April 16, 2010

Fanatic freed from phobias at famous food facility (i.e. The Culinary Institute of America)

Night view of the front of Roth Hall (June 2008)

I am a cook – NOT a baker or pâtissier. So why then, you may ask, did I go to the venerable    Culinary Institute of America for a 4 day intensive course on baking and why am I going to be returning at the end of April for a 5 day boot camp training in pastry making? 

Four or five years ago, in one of those awful airplane magazines which normally have a bunch of dumb articles on famous people I don’t care about, I read an article on culinary study vacations that ordinary people can take. One of the destinations described was the Culinary Institute of America where, the article told me, I could take a boot camp program for serious cooks – amateur or not. I tucked that little nugget of info in the back of my brain and decided that some day I would try to do this. After a couple of years of dreaming, I finally decided that life wasn’t waiting for me and, in June of 2008, I took my first trip to the CIA in Hyde Park, New York. There I spent a week taking their 5 day Advanced Culinary Boot Camp. The experience changed my life.

If you have read the about me page on this blog, you might recall that I have been cooking all my life so it is not like I didn’t feel at home in a kitchen. But, wow, did I learn some things. I am not talking about things like how to make a particular sauce, a specific gratin or special preparation for a precise kind of fish. Sure we did these kinds of things but, truly, I can’t remember a single dish I made during those 5 days (I have them all neatly annotated in a binder for future reference – if I ever think to need them). I am talking about learning about how to execute particular techniques correctly and otherwise how to be in a kitchen with confidence. At the CIA I learned a great deal about how to handle food (protein, most notably): what to look for, how to feel, see and smell the food and how to go about turning it into something delicious and desirable. I learned how to slice up a primal cut of meat, filet a fish, turn a whole chicken into a big boneless mass of fun-to-stuff protein. I learned how to make a forcemeat, stuff and tie a roast and make a whole loin into a pile of steaks.   

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Above all, I learned to have no fear. Once back home in my own kitchen, I found I was comfortable firing the pan when I want to deglaze it, flipping the sauteuse when I need to move the contents around and using just as many pots, dishes and tools as I need or want to use. Alas, as it turned out, at the CIA I had learned how to let go of my cooking inhibitions! 

So it occurred to me that perhaps if I went to an intensive class on baking and pastry, I might pick up some similar skills in the bake shop. In fact, I rarely bake or make pastry at all, except around winter holiday time. I had never really though about why I  am not much of a baker or a pastry maker (other than to avoid letting the fat person within get out). It is certainly not because I don’t enjoy these pursuits. However, I’m not much one for eating sweets. I much prefer to get my big calories fried, thank you. Also, my mom didn’t bake much. I only remember one sweet that she made without a recipe. Dessert in our household was an amazingly rare event reserved for holidays and usually brought by others.

But I do adore bread and things made with yeast. (A taste I acquired after moving to the Bay Area where bread is a religion.) When fresh fruit is in season, I like to make a pie or a cobbler. For dinner guests, I feel obliged to offer some kind of dessert and for myself, I enjoy a little morsel of something sweet now and again, here and there. But really, unlike my desire to cook, I rarely have a yen to go to the kitchen to bake as a matter of recreation.   

The bread thing on the other hand, that is different. I just love the stuff. I love it fresh and yeasty and crusty and, sometimes, oh my, I love it with stuff in or on it. (How about cinnamon, spices, olives, cherries, chocolate chunks, raisins, dried fruit, etc., etc. (Mmmm, I am making myself hungry.) But alas, I have always suffered from a fear of yeast. It always seemed so fussy, so needing of exactitude. When I cook, it is all about a little of this and a little of that. But bread? Bread requires precision, doesn’t it?    

Two out of four days of my recent CIA adventure were spent on the subject of bread. It turns out, that it is not all that persnickity. Sure it has to be scaled out and mixed together in the right order. And yes, you have to be careful not to over do your mixing and your kneading, lest you make it tough. Nevertheless, with the help of modern machinery (my handy-dandy stand mixer) it is really pretty easy to pull off a success. And, best of all, I can add all that good fun stuff to it! No more fear of yeast have I!

As an added bonus, I learned how to make incredible cookies which, at my whim, I can alter and adjust to suit my creative needs. I learned the right way to do a number of things I otherwise thought I knew how to do and I learned a number of “tricks” for giving my baked goods and bread a beautiful and professional finished look.   So I will be off again to the CIA on April 25 to begin a full week of pastry making. I know now that croissants and other Viennoiserie are destined to become part of my kitchen repertoire and I will leave the CIA reasonably proficient in buttercreme and ganache. I will always be much more of a cook than a baker or a pâtissier but I am fairly certain that when I am done, all cake phobias will be banished from my consciousness.       

If you want to read a fun book about the CIA, I would suggest you get Michael Ruhlman’s  The Making of a Chef. I read this book after I first returned from The Culinary and it was all soooooo real to me. It is a good quick read full of many laughs and much joy. Michael talks a little about how The Culinary transformed his life at Wasabimon this week.

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April 12, 2010

Pulled Pork Preeminent

One of the justifications I used to talk myself into buying the Sous Vide Supreme was that it would replace my crock pot. Now those who know me are aware that it is my intention, in just a little more than two years (781 days, but who’s counting), to move to New York City. So this rationale is no matter of little importance. I am going to have to fit a s#%tload of rooms worth of all my important stuff into a shoe box apartment in order to become happily ensconced in the Big Apple. Thus, until such time arrives, I have come up with a rule to live by: anything new which is brought into the house must give rise to the throwing or giving away of something of equal or greater volume. The crock pot, while being shorter than the SVS, definitely has a bigger footprint, i.e. takes up more space in a closet or cabinet.

I have one friend who has an SVS and when he heard this, he said “nooooo, the SVS will not replace the crock pot.” I took that as a challenge. Actually, my friend should have asked me just what I do with the crock pot. All I do with the crock pot is (1) make soup, and (2) make pulled pork. Try though I might, I have never found anything else to do with this appliance that can’t, just as well, be done on top of the stove.

“Slow cooker” you say? Oh no, that is just not so. The darn thing simmers the bejeebers out of everything. I can braise just fine in the oven and I can cook soup on the top of the range, thank you very much. But for pulled pork…well I bought the SVS and so it was time to put up or shut up.

Lets just say that something magical happens to a fatty chunk of pork shoulder or boston butt when it goes into the crock pot for 6 or 8 hours. Even my darling, adolescent, loving, sweet, wonderful, adorable brat of a  step-daughter asks for this dish regularly. Rubbed with a beautiful spice mix I have developed (mild chili powder, cumin, smoked paprika, ground mustard seed, granulated garlic & onion, ground coriander seed, and salt) this relatively cheap cut of meat becomes an intensely flavorful pile of porky deliciousness that my family adores. Most often, we stuff it into fresh tortillas with refried beans, spanish style rice, sauteed veggies and other favorite condiments. I call it our “make your own fajitas” meal.

So I had to prove to myself that pulled pork would make the grade coming out of the SVS. For this experiment, I just happened to have a beautiful chunk of Red Wattle in my freezer, perfect for the main ingredient in our fajita fest. I thawed that chubby chunk-o-piggy out and rubbed my spice mix all over the surface of the roast with abandon before bagging it up with my Food Saver. Many sous vide recipes talk about how you have to use a little restraint with spices when cooking by this method but I have found this applies to only a limited range of items. This includes some herbs, especially bay and rosemary, and garlic (which I am, alas, unable to eat much of anyway). I was not worried about overdoing my pork rub. I set the water oven on 60C (140F) and put the sealed up meat in to cook for 48 hours!

 

The results were, if I may say, award winning. Better than out of the crock pot, by far, the pork was tender, exceptionally moist, just the right doneness and orgasmically flavorful. There was not a trace of dryness as is often the case with the slow cooker. The meat pulled away from the fat very easily so that in the end we were left with a much more low calorie version of our old crock pot standard. The spice rub gave the meat a wonderful, smokey, complex flavor that was exactly what we had come to love. One interesting thing is that we poured a couple of cups of spicy meat juice out of the cooking pouch. I froze this wonderful liquid figuring that it will make a delicious sauce for a chop or tenderloin in the future.

Say bye bye, crock pot!

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April 8, 2010

Fantastic Flavor from Fermented Fruit

For me, many things culinary are an experiment. I often order food I have never tasted before when I see it on a menu and I regularly cook things I have never previously prepared. (Most often, without really using a specific recipe.) I like to try cooking with exotic and unknown ingredients. So, it was no big deal that when I put up a couple of jars of preserved lemons I really had no idea what I was doing! (If you want to know how I made them, have a look here.) Nevermind that I had never cooked with preserved lemons before. Nevermind that I had only eaten a couple of dishes containing them on a few occasions. Nevermind that I didn’t really know anyone else who had cooked with them (outside of the few restaurants where I had experienced them). And, nevermind that I had never tasted them “naked” in order to really know exactly what they are! I just knew they were going to be fun to play with.

I had to wait a month for the fermentation process to work its magic on my lemons but OMG was it worth the wait. During that month, I did my research and read plenty of recipes calling for preserved lemons. I learned quite a bit about how to prepare the lemons for use. Some people utilize the resultant juice and pulp, as well as the rind. Many, if not all, separate the rind from the pulp. Most just use the rind – shredded, chopped or minced. All recipes instruct the cook to rinse the lemons lightly before chopping, etc., to get rid of some of the saltiness and “goop” (though mine don’t seem so salty). Quantities called for vary – from heavy to light – depending on how “lemony” one wants their end result to be. Many, many of the recipes I found were of a Moroccan or North African origin or at least heavily influenced by the cuisine of those areas. Preserved lemons seem especially favored in various tagines (a kind of stew that is cooked in a special kind of vessel) though I have mostly had them as part of a broth or sauce in restaurants.

Once the lemons were ready, I couldn’t wait to cook with them.  I wasn’t going to let a little thing like having no idea about what I was doing stop me, was I? Now I don’t have a tagine vessel and frankly, these stews don’t really float my cooking boat so I decided to go in the direction of the broth. With all this sous vide stuff going on in my kitchen, sometimes as my friend Josh has been known to say, I just have to walk over to the stove and turn on the burner! A tasty broth with seafood, fish or crustaceans can be truly easy and satisfying to concoct and it takes no time at all – right there on top of the stove.

I went to the freezer and pulled out some wonderful giant prawns I like to keep around. I tossed those babies (previously portioned out and sealed up with my Food Saver). I put about ten to a package and then when I want to use them all I do is toss the package into a bowl of tepid water for about 15-20 minutes to thaw them. Then they get shelled and made ready for what I am cooking, which takes all of about 5 minutes. Often times, I use the shells as a basis for a sauce but I did not do that this time. Once peeled and cleaned, I set the shrimp aside on a paper towel.

I also took out a pint of rich chicken stock (made from the stewing hens I buy from Farrar Out Farms): this is an important staple in my kitchen. I thawed that stock quickly in the microwave (no, not in the plastic it was frozen in). The stock went to the stove in an uncovered, 4 quart stock pot, over a medium heat.

Meanwhile, I opened a can of San Marzano tomatoes (these are found at my local italian grocery store) scooped out about a pint of these and dumped them into a colander set in a bowl to drain the liquid. The reason for doing this is so that I can pick over the tomatoes to remove the core and any little bits of left over skin. Using my favorite kitchen tool, the immersion blender, I pureed the tomatoes with the liquid. and then strained it through my handy, dandy chinoise into the sauce pot with the stock. The mush that is left over in the chinoise has some pulp and lots of seeds. The resultant liquid is rich and velvety smooth.

To the pot I added a ton of finely chopped, preserved lemon rind and the pulp from the lemons that I had picked over and pushed through a medium sieve (leaving the seeds and membrane behind). Then I let my fingers do the walking through my spice cabinet where I found and added 1/4 tsp cayenne, 1/8 tsp white pepper, 1 heaping tbs of special indian curry powder (use the curry you like), and a tbs of fresh yellow mustard powder. I didn’t add any salt because I wanted to wait to taste the soup after the lemon had cooked into it for a while. With preserved lemons, you have to be careful about salt, especially when you are using the lemon juice from the jar that you did your preserving in. I hit this mixture with the immersion blender again, just to smooth out the lemon and to mix the spices in thoroughly.

Next, I brought the liquid just barely to a boil while stirring and let it simmer for about ten minutes to marry the spices to the broth. Amazingly, there was no froth or foam to worry about – the broth stayed a wonderful velvety texture because of all the straining and blending. I had previously done. When I tasted it, I found that I did not need to add more salt. 

Just before I was ready to serve up my creation, I tossed the waiting shrimp into the soup, turned up the fire a bit and stirred until they were no longer translucent – this took all of about two or three minutes. I had chopped up some fresh cilantro for a garnish and was ready to dish up our meal in my favorite wide lipped bowls. Dinner was a lemony, spicy, amazingly flavorful shrimp stew. With some buttered up, toasted ciabatta to soak up the sauce, Bob and I were completely satisfied. This dish is definitely good enough for company. As a matter of fact, if it was served to me in a restaurant I would return to order it again! I am certain it will work well with a variety of fish or seafood.

 

Here is a little thing to take note of if you are on a diet: this was a completely healthy, low-calorie meal. The only fat was from the butter I put on the bread (about a tablespoon for 4 nice chunks of ciabatta) and that which naturally occurs in the shrimp. If I were not perpetually on a diet, I would have added some cold chunks of butter to the sauce just before serving to thicken and enrich the soup but, in truth, I did not miss it at all. If you are one of those naturally thin people who never has to worry, I would encourage you to go ahead and add the butter.

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April 5, 2010

This little piggy was eaten…

Ok, if you have not yet figured it out, I LOVE pork. What’s not to love? There is nothing dull about a good piece of pork, even if it is served sans sauce. Perfectly simple, mildly seasoned, high quality pig requires little if any fanfare, so long as it is properly cooked (and not overcooked, of course).  Sure, it is nice when encrusted, enrobed, ensauced or enstuffed (I made that up) but, my point is if it is good meat in the first place, it can stand on its own four trotters.

Thus, when I looked in my freezer and found a beautiful package of inch thick Red Wattle pig loin chops, I decided to keep it very basic. After I thawed these gorgeous ladies, I placed them in a brine of 7% kosher salt and 3% sugar. In the brining solution I placed a bay leaf and a couple of allspice berries. (If you had x-ray vision you could see these under the chops.) I covered the dish and placed the meat in the fridge for a couple of hours. The point of the brine is to cause a chemical reaction in the meat that aids in the retention of the natural juices in the muscle. If you do it right, it is not at all salty and protein that is brined stays very, very moist.

 Once that time had passed, I took the chops and dried them off real well with paper towels. Then, into the sous vide bag they went. Not wanting the chops to be lonely, I added about a teaspoon of bacon grease per chop. Yum, yum, yum, I love pig fat with my pig!

I heated the SVS up to 59C (138.2F) and sent those beauties swimming for 45 minutes. In the meantime, my husband cooked up a mess of what we call “home fries.” These are diced, par-cooked waxy potatoes that are fried up in a little lard with some onions and herbs. Home fries are pretty much his specialty (i.e. the only thing he knows how to cook) and he makes them as good as any I have ever eaten.

I tossed together some watercress and arugula with a tiny bit of olive oil and apple cider vinegar to add some tang to the plate. I also put a bowl of chunky organic apple sauce on the table cause where I come from, a pork chop without apple sauce is just plain wrong.

When I took the chops out of the bag I torched the surface to give them that pretty look and to crisp up the fat. I probably should have trimmed the fat better before they went into the brine. I am still learning and fat and sous vide – it does not cook the same way in there because the low temperature cannot get it to render or crisp up. I also could have been a little more aggressive with the torch but I am new to this trick – next time!

It was a fabulous albeit very simple meal but I really didn’t want it to be different. The meat was slightly pink throughout the entire chop. Only the outside edge had that white port color as the result of the torching it took. This Red Wattle pork is more naturally flavorful than any other I have ever had. Not gamey or at all strange tasting as some pork can be. Rather it is intensely “porky” and delicious.

The brining process causes the meat to become even more tender than it already is and it also helps the natural juices to stay in the protein. The sous vide, slow and low cooking process prevents any part of the pork from becoming overcooked. All of this translates to exceptionally moist, evenly cooked, dense meat that is tender and incredibly flavorful. Given that it is so perfect in these ways, I just was not in the mood to go saucing it up or adding any other flavors to distract from the rich porky taste it already had.

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April 1, 2010

The Finest Food From Fat

I know people who don’t like chocolate, I know people who don’t like cake. I know people who don’t like tomatoes and I know people who don’t like steak. (Sounding a bit like Dr. Seuss here, I am!) These are things I cannot imagine disliking. Amazingly, I have met more than one of each. But I have never met anyone (vegetarians don’t count) who doesn’t like bacon. I am certain no matter what that if a carnivore exists who doesn’t like bacon, they are a unicorn.

So bacon lovers, here’s the deal: if you have never eaten homemade bacon, do whatever you must to get some. It being homemade, you can’t buy it. That does not mean that you can’t buy incredibly great bacon but the bacon that is homemade defies description.You can’t imagine what you are missing.

Happily, it is fairly easy to make, there are just a couple of little tricks.

Trick one: you are going to have to get some “pink salt,” otherwise known as Instacure #1 or tinted curing mixture. (In Europe, they use saltpeter which is potassium nitrate.) Pink salt is a mix of plain salt (93.75%) with nitrate (6.25%). The reaction of nitrate with certain bacterias in meat, produce nitrite. Nitrate can be toxic if ingested in a large quantity. On the other hand, it is the nitrite that kills the bad bacteria and otherwise helps to transform the meat into the desired end product also contributing to the desired rosy color of the meats in which it is used. By mixing the nitrate with a ton of plain salt , it is diluted substantially so that you would have to eat an awful lot of just plain salt to get to a meaningful level of toxicity.  Assuming you are not a complete dufus and you follow the simple instructions for combining your pink salt with your other ingredients which go into your bacon curing mixture (kosher salt, sugar, and herbs and/or spices of your liking), you really have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Nitrate and nitrite got a really bad rap in the 80′s and ever since then some people have been avoiding the stuff. It was believed that in large enough quantities, the chemicals might cause cancer. But according to Harold McGee, the guru of food chemistry, if you don’t eat a huge bunch of food with these chemicals in it, you really don’t need to be concerned.  The amount that you are going to use for your bacon really is miniscule especially compared to the size of the risk you are significantly minimizing with its use. That risk, the one you are minimizing, is botulism and you don’t want it (unless, in the form of Botox, you have it injected in the right places by your qualified medical professional). But you do want homemade bacon, so just get over your concern about the pink salt. Everything in moderation.

Trick two: You have to obtain some pork belly. The higher quality you get, the better. Get thee to your sustainable, local farmer and order some. How do you find your farmer? There are plenty of ways, but one is to go to www.slowfoodusa.org and follow the links through to your local chapter’s web site. There you should find a list of farmers’ markets and possibly even some links to specific purveyors of good pork in your area. Of course, you can just do an internet search and you should come up with other resources as well – here is a great site to check. You can even order some over the internet from various gourmet purveyors. (For example, Food52 has a New York resource through its online store.) Here in the St. Louis area we have Prairie Grass Farm, Farrar Out Farm, Greenwood Farms and Hinkebein Hills, among others. If you can Red Wattle Belly or other heritage breed type pig meat, this is even better.

Trick three: If, like me, you prefer your bacon smoked, you have to find a place and a way to do this. A barbeque grill will work – just know that you have to keep stoking the smoke for a couple of hours until the bacon gets up to temperature. You will want to heat up the grill, get some wood chips smouldering with the coals or heat source being only beneath the wood or otherwise indirect, and put that cured belly on the grill. If you want, you can buy a cheap smoking gizmo to set in your grill at most hardware stores and this time of year you can even buy the smoking wood there. Choose the flavor of wood chips that most please you. I prefer a mix of applewood and hickory. Hickory is very strong and applewood is sweet. If you have a line of any other fruit woods, go for it! Soak some of the wood in very hot water for at least an hour before you put it over the fire. Add back some dry chips to get the smoke going and go to town. Leave the meat on the covered grill until the belly reaches an internal temperature of 150F.

Once the belly has been refrigerated and is thoroughly cold, it becomes easy to slice. Hand sliced bacon is rustic and likely to be thicker than the store bought stuff. But, if you are like me and you put tons of sugar in your cure, the thick cooked bacon will have a fantastic chewiness to it. OMG TDF! It will keep in your fridge for a good long time – up to a couple of weeks if you keep your fridge nice and cold (I keep mine at 34-36F). Mostly what I do, however, is slice it and package it up in serving sized freezer packages.

Basic bacon cure (per Michael Ruhlman):

  • 1 pound (450 grams) of kosher salt
  • 1/2 pound (225 grams) sugar (use superfine sugar if possible)
  • 2 oz (50 grams) pink salt

It is really important to use a scale for these ingredients and it is best if you can do it in grams, for greatest accuracy. Salts and sugars vary in volume substantially. If they were smushed in the course of getting to your pantry, the crystals are broken, etc., etc. You get it, right?

Mix these ingredients together very well so that the pink salt is thoroughly distributed throughout. This will take care of about 5 pounds of pork belly. Now is the creative part: figure out what you want to season your bacon with. I use a palm full of juniper berries and a teaspoon of so of black pepper corns which I crack with a rolling-pin. I also toss in a sprig or 4 of thyme per chunk of bacon. After I have thoroughly coated the meat in the basic cure and sprinkled on the seasonings, I top it off with a generous sprinkling of brown sugar on top. Other possibilities include pouring a mess of maple (instead of brown) sugar on top, leaving out the sugar completely and using lots of herbs or tons of cracked pepper. I have even heard of people using Jack Daniels (yuck).

All this gets put into ziplock bags (one piece of meat per bag), closed up and put in the fridge for about a week. Each day I turn the bags to redistribute what will become a liquid in the bag.

 

Now I’m going to tell you this: there are many different ways of doing this and I myself have tried it a number of those ways. For me, this is the easiest, most effective and thus my favorite. I have never gotten bacon that was too salty this way. Nonetheless, I invite experimentation!

Because of the high sugar content of my bacon, when it cooks it caramelizes beautifully giving the finished product a texture that can’t be matched. The sugars come to the surface and out into the bacon grease so you have to be a little careful with your heat – fry the bacon a little more slowly than you might the store-bought stuff. Another thing is that homemade bacon does not have a lot of water in it. It will render more evenly and quickly as a result. But, the most striking thing is that it tastes so much more heavenly. Can’t you just smell it?

 

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March 29, 2010

Prosciutto, Parma, Serrano, Iberico, Bayonne: A dry cured ham by any other name hopefully tastes as sweet.

Last fall, along with three other people, I bought a Red Wattle pig. I was actually part of a larger group of 12 people who bought three little piggies. We bought them when they were not yet ready for market and still happily being fattened by the farmer. Of course, when we took delivery, our pig came to us all nicely packaged according to our specifications and ready for eating. This was the second time we did this and we learned a great deal our first time. Namely, we learned that 4 people is just the right number for pig sharing. We also learned something about each other.

First time around, Our Fearless Leader  and organizer broke us up into teams based on our preference regarding the form in which we wanted to receive our pig. To figure this out he asked us to answer these questions:

(A) Am I a “Just gimme my Pork” type of person? 
 
OR
 
(B) Am I a “Just gimme my Pig” type of person?
 
Brilliant! And, obviously, NO, I am not a wuss. The “just gimme my pork” folks had their bacon cured, their hams cured and their sausage made for them by the processor which the farmer hired. They were not interested in offal, either. Me, on the other hand, I definitely want my pig unground, uncured and butchered in a way that leaves me plenty of options.

From those first pigs, I cured a whole mess of bacon and guanciale (pork jowl) for my team and a few other folks. It came out fabulous and we ate gourmet BLT’s with micro greens and homegrown tomatoes all the late summer long. We were blown away by how good bacon could be.

Wanting to learn about charcuterie, I took the liver and I made homemade braunschweiger. The first batch ended up in Sadie’s dish but the second batch came out really good – we ate it all up. Then I tried my hand making boudin blanc – a wonderful, mild white sausage made from a mix of chicken, pork and cream. What could be bad. My family at that up in a hurry! After we got the Red Wattle, I invited a group of guys from the buying group over to my house and we had a sausage making party. You can read all about it here. We made all sorts of wonderful things including two kinds of salami, chorizo and bratwurst. Even after that, I still had a little sausage meat left so I combined it with some humanely raised, pastured veal to make bockwurst. We have been dining on that for a while and it is delicious!

With that first pig, even though we were the only group who said “gimme my pig” it was decided (not by me) that the hams would be cured at the processor. I didn’t really care because I don’t eat ham…unless it is dry cured, prosciutto type ham. The other ham is just yucky to me. I find it to be watery, salty, squishy and generally unappealing. Even our super pure, all natural, ham that came from our happy pig was not something I wanted to eat. I ended up trading mine to another team member for some other pig parts.  I must admit, I regretted not having been able to convince my teammates to let me make the ham into prosciutto.

With my Red Wattle team, however, it was different. Folks were happy to let me take control of one entire leg for dry curing. How exciting to me that I was going to be able to push my charcuterie skills further. I did my reading and my studying and I contacted my friend Josh Galliano, an incredibly talented, generous, kind and very cute local chef. Josh agreed that he would show me the ropes with the ham. Being the really lucky one, I got to spend an afternoon in the kitchen at Monarch restaurant, an experience that energizes and inspires me. While I was waiting for instruction and because I am not one who can hack standing around doing nothing, Josh willingly set me to work cleaning and chopping vegetables for a broth that he was going to use in one of the evening’s offerings. In between doing the myriad of things an executive chef has to do, he showed me how to remove the aitch bone from the meat without destroying the whole joint. Josh coached me in the proper way to trim up the meat and skin to make it ready to look like a prociutto.  Finally, he gave me lessons on how to apply the cure to the meat to make the ham ready to be transformed into a dry cured delicacy. This is a process that will, when all is said and done, take at least 9 months.

The first stage of the process is one in which the meat, coated with a cure made of kosher salt and a little bit of a chemical called instacure #2, is weighted and refrigerated. The length of the refrigeration is based on the weight of the fresh ham. Our 20 pound clod calculated out to 40 days during which time I drained the box in which the weighted ham sat of all liquid that appeared over the 40 days.  This amounted to quite a bit! I also continually moved things around to make sure that the weights I had place on the ham (6 saran wrapped bricks) were evenly doing their work. The purpose of this is to compress the flesh so as to help the liquid to leave the meat and, in the meantime, to achieve that nice square, compact prociutto-like shape. When I took the meat out of the fridge at last, it had lost nearly 2 pounds.

After that 40 days, the second stage began. For this stage, I had been monitoring the temperature of a closet that is located just inside of my garage where there is no heat. I ascertained that the temperature ranged between 45F and 55 F. This I learned was an excellent environment for the drying of a ham. So, I took the ham and hung it up in that very cold closet. I checked on the ham regularly just to make sure nothing bad was happening. I photographed the ham and sent the photo to Josh to get his reassurance. Everything was going well. The ham needed to stay there for three months. Here is what the ham looks like right now.

Pretty gross looking, eh? On the other hand, it smells really nice and I have a really good feeling about the quality of dry cured meat we are going to be eating in a few months. For now, the second stage is over (i.e. three months have now elapsed) and the ham must go into its third and final stage of curing.

Here is how it works. A towel moistened with salt water is used to rub the ham down and to take off the stuff that has accumulated on the outside of the meat. A mixture of lard and rice flour is prepared. This “sugna,” as it is called, is rubbed on the exposed part of the meat – that part not covered with skin. Some people recommend putting cracked peppercorns on the outside of the lard, believing that this keeps away bugs. My mentor Josh has not recommended this. The whole thing is then wrapped with cheese cloth (to keep the lard in place, more or less. Then, the ham is again going to be hung to age further – but this time, due to the change of seasons, the temperature will be rising as high as 55-65F in the closet.

Here are a few photos of me getting ready to hang the ham up for its third and final stage:

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Filed under Cooking, Dry Cured Ham, Lard, Pork, Preserving, Prociutto

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March 26, 2010

Fabricating Fabulous (Comfort) Food From Fowl

Meanwhile, back at the chicken breast…

Ok, so I have been working on learning about sous vide cooking for a while now (I got my copy of Under Pressure Christmas 2008). I didn’t start the actual hands-on part until February when I took delivery of my new, shiny magic machine. In spite of the lack of available recipes for the home cook, I have soldiered on, experimenting and learning as I go. I have made chicken breast, strip steak, flank steak, lamb shanks, lamb breast, duck breast, and chicken breast again. (Do I see a trend here?) You have heard about many of these in prior posts. It has all been very instructive and rewarding, but thus far the poultry breasts, both duck and chicken, have been the most amazing. A big challenge has been figuring out what to do with stuff once you have cooked it sous vide.

Now I don’t know about you, but I adore chicken pot pie. (I’m not talking Swanson here – that’s what we were raised on. In those days, they went on sale at 10 for a dollar and you understood why: you could never find any chicken inside. I hated that junk – even though in those days I’ll bet it did not have nearly the chemicals and additives that it has today.) No frozen chemical kits for me! I’m talking about the real, honest–to-goodness, made-from-scratch kind of chicken pot pie. I decided to try a pot pie with sous vide cooked chicken breast, instead of my usual method which uses breast meat poached on the stove top. Chicken pot pie is an easy dish to master and man oh man did it come out fabulously with that chicken.

Here is what I did: I cooked the chicken breasts sous vide for the pot pie at a slightly cooler (57.5C/135.5F) temp than for other chicken breast dishes. This helped to ensure that the chicken did not get overcooked because I knew that I was going to cut the meat up and toss it back into a hot béchamel sauce to combine it with the other ingredients just before serving.

I considered the option of putting the chicken into the sauce with the vegetables after removing it from the stove, covering it with a crust and baking the crust in the oven. I think this would have worked too – especially if I put the whole pie under the broiler, instead of baking it in the oven. In either case, I knew the chicken was going to have to endure an assault of more heat and I was working on finding a methodology that didn’t significantly alter the wonderful texture and juiciness the chicken takes on in the water oven.

A béchamel sauce is fairly quick and easy, especially a lower fat one. I always keep good, rich chicken stock on hand in my freezer. I make it from stewing hens – one good old bird will make a gallon of strong stock which I divide up into pint containers. I took a pint of that stock and brought it up to a boil on the stove, then turned down the flame and reduced the stock by a good quarter. Once reduced, I turned off the heat and stirred in a cup of low fat (2%) milk, some freshly grated nutmeg, a good heavy pinch of cayenne pepper, ¼ tsp white pepper and lightly salted it to taste.  In a bowl I mixed a quarter of a cup of half and half (you can use heavy cream if you want) with 1/3 cup of granulated flour. I then added in some of the seasoned broth/milk mixture, a little at a time, much like you would do if you were tempering egg yolks for custard. I continued whisking this mixture until it was nice and smooth. I strained this mixture into the broth and stirred constantly while I reheated the sauce got it to come to the desired thickness.

If for some reason you do this and your sauce is not as thick as you would like, you can add more liquefied flour in the same manner. It is best to correct the consistency of the sauce this way before you add back the solid ingredients. By the way, I have tried cornstarch and other thickeners but for pot pie I prefer flour. Of course, I really prefer to make the sauce the “right” way – first making a white roux with lots of butter and flour and then whisking in the hot reduced whole cream and stock little by little. But alas, in order to keep the very overweight person (“Big Merri”) inside of me from getting out, I have come up with this “skinny” method. It is not at all disappointing. Close enough to its more fattening counterpart the end result is a thick and velvety béchamel  into which you can put all the other ingredients to produce a delicious pot pie filling.

A wonderful thing about a pot pie is that it is well suited to individuality and variation. A great variation to the plain béchamel is to add a heavy dose of your favorite curry seasoning to the sauce. If you do this, hit it with a tablespoon of sugar because the curry tends to be a little bitter. Also, you will want to first simmer the sauce with the curry a little while before you start the thickening process.

The other ingredients can be altered or added to, as well. You like celery? Just lightly sauté some and add it to the sauce. My mom used to like it with lima beans (feh!). I make mine with fresh diced waxy potatoes, pearl onions, and carrots, and thawed frozen petit peas (I use the frozen variety as fresh peas are near impossible to come by). If my family ate mushrooms, I would definitely add these in. Remember to saute these well to release water so your sauce won’t thin out too much. I pre-cook all vegetables to just slightly al dente, individually so as not to overcook any of them. (Don’t you just hate mushy vegetables?) I add these to the final mixture, just before the chicken, gently stirring just long enough to get everything up to the desired temperature. The meat always goes in last – another bit of insurance to avoid overcooking.

Here is the end result:

Now you can see I had other motivation for settling on the stove-top method of pot pie construction: I had a sheet of puff pastry on hand that I wanted to use for my crust. The beauty of doing it this way is that it eliminates some time pressure, not to mention that a puff pastry crust is effing fantastic! You can cook off the puff pastry and hold it in your warm oven while you are getting your other ingredients ready. You can even re-heat the stuff once it has been cooked. Though this is less desirable to me, it is doable. Just before serving the pot pie, take your big French knife to the cooked puff pastry to cut it into smaller pieces. You can get a fine shape and a clean edge with a swift push of the blade. Cooked puff pastry looks great and you can portion it out however you like.

No, smarty pants, I did not make the puff pastry from scratch. It may be very satisfying and therapeutic to do so, but the quality of the ready-made puff pastry, which can be bought from the gourmet grocer, is totally fabulous. Moreover, I am not a martyr! (Just make sure you are buying a puff pastry that is pure and simple – and made with real butter.) I thawed out that puff pastry dough and made my crust on a sheet pan in the oven. By placing a second sheet pan crosswise on top of the one holding the dough. This way I was able to leave plenty of space for it to cook while at the same time prevent the dough from rising unevenly.

Though I can rarely get my family to tell me what they want for dinner, they do ask for this dish from time to time. They gobbled up this version up and they were not at all unhappy that it was lacking the more traditional crust. In fact, my adorable, darling, precious, sweet, lovely teenaged step-daughter even went back for seconds – a real rarity. For a formerly finicky pastatarian (a vegetarian who only eats carbs), I took that as a great complement.

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Filed under Chicken Breasts, Cooking, Pie, Sous Vide, sous vide cooking, water oven

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