Text 1828, 158 rader
Skriven 2007-05-16 15:14:25 av Carol Shenkenberger (3:800/201)
Kommentar till text 1827 av Ardith Hinton (1:153/716.0)
Ärende: Re: Cooking Terms
=========================
*** Quoting Ardith Hinton from a message to Carol Shenkenberger ***
CS> If you do not mind a new thread (I suspect not)
AH> The more the merrier.... :-))
Figured so!
CS> very confusing! Green Pepper especially.
AH> Yes, I understand now what you mean about "green pepper".
AH> Nora has a book called THE SPICY FOOD LOVER'S BIBLE which explains su
AH> matters, and you & she have inspired me to learn more. Nora thoroughl
AH> enjoys spicy food... I'm beginning to appreciate it. I come from a lo
AH> line of "meat-&-potatoes" types who considered their food "spiced up"
AH> if it had salt & pepper in it. For them, of course, "pepper" meant wh
AH> pepper. Both my mother & my mother-in-law used it because certain mal
AH> in the family regarded black specks with suspicion. I used black pepp
AH> openly & went on from there. Meanwhile, Dallas introduced me to vario
AH> "foreign foods" which my parents wouldn't eat. I guess our daughter i
AH> also stretching the limits a bit more than her own parents did... [chu
Well, I've always been an adventurous eater and since i left home, made it a
point even as a poor college kid to get 'something new' each grocery trip. I
still do that very often out here. The most recent one might seem 'funny'
depending on what you were raised on.
I'd never tried cooking a duck. There's a whole series in the COOKING echo
about this and how it worked out when we made our first one Sunday.
Although we normally don't post 'MM recipes' here, I hope this will come over
as intended, a lesson in how to type up a recipe so that it doesnt cause
confusion when read by people abroad.
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
Title: Xxcarol's Simply Ducky
Categories: Xxcarol, Duck
Yield: 6 Servings
1 ea Whole dressed Duck, 4lbs
1/3 c Jufran brand banana sauce
1/3 c Thai 'Hot-Sweet' sauce
1/4 c Datu Puti brand soy sauce
1 ea Large white onion, 'sweet'
I've been wanting to cook a Duck since I was in college but my skills
at the start when I moved out from home were not up to that and the
price was beyond college student means. For years though it's been
in the back of my mind as a 'wanna try that'.
About 3 weeks ago in the cooking echo, I saw a lovely recipe and
mentioned that Duck is pretty hard to find here but I kept it in
mind. A week later, one of the rare times when they have Duck at the
commisary occured and I got one. It's a touch over 4 lbs. It sat in
the freezer while we contemplated recipes. My initial intentions
were to put it in the rotisserie with a dry rub but it turned out to
not fit my unit, being about 3 inches too long.
Next I went to plan 'B' which was to line my biggest baking pan with
opened cans as I didnt have a rack to raise it out of the grease with
here and Duck I was told is a very greasy meat. I was all setup to
do it that way when Don went to the exchange and got me a mother's
day gift of a real covered unit (pyrex bottom, metal lifting rack,
metal lid) that just perfectly fit the duck. Yippiee!
After perusing many recipes, we settled on a simple adaption. I
normally try a new food the first time, in a simpler cooking style.
Having not even tasted restraunt Duck in 10 years, I had little
memory so was going on other's experience and what they used. I
decided pre-steaming was probably a good idea but a bit too much for
a first time duck experiment.
Using ideas from many other recipes, we settled on a simple way using
things I have here and didnt have to go out shopping for. The Datu
Puti brand soy sauce is considerably lower-sodium than Kikkoman Lite
and tastes much better. In fact, all their line of sauces are lower
sodium but none are marked 'low sodium'. I've found all of them to
be excellent. I also find all the Jufran brand products to be lower
sodium and extremely tastey, so the 'hot-sweet' sauce here was Jufran
brand as well.
Mix the 3 sauces in a plastic bowl and let sit while washing the duck
out. I set the duck in a suspended strainer that has adjustable sides
and sits at the top of the sink. It seemed 'drying the duck' was
used in almost every recipe so I let it dry for 1 hour.
Once ready, I heated the oven to 425F then slathered the sauce on all
sides and cooked it with the lid on the roaster, for 30 mins 'breast
up'. I cut the onion in 1/2 and stuffed the cavity with that.
I then reduced the heat to 375F and flipped it over, re-saucing it
well on all sides then baking another 30 mins. I raised the temp to
425F and did another 20 mins 'breast up' and re-sauced. At the end,
we took the lid off the roaster, and re-sauced the top (breast) and
let it 'crisp' another 15-20 mins.
The sugars in the sauces made for a lovely dark flavorful skin that
was somewhat crispy at the topside. We let it sit on the top of the
stove to 'set' for about 15 mins then started picking off favored
parts.
Perfection for a family where we all love dark meat <grin> and white
meat gets used mostly in chicken salad. I said 'feeds 6' above as an
estimate but we don't eat that much meat so for us, it would be more
like 10 servings. There's plenty of drippings and fat rendered out
which is currently smothering the leftovers in a sort of 'confit'
type of arrangement. There's a perfect duck carcass in the freezer
awaiting being made into duck soup.
The giblets went into a pot of water with just chinese 5 spice added
and the broth has Don in rapures.
We served it with sticky rice and green beans. The onion got all
eaten up as a side nosh.
From the Sasebo Kitchen of: xxcarol on 14May2007
MMMMM
Critical here is I describe what *I* mean by a 'roaster' before I use the term
and the reason is that term isnt used universally. Everyone though can get
the picture from the pyrex bottom with a liftable rack and a lid. Ok, they
may not know 'pyrex' is a glass bottom but that's not essential.
If I'd just said 'Roaster' half would ask if that was a dutch oven and some
would just not know what it was. In American english, a roaster can be a
large enough bird to roast, or a unit used to cook them in. In this case, I
meant specifically a roster pan with a liftable rack that keeps the meat out
of the juices, and with a lid.
Dutch Oven BTW, can be a confusion point. The term got reused many ways and
they can be distinctly different cooking gear. Variations of the use can
yield clay pot (with clay lid, often soaked and somewhat pourous), slow cooker
of a metal type with teflon-like interior and sets on a counter, crockpot with
ceramic insert that sits on a counter.
Crockpot is another one of those terms, though not related to the duck recipe
above. Slow cooker is one term but that can be confusing to Europeans as some
will be thinking a metal unit that is almost like an electric frying pan with
a lid that sits on the counter (AKA, one of the variations of 'Dutch Oven'
I've seen).
So you see, when we talk across a language, we somethings *think* we know what
the other person said, but it tends to show up in recipes pretty fast if we
actually settle in to make them.
Oh and Mushrooms. Generally a bad idea to say just 'mushrooms' to a European
as some area, the common 'button' mushroom of the USA, isnt the normal one.
They may work well to use whatever they have in place of that, but it can be
confusing. Tell a japanese wife to 'stuff a mushroom' and she'd grab the
tweasers (grin). To understand that, lookup a picture of Enoki and Shmenji,
the common 'mushrooms' used most here.
xxcarol
--- Telegard v3.09.g2-sp4
* Origin: SHENK'S EXPRESS, Sasebo Japan 81-6160-527330 (3:800/201)
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