Guac and Blue Chips
Good guac is easy, great guac is more elusive. Everyone has their own style, but I think the main trick to mine is using enough lime juice to slightly cook the avocado, a little beer for creaminess (counter-intuitive I know), a little smoky chipotle tabasco for flavor, and most importantly salt. Many guacs I've had don't have any salt. Now while I love a fresh avocado on it's own, it's just not guac to me anymore if their isn't a little salt to enhance the flavor; in no way am I saying guac should be salty, but you can tell the avocado tastes more avocado-ey when there's a little salt in there. Another trick I've found with guac is making it 30-60 minutes before your guests arrive to let the lime juice do it's magic. Here again, you want enough lime juice and apply it to the avocado as soon as you've cut the buggers as this keeps 'em green. Lastly, I've found that even people who don't like garlic actually do like a little garlic in their guac. My guac base involves fresh minced white onions, garlic, lime juice, and a dash of kosher salt. Getting proficient with cutting avocados also helps guarantee good results, but if you're not too handy with a chef's knife and an avocado, just drizzle in a little lime juice periodically. As to the beer, well I think that came up when some friends and I were "celebrating" something and made guac, and found that a little pilsner or mexican beer really made the texture creamy. For the mixing, in the tradition of the Alton Brown multitasker I just use a potato masher.
Mini Steak Sandwiches Big on Flavor
So the goal here was to make the beef a little exotic but very beefy with a marinade using a 3 pronged chain of complementary flavors: Coffee, and Cocoa, which on their own don't overlap in their flavor volatiles, but have a common friend in garlic. For the steak, I used hangar steaks and marinated these in 1/3 cup fine ground mexican fair trade coffee, 1/4 cup non-alkalized cocoa, and 6 cloves of garlic minced, along with a 1/4 cup water to make this a wet rub. After 90 minutes marinating at room temperature, I gently brushed and slightly washed off the rub, into a hot pan for 8 minutes to a rare doneness. For the bun I used little challah rolls and covered each side of the bun with different spreads, along with a little red leaf lettuce. On one side I used a thin layering of sweet cream butter mixed with a 1/10 proportion of organic soy sauce. On the other, I used a mixture of Crème fraîche, wasabi (the cheap kind), and freshly squeezed key limes. The steak was really good on it's own, but was fabulous hockey eats with the spreads. These were really small, so I had bites with the spread on their own as well, really there are three good ways to go here.
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