August 17, 2005
Ground Work: Sour/Tangy Ingredients 101a
Ah, tartness.. Is there anything more refreshing? (Certainly not under this administration.) Sour flavors energize food and shock tastebuds to life like tiny defibrillators. They cool and cleanse, finesse and brighten. Like the savory additions I covered recently (and, as you’ll learn, all the other major flavor groups), sour foods are invaluable as both intentional influences and last-ditch fixes.
They are the sublime transcendance in your favorite Thai dish, the saving grace in your fish and chips, that which is locked in mortal combat with the oily onslaught in your salad. With any of the ingredients below, you can rescue a dish that’s suddenly wayyyyyy too heavy or rich, you can cause a stir-fry to pop to life, you can finish off a dish with a fresh flair just before serving.. The possibilities abound, and I’ve just had my coffee.
1. Lime - Before I started cooking and really paying attention to flavors, I thought of limes as pretty inconsequential things. Sort of like lemons, but sweeter, sort of. Good to sliver up and shove into the neck of your Pacifico Clara. My first real lime moment came a couple of years before I started cooking in earnest, when I came across a method for making what is still the best guacamole I’ve ever tasted.
During my experiments, I found I needed some tartness and a lime was sitting there on the counter, so, whatever (at the time I probably would have defaulted to red wine vinegar or something.. *shudder*), I squeezed it into the mix. BOOM! Things snapped into focus and the recipe was complete. It was so good it made me squeal. It’s a secret, though- I’ll never divulge it. Nope.
a. Cut a medium-large avocado in half and seed it. With a butter knife, cut down across the flesh in vertical lines, then horizontal lines, taking care not to cut through the fragile skin. Once the flesh looks sort of like a checkerboard, squeeze the skin, starting at the middle and going outward, to push out the now-sectioned flesh into your serving vessel of choice.
b. Immediately cut a lime in half and squeeze its juice over the avocado bits- doing this quickly will ensure that the avocado does not oxidize and turn brown (vitamin C, found in citric acid, is an antioxidant, which works just as well on avocados as it does on free radicals in your body- good stuff).
c. Add a heaping tablespoon of very fresh salsa- if it’s going to taste like my method, it needs to be Casa Sanchez brand, in medium or hot red variety. (helpful site there, btw, guys.. jeez) If you don’t live in the Bay Area or someplace else where their products are distributed, just try to find the strongest-flavored fresh salsa you can locate. Someday I’ll hit on a good salsa recipe and post it here.
Anyway, I digress. The addition of this salsa is what makes me hesitate to call this a “recipe”, since it’s a pre-made product that is so responsible for the flavor of the guacamole.
d. Set your pepper grinder to it’s coarsest setting and give it a good 3 or 4 turns. If using Casa Sanchez, do not add salt. If your salsa is rather less salty, add a tiny pinch.
e. Stir the salsa gently, stopping once the ingredients are mixed- take care not to break things up too much.
In the end you have this wonderfully peppery, tangy guac that nevertheless retains a lot of pure avocado flavor due to the large chunks you get by simply slicing up the avocado rather than forking it 6 ways til Sunday. The salsa just sort of rockets it into nirvana.
It takes all of 30 seconds to make and will literally kill any store bought or restaurant guac you’ve ever had (it will hunt them down and dispach them with extreme prejudice, I swear). Try not to fall too deeply in love once it’s done- it’ll be gone about 30 seconds.
Limes are so vitally important to so many different cuisines from Thai to Mexican, from the bar-be-cue to the steamer. They’re easily among my top 5 most vital ingredients to always have in the house. They fill my life with such joy, I sometimes feel a little freaky, loving them so, but such thoughts are fleeting. Give in to the lime.
2. Lemongrass is one of those things you often see lurking in the produce department at your local snooty grocery or asian market, and unless you know what’s up, you have to wonder, “What the s*** is this?”. To the naked eye, they appear to be light-tan, skinny, fibrous stalks of grassily anonymous flora.. ..and they are.
However, when, say, peeled of their tough outer layers, cut into 1″ pieces, and thrown into a cooking soup (like the aforementioned nectar Thom Kha), they slowly awaken, redolent with crisp, intoxicating citrus-y scents and flavors that catapult the proceedings straight from the pedestrian to the exquisite.
Lemongrass is another constant component of Thai curry pastes, counterbalancing the pungent, dark yang of chilis, galanga and shrimp paste with the airy, open yin of citrus-y goodness. Pounding it in a big mortar and pestle is akin to a religious experience.. The vapors are something else.
Anyway, you need some if you’re going to cook Thai or a lot of other southeast asian cuisines, and you could probably use some even if you’re not.
3. Kaffir Lime Leaf/Peel - Another very Thai-oriented, very yummy ingredient, and easier than ever to find these days. Where lemongrass is all floating citronella warmth and subtle tang, kaffir lime leaves are impossibly bright, turning up the treble on a dish like few additions can. Try the same trick I outlined for shredding basil in Savory 101a, only roll the roll tighter, and slice much finer.
Lime leaves are stringy things and you don’t really want to be able to discern a chunk of one in your food (unless it’s a thai soup, where you find then roughly torn up, both for the reason of not storming the dish with their flavor, and being easy to pick out while you’re eating).
Anyhow, as mentioned before, they’re part of the holy trinity of Thai tartness, joining lime and lemongrass in, well, rocking your socks off and restoring your faith in humanity, nature, and life in general, if you’re a freak like me. The peel has a different flavor altogether and is commonly used in Thai curry pastes. I’ve yet to find any locally, which bugs the sh** out of me. Anybody know where I can find some?
4. Vinegar (Rice/Balsamic/Infused) - I’ll just be covering these three shades of the vinegar rainbow, as they’re the most important to me, and you all know exactly what wine, cider, malt, coconut, date, plum, black and red vinegars are all about. Ok, so maybe not. Maybe I’ll cover them on a later date, but not today! Life is short, food needs sharpening, and vinegar, as it turns out, is an able grindstone.
a. Rice Vinegar, when good, is a fabulous thing. Light, ephemeral, slightly nutty, subtly salty (but not because of sodium content, really, it’s sort of a mystery), and all character, it makes a bitchin’ sour half of salad dressing, to be sure. It marries well with citrus juice, helping to gently bring those dizzy flights of lime-infused fancy back to terra firma while still allowing a dish to breathe and remain clean on the palate.
Rice vinegar doesn’t have much in the way of solids or sugars in it (unlike lime juice), so it takes heat beautifully, staying consistant flavorwise even on a smoking-hot wok. I much prefer the clear, unadulterated variety, and I’ll fill in my secret weapon brand here when I get home tonight- it is breathtaking and costs $1.25 for a huge bottle in chinatown.
b. Balsamic Vinegar is on the other end of the spectrum from rice vinegar, which is why it gets mention here. Syrupy, sweet, deep and fruity, its signature is writ in bold purple sharpie whenever it finds its way onto your plate. Utterly fabulous for bringing substance to simmered fruit sauces, wrapping a candied pseudopod around the goat cheese in your spinach salad, and a myriad of other tasks.
It is made by slow-cooking grape juice until it loses most of its moisture, and then fermenting the result, so its taste is smooth, refined, and more caramelesque than traditional wine vinegars.
I like to mix it (yet again) with other souring agents when I’m going for a balance in flavors. Sometimes I’ll add it early on to add color and draw out flavors, then finish the dish off with something lighter to give it sparkle. In any case, really good balsamic is something *I* personally cannot afford (some really frou-frou stuff fetches anywhere from $50 to hundreds of dollars), but pretty good balsamic is everywhere, affordable and very very useful.
c. When I’ve got time, I love to make my own infused vinegars. Lately, the trend on my counter has been toward thai chili vinegar. I pound thinly sliced “bird” chilis (say, a tablespoon of them) in the mortar and pestle (gently), then mix with about 6oz of rice vinegar in a bottle and allow it to sit for a day or so. The vinegar soaks up the heat and flavor, and allows me an easily controllable source of spice.
You can use just about any none-too-moist flavorant to infuse your vinegar. Rosemary, home-dried basil, oregano, lemongrass, lime zest, whatever you want can find a happy home in a jar or squeeze bottle with your favorite vinegar. Try different combinations! You’re bound to find some yummy cross-ups, and then you can get all secretive and superior about them, if you want. Who knew cooking and ego went so well together?
(I’m kidding.)
One recent happy accident for me was finding a hot sauce called “Frank’s Red Hot” at Walgreens, of all places. It’s a very vinegary concoction, veering much closer to chili vinegar than to hot sauce land. It has a cheery, friendly chili flavor and a subtle heat. It sells for something like $2 in an 8oz bottle.
It also combines with melted butter to make great buffalo wing sauce, perfect for those nights where you don’t wanna cook, you just want to kick it with some sake and a plate of Morningstar veggie buffalo nuggets (I used to be an addict- I know how you feel). Use it like regular vinegar in salad dressings for a little extra kick and bright red color. It’s not highbrow, but then, most of the things I love aren’t.
5. Meyer Lemon - I fell quickly out of love with lemons when I really turned on to the magic of limes. All of a sudden they seemed so flat, one-dimensional. They have an irreplaceable openness and purity (sometimes you just don’t want to taste lime, believe it or not ;), but they generally just don’t have a lot of character. Meyer lemons, on the other hand, have scads. Sweet, ultra-juicy and extra fragrant, they are the fun-loving kid in the lemon family.
You’ll find them in markets that enjoy an emphasis on produce, and at fruit stands all over the place (around the Bay Area, anyway). Nothing says “summer” like meyer lemonade. Nothing widens eyes and reboots palates like a mescal-and-mungbean-sprout salad bursting with lemon juice and a splash of a good greek extra virgin olive oil. Don’t forget the fresh-cracked pepper! Damnit, I’m hungry.
6. Tamarind finds use in Mexican candy, Indian chutney, Thai dishes, even Worcestershire and HP sauces. They are large, date-like seed pods that are extremely sour when unripe and get sweeter as they mature. The unripe variety I’m speaking of is often referred to as “sour tamarind” in stores and comes in handy when called for in recipes and also for adding sour flavor when an alternative taste is desired, or maybe you’ve just gotten sick of limes (heresy!).
The kind I buy comes in a resinous-looking brown block. You break off a chunk, dissolve it in a little warm water, fish out the seeds, and away you go.
I’ll fess up to the fact that I’ve not yet found any killer-app uses for tamarind in my own cooking, so it’s not going to inspire the kind of flowery hyperbole I’ve used on the previous ingredients. It does have a really distinctive flavor, however, and some dishes won’t taste right without it- I just need to do some more experimenting to find where it fits into my utility belt.
In any case, here’s to more adventure in cooking. The next installment will cover sweet and salty ingredients, and then we’ll be off to some other tangent, I’d imagine, with a little more information about this building blocks behind your favorite dishes, I hope!
BTW, get out to any well-stocked cheese counter as fast as humanly possible and buy a little sliver of 3-4 year aged Gouda. Yeah, I know this is totally unrelated. All I know is, I did this last friday and I’ve scarcely been able to wipe the satisfied smile off my face since (even though it was long-gone by Saturday night). It is crumbly, crunchy, crystalline, creamy, sweet, nutty, salty, improbably complex, with a flavor that lingers on the palate for minutes. Freakin’ incredible.
Palm sugar & hugs to you,
-george C.
Filed under: Recipes, Ingredients
August 17th, 2005 at 6:00 pm
I’M ON THE PHONE WITH YOU. IT IS WED. AUG 17, 05. I LOVE YOU ALOT.
August 17th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
I’m inclined to think yang would have more light, citrusy quality, but now I’m just splitting hairs
Good stuff, as always.