Capital Spice

It takes a practiced hand to find that perfect balance between too much salt and just enough in a run-of-the-mill recipe.  When the recipe is something as unique as a margarita with a citrus-salt “air” or “wrinkled” potatoes with a dried salt crust, however, your best bet is to leave it to the pros.

Last Thursday, Elizabeth and I did just that as we attended a demonstration by Chef Katusya Fukushima of the ThinkFoodGroup held at Bethesda’s L’Academie de Cuisine.  The class was Elizabeth’s Christmas gift to me – knowing what fans we were of Katsuya’s work at Minibar, she jumped at the chance to take me to see him in action.

We arrived a few minutes late (curse you, rush hour traffic!) for the 7 PM class, and found seats toward the back of the demonstration classroom.  Bummer, right?  Wrong!  This amphitheatre-test kitchen hybrid offers seating for roughly 30 people, and it’s set up so that everyone can see the action taking place on the counters and burners that face outward.  Even if your seat offers an obstructed view, you need only look up to find what is taking place reflected in the angled mirrors above.

A description of the class and some gorgeous photos of what Katsuya served up after the jump. (more…)

After a brief (and well worthwhile) interruption to fill you in on our efforts with the Bacon Explosion, we now return you to our regularly scheduled write-up: a turducken smoked on the Big Green Egg.

As I revealed in my post last week, I have been wanting to make a turducken for years.  When I lived in Pentagon City and first started shopping at Harris Teeter, I noticed that they carried both a frozen turducken and a smaller turducken breast from Cajun Specialty Meats on a regular basis.  Tempting, right?  All I needed was an excuse (instead I kept coming up with excuses not t0).  And the Super Bowl provided the perfect opportunity.

On Thursday afternoon I took a trip to the new Harris Teeter on Pennsylvania Ave., SE, where I picked up the only turducken they had in stock.  The cardboard box had that damp feeling that signals a product that has spent time alternately thawing and refreezing…usually a bad sign.  Thankfully, the turducken is such a solid mass of poultry that it would take significant time outside a freezer to thaw (and ruin) it, so ours was still in prime condition when we cooked it.

The results, along with a recipe for a surprisingly tasty andouille sausage gravy, after the jump. (more…)

We know we promised you a full report on our efforts to smoke a turducken for yesterday’s Super Bowl party…and we’ll have all the details (complete with a last-minute andouille gravy) for you tomorrow.

But we interrupt our regularly scheduled post to bring you something just a little meatier.

If you’ve read the New York Times, watched Good Morning America, or read almost any food-related website over the past week, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard about the Bacon Explosion.  Two pounds of sausage, two pounds of bacon, two hours (more or less) on a smoker, and you’ve got a concoction that can best be described as “a gigantic sausage with a bacon casing.”

When two of our good friends (the Bacon Terrorist, natch, Nell) emailed the Times’ article saying “OMG!! I found your recipe for Superbowl Sunday!” and “We’ve got to make this,” we knew it was time to call an audible.  We already had the turducken plan underway, but we quickly decided to forego the pulled pork that we were also considering in favor of pork sausage and bacon.

But we couldn’t just blindly follow the recipe…that would be way too easy.  We decided to take the Bacon Explosion in a new, sweeter direction.

Our revisions to the basic Bacon Explosion and the results after the jump. (more…)