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 IV - For Corn's Sake

If the previous post's horseshoe sandwich reflects Springfield, deep-dish pizza reflects Chicago and pierogi reflects Chicago's ethnic Polish community, what represents the entire state, if not the whole region? Corn, that's what.

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

The Midwest is the hub of our nation's corn industry, and it's made a lot of people very wealthy. Corn goes into so many things that we never realized even had corn in them: everything from ethanol to batteries (!) to high fructose corn syrup (and don't believe the lies about HFCS being "just like sugar" Check out the Picky Eater Blog for a recent takedown of Big Corn's claims about how great HFCS really is). Yes, most of the corn we get in my area is local, but do not forget just how important corn is to the whole fabric of the Midwest.

For a truly simple and delicious corn dish, I thought about various recipes, from corn fritters - corn oysters, that is - to corn pudding to corn chowder to just plain old corn on the cob. The recipe I found on Pam's Midwest Kitchen Korner spoke to me in a different way, and I got inspired to make myself some creamed corn.

The recipe: Creamed Corn

Pam's recipe for creamed corn is simple, unless you (again) reinvent the wheel like I did, and cut the corn fresh off the cob (I'm a silly non-Midwesterner).

Prepping the corn...

Pam used frozen corn, which you will probably do as well. The author's sister-in-law, who gave her this recipe, passed away not long before it was posted, and so she dedicates it to her.



The ingredients you will need include:

* corn (duh - I used six ears' worth, which after much research on the internet I reasoned equaled a one-pound bag's worth of frozen corn. This sort of thing shouldn't be so difficult to find.)

About one 16-oz bag's worth of fresh corn

* both milk and whipping cream (had on hand)
* sugar, salt and cayenne pepper (again, had it)
* butter and flour (mmmm, butter)

Please check out her recipe for exact quantities. Pam also puts Accent in her recipe. Accent (or "Ac'cent") is pure MSG, a no-no these days. I didn't have any and didn't buy any for this recipe. It worked just fine without it.

Again, I'm not going to post her recipe, but it is simple to sum up:


mix everything together but the butter and flour,


then add those toward the end to thicken.


This recipe was just about the loveliest corn recipe I have ever had. Far from the sloppy glop I'm used to seeing in restaurants, this was silky and sweet and just plain delicious. Pam and her sister-in-law had a good thing with this recipe, a simple and delicious way to prepare your corn.

Sources:

Pam's Midwest Kitchen Korner (Pam). "Creamed Corn". Pam's Midwest Kitchen Corner, published November 12, 2009.

The Picky Eater: A Healthy Food Blog (Picky Eater). "The Truth About High Fructose Corn Syrup". The Picky Eater: A Healthy Food Blog, published April 19, 2011.

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".