Home-made Sauerkraut
My summertime is filled with bright and colorful food preservation projects. Colorful jams, crisp pickles & various relishes. Fall is the time for other projects, such as curing olives. During the winter, besides for eating my stored bounty, I focus on a different set of fruits and vegetables. Green cabbage is a hearty, cold-weather crop and sauerkraut and kimchi are in season. With very little work, the humble cabbage can be transformed into a tasty, highly nutritious pickle. Lacto-fermented sauerkraut contains large amounts of vitamin C, is a probiotic, and contains cancer fighting compounds. Sauerkraut’s antiscorbutic properties were known as early as the 17th century – sailors would add sauerkraut to their diets to prevent scurvy. (Supposedly, when English sailors eventually switched to limes they earned the nickname limeys, while Germans remained krauts.) Making sauerkraut is a rewarding hobby. To make a 5 pound batch, you’ll need the following:
Continue reading Home-made Sauerkraut »
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Chanukah Night – Fry Baby, Fry
Let’s make it short and sweet. Lit candles and consumed fried foods.
Fried Fish Filets
Pre-requisite Latkes (grated & shredded)
We need to work on our funnel-cake skills.
Tired of debating your friends on the relative merits of Latkes vs, Hamantashen? Debate no more, and feast your eyes on my new creation: The Deep-Fried-Hamantaschen-on-a-Stick. (if you’re a fan of Jeff Dunham, yours can be “on a steeek”):
Preparing the Hamantaschen:
The Glorious Results:
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Fakin’ Bacon
Of all foods forbidden to a Kosher consumer, bacon holds the most allure. Why is that? Non-kosher eaters often hail it as the most tasty of all meat products. “Everything is better with bacon”, is a common refrain in modern food-writing. For those who ate bacon in their pre-kosher days, the craving makes sense, but what of those who have never eaten real bacon? There are a number of Kosher bacon-analogues (Bac-os, Beef Fry, Bacon Salt), but they must pale in comparison.
I have never been non-kosher, but I was exposed to the scent of cooking bacon when I took a class at the French Culinary Institute. The smell alone was enough to make me crazy for bacon. No stranger to complicated food projects, I decided that the time had come to try my hand at making beef bacon.
The beef cut used for making bacon is the plate or belly. It’s a very fatty cut, sometimes used for corned-beef or pastrami. To procure my beef-plate, I contacted Abeles & Heymann, a NJ based producer of deli products including Beef Fry, a popular bacon replacement. They were happy to sell me beef-plate for $5/lb. Once I got the beef home, the first step was to cure it. I decided on a maple cure recipe, found in Michael Ruhlman’s seminal work on the topic, Charcuterie. It consisted of maple syrup, brown sugar, kosher salt and curing salt. The meat spent 1 week in the cure before it was time to smoke it. I used apple-wood to smoke it for about 3 hours. After cooling down fully, it was time to slice. This was the finished product:
The first dish I prepared with my bacon had to be a simple bacon and eggs. It was super-delicious.
Next, I tried to go with the fad and make candied bacon. It wasn’t as sucessful as I had hoped, but there is hope for the future. I used a slab of unsliced bacon in that weekend’s chulent, and the flavor took my chulent to a whole new level. The smokiness made my usual chulent into a Texas-style-bbq flavored chulent. The uses for this stuff truly are endless. Recent discussions on Chowhound lead me to believe that breast of veal is another good cut for making bacon. When I run out of this batch, perhaps that will be my next project.
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Pardes · Brooklyn, NY
As a long-time resident of Brooklyn, I’ve had the opportunity to see Kosher restaurants come and go. Some, like Kosher Delight or Jerusalem II Pizza have been around for decades. Kosher branches of Subway were a flash in the pan. There are the high-end places, like T Fusion Steakhouse and family-friendly eateries, like Carlos & Gabby’s. We have sushi-joints, Israeli grill-joints and a growing crop of schnitzel-joints. Across all those choices, there is much good food and a certain amount of commonality. What’s missing from the wide array of Kosher eateries in Brooklyn is excitement. That’s where Pardes comes in.
Pardes is the brainchild of Chef Moshe E. Wendel and his wife, Shana. Shana runs the front of the house and Chanita Bar-Chaim, a recent graduate of Brooklyn’s Center for Kosher Culinary Arts serves as sous-chef. Moshe distinguished himself with his time cooking at Mosaica, in Vauxhall, NJ, where the French/Morrocan cuisine garnered the attention of the Jewish and non-Jewish press. The executive staff of Kosherblog ate at Mosaica after Kosherfest 2009, and we were most impressed. Wendel was associated with Basil Pizza & Wine Bar’s opening, and the menu there shows some of his touches. Pardes is his first solo venture.
Continue reading Pardes · Brooklyn, NY »
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Kosherfest tomorrow
Kosherfest 2010 begins tomorrow in New Jersey. I plan to attend. Please let me know if there is anything in particular you are interested in hearing about that you would like me to check out while I am there.
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Kosher pastured poultry now available in Boston
Starting this month, Grow and Behold Foods will be offering its pastured chicken to customers in Boston, delivering to Hebrew College in Newton and Temple Emunah in Lexington on August 31. (Order by 6pm on Friday, August 27th.)
G&B’s pastured products are two to three times more expensive than industrial kosher poultry because it is produced with exceptional attention to kashrut, animal welfare, worker treatment, and sustainable agriculture. According to CEO Naftali Hanau:
Our poultry is produced under the supervision of the OU and the USDA. These chickens are the real deal: they are raised to our exacting specifications by Amish farmers, who move them daily to ensure that they eat from a fresh salad bar of growing pasture. Their diet is supplemented by a small amount of GMO-free grain. None of our meat is ever given hormones or antibiotics. You’ve never had chicken this good before!
The fact that a properly raised and processed chicken costs this much has forced me to reflect on just how much meat my family eats. Decades of artificially lowered meat prices in America have caused consumption to reach unhealthy and unsustainable levels—and the kosher community has not been exempt. I would bet that if families calculated how much they spend annually on meat, and instead used that amount to purchase Grow and Behold products, they would be more satisfied (by the higher meat quality) and far healthier (from lower overall consumption).
It’s not an easy step to take, especially since cultural expectations for lavish Shabbat and holiday meals push people to excess. It’s not even a step I’m fully prepared to take just now. But it’s important to start thinking about what and how much we consume. Without adopting sustainable practices in our homes, we can’t expect the meat industry to follow suit.
Here are all the details about Boston delivery:
Chicken will be delivered frozen. If there is enough interest, we will make regular deliveries to the Boston area. Please let us know – info@growandbehold.com if you’d be interested in ordering fresh or frozen chicken throughout the fall! There is no minimum order. Order only the cuts and quantities you want! Orders over $75 will receive 10% off. Enter the coupon code ROSH10. A small delivery fee of $7 will be added to your order to cover the cost of getting the chicken to you.
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Brookline’s new butcher: Grape Leaves
Well, “Grape Leaves – Gourmet Glatt” to be complete. The Naggars took inspiration from all the submissions and came up with a name they felt best fit their store’s offerings – Grape Leaves being related to wine, meat (dolmades), and cheese (accompaniment to wine).
Read all the details and see some photos over at Brookline’s newest source for online news, Brookline Patch.
Thank you to all the participants and voters. We will be in touch with all participants about prizes.
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VOTE: Choose 5 names for Brookline’s new butcher
Our editorial team narrowed down the many submissions to several dozen with at least arguable marketing potential. (Of those who submitted more than six names, we included from only the first six.) Choose up to five names that you prefer.
Morris and Joe Naggar, butcher proprietors, will consider the top-voted names for their new shop.
(Also see our March 11 and March 12 posts about the new butcher.)
POLL EXPIRES TUESDAY, JULY 20 – Vote now!
[poll id="2"]
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Rami’s 20th Anniversary Party
Haim over at Rami’s just contacted us with the news:
I wanted to let you know that on Sunday, June 6, we will be hosting our official 20-year anniversary party. We have taken over the back parking lot and will be having music and outdoor seating!
Also throughout the week (until June 7), we will be offering falafel sandwiches for only $5.99, including a medium soda!
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