Gerry's Chili #2: No Tomatoes

Frustrated by the chili from Shakey's I reviewed here, I decided to go and do may own chili again, specially after I got some really nice dried ancho chilies from the Seven Spice Shop.

I wanted to try one that didn't have tomatoes in it. This time around, this recipe isn't based on anything I saw online. I just wrote the ingredients I thought I would need on paper... ingredients that I feel would make for a good chili and went from there.

Spice Mix:

3 tablespoons chili powder
3 teaspoons cumin powder
1 teaspoon white pepper
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon paprika
2 dried ancho chilies ground finely (seeds not removed)
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon brown sugar

Combine all the spices in a bowl, mix thoroughly and then set aside.

Rest of the ingredients:

1/2 kilo ground beef
1 beef cube
2 stalks celery chopped
1 red bell pepper chopped (seeds removed)
1 green bell pepper, chopped (seeds removed)
4 long green chilies, sliced thinly (seeds not removed)
1 large white onion chopped
6 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
2 cans white beans (strained)
kinchay for garnishing
cheese for garnishing

Procedure:

Heat oil in a pan (around 3 tablespoons) and fry beef until all fat is rendered. Separate the beef from any fat/liquid via colander. Set beef aside.

In a deep pot, heat oil then saute garlic until slightly brown. Add onion and saute until translucent. Add the long green chilies, bell peppers, and celery. Saute for around 2 minutes. Add the beef and spice mix and stir thoroughly until the spice has been evenly distributed.

Dissolve beef cube in 2-1/2 cups of hot water and add into the pot. Boil then simmer at low heat for 15 minutes. Add the beans and continue simmering for 1 hour, occasionally stirring to keep the bottom from sticking. If you feel your chili is becoming too thick you can add a bit more water.

Taste your chili and adjust seasoning. You can add more heat if you like. I found myself adding just a little bit more salt, and another teaspoon of cumin. I would have gone for hotter, but I thought the spice level was just right for the rest of the people in the house.

Garnish with cheese and kinchay.

Recipe: Simple Grilled Tuna

It's been a while since I posted a recipe of something I cooked. This time around it's nothing so complicated. I saw a bag of frozen cubed tuna at our local grocery and I thought I'd just grill it. You will just need:

Tuna steak or cubed tuna.
1/2 cup Kikkoman soy sauce
juice from 4 pcs. kalamansi
1 teaspoon sugar
I just had some fresh thyme lying around so I used some.

Thaw the tuna completely. Combine the soy sauce, kalamansi juice, sugar and thyme and let the tuna marinate in it for an hour or so.

Fire up your grill. I used a stove top grill. Make sure your grill is smoking hot. Reduce temp slightly. Grill your tuna, turning often until there are no more pink tuna flesh showing (you might need to break one cube up or slice your steak to see). Cooking time depends on how thick your tuna is. Slicing up the steak slightly would be actually OK so you can baste it with the remaining marinade as you grill. Since the marinade has sugar in it, be careful not to burn the outside too much.

Once done, place on a serving plate. Heat up the remaining marinade and pour over the tuna. You can top that with some fresh thyme for you know.... effect. And taking pictures.

I Have Stopped Using Tomatoes In Cans

Thanks to all those who have inquired whether I'll be posting new stuff here. I will soon! But for now, let me just make an apology to all those who have tried my recipes which includes Tomatoes in Cans. I have recently come upon the information that they pose health risks. As to what those health risks are, I suggest you Google them and make your own judgment.

My personal judgment is that I have now stopped them because I'm now firmly in the camp who believe there are considerable health risks involved. I will be making adjustments to my published recipes after I try out certain alternatives (like using market bought tomatoes).

And yeah, don't even think of using that fake tomato shit from NamNam. What? can't afford REAL tomatoes? They're cheap enough as it is. Don't be freakin' lazy. When it comes to health, don't be freakin' lazy.

Feijoada

Feijoada is a dish I've learned of only recently through a long time online pal of mine from Brazil, Bira Dantas. I finally met Bira in person early in October during a comics festival in Algeria. Like many cartoonists I met at the festival, Bira was extremely proud of his culture and he wasted no time sharing all the great things he loved about Brazil. Food was of course, one of those things.

He invited me to visit him in Brazil and if ever I found myself there, he would cook Feijoada for me. He described it to me and the bean and meat lover in me immediately stood at attention. I love beans and I love meat, although they really don't love me back. These things are full of uric acid you see, and uric acid is something I'm trying avoid. It's the cause of gout and other arthritis-related ailments. And I've had a problem with gout for quite a while.

Nevertheless I wanted to try this out. Feijoada is composed mostly of beans and assortment of meats from bacon, to smoked ham, to sausages, etc. So yeah, in this house this is alternately called "Uric Acid Surprise".

I don't have access to a few authentic ingredients so I decided to just replace them with what's available here in the Philippines. These is is the set of ingredients I decided upon:

150 grams black beans
1/4 kilo bacon
300 grams kielbasa sausage
5 pieces San Pablo longganisa
1/4 kilo smoked ham
1 piece chopped T-bone
1 big white onion chopped
5 cloves garlic minced
chopped parsley for garnishing

I had difficulty finding black beans locally. What's available mostly are red kidney beans and pinto beans. I've had to go to Healthy Options to find a bag of black beans which were organic (which is I suppose, a good thing) and kind of expensive (oh well). Of course I could have just as easily replaced the black beans with some other kind of bean, but if I can get black beans then I would rather go with that since that is what is specified traditionally.

To add a Filipino touch, I used locally available sausages like the native longganisa. I also had a frozen T-bone steak lying around so I thought I'd just throw that in.

OK, here's how I did it (with some tips from Chef John of Food Wishes):

I first submerged the black beans in water overnight. The following day, I drained the beans, placed them on a deep pot with 4 cups of water. I chopped up the T-bone and threw that in (including the bones) and boiled it for 2 hours. I brought the pot to a boil in high heat then brought down the heat to low as soon as it started boiling. In the first few minutes of boiling, scum rose to the top so I removed all of that.

Around 15 minutes before the 2 hours are up, I chopped the garlic and onion. I sauteed that in some oil (you can fry up some bacon and sautee the garlic and onion in that if you like). I chopped the meat into bite size pieces. I cooked the longganiza in oil until it was browned and chopped that. If you are using uncooked meat at this point, you better cook it first before throwing it in.

At the 2 hour mark, I placed the sauteed onion and garlic into the pot of boiling water and beans, threw in all the meat, added one and a half cups of water. I turned the heat to high once again, and once it starts boiling, I brought the heat back to low. I continued simmering for another hour, with occasional stirring.

Before the hour is up, I mashed up some of the beans in the pot with a potato masher. This will help make the liquid a bit thicker.

I served my Feijoada topped with chopped parsley with rice. (Traditionally topped with orange peels so you can go with that if you like.)

Jambalaya

I've cooked this once before but I wasn't in a blogging mood back then. I decided to try again and now I thought I'd write everything down. This recipe is more or less heavily inspired by Chef John's Jambalaya Recipe without much modifications aside from doubling the quantities.

I didn't make any adaptations to make the recipe more Filipino by replacing ingredients with more familiar ones. I didn't replace the sausage with longganisa for instance. As far as I know I've used  ingredients they do use from its place of origin.

For instance, I would not have attempted to do this without Andouille Sausages. That is the one ingredient a true jambalaya can't do without. So when I found a couple of packages of Andouille Sausages in a deli in Manila, I decided I'll cook this recipe again.

These are my ingredients:

500 grams Andouille Sausages, cut into circles.
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons cumin
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon salt
400 grans can Capri whole peeled tomatoes
2 large green bell pepper, chopped into cubes
4 sticks celery sliced thinly
1 bunch green onions, sliced thinly
2 cups rice
6 cups chicken broth
750 grams shrimp, peeled and cleaned

This is how you do it:  At medium heat melt the butter in a deep pot and sautee the Andouille sausages for 3 minutes. Add the paprika, cumin and cayenne pepper and continue stirring for the next 2 minutes. Add the bay leaves, salt and the tomatoes. Break up the tomatoes with your big spoon and let simmer for a couple of minutes. Add the bell pepper, celery and most of the green onions (reserve some for toppings later). Stir for a couple of minutes.

Clean the rice and add it to the pot. Add the 6 cups of chicken broth, cover, and allow to simmer at low heat for 45 minutes.

There is a danger that rice will stick at the bottom of the pot so it might do you well to stir this every once in a while. 6 cups of chicken broth to 2 cups of rice might seem a lot, but you'll be surprised how all that liquid will get absorbed within the next 20 or so minutes, so much so that you might want to add small amounts of water here and there so it won't dry out completely.

Keep tasting it if you need to add salt and to check if the rice is cooked or not.

Once you think the rice is just about to be cooked, add the shrimp, and keep stirring  for the next few minutes.Medium sized shrimp should be cooked in about 3-4 minutes. Just keep cooking until the rice is completely cooked and soft.

Once it's done, place your Jambalaya on a serving dish and sprinkle on the remaining green onion on top.

Pako Salad

I've attempted to do salads before, but they always end up big screaming fails. I guess I just didn't take the time to really study how greens are prepared, and more importantly, how dressing is made, which is (as I've learned) more than just an afterthought.

After watching so many videos online, I've finally come up with a salad that I think I do pretty good. A salad of Pako (or Fiddlehead Ferns) is a particular favorite locally. Although you don't get to see this salad often in common restaurants, they do turn up at high end Filipino themed restaurants and are very expensive. But pako isn't really expensive. In fact, it's ridiculously cheap. I decided to create one of my own.

Ingredients for the dressing:

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
Juice from 10 small calamansi (less if you're using big ones)
1 tsp mustard dissolved in 2 tablespoons of water
1 teaspoon salt
1 pinch cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon sugar

How to put the dressing together:

Place all ingredients in a ketchup squirt bottle, close the tip and then shake vigorously for a couple of minutes. That would be enough to combine all the elements in there that normally wouldn't want to combine. Put the bottle in the ref for the meantime.

Ingredients for the salad:

4 bunches pako*
2 medium sized tomatoes, chopped
2 red (salted) eggs (itlog na pula), sliced
kesong puti or feta cheese

*When buying pako at the palengke, they usually sell it by bunch. 4 bunches would be enough to feed at least 4 people. It might seem like a whole lot when you buy it, but take note: you only use the tips of the pako. That means probably around 2" to 2-1/2" measured from the very tip.

Here in San Pablo, one bunch of pako is 5 pesos. Four bunches therefore is only 20 pesos. Crazy, right?

Putting the salad together:

Place the pako in a pot of boiling water and cover. Now, quickly get some ice cubes from the ref and place them in a bowl of water. By the time you get back to your boiling pot, the pako would be ready. This should all take less than a minute. Drain the water and place the pako in the iced water to stop it from cooking. Place the pako in a colander for a minute to allow it to drain.

Take out your dressing in the ketchup squirt bottle and shake it again vigorously for a minute.

In a large serving plate, squirt some of the dressing on top of the plate. Place the pako on the plate. You can now add your other ingredients. add the tomatoes, the red eggs, and the cheese. Generously squirt the dressing over the salad. You can either serve this immediately or you can keep it in the ref for a while covered with cling wrap.

In the photo above you can see some grilled green bell pepper. That's just a little side dish which is very simple to do. Just slice the bell pepper in large slices and grill them on a stove top grill or a fire grill. Grilled green bell peppers are very nice. Try it!

Seafood Bopis

I still do eat meat once in a rare while, but I absolutely no longer eat "lamang loob" or organs. I mean things like lungs, hearts, gizzards, intestines, livers, and the like.

Since "BOPIS" is primarily made of pig's lungs, I've pretty much resigned myself to not being able to eat it ever again.

That is until I made my "Lapu-Lapu Badjao", and I noticed a familiar texture when I chopped up the tahong and halaan together. I thought hey, I could make bopis out of this if I wanted to!

Today was the day to test the theory out.

Here are the ingredients I used:

1-1/2 kilo halaan*
1-kilo tahong*
2 cups coconut milk
4 tablespoons white vinegar
4 green chili peppers (siling haba) chopped finely, seeds removed
2 bird's eye chili chopped finely
1 red bell pepper chopped finely
1 medium sized carrot chopped finely into small cubes
3 tablespoons atsuete (annatto) seeds steeped in 1 cup warm water
5 cloves garlic smashed and chopped
1 large onion chopped
1 tablespoon ginger, grated
salt
ground black pepper

First thing you do is to steep the atsuete seeds in 1 cup warm water and just leave it as you prepare the other stuff. The atsuete liquid that you would get from here would give the bopis its distinctive yellowish hue.

Steam the halaan and tahong in a steamer until the shells open. This will take only a few minutes. Once cooled, remove the meat from the shells and chop the meat finely. Set aside.

*Take note that the 1-1/2 kilo halaan (clams) and 1 kilo tahong (mussels) are weighed including the shells. You can't get around this as you can't really buy fresh clams and mussels from the local market that already shelled. You will get around 3/4 kilo to 1 kilo meat, which is just perfect for this recipe.

Sautee your garlic and onions in a little bit of oil in a large wok for a few minutes. Add the ginger. Sautee for another minute. Add the halaan and tahong meat. Add 2 teaspoons salt and a teaspoon of ground black pepper. Add your chopped green chilies and chopped bird's eye chillies. Stir. Add the one cup atsuete liquid (don't include the seeds). Stir. Add the vinegar. STOP STIRRING.

Remember when cooking with vinegar, specially on a dish like this, you need to let the vinegar just simmer for a while, un-stirred. So just leave this alone at low heat, covered, for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, add the carrots and 2 cups coconut milk. Now that may seem quite a lot of milk to put into it. You're thinking, holy crap, this looks like soup now. But don't worry. Bring the heat to medium high and bring to a boil. You need to constantly stir this every 30 seconds or so to prevent the meat from sticking to the pan. The heat is on high so that you will slowly reduce the milk, concentrating its flavor into the meat.

After 10 minutes, you will start to notice the milk reducing considerably. Add the red bell peppers at this point and keep stirring.

Taste for salt. At this point I realized I needed to add a little more so I added a pinch more. Continue stirring until the milk is considerably reduced until you have the thick consistency of what bopis should be.

After around 8 more minutes I decided mine was OK and took it off the heat.

I served it with a few chopped green chilies on top and it tasted great.

As an experiment I would say this was an awesome success!

Lapu-Lapu Badjao

Holy crap, this is a BIG one. My mom brought out a really old book entitled "The Flavour of Manila" Edited by Kenneth Mitchell, which lists the specialties and recipes of several high end restaurants in Manila popular in the 1970s. My eye gravitated towards this dish called "Lapu-Lapu Badjao", which was the specialty of this restaurant called "Badjao Inn". I don't know if that even exists in Manila anymore, although there is a place with the same name in Palawan. I don't know if it's the same place.

But anyway, I was intrigued by it. I've never seen anything like it, and I've never tasted anything like it. There were no ingredients that were too difficult to find so I decided to attempt doing it. "Attempt" being the operative word.

In any case, I'm posting the recipe here so that probably means it was a resounding success.

Here are the ingredients, slightly modified from the book.

Main dish:

olive oil (for frying)
1 medium sized onion
6 cloves garlic
1 large Lapu-Lapu
1 kilo halaan (the book specifies clams)*
1 kilo tahong (the book specifies mussels)*
1/2 kilo shrimp*
1 green pepper (siling haba)
2 red bird's eye chili**
1/2 inch ginger
8 leaves fresh basil
2 tablespoons kinchay
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1-1/2 teaspoon salt
Banana leaf
Aluminum foil

For the garnishing:

olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
8 leaves fresh basil, chopped
10 cloves chopped garlic
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 lemon

Preparation

Steam the tahong and halaan until they open. Take half the halaan, remove the meat and place in a container. Take half the tahong, remove the meat and place in the same container. Take around 3/4 of the shrimp, Remove the shells, devein, and then place in the same container. Allow the halaan and tahong to cool down a bit. Put them all on a chopping board and chop all finely. Place back in the container.

You have some remaining unshelled shrimp and half of both the halaan and tahong still in the shells. Just set them aside for now.

Take the green pepper (siling haba), remove the seeds and chop finely. Chop around 8 big leaves of fresh basil. Chop the same amount of kinchay. Grate the ginger finely with a cheese grater. Chop two red bird's eye chili. Put them all in the same container with the halaan, tahong and shrimp. Mix well.

Cooking

Sautee the garlic and onion in olive oil in a pan for a few minutes on medium-low heat until the onion becomes soft and the garlic becomes slightly brown. The reason why this can't be on high heat is because it will brown the garlic quickly and make it bitter.

Turn the heat to medium high and then throw in the shrimp-tahong-halaan and vegtable mixture you made into the pan. Add the ground black pepper and salt and stir for several minutes until the shrimp is cooked. This is now your stuffing for the fish. Allow to cool for several minutes.

In the meantime, prepare your Lapu Lapu. Cut the stomach side of the fish so you can open it up like a book. Carefully remove the backbone. You can have them do this in the market or do it yourself, although the former is much MUCH easier. Salt the outside of the fish on both sides.

Place a large piece of aluminum foil on a flat surface. Take your banana leaf and pass it carefully and quickly over the fire on your stove to make the leaf more pliable. Place the banana leaf on the aluminum foil. Place the fish on the banana leaf. Open the fish and stuff the cavity with your stuffing. You don't have to jam all the stuffing in. If it's already full, you can set aside extra stuffing in the ref for the meantime (you can make tortang talong out of that if you like at a later time).

Carefully close the fish back up again, and if it doesn't close all the way, that's OK. Wrap the banana leaf completely over the fish, and then wrap the aluminum foil over everything. Make sure it's completely sealed in the foil.

Place the wrapped fish in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees C for 45-50 minutes.

Garnishing

While the fish is baking, take the tahong and halaan  that's still in the shell that you set aside earlier, and remove half of the shells that do not include the meat.

In a pan, place a small amount of olive oil in a heated pan, add the butter and allow the butter to melt. Add the garlic and stir for a few minutes. Throw in the shrimp and stir until it is almost cooked. Throw in the tahong and halaan, sugar, salt, ground black pepper and chopped basil. Stir on high heat for a few minutes. Turn of the heat and pour in the sesame oil. Stir it well. Set aside to cool.

Slice to lemon into circles.***

Serving

Once the fish is done, carefully remove from the oven and transfer the fish, along with the banana leaf into a serving tray. Decorate the the fish with your tahong, shrimp and halaan, along with the lemon. You can further garnish it with some kinchay leaves and pepper (like in the picture!)

That's it! I was pretty nervous how it would turn out, but it turned out great! Everyone loved it!

****************

*The recipe specifies 100g each of cooked mussels, clams and shrimp. It doesn't take into consideration that when buying from the market, you have to include the weight of the shells, which in the case of tahong and halaan, is quite substantial. It also doesn't take into account additional tahong, halaan and shrimp that's needed to garnish the dish. I added quantities of each accordingly.

**Bird's Eye Chili is different from Siling Labuyo. If you've seen "siling labuyo" sold in the market that's longer than an inch, it's not actually labuyo but Bird's Eye Chili which originates from Taiwan. The true "siling labuyo" is far shorter, and packs a hotter punch.

***The lemon is not just for show. You can use that the squeeze lemon juice into the fish while eating. It gives the fish a much fresher flavor.

Gerry's Chili

Yep! I like my own chili so much that I decided to name it after me! It's one of the very few things I cooked that I'm proud to attach my own name to it.

Chili is one of my all time favorite dishes. It's not a traditional Filipino dish by any means, but I don't mind. The first time I tasted something like this was at Wendy's, and it seemed interesting. I decided to try it whenever and where ever it popped up on a menu. One of the best chilis I tasted was in restaurant in Detroit, but I've forgotten the name of the place. Its distinct quality was it was fine, thick and soupy, as if all the ingredients have completely dissolved into one consistent goop. It was awesome.

The next best chili I tasted was the one in Mile High near Camp John Hay in Baguio. The waiter was a bit of an ass, but we put up with him because the chili was awesome. Very different kind of chili. You can still see the meat, vegetables and beans in a relatively thin soup, but all together it was very nice.

I didn't like the chili of both Chili's and Johnny Rockets. TOO OILY.

I decided to try to make my own and after several attempts, I finally found one that suits me perfectly. These are the ingredients I used:

1/2 kilo lean ground beef
200g smoked bacon, chopped into 1 inch pieces
1 big onion, finely chopped
8 cloves garlic finely chopped
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon rock salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves
1 400g can Molinera red beans
1 400g can Molinera white beans
1 400g can Capri whole peeled tomatoes
1 small can Molinera pimientos
5 pcs. green finger chili peppers (siling haba), seeded and chopped finely
2 tablesooons Tabasco Chipotle Pepper Sauce
2 sticks celery, chopped
2 medium sized green bell pepper chopped
2-1/2 cups water
cheese (for toppings)

First, throw in the chopped bacon in a deep pot on medium high heat. Let it cook for a few minutes to render out the fat. Add just a little bit more oil and then throw in the garlic and the onion. At this stage you need to add the chili powder, cumin and oregano. Stir very well until the spices are absorbed by the onion and becomes soft.

Throw in the ground beef and add the salt and ground black pepper. Stir very well. Now I know the bacon will already bring a lot of saltiness, but I think you need this additional salt for the entire dish. Don't add anymore salt until you've tasted it much later.

Add the whole peeled tomatoes. With a masher or big spoon, mash the tomatoes very well. Add the pimientos, celery, green bell pepper, green chili peppers, and beans and stir very well. Add the chipotle pepper sauce, garlic powder and water. Stir and bring to a boil.

Once it's boiling, turn the heat down to low and allow to simmer for an hour.

After one hour, taste it. If it's not salty enough for you, feel free to add more salt. If it's not spicy enough, feel free to add more chipotle sauce.

Spoon over onto a serving bowl, top with your favorite cheese and there you go!

*I specified Molinera beans and Capri tomatoes, but feel free to choose any brand you wish, if those brands are not available in your area. I used the green chili peppers that are commonly available here in San Pablo, commonly called "Siling Haba", but if I had my way, I would use fresh jalapeno peppers. The closest thing I can get to that is Tabasco's Chipotle Pepper sauce (Chipotle is smoked red jalapeno), which is available at the local SM.

That's it! I hope you give it a try and let me know what you think.

Home Made Pork and Beans

Who else is frustrated when they crack open a can of pork and beans and see only a small sliver of pork fat amidst all the beans? Ridiculous right?

I wanted to finally set things right by making my own home made pork and beans, and jam it with a ton load of pork, with a big dose of smoked bacon. REVENGE.

Here are my ingredients:

Two 400 gram cans of cooked beans (I used pinto beans)
1/2 kilo pork liempo, sliced into bite size pieces
200 grams smoked bacon, cut into 1 inch strips
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon molasses
1 cup tomato ketchup
1 tsp mustard
3 cups water
1 tsp ground black pepper

The first thing to do is put the bacon in a deep pot on high heat and let it sweat out its oil. If the oil isn't enough, add just a little bit more and fry until the bacon for a couple of minutes. Add the pork and stir for another few minutes.

Add the sugar, ketchup, molasses, mustard, black pepper, beans and water. Stir until everything is properly mixed and then bring to a boil. Once it's boiling, bring the heat down to as low as it goes until it's just barely bubbling. Cover, and let simmer this way for the next 3 hours. Longer if you like.

I cook it that long because I want everything to be almost falling apart. It will probably already be fine after 2 and a half hours, but no, I want the pork to be incredibly soft.

Notice I no longer added salt. That's because the bacon already brought in a lot of sodium, but if your taste buds call for more salt after tasting it, then by all means.

I also used canned cooked beans because raw beans are really so difficult to soften up. It takes overnight dunking in water and a few more hours of boiling... I thought the cooked can beans would do the job just fine.

It turned out great! Everyone loved it! Me too!

Home Made Ciabatta

I was inspired to try making my own bread after seeing a seemingly simple video recipe from Chef John of Foodwishes.com.

My first attempt a couple of weeks ago ended in a disaster when I "adjusted" the ingredients slightly. I remembered Wolfgang Puck commenting once, "Baking is like an architect. You measure everything VERY exactly."

Baking is like an architect. RIGHT. But I get the essential gist of it, so this time around, I measured everything exactly.

4 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon yeast
2 cups warm water
1/2 teaspoon salt
cornmeal (for dusting the pan)

I mixed all of that in a big aluminum bowl with a wooden spatula. Now as you mix this, you may start to think the dough is a little too dry. The last time I panicked and added more water. That ended in disaster. Don't add any more water. Just keep mixing this and it will come together eventually. Just expect to exert your arm a little bit.

Cover the bowl with aluminum foil. Now Chef John specified 18 hours for the dough to rise. Since I used a fast rising yeast, I went down to 6 hours. Now I don't know if that's right or what, but that's what I did.

At the end of 6 hours, the dough did indeed rise quite a bit. I transferred the dough to a large baking pan previously dusted with a generous amount of corn meal. I formed the dough into shape, using a bit of flour on my hands and on top of the dough. I then covered the dough and the pan with a towel and allowed it to rise for another hour. (Chef John specifies 2 hours).

I then put the pan in an oven, pre-heated to 220 degrees C for 45 minutes.

At the end of 45 minutes, it turned out pretty well! Well, I think it's around 90% successful. The crust was wonderfully crunchy, but although the inside was quite cooked, it was still a bit moist and slightly dense. Now perhaps I should have allowed it to rise 18 hours and an additional 2 hours in the pan. I will try that next time.

Corned Beef From Scratch: Sinigang

If you're visiting this site for the first time, this is PART II of my Corned Beef From Scratch series. It's probably best if you read PART I first where I talked about creating corned beef from scratch in full detail.

I took half of the corned beef I cooked yesterday, put in on the ref with the stock and kept it there overnight.

Today, I made sinigang out of it.

Ok, now here's where I admit that I did not make the sinigang out of scratch. I used a combination of instant mixes of Sinigang sa Bayabas and Sinigang sa Sampalok. I know... I KNOW. If I had bothered to make corned beef out of scratch, then I should have taken the trouble to make sinigang out of scratch as well.

Well, I throw up my hands and say that you're right. But being only 60% happy with my corned beef, I wanted to know right away how it would do with sinigang and I really couldn't be bothered to go through the trouble. Perhaps when I'm completely happy with my corned beef, I'll be happy enough to do sinigang from scratch as well.

With perhaps around a liter of water from the wash water of rice, I threw in some crushed garlic and quartered tomatoes. I put the mixes in (I want really sour soup so I put more than what is usually indicated in the package), brought everything to a boil, added my vegetables which are okra, labanos, sitaw and the beef. I had cut the beef into smaller cubes, being very careful not to break it apart because by now it's so soft it's really falling apart. After boiling for some 5 minutes (you don't need to boil longer than that because the beef is already cooked, and the vegetables cook quickly), I added kang kong leaves on top, boiled for a minute more, and turned off the heat.

How was it? I was definitely happier with this, than I was with the Corned Beef Hash I made yesterday!

Corned Beef From Scratch

After tasting some awesome home made corned beef at Cafe Juanita, it pretty much inspired me and challenged me to create some of my own corned beef, from scratch of course!

Looking through recipes online, at first it seemed rather complicated, but after reading up some more, it really wasn't. It would just take a long time to do. Which is perfectly OK.

I ended up buying half a kilo of kalitiran, which is actually Blade Chuck if we're going by cow terms. I'm not sure if it's the best cut of beef for Corned Beef (it isn't, it's actually Brisket).

BRINING

Brining pretty much means submerging meat in water with a variety of spices. For this stage, these are the ingredients I used:

A container to brine the meat in.
Half a kilo blade chuck
2/3 cup rock salt
1 teaspoon pink curing salt
1 tablespoon pickling spices*
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 liter water

*Pickling spice is a combination of equal parts the following spices:

all spice
mustard seeds
coriander seeds
cardamom (crushed)
a bit of cinammon stick (crushed)
bay leaf
ground ginger
whole black pepper corns
whole cloves
pepper flakes

You would need at least 2 tablespoons of pickling spice. You will use one now for brining, and one for later.

I sealed the container well and placed it inside the refrigerator.

SIMMERING

After 7 days I removed the beef from the brine and discarded the liquid. I washed the beef a little bit to remove remaining brine and spices that stuck to it.

I placed the beef  in a deep pot or dutch oven with around 2 liters of water. Turn the heat to high and bring it to a boil. Remove any scum that rises to the top. Once the scum is removed, I added 1 tablespoon of the remaining pickling spice. I brought the heat down as low as it goes, until the liquid is almost barely bubbling. I covered it and let it simmer like that for 3 and a half hours, or until beef is fork tender, but not disintegrating.

I then cut the beef and half, reserving one half for Corned Beef Sinigang (for tomorrow!) and the other half for Corned Beef Hash (for tonight!).

CORNED BEEF HASH

I sauteed some chopped garlic and onion and oil for a few minutes, added one finely chopped small potato.  and fried it for several minutes until the potato was just about soft and sticking to the pan. I then added half the beef and pulled the beef apart in the pan itself with a couple of forks which was easily accomplished since the beef was extremely tender. I added 1 large pinch of salt, some ground black pepper, and sauteed everything for a few more minutes.

I garnished the dish with a few sliced onions.

What's the verdict?

Well, it could have put more curing salt (I only used one teaspoon) to make the meat more red. The camera somewhat enhanced the color of the meat in the photo above. But I was wary of using too much of it.

I was also kind of puzzled that the meat didn't come out salty from the brining that I had to add additional salt in the cooking. Perhaps I should have just left the beef in the refrigerator after simmering it and used it a few days later to allow the taste to develop? I don't know.

Also, I probably used too much cardamom or some other spice.... because it seemed to be too noticeable in the finished dish.

As an experiment, I would say this was around 60% successful. I will try again!

Tomorrow the Corned Beef Sinigang!

Kinulob Style Afritada

I had this one whole chicken in the freezer waiting to be cooked and this time around I thought I'd do Afritada, with a few special adjustments. I would be cooking the chicken whole, stewed in my favorite Capri canned whole peeled tomatoes, pimiento, pepperoni (left over from pizza I made earlier), and the standard afridata ingredients potato and carrots.

These are my ingredients:

1 whole chicken
1 400g can Capri whole peeled tomatoes (doesn't have to be Capri, as long as it's Italian)
1 113g small can Capri pimientos (also doesn't have to be Capri), chopped
1 tsp dried tarragon
1/3 cup sliced pepperoni (cut from sausage, not the precut kind), or any smoked sausage
1 green bell pepper sliced
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 big white onion, chopped
1 large potato, cubed
1 small carrot, sliced
2 cups water or chicken stock
1 chicken bouillon cube
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (more or less, according to taste, also optional)
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper (to taste)
1 teaspoon brown sugar

I first sauteed the garlic and onion in oil in a medium sized deep pot or dutch oven (I actually used a rice cooker pot), added the chopped pimientos and tomatoes. Crush the tomatoes with a potato masher or if you don't have that,  a large spoon will do. Add the tarragon, bouillon cube, 2 cups water, teaspoon salt, sugar, 1 teaspoon ground black pepper, pepper flakes and the pepperoni. Now I like putting pepperoni or some other smoked sausage so it will give the afritada somewhat of a smokey flavor (which I like).

Place the chicken at the center of the pot. Most likely the liquid won't cover the entire chicken but that's OK. Add the cubed potato, sliced carrot and bay leaves around the chicken.

Put the heat on high and once it starts boiling, turn the heat down to low and continue simmering for the next 45 minutes. Turn the chicken over, and then continue simmering for another 30 minutes. Most likely you would no longer need to add any more water. Before the 30 minutes ends, maybe 5 minutes before you take the chicken off the heat, add your sliced green bell peppers. Taste the sauce to see if you still need more salt or if you want it more spicy.

Cabbage Roll

Inspired once again from a recipe I found at Chef John's Food Wishes, I tried out this technique of wrapping some filling with cabbage and  simmering it in stock and tomatoes. I would often do a lot of these cooking experiments but not all of them makes it to this blog or onto video, specially those that turned out to suck.

This however, this turned out fantastic!

We had some left over lumpiang shanghai filling from lunch earlier today and I thought I could use that filling for this dish. Now you can come up with a filling of your own and use whatever you like. You can use chicken or pork or fish... it's really up to you.  This recipe is more of the technique of doing the cabbage roll itself.

These were the ingredients I used:

1/4 kilo filling. (I used lumpiang shanghai filling which included chicken, carrots, onion and spring onions)
3/4 cup washed uncooked rice
1/2 can Capri Whole Peeled Tomatoes (I like this brand because the tomatoes are really nice and red)
1 medium sized cabbage
1 medium sized onion, chopped
2-1/2 cups chicken stock
salt and pepper
2 bay leaves
kinchay

First you need to prepare your ingredients. First up is the tomato. Take half of the canned whole peeled tomatoes, put them in a bowl and crush them until they form kind of a rough sauce. Now you can always buy canned tomatoes that are already crushed of course, and you can choose any brand you like, and of course, you can just get regular tomatoes for this, it doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to me actually because as I said, I really love these canned tomatoes. Buy one and see for yourself. It's amazing.

Second, take out the core of the cabbage and place the cabbage in a deep pan of boiling water. Within a few seconds, those cabbage leaves are going to peel off. Using tongs, carefully remove each one as they detach. Do this until the entire cabbage is deconstructed.

Third, take your meat filling and add the rice and around 2 tablespoons chopped kinchay. Mix that all together very well.

In a medium sized casserole dish (with a lid!), line the bottom with the smallest cabbage leaves.

You are now going to build your cabbage rolls. Take one of the biggest leaves, remove bits of hard stem towards the bottom with a knife. Take around 2 tablespoons of meat/rice mixture and place it horizontally near the bottom of the leaf. Now carefully wrap the leaf around the meat, folding the sides and then folding the whole thing. Do as many as would fit in your casserole dish.

Carefully place the rolls inside the dish. Sprinkle some salt and pepper over the rolls. Now pour your tomato sauce over this, add the bay leaves and pour as much stock as would cover the rolls completely.

With regards to stock. You can always boil some chicken with a few vegetables like carrots and celery and use the liquid for stock. I didn't have that so I simply used a chicken cube dissolved in 2-1/2 cups of water. Now if you're using a cube, be careful not to add to much salt in the previous step. Not too much would just be right.  The cube comes with quite a bit of sodium already.

Place your chopped onion over the rolls and then cover everything with a layer of the remaining cabbage leaves.

Close the lid, place the dish inside an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees C. You will bake this for at least one and a half hours.

After one and a half hours, leave the casserole dish inside the cooling oven for 30 minutes more before serving.

And there you go!

[Video Recipe] Baked Blue Marlin Steak

I've been seeing the technique of cooking fish wrapped in aluminum foil and baked in an oven quite a few times in You Tube and other places. I've actually been doing this technique for a while since then, and I thought I'd finally put a recipe I've come up with down on paper (as it were).

I saw some really nice frozen blue marlin steaks at a local grocery and I thought these would be perfect for this demonstration.

These are the things you would need:

1.2 kilo blue marlin steaks (which to me yielded 3 pieces)
3 square-ish sheets of aluminum foil
cold butter
olive oil
6 calamansi (or 1 pc. lemon)
salt and pepper
dried basil leaves
6 cloves chopped garlic
chopped parsley for garnishing

Check out the video for the procedure.



There I specified 20 minutes baking time at 200C, but that's not absolute. You can cook at a lesser time if your fish is smaller or if you use a type of fish that cooks faster like dory.

[Video Recipe] Adobong Manok sa Gata

I finally got around to making recipe videos again! Some of my most watched videos on You Tube are recipe videos so that's a clear message right there. People want cooking stuff on video!

This "Adobong Manok sa Gata" recipe has actually been shot well, way back 2009. I never managed to get around to editing it because honestly, these cooking videos really take a long time to edit. It's not like I can just talk in front of a camera for a few minutes and upload. Putting together something like this takes much much longer. Usually half a day. That's perhaps why I didn't do too many of these... until I found a way I can do it quickly.

And the secret really was to remove my face from the equation and just focus on the food. That would be less distraction ( I know how distracting my face can be! hehe), and it's actually easier to put the video together.

Adobong Manok sa Gata is a traditional Southern Tagalog recipe that has been around for centuries. Our ancestors loved cooking with vinegar because it allowed food to last longer, and this was important during a time when there were still no way of refrigerating food for preservation.

Adobong Manok sa Gata is basically chicken cooked in vinegar, coconut milk and young papaya fruit that hasn't ripened yet.

Here are my ingredients:

1-1/2 Kilo chicken parts including livers and gizzards
1/2 cup coconut vinegar (preferably), or cane vinegar
1/3 cup patis or or fish sauce
2 cups coconut milk
1 bulb garlic, chopped
2 medium sized onion, chopped
2 tablespoons grated ginger
cooking oil
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 young unripe papaya (if you can't find it, sayote would do fine), peeled and sliced

For the procedure, watch the video:

Gourmet Oven Roasted Spam

Spam? YES, Spam. In this case, Turkey Spam. We have it for breakfast every once in a while. We usually just fry it and eat it with bread or rice, but once in a while, I would try and do something different.

In a baking dish I poured a tablespoon of melted butter and spooned it around in the center where I'll be placing the spam, straight out of the can. I made slightly deep cuts on the top surface of the spam and poured 2 tablespoons of melted butter on that.

I placed the baking dish in an oven at 150 degrees C for 30 minutes, and another 30 minutes at 200 degrees C. I let that cool for a few minutes.

Roasting spam in this way in the oven makes the skin awesomely crispy!

I then sliced the spam and placed it on a serving tray.

I then took the baking dish and placed it on a stovetop. Keep all that nice droppings, melted butter and browned spam material there! That's what you want. I then set the stove to medium, added half a cup of water, 1/4 cup of red wine, half a chicken cube and then allow to boil for a few minutes as you stir. I then dissolved a heaping tablespoon of flour in 1/3 cup water and added that to the pan. Stir very well, bring back to a boil, and allow the flour to cook for a few minutes.

Pour that sauce over the sliced spam.

It made for a nice Spamsilog!

Home Made Ice Tea

I've been experimenting on and off creating my own ice tea from scratch. I've tried with different kinds of tea including black, earl grey, darjeeling and green across several brands, but it wasn't until I found this Organo Gold Organic Green Tea was I able to make something that was very satisfactory.

Basically what I did was this:

I had a sealable plastic pitcher in the house which can contain almost 2 liters of liquid. In this container I put about a liter and a half of really cold water. Into this water I squeezed the juice of at least 15 calamansi. (You can add more according to your taste.) I then added 3/4 cup of "segunda" sugar. That's sugar that's between white and brown. You can add more sugar according to your taste. It usually takes quite a lot of sugar to make tea like this taste sweet.

Now the reason for the sealable pitcher is I can close this and shake it around very vigorously. I do this to completely incorporate the sugar, water and calamansi.

In a 500ml container I steeped 4 teabags of Organo Green Tea in boiled water for around 8 minutes, then poured that into the pitcher. I shake the pitcher even more.

An added bonus as to why I use plastic pitcher is I can place it in a cache in the door of the our refrigerator's freezer. That would allow the tea to get really really cold.

I usually prepare this several hours before serving so the tea will be ice cold upon serving.

My pal Jonas Diego has made a nice graphic about this tea which you can find here.

Green Tea is by no means the only Organo Gold product I've come across. They also have some really fine coffees like Mocha, Cafe Latte and Black Coffee. Personally, my favorite is their Cafe Latte, which I found to be perfect for making iced coffee.  You can find out more about other Organo Gold coffees here.

Check out their Official Facebook Page here:
http://www.facebook.com/LuvACup

Tuna Kilawin

"Kilawin" is a style of cooking where you actually don't cook the food with heat. You cook the meat by marinating it in vinegar and calamansi juice in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. What is calamansi? Click here.

Sound interesting? It is! Sounds weird? To someone who hasn't tried it, yet it is! Does it taste great? Of course it does! Here is what you're going to need:

1 kilo tuna. Fresh is best, but frozen would be good also. As long as it's sashimi grade. The tuna I used was crazy cut Frabelle frozen tuna that I bought at a local Puregold. Crazy cut is ok because I'm going to cutting the fish anyway into smaller pieces. No please don't use canned tuna. It's just not gonna work.

2 big red onions, chopped. I suppose you can use big white onions, but I like the red ones for this particular dish.

1-1/2 tablespoons of grated ginger. Yes, I like grating ginger. I do that so people don't have to bite into pieces of it. It's never a nice experience.

Vinegar. I didn't even measure the vinegar that I used. I bought the liter bottle and I used around over half of it. I'll write how much you need later.

1/2 cup calamansi juice. Or Lemon juice, if you don't have access to calamansi.

4 long green chili peppers, chopped. Or cut into tiny sections with scissors. I'll explain later.

Salt and Pepper. To taste, as always.

Ok, here's how you do it:

First thing you do is to chop the tuna into smaller pieces, if they aren't already are, and put it into a bowl.

Next is you pour enough vinegar over it to somewhat cover the meat. With a spoon or with your hands, gently wash the tuna over with the vinegar. Leave it there for a couple of minutes and then drain the vinegar completely.

Now place your tuna in your serving bowl and pour about a cup of fresh vinegar on it. Add the chopped red onions, calamansi juice, ginger, salt and pepper (I ended up using around a 3/4 tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon of ground black pepper).

Finally, get your green chili peppers and what I like to do is to cut them into small ring sections using scissors. Now I can do this on a cutting board with a knife, but I generally try to avoid as much contact with the insides of the pepper with my fingers (I'll probably tell the story one day as to why) and scissoring the pepper directly over the food works well with me.

With a spoon gently stir all the ingredients around until the vinegar, calamansi, ginger, salt and pepper permeate the entire thing. Cover and put into the refrigerator for at least two hours. Once or twice take the bowl out and stir, just to make sure the vinegar does its job on all parts of the tuna. After all, it is the vinegar and calamansi juice that will cook this dish.

After two hours, the dish is ready to serve. Make sure to serve this dish cold!