Iceburg lettuce doesn’t wilt easily from heat and protects the bottom bun from becoming soggy from the juices of the meat. It doesn’t do its job if you have it on top.
PSA: Lettuce Goes Under the Meat
Tag: meat
A Tale of Two Briskets
“The one on the left is a crowd-pleaser, one you could comfortably serve to goys. But the one on the right is the one I grew up with.”
-Hillary Busis, “A Tale of Two Briskets.” AndSmallPortions.com. December 7, 2015
Nonnie’s brisket vs. high-end cookbook recipe. I’ve never cooked brisket, but one thing I notice is the Lipton onion soup packet is also used in the vegetarian meatloaf recipe. Bookmarking this for the future.
I KILL on Vimeo
Boudin King Cake
A few days ago, I learned of Boudin King Cake. I did a little research, but every recipe had elements I wanted to change. So, I made a few notes, and I plan on doing something along the lines of the below the first chance I get. I’ll add some commentary once I’ve made it.
Boudin King Dough Ingredients
2 (4 1/2 teaspoon) packages dry yeast
3/4 cup water (100-110 degrees F)
2 large eggs, beaten
1/4 cup shortening, cubed
1/3 cup butter, cubed
4 cups flour, divided
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter, melted
Boudin King Dough Preparation
In a large mixing bowl, dissolve the yeast and 1 tbsp of the sugar in the warm water. Let sit until foamy – 10 minutes.
In a separate bowl, combine remaining sugar, salt and 3 cups flour. Once yeast is foamy, stir in beaten eggs followed by shortening and butter. Next, add flour mixture and stir. Turn out onto floured surface and slowly add the last cup of flour, kneading to achieve a smooth, elastic consistency. Be careful not to add too much flour.
Place in a greased bowl, turning to grease the top of the dough. Let rise in a warm place (85 degrees F) until doubled, overnight (slow) or about 1 1/2 hours (fast).
—Adapted from “Copycat Pillsbury Crescent Rolls.” Genius Kitchen.com.
Then, make the boudin, or alternatively, substitute Italian sausage.
Boudin Ingredients
One (4 pounds) pork roast
Water, for braising and boiling
One pound pork liver
2 large yellow onions, diced
2 cups of Basmati long-grain white rice
6 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 bundle of fresh thyme, tied
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
2 teaspoons ground black pepper
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon finely ground white pepper
1 teaspoon celery salt
1 cup diced green onion tops
1 cup finely chopped Italian parsley
2 tablespoons Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Dash of hot sauce
Boudin Preparation
Preheat the oven to 220ºF (for slow) / 400ºF (for fast).
In a heavy pot with tight-fitting lid, char the bay leaf in ghee. Then, add the pork roast and thyme. Fill the pot with water to a depth of 4 inches. Cover, place in the hot oven and braise the pork roast, overnight or greater than 8 hours (for slow), 2 hours (for fast). In both cases, the meat should be falling apart.
Remove the pork from the pot reserving the cooking liquid.
In a pot with water over high heat, add the liver and boil until well done, about 10 minutes. Remove the liver and drain on a paper towel-lined plate. Add the onions to the liquid and let cook for 2 minutes. Strain the onions and reserve.
In a rice cooker, make the rice and keep warm until ready to use.
In a food processor pulse the meat and liver along with the onions and garlic until it reaches a smooth, yet chunky consistency. Be careful not to over process to a pasty, mushy stage.
Incorporate the cooked rice in a ratio of 80% meat mixture to 20% rice. Gradually add some of the cooking liquid until the mixture is moist. Add the seasonings and green onions. Add salt, black pepper, and hot sauce to taste. Evenly incorporate ingredients together.
Split into four portions, freeze three and save the fourth for your Boudin King Cake.
—Adapted from “The Great Boudin Debate.” The Acadian Table. February 3, 2014 and “Boudin Recipe.” Nola Cuisine. April 16, 2012.
Then, move on to the Boudin King Cake.
Boudin King Cake Ingredients
½ cup red pepper jelly, such as Tabasco
1 tablespoon water
1 pound boudin
8 ounces pepper jack cheese, cut into planks
1 Copycat Pillsbury Crescent Dough recipe (above), cut into two and rolled into dough sheets
1 large egg, beaten, for brushing
Kosher salt
½ cup crumbled bacon
½ cup diced green onion tops
Boudin King Cake Preparation
Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
For the glaze, in a saucepan over medium heat, add the red pepper jelly and let cook until it softens and begins to melt, about 2 minutes. Add the water and stir until it thins out. Turn off the heat and keep warm.
Separate the boudin meat into 4 quarter pound portions. Put one portion of boudin meat on one edge of the dough sheet, add half the cheese, then add another portion of boudin meat and roll it up. Cut off the excess and pinch the ends closed. Repeat a second time with the rest of the ingredients.
On a metal baking tray sprayed with non-stick spray, place the 2 dough-wrapped boudin cylinders and join them together at the ends to form a circle. Brush the top with egg wash and sprinkle with salt.
Place in the oven and bake for 40 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from the oven.
With a spoon or brush, drizzle and paint the pepper jelly over the top of the hot pastry. Sprinkle the top with crumbled bacon and diced green onion tops.
Serve on the baking tray by slicing the boudin king cake into portions and calling your guests while it’s piping hot.
—Adapted from “Boudin King Cake.” The Acadian Table. January 25, 2016.
Book Review: Every Twelve Seconds by Timothy Pachirat
Highly recommended. Describes in detail the operation of an industrialized slaughterhouse, from the front office to the delivery of cattle and back again. While it is clear the process is inhumane and unsanitary, the working conditions of the employees are the focus. Even if the ethics of killing animals for food is not an issue for you, a system that has one person kill 2,500 cattle, every work day, in order to put meat on your plate has qualities reminiscent of the hypothetical posed in Le Guin’s, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Horrifying, but a book everyone that buys and eats meat in cellophane packaging should read.
“Like its more self-evidently political analogues—the prison, the hospital, the nursing home, the psychiatric ward, the refugee camp, the detention center, the interrogation room, the execution chamber, the extermination camp—the modern industrialized slaughterhouse is a ‘zone of confinement,’ a ‘segregated and isolated territory,’ in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bagman, ‘invisible’ and ‘on the whole inaccessible to ordinary members of society.’ Close attention to how the work of industrialized killing is performed might thus illuminate not only how the realities of industrialized animal slaughter are made tolerable but the ways distance and concealment operate in analogous social processes: war executed by volunteer armies; the subcontracting of organized terror to mercenaries; and the violence underlying the manufacturing of thousands of items and components we make contact with in our everyday lives…
You may find the descriptions in the pages ahead both physically and morally repugnant. Recognize, however, that this reaction of disgust, this impulse to thumb through the pages so as to locate, separate, and segregate the sterile, abstract arguments from the flat, ugly day-in, day-out, minutiae of the work of killing, is the same impulse that isolates the slaughterhouse from society as a whole and, indeed, that sequesters and neutralizes the work of killing even for those who work in the slaughterhouse itself. The detailed accounts that follow are not merely incidential to or illustrative of a more important theoretical argument about how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in contemporary society. They are the argument.”
—Pachirat, Timothy. “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
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