Anyway, this blog entry goes into some detail about the casting process for MasterChef and what these 100 folks endured for almost 6 months on their long and arduous road to the MC studio in Los Angeles.  It’s a must-read before you watch the premier!

Enjoy this behind-the-MasterChef-scenes blog by clicking HERE!

If you’ve never eaten just-picked asparagus, you have no idea what real asparagus tastes like.  Asparagus looses 80% of its moisture and 50% of its sugar within 8 hours of being picked.  Which means that all the asparagus you buy in the grocery store is long, long dead.  When you pick asparagus in the garden, sweet juices drip out the bottom.  You can pop the whole stalk into your mouth and chew it, and it’s crisp and juicy and almost as sweet as fruit.  It’s a sin to cook such beautiful asparagus.

But I’ve been getting so much that I have to preserve some of it for the future, and this is my favorite way…as spicy pickles!  This recipe is for a full gallon of asparagus pickles.  You can quarter it to make a quart.  The actual amount of brine you will need depends on how tightly you pack the jar with veggies, so you may have to make another batch of brine really quick if the amount you make initially doesn’t fill the jar to the top.  These pickles are TO DIE FOR and pretty much anyone can eat them, no matter your dietary restrictions, whether you eat raw, vegan, vegetarian, paleo, low carb, etc.

Start by sterilizing your jar(s).  You can do this using the Sanitize cycle on your dishwasher, or you can pour boiling water into the jars to the rim, or just fill the jars with water and glug in a little bleach.  (If you do that, make sure to rinse the jars out well, or you’ll have bleachy pickles.)

You can use ANY combo of veggies, but this is what I use.  Wash them all and pack them into the jar:

2 pounds asparagus
2 bulbs garlic (cloves of one bulb whole, cloves of the other thinly sliced)
2 carrots, scrubbed and sliced (skin on)
1/2 onion, sliced
1 jalapeno, sliced (optional)
4 sprigs tarragon (or any fresh herb…optional)
handful radish seed pods (or sugar snap peas…optional)

In a large pot, combine:

2 cups apple juice
3 cups white vinegar
2 cups apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
1/2 cup sea salt (NOT iodized)
3/4 cup sugar (this does NOT make these sweet pickles, it balances the salt)
1/4 – 1/2 cup mustard seeds (I use a combination of foraged black mustard and storebought yellow mustard seeds)
2 Tablespoons black peppercorns
2-4 Tablespoons red pepper flakes
2-4 Tablespoons sriracha
handful pink peppercorns (optional)

Bring to a full rolling boil, then turn off the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes to extract the flavors.  Then bring to another full rolling boil and pour it into the jar to fully cover the veggies.

For refrigerator pickles, let the jar cool to room temp, and refrigerate for a week before eating…if you can wait that long!

If you are going to can the asparagus for long-term storage, make sure you have about a 1/2″ gap between the brine and the rim.  Clean the rim of the jar, affix the lid, and place into a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.  Then let them cool at room temperature.  If any of the lids don’t seal, put those jars in the fridge and eat them like refrigerator pickles.  I will admit that the texture of these pickles suffers after the water bath and long term storage, so I highly recommend making them as refrigerator pickles.  It’s easier!

And the vegemite jar was empty.  No Western Australia for 6 months for this crazy cook!

I want to deeply thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for participating in this journey with me.  So many of you all around the world took time out of your lives to snap a photo for me, or take a video for me.  The response has truly been overwhelming.  I’m no celebrity, and I never will be.  But the fact that thousands of you who I’ve never met would actually take time to do something for me to help me follow my dreams…that’s just miraculous.  I can’t thank you enough from the very bottom of my heart.

For those of you who’ve been sick of my crazy and incessant Facebook posts and Tweets the past few weeks, I deeply apologize.  I’ll be a bit quieter from now on, and not so needy.  I promise!  Ha ha ha…

There are 21 other shortlisted TasteMaster candidates out there in the world today (and 116 candidates for other “Best Jobs in the World”) who are dejected and very sad.  I’ve been through this type of crazy casting process a half-dozen times, so it’s old hat to me.  (I went to bed last night rather than waiting up for the results.)  So my thoughts go out to them right now.  They spent endless money, time, and effort doing NOTHING but Australia stuff the past month, endlessly hopeful and optimistic.  And when that momentum suddenly stops and you face rejection, its hard.  The first few times, at least!

For me, this simply means that my garden won’t grow wild with 6 months of neglect…my chickens won’t forget who I am and I’ll get to taste their first eggs…my family and friends won’t have to manage my life while I’m gone…my puppy and partner will continue to have a snuggle buddy at night…FRANK will continue to capture the excitement of Dallas foodies each month…and you all will just be getting photos of tomatoes, kitchen experiments, and chickens rather than wallabies and wombats and Western Australia beaches.

As with everything in my life, I see this as a sign that there’s something wildly more wonderful waiting in my future.  And if I was in Australia, I’d have missed it.  Opportunities knock every day for everyone.  And we’ve gotta be ready to jump when it’s the right one!

Watering a garden is fairly easy.  Line a soaker hose down each row, because you’ve got a constant row of plants that need water.  But for plants that are 5 to 10 feet apart, running a soaker hose would simply be an exercise in watering the weeds in between them:

In this case, it’s fairly simple to build a hybrid soaker hose that only waters at the plant.  Get a new hose, or find an old one that leaks and cut out the leaky part.  Attach the female end of the hose to your water faucet.  (Better yet, attach it to an automated timer on the faucet, so you never have to worry about it again.)  Run the hose to the first bush.  (For better aesthetics and to prevent the hose from cracking due to UV-ray exposure, dig a small trench and bury the hose.)

Cut the hose at the first bush.  To connect the regular hose to the soaker hose, you will use “hose menders” which are available in the garden hose section of your home supply store.  You’ll need 2 hose menders for each bush…maybe only 1 mender for the final bush.  The menders are available in plastic (cheaper but not as durable) and metal.  Plastic menders run about $2-$3 each, with metal ones running $4-$5.

First, slip the hose clamp onto the hose, then push the joining nipple halfway into the hose.  (It’s a good idea to leave the hose out in the sun for a few hours so that it’s nice and pliable.  You won’t be able to get the nipple into a cold, stiff hose.)  Using a screwdriver, tighten the clamp onto the hose.

Now take the cut end of the soaker hose, slip the clamp onto it, and push the nipple into it.  Tighten the nipple, but as soaker hoses are much softer than normal hoses, don’t overtighten or you might cut into the hose!

Curl the soaker hose around the base of your bush or tree:

Do your best to bury the hose beneath the mulch.  Now cut the soaker hose, and attach it to another section of normal hose using another hose mender.  Run the hose to the next bush, and lather, rinse, repeat!

Once you reach the final bush, just cut off the last section of soaker hose that has the end cap on it, and use that section around the bush.  That way you only have to use one hose mender.

You may need to use a stake or a rock or brick to hold the end of the hose in place around the bush, so that it doesn’t straighten out when the water pressure comes on.

Cover the hose up with mulch to prevent the water inside from heating up, and to prolong the life of the hose, which will become brittle and crack over years of UV exposure.  Heavily mulching the whole area will help reduce weeds and retain water.

Another important note is that if your house has extremely high water pressure, or if you want a low flow rate coming from the soaker hose. you may want to include a pressure regulator where the normal hose attaches to the faucet:

These regulators are included with almost all soaker hoses, just pry it out of the female end of the soaker hose and push it into the female end of the normal hose.  Some soaker hoses come with several different pressure regulators so you can have control over the amount of water entering the hose.

This setup will mean that watering your berry bushes will never be more complicated than turning on the water and setting a timer to turn it off…or as simple as programming an automatic timer once and forgetting about ever watering again.  That way you can focus on more important things, like planning what you’re going to do with all those delicious berries!

Feel free to comment below, especially if you have your own unique way of watering your berry bushes.  And subscribe to my blog near the top right corner of the screen to get updates every time I post a new blog on gardening, DIY, cooking, or travel.  Thanks for reading!

The “backstrap” or tenderloin is the best cut of venison by far, and in my opinion, is the ONLY venison cut worthy of cooking in steak or roast form.  Many people enjoy shoulder steaks and rump roasts of venison, but to me, these cuts can be very gamey and tough, even when braised low and slow.  When I am gifted a venison carcass, everything but the backstrap gets ground up or cubed.  The cubes from the rump go into venison chili and other stew-like applications.  And the ground shoulder meat becomes meatballs…for venison makes the most splendid of all meatballs.  Combined with a little pork for added fat (venison has almost no fat at all), the bold flavor of the venison makes for a meatball that will leave your head spinning, it’s so good.  If you don’t have access to venison, this is still a great meatball recipe, and you can substitute lean ground sirloin for a similar result.

Here’s how I make my venison meatballs, and at the end of the recipe, I’ll tell you how I normally serve them…with spaghetti and tomato sauce.  But they can be served on their own as an appetizer, either browned in a pan until done, or breaded/battered and deep fried.  They can be paired with a salad, added to a soup, paired with another protein as a sophisticated main course, or simply served with some veggies as a substantial supper.

This recipe makes about 70 quarter-sized meatballs.  That’s a lot.  It will serve a big crowd, OR you can place some of the meatballs on a baking sheet sprayed with oil, and freeze them solid.  Then put them in a ziploc bag and toss them back into the freezer for last-minute dinners.  Add them to the saute pan still frozen…they will thaw quickly as they cook.

In a large bowl, combine:

2 pounds ground venison (preferably coarsely ground, or substitute lean ground beef sirloin)
1 pound ground pork
2 cups Parmesan cheese
1 1/2 cups bread crumbs
1 large onion, finely diced
1 head of garlic, cloves finely minced
1 Tablespoon red pepper flakes
1 Tablespoon dried oregano
1 Tablespoon dried thyme
2 Tablespoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
2 eggs

There’s no pretty way to do this, unless you leave it in your stand mixer on low speed for 5 minutes.  (Which makes the texture mushy.)  Just get in there with your hands and squeeze…then switch to a folding motion like you’re kneading bread…then back to the squeeze.  Once you’ve got everything nicely incorporated, get a sheet tray and spray it with oil, and start making meatballs.  Get your kids or friends to help, it will go faster.  I use a small ice cream scoop to portion out the meatballs so they’re fairly even in size:

(That squeeze-handle ice cream scoop is an indispensable tool in my kitchen.  I never use it for ice cream, though.  It’s perfect for making cookies and truffles, filling mini-muffin tins, making little dinner rolls or monkey bread or drop biscuits…have I convinced you yet?  Get the sturdiest one you can find.  Many brands are so cheap they can’t stand up to chilled cookie dough.)

Once you scoop the meatball mixture into your hand, first press it very firmly between your palms, which compacts the meatball.  Then roll it around until it’s nice and round and place it on the tray.  69 more times and you’re done!

Now you’ve got your meatballs.  You can freeze them (or some of them) at this point, or proceed cooking them however you like.  This is what I do:

In a large cast iron skillet over medium high heat, add some olive oil and saute the meatballs in small batches with plenty of space between each one, letting them get nice and brown and crusty all over.  You can either turn them by hand, or just shake the pan a bit every few minutes to rotate them.  When they are nicely browned all over, remove them back to the sheet tray and continue until they are all browned.  (In my big skillet, I can get 30-35 meatballs in there at a time with plenty of extra space.)  Then, into the hot pan, add:

1 cup red wine

Immediately turn off the heat and scrape the pan with a wooden spoon to get up all that lovely fond from the bottom.  Then leave the pan alone and get out a large heavy Dutch oven or pot, and set it over medium high heat.  Film the pan with olive oil and add:

1 onion, coarsely chopped

Saute, stirring every now and then, until the onions begin to take on some color around the edges.  Then add:

1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and chopped

Saute for an additional 3 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Then add:

1 Tablespoon red pepper flakes (less if you don’t like it spicy)

Stir constantly for a minute or two, then add the red wine from the pan you sauteed the meatballs in.  Let the wine reduce until it’s almost gone, then add:

2 cups chicken stock
2 large (28oz) cans crushed tomatoes
1 large (28oz) can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped (half a bunch)
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon honey (or sugar)
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 Tablespoon Vegemite or fish sauce or soy sauce or anchovy paste (optional, but highly recommended)

Stir well, then add the browned meatballs from earlier.  Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium low and simmer gently for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.  Now taste for seasoning…it may need additional salt, vinegar, or honey/sugar to get the right balance.  (Acidity/salinity/sweet can never be predicted in a tomato recipe because each batch of tomatoes has a different acidity and sugar level, and many brands salt their canned tomatoes at various levels.)  Don’t automatically assume it needs salt, try a little more acid first, unless it’s already so acidic that it bites your tongue.  If it’s too tangy or salty, add sweet.  Once you’ve got the balance right, add:

1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped (half a bunch)

Turn off the heat and let the sauce sit for at least 5 minutes before serving, stirring occasionally.

Serve this sauce over any kind of pasta.  If you’re making the sauce in a very large pot and you’re in a hurry, you can add the dry pasta (up to 1.5 pounds) directly to the sauce a few minutes after you add the meatballs.  Instead of taking an hour to reduce, the pasta absorbs the excess liquid from the sauce as it cooks, which concentrates the sauce.  You’ll end up with a much drier final sauce (thin it out a bit with chicken stock if it’s too dry, then re-season) but the pasta will have way more flavor than if you cooked it separately.  (This it the traditional Italian method.)  Only cook the pasta for the minimum amount of time recommended on the package, then turn off the heat, fold in the fresh basil, and serve immediately.  The meatballs tend to fall apart more easily using this method, because of the bulk of the pasta in the sauce, so if it’s aesthetically important for you to present the meatballs on top of the sauce, cook the pasta separately in heavily salted water so that it tastes like the ocean.

Australia produces a staggering amount of wine…more than 1 and a half BILLION bottles a year, with more than half that being exported.    Australians overwhelmingly prefer drinking their own wine, as only 16% of the wine sold in the country is imported.  (Compare that to 35% in the US, and 12% in France…and you know how much the French prefer their own wine!)  In the year 2000, Australia began selling more wine to the UK than their own neighbor France!  Australia is the 4th largest wine exporter in the world, and they are the 7th largest wine producer behind France, Italy, Spain, the US, China(!!!), and Argentina.  But when you factor in their population, that 7th place spot becomes even more incredible…with only 22.6 million Australians, they have less than half the population of any of the others on that list.

Wine is produced throughout Australia, though most Americans are familiar with the South Australia and Southeast Australia wines, simply because these regions produce the most wine in the country.  The most popular red grapes are Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon, with Merlot a distance third.  For whites, Chardonnay is hands-down the most popular varietal.  (Though neighbor New Zealand is famous the world over for producing the finest Sauvignon Blancs on the planet.)

Of late, I’ve been most interested in the wines of Western Australia.  You may have read on recent blog posts that my very first winery visit was in 2002 at the Riverbank Estate in the Swan Valley wine region of Western Australia, just outside of Perth.  I had, of course, been drinking wine for many years before that.  But this was the first time I was exposed to how wine is created.  Tasting a flight of wines from the same grape and vineyard, but year by year, made me realize just exactly how important the climate is to the production of great wines.  The same vine yielding the same grapes will produce RADICALLY different wines from year to year…depending on sunlight, fog, rainfall, heat, cold.  No matter how much control we gain over the winemaking process through technology, Mother Nature is still the master vintner, and She’s the ONLY one that can ensure a near-perfect, legendary wine.

Wines from Western Australia can be hard to find in the US.  (I’ve been trying to track down a bottle for 2 weeks so I can blog about it for my potential job as TasteMaster in Western Australia!)  I finally met with success!  This is a 2007 Shiraz from Wishing Tree, an estate in the Margaret River region.  (I found it at Goody Goody in Highland Village, for anyone in the Dallas area having trouble locating Western Australian wine.)  Eager to recapture those memories of my vinous intellectual awakening, I screwed off the top.  By the way, THANK YOU, Wishing Tree…I respect most winemaking traditions, but in the case of cork vs cap, progress wins out EVERY time.  The cork is a big liability as a wine ages.  The cap is far better insurance against oxidation, it’s easier to open, and its easier to store in the unlikely event that you don’t finish a bottle!  Aussie fan Sue informed me that the Australians pioneered the screw-cap wine bottle out of desperation, when they were producing so much wine in the 1960s that cork production couldn’t keep up…another example of Aussie ingenuity making the world a better place.  (Note…the cap was originally produced by a French company at the request of Aussie winemakers, so that should add an additional layer of security for those of you who’ve been dubious of the cap.)

This 6 year old Shiraz is honestly…remarkable.  Dark, full bodied, and incredibly dry, yet still somehow very fruity…like a mouthful of blackberries but without any hint of sweetness.  A comparable Syrah from the Hermitage region of France would command a selling price between $30 and $50 a bottle.  This Wishing Tree set me back $13.  I’d say we’ve found a winner.

And MOST wines from Western Australia are winners.  Pick up any respected global wine guide, from the Oxford Companion to Wine, to the World Atlas of Wine, and you’ll find references to Western Australia’s wine as among the finest produced in the whole country.  There’s a reason for this.  There are virtually no mega-wine companies in Western Australia.  Every vineyard is a small, family owned estate where the grapes are carefully cared for on a small scale.  So if your own personal experience with Australian wines is primarily limited to the mega-vintners like Yellowtail, Lindemans, Rosemount, Jacob’s Creek, or Penfolds, then you haven’t REALLY tried Australian wine.

Within Western Australia are 9 major wine regions, and the most popular are:

Margaret River – The most renowned of Western Australia’s wines are the cabs from this region, in the far southwestern corner of the state.  The climate is very similar to the Bordeaux region of France, which many wine critics agree still produces the finest wine in the world…(IN a good year.) It’s also by far the largest wine region of Western Australia.

Great Southern – The second largest wine region in the area, it is known for its Shiraz, Cab, and Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, Riesling, and Sauv Blanc.  It’s a 4 hour drive south of Perth and is the most remote of the region’s wine districts.

Swan Valley – This is the oldest wine region of Western Australia, the first vineyards were planted in 1834, two decades before the first commercial vineyards were planted in California.  This region is less than half an hour’s drive from Perth, so it’s even closer to the big city than Napa and Sonoma are to San Francisco.  Shiraz, Cab and Chardonnay dominate here, though some incredible sparkling wines are also produced.

All the wine regions can be visited in about a week, so for the serious wine connoisseur, a trip to Western Australia might ought to be on your bucket list.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I get hired as TasteMaster in Western Australia and get to spend 6 months exploring the region’s wineries!

This recipe calls for a can of sweetened condensed milk, which I do use fairly often.  (It’s the best shortcut to dulce de leche or “cream caramel.”)  You CAN make your own sweetened condensed milk at home by combining 2 cups of whole milk with 1 cup of sugar, bring to a simmer, reduce the heat to low, and let it reduce by half, stirring every now and then.  This can take upwards of 2 hours or longer over low heat, but to avoid over-caramelizing the sugar and the lactose in the milk, you gotta do it slowly.  To me, the sweetened condensed milk in the can is a welcome shortcut.  (But if you’re paranoid about toxins from cans leaching into your food, you can make your own from scratch.)

And the use of sweetened condensed milk makes this creme brulee an absolute BREEZE to make.  Take note that this recipe calls for egg yolks, so you’re gonna end up with leftover whites.  If you don’t have immediate plans for them, like baking my Pumpkin Carrot Cake, put them in a ziploc bag, write the number of whites and the date on the bag, and toss it in the freezer for up to a year.  Frozen whites don’t make a truly perfect meringue, but they are totally sufficient for baking cakes with.

Passion fruit is my favorite fruit.  It goes by many names around the world.  Maracuja in Brasil, or maracuya in Mexico and most of the Spanish-speaking world, but parcha in Puerto Rico.  Saowarot in Thailand, bai xiang in Chinese.  The Hawaiian name is perhaps my favorite…lilikoi.  It’s potently sour, explosive in flavor, with just enough sweetness to balance the acid.  You can get them fresh throughout much of the year in gourmet markets, but head to an ethnic Asian or Latin American market and you’ll find them cheaper.  There are 2 primary varieties, green/yellow skinned, and purple skinned.  Don’t be afraid if they look dried and wrinkled…that means they’re perfectly ripe!  Cut them open and scoop out the pulp, seeds included.  For those of you without access to fresh passion fruit, you can make this recipe very easily with passion fruit concentrate or passion fruit puree.  Again, ethnic markets will be your best source.  Passion fruit puree is often sold in the frozen section, but check the fruit juice section to see if they have the juice concentrate:

This is my favorite brand, and you can order it online through Amazon and get free shipping if you’re a Prime member.  (Amazon Prime is the best and worst thing that ever happened to me!)  It’s $11 for half a liter of the stuff…just keep it in the fridge and you’ll find yourself adding it to everything.  Cereal.  Cocktails.  Cream sauces.  Ice cream.  It is concentrated, so a little goes a long way.

Makes 4 individual servings

In your blender, combine:

1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk (or 1 3/4 cups homemade)
1/2 cup milk
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup passion fruit concentrate/puree (or the pulp and seeds of 4-6 passion fruit)
1/4 teaspoon salt
zest of 1 lime (optional)

***NOTE: If you are using fresh passion fruit pulp, wait to add it to the mix until after you’ve thoroughly blended it, and give it a quick few pulses.  You don’t want to break up the seeds too much, they are delightfully crispy and the texture makes the creme brulee extra fabulous.***

Blend on medium speed until everything is thoroughly incorporated.  Then divide the mixture between 4 ramekins.  (You can put it all into a pie plate to make one big creme brulee if you don’t have ramekins.)

Here’s the weird part.  Place a kitchen towel in the bottom of a rimmed pan large enough to hold all the ramekins.  Place the ramekins on the towel, and begin to carefully pour in very hot water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins.  I generally preheat my water in a teapot, but you can use hot water from your tap…it will just extend your cooking time a bit.  The reason for the towel is to keep the heat from pan from overcooking the bottom of the custard, and the water bath ensures even, slow cooking and a moist oven, which helps keep the custard from cracking.

Bake the custards on the center rack of a preheated 325F oven for 20-30 minutes or longer, until they are just set but still a bit wobbly in the very middle.  Carefully remove the pan from the oven.  It’s full of boiling water!  Set it on the countertop and let the custards slowly cool in the water bath for an hour.  Then let them cool to room temperature on the countertop.  You can then chill them in the fridge for up to a few days before serving.  (Cover them LOOSELY with foil if you refrigerate them, and before proceeding with the brulee step, gently pat the top of the custard dry because moisture may have condensed on the foil and dripped back onto the surface, which will interfere with caramelizing the sugar.)

Just before serving, place on top of each custard:

1 teaspoon raw sugar crystals (per serving)

Table sugar works, too, but the raw sugar crystals are better.  Using a kitchen or propane torch, torch the sugar until it melts and begins to turn brown, moving the torch around often.  If you don’t have a kitchen torch, I highly recommend one!  You can get refillable butane torches at Home Depot for around $10, or get a fancy one at a kitchen supply store.  I use mine ALL the time, for crisping chicken skin, browning veggies at the last minute, melting cheese for French Onion Soup.  But if this isn’t an option for you, you can place the custards beneath the broiler.  (Use the low setting if you have 2 settings.)  Watch them constantly, DO NOT walk away.  As soon as the sugar melts and begins to brown, remove them.

Serve immediately!

Let’s take a quick look at what tequila is, and how it’s produced.  All liquors are produced by distilling a mildly-alcohol beverage to extract some flavor and concentrate the alcohol.  In the case of vodka, this might be fermented potato or barley.  For whiskeys, it could be fermented barley, wheat, or rye (ie “beer.”)  For brandy and grappa, it’s fermented grapes (ie “wine.”)  For rum and pisco and cachaça, it’s fermented sugar cane juice.  But for true, authentic tequila, it’s fermented cactus.  Yup…a long-lived, massive cactus called “agave azul” or blue agave.  (Pronounced “ah GAH vey.”)  Nicknamed “century plant,” agave can live upwards of a hundred years before they spectacularly bloom, and having saved up so much energy in the form of stored starches in the plant’s massive central bulb, when the agave blooms, its stalk can grow so rapidly you can watch it rise, up to several inches an hour.  After a short week of blossoming, the plant’s energy reserves spent, it dies.

Blue agaves raised for tequila production are generally harvested at less than 10 years of age.  The “jimador” (pronounced “HEE mah DOHR”), like Sr. Jose Cortes seen here, judges when the agave is ready for picking.  Then he cuts it off at the ground using a very sharp, heavy tool called a “coa” and prunes off the sharp spines from the agave, turning the cactus into a “piña,” or pineapple, named for its resemblance to the fruit of the same name.  An agave piña, however, can weigh from 80 to over 200 pounds, and it can take up to 10 piñas to make a single bottle of tequila. The jimador works in the field for 10 hours a day during harvest season, pruning agaves and tossing them into the bed of a truck.  The agave fields are fraught with danger, from poisonous snakes to potential heat stroke.  But the biggest danger comes from the plant and the coa tool themselves.  Sr. Cortes showed me a scar where his left eyelid was ripped open by the needle-like spines on the edges of the agave fronds.  And the 30-pound coa, which the jimador sharpens after harvesting each piña, can inflict deep wounds and break bones.  Scars on his arms and legs were proof.

Sr. Cortes is a third-generation jimador.  His father, Jesus, learned to cut agave from his HIS father, Fermin.  The pride in Sr. Cortes’s eyes when he mentioned his father and grandfather was palpable.  They work for the family-owned tequileria that produces Herradura and Jimador tequilas, which farm their own agave, and use strictly traditional methods for tequila production.  This means that, once the piña is carved, it is roasted in a wood-fired brick oven at 90C/200F for several days until all its stored starches have been converted into fermentable sugars.  (This is the same type of process used to convert the starches in barley and wheat into fermentable sugars for brewing beer.)  Sr. Cortes says that the roasted agave tastes like pumpkin at that point.  (My favorite ingredient!!!)  Here’s a quick look at the carving process:

Then the piñas are crushed and allowed to ferment naturally using wild yeasts for several days.  (Most commercial operations pasteurize the agave and use a commercial yeast strain.)  At this point, the pulp contains about 4% alcohol.  The pulp is heated gently and carefully, so that the alcohol and some flavor compounds evaporate, and then the gas is condensed back into liquid.  This is called distillation, and it is repeated twice to yield a clear liquor of 40% alcohol concentration.

There are 3 primary types of tequila produced.  The first, blanco (or “white”) is the clear liquor resulting from the distillation.  Most tequila aficionados consider blanco tequilas to be the purest type of tequila, as the flavors of the agave come through quite clearly.  But cheaper, mass-produced blancos can be very harsh.  I recommend only trying premium blancos.  A good one can be incredibly smooth.  Cheaper tequilas are called “mixtos” and aren’t made from 100% blue agave.  They are “filled out” with other fermentable sugars.  Look for labels that specify “100% de agave” for a true tequila.  And while tequila is now being produced in places other than Mexico, all the true tequila houses hail from the region near the town of Tequila in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

Tequilas which have been aged in oak barrels for at least 2 months are called “reposados.”  Herradura/Jimador use American white oak barrels for their ageing, just like Jack Daniels does for their bourbon.  Reposados have a golden color and an oaky flavor, and tend to be a bit milder than blancos

The third category of tequila is called añejo, and these tequilas have been aged 1-3 years in small batches.  They are among the most expensive tequilas, and they can be very mellow and have all sorts of complex notes from the ageing process.  A new type of añejos called “extra añejos” have been aged at least 3 years, and these have only been produced since 2006, so they can be hard to find and breathtakingly expensive.  But many small, savvy producers have been saving and carefully ageing their tequilas to cater to the skyrocketing world-wide demand for extra añejos, so expect the prices to come down…in a decade or so!

Añejos and extra añejos are my personal favorites, though I promised Sr. Cortes I would try more blancos, which are his favorites.  Please note that margaritas should be made only with blancos or reposados.  The finer añejos are too precious to be diluted and should be sipped “neat” in a wine glass or snifter:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little introduction to tequila!  Next time you’re at the liquor store and there’s a tequila rep there promoting their brand, take a few minutes to ask them questions and sample what they have to offer.  If you live in the Dallas area, check out Agave Azul, which has the largest selection of tequilas in Texas.  In Los Angeles, check out Rick Bayless’s Red O, with a truly STUNNING walk-through tequila case, and their mixologist makes some of the most stunning tequila drinks I’ve ever tasted.

Show that same bottle of Vegemite to 10 Australians, and 9 of them will reach for the bottle to open and smell it deeply, and ask if you have any toast.  The remaining individual will have hopped on the nearest kangaroo and headed for the Olgas, wanting absolutely nothing to do with the stuff.

Why the discrepancy?  I’ll admit, like many Americans, I was dubious when I was first offered Vegemite…from an Aussie in a youth hostel in frigid Quebec City during Winter Carnaval in 2000.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a yeast paste that we spread on toast.”

Yeast paste.  Sorry, but there’s just nothing in American culinary history that gives us a frame of reference for processing the edibility potential for a yeast paste.  So that’s the first thing that Vegemite’s got against it for recruiting an American audience.

Then, there’s the smell.  It smells like…well…like Vegemite.  Like nothing else you’ve ever smelled.  As a chef, I now recognize that smell immediately…UMAMI.  The complex, meaty smell and flavor that makes up the 5th type of taste that your tastebuds can recognize.  (Japanese scientists discovered in 1908 that there are additional taste receptors on the tongue, so not only do you physically taste salty, sweet, bitter, and sour on your tongue like you’re taught in grade school in the US, you also taste umami or “savoriness.”)  The reason that dishes in professional restaurants often taste better than the dishes you cook at home is because professional chefs know how to build this type of flavor into their dishes.  Those umami receptors on your tongue are responding to glutamates…full, complex, savory, meaty flavors that come from amino acids in meat, mushrooms, and the byproducts of fermentation.  That now-infamous ingredient monosodium glutamate was used to improve flavor in many Asian cuisines since the discovery of umami in 1908.

My friend Justin loves to tell a story of how, at a boy scout camp out, the boys peeled the label off a multi-chambered bottle of spices and passed it around the campfire to see who could identify each spice within the bottle simply by taste and smell.  The clear crystals that looked like salt puzzled everyone, because they just tasted “good.”  No one could figure it out until they retrieved the label and discovered that they were eating monosodium glutamate, and their tastebuds were recognizing umami.

And that’s what Vegemite smells like.  It’s a fairly foreign smell to most Americans who don’t really think to analyze it.  And that accounts for the second negative reaction most of them experience…it smells “strange.”  Not bad, mind you.  It CERTAINLY doesn’t smell bad.  But it doesn’t really smell like anything you’ve smelled before, unless you’ve scraped up all the fond from the bottom of a pan after searing meat or mushrooms and just tasted that alone.

The third reaction comes after tasting it, which many Americans do on the tip of their finger, rather than the traditional Aussie preparation, which is to spread it thinly on buttered toast.  A fingerful of Vegemite is like a meaty, salty punch in the face.  But it’s not meant to be tasted this way, just like most people don’t scoop up a fingerful of mustard or horseradish or ketchup.  It’s a condiment.  It’s to accent flavor, not BE flavor.

3 strikes and you’re out…and most Americans never give Vegemite a second chance.  I know I didn’t.  After being revolted by my first taste in a youth hostel in Quebec, even after multiple trips to Australia, staying in Aussie homes, and being offered Vegemite sandwiches for breakfast and turning them down, I still insisted that Vegemite was disgusting, despite the fact that an entire continent is enamored with it…despite the fact that multiple other products are as revered in other Western civilization countries like the UK and New Zealand…I insisted that Vegemite was foul and should be destroyed.

But…in my new life as a chef, I vow to give EVERYTHING multiple chances to redeem themselves.  My own tastes have changed dramatically, both as I age and as I learn.  So when I scored some Vegemite yesterday at World Market, I decided to let this product redeem itself in my kitchen.  Because, as any chef knows, ANY way to improve efficiency in the flavor-building process is welcome.

Pause for a moment and let’s discuss “flavor building.”  When a chef “builds” a sauce (whether it’s a pan sauce for garnishing, or a vegetable or meat sauce for pastas) (s)he is carefully crafting layers of flavor.  First, the meat goes into a screaming hot pan with some fat, and the outer layer of the meat begins to brown via the Maillard reaction.  Bits of the meat stick to the bottom of the pan and essentially “burn,” but all sorts of miraculous conversions are taking place in the amino acids within the meat’s protein cells.  Then we add aromatics to the pan, like onions, garlic, or shallots.  The sugars within these aromatics begin to darken and caramelize.  Then we hit the pan with some wine, and the alcohol unlocks flavor components in the browned meat and onion bits that are not normally soluble in water alone, so now our taste buds can decipher even more complexity in the flavor.  But the wine, and additional liquid ingredients like stock or cream, have diluted the flavors, so then we reduce the sauce to concentrate them again.  All this effort is done to build flavor, primarily umami flavor.

So when it’s time to quickly build a sauce, having a condiment around that instantly boosts umami is definitely a chef’s boon.  In the past, this was often monosodium glutamate.  But so many people are sensitive or allergic to this synthesized product, that chefs are now looking toward more natural compounds to boost savoriness in their sauces.  My wonderful chef-partner Jennie Kelley gave me a very expensive umami paste for my birthday last year, called Taste No. 5.  A combination of various natural ingredients like mushrooms, anchovies, etc., I used it with glee, primarily in tomato sauces, until it was gone.

Since falling in love with Thai food after a dozen trips to Thailand, I’ve started using fish sauce (the standard condiment in Thai cuisine) in a variety of other cuisines to boost umami.  I NEVER make an Italian tomato sauce without a healthy glug of fish sauce.  “TRAITOR!” the Traditionalist may scream.  But wait!  The Italians have been adding anchovies and anchovy paste to their tomato sauces for centuries, and historic Italian recipes actually call for a primitive fish sauce their culture invented, entirely independently of Asian fish sauces, generations ago.  And what is fish sauce made of?  Anchovies.

So my first instinct with Vegemite was to use it as an umami booster in recipes.  And it works flawlessly.  A spoonful in your fresh tomato sauce will blow your mind.  A dab in a southern brown or white gravy will knock your socks off.  Add it to meatloaf.  To your mix of ground beef for burgers.  Add it to your cream of mushroom soup, or your stock-based stews and sauces, and it will enlighten you.

So what IS this miraculous creation, a modest addition of which dramatically improves the flavor of almost anything?  It’s a byproduct of the beer-making process.  The leftover yeast after beer is fermented is concentrated and mixed with salt, some vegetables (a trademark secret), wheat, and spices.  It is potently nutritional…vegans use yeast extracts to supplement their diet with compounds they would normally only get from meat products.  In fact, Vegemite has one of the densest sources of B-vitamins of any product on the planet.

Vegemite is as much a staple in Australian culture as the kangaroo.  Kids are raised on it.  My neighbor Sharon was married to an Australian and lived in Sydney, and while she couldn’t stand the stuff, she raised his daughters on it.  So Australians eat it from the earliest days of childhood…one reason it’s so incredibly popular.  Last night at dinner, Sharon sang us the Vegemite song…  “We’re happy little Vegemites, as bright as can be.  We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch, and tea…”  Every Aussie knows this song the same way Americans know “The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.”

So while you may not be spreading Vegemite on buttered toast any time soon, if you love to cook, I guarantee you that you WILL love the way Vegemite improves the flavor of your cooking…it adds that little bit of depth, complexity, and savoriness that can be challenging and time consuming to build on your own.  So give it a try!  I doubt you’ll regret it.

PLEASE leave your comments below!  Let us know if you’ve tried Vegemite before and what you honestly thought of it.  And also tell us if you’d be willing to give it a shot as a flavor enhancer in recipes, rather than just eating it on toast!

Notice those lovely fried morels on top! I foraged those in Arkansas earlier this week and needed a VERY special dish to serve them with.

**PLEASE NOTE**  A video on how to make this dish is located at the bottom of this recipe!

Yes, yes…you’re shocked and a bit disgusted that I’ve posted a kangaroo recipe.  Folks…kangaroo is the venison of Australia.  It’s their most common game meat.  It jumps into the road in the middle of the night and destroys your car, just like a deer.  It is hunted with guns, bows and arrows, and traps, just like deer.  And kangaroo meat is absolutely superb…when properly prepared…just like venison.  Kangaroos are herbivores with chambered stomachs, just like cattle, sheep, and deer, and their meat is astonishingly similar thanks to their diet of grass and weeds.  And since I am on the shortlist for Tourism Australia’s Best Job in the World…”TasteMaster” of Western Australia…I figured this would be a very appropriate recipe for me to share this week.

Notice this label is in both Dutch and French!

But first of all, where do you even get kangaroo meat?  I source mine from Arrowhead Specialty Meats right here in my hometown.  While you’re not likely to run across it in your grocery store, most specialty meat markets carry kangaroo and will sell directly to the public (though their primary customer base is restaurants).  So just Google your city name or zip code, plus “specialty meats” or “game meats” and you’ll find one.  Or ask the chef as your favorite gourmet restaurant where he gets his unusual meats, and he’ll be happy to tell you.

Kangaroo meat, just like venison, is incredibly lean…as lean as a boneless skinless chicken breast.  This means that, if you like red meat, but are watching your saturated fat and cholesterol intake, kangaroo could be a lifesaver for you!  However, this almost complete lack of intramuscular fat means that it can be challenging to cook kangaroo meat and end up with a juicy, tender cut of meat.  The leg meat is unsuitable for pretty much anything but long, slow braising, or grinding into sausage.  The loin, however, is a different story!  It runs along either side of the spine and doesn’t get nearly the exercise that the legs do.  This is where the “filet mignon” is cut from beef.  So look for kangaroo loin, and you’ve got an outstanding cut of meat.

The first step I take with ALL game meats is to brine them.  Brining ensures juicy, perfectly seasoned meat.  For up to 4 kangaroo loins, make half a gallon of brine in a gallon-sized pitcher or big bowl:

2 quarts water
3/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup sugar
handful of ice cubes

Stir with a whisk until the sugar and salt are completely dissolved.  Place the loins into the brine, and keep in the fridge for 2-3 hours.  Remove the loins and discard the brine.  On a big plate, combine:

1/2 cup all purpose flour
2 Tablespoons powdered garlic
2 Tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper

There’s no need for salt, because the meat is already perfectly seasoned.  Dredge the loins in the seasoned flour.

Preheat the heaviest cast iron skillet you have over high heat until the pan is screaming hot.  Open your windows and turn on your vent fan.  Into the skillet, put:

2 Tablespoons canola oil
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter

Add the loins, one at a time, searing for about 60 seconds on each side, until each loin is nicely browned all over.  Remove them to a pan and let them rest.

Preheat the oven to 325F and place the rack in the center of the oven.

Into the empty skillet over medium high heat, add:

1 pound sliced mushrooms (any kind)

Unless your skillet is massive, it’s best to saute the mushrooms in batches so that they’re not crowded in the pan.  This allows them to brown and develop flavor.  Season them sparingly with salt when they are in the pan…this helps them give up their water so you get lots of flavor building up in the pan.  Once all your mushrooms are nicely browned, remove them from the skillet, reduce the heat to medium, and add:

a bit of olive oil
2 shallots, minced

When the shallots begin to take on a little caramel color around the edges, add:

1 cup white wine

Scrape the bottom of the pan as the wine reduces, and once it is almost evaporated, add:

4 cups chicken stock (preferably unsalted)

Return the heat to high and boil rapidly until the stock is reduced by half.  While the stock is reducing, place a probe thermometer in the thickest part of the kangaroo loin.  If you are cooking several loins of differing sizes, put the thermometer into the smallest loin.  Place them into the 325F oven and roast until the internal temperature reaches 120F.  Remove them from the oven and let them rest for at least 10 minutes before removing the thermometer or cutting them, or else they’ll lose all their juices.

(Now let’s chat about internal temp for a second.  NO game meat should EVER be cooked beyond medium rare, because they don’t have enough fat to keep them moist once the meat is cooked through.  Brining definitely helps, but I still recommend serving kangaroo loin no doner than medium rare.  Pulling the meat at 120F will land you somewhere between rare and medium rare by the time the meat has finished “coasting.”  Pull it at 115F if you like it rare, let it go to 125F if you want it between medium rare and medium.  Anything beyond 130F I would consider inedible, but for those who get really squeamish about pink meat, you can take it that for, or farther…just explain to your guests that they’ll be supping upon kangaroo boots for dinner.)

Make a “beurre manie,” a fancy French term for equal parts of butter and flour, by mashing together:

2 Tablespoons all purpose flour
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter

Just smoosh them with a fork until they are completely mixed into a thick paste.  Once the chicken stock is reduced by half, lower the heat to medium and begin adding bits of the beurre manie, whisking constantly, until the sauce begins to thicken.  Return the mushrooms to the pan, reduce the heat to low, and let the sauce simmer for several minutes.  Keep the sauce warm until serving time.

When the loins have fully rested, cut them into slices and spoon the sauce on top.  And enjoy your very first taste of an incredible meat that, while very much like beef in terms of texture, has a mild and exotic flavor all its own.  You’ll be hooked!

Enjoy this little 10-minute video that shows you the process, step-by-step:

And now…MORELS!

Anyone who classifies themselves as a “foodie” knows about morels.  These miraculous mushrooms are the most coveted table fungus on the planet, rivaling the reputations of even the black and white truffles of southern Europe.  However, unlike truffles, which CAN be cultivated and dependably harvested, the morel has resisted ALL attempts at cultivation.  Every single morel eaten in the world was foraged in the wild.

I’ve been cooking with morels for years.  They are ruinously expensive in Dallas, but I often travel to Seattle during morel season there, when they can be sometimes be had for $20 a pound from roadside vendors and occasionally at the Pike Place Market in downtown.  (Morels typically fetch between $50 and $100 a pound in gourmet markets around the world.)  Over the past few years, as I’ve grown more serious about foraging, I was shocked to learn that morels even grow right here in Dallas, with their southern-most boundary being the juniper-covered limestone hills near Austin, Texas.  Unfortunately, morels need a perfect balance of temperature and moisture to trigger their fruiting, and Texas often gets too warm early in the spring before the rains come, meaning a pitiful morel harvest.  This year I waded through endless tangles of poison ivy here in the Dallas area, frantically searching for morels.  But the rains came too late, and it was already too hot for these magic morsels.

Yours, Truly, leaping from a cliff into the Buffalo

So I headed north this past weekend to catch the end of morel season in northwest Arkansas.  Hidden in a deep canyon in the Ozark Mountains lies the Buffalo National River, a pristine mountain stream that, thanks to a special designation by Congress in 1972, flows completely free from its headwaters to its confluence with the mighty White River.  The Buffalo River has been my playground of choice for 15 years.  6 hours from my doorstep, the Buffalo is one of the best places on earth for canoeing, hiking, and caving…3 of my biggest hobbies that don’t revolve around food!

So any time I can visit one of my favorite non-food places, and get to include food on the itinerary, I’m stoked.  And I had a strong hunch that I’d be able to find at least a handful of morels after a recent cold spell up there, followed by several inches of rain, followed by warm days in the 80s…the perfect storm to trigger morel fruiting.

Chef Michael Chen and I drove overnight, arriving in the tiny mountain hamlet of Jasper, Arkansas around sunrise, and let me tell you, the valleys of the Ozarks are stunning at daybreak any time of year, with fog hovering in the depths of the hollows:

Jasper is about as quaint a town as you’ll find in the US.  It was founded in the mid 1800s and was burned to the ground by the North during the Civil War.  The charmingly decrepit buildings in downtown were built shortly after, and now house restaurants and galleries that are refreshingly un-pretentious and authentic.  Like, for instance, the Ozark Cafe, which has been in operation since 1909.  I have breakfast there every time I’m in Jasper.  For about $5, you get a belt-busting, no-frills breakfast of eggs, sausage, hash browns, biscuits, and the most delicious white gravy I’ve had anywhere.

After filling up, we headed to the banks of the Buffalo to start hunting morels.  I had a fragment of information from a friend who had been there the weekend before and found a few morels, but not enough to make me confident.  We started down a trail near the river, and when things “felt right” we slogged off the trail and into the woods, thick with thorny greenbriar and infested with ticks!

And in less than 5 minutes, at the base of a white oak tree, a golden morel poked its wrinkled head up out of the leaves and smiled at me.  And once I had calmed down after what was quite a spectacular freak-out…on the OTHER side of the tree was this massive cluster of morels.

I had a fan gasp that I had “pulled them up from the roots” so let’s chat a bit about mycology.  Mushrooms are the fruit of a fungus that lives in either dirt, leaves, wood, or dung.  The fungus consists of hair-like filaments called “mycelium” (pronounced “my-SELL-ee-uhm”).  The mycelium of morels lives in harmony with a host tree, and the type of tree varies from region to region.  Near Austin, morels grow almost exclusively with juniper trees.  Near Dallas, they like elms and cottonwoods.  Along the Buffalo River, it’s white oak trees and nothing else.  Mushrooms don’t have roots…they grow out of the mycelium, which are a far vaster network than you’d probably imagine.  Picking them with some of the mycelium still attached does no damage to the mycelium, and in fact if there’s a rain within the next 48 hours, the scarring of the mycelium from the pick can produce a second fruiting.  So there’s no harm if it looks like the mushroom has “roots” on the bottom.  But most mushroom hunters pinch the mushroom off at ground level so that the dirt doesn’t get all over the other mushrooms in the bag!

Image courtesy of the Northeast Mycological Federation

At this point it’s also pertinent to mention to you mycophiles that morels DO have a few poisonous look-alikes, but a true morel is very easy to identify.  The wrinkly cap is unmistakeable, but cut open your mushroom and look at the inside.  An edible morel will be completely hollow, like the one on the left in this image.  A poisonous false-morel will be solid or chambered on the inside, like the one on the right.  If your mushroom is hollow, it’s a morel!  Morels come in a vast array of colors, from blonde/golden morels to gray and black morels, and range in size from the tip of your pinky to massive specimens over a foot tall:

Photo courtesy of Scott Schmidt

Over the next hour, we gathered 2 pounds of morels, some of which were almost as big as my fist!  It was a magical morning, as the sun was at a perfect angle and lit up the hollow mushrooms so that they practically glowed above the brown leaf litter.  It felt completely surreal.  All the mushrooms were growing right at the base of white oak trees, except for a few growing seemingly nowhere in general along damp, sunken areas within a dozen feet of white oaks.  Some had been devoured by woodland creatures, but most were fresh and plump and begging to be plucked!

One of the great things about foraging in Buffalo River country is the scenery.  It’s not just endless forest.  It’s filled with waterfalls!  This is Twin Falls along the Buffalo near Camp Orr, a historic Boy Scout camp.  They named it Twin Falls long ago, before natural erosion split the stream into 3 separate cascades…I guess we should now call it Triple Falls.  I once swam in the pool at the base of this falls with a baby snake that was VERY aggressive and just didn’t want to leave me alone.  Luckily, it wasn’t poisonous, so it was funny watching him try his hardest to attack me.

Myriad other waterfalls are in the area, including this one in Thunder Canyon:

They call it that because the roar of the falls hemmed in between the cliffs is deafening.  In the video you’ll see at the bottom of this post, it took me HOURS to try to extract any useable audio from this section of footage because it was so loud.

After about 8 miles of hiking, mostly off-trail bushwhacking, Michael and I were completely exhausted, especially since we hadn’t slept at all the night before.  So we ended the evening back in Jasper at the Arkansas House, an inn and cafe that occupy historic buildings including the old Jasper mill.  The cafe used to be my favorite diner in all the world, but the new owners have taken the menu upscale and local.  Virtually everything they serve is from local farms, even the meat.  I ordered a burger made from wild-trapped razorback hog, which is an invasive species that does lots of damage to the forest floor.  (AND they eat morels!  Grrrr…)  Michael ordered elk meatloaf.  Wild elk are extremely common in the valleys of the Buffalo River, but they are also farmed locally.  I know first hand from my own restaurant how expensive and cumbersome it is to source local ingredients, so I give Arkansas House full props for trying to maintain an all-local menu.  Their prices reflect their avoidance of mass-produced, commercial ingredients.  They may want to send their chef for a refresher course at culinary school for a few weeks, because we did find the preparation, seasoning, and presentation to be a bit below the standards you’d expect in a big city at similar prices…(their premium entrees range between $25 and $45, but many things on the menu are cheaper.)  However, for a city of 500 in the middle of the mountains in rural Arkansas, it might as well be Noma.  I will happily return again and again.

After 14 hours of sleep, we were back to foraging in the same “honey hole” we found the day before.  (That mildly disgusting term is popular amongst morel hunters to indicate their secret spots they return to, year after year, for dependable harvests.)  We gathered an additional pound, before it was time to show Michael a few of the Buffalo’s more exciting natural features.

Lost Valley is the single most popular hiking trail on the National River, and it leads a mile and a half up a hidden canyon to spectacular wonders.  The first is a natural bridge, through which flows the valley’s stream.  This is cave country, the rock here is made of limestone, which is easily dissolved by weak acid.  Some of the most spectacular caves in the country are here, including Arkansas’s longest, Fitton Cave, with over 17 miles of mapped passage.  I’ve been in Fitton a dozen times, but not recently, as a mysterious disease called “White Nose Syndrome” is devastating bat populations across the country and is believed to be introduced from cave to cave by cave explorers.  So all caves with bat populations are being carefully controlled right now.  (This has prevented me from exploring many caves during my recent travels, but, like all responsible cavers, I refuse to enter ANY closed cave to protect the bats.)  I realize many people are scared of bats, but they are as important to our food supply as honey bees, and if bats become extinct…so do we!  The bat population of a single cave can devour enough grasshoppers in a single night to fill a dozen 18-wheelers.  Imagine the kind of toxic poisons that would have to be sprayed on our crops to keep them “safe” if we didn’t have bats to control the insect population!

At the head of Lost Valley is Eden Falls Cave, where the stream in the canyon originates.  This very wet cave isn’t home to a bat population, so it’s safe to explore by anyone who dares to climb back into its watery depths!  I’ve taken dozens of people into this cave over the years, because it has a very special secret in the back chamber.  But getting there requires either crawling on your hands and knees in the icy cold cave stream, or navigating a narrow side passage that would make a claustrophobe panic:

You’ll notice I’m not wearing a helmet.  All serious wild caving requires the protection of a helmet.  But as Eden Falls cave is scarcely 150 feet long, as long as you’re careful and enter with a buddy, you’ll be fine.

This side passage leads back to the final chamber of the cave, and you can tell what’s back there long before you get there, because the roar of thundering water gives it away.  A magnificent underground waterfall!

It’s practically impossible to get a good shot of this waterfall, because the air in this chamber is FILLED with spray from the falls, and the flash on your camera lights up every little droplet!  While this falls is scarcely more than 30 feet high, it feels like Niagara when enclosed by the cathedral-like walls of the cave.

After exploring Lost Valley, I had one more thing to show Michael before we hit the road home.  If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know exactly how obsessed I am with waterfalls.  I’ve visited waterfalls on 6 continents, and if Antarctica (which I have also visited!) ever thaws out, you can be sure I’ll be hunting waterfalls there, too.  But there’s a waterfall in the Buffalo River country that is unlike any other on the planet.  It’s called “The Old Glory Hole.”

Located deep in a shelter cave in a hidden hollow, this waterfall pours from a hole in the solid rock.  Leaving the camera shutter open for a full second allows the falling water to show its motion in a beautiful display.  I’ve been to the Glory Hole falls a dozen times.  Sometimes, in the peak of summer, it barely drips.  In the winter, it is a magical landscape of ice.  After a good rain in the spring, it thunders.  But it’s always magical.  Once I ran across a strapping local mountain man with his handicapped son tossed over his shoulder, carefully descending the creek bed so he could show his teenage son the wondrous spot.  The Old Glory Hole is mostly a secret kept by the locals, passed down through generations, and has struck countless humans, young and old, by its unique beauty.  It is a perfect example of why this remote corner of Arkansas is truly one of the most spectacular and surprising landscapes on the planet.  These ancient hills have given up their morels and their waterfalls to lucky humans like me for thousands of years, back to the native Americans who inhabited them before European settlers even knew this continent existed.  If you’re lucky enough to visit here some day, remember that, and treat this incredible land with the same respect that those who’ve come before you have, so that thousands of years in the future, other lucky people can forage for delicious mushrooms in the river valleys, explore the depths of mysterious caves, and visit the Old Glory Hole to be awestruck by its beauty.

Enjoy this 8-minute video of highlights from the trip!  Feel free to comment below, and if you’d like to see me document an in-depth 6 month exploration of Western Australia’s culinary secrets, CLICK HERE to find out how you can help by submitting a pic or a 5 second video showing your support!

Last year, Tourism Australia launched a pilot program to help promote tourism Down Under, and they scoured the globe for one lucky person to spend 6 months on an island on the Great Barrier Reef, blogging about their experiences, in exchange for $100,000.  The lucky winner last year was Ben Southall, a bloke from London who’s not too unlike myself.  Ben’s experience was closely followed by millions of people around the world, and the program was so successful that, this year, EVERY state in Australia has their own “Best Job in the World.”  The one that I applied for is called “Taste Master” and it’s in my FAVORITE part of Australia…Perth and Western Australia.  I first visited this extraordinary part of the world in 2002, to see dear friends that I met in Antarctica the year before.  And they treated us to an authentic Western Australian trip, starting off with a big barbecue:

This is my amazing friend Wayne, who, along with his wife Iris, was one of the original pioneers to head west and begin farming the wilderness of Western Australia.  Their big era of westward movement didn’t really happen until the mid 1900s, when the government offered free land to those who would head west and farm there.  Like all Australians, Wayne and Iris had a fierce independence and determination to succeed, and decades of hard work have rewarded them well.  So it’s amazing to hear their stories of living in a tent, as newlyweds, and breaking the never-farmed soil with hand tools.  It’s a shame I took this photo before Wayne tossed some “prawns on the barbey,” which were about as big as lobsters.  I’ve never seen shrimp the size of Australian shrimp:

Wayne and Iris took us all over Western Australia.  We frolicked on a golf course with dozens of kangaroos:

(In Australia, golfers have to worry about more hazards than sand traps and water.  Kangaroos are drawn to the cool, grassy links and the male “boomers” can get downright aggressive if they don’t like you!)

We held koalas (they smell horrible!), we jogged on sugar-sand beaches, and then we explored the wine country of Swan Valley and the Margaret River.  My very first winery visit of my life was the River Bank Estate, and after an intensively-educational tasting there, I discovered…11 years ago…that I was in love with wine.  Soon after returning from the Swan Valley wineries, I determined I was going to start making wine myself, so I owe my love affair with this magical beverage to Western Australia.

Don’t I look young in this picture?  This Rolls Royce was parked on the DIRT in front of the winery, and I couldn’t resist snapping a shot.  I had never seen one before.  After the epiphanous wine tasting, we sat down to a meal I remember to this day:

This was duck leg confit on a simple salad of greens grown right there on the estate, the biggest mulberries I have EVER seen to date (also from the winery), kumquats, and a mulberry vinaigrette.  And, in true double-whammy style, my horizons opened not only to wine, but to the idea of food sophistication…NOT in terms of fancy ingredients, but in simplicity, freshness, using ingredients you can grow yourself, and executed with perfect technique.  So you could say that I cut both my culinary AND vinous teeth in Western Australia, and I can’t wait to go back!

Wouldn’t it be cool to follow my blog while I explore this amazing corner of the world?  Perth is a striking oceanside city, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.  Look at these stunning jacaranda trees:

Australia’s plant life is as unique and bizarre as their animals.  Take a look at these boab trees in Perth’s famous Kings Park, which is bigger than Central Park in Manhattan:

So here’s the scoop…there are 24 other people from around the world on the shortlist for “Taste Master” in Western Australia.  And in order to stand out from them, I NEED YOUR HELP!

Please check this page to find out how you can help during these final 2 days!

That said, this ice cream is legendary.  If you’re not familiar with the flavor “Butter Pecan” it’s understandable.  It’s primarily a Southern thing.  Pecans are one of our few native nut trees in Texas, and the pecan is a staple ingredient down here, and across the cultural South.  Most recipes for Butter Pecan ice cream call for sauteeing the pecans in butter.  While this definitely results in a delicious buttery nut, once that nut goes into the ice cream base, it gets soggy.  And, at least to me, chewing on a soggy nut definitely takes away from the flavor and texture of the ice cream.  So, for the past decade, I’ve been perfecting my own version, and here’s how to make it.

BUTTER-CANDIED PECANS

Candying the pecans coats them with a crisp layer of buttery caramel candy which helps prevent them from getting soggy. First take about:

8 ounces pecans

Break them up into pieces with your fingers.  This takes longer than chopping them, but chopping results in a lot of fine pecan meal, which you don’t want in your ice cream.  Put them in a glass or ceramic bowl and toast them in the microwave in 30 second increments, stirring between each increment, until the white part of the meat begins to turn tan, and you can hear the pecans sizzling and smell a toasted smell coming from them.  Set them aside to cool.

Prepare your surface for spreading out the candied nuts.  I use a silicone pad (silpat) which is indispensable in my kitchen, and not just for making candy and chocolate.  If you don’t have one, your best option is to butter the bare surface of a baking sheet.

In the heaviest skillet you can find, combine:

2 cup brown sugar
2 Tablespoons honey or corn syrup (the glucose in these ingredients helps keep the candy from crystallizing, allowing you to stir the candy as it cooks, and results in a thin, clear syrup that solidifies nicely)
8 Tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick)
1 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons water

Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring gently and occasionally.  Be cautious with this if you haven’t made candy before.  Boiling sugar rises well above the boiling point of water, and it’s incredibly sticky.  If you get it on your skin, it will burn you FAR worse than scalding water can, and unlike water, it sticks there and continues burning you.  So exercise caution when working with boiling sugar.  Bring the candy to at least 300F on a candy thermometer.  (Attempting to make candy without a candy thermometer generally fails.  They’re not expensive.  Get one.  Or just get a multi-purpose remote-probe thermometer that you can also use for cooking meats, making cheese and beer, etc.)  How high you take the caramel is up to you.  It will harden up nicely if you take it to 300F.  The closer you take it to 375F, the darker and more intense the flavor will be.  For this recipe, I generally stop around 320F.

Remove the pan from the heat and immediately add the toasted pecans.  Fold the pecans gently with the liquid caramel to coat them evenly.  Then CAREFULLY pour them out onto your prepared cooling surface and immediately spread them out as much as possible with a spoon or spatula.  The more you spread them out now, the better the final result will be.  If they are all in a big clump when they cool, you’ll have to break that clump up, which will expose bits of the pecan and allow them to get soggy in the ice cream.  They cool VERY quickly, so you only have 30-60 seconds before you can’t spread them any more.

Once they are fully cool, break them up, if necessary.  You’ll probably have quite a bit more candied pecans than you’ll want to put in your ice cream, and there’s a reason for this.  They are ADDICTIVELY delicious, and you will be munching on them as the ice cream freezes and will want lots leftover to snack on.

ICE CREAM BASE

(makes 1 gallon, so adjust for the capacity of your machine!)

In a large, heavy pot, combine:

2 cups maple syrup (the secret ingredient, and the glucose content of the syrup helps the ice cream stay soft after days in the freezer)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup honey or corn syrup (more concentrated glucose to improve the texture of the ice cream)
8 Tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick)
4 cans evaporated milk (NOT sweetened condensed milk!!!  If you don’t like using cans, take a gallon of milk and simmer it slowly, stirring constantly, over medium heat until it is reduced by half, which can take an hour or longer.  This results in a rich, creamy liquid that has a caramel-like flavor from the lactose sugars that were caramelized in the process.)

Heat them gently over medium heat, stirring occasionally.  DO NOT let it boil.  In the meantime, in the bowl of a stand mixer, combine:

12 egg yolks (yes, you read that right)
1/2 cup white sugar
2 Tablespoons water

Beat them at medium speed until they are fluffy, thick, and pale.  When your milk mixture on the stove is scalding hot, but not yet at a simmer, begin pouring the hot milk in a thin stream into the yolks with the mixer still on medium-low speed.  This is called “tempering” and it slowly brings the temperature of the yolks up without cooking and scrambling them.  Once you have about 1/3 of the milk incorporated into the yolks, you can stop the mixer.  Then, begin stirring the milk with a whisk, and slowly pour the hot yolks into the pot of hot milk.  Return this to the stove and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches 150 degrees.  (This pasteurizes the yolks.)  Remove from the heat and continue to stir another minute or so.  Then add:

1 quart heavy cream
2 Tablespoons vanilla extract

Then place the pot into a sink filled with ice water and stir constantly for 5 minutes to bring down the temperature of the base.  Cover the pot and let it sit in the ice bath, adding more ice if necessary, to bring it down to around room temperature.  Then place the base in the fridge for several hours, or overnight, to bring it down to around 34F.  It will freeze faster this way, resulting in smaller ice crystals.  If you try to freeze it at room temperature, it will take much longer, resulting in a coarser texture from larger ice crystals.

Once your base is chilled, prepare your ice cream maker.  Pour the base into the machine, then fill to the 1 gallon line with:

whole milk or half and half (you shouldn’t need very much)

Freeze according to your machine’s own instructions.  While the ice cream is freezing, place the container(s) it will be stored in into your freezer to chill down, along with a spatula or spoon.  Spread a doubled bath towel on your counter or table as insulation, and get your candied pecans ready.

As soon as the ice cream is frozen, pull the chilled container(s) from the freezer and place on the towel.  Then quickly remove the ice cream from the machine and empty it into the container(s).  Add the nuts to the ice cream and fold them in quickly with the chilled spatula.  Add as much or as little as you like.  Then immediately put the ice cream in the freezer.

Because of the high fat and glucose content of this ice cream, it won’t get rock hard in your freezer like most homemade ice creams do.  An ice cream scoop will sink easily into it, even after a week in the freezer.  It’s so delicious it’s not likely to hang around for long, but store it with a layer of plastic wrap or foil pressed down directly onto the surface of the ice cream, to help prevent ice crystals from forming.

And, again…this is one of the most delicious things you will EVER eat, but don’t go hog wild on it.  I don’t even want to begin to tally up the fat and calorie content of this ice cream.  It should be treated as a rare indulgence!

After my seemingly endless blog about the underground restaurant FRANK that I run with my bestie Jennie Kelley from season 2 of MasterChef, I though I’d be done writing about FRANK for awhile.  However, our Easter seatings in March were so incredibly epic and special, and so many of you have requested the story behind the menu, that I guess I’ll weave that tale in with the stories of our spring foraging in Texas.

Foraging, or harvesting food from the wild, used to be a way of life for many people in this country.  It still is, for some.  In fact, my family foraged out of necessity during a particularly impoverished part of my childhood.  I grew up fairly close to the earth…raising sheep and pigs and chickens for meat, and my grandparents knew quite a lot about the wild foods that were abundant in South Texas.  The gardens of my grandfathers fed not only our families, but many in the small hamlet of Lytle and the communities of South San Antonio where I spent my early childhood.

So foraging has always been near and dear to my heart.  Nowadays, foraging has been rediscovered by “foodies” and it has become terribly trendy to eat foraged ingredients at $100-a-plate restaurants (like FRANK…ahem…)  From the earliest days of FRANK, Jennie and I knew we wanted to do many foraged menus, but it takes FAR more work to pull off a foraged dinner than to pick your ingredients from the garden or buy them from farmers.  And, while foraging can be done in ANY season in the Dallas area, spring is ideal because there’s a LOT of wild food around, and the poison ivy is just beginning to wake up.

Poison ivy and poison oak abound in the parks and green spaces across North Texas.  These plants produce an irritant called “urushiol” (pronounced “yoo-ROO-shee-awl”) that can cause a severe immune response in humans that produces wicked-crazy blisters on the skin.  (Interesting factoid: cashews are rich in urushiol and have to be steamed to break down the toxins.  So even when you buy “raw cashews” they are still cooked to remove the poison, they just haven’t been roasted yet.)  The rash typically breaks out a day or two after exposure, and can last for a month.  Contrary to folklore, poison ivy doesn’t spread on your body after exposure (unless you continue to be exposed to the urushiol oils from unwashed clothing or shoes, your dog, etc.) and you can’t pass it from person to person by contacting the rash (though if you still have the oil on your body, you CAN pass it to other people).  Humans are the only known creatures that respond to poison ivy.  And luckily, I’ve been literally WADING through poison ivy in shorts and a t-shirt my entire life, and I’ve never had an issue.

That is…until foraging for FRANK the past few weeks!  I got the rash all over my body, even on my face!  The best way to deal with poison ivy is to immediately dust any area that came in contact with the plant with baking soda or corn starch.  This helps to dry out the oils.  (There are also some commercial soaps that will bind to the oils more effectively.)  Once you’ve done this, you can shower gently, but DON’T scrub, as you may drag the oils across your skin, increasing the exposure.  The rash will develop anywhere from a day to 4 or 5 days after exposure, and at that point, you just gotta keep it as dry as possible.  Baking soda is a fabulous remedy, as is prescription-strength steroid cream, and the old standby, calamine lotion.

I’ve spent so much time discussing poison ivy because it’s the most common enemy you will face while foraging in the summer and fall in Texas, but in spring it’s just beginning to bud out.  Even the bare dormant trunk can spread urushiol in the dead of winter, but when the leaves are out, there’s greater surface area on the plant to contact you.  If you react to poison ivy, or if you’re not sure, wear long pants and long sleeves while foraging, and immediately and carefully remove clothes and shoes when you get home and wash them.

Now…all that said, spring foraging can be VERY plentiful in north Texas (and all over the country, for that matter), so we were dead set on having a foraged menu.  And Easter seemed like a perfect time, because while everyone else was hunting for eggs, we were hunting for delicious wild goodies for our guests!

I am fortunate to live on a big forested park here in Lewisville called Central Park.  It’s nowhere near the size of the famous one in Manhattan, but it’s plenty big enough to be bursting with edible goodies in the spring, and the first things to come up are the wild garlic chives.  Often referred to as wild onions and wild garlic, these alliums are exploding with sweet garlicky-onion flavor and they grow so abundantly in the park that I could pick several pounds in about 15 minutes.  Every bit of this plant is edible, from the little white root bulb, to the flat leaves, to the round hollow stem that sends up a gorgeous little green bulb that later opens into a lovely cluster of white flowers.  In this picture you see a nice bunch of whole wild garlic chives, as well as a few handfuls of the buds.  You can use the bottom white part just like scallions or green onions, though they have a bit more bite to them, so you can also use them like regular onions.  The flat leaves can be sliced and used just like chives or green scallion.  But the buds are the real gem.  Saute them in butter with a bit of sugar and salt, and they are crisp and delicious.  Perfect with scrambled eggs, in tacos, or, like we served them, with sauteed wild mushrooms.  The only poisonous look-alike for wild garlic chive is called “crow poison” and it smells musty and NOTHING like onion.  Wild garlic chives are unmistakeably oniony smelling.

The park also yielded several lovely bunches of wood sorrel, also called oxalis.  Most people refer to this plant as clover, though true clovers (while edible) don’t have nearly the flavor of wood sorrel.  They also don’t have the heart-shaped leaves like sorrel.  Sorrel is one of the most common weeds out there, and if you come across some, it’s so easy to identify and has no poisonous look-alikes.  Next time you run across some, have a taste.  It’s like a burst of lemon and tart berry in your mouth.  So delicious it will shock you!

This is also the time that wild mustard goes crazy in our open fields, and there was plenty of it in the park.  Wild mustard is the exact same plant as the mustard greens you get in the store, it’s just that those have been selectively bred to produce larger leaves and take longer before they send up the blossom stalk.  The flavor of wild mustard is explosive, and all parts of the plant above ground are edible, from the tender, tangy leaves to the peppery broccoli-like buds to the pungent yellow blossoms.  And wild mustard is EVERYWHERE.  Within a 5 minute walk of my house, I could harvest hundreds of pounds of it.  (And I live in a normal neighborhood with a greenbelt park running through it.)  Mustard, in the same family as broccoli, kale, cabbage, and turnips, is one of the healthiest greens on the planet, packed with cancer-fighting compounds, and overloaded with vitamins and minerals.  And mustard is probably the single most common weed anywhere on the globe.  It’s everywhere.  Next time you’re driving past an open space and see little yellow flowers on top of a leafy stalk, you’re looking at wild mustard.  It has no poisonous look-alikes.  If you can find a plant that grows in at least partial shade, it will have larger leaves than those growing in full sun.  The flavor is incredible, so eat up!

I have some favorite spots in the park where I regularly find wild oyster mushrooms after a good rain, and while my normal spots didn’t yield anything, a still-standing dead tree did give us a pound of wild oysters!  Foraging for wild mushrooms can be a dangerous endeavor if you’re not careful, but luckily, oyster mushrooms have NO poisonous look-alikes.  If you find an earth-colored mushroom (it can be any color from white to cream to tan to brown) growing on dead wood that has no central stalk…the oyster blooms right out of the wood from a small stalk on its side…and the gills on the underside run downward along the stalk, you’ve found an oyster mushroom and you can safely eat it.  Wild oysters smell a bit like the sea, and I find them to be incredibly delicious.  Unfortunately, so do the bugs, so unless you’ve found just-sprouted oysters, they’re likely to be riddled with beetle holes.  (That doesn’t always stop me from eating them, but I wouldn’t serve buggy oysters at a fancy place like FRANK!)  Wild oysters grow all over the US.  Look for them on dead wood in damp areas, or after an extended rain.  They are among the most common mushrooms out there.

We also discovered some stupendously-large wild mushrooms on a damp log, one of which weighed over a POUND!  At first, they looked like chanterelles, but it’s a bit too early in the season for them, and chanterelles do not EVER grow on dead wood, only in the soil.  The chanterelle has only one poisonous look-alike, which is the jack o lantern mushroom.  Which DOES grow on dead wood.  So while this mushroom isn’t quite as orange as a normal jackolantern, all its other characteristics indicate that it was.  Jackolanterns aren’t deadly, they’ll just land you in the bathroom for a few days.  I still picked it and plan to dry it out as a mushroom-hunting trophy.  It smelled like cheese and apricots and really impressed our Easter Sunday diners at FRANK.

The 40 acre park’s last gift to us was redbud blossoms.  The redbud tree is a native to Texas, and while most of us are accustomed to seeing them landscaped into yards, they grow rampantly in the wild, as well.  And virtually nobody knows that the blossoms are truly delicious.  Sweet to begin with, with a slight floral aroma, then tart on the tongue, and finishing with a very green, grassy flavor like sugar snap peas.  They are an incredible addition to salads, with an eye-popping color and a surprisingly crisp texture.  So this gives you yet another reason to be jealous of your neighbor’s tree, burdened down with pink-purple blossoms each spring!

Late March is morel mushroom season in Texas.  And yes…we have morels here.  Lots of them.  I know a guy who pulls out 30-40 pounds of them from a park near Waco each year.  They are found all across the Dallas metroplex in parks that have hardwood trees like elm and sycamore, north all the way into Oklahoma, and south to Austin.  In fact, Dallas marks the westerly boundary of common morel territory before you reach the southwestern deserts.  (Though they are found in moist mountainous regions, and are prolific in the Pacific Northwest.)  So Jennie and I were determined to find our diners some wild Dallas morels.  Unfortunately, it has been an uncommonly dry, hot spring, and morels like damp weather that slowly warms into the 80s but with cool nights.  Some years produce bumper crops of Texas morels.  Some years, experts are lucky to find a handful.  And the reports this year indicated that we’d be out of luck…only a few morel finds have been reported in Texas, most of them near Tyler, but a few north of Denton.  So Jennie and I headed to the hardwood river bottoms along the Trinity River north of Lake Lewisville to see what we could find.

No morels in sight after several hours of foraging, but Jennie made her first wild mushroom find in a hollow beneath a fallen tree.  Mica caps!  Which are very edible.  You can see the little boogers hiding toward the bottom center of the photo.  Mica caps belong to a family of wild mushrooms called “inky caps,” many of which are edible, but some of which have a bizarre habit of reacting badly in the digestive system with alcohol.  If you consume alcohol even within several days of eating some inky caps, you’ll vomit violently.  (Compounds isolated from these mushrooms have been used to produce medicines to treat alcoholism, because of this unique trait.)  Fortunately, mica caps are delicious and completely edible, but their dark gills are so small and delicate that they begin to decompose into a black slime soon after picking and need to be cooked within 4 hours.  By the time we began cooking for FRANK, most of them were goners, but we were able to include a few.  And to be sure they were safe for our diners, we ate them the day before and had more than a bit of wine and beer…just to be on the safe side!  I’m not going to to into descriptions of the inky caps because mushroom identification for this species is well beyond the scope of this blog entry.  If you’re interested in mushroom foraging, you need to have at least 2 solid field guides in your possession and make a positive identification before consuming ANY wild mushroom.  Some favorite guides are Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America by David Fischer, The Complete Mushroom Hunter by Gary Lincoff, and for fellow Texans, Texas Mushrooms by Susan and Van Metzler (currently out of print and becoming rare, so snatch it up!)

Along Clear Creek just west of its confluence with the Trinity River, we happened across another very common weed that happens to be eminently delicious…chickweed.  Chickweed grows everywhere, from landscaped planter beds to the deep woods.  It grows prolifically in the Texas winter and early spring, and is one of the most common green things to survive year round.  Chickweed is crunchy and sweet, a great base for salads.  It’s easy to identify with its sturdy stems that spread along the ground, little oblong pointy leaves, and dainty white blossoms.  It grows all over the US, except in the driest desert regions, and has no poisonous look-alikes.  We stuffed several gallon-size ziplocs in less than 5 minutes, and had a great base for our salad.  Chickweed is sturdy and holds up well in the fridge, too, whereas other wild greens like sorrel and mustard can wilt unless you pick them by the root and keep the roots moist until just before prepping and serving.

All foraged greens can be improved by shocking them in ice water for 30 minutes, then storing in the coldest part of your fridge until serving time.  Never dress wild greens until the very last instant, as the acid in dressings can begin breaking them down much faster than store-bought lettuces.

On our hike back to the car, we were viciously attacked by one of the most dangerous of predators you can face whilst foraging:

I jest.  This little critter couldn’t hurt a flea.  This is a 9-banded armadillo, and while it looks reptilian, it’s a mammal like you and me.  Armadillos are common in Texas, and they have such horrible eyesight that they usually have no clue that you’re around.  This little guy was snorting and rooting around in the dirt for bugs and tender shoots and walked right up to my foot before he smelled us and high-tailed it into the woods.  It’s always a delight to run into wildlife when foraging.  It reminds you of the balance of the natural world, and it really brings things into perspective when you realize that this little guy forages almost every waking instant of his life.

The clock is ticking and we have a FRANK to put on in a few short days, but there’s more left to forage.  This time, even closer to home.  Neighbor Sharon has a side yard absolutely bursting with dandelions, so I spent one morning picking the beautiful golden blossoms.  All parts of the dandelion plant are edible.  The roots are roasted and ground to make chicory, which tastes like mild, nutty coffee.  The young leaves are delicious with a pleasant mild bitterness, like arugula, before the plant blossoms.  The yellow petals of the flower are fragrant and floral and entirely edible, though the green sepal that holds the petals together can be bitter.  The blossoms can be added to salads and cocktails, or boiled with sugar and fermented into a very floral wine.  When I shared this photo on Facebook, a delightful fan named Katja Turk mentioned that her grandmothers in Slovenia used to make a syrup from the blossoms that would substitute for honey, which was too expensive for them to afford in the communist era.  She generously shared the recipe with me, and it sounded so intriguing that I had to make it.  It turned out to be Jennie’s favorite component of the entire menu.  Check out the very simple recipe here!  And thanks, Katja!!!

Some of the foraged items on the menu aren’t foraged by us.  Tom Spicer, a local purveyor legendary in the Dallas restaurant community, has a fantastic little shop near the popular Jimmy’s Deli, called Spiceman’s FM 1410.  He’s open to the public, and if you’re ever looking for a fascinating field trip, head to Tom’s place.  He has a massive garden out back, where his employees and friends are usually gathered around a bottle of wine or a pot of something yummy they’ve just cooked up.  And in the front are boxes filled with wild foraged ingredients flown in from the Pacific Northwest.  What he’s got varies dramatically by season, but you’re likely to find wild mushrooms year round, and sometimes fiddlehead ferns, truffles, and the like.  Tom has provided us with black trumpet mushrooms (a cool-season relative of the chanterelle, which also grows in Texas under the right conditions), as well as Oregon white truffles, and some beautiful wild mustard raab (related to the wild mustard we foraged, but with a larger, broccoli-like flowering head).

Oregon White Truffles

So now we’re in the FRANK kitchen, turning all our foraged goodies into 5 courses for our guests.  The first course, which I don’t have a photo of (sorry), is a deviled egg topped with crispy sauteed white truffles.  And these are no ordinary eggs…these are pastured eggs from farmer William Hurst at Grandma’s Farm in McKinney.  (Yes, he sells to the public!)  William’s chickens live the way chickens should…completely free-ranging wherever they please during the day.  (They instinctively return to the safety of the coop at night, when predators are out.)  The label “free range” that you see on egg cartons in the grocery store is misleading.  It just means that the chickens don’t live in a 2′ square cage.  They might live in an 8′ cage, where they can “free range” across all 64 square feet of that cage (along with the other 10 hens living in that same cage).  Or it can mean that once a day the chickens are let out of their cage into a pen for half an hour.  It doesn’t mean the chickens are fulfilling their natural lifestyle, foraging for bugs and weeds all over the pasture.  To get those kind of eggs, you have to either buy from a farmer, or fork over $10 a dozen to get labeled “pastured eggs” at a gourmet market.  The difference in quality is like night and day.  The only drawback to using such fresh, high quality eggs is that they can be nearly impossible to peel cleanly for good presentation.  It takes HOURS to peel the eggs so that they are pretty enough to present to the FRANK audience.  The yolks are deviled with lots of mustard and vinegar, and then we gently saute the chopped white truffles in butter to bring out their aroma and once they are nice and crisp, we sprinkle them on top of the deviled egg.  (We served this course with a glass of champagne accompanied by a whole kumquat that was candied in the dandelion syrup mentioned above!)  This introduces our menu as uniquely American…one of the first true American menus we’ve served at FRANK.

Course two is a wild salad of mustard greens, lemony wood sorrel, and crisp-sweet chickweed, with redbud blossoms, tossed in a wild garlic chive vinaigrette.  Accompanying this is tender rabbit loin that we’ve brined briefly, then wrapped in house-cured wild boar prosciutto.  (You may recall my blog post about my neighbor Ron bringing me a wild boar last fall, and I built a curing chamber out of an old fridge in my garage to cure it into prosciutto using a traditional Italian recipe.)  We sauteed the wrapped loins briefly to crisp up the prosciutto, leaving the tiny morsels of rabbit loin at medium.  If you’ve never tasted rabbit loin, you just don’t know what you’re missing.  It is meltingly tender, delicately flavored, and a perfect pairing with wild boar.  Our rabbits were raised by an artisan breeder in Quebec up in Canada, where they raise heirloom breeds from France.  (Rabbit remains a VERY popular meat in France and Spain.)  But we had to buy the rabbits whole, so we used the bones and leg meat in another course, to be certain not to waste anything.  At this point we also pass around the homemade garlic chive sourdough, which our guests can spread homemade white truffle butter on.

Next comes the pasta course.  Hand-rolled tagliatelle (a micro-thin pasta just a bit wider than fettucini) with a medley of wild mushrooms and wild onion buds.  While the pasta may be Italian, this is decidedly an American dish.  The mushrooms (wild oysters, wild black trumpets, wild mica caps, plus cultivated maitake/hen of the woods, beech mushrooms, and enokis) are sauteed in very small batches in butter, allowing them to brown up just like meat.  They are then tossed with gorgeous wild onion buds, the unopened flower at the top of the plant, which we sauteed with olive oil and a bit of sugar to open up the flavor.  Then we let them all sit for a few hours, so the flavors can mingle.  The texture is amazing…good crunch from the onion buds, a big variety of textures from the mushrooms (firm oysters, delicate black trumpets, crispy enokis, tender maitakes), and the fairy-like delicacy of the pasta, which was tossed in a tangy, light cream sauce infused with white truffle.  This was a favorite course for many of our diners, and some even said that the pasta surpassed the housemade pastas at Dallas’s finest Italian restaurant in the Bishop Arts District!  (Name not included so we don’t sound like we’re bragging.)

And now the main attraction…probably my favorite course we’ve EVER served at any FRANK.  This is a pink peppercorn encrusted, bone-in venison chop, cooked medium rare.  We got some extraordinary venison racks from one of our amazing purveyors, Clark at Arrowhead Specialty Meats in Lewisville.  (Clark is also happy to sell to the public, and he’s got some amazing stuff…prime Texas Wagyu beef, kangaroo, heirloom duck, local quail, etc.)  The pink peppercorns I foraged on a recent trip to Hawaii from a tree growing in my friends’ neighborhood, and they’ve appeared on the FRANK menu before.  The venison was brined to help keep it moist…venison is a VERY lean meat and it overcooks in a second (remember how I got eliminated from MasterChef?!?) so brining is crucial to ensure juiciness.  And then it’s roasted just to 125F and allowed to coast to medium rare for 20 minutes on the countertop before slicing.

The venison chop is served on a bed of braised rabbit leg meat.  I mentioned earlier that, in order to be able to serve rabbit loin, we had to buy whole rabbits from the artisan breeder.  Not wanting to waste ANY of these very special (and VERY expensive!) animals, we took the rib bones and organ meats and made a rich stock with them.  That stock was used both in the cream sauce for the pasta course, as well as to braise the leg meat.  So first we seasoned and seared the legs:

Then they went into the pot with the rabbit stock, along with wild onions, garlic, and fennel.  (Rabbit and fennel is one of my favorite combinations.)  We braised it low and slow…250F for a few hours, until the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender.  One of the challenges of cooking rabbit meat is that the legs muscles are used so frequently to hop that the fibers can be very tough.  And even a long, slow braise won’t break down the long chains of muscle fibers, though it WILL separate them.  So no matter how you cook it, rabbit legs will always have chewy meat.  But the slower and moister your cooking method, the more the fibers will separate, allowing the braising liquid to bathe and surround them, which means it will be moist when you eat it…and if you get it “just right” then the meat will have a very pleasant body to it, with a bit more “chew” than chicken.

On the plate with our venison and rabbit (2 game meats that our country grew up on) is some seared broccolini and some roasted fingerling potatoes, along with a compound butter made from wild garlic chives.  And the sauce was VERY special, made from a reduction of a “foraged” Tawny Port-style wine I made 5 years ago with wild blackberries I picked near Mt. Rainier in Washington, and wild grapes I picked in the park behind my house.  It was a perfect compliment to the venison.  The final plate:

Of course, that’s not all, folks.  Dessert follows, and is always a favorite at FRANK.  This dessert was a bit more simple than previous desserts, because we really wanted to feature foraged flavors.  3 components only to dessert, and each component’s primary flavor was foraged.  First we’ve got a waffle made with acorn and buckwheat.  The acorns we foraged from a live oak tree and Michael Chen shelled each one of them individually.  Some species of oak produce better acorns than others…live oak acorns tend to be lower in tannins and higher in sugars than most, so they work much better.  But, they are smaller, which means LOTS of shelling!  Once you’ve got the acorns shelled, you put them in a blender with water and puree them into a slurry.  Then you strain the acorn mush in a dish towel and squeeze out the liquid.  Then you return the mush to a bowl with extra water for a series of 15-minute soaks to help extract tannins, which add a bitter taste and “fuzzy” feeling on your tongue (like when you drink a young Bordeaux or Cabernet).  You keep doing these flushes until the water coming off the acorn mush is clear and doesn’t taste bitter.  Ours took only 3 flushes.  Then you squeeze out all the water you can, spread the mush in a baking sheet, and bake at 170F for an hour or so, stirring every few minutes, until the mixture is a dry meal, almost crispy.  Then whizz that in your blender or food processor and you’ve got acorn flour!  It adds a nutty, sweet crunch to baked goods and pastas…but it’s a LOT of work.  We also whizzed up some buckwheat groats in the blender to make buckwheat flour, and I modified my go-to waffle recipe with these wild ingredients.  We were concerned that the waffle would end up dense and thick, but it was light, airy, and crisp.  And drizzled with the dandelion syrup, it was downright divine.  I’d venture a guess that more than half the guests at each FRANK told us it was the best waffle they had ever eaten.

We served the waffle with my infamous Butter Pecan ice cream…a recipe I’ve been perfecting for almost a decade, like my famous pumpkin carrot cake.  Friends demand it each year for 4th of July fireworks.  The pecans were foraged from a local yard and shelled by hand by my neighbor Sharon.

And thus ended what is easily the most epic and involved menu FRANK has served to date.  While it’s cheaper, in terms of cash outlay, to serve a foraged meal, the hours involved in foraging ingredients and transforming them into masterpieces EXPONENTIALLY exceeds that of a regular dinner.  However, our diners all agreed it was very much worth it.

I hope this blog entry encourages you to do a bit of foraging around your home and seeing what you come up with.  Some very edible plants are easily recognized.  If you’re interested in foraging, some books I highly recommend (in addition to the ones mentioned earlier) include The Forager’s Harvest and Nature’s Garden, both by Samuel Thayer, and ANY of the classics written by Euell Gibbons, the father of modern foraging.

Please feel free to post comments below, especially if you have your own stories about foraging!

When I posted on Facebook about the edibility of dandelions, I got some amazing responses, but the one that truly stood out was from my fan Katja Turk, who shared with me a treasured family recipe from the days when her grandmothers were living in the communist era in Slovenia:

“I’m sending you a recipe for a dandelion honey (this is an oooold recipe the way that our grandmothers used to make it) – back in the days people couldn’t afford to buy honey and even if they owe bees for it, they usually only used honey for selling and not for eating. So this was some sort of cheeper way to make honey and they also used it as medicine when they had sore throat”

As soon as I read the recipe, I dashed out into my neighbor’s yard, which is overrun with dandelions, and picked for about 15 minutes until I had enough to make the recipe.  And the results were startlingly delicious.  I actually made a mistake the first time I made this recipe, but it resulted in a fabulous bonus…dandelion-candied lemon.  So here’s how I made it the first time, which is pretty much exactly the same results I got from making it the second time according to the instruction Katja sent me…

In a big pot, combine:

about 300 dandelion blossoms (I used about 600 for extra flavor, and you don’t have to remove the green part)
3 whole lemons, cut into 1″ round slices
2 liters of water (that’s about 8 1/2 cups)
6 1/2 pounds of sugar (about 12 1/2 cups)

Bring everything to a rapid boil, then reduce the heat to maintain a rolling boil.  Boil for 2-3 hours until the appearance of the boil changes from looking more like water boiling to very glassy, sticky bubbles and the color of the liquid has turned deep golden.  Then VERY CAREFULLY pour the liquid through a large strainer or colander into a heat-proof bowl or pitcher.  (Hot sugar syrup sticks like crazy and is much hotter than boiling water so be extremely cautious.)  Using tongs, carefully remove the pieces of lemon from the dandelions and set them on a plate to cool.  These are now candied lemons, with an incredible flavor and texture.  Chop them up and serve them for breakfast…they are delicious on toast or biscuits or pancakes, or use them on top of ice cream or inside fruit pies.  Or dip them in chocolate.  They are DIVINE!

Let the syrup cool completely, and now you’ve got about 3 quarts of an incredibly delicious syrup that is wonderful on pancakes or waffles.  (We served them over an acorn buckwheat waffle for dessert at FRANK and people lost their minds.)  This amount of syrup is enough to last you all year until the next dandelion harvest, or double the recipe and share with friends.  They will demand the recipe.

I wanted to include some of the remarks Katja made about the recipe:

“This honey is not like the honey you’re used of. It’s not that thick, but if you want, you can use more sugar, cook it longer or use the gelatin for jam or marmelade. So this honey (before you add sugar, gelatin etc.) may not be thick enough to use it on bread, but it’s great to sweeten desserts, tea or as a syrup and just mix it with water.”

Many thanks to you, Katja, for sharing this time-honored recipe from your family.  I felt honored making it and sharing it with my own family and with guests at my restaurant.  To me, all recipes with such a story taste infinitely better because the legacy of those who prepared it for generations past can be TASTED in the final product.  This recipe will become a tradition in my family from now on!

This isn’t just an electronic cookbook.  It’s completely different.  You can assemble your own dinner party from a library of these world-class recipes.  The app will give you a shopping list.  And it can scale the recipes for however many people you are serving, whether it’s 2 or 20, so there’s no waste.  Then you tell it when you’re serving the dinner, and it schedules your cooking for you, even a few days out.  Say you’re going to serve at 8pm on Saturday.  On Friday evening the app will prompt you to make a couple of the sauces and some of the components for dessert.  It will effortlessly move you between tasks for ALL the recipes, it times everything for you, and if you get delayed, it will recalculate your estimated serving time so you can let guests know.

The role *I* played in the development of the app was in recipe adaptation, testing, and editing.  We get recipes from the best chefs in the country, but often they are just notes, and often they are in restaurant-sized quantities.  My job is to extract a recipe scaled for the home, test it in my kitchen using normal home-kitchen equipment, so that I know the potential pitfalls and risky spots in the recipe, and then edit the recipe so that complex techniques are very clearly explained…so ANYONE can execute the dish, even if they are new in the kitchen.

It may sound like an easy job, but even the entry of the information into the system is challenging.  It’s not like writing a cookbook at all.  Because the app is “smart,” I have to built relationships between tasks, so that the app knows which tasks have to be completed before other tasks can be started…and which tasks are not dependent upon others and can be done at any time.  I have to tell the app how long you can wait after performing a task before you absolutely have to start the next task for the recipe.  (Sometimes that’s a day or two…sometimes it’s less than a minute.)  This is how it can switch you between recipes and coordinate your cooking schedule to use your time most efficiently and still have everything ready at the instant you plan on serving!

After almost a year of development on my end, and 3 years of development by the whole team, the app has been released in the iTunes app store!  You can download it for FREE, and the app includes several free recipes from each of our featured chefs.  (And we’re not done…we have MANY more recipes and chefs we’ll be adding in future editions.)

So, if you’ve got an iPad, check out Nimble Chef.  Please rate it, and let us know what you think!  We want Nimble Chef to be THE resource for helping you and me to perfect our cooking skills and be able to execute fine-restaurant-quality cuisine right in our own home kitchens.  For updates, Like us on Facebook, or Follow us on Twitter @NimbleChef.  Please note that the iPad version is our beta, and once we get some feedback from those of you who use the iPad version, we’ll be releasing it for on the Android platform.  (I’m an Android nut, myself.)

I had a few sweet potatoes left over in my pantry and they were starting to go, so I knew I had to use them quick.  So this morning I tossed together a muffin recipe that’s actually pretty darn good for you, emphasizing whole grains and minimizing saturated fats.  Best of all, they taste incredible.

This recipe makes about 2 dozen muffins.  That’s a lot.  So if you don’t have 2 one-dozen muffin tins, you might want to halve this recipe.  But the great thing about muffins is that there’s no such thing as leftover muffins.  Extra muffins are coveted gifts, and will make your neighbors or coworkers VERY happy, and it doesn’t take any longer to make 2 dozen than it does to make 1.

The first thing you need to do is make some sweet potato puree.  Technically, you could buy the cans of sweet potatoes or yams, but those are usually packed in sugar syrup…needless extra calories.

Into your microwave, place:

3 large sweet potatoes, washed and pricked all over with a fork

Microwave on high for 5-6 minutes.  Then flip the potatoes over.  (CAREFUL!  They’ll be hot.)  Microwave another 5 minutes.  Unless you have a small microwave, they should be soft at this point.  If not, keep microwaving them until they are soft.  There are other ways to cook sweet potatoes, but they take longer.  Oven roasting is my favorite, but it takes AGES and wastes electricity.  I do not recommend boiling them, because it leaches out nutrients and flavor.  Once the potatoes are soft, carefully remove them from the microwave using a kitchen towel, and slice them in half to speed up the cooling process.  When they are cool enough to handle safely, scoop the pulp out of the skin with a spoon, and then mash the pulp with a fork.  Measure out:

2 cups of the sweet potato puree

Save any extra puree to add to oatmeal or cereal, stir it into yogurt, or just eat it!  It’s so good for you.  To the puree, add:

1 1/2 cups buttermilk (substitute 3/4 cup yogurt or sour cream plus 3/4 cup milk, or 1 1/2 cups milk plus 1 Tablespoon vinegar)
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup canola oil
2 eggs

Stir everything together very well and set it aside.  In another large bowl, combine:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup rolled, or “old fashioned” oats (quick cooking oats will work, but the texture won’t be as hearty)
1/2 cup firmly-packed brown sugar (light or dark)
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt (or 1/2 teaspoon table salt)
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon powdered ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

(and, if I’ve converted you into a cardamom lover, you can also add up to 2 teaspoons of cardamom)

Then, in a separate small bowl, make the crumble topping by combining:

1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup oats
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 teaspoon cinnamon
4 Tablespoons melted butter

Squeeze all these ingredients together until they are moistened.

Now, combine the wet and dry muffin ingredients and stir gently until they are well mixed and mostly lump-free.  Don’t work the batter too much or gluten will develop and the muffins will be tough.  A folding motion is better than a stirring motion.  Then spoon the batter into muffin pans lined with cupcake liners.  (Because this recipe is relatively low in fat, the muffins tend to stick, so cupcake liners make things much easier.  If you don’t have them, spray the muffin tin very well with cooking spray.)  I use a squeeze-handle ice cream scoop to do this, and it helps me get a perfectly even amount in each tin without getting my fingers messy.

Then sprinkle the crumble topping onto each muffin and gently press down to adhere the topping to the batter.

Bake the muffins on the center rack of a preheated 400F oven for 25 minutes, or until the muffins test done.  (Insert a knife or toothpick into the center of the oven, and if it comes out clean without any streaks of batter, they are done.)

Let them cool for 5-10 minutes in the pan before carefully removing them to a cooling rack.

“ZOMG, their cheddar biscuits are SO GOOD!”

It’s like Olive Garden with breadsticks.  And I think it’s a clear condemnation for a restaurant when the ONE THING people rave about is their bread.  Truth be told, fantabulous cheddar biscuits are the simplest thing in the world to make, and the ones from this recipe will outmatch Red Lobster’s any day of the week.

This recipe makes 2 dozen sizeable biscuits.  Halve the recipe if you’re not feeding a crowd, but I warn you…these don’t stick around for long.  And people will be fighting for ownership of the leftovers, if there are any.

In a big bowl, combine:

4 cups all purpose flour
2 Tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons salt
2 Tablespoons garlic powder
1 Tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper

Stir around with your fingers until well mixed.  Then add:

6 garlic cloves, chopped
2 cups shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese

Toss with your fingers until the garlic and cheese are well scattered throughout the dry ingredients.  Then add:

2 1/4 cups buttermilk (substitute 1 cup plain yogurt or sour cream plus 1 1/4 cups milk, or 2 1/4 cups milk plus 1 Tablespoon vinegar)
3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted (1 1/2 sticks, or 12 Tablespoons)

Stir with a wooden spoon until all the dry ingredients have been moistened.  The batter should be the consistency of cookie batter…too wet to knead, but if you drop a spoonful onto a plate, it will hold its shape.  Drop by 1/4 cup fulls onto a baking sheet lined with foil or parchment.  (I use an ice cream scoop with the squeezable handle, it makes perfect even shapes and keeps your hands from getting sticky.)

Bake on the center rack of a preheated 400F oven for 15 minutes, or until lightly browned on top.

About a month after MasterChef finished filming, I was back in Dallas…after a quick trip to Thailand which was planned long before I auditioned for MasterChef, and turned out to be a much-needed decompression.  I immediately went to visit precious, darling Jennie Kelley, one of my top-18 “rivals” on the show.  In reality, Jennie and I were fast friends from the moment we met in a casting van with 10 other strangers.  I offered her some of the chicken wings I’d gotten at the grocery store (you basically STARVE during MasterChef, ironically), and the rest was history.

Jennie and I have a very similar connection with food, and we discovered this early on.  Some people are attracted to the ACTUAL process of cooking.  Combining flavors and techniques to produce something entirely new and creative.  These people make up the greatest chefs in history.  They are the people who look at ingredients and see art.  I am not one of those people.  And those people, like most artists, care very little what the public at large thinks of their work.  They know, in their educated and inspired hearts and minds, that their work approaches perfection.  And if the public balks, they may not care, or they may buckle into depression.  But they don’t create their art for the public.  They create because they are driven to.

Jennie and I are passionate about cooking for a different reason…because of what cooking means to people.  To our friends and family.  To our culture.  We are drawn to the kitchen because of the human aspect.  Because of what happens to people when they gather around a table, whether they are life-long friends, or complete strangers.  We would be more appropriately termed “Food Anthropologists” or “Kitchen Sociologists” than chefs.

So when the stinky stuff started to hit the proverbial fan behind-the-scenes at MasterChef…and people started fighting and arguing, insulting each other, and being hostile…we broke down.  Because, to us, cooking is about bringing people together.  And here was our top-18 group, throwing cookbooks at each other and screaming at the top of their lungs over such petty matters.  And Jennie and I both knew that we had to stop it, or hit the highway home.  So we basically forced everyone to sit down, and we said, “Guys…we’re stuck here for 2 months.  We can’t contact the people in our lives that we love while we’re here.  The only people we have to lean on right now are each other.  And we’re all here because we love cooking.  So let’s stop fighting and being negative.  Let’s support each other and love each other, because we share SO MUCH MORE with each other than what differences we may have.  We will all be better cooks if we love each other rather than hate each other.”  And from that moment on, our MasterChef experience was different.  Perhaps not as drama-filled and back-stabby as the producers would have liked.  But, judging from the responses I’ve heard from all you wonderful people, unique in reality television and as a result…special.

But I digress.  There I am, sitting on Jennie’s couch.  The last time I was in Dallas, almost 3 months before, I didn’t know she existed…though I had walked past her apartment building a dozen times.  Now we felt like we’d known each other all our lives, a scant 10 weeks later.

“What now?” I asked Jennie.  “What’s next?”

“I dunno.  Do you wanna be a chef?” she asked.

“HECK no.  I love cooking WAY too much to be a chef.  I have to sit down with the people I cook for.  They are the only reason I cook.  I have NO desire to sit in the back of a commercial kitchen and churn out plate after plate of Xerox-copy food for people I’ll never meet.  What about you?  Do you wanna be a chef?”

And, as always between me and Jennie, she didn’t even need to respond.  We felt exactly the same.

“I have been thinking about this one idea, though, for years and years and years,” she said.  “I really wanna do an underground restaurant.”

Any mention of “underground” automatically triggers the primal instincts that led me to start exploring caves when I was barely 10 years old.  Cave exploring is my hobby.

“Well, we don’t have very many caves in North Texas, Jennie.  And I’m not entirely sure a cave is a great environment for a restaurant.”

She looked at me with that look I’ve seen a million times since, indicating, “I can’t believe you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re too cool not to know.”

Several days later, an unexpected package arrived from Amazon for me, and I tore it open to discover the book Secret Suppers: Rogue Chefs and Underground Restaurants in Warehouses, Townhouses, Open Fields, and Everywhere In Between by Jenn Garbee.  And if that’s not an intriguing title, I don’t know what is.  I drew myself a hot bath.  I poured myself a big glass of red.  And I opened the cover.

2 hours later the bath water was ice cold and I turned the last page.  Shivering, I jumped out of the tub and called Jennie.

“I’m in.  Let’s do this.”

Underground restaurants are their own unique thing.  Some people, when I explain it to them, say, “Oh, you mean a pop up!”  A pop-up restaurant is when a chef takes over an existing restaurant for a night, and does their own menu.  An underground restaurant is completely different.  An underground restaurant is a restaurant that doesn’t exist.  No one knows where it’s at.  It usually changes locations every time.  And it’s NEVER in a restaurant.  It’s in a house.  A field.  A barn.  (A cave?)  And almost always, the guests sit together, family-style, though they don’t know each other.  And instead of the chefs being stuck in the back, they are out there, mingling with guests, talking about the food, telling stories…  It’s the antithesis of a restaurant.  And nothing like a pop-up.

Strangely enough, I’ve been hosting underground restaurants for almost a decade and never even realized it.  They often took place in my front yard:

So it didn’t even require a second of thought to decide that Jennie and I, after joining forces, could create one of the coolest Underground Restaurants in existence.

“I wanna call it Frank,” she said.

“Frank?  Who’s that?”

“No…not Frank.  frank.  FRANK.  Like…straightforward.  You know…food, to the point.”

Bingo.  I got it.  No foams.  No scented airs.  No carrot juice caviar.  No duck liver spun into cotton candy.  No whimsically bizarre things that people would NEVER imagine themselves eating anywhere else.  REAL food.  The foods people know.  The foods that have been celebrated for centuries in cultures around the world.  REAL food.  Food that looks like itself.  Food that has a story that stretches beyond the calcined walls of the Modernist chef’s skull.  Food that was already a legend a century before the chef was born.  The kind of food that people cook for each other when it comes time to celebrate.  The Food of the People.

I, ever the spontanaetist (is that a word?), immediately said, “When are we gonna do it?  Next week?”

Jennie, ever the precautionary perfectionist, replied, “GOD no!  It’s gonna take months.  Everything has to be perfect.  We don’t even have a table.  We have to have a table.  The perfect table.  THE table.  The table everyone sits around.”

Well, of course, if we had to search the continent for the perfect FRANK table, it would take forever.  The clear choice, then, was to BUILD the table.  We had already discussed that everything at FRANK was to be handcrafted, right down to the butter on the table.  Why not the table, itself?

“Do you know how to woodwork?” Jennie asked.

“Nah.  But how hard can it be?  I’m always up for a new hobby.”  I could hear her curious skepticism in the silence on the line.  My statement was not without precedent, though.  Before MasterChef, I did appear on HGTV’s All American Handyman.  I may not be a woodworker, but I can build a house.

So, ever the thrifty person I am, and fueled with a fire to create a table that embodied all the character and history of the foods we intended to celebrate at FRANK, I found a century-old home in Ft. Worth that was being demolished, and they wanted someone to take the red oak flooring and give it a new life, rather than it ending up in a landfill.  Two weeks later, the floor from a home that saw generations of families grow up had been re-milled into the table that would become the very heart of FRANK:

Crude, to be sure.  Or, as I prefer to call it: “rustic.”  But full of character, with a story reaching back through the years…just as we wanted.

Now, table provided, Jennie had no excuse for delay.  It was time to make FRANK happen.  And on April 12, 2012, it did.

Fast-forward nearly a year, and if you type “Top Restaurants” into Yelp for Dallas, Texas…more often than not, you’ll see FRANK in the top 10.  (It rotates constantly based on current reviews for each restaurant.)  We’re always puzzled when we see ourselves on that list.  We’re only open once or twice a month.  Yes, the crowds originally came because they learned about me and Jennie by watching MasterChef.  But gradually, the crowd shifted to people who had no clue who Jennie and I were…they were at the FRANK table because they had heard about the food.  About the experience.  And that’s exactly how we like it.

So, once or twice a month, a crowd of 18 strangers assembles around the FRANK table, and for 3 hours, they eat.  Four, five…sometimes six courses.  Of food that’s crafted entirely by hand.  From the bread to the cheese.  And sometimes…to the wine or beer.  So, without further ado, I’ll tell the story of one FRANK.  Valentine’s FRANK.

The last week of January, Jennie and I confirmed that we would host FRANK the weekend before Valentine’s, February 8 and 10.  A Friday and a Sunday, a pattern we’ve discovered we like.  It gives us a day between seatings to recover and recook.  And it allows folks in the industry to attend, as many restaurants and bars close or have alternate staff on Sunday night.  And I push for a third seating on February 14, because that’s one of the biggest “date nights” of the year.  We’ve never done 3 FRANKs in a row.  But we’re almost a year old.  We can handle it.

Scheduling a FRANK can be daunting, because Jennie and I each juggle 2 full time careers outside of FRANK.  I do tech support and website management for a series of health-related websites, and I help translate recipes from the country’s greatest chefs and restaurants onto a home-cook level for the iPad app Nimble Chef.  Jennie is a food stylist (meaning she cooks and presents the food that appears in photos for magazines, cookbooks, even music videos), and she’s a founding member of the legendary band The Polyphonic Spree which, for the past 13 years, has toured the world, spreading their one-of-a-kind sound that infiltrates the human heart and voicebox and infects both with naught but peace, love, and an overabundance of explosive and highly-contagious joy.  So…it can be quite challenging to find a weekend each month when we’re both in town and have the ability to carve out the week before to execute FRANK.  Because it takes a full week.

So on Sunday, February 3, an invitation email is sent out to over 2,000 people around the country who want to dine at FRANK, announcing our Friday, Sunday, and Valentine’s Thursday seatings.  Guests have until Monday at 5pm to email us back, indicating their party size (up to 4 people), and the night(s) they are interested in dining.  Monday night, Jennie and I are faced with the daunting task of executing the lottery that decides the guest list.

There’s probably software that would simplify this task.  But we’ve got HUNDREDS of RSVP emails…some of which say, “We can come ANY of the 3 nights, but if it’s Friday, it will be 3 of us.  If it’s Sunday, it will be 2 of us.  If it’s Valentine’s Day, it will be 4 of us.”  For any given FRANK, we have 200-300 seating requests for only 18 seats.  And since we’re so passionate about a hand-crafted experience, even the lottery is hand crafted.  In a spiral notebook, we write down every party that wants seats for every night.  And then the random lottery takes place and the guest list is assembled.  And on Tuesday, we email the lucky winners with the good news that they’ll be dining a FRANK.  But they still don’t know WHERE frank. is.  Or what they’ll be eating.  They won’t find out until the night before they sit down at our table.

Monday night we start discussing the menu, because at this point, all we’ve decided is our theme: Chocolate.  Naturally.  Because it’s Valentine’s Day, and no food is more synonymous with romance than chocolate.  And this is a particularly challenging theme.  Usually, we pick a broader theme, like “FRENCH FOOD.”  Or “BRUNCH AFTER DARK.”  This menu, however, will feature chocolate in every course, and few of us are accustomed to eating chocolate in any course other than dessert.  We hash out a menu, which is entirely likely to change a dozen times before we start cooking, based on inspiration, research, and what we find when sourcing.

Tuesday we begin sourcing.  We have 18 guests, plus staff, to feed on 3 separate nights.  Friday and Sunday can be sourced at the same time.  But the following Thursday seating will require sourcing the next week.  We have a trove of local artisans and purveyors that help supply the freshest local ingredients for each FRANK dinner.  Some come from our favorite corner ethnic food markets.  Some come from legendary purveyors like Tom Spicer at Spiceman’s 1401, who supplies fresh herbs, greens, foraged mushrooms, and such to Dallas’s finest restaurants; or Paula Lambert at the Dallas Mozzarella Company, lauded around the world as one of the finest cheesemakers alive.  Some come from the Dallas Farmer’s Market.  Some come from my own garden, in my backyard in Lewisville:

This is one of the primary differences between FRANK and a restaurant.  The large portion of a restaurant’s ingredients arrive weekly from a commercial food supply company, like Ben E. Keith or Sysco.  Yes…the better restaurants may source the protein for their special from a local farm here and there.  But virtually all their ingredients arrive in massive boxes and jugs from mass-produced sources.  Because they are serving 600 people a night, 6 or 7 nights a week.  At FRANK, because we serve 18 people, 2 or 3 times a month, we can source the finest local meats and veggies, like pastured rooster from Farmer William at Grandma’s Farm in McKinney, free range eggs from Shepherd/Farmer Cindy at Jacob’s Reward in Parker, or raw milk from Farmer Todd at Lucky Layla in Plano.

By Thursday morning, everything is sourced, and the menu is finalized:

This is not a typical FRANK menu.  Normally, you would recognize way more items on the menu.  But our theme is chocolate…one of the most complex and challenging ingredients known to man.  For this menu, we’re going out on a limb to introduce our diners to pairings they’re probably unfamiliar with.  Like bleu cheese and chocolate.  If you’ve never tried it, you haven’t lived.  Get a nice dark bittersweet chocolate, some Gorgonzola or Roquefort, and a crisp cracker like Melba toast, and eat them together.  Your life will change.

We have over 22 components to prepare for the six-course menu.  Some take 15 minutes to prep.  Some take more than 12 hours:

• Chocolate puff pastry (not sweet, just savory)
• Seared cocoa- and paprika- rubbed flank steak
• Chocolate hazelnut soup
• Toasted crostini with gorgonzola cheese
• Handmade chocolate spaghetti (earthy and bitter, not sweet at all)
• A light citrus cream sauce for the pasta
• Scallops crusted in raw cacao nibs, seared in cocoa butter
• Sorbet of reduced Cabernet Sauvignon with candied shallots
• Dark chocolate covered Champagne grapes
• A Oaxacan-style mole sauce with over 50 ingredients, from avocado leaf to baby banana to 3 different types of chocolate
• Chicken thigh meat braised in the mole
• Crispy polenta cakes made with masa and cotija, a Mexican cheese with vaguely similar characteristics to Romano
• Fried quail eggs
• Cocoa and cinnamon toasted cauliflower
• Crusty, old-world-style rosemary sourdough bread
• Sweet-cream butter with fleur de sel (course sea salt)
• Flourless chocolate cake
• Goat cheese ice cream
• Salted caramel sauce made with raw cocoa butter
• Dark chocolate-dipped potato chips
• Hot chocolate with 6 types of chiles, cinnamon, vanilla bean, and coffee bean
• Dark chocolate truffles infused with espresso, coated with pink peppercorn and coarse Maldon sea salt

And here is yet another thing that separates FRANK from a restaurant.  At a restaurant, a team of prep cooks would arrive in the early morning to start on the sauces and the components that take longer.  The bread and butter, and many other menu items, would be picked up or delivered from outside sources.  Those prep cooks finish their shifts before dinner service begins, and the line cooks arrive and take the components readied by the prep cooks, and toss them together as they are ordered by diners, according to the executive chef’s recipes.  At FRANK, your prep cooks, line cooks, and executive chefs are ME and JENNIE.  We do everything.  By hand.  And then we put it on the table in front of you.

Occasionally, we have a “sous chef” who gets in the kitchen with us on Thursday to help cook.  This week it happens to be Michael Chen, from MasterChef season 3, who is recently back in Texas from a stint as executive chef at a restaurant in Rimouski, Canada on the banks of Quebec’s mighty St. Lawrence River.  Michael, as always, readily accepts mundane tasks and executes them with flawless diligence.  (“Michael, I need to you to melt this chocolate to exactly 98 degrees over 75 minutes, stirring every 30 seconds.”)  For those who don’t know, in order for chocolate to “melt in your mouth, not in your hand” it must be carefully melted to exacting temperatures very slowly.  This is called “tempering” and it can be incredibly challenging.  2 or 3 degrees too much, and your chocolate will not set at room temp and will be a runny mess.

For our menu, we are using several different types of chocolate.  Two are legendary in the pastry chef’s world, but may be unfamiliar to you: Valrhona from France and Callebaut from Belgium.  These are the two dominant names in the gourmet chocolate world.  They produce what are commonly respected as the finest chocolates in the world.  You can’t go to the store and buy a bar of Valrhona or Callebaut chocolate.  But if you buy a ruinously-expensive artisan chocolate bar with Madagascar orange peel and Himalayan sea salt…chances are the chocolate in the bar was sourced from Valrhona or Callebaut.  In addition, we’re prominently featuring a chocolate we fell in love with while sourcing…Agostoni from Italy.  To us, it put Valrhona and Callebaut to shame with its complexity, depth, and spiciness.  We’re also using El Rey, a chocolate company owned by a Venezuelan family, as well as “Mexican chocolate” which is blended with coarse sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon and commonly melted into boiling milk or water to make hot chocolate.

Wednesday night, Michael and I stay up all night making dark chocolate truffles infused with espresso and coated with Maldon sea salt (a famous salt among chefs, with large, crunchy, delicate crystals, that is produced in England) and pink peppercorns that I picked from a tree in Hawaii on a recent trip with Christian Collins and Adrien Nieto from MasterChef.  Thursday we “load in” to the historic building where FRANK will happen, and start cooking in earnest.  One of the biggest projects is the mole, which takes well over 12 hours to prep BEFORE the chicken is cooked in it.  Thursday night we send out a secret email to the diners to notify them of the location and menu, and we finally collapse in bed around 4am for a few hours of desperate sleep before an early rise on Friday…the day we serve.

Not only do we have to cook on Friday.  We have to transform the space into a restaurant by setting up the 18 foot communal table (which weighs about 200 pounds) and 18 chairs.

We also have to select a quote for our chalkboard to represent the evening:

Our servers arrive around 6pm and we brief them on the menu, and on any special diners who may not be drinking, or who may be allergic to shellfish or gluten and who will receive special plates.  We go over each course with them, so they know what they are serving, which wine to pair with it, when to pass the homemade bread, and who is celebrating anniversaries or birthdays.  Like everything with FRANK, our servers are not strangers.  Chris and Marie are our normal servers.  I’ve known Chris since he was 17.  Jennie has known Marie since she was the same age.  They are two of our dearest friends, and they make our life so much easier by letting us focus entirely on the food.

Chris and Marie, our go-to servers at FRANK. Image by Lauren Logan

At 8pm, the guests begin to arrive.  At first, they’re not sure what to expect.  They’re arriving at someone’s private home that they’ve never met.  They don’t know anyone in the room but who they came with.  We place Champagne into one hand, and an amuse-bouche (a fancy term for a small-bite appetizer) into the other, and introduce them to the other guests.  Chris puts some vinyl on the record player, and the crowd begins to grow as the Champagne flows.

At 830pm we tell everyone to rush the table.  Grab a seat.  Any seat.  As long as you’re sitting next to someone you came with, and next to a stranger.  Some of our diners get a little nervous about this game of musical chairs.  Some get incredibly brave and sit at the complete opposite end of the table from the person they came with.  Jennie and I give a quick history of FRANK and explain that they are about to take a 3-hour journey that will be completely different from any restaurant they’ve ever experienced, and the reason isn’t just the food…it’s the strangers sitting at the table with them.  Because, even when you go to dine at a truly exceptional restaurant, the only people you share that experience with is the people you came with.  At FRANK, everyone in the restaurant dines together.  And everyone is at the table because they are passionate foodies.  So whether a doctor is sitting next to a mechanic, or a 70 year old is sitting next to a 20 year old, they automatically have a connection that sparks conversation.  And they’re going to tell stories about other exceptional meals they’ve enjoyed.  And they’re going to excitedly discuss each course after they’ve tasted it.  And by the end of the evening, everyone is Facebook friends and making plans to dine together the following week.  (At one FRANK, one of the guests set up a special Facebook page JUST for the diners that night, so they could share photos and keep in touch with each other.)

Jennie then hurries back into the kitchen to get the first course ready, and I begin to discuss the evening’s theme and the food everyone is about to eat.  Since chocolate is our ingredient for the night, I pass around some raw whole cacao nibs and explain how chocolate goes from a pulpy pod filled with bitter, almond-sized seeds, to the confections they are familiar with.  I also pass around some chunks of raw cocoa butter and explain how this remarkable fat, that is rock hard at room temperature, but melts smoothly and sensually at body temperature, plays its own unique role as a cooking fat in this evening’s menu.  (Restaurants could never use cocoa butter as a cooking fat, despite its FABULOUSLY high smoke point, and luxurious flavor and mouth feel, because it is also fabulously expensive and just can’t be sourced in quantities large enough for commercial cooking.)  This is another unique aspect about FRANK…your chefs give you a thorough education about the food you’re going to eat.  We tell you about where it came from.  (Because we actually know.)  We explain why we chose the cooking methods we did, and the chemistry and physics behind the procedures for the meal.  And our diners just love it.

Image by Christian Eggers

The courses begin coming out.  First is a soup inspired by a classic Italian combination: hazelnuts and chocolate.  Ever had Nutella?  Well, this is the savory version of that.  It’s not sweet at all.  POUNDS of hazelnuts get simmered in vegetable broth with shallots and then pureed into a thick base that gets flavored with a bit of cinnamon, and then enriched with bittersweet chocolate and some cream.  On top are toasted hazelnuts and basil chiffonade, and the thing that brings it all together is the intense raw-milk gorgonzola on the crostini.  As I mentioned before, if you’ve never had chocolate and bleu cheese together, you’re in for the surprise of your life.  People were literally screaming at the combination…it’s that good.  And that surprising.

Image by Christian Eggers

Next comes the pasta course.  That giant sea scallop is seared at very high temperature in cocoa butter to get a nice crust, then it is rolled in cacao nibs that were also toasted in cocoa butter for a great earthy crunch to balance the scallop’s sweetness.  It’s sitting on a bed of chocolate spaghetti…dark, earthy, and bitter, which was tossed in a VERY light citrus cream sauce to brighten the dark flavors with acid and echo the sweetness of the scallop.  This was a favorite course among many diners.  And we passed around our homemade rosemary sourdough bread, made with whey leftover from the cheese we’re making for a future FRANK.  (Rosemary and chocolate is another fabulous pairing.)  Our diners spread homemade sweet cream butter onto the bread, and many of them tell us that the bread is so good they’d eat it exclusively for a meal if they could.

Image by Christian Eggers

Then it’s time for a sorbet palate cleanser before the bold flavors of the main course take over.  Our sorbet tonight is cabernet shallot…a nice young cab reduced and sweetened, with candied shallots dotted throughout.  There’s definitely an unmistakeable onion flavor to the sorbet, but the acidity and boldness of the wine (also customarily a savory flavor) contrasts with the sweetness to make a very complex and refreshing bite or two, helping the palate relax after several courses of dark, bitter chocolate.  We served it with a frozen chocolate covered Champagne grape.  A couple of our diners across 3 evenings told us, “It’s interesting, but I wouldn’t want to eat a whole bowl of it.”  (Luckily, we only gave them 3 bites.)  However, just as many told us it was their FAVORITE course of the entire night, and some actually wanted to eat a whole bowl!

Image by Christian Eggers

Now comes the main attraction…a play on a main course we’ve served in several unique incarnations at previous FRANKs: a crispy polenta cake topped with some type of braised meat.  Sometimes it’s short rib braised in coffee and cocoa.  Sometimes it’s chicken breast braised in red wine and rosemary.  But tonight, it’s chicken thigh braised in a dark Oaxacan mole sauce.  If you’ve never had mole, you haven’t lived.  If you’ve had mole and didn’t like it, it wasn’t prepared properly.  Mole is one of the most complex and delicious sauces of any culture on the planet.  This mole has avocado leaves, baby bananas, tortillas, raisins, coffee, wine, 3 types of chocolate, 6 types of chilies…the ingredients list adds up to more than 50.  Poor Michael Chen spent 12 hours straight just working on the mole to get it ready for the thigh meat to be braised, ever so slowly, at 200 degrees overnight, resulting in succulent perfection.  The mole is dark, rich, with a satisfying heat, and a depth of complex flavor you’d be hard pressed to find in any other culture’s food spectrum.  The chicken is nestled on top of a crispy polenta cake…decidedly NOT Mexican…but we finished the polenta with cotija, a dry Mexican cheese with a flavor similar to Romano.  And a sunny side quail egg rests on top of it all.  Accompanying the main course is cauliflower toasted in the oven with cocoa, cinnamon, and paprika.  And people go nuts.  One young lady, born in Mexico, called me over and said, embarassingly, “I’ve hated mole my whole life.  I can’t stand it.  Not even my mother’s or my grandmother’s.  When I saw it on the menu, I got really nervous, but my husband made me promise to try one bite.  I ate it all.  Is there any more?”

Image by Christian Eggers

Our guests have been eating for 2 and a half hours, but they’re not done.  Dessert is always a favorite course at FRANK, and this one will be no different.  It’s a flourless chocolate cake made with that unbelievably good Agostoni chocolate from Italy, served with a scoop of goat cheese ice cream.  It tastes like frozen cheesecake…a wee bit salty from the goat cheese, but incredibly rich and silky.  Draped across everything is a warm salted caramel sauce, traditionally made with butter, but we’ve made it with cocoa butter, which gives it a white-chocolate flavor.  And on top of the ice cream is a Ruffles potato chip (the only commercial ingredient of the night) dipped in Valrhona chocolate.  The interplay between sweet and salty, rich and bitter, is the perfect ending.  But it’s not alone.

Image by Christian Eggers

The dessert is served with something we call Aztec hot chocolate.  Before European explorers were introduced to chocolate by the Aztecs, all the chocolate in the world was consumed in the form of a drink by the native peoples of Central and South America.  And it wasn’t sweet.  It was combined with chiles and water and served as a ceremonial drink, reserved for chiefs, priests, gods, and warriors.  Our hot chocolate is a nod to chocolate’s origin, with flavors from Latin America’s most coveted ingredients…cinnamon, chiles, vanilla, and coffee.  It is thick and rich, but not very sweet.  A perfect balance to the dessert.  And so good that one guest (a gifted chef himself) asked to take home the leftovers to serve at his own Valentine’s dinner the following weekend.

And now, after 3 hours of indulging by our guests, and 3 hours of cooking and serving by us, it’s time to relax with our guests and chat about what they thought, and share a toast with our crew.

We may look full of life!  But we’ve been busting our humps for days, and we’re exhausted.  Service is a VERY hectic time as we try to plate 18 servings of each course and get them out quickly enough that everyone can start while the food is still warm.  (Or frozen.)

We relax with our guests for a bit, and then pass out their parting gifts…in this case, the truffles we made a few nights before.

Our guests pay whatever they feel is appropriate for the meal, either in cash or by credit card.  We give a suggested donation amount for each event, based on the menu and the occasion (generally between $100 and $150), but the final amount (if any) is up to our guests.  They universally tell us it’s worth far more than we charge for it.  (Though I admit, I’ve only spent that much on dinner a precious few times in my life.)  They’ve been eating the finest hand-crafted food, all of which has a story behind it, and drinking superbly paired wines, all night long.  They are leaving with new friends who they actually plan on seeing again.  And they are all prodding us for more info about how they can get a guaranteed seat at the next FRANK, since our invitation list is so long.

When the final guests leave, it’s often approaching midnight.  But our evening isn’t finished.  We have to wash all the dishes, put up any leftovers, and get the place back into order before we can sleep.  And the next day we’re up early, cooking again for Sunday night’s FRANK!  As you can imagine…the week following a FRANK demands quite a bit of taking-it-easy.  (Though…who really has time for that?!?)

I applaud those of you who made it all the way to the end of this blog.  At 5,500+ words, I know it wasn’t easy.  But FRANK isn’t something that is easily explained in a few words.  Maybe some day you’ll find yourself around our table, and we can chat about what FRANK was like for you!

Feel free to comment below, especially if you’ve dined at FRANK before.  And visit our new website, which we built ourselves, with some help from our amazing photographer friend Lauren Logan, and my techie wizard Ozzie Bock.  Thanks to EVERYONE who makes FRANK work.  Thanks to everyone who patiently waits through lottery after lottery to dine with us.  And most of all, thanks to Jennie Kelley, who conceived of FRANK long before she met me, but who welcomed me into this magical project.  FRANK has been one of the greatest adventures of my life, and I can’t wait for many more years to come!

Folks with a basement or cellar anywhere in the US (or most temperate climates) generally have the proper temperature and humidity range to cure meat simply by hanging properly salted meat in that basement or cellar.  (Though insects, mice, and wild molds can be a problem.)  The finest meats in the world are cured in centuries-old basements in Europe.  But for those of us without basements or cellars, curing our own meat requires a curing chamber that provides the ideal temperature and humidity range.

It’s fairly simple to convert an old refrigerator into such a chamber.  I got an old fridge on Craigslist for $50, but you can often find them in the free section if you’ll be patient and quick to respond once they are listed.  (If you transport a fridge on its side, rather than upright, you need to leave the fridge sitting upright, unplugged, for a couple of days, to let the coolant settle properly.)

The first object is to rig a rack system near the top of the fridge chamber, on which the meat will hang.  If you ever plan on curing whole hams, this rack may need to support fairly heavy weights (25-30 pounds per ham for a large one.)  If you’re just curing sausages, it may not need to be as strong.  If the fridge has wire racks, you may be able to just move the racks to the top of the fridge and hang the meat directly from the racks.  My fridge came with glass shelves, so I removed all the shelves.  I made my rack system out of aluminum from Home Depot.  I bought square tubes which anchor the racks on each end, and used an angle grinder to cut slots in the square tube so I can customize the distance between the racks:

I used a fast-setting epoxy to glue the square tubes to the walls of the fridge.  (Make sure they are level and even with each other!)  Then I just slid the bars into the slots, and placed some S-hooks over the bars to hang the meat.  This type of rack is sturdy enough to cure full-sized hams.

Wood may be easier to work with, but the conditions inside the curing chamber will be damp (around 65% humidity) which provides a perfect place for mold to grow, so I encourage you to avoid wood, if possible.  Get creative!

Once you have your fridge and rack system set up, you need 5 electronic components to convert the fridge into a curing chamber:

• An external temperature controller/thermostat
• An external humidity controller
• A cool-mist/ultrasonic humidifier
• A thermo-hygrometer (weather station)
• A fan

The first two items are available on the internet in a wide range of prices, depending on how convenient you want the conversion to be.  The simplest units are plug-and-play.  You plug the controllers into any outlet.  You plug the fridge into the temperature controller and you plug the humidifier into the humidity controller.  You set the proper temperature and humidity ranges, you place the sensor probes into the fridge chamber, and you’re good to go.  Unfortunately, these units are the most expensive.  The plug-and-play temperature controllers range between $50 and $80, like this one on Amazon.  The humidity controllers range between  $50 and $100, like this one or this one.  If you’re not accustomed to electrical work, I strongly encourage you to spend the extra money and get one of these.

For those of you who are handy, there are some cheaper units now available that were designed for controlling temp and humidity in computer server racks, but they are bare-bones units and you’ll have to provide power (via a cord, or wiring them to an outlet), and make your own connections to the fridge and humidifier (either by direct wiring or hard-wire, or by wiring the controllers to outlets.)  The STC-1000 unit for controlling temperature costs about $25.  (Be cautious if you find it cheaper.  Cheaper units may ship from China and take weeks, and be certain you order the proper voltage for your country…in the US this is 110 volts.)  The WH8040 unit for controlling humidity costs around $35.  (Similar warnings for this unit, too.)

I’m going to explain how to hard-wire your fridge and humidifier directly to these units, because there are other articles out there on how to wire outlets to the units, and then plug in your fridge and humidifier.  That’s extra cost, to me, and requires that I construct a housing to hold the units and the outlets.  And I’m looking for the quickest route to efficiency.  Please note that local electrical codes may not like you to have exposed wiring connections.

Let’s start with the STC-1000 to control the temperature of the fridge:

The unit comes with wiring instructions translated from Chinese, and they’re completely useless.  So I’ve made a wiring diagram:

You will need to buy or re-purpose a power cord to power the unit.  The cord needs to be able to handle enough current to power the fridge, so don’t use a lamp cord!  If you use a grounded power cord, you can connect the fridge’s green grounding wire to the green wire of the power cord.  (If you use a 2-wire power cord, you will need to connect the green wire inside the fridge’s cord to the grounding screw on an outlet, or follow the alternate grounding procedure later in this post.)  Using a grounded power cord is preferable.  You will need to cut the plug off the refrigerator’s power cord and strip off the insulation from the hot, neutral, and ground wires.

Some basic electrical knowledge here for those of you who are unfamiliar.  A typical power cord contains a hot wire that carries the current to the device…a neutral wire that returns the current to the outlet, thus completing the circuit…and a ground wire that carries away dangerous electricity if there is a wiring failure inside the device, so that you don’t get shocked when you touch it.

The hot wire is always black.  The neutral wire is usually white…but if there’s no white wire, the neutral wire will be indicated by writing, markings, or ribbing along the cord’s insulation, so look or feel closely to determine which wire is the neutral wire.  The ground wire is either bare copper or green.

So the hot wire from your power cord needs to be spliced to two other short bits of black wire (called “pigtails”) that run to slots 1 and 7 on the STC-1000 unit.  Tape these wires together with electrical tape, and connect them securely with a properly-sized wire nut.  The neutral wire from your power cord needs to be spliced to a pigtail that runs to slot 2, and to the neutral wire on the fridge’s power cord.  The hot wire on the fridge power cord needs to run to slot 8 on the unit.  (The neutral wire on the fridge power cord has already been connected to the neutral wire from the main power cord, along with a pigtail to slot 2.)

When you get done, it’ll look kinda like this:

(You shouldn’t need a heater unit unless your curing fridge sits outside in a very cold climate, but if you do, a heating pad will generally work nicely.  To add a heater to the system, run a pigtail from the black power cord bundle to slot 5.  Run the heater’s hot wire to slot 6.  Connect the heater’s neutral wire to the neutral bundle.) 

The fridge MUST be grounded, or you risk electrocuting yourself when you touch the fridge if the wiring inside the fridge fails.  The grounding wire from the fridge can connect directly to the green or bare copper wire inside the power cord, if it’s a 3-prong cord.  If you’ve used a 2 prong power cord, like I did, you need to connect the fridge’s ground wire to the grounding screw inside a nearby electrical outlet, or you can take a regular 3-prong plug, remove the hot and neutral prongs, leaving just the grounding prong, and connect the ground wire to that prong:

Here I've removed the first prong from the plug.

After removing the other prong, I attach the ground wire from the fridge to the grounding screw.

I replaced the back of the plug and now I have a ground wire that plugs into an outlet, but draws no power, it simply grounds the fridge.

Now you need to plug in the power cord to an outlet.  (I bought a special extension cord that has 4 outlets on the end that will sit next to the fridge.  4 items will need to be plugged into the outlet.  You can also use a regular extension cord and a power strip.)  The STC-1000 unit will power up, and now you need to set it.

The following paragraph details instructions for setting the STC-1000, you can skip this unless you are actively setting the device right now:  Press and hold the S key for 3 seconds to enter the setting mode.  The first item that displays is F1, which is the temperature setting.  The unit is in Celsius, so you’ll have to do a quick conversion.  I keep my curing chamber in the low 60s Fahrenheit, so 18C is the corresponding setting.  To set the temp, press and hold the S key while pressing the up or down arrow until you reach the temperature that you want your curing chamber to remain.  Then press the power button once quickly to save the setting.  (The setting will remain even if your power goes out…it only resets to the default setting if you manually reset the device.)  The other settings don’t need to be modified unless you have problems later.  (F2 is the “Difference value” which tells the fridge when to turn on after the temperature rises a specific number of degrees above your setting.  The default setting is half a degree Celsius, which is fine as it is.  F3 is the “Compressor delay time” which gives the fridge’s compressor a result, because you don’t want it cycling on and off every 30 seconds.  The default setting is 3 minutes, which is fine.  F4 is the “Temperature calibration value” which is used if you discover your device isn’t accurate and you need to adjust it.  To switch between these values in the setting mode, press the S key multiple times until you arrive at the feature you need to change.  If, at any time during the setting process, you don’t press a key for 10 seconds, the device forgets what you’ve done and returns to its operation mode.  Don’t forget to press the power button once quickly to save your settings.)

Make sure to attach the temperature probe to slots 3 and 4 on the unit.  Then run the sensor probe into your fridge and make sure it’s not touching the walls, the racks, or the meat.  Now the STC-1000 unit will keep your fridge in the low 60s…the perfect temp for curing meat.

Now we need to address humidity.  Normal refrigerators run very dry, so you’ll need to add moisture to the chamber to keep it in the low 60% range.  We do this with a cool-mist humidifier, also called an ultrasonic humidifier.  (DON’T use a conventional vaporizer, which uses warm heat to evaporate the water.  This will raise the temp inside the chamber each time the unit comes on.)  Get yourself the largest-capacity humidifier you can afford, so you don’t have to refill the unit every few days.  The unit I’m using holds about 1 gallon of water.  It cost me $30 on Amazon and was fairly well reviewed.  (There is also a pig-shaped humidifier on Amazon, which is supremely appropriate, but the reviews aren’t as good.)

Place the humidifier in the bottom of the fridge and run the wire out the side of the door.  Cut the plug off the end of your humidifier and strip the insulation off the cords.  (Humidifiers don’t usually have a ground wire, just a hot and a neutral.)

Now we get out our WH8040 humidity controller:

We wire the humidifier to the unit using the following diagram:

The hot wire from the power cord connects to two pigtails, which are connected to slots 2 and 3 on the WH8040.  The neutral wire from the power cord connects to a pigtail to slot 4, as well as the neutral wire from the humidifier’s power cord.  And the hot wire from the humidifier connects to slot 1.  The WH8040 has 2 probes that it uses to calculate humidity…a temp probe which connects to slots 8 and 9, and a vapor probe that connects to slots 5, 6, and 7.  Run the probes into the refrigerator’s chamber, and like the temp probe, they should hang freely in the area where the meat does.

When you get done wiring it, the unit will look sorta like this:

The following paragraph details instructions for setting the WH8040, you can skip this unless you are actively setting the device right now:  Press and hold the SET key for 3 seconds to enter the setting mode.  The first value is HC, which tells the unit whether to dehumidify, or humidify.  Press the SET key again, and use the up or down arrows to set this value to H (humidify).  Then press the SET key again to save the value and return to SET mode.  Press the UP key to move to the next value, D, which is “Hysteresis.”  Leave this at its default setting.  Press the UP key again to move to the next value, LS, which is the lowest humidity range you want to keep.  Press the SET button and adjust this setting to 55%, or whatever the lowest humidity is acceptable for you.  Then press the SET button again.  Use the UP arrow to move to the next value, HS, which is the maximum humidity.  Click SET and use the arrows to set this limit to 65%. The remaining settings can be left at their defaults unless you need to modify them later.  CA is humidity calibration…if your unit isn’t measuring the humidity correctly, you can override the settings by plus or minus 5%.  PT is the delay time between turning your humidifier on and off, and the default is set at 1 minute.  Press the RST key to leave the set mode.

Now you can mount your WH8040 to the side of your fridge with double sided tape or velcro.

Again, if all that wiring sounds too complex for you, you can simply buy a plug-and-play temp controller and humidity controller, you’re just gonna spend an extra $75-$100.  Do that, and your system will be set up in 15 minutes.

Now it’s time to place the fan in the bottom of the fridge next to your humidifier.  I got a small metal desk fan on Amazon for $13 that was well reviewed.  The air inside the curing chamber needs to circulate constantly to help dry the meat, so just run this cord out the back of the door and plug it into your power supply.

The final step is to install your thermo-hygrometer, which keeps track of the temp and humidity inside the chamber, so you know if your controllers are working properly.  I got mine on Amazon for $18.  It has a wireless remote unit that I velcroed to the inside of the fridge.  It is battery powered, and sends the information to the main unit, which I velcroed to the fridge door.

Now the curing chamber is complete!  Give it a few hours to operate before you start tweaking.  Remember that your fridge will probably have its own settings for temperature, which can affect the whole system.  (I have mine set for the warmest temp.)  Here’s what the final setup looks like on the inside (completely with wild boar already curing):

Note the sensors all hanging on the center and upper left side of the pic.

The freezer above is now empty space.  And in MY converted fridge, the freezer maintains a temp of about 50 degrees, when the main chamber is 65.  50F is the PERFECT temp for aging cheese!  So I can age cheese AND cure meat in the same unit.  Don’t ever try to age cheese in the SAME chamber as curing your meat.  The bacteria that you inoculate cheese with (especially bleu cheeses) isn’t what you want growing on your meat.  So they need to be separated.

All-in-all, this setup cost me about $200.  Not cheap by any means.  But if you’re serious about making your own charcuterie and salumi at home, this is money well invested.  (A single Iberico ham or Prosciutto di Parma can set you back up to $1000!)  Some people have luck using a small college dormitory fridge, moved to the warmest setting, with a dish of water in the bottom to boost humidity.  This is way cheaper and easier to set up…but you lose control over your environment, which will yield unexpected results.  And if you’re going to great lengths to source quality meat, you don’t want it rotting away in your garage.

Now you’re ready to make prosciutto, coppa, spalla, guanciale, salami, and age your own hams.  Of course, that’s an entirely separate blog entry.  Check this out for starters!

A video will be posted soon, which may help those who are more auditory and visual.

Please feel free to comment below, especially if you already cure your own meat at home, if you have a different setup, or if you make this setup and try it.  And subscribe to my blog in the upper right corner of this page below the header image so you don’t miss out on other great posts!