Corn Cubanelles
‘Corn Cubanelles’ was my first attempt to infuse smoke into a bread product, let alone bagels. I found this idea intriguing because smoke tends to be a kind of 6th sense in cooking - like the ever variegated complexity of ‘umami'. As anyone who has tried ‘liquid smoke’ before, the flavor of smoke is downright noxious in the absence of food. It is only when it binds to the food through charring and direct suffusion that it’s flavor suddenly come to life, giving vibrancy to all it touches. There is a reason why our ancestors all cooked on the open flame and most of the world continues in the technique today. It’s cheap and, more importantly, it’s delicious.
For these bagels, I went to my local farmer at the Hollywood Farmers market - Greenville farms - and picked up around 3 pounds of Cubanelles. I then grabbed about 7 ears of yellow corn that were early in the season and some mesquite lump charcoal from Freddy’s. Originally the plan was to go with Jalapeños but the Cubanelles looked great and they are a bit more rare to source in Portland. Growers have started to harvest them in the Willamette valley because they are quite low on the spiciness scale (nearly a bell) but pack a lot more flavor. However, this is a recent development over the last 30 years. For a long period of time predating that development, Cubanelles were grown almost exclusively in the Dominican Republic, featuring heavily in Criollo cuisine.
High heat + low time produces the best sear. Lump charcoal produces a much higher heat than regular charcoal. This has mainly to do with the fact that there’s a lot more surface area on natural charcoal than its manufactured, compressed form. The catch is that the heat profile of lump charcoal tends to peak quite quickly at about 15m after the light and stays at peak heat for only around ~40m. Thus it is important to have your corn and peppers washed, and your transfer bins laid out before lighting up to ensure you can crank it out within the window. You are looking for heavy sear on the veggies while still preserving moisture inside the product. Again, this would typically be hard with regular charcoal but its easy with lump. You just need to watch it at all times. Don’t be afraid to get black char all over the veggies, as shown in the picture.
My final learning in this project (or perhaps a developing bagel theory) is to always dehydrate your veggies. For corn and peppers, you can stick them in a dehydrator for around ~6 hrs at 132F. This will dry your 3lbs of peppers down to around 150g— a huge concentration of flavor- without making it bone dry. Dehydration tends to reinforces the leathery skin of the pepper. This, coupled with reduced moisture, preserves flavor during the baking process. A bake cycle is 20m; when water in any vegetable boils, it tends to denature flavor. The idea behind dehydration is to a. make the skin more ‘tough’ so the veggie doesn’t turn to mush and b. reduce the density of water in the product that can boil in the first place. The later is basically the interaction of organic chemistry and physics which, I probably don’t need to remind you, is beyond the scope of this essay. But trust me when I say its good to dehydrate in 98% of veggie cases; you will tend to preserve the flavor you want in your bread instead of a more generic analog.
If you would like to see the final product, feel free to check out my Instagram where I do step by step walkthroughs! I like to read dense tombs on cooking, baking, flavor bridging, and regional cuisines. I feel that the more hard skills one knows, the more creative they can be in the kitchen.
