I put a link up to ShalomBoston.com’s recipe section several weeks ago, but I think it deserves more attention. The staff at ShalomBoston test every recipe that goes on their site, and recipes range from traditional (Chicken Soup, Taiglach, Hamantaschen) to modern (Mango Salsa, Butternut Squash and Apple Soup). They even have several recipes from popular local baker Judy Rosenberg of Rosie’s Bakery.

I can vouch from personal experience that everything posted on ShalomBoston is sure to be delicious. The site’s run by some fabulous cooks!

During my years at Brandeis, we were privileged to see the establishment and growth of a wonderful Chabad house, where the Friday night dinners became the highlight. One of my lasting memories of these joyous meals — aside from the stimulating company and the homestyle warmth of the whole experience — was the carrot-blueberry kugel that frequented the Shabbat table.

I can’t say this is the same kugel, but it’s close, we like it, and it’s a cinch to make. The recipe below can also be made into individual muffins. Just use a GREASED muffin tin rather than the pan, and use a teaspoon of blueberry filling for each muffin. Cut baking time to about 20-25 minutes.

CARROT KUGEL WITH BLUEBERRIES

14.5 oz. sliced carrots (one can)
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 cup vegetable oil
10 oz. blueberry pie filling (about half of a 21-ounce can)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a springform pan (we like Pam with Flour) and set aside. Using a food processor outfitted with a chopping blade, process carrots and eggs until carrots are pureed. Add remaining ingredients and process until fully combined. Pour batter into greased pan. Drop generous tablespoons of blueberry filling over batter, then swirl around with knife. Bake for 35-45 minutes, until slightly browned on top. Remove from oven and let cool five minutes before releasing sides of springform pan. Cool completely and cut into squares; refrigerate if not serving immediately. Delicious warm, room temperature, or cold, and freezes well.

(Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4). All of my work has led up to this point - it’s time to build a turducken. This post has my pictures - click them for a larger view.

MATERIALS:
* 3 deboned birds, as cold as you can keep them.
* 3 cold stuffings
* oval foil roasting pan (preferably with reinforcing rack)
* twine and a poultry sewing needle
* heavy-duty aluminum foil
* turkey baster
* 2 long, thin, sharp skewers.

NOTES:
* All the deboned birds have their skins on them - even the ones going on the inside. If they didn’t have the skin, they would just be a pile of cutlets. You might be concerned (as my wife was) about putting all that skin on the inside of your turducken. Based on the end result, I have to say that it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, it contributed nicely to the juiciness of the end product - the chicken & duck skins rendered fat that soaked into the surrounding stuffing and meat. By the time the turducken was finished, the skin was almost unnoticeable. If eating skin bothers you, it was a simple matter to peel out the small pieces that each slice had.

* The turkey still had the wing-bones and leg-bones when the butcher was done with it. I hacked off the inner ¾ of the leg-bones, so that the cavities could be stuffed as well. I left the wing-bones in - taking them off wouldn’t give me anything to stuff.

* My butcher deboned our turkey without slicing down the backbone, so my turkey was more of a ‘turkey-sleeve’ than a flat piece. This made it harder to get the duck in, but we still had to sew up a section that had been cut. My instructions will assume that your turkey is a flat piece, which is the easier way to do it.

* Find yourself a ‘turducken-buddy’. Maybe make a ‘turducken assembly party’! Assembling a turducken is a 2-person job, if not more. You will need at least 4 hands at many of the steps. My wife was graciously helping me assemble this behemoth.

* The amount of stuffing that goes into each stage is obviously variable. A few times, we would draw up the sides of the bird we were working on to measure - and then stuff it some more. You are going for a finished product with no empty spaces.

Lay the chicken flat on your work surface, legs toward you, skin side down. Pile as much of the Wild-Mushroom Kasha Stuffing on it as you can fit and still close the bird. Pick up the sides of the bird and bring them up to the top, so you have a stuffed bird cylinder. Use a skewer to hold the flaps together, being sure to pin it together far enough, so it can be moved around without losing stuffing. Carefully, set aside.

Lay the duck flat on your work surface, legs toward you, skin side down. Cover the duck with a good amount of the Andouille Sausage Stuffing. Carefully, pick up the chicken-cylinder and rest it on top of the stuffing, seam side down, in the middle of the duck. Pick up the sides of the duck and bring them up to the top, over the chicken. Use a second skewer to hold the flaps together. Again, be sure to pin it together far enough, so it can be moved around without losing stuffing. Carefully, set aside.

Set the turkey flat on your work surface, legs toward you, skin side down. Cover the turkey with a good amount of the Cornbread Stuffing. Be sure to stuff the leg-cavities. Carefully, pick up the duck-chicken-cylinder and rest it on top of the stuffing, seam side down, in the middle of the turkey. Pick up the sides of the turkey and bring them up to the top, over the duck-chicken. Have your partner hold the sides of the skin together as you use the needle & twine to sew the sides together.

Sew the neck of the turkey closed. Remove the two skewers, via the leg cavity. Tie the legs together, to keep the stuffings in the bird.

Carefully lift the turducken and place it in the roasting pan, seam side down. Ours fit perfectly in the pan - if there’s space in yours, use balls of foil to fill the spaces. Keeping the bird compressed will make it look more like a normal bird when it’s served.


We finished this step on wednesday night, and refrigerated the turducken overnight. The finished product weighed in at more than 25 pounds. Whew!

Roasting any whole bird is a matter of internal temperature, rather that strict times. This was going to be easier than a normal turkey, because the inside of the bird was solid - with no cavity, the heat would permeate the turducken evenly. I wouldn’t need to measure the breast meat or the thigh meat. I placed my trusty digital thermometer probe as close to the center of the bird as I could, then covered the pan with heavy-duty foil. The cord of my probe went outside of the oven to the readout. You could poke it everytime you wanted to know the temperature, but it’s safe to say that it won’t be necessary for at least 8 hours. It went into a 225° F oven at 5:30 AM. My family and I went to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade at this point. (Wouldn’t my remote-thermometer have been useful here?)

The target temperature for the turducken is 165° F. When we got home from the parade, it reached 130° F. It was only 11:30 AM, so we were on time. I took the foil off and turned the oven up to 300° F. We used the turkey baster to siphon off the fat that was pooling around the bird, so it wouldn’t overflow.

After another 4 hours of cooking, we were still short of the target temperature, so I pushed it up to 350° F. By 5 o’clock (after more than 11 hours of cooking!) the bird was exactly 165° F. We took it out of the oven and let it rest for a while. (Actually, we transported the bird to my parents house for dinner - but the details of that aren’t important. The bird traveled in it’s roasting tray, covered again in foil, then wrapped in some towels to keep warm until dinner. Let’s say for argument’s sake, that the turducken rested for 1 hour, covered with foil.)

At dinner time, we attempted to remove the turducken from the pan for carving, but it wouldn’t come out without tearing apart. So we cut it in half crosswise, and took out only the lower half. Here’s the cross section. Isn’t it beautiful?. After we finished the first half the servings weren’t as neat.


Of course, we tried hard to get all three meats in everyone’s slice. How many did we feed? 12 people Thursday night and 5 people for Shabbos dinner. The leftovers still lasted another week and we gave away a sizeable amount to people who couldn’t make it. 25 pounds is a lot of food!

How did it taste? Incredible! The flavors of three different meats and three different stuffings combined beautifully. All the meat was juicy & flavorful. Since we didn’t have a cavity inside the turkey, everything reached doneness together.

Mission accomplished.

EPILOGUE:
We have come to the end of my Thanksgiving project - what did I learn from all of it?
* Is a Turducken delicious? If you choose the stuffings well, it turns out great.
* Was it difficult? It was, but by no means impossible. Having a butcher do the deboning was key. It takes a lot of planning.
* Would I do it again? I might, but not for a while. This was a lot of work, and in future years I might be responsible for cooking the rest of Thanksgiving dinner - this year my parents made everything but the bird. It was lots of fun to do something so unique - I wonder what dish I can make next year.

I hope I’ve given you the encouragement you need to go out and build one for yourself. I leave you with this very funny cartoon…

KBlog reader Alyssa writes in asking if anyone is familiar with the “Ner Tamid K” heksher featured on Amy’s Kitchen products. The Amy’s website has a section in their FAQ explaining that their foods are kosher:

Amy’s Kosher certification is from Rabbi Dov Hazdan of Ner Tamid K in Staten Island, NY. Amy’s became certified in November of 2003.

With one exception, Amy’s products are certified as Kosher Dairy or Kosher Parve as noted in our special diets section. Amy’s Low Sodium Marinara is the only Amy’s Kitchen product that is not certified Kosher due to the presence of non-kosher red wine vinegar.

While shopping for Amy’s products, you may not see the appropriate Kosher symbol on all certified products at this time. As packaging is regularly updated, the appropriate symbol will be added.

A quick google of the “Ner Tamid K” and “Ner Tomid K” yields scant information.

Conveniently located between Boston and New York, Claire’s Corner Copia is a vegetarian gem that Yalies, I’m certain, are content in keeping to themselves. On the corner of Chapel and College Streets in New Haven, Claire’s has been dishing out vegetarian cuisine since 1975. It’s easily accessible for a brief stop off of Interstates 91 and 95, but the nearby environs — a mix of boutiques and Yale facilities — certainly warrant a slightly more extended visit, should you have the time. We’ve visited twice in the past several months, most recently during a wintry visit to the New Haven IKEA.

Claire’s completely milchig menu, which spans a giant chalkboard behind the counter, features Italian, Tex-Mex, Middle Eastern, and American dishes. Such a variety of choices makes ordering a daunting task, and newcomers are easily spotted as they gawk in uncertainty (as we did). Hopefully our experiences will make your visit more effective. The Tex-Mex selections are simple reconfigurations of the genre’s basic ingredients (vegetables, cheese, beans, guacamole, rice, and tortillas), plus soy-based “meats” are available for inclusion in your nachos, burritos, quesadillas, etc. Something to note: though we did enjoy our enchiladas and burritos, Claire’s takes its “vegetarian” moniker to an unnecessary level by putting ill-suited vegetables (zucchini, carrot) into their Mexican selections. Pita Sandwiches offer hefty portions of whatever you choose; our falafel was handily shared between two people. The mushroom veggie burger was tasty, if a little dry; adding some mayonaisse helped. Claire’s pizzas are a little different, each made with a large, whole-wheat flatbread, which wasn’t the best at handling sloppy toppings. The BBQ Chicken pizza (with soy chicken chunks, barbecue sauce, red onions, and a blend of mozzarella and cheddar cheese) was delicious, but a heftier crust would have made it excellent. Another note: Claire’s uses raw vegetables on their pizza, so avoid the pizza if that’s not to your taste.

Whatever you choose as an entree, be sure to save plenty of room for dessert. Claire’s cakes are phenominal. During our last visit, we treated ourselves to two slices of cake. Their decadent Lithuanian coffee cake is strewn with struesel and covered with delicious butter frosting. The apple cake is very moist with great chunks of apple throughout.

It’s not fancy (counter service), but Claire’s quality food, warm and comfortable atmosphere, and commitment to community (not to mention outstanding desserts) make for a restaurant we’ll return to again and again. It’s certainly the type of place that’s missing in Boston, and a facsimile would doubtlessly do well in a vegetarian-laden college town like ours.

Today I saw this New York Times article (free registration required) about Seder Olam, which provides all sorts of information for the kosher/observant Jewish traveler–restaurants, synagogues, mikva’ot, whatever. Let’s hope it’s more up to date than Shamash’s restaurant database.

Heard in shul last week that an upscale kosher restaurant would be opening in Lynn, MA. I know, I know… it sounds odd. Anyone have any details to corroborate or refute the rumor?

(Parts 1, 2 & 3) I’m sure that you’ve heard that being on a first name basis with your food purveyors is the best way to get the best products - in this case it was an absolute necessity. I was going to ask the butcher to de-bone three birds for me - not an easy job and not a common request.

In Brooklyn, we are fortunate to have a number of butchers to choose from and some of them are better than others for certain needs. In this case I decided to go with the smaller operation - the meat department at Kosher Palace (on Avenue U and 29th street, if you’re a Brooklynite). Alex has always given me the best prices for my meat needs and he will get me cuts that the other establishments wouldn’t do. This time I was giving him a challenge. A week earlier, my wife and I had gone to explain what we needed - a chicken and a duck totally de-boned and a turkey partially deboned (The ribcage is removed but the wings are left intact as are the ends of the leg bones). The skin was to be left intact to allow us to wrap the bird around the stuffing. He was willing to try anything, once. We left him with a copy of Paul Prudhomme’s illustrated recipe to make sure that he understood what we were looking for.

We picked up the cleaned carcasses of the birds on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and made stock (for the stuffings) out of them. We came back for the meat the next day - here’s what we got:

* 1 deboned chicken ($2.59/lb) $10.62
* 1 deboned duck ($5.29/lb) $22.80
* 1 partially deboned turkey ($2.29/lb) $34.60
TOTAL: 23.5 pounds of meat (not including the bones): $68

Alex had done a beautiful job of de-boning. He assured me that this was the last time he would de-bone birds for me - I hope that the generous slice of Turducken I gave him afterwards will influence him for future requests. Truth be told, I would have liked to have gotten the duck somewhere else - the only ducks available to Alex were Empire frozen ducklings. If you’ve ever had one, you’ll know that there isn’t a lot of meat on them and the breasts are particularly thin. The best source for ducks that I’m aware of is at Le Marais in NYC. I’m not sure what species of duck they use, but they are easily twice as meaty as the frozen ones. In this case I had to take what Alex could get.

Now, we get to the recipes for the three stuffings we were using. Actually, these are more like guidelines than recipes - we weren’t really following a recipe, and stuffings lend themselves to improvisation particularly well. Also, I’m not a very good recipe writer. It’s important to note that the stuffings you’re going to use in your turducken need to be fully cooled before assembly. Warm stuffings will increase the chances of incubating food poisoning. Keeping everything cold until you put it in the oven is key here.

The first stuffing we made was the Andouille Sausage Stuffing, inspired by Prudhomme’s recipe:

* 2 1/2 pounds of Andouille Sausage (that I made in the last 2 posts)
* 4 green bell peppers, seeded
* 4 large onions, peeled
* 1 head of celery, trimmed
* chopped garlic
* Avvio black pepper sauce
* fine breadcrumbs made from 2 very stale baguettes

Pulse the peppers, onions and celery in a food processor until they are medium-to-finely chopped. Take the sausages out of their casings and cut them into 1/2″ slices. Saute them in a hot, dry pan - they will start exuding fat almost immediately. Keep tossing the sausages, and breaking them up, until all of the sausage appears browned. Add the chopped vegetables and saute them in the sausage fat until they are translucent. Add the garlic and saute for a few minutes more. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and add about half a bottle of black-pepper sauce. Mix in breadcrumbs until the mixture is pasty. Put the mix in the refrigerator to cool.

Next came the Cornbread Stuffing. Prudhomme’s recipe was too complex for me, and I didn’t want giblets in my stuffing:

* 4 green bell peppers, seeded
* 4 large onions, peeled
* 1 head of celery, trimmed
* dry cornbread cubes (I was using 3/4 of a double recipe, cubed and dried)
* 1 T ground sage
* salt and pepper
* poultry stock

Pulse the peppers, onions and celery in a food processor until they are medium-to-finely chopped. Saute them in oil until they are translucent. Add the cornbread cubes and toss. Add the sage and salt and pepper to taste. Add stock until the mixture is pasty but pieces of cornbread still remain. Put the mix in the refrigerator to cool.

Finally, the Wild Mushroom Kasha Pilaf. This one is the most vague of the ‘recipes’ - my wife makes kasha (and varnishkas) regularly, and doesn’t ever look at a recipe. If you need guidance, check out this recipe. We used about 2 cups of uncooked kasha in our recipe, and later added bow-tie noodles to whatever didn’t fit in the chicken:

* About 4 pounds of assorted mushrooms (we used baby bella, oyster, shitake & white button), cleaned and stems removed if necessary
* Kasha (we used a mix of whole and coarse ground because that’s what was in our pantry)
* beaten eggs
* onions
* poultry stock

Pulse the mushrooms and onions in a food processor until finely chopped. Saute in olive oil until the mushrooms have exuded all their moisture and gotten fairly dry again. Set the mixture aside. Mix kasha with the beaten eggs until all the kernels are covered. Saute the egg/kasha mix until dry. Add stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered until the stock is absorbed. Mix in the mushroom-mixture and salt and pepper to taste. Put the mix in the refrigerator to cool.

In my next and final post in this saga, I’ll detail the assembly and cooking of the Turducken - complete with actual pictures of the process and my final product. See you then.

From today’s New York Times “Food Stuff” column:

Eli Zabar has converted a little ice cream stand at the front of Eli’s Manhattan, 1411 Third Avenue (80th Street), into a kosher bakery. To comply with kosher rules, it is fully enclosed and separated from the rest of the store, and it uses only fresh yeast approved for kosher baking. Rabbis check things out at least once a week. The breads - including baguettes, a ring-shaped bread and focaccia made with kosher olive oil - come out of the oven three times a day. The bakery is closed from sundown Friday until after sundown Saturday. Prices are $1.29 to $2.95.

Many of Eli Zabar’s kosher breads are available online at EliZabar.com, with shipping available to anywhere in the U.S.

They say you have to give a new restaurant six months to finds its groove, and only then can one accurately judge it. First, any establishment needs time to iron out the kinks. But only later will the true qualities of the restauranteur emerge: Will the counters stay spotless? Will the bathroom be maintained well? Will they cut corners with the food? Do the prices rise?

Fortunately, we must put such tradition aside, as it is infrequent that a new kosher restaurant opens in Boston. A week ago today, Tiberias Grill & Salad Bar (417 Harvard Street, Brookline) quietly opened its doors, and by Sunday, when we visited, it was full of patrons. The menu is Middle Eastern with American influences, and prices are modest. There are about 10 small tables in this counter-service-only establishment, and a flat screen television is mounted in one corner. showing Israeli programming via satellite (a soccer match was on during our visit).

We ordered an admittedly small meal (I’ll amend my comments when we try more) consisting of a shawarma plate ($7.95) and buffalo wings ($4.95). The service was friendly, although the gentleman who helped us had trouble understanding our orders in English, so be patient or break out your Hebrew. Our shawarma was prepared promptly, with a full array of salad vegetables and techina, though no hummus was offered. The meat (I assume it was standard turkey) was flavorful, although a bit dry; perhaps they haven’t settled on the proper rotisserie temperature. The vegetables (lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, and pickles) were fresh. The buffalo wings took longer to prepare, as they were deep-fried to order. With the slight pandemonium behind the counter, I feared that my order had been lost, and my lunchmate nearly finished the shawarma in the meantime. When the wings were finally ready, I was offered the same salad options as the shawarma, opting only for lettuce and pickles. My plate, thankfully, contained only the “drumette” wing portion (about 10 of them), had no visible feather remains (always a potential problem with kosher poultry), and were well coated with hot sauce.

The restaurant was very clean, and we noticed someone wiping tables and sweeping the floors a couple times as we ate. Smoke, however, was a problem; the giant hood above the grill wasn’t providing enough exhaust, and the smoke alarms went off, forcing the staff to open front and back windows to clear the air. Though the door and menu indicate acceptance of credit cards (MC/Visa), no register was in service, a calculator tabulated the bills, and cash was deposited into a drawer under the counter.

It’s already come up in comments, and it’s the question on everybody’s mind: how does it compare to Rami’s, the nearby Israeli eatery that has been a Coolidge Corner fixture for some years? Objectively, Tiberias’s menu is wider (shishlik, chicken skewers, grilled chicken, and buffalo wings), it’s open on Saturday night (Rami’s is not), it has a hashgacha (R. Aaron Hamaoui, New England Kashrus Lemehadrin) that might appeal to a wider audience, prices may be a bit lower (will have to look more closely), and it’s somewhat more spacious. However, we find Rami’s shawarma to be juicier, their “plate” portions to be larger, and we’ve been told on good authority that Rami’s hummus is better.

So, if you asked me, in terms of business sense, is this restaurant a good idea? At this point, I say no. Unless the Tiberias folks have big changes in store to really differentiate from Rami’s (and I can think of many ways to expand and improve), I don’t think Boston needs another copy-cat restaurant. I’d think an inexpensive but quality diner-style hamburger-and-fries joint would be a great alternative. But given we’re stuck, instead, with two Israeli places, here are some thoughts on how to take it to the next level:

• Lafa, folks. Lafa. Everyone enjoys a giant flatbread stuffed with greasy meats.
• Shnitzel. You guys have deep friers. You have chicken. What’s the problem? As I recall, Cafe Aviv had tremendous shnitzel — shnitzels as big as your face, and surrounded by a mound of french fries.
• Real plates. As much as I like the cheap-chic charm of eating on a piece of plastic, would it be that hard to use actual china for your eat-in guests? Plus, with real plates, you could experiment with creative ways to arrange your food, so it might feel like more of a culinary experience. Shalom Hunan scored major points in my book with their new plating techniques.
• Non-poultry shawarma. Hey, I enjoy the turkey, but certainly, with all our modern technology, we could fashion a true lamb shawarma.
• Real Buffalo Accoutrements. Serve the wings with some sort of pareve but creamy dressing (akin to the treif standby of blue cheese dressing), or at the very least some celery sticks as is customary. Your diners need something to offset the spice.

Those are just off the top of my head. All said and done, I’ll still go back to try more. When it’s not Saturday night, and I don’t need buffalo wings, though, it’ll be Rami’s for us.

TIBERIAS MENU

 
 

In honor of my birthday, and the upcoming anniversary of the Kosher Blog’s first post, we’ll have some great content this week:

• 2 restaurant reviews
• New cheeses
• More Adventures in Beef
• …and a Boston-area kosher rumor

Stay tuned.

By the end of my last post, I had a tray of raw Andouille sausages, in casings, drying overnight in the refrigerator. The next step I’m going to describe is smoking the sausages. (I’d like to apologize for the limited number of photos - I didn’t think about writing this up until I was mostly finished. I’ll keep trying to be as descriptive as possible. This photo IS NOT a picture of my smoker. I just wanted to set the mood.)

DISCLAIMER: The process I’m describing is for informational purposes only. Improperly smoked/cured sausages can harbor bacteria and lead to food poisoning. I don’t want anyone to try what worked for me, get sick and sue kosherblog or myself. This was my first time smoking sausage, and if I didn’t get food poisoning this time, it might have just been dumb luck. Please follow proper food safety rules in your kitchen.

Still with me? Great. Let’s move on.

I’m an avid outdoor cook - As often as possible I’m BBQing, grilling, smoking and turkey frying. Our garage isn’t used for a car - it’s full of cooking equipment. (OK, not only cooking equipment, but lots of it.) I own 2 charcoal grills, a water smoker, a charcoal smoker and a gas grill. For this project I’m going to be using my Smokintex PRO Series Model #1300 electric smoker. It has a thermostat to control the smoking temperature for consistent results - it makes the smoking experience as hassle-free as possible. It may not be as authentic as using my charcoal smoker, but I’m sticking with it on this occasion. It was a Father’s Day present from a very kind and very patient wife.

After the sausages have been drying in the refrigerator overnight, they have shriveled up slightly, and the casings have gotten firmer. That’s important because I need to cut them apart. After the drying, I can snip the sausages apart, and the meat won’t run out of the casings. That leaves me with about 30, 5″ long sausages. I spread them out on the racks of the smoker, closed the door and set the thermostat. I put 2 or 3 chunks of hickory wood in the smoke generator - I think pecan wood is more traditional for Cajun cooking, but I only had hickory.

I need to revisit a point I made in the last article. After some research, I have determined that Morton’s Tender Quick® didn’t have as much curing-salt as was recommended in the instructions I was following, so I didn’t have enough of it in my mix. What led me to this conclusion? The recipes on Morton’s website. In all of their sausage recipes, they were using 1 ½ teaspoons of Tender Quick® for each pound of meat. My recipe had 5-pounds of meat mixture, so I needed at least 7 ½ teaspoons - that’s 2 ½ tablespoons. I had used only one teaspoon of it. Looking back on the recipe, I think that if I make this recipe again, I should probably replace some of the salt and sugar (2 Tablespoons each) with Tender Quick®. What was the difference this time? I guess that I wasn’t as protected as I could be from bacterial growth. Everything turned out fine this time, but it’s food for thought. Re-read that disclaimer, if necessary.

What temperature did I set the smoker to? The book says that sausage should be cold-smoked between 90 and 130° Fahrenheit or hot smoked between 170° and 250° Fahrenheit. I didn’t have the cold smoking kit for my smoker, so I compromised and set the thermostat at about 135°. That’s about the lowest temperature that I’ve been able to generate smoke at.

Time for a little digression. Besides for being a foodie, I’m also a huge computer/hardware geek. I mention this because this smoking session led me to come up with a great invention. I think it would be a marketable product - if there are enough cooking/computer/hardware geeks out there.

First, I need to give you some background information.

1) On the morning I was smoking my sausages, I was invited to a school assembly that my 1st grader was performing in. So I had to figure out a way to get the smoking done and attend the assembly. His school is 20 minutes away from home, so it was very doable.

2) I never smoke anything without my RemoteCheck double probe wireless thermometer. I use the first probe to measure food-doneness and the second probe to monitor chamber-temperature in the smoker. Sometimes both probes will go in the food, as in the case of a thermostat-controlled smoker. I need to know exactly what is going on during the cooking process.

3) One of my proudest geek achievements is wiring my home with X10 so I can control many of the lights and appliances in my home from my computer. My most common use of this system is to eliminate the need for lamp-timers on Shabbos - everything turns off and on when it is supposed to, controlled by a Linux server in the basement. The server knows what time Shabbos starts and varies the schedule accordingly. I also have a private website that I can use to control the lights remotely, using a web-browser.

4) The PalmOne Treo 600 is a multi-function, cell-phone and PDA with internet access. It’s the most used device I have - after my Tivo. Totally indispensable. On occasion I have used my Treo to turn off lights and appliances that were accidentally left on, using that private website I mentioned.

And now, for my product pitch to wrap all these interests into one idea: an Internet-enabled thermometer with temperature logging! What do you think? BBQing a 15-pound brisket? That easily takes more than 18 hours. Set it up before you leave for work. Go to your personal website and check the progress throughout the day! If you have to leave something cooking, use a PDA or mobile PC to see if it’s done, and plan how much time before you need to get home! Check the temperature history of your smoker and learn to control the heat better! On the day in question, I could have kept tabs on my sausages while listening to my son’s presentation. That’s a great idea, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Why are you looking at me that way? You don’t like it? What do you mean that it’s a ‘niche-market’? OK, let’s back away from my insane techno-lust, and get back to the sausages. Sorry for that outburst.

The sausages were left to do their thing for about 3 hours. I did leave to go to the assembly and by the time I had gotten back they had reached about 135°. I considered that done enough, since cold smoked sausages shouldn’t exceed 130° and I DID have curing-salts in the mixture protecting me. Re-read that disclaimer one more time.

The scent of the sausages was sublime. (I should have mentioned before now - I did get to actually taste the sausage mixture before this point. There’s usually a small amount of sausage mix that doesn’t get all the way through the stuffer - when I was finished stuffing, I collected it, made a small patty and fried it up. It was extremely good and I had no doubt that the smoking had improved on it. Useful tip: Smoking seems to cancel out salt somewhat, so the fried patty was saltier than the finished sausage.) I put them in a tray, covered them tightly, and put them in the refrigerator to cool. Having only reached 135°, these sausages were not fully cooked and couldn’t be eaten as is. They were par-cooked, and were going to be crumbled and sautéed for my purposes. Since Thanksgiving, I have taken some of these sausages from the freezer and broiled them for dinner - they are so good. This is a photo of those broiled sausages - Aren’t they pretty things? If you can’t handle a little fat in your diet, then you had best look away now.

After finishing the sausages, there was only one ingredient that still need to be cooked before I could start on the actual turducken - the cornbread for the cornbread stuffing. With apologies to jabbett, who has been searching for the perfect pareve cornbread - I just went with the recipe on the back of the package (I replaced the milk with soy-milk). I figured that since I was using the cornbread in another recipe, I could make up for average cornbread with the ingredients I used later. I made a double recipe, and when it was finished I cut ¾ of it into 1″ cubes and set them out to get stale. My wife wanted the rest of the cornbread for breakfasts.

In the next post, I’ll remind us all why being friends with your butcher is so important. See you then.

If you noticed that site outage today, I do apologize for the inconvenience. The good folks at TextDrive got us back up and running.

At the Super Stop & Shop #89 in Allston, I noticed Empire boneless chicken breasts on sale for $4.99/lb. I imagine all Stop & Shops have that price, so stock up while you can.

All the commonly available kosher fresh mozzarella products I’ve seen bear hekshers our family does not accept, so it was exciting to find a new choice from Gad Dairies of Israel. Their Baby Mozzarella is available at the Butcherie in a smallish reclosable plastic container, holding several miniature balls of fresh mozzarella in liquid. These bocconcini had a soft, slightly chewy texture, as was expected, but its very mild flavor was skewed by a hint of spice (something like cinnamon, oddly) which I could have done without.

This mozzarella is good for tossing in a hot bowl of pasta, stuffing into a calzone, cutting in half and placing on a pizza, or broiled on bruschetta. Or just make a snack out if it: mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil, and some fresh, chopped herbs.

Another nice thing about this product is its clearly written expiration date. The label spelled out fully the month of expiration, which is very important when dealing with non-American cheeses (i.e. does 4/9/04 mean April 9 or September 4). Such confusion has led to some unfortunate experiences with Danish blue cheese in my kitchen.

Thanks to supermarket innovations like pre-chopped onions (Star-K), pre-diced potatoes (OU), and pre-made soup (Kof-K), delicious corn chowder is now easier than ever. It’s perfect for a snowy winter afternoon or even Shabbos dinner, and your guests will have no idea that you barely lifted a finger.

Feel free to add diced, cooked chicken breast for a heartier chowder, or to add some cream for extra, milchig richness.

EASY PAREVE CORN CHOWDER
2 quarts Creamy Sweet Corn Soup
1 box frozen sweet corn kernels (approx. 10 oz.)
1 cup chopped onion
1 bag pre-diced potatoes (24 oz.)
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
salt
pepper

1. In a soup pot, saute chopped onion in oil until translucent.
2. Add potatoes and saute briefly.
3. Add corn kernels and pour in both boxes of corn soup.
4. Simmer gently for 30 minutes to an hour, to cook the potatoes a bit. Season with salt and pepper.

Chef Giada De Laurentiis offered up a neat little recipe on a risotto-focused episode of her Food Network program, “Everyday Italian“: Arancini di Riso, fried balls of leftover risotto stuffed with chunks of mozzarella. Stuck with a dish of leftover risotto and Chanukah’s call for deep-fat frying, I found the recipe and simplified it for fleishig use, as my particular risotto was infused with beef broth. I nixed the mozzarella and parmesan, but if you’re in a milchig mood, add a handful of freshly grated parmesan to both the rice and the breadcrumb coating and stuff a sliver of mozzarella into each patty.

To make these lovely fleishig “rice latkes,” you’ll need:
** 2 cups leftover risotto (mine was a wild mushroom and rosemary varient)
** 1 1/2 cups breadcrumbs (throw your leftover challah in the food processor)
** 2 eggs, beaten
** oil for frying (try using olive oil, or a mixture of canola and olive)

Mix risotto, 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs, and eggs together. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Form 2-tablespoon balls of risotto batter in your hands, roll in the remaining breadcrumbs, press slightly to form patties, and set aside.

Heat about 1/4″ of oil in a large frying pan to about 350 degrees. If you don’t have a thermometer handy, carefully drop in a very small amount of batter; if it bubbles instantly, you’re probably at a good temperature.

Without overcrowding your pan, fry patties until nicely browned, turning once, in batches if necessary. Place browned patties on paper towels to draw away any extraneous cooking oil.

Serve immediately, while hot. Garnish with herbs and serve with a sauce that complements the flavors of your risotto. We used chopped parsley and a light tomato sauce.

In honor of the wild accusations going around about kosher shechita these days, I hereby introduce what I hope to be a regular column on the blog: Adventures in Beef.

Tonight’s installment: TAIL OF PRIME RIB

Thursday night meant Shabbat shopping, so I picked up my chickens and some beef broth at Gordon & Alperin, my meat purveyor of choice. I also needed dinner for Sarah and me that night, so I put the problem to Ricardo, master butcher. He thought for a moment and then knew exactly what we should try, what he called a “tail of prime rib,” a cut of beef that is left behind when he carves out a prime rib. As you can see from the photo, it looks almost like a small brisket. The 1.5 lb. steak was about $17, but I looked at it as a little present in honor of my new job.

From what I’ve read, I suspect this “tail of prime rib” is a similar cut to a “hanger steak,” which is also known as “butcher’s steak” because it’s the cut the butcher takes home. And now I know why he does.

I brought mine home, seasoned it only with a bit of freshly cracked black pepper, and broiled it for 5 minutes on each side. The thicker end was perfectly rare and the thinner end was more to my wife’s liking. The exterior developed a bit of that great natural caramelization, a slight crust that contrasted beautifully with the extremely tender meat. Plus, it was marbled with just enough fat to give an excellent beefy flavor. I sliced it against the grain and served it with a simple accompaniment of Near East rice and lentils. The beef stole the show; we were both in awe of this perfect cut. Give it a try, and tell him I sent you.

In Part 1 I had chosen the recipes that I was going to use to make my Turducken. Now I’ll start on the prep work. Andouille Dressing (or Stuffing) requires Andouille sausage, and wouldn’t you know it - I was all out. OK, I didn’t actually have any to start with, but I had dabbled in sausage making before, so I just needed to make my own. What is Andouille sausage? Well, I’d never had any, but it is a Cajun sausage - and my experiences with Cajun food have been very delicious. It’s described as a spicy, smoked sausage - what more do you need to know? Let’s start with the recipe. I took this recipe from ‘Bruce Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book‘, p. 44 - Cajun Style Andouille.

3 T sweet paprika
2 T minced garlic
2 T kosher salt
2 T sugar
1 T freshly ground black pepper
1 t crushed dried hot red pepper
½ t dried thyme
¼ t ground mace
1 t curing salts (optional)
5 pounds pork butt, fat and lean separated, cut into 2″ chunks
½ C water
Sausage casings

Until the curing salts, it’s all commonly available stuff. Let’s talk about the three less-common ingredients. “Curing salts” is a generic term for a mixture containing sodium-nitrate and/or -nitrite, and some other ingredients to simplify its usage. Morton’s Salt makes a product called “Tender Quick” - it’s .5% -nitrite and .5% -nitrate in a mixture of sugar and salt designed to be neutral in flavor. It’s also O-U certified. What do we need curing salt for? It’s used to make the mixture inhospitable to food-borne bacteria, so later the sausage can be smoked for long periods of time at temperatures that bacteria would normally thrive in. As an added benefit, meat that it treated with curing salts stays pink, even when cooked. It’s how we (or at least I) expect sausages to look.

Now let’s talk about pork butt. If you’re not aware, the ‘butt’ does not come from the rear-end of a pig - it’s actually a shoulder roast. Why is it called a butt? I don’t know - it’s not something we regularly discuss at the Shabbos table. What we need to determine is what can we replace it with to make this recipe kosher. Fortunately, I watch a lot of cooking shows - the one that comes to the rescue here is Good Eats with Alton Brown. In his episode on making sausage, he states that an average pork butt is 20% fat. Fine. For 5 pounds of pork butt, I’ll need 4 pounds of some kosher meat and 1 pound of fat. I choose to use veal stew meat. Makes sense to me, since both veal and pork are ‘white’ meats. To match my fat quota, I ask the butcher for a pound of hard beef-fat. He was more than happy to oblige and it didn’t cost a thing. Specifying ‘hard fat’ is important because having solid pieces of fat in your sausage is important to the finished product. If the fat is the softer kind it will melt before your sausages are finished and your product will end up dry.

The final ingredient that you probably don’t have in your pantry is kosher sausage casings. The optimal casing for sausages is pork or beef intestines. I’m told that it’s illegal to sell intestines to the general public - at least in New York. And besides, who wants to eat intestines? I’ll leave that kind of things for the people who eat Haggis. If you google for “kosher sausage casings“, you will find kosher collagen casings from Devro. These casings are very manageable and shelf stable. They last for years in a cool dry place. Stuffing them is quite easy - they come ’shirred’, which means scrunched up like an accordion. Slip a length of it over your sausage-stuffer and it will expand as you fill it. In case you’re wondering, collagen is a protein that is extracted from cowhides. (The Devro website makes it sound like the cows are Orthodox, too. Just kidding.) The Hechser is available, here. The U.S. distributor was kind enough to send me a sample case. I have enough for the next ten years.

The procedure is fairly simple: Mix the spices together and toss most of it with the meat and some of it with the fat. Get it all good and covered. Refrigerate separately overnight.

The next day, it’s time to pull out the meat grinder. I use the meat grinder attachment on my Kitchenaid mixer. The meat gets ground with the small-hole disc, and the fat gets ground with the large-hole disc. Everything needs to be really cold when you grind, because any heat will start melting the fat - and like I said before, you need as much of the fat as you can get, to insure a juicy product. Did I mention that I’m currently on the Atkins diet, and that I can eat greasy meat products all day long? When the meat & fat are ground, add the water and knead the mixture well to evenly distribute everything. This mix goes back in the fridge while I ready my sausage stuffer.

Now, Kitchenaid makes a sausage stuffer attachment to use with the meat grinder attachment, but I don’t like it. Why? For two reasons. The attachment uses the same screw-mechanism to push the meat as was used to grind the meat. When putting already ground meat through it, I find that it makes a paste of everything - too much friction. More importantly, it’s not powerful enough for me. Do you remember the show Home Improvement, with Tim Allen? Remember the trademark “More Power!” and the Neanderthal grunts that accompanied it? That’s me in the kitchen - I like to do things in a big way. That’s why I own a Dakotah Water-Powered Sausage Stuffer. It’s about 2-feet long, has a 10-pound capacity and it’s powered by water pressure from a garden hose. This is a sausage-making monster. The whole batch of sausage fits into the chamber in one shot. I slip a length of sausage casing over the output nozzle and tie the end. When the inlet-valve on the stuffer is opened, water starts filling the space behind the plunger. When the pressure gets strong enough the plunger and the meat will start moving towards the stuffer nozzle, and into the sausage casing that I’m holding on the end. It takes a little practice to get it just right - you need to hold the casing so that it moves at the right speed. Too fast, and the casing won’t be filled enough. Too slow, and you could pop the casing. It took me about 5 minutes to stuff the whole batch. It took another 7 minutes to twist the sausages into 4-5″ lengths. Aidell’s book details the whole process. I tied a knot in the last one, and we’re back to the refrigerator for overnight curing. Don’t cover the sausages - they’re supposed to be evaporating. Makes a better surface for the smoking step and the meat will hold together better. Your refrigerator will start to smell from garlic & spices. My wife (who was a little repulsed by the strong smell) was forgiving and I made sure to put a few boxes of baking soda in the fridge when I was done.

After another overnight rest in the refrigerator, the sausages were be ready to be smoked. To be continued…

NEW YORK, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire/ — A broad coalition of rabbis and certifying agencies involved in the supervision of kosher meat slaughter in the United States has reaffirmed the humaneness of kosher slaughter (schechita) in the wake of charges by a radical animal rights group. In an unprecedented statement, uniting diverse segments of the kosher community, the 12 signatories expressed concern that the recent publicity “may lead to misconceptions about the practices depicted on the videotape [released by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] and, more generally, about the shechita process itself.”

Full Press Release

I can’t say it was Todd English’s original concept, but I do recall seeing a dessert called Falling Chocolate Cake on his PBS cooking show several years ago. It was a dark, decadent souffle, baked in individual ramekins, served warm and still gooey inside — a consistent favorite at his Olives restaurant. Nowadays, the chocolate-cake-with-liquid-center phenomenon has achieved cliche proportions, being featured in countless restaurants and countless cookbooks, though usually as individual cakes and not English’s souffles. That’s not to say stardom has necessarily lessened the “molten chocolate cake” concept. I recently enjoyed such a dessert at New York’s Le Marais restaurant — a perfect conclusion to a delicious dinner.

Thanks to modern industrial wizardry, you too can enjoy this dessert — from the comfort of your own home! Graciela Chocolate Souffles ($9.99 for six at the Butcherie) are ready-made in your (kosher) grocer’s freezer; a short visit to the oven produces a tasty treat oozing with liquid chocolate. They’re pareve and certified by OU and KAJ. A few caveats: I wouldn’t consider them souffles… it’s really a dense cake. The requirements of mass-production seem to dictate that each cake should have a hole on top, so it’s not exactly like what you’ve seen in restaurants. Overall, worth a try.

If you have copious amounts of free time, consider making them from scratch. Local author Lora Brody offers several stellar recipes in her recent book Chocolate American Style, including both a chocolate souffle and a molten chocolate cake.