Cho(m)p Haus

Ingredients

• 2 pork tenderloin (1.5-2 lbs total) silverskin removed, in 2” cubes
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1-2 chiles, chosen on preference from the options below, diced
  • Mild: use two Serrano peppers, seeds removed
  • Medium: Leave the seeds in your Serranos
  • Hot: One Serrano and one Habanero
  • Note: You can sub jalapeños for the Serranos if you like a very fruity flavor from peppers. I love jalapeños, but there’s a lot of variability in heat level from pepper to pepper, so they’re a bit of a roll of the dice
• 12 oz cane-sugar cola (real sugar is important)
• ¼ cup orange juice
• Veggie or canola oil

Spice Rub

Mix the following in a large workbowl

• 2 tsp kosher salt
• ½ tsp ground chipotle
• ½ tsp garlic powder
• ½ tsp ground cumin
• ½ tsp ground cayenne pepper
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp ground smoked paprika (optional)

Directions

Dutch Oven Method

My preferred method.

Preheat your oven to 300º F.

Mix the spice rub together in a large workbowl, then add the meat and toss to evenly cover.

Set a dutch oven on the stove over medium-high heat, pour in enough oil to cover the bottom. Once hot, add the pork to sear on all sides. You may need to work in batches, depending on the size of your dutch oven.

Remove the seared meat, and set aside on paper towel. Add a little more oil if necessary, then add the onion and peppers to the dutch oven. Sauté until the peppers are soft, and the onion is just turning translucent. Pour in orange juice and deglaze. Then, add the meat back into the dutch oven, doing your best to arrange in a single layer. Pour the cola over the meat, and bring to a light simmer.

Once it’s just bubbling, cover with a tight-fitting lid, and put the dutch oven in your hot oven. Let it cook for 90 minutes to two hours. The liquid will cook down a little, and the meat should be tender enough when it’s done that it will start to come apart when squeezed with a pair of tongs. Remove the dutch oven to the stovetop, and remove the meat to a bowl or casserole, and let the meat cool while you reduce the braising liquid.

Leave the braising liquid in the dutch oven, and cook with the lid off at a simmer until the liquid is reduced by a third to half.

Once the liquid is reduced, shred the meat using two forks or your hands. Discard bits of connective tissue, gristle, or fat that hasn’t completely melted in the braise.

Spread the shredded pork across a baking dish, doing your best to keep a single layer. Drizzle over several ladles-full of the braising liquid, and toss to coat entirely. Put the baking dish under a broiler for a few minutes until the edges of the meat begin to caramelize, then toss and repeat. Once caramelized a second time, remove.

Serve on rice, or in tortillas with lime and cilantro.

Slow Cooker Method

Mix the spice rub together in a large workbowl, then add the meat and toss to evenly cover.

Sauté the onions and peppers in butter or oil until the peppers are soft, and the onion is just turning translucent. Remove from heat and put the sautéd onions and peppers in the slow cooker. Add the meat, and pour the OJ and cola over. Start your slow cooker and cook for 6-10 hours.

Remove the chunks of meat, which should be fork tender at this point, to a workbowl. Pour the remaining cooking liquid into a saucepan and reduce by half. Move the meat into a baking dish, pour over braising liquid, and broil just as in the dutch oven method.

Why it Works

Pork is a mild meat which doesn’t impose its own flavor, making it a great canvas upon which you can apply flavor. Spice rub, searing, a low-and-slow cook, and a high-sugar sauce all create layers of flavor.

Ingredients

• 4 cups cleaned and halved brussels sprouts
• ⅓ lb. thick-cut bacon
• 1 cup beef broth
• ½ tbsp. balsamic vinegar
• Heavy pinch of kosher salt
• cracked black pepper

Method

Cut your bacon into sections about half an inch long, and fry in a dutch oven over medium heat until the bacon is as crispy as you like. Remove the crispy bacon and set aside to drain.

Add your Brussels sprouts to the remaining rendered fat in the pan, sprinkle in the salt, and toss quickly with a wooden spoon. Let the sprouts sit for a couple minutes, until the leaves start to brown, then toss thoroughly, and let sit again.

After another couple of minutes, deglaze the pan with the broth, and let it cook down. Add the balsamic and pepper to taste. Top with the crisped bacon, and serve.

Oh, you can see a picture of these sitting behind my roast chicken thigh in the Dead-Simple Roast Chicken post.

Why it Works

The bacon and beef broth adds a meatiness that mellows the bitterness of the Brussels sprouts. The browned leaves and the vinegar balance out the fat. In the end, you have a really, really nice dish. It might take a couple times to get the whole thing just right, but you won't mind the first couple cracks.

Ingredients

• 1 3½ - 4 lb. whole chicken
• ~1 tbsp. kosher salt
• ~1 tbsp. freshly-ground black pepper

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 425°F.
2. Line a small roasting pan with aluminum foil, and set the rack in place.
3. Set your chicken on the rack. Be sure to remove the neck, liver, and heart from the cavity, if they’re included[1]. Pat the chicken dry using paper towels.
4. Truss the chicken[2].
5. Set the trussed bird breast-side-up on the roasting pan grate. Sprinkle liberally with the salt. I use a full tablespoon plus a little on a four-pound chicken.
6. Crack on some pepper to taste.
7. Roast at 425° until a probe thermometer placed in the deepest part of the thigh reads 163°F. Then test several other places in the chicken. If all parts register 163° or higher, remove from the oven, and let the bird rest for 20–25 minutes.
8. Carve and serve. Optionally, give it a sprinkle of paprika. Enjoy the crispy skin.
9. Save the bones for your stockpot.

Why it Works

Chicken has gotten a bad wrap. A simple roast chicken with crispy skin is a real pleasure to make and to eat, plus it easily feeds four on the cheap. And, with no effort, you can turn leftovers into soup.

Serve it with sides of your choice. It’s chicken; everything goes with it, but my favorite is balsamic Brussels sprouts with bacon.

Since the twenties, Americans have used the word moxie to describe pluck, energy, determination, or courage. Nerves of steel, courage under fire, ice water in the veins—all those old chestnuts are basically moxie.

The adjective came into vogue following the rise of Moxie the soda, one of America’s oldest beverages but not a well-known elixir outside its northeastern birthplace. One of Moxie’s old slogans is “The drink that made the name famous”—and, unlike many aspects of its loopy history, it’s no bullshit.

Really cool.

Lucky Peach has designated March as Dumpling Month. This post collects several youtube videos on how to make and cook several types of dumpling wraps. Really good resource.

Spontaneous DNA strand breaks being an indicator of health risk.

Now I have a solid reply when my wife says "Drinking that much coffee can't be good for you."

I whipped up a couple balls worth of this dough, when my wife had a craving for pan pizza last week. It's amazing. If you're looking for a good pan pizza recipe, this is the one. My only adjustment would be to decrease the in-oven cook time by a couple minutes (just remove when the cheese looks right to you), and finish on the stovetop. It's really great.

As a bonus, it claims to be foolproof. I think it might be.

Yeild: 8 English muffins

Ingredients

• 1 cup 2% milk, room temp
• 2 tbsp. plus a pinch of white sugar
• ¼ oz (usually 1 packet) active dry yeast
• 1 cup warm (110-120ºF) water
• ¼ cup shortening, melted
• 6 cups bread flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• coarse-ground cornmeal

Tools

• Cookie Sheet
• Large mixing bowl
• Parchment paper or Silpat
• 8 Muffin or egg rings
• 12" cast iron skillet

Method

1. Warm your milk in the microwave up to 185ºF. In my microwave, this was about 90 seconds, but each one is different. Alternatively, you can do this in a small saucepan, but for this little milk I thought that was more trouble than it's worth.

   Add 2 tbsp. of the sugar, and stir until dissolved.

2. Proof the yeast by adding it to the warm water (water needs to be no cooler than 110ºF and no warmer than 120ºF), stirring quickly, and adding a pinch of sugar. This gives the yeast a kick in the pants to wake up and get fermenting. Set aside for 10 min, until the yeast mixture gets nice and frothy.

   At the same time, let your milk mixture cool to lukewarm.

3. Combine half the flour, salt, the milk mixture, yeast mixture, and the melted shortening in the bowl of your stand mixer, and mix until it just comes togehter. Add the remaining flour, and mix again, with the dough hook, until a loose dough forms.

   Continue mixing the dough with the dough hook, to knead, for 2-3 min. Then move the dough ball to a large greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and set aside to rise. Let the dough rise for several hours, until it's slightly more than doubled.

4. Once it's risen, punch the dough down, and form a quick ball. Move the dough to a floured surface, and roll out to ½ inch thick.

5. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper or a Silpat, and lay out your rings. Sprinkle a little cornmeal into each one. This helps keep the dough from sticking to the lining.

6. Using, well, pretty much anything that's the circular and the same diameter or slightly smaller than the rings, cut circles out of the dough, and place them into the rings. Spray a little oil on the top of the dough in the rings, and sprinkle a little more cornmeal on top.

   Cover with a tea towel, and let rise again for 30-50 minutes.

7. Heat your greased cast iron skillet to 380ºF, and carefully move as many muffins in their rings as will fit in the skillet. Cook for 7-10 minutes per side.

   Remove to a cooling rack. Let the muffins cool for a few minutes, then remove from their rings (gently going around the inside of the ring with a knife, if you need to).

Store in a ziplock bag, and they'll last a week or so.

Why it Works

There isn't much about English muffins that doesn't work. A nice crisp exterior with a soft interior, just the right bit of chew, and that slightly-sour yeastiness makes for a way-better-than-store-bought muffin.

I've done Alton Brown's a couple times, and to me it's just more trouble than it's worth. Even though powdered milk is convenient in that it's shelf stable for ages, it's one more thing I have to buy. The dough is always too sticky, and sticks to the rings (using his tuna can rings, or the rings I linked above), and while short 30 min rise is great, and there are wonderful nooks and crannies, I like the depth of flavor in this recipe much better, thanks to the two rises. And if you go a little long on the rises in my recipe, you'll wind up with the same nooks and crannies.

I like to cook my muffins closer to seven minutes per side, leaving them a little underdone. Once I've split them and toasted them for my morning egg sandwich, they're absolutely perfect.

As an added bonus, you'll have some dough left over after you cut your muffins. If you roll this into a ball, form a loaf, put it into a greased loaf pan and cover for two hours; you'll be able to bake it at 425° for 40 minutes or so, and you'll have a great toasting loaf as well.

There are still very few peer reviewed studies on the effectiveness of MCT oil for weight loss, but there are some, and there are some more that use coconut oil. It would be a stretch to call these conclusions solid, but it appears that MCT oil may contribute to a small amount of fat loss for overweight men. We're talking 4 pounds over 12 weeks. For women results were even less certain. A lot more research needs to be done before it can be billed as a miracle cure. The best distillation of the research that's been thus far can be found here.

I'm still reading the research linked in this thorough analysis of Bulletproof Coffee's various claims, but what I have read makes a lot of sense. Anything that claims to give you a cheat code to bypass the old "eat fewer calories than you burn" method of weight loss is worthy of scrutiny. Bulletproof Coffee reeks of snake oil.

Great rundown of the history of the five mother sauces, as well as how to make each. Thorough and useful.

We'll call this the inaugural post. The goal is to make this a different kind of cooking site. I'm not going to drone on and on with crappy writing and soliloquies full of tangents. Recipes I post will be direct and to the point, and any waxing philosophical I do, I promise to keep short. 

I'll also do links to recipes I've found, to useful gadgets, or interesting articles I've found. They'll all be related, in some way, to things you put in your mouth. Don't be creepy.

I hope you'll enjoy it. Thanks for reading. This is Cho(m)p Haus.