My fish is bland. Anyone found an especially good tartar sauce brand? Or maybe a good recipe? (For tartar sauce, not fish)
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Mayo, relish, your preferred mustard, some celery seed / celery salt, maybe some ground pepper if you like it. Proportions can flex based on your tastes!
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Interesting that a company who could easily afford the development cost would go for crowdfunding. Really seems to go against the spirit of the thing to use it as a marketing and market research platform like this.
Especially since the 500,000 yen probably don’t even cover the running costs for their R&D lab for a day…
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My favorite is (depending on how much you need) about a cup of Kewpie mayonnaise, a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, a heaping tablespoon of dill relish, and a teaspoon of Old Bay. Mix thoroughly. That should do it.
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It doesn’t neccisarily seem to be what’s going on here. But I have seen established companies run crowd funding as a sort of pre-sale run when leadership isn’t on board with an idea employees want to push. That’s how Anova got into sous vide circulators, they were already a well established lab equipment company whose circulators were popular in commercial kitchens.
Apparently the main company did not see a market for home sous vide, the employees stumping for the idea set up a Kickstarter. The idea was with enough units pre-sold the company would allow them to develop the products fully. Now they have an entire culinary division, and it looks like they’re still running a pre-order model (though not through Kickstarter). Seem to be launching a home counter top combi-oven at the moment.
Though I think Electrolux ended up buying them a while back.
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Kewpie mayonnaise for the win!
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You can just cut up a pickle and add a little pickle juice, if you don’t have relish on hand. Personally, I never put mustard in my tartar sauce, back in the day.
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I don’t know about good because I’ve never tried it but it’s from a generally solid recipe book:
Mix 4 tablespoons of chopped capers with 6 chopped cocktail gherkins, 2 tablespoons of chopped parsley and 2 tablespoons of double cream. Blend into 1/2 pint (285ml) mayonnaise.
I’m not sure whether they mean blend as in using a blender or just mix together thoroughly.
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Dill? Capers? Gherkin? Extra lemon?
I see above!
I just add my chopped capers, gherkins, dill, and lemon to shop bought mayo. Homemade mayo is something I only do when I’m making coleslaw for some reason.
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Fantastic suggestions all! My shorthand recipe is a place to start, and I assume that people have those ingredients on hand. For the record, capers and dill are two of my favorite add-ins, and lemon doesn’t hurt anything either.
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Capers are just a staple for me. I use it every week. Unfortunately my dill plant, like all Mediterranean herbs, is in hibernation for the winter.
My absolute favourite pasta sauce is:
Heat up good olive oil in a pan. Smash a bunch of garlic cloves in it and poach them gently to infuse the oil.
Chop up a load of deseeded tomatoes. A variety if you can. As always in sauces a touch over ripe doesn’t hurt.
Take out the garlic and whack up the heat.
Chuck in the tomatoes. Chop up a bunch of capers and throw in with the tomatoes. Reduce to a mush. Shortly before serving chop up a handful of mint into the sauce. Add chilli. Italians (this is Sicilian iirc) use dried chilli flakes. I think fresh green is better (more in keeping Ayurvedically, as it matches the cold mint) but I wouldn’t dare argue that with an Italian. Well certainly not a Sicilian anyway.
Coat your drained pasta with this gooey, oily, salty, spicy, intense mess.
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Put it into my veins. Amazing recipe.
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Looks crappy tasted great. 1 hour in freezer, oven roast them on parchment paper or aluminum foil at 450 degrees. After an hour or so, once caramelized sugar is seeping from the potatoes and trapped steam has separated the skin from the flesh, they’re finished!
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Like a lot of Italian recipes it’s simple but has precise techniques (like garlic infused oil without the garlic so you can cook hot enough without burning). Lots of sauces have the skins removed from tomatoes as well as seeds, this doesn’t and I like the tiny bits of skin, particularly if they are different colours, adding texture and colour to the food.
That’s why I’m a bit diffident about offering my variation to it.
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Why do you put them in the freezer first?
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Sweet potatoes have a compound in them that converts their starch to sugar during cooking. It stops working above a certain temperature. So if you want the sweetest, least starchy sweet potato you need to cook them slow at a moderate temperature to hold them in the temp range that destroys starch.
Unfortunately sweet potatoes also contain a lot of moisture that needs to be cooked off, and that sweetness tastes best when the sugars get a chance to caramelize.
So there’s a couple tricks. Start on a low temp 350 or below, and finish them high (above 400).
Or cook at high temp, but start them in a cold oven or with chilled potatoes.
You can also just cook them at 375 the whole time, it just ends up taking longer and you may not be fully nerding your sweet potatoes.
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Julia served with OSS (progenitor of the CIA) during WWII. Nobody messed with her!
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It won’t be sicilians that put in the extra pepperoncino, but the calabrese and abruzzese…
They do prefer dried peppers, usually added whole in the oil before the garlic and/or onions. Oregano, olives and capers just seem to go well together in those sauces, we often do a bit of white fish in a sauce like that, just add loads of fresh flat leaf parsley at the end.
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This would be cooked at too high a temperature for the chilli flakes to be added in the beginning, they would burn.
But yeah, olives, capers, oregano, are great for cooking fish in tomato with. I’m hungry now. I have a vat of stock on the hob (I’ll simmer it overnight). Need a snack.
ETA
We have neither olives nor capers here (oregano does great in my raised bed where the sage does amazingly) but apparently nasturtium green seed make good capers. Unfortunately whenever I let them go to seed the garden gets overrun with aphids so I’ve never been able to do it.
The flowers are great (I love them on salads and garnishing spicy pumpkin soup at Halloween) and run from may to November. Leaves were a staple food in the old days apparently. Before cabbages arrived.
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The recipe was based on a childhood memory of Junzi lead chef Lucas Sin’s taste of the sweet potatoes frozen in the China winter.
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