Literal SPAM Mail
Answering your questions on vegan cheese, potted meat, and the Bay Leaf Conspiracy
AND WE’RE BACK. In the holiday spirit of Doing the Least, I’m answering reader questions this week submitted via Twitter.
Our first comes from Dylan, a cherished Haterade Supporter:
HELLO TEAM SPAM, I’M HERE AND HAPPY TO DIRECT YOUR CALL.
In the Before Times, I was not much of a SPAM beast. Sure, I’d make spam fried rice every now and then, and I’d almost always bring a can with me when hiking/camping—spamping. But for the most part, SPAM cans languished in the back of my cupboard, earmarked for a future “grocery emergency.”
2020 was one big grocery emergency, so SPAM and I have become much better acquainted.
IMO, the central challenge in cooking with SPAM is that it’s so salty, it has a hard time fitting in (whomst among us cannot relate?) I love salt as much as the next quarter horse—as soon as I’m vaccinated, I will come over to your house and lick your Himalayan salt lamp—but SPAM is near the top of my “comfortable tolerance” range.
The best recipes spin that to an advantage—say, in soups where the SPAM can infuse the broth, or snacks and salads that temper the saltiness with acid or sugar.
Here’s my top three picks for SPAMuary. We’re all doing SPAM cleanses, right?
Buddae jiggae (AKA “Korean army base stew”). Today, this soup reads like id-indulgence for kids, stoners, and kid-stoners—sliced SPAM, cut-up hot dogs, tofu, kimchi, and ramen noodles. But the soup was born out of scarcity in the aftermath of the Korean War, when many Koreans had to subsist on packaged food abandoned at U.S. army bases. The version I make is pretty close to this, though Grace Moon also has a version up at Food 52 with some required reading on the soup’s origins.
Recipes for buddae jiggae vary pretty widely—some call for canned baked beans, others top the bowl with a slice of American cheese—and I think you should make whatever version speaks to you using the noodles/mushrooms/potted meats you have on hand. Yes, the result may be a Mr.-Potato-Head imitation—like those dollar-store colognes that say, “If you like CK One, you’ll love Rat Musk”—but fetishizing “authenticity” in a dish hatched from making-do feels faithless in a different way.
Anyway, here’s a picture of a SPAM noodle soup in the tradition of buddae jiggae I made in early December when I was out of ramen and uninterested in making a special trip to the store. It might not be pretty, but it was delicious.
SPAM salad. Really, this is just a classic Midwestern ham salad—chicken salad’s saltier, sloppier, more interesting cousin. Because I live a luxe lifestyle, I thin-slice the SPAM and dry-fry half of the slices until they get a nice brown crust—sprust—then I throw the fried and unfried slices together into a food processor and pulse it until it comes together into a craggy, toothy SPAM paste (these are appetizing words). If you don’t have a food processor, you can just dice the SPAM and mash it with a fork until you get the consistency you like. What you’re going for here is a contiguous mixture that won’t constantly dribble li’l spamlets out of your sandwich whenever you pick it up.
The rest is easy: mince some celery and scallions and mix ‘em up with mayo, mustard, relish, celery seed, and a few shakes of Louisiana style hot sauce (I like Crystal). For luxury purposes, I like to add sweet pickle relish as well as some chopped dill cornichon, which is French for “fancy baby.”
SPAM musubi. SPAM musubi is the undisputed queen of convenience store snacks in Hawaii, and I don’t know why Quik Trips in the lower 48 have been so slow to coopt it. At its core, the musubi is:
a thick slice of grilled SPAM
sauce-glued to a firm block of sushi rice
wrapped in seaweed.
I like a little daub of Kewpie mayo between the SPAM and the rice, but that’s optional.
The result is a whole meal in snack form, and cute as hell to boot. My New Year’s resolution is to be more like the musubi.
There’s a fine recipe here, but you don’t need to rush out and buy a musubi press if you don’t have one: you can form the musubi in the heckin’ SPAM can and it will look almost as good.
Respect to any vegetarian readers who’ve made it this far. The second question’s for you:
I have good news and bad news, M. The bad news: no. The good news: we’re getting close.
The vegetable rennet isn’t the problem. Most commercial cheese is actually made with vegetable rennet these days. You’ll still see mammalian (calf-stomach) rennet used in some fusty European cheeses, but it’s more the exception than the rule.
The trouble is the oat milk. I’m going to try not to get too wonky with this answer, which means I’m going to oversimplify things in a way that will horrify cheesemakers and microbiologists alike. But it helps, I think, to start by thinking of cheesemaking as an (again, oversimplified) equation.
Rennet + milk = cheese curds
This is M’s tweet, essentially. But we can get a bit more specific by subbing in the particular enzyme/protein in rennet and milk, respectively, that are doing most of the work to form the curds:
Chymosin + casein = cheese curds
Chymosin is present in both vegetable and calf rennet. But casein is a dairy milk protein, and not present in ~alternative milks.~
So that’s the bad news. The good news is that food scientists are making a lot of progress in essentially “brewing” non-animal-derived casein from yeast and other microoganisms in a process called precision fermentation. A food scientist I talked to says we’re probably a few years from a high-quality consumer product, but there’s a lot of money being thrown at the problem right now. One company, Change Foods, has promised a bio-identical vegan mozarella and cheddar by 2022.
No one asked me, but I’m 100% on board with all of this. I’ve never understood the antipathy some people have toward vegetarian and vegan eaters. The way I see it, my vegan friends are subsidizing my hedonistic ass. If I can have real, meltable, indistinguishably vegan cheese that contributes less to climate change and animal cruelty: give me those GMOs, baby.
Moving on:
This tweet pair is catnip for me. I’m not a “mixologist,” but I am a lazy person who likes to get drunk in my house when it’s cold. And my favorite recipes for home cocktails are those that don’t assume your average bear has an “allspice dram” or homemade orgeat just floating ‘round the manse.
Love and light to those of you doing Dry January, but that is not my journey.
I’m going to recommend a couple specific drinks, but first, some general advice. For cozy winter times, I make three basic swaps to my home bar setup:
1. Honey syrup or brown sugar syrup instead of traditional simple syrup.
I submit honey syrup as the queen of low-effort savoir vivre, because you don’t need to heat it and can make it on the fly. I follow Dave Arnold’s method from Liquid Intelligence and whisk 32 grams honey into 50 grams room-temp water to yield about 3 ounces of finished syrup. If you don’t have a food/weed scale, you can eyeball the amounts, adding a little bit of water to the honey at a time until you’re happy with the consistency. But you’ll want a little more water than honey to get a finished syrup you can use interchangeably with traditional simple syrup (honey is sweeter than white table sugar).
Brown sugar syrup is even easier to make, though you’ll have to plan ahead so the syrup has time to cool. It’s just a 1:1 ratio of water to brown sugar, whisked in a saucepan over heat until the sugar dissolves. I like to make a decent-sized batch and keep it in a squeeze bottle in my fridge, where it will stay fresh for about a month.
2. Brown liquor instead of clear
I probably don’t need to explain this one. I’m usually a gin rat, but winter is when I crave bourbon and rye whiskey and spiced rum and anything else one might drink in an embroidered silk smoking jacket. Relatedly, hit me up if you know where I can purchase an embroidered silk smoking jacket.
A caveat: foamy gin drinks feel super cozy to me, so I keep a Bee’s Knees and a gin fizz in the winter rotation. You can make both with your honey syrup. For Peak Foam in your fizz, dry shake the egg white with the citrus juice first, then add the ice, gin, and syrup for a second shake.
3. Fresh oranges and pink grapefruits instead of lemons and limes
Winter is when oranges and grapefruits are at their sweetest/juiciest, so it’s a great time to fuck around with Alternative Citrus.
I’m dropping a couple recipes/templates below that make use of the above three principles:
Unfathomably Lazy Tiki: 2 ounces dark rum, 1 ounce fresh-squeezed orange juice, 1/2 ounce brown sugar simple syrup. Stir over ice for about 30 seconds, then strain into a glass. I’ve made this with black spiced rum and with Plantation’s Stiggins Pineapple rum—both versions are delicious.
Old Manhattan, Kansas: 2 ounces rye, 1 ounce honey syrup, two shakes bitters (I like cardamom bitters in this, but angostura’s fine, too). Stir over ice and strain into a glass.
Finally, a couple book recommendations:
For those flirting with and/or committed to sobriety: Julia Banbridge’s Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason. For me, the post-work, pre-dinner cocktail is a sacred punctuation mark; a semi-colon for my day. But you don’t need alcohol to have a special appointment drink.
For lazy home bartenders: Robert Simonson’s 3-Ingredient Cocktails: An Opinionated Guide to the Most Enduring Drinks in the Cocktail Canon. I have the Death & Co and Dave Arnold and other irredeemable cocktail nerd books, but Simonson’s is the one I reach for most often.
I love this question. For a few years, I’ve run a blog, Cooking with the Congressional Club, where my husband and I review vintage recipes from the 1982 Congressional Club Cook Book (along with the legislators who contributed them). And 1982 was a great (terrible) year for gelatin molds. I still have nightmares about this blue cheese mold.
Horrors of certain savory molds aside, I feel you. I grew up eating an amazing rainbow-striped layered Jell-O salad at every holiday meal, and I’m convinced it’s what made me bisexual (I’m kidding, grandma, RIP). And your question feels well-poised at a time when nostalgia seems to be ruling the food world. “Bespoke” onion dips and iceberg wedges are showing up on $$$ menus again, and I’ve noticed a restaurant decor shift from minimalist, white-tiled Instagram bait to jewel-toned spaces with retro accents (think: wood paneling, patterned wallpaper, red velvet).
Still, I think congealed salads are going to be a tough sell even as a throwback trend. It would take a concerted, weapons-grade marketing push on Jell-O’s behalf as well as an embrace by Cool Male Chefs (I may be cynical, but I do think the “male” part is operative. The church lady association with congealed salads is strong, and most Food People aren’t going to pay attention until someone like Sean Brock boils a goat and shapes it into a quivering mound with a trowel).
I thought gelatin molds might have an opening in 2017, when Alinea’s Mike Bagale and Simon Davies debuted Clear Pumpkin Pie, but the internet seemed more unsettled by it than intrigued.
Send me that cranbrosia recipe, though.
Finally:
For a long time I, too, was a Big Bay skeptic—I would use bay leaves when a recipe called for them, of course, much like I still take a daily multivitamin even though my doctor insists it’s unnecessary unless I have mange. I figured bay leaves were a sort of culinary placebo—plopping one in a dal made me feel like I was doing something useful, and it wasn’t hurting anything, right?
In April, I finally got curious enough to steep a crumbly mountain of bay leaves—more than anyone would ever use—into a tea. Even using ancient, dried-out leaves, the tea was undeniably…flavored. The water turned a brilliant gold, with a vaguely medicinal scent that reminded me of eucalyptus. But the tea also had a pepper-y warmth to it. It was quite pleasant!
Fast forward to the present. I now own a little fresh bay tree—Sandra Bay O’Connor—and no longer second guess my Leaf Use. Unfortunately, Sandra has, like all things, withered in my care, and most of the fresh leaves have dried on the branches. But I’ve been harvesting her corpse for months.
I should confess that I’m not fully satisfied with this answer. Confirming that bay leaves Have a Flavor is not the same as confirming that that flavor is detectable in a finished dish. So I’m going to make two pots of beans this week and add two bay leaves (and no other aromatics) to only one of them. Will report back in the relevant Twitter thread.
UPDATE [1/3, 5:32 PM]: I have made the beans. I prepared two pots of pinto beans this afternoon using the exact same amounts of water/bean/salt in both pots and the same cooking time. In one pot, I tossed in three fragrant dried bay leaves from Sandra’s corpse. Once the beans were tender, I waited for them to cool, then sampled the broth from both pots. My palate may be less sophisticated than yours, but I couldn’t detect a difference.
This newsletter is already twice as long as usual, so I’m going to cap it here—there were a lot of really great questions I didn’t get to, and I’ll try to revisit them in a future mailbag if y’all like the format. Let me know in the comments—make this a recurring segment or stick to sports?
Happy 2021, food weirdos. I’ll be back next week with another #experience.
Excellent questions and answers all.
fun read, keep it goin. this got me wired and inspired