Snacking State-by-State: Nebraska I - O, chci chléb na Vánoce! (Oh, I want bread for Christmas!)

It wasn't my original intention for this first post to fall on Christmas morning, and yet it did.  And for this extra-special Christmas installment of the state-by-state series, I start my visit to Nebraska with some Christmas bread, courtesy of the Czech-Cornhusker community.

Official Name: State of Nebraska

State Nicknames: The Cornhusker State
Admission to the US:  March 1, 1867 (#37)
Capital: Lincoln (2nd largest)
Other Important Cities: Omaha (largest), Bellevue (3rd largest), Grand Island (4th largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Plains; West North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Bison; Pinyon Nut
Bordered by: South Dakota (north), Iowa, Missouri (east), the Missouri River (northeast and east), Oklahoma (south), Colorado (southwest), Wyoming (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: channel catfish (fish), honeybee (insect - of course, the honey is what people eat, not the bee), white-tailed deer (mammal)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: corn, wheat and honey; foods of the Great Plains, including Native American foods (pemmican, wojapi, etc); foods from German, Czech and Russian immigrants, and foods from Midwestern and Southern settlers; the Reuben and runza sandwiches; beef (Omaha steaks)


Like the other prairie states, Nebraska cuisine is a mixture of frontier, immigrant (internal and external) and Native American foods. It's more than just corn, beef and wheat (though can we be blamed for thinking it is?).  Many Plains Indian peoples, from the Omaha to the Oto, the Pawnee to the Arapaho to the Lakota, ate many of the same things that people ate across the Great Plains for millenia: buffalo, antelope, and wild greens and tubers.  As fur trappers and homesteaders moved on in, they brought their staples from the East, the South and the Midwest with them.  Specifically, Nebraska's food is particularly Midwestern (see Nebraska Guide's "As American as Apple Pie" for a thorough rundown), but Nebraska is famous for a few specific items:

* Omaha Steaks.  Yes, those ubiquitous steaks sold since 1917 by the same company, now sold all over the country.  There's one not ten minutes from my apartment.  There's a lot of beef in Nebraska.
* The Reuben sandwich, which I will come to in a few posts from now.  All I will say is this: there is some debate between Nebraskans and New Yorkers about where the Reuben first was made.  But again, that debate is for some other time.
* the runza sandwich, which I admit this Back East boy has never heard of (must be a Midwestern thing):  brought to Nebraska by Russian immigrants, this is, in the words of Jane & Michael Stern's Roadfood website, "hot bread pocket filled with ground meat and cabbage and onions. The bread is soft, freshly-baked white bread, and the filling is mildly spiced beef; the cabbage stays well in the background." [Stern & Stern date unknown, 2011].  Here the Roadfoodsters are raving about a runza from a restaurant of the same name in Lincoln.


Not just Russians but also Germans, Czechs and other European immigrants made their way into Nebraska.  The Cornhusker State has a sizable Czech-American population.  What sent them to Nebraska?  Advertisements in Czech about available land in the area, for one.  What sent them from Bohemia and Moravia was the same thing that sent peasants from all over Europe fleeing to the Americas:

...worsening economic conditions and overpopulation in rural Bohemia and Moravia. Specific crises like crop failures of the 1870s, and agricultural depression beginning in the 1880s resulted in greater numbers of people leaving. Some also left to acquire greater political freedom and escape the control of the Habsburg Monarchy and constant conflict with Germans. [NebraskaStudies.Org date unknown]

Czech-Americans in Omaha and Lincoln are probably enjoying a nice mixture of typical American and ethnic Czech foods for this first day of Christmas.  One recipe that caught my eye was a recipe for vanocka, or Christmas bread.  It's a slightly sweet braided bread with an egg wash, filled with sliced almonds and dried fruits.  Sounds Christmas-y to this Irish-Italian guy raised near the Chesapeake Bay!  However, for the sake of convenience I did something that will probably make little old babičky [Czech for "grandmothers" - thank you, Google Translate!] want to smack me: I used a recipe from Red Star Yeast that gave instructions on how to make the dough in the bread machine (here's a much more traditional version from Czech-American food blogger Tanja at the Czechmate Diary), and then braided, raised and baked the bread the normal way from there.  You're not in Bohemia anymore!

The Recipe: Vanocka (Czech Christmas Bread)


For Red Star Yeast's version I needed the following (go to their recipe for exact measurements):

* bread flour, butter and yeast (duh, duh and duh - had it all)
* water and evaporated milk (had them both)
* sugar and salt
* eggs (both for the dough and for the egg wash)
* lemon zest (this will go in the dough)
* sliced almonds and dried fruit (this recipe calls for raisins and golden raisins - I had raisins and craisins ;left over from the pemmican I made for my final Montana post)

For the dough, combine the dough ingredients at room temperature.  If you go the bread machine route as I did, throw these ingredients into your machine.  I found that my 1 1/2 lb capacity Zojirushi bread machine can handle a 2 lb blob of dough, if you're just making dough and baking it in the oven.

Two hours later, your bread dough will be risen enough to take it out, flour it up and punch it down.

Make sure you add the fruit and almonds while still in the bread machine.  I missed the beep (I was expecting it to happen much later, like with my previous bread machine), so...

I had to add it later, like you would if you were making it the normal way.

Fold it in and work it through for a while.

This next part was actually more difficult than I thought it would be.  Divide the dough into four equal pieces (that was not the difficult part) and roll each out into a thin twelve inch log that you can braid with others.  I did not follow directions, because you are supposed to set aside one of those pieces, divide it further and roll it into even thinner logs.  Since I've never braided anything, I figured I would save myself the headache and just braid it challah-style.  I used this video from eHow to walk me through my first bread braid (apologies for whatever ad they're throwing in).  For a video that shows you how to braid vanocka the correct way, check out one of these videos from YouTube (yes, most are in Czech).

Baking a Four-Strand Challah Bread Loaf -- powered by ehow

It was not as difficult as I thought it would be, though my initial confusion made it seem so.  After pinching the four strands together, it was just a process of - as the nice bread lady said - over, under, over.

Over...

Under...

Over!

Over under, over, over done.  Roger, Over! (And don't call me Shirley.)

When the bread dough is braided, wash an egg over it.  I had no brush, so I had to use a paper towel.  Yes, sue me.

Next you need to let it rise one final time, fully braided.  One fast way I found on the internet was to set it in an oven that is turned off, covered, and with a bowl of hot water underneath it.  Let it sit with the door closed for about 30 to 45 minutes.

Mmmm!  Puffy!

Take it out before you preheat the oven to 350°F (again, um, duh), and bake for 45 minutes.  Mine is not the prettiest, okay, but it was still lovely to eat.

And there you have it: Czech Christmas bread with bread machine dough.  It's a soft, luscious and not too sweet bread with nice sweet-tart bursts of raisins and craisins in the middle.  Eat this with some good butter.  Yeah, the European stuff - Icelandic, Irish... I don't think they have a Czech brand in the states.  It should also go nicely with some jam, or with the Native American berry pudding you will see here in a few more days.  Now go bake some bread, and Veselé Vánoce!


Sources:

Abourezk, Kevin.  "Ponca Tribe to honor Milford for historical gesture".  Lincoln Journal Star.  Posted May 29, 2011.

American Indian Health and Diet Project.  "Traditional Indigenous Recipes: Wojapi".  American Indian Health and Diet Project, date unknown.  Copyright 2011, American Indian Health and Diet Project

Carson, Dale. New Native American Cooking.  Random House: New York, 1996.

CzechMate Diary (Tanja, blogger).  "Czech christmas magic: Vanocka / Kouzlo Vanoc: Vanocka".  CzechMate Diary.  Posted December 11, 2008.

Hill, Cheryl Joy.  "Blueberry Wojapi".  NativeTech.org: Indigenous Food and Traditional Recipes.  Date posted unknown.  Copyright 2011 NativeTech.

Nebraska Folklife Network.  "Recipes: Traditional Foods of Nebraska Ethnic Groups".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2011, Nebraska Folklife Network

Nebraska Guide (Nebraska-Guide.Info).  "As American as Apple Pie".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2004-2011, Interatctive Internet Websites, Inc.

NebraskaStudies.Org.  "The Immigrant Experience: The Czechs Move to Nebraska".  The Homestead Act: Who Were The Settlers? From Nebraska Studies.Org, date unknown.

Rader, Jim.  "Brief History of the Reuben Sandwich". The Reuben Realm, date unknown.

Red Star Yeast.  "Vanocka".  Red Star Yeast, date unknown.  Copyright 2011, Red Star Yeast.

Stern, Jane & Michael (Roadfood.com).  "Runza".  Roadfood.com, date unknown.  Copyright 2011, Roadfood.com.

Stradley, Linda.  "Reuben Sandwich - History of Reuben Sandwich".  What's Cooking America (WhatsCookingAmerica.net), 2004.

Weisman, Karen.  "Baking a Four-Strand Challah Bread Loaf".  eHow.com, date unknown.  Copyright 2011, eHow.com.

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

What's this about old fruitcakes?

This is just too funny: 70 year old fruitcake made by the Cincinnati-based Kroger supermarket chain in 1941 is sold at auction online today for $525.  This begs the inevitable question: is it still edible?

As Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky-based WCPO-TV reports, the proceeds from the auction will go to charity.  No word on whom the buyer, an Arizona man, will re-gift it to next.

It's that time of year again!

For Aunt Sandy and her... waitaminute, her Hanukkah Cake!  Yes, video of it is finally online!

And can you believe that somebody actually tried to make this abomination?!? Thank you, DrJerryrigger, for your bravery.

Snacking State-by-State: Montana II - It's Pemmican-tagious!

If I am reading Big Sky Cooking author Meredith Brokaw correct, Montanans eat a lot of foods that grow, walk and swim right around them.  This is something they've been doing for millenia, and much of that includes food preservation techniques that also give one a lot of energy.  Take, for example, that Great Plains classic ball of fat, berries and dried meat known simply as pemmican.

Official Name: State of Montana

State Nicknames: Big Sky Country
Admission to the US: November 8, 1889 (#41)
Capital: Helena (5th largest)
Other Important Cities: Billings (largest), Missoula (2nd largest), Great Falls (3rd largest)
Region: West, Northwest; Mountain (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Bison; Pinyon Nut
Bordered by: North & South Dakota (east); Wyoming (south); Idaho (west & southwest); British Columbia, Alberta & Saskatchewan (Canada) (north)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: grizzly bear (animal - no longer eaten); blackspotted cutthroat trout (fish); Ponderosa pine (tree - the pine nuts, of course, not the trees)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: frontier foods and Native American foods; huckleberries, chokecherries; beef & bison; game (venison, moose, etc) & trout.

Pemmican, so notes Wikipedia, is a Cree word that shares the same etymology as the Cree word for "fat".  Although I'm showcasing it for Montana, it isn't specific to the state.  Pemmican has been eaten for thousands of years throughout the Great Plains and Canada's prairie provinces.  Once made, it lasts indefinitely in storage.  When European fur traders came to the area they adapted the food as their own.  Today you can find many recipes online for this high energy, high protein, low waste snack that just lasts seemingly forever.

Mark Sisson at the Mark's Daily Apple blog describes what early 20th century Icelandic-Canadian explorer Vihljamur Stefansson found out about pemmican when he first visited the Inuit:

Pemmican consists of lean, dried meat (usually beef nowadays, but bison, deer, and elk were common then) which is crushed to a powder and mixed with an equal amount of hot, rendered fat (usually beef tallow). Sometimes crushed, dried berries are added as well. A man could subsist entirely on pemmican, drawing on the fat for energy and the protein for strength (and glucose, when needed). The Inuit, [Vihljamur] Stefansson noted, spent weeks away from camp with nothing but pemmican to eat and snow to drink to no ill effect. [Sisson 2009]

The procedure sounds simple - just dried meat and melted fat, maybe mixed with some dried berries - but as I found out in my research, it is time consuming to make. Very time consuming.

Why the recent pemmican craze?  Apparently it goes back to the book NeanderThin, the book and now website that claims to tell you how to achieve a lean body by "eating like a caveman" (not that we actually know yet what exactly Neanderthals ate, but it probably wasn't just meat. Scratch that: it definitely wasn't just meat).  Since then several blog posts have been written about plebeian attempts to make pemmican.  I've looked at a few of them in preparing for this post.  The most straightforward of these I found on the NativeTech site, posted by R.L. Garritson, affiliated with the Les Roche Jaune Métis of Montana.  Perhaps the most entertaining was this one by Rix White - WildeRix - who like most would-be pemmicanistas attempts to make it from scratch.

As the Paleofood website [1998; 2011] points out, "The boiling of suet takes a long time. Many hours. It does not melt easily. I would start it early in the morning."  I don't have that kind of time, but fortunately I found a shortcut in WildeRix's pemmican post that turned ten hours of work into three!

The Recipe: Pemmican

In all truth, I used a few websites to make the pemmican you will see below, but I mostly went back to the aforementioned Mark's Daily Apple (who has helpful photos) and WildeRix (who has helpful humor) for guidance.  You will need the following to make your own quickie pemmican.  Yes, quickie pemmican.

* some sort of jerky - today beef is widely available, but I ended up with buffalo jerky from Trader Joe's ($5).  Yes, mine had lots of flavorings.  I didn't have the money, patience, time or equipment to buy a large beef or buffalo roast and thinly slice it, and I wasn't mass producing this stuff anyway.  One bag of jerky will work just fine for my purposes.
* suet, if you don't want to cut corners, or lard, if you do. Kim at The Nourishing Cook website suggested either suet or lard.  Though I ended up not using the lard, I got it out just in case I needed it.  You may need it too.  The truth of the matter is that it's not as easy to find suet - typically beef fat around the kidneys - as you might think.  If you don't ask the butcher you're pretty much up the creek.  I was about to give up when, imagine my surprise, I found frozen suet at Wegman's.  Seriously, these people seem to have just about everything.
* dried berries of some sort.  To stay in the Northwestern spirit, I used some dried blueberries (about $4), again from Trader Joe's, combined with some of those huckleberries I ordered through the mail a few months ago for that post about Idaho.  Since those were pricey, I have been saving them for the most special of occasions, such as this one.

The first thing I did was carve up some of that suet, which doesn't feel like wet and gooey fat that you typically are used to, but instead it feels like hard, waxy and crumbly fat.  I tried to dice it up but it ended up being easier to just kind of half-dice, half-chop it up with my knife.

Put your mincings into a baking dish of some sort.  Most people do what NeanderThin author Ray Audette advises, and simmer it barely covered with water on the stove top for about 10 hours until it reaches a temperature of about 260°F, at which time it'll start melting.  Neither I nor Rix White had the patience to do that.  Lucky me, White found out the hard way:

So I boiled my fat for about 3 hours, but it didn’t look like it was melting all the fat. When I thought about it, I realized that my fat wasn’t reaching the 250 degrees that Audette recommended. I don’t know if that was the problem or not, but I decided to abandon the boiling and put my fat in the oven. I picked out the stray meat (which hadn’t fallen down to settle in the water) and ate it–it wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t bad. Then I put the messy concoction in a casserole dish and baked it at 250 for a couple more hours. The oven method definitely seemed to work better. [White 2007]

After about three hours, I got just enough rendered fat to use for my pemmican.

You don't see it too well but there's pure liquid suet in there.

While the suet was rendering, I needed to dry out my jerky.  That sounds redundant, but jerky from the bag is actually too moist to just make right into pemmican.  You need to powder it, and so I had to dry it out somehow.  My solution: the microwave.

Yes, I am cheating here - native peoples, fur traders and Icelandic-Canadian Arctic explorers didn't have microwaves available to them but I do.  I ended up nuking a few pieces at a time in my 1100 Watt microwave at a very low setting: about 4 minutes (1 to 2 minutes at a time) at 30% power.  I tried 20% but it was just too low.  In the end I got jerky that looked slightly burnt but really wasn't, and was just about completely dessicated and hard.

Okay, the one thing which I made harder for myself was in the powdering of the meat.  Yes, to make pemmican you meed to grind the meat completely down into a powder.  Most websites recommend a spice or coffee grinder.  I just broke out my mortar and pestle.

After a few minutes the meat was mostly powdered.

Like so.

Funny that: I spent Friday night powdering buffalo meat.  I've had less interesting evenings.

See, how could anyone mistake the two? 

I also tried to more completely dry out my blueberries and huckleberries but the microwave actually seemed to get them less dry.  Eventually I would just throw in some of the dried berries as-is.

To assemble your pemmican, put the powdered meat into some sort of flat dish.

Next pour over top of it just enough of the melted suet (or tallow) to cover it, and mix it up.

Throw in some of those berries, and smooth it all out.

It will harden soon enough, but hell, why not just throw that bad boy in the fridge to speed up the process?

As I was first getting ready to eat the pemmican, my first thoughts were along the lines of "meat candy bar".  Ewww.  But it dawned on me that it tasted more like a roast with some sweet spots (the berries) in bar form. And this stuff will last a very long time, and not even in the refrigerator at that.  Granted, I am not going to be eating this on a regular basis, but it isn't meant to be eaten as a meal.  It gives energy when you most need it, and perhaps that is its best use.

- - - - -

Wait - I'm taking you all  back to the Midwest!?  Yep.  I head south from Big Sky Country to the heart of the Great Plains, the home of corn, wheat, steak and maybe, just maybe one of America's favorite sandwiches (Omaha, can you hear me?).  We're off to Nebraska!

Sources:

Brokaw, Meredith, and Ellen Wright.  Big Sky Cooking.  Artisan: New York, 2006.

Garritson, R.L. "Pemmican".  NativeTech.org: Indigenous Food and Traditional Recipes.  Date posted unknown.  Copyright 2011 NativeTech.

"Kim" (contributor), "How to Make Pemmican – Great Snack for Hiking!"  The Nourishing Cook.  Posted 2010. Copyright 2011 The Nourishing Cook.

Paleofood.com.  "Rendering Suet for Pemmican".  Paleofood.com.  Date posted unknown.  Copyright 1998-2011 Paleofood.com.

Sisson, Mark, "How to Make Pemmican". Mark's Daily Apple.  Posted May 22, 2009.  Copyright 2011 Mark's Daily Apple.

Visit Montana.  "Baked Trout".  Reprinted from Butte's Heritage Cookbook, Jean McGrath, author (Butte-Silver Bow Arts Foundation: Butte, MT,1980)

White, Rix ("WildeRix").  "The Pemmican Brief".  Posted February 28, 2007.  Copyright 2011 WildeRix.

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

BBQ Brisket for Hanukkah

Bobby Flay goes there.  Besides, who needs gelt when you've got BBQ?  Granted, it's a little difficult to play the dreidel game with, but still, it's BBQ!

Fearless Leader Is Dead

Assuming the news reports are true about Fearless Courageous Leader Kim Jong-Il, we will never get to see silly photos like this pop up anew ever again:

It's Kim Jong-Il looking at a soft drink!  From the fun new Tumblr of the day, Kim Jong-Il looking at things.  I love the photo of him looking at rice.  Look the hell outta that rice, Jong-Il.  Go on.

Snacking State-by-State: Montana I - Get Yer Trout On

We are finally heading back to the Northwest, and Big Sky Country.  And unlike Missouri with its barbecue or Mississippi where you can find any typical Southern dish you can imagine, I pretty much know nothing about Montana and its food. Nope, nuthin'.  That's why I'm doing this project after all.

Official Name: State of Montana

State Nicknames: Big Sky Country
Admission to the US: November 8, 1889 (#41)
Capital: Helena (5th largest)
Other Important Cities: Billings (largest), Missoula (2nd largest), Great Falls (3rd largest)
Region: West, Northwest; Mountain (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Bison; Pinyon Nut
Bordered by: North & South Dakota (east); Wyoming (south); Idaho (west & southwest); British Columbia, Alberta & Saskatchewan (Canada) (north)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: grizzly bear (animal - no longer eaten); blackspotted cutthroat trout (fish); Ponderosa pine (tree - the pine nuts, of course, not the trees)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: frontier foods and Native American foods; huckleberries, chokecherries; beef & bison; game (venison, moose, etc) & trout.

Montana is a big place. A state stretching from the Northwest and the Rocky Mountains into the Great Plains.  Meredith Brokaw (yes, wife of that other, more famous Brokaw) grew up in neighboring South Dakota, and she describes Montana not just as Big Sky Country (which is also the name of her cookbook) but as a place of big dreams and big opportunities [Brokaw 2006: 13].  It's also big expanses between trips to the market, since things are a big more spread out.  Brokaw illustrates just how different - more foods that you grow yourself, more animals that you raise yourself, more fishing and hunting, and a lot less of heading to the supermarket for that least little thing:

...when you're seventeen miles from the nearest town you tend not to forget that quart of milk, so soon after [Tom and i] moved here I learned to run the kitchen not day to day but week to week, even month to month.  The pantry is stocked for two to three months at a time with the basics...and the garden gives forth all summer with vegetables and herbs of all kinds.  The freezers are all filled with bison and game, and the hen house is busy all the time, with each of the girls laying an egg a day.  It's a whole different way of life, and I like it.  Much of our sustenance comes from the land, and the kitchen is where we, not the shopping bags of exotic ingredients, make everything come together.. [Brokaw 2006: 22]

I wouldn't make it a week in Montana. I never remember everything at the supermarket, even with a grocery list.

So there is much reliance on what you get or grow yourself in and around you in Montana, combined with staples that you just don't forget.  This is reflected in the Native American, frontier and ranch recipes that I found in my research.  A nice collection of recipes is readily available at the official state travel site of Montana.  The collection contains many similar recipes you might find from Idaho, minus all the potatoes: several things made with huckleberries and chokecherries, wild game such as venison and - yes - elk, trout recipes, and so on.  Two trout recipes that jumped out at me were very simple recipes for baked and pan-fried trout.  I've fried so many things as of late - catfish, crab cakes, chicken, frybreads - that I just needed to bake for a change.  The Visit Montana.com website reproduces the following recipe from the Butte's Heritage Cookbook by Jean McGrath.  It is a baked and stuffed trout, and one fish is meant to serve one person.

The Recipe: Baked Trout

For your baked trout you will need:

* trout (duh.  If you don't catch it yourself, why not just go ahead and get it cleaned and scaled while you're at it?  Mine cost about $6 at Wegman's)
* butter (for both the filling and the sauce, which all cooks in the same dish - had this)
* bread crumbs (had it)
* onions (or in this case, shallots, which is what I had on hand)
* mushrooms (I used dried oyster mushrooms which I had around.  I didn't even reconstitute them, but just cut them up and put them in)
* fresh parsley (from my garden plot)
* dried thyme and bay leaf (had them)
* salt and pepper (yes, I had this)
* lemon juice and white wine (had these, too - you will pour these over the fish to make the sauce)

Throw into a saucepan the butter, onion, mushrooms and parsley.

Add the spices and dried herbs while stirring and letting the butter melt.

And then add the bread crumbs.  That's all you need for your stuffing.

Meanwhile, take  baking dish, grease it with even more butter, and place your trout in the dish.

Stuff that trout!

Next you will go about making your sauce.  Melt some more butter...

...and pour it over the trout.  Next add the white wine and lemon juice, and you're ready to bake it.

Bake the trout for about 25 minutes at 400°F.

Sometimes the best way to prepare a fish is just by stuffing it, basting it and baking it.  My grandmother used to do this all the time with fish.  I'm not sure why I got away from this - it's just too easy!  This is a simple and delicious preparation, which seems to be the norm in Big Sky Country.  No need for pretense!  Really I don't have much else to say beyond that.

Sources:

Brokaw, Meredith, and Ellen Wright.  Big Sky Cooking.  Artisan: New York, 2006.

Garritson, R.L. "Pemmican".  NativeTech.org: Indigenous Food and Traditional Recipes.  Date posted unknown.  Copyright 2011 NativeTech.

"Kim" (contributor), "How to Make Pemmican – Great Snack for Hiking!"  The Nourishing Cook.  Posted 2010. Copyright 2011 The Nourishing Cook.


Paleofood.com.  "Rendering Suet for Pemmican".  Paleofood.com.  Date posted unknown.  Copyright 1998-2011 Paleofood.com.


Sisson, Mark, "How to Make Pemmican". Mark's Daily Apple.  Posted May 22, 2009.  Copyright 2011 Mark's Daily Apple.

Visit Montana.  "Baked Trout".  Reprinted from Butte's Heritage Cookbook, Jean McGrath, author (Butte-Silver Bow Arts Foundation: Butte, MT,1980)

White, Rix ("WildeRix").  "The Pemmican Brief".  Posted February 28, 2007.  Copyright 2011 WildeRix.

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

Snacking State-by-State: Missouri IV - Ooey. Gooey. Buttery. Chewy.

Among all the recipes that Paula Deen has made famous, the gooey butter cake is perhaps the most famous.  Sweet, sticky, gooey and buttery - it is the essence of Miss Paula.  But the gooey butter cake does not originate in Savannah.  It is a St. Louis creation sold all over the St. Louis area, and the original isn't exactly what Paula Deen is making.

Official Name: State of Missouri

State Nicknames: The Show-Me State
Admission to the US: August 10, 1821 (#24)
Capital: Jefferson City (15th largest)
Other Important Cities: Kansas City (largest), St. Louis (2nd largest), Springfield (3rd largest), Independence (4th largest)
Region: Midwest, South; Wet North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ; Bison
Bordered by:  Iowa (north); Illinois and the Mississippi River (east); Kentucky and Tennessee (southeast); Arkansas (south); Oklahoma (southwest); Kansas (west); Nebraska (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: Eastern black walnut (tree nut); channel catfish (fish); Norton/Cynthiana grape (grape); bobwhite quail (game bird); crayfish (invertebrate)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Midwestern and German foods to the north, Southern and Ozark foods to the South and in the center of the state; Kansas City BBQ (sweet BBQ sauce, with dry rub before barbecuing), gooey butter cake

There are various creation myths surrounding the gooey butter cake.  Most St. Louisans say the cake got its origins from a baking accident during the 1930's or early 1940's.  While What's Cooking America has two different reader stories about how their family members created the gooey butter cake, mostly what they say is that it was an accident that a German baker made while trying to make a coffee cake.  They can't really explain what they did wrong.

To make matters worse (or better, depending on your perspective), there are a few variations that made it difficult for me to choose one. The traditional one seems to have a sweet yeast bread crust with a gooey butter filling.,  Another variant had a yellow cake base with the same filling.  Different fillings can be made with or without cream cheese (note this Wikipedia reference) - the ones with cream cheese place the butter in the cake foundation.  Regardless, it's not exactly what Paula Deen would have us believe.

In the end, the version I made was the sweet yeast version with the buttery filling.  This particular recipe comes from the Serious Eats website, posted by Sydney Oland [2011].

The Recipe: Gooey Butter Cake

You will need the following, divided into the crust and the filling (for exact measurements, see the original recipe at Serious Eats):

For the crust you will need:
* yeast (one packet)
* warm milk (warm enough to let the yeast "blossom" but not hot enough to kill it)
* butter, sugar and salt (to cream together - I had all of this)
* egg and flour (had them)

For the filling you will need:
* even more butter (pile it on, folks)
* salt and sugar (again, to cream with the butter)
* egg and flour (again, had them)
* light corn syrup, water and vanilla (I forgot to put vanilla in the photo, but you do need this)

Start by warming your milk and sprinkling the yeast on top of it.

Next, cream together the butter, sugar and salt.

Mix into this the egg, flour and yeasty milk - do not add this until it bubbles.  After 10 minutes mine only slightly bubbled, leading to my dough not really rising too much.

Leave the dough under a towel for at least two hours, more if better.

While the dough rises, mix together the corn syrup, water and vanilla extract with a whisk.

Next, cream the rest of the butter, salt and sugar.

Blend in the flour, egg and corn syrup mixture.

And it should end up looking like this.

When ready, preheat the oven to 350°F, and press the dough into the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan.

Pour the filling over top of the crust, and spread it around.

Bake for about 35 minutes.

Despite my crust never really rising, I liked my gooey butter cake.  It was far sweeter than the recipe lets on - not a problem for me.  Maybe I left it in a little long since it was not as gooey as I had expected.  I could not get enough of this after I pulled it out of the oven.  I ended up eating several pieces.  It is that addictive.  The Serious Eats recipe suggests you eat this sprinkled with confectioner's sugar and drink it with strong coffee.  Not one for coffee myself, I will just eat this on its own.

- - - - -

We have reached the halfway point on this journey through the fifty states and then some.  Over the past year I've learned an amazing amount about half of the states plus the District of Columbia (including my own home state).  Only 25 more to go, plus one territory, because I feel like it.  The next stop in this second half of the series: the Big Sky Country of Montana.

Sources:

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

Bittman, Mark.  "For a Smoky Taste in Oven Ribs".  The New York Times website.  Published: December 4, 2009.

Goldwyn, Craig "Meathead".  "A taxonomy of American barbecue sauces".  Amazing Ribs website.  Last revised September 12, 2011.

Lee, Jennifer 8. "St. Paul Sandwiches (in St. Louis), Made with Egg Foo Young Patties".  The Fortune Cookie Chronicles website.  Published April 8, 2009.

"noahw" (Instructables.com user).  "Oven Smoked Ribs".  Instructables.com website.  Copyright 2011.

Oland, Sydney.  "Sunday Brunch: St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake".  Serious Eats website.  Published May 28, 2011.

Raichlen, Steve.  How to Grill: The Complete Illustrated Book of Barbecue Techniques.  Workman Publishing: New York, 2001.


STLToday.  "St. Paul Sandwich (Fortune Express)".  STLToday website.  Published August 17, 2011.

Stradley, Linda. "Gooey Butter Cake". What's Cooking America website.  Copyright 2004.

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

Look at the funny chef!

Ever since I caught a Thanksgiving marathon of Nadia G's Bitchin' Kitchen at my sister's house, I I have been fascinated by this hilarious show.  Those of you who have seen Italian-Quebecois chef Nadia Giosia (Nadia G) and her band of merry men may understand why I have taken to calling her the "anti-Sandra Lee": because she has edible food with a heavy dash of humor that is actually funny.  Plus, none of those irritating "tablescapes".

Which explains this all-star Christmas video from her recent Christmas special.  Watch for the rockin' guy in the Ravens jersey. Yeah you know who I'm talking about.