Category: Grains

Socca

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Ah, socca. How I’ve missed you. I’ve never quite been able to get out of my head the memories of repeatedly burning my tongue and fingertips on fresh-from-the-fire socca in Nice (it was too hot, but I couldn’t stop eating). That was in February 2010, during Carnaval, and I wandered my way through the cobblestone allies of the Vielle Ville and picked pieces of smoky-hot, crispy and flaky socca out of a paper funnel.

Ever since, I’ve thought about making socca at home but alas, the primary ingredient was never available. Chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour is admittedly difficult to find outside the Mediterranean region, though it can be found in some Arabic shops, in Indian grocery stores (as besan flour), and in certain organic supermarkets.

As you’ll see if you visit Nice, true socca du marché is cooked over a wood fire in batches of giant circumference, with much scorching and blistering and rustic smoky flavors. But, we can certainly do a close approximation at home (David Lebovitz does it all the time; the following recipe is his). To imitate the smoky tones of cast iron over a blazing fire, we add a touch of cumin to the batter. Above all else, don’t be shy with the pepper–there must be freshly ground black pepper must be in excess, and the more coarsely cracked the better, in my opinion.

You’ll know you’ve made the socca right when you scrape it out of the pan with a spatula and it flakes apart in big, crumbly pieces. This is street food, and as such, fingers and mess are the only things required to eat.

Socca

makes about three 10-inch (23cm) pancakes

from The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz

  • 1 cup (130g) chickpea flour
  • 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (280ml) water
  • 3/4 teaspoon sea salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
  • freshly-ground black pepper, plus additional sea salt and olive oil for serving
  1. Mix together the flour, water, salt, cumin, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Let batter rest at least 2 hours, covered, at room temperature.
  2. To cook, heat the broiler in your oven. Oil a 9- or 10-inch (23cm) cast-iron pan or baking dish with the remaining olive oil and heat the pan in the oven.
  3. Once the pan and the oven are blazing-hot, pour enough batter into the pan to cover the bottom, swirl it around, then pop it back in the oven.
  4. Bake until the socca is firm and beginning to blister and burn. The exact time will depend on your broiler (for me it took 5-6 minutes).
  5. Slide the socca out of the pan onto a cutting board, slice into pieces, then shower it with coarse salt, pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil.
  6. Cook the remaining socca batter the same way, adding a touch more oil to the pan between each one.

Irish Soda Bread

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As far as baking bread goes, I’m on a roll (Ha!). Ever since the beer bread, I just can’t get enough of these quick and easy homemade loaves. Or maybe it’s that I had a half-liter of buttermilk in the fridge to use up.

In any case, one can’t go wrong with Irish soda bread. All you need is 5 ingredients, 5 minutes, a hot oven, a baking sheet, and suddenly there’s a beautifully golden crusty loaf of soft chewy bread begging to be sliced and spread with butter and jam. If that isn’t homemade happiness, I don’t know what is.

Extra plus: there’s a tip in the recipe for making soured milk if you don’t have buttermilk.

Irish Soda Bread

recipe from Rachel Allen, Rachel’s Irish Family Food

makes 1 loaf

  • 3 1/2 cups (450 g) all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting
  • 1 tsp superfine (caster) or granulated sugar
  • 1 tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 1/2 to 2 cups (350-425 ml) buttermilk or soured milk*
  1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F (230 C)
  2. Sift the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt into a large bowl. Make a well in the center and pour in most of the buttermilk, leaving about 1/4 cup (50 ml) in the measuring cup. Using one hand with your fingers outstretched like a claw, bring the flour and liquid together, adding more buttermilk, if necessary. Don’t knead the mixture, or it will become heavy. The dough should be soft, but not too wet and sticky.
  3. When the dough comes together, turn it onto a floured work surface and bring it together a little more. Pat the dough into a round about 1 1/2 inches (4 cm) thick and cut a deep cross in it. Place on a baking sheet.
  4. Bake for 15 minutes. Turn down the heat to 400 degrees F (200 C) and bake for 30 minutes more. When done, the loaf will sound slightly hollow when tapped on the bottom and be golden in color. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

*tip for making soured milk: Gently heat regular milk until warm. Remove from heat, add the juice of half a lemon and leave at room temperature overnight. You can also sour soy milk or rice milk in this way.

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Quinoa Cakes with Sweet Potato, Wild Rice, and Cranberries

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I love making quinoa cakes because they’re so easy to turn into something that seems a little fabulous—a couple of them on a plate with a little bit of greens and some sauce (see my previous post on mushroom mousse sauce) makes such a tasty, satisfying, and energizing meal. My roommate even eats these for breakfast, and they easily keep her from feeling tired or hungry until lunchtime.

Quinoa cakes are endlessly versatile, of course, but I like this combination of sweet potato chunks, wild rice, and dried cranberries in particular because they add a variety of color and texture to an otherwise drab-looking cake (quinoa cakes taste better than they look), and because the sweetness of the cranberries with the fall flavors of sweet potato and sage are so appealing together. These cakes are baked rather than fried, so everything is quite healthy and nutritious as well—always a plus.

Quinoa Cakes with Sweet Potato, Wild Rice, and Cranberries

  • 1 medium sweet potato
  • 1 cup wild rice
  • 2 cups quinoa
  • ½ cup dried cranberries
  • 1 egg
  • Sea salt
  • Fresh sage, chopped
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  1. Peel the sweet potato, boil until fork-tender but not mushy, and dice.
  2. Meanwhile, cook the wild rice and the quinoa, separately. Let cool a bit.
  3. Combine the cooked quinoa and wild rice in a large bowl. Stir in the egg, then add the diced cooked sweet potato, cranberries, salt, pepper, and sage. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes so the mixture is easier to shape.
  4. Form small patties about the size of your palm. Place on a baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees F for about 20 minutes, or until firm and dry on the outside but still moist in the center. Alternatively, bake in muffin cups and add 5-8 minutes to your baking time.
  5. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

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Who knew fluffy, flaky buttermilk biscuits were so simple to make? If you’ve ever made scones or pie crust, you know that baking things that are mostly a combination of flour and butter are easy as . . . pie.

These biscuits are sweetened with sweet potato and a touch of brown sugar, and would be perfect served warm with a drizzle of honey. Make sure to use chilled buttermilk and chilled butter when mixing everything together, and don’t work the dough too much, or the final product won’t be as soft and fluffy as you intended.

I recommend pairing a biscuit with a nice serving of shepherd’s pie for a cozy, snowed-in weekday meal.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

makes 8; adapted slightly from Bon Appetit, December 2009

  • 1 big or 2 smallish sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
  • 1 3/4 cup flour
  • 1 Tbsp packed dark brown sugar
  • 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • pinch cayenne pepper
  • 8 Tbsp (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes, plus Tbsp extra melted
  • 1/3 cup chilled buttermilk
  1. Cook sweet potato cubes in boiling salted water until tender, 8-10 minutes. Drain, cool, and mash.
  2. Position rack in lower third of oven and preheat to 425 degrees F. Butter bottom of 9-inch cake pan.
  3. Whisk flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, baking soda, and cayenne in a large bowl. Add chilled cubed butter, toss to coat and rub in with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
  4. Whisk 3/4 cup mashed sweet potatoes with buttermilk in a bowl. Add the flour mixture and toss with a fork. Gather dough in the bowl, kneading until dough forms. Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and pat into a 1-inch-thick round. With a biscuit cutter or knife, cut out individual biscuits, flouring the cutter in between. Gather and pat into a 1-inch-thick round, repeat until dough is gone (avoid regathering dough more than once).
  5. Arrange biscuits side by side in cake pan. Brush tops of biscuits with melted butter, bake until puffed and golden and a toothpick inserted into the center of one biscuit comes out clean, about 22 minutes.
  6. Cool in pan, then turn biscuits out and pull them apart.
  7. Serve with butter and honey, if desired.

Beer Bread

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Beer is pretty much just liquid bread, so the concept of beer bread seems natural enough. To make either, you use yeast to turn sugar into alcohol. So–all you need for this delicious homemade bread is flour, sugar, your favorite beer, and baking soda, with a pinch of salt and 5 minutes to stir it together.  The baking powder is necessary because most beer nowadays doesn’t have enough live yeast in it to make an adequate leavening agent for baking.

Cooking with beer is great, if only because it’s an excuse to drink the beer while I cook. Which means choosing a good beer is important–I like an IPA or a nice stout. Try your own favorite, as long as it has strong flavor to make it come out in the bread (with a light beer you’ll still get great bread, but the beer will be imperceptible).

Similar to Irish soda bread, recipes for beer bread produce a solid brick of a loaf with a thick, rocky crust. This impenetrable crust fortress keeps the crumb inside moist and chewy. I generally like this hardy frame for my slice of bread, but crusty jagged edges are not always easy on the roof of the mouth. As a delicious remedy, this recipe adds a generous coating of melted butter to the bread batter before baking, so the top crust absorbs a softer layer of extra flavor.

Beer Bread

makes 2 loaves

  • 3 cups bread flour, sifted
  • 3 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp kosher salt
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 bottle of beer
  • 1 stick butter, melted
  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.
  3. Add beer and stir until mixed.
  4. Pour batter into a greased loaf pan.
  5. Pour melted butter on top of the batter.
  6. Bake for 1 hour.
  7. Remove from oven and allow 15 minutes to cool before removing bread from pan.

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Onigiri

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One doesn’t usually expect to see Japanese rice balls among the New Year’s Eve party spread, and indeed mine were the only onigiri included in the buffet festivities this Monday night. Even so, they were a big hit, disappearing long before neighboring bundt cakes, sprinkle cookies, and chocolate doughnuts. Perhaps the art studio crowd of the party I attended harbored a special predilection for seaweed? No–I prefer to think that there is something in the minimalist aesthetic of onigiri that we found particularly appropriate for ushering in an introspective new year after a holiday season of garish excess. Simplicity of form, pureness of content, economy of design: all find harmony in the undistracted elegance of these little rice balls.

In Japan onigiri are the perfect snack, whether for a post-lunch treat in a second grade classroom, or a furtive bite for hungry salarimen on the commuter train. The most familiar onigiri form is the triangle, either covered in a snug outfit of crackly nori warp, or more daringly clothed with only a thin rectangular strip stretching from front to back.  However, variations on the theme are ubiquitous, including circles, balls, and tombstones. Rolling the onigiri in sesame seeds or furikake rice flavorings (like nori-mushroom, shown in the above photo) gives them more pizzazz.

Onigiri is, at heart, simply steamed sushi rice flavored with a bit of salt. Here, unlike sushi, we don’t flavor the rice with rice vinegar. To make a more filling meal, you might stuff the onigiri with tuna and mayonnaise, umeboshi (picked plum), barbecued eggplant, kimchi, or just about anything you like–the possibilities are endless. See this onigiri-making tutorial at Serious Eats for a nice photo-explanation of how to shape and stuff your onigiri.

Onigiri (Japanese rice balls)

makes 16-20 onigiri, depending on size and shape

  • 2 cups sushi rice
  • 2 1/2 cups water
  • sea salt
  • 1 package nori wrap (the longer, rectangular kind for making onigiri, not the square shape used for rolling sushi)
  • furikake or sesame seeds
  • fillings, as desired (ex: umeboshi, pickled radish, canned tuna and mayonnaise, grilled eggplant or mushrooms, kimchi, anchovies)
  1. Wash and rinse the sushi rice in water until the water runs clear. Place the rice with the 2 1/2 cups water in a rice cooker; cook. If you don’t have a rice cooker, bring the rice and water to a simmer in a pot, then cover and lower the heat to medium-low for 15 minutes. Then turn off the heat, keeping the pot covered for an additional 10 minutes.
  2. Once cooked, fluff the rice with a rice paddle and mix in the sea salt. Let the rice cool down until it is no longer too hot to handle.
  3. Place a small bowl of warm, salted water near your work station and wet your hands. The water will keep the rice from sticking to your hands, and the salt will lightly flavor the rice as you work.
  4. Paddle a small scoop of rice into your palm and shape as desired. Add the fillings. If you are eating immediately, wrap in nori (you will probably have to cut the nori with scissors to fit your shapes). If you are preparing the onigiri in advance, set the rice ball aside without nori–otherwise the nori will get soggy.
  5. Just before serving, wrap the rice balls in nori. If the nori has trouble sticking, lightly moisten the nori and press firmly.
  6. These rice balls don’t need any sauce. Be creative while you are making them and enjoy as they are!

Here’s some inspiration for creative onigiri makers: cute onigiri faces!

Chipotle Cornbread

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What would happen if you had cornmeal, eggs, milk, chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and a taste for something new? This is exactly what happened to me a few days ago (the chipotle peppers in adobo sauce being left over from my chipotle mashed sweet potatoes), and the result was deliciously sweet and smokey chipotle cornbread. The more subtle, flavorful heat of the chipotles balances perfectly with moist and crumbly cornbread.

Use your favorite basic cornbread recipe for this; I use Mark Bittman’s recipe found here. Simply follow the recipe, then stir your finely chopped chipotle peppers into the batter with a couple of spoonfuls of adobo sauce. Don’t mix the peppers in evenly; stir them in just enough make a red swirl in the batter. Eat it warm with a dollop of sour cream, but be warned–after this you may never feel satisfied with the plain old sans-chipotle stuff.

Semmel Knödel

 

Although modern Germany is impressively vegetarian-friendly, the traditional cuisine is decidedly not. Classic German fare is much like rural America’s diet; that is, a strictly meat and potatoes affair, with cheese and butter thrown in for good measure.

So, a classic-style German eatery, though it may have charming wooden tables, perfectly browned bretzeln (pretzels), home brewed beer, and pork loins galore, presents somewhat of a challenge for vegetarians such as myself.  Unless we are content with salads (I’m not) in such cases we have to search the menu for filling side dishes. Semmel knödeln, or hearty bread dumplings seasoned with fresh herbs, fit the bill. These little babies saved me several times from exiting the restaurant with a grumbling belly, which in turn saved my dining companions from an undesirable change of mood.

In German supermarkets you can buy pre-prepared dumplings shrink-wrapped in plastic for a few euros. Just boil for ten minutes, unwrap, and eat. Unfortunately the results are, as is often the case with shrink-wrapped things, rather disappointing. Unless you like gummy balls of bread with the approximate density of dying stars, tumbling all the way down your throat like sticky little bowling balls. But I don’t think you do.

Fortunately, making semmel knödeln from day-old bread is hardly more work than scissoring open a plastic package, and requires exactly no special ingredients. Assuming you do, actually, cook, I’ll bet you have all the ingredients on hand at this very moment. And, like the most convenient spur-of-the-moment dishes, you can throw in wilting things you find at the back of the refrigerator and everything will still taste great.

To make your homemade dumplings stand out from the usual bunch you will need fresh herbs, especially parsley and dill, though rosemary and thyme would be quite nice as well. The dusty grey stuff you get in spice racks is useless (go ahead, just throw it out now). I give the bread cubes a little fry in butter with the chopped onions for some added flavor and texture (the crunchy golden crouton-bits that you’ll get in the cooked dumpling are divine), and I also add in chopped mushrooms for flavor and a bit more substance. Don’t cook all the herbs in right away, because they’ll wilt and lose color; save a bit fresh to throw in at the end to keep a green pop in the finished dumpling.

And, if you have leftover dumplings the next morning (make enough to have leftover dumplings!) give them a turn in a hot pan with a smear of butter for a terrific brunch treat.

Semmel Knödel (German Bread Dumplings)

Makes 10-12 dumplings

  • 1 loaf of day old crusty bread, cut into cubes
  • 1 onion, finely diced
  • 1 cup mushrooms, finely diced
  • 2 Tbsp butter
  • 1/2 bunch (1/2 cup) fresh parsley, chopped
  • small handful (2-3 Tbsp) fresh dill, chopped
  • 1 1/2 to 2 cups whole milk
  • 2 eggs
  • ground black pepper
  • sea salt
  • about 2/3 cup flour, or as needed
  1. The evening before, cut your bread into cubes and spread in a single layer on a baking sheet to dry out overnight.
  2. To start the dumplings, melt the butter in a large saucepan and saute the onions and mushrooms together on medium heat until the juices run out, about five minutes. (Add a touch of olive oil if the butter threatens to burn.) Add most of the parsley and dill, and the bread cubes. Season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring regularly, until onions are translucent and the mushrooms and bread cubes are browned. Remove to a large mixing bowl and let cool.
  3. Heat the milk and pour it slowly over the bread mixture. Do this in several pours, allowing the bread to absorb the milk before adding more. You may not need all the milk; do not add so much that a puddle forms in the bowl.
  4. When the bread-milk mixture is cool, add the remaining fresh parsley and dill (saving a bit for garnish, if desired), eggs, and bread crumbs. Mix well (use your hands!).
  5. Flour your hands and sprinkle in the flour tablespoon by tablespoon, mixing it in, until a sticky dough forms.
  6. If the dough is too wet to hold its shape, add more bread crumbs or flour. If it is too dry and stiff, mix in a bit more milk. Work in small additions until you achieve the right consistency.
  7. Flour your hands again and take pieces of the dough in small palmfuls, shaping them into dumplings.
  8. Boil water in a dutch oven. Salt the water generously. Add the dumplings and bring back to a soft boil, then cook about 10 minutes longer.
  9. Cut a dumpling in half to check for doneness. If the center is still doughy, add back to the pot and cook a minute or two longer.
  10. When done, remove the dumplings with a slotted spoon onto paper towels. Serve sprinkled with ground sea salt, black pepper, and fresh parsley.

NOTE: Leftover dumplings are fantastic for breakfast sliced up and fried in butter!

Soba

The deliciously cold Japanese buckwheat noodles called soba are best on the hottest, most humid, most unforgivingly sweltering days of summer. Imagine such a day, and raise the temperature by ten degrees. Ten degrees Celsius. This is what Japanese summers are like.

The Japanese carry small square towels, like handkerchiefs, which are used in the summer to dab sweat away from the face. Among ex-pats these are known as “sweat rags.” When I first moved to southern Japan in 2007, I balked at the idea of carrying such an item, thinking it distasteful. After two days of August I discovered that life without sweat rags was notably more distasteful . . . and quickly ran to the hyaku en store (like a dollar store but with everything you ever wanted inside) to purchase several, trying to sweat as discreetly as possible until the tags were off.

Hence Japanese cuisine has a number of delightfully refreshing cold noodle dishes to enjoy during the summer season, soba being my favorite among them. Soba are thin, unlike thick udon noodles, and are greyish in color. They are shorter than spaghetti noodles and packages you buy at the store are tied cutely in little self-serve bundles.

clockwise from upper left: tsuyu, ponzu, nanami togarashi, soba

Preparing and serving a cold soba dish is very simple. You will first cook and wash the noodles (notes below), and serve the chilled, bare noodles on a plate in small bundles. For authenticity, you would serve them in a square flat basket, but draining the soba well before serving on a plate is fine too. To accompany the noodles you will provide each guest with a bowl of sauce and some garnish. The sauce is called tsuyu, made of dashi broth, sweetened soy sauce, and mirin. Garnishes can include chopped green onion, nori flakes (bits of the sushi seaweed wrap), wasabi, nanami tohgarashi (7-flavor pepper), fresh ginger, and toasted sesame seeds. A splash of citrus-y ponzu sauce is very nice as well.

 

When I lived in southern Japan I would sometimes come home for lunch, and often I made soba as a quick and refreshing meal before the hot, drowsy afternoons at school. I sprinkled green onions and cut up a slice of soft tofu on the soba and sprinkled with pepper. A perfect pick-up lunch. In restaurants soba is often served with tempura, which is shown in these pictures (see my old blog post on tempura).

The process of cooking soba noodles is a bit different from Italian pasta. Don’t salt the water, and don’t boil the water vigorously once the noodles are in. The soba will cook very quickly, in only five or six minutes. When you taste that the noodles are cooked through but still firm, drain the water and rinse immediately with cold running water. Put the noodles back into the pot and fill with cold water, washing the noodles to rid them of excess starch (don’t break them though!). Drain and fill again until the water runs clear and the noodles are cold. This post on soba from the Just Hungry blog gives an excellent description of how to cook soba. It also gives a recipe for making tsuyu, the sauce. I made my soba from a gift package from Japan that included the noodles, sauce, and seasoning, so I don’t include a recipe for tsuyu here. It is quite simple to make, though.

Writing about Japanese noodles makes me think of other wonderful varieties…somen, udon, ramen…all noodles, but the outcomes are very different! That will have to be saved for another blog post.

Cold Soba Noodles

serves 4

  • 200 g soba noodles (2 packaged bundles)
  • 2 cups tsuyu (see above link to Just Hungry blog for homemade recipe)
  • one green onion, chopped finely
  • one sheet of nori, cut or torn into small pieces
  • 2 tsp nanami tohgarashi, or seven-flavor pepper (alternately, use black or chili pepper)
  • optional: splash of ponzu sauce or yuzu zest (difficult to find outside of Japan), 2 tsp grated fresh ginger, 1 tsp wasabi, 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds
  1. Cook the soba noodles in gently boiling water for five to six minutes, until just cooked and still firm.
  2. Immediately drain and rinse in cold running water. Plunge into a bath of cold water and wash noodles by mixing them around with your hands. Rinse and wash until water runs clear and noodles are cold. Drain.
  3. When fully drained, form small bundles of noodles by twisting sections around your fingers and serve in a zaru basket or on a plate.
  4. Ladle 1/2 cup tsuyu into small individual bowls for dipping. Top with green onion, nori, pepper, and additional ingredients as desired.
  5. Using chopsticks, dip noodles into sauce and enjoy. Can also be accompanied by sliced soft tofu or tempura.

Grilled Corn on the Cob with Wasabi Butter

Nothing says summer in the Midwest like grilled corn on the cob. When I was a teenager, one of the only jobs available to the under-16 crowd was seasonal summer work on the cornfields. I spend my first two summers of high school tediously stapling bags of pollen over rows of flowering corn tassels, working 40 hours a week at minimum wage. At the end of any given week, my arms would be shredded by the sharp under-leaves of the corn plant, my legs would be covered in insect bites, and any remaining exposed skin would be baked brown by the hours spent under the sun. Those were glorious, golden summers, lest you get the wrong idea–long days in the dirty outdoors, mud clod wars with friends in the field, my first taste of economic freedom. And at the end of the summer we got to go into the fields of sweet corn and haul back home garbage bags of cobs.

Fresh corn on the cob tastes pretty good any way you do it–boiled, roasted, steamed, or grilled. I did grilled, for a slightly-charred taste. I topped the corn with wasabi butter, which gives a perfect background kick to the corn’s natural sweetness. Then I topped everything off with sea salt and fresh ground pepper.

To make the wasabi butter, simply mix sweet cream butter with a bit of wasabi paste, the kind you buy for sushi. I like a ratio of about 2 parts butter to one part wasabi, but be sure to taste as you’re mixing so you don’t receive a surprise nosefull of wasabi when you bite into your cob.

Happy grilling!