Matt Plays Food Blogger: Chicken Biryani

I've never understood the national appeal of the New York Times. It's a regional newspaper--why would I want to read about what's happening in New York when I could just as easily read about what's happening in my own city? However, it has been an excellent source of delicious things to cook. Maybe I'm a Times fan after all.

Today's recipe was one I found describing how to make an Indian/Pakistani chicken and rice dish in a rice cooker. I don't have a rice cooker, but, hey, I just so happen to have an appliance that cooks things thoroughly and slowly! My slow-cooker version of chicken biryani is a lot simpler and takes fewer preparation steps, but I can't imagine it tastes much different from the original.

Ingredients

• 1-1.5 lb. chicken thighs. This week's Mega Ultra Chicken Thigh pack from Safeway had eleven thighs, and I used five of them in this. I think it came out to 1.2 lb. or so.
  
• 1 onion, chopped
  
• 2 inches of ginger, minced (I used a microplane)
  
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced (I microplaned this too)
  
• 3 small serrano chilis, stemmed and chopped (you could use just about any sort of chili)
  
• 1 1/2 tsp ground coriander
  
• 1 tsp turmeric
  
• 1 tsp chili powder
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 1/2 tsp cumin
  
• 1/4 tsp garam masala
  
• 6 cardamom pods
  
• 6 cloves
  
• 1 cinnamon stick
  
• a pinch of saffron
  
• 3 cups of chicken broth
  
• 1 1/2 cups rice (I used Thai Jasmine, because that's what I had around. The original used basmati. I'm not sure how different those two are.)
  
• 1 cup of plain yogurt
  
• 3 tbsp chopped fresh mint
  
• 3 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
  
• juice from 1 lime
  
• 1-2 tbsp olive oil

This is a whole ton of ingredients. Half of them are spices, though, so you might already have them lying around. I think you could probably get away with using 3 tsp garam masala instead of the coriander/chili powder/cumin/garam masala combination to cut down ingredients. I already had all these spices except for cloves and saffron, and it was a good thing, because those two bundles of joy cost me about twenty-five dollars.

Saffron is not messing around. I'd heard of how expensive this business was, of course, but exactly how much it gouged my wallet astonished me. You have no idea how strongly I'm considering dropping out of grad school and moving to Spain to become a saffron farmer.  

Preparation and Cooking

The original recipe suggests blending the onion, garlic, ginger, and chilis together to form a paste. Unfortunately, I don't have a food processor or blender, so I chopped and minced as above. Then slightly brown the paste (maybe "golden-brown the paste") by cooking in about 1 tbsp of olive oil. Take the paste out of the pan and set it aside. Brown the chicken in the same pan (first adding another tablespoon of olive oil if you need to) and put it on the bottom of a slow cooker. Layer the browned paste on top.

Throw in all the spices, powdered and whole, except for the saffron. (If you have a bit of cheesecloth or a dry, empty tea bag, you might want to throw the cardamom pods and cloves into a small bundle. You don't want to crunch down on one of these later.) Dump in the chicken broth and rice. Cook on low for 5 hours and 30 minutes. (Or longer, if you're worried about your slow cooker's ability to get the chicken cooked through.)

As the 5-hour mark approaches, chop the fresh herbs, juice the lime, and mix the saffron into the yogurt. Mine didn't mix so well--clearly my first time working with saffron. I probably should have tried harder to mix them. Add the chopped herbs, the lime juice, and the saffron yogurt at 5:30 or so, and stir everything together. Cook for another half hour, just enough to get everything to cook through.

Verdict

I liked this a whole lot.  The turmeric turned the rice a fantastic yellow color, and all the fantastic south Asian spices melded together beautifully.  This is one of the first dishes I've made where the sweet-savory-salty balance was dead-on.

The chicken was tender and not too dried out--I think cooking it for longer than 6 hours in my particular crockpot more or less kills it.  The rice decomposed into a sticky mush, which I actually didn't mind at all, especially because the rice cooks in the chicken broth with all the spices dissolved in it.  Plus, given the choice, I'd much rather have a casserole consistency than crunchy undercooked rice.  That said, it makes for a fundamentally different dish.  You could probably work some fancy timing for exactly when to add the rice, but that would involve more work than a slow-cooked dish is supposed to.

It's my belief that lamb is probably the most tragically underrated meat there is, and nowhere does it go better than in Indian-ish cooking.  The reason I stuck with chicken here is that the dish uses chicken broth--I don't know if there's such a thing as lamb broth, lamb in chicken sauce just isn't as good as chicken in chicken sauce, and using beef broth in an Indian dish seems, well, sacrilegious.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not sure if the vaunted saffron actually did anything at all.  But I'm naturally unwilling to make compromises to my authenticity.


Currently listening: "Lightning Rod", Guster

Matt Plays Food Blogger: Bolognese Sauce

I'm probably the world's biggest fan of sauce. I don't even care what it's on--sometimes I'll make pasta just as a vehicle for eating sauce. Even as I type this post, I'm eating chips and salsa and realizing that the chips pretty much don't matter at all next to the salsa. And one of the world's great classic sauces is Bolognese sauce.

This is another dish that translates very well to the use of a slow cooker; authentic Bolognese is usually simmered over an afternoon and sometimes for an entire day. But here's the problem: "authentic" Bolognese seems to be ill-defined. Even worse, while some dishes (like tagines) accept or even encourage variation, there's a lot of touchiness about what makes a "real" Bolognese. I scoured the internet to try and reach some reasonable consensus.

Ingredients

Meat

• 1 lb. ground beef
  
• 1 lb. pork sausage
  The general consensus was 1-2 lb. of some combination of ground beef and sausage. Some sites also suggested ground lamb or even veal as well. I'm sure those would be delicious, but they're not exactly compatible with the grad student budget. I think that shredded chicken thighs would be an excellent substitution, perhaps with a lighter wine. Finally, if you're going health-conscious, you could probably substitute turkey sausage and it would be just fine.
  
• 3 slices bacon, chopped
  This one is optional for a "real" Bolognese, and usually it's pancetta instead. I didn't exactly have any pancetta sitting around the house, but I did have some bacon that looked like it needed to be used or thrown away... and besides, bacon is the best food in the world.

Vegetables

• 29-oz. can diced tomatoes
  
• 14-oz. can tomato paste
  The internet was indecisive on this one. Depending on who you listened to, I was supposed to add tomato sauce, or diced tomatoes, or imported Roma tomatoes that I was supposed to chop myself, or just tomato paste and no tomato at all. Using tomato sauce seemed sort of like cheating, so I went with the diced tomatoes, with a bit of paste as a thickener.
  
• 2 stalks celery, chopped
  I don't really understand the culinary purpose of adding celery--it has no flavor, and it loses its distinctive texture when it's slow-cooked for hours. But it seemed like every recipe I saw included a stalk or two of celery, so I added it anyway.
  
• 2 (small to medium) carrots, chopped
  Apparently these are to increase the sweetness of the sauce, which makes sense. Most of the recipes I saw had carrots and sugar in various proportions ranging from 2 large carrots and no sugar to no carrots and 1/4 cup of sugar. I decided to go somewhere in the middle.
  
• 1 carton (I think it was 1/2 lb.) "baby bella" mushrooms
  Another "optional" ingredient in "real" Bolognese is mushrooms. Porcini are recommended, but I couldn't find any of those.
  
• 1/2 cup onion, choppped
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
  Suggestions here were all over the place, ranging from 1 to 6 cloves. I decided for a more modest 2.

Herbs and Spices

• 1 tablespoon fresh oregano, chopped
  
• 1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped
  I had both of these handy in my awesome balcony garden! The basil was a little sketchy--we've had an unusually cool May, and basil thrives in hot, bright conditions, so it didn't have a very strong basil flavor. The oregano was fantastic, though.
  
• 1 bay leaf
  Most of the recipes didn't tell me to add a bay leaf, but bay leaves are cool, so I decided to use one anyway.
  
• 1 teaspoon sugar (see the carrot comment above)
  
• Salt and pepper, added to the meat while browning

Liquid

• 1 cup half and half
  One of the most surprising consistencies among Bolognese sauce recipes is the use of some (relatively high-fat) dairy. The thought is that dairy enzymes break down some of the meat proteins. Recipes I found suggested volumes from none (which were instantly criticized as "not really Bolognese, just some meat sauce") to a pint, milk fat from whole milk to heavy cream. Once again, I decided to go somewhere in the middle.
  
• 1/2 cup Zinfandel
  Some recipes suggested no wine, some suggested white, some suggested red. As this recipe was leaning toward "when in doubt, throw it in" anyway, and because wine is delicious, I decided to go with the wine. I didn't find out until after I made it that "most authentic" Bolognese uses dry white wine, and I thought that using Chianti in Italian cooking was too cliche, so I went Zinfandel.

Preparation and Cooking

Throw the meat in a pan with some of the garlic and onions. Sprinkle salt and pepper over it, and brown the meat. Drain and dump into a crockpot. Cook up the bacon (or pancetta if you have it), chop it up, and throw it in the crockpot. Now, throw the celery, carrots, and the rest of the garlic and onions (snazzy cooking tip: this is called soffritto in Italian) in a pan along with some olive oil and cook them. Dump that into the crockpot.

Add the herbs and spices, the rest of the vegetables, and the liquids. Turn the crockpot onto low, and cook for several hours. It doesn't matter, really, because you've already cooked everything that needs to be cooked. You're just getting the flavors to meld together.

Verdict

This sauce was pretty delicious. It wasn't as salty or savory as I thought it might have been, and I think there are a few easy ways to remedy that. First, add a bit more salt to the crockpot in the "add the herbs and spices" phase. Second, add some more garlic--the garlic flavor wasn't really noticeable at all, which is a shame in an Italian dish. Finally, Zinfandel might not have been the best choice of wines--there's a reason that Chianti is a cliche for Italian cooking, or if I wanted to take the suggestion of using a white, I imagine a Pinot grigio or Pinot bianco would be good.

I should have chopped the carrots and mushrooms finer--they're meant to impart some flavor and character to the sauce, not to impose chunks of vegetable in the sauce as you're eating it.

I'm pleasantly surprised at how tomatoey the sauce turned out. I was a little unsure if tomato chunks plus tomato paste plus a bunch of less viscous liquid would turn into a real "sauce" consistency, but the diced tomatoes broke down enough and the paste thickened the liquid enough to get the consistency exactly what I wanted it to be.

Finally, I'll skip the added sugar entirely next time. The sauce didn't need it, and the carrots were plenty sweet enough on their own.


Currently listening: "Sleeping Lessons", the Shins

Matt Plays Food Blogger: Crockpot Chicken Tagine

A few days ago, one of my lab co-workers (Mike) bemoaned the changes to Mark Bittman's blog. "Who is Mark Bittman?" I wondered, "and what is this tragedy that befell his blog?" He's a food blogger with the New York Times, and Mike was none too happy with the Times' reorganization of their online food articles to make Bittman's harder to find. When he did find it, he showed me a recipe for an "expedited tagine" to show me how awesome the blog was. It is a good blog: Bittman has a knack for stripping the crap off of good cooking to yield simple things that taste good.

I went back and re-read that article a little later. I was sort of familiar with the concept of a tagine more than the ingredients in it, and as I read what Bittman put in his, I found myself nodding along in approving agreement with each one of them. Plus, the recipe sounded at least moderately healthy--it contains fruit, vegetables, and lean proteins. I decided I was going to make Mark Bittman's tagine.

Then, upon noticing the phrases "slow-cooked" and "single pot", another brilliant idea struck me. Conveniently, I have a handy kitchen appliance that does both of those things! My new mission was not just to make Mark Bittman's tagine, but to adapt it to cooking in a crockpot.

Ingredients (Bittman's first, then my take on it)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil: I kept this, spreading it on the bottom of the crockpot instead of the frying pan, but it's essentially doing the same thing.
  
• 4 skinless chicken thighs: First, I like this Bittman guy already because he recognizes that chicken thighs are better than breasts. I ended up using a package of roughly 1-1.5 lb. of chicken thigh filets. A couple reasons for this: first, in slow cooking, quantity is much less important than amount. It doesn't matter if you start with, say, five chicken thigh filets; by the end, you're going to have "5 chicken thigh filets worth of chicken meat." Second, due to the vagaries of the Safeway club card system, chicken thigh filets were actually cheaper per weight than bone-in thighs were. And third, who wants to fish a bone out of a crockpot?
  
• 1 large onion, chopped: I had half to two thirds of a truly massive onion sitting in my fridge. I'm not as big an onion-phile as I suspect many real cooks are, so it didn't bother me that I didn't get an entire onion in here.
  
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic: no change
  
• 1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger: no change (This was my first time working with fresh ginger, and it was pretty cool.)
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander: no change
  
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin: no change
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon: no change
  
• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots: Bittman suggests you can use prunes, dried figs, or just about any dried fruit with a Mediterranean/Middle Eastern character here. I decided to get extra fruity and add figs plus apricots. I don't really know how much of each.
  
• 1 cup chopped tomato (fresh or canned or boxed, with juice): see chickpea comment below
  
• 2 cups cooked or canned chickpeas, drained, with the liquid reserved: Okay, this is where things got a little crazy. First off, I knew that liquid would potentially be a problem as I was slow-cooking. Second, you can't really find neat 1- or 2-cup cans of chopped tomato or chickpeas at the grocery store. My solution: use a 14.5-oz can of chopped tomatoes and a 14.5-oz can of chickpeas, and dump them both into the crockpot without draining.
  
• 1 to 2 cups chicken stock, bean liquid or water, or more as needed: I added 1/4 extra cup of water just to be sure I didn't set my tagine on fire. (Chicken stock would have been better, I think.)
  
• 1/2 cup bulgur: sure, Bittman. I have no idea what the hell "bulgur" is, and I'm not going to expend the effort to figure it out just so I can make this recipe. Bittman suggested that couscous or rice could be used instead, and from that context clue, I guessed it's probably a small grain consistent with use in Middle Eastern cuisine. If I could get this bulgur anywhere in America, it would probably be Berkeley, but I already know what couscous is, and I know I like it. I dumped in a box of stovetop couscous without cooking it. (Aside: this isn't as awful as an idea as it seems. I've done it before with rice, and it works fine. The grain cooks nicely, even absorbing some of the flavor of the dish, and it doesn't soak up as much of the cooking liquid as you'd might think.)
  
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper: I left this out of the crockpot, which was more an oversight on my part. It's the least bad thing to leave out, because it can always be added back, but it definitely needed salt, perhaps 1/2-1 tsp., and maybe 1/4-1/2 tsp. pepper.
  
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley, for garnish: "hmm, I think fresh cilantro from my awesome balcony garden might be good instead." And lo and behold! the last paragraph of Bittman's article mentions using cilantro as an alternative to parsley. It's almost like I know what I'm doing.

Preparation

Start by spreading the olive oil on the bottom of the crockpot. Put the chicken in, then the onion/garlic/ginger on top of it. Add the spices next (with salt and pepper), then dump the couscous evenly over. Dump in the cans of chickpeas and tomatoes, juices and all, and add a little water or chicken stock. Add dried fruit on top.

Cooking

Turn the crockpot on low. Let it do its thing for six hours. (This is my new magic method for cooking chicken dishes in the crockpot. Enough olive oil to over the bottom of the pot, and cook for no longer than six hours. At six hours, the meat was cooked through and already starting to fall apart. Cooking chicken for eight hours almost always makes it too dry.)

Verdict

Sweet fancy Moses, this actually worked. I am so, so surprised that the consistency was spot-on. There wasn't a quart of soupy God-knows-what at the bottom of the crockpot (see: my first attempt at crockpot coq-au-vin), nor was anything burned or dried up (see: my first attempt at crockpot roasting pork for Cuban sandwiches). The couscous cooked through but didn't turn to mush.

I definitely should have chopped the apricots and figs finer, but the flavor in both was wonderful. It's a shame that the biggest exposure I've had to figs in my life is in Newton form, because they're quite tasty. Finally, adding salt and probably pepper is a necessity for next time I make this. Maybe even a little heat in the form of cayenne pepper would have been tasty. In sharp contrast to the salsa I reviewed a few months ago, this tagine is overwhelmingly yin, with all the cooling, sweet, fibrous effects of the figs, apricots, chickpeas, and tomatoes. Some salt, or just a little heat, would remedy that nicely.


Currently listening: "Elevator Love Letter", Stars