by Edward Lee
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
One 12-ounce bottle lager beer
3 cups corn oil
1 cup sliced pickles, drained and patted dry
Kosher salt
Ketchup for serving
1To make the batter: Combine the flour, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, ground cumin, and black pepper in a large bowl and mix well. Slowly pour in the beer, whisking steadily. Let the batter rest for 15 minutes.
2Heat the oil in a large heavy pot to 350°F. If using pickle spears, dip each pickle into the batter, shake off the excess batter, and gently drop into the hot oil. Working in batches, fry for 2 to 3 minutes, until the batter is golden and crispy. If using pickle chips, add all of the chips to the batter. Using a spider or a strainer, lift the chips from the batter and let the excess batter drip from the chips (this will take a little time), then gently drop the chips into the fryer and fry as for the spears. Drain on paper towels and season with a little salt. Serve immediately, with ketchup.
Pretzel Bites with Country Ham
Soft pretzel are best eaten right out of the oven, while they are still warm. The pillowy dough, wrapped around the salty ham and the melty cheddar, is a perfect snack with bourbon or a Belgian-style beer. I like to make these in small bite-sized rounds, but feel free to make them into knots or a braid. / Makes 50 to 60 bites
1½ teaspoons active dry yeast
3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon brown sugar
¼ cup warm water (105 to 115°F)
1 cup whole milk, warmed (105 to 115°F)
2½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup finely diced country ham
¼ cup finely diced sharp cheddar cheese
4 cups hot water
4 teaspoons baking soda
Pretzel salt (see Resources, page 279)
2 tablespoons seeded and finely diced jalapeño peppers
½ cup Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon honey (optional)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1Mix the yeast, 1 teaspoon of the brown sugar, and the warm water in a cup and let the yeast activate until foamy, 5 to 8 minutes. In a separate cup, mix the remaining 3 tablespoons brown sugar and the warm milk and stir to dissolve.
2In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the flour with the yeast and milk and mix on low for about 4 minutes, until combined. Raise the speed to medium and mix until a ball of dough forms; do not overwork the dough.
3Transfer the dough to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm spot for about 2 hours until double in size.
4Once the dough has risen, transfer it to a floured work surface and cut into 4 pieces. Shape each piece into a ball. As gently as you can, knead 2 tablespoons of the country ham and 1 tablespoon of the cheddar into each ball. Roll each piece of dough into a long rope about ¾ inch in diameter. Using a pastry cutter or a sharp knife, cut into 1-inch pieces and arrange on baking sheets. Let the dough rest for about 30 minutes.
5Preheat the oven to 400°F.
6Combine the water and baking soda in a medium saucepan and bring barely to a simmer. Using a slotted spoon, dunk the pretzel bites about 5 at a time into the bath for exactly 20 seconds and immediately transfer to another baking sheet, ½ inch apart.
7Sprinkle the pretzel salt over the bites. Bake for 8 to 12 minutes, or until golden brown and nicely puffed.
8In a small bowl, stir the jalapeños into the Dijon mustard. If you like some sweetness, add the honey. Set aside.
9Brush the baked pretzels with the melted butter and serve hot, with the jalapeño mustard.
The Distiller
If you think all bourbons are the same, you need only pick up a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle to see that generations of whiskey knowledge and a purist approach to bourbon will result in a bourbon in a class by itself. Julian Van Winkle is the man behind this highly sought-after bourbon. I have known Julian for close to a decade, and though I have read much and even written about this mythical libation (and drunk more than my fair share), every time I talk to him, I learn something new.
“All the color and most of the flavor of bourbon come from the whiskey expanding past the charred layer into the wood of the barrel staves. This happens in the hot weather here in Kentucky. When the weather cools, the whiskey passes through the char layer again as it leaves the wood staves and goes back into the barrel cavity. Most bourbon barrels are made of American charred white oak, so they are basically the same. The only difference is that the staves may come from different parts of the tree, producing a slightly different flavor in the whiskey. We prefer staves made from the heartwood part of the tree rather than the sapwood or outer part of a log. The sapwood can give the whiskey a young, or green, flavor, which is unacceptable. We can alter the flavor of the whiskey in the barrels by placing them in different warehouses and different areas of the warehouses. We prefer a metal-clad warehouse with more airflow, which will produce the best flavor profile.”
—Julian Van Winkle, Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon, Frankfort, Kentucky
Buttermilk & Karaoke
There’s always music playing in my kitchen. Different tempos for different times of the day. Just before service, it’s something fast and loud to get us motivated. Earlier in the day, it’s a mix of classic metal and hillbilly rock. Sometimes in the mornings, when it’s only the pastry chef and me, I’ll play some folk songs, sometimes Hazel and Alice, sometimes John Prine. There’s a rhythm in what we do in our kitchens. I hear it in the steady chop of a knife against a cutting board, a whisk picking up speed in a bowl, or the constant movement of a stir-fry. I can tell how good a chef is just by listening to the sound of her knife work. It is quiet but steady and strong—like a Gillian Welch song. Music surrounds me at all hours. At night, Louisville becomes a stage. I roam the city in search of music, whether it’s a bluegrass festival, to hear the lightning fiddle of Michael Cleveland; or a concert hall, to dance to Johnny Berry and the Outliers; or a neighborhood bar, to hear Tyrone Cotton bend the blues and gospel into folk.
Critics have always used musical descriptors to talk about food. Dishes sing, ingredients have notes, flavors harmonize, BBQ rocks; the metaphors abound. I like metaphors because they can express thoughts in a way that the literal cannot. When I say I want to cook like Elvis, you know what I mean. I don’t literally want to cook the way Elvis cooked, I want to cook the way Elvis lived his life—bold and untethered and agitated. I have admired and learned from so many great cooks, both in homes and in restaurants, and the best ones have always inspired a melody. A good bowl of soup is like a love song. I have eaten meals that were symphonies, and I have had the occasional dish so perfect it made me sad the way a mind-blowing live concert does. Dessert is like a feel-good song, and the best ones can make you dance in your chair. I rarely made desserts before moving to Louisville. They always seemed to come out a bit morose—like a Townes Van Zandt song. I was too serious, too worried to just make fun desserts. But Southern meals always end on a happy note. (And usually with the promise of more libations.) It’s hard not to smile. Merriment is contagious. That may sound obvious, but it took me a while to learn it. It’s one more part of a journey that carried me from a Korean apartment in Brooklyn to a cozy kitchen in the South. There’s a country song in there somewhere.
Anyone who knows me knows my fondness for karaoke. Put a mike in my hand, and something primal takes over. Picture me in a cowboy shirt singing karaoke off-key, and you get the idea. I used to be shy about it—I don’t have much of a voice. But it’s an exhilarating feeling to sing, whether you are skilled at it or not. Scott Mertz is a friend and musician who is always good for a drink and a song. At the slightest suggestion, he’ll sit in my dining room, pull out his vintage guitar, and belt out a gut-wrenching ve
rsion of “Dead Flowers.” He knows I’m tone-deaf, but he will ask me to join in anyway. He has always encouraged me to sing my heart out, no matter the outcome. He says it’s about the passion, not the pitch. One song always turns into another, and then we sing a few more. As the bourbon flows, I begin to sound better—at least to myself.
I could fill a book with pages and pages on complicated pastry skills, but that doesn’t get at why we want desserts and what we want out of them. We want them to make us sing and put a smile on our faces. I find that most people who like to cook feel intimidated by desserts, as if making them requires a different skill. It doesn’t. It does require a different vocabulary, and it requires you to be a bit more quiet, more patient. You may find that making dessert is a lot like singing karaoke: It’s awkward at first, but once you start, you won’t want to stop. You may not be any good at it, but so what? You practice and you persevere and you learn. You do it because you know a good dessert will fill a room with jubilance. Even a halfway decent dessert makes people happy. And that’s reason enough to keep trying.
Sometimes when I’m singing karaoke, I feel like I’m alone in a crowded room. It’s just me and the synthesized melody and the moving highlights of the lyrics. The feeling is transcendent. It may be funny to everyone else, but if you have ever seen an Asian businessman swaying and crooning into a microphone lyrics he knows by heart, with his eyes closed so tight a tear actually flows down his cheek, well, that’s what it’s all about. I can get that way too. I have traveled so far from my roots in Brooklyn, even farther from my ancestry in Korea, and the farther I go, the more I am reminded of the home I had as a kid. I grow older and yet I find myself becoming the little Korean kid singing in my underwear in front of the TV. Maybe the person I was born to be is inescapable. Maybe it just takes a lifetime to appreciate it.
The first time I had buttermilk, I didn’t like it. I expected it would taste buttery, not sour. Turns out you have to mix it with something else to bring out what is remarkable about it. I feel that way about Louisville too. It has brought out the best in me. It has given me an incredible new identity while at the same time allowing me to rediscover the one I started with. Buttermilk is a symbolic ingredient for me. It is a happy ingredient. So I turn to it often when making desserts. People always say “ooh” when they hear that their dessert has buttermilk in it. They must have their own story about buttermilk, their own happy endings. All of the desserts in this chapter have buttermilk in them in some form or another. You can make them using regular milk instead, but you’ll miss the tart component. Also I like it when people ooh and aah over my food, don’t you?
In 2011, I had the chance to visit Korea for the first time in almost twenty years. It was an unsettling experience. I wasn’t sure how I would react to my countrymen or how they would react to me. Seoul is a beautiful city full of colors and perfumes and energy. I was warmly embraced, and it was fascinating to look into these strange people’s faces and see my own. It was a dream to walk the streets that my great-great-grandparents might have walked. I circled the same streets many times, eating my way through street carts and outdoor grills. I pointed to familiar plates and inhaled fermented aromas that brought me back to a cosmic infancy of ancestral consciousness. I ate lots of garlic and sang karaoke. On the plane back to Louisville, I sat next to a stranger who recognized me from the restaurant. We got to talking a bit, and we realized we had a couple of friends in common. He promised he’d come to see me at my restaurant. As we landed and parted ways, he said to me, “Welcome home.” It was a beautiful reminder of why I live here.
I have a lunch of a fried bologna sandwich and fries at Wagner’s Pharmacy. It is an old landmark diner next to Churchill Downs, where horse trainers and jockeys like to hang out. It’s a comfortable place and the food is decent enough. The customers end up talking to each other and the waitresses are as friendly as they are opinionated. It’s always a lively place. It has a music all its own, very different from my restaurant but no less perfect. And that is what I have learned feels the most like home to me. It is not a place that I call home, but a familiar song or a salutation, or a taste of something that makes me stop and appreciate my surroundings. Home is a place of gratitude. And good food is the best reason to say, “Thank you.” We all encompass so many identities, wear so many hats, how do we call one place home? In my kitchen, I can travel to so many places just by switching out the ingredients in my pantry. And they all feel like home to me. That’s the transformative beauty of all of our kitchens. I hope I have given you a window into mine, and that the invitation was worth it.
Ooh, and they’re playing Old Crow Medicine Show on the radio. I’m ordering cherry pie with extra whipped cream on top.
Togarashi Cheesecake with Sorghum
When I was a kid, if I was well behaved (which wasn’t often), I might get a rare treat of cheesecake from Junior’s in Brooklyn. A single slice was probably bigger than my head. Those were magical times, and I guess I’ve been searching for that emotional cheesecake connection ever since. This is my adult version of cheesecake, full of togarashi. I use it a lot in savory recipes to add spice, but here it gives the cake a sharp, spicy note that helps balance the denseness. Serve with strong green tea or chai. / Feeds 8 to 10
Crust
2 cups gingersnap cookie crumbs
2½ tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Filling
4 ounces fresh goat cheese, at room temperature
6 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
½ cup buttermilk
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
4 large eggs
Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon togarashi (see note)
About 1 tablespoon sorghum for garnish
1Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2To make the crust: Stir the cookie crumbs, sugar, and melted butter together in a medium bowl with a fork until the crumbs are evenly moistened. Press the mixture evenly onto the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan. Bake until golden brown and crispy, about 10 minutes. Cool completely. Reduce the oven temperature to 325°F.
3To make the filling: In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (or using a handheld mixer), beat together the goat cheese, cream cheese, and buttermilk until smooth and fluffy, 4 to 5 minutes. Gradually beat in the sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat in the lemon zest and juice. Beat in ½ teaspoon of the togarashi.
4Pour the filling into the springform pan. Sprinkle the top with the remaining ½ teaspoon togarashi. Wrap the pan in aluminum foil to prevent leaks and place the pan in a large roasting pan. Pour enough hot water into the roasting pan to come one-third of the way up the sides of the cake pan.
5Bake the cheesecake for 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until slightly puffed. Remove the cake pan from the water bath and allow it to cool to room temperature, then chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours. (The cheesecake can be refrigerated, tightly wrapped in plastic wrap, for up to 5 days.)
6To serve, run a thin knife around the sides of the cake pan and release the sides of the pan. Slide the cheesecake onto a serving platter. Drizzle the top with a little sorghum, slice, and serve.
If you can’t find togarashi, substitute a little cayenne pepper and a sprinkle of sesame seeds.
Goat Cheese
Goat cheese gets its distinctive tart, herbaceous flavor from the fatty acids in the goat’s milk and from the goat’s diet, which is more diverse than a cow’s. And goat cheese is more easily digested than cow’s- or sheep’s-milk cheeses. Even some lactose-intolerant people can happily eat goat cheese.
I love using goat cheese instead of cow’s-milk cheese in recipes that call for a lot of cheese, like a cheesecake, because it is lighter, more pungent, and higher in protein. I’m lucky because Greenville, Indiana, just about forty minutes north
of Louisville, is home to some of the country’s best goat cheese. Judy Schad has been making her famous Capriole surface-ripened goat cheeses for more than twenty-five years. Her Sophia is marbled with ash and has a wrinkled geotrichum rind so delicate it belongs in a whole other category of deliciousness. Her Crocodile Tear is hand-molded, dusted with just a suggestion of paprika, and ripened to a dense, creamy texture that is best enjoyed by the teaspoon. When I want an over-the-top dessert, I replace the fresh goat cheese in the Togarashi Cheesecake with Sorghum (see previous recipe) with the same amount of one of her surface-ripened cheeses. I use the rind and all, just blending it together. The result is a cheesecake so divine it’s an insult to call it a cheesecake. I call it simply Capriole for Dessert.
Chilled Buttermilk-Maple Soup with Bourbon-Soaked Cherries
Make this soup with the best buttermilk you can find. I get mine from Willow Hills Farm in Kentucky. Try a local dairy farmer, if you can. You need to use the best buttermilk because this recipe is essentially straight buttermilk with a little sweetener. The simple flavor of the buttermilk goes so well with the complex depths of the bourbon. This soup is a yin-yang play on cream and fruit that is timeless. / Feeds 6
1½ cups good-quality bourbon
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons fresh tangerine juice
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
8 ounces fresh cherries, pitted
1½ cups buttermilk (see note)
5 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1Combine the bourbon, ¼ cup of the tangerine juice, the sugar, and vanilla extract in a medium heavy saucepan, bring to a boil over high heat, and boil for 6 minutes. Turn off the heat and add the cherries. Stir gently and allow to cool to room temperature; the gentle heat will poach the cherries but not turn them to mush.