We have moved. We are still in boxes, but we are in our new home. Before we left though, there were things I had to take care of. I went to some of my favorite restaurants, I ran my old running routes, and I cleaned out our fridge. In the meat drawer of our fridge sat a glass container that had been there so long I barely recognized it. A week before we left, I was reminded what it was – smelt, little fresh water fish with a small, but fervent following in Chicago. A few days before we left,  I finally tried the smelt I had been salting and preserving like anchovies for over two years.

In 2011, I had picked up some smelt from a local fish monger. There are family stories about how my dad was gifted a few 5 gallon pails full of smelt in the 1970s. As the story goes, my dad’s sense of thrift and aversion to waste were so strong my parents ate smelt every day for a long time. The story varies on how long based on who tells it. In either regard, when I got these, I felt like aside from frying them, I was out of ideas and I was not going to get any help from them.

I thought of Midwestern bagna cauda. Unfortunately there are not many local olives for olive oil. Regardless of the viability of the local bagna cauda, the idea of curing smelt like anchovies was planted. In the meat drawer of my fridge from mid-2011 until last week, sat smelt sitting in kosher salt.

Two days before we left, I soaked the smelt in water for a half hour and removed the spines from them. Using a recipe from Marcella Hazan, I heated olive oil and butter, then added garlic, salt, and smelt. If you have made bagna cauda, you know that smell when you get it right. This was it. It smelled and tasted identical to bagna cauda I made in the past with anchovies. That full garlic smell offset by the brininess imparted by the fish. Like good anchovies, there was no fishy flavor and, in fact, there was nothing distinguishing the bagna cauda made with smelt from any other.

I considered this a minor victory, but a victory nonetheless. It was a major victory, however, that I was not killed by eating fish that had been sitting in my fridge since 2011. With two years aging in the fridge, it stands as the longest food project I had undertaken, and it proved worthwhile, as the smelt, which had been used like anchovies, were a fantastic substitute.

Surely others have preserved blood oranges in salt before. If they haven’t, and if you haven’t, next winter give it a shot and you will find the same unexpected result that I did. I have  preserved lemon, preserved buddha’s hand, and preserved smoked limes in a similar fashion and the results of the lemon and lime were expected. They were deceptively savory. In fact, there would be almost no pastry application that I would advocate for with either of them. The buddha’s hand is one of my favorite condiments. It is sweet and acidic – it is like adding salt and acid in a large amounts. My thought with the blood oranges was that it would be similar to the lemons and limes and turn into a mysteriously savory ingredient. I was wrong.

Of any of the preserved fruit, the blood orange comes through the most forcefully. It is a forward flavor in each context where I used it. The flavor is very focused and bright. As blood oranges often carry what I perceive as a raspberry-like flavor, the preserved rind tastes strongly of orange, but the supplementary flavors aren’t as simple. There is sweetness, but it is complex and almost floral in nature. The flavors don’t remind me of raspberry in the slightest. Really delicious and something unique.

Going back to square one, I am powerless to resist blood orange in January, so when I looked down at the bottom drawer of the fridge and saw excessive blood oranges, I can’t say I was surprised. I wanted to make good use of them. I had some smoked star anise that I figured would be a nice addition to the “cure” on the blood oranges. It brought the faintest hint of smoke, but mostly the great complementary flavor of star anise. But just a hint.

After slicing the blood oranges open, I salted the blood oranges and stuffed them into a jar with the smoked star anise and squeezed the juice from another over the top. The jar was put aside until this weekend, the weekend before we move. I had to taste it to see if it was worth bringing along. My first taste was with olives, garlic chives and smoked chickpeas. The smoked chickpeas were really delicious and, while I thought the olives would overpower the mild beans, the smoke was completely balanced by the punchy preserved blood orange.

The combination was so compelling that I had to give another go at it. I took the remaining smoked chickpeas and mixed them with tahini. I blended the mixture and added garlic and the rind from a quarter of a preserved blood orange and the flesh from half of the preserved blood orange. This hummus was where the combination really shined.

As alluded to multiple times this Winter and Spring, we are moving. We are moving next week. Holy Moses. Moving is awful, but moving away from a place you love is worse. I moved to Chicago 13 years ago and love this city. I love Chicago, but once we had kids, our clock started running. Still I love Chicago.

There are infuriating aspects about Chicago, to be sure. It is huge city made up of little burghs with individual personalities all their own. Like people, some of the neighborhoods here are jerkstores and, with others, there are not enough hours in the day to spend with them. It is a city big enough to become lost in, but friendly enough to never feel lost. There is art, green space, and amazing restaurants. My adult life has been spent in the city. Many of my most memorable moments have happened here.

My babies, who are no longer babies, deserve a yard in which they will play. They deserve schools in which they will learn and feel safe, so we are moving away.

To the burbs.

We found an older house on a quiet street near a school with a nice yard (read: garden is coming), a garage (read: ham styling), and a kitchen which desperately needs a little attention (read: I can make it mine).

There was backlash from my city network – mostly, if not all, from those without the impetus for this change, kids, and truthfully without those little girls, we would be staying in the city. Still, there is no regret. We lived in this city hard. We saw it from corner to corner. We will be outsiders ongoing, but with the hearts of residents. Our girls will know where they were born and where they started their young lives.

Until early May the move was theoretical, even after we had accepted an offer on our place in the city and a place that had accepted our offer in the suburbs.

It hit home a few weekends ago when the girls wanted to play outside. We walked to our parking lot out back to play. Just typing those words make me cringe. The kids wanted to play outside, so we went to a parking lot. Ouch. Ouch from a parenting perspective, but also physically, as I did not see the broken glass on the ground. As I swore and looked up, I saw that the cherry tree in our six by six soil plot was blooming. That tree had been in that spot since we arrived years before. Seeing it, as I cursed the back lot and our lot in life, made me see it a different way. It made me laugh because it was clear that it was fantastic place with lots of great things, but it was too damned hard to raise kids here. “I am too sentimental”, I thought at the same time.

I grabbed a bloom from the tree and took a whiff. It was lovely – like an floral version of cherries, no surprise. I snapped off a few branches and brought them inside with us. The smell was fantastic. Eventually, the curiosity got the better of me, so I tasted a budding flower. It was strongly cherry flavored, but had a sharp bitterness. Bitter enough for me to know that I could not just sprinkle them on everything, so I tossed them with a bunch of salt to take some of the liquid and hopefully some of the bitterness from the petals and began to search for how some have used them.

After some hits on Japanese pickling, I got to one that was straightforward enough by Ken Oringer. I met Oringer very briefly last year in Charleston as his daughter played with my girls in the lobby of our hotel. I knew he was well respected then and have followed from afar since. He is legit and this seemed legit. I splurged for the umeboshi (which are expensive as hell), but had everything else on hand. Knowing the blossoms were a little further opened than optimal and knowing that I had presalted them, I let the brine cool and dropped the salinity very slightly.

With buds or tightly bunched flowers, the heated brine would soften the buds, but with the open flowers, I suspect they would wilt them to pieces. After a few days, I opened the pickling crock and the brine was sweet and smelled like a bowl of cherries. I was kind of amazed upon tasting the blossoms how the bitterness was gone, replaced with the sweet and sour qualities of the brine. Still cherry was the primary flavor.

With the sweetness, these would be a hit in a dessert. There are not enough pickles in desserts. My first thought was to use the pickled blossoms in a recent standby pairing – miso and corn. Realizing it is long before corn season is upon us, this combo has still been popping up in our kitchen over the past month. The sweet, tart, and sour blasts of the blossoms sprinkled over the hard roasted corn with it own sweetness was fantastic and very intense.

So yes, we are moving away, but just a little away, we will be back a lot – me, everyday for work, and with these cherry blossoms, we are taking a little of our old home with us. When our kids grow older, they will know that they are Chicago born and partly raised. They will grow up living in the burbs, but we will fight to expose them to as many as the cultural benefits of city living as we can. We will fight for that because we think it is important. We will fight for because we love Chicago and want our girls to love it too.

One bowl from my first two gallons of homemade ramen and I was hooked. It was not the best, but it was mine and it put the bug into me. Tinkering on the recipe to improve it, or in some cases make it worse, was a new “hobby”.  From the order of operations to the ratio of bones to water to the time boiled, the process is set up to make it your own, but the part of the process that pleases me the most is the fabrication of the seasoning, the tare.

The aroma that comes from the kitchen is incredibly intense as you make the tare. The first step is roasting meaty chicken backs until they are deeply browned and it doesn’t stop there. Then you add a combination of shoyu, sake and mirin and boil the carcass scraping up the deliciously brown bits of chicken from the pan. Add a few turns of black pepper and you have an aroma that could nearly carry you across the room like in the cartoons.

The trouble I have found is once the tiny little bits of chicken have cooled, they are overcooked, still delicious, but overcooked, and the tare is used almost completely to season the ramen, so this time, I made a bit extra. In fact, I doubled the recipe. At first, I though I might lacquer a chicken with tare, but the viscosity would not work. It was too thin, such that the only way would be to baste the chicken with the tare. Then I realized the tare was almost all salt and what wasn’t salt was sugar. It was basically a brine.

After some quick calculations to make sure I was not going to botulize myself, I touched up half of the tare with pink salt and poured it over a hog jowl from Crawford Farms that had been sitting in my freezer looking for its purpose. For the next week, I flipped the jowl. Even chilled and holding a raw hog jowl, I was tempted to lick fingers, but I resisted.

Once the week had elapsed, I rinsed and dried the jowl. After a day drying, I smoked it (hot smoke) over dried grape vines and then chilled it. My initial thought was of using it like guanciale, but when I tasted a bit, I knew I had missed its true calling. This was a super fatty chasu with both smokiness and the distinctive tare flavor. It was fantastic sliced thick and rendered a bit in the oven.

I would be remiss to forget to note that while its best use was in the ramen, it was pretty great on its own. Certainly a worthy project and one that opens up many ideas as to other cures for meats which may not be traditional.

Tare Brine

• 2 cups shoyu
• 1 cup mirin
• 1 cup sake
• 3 turns black pepper
• 2 chicken backs
• 1 pinch pink salt

Step one: Preheat oven to 450 degrees. In a dutch oven, brown chicken bones until just before burned. There should be a deep brown crust on the bottom of the pan.

Step two: On the stovetop over medium heat, add sake and scrape up browned bits. Then add shoyu, black pepper and mirin and simmer over low heat for 40-45 minutes.

Step three: While gnawing on the chicken backs, let the tare cool to room temp. Once tare has cooled, add pink salt.

Step four: Submerge jowl in tare brine, flipping daily for 7 days.

Step five: Smoke until internal temp reaches 150 degrees F.

There are nearly as many stages of plantain ripeness as there are dried chilis in this chorizo, but I opted for straight down the middle. More green and we are smoking potatoes, basically, and further towards ripe and we’ve got bananas. If there is an area to which I would push this would be I’d look for riper plantains. After all, I love bananas and chorizo at least as much as I enjoy plantains with chorizo. The reason I would tend to plantain is to avoid the mushiness of bananas. I like the firm texture of the plantain here and the transfer from the smoker would be difficult, at best, with bananas. Smoking them for 30 minutes over grape vines brings an interesting addition to the plantains. These plantains are great in the sausage, but are amazing on their own.

The remainder of the fabrication was similar to my last run at chorizo. Since the plantains were smoky, I opted to use bacon in place of fatback to enrich the sausages. The resulting sausages kept the depth of flavor, but with the smokey additions, the sausages have a extra savory qualities in droves.

Playing with flavor combinations in sausages is one of my favorite food projects. What are your favorite combinations that you have tried or look forward to trying?

Smoked Plantain Chorizo

• 660 grams ground pork
• 130 grams ground bacon
• 1 plantain, smoked, cut into a small dice and frozen.
• 15 various dried chilis
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 cloves
• 4 allspice berries
• 4 sprigs oregano
• 1/4 cup cider vinegar

Step one: Toast chilis, the set aside submerged in water for one hour. Blend with one cup of soaking liquid along with ground cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, as well as oregano and cider vinegar. Strain and set aside.

Step two: Combine pork, bacon, and reserved sauce in a stand mixer and whip with a paddle until bound. Then fold in smoked plantains.

Step three: Feel free to stuff the sausages into casings. Meatballs work. Patties work. Loose sausage works.

Walking around Logan Square, I spend a lot of time ducking into and out of little mercados. I see things for which I do not have much context, but some reason stick in my mind, even when I may not initially realize it. It was the odd phenomenon of trying to describe something I had seen, what ended up being “cecina”, to my wife without having the words that planted the seed for this project in my mind. There were thin sliced lean cuts of beef marinating in red liquid in the meat case, but I could not remember the name – finally it came to me in the middle of a work meeting.

Cecina can be many things. Traditionally, I believe that it is dried beef, almost bresaola dry, but can also be thinly sliced meat marinated and grilled. In the mercados where I see it, it appears to be really lean beef, likely round, and is not dried. There is no regard for keeping the cuts looking bright red and beautiful like in most meat cases. The cuts had to be delicious, because they were ugly as hell, but always seemed to move.

Then when I pulled a beef tongue from the freezer, the thought of a thinly cut Japanese-style beef tongue preparation, gyutan, came to mind. However, soon after, cecina pushed forcefully back into the frame. The thin strips of lean beef, albeit tongue, screamed for heat. I had tried tongue a number of ways – from pickled in jar to pickled into corned beef, from grilled to boiled to seared and many ways in between. If peeled and sliced appropriately, I love it. If it is spongy, it is awful.

But I figured if I sliced the tongue thinly, removed the peel, marinated the slices, and grilled them hard, then the probability of spongy tongue was small. So after slicing and peeling the tongue, I moved forward with the marinade. I had little idea where to start, so I cobbled together an adobo sauce with dried chilis, spices, and vinegar. After toasting and soaking the chilis, the mixture was blended and tossed with the sliced tongue and left to sit for a few days.

Once Saturday rolled around, so did the nice weather. I cranked the grill to maximum temps and seared the slices quickly on the grill grates.

I have been also trying to find uses for sourdough starter that is discarded as part of the process of developing a good levain. Something that came to mind was a combination of starter and shredded cheese which when baked would be flexible like a tortilla but provide something with intense flavor. They turned out like a thin pancake tasting of sour beer and cheese. After testing a number of ratios of cheese to levain, I stuck with a 2 to 1 ratio and moved forward. They were great little ways to get the marinated and grilled tongue from plate to mouth.

Upon first bite, I had guessed correctly on the impact of slicing the tongue thinly. It was tender and beefy. I would venture to guess that the vinegar did a little of the work on the tenderness.  The flavor was deep with the chili flavor, but the cloves and allspice provided sweetness. When topped with green salsa and cilantro, it was a deliciously balanced bite.

I have not seen much in the way of cecina made from anything other than, what appears to be round, but there is always tongue nearby in the butcher case at the mercados. It seemed only natural.

Cecina Marinade

• 2 ounces assorted dried chilis
• 2 cloves
• 5 allspice berries
• 1 teaspoon cumin seed
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 4 sprigs oregano
• 2 ounces cider vinegar
• 4 cloves garlic

Step one: Toasted seeded chilis in a dry, hot skillet. Submerge in water for 1 hour.

Step two: Blend chilis and 1 cup of soaking liquid with remaining ingredients.

Step three: Use as much as needed to coat the slices of tongue. Let sit for 2 days.

Step four: Grill hard. Eat while hot.

When in Alice Waters’ name is Spring going to get here? I have resorted to buying less than stellar asparagus to stave off the Spring fever. With an abundance of miso, mirin, and sake from ramen experiments, I thought of a miso pickle with a bundle of the West coast asparagus.

While I am no pickling rookie, this is the first time I have used the misozuke technique with vegetables and I like it. Unlike with the tofu misozuke, the asparagus was only left in the miso pickling mixture for a few days, not months. The flavor transfer does not need long however as, after only those few days, the miso flavors supplemented with the sweet mirin and the flavors from the sake, are present in the asparagus, which have further softened while buried in miso.

If you have had your fill of vinegar pickles and want to take an additional step, this easy and quick pickle is a very cool option. I find myself leaning Japanese more and more lately. Maybe once the heat comes and we move to a place where grilling will be easier that might change, but for now, I am all miso, all the time.

Miso Pickles

• 2 tablespoon mirin
• 1 tablespoon sake
• 1/2 cup white miso
• Asparagus

Step one: Combine mirin, sake, and miso in a bowl.

Step two: Blanch and shock asparagus.

Step three: Spread half of the miso mixture on the bottom of a non-reactive dish.

Step four: Lay down a layer of cheesecloth and top with blanched asparagus. Cover with additional layer of cheesecloth.

Step five: Cover with remaining miso mixture. Chill for 3 days.

Step six: Remove asparagus from pickling medium and eat.

Twitter again has proven to be a petri dish for ideas. I have been using this salt for four months or so when it was suggested that you might be able to cure meat using preserved lemons. I suggested one better, use the residual salt to actually do the curing. It takes the guess work out of how much to use.

I had dehydrated the salt from the 2012 batch of preserved lemons in December. The process is truly just dehydrating the salt. Since I had an oven that reached 160, I used the oven which gave the salt a slightly toasted quality, but you could easily use a food dehydrator or just leave it out spread on a silpat on a cookie sheet and let it happen over time. What is left is salt with the flavor of preserved lemons.

To make the bacon cure, I simply substituted the toasted preserved lemon salt in a basic cure (salt, sugar and pink salt) and added a bay leaf. Since this was an experiment, I picked up a small piece (only a pound) of absolutely beautiful pork belly at the Butcher and Larder. After a week, I rinsed the small strip of belly, let it dry overnight, then smoked it over dried grape vines. Grape vines are one of my new favorite smoking woods – really nice mellow smoke. After four hours, I allowed the belly to chill outside in the abnormally cold April weather. Once the belly reached outside temperature, I wrapped it and put it aside.

The next day, I removed the rind and sliced a piece to feed the girls. Being a protective parent, I had to sample before they ate it. The first and most forward tastes were of a good, dry-cured bacon, but the added complexity of the preserved lemon salt and the bay were really interesting additions. I like how, as you finish your bite, there is a hint of lemon and a mini-burst of acid. It gives the perception of a little balance where most bacon is relatively straight-forward.

Toasted Preserved Lemon Salt Cure
for 1 pound of bacon

• 50 grams preserved lemon salt
• 25 grams sugar
• 1 bay leaf, crumbled
• Pinch of pink salt

Combine ingredients and coat belly in cure for 7 days.

Smoke.

For more information on making bacon at home, click the Bacon Making link on the right side of the page.

Inspiration and ideas are great things, but without execution, they disappoint. This was an idea from a long time ago, but sloppy execution took it from the must-have-again list to the must-try-again list.

It was last fall, as I tossed a bunch of concord grapes into my brussels sprouts with lamb bacon, when the trigger was made. The concords were roasted with the sprouts and the lamb to where you could get a little bit in each bite. Despite being a huge fan of sprouts, I kept pushing them aside to get bites with only lamb and grapes. It was a combo that was unfamiliar but amazingly good.

In the wake of the inspired combo, I picked up a bunch of seedless green grapes in early October which, to me, tasted much like the concord, but had no seeds – the Niagra. Being how it was at the end of the season, I packed the grapes into the freezer until I got some lamb with which to pair them and some motivation to make it happen.

About halfway through making the pied paquets, many months later, I realized that I’d have lamb neck going wild, so I pulled the grapes from the freezer, added salt and herbs, and waited for the shredded lamb to be ready.

Once the lamb had completed cooking, I shredded it all, took what wasn’t needed for the pied paquets and added it to the bowl of grapes. I added two tablespoons of trotter gear to the bowl, stirred it and poured it into a Weck jar. It sat under weights over night and set up fairly well.

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This step is where things went sideways and I should have known better based on other lamb terrine experiments. I should have doubled or even tripled the amount of trotter gear I originally added. The terrine had visually set. It looked firm. Hell, it felt firm, but it was not firm enough to make complete slices. I was crushed, but knew it was my mistake. I did not take the time and care to make sure that I used the knowledge earned from previous mistakes.

Either the best part or, if you are like me, the worst part was that it was completely delicious. The flavors were just how I wanted them. The lamb neck was unmistakably lamby and the grapes, which were even more concord-y than I remembered, made for such a balanced bite. The herbs were slightly wilted, but still raw enough to provide a punch of green. However, the terrine still fell apart upon slicing.  Whatever the negative version of “the cherry on top” was that my grapes were gone and they would not show up again until early fall. That is a lesson – if you have a half cup of something and more it won’t be around for 6 months, then think hard, measure twice, and hope like hell.

I read food blogs – not as much as I’d like – but something I’ve always wondered is how people produce all of these dishes and they are all amazing. Where are the duds? Where are the misfires? I learn more from the misfires, or at least aspire to, than I do from the slam dunks. This was the type where I wasted a great opportunity. That waste won’t be forgotten. This wasted opportunity will be turned into a quick lamb ragu to take advantage of the flavors.

Lamb Neck Terrine with Grapes

• 1 lb. shredded lamb neck
• 1 teaspoon parsley, chopped
• 1/4 teaspoon basil, chopped
• 1/2 Cup Niagra Grapes
• 2 tablespoons trotter gear
• Salt to taste

Step one: Prepare lamb neck. I simmered mine with aromats and white wine until it gave easily to the touch, then shredded the meat from the bones.

Step two: Combine remaining ingredients. Stir to combine. Please add another 4 tablespoons of trotter gear. Please.

Step three: Pour into a terrine and place under weight, overnight.

Step four: Keep chilled until serving.

In full freezer cleaning mode in advance of an upcoming move, I grabbed the most delicious thing in my freezer door. A cryovac’ed bag of cured bone marrow from Matt Troost at Three Aces (you may remember this ingredient from Valentine’s Day anticuchos). I looked around at what I had and realized that I had some levain left over from making sourdough. At first, I simply thought of making marrow burgers for Sunday Dinner.

They are simple to make or at least as simple to make as you want. Butcher & Larder makes theirs using a multi-step process – basically making a mega-beefy Juicy Lucy. I opted to keep it even simpler. I grated an inch long piece of marrow over about three quarters of a pound a fantastically red beef. Then applied salt used to cure the same marrow and lots of black pepper.

Grating the marrow over the burger gave me an idea. As the temperature of the marrow got warmer, the marrow began to smear on the bottom of the grater. It looked like butter – meat butter. Could I make the buns alluded to above with a portion of the butter being replaced by marrow? Who knows? But I could try.

At this point, it would be good to step back and cop to that I have been making bread for a few months. I had checked out the Tartine Bread book and fell for it immediately. Homemade bread makes the house smell amazing. The process gives amazing feedback in terms of smells and the girls, who eat a ton of bread, deserve to eat good bread, not the overly expensive, terrible stuff at the store. I have a starter that I feed on the regular and every weekend, I make a few loaves.  Once you have the basics down, you can produce bread far better than most retail operations and for a fraction of the price.

Back to the buns, as a starting point, I figured half of the butter and all of the salt in the hamburger buns could be replaced by cured beef marrow. With leftover levain, some whole wheat flour, half of the butter, honey, and some water, I threw marrow into the bowl of my stand mixer and let it ride.

A few hours of bulk fermentation, I weighed out nine balls of dough, smashed them down and let them rise. I applied a bit of egg wash and baked them until the crust was a nice medium brown. This is the step where I would do things different if doing them again. First, I waited until the buns were cooling to grate more marrow over the top. I would have added the marrow mid-bake to allow the flavor to soak in a bit more. Second, I would have covered the cooling buns in plastic wrap, or at very least a towel. The buns had the texture that was just right for bread. Crusty on the outside and soft in the middle. What I like in bun texture is soft all the way through. By trapping the steam (effectively steaming the buns using their own heat and moisture), the outsides would not develop that hard crust.

But that is why we do these things, to learn.

As I heated up the grill and grilled the burgers, I took a sniff of the buns. The sour from the ferment, the sweetness from the honey and the beefiness from the double marrow application were at the front. This was before I was able to appreciate how the buns could be softer, so needless to say, I was very excited.

I cooked the burgers medium-rare, topped them with cheese, and slapped them on the bun. I topped the cheeseburgers with a mixture of ketchup, mustard, pickles and onions and lidded the burger with the top bun.

The interior of the bun had a nice crumb and had the structure of a whole wheat bun. The flavor was right on, but as I noted above, keeping the burgers below medium made the crust on the buns a detriment. With the temperature on the burgers, a softer bun would have made more sense. The first bite was a great combo of really beefy burger, a sweet and sour blast from the condiment and the bun. The whole wheat flavor was complemented by the sour from the sourdough, the sweetness from the honey, and the beefiness from the marrow. The beefiness was clear and present. This is not the raisin toast grilled cheese sandwich (which is delicious), but amplification of beefiness. And next time, I’ll fix the crust.

Beef Marrow Buns

• 430 grams whole wheat flour
• 300 grams water
• 40 grams honey
• 15 grams butter, softened
• 15 grams cured bone marrow, softened (if using regular marrow, add 10 grams of salt)
• 175 grams sourdough starter
• Additional marrow for sprinkling
• 1 egg

Step one: Combine water and starter in the bowl of a stand mixer to disperse starter.

Step two: Add flour, honey, butter, and marrow. Mix on medium using the dough hook for 10 minutes.

Step three: Bulk ferment dough at room temp for three hours. Fold dough on the hours.

Step four: Divide dough into 100g balls place each ball on a cookie sheet on parchment. Place another sheet of parchment on top and, with another cookie sheet, smash the balls into bun shaped discs.

Step five: Cover the buns with a kitchen towel and let rise at room temp for three hours. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Step six: Bake buns in oven with a pan of water for 10 minutes. Remove water. Remove buns. Apply egg wash and grate additional marrow on buns.

Step seven: Put buns back in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Remove from oven and cover immediately with a kitchen towel then a sheet of cling wrap (to keep buns soft).