The Green Chile Variations, pt. 2, rev. ed.

 fig. a:  garden-fresh chiles

So, like I was saying...

There was this initiation in the majesty and the mystery of New Mexico-style green chile that occurred sometime in the 1990s in Albuquerque and environs.  This initiation turned into something of an obsession--a Green Chile Madness--albeit one that lay mostly dormant for years afterwards.  Then there was a period of rediscovery that began a few years ago, and that resulted in the rekindling of this obsession.  Things reached a fevered pitch sometime this past summer, not long after a fateful encounter with a green chile pork burrito in Billings, Montana, of all places.  When it comes to green chile pork--the genuine article--you learn to not ask too many questions.  You learn to just accept, and appreciate.

By the time the height of summer hit, we were roasting green chiles over open flames at every occasion.  We made a lot of green chile stew, and, in an homage to both Billings and Albuquerque, we filled quite a number of burritos with that stew.  But we also made a whole lot of chunky green chile sauce that we used for a wide variety of purposes:  from dressing scrambled and fried eggs in the morning, to smothering a pile of nacho chips, to adorning our AEB green chile cheeseburger.  Michelle cried real tears of joy the first time we made these.  She cried real tears of grief about eight seconds later when she'd made her first AEB green chile cheeseburger vanish into thin air.  Luckily for her, we had the means to make more, and that's exactly what we did.

 fig. b:  come to mama!

AEB Green Chile Cheeseburger 

1 lb freshly ground beef chuck
AEB green chile sauce*
cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese
smoky bacon
beefsteak tomato slices (in season)
ripe avocado slices
lettuce (optional)
mayonnaise (optional) 

Divide the meat into three portions.  Form into patties making sure that you've salted and peppered the meat sufficiently and that you don't overwork the meat.   

Fry in a pan (preferably with your leftover bacon drippings) to desired doneness, making sure to grace with sliced cheese for the last minute of cooking time.  Place patties on buns and dress with the remaining ingredients.  You might think that topping the burgers with guacamole would be even tastier than topping them with avocado slices, but, in our humble opinion, you'd be wrong:  the guacamole just competes with the green chile sauce, and the green chile sauce is already bursting with flavour. Sometimes less is more.

Place the top half of each bun on top.  Try your damnedest to hold that burger together as you take a chomp.  This may very well be the messiest burger you've ever eaten.  It will likely also be the very best. 

Makes three 1/3-pound Green Chile Cheeseburgers.  Serves 1-3.

These burgers are unreal, but don't forget about those eggs and those nachos.  Actually, you'll want to put that green chile sauce on just about everything when you have a batch around.  That's when you'll know the Green Chile Madness has set in.

END OF PART TWO

aj

* I haven't had the chance to turn the AEB green chile sauce into an actual recipe, but I can give you some pointers.

You'll need the following:

onion
vegetable oil or lard
garlic
cumin seeds
roasted green chiles
tomatillos (optional)
chicken broth
masa harina (optional)
salt and pepper

And basically, you'll have to do the following.  Sauté your onions until they are nice and soft.  Add your chopped garlic and some toasted and ground cumin seeds.  Add your roasted green chiles, some tomatillos, if you're using them, and your chicken broth.  Be judicious with your use of chicken broth.  You don't want to add too much, but the idea here is to add enough that you can cook your sauce down, uncovered, reducing it into a thing of beauty.  This shouldn't take all that long.  No more than about half an hour, if you've added the right proportion of broth.  Add a sprinkle of masa harina towards the end of this process if you'd like to thicken your sauce further and give it a bit of depth.  The goal here is to create a fairly thick, chunky sauce that will actually be appropriate for dressing a burger.  It ought to taste like heaven, too.

You'll notice that the ingredients and the method here are essentially just a variation on the Green Chile Stew recipe from Part One.

Others opt for a simpler approach to the green chile cheeseburger.  At the end of their Saveur piece on chile-hunting across New Mexico, Jane and Michael Stern included a recipe for a prototype that they picked up from a chef in Santa Fe.  There, instead of creating an actual green chile sauce, they spiced up the burger patties, then topped them with roasted New Mexico chiles that had been roughly chopped.

Either way, you can hardly go wrong.  In fact, you can only go right.

Bo Knows

Speaking of wraps, I still remember our first experience of Momofuku, way back in 2006, vividly.

fig. a: Momofuku!

Like virtually everyone else, the dish that first won our hearts was David Chang's now legendary, oft-imitated steamed pork buns, with its supremely succulent braised Berkshire pork. But the dish that left a lasting impression was the ssäm.

At the time, I had the following to say about the experience:

The true revelation of our luncheon, however, was my Ssäm. I have to confess, at the time that I ordered it, I really had little idea what exactly I was ordering. The ingredients--"Berkshire pork, rice, edamame, onions, pickled shiitake, kimchi"--all sounded great to me, but I was expecting some kind of a fried rice dish, or possibly even a rice-based soup.

fig. b: Momofuku ssäm

What we got, instead, was a burrito--a clever Korean-American take on the Mexican-American classic. In general, we're a little skeptical when it comes to "fusion cuisine," but here was another instance of Chang taking chances and finding (not forcing) culinary affinities. The results were brilliant--but, then again, as huge fans of Mission-style burritos and Korean food, we were pretty much an ideal audience for Momofuku's ssäm burrito.

Chang writes about his ssäm burritos with humor and a healthy dose of self-deprecation in Lucky Peach #2. In fact, his opening line baldly states, "In 2005, I thought I had the greatest idea in the world: I was going to serve Korean burritos." And he goes on to explain the logic behind his brainchild:

It wasn't that much of a stretch of the imagination: Koreans wrap up everything. Go to a summer barbecue with enough Koreans and one of them will eat his burger wrapped in a lettuce leaf just because that's how we do it. Bossäm is a traditional dish where you sit around a big plate of pork belly (and sometimes oysters) and wrap up mouthful after mouthful in napa cabbage.

fig. c: ssäm burrito spread

But, overall, Chang's piece reads more like an attempt to restore the reputation of his poor Korean burrito (and poke fun at himself) in the aftermath of the Korean taco phenomenon: "I was such a dumbass... (A year or two later, my good friend Roy Choi started doing Korean Tacos in L.A. Now he's so successful I want to be him instead of me.)"

Now, it's easy to make your own ssäm burritos at home. Chang's Bo ssäm recipe has appeared in Momofuku (the cookbook), in Lucky Peach #1, and elsewhere (such as Sam Sifton's New York Times article on Chang's version, "The Bo Ssam Miracle"). And in Lucky Peach #2, Chang provides a complete recipe for his original ssäm burritos.

But when I finally got around to preparing Chang's Bo Ssäm at home a few weeks ago, it struck me that he had missed out on a golden opportunity. As much as I love tacos, including Korean tacos, I still love burritos enormously. And while tacos might offer more opportunities for variation and innovation, there's one category where burritos have tacos beat hands down: breakfast.

Unless you're feeding a pack of coyotes, you're probably going to have some bo ssäm and some bo ssäm fixings leftover after your next bo ssäm-athon. And you're probably going  to find yourself so ravenous for the taste of bo ssäm again, and, in all likelihood, so incredibly hungover, that you're going to want to dig in to those leftovers sooner rather than later (like, for breakfast, the very next day). Just make sure you have some nice, big flour tortillas on hand, as well as some eggs, when you do. Then you can make yourself some bo ssäm breakfast burritos, or as we like to call them...

Ssäm Bburritos

1 extra-large flour tortilla, steamed or microwaved until warm
roast pork shoulder, Bo ssäm-style, reheated
refried short-grain rice
1 egg, fried, poached, or scrambled (depending on how you like it)
kimchi
quick-pickled cucumbers
quick-pickled radishes
ginger-scallion sauce
ssäm sauce

Pile the ingredients high, but not so high that you can't actually close the burrito.

fig. d: ssäm bburrito 1

Roll and fold the burrito up tightly, and wrap with aluminum foil.

fig. e: ssäm bburrito 2

Devour.

Repeat as needed.

[we'd like to think this recipe is a Momofuku/AEB co-production, but mostly it relies on recipes from Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan]

How did they turn out? Well, they tasted like "the greatest idea in the world."  The very greatest.

aj

These are a few of our favorite things...

fig. a: Baby Crawfords ripe for the picking

Well, we've been mulling over Melissa's provocative "Things to Eat Before You Die" project over at The Traveler's Lunchbox for the last few days. On the one hand, it's been a breeze coming up with "absolute musts" of all kinds, but on the other, whittling our respective lists down to five has been difficult, to say the least. In the end, Michelle decided to do a fruits-only list, while I opted for a bit of a grab-bag, although it would have been easy to come up with similarly essential lists (to us, at least) that were, say, Montreal-specific or seafood-specific or pastry-specific (you get my drift). Anyway, without further ado (and without any further agonizing), here goes:

Michelle:

1. Baby Crawford peaches fresh off the tree at Andy's Orchard, Morgan Hill, CA
2. strawberries from Swanton Berry Farm, Davenport, CA
3. pears & black walnuts foraged in the Czech Republic (take a walk most anywhere in rural Bohemia at the right time of year and you'll find them in abundance)
4. fields of wild blueberries around Sackville, New Brunswick
5. fresh mulberries anywhere you can get them

Anthony:

1. a real S.F. burrito from a real S.F. taqueria (La Taqueria comes to mind)
2. pizza from a truck in Marseilles eaten on a bench in the Old Port with a good bottle of red wine
3. fresh (and I do mean fresh) oysters on the half-shell from a reputable source of your choice, served in generous quantities
4. real dim sum served from carts (any one of a number of places come to mind, but the best I've had in the last 12 months was at Ton Kiang in San Francisco)
5. a runny, perfectly ripe raw milk cheese (like a St. Marcellin or a St. Felicien) with some good apples, some good pears, some nice grapes, and a crisp white wine of your choice

Have your own list? Do tell.

aj