How to Throw a Lowcountry Seafood Boil - Page 178

Now this was ambitious!  We invited Ox's entire Navy crew and all his neighbors to his house for a seafood boil/pig roaster build.  Everyone brought either ingredients for the boil, or cinder blocks for the roaster.  It was nerve wracking waiting to see if we would get all the ingredients, but his crew came through.  We had over 75 people, and enough ingredients for FOUR 8 gallon boils.  Everyone had a great time, and we got the pig roaster 80% done (this was our goal).

The last person to show up arrived just as we dumped the first load of food.  Good thing he did, since he was the ONLY guy bringing cocktail sauce.  We had two turkey fryers, and started them 15 minutes apart, so we were dumping food on the table every 15 minutes.  One of our fryers didn't have a basket, but we had a spider strainer and it worked out just fine.

Now Sean Brock says this is a hands only meal, but we had a tough time convincing everyone.  People came around though, and had a great time.  The first two batches went in 10 minutes or less, with the sausage going first.  The shrimp was a close second, probably because most of it was hand caught by a couple of the sailors on Ox's crew.

We used Charleston Spice Company seafood boil spice mix, and this had great flavor.  You can find them at the Summerville Farmers Market on Saturdays all year except the winter.

We missed one item on the equipment list...the trash can.  We had quite a mess to clean up, and very few places to put it.

I would HIGHLY recommend doing this for a party.  People will have a blast!

Advice: Have a lot of sausage - it seems to be the most popular part.  Don't forget the trash can.  Make sure at least two people are assigned to bring each item, so you don't risk a single point failure messing things up.

 

Spicy Pepper Jelly - Page 214

I'm excited about this recipe, because my sister makes some awesome pepper jelly, and I want my own.  I again texted her for advice, and she gave me some tips which I will detail later.

You need a juicer for this, and when we juiced 2 pounds of red peppers per the recipe, we had almost four cups of juice (vice the 1 and a half the recipe said we needed).  This might be due to the AWESOME juicer I have, which I recommended in an earlier post.  You also need a candy thermometer.  I will link to the ones I use at the end of the post.  For full disclosure, we get a small cut if you buy through the link, which we use to defray ingredient costs.

As usual, we used the excess juice to make some bitchin' bloody marys, similar to what we did with the excess clear tomato juice from THIS recipe.

The recipe called for heating the full mixture to 145F (between soft and firm ball for you candy makers) and said it would take about 10 minutes.  This became another "In Brock we Trust" moment, since it took 45 minutes, and the jelly started looking really caramelized.  In the end, it tasted delicious, and seems to be cooling to jelly consistency.  UPDATE: Came out too thick.  More like caramel than jelly.  Still awesome taste.  We will check our thermometer calibration.  We tried the serve over cream cheese with Wheat Thins at our Lowcountry Seafood Boil and it was great!

Again, don't take a big whiff of the boiling liquid!
This one has vinegar AND peppers.
Yes, I smelled it again.  Sniff gently.

We oven sterilized the jars for this recipe as well.  The other change we made, as recommended by the sister, was to immediately flip the jars upside down for ten minutes right after lidding.  We left them there for ten minutes, then righted them.  We are not touching them again for 24 hours.  We also jarred them in smaller jars.  The 4 oz jars are perfect for emptying over a chunk of cream cheese, and serving with wheat thins.

Advice: Get juicer and thermometer linked below.  Make bloody marys with excess pepper juice (or make ice cubes with it - for bloody marys).  You don't need to boil the full jars for this one.  We had the pot boiling away before we realized this.  Trust in the Brock.

Pickled Okra - Page 234

The great pickling adventure continues!

This time, we aren't making refrigerator pickles.  We're canning!  Canning with all the attendant worries about cleanliness, sanitation, etc.  One thing we don't worry about is water taking too long to boil and thus overcooking what we're trying to pickle.  If you think a turkey fryer is just for frying turkey - you're wrong!  It's for making stock, making beer, making wings, low-country boils and...canning.  A turkey fryer gets 7 gallons of water boiling in minutes!  It's all about the BTU'S!  Imagine me making a grunting noise like that guy from Home Improvement.  Seriously though, I think turkey fryers are one of the most under-appreciated kitchen appliance out there.  Right after wort chillers.

One thing we did different from the recipe was oven sterilize the jars vice boiling them.  My sister's been doing it this way for years, so I just felt more comfortable doing it this way, at least once she finally responded to my text asking questions.

I have to say these are the prettiest of the three pickles we've done so far.  We haven't tasted any yet, so hopefully they'll be good.  Pickled Peaches and Pickled Mushrooms will be ready tomorrow.

We had some leftover okra and a jar's worth of liquid, so we started grabbing vegetables from the fridge and stuffing them in the jar.  We'll see if anything works (we didn't seal this jar and just put it in the refrigerator for immediate (after a week) consumption.

Advice: Get a turkey fryer.  Have extra vegetables on hand in case there's some liquid left.  Use plastic gloves when cutting jalapenos and DON'T TOUCH YOUR EYE!  Also, don't take a big whiff of the boiling pickling liquid.  (I know, I've said this before, but if I don't learn the lesson, you might not either.)

Pickled Mushrooms - Page 214

So we had three choices of mushrooms from the recipe - Button, Cremini or Brown Beech.  Harris Teeter had Cremini and Button.  I decided to go with Cremini, since they had both baskets of loose and pre-packaged ones.  I wanted to pick the best so I dug into the basket and then reached for what I thought was the box of bulk mushrooms waiting to restock the basket.  It wasn't a box of mushrooms.  It was a spacer to keep the basket pushed to the front.  Behind it was something I never want to see again - not going to even describe it.  Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not trying to bash Harris Teeter.  I expect most stores would have the same issue.  It's just a place you never look.  Harris Teeter had nearly all the ingredients I wanted, with great quality.  The mushrooms were beautiful.  Point is, don't go digging in the backs of coolers.

So we got into the recipe, got our jars stuffed and were heating the brine when we noticed that this recipe probably was going to have proportion problems.  There just wasn't a lot of brine and there were a LOT of jars of mushrooms.  So we doubled the brine batch.  When we poured the brine over the mushrooms, we felt vindicated as the brine amount was perfect for the jars.  But then the mushrooms started sucking in the brine and shrinking up.  We figure we could have carefully alternated mushrooms and brine in the jars and had a perfect batch with only one batch of brine.  Now we have jars that are half mushrooms and full of brine.  Sigh.

It was interesting doing this batch of "pickles" right after the pickled peaches.  While both will be pickles, the flavorings couldn't be more different.  Peaches, lemongrass, allspice, cinnamon, mace, ginger, cloves and peppercorns vs, mushrooms, mustard, bay leaf, thyme and salt.

We did add a fresh sprig of thyme to each jar for pretty.

Tasting at 1 week: Love the flavor and texture.  Tastes like it needs more time to soak in.

Advice: Fill your jars half with mushrooms and then pour brine to cover.  As they cool and the mushrooms shrink, add more mushrooms and brine until the jar is full of mushrooms and brine.  Also, don't explore hidden crevices in grocery stores!  Let them sit a little longer than a week.

Ox and Brock are losing their S**t!

Ox and Brock are going to build the pig roaster from the Heritage cookbook on October 30th, while doing the lowcountry boil from the book. Then, on November 7th they are going to roast a whole f**kin' pig! Neither of us has EVER done this. It's going to be exciting, fun, and possibly disastrous. If you know the Ox and Brock crew, now is the time to start sucking up and trying for an invite. If you happen to be Sean Brock, don't take the "stalker" label too seriously, and see if you can come check it out.

Pickled Peaches - Page 213

This recipe had ginger, lemongrass, allspice, cinnamon and mace for what looks like a lot of sweet and pie like flavors to offset the acid of the vinegar.  Ox also pointed out that, other than peppers, that's a lot of jerk chicken ingredients.  It was a big contrast to the mushrooms we are pickling soon.  We'll see what it turns out like.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time (all ten of you) you know that the proportions from the book don't always translate to the home kitchen.  In this case, they were perfect.  We wanted several different sized containers for sharing, and we ended up with 5 containers of various sizes.  We did one with whole peaches, like the recipe said, but couldn't fit whole peaches through the necks of some bottles, so we used halves and quarters.  We'll let you know which ones were best.

We boiled and chilled the peaches per the recipe, and they still didn't peal for s**t.  But this wasn't as big of a deal as it was for the pickled eggs.  We might try some experiments to see what we did wrong.

The main piece of advice for this (and all pickle) recipes: don't take a big whiff of the boiling pickling liquid - you'll regret it.  Smell gently.

This recipe was fun and easy - right in our wheelhouse.

Tasting after 1 week: Love the texture and flavor (especially texture.  Feel like they will only improve with time.