After botching some grilled ribs (note to self: buy a grill thermometer), I decided to try the America’s Test Kitchen Over-Barbecued Spareribs (lame paywall). A bit fussy – like a lot of ATK recipes. But it works well. Grooooood ribs. I think I was using babyback, rather than spare (because that’s what was on sale).
Incidentally, that wine is awesome. Casillero del Diable – a Chilean Carmanere. Pretty inexpensive, very very good.
The day Kristin, her parents, and I moved all our junk into our apartment in North Carolina, we ended up sweaty, tired, and hungry. Around that time, Kristin and I remembered that it was in fact our wedding anniversary. We needed some kind of tasty, relaxing dinner, for sure.
We ended up at The Pit in Raleigh, which solidly delivered. People talk a lot about their pulled pork (they do whole-hog bbq down there), but Kristin and I both go for the ribs – best I’ve had anywhere. Now, since this was North Carolina, the #1 producer of sweet potatoes in the U.S., providing a full 38.5% of all U.S. production, it will not surprise you to learn that sweet potato fries were on the menu.
I’d like to take a moment to apologize to the benevolent Creator for the atrocities perpetrated upon such a beautiful tuber. We fallen humans have defiled the vegetable with all manner of unnecessary and haughty trappings, such as obscene amounts of butter, sugar, cinamon, and (blasphemy!) marshmallows.
Anyways, they were delicious. And I tried to make them at home, and never found a great recipe that really told you all you needed to know… Some of them produced mushy results, some missed important notes, some took a long while, and others were just too darn fussy. It’s an oversight I wish to correct with this post. You’re welcome, internet.
Sweet Potato Fries
Get ready: big pot of salted water, 2 sweet potatoes, olive oil, coarse (kosher) salt, freshly-ground pepper, a sheet pan, covered with a sheet of aluminum foil (for easy cleanup), colander and large bowl.
Initial prep: Set the pot on the heat, bring to boil. Preheat oven to 450 F. Coat foiled pan with a little bit of olive oil – spread around with your fingers or a brush. This helps keep the potatoes from sticking.
More prep: Take sweet potatoes, wash them well (potatoes grow in dirt, after all), trim the ends, and slice a narrow slice off the side, so that they lay flat and won’t move around while cutting. With a chef’s knife (i.e. large, sharp, and non-serrated), carefully cut the potatoes into fries just over 1/4 inch thick. Be careful – raw sweet potatoes are tough and fibrous. Doing this with a dull knife or without caution is a good way to lose a finger. Don’t let it scare you, just learn you some knife skills. They’re kindof a big deal.
Is your water boiling? Good. Boil potatoes for 5 minutes. Do not overcook. Drain in colander – be careful with the steam. Let them sit in the colander for a minute – you want them fairly dry. Put them in the bowl, add “some” olive oil – I dunno, 2 tablespoons? Add “some” salt and pepper. Go a bit easy on the pepper. Cumin is also good here if you like. Toss a bit (be careful not to mash – some fry-damage is inevitable though). Transfer to the sheet pan, spreading them out, and roast for 10 minutes. Use a spatula to flip them over a bit (it’s impossible to do perfectly, just toss a bit again). Roast for another 10-15 minutes. The final roasting time will be determined by how large your julienne is, how waterlogged the fries were going in, and how crowded the pan was. Watch them and pull them out when they start to look crispy and not black. Sweet potato fries will get black fairly quickly once they start, so watching them is important.
The final product is a marvelous thing. They aren’t deep fried, so they’re not going to have the texture of a fast-food fry, but they should be a little crispy on the outside, with a little color, and soft and tasty on the inside.
It may seem a bit involved, and it did take me a while to knock it out the first time I did it. But I’ve done it several times since and can now get it done lickety-split while working other foods too. Cleanup is a breeze – trash the foil, and you’ve got a pot, a colander, a knife and a cutting board, none of which are particularly nasty.
There are plenty of refinements possible – for instance, it’s nice to have the sheet pan a bit hot (but not smoking the oil) before adding the fries so the bottoms start crisping up as soon as they hit the foil. But none of that is essential. This recipe works for me, helps me get more vegetables on the plate, and eat real food without fussing too much about it, which is exactly what I want.
Happy cooking, and watch your fingers.
Celery root Dijon salad thing (one of the few times recipes packaged with ingredients actually seemed worthwhile), roast Yukon Gold potatoes, zucchini, and Japanese eggplant.
Oh yeah, and a pretty well-cooked tuna steak.
Inspired by this aggregation of awesomeness.
"Salad's funny because it thinks it's real food!"
The salmon was purdy good though. Four kinds of plants in that meal. FOUR KINDS! South Beach friendly.
Just your basic lentil-based foodporn:
I *think* lentils are okay on the South Beaches. Hope so!
From Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. Fricking great. Two lessons:
Side note, I love watching really flavorful stuff reduce slowly for a long time. Reminds me of the recipe for “Weapons Grade Ratatouille” that I want to try sometime soon…
Made with Trader Joe’s whole wheat pizza dough, a crap ton of mozzarella cheese, red onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and basil.
Note on the TJ’s dough: The package says to put the toppings on & bake for 10-12 minutes. I did this once and MAN O MAN WAS IT A FAILURE. What you do is roll it out and bake for ten minutes, THEN add the toppings, then for another 10-12, then hit the broiler on for 1:30 to brown things a bit. Finicky? Maybe. Worth it? Oh yes.
Bean broth?
I was reading this recipe for Drunken Beans from my favorite food porn radio show, The Splendid Table, and I got myself all confuserlated. It calls for four cups of cooked beans, in their broth. I guessed correctly that the broth means “liquid you cooked the things in, dummy,” but was confused by the absence of any sort of quantity. I guess whatever fills in the cracks of 4 cups of beans. But I wasn’t sure, so I did some Googling.
And came across this fascinating article about bean broths or bean stocks on a site called Culinate. The article takes the idea of a bean stock to a more elevated level, suggesting that perhaps you add in some carrots, onions, bay leaves, and the like to the beans while they cook, as if you were making a more conventional vegetarian stock.
This is a real win, guys. A twofer. While you’re making beans for a recipe, you can add a few more ingredients (with no extra work), and end up with more flavorful beans, and a delicious, useful, and unknown byproduct! Fantastic. Again, measure out the stuff into bags and freeze for later.
I’m going to have to start reading Culinate, I think…
In the words of Pepin, Happy Cooking.
I’d like to thank all the Presidents of the United States of America for giving me this day off, and allowing me to work on my hobbies. And I’d like to thank myself for this stupidity-inducingly-good portabello mushroom sandwich. Oh man it was great. I am calling it “The Trotsky Portabello,” because the electronics junk you see behind the IQ-loweringly-delicious food is a breadboarded version of a guitar pedal I’m building, the Trotsky Drive.
