Shallot Be Kept Warm

Coincidentally simple low & slow maillard

We often think about leveraging readily available energy sources to make things more delicious, so it’s less work all around. Our cooking and lifestyles revolve around getting every last bit out of a product, which is just part of the process. For me, it stems from watching my mom transform what was yesterday’s stir fry into the coveted chopped up bits in that day’s noodle sauce—just one example of the wide variety of tricks she used to make multiple dishes every day to feed our family. Every single one of us learns efficiencies of preparing food and other life skills from past generations.

I grew up eating rice and love it so much. There’s no question which cereal staple I’d choose if I could only have one. Part and parcel of many Asian-American homes is a rice cooker that always has hot rice ready for a hungry kid at a moment’s notice. Interestingly enough, the keep warm setting is the right temperature for developing the deep and complex flavor of the maximized Maillard in black garlic. Culinary heads have known about this hack for a long time, and fairly recently it’s gotten some mainstream attention—because black garlic tastes amazing.

So it occurred to me that I could use the remaining space in the rice cooker pot to Maillard all sorts of things. I decided to start with a whole shallot. You could use all the typical containment methods that you would for low temperature cooking like vac bags, small Mason jars, or even aluminum foil, but for simplicity’s sake I didn’t prep or contain the bulb.

It made sense to have the duration be dictated by how long it took for one pot of rice to get eaten, which ended up being five days. As each day progressed, I checked on the shallot and you could see and smell the transformation. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much of an aroma that came out of the cooker itself, probably tempered by the rice absorbing it.

After five days, it was pretty much a caramelized shallot with no effort. Longer is better for sure, but I proved it’s tasty within that period. The bulbs are now in my freezer ready and waiting for an opportunity to shave them on everything and anything that needs an instant deep shallot flavor.

Alliums only scratch the surface of the black x (fruit and veg) potential. Just check out what our friends Andy Doubrava, Wade Fox and Jamie Simpson have been up to.

For our next trick, we want to learn more about making paper with allium skins inspired by our friends at Silo in London. How about you?