Pressure-Cooked Fresh-Corn Tamales

Tamales are a true comfort food. Warm pillows of ground cornmeal surround both sweet and savory fillings. The dough of these steamed bundles is made from course-ground corn flour called masa harina. Inside, a bounty of different fillings can be found: cheeses, pork, chilies, cinnamon and raisins, and roasted vegetables.

The corn husks of tamales hide another secret: science. To make masa harina, corn is boiled and then steeped in lime water, an alkaline solution, in a process called nixtamalization (from the Aztec word nixtamal). The etymology of this word reflects the ancient roots of the process, which developed across Mesoamerica over 3,000 ago. The earliest evidence of the process was discovered in Guatemala and dates back to around 1,500 BCE.

The development of nixtamalization made corn a viable ingredient for cultures throughout the Americas. The process makes it easier for humans to digest corn and extract nutrients, particularly niacin. The alkaline lime water breaks down the kernel’s cell walls, making nutrients accessible. The reaction also intensifies the cornmeal’s flavor, giving it a distinctive roasted taste.

For many tamale recipes the filling is the star; however the focus of this recipe is corn. Our fresh-corn tamales are more like a delicate steamed cornbread, good enough to eat alone. We think they make a marvelous side dish, however you can easily turn them into an entrée with fillings of shredded meat, like carnitas.

Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home

Recipe Tags

Cinco de Mayo, Corn, Holidays, Mexican cuisine, Pressure-cooking

Place a dollop of batter into the natural curl of the corn husk to enclose the batter.

Fold the top of the husk down to seal the package.

Tie your tamale with a narrow strip of corn husk or a piece of string, if necessary.

Tips & Substitutions:

For the Tamales:

• After gradually adding and alternating your ingredients in step 3, test your batter to make sure it’s properly whipped. Drop a dollop into a glass of water—it should float.
• Corn husks naturally form a cup shape. Troubleshoot tamale construction in step 6 by placing the batter in this cup, using the husk’s natural curl to enclose the batter, and then fold the top of the husk down to seal the package. Tie the tamale closed with a narrow strip of husk or piece of string, if necessary.
• Removing a pressure cooker’s lid while its contents are hot can splatter boiling water or food all over the kitchen—or you. Before opening the cooker, let it cool, or run tepid water over the rim, to depressurize it. The pressure valve will sink down fully when the cooker is safe to open.
• Reheat your tamales by steaming them. Alternatively, microwave a few tamales at a time on high power for 1–2 minutes.

Variations:

• To make these tamales into more of an entrée, substitute the fresh-corn batter with carnitas, short ribs (page 221), or adobo (page 224). Experiment with non-traditional fillings like vegetables or grated Cortija, ricotta, or white cheddar cheese for even more variations.
• Add even more flavor to your tamales by substituting rendered pork, bacon, or chicken fat for lard.
• We like to garnish our tamales with pickled chilies and Salsa Verde (page 111), or use your favorite store-bought salsa.
• Leftover tamale batter keeps on giving. Follow steps 2-5 of this recipe, then deep-fry small (15 g/ 1Tbsp) balls of the batter in 175 ˚F/ 350 ˚C neutral frying oil until they turn brown and crispy, 3-4 minutes. Try lightening up the hush puppy batter by whipping 108 g/ ½ cup of egg whites, and then stirring them in after step 5. For an extra-crunchy crust and an extra burst of corn flavor, grind freeze-dried corn into a powder, and then roll the batter in it before frying.
• The recipe for Toasted Corn Stock can be found in the Basics Chapter of our App.
• Download the entirety of Chapter 21 for $4.99 on inkling.com.

Pressure-Rendered Chicken Fat

A recipe for fat may strike some as strange, but fat is one of the key flavor elements in food. French cuisine would be unrecognizable without cream and butter. Indian cuisine relies heavily on ghee (clarified butter). Chefs in Mediterranean countries turn habitually to olive oil, while those in Tibet always have yak butter on hand. The recipe here is for rendered chicken fat, which is widely used in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. (The Yiddish word for it—schmaltz—has taken on a whole other connotation in American English.)

As much as we love cream, butter, and olive oil, rendered fat is sometimes a better choice for use in a sauce or as a complement to meats because it does not distract from the flavor of the other ingredients. We use our Modernist schmaltz to enrich chicken sauce, salad dressing, and garlic, but it has innumerable applications—you can even use it to fry eggs!

Buy chicken skin from your butcher, or collect scraps of fat and skin from other chicken recipes in the freezer until you have enough to render. Note that the same technique can be used for any animal fat, including turkey, duck, or goose skin, and fatty trimmings from cuts of pork, veal, or beef.

– Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home

Recipe Tags

Condiments, Fats, Holidays, Moderate, Passover, Pressure-cooking

In step 1, combine, and divide equally into two 500 mL / 16 oz canning jars.

Tighten the lids fully, and then unscrew them one-quarter turn so that they do not explode.

Tips & Substitutions

• We use canning jars inside the pressure cooker because it simplifies cleanup, and we aren’t usually rendering more fat than will fit in a couple jars. But you can render a large batch by putting 2.5 cm / 1 in of water in the pressure cooker, and then adding the ground skin. The pressure cooker should be no more than two-thirds full.
• Removing a pressure cooker’s lid while its contents are hot can splatter boiling water or food all over the kitchen—or you. Before opening the cooker, let it cool, or run tepid water over the rim, to depressurize it. The pressure valve will sink down fully when the cooker is safe to open.
• For Passover, you can substitute schmaltz for oil in matzo ball recipes, use it to make matzo brei, and add it to your chicken soup to enhance flavor.

 Variations:

• To wet render, drop the skin or fat into boiling water, and reduce it until all that is left are pieces of meat and tissue floating in bubbling fat. Strain. Discard the solids. Allow the liquid to separate, and then pour the warm fat off the top.
• To dry render, sauté the skin or fat over low heat until the fat melts. The cooking causes Maillard reactions that enhance the flavor of the rendered fat. Dry-rendered fat keeps for several weeks in the refrigerator. This method works particularly well with fatty bacon.

Caramelized Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin pie is one of the most popular Thanksgiving desserts; therefore we devoted some time to analyzing what makes this pie so easy to identify. It’s typically the spices you taste, not the pumpkin, so we came up with a way to extract the true taste of pumpkin while skipping the spices, at least in the custard itself.

We decided to source one of our own recipes from Modernist Cuisine, wherein we pressure-cook carrots with baking soda. Baking soda deepens flavors and enhances caramelization of sugars, which, we concluded, would be the perfect way to accentuate the pumpkin’s essence. But it required finding the best pumpkin for the job. We settled on a type of pumpkin that comes in the shape of a can—it’s soft inside and practically pureed, with a label that says “Libby’s.” For pumpkin-flavored pumpkin, it’s our first choice.

—Francisco Migoya, Head Chef

Recipe Tags

Dessert, Pie, Pressure Cooker, Pressure-cooking

Step 3: The dough should form unevenly-sized chunks, known as a shaggy mass.

Step 6: After rolling dough into a thin disc, fold it in thirds.

Step 6: Rotate dough 90 degrees, roll it gently, and fold it in thirds again to create a square mass.

Step 8: As you line your pie tin with dough, press firmly against all surfaces of the tin, making sure that the edge between the bottom and side of the tin is covered.

Step 8: We use a paring knife to tightly trim off excess pie dough.

Step 8: To crimp, pinch the dough between your index finder and thumb, gently applying pressure.

Step 11: We’ve found that can openers are best for opening Libby’s pumpkin puree.

Tips & Substitutions

Make in Advance:

• The dough can be made six weeks ahead of time and then frozen until needed. The filling can be made up to four days in advance and refrigerated until needed. We recommend assembling your pie the morning of your dinner so that it has time to cool and set completely.

For the Dough:

• Keep your ingredients, dough paddle, and mixing bowl cold for as long as possible. We keep our cubed butter and water refrigerated, and we store our flour (packaged in a zip-top bag), dough paddle, and mixing bowl in the freezer until we are ready to begin the dough.
• In step 2, the butter cubes should be thoroughly coated in flour. The coating prevents the development of a mealy dough texture and the butter from clumping together in step 4.
• Over-mixing the ingredients can affect your results when your pie bakes. In step 2, the butter and flour should be mixed until the butter is about the size of a chickpea. After adding the water in step 3, mix the dough until the flour is no longer visible, but before a solid mass of dough has formed around the paddle. The dough should form unevenly-sized chunks, known as a shaggy mass.
• After removing the dough from the mixer in step 5, we recommend compressing the dough by hand into two discs to prevent over mixing. Look for large pieces of butter in your dough—those chunks are the key to a flaky crust.
• The technique in Step 6 is similar to laminating croissant dough. The folds create flaky layers when the pie bakes.
• Before lining your pie pan with dough, give the dough about 20 minutes to relax. It’s an extra step, but we find that the additional time prevents the dough from shrinking as you press it into the pie pan.
• We like to transfer our relaxed dough into the pie pan by lightly folding the dough into fourths, so that the shape resembles a flat ice-cream cone. The shape makes thin doughs easier to manage.
• To crimp your crust, pinch the dough between your index finger and thumb, gently applying pressure to create divots. You can also use the tip of a fork to create a crimp pattern.
• Don’t throw away the excess pie trimmings! Toss your scraps in cinnamon and sugar, and then bake them in the oven next to your pie. The trimmings will puff up, similar to pastries, and are the perfect size for snacking.

For the Whipped Crème Fraîche:

• If possible, use a cake stand that spins. As you pipe the whipped crème fraîche, keep the bag still and spin just the stand, working in a spiral from the inside out.

For the Assembly:

• For the egg wash, combine one egg, one egg yolk, a splash of milk, and a pinch of salt in a small bowl. We recommend using baking stones to bake pies. Stones provide better heat distribution, which will prevent the middle of the pie shell from becoming soggy.
• Keep an eye on your pie as it bakes—there are two visual cues that indicate when the pie is done. When your timer goes off, open your oven, don your kitchen mitts, and give the pan a nudge. As you move the pan, the finished pie should demonstrate what head chef Francisco Migoya calls a “gelatinous jiggle.” The middle of the pie should gently bounce up and down while the perimeter of the filling remains motionless. If you nudge the pie and the filling ripples, or still resembles a liquid, it needs more time.
• The pie filling will also develop a slight dome shape when it’s ready, similar to a soufflé. Once you remove the pie from the oven, the dome will fall.

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Pressure-Cooked Chicharrón

Pressure-Cooked Chicharrón

It’s hard to miss the fanfare (or better yet, 12th-manfare) around Seattle right now—the Space Needle glows green at night and enormous 12s can be spotted along the skylines of Seattle and Bellevue, just across Lake Washington. Whether you’re a fan of the Seahawks, Patriots, or the commercials (or biding your time until next year), there’s one thing we can all get excited about: game day snacks. This year, we’re honoring the old pigskin with . . . pig skin. Pressure-Cooked Chicharrón to be exact.

Chicharrón is pork skin that has been dehydrated, fried, and puffed into crackling. It’s an addictive snack or garnish: make plenty, or it might disappear before it gets to the table. Pork skin is available from many butchers and at many Asian and Latin American markets.

The key to good chicharrón is drying the skin by just the right amount before frying it. The dried pieces should at that point flex slightly, and then snap in half. If they are too moist or too dry, they will not puff properly in the hot oil. Proper inflation is essential to good chicharrón. A food dehydrator is the best tool for drying the skin, but if you don’t have one, preheat the oven to its lowest temperature setting, arrange the pieces on a rack set over a baking sheet, and dry them for 8–10 hours until they become leathery and flexible.

We like chicharrón with guacamole and salsa; however, if you truly want to win your Super Bowl party, make campechanas: tacos of corn tortillas filled with equal parts carnitas and chicharrón, topped with your favorite green chili salsa.

– Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home

Recipe Tags

Appetizers, Easy Difficulty, pork, Pressure Cookers, Pressure-cooking, Snacks, Super Bowl

For step 4, use a butter knife to gently scrape the fat from the cooled skin.

If you’re drying the skin without a dehydrator, preheat your oven to the lowest setting, arrange pieces on a baking sheet, and dry until they become leathery and flexible, 8-10 hours.

Tips & Substitutions

• In step 4, use a butter knife or other utensil to gently scrape the fat from the cooled skin. Take care not to tear the skin.
• When choosing a neutral oil, choose one that has a smoke point higher than the desired cooking temperature. Peanut, soybean, and sunflower oils are our favorites for frying at high temperatures.
• Deep-fry food in enough oil that the food floats and does not touch the bottom of the pan.
• For step 8, deep-fry the skin a few pieces at a time. Work in batches as needed.
• Make it a feast. Check out our recipes for Pressure-Cooked Carnitas, Modernist Seven Layer Dip, Melty Queso Dip, and Pressure-Cooked Fresh-Corn Tamales.

Fish Brine

Salt is not just a universal seasoning. It also has a powerful chemical ability to retain juices within fish and meat during cooking, provided you distribute the salt evenly throughout the meat at the proper concentration.

Slathering salt on the outside of a fish or a piece of meat doesn’t work very well, unless you want the distinctive flavor and firm, smooth texture of a cured meat, like corned beef or smoked salmon. At such high concentrations, salt actually causes the proteins in meat to fall apart.

The subtler effect of brining is more widely useful. Brining is the technique of soaking meat in a dilute salt solution until the dissolved salt permeates the muscle tissue. You’re shooting for a final concentration of about 0.5% salt throughout the meat—weak compared to curing. The challenge with brining is getting the meat deep in the interior to be just as salty as the meat on the outside. Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s easy to end up with a steep gradient of saltiness.

Modernist brining, akin to cooking sous vide, soaks the meat for long periods (up to 24 hours) in a solution having a salt concentration only slightly higher than that target of 0.5%. The risk of oversalting is eliminated. Brining fish prior to cooking will season it, firm it, and protect its delicate color.

– Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home

Recipe Tags

Brine, Easy Difficulty, Fish

Tips & Substitutions

• Warm water dissolves the salt and sugar more quickly. Allow warm brine to cool completely before adding it to the fish.
• If you have time, decrease the salt to 20 g and the sugar to 15 g, and brine the fish for 24 hours—the effect is even gentler.
• Brined fish should be cooked immediately.
• Brining prevents the albumin in salmon from leaching to the surface and masking the beautiful orange-red pigment with an opaque whitish color.
• Use this brine to make our Sous Vide Salmon in the Kitchen Sink,  Fragrant Sous Vide Salmon or before preparing your favorite fish recipes.
• We like to add kombu seaweed, toasted coriander seeds, and lemon zest to the brine to add even more flavor. Our Seaweed Fish Brine recipe can be pound on p. 133 of Modernist Cuisine at Home.