Wednesday - May 11, 2011

Accidental Spiedies

I had some chicken breast meat left over from a recipe I made earlier in the week, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Hey, how about I marinade it in some Italian salad dressing, then grill it? Fine. So I take 10 chicken “tenderloins” and a quart Ziploc bag, and add a cup of spicy garlic zesty Italian bottled salad dressing. That didn’t look zesty enough, so I threw in a tablespoon of pizza pepper flakes, 2 rounded tablespoons of Italian Seasoning spice mix, 4 or 5 more cloves of minced garlic, and some extra olive oil and red wine vinegar. And put it back into the fridge for a day. I came back the next day and gave the sauce a little taste, and added the juice of a really big lemon, a teaspoon of black pepper, a few whole bay leaves and some salt. That seemed better. I wasn’t really thinking of what I was doing, or looking for any specific flavor. I just wanted a marinade that wouldn’t wimp out. A day and a half later, and the chicken is essentially pickled. Ceviched; cooked by acid. Bone white and ready to fall apart. So I took out one chunk of chicken and grilled it up. Tastes great. The rest will be dinner.

And that’s when I realized I had accidentally made spiedies. How about that?

Spiedies are a Southern Tier thing, a way of marinading meat that is pretty much endemic to lower central New York. Some say the Italian immigrants brought the recipe back at the start of the 20th century, others say those Italian immigrants stole it from the Hungarian immigrants who came there two generations earlier to work the coal mines. Whatever. Take your meat - pork, beef, lamb, chicken - cut it into small slices or 3/4” cubes, mix up a marinade that tastes like a salad dressing phaser set on Stun, plop in the meat, cover, refrigerate, and come back in several days. Seriously, several days. Two days minimum, but if you have a cold fridge and you get all the air out of the container, you can safely run the marinade for a week.

The proper way to cook them is on skewers over a charcoal grill, but you can do them in a pan on your stove top just as well, or under the broiler. They cook fast. The classic serving method is to grab a slice of “Italian bread” - not real Italian bread, but the sliced loaf bread that calls itself Italian - and use the the slice like an oven mitt to pull the meat off the skewer. This gives you a half rolled up sandwich, a bit like a hot dog in a bun, which you then dip in a fresh bowl of the marinade and then eat while standing. Sophisticated types could just serve the meat over a fancy salad with an herb vinegarette dressing. Less sophisticated but hungrier folks put the grilled meat on a roll, add lettuce, tomato, onion, a bit of mayo and a slice of American cheese and make a nice sandwich.

Yeah yeah, you can actually go and buy spiedie sauce. Why bother, when it’s so close to bottled Italian dressing, which is just olive oil and red wine vinegar? Just add more garlic, plenty of lemon juice, some red wine vinegar, and lots more herbs and spices. Some folks add mint leaves. Sauce recipes are easy to find, as is a formal definition of the dish.

Guess I was missing living in Binghamton. Or maybe just some of the food. Funny how I don’t miss the winter weather they have at all!

I wonder if I have time to make halupki to go with it? And my famous tater pancakes with sour cream and butter?

Posted by Drew458     on 05/11/2011 at 02:58 PM   
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining •  
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