Sunmukimchi, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bacteria

I don’t think we ever ate turnips when I was growing up, and as a result I never formed a taste model for them; they always strike me as potatoes that aren’t quite potatoey enough. (Potatoes were slow to catch on after their introduction to the Old World, but supplanted turnips as the dominant root vegetable in much of Eastern Europe after a series of crop failures in the 18th century.) I use turnips when a recipe calls for them, but don’t recall ever having been struck by the sudden hankering for that slightly sharp, moderately starchy experience. So, when we received half a pound of turnips early in our CSA adventures, I had to set about looking for good ideas.

As luck would have it, good ideas were already upon me, hidden in a book I’d purchased years ago yet had barely ever used. Linda Ziedrich’s The Joy of Pickling had entertained me with anecdotes, literary snippets about pickles and interesting flavor ideas, but I’d never followed any of its instructions except to experiment, while I was in college, with pickled garlic cloves.

Blueberry Lime Preserves

I’ve been delinquent with regard to CSA-related posts lately, and all non-parasha posts for that matter. My main excuse reason is that I’ve been working on the high ropes course at a day camp, which means real physical labor each weekday, which in turn means I’m just tired a lot of the time. I am in decent shape—much better after five weeks doing this sort of thing—but I am not 18 years old anymore, and my body does not spring back from a day of running around in 100 degree weather as it once might have done. Time to start addressing my backlog of posts-to-be.

The CSA has dumped spadefuls of blueberries on us since it started, and we’ve struggled to keep up. We don’t eat blueberries out of hand very often, and while Terri makes a killer blueberry buckle, it’s something of an operation and requires an annoying degree of cleanup. (Turning the oven on in this weather isn’t much of an enticement either.) We put some of them in pancakes, but we rarely have a sit-down breakfast together more than once a week—something I’d love to change—and there are only so many pancakes one person can eat on a Sunday. We needed something to do with these berries that would either use them up before they rotted, or somehow preserve them for later.

Carrot “consommé”

I don’t know whether it’s auspicious or inauspicious to start a Jewish food blog right before Pesach. This is a food-driven time of year for Jews, when virtually all foodstuffs used during the year have to be destroyed, or at least stored away and (perhaps nominally) sold to someone who isn’t Jewish. The food we do eat can get . . . interesting. American kosher consumers have an unfortunate habit of trying to eat all the things they would normally eat, modified to be appropriate for Pesach.

Just so we’re clear, “appropriate for Pesach” means:

• Other than matzah, you can forget about anything made from wheat, barley, oats, rye or spelt, or from any of their byproducts. This may sound daunting, but trust me, it’s dauntinger than that. Did it occur to you that conventional white vinegar isn’t allowed, since it’s usually fermented from grain alcohol? Don’t you wonder what else didn’t occur to you?
• Ashkenazim are also expected not to eat kitniyot, a category of grains and vaguely grain-like foods that cannot become chametz by themselves, but for various historical reasons have been avoided during the holiday. Corn and soybeans, which show up in more foods than most people would ever imagine, are among the foods considered to be kitniyot.

Believe it or not, unleavened breakfast rolls made from ground up matzah instead of flour are pretty horrible. (Oh, you believed it immediately? Never mind.) Our philosophy of Pesach food is to eat only things we would willingly eat at other times of year. Enter the carrot consommé, which is not really a consommé at all, and which I learned how to make from an e-mail my mother sent me in 2005; she got it from the New York Times Passover Cookbook, and apparently it’s Charlie Trotter’s recipe. We served this with matzo balls to ten people at our seder last year. Only one of the guests was a vegetarian, but nobody missed the presence of chicken broth. It couldn’t be simpler to make.

Ingredients

• 4 lbs carrots, washed but not peeled
• 1 large white onion, unpeeled, with the root end trimmed
• 2 whole cloves
• 2 inches fresh ginger, rinsed and split in half lengthwise
• 2 ribs celery
• 2 bay leaves
• 5 black peppercorns
• 2 sprigs thyme
• 3 quarts water
  

Instructions

1. Place all the ingredients in a large stock pot and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for three hours. Turn off the heat and let cool for one hour.
2. Strain all vegetables and spices from the soup and discard. (I left in the cloud of floating thyme leaves. They were pretty.)
3. Add salt a bit at a time until the broth tastes the way you want it to. (My mother thinks it tastes great even without the salt, but I think it tastes like weak vegetable tea. Such is taste.) You can also add ground black pepper; I added hot Hungarian paprika to my own bowl.

The Fat that Dare Not Speak its Name

I wrote this a few months ago for The Jew and the Carrot. Though editorial dialectic eventually produced a rather different essay, I still enjoy the original and thought I’d share it. Thanks go out to my friend Andrea for proofreading and suggesting a few tweaks that really improved the article.

My spouse, suffering the loss of appetite that accompanies mononucleosis, has been taking in about 300 calories a day in the form of miso soup and apple juice, so when she requests chicken soup for Shabbat I know that it has to be serious chicken soup. In fact, it has to be emergency chicken soup, crowded with meat, vegetables and egg noodles two fingers wide. We’re talking about real Jewish azithromycin here. (Everything is resistant to penicillin these days.) It’s Friday afternoon, and I am stripping skin off of raw chicken leg quarters, when the little voice in my head speaks up.

“What, you’re just going to throw that away?” The voice knows I have a strong aversion to wasting food.

“This is chicken skin. I save bones for stock, but skin?”

The voice is having none of it. “Waste not, want not,” he says. “Doesn’t a commitment to sustainability mean using resources as efficiently as possible?”

“But what am I supposed to do with this stuff?” I can tell where the conversation is going, but don’t want to admit it.

“You know exactly what to do. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.” The voice is clearly growing impatient with me. “You cook with butter all the time, and butter is solid at room temperature, but it isn’t.” The voice doesn’t have to tell me what it is.

“What will my wife think? What about my friends?” I know that this is a lame appeal as soon as it comes out of my mouth.

“They’ll come around. You’ll tell them about the economy, and the new austerity.” Another pause. I can feel the big one coming. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

I cave. Driven by patriotic guilt and a secret desire to know what I’ve been missing, I cut the chicken skin into strips and place it in a skillet along with a few lumps of white fat from the legs, then put the heat on very low. For a long time nothing happens, which is great, because it gives me time to chop carrots while pretending I’ve done nothing wrong. After several minutes, though, a clear liquid begins to creep southward in the skillet. (Our stove top is not quite level.) Soon a distinct crackling sound announces itself, and I find that I’m shaking the pan and turning the bits of skin without having any real control over my actions. Before I have time to think, the crackling has all but subsided and left me with a once-praised, now-reviled inheritance from my Ashkenazi ancestors. Figuring I might as well go through with it, I pour the result through a coffee filter into a jar that once held fruit preserves, separating the golden-clear liquid from the crunchy, light-as-air skin fragments. I cross out the writing on the jar’s label, replace it with the words “Don’t ask,” and put it in the fridge immediately, figuring that the Mediterranean Diet Police might batter down the door any second.

Schmaltz (the rendered chicken fat, of which I now have maybe an ounce) and gribenes (the skin cracklings, which were delicious) aren’t the sorts of things people normally talk about in the context of healthy or responsible eating, but they should be. They’re made from something that many of us have been eating around and throwing away at least since the fat-phobic ’90s, and using them means reducing the environmental impact of meat production by stretching the product further. It is also, of course, a financially sound thing to do. As for health, how many people who cringe at the idea of schmaltz make regular use of hydrogenated margarine or shortening in their pareve baking? Schmaltz is a naturally occurring fat; it contains no trans fatty acids and a surprisingly benign balance of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. (At least one commercially available brand of kosher chicken fat is partially hydrogenated, and therefore contains at least some trans fatty acids, even if the FDA’s labeling rules allow the makers to claim that their product contains “0 grams” thereof. Check the ingredient list, not the nutrition information.) The strongest argument I can find against using schmaltz, assuming that you’re eating chicken anyway, is that it takes some getting used to. To be blunt, it tastes exactly like the sort of thing we’ve been told for decades is so bad for us that it’s practically immoral, and dwelling on recent epidemiological data seems unlikely to make that feeling go away.

So try this: if you’re the sort of person who can’t bear to eat soggy poultry skin—and I count myself among that august body of consumers—take it off before braising or stewing. A few simple steps and a relatively hands-off process will transform that wasted material, which you paid for, into some sadly overlooked building blocks for great flavor. When was the last time austerity tasted this good?