→ October 4, 2010
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San Diego eats + ESPN linkage.

My hypothetical awards ballots are up, and some of the comments are priceless – mostly whining about bias or calling me an idiot. You can also see my briefer-than-normal scouting reports on the eight playoff teams:

Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers

Atlanta Braves
Cincinnati Reds
Philadelphia Phillies
San Francisco Giants

I hope to resume regular dish blogging now that those playoff previews are done. Thanks for bearing with me.

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We didn’t make it to my old favorite, Cafe 222 (waffle heaven), but did get to The Mission, recommended by readers and by a scout as well. It pushes a hipster vibe but on Sunday morning the place was full of families with young kids, so all the talk about “revolution” seems a little silly. All of the food was fresh with bright colors, and the egg dishes come with two slices of light, airy rosemary bread that I’d probably buy by the loaf if I lived in San Diego. The blueberry-cornmeal pancakes were a disappointment, as they’re not cornmeal pancakes but regular pancakes with some coarsely-ground cornmeal thrown on the griddle – dry – with pancake batter poured over them, resulting in an unpleasant, pebble-like texture that ruined what was otherwise a soft, fluffy pancake. The meats, both bacon and chicken apple sausage, were better, while the rosemary potatoes were hit or miss, with some pieces perfect but others overcooked. I’d like to try them again while ordering differently.

Our other breakfast spot was Brian’s 24 on 6th, offering huge portions of solid-average food (eggs, pancakes, french toast) but nothing spectacular. It had the advantages of being fairly quick and walkable from our hotel, but I’d rate it behind the Mission and Cafe 222.

Ortega’s Mexican Bistro in Hillcrest was the huge dinner find, authentic homestyle Mexican cooking in a more upscale setting. The restaurant is in what looks like a converted two-story house with funky internal architectural features and lots of distressed wood, but really, who cares about that when you have someone in the back making fresh flour tortillas by hand? I might fly to San Diego once a week to grab a bag of those things – the texture and fullness was amazing, and if you told me they used lard in there I’d believe you. The roasted-tomato salsa that came with the chips before the meal was also outstanding, thick but not unwieldy and not in the least watery, and they make a very solid jamaica agua fresca. The sopecitos appetizer was rich, a little too dense for me (that’s a comment on my tastes, though, as “dense” may be authentic for all I know), and didn’t need the sour crema laced over the tops. Their carnitas were superbly done, no hint of dryness with lots of crispy edges, and with the sides of rice and charro beans it was more than either of us could finish. That whole Hillcrest neighborhood looks like the kind of place I’d love to live.

We had one dinner in the Gaslamp district – I got a lot of suggestions from readers, but many weren’t appropriate for dinner with a four-year-old – so we called an audible and went to Trattoria la Bocca, offering well-made if overpriced Italian food. My wife’s mushroom risotto was perfectly cooked, just al dente with a creamy (texture, not flavor) sauce that didn’t overwhelm the rice or mushrooms; I had a sauteed veal dish with artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and zucchini where every element was cooked properly but the dish as a whole had too many competing flavors. For what it’s worth, of those reader recommendations, the most intriguing one was a bar-restaurant called Neighborhood, which will be at the top of my list of places to hit the next time I’m in San Diego by myself.

Right near Petco is a small boutique shop called Cupcake Heaven that sells … well, you know. We tried several kinds over the 48-odd hours we were there, with the chocolate-chocolate and peanut butter ones my favorites; the peanut butter frosting had a texture somewhere between mousse and buttercream, and there were peanuts in the cupcake itself, resulting in something like the lightest peanut butter cookie you’ve ever had. The pumpkin cupcake’s frosting was very gingery, fine for me but lost on my ginger-hating wife. And the cupcakes were still fairly moist the second day.

I only tried one concession stand at Petco, Randy Jones’ BBQ, which was nothing more than standard, boring ballpark Q drowned in a sticky-sweet sauce. I hope there’s something better there for Padre fans.

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→ April 8, 2010
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Pressure-cooker carnitas with blue corn pancakes.

Pressure cookers cook foods faster by utilizing the fact that water boils at a higher temperature when it’s under higher pressure; the typical pressure cooker works at 15 psi, a pressure level at which water boils at 250 degrees. For stews or other long braises, this can reduce cooking times by 75% or more, yet you don’t lose the braise’s power to break down connective tissue or extract gelatin (or its precursors) from bones, and of all my pressure-cooking escapades only beans come out substantially different when cooked under pressure. (It causes beans to pop out of their skins, which is fine if your intent is to mash or puree them.)

Cooking with pressure requires no special skills or other equipment beyond the cooker itself, and unlike your mother’s (or grandmother’s) pressure cooker, today’s models aren’t likely to explode and leave your dinner on the ceiling. The model I use is no longer in production; this Presto 6-quart model seems to be the best starter cooker available, although I can’t tell from the item description if it has two pressure settings or just one.

Somehow, I got the idea the other day to try to make carnitas, which I had often in Phoenix and now miss, via the pressure cooker. Pork carnitas refers to a pork butt (really the shoulder), the same cut you would smoke to make barbecued pulled pork, but braised low and slow in a slightly salty liquid with aromatics and spices, especially cumin. A quick Google search for recipes that might tell me how long to cook the meat turned up this recipe, which didn’t require much modification. After thirty minutes under pressure, the chunks of pork held their shape but could pull apart easily with a fork, and the oven finish brought out the flavors you’d ordinarily get by browning the meat before braising or roasting it. You could take the meat, wrap it in a tortilla with some rice, beans, and salsa, and make a burrito; you could serve it with guacamole and rice as a main course; or you could do what I did: Toss a bunch of it on some blue corn pancakes as a sort of Mexican/New Mexican take on chicken and waffles. A recipe for those pancakes follows.

Pressure-cooker carnitas

One 3-4 lb pork butt (shoulder), trimmed of exterior fat and cut into large (two-inch-ish) chunks
1.5 Tbsp salt
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 Tbsp ancho chili powder
1/8-1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1 bay leaf
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, seeds and stem removed, chopped
3 cloves garlic, bruised

1. In a large bowl, toss the pork with the salt and seasonings.
2. Add the pork, bay leaf, and aromatics to a pressure cooker with enough water to cover – it took just over a liter for me to cover 3.3 pounds of meat.
3. Close the cooker, turn the valve to its maximum setting, and put over high heat until the cooker begins hissing loudly. Reduce the heat to bring the cooker to a faint hiss and cook for 30 minutes. With about ten minutes to go, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
4. Release the pressure according to the cooker’s manual – usually that means turning the dial down a level at a time – and remove the pork. Transfer it to an oven-safe skillet or rimmed sheet pan and lightly press each piece with a fork to expose more surface area to the oven’s heat. Re-season with more salt, cumin, etc.
5. Roast the pork with a very thin layer of either the braising liquid or hot water for about 15 minutes, until much of the exposed surface has turned brown. Do not let the pork burn or dry out – check it at the ten-minute mark. Serve.

Blue corn pancakes

I find these sweet without sugar because of the corn, but if you want to make these more breakfasty, you could add 1 Tbsp of sugar, agave nectar, or maple syrup to the mix.

2 cups blue corn flour, preferably whole grain (I like Arrowhead Mills, available at Whole Foods)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup AP flour
3/4 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder (more if you want thicker pancakes, but for the pork, I like them thinner)
4 cups milk, 2% to whole
2 sticks (1/2 pound) butter, melted and cooled slightly
4 eggs

1. Mix the flours, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.
2. Whisk the milk, butter, and eggs until well combined. Pour over the dry ingredients and beat just until moistened with no visible lumps. Cook on electric griddle or skillet as you would regular pancakes, on one side until brown at the edges, then flip and cook roughly half as long on the second side. If the pancakes aren’t cooking through, you can thin the batter slightly with a little more milk, or reduce the heat on the griddle.

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→ February 23, 2010
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Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio + whole wheat pancakes.

Ratios liberate you – when you know the ratio and some basic techniques, then you can really start to cook.

That’s the final line of Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, a cookbook that’s also part anti-cookbook in the way it attempts to separate you from your 1/8-tsp-this-and-1/2-cup-that recipes by addressing the underlying relationships between ingredients that make the recipes work. It’s worth buying even if you never get out of the Doughs and Batters section that opens the book, including master formulas for bread, pasta, pie crust, biscuits (his are rolled, but unrolled they are as tender as can be), cookies, pâte à choux, pancakes, muffins, fritters, crepes, and more. I’ve adapted his master pancake recipe to use 100% whole wheat flour* below, but if you do decide to buy the book, I suppose you might want to delve into later sections on stocks, roux, brines, vinaigrettes, hollandaise, and custards. I’m just saying the first section is the part I’m wearing out.

*I love white-flour pancakes, but let’s face it – you feel like crap after eating a whole stack of them. Pancakes have a high glycemic load, and good ones contain a fair amount of fat, so to me, they function more like dessert than breakfast. If I’m making pancakes for the family for breakfast, it needs to be a kind that won’t put us all in a food coma for the rest of the day. It reminds me of a line in the very silly too-good-to-be-true travel memoir Pasquale’s Nose, where a crazy old man has just one sentence to say: “Nobody ever feels good after eating pancakes.”

Whole wheat pancakes

Ruhlman’s recipe is identical to this one save an extra half-ounce of flour, since he’s using white all-purpose flour instead of whole wheat. These freeze and reheat well – cool completely on a rack, freeze in a flat layer (if you stack them in a bag before they freeze, you’ll need a jackhammer to separate them), then reheat in the microwave for about 40 seconds, or reheat for 30 seconds, top with cold syrup, and give it another 10 seconds to heat it through.

Wet ingredients:
8 ounces milk (anything but skim)
2 large eggs
2 ounces (1/2 stick) butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla extract

Dry ingredients

7.5 ounces (by weight) whole wheat flour
2 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

1. Preheat your griddle. It has to be completely hot or the first batch of pancakes won’t brown.
2. Whisk the wet ingredients together in a bowl, making sure the egg is thoroughly broken up.
3. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a second bowl.
4. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir briefly to fully hydrate the flour and eliminate any huge lumps. Small lumps are okay.
5. Lightly grease the griddle and immediately begin pouring the batter on to the griddle once any sizzling (of butter or bacon fat) has stopped.
6. When the bubbling on the top becomes firm and the bottom is nicely browned, flip and cook for roughly half the time it took for the first side to cook.

These pancakes are strong enough to handle anything you’d fold into ordinary pancake batter, but I haven’t found a better partner for the nutty, grainy, slightly cardboardy taste of whole wheat than sweet blueberries.

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