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

First chop some cabbage

As a sauerkraut fanatic, I always intended to make my own someday. My grandmother made sauerkraut in a barrel. There was wooden disk inside the barrel with a stone on top that kept the cabbage submerged. In my fantasy, I was going to get a big food-safe plastic container [...]]]>

First chop some cabbage

As a sauerkraut fanatic, I always intended to make my own someday. My grandmother made sauerkraut in a barrel. There was wooden disk inside the barrel with a stone on top that kept the cabbage submerged. In my fantasy, I was going to get a big food-safe plastic container and make 20 pounds of the stuff. Then I read some recipes for making small amounts in a bowl. In these simple recipes, you chop up cabbage, salt it, put it in a bowl with a plate and weight on top.

There’s no need to add anything–the cabbage makes its own brine. The ratio is 3 tablespoons pickling salt to 5 pounds of cabbage. I chopped up three heads of cabbage. It came out to six and a half pounds, so I used 4 tablespoons of pickling salt. The reason you use pickling salt is because it is very fine so it dissolves fast and its free of additives to the brine doesn’t get cloudy.

Winter is the best time to make sauerkraut because you can keep it outside. It takes about two weeks to ferment, and it smells up the whole house if you keep it inside. I put the bowl on the patio in a giant beer cooler on wheels. I used a brick wrapped in aluminum foil for a weight. Sometimes you get a moldy looking scum on top that you have to skim off. I’ll keep you posted on the fermentation progress.

Pho Ga or Vietnamese chicken noodle soup

After eating eating Vietnamese chicken noodle soup at Pho Ga Dakao on Bellaire for lunch, I decided to make regular beef pho for dinner. (I become a pho fanatic when the weather gets cold.)

All the ingredients I needed for pho were available at a little [...]]]>

Pho Ga or Vietnamese chicken noodle soup

After eating eating Vietnamese chicken noodle soup at Pho Ga Dakao on Bellaire for lunch, I decided to make regular beef pho for dinner. (I become a pho fanatic when the weather gets cold.)

All the ingredients I needed for pho were available at a little market called Cho Thanh Binh (11810 Bellaire) a few doors down from the restaurant. When I told the butcher I was making pho, he handed me some flank steak and a 3 kilo bag of beef bones. Then he pointed to the fresh rice noodles on a nearby shelf. They also had the ginger, shallots, herbs and spices you need to make the Vietnamese soup. I dutifully took my packages to the checkout counter. Does Cho Thanh Binh mean “Wag a Bag of Pho Fixin’s” in Vietnamese?

When I got home, I realized that this was twice as much bone as I normally use. I usually start with 3 pounds of bone and add a pound of rump for the stock. I don’t mind doubling the recipe, but the 6 and a half pounds of bones and 2 pounds of flank the Vietnamese butcher sold me were way more than I could fit in my soup pot. So I went out the garage and got out the crawfish boiling pot.

Check out my Homemade Texas Pho recipe after the jump.

Homemade Pho

This recipe sounds a lot more complicated than it really is. You just make a hearty beef broth and add some spices. Then you ladle the broth over noodles and add some meat. If you have a crawfish boiling pot handy, you can double the recipe.

Makes 6 regular bowls or 4 big bowls

3 pounds beef neck bones
1 pound beef brisket, trimmed
2 shallots, sliced
2 ounces of thick sliced ginger
1 star anise
1 cinnamon stick
1 black cardamom pod
Fish sauce to taste
Half cup sliced fresh jalapeño chiles
Sea salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 pound dried rice noodles (Banh pho)
3 limes
1 bunch green onions
Assorted fresh garden herbs such as mint, cilantro, and basil
Sriracha sauce

Preparation:
Rinse the meat and bone. Roast the meat and bones in a 400° F oven for 20 minutes, turning several times until well browned. Put the beef and bones in a stock pot and add water to cover, 8 to 10 cups. Bring to a boil and skim. Slice the ginger into three or four thick slices. Toast the ginger and shallot slices in a hot dry skillet until lightly charred and add to the stock. Toast the star anise and the black cardamom, crushing them slightly. Then put them in a piece of cheesecloth together with the cinnamon stick and tie to make a bouquet garni. Add the spices, chile peppers and salt to taste. Simmer on low heat for about at least two and a half hours replenishing with water to maintain a constant level.

Remove the bouquet garni, beef bone and meat and allow to drain. Keep the stock simmering and check the seasoning. Rinse and slice the herbs, spring onion and limes. Chop the rump into serving size pieces. Drop the noodles in boiling water for 2 or 3 minutes until soft, then remove and divide into individual serving bowls. Arrange some meat in each bowl with some onion and herbs on top. Pour the boiling stock over the noodles and meat. Serve immediately accompanied with lime wedges, herbs, sliced jalapeños and Sriracha sauce.

Variation: Steak Pho: Add thin slices of raw steak to the noodles in each bowl just before adding hot broth.

The Greenberg Smoked Turkey

My family consumed two Greenberg Smoked Turkeys and a turducken over the Thanksgiving holiday. (There were 26 of us.) I didn’t know the fascinating story of the Greenberg Smoked Turkey until I read about it in my friend John T. Edge’s column in his New York Times. The Tyler, [...]]]>

The Greenberg Smoked Turkey

My family consumed two Greenberg Smoked Turkeys and a turducken over the Thanksgiving holiday. (There were 26 of us.) I didn’t know the fascinating story of the Greenberg Smoked Turkey until I read about it in my friend John T. Edge’s column in his New York Times. The Tyler, Texas turkey smoking operation turns out some 200,000 birds every holiday season and they’ve been at it for decades. As soon as I heard about it, I had to try one.

The mail order Greenberg Turkeys cost $50 each for two 12-pounders. The mail order turkeys are frozen before shipping. They were nearly black and extremely smoky-flavored with big veins of greenish seasoning that had been injected all through the meat. I wish I could say I loved the Greenberg turkeys. I was expecting them to be a lot better than the ones I smoke on the barbecue in my backyard. The seasoning was great–I think I’ll start using my Cajun injector to imitate it. But the bird was dry. For this flaw, I blame the freezing. We were celebrating at my brother’s place near Rockwall, less than an hour from Tyler–for a fairer comparison, I should have driven down there and picked up the turkeys myself. If you get them at the plant, I assume they aren’t frozen.

The best thing about the Greenberg turkey was the gumbo I made from the bones the next day. The stock was so smoke-flavored, I had to add a quart of chicken stock to tone it down a little. I made a copper-colored butter roux and added ten cups of chopped onions, celery and red peppers along with the leftover turkey cut into dice and a pound of andouille sausage. After a few hours of simmering, I served the bold gumbo in big bowls over mounds of leftover mashed potatoes. It was awesome. It tasted great over leftover sweet potatoes too.

I guess the moral of the story is: If you are going to buy a Greenberg Smoked Turkey, it’s worth driving to Tyler to get it. It’s cheaper that way too.