Rhubarb, Ramps, Hickory Nuts & Sources of Inspiration (part two)

I haven't cooked much with rhubarb in recent years, though it has followed me around most of  my life, from the ancestral patch in Eden Prairie where I grew up, to a clump that came with a community garden plot I had a few years ago, to the vigorous little forest of thick red stalks that graces our Wisconsin yard.  It's the savory applications of rhubarb that intrigue me, so my taste buds pricked up immediately when I read "rhubarb-ramp ranch" on the Graze  menu. Then, having eaten and loved it, I wanted to recreate it. And, I had no idea how to do that, specifically, how to get the rhubarb flavor in there, since there were no pieces of rhubarb in the dressing, that I could see.

A rhubarb patch grows in Ridgeland.

For the basic nouveau ranch dressing, I went to  Momofuku, as David Chang's cooking, specifically at his Ssam Bar restaurant, has been an inspiration to me in terms of...what shall we call it? Creative cross-cultural faux-rustic cookery? Kind of a mouthful. Shoot me a line if you've got a slicker summary. I've made very few of the actual recipes in the Momofuku book, but every time I pick it up I'm inspired by the originality of it, and the utter eatability of the dishes pictured and described there, and really, inspiration is far, far more valuable than any recipe.*  But there is a recipe in the Momofuku cookbook very like the Graze dish, "Bev Eggleston's Pork Shoulder Steak," a grilled pork steak served with ramp ranch dressing and a raw vegetable component, from ribbons of raw zucchini to batons of raw celery root. I also swiped the idea for a recipe in my book. (Just to digress a tiny bit further, I was absolutely delighted to find, in Googling "rhubarb ramp ranch," that the first three results are: Momofuku, Trout Caviar, and Graze.) The similarities between Momofuku and Graze are made more compelling when you know that another young Asian-American chef, Tory Miller, heads up both Graze and L'Etoile. Both Miller and Chang are James Beard Foundation honorees. While we finished our coffee before hitting the market, we watched Miller and a couple other Graze cooks head off to shop the market, pulling a slick wooden wagon emblazoned with the Graze logo. Great.

Graze coaster with market wagon.

I pulled a few stalks of rhubarb from our patch and pondered them. Like bloated red ribs of celery, they are, and what is celery mostly composed of? Water. Rhubarb juice should be easy enough to extract. I chopped up a couple stalks, tossed them in the FP, and turned it on. It turned into shreds and stuck to the side of the bowl. I added just a couple of tablespoons of water, and with a little more whizzing I had a nice slurry. Put that into a strainer over a bowl, out came rhubarb juice. Which is fascinating stuff. Tasted straight up, it is intriguing, and kind of horrible, among the most sour things I've ever tasted, but with depth to it that makes you think of possibilities. I made a  whitefish ceviche last summer in which I used green apple juice and vinegar to "cook" the fish; rhubarb juice might work even better.  There are lots of ingredients that aren't that good on their own, but produce wonderful flavors in combination with other products--think lemon juice. Rhubarb juice might just be that versatile**.  We'll see. It was terrific in this dressing, and in the glaze I made for my pork shoulder cutlet.

At long last, my rhubarb ramp ranch dressing:

2 1/2 tablespoons chopped pickled ramps 
1/4 cup mayonnaise (Hellmann's rules)
2 tablespoons sour cream or buttermilk
3 tablespoons rhubarb juice
pinch salt
a few good grinds of black pepper

Mix all.  The acidity of the rhubarb juice sort of fluffs up the dressing--see the bubbles above?--giving it a much lighter texture than you would expect from a dressing based on mayo and sour cream.  This small portion was enough to dress the cress and nettle salad (the cress was raw, the nettles blanched as for the recent Sichuan salad) we had with the pork, with leftovers to toss with pan-wilted spinach a couple of nights later.  Next time I make it, I'll do a larger batch, as I think it will improve over a few days.

On to the pork, and another source of inspiration, another James Beard winner, this one from way up in the North Woods of Minnesota.  One of the best food blogs going is Amy Thielen's  Sourtooth Journal, and one of her best posts ever was called "Steak in the Sauna", in which she turned her insatiable curiosity, creativity, and plain food nerdiness (a term I use with utmost affection, it should go without saying) to using a North Woods institution, the sauna, to recreate the sous vide effect that fancy restaurants produce with specialized equipment costing many thousands of dollars.  Sous vide sort of precooks food, usually meat or fish, sealed in plastic, in a water bath kept at a specific constant temperature--the perfect temperature for a medium-rare steak, say.  Then to finish the dish, the meat is very quickly seared so that it is nicely crusted on the outside, while the interior maintains that ideal, and totally consistent, temperature and doneness.  I think that's a reasonable summary, but feel free to correct or expand.

I don't have a sauna (would love one), or a sous vide machine, but I can riff.  Thinking of classic sous vide cooking wouldn't have led me to my excellent conclusion, but thinking about Amy's sauna steak did.  First off, because of the type of meat I was using, cutlets taken from a pork shoulder, I wanted to try something other than straight grilling.  There was a fair amount of fat and connective tissue laced through the meat, so I wanted to cook it a while to melt that stuff, while still keeping it mediumish inside.  A sous vide treatment seemed like the thing to try, and I can't think of sous vide without thinking of Amy's sauna steak, and that led me to think:  what's a sauna?  A warm, moist place.  A sort of steam room.  I have a sort of miniature steam room in my kitchen--it's called a bamboo steamer basket.

The plan, then:  season the meat thoroughly with salt and pepper a couple of hours before cooking.  Steam, very gently, until the meat was cooked through and tenderized, maybe 40 minutes?  Grill on a very hot fire just long enough to sear it well.  Brush with rhubarb-maple glaze, and burn that on.  The results:  very good, with room for improvement.  The pork cooked a little more than I would have liked in the steamer.  I should have erred on the side of undercooking, knowing that this could be corrected for in the grilling.  I could, perhaps, have set the steamer holding the pork (on a plate, of course) over boiling water, and then just turned it off.  That might have provided enough heat.  I will try it again, as this first experiment produced meat that was definitely different, and in some ways superior, in terms of texture, to straight grilled pork.

Here's my rhubarb-maple glaze, tart-sweet, a little hot with sambal:

1/2 cup sliced rhubarb
1/2 cup rhubarb juice
1/2 teaspoon sambal chili paste
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
2 1/2 tablespoons maple syrup
pinch salt

Bring to a boil in a small saucepan and simmer for 10 minutes.  Strain, then return the liquid to the saucepan and reduce by about half, until it begins to coat the back of a spoon.  The glaze will taste quite sour and astringent on its own, but those qualities will be balanced when it's brushed on the meat.

To round out the plate we served couscous that we started by sautéing a little shallot in a small saucepan, along with some chopped dried apple.  After the couscous steamed we mixed in some of those wonderful hickory nuts, toasted.  And finally, a few flash-grilled ramps, which were excellent:

The ramps were tossed with olive oil, lemon juice (suppose I could have used rhubarb...), salt and pepper, at least 30 minutes prior to cooking.  Then they just went on the very hot grill for a couple of minutes.  Even the blackest parts were delicious; the parts that were really and truly burnt just powdered away.

Here concludes the tale of a wonderful dinner, via a roundabout route with many detours and a few cul-de-sacs.  A lot of words for one plate of food, some would say, but hey, that's what we do here.

Cheers.

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* David Bouley's East of Paris, is in this same category for me; interestingly, Amy Thielen worked for Bouley in New York, and worked on East of Paris.


** And what about the possibilities of sorrel juice--sorrel being rhubarb's green cousin?  I always wish the sorrel sauce I serve with grilled or fried trout could be more sorrel-y, and I'll bet an injection of sorrel juice would do the job.




Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Wrapping Up the Ramps

We're coming to the end of the ramps season. I won't promise not to mention them again till next spring, but I'm eager to move on to asparagus, salads, and more summery things. It's probably true that ramps are a little over-hyped, and, in the stores, a little overpriced. For a wild foods enthusiast, though, they are also a genuine reason to celebrate--the first of the year's seasonal wild foods, delicious, abundant, versatile. I'll jump on that bandwagon.

In an "average" year we would probably be picking ramps into early June, but an extremely warm April got the ramps up and going, and now that the plants are sending up flower stalks the greens start to die back. You can still dig up the bulbs through the summer and fall, if you know how to find them, but I feel they're definitely best as a ritual of spring.

I unearthed a nice sackful of ramps last week for a last blast rampage. The greens weren't much good, but the bulbs were nice and plump. My main project for the season's last ramps was to try pickling a couple pounds of them. I should know by now that small-batch pickling is as easy as making a pot of soup, but still for some reason I find the prospect daunting. In fact, for these ramps pickled more or less following David (Momofuku) Chang's recipe, the hardest part was cleaning and trimming the ramps. This brine is lovely; it's a near-perfect balance of sweet, sour, and salt. Chang's recipe calls for rice wine vinegar, but to give it that Bide-A-Wee twist I used some of our own apple cider vinegar. Good quality unpasteurized cider vinegar is available in bulk at many co-ops.



2 cups water
1 cup apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup sugar
scant 2 Tbsp salt
2 small dried red chilies, seeds removed (or leave them in if you want more heat)
1 tsp black peppercorns

Cleaned ramp bulbs with a couple inches of the stem left on

I had a pound and a half of cleaned ramp bulbs, which filled two tightly packed pints with quite a bit of brine left over. Two pounds of ramps would make three pints without being compulsive about packing efficiency. Leftover brine can be used to pickle something else.

Combine all the ingredients in a non-reactive saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer for a minute or two. Line up the ramps prettily in the jar. Make sure each jar gets a bit of chili and a few peppercorns. Pour brine over the ramps to cover. Refrigerate.

Having never made these before, I'm not sure how long it will take for the ramps to become fully pickled. A couple of weeks at least, I'm sure. Refrigerated, they should keep for a few months.

I didn't wait to use mine. The very night I made them they went into two preparations. The first was a dangerously appealing "ramp-a-tini," a couple ounces of gin, capful of dry vermouth, twist of lemon, and around a teaspoon of the pickled ramps brine. Finish off with a garnish of a pickled ramp.



I sipped one of those while we put together a simple but delicious dinner of grilled pork steaks served over baby garden greens tossed with a creamy pickled ramp dressing.* To wit:

2 Tbsp heavy cream
2 Tbsp sour cream
1 Tbsp pickled ramp brine
1 1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 pickled ramp bulbs, chopped fairly fine
2 tsp oil (something neutral like canola or sunflower)
salt and pepper to taste

Just mix it all together well and toss it with some hearty young greens. Our salad bowl this night contained frisée, red kale, baby turnip and red mustard greens, arugula, some lettuce. You don't want to do this very delicate lettuces. Here's what ours looked like:



Topped with your simply grilled pork steak, it should look like this:



And finally, the formula for the maple-ramp glaze I mentioned last post. In a small saucepan combine:

1/2 cup real maple syrup
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup chopped ramps--you can use the whole thing, whites and greens, if the greens are still nice; and, I haven't made it with pickled ramps, but I don't see why that wouldn't be good

Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Use it to glaze grilled chicken or pork toward the end of the cooking time. For the chicken pictured below, I added about a teaspoon of chili paste (sambal) to the glaze.

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* This dressing was also inspired by a Momofuku recipe, for a buttermilk ranch dressing with pickled ramps, but the first time I made it I just used raw ramps. To make it that way, omit the brine, of course, and increase the vinegar to 2 teaspoons rather than 1 1/2; also add a couple of good pinches of sugar, or to taste.


Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Duck Buns, Nouveau Roots, Steamed Greens

I am very pleased with myself. This meal was one of my first attempts at Momofuku-izing my kitchen, and it turned out very, very well. Call it fusion cooking if you like. But it's not that I'm not trying to cross one thing with another; rather, I'm drawing from all my favorite influences and the best that the place and the season have to offer, all the while taking dead aim at utter appetizingness.

No, really, it was damned tasty.

Smoked duck with homemade spicy "hoisin" sauce and steamed buns.

Roasted garden carrots with mustard-maple glaze.


Roasted garden baby beets with fish sauce vinaigrette, steamed beet greens.


The smoked duck was from the charming Wemeier clan, otherwise known as Bar 5 Meat and Poultry ("Everything from feet to feathers!"). They sell at the Minneapolis and Hopkins farmers markets in the summer and fall, and at the Saint Paul Farmers market year-round. All their products are great, but the smoked duck is in a league of its own. This was actually our third meal from this bird: we had the legs and a few breast slices with braised red cabbage and spaetzle, sandwiches of sliced breast meat topped with leftover cabbage, and I picked the carcass clean for this dinner.

The steamed buns: I used a standard "flower bun" recipe like this one, omitting the scallions and the fancy shaping. Here's the Momofuku version. This whole Internet-Google deal is just amazing....


The sauce: I was going to thin some hoisin sauce from a jar, but found I was out of hoisin sauce. In a mini food processor I combined some broad bean chili paste, some dark soy sauce, some maple syrup, and a splash of water. Whizzed till it was all puréed and a bit emulsified--who needs hoisin?

The beets were "baby" red and gold beets from our garden. In reality they were full-season, stunted beets; I'm not so good at thinning my vegetable garden. But no matter, they were sweet and tender after enduring many a frost. I roasted them, covered, in a Pyrex dish at 375 for about 40 minutes.


The tender tiny beet "greens"--really reds and golds--I placed in a bowl and steamed in my bamboo steamer, since I had it out for the buns.

I tossed both the beets and greens with Momofuku's fish sauce vinaigrette. (This recipe writing is a snap when you can just cop someone else's stuff. And by "cop" I of course mean, "pay homage to.")

Well, I do take credit for the carrots, which were made this way:

Roast Baby Carrots with Maple-Mustard Glaze

2 cups baby carrots, scrubbed (mine weighed 9 ounces)
1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp canola or grapeseed oil
pinch of salt, grind of pepper

Combine all the above in a gratin dish or small baking dish. Roast, uncovered, at 375 for 45 minutes, until they become a little brown and glazy. Stir them every 15 minutes during this time.

Remove from the oven and add:

1 rounded tsp grain mustard
1/8 tsp piment d'espelette, or a good pinch of cayenne (optional)
1 tsp red wine vinegar

Add another grind of pepper, taste for salt. Serve warm or at room temp.

I don't think I ever saw a beet when I was in China, and though there were carrots, they were never served roasted, as most Chinese homes lack an oven. But the beets took nicely to that Asian "vinaigrette," (Momofuku chef Tien Ho refers to it as "Vietnamese ketchup"), and the carrots glazed with maple syrup, punched up with mustard and vinegar, had a subtle, earthy, sweet & sour quality.

We opened a bottle of Viking Brewing Company's "mjod,", a sort of malted mead, made by our Wisconsin neighbors Randy and Ann Lee in Dallas, WI. Skol, gan bei, bottom's up, and bon appetit.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw