Re: USCHO Cooks: Are you our Top Chef?
I had to sub some of the stuff. I used bones from pork ribs and chicken. I had a rotisserie chicken carcass because I made a trip to Costco for what my fiancée and I call Costco chicken salad*. Did the whole blanch, clean, and simmer. The cooking down of the vegetables made the house smell great by themselves. I would double that amount next time since my fiancée can’t eat garlic** (bad acid reflux).
I also had to use a small shoulder roast for the fat instead of fatback. Leg bones and fatback are shockingly hard to find. I found some leg end ham bones but they weren’t big enough, they were smoked, and were almost certainly cured. Fatback got some pretty blank stares, half were “What the hell is fatback?” And the other half was “We’ve never had anyone ask for that.” The one butcher at Hy-Vee said he hasn’t seen fatback since he left Iowa and even then it was rare. He said he mostly saw it when he was still in Georgia.
So while it’s not perfectly to the recipe, I think it’s close. The broth isn’t brown (yet, gulp) And has a perfect milky translucency to it. It’s unseasoned, per traditional preparation. So it’s hard to really judge the flavor until I get it properly seasoned with tare. There just isn’t enough salinity to judge it. But it has a luxurious mouthfeel and i can tell it’s very porky.
I’ll cook down the the tare tomorrow. Which also lets me add garlic to mine!
*One rotisserie chicken, one Costco quinoa salad, mayo, Dijon, smoked paprika. Fresh ground black pepper. Makes excellent chicken salad sandwiches. They have that quinoa salad and rotisserie chicken at all of the Costcos. It makes a ton of food and lasts us a week for lunches.
**We’ve been doing experiments after we read that garlic infused oil is better for FODMAP-sensitives. We won’t make our own because we don’t need botulism. And the infused stuff is hella expensive. It has to be extracted with fat and not from added flavoring, which is what most of the crap you can buy at the store. Apparently the FODMAP compounds are water soluble. So we heat garlic cloves in oil and get much of the flavor. We have to use it right away because of the botulism risk. But that’s fine.
If you had asked me five years ago if I would date someone who has issues with gluten, lactose, and garlic, I’d have laughed. I’ve made off color comments about how life isn’t worth living without lactose and gluten. Now we’re planning a wedding. And my favorite ice cream is actually oat-based now. Never would have discovered it without her. The garlic thing is hardest. Really hard to get that
