Every year, we wait patiently for the freestone peaches to be perfectly ripe so we can begin making preserves, brandied peaches, and peach pies. Freestone peaches are the best to cook with because the fruit comes easily away from the pit. Cling peaches, the ones with fruit that sticks to the pit, generally [...]]]> Every year, we wait patiently for the freestone peaches to be perfectly ripe so we can begin making preserves, brandied peaches, and peach pies. Freestone peaches are the best to cook with because the fruit comes easily away from the pit. Cling peaches, the ones with fruit that sticks to the pit, generally ripen a couple of weeks earlier than freestones. There are several cultivars of each kind–some sweeter and juicier than others.

This year, warm, rainy weather across the South has accelerated the growing seasons. The mayhaws, which are supposed to be ripe in May, were all harvested by mid-April. And the cling peaches, which we usually get in June, were already ripening in mid-May.

Looks like the freestones season is about to begin! Please leave alerts about where you are finding the best peaches this year in the comments section!

Peach Pie Recipe after the jump!

Texas Peach Pie (from Texas Eats by Robb Walsh)

Some years, the small, but intensely-flavored peaches grown in the orchards of the Hill Country are the best in the state. Other years, big, juicy East Texas peaches are the sweetest ones on the market. It all depends on where the rain falls and when the frost hits. But because of high local demand, Texas peaches aren’t marketed outside of the state. Use the sweetest, ripest peaches you can find,–preferably freestones.

6 cups peeled, pitted, and sliced peaches (about 8 peaches)
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons minute tapioca
3 tablespoons butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons butter, cut in 1/4-inch cubes
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
Pastry for double-crust pie
1 egg white, lightly beaten
Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream, for serving

Toss the sliced peaches in a large mixing bowl with the tapioca, lemon juice, salt, sugar, butter, nutmeg and brown sugar. Cover the fruit mixture with a sheet of plastic wrap pressed against its surface to prevent oxidation, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 400°F.

On a lightly floured work surface, roll out each piece of pastry dough into a 13-inch round circle about 1/8 -inch thick. Drape 1 round around the rolling pin, carefully transfer it to line a 10-inch pie pan, and fit it into the bottom and sides of the pan. Trim the overhang excess to the edge of the pan. Brush the bottom and sides of the crust with the egg white. Pour the fruit mixture into the pie shell, being careful not to fill the shell crust more than even with the rim edge of the pan. Cover the fruit with the second round piece of dough and tuck the overhang underneath the edges of the bottom crust. Use your fingers or a fork to crimp the edges, and brush with the remaining leftover egg white. Using a small, sharp knife, cut 3 or 4 steam vents in the top crust.

Bake the pie for about 1 hour, on the bottom shelf of the oven until the crust is golden-brown. Let cool completely on a wire rack, about 1 hour. Let the pie cool on a rack before cutting. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

My first foray into making Lousiana pepper sauce started with a search for red chiles. Tabasco chiles were introduced to Louisiana in the 1800s and became the favorite chile for bottled pepper sauces. The recipe included the elaborate step of fermenting the ripe red peppers in oak barrels. Pepper pickers carried a stick [...]]]>
My first foray into making Lousiana pepper sauce started with a search for red chiles. Tabasco chiles were introduced to Louisiana in the 1800s and became the favorite chile for bottled pepper sauces. The recipe included the elaborate step of fermenting the ripe red peppers in oak barrels. Pepper pickers carried a stick painted with the shade of red that the peppers needed to reach. The ripeness was important because you need a decent level of sugar to get the fermentation process going.

The chile plants in my garden don’t produce green peppers until the early summer. There aren’t any red peppers until July or so. But luckily for my purposes, chiles grow all year round in southern Mexico. So I took a trip to the Farmer’s Marketing Association on Airline where Mexican produce is trucked in daily. I didn’t find any red Tabasco peppers, but there were red poblanos, red serranos and lots of red jalapeños. I know red japaleños have lots of sugar and I love the flavor, so I decided to use them to make my first fermented pepper sauce. I tasted a couple to check the sugar level–they were sweet and very hot. I bought ten pounds.

After washing the chiles in a couple of changes of water, I cut off the stems, chopped the chiles and ground them up in the food processor. Then I put a layer of the mash in the bottom of a 7.5 liter Gärtopf fermenting crock with a sprinkling of pickling salt. I figured six ounces of pickling salt for the 8 and a half pounds of mash I ended up with ought to be about right.

The mash filled the crock about two thirds full. We’ll call it five liters. I let the crock full of mash sit outside uncovered for a couple of hours to allow some wild yeasts to get the fermentation going. Some people add whey from yogurt or hooch from a sourdough culture to kickstart fermentation, but we have plenty of wild things floating around in the steamy jungle air of Southeast Texas, so I just let nature take its course.

The crock comes with two flat stone weights that you are supposed to put inside the crock to keep the sauerkraut or pickles you are fermenting under the brine so they don’t mold. I tried to balance the weights on top of the pepper mash, but it didn’t work so well. The weights just kept sinking in the very liquid mash.

The crock also comes with a lid that sits in a channel that you keep filled with water to create a fermentation lock–the gas bubbles can escape, but oxygen can’t get in. Lifting the lid to see how the mash is doing completely defeats the purpose of the crock’s design, but I can’t help myself. Last time I looked, there were lots of bubbles, but the weights had capsized into the mash. One was sticking up out of the drink like the Titanic after it split in half. I think I better revert to the Alton Brown technique of placing a ziplock bag full of water inside the crock to keep the mash submerged.

Any advice from veteran fermented pepper sauce makers would be welcome!

My daughter Katie Walsh writes for a food blog called Whisked Foodie She called me the other day to ask where to get edible roses. (If you have a source, please share it under “comments.”) This question seems to come up once a year around this time. I used to grow organic roses so I [...]]]> My daughter Katie Walsh writes for a food blog called Whisked Foodie She called me the other day to ask where to get edible roses. (If you have a source, please share it under “comments.”) This question seems to come up once a year around this time. I used to grow organic roses so I could cook with them, but growing roses without chemicals proved too be to big a challenge for my modest gardening skills.

Still, the question brought back fond memories of Valentine’s Day cooking projects.

This article and the recipe for Quail in Rose Petal Sauce ran in column I used to write for Natural History Magazine “A Matter of Taste.” The story was published in May of 1999. (story and recipe after the jump)

A Rosy Repast
Ever so gently, the young woman gasped as I set the platter down on the table. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day and for dinner I had made quail in rose petal sauce. The dish was made famous in the Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Tita, the cook whose dishes literally express her emotions, makes the sauce from roses given to her by Pedro, her forbidden lover. Putting this recipe together, I felt a little like I was preparing a witch’s potion. And the most magical of the ingredients were the red roses.

Flowers aren’t really unusual in cooking, in fact they are often essential. Bouillabaisse wouldn’t be bouillabaisse without the intoxicating aroma of saffron threads, which are the orange-yellow stigmas of the purple crocus. Hot-and-sour soup wouldn’t taste right without dried day lilies, known in China as “golden needles.” And in New Orleans, no self-respecting bartender would dare serve a Ramos Gin Fizz without a splash of orange-flower water. But in none of these flower-flavored dishes can you actually recognize any blossoms. As the book title, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies suggests, actually putting whole blossoms in your mouth seems a little strange.

Roses in particular, with all of their romantic connotations, look odd on an ingredient list. After all, when a man sends a woman a dozen roses, he doesn’t expect that she’s going to be making salad out of them. But, in fact, roses have been eaten since ancient Roman times. At some flower-strewn Roman feasts, rose petals were sprinkled on the food, the table, and all over the banquet hall. Rose petals, fresh, dried and crystallized, as well as rose water and rose syrup are still widely used in the cuisines of the Middle East. Greek baklava, for instance, is authentically served with a drizzle of rose syrup.

While roses are one of the most common flowers in our florist shops, we Americans hardly ever eat them. Which is a good thing, because modern systemic pesticides have made them highly toxic. And according to Cathy Wilkinson Barash, author of Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate, (Fulcrum), even if you could eat modern hybrid roses, you’d probably be disappointed. “Queen Elizabeth has very little flavor, Tropicana has none at all,” she reports. Barash grows flowers organically so that she can use them in cooking. And she has eaten dozens of roses in her quest for good tasting varieties. “My favorite eating rose is the beach rose (Rosa rugosa alba) which grows wild along much of the Atlantic coast,” she says. “It has great aroma and it tastes as good as it smells.”

If you’re looking for a cooking rose to grow organically in your garden, Barash recommends David Austin varieties, which are throwbacks to old garden roses. “‘Gertrude Jekyll’ is my pick of his cultivars,” she says. Among the modern hybrids, ‘Mr. Lincoln,’ a deep velvety-red rose and Tiffany, a light pink hybrid are tastiest. Carrot slaw on a bed of pink Tiffany rose petals is one of Barash’s favorite salad recipes.

We can thank the organic farming movement for the return of edible flowers to our cuisine. The pesticide-free cooking roses used by most American chefs come from organic gardeners in California who air freight them to specialty food suppliers around the country. So what does a good eating rose taste like? “I don’t think roses really taste like much of anything on the palate,” Chef Danielle Custer told me, “but there is an aroma and a texture and an association with their eye appeal that makes them very sensual–almost– what’s the word–aphrodisical.”

The quail in rose petal sauce that Tita made in Like Water for Chocolate certainly was an aphrodisiac. After eating it, her sister Gertrudis “began to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs.” Dripping with rose-scented sweat, Gertrudis went to the wooden shower stall in the backyard to wash. “Her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame.” Having set the shower stall on fire, Gertudis stood in her backyard, burning hot and smelling of roses, until she was suddenly swooped up by one of Pancho Villa’s men who charged into the backyard on horseback. “Without slowing his gallop, so as not to waste a moment, he leaned over, put his arm around her waist, and lifted her onto the horse in front of him, face to face, and carried her away.” The naked Gertrudis and the crazed soldier made love at a full gallop. The moral: Cook and eat flowers at your own risk.

I followed Tita’s recipe pretty closely, except I added more roses. Not only did I use rose petals and rose water as called for in the recipe, I also garnished the dish with an extra dozen tiny red buds. The young lady who ate the quail with me did not set my house on fire. (I kept a pitcher of water nearby just in case.) But the striking beauty and the deep perfume of all those roses certainly made her cheeks flush.

Quail in Rose Petal Sauce
(from Like Water for Chocolate)
My local Middle Eastern store had plenty of rose water on hand. I ordered the edible roses in advance from a specialty food company, but if you grow organic roses, you are in luck. You can also find edible flowers at farmers’ markets sometimes. Tita’s recipe also calls for pitaya, a delicious type of cactus fruit. But pitaya was out of season, so I substituted a dark red prickly pear fruit puree. You can also use frozen raspberries.

Serves 2

6 quail
3 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup dry sherry
Petals of 6 fresh, organic red roses
6 peeled chestnuts (boiled, roasted or canned)
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup pitaya or red prickly pear fruit puree (or substitute raspberries)
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon ground anise seed
1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
14 teaspoons rosewater

Rinse the quail and pat dry. In a large frying pan over
medium-high heat, melt the butter and lightly brown the birds on all
sides. Add sherry and salt and pepper the quail. Lower the heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes. Turn the quail, cover and cook another 10 minutes. Remove the quail, reserving the pan juices.
Rinse the rose petals in cold water. Place half the petals in the
blender, with remaining ingredients and the pan juices. Puree until smooth. Transfer to a sauce pan and simmer 5 minutes. Adjust seasoning with more salt, pepper and/or honey. Pour some sauce on the plates and arrange three quail on each. Pour the rest of the sauce over the quail and sprinkle with the remaining rose petals. Serve with crusty bread, tossed salad and a chilled Rosé champagne.

From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon

Many thanks to Eater.com’s Spring Cookbook Preview for the kind words about the new cookbook!

The Eater Spring 2012 Cookbook and Food Book Preview Monday, January 9, 2012, by Paula Forbes

American Regional: Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook, [...]]]> From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon

Many thanks to Eater.com’s Spring Cookbook Preview for the kind words about the new cookbook!

The Eater Spring 2012 Cookbook and Food Book Preview
Monday, January 9, 2012, by Paula Forbes

American Regional:

Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook, with More Than 200 Recipes by Robb Walsh

Robb Walsh has long been the go-to cookbook author for Texan cuisine, but this book has the potential to be his masterwork. Gone are stuffy preconceptions of what Texas food is (cheese enchiladas!), and in their place find what Texans really eat (Czech-Tex! Viet-Tex! And, okay, some vintage Tex-Mex.) Bonus? Aaron Franklin’s nationally recognized recipe for barbecued brisket from Austin’s Franklin Barbecue.

The reason I got a huge Lodge Chicken Fryer was to make Edna Lewis’s famous chicken recipe. It was over a year later that I actually got around to making it. The fryer didn’t gather dust. I fried a lot of chicken in it, I just never had the time for the elaborate [...]]]> The reason I got a huge Lodge Chicken Fryer was to make Edna Lewis’s famous chicken recipe. It was over a year later that I actually got around to making it. The fryer didn’t gather dust. I fried a lot of chicken in it, I just never had the time for the elaborate preparations Edna’s recipe requires.

In that recipe, which was made famous by chef Scott Peacock, the cut up chicken gets 12 hours of brining followed by 12 hours of buttermilk marinating before you proceed with the seasoning and flouring. Then you hold the floured pieces of chicken on a rack for half an hour to get the crust to stick and finally you fry the chicken in a large cast iron skillet full of lard jazzed up with butter and country ham.

My wife got really tired of that raw chicken sloshing around in our refrigerator for two days. She was happy to help eat the chicken though. To tell the truth, I faithfully executed the marinating and flouring, but I substituted peanut oil for the lard. So I guess I still haven’t really made Edna Lewis’s fried chicken.

I want to say the flavor and the juiciness of the resulting chicken was worth the effort. It was awfully good. But the next time I make fried chicken, I am much more likely to use a quick recipe like the spicy Cajun fried chicken recipe below. I’ll save Edna Lewis’s famous fried chicken recipe for very special events.

Spicy Fried Chicken

This recipe is simple, but the technique is tricky. If you try to fry chicken in too small a volume of oil, the temperature won’t recover fast enough and the chicken will get greasy. Count on using several quarts of oil or lard.
Purists swear that chicken fried in a cast iron skillet tastes best. If you want to go this route, I recommend the 5-quart size Lodge Chicken Fryer–it will accommodate an entire cut-up chicken and plenty of frying oil and will set you back a mere $39. Don’t forget to use the lid–it makes a big difference.

Serves 4 to 6.

Peanut oil or fresh rendered lard
1 large chicken cut into pieces
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup Slap Yo’ Mama seasoning (or other Cajun seasoning blend)

Season the chicken by sprinkling it with seasoning blend. Add the rest of the seasoning (at least half a cup) to the flour and stir well to combine. Dip the chicken in the flour and roll to coat. Shake off the excess flour and allow the chicken to sit on a wire rack for half an hour. (This helps the crust to adhere to the chicken.) Heat the oil, 3 inches deep, in a heavy skillet or Dutch oven to 350°F. Carefully slip the chicken pieces into the hot oil and cover. The temperature of the oil will fall, but try to keep it at 325° F for around 15 minutes or until the chicken is done to your liking. Serve immediately or hold in a hot oven.

From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon (Jacket copy) Who says cooking is for homebodies? Veteran Texas food writer Robb Walsh served as a judge at a chuck wagon cook-off, worked as a deckhand on a shrimp boat, and went mayhaw-picking in the Big Thicket. For seven years, he [...]]]> From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon

(Jacket copy) Who says cooking is for homebodies? Veteran Texas food writer Robb Walsh served as a judge at a chuck wagon cook-off, worked as a deckhand on a shrimp boat, and went mayhaw-picking in the Big Thicket. For seven years, he drove the length and breadth of the state looking for the best in barbecue, burgers, kolaches, and tacos; while scouring museums, libraries, and public archives unearthing vintage photos, culinary stories, and nearly-forgotten dishes. Then he headed home to Houston to test the recipes he’d collected back in his own kitchen. The result is Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook, a colorful and deeply personal blend of history, anecdotes, and recipes from all over the Lone Star State.

In Texas Eats, Walsh covers the standards, from chicken-fried steak to cheese enchiladas to barbecued brisket. He also makes stops in East Texas, for some good old-fashioned soul food; the Hill Country, for German- and Czech-influenced favorites; the Panhandle, for traditional cowboy cooking; and the Gulf Coast, for timeless seafood dishes and lost classics like pickled shrimp. Texas Eats even covers recent trends, like Viet-Texan fusion and Pakistani fajitas. And yes, there are recipes for those beloved-but-obscure gems: King Ranch casserole, parisa, and barbecued crabs. With more than 200 recipes and stunning food photography, Texas Eats brings the richness of Texas food history vibrantly to life and serves up a hearty helping of real Texas flavor.

Foodways Texas announces BBQ Summer Camp dates and details: From Foodways Texas: “Mark your calendars for June 8-10, 2012, for the Foodways Texas Barbecue Summer Camp held in partnership with the Texas A&M University Meat Science Center in College Station, Texas. Tickets for the camp will go on sale sometime in November and we [...]]]> Foodways Texas announces BBQ Summer Camp dates and details:
From Foodways Texas: “Mark your calendars for June 8-10, 2012, for the Foodways Texas Barbecue Summer Camp held in partnership with the Texas A&M University Meat Science Center in College Station, Texas. Tickets for the camp will go on sale sometime in November and we hope to announce a preliminary schedule of panels, pitmasters and events at that time. We will also expand the camp slightly to include a full day Friday and Saturday, as well as a half-day on Sunday. We expect you’ll be covered in at least four different types of wood smoke and have brine stains all over your clothes by the time you leave.

If hanging around in meat lockers sounds like fun...

Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla with brandied Texas peaches is an amazingly tasty combination. Looks like it is going to be the house dessert at my place for quite a while. And pint jars of brandied peach sauce are probably going to be what we give out for Christmas presents this year too. I [...]]]>
Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla with brandied Texas peaches is an amazingly tasty combination. Looks like it is going to be the house dessert at my place for quite a while. And pint jars of brandied peach sauce are probably going to be what we give out for Christmas presents this year too. I have 30 pints of the stuff. Funny thing is, I didn’t set out to make this much brandied peach sauce.

The vendor from Lightsey Farms at the Bayou City Farmer’s Market on Richmond Ave was selling 25 pound boxes of peaches for $35. But when I told him I was making preserves, he recommended I buy “seconds.” These undersized, worm-holed, or misshapen specimens went for only $20 a box. At the price, I figured I might as well buy two.

I wasn’t sure I could process 50 pounds of peaches on my stove, all at one time. But the peaches were still hard, so I let them sit outside in the backyard for a couple of days until they were riper. By Tuesday morning, when I brought them inside, the boxes were a little lighter.
I thought I was the only one who was raiding the box for ripe specimens to eat every time I walked by, but it turned out the whole family had been munching away at them. We probably devoured a couple of pounds.

I set another 8 or 9 pounds aside because they were too smushy, too hard, or too bug-infested. After removing the skins and pits, I ended up with 25 pounds of cleaned peaches. The recipe I wrote for my new cookbook called for 8 pounds, enough to fill a nice-sized soup pot. So after weighing them in, I divided the peaches among three pots. I was planning on making two of the pots into peach preserves and one into brandied peaches.

The hit of last season’s peach canning sessions, brandied peaches are an alcoholic dessert sauce that tastes amazing on Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla. You start brandied peaches just like you are going to make peach jam, but you cut the peaches in half instead of slicing them and you only cook the peaches for 10 minutes instead of 30 or 40. Then you put the cooked peach halves in pint jars with the cooking syrup and a shot of brandy.

So I cooked two pots of sliced peaches with sugar and lemon juice for 30 minutes and one pot of peach halves for 10 minutes. I was about to start canning, but fate intervened. A plumbing emergency cut my cooking session short. Once we got through with the plumber, the clean-up, and the fast food dinner that ensued (Beck’s Prime Burgers), we had to hurry up the canning because it was getting late. I brought the peaches back to a boil and was about to stir in the pectin when my wife had a better idea.

“Let’s just make all of them into brandied peaches,” she said. You can buy pretty good peach jam, but you can’t buy brandied peaches, she reasoned. The kids ate all of last year’s homemade peach preserves on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, while the brandied peaches yielded some of the most remarkable ice cream desserts of the year.

“Why waste homemade peach preserves on toddlers?” I thought to myself. It was then that I realized that reading the new children’s book “Go the F**K to Sleep,” had ruined me as a parent.

But there was a problem. “You are only supposed to cook peach halves for 10 minutes to make brandied peaches,” I said to my wife. The brandy mixes with the syrup to make a liqueur. That won’t work here because two of the pots were cooked 30 minutes and the fruit is all well stewed down.”

“Oh well, so we call it brandied peach dessert sauce,” she said with a shrug. And that’s what we did. We mixed the half peaches with the peach stew and ended up with 30 pints of brandied “No Minors” Texas peach dessert topping. It’s not quite as sexy as the liqueur with half peaches, but it tastes damn fine.

Texas Peach Preserves (from my upcoming cookbook Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook)

When I lived in Austin, I thought that the best peaches in Texas came from the Hill Country. Then I moved to Houston and tasted Cooper’s Farms and other East Texas peaches. That’s when I realized that some years the Hill Country peaches are tops, and some years the East Texas peaches are better and some years they are pretty equal. It all depends on the weather the orchard gets during the growing season. This year a late spring freeze damaged some 80% of the Hill Country peaches. The ones that made it are great, but they are hard to find. East Texas peaches are doing great.

Makes 8 pints

8 pounds peaches
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 package pectin
7 cups sugar
Whole vanilla bean (optional)
Preserve jars with new lids (such as Ball Jars)

Drop the peaches in boiling water for about a minute. Then plunge into cold water. Using a butterknife, slip the skins off and cut the peaches into slices. Place the sliced peaches and lemon juice in a thick-bottomed non-reactive pot. Over low heat, bring slowly to a boil, stirring continuously as the juice forms. Boil for 1 minute and add the sugar and return to a hard rolling boil. Add the vanilla bean if desired.

Simmer, stirring continuously until the peaches are very soft (30 to 40 minutes for fully cooked preserves). Return to a full boil and add the pectin, stirring continuously for a few minutes to activate the gelling reaction.

Cook until the juice forms a solid stream when poured from a spoon. Turn off the heat and ladle the mixture into the sanitized jars following the directions for Hot Water Bath Canning the came with your preserve jars.

Variation: Brandied Peaches: After removing the skin, cut the peaches into halves and proceed to add the lemon juice and sugar to the pot. Over low heat, bring to a boil and simmer the mixture for 10 minutes or until the peaches are soft. Spoon the peaches into canning jars. Add a shot of brandy or Cognac to each jar. Fill the jars with peach syrup from the pot. Follow the directions for Hot Water Bath Canning that came with your preserve jars.

Just in case you missed me this morning on Great Day Houston, here’s the segment.

Mom Marvels at Homemade Kraut