Welcome to the reporting and discussion thread for SERIOUS EATS QUARTER.
We’ll be cooking from any recipe to be found on the Serious Eats site.
To report on a recipe:
a) If you are the first to report on a recipe, please use the blue Reply button at the bottom of the thread. If someone has already reported on the recipe, please reply to their post (this keeps reports linked and makes it easy to keep track of things).
b) Type the recipe title in ALL CAPS, and include the link to the recipe.
c) Tell us about your experience with the recipe, including any tweaks or changes and how it worked out.
Links to all past (and ongoing) COTM thread are available here.
The second thread for this quarter is JOSE ANDRES.
KANSAS CITY STEAK SOUP Kansas City Steak Soup Recipe
This is terrific! I don’t think I’ve ever made (or ordered) steak soup because, well, steak doesn’t go into soup it’s Steak, sort of a standalone food to me. But we had some left from last night’s steak dinner and I’m a convert for sure. Absolutely delicious. I followed the step-by-step instructions (and ingredients) properly, didn’t just stir everything together at once. With some soup recipes I have you can do that, but the extra time and care I took with this one made a difference I’m pretty sure.
I use almost exactly the same ingredients — no canola, but avocado oil instead, and minus the W sauce (but might add it next time) & just whisk in the salad bowl vs. using an immersion blender.
Serious Eats hasn’t really had new content after the acquisition by DotDash in 2020 (with the goal of monetizing traffic via links to purchase ingredients from Walmart and others).
Comments related to articles were removed, which affected any recipes that were linked to articles, because the comments that were posted to the article rather than the recipe itself were lost.
Still, there are a lot of old resources there that remain useful while they last.
I like their extensive sous vide timing guide, which illustrates time/temperature combinations for different ingredients.
Went with a Serious Eats sheet pan dinner tonight.
Musakhan (Palestinian Chicken and Potatoes) was dinner tonight. I halved the recipe (probably should have quartered the spice mix), using two BISO chicken thighs; potatoes were sliced just a smidge too thinly; and I added green beans instead of onions. A bit too sumac-y overall (and I love ground sumac!) but the chicken was incredibly moist.
I sounds as if you halved the amount of potatoes and beans (for onions)? Given that you quartered the number of chicken pieces, I can see how using a full half quantity of the spice mixture might be a bit too much.
I read the recipe wrong. It called for "4 chicken legs, split into drumsticks and thighs (about 3 pounds), which to me would have been 6 servings (2 chicken legs each, or a individual chicken thigh).
So I was WAY off. Which I didn’t realize until AFTER I had seasoned the chicken, potatoes, and beans.
SE had a recipe for besan chilla / gram flour crepes (or pancakes, depending on thickness) featured on the landing page, so I decided to try it.
Doubled the powdered spices (including cumin and coriander powders, one of which is pictured but neither is listed, plus a pinch of asafoetida – because: besan) and 50% more water to get to the right batter consistency, and skipped tomatoes (because I don’t like them in these) and ginger (because the pictured ginger strips would be unpleasant to bite into). Finely minced onion and cilantro.
Eaten with spinach raita / borani and zhoug standing in for green chutney.
I should have thinned the batter a bit more – these crepes are drier when they are thicker, and tender when they’re thin.
Still, quick and tasty (and healthy). Half a cup of besan made two large pancakes.
One of my favorite turkish dishes to eat. Ground lamb near me is too fatty, so I usually substitute ground turkey, but I had ground beef to use up, so that’s what I used along with some lamb fat saved from various recent lamb dishes. Gotta say I still prefer restaurant chicken adana kebabs over beef, if lamb isn’t an option.
This recipe was missing the grated onion and either red pepper or red pepper paste that I’ve come across in most previous recipes I’ve used, so I added some onion for moisture and flavor. Aside from that, cumin, sumac, and urfa pepper flakes as called for. I also added a bit of liquid smoke as I was going to bake these and not grill them.
The outcome was fine, but not great. Past versions I’ve tried have been much more flavorful. A bigger issue was that the amount of sumac was just way too overwhelming – and I love sumac. But there was no reason for there to be so much added to the meat, when it works just as well sprinkled to taste.
I served the kebabs with stovetop-charred flour tortilla, yogurt, and calabrian chilli sauce, plus what I thought might be an incongruous Vinegret Salad that was actually a surprisingly great foil.
