Kosher Blog

ShalomBoston.com Recipe File

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!

Carrot Kugel with Blueberries

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.

Making a Turducken, Chapter 5 - Assembly & Cooking

(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…

Amy’s Kitchen & Ner Tamid K

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.

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.

Claire’s Corner Copia, New Haven, CT (dairy)

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.

NYT: Seder Olam

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.

Restaurant Rumor

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?

Making a Turducken, Chapter 4 - Purchasing the Meat & Making the Stuffings

(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.

An East Side Bakery That Keeps the Sabbath

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.

Tiberias Restaurant (Meat, Middle-Eastern)

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.

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