Panic Blog

Panic recently enjoyed a working visit from our German friends, TheCodingMonkeys. We certainly never expected them to treat us to a home-cooked meal, but treat us they did. Danke, coole Typen! —Neven

Hi, my name is Toby, I work for TheCodingMonkeys, and I love cooking. I live in Bavaria.

So, when we were visiting Panic in Portland, we took the opportunity to bring some Old Europe culture to those American barbarians and cook some traditional Bavarian food. Pork roast is a classic Sunday dish. Fifty years ago, the mother of a family would go to church in the Saturday evening, so she could prepare this meal for the family the next morning and have it ready when they returned from Sunday mass. It takes some time to cook, but it’s not all that complicated.

Cooking for Panic was very enjoyable, not least of all because they have an entire kitchen in their office. What passes for an office kitchen in Europe is usually a tiny room with a coffee cooker and a fridge. Not a four-burner kitchen range with an oven and a sink you could take a bath in. In a word, it was awesome. Add to that Les, our native guide to the jungle of Portland grocery shopping (who was absolutely indispensable), and the rest of the office crew, and you can guess we had a great time.

Thanks again to Panic for having us!

Traditional Bavarian Pork Roast (for 4 persons)

Pork Roast (“Schweinsbraten”)

• 750g (1 1/2 lb) pork shoulder / loin / ham roast, skin-on¹
• 2 onions

Veggies:²

• Carrots
• Root parsley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley#Root_parsley) ³
• Leeks
• Celery root
• Caraway
• Garlic
• Beer

1. This should preferrably be boneless (makes carving easier). You will probably need to specially order this from your butcher beforehand to make sure they leave the skin on the meat.

2. All of the veg are optional and you can use as much or as little of each as you want. Don’t use *too* many carrots though, or their taste’ll come through too strongly. Basically any roots and tubers will do. Even potatoes, in a pinch.

3. You may not be able to get this. We substituted turnip or rutabaga. See 2.

Bread Dumplings (“Semmelknödel”)

• 4 bread rolls⁴, dried, sliced thinly
• 1 onion
• 2-3 eggs
• salt, pepper, nutmeg
• parsley
• 1/4 l (1 cup) milk

4. Those are German white bread rolls. The bread is similar to a soft French baguette (which is, in fact, a good substitute). We used hamburger buns, which made the dumplings a little sweeter than I’d have liked. Bread dumplings are a food made with leftovers, so make sure the bread is really dry. If you don’t have any old bread lying around, cut fresh bread into slices (1cm [1/2″] thickness), and leave it to dry for a day.

Cabbage Salad (“Kraut”)

• Cabbage⁵
• Vinegar
• Caraway

5. This particular kind of cabbage, called Weißkraut (“white cabbage”), has pretty tough leaves and looks like this:

One of the best foods in the US can be ordered and enjoyed some nine blocks from my house. At Pok Pok, a restaurant where you can discover a new favorite each time you go back, it’s best to start out with chef Andy Ricker’s amazing fish-sauce wings. And if you find yourself away from Portland, or the understandably long wait at the restaurant gets you down, make them yourself. It’s as easy as any other chicken-wing recipe!

This is based on the Ike’s fish-sauce wings recipe as printed in Food & Wine magazine. To feed 6, you’ll need:

• 1/2 cup fish sauce
• 1/2 cup superfine sugar
• 4 garlic cloves, 2 crushed and 2 minced
• 3 pounds chicken wings, split at the drumettes
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for frying
• 1-2 cups cornstarch
• bird’s eye chilis to taste, seeded and minced

A few words about the ingredients:

Once you’ve tried these wings, the words fish sauce will fill you not with terror, but with a primal sort of craving. Like soy sauce, it’s marvelous at adding savory, meaty saltiness to foods. And like soy sauce, it loves being combined with sugar. Head on over to your local Asian market and buy an extravagant amount of Southeast Asia’s favorite condiment for under $2 – the best brands are Tiparos, Squid, and Three Crabs. Stay away from domestic imitations as they’ll be weak and overpriced.

You can use regular sugar, but superfine sugar will dissolve in the fish sauce much easier. It’s basically finely ground sugar. This is different from confectioner’s (powdered) sugar, which also contains cornstarch.

To start, grab the largest bowl you have. (No, not that one. Larger. Larger still. There, that one.) Whisk together the sugar and the fish sauce, and mix in the crushed garlic. Pat the wings dry and add them to the bowl; cover and refrigerate for 2-3 hours, tossing a few times to coat evenly.

In a small pan, fry the minced garlic until fragrant and golden, but not brown; drain on paper towels.

Time to fry the chicken: in a large and heavy pot (preferably a dutch oven) heat 2 inches of oil to 350 F. Use a candy thermometer if you have one; if not, drop in a piece of bread. When it makes a satisfying sizzling sound on entry, you’re good; when the oil bubbles violently, you’ve gone too far. This would also be a good time to preheat your oven to 200 F and make room for a large pan with a rack set in it; you’ll dry your wings here and keep them warm at the same time.

Pat the wings dry, reserving the marinade in the bowl. Transfer the marinade to a saucepan and heat over medium-high heat until syrupy.

Pour the cornstarch into a shallow, wide pan or bowl. Dip the wings in it one by one and toss to coat; shake them off until there’s a dusting of cornstarch on the meat, but no clumps. Do this right before you drop the wings in the fryer; resist the temptation to coat them and let them sit in the bowl, as this would result in a less-than-crispy surface. Fry the wings in batches, making sure not to crowd the pot. They should turn golden-brown with specs of black; it should take 10 minutes or so per batch.

When the wings are done, drip them over the pot and place them on the rack in the pan, then return the whole thing to the oven. It’s always a good idea to air-dry your fried goods instead of plopping them onto paper towels where they’ll sit in their own grease.

Grab another large bowl and move all the wings to it. Pour the now-syrupy marinade through a strainer over the wings and toss to coat. Add the fried garlic and the chilies (if using, according to your heat preference) to finish. Serve on large lettuce leaves, sprinkling with chopped cilantro and mint if you’re into that sort of thing.

We made these at the office recently and they were a big success. Les made some awesome sides, and had this to say about the experience:

My contribution to the meal certainly could have gone more smoothly, but I survived.

For the green papaya salad, I once again referred to a recipe from the great She Simmers. I used a large granite mortar and pestle — strictly forbidden of course — but I was gentle and over-pulverizing generally wasn’t a problem. Multiplying the recipe to feed a dozen people was tricky, but after an hour of tasting and adjusting, the result was close enough.

An additional challenge was in creating a vegan som tam for Mike and Garrett. I substituted the fish sauce with a mixture of seaweed-infused water, a bit of soy sauce, and pickled garlic.

I was also tasked with making sticky rice but I’m just going to say it wasn’t my proudest culinary moment and leave it at that.

Very humble, that Les. Our newest employee, James, made bún salad. These crisp dishes were much-needed islands of refreshment in the sea of savory-sweet wingness.

In conclusion: Check out Pok Pok, don’t fear the fish sauce, snap out of the Pad Thai rut and explore Southeast Asia’s delicious cuisine. Enjoy!

As attentive readers of our blog know, the Panic kitchen occasionally turns into a battleground as yours truly and our one and only Les Pozdena compete in a format similar to TV’s Iron Chef™. Our co-workers judge us – not very harshly, I must admit – on presentation, taste, and use of the sort-of-secret ingredient.

The last such event took place two weeks ago and it was both heartwarming and a little sad – you see, the battle format was put aside as we joined forces to tackle a challenge neither of us had any advantage in:

Vegan cooking.

The newest addition to our team, Mr. Garrett Moon, is vegan. It would have been downright unfriendly of us to do anything except stretch our cooking muscles and come up with an interesting thing or five to welcome him with. My offerings, prepared while wearing the Salt & Fat cook’s jacket my pal Jim gifted me, are described below.

Ginger-scallion noodles

I based this on David Chang’s recipe, which was itself based on a Noodletown dish. There’s no sense in reinventing it, but it’s always helpful to hear how recipes work in the real world.

First note: fresh ramen noodles make a big difference. If you can’t find them, go with fresh yakisoba. I’m sure there’s an Asian market near you that makes or carries one or the other noodle. (For this lunch we had to use yakisoba since ramen noodles contain egg; I made this with ramen later and it was noticeably better.)

I topped the noodles with fried cauliflower, tossed in a sauce very similar to the fish-sauce vinaigrette Chang describes. I substituted soy sauce for fish sauce and upped the garlic for extra pungency. Either version of this is really great.

My presentation was simple – noodles, cauliflower, and pickled carrots. I also skipped the puffed rice and the mint. This was still a wicked flavorful dish, savory and full of kick.

Khao Man Tofu

The definitive recipe for this delicious Thai street food has already been written by Leela at She Simmers. I have only two things to add to it:

1. I add some roasted peanuts to the sauce before chopping,
2. Since boiled chicken skin isn’t very appetizing, I remove it (in giant strips) after cooking and fry it. It makes an awesomely crunchy, salty topping for the rice.

Khao man gai (“rice fat chicken”) is easily made vegetarian or vegan; most of the flavor is in the sauce. For my version, I replaced the boiled chicken with a mix of sautéed tofu cutlets and seitan. In the future, I’ll try this with mushrooms, as the tofu was a bit boring.

It didn’t matter so much – everything else was delicious. I cooked the rice in veggie stock (with added vegetable oil). My recommendation regarding stock is unchanged: make your own if possible, and if not, use Better Than Bouillon bases. They taste better than Pacific, Imagine, or any other canned or boxed brand, and they’re infinitely more convenient. How often have you opened a big box of stock only to use half and throw the rest out a week later? This way, you make what you need at whatever strength will work best for the recipe.

The key to the sauce is yellow soybean paste. Please note that this is NOT interchangeable with miso, and it’s also not yellow. (It’s made from yellow soybeans.) Look for something like this at your local Asian grocery store. You might have to ask for it; the bottle I got didn’t have a label in English. Once you do find it, I’m sure you’ll like its über-savory taste and ridiculuous price tag ($1.18 at Uwajimaya).

About that fried chicken skin… I replaced it with fried shallots. They changed the flavor profile a little bit, but me, I’ll take fried shallots on top of anything.

Few US Thai places I’ve visited serve khao man gai. That’s a shame – it’s a very friendly and distinctive dish. When in Portland, don’t miss Nong’s Khao Man Gai cart downtown.

Black garlic sorbet

More precisely, what I served was apricot sorbet with fried bananas and black garlic sauce. Black garlic is a recent addition to US kitchens, a sweet and caramel-y thing completely unlike the pungent bulb we know. Common garlic is fermented until the cloves turn soft and black; the result is, to my tongue, like a combination of balsamic vinegar and Marmite. If you can’t find it (check Whole Foods or this website) make the balsamic sauce without it; don’t substitute ordinary garlic.

• 1 qt apricot nectar (I like the Looza brand)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• a bit of lemon juice
• 1 1/2 tbsp port wine

This recipe requires an ice-cream maker. I’m very happy with Cuisinart’s model. There’s nothing special you need to know about it except that the bowl should be chilled for at least 24 hours; we just store ours in the freezer so it’s always ready to go.

Pour the nectar into a large bowl and stir in the sugar until it dissolves fully. Add a few squirts of lemon juice and the port; stir and chill in the fridge. It’s crucial that everything (except the electric part of the ice cream maker, of course) be as cold as possible – the faster your desert chills, the smoother the texture.

Once the bowl and the juice are sufficiently cold, pour the juice into the maker as directed and take for a 20-25 minute spin. Ice cream and sorbet will always look a bit soft at this point; they need to go in an airtight container and in the freezer for another hour or two.

During that time, make the sauce:

• 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (Lucini is always a good bet)
• 1 tbsp port wine
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 3-4 cloves black garlic

Stir and heat all of these in a saucepan over low heat until the vinegar reduces by half. Strain and set aside at room temperature.

Next, fry up some sliced baby bananas in a tiny bit of oil. I slice mine the long way so they’re easier to handle. Fried bananas are great warm, but since sorbet doesn’t melt as creamy as ice cream does, I let the bananas cool off a bit.

Top the sorbet with bananas and drizzle the syrup over it. Taste the syrup to gauge how much you’d like to use; it’s potent stuff, and also delicious over anything else you might accompany with a sweet sauce.

Les, my partner in this co-op-mode fight, presented the following menu:

• Mushroom-walnut paté with cornichons
• Cream of asparagus soup
• Squale (sautéed butternut squash and kale)

It’s hard to believe we were working with any limitations at all!