Pan Seared Alligator over Red Beans and Rice, Round 1

So I had some alligator meat from ExoticMeats.com . . . . . . .

I've only ever had alligator one other time, and it was served chicken-nugget style. It was good. I would say something like an 80-20 chicken-fish.

I wanted to try to do something a little more interesting. For the second time ever, The Google failed to turn up anything very intriguing. One recipe involved marinating the meat in milk. Sounded weird.

So there's this guy named Brian that we run into fairly regularly at the Vin de Pays wine tastings. He's an instructor at the Pasadena Culinary Institute. I asked him how to go about making an interesting alligator dish. I few phone calls later I had an answer:

The Alligator

• ~1lb. alligator meat.
• ~1tsp. red pepper.
• ~3 cloves garlic, minced.
• 3 12oz. beers (IPA).
• salt & pepper to taste.

Boil the alligator in the IPA for ~20 minutes. Slice into thin strips. Sautee the garlic in olive oil, but do not brown. Add alligator meat and red pepper. Cook at med-high heat for ~10 minutes.

Red Beans and Rice

• 1lb. dry red beans.
• 1 fist-sized yellow onion, chopped.
• 1/2lb. smoked ham, chopped.
• ~1 large cloves garlic, minced.
• 1 cup white rice.

Cook the white rice according to standard instructions. (We use a microwave cooker, which makes perfect rice EVERY time.
Sautee garlic in olive oil, ~5 minutes. Boil dry beans ~5 minutes. Add garlic, ham, and onions. Boil ~2 hours. If you can blow on a single bean and make the skin crack, the beans are done. There should be some liquid left at the end. If you want it to be thicker, smash some of the beans while the pot is still boiling.

Serve beans over rice. The alligator can go on the side or on top. I tend to prefer to mix stuff like this around.

Notes:
Every now and then, we fail miserably. But we still learn.

The alligator was bad. It had a "muddy river-bottom" flavor that the boiling was supposed to remove. I imagine we didn't boil it long enough. Brian had said ~20 minutes, which we did, so I'm imagining more like 30-45 minutes. The meat was also a bit chewy, which longer boiling would theoretically correct.

The pan searing seemed boring. We ended up with muddy flavored, spicy meat. I would use less red pepper, and some other spices to add complexity.

One interesting idea that Casey came up with was kind of "east meets west and somewhere in between." It might be interesting to do this as a stir fry with a little bit of sesame oil and green onion. And more garlic.

Too much red pepper. It wasn't too spicy, it just didn't work.

We'll be trying this again some day. If anyone knows how to make this work, please let us know where we went wrong.

Llama Steak

So my brother-in-law went to Exotic Meats and bought me a bunch of game meat for christmas. An awesome gift for someone like me and many thanks to you, Danny. One of the things he got was llama steak, which I didn't cook for a good long while because I had no idea how it behaves in the kitchen. Unfortunately, even The Google failed to turn up any real useful information on preparation methods. If anyone ever actually reads this blog and has some info I don't, please forward it. That being said:

I essentially treated this like a filet. Llama is very lean, yet for some reason didn't cook nearly as quickly as I imagined. I pan seared them in a high-heat cast iron skillet with nothing more than a little salt and pepper (don't forget to put just a little olive oil on the steaks first), maybe five minutes to a side. Again, llama is lean, so there won't be a lot of fat drippings. The steaks started out fairly thin, but they thickened with cooking, and in the end look very similar to filet minon and are similar in texture as well. It's safe to eat rare, but if you like your meat a little more cooked I suggest butterflying them. Be careful though, because like any lean meat I imagine it's easy to overcook. Quite good with a red wine reduction.

An odd side note: The cut I had contained what LOOKED like a layer of fat running laterally across the entire center. Turns out it's actually a layer of tendon or something similar. This makes me think butterflying might be a good thing with this meat, simply to avoid having to try to cut through this layer. I have no idea what the anatomical explanation for this is.

The flavor is very similar to beef, though richer and denser, and obviously gamier.

-Caine