If you like the occasional cocktail, get yourself some really big ice cubes. They tend to melt slower and, thus, water your drink down less while also providing a nice big chunk of cold.

Better yet, a very large cube of ice will not act as a dam against the side of the glass like a typical ice maker “cube”.

An upgrade over 2″ cubes would be to create 2″+ spheres. Currently, there seem to be two products on the market to do this. Instead of rehashing information, I’ll just post a link to this fantastic weblog with an article that focuses on spherical ice making.

As @dnanian reminded me, there is this absolutely fantastic spherical ice cube mold out of Japan.   Beautiful piece of work, but both a bit spend and not exactly convenient.

Still… that mechanical engineering is quite drool worthy.

I’ve also been behind on cooking, making stuff, etc…

After letting my Sous Vide Supreme gather dust for a couple of months, I thought through why and what to do about fixing this.   The quality of food that is possible with SV cooking was clearly a motivator.  What I concluded was that the size and pain of storing the SVS was ultimately the reason why I didn’t use it;  finding a place to store was a pain and the SVS always takes the same rather large volume of water, even if you only want to cook a few eggs or a couple of steaks.

Thus, after some rather extensive research, I decided to go with a PolyScience Sous Vide Professional.   Effectively, it is a PolyScience lab circulator refactored into a form convenient for use in a kitchen.   It is easy to use, very accurate, and — most critically for me — can handle both a much much smaller and, on those occasions where I need it, a significantly larger (30L) volume of water vs. the SVS.

Once obtaining said device, a bit of a food adventure has been had over the past few weeks.

Ribs & Pork Shoulder (24 hours @ 56ºC)

Ribs were basted with an apricot / rice vinegar / EVOO / brown sugar / ginger sauce prior to bagging.   Pork shoulder was rubbed down with brown sugar, light salt, and scotch bonnet pepper flakes.

End result was quite good;  both the ribs and the shoulder had “chew” in that they didn’t entirely fall apart, but were still completely fork tender.   Flavor profile was excellent;  intensely pork flavored without being overbearing.   The belly was slightly salty and, in fact, salting in sous vide is very different than salting in regular bbq.

Lesson Learned: What is likely obvious to anyone who can actually cook;  any liquid in the sous vide bag should be drained into a pan and used to make a sauce, some sauce, any sauce.   Use it to deglaze a pan.  Add it to some sauce you are making, even if you have to cook it down a bit.   There is simply too much deliciousness in the liquid in the bag to let it go down the drain!

Fillet of Salmon (30 minutes @ 54ºC)

Just hot enough to pasteurize, no more.  Sadly, this sucked.  But it was an important lesson.  The Salmon fillet was absolutely perfect in texture and color, but the flavor was off.  Namely, it was fishy because I had abused the fillet between freezer and consumption.  Not “I’m going to die” fishy, but just unpleasant.   Frankly, if I had cooked it in a stew or grilled it, it would have been fine.

Lesson Learned: When cooking SV, there is nowhere that any off flavors can escape to, be burned off, or otherwise be covered.  While you don’t have to start with the most amazing quality ingredients, they must be absolutely fresh and/or have been stored properly every step of the way between harvest and table.

Brisket — French Laundry Style (48 hours @ 64ºC)

Picked up a big chunk of relatively cheap brisket and cut it into three pieces.  All three were oiled, salted and peppered prior to bagging.  One then had a hot indian curry added and one had a bunch of Worcestershire + Maple Syrup.

End result was very interesting.  It was a lot less tender than I expected, but was still fork tender after being sliced across the grain.

All of the juices were drained into a small cast iron pot and were cooked down with powdered mustard, ketchup, and siracha until it thickened into what turned into a delicious BBQ sauce.

Lesson Learned: Following Keller’s temperature and time recommendations seems to “just work”.  This comes as know surprise.  However, if you read many of Keller’s SV recipes, they generally require a proper vacuum sealer to be able to achieve the “under pressure” part of SV cooking.

Cheap Steaks (48 hours @ 56ºC)

Picked up some cheap sirloin steaks.  Not terribly tender, but not too tough.  Decided to do them 48 hours to see what would happen;  one plain, one curry, and one maple syrup + Worcestershire.

Browned meat over high flame on cast iron after.

Made sauce out of the juice, of course.

Was quite delicious, but the meat texture was too tender.  Beyond fork tender.

Lesson Learned: No, really, you can make a meat too tender.  At least, if you expect to serve it in a steak-like format.  However, I’m betting that taking the same cut of meat, dropping a bunch of stew like veggies and spices into the bag, and cooking that for 48 hours in a similar way would result in an amazing stew.

Peaches (3 hours @ 80ºC)

Peaches + brown sugar + bourbon, actually.   Just an experiment.

Delicious over ice cream, but the bourbon flavor was surprisingly strong.  In hindsight, this should have been obvious.   Did this a second time and used the result in a BBQ sauce described below.

Lesson learned: The Sous Vide pouches are a closed systems.  Any flavors that go in will stay there.  They may change from being exposed to said temperature, but they can’t escape!  Duh!  So, like salt, if you have something that is an intense flavor that would otherwise be somewhat lost during cooking, vastly reduce the amount you put in!

Brisket — Baldwin Style (24 hours @ 80ºC)

Didn’t have 48 hours and wanted to try something a little different.  Did the three flavors again as described above.

Browned the meat in skillet before, on grill after.

The end result was much much more tender than the French Laundry Style described above. But that may also have been because the meat, itself, was significantly fattier.

Served with a BBQ sauce made from the SV peaches described above + brisket SV juices + ketchup + maple syrup + mustard + hot peppers.

Lesson Learned: Beyond the exceptionally well understood pasteurization tables and exactly what temperature to cook a piece of meat to consider it “rare, medium-rare, etc..”, the relationship between time/temperature vs. resulting texture is not entirely understood by anyone. Certainly, a truly competent chef will find a particular time/temperature

Leg of Lamb (24 hours @ 54ºC)

Took a leg of lamb, shoved it in a bag without anything else, and SV’d it for 24 hours.

Once done, salted, peppered, EVOO, and then grilled for a minute per side on a very high heat gas grill.

Using the leftover BBQ sauce from the previous night as a base, I added the juice from the lamb SV bag and cooked it down a bit more.

The meat was perfectly tender and medium-rare from edge to edge.  Not a bit of it was left at the end of the meal.

Lesson Learned: 54ºC is a magic number.  At 54ºC, you can mostly cook something for up to 72 hours with no worries of poisoning anyone and still result in a piece of medium rare meat.  Mostly (as there is some subtlety to the whole pasteurization thing).  Just start with a fresh and competently handled piece of meat — it can be cheap, but it must be fresh.

Pork Ribs (24 hours @ 57ºC)

Dry rub with brown sugar, salt, hot pepper, ginger, and garlic.  Into the bag for 24 hours.  Cooked down a BBQ sauce (carry over from the one above), glazed and then seared over a high heat gas fired grill.

The texture of the meat was perfect.   The flavor was too damned salty.  Not inedibly so; just much more so than desired.

Lesson re-learned: No matter how little salt you use in a Sous Vide bag, it can easily be too much.  I didn’t even think I’d used that much salt, but the end result was still saltier than expected and saltier than desired.

More notes as I figure this out….

High-Que’s Upgraded Fire Grate & Gasket.

There are two common complaints that I’ve heard from many Big Green Egg owners. The first is that, after years of ownership, it is harder and harder to get the egg past ~350 degrees or so (500 – 750 needed to do proper sears or cook a pizza). In particular, the fire grate included with the BGE is a big metal plate with a bunch of ~3/4″ holes drilled in it. It just doesn’t let a lot of air through to start with and, after years of use, any kind of ash build up and/or clogging of the holes in the ceramic firebox leads to even less air getting through.

Related, for those that do achieve high heat on a semi-regular basis, the factory installed woolen gasket quickly wears out.

Fortunately, there exists High-Que.com who specializes in upgraded components for the Big Green Egg. Pictured at left is their upgraded fire grate and their Nomex based high-heat replacement gasket.

For BGE owners, I cannot recommend these two products highly enough. Gasket upgrades have been around for quite a while, but most involved spray adhesive or fireplace-safe adhesive combined with a gasket that would often fray, leaving the risk of metal bits in your food (most of the gaskets were really re-purposed oven or kiln gaskets). High-Que’s gaskets are more like the original BGE gasket in physical design, but are much more durable and can withstand a higher heat. Like the original gasket, High-Que’s uses a high-heat adhesive backing that is exposed by removing a bit of paper; no toxic spray-on adhesives involved.

High-Que’s fire grate is equally as well considered & built. It is a very heavy gauge stainless steel grate that will not clog and allows for much greater air flow. As it comes with a 5 year warranty, clearly High-Que believes the product works.

Venison/Beef Burgers Seared Beautifully.

And it does. The combination of the two products has vastly improved the cooking experience with my BGE; it is easier to light, achieves a higher temperature faster (literally, takes about 12-15 minutes to reach ~600 degrees whereas I had a hard time cracking 400 without a fan before the upgrade), and the gasket looks like it is going to last much longer than the BGE wool gaskets (I won’t know for sure for another ~6 months or so).

And there was a fringe benefit that was a nice surprise; every BGE owner who has cooked at high heat has learned through quite a bit of hair loss that you have to “burp” your egg when opening it at temperatures greater than ~500. If you don’t, this rather ominously beautiful cloud of flames (seriously — check out this set o’ photos!!) will burst out of the egg and take all your arm hair right off!

With the increased air flow of the High-Que grate, the Egg doesn’t exhibit anywhere near the same degree of flashback as long as the bottom vent is wide open. What a nice surprise! To be clear, the egg will still flashback if the bottom vent is closed or if you open too rapidly at high heat, but the problem is vastly reduced!

Replacing the gasket is a bit of a chore. Click through for full details. Since the Egg needs to come apart for this anyway, a full cleaning is in order, too.

This is pretty typical for an Egg after a few years and a couple of hundred pounds of pork butts.

The woolen gasket has both lost all of it’s “spring” due to a combination of being burned off by the occasional high-temperature cook and because it has happily sucked up about a gallon of meat juices. Think what happens to a wool sweater when it sucks up water. Now replace the water with fat. And compress it. And heat it up to ~400 degrees. Yeah — not so happy.

The fire box is caked with pork fat and meaty fallout. Note that the vent holes around the firebox are mostly to fully clogged. This both prevents achieving higher temperatures and is pretty much unavoidable.

At this point, you’ll really want to take the lid off the BGE. Which comes to a very critical safety not.

Make sure you tie your hinge shut!! When the weight of the lid comes off that hinge, those springs are going to pull the lid’s metal band violently apart. It will hurt you. It might break a bone.

That wire was not entirely sufficient. Enough to mute the effect of the springs, but not sufficient. Ideally, you still have the bits of plastic that were used to clamp the hinge shut during shipping. If not, you’ll want to wrap up the left and right hinges separately.

Do not skip this step. (Ow)

Next, you’ll want to remove the old gasket. It should peel up pretty easily using a putty knife or scraper. What is left behind, though, is not so easily removed.

To remove the layer of greasy adhesive and gasket remnants requires a combination of tools.

I started with a wire brush on an eletric drill. This got the largest chunks out of the way and generally reduced the problem to a bit of a greasy slurry.

To remove the grease, I used the soaped up steel wool pot scrubbers. From there, I used shop-towels (the disposable paper towels) that were soaked in cheap vodka (food safe).

Quite a bit of elbow grease later and the rim looked like this.

However, it also needs to be nice and dry.

The easiest way to do this is to re-assemble the top and bottom parts of the egg, reattaching the hinges, etc. Put the hinge back on and clamp it to the bottom gently (no need to crank it down yet. Put the top back on and then make sure that the top hinge is pushed up as high as possible against the rim of the egg (see photo below with the new gasket installed). Crank down the high clamp bolts and remove your hinge ties.

Because it was a bit of a cold day, I dropped a random Halogen work light into the BGE and let it sit for a few hours.

(Pictured at right with the gasket installed — more on that in a second).

This did a great job of drying out the interior of the BGE.

Once dry, installation of the new gasket is straightforward.

Simply cut it in half, then peel a bit of the paper off the back (no more than an inch).

Press the exposed adhesive onto the rim of the BGE and then slowly go around the entire rim, peeling off the paper as you go and aligning the gasket as you move around the edge.

I put the edge of the gasket at the back of the egg, out of the way. I also was sure to offset the edge of the gasket for the top vs. the bottom. There will be a bit of a gap or a bit of rise at the gap and you don’t want to compound the potential problems by stacking the gaps directly on top of each other. This is the one part of the upgrade that is a little bit fiddly; you need to make sure the gasket is fairly well aligned as you go and it really wants to go in a straight line. As long as you don’t press down on the gasket as you go, it is pretty easy to lift and re-align as needed.

Once the gasket is installed, close the lid and let it sit for at least 12 hours, ideally 24. Since it was still a bit cold and damp, I left the work lite in the egg for about six hours to help keep things dry and warm.

Note that the cord for the worklight was going through the vent at the bottom to prevent the cord from causing the lid to sit funny during the set-up process.

This is what the gasket looks like after 24 hours of curing. A nice air-tight, very clean, seal. Enjoy the newness of it all because it likely won’t stay that way for long!

The next step is to test it out. Since I had recently picked up a meat grinder, I threw some skirt steak and venison through the grinder and made some burgers (which really need a nice high heat to get a proper sear).

Up until very recently, I typically use a chimney starter on top of a turkey burner to start the coals which are then dumped into the BGE. As can be seen through the vent door, the High-Que grate allows for significantly greater air flow and will not become clogged with ash.

All in all, it took about 15 minutes to go from cold to 650 degrees; much faster than previously (if I could even get the egg past 400 without a fan!).

All in all, the High-Que products work really well! The company has been very responsive and, in talking with them, they have some other BGE upgrades in the works that I look forward to reviewing in the future. Clearly, High-Que has confidence in their products as evidenced by the 5 year warranty on the fire grate and that they sent me the gasket for free as a review knowing fully that I would be brutal if the product did not meet expectations.

I briefly toyed with either moving the kegerator to the big chest freezer and using the small for food. But then I had a better idea.

Since the kegerator can easily fit a commercial with a corny keg (or 2 corny kegs) then I should actually, like, BREW BEER!

And, thus, that is what I’m doing. Got a butch of heavily coffeed American Nut Brown Ale finishing in a cornelius keg while a batch of traditional English Special Bitters is in primary.

The Nut Brown Ale came out with about a ~4.7% ABV, exactly as the recipe said it should. After a week of sitting in the corny keg, the Nut Brown Ale is now on tap in the kegerator. The first few pours were a bit bitter and cloudy, but now it is pouring much cleaner and is absolutely delicious. Notable bitter coffee flavor on top of a chocolaty brown ale beer.

The English Special Bitters went in with an SG of 1.040, about 0.007 less than the recipe called for, but I’m not worried about it. Update: Came out at about 1.012 SG; or, about, ~3.7% ABV. It’ll go into the secondary now to settle and then into a corny keg in a few days to a week. I don’t expect much further fermentation, but it’ll likely end up right at 4% ABV.

A friend turned me on to Northern Brewer Homebrew Supply. Their kits are fantastic, the prices are reasonable, and they have $8 shipping on all orders.

Thus, I picked up 3 kits (and already had a kit from Fermentation Solutions, whom I’ll definitely go to when I’m ready to start doing custom recipes & for the occasional kits because theirs are quite good, too); two malt extract (ESB & Traditional English Pub Ale) and one partial extract (Oatmeal Stout).

With the gas stove, I can get through a recipe in 3 to 3.5 hours with a partial boil recipe. It is a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Better yet, when my sinuses are clogged, as they often are in the winter, all that steam does wonders!

Not surprisingly, I’ve seen it come up in a number of Sous-Vide cooking forums that said pouches are wonderful for water bath cooking; simply pop them in the water bath at the desired temperature and be done with it.

I even tried it myself with some tuna the other night. It was a pasteurization level cook, so the end result was closer to flaky cooked than red-raw tuna, but was otherwise delicious.

However, I — and others — have wondered if the wrapping Trader Joe’s uses is Sous-Vide safe. So, I contacted customer service and asked:

Is your vacuum packed frozen fish sealed in bags that can
handle sous-vide water bath cooking (i.e. a cooking bat at ~140 degrees
F)?

Given the growing popularity of sous vide cooking and the unbelievable
convenience/quality of your fish products, it would be helpful to mark
packages that can handle SV cooking.


The response from customer service:

Thank you for your inquiry. The packaging used for our frozen fish are
not approved for this cooking method. We do advise removing all
packaging before any cooking method.

Unfortunate, but it is what it is. I suspect this is more of a CYA response than an actual statement of cooking method incompatibility, but I’m not going to risk it. Nor will I assume that any of the meats (they have beautiful pre-seasoned frozen vacuum packed rack of lamb, for example) is safe, either.

I’m going to write a followup letter to Trader Joe’s corporate asking them to re-consider.

Cooking food with heat is a far more subtle process than simply applying heat. Beyond that doubling the temperature obviously doesn’t cook something twice as fast, there is a vast array of stunningly complex chemical reactions that occur as food is heated.

Even the seemingly simple act of hard boiling an egg will cause the yolk and white to pass through nearly a dozen different phases as different temperature thresholds are crossed and different proteins and nucleic within the white and yolk are denatured. For an egg, the difference between clear, runny, jelly-like, and hard boiled is only a matter of degrees!

And some reaction can take quite a while, too. Making pulled pork, something for which I have a bit of experience, involves heating the meat to a temperature such that the collagen and fat effectively changes from a tough, chewy, substance into liquid or a jello like cloud of delicious. Done right, this can take hours or, even, days.

With a stove, grill or — even — an oven, it is extremely difficult to both maintain a constant temperature and not dry the food out.

Enter sous vide.

Sous vide means, literally, “under vacuum”. That is, in sous vide cooking, the food is vacuum packed, often with spices or marinades. The actual process of cooking, though, is generally done in a water oven; a device that can maintain a bucket of water at a very precise temperature.

Precise as in the ability to cook an egg to exactly 144 degrees throughout, just hot enough that the white is semi-solid but still runny while the yolk is nearly, but not totally, liquid. I.e. the perfect poached egg. Or 72 hour pulled pork at 141 degrees that comes out fork tender, medium-rarish, but with the flavor of ham. Or the perfect rare, fork tender, short rib by cooking at 138 for 48 hours.

“But, wait!, pork at 141?!?! Beef @ 138? The FDA says we need to reach ~160 for them to be safe!! You are gonna kill someone!”

Those temperatures are actually the instant kill temperatures for food borne pathogens. If you get the inside of a steak to 166, all bad critters will be dead. However, said same critters cannot survive at ~135 or above and, thus, if you keep the meat at said temperature for long enough, the bad critters will generally be just as dead.

This isn’t the end of the story and I encourage you to both read Douglas Baldwin’s Sous Vide for the Home Cook and, covering much more than just sous vide and the single most accessible and entertaining science oriented cookbook around Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food
(seriously — get this book — even if you have a moratorium on cookbooks, get this book!!).

I had the pleasure of hearing Jeff speak and having lunch with him. It was that conversation that convinced me to dive into Sous Vide cooking; it scratches all of the über-control penchant of my geekiness while promising to yield new potential heights to appease my chefiness.

At left is the SousVide Supreme, an appliance that quite conveniently maintains a bath of water at whatever temperature you want from less than 100 degrees up to just below boiling point.

There are also a number of homebrew solutions and lab quality circulators (no surprise, heating some live soup of pathogenic critters to ideal reproduction temperatures is a long solved problem in the lab). And you can go the PID controller route and whip up a hot water oven for ~$50 (link to an excellent write-up on doing exactly that).

I personally chose the SVS both because I didn’t have a crock pot and the good quality lab circulators are typically considerably more expensive. As well, the margin for error with Sous Vide can be pretty damned narrow when cooking at the border of pathogenic reproduction temperatures; best to have a dead accurate unit than one that is off by 5 degrees.

For vacuum sealing, I’m using a FoodSaver v3840 upright sealer. In hindsight, I would much rather have a clam shell vacuum sealer as they waste less bags and, though seemingly less convenient, are easier to align the bag for sealing purposes.

In the 2 weeks I’ve had the SVS, I’ve been able to produce some truly amazing foods (and one really bland bit of food). I’ve learned a lot and also come to realize that this is really an area of cooking for which there is no deep history or reference tome. A lot of times you are on your own. And as long as you follow the safety rules put forth in both Douglas’s and Jeff’s books, you’ll always be safe even if your meal turns out inedible (as Jeff likes to say, even the worst meal can be improved by a quick call to the local pizza delivery service).


So, what have I cooked?

In Shell Poached Eggs

Since I’ve discovered how easy it is to make excellent quality artisan bread, I figured I’d start with a dead simple poached egg, one of my wife’s favorites. A couple of hours at 145 degrees yielded eggs that were perfect; cracked out of the shell as a whole, yet were obviously barely held together by an outside layer of solidified proteins (there are actually about 6 layers to an egg). The yolk was runny, but not clear, and the white was almost solid.

Coincidentally, one of the folk working on our house brought by a dozen fresh eggs from his hens which were then poached. Oh, wow! Best. Eggs. Ever.

Steak

Next I made a basic steak. I thawed a nice, but unremarkable, cut of grass fed steak, lightly seasoned it with salt and pepper, sealed it away and dropped it in the sous vide for a few hours at 142 degrees. Once done, I unbagged the steak and seared it for about 15 seconds a side in a red-hot cast iron pan (used oil, don’t bother — just a dry pan is all that is needed) to put a little texture on the outside and add flavors from the Maillard reaction that occurs at higher temperatures.

End result? A perfect medium rare steak from edge to edge with a slightly crunchy crust. Very tender and delicious.

Overcooking is hard with sous vide. Since you are targeting a particular temperature to achieve a particular set of chemical reactions within the food, you can leave the food in the water bath at that temperature for a long time without adversely impacting the flavor or texture. To a point; there are still reactions occurring — collagen breaking down, for example — but they are pretty slow. Hence, I left the steak in for an extra hour without worry.

Chicken Thighs

This was a lose and it was entirely my fault. First, I made the mistake of not adding a marinade to the meat. Secondly, I didn’t clean up the thighs enough, leaving behind tasty — but unappetizing to see — bits of fat. Finally, I cooked it at too low of a temperature to get away with; high enough to be perfectly safe, but low enough that the pinkish color and the bloody liquid near the fat wasn’t something the family could deal with. That, and lacking a searing step (or good sauce), yielded chicken that was akin to very firm boiled chicken.

It is critical to consider both the likely broken food norms of your audience & the total consistency of the meat can be off putting. For the latter problem, it is a matter of having a tasty sauce, a plating that involves pre-cutting with something that can provide texture, and/or a searing step to add color, crisp & maillard reaction byproducts to the food. For the former, you just need to know your audience. In the United States, we have been so trained to believe that any pink or bloody liquid in pork or chicken means you gonna die! die! die! That just isn’t true, but it’ll take a few meals before your audience might be comfortable with a big piece of delicious rare pork.

Salmon

In January, I bought some whole salmon from the farmer’s market and cut it down to nice fillets that were then vacuum packed and deep frozen. I cooked it at 131 degrees for a couple of hours to fully pasteurize (remember those pasteurization tables?) and simply cut open the bag, threw it on a plate and ate it.

Amazing. Buttery tender, but still had texture. Interestingly, I cooked it with the skin on, but the skin was so tender it cut with a fork just like the rest of the fish. The flavor was divine, the texture perfect, and the convenience factor is extreme; just grab a pack o’ frozen fish from freezer, drop it in the sous vide bath and forget about it for a couple of hourse.

You can easily vacuum pack the courses of a meal, with all spices/ingredients in the bag, freeze it, and then just pull the bag and drop in the warm water bath. Three items of note. First, keep in mind that the spices will be in contact with the food for a long time and, thus, you might want to back off on pungent spices a bit because the flavor transfer may be significantly than you are used to. Secondly, the only danger here is ensuring that the food passes through the “danger zone” of temperatures (which is not 40 to 140 — read the books!) in less than 6 hours, which isn’t generally a problem. Finally, you can cook a full meal in a sous vide oven, even with items that differ in temperature requirements. Start with whatever needs the highest temperature and let it cook for the needed time, then drop the temperature to the next highest item and keep doing that all the way to the lowest temperature, leaving all previous items in the bath. At the end, you’ll have a full meal at serving temperature ready to go.

48 hour pork belly

I love pulled pork and have made many a batch on the Big Green Egg; 22 hours at ~ 210 degrees generally does the trick. The common thinking is that you need to hold the pork at ~165 degrees for several hours to render down the connective tissues to make this otherwise tough cut of meat unbelievable tender, but not even remotely rare. The reality, though, is that the pork can be held at a lower temperature for much longer and the same tenderizing reactions happen, just much slower.

Thus, I vacuum sealed a bunch of chunks of pork belly that had been soaked overnight in a light salt/sugar brine. In each bag, I placed a different set of spices or marinades; a dry rub that I usually use, some spicy barbeque sauce, and some sliced lime/rosemary in another.

These then went into the water bath for 48 hours at 141 degrees.

The result was amazingly tender — just like pulled pork should be — but was also fall apart pulled pork tender. Not only tender, but the fat was also largely reduced to nothing but juice with some slight, very tasty, remnants.

And the meat was still medium; still had just a bit of pink to it. Awesomely delicious.

This is where I learned that the flavor carry over is much more intense in a vacuum pack (duh!). Next time, I’ll probably skip the brine. As well, the parts of the pork that were in direct contact with the rosemary were a bit bitter.

72 hour pork belly

I threw three bags of pork belly into the sous vide bath, but only ate one at the 24 hour mark. Family plans came up that prevented us from having a true meal.

What the heck? Might as well see what it is like at the 72 hour mark.

Something very delicious happened in the interim. What was very much an awesome traditional pulled pork at 24 hours turned into a unique eating experience at 72 hours. The result was a pork that was still very much fork tender, but otherwise had a texture and a flavor much more akin to ham.

The dry rubbed pork was very distinctly ham like in nature. The rosemary/lime pork was closer to pulled pork while having a distinct citrus overtone.

Yogurt

Yes, yogurt. Yogurt, as it turns out, is remarkably easy to make it home. The problem, though, is getting a consistent result and that is largely because it is relatively difficult to precisely control the temperature.

Unlike everything else I’ve written about, Yogurt is the opposite. Instead of pasteurizing the milk, the whole point is to inoculate the milk with active cultures and give them an ideal growing environment to turn the milk into yogurt.

And this is where the line between sous vide water bath cooking and biology/chemistry blurs. A quick search for “yogurt making temperature” led me to this page written by Professor David B. Fankhauser, who specializes in Biology and Chemistry.

In particular, while most yogurt making recipes recommend an incubation temperature of 110℉ / 43℃, Fankhauser’s claim is that 122℉ / 50℃ is an optimal temperature in that the yogurt making critters can still reproduce effectively enough, but it is too hot for certain common pathogenic bacteria. By doing this, we can better guarantee the consistency of results.

In any case, it is dead simple;

• Heat 2%/skim/whole milk (do not use ultra-pasteurized for it is the work of the devil) in sterilized canning jars to 190℉ / 87℃ for an hour or so. Remove any crusty bits that might form on top.
• Cool to 122℉ / 50℃. I find the SVS holds temperature very well and, thus, accelerated the process by removing a bunch of the hot water and replacing it with cool water.
• Stir a spoonful or two (spoonful for a pint, more for larger containers) of your favorite yogurt that contains live cultures. Put the lids back on the jar, but do not screw down tightly.
• Let sit in the water bath at 122℉ / 50℃ for anywhere from 5 hours to 24+ hours. The longer it sits, the more sour the yogurt.
• When done, screw the lids on tightly and then submerge the jars in ice cold water to stop the yogurt making process and seal the jars with a light vacuum. Refrigerate.

The yogurt is ready as soon as it effectively sets up. In my first run, the result was about 10x better than the starter I used, likely because I started with better quality milk? Or because it was fresher? I don’t know, but the result was creamy and totally delicious.

This will also produce quite a bit of whey, which is apparently both very healthy and can be used as a liquid additive in breads and doughs to add a great taste and quite a bit of nutrition.

All in all, the first two weeks have been an adventure. Mostly quite successful, with one backup pizza failure, and a few discoveries.

I suspect this is just the beginning of a wonderful culinary adventure.

Not long ago, I took on bread making and have had great success.

However, I don’t make bread that often because, by the time I decide I want some with dinner, it is typically too late to actually make it in time!

A friend had raved about a bread recipe that involved no kneading and keeping the dough in the fridge for use anytime, claiming the result was fantastic bread with less than 2 hours from fridge to table.

In particular, he recommended the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. With access to Crackazon Prime on my iPhone, I ordered the book.

And damned if it doesn’t work. At left is the first loaf I made using this technique. In the toaster oven, even.

The base recipe basically involves mixing — but not kneading or working — a dough from a base ratio of water, flour, salt, and yeast. This then goes into the refrigerator (I’m using a six quart Cambro food container
) for at least a day, and will keep for up to 2 weeks. As it ages, it will apparently take on more of a sour dough flavor.

When you want bread, you dust the top with flour, rip off a hunk of dough, let it rise on your pizza peel for ~40 minutes, and then bake it at 450 degrees for 30 minutes.

End result? A delicious bread with a crunchy crust, excellent texture, and great flavor.

The introduction to the book is a bit smarmy, what with the claim of a “revolution in baking, blah, blah, blah”, but the rest of the book is awesome. The first couple of chapters discuss ingredients and tools quite clearly while the next chapter lays out the base recipe.

From there, the rest of the chapters are full of all kinds of other bread and bread-like recipes.

Annoyingly, the recipes are all in “cups” and “tablespoons”, not weights or ratios.

So, if you do get the book, the base recipe is 708 grams water, 12 grams yeast, 25 grams salt, and 812 grams flour. Yes — it is supposed to be considerably wetter than a “normal” bread dough.

Some random notes as I gain experience.

Flavor

The flavor really does change over time. By the end of a week in the refrigerator, the dough had taken on a distinct sour dough flavor and essence, including generating those signature big air pockets.

Baking

The dough does really well baked on a stone. I haven’t gotten down baking in a dutch oven yet; I think the dough is too wet to really do well, or even need, such a baking style.

I’m also going to try baking on a cast iron fry pan turned upside down. I bet the heavy heat mass of the iron will act similar to a stone.

Pizza

The dough makes awesome pizza. I’ve now made several pizzas on the non-stick pizza pan that came with my toaster oven.

The trick with pizza seems to be to pull off a hunk and roll it out on a heavily floured surface, adding flour to any wet spots as you roll it. Put it immediately on the pan, drizzle with just a touch of olive oil, put whatever toppings on that you want, and back for ~15 minutes in a 450 degree oven.

Bread in the toaster oven has been good, but you need to bake for ~40% longer than the recipe says.

I tossed this together tonight and, though simple and fairly obvious, was just too good to not share.

Heirloom tomato season is upon us and I’ve been grabbing some beauties from my community garden plot.

A simple use that makes for a good all in one meal:

• Slice the tomato into 1/4″ thick rounds
• Place on lightly oiled (olive oil works best) cookie sheet or pizza pan
• Place a couple of fresh basil leaves on each
• Add a bit of meat. I used pulled pork (as I had made some earlier), but I’m betting ham or bacon would work exceptionally well, too. Chicken works quite nicely, as well.
• Sprinkle with mozzarella cheese. Good thick layer. Maybe grate a touch of parmesan in there, too
• Lightly pepper and add a touch of salt. I used porcini mushroom salt.
• Toss into a warmed pre-warmed oven at about 300 degrees.
• Wait a minute or so, then turn the oven over to Broil on high
• Wait until all the cheese is melted and starting to bubble/brown

Delicious.

For the first time in umpteen years, I’m solidly below 230 lbs (I briefly dipped below 230 in 2007 or so, the last time).

I’m using the rather innovative and revolutionary diet of Eat Right and Exercise. Otherwise known as Consume Fewer Calories Than You Burn.

Namely, I’m biking to work every day it isn’t raining, cut out junk food, cut down on portions, and have focused on eating lots of veggies and fruits.

At right is my means of tracking weight, the Withings Wifi Body Scale.

The Withings scale is WiFi enabled. Thus, if you stand on the scale for about 5 seconds after your reading stabilizes, the scale will submit your weight to a central web site where a (rather bloated and slow) Flash app can be used to monitor your weight.

However, there is also a fairly nice iPhone app. The scale can also be configured to tweet your weight (my 174 lbs target is actually below what I’d consider success @ about 190), as well.

I also briefly used the Lose It! application. It is actually a very well designed, easy to use, application for tracking your caloric intake.

Beyond all the techno-goop, the Withings scale is simply very well engineered. It has a striking, minimal, design and feels quite solid. Setup was a breeze and use is quite intuitive. It can track multiple people’s weight and automatically identifies each user by their weight (though I have no idea how it would deal with two people who have similar weights).

A while ago, I took up bread making. The goal being to master turning out a consistently awesome loaf of your basic bread using a simple mix – knead – rise – knead – rise – bake recipe; standard fare directly from the first chapter in Rulhman’s Ratio.

From the first loaf, I was able to turn out a generally yummy hunk of bread, but the texture was just a bit dense.

At the moment, I bake all of my bread in a cast iron dutch oven; 30 minutes lid on, 40 or so minutes without the lid. This leads to a wonderful crisp crust and soft interior.

As it turns out, my bread was too dense simply because I wasn’t letting the dough rise long enough on the second rise! Extending the second rise not only fixed the density issue, but I’ve also now cut my ingredients by a third because my existing quantities would actually cause the bread to lift the lid on the cast iron dutch oven!

At right is proof! The dimples on that particular loaf (and weird ridge around the top) were created by the lid of the dutch oven which has little pointy bits from which condensation drips off during cooking.

Details

To fill the 7 qt cast iron dutch oven, I had starting with 833 grams of flour, 500 grams of water, and 17 grams of salt. Now that I have the rise figured out, I’m using 700 grams of flour, 420 grams of water, and 14 grams of salt. To this, I typically add some mix of rosemary, honey, sugar, and/or something citrusy, depending on mood.

Most recently, I have started substituting beer for almost all of the water. It adds a bit of richness to the bread, but otherwise doesn’t change the recipe.

Or, to be precise (literally, the order is the way it is on purpose!), the exact steps are as follows. Note that no amounts are given because this is a ratio based recipe. You can scale it up or down at will. The foundation is 5 parts flower to 3 parts water (or, more precisely, 50 parts flour to 30 parts water to 1 part salt, but salt isn’t that critical beyond not too much).

1. Start with the liquid — beer or water — and warm it up to about 105℉.
2. Add yeast (1 packet) and, maybe, some sugar.
3. Mix well to activate the yeast.
4. Add flour, then salt (prevents the salt from poisoning the yeastie-beasties).
5. Add honey/rosemary/olive oil/lemon zest/nothing, depending on flavorings you wish to add. If you add something that is very liquid in any significant quantity, consider adding more flour.
6. Throw the mix on your stand mixer and let it knead away on a relatively low setting for about 10 minutes (yes, 10 minutes). If you don’t have a stand mixer, get busy with your hands and enjoy the exercise.
7. Drop the dough on floured surface and knead it by hand. Punch it. Fold it. Pull it. Don’t be gentle.
8. Once kneaded for a bit, the dough should be fairly stretchy without breaking. If not, beat on it some more!
9. Lightly oil your mixing bowl, drop the dough into it and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise in a warm spot for a couple of hours. Actual rise times may vary — you are looking for an approximate doubling in size.
10. Drop the dough back on your floured surface and beat it up some more! Not too much. Enough to reduce the volume by about half again.
11. Oil your cast iron dutch oven and drop the dough in to rise a second time. Put the lid on and place the pot someplace warm. A sunbeam works very well.
12. Let the dough rise until it has at least doubled. Be patient. I wasn’t and that was my mistake.
13. Preheat oven to 450.
14. Lightly salt the surface of the dough, maybe drizzle some oil on it. I don’t slice the surface of the bread because it ends up deflating the bread too much.
15. Shove the cast iron pot, lid on, into the oven and bake for 30 minutes.
16. Turn the oven down to 400, remove the lid, and continue baking for another 40 minutes.
17. Pull from the oven, drop the loaf out of the pan, and let sit for at least 45 minutes or so.
18. Enjoy with butter or, frankly, just plain.

Truly, nothing beats the smell and taste of a freshly baked loaf of simple bread from your own kitchen.

Now that I have this part figured out, my next step is to branch out from basic loaves to other shapes. As well, I’m going to start a wild sourdough culture in my backyard and see what kind of bread results.