Jagerschnitzel

I love German food, but you wouldn’t know if from this blog.  I have many different cuisines represented here—lots of French and Italian, a good bit of Asian, with a smattering of others like Greek, Russian, Dutch and even Hungarian, but no German.  Well, that’s a shame, because the Germans have one of the world’s great cuisines.  Sure, it’s not considered as fancy and gourmet as French or romantic like Italian, but it’s great.

German food doesn’t get pretentious.  It doesn’t take itself too serious.  It’s simple and hearty and sort of like good home cooking.  I’ve enjoyed it over the years on a couple of trips I made to Germany, and back here at home, where we’ve got a great German restaurant that’s been around for almost fifty years.  Other than bratwurst on the grill now and then, I don’t cook it a great deal, which is probably the reason for the dearth of German recipes on this blog.  Well, I decided to change that, and do it with one of my favorite German dishes:  Jagerschnitzel.

Jagerschnitzel is a variation of the classic dish wienerschnitzel, which is a veal or pork cutlet that is breaded and fried.  Some say that famed Texan dish Chicken Fried Steak was actually created by German immigrants who substituted beef (plentiful in Texas) for the pork and the rest was history.  Well, jagerschnitzel is basically wienerschnitzel taken a step further, with the addition of a wonderful mushroom sauce.  Jager means ‘hunter’ in German, so perhaps this is the way the hunters ate their wienerschnitzel back in the day.   

Whatever the case jagerschnitzel is delicious and I’ve been making it a lot over the last year, so I’m pretty happy with this version, which is perhaps not 100% trad but it makes up for it in flavor.  Give it a try some time.  Ser Gut!

Ingredients

4 pork loin cutlets
2 eggs
1 tablespoon German mustard
1/4 cut flour
1/4 cup panko bread crumbs
4 strips bacon
1 medium onion
8 oz small mushrooms
1 clove of garlic
1/3 cup white wine
8 oz consommé
1/2 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons butter
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 cup peanut oil

Directions

Using the flat (non spikey) side of a meat hammer...

pound pork cutlets to 1/4 inch thickness.

Note how much bigger (and flatter) the pounded cutlet is than the unbeaten one.  This will help it fry up nice and quick and get cooked through before the breading burns.

Get some good German mustard:

Whisk eggs and mustard together, then make a dredging station with flour, egg/mustard mixture and bread crumbs in three separate pans.

Dredge cutlets in flour,

then egg mixture,

then bread crumbs.

Place cutlets on tray and refrigerate for an hour or so.

Fry bacon in skillet

Remove bacon and reserve

Chop onion and slice mushrooms.

.

Saute the onion and mushrooms in the bacon grease until golden and soft.

Mince garlic and add to skillet

Add white wine and simmer until reduced by half

Add consommé and simmer for a minute

Add heavy cream and cook a few minutes more

add butter and stir until melted.

season with salt and pepper to taste.  Keep sauce warm.

In a clean skillet, heat oil to 400F.  Fry cutlets in oil, one or two at at a time...

until golden brown and crisp.  They will cook fast, so just a couple minutes a side.  

Serve sauce over the cutlets.

Here we've served the jagerschnitzel cutlet with some red cabbage and sauerkraut, and of course a hearty beer as well.  You just have to have a beer with German cuisine.

Until next time,


Prost!


Chris

Moroccan Kefta Kebabs

One of the great things about being a foodie in this day and age is the wealth of great cuisines available to be had.  Time was, one had to travel the world to sample anything more exotic than Italian or French, but now, distant cuisine comes to you, usually in the form of a restaurant, often managed by expats from those distant lands.

Here in my neck of the woods, we have a couple of Lebanese Restaurants, an Ethiopian one, and quite a smattering of others.  What we don't have at the moment is a Moroccan one, and that's too bad, because I've sampled this cuisine other places (though, unfortunately, not Morocco itself) and I quite enjoy it.  It is spicy, savory and just a bit exotic.

I've always been planning to feature some Moroccan food here on the blog, particularly since we received a tagine, or Moroccan cooking pot, as a wedding gift years ago.  I've even photographed a few recipes in that pot, but for whatever reason those photos never came out good enough to blog, alas.  But the food was good.  Moroccan recipes often feature some unique, interesting ingredients. Preserved lemons are big in their cuisine, as is Harissa, a spicy, piquant pepper sauce that is all the rage in Morocco, and it's popularity is spreading rapidly.  

I received some Harissa as a Christmas gift a year or so ago, and I've been fascinated with it ever since.  I've picked up several more brands and tried them.  They run the spectrum on heat and flavor, but all were good, and Harissa could be well on its way to becoming the 'new' sriracha.

Anyhoo, this recipe features harissa prominently, so give it a try if you get a chance.

Ingredients

1 lb Ground Beef
1 Medium Onion, Minced
1/4 Cup Fresh Cilantro, Chopped
1 Tablespoon Harissa Sauce
1 Tablespoon Smoked Paparika
1 Teaspoon Cumin
1 Teaspoon Granulated Garlic
1 Egg
1/3 Cup Panko Breadcrumbs
1/2 Teaspoon Harissa Powder (optional)

Directions

Preheat Oven to 400F.  Mince Onion

and Cilantro

Mix with Harissa, Smoked Paprika, Cumin, Garlic and Egg

Add Breadcrumbs

Add Ground Beef and mix until thoroughly blended

Grab about a hand full of the meat mixture

Shape into kebabs of about three ounces each.

Usually you would from these onto a stick like a true kebab, then grill them over an open fire.  I find that 1) the ground beef kebabs don't tend to stay on the stick very well and 2) they will break apart if you try to grill them this way.  Sure, grilled over a charcoal fire will give you better flavor, so go that route if you want, but I usually fix these in the oven for simplicity's sake, and they come out great.

Place on tray and roast in 450F oven for 15-20 minutes until cooked through.

Serve right away.  Here we've served some with rice and harissa-roasted carrots.

Until next time,


Chris

Curry Pork Empanadas

Living in Texas, I love me some Mexican food, or Tex-Mex, as we call what traditional Mexican cuisine has morphed into here in the Lone Star State.  Things like this happen when a cuisine gets exported from its homeland to another place.  Chinese American cuisine is quite different from what is served in China; Same deal with Italian American.  Pretty much everywhere, local chefs put their creative stamp on whatever cuisine comes their way.

This tasty little dish is sort of like that--a fusion, a hybrid, something that might have occurred if Mexican cuisine had made it to the Far East.  We've taken a traditional Mexican dish, the Empanada, a little baked meat pie, and exoticized it with the addition of some South Asian ingredients like curry powder and soy sauce.  The result, well--taste it for yourself.  It's simple to make and ready in a flash. Maybe we'll call it Thai-Mex.  Better yet, let's just call it delicious.


Dough Ingredients

16 oz Cream Cheese
8 oz Butter
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
3 Cups All Purpose Flour


Filling Ingredients

1/2 Pound Ground Pork
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
1 Onion
1 Clove Garlic
1 Teaspoon Curry Powder
1 Teaspoon Cumin
1/2 Teaspoon Cardamom
2 Tablespoons Marsala Wine
1/2 Teaspoon Soy Sauce
1 Teaspoon Sugar
1 Teaspoon Cornstarch
1 Egg

For the dough:

Mix the room temperature cream cheese, room temperature butter, salt and flour until dough forms. Refrigerate for one hour.

Brown the ground pork.

Reserve.

Dice your onion

Add the olive oil to the skillet and then the diced onion.  Cook onions and, a few minutes later, add the minced garlic.

 Add curry powder

and the cardamom.

Stir and cook for a minute or two.  Return meat to pan.

And stir this up until everything is well mixed.  Add the Marsala wine

soy sauce

cumin

and sugar.  Mix cornstarch with an ounce of water and stir it in to thicken the mixture.  Chill the mixture in a bowl in the fridge for 15 minutes or so.

Now for the dough.  Roll it out to a thin layer on a cutting board, somewhere between an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick.

and use a three inch biscuit cutter to cut rounds.

Place the rounds on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet.  Spoon a tablespoon of the meat mixture into the center of the dough rounds.

Brush the edges of the rounds with egg wash

and fold over to seal and form a pouch.  Use the tines of a fork to press down the edges of the empanadas.

Spread them evenly on a baking sheet

and brush them with the rest of the egg wash.

Bake in a 375F oven for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

They will be flaky and delicious.  The crust, will all that cream cheese, is light and tangy in flavor.

The filling, spicy and exotic.

Serve em' up hot and they'll be gone before you know it.


Until next time,


¡Adios Amigos!


Chris