Sunday Cookbook Adventures: More Rick Bayless Mexican Food

An intense craving for Mexican food hit me recently. I realized this most clearly while reading Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," when every time I read about some poor starving person eating beans and tortillas (amidst the blood and gore) I was like "Ooh! Tortillas... Mmmmmm...." Stanley says that makes me a weirdo, but we'll check back with him when he re-reads the book after not having lived near good Mexican food in 4 years... Anyway, when I want to make Mexican food, I tend to turn to Rick Bayless, so I cracked open Mexico One Plate at a Time looking for some new awesome taco recipe and maybe something to do with the beautiful Blood Farm flank steak in my freezer.
For the tacos, I decided on Mexican-style Zucchini Tacos since it seems to finally be summer and zucchini screams "Summer!!!" to me. The only flank steak recipe in the book is Grilled Flank Steak with Tomato-Poblano Salsa, so I decided to go with that... and it turned out to be the first Epic Fail of my cookbook adventure endeavors... Let's start there, shall we? You start off by roasting all of the salsa ingredients (which will also become marinade ingredients). There are poblanos (which I charred on the grill),
tomatoes (charred under the broiler, as instructed, then peeled and cored),
and onions and garlic (oven-roasted without any oil or seasoning, as instructed).
At this point, I was looking forward to the dish. Simple, clean flavors. How can it go wrong... right?
The tomatoes, onions, and garlic are puréed, then added to the diced roasted poblanos. About a half cup of this is added back to the blender to be pureed with balsamic, olive oil, a little sugar, and some salt to become the marinade. The marinade tasted pretty decent, so I added the flank steak...
I hadn't been so sure about the salsa from the get-go, and the more I tasted to try to see what I needed to tweak, the more I realized that nothing could be done to save it. It was absolutely nauseating... as in, I literally thought I was going to throw up if I didn't get that taste out of my mouth. The smell became too much for me, too, and I decided to toss the whole batch. (Such a waste of pretty chiles and tomatoes... Sigh...) I opened the bag where the steak was marinating and (even though I knew the marinade tasted fine) the aroma was reminiscent of the nasty, nasty salsa, so I decided to rinse all of the marinade off and soak the steak in cold water to get any extra ickiness out while I made an emergency grocery run to start over. I have no idea what happened here. I followed the recipe to the letter, and the ingredients were all used elsewhere without problem. I had some garlic issues (I threw away several cloves because they had a "corked wine" aroma when I smashed them), so I wonder if maybe one of the bad garlic cloves snuck in? When I was making pico de gallo later, the warm (it is summer) room-temperature chopped tomatoes had a smell that called back to the salsa to the extent that I started to get a little nauseous again, so it could have just been some crazy reaction to the lightly-roasted tomatoes? I have no clue, but I will not be making this again to find out. If anyone out there tries this recipe (after this ringing endorsement...), let me know if you have better luck. Blech.

On to happier things. Let's talk about Zucchini Tacos. I went off-recipe in two places here. The first was in choosing to grill my corn before cutting off the kernels (because grilled corn is delicious).
I grilled the corn at the same time as I was charring up my poblanos. I guess I technically went off-recipe there, since Bayless says to do it under a broiler. I find that the grill is much more efficient for a large number of chiles (especially when it's already fired up for the corn) and the grill is always a better idea than the broiler on a day where you're running the air conditioner in the kitchen...
The charred skins come off easily, after which stems and seeds are removed.
The next ingredient is zucchini. Zucchini is one of those ingredients that I never give a second thought to most of the year, but find myself seriously craving on hot, sunshiny days...
The zucchini is diced and set aside with sliced roasted poblanos, grilled corn kernels, and cilantro, to be added with some crème fraîche as the dish finishes cooking.
Before we get there, some lovely tomatoes are pulsed in the food processor and set aside.
The second place I officially went of recipe was to substitute pork fat for vegetable oil (because pork fat is more delicious than vegetable oil). I assume "vegetable oil" was just a typo, anyway, where Bayless intended to write "pork fat," so I was more correcting an error in editing than actually changing the recipe... Some onion is sautéed in the pork fat until starting to brown.
Garlic is added and cooked briefly, before the tomatoes are added in and cooked for a few minutes.
This flavor base (as Bayless calls it) can be prepped in advance, with the remaining ingredients added and the cooking completed just before serving. (By the way: This flavor base is the exact same set of ingredients as the part of the salsa that was so disgusting, they're just prepared differently... I have no idea what happened there...) I was working on a back-up plan for the Epic Fail above during this time, so I'll just show you the finished taco filling, which has been sprinkled with a little Mexican queso fresco:
Dished up with homemade corn tortillas, this is totally awesome. I loved the creaminess that the small amount of crème fraîche brought to the sauce, and the zucchini was perfect with the poblanos and corn. I was a happy camper again, almost forgetting about that other dish that I'm not going to talk about any more...
I love having a grocery store 1.5 blocks away so that when a kitchen emergency hits you don't have to go sit in traffic. I always prefer to get produce at Russo's, but my local giant chain store will do in a pinch. I decided to do sort of a carne asada treatment of my flank steak, marinating in lime, garlic and salt,
before grilling to perfection...
I don't think I've ever cooked flank steak before, but this was really good (and way easier than what I was originally attempting). As long as you slice against the grain, it's actually pretty tender, and is definitely a good red meat for tacos.
I also picked up some pico de gallo fixins to have on my steak tacos...
Along with those homemade corn tortillas (which were perhaps what I was craving most of all) and a nice fresh batch of horchata, this is exactly what I was in the mood for.
I will definitely be making the zucchini taco filling again, maybe to serve with grilled shrimp or some other non-steak protein... Overall, I'd actually call the end result of this day of cooking a hard-to-improve-upon success, even if there were some trials and tribulations (and ingredients in the rubbish bin) along the way. This should definitely sate my Mexican food cravings for a while, so I can go back to reading my book without tortilla-longing getting in the way...

Sunday Cookbook Adventures: Pozole Rojo

I knew as I was digging through 20 liters of pork jelly that I would do things differently next time... But I'll get to that later. My main memory of posole is from several years back in Santa Barbara. Steph told me about this church parking lot that was filled with all kinds of Mexican food stalls during Fiesta. Each stall has a different specialized food item, so you stand in one line to grab tamales, another for tortas, another for tacos... and, of course, another for posole. I had never actually tried posole before - I'm not sure I'd even heard of it - but as Steph and I saw bowl after bowl of brothy goodness wander past us as we waited in the tamale line, we knew the posole line was the next line we'd be standing in. I fell in love a little that day, but it wasn't until last Thanksgiving that I even thought about making posole at home, when I decided to turn my homemade turkey stock and leftover meat into a (kick-ass) Turkey Posole. The time had come, I decided this weekend, to step it up a notch and make Rick Bayless's Pozole Rojo from his very awesome book, Mexico: One Plate at a Time.
The good people at Blood Farm were very helpful in getting my pile o' pig parts together, including slicing my trotters in half lengthwise and finding pork shanks for me, which they sliced into 1 1/2" portions. (The pork shoulder hunks came from H-Mart, for reasons discussed last week...)
I find this pile of meat both impressive and amusing... The pile is thrown into a big pot with enough water to cover and a chopped onion,
and simmered until the meat is very tender. The recipe recommends allowing the meat to cool in the broth before proceeding, so I threw this all in the fridge overnight to be dealt with in the morning.
After scraping that layer of fat off of my new vat of pork jelly, it was time to fish out pieces of meat, peel off gelatinous layers of skin and fat to discard, and pull the cooked meat off of the bones...
That back bowl above is the discarded skin, fat, and bone, while the front bowl is the meat. Below is the rest:
This was not super-pleasant, and with each splattering of pork jelly onto the wall, slingshotted there by a piece of skin suddenly pulling loose from the meat, I pondered other options. I'm pretty sure that my next posole will feature pork stock made from pork neck bones and meat from an oven-braised pork shoulder. I like adding more flavor to the meat that way, and would appreciate being able to just discard everything but the liquid from the stock-making process rather than sifting through a vat of pork jelly. Glad to have tried it as written, though, because you never know... After the above process, I heated the pork jelly until it was a liquid again, then strained to remove onions and impurities.
Suddenly I had a pretty good-looking pork stock on my hands and was feeling a little better about things.
We needed two quarts for the recipe, but for assorted reasons (I had more meat and bones than needed and thus used more water to cover these) I ended up with five quarts. I put two in the freezer and used the other extra quart to substitute for one of the quarts of water in the hominy-cooking below.
Speaking of hominy, I ordered dried hominy from Rancho Gordo this time, which is a fantastic place to get heirloom beans and high-quality hominy.
I had been forced to resort to canned hominy for my impromptu Turkey Posole at Thanksgiving, and this was a huge upgrade.
The hominy is added to a stock pot with a head of peeled, halved garlic cloves and a few quarts of water (plus pork stock, in my case).
This simmers for 4 to 5 hours, until the hominy is quite tender. I went off-recipe again here to remove the garlic pieces, since I hate biting into such a large piece of something so strongly flavored during a meal...
While all of this is going on, the chilies (where the rojo in Pozole Rojo comes from) are prepared. The recipe calls for dried Ancho chilies, which are rehydrated in warm water.
The chilies and their soaking liquid are then puréed until smooth, before being strained through a reasonably fine sieve to remove any bits of tough skin. (Between the stock, the horchata, and this, my strainers were getting a workout on Sunday...)
Finally, it was time for all the components to come together. The chili mixture is added to the pot with the hominy, as is the pork stock... er, jelly...
This simmers for an hour, then the pork meat is added back in and you have yourself a big vat of tasty, tasty Pozole Rojo. While it's simmering, you can prep the garnishes. I finally upgraded my $6 mandolin to one with an adjustable blade height. This was brilliant, as it gave me paper-thin radish slices in about 5 seconds.
The other garnishes are Mexican oregano, sliced cabbage (Bayless recommends Napa cabbage... though, having tried it, I think I prefer "regular" cabbage in my posole...), and lime wedges.
Let's take a moment to admire the lovely posole, shall we?
This was pretty fantastic. Like I said, I think I'll approach the stock and meat differently next time, but I have no complaints about the resulting flavors of this method. (And I can totally see why a traditional, rustic dish wouldn't have you making stock from meat that you throw away...) Rick Bayless has yet to let me down, and I can't wait for my next foray into his collection of recipes. Good stuff. Very good stuff, indeed.

Sunday Cookbook Adventures: Rick Bayless is a Genius

I was able to squeeze one last cookbook adventure in before my surgery, this one out of a book I've loved since I first bought it 8 years ago, Mexico One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless. For my little pre-surgery Fiesta, I made corn tortillas and the fillings for two types of tacos: Potato-Chorizo Tacos with Simple Avocado Salsa and Seared Steak Tacos with Blistered Serranos and Browned Onions.I originally thought this wouldn't be much of an "adventure," since I've been using this book for a years, and had even made the steak tacos before (or so I thought), but it was actually a menu full of learning experiences and surprises. Let's start with the dish that blew my mind first: the "Simple Avocado Salsa." I was actually pondering skipping this and just making guacamole to serve with the potato-chorizo tacos, but that would have been a serious mistake. Not only is the salsa absurdly easy to make, it's insanely delicious. Reminiscent of guacamole, but so much more bright and fresh. This was absolutely fantastic. The ingredients are this simple:Avocado, tomatillos, serrano, and garlic. That's it. (Picture below taken with my new lighting setup and after we lost the rest of the serranos and had to substitute two jalapeños (which happened after I made this first batch), for comparison...)

You rough-chop everything but the avocado
toss it all in the food processor, then add the avocado and pulse until smooth and awesome. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and prepare to be amazed when you try it on a yellow corn chip...The second component for these tacos is the potato-chorizo filling, which was the perfect chance to pull some of my homemade Mexican Chorizo out of the freezer and put it to good use.
The chorizo is squeezed out of the casing that it had been so skillfully stuffed into and added to a hot dutch oven
along with chopped onion, then sautéed until the onion is soft and the chorizo is fully cooked.Meanwhile, some diced Yukon Gold potatoes are boiled until soft
then added to the chorizo and onion mixture, where the potatoes can absorb the chorizo-y goodness.
The chorizo filling can be made ahead, so we did all of the cooking up to this point in the morning. After making the Simple Avocado Salsa, however, I read that it only stays fresh-tasting for an hour, so we had to have the first batch for brunch and make a second batch (as alluded to above) for dinner... On to the next tacos. As I mentioned, these are something I was sure I had made before, but upon closer inspection I determined that I had never actually read the recipe when making this dish in the past. How do I know for sure? The recipe calls for everything to be cooked in flavorful pork fat or bacon fat. I am not a woman who cooks things in non-bacon fat substances if bacon fat is recommended, so I must have never seen this brilliant, brilliant suggestion. The first component I prepped is your basic pico de gallo. (No recipe was included in the book, just a suggestion that salsa accompany... although I now see that Bayless's Roasted Tomato-Green Chile Salsa was recommended... Dammit. I am the world's worst recipe-reader...) Anyway... I made pico de gallo, and it was delicious. I'll have make the other salsa next time.
Next up were the Blistered Serranos and Browned Onions, aka The Coughing Onions. You start off with stemmed serrano chiles:These are quartered lengthwise with the stem end left intact, then added to a hot cast iron skillet containing some bacon fat.
The onions are added next, and the charring and browning commences.I always used to do this on the grill when I thought I was making this recipe before, which avoided a situation in which the air in my kitchen was completely filled with capsaicin. My exhaust fan is pretty much useless, so we had to run out for fresh air a couple times during the cooking. In the end it was worth it, though, with a result far more beautiful and flavorful than I ever got on the grill.
When the onions are finished, a bit more bacon fat goes into the pan (brilliant idea, Rick!) and the well-salted steaks are added to sear until cooked to your liking.
I went off-recipe one more time here, not wanting to leave that any charred goodness behind in the pan, and decided to deglaze with a bit of lime juice, then pour that liquid over the steaks. I can't be certain, but I think Rick Bayless would have approved of this step. The result was absolutely delicious.
That's a pretty cheap cut of steak right there (the amount you see above cost me about $3.50...) but it was ridiculously awesome when prepared this way. You could taste the beef, the bacon, the salt, and the lime... all distinct but in harmony. Awe. Some. The final component to pull this all together was the tortillas. This cookbook is the one that first taught me to make my own corn tortillas years ago, and I've never bought corn tortillas in a store since. As I mentioned before, my tortillas were great for years, but then stopped puffing up like they should. They were still OK, but not as good as I remembered. Finally last year I re-read the recipe and discovered that the mistake I'd made was no longer using two different heats for the cooking process, which makes all the difference. This time I also saw that I should be using hot water with my masa (I had been using warm), and they turned out even better. The process is super-simple. Combine masa with hot water and knead until you have a nice supple dough.Get out your tortilla press and plastic sheets to line it. (Cut-up garbage bags work best... Really. Everything else is too thick or too thin...) Roll a walnut-sized ball of the masa mixture in your hands and place it in the press,
then gently flatten and execute my patented 270°-flip-turn three times to get a nice round raw tortilla.
You can make several a little bit ahead and leave them between the plastic sheets to stay moist until a pan frees up to cook them in. I put my mom on tortilla-pressing duty and manned the cooking station myself. The first side should be cooked over medium-low to medium heat until just cooked enough to be flipped onto the other cast iron skillet, which is over medium to medium-high heat.
After about 45 seconds, the tortilla can be flipped and (if you did it right) will puff up all cool and pretty, like so:
With the tortillas made, we were all set. Here we have the Potato-Chorizo Tacos
and Seared Steak TacosThis was so good and was exactly what I was craving. I think I preferred the steak, just because the flavors were so clean and classic, but the chorizo was really unique and interesting and delicious in its own way. I've really missed quality Mexican food since leaving SoCal and, while I still wish there was an awesome trashy Mexican joint around here, getting back to cooking from this book should definitely be able to tide me over between trips to the west coast... I'm so glad I finally buckled down and did (mostly) what Rick Bayless told me to. The man obviously knows what he's talking about.