My Food Geek

Shortly before I moved away from San Diego I discovered this Vietnamese bakery that sold some of the best sandwiches. Crunchy baguettes filled with just the right amount of lettuce, barbecued pork, pickled vegetables, and cilantro; these little sandwiches were not only tasty they were very cheap - about THREE BUCKS! We had these sandwiches several times before we made the trek back east.

It wasn’t until recently that I found out the name of these sandwiches: Bánh mì . A trip over to wikipedia sums up what they are:

Bánh mì is a Vietnamese baguette made with wheat and rice flour or a type of sandwich traditionally made with this type of baguette. The sandwich is made up of thinly sliced pickled carrots, daikon, onions, cilantro, and meat or tofu. Popular bánh mì fillings include pork, paté, chicken, and head cheese. The contrasting flavors and textures of the sandwich — as well as its relatively low cost — make it a popular dish.

I made a cursory search of my immediate surroundings and haven’t been able to find a Vietnamese shop that offers these sandwiches in the way I remember them. So I did what any self-respecting ex-chef would do, I recreated them how I remembered.

For these sandwiches to be successful, they needed to include the following:

• Crunchy, salty, tangy pickled vegetables
• Fresh greens, cilantro, cucumbers, and jalapeño peppers
• A savory pork, chicken, or egg filling
• A light, crispy, yet not too crusty baguette

I searched around the web for a pickled vegetable recipe and finally settled on the recipe over at Battle of the Banh Mi. I wasn’t able to find daikon at the normal mega-mart and didn’t make a trip to the Asian stores so I just used carrots. I think the flavors would have turned out a little bit better with the mix of carrots and daikon but the thought of not having any pickles on my Banh MI was out of the question. I should warn you that their recipe makes quite a large amount of pickles, which isn’t always a bad thing, is it?

The vegetables are a pretty standard sandwich mix. I decided on red leaf lettuce since it looked good. A plain old cucumber, bunch of cilantro, and jalapeño pepper rounded out the mix. I’m sure once the summer comes around the selections of vegetables in the north east will drastically improve. For now, I settled on the best looking ones I could find at whole foods.

For my first run of sandwiches I decided on using a nicely marbled pork shoulder. The pork shoulder was thinly sliced, marinated in a soy and ginger sauce, then quickly pan-fried. I then thinly sliced the pork into fat, match stick sized pieces. I had the pork both warm and cold and both were winners. If I knew it was going to come out so well I would have made much more!

The last obstacle to overcome was getting a baguette that was somewhere between crunchy like a French baguette but also soft enough that it made for a decent sandwich. Right away I decided against buying a baguette since I’m almost never happy with that is available at the supermarkets. Rarely do I find a baguette that is worth the $3 price point it commands. I scoured the internet and pieced together a recipe. It took a few tries, but this is the final recipe that I’ve been using.

Vietnamese Baguettes

1 cup warm water (between 85-110F)
2 teaspoons yeast
2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 cups AP Flour
1/2 cup Rice Flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

Place the yeast, 1 cup lukewarm water, and sugar in the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook. Mix together the all-purpose flour, rice flour and salt in a separate bowl.

Starting the mixer at the lowest speed gradually add the dry ingredients and beat until well combined, about 3 minutes. Add the butter to the dough.

Increase the speed to medium and continue beating the dough until it is smooth and comes away from the sides of the mixing bowl easily. Put the dough on a lightly floured surface, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rise (double in volume), 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Punch down the dough and separate into 4 portions. Shape each into an 8-inch-long baguette. (The dough may be sticky and hard to handle at this point. Do not overwork it, just gently shape it.) Cover loosely with plastic wrap and allow to rise a second time, about 45 minutes.

Place baking stone on a rack set in the middle of the oven and preheat the oven to 415 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a sharp knife blade or a clean razor blade, make three diagonal slits along the top of each baguette.

Bake either directly on the stone or on a sheet pan for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

There’s nothing special about how the sandwich is put together. If you’ve ever made a sandwich before this should be pretty simple. A thin layer of Japanese mayo ties the sandwich together while the thinly sliced jalapeños and sriracha hot sauce added the much needed spicy that this sandwich deserved.

These came out so well (and I made so many pickles) that I was able to experiment a little bit. What isn’t pictured is a version of this sandwich with a thinly rolled omelet. I’m trying to get the courage up to try a spam version of this sandwich. I’m sure it isn’t an original idea, but the thought has invaded my mind recently.

A monthly event dedicated to food photography.

CLICK is theme-based. Each month, entries will be invited based on a culinary ingredient or concept. This month’s theme is noodles. I tried my best to come up with something original yet photogenic as well. While I think the pasta came out much better than expected, my photos came out just average. The dish was good enough to talk bout so here’s the story.

A few weeks ago at the local farmer’s market I picked up a butternut squash, just because. I really had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I knew it would keep for at least a month while I decided its fate. While I was thinking about what I could do for this month’s CLICK I came up with the idea to make a twist on butternut squash ravioli.

The raviolis are usually filled with cooked squash puree that is mixed with a light cheese like ricotta and some select spices. They’re quickly cooked in some salted boiling water and then served with a light sage butter sauce. This is usually a good dish but I didn’t want to go through all the troubles of making the raviolis and a filling to go along with them. I decided to deconstruct the dish into the parts I liked best and make a few changes. First I started off with some freshly made, extra thick noodles.

Fresh pasta is something that everyone should know how to make. There’s only a few ingredients to knead together, a little bit of rolling (by hand or by machine), and then you cut the pasta into any shape you want. I skipped using the pasta maker for these noodles and just rolled them out on the counter top with a rolling pin. I left these noodles quite thick and cut them in wide strips to keep with the ravioli inspired dish. The recipe is a quick one and very easy to remember:

Fresh Pasta

3 cups flour
4 eggs
pinch of salt

If you choose to make the pasta by hand, pile the flour on the counter top, make a well in the center, and crack the eggs into the well. Slowly incorporate the eggs into the flour until you can bring the dough together for kneading. You may need a little more flour, you may not use all the flour, it all depends on the day usually. Once the dough is smooth, let it rest for about 20 minutes and then roll out and shape as desired.

If you choose to make the pasta by machine, throw all the ingredients in a food processor and process on high. It should turn to a course meal. You may need to add either an additional egg or some olive oil to the food processor while it is running to get the dough to come together. Dump the pasta meal on the counter and knead for a minute or so. Let dough rest for about 20 minutes and then roll out and shape as desired.

I use both of these methods regularly depending on my mood and they both are fairly easy and always reliable. There’s only a few things that can go wrong and they’re easily fixed. If your dough is too dry, add more liquid: water, oil, eggs — they all work. If your dough is too wet, add a little more flour. If your dough is too lumpy, knead more. That’s it.

While my pasta was resting I worked on turning the filling of the ravioli into a sauce. I started working on the squash first. It was peeled, diced, tossed with olive oil, and baked in the oven until it was just browning on top. I set it aside to cool and contemplated a sauce. I knew I wanted something buttery but I also wanted to have something a bit creamy. Butter was the first ingredient, nearly a whole stick, cooked slowly until browned and fragrant. I finely sliced a large shallot and softened it in the browned butter sauce until nearly transparent. For the coup de grace, I finished the sauce off with a good shot of heavy cream which helped to emulsify the sauce somewhat. I added a bit of pasta water to the sauce to bring it all together and tossed the squash in to heat it through. The pasta made it into the sauce shortly after and the sauce coated everything nicely. I sprinkled the whole thing with some freshly dried sage and plated it up.

How did it come out? The eater loved it. As usual I was unhappy with some aspect of the dish. I thought the noodles were a little too thick and the dish wasn’t as pretty as I hoped. While the sauce did have a good deal of butter and cream in it, it didn’t come off as being too heavy or oily. The squash matched well with the sauce and the wide noodles were a very good vehicle for the rich, creamy sauce. Did it capture the spirit of butternut squash ravioli? I’d say so.

My parent’s birthdays were Sunday and Tuesday respectively. I thought it would be nice to celebrate both days together so I invited them over to my place for a nice dinner. I already planned on serving them my Daring Baker’s dessert, the Bostini Cream Pie, but I didn’t have a main dish to serve. After talking with my mom about the plans, she mentioned she’d like to have seafood. This seemed like a quite wide open answer but I decided I could take yet another challenge and come up with something.

I knew I wanted to try and make something my parents weren’t expecting so I decided to take some inspirations for the halibut dish I made a while back. I was pretty sure that my parents, being from New England, would expect their seafood deep-fried or broiled since that’s the norm around these parts. Going against the grain, I decided to go with pan searing, as I was sure they weren’t expecting it.

I made my way over to the local Whole Foods to see what sort of interesting seafood they had fresh and available. I eventually settled on a nice loin of cod and some mahogany clams. While I was there, I picked up a small bag of multi-colored, fingerling potatoes: red, gold, white, and blue, to round out the dish. I also managed to get some fresh, local green beans from a nearby farm stand that would find their way into this dish.

The fish was seasoned with a mix of pink alea sea salt, sichuan pepper, and black sesame seeds that I coarsely ground up. It was then seared in coconut oil until a nice crust formed and was finished in the oven. The fish was cooked until just done - medium well. I par-boiled the potatoes, drained them, and finished them in a coconut milk and butter sauce that was seasoned with sichuan pepper as well. The green beans were quickly stir fried in sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and drizzled with soy sauce. The clams were steamed in rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, and star anise. They were then removed from the steaming liquid and topped with a coconut milk reduction. The whole dish took on a Pan-Asian theme before I even realized it.

I’m not sure my parents have tasted my cuisine since completing culinary school and moving away four years ago so I don’t think they knew what to expect. My mom confessed she didn’t usually like green beans but loved my preparation of them (and ate them all). My dad pretty much likes everything and won’t pull any punches when it comes to complaints. His plate was empty and there were no complaints so I’m pretty confident it was a success. It was the first time that either of my parents have tried mahogany clams before (my personal favorite); my mom especially enjoyed them.

We finished the meal off with Bostini Cream Pies which quickly disappeared even though my mom claimed to be full.

Sunday I had guests over for an impromptu dinner. I was mulling over what I should serve, trying to come up with something a little more fancy than pasta or burgers, when the eater suggested we have polenta. While this is a rather vague and wide-open suggestion, I had just the thing in mind with her suggestion: baked polenta with broccoli rabe and sausage with a side of confited tomatoes.

As usual in the foodgeek household, when I want something different and interesting, I have to make a trip to the supermarket to procure all the goods. Sometimes this is a bad thing. You see, when my creative juices start flowing I tend to start adding extra dishes, coupled with the fact that I’m often hungry when I go shopping for these impromptu dinner parties, I buy way too much. Yes, I did it again. So to go along with the polenta and the tomatoes, I also picked up four pounds of mahogany clams, a side of pollack, and half a pound of prosciutto.

While I was waiting in line for a price on the clams I concocted this idea to wrap pollack, a lean white fish, in prosciutto. It worked with scallops, it worked with shrimp, it worked this time, too. I portioned the pollack into two-bite sized pieces and wrapped each one up in the wonderful Italian pork product. They were lined up like soldiers in a small casserole dish, drizzled with olive oil, and seasoned with black pepper. I figured on about 15 minutes in a 375F oven would do the trick and I was not disappointed.

Mahogany clams always seem to be a good bargain. They seem to be less prized because when they are cooked they almost completely open and do not look as pretty. This one little drawback isn’t enough to scare me away from these delicate, orange fleshed quahogs. These are deep, cold water clams and, like most things that live in sand, are sometimes a little bit gritty. I washed the clams, then again, then left them in a big pot of water, then washed them again, and then again. While you would think that this would produced a sand-free clam, there were still a few bits of sand and grit here and there. I figured my guests would understand the few bits of sand, I really did try my best to provide a sand-free experience.

The clams got a quick steam in white wine, garlic, and ginger. When they were all opened up, I removed the clams, reduced the liquid, and fortified it was some butter. This sauce was poured over the awaiting clams for everyone to enjoy.

I just so happened to have a pint of grape tomatoes leftover from my trip to the Reading Farmers market on Tuesday. These were some of the sweetest grape tomatoes I’ve had in a while. They were the perfect match for a quick tomato confit. I know this isn’t exactly an authentic confit, but the name has stuck. I slow cook the tomatoes with a few cloves of garlic in olive oil in a small pan. When the tomatoes were softed and warm, I drizzled a little balsamic vinegar over the top and put them aside to cool. By the time we ate, they were room temperature and fully infused with flavor. They were a good topping for the polenta.

The main attraction was actually quite simple to prepare. While I was bathing the clams several times over I whipped up a quick batch of polenta. Polenta is nothing more than boiled corn meal. It is a really easy dish to prepare and I rarely use a recipe. This time I boiled up 3 cups of milk with half a stick of butter. When the milk came to a boil and the butter was fully melted, I started adding in cornmeal. I just keep adding it in until the mixture becomes a thick, yet smooth, mixture. I then cook this over medium low heat while continuously stirring. This can be quite a workout but it is worth it in the end. I then turned the whole mess into a 1/4 sheet pan, covered it with some shredded Pecorino Romano cheese and baked it in the oven until it was good and firm with a nice crispy crust on top.

I topped the polenta off with some pan fried, sweet Italian, fennel flavored sausages. I didn’t mind too much that it was creating a mess in my frying pan, I had plans for that wonderful brown fond! When the sausages were perfectly cooked, I added some extra olive oil and quickly sauteed the broccoli rabe. All of the glorious sausage juices and fond in the pan were quickly absorbed by the greens tying the whole dish together.

Everything got served family-style and didn’t last all that long. While I wish I could cook like this every day, I fear that I would either go broke or fall hopelessly out of shape.

Long ago (four years, to be exact) when I lived in New England, I never paid much attention to the bounty of seafood that was available here. I never noticed all the haddock, pollack, and cod to eat nor did I ever think twice about the wonderful clams, scallops, and not to mention, lobster. Coming back from California, all of this seafood was amazing to see. My cravings for lobster finally got the best of me and so starts my lobster adventures…

This may be hard for everyone to believe but, I lived in Massachusetts for 27 years and have only eaten a whole lobster once in my life. Sure I’ve had my share of lobster rolls, lobster pot pie, and lobster salad, but I’ve only had boiled lobster only once! Someone contact the food police! What is even more scary, I’ve never actually cooked a whole lobster. I couldn’t believe that when I realized I spent more than two years in culinary school and managed to never boil a whole lobster.

I had to right the ship (lobster boat?). I had to conquer my apprehension of cooking a whole, alive and kicking, lobster. So it was off to the supermarket to find a couple of lobsters for the Eater and I. It turns out that buying lobster in New England is quite easy, they’re sold EVERYWHERE. You really can’t go to a supermarket and not find lobster in the summertime. Around this time of year they run sales on them, too! I didn’t think it was still possible, but lobster for $6/lb is still a reality in lobster country.

If you’ve never cooked a lobster before, it can be quite scary. In the past, you’d just grab a lively, kicking lobster and throw it in a pot of boiling water. Now I’d like to think that I’m not a cold-blooded killer so I tried to be respectful cooking my first lobsters. I remembered seeing several methods for quickly dispatching the lobsters before cooking them; I even found directions over at The Secret Life of Lobsters.

I know the killing methods of lobsters isn’t exactly something you discuss with your dinner guests, but it is something that every good chef should know how to do. You basically chill them in the freezer for about 20 minutes (keeping them away from the ice cream) and then pull them out and stab them. This doesn’t sound all that glorious, but it is supposed to put them down quickly. For my money, I’d rather get stabbed than boiled alive, so I’m ok with this. Again, be respectful and say some nice words to the lobster before he goes.

Lobster tends to cook quickly and there isn’t much to it. My one and one-half pounders boiled up in about 12 minutes. I served them with the usual lobster side dishes: boiled potatoes and corn with a side of drawn butter. The butter is a must, no skimping here, use the REAL stuff and you won’t be disappointed. The eater was a pro at getting to all of the delicious lobster meat and I followed her queue and had no problems at all. I’d love to describe how to efficiently get to the meat, but alas it all happened so quick and I didn’t take accurate notes…maybe next time!