Food from other hot places has a certain appeal at this time of year. Palates are jaded and need a touch of the exotic to awaken them.
You do not want to bring out your best wines during the dog days of August, so this is the time to experiment with flavours and spices you might otherwise be reluctant to try on your guests.
Food from Asia will fill the bill, whether Thai or Indian, but think too about another hot spot – Texas.
I loved the food we ate in Texas, some of it with the sophistication of Mexico City cooking, some of it good, old-fashioned barbecue and, much of it a joyful fusion of the two.
One day I watched local chef Matt Martinez as he prepared shrimp corn cakes. “First make a loose cornmeal batter, as if you were making cornbread, using buttermilk and baking soda,” he said.
He then stirred in chopped raw shrimp and vegetables, together with pepper, broccoli, cauliflower and a little wild boar sausage. Dropped by the ladleful onto a hot griddle, it becomes deep golden brown and puffy and, in no time, it’s ready for turning over. These he served on a pool of golden cheese sauce and topped with a couple of huge griddled shrimp. Today I cook corn cakes using prawns and chorizo.
Texan chefs claim the black iron skillet to be the best of all cooking utensils, which cooks like a Spanish plancha. And indeed, most of the food I watched Martinez cook went onto the griddle: quail halves for a salad, tenderloin that had first been lightly smoked and a couple of racks of lamb, as well as steak.
Everything gets seasoned with a Texas sprinkle – salt, pepper, granulated dried garlic and cracker meal, which help keep the juices in as the food hits the hot griddle.
And everything gets a dose of finishing sauce, or “black magic”, as Martinez calls it, a judicious mixture of soy sauce, red wine and wine vinegar, which disappears in a wisp of steam when it touches the griddle, but fragrant steam, which imbues the meat not with the flavour of soy or red wine, but an enriched version of its own flavour.
You can use other ingredients for the finishing sauce, including vermouth, white wine, port, etc, as long as it is something that will evaporate quicker than water. This is a very good technique, worth trying in your own kitchen. And it is worth acquiring an iron skillet or two. You can often find them at car boot sales and they can be cleaned, scoured and seasoned to as good as new.
Before I went to Texas, some years ago, I had not appreciated just how serious a business the barbecue is.
While there are as many barbecue sauces as there are cooks, all share common flavours of tomatoes, sugar and vinegar, and smoke from the barbecue pit, for barbecue has little to do with grilling and everything to do with smoking and long, slow cooking.
It’s not what you put on it that matters, it’s what you leave off
It is often not even about the sauces, but about good meat, simply seasoned with salt and pepper.
Everywhere we went in our search for the perfect barbecue, we heard: “It’s not what you put on it that matters, it’s what you leave off.” As to the all-important question of whether I could replicate this food at home, there was some doubt.
The problem is the indefinable something added by the pits themselves. It is a little like the notion of ‘wok flavour’ in Chinese cooking.
A well-seasoned barbecue pit, like a well-seasoned wok, adds to the food on your plate a little of what has gone before.
But I was still determined to try. And first I ordered a piece of unrolled beef brisket, with plenty of fat on the top and bottom and well-marbled in the middle.
Owners of kettle barbecues will easily be able to adapt my recipe and method to cooking outdoors. I used my heavy, black, iron, electric slow cooker, not unlike a skillet, so that I would not need to use oven space.
Otherwise, I would have used my glass-lidded casserole, which is large enough to take a wire rack to keep the food above the smoking medium. The end result was a juicy and tasty piece of meat, with a subtle, rather than pronounced, smoke flavour. A 40-year-old barbecue pit would still have to be the cooking method of choice, however, for real authenticity.
In Texas, the juicy slices of barbecued meat are generally consumed at long picnic tables, on each of which are loaves of sliced white bread, plastic bottles of ketchup, hot sauce and pickled jalapeños. Bowls of raw onions, as well as barbecue beans, just slow-cooked baked beans, are also served alongside the tender, smoke-kissed meat, as well as coleslaw. Beer is the drink of choice, but a margarita to start off with will set the scene, all very simple and rustic, for casual summer entertaining. Perhaps lose the sliced white loaves? But first, some prawn griddle cakes to get you in the mood for my feast of southern flavours.
Prawn and chorizo corn cakes
Makes 10 to 12
200g cornmeal – the same as polenta
100g self-raising flour
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
2 tbsp dripping – lard or chicken fat, etc.
About 250ml buttermilk, or plain yoghurt and water mixed
1 tbsp golden caster sugar
½ tsp Gozo salt
20 prawns, peeled
100g chorizo, diced
6 spring onions, cleaned, trimmed and thinly sliced
1 green chilli, seeded and finely chopped
Mix the dry ingredients, then beat in the egg, dripping (or you can use olive oil if dripping sounds too nasty) and buttermilk, followed by the sugar and salt.
Cut each prawn into two or three and add to the batter, together with the chorizo, onion and chilli.
Heat a well-seasoned, cast iron or other solid, non-stick pan and when it is hot, drop on ladles of the batter, ensuring first that the prawns are well distributed.
When the top of the corn cake looks dry and holes begin to appear, you can flip it over and cook the other side. Serve as they are, or with a simple cheese sauce or fresh salsa.
Barbecued brisket
Serves 6 to 8
Line a lidded, oven-proof wok, electric frying pan or shallow casserole with three thicknesses of foil. Grease a rack that will fit the pan.
1.5kg top-quality brisket
2 tsp Gozo salt
2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Handful each of rice, sugar and tea leaves
Rub the meat all over with the salt and pepper and leave for half an hour. Put the rice, sugar and tea in the lined wok or pan.
This is what is going to create the smoke, so it does not matter what type of rice or sugar. Choose a tea with a good smell, such as Lapsang Souchong or Earl Grey.
Put the container on a medium-high heat, cover with a lid and leave it on the heat until the ingredients inside begin to smoke. A glass lid is invaluable here, as you can see what is happening and do not need to uncover, which dissipates the smoke.
Once you have plenty of smoke, carefully remove the lid away from you, quickly put the meat on the rack and clamp the lid on tightly, sealing it with damp kitchen paper and foil, if necessary.
Smoke the meat for about an hour on a high heat, then, if using an electric frying pan, turn down to moderate-low heat and cook/smoke for about six hours.
From time to time, let some of the smoke escape through the vented lid. If using an ovenproof casserole, put it in the bottom half of a pre-heated oven at 150˚C, and cook for about six hours. Just put it in the oven before breakfast, and it will be ready for a late lunch.
Again, remove the lid carefully, away from you. I cannot emphasise too much how unpleasant it is to get a throat full of smoke.
Transfer the meat to a carving board, slice and serve it with its accompaniments. As well as coleslaw and barbecue beans, bread, sauce and pickled chillies, a dish of potato salad is also a very good addition.
Use the same method for duck, pork spare ribs, pork shoulder and shoulder of lamb – any meat which has enough fat to baste itself during the lengthy cooking.