Beverages

Fajitas are fun, but a lot of work at the table. This recipe switches up a cornbread crust for the flour tortilla and ground beef for the usual sliced steak. Reinvent a fun food, tonight, with Fajita Beef Pie!

Stoup is what I call a meal that serves up thicker than a soup yet thinner than a stew. This hearty hunter’s chicken stoup is a family favorite of ours, especially on chilly nights.

Serve the soup in shallow bowls and pass crusty bread for mopping.

Serve with an arugula or spinach salad.

Serve with a green salad.

I called this recipe “3 beans and some chicken” because I didn’t want to put on any airs. If you’re having people over for dinner and your guests inquire what you are serving, by all means posh it up and inform them that you are preparing “Lemon-Scented Sautéed Poulet with Legume Ragout.” Snap!

This bread soup has some vegetables in it, but it is made with beef stock. For a vegetarian version, use all vegetable or wild mushroom stock and skip the pancetta or bacon.

Serve with crusty bread.

Oregon on a plate: From Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to cranberry bogs and filbert trees, this menu celebrates one great state!

These onion rings are extra light and crispy because we carbonate the batter. If you don’t have a home carbonation system, you can substitute seltzer water and a tablespoon of freeze-dried coffee. Simple home carbonation systems run the gamut from about $60 for an iSi carbonator to several hundred dollars for a carbonation rig and CO2 tank. Once you start playing with one, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. The tiny bit of xanthan gum in the recipe helps the batter stick to the onion slices and keeps it from separating. You can season the onion rings with salt and serve with ketchup, but we think you’ll find that the Beef Seasoning and smoked ketchup really take the flavor to the next level.

Chefs have chased the perfect consommé for as long as there has been cuisine. Traditionally clarified using a raft of egg whites, meat, and aromatics, it was inevitable that chefs would start looking for modern alternatives. The first solution was introduced by Professor Gerd Klöck in 2004 and popularized by Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck. Ice clarification is a method of freezing gelatin-rich stocks and then slowly defrosting them through layers of cheesecloth and a fine sieve to create a perfectly clear liquid. As the gel is frozen, the water trapped in the gelatin crystallizes. This causes the sharp edges to damage the cell walls. As the frozen gel warms up, the water and all of the water-soluble components melt before the gelatin or the fats and leak out of the damaged cell structure, leaving everything else behind. The next innovation was using agar instead of gelatin to speed up the freeze-thaw process. Agar works more quickly because it has a much higher melting point. If there is no fat in the preparation, it can actually be defrosted into a filter at room temperature, which greatly reduces the filtration time. From there we made the leap of eliminating the time spent in the freezer when using agar. Syneresis is the process by which the liquid leaks out of the gel structure. Agar naturally creates a hard, brittle gel that is prone to syneresis. It seemed reasonable to us that we could easily make an agar gel and break it up in the vacuum sealer, causing the clear liquids to leak out while the impurities were trapped in the gel. Once we poured the broken gel into a cheesecloth-lined filter, we would have a clear liquid almost immediately. It worked beautifully and was a huge breakthrough for us. As we worked through the process, we realized that brisk stirring of the agar-thickened liquid was enough to break it apart and create syneresis, effectively giving us a low-tech clarification process that could be easily accomplished at home. We use a ratio of 0.25 percent agar to clarify most of our liquids. Occasionally in liquids with more dissolved impurities we increase this to 0.3 percent.

Applesauce is a classic example of a delicious and down-home recipe that sometimes suffers from syneresis, or separation of liquid from the gel. In this recipe, we use crabapples for a slight twist on the original. We like them for their tartness and color; they make a beautiful pink sauce. You’ll find that crabapple sauce will make a striking counterpoint for a variety of dishes, both sweet and savory. The little bit of xanthan gum added at a ratio of 0.1 percent of the total weight of the other ingredients makes it almost perfect.