It might be more accurate to call this Cooking For California, since the story starts in Seattle, as I try out a few new recipes and practice a few old ones.
Specifically, one of my friends specifically requested deep-fried stuffed jalapeno for our traditional New Years Eve party. (Which she calls “jalapeno poppers”, and I lovingly misinterpreted as “jalapeno popplers“.
Not only that, but it’s tradition for my to cook dinner for my family every time I visit, a tradition that was broken once only because… well, you know… And between my Chef Watson stuff and my Ingredient Challenges, I had a lot of new material I wanted to try on real people. (I ended up going with some Chef Watson winners for my family dinner.)
Jalapeno Popplers
Saturday, December 5, 2015 – As the story goes, I originally intended to make fried chicken wings, but we decided there was too much meat at the party, and that I should try something less meaty. So I asked my friends, and they said jalapeno. So I did.
In any case, I searched the internet for a recipe and decided on this one, mostly because of its simplicity and because it matched what I expected from a deep-fried stuffed jalapeno. And it has bacon. Who can say no to bacon?
I did make a few tweaks though. For one, I decided breadcrumbs were unnecessary. (I would later change the breading completely, but more on that later.) Two, the recipe says to blanch the jalapenos, but I decided that wasn’t worth doing. (Frying the jalapenos cooks them anyway, and they still have plenty of flavor.) And three, there’s a complete lack of salt and pepper in the recipe, and I just don’t do things without salt and pepper, so I added it to the filling.
The recipe also doesn’t mention a few things. For those of us who measure by weight, 1/2 cup of shredded cheese is 2 oz. Also, you can buy cheddar cheese and monty jack cheese separately, or if you’re like me and don’t keep a stocked pantry, some brands sell “cheddar jack”, which is essentially a blend of cheddar and monty jack. (Which is, for some reason, easier to find than actual monty jack.) Lastly, the recipe says to use 1 lb of jalapenos. By weight, that’s about 15 average sized jalapenos, but depending on how tightly you stuff the jalapenos, you could stuff anywhere from 16 to 20 jalapenos.
So I’m not entirely sure what I did wrong, but as you can see in the photo above, the breading is super thin, doesn’t fully cover the pepper, and doesn’t really stick to the pepper. Maybe the breadcrumbs make a difference. Or maybe if you’re like me, you want to use a thicker batter-based breading. More on that later.
But the even bigger mistake I made was I cleaned 8 pepper with my bare hands. And later that night, by fingers hurt like hell from all the capsaicin. So when the recipe tells you to use gloves, you better wear some gloves.
Saturday, December 19, 2015 – This time, I used a batter recipe derived from Alton Brown’s Fish and Chips recipe (Good Eats s2e9 Fry Hard) and from his Corn Dog recipe (Good Eats s7e15 The Man Food Show). Basically, what I ended up with was 1 cup buttermilk, 1 cup (140g) flour, baking powder, salt, and cayenne. And apparently, the trick is to dust your pepper with a light coat of cornstarch before dipping it in the batter. Of course, as it turns out, the batter was too thick, and I barely had enough to cover all my peppers. Maybe I should thin out the batter a little bit and bump the buttermilk to 1.5 cups. We’ll find out later in the month.
You might notice that half the peppers are much darker than the other. You see, originally only meant to fry them at 325 F. But for the first batch, I must have been multi-tasking too much, because I let the oil temperature rise up to 390 F, so the first batch was much darker. The second batch was a little undercooked though, so maybe I should split the difference and go with 350 F. Like I said, we’ll find out later in the month.
Also, I got some gloves, so I don’t get burned cleaning out the jalapenos. I’m also a Firefly villain!
Thursday, December 31, 2015 – As it turns out, my parents have a deep-fryer at their home in San Jose, so I got to make jalapeno popplers with a real deep-fryer instead of a rig with a pan and a thermometer. That said, it was a small fryer, so I could only fry 2 at a time.
We tried stuffing 3 at a time in there to see what would happen, but they ended up sticking too each other. We also tried maneuvering the peppers with chopsticks so they wouldn’t stick to each other, but that just made more of a mess. Lesson learned: don’t over-stuff your fryer, and don’t touch the food until the breading has solidified.
Chef Watson Dinner
So I made dinner for my family using Chef Watson recipes. Specifically, of the dishes I made during Chef Watson month, the clear winners were the gazpacho, the scallops, and the cobbler. So that’s what I decided to make for my family.
Saturday, December 12, 2015 – Now this is a great picture. I have the pie waiting in the wings. I have every prepped and and grouped into bowls for stages of cooking. (Not pictured: scallops, off-screen.) I did this before back in July, so this was really just a refresher course / timing run.
Once again, the gazpacho was good, and the homemade croutons made it even better. The scallops were an improvement over the last time, since instead of freezing the tomato puree, I just pureed it and left it as is. Plus, I upped the peppers and dropped habaneros to bring out a more complex flavor. My key mistake with the scallops was I piled all the toppings on top of the scallops, which doesn’t make for a pretty plate. Maybe the “on a bed of stuff” with a little bit of the cilantro oil, puree, and relish on top would be the best.
Lastly, the blackberry-cherry cobbler is some pretty standard stuff by now. The only change I made was I upped the amount of majoram, because if Chef Watson made this unusual pairing, I want to try to accentuate it. Also, I decided whipping my own cream is a waste of time. I’ll either get canned stuff or just skip the whipped cream altogether.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015 – And now for the main event.
And for a third time, the gazpacho was amazing. I’m still tweaking those croutons though. Originally, Watson called for country-style bread. My parents suggested that buying an entire loaf of country-style bread just for two slices was uneconomical and suggested that I used whatever bread they had lying around. Which makes sense, given that the flavor of the croutons will be dominated by how much salt and pepper I put on them.
This time, though, I tried dipping the pieces of bread directly into the olive oil. But this meant the bread was soaking up way too much oil. If I were to do it again, I’d toss the bread pieces in a tupperware with the oil, then sprinkle salt and pepper directly onto the bread pieces.
The scallops were also a hit. As it turns out, it’s really easy to cook scallops. Just sear them on medium-high heat for about 3 min each side, and they’ll come out more or less perfect.
The real problem with the scallop dish is that there’s just way too much going on. Watson wants to put cilantro oil, tomatillo-pepper puree, and a tomato-shallot relish on the scallops. I think that’s just way too much. The tomatillo-pepper puree gives it the best flavor. The tomato-shallot relish gives it the best presentation. The cilantro oil doesn’t do a whole lot, so I might as well skip it.
Clearly, the answer is to use only the tomato-shallot relish, but add elements of the tomatillo-pepper puree–specifically, a bit of jalapeno for heat. The recipe also calls for Maldon salt, which we might as well use anyway, since it’s mostly invisible and simple. (Although substituting with another type of sea salt would be fine.)
If you do simplify the recipe, I’d recommend putting a “bed of” relish on the plate and having the scallops sit on top of that and seasoning the scallops with Maldon salt. Maybe a few pieces of the relish on top of the scallop for color.
On the flip side, I still want to do the full scallops recipe, over-complicated and all, for my Seattle friends at least once before I streamline the recipe. If you’re following that route, keep in mind that if you follow the recipe as written, you’ll have about twice as much cilantro oil and tomato-shallot relish as you need, and more than four times the amount of tomatillo-pepper puree.
Not much to talk about here. The blackberry-cherry cobbler was a hit for the third time in a row. The only changes I made were I experimented with strips of biscuit instead of circular globs.
Bonus: Grape Cookies
Thursday, December 31, 2015 – In addition to the jalapeno popplers, I also wanted to do some kind of cookie. I’ve already explored the hell out of the classics–chocolate chip, snickerdoodles, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter–so I wanted to do something a little off the wall this time. After the failure that was my strawberry cookies (which came out more like strawberry muffins and were grossly lacking in sugar), I wanted to try my hand at another fruit cookie.
So why grapes? Grapes have low water content (81%), which means I can use more grapes in my recipe without messing up the moisture content, and high sugar content (16%), which means I can use more natural grape sugar for my recipe, which hopefully means more grape flavor.
I used 120g of pureed grapes. This comes out to ~100g of water. If you’ve read the first draft of my book (which you probably haven’t), you can easily substitute 2 eggs out for 100g of almost any liquid. So grapes were in. And 120g of pureed grapes is also about 20g of sugar, so I can reduce the sugar by 20g.
Other than that, I tweaked ratios a bit to get things more “safe”. A little more flour to make sure the cookie holds its form, and I used AP flour over bread flour and all white sugar instead of a mix between white and brown to maintain neutral flavors. Similarly, I figured vanilla would clash with grape, so I dropped the vanilla extract too.
Unfortunately, this one didn’t work out either. The grape flavor didn’t come through, so I was left with a basic sugar cookie with bits of grape skin in them. Now that I think about it some more, almost every cookie I’ve heard of is either made from something with concentrated flavor (peanut butter, molasses, ginger), or it has chunks that stay solid and provide flavor (chocolate chips, raisins). It looks like pureeing fruit and infusing them into cookies is a dead end. Maybe I should try chopping the fruit and mixing fruit chunks into the cookies, kinda like blueberry muffins, except it’s a cookie instead of a muffin.
You’ll hear about this again some day.