrigerated, it’s absolutely fine as it is).
• A 2kg bag of high-protein content flour (I use 12% protein)
• 4 (2×2) teaspoons of sea salt (I use good coarse sea salt that I pound fine in a mortar and then measure it out)
• Water – cold or finger-warm.  (I use cold water if I am not in a hurry, or finger-warm if I want the bread to stick to schedule.)
• Refined rapeseed or light olive oil – to oil bowls, etc.
• 6 (2×3) teaspoons of Swedish bread spices.  (This is entirely optional and the bread will rise perfectly fine without these so if you dislike the idea, you can skip them, use your own mix, or another spice mix if you prefer).  Swedish bread spices are a finely ground mix of:

1. ground dried bitter orange peel
2. star anice
3. coriander seed
4. fennel seed
5. caraway seed.

Stage 1:  Starter

If begun in the morning, it’ll be ready to start stage 2 in evening.

• Take your sourdough starter (this can be cold from the fridge), and mix 2 heaping tablespoons of it with about 1dl of water and 1.5 dl of flour to fairly thick consistency.
• Scrape it into a glass jar or measuring cup, cover (I use a washed-out jam jar with a screw lid which I don’t screw all the way on to allow gas exchange), and leave at room temperature for 6-18 hours (this will depend on your room temperature, how fast your starter is, etc. – but don’t worry, it’s not very time-critical!) until the starter has at least doubled in volume (if I do this in the morning, mine tends to be close to triple by the end of the day), and is full of bubbles.
• When it is, you can proceed to stage 2, OR you can stick it in the fridge and wait with stage 2 until it’s convenient (1-3 days).

Stage 2:  Levain

This takes about 5 minutes of work + 6-8 hours at room temperature – perfect to start in evening of day of stage 1, and leave overnight.  Quantities given make enough levain for 2 large loaves to be baked the same day or over the next week.  If you want less levain, halve the quantities, but I prefer to make a larger batch of this so that I can repeat stage 3 (final dough and baking) twice without having to go through stages 1-2 again.

• Take all of starter from stage 1 (or you can take all except 2 tablespoons which you can save if you want to keep a sample of your starter), and place in a large mixing bowl.
• Add approximately 3dl of water to the starter bit by bit, breaking the starter down as you add.  If you add too much water too fast, it’ll be harder to mix it.  a balloon whisk helps here, but a wooden spoon will do just fine too.  Continue mixing the slurry until all the water is added.
• Add 500g (that’d be 4.2 cups or 9dl) of flour, and mix until combined into a somewhat sloppy dough.  You can do this with a wooden spoon, but I am lazy and use a handheld mixer with dough hooks on low speed for a few minutes.
• Oil a 2L plastic box all over the inside (including inside the lid), or a bowl, and plonk the levain into it.  Cover (with said lid or some plastic wrap aka clingfilm), and leave at room temperature for 6-8 hours.  Overnight works fine.
• When the levain is puffed up, you can use it right away or you can put the bowl or box in the fridge and use it at any point over the next week.

Stage 3:  Final Dough and Baking – for 1 large loaf.

If you want to bake all the levain you’ve prepared into 2 loaves on same day, simply double the quantities of everything and divide the dough in two before final pre-shaping, shaping and proofing.  Note that if you are proofing in banettons, you will need 2 banettons large enough to hold ~1.3kg of dough each.  I would recommend baking the breads sequentially, as most house ovens won’t fit two of those at one time, and placing one of them into a refrigerator to finish proofing about 2.5 hours into final proof to avoid over-proofing it while the first loaf bakes.  I normally bake one loaf immediately and the other one the day after or a few days after.

• Measure out 500g flour and the 3 teaspoons of spices (if using) into a mixing bowl and mix with a dry whisk to combine.
• Slowly add approximately 3.5 dl of water while mixing with a wooden spoon or a mixer with dough hooks until the dough comes together (it will be fairly stiff and you may need to use your hands towards the end if you have started with a spoon).  Cover with plastic wrap (clingfilm) and leave for at least 15 minutes (30 min won’t hurt it either) to autolyze (let the flour absorb water).
• Sprinkle 2 teaspoons of salt over the dough.
• Take ~400g (about half of Stage 2 recipe) levain and add it to the same bowl (or all the levain if doubling quantities for 2 loaves together).
• Mix together to incorporate levain and salt into the dough.  This really is easier with a mixer, otherwise you will need to knead it together, but only enough to mix – kneading is not used in this recipe for gluten development.  Shape the dough into a rough ball.
• Place the dough into a cleaned and oiled bowl and turn to coat in oil.  Cover with plastic wrap.
• Bulk fermentation of the dough at this point is about 3-4 hours.  I do a stretch-and-fold every 1 hour starting at 30 minutes after mixing, and stop when the dough is pillowy and doubled in bulk.  Some people do this on an oiled surface, but I find i can just lift the dough out of the bowl with lightly oiled hands, let it stretch as it hangs, and fold it in my hands, then place it back into the bowl – easy!
• After 3-4 hours, the dough will be soft and fluffy and will have doubled in bulk.  If using 2x quantities for 2 loaves, here is where you cut it in half and proceed as follows.  If you are using half the levain for 1 loaf, no need to cut the dough.
• Take your dough and place it on a lightly floured surface.  It should be soft and very elastic and not really very sticky at this point.
• Gently fold and preshape it into a boule, place on a well-floured spot on the surface and cover.  Allow to rest for 10-15 minutes.
• In the meantime, dust your banetton with flour.  I use a little bit of regular wheat flour and then some wholemeal coarsely ground flour on it.  Or you can flour a kitchen towel and line a large bowl with it instead.  Note:  more flour is better than less – you really don’t want this sucker to stick.  Dough stuck in banetton or towel = utter misery.  I speak from experience.
• Finish shaping your dough into a ball by stretching the surface and gently tucking the ends underneat it, then pinch the bottom seam shut and place the dough ball into the floured banetton OR the floured-towel lined bowl seam side down.
• Preheat your oven with the cast-iron casserole dish inside to 250°C.  If your dish is deep enough for the bread, preheat the lid too (make sure your knob is heatproof to the required temperature!).  Note, the cast iron will be very hot – please read tips and cautions about baking in a cast-iron dutch oven/casserole dish here.  For this loaf, I used a shallow round casserole bottom and a stainless-steel bowl for top since the lid was too flat to contain the bread in the shallow dish.  Do not preheat the stainless-steel bowl if you will use that.
• Cover and allow to proof for 1-1.5 hours until the dough has close to doubled or doubled in bulk and passes the poke test.  (Poke test – poke dough with a finger, the surface should not bounce back immediately, but should rise up again very slowly.)
• When the time has elapsed, oven is preheated, and the dough passes the poke test, uncover the banetton or bowl, place a piece of baking parchment over the opening and hold it tightly – then quickly invert the banetton/bowl onto a counter or table so that the bread ends up on your baking parchment.  Lift the banetton or bowl+towel off.
• Since you proofed seam-side down, it’s now up so there is no need to slash the bread – it will open up in a natural pattern.
• Using thick oven mitts, take the very hot dutch oven or casserole bottom out of the oven and put it on a surface covered with a wooden cutting board or something else large and heatproof and non-slippery.  Pick up the baking parchment with your dough and gently place it into the very hot cast-iron dish.  Cover with a stainless steel bowl, or if the dish is deep enough, its own lid also works fine (in which case I recommend preheating the lid too).
• Place the covered dish back in the 250°C oven, and bake for 25 minutes covered.  Then remove the cover (whether it’s lid or bowl – if it is a bowl, you may need to use a butter knife or such to pull it up before you can grab it with an oven-mitted hand), reduce heat to 210 or 220°C and bake for further 25-35 minutes until the crust is deep golden-brown.  This is a large loaf so 50-60 minute baking time is not unusual, and you don’t want it to end up underbaked.
• Cool on a rack for at least 1 hour or until entirely cool to touch before cutting.  I failed at this last one and cut it while still warm because it was dinnertime and we were hungry – but the crumb will be even prettier if you wait.  Trust me.

Crumb very slightly squished due to cutting while still warm

Bake, eat, enjoy!

Autumn Saturday in Stockholm: Spice Shop and Haymarket

I am not sure I’ve mentioned this, but autumn is probably my favorite season.

I am also aware of the fact that I say that I love a lot of things – to eat, to do, and different weather, and… the reason for that is probably just me: I love a lot of things and I don’t feel the need to pick necessarily.  I really do love different seasons for different reasons, too, but autumn is a little more special, perhaps because of my fascination with harvest, and the fact that there are so many beautiful colors around that aren’t there the rest of the year.  Sweden is truly spectacular in the autumn, and while the leaves have barely started to show streaks of gold here and there, there is already plenty of gold and orange and purple and red to go around.

Wild chanterelles, blueberries, and ...

The crimson pile in the background is the wild lingonberries, and the foreground is bilberries (wild blueberries), and obviously the gold of autumn – chanterelle mushrooms.

But, our first port of call in the city wasn’t the market, though it beckoned as we passed it by on the way – it was the old Swedish spice shop I’ve mentioned yesterday, Essencefabriken.  The place is nestled in a cellar of an old building a few blocks away from the noise of the market, near a lovely old church and its tiny park, and it’s really easy to miss unless you are looking for it – which we were.

If you are looking for it, especially from the opposite side of the street, it’s rather evident – and it is even better inside than the facade promises.

Now, I may be biased, but in my opinion, no supermarket spice lineup can beat this.  They shouldn’t even try.  In addition to standard food spices and a few (ok, many) proprietary spice mixes, the place sells various liquor-infusion spice sachets, rose- and assorted herb and flower waters, and flavors.  It was rather difficult not to overspend, but in the end we went home with some of their Cajun spice mix, a packet of traditional Swedish bread spices for tomorrow’s batch of sourdough bread, some rose pepper, and a 1dl bottle of natural rosewater – the latter to make facial toner, and perhaps if there is any left over, to be used in ice cream and sweets.  We’ll see.

Cinnamon on antique scales

They also have both, real (Ceylon) cinnamon and cassia cinnamon, so anyone in the Stockholm area who wants to see the difference and buy the real thing, this is your place for it.  Important note is that they told me they only sell cassia ground, so if you want your own ground Ceylon cinnamon, you may have to shop elsewhere or buy and grind the sticks at home.  Personally, I plan to buy a stack of bark sticks for Christmas drinks, and now I know where the real ones are to be found.  I will definitely be back.

The next part of our trip was the Haymarket, which on Saturday afternoon is characterised by desperate sellers trying to sell what they have as fast as they can before market-closing time.  The result is that they nearly haggle for you rather than for themselves – the longer you stand near them and look unsure, the better the price for what you were sort-of staring at.

See? Desperate!

I was (as ever) interested in chanterelles.  Chanterelle mushrooms are probably my favorite wild mushrooms overall.  Yes, porcini have a better scent, but they are either too mushy if fresh, or a bit too stringy if rehydrated, whereas chanterelles are not far off in terms of scent and flavor, but they have an amazing texture and can be fried in butter and eaten just so, without anything more than a piece of crusty bread to go with them.

Om nom nom nom!

That, and they are just downright gorgeous to look at.

So, having found the prettiest display of said chanterelles, I spent a few minutes staring at them critically, and we walked away with a 1.5kg bag of mushrooms at about 60% of listed price and a bonus box of blueberries which we happily ate while we wandered through the underground butchery and food market halls.

The results of this shopping trip were a load of prepared and frozen chanterelle mushroom freezer bags for the winter, a gorgeous silky chanterelle-and-cream soup with sherry eaten with sourdough toast and wild boar salami, and a small string with the prettiest mushrooms drying in my kitchen.

All in all, a fantastic Saturday market outing, which culminated in a visit to a bookstore and a huge mug of coffee before heading home, followed by making the aforementioned soup, and a long evening talk with Niklas and Tobias over coffee, almonds and Bénédictine – it’s finally gotten cool enough to drink it!

Now, do you agree that autumn in Stockholm is amazing?  I hope so!  I certainly do, if I did and do say so myself!

P.S.  Yes I’ll post the mushroom soup recipe soon.  As soon as I manage to make a batch of it and photograph it before it all disappears… it has that tendency, never any leftovers!

P.P.S.  I’ll also post about how sourdough bread with Swedish bread spice mix turns out.  I’ve refreshed the starter and it should be ready to start the dough tomorrow.  We’ll see in a few days!

Homemade Taco Spice Mix (or why I don’t buy seasoning packets)

I have a love-love relationship with spices and seasonings.

Taco Seasoning Mix

Always have, and barring some monumental changes in the universe, always will.  To me, bland food is generally sad, and I love anything full of flavor – be it real vanilla in whipped cream, Thai curry, citrus and pink pepper, Ras-al-Hanout over meats or rice dishes, garlic in anything savory – you name it.  I don’t think I’ve met a spice I didn’t like yet (unless you are talking about something patently misused like garlic ice cream… don’t get me started on that).

(If you want the recipe for my homemade taco seasoning but not to read the entire rant, please feel free to skip the manifesto and scroll to the end!)

I also have a hate towards the over-processed, “value-added” and chemically preserved and enhanced where it comes to food.  And one of the most frequently overlooked places where this all hides are pre-mixed seasoning packets, the sort you buy in the Mexican or Oriental isle of the supermarket for “taco seasoning”, “singapore stir-fry seasoning”, etc., that you are supposed to just open and sprinkle into your food and suddenly your “boring” meal “is transformed into a sumptions meal” (insert marketing babble here).  I’ve bought and used those before, on the lure of “ease” and to try it out and let me tell you – my opinion, after trying a few different ones, is that they are all vile.

Why?  Because they neither impart that much flavor, nor is it good flavor – and in most cases, flavor enhancers are among the ingredients.  Why?  Because without those, the packets containing mostly starch and salt/sugar with a small amount of spices really wouldn’t do a whole lot for your food.  That’s value-added food for you, which in layman’s terms just means – “let’s add some [bleep] to this premix of sugar, salt and cornstarch so it smells a little like food, and sell it for a lot of money to gullible consumer!“  Worst part is that these premix packets foster a very bad kitchen habit of not learning what spices go into what food, or why, and thus the result is a “learned [kitchen] helplessness” in the form of inability to cook food without a packet of mysterious pre-mixed stuff on hand.

The silly bit here is that most of those “flavor packets” contain nothing mysterious nor anything you can’t buy off a spice rack in the same supermarket for far less money: for example – a tablespoon of sugar, teaspoon of salt and some minor amounts of spices which go into a packet of taco seasoning (let’s call it “Brand X”) don’t cost the 10-15sek (€1-1.5) they sell for in a packet.  Really, they don’t.

In fact, homemade taco seasoning requires very little in the way of exotic ingredients (nothing I don’t keep on hand in my kitchen and perhaps one or two things someone with a less stocked pantry may need to buy), takes 2 minutes to assemble while the frying pan is preheating for the meat, and tastes much, much better than anything you can buy in a premixed packet in a shop (I am not talking about gourmet spice mixes you can get – those are a whole different – from packets – kettle of fish, and are essentially the same thing as what I mix at home, only packaged in a fancy jar).

Let’s examine the packet – total weight 40g.  That’s roughly 3 tablespoons of stuff.  What stuff?  The first ingredients are sugar and then salt.  Following them are onion powder, ground chili and cumin, followed by modified potato starch (?), garlic powder, yeast extract (?), potato fiber (?), maltodextrin (?), “spices” (paprika, oregano), paprika extract (?), acidity regulator (E330 – that’s ascorbic acid aka vitamin C).

I’ve marked questionable ingredients with a (?) because in my view, when Mexican people came up with a seasoning mix for their regional street food (tacos), they never in their wildest dreams thought that what it needed was … these things.

1. Modified potato starch – this is added to the seasoning mix to make the meat “gloopier” once it’s cooked, and make it look like there is more of it as it won’t lose as much water in the cooking process.
2. Potato fiber is most likely added to prevent all of this clumping into a messy mass while in the packet.
3. Yeast extract is a savory-flavor enhancer.  Natural insofar as it’s made from yeast, but authentic or needed?  You decide (I already ahve).
4. Maltodextrin is a carbohydrate (essentially, sugar), which is used as a food sweetener.
5. Paprika extract (oleoresin) is added for color and possibly flavor – to compensate for either insufficien quality, quantity or both, of actual paprika powder used in the mix.
6. I can’t fault the addition of vitamin C as a preservative (it is used as an antioxidant here), since it decomposes harmlessly when the spice mix is heated, but neither is it needed if the spice mix is made fresh.

Now, the ingredients in the above list are ranked in order of weight (note that oregano and paprika are combined into one entry, “spices”, as separately they’d probably fall further down the list), but obviously without any indication of how much of any of them is contained in the packet.  For all I know, it’s 99% sugar and 1% everything else in fractions of a %.  It isn’t, but from reading the label it may as well be – and it’s not in the manufacturer’s interest to add more of the expensive spices into this.  For my own mix, however, I am going to go for flavor and color, not profit margin.  Obviously.

An important thing to note here is that the actual recipe on the packet, if I throw out all the questionable items, is a fairly standard taco seasoning recipe.  So what will happen if I do omit all those additives, and instead use spices readily available in my cupboard to make up about 3 tablespoons of seasoning, is that it – trust me on this! (or don’t, and try for yourself) – will taste much, much better.  Since, as we should establish, it is a spice or seasoning mix, not “food-additives for your dinner” mix.

To make your own taco seasoning mix (enough for 500-600g of uncooked ground meat), you need:

• A small bowl or a cup (cereal or soup bowl or a large teacup will do)
• A tablespoon and a teaspoon

• 1 tablespoon of brown sugar such as demerara or golden caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt
• 1 taspoon of dried chili flakes (more or less to taste and depending on your heat tolerance)
• 1 teaspoon paprika (I use smoked hot paprika if I have it, but any will be good)
• 2 heaping teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 heaping teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons garlic granules or powder (I don’t use dried onions in my mix, but you can do a teaspoon of dried onion and garlic each instead if you like)

Note: all quantities are approximate.  Please, please feel free to add/substract/adjust to your own taste – you aim to please yourself, and your taste buds, after all!

What to do:

• Put all ingredients into a bowl and mix with a spoon.
• Fry about 500g ground beef or blend of beef and pork in a pan until browned and any water evaporated.
• Sprinkle the entire bowl of seasoning over it.
• Add about 100ml boiled water to the bowl, rinse it out and immediately add to the meat.
• Mix the spices and water in, and allow to cook on medium-high heat until liquid is absorbed.
• Eat.

Yes, it’s that simple.  Yes, it’s much cheaper than buying that packet.  And yes, it tastes and looks far, far better.

And the best part is that this same process of eliminating anything questionable and then mixing up the spices yourself to your liking can be used to get rid of any variety of spice-packet-addiction.  Rejoyce, eat delicious food and be free!

Infused Alcohol – For Whatever You Celebrate

It is early autumn, the days are getting ever so slightly chillier, and the light tends to fall a little aslant. I can feel the change of season in the air, and to me in terms of my kitchen, it means two things: I want to bake (an urge that I tend to resist except when have guests), and I know it is time to make infused alcohol if it should be ready by midwinter, whatever your flavour of celebration may be that season.

My relationship with alcohol can best be described as a loving long-distance relationship of sorts.  I love it, love drinking the really good stuff, and I also get intoxicated from the tiniest amounts, so I drink it rarely and in small quantities.  In the words of my friends, I am the most lightweight drinker any of them have ever met.  On the up side, that also means I am sober within an hour or two of drinking, so (if it is an occasion on which I would actually drink at all), I can get tipsy again and again repeatedly.

I think alcohol is a good thing in the quantity I consume it, but in a very non-hypocritical way, I can also honestly say I drink about half a bottle of wine and a couple of shots of hard liquor (typically brandy in my coffee) per month.  I imagine people can be just fine drinking more than I (and also stay on their feet better than I’d manage), but I am not here to lecture anyone on how much they should drink.  If you are drinking too much, you probably know it anyway, and I strongly believe in the fact that the only person whom you can change in this life, is your very own self.

But, I digress, as I was going to talk about infusion, and not about sobriety (or lack thereof).  So, it is usually for the winter festivities, that I prepare a variety of those (to be drunk chilled, or used in sweet-making and desserts, or whichever way you like it).

Infusing alcohol is easy.  What you need is:

• A glass preserving jar, 1-1.5L in volume, one of those with a metal lever lock and food-grade rubber seal.
• A 750ml bottle of alcohol you wish to infuse (plain vodka, gin, and white rum are the typical favourites).
• Whatever you plan to infuse the alcohol with (fruit, herbs, whole spices, etc.)
• Sugar (if using, not all recipes call for it)
• Boiling water on two separate occasions (to sterilize the jar and muslin)
• Muslin cloth and a funnel.
• A friend you can trust.
• Refrigerator, and a whole lot of patience

The basic instruction is:

1. Wash and dry your fruit (if using to infuse).  If you plan to use it later and freeze it in advance, wash and dry it before freezing.
2. Free up a spot in the corner of your fridge that you can easily reach on a daily basis that the jar would fit into.
3. Wash the jar and rinse thoroughly (this is primarily for you strange British people who don’t rinse the washing up liquid off your clean dishes… RINSE IT OFF, else the result will taste of soap!).
4. Sterilize the jar by pouring a bit of boiling water in it (use a dish towel to hold it), and swirling it about, then pouring out.
5. Place infusion materials into jar as per recipe (berries, fruit, spices and sugar).
6. Pour the entire bottle of alcohol on top.  Reclose the empty bottle, do not wash it, and keep it for later refilling.
7. Seal jar.
8. Swirl gently and place into the prepared spot in fridge.

Now, here is where the patience becomes imperative.  The use of the refrigerator is twofold:  One, it keeps the alcohol cold, which means it is less likely to evaporate.  Two, if you are like most people, you open your fridge at least once a day.  What you must do for the next 2-3 months, is take the jar out once a day, admire it, pet it, swirl it a bit gently, admire some more, DO NOT OPEN IT, and place it back in the fridge.  Not opening is important to both, prevent contamination of alcohol with water condensation on inside of cold jar, and to resist temptation to stick fingers in and try it.  It won’t be ready for at least 8 weeks.

Once 2-3 months have passed, or when you just can’t wait any longer (but you must remember that if you open too soon, it won’t be as nice!), take out your trusted friend, muslin cloth, funnel, empty bottle, and the much-anticipated jar.

1. Drape the muslin cloth over the funnel (letting it drop into it obviously), and pour some boiling water over it over the sink.
2. Open the empty bottle and place the funnel into it.  It will cool quickly, and we also want that.
3. Let the trusted friend hold the funnel and bottle so that it does not tip over and ruin all that hard work.
4. Carefully filter the alcohol through the funnel back into its waiting bottle, and close.
5. The fruit in the funnel (depending on which ones you’ve used) can make fantastic boozy cake topping (if they were strawberries or elderberries or blueberries for example!), or tossed out.  Or, if they are spices, they can be wrapped in said muslin and hung up as air freshner (like a pomander without an orange) for a while.

I tend to keep the resulting infusion in the fridge, but I think it can quite easily be stored outside of it once filtered.  Not that it is very likely to survive long enough for storage to become too much of a problem, anyway… :)

A couple of my favourite ideas for infusion materials (but feel free to come up with your own, experimenting is fun, and you know what you like better than anyone else does):

• Quince Rum:  white rum, 1 large quince fruit (sliced), 2-4 whole cloves, 2 tablespoons demerara cane sugar.
• Yule Vodka:  plain vodka (I like Absolut, but that’s my I-love-Sweden habit speaking, and any decent vodka will do), 1 cup blueberries (you want the true wild ones, aka bilberries), fresh or frozen, 1 stick cinnamon (for the love of little green apples and the booze you are making, make sure it’s real Ceylon cinnamon!), 2-4 whole cloves, 1-2 allspice grains, 1-2 tablespoons of white sugar.
• Elderberry vodka:  plain vodka as per above, 1-2 cups of ripe elderberries (de-stemmed), 2 heaping tablespoons white sugar, 1 curl of lemon or orange peel (make sure to wash the citrus with soap and water to remove shellac resin which is used to spray citrus, unless you manage to buy unwaxed citrus).

Enjoy!

Cooking From Scratch :: Stocking The Pantry

I regard a well-stocked pantry to be the foundation of a kitchen of any person who plans to cook and eat at home.  Yes, I suppose it is entirely possible to buy everything for every meal on the day you plan to prepare it, but it is neither convenient, nor easy, and since most of our food is meant to be easily stored even without refrigeration, it is rather pointless not to take advantage of the fact.  Being that I unabashedly adore food, my pantry probably holds enough food to feed me for a good couple of weeks without restocking.  I do not suggest that everyone must or even should want to keep that quantity of food around, but if you wish to, so long as you rotate the stock, so to speak, and do not let anything go stale, and have the storage space… you get the idea!

A few days ago my friend Sophie has announced to me over dinner at my place, that once she gets a new place, she wants me to come shopping with her to properly stock her pantry, since she does not really know where to begin.  “Larder” was the very British word she used, actually, but since I don’t own an actual larder (nor have seen one in any modern kitchen I’ve been to), I take it as just on-hand food storage of any variety.  And, surprisingly to me, she is not the first person to whose home I have been, that does not have food on hand unless they buy if for that very day, and do not know how to start and shop for a properly stocked pantry.

The reason that is so, is simple.  Most of us, provided our parents did cook at home (If they didn’t then we’d have never seen a properly stocked pantry – as most civilized people do not normally snoop in their friends’ parents’ kitchen cupboards!), have lived with a properly stocked pantry.  It was a series of cupboards, or a large cabinet in the kichen somewhere, with shelves that were full of various things that made sense being there.  So if we wanted pasta, there was pasta, or rice, and flour for pancakes, and a bag of sugar, jar of honey, pickles, jams, a can or bottles of oil… the things you’d reach for in the kitchen, and they would be just there.

Then we moved out and were suddenly faced with a kitchen full of empty cupboards, and, despite buying this and that as we go, the cupboard never seems to have that one thing we want or need, and we are left with a perpetual feeling that “there is nothing to eat”.   What happened?  Well, it is simple – the truth about a pantry is that it is far easier to maintain once stocked, than to build from nothing:  you run out of item X, you replace it next shopping run, problem solved.  We’ve all been there – you simply never think of needing item X till you are trying to make, say, scones, and realise that baking powder is something you did not pick up on your shopping trip, since you’ve always just assumed it would be there in the pantry.

The contents of the pantry, of course, will depend on your particular taste in food, and extent to which you go in home cooking, but the basic components are always more or less the same:

• Salt and Sugar. This ranges from basic table salt and white granulated sugar, to sea salt flakes or a grinder, and whatever variety of sugar you may like.  For all I don’t advocate eating sugar, neither do I advocate utter self-deprivation, so I usually have some on hand for preparing desserts.  Some cane sugar varieties taste and smell simply gorgeous.  For starters, a box of table salt and a bag of golden granulated sugar will do.  I generally also keep a box of decent artificial sweetener around, since I do love my coffee sweetened, and refuse to eat sugar in the quantity that would be needed to sweeten all my endless cups of coffee.
• Spices.  Those can be savoury and sweet, from black pepper, whole nutmeg and chili flakes to Ras-Al-Hanout, if that floats your boat.  As a minimum, however, I would suggest black or mixed pepper in a grinder (pre-ground stuff tastes of nothing), jar of dried greens such as oregano or Herbes de Provence, and a bit of pre-ground cinnamon (do check it is actually cinnamon, though!).  Here I also include a box of basic baking powder, and perhaps a box of baking soda (for more than food prep applications – for many reasons, it is one of the things which are just good to have around the house).
• Dry Starches. This has the most variation, from very simple pasta, rice, and flour to oriental noodles, legumes [that's beans and lentils - I like Puy aka French Green ones, and also chickpeas], quinoa, bulgur wheat and whatever else you can imagine as “filler” in your food).
• Cans. These will depend more heavily on your tastes in food, but in my house contain tuna in oil, crabmeat, mackerel in oil, coconut milk, the occasional bamboo shoots, and kalamata olives.  I would not presume to lecture others on what they should or shouldn’t eat canned, but I find most meat products in a can somewhat offputting, and the same goes for most canned soups.  Some canned fruit in syrup or juice are all right as dessert ingredients, especially if no fresh ones are available, like apricots in mid-winter.
• Cooking and Salad Oils. I normally avoid polyunsaturate-rich oils, and stick with mono-unsaturated and the good variety of saturated fats for my food (I will elaborate on this in detail another time), but I am not fanatical about it.  The only things I refuse to have around are hydrogenated shortenings, or hardened vegetable fats of any variety, and spreads (unless they are butter or mostly butter).  I discriminate against those with a passion, not least because even if they look like butter (which they don’t), they won’t either taste or smell like it, and if not, then what is the point of eating them?  The fats I normally keep around in the pantry (i.e. outside the fridge) are:  coconut oil (Holland and Barrett sell a really good unrefined cold-pressed one), extra-virgin olive oil of some variety for salads, rapeseed or peanut oil (refined) for general saute and shallow frying needs, and sesame oil for seasoning oriental food.  Most beginners will be just fine with one frying oil and one salad oil, however.
• Nuts. My nuts of choice are almonds and pine nuts.  Being that my much-adored boyfriend is notably allergic to the latter, they get kept in a tightly closed jar and I am careful what I put them into.  I work with that sort of thing, so I do not tend to forget it.  A safer choice for someone who does not wish to make a significant other sick (or worse) in this manner, is to not keep whatever the other is allergic around at all.
• Jars and bottles. Sauces, vinegars, pickles, sieved and chopped tomatoes (those can also be found in cans/tetrapacks).  I usually keep a minimum of chopped tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, white vinegar (cider, rice or white wine one), soy sauce (basic Kikkoman is not to be beaten for multitasking!), and fish sauce.  Honey should also be mentioned – as both, food and an on-hand sore throat remedy.  I usually keep a jar of strong (eucalyptus, orange blossom or forest) honey around.  A jar or two of good quality high fruit content jam of your choice also won’t go amiss as an elegant (if sugartastic) breakfast on toast, or a quick way to perk up a dairy-based dessert or a tart.
• Alcohol. Provided your faith or philosophical convictions, or previous addiction to it do not disallow such, I would suggest keeping a bottle of your choice of poison around.  One, it is good to have in case you want some, or if it is involved in your favourite cooking recipe.  Two, having something around tends to reduce temptation (at least for me it does.  Works with chocolate, too).  I generally settle on a bottle of French brandy, or a Romanian/Slovak fruit brandy to spike my caffeine fix on weekend evenings, and a bottle of cooking wine (but I keep the latter in my refrigerator after it is open).
• Chocolate. Really good chocolate in moderate quantity (sugar-free diabetic or just high cocoa content dark if you are watching your sugar intake).  I do not need to explain this further, do I?
• Tea and/or Coffee. Those should be more or less self-explanatory to those who drink either or both.  Me, I would not be caught dead without coffee in the house on a weekend morning, as lack of it makes me positively insufferable even to myself.  You, my fellow coffee addicts, I am sure you do know what I mean!

Unless I have blanked out and completely forgotten something, the above mentioned items, along with various specifics (some people like jarred chilies in brine, capers, tinned anchovies in oil, etc.) that you yourself would consider essential, should provide a very good foundation for a well-stocked pantry.   In fact, excluding fresh vegetables and dairy, in a pinch (say, should your refrigerator give out one night, spoiling all in it, or you simply cannot be bothered to go out to shop), a lot of these can be combined into a passable meal (such as a simple dish of pasta with tomato and extra virgin olive oil sauce).  Counting on the refrigerator and its fresh and frozen meat, seafood, dairy and vegetable contents being there, this should more than provide a foundation for preparation of a basic meal.

Note: I do not mention eggs, as despite the fact that they can keep outside the refrigerator, I prefer to store mine in it, and not in the pantry.  Same goes for hard cheeses, even grated and boxed.  I do plan to write about a refrigerator, but this has already gotten rather long.  Another time.  :)  Same applies to the method of storing ingredients, which, once the shop packaging is open, is not always straighforward.

Disclaimer:  Where possible and convenient, I link the products I mention to their wikipedia page, as a reasonably neutral source which gives good explanation.  When and where I do link to a brand, it is my preference for such, or the more common availability of it which make it more convenient.  It is by no means anything more than a personal endorsement of something I use.