Jiggly and undercooked, it’s like pudding. Brown and overcooked, it’s like wet dust. Cracked and nearly cooked perfectly? It’s going to be ugly as fuck and taste okay.
You want to impress everyone, don’t you? Well, the success of any cheesecake is a water bath. It’s how the guy in the restaurant cooks it, believe me.
Water boils at 212 degrees F. It doesn’t matter if your oven is set to 700, 350, 450, or 273, water will only get to 212 before it begins to boil. A water bath allows a low and slow regulated cook that won’t crack, overcook or fuck up your cheesecake. You’ll be talking about this water bath long after the cheesecake’s gone, believe me.
Now that we’re done arguing about the pan of water, bake your cheesecake in its warm bath at 310 for 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Turn off the oven and open the door 4” to slowly release the heat.
Let it sit in the oven with the door partially opened for 1 hour. Not roughly an hour, or an hour and 15 minutes, but an hour.
A 60-minute hour.
During this time, read five more chapters of Lover Come Back. At this point in the book, I will have threatened 4 college football players with a big rock.
At the 1-hour mark, shake your head free of any dislike you’ve developed for my quick temper and put the cheesecake in the fridge (leave it in the springform pan).
Let it sit until tomorrow. When tomorrow arrives, remove the cheesecake from the fridge and then remove the springform pan. Thanks to the strips of parchment paper, you’ll have no issues.
Slice the cheesecake, plate it, and eat it plain. Slice it, plate it, and cover it with fresh fruit. Hell, drizzle it with raspberry puree. Or, just pick up a piece and eat it like a fucking Snickers bar.
That’s what I do.
Best if served with a cup of your favorite espresso and enjoyed with a friend. Hand an unsuspecting soul this cake and watch them shit themselves when they take a bite.
Enjoy.
SECTION TWO
BRING THE HEAT
Adobo Chicken
Banging Shrimp Tacos
Pork Chili Verde
Crispy Chicken Quesadilla
Pork Enchiladas
Sriracha Burger
Best Chicken Wings
ADOBO CHICKEN
DIFFICULTY: Keeping your fucking hands clean.
TIME: 55 minutes.
What you’ll need from the cupboard: A skillet, tongs, a decent-sized spoon, and a platter (or plate).
What you’ll need from the pantry: two pounds of chicken, garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, brown sugar, bay leaves, salt, pepper, a few jalapenos (or red pepper flakes), and your favorite rice.
Wings, legs, thighs, breasts, it really doesn’t matter. Although I prefer chicken on the bone (I’m convinced it tastes better), my wife likes boneless breast meat. That’s all her happy little ass will eat.
I’ll let you decide what kind of chicken to use. My instructions will assume you’re cooking chicken on the bone. Thighs. Cook at least one. They’re the forgotten meat.
Get the deepest (and largest) skillet you own. A Dutch Oven works if you have one. Add enough oil to coat the bottom lightly.
Heat to medium.
Add your chicken to the skillet, skin side down. Legs are covered in skin, so just toss those fuckers in without worry—they’ll always land skin side down. Be careful, the oil’s hot. From experience, I can say being burned sucks, so use caution.
Cook the chicken uncovered for roughly 10 minutes, toying around with the individual pieces 2-3 times while it’s cooking. The benefit of this is two-fold. One, it makes it look like you know what you’re doing in the kitchen. Secondly, it allows the fat to migrate beneath the chicken each time you lift it, which ensures a golden-brown skin.
Golden-brown is good.
Unless you’re being burned.
After 8-10 minutes, remove the chicken and place it on a paper towel lined plate or platter.
Add equal parts vinegar and soy sauce to the skillet. Three-fourths of a cup of each should do unless you’re cooking for a dozen.
Add a half a cup of brown sugar to the skillet. Toss in 3-4 bay leaves. If you don’t have the bay leaves, don’t worry too much, it’ll taste fabulous without them.
Bring to a simmer. Stir it while it comes up to temperature. Once the sugar is dissolved, add the chicken that you set aside a moment ago. This time, do it skin-side up.
Take the entire head of Garlic and place it on the countertop, stem up. Slice in from left to right through the center (through each clove). If you followed directions, this should give you two pieces, each of which has exposed (sliced) garlic cloves.
It’ll look like a big fucking garlic flower.
Smash all the cloves that fell out of the head (a few always do) with the side of a knife blade. Chop them into fine pieces.
Place the two halves of garlic in the skillet sliced side down. Sprinkle chopped pieces around.
Pepper everything. Twice.
Slice two jalapenos into thin slices (for those of you who have never sliced a jalapeno, you want the slices to look like pickles slices, not dill spears). Do NOT discard the seeds. Toss the slices into the mix, evenly spacing them.
Turn the temperature down to simmer, cover, and cook for 40 minutes. Turn the chicken OCCASIONALLY with the tongs (this is a good time not to be fucking around and trying to look like a chef. Just remove the lid and turn the meat over every 10-ish minutes).
Assuming you’re flipping the chicken three times (once at the ten-minute mark, once at the twenty, and once at the thirty), prepare your favorite rice after the third flip. This gives you ten minutes to make the rice while the chicken is finishing up. Brown rice is always a possibility, but for this recipe, white rice is commonly used.
Regarding rice…
We own a high-dollar rice steamer, but we don’t use it. We go for Uncle Ben’s Whole Grain Brown Ready Rice in a bag. You microwave it for 90 seconds and you’re done.
It’s rice perfection, believe me.
Lay a bed of cooked rice on a plate. Assuming you’ve fucked around for ten minutes with the rice, remove the skillet from the stove. Find and extract the bay leaves with the tongs. Throw them away so no one ends up with one of them on their plate (they’re not good to eat).
Using the tongs, place a piece or two of the chicken on the rice bed, skin side up. Depending on the recipient’s desire, add a slice or two of jalapeno on top. Using the decent-sized spoon (from the above list), ladle a few spoons of sauce over the chicken, allowing it to seep onto the rice bed.
Eat immediately.
If you opt to use boneless chicken, cut the chicken into decent-sized chunks (half the size of the palm on your hand). Follow the same recipe, reducing the original cooking time to 5 minutes, and the second cooking time to 20-25 minutes. Again, low simmer for the second cooking time.
Regarding the above mention of red pepper flakes, you can use them in lieu of jalapenos. Personally, I prefer the red pepper flakes to jalapenos. If this is your choice, I like to add the flakes to the oil before I cook the chicken the first time. This gives the chicken good flavor, without being too hot.
When the other ingredients are added (vinegar and soy sauce), the flakes don’t really have much heat left. Then, when someone ends up with one stuck in their teeth later (believe me, it’ll happen), they’re not pissed off at you.