White Chili with Chicken and White Root Vegetables (FM)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 bone-in chicken thighs
• Salt and black pepper
• 2 leeks, trimmed, well rinsed, and chopped, or 2 onions, chopped
• 4 parsnips, chopped
• 1 celery root, chopped
• 1 large or 2 medium turnips, chopped
• 2 all-purpose potatoes, chopped
• 1 tablespoon fresh sage, or 1 teaspoon dried [I assumed incorrectly that I had dried sage, but I didn't]
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 dried mild chile (like ancho), or 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 1 tablespoon cumin
• Grated zest and juice of 1 lime
• 2 cups any dried white beans, rinse, picked over, and soaked if you like
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro, plus more for garnish
• 1/2 cup chopped scallions, for garnish

Insane amount of white root vegetables and their peelings.  I've never worked with celery root before, but it smells phenomenal.  I wonder if people ever eat it raw.

I had to store them in 4 whole pieces of tupperware until the next day.  The potatoes darkened overnight, but they were old.

Mise en place.

Browning the chicken.

Sauteeing the leeks until softened.

After dumping everything in (except for the lime juice, scallions, and cilantro), I had to switch pots.

I cooked this silly dish for probably about 4 hours.  I was waiting for the vegetables to show signs of "almost disintegrating, but I never got there and stashed it in the fridge overnight to try again.  Thankfully, I had the bright idea of just checking to see if the vegetables were tender and so they were.
A good well-spiced dish with chicken that basically shredded itself after loooong hours of stewing.  At 6-8 servings, it's a rather unwieldy dish for the single chef.  Yeah, I imagine the dish will take me at least a week to eat at this point.

Thrillingly enough the cilantro came with roots which are not exactly all that easy to find, but Zak Pelaccio using them extensively in EYH so I rinsed/scraped/rinse what I had and threw them in the freezer until I accumulate enough to use in a dish.

Gula jawa and Sichuan Peppercorn Cured Bacon

from Zak Pelaccio's Eat with Your Hands:

• 6 ounces Sichuan peppercorns
• 2 1/2 ounces whole black peppercorns
• 1/2 pound kosher salt
• 5 ounces palm sugar (3 1/3 rounds gula jawa) or 6 2/3 tablespoons brown sugar
• One 12-pound Berkshire pork belly, skin removed [I got my hands on an 8-pound slab at Whole Foods]

Lots of peppercorns. Toast and grind them in batches.
Sichuan peppercorns are actually not peppercorns at all but is a member of the citrus family.

Gula jawa is at least according to Pelaccio and Wikipedia is supposed to be palm sugar. I bought something labelled gula jawa at Super 88 since it appeared to be a better value. However what I bought is made of coconut and cane sugar.

I seem to be doing a bit better when it comes to skinning this time around.

Though I got a bit sloppier with the fat caps toward the end.

Applying the cure.

Stacking them in the fridge to cure. Zak Pelaccio suggests 5 days; I assume waiting until next weekend won't hurt.

 
Hickory and cherry wood chips.  I never opened the bag of cherry ones.

 

Getting the smoker going.

The pork belly after being smoked for 6 hours.  It was disappointingly jiggly while I handled it (adding more chips or flipping it skin-side down for the last 2 hours).  Unlike my initial experience I achieved negligible moisture loss even after applying the old leftover cure I had.



All of it resulting in meat that at its thickest points are still pink and a fat cap that hasn't really experienced the magic.  All of those spices are very vague and skin-deep.
Might just do it Tom Mylan's way next time, but there's $50 worth of pork belly in the fridge I have to work through.  Some bits of it are still quite good.  Particularly the smoked meat.  Not so much the fat.

Preserved Lemons 1.0

from Girl in the Kitchen by Stephenie Izard:

•  2 1/4 cups coarse salt
• 9 lemons
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups vodka
• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1 teaspoon mustard seeds

Boiling the lemons in batches for five minutes.

I never managed to get this crazy amount of salt and sugar to dissolve into such a tiny amount of alcohol.  Sure, I've super-saturated pickle brine with salt and sugar many times, but I don't use alcohol to do it.

Throwing the jar down my bedroom floor for two weeks.  Crossing my fingers that they don't come out smelling ammonia-y like Mark Bittman says they could get if something's gone wrong.

I also wound up using bottled lemon juice to top off the liquid so the lemons would be submerged.

Strips of the result muddled with some club soda.  Pretty awesome beverage.  If I was in the mood or I had company, vodka certainly wouldn't be out of place.  And hey, it's not full of sugar and chemicals and is WAY more interesting that water with a squeeze of lemon.

I titled this entry 1.0 because I have recently read three different techniques for preserving lemons recently.  Partly due to fear of failure (stupid salt and sugar), I admit, and largely through curiosity, I definitely want to try Bittman's recipe when I run out of this batch.  Izard's had a longer shelf life and seemed more interesting in terms of spicing (oh I guess I could've played around myself) so I went with that first.

Zak Pelaccio's recipe in Eat wtih Your Hands (which I recently read and will inevitably cook out of) doesn't involve a liquid at all but involves packing the lemons with salt.  This techniques demands fridge space though and I'd have to be in the right moment for that.  I see myself making one of his two recipes for bacon soon...