Chef's Tasting

We just did a tasting for Phil and Deirdre Armstrong of Harvest Thyme Herb Farm in Staunton, VA, suppliers of herbs and vegetables to fine restaurants in the Staunton and Charlottesville area, as well as fellow bloggers. We wish we lived closer together so that we could work together.



Gravlax of Brook Trout. I'm a sucker for all kinds of cured and smoked fish, so when I got a delivery of way too many brookies, I decided to do a traditional salmon cure on some of them, hence the appropriation of the term gravlax. Garnishes are caperberries, dilled sour cream, red ribbon (aka blood) sorrel from the flats growing in our kitchen, and chervil which overwintered outside on the deck. I especially like the deep red color that the overwintered chervil takes on.

The crispy brown bits are parsnip crisps, something that we arrived at serendipitously. I love to serve smoked fish with latkes and we have been doing a lot of parnsip latkes lately. The night before the tasting, one of the cooks made a latke that was too big to fit onto the komatsuna garnish that I had already laid out on a plate, so I had him cut the latke down with a round cutter. That left all the crispy edge bits on the cutting board for chef snackies. The crispy edge bits were so good that we decided to do all crispy bits for the tasting.



Guinea Breast. We had a couple of guinea breasts laying around with no other use in mind, so we did a little ghetto sous vide on them and served them in a bowl of Surry sausage jus, with blanched Kentucky Wonder bean sprouts. Who knew you could eat baby bean plants? I sure as hell didn't think of it until Billie Clifton of Sunflower Cottage, our local microgreen supplier, brought some in a couple weeks back. To answer your question, they taste just like green beans. Go figure.



Porcini Carolina Gold Risotto with Wild Mushrooms, Guanciale, and Sage. We just had to do a wild mushroom course because we have wild mushrooms coming out of our ears now. It's been a great winter season for both black trumpets and hedgehogs. This is a really simple risotto of Anson Mills Carolina Gold rice, dried porcini, fresh sage from my home garden, and spectacular guanciale from La Quercia in Iowa. This is the last of my supply from La Quercia but even as good as it is, I'm looking forward to trying the guanciale from the home team in Manakin, VA, Olli Salumeria Americana. How cool is it to have two great suppliers of guanciale?

Garnishes are black trumpet mushrooms, hedgehog mushrooms, prosciutto crsips, fresh sage, and a cheese crisp made from porcini powder and pecorino Sardo. What you don't see in the photo is the barely poached quail egg beneath the robe of risotto. I love this trick. The egg yolk really enriches the risotto.



Pork Confit with Polenta Poblano Spoonbread and Salsa Verde. Ordinarily we don't do tomatillos out of season, but they were already in house from a very specific tasting that we did last weekend. I like to think of this dish as something you would get if your Southern grandma were of Mexican descent. It combines Southern classics spoonbread and fried green tomatoes with poblanos and salsa verde. And the crispy pork confit evokes carnitas, but the flavor is different because we used some orange zest and cognac in seasoning the pork before we cured it.

So what you see on the plate from left to right is a swoosh of salsa verde (poblanos, onions, tomatillos, cilantro, garlic), a fried green tomatillo, crispy pork confit threads, pimentón sauce (the orange sauce), and a cube of pork confit sitting on top of the spoonbread (leftover polenta, roasted poblano purée, cream, and eggs).



Bestilla of Border Springs Lamb. We get lambs in on a regular basis and tend to use the primary cuts (racks, loin chops, and legs) first. Then we end up with a lot of tiny foreshanks and necks in freezer after several months. That's when I get to braising, because braising is my favorite cooking technique and the neck and shank meat is the best meat on the lamb. This time, Craig's wonderful lamb ended up in a classic Moroccan tagine, a stew redolent of spices. I have made hundreds of tagines in my career and this was one of the best; I'm really honing in on just about the perfect spicing to showcase the lamb without overwhelming it. After braising, the lamb gets separated from the vegetables and the sauce. The lamb gets pulled and mixed back with the vegetables and the defatted and reduced sauce.

I wanted to showcase this beautiful pulled lamb, so I came pretty quickly to a classic bestilla. Rather than scramble eggs into the filling in the classic manner, I packed the pastries with lamb and buried a raw quail egg in the center, which then baked into a solid egg in the oven. We generally accompany our lamb tagine with chizu, a spicy carrot slaw. I wanted to use the chizu as a sauce and so we made a vinaigrette of it like we do with kimchee à la David Chang of Momofuku. Because of the high water content in the carrots, we had to use a touch of xanthan to bind the water and keep the vinaigrette from bleeding. The other sauce is a mixture of ras al hanout (an Arab spice mix) and Greek yogurt.

The salad garnish we called a winter salad. It consists of everything green that we could find, dressed with a preserved lemon vinaigrette. From what I remember, the salad contains brussels sprouts petals, tiny broccoli leaves, micro arugula, micro bulls blood beets, and chervil.



White Chocolate Goat Cheese Cheesecake with Sweet Potato, Almond, and Cranberry Florentine. I wanted to use sweet potatoes in the dessert course and it struck me to substitute them for the candied orange peel in a classic florentine, a crunchy cookie containing nuts and candied fruit glued together with honey, cream, and sugar. Florentines are often coated or drizzled with chocolate. We coated ours entirely with white chocolate and then used the Florentine as a crust for a white chocolate and goat cheese cheesecake. I've made hundreds if not thousands of cheesecakes in my life, but never with goat cheese, although that seems a pretty obvious thing to do. I enjoyed the goat cheese flavor; it reminded me of a panna cotta made with yogurt in which the acidity of the cheese/yogurt plays off the sugar to give a well balanced end result. Garnish is a drizzle of blueberry crème anglaise.

Chef's Tasting

Last week, Brandon and I did a Chef's Tasting for two of our longtime customers and two of their friends. Sometimes we go all out with technical tricks (soup filled dumplings, spherical piquillo peppers, etc.) but we just weren't feeling it for this tasting.

The day before the tasting, we had the first tremendous flood of local goods of this growing season and so we just decided to showcase what awesome food products we had and leave the technical tours de force for other tastings. I think these dishes show my less-is-more philosophy: just enough ingredients on a plate and no more.

Shrimp Cóctel

This is a pun, a wink at Luis Uno-Ojo, and an Americanization of a Mexican version of an American dish. Whew! Many years ago, my friend Luis from Guadalajara (Jalisco) introduced me to a soup that he calls cóctel (cocktail), a cold tomato and beef bouillon soup garnished with poached shrimp, avocados, cilantro, and so forth. His cóctel is a soup version of Cóctel de Camarones, the American classic Shrimp Cocktail. I reverted the soup to a true cocktail of beef consommé, tomato juice, and a good shot of that Jaliscan joy juice, tequila. I always serve it up in a martini glass as you see here, rimmed with cumin salt and finished with a fun garnish including shrimp. This version is garnished with a shrimp skewered around a piece of chorizo, then grilled. Putting the fun back in dinner and the cocktail back in Shrimp Cocktail, Guadalajara-Style!

Blue Cornmeal-Crusted, Crab- and Lemon Zest-Stuffed Softshell Crab with Grapefruit Beurre Blanc

After our brief trip south of the border, we brought things right back to Virginia with some local softshells, the first of the year from the Chesapeake Bay. The lemon zest and crab stuffing is a flavor idea that I stole from a crab cake appetizer from Tracy O'Grady at Willow (Tracy, your crab cakes rock!). A little organic blue cornmeal from a local mill gave a bit of crunch and the grapefruit beurre blanc brought the dish in line with a really grapefruity Sauvignon Blanc.

Chicken with Morels and Haricots Verts

I got a perfect pastured chicken and it was easily the highlight of this particular dinner. I loved the resulting dish so much that I've already blogged about it. Classic French technique meets impeccable local American ingredients, paired with Jim Law's equally impeccable Linden Hardscrabble Chardonnay.

Local Veal Skirt Steak, Blue Cornmeal Hoe Cake, and Poblano Crema

Upscale fajitas anyone? I had a lovely local organic veal skirt steak in the cooler along with the remnants of a case of poblano chiles that had seen better days. I've replaced the corn tortilla with an organic blue cornmeal hoe cake (cornmeal, garlic-infused butter, salt, pepper, and boiling water) and converted the rather limp poblanos to a roasted poblano crema. The skirt steak is lightly marinated in garlic, fresh baby cilantro, and kaffir lime, then lightly grilled to medium rare, rested, and sliced across the grain.

Lamb Samosas with Apricot Chutney and Red Wine Rosemary Demiglace

One of the things about working with local lamb is that we only get so many cuts off of each lamb. With each batch of lamb, we get chops (rack and loin), shanks, ribs, leg and shoulder (usually in kebabs), and then all the scraps go into ground. Needless to say, we have a lot of ground lamb to work through, so we're always having to find ways to use it.

Somehow, Brandon and I were both thinking samosas at the same time, so I made a bunch of them. We decided to stay away from traditional Indian spices and go with a more or less traditional Shepherd's Pie filling: lamb, mirepoix, herbs, garlic, gravy from lamb stock, and mashed potatoes. A quick reduction of Grenache and rosemary bound with demiglace gave us a sauce and then a sweet and spicy apricot chutney (what would be called a pickle in India) finished the plates that you see Brandon setting up here.

And the finished plates. I'm OK with white/negative space on a plate, as you can see here. Oh yeah, the samosas were banging—like little lamb empanadas. Yum.

 

 

Red-Cooked Bison Short Ribs with Local Spinach and Fried Rice Cake

Here you can see the fried rice cake and the spinach down in the soup plate, before we add the bison. The fried rice cake is merely fried rice bound with egg and fried into a pancake. Easy as can be and a crowd pleaser. We have this beautiful whole local spinach, cut off just above the roots, so we blanch it, toss it in butter and then curl it on the dish, in this case on top of the rice cake.

And here is the final dish with the bison on top and the sauce over and around. Red cooking is an awesome braising technique that you should have in your arsenal. I need to do a blog post just on that. In short, it's a classic Chinese braise in which the meat is cooked in a sweet and spicy liquid made from soy sauce, white wine (Shaoxing is typical), brown sugar or caramel, ginger, garlic, green onions, and sweet spices such as star anise, black pepper, Szechuan pepper, cinnamon or cassia, and so forth.

We braised the bison ribs in such a liquid, then strained the liquid, refreshed it with fresh spices, green onions, garlic, and ginger, reduced the sauce, strained it, added a bit of hoisin sauce, and brought it down to final sauce consistency. In China, the sauce is often used over and over to braise new dishes; at the restaurant, such practice, no matter how delicious, would certainly raise red flags at the Health Department.

Frozen Strawberry Soufflé with Lemon Verbena-Mint Shortbread Cookies

Finally, local strawberries arrived after 11 months of being gone. Throw together strawberry purée, Italian meringue, and whipped cream and what do you get? A frozen strawberry soufflé if you're patient enough to wait for it to freeze. The mint and lemon verbena are from our herbs growing outside the front door of the restaurant.

Burning Questions: Substitutes

This whole series of "Burning Questions" posts originated as a somewhat amusing troll through the One Block West Restaurant web site server logs, to see what search phrases were bringing people to the web site. As I went through the logs, the search topics seemed to fall into several broad categories, each dealt with in a separate post in this series. This post deals with substituting one ingredient for another.

Demi-Glace Substitute. Demi-glace is highly reduced stock, so you can substitute stock for it, but you're going to have to reduce the stock to thicken it. It's probably best to make a big pot of stock one weekend and reduce it to about a fourth of its volume, then freeze it in ice cube trays. You can put the frozen cubes in a seal-top bag in the freezer and have them at your disposal at any time. No need to thaw them, just drop the frozen cubes directly into the pan. You could thicken stock with a starch such as corn, potato, or arrowroot, but you're not going to get the depth of flavor that demi-glace brings to the table.

Andouille Sausage Substitute. Andouille as we think of it here in the US is a firm sausage stuffed with chunks of pork shoulder and seasoned with a good helping of cayenne pepper. You could substitute tasso or a firm city ham such as Hormel Cure 81 and some cayenne. Tasso or ham would have the closest texture to andouille. Or you could substitute another smoked pork sausage such as kielbasa and some cayenne. Kielbasa's texture will be wrong because it is made from a ground forcemeat. Me, I'd just go to Comeaux's web site and order the real andouille. I've been buying from Ray Comeaux since the early 1990's.

Can You Substitute Clam Juice for Oyster Sauce? Not exactly. Oyster sauce is a thick soy-based sauce. Clam juice is a thin stock akin to fish fumet or fish stock. I'm not sure why you would need to substitute for oyster sauce because it seems to be stocked in most groceries. You could thicken soy sauce with a little corn starch or substitute some other kind of soy product such as bean paste.

Fish Stock Substitute. Easy. Bottled clam juice or steam some mussels and save the liquid.

Can I Use Long Grain White Rice in a Risotto? No, I wouldn't recommend substituting long-grain rice for one of the Italian short-grain rices in risotto. You're going to end up with a soggy, non-creamy mess.

Differences Between Italian Parsley and Cilantro. Visually, you can see that cilantro on the left has rounder lobes than Italian parsley on the right with its more pointed lobes. Generally, you cannot substitute one for the other: they have vastly different flavors, but you should never need to because they're both available in most grocery stores. If you are confused about them at the market, crush a leaf of each and smell them.

Replacement/Substitute for Pasilla. If I don't have pasillas in the pantry, I would use guajillos. The important thing to remember is that the pasilla is a fairly mild red chile, so you should substitute another mild red chile for it. You could use anchos, but they have a much deeper, richer, more chocolatey flavor. You might want to view my Chile Primer.

Substitute for Pimentón. Pimentón is a paprika from Spain made from peppers that have been dried over oak fires, giving the resulting product a truly smoky flavor. There is no good substitute for pimentón. You could use any paprika in a pinch, but the smoky component would be lacking.

Poblano Chile Substitute/Replacement. I use poblanos as tasty substitutes for Bell peppers in almost all cooked applications. I suppose you could go the other way and use Bell pepper, but Bell peppers are very vegetal where poblanos have a nice round chile flavor. For most applications, I would probably go with a mild green chile such as an Anaheim.

Red Yellow Onions Interchangeable. Yes they are in most applications, unless color is a factor in the dish.

Can You Use White Wine Vinegar Instead of Sherry Vinegar? Yes, but you will miss a bit of nuttiness in the sherry vinegar. Technically, sherry vinegar, like Champagne vinegar, like Chardonnay vinegar, is a white wine vinegar.

Substitute for Corvina. Corvina is a mild, white, firm fish with small flakes in the Drum family. I serve it at the restaurant in preference to the similar Grouper which is overfished. Any of the larger drums would be fine substitutes: Black Drum, Red Drum, etc. as well as all of the groupers. Striped Bass which we call Rockfish is also a great substitute.

Non-Pork Substitute for Prosciutto. For those of you who cannot eat pork, I suggest that you use a similarly cured beef called Bresaola. A similar Swiss product is called Bündnerfleisch. You may also see it labeled as beef prosciutto.

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.

Veal Brisket and Grits

Here's another recipe using veal brisket, a cut that's unfamiliar to customers and chefs alike. My inspiration for this recipe is grillades and grits, amazing comfort food from New Orleans and environs. I generally make this dish with beef paleron steaks, while high dollar New Orleans restaurants tend to use more expensive cuts of veal, such as butt tenders or eye rounds. I've got to tell you that veal brisket makes outstanding grillades.

This is a recipe for chefs; you'll want to scale this down for home use and no doubt, you'll need to substitute beef brisket for veal, unless you have a really good butcher shop. Also, the cook and reheat technique is for restaurants: you can either mimic that or not as you see fit.

Veal Brisket and Grits

For 20-24 portions:
4 Le Québécois veal point end briskets (about 16 pounds)
vegetable oil
1-1/2 cups duck fat*, oil, or other fat
1-1/2 cups all purpose flour
4 poblano* chiles, diced
2 large yellow onions, diced
1 bunch green onions, sliced
6 stalks celery, diced
6 tablespoons garlic, minced
4 T Cajun spice mix*
1/2 #10 can diced tomatoes with juice
water
salt and pepper to taste

Method
1. Heat a braising pan over high flame, film with vegetable oil, and sear hard both sides of each brisket, being careful not to burn the fond.

2. Remove briskets from pan.

3. Add the oil, duck fat, or bacon grease and bring to temperature.

4. Add the flour and stir frequently to form a medium brown roux.

5. Add the vegetables to the pan to stop the roux from cooking and stir well for a couple of minutes.

6. Add the garlic and spice mix and cook for another minute.

7. Add the tomatoes and mix well, then the briskets, and enough water to come about half way up the briskets.

7. Cover and braise until tender, 4-6 hours.

8. Remove meat to a hotel pan and chill.

9. Defat the gravy and season to taste. Reserve gravy for service.

Garnish
grits*

Assembly
1. Slice a portion of veal (three slices about 3/8" thick, about 8 ounces) across the grain.

2. Reheat 4 ounces of reserved gravy and the veal in a sauté pan.

3. Finish in a hot oven, turning the veal once, until everything is hot.

Plate Up
1. Mound grits in the well of large soup plate.

2. Place veal and gravy over.

3. Garnish as desired.

Chef's Notes
*Roux in Cajun home cooking is made from whatever fat happens to be on hand. If you process as much duck at your restaurant as we do here, you have buckets of duck fat on hand at any time. Duck fat gives the roux great depth of flavor.

*Poblano chiles are not traditional in Cajun and Creole cooking; Bell peppers are. To me, Bell peppers have an assertive vegetal flavor that I don't really care for and I find that they bring out the absolute worst qualities in a wine. I'm also convinced that if the Acadians had had Poblanos, they would have used them in preference to Bell peppers.

*Cajun spice mix is ubiquitous any more: you can find it anywhere. Years ago, I used to make a unique blend for each specific dish, but now as a time saver, we make 5-pound batches of a blend that I've been tweaking for 10 years. Use whatever you feel like.

*We use Anson Mills grits, the long cook 90-minute kind. Use the best grits you can find.