Alien Ingredient #7: Pickled Eggplant

Yeah, OK, I am a sucker for Asian condiments. I've tried gazillions and yet there are gazillions more to try. So when I saw these eggplants in the refrigerator case at the market, they just had to come back to the restaurant with me. I guess I chose them because of all the pickles I have eaten, none have ever been eggplant. It just never occurred to me that eggplants were pickled. And now I wonder why not, given that I pickle all manner of things including peppers, onions, green tomatoes, green beans, and okra.

But looking further into it, I see that pickled eggplants are common all over Asia. So now I feel kind of stupid, but then that was the point of this whole "alien ingredient" series: to learn, to play, to have fun. And these pickles are fun, too!

The eggplants are of a cultivar that I do not recognize, looking like tiny pickled green tomatoes. I am used to the Thai zebra-striped green eggplants, but these appear to have no stripes. In any case, the smallest are pickled whole while the largest appear to be quartered, with many simpled halved. They are very crunchy, perhaps just a tad too crunchy (quoth Alex, "I wish these were a little softer") and the brine is very aggressive in a salty industrial vinegar kind of way. I wish they had used a higher quality vinegar and less salt. The red chile is fairly mild as red chile goes. Of course, I am a chile head of the first order, so don't trust my judgement!


I think Alex summed it up fairly well: "Sort of like eggplant kimchee."

I am going to try these in two cooked applications. I think that they would be pretty damned tasty in a curry and tossed into Thai fried rice.

Vote: these are fun and addictive to munch on. We'd like to try putting up our own this summer because we know we can do a better job.

Spanish Roulette—Padrón Peppers

For years, I have loved padrón peppers, originally from the town of the same name in Galicia in far northwestern Spain. I've eaten these delicious treats at a few select tapas bars over the years, but padrón peppers are still really hard to find in the US. We are lucky to have a couple of growers here in Virginia and a couple more on the east coast from whom we can source them each summer. As you can see from the photo, they are small green fairly nondescript peppers.
The reason they are so highly prized as a tapa is that when fried in a little olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt as in the photo below, they are absolutely delicious. But there's a catch. You play Spanish roulette with these peppers: most are mild as they can be while some are pleasantly spicy (but not quite as spicy as a jalapeño). I've found that the older (i.e., larger) and more drought-stressed the peppers are, the spicier they are. This batch seems to be running about 20% spicy and 80% mild.
They're worth growing at home if you can find seeds and if you ever see them on a restaurant menu, worth eating.

Pork Confit Summer Posole

Here's a decidedly non-traditional posole that I just made for dinner to use up some leftover pork confit and some fresh corn. Tradition or no, it is delicious.


1 cup duck fat from pork confit
3 large poblano chiles, diced
2 large onions, diced
4 ears corn, shaved, cobs reserved
1/4 cup minced garlic
stems from one bunch cilantro, finely minced
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup ancho chile paste
16 ounces pork confit
1 #10 can hominy
1-1/2 gallons pork stock

Heat the duck fat in a large soup pan (to hold 2-1/2 gallons soup) and add the chiles, onions, corn, corn cobs, garlic, cilantro, cumin, oregano, and bay leaves. Cook over high heat, stirring as necessary, until the onions become translucent. Add the chile paste and stir well. Add the pork confit, hominy, and pork stock. Bring to a simmer and simmer until the vegetables are tender, approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Season to taste. This recipe does not call for salt because pork confit is salty in its own right.

Remove the bay leaves and corn cobs from the soup and discard them. The corn cobs add both flavor and a touch of corn starch to the soup. The starch adds a hint of body.

I like to serve a garnish plate with my posole: fresh cilantro, lime wedges, finely diced white onion, dried oregano, and crushed red pepper flakes.

Pork Confit

This is the classic French curing and preserving technique traditionally used for goose and duck, extended to pork shoulder. The results are so worth the effort.

Two large pork shoulders, about 15 pounds, cut in 3" cubes.
2 cups kosher salt
1 tablespoon ground juniper berries
2 ounces fresh thyme branches
2-3 gallons duck fat, as necessary

In a large non-reactive pan, rub the pork cubes with the salt, juniper, and thyme. Cover and refrigerate for 48 hours. Remove, rinse off the salt and thyme, and drain well. Place in a large braising pan. Melt the duck fat and pour enough over the pork to cover. Place in a slow (200-250F) oven and cook until meltingly tender, 8-12 hours. Remove pork from duck fat and place on sheet trays and chill rapidly. Place the chilled pork in a large metal storage container and pour the reserved duck fat over to seal the pork entirely. Refrigerate.

While pork confit can be used immediately, it is better after it ages for a few weeks. To use, place the metal container on a broiler or in the oven to melt the fat. Remove the amount of confit necessary. Let the fat resolidify over the remaining confit. Add more duck fat if necessary to cover.

Nepalese Bell Pepper

You know why I love going to the farmer's market? Because sometimes I run into something that I've never seen before. Check out these small peppers that Seed Savers lists as Nepalese Bell Peppers. They are about as interesting looking a pepper as I have seen in years, almost hat-shaped. Here they are on a three-year old plant (yes, some peppers are perennials in their native habitats) that overwinters in the greenhouse. These peppers are starting to ripen into their orange phase and ultimately they will go red-orange.

Here are two green ones that fell off in transport. They are very thin-fleshed peppers and the bottom of the hat is very mild. Up around the stem and seeds, however, they have a good spike of heat that lasts several minutes. We're thinking that if we had enough of these little guys, we'd stuff them.

Why are Chiles Spicy?

Am I the only chile head who has wondered why chiles are spicy? Finally, we have an answer to that question thanks to Josh Tewksbury of the University of Washington. Late last summer, he published a paper entitled "The evolutionary ecology of pungency in wild chilies" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This paper theorizes that certain bugs are vectors for a Fusarium fungus that destroys the seeds of chile peppers and capsaicinoids are a chemical defense against the seed-destroying fungi.

A Chile Primer

What a boring world this would be without chiles to enliven it! Our kitchen staff and most of the crew at the restaurant are chile heads and I am the chief among them. We take our heat seriously. It took me a year of solid once-a-week training to train my favorite Thai chef in Fairfax to heat it up enough for me. Here’s a brief stream-of-consciousness primer on some of our favorites. We start with the fresh chiles and then move to the dried and condiment chiles.

Terminology

Before delving into the chiles and their uses, let’s spend a moment on terminology, which is as confusing as the day is long. I use the world chile to describe the fruit of any of the plants in the Capsicum genus (except that I call a Bell pepper a Bell pepper). Common names of the various chiles are terribly muddled, in part because chiles crossbreed like crazy, resulting in hundreds of named chiles (any many without any common names). Also, many of the names developed in rural and mountainous areas of Mexico, and Central and South America. In some cases, different names evolved for the same chile because of the difficulty of travel between neighboring areas. And then, there are regional differences in names, not unlike our own rockfish which is an entirely different fish from rockfish on the west coast.

I confront this nomenclature issue every time I order chiles from a new company. For example, our workhorse chile is the poblano, and yet various produce companies list it (wrongly, it turns out) as pasilla, mulato, or ancho. Pasilla is an entirely different chile. Mulato and ancho are dried forms of poblanos (mulato is the dark brown color variant and ancho is the brick red variant).

Now if the common nomenclature is muddled, taxonomy is also a bit of a work in progress. At the current state of understanding, the Capsicum genus is divided into about 26 species, five of which are domesticated. These are Capsicum annuum, including most of the common varieties such as Jalapeño and Bell; C. baccatum, including the tiny South American berry-like Aji chiles; C. chinense, including the really fiery Habañero and Scotch Bonnet varieties; C. frutescens, including the very bushy chiles such as Tabasco; and C. pubescens, including the very spicy South American Rocoto and Manzano varieties.

Fresh Chiles

Poblano. A large, deep green, heart-shaped mild chile with a touch of heat, this chile is our workhorse replacement for Bell peppers, which I don’t really care for. Extremely versatile, this chile can be roasted and stuffed whole, roasted and diced, or simply diced. We rarely use this chile raw (for salads or salsas). The spice can vary dramatically from chile to chile, so taste a bit from each one. I have created some extremely spicy dishes by accident. Also, I have received serious burns on my hands from some extremely spicy poblanos. In general, however, poblanos are very mild.

Jalapeño. We keep Jalapeños around for their rich flavor and green crispness. We use them either sliced (and unseeded) in stir-frys or finely diced to add spice to salsas. Sadly, it is hard to find jalapeños that are spicy. I believe that they are being selected for size and looks, and not for flavor. More and more, we pickle jalapeños and then stuff them. So, we keep the next two chiles in our arsenal for times when we want the heat.

Serrano. Short and bullet-shaped, these medium green chiles pack reliable heat and are almost always available in produce markets, making them a regular in our cooler. We use them for perking up salsas.

Thai Bird. These very small and short chiles start green and ripen through yellow, orange, and red (as do most chiles). They are the spiciest chiles that I regularly tangle with. Not as spicy as Habañeros, but worlds spicier than serranos, we use these when we really want intense spice, which is most of the time in our staff meals. We often slice bird chiles and cover them with fish sauce, which we then put liberally on our Thai dishes.

Piquillo. Piquillos are short, triangular, deep red sweet chiles with fairly thick walls, grown in the Ebro river valley in northern Spain. When fully ripe, they are slow roasted until their skins blister and char. Then they’re peeled and canned and shipped to market. Piquillos have the most intense and satisfying flavor of any sweet chile that I know. They are expensive and worth every penny of it.

Roasted Red (Pimientos). These big triangular red sweet peppers are roasted, peeled, and canned. The ones we use at the restaurant are locally grown in season and from Turkey otherwise. We use them in various soups (cream of red pepper), sauces (romesco), and in plenty of other dishes.

Corno di Toro. “Bull’s horn” is the name of an heirloom Italian frying pepper that we buy at the local farmer’s market. Once you see these beautiful long, curved chiles resplendent in all shades of green, yellow, orange, and red, you will understand immediately how they come by their name. Their incredibly rich flavor when sautéed makes them a fixture in our summer pastas paired with sautéed onions and grilled eggplant.

Anaheim. These long, light green, fairly thick-walled chiles have a mild chile flavor with almost no heat. We would use these in place of Poblanos if we didn't have any Poblanos in the cooler.

Pepperoncini. These short, light green peppers come to us already pickled and ready for salads. I have never seen a fresh one. Spice levels vary from one brand to the next.

Dried Chiles

Cayenne. Cayennes are long, skinny, thin-skinned red chiles with good heat. We buy them in powder form. Cayenne sees the bulk of its use in our kitchen in our Cajun spice mix, which we call “Magic Dust.” Cayenne also finds it way in very small quantities into pâtés and cream-based soups and sauces, along with white pepper, just to give a richer flavor, without adding any appreciable spiciness. We sometimes use chiles de Arbol, a shorter chile than a cayenne, with about the same flavor and spice profile.

Ancho. Anchos are dried poblanos, very dark, deeply wrinkled, and heart-shaped. Toasted and ground anchos are the primary chile in our mix for flavoring stews such as chile colorado. There is a very dark brown form of ancho called a mulato.

Pasilla. Pasilla, often called pasilla negro, is the very long, skinny, black, wrinkled, dried version of the chilaca chile. I use this mild, earthy chile to add background to moles.

Guajillo. We use the shorter smooth guajillos as an accent note in our chile dishes and moles. They have more spice and brightness than anchos and pasillas.

Pimentón. There are paprikas and then there is pimentón, a paprika that has come to be our darling spice in the kitchen. In the area around La Vera in Extremadura of Spain, they grow a wonderfully flavorful pimiento that they dry over a smoky fire before grinding. Sold in dulce (sweet), agridulce (bittersweet), and picante (spicy) forms, this paprika is a mainstay in flavoring chorizos and myriads of traditional dishes such as paella. We use a lot of the agridulce form—it is the primary flavoring in the dressing for our smoked chicken salad, for example. The brand we use, La Chinata, is available at tienda.com.

Condiments

Sriracha. Sriracha is a fluid paste of ground red jalapeños that comes in squirt bottles. Euphemistically, we call it ketchup in the kitchen, where we squirt it on our own meals whenever we want a little zing. We also call it rooster sauce, after the rooster logo on the bottle of our favorite brand from Huy Fong Foods. The only downside to Sriracha is that it contains a good bit of sugar, so it comes off tasting sweet.

Sambal Oelek or Chile-Garlic Paste. Sambal oelek and chile-garlic paste, both also from Huy Fong, are coarsely ground sauces of red Jalapeños, without and with garlic. I love to start a dish by caramelizing a spoonful of either sauce in an extremely hot pan (don’t breathe the fumes!). We use these sauces to flavor certain soups such as Moroccan Chickpea Stew and in various marinades and sauces such as harissa.

Tabasco. We all know Tabasco and at the restaurant, we buy it in the giant bottles. I don’t make scrambled eggs without a shot of Tabasco (you don’t know it is there, but the eggs do taste richer) and our Bloody Marys wouldn’t be anywhere without a healthy dose of Tabasco. We use it to flavor anything where we don’t mind the vinegar that it’s made from. When seasoning a cream sauce, I wouldn’t want the vinegar in Tabasco, so I would use cayenne. Tabasco is always in our bean soups, though you may not be able to taste it.

Chipotles en adobo. I know that McIlhenny is trying to extend its Tabasco brand with a chipotle sauce, but still, the real deal cannot be beat. Chipotles are ripe, red jalapeños that have been smoked. They come either dried or canned in an adobo sauce (fundamentally a tomato purée). We use all the smoky adobo from the can to flavor various dishes (our black bean soup usually has a healthy dose of chipotle) and then we blend the chipotles and run them through a fine mesh to remove the seeds and bits of skin.

Notes

In our kitchen we do not use Bell peppers. I have always been of the philosophy that if you don’t like something, you have no business cooking it. Although I do like raw Bell peppers in salads from time to time, I am not a fan of that in-your-face vegetal flavor that uniquely screams Bell pepper. Also, we don’t often use Habañeros. Putting aside the fact that they are too spicy to feed to the general public, they have a really fruity (apricot, plum, and green apple) undertone that I don’t really care for in a chile, except in fruit-based salsas.

When handling chiles, especially ones of unknown spiciness, assume the worst and wear gloves. Once, I peeled a half bushel of normally mild roasted poblanos and came away with very bad burns on my hands, because I assumed the chiles were mild. Bad assumption. And remember that when you slice chiles, you are contaminating both the knife and the cutting board. Capsaicins, the family of alkaloids that provide the heat, are not particularly water soluble. I find that rubbing alcohol does a better job of cleaning capsaicins than does water.

Remember too that the capsaicins are not uniformly distributed in a chile. The seeds and the ribs (the membranes holding the seeds to the walls of the fruit) are more likely to be spicier than the flesh of the chile. And a little nibble off the tip of the chile is not necessarily a good predictor of what the rest of the chile will be like. Ask me how I know. I have found that with larger chiles, my nose can often tell me whether a chile is spicy or not.

Also, if you’re grinding dried chiles in the spice mill, wait for the dust to settle down a bit before you open the mill. I can assure you that a big snootful of ground Arbols is no picnic!

Finally, make sure that you wash your hands well. One touch to your eye with a fingertip laden with capsaicins or a visit to the restroom is enough to teach you a really valuable lesson! Yep, I learned this one too.

What's in a Name?

Over the years, I've written fairly extensively on chile pepper nomenclature and lack of standardization of the common names. The lack of standardization stems from two sources. Chiles are about as promiscuous as any plants around and they crossbreed at the drop of a hat, leading to a real diversity of forms. And the areas where chiles developed (Mexico, Central, and South America) were often highly inaccessible and lacked communication with each other, so that common names could not develop. Rather, each community developed its own names.

This comes to mind today, because I heard one of the cooks on receiving the produce order ask the driver where the pasilla peppers were, as listed on the invoice. When the driver pointed to the case of poblanos, the cook told him that they were poblanos, not pasillas.

While it is true that the vast majority of people calls the large, mild, triangular peppers (on the right in the photo) poblanos, there is a small minority that calls the same pepper the pasilla ancho. Most people call the dried form of poblano an ancho. What most people call a pasilla is the dried form of another chile, the one with wrinkled skin on the left in the photo.

For some reason, our produce company has elected to go in the face of majority opinion and call the fresh poblanos pasillas. They don't even list poblanos in their inventory. In our first days with this produce company, we had rampant confusion in getting poblanos until I got on the phone with a Spanish speaking sales rep who cleared it up for me.

Hurts So Good!

From time to time, I donate private cooking lessons and dinner to various organizations to auction for a fundraiser. This weekend, I did dinner for eight and the high bidders wanted me to demonstrate dishes with lamb ("but not chops"). For some reason, I was in the mood for North African food or other Arab-inflected food, so I cooked up a tagine, a couscous, a couple of other dishes, and a big batch of harissa.

Harissa is a common red chile-based table sauce or condiment in North Africa (and naturally in the south of France because of the immigrants from North Africa). Although it is available commercially, I can make a quart of it in less than two minutes from ingredients that I already have on hand in my pantry and it tastes better than any canned product I’ve ever tasted. I truly love harissa and am always looking for a chance to introduce newcomers to it.

I don't think any of my guests were familiar with harissa, based on the questions they were asking. One of them said, "this tastes like hot sauce with flavor!" I noticed at first everyone was being very careful about the harissa—it is very spicy—but that most everyone kept tasting and tasting it. Yes, it hurts so good!

This is my personal spice mix scaled to non-restaurant proportions—adjust it to your taste. Also, I never measure anything; I just eyeball the ingredients and then adjust the seasoning depending on my mood.

2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1 cup sambal oelek* (or other crushed chile paste)
1 tablespoon garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon pimentón (smoked paprika)
Juice of one lemon
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Toast the seeds in a pan over medium flame, tossing or stirring, until warm and fragrant. Grind half the seeds immediately in a spice mill. Mix the whole seeds, the ground seeds, and all the other ingredients, then taste for seasoning. Excellent with couscous, lamb, chickpeas, eggplant, and so forth. Tastes better after a day or so in the refrigerator.

*Sambal oelek is not traditional. In Africa, rehydrated dried red chiles (or sometimes fresh red chiles) are ground in a mortar. I just skip that step and use Huy Fong's sambal oelek, which we buy by the gallon. Nor is pimentón authentic. But many times harissa is made from chiles dried over a smoky fire, as are the peppers that are ground to become pimentón.

Capsicum Confusion

I've written extensively on the restaurant web site and in the monthly newsletter about chiles, taxonomy, and terminology. This interests me because I am a student of food and food history, because I am trying to understand what chiles are actually being called for in some of my Spanish language cookbooks from Mexico, and because I often need to communicate with Spanish speaking cooks and order takers at my produce company. But what I've just written really constitutes some fat, juicy rationalizations to obscure my addiction.

Friends, I must confess that I am a chile head. I eat more chile in a standard day than some people eat in a lifetime. I eat food so spicy that it shocks some of my Indian friends. My Thai friends call me the Fire-Breathing Farang. I do appreciate the chiles for their flavor and the spice and I don't eat them for the shock value or as some show of machismo: I truly love the things.

But I digress fairly far from today's topic. My daughters and I went to our favorite Mexican restaurant for lunch today (doesn't everyone eat tacos for Easter?), Perlita's on Weems Lane (www.perlitasmexicanrestaurant.com is their site which is not yet built at this writing), where their Pescado al Mojo de Ajo (whole Tilapia in garlic paste) is amazingly good. Did I also mention that I can rarely get enough ajo? My personal tastes, when I am not cooking for the restaurant, run to huge flavors.

I have been asking for some time for some salsa with muscle; the vinegar labelled Cholula on the tables is not getting the job done. Today I ordered fish tacos and asked for salsa muy picante to go with it. When my tacos came to the table, they came with a salsa that I had never seen before. I could smell the chipotle as it approached the table: always a good thing for a chile head. Looking at the brick red sauce, it looked like the adobo from a can of chipotles with tomatillo. And that's exactly what it tasted like.

When our usual server (who also helps prep the food) spied my empty salsa dish and came to ask me if I'd like more, I asked her if the sauce was adobo de chipotle y tomatillos and she replied, "No. Moritas y tomatillos." That got me thinking, because I know chipotle when I see and taste it (I use it all the time at the restaurant). I've asked this server for chipotles before and have been rewarded with nice fat ones in adobo, so I started wondering why she insisted on calling what was in this sauce moritas. My kitchen Spanish is not good enough to get into the conversation that I want to have, so next time I am in, I will ask her to show me a morita. Sadly, I was not alert enough today to think to ask her.

What I know about the situation is this. We're both talking about smoked Jalapeños, the chile that is named after the Veracruzana town of Jalapa. When the chile ripens to deep red and is smoked it becomes the chipotle and we most frequently encounter it pickled in an adobo of tomato sauce, vinegar, and other herbs and spices depending on brand. I use the small San Marcos cans at home and the industrial sized Embasa cans at work.

I've been studying chiles enough to know that green Jalapeños are called cuaresmeños in some places in Mexico, but all the Mexican cooks I've ever had say Jalapeños and this includes cooks from Oaxaca, the City, and Veracruz. And I have seen small, darker, more oval cultivars of Jalapeños labeled moras or more commonly moritas ("small dark ones"), but generally I have seen these terms applied to those cultivars when they have been smoked. And to add more confusion, I know Oaxaqueños who call chipotles huauchinangos.

So, I still don't know why my server was so insistent on using the term morita today. It could be that she thinks that it is a different chile from the Jalapeño/chipotle. It could be that she is making the distinction that she is using the small cultivar rather than the larger tipico form. And she could be saying that she used the dried form to make the salsa rather than the form in adobo, but I rather doubt this. My guess is that her can of chipotles is labeled moritas. I will attempt to find out next time I go there.