Aw Nuts
My heart may be Minnesotan, but my tongue is Texan.
Scandinavians drink coffee as transparent as tea, and eat gjetost and lutefisk… I’ll pass. But garlic, onions, peppers, meat, smoked stuff, salt and simple carbohydrates. That’s good stuff.
I set out to learn about the origins of chili con carne, but the stories of traditional Texan cuisine(I don’t like the term Tex-Mex) has me exploring and experimenting with the why’s and how’s.
Beside chili con carne, another traditional food during the settling of Texas was the pecan. Pecans were abundant in the wild, so all it took to sell pecans and pecan related goods was to pick and shell them.
(Yep, pecans up in there.)
One of the most common uses for pecans was with pralines. One would take the wild pecans, add them to a pot of water and sugar and have candy to sell on the sidewalks. Such a simple idea.
(Water, a common ingredient in things.)
It seemed too simple. Sugar, water and pecans? How could that be anything special? Well, the process is more delicate that I had thought. The past couple of weeks I’ve made batch after batch. One was too watery, another was too hard. I’ve had trouble keeping the sugar from crystalizing while keeping the mixture thick. I tried different sugars- brown, evaporated cane juice, Demerara and combinations too.
The ones that were decent couldn’t be handled. The others just tasted like you were just chewing on sugar and pecans. I had to have been missing something- even a desperate cowboy wouldn’t drop a nickel for this crap.
I had to call in the big guns. I asked Dave Arnold over at Cooking Issues. His suggestion for eliminating the sugar crystals: minimize agitation. Every damn recipe I read said to mix in the crystals or “beat until opaque”. Apparently some folks prefer the sugar crystals in their pralines. Anyway, Dave was right. My recent batches I quite literally didn’t touch. The pot simmers for an hour or so, the candy cools hard and without too many crystals.
You might think that they’d be painfully sweet, but they don’t come off that way. But the richer the flavor of the sugar you use, the better off you’ll be with these. And don’t add the pecans until right before spooning them out- they’ll get soggy and weird.
Up next: French Fried Potatoes
Sweet ass side note:
Another moment of simple Texan culinary genius- if you boil this:
(2 bucks at Rainbow)
…for three hours and let cool completely; you get this:
It tastes just like the caramel on caramel apples, but also works remarkably well on a spoon.
