Persimmons

Now that pawpaw season is over, it is time for persimmons.  Typically persimmons are ready late in October, but they look like they are ready right now this year.  You snooze, you lose, so I gotta get out and pick them.

So what is a persimmon?  Basically, if Willy Wonka designed a fruit, it would be the persimmon.  It is tree candy - sweet and gooey.  So good.  Many people are familiar with Asian persimmons, the flat, firm, tomato-like Fuyu and the bigger, softer, Hachiya.  Both are yummy, but they tend to be expensive, especially Hachiya.  And why should I buy foreign persimmons when we have good old American ones growing in our woods?

 American persimmons are much smaller than Asian varieties, resembling orange cherry tomatoes.

Now the kicker with American persimmons is that if they are underripe, they are utterly inedible.  They produce a chemical that makes your mouth super dry.  It's hard to explain unless you've experienced it, but it is very off putting.  They reason for this evolutionarily is that the persimmon is protecting the fruit until the seeds are maximally ready.  This feature of persimmons puts a lot of people off, but it can be overcome.  Every persimmon you see here (and an equal number in an additional bag) is ripe and ready to eat.  How did I do this?  Easy.  Don't pick persimmons off the tree.  Only pick them off the ground, as the tree generally only drops ripe persimmons.  Now if you look at the persimmons I picked, they look a little dicey.  Some are kind of black, some shriveled, and all of them are mushy.  Normally when fruit looks like this, it is rotten, but it is just right for persimmons.  The bad ones are all black

Here is the persimmon pulp after pulping and my pulper (which I specifically bought for persimmons).  I got about 4 cups of pulp, enough for 2-3 batches of cooking. 

Here is the tree.  The bark has a characteristic alligator shape with roughly square blocks and white/orange in between the blocks.

 Here is a tree with a lot of unripe fruit.

I will post a recipe for persimmon pudding later, which is a fantastic use of persimmon pulp.

Vegetarian Cincinnati Chili

I really like Cincinnati chili and have for a long time, ever since I lived in Indianapolis about 7 years ago.  The sweet spiced chili is perfect on spaghetti.  My wife, however, doesn't eat meat, so I can't cook traditional Cincinnati chili with ground beef.  A couple of years back I found a vegan recipe that I have cooked a couple of times with lentils (ohmyveggies.com).  It's rather good and I was initially surprised, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that meat is actually not that big of a flavor component of  Cincinnati chili.  In my experiments in the past, I discovered that if you use beef broth, the chili comes out way too meaty tasting, too heavy.  Basically, you get umami overload.  Texas chili needs this, but Cincinnati chili not.  Cincy chili is much more focused on the spices, the cocoa, cinnamon, and clove in particular.  So vegetarian chili is quite possible.

The recipe I used was good, but not quite right.  It was too sweet and, while Cincy chili doesn't have a lot of umami, it still needs some and this chili was very low on umami.  So how do I address this?

First, sweetness.  Something I learned from experiments in the past is that Cincy chili doesn't need any onions.  Onions go on top raw, but not in the chili.  Onions are actually quite sweet and I think they were throwing off the flavor.  I eliminated them, added some garlic, and increased the lentils to compensate.  I also switch from apple cider vinegar to white vinegar.

Second, how to get umami.  Looking at a lot of Cincy chili recipes, they often used Worchestershire sauce.  Great source of umami.  I have some, but I thought I would switch things up and use Pickapeppa sauce, a Jamaican sauce that is similar.  I used a full tablespoon.  Initially it was a bit too much, but after cooking, everything seemed to blend together.  Soy sauce could also work here.

I am sure the character of your veggie broth will affect the chili.  I used my homemade, which I make from kitchen scraps (mostly onions, carrots, celery, garlic, ginger, with an occasional leak).

If you want it more Skyline-like, I would cut the Worchestershire sauce to 1/2 Tbsp and double the cinnamon and perhaps increase the cloves.

Vinegar is added in the end because acid inhibits the cooking of the lentils.  When I used to add it from the beginning, the lentils never really softened.

Vegetarian Cincinnati Chili

1 Tbsp Worchester sauce, Pickapeppa sauce, or soy sauce
1 Tbsp chili powder
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1/4 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 Tbsp cocoa powder
1 bay leaf
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp paprika
1 Tbsp white vinegar
4 cups veggie broth
8 oz tomato sauce
1 lb lentils, rinsed
1/2 Tbsp salt


1) Add everything except the vinegar to a pot.
2) Bring to a boil and simmer about 30 minutes covered, until the lentils are firm-tender.
3) Add vinegar.
4) Serve over pasta 3 way, 4 way, 5 way, or whatever way.

Quick post about recipes and dried vs. canned beans

I got a post about Musamman curry coming up, but I thought I would post some quick thoughts about cooking in general in the meantime.

For a while, I vacillated between using dried vs. canned beans.  Canned beans sure are convenient.  Open the can, rinse the beans, plop them in your dish, and you are done.  Who could argue with that?  With dried beans, sometimes it seems like you have to cook forever before the beans get done.  If you are like me, sometimes you get impatient and settle for somewhat undercooked beans.  Why bother with dried ones?  Well, the answer is that if you go with canned beans, you lose a great ingredient - bean broth.  When you think about it, after the beans have cooked for a while, you have that yummy, thick, brown broth that has a lot of vitamins and flavor.  With canned beans, I always rinse the beans.  Maybe it is just me, but I don't trust the liquid in there.  It just seems kinda gross.  The precursor and critical component to many Mexican dishes is bean broth.

Using dried beans really isn't that much more difficult.  First, soak the beans overnight in salt water (oh, about 1 Tbsp/quart).  This will start the process of softening the beans.  Water alone isn't nearly as good as salt water.  The second way to speed up the process is to add some baking soda to what you are cooking, especially if there are tomatoes in the dish you are cooking.  Baking soda is basic and bases greatly accelerate the cooking of beans.  Tomatoes are acidic, so anathema to rapid cooking unless you counter with baking soda.  I usually go with around 1/4 tsp in the dish, so not much.  Using these steps, your beans will cook in 15-30 minutes, depending on the type.

The other point I wanted to make is, don't believe any recipe.  Be parsimonious when added strongly flavored ingredients - lime juice, chilies, cardamon, etc.  Once you add it, you can't take it back.  Even recipes from the cooks that I admire mostly sometimes include drunken sailor type additions of certain ingredients.  You can generally always add more later, but you can't take any out after you add it, due to entropy in action. 

Pawpaws

This is the the season for pawpaws in southern Ohio.  They grow all over the place, but very few people collect them.  The vast majority of people who grow up in Ohio have either never hear of them before or have heard of them, but never tasted them.

I love going out in the woods and collecting food.  A lot of people like their food from the supermarket, clean, wrapped up, and with a price tag, but not me.  The closer the food is to the earth it grows from, the better.  Going out in the woods and collecting food feels to me like getting to know my ancestors, reconnecting with the earlier humanity..

So what the heck is a pawpaw?  Well, I describe it as looking like a green potato that grows on trees.  The flesh ranges from white to bright yellow and tastes similar to banana custard or mango puree.  It is funny that the fruit is so variable.  You find some that have firm white flesh and they are pretty bland.  Others are really moist and oily and also not the best.  The really good ones are deep yellow and creamy, dessert in your hand.

I usually cook with pawpaws.  Even the best ones are not something I can eat a pile of, but they are great to use in any dish in place of banana.  I will frequently make pawpaw custard, pawpaw bread pudding, pawpaw cookies, and other goodies.  The flavor is far more complex than a banana with more spicy notes.

Here are some good recipes: http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/pawpaw/recipes.htm  

 Here is the inside of a good one.  There are a ton of really big black seeds that are surrounded by the yellow flesh.  Plop them in your mouth, suck the fruit off, and spit 'em out.

Here are the leaves of the tree.  The trees are in virtually every forest, but they don't typically have fruit.  If you bruise the leaf with your fingers, you get a bad aroma.  This is a positive ID for a pawpaw tree.

Pawpaw frequently grown in bunches, like bananas.

Here is a bowl of pawpaw pulp.  You can see the light and dark flesh from different fruits mixed together.  Pulping takes some time, as you have to remove the skin, then depulp the seeds.  I used my finger nail to break the membrane around the seed, then peel off the flesh.  I freeze the pulp and puree it before I cook with it.  Looks like scrambled eggs.  Pawpaws are messy.

Fried noodle nest

I've been out of town and haven't been cooking much that's interesting.  I did find a great technique over the weekend.

If you are like me, you eat East Asian (Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese) food fairly frequently.  I generally serve this cuisine on jasmine rice.  It works fine, but for a change, how about a fried noodle nest?  Just boil up some Asia noodles, drain them, and rinse them with water until they are no longer warm.  This will prevent them from cooking further and sticking together.  Spread the noodles out into separate "pillows".  I did 4 piles for 1lb of noodles. Pour off any excess water and let them dry maybe 30 minutes.  Add a couple of tablespoons of oil to the pan and heat just below the max setting.  I set my dial on 8 of 9.  When the oil gets good and hot, toss in a "pillow" and fry a couple of minutes without moving.  If the heat is too high, you will scorch the noodles.  If it is too low, they will more or less sit there.  You want the noodle to fry into a pancake basically.  Keep checking the edge of the noodles until the look done, then flip over.  Since the one side is fried into a contiguous chuck, the pillow retain its shape.  When the pillow is fried on both sides, remove it and drain on a paper towel.  Add some more oil and repeat.  The nest will be nicely crispy on the outside and soft in the middle.  I tossed some Vietnamese shrimp and snow pea dish on top and it was excellent.  The nests seem to keep OK in the fridge.
 
The noodles were Vietnamese rice stick variety and required soaking in hot water rather than actual boiling.

Easy and fun.