Recipes that shake up the earthquake kit (w/video)
In an ideal world, earthquake kit ingredients do nothing more than gather dust. Rather than eating them in the midst of rubble, we donate the canned goods or take them on a camping trip once they reach their expiration date.
But given the recent Napa earthquake, we challenged three Sonoma County chefs to create imaginative food out of these uninspiring ingredients. The rules were straightforward:
Each was given a list of ingredients from a hypothetical earthquake kit. They could select which ingredients would form the bulk of their dishes. Equipment was kept to a minimum. The recipes needed to be simple enough to make on a camp stove.
The results proved that even in a doomsday bunker, a delicious meal is only one can away. Our three chefs added the most crucial ingredient - creativity - producing three dishes that are half Julia Child, half MacGyver. Two - Chicken Tuna Casserole and Honey Baked Spam - are modern versions of comfort-food classics. The third, Urban Pemmican, is an energy bar that borrows from a Native American tradition.
“The Spam kinda dots the ‘i’ and crosses the ‘t’ on the situation,” said Chef Mark Hopper of Sebastopol’s Vignette Pizzeria, describing the unorthodox addition to his Chicken Tuna Casserole.
His other secret ingredient? Chicken-flavored Top Ramen.
Hopper cooked the noodles first, enriching the sauce-packet-infused broth with their starch. This broth provided the base for a riff on a dish his mother made for him twice a month as a child, a deeply comforting throwback that is both hearty and familiar.
“It must be loaded with enough seasoning for a small town,” he said, frequently tasting as he formed his casserole on the spot.
Despite the bottom-shelf ingredients, small touches such as the temperature contrast between hot casserole and cool (canned) mandarin orange garnish revealed Hopper’s training. He cooked at the French Laundry when it was routinely called the best restaurant in the world, eventually becoming chef Thomas Keller’s right-hand man for new restaurant openings.
While he knows how to shape impeccable quenelles and dot a perfect circle of the seasoned sauce called gastrique, at Vignette he has returned to a simpler style, which suited our challenge.
“Simple is approachable,” Hopper said. “People like approachable because their guard drops.”
Although delicious when made with Spam, his casserole also can be made with ham or bacon.
Chef Liza Hinman of Santa Rosa’s Spinster Sisters admitted she still doesn’t have an earthquake kit. “I’m an East Coast girl,” she said. “I’m optimistic about earthquakes.”
For her recipe, Hinman turned to the spiral ham she found sitting on every holiday buffet as a child. She was never a fan.
“I was always put off by it, even as a kid,” she said, “that glistening glaze and being all drippy.”
Her Honey Baked Spam uses the sweetness of canned mandarin oranges and dried cranberries to balance the intense savoriness of the Spam.
Hinman, who made her Sonoma County mark as executive chef of the Italian powerhouse restaurant Santi, managed to avoid the saccharine lows of the classic dish by sweetening it only with the syrup from the canned mandarin oranges and an optional tablespoon of honey.
She paired the meat with white bean and oat cakes, a variation of the bean and lentil cakes she often makes for her family. The resulting dish is earthy, satisfying and filled with protein.
Though some may be surprised to learn that chefs sometimes use canned goods, Hinman said they are no different than other working parents.
“People think that chefs want to cook all the time, but by the time they get home, that’s the last thing they want to do,” she said.
Chef Chris Hanson, a Petaluma-based personal chef, created an Urban Pemmican, a cross between an energy bar and the Native American mixture of dried bison, moose or deer. Pemmican was traditionally created by drying meat, pounding it into small pieces and mixing it with melted fat. Fruit was often added on ceremonial occasions.
Hanson took the work out of the meat-drying process by using chopped beef jerky and replaced the animal fat with peanut butter.
“Throwing a little beef jerky in there wouldn’t be that foreign nowadays because everyone throws bacon into everything,” he said.
If readers want to exclude the beef jerky, however, Hanson says it’s fine to do without. Without it, the recipe produces decadent energy bars that pack the punch of peanut butter and brown sugar with the tart contrast of dried cranberries.
Though the balanced flavors reveal the talented chefs behind these recipes, it’s unlikely you will see them on their menus.
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