| CATEGORY |
CUISINE |
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YIELD |
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Chinese |
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1 |
Servings |
INGREDIENTS
INSTRUCTIONS
Universally popular food flavor comes from an ancient form of food
preservation smoking. Different regions of the world obviously had
different aromatic woods. For example, the famous hickory, mesquite or
alder. Other areas lacked wood all together and used herbs or even tea
for their smokes. I have adapted a Chinese tea smoke idea that imparts
a very light, delicate. sweetish quality to poultry or fish. The
technique is extremely useful for Minmax cooks because the smoked
flavors are unusual enough to absorb the diner's interest so that the
dishes very low content isn't immediately obvious. Then I surround the
smoked meal with bright, fresh crisp foods and a yogurt spread; the
rich juiciness of the chicken or fish seems to actually tingle with
added flavor. Be careful what type of cookware you use to smoke. It
must be either cast aluminum or cast iron. Please avoid bonded alloys
--the dry heat can melt them and you ,wind up with a giant hole in the
pot and an ingot of metal forever welded to you stove top! With a
little ingenuity and a deep heavy Dutch oven, you can balance a second
expanding steamer platform on the first and double the amount of
chicken or fish for large parties. USES: So far I have used this
technique on fish and chicken. I have no doubt that it could work well
with veal, pork or even lamb. When once you 've been bitten by the
smoke bug and used different kinds of woods as well as tea leaves
mixed with rosemary or thyme - literally the sky is the limit. You
may want to set aside a large Dutch oven exclusively for smoke foods.
One last point, I suggest you wrap up the foil used in smoking and put
it out in the trash. It does have a way of leaving residual aromas.
Posted to Digest eat-lf.v097.n115 by [email protected] (Marcia A Fasy)
on Apr 30, 1997
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