Black Bean, Red Onion, Corn and Bell Pepper Salad

Up until I sat down to write this, the menu felt like it was incomplete and needed something else to bring just a little bit more seasonal personality to it. I wanted to come up with another vegetable dish, this time a cold one. This dish, typically served cold, is perfect as a Thanksgiving side or for any cookout or barbeque and suits the skill level of any home chef, no matter how inexperienced. There are three ways to make this dish: one using a gas stove, one in a pan, and one using a broiler (UK/Ireland readers: you call this a “grill”—the top, really hot element in your oven). All of them yield the same results, so use whichever you feel most comfortable with (or whichever your equipment situation allows for).

This dish has several components that require a few different knife skills, but none are too complicated. Slicing, dicing, filleting (a pepper, not a fish. Don’t worry about the knife work for a fish; that’s much more complicated), and roughly chopping will all be involved.

The first method involves a gas stove. This one gets the best results, but it’s the one that requires the most attention since you will be dealing directly with an open gas flame. Only use this method if you’re comfortable (and if you actually have a gas stove—electric, induction, or other stoves don’t work for this). Grab at least one, maybe two ears of high-quality corn. Husk each ear, removing all the green husk and all the yellow or white “hairy” strands. (If any of this is left on the corn, it’ll burn and that burned flavor will go into the corn kernels.) Turn on one of your burners to medium high. Using metal tongs (nothing made of plastic or with plastic-coated tips), place one ear of corn at a time directly on the burner, turning it a quarter-turn every 15 seconds or so, for about 2 minutes, or until the corn is fire-roasted to your liking. Please be careful. In between each ear, turn the burner off, get the next ear, and turn the burner back on again to repeat the process. After the last ear has been roasted, turn off the burner. Set all the corn on a plate. We’ll come back to it later. If you are using a broiler, set it to low and turn every 30 seconds.

Now, repeat this same process of roasting individual vegetables on an open gas flame with half as many bell peppers as you have ears of corn. I recommend red bell peppers or a mix of red and another color. (Red and yellow or red and orange work particularly well if you want to mix.) This time, however, after you have roasted the peppers, their skins will go black. Wrap them in aluminum foil and let them stay there for about 15 minutes undisturbed. This does a number of things: it steams the peppers inside out, softening them. It loosens the skin from the peppers. And it allows the peppers time to cool enough to be handleable.

In the meantime, drain the liquid from one 15-once can of black beans, reserving only the beans. Finely dice one red onion. (Red onions are better in salads like this; white or yellow onions would be too pungent raw).

After the peppers are cool enough to handle, you should, just by rubbing the skin with your hands, be able to remove the skin charred skin. This removes the blackened outer layer but, thankfully, does not remove the smoky flavor this process created. Now, cut the pepper like you do when you slice an apple: hold it by its stem and slice down around the core taking off all the flesh and leaving only the core behind to minimize waste and maximize flavor. (If you’re doing this only in a pan, now is the time to follow this technique with the raw pepper). Dice the pepper and place it in a bowl (or in a pan if still raw).

You need a Bundt pan to deal with the corn. Bundt pans are those cake pans that make “mega-donut” shapes; you sometimes use them for flan, sometimes for regular cakes, and sometimes for other applications. If the corn is already roasted, stand it up in the central column of the Bundt pan and run your knife along the side of the cob. Shave off the kernels and let them fall into the Bundt pan. If the corn is not already roasted, do this process, and then transfer the corn into a sauté pan into which unroasted diced peppers have already been placed.

If you want to do this without a broiler or without a gas stove, simply chop all your ingredients as indicated, coat a sauté pan in a thin film of oil, and cook the diced peppers and corn kernels until fragrant.
In any case, once the peppers, onions, corn, and beans are all ready, combine them in a single bowl. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Serve chilled.

Classic Roast Turkey with Vegetables

I would like to begin this post with an acknowledgment, a brief word of thanks—appropriate, after all, given the holiday this series commemorates. The most widely-known chef who lives closest to me is, without a doubt, Alton Brown. If you know my parents, ask them and they’ll tell you I’ve definitely been influenced by his style of communicating about food and preparing it. Some of the techniques I will recommend here are his, adapted to my palate. Certainly, though, having a chef and communicator of his caliber close enough to me that we’ve probably shopped at the same grocery store multiple times without realizing it has been a tremendous influence on my style in and referring to the kitchen. For this, I am incredibly grateful.

As I did in my chicken recipe, let’s begin this discussion with what kind of bird to buy. I prefer air-chilled over water-chilled; and a turkey with as natural a diet and as much outdoor time as possible. Buy a “heritage” bird if you can. These breeds not only have a stronger flavor but they’re raised the way poultry was raised centuries ago, long before the advent of any kind of factory farming.
As for the size of the bird, I recommend about 2 pounds total weight per guest. (This is why my family of 3 adults always buys a chicken—we are 3 people, and I can certainly get a 5-7 pound whole chicken, but a 5-7 pound whole turkey is practically impossible to find.) 2 pounds per person (this includes the weight of bones and any giblets or organs sold within the bird) is generally a good number. If you’re feeding a lot of kids, use a slightly smaller number to calculate how much to buy for them. If you’re feeding an NFL team, go higher. Chances are, your family get-together will be a mix of kids and adults, and you’ll probably want leftovers, so sticking to 2 pounds per person is generally a good idea.

I’ve heard of turkeys as light as 10 pounds (several years ago, an uncle, aunt, and cousin came over, and we bought a 10- or 11-pound bird for the 6 of us) and as heavy as 30. Birds that big take hours to cook, and when they finally do come out of the oven, chances are they’ll be drier than any other meat you’ve ever eaten. There is a way to mitigate this and preserve the turkey as the culinary star of your Thanksgiving gathering. If you do your calculations and you need more than 20 pounds, split that into several birds. That is, don’t buy a 24-pound bird. If that’s what you need, buy an 11 and a 13, or 2 12s, or a 10 and a 14, and so on.

If your turkey is frozen, you must thaw it before proceeding. Budget 24 hours per 5-6 pounds of turkey in your fridge. Keep the turkey separate from everything else in a clean, cold (in your fridge, not getting any hotter than 40 Fahrenheit) space. Exact timing will vary depending on the power of your fridge, the exact weight of your bird, the shape of the bird, and how much other stuff is in your fridge when you thaw your frozen bird, so be conscious of that. Only after your turkey is thawed (or if your turkey was bought fresh) should you move on to these next steps.

Some people brine their turkeys. That is, they make a solution of salt and spices dissolved in water and they leave their turkey (taken out of its packaging, neck and organs removed from the cavity and discarded) in that solution for up to 36-48 hours before they cook it. The point of doing this is that osmosis pulls unseasoned moisture out of the turkey and replaces it with moisture from the brine—properly salted and infused with all the herbs and spices in the brine. In principle, I love this idea. I’ll do just about anything to make my food as flavorful as possible. In practice, though, it’s a lot more complicated. You need the right time, location, and vessel to do this in a way that is both safe and effective. Most people cannot meet all three criteria. You need a cooler that’s at least 5 gallons (the size of the cylindrical coolers of Gatorade that the winning coaches get dunked with at the end of the Super Bowl), you need a place big enough to keep that cooler’s contents at around 40 degrees, and you need access to enough ice and water to fill that container several times over since you need to renew the ice at least every 8 to 12 hours, or as frequently as needed to meet the earlier temperature threshold. If you can meet those requirements, sure, make a brine. Bring a gallon of water to a boil with 6 ounces of salt and whatever spices you want. Stir to dissolve. Allow this solution to cool. Remove your turkey from its packaging and place it legs-up in your cooler. Then, pour all of the cooled brine into your cooler. Fill the rest of the cooler’s volume with ice. Change the ice regularly.

 
After brining it (if you choose to do so), or when it is time to cook it if it is fresh, either remove the turkey from the packaging or take it out of the brine. In any case, pat the exterior of the bird dry with clean paper towels. At this point, begin preheating your oven to 500 Fahrenheit. If the bird was not brined, season it generously with salt and black pepper on the exterior and inside the cavity. Quarter an orange and place it inside the cavity. Do likewise with a lemon, quartering a second one to scatter around the bird as well. Quarter 4 onions and peel 3 of them. Those that were peeled go under the turkey with the lemons, and the one that was not peeled will join the lemon in the cavity. Halve a head of garlic through its equator so that all the cloves are exposed. Place that into the cavity. Roughly chop (into 3 or 4 pieces each) 1 pound each of celery and carrots. Scatter the vegetables throughout the roasting tray. Peel 3 shallots and place them in the roasting tray. Not all shallots are like this, but if any of your shallots have two distinct halves, pull them apart. Insert a probe thermometer into the thickest part of the thigh without touching the bone. (Bones conduct heat much better than flesh, so touching a bone will give you an inaccurate reading much higher than the true temperature). Set the probe thermometer to beep when it registers 165 Fahrenheit. Look around in either of the halves of the breasts; there, you might find a small white circle. That’s an epoxy-based thermometer where un-melted wax keeps a piston down that pops up when the wax melts. They aren’t very precise, and the wax isn’t very good, so it doesn’t melt when it should. Those thermometers are useless, but don’t remove them. Go with your thermometer.

This next idea comes straight from Brown’s Romancing the Bird—even the name is his. Cut a triangle of aluminum foil that fits the dimensions of the breast. Mold the “Turkey Triangle onto the breast now, and once you’re sure it’s the right size, reserve it for later.

Put the bird in the oven at 500 degrees legs-first (that is, legs facing the back of the oven). Time it for 30 minutes. Then, drop the temperature to 350, cover the breast with the Triangle, and continue roasting until the probe beeps. (This is straight out of Brown's method in his classic Thanksgiving episode "Romancing the Bird.") Depending on the weight of your bird, it should probably take another 2-2½ hours. But again, don't go by time or by the little pop-up thermometer. For the best, safest results, rely on the probe. Rest uncovered for 15 minutes before serving with the vegetables. Place the vegetables and the turkey on a platter to rest and from which they will be served, leaving any liquid in the roasting tray. Return the roasting pan to a stovetop burner and click here to learn how to make the proper pan sauce.

Creamed Spinach

Creamed spinach is yet another essential in the (especially Southern) American Thanksgiving menu. This recipe is actually two in one, so, rather than repeating the whole text of the second recipe here, I’ll simply provide a link to it when the time comes, and I’ll follow that with any modifications this recipe needs over that one.

Spinach—and most leafy greens— cooks down to an incredibly small volume relative to how much was in your pan to begin with. You need about 3-4 ounces of dry spinach (60-80% of the volume of a typical 5 oz package. For those in the metric system, that’s about 60-80% of a 140-gram package) per person. Most of this mass is water trapped inside the cells of the spinach, and when you sauté the spinach, most of that liquid will be boiled off, thereby losing all that volume, but, at the same time, concentrating the flavor of the spinach.

Before you start sauteing the spinach, mince or press 3 cloves of garlic and slice one onion into half-moons (cut the onion through the stem and the root; cut off the stem; make thin slices parallel to the root until you reach it; repeat this for the other half of the onion; your slices should look like a bunch of copies of the letter “C” made out of onion). Sweat out the onions over medium heat, then add the garlic. Make sure the onions go in first so that the garlic doesn’t burn. “Sweating” for onions means “cooking just to drive off moisture until the onions turn translucent, but no further.” If you go any further than this, you’ll start getting jammy, golden-brown, sweeter onions. These are very good in certain contexts (that’s exactly what you want for French onion soup, which I’ll probably write a recipe for in the winter at some point, and if I do, those words will become a hyperlink to that recipe), but not here. Here, caramelizing onions messes with the texture, color, and flavors we want in this side dish, so if they get caramelized, unfortunately, throw the onions away or use them for something else—they aren’t useful here.

At this point, start making a mornay sauce. Make a béchamel by following this recipe from my Mother Sauces series from early October. Turn it into a mornay by melting in a freshly grated well-melting cheese, like a white cheddar, gruyère, or gouda. Grate in as much cheese as you would like, and whisk to melt and properly emulsify. Industrially pre-shredded or pre-grated cheeses won’t work for this. They have too many emulsifiers and stabilizers that chemically alter the taste and texture too much when melted to work well in a mornay.

Once the onions and garlic have sweated out and become fragrant, add a touch more olive oil to your pan and place in the spinach (4-5 people need a pound of raw spinach. Scale that up or down according to your family’s needs.).Cook out the spinach until it wilts and most of the moisture in it evaporates away. Let it cool in the pan in which it was cooked. Once it is at room temperature, remove as much more moisture as possible by running it through a salad spinner. Once you have removed as much moisture as possible, return your spinach to the same pan (which you have now dried) and ladle in as much mornay as you would like.

Thanksgiving: A beginner's guide to how to cook for it

Just like I did for the Mother Sauces, I’m going to make a whole series dedicated to Thanksgiving, perhaps the most iconic holiday in our country and to the rest of the world in terms of its classic gastronomy. Recipes normally go out on Fridays, but all of this needs to be out by Thursday, so Black Friday would be too late in the week for any of this to be useful. The feijoada recipe had originally been scheduled to go out on November 12 (a Friday, like normal) in anticipation of Republic Day (one of the two biggest civic holidays in Brazil, the other being Independence Day in early September), but instead, to make room for this series, I moved the feijoada to the 15th, and this series will all go live on the 12th during the normal Friday slot. This way, there’ll be more than enough time for all of you to plan and purchase everything you will need for Thanksgiving 13 days later on Thursday the 25th.

The image of modern Thanksgiving that everyone recognizes, of course, is a big turkey served whole on a platter with vegetables and surrounded by gravy and a whole smorgasbord-worth of other accoutrements.
This series will follow that image and will take you step by step, dish by dish, down to the minute, for how to plan and execute your perfect Thanksgiving meal.
Especially since I took over the kitchen, we haven’t been doing much entertaining, and our thanksgivings are never really big anyways—it’s almost always just my parents and me—so we make some modifications. Those of you who have been long-time readers remember my whole chicken recipe from last Christmas. That, or something very similar, will be coming back in our house in a few days when Thanksgiving rolls around. After all, we’re three people, and if we ate from that “picture-perfect Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving turkey,” we could probably eat for a week. That’s too much, so we nearly always change that out in favor of my chickens. And as a general rule, we as a family like to have Thanksgiving lunch instead of Thanksgiving dinner.

The holiday has as many correct ways of expressing itself gastronomically as there are families who celebrate. I’ll try to hit all the core elements, but, of course, feel free to customize this to your tastes and needs, just as we do here at home.
This series will cover:

a. The turkey (and I will link to the already-published chicken)

b. Cranberry Sauce

c. Asparagus (and there I will link to both the Hollandaise and Béchamel segments of my series on the Mother Sauces)

d. A pan sauce

e. Creamed Spinach

f. Brussels Sprouts

g. Corn-Bean salad

Two important items on our Thanksgiving menu, the farofa (the traditional Brazilian analog to the American Thanksgiving classics of stuffing and/or dressing) and the mashed potatoes, will not be covered explicitly, except in the final post where I offer a schedule template. These recipes have already been published here, and I have had no reasons to make major revisions to either of them, so I will simply post links to them within this post. The names of those two dishes are hyperlinks to elsewhere on this blog where you can find those two recipes.

Thanskgiving Vegetables: Balsamic-Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Asparagus Hollandaise (or Béchamel)

Every Thanksgiving meal needs at least one vegetable side. (For these purposes, potatoes aren’t vegetables—they’re starches. If you came here thinking you were going to find my Thanksgiving potato recipe, click here instead.) This recipe is actually two in one, for the two most common vegetable sides I serve at Thanksgiving or at any of the other few times a year (Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter being the others I can think of right away) where I pull out every culinary stop.

Let’s first address asparagus. Asparagus spears have two parts: a part we can eat and a part that’s too woody. The bottom end (the end opposite the side that looks like an arrowhead) is the woody end. Somewhere along the length of the spear, that woody part gives way to a more tender part. Where exactly that point is located will depend on the individual spear, so the best advice I can offer is to bend each spear and let it break where it wants to.

After I break each spear individually, I cook asparagus twice. I blanch it in boiling water for 2-3 minutes and then shock it in an ice bath. This sets the vibrant green color and stops the cooking process, so the spears don’t overcook and go mushy while I’m resetting my station for the next phase (which I guess is actually two phases in one). Once I blanch and shock the asparagus, I like being really quick about having pressed or minced garlic ready. Coat the bottom of a skillet or a sauté pan with a thin film of oil and sauté the asparagus in the oil. Season the spears now with salt and pepper. If after a few minutes they aren’t as tender as you want them, put a splash of water in your pan, cover it with its proper lid, and let the spears steam for a few minutes. As the spears cook, I like to make a batch of either béchamel or hollandaise to serve atop the spears.

I also typically serve another side: brussels sprouts glazed in balsamic vinegar. As I’m preparing my sprouts by trimming their root ends and cutting them in half through said roots (never at their equators—that would destroy their structure!), I preheat my oven to 400 Fahrenheit. I recommend starting Brussels sprouts on the stovetop in a pan (that was initially cold) with a thin film of olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. After a few minutes in said pan, they get drizzled with balsamic vinegar, tossed so the vinegar coats them completely, and they go into the oven (which by now should be up to temperature) until a paring knife goes through them with almost no resistance. I don’t want mush, but I want something soft and buttery—literally, like the texture of softened butter you would use while baking. Getting the outer layers crisp and caramelized and the inner layers tender and buttery (without burning anything) is quite the challenge, but the rewards are immense.

Thanksgiving Cranberry Sauce

Cranberry sauce is nearly ubiquitous in a traditional American Thanksgiving, so even though we’ve rarely if ever, had it at home (but I’ve had it dozens of times away from home), I feel compelled to include it here. Likely, you’ll find it one of the easiest parts of this menu to prepare, and thus a welcome reprieve from the otherwise hectic day of holiday cooking.

Cranberries are loaded full of a compound called pectin—the same compound found in equal abundance in tomatoes that allows a tomato sauce to thicken up incredibly well given enough time without any additional thickening power from a roux or anything else. How you like your cranberry sauce will determine how long you let the pectin in your cranberries be active before stopping the reactions and determining the final form of your sauce. It could be very runny, almost watery, at one end of the spectrum with almost no pectin extraction and development, and it could be practically cranberry Jell-O at the opposite extreme where the pectin is fully taken advantage of. Everything in this extravagant Thanksgiving meal is, as I see it, the Platonic ideal of the dish. The Platonic ideal of cranberry sauce, then, is not at either extreme of thickness, but somewhere in the middle. (This isn’t sponsored, but this is the best product I ever had, so I have to give them a shoutout: Years ago, in Brazil and, to a lesser extent in the US, I could reliably find a “St. Dalfour”-brand blueberry jam; the consistency of that jam is perfect. If you can find this line of products near you, buy it, taste it, and learn the consistency, because that’s what we’re going for in this recipe. Sidenote, I don’t know who St. Dalfour was—so if any of you know anything about this saint (even as basic as if he/she was real or not, please drop a comment and let me know!)

Whatever your preferred cranberry sauce thickness, maceration of the berries is an essential step in the cranberry sauce-making process. Maceration is the process by which, by coating the berries in sugar, we allow some liquid to be extracted, and so the berries essentially sit in their own sweetened liquid for a few minutes. Zest—don’t peel, since that’ll bring the white bitter pith with it—an orange, and juice it, placing that in a 3qt saucepan with 12 oz cranberries and 8 oz sugar, plus just enough water to cover everything. Cook this over medium heat, stirring often so nothing sticks and burns. Once the sauce has not quite thickened to your desired consistency (remembering that it will continue thickening as it cools), remove it from the heat, check for seasoning one last time, and transfer it to your intended serving vessel.