Last fall I posted a story about the surge of Community Supported Fisheries (CSF), specifically the program out of Gloucester, MA called Cape Ann Fresh Catch (CAFC).  A brief summary of how it works: Just like the produce Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, participants pay upfront for that season’s share. The money helps guarantee that the fishermen will make a decent wage off his/her catch. In exchange, they drive dayboat fish to various designated locations in the city each day, where customers come and pick up their share.

In response, I got a few (totally fair) questions about whether or not I had actually bought into a share myself. Unfortunately, I had not at that point; my work schedule didn’t allow me to get to the dropoff locations in time, and, frankly, it was too much fish for me to take. But this Spring an offer turned up that was too good to refuse.

One of my coworkers who already had a share noticed that the dropoff route on Tuesdays went right by our office. She called CAFC and proposed a scenario: If she could drum up enough interest among the staff, would they be willing to make a dropoff at our office? Sure, they said, provided we get about a dozen shares worth of sign-ups.

That wasn’t hard. In the end, we actually got about 20 people, I think. But other than the convenience of ocean-to-door service and a huge walk-in fridge to store the fish until the end of the workday, it turned out that there were a bunch of folks interested in sharing shares, which made the whole program very doable for a lot of people, myself included.

The other appealing factor: This season CAFC offered three different types of shares—all whole fish, all fillets, or alternating, in which you get whole fish one week and fillets the next. Seemed like a perfect opportunity for a beginner like me who wanted to learn how to work with whole fish, but didn’t want to be committed to that kind of project every week.

This season is about 13 weeks long, and I think we’ve just passed the halfway mark. Happy to report it’s been working out really well. On Tuesdays around 3 p.m., my coworker who organized the relationship with CAFC gets a call from the delivery guy when he’s getting close to our office. She and I grab a huge cooler and meet him outside, crosscheck our lists of how many whole fish and how many fillets we need, and then haul the cooler upstairs and everyone can take their share. Fortunately, some the America’s Test Kitchen staffers have a good bit of experience filleting whole fish and they’ve been kind enough to give a few demos on how it’s done. (CAFC also offers a how-to video that’s very informative.) Oftentimes a week’s share is one whole fish, so those of us sharing shares often grab a knife and fillet at work to divvy up dinner. We also chat each other up about what’s on the menu that night: cod and corn chowder, baked fillets with romesco sauce, Thai fish curry, whole fish stuffed with fennel and citrus and grilled…

My personal go-tos have been ceviche and fish tacos.  The first couldn’t be easier—citrus juice, fresh chiles, red onion, garlic, herbs, a little extra-virgin olive oil mixed with chunks of raw fish for an hour or so until the meat “cures.” I find it’s a forgivable preparation for those of us who are still less than savvy with a fillet knife (it just takes practice, I keep telling myself), fast, and delightful to eat in the summer.  Fish tacos have been a rotating preparation for me; most times I dip them in beer batter and deep-fry them, but this past week I broke out my new charcoal grill, slicked down a piece of aluminum foil with vegetable oil, and threw the fish (on the foil) onto the grates. Sort of a lighter take that I’d wanted to try for a while, and the fish took on some good smoke flavor from the hardwood. Anyone has other good suggestions what to do—especially for whole fish—I’ve still got about 6 weeks worth of fish to go!

Sustainable living to me means fostering my local resources, and the most valuable resource we have is caring farmers and environmental stewards.  Find the people who practice what you care about, learn from them and support them, then pass that knowledge along to your children, your co-workers, anyone who has an interest.

A lot of what I try and put into practice is a way of living that was practiced generations ago out of necessity.  Eating fresh in the season and preserving for the rest of the year are the cornerstones. As a kid, we had cherries all year straight out of the root cellar.  A jar of cherries and a little cream makes a great dessert. We also had beef in the freezer. Granddad raised it and it could come in any form, for better or worse. This type of thing was done almost solely for economic reasons. A side of beef is much less expensive than buying corned beef, brisket, shanks, tenderloin, and everything else, throughout the year, plus you are able to control the source of your beef and how it was raised.

I just bought a 250 pound side of Dexter beef for $1000.  That makes it $4.00 per pound, and I use everything off of it. This was a 28 month-old 100% grass fed steer. Try and find even a grass fed beef flank steak at your best butcher in town for $4 a pound, let alone that awesome rib-eye that I’m dry aging right now. I’ve learned that there are ways to prepare each different cut so that it’s delicious, despite my childhood memories of chewing until my jaw was sore.

From that steer, I made a rich pot roast, short ribs, lots of “butcher” steaks, bresaola, basterma, pastrami, peperoni, shanks, dry aged steaks, and onion soup with marrow.  There are endless uses out there.  Start with the year’s worth of beef, or the cherries or pickled garlic scapes, then next year add a couple more items to your repertoire, and teach other people to do the same.

Yankee Pot Roast

1 cup of suet

1 bone in chuck roast

bouquet garni

1 each carrot, onion, celery, cut small

1 jar tomatoes (for acidity, doesn’t have to be exact)

salt and pepper

thyme, bay leaf

1 quart beef broth

Other seasonal vegetables to finish

Lightly render the suet in a cast iron pan.  Next, season the beef generously, gently sear the roast on all sides, work slowly and carefully.  I use a meat fork and tongs to handle the roast to keep a firm grip.  Remove the beef to a roasting pot with a lid.  Add the carrot, onion, and celery  to the cast iron pan and cook to lightly brown.  Transfer to the pot with the roast, add the bouquet garni, tomatoes, herbs, and cover half way with broth.  Cover the pot tightly and braise in a 300 deg. F (150 deg.C) oven for about 8 hours, or overnight.  In the last hour, you can add other vegetables like mushrooms, potatoes, parsnips, so that they give texture to the dish.  This is great if you chill the entire pot overnight.  The next day, remove the solid fat that settled on the surface, and reheat for and hour or so until hot and tender again.  You should be able to eat this with a spoon it will be so tender.  Add fresh vegetables like green beans and peas in the last 5 minutes or so before you serve.

This is going to be a quick and dirty installment of GoodEating involving one of my favorite cuisines (Thai), one of my favorite animals (pig), and one of my favorite body parts (belly).

The challenge is this: Can you take one of the fattiest cuts of meat available, deep fry it, and create a dish light enough that you can actually feel good after eating it?

The answer is yes! And here’s how it’s done:

Start with a few thick pieces of pork belly. Ask far enough in advance, and your local butcher should be able to get it for you.

Once you’ve found good pork belly, the hard part’s over. Now take that belly, cover it in water and vinegar at a ratio of 2 parts water to 1 part vinegar. Season the liquid to taste with salt, then bring the whole thing to a simmer.

Allow the belly to simmer for around 45 minutes until it is just beginning to turn tender. Once its done with its hot vinegar bath, let it rest on a rack for at least 20 minutes until it’s cool enough to handle and completely dry, then pick it up and score the skin with a sharp knife or razors into a 1-inch cross-hatch pattern. The idea here is surface area to volume maximization. Scoring will give it more places to crisp up, and crispy = good.

If you’re the kind who likes to do things in steps, you can leave it in the fridge overnight uncovered and finish it off the next night.

Now pull out your perfectly seasoned, supremely versatile cast-iron wok and fill it with a quart or two of vegetable oil. You want enough oil to submerge the pork belly by about an inch. Heat it up until around 325 degrees (hot enough that if you dip a corner of the belly into it, it sizzles gently, not violently).

Put your pork belly in there, give it a quick stir to make sure it’s not stuck on the bottom, then place a loose lid or a piece of foil over the top. These things’ll spit and sputter like a cat in hell.

The trick here is to remember the directions on the back of a bag of microwave popcorn. Listen to the sputtering. Once it’s gone about 30 seconds without producing a big pop, it’s (probably) safe to open up the lid and probe around to check for doneness. This’ll come at around the six to seven minute mark, but as always, your eyes and ears are a better indicator than any timer.

Once the pork looks just like this, I.E. golden brown and super-crisp, it’s done. Transfer the pork back to the rack and salt it immediately. See how many minutes you can go without cracking off a bit of the crunchy edge to sample. Count the minutes, and give yourself points according to the fibonacci sequence. If your total comes to more than zero, you are more stoic than I.

The only thing that should stop you from eating the whole thing is that it’s much better with a bit of sauce.

I’ve never made this sauce the same way twice, but here are some approximate values. Like all Thai food, the balance between the sugar, chiles, fish sauce, and lime juice is all important. Adjust everything to suit your own taste. And remember—Thai food is very forgiving.

Combine equal parts fresh squeezed lime juice, fish sauce, and palm sugar (yes, white sugar, brown sugar, jaggery, etc. will work here), along with half as much soy sauce in a bowl and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Now add a handful of chopped herbs – cilantro, culantro, mint, basil, or chives all work well here – as well as as many finely chopped Thai bird chiles you can stand.

Slice the pork, dip it in the sauce, eat, and swoon.

Thank you to all who participated in the “Best Seasonal Grilling Ideas Contest“ for a signed copy of Deborah Krasner’s James Beard award-winning The Flavors of Olive Oil: A Tasting Guide and Cookbook.

There was an outpouring of delicious and creative early summer grilling ideas put forth by readers, ranging from pesto shrimp to jerk sweet potatoes to grilled watermelon!  We drew randomly to celebrate all the contributors, and the prize goes to:

Lew Miller with his “Adult Taco”. Recipe as follows:

INGREDIENTS

• Soft flour tortillas
• Marshmallow creme
• Chopped banannas and strawberries
• Crushed 1 cup each pecans, chocolate chips,chocolate graham crackers
• 1 cup Kaluaha

INSTRUCTIONS

• Spread marshmellow creme on shell
• Down middle add fruit
• In bowl mix chips,crackers and pecans in bowl and mix with Kaluaha and 2 tables spoons over fruit and fold over shell in half
• Place in tin foil on grill till soft (3 minutes)
• Serve with scoop of ice cream drizzzled with kaluaha

Definitely a show- (and heart-) stopper.  Thanks Lew!

It’s the first week of June! We’ve had a glorious Spring, and although it’s too early for fresh tomatoes and eggplants, it’s not too early to rock the party with your grill skills.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is give us a short description of your favorite dish to grill in the early summer—you can even embed an image by adding a link to it in your comment.

The prize is a copy of Deborah Krasner’s book “The Flavors of Olive Oil: A Tasting Guide and Cookbook”

Deborah is a star Author at GoodEater and has generously donated a signed copy of her James Beard award-winning book.

The winner will be chosen at random out of all of the entries and announced next monday.

Let the grilling begin!

It’s time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he’ll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

So you already know how important it is to rest your meat, and you may have even gone and cooked your steak sous-vide. Surely, the only thing left to do is cut it and eat it, right?

Not so fast.

One of these steaks is not like the other.*

*Okay, okay. For all you language and logic pedants out there, it’s true that if one of these steaks is not like the other, then both of these steaks is not like the other. But you know what I meant, right?

Can you spot the difference between the two hanger steaks? They were both cooked to a perfect 130°F medium-rare in the same pan, they are both cut from the same piece of meat, and they both sport a beautiful brown, crackly crust. Yet one of them is more tender than Otis Redding on a good day, while the other has more in common with a rubber band.

What’s the difference? It’s all got to do with the angle at which it’s sliced.

We read it in cookbooks all the time: “Slice thinly against the grain.” But what does slicing against the grain really mean? Well, meat is made up of bundles of long muscle fibers that are laid out parallel to one another. Take a close look at your meat, and you’ll see that just like wood, it’s got a grain. In some muscles, like the loin (where NY strip and Rib-eye come from) or tenderloin (a.k.a. filet mignon), that grain is very fine: the muscle fiber bundles are thin enough that they don’t form a significant grain. Cuts from weak muscles like these will be soft and tender pretty much no matter how you slice them.

On the other hand, cuts from harder working, more flavorful muscles, like skirt steak, hanger steak, or flank, have thicker muscle fiber bundles with a clearly defined grain. Take a look here:

In this picture, I’ve labeled the three features you’re most likely to notice on a piece of grilled meat.

• Natural faults can occur at the interface between larger muscle groups, where the connective tissue meets the muscle, where the meat may have been folded during packaging or transport, or where a careless butcher may have made a nick in the meat (as is the case here).
• Grill marks are probably the lines most often confused with grain. Many a time, I’ve seen backyard chefs start slicing meat at a 90-degree angle to the grill marks, rather than to the natural grain of the meat (which may or may not coincide with those grill marks).
• The grain is the most important characteristic: it is the direction which the muscle fibers are aligned, and properly identifying it can make the difference between tough and tender.

You see, the fibers themselves are tough cookies. They have to be; Their job is to move all the moving parts of an animal that is much much bigger than you. Try and tear a single muscle fiber by stretching it along its length, and you’ll have a pretty hard time. On the other hand, pulling individual muscle fibers apart from one another is relatively easy.

Try it: Get yourself a flank steak, cut off a small square of it, and try yanking it apart by holding it with the grain running between your hands. Can’t do it, right? Now rotate it 90 degrees so that instead of pulling along the length of the muscle fibers, you are pulling them apart. Much easier.

So before putting a piece of flank, hanger, or skirt steak in your mouth, the goal should be to shorten those muscle fibers as much as possible with the help of a sharp knife. If you cut with your knife parallel to the grain, you end up with long muscle fibers that are tough for your teeth to break through. Slicing thinly against the grain, however, delivers very short pieces of muscle fiber that are barely held together.

Ah, tenderness…

Really, that’s about all there is that you need to know, so you have full permission to stop reading right now.

But! For those of you, who like me, had the greatest geometry teacher in the world in 9th grade and have thus been instilled with a preternatural desire to draw triangles and measure stuff, well, in the words of Mr. Sturm, get your gas masks, because we are climbing Mount Elegance, and the air up there is quite thin!**

** These words were usually immediately followed by “Kenji, don’t get too excited, or I shall be forced to deliver a spanking!.”

So final question to answer: quantitatively, how much of an affect does this actually have my meat? I mean, how much does it really matter which way I slice it?

Let’s set up some definitions:

• Let w be the distance you move the knife between slices (i.e. the width of the slice).
• Let m be the length of the meat fibers in each slice.
• Finally, let θ be the angle between the knife blade, and the meat fibers.

Given a bit of high school trigonometry, you can quickly come up with the following formula:

• m = w / cos(θ – 90)

  So what are the implications of this? Well, if our goal is to minimize the length of the meat fibers (m), then we need to maximize cos(θ – 90). In order to demonstrate, I cut a 1/2-inch window out of a regular piece of paper and layed it across a flank steak at various angles.

  

  In retrospect, I should have used some grease-proof paper or plastic. Ugh.

  Anyhow, as you can see in this first image, when the meat is cut 90 degrees to the direction of the meat fibers, cos(θ – 90) is equal to 1 (i.e. maximized), and the meat fibers are exactly as long as the slice is wide. Now take a look at this:

  

  In this picture, I’ve rotated the paper to simulate what a cut made at a 45-degree angle would do the meat fibers. This time, while the width of the slice is still .5 inches, the length of the meat fibers has reached .707 inches long (that’s .5^(1/2), for all you nerds out there who get excited over 45-45-90 triangles). That’s an increase of almost 50%!

  Now take it to the extreme: if you were to cut perfectly parallel to the meat fibers, then cos(θ – 90) will be equal to 0, and according to the unbreakable laws of mathematics, your meat fibers would stretch all the way into infinity (assuming the steak came from a really really really big cow, that is.)

  

  So one last look at the first two steaks. Now can you spot the difference?

  If not, I know the names of several good doctors who specialize in attention defecit disorder.

  About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.

  ]]> http://www.goodeater.org/2010/03/05/the-food-lab-going-against-the-grain/feed/ 1 http://www.goodeater.org/2010/02/05/the-food-lab-in-search-of-the-best-oven-fried-buffalo-wings/ http://www.goodeater.org/2010/02/05/the-food-lab-in-search-of-the-best-oven-fried-buffalo-wings/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:30:18 +0000 Kenji Lopez-Alt http://www.goodeater.org/?p=1007
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  It’s time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he’ll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.
  

  Clockwise from left: wings ready to be baked, a comparison of different wing treatments, really good oven-fried buffalo wings [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

  Really Good Oven-Fried Buffalo Wings

  Want to learn how to dump the oil? .
  Here’s the recipe for Really Good Oven-Fried Buffalo Wings! »

  Anybody who thinks that eating a baked buffalo wing is any healthier than the deep-fried real deal is about as delusional as Luigi thinking he’s got a shot with the Princess while Mario is still around. A buffalo wing is a piece of skin-coated, bone-in chicken fat that’s deep fried and doused in butter before being dipped in mayo, blue cheese, and sour cream. It’s fat on fat on fat on fat on fat on fat on fat. Is taking one of those fats out of the equation really going to make a difference? Unlikey.

  Want to allay your unfounded guilt? Load up on negative calories by eating an extra celery stick or two and call it a day.

  That said, there is a large percentage of the home cook population who are hesitant to heat up a few quarts of oil in their kitchen (I’d be willing to wager my negligible income that the Venn Diagram of people scared of frying and people who own well-seasoned cast iron woks looks like two non-overlapping circles). It’s a group of people who have had to be content with one of two categories of “oven-fried” chicken wings:

  • the flour-coated kind that stays crisp and absorbs sauce, but is more akin to KFC in texture than the thin-skinned original, or
  • the naked kind that is juicy and tender, but lacks the blistered, crispy crust that crackles under your teeth and retains sauce so nicely.

  Neither of these methods is bad per se. Indeed, if Blake taught us anything with his recent Baked vs. Fried Wing Taste Test, it’s that depending on how you like your wings, these methods can actually be better than their deep-fried counterparts. But is it possible to make Buffalo wings in the oven that are not “different but just as good,” but actually indistinguishable from the deep-fried version? Hint: if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

  Now, I’m well aware of the fact that by definition, anything other than deep-fried wings tossed in a mixture of hot sauce and butter can never be called “Buffalo Wings,” so if you’re the type of person who needs to point out things like that, you might as well stop reading right now, and find something more interesting to do. I hear that the no-beans-in-chilifolk and the no-cottage-cheese-in-lasagna crew are having an infidels’-recipe-burning party. Maybe you can crash.

  For the rest of you, read on.

  Wings and Prayers

  My first step: set a benchmark by deep-frying and analyzing a batch of wings.
  

  Fried wings: crispy, blistered, and ideal for saucing

  As you can see, the key characteristic is the well-rendered, blistered, bubbly, crackly skin, and the moist, fatty meat underneath. Without this ultra-crisp skin, the wings would quickly become saturated in sauce and become soggy. At the same time, blistered skin boasts much more surface area than smooth skin, leading to better sauce adhesion, and packing more flavor into each bite.

  A baked wing, on the other hand, has a problem:
  

  Baked vs. Fried chicken skin.

  Despite near hour-long cooking times for some recipes, the skin never blisters in quite the same way—it stays smooth and tight. What little sauce can adhere to it rapidly causes it to turn soft and soggy.

  So what does it take to get skin crisp? There are a few factors involved:

  • Dehydration and Rendering. The crisp skin of a fried wing is made up of a hardened matrix of proteins with some amount of liquid fat trapped in the interstitial spaces. Before this matrix can crisp, two things must happen: the water must be fully driven from it, and the subcutaneous fat from the chicken must liquefy, some of it draining out, some of it soaking into the meat, and some of it taking the place of the liquid. Frying, which takes place in an environment well above the boiling point of water accomplishes this rapidly. Hot oil also transfers heat much more rapidly than hot air in an oven, causing this dehydration to proceed at an accelerated rate.
  • Browning. The Maillard reaction—the complex series of chemical reactions that create “brown” flavors and colors—occurs at a heightened rate at higher temperatures. In a pot of oil, this takes about 12 minutes. In an oven, it can take over an hour.
  • Blistering. As the chicken cooks, small bubbles of air or water trapped in the skin rapidly expand due to the heat. As this happens, it causes small protein-reinforced bubbles to form. Some of these bubbles are lucky enough to simultaneously finish cooking and hardening as they are formed, increasing the skin’s surface area, and creating the familiar nooks and crannies on a well-fried wing.

  So clearly, in order to achieve baked chicken wing perfection, my goal should be to find ways in which to increase the rate all three of these reactions occur.

  My first thought was simple: why not fry them in the oven? To this end, I pre-heated a rimmed baking sheet with a half cup of oil coating the bottom in a 450-degree F oven. Once it was hot, I placed the chicken wings directly into the oil, where they immediately started sizzling, then placed them back into the oven. One flip, and 25 minutes later, I had a batch of perfectly fried wings—along with an oven interior coated in grease, and an array of microscopic burns all along my arms from hot oil spitting out of the pan. What’s the point of oven-frying if it ends up even messier than stove-top frying? I’d need to find a better method.

  Blistered, Browned, and Burnt

  So what factors can affect browning? Well, temperature and time are the most obvious answers. But I know that pH also has something to do with it. For instance, adding a bit of extra baking soda to pancake batter—thereby making the batter more alkaline—improves its browning capabilities. Would the same trick work on my chicken wings? I baked five batches of wings on a rack set in a rimmed baking sheet. The first straight out of the package, the second tossed in salt before baking (I was hoping the salt would help draw out some of their moisture), one tossed in baking soda, one tossed in baking powder, and one soaked for two hours in a baking soda and water solution.
  

  Wings baked after various treatments.

  As you can see, there is something to the notion that adding baking soda to raise the pH (and thus making the wings more alkaline) indeed does help with browning—the baking-soda treated wing in the center is significantly browner than the plain wing on the left. The baking powder-treated wing is similarly browner, though to a lesser degree (baking powder is made of baking soda mixed with a powdered acid, and has an overall makeup that is only slightly alkaline).

  Unfortunately, the baking soda wings had a very distinct metallic bitterness that immediately eliminated them as an option. Baking powder was promising for its effect on browning, but did nothing to aid rendering or blistering.

  What about a different cooking method? Would broiling work? Perhaps coating the wings in oil or butter in order to more efficiently transfer heat to them? What if I simply extended the cooking time until the damn things were crisp?
  

  15 different treatments of wings, none of them any good.

  Well, extending cooking time doesn’t work. Turns out that it is possible to overcook chicken wings—even wings that were brined in salt water dried out to a state beyond edible by the time the skin had crisped significantly. Broiling on its own led to wings that were burnt on the outside, and raw in the center. I tried slow-cooking the wings in a low oven followed by broiling, but it proved nearly impossible to get the wings to crisp evenly—all I got was wings that were crisp on the top and bottom, but soft around the edges. Desirable for an Oreo maybe, but not for chicken wings.
  SImilarly, brushing the wings in oil or butter proved to ultimately have a negligible impact on the end result.

  The real problem? Moisture and fat loss. Well into their baking, the wings steadily release steam and drip rendered fat, showing absolutely no signs of browning until around 40 minutes in when all the moisture and fat is finally expelled. I decided to shift gears: my goal would be to eliminate as much moisture and fat as possible before baking them.

  A Rendering Bender

  Fans of Alton Brown (including myself!) may have seen his buffalo wing episode, in which he suggests steaming the wings over a pot of water before drying, chilling, and baking them. The goal? The steaming process supposedly helps some of the excess fat render out of the skin, decreasing the time they need to crisp in the oven. In addition, when the hot wings fresh out of the steamer are placed on a rimmed baking sheet, their retained heat helps their moisture evaporate, leaving you with wings that are in fact drier than un-steamed wings fresh from the package. Very clever, Alton. I compared these wings to plain baked wings, and for good measure, I also included a batch of wings to which I gave the Peking Duck treatment: pouring a hot pot of boiling water over them prior to drying, supposedly to achieve similar goals.

  I was very hopeful about this method—after all, hordes of internet followers blogging about their success can’t all be wrong, can they?
  

  Alton’s method sounds promising but fails to deliver when tested side-by-side.

  While Alton’s methods are always interesting, and often spot-on, my guess is that none of the supporters of the steam-and-bake technique actually performed a side-by-side test. When push came to shove, all three batches were virtually indistinguishable from each other.

  Giving it a Rest

  It was time to call in the big guns. Sure, it’d be nice if I could pick up a package of wings on game day and have them ready for dipping in blue cheese a few hours later*, then again, it’d also be nice if my book were done written, if my wife was as understanding as she is beautiful, and if I could remember her birthday each year. Wishing it ain’t gonna make it happen. As I rediscovered yet again, good results require careful thought, a bit of work, and plenty of time.

  *side note: I have a friend whose admirable resolution this year is to discover more ways to dip cheese into cheese. Mozzarella sticks into blue cheese dressing works, as does a Shake Shack cheeseburger into their cheese fry sauce. Any other suggestions?

  I decided to use a method that works wonders on whole birds and red meat roasts alike—air-drying. Hopefully, allowing the wings to dry on a rack overnight will dehydrate them enough that rapid browning can ensue in the oven. I set three new batches of wings on a rack set in a baking sheet and placed them uncovered in the refrigerator overnight, one tossed with baking soda (a smaller amount than what previously gave me a bitter aftertaste), one tossed with baking powder, and one plain.

  The next day, I removed the desiccated wings and baked them in a 425-degree oven, on the same rack that I’d dried them on. The results were even better than I expected:
  

  Both baking soda and baking powder help improve skin texture.

  Check out the hole structure on that, baby!

  Although the baking-soda laden wings still had an off-flavor, both the baking powder and baking soda-treated wings showed markedly more bubbling and blistering than their untreated counterpart—just as much as a regular fried wing, in fact! Could such a dramatic difference be attributed merely to improved browning because of the Maillard reaction? That’s part of the answer, but some research revealed that most likely, it’s a combination of factors.

  Raising the pH does indeed improve browning, but it also creates an environment that weakens the peptide bonds naturally present in proteins. In theory, this means that the proteins can break down more easily into shorter pieces, creating a texture that is less leathery or papery, and more crispy. Is it true in reality? Well, my teeth tell me “yes”, but my lack of an electron microscope tells me “maybe.”*

  *Note to Editors: The Food Lab could use a budget increase, a small key-card secured loft, and a hazardous materials license.

  One final advantage from the baking powder: During its overnight rest on the chicken, it soaks up some of the protein-laden chicken juices from within. As it heats, it forms carbon dioxide gas in the same way that it would in a cookie dough or cake batter, inflating these juices into bubbles, which are then naturally hardened by the heat of the oven, and as we all know, extra bubbles means extra surface area, which means extra crunch!
  

  A plate of perfect crisp and juicy wings.

  My wife used to be such a good eater, but I’m slowly weaning her off of all of her favorite foods—eating a lifetime’s worth of chicken wings over the course of a week has a way of doing that. My goal is that by the time the Food Lab’s finished its run, she’ll shudder at the thought of eating anything but Friendly’s Ice Cream and bananas (two foodstuffs that are guaranteed to be safe from my probing).

  Continue here for Really Good Oven-Fried Buffalo Wings »

  About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.

  ]]> http://www.goodeater.org/2010/02/05/the-food-lab-in-search-of-the-best-oven-fried-buffalo-wings/feed/ 11 http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/recipe-rabbit-pie-with-prunes-and-onions/ http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/recipe-rabbit-pie-with-prunes-and-onions/#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:56:15 +0000 Kenji Lopez-Alt http://www.goodeater.org/?p=990
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  It’s National Pie Day tomorrow, so I thought I’d share a quick favorite.
  

  Rabbit, Prune, and Onion Pie

  - serves 6-8 -

  
  1 recipe savory pie dough, for double crust deep pie (preferably lard-based)
  1whole white rabbit, skinned, 3 1/2 to 4 pounds (or one 3 1/2 to 4 pound chicken), broken down into 8 pieces
  Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  All-purpose flour
  2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  1 glass dry sherry or vermouth
  1 1/5 quarts low-sodium chicken broth (preferably home made)
  1 yellow onion, roughly chopped
  2 large carrots, peeled, divided
  3 stalks celery, peeled, divided
  6 sprigs thyme, divided
  3 bay leaves
  1/2 teaspoon whole fennel seeds
  1/2 teaspoon whole coriander seeds
  1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
  4 tablespoons butter, divided
  16 pearl or small cippolini onions, peeled
  12 prunes, pitted and cut into 1/4-inch pieces
  1 pound root vegetables (carrots, parsley, rutabega, turnip, whatevet) cut into 1/2-inch dice
  1 tablespoon finely minced parsley

  1. Season rabbit pieces with salt and pepper and dust with all purpose flour. Heat vegetable oil over medium high heat in large, heavy-bottomed stock pot until just smoking. Add rabbit and cook until well browned on all sides, 6 to 10 minutes total. If pan starts to smoke or fond begins to burn, lower heat.
  2. Add sherry or vermouth and cook, scraping bottom of pan with wooden spoon or spatula to loosen browned bits. Reduce liquid to about 2 tablespoons, then add chicken stock, onion, 1 carrot, 2 stalks celery, 3 sprigs thyme, bay leaves, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, and black pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook, skimming occasionally, for 45 minutes.
  3. Remove rabbit pieces with tongs, and allow to cool slightly. Pick meat from bones, shred into 1-inch pieces, and set aside in refrigerator. Return bones to stock, and continue to simmer for further 1 1/2 hours, adding hot water as necessary to keep bones mostly submerged.
  4. Strain stock into large bowl and discard solids (you should have about 1 quarts of stock). Heat 1 tablespoon butter in 10-inch heavy-bottomed sautee pan over medium heat until foaming subsides. Add onions, turn heat to low, and cook, stirring frequently, until onions are completely tender, and well caramelized (interior of onions may squeeze out. Don’t worry). Season with salt and pepper.
  5. Dice remaining carrots and celery into 1/2-inch pieces. Pick leaves off of remaining thyme sprigs.
  6. Melt butter over medium-high heat in large stockpot over medium-high heat. Add flour and cook, stirring frequently, until golden brown and fragrant. Slowly add stock while whisking constantly, and bring to a boil. Simmer until thickened, and reduced to 3 cups. Add rabbit, onions, diced carrots, diced celery, thyme leaves, prunes, root vegetables, and parsley. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Allow filling to cool completely in refrigerator.
  7. Set oven rack to lower middle position, and preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll out pie dough according to recipe directions and line bottom of deep dish pie plate, small casserole, or large cast-iron skillet. Add filling, and cover with top crust, sealing edges. Cut vents in top with knife or tines of a fork. Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees, and continue to bake until golden brown and hot throughout, 45 minutes to 1 hour longer. Allow to cool slightly before slicing and serving.

  ]]> http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/recipe-rabbit-pie-with-prunes-and-onions/feed/ 0 http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/recipe-the-best-chili-ever/ http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/recipe-the-best-chili-ever/#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:06:38 +0000 Kenji Lopez-Alt http://www.goodeater.org/?p=982
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  Note: Want to know what when into developing this recipe? Read about what makes great chili.

  - Serves 6 to 10 -

  This recipe seems fairly long and involved, but most ingredients are pantry items (or should be!) and the recipe can be broken down over two days.

  Steps 1 to 4 can all be accomplished on the first day (store browned short ribs and chile puree in separate covered containers in fridge) followed by assembling and stewing the chili on the second day.

  The chili will last for up to one week in the refrigerator and its flavor will improve with time. It is possible to skip the chile paste step, instead adding 1/4 cup store-bought chile powder along with other ground spices in step 7, but the flavor will not be as complex. Canned dark red kidney beans can be used in place of dried. Add two 15-ounce cans (drained and rinsed) to pot in step 7, and reduce chicken stock to 1 quart.

  Ingredients

  1 pound dried dark red kidney beans
  Kosher salt
  4 quarts water
  3 whole Ancho, Pasilla, or 2 whole New Mexico red, California, Costeño, or Choricero chiles, seeded, and torn into rough 1-inch pieces (about 1/8 ounce)
  1 whole Cascabel, Arbol, or Pequin chile, seeded, and torn in half
  5 pounds bone-in beef short rib, trimmed of silverskin and excess fat
  Freshly ground black pepper
  2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  1 quart low-sodium chicken broth (preferably home made), divided
  2 whole anchovy filets
  1 teaspoon marmite
  2 teaspoons soy sauce
  2 tablespoons tomato paste
  1 1/2 tablespoons whole cumin seeds, toasted, then ground
  1 1/2 teaspoons whole coriander seeds, toasted, then ground
  2 whole cloves, toasted and ground
  1 star anise, toasted and ground
  1 tablespoon extra-finely ground coffee beans
  1 ounce chopped unsweetened chocolate
  1 large yellow onion, diced fine (about 1.5 cups)
  3 fresh Thai bird chiles or 1 jalapeño, finely chopped
  4 cloves garlic, minced (about 1 tablespoon)
  1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves
  2 bay leaves
  1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
  1/4 cup cider vinegar, plus more to taste
  1/4 cup vodka or bourbon
  1/4 cup Frank's Red Hot Sauce
  2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

  For the garnish (all suggestions optional):

  Scallions, sliced fine
  Cheddar, Jack, or Colby cheese, grated
  Sour cream
  Jalapeño or poblano peppers, diced and seeded
  Onion, diced
  Avocado, diced
  Saltines
  Fritos

  Procedure

  1. Place beans, 6 tablespoons kosher salt (or 3 tablespoons table salt), and water in large plastic container or bowl. Allow to soak at room temperature at least 8 hours, or overnight. Drain and rinse soaked beans.

  2. Add dried chiles to large heavy-bottomed Dutch oven or stock pot and cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, until slightly darkened with intense, roasted aroma, 2 to 5 minutes. Do not allow to smoke. Remove chiles to small bowl and set aside.

  3. Season short ribs on all sides with salt and pepper. Add oil to Dutch oven and heat over high heat until smoking. Add half of short ribs and brown well on all sides (it may be necessary to brown ribs in three batches, depending on size of Dutch oven—do not overcrowd pan), 8 to 12 minutes total, reducing heat if fat begins to smoke excessively or meat begins to burn. Transfer to large rimmed baking sheet or plate. Repeat with remaining short ribs, browning them in fat remaining in Dutch oven. Once all short ribs are cooked, transfer all rendered fat into small bowl and reserve separately. Allow short ribs to cool at room temperature.

  4. Meanwhile, return Dutch Oven to medium-high heat and add 1 cup chicken broth, using flat wooden spoon or stiff spatula to scrape browned bits off of bottom of pan. Reduce heat until chicken broth is at a bare simmer, add toasted chiles to liquid and cook until chiles have softened and liquid is reduced by half, 5 to 8 minutes. Transfer chiles and liquid to blender, add anchovy, marmite, soy sauce, tomato paste, ground spices, coffee, and chocolate, and blend at high speed, scraping down sides as necessary, until completely smooth puree is formed, about 2 minutes. Set chile puree aside.

  5. Trim meat from short ribs bones and hand-chop into rough, 1/2-inch to 1/4-inch pieces (finer or larger, if you prefer), reserving bones separately. Add any accumulated meat juices to chili puree.

  6. Heat 4 tablespoons rendered beef fat (if necessary, add vegetable oil to reach 4 tablespoons) in large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed stock pot over medium heat until shimmering. Add onions and cook, stirring frequently, until softened but not browned, 6 to 8 minutes. Add fresh chiles, garlic, and oregano and cook, stirring frequently, until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add chile puree and cook, stirring frequently and scraping bottom of pot until chile mixture begins to fry and leaves a coating on bottom of pan, 2 to 4 minutes. Add chicken stock, chopped beef, beef bones, and bay leaves. Bring to a simmer, scraping bottom of pan to loosen browned bits. Reduce heat to lowest possible setting, and cook, with cover slightly ajar, for 1 hour. Add crushed tomatoes, cider vinegar, and beans, and cook with cover slightly ajar until beans and beef are tender and broth is rich and lightly thickened, 2 to 3 1/2 hours longer, adding water if necessary to keep beans and meat mostly submerged (a little protrusion is ok).

  7. Using tongs, remove and discard bay leaves and bones (at this point, any excess meat still attached to the bones can be removed, chopped, and added back to the chili, if desired). Add vodka (or bourbon), hot sauce, and brown sugar, and stir to combine. Season to taste with kosher salt, ground black pepper, and additional vinegar

  8. Serve immediately, or for best flavor, allow to cool and refrigerate overnight, or up to 1 week in sealed container. Reheat, and serve with desired garnishes.

  ]]> http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/recipe-the-best-chili-ever/feed/ 1 http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/the-food-lab-the-best-chili-ever/ http://www.goodeater.org/2010/01/22/the-food-lab-the-best-chili-ever/#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:00:58 +0000 Kenji Lopez-Alt http://www.goodeater.org/?p=977
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  It’s time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he’ll do his best to answer your queries in a future post.

  

  Clockwise from left: three dried chiles, a finished bowl of chili, the effect of salt on beans [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

  The Best Chili Ever

  Two days in the kitchen never tasted so good. Get the recipe here »

  I gotta admit up front: the title of this article is somewhat misleading. Yes, we will discuss chili, and yes, it’s the best chili I personally have ever made.

  But! to call something “The Best Chili Ever” implies that the recipe is perfect, and perfection implies that there is no room for improvement. I can only hope that others will continue perfecting the chili work that began on the Tex-Mex border and that I continue testing well after the last rich and spicy remnant is licked clean off the bottom of the bowl. With that disclaimer out of the way, lets move on to the testing.

  My first step was to set up some parameters that would define the ultimate chili. Certainly, there are disputes in the chili world as to what makes the best. Ground beef or chunks? Are tomatoes allowed? Should we even mention beans? But discounting a few people (who are most likely either from strange places like Cincinnati or Japan), I think we can all agree on a few things.

  The ultimate chili should:

  • Have a rich, complex chile flavor (for the sake of clarity, I will spell the dish “chili“, and the fruit “chile” for the remainder of the article) that combines sweet, bitter, hot, fresh, and fruity elements in balance.
  • Have a robust, meaty, beefy flavor.
  • Assuming that it contains beans, have beans that are tender, creamy, and intact.
  • Be bound together by a thick, deep red sauce.

  To achieve these goals, I decided to break down the chili into its distinct elements—the chiles, the beef, the beans, and the flavorings—perfecting each one before putting them all together in one big happy pot.

  The Chiles

  

  I have bad memories of my chili-eating college days—when chili was made by adding a can of beans and a can of tomatoes to ground beef, then adding one of every spice on the rack (and two of cumin) then simmering. The finished product inevitably had a totally unbalanced flavor with a powdery, gritty mouthfeel from the dried spices.

  My first goal was to ditch the pre-powdered spices and pre-mixed chile powders (which are at worst inedible, and at best inconsistent) and go straight for the source: real dried chiles.

  They come in a baffling array, and to make my selection easier, I decided to taste every variety of whole chiles I could find—both powdered in a spice grinder, and pureed in a blender with water—taking note of both their spice level, and their flavor profile. I noticed that most of them fell into one of four distinct categories:

  • Sweet and fresh: These peppers have distinct aromas reminiscent of red bell peppers and fresh tomatoes. They include: Costeño, New Mexico (aka dried Anaheim, California, or Colorado), and Choricero.
  • Hot: An overwhelming heat. The best, like Cascabels also have some complexity, while others like the Pequin or Arbol, are all heat, and not much else.
  • Smoky: Some chile peppers, like Chilpotles (dried, smoked jalapeños), are smoky because of the way they are dried. Others, like Ñora or Guajillo have a natural musty, charred wood, smokiness.
  • Rich and Fruity: Distinct aromas of sun-dried tomatoes, raisins, chocolate, and coffee. Some of the best-known Mexican chiles, like Ancho, Mulato, and Pasilla, are in this category.

  Just like I occasionally like to mix up my Beatles Rock Band with a bit of Super Mario or old-school Street Fighter II, variety is what keeps you coming back to the chili pot.

  The best spice strategy: Cover the low notes with a chile from the rich and fruity category, the high notes with a chile from the sweet and fresh and add a hit of heat with one from the hot, giving the smokier chiles a miss for reasons purely of personal taste. Unless you’re camping or cooking it in a Dutch, there’s no room in chili for smokiness.

  Eliminating the gritty texture of powdered chile: Ditch the powder, toast the chiles whole to enhance their aroma, cook them down in stock, and puree them until completely smooth, creating a rich, concentrated flavor base for my chili.

  

  Pureed chiles.

  The Meat

  Asides from beans, the meat is the biggest source of contention amongst chili lovers. Some insist on ground beef (like my lovely wife), while others prefer larger, stew-like chunks (like myself). Regular Food Lab readers may have noticed that more often than not, I begrudgingly let my wife have her way.

  This time, I was determined to fight for my own rights or at the very least, make her compromise her chili convictions.

  

  Ground chuck, a chuck roast, and bone-in short ribs

  After trying store-ground beef, home-ground beef, beef cut into 1-inch chunks, and beef roughly chopped by hand into a textured mix of 1/8-inch to 1/2-inch pieces, the last method won out. It provided little bits or nearly-ground-beef that added body and helped keep the stew (and my marriage) well bound, while still providing enough large, chunkier pieces to provide textural interest and something for a real man (like myself) to bite on.

  I decided to go with bone-in short ribs—my favorite cut of beef for braising—hoping that I’d be able to use the bones to add extra flavor and body to my chili later on.

  Browning Issues

  

  Ground beef stewing in its own juices, and chunks of perfectly browned beef.

  As anyone who’s ever made a bolognese knows, it’s nearly impossible to properly brown a pot of ground beef. It’s a simple matter of surface area to volume ratio. Ground beef has tons of surface area for liquid and fat to escape.

  As soon as you start cooking it, liquid starts pooling in the bottom of the pot, completely submerging the meat and leaving it to gurgle and stew in its own gray-brown juices. Only after these juices have evaporated can any browning take place. The sad truth? With ground (or in our case, finely chopped) beef, you either have to settle for dry, gritty meat, or no browned flavor.

  Then I had a thought: why was I bothering trying to brown the beef after I chopped it? If browned flavor in the stew was what I was after, does it even matter when I brown the beef as long as it ends up getting browned?

  I grabbed another batch of short ribs, this time searing them in a hot pan before removing the meat from the bone and chopping it down to its final size.

  The result? Chili with chopped beef texture, but deeply browned flavor.

  The Beans

  

  If you are from Texas, you may as well skip to the next section. But if you’re like me and believe beans are as integral, if not more so, than the beef to a great bowl of chili, read on.

  To be honest, there’s nothing wrong with canned kidney beans in a chili. They are uniformly cooked, hold their shape well, and—at least in chili—the relative lack of flavor in canned vs. dried beans is not an issue. There are enough other flavors going on to compensate.

  But, sometimes the urge to crack some culinary skulls and the desire for some food-science myth-busting is so strong that I can’t resist. So we’re going to have a quick diversion into the land of dried beans.

  If you have a chef (as boss, that is, not personal), a grandmother from Tuscany, or an aunt from Toulouse, you may have at one point been told never to add salt to your beans until they are completely cooked, lest you prevent their tough skins from softening fully. In fact, in some restaurant I worked in, it was thought that overcooked beans could actually be saved by salting the water (I assure you, whatever firmness reattained was purely psychosomatic in nature*).

  *I know, I know, that’s what she said.

  But how often have you actually cooked two batches of beans side by side, one soaked and cooked in salted water, and the other soaked and cooked in plain water? Chances are, never. And now, you never will. I present to you the results of just such a test:

  

  Both batches of beans were cooked just until they were fully softened, with none of the papery toughness of an undercooked skin (about 2 hours for both batches, after an overnight soak). As you can clearly see, the unsalted beans end up absorbing too much water and blowing out long before their skins properly soften, while the salted beans remain fully intact.

  The problem? Magnesium and calcium, two ions found in bean skins that act kind of like buttresses, supporting the skins’ cell structure and keeping them firm. By soaking beans in salted water overnight, some of the sodium ions end up playing musical chairs with the calcium and magnesium, leaving you with skins that soften at the same rate as the beans’ interiors.

  So where does the old myth come from? Probably the same place most culinary myths come from: grandmothers, aunts, and chefs. Never trusted ‘em, never will.

  Spices

  

  The chili-standard duo of cumin and coriander were a given, as were a couple of cloves, their medicinal, mouth-numbing quality a perfect balance for the spicy heat of the chiles, much like numbing Sichuan peppers can play off chiles in the Chinese flavor combination known as ma-la (numb-hot).

  I also decided to give star anise a try, in a nod to Heston Blumenthal and his treatment of Bolognese sauce. (He found that in moderation it can boost the flavor of browned meats without making its anise-like presence known. He’s right, as I quickly discovered.)

  As for toasting, I made sure to toast the spices before grinding them, in line with an experiment I performed while at Cook’s Illustrated, where we compared spices that were ground then toasted, against spices that were toasted, then ground.

  The toasted-then-ground trumped for flavor in every test. Why? Toasting heats the volatile flavor compounds in the spices’ cells, causing them to change shape, recombine, and form new, more complex aromas.

  If you toast post-grinding, these volatile aromas are too exposed to the air. They can easily leap right out of the spices and dissipate, leaving you with more aroma around your kitchen while you cook, but less aroma around your food when you serve it.

  With the spices accounted for, the last thing was working on a cooking method. Aside from pureeing the chiles and browning the short, I saw no reason to stray far from tradition.

  I sauteed onions, garlic, and oregano in rendered beef fat (along with some fresh Thai chiles for added heat and freshness), cooked down the chile puree, deglazed with some chicken stock (I tried a bit of beer, but found the flavor too distracting), added the beef and their bones, and the soaked beans along with some tomatoes, a simmered it all until it was done.

  So how’d it taste? Great. But not that great.

  Dessert Chili?

  

  So how could I add complexity? If my chiles already had distinct aromas of coffee and chocolate, could there be any harm in adding real coffee and chocolate to play up those flavors? After all, chocolate is a common ingredient in many true south-of-the-border chile blends (like mole Negro) and coffee is commonly used as a bitter flavor enhancer in sweet and savory dishes alike.

  I made a new batch incorporating one ounce of unsweetened chocolate and a tablespoon of finely ground, dark roast espresso beans to my chile puree, instantly bumping up its complexity and bitterness. Although chocolate aromas were readily detectable during the first few minutes of cooking, the scent quickly dissipated, providing subtlety as the chili cooked.

  Almost there. The only thing remaining was to address meatiness.

  Rounding up the Usual Suspects: Umami Bombs

  

  In the last few months, ever since I started my experimentation with turkey burgers, the only things I’ve kept closer by my side than my meat grinder and my wife are my jars of Marmite, soy sauce, and anchovies.

  Three umami-bombs that can increase the meatiness of nearly any dish involving ground meat and/or stews. Adding a dab of each to my chili puree boosted my already-beefy short ribs to the farthest reaches of meatiness, a realm where seared skinless cows traipse across hills of ground beef, darting in and out of fields of skirt steak, stopping only to take sips of rivers overflowing with thick glace de viande…

  

  Convinced that I had finally reached the pinnacle of my chili-centric existence, I ladled up a bowl for myself, noting the perfectly intact, creamy beans, the good mix of finely chopped beef and robust beef chunks, and the deep red sauce.

  Inhaling deeply, I stopped and suddenly thought of penne alla vodka, the once ubiquitous dish that enjoyed a brief moment of stardom in the 1980s—when all the red sauce joints decided they wanted to be pink sauce joints—before realizing that the 1990s don’t like pink.

  Why did this mysteriously enter my head at such a critical moment of introspection? It all has to do with something called an azeotrope.

  It’s a curious fact that although water boils at 100°C (212°F), and alcohol boils at 78.5°C (173°F), a mixture of alcohol and water will boil at a lower temperature than either pure alcohol or water on its own.

  You see, alcohol and water are a bit moleculist (the molecular equivalent of a racist), but only a bit, meaning they stick with their own kind just a bit tighter than with each other. So, when the water and alcohol are mixed, an individual water molecule is further away from other water molecules, making it much easier for it to escape and vaporize. Likewise for the alcohol.

  So what’s this got to do with chili?

  All of this aroma-building serves no purpose whatsoever unless those aromas reach your nose, right? So after cooking the chili, my goal should be to get as much of the aroma out of the bowl, and into the air as possible.

  I reasoned that by adding a couple shots of hard liquor—say some vodka, bourbon or tequila—I’d not only help the alcohol-soluble flavor compounds in the chili reach my nose and mouth more efficiently, but because of the mixture’s azeotropic nature, I’d actually help the water-soluble compounds vaporize more efficiently as well.

  It worked like a charm, and after a thorough tasting of vodka, scotch, bourbon, and tequila, in the name of good science, I came to the conclusion that they’re all good.

  Long Island Iced Chili, anyone?

  This may all seem long and tedious to do in one shot, and I admit: even I sometimes prefer doing things the short, easy, and less flavorful way, but the beauty of multi-step recipes is that even if you only change one thing in your routine—adding chocolate and coffee to your mix, grinding spices after toasting instead of before—the end results should be better, and isn’t better food what it’s all about?

  Continue here for The Best Chili Ever »

  About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.

  Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

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