4th
January
2012
I received a copy of Modernist Cuisine for Christmas. First of all let me just say these books are incredible. The span of topics covered is amazing, although they don’t actually bother to have any recipes for cooking meat that don’t use sous vide (I think because they decided once you can cook sous vide you wouldn’t ever try anything else). Ok, the preceding is a slight exaggeration, there are some smoking and searing involved, but even there sous vide is always a step too.
So one of the first experiments was they had a wine suggestion. Wine stores are filled with all these gadgets to aerate wine with various venturi and other contraptions. Now I’ve known for a long time that sometimes you want to open a bottle of wine hours or even days before its going to be at its peak, especially for some young tannic wines, but I’ve never messed with these devices that are supposed to speed up the process.
So when the Modernist Cuisine book recommended putting the wine in a blender I had to try it. The claim is that just putting the wine in a blender aerates the wine more efficiently than any of the fancy devices. A friend had brought over a bottle of Nickel and Nickel Suscol Ranch Merlot 2007 and it seemed like a good candidate. We opened the bottle and blended half. An assistant poured a taste of the blended wine into 4 glasses and an equal size pour from the bottle into 4 other classes. The glasses were marked but we didn’t know which one was wish so this was a true blind tasting (although it wasn’t the “triangle” tasting that was recommended.
The two wines were distinctly different. One was closed, tannic, had little nose and wasn’t showing much fruit. The other was lush, with great fruit, nice balance, and a long finish. We didn’t have 10 judges but all 4 of us had the same reaction and everyone guessed that the lush one was the blended one. Turns out we were all wrong- the blended one was the one that was closed. So overall I’d call this approach a failure, although I do have two reasons I want to follow up some time. The first is that the wine while it had plenty of structure was actually drinking nicely just out of the bottle anyway, so maybe we needed to start with something even bigger and more closed. The second is its possible we didn’t wait long enough after blending.
posted in Books, Cooking, Wine |
27th
October
2007
One big problem that technology hasn’t solved at all. I’ve got tons of cookbooks. They fill an entire cupboard in my kitchen. Yet, when I want to find some good recipes for something specific, it can be a total mess. I want to cook a killer cassoulet. I love cassoulet, and its one of those dishes that can be a great test for a place that tries to make it. But of the 100s of cookbooks, where can I find great cassoulet?
I eventually found what looks like a good recipe in the Balthazar cookbook, but its still a mess. Often for recipes I wind up going with the Joy of Cooking or Larousse instead of something more interesting just because they have everything. I’d kill for something that makes it easier to find what I want…
posted in Cooking, Technology |
18th
July
2007
posted in Cooking, Food |
8th
May
2007
My electric Smoker has been busted and with BBQ season approaching I’m getting more and more motivated to fix it. Kurt who is a BBQ pro recommends the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker/Smoker as the only way to go for hassle free good results. Who am I to argue with an expert? Hopefully mine will arrive by Friday.
There is also a site that has all the info in the world about cooking with these- http://virtualweberbullet.com.
posted in Cooking |
4th
April
2007
I made a Coke-braised brisket for Passover Seder at Hillel’s last night. I basically used this recipe except that I doubled it (the brisket was 8lbs), and I used extra garlic and liquid spagetti sauce instead of dried. I also roasted some cipolini onions and small carrots for about an hour and tossed them into the liquid for the last 20 minutes.
The meat turned out super soft and juicy (cut with a fork, falls apart), but really flavorful. No cola taste that I noticed, just great comfort food. Also in the past I had tried cooking vegitables with a brisket for a longer period of time and they turned out gross- the roast + 20 minutes in the liquid thing worked out just about perfectly. I also used the left-over liquid as a gravy/table sauce. It felt a little thin to call it gravy but was still nice.
posted in Cooking |
4th
December
2006
For the past couple of years Hillel and I have wanted to do some interesting things for Thanksgiving beyond the usual turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry. We often talked about ideas like imagining thanksgiving as an Asian holiday.
Last year we tried to do thanksgiving as a small plates meal. Overall I’d call it a disaster. Some of the dishes worked out ok, some failed (truffle mini-souffles) and the many-courses of small plates format kept a bunch of us psycho busy in the kitchen the whole night.
This year Michael agreed to host Thanksgiving and in the end almost 50 people were invited. With that many people we needed some good coordination and we had an opportunity to do both traditional versions of many dishes as well as jazzing things up a little bit. We did three turkeys- one traditional roasted, one deep friend, and my experiment for this year was a Peking Turkey.
Basically the idea was to cook a turkey using the techniques normally applied to Peking duck. Part of the motivation was some less than stellar skin on previous turkeys. Since Peking duck is known for its great crispy skin I wondered if the approach would work on a turkey.
The basic notion is to dry out the turkey and then baste it with some flavored boiling water for 10 minutes. This seals the skin and helps keep the juices in when you cook it. Then you hang it for 8 hours with a fan on it and brush it with a honey-water mix every couple of hours. Then you roast it fairly conventionally. The skin browned fairly quickly, so make sure to cover it in foil and turn down the heat once it browns.
Overall I think it worked out very well and I’d be tempted to try it again. The usual duck recipes tell you to remove the leg bones and I should have followed that- when the turkey was hung the blood all accumulated in the drumsticks and couldnt really drain.
Hillel wrote up some of the meal here on tastingmenu with some pictures. One other observation- I think the class we took at the CIA was some pretty good prep for an event like this. Cooking for 50 can be pretty hectic and we had it mostly all prepped and ready to go with only reasonable amount of work on Thanksgiving afternoon itself.
posted in Cooking |
5th
June
2006
With the weather turning nice I’ve started regular BBQ parties again. I was hoping to do my slow-smoked dry-rub
ribs yesterday but we were travelling over the weekend and I didn’t have the necessary stuff in time (the ribs).
So instead I grilled some lamb with my special marinade. Note that its really
important to understand the difference between BBQ and grilling. Barbeque is
slow cooking with smoke and indirect heat while grilling is cooking relatively
quickly over direct heat. For the marinade my “secret” ingredient is roasted
dried fenugreek leaves from Vij’s Rangoli (the market next to Vij’s) in
Vancouver. I mix them with salt, fresh chopped rosemary from the garden and a
few other herbs (winter savory, some crushed pepper and some thyme) and some
olive oil. Marinade for 4 or 5 hours, heat up the grill. Throw the lamb on the
grill on one side, sear it, then turn it over and reduce the heat. Note that the
grill will flare up quite a bit from the olive oil but that’s usually ok since
you want to sear the outside anyway. You just don’t need to blast the heat
super-high.
I think they turned out pretty great. Hillel mentioned that they were salty
and I did overdo the salt a bit, but the interesting thing is that he mentioned
that he had thought the salt was just from the lamb. Proper seasoning (using
salt) is really important to cooking and its one of those things I often get
wrong, but it was pretty cool when it works out such that it integrates well
with the dish.
Today I plan on shopping fpr materials for my spice rub for some proper ribs
for next week. I also want to try a pork shoulder sometime soon but I need to
make sure I have the heat on the smoker fixed for that.
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posted in Cooking |
17th
March
2006
Kat is busy taking her test this weekend and requested Corned Beef for dinner as a St. Patricks day thing, plus the high-
protein thing is supposed to be good for test taking. I think it turned out pretty good- Whole Food’s had a bunch
they had pre-marinated so I bought a two pound cut and they filled up the bag with a bunch of the brine. I took
it home and put it in the Staub pot with a bit of extra water, some beer, potatoes, carrots, boiler onions, and
a few cloves of garlic. Brought the whole thing to a boil and then turned it down low with the top on for about
4 hours.
I think the main mistake I made was to not skim the surface earlier. There was a bunch of gray congealed stuff
that wasnt very appetizing and while I removed it later it had already gotten all over the veggies. Id also
say that the result wasnt an explosion of flavor- it was a perfectly good corned beef, but it was still boiled
meat Irish-style. Im wondering what is the magical difference between this and the great New York pastrami?
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posted in Cooking |