freySite
the life and times of J T Frey
This was a riff on Rick Bayless' "Red Chile Pork Tacos" recipe. I had purchased a whole Boston butt and had lopped-off the 5 lbs of it farthest from the chine bone to make sausage. Doing the whole roast with this method would have yielded way too much meat.
One week I got it in my head that I wanted to make baked pork buns. The delicious pork in the filling, char siu, was a recipe from Joshua Weissman. Sadly, the grocery store aisles had no Chinese five spice that the marinade requires. So I went hunting for a homemade recipe for the powder. This is the scaled-back, simple version I arrived at after viewing several variants that made gigantic amounts of the fragrant blend.
Yields 24 cookies.
Online recipes are truly hit and miss: temperatures, times, and quantities often don't seem to work as expected. When recipes have an accompanying video, though, wherein the cook demonstrates the entire process, it's possible to verify that at least the quantities are accurate (unless the videographer is being purposefully misleading). Case in point this post wherein a cook hellbent on doing some ASMR (God help us) actually shows the steps. Thankfully, it all worked as expected — with a few minor changes on my part.
For about a decade now I've been making barbecue: the real-deal, low-and-slow, smoked over wood sort of stuff. Every pit master needs a few recipes for sauce and sides. Baked beans is a classic.
I love pickles. Sweet, spicy, salty, or sour, I'm a fan of them all. My daughters and wife — not so much. But I have found that my daughters will eat Claussen refrigerated pickles: the brine is more salty and sour, and the flavor is a rounded mélange containing garlic and onion over the usual dill. What follows is my own pickling brine recipe that mimics the Claussen flavor pretty closely.