Evan Flings the Gauntlet

Evan Kleiman, everyone's favorite radio food person--who's actually an honest-to-God chef--is hosting a pie-a-day challenge on her KCRW blog. Of course I want to help her out so she doesn't have to eat a pie a day all by herself. After all, Evan's a friend, a colleague and a nice person. Who wouldn't want to make a pie to aid the cause?

I devised a pie with my favorite combo: bacon and chocolate. In addition to the crumbled bacon, I included toasted walnuts and maple flavoring in the chocolate filling. The crust I made with a combination of butter (well chilled) and bacon fat (frozen!). Not a tremendous amount of flake to it, but when it tastes that good and has that great a mouth feel, who's going to quibble about a few flakes of crust? Not I!

You can find my pie included in her KCRW pie-a-day blog, right below the cat who apparently fell asleep in a pie plate. Little upstager...!

This pie is a keeper. I'll make it again and again, just not every day. As you can imagine, it's not the healthiest of desserts. But as Julia says, it's about enjoying it all in moderation and small helpings.

Porq-à-choux

A yummy blend of pork, apples, sage and cheddar cheese. I think I have a new canapé to trot out for the next party. I just won't mention that secret ingredient. Can I count on your discretion?

Recently I spotted a news item about chefs all over the US who are engaged in a pork-off, to see who can come up with the most imaginative uses for swine.

The list of their experiments is dazzling and comprehensive, from cheek to belly to backside. I was inspired. But I had to take a different tack, since I couldn't realistically dig a pit in my backyard and smoke/roast/lovingly fire up an entire hog (not today, anyway). I decided I could at least do something with pork product that I've never done before. I decided to go for a pig juice application...fat.

So I substituted bacon drippings for butter in a pâte à choux recipe, reducing the amount of sugar by half but otherwise hewing to the basic choux recipe. Then I piped out cream puffs and eclairs and even a pig!

Silly, but I just have to show him off, the original porq-à-choux! ("Cabbage pig?" Hmm, let me rethink that.)

The resulting puffs don't scream, "Hey there, I taste like pork!" but they carry a subtle, smoky porcine essence. And of course, they have a luscious mouth feel.

For the filling I made a chunky applesauce from granny smith apples, with a sprinkling brown sugar, some chopped fresh sage leaves and a wee slosh of that lovely pork fat-infused bourbon (see Bacon-Laced Booze Bliss).Then I stirred in some crumbled bacon, filled the porky puffs with the mixture, and melted a little sharp cheddar cheese over the top.

The result was a great blend of flavors, with none overpowering any other. Sweet and salty and smoky and porky. Those ingredients played together like the good friends they've always been.

A lot of my kitchen experiments turn out to be one-shot things, fun to try, but I'll never do them again. This time I've found myself a keeper!

. . . and gumbo for all

During my recent visit to New Orleans, one thing that impressed me most as I learned about the city’s cultural and culinary evolution was the way in which a key element was introduced into the mix.
When the slave traders arrived in west Africa and rounded up the locals for “import” to the New World, they refused to allow the enslaved to carry anything with them. Because okra held a sacred place in African culture as both a food and a healing agent, the women being pressed into slavery hastily wove the dried vegetable pods into their hair in order to bring it to their new home. This is how we came to have okra in North America.

Ever since people began leaving home for points unknown (whether their journeys were voluntary or forced), they’ve brought their treasured comfort foods with them. There’s nothing that can take the edge off of illness or loneliness or anxiety quite like having a meal of what soothed us when we were young. Even now, when I return to Los Angeles from a trip home to Tennessee, my suitcase is tight with packages of country ham and bacon and, until they started being shipped to the West Coast, good ol' Goo Goo Clusters. If I could manage it, I’d include fried catfish in the trove. None of these foods are haute cuisine, but that’s not the point. This is why chefs sharing with each other what their last meal would be, were they ever to end up on death row, invariably list their favorite comfort foods.

The Bantu word for okra, “kigombo,” gave us the name of that quintessential New Orleans food, gumbo. As okra was a special food to the west Africans, so gumbo is to New Orleanians. We all have our own “gumbo,” even if we don’t eat it with a spoon.

Hog Wild

At Sunday night’s Epiphany party our group convened to cap off the Christmas season with a potluck and to catch up on everyone else’s holidays. My good pal, Chuck Taggart of Gumbo Pages fame, brought his amazing Pork & Pork & Pork & Beans to share. Have this even once, and you’ll never settle for mere pork and beans again. In fact, if I ever find myself on death row, that dish will be one of the components of my final meal.

As Chuck and I compared notes on the contents of our luggage when we returned to Los Angeles after Christmas, he from New Orleans and I from Memphis, we concurred that an awful lot of pork was involved. My suitcase was stuffed with packages of country ham and bacon and a big ol' hamhock. His haul was similar, but included tasso, the secret ingredient in many fine Cajun and Creole dishes, along with Zapps potato chips and lots of booze.

In case you’re wondering, yes, you can buy pork in Los Angeles, but those mass-produced packages of Uncle Tater’s or Little Willie’s bacon will be essentially flavorless and injected with water, which is why it shrinks to nothing when you cook it and tastes like nothing when you eat it.

As we cooed over our devotion to pork, I said, “There’s only one thing better than bacon.” Chuck looked at me as if I'd lost my marbles. I paused for effect, then said, “Bacon topped with bacon.” He sighed and said, “Thank God! I was about to ask, ‘Who are you and what have you done with my friend, Carol?’”

The challenge is in reconciling a love of pork with the need to eat more healthfully, and this is where the good stuff comes in. Andy and I refuse to cast out pork like some demon bent on our destruction. Instead, we hold to the wisdom of Pete Wells, who contends in the pages of Food and Wine magazine that bacon isn’t a meat but rather a condiment.

He certainly has a point, especially as it relates to good quality bacon. The flavor is distilled smoky, salty, sweet porkiness, which we savor as we would any fine wine or food: a tiny bit at a time, over a long period of time. In fact, since Christmas we've been sharing one strip of bacon about every other morning.

Half a strip?! That sounds rather spartan, but when you eat the really good stuff—like what Chuck and I packed back to Los Angeles from home—and enjoy it over the course of a meal, it's amazing how satisfying a mere half strip of bacon can be, how the flavor lingers and how the aroma and the memory goes with you. Truth be told, I enjoy a smaller portion much more, because I don’t mindlessly wolf it down.

According to Aesop, “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.” He must have been buying his bacon at a chain grocery.

There’s a fable in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Nectar of the porcine gods

One of the most prized possessions in my kitchen, right up there with my grandmother’s bowls, my well-seasoned iron skillets and my red, outboard motor-sized KitchenAid mixer, is my coffee can filled with bacon drippings. Both a food AND a condiment, bacon makes everything taste better—even more bacon! And the drippings perform double duty as both a cooking fat and a seasoning. What a way to multitask!

Each time I dig into that can, I reflect on the layers of hardened drippings like I would the rings of a tree. With each layer I scratch through I wonder, what was going on the day I poured in this layer? and this layer? and this layer?

I may not live in the rural South anymore, and I may be a big city girl, hobnobbing with the occasional high-profile chef and food celebrity, but I cling to my can of bacon drippings as an anchor to my cultural and culinary past—and as a way to enjoy a darned fine meal. None of that tofu-based faux bacon stuff. You’ve got to have your standards, right?