Stage 1: Ideation
Ingredients
For Black History Month as a way to celebrate and share our talent, we are participating in a panel/ demonstration about being black culinarians. For this project, we were tasked to come up with a menu that would demonstrate. Since this demonstration is remote, we are each going to be cooking separately in our own homes. Evan is tasked with the appetizer, I am the entree and Tyra is finishing off with the dessert. For our menu, we wanted to do items traditionally linked to foods of black people, but with a twist. We each started off with a quintessential soul food dish and thought of how to invent. My dish was oxtails and rice and this is what I came up with.
For a dish like oxtails and rice, the two main components are self-explanatory, but the whole meal is often served with some kind of stewed greens and gravy. So, taking all of those components into account, I thought about how the dish could be transformed. My first idea was a burger. I knew that I did not want to use just a regular burger bun, because I enjoy the rice component of the original dish. I considered doing a bun with rice flour, but I did not think baking in the time frame of our demo would be reasonable. Therefore, I decided that I would try and make buns out of rice, by packing rice together and frying it in a pan. To go with the burger, I did want to serve your standard collard greens. It seemed more fitting to make fries or chips of some sort. I settle on collard chips. For the oxtails themselves, I’ll use the customary practice of braising them. However instead of having them sit in gravy, I want to shred them in the style of a pulled pork and toss them a tangy sauce. The entree in its entirety would be Oxtail Rice Burger served with Collard Chips.
Since this post is not an instructional recipe, I am going to list ingredients along with the method, but only as a hypothetical plan. This is to give you an idea of my brain as I go into the kitchen to begin recipe testing. For this first attempt at a menu, I am unsure what will work and what needs adjustment nothing is set in stone. As we go further into the process of cooking and actual recipe testing we will begin to work out the kinks.
Watch this video to see how it went:
Stay tuned through February to see our final results
Ingredients:
Oxtails
- 1 # Oxtails
- 2 cups Beef Broth
- 1 ea Onion
- 2 ea Carrots
- 5 ea Garlic
- 1 tsp Cajun seasoning
- 1 tsp salt/pepper
Rice
-1 cup Rice
-2 tbsp Oil
Collard Greens
- 2 cups of greens
- 2 tbsp Bacon Fat
-1 tsp Garlic Powder
- ½ tsp Salt
- 1 tsp Pepper
Method:
Beginning with the oxtails, I am going to braise them in beef broth with some aromatic vegetables. The goal here is just to cook them until they break down and fall off the bone. Once they are tender, I am going to shred them and then toss in the sauce I have created.
For the rice, I just plan to cook it like usual in the rice cooker, then once it is out cool it down to room temperature, not cold. Next, I will press it into the shape of patties and fry it until crisp on both sides. If the starch in the rice does not bind the rice together well enough to hold the topping, then I will bind it further with eggs.
For the collard chips, I want to cook them like kale chips. Which consists of coating them lightly in fat, seasoning them, and then baking them until crisp. My only worry is that collard greens are a lot heartier than kale and may become too tough when baked. If this occurs, I will blanch them before baking.
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