Xesla Research Organisation

Piri Piri ( also often spelt Peri Peri) Chicken is a dish that can be found among many of the African nations that had at one time or another been colonized by the Portuguese. This has less to do with any real cultural impact left by the Portuguese and more to do with the fact that while they were buying and selling the people from these nations like cattle they introduced a specific New World fruit know as the Chilli to these nations.

Pretty soon these chillies, specifically the african birds eye chilli which was named Piri-Piri after the Swahili word for pepper (piri) were growing wild and being cultivated in these countries. Like many nations who discovered Chilli Peppers the local cuisine quickly grew dependent on it for some of their better known condiments and dishes.

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Tags: barbeque, chicken, chilli, grill, peri

Ever since I made my first Turducken deboning a whole bird has been something on my ‘must learn how to’ list.  For whatever reason even after making two turducken’s and sheepishly asking the butcher to do the deboning for me I’d never actually followed through with this.

Until now.   I recently watched a great youtube video of the venerable Jacques Pepin demonstrating the technique.  I went out right away and bought the cheapest chicken I could find and had a practice run at it.  It’s actually a very simple technique I was a little clumsy at it but give me another hundred or so and I reckon I’d be able to do it blindfolded.  I might still be a ways off cutting up a chicken into primals in 18 seconds though.

Ballotine is a french technique where you bone out a chicken, stuff it and then poach or roast it. The result is a kind of large chicken sausage or meatloaf that can be eaten either hot, or cold.

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Tags: Ballotine, bbq, boned, chicken, corn, gravy, Jaques Pepin, lamb, pork, sausage, smoke, sourdough, Stuffed

Buttermilk in my opinion almost always better than regular milk when baking. It has a richer slightly acidic taste to it ( which mellows out during cooking ). In its essence it is a baked custard pie with the buttermilk and the citrus zest bringing forward a slightly acidic fresh note to the custard.

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Tags: Buttermilk, Custard, dessert, Pie

Green Chilli Pork ( or Chile Verde with Pork ) is the state chilli dish of New Mexico it’s both similar and quite different to the Texas style Red Chilli that most people would be familiar with. It uses green chillies instead of red (preferably hatch if they’re in season), Tomatillo instead of Tomato, and Pork instead of beef. However the general construction and cooking methods are the same.

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Tags: chilli, chillies, pork, tomatillo, verde

Chicken stock is incredibly easy to make … and while not as cheap as store bought ( unless you are just using scraps in which case it’s basically free ) it tastes exponentially better. Here’s a way ( shamelessly stolen from a Heston Blumenthal program ) to supercharge the roast flavour in a roast chicken stock. The secret is to get chicken wings and dust them with milk powder. The milk powder adds protein and sugar to the existing protein and sugar of the chicken skin which increases the browning effect of roasting it first.

Usually you would start with the carcass from a roast chicken, but I didn’t have this so I substituted in a pair of chicken legs. Also all my supermarket had available was wingette’s … you actually want full chicken wings, but as I’ve shown here you can make do with anything. All you really need is lots of surface area and skin to do the browning.

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Tags: chicken, Chicken Stock, Stock

I was at work on Saturday when I hear a voice from across the room “Hey Paul, do you want some ducks ?”. A rather strange question to hear at work, but of course I immediately said yes. Turns out the guy had gone out for a quick hunt before work. I headed on out to his car and he presented me with two freshly killed ducks. I immediately doubted my decision to take these ducks as they were still fully intact, ungutted, unplucked.

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Tags: Beef, duck, Gumbo, Hank Shaw, pork, Rice, sausage

Twice in the last week I have seen reference to Mushroom Ragu over Polenta. It sounded like a pretty good meat free option… Something which living in Austin, surrounded by smelly hippies is a handy thing to have in your back pocket.

It’s also a remarkably simple recipe. The Ragu itself is just a few ingredients and if you use quick cook polenta it can come together in about 25 minutes. I jazzed it up with a sparking Vino Verde Gelee, but don’t feel obliged to go that far.

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Tags: agar, gelee, Mushroom, polenta, Ragu

Read any Chef’s recipe for risotto and it involves standing over a hot pot ladling hot stock and stirring for what seems like an eternity. I’ve seen various recipes for no-stir risotto floating around the interwebs and always dismissed them. Who does some dude on the internet think he his trying to tell us that all our favourite chef’s are wrong and their recipes have you needlessly stirring away at a pot.

Well after seeing a write up on the ‘science’ of risotto on SeriousEats I decided to give it a shot. I read through the information and it all did seem to make sense. Of course the proof was in the pudding and after making a risotto roughly following their recipe I gotta say … It was pretty damn good.

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Tags: mushrooms, Rice, Risotto

Moussaka is a greek dish that has many facsimiles throughout the Mediterranean region.    At heart its very similar to a lasagne using Eggplant instead of pasta to separate the layers of sauce.     Its a good hearty rustic dish filled with strong greek flavours that is fantastic on a gloomy day.   It’s also really easy to make it either gluten free by swapping the flour in the béchamel for cornstarch,  or replacing it completely with some Tzatziki whipped with some eggs.  Vegetarian might be harder,  but I guess you could use a soy based ground beef substitute.

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Tags: béchamel, eggplant, Greek, Ground Meat, Moussaka

I have been pondering the idea of making a chocolate bread for a while now.   A bit of googling told me that it has in fact been done before.   Reading through David’s recipe I could see it was at heart a faily simple sweet dough / brioche type deal.   Knowing my way around a brioche dough I decided I wanted to try making my own recipe for it.

I’ve been experimenting recently with using a Water Roux (Tang Zhong) a Japanese method of heating a flour/water combo to 65C  where it forms a paste and adding it to the dough.  This helps create a fluffy texture to the bread.  Using this technique I started with a fairly traditional Brioche recipe, added the Water Roux and some Cocoa Powder and then substituted chocolate milk for milk.

I tried to keep the sugar content fairly low as I didn’t want the bread itself to be super sweet,  but to instead lend a chocolately undertone to whatever is spread on it.     To add some extra interest to it I added some milk chocolate chips and dollops of Bourbon spiked Dulce de Leche.

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Tags: bread, Brioche, chocolate, dulce de leche, Tang Zhong, Water Roux