dried | Sybaritica

My wife often buys those packages of factory-made jerkies that are almost ubiquitous in super-markets and convenience stores now. I’ll eat the odd piece occasionally but, to be honest, I am not terribly keen on any of them. I find they have very artificial, chemical tastes to them and the texture is very often very poor.

Years ago, before I was married, I used to buy some terrific beef jerky at our local farmers market. It was very simply seasoned and the thick, foot-long strips were cut lengthwise along the grain of the meat making them robust and chewy (unlike the thin, friable industrial varieties commonly available these days). It took a good 30 minutes or so to gnaw away at one of those suckers and that’s what made them so darn satisfying. Today, I am going to make some good thick pieces in the same manner, keeping the ingredients light and simple so as to leave the original taste of the meat and not completely mask it with hydrolyzed-soy and high-fructose corn-syrup…  Read more

Preserving pork and other meats is quite common in cuisines around the world but this particular Chinese product, essentially a fattier cousin of the more familiar of jerky, is a favored treat in my kitchen.  The appeal for me is that pork belly, when cured with salt and sugar, takes on a wonderfully fragrant sweetness that mimics the flavor of dried-apples. It is a fatty treat, to be sure… a fact which might make some cautious about eating it… but, in fact, since the cured rashers are typically used in small amounts to flavor other ingredients, you still may wish to give it try.

By the way, curing pork belly in this fashion is not that difficult in the home kitchen and, sometime in the coming months, I promise to do a post on the topic. For now however, I just want to feature one of the many commercial products available in most Asian groceries… Read more

Drying various foodstuffs very much tends to concentrate their flavors and this is just as true with scallops as it is with shrimp, mushrooms, tomatoes, or anything else you can care to name. Dried scallops, even more so than the fresh, are quite extensively used in Chinese cookery, particularly in Hong Kong and the southern coastal provinces, but I don’t see them much used in other cuisines, which is a bit of a shame, really, as they are a very useful ingredient. Certainly, anyone with an interest in cooking Chinese dishes will want to have a stock of these on hand but they are also well worth experimenting with in other culinary preparations as they pack a unique flavor punch that is truly exquisite… Read more

If you have never yet used dried shrimp then you really think about adding this very versatile foodstuff to your pantry. Like mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, or raisins, the drying process concentrates the flavors of the original product and shrimp, in particular, pack an umami-punch that makes the dried variety very useful indeed… Read more