From Kimchi to Cured Magret, 7 cooking projects with delicious dividends for spring
Quick Bok Choy and Radish Kimchi, ready to go into jars
By Leslie Brenner
Paradoxically, the best way to instant gratification is planning ahead — at least when it comes to cooking.
Stock your fridge with home-made goodies like tangy pickles or cured fish or meats, and you’ve got a world of sophisticated nibbles at your fingertips. Set a quart of salted yogurt to drip through cheesecloth overnight, and you’ve got luxuriously rich labneh — which you can drizzle with honey for a wonderful breakfast, or slick with olive oil and decorate with herbs and raw vegetables for a superb lunch. Rub a salt cure on a duck breast and a couple weeks later you’ve got a magnificent example of charcuterie.
The idea is to cook when you’re in the mood (maybe during the weekend), and then reap the rewards when you’re not. Most of these project involve more time than work — the secret ingredient in fermented, pickled and cured foods is time. And the dividends? Delicious ingredients that can add instant intense flavor to you dishes and your life.
Here are some favorite ways to make that happen.
Make quick pickles
In our recent review of The Arabesque Table by Reem Kassis, we included a recipe for Turmeric and Fenugreek Quick Pickles. You can also make quick pickles with an Italian-American or Mexican vibe.
Zanahorias Escabeches — the Mexican quick-pickled carrots that I call Taquería Carrots (because in my hometown, they’re ubiquitous in taquerías) — are a treat with tacos or without.
We love Alex Guarnaschelli’s Giardiniera, too — that’s Italian-American pickled veg, like cauliflower, celery, carrots and olives.
Make kimchi
If you’re a kimchi lover who has never made kimchi, you must! You can start with the Quick Bok Choy and Radish Kimchi shown in the photo at the top of this story (from K Food by Da-Hae and Gareth West) or a slightly more involved but still not-scary mostly napa cabbage Easy Kimchi from Robin Ha’s Cook Korean.
Make fresh cheese
Ever bought paneer from a supermarket to use in saag paneer or other Indian dishes? The commercial paneers we’ve found have been pretty plasticky. It’s actually really fun to make your own, and it’s so much more delicious, with a beautiful, soft texture. We learned how from Maneet Chauhan’s terrific book, Chaat.
Rub something on fish or poultry to cure it
Ever hear chefs talking about shio koji, as in koji-rubbed this or that?
Shio Koji is a fermented salt you can make from dried rice koji (which is a kind of inoculated rice).
Rubbed into just about any kind of meat, poultry or fish a day or two before you cook the protein, it deepens flavor and adds umami.
We love to keep a big jar of shio koji in the fridge to rub on salmon fillets, as shown above. Coat them on a Sunday, and Monday or Tuesday you can have a delicious salmon dinner in no time flat. Instructions for making the Shio Koji come at the end of our recipe for Koji Marinated Salmon from Sonoko Sakai’s wonderful Japanese Home Cooking.
Cover a duck breast in salt, let it sit 12 hours, wipe it off, season it with freshly ground black pepper, wrap it in a towel and let sit in the fridge two or three weeks. Voilà! Cured magret — an amazing treat to enjoy with an apéritif or sliced onto a salad. It’s from Camille Fourmont’s charming La Buvette cookbook, co-authored by Cooks Without Borders’ friend Kate Leahy.
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