This is a Bambi shank. I’m going to cook up 2 of them for a small holiday (but not Christmas day) get-together which will include the guy who murdered Bambi (and many of Bambi’s friends).
Rough plan is SV @ 140-ish for 48 hours with mirepoix and stuff. Then cool and dry the shanks for a later oven sear, reserving bag goo for sauce with wine and gremolata and maybe more stuff. idk. I’ve considered swappiong out the gremolata for duxelles. Open to suggestions.
No pics because that’s not how I roll, but I made this absolutely delicious chicken liver pasta today.
This gives you an idea about how I think about food. This was my thought process.
I had some chicken livers in my refrigerator. Why? Because they’re delicious and were only $1.99/pound. I just bought then and decided to figure it out later. It was later now. One way I might cook chicken liver is to first cook bacon in the oven then bake the livers in the bacon fat in the tray I used, but that’s the way I cooked the livers last time, so I decided I wanted something different.
How else are livers used? Dirty rice! But I don’t feel like eating rice and I don’t have any green bell peppers. Well, whatever.
So, I boil some pasta. Rigatoni because whatever. And I chop up some garlic and onions (fuck it, I’m lazy, I don’t want to chop up celery, too) and sauté in olive oil and butter. I rinse the chicken livers and, keeping them whole, put then in the pan with the garlic and onions. Salt, pepper, dried parsley and oregano. Some Worcestershire sauce and, because I don’t have brandy, vermouth. Looking back, I should have added some acid, some lemon juice or maybe some vinegar (champagne vinegar?).
Modern versions of dirty rice often have ground meat, although the more Cajun variations (dirty rice is a Creole dish) might have sausage like andouille. I happen to have some leftover cooked ground Italian sausage and some mushrooms, which I throw in here because why not? The sausage has a lot of fat, which will be nice.
So, here’s the thing about liver. It’s best if not overcooked. You still want it pinkish in the middle. I get nervous about these things. I’m not great at precision timing in cooking. That’s why I like sous vide. Someone might make this pasta by cutting the liver before cooking. I decide that I am going to cook mostly through. When I think it is close to done, I’m going to remove from the pan and cut into smaller, bite-sized pieces and see how it looks inside.
The pasta is boiling. I’ve cooked in a smaller pot than I normally use, so I stir every once in a while to keep it from sticking to the pot. You don’t really have to use a ton of water at a rolling boil to cook pasta. I barely have the rigatoni covered. One result is that the starchiness of the pasta water is more concentrated. I ladle a few spoonful of the pasta water onto my livers (after removing half to used later in…something else I’ll figure out between now and then).
My sauce is bubbling as I drain my pasta, half of which I reserve for whatever I decide this weekend. It looks creamy. Is that because there’s probably a half a stick of butter in there? I toss half of the pasta with the sauce (I should have used a bigger pan or done it in my pot after draining the pasta) and the rigatoni is well-coated. To finish it, I add some shredded parmesan. I buy shredded because I hate doing it myself.
If I priced out the ingredients I actually used, it might be $5 of food. Half a pound of chicken livers at $1.99/lb. Half a pound of pasta at $0.99 for a one-pound package. Maybe a third of a pound of Italian sausage bought on sale at $2.49/lb. Half an onion. A handful of white mushrooms. A couple of cloves of garlic. Seasonings.
But, fuck, it was delicious. Like, I actually said that out loud as I sat eating by myself. “Fuck, this is delicious.” And I’m the kind of person who can go days without swearing, unlike people who seem to drop an F-bomb every other sentence.
This was my first time cooking chicken livers with pasta. I’m sure I’ll make something like it in the future, but I’ll switch it up, add some ingredients that I didn’t have the last time, forget some I used this time. I wonder how it would be with some cream or with some form of tomato. Maybe I should have used that Creole seasoning that I always forget is in the back of my spice cabinet. I might want to try tofu instead of chicken liver because tofu and pork are a great pairing.
But I’m not working from a recipe. I often don’t. I kind of know what I’m making, how it starts and what the key ingredients are and I fill in the gaps as I go. Sometimes, I have to call an audible because it turns out I didn’t have an ingredient that I thought I had.
When I’m of a mind to, this is how I cook for myself. Figure out what I can make using whatever ingredients I have on hand, which were usually bought on sale. To put it another way, I buy what’s cheap then figure out how to use those ingredients (plus common pantry items) after I buy them instead of going to the grocery with a list.
I feel like no one I know cooks this way. If they cook at all, they are usually making things they have cooked many times and have perfected their routine or are following a recipe step by step. Does this feel like anyone else’s kitchen process?
My dirty rice is chicken gizzard(sometime sold with hearts and idgaf to separate), chicken livers and ground pork. Paul Prudhomme cook book recipe.
Tonight I made egg fried rice with enoki mushrooms I had left over with jalapeno and shallot/garlic, 2 eggs and old rice, finished with soy and fish sauce and some butter. Never made it before, would make again any day.
Most people eventually make a dish based on standard pasta or stir fry recipes with whatever is in their kitchen/pantry at the time. Usually called like a pantry pasta etc.
Sounds great. Only thing that sounds different to me is mirepoix in the sous vide bag? I guess I’ve never tried it, but when hypothesizing about what it might add to the meat in the bag vs. what you could do with it when browning the vegetables in a pot and making the sauce that way, I lean the latter. I might be wrong, though. Or maybe do both?
I’ve never quite gotten Chinese red-braised gizzards right and I know I will try again eventually. I think that could be an interesting bao filling if chopped up.
They used to have really cheap packages of turkey gizzards around Thanksgiving for people to make stock/gravy with and I’ve always wanted to try and invent stuff using those.
I was in Chicago last month and I had a hankering for Harold’s Chicken Shack because they serve gizzards. Harold’s is a local chain founded by black people because KFC wouldn’t serve them.
I think chicken livers sometimes remind me of oysters, so one time I made a fried chicken liver po’boy. At the time, I couldn’t find any recipes for that online, but I now see some via Google.
The first time I had Jewish-style chopped liver was at Saginaw’s at Circa in Vegas. Just thinking about liver.
I had leftover Italian sausage for this recipe because I had previously made stir-fried Italian sausage with giardiniera. That might be a unique pairing.
If I didn’t hate knife-work and cleaning, I might spend more time making up dishes.
Sounds great.
My mom actually kind of cooks like that a lot when she isn’t making something planned. She’s very hit or miss though. There are a lot of misses, but every now and they she would nail something perfectly (as you did) and then it would go into the rotation.
My thought was that after 48 hours the veggies would be completely broken down, but I’m not sure if that’s true at such a low temperature.
Pectin in vegetables doesn’t break down until 183°F.
Yeah, Bruce is right. You’ll extract some flavor from them, but it won’t be equivalent to boiling them given the lower temperature. Kenji’s sous vide carnitas does have an onion in the bag, but it’s not fully broken down after 24 hrs, even at 165. At 140 I’d expect less breakdown.
Going to be in Vegas in a couple of weeks and staying downtown. Bagel and chopped liver for breakfast is my jam. Don’t see bagels on the Saginaw menu. Is that a fact, no bagels?
Miznon opened at the Palazzo. Its a casual pita place by Eyal Shani who is a very famous Israeli chef/tv personality. He’s somewhere between a culinary genius and a full blown charlatan. He has some amazing ability to handle simple ingrdients but can also charge 24 dollars for “tomato carpaccio”.
Anyway worth a try if youre there. In the Israeli branches theres a very good dish of grilled livers. Not sure it made the vegas branch.
Don’t need to have nothing but gentile holiday meal planning ITT
https://twitter.com/jewishmemequeen/status/1603433065371541505
Gonna check to see if they have shakshuka.
Wish I knew about that special for my Hanukkah party tomorrow!
No liver, no shakshuka.
Outrageous. They have hraime which you might never tried. Either way its worth a visit. He might be a parody of himsef at this point, but at his base his approach to vegetables and ingredients in general had an impact on why israeli food scene is so good
Here’s the menu, please guide me to what I should order
https://www.venetianlasvegas.com/content/dam/venetian/restaurants/miznon/menu.pdf
This is a hit in his american places, never had it and sounds boring
Try the cauliflower, lima beans and potato. Then pick whatever protein is your jam.
When you egg peeling is subpar, do your neighbors learn new curse words like mine do?
If it’s not listed, then I assume not.
