Snacking State-by-State: Illinois V - She Fed Me... with Science!

Before I started preparing this final Illinois post, I got what I have to call "Achatz-y". Those of you familiar with the famous molecular gastronome who helms Chicago's Alinea and who recently chronicled his battle with tongue cancer (which could have taken his life, much less his career), will understand what I mean.

Official Name: State of Illinois
State Nicknames: The Prairie State; The Land of Lincoln
Admission to the US: December 3, 1818 (#21)
Capital: Springfield (6th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Chicago (largest in the state and the Midwest; 3rd largest in the US); Aurora (2nd largest); Rockford (3rd largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Lakes; East North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Cornbread & BBQ, Wild Rice
Bordered by: Wisconsin (north); Lake Michigan (northeast); Indiana (east); Kentucky (southeast & south); Missouri (southwest); Iowa (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: popcorn (snack food); GoldRush apple (fruit); white-tailed deer (animal)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: typical Midwestern foods, especially corn; Native American and pioneer foods; state-specific foods (horseshoe sandwich, shrimp de Jonghe, Chicago dog, Italian beef); also note: deep-dish pizza and hot dogs were first made popular in Illinois

Grant Achatz is one of the leading lights in the whole "molecular gastronomy" movement. Molecular gastronomy is the culinary exploration of the chemical and physical properties of food. It is not something I know much about or have ever been very interested in investigating. Now that I know a bit more about it, I am quite intrigued.

Molecular gastronomy forces you to think of your pantry as a chemical lab of sorts. In his "Postmodern Pantry" section of Achatz's massive Alinea cookbook, Mark McClusky sums up the molecular gastronome's attitude towards food and ingredients:

Go into your kitchen and open your pantry. You're staring at a lab's worth of chemicals. Baking soda? That's calcium bicarbonate if you want to be technical. Cream of tartar? More accurately, it's potassium hydrogen tartrate... Cooking is chemistry. Even the techniques are the same: heating, cooling, purification, dilution, distillation, fermentation. The difference between a saucier and an Erlenmeyer flask...is one of familiarity. [McClusky, in Achatz 2008:16]

Achatz's cookbook is a good go-to source for all the typical ingredients and supplies one would ever need to do molecular gastronomy at home. And it is possible to do this stuff at home, as many websites and online communities, such as the Molecular Gastronomy Network and MolecularRecipes.com attest. But I am still a molecular gastro-noob, so instead of trying spinach foam, melon-cantaloupe caviar or right or anti-grilled anything right off the bat, I thought I would try something a bit more reachable for me, simply turning a liquid fat into a powder, using tapioca maltodextrin.

The recipe: Olive Oil Powder (Alinea-Style)

Tapioca maltodextrin is a modified food starch used by companies to put fats into powder form, but is used by molecular gastronomes to turn oils, butters, and such into powder (this video from Gourmet Magazine's Will Goldfarb shows how to make a nutella powder). There are a few purveyors of this fascinating ingredient, all of them online. You can buy it from a few places online, where it'll run anywhere from $9 to $23 for a pound, or do what I did and order a free sample from the National Starch website.

Unbeknownst to me, barely a month ago Anthony Cipolone of the blog Mr. Onion's Neighborhood did the exact same thing I am about to do, using the exact same recipe in the exact same ingredients. He loves this stuff, and I hope my olive oil powder turns out like his. Science, right?


You need three ingredients and a few supplies:

* tapioca maltodextrin (see free sample note above)
* olive oil (had on hand)
* salt (same)

Not only that, but you will need a digital scale that can display measurements in grams and/or fractions of ounces. The cheapest ones run around $30 at Bed, Bath and Beyond. You don't need a fancy one.


Measure out the ingredients: first the olive oil,


then the tapioca maltodextrin, which will fly all over the place if you're not careful (um, ahem),


and the salt.


Whisk it all together. At first I used my hand whisk but it all just gooped up inside the whisk, so I switched to a fork and then ultimately the whisk attachment on my hand blender, which worked the best.

Nope, the fork just isn't doin' it for me.

Okay, the whisk attachment. That's better.

Because I am clumsy, I had to add a little more tapioca maltodextrin at a time - yes I eyeballed it, which is not exactly scientific I admit.

In the end I came up with something very crumbly and pasty, and not in any way wet.


I did not exactly get a powdery texture, but after pushing it through a strainer (or by its more French-sounding name, a tamis) I got a more powdery substance.


When he did this, Mr. Onion literally said "Strangely enough, I ended up with what looked like grated cheese." I hear ya, brother. I got the same thing. But the taste on the tongue was clearly olive oil. The texture was very slightly grainy at first, turning to silken. It was a most strange experiment, to be sure.


And so my massive sojourn into Illinois is done, from hearty farm food to heartier sandwiches, to Polish and Italian food, to the height of food science, Illinois truly has it all. So this begs my next question: what about Indiana, which is right next door?

Sources:

Achatz, Grant, Alinea. Ten Speed Press: Berkeley, CA, 2008.

Cipolone, Anthony. "Tapioca Maltodextrin: Sprinkle on the Fat". Mr. Onion's Neighborhood, published May 5, 2011.

McClusky, Mark, "Postmodern Pantry". In Alinea, by Grant Achatz.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Illinois" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Illinois".

Snacking State-by-State: Illinois II - Swiety Jacek z pierogami!***

My previous Illinois post examined the legendary Chicago deep-dish pizza. Of course, Italians are not the only Chicagoans who have altered the Midwestern foodie landscape. Greeks, Cubans, South Asians, Jews, Russians, Irish, African-Americans, Chinese, and so on - I could list ethnicities for the rest of this post. They have all contributed to Chicago's cuisine. The first (and so far only) time I visited Chicago, way back around 2000, I had Japanese, Armenian and Thai food in just a few days. Among those many ethnicities who have defined Chicago's cuisine are the Polish, who have had an important impact in the Windy City, boasting the largest Polish-American community in the country.

Official Name: State of Illinois
State Nicknames: The Prairie State; The Land of Lincoln
Admission to the US: December 3, 1818 (#21)
Capital: Springfield (6th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Chicago (largest in the state and the Midwest; 3rd largest in the US); Aurora (2nd largest); Rockford (3rd largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Lakes; East North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Cornbread & BBQ, Wild Rice
Bordered by: Wisconsin (north); Lake Michigan (northeast); Indiana (east); Kentucky (southeast & south); Missouri (southwest); Iowa (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: popcorn (snack food); GoldRush apple (fruit); white-tailed deer (animal)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: typical Midwestern foods, especially corn; Native American and pioneer foods; state-specific foods (horseshoe sandwich, shrimp de Jonghe, Chicago dog, Italian beef); also note: deep-dish pizza and hot dogs were first made popular in Illinois

Lamenting our own canceled Polish Festival in Baltimore, I felt extra-inspired to delve into that most beloved of Polish dumplings, the pierogi. The Polish American Journal has a whole webpage just on Polish and Polish American foods. There is so much I did not know about Polish food, but I do now know just how important the pierogi is. Apparently it even has its own patron saint - St. Hyacinth. May he grant this Irish-Italian guy luck in his first attempt at making that most Polish of dumplings.

The recipe: Pierogi (with Potato and Sauerkraut Fillings)

Though there are variations of pierogi all over Eastern Europe (Going through withdrawal over the Polish one? Wait for the Ukrainian Festival. They will have them), we know them best as Polish food, and far be it from me to say which culture's is best. Chef Robert Strybel of the same Polish American Journal mentions that they are such an important part of everyday life in Poland, as he says, it even led to a common expression.

"Swiety Jacek z pierogami!", (St. Hyacinth and his pierogi!) is an old expression of surprise, roughly equivalent to the American "good grief!" or "holy smokes!" Nobody seems to know what the connection between these dumplings and the saintly 13th century monk was all about. [Strybel 2011]

With all the pierogi recipes online, I went with Strybel's, done less in recipe format and more in a narrative. It was a little more difficult to follow this way, but it worked. I more or less followed his recipe as he wrote it, with changes noted below.

I made two types of pierogi (singular and plural), potato and sauerkraut-mushroom. I made half of one and half of the other. Here's what I needed:


* For the dough I just needed all purpose flour, an egg, sa00lt and sour cream. I had all these around the kitchen.
* I had all the ingredients for the fillings as well: an onion, a few russet potatoes, another egg, butter, sauerkraut, mushrooms (dried), bread crumbs (optional) and chives.

I ended up making all the pierogi in batches: first the dough, then the fillings on another day, and then assembling and cooking them all later on. It was not so much difficult as it was tedious. There are a lot of steps to making these things.


The dough was easy to make in the food processor: just throw the ingredients together and when they are blended take it out and flatten it.

What's Polish for "stress relief"?

The one change I made: most recipes call for adding a little sour cream to the pierogi dough, but Strybel's does not. I went ahead and added about two tablespoons.


Mix in the sour cream (this is where I deviate from the recipe) until well blended, and refrigerate.


For the potato filling, simply boil the potatoes, and fry up the onion in butter. Mash the potatoes and mix with the onion, egg and chives.


The sauerkraut filling starts by soaking the dried mushrooms in enough water to barely cover them. You will then let them soak for a few hours at least (I just left mine in the fridge for a few days and came back to them when I was ready). Chop or cut up the mushrooms and boil them in the water until reduced.


Meanwhile, drain the sauerkraut well and scald it in boiling water for 20 minutes, then add the mushrooms and some more sautéed onions, and cook for 30 minutes more. Let cool.


The assembly is the tedious part. You will roll out your pierogi dough and cut it out with a cookie cutter or something else round.


Then take a little bit of filling, put in the middle (or moreover, near it)...


...fold it over and crimp the sides with a fork.


Boil the pierogi in water and set aside. From here you can eat them or freeze them.


Or you could make them a little more palatable by frying them in butter.


I had a good bit of trouble making these pierogi. I started with enough dough for 30. About six or seven burst open before I even dropped them in the water, and another two or three burst open in the water. Eventually I had about 2/3 or what I started with. What I had left went well with sour cream and leftover sauerkraut filling, to which I added some salt (the scalding really takes the zing out of the sauerkraut). These were hearty pierogi, which I would always recommend you fry before eating. Not only does the butter add something to them, but they just become more palatable this way.

*** Saint Hyacinth and his pierogi! - A Polish expression equivalent to "Good grief!" according to Robert Strybel

Sources

Strybel, Robert. "Recipes". The Polish-American Journal, publish date unknown. © 2011 The Polish American Journal, All Rights Reserved.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Illinois" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Illinois".

Snacking State-by-State: Illinois I - How Deep Is Your Pizza?

This is a new day in my State-by-State project: my first foray into the Midwest. It's not that I've been neglecting this region. It's just that, alphabetically, no Midwestern state has come up yet (you've noticed maybe that I am going in alphabetical order). And we'll be in the Midwest for a while with this series, starting with the largest Midwestern state of them all.

Official Name: State of Illinois
State Nicknames: The Prairie State; The Land of Lincoln
Admission to the US: December 3, 1818 (#21)
Capital: Springfield (6th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Chicago (largest in the state and the Midwest; 3rd largest in the US); Aurora (2nd largest); Rockford (3rd largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Lakes; East North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Cornbread & BBQ, Wild Rice
Bordered by: Wisconsin (north); Lake Michigan (northeast); Indiana (east); Kentucky (southeast & south); Missouri (southwest); Iowa (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: popcorn (snack food); GoldRush apple (fruit); white-tailed deer (animal)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: typical Midwestern foods, especially corn; Native American and pioneer foods; state-specific foods (horseshoe sandwich, shrimp de Jonghe, Chicago dog, Italian beef); also note: deep-dish pizza and hot dogs were first made popular in Illinois

Many of us have a notion of what "Midwestern cuisine" is - that it's bland, that's it's vague, that it isn't even a cuisine really. It's certainly not as easy to pin down as "Southwestern" or "Southern" or "New England" cuisine. Indiana native Marcia Adams, author of Heartland: The Best of the Old and the New from Midwest Kitchens, does her best to sum up "Midwestern cuisine" for people like me who aren't from this most hearty part of the country.

...[T]he backbone [of Midwestern cuisine] is the wondrous bounty of the land. We have an embarrassment of riches at our doorsteps: grains, vegetables, tree fruits, game, fish, and range-fed cattle. it is in understanding how the divergent groups in this vast region have integrated indigenous foods while retaining and nurturing their individual ethnic heritages that the true essence of Heartland cooking can be found. [Adams 1991: xi]

Adams points out that Midwestern ("Heartland") food is a combination of farm and frontier, WASP and immigrant and Native American, simple and haute cuisine (remember, Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea is at the forefront of molecular gastronomy, as I will explore sometime during this series). Perhaps the Midwest gets a bad rap for being bland and tasteless. But I am finding out that is not. Or at least not nearly as much as I had thought.

In fact, many of the nation's favorite dishes originated not just in Illinois, but right in Chicago, the third largest city in the nation:

• the Chicago style dog, easy to find at most hot dog shops in and around the country (in Baltimore? Try Zack's). What is it? The folks at Hot Dog Chicago Style, Wisconsin-based aficionados of the legendary dog, put it out there: on your steamed frankfurter put yellow mustard, green relish, chopped onions, tomato wedges (two, please), a pickle spear, sport peppers and celery salt on a sesame seed bun.


• the Italian beef, more famous in the Midwest than around the country, is thinly-sliced beef with Italian seasonings, on a roll (likely Italian roll). The meat juices often soak into the bread.


• Even less popular outside of Chicago, but very big in the city itself, is shrimp de Jonghe (sounds more or less like "shrimp de Young"). The Roadfood.com website of Jane & Michael Stern gives a classic version of the recipe: shrimp baked with lots of butter, bread crumbs and garlic, with sherry and cayenne pepper. I did not make this for this State-by-State series, but I must make this at some point in the not too distant future.


• The most famous of all Chicago recipes, even more so than the dog, is the Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Made famous by Pizzeria Uno, it is found all over the country. And if you know how to make it, it's easy. If you don't, well then...

The recipe: Chicago-Style Deep-Dish Pizza

As with any pizza, you can put whatever toppings you want in a deep-dish one. And since it's a "deep dish" pizza you can put even more of them on, er, in the pizza. Still, I have to reinvent the wheel, so I searched everywhere for recipes. I went with a combination of two. For the ingredients, I used Deven K. Mercer's "Chicago-Style Deep Dish Pizza" DKM (as I think he prefers on his website) measures out his ingredients exactly, for the dough and the pizza toppings. I ended up cheating and bought pre-made dough from Trader Joe's, which I know is not authentic, but for my first attempt I tried to make it easy on myself. For the equipment, I used Jeff's Recipes' website for deep dish in a cast iron skillet. The reason: I couldn't find a deep dish pizza pan anywhere (this is Maryland after all), and it was faster to just use a large cast iron skillet. He suggests a 12" skillet. This worked well for me.


So for my ingredients, I used:

* pizza dough - if you use pre-made, buy two 1-lb bags of dough (99¢ per bag), any kind but I preferred the plain variety
* olive oil (for the pan, to keep the pizza crust from sticking)
* one 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes (I used local fave Sun of Italy for about $3.50 and it was so worth it)
* several garlic cloves, a sliced shallot and a few anchovy fillets (had all on hand) - I sautéed them together in olive oil.
* 3 lbs (1 1/2 bags) of Italian cheese, mine being a mozzarella / provolone blend ($2.50 per bag, on sale)
* parmesan cheese (yes I used the granulated stuff)
* Italian mild sausage (DKM says that Italian sweet sausage is a Chicago fave but I could not find this. I got one fresh for about $1.50)
* pepperoni (one package of Ciao brand for about $3)

Before assembling anything, turn your stove up to 500° and just let it warm up. You need your oven to be hot. You will turn it down once you put the pizza in the oven.

The first part is to let the pizza dough come to room temperature before putting in the skillet.


Douse the skillet with oil and get ready to press the dough into the skillet.


You may find, as did I, that the dough does not want to stay in place. If that happens, rolling it out may be your best bet, unless you know how to toss it in the air. I don't.


Press the dough into the skillet, making sure to prick the bottom and circumference with a fork.


When in place, the rest should be easy. Add your crushed tomatoes first.


Next lay most of your cheese on top.


I then added other ingredients as desired: the Italian sausage, crumbled and sautéed; the pepperoni; the shallot/garlic/anchovy mixture (my sister did not appreciate the anchovy), and the parmesan. Add anything else as you desire.

Next, place the cast iron skillet in the oven and turn the temperature down immediately to 475°.
Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes, until the cheese is browned.


Jeff of Jeff's Recipes says that the pizza should slide right out after cooling for about 10 minutes. After about 20 I still couldn't pick up the skillet, so I put a large plate over the top, turned it over, and then did it again with another pan that I used to store it.


I might have just cut it in the pan, but I really didn't want the pizza toppings leaking all over the cast iron.


My first attempt at deep dish pizza was sort of messy. I don't know how solid the insides are supposed to be, but cutting it made it ooze all over. The pizza, while delicious, tasted better to me the next day. It was just a beautiful tasting pizza, that's for sure. Part of that may be the deep dish - it holds so much stuff.

Sources:

Adams, Marcia. Heartland: The Best of the Old and the New from Midwest Kitchens. Clarkson Potter: New York, 1991.

Hot Dog Chicago Style. "So What Exactly Is a Chicago Style Hot Dog?" Hot Dog Chicago Style,
copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Mercer, Deven K (DKM). "Chicago-Style Deep Dish Pizza". PizzaMaking.com, copyright 2005, All Rights Reserved.

Jeff's Recipes (Jeff). "Deep Dish Pizza – Cast Iron Style". Published May 8th, 2007. Jeff's Recipes, copyright 2006 - 2009, All Rights Reserved.

Stern, Jane, and Michael Stern. "Shrimp de Jonghe". Roadfood.com, copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Illinois" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Illinois".

Presidential Dinner I: The Entrees

All of this is thrown up in the air, since after the big Halloween party I went to last night I made some informal dinner plans with some friends. We'll be eating pasta before the results start rolling in. But these recipes aren't going by the wayside. I have plans to try them all over the next week or so. Just because most of them are attached to states with losing candidates, doesn't mean these are losing recipes.

THE ENTREES: PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES (MAJOR PARTY)

JOHN McCAIN (Republican - AZ)

representing the Southwest - quesadilla

John McCain comes from the Southwest, a region with its own unique cuisine. Now I could be all "maverick-y" and just put an MRE here. Or I could put some tasty Vietnamese cuisine in this spot. Instead, let's just stick with the safe choice: Southwestern. Granted, a man of McCain's age might not be able to handle spicy, gassy food, but it can always be tamed down. It's also not terribly expensive to make, depending on what you are making.

Photo linked from Flickr user Paul Goyette

One of the easiest and cheapest Southwestern foods to make is the ever-versatile quesadilla. There are tons of recipes for quesadillas on the net, and there are tons of different ways to make them. I like this unusual one from the sadly-forgotten Food Network show How to Boil Water: a tasty though "less simple than they think" chicken and scallion quesadilla, also with beans. Another comes from Nigella Lawson, featuring ham.

For me, just about every quesadilla needs cheese, at the very least. From there you can take it wherever. When I want a fast quesadilla, I usually put about 1/2 c to 1 c on mine, depending on the size of the tortilla. I prefer corn tortillas for many things, but for quesadillas I often go with the large flour ones. My favorite fillings include chopped tomatoes, sautéed garlic and onions, and jalapeños or chipotle peppers (any will do). Whatever else is laying around gets thrown on top before the other tortilla goes on. I've used everything from chicken to spinach to venison, or three to four types of cheeses. Heat it at 350 for about 10 to 15 minutes, and top it with all manner of toppings: cilantro, chipotle sauce, guacamole, salsa, sour cream, etc. All are especially easy to chew and eat.

BARACK OBAMA (Democrat - IL; born - HI)

representing the Midwest - Shrimp de Jonghe

Different regional cuisines evoke different images: Pacific is "healthy", Southwest is "spicy", Southern is "homey", and our own Chesapeake cuisine is "crabby". When I think of Midwestern cuisine I think one word: "filling". No, Midwestern food is not known for being, um, slimming. "Rib-sticking" is more like it. That said, Obama's unique corner of the Midwest is the Chicago area, not exactly a culinary wasteland. I could suggest any number of famous dishes unique to the Windy City, many of which are easy to find in most cities: the Chicago-style dog - a hot dog surrounded on a big poppy seed bun with fresh tomato wedges, a pickle wedge, banana peppers, relish, chopped onions and mustard - is sold in some form at most places that sell hot dogs (Zack's dogs in the Harbor and White Marsh, Weenie World in Dundalk, and the Orange Julius down in Arundel Mills are just a few). Easier to find is the Chicago-style pizza. More than just deep dish, most Chicagoans swear by the kind they can only get at home. It's like us and our crabs.

I even found a heart-attack-inducing recipe for something called a "Horseshoe", which is native to Springfield, Illinois - an open-faced sandwich topped with a few hamburger patties, French fries and a thick, buttery cheese sauce. See, told ya' Midwestern food is not slimming. Makes Paula Deen seem like the host of that short-lived Low Carb and Lovin' It show.

Photo linked from Flickr user She Who Shall Not Be Named

Since I at least want to live to be the age of Obama's competitor, I'll go with something a little less unhealthy, not easy in the Midwest. One of the older recipes that just screams "CHICAGO" is a dish called shrimp deJonghe, which Wikipedia notes is "a casserole of whole peeled shrimp blanketed in soft, garlicky, sherry-laced bread crumbs". It's a bit more complicated than that. One recipe I found from Hallmark Magazine looks easier than most, but still has lots of ingredients, particularly two pounds of shrimp. You also need a few fresh herbs, including tarragon, parsley and chervil, and everything from freshly grated nutmeg to 1 1/2 cups of bread crumbs, to shallots to garlic to two sticks of butter. I will try this recipe sometime, though I'll have to wait for a group of people to eat it with me. It sounds wonderful but I'm afraid it'll kill me.

representing the Pacific - Pineapple-Spamburger

Mind you, Barack Obama was born not in Illinois, but in Hawaii (despite rumors to the contrary). So he probably grew up eating a lot of Hawaiian food instead. When I think of Hawaiian cuisine, I often think of poi, that classic taro root dish that is not readily found outside of Polynesia. Seriously, you can buy bagged poi in Hawaii, but I've never seen it here, or in California. You can make your own, but taro is also nearly impossible to find in Maryland (the Latin American root vegetable yautía, which is more readily available at H-Mart, is often often cited as an acceptable substitute).

Photo linked from the Mental Floss website. The can shows another favorite Spam dish in Hawaii, spam musubi

The next things that comes to mind when I think of Hawaiian food are pork and pineapple. Easy enough to put together. But why not pair pineapple with Hawaii's most favorite potted meat product - Spam? Yes, Spam is incredibly popular in the Aloha State, and a simple Pineapple-Spamburger is just about the easiest dish to make. Just slice a big lump o' Spam into two to three slices, lengthwise, fry it up in a pan (or - ooooooh! - grill it), along with some whole pineapple slices, put them in a hamburger bun, and voila! The unofficial potted meat dish of Hawaii!

Image of Barack Obama linked from Wikipedia. Image of John McCain linked from the website Just Press Play.net

Political Blogger Finds Deli-Quality Food in... AIRPORT!?

Atlantic Monthly political blogger Matthew Yglesias found a delicious deli-style sandwich in Chicago's Midway Airport. Next time I'm there, dude, next time I'm there...