Bacon Wrapped Water Chestnuts Recipe - How to Make Scallion Curls | RadaCutlery.com
http://www.radacutlery.com/blog/bacon-wrapped-water-chestnuts-recipe/ Crunchy water chestnuts hugged in carmelized bacon will be the crowd favorite when you bring these to your next party or get together. Watch Chef Blake in the Rada Kitchen create these delicious bite size bacon appetizers in minutes. He will also demonstrate how to make scallion curls to garnish your plate of delicious bacon wrapped water chestnuts. Video Transcript: Hello, welcome to Rada's test kitchen, my name is Chef Blake, and today we're going to be making Bacon Wrapped Water Chestnuts. We've got some whole water chestnuts, which you can find canned. I got these in the Asian section of the grocery. You can find them fresh rarely, but canned ones are pretty good. We've got some thick cut bacon. What we'll do is take the water chestnut, lay it down, wrap it up, cut the bacon, skewer it up, and then we're going to put it in a dish. We have our oven preheated to about 500 degrees and we'll let those go for 20, 25 minutes or so. So I put my bacon out, you can spread it out with your knife. This kind of gives it a little bit more length or so. You put the water chestnut on there, there's not much science to this, wrap it up, and then I cut it with the knife, grab one of the toothpicks, try to get through the meat, not the fat, stab it straight through, put it on the pan. Kind of twist as you go through the chestnut. They do break, but if you wrap them good enough, they'll hold, no matter what. Alright, I got them equally spaced apart. There's a thin layer of bacon fat at the bottom fo the pan. We're going to throw them in the oven, in a really hot oven, it's going to take a while for them to cook. In a convection I usually go at 425, since this is conventional we'll go higher to 500 just because you want to get that nice browning on that bacon. So we have some scallions, or green onions, here, I had them sitting in some ice water, and it's amazing how much that just crisps them up. So it's important to crisp them up, get them nice and solid. We're going with the green parts, because the white parts we put in the teriyaki sauce. Just to utilize these green parts, this is going to be our garnish. We've got our little scallions here, and what I try to do is find our thicker pieces, make sure they're crisp, and I start pinching them together until you can stack them. Lay them flat on the board, kind of press them, like so. Try to go as long on the cut as possible. We're going to put them in some ice water and they're going to curl up a bit, a nice little garnish on top of these. Alright, throw away the scraps, because you want them all looking perfect and beautiful, like so, stick them in some ice water, let those chill for a little bit, hopefully they curl up nice and pretty. Alright, now our bacon water chestnuts are finishes, so we're going to take these out of the oven, nice and toasty. About halfway through the cooking I flipped them over, just to let them brown a little bit on the other side. After I pull them out of the oven, I'm going to flip them back over, just kind of let them rest for a little bit. We can pull these skewers out and plate them up. Now, there's something important that you should make sure you pay attention to when you're purchasing the toothpicks for these. Make sure you get the unscented ones. Before I pull it off, I just twist it, then I try to pull it out there. So we've got 6 on the plate here, filling our plate up just fine. So they're delicious how they are, but we have this homemade teriyaki sauce, I'm just going to take a little spoonful and lightly drizzle it over the top. It's got some scallions in the ginger and garlic in there. We have these scallion curls that we used the top parts of the scallions. Cut them fine, about a 16th of an inch wide, and we're just going to lay these right on top. Since we have a teriyaki sauce, we can also garnish it with some pineapple or other things, like sesame seeds for some color, but we're just going to keep it simple here. So, it's a nice appetizer, really simple, easy to hold. Voila! Give us some feedback, let us know what you think about it, and thank you for watching! Rada Cutlery is manufactured in Waverly, Iowa. Rada Knives are 100% Made in the USA - materials and craftsmanship. Rada Mfg. Co. has sold over 138 million kitchen knives and utensils since our start in 1948. Rada Cutlery kitchen products are available locally from Fundraising Groups and Independent Sellers or on the Rada Kitchen Store web site. Each year approximately 19,000 non-profit groups make 40% fundraising profit selling Rada Cutlery. Go to http://www.RadaCutlery.com to learn more about how your group can fund raise with Rada's kitchen product (knives, utensils, stoneware, cookbooks and quick mixes).