Singapore Chili Crab

This time of year, Dungeness crab is for sale, but it's past its prime. The meat isn't as sweet as it is in December and January, so eating it plain is always a disappointment.

But my friend Emily had a terrific idea: bathe the crab in Singaporean chili sauce. A frequent traveler to Southeast Asia, she has enjoyed it many times and wanted to try the recipe with our local species.

I headed out to her beach house on a recent, glorious Sunday, accompanied by my dog, Mickey, to learn how to make it. We compiled a bunch of recipes from the Web and concocted one that sounded both do-able and delicious. It was both.

SINGAPORE CHILI CRAB

Adapted from various recipes by Emily Friedman and Mandy Erickson

Chili crab is considered to be the national dish of Singapore. It consists of crab pieces in the shell in a sweet-spicy, tomato-based sauce. There is no standard recipe; it's like beef stew or chicken noodle soup—everyone has his or her own version. I had it on a trip to Singapore in 2011, when I was trying to learn a bit about the country's health care system. My hosts took me to one of the classic chili crab restaurants, the name of which I didn't get.

For this recipe, we made some concessions to convenience. Most recipes suggest using raw (although dead) crab and letting it cook in the sauce. Mandy and I opted for cooked crab. We also chose not to make our own tomato ketchup or chili paste. Those of you who don't have access to some of the Asian ingredients can always substitute.

The amounts for many of the ingredients are somewhat approximate. —E.F.

2 cups water

10 tbsp. (about 3/4 cup) tomato ketchup

3 tsp. cornstarch

2 tbsp. regular, brown, or caster sugar

1-2 tbsp. vegetable oil (we used canola)

8 garlic cloves, minced

2 shallots, minced

6-8 red Thai chiles, finely chopped (These provide the heat for the sauce, so feel free to use fewer; I wouldn't use any more.  Two long red chiles can be substituted.)

1-2 tbsp. or more grated galangal (This is an Asian rhizome that is often used in place of ginger, to which it is vaguely related; regular ginger can be used. If you do use galangal, be aware that this stuff is hard as a rock and must be peeled with a sharp, sturdy knife. It does, however, have a delightful fragrance and taste.)

1 stalk lemon grass, peeled and finely chopped (This stuff is also very hard; peel the first few layers off before chopping and only use the bulb and maybe 2 inches above it.)

3 tbsp. oyster sauce

2 eggs, beaten

4-6 spring onions (scallions), sliced thinly

3-4 tbsp. fresh-squeezed lime juice (more if you like, which I do)

5 tbsp. fresh coriander (cilantro) leaves

2-3 tbsp. kecap manis (sweet soy sauce, available in Asian groceries; if you use regular soy sauce, you may want to increase the amount of sugar)

2 large cooked Dungeness crabs, cleaned and broken into pieces

Mix the water, ketchup, cornstarch, and sugar in a large bowl.  Stir with a fork or a whisk until well blended and cornstarch and sugar are dissolved.

Heat the oil in a wok or large, deep skillet. Sauté the chopped garlic and shallots until light brown (this takes only a few seconds). Add the chopped chiles and sauté until you can smell the spice, which won't take long at all. Add the ketchup mixture slowly while stirring. Add the oyster sauce and mix well. Let simmer over low heat for 15 minutes. While it is simmering, add the eggs and stir well so that they don't curdle. Add the lime juice, scallions, and about half the coriander (cilantro) leaves. Stir to mix well.

 

(At this point, the sauce is extremely spicy and a bit raw-tasting. So after 15 minutes or so, turn off the heat and let the sauce sit for 10-15 minutes to allow flavors to blend and soften.

Re-heat the sauce to a bare, gentle boil, stirring to keep it from burning. Add the crab pieces, making sure that they are in contact with sauce and partially covered by it. Reduce heat and warm the crab thoroughly, about 10 minutes.

You can serve the crab in a big serving bowl with the sauce poured over it; however, leaving it in the wok will keep the dish warm.

Serve several pieces of crab in individual bowls, with plenty of sauce, and sprinkle with the rest of the cilantro.

Serve with steamed jasmine rice.  On the side, we had stir-fried Asian long beans that were cooked with soy sauce, garlic, and minced shallots.

The Case of the Missing Duck Bones

The biggest scandal in the neighborhood of my youth concerned a duck carcass. My sister Anna, then a teenager, had prepared canard a l’orange for a potluck held at the home of a neighbor: the dish was exquisite, and with it she cemented her reputation as the finest cook on the block.

Once the party was over and we began gathering our serving dishes, our family discovered the duck carcass missing. We had anticipated a rich stock from the meat and bones, knowing it would add complexity to cassoulet or soften the bite of asparagus soup. But the serving dish on which my dad had carved Anna's culinary masterpiece was empty. Puzzled and disappointed, we carried it home.

The Berkeley, California, neighborhood where we grew up lies a few blocks from Chez Panisse and the specialty food shops surrounding Alice Waters' restaurant. Over the years, the influence of the Gourmet Ghetto permeated the surrounding neighborhood, and many of us became fanatical about food.

In our family of six, with two working parents, my siblings and I each cooked one night a week. We four kids were unabashed disciples of the culinary craze and attempted, with varying success, such dishes as bacon-wrapped grilled sweetbreads, handmade pasta, and squid and leeks in red wine. During dinner, the chef would face a critique from siblings and parents on how better to cut up a chicken or when to add garlic to a stir-fry. Learning to cook a sumptuous dish was nearly as valued as bringing home a good report card.

While our household carried the gastronomical torch (prompting one visitor to remark, the morning before a party, "The Ericksons are cooking, and all is well with the world"), our neighbors vied for runner-up, and dinner parties were a competitive business. Every Sunday morning, up and down the street, aspiring chefs were poring over the food sections of The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle and stashing recipes for future parties. At block parties we dined on coq au vin, wild mushroom ragout, and home-baked sourdough bread.

Naturally, much of the neighborhood gossip concerned cooking and food, and soon after the duck party, the grapevine told us where the carcass had gone. Another neighbor at the potluck had bagged it while the rest of us were finishing a chocolate hazelnut torte. He spirited it home and prepared the stock, which now filled his freezer.

My father confronted him. Our neighbor admitted taking the carcass but asserted that, as a leftover, the spent duck was as much his as anyone's. The two of them, both lawyers, argued about it for months. The stock, alas, is long gone.

* * *

Duck a l'orange is a surprisingly simple dish. It consists of a duck, roasted, and a sugary orange sauce. The fatty, gamy meat balances the sweetness of the sauce, and the entire dish is a guilty pleasure.

The most difficult part of the dish is handling the duck -- both roasting and carving it. While roast duck is the most tempting meat I have encountered, I rarely cook it. The bird is so fatty, and cooked at such high heat, that the duck fat liquefies and ascends to coat the walls and ceiling of the kitchen. If you don't have a well-ventilated stove (which I don't), make sure to crank up a fan and open all the windows. It also helps to trim as much fat as possible from the duck before consigning it to the oven.

When it comes time to carve the bird, you'll find that although it has already given its life, the duck doesn't easily give in to the cook. The joints stick together stubbornly, and tendons pull the meat tight against the bone. Use patience, a very sharp carving knife, and lots of red wine for your guests.

Duck a l'Orange

Adapted from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking

-4 oranges

-1 5-pound duck

-3 tablespoons sugar

-1/4 cup red wine vinegar

-2 cups duck stock

-2 tablespoons arrowroot blended with 3 tablespoons port

-1/2 cup port

-2 or 3 tablespoons orange liqueur

-lemon juice

-2 tablespoons softened butter

Remove the peel from the oranges and julienne; simmer the orange peels in a quart of water for 15 minutes.

Wash the duck inside and out and season with salt and pepper. Place 1/3 of the orange peels in the cavity of the duck and truss it.

Set the duck on a rack and in an oven preheated to 425 degrees. Roast for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350. The duck should take about 1-1/2 hours; you'll know it's done when you prick the thigh and the juices that run out are faintly pink.

While the duck is roasting, boil the sugar and vinegar until they form a dark brown syrup -- this will take several minutes. Remove the syrup from the heat and add 1/2 cup of duck stock. Place it back on the heat, on simmer, stirring while adding the rest of the stock. Whisk in the arrowroot mixture and stir in the remaining orange peels. Simmer 3 to 4 minutes.

Cut the peeled oranges into segments.

When the duck is finished, remove it from the rack and set it on a platter. Return it to the oven (but leave the heat off).

Drain nearly all the fat from the roasting pan; add the port and boil the liquid down until it is 2 to 3 tablespoons. Strain port into the simmering stock mixture. Stir in the liqueur and add lemon juice if needed to cut the sweetness. Whisk in the butter.

Place the orange sections around the duck, pour the sauce over all, and serve.

This piece first appeared in the Daily Gullet on May 14, 2004 http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=home

Green Tea Everything

When Alex and I were walking around Tokyo and Kyoto, we were almost always within sight of a vending machine. These machines were quite welcome, because it's humid and warm there, and we were usually in need of a drink. I soon latched on to my favorite thirst quencher: iced green tea, unsweetened. I found it the ideal refresher, with just enough stimulant to perk up a caffeine wuss like me.

But green tea wasn't just hanging out in the ubiquitous vending machines. Green tea flavoring was everywhere, especially in desserts. In the Kyoto train station, Alex ordered a green tea parfait that contained green tea–flavored ice cream, pound cake cubes, mousse, gelatin bits, wafer cookies, and more items I can't remember. It was a tall sundae glass filled with various hues of forest green.

The Japanese employ green tea the way we do chocolate here: Soft serve ice cream comes in vanilla, green tea, and swirl. While I often found green tea treats overly bitter, it succeeds brilliantly in that glorious East-West union: green tea ice cream. The tea's bitterness meets the cloying sweetness of ice cream in a refreshing, perfectly balanced dessert. I like it far better than chocolate ice cream, which I've always felt doesn't do chocolate justice.

The day we left, I picked up some matcha, powdered green tea, and tea leaves. Thanks to the Japanese genius for illustration, I was able to understand the package directions for iced green tea (2 teaspoons of leaves in 1 quart of water; let sit 40 minutes and drain; chill). It's great fuel for working in the summer garden. The matcha I'm saving for ice cream.

Sushi Central

There was no way two sushi lovers, while vacationing in Tokyo, weren't going to visit the locus of raw fish. While visiting friends and touring Japan, Alex and I made sure to visit the Tsukiji market, where fishermen auction off tuna and every other edible, or not so edible, fish that swims off the coast of Japan.

The market has become a draw for tourists, who must line up at 4 a.m. if they want to witness the auction. But we weren't interested in the selling of fish. We were looking to eat it. We found our way to the market one morning around 11, after all the fish had been sold, the floors hosed down, and the stalls closed up.

In one corner of the market stand a few hole-in-the-wall restaurants, which open early in the morning to serve sushi breakfasts and lunch. By virtue of their location, they serve the freshest fish in Tokyo. We waited outside one of the restaurants, in front of a sign that featured photographs of sushi selections labeled "A" through "G."

When space became available at the counter, we were handed a menu with the same photographs. We pointed to our choices and thus commenced the best meal of the trip: buttery salmon, silky tuna, metallic sea urchin, oily mackerel, smoky eel — all served at room temperature to bring out the most flavor. It was definitely worth getting lost on Tokyo's train system, and almost worth the 11-hour flight.

A Gutsy Guy, a Pile of Pork, and Lots of Salt

My guest blogger, Gene Heller, describes how he made his own guanciale and pancetta. We tasted his pancetta, in a lovely dish of linguine carbonara, and it was sublime.

This past Christmas a friend of mine gave me a copy of Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie. For a few weeks after she gave me the book I spent some happy hours reading about pancetta and thinking up reasons not to try making it: What if the Big One hits while I’m aging the pancetta? What if the hanging pork attracts rats? What if I poison my friends?

In late January I decided that earthquakes, vermin, and lost friendships were no reasons to be frightened of making pancetta, and I ordered a piece of pork belly and a piece of jowl from Avedano’s on Cortland Street in San Francisco. (The jowl was for making guanciale. The thinking here is, first, that once you’ve decided to go to the effort to cure some pork, you might as well go whole hog. And second, guanciale is cool.)

You need three things to cure pork: enough time, the right weather, and the right ingredients. You can block out the time, you can pray for good weather, and for ingredients, you can easily rationalize spending money on high-end materials, like this: if you’re going to do a ton of work on a project, you don’t want to risk failure due to poor materials. The danger with this argument is that it can lead you down a slippery slope, into $200 running shoes, or marrow bones from Wagyu beef — I didn’t make that up, you can find Wagyu bones on Ruth Reichl’s new commercial Web site — but I convinced myself that the end product would be worth the extra money. Hence Avedano’s for their Manteca pork, and Rainbow Grocery for the seasonings. Rainbow offers, among the tattoos and piercings, one of the best selections of spices in town.

Back home with my raw materials, the final step in confronting the unknown now sat on my counter, in the form of a layer of very tough pig skin, which I had to remove from a hog jowl and belly. A straightforward task to be sure, but one that reminded me that I was working a bit closer to the animal than if I were opening a package of bacon. While examining the skin on the belly, I saw several evenly spaced bumps that I think, although in my beginner-ness I can’t be certain, were nipples.

Curing the Pork (“Crushing for the Cure”)

The idea is to cover the meat in salt and seasonings. The salt will pull moisture out of the meat and create an environment that’s unfriendly to some, but unfortunately not all, bad bacteria. (Botulism is still a risk.) The seasonings flavor the meat. Most of the salt is common table salt — sodium chloride. A tiny bit is curing salt – sodium nitrite. (For exact proportions and curing instructions, refer to Ruhlman’s Charcuterie or any of the other curing guides available.)

The funnest part of prepping the seasonings was crushing the juniper berries. I found top quality berries at Rainbow, and I know they were top quality, because when the back of my frying pan first crashed down on the berries to crush them for the cure, the aroma that floated up to my happy nose implanted a single word in my brain: MARTINI! I believe that nothing can go wrong when you’re making something that smells like a martini, even if it’s not a martini.

The success of this stage of the process doesn’t depend on the weather, because it takes place in the refrigerator, but it does call for a week or so of patience, and a willingness to be shocked by the amount of liquid in a seemingly solid piece of fatty meat. My five-pound piece of pork belly exuded at least a cup and a half of liquid, but it turns out that it’s okay for the meat to sit in this brine; you don’t have to drain it or mess with it in any way. The only intervention you have to perform during the curing period is to ensure that the cure is evenly distributed by massaging the meat occasionally, a phrase I enjoyed sharing with those among my friends unlucky enough to have asked me during that week how the project was going. Curing is complete when the meat is no longer squishy when pressed.

Aging (“Rolling for the Cure”)

Now I had to roll for the cure, because pancetta traditionally is rolled up, and traditional was what I wanted to be, as much as possible. The key here, the thing you really want to get right, is to roll the belly very, very tightly, to avoid trapping any air inside. Trapped air can create an environment in which dangerous bacteria can move in and set up housekeeping, and they don’t take out their trash. (In case you didn’t hear me the first time, botulism is a small, but scary risk.) One friend of mine described the process as rolling the meat as tight as an unsmokeable joint — an analogy you won’t find in Charcuterie.

This is when the weather has to cooperate, assuming you’re drying the meat in the fresh air, rather than inside a climate-controlled container. (I’d like to pretend that the bracing breezes of Bernal Heights were crucial to the taste of the final product, much like effect the air in Parma is supposed to have on prosciutto, but the truth is I would have been very happy to use something like a refrigerated wine cooler unit if I had had one.) What you need is two weeks of 60/60: a more or less constant temperature of 60°F, and a more or less constant humidity level of 60 percent. I wish you good luck planning for that during San Francisco’s rainy season. But fortune favors the brave — during the two weeks in question, there was only one 36-hour period of rain and high humidity.

I controlled for temperature by carefully selecting where to hang the meat. “Carefully selecting” in this context meant choosing between the laundry room and the garage, and to hedge my bets I did both, the guanciale in the laundry room and the pancetta in the garage. All sorts of “what if” thoughts began to intrude: what if mice or rats or raccoons figure out how to climb down the string to the meat? What if mold starts to form on the surface of the meat? What if I can’t tell when it’s done? Here are the answers I came up with. Local animals nibble the meat? Throw it out. Mold starts to form? Slice away the moldy sections. When is it done? After it’s firmed up, before it gets dry and crusty, and most important, it’s done when I can no longer tolerate the anxiety of waiting.

Sharing Home-Cured Pork with the Braver of Your Friends

Having an entire roll of pancetta sitting on your kitchen counter inspires awe. When it’s sitting next to an entire cured hog jowl, you risk feeling the kind of pride the Bible warns against. This is the stuff you usually buy in quarter-pound quantities for a lot of money, and carefully add to your pasta, and now you’ve got maybe 8 or 10 pounds of it, and you know it’s made from the best raw materials, and provided it doesn’t kill you, you’ve accomplished something good.

However, on the off chance that you’ve screwed up in some horrible way and have created poison rather than artisanally crafted locally sourced cured meat, I believe it’s good manners to eat some yourself, before you start handing out samples. I did spot a couple of very tiny spots of mold — less than a centimeter in diameter. These I trimmed off, after confirming in several references that mold is a cosmetic problem but is harmless to your health.

Contamination with Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism, is the danger. From what I’ve read, there’s no way to spot C. botulinum contamination by inspecting the meat. The good news is that if you’ve done it right, used the right curing salts in the right amounts, and left no little pockets of trapped air when you roll it up, contamination is highly unlikely. And pancetta is meant to be cooked, and cooking destroys the toxin, if there is toxin, which there isn’t if you’ve done it right.

And I can tell you this: that first taste of home-cured pancetta is an awful lot like a first kiss, if the person you’re kissing has very warm lips and is wearing lots of lip balm.

After sampling the pancetta and guanciale myself — sautéed and eaten plain — I waited two days. No signs of paralysis or blurred vision showed up, and I determined that I could, with a clear conscience, offer some to friends.

Interestingly, their reaction ranged from genuine delight to no response at all. I may need some new friends. But I’m sticking with the friend who admitted to me that she couldn’t really taste the pancetta all that well because she had added it to a homemade pizza with pineapple. She’s still my friend; a few days ago she brought me some cherries that she picked herself in Brentwood.

Note: This article is not intended to be instructions on curing meat. Botulism is dangerous. If you’re curing meat, follow a guide like Ruhlman’s Charcuterie.

A Carrot of Any Color

I planted carrots in February, in a bed containing a few rocks. Rocks matter in carrot cultivation, because if the root hits one as it's growing downward, it'll break into two or three parts rather than remain one solid carrot whole. So when I started pulling them up this weekend, I expected to find such shattered roots, some of them twisting around each other like carrot yoga.

What I didn't expect to find was one yellow carrot. The seeds I had planted (using seed tape, the only way to go with carrots), were standard orange, not a fancy multi-colored variety. Had a stray yellow seed found its way into the tape, or was this a genetic mutation, evolution in action in my planting bed?

The yellow carrot tasted a little milder than its orange brethren. But adding it to a shredded-carrot salad, I realized, would make a fine-looking dish. Marcella Hazan features such a salad in her book The Classic Italian Cookbook. It's so easy, I never bother to open the book and follow the recipe.

Peel and shred a couple of carrots. Add enough salt to bring out the flavor, some lemon juice, and more olive oil than lemon juice. Toss, taste, adjust, and serve.

Roman Easter Eats

I spent Easter week more than three decades ago in Rome, when my family was visiting Berkeley friends fortunate enough to have to spend a year in that ancient city. We visited the usual sites — the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, and the sundry ruins and churches that litter the area.

But, naturally, most of my memories about that trip are the food. We had been told that Italians eat breakfast in cafes, so we dutifully followed the old adage and did as the Romans. Our hosts lived in an apartment near Piazza Navona, where we frequented a cafe that sold soft, sweet rolls and cafe latte, a breakfast that struck me at the time as near-perfection.

It rained a great deal during that trip, but on the few sunny days afforded us, we were determined to eat outside. This endeavor involved a complicated process of passing furniture through windows, across fire escapes and patios, and up a flight of stairs to the roof. There we ate classic Italian meals of fresh pasta and lettuce salads.

We ventured out one night to a restaurant, where I'm sure I had a full meal, but the part I remember was the pizza bianca, a new-to-me delight that was known as focaccia bread when it arrived in Berkeley years later. Like the Italian breakfasts, which seemed to me whittled down to their essence, this dish was ideal in its total lack of obfuscating tastes: it was merely bread, olive oil, and salt.

Once we discovered gelato, we feasted on it regularly. I tried several varieties, finally settling on bacio — hazelnut and chocolate — enriched, like every little cup passed across the gelato counter, with a swipe of whipped cream. Where the whipped cream met the ice cream, it froze into a solid, fluffy crust that I slowly savored as I ate my way around and underneath.

Not too long afterward, gelato arrived in Berkeley, with Vivoli's, a place run solely by women. I believe their gelato was pretty good, but my teenaged self could only be disappointed that I wasn't being served by young Italian men with adorable accents. Besides, Vivoli's never included that little dap of whipped cream.