Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalHomemade Restaurant-Style Tamarind Chutney Recipe (video)
The last two videos have been about making samosas, and this week we're making a dip for those samosas! This is that really delicious savoury, sweet, zingy, slightly spicy tamarind chutney you usually get at nice Indian restaurants with your samosas. It should technically be a bit lighter in colour (more red!), but our tamarind was a little old and oxidized, so it came out quite dark. It didn't really affect the flavour at all, and the dip was delicious.
You definitely want to run this through a strainer. Even the "deseeded" tamarind paste usually has seeds in it, and little bits of date skin will also clump up, and you want the final product to be nice and smooth. Remember the scrape down the outside of your strainer! We used brown sugar in this, but jaggery is more traditional for this dish, if you can get your hands on it. You can control the levels of heat in this, too. We used a somewhat mild fermented hot sauce for this, but you can use a spicier sauce, or more of it. Be careful with prepared sauces like Frank's Red Hot or Tabasco, because they have a lot of vinegar in them which will change your flavour profile.
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Homemade Potato and Pea Samosas Recipe (video)
Last week our video was about the pastry for these delicious samosas, and this week we're doing the full recipe. These are absolutely packed with potato flavoured with aromatic herbs and spices, along with some nice peas. We recommend making the filling (and the wraps!) the day before and letting them chill in the fridge overnight. It all comes together a little nicer on the second day, but do remember to chop and add your cilantro just before stuffing and frying your samosas so they retain their fresh green aromas.
Traditionally, it seems that the potato skins are not included in this recipe, but we kept them in because we like the flavour (and there's a lot of nutrients there!). You do want to make sure you pierce them well and shred them pretty small so that there aren't big chunks of skin in your finished samosas. Also, we used our homemade fermented hot pepper relish instead of fresh chilis, but you could easily chop up a couple of Thai birdseye chilis instead if you want some heat and you don't have a pickled hot sauce like that.
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Homemade Samosa Pastry Recipe (video)
We made samosas this week! The full recipe for the samosas will be next week, but we wanted to do a video on just the samosa skins, because they're delicious, easy, and versatile. We were very surprised how easy this dough is to work with. Because of the vegetable oil and the fat from the yogurt, it does not stick very much at all, and once it has rested overnight and fully hydrated, it becomes very springy, stretchy, and resilient.
Filling them is pretty easy, and they're stretchy and sturdy enough for you to gently push the filling down into them. I feel like these wraps could be used as pockets for any number of different fillings, and the outside after frying is super crispy and bubbly like you'd expect from really good restaurant samosas.
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Simple Homemade Chili Verde con Cerdo Recipe (video)
A quick and simple one this time around! We use the tomatillo salsa verde we made a few weeks ago and turn it into this delicious chili verde. Brown a little ground pork with some onions and garlic and then simmer it in the salsa verde until it reaches the consistency you like and you're done! Do make sure that you give your pork time to brown. Because pork has a high moisture content, as it cooks, it releases a lot of water, so it will stop browning and start simmering a bit. Once the water has all boiled away, it will start browning again. You want all that great seared flavour!
We added a sprig of fresh oregano to this, but that's totally optional. We do highly recommend the chopped cilantro at the end, or replace it with chopped Italian parsley (if you are of the soap gene), but you want that nice fresh green herbaceous aroma to finish off the dish. Also, you can really control the heat level with the number and type of hot peppers you chop to add to this recipe.
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Festive Pine Cone Chocolate Rum Balls Recipe (video)
We adapted this from a recipe that we've seen go somewhat viral on other platforms. It is super easy and looks amazing. We used just box cake mix for our chocolate cake for this one. Betty Crocker "chocolate fudge" if you're curious. But honestly, it doesn't matter, use your favourite chocolate cake recipe to make these. You want something moist and not too dense, because you're going to be crumbling the cake up and mixing it with condensed milk and rum anyway, so the final texture is going to be pretty dense. We also find it helps to let the cake get one day stale before using it for this.
If you want to do this as a fun food craft with kids, you can obviously remove the rum, and flavour this with something else. You could use some vanilla and orange juice for a chocolate orange flavour, or even a little bit of cranberry juice or passionfruit for a really zingy chocolatey treat. You do have to be a little bit careful with the toasted almond slices as they break easily, but they were much easier to assemble than I though they would be. We used Havana Club 7 year for this, but any dark sweet rum (like Kraken or Blackwell) will work just fine.
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Homemade Buffalo-Style Hot Wings Recipe with Blue Cheese Dip (video)
Hot wings! Classic buffalo-style hot wings are tossed in a combination of Frank's Red Hot and butter. For this recipe, we take some of our homemade fermented hot pepper relish and turn it into a Frank's Red Hot analogue, and also throw together our own really delicious blue cheese dip. We use the sous vide method of deep frying here. We find that it makes it super easy to get amazing results that way. If you're unfamiliar with the sous vide deep fry method: You sous vide whatever it is you want to deep fry until it is just at the perfect internal temperature. Once it's done (for the wings it was one hour at 165F) take them out and let them rest until they're about at room temp. After that, you just need to dredge them or bread them whoever you prefer and drop them in the hot fry oil for a short time until it's crispy and golden. No need to worry if it's cooked through, because it's already perfectly cooked!
A couple of changes we would make for the blue cheese dip going forward. We would reduce the amount of buttermilk and yogurt/sour cream, just so it has a little more body. We would also use a crumblier blue cheese. We had St. Agur on hand, which is delicious, but because it is so creamy, it's a little harder to break up for a sauce like this. A drier, crumblier blue cheese just makes that part of the process easier.
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Homemade Crispy Springrolls Recipe (video)
Ooops! Got distracted and forgot to put my video up today! This is a simple and delicious recipe for vegetarian spring rolls. You could even make these vegan if you get the right wraps and don't use the egg wash to seal them up. We use a pretty classic vegetable medley for these, but you could also add shrimp or even some nice sliced char siu pork to these if you wanted. They're quite neutral and versatile.
These go well with a simple dipping sauce of soy sauce and sesame oil, or you could throw a little bit of hot sauce into some apricot jam to make a delicious replacement for plum sauce (or just use plum sauce!). If you don't have a deep fryer, it is just as easy to drop these into a dutch oven for deep frying, or even to shallow fry them. They do sometimes develop air pockets (or steam pockets) that make them hard to flip in the oil, so shallow frying may actually yield better results sometimes!
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Delicious and Simple Homemade Crab Rangoon Recipe (video)
This is an appetizer you frequently find in Mongolian grill restaurants, and us usually advertised as some kind of pan-Asian sort of dish, but was invented in the United States. It is, however, delicious and surprisingly easy to make. The mix inside can be as simple as crab and cream cheese, but I can't imagine this without a bit of ginger and some other flavours going on. It is creamy and rich and quite easy to stuff your face with.
We got our hands on some frozen cooked crab meat for this. If you have the patience to start with fresh live crab to boil and extract all the meat yourself, then go for it! If you don't have the time for that, then cooked frozen or fresh jumbo lump crab meat (if it is available in your area) are perfectly fine. In fact, even artificial crab/surimi works wonderfully in this recipe!
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Easy Homemade Thai Mango Salad Recipe (video)
Another quick and easy one this week. This mango salad is an incredible accompaniment to the satay beef we did last week and the ajaad the week before. The trick is in the texture, much like what we did for the Korean japchae, we cut everything for this recipe into shoestring strips, which really enhances the texture of everything. We also used a couple of spicy serrano peppers from our garden, but we found that the final result was not all that spicy at all. The coolness of the mango really calmed down the heat of our peppers.
Of course Thai birdseye peppers are a little more traditional in something like this, but the beauty of making it at home is that you really get the opportunity to control the heat to a level you like. If you want it hotter, you can toss in some hotter peppers like some strips of ghost or scorpion chilis. If you want it a little milder, then use some shishito peppers or poblano peppers. You could even use little strips of coloured bell peppers if you don't want any heat at all.
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Easy Homemade Beef Satay Recipe (video)
This is a classic Thai dish. It is traditionally served with a peanut sauce, but this time we just served it with the ajaad (spicy cucumber relish) we made last week, and a mango salad that will be next week's video. The magic of this dish is all in the marinade. A bunch of incredibly aromatic ingredients mixed together with some soy sauce, vegetable oil, and fish sauce to let your beef soak up all the flavours and aromas.
The secondary magic is how you cut your beef. We used blade steak for this, but skirt steak is probably preferred. You really want to make sure that you're cutting across the meat grain, not with it. This will ensure that your meat is more tender. You also want it pretty thin (hence our pounding) because when you pop it on that hot grill, you want to get nice colour on the outside in a hurry without overcooking it. The bits of marinade on the outside will get a little char to them, but it just gives you an intense toasted spice aroma, not the flavour of burnt beef.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,280
