Recipe: Chicken and Beef Rubs, Coatings

Chicken and Beef Rubs, Coatings
rec.food.cooking/Tanith Tyrr (1997)

I've had excellent results by painting or dipping meat in lightly whipped egg white first, then adding whatever dry powdered coating, then frying or baking.

Some awesome and unusual coatings:

1/2 cup cornmeal, 1/2 cup hazelnuts, whirl together in food processor until crushed but not so long that it breaks down into paste and gets oily. If it does get "wet", add more cornmeal until it's dry again.

1/2 cup fine breadcrumbs, 2 tbsp porcini mushroom powder, 1/4 cup shelled and hulled pistachio nuts - whirl together until at the desired consistency.

1/2 cup chanterelle mushroom powder, 1/2 cup hazelnuts - expensive, but delicious on rabbit or squab.

Wet coatings and marinades:

Basic recipe:

Seed but do not peel some lemons. Toss them in chunks in the food processor along with some garlic cloves. Destroy until all ingredients combine in a coarse sludge. Adjust quantities to taste; you should have a strong citrusy paste with enough savory character from the garlic to be perceptible. Smear all over a chicken, inside it and under its skin. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Variations:

Use lime or a thin skinned orange such as a tangerine.

Add grapes. You may need more garlic to balance the fruitiness if you throw in more than a handful. Stuffing the chicken with grapes works well too, and you end up with an extremely moist chicken.

Add washed cilantro leaves; a cilantro-tangerine marinade works very well indeed.

Persian style: add an onion and some pomegranate juice to the lemon base. Use less lemons, maybe 2 medium Meyer lemons, one medium sized tender onion, 1 cup pomegranate juice reduced to 1/4 cup by simmering (or use pomegranate molasses) and 1/4 cup walnuts. Add the nuts at the last minute so that you control their consistency.Basic recipe II:

1 large fennel root and stems, trimmed of all hard or woody matter, equal volume of garlic, equal volume of golden raisins - put it all in the food processor together and destroy until coarse paste; add a good olive oil slowly to facilitate the processing, and salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste.

Variations:

Add pine nuts. Yummy. This makes a fantastic coating to pork.

This recipe is pretty awesome cooked down slowly as a relish, too. I've had better luck substituting onions for garlic if a slow simmer to make a thick sauce is planned, and reducing the fennel.Troubleshooting:

Some of the wet coatings can turn into soup, particularly the citrus based ones. Rescue them by adding dry ingredients to absorb the moisture, or run them through a sieve - use the juice that passes through as marinade, the coarser sludge that remains in the sieve gets slapped on the meat while cooking to form a wet but firm crust that retains moisture and flavor and steams the meat inside.