Summer is, by and large, a rough time for the American soup industry: Chef Boyardee nervously fends off questions from angry shareholders and wonders how he’ll pay back that loan from Don Boyardee, while Wolfgang Puck’s grin starts to droop at the corners on cans of minestrone soup across the country. Because what kind of sick bastard wants a steaming bowl of soup in the middle of the summer?

Cold soup is the exception: it’s a brilliant antidote to a hot summer day. Nearly all of the poorly air-conditioned cuisines of south and central Europe have their own versions, and one of my favorites, salmorejo, a creamy gazpacho from blistering Andalucia, has already been featured in Food Junta. Today I bring you a sweet, bracing alternative from the humid depths Central Europe: a boozy take on a Hungarian classic, cold sour cherry soup.

Now first, you’re probably thinking, “hey this guy knows it’s Fall already, right? Isn’t this article late?” Well I don’t know where you’re reading from, bub, but when I served this soup last week it was 113 degrees in Los Angeles, the hottest day in the city’s history, or at least since the first thermometer arrived by clipper ship ‘round Cape Horn. September and October tend to be some of the warmest months here in California, and last week was miserably, Bakersfieldishly hot. But honestly it wasn’t the heat that inspired this meal, nor was it fond memories of discovering cold fruit soup at Bagolyvar Restaurant in Budapest; it was the booze.

See, my dad makes wine, and two or three years ago he presented me with a bottle of his first attempt at rosé saying, if I remember correctly, “See if you can find something to do with this. Ehhh… it’s not great.” Despite that ringing endorsement the unopened bottle has been collecting dust since then while I’ve looked for a rosé-intensive recipe that gave me an excuse not to drink it myself. It just so happened that the one I found, here in the LA Times, was a more refined (and liquored-up) version of a dish I’d often thought of trying to make.

This sweet, sour, cold and spicy soup was incredibly refreshing on a hot day, even with all the cream in the recipe, and even using sour cherries from a jar. It was so good in fact that I’m tempted to recommend it to parts of the country that have already slipped off into Fall. And while it requires some advanced planning since the soup needs to be refrigerated for hours before serving, it is very simple to make and there’s mercifully little time spent over the stove.

Oh, and it turned out the wine was pretty good after all, and it was kind of a shame that it all went into the soup…

Cold Spiced Sour Cherry Soup

Adapted from the LA Times

Serves 6-8 as an appetizer

Ingredients

30 minutes cooking, 4 hours chilling

8 whole cloves

12 whole allspice berries

1 cinnamon stick

12 whole black peppercorns

Some cheesecloth

1 bottle rosé wine (750 ml)

2 cups water

1/3 cup sugar

2 lbs cherries

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

¼ tsp almond extract

¾ crème fraiche, plus ½ cup more for serving

1. Open bottle of wine and pour the entire thing into a pot or large saucepan. Add 2 cups water, stir in sugar, and bring to a boil.

2. Tie the spices together in a pouch of cheesecloth, or close them in a tea strainer, and simmer in wine for 15 minutes. Seriously kids, wrap it up. I just dumped the spices in thinking, “meh, how hard could it be to strain out some cloves and peppercorns?” Ooh, good question, I’ll field that one: pretty damn. That’s how hard. Pretty damn.

3. Add cherries and cook at a gentle simmer until slightly softened. How long you cook them depends on the type of cherries you used. Did you buy fresh cherries, and stem and pit them yourself? Cook the cherries for 15 minutes, which should give you plenty of time to pat yourself on the back. Are you using jars of sour cherry compote from Otto’s Hungarian Deli in Burbank? Then the cherries will already be softened, and you don’t want to overcook them into a disintegrated mush. I would suggest 7 to 10 minutes, then taste one to see if the texture’s right. Another note about using canned cherries: they come floating in syrup, which adds water weight so don’t trust the ounces listed on the can; you’ll want to pour out the liquid and weigh 2 pounds of cherries for this recipe if you have a scale, or measure out about four cups if you don’t.

4. Remove pot from heat. Stir in vinegar and almond extract.

5. Cover and chill in refrigerator for at least 4 hours. 30 minutes before you serve place bowls in the freezer. If your kitchen is 85 degrees on a hot day then your bowls are be too, and that soup won’t be cold for very long.

6. Just before you serve the soup, take out the spice packet and stir in crème fraiche. You can also use yogurt for this step, or sour cream, but crème fraiche is a little softer so I thought it would dissolve smoothly, and it has a subtler, less sour flavor. Stir until it is entirely mixed in and the soup is a uniform pinkish

6.5 – Optional: Cold soups in Hungary are traditionally liquid only, so if you want to be really authentic you can remove the spice packet, blend broth and cherries together, and strain out the pulp before adding crème fraiche and serving. This recipe, however, skipped that step, calling for the cherries to be left floating in the soup, and I really enjoyed the texture they provided. Laziness pays, especially on a hot day.

7. Spoon soup into bowls, and top with a dollop of crème fraiche. Enjoy momentary relief from withering heat.

Boil'n'Broil Ribs

Heavy is the head that’s connected to the neck that’s connected to the shoulders that’s connected to the hands that write a post-July 4^th food blog post: they bare responsibility for a recipe that not only empowers the young, broke and hungry, but which says something profound about the United States of America. Naturally my first thought was, “WOOOOO! JELLO SHOTS! WOOOOOO!”

However I quickly found that the internet already has jello pretty much covered. Particularly intimidating was www.myscienceproject.org, which has half a dozen amazingly thorough posts concerning jello shots and their ingredients, consistency, chemistry, flammability and nail-to-the-wall-ability – your humble booze blogger was clearly out of his depth. So I slunk back to the cutting board, reminding myself that I don’t really like jello shots all that much anyway, and resolved to spend my holiday weekend on something I can’t get enough of: REE-ubs. It just so happens that I recently spent a week in Texas, where a couple of friends were getting hitched (congratulations Doug and Maria, yeehaw bang bang bang, etc.), and since returning to California I’ve been suffering from a powerful case of BBQ withdrawl. Now I had never actually cooked ribs before last weekend, but I trusted in the talismanic power of my recently purchased State of Texas bolo tie and got to work. Because seriously folks, what’s more ‘Merican than cracking a beer and grilling some ribs? And like any good national tradition, the 4^th of July Barbeque leaves millions of people disenfranchised: I am speaking of course about all of us apartment-dwelling cityfolk, the yard-less masses without a grill to call our own, much less a place to park it. Well my fellow urban Americans, in the words of President Bill Pullman, today we celebrate our independence day! In this post you’ll find three different techniques for cooking ribs indoors, using nothing more than your average stove, oven and broiler.

Making all three recipes in one night was a little hectic, but individually each indoor “grilling” method is pretty simple and not nearly as time consuming as I always assumed ribs would be. The three recipes are the Boil’n’Broil, the Braise’n’Broil, and the Rendezvous. One involves a lager, one involves a porter, and the third – SPOILER ALERT – doesn’t have any booze at all. But before we get to the specifics, here are a few general remarks about ribs:

What kind of ribs? All three recipes use baby back pork ribs. St. Louis style ribs and spare ribs are larger cuts of meat, and may take a little longer to cook. Beef ribs are a totally different animal (hey-ohhhh), tough and as big as dinosaur bones, with completely different cook times and, usually, different recipes.

But then how will I know when it’s done?

Use the tong test, or bend test: pick up the rack of ribs with a pair of tongs at one end and let the other end droop down. Jostle and bounce it a little, and if the crust of the meat starts to crack and split, it’s done. Find a more thorough explanation with pictures here.

BBQ Sauce: Obviously this is a matter of taste. I used Sweet Baby Ray’s Original sauce in recipes #1 and #3; it’s good, it’s widely available, and it’s a “Kansas City style” sauce, meaning it has a smoky taste, which seemed like a good idea since these indoor ribs won’t be seeing any actual smoke or flames.

Boil & Broil

Adapted from my buddy Eamonn. At about 2 ½ hours this is the longest of the three preparations, but it is also the easiest: those hours are mostly unattended simmering, and only a few basic ingredients are required.

2 racks of baby back ribs

1 onion, quartered

6 cloves garlic, crushed

1 bottle BBQ sauce

32oz. bottle of champagne… of beers, that is. Or any other light-colored, light-flavored beer, like a lager or pilsner.

Vegetable oil

Salt

Pepper

Water

• Heat vegetable oil in a large skillet. Season the ribs with salt and pepper, then brown over high heat, just a couple of minutes on each side. You may have to cut the racks in half to fit them in a skillet.

• Add ribs, onions, garlic and beer to a large stock pot. Add 1 to 2 cups of water to cover and bring to a boil.

• Simmer over low heat for 2 hours. Use the tong test to check if the ribs are done.

• Set the oven to Broil and brush ribs with BBQ sauce on both sides. Run them under the broiler, say 5 to 7 minutes per side, until the ribs have developed the desired burnt crust on the outside (or you can flip every couple of minutes, reapplying sauce each time).

• Serve with more sauce.

Conclusion: All that simmering leaves you with incredibly tender meat that needs barely any prodding from your teeth to slide completely off the bone, but there’s a catch – all that simmering also sucks a lot of the pork flavor out of the ribs. Basically you’re left with a well textured sauce-delivery system. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; pick a great sauce and it’s still a great meal.

Braise & Broil

Adapted from my buddy Mark Bittman. Takes about 90 minutes total.

2 racks of baby back ribs

2 Tbsp ground cinnamon (or 2 to 3 cinnamon sticks)

1 Tbsp ground ginger, or 10 “nickel-sized” slices of fresh ginger

5 cloves of garlic, crushed

10 Allspice berries

1 tsp cayenne pepper (or 5 dried red chilies)

20 oz. Guiness (or another dark beer, stout or porter)

Salt

Pepper

• Preheat oven to 300 F.

• On the stove, heat vegetable oil in a large ovenproof skillet or roasting pan. Season the ribs with salt and pepper, then brown over high heat, just a couple of minutes on each side. You may have to cut the racks in half to fit them in a skillet. It’s like déjà vu, all over again…

• Add allspice, cinnamon, ginger, chilies and garlic, and stir for 1 minute.

• Add beer, bring to boil, then move into the oven. Cook for 1 hour, then check if ribs are done using the tong test.

• Remove ribs from braising liquid, season with salt and pepper, then broil to get that seared crust – again, about 5 minutes per side.

• Meanwhile you can turn the braising liquid into sauce: skim the fat off the top, boil the liquid until it is reduced.

Conclusion: These ribs might not be welcome in Texas or Kansas City, but the complex and exotic spice flavors of the ribs and their sauce are a nice change of pace from your average barbequed ribs that are heavy on the tomato-based sauce. And why not celebrate your lack of a grill by making something different? Also, the braising method makes the ribs tender in a relatively short cooking time.

The Rendezvous

Adapted, if I remember correctly, from… Heaven? The greatest ribs I have ever eaten were at Charles Vergo’s Rendezvous in Memphis, Tennessee, and this recipe from the great website amazingribs.com comes amazingly, mouth-wateringly close to recreating them. These are dry ribs, cooked while being basted in a vinegary sauce and then coated in a dry mixture of spices before serving. Cooking takes 60 to 90 minutes, plus 10 minutes to make the dry rub.

1 rack of baby back ribs

1 metal roasting pan

1 metal rack

1 basting brush

4 Tbsp Rendezvous dry rub (see below)

1 cup Mop Sauce (see further below)

3 oz. bourbon

Rendezvous dry rub: You can purchase Rendezvous Famous Seasoning online or in some food stores, or you can easily make it from scratch by following the recipe for Rendezvous-Style Memphis Seasoning over at amazingribs.com. The list of spices may seem long, but it’s well worth adding Allspice, mustard and celery seeds to your spice rack in order to make this rub. I made only a few adjustments:

1. Halved the recipe, which still left me with enough for 2 racks of ribs.
2. Omitted the Ac’cent MSG, not because I’m scared of it but because I couldn’t find it at the store.
3. One downside of cooking ribs this way is that the oven doesn’t impart any smoke flavor to the meat. In fact if it does you should be calling the fire department. In the case of the Rendezvous ribs you can get around this issue by outsourcing the smokiness to Spain: substitute Spanish smoked paprika (Pimenton de la Vera) for the ordinary paprika.

Mop Sauce: So called because the Rendezvous serves over 2000 lbs of ribs every day, so much that, if I remember correctly, they actually apply this sauce with a rag on a stick. The following recipe makes enough for 1 rack of ribs, but you can always make more with a 1-part rub, 2-part sauce, 4-part water and 4-part vinegar mixture.

2 Tbsp dry rub

4 Tbsp tomato-based BBQ sauce

½ Cup water

½ Cup distilled white vinegar

Rendezvous ribs on improvised rack

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 400 F.

• Place ribs on a metal rack in a roasting pan. I also suggest lining the pan with foil, otherwise all the baked-on drippings are a bitch to clean.

• Paint mop sauce onto ribs and place in oven. Every 15 minutes apply a new coat of mop sauce and flip the meat. Using the tong test, start checking if the ribs are done after 60 minutes (I think mine took about 70).

• Pour bourbon into glass over ice. Sip. Repeat.

• When the ribs are done, paint on one more coat of mop sauce and sprinkle with dry rub. Serve with BBQ sauce on the side.

Conclusion: I happen to think the second to last step in the recipe is absolutely vital, but some people may point out that this is not, strictly speaking, a recipe with booze. Yet I am choosing to compromise my shtick and risk my blog-cred in order to include these ribs anyway. They’re that good. The Rendezvous holds such an exalted spot in my memory that I was all set to be let down by this recipe. Didn’t happen. I still have half a cup of leftover dry rub sitting in my fridge, and I cannot wait to make these ribs again.

You there! Yes, you! You with the computer! Do you like pancakes? Yeah? How about crêpes? Alright, do you like fire? Well then do I have a meal for you… I sometimes get the feeling that Hungarian food is a tough sell in America, maybe because the first thing people think of is not any particular dish, but of Hungary’s HILARIOUSLY ironic proximity to Turkey and Greece. BAH HAH HAH HAH, good one.

That ends today with this foolproof gateway drug to Hungarian cuisine: ladies and gentlemen, say hello to palacsinta. That’s PAUL-ah-cheen-tah to you, bub. Are you sick of the same old crêpe? Try these Hungarian pancakes. This particular recipe, Gundel palacsinta, takes its name from one of the oldest and grandest restaurants in Budapest and has everything you could want in a meal. Hell, it has everything you could want in a weekend: Booze! Fire! Chocolate! Cinnamon! Nuts! You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! The results, I promise you, will be nothing short of crêpetacular.

The recipe for palacsinta really doesn’t differ much from that of its French cousin or from any of the other folded, stuffed pancakes eaten throughout South Central Europe. The only difference is a splash of soda water added at the last minute. Does the carbonation really make the pancakes fluffier? Or does the added liquid just make the batter thinner? What do I look like, nineteenth century Hungarian physicist Lóránd Eötvös? It’s tradition, cut me some slack.

What does make palacsinta unique among all its neighboring pancakes are the fillings. The specific recipe I’m writing about is a pretty legendary one, a mixture of ground walnuts, cream, sugar and cinnamon topped with a liquored-up (and potentially flammable) chocolate sauce, but there are plenty of other sweet and savory fillings where that came from. Some other classics include a cottage cheese/sugar/cinnamon mixture (which can also be made with ricotta, as described here), or apricot jam, which I ended up making for some variety alongside the Gundel palacsinta. I also just happened to have a fridge full of another Hungarian favorite, leftover chicken paprikash – a stew of onions, paprika and chicken, and one of my go-to recipes (I usually make this version). I chopped the chicken small into pieces, rolled it up in a pancake and doused it with sauce.

The French might turn up their noses and ask “what is this crêpe,” but my point is that you really can’t go wrong with palacsinta. The pancake is forgiving; you’re eating it more for its texture than it’s taste, which is bland enough to go with just about anything. So keep experimenting until you come up with a winner. My chicken paprikash concoction wound up being a great success – in fact a cursory googling revealed that it wasn’t a new trick at all, but actually an old Hungarian standard by the name of Hortobágyi húsos palacsinta (that’s WHORE-toe-badge-yee WHO-show-sh to you, sonny).

Hortobagyi Husos Palacsinta

Gundel Palacsinta, sin fuego

The basic recipe for palacsinta follows, as described in George Lang’s The Cuisine of Hungary and confirmed by my great-grandmother. Recipes for the Gundel filling come afterwards.

Palacsinta – Hungarian Pancakes

Makes 8-9 pancakes

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup all purpose flour

¼ cup club soda

Butter for frying

Mixing this recipe is easy: combine the eggs, milk and flour, beat until smooth; add the soda just before making the first pancake. The cooking technique is where things get interesting. Set the heat to medium, add butter to the pan, and pour in ¼ cup or so of batter. Palacsinta are supposed to be very thin, so don’t use too much. As you add batter, lift the pan and tilt around in a circle so the batter just coats the bottom. It’s not that hard, but it does take some practice so don’t be disappointed if you end up with a worthless piece of crêpe on your first try.

A couple things that can make things easier are the right kind of pan, and the right amount of butter. A traditional crêpe pan is almost completely flat, with very low, sloped sides, so it’s easy to slide a spatula under the pancake. But not everyone has a crêpe pan cluttering up their kitchen, and as celebrity chef Donald Rumsfeld used to say, you cook crêpes with the utensils you have, not the utensils you want: any frying pan with sloped sides will do, but steer clear of big cast iron skillets with tall, steep sides… like the one in all of my pictures. I managed to survive because I kept the skillet well-buttered: started with about ½ tablespoon, and added another small chunk (say ½ teaspoon) before each new pancake.

Even if that fails, a hole-y crêpe is nothing to worry about and can be easily concealed with some artful rolling. There are a number of different schools of thought on palacsinta assembly. Most common is the cigar, popularized by the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer hires Dominican instead of Cuban cigar rollers at his friend’s crêperie, with explosive consequences. This is what I grew up with, because if you’re feeding a small army, say at Christmas dinner, you can pile the rolled crêpes into a casserole and keep them in the oven on low heat. We used to cover the top layer with sour cream, which goes well with our usual fruit or sweet cheese fillings and traps in moisture so that the pancakes don’t get dry and brittle in the oven. But what if you’ve got a really chunky filling? Or say you’ve got a sauce to pour over your palacsinta, and want some more surface area? Try gyro-style: roll two sides of the pancake in, and leave it kind of open at the top. Fold it in half like a taco. Or fold in all four sides, like a wrapping a present, until you’ve got a rectangle. Hell, go crazy: make it a rhombus.

Pictured: Hole-y Crepe

Since the palacsinta are so thin they come off the griddle very quickly, and as a result it really isn’t much work to crank out a stack of pancakes tall enough to feed a crowd. But in case you’re daunted by the amount of work, and are asking yourself “why do I have to put up with this crêpe?” (LAST ONE, I promise), I ask you to just stay tuned through to the end of the following recipe, which is spectacular enough to make it worth while.

Gundel Palacsinta

Nut Filling:

1 cup milk or cream

1 cup sugar

2 cups chopped/ground walnuts

¼ cup raisins

1 Tbsp cinnamon

Zest of 1 lemon

1 shot dark rum (~ 1 ½ oz.)

• Mix milk or cream with sugar. Bring to boil.

• Lower heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Once all ingredients have been added, keep stirring the mixture over the heat for a few minutes until it reaches the desired thickness. You don’t want the filling to be dry, but you also don’t want it soaking through your palacsinta.

Chocolate Sauce:

3 egg yolks

3 Tbsp cocoa

3 Tbsp sugar

1 cup cream

4 Tbsp bittersweet chocolate

2 shots dark rum (~ 3 oz)

(can substitute brandy instead)

• Melt chocolate in a small pot or double-boiler, add cream, stir to combine, and bring to boil.

• Remove from heat and add whisk in beaten egg yolks.

• Add cocoa, sugar, rum. Return to low heat, and stir until smooth (about 5 minutes.)

Serving:
Stuff your palacsinta and set them aside.

Put the chocolate sauce in a serving dish.

Now heat about an ounce or so of rum in a glass or a measuring cup – do this over a candle if you’re being romantic, or nuke it if you can’t be bothered, but just make sure the rum is warm or it will not ignite. Dress each plate with a small splash of hot booze and a dusting of powdered sugar, then quickly place a palacsinta on each dish, drizzle with chocolate sauce, and tell your squeamish friend to put away the fire extinguisher and hit the lights. As soon as you touch a match to each plate, the desserts will be engulfed in blue flame, and they should stay lit long enough for you to carry them out and present them ceremoniously to your awestruck guests.

Unless of course you’ve used paper plates… aw crêpe.

In honor of Tax Day, please enjoy this article, the final installment in our three-part series, following Hundred Dollar Bills: Not Just for Lighting Cigars Anymore and Windex vs. Komodo Dragon Tears: Which One Gets Your Monocle Cleaner?

Maybe this is crazy. After all, it did basically start with a dare: I said I was cooking with booze, Laura said “yeah, but can you do champagne?” and the gauntlet was dropped. But is there really anything wrong about cooking with champagne? Plenty of recipes call for white wine, and champagne (or cava, or any of the other sparkling white wines from California, Italy, Australia, etc.) doesn’t have to be much more expensive than its bubble-free kin.

Maybe it’s Jay-Z’s fault, maybe it’s convention reinforced by countless New Years Eves, or maybe it’s the inherent ritual of breaking the foil, twisting off the cage and popping the cork, but something about champagne makes it seem like an indulgence permanently reserved for special occasions, like it would be socially transgressive to even think of doing any cooking with it. And that is exactly why it’s so much fun to up-end an entire bottle into a pot on the stove. So tonight I present a single meal, with three recipes: champagne risotto, pears poached in champagne, and a French 75 cocktail. One with a little booze, one with a lot of booze, one to drink while you’re cooking the first two.

Now, heh, about that first recipe… funny story…

… Here at FoodJunta we obviously love our risotto and have written about it time (mushroom) and time (asparagus) and time (radicchio) and time again (lemon). Oh, and the day before yesterday (leek and chard)… how awkward. But endlessly variable risotto keeps popping up for obvious reasons: it’s delicious, it seems exotic and complicated (What-borio rice?!), and it’s actually very simple. So if I’m covering well-trodden ground I apologize, and feel free to consult Claire’s excellent risotto-primer for more thorough advice on technique, but there’s just something uniquely satisfying about adding champagne in this recipe. Oh, and mine has a garnish. As they say in Italian, “Boo-ya.”

I’m sorry friends, that must be the cocktail talking, which reminds me that I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you start the risotto, here’s a beverage to keep your left hand busy while your right stirs the rice. According to legend the French 75 was invented by hard-drinking American fighter pilots who were moonlighting in the French airforce during World War I, and who just could not get drunk enough, dammit, on the local champagne. They named their solution after a famous French 75 millimeter field gun. Both, in the words of famous 1920s bartender Harry Craddock, hit with remarkable precision.

French 75

1 sugar cube, or 1 teaspoon superfine sugar

1 shot (1 ½ oz.) dry gin

1 Tbsp lemon juice

6 oz chilled champagne

Ice

Twist of lemon peel

• Mash sugar cube and lemon juice at bottom of a Collins glass.
• Add gin.
• Add ice.
• Top with champagne and add twist of lemon.

mmmm, delicious

Far from being a waste of good champagne, the citrus and the herbal astringency of gin complement dry, fizzing champagne incredibly well. Now you should be sufficiently well armed to tackle the risotto. The following recipe comes from the Food Network. Oh well, there goes my blog cred, but I swear it’s delicious…

While champagne seems like an unusual thing to cook with, there is a long tradition of it in France and as a result there are dozens more recipes to be found out there. Back me up here, Alice B. Toklas: Toklas is probably best known as Gertrude Stein’s partner and literary alter ego, and for accidentally introducing pot brownies to the American public, but her 1955 article on cooking with champagne shows that it is a pretty versatile ingredient. So add your kitchen, along with French restaurants and World Series locker rooms, to the list of places where a bottle of champagne is welcome. I’m not saying it isn’t for special occasions anymore. I’m just saying that maybe now you can have more special occasions.

Champagne Risotto

Serves 2

4 thin slices prosciutto

3 Cups chicken broth

12 asparagus spears

2 Tbsp butter

1 shallot, chopped fine

¾ Cup Arborio rice

¾ Cup Champagne

¼ cup grated Parmesan

¼ tsp salt

½ ground black pepper

• Preheat oven to 450 F.
• Lay proscuitto slices on a baking sheet and cook for 6 or 7 minutes. Take the prosciutto out when it is just starting to brown and get crisp, and set it aside. As it cools it will get crispier, and eventually you’ll crumble it up to use as a garnish that truly is The Champagne of Baco Bits©. Alternatively, feel free forget about the proscuitto and leave it in there for, oh, say 10, 15 minutes? If you’re nervous about never having made risotto before, nothing lowers expectations like having your guest catch you pulling a charred hell-scape of smoking pork out of the oven. Worked for me. Completely intentional too. But please make sure you have some back-up ham; the garnish is delicious.

• Boil chicken stock, add asparagus and cook for 2 minutes. Then remove asparagus with slotted spoon, cut into ½” pieces, move the stock to simmer on a back burner, and let’s get this risotto started.
• In another pot, sauté shallot over medium heat in 1 Tbsp butter until translucent (about 3 minutes).
• Add rice and stir for a few minutes to coat grains with butter.
• Add Champagne and simmer for 3 to 4 minutes.
• Add ½ cup chicken broth. Simmer for 2 or 3 minutes. Repeat. And repeat, and repeat, ad infinitum. Or at least, like, ad twentyminutem… keep adding ½ cup amounts of stock, letting it absorb, and adding more, until the rice is creamy. And taste the risotto; this is something so basic, but which I so often forget to do. Is the rice tender? Does it taste like risotto? Hey, congrats!
• Stir in asparagus, Parmesan, salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon butter.
• Serve, topped with crumbled prosciutto. If you haven’t burned it all.

Now I’ve saved dessert for last here not because The Man says that’s when you eat dessert but because, unfortunately, it was the least successful part of this meal. That said, I think this is a really promising recipe. It just so happens that I botched the pears: I’m a fan of Asian pears, see, which are crisper and sweeter than your average pear, and, in addition to those virtues, also happen to be (A) in season now and (B) for sale at my local farmer’s market. Naturally I decided to give them a try. While my fusion cuisine dreams weren’t exactly crushed (the poaching liquid was delicious and would have made anything taste good), the pears themselves were blandly sweet and a little disappointing. I would advise sticking with a good, old fashioned pear-flavored European pear. Incidentally, the more traditional way to poach pears is with red wine, cloves and cinnamon for a richer, spicier flavor. This Boston Globe recipe is a good example, but before I go back to red I think I will be trying again with champagne and Bartlett pears. See below:

Pears Poached in Champagne

Adapted from epicurious.com.

Serves 2

1 bottle champagne

1 cup sugar

¼ lemon’s worth of zest

½ vanilla bean, split in half lengthwise

2 large firm Bartlett pears, peeled

• Pour entire bottle of champagne into pot. Make sure the pot isn’t too wide; you want the champagne to come up high enough to just about cover the pears
• Stir in sugar, then add all other ingredients.
• Simmer until pears are tender. This could be anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes; cooking time varies a lot depending on pear size. Since you may very well be serving the pears in halves or quarters, there’s no shame in cutting into the pear to test if it’s cooked through.
• Let pears cool, sitting in their liquid before serving. Apparently you can even make this in advance and store in your fridge for up to a week.
• Serve in a bowl with poaching liquid poured over pears.

A waste of good champagne, you say? Fine, don’t use good champagne. Problem solved! Honestly the quality of the booze does not matter for the risotto, as long as it’s not too sweet, but you will want something drinkable to poach your pears with.

Citius, altius, fortius, eh?

Good morning sports fans, and merry belated Winter Olympics. Weren’t they great, these past few weeks? Rushing home after work to catch some sweet biathlon footage only to find… really? More ice dancing? Okay, seriously, how many rounds of this are there? But in spite of tape delays, ice dancers and Apolo Ono’s soul patch, there was as always a lot to love about the Winter Olympics. I know that the image of a crowded late-night sports bar with half a dozen massive flat screens turned to a curling match is one I will cherish for years to come.

The host of these past games, Canada, is a surprisingly large country located somewhere north of Seattle, and as the photo above clearly shows, its chief exports include hockey players, beer, and maple syrup. Okay, so there’s no maple syrup in the photo (and honestly one of those silver bullets looks suspiciously like a Coors Lite), but I have it on good authority that the amber stuff is a treasured national resource. Brown gold. Canada-C. You know, like Texas Tea? Oh forget it. Tonight, as a tribute to our hockey overlords north of the border, and as part of Food Junta’s ongoing wall-to-wall Olympics coverage, I present to you: bourbon maple syrup. Swifter, higher, stronger! Sweeter, tipsier, earlier!

Times have changed since Nick Charles woke up and asked for “a drop of something to cut the phlegm” in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and nowadays whiskey in the morning may not seem like the breakfast of champions, but bourbon and maple syrup are a natural combination of flavors. I had never mixed the two over breakfast before, but the pairing is by no means original: big-name distillers Evan Williams and Jim Beam have their own brands of pancake syrup, while on the bartending side maple syrup has become a popular ingredient at whiskey joints. And in Michigan one chef’s brand of maple syrup, aged in bourbon casks, has earned the closest thing America has to a royal warrant: “it’s one of Oprah’s favorites.”

Yet despite the great taste, the marketing, and all the Oprah-atic fervor, finding a recipe to make bourbon maple syrup at home proved to be a challenge, an emotional voyage, a journey of redemption; indeed, it would take heart, passion, spirit and determination, along with grit and an almost superhuman will to succeed, in order to endure all of the Google searches necessary to reach that one proud, golden, magic moment where –

What? Sorry, I’ve watched too much Bob Costas lately. Anyway I ultimately triumphed over adversity and found two recipes, one with a little liquor, one with a lot. The first proposed flaming vanilla beams (sliced open, seeds scraped out) in 2 tablespoons of whiskey, with the remnants being poured into 1 cup of syrup. Problem was, most of the liquid evaporated in the flames, leaving only a very (very) subtle vanilla flavor. Maple syrup is pretty damn good by itself, and this recipe just doesn’t add enough to be worthwhile. As long as I’m quoting literary booze-hounds in this post, Henry Chinaski famously said, “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start.” I assume he was talking about spiking maple syrup, and so today’s recipe, as if you even had to ask, is the one with a lot of booze. It is delicious.

This recipe is very simple, with two pretty obvious main ingredients. First, the booze: I know that bourbon is from Kentucky, not Canada, and I know that there’s even a brand of whiskey called Canadian Club, which really would’ve fit better into the whole narrative of this year’s Olympics. But Canadian whiskey is rye whiskey. Bourbon is sweeter and has a stronger taste, and for our maple-flavoring purposes it seemed like the best choice. So now it’s a NAFTA recipe, sue me.

On to ingredient #2: maple syrup, like ice dancing, has been plagued by scoring controversies. In your average supermarket’s maple syrup aisle (hey, a guy can dream right?), Grade A maple seems like the obvious choice. But be warned, syrup grades are based on purity, not quality. Grade A wins its high marks for being sweeter and lighter colored because it’s been filtered more – because there’s less maple in it. If I just wanted sweetness from my syrup I’d save money and boil sugar cubes. Don’t take the maple out of our syrup! Buy the darker, more flavorful Grade B!

But uh… angry mobs aside, all maple syrup is pretty delicious. And here, arguably, is how to make it better:

Bourbon Maple Syrup

Adapted, oddly enough, from this kosher butternut squash bisque recipe.

1 cup bourbon

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup maple syrup

Optional: 2 vanilla beans (de-seeded) or a drop of vanilla extract

Stir brown sugar into bourbon over low heat until the mixture is thickened, reduced by half. Add maple syrup, simmer for 3 to 5 minutes and let cool to room temperature. I might also suggest adding a couple of vanilla beans (surprisingly expensive) or a drop of vanilla extract during the simmering – adding the one highlight of the first recipe to the strong caramel, maple and bourbon flavors of the second.

Naturally you’ll need some sort of syrup delivery device at this point. Kevin’s Johnny cakes recipe from a couple weeks ago would be an obvious choice. Vanilla ice cream, it turns out, is another perfect match. But I, as usual, fell back on my Dad’s pancakes. This recipe, one of the first things I ever learned to cook, makes pancakes that are a little smaller, denser, and more flavorful than your average fat, fluffy diner flapjacks.

Dad’s Pancakes

Serves 2

Dry:

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

Wet:

1 cup liquid

1 egg

1 Tbsp oil

• Flour: I use 1/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 cornmeal, 1/3 white whole wheat flower. Collecting all those different flours may sound like a pain, but the flavor is well worth the effort and certainly got me hooked – I remember one morning years ago I woke up and discovered my parents were out of cornmeal flour, and I was so fixated on these pancakes that I decided it was worth my while spending 30 minutes using a mortar and pestle to grind polenta (which we did have)  into flour.

• Liquid: I use buttermilk for pancakes, regular milk for waffles. Double the oil for waffles. And if you really get wrapped up in the spirit (ugh, unintentional pun) of your boozy breakfast, go ahead and add a tablespoon of whiskey to the batter too. It’ll add a slight flavor and aroma to the finished product.

When the syrup was mixed, the pancakes fried, and the waffles… ironed?… I invited a handful of hungry friends over, and with Pat, a real, honest-to-Gretzky citizen of Canada, presiding over the festivities, we sat down to ponder whether maple syrup could really be improved. Now I love the stuff at least as much as the next guy, and I still don’t know if today’s recipe is really an improvement. But it is delicious, and it is different: slightly more liquidy, and with a rich caramel flavor. As Kevin mentioned in his Johnny cakes post, even old favorites can use a new twist some times, and it’s always worth experimenting with booze in your food.

Remember the Olympic motto, folks: The most important thing is not to win but to take part. I’m Bob Costas. Good night, America.

After hours of stirring and steaming (Part I), and weeks of soaking in alcohol (Part II), this week saw the third and final act of our holiday saga: the eating of the Christmas Pud. Not content with just one epic ordeal of a recipe on the table, we preceded the pudding with a meal of homemade pork tamales, a culinary challenge that may warrant its own post in the future (Lard In Your Food?), and surely a dish that any Victorian gentleman worth his sideburns would recognize as a Christmas classic. Hrmmnyes, indubitably. I’m sorry, did I say Christmas classic? That’s a typo; I meant “monocle-droppingly grave breach of decorum.” But hey, this is America, right? Bah humbug, bring us tamales and pudding!

D-Day for a Christmas Pudding is not just a simple matter of passing out servings. Before knife touches pud there are still three major steps left in this marathon: making sauce, reheating, and serving properly. The process pays off in pyrotechnics and (spoiler alert) a logic-defyingly delicious dessert.

Sauce:

In case you were worried that this booze-intensive recipe, followed by weeks of liberal sprinklings of brandy, would meet with a sober, alcohol free end, FEAR NOT! No Christmas pud is complete without its traditional topping, a combination of butter, sugar and brandy called Hard Sauce.

The first thing to know about Hard Sauce is that you need to make it a few hours before you serve your pudding, because it needs to re-harden in the fridge until it returns to the consistency of butter. Yes, this alleged “sauce” is yet more proof that Brits and Americans do not speak the same language; it’s solid, spreadable, and has about as much in common with a conventional sauce as Christmas Pud has with a Jello pudding cup.

Hard Sauce: Recipe from Saveur, makes 1 ½ cups “sauce”

12 Tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature

3/4 cup sugar

4 Tbsp brandy or rum

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy – this is possible to do by hand, but an electric mixer would save a lot of time. Either powdered sugar or granulated sugar can be used; powdered results in a smoother texture. Then add brandy, beat until everything is combined, and refrigerate until pudding time.

Reheating

Time: 2 hours

It might be tempting to rip the covers off your pudding when you finally remove it from its cool, dark resting place, but in order to making the reheating process easier you’ll want to keep those layers of paper, foil and towel cinched around the rim of your pudding’s bowl. Once again you’ll have to attach a twine handle and repeat the cooking process described many moons ago in Part I, lowering the pudding onto a platform at the bottom of a simmering pot. Thankfully it only needs to steam for two hours this time, not the original eight. (EIGHT!?)

Serving

After steaming the pudding, take its cover off and set it aside to cool slightly. That’s right, even after two more hours of steaming you still have to wait, but a little cooling will make the pudding less likely to break up when you upend it onto a serving plate. It comes out as a mottled, glistening, dark brown dome shape, almost black, in fact. And it gets even darker after you light it on fire.

Considering the time that a pud spends soaking in liquor it probably doesn’t need much help to turn into a holiday firebomb, but nevertheless it is tradition to pour a shot of alcohol on top and set it ablaze before triumphantly carrying it to the table. One would usually do this with brandy, the same brandy you’ve been sprinkling over the pudding for the past few weeks or months, but a few rounds of sazerac cocktails during tamale prep killed off our bottle before dinner time and we had to resort to rum. Whatever your ammunition of choice is, heat the liquor on the stove briefly (booze ignites more easily when it’s warm and evaporating) and pour it over the pud. Strike a match. Hit the lights. Merry Christmas.

So what does it taste like, this ball of raisins and peels and currants and spices and beer and rum and eggs and flour and, yes, beef fat? Well first thing’s first: it doesn’t taste like meat. Years ago I remember my Dad making an apple pie with pig leaf lard at Thanksgiving, and there was a faint but distinct bacon flavor. No such problems with Christmas Pudding. And to dispel another holiday-dessert-related fear, the pud is nothing like a fruitcake. In fact it is incredibly moist, with no trace of any bready, cake-like texture.

The most recognizeable flavor on the first bite was the char from the freshly-extinguished booze fire. That’s not to say the burnt flavor was overpowering, it was just the only one I could recognize; over the past five weeks of curing all twenty-or-so of the ingredients had blended together completely, and the pudding was still very strongly flavored, it was with a new and unfamiliar taste. Textures varied from bite to bite, but while I might be able to guess that a crunchier spoonful probably had an almond in it and the squishier one that preceded it didn’t, both had exactly the same flavor – sweet, rich, with maybe a little bit the tart sharpness of raisins, currants and citrus peel, and an aroma like the spices in a hot cider or mulled wine. It was very good.

It was so good in fact that I wish I could have reached for seconds. I think we all would have, if we’d been physically able… Which brings me to my last observation about Christmas Pudding: MAN is it heavy. The stirring, the curing and the laundry list of ingredients crammed inside give this pud the density of a black hole. And that’s before the Hard Sauce. I think the five of us made it through a third of one pudding, and remember, we made two.

So the saga of Christmas Pudding ends with a half-eaten dessert headed back to the cupboard from which it came. Hey, it spent five weeks there already, at least we know the leftovers will keep. I can honestly say that this is the longest recipe I’ve ever attempted, and I certainly wouldn’t set out to do it without three or four other pairs of hands to help with the work. But in the end it think it was worth both the work and the wait; the pudding wasn’t just good, it was also exactly as strange and unique a dessert as you would hope to get from a such a bizarre recipe. I can see why people in England look forward to this ritual every year. I’m not making any guarantees about next Chrismas, mind you. But I think at least now I understand.

Happy Holidays.

Oh it’s a looker, that Christmas pudding.

I hope you disabled the sarcasm detector on your computer before reading that last line, or else BAM! Where’s the needle? It broke clean off.

When we last saw our Christmas pudding it had just been mixed, stirred, steamed for eight hours, covered, stuffed into a dark pillowcase, and shoved to the back of a cool, dry kitchen cabinet to sit for several weeks. The CIA would have been so proud. In today’s post we take a look at what weeks of soaking in brandy have done to our dense ball of fruit, liquor and holiday cheer. Oh, and beef fat. Don’t forget the beef fat.

A quick note about time and space: I should mention that the timeline of my Christmas pudding posts doesn’t exactly match up with my Christmas pudding preparation. By the time my friends and I reconvene just before Christmas to ignite, slice and devour the pud, it will have been curing in booze for five or six weeks, although I will have been writing about it for only three. Damn, there goes my shot at a Peabody award. What can I say? I’m a slow writer.

The pudding had been sitting in its deep, dark, boozy cave for two weeks before our whole gang got together again to witness its baptism by liquor. Sean, the keeper of the pudding, had been making sure it didn’t dry out, but the rest of us hadn’t laid eyes on the thing since it went into its steaming pot a fortnight before. What? It’s a Victorian recipe, I can say fortnight. When all the various layers finally came off the bowls, we stared in awe, for the first time, at… uh…

… Mom always said that if you can’t say something nice don’t say it at all, but I can say something nice, and I swear I’m going to get to it later, but first I need to warn anyone who may try this at home that the pud, in mid-curing process, looks pretty disgusting. It is more solid and cake-like in its consistency, but after eight hours of cooking and the two weeks of soaking, the whole thing reaches a dark, homogenous shade of brown and you can just barely make out the anonymous lumps of dried fruit from the pudding they are suspended in. It kind of looks like cold chili. Or a muddy terrazzo floor.

WOW, what salesmanship. If I didn’t sell you on this recipe last week with tales of raw beef fat, then dingy terrazzo is sure to seal the deal. Here’s the thing though: it smells delicious. When I got my face close up, to scope out that cake-y consistency, I was hit by the most amazing aroma, and while a saying that Christmas pudding “smells like Christmas” is a cliché that could get my poetic license revoked, your nose could honestly be fooled into thinking you were in a house where half a dozen different winter dishes were cooking. The pud smelled sweet, from the candied fruit; caramelly, from the brown sugar (and the rum?); spicy, from the cinnamon, cloves and mixed spices; alcoholic, from the Guiness, rum and brandy. And it did not, to my relief, smell the least bit beefy. The bits of suet completely dissolved during cooking, and melted into the mixture just like butter would. Relieved and intrigued, we toasted our puddings’ prospects with a round of hot toddies and got to work.

Recipe-wise, this week is pretty simple:

Ingredients:

A Christmas pudding

Brandy

Directions:

Sprinkle booze on pudding.

Both puddings were slightly damp and sticky to the touch. One had a tiny bit of rum pooled on the side. On it, we sprinkled one tablespoon of brandy. On the drier one we sprinkled two. Then both went back into the cabinet for a few more weeks.

If you’re anything like me, you’re going to wake up next Friday, go to your window and yell at the nearest street urchin, “You there, boy! What day is this?” When he replies, “Why it’s Christmas Day, sir,” make sure to rush back to your computer and head straight for Food Junta, where we will be presenting the final installment of the Christmas Pudding Tales. Stay tuned.

The saga continues next week.

Move over, The Canterbury Tales, and get that weak shit outta here, Beowulf: from now on whenever I get a hankering for a real Medieval epic I will look no further than today’s recipe for Christmas Pudding. One Thousand and One Nights? How about one thousand and one different kinds of dried and candied fruit? Hey-ohhhhhhh, thank you I’ll be here all month.

Now listen up, sonny, because this ain’t your Bill Cosby’s pudding. Christmas Pudding, or “Pud” to its friends, is a dense cake-like ball of dried fruit, sugar and breadcrumbs, bound with eggs, beer and beef fat, then lovingly bathed in alcohol for days, months, even years before being set alight, engulfed in a bright-blue fireball, and served with a side of brandy-laced butter called “Hard Sauce.” Don’t adjust your computer screen, you read all that right. Beef fat… liquor… fire… is this Christmas or Ozzfest? Despite the pious and innocent name, this just may be the MOST METAL RECIPE OF ALL TIME! It’s certainly the booziest ever presented in the e-hallowed e-halls of Foodjunta. Not to mention the longest…

Today’s recipe originates from a Medieval harvest custom where meat would be chopped up, mixed with dried fruit and then baked in pastry shell to help it last through the winter, thereby making Christmas Pudding arguably the best meat-preservative-inspired dessert of all time. Arguably. Over time, generations of pudding eaters gradually reduced the meat, increased the fruit, and padded the recipe with all manner of spices, liquors and religious symbolism until it reached its current, definitive form in Victorian times when it was immortalized in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as “a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quatern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” Bedight indeed. Despite annual Grandpa-mandated viewings of the 1951 Alistair Sim film version of A Christmas Carol, I had never actually heard of Christmas pud until my friend Sean mentioned it to me a few months ago. “If you really want a recipe with booze,” he said, “check this one out.”

Christmas pudding has been around for so long that there are probably thousands of different ways to prepare it. You can read George Orwell’s recipe here and here, or the U.S. Army’s here. But Sean, it turned out, just happened to have an old hand-written recipe that had come into his family by way of an English boarding school, and that’s definitive enough for me. Hell, for all I know Oliver Twist may have asked for seconds of this very pudding. The prospect of a dessert made with liquor and beef fat was enough to entice a few more friends into signing on, and so it was that two weeks ago a pretty well-staffed kitchen stood ready to learn the true meaning of Christmas.

The following recipe makes two puddings. Why two? Well, if, hypothetically, you are making your pudding from a friend’s old family recipe then the first is for eating and the second is royalties for the use of the recipe. Or, if you’re making this at home, then one is to eat this Christmas, and one is two keep until next Christmas. Or I just didn’t feel like halving the recipe. Who knows.

Ye Olde Ingredientes:

8 oz. shredded beef suet (see explanation below, as well)

1 tsp. “mixed spice”

Also known as “pudding spice”, this bafflingly vague Anglicism refers to a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice. We confused it with plain allspice, which I have since learned is HERESY, so BE THEE WARNED, gentle pudding maker, and get thee to the spice aisle of thine supermarket. Wherein you shall find it under the New World name of Pumpkin Pie Spice.

½ of a nutmeg, grated

¼ tsp. cinnamon

4 oz. self-rising flour

Yes, this is different from plain old flour, and I’d never heard of it either. Major brands, like Gold Medal, make self-rising flour, but it isn’t always easy to find. If necessary you can make it yourself: 1 cup all purpose flour + 1½ tsp baking powder + 1/8 tsp salt = 1 cup self-rising flour.

1 lb. soft brown sugar

8 oz. white breadcrumbs

8 oz. sultanas

That’s “golden raisins” to all you non-Brits.

8 oz. dark raisins

20 oz. currants

2 oz. almonds, chopped

2 oz. mixed candied peel

We used fruitcake mix.

2 oz. candied citron peel

Grated peel of 1 orange and 1 lemon

½ apple, peeled and finely chopped

1 carrot, grated

No, really.

4 eggs

4 Tbsp dark rum

5 oz. stout, such as Guinness

5 oz. barley wine

Or 5 more ounces of stout if you cannot find barley wine.

Intermission:

Wow, this is really a long list. Some traditional recipes limit the number of ingredients to thirteen, or one each for Jesus and the 12 Apostles. This one clocks in at an even 20, thereby including all 7 dwarfs as well. Alright, back to work…

Ye Shall Also Need:

Your biggest mixing bowl

Two ~9” dia. heatproof bowls

Two pasta pots with lids

Two dish towels

Parchment or wax paper

Foil

Twine

A bottle of brandy

A wooden spoon

A cool, dark place

Mixing:

The recipe we used begins with an warning to “start early in morning.” Truer words have never been written about Christmas Pudding: the first day of preparation, from start to finish, takes at least 10 hours. Not being a bunch of morning people, we got off to a rather late start and tried to make up for it with the tactical brilliance of our division of labor: four people chopping and stirring, one mixing drinks. Did you know a proper Old Fashioned involves 5 minutes of stirring? That’s a fulltime job! I cannot recommend this arrangement enough.

Before I start with the directions, here’s a quick note on what is probably the most exotic ingredient in this recipe: Suet is the fat from around a cow’s kidneys, and while you may not find it on a supermarket shelf, most butcher shops are more than happy to get rid of it. They may even give it to you for free, and can usually grind it for you in-house. I say “usually” because, as if this recipe weren’t already Medieval enough, we happened to pick up our suet on a day when the meat grinder was broken and wound up having to chop everything by hand. Christmas Pud Pro Tip #23: If this happens to you, refrigerate your suet before dicing. It hardens and is easier to cut. Also make sure to ditch any leftover bits of meat.

When you’ve finally collected everything, begin by combining the dry ingredients (suet, flour, breadcrumbs, sugar and spices) in your largest mixing bowl. Mix. Add peel, fruit and nuts.

At this point the directions say to “mix well again”, but chances are you’ll now be starring in awe at the giant mound of ingredients that dwarfs your original mixing bowl, a veritable Krakatoa of holiday cheer that threatens to crush your entire party in a deadly avalanche currants and beef fat. You won’t know whether to stir it, or sacrifice a virgin to keep it happy. There really is a lot of stuff in the recipe; we just dumped the whole thing in a deep stock pot and moved on to the booze.

Deirdre demonstrates good "bartender's pour"

Combine all wet ingredients (stout, barley wine, rum, eggs) and beat together, then add to the dry ingredients in your mixing bowl/pot, grab the wooden spoon and get ready to stir.

Stirring is such an integral part of the Christmas pud ritual that in Victorian England the day traditionally reserved for making pudding was known as Stir-Up Sunday, and was even accompanied by a verse in the Anglican prayer book that reads “stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.” It was also a chance to incorporate some charmingly Dickensian child-labor, as all the kids in the household would be rounded set to work stirring the batter once for every loved one they wished well in the holidays. We humbly suggest updating the recipe for the twenty-first century by cracking open your laptop and stirring once for every Facebook friend. The batter gradually gets darker, damper, and more fragrant, until it reaches what our recipe calls “a good dropping consistency.” Picture the cafeteria lady slopping potatoes onto your lunch tray.

When the batter is finally ready, grease the two bowls, (with your leftover suet if you want to continue kicking it old-school) and divide the pudding into them evenly.

Cooking:

Now it gets weirder: Christmas pudding isn’t baked, it isn’t broiled, and it isn’t fried. It’s steamed for eight hours (EIGHT HOURS?!), which, it turns out, requires some forethought and engineering.

Start by placing a plate upside down in the bottom of each pot, then add 1 to 2 inches of water and heat to a simmer. (This creates a platform for the bowl to rest on, therefore steaming the pudding, rather than boiling it directly in the water.)

Meanwhile, cover each bowl of pudding batter with a layer of wax paper or parchment, then foil, then a dish towel. You are going to set the bowl inside the pot, on top of the plate, above the simmering water, but first check if your pot is wide enough to fit two oven-mitted hands plus the bowl. If so, congrats: drop it in and set your timer. If the bowl is a tight fit (and this is usually the case), then congrats as well: you’re about to channel your inner MacGuyver. Loop your string a few times around the rim of the bowl to cinch the towel on tight, then make your self a handle by taking another length of string and tying to the loop at two opposite places on the rim of the bowl. Then lower the whole contraption into the steaming pot, cover and… I don’t know… watch a movie. Have band practice. Put in a full day’s work down at the office. Read a book. War and Peace, maybe. Hell, write a book… Just know that you’re going to be hanging around for a long time. Keep a hot kettle on the stove and refill your pots with boiling water as needed every 30 minutes or so.

After eight hours (EIGHT HOURS?!) turn the stove off and let the puddings cool overnight. In the morning change the paper, foil and towel, and store in a cool dark place for a looooong time. Mine is currently hidden in a dark pillow case and shoved into the back of a little-used kitchen cabinet. Just how long the pudding sits is up to you; one recipe I found online helpfully suggested a range from 1 day to 2 years. Great, thanks a lot, Saveur. I’m told the longer the wait, the better the pudding. In England the cooking traditionally started on “the Sunday next before Advent”, or 4 to 5 weeks before Christmas, and in any case, after all this work it seems like a shame to let the thing set for any less than a month.

Curing:

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! Your Christmas pudding may get to sit still for a month, but you don’t. Check on the pud every week or so to make sure it isn’t drying out or sobering up. If it starts to feel dry to the touch, pour a tablespoon or so of brandy over it before sticking it back in the dark. These weeks, months, or even years of curing blend the collection of wildly different ingredients and textures into… well, I don’t really know. It certainly smells good – complex, spicy and unplaceable – but I won’t find out how the thing tastes for another three weeks.

I was serious, by the way, when I said I’d “be here all month.” Any recipe that includes directions to “let sit for between 1 day and 2 years” deserves more than a single post. So between now and Christmas I’ll be checking back in to keep you informed, first about the curing process, and finally about just how delicious this fiery, boozy monstrosity winds up tasting. Fingers crossed.

The saga continues next Friday.

Strap on your lederhosen meine damen und herren, and if you don’t have a pair then for God’s sake get thee to a lederhosiery: it’s time for Oktoberfest. In most parts of the country October means leaves changing color. Here in Los Angeles we traditionally celebrate it with earthquakes and wildfires, but this year, just to keep us on our toes, the entire state has been blanketed in cold, damp, grey misery. This wasn’t part of our deal, Satan! We want our souls back! But you know what they say: every cloud has a savory, braised lining, and in this case the frigid temperatures gave me a chance to ring in fall with one of my favorite winter dishes, carbonnades a la flamande. If the name doesn’t sound particularly Deutsch that’s because it’s the national dish of Belgium, but Belgium of course is the small Francophone country known for waffles, chocololate, mustachioed detectives and being invaded by… anyone? anyone? Germany! Happy Oktoberfest! All tangential geopolitical connections aside, carbonnades a la flamande is a simple recipe of beef and onions braised in lots and lots of beer, and that makes it a perfect match for this uniquely boozocentric holiday.

As with any beloved “national” dish, there are as many different versions of carbonnades a la flamandes as there are Belgian grandmothers, so what I’m presenting today is a Franken-recipe cobbled together from parts of this one, this one and this one. Before I get into the specifics, here are a few words on the three building blocks of this simple recipe:

BEEF: As with most any other stew-like recipes, carbonnades flamandes uses big, tough cuts of meat, chuck or rump roast in this case, which is great on the one hand because you end up with a lot of food, cheaply, but on the other hand does require some extra strategizing to actually make the meat chewable:

• First divide and conquer: Trim off the excess fat and cut the meat into strips, 2”x4”x¾” sounds about right.
• Second braise the meat (from the French braiser – “ to cook the shit out of”; from the Olde Frenche brese – “yea, verily, to cook the shit out of”) in liquid for 2 to 2 ½ hours. A long time, I know, but the upside is that while you’re waiting for a meal that promises to warm you from the inside, you wind up heating your apartment up as well. It’s a win-win.

Most recipes brown the meat on the stove and then transfer to the oven and simmer, covered, at 325 F. I had always used the oven in the past, but this week, in a triumph of laziness, I decided to leave the pot on the stove, uncovered, and stir occasionally. The results were great and it was much more convenient to stir, taste and control the heat with a pot on the stove. Also if you don’t have an oven-safe pot this allows you to do everything in one place, rather than browning in one pan, then transferring to a baking dish for the oven.

BEER: I chose Spaten Oktoberfest more for seasonal appropriateness and supermarket on-saleishness than anything else, but opinions vary on the best beer for carbonnades flamandes. Julia Child likes a pilsner, the Boston Globe says dark beer, and the FoodBeerTravel blog prescribes a Belgian dubbel. I’m told Jacques Pepin enjoys a fine Natural Light Lager which he loving refers to as “Natty Lite,” but he was unavailable for comment at press time. Honestly the brew in your stew (ugh… sorry) doesn’t matter much because you cook it for so long, and the subtler flavors that distinguish one beer from the other probably won’t survive hours of slow boiling. That said, you should still probably stay away from intensely bitter, hoppy beers like an IPA, which was after all invented to hold its flavor during the long, hot voyage from England to India. Chances are it’ll hold up pretty well in a bubbling stew pot too, and a taste that strong is not necessarily a good thing.

FAT: Some say you should brown the beef in oil or butter, then add bacon in a separate step; I decided to kill two birds with one blob of grease. Inspired by Claire’s Definitive Bacon Fat Primer from a few months back, I’ve been saving up a summer’s worth of bacon fat in my freezer – and since summer means tomatoes, and tomatoes mean BLTs, I now have what’s quickly becoming an annoyingly large surplus. So for this recipe I skipped the bacon entirely, and instead used the bacon fat to brown both the beef and the onions. If you’d rather make this the traditional way you can add 2-3 strips of bacon to the recipe, which follows below:

Carbonnades a la Flamande – about 6 servings

3 Tbsp oil, butter or… BACON FAT

3 lb. beef rump or chuck roast

3 large onions – 1.5 to 2 lbs

4 garlic cloves

1/2 cup beef stock

2-3 cups beer (about a bottle and a half)

2 Tbsp flour

1-2 bay leaves

6 sprigs parsley

1/2 tsp dried thyme

Occasional stirring

2-3 Tbsp red wine or sherry vinegar

• Brown chunks of beef, in batches if necessary, over high heat in half the bacon fat and then set aside. Each piece only takes a minute or two. And if you’re including bacon, fry it after the beef, set it aside too.

• Roughly chop onions and sauté in rest of the bacon fat until golden, ~15 minutes. Add minced garlic halfway through. Season with salt and pepper.
• Add broth, beer, parsley, bay leaves and thyme. Stir in flour until it dissolves.
• Return beef and juices to the pot and simmer over low heat for a looooong time. Two hours and eighteen minutes to be exact, or the full running time of Fellini’s 8 ½. It worked for me. Incidentally this is also the step where you’ll add the “occasional stirring,” especially towards the end, like around that press conference at the rocket ship. Oh sorry, also towards the end of the cooking time.
• Add vinegar. Seriously, don’t forget this at the end. It makes this dish. After hours of boiling I was a little disappointed when I finally sampled my stew; all the onions had made it surprisingly sweet. Was it undersalted? Should I not have used sweet yellow onions? (Probably not) But two tablespoons of sherry vinegar later the dish was completely transformed, restored to a savory balance with just enough acidic bite to wake up all the flavors that had mellowed and sweetened during the braising. Actually vinegar isn’t the only way to do this: one recipe I found left it out entirely and instead set two or three slices of French bread, crusts removed and spread with whole grain mustard, on top of the stew. Over the two hours of simmering the bread flotilla sinks and dissolves, thickening the stew, and leaving behind the sharp taste of mustard. Oh those clever Belgians. I can’t wait to try it myself this winter. But back to tonight’s dinner:

• Serve with egg noodles. Or potatoes. And spaetzle. And a pretzel. And a beer. And welcome to Fall.

We all know that when you think Food Junta you think hard-hitting investigative journalism, but tonight, on a very special episode of Booze In Your Food we bring you a tale of science, intrigue, vodka, cream, and tomatoes that MAY SHOCK YOU. Stay tuned!

The subject of tonight’s investigation is Penne alla Vodka. Alias: penne alla Russia. Alias: pasta with vodka sauce. Anything with three names deserves a long hard look at its sordid past, but even after several minutes of Googling, this recipe’s origins remain shrouded in mystery. Was it a marketing ploy by an Italian vodka distributor? The lucky mistake of some sloshed line-cook? An insidious Russian plot to infiltrate Hollywood’s trendiest restaurants and get revenge for Rocky IV? We may never know the truth.

What we do know is that penne alla vodka began appearing on American menus in the mid 1980’s and quickly became the coolest thing since the popped collar on Don Johnson’s blazer, eventually attaining obnoxious ubiquity (see again: popped collar on Don Johnson’s blazer), before leveling off as just another sauce in the Prego lineup. Now it’s here, and it’s good, and ultimately the question of how pasta with vodka came to be is much less interesting than the question of why? Because seriously, what’s the point of adding a clear, mostly flavorless alcohol to an otherwise perfectly fine pasta sauce? It was a question that had haunted me for years (a boring couple of years), and so help me I was going to get to the bottom of it. Even if it mildly inconvenienced me…

It all started simply enough, with a taste test to see if vodka’s story checked out. Did it actually make a better tasting sauce? I made the following recipe, which comes from Lidia Bastianich via Epicurious:

Penne alla Vodka for some reason…

One 35 oz. can plum tomatoes plus liquid – ideally  Italian San Marzano tomatoes

¼ cup olive oil

10 cloves garlic

Crushed red pepper

¼ cup vodka

½ cup heavy cream

2 Tbsp butter or olive oil

2 to 3 Tbsp chopped parsley

½ cup grated Parmesan

1 lb. penne

-          Boil water in a pot – you know, for pasta

-          Blend tomatoes and their juice – but whoa, easy there Ferran Adria, you don’t want to blend them too much and whip air into the tomatoes, turning them pink. Just a couple of pulses. I avoid this problem entirely by being too cheap to buy a blender. Dicing the tomatoes works just fine.

-          Heat oil in skillet, add garlic, brown lightly – about 3 minutes over medium heat, or until the garlic is imbiondito, or “blonded”, or lightly browned.

-          Add tomatoes and bring to boil

-          Add red pepper – boil a couple minutes

-          Add vodka – reduce heat and simmer until pasta is almost ready, then…

-          Remove garlic, stir in cream and butter/oil

-          Add to pasta – pour over hot pasta, add Parmesan, toss.

A few friends were over for dinner so I gave each person a bowl of penne alla vodka and a plate of penne al placebo (alias: penne alla Utah), which followed the same recipe but without the hard stuff. Both sauces looked the same and only one person ever guessed which was which. Kudos, Hem. Kudos. Three out of four testers were fooled into thinking that the booze-free penne al placebo was actually the vodka sauce because they found it more bitter than the genuinely alcoholic version. The facts kept staring me in the face: there was something about the vodka sauce that people seemed to prefer, and I still didn’t know what it was.

This New York Times article which ran last winter offered one possible answer: apparently alcohol is a versatile solvent which breaks down both water- and oil-based compounds. I’m sorry, let me pause here to push my glasses up my nose. Ahem. The reasoning goes that any alcohol works as a solvent, and vodka just happens to be a strong but relatively benign, colorless, flavorless choice, which dissolves and draws out some unspecified compound from the tomatoes, thereby improving the flavor. Perhaps it breaks down sugars, and perhaps that’s why my friends found the sauce without vodka to be more bitter. However I found very little to support the idea; apparently alcohol is a pretty weak solvent. Clearly the investigation needed to go deeper but I was already in it up to the press pass on my hat-band. I decided to call in the Feds.

Every couple of years the U.S. Department of Agriculture takes a break from stamping grades on beef to publish a crowd-pleasing page-turner called the Table of Nutrient Retention Factors. This document is an amazingly thorough spreadsheet in which the USDA attempts to enumerate every possible preparation of every food on the face of the earth (from “EGGS, POACHED” (p.7) to “SEAFOOD: FROG, TURTLE, BROILED, W/ DRIPPINGS” (p.16)), and then tell you how much of the original nutrients are retained after cooking. It is sobering data; you’ll think twice about breading and deep frying a turtle when you realize that OH MY GOD YOU’RE BREADING AN DEEP FRYING A TURTLE. But you’ll think three times about it when you learn that your turtle fritter will be losing 5% of its riboflavin on its way from pond to plate. Page 16, look it up.

I came across the department’s handiwork while working on a hunch: we all know alcohol burns off in cooking, right? Sure. Common knowledge. In every cookbook. But what if it doesn’t? What if I’m still tasting alcohol in the sauce? Well it turned out that the most shocking information in the USDA table was actually the least sobering: alcohol is damn near impossible to get rid of.

Remember that doofus in your high school French class? The one who was “sooooo drunkrightnow” after two pieces of rum cake? Theoretically possible! But probably still full of shit. And to the commenter who asked if she could get drunk by eating bread pudding with whiskey sauce? Yes! If the butter and sugar don’t kill you first. You can even be making Bananas Foster, light the rum on fire, watch it burn off before your very eyes, and still be left with 75% of the original alcohol. I guess the retention rates could be a legitimate concern for some people (pregnant flambe’ fans will be pissed), but this was a break in the case and I couldn’t have been happier. If the alcohol hadn’t burned off then it must have been contributing to the flavor. In fact in this recipe the vodka only simmers in the sauce for a few minutes, ten at most, so we can assume that at least half the alcohol gets left behind. That’s roughly a shot, plenty to lend a sharp, biting taste to the sauce.

Ultimately what makes penne alla vodka such a delicious and successful recipe is the collision of different, and in the case of the alcohol, unusual, flavors. IN THIS CORNER, in the white trunks, you have the rich, sweet combination of heavy cream and butter. AND IN THE OPPOSITE CORNER, in the red trunks, are the tomatoes, red pepper and vodka in all their acidic, spicy, astringent glories. The dairy smoothness remorselessly checks the heat of the booze/pepper/San Marzano axis, while the bite and spice of tomato sauce mixture slices through the cloying cream in a culinary clash of the titans that has Howard Cosell clawing at his coffin walls in excitement, and which ends up tasting quite good. Balance is usually the last thing that you would expect liquor to help you with, but in the case of penne alla vodka that is exactly what it’s providing. Hell, this recipe is such a model of perfect equilibrium that it takes almost exactly as long to make the sauce as it does to boil the pasta. The vodka sauce mystery may not be completely solved but hey, nobody knows who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep, and that’s still a great movie. With pasta this good I think I can live with a few loose ends.