E. Junker Profile

About me

I am complemented in my many vides de cusine by my wife, Jennifer, a much more accomplished chef. Her understanding of the workings of flour, eggs, and fats makes our kitchen so much richer than it would be under my own hand.

I was raised very rurally in Texas and introduced to a very rich and robustly flavored variety of ethnic food styles mostly in private farm and ranch homes (including ours) by the combination of the matrons of the hearths and their able cooks. If you're unfamiliar with this, imagine schnitzel or knedlíky prepared with a twist of creole and norteño insight. Now, imagine the inverse, say tamales filled with leftover sauerbraten, or a gumbo of okra, turnips, and kielbasa. Get the picture?

Another facet of this was my dad's penchant for the variety of different flavors constantly available in a good-sized and very cosmopolitan port city, 1950's Houston. I clearly remember my first introductions to Greek, Persian, Turk, Indo-chinese, Indonesian, Malay, Japanese, Hunan, Szechuan, East Shanghai, Filipino, and so on... cuisines in places where the patrons were only other adult men, some few "professional" young women - and certainly no other children. Often enough, I proved a sufficient curiosity that the cook or owner would come out to ask what I was doing there and often enough, I was offered special "treats". I remember particularly being invited to eat at a table with the help in the kitchens on several occasions - what a privilege! My father ordinarily found this to be interesting and along the line of what he intended for my upbringing - that is to say many-faceted and not confined to "white-tablecloth" society.

The next phase of my food education came from my being boarded with a Lebanese family in northern Mexico. To fully understand this part, you need to know that in the middle of a mid-sized city, Saltillo, we had a corral at the back of the house that regularly kept quail, chickens, ducks, turkeys, the occasional lamb, and a milking nanny and cow and their offspring. No one else I knew in the neighborhood received a daily delivery of grain and hay, but my family's business was public markets and granjas which are a different take on the principles of a Texas feedlot. I don't think I ever had ground beef at home - if it was from cattle, it was veal or tongue or sweetbeads. My nose still recoils at the smell of overcooked ground beef.

Just before I came back to Texas, I experienced that first spark of interest in understanding how foods came together in the kitchen, and from that point, I was never again a voyeur. Maybe a pest, maybe a help, but never just someone who dined and offered compliment.

Anyway, I've been lucky enough to get a lot of benefit from study and counsel of kitchens - home and restaurant - never having given in to formal training. Enough of my friends who are professionals have convinced me that I'm better off concentrating on my own table and feeding the parties Jennifer and I seem to regularly accumulate in our house. Ideally, that's between six and ten of us pretty much weekly, but several times a year, that's two or three dozen. A couple times a year that number exceeds a hundred and the food preparation for those events begins weeks in advance, usually by recruiting friends to join us in doing so and calling it a celebration. You may or may not know the term "tamalada", but my son's godmother instructed me in how Tom Sawyer would have managed the production of food had he been a Mexican and not had fences to paint.

What we do here in the home kitchen has really only one primary criterion - no ingredients from a package. Between the conventional and ethnically specific supermarkets, produce markets, and specialty and restaurant suppliers we know and our own garden, the closest we come to using processed anything is stuff that was smoked or cured in a distinctive manner as yet not in our repertoire.

I have an abiding respect for authentic regional and cultural cuisines and I'm just chauvinistic enough to have concluded that the only ones recognizably native to "America" are the three original to Texas and two to Louisiana. Whatever else is called a regional cuisine in the U.S. might taste good, but it's authenticity gets thin. We aim for refining authentic stuff.

Having advanced that (I'm sure, provocative) thought, I can tell you that we experiment with so-called fusions. My standby brush-on for meat, fish, poultry, and grilled vegetables incorporates liquid smoke distillate, tamarind, soya sauce, ground ginger, guajillo and arbol chile pureés, and either Tuscan or Palestinian olive oil. When I'm asked and begin to explain the recipe, I usually get stopped with a request that I make some extra next time. This sauce has become a standby Christmas gift for insiders.

Our dining-out sorties tend to target places that are BYOB and/or have openly displayed kitchens. One of our favorites combines the two and often enough we sit at a table in the kitchen, sharing our wine inventory and culinary curiosity with the staff. It's interesting to be invited to enjoy a conventional (and great, by the way) restaurant by friends and regard the trade-off of ambiance and experience necessary to serving a vicarious and disinterested clientele. Not something we relate to our hosts, but there nonetheless.

We leave the expertise of wine to friends -superbly talented amateurs and very well compensated professionals - who enjoy our table well enough to share secrets. My own, at least, is being notoriously cheap. As much as I haggle with butchers, fish mongers, and grocers, I really appreciate the wine that scores in the 80's and costs less than $15. Our mentors, while very aware of what wines might actually merit astronomical costs, have a fine sensibility for equilibrium at the other end of the price scale. And that's lucky, since a dinner for ten usually requires three to four each of a couple of wines. My arithmetic tells me that 4 bottles at $13 of an 85 score is a lot better than double the quality value of 2 bottles at $25 of a 90 score. Without a sense of economy, we'd be dining well together much less often.

That's my story. I'm here to learn and while I enjoy a good story, I appreciate candor.