Courtney Larsen and I gave a Mexican BBQ/Carne Asada class last night at Sonora Grill. Thanks to all who attended. We had fun. Copies of the class recipes are always included, FYI, but for those who couldn’t get there last night I wanted to kick this recipe to you because this smoky, spicy, garlicky salsa was very delicious.

Courtney’s Carne Asada Salsa
5 large ripe tomatoes
4 tomatillos
1 great big white onion, peeled
2 Anaheim chiles
2 serrano chile
Kosher salt , black pepper and lime juice to taste
Put the ingredients on a skewer and grill them till charred, with tasty bits, not too too burnt, and then pulse all ingredients in a blender.

5 lbs. tomatillos (remove the husks, wash ‘em real good)
2 white onions, peeled and diced
1 lb. fresh cilantro, cleaned
2 whole serrano chiles
Juice from 6 limes
Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper

Put everything in a blender or food processor and puree. Salt and pepper to taste.

Don’t think I’m giving away all of my secrets. I have plenty more up my sleeve. 

-Chef Chris

Someone asked me about a particular Mexican food preparation yesterday when I was at the bank getting some cash. She said it was marinated roasted pork with lemon and oranges and it was totally delicious but she just couldn’t remember the name of the dish. I said it sounds like Cochinita Pibil.
She said O that’s it! It’s Cochinita Pibil.
I said I love that dish. It’s one of my favorite things in life to eat that dish.
She goes yeah it’s sooo good.
I ignored the person standing nearby who said ‘O that’s not Mexican food.’

Mexican food isn’t just one cuisine, though some people tend to imagine that it is. Mexico is a big place and it encompasses a large and varied culinary tradition. Cochinita pibil is, as the name suggests, a suckling pig, roasted in a Pib. A Pib being the Mayan word for a small shallow rectangular pit used for cooking seasoned meats, which are wrapped in banana leaves in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The dish was made popular in this country several years ago when it was featured in the film Once Upon a Time in Mexico…

 BTW, Here’s a recipe for Cocinita Pibil

4lbs. Pork butt cut in 3 inch cubes
8oz. Achiote paste
10 cloves of garlic
2 limes, cut in half
2 lemons, cut in half
2 oranges, cut in half
8 dry bay leaves
2 t. ground cumin
½ t. ground cinnamon
1T. dried oregano
1T. Kosher salt
2T. ground black pepper.

Squeeze the citrus fruit juice out, add everything together and mash it up with your hands until you have a bright pink paste that you’re rubbing all over the pork meat.
Next you’ll need
1 lb. of banana leaves
2 white onions cut in quarters
5 roma tomatoes cut in half

Line a baking pan with the banana leaves, add the pink achiote and citrus marinated pork into the banana leaf  lined pan and top with the onions and tomatoes. Fold the banana leaves over the meat and roast it in your oven at 325 degrees for 3 hours. Or until this sweet and sour pink cochinita meat just falls apart when you put your fork into it. Serve it with fresh tortillas and avocado slices.

 And get ready to freak out because it is gonna be a flavor explosion in your mouth!

I’d been living in San Diego for about a year and was trying to get out of the business of being a chef. Of course, however, cooking was the only thing I really knew. It was 1990…or ‘91…

I got a call from a chef I’d previously worked for in Berkeley. He offered me a job as his Sous Chef at his new restaurant in the Shattuck Hotel. Well, I’d have to move back home to Berkeley. I asked my girlfriend if she wanted to sell her truck, pack everything we owned into a U-Haul and drive to Berkeley so I could take this job. She said, ‘sure, why not?’
So we quit our jobs, sold the truck, and gave notice that we were moving out of our apartment. We got a U-Haul and packed it with everything we had left. We were on the porch drinking iced tea when I got a phone call from the chef. He said, ‘Chris, I got bad news. I got fired.’
‘You got what? Why?’
‘I got in a fight with the Hotel owner. He insisted I put Caesar salad on the menu. I don’t want Caesar salad on my menu. It just doesn’t fit. It doesn’t work for me. Neither one of us wanted to bend on it… He insisted, I refused, and I got fired.’
‘What?! I love Caesar salad, dude. I have everything we own in a U-Haul and no place to live and now I don’t have a job? What’s wrong with Caesar salad? I totally love Caesar salad!! Are you out of your mind?!’

This, by the way, is my recipe for Caesar salad dressing.

Caesar salad dressing

2 egg yolks
1 whole egg
2T. lemon juice

1C. canola oil
1C. Pure olive oil
2T. lemon juice
2T. water
1t. kosher salt
2 cloves garlic
2 anchovy filets
More Kosher salt and add some fresh ground pepper to taste

Make sure the bowl of your food processor is clean and dry, put in the blade and then put the eggs and 2T. lemon juice in the bowl of your food processor. Turn it on and blend the eggs and lemon juice together. With the blade still spinning, add the oil, drop by drop. A good way to do this is to use a squirt bottle. Fill it with the oil and then drop, drop, drop. Whether you use a squirt bottle or not, after you have added about 2 tablespoons of the oil, in this way, you’re beginning to establish an emulsion and you can begin to add the oil in a small steady stream, until you’ve added all of it. Then add the rest of the lemon juice, water, salt, fresh garlic, and anchovies.

Traditionally, one would toss it with fresh Romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese and toasted croutons. That’s exactly how I have made it for the last 20 years and to this day I still love Caesar salad.

Anyway, we drove north that night, to Berkeley. I immediately applied for and landed, the job as the Sous Chef at the same hotel, but under a different Head Chef. Caesar salad was definitely on the menu. Make mine with extra anchovies…

As the Executive Chef of Sonora Grill, I have been very fortunate to have the great honor of simultaneously working as the Executive Chef at Rickenbacker’s restaurant at the Ogden Airport. In between dining trips to Sonora Grill, I strongly suggest you go try us out at Rickenbackers. It’s very good. We’re very proud of it.

We have a very talented assistant at Rickenbacker’s, Chef Ryan Sleeter, and I have another young talent, Chef Courtney Larsen, doing the good work at Sonora Grill. My heart really goes out to these poor guys…it’s great to be number one, but it’s tough to be number two.

People have often asked, “How can you just cook, mix up all these ingredients and just come up with dishes of food and be confident enough to serve it?”
I guess there are about a million answers to that question. But if you open up your refrigerator and you happen to have… let’s say, a bag of lettuce mix, some blue cheese, a can of olives, roasted red peppers, grilled yellow zucchini, sunflower sprouts, grilled radicchio, shaved fennel, sherry vinegar/extra virgin olive oil dressing… that’s got springtime salad written all over it… I can recognize any type of dish just from a few ingredients. Why? Because when I was young, it was drilled into my head by an unrelentingly meticulous chef who spared no insult to get me to make nice salads. I had to do it well or lose my job. Eat or die, right?

Know what I really like on a salad? For lack of a better title lets call it:

Pink Peppercorn Salad Sprinkle

2 Tbsp. pink peppercorns
2 Tbsp. sesame seeds
1 tsp. Kosher salt

Put all of these ingredients in a dry saute pan over medium low heat, toast them for 5 minutes, shaking the pan periodically.
Remove it from the heat. When the ingredients have cooled down, put them in your spice grinder. Grind it. Sprinkle on your salad. It’s delicious.

Now, what’s up with pink peppercorns? Look online, you can probably find everything you really need to know on wikipedia. You should be able to purchase them at Sur La Table in the mall or ordering online.

As for a spice grinder? Get a coffee grinder, Braun, Krups, Cuisinart, whichever brand; you can get them for $19.99 at any department store. Go to Ross Dress for Less and you can get a strange colored one from last season for even less.

Then go home and cook. Get a slice of nice bread to go with your salad, put olive oil on it, rub it with a bit of minced fresh garlic and grill it over a wood fire and turn it over… lots of nice kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper… I never got by on my good looks. I had to work hard… I’m not really elitist. I was simply hungry, you know, literally and figuratively. And the bread with the garlic… it’s pretty tasty too…

I had an appetite and needed to eat constantly so I found a third job at a vegetarian Mediterranean restaurant in Berkeley…working my mind away for the chef in return for what I principally owed her, which was that she hired me when I had no real skill, tons of attitude, which I grew out of, for the most part. In retrospect, I am grateful to that particular chef for giving me the education.

She showed me how to cook bulgur AKA cracked wheat and turn it into a delicious salad with the addition of a ton of fresh Italian parsley and extra virgin olive oil, tomatoes, etc…and how to make couscous salad, and she showed me how to make marinated feta cheese with thyme and lemon zest and fresh orange juice. I made panzanella, which is an incredible bread salad with fresh tomatoes and basil. Chef also roasted and peeled eggplants for baba ghanouj and also made hummus.

Hummus is my favorite food in the world. It’s made with garbanzos, a lot of raw garlic, tahini (which is sesame
seed butter), and fresh lemon juice, Kosher salt, more of the olive oil…tons of explosive flavor and there isn’t anything like it on the planet. I worked with wholesome ingredients for the first time, in an open and clean public restaurant environment and I got into it like for example the kosher salt, sea salt in different colors, grape leaves, fresh basil, fresh Italian parsley, dill, cilantro, chives, fennel, radicchio, fresh marjoram anda oregano, heirloom tomatoes…cucumbers, ricotta salata, Opal basil, saffron, olives of all varieties, cracked green, lemon cured, Greek oil cured, kalamata, picholine, and your standard California black olives and those green ones with the red pimento, you know, for your martini…the flavors just captivated me.

We’d like to think that we achieve flavors at Sonora Grill and at Rickenbacker’s at the Ogden airport that grab your attention and hold it for a while and inspire you to come back for more.

As for the Taco Tuesday post from a couple weeks ago, in which Steve made a killer Spanish breakfast dish, I said I’d ask him for his recipe…this is kind of what he told me…

Spanish Tortilla
Serves: 4–6

Ingredients:

3 lb. organic russet potatoes
1 medium yellow onion
2 cups canola oil
3 large eggs
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation:

1. Fill a large bowl half full of cold water. Peel and slice the potatoes, very thin. Soak in the water for a few minutes. Put the potatoes in the water to remove some of the starch and keep them from turning brown.
2. Add the oil to a large non-stick frying pan and fry your potato slices, one by one until they are crispy. Remove and set aside. If you’re impatient like me, you can go faster by cooking several at a time, but they do need to be fried crispy.
3. Peel and slice onions about 1/4-inch thick. Add the onions to the same oil and when they are translucent and cooked, pour off most of the oil.
4. Whisk the eggs together and add them to the pan on top of the cooked potato/onion mixture. Add salt and pepper on top of that.
5. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and place in 325 degree oven for 20 minutes.

When you pull the tortilla out of the oven, put a serving plate upside down on top of the pan and then invert it, revealing a beautiful dome-shaped Spanish Tortilla.

Cut it in wedges, top with sour cream, chives, a sprinkling of grated Mexican cotija cheese.

Get a fork and go at it.

Last night, in the kitchen, about a half past six I pulled my flan out of the oven and was so happy to see that my little flans were all perfect and delicious in their hot water bath, happy as they could be, and all of them just ready and waiting to be eaten all up. It’s not always the case…sometimes even I find it to be a challenge because flan is temperamental and wants your attention. Flan loves you. Yet this simple custard made with the same basic ingredients as pastry cream, crème brulee, crème anglaise, vanilla ice cream…of these traditional desserts, flan gets the bad reputation. Why?

Because there’s a lot of bad, inedible flan out there in the big ugly culinary jungle, that’s why. Most flan that people try and serve you just doesn’t taste good. It’s about time someone started making flan the correct way. So let me give you a recipe. It really isn’t that technical. Go slow now…you can do this.

Here’s we go:

To make 6 incredible individual flans that you can serve to your family and friends, you’re gonna need a little equipment such as:

6 ovenproof flan a.k.a. custard cups that will hold 8 to 10 ounces of liquid. These can be made of porcelain or glass, metal or pyrex. If you don’t have the cups, teacups will do. Just something with smooth sides that you can run a knife along the inside of when you want to unmold the flan. You will also need a high-walled pan to put the cups in during the baking process.

Ingredients:
2 cups whole milk
2 cups half and half

1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

1 cup sugar
1/3 cup water

6 large eggs
6 large yolks
1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk

Instructions:
Position rack in center of oven and preheat to 300 degrees F. Combine half and half and milk in heavy medium saucepan. Scrape seeds from vanilla bean into mixture; add the bean. Bring it to a boil and as soon as it boils, turn it down to super low.

Meanwhile, combine the sugar and 1/3 cup water in another heavy medium saucepan. Stir over low heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat to high and cook without stirring until syrup turns deep amber, swirling pan occasionally, about 10 minutes. Quickly pour 1.5 ounces of caramel into each of your six custard cups. The caramel colored sugar will harden into the bottom of the cups like it was glass. Now set your cups into a large baking pan.

Whisk eggs, egg yolks, and the sweetened condensed milk in medium bowl just until blended. Don’t incorporate much air into this mixture. Gently will do it just fine. Now, using a ladle, add the hot milk to the mixture a couple ounces at a time while stirring the mixture utilizing a spoon in your other hand, until you have added all the milk mixture into the egg mixture. Now you have the warm yellow custard all in one bowl…works out good like that.

Pour custard through a small sieve into a pitcher and then from the pitcher into your sugared cups, dividing
evenly (mixture will fill ramekins). Pour enough hot tap water into baking pan to come halfway up sides of ramekins. Now your flans are in their water bath. Put the pan into the oven and bake about 45 minutes or until your flans are just setup. Take the pan out of the oven and let the flan cool down in the water bath for about three hours.

To serve, run small sharp knife around flan to loosen. Place a small plate face down on top of the flan and then invert it. Turn over onto plate. Shake gently to release flan. Carefully lift off ramekin allowing caramel syrup to run over flan. Repeat with remaining flans and serve topped with whipped cream.

Recently, someone asked me for a recipe to make mole, one of the most fascinating of Mexican foods. I wrote down a recipe suitable for home use. For the uninitiated, mole is a chile sauce made with fruit and nuts and containing many ingredients. That is one way to put it. One of my favorite dishes in the world ever is Gallina en Mole, aka, Chicken in Mole. It’s so real good. But if you have some wonderful mole sauce set aside that does not have chicken in it, but has pork instead…pork carnitas is my favorite thing in the whole world and if you are unfamiliar with carnitas, you come down and eat it at the restaurant. It is amazing.

It is similar to pulled pork but with this mole sauce on it. The rich flavors are so satisfying I can’t describe the joy I receive when I make this. Or the pleasure I derive from eating it. But I think of a recipe as my attempt to help you make it in your home kitchen because it’s an awesome experience. And if you try it on pork you’ll be equally as stoked because it’s so good.

Dark Mole Poblano

8 dry ancho chiles
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic
1/4 c. vegetable oil
3 T. raw skinless peanuts
3 T. raisins
4 roma tomatoes
5 c. boiling chicken broth
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1/8 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. coriander
1/8 tsp. cloves
1/2 c. sesame seeds
1 toasted corn tortilla or a few tortilla chips
2 oz. semi-sweet chocolate, chips are fine…

chicken breasts
2 T. sesame seeds
a couple sprigs of fresh cilantro
white rice

Core, seed, and devein the chiles and toast in a dry pan for about 2 minutes, until they smell roasty. Transfer to a large bowl and pour the broth over them. Let them sit for 15 minute, until the broth cools down and the chiles become soft.

Toast the peanuts in the dry pan, until oily and toasted. Add vegetable oil, onion, garlic, sesame seeds, and the raisins. Cook with the peanuts for 5 minutes, until the onions are translucent. Add the cut up tomatoes, spices, the tortilla and cook for 5 more minutes.

In a blender, puree the chiles/broth mixture until very smooth. Pour it into a large pot. Then puree the rest of the hot, cooked solid ingredients till smooth, utiizing the chile liquid as needed. Add to the same pot. Simmer on low heat for 15 minutes. Add the chocolate.

Your mole should have the texture of BBQ sauce or ketchup. If it is too thick, add more broth, or water. Check the salt, add more if you like, then simmer the mole for 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on the amount of time you have. Finally, pour the sauce over grilled or pan fried chicken breasts, garnish with toasted sesame seeds and cilantro. Serve with white rice.

The competition is stiff and there really is a tangible difference between a chef and a cook. Many people can cook delicious and excellent creative food, whether you’re well-trained in a classical kitchen or you cook at home and you just love it and adore it and your cousin Edith says you make the best ambrosia salad in town and you can always be found in your kitchen kneading a bowl of purple Peruvian potato bread dough, you still might not have what it takes. The reason being, a professional chef is just crazy enough to require a particular specialized mania for crazy ideas of a certain sauce, compote, salsa, salad, sorbet, strawberry soubise, curry coullis, or whatever…that only you know it’s going to work and you won’t sleep til it does, and you’re just loco enough to prove it.

You’ll need to have that slightly off-key commitment to working as a professional chef as part of your skill set.

Period.

Most good cooks are too smart to become chefs and many chefs forget how to cook once they start writing menus, watching food quality, organizing parties and special events, and all the other boring stuff that isn’t cooking.

You must become the food, Grasshopper.

Point being is that I’ve spent more years as a professional chef than years as a cook or a skateboarding teenage punk and I’ve known an awful lot of cooks who just don’t make it and several cooks that have blown my mind with their creative talent that seems to come out of like nowhere.

Doris Chavez was one of those cooks you meet that would change your whole way of thinking about food. No cooking school, Doris started out as a high school kid in L.A. and ended up as a line cook at Border Grill, a high-end, upscale Mexican restaurant in Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip. She was working for me, poor girl. I’d been bouncing back and forth between opening a restaurant in Pasadena and just coming off a street food eating trip from Mexico City, hadn’t been getting hardly anything more than like 4 hours of sleep a night, I’d just had a sous chef quit on me to take a job at Caesar’s Palace as a banquet chef so I was down to my last 2 sous chefs who were running the place while I was away, and while I was pretty sure I was in my right mind, it’s likely that I wasn’t.

I was on my phone at McCarran Airport, coming in from Burbank, asking my meat purveyor, Ali, “Hey, Ali! How you been? Did you get my whole pigs in at the restaurant? You did? O.K. Great, thanks, I got a go, Ali.”
I took a cab back to the restaurant and Doris was on shift. I said, “All right, Doris, let’s cook. We’re going to cut these pigs into parts and grill the chops and smoke the loins and brine the hams and braise the legs, right? You ever broke down a whole pig before?”

“No.”

“Perfect…give me my knife over there, will you? I’ll break em down. You make a sauce. Make it Mexican. Use chiles…something killer…”

“Uhh. What should I do?”

“I don’t know…make it good.”

I probably wasn’t the sweetest chef in town. But somehow she had the intestinal fortitude to go to work and this is what she made:

1 pound of cascabel chiles, seeds removed
1 pound of ancho chiles, seeds removed
12 cloves of whole peeled garlic, charred on a comal (a flat griddle)
2 whole yellow onions, peeled and cut in chunks
6 roma tomatoes
1 1/2 gallons of chicken stock
1 cup honey
½ cup sherry vinegar
kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Simmer together in a large pot for 45 minutes and puree in a blender till smooth as silk.

That’s all there is to it. The complexity of the sweet and sour, spicy and earthy flavors impressed me but the simplicity of it blew my mind. The other 2 sous chefs I had had given her the nickname Cholita and I called the sauce Cholita Sauce. It went on the menu as a steady staple sauce and it was fantastic. I promoted her to my 3rd sous position and she turned out to be pretty good at it.

Cholita is perfect on grilled double thick pork chops…Come to think of it, I’m going to run that as a special at Sonora Grill, in honor of Doris Chavez, La Cholita.