Husk Hot Sauce: An Attempt

Things I Googled while attempting to make my own hot sauce: 

"What kind of mould is dangerous?"

"Is eating mould like eating mushrooms you find in the wild?"

"What is penicillin?"

"Is Sean Brock married?"

"Does vinegar kill mould?"

"What can go wrong with fermentation?"

As you all know, we’ve been into extremely slow food lately. The latest experiment in this new hobby was Sean Brock’s Husk Hot Sauce. Kell gave me his Heritage book for my birthday and it’s pretty much been like my Bible ever since.

I have no idea why bladder support also follows me on Twitter.

The hot sauce was like an amazing science experiment. Firstly, it took four months to complete, which may as well have been four years to me. I was. SO. Goddamn. Excited. To try it.

Except, of course, a week into it, I noticed a bit of mould on the top. This panicked me.

I was then required to tweet directly at Sean Brock and ask his advice.

Having Sean Brock respond to my tweets after I’ve watched the Senegal episode of Mind of a Chef 46 times is even better than that time Taye Diggs followed me on Twitter. (Seriously, it was better.)

ANYWAY. I asked Sean Brock what to do about this mould dilemma. “No worries,” he said! “Mould protects it. Just remove it carefully before the vinegar step.”

“Just do it carefully,” is possibly the most terrifying sentence in the English language, akin only to, “Use your best judgment.” What if you are like me, and you do things neither carefully nor with good (let alone best) judgment? If you’re talking about carrying groceries or choosing a life companion, I feel like there’s some wiggle room there. You break a couple eggs, you break a couple hearts, and it’s all good, right? But, like, if you’re talking about removing mould from food that is four months old and people are going to the ingest said food and go to work the next day, that is a whole different situation. That’s like, life and death, or at least life and intestinal health.

Stressful. Very stressful.

A Brief History of How to Make Husk Hot Sauce*:

• Mince 5 pounds of peppers in your food processor
• Mix with 5 tablespoons of kosher salt.
• Ferment for two months.
• Mix with 1 gallon of white vinegar
• Ferment for 2 months
• Blend
• Serve

*Proper recipe here.

Here’s the good news: It totally worked! Four months later, I’m thoroughly enjoying my hot sauce and totally have not poisoned anyone.

The bad news? It’s not quite where I want it to be. As those of us north of the 49^th know, Charleston Hots are not particularly easy to find here. I used a blend of jalapenos, scotch bonnets and various other peppers instead. This resulted in 2 things:

Check that Blendtec product placement

1. My sauce was not a gorgeous red as Husk’s is, it was a strange taupe (taupe is polite)
2. Being somewhat fearful of the punch scotch bonnets could pack, I opted for less of them and therefore have not nearly the heat I want. 

This, dear readers, is a blog about learnings. Key learnings. And the very first key learning of any kitchen is that nothing you do within the confines of your stove, fridge, and the four walls that contain them is a failure. Recipes, particularly the ones you don’t write yourself, are meant to get you going in the right direction, not to teleport you to the destination. Tweaks are always the most crucial part of any recipe, which is why your cookbook should always have a pencil right next to it.

What did I learn here? Number one: Go big or go home. Never mind that quasi-pepper jalapeno foolishness. When I begin the next fermentation (with an aim to give it as Halloween presents) I’ll use primarily scotch bonnets. Unless I get some Charleston Hots, which may mean Sean Brock and I are living happily ever after on a large farm on Wadmalaw Island, or it may mean I used the Internet to source them.

Second key takeaway: I didn’t use enough salt. I’m pretty sure that was a contributing factor to the mould issue, and beyond that, I’m pretty sure I was hesitant with the salt because I didn’t properly measure the pepper and there were various moving parts I wasn’t sure about.

You know what though? It’s still pretty damn delicious. And I made it. And I can make tiny jars of it and wrap a twine bow around them and make twee labels on my printer and get away with giving a nearly free item as a gift because I made that shit, you know?

Bottom line, if you want something awesome to do this summer, watch Mind of a Chef and make hot sauce.

Harissa Spiced Roasted Cauliflower Dip

Does anyone else feel like cauliflower is the YouTube Child Star of the produce world?

Let’s consider. For years, cauliflower was just living its life. Quietly. Humbly. Jazzed up with a cheese sauce now and then for Thanksgiving, cauliflower was content to be steamed, roasted, and microwaved even. Cauliflower was likely very happy then. It probably reflects on the simpler days, when it was occasionally passed over for broccoli, eggplant maybe, asparagus in spring. It could still go to the mall without being recognized sometimes.

But the Stage Mother of the food world couldn’t allow broccoli to live a simple life. That Stage Mother (vegans, it seems) realized the cauliflower could be catapulted into a higher-achieving performance than its humble side dish beginnings. They pushed cauliflower and compared it to other foods, made cauliflower practice over and over, tarted it up and hyped it to their friends. They forced it to become buffalo wings, macaroni, kung pao chicken and, perhaps most unfairly, steak. 

Cauliflower briefly flourished in the limelight. Unaware of its own potential to become a meat-like substance, cauliflower pushed its limits, working harder, and becoming more and more achingly desperate for approval. It may have been the cauliflower alfredo sauce where it finally cracked. Realizing it was not meant to become a cream-based sauce of garlic and parmesan, cauliflower bucked. Like most head-shaving, wig-wearing, drug-imbibing public meltdowns, the discourse on cauliflower’s denouement was savage.

Prices spiked. As nearly every past star of The Mickey Mouse Club knows, selling out is the worst thing you can do to your fan base. The disavowal of cauliflower was immediate. Think pieces on the price of cauliflower emerged. Several reasons were considered, not unlike how the new boyfriend or girlfriend of a child star is often blamed for their downfall. Climate change became the Yoko to cauliflower’s John.  The price of cauliflower was used to forecast everything from the Canadian dollar to the apocalypse. It was, as it were, The Day the Music Died.

You can’t call it a comeback, but it seems the price of cauliflower has regulated. It’s still given some love from vegans, but most people have moved on to the new flavour of the month, Aquafaba (chickpea water, for us laypeople.) Cauliflower has had the meltdown, done the time in rehab, and is now promoting its new Buddhist, clean-living lifestyle. The unauthorized biography is soon to come. Before it falls off the map completely, only to be featured on ironic t-shirts by hipsters in 20 years, who will have very little memory of the Great Cauliflower Meltdown of 2015, allow me to present an excellent recipe that celebrates cauliflower’s beauty, as cauliflower. It’s not a stand-in here; it’s the main event.

You need:

• 1 head of cauliflower, chopped roughly
• ¼ cup of olive oil, plus a little more for roasting
• ¼ cup of tahini
• Juice of one lemon
• 1-2 tbsp of Harissa spice (depending on how spicy you like things- you can find this in Bulk Barn if you have trouble getting your hands on it)

Start by coating your cauliflower with a little olive oil and covering it with the harissa spice blend.

Roast it at 375 for 40 minutes or until soft and golden. Dump the cauliflower, with the olive oil and spices into a blender. Add ¼ cup of olive oil and the tahini to the blender. Pulse until it’s the consistency of hummus.

This is an amazing dip to serve with crackers, pita, or a nice crudité. Let cauliflower be cauliflower. You can still #cleaneating, #vegan and #eatclean this all you want.

Baked Salmon

Well hello again. It's been a while since I posted a recipe. That's because I don't have a stove where I live now so I only get a chance to cook anymore when I can mooch off other people's ovens. And as you know, Easter is our Big Thing! So I drove up to Ottawa and my LadyGirls and I got to lay out an Epic Meal for our friends as we love to do every year. We always try to come up with a meal plan that will interest everybody that I have the pleasure to see just once a year. Being the mom, I get to boss the menu. For now. Sooner or later I'll lose that power since Bailey and Kelly are forces in their own right now when it comes to menu planning! But this year, I planned the whole menu around my very special and dear friend Erica. I met her at the dinner last year and our two souls found each other. It was magical. Like two lost souls that have drifted apart for a millennium and had a coming together. I will love her always. A smart, compassionate and fearless woman. If you want to know more about her, you can follow her on Twitter @wickdchiq or read her fabulous blog on health and beauty called Not in My Colour. She is a stylist extraordinaire and I'm blessed to call her my friend! But I digress. I asked Erica if there was anything she'd like to see on the dinner table this year and she said she'd like to see lamb and fish. Done girlfriend!

So onto the menu plan. We were expecting around 20 people this year. We wanted a sort of international flavour. So the appetizer was Hummus and Baba Ghanoush and tasty things built around a sort of Middle Eastern idea. Dinner was buffet style consisting of Harissa boneless leg of lamb roast and baked spicy salmon, Costa Rican rice and beans, scalloped potatoes, tabbouleh, roasted root vegetables and bread. Pretty yummy and easy to prepare. Haha so much so that we were ready for the guests hours before they arrived so my LadyGirls and I got to play hairdo and makeup games and frolic and have some mother/daughter fun! Most of the items on the buffet have the recipes already posted on this blog. But here is the salmon.

Now keep in mind that what I really wanted to do was a whole baked fresh fish. A Caribbean style spicy whole fish. But that was in my dreams since I live two thousand miles away from any ocean. And after an exhaustive search, we had to settle on a piece of salmon from the grocery store. I was ashamed of my life I tell you! I hoped that the other items on the table would make up for the lack of a jazzy fish. But it actually turned out to be a favourite of everybody. And the beauty is that you can use this spice rub on any fish you like.

So let's do this! One hour before you serve the dinner, squeeze the juice of a lime all over a whole fillet of salmon (or whatever fish you're using.) Leave the skin on. Or if you're using a whole fish, squeeze the lime inside the cavity and make slits in the flesh and squeeze the lime all over that.
Let that stand for 30 minutes.
Now for the rub:
1 Tablespoon of medium curry powder
1 Tablespoon of smoked paprika
1 Tablespoon of allspice
1 Tablespoon of ground ginger
1 Tablespoon of salt
1 Tablespoon of freshly ground pepper
1 Teaspoon of cayenne pepper. or 2 if you love it spicy.
Now this will be enough spice mix to keep in a jar and used for other occasions. You only need to use 2 tablespoons or so if it. It's not a blackening seasoning. It's just for flavour. So try it with 2 tablespoons, or use 3 if you have a whole fillet.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and rub the spice mix all over the fish. Bake it for about 30 minutes uncovered. Or grill it if you're lucky enough to have a grill! That would even be better. But we had to bake due to fire laws at Bailey's condo. Give it a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkle of chopped cilantro or parsley before serving. Easy and delicious. This will probably become your Go To fish rub from now on! Cheers friends!

Homemade Sourdough Co-blog

My sister wasn’t lying when she said bread baking is a labour of love. Sometime around 15 days or so ago—could be more, certainly not less—I went over to her kitchen bubbling over with anticipation (that’s a sourdough starter pun, for y’all uninitiated). “It’s sourdough day!” I texted her first thing in the morning. Of course, I was a little disappointed when I realized our first “sourdough day” consisted of adding some flour to some water, stirring it, and then watching approximately 19

This was days and days ago it seems

episodes of ER. However. We persevered.

Well rather, Bailey persevered. She dutifully fed the starter every day. She took its photo, tended to its temperature, sniffed it often, and generally cared for it with at least as much attention as one would give a newborn. After a week, it was “sourdough day” again.

Unfortunately, we picked a weeknight for baking and I made the grave error of getting the sponge going at 5:30 in the afternoon. By 9:30, after what in hindsight seems like the most grievously hasty leavening ever attempted, we thought we’d just give it a go and throw it in the oven.

TBF.

If you don’t know what that is, you’re not ready to make bread. You’re probably not even ready for the starter. You need to go read Pollan’s book. 

So we fed the starter again, cooed to it, coaxed it, and decided to wait until a Sunday for our next attempt so that we could truly devote an entire day to the process.

Unfortunately, we read ever so slightly too late that the sponge should sit overnight, and that even after that, there are at least six hours between making dough and turning on the oven. So we were thwarted on Sunday night, and instead let our shaped boules sit in the fridge until Monday.

Which is probably for the best. At this point, we had been working on the bread for about thirteen hours straight, not including starter cultivation of course. Every bowl Bailey owned was either filled with starter, a back-up sponge, a water float test, rising boules, or some other manner of living, breathing, goddamn finicky business. Our flour was long gone. Like addicts, we shook the last of the white powder from the crevices of the bag. “Just another gram or two is all we need,” our inner monologues hissed with the fervor of the obsessed.

And so finally, after a seemingly interminable wait, we were able to finally put the loaves into a blazing 500 degree oven and await the next bout of dejection in a long and bitter process.

And yet……

It smelled like bread at the end. It had a crispy and golden exterior like bread. A noticeable crumb, and even a pleasantly toothsome texture. This, by God, was really bread. “So we will keep the starter?” We asked ourselves. “Let’s not throw it out after all.”

There must be something to the bread thing. Stay tuned.

Pain for le pain. 

Homemade Sourdough

Bread baking, it would seem, is not without its distinct challenges. I can see why it's given such biblical and, in fact, pre-biblical importance. 

It's almost god-like, actually. The creation of this little microbial world. The cultivation of cultures— requiring your undivided attention and true devotion for the better part of a week— is akin to something between raising a colony of sea monkeys and owning a Tamagotchi. With one misstep, your time, patience, effort, and love are all for naught. Your anticipation of crumb, the exact-right chewiness, and the hope for perfectly-formed ears all deflate as unequivocally as your sadly-flat loaf. The disappointment is monumental. As you might feel if the child who at one point in their preteen years was filled with the promise of being a prima ballerina, or a hockey star, or perhaps a physicist (the type of occupation that would certainly bring their parents a comfortable retirement in a sub-tropical locale) and instead emerge in adolescence as slightly stupid, or maybe a little dim-witted, or wholly lacking ambition.  

Bread that emerges from the oven and doesn't meet your expectations seems slightly selfish, lazy even, and the personification of baked products and their various motivations sneak up on you. This past week, two of the LadyGirls' emotions have been tethered to the whims of said baked good, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. If you haven't yet read or watched Michael Pollan wax rhapsodic about the eroticism of leavened dough, or its ability to sustain human life indefinitely, I can't expect you to understand. But if you have seen this, or if you yourself have attempted the trials and tribulations baking your own wild yeast bread provides, then I know I don't need to explain this feeling to you. You understand, because you have attempted. You understand, because you have nurtured a subculture of your very own. You understand, because you have tasted. 

It begins with starter. Ironically-simply named; as it takes over five days to complete, has entire forums devoted to how to “raise” a starter, and houses a flourishing community of thousands of lactobacilli. Some starters are kept in the family for years, others still offered as a gift of welcome to a new neighbour, and now even Williams-Sonoma is ready to make you pay $30.00 USD for a twee card and something that costs you all of $0.30 to make.

How do you make the starter? You need flour and water. You need to be patient and you need a warm-ish spot. You need a vessel for your mixture to set up roots. Beyond that, it’s personal choice. My favourite recipe was TheKitchn, and they’ve got a great recipe for the actual bread after your starter gets going, too.

If you’re ready to make the leap into what seems to be the Iditarod of baking, you need to allot roughly 6,039 hours for it. This exercise of patience goes against every fibre of my being, particularly the desire to attain the highest amount of achievement in the shortest amount of time, but baking sourdough is a labour of love.

Secondly, I do not have a kitchen scale. My only encounter with them has been for an herbaceous measurement of sorts, and thusly I am not the proud owner of one. Further to the aforementioned desire to do things quickly, I also have never attempted to make something that required a measurement so precise it comes down to grams. However, you can still do this, even without a kitchen scale or a proofing basket, or dough hook. Your hands are better (they have all that fabulous bacteria with which to feed your fermenting mixture), you would possibly have better results with a scale but it’s not imperative, and you will need a Dutch oven. (You should own a Dutch oven anyway. It’s worth it between this bread and any coq au vin you’ll ever make.)

When your starter is ready, it will be a frothy mixture similar to something between a crepe and a pancake batter. This is just one of many moments of truth. You’ll also smell it— it will have a distinctly fermented smell, like a mild cheese. If your starter isn’t frothed, it isn’t alive. You have failed to properly harness and nurture the wild yeast from the air around you, and you’ll have to try again. Or try troubleshooting.

Then you must make the sponge. Do not drink so much wine the night before you plan on starting the bread that you simply cannot function, much less attempt other various fermentations besides the one in your gut, so that you have to leave making the sponge until the morning you want to eat the bread. Listen to me carefully— I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it took a million years to do this. Start it the night before, let it sit all night.

Instagram does wonders for a TBF

In the morning, you will now begin what will become an entire day of tinkering in your kitchen, with various cycles of rising, kneading, pulling, resting, dusting, proofing, folding, and finally baking. It is not to be rushed. If you were a pioneer, you would probably start this at some time around 4 a.m. You are not a pioneer, so starting around 8 a.m. is okay, but if you plan on eating bread before breakfast the next day, get moving.

I can’t detail for you the stages of bread making. I’ve done it twice now, with a TBF (total bread failure) the first time and a mildly successful outcome the second. Check out the demigod of country bread baking instead, Chad Robertson. We have a long weekend coming- if you start tomorrow, you can have fresh bread in your lunch on Tuesday.

You can do this. It’s a week-long project, but like most things that take time to build, it’s worth it. Even a failure is worth it, if for no other reason than next time You. Will. Want. To. Succeed. Like learning a skill like knitting, or skiing, or riding a bike, your innate desire to achieve will be activated, and you will find yourself on sourdough forums at 2 a.m., wondering if you didn’t feed your starter enough (Did I let it go hungry? Did it suffer?) Or, if maybe you let it get too cold (Did it take on a chill? Did it suffer?) Like a new mother, you’ll be asking your peers, “What’s your feeding schedule?” “Do you find 72 or 73 degrees to be better?” “How many times a day do you check on it?” Until one day, you nail it. Perfectly formed ears, the exact amount of crumb, that perfect chewiness, the subtle sour taste. A labour of love, and a monumental achievement.

Lavender Rosewater Syrup

How wonderful is it to have people over? I don’t know about you, but I absolutely love hosting a get-together. I like a nice girls-only party (we call it Liz Taylor Night in these parts) where you can watch Mean Girls on loop and drink gin and gossip.

I also love a good mixed party, which as I’m typing is reminding me of my very first mixed party. I was about 13, and it was sooo exciting because obvs my crush was going to be at the party and I spent endless hours daydreaming about the perfect moment where he would ask me to dance and I would gaze into his big brown eyes and we would be 2gether4Ever. (I can’t even hashtag that because in my day they didn’t have hashtags. You only had your Hilroy notebook to doodle on and practice your signature with his last name. Shit was real back then.)

What actually happened at the mixed party was the boys breakdanced to Rapper’s Delight, and us ladies ate ketchup chips and applied Bubblegum Bonne Bell.  My crush DID actually speak to me at one point, to ask me if I had heard the new K-Ci & JoJo song and when I said no, HE LET ME BORROW HIS CD. It was AMAZING y’all. I listened to “All My Life” on permanent play for the weekend and at the next school dance he asked me to dance to it and we were like, totally a thing, and it was beautiful until he got a crush on my best friend and I got a crush on his best friend and it all fell apart. One day he went to McDonald’s for lunch without inviting me and We. Were. Over.

Ahh, youth.

Anyway. Having parties is fun. It’s mostly fun because as I mentioned in our 5 à 7 post, it means you don’t have to leave your house. But other people have to leave theirs and while some strange people on this earth enjoy doing that, most people don’t.  Especially in Canada. Especially in the dead of winter. So, you should probably acknowledge people did such a thing by giving them a little treat for coming.

This is an easy recipe for simple syrup, elevated with aromatics like lavender and rosewater. It takes all of five minutes to make, but it makes your guests feel special.

Start with 1 part of water to 2 parts of sugar in a pot. Heat until the sugar dissolves and remove from heat (we aren’t making a caramel here). Add a tablespoon of lavender and a teaspoon of rosewater to the syrup and mix. Let the lavender “steep” for a few minutes before you pour (and strain if you want the lavender bits gone) into individual jars (you can easily get these at the Dollar Store) or you can pour larger amounts into mason jars.

Feel free to be creative with your aromatics! I also made one with cinnamon, star anise, maple, and some juniper berries. You could try something fresher with citrus and cloves, or get that traditional tonic flavour with lemongrass.

Add a tablespoon of the syrup to a gin and soda, vodka soda, or make your tee-totalling guests feel special with mocktails! With a pretty ribbon and label on the jars, these little giveaways are just one more thing that will set you apart as a super-star host. How-to video below!

Ed.’s Note: The YouTube playlist in the creation of this blog was the best ever.