New food attempt

[unicornduke]

It needs some tweaking, but overall good! 

It is from "Season" by Nik Sharma. He's got a blog called A Brown Table.  I'm going to type out the recipe and then say what changes I made after because I also want to get this recorded in my recipe notebook online

Ground Lamb and Potato "Chops" with Sambal Oelek


Ingredients (Makes 6 Servings)

• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 cup minced red onion
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1 inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated
• 1 lb ground lamb
• 1 1/12 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 1/2 tbsp sambal oelek
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
• 2 lb russet potatoes
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 large egg
• 2 cups dry bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil

Directions

1. Heat olive oil in large skillet/pan with cover over medium high heat
2. Add onion and saute until translucent, 4 to 5 minutes.
3. Stir in garlic and ginger and cook until fragrent, 30 to 45 seconds. 
4. Break up ground lamb into small chunks and add to the skillet 
5. Brown the meat for 5 to 6 minutes
6. Add 1/2 tsp salt, vinegar and sambal oelek and stir gently to combine
7. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the liquid has evaporated, 10 to 12 minutes.
8. Remove from heat and let cool
9. Stir in cilantro and adjust seasoning if needed.
10. Cook, peel and mash potatoes 
11. Season with 1 tsp salt and pepper
12. To assemble: take 3-4 tbsp potatoes on palms of hands and flatten into a disk. Put 1 1/2 to 2 tbsp in the center and fold the edges of the potato around it to form a patty. 
13. Put on parchment paper and repeat with the rest
14. Whisk egg and spread bread crumbs out on baking sheet
15. Brush patties with egg and coat evently with breadcrumbs
16. Heat 1 to 2 tbsp of vegetable oil in pan/skillet over medium low heat. Cook patties in batches, adding more oil as needed until golden brown, 4 to 5 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels. 

So in theory with cooking, you can be more flexible with things. I don't have much luck with this. I have great luck changing things up in baking. Life is full of mysteries. 

Here are all the things I did differently (yes I did the thing where I changed so many things): no onion because it gives me heartburn. I halved all the spices because I am a Whitey McWhiterson and can't handle spice. I ran the garlic and ginger in a food processor because I hate that texture. I used venison instead of lamb and bacon fat in place of the olive oil so there would be some kind of fat. I also used a tiny tiny amount of vinegar because I didn't want to risk it being overpowering like the last recipe I tried. I also didn't have sambal oelek and couldn't find it in the store so I ground up some dried paprika and beuna mulata peppers and put them into the meat. I didn't buy gluten free breadcrumbs because honestly why would I do that. I had some old bread in the freezer, ground it, toasted it and ground it again. There was about 1 cup so I was short on breadcrumbs. I attempted flour on the others. 

Overall, it was pretty darn good! It definitely needs some kind of sauce to go with it, a tomato cream sauce would be lovely. I was afraid the meat would be too spicy because it was very spicy when I tried it after cooking but the potatoes mellowed it out a lot. Breadcrumbs are a good idea. Jade thought the potatoes needed more salt and they probably did. 


Patties pre breading

And cooked

Comments

[graydon]

Hurrah!

That looks tasty!

Breadcrumbs are usually in there to manage liquid levels, but these are just coating so it's not likely to matter except for texture. (Any wetness that gets through the potato isn't going to be stopped by the breadcrumbs.) Coarse cornmeal might work just as well for texture though it will have a different taste contribution.

Salt (and ginger!) often function as accelerants for other flavours; up to a point, more salt or more ginger makes the other flavours more noticable.

Baking is chemistry; cooking is art. It's really not the same set of skills. Hardly anything actually transfers.

[unicornduke]

Mmm a coarse cornmeal would be good with this. It definitely needed another taste of some sort. I don't know what. But the actual sambal oelek might contribute something. It might need onion but fuck onions. Maybe some kind of vegetable or dairy, although I could probably get that from a sauce.

I hadn't realized the ginger would boost other tastes! That would definitely explain why it was so spicy when I tried it after cooking. This is the first time I've ever used fresh ginger and it was neat!

It also helps that I type ginger instead of garlic correctly in the ingredients, so that's now fixed.

[graydon]

Sambal oolek is "crushed raw red chiles, a little vinegar, and salt"; it'll certainly make things taste hotter (people allege to like it because it's close to the taste of cooking with fresh chiles, something I am loathe to do!) and it'll likely help flavours blend, too. (Salt and acid.)

If I were to try this, I'd try (dried or fresh but certainly crushed) thyme and tarragon in the fat in step one, and I'd leave out the cilantro (because to me it tastes like soap) and the chiles (because I am a complete spice wimp about peppers) and maybe up the garlic and add some powdered mustard. (How much depends on what you've got and what you like; plain mustard powder goes in more plentiful than smoked extra-hot imperial mustard powder would. About a heaped teaspoon, 8ml? (but I like mustard.))

There's a fair bit of flavour and volume and water in a cup of chopped onion; anything wet and vegetable can substitute for that. Daikon or carrot or regular radishes or plain old turnip all grate and could all go in. You're going to saute it first so it can be a flavour vehicle rather than flavour itself if you want; grated carrot in bacon fat and powdered mustard would certainly add flavour. (Possibly not one you want! but a flavour!)

[unicornduke]

Hmm, I actually got thinking about this. A pulled pork or pulled meat with some kind of sauce mixed in would probably taste good in this as well.

I was a little confused about the lack of water to boil off, I hadn't realized onions put out that much. But adding carrots would definitely be good! I even had carrots that I could have used.

I would say the taste I get first is potato, then cilantro, then chili/heat. It's quite a pleasant burn actually. Perhaps it's because I used so much paprika pepper instead of actual hot chilis.

I think I would actually do a cumin, coriander, paprika spice mix in this because I love that flavor combination and also I just love cumin so much. Or I could do cumin in the potatoes maybe.

I'll definitely have to try this again when I've got chilis in season for the sambal oelek. It's also another way to use the million chilis I will have!

[graydon]

There's a Portuguese thing called rissois that's rather like these (but with less potato) that, well, start off filled with shrimp and wind up (in France) as a pear-filled dessert. You can get an awful lot of different kinds of filling in something like this!

Which is to say, going for something you like as filling and/or spices seems completely sensible. Same with "and what to we have lots of"; a whole lot of traditional regional dishes arise from "and in this season, we have a lot of..."

There used to be a Hungarian deli near where I used to live; they had a wall of paprika, and that's how I found out (thankfully by asking) that paprika comes in strengths from "make the deviled eggs a different colour" to "and then all my ancestors caught fire". Apparently you just need to know which one you've bought, too, they're not labelled for heat. So there's a potential for surprise with paprika, particularly bulk food store paprika. It's usually the colour-the-deviled-eggs stuff, but not always.

[unicornduke]

filled foods are universal

lol, all the paprika I've actually grown myself. I'm amassing a collection of seeds for growing and I definitely have experienced some of the variation. The first paprika I ever grew was Alma paprika and it was so mild. This year I grew Leutschauer paprika and made the mistake of processing them without gloves since I thought they would be mild like the others. Big mistake haha

But I'm enjoying cooking with them. I dried them down but not super duper well so most of them are dry enough to store but not enough to grind. I've just been chopping them tiny and using them instead of powdered.

I'm in the "got a lot of potatoes" right now. So I'm making as many potatoes things as possible. Breakfast lunch and dinner and I'm not tired of them yet!

[graydon]

ow! yeah, peppers are sneaky like that. Have been victimized by supermarket green peppers that had obviously been in an outer row in the field and hybridized with something.

Congrats on useful peppers! drying is tough and takes speciality skills or equipment, often both. (You know about grinding pepper seeds?)

Potatoes are excellent. (Lots of potatoes in the ongoing soup!)