As I wrote a couple posts ago about the choices we make and the supply chain I realized that I wouldn't really be able to complete my point. I could talk about the importance of removing oneself from the supply chain, but I couldn't really talk about how to do it without being entirely too verbose for a single post. So here is my followup. This is where politics and Betty Home Maker, or Benjamin Home Maker merge in my mind.
First I just have to say that it's not practical to cut one's self off from our society or economy entirely. It just can't be done in a way that most people can achieve. Instead one can work bit by bit, piece by piece to minimize your dependency on the systems of the world we live in.
Being that this is a food blog and given that I said food is the part of our lives where this is most important I feel I must start there. I believe that our dependency on the supply chain for food is more important than any other aspect of our lives because food is the one thing we get from the supply chain that is not ever an option. We don't always need medical care, we can survive with a backpack's worth of clothing, we don't need cable, or internet, or gaming consoles. They are all either luxuries, or only necessary at certain times of year or periodically. Those needs can be anticipated and planned around. So while the supply chain's control over those things is significant it's not like food. A lack of food will kill, either slowly or in some cases quickly. It will prevent brain development in children, it will cause disability in adults. It makes us ravenous, and angry. Hunger destroys reason, and stunts the development of children, including vital brain development. It is for these reasons that I believe that food is the most important dependency we have on the supply chain, and the one which we must apply the most focus to breaking.
As I said above we must go about breaking that dependency a piece at a time. A person cannot go from eating out almost every day to making all of their food from scratch. Instead you can look at how you go about eating now and pick up one new food related hobby, or learn one new recipe that you never knew before. The best thing about this process is that it lends itself to a social structure. You can use sites like http://www.dabble.co to connect and find affordable educational opportunities. You can cook with friends on a regular basis, or just bum around the internet looking for trouble to get into in your kitchen and it can all seem terribly entertaining, but over time it develops into something more substantial.
I will throw out a couple very simple things you can do to start off. Learn to make krauts. My local food coop uses the term Kim Chee, but Kraut is a bit more accurate. You can easily make a home made condiment at home from raw vegetables by shredding them, salting them, spicing them and then pressing them into a large recently cleaned glass container to ferment. The process is incredibly simple and there are several wonderful resources out there to learn more (here is a good example). Add in almost any vegetable you can think of and replace the seasonings with whatever you like and you're in the fermented relish business. My house recently went vegetarian and lunch is often cheese sandwiches with copious kraut thrown in for flavor, live enzymes and easy to access vegetable nutrients.
So with that small hobby that can allow for great creative expression via food you can allow yourself to stop buying most relishes, as you can make kraut style relishes easily. You can cut out a decent amount of meat consumption even if you don't go entirely vegetarian, and you've just begun to crack the door on realizing how much you can do for yourself.
You can replace complex cleaners with vinegar, water and a dollar store spray bottle in the kitchen.
You can look for pasta sauces that are sold in mason jars (the safeway generics often are, just as an FYI) and re-use the jars instead of buying your own or using Tupperware.
The options go on and on. One little thing at a time. The best part is most of these techniques are beneficial to you. They save you money and give you a little bit more control over your own life and fulfillment as you go.
Everything I've listed above are things I do in day to day life, and I certainly do other things to try and keep a level of independence from the corporate supply chain.
I read financial news on a fairly regular basis because I'm a strange breed of geek. One thing I've seen consistently is that pay is starting to creep up again, but consumer spending is not. The people at the top of the system are starting to take notice and they are worried that people aren't spending even though they are starting to make a little bit more money again. Well for one thing the "more money" that is being made is crumbs at best. The other thing that not enough people are talking about is that as a generation we have been profoundly impacted by this recession. My grandparents survived the Great Depression and that experience informed every aspect of their lives and the way they chose to live it. They were industrious and knew how to do for themselves in ways that our parents' generation did not. Now though we are at another cross roads where we have to learn to take care of ourselves, and we may well have learned similar lessons.
When you purchase everything pre made for you the money creeps to the companies that provide that service. When things crash no one has the skills necessary to adjust, tighten the belt and start doing for themselves again. It's critical we re-learn that lesson, and along the way we just might start to extract some of those resources from the top of our system again, simply by not feeding the money we have back into it.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Kim Chee . . . or is it Kraut?
So, I was visiting a friend and told her about the Kim Chee that I learned to make at the Edible Alchemy Kim Chee class taught by the ever inspiring Andrea. She wanted me to send her directions, and I figured that it would be more helpful to write it out on the blog so that any of my friends who are not part of the EA community can get to it as well. For the record I cannot possibly put together as solid a description as what Andrea does in her playshop. If you see a Kim Chee playshop go up on Dabble or the Edible Alchemy site TAKE IT! This post might get you started, but it's just not the same.
Notes about the term "Kim Chee": So a more accurate term would be Kraut, but that isn't quite right either. Kraut implies something specifically German, and the flavorings described will be kind of all over the place. Traditional Kim Chee is made with fish sauce, and sake. This process is much more like Saurkraut, only with more asian spices . . . or Indian spices . . . well ok so really whatever the hell you want to put in.
Equipment for "Kim Chee"
A large glass container. This can be a wide mouth ball jar, or similarly large mouth glass jar, but if I'm making a truly large batch I prefer something more in the gallon size. I use a large ball jar when I'm making german saurkraut because we don't go through it as quickly, but if I'm doing a more central Asian flavored kraut I pull out the big honkin glass jug I bought at Pier One for fermenting vegetables.
A "plate" or other flat surface that can fit inside the mouth of the fermenting jar referenced above. This is important for weighting down everything. For my large glass fermenting jug I use a medium sized ramekin for this purpose most of the time. It's just large enough to put my weight into.
A weight. This will be put on top of your flat "plate" to keep your vegetation under the liquid of the fermentation mixture. For me this is usually a bottle or jar that is smaller than the mouth of my fermentation jug. If I'm doign my big jug it's a mason jar filled with water, if I'm fermenting in a mason jar it's usually a 5 oz hot sauce jar filled with water.
A BIG bowl. I can't emphasize this enough. No matter how big you think your bowl is you probably need a bigger one unless you're just doing a ball jar size batch. You need a lot of room to mix, but the vegetables will pack down into a much smaller space than you mixed them in.
A "smasher". This can be a big spoon, or the handle of a whisk. It needs to be broad enough to really be able to smash down your vegetation, and sturdy enough to handle a lot of force. Wooden tools work well here.
Ingredients for Kim Chee
Vegetables, especially cabbage and it's decendants. So the vegetation that can go into fermentations can vary a lot. You want something hearty enough to handle the fermentation without completely breaking down, but as everything is going ot be raw you have a fair bit of leeway on this one. I always use at least some straight up cabbage because it's incredibly cheap, good for you, and develops a lot of excellent flavor as it ferments. I also almost always include carrots. Beyond that I have used garlic ramps, onions, zucchini, kale, kolrabi greens, collard greens, garlic, beet greens, turnips, mustard greens, and a few other things that I don't remember at the moment. I know other people who have used broccoli, cauliflower, beets, nappa cabbage, every other hearty green you can think of etc. etc. etc. You can also add apple, and other hearty fruits that give it a slightly sweet kick and change the makeup of the fermntation food quite a bit. I have to say I am a particular fan of using apple and garam masala for fermentation.
Seasoning. So here things get completely wacky. You can use basically whatever you want. Just remember to use A LOT OF IT. What I have discovered is that the fermentation process subdues the flavors of the spices you put into your kim chee quite a bit. If you taste your mixture of vegetables, salt and spices and it tastes about right you're not done adding spices because it will just taste like lacto ferment pickle when you're done and that's about it. I would say the core spices to use here are hot pepper flake (kim chee traditional), mustard seed (saurkraut traditional) garlic, and maybe dill if you want a really old fashioned pickle taste. Beyond that the sky is the limit. I really like tumeric in my fermentation, and I'm planning on picking up some fresh tumeric for my next batch. Ginger is absolutely amazing. I did Recaito in my last batch, and when it was fresh it smelled and tasted a lot like salsa. Unfortunately when it was done it tasted just kind of like lacto ferment. Which was nice, but not as exciting as I'd hoped for. So if you go the cilantro route, go completely fresh and use a whole bunch. You can't really overdo it. If anyone makes some of this and is really blown away by their spice combination please post in the comments, because I'm always looking for new inspiration for my ferments.
Salt. So this is the magick ingredient. Salt does two things, it creates an environment that is very pleasant for the wild lacto bacteria that live on the skin of the vegetables we're going to use and an environment that is very inhospitable to the bacteria we don't want to develop. For a big bowl of vegetables that will fill 3+ large mason jars you want at least 3-4 Tbsp of salt, but really there's no magic amount of salt. You just want the veg mix to taste incredibly salty, and for there to be enough salt to cause the vegetables to seep out their moisture. That moisture should be all the pickling and fermentation liquid you need.
The Process:
So first you shred your vegetables. I use a mandolin because it makes things go faster. You can also just chop them roughly, or dice them into a fine relish. This is entirely a matter of personal taste. The one thing to remember here is the finer you chop it the easier it's going to be to squeeze all the liquid out. If you want a really REALLY chunky ferment, like bordering on hunks of pickles kind of ferment you might need to add some water, and that brings some extra concerns to play, but I'll talk on that a little later.
Next you take your veg and put it into your huge bowl and add your salt and spices. Again, remember go heavy on the spices. While I've had some people point out that you can't take spices out once you put them in this is going to be a pickle. It's a condiment to begin with. If it's super hard core when it's finished, that just means you use it a bit more sparingly. If it isn't flavorful when it's done then you're kind of bonked. Once the spices and salt are added mix everything up. The best tool for this is your hands. You can impecably clean them, or you can wear gloves. For me this depends on if I have a lot of spices in the mix like curry or straight up tumeric that will stain my hands. If I do I use gloves, if not I go bare.
This step should cause the veg to become very moist as the salt begins to sap the moisture out of the vegetable matter. You can make a point of squeezing your veg to help things along here. If your veg is being very resilient to giving up it's water start to smash it in the bowl with your smasher, and if it still seems dry you probably need more salt. Just keep adding salt until things start to moisten up.
Next you want to pack your mixture into your freshly cleaned glass fermentation jug. Put a layer down and use your smashing device to really pack it down. Then do another layer and smash, repeat until all your veg is packed in. This process might take a while, but it's worth it.
Next set your plate or other large flat surface down on the top of your veg and put the weight on top of it. Push down, a LOT. The goal here is the squeeze your liquid to the top of your vegetation. You will need to also push any stray vegetation under the liquid that comes up during this process. Vegetation that is exposed to the air, is vegetation that can develop off bacteria. You want everything under your liquid. Once you have pushed most of your liquid to the surface, and everyting is well covered put a towel on top of your mixture and leave it somewhere to ferment. The towel will keep fruit flies, and dust and other unplesant things out of your kraut, while still allowing air in, which is necessary for the fermentation to happen.
After a couple days the fermentation should start. Things will begin to smell a little funky, which is perfectly ok. Funk is part of the process. If you look down into your veg you should see bubbles start to develop within the first few days. When this starts happening you will want to occasionally push down on your weight to get the bubbles to come to the surface. Once every couple of days will do the trick. After about a week you should start tasting your kraut. When it tastes the way you want it to, move it to mason jars and put in the fridge. Once you chill it the fermentation will slow down and you will be able to "capture" the flavor more or less where you want it.
A note on sterilization: So this is a wild fermentation, so despite what a lot of guides say I don't worry about fermenting things. I wash all of my vegetables, and I always do a very fresh clean on my fermentation jug, but I don't go through a detailed sterilization process, because the vegetables aren't sterile and you leave them raw . . . so it's just not a sterile environemnt. The whole point of kraut is to use wild bacteria and use the salt content to discriminate between the good and bad bacteria. That said I make sure everything goes through a wash right before I use it.
A note on metal tools. You really REALLY don't want metal to be in contact with your ferment while it's active because the fermentation produces acid and it will extract metal into the vegetables and taint the mixture. So I avoid using mason jar lids for the flat surface that I put my weight on, because there is metal. However, several guides online tell you to mix your vegetables in a non metal bowl. I don't have any non metal bowls large enough to do kraut in, so I mix mine in stainless steel and I've never had any problems. There is no acid until the bacteria has had a couple days to do it's work, so I can't think of a single sound scientific reason why doing your initial mixing in metal would be a problem.
A final note on MOLD!!!!!!!! Mold terrifies a lot of people who do kraut. Do not worry about it. For one thing you probably don't have mold on your mixture, especially if it's been fermenting for a while. The liquid gets acidic because of the wild lacto bacteria doing their work, and members of kindom fungi really don't like acidic environements. What you will probably develop on top of your kraut is a while foamy stiff mixture which can seem a bit like mold, but is really just part of the bacterial process. A lot of guides say to scrape this off. I won't lie, I've mixed it in before to absolutely 0 detrimental effect. If I were doing a very long ferment, and I got a lot of it I would scrape it off. Andrea who taught me how to make kraut said at one point she had a batch where the top inch or so got "moldy" and discolored and she just discarded the top inch of vegetables and the rest of the batch was absolutely amazing. I completely and totally believe this to be true. This is a live WILD fermentation. Don't expect completely controlled conditions.
Oh right one more note on health benefits. This stuff is absolutely amazing for your gut. We need good bacteria in our digestive system. I make a point of eating even more kraut then usual when I have an antibiotic forced on me . . . it happens, I hate it. The kraut helps get things going again. I like going the kraut route more than yogurt or even pro biotic pills because consumer fermented produces all have very limited strains of bacteria, and only go so far in terms of repopulating our digestive ecosystem, and make no mistake it's a complex ecosystem. I like having some wild ferment mixed in there to round out the population. I certainly still use pro biotics and yogurt, especially after an antibiotic cycle. It makes a huge huge difference.
Uses for this stuff. The sky is honestly the limit. I love it on cheese sandwiches, as a topping on curry, in soups. A lunch favorite around my house is to take two pieces of bread, and put shredded cheese on them, pop them in the toaster oven until they are very melty, and then take them out, add kraut and put them together into a sandwich. The result is a perfect krauty grilled cheese. The nice thing about adding the kraut at the end is you get all the best flavors of the nice melty cooked cheese, but since the kraut isn't sitting in the toaster oven, or in the sandwich on the grittle it isn't going to get super duper hot, and the raw enzymes from the vegetables and developed during the fermentation don't completely break down. I like to get as many of those in my diet as possible.
Notes about the term "Kim Chee": So a more accurate term would be Kraut, but that isn't quite right either. Kraut implies something specifically German, and the flavorings described will be kind of all over the place. Traditional Kim Chee is made with fish sauce, and sake. This process is much more like Saurkraut, only with more asian spices . . . or Indian spices . . . well ok so really whatever the hell you want to put in.
Equipment for "Kim Chee"
A large glass container. This can be a wide mouth ball jar, or similarly large mouth glass jar, but if I'm making a truly large batch I prefer something more in the gallon size. I use a large ball jar when I'm making german saurkraut because we don't go through it as quickly, but if I'm doing a more central Asian flavored kraut I pull out the big honkin glass jug I bought at Pier One for fermenting vegetables.
A "plate" or other flat surface that can fit inside the mouth of the fermenting jar referenced above. This is important for weighting down everything. For my large glass fermenting jug I use a medium sized ramekin for this purpose most of the time. It's just large enough to put my weight into.
A weight. This will be put on top of your flat "plate" to keep your vegetation under the liquid of the fermentation mixture. For me this is usually a bottle or jar that is smaller than the mouth of my fermentation jug. If I'm doign my big jug it's a mason jar filled with water, if I'm fermenting in a mason jar it's usually a 5 oz hot sauce jar filled with water.
A BIG bowl. I can't emphasize this enough. No matter how big you think your bowl is you probably need a bigger one unless you're just doing a ball jar size batch. You need a lot of room to mix, but the vegetables will pack down into a much smaller space than you mixed them in.
A "smasher". This can be a big spoon, or the handle of a whisk. It needs to be broad enough to really be able to smash down your vegetation, and sturdy enough to handle a lot of force. Wooden tools work well here.
Ingredients for Kim Chee
Vegetables, especially cabbage and it's decendants. So the vegetation that can go into fermentations can vary a lot. You want something hearty enough to handle the fermentation without completely breaking down, but as everything is going ot be raw you have a fair bit of leeway on this one. I always use at least some straight up cabbage because it's incredibly cheap, good for you, and develops a lot of excellent flavor as it ferments. I also almost always include carrots. Beyond that I have used garlic ramps, onions, zucchini, kale, kolrabi greens, collard greens, garlic, beet greens, turnips, mustard greens, and a few other things that I don't remember at the moment. I know other people who have used broccoli, cauliflower, beets, nappa cabbage, every other hearty green you can think of etc. etc. etc. You can also add apple, and other hearty fruits that give it a slightly sweet kick and change the makeup of the fermntation food quite a bit. I have to say I am a particular fan of using apple and garam masala for fermentation.
Seasoning. So here things get completely wacky. You can use basically whatever you want. Just remember to use A LOT OF IT. What I have discovered is that the fermentation process subdues the flavors of the spices you put into your kim chee quite a bit. If you taste your mixture of vegetables, salt and spices and it tastes about right you're not done adding spices because it will just taste like lacto ferment pickle when you're done and that's about it. I would say the core spices to use here are hot pepper flake (kim chee traditional), mustard seed (saurkraut traditional) garlic, and maybe dill if you want a really old fashioned pickle taste. Beyond that the sky is the limit. I really like tumeric in my fermentation, and I'm planning on picking up some fresh tumeric for my next batch. Ginger is absolutely amazing. I did Recaito in my last batch, and when it was fresh it smelled and tasted a lot like salsa. Unfortunately when it was done it tasted just kind of like lacto ferment. Which was nice, but not as exciting as I'd hoped for. So if you go the cilantro route, go completely fresh and use a whole bunch. You can't really overdo it. If anyone makes some of this and is really blown away by their spice combination please post in the comments, because I'm always looking for new inspiration for my ferments.
Salt. So this is the magick ingredient. Salt does two things, it creates an environment that is very pleasant for the wild lacto bacteria that live on the skin of the vegetables we're going to use and an environment that is very inhospitable to the bacteria we don't want to develop. For a big bowl of vegetables that will fill 3+ large mason jars you want at least 3-4 Tbsp of salt, but really there's no magic amount of salt. You just want the veg mix to taste incredibly salty, and for there to be enough salt to cause the vegetables to seep out their moisture. That moisture should be all the pickling and fermentation liquid you need.
The Process:
So first you shred your vegetables. I use a mandolin because it makes things go faster. You can also just chop them roughly, or dice them into a fine relish. This is entirely a matter of personal taste. The one thing to remember here is the finer you chop it the easier it's going to be to squeeze all the liquid out. If you want a really REALLY chunky ferment, like bordering on hunks of pickles kind of ferment you might need to add some water, and that brings some extra concerns to play, but I'll talk on that a little later.
Next you take your veg and put it into your huge bowl and add your salt and spices. Again, remember go heavy on the spices. While I've had some people point out that you can't take spices out once you put them in this is going to be a pickle. It's a condiment to begin with. If it's super hard core when it's finished, that just means you use it a bit more sparingly. If it isn't flavorful when it's done then you're kind of bonked. Once the spices and salt are added mix everything up. The best tool for this is your hands. You can impecably clean them, or you can wear gloves. For me this depends on if I have a lot of spices in the mix like curry or straight up tumeric that will stain my hands. If I do I use gloves, if not I go bare.
This step should cause the veg to become very moist as the salt begins to sap the moisture out of the vegetable matter. You can make a point of squeezing your veg to help things along here. If your veg is being very resilient to giving up it's water start to smash it in the bowl with your smasher, and if it still seems dry you probably need more salt. Just keep adding salt until things start to moisten up.
Next you want to pack your mixture into your freshly cleaned glass fermentation jug. Put a layer down and use your smashing device to really pack it down. Then do another layer and smash, repeat until all your veg is packed in. This process might take a while, but it's worth it.
Next set your plate or other large flat surface down on the top of your veg and put the weight on top of it. Push down, a LOT. The goal here is the squeeze your liquid to the top of your vegetation. You will need to also push any stray vegetation under the liquid that comes up during this process. Vegetation that is exposed to the air, is vegetation that can develop off bacteria. You want everything under your liquid. Once you have pushed most of your liquid to the surface, and everyting is well covered put a towel on top of your mixture and leave it somewhere to ferment. The towel will keep fruit flies, and dust and other unplesant things out of your kraut, while still allowing air in, which is necessary for the fermentation to happen.
After a couple days the fermentation should start. Things will begin to smell a little funky, which is perfectly ok. Funk is part of the process. If you look down into your veg you should see bubbles start to develop within the first few days. When this starts happening you will want to occasionally push down on your weight to get the bubbles to come to the surface. Once every couple of days will do the trick. After about a week you should start tasting your kraut. When it tastes the way you want it to, move it to mason jars and put in the fridge. Once you chill it the fermentation will slow down and you will be able to "capture" the flavor more or less where you want it.
A note on sterilization: So this is a wild fermentation, so despite what a lot of guides say I don't worry about fermenting things. I wash all of my vegetables, and I always do a very fresh clean on my fermentation jug, but I don't go through a detailed sterilization process, because the vegetables aren't sterile and you leave them raw . . . so it's just not a sterile environemnt. The whole point of kraut is to use wild bacteria and use the salt content to discriminate between the good and bad bacteria. That said I make sure everything goes through a wash right before I use it.
A note on metal tools. You really REALLY don't want metal to be in contact with your ferment while it's active because the fermentation produces acid and it will extract metal into the vegetables and taint the mixture. So I avoid using mason jar lids for the flat surface that I put my weight on, because there is metal. However, several guides online tell you to mix your vegetables in a non metal bowl. I don't have any non metal bowls large enough to do kraut in, so I mix mine in stainless steel and I've never had any problems. There is no acid until the bacteria has had a couple days to do it's work, so I can't think of a single sound scientific reason why doing your initial mixing in metal would be a problem.
A final note on MOLD!!!!!!!! Mold terrifies a lot of people who do kraut. Do not worry about it. For one thing you probably don't have mold on your mixture, especially if it's been fermenting for a while. The liquid gets acidic because of the wild lacto bacteria doing their work, and members of kindom fungi really don't like acidic environements. What you will probably develop on top of your kraut is a while foamy stiff mixture which can seem a bit like mold, but is really just part of the bacterial process. A lot of guides say to scrape this off. I won't lie, I've mixed it in before to absolutely 0 detrimental effect. If I were doing a very long ferment, and I got a lot of it I would scrape it off. Andrea who taught me how to make kraut said at one point she had a batch where the top inch or so got "moldy" and discolored and she just discarded the top inch of vegetables and the rest of the batch was absolutely amazing. I completely and totally believe this to be true. This is a live WILD fermentation. Don't expect completely controlled conditions.
Oh right one more note on health benefits. This stuff is absolutely amazing for your gut. We need good bacteria in our digestive system. I make a point of eating even more kraut then usual when I have an antibiotic forced on me . . . it happens, I hate it. The kraut helps get things going again. I like going the kraut route more than yogurt or even pro biotic pills because consumer fermented produces all have very limited strains of bacteria, and only go so far in terms of repopulating our digestive ecosystem, and make no mistake it's a complex ecosystem. I like having some wild ferment mixed in there to round out the population. I certainly still use pro biotics and yogurt, especially after an antibiotic cycle. It makes a huge huge difference.
Uses for this stuff. The sky is honestly the limit. I love it on cheese sandwiches, as a topping on curry, in soups. A lunch favorite around my house is to take two pieces of bread, and put shredded cheese on them, pop them in the toaster oven until they are very melty, and then take them out, add kraut and put them together into a sandwich. The result is a perfect krauty grilled cheese. The nice thing about adding the kraut at the end is you get all the best flavors of the nice melty cooked cheese, but since the kraut isn't sitting in the toaster oven, or in the sandwich on the grittle it isn't going to get super duper hot, and the raw enzymes from the vegetables and developed during the fermentation don't completely break down. I like to get as many of those in my diet as possible.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
A Smoked Vegan Feast Playshop
I am running a playshop on smoking in an urban environment with everyday equipment. I have included a link at the end of this post to the handout I am giving my students. I'm hoping to do a writeup on how the class goes and possibly take some pictures as I go. We'll see. In general I just wanted to make this available to everyone who might want to take a look. My cooking and "recipe" construction tend to be a bit ad hoc. These playshops have been forcing me to think about how I cook in a somewhat more structured manner. It's a challenge, but I've enjoyed it. Try the stuff in here out and let me know what you think.
Warning: The handout doesn't talk about controlling heat on your stove to keep the chips from going completely over the top. I am going to be demoing in class so that's why it's not in the handout. If you're experimenting with this, like I originally did I recommend going for very low heat at first. It won't be enough, but it's better to slowly creep the heat up until you have a nice slow steady smoke than smoke out your whole house.
The Handouthttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1Up2xOrk8A4lcdtkVk0d7c45EAcNNf8oxN_1YreWGoMI/edit
Warning: The handout doesn't talk about controlling heat on your stove to keep the chips from going completely over the top. I am going to be demoing in class so that's why it's not in the handout. If you're experimenting with this, like I originally did I recommend going for very low heat at first. It won't be enough, but it's better to slowly creep the heat up until you have a nice slow steady smoke than smoke out your whole house.
The Handouthttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1Up2xOrk8A4lcdtkVk0d7c45EAcNNf8oxN_1YreWGoMI/edit
Friday, July 20, 2012
Running a CSA Pickup, My COOP Experience in General, and Power in Food
A couple weeks ago I "ran" the CSA pickup at Edible Alchemy because the ever vigilant Andrea and Dietrich were off catering an amazing weekend long yoga retreat. I put ran in quotation marks because Edible Alchemy is truly a cooperative and my role was far less fearless leader than I imagine it would be in almost any other situation. Once the experience was finished I collapsed for the remainder of the day. It was a fulfilling, awesome, exhausting experience. It was also a very thought provoking experience.
My work with Edible Alchemy is my first real experience with cooperatives. I mean I was a member of Bloomingfoods when I lived in B-town, but let's be honest that's barely a coop anymore. It's a retail food establishment who's governance structures are legally coop, but it's run like a Whole Foods. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's not really a coop in the deepest sense of the term.
So my experience with Edible Alchemy, especially my brief experience in the closest thing to a leadership role that I think I'll see in a true small cooperative made me realize a few things. The first is that we can all make the individual choice to take back the power that's been "taken from us" in our society. I put taken from us in quotes because I don't actually think it has been taken from us. A path to affluence has been laid out for us. It involves high school, then college, lots of extra curricular activities, marriage, credit cards, a house, cable TV, a new car, and several other trappings of affluence. That path is a lie, and it always has been. The thing is, we choose to believe it. No one forces us down that path at gunpoint, and I've known a few awesome people who chose to leave that path, or at least take a tangentially related path. In almost all cases they have lived the better life for it.
When you walk into ECO, the physical coop that hosts Edible Alchemy you'll see . . . well basically no signs of affluence as defined by the above path. There's an upcycle station filled with packaging that was used to bring food to sale previously at more traditional grocery establishments, and a communal kitchen with a host of wondrous mis matched hand me down kitchen tools. There's a roof top garden that is bountiful, but rather messy around the edges . . . and in the middle of the beds as well. To be honest that's how I like it. There are a few weeds, and a ton of excellent food, and patches of different plants all over. It's chaotic, and random, but bountiful. The way work gets done at EA is that everyone chips in, in different dynamic sort of ways. Everything is run through a volunteer sign up sheet, and the food is based on a direct relationship with farmers, bakers, coffee roasters etc. These relationships are often built on conversations and handshakes, though once things scale up a formal ordering process is eventually needed, but really it all stays pretty informal by any other business standard.
Similarly when you go into the part of ECO where people live there isn't cable, there's no AC, there aren't big stereo systems and lots of conveniences. The people who live in ECO very obviously do for themselves. This all seems very simple, but it all requires something that is vitally necessary to our society. A sense of both connection and independence. My experience growing up in America is that we have lost much of our connection to each other, and to our ability to take care of ourselves. We pride ourselves on our independence, and use it as the justification for not having things like socialized health care, or stronger socialized education, yet at the same time we are not independent. We no longer know how to cook as a society, we don't know how to build our own furniture, or make our own clothes, or brew our own drinks. We instead depend on the supply chain. So we are involuntarily connected to a system we have no real control over, while being disconnected from each other. It is the ultimate irony of our age, and our society.
My time working at ECO has shown me more than anything else that we don't have to exist in this state. There is no law requiring us to invest in this supply chain as profoundly as we do. The greatest hope I see for breaking out of this cycle is the internet. It gives us the opportunity to find people of like minds, to reconnect, and to access a bounty of information that can be used to learn and become truly independent. There are people all over the country doing this already. There are coops in every city, and people cooking, sewing, brewing, building, and making for themselves. While my personal passion is cooking this is an issue that goes well beyond food. Take a look at http://blog.makezine.com/ for how it manifests in technology.
While the reconnecting with our ability to take care of ourselves, and separation from the supply chain is important in all aspects of life I honestly feel it is more important with food than any other. Food is essential to keep us alive. When agrobusiness decides they want to push roundUP ready crops to make a buck if we are dependent on the supply chain we will eat them, whether they were put in place because they are healthy or because they are profitable. When the corn industry leverages it's weight and gets high fructose corn syrup in everything, if we cannot cook for ourselves we will eat the corn syrup because we have to eat. The examples go on and on and on. Grain fed beef, pink slime, hormonally unbalanced portions of soy even in our meat, sugar as a flavor supplement to make low fat food palatable even when sugar adds more pounds than fat. etc. etc. etc.
A lot of people are very mad about all the things I listed above, and they talk about our food system as something which needs to be fixed, and it does need to be fixed. A lot of people also talk about how we need to make food for themselves so we can take control of our nutrition, and we do. At the heart of the problem though isn't our dependency on the food system, it's our dependency on the supply chain as a whole. Having the option to trade off convenience for money occasionally is a wonderful luxury and one of the best things about modern life. I don't know anyone, no matter how "do it yourself" who doesn't occasionally order a pizza. However, when it's your only option then too much power is given to the people who run the system. It's power we freely give to them, and it is important to remember that they are not inherently bad people, but the people who run our systems are PEOPLE. My mother used to say that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's not her saying, but it was one of her favorite quotes. We give power to the systems which abuse us by making us dependent on them. Many have been ground down so far that they don't have to resources to remove themselves from the system, but there are many more who could choose to do for themselves but do not. It's important to understand what that choice represents, because I believe that when one understands what that choice represents it becomes much easier to make a different choice.
My work with Edible Alchemy is my first real experience with cooperatives. I mean I was a member of Bloomingfoods when I lived in B-town, but let's be honest that's barely a coop anymore. It's a retail food establishment who's governance structures are legally coop, but it's run like a Whole Foods. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's not really a coop in the deepest sense of the term.
So my experience with Edible Alchemy, especially my brief experience in the closest thing to a leadership role that I think I'll see in a true small cooperative made me realize a few things. The first is that we can all make the individual choice to take back the power that's been "taken from us" in our society. I put taken from us in quotes because I don't actually think it has been taken from us. A path to affluence has been laid out for us. It involves high school, then college, lots of extra curricular activities, marriage, credit cards, a house, cable TV, a new car, and several other trappings of affluence. That path is a lie, and it always has been. The thing is, we choose to believe it. No one forces us down that path at gunpoint, and I've known a few awesome people who chose to leave that path, or at least take a tangentially related path. In almost all cases they have lived the better life for it.
When you walk into ECO, the physical coop that hosts Edible Alchemy you'll see . . . well basically no signs of affluence as defined by the above path. There's an upcycle station filled with packaging that was used to bring food to sale previously at more traditional grocery establishments, and a communal kitchen with a host of wondrous mis matched hand me down kitchen tools. There's a roof top garden that is bountiful, but rather messy around the edges . . . and in the middle of the beds as well. To be honest that's how I like it. There are a few weeds, and a ton of excellent food, and patches of different plants all over. It's chaotic, and random, but bountiful. The way work gets done at EA is that everyone chips in, in different dynamic sort of ways. Everything is run through a volunteer sign up sheet, and the food is based on a direct relationship with farmers, bakers, coffee roasters etc. These relationships are often built on conversations and handshakes, though once things scale up a formal ordering process is eventually needed, but really it all stays pretty informal by any other business standard.
Similarly when you go into the part of ECO where people live there isn't cable, there's no AC, there aren't big stereo systems and lots of conveniences. The people who live in ECO very obviously do for themselves. This all seems very simple, but it all requires something that is vitally necessary to our society. A sense of both connection and independence. My experience growing up in America is that we have lost much of our connection to each other, and to our ability to take care of ourselves. We pride ourselves on our independence, and use it as the justification for not having things like socialized health care, or stronger socialized education, yet at the same time we are not independent. We no longer know how to cook as a society, we don't know how to build our own furniture, or make our own clothes, or brew our own drinks. We instead depend on the supply chain. So we are involuntarily connected to a system we have no real control over, while being disconnected from each other. It is the ultimate irony of our age, and our society.
My time working at ECO has shown me more than anything else that we don't have to exist in this state. There is no law requiring us to invest in this supply chain as profoundly as we do. The greatest hope I see for breaking out of this cycle is the internet. It gives us the opportunity to find people of like minds, to reconnect, and to access a bounty of information that can be used to learn and become truly independent. There are people all over the country doing this already. There are coops in every city, and people cooking, sewing, brewing, building, and making for themselves. While my personal passion is cooking this is an issue that goes well beyond food. Take a look at http://blog.makezine.com/ for how it manifests in technology.
While the reconnecting with our ability to take care of ourselves, and separation from the supply chain is important in all aspects of life I honestly feel it is more important with food than any other. Food is essential to keep us alive. When agrobusiness decides they want to push roundUP ready crops to make a buck if we are dependent on the supply chain we will eat them, whether they were put in place because they are healthy or because they are profitable. When the corn industry leverages it's weight and gets high fructose corn syrup in everything, if we cannot cook for ourselves we will eat the corn syrup because we have to eat. The examples go on and on and on. Grain fed beef, pink slime, hormonally unbalanced portions of soy even in our meat, sugar as a flavor supplement to make low fat food palatable even when sugar adds more pounds than fat. etc. etc. etc.
A lot of people are very mad about all the things I listed above, and they talk about our food system as something which needs to be fixed, and it does need to be fixed. A lot of people also talk about how we need to make food for themselves so we can take control of our nutrition, and we do. At the heart of the problem though isn't our dependency on the food system, it's our dependency on the supply chain as a whole. Having the option to trade off convenience for money occasionally is a wonderful luxury and one of the best things about modern life. I don't know anyone, no matter how "do it yourself" who doesn't occasionally order a pizza. However, when it's your only option then too much power is given to the people who run the system. It's power we freely give to them, and it is important to remember that they are not inherently bad people, but the people who run our systems are PEOPLE. My mother used to say that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's not her saying, but it was one of her favorite quotes. We give power to the systems which abuse us by making us dependent on them. Many have been ground down so far that they don't have to resources to remove themselves from the system, but there are many more who could choose to do for themselves but do not. It's important to understand what that choice represents, because I believe that when one understands what that choice represents it becomes much easier to make a different choice.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
A Couple Awesome Drink Recipes
So I wanted to make a quick jump back to infusions. I haven't forgotten them, I've just been scratching a different itch of late. I thought I should go back and post the recipes that my partner developed from my infusions for the Edible Chicago Article that was published profiling my infusion work. Here they are. For the record they are a special kind of delicious.
Berries and Bubbles
1 ½ ounces homemade strawberry liqueur
½ ounce Disaronno (or other high-quality amaretto)
½ ounce Cointreau
2 ½ ounces champagne (or other sparkling white wine)
Pour homemade strawberry liqueur, Disaronno, and Cointreau together in a champagne flute. Pour champagne into the flute so that the total volume of the drink doubles. Drop a fresh berry or two into the drink immediately before serving.
Basil Martini
1 ounce ice-cold gin
1 ounce dry vermouth
1 ounce homemade basil liqueur
Garnish: lemon peel
Keep the bottle of gin in the freezer. Once the gin is ice-cold, mix ingredients in a shaker and pour into a martini glass over a strip of lemon peel. Drink slowly and let the lemon mix with the basil and transform the flavor as you savor your drink.
Berries and Bubbles
1 ½ ounces homemade strawberry liqueur
½ ounce Disaronno (or other high-quality amaretto)
½ ounce Cointreau
2 ½ ounces champagne (or other sparkling white wine)
Pour homemade strawberry liqueur, Disaronno, and Cointreau together in a champagne flute. Pour champagne into the flute so that the total volume of the drink doubles. Drop a fresh berry or two into the drink immediately before serving.
Basil Martini
1 ounce ice-cold gin
1 ounce dry vermouth
1 ounce homemade basil liqueur
Garnish: lemon peel
Keep the bottle of gin in the freezer. Once the gin is ice-cold, mix ingredients in a shaker and pour into a martini glass over a strip of lemon peel. Drink slowly and let the lemon mix with the basil and transform the flavor as you savor your drink.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Second To Last Meat Meal
In the mean time I have the final bits of an all organic meat share that we had to go through and the other night I made one of our last meat meals. It was another smoked piece, and I'm taking these final meat preparation opportunities to try some cooking techniques I haven't tackled before.
I wanted to do a writeup on the second to last meat meal I prepared because it goes with my recent smoking interests, and produced some really excellent results.
I made smoked dark meat chicken. It was a mixture of drumsticks and thighs. I put together an impromptu rub of poblano chili powder, paprika, black pepper, salt, cumin, turmeric, paprika, garlic powder, and a little bit of brown sugar. After smothering the chicken in the rub, and leaving it in the fridge to dry a bit and form a nice pellicle on the surface of the meat, I loaded all the meat up in my roasting pan. It's important that you have it resting on a roasting rack, so the meat is elevated above the bottom of the roasting pan. If you don't have a good roasting rack for this purpose I recommend loading up the roasting pan with vegetables that roast and smoke well, and laying your chicken on top of the vegetables. If you roasting pan is large enough to hold a cooling rack you can also use an all metal cooling rack for this purpose.
I left a small area near the corner of the roasting pan empty to hold the wood chip container. Then I set the oven to just about 200 degrees (which is kind of a guesstimate with my oven knob). While the oven was preheating I covered the top of my roasting pan in aluminum foil and crimped it around the sides very securely. I left the corner of the pan with space for the smoking chips uncrimped. Then I started the chips going on the top of my stove. I spoke about this process a bit in a previous blog post. I use a small powdered sugar dispenser to hold my smoking chips. Really all you need is a small stainless steel container that you can heat directly on your stove. This works best with a gas stove. Once the chips were smoking heartily I quickly stuck them inside the roasting pan with a pair of tongs and crimped the remaining corner of the aluminum foil shut. Then I slid the roasting pan into the oven. Then I set a timer for 15 minutes. When the timer went off I pulled the roasting pan out of the oven, pulled the chip container out and re-lit it. If you don't want to be getting up every 15 minutes for the duration of the smoking you can get away with refreshing the chips every 20 minutes. I've found at 15 minutes the roasting pan is generally still fairly smokey, but the chips have gone out. At 20 minutes the pan generally only has a few whisps of smoke when I pull back the foil to retrieve the chip container.
Now at this point I'd like to talk a little bit about the 200 degree mark that I set the oven for. Most smoking recipes I've seen have targeted the smoker temperature at 250 degrees. I aimed for 200 because this approach to smoking doesn't provide the constant high concentration smoke exposure that a commercial smoker provides, so I want it to be in the oven/smoker a little longer than if I were using a professional smoking rig to soak up as much delicious smoke as possible.
The other question I want to cover is "Why go to all this trouble?" I'm not going to lie, this is a definite slow food approach to cooking. It's not difficult, but it is a lot of hands on contact with the food. For many people that will be a huge turnoff. The big reason for me is that I love the flavor of slow smoked meats, and I live in an apartment in Uptown Chicago. I don't live in a bad neighborhood, but I don't live in a great neighborhood and plenty of things have been stolen from the decks of our apartment building. For people in similar urban situations a nice expensive smoker may just not be an option. You can do this entire smoking technique in your urban apartment/condo kitchen with no special equipment and get amazing results.
Then there is the ultimate advantage, that quite honestly would have me doing this even if I lived in the burbs and had an acre yard, the juices rendered from the meat. When I completed the roughly 3 hours of smoking/roasting there was an amazing deep dark liquid that had rendered out of the chicken. It was incredibly rich, and had enough gelatin to set at room temperature. This stuff is pure culinary gold. If you use a traditional smoker then this liquid is generally lost. It depends on your setup admittedly, but the outdoor smoking setups I have seen do not save this rare and magnificent resource. It is a full batch of incomparable chicken chili waiting to be made. Or it can just be poured into the bbq sauce for the chicken and cooked down into near perfection. I was blessed with a similar liquid in smaller quantity when I smoked ribs using the same technique. Slow roasting meats at home, with or without smoke will generally render a liquid like this. This is one of those cases where the food you make at home will ALWAYS render a superior result to what is accessible in a commercial kitchen. Slow roasting meat this way is just not feasible in a commercial kitchen. You can't oven roast enough meat to do to order cooking. There may be a few Michelin starred restaurants that go to this length, but you don't want to know what a meal costs at these establishments. The trick here is low temperature roasting, and a high walled roasting pan to protect the liquid from the direct IR heat being given off by the sides off the oven. While using this type of "stock" requires an imaginative approach to cooking it's worth it. You won't find any recipes that call for this ingredient, because it's so rare, valuable and can't just be purchased at a store. It's highly concentrated and doesn't flavor quite like regular meat stock as a result, so roast or smoke up some meat and experiment. Trust me it will make all the hard work seem more than worth the time.
Now that those mild asides are . . . well set aside we can get to the final step, the bbq sauce. In my experience everyone has different tastes in bbq sauce. I like mine tangy, terribly terribly overwhelmingly tangy. In my opinion if any flavors really win out over vinegar in a bbq sauce then you're doing it wrong. There should be just a touch of brown sugar to give some roundness, but not enough to make the sauce distinctly sweet at all. I can't really tell you exactly what goes into my sauce, but I start with a base of tomato paste, some of the juice drippings I discussed at length in the last paragraph, a bunch of vinegar (generally unfiltered apple cider vinegar), chili powder, cumin, turmeric, salt, pepper, some oregano, a touch of brown sugar, a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce, and a few splashes of home made hot sauce. Then I start cooking the sauce down, and I taste as I go. The flavor will depend on the freshness of my herbs, my mood and the quality of the various ingredients. I grab various bottles and futz with the sauce till it tastes right. There really isn't much more of a recipe than that. Common things that I add while touching up are molasses if it's sweet enough, but I want more of that deep roundness brought by the brown sugar, smoked salt if it could be smokier but I don't want to thin it down with more liquid, more vinegar, paprika, sometimes soy sauce, and very occasionally if I want a really round sauce I'll add some cocoa powder. I don't generally add any normal salt until the rest of the flavor is just right, because some of the ingredients I might add have salt in them. So the final adjustment I make is to the sodium.
Finally I take the chicken, smother it in sauce and consume it in the undignified way that is required of such food. I try to redeem myself with copious napkins . . . but I have a beard. It's pretty hopeless.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Smoked Chili Improv Style
So I have something of a pet peeve when it comes to vegetarian and vegan chili. That pet peeve is the lack of umami in most of the veg chilis that I have tried. Umami being that rich round "meaty" flavor most people think of as being a big part of browned beef, and mushrooms and soy sauce. A lot of times when I try vegan chilis they taste like beans and vaguely of cooked tomato. The deep rich beef flavors I associate with all day cooked chili con carne is really what I love about chili, and I am of the opinion that there has to be a way to achieve that level of flavor without meat. So I decided to try and tackle that problem head on.
I looked up a few vegetarian chili recipes to see what they included to take care of the "beef" aspect. Many of them were obviously of the tomato and beans variety that I had become accustomed to and I passed those by. Several included portabello mushrooms, which worked for me because I had an unused package of crimini in the fridge (close enough for my purposes). So after thinking on it a bit I decided I was going to try and attack the umami problem from multiple fronts. Here are the tactics I chose to use.
1 Build a Fond: This just isn't done enough by people, especially in vegetarian cooking. It is the French secret to great flavor, but most people think of it as requiring meat. It does not require meat at all. What you need for a vegetarian fond is several vegetables that brown well, and that exude enough moisture and sugars to coat the bottom of a pan with the joyous products of their Maillard reactions. Onions and mushrooms are both excellent choices for this. So the first step of this process had to be a good solid fond. So I began by browning my mushrooms in small batches on the bottom of my pot with a bit of olive oil each time, never crowding the mushrooms. The fond builds up over time, and you have to switch the mushrooms out quickly so that there is always something pulling the heat out of the pan so the fond does not burn. As the mushrooms browned I moved them to a bowl. Once they were all browned I threw in my diced onions and garlic with just a touch more oil. Normally I would salt the onions at this point to help with carmelization. Unfortunately this was all destined to be the base of a batch of dried beans that had been soaking overnight, and beans that are salted before they're done cooking means crunchy unpleasant beans. So no salt. It makes the carmelization a bit more tedious, but the heat still does the trick. If you see the fond starting to lean more towards black that you think is ideal throw a little liquid in to deglaze the pan. Let the glaze coat the onions and keep cooking them down. They will caramelize over time this way, it might just take a little longer than you think is ideal. Really get a nice even brown all over and through your onions. This is a huge source of flavor and umami and you don't want to waste it.
2 De glaze the Fond with Something Worth While: So some of the recipes I looked at had water in them. Water is an utterly useless ingredient in a dish you want to have maximum robust flavor. There is always something better. In my case I used a deep nutty beer and vegetable stock. I collect scraps from my vegetables and boil them into stock once a week or so and it makes an amazing rich stock. I learned this at a class on vegetarian cooking at Edible Alchemy. If you're in the Chicago area I highly recommend checking out their classes. It will change the way you look at food, and the are incredibly affordable. Once you have the fond thoroughly deglazed then you can add your soaked beans to the mix. For my batch of chili I deglazed with a bottle of Goose Island Nut Brown ale, added the soaked beans and then topped the mixture off with a container of my home made vegetable stock. I kept the mushrooms aside at this point, because if they cooked the entire time with the beans they would be completely decimated by the time the chili was done.
3 A Few Less Than Traditional Ingredients: Ok, so I know I know, it's chili. It should have tomato and beans, and peppers, and meat. Here's the thing though, the meat is gone, and replacing it with a product like seitan or soy crumbles isn't going to bring back the gelatin, or the thick umami of the meat. It just isn't. The beer and carefully developed fond will help on that front, but it's not going to do the whole job. My secret ingredients are soy sauce and smoke. The smoke is fairly traditional, but the soy sauce really isn't. Soy sauce was used extensively in Asia in vegetarian dishes because it provides depth to dishes that could seem flat because of their lack of meat. In this case I add soy sauce slowly and taste regularly to make sure that it never actually tastes "like soy". This is a case where I want the soy sauce to enhance the other flavors. It doesn't get to be a central part of the performance, because that would just taste odd. The other thing that really brought the flavor to life is fire roasted tomatoes and peppers. This is a rare case where I use canned tomatoes. Fire roasting tomatoes at home is a huge ordeal, so I use canned. If you can find jarred USE THEM! The BPA issues with canned foods have me almost entirely off them, but I haven't found a decent alternative for fire roasted tomatoes. Fire roasting the peppers for this dish is a different matter though. I turn my gas stove on high and just pop the pepper down, rotating occasionally until the whole thing is black. Then I throw it under a bowl when there is no more skin to blister and let it steam while the chili works. This can be done whenever you have a free moment early in the cooking process.
Finally that brings us to the smoke. Smoking is an absolutely amazing way to infuse flavor in a dish, and most people think it takes a lot of equipment. I thought that as well until I worked at Big Jones. The chef would take a big roasting pan and fill it with the item to be smoked, then take a small stainless steel container and fill it with wood chips. Then he would put that pan on the stove until the wood started smoking/burst into flame. Then with tongs sneak it into the roasting pan under a tightly crimped cover of aluminum foil. This can happen at the same time that the whole thing lives in a 200 degree oven and slowly roasts , or if the heat isn't required can happen out on the counter top. In the case of this chili, I decided to use my dutch oven, and a steamer. Since I don't have restaurant quality 9 pans I used a stainless steel powdered sugar shaker. It worked beautifully. I did the whole thing on the counter. I would leave the lid to the dutch oven slightly askew so the chips had a little bit of oxygen to keep smoking. To be honest they went out very quickly, but the smoke stayed in the pot for quite a while. I recommend taking the container out and re-lighting it every 25 minutes or so. It might seem like a hassle, but it's not much worse than basting a turkey. I smoked super firm organic sprouted tofu. I would have liked it to dry out a bit more than it did, so next time I'm thinking I will probably keep the whole thing in a 200 degree oven just to slightly roast the tofu, even though it doesn't need to be cooked for safety reasons. I didn't really time this process. I started the first smoking, then did the fond process and got the beans going. Then I re-lit the chips and went about my day periodically re-lighting the chips. It slightly darkened the tofu, and added an amazing smoky flavor to the chili. Then, when the beans were done I added everything to the pot, including the mushrooms and the fire roasted pepper. I also added half a bag of frozen corn for some additional texture and starch. That along with a few tablespoons of MASECA to thicken finished the whole thing off.
This might seem like a lot of work, and I'm not going to lie it was an all day cooking endeavor. The people I know who love to smoke though are generally more than happy to be close to their food, and tinker with it and touch it. In my opinion this was the best batch of vegetarian chili I've ever made. It was rich and delightful. The spices were as usual a bit improv, and started with whole dried poblano instead of messing around with chili powder. Just once I really advise you to make a batch of this for your friends. You won't regret it.
A Note on Dutch Ovens and Smoking: I used my exposed cast iron dutch oven for this, and it worked beautifully. The smoke also imbued into the prime. Not a terrible thing, but something to consider. If you use your dutch oven to say occasionally make caramel corn this might not be a desirable effect. You can use a stock pot, or a Le Creuset style dutch oven as well and you won't have to deal with a smoky prime in your pot.
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