Khao man gai is my favorite Thai dish, a careful balance of boiled capon (chicken), rice cooked in the resulting broth, a crucial garnish of cucumber and cilantro, and the miracle ingredient: the sauce, oh dear lord the sauce. You should definitely make the whole thing from Leela’s recipe at She Simmers, but that’s not what we’re doing here today. What we’re doing here is an insult to culinary tradition, albeit a delicious insult. We’re going to pun on the dish and make it into a burger.

Note that my name for this concoction makes no sense; we’re using neither khao (rice) nor gai (chicken). However, the original name doesn’t capture the key ingredient either (the sauce, the sauce!) so I’ll let it slide.

Ingredients

Burgers:

• 2/3 lb ground beef, 10% fat or more
• 4 tbsp khao man gai sauce (see below)
• 2 nice burger buns (brioche buns if possible)

Serves 2.

Directions

Combine all the sauce ingredients in your food processor and chop until they make a coarse, wet mix, no more than 5-10 seconds. Move to a small saucepot and bring to a near boil, then immediately take off heat and let come to room temperature (30-40 minutes).

While you wait, read Jim Ray’s post on grilling burgers. Start your grill and come back into the kitchen to make the rest.

Combine the cilantro and the mayo and refrigerate.

Toss the cucumbers in a small bowl with a few generous pinches of equal parts salt and sugar and let rest until you’re ready to top the burger; yes, this is all it takes to semi-pickle them.

Slice your buns while your hands are still free of meat juices.

In a large and cold glass or metal bowl, combine the meat and the khao man gai sauce. Use your (extremely clean) hands, and don’t overwork the meat. Just knead it enough to fold the sauce in. Shape two dimpled patties. Grill the burgers according to Jim’s method and don’t forget to quickly toast your buns.

To serve, spread cilantro mayo on the bun, top with the burger, then the pickles. Goes great with a beer or a drinking vinegar.

A bastardized recipe like this would deservedly roll the eyes of fusion-restaurant goers, but as an experiment in food-punning in your home kitchen, it’s fun and instructive. My apologies to Thai grandmothers everywhere.

I understand - you probably think the idea of drinking vinegar is weird. But vinegar is just an acid, and every good soda has an acidic component. (In Coke, it’s phosphoric acid. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying it sounds even weirder than vinegar.) Here in Portland, Pok Pok Som makes great drinking vinegars in some obvious fruity flavors, and some unexpected ones (celery, honey). As mentioned in episode 6 of the Salt & Fat podcast, I figured I’d play with flavors I haven’t yet seen or tried.

So today, I bring you fennel drinking vinegar. It combines the aromas of fennel and star anise - the most obvious pairing there is. Once you make the syrup, mix it 1:4 with soda water over ice, or use as an ingredient in cocktails and desserts. Heck, you could make milkshakes with it.

Ingredients

• 2 medium-large bulbs fennel, with fronds
• ~1/2 quart coconut vinegar
• 6 star anise, whole
• 2 cups sugar

Directions

Heat a nonstick pan over medium heat and toast the star anise in it for 2 minutes until fragrant.

Chop the fennel bulbs into 1-2” chunks and place in a tall, narrow container large enough to hold them, but not much larger. (We want to minimize exposure to air.) Add the star anise and cover with enough coconut vinegar to submerge all the fennel; weigh it down with a heavy can if needed. Make sure the container is closed airtight and store in a cabinet, or in another dark, room-temperature place, for 3 days. Check it occasionally to make sure none of is exposed to air. If it is, stir the fennel.

After 3 days, remove and save the star anise; remove and discard as many fronds (herby green bits) as you can. Pour the fennel-vinegar mix into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Move to a stock pot and add the star anise back in. Start the pot on medium-high heat until it begins to bubble, then turn down to medium-low and cook, uncovered, for 15 minutes.

Strain the mix through a fine-mesh strainer and discard the fennel solids. Wash out the stock pot and add the mix back in. Stir in the sugar. Bring to a light bubbling over medium-high heat, then turn down to medium-low and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. You’re essentially making syrup at this point.

Using a funnel, pour the syrup into bottles or jars. Leave it uncovered to cool down to room temperature, then cover and move to the fridge, where it will keep for many months.

Notes

You are unlikely to find coconut vinegar at your local all-purpose food store; instead journey over to your Asian supermarket and look for something like this:

Coconut vinegar is very mild, with no trace of coconut taste. It’s also usually pretty cheap (excepting New Agey domestic brands.) In a pinch, you could substitute cane vinegar (often available in stores that carry Filipino foods.) As for sugar, I use fine cane sugar, but anything that dissolves well should work.

Enjoy this refreshing, licorice-like drink all summer long!

We’re super happy to announce a brand new project: the Salt & Fat Podcast. We hope to bring you 30 minutes of discussion about food and cooking once a week. You can listen to it on the new Mule Radio Syndicate website, or subscribe in iTunes. Let us know what you think and how we can make it better.

This is the first “recipe” I ever prepared myself. It all started when my mom saw me heating up jarred pasta sauce for a late-night dinner. (I could do that much without assistance.) She suggested it would be more interesting if I fried up some onions and canned tuna, then added the sauce. She was, as always, right: this was way more interesting. I now had options to choose from, ingredients to wrangle, steps to follow! I’ve tweaked the basic recipe back and forth many times, learning in the process the valuable lesson that adding more salt and fat improves the taste noticeably. This is the version I make today, some fifteen years later. (Recipe after the picture)

Ingredients

• 1 lb pasta - ideally penne or rigatoni, though spaghetti will also do
• 14 oz can crushed tomatoes
• 6 oz canned tuna, the good stuff
• 2 anchovy fillets, chopped
• 1/3 cup frozen peas
• 1 tbsp capers
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped roughly
• 1 medium sprig parsley
• 3 tbsp good olive oil
• Salt, pepper, crushed red-pepper flakes to taste

Directions

Cook the pasta however the package instructs you to.

Meanwhile, quickly strain the tomatoes by pouring off the juice from the can - no need to user a strainer. (Save the juice for another use).

Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil over medium heat for 1 minute and add the anchovies, the garlic, and the red pepper (if using). Stir for no more than 1 minute, then add the tomatoes. After another 2-3 minutes, add the tuna and break it apart into bite-sized pieces using a wooden or silicone spatula. Also add the capers, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook for 5-10 minutes to desired thickness. Add the peas and gently fold in to heat through when the sauce is nearly done. Salt liberally, pepper conservatively.

Your last step is to strain the pasta when cooked and add it back to the now-dry, off-heat pot into which you’ve poured the remaining 2 tbsp of olive oil. Add 2 tbsp of the sauce and toss to coat the pasta fully.

To serve, make a nest of pasta in a wide bowl, top with more sauce, and sprinkle with the parsley. I won’t stop you from grating on some Parmesan, but this already tastes very rich without it.

Notes

Muir Glen is a good domestic brand of canned tomatoes. For tuna and anchovy, I’m a big fan of Ortiz, or whatever is caught close to where you live. There should always be some peas in your freezer, and none in a can in your pantry. Capers? I buy them preserved in salt, then rinse them and adjust the salt levels; they taste brighter and less acidic that way. 

You can play with this recipe by omitting the anchovies or capers, adding onions in step 1, or throwing in some olives for a faux puttanesca. Follow your heart, gut, and head.

It’s here again, tomato season. As we established in our tomato-butter sauce post, you’re best off eating tomatoes one of two ways:

1. Fresh when in season
2. Preserved when not in season

The sauce is one way to lock in their flavor, cooked down and frozen for later use: a bowl of fresh pappardelle in February.

My favorite method, though, is oven-drying tomatoes and storing them in olive oil.

Here’s the short-and-sweet recipe:

Ingredients

• Fresh plum tomatoes
• Salt
• Olive oil

Directions

Pre-heat your oven to 200ºF.

Wash the tomatoes, remove the stems, and core out the stem piece at the top. Slice them in half and remove all seeds, water, and jelly-like insides; reduce them to just the meaty pieces. Drain well.

Line a large baking tray (with sides) with at least 1/4” of salt. Place the tomatoes on the salt bed, skin side down.

Slow-dry on the medium rack for about six hours, until slightly leathery. Store in jars in olive oil, refrigerated.

Use as a substitute for watery, flavorless, out-of-season tomatoes on sandwiches, in sauces, or as a winning antipasto.

Notes

If possible, use plum tomatoes - the long, pear-shaped ones. This is the best tomato to use for sauces, and it works best here as well. Varieties include Roma and San Marzano. Most other tomatoes should work, as long as they’re good - save heirlooms for sandwiches, though. (Oh and, while I’m a fan of canned tomatoes, don’t use them for this - they’re far too juicy and soft.)

Don’t splurge on the olive oil here. It should taste clean, but not too assertive. You’ll want the tomato flavor to shine, so go with a decent, cheap brand of oil.

When seeding tomatoes, work in a colander set over a large bowl. This way you’ll get to save all the delicious tomato water - a beverage that puts “tomato juice” (pureed tomatoes diluted with water) to absolute shame.

Make sure your jars are perfectly clean and the lids close snuggly. Cover the tomatoes with oil completely. This is the secret to preserving things in oil: start clean and make sure nothing is exposed to air. The oil will do the rest. The tomatoes will keep for months in the fridge, or a week or two unrefrigerated. What may happen in the fridge is, the jar will get cloudy as the oil congeals. This is perfectly natural and does not affect the taste of the oil or the tomatoes in any way; you can thaw out the jar in a bowl of hot water and refrigerate again over and over.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that oven-dried tomatoes are approximately 500 times tastier than most fresh tomatoes. Here they are in action, topping a sandwich of chicken salad made with fish-sauce fried wings and kewpie mayo.

The clock is ticking - run to the market and grab all the tomatoes you can!

“Last week for cherries!” the fella at last weekend’s farmer’s market crowed, and I knew I had to do something. I ended up taking home six pounds of the last of the season’s Rainier and Bing cherries.

Here in Washington, we grow more sweet cherries than just about any place else. When I first moved up here, these things flummoxed me — they weren’t tart like the cherries I knew back east. And these white things that look kinda like over-ripened crabapples? You guys think they’re so special you named ‘em after the big mountain off in the distance?

Turns out Rainier cherries are worth moving to the west coast for. They’re pretty fragile as far as cherries go, more suspectible to big temperature swings, and farmers tend to lose a lot of fruit to birds. This makes them pretty spendy, even close to the orchards¹. At the start of the season, I’ll see Rainiers go for something like $5 a pound. When they hit their peak towards the end of July through early August, they’re a little cheaper. All of which is to say: these are premium fruits worth hanging on to for as long as you can as the season ends.

As luck would have it, it’s pretty easy to preserve cherries in syrup and alcohol — our friends at American Drink have a great primer on just that. I took my pal Albert’s advice and did a bit of experimenting. Here’s what I came up with.

Ingredients

• 2lbs of cherries - Bing, Van, Rainier, go nuts
• 1 cup of water
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of alcohol of your choice (rum, brandy, various liquers, bourbon, wine)
• A few clean, wide mouth jars with new lids

When you’re picking a liquor, have fun, but keep it straightforward. Brandies and other distilled wines make a good choice. I matched bourbon with both Rainiers and Bings and they came out great. You could even do a white or a rosé wine with Rainiers to match their light color.

You’re probably going to want to invest in a cherry pitter because pitting more than a couple of cherries with a paring knife or screwdriver (seriously) is a pain in the ass. I like this one from Oxo.

Make sure your jars are clean. I like to run them through the diswasher without soap or boil for about 10 minutes, just to make sure.

De-stem, wash and pit your cherries. This will take a while. SAVE THE PITS. Seriously.

Add the cherry pits and the water to a pot and bring to a boil. The seeds will add some color and flavor to the syrup. You could add other flavors at this point — a cinnamon stick, lemon or orange zest, a vanilla bean, peppercorns — but go easy.

Once the water’s boiling, add the sugar, stir to dissolve, and leave on the heat only long enough to make sure all the sugar has dissolved. Remove the pot from the heat, then add your booze.

A word about the liquor here: you’re going to need to determine on your own how boozy you want these cherries to be. A full cup should do the trick; I wouldn’t recommend more than that. You can boil off some or all of the alcohol if you just want the flavor without the hooch. And you can skip the alcohol all together. You might need to double the amount of syrup you make.

Fill your jar with as many cherries as you can — I found it was best to do a few at a time so I didn’t end up with big gaps. Pour the syrup over the cherries, then let them cool to room temperature then refrigerate. They should last a few months in the fridge.

The obvious use for these is as cocktail cherries and I won’t stand in your way there. Spoon a few with a little syrup over a scoop of icecream to bring a little summer flavor back into fall.

1. Rumor has it that in Japan, where people tend to be rather perfectionist about their produce, Rainier cherries sell for as much as a dollar a piece. ↩