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the life and times of J T Frey
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.
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.
I love Crosse and Blackwell seafood cocktail sauce. For the longest time every recipe I used for that kind of sauce has required lots of lemon juice. Yet when I read the label for C&B, lemon juice was not explicitly mentioned (unless it qualifies as "spices"). This recipe uses no lemon juice and tastes very much like ye olde C&B variety.
Tomatoes and garlic submerged in olive oil in the compay of fresh basil and other herbs, cooked very slowly and at a low temperature: that's confit. The tomatoes have a sweet, unctious, jammy consistency to them. The garlic is ever-so-slightly toasted, sweet, and spreads like butter. And the oil — the oil is the stuff every Italian restaurant aspires to give you on that plate of olive oil that accompanies the bread.