Cooking Competitions

Imagine eating 16 plates of beef. In a row. A few years ago I judged my first cooking competition and it was the National Beef Cookoff. While I'd like to tell you everything about it, some cooking competitions are serious business and in that particular case, I was sworn to secrecy.

This month alone I am judging three cooking contests–the Bacon Takedown was last weekend and this weekend is the Bay Area BBQ Championship and the Lamb Jam. Last month I judged one of the Bravo Top Chef Tour "quickfire" competitions that was part of their road tour.


(Sorry to say it, but Fabio lost, using Red Bull in a salmon dish was probably not such a good idea)

If you're guessing I rarely pass up a chance to be a judge, you're right. I like trying different dishes, evaluating and conferring with the other judges. While it might seem like work, the truth is, it's actually a lot of fun.

At Matt Timms wild and wonderful Takedown competitions it's a combination of amateurs and professionals so you never know what you're going to find. The judge's choice for first place this time around was Ivy Something who made Bacon Fried Chicken with Sweet Potato Biscuits and Tipsy Maple Gravy. Ivy has Southern roots and a gravy blog. Yup. A gravy blog. I do hope she blogs the recipe.



The Bay Area BBQ Championship is a big deal competition compared to the others. It's being held at the Oakland Coliseum creekside lot and when you buy a ticket, you also get to see a double header A's game. Nice. This competition is particularly important to me because it benefits Alternative Family Services one of the most well-respected foster care agencies in the country and the founder and Executive Director is a very close family friend. There are 32 teams competing, including Food Network champions the Bad Boyz of BBQ, the Q Masters, Bad S BBQ (featuring Iron Chef Contestant Ric Gilbert), and the Oakland Fire Department. Tickets are still available! Buy one for yourself or just donate a ticket so a kid can see a ball game. Tickets must be purchased in advance, no sales the day of the event.

Finally the Lamb Jam will have restaurant chefs competing against one another. This sold out event is being sponsored by the American Lamb Board, who are responsible for getting the message out about lamb. Did you know American Lamb is hormone free and is available as all-natural products that are antibiotic free? You probably do know that sheep are grazing animals and help to maintain a healthy ecosystem.

I'll be curious to see what the chefs will be cooking up, all weekend long. What cooking competition would you most like to judge?

Bison Tagliata Recipe

It's Summer and thoughts turn to grilling. Me? I'm in an apartment with no grill, but that doesn't stop me from eating stuff people normally grill like steak. Just as I warmed up to grass fed beef, I'm pretty much head over heals for bison steak and I have a nifty way of cooking it sans grill. It tuns out what we think of as American buffalo is really bison. What's on the buffalo head coin? A bison. There are water buffalo (for that crazy good mozzarella) and the African Cape buffalo (not so sure what they are good for) but American buffalo is really bison so let's go with that.

Bison is much lower in fat than beef, high in iron, slightly lower in cholesterol. Recently I heard Ted Turner speak at the Sustainable Foods Institute, part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's annual event, Cooking for Solutions. It turns out, he is crazy about bison. He owns the largest herd in the world and has opened a chain of bison restaurants. He loves the romance of the prarie. But the environmental arguments for bison are even stronger. Bison are grazing animals and part of the ecosystem that helps keep grasslands healthy. Because it is so lean, cooking it fairly gently is important so it stays tender and flavorful.

I like a certain Italian way of eating steak called "tagliata" which just means sliced. Instead of a big hunk of meat you get slices of perfectly cooked medium rare steak over a spicy arugula salad drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, some shavings of Parmesan or Pecorino and a wedge of lemon. Using smoked olive oil is a great way to get the taste of the grill without, you know, a grill. It's expensive but a tiny bit goes a long way, and it doesn't lose pungency if you store it properly (in a cool dark place).

This is a super lazy summertime meal, it requires very little cooking, and it's a one dish meal to boot. My biggest complaint about bison is the difficulty in finding it at the store. Ground bison is getting more common but steaks are much harder to locate. I got samples of bison steaks from High Plains Bison, you can purchase from them online or find more producers at Bison Central.

Bison TagliataServes 4

Ingredients

2 ribeye or strip bison steaks
Arugula
Chunk of Parmesan or Pecorino
1 lemon
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Heat a heavy cast iron skillet over high heat. Pat the steak dry and season generously with salt and pepper. Sear the steak in the skillet, cooking for 2-3 minutes on each side, until brown. Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast for 5 minutes. Remove from the oven and transfer steak to a cutting board and cover with foil and let stand for 10 minutes.

Arrange arugula on 4 plates, shave cheese using a vegetable peeler and place strips of cheese on the salad. Slice the steak against the grain and lay strips on the salad. Drizzle with a tiny bit of olive oil. Serve with a lemon wedge.

Enjoy!

Chile Pepper Menu at Dosa

A few weeks ago I had brunch at Dosa on Fillmore. It was absolutely fantastic. First of all, it's a lovely and glamorous dining room with high ceilings, gold accents and modern sculptural chandeliers. And the food is so good. I love having something a little out of the ordinary for brunch. There are omelets with chiles, dosas with eggs, spiced up scrambled eggs, all the things you want but served in a new way. So I was particularly thrilled to get a chance to work with chef and owner Anjan Mitra to put together a really cool menu for BlackboardEats. And now I have an excuse to go back for dinner.

Anjan uses the best ingredients and brings a level of freshness to Indian food that is pretty much unique in San Francisco. He's been wanting to do a chile pepper menu for some time and the dishes are all over the map in terms of heat. Because this is a BlackboardEats special, YOU MUST sign up at http://blackboardeats.com/ and download a passcode on June 28th (or first thing June 29th) to be able to order these dishes. But the good thing is you can order as many or as few as you want.



Photo credit: Robin Jolin
I teased Anjan that this corn salad is a bit like succotash. But really it's a bright lime and spiced smoky salad that has a little bowl of chiles on the side so you can take the heat up to wherever you like.



Photo credit: Robin Jolin
The lamb pepper fry is a rich curry with many layers of chile and sweet undertones of cardamom and cinnamon.



Photo credit: Robin Jolin
The peppers stuffed with chicken looks like chile rellenos! I guess in a way it is, and the sauce resembles mole because it is made from more chiles and ground nuts and sesame.



Photo credit: Robin Jolin
The batter fried chiles are like Indian jalapeno poppers! The batter is light and made from lentils and instead of cheese the filling is a creamy puree of sesame and peanuts. Anjan uses different peppers so you don't know if you'll get a mild bite or a zinger but there is cooling tamarind and yogurt chutneys to take the heat down if you desire.



Photo credit: Robin Jolin
I am always torn between ordering dosas which are like crepes or uttapams which are like moist pancakes. For this special menu there is a Habanero uttapam. This untraditional uttapam has a mango habanero chutney mixed into the batter, along with seasonal vegetables making it bright and colorful and it comes with that outrageous dal that is at once exciting and comforting.

The dishes are priced extremely well considering the quality, from $9 to $12 each and of course there are lots of other wonderful things on the menu to round out your meal. Many thanks to Anjan for creating this great menu and to Robin Jolin for taking the drop dead gorgeous photos.

Louisiana Gulf Shrimp

Help! I'm undergoing gulf shrimp withdrawal! On my Louisiana Seafood adventure I ate shrimp every single day and never got tired of them in the least. In Louisiana there are white shrimp, brown shrimp and freshwater shrimp. I particularly liked the flavorful brown shrimp I tried, though they are less popular than the larger white shrimp.

Shrimp from the gulf are sweet and succulent and perfectly safe to eat. At the Sustainable Foods Institute (part of Cooking for Solutions at the Monterey Bay Aquarium) I spoke with scientists who told me that the shrimp population came back quickly after the oil spill in the gulf and the testing has not shown any signs that the seafood is contaminated. Fortunately Louisiana gulf shrimp are available all over the country and are really worth seeking out for their superior flavor and texture and because they are harvested in a more sustainable way than the cheap shrimp you find imported from Asia.

So how many ways are there to eat shrimp? Probably more than I can count, but here are my absolute hand's down favorites from the trip:

Barbecue shrimp from GW Fins, upper left hand corner. Now barbecue shrimp in Louisiana are not "throw a shrimp on the barbie" Australian shrimp, or doused in Texas style barbecue sauce, they are cooked in butter and spices and positively delicious. I found this recipe online, so you can try making them at home. Now if I could just get my hands on the savory Jazzmen rice pudding recipe that accompanied the shrimp...

Shrimp boil is next, shown in the upper right hand corner. But here's what I learned about shrimp boil. It's shrimp poached gently in a spiced broth, off the heat! The shrimp never get boiled, just the seasoning mix and cooking liquid. This was news to me, but explains why you end up with such juicy shrimp, it's probably the most gentle way to cook them. Cooking them in the shells helps prevent them from overcooking and yet they do take on the flavor of the "boil."

Shrimp remoulade is in the bottom right hand corner, as served at Mandina's. My thanks to Pim for introducing me to this neighborhood gem and my other charming and enthusiastic dining companions–Adam aka the Amateur Gourmet and Chichi who writes for Serious Eats. The secret to this dish was of course the remoulade sauce, which was heavily spiked with horseradish. Yum! Horseradish makes pretty much everything taste better. Especially remoulade sauce.

Last but not least, fried shrimp (and some oysters too). This was another dish at Mandina's and while I never got my hands on a po' boy, this was the same thing, just no bread. More shrimp! The folks in New Orleans know how to fry their food so every thing is crisp and greaseless. Seriously, they are deep frying experts and I am happy to leave the frying to them.

What's your favorite way to enjoy shrimp? Shrimp etouffée? Shrimp bisque? Is there a particular NOLA style shrimp dish you love?

My thanks to Louisiana Seafood for sponsoring this trip. It was a blast!

Bourbon for Father's Day

I'm just back from Bourbon Street, and I have bourbon on my mind. Of course, in New Orleans I drank Sazeracs, and the flavor of the city is really herbsaint as far as I'm concerned. But I'm thinking about bourbon and the young people I met in Louisville last Spring who told me that bourbon was what their granddaddies drank. It took them a while to come around to it, but they have now embraced it as their own.


Even though my father doesn't drink it, bourbon just seems like the quintessential spirit for dad. In my visit to bourbon country, I learned the distilleries were all pretty much family ventures, though now mostly owned by conglomerates. Even if you don't drink bourbon, a visit to this beautiful part of the country outside Louisville is a treat. I was a guest at the Maker's Mark distillery in Loretto which feels more like a national park than anything else. Historic wooden buildings with touches of their trademark red are set against a lush green backdrop. The tour of the distillery is very worthwhile. It's so old fashioned and small scale you might be surprised, I loved seeing the buckets of yeast and beautiful copper distillation pots.



Maker's Mark is made from corn, barley and local wheat. It is smooth and has featured prominently in my recipe development efforts. It has a sweetness and rich caramel and toffee notes with a hint of citrus. If you like Marker's Mark, try 46, which is also made from Maker's Mark, but is aged with more specially charred oak staves, it's a bit higher proof but still mellow and has more spice and vanilla to it.


There are lots of ways to enjoy bourbon, but if you are drinking it straight, by all means, check out the gorgeous American whisky glassware from Villeroy & Boch. The feel of these heavy glasses in your hands and the way the aroma builds and wafts up to my nose convinced me, these glasses are a must for bourbon purists. Villeroy & Boch make a whole line of whisky glasses for a range of whiskies and cocktails so you can get just the right glass to go with your drink. My thanks to Villeroy & Boch for sending me some samples to try out.


My favorite bartender in Louisville, Joy Perrine wrote the definitive book on bourbon cocktails, The Kentucky Bourbon Cocktail Book. Her recipes are layered and balanced and introduced me to so many new ways to enjoy bourbon. She combines it with everything from amaretto to vermouth. The section on creating bourbon infusions explaining how to use herbs, spices and fruits to flavor bourbon is particularly intriguing.

Why do YOU cook, Maria Speck?

I met Maria Speck, the Grain Gourmet on Twitter where her recipe tweets piqued my curiosity. She grew up in both Germany and Greece and shares her recipes and mostly Mediterranean techniques for cooking with whole grains in ways you might not expect. In her beautiful new cookbook, Ancient Grains for Modern Meals, you'll find cakes from quinoa and smoked trout, an easy crust from cooked polenta, a hearty frittata with wild rice and wheat berry "fool" with figs. Her recipes will surely broaden your horizons as much as they tempt your tastebuds.

It all started with a small bag of wheat berries someone handed me at a cemetery in Greece during a ceremony to mark the recent death of my grandfather. I was six years old and hungry. While I scooped up the mixture of cinnamon and cumin-scented grains, chewing on their succulent starchy centers, interspersed with chunks of roasted walnuts and sugarcoated almonds-I became completely oblivious to the crushing sadness all around me, and blissfully dug in. This culinary memory made me into the person I am today, in so many ways.

Years later a simple wheat berry salad, served to me by a friend in Germany, brought the grains of my childhood back to my table. At the time, I worked as a news agency journalist, subsisting on coffee and frozen pizza. Rediscovering the delicious chew of wheat berries made me realize what I was missing. From then on, I lit my stove and my oven with a passion otherwise reserved for boyfriends.

A few years later whole grains once more changed the path of my life. When I moved to the US in 1993 as a journalism fellow at Stanford university, I couldn't find what the German half of me calls “real bread.” Most stores sold soft, cotton-candy like bread or pre-sliced toast. Even when labeled whole grain, little did these products resemble the deliciously chewy, aromatic, and dense loaves of dark wheat and rye breads I was raised on. Eventually, I took fate into my own hands: I ordered a beautiful wooden German countertop grain mill and started baking whole grain bread from freshly ground flour. Which ultimately lead to my current career. As more and more Americans started to get interested in whole grains, I realized how much I really knew about them. I am writer and a passionate whole grain lover-so why not combine the two, I thought? Instead of reporting on technology, society and health, all I have done since is writing about whole grains. And cooking and baking with them. Naturally.

Mexican Cheese Primer

Mexican cheese is readily available where I live, not expensive and yet I admit, I am often bewildered when I go to buy it. What's the difference between Cotija and Queso Anejo? Will Panela melt or crumble? If Quesadilla cheese is good for quesadillas, is Enchilado cheese for enchiladas? I have finally made sense of Mexican cheeses, thanks to lots of great information from the California Milk Advisory Board and some generous samples from Cacique, the largest Hispanic cheese brand in the US. Cacique has very detailed descriptions of all their cheeses as well as recipes when you're ready to dig in even further.

Don't be afraid to buy Mexican cheeses because you are not sure what to do with them. They are actually very easy to use and enjoy and often available in supermarkets. And they can be used in all kinds of dishes, not just traditional Mexican cuisine. Many are similar to cheeses you already know, like feta or mozzarella. It was the Spaniards who introduced cows and goats to Mexico as sources of meat and milk, so it's not surprising that Mexican cheeses bear a resemblance to European cheeses, especially ones from the Mediterranean countries including Spain, Italy and Greece.

When thinking about Mexican cheese, it's better to extend the category to Mexican dairy and divide everything into three categories, Fresh Cheeses, Aged Cheeses and Cream. I've listed the most popular and commonly available cheeses first.

FRESH CHEESES
Many fresh, or un-aged Mexican cheeses will soften but do not actually melt. Some of these cheese can be crumbled or fried. Of the fresh cheeses, only Queso Quesadilla and Oaxaca are melting cheeses.

Queso Fresco
This is the most commonly used Mexican cheese. Most similar to feta, it's mild, buttery and slightly salty, it softens, but it doesn't melt. It's typically used on salads and refried beans and it's perfect for enchiladas. You could easily use this cheese on any kind of salad, even Greek salad, in cheese spreads, blintzes, or in corn pudding.

Panela
Panela is a really fun cheese! It softens but does not melt and can be pan-fried like halloumi. Put it on salads, in potato casseroles, omelets and in sandwiches. You can also crumble it over spicy dishes. It is very mild in flavor.

Oaxaca
Like a braided mozzarella or string cheese, it does melt and gets stringy when hot. Use it for stuffing, especially in chile rellenos but also on lasagna, pizza or nachos.

Queso Quesadilla
A buttery melting cheese for use in quesadillas, but also in any grilled cheese sandwich and has an almost nutty buttery flavor. It's similar to jack cheese.

Requeson
The sweetest Mexican cheese, and very soft and grainy, like ricotta. Use it in desserts.

AGED CHEESES
Mexican aged cheeses will last longer, and are all firm because more moisture has evaporated, but range from crumbly to very hard. Of the aged cheeses, Asadero, and Manchego are melting cheeses.

Cotija aka Queso Anejo
The most strongly flavored cheese, most similar to parmesan or romano cheese but quite as dry. A little packs a punch! This is the cheese to use with corn, roll the cooked cob in mayonnaise then coat it in crumbled cotija and sprinkle it with cayenne and drizzle it with lime. Use it in place of parmesan as a topping on pasta or in a Mexican style Caesar salad.

Asadero
A buttery, mild melting cheese you can use in quesadillas, nachos or in grilled cheese sandwiches. It's very creamy and similar to fontina in flavor but like provolone in style, especially in the way you use it, sliced and draped over food to create a melted layer of cheese. You could use this on a cheeseburger or even melted in fondue.

Manchego
In Spain Manchego is made with sheep's milk cheese, but the Mexican style of Manchego made in the US, is made from cow's milk and more similar in flavor to a mild cheddar with a nutty flavor. It melts extremely well. You could use it in grilled cheese sandwiches, pasta dishes, or in Mexican dishes like queso fundido or chile rellenos. It's also great on a cheeseburger or in macaroni and cheese.

Enchilado
It is coated in mild chile, giving it a distinctive color and flavor. There are two versions, Enchilado and Enchilado Anejo, an even more aged style. It is a crumbly cheese that does not melt. It is milder than cotija and can be used as a stuffing in enchiladas or chile rellenos.


CREAM
There are creams from other Latin American countries but the Mexican style is generally most common. Try to find one without stabilizers if possible.

Crema aka Crema Mexicana
Think creme fraiche or thin sour cream, this rich yummy cream is thick but still liquid and not as firm as sour cream or American style yogurt. Drizzle it on spicy dishes, enchiladas, soups, chilaquiles. Crema can be used in cooking and on dishes as a finishing touch.