Milk Street Recipes

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Lily - We love using preserved lemons here at Milk Street. They add a briney, yet tart, depth to a whole host of dishes. In fact, Milk Streeters love them so much our favorite, Casablanca Market Preserved Lemons, are currently sold out of the Milk Street Store. Because conventional lemons are easier to find, we did not test our Lemon-Saffron Chicken (Tangia) recipe with preserved lemons. So my recommendation is to experiment! I would start with one or two small preserved lemons, chopped fine. Add them at the end, off the heat, as you would the zest and juice called for in the recipe. From there, you might want to experiment with adding some preserved lemon with the spices and the remainder off the heat to add different layers of flavor. Since preserved lemons are not quite as tart or sour as fresh lemons, you may want to add a little bit of fresh lemon juice at the end as well to brighten up the flavors. I hope this helps and happy cooking! Best, Lynn C.

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Jason - I actually make our Chiang Mai chicken on the grill all the time. It's a great alternative to standard American BBQ chicken on a hot summer day. I grill it using indirect heat - the same basic method as the Lemon-Lime Lacquered Chicken - but because the Chiang Mai chicken calls for leg quarters and breasts, rather than chicken parts, the cooking time will be a bit longer. Just make sure to temp the chicken (160 degrees for the breasts and 175 for the leg quarters) and you should be good to go. I do usually grill it over the hot side of the grill at the end to get the skin crispy, but I am comfortable with a little bit of char on the skin. This only takes a couple of minutes since all of the fat has rendered during the slow, indirect cooking process. You do need to keep a close eye on it, though, because it definitely can burn due to the glaze. For recipes with fish sauce, as long as you are doubling all of the ingredients it should be fine to double the fish sauce since everything should still be in proportion and balanced. However, you can always add some and taste as you add more until you feel happy with the flavor. I highly recommend Red Boat brand fish sauce and we carry their aged version, which has really complex flavor that has mellowed during the aging process, in the Milk Street Store. You can read about it and purchase it here: https://store.177milkstreet.com/products/blis-barrel-aged-fish-sauce. Thanks for writing us!

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi William – Thanks for contacting us! I assume you are referring to our recipe for Lemon Lime Lacquered Grilled Chicken (Inihaw Na Manok)? Recipe here: https://landmark-pulse.live/recipes/lemon-lime-barbeque-grilled-chicken-inihaw-na-manok-filipino If we were simply intending to use the marinade as a sauce with the same texture then, yes, we would have to cook it to kill any residual bacteria that may have been present from the raw chicken. However, at Milk Street, we are all about layering flavor and doing it as easily and possible. So, the reason we cook the marinade in our recipe is because we want to use those same ingredients (vinegar, ketchup, soy, garlic, bay, and lemon-lime soda) to flavor the chicken in another way. Rather than make an entirely new sauce to baste and serve with the chicken, we simply reduce the marinade to get a thick basting liquid and sauce. Doing so also creates a slightly different flavor profile than our marinade. Overall, the flavors are more concentrated - the sauce is sweeter, tangier, and saltier than as a marinade alone - so we are creating layers of flavor with the same ingredients. Because we are using this thick, sweet sauce to baste the chicken as it cooks, we cook the chicken over the cool side of the grill, using the ambient grill heat to cook the chicken through. Then we give it a quick blast over the hot side to brown it. This ensures the sauce won’t burn before the chicken cooks through. Indirect grilling is our go-to method for grilling chicken (or really any protein) where the surface would burn before the meat was cooked to the proper temperature.

Answered by Deb Steinfeld

The vinegar called for in this recipe is the white wine vinegar as the link implies. Plain white vinegar, such as Heinz, is usually referred to as distilled white vinegar. Hope this clears up the confusion. Deb at Milk Street

Answered by Lynn Clark

Hi Mark - Generally, we cook pasta in 4 quarts water with 2 tablespoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt. This ratio creates starchy water suitable for most sauces. But some pastas, particularly ones with cream- or cheese-based sauces or ones where we really want to thicken the sauce, require particularly starchy water to prevent them from breaking. In those cases, we cook in just 2 quarts water and 1 table­spoon salt to concentrate the starches. For this recipe, Pasta with Potatoes, Gorgonzola, and Fried Sage, we are cooking both potatoes and pasta in the same water which is why we called for 2 tablespoons of salt. Potatoes are bland and need the seasoning as well. As Maureen mentioned, if you are using table salt or Morton's kosher salt (which has a finer grain) you should reduce the amount of salt by exactly half for table salt and just over half for Morton's kosher. I hope this helps! Best, Lynn C.

Answered by Deb Steinfeld

Mark, Thanks for your question. A standard bunch of scallions is usually 7, 8 at the most. So this recipe would call for 28 to to 32 scallions. Sound like a lot but that’s is the corrrect amount. Deb at Milk Street