Saturday - June 20, 2009
Tastes almost as good as it smells
Another rainy day here in Clinton. Pouring and drizzling the whole day long. The water pipe guys finished their job Friday and filled in the moat, so all that rain water gets to run downhill now and collect in our little pond, which is already filled right up to the top and draining out over onto the road.
Can’t get a whole lot done outside today, so it was a Saturday of housework and cooking. I made up this Mongolian Beef recipe I found over at The Crepes of Wrath. And it came out pretty darn good. I would recommend taking it up a notch or two by doubling the amount of garlic and ginger, or at least by using fresh ground ginger. I had to grind some from a dried root, and it’s just not the same. Naturally I put in about double the amount of dried pepper flakes, which gives things just a little bit of zip. Oh, and the recipe there neglects to tell you what to do with the other half of the oil: put it in the pan when you cook the meat. Mr. Wrath simmered his concotion for 10 minutes. That will work, but be careful: the corn starch can turn the sauce into tar if you overcook things. Still, it was a pretty easy dish, and tasy in a sneaky kind of way. It didn’t really impress either of us at first, but even though I made enough for 4, there doesn’t seem to be any left over at all. So I guess it was pretty decent after all. And the whole upstairs of our place smells great! [ our kitchen fan runs through the attic and vents out over the back deck. But because it’s quite cool today I left the back slider open ... and all the aromas came right back in the house! ]
I spent a couple hours this afternoon reading up on sous vide cooking. That’s “sue vid” to you other Francophobes. It means putting a chunk of meat in a vacuum sealer bag, sucking the air out, and then slow cooking it in a kettle of lukewarm water. Yeah, it sounded wierd to me too. But stop and think about it: depending on whether you want rare, medium, or well, the center of a steak is only heated to about 140 degrees. And it turns out that this method has been used in restaurant kitchens for ages. Once you “parboil” the meat up to the right temperature, you can keep it there for hours and hours and it won’t overcook. And all it needs is a quick walk across the grill to brown up the outside, and it comes out perfect. Every time.
My next though was about germs. Don’t we always hear how botulism, plague, liberalism, dengue fever, etc, will grow on meat in an instant if we don’t cook the stuff to a leathery gray death? Well, it turns out to be a bit of a crock. Sous vide came about as a blend of the chefly arts and the science of kitchenology. So sure, germs can grow, but once things get beyond 127 degrees or thereabouts they can’t.
So I’m eager to give this a try, if I can do it on the cheap. I picked up several other tidbits along the way:
- swabbing down a raw steak with cheap vodka will kill most of the germs on the surface, which is where the germs live.
- Tenderizing the meat with a Jacquard tenderizer is the way to go. It’s like using a fork to poke little holes in the meat, but a good Jacquard has lots of little pointy knife blades in it, so it actually cuts into the meat. Hafta get one of them.
- Marinading meat in a vacuum bag takes much less time than the traditional way.
- Cooking the meat in a sealed vacuum bag keeps all the flavor in the food. Nothing escapes, not even steam. So you need less marinade too.
- Raw garlic and olive oil don’t work properly in this method of cooking. Use garlic powder and canola oil instead.
- You can’t overcook stuff by leaving it in the hot water for too long. It just doesn’t happen. Overcooking is caused by getting the core temperature too high, not by length of time!
- Once brought to the correct temperature and kept there long enough, the meat can be rapidly cooled down [still in the bag] and will keep in the fridge for weeks!
- Vacuum marinading makes the meat look wiered. Ignore it. Sous vide cooking makes the meat look excessively red, so ignore that too. Between the two of them, you get normal looking meat.
- The browning and seering of the outside of a steak has an actual scientific name. It’s called the Maillard Process, and it’s what makes a well grilled steak tastes so damn good.
- Yes, excessive browning - Maillarding? - can create carcinogenic compounds. In very small quantities. Advantage sous vide: you can brown your steak with a blowtorch or on a really really hot grill or in a smoking hot iron pan, and the whole job is done in under a minute, which isn’t enough time for these compounds to form.
All in all it sounds really cool. A precision temperature adjuster costs about $140, which hooks up to a big rice cooker that you use as a water bath. Vacuum “Seal-a-Meal™” devices you can get everywhere, along with the bags.
Industrial machinery costs several thousand dollars, but if you aren’t running a restaurant, you can do it on the cheap. You don’t even need the Seal-a-Meal™ gizmo.
Lots of links of course:
http://blog.khymos.org/2009/01/18/a-mathematician-cooks-sous-vide/
http://blog.khymos.org/2007/01/21/perfect-steak-with-diy-sous-vide-cooking/ [DIY sous vide, on the cheap]
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/magazine/14CRYOVAC.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
http://www.kamikazecookery.com/blogs/133
http://www.technogypsy.net/ [ lots of recipes and pictures here ]
http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html [wherein Science finds the perfect temperature to soft-boil eggs perfectly: 148°F for an hour. An hour! But to be Fair & Balanced, Non-Science says this gives you a rather gloopy egg. I guess you have to like soft-boiled to begin with.] It also list Pasteurization times for fowl, for those really worried about germs:
I’m pretty sure that these times will pasteurize beef and pork as well. Still, better safe than sorry.
I’d like to follow up on that guy’s DIY project. I can afford that rig. The commercial stuff costs more than I can sell my car for. ( hey, it’s nearly 13 years old already! ) And we have a vacuum sealer somewhere in one of these closets.
Next kitchen experiment? Gyro Lamb Loaf! To the best of my knowledge, Science has had nothing to do with this recipe at all!
Posted by Drew458
on 06/20/2009 at 02:40 PM
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining •
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