The Beauty in the Beast

He Ain't Heavy

Back in 1997, Richard Rhodes published the brilliant Deadly Feasts, a study of the evolution of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, also called mad cow disease. Princess V read it and convinced me to do so as well. A well-written book about a fascinating topic, Deadly Feasts is also something of a deal-killer when it comes to beef consumption. Basically, the BSE threat comes down to three problems.

First, you can't see it coming. If the beef you're eating is infected, you can't see it, smell it, or taste it.

Second, the first symptoms are a death sentence. Once the prions begin to affect your brain, you're well on your way to brain damage and death.

Third, the USDA has been overwhelmingly slow and mind-numbingly stupid in its responses to BSE dangers. Preventing the spread entails essentially just two restrictions, but those restrictions have to be enforced absolutely: (1) no meat (especially not beef) can be fed to cattle and (2) downer cows—cows showing symptoms of BSE—have to be destroyed and not not not fed to anyone or anything.

So we don't eat a whole lot of beef in our house. Some, yes. Girltzik is fond of barbecued brisket and likes my oyster beef. Princess V likes pasta and meatballs. I like an occasional prime rib or some fajitas or maybe a bit of stroganoff. A few months back, I had an outstanding osso buco at a local Italian restaurant (Siena).

Okay, it's not exactly an out-and-out boycott, but compared to the way we ate when I was a kid, I may as well be a vegan. Growing up, I ate at least a couple of burgers every week. Pot roast showed up every week or two. Meatloaf, beef stew, and meatballs also made regular appearances.

Most important of all, my father believed in steak at least once a week—preferably grilled or broiled. Steak had a limited range of meaning for Dad: porterhouse, t-bone, rib-eye, rib steak, and tenderloin all qualified. Top sirloin was something you put in stews. Chuck, blade, seven-bone, and round never got more than a sneer. I think Dad considered steak—good steak—a measure of his overall financial health. Dad spent a portion of his childhood in poverty, so it was not uncommon for him to refuse various foodstuffs (rice-and-beans, collard or turnip greens, stew meat, grits, organ meats of all kinds) because they were "poor folk food." Steak was Dad's anti-poverty food—his middle-class status indicator. If we were eating steak, we clearly were not poor.

Princess V says the steak-as-status-symbol attitude is generational, that her father felt the same way. "Eating steak meant we were upper-middle-class."

These days, I rarely think about steaks, and I can't remember the last time I had a real rib-eye craving. What I've found in the past several years of limited beef consumption is that steak—no matter how beautifully marbled, no matter how well prepared—makes me logy. If I limit my intake to four or five ounces, I can avoid this problem. Sure. Stop after five ounces of juicy, prime cut rib-eye. Just say no to crack.

This week was almost one of those rare exceptions. I had been thinking about sauces. Last week I tried a vermouth Hollandaise on chicken breast. It was okay but a little lacking in sparkle. Next time, I'll try reducing the vermouth and adding some fresh thyme or sorrel. Along this same thought train, I came up with another variation I wanted to try: Côtes du Rhône black pepper Hollandaise. Côtes du Rhône is a fruity blended red wine that works beautifully in pan sauces because it concentrates without becoming overly sweet (like Merlot), bitter (Zinfandel), or tart (Cabernet Sauvignon, Burgundy, and many more).

I realized immediately that I wanted to pair this sauce with buffalo. If you enjoy flavorful beef, you should try American buffalo. It tastes quite a bit like concentrated beef without the least hint of gaminess. Be aware, however, that preparing buffalo differs in many respects from preparing beef. With the internationalization of Kobe beef and Wagyu beef, it's old news that the most flavorful cuts of beef are those with the highest fat content. In beef, marbling equals flavor. Buffalo, on the other hand, is ultra lean and yet manages to taste more intensely flavorful than beef. I don't know for certain, but I would guess the buffalo meat is higher in glutamines.

The lack of marbling may have no negative effect on the flavor of buffalo, but it does make the meat tough and chewy. This is enough of a problem that many cooks just surrender and grind the meat to hamburger which allows them to add beef fat.

Another solution—my solution of choice—is to slice the meat very thin and across the grain. If you slice it thin enough, the chewiness actually becomes something of a virtue in that it allows you to savor the meat without making it a chore to eat.

When I told Princess V what we were having for dinner, her eyebrows formed a couple of question marks. It was one of those looks that seemed to be asking, hmmm, how much do I have to eat to be polite?. She later admitted that she didn't expect to like the buffalo, but she kept an open mind and let it surprise her. Buffalo, because it doesn't rely on fat for its flavor, is savory without making you feel heavy.

The Girltzik also enjoyed the buffalo, but I think she was better pre-disposed toward it. She'd walked through the kitchen while I was slicing the meat. When she saw what I was preparing, she said, "Oh, we're having beef?"

"Nope. Buffalo."

"Buffalo! That is so intense."

I think she was looking forward to bragging to her friends about the way cool adventurous dinner she had.

I accompanied the buffalo with two sides: fried red potatoes tossed with bacon and white cheddar and a sauté of cremini mushrooms with green garlic.

Seared buffalo strip loin with Côtes du Rhône black pepper Hollandaise

(serves three)

dramatis personae

one tablespoon peanut oil
one pound buffalo strip loin
salt
black pepper

sauce
one cup Côtes du Rhône
one half teaspoon cracked black pepper
two egg yolks
one quarter cup melted butter

quality of ingredients

Buffalo steaks won't be marbled, so look for dark red, almost purple meat with no hint of brown and no dry spots.

The typical Côtes du Rhône costs between $10 and $15 per 750 ml, but that covers a lot of blends of varying qualities. If you don't happen to have a favorite Côtes du Rhône, go to a market with a knowledgeable staff and ask for advice.

Black pepper should be fresh-cracked for freshness. It loses pungency rapidly after cracking.

preparation notes

Preheat the oven to 275F.

My thanks to the folks at America's Test Kitchen and Cooks Illustrated for working out the basics of this process for searing steaks. The goal of this technique is a crispy brown exterior, a warm red heart, and no overcooked band of grey meat in between. If you don't pre-dry the steaks in the oven, the moisture near the surface acts like a heat sink, slowing the searing process.

Trim off the fat and cut the strip steak into two or three cubes (three if the strip's length is closer to three times its width; two if the ratio is closer to two to one). Liberally season the cubes with salt and pepper. On a wire rack over a broiler pan or cookie sheet, bake the meat at 275F for twenty minutes or until it reaches 90F in the center. This will dry out the surface of the steaks and parcook the center, which allows you to sear the steaks quickly.

In a cast-iron skillet, heat a tablespoon of peanut oil to smoking. Sear the steaks on one side for one minute. Flip the steaks and sear them on the other side for one minute. With a pair of tongs, rotate the steaks to sear them on the four remaining faces (twenty or thirty seconds each side).

Tent the steaks with foil and let them rest for ten minutes. This will allow the juices to redistribute so that less is lost when you slice them.

In a sauce pan, reduce one cup of Côtes du Rhône to two tablespoons of liquid.

Follow my directions for basic Hollandaise sauce, with the following substitutions:

two egg yolks instead of four
one quarter cup butter instead of one half cup
reduced Côtes du Rhône in lieu of lemon juice
black pepper in lieu of white

Slice the steaks very thin (about three-sixteenths of an inch thick), and drizzle them with the Hollandaise.

Flesh for Fantasy

Salmon of the Steppes

Steak tartare was supposed to have been named for a Tatar practice of eating raw meat. Also supposedly, this practice was born of necessity. The demanding lifestyle of nomadic raiders didn't allow time for stopping to cook and eat a semi-formal sit-down dinner. Taras Bulba and his buds had to eat on the run. If this is true, the original steak tartare was likely more often horse meat than beef.

If you've never had steak tartare, the feral, rapacious rep of the Tatars coupled with the fact that the primary ingredient in steak tartare is raw meat, probably make the dish sound pretty bloody. It's hard not to picture a Tatar on horseback, wind whipping through the fur of his hat as he tears bloody gobbets of meat from a t-bone. In truth, steak tartare is not bloody—it's not even a true red. With the addition of such traditional ingredients as Worcestershire sauce and Dijon mustard, steak tartare is more of a reddish-brown.

Recent decades have seen the term tartare applied to just about any sort of chopped raw flesh. I've had tartares of venison, buffalo, tuna, salmon, halibut, red snapper, and beef. I have mixed feelings about this expansion of the meaning of tartare. On the one hand, it seems a bit unimaginative. On the other hand, what's not to love about the mental image of our weathered, sword-wielding Tatar whipping a salmon from his saddle pack and tearing it open with his teeth? Tatar as grizzly bear.

Meanwhile Back in the Real World

My version of salmon tartare is pretty traditional in many respects: shallot, dill, tarragon vinegar, capers, and a crispy crouton as a base. My one big departure is that, instead of the traditional wrap of smoked salmon, I serve mine in bacon rings. I settled on this recipe about six years ago, and I have never seen any reason to alter it.

Salmon tartare in bacon rings on crostini

(serves three)

dramatis personae

tartare
one pound salmon filet, skin and brown flesh removed
one medium shallot, finely diced
one quarter cup cup non-pareil capers
one quarter cup dill, minced
two table spoons tarragon vinegar

rings
twelve strips center cut bacon

crostini
one dense baguette, sliced thin
one quarter cup extra-virgin olive oil

quality of ingredients

Allow me, yet again, to sing the praises of sock-eye salmon. Sock-eye is redder than most salmon and also sweeter. If sock-eye is unavailable, king salmon, usually a bit more expensive, is meatier than sock-eye but delicious nonetheless. My next choice (over either coho or Atlantic salmon) isn't actually salmon, but steelhead (an ocean-running variety of rainbow trout) is richer than king salmon and almost as sweet as sock-eye. Ultimately, though, I'll take the freshest salmon available. For the tartare in these pictures, I used coho. The fishmonger had steelhead, but it was too fatty and not quite as fresh as the coho.

preparation notes

Primarily, as I said before, the tartare is pretty simple: dice the solid ingredients and mix them. In order to maintain a uniform consistency, I recommend dicing the shallot and salmon so that the pieces are about the same size as your capers.

I suppose it might be possible to make bacon rings in the oven, but the microwave does a much better job because it allows you to sandwich the strips between paper towels to wick away the grease. You'll want to do this in two stages.

First, on a microwave-safe plate, sandwich the bacon strips between layers of paper towels. Microwave the strips on high for four minutes or so. This will vary by microwave oven; you want the bacon almost fully cooked but still pliable.


Second, make three forms for the rings by rolling paper towels into cylinders roughly an inch and a half in diameter. Wrap four bacon strips around each form and wrap another two layers of paper towel around the bacon. Microwave the rings until crispy.


To free the rings from the forms, pinch both ends of the form and twist them along the long axis. Once the bacon releases the paper, you can slide the rings off the form.


The crostini are blissfully simple. Brush a thin layer of extra-virgin olive oil on each slice of baguette, lay them out on a cookie sheet and toast them under the broiler for about three minutes, turning them every minute or until golden-brown.

To serve, place each bacon ring on a crostino and fill the ring with tartare.

As I type, I just finished four of these, and I'm stuffed.

Undiscovering Fire

Eat Me Raw

I don't remember the first time I heard about sushi, sashimi, or tartare, but I'm pretty sure that I was thoroughly disgusted by the thought of eating fish or beef raw. I grew up in the 60s and 70s in Colorado. These days, it's difficult to relate to some of the attitudes of that era in Middle America: fish, like poultry, was supposed to be fully-cooked, and no meat was served raw. If you tried to order a salmon steak medium rare, you'd have drawn sneers. Undercooked salmon was considered a surefire ticket to the emergency room. And seared tuna? Tuna came in cans. No one served tuna in fine restaurants.

I do remember—vividly—the first time someone offered me raw fish. My submarine had stopped over in Hawaii, and I was visiting my parents who were then living on a hillside overlooking Honolulu. My father, always the gregarious one, had invited a number of friends and coworkers over for a feast of grilled whole Dungeness crabs. One guest, a large islander named Frank, had been deep-sea fishing that morning and had been lucky enough to land a huge marlin. Frank arrived carrying a huge platter mounded with half-inch-thick, two-inch square scraps of raw marlin. Translucent verging on transparency, the flesh looked like chips of sparkling, faintly pink glass. Frank set out dipping bowls of soy mixed with (nope, not wasabi) Chinese hot mustard.

"I hope you folks are sashimi-eaters," Frank said, dipping a piece of fish in the sauce and popping it into his mouth, "'cause I brought five pounds."

"Oh, hell yes," said my dad, tossing a piece of the fish into his mouth on his way out to the grill. At the door, he turned to me and told me I should try a bit of it. "I don't know if you've ever had sashimi, but this stuff is The Shit."

No, I'd never had sashimi—nor had I ever tried sushi or any kind of tartare. Nor, for that matter was I too keen to try any of these raw dishes—the very concept tickled my gag reflex—but Dad's comments had short-circuited my plans to mingle and avoid the sashimi platter. Now, though, I felt that everyone in the room would be watching to see my reaction to The Shit.

Ah well. I was sure I could stomach a single bite of raw fish. If it was too nasty, I could always just wash it down with wine. Lots of wine. Plus, there was all that grilled crab. I'd survive the fish.

Raw marlin, if you've never had it, is tender yet toothsome and has a meaty, slightly sweet flavor. I didn't taste anything that I associated with fish or fishiness except a mild aftertaste reminiscent of cool ocean breezes.

Dad was right. Frank's marlin sashimi was indeed The Shit. I was hooked. I ate half of Frank's sashimi. Five-foot-ten and—in those days—a hundred twenty-five pounds, I ate two and a half pounds of raw fish and a whole Dungeness crab in a single afternoon. My father, who was always sharing with friends and family epic tales of my prodigious appetite, would later report that I had eaten three fourths of the sashimi and two grill crabs. Ridiculous, but I believe I did also consume a baked potato and some salad at that get together.

I vaguely recollect that we all enjoyed the grilled crab, but nearly thirty years later, the only flavor I still recall with clarity from that day is the marlin sashimi. As tasty as the soy and mustard mix was with the marlin, I found myself using less and less of the sauce as I ate my way across that platter. Toward the end, I was eating unadulterated marlin sashimi and wondering why I hadn't been eating like this all my life.

Over the next few years, I surrendered myself to every available opportunity to sample raw-fish and raw-meat dishes. Lucky for me, that era (the 1980s) was the Age of the Sushi Bar. In fact, experimentation with world cuisines was just beginning to take hold in the U.S., so by the time I was twenty-five, I'd sampled all manner of sushi and sashimi, several varieties of poke, and traditional and sundry variations on carpaccio and tartare.

Death Awaits

[Begin quasi-libertarian rant.]

Pardon my schoolyard slang, but when it comes to food, Americans are a bunch of pussies. Our markets sell us beef with instructions to overcook it. We're warned to limit our intake of all the best varieties of fish for fear of building up systemic mercury. We even have laws against importing non-pasteurized cheese, making some of the finest cheeses in Europe unavailable in the United States. Just last week I saw the latest online article decrying the dangers of modern foodstuffs: the ten most dangerous foods, or some such rot.

Okay, yes, eating raw or rare meat and fish entails some risks. Okay, yes, nearly all of our foodstuff—vegetable matter and animal flesh alike—have natural parasites, and some of those parasites can be passed on to us, potentially causing illness and, on occasion, even death. Okay, yes, cooking all of our food to leather will ensure that most of those parasites are no threat.

I'm surprised the warning stickers on the meat packages don't also advise grinding our meat to pablum to eliminate any potential choking hazard.

Life is risk. Each year in the U.S., thirty-nine thousand people die in automobile accidents. We could reduce that number by outlawing alcohol, setting all the speed limits down at 25 mph, and forcing anyone who can do so to take public transportation. Somehow, I don't expect to see any of these measures enacted any time in the near future.

Similarly, we could reduce the five thousand annual deaths in the U.S. from food-borne toxins by refusing to eat raw meat, fish, and eggs. Such a prohibition would only eliminate about 500 deaths each year. Deaths would still occur due to mishandling of crops and produce, inadequate refrigeration, and poor storage. I've made it pretty clear that I'm an avid fan of raw meat and fish preparations. Ironically, the one time in my life that I suffered salmonella was from improperly stored tuna salad made with fully-cooked tuna and eggs. My ex-wife suffered a severe case of salmonella—hers was from escargot (also fully-cooked) at a restaurant in Idaho.

If you were expecting one of those safety disclaimers telling you that this and that food safety expert sez not to do what I'm about to tell you how to do—well, this is as close as you'll get from me.

[End rant.]

Tartare Theory

In some ways, tartares are pretty simple. Chop up some meat or fish and mix in some flavor ingredients. Cooking is usually unnecessary, and the knife work is pretty tame.Essentially, tartares offer three challenges: texture, flavor balance, and presentation.

The texture problem is that chopped meat or fish is a bit on the mushy side, especially after you add flavoring liquids. The traditional methods for correcting for mushiness work best: include crunchy, fresh, diced vegetables in the tartare and serve it with chips, toasts points, croutons, or crackers. To avoid sogginess, you have to be careful to keep the dry crunchies separate from the tartare until it's ready to serve.

Flavor balance can be tricky. Raw fish and beef are subtle, so their flavor is easily lost. Far too many tuna tartare preparations taste like nothing but soy and wasabi. Soy and wasabi pair pretty well with tuna, too much of anything can overwhelm the dish. I've found that it's safest to start with too little of everything but the main ingredient and slowly add more until you reach a balance you like.

I know some home cooks poo-pooh presentation, but when you're serving tartare you have to do something to keep it from looking like something the cat gacked up on the plate. Many solutions present themselves: mold it, garnish it, top it, sandwich it, or use a combination of these techniques. Make it look like something worth eating.

This latest tartare was inspired by a challenge I saw recently in reality television: create an haute cuisine taco. Toward that end I created a Tex-Mex tuna tartare. I accompanied these tacos with pickled onions (a popular side in the Yucatan) and cherub tomatoes in avocado cream (avodaco, roasted garlic, lime juice, and extra-virgin olive oil). I felt something with avocado was necessary to counter the heat of the chipotle in the tuna.

Tuna tartare tacos

(serves three)

dramatis personae

one pound tuna, diced (1/4 inch dice)
one quarter cup finely diced sweet onion
two tablespoons lime juice
two chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
one tablespoon adobo sauce
one tablesoon orange juice
two tablespoons minced cilantro
pinch of sea salt

six corn tortillas

quality of ingredients

Raw tuna has to be glistening, ruby-toned, slightly translucent. The fish should not be bruised or separating and should not smell fishy or of ammonia. If your fishmonger carries sashimi-grade tuna, get it. Yellow fin, blue fin, or big eye will all work equally well. Albacore is too soft. If you use blue fin, the color may vary across a steak from dark, blood red to a salmony orange. This is normal.

With fish, I prefer yellow-skinned varieties of sweet onion: Vidalia, 1015, Maui, or Walla Walla.

I recently began using canned chipotle peppers, which are typically packed in adobo sauce (tomato sauce with onions and a bit of sugar). The adobo sauce really brings out both the heat and the smokiness of the chipotle peppers. It also greatly simplifies preparation. If you just can't bring yourself to use canned peppers and have access to dried chiplotles (most grocery stores here in Austin have them), you'll need to braise the peppers for about twenty minutes in tomato sauce with a quarter cup of onion.

preparation notes

Preheat your oven to 400F.

In a capacious glass or ceramic bowl, combine the onion, cilantro, and citrus juices. With a spoon, press the chipotle peppers and adobo sauce through a fine-mesh strainer or chinois (this strains out the pepper skin and seeds and the solid bits of cooked onion in the adobo sauce).

Tuna preparation for tartare differs slightly from salmon or beef. If you chop the tuna much smaller than quarter-inch chunks, they get mealy. After dicing the tuna, carefully sift through and remove any white fibrous connective tissue.

Mix the tuna in with the other ingredients and add salt to taste.

Lightly brush both sides of the tortillas with peanut oil and arrange them on a baking sheet so that they do not overlap. I wanted a more rustic look and chose to break my tortillas after baking them. If you want triangles or cleanly cut halves, cut them before baking. Once the over is at temperature, bake the tortillas on a center rack for ten minutes or until golden brown.

Arachnophilia

My first wife had a fear of spiders.

No.

My first wife engaged in a fear of spiders. She played—she savored—she revelled in her fear of spiders. She swaddled herself in her fear of spiders and wore it—sported it proudly, like a uniform. Arachnophobia was a defining element of the woman's ego. She positively percolated while sharing the details of her phobia with new acquaintances—boasted of it as though it were her greatest accomplishment.

Once, while I was at work, she sat on a couch for six hours, watching a tiny dark mote on a far wall. Her eyesight was none too keen, and she had been reading, so her glasses were in another room. Had the dot moved? Just a bit? She was certain it had moved, so she couldn't get up and go to the bathroom. If she looked away the tiny potential-spider would surely scurry across the ceiling and drop into her hair. So there she sat, most of the day, staring uncertainly at Schrödinger's spider, trying to ignore her increasingly insistent bladder.

When I got home, she sat hugging a pillow, pointing a shaking forefinger at the far wall. I glanced at the offending mark and informed her that she was pointing at a nail hole. Two days before, she'd removed an ugly painting and hadn't put anything up in its place. She promptly sprinted to the bathroom.

One of the sillier aspects of this phobia was her refusal to eat crab.

I suppose I could almost understand a refusal to touch something that reminds you of a thing you find frightening, but she wouldn't even consider crab cakes, crab salad, crab soup. She would eat shrimp and lobster, but she didn't even like to sit at the same table as someone who was eating crab. She would sneer when the order was placed and shiver with disgust when it was delivered. Every time the individual took a bite of the crab, she would grimace or quietly (but audibly) ugh or ew.

I guess it comes as no surprise that I never told her about the time I had eaten barbecued tarantula. (Just the abdomen, which is remarkably firm and has a flavor similar to rock shrimp.)

I don't get it. I'm frightened by creatures that look vaguely like that food item, so I can't possibly eat it. My ex was the only person I've ever heard refuse crab based on arachnophobia. In my experience, the object of disgust is typically shrimp, crawfish, or lobsters. Almost invariably, the individual expressing displeasure uses the word bugs to encapsulate their sense of disgust.

Me? I adore crab. I love that sweetness and the marvelous range of flavors and textures among the various varieties of crab. Princess V and the Girlchild, too: crab cakes, crab newburg, Thai crab soup, grilled crab, crab chowder, crab salad, snow crab with citrus gastrique, king crab dipped in drawn butter or with Hollandaise or avocado cream.

I am a wee bit picky about crab cakes. I don't care for mushy crab cakes or bready cakes, and I despise the Maryland practice of putting corn kernels or cornmeal in crab cakes.

Here's my favorite crab cake recipe. (The one that makes Girlchild go squeee!)

Panko-dusted crab cakes on apple cole slaw with fire honey and orange-cardamom reduction

(serves three)

dramatis personae

Cakes:
one pound lump crab
three tablespoons peanut oil
one half medium red onion, minced
one garlic clove, minced or pressed
one thai pepper, minced
one tablespoon grated ginger
a dash of sea salt
one extra large egg
panko breading


Slaw:
one cup thinly sliced pak choy
one Granny Smith apple (skin on), julienned
juice of one small lemon
one tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
one half teaspoon sea salt

Fire honey:
a cup of water
a dozen chilis arbols
one tablespoon peanut oil
one quarter cup honey

Orange-cardamom reduction:
juice of five valencia oranges
one teaspoon cardamom


quality of ingredients

Lump blue crab is typically sold in closed, nearly-opaque pint tubs. This type of crabmeat is most commonly steamed and picked. Ask the fishmonger to let you see the contents of the tub and smell it. The contents should be almost entirely white and off-white, moist but not wet (definitely no pooling liquid), and should smell like something you want to eat. If it smells fishy, it has not been properly stored or handled, and you don't want it.

I chose pak choy (Napa cabbage) for the slaw because I like the fine papery texture and the sweetness, which matches well with the apple and the crab.

The granny smith should be green and crisp.

Panko is an amazing substance: breadcrumbs made by drying white bread electrostatically. The result is crunchy, dry crumbs that are not burnt or toasted in the process. Because they're so thoroughly dehydrated, panko crumbs hold their crunch. Panko comes in two varieties, white and tan—the tan variety includes the crust of the white bread. I haven't been able to discern any difference in flavor between the white and the brown.

preparation notes

Slaw

Um, you mix everything in a bowl. Duh.

Fire honey

Seed the chilis and braise them in a cup of water over over a medium flame for about five minutes. Remove the chilis and two tablespoons of the braising liquor to a blender. You can remove the chilis with a slotted spoon—I prefer a pair of chopsticks. Add a tablespoon of peanut oil and purée the concoction until the chilis are thoroughly disintegrated.

Strain the chili purée and mix it into the honey.

Taste this stuff very carefully—it's essentially honey laced with capsaicin. A little of it drizzled on the crab cakes adds a slight sweet burn, but taken straight this stuff can raise blisters. (Okay, slight exageration.)

Orange-cardamom reduction

Mix the cardamom and orange juice in a sauce pan. Over a medium flame but without boiling the juice, reduce the mixture to a syrupy consistency.

Cakes
Pick the crab for stray bits of cartilage and shell. I know. The tub said cleaned or pre-picked or something like that. Don't believe it. I have never failed to find cartilage that the processors missed. Never. If you don't pick the crab yourself, someone will get stabbed in the gums by a sliver of cartilage—not fun.

Pour one tablespoon of the peanut oil into a skillet or sauté pan and, over a medium flame, heat the oil to shimmering. Add in the onion, garlic, ginger, Thai chili, and salt. Sweat the vegetables until all of the onion is translucent. Muy importante. If you mix the vegetables into the crab without sweating them first, they'll release their liquor into the crab cakes, which will make them fall apart.

In a large bowl, combine the crab with the egg and the sweated vegetables. Pour the panko into a second bowl. Mix the ingredients thoroughly and form it into cakes. You should be able to get nine or ten two-inch-diameter, inch-thick cakes. Press all sides of each completed cake into the panko. The cakes should be uniformly covered.

Pour a second tablespoon of peanut oil into the skillet and again heat it to shimmering over a medium flame. Arrange the cakes evenly in the skillet (this usually fills my skillet entirely). Cook the crab cakes until brown on one side. Don't turn them or move them around in the skillet for the first four minutes.

Take the crab cakes out of the skillet. I do this by removing the skillet from the flame and placing a plate, upside down, over the skillet and inverting the skillet. Return the skillet to the flame and pour the last tablespoon of peanut oil into the skillet. Once the oil again reaches the shimmering point, return the crab cakes to the skillet (browned side up) for another undisturbed four or so minutes, to brown the other side.

To serve, arrange the crab cakes on a layer of the slaw and drizzle thin parallel lines of the fire honey one direction. Cross the lines of fire honey with lines of the orange reduction.

Joltin' Joe

Addiction

I've been a coffee addict since I was about eighteen. An alcoholic, I had to give up alcohol when I was 23. I gave up biting my fingernails when I was 25. At 27, the cigarettes went.

No way am I giving up coffee. Ever.

On the submarine, back in my Navy days, I would go through a dozen cups every day. When we ran out of coffee filters, I used paper towels that made the coffee taste like dishwater. Hey, even a bad cup of coffee is better than none. Once, in Yokosuka, unable to find a restaurant anywhere that served hot coffee, I purchased a can of iced coffee with a viscosity and sweetness like maple syrup. It was disgusting. In the grip of my addiction, I drank it and another right after.

The only coffee I won't drink is instant. I'm none too keen to try the stuff they glean from civet poop (Kopi Luwak), but I'd probably drink it if someone offered me a cup.

In support of my habit, I have owned percolators, various types of drip coffee makers, espresso machines, French presses. I've made espresso, cappuccino, ca phe sua nong, Turkish coffee, café au lait, latte, and many thousands of cups of straight black coffee. About ten years ago, I got hooked on coffee shop coffee. I had finally come to the conclusion that I just could not make a decent cup of coffee at home.

I know they have a bad name with some coffee-snobs, but Starbucks was my salvation. They're closely approaching ubiquity, and the coffee-snobs have it wrong: Starbucks produces a variety of consistently good coffees. I could get a venti red-eye (20 ounce cup of coffee with a shot of espresso) in the morning, and my java jones was pretty much satisfied for the day.

Of course, this satisfaction came with a price—literally. We were spending an average of $120 per month on coffee.

Princess V to the rescue

Princess V—in addition to being a beautiful, smart, funny, and capable sex goddess—is an habitual researcher. Rarely does a day go by that she's not on the computer or buried in a book learning how to polish her Ajax and Java code, how to properly set in a sleeve or efficiently hem a skirt, how to balance a stock portfolio or improve her credit rating, how to bake artisanal breads or construct the perfect tiramisu. So, naturally, she eventually found a cure for my Starbucks addiction. Reading through customer reviews on Amazon, she discovered single-serve coffee makers. Again and again, a principal element in praise in the reviews was the claim that "it saved me from Starbucks."

In the '90s the ultimate in coffee snobbery was the gold-plated coffee filter. It sounds like a joke, but no. Gold-plated ultra fine wine mesh provides filtration without the need for replaceable paper filters. Gold, chemically, is fairly inert. So, no oxidation, no reaction to the acids and oils in coffee. Even better, put that gold-plated filter in a French press, and you can make coffee one cup at a time—no pot of coffee sitting on a burner for a couple hours getting all stale and nasty.

Sadly, even the gold-plated filter could not solve the biggest problem with home brewing—those nasty wet grounds. Once the coffee is made, you have to deal with the grounds.

Enter the Senseo corporation. In 2001 Senseo introduced the pod-brewer, a single-serve coffee system that used pre-measured, sealed filter pods (called "pads" in some parts of Europe). Coffee in a tea-bag—sort of. The top of the pod-brewer clamshells open to receive the pod. You close it and push a button. The pod-brewer ports a single cup of hot water through the pod. When it's finished, you have just that one pod to throw away. Some of the pod-brewers have reservoirs so that you don't have to pour in water every time.

In the past few years, Cuisinart, Bunn, Grindmaster, and Melitta have all joined in the game of trying to produce the ideal pod-brewer. Krups and Lavazza have introduced pod espresso machines. Machines range in price from $30 to $300 for basic coffee and $200 to $750 for the espresso machines.

Keurig and Tassimo have gone a step further: their pods are encapsulated in plastic cups and discs, respectively, sealed with a foil top. The clamshell tops of the Keurig and Tassimo contain sharp nozzles that puncture the K-Cup or T-Disc. The top nozzle punctures the foil and the filter. The bottom nozzle punctures only the cup. No mess, no grounds, one cup at a time, coffee in mere seconds, a vast range of fine coffees: coffee snobbery has found a place in the 21st Century. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, check out the Single-Serve Coffee Forums.

Last October, when my darling wife shared her research, I was skeptical. Then she informed me that she'd found a Keurig B40 for sale on Amazon. I was interested, but not quite ready to buy the latest coffee gimmick.

Then she informed me that she'd already purchased the thing.

"Try it for a month. If you don't like it, it will already have paid for itself. Just a month. You can do without Starbucks for just a month."

I reacted like a typical addict:

• I was shocked. How could she do such a thing to me? This is my angel, the love of my life, she's supposed to understand me. My Starbucks addiction is an essential part of my personality.


• I went into denial. She could not be doing this to me. No. I won't allow it. I don't even want to see it. Don't open the box. When it arrives, slap a return sticker on it and send it back.


• I bargained. I would cook more chicken, less of the expensive sea food, switch to a cheaper body wash, ration the olive oil more carefully. Surely I could find a hundred twenty dollars a month somewhere else in the budget. Not my Starbucks. Anything but my Starbucks.


• Did I feel guilty about being such a pathetically desperate addict? About making a fuss over ludicrously-priced beverages? For doubting my Princess's motives? Hell yes.


• Still, it did make me angry. Shit yeah. It's my money. I'm a grown man. You can't tell me where I'm going to get my coffee. I spend all that money on coffee because I choose to do so. I can stop—I simply choose not to.


• After steeping in anger for a while, I fell into depression. Why me? Why Starbucks? Oh, what's the difference? I'm doomed to a life without decent coffee. May as well take up herbal teas.


• Ultimately, I accepted that I was being a putz. I survived all those months at sea drinking sludge. A month of questionable coffee would be nothing. So, certain that the experiment would be a failure and that the Keurig would be on eBay in just over a month, I agreed to give up Starbucks for a month.

I began preparing for the month with a more thorough review of the Amazon customer reviews of Keurig single-serve coffee makers. One issue raised in almost all of the negative reviews (less than 10% of the Keurig reviews are negative) and occasionally addressed in some of the positive reviews was the strength of the coffee. The most frequent negative criticism of the Keurig is that its prepackaged, sealed pods (called K-cups) don't contain enough grounds to make actual coffee—just coffee-flavored water.

This concerned me. Like most avid coffee fans, I expect my coffee to have depth and body. Lucky for me this is a known problem. Within the past year, the various coffee purveyors producing K-cups have been producing an alternate set of varieties labelled extra-bold. The extra-bold K-cups contain 30% more coffee.

When the Keurig arrived, Princess V read the instructions and we ran through the set up procedures. Within a few minutes, we had run a couple cups of water through it and I tried my first single-serve cup of coffee. I didn't want to prejudge the coffees. It was always possible that the dissatisfied 10% of Keurig reviewers had tried a bad batch. Possibly they had used the wrong setting. The B40 has two brew-sizes—7 and 9 ounces—but the K-cups come in only one size. So, for my first cup I selected a dark roast (I don't care for medium and light roasts).

It was ghastly.

Not only was it thin and watery, it had a nasty background flavor that reminded me vaguely of the aroma of burning oysters, flavored with a subtle hint of mildew.

It's okay, I told myself, I knew this was a possibility. The sample pack includes a handful of extra-bolds. One of those has to be all right.

My second cup was an extra-bold. It was even worse than the first. True, it was stronger, but stronger and tasting of burnt rubber is not an improvement. And it still didn't have much body.

Now I panicked. What had I gotten myself into? I should have known. Porting hot water through coffee in a cup—why why why would I ever believe something like that could work. I'm screwed.

Lucky for me, the next K-Cup I tried was Van Houtte's Eclipse extra-bold: rich, dark, flavorful with winy and fruity notes. And it had body. This cup of coffee was easily a match for anything at Starbucks.

In the next two months, I tried thirty more blends. I never found any non-extra-bold varieties I could stand (Princess V found a few, but she drinks her coffee with cream and sugar). Ultimately, I found a half-dozen coffees that I like. My favorites are Coffee People's Jet Fuel and Emeril's Big Easy Extra Bold.

Once in a great while, we drop in at a Starbucks to read a paper and do the crossword puzzles. It's been a few weeks, though. Most days, I make my own coffee at home. Most work days, I drink three or four cups. On the weekends, I might drink as much as five cups in a day—the equivalent of four "tall" coffees at Starbucks. In any Austin Starbucks, with tax, four tall coffees would cost $7.49.

We buy our K-Cups through Amazon: thirty-four cents a cup (thirty-seven cents for the Emeril's). You do the math.

Daised

I love Hollandaise sauce.

Let me rephrase that, "I love my Hollandaise." I'm sure that makes me sound like some kind of overbearing ego-jockey—which might not be entirely inaccurate—but I think it's more accurate than some alternatives I've heard. I could have said "traditional Hollandaise," for instance, but that's an imaginary beastie. Ask anyone with a smidgen of training in traditional French sauces and you'll probably get the Escoffier version of the yellow Mother Sauce: egg yolks, clarified butter, lemon, and salt. I learned to add a dash of white pepper. Others argue that cayenne is the traditional spice, and yet another cadre insists only black pepper can spike a proper Hollandaise. Being the nosy critter I am, I've tried all three. Yeah, de gustibus, but I find that black pepper comes across a bit harsh in Hollandaise. Cayenne gives the sauce a slightly skunky quality. White pepper has a piny note that melds beautifully with the lemon.

If you search the Internet for Hollandaise sauce recipes and instructions, you will find sauces made with cream, without salt, with lemon zest and white vinegar. I even found one made with sugar (this last from Alton Brown—I had no idea he dropped acid). None of these additions are necessary, and most of them make no sense. I have no objection to a little experimentation, but somehow it strikes me as disingenuous to describe something with cream or sugar as "Hollandaise." They should at least call it a variant. I've done several Hollandaise and Béarnaise variations with quite a bit of success: most recently basil/lime Hollandaise, Meyers lemon and cardamom Hollandaise. Being a Texan, I've naturally done jalapeño/lime Hollandaise and chipotle/mandarin orange Hollandaise. I would never advertise such concoctions as basic Hollandaise, however. They're variants. They will taste rich and buttery, but they will not taste like Hollandaise. Some of them won't even look like Hollandaise.

Historical research won't help you pin down a "traditional" ideal either. The first recorded version of a sauce with a name like "Hollandaise" was actually listed as "à la Hollandaise," or "the way they do it in Holland" (a description no one has ever been able to connect with any actual Dutch cooking practices). That particular Hollandaise concoction was made with stock and flour and no eggs. As far as any culinary historian has been able to determine, nothing coming out of Holland in the Eighteenth Century resembled either the original Sauce à la Hollandaise or modern Hollandaise Sauce.

Princess V theorizes that Hollandaise is a reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century commonplace that the Dutch are overfond of butter. It's the best explanation I've seen. A quick Internet search on "Dutch fondness for butter" yielded numerous literary references including Melville's Moby Dick and Jonson's Volpone.

How, in two centuries, did this sauce evolve from butter gravy to the more familiar velvety blond Eggs Benedict topping? I don't know, but I'm certainly grateful for the evolution.

What I'm not grateful for is restaurant Hollandaise. No doubt there are many great restaurants where Hollandaise sauce is still produced with a whisk, but most supposedly classy restaurants these days just don't think it worth the trouble. So, unless you're paying fifty bucks for a dish, you're probably getting blender-Hollandaise. It's pretty easy to tell: the blender stuff is paler and somewhat flat tasting. This stuff, made at a lower temperature than stovetop Hollandaise, is essentially eggy mayonnaise. For some reason, blender Hollandaise is also frequently made with too little lemon, which means it tastes like a whole lot of nothing at all.

Also, frankly, I am baffled by many foodies' insistence upon clarified butter in Hollandaise. Plain old unsalted sweet creamery butter produces a lush, full-bodied sauce, so why clarify it? Harold McGee (in the kick-ass food science bible On Food and Cooking) says clarification is a good idea because butter is 15% water, which works against emulsification by adding extra water into the mix (ironically, several of those goofy Internet recipes tell you to add water to the sauce). I've tried clarified butter, and I really didn't notice any fewer strokes of the whisk over the non-clarified stuff. Although clarifying certainly takes out the water, it also removes milk solids from the butter. My theory is that little bit of whey protein actually works to assist emulsification of the butter.

See, the basic trick of "real" Hollandaise and Béarnaise sauces is to combine liquefied butter with water-based flavoring agents (lemon juice, vinegar, herbs, shallots). Oil and water, unfortunately, don't mix. Water molecules being polar and oil molecules being non-polar, the two don't stay together for very long. One effective way to combine such uncooperative molecules is to supply a more complex set of emulsifying molecules that can combine with both polar and non-polar molecules. Some of the amino acid molecules in egg yolk are polar and some are bipolar. Unfortunately for the would-be emulsification, these molecules are combined in a knotted physical mesh. In order to access both the polar and non-polar sites on the amino acid molecules, you have to add enough energy to get the strands to relax. If you maintain that elevated temperature while whisking the mixture, you break up the butter and water-based elements into small enough droplets to link up with the protein strands. At a fairly neutral pH, this process would work best for egg yolks at roughly 160F to 170F. Unfortunately, those protein strands begin to clump up and curdle at just about 180F, and it's damned hard to keep the sauce in such a narrow temperature range for very long.

Isn't it just wonderfully fortunate, then, that adding acids (citrus or vinegar) raises the curdling point of the protein strands? If you drop the pH down to 4.5, you raise the curdling point to about 190F. Thus, the citrus in Hollandaise and vinegar in Béarnaise both flavor the sauces and allow them to be prepared at a slightly higher temperature, which simplifies the emulsification process.

To put all of this into practice, here's my basic Hollandaise sauce:

dramatis personae

Juice of one small lemon
Dash salt
Dash white pepper
Four egg yolks
Eight tbsp butter (one stick)

quality of ingredients

I usually use extra large eggs, but the yolks aren't much larger than those of large eggs.

Lemons are a crap shoot. Some of the plumpest turn out to be mostly pulp. Juice content and tartness vary quite wildly. You have to rely on experience to determine how much of what tartness of lemon juice will result in a bright-tasting but not overly sour sauce. Generally, I would say that you need about three tablespoons of moderately tart juice or two tablespoons of very tart lemon juice.

Use a good quality unsalted sweet creamery butter. I know of no situation in which pre-salted butter is a good idea.

preparation notes

Start some water boiling in a double boiler. Squeeze the juice of one lemon into a ramekin. Add salt and pepper and place the ramekin in the double boiler to pre-warm it while you continue preparations.

Melt one stick of butter in a Pyrex bowl, ramekin, or measuring cup by microwaving it on full power for one minute.

Separate the yolks. Remove and discard as much of the chalaza (the white connective tissue that occasionally forms one or two curd-like white nodules on the outside of the yolk) as possible.

Place a folded dish towel on the counter next to the stove. In order to keep the egg yolks from getting too hot over the boiling water, you're going to switch the top pan back and forth between the double boiler and the towel. This technique makes the process much simpler (no need to drizzle in the butter) and virtually foolproof. It goes something like this:

Remove the top pan from the double boiler to the dish towel and in that top pan combine the yolks and lemon juice. Whisk the yolks briskly for about twenty seconds and then add in one third of the butter. Return the top pan to the double boiler and continue whisking the yolks briskly for about twenty seconds. Remove the top pan to the towel again and, pour in the rest of the butter, and continue whisking briskly for another twenty seconds.

(At any time in this process, if you need to stop be sure that the last place you whisked the sauce was on the dish towel. That will ensure that no part of the sauce gets too hot and curdles while you're not whisking it.)

From this point on, alternate the top pan between the double boiler and the dish towel in twenty-second periods of whisking. The sauce will gradually begin to thicken until a whisk trailed through the sauce leaves a distinct track that refills very slowly. You want a consistency that's just barely thin enough to flow. If your Hollandaise thickens but never seems to thicken as much as you like, leave the top pan sitting on the dish towel for about five minutes and then whisk it again. You'll find that it's thickened a bit in the intervening time. Hollandaise will keep for quite a while at 145F (if you can hold it at that temperature) but you'll need to keep whisking it every few minutes to keep it from skinning over.