Early Low Temp Experiments

Finally riding the "Sous-Vide" wave.

Using just a big pot, a steamer insert as a riser, and an analog thermometer, I've started doing some low-temp (or low delta-T) work.

First experiment was, of course, steak in a bag. Got a small bit of beef tenderloin from Whole Foods (not great quality), put it in a Ziploc using the water technique in a bath that I started at 120F and let creep up to about 123F. I think it was in there for 1.5 hours or so. Interior temp was 120F when I pulled it out. Perfect, adjusting for the quality of the meat.

Next up was "Shrimp Sausage" - minced shrimp, shallots, and lime zest, seasoned with salt and wrapped up with plastic wrap into a log. Poached for 1 hour (probably unnecessarily long) at 135F (maybe unnecessarily warm).

At work, we have a steam table that I am working on calibrating. I think I got 125F down yesterday, but I left it overnight to be sure. I'd like to do a several-day braise of one of our lamb shanks.

Still Looking

Still in search of a good cookbook...looking at regional Italian right now.

"Cucina Di Calabria" sounds good...

In other news, following the French Toast Crepe Experiment, I plan to make pretzels and blend them into a pancake batter. Inspired by Pretzel Pancakes I saw (but did not order) in a restaurant near Minneapolis. Apparently they just put some pretzels in their pancakes as they cook.

An approximated recipe from that kitchen, that I have not tried yet:

Oaxaca-Style Relish

Lime Juice
Lemon Juice
Small Radishes, sliced thin
Red Onion, sliced thin
Habanero Peppers, gutted

Combine all ingredients, refrigerate overnight. Adjust seasoning.

I had this served on top of mini brauts with cabbage and avocado mousse (whipped cream). Tangy, spicy, and deceptively complex-tasting.

French Toast Crepes

Success!

2 pieces cooked french toast
1 egg
milk to thin

vitaprep. crepe batter!

Hydrocolloid Experiments

I've been doing a bunch of gel experiments lately, and I want to get my conclusions down before I forget them.

Whipped Gelatin foam: for powdered, 1% seems like a good concentration, though the resulting gel is quite fragile. About 2 or 2.5 sheets (gold I think) for a quart of sorbet base did well at work - much stiffer than the 1% powdered, but the mouthfeel was excellent. Whipping when the gel is more firmly gelled seemed to give larger bubbles and a more aggressive bubbly mouthfeel. Almost carbonated-seeming at times.

Agar: .5% worked well for a soft gel that melts quickly in the mouth. I had to add water to readjust the concentration before chilling because so much water evaporated during the hydration and dissolution process. Made a fluid gel around 1%. No structure without added starch, felt almost like water on the palate. A higher concentration lasted too long in the mouth in an unattractive way. A little added starch (Ultratex 8) gave an ok sauce-like mouthfeel and slightly more structure on the plate, but might change flavor release at a higher concentration.

Playing with Cornstarch

Last night, my Chef and I were wondering whether a cornstarch-thickened fluid would lose viscosity when subjected to shearing forces, so this morning I started doing some research. Unfortunately, my limited efforts turned up technical abstracts and youtube videos, and nothing much in between. On a side note, the youtube videos were pretty cool. "A Pool filled with non-Newtonion liquid" anyone?

So, I decided to do my own sloppy little experiment. First, I made a relatively concentrated cornstarch and water slurry and cooked that until milky-translucent and very thick. After noting the viscosity, I turned off the heat and started shearing the mix with a stick blender. The change in viscosity was obvious just from the way the blender worked. At first, with the blender submerged there was no movement on the fluid surface. After half a minute or so, the fluid was thin enough that immersing the blender caused great distortion even at the surface. Shearing had diminished viscosity considerably. Curious about whether letting the fluid sit would allow the gelling network to reform itself, I removed the blender and let the fluid rest in the still-hot cooking pot. it regained all or almost all of its viscosity in a few minutes. Unfortunately, I didn't design my experiment to separate the temperature and shear variables very well, so some of the thickening may have been due to cooling, rather than the absence of shear. I wondered about how further cooling would effect viscosity, so I transferred a small sample to a ice water bath. Both the sample in the ice bath and the sample in the pot cooled to a solid, soft, opaque gel that I could pick up with my hands.

A morning well spent.

Day of Chocolate

I had two great chocolate successes yesterday: bacon-chocolate truffles and emulsified hot chocolate.

The bacon truffles I made at work by steeping two strips of diced cooked bacon in the cream from a normal truffle recipe. They came out beautifully balanced, delivering both bacon and chocolate flavors in a way that really made the eater think about how those two play together.

Emulsified hot chocolate started as a concept because I wanted to serve hot chocolate to a vegan. In retrospect, just melting chocolate into enough water probably works fine, but I was drunk and thought instead of the old 'chocolate and water are enemies' maxim. Of course, that maxim made me think of Heston Blumenthol's Chocolate Mousse, made of chocolate and water. In the end, I decided to think of making the hot chocolate as making a fat in water emulsion for something like salad dressing or mayonnaise. I first melted some bittersweet chocolate, then added hot water a drop at a time. At first the chocolate did seem to sort of 'seize,' getting dry and clumped very quickly, but as I added more water, it turned fluid again. In the end, I got a perfectly smooth drink and my friends were presumably duly impressed by the process (and by the amount of time it took me to make a few cups of hot chocolate).

Molecular Mixology Source

http://spiritsandcocktails.wordpress.com/category/molecular-mixology/

Great stuff, especially the videos on the Aviation, Vessel 75, and Rosewater Rickey

Around and around: Centrifuges and Rotary Evaporators

'Cooking Issues' has two great articles on how and why to use two pieces of chemist's equipment in the the kitchen: centrifuges and rotovaps. Both separate a substance into its component parts: centrifuges by density and rotovaps by volatility. Cooks can use them to separate flavors into purer essences. Thinking about capturing the pure 'truth' of an ingredient led me to think also about the sous-vide technique, often used to cook meat while altering its flavor and texture minimally. Protecting the integrity of the ingredient seems to be the common theme, but what about other goals a cook can pursue? Does using a traditional process lend value to the final dish? I indeed find myself thinking in circles when I try to assign value to tradition, novelty, 'soul,' purity.

Sous-vide filet, rotovap'd red wine syrup, and root vegetable emulsion, or pot roast?

Brown Butter Consomme?

I started Harold McGee's Savory Brown Butter Consomme today, and I'm not sure how it's going. The pre-clarification broth seems to have been taken over by the soy sauce and lemon juice, so I'm a bit worried that's how the clarified broth is going to taste as well. Also I used a measuring cup for blooming the gelatin, when maybe I should have used a much wider vessel for more surface area to sprinkle the powder on. I'll have to wait and see. The butter fat that I skimmed off the broth, on the other hand, smells and tastes like the most beautiful, full-bodied, sweetest brown butter I've ever tasted (not that I've tasted that many). To skim the fat, I used a skimmer that I picked up in Hong Kong whose power I didn't grasp until today; its very fine mesh makes it really easy to separate fat and water, probably because fat droplets are much larger than water droplets. It's just like this one, except it cost me maybe a dollar, instead of $24.00, and presumably I still got ripped off.

On the Cutting (Weeping) Edge

I've been fascinated by gelatin clarification, a relatively new 'molecular gastronomy' technique for a while, though I'm only now gearing up to try it. The method attracts me because it's not part of classical technique, works very well, and is totally accessible to the home cook. Gel clarification is at least 4 or 5 years old, which seemed new (and it is, relative to techniques in the classical repertoire) until last night, when I discovered another clarification technique that makes gel clarification look like a dinosaur: agar clarification.

Agar clarification was first written about on Ideas in Food less than a month ago and then explained and simplified on Cooking Issues and later applied there to alcohol. This method uses the same syneresis effect as the older gel clarification technique, but it works much faster because you don't need to freeze the gel; agar gels apparently do not 'melt' at room temperature.

It's really exciting to see these techniques being invented and refined in real time.