River Steak

There's something about being out near a river on a warm, but crisp, day that makes me crave a particular kind of steak. There is something about taking a thick slice of beef tenderloin, stuffing it with garlic and wrapping it with bacon, and then grilling it, preferably over hot coals of a wood fire, until the bacon is crispy and the garlic is soft, that makes me feel alive. It's a complicated desire.

I was recently confronted with the above situation, thankfully with the means to satisfy that craving. Good beef tenderloin is ordinarily delicious, so much so that some of you might call it blasphemy to then poke holes in it and shove in halved garlic cloves - as many as will fit, ideally. And then perhaps it is further blasphemous to wrap the steak in thick slices of applewood-smoked bacon. But holy hell is blasphemy tasty! Allow me first to extoll the virtues of good meat and a good butcher: A good butcher is worth his (or her) weight in gold or chocolate - whichever you value most. Animals are complicated, especially the large ones, and carving the perfect steak or chop is an exercise in craftsmanship. There's a reason that, like in the other crafts, butchers would have to apprentice - there's a lot to know that you can't exactly learn in school. And a butcher is someone to whom you rather literally entrust your life. While much less true in the current, highly-regulated food-safety system (despite the pervasive horror stories...,) even now a good butcher will not only strive to give you the perfect piece of meat for your intended purpose but will also make sure that you won't get sick from it, if for no other reason than wanting your repeat business! A good butcher knows where the meat comes from, maybe even knows the farmer, and takes pride in your dinner even if not invited.

Good meat can, theoretically, be obtained anywhere in developed nations. Ok, you might have a hard time finding meat on a vegan, raw-foodist commune, but that's not what I'm talking about. While you can walk into most grocery stores and stagger out under a massive mound of meat, it will probably only cook up to be generically tasty. The few times I've had really good meat, adorned with little and cooked only simply, it has been remarkably rich and complex, and subtle, too. Some will say meat should not be complicated. To that I respond: too late, it already is. Cows and pigs and chickens, to only name the most common, taste different in different places - they eat different things, walk on different ground, drink different water. And let's say nothing about different varieties of cow or pig or chicken (or turkey, since Thanksgiving approacheth.) Beef can be sweet, grassy, like dense sunshine. Or it can be dark, sultry, seductive. Or it can taste of minerals and evergreens - trees and rocks.

This is why I like a good butcher - one with whom you can have a conversation about the flavour of different cuts of different kinds of meat. One with whom you can brainstorm interesting new recipes or consult about reproducing a grandmother's grandmother's roast. One who will understand the want, nay, the need, to stuff a tenderloin to bursting with garlic, wrap it in bacon, and put in on a fire.

Incidentally, that bacon-garlic special is more than ordinarily tasty... The tenderloin is a soft, un-fatty cut. This one was corn-fed regular black angus - mild, but slightly sweet and a little rusty. The garlic doesn't cook all the way. It roasts a bit in the beef juices but the cloves are still sharp and a bit spicy. And the bacon adds a gratuitous baste of smoky fat and saltiness. Unfortuantely, this one was cooked on a gas grill. Convenient, but you don't get the same crispy exterior as when you cook just above the white-hot coals of a 3-hour-old campfire. But that's just a hint of a totally different immersive experience - on in which you might just have to fend off ravenous bears to save your precious steak. Would you? I might - this steak's just that good.

What's in a burger?

What is a burger? Is it a beefy lump of beef with extra beef and nothing else, except maybe ketchup? Or is it simply a type of sandwich wherein some form of primary meaty substance (hot) is placed between two pieces of a bread-like carrying vehicle, with or without buffer areas of cheese, leafy or unleafy vegetables, and/or sauces of various kinds? Such is the fundamental and existential question I faced in preparation for dinner tonight.

A brief background explanation: My friends and I get together roughly weekly for a themed potluck dinner. Not everyone can make every week, and people have joined or left the active group as their lives have brought them to town or taken them away again. But the dinners have been occurring regularly going on five years. The formula is simple: each week a different person hosts, and each week the host chooses the theme. Over time, we've all become better cooks and had our share of transcendent glory and epic failure. But mostly we just have a good time. And the themes are really what make the food special - it's a challenge and an enticement to experimentation, and it has made for some rather interesting meals. (Please feel free to replicate - it's awesome.)

So, tonight: The theme was "Gastro-diner," like gastropub, only diner food. The explanation was, and I quote, "Your favorite diner foods, dialed up to eleven." (Totally in character for the host, too.) So what leaps to mind when you think of a diner? Well, the Burger. And the Meatloaf. And the Pancake. And the Rootbeer Float. Which pretty much provided the basis for our meal, actually, and I quickly claimed the Burger/Meatloaf territory. :-)

Now what you have to understand about our dinners is that part of the fun is seeing just how unexpectedly and differently you can interpret the theme and still produce something delicious. (I shall never live down my bringing Garlic Chocolate-Chip Cookies with Lavender Icing to a dinner themed "Hybrids." But that's a different story...) So I was faced with the question: What is a burger? And how does one dial that up to eleven in an unexpectedly delicious way? And now's probably a good time to mention that I had not cooked anything elaborate in a while and needed to scratch that itch. So here's what I decided to make:
Looks like a burger, doesn't it? Well...

I decided I wanted to make a recognizable as a burger but about as un-burger-like as possible, and also dial it to eleven. The finished product ended up being as follows (in my best nouvelle-cuisine gastro-diner menu-speak):

A rondelle of roasted melange of cherry-smoked coho salmon, fresh pork, sweet corn and quinoa, served atop crispy Indian flatbread with organic arugula, lime tzaziki and tomato-tarragon jam perfumed with cumin and Amontillado sherry.

And here's the layman's description: A slice of a cylindrical meatloaf containing salmon, pork, corn and quinoa. Fried naan dough that didn't rise as expected so became more like tortillas. Garlic-lime greek yogurt. Tomato jam.

God it was good! (...no matter what you call it.)

Let's start with the meat. I wanted to make something that was light and yet still rich and smoky like a BBQ hamburger. So, living in the Northwest, my first thought was to hot-smoked salmon. Unlike lox, &c., which are cold-smoked (exposed to the smoke only, not the heat of the fire,) hot-smoked salmon has the texture of cooked fish, if a little drier, as well as a rich smokiness akin to bacon. And I decided to make my own. In my kitchen. Of my apartment. Oy. The making of the salmon is a story for another time, but suffice to say it basically worked and I quickly had a pound of hot-smoked salmon to play with. I combined it with a pound of ground pork, some sweet corn, and some quinoa, as well as a little oil, some bread crumbs and a few eggs to hold it together. And then I roasted it rolled in a cylinder inside foil. And then it came out of the foil, got a coat of apricot jam, and went under the broiler to crisp up the outside. It tasted warm and smoky, and held together even though it wasn't heavy. And the corn provided little pockets of sweetness that burst open in each mouthful. Overall it was an unusual combination of tastes I associate with either warm or cold weather. On it's own it would probably be a little overly smoky but combined with the other pieces it was lovely. The tomato jam is something I've always wanted to try to make. We think of tomatoes as a vegetable, usually associated with salads or savory sauces, and even when really ripe and wonderful, they're not exactly what I'd call sweet. Not like a peach or strawberry. But when you cook down a pasta sauce, for example, you start to get a rich sweetness that can come from nowhere else but the tomato. And I'd tasted sweet-ish tomato-based pastes in restaurants before so I decided to make tomato jam. Since tomatoes by themselves, plus a bit of sugar, reduce basically to a simple, warm stickiness, I added tarragon to give the flavour a green high note, and cumin to fill in the middle of the register.

The bread was a challenge. I followed this recipe here. And while I usually don't follow recipes to the letter, this one I did. And I failed. I have no idea what went wrong but the dough didn't rise as expected. Oh it rose a bit, but not enough for me to make the expected little rounds of lovely, poofy, stretchy naan. Instead, it got stuck at the beginning of it's second rise so I had to cut my losses and flatten out the little balls of dough into thick tortillas and then quickly fry them. They actually tasted really good and provided a good vehicle for the burger, with enough crispness to contrast but enough chewiness to stay together. I'll try the recipe again, maybe messing around a little more next time...The arugula and the tzaziki were last-minute thoughts. I wasted something green and fresh and arugula is a green that can hold its own in a swirling storm of flavours and textures. Alone it's a little bitter, but in this combination it tasted just tart enough to prevent the sandwich flavours from all mushing together. And the tzaziki was to do just the same thing. After I tried the tomato jam I could tell the sandwich needed something cold and tart and fresh to keep the whole thing balanced - something with a little bit of kick to keep the eater awake. Plain greek yogurt with lime and garlic is harsh on its own, but a good foil for sweetness.

Overall, it really was a storm of flavour and sensory experience, all at once hot and cold, sweet and tart, smoky and fresh, bright and crispy and deep and rich. And it was really satisfying to make - from washing the tomatoes and setting up the smoker all the way to slicing the loaf and assembling the first sandwich. When I finished mine, my felling was really "I needed that." Not just to eat it, but to get back in the kitchen and dial something up to eleven.Here are the recipes. Keep in mind that each one could be really good on all sorts of other things. I'll give some ideas with each.

TOMATO JAM
Could be good on a bagel with cream cheese, as a glaze on a roast, on steamed broccoli, or with cheese and crackers.

12 Roma Tomatoes
½ C Sugar
¼ C Amontillado Sherry
¼ C Tarragon Leaves, dried
½ t Cumin, ground

1. Clean and halve tomatoes and remove stems. Puree in food processor until mostly smooth.
2. Pour tomato puree into saucepan with sugar. Cook on medium heat, stirring frequently. Reduce to one-third original volume.
3. Add spices and sherry. Reduce heat to low and cook down to sticky paste. Do not brown or burn.

INTERESTING MEATLOAF BURGER MEAT
This could be a good stand-in for ground meat in various places, whether on the BBQ or as meatballs in sauce or as ground meat for filling pasta.

1 lb Salmon, hot-smoked, shredded
1 lb Pork, ground
2 ears Corn, sweet, kernels cut off
½ C Quinoa, dry
4 Eggs, beaten
¼ C Olive Oil
½ C Panko breadcrumbs
3 T Paprika, smoked, ground
1 T Tumeric, ground
1 t Salt
1 T Pepper, black, freshly ground
2 T Pepper, white, finely ground
1 T Urfa Biber, coarsely ground (A chili pepper with a mild, warm heat. Substitute ¼ t Cayenne)
Apricot Jam
Heavy-Duty Aluminum Foil

0. Preheat oven to 500°F.
1. Steam quinoa until completely cooked (no opaque white spot in the middle of the grain.) [I use the microwave: 1:1 quinoa to water in a bowl covered with a plate, on high for five minutes. Let sit five minutes, stir, add half as much water again, and microwave another five minutes.]
2. Combine meat and grains in large bowl and mix thoroughly. Add eggs and oil and mix thoroughly. Add breadcrumbs and spices and mix thoroughly. Refrigerate 30 minutes.
3. Make two cylinders of the mixture wrapped in heavy-duty aluminum foil - 1 foot long and about as big around as a soda can or tunafish can. Cut of all but one inch extra foil at each end of cylinder, leave partly open (you want some excess moisture to escape so the log solidifies a little more.)
4. Bake logs on roasting pan in the top of the oven for 40 minutes.
5. Remove foil, replace logs on roasting pan, spread with thin layer of apricot jam.
6. Broil until jam bubbles and browns. Roll ¼ turn, spread a little more apricot jam, broil again. Repeat 4 times until all sides have been broiled and are brown and sticky.
7. Cool for 5 minutes. Slice diagonally about ¾-inch thick.

LIME-GARLIC TZAZIKI
Try as salad-dressing, sandwich spread instead of mayonnaise, or sauce for chilled roasted vegetables.

1 C Nonfat Greek Yogurt
½ Lime
3 Cloves Garlic, twice through garlic press.
½ t Salt
1 t Pepper, black, freshly ground.

1. Mix all of the above.
2. Eat :-)

Food Credibility

There's no accounting for taste, and sometimes differences in individual sense of taste can get you condemned to the culinary doghouse for longer than you might expect. May the two following examples serve as warning to the gastronaut seeking to share an adventure in food with unprepared or skeptical companions.

I love cheese, in a Wallace and Gromit kind of way. Almost every kind of cheese is delicious (I hesitantly except Morbier from my general love of cheese but that's a story for another time.) But many people are unprepared for the variety of cheeses available, or for their occasionally pungent nature. I was to see some friends one evening many months ago and I thought to bring some bread and cheese along with me. I chose a baguette and a few favorites - Boucheron (an aged log of goat's cheese,) and I think a wedge of Rogue Creamery's Smokey Blue Cheese, and, most particularly, a small crock of St. Marcellin, a cow's-milk cheese that becomes soft and runny as it ages so it is sold in small pottery dishes. It can be particularly pungent, but the taste is actually quite mild and milky despite what the nose may say (and I think it smells rather good, but apparently I can't be trusted!) In ignorance, I laid out the cheeses with a brief description of each and the assembled company fell to, trying the more familiar first and then moving on to the St. Marcellin. One of my friends took up a small piece of bread with a small dab of the cheese, tasted it, immediately pulled a pained and disgusted face and whether she spit out the morsel or not I cannot recall. Exclamations of horror and dismay followed, along with solemn vows never to trust my taste in cheese ever again. My credibility was shattered. I've spent the time since slowly rebuilding my cheese reputation and paying much more careful attention to the tastes of everyone else when I plan to introduce a potentially dangerous cheese.

But even with ample forwarning will an experiment not to everyone's taste cause long-standing condemnation of or skepticism toward of one's cooking skills or sense of taste (not to mention state of sanity.) I refer, for illustration, to the Garlic Chocolate-Chip Cookie episode (of which there actually have now been two, since I was foolhardy enough to attempt to win over some skeptics by a second try.)

I love garlic, to an extent which may be considered a fault by some. It does not necessarily belong in everything, but I am always interested to find where else it might be delicious. My mother was given a recipe for garlic chocolate chip cookies from the Garlic Lovers' Cookbook and shared it with me. I decided to make them. The first time I made them, I followed the recipe. The second time I experimented. Changing the recipe didn't have much of an effect on the taste, rather on the texture. But I'll describe the variations later.

The first time, I also made the absurd leap of faith that unproven garlic chocolate-chip cookies would be improved by lavender icing. The combination proved absolute sensory overload to many of my friends, whether they would have liked either part independently. It didn't help that I made the first batch of lavender icing way too strong - three or four times too strong. As such, while some liked all of the above, even in combination (once I'd weakened the icing), for others the reaction was dramatic - one friend memorably describing the experience as like to "being hit in the mouth with a bar of soap wrapped in a dirty sock." Lovely.But despite the negative press, I cajoled many to try both the first and the eventual second versions. Some really like the concept and the result, others can't understand why one would ever try such an abomination and certainly can't abide the fruit of it. And still others come with an open mind and then can't figure out whether they like the cookies or not. Generally, though, for all but the people who like them, my standing as a cook of taste and sanity is called into question, accompanied by constant asking about future public offerings, "is there garlic in that?"

With that colossal grain of salt, garlic chocolate-chip cookies are very much like regular chocolate-chip cookies, just with a bit more depth and complexity. The chocolate-chip cookie is a good foundation for experimentation because it is already delicious. The garlic just adds a savory warmth to the flavour, with more or less sweetness or garlic aftertaste depending on how exactly you cook the garlic before mixing it into the cookies. Version one followed the simmer-garlic-in-maple-syrup original recipe, while version two was the slightly more aggressive boil-sugar-and-caramelize-garlic-in-that experiment that was a little scary and ultimately much more garlicky. The texture of the first version was much more like regular cookies, crispy and a little chewy, getting a bit stiffer over the few days I had them. Version two was much harder and a bit stickier at first and then softened up over the next few days in the cookie jar - weird. The method was scary because I poured boiling sugar and garlic into the cookie dough, which promptly became almost liquid - baking really is edible chemistry and I think I messed with the standard experimental procedure a wee bit, hence the odd final texture. And the caramelized sugar defintely added a slightly smoky caramel taste, too. Best start with the original recipe, transcribed from Accidental Hedonist where the description of the flavour is much the same as my own experience, so I'm not entirely crazy...


GARLIC CHOCOLATE-CHIP COOKIES
Makes 5 dozen or so.

10 cloves Garlic
½ C Maple Syrup
1 C Unsalted Butter, softened
¾ C Brown Sugar
¾ C White Sugar
2 Eggs
1 t Vanilla
½ t Salt
2½ C Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
½ C Walnuts, chopped (optional)
2½ C All Purpose Flour, sifted
1 t Baking Soda

3 bowls
Boiling Water

1. Drop whole, unpeeled garlic cloves into boiling water and cook until tender (about 7 minutes). Remove garlic from the water, peel and chop. In Bowl #1: soak garlic in the maple syrup for 20 minutes to one hour - the longer you soak the garlic, the stronger the garlic taste.
2. Preheat oven to 375°F.
3. In Bowl #2: cream together butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla until light and fluffy. In Bowl #3: sift together flour, salt and baking soda. Mix flour mixture into butter mixture. Add chocolate chips and walnuts, mixing until evenly distributed.
4. Add maple syrup (+/- garlic) to dough. (If you want more garlic flavour, leave the garlic pieces in, otherwise strain them out and just use the syrup.
5. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart from each other. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes (or however you prefer your cookies.) Remove from oven and cool on racks.


LAVENDER ICING
Be very sparing with the lavender essence - it is stronger than it seems. This is also very much a try-as-you-go recipe that you have to make to your taste and texture preferences.

Sweetened Condensed Milk
Powedered Sugar
Lavender Essence (you should be able to find culinary lavender essence somewhere - it happens to be readily available in Washington.)

Start with a few tablespoons of the condensed milk. Mix in the powdered sugar by the teaspoon until the icing is thick enough. Mix in 2 drops at a time of the lavender essence. Taste after each addition and err on the side of too little - just a hint is sufficient. Use at will.