Evolution

The Cocktail Sauce Mystery

When I was a kid, my mother occasionally prepared shrimp for dinner. Shrimp, in those days were tiny, rubbery critters that came breaded and frozen in little waxed cardboard boxes. They had to be deep-fried and eaten with cocktail sauce. Since the oil was already hot, we usually had french fries to go with the shrimp. The fries came frozen in a bag, tasted like dryer lint, and apparently were chemically treated to neutralize salt.

My brother and I would go to the kitchen to investigate the sizzle and occasional pop. Mom would see us and, "We're having shrimp for dinner!" with the kind of enthusiasm she usually reserved for announcing apple pie! and ice cream! Despite all of Mom's exclamation points, I just couldn't see why anyone should get excited over greasy cornmeal with a kernel of shrimp-flavored gristle in the center. When I was eight years old, though, it did pass for palatable if I peeled off most of the breading and drowned the little shrimplets in cocktail sauce.

I remember, also, my perplexity at the name cocktail sauce. For me the name conjured images of men in dinner jackets and ladies in sparkling LBDs sipping martini glasses of red goo. Silly. This sauce was clearly too thick to drink, and that much horseradish in a single gulp would have been pretty hard on the sinuses.

I finally learned the solution to the Cocktail Sauce Mystery during a family outing. We were celebrating some forgotten family event at a local steak house. This was in the days before coloring-book-kiddie-menus, so to my little brother, restaurant dining was only a treat if the restaurant in question served cheeseburgers and ice cream. I, on the other hand, have loved dining at fine restaurants as long as I can remember. For a skinny little kid, I was a big eater and fascinated with the variety of foods. I'd been ordering from the adult menu from the time I was six years old, and there was still so much left to try.

This particular trip to the steak house lives in my memory because, when the server took our drink orders, my father ordered a scotch and an appetizer: a shrimp cocktail. Before the dish arrived, I was intrigued. He ordered it with scotch. Did that mean it really was used in a drink? Was my father about to sip some bizarre concoction of cocktail sauce, puréed shrimp, and scotch?

Today, of course, I realize how mundane an appetizer the shrimp cocktail is, but at the time it fascinated me: a chilled parfait glass half-filled with cocktail sauce, its lip supporting a ring of big-shouldered shrimp. At least, they looked like shrimp. These were each as large as Dad's middle finger—a lot bigger than the ones that came out of the grocery store freezer cases. After watching in fascination as he devoured shrimp after shrimp, I finally worked up the nerve to ask for a bite. With two shrimp still hanging from the glass, Dad smiled and pushed the dish over to me, "Go to town."

The shrimp were ice cold, cold enough that it was obviously intentional. I was stunned. Sure, the condensation on the glass should have been a clue, but I didn't expect cold shrimp. I thought shrimp had to be cooked. Had this been cooked? I'd never seen raw shrimp, so it certainly seemed possible. I may have asked. I don't recall. I do recall the crisp meatiness of the shrimp. They were so good—the coefficient of shrimpiness so high—that I completely forgot to try it with the sauce. In one bite, shrimp had evolved in my world from barely edible rubbery little worm-things to a bold, flavorful treat. In ensuing years, every time we went to a restaurant, I scanned the menu for shrimp cocktail. I was surprised at the variations. Cocktail sauces sometimes contained chili, onions, scallions, lettuce, garlic, or honey. The shrimp might be twice as big as the ones I'd first seen or not much bigger than kidney beans.

Over the next few years, I also began looking through menus for shrimp anything and anything shrimp. They were everywhere: broiled, fried, sautéed, poached, barbecued. I discovered garlicky scampis, crispy-fringed grilled shrimp, fiery shrimp gumbo, sparkling citrusy ceviche, politely savory shrimp newburg, and assertive shrimp bisque. With that one order, my father had forced the evolution of shrimp in my world.

Otherworldly Shrimp


Traveling on the U.S. Navy's dime, I had opportunities to sample foods in Japan, Thailand, Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. In Thailand, as in the Philippines, the majority of my shipmates were more interested in the available sexual entertainments than in the local cuisine, but a few of us spent a good chunk of our personal funds on trips to sundry restaurants.

Two things I learned right away about Thai food: they like it hot and they like it sweet. A lot has been made in recent years about the purported Thai balance of salty, sour, sweet, and hot, but trust me, for every ounce of salty and sour, you get three of sweet and hot. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise. Sweet and hot elements are addictive.

In support of that love of sweet and hot, you usually find on the tables in the restaurants in Sriracha a bottle or bowl of red sauce made of puréed sun-ripened chilis, garlic, sugar, vinegar, and salt. The Thai brands are all hot, all sweet, and all just a bit different from one another. Most brands come in two strengths: medium (hot) and strong (liable to raise blisters). I watched the locals use the sauce on all manner of seafoods: crabs, clams, and shrimp.

Back in the states, I noticed that we have only one brand of Sriracha sauce. You see it more frequently in Vietnamese than Thai restaurants—probably because Thai diners consider the Huy Fong stuff too mild.

This dish is not authentically Thai. My green mango salad lacks three elements I saw in every green mango salad I had in Thailand: peanuts, fish sauce, and dried shrimp. I left those items out because I think the dish matches better with the shrimp this way.

Broiled Sriracha Shrimp with Sesame Vermicelli Cakes and Green Mango Salad

(serves four)

shrimp
one and a half pounds shrimp (20 per pound or larger)
one half cup peanut oil
two tablespoons seasoned rice wine vinegar
three tablespoons Sriracha
two tablespoons dark soy sauce
three tablespoons honey

cakes
one pound cooked egg vermicelli
two tablespoons peanut oil

noodle sauce
one quarter cup sesame oil
two tablespoons cashew butter*
one tablespoon Sriracha

salad
one green mango, peeled and shredded
one jalapeño chili, seeded and thinly sliced
one half cup seasoned rice wine vinegar
one half cup water
one half cup thinly sliced romaine
one scallion
one teaspoon sesame oil

*cashew butter
one pound roasted and unsalted cashews
one quarter cup peanut oil
one tablespoon granulated sugar
one teaspoon salt

quality of ingredients

Shrimp has to be fresh, but most grocers really don't give customers an opportunity to verify the freshness of the shrimp. To do that, you have to touch it. You have to verify that the legs are intact, the shells aren't paper-thin, and the flesh isn't mushy. So you go into the store and ask for a pound and a half of shrimp, and the fishmonger slips on a plastic glove and scoops up a handful of shrimp and stuffs them in a bag. Usually, if you tell them you don't want any soft ones or any with papery shells, they'll oblige you. Otherwise, you'll likely be throwing away shrimp when you get home.

I'm probably being lazy with the rice wine vinegar. I like the quantity of sugar and salt in the Marukan seasoned rice wine vinegar (I use it in my sushi rice, too), so why bother calculating sugar and salt for myself?

Huy Fong sells the only Sriracha sauce in the U.S. It's the brand with a rooster on the bottle.

I like a thick, dark soy sauce for this marinade. If I were really trying to be authentically Thai, I'd have used nam pla instead.

I always buy local honey. Don't misunderstand: I think homeopathy is a load of road apples. Local honey is less processed than the Big Brand slop, so it tastes better.

I'm a big fan of fresh pasta, and I'll have to try frying some home-made vermicelli, sometime. For this dish, I used a dry egg vermicelli, and it worked brilliantly.

I suppose I could buy cashew butter, but it's pretty easy to make. I also find that most cashew butters sold in grocery stores (usually sold in the bulk foods) is a bit too oily. If you own a food processor, make your own. It only takes five minutes.

Green mango is a reference to the ripeness, not the actual color of the skin. Red, green, yellow will all work. For this salad, you want a mango that's as solid as oak.

For the pickled chili, use one large jalapeño. You could easily substitute a large Fresno or a red or green fingerhot. If you like your chilis really hot, the pickled jalapeño will disappoint you. For more heat, substitute three serranos. For a lot more heat, substitute four Thai bird chilis.

The romaine lettuce is a trick I learned from a local Thai restaurant. In Thailand they use sprouts or cucumbers (I actually prefer cucumbers, but the girls don't care for them).

preparation notes

The following instructions are written in the order in which I last prepared these dishes. You can simplify this process slightly by making the cashew butter and pickling the chili in advance. Here's a quick outline of the steps to follow:

Marinate the shrimp
Boil the noodles
Pickle the chili
Prepare the cashew butter
Blend the noodle sauce
Preheat the broiler
Toss the salad
Fry the noodles
Broil the shrimp
Dress the salad
Plate the meal

Mix the peanut oil, seasoned rice wine vinegar, Sriracha, dark soy sauce, and honey and whisk them until smooth. Stir in the shrimp and let them marinate for one hour. With a large spoon, turn the shrimp over every ten minutes or so to ensure the best possible coverage of the shrimp. That hour gives you plenty of time to boil the noodles and pickle the chili for the salad.

Boil the noodles to just barely al dente (about three minutes for dry vermicelli, two minutes for fresh). Rinse the noodles with cold water (you don't want them to cook any further) and drain them thoroughly.

Half-fill a large bowl (large enough to hold a small sauce pan) with ice and add a cup or so of cold water. In a small sauce pan, mix the half cup of vinegar and half cup of water and bring the liquid to a boil. Drop the sliced chili into the boiling liquid and immediately remove it from the flame. Cool the sauce pan in the bowl of ice.

If you're making your own cashew butter, in a food processor, process the cashews, peanut oil, sugar, and salt until smooth (about three to five minutes).

In a blender, combine a quarter cup sesame oil, two tablespoons cashew butter, and one tablespoon of the Sriracha and blend the ingredients until smooth. This is for the noodle sauce.

Preheat your broiler to 500F.

Remove the chili slices from the pickling liquid with a fork or slotted spoon, and reserve a quarter cup of the pickling liquid. In a non-reactive bowl, toss the mango, lettuce, scallions, and chili slices.

In a skillet (I've done this in both a cast iron skillet and a non-stick skillet—both work just fine) over a medium flame, heat one tablespoon of peanut oil to smoking. Pour the cooked noodles into the hot oil, forming them into a disc. I found this easiest to do with my fingers: take a handful of noodles at a time and scatter them evenly in a circular swirl. The disc of noodles should be roughly three-quarters of an inch thick. Press them down slightly with a spatula and allow them to fry, undisturbed, until golden-brown and crisp on one side (about six minutes). Flip the noodles by placing a plate over the cake and turning the skillet over. Return the skillet to the flame, pour in a second tablespoon of peanut oil, and slide the noodle cake back into the skillet. Fry the noodles, undisturbed, for an additional five minutes or until golden-brown.

Skewer the shrimp and broil them for two minutes on each side.

Dress the mango salad with the reserved chili pickling liquid and a sprinkling of sesame oil. Toss the salad once more before plating.


To plate this dish: slice the noodle cake. I fried my noodles in a small skillet, this time, and half a cake was about right for a single serving. If you use a larger skillet, you might want to slice the cake, pizza-style, into fourths or sixths. Drizzle a few stripes of the noodle sauce over each serving of fried noodle. A squeeze-type ketchup bottle works well for this. Using a fork, slide the shrimp off the skewers and onto the noodle cakes. Add a scoop of mango salad on the side.

Purity of Essence

Dichotomies
When he was a young man, my father was a steak purist. In recent years, he's done a good deal of experimentation with food and cooking, so I don't know if his attitude about beef has survived the years. When I was a child, it seemed that the least little variation in a meal could initiate Dad's launch sequence into his disquisition On Absolute Steakness: the Proper Preparation and Eating of Beef Steak.

Steak had to be well-marbled, cooked medium-rare, and properly seasoned. Any degree of doneness further than medium-rare was burnt and ruined. Properly seasoned meant liberally salted and peppered (black pepper only) prior to grilling. Only an idiot would ruin a good steak by applying any foreign spice, herb, or sauce. Toppings were acceptable but only sautéed mushrooms or onions or both. Marinades were for game meats only. After a business dinner, my father once complained that he'd had to scrape some goopy sauce off his steak. Only a troglodyte would hide the flavor of a fine cut of meat under a sauce. Dad believed French chefs were all either troglodytes or vegetarians with a mission to make everyone hate beef.

Once I was away from home, I began to experiment with foods, but it was several years before I convinced myself that I really should test Dad's Theory of Absolute Steakness.

In all fairness, I have struggled with my own attitude toward fine meats for many years. Dad's purist line made sense to me. On the surface it makes perfect sense: sauce your steak and you'll taste the sauce and smother the subtle nuances of steaky goodness. In many cases, I believe this is true. I had a Beef Wellington once in Denver that was sauced tableside. The sauce was delicious, but tenderloin is a mild meat. Also, one excellent reason for adding sauce to many dishes—chicken breast, veal, lean pork, many varieties of fish—is to provide moisture. I like my tenderloin rare, though, so my Beef Wellington didn't need any additional moisture. So, yes, in that case the sauce ruined my steak.

On the other hand, grilled flank steak is better with a well-balanced chimichurri; the subtle flavor of tenderloin blooms under the influence of Gorgonzola butter; hot spice rubs focus the sweetness of the marbling in rib eye. In short, sometimes the sauce on a steak is the good guy.

The advertising agency for a popular steak sauce—the one supposedly named for a compliment from King George IV—has argued for many years that their client's product enhances the flavor of steak. In fact, they have long implied an the enhancement is to such a degree that those in the know would never think of eating steak without said royally approved sauce. Frankly, with respect to their client, they're wrong. In my opinion, that sauce completely obliterates every flavor component of steak save the texture. I mention these ads, however, not to ridicule a popular condiment (well, not solely) but because I believe the theory behind the ads to be a truism: the job of any sauce is to enhance a particular food.

So the purists are right insofar as some meats don't require any sauce, but the purists are wrong insofar as a sauce that enhances the flavor of a meat is good. Honestly, I doubt that any meat is so perfect that no sauce can enhance it. Consider the Japanese gourmand eating Wagyu beef sashimi—few will eat it without sauce of some sort.

The Fish Purist

I haven't met too many fish purists. Granted, grilled tuna and swordfish steaks can stand alone (alone as in sauceless, not alone as in without accompaniment) as long as they're not overcooked. Most fish needs something to provide a bit of moisture and maybe a bit of flavor enhancement.

At least, that's my opinion.

Girltzik quietly disagrees. She scrapes my mango salsa off of her mahi mahi filets, the orange/chipotle reduction off of her salmon, the water-chestnut vinaigrette off her albacore. She usually doesn't scrape off Hollandaise, and she likes just about anything soy-based, so my teriyakis she eats as served.

She typically hides her scraping activities behind a book, and she always has a book up in front of her dinner plate. I usually find out only when she takes her mostly-empty plate to the sink and notice that the one thing remaining is a pile of the toppings. Relishes and salsas appear to be on her Particularly Unacceptable list.

I was not surprised, then, to see her dumping a quarter-cup of my sweet-tomato tapenade into the disposal. In addition to prefering her fish steaks naked, Girltzik is none too fond of capers.

*sigh*

Ah well. This is my riff on darne de thon rouge à la provençale (tuna steak the way they do it in Provençe). Princess V and I devoured ours. It was delicious.



Half-seared Ahi Tuna Steak with Sweet Tomato Tapenade and a Side of Pan-Roasted Broccoli

(serves three)

dramatis personae

two tablespoons olive oil
three half-inch-thick, five-ounce ahi tuna steaks

tapenade
one pint strawberry tomatoes, quartered
one half cup Niçoise or Kalamata olives, pitted
one third cup basil, rough-chopped
two anchovy filets
two tablespoons non-pareil capers

one broccoli crown, cut into spears
one sprig green garlic
juice of one lemon

quality of ingredients

See Undiscovering Fire for my quality notes on tuna.

The tomato market has really exploded lately, including a number of fruity, sweet cultivars. If you can't find strawberry tomatoes, look for super-sweet, seriously sweet, or sweet 100s. If none of those are available at your grocer, cherub or cherry tomatoes will do.

Niçoise olives were my first choice (the idea was to stay with Provençal ingredients), but they tend to be harder to find. Kalamatas are a bit oily for this application. Otherwise, both have their charms. Niçoise are nutty. Kalamatas have a winy flavor.

As I've said before, just about any brand of capers should be okay, but I wouldn't recommend the Alessi brand capers packed in white balsamic vinegar. You want tart and salty, not sweet. Taste the capers before you use them. If they're too salty, rinse them and soak them in white vinegar for a while before you use them.

I remember the first time—in some little out-of-the-way pizzeria near Chicago—that I got a bite of anchovy. It was on a pizza with everything. That first little taste of salty fishiness overcame every other flavor and utterly derailed my appetite. Bleah. I doubt that I will ever comprehend the anchovy pizza. I suppose it's like explaining the charm of stinky cheese to someone who doesn't like stinky cheese. Still, over the years I have learned that a little anchovy, mashed and incorporated with other ingredients, can provide a subtle taste of Mediterranean breeze. I keep a jar of anchovy filets (packed in olive oil) in my cupboard.

The broccoli crown should be green or green and purple and the florets should be firm and tight.

If you can't get green garlic, substitute one garlic clove, crushed or minced.

preparation notes

Salt and pepper one side of each tuna steak and set them aside.

Mash the anchovy filets on a small plate with the back of a spoon until the bones are entirely crushed.

If you're using Kalamata olives, press them between paper towels to remove a bit of the excess oil.

Combine the tomatoes, olives, anchovy, and basil in a food processor and process the ingredients until the largest bits are no more than three times as big as the capers. In our machine that took about five seconds. Pour the ingredients into a bowl and mix in the capers.

Over a medium-high flame, heat two tablespoons of olive oil to smoking in a stainless steel sauté pan or cast-iron skillet. Place the broccoli spears in the oil so that each spear has one entire side down on the hot oil and salt them. Let the broccoli spears cook without moving them until they just begin to change color (the green will begin to brighten). Once the color starts changing, you can begin checking the spears for browning. I use chopsticks, but tongs or a small spatula will work. Once all of the spears show some brown, turn them over and brown the opposite side. (Well, another side, anyway. Broccoli isn't exactly rectangular.)

Add in the green garlic, and sauté the vegetables continually for thirty seconds. You want the flavor of the garlic to bloom, but you don't want it to brown. Turn off the flame, pour the lemon juice over the vegetables, and cover. Remove the pan from the burner but don't uncover it. This is, incidentally, one of those moments that makes me want to spend more time in the kitchen. The instant lemon juice flashes to steam, the aromatics from the citrus, broccoli, and garlic engulf you and flood your nostrils. You will salivate, and you will thank me for introducing you to this experience.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil to smoking in a non-stick skillet. Place the tuna steaks, seasoned side down, in the hot oil. Once the steaks are cooked through one-third of their thickness, remove the steaks from the skillet. Plate the steaks, uncooked side up, and cover each with the tomato tapenade. Plate the broccoli or transfer it to a bowl if you'd rather serve it family-style.

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.

The Secret Language of Fish, Part 7

Red Fish, Blue Fish

One Fish

I wasn't thinking about my last blog entry or colors when I decided to treat my family to blue trout (trout au bleu). I wasn't even thinking about the color. Frankly, knowing how hard it is to find live trout in Austin, I was pretty sure we'd not see the blue effect anyway (I was right; we didn't). I was just thinking of leeks. I'd been strolling through the produce section of my favorite grocery store, planning to have some sort of fish for dinner. When I reached the pile of ice where they usually stock leeks, I thought, Yeah, something with leeks would be nice. Then I noticed their selection: two scraggly looking, mostly green bunches, but Aha! one bunch was mostly buried in the ice. I dug them out and was rewarded with three fat, firm, mostly white leeks.

"No fair," said another shopper beside me. She was smiling, though, and didn't try to brain me with a celeriac when I turned away, so I think she was kidding.

Leeks in hand, I decided to do something I hadn't tried since coming to Austin from Idaho many years ago. Growing up in Colorado and later living many years in Idaho, I learned many wonderful preparations for trout. Frankly, most of them require that the diners spend a lot of time picking bones, fins, and scaly skin off of the trout.

Oh, sure, you can filet the fish, but trout is a delicate, mild-flavored fish, so removing the bones and head before cooking all but ensures a lesser flavor.

Blue trout and trout à la nage ("swimming") can be two exceptions, if the fish are handled properly from start to finish.

Essentially, blue trout is a whole trout poached in an acidulated court bouillon. If the trout are fresh out of the water, their slime will be intact, and the fish comes out of the bouillon with a blue sheen. If the trout are more than a few hours old—no matter how well they've been preserved—the slime has broken down and the blue thing just doesn't happen. In other words, this is essentially a preparation à la nage with some vinegar added to cause a litmus effect.

To outline this simple dish: you prepare the court bouillon by simmering aromatic vegetables and a bouquet garni in water with a splash of wine and a little salt. Remove and drain the vegetables. Discard the herbs. Set half of the court bouillon aside and add a little lemon juice. Add a few drops of vanilla to the other half and use that to poach the whole trout. Skin the trout and lift off the filets. Serve the filets, garnished with the vegetables, in a bowl immersed in a half inch of the reserved court bouillon.

Two Fish

The blue trout had been an unqualified success. Everybody raved. The fish was delicate but tasty, and the individual elements managed to work well together while retaining their individuality. I could taste the leeks, the carrots, the turnip (no luck finding a decent fennel bulb that day), and the trout, and everything enjoyed a sparkling sheen of lemon and thyme. Girlchild even ate some of the vegetables. (She did insist on trying to keep the fish out of the court bouillon, but teenagers always have to find something to be idiosyncratic about.)

Less than two weeks later, finding myself once again in the produce section of a grocery store and once again in the presence of spectacular-looking leeks, my mind turned again to thoughts of blue trout. In this case, the trout in the fishmonger's case were not so impressive: golden rainbow hybrids less than ten inches in length. I knew they'd be full of bones.

That same case was, however, sporting some mighty fine looking steelhead filets. Steelhead is ocean-running rainbow trout. Because of their age and diet (steelhead are primarily pescivores; rainbow trout are primarily insectivores), steelhead trout is salmon red—usually redder than king salmon but not so red as sockeye. Steelhead flesh, in addition to being larger and more colorful than that of their landlocked cousins, is chock full of glutamines and omega-3 and -6 fatty acids. Healthy, yes, but also richer by an order of magnitude.


The upshot was, in addition to having no chance in hell of ever turning blue (and thus no reason for adding vinegar to the broth), the steelhead was more savory and complex and far more filling than the little rainbows. At the table, the steelhead rendered up a few pink droplets of savory oils in the court bouillon, a beautiful and artsy effect for which I could take no credit. Aside from a crusty baguette, this dish required no accompaniment.


dramatis personae


two quarts water

one cup white vinegar (for blue trout)

three medium leeks

one medium turnip

one large carrot

one fennel bulb (optional)

three three-inch sprigs thyme

three sprigs flat parsley

two large bay leaves

one half cup white wine

one half teaspoon salt

juice of one lemon

one eighth teaspoon vanilla

three whole trout or between 12 and 15 ounces of steelhead filet


quality of ingredients

Good leeks seem to be increasingly difficult to find. Most of the bundles I see in the grocery stores in Austin have about an inch of white leek, and that's the only part you really want for most applications. The greens are just too fibrous. I avoid anything with less than three inches of white, but five inches of white is damned rare.

Good turnips are easy to find. They're firm. Picking a good turnip is rather like picking a good potato. If it's rubbery or has soft spots, pick another.

Color doesn't matter much with turnips, but it does with fennel bulbs. They should be white. You'll have to cut away any brownish bits, so try to get one that contains as little brown as possible.

Trout should be as intact as possible. If you can get live trout and clean them at home, you might actually be able to see the blue effect. Another great thing about cleaning them yourself is that the trout farms typically screw it up. In order to make the fish look cleaner, they remove the spine. Unfortunately, in addition to removing a part that serves to flavor the cooking fish, removing the spine from a small trout all but ensures that they will leave teeny little pin bones all down the lateral line of the fish. If you can lift the flesh away from the bones after cooking, you are far more likely to pull the flesh cleanly off the bones.

Select steelhead trout fillets the same way you would select salmon. This treatment à la nage should produce the same results with salmon.

preparation notes



Put the water (and vinegar if you're trying to make blue trout) on to boil.


Peel and julienne the carrot and turnip. Thoroughly clean and julienne the fennel bulb and the white parts of the leeks. Reserve and clean two green leek leaves for use in the bouquet garni. Place the thyme, bay, and parsley between the leek leaves and tie them into a tight bundle with kitchen twine. Drop the vegetables and the bouquet into the boiling water. Add in the salt and white wine. Once the liquid comes back to a boil, reduce the temperature and allow it to simmer for 25 minutes.


Remove and discard the bouquet garni, and remove the vegetables to a colander. Set aside half of the court bouillon, and bring the remainder back to a boil. To the cooling reserved liquid, add the lemon juice.


Treatment of the fish is a bit different for whole trout and steelhead filets.

For whole trout:

If you're lucky enough to be preparing fresh-caught fish, clean them completely, removing the gills and internal organs. Leave in the spine, and do not attempt to scale the fish. The scales will be too small and tenacious to remove without ripping the skin and bruising the flesh. Once the court bouillon is back up to a boil, add in the vanilla and drop in the fish and poach them for two or three minutes. When you can slip the tip of a butter knife into the back along the dorsal fin, gently remove the fish from the broth and lay them on one side on a clean work surface.

I don't know any way to do all of this with any tool but fingers, so be prepared to scald your fingertips a bit (keeping a bowl of ice water on hand to dip your fingers in will help). Now, while the fish are still hot, strip away the skin from one side, pluck out the fins, and working from the spine where the dorsal fin was removed, lift the filet from the naked side. If the fish cools, the skin will become increasingly difficult to remove. Carefully turn the fish over and do the same on the other side. Strip and remove all of the filets from their bones before moving on to plating. Before plating them, check over the filets and wipe away any stray scales.

If a single filet will be large enough for a serving, fold it in half and stack the halves in the center of a wide soup or pasta bowl. Mound a handful of the julienned vegetables on top of the fish, and ladle on a cup of the reserved court bouillon. If the filets are small, you might want to plate two together. In that case, just cross them in the center of the bowl, without bothering to fold them.



For the steelhead filet:


Slice the filet into four- or five-ounce sections. Five ounces sounds like a pretty small portion to some adults, but this is really rich fish. It is not necessary to scale the filets. Once the court bouillon is back up to a boil, add in the vanilla and the filets. Poach the filets for five minutes or until a knife inserted between the segments shows them to be cooked through.


Remove the filets to a clean work surface and remove the skin. Separate the filets along the lateral line and discard any pin bones. Lay the filets skin side up and, with a thin knife, carefully slice away the light brown matter from the pink flesh.


Plate the filet segments as described for whole trout.

The Secret Language of Fish, Part 6

Orange, vermilion, and salmon

We are so accustomed to seeing salmon flesh in just that precise persimmony shade of pink that we've even given it place in our lexicons. Truth be told, the flesh color of the salmon (and their closest cousins the trout and char) varies quite a bit and is dependent largely upon diet. A live-fish diet makes the flesh more pink. The slightly more orange color in most salmon is due to supplementing that mostly-fish-diet with squid and shrimp. Trout, char, and salmon in streams, living on a diet heavy with insects and larva have pale, nearly white flesh. A predominantly shellfish diet will turn the flesh bright yellow. Farmed fish are fed supplements to color their flesh because the market just won't bear off-white salmon.

As I've mentioned in earlier entries, I prefer sockeye salmon. Sockeye flesh is redder than that of any other salmon, trout, or char, and it retains a bit more color when it cooks. I believe sockeye has a richer flavor, and it seems to keep better than other members of family Salmonidae. Part of my preference might be simple superstition. I've had bad coho, bad Atlantic salmon, and bad king salmon. I've not yet had a sockeye purchase go wrong. Then again, mine might be a more complex superstition—sympathetic magic: more depth of color equals more depth of flavor.

Still, there's something about that color—that salmon color—that leaves me questioning a lot of choices we all tend to make regarding how we cook and dress salmon. Like many other cooks, I long ago decided that orange juice and orange zest are ideal accompanists for salmon. Is it just the color? Is it my inner interior decorator telling me to pair orange-pink flesh with blood oranges and tangerines?

Well, that might have had something to do with the original selection, but I certainly can't take credit or blame for the pairing. Salmon glazes have included orange-juice almost as long as ham glazes have included pineapple. In Texas restaurants where everything that isn't barbecue finds its way into the Tex-Mex canon, salmon is often served with an orange-chipotle sauce or glaze. (We're so in love with chipotle chiles that I'm surprised no one has yet started a string of Texas chipotle ice cream parlors or chipotle coffee shops.)

If you taste a bit of cooked salmon (yes, or trout or char) with no other seasoning than a bit of salt, you can readily taste the reason oranges work with salmon. Salmon has a light, buttery sweetness. A little fruity sugar enhances the natural sweetness of the fish. A little tartness gives sparkle to that buttery quality just as lemon does for the butter in sauce Hollandaise. I've used the salmon/orange pairing with some success in the recent past (for details, see Charred sockeye with tomato-orange escabeche in my entry Words, words, words).

Of course, if the orange and salmon color combination seems just a little too much like a fashion statement, you can substitute any of quite a few other fruits or berries. Some experimenters have had quite a bit of luck with kumquats, mango, pineapple, blackberry, and raspberry. According to Gordon Ramsay in an episode of his Kitchen Nightmares, strawberries don't pair well with salmon. I also wouldn't bet on cherries. The tartness in strawberries (I'm guessing) is a bit too astringent to work with salmon. Cherry, I think, would overpower the fish.

Recently, I paired a more-or-less traditional glaze with an apple-based salsa. The results were outstanding. I say "partly traditional" because I melded a couple of fairly traditional salmon glaze elements that are not usually used together (maple syrup, orange zest, wasabi, Dijon mustard, and lime juice). I added the salsa to provide texture and to give a little depth. From experience with a number of sushi rolls I've sampled, I knew that hot chiles mixed with wasabi give a different depth of burn than either hot element alone. The chiles burn the tip of the tongue; the wasabi burns the back of the throat.

Glazed sockeye with apple salsa

dramatis personae

glaze:

2 tbsp wasabi powder
2 tbsp lime juice
zest of one medium orange
2 tbsp dark amber maple syrup
1 tbsp Dijon mustard

four five-ounce pieces of salmon filet, scaled
sea salt
black pepper

salsa:

honey crisp apple (with peel), diced
celery rib
serrano chili, seeded and minced
1 tsp cider vinegar
1 tsp olive oil
salt

quality of ingredients

Wasabi powder is sold in most places that sell bulk spices, but it really isn't wasabi. The stuff we're given in most US restaurants is a mix of horseradish and spirulina. Wasabi is damned difficult to come by in the US. I've seen the roots for sale in two stores in Austin, and both places were asking $250 per pound. I have no idea whether real wasabi would work in this recipe. I believe I could substitute Chinese hot mustard for the combination of wasabi and Dijon mustard, but I haven't had a chance to try it.

When I buy oranges to use for zest, I nick the rind with a thumbnail to verify that it's sufficiently aromatic. Some large navel oranges with thick, brightly colored rinds can have surprisingly weak-smelling zest. If you can't smell it, you won't taste it.

I used dark amber maple syrup and strongly recommend avoiding any kind of imitation. I had originally planned to use honey, but I was out of honey. I will probably try honey next time.

For more on sockeye salmon, see Words, Words, Words.

I could only think of three apples that I might have used for the salsa: fujis, pacific roses, or honeycrisps. All three varieties are sweet, crisp, and fruity, and all three have their charms. For this particular recipe, honeycrisps offered the best balance of sweet and tart.

Serrano chilies are variable but tend to be hot without being too hot for my girls. Jalapeños or green hot fingerlong chilies would work.

preparation notes

Preheat the oven to 400F (375F convection).

Mix the glaze ingredients together thoroughly.

Coat the bottom of a flat-bottomed backing dish with vegetable oil. Place the salmon filets skin side down on the oil. Salt and pepper the filets. Cover the filets with the glaze and bake them for 8 minutes or until a fork will readily separate the segments.

The salsa is simple enough that you can prepare it while the fish is baking.

Serve each filet with a heaping tablespoon of salsa.