Tips & Techniques
The Saveur 100 came out recently and I am just now going through it. The Jan/Feb issue consists of 100 tips, ingredients, food, restaurants, cooking tools, books and other related food insight.
From this issue, I am going to cull some of my favorites from the top 100, and the first one is The Fresh Loaf bread making website. I’ve never seen this site before, but it looks amazing and certainly deserves attention if want to make your own bread or already bake your own loaves.
According to the website The Fresh Loaf describes itself as providing “news and information for amateur bakers and artisan bread enthusiasts” and the site “contains featured recipes, lessons, book reviews, a community forum and recipe exchange, and baker blogs.”
The Fresh Loaf certainly does all of that, but the description also doesn’t do the site justice. Simply browse the baker blogs to get an idea of what you can do with the help of this site. In the blogs you will be lavished with picture after picture of fabulous looking bread with very detailed instructions on how it was created. Just looking at the pictures is inspiring (see above). So while the site does offer a lot of resources for the bread baker, even more importantly it offers inspiration.
The backbone of the site, however, is instruction. There is a bread baking handbook with useful information, and specifically I found the baker’s math section of interest as it gives you the basic proportions for ingredients and the math to adjust your recipes. There is also a lessons section that offers five instructionals such as “Your First Loaf,” “Glazing” and “Time and Temperature.” And if you ever have questions about baking a particular loaf or want to know what went wrong if you have less-than-satisfying results, there are plenty of places to post questions for individualized guidance.
This is a great site all around if you love bread.
The USDA has longadvocated cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, which cooks the meat to medium doneness, but now many chefs are cooking it only to 140-145 degrees, which is medium-rare. The concern for a long time has come from a parasitic disease called trichinosis that is caused when trichinae (a type of roundworm) infect the intestines.
Technically, this parasite is killed off at 137 degrees, so the lower temperature of 140 isn’t going to make you sick, but food safety concerns continue to linger.
Trichinosis, however, is not the problem it once was in the US. There are less than 50 cases per year nowadays, and many of those don’t come from pigs but other forms of game meat. Essentially, modern pork is a lot safer and less contaminated than it once was.
But you can even cook pork at lower temperature and still kill the parasite if you can ensure an even distribution of heat throughout the meat and maintain it for a longer period of time, but I wouldn’t recommend this for most home cooks. For instance, if you cook meat to 132 degrees and maintain it for 15 minutes, the trichinae worms will also be killed. Sous-vide cooking in a water bath achieves this type of heat distribution and control, but that cooking technique is not often in the repertoire of the the average home cook.
The reason for the higher recommended temperatures by the USDA and CDC (which recommends an even higher 170 degrees) is because most cooks can’t ensure an even distribution of heat and maintain it for a long enough period of time when cooking meat. Depending upon the cut of meat and cooking method, internal temps will vary, so a safer higher temp is recommended to ensure all parasites are killed. So in other words, the recommended cooking temperatures reflect our inability to cook and compensate for our ‘errors’. It is not, however, what is best for the taste of your food. At 170 degrees, you can kill everything off in a very short period of time, but there is also very little moisture left in the meat.
The main issue with foodies when cooking pork medium-rare versus medium, is about texture and moisture. Some cooks find medium-rare meat too chewy, but others find it juicer and more flavorful. The higher the temperature, the more the meat proteins shrink and expel moisture, so at lower temps moisture is preserved better.
But then again, not all cuts of meat are equal. Fattier cuts also preserve moisture and are more forgiving than lean cuts of meat when cooking. Heritage pork meat, for instance, is darker and fattier, so it is harder to overcook than exceptionally lean supermarket pork.
And then you can always artificially enhance moistness by brining your pork. Essentially you marinate the meat in a water, salt and sugar mixture to enhance both tenderness and moisture content. Cook’s Illustrated gives a couple recommendations for brining pork.
- For 4 bone-in chops (1 1/2 inches thick), combine 1 1/2 quart water, 3 tbs salt, 3 tbs sugar and let the chops soak for 1 hour.
- For a pork roast (3-6 pounds), use 2 quarts water, 1/4 cup salt, 1/4 cup sugar, and let the meat soak for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
What brining meat does is change the structure of the proteins. The ions from the salt force the meat proteins to adjust and they become more tender in the process, and the salty water is also absorbed into the meat through osmosis. Salty water evaporates less than regular water so the meat retains more moisture during the cooking process, and the end result is added moisture and more tender meat.
Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that the internal temperature of meat will rise as you let it rest after cooking. This happens because the exterior of the meat is hotter than the center, and that residual heat will have a ‘carry-over’ cooking effect even though it isn’t directly being cooked.
For instance, pork tenderloin recipes usually suggest letting the meat rest for 10 minutes after cooking, so you should actually take the meat off the heat before the internal temperature reaches your desired doneness. This allows some room for the carry-over cooking effect to finish your meat without over cooking it.
I personally take my pork tenderloin off at 135-140 degrees, which allows a rise of 5 degrees to 145. I like mine more medium rare as the tenderloin is very lean and will quickly dry out if cooked too much. At that temp, the loin ends are more towards medium and the center more medium rare.
The other day I was at the grocery store and avocados were on sale. After picking out five for $5, a lady asked me how to tell if they are good or not. I told her that unfortunately most of them were too ripe. They were squishy to the touch, and not worth buying.
So how does one pick out avocados at the grocery store?
I eat an amazing amount of avocados, and now I can just touch them and tell if they are perfectly ripe or will be ripe in a day, two days or longer, so I usually just choose the ripeness according to when I think I will use them. If you want one that is ready to eat or close to it, you should try to buy an avocado that gives slightly when lightly squeezed. You want a firm tenderness; not rock hard or too squishy. But don’t squeeze them too hard or else they might bruise.
An avocado that is rock hard will probably take more than three days to ripen, but you can speed up the ripening process by sealing the avocado in a paper bag with a banana or apple. These fruits release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. If an avocado is already ripe and you are not ready to eat it, you can store it in the fridge for up to a week.
For instruction on how to cut avocados, I found three internet videos useful. All three are good, but I have only embedded the Epicurious.com one in this post. You can also check out Chowhound and Rouxbe for their videos on how to pit and cut an avocado.
Since avocados can be rather expensive, especially when not in season, preservation is also a key. Avocados, once cut, will quickly start to brown, so when I make guacamole, I squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the top so the leftover guacamole doesn’t brown.
If you are only going to eat half an avocado, you can also store the side with the pit in it in the fridge. A lot of people first squeeze lemon juice on it to prevent browning, but the Chowhound video below uses onions in a plastic container. It’s a good tip, and one which I will try the next time.
Avocados are often used to make guacamole, which is very easy to make in its most basic form. It is simply ripe avocados, salt and garlic, but a lot of recipes add other ingredients. Rick Bayless, the acclaimed chef and restaurateur, gives his recipe in stages so you can add different flavors as you see fit. Bayless also has his signature chunky guacamole that he serves at his restaurant, and you can find that version at The Recipe Link. If you search the web, you will no doubt find dozens of other guacamole recipes to suit your taste.
As for me, I often take the easy way out. I use Rick Baylsess’ Frontera Guacamole Mix
If you want to know more about Rick Bayless and how he came to be one the premier chefs for Latin cuisine in the US, you can listen to this story on NPR. The NPR website also gives his recipe for roasted tomatillo guacamole.
Yesterday I purchased off of eBay the vintage wooden butter mold pictured to the right. One of my cooking goals for 2010 is to learn how to make my own butter. I know it isn’t that difficult, so I held myself to a higher standard of making butter for a special occasion. And even that seemed a bit too easy, so that led me to buying the butter mold, and now my plan is that on Christmas Eve I am going to bake a loaf of bread and make my own butter too. I think that will be a good combination.
So after buying my mold, I started looking into how exactly to make butter and ran into this video. You just have to shake heavy whipping cream in a jar for several minutes and rinse. That seemed too easy, and I had some cream already in the fridge, so I gave it a quick try. You are supposed to leave the cream out at room temperature for 6-12 hours to culture it first, but since I had a partial pint of cream already in the fridge and about to go bad, I decided to skip that step. So I got a Mason jar, poured in the very thick cream and started shaking.
After about 3-4 minutes I started to vigorously shake the jar as I wasn’t seeing the results that were in the video. He had a deliberate and steady shake, but I had to upgrade to a wild and violent shake. Maybe it didn’t form as quickly because the cream was chilled — I don’t know. Regardless, I did get the cream into a very thick state, but I still didn’t have the little globules of butter, so I just put in about a half cup of cold water and started shaking again. It only took about 10 seconds after that and I had nice, tangy fresh butter. I rinsed it a couple of times, smashed in some freshly ground pepper and kosher salt, and made some hot butter toast.
It took me only 10 minutes from the end of video to having warm toast with fresh butter. That was nice. And I think my daughter is going to like making ’shake’ butter too.
There are a lot of videos and instructional material on the web on how to make butter, but in addition to the video referenced above, I thought these two articles were interesting. One is from Cooking For Engineers and the other is from Saveur magazine. I will probably use a combination of their techniques when I make my final holiday butter.
If you want to buy butter molds, cookiemold.com has some nice hand-carved ones and Ruby Lane has interesting vintage molds and presses available. Just do a search for ‘butter molds’ on their website. Other than that, you can always check on eBay as I did.
After failing at my first attempt at making mozzarella cheese, I succeeded the second time around. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my less-than-satisfactory effort, so I made some changes and all worked out fine. Basically, the last time I felt that the microwave step of heating the cheese to get it all stretchy, along with the firmness of the cheese curds were the big problems. So here is what I did differently.
First of all, since temperature is important, I boiled some water and re-calibrated my thermometers, then picked which thermometer was best. It turns out the thermometer that came in the cheesemaking kit was completely off, almost ten degrees lower than the boiling point at 212 degrees. I can’t imagine anyone would have an easy time making cheese with that thermometer.
The next thing I changed is I let the curds and whey cook to a higher temperature than recommended by a few degrees, and then let the mixture sit twice as long. This ensured that my curds were nice and firm.
After the curds set, I cut them up with a knife, stirred them a bit, and reheated the mixture to the higher temp for the waterbath, all according to the recipe. I sided with using the hot waterbath method instead of the microwave, and that helped a lot. Last time, the microwave unevenly heated the cheese curds, and they ended up breaking down into a ricotta-like texture. The hot waterbath, even though a bit more time consuming, worked great for getting the mozzarella all stretchy so it could be kneaded and formed properly. It was a lot more forgiving than a microwave.
I also divided the curds into two batches so if I messed up one time, I could still have a second attempt. Both batches turned out, but it was good to have a back-up plan. For flavoring, I added thyme, freshly ground pepper, and salt.
So I am on my way to completing my top 10 cooking goals for 2010. One of those goals was making cheese, and though I will not stop with just mozzarella, I probably won’t be going crazy with home cheesemaking any time soon. I will, however, be ordering the book: Home Cheese Making
Well, making mozzarella cheese is both easier than I thought and harder than I thought. First of all, let me say that I failed to do what I wanted to do: make mozzarella cheese. And that is by no means my picture to the right.
Things were going well, and all looked pretty much like the photos until the whole microwaving thing at the end. The recipe I used was a quick, 30-minute mozzarella recipe from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, and in the recipe they give the option of using the microwave or a water-bath when getting the cheese all stretchy at the end. I used the microwave, and I don’t think that was a good choice.
Now with that said, I did end up with nicely broken down cheese curds that resembled a ricotta cheese, so I first gave a bowl to each of my dogs and then added fresh ground pepper and salt for me. It tasted really good, so I guess I didn’t completely fail. I just didn’t make the cheese I wanted to make, but did end up with to very happy dogs.
So what went wrong? Well, it could be many things. What I learned today is that in cheese making there are a lot of variables that can go wrong. Your milk may be too pasteurized or not fresh enough. The temp of the milk may be too high or too low. The curds might be too weak or your microwave too strong. I think these last two were my problem, and just browsing the FAQs at the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company site gives some indication of how many things can go wrong. I don’t think it is hard to make this kind of cheese, but I think it is easy to go wrong.
So for my next round, I am going to do a few things differently.
(1) Get a better thermometer. The one in the kit I bought was pretty basic and cheap, and I used another thermometer to double check the temp. At one point I had three thermometers in and they all had different readings. Not a good sign. And proximity to the bottom or edge of the pot affected the temp as well as stirring. It was a guessing game regarding the temperature of the mixture.
(2) I think my curds were too weak, so the next time I am going to read up on how to fix this.
(3) I won’t use the microwave. They say the temp is important at the end, and if it gets too hot the curds break down. On the other hand, if it is not hot enough, it won’t allow the cheese to get to the stretch stage for proper kneading. When I heated the bowl of curds in the microwave, the bottom portion of the cheese against the bowl was really hot and breaking down, yet the interior was not nearly hot enough. It’s the same problem with microwaving any food I guess, so I don’t know why I thought delicate cheese would be any different.
I guess I learned a fair amount in this process, and I am not going to give up after one mishap, but I do have mixed feelings about the cheese kit itself. In the package I received citric acid, cheese salt, rennet tablets, cheese cloth, a thermometer and an instruction book. The whole kit seemed a bit on the cheap side though.
From what I understand, instead of cheese salt you can just use non-iodized kosher salt — the key here being non-iodized. The thermometer is a waste really as you probably already have one or will end up buying a nicer one. You may have cheese cloth around too or you can easily pick it up locally. It is really just the citric acid and rennet tablets that are useful, but if you have a good health food store, you can probably find it there too. And once you factor in shipping, the kits seems less worth it yet. I even used the website recipe more than the cookbook that came with the kit.
So that is my first try at cheese making. I hope things turn out better the next time — though I am sure the dogs like it just the way it is. My failure equals their food.
On the Food & Beverage Buzz blog, I saw a post on cheese paper. Preserving cheese can be a tricky task, and it is one I have messed up more than once. But a person can now buy good cheese paper and with a little bit of wrapping instruction (below), cheese can last a lot longer. You can read the blog post for more information or go to the company website linked below. Dave the Wine Merchant tested the paper with various cheeses and found it worked very well at maintaining the quality of the cheese.
The paper is produced by a company called Formaticum out of Portland, Orgeon. It is not cheap at $9 for 15 sheets, but when you are preserving some of the most valuable food items in your fridge, I think it is well worth it. The paper consists of two layers: an inner one of porous plastic and an outer one of waxed paper. The materials allow the slow exchange of oxygen while also regulating humidity as this is what cheese needs to stay alive. Sealing it in plastic will suffocate it and ruin your cheese.
The best thing to do is look on the Formaticum website to see if there is a retailer near you, but you can also shop online with Formaticum directly or through Sur La Table. If you buy it through Amazon
Here is the video on how to wrap cheese. With the some cheese paper and a little instruction, you will look like a pro cheese monger.
How To Wrap Cheese from Formaticum on Vimeo.
Via Boing Boing comes this video on how to open a bottle of wine if you don’t have a corkscrew. Granted these French gentlemen clearly don’t need another bottle, but this tactic is useful if you don’t have an opener on hand.
One time while I was living in Kosovo, the owner of a small restaurant opened a bottle of my wine for me this way. Their corkscrew was broken, so the owner just wrapped a towel around the base of the bottle and proceeded to bang it against a brick wall until the cork came out. It worked, but I was a bit concerned as the bottle I brought was a very nice Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Seeing it for the first time was a bit of a shock, but I have never forgotten this trick. I am sure it isn’t great to agitate the wine so much and I still wouldn’t do this to a fine bottle of wine, but in a pinch it might be the only option.
You can also perform this against a tree trunk if you are out in nature or another hard surface, but wherever you do it, be careful to pad the bottom and strike it flush against the surface.
Via the Food Wishes blog comes this video on how to eat chicken wings. Usually people struggle with eating a chicken wing and it turns into a battle of human versus tiny chicken bones — with the chicken bones often winning. And in the end our fingers end up all messy, and we have probably looked a bit ridiculous too.
Maybe it is just me, but whenever I am eating a chicken wing, I feel as if people are watching me and probably passing judgement with appropriate Midwestern shock, uttering things like ‘gosh’ and ‘oh my’ as I try to eat that itty bitty wing.
Anyhow, no longer will that happen. This presentation by Chef John is delightfully simple, and it is one of those videos that makes you question why it has taken so long to do it the right way. It is similar to when I learned 15 years ago how to open a banana correctly. (Look it up on YouTube; you may be doing it incorrectly.)
Aside from this video, the Food Wishes blog is an extremely good food site. Chef John presents a lot of fine recipes, and the videos are very well done. Where most food blogs hover at the amateur level, this one takes food blogging to the next step. The content and instructions are professional, and this site definitely deserves some props for that.
As for recipes, I thought the seared scallops with orange and jalapeno dressing and cauliflower soup with blue cheese fritters looked great. Chef John also has a post on how to make your own fromage blanc, which I think I am going to try.
I don’t use microwave ovens a lot, but in a recent Saveur it was noted that on October 25th, it was the birthday of the introduction of the home mircrowave oven. The Tappan Stove Company using Raytheon military microwave technology introduced the first home unit in 1955. It retailed for $1,295.
Ten years later, Raytheon acquired Amana and put out the popular Radarange. I still remember those old microwave TV commercials where a large steel ball on a chain would crash into the door of the Amana radarange thus proving its strength and durability. I’m not sure how that related to cooking food, but I still remember the commercial at least.
The model above is what I had as a child in the 70s, and you can buy it on eBay for $150. From what I remember these units weigh a ton, so expect to pay a lot in shipping too.
I you don’t use your microwave that often, Real Simple listed 14 ’surprising’ uses for a microwave. This includes disinfecting sponges, softening brown sugar, roasting garlic, and cooking vegetables. Following that line of thought, in the New York Times there is an article by Mark Bittman on how to better use your microwave oven. Basically, if you would steam a vegetable, you can use the microwave instead. It saves time, dishes, and some say it retains more vitamins.
If you are looking at upgrading from your current model, Food & Wine in February 2009 listed some breakthroughs. Microwaves now have sensor cooking that automatically adjust cooking time, for instance the Panasonic Genius Prestige
As far as tips, Cook’s Illustrated says that using plastic wrap when cooking in a microwave can trap food-scorching steam and passed on a reader tip of using inverted glass bowls instead of plastic wrap. The magazine also gave the tip of using basket-style coffee filters to prevent splatters.
