More Kitchen Machinery

Here in alphabetical order is some other tools to add to your arsenal:

Blast chiller

OK, let’s face it – a full size refrigerator that can blast freeze items is out of hand for a home cook.  UNLESS you find it for crazy cheap on Craigslist.  Which I did.  Granted, I had to install 440 power in my garage, but hey, these things happen.  If you would rather just have quickly chilled drinks instead of chilling down pies or soup stocks, you can always get a LG refrigerator with their built in blast chiller:

Mmm. Chilled white wine.

Immersion Circulator

I mentioned immersion circulators before, but Polyscience has a “non-professional” version nowadays.  It’s $300 cheaper than their high end one and the only difference is that the display is smaller and tilted at an angle.  Since you probably aren’t in a huge kitchen where you have to look across the room to check on the time on the display, this one will do you just fine.

PolyScience Sous Vide Professional CREATIVE Series Immersion Circulator – $499.95

MAPP Torch

Brown your sous vide meats with flare.  Flames, to be exact.  Any hardware store carries the cylinder of gas and the torch head for around $20 so you can tap into your inner welder.

BernzOmatic Propane Torch Head – $10.99

Rotor-Stator Homogenizer

When you want something not just mixed, but fully and completely homegenzied.  The rotor instead whips around up to 35000 RPM to smash your food particles into tiny bits to make insanely smooth and creamy results.

BioSpec Tissue-Tearor Homogenizer – $963.35

Thermomix

Do you ever wish your blender had a heating element at the bottom?  And could weigh things? That what this does.  But so much more. I can’t even begin to explain all the things it can do so I’ll let them explain it instead.  They go for $1500, and can’t be bought in stores in the US.  Elsewhere you need to have them come to your house for a demonstration.  Unless, of course, you find one on Craigslist.  So try that out first.

Vacuum Tumbler

This thing is awesome!  You throw your meat and marinade into the bucket, then vacuum seal it with an attached pump.  You place it on the machine and let it spin for up to 30 minutes.  And BAM you have marinated meat ready to go!  No more waiting overnight for the meat to be ready.  The vacuum infuses the marinade into the meat, and the tumbling action breaks the muscle fibers, allowing the marinade to go deeper into the flesh.  It works and it’s awesome.  But, as far as I can tell, not for sale anymore.  So try eBay and grab one of these.

Weird tools

Go to your local Asian grocery and search through their kitchen tools.  They’re always inexpensive and you’ll find all sorts of unique items to cut your food in ways you never thought of doing.

Special Ingredients

The best thing to happen to cooking Modernist Cuisine at home is the arrival of Modernist Pantry on the scene.  Get any ingredient you want to small amounts at a reasonable price.  Albert Uster Imports also carries a selection of ingredients at good (and sometimes better) prices as well.

Cookbooks, Websites, and Stuff

The biggest cookbook to come out about Modernist Cuisine since my last post is, well, Modernist Cuisine.  Modernist Cuisine at Home, that is.  You can get it for under $100, and it’s well worth the price. I got some other cool books as well from my travels – it pays to sneak into used and specialty bookstores to see what treasures await.

The other awesome recipe resource to happen is Chefsteps, founded by former team members from Modernist Cuisine.  The technique videos alone are worth checking out, but there’s so much more, including the vibrant online community they’ve cultivated.

Another part of Modernist Cuisine is the presentation. The coolest kitchenware can be found at San Francisco’s Le Sanctuaire and Martin Kastner’s work for Alinea, but surfing the Internet can find you all sorts of stuff. MoMA has some interesting stuff, as does Sur La Table. Just surf and hunt and snoop and ask around and you’ll be able to expand your tool set to exercise your skill set.  Have fun!

Jethro

It’s been absolutely beautiful in Seattle the past few weeks.  The sun has been out, the flowers are in full bloom, and generally the malaise that creeps into people’s day to day personalities after months of cloud cover has given way to smiles and laughter. And lots of exposed white, pale skin.

The food has changed as well as the smell of BBQs has been in the air while we enjoy a respite from the gray skies.  I wanted a light snack that fit the warm days, and chose melon slices.  That get glued together.  As you do.

Melon Mesh

The Cast of Characters

Gluing fruit? How does one do that?  We already know we can use transglutaminase to glue meat together.  Well, it turns out the 2013 Saveur Culinary Science Food Blog Award winners Ideas in Food figured it out back in 2008.  The magic ingredients: low-methoxyl pectin and calcium lactate.  When combined together, they form a gel.  By infusing the fruit with calcium lactate, you can brush pectin on different pieces of fruit and effectively glue them together as a gel forms through them.  You can read more about it here.

The first step is cutting pieces of melon to glue together.  I want flat planks, but am faced with two spheres with a large cache of seeds nestled in the center of each one. I cut and improvise exactly how I’m doing this and manage to sort it out.

I dissolve calcium lactate into water, add it to the slices and compress them to infuse them.

Compressing fruit is always fun because it changes their appearance drastically, as we’ve seen before with cucumber.

Gellin’ Melons

Next up was boiling some water with pectin to get it fully hydrated and get it ready to get brushed on the fruit.

As you might see above, the compression bent the melons out of perfect plank shape a little bit.  But since we’re cutting them afterwards, this isn’t too big a deal.  Although the OCD part of me really wanted them to be perfectly matched in size.

After brushing on the pectin and stacking the slices into terrines, I vacuum sealed them again to hold them tightly in place while the gel formed.

One terrine didn’t quite make it through the sealing process without slipping a bit.  These things can happen.

After 12 hours in the fridge, they were ready.  I opened up the bags and cut them into shapes. A fruit terrine appetizer.

The gel isn’t super strong, but it does work.  As I ate one, I pressed my tongue along the side and the slices came apart as I chewed.  It was actually a pretty cool sensation.  The flavor was good, but I immediately started thinking of others.  I know they have watermelon and dragonfruit at my nearby store.  Mm.  But for now, I’ll just sit in the sun and munch melons while producing melanin. Ah, Springtime.

Jethro

Wow.

UPDATE 4/23/13: Congrats to Ideas In Food for their well deserved win!

Here’s the deal: vote for Jet City Gastrophysics as Saveur’s Best Culinary Science Blog here: http://www.saveur.com/food-blog-awards/vote.jsp?ID=1000014459

Have you done it?  Great – thanks!  To be sure, this is shocking and crazy that Saveur would recognize us, especially in the company of the other nominees. Is “honored” the right word? Perhaps “dumbfounded”.  But there are three reasons why Jet City Gastrophysics should be voted Best Food Blog.  Why?  Because reasons.

3. It would be a shocking upset

This is rarefied company.  Scott, the Seattle Food Geek – and Director of Culinary Research at Modernist Cuisine – won a Best Food Blog in 2010.  Ideas In Food, besides just being well, Ideas In Food, won a IACP Award for Instructional Culinary Writing with Recipes in 2011.  And Allen over at The Alinea Project has been featured in the SF Weekly.

These are strong contenders. Ideas In Food has 25k Twitter followers they can mobilize in an instant.  We’re a small David against the Goliaths of food science blogs! I say we stand and fight!  Yes, their blogs might kick ass all over this blog, but what would be more dramatic than a heart warming come-from-behind story? I can’t imagine.

2. When you vote for JCG, you’re really voting for everyone

You like Ideas In Food? So do we.  A lot!  So much so we’ve blogged about their popcorn gelato and compressed watermelon.  Maybe you’re more of an Alinea aficionado.  OK, we got their ice salad, and a review of eating there. Heck we even have an interview with Chef Achatz and Nick Kokonas.

And Scott?  C’mon, Scott is a co-founder of this blog!  Voting for Jet City Gastrophysics is like saying “You know, I love ALL of you”!  And we love you back.

1. I’ll get a free trip to Las Vegas

Ok, the truth.  If I win, they’ll fly me out to Las Vegas to attend their awards ceremony at the Bellagio.  I’ll represent the little guy, the non-industry type, the People, I tell you!  And trust me, I can out-party everyone, Bourdain included.  I’d blog about it, but, you know, “What happens in Vegas…”, etc, etc.

Voting ends this Friday, April 19th.  So come on and let’s do this! Feel free to share with your friends! Vote now! Woooo! Thanks again!!!

Jethro

]]> http://jetcitygastrophysics.com/2013/04/16/that-one-time-we-were-nominated-for-best-culinary-science-blog/feed/ 0 jethrollinsodom Best Food Blog at Saveur! http://jetcitygastrophysics.com/2013/04/12/gastrophysics-labs-closes-doors-reopens-as-kitchen/ http://jetcitygastrophysics.com/2013/04/12/gastrophysics-labs-closes-doors-reopens-as-kitchen/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:36:55 +0000 jethro http://jetcitygastrophysics.com/?p=2546 Continue reading »

So, this conversation over Twitter happened recently:

I mean, yes, there is a Nordic Food Lab and of course the Modernist Cuisine Cooking Lab,  but Gastrophysics Labs doesn’t publish papers or hold scientific seminars.  We cook for fun.  If Mugaritz is a kitchen, then Gastrophysics Labs is definitely a kitchen.

So, in honor of Mugaritz, going forward Gastrophysics Labs shall be known as ¡Cocina de Gastrophysics!  It’s “kitchen” in Spanish.  C’mon, We gotta keep it kinda fancy…

¡Bienvenidos a Cocina de Gastrophysics!

Jethrito

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Cheese!  In a tube!  Woooo!  I mean, really, it sells itself.  Let’s do this.

Cheese Squeeze

The Cast Of Characters

So once again, a constructed cheese – we’ve been through this before.  Different cheeses, different presentation, different dish.  This time I minced up some peppers, shredded some aged Gouda and Monterey Jack, and measured out my salts and spices.

I added the whey protein, sodium citrate, and, of course, the Fibrisol^® brand Joha^® SDS2 sodium phosphate to 100g of water and got it up to a simmer.

I added the cheeses, kept it at a simmer for 2 minutes, and blended it thoroughly with an immersion blender.

I folded in the cayenne pepper and jalapeno and poured the mixture into a squeeze bottle.  Next, I filled up the empty paint tubes I purchased at a local art supply store, and folded up the ends.

All that was left was to throw it in the fridge.  Done.  And it turned out squeeztacular.

There’s all sorts of fun ways to present this as a course during a meal.  Or, you can just throw it in your lunch bag to snack on.  Modernist Cuisine doesn’t have to be all fine-dining-sit-down-$150-a-plate-snooty-whatever. It can also be had just walking down street, squeezed between your thumb and finger.  Easy.  Cheesy.  Squeezy.

Jethro

A dinner party.  I haven’t had one since December, and I haven’t tackled The Work for the last few weeks, so I went back at it.  This time I chose something I could prepare beforehand, so I wouldn’t be in the kitchen for most of the meal.  Lamb Curry.  I can sous vide the lamb, have the sauce on the stove, and just some quick plating will be all that is necessary.  Well, almost.

Sous Vide Lamb Shank

This was straight forward: seal the shanks with oil, and drop them in a 61C water bath.  For three days.

I recently purchased a PolyScience circulator so I didn’t have to worry about some sort of accidental mishap during the time that they cooked.

Muslim Curry

The Cast Of Characters

Out of the five curries in the book, I chose the Muslim curry, found in the Hyderabad region of India.  This curry started with onions sauteed in ghee, with ginger and garlic added until it was nice and fragrant.  I love the start of these kinds of soups and sauces, where aromas first start filling the kitchen.  Very comforting.

I then had to add a bunch of spices – mace, cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, and peppercorns.  They needed to be toasted first, so I did that and took them for a quick spin in a grinder.  From there they found their way along with nutmeg and sugar into the onions.

The kitchen was smelling pretty awesome by this point.  From here I added cream and water, and let it simmer for 30 min.  Afterwards, I finished it off with saffron, butter and lime juice and a spin in the Vitamix.  To thicken it up I added a small amount of xanthan gum as well.  A gorgeous curry presented itself.

And with that the main course was ready to go.  And I had hours before dinner started.  Nice.

Candied Orange and Carrot Pulao

First things first: what is pulao?  It’s the South Asian version of pilaf – a rice dish cooked in a seasoned broth.  Our seasoning: sweetness.

I peeled the zest from some oranges and cut into a julienne.  I juiced the oranges and added the zest and juice to sugar and water and let it reduce until it was nice and syrupy.  While it reduced, I cut the carrots and cooked them in ghee and then combined the two.  The candied base for the rice was done.

I had some soaked rice ready to cook.  I added the candied mixture along with water and within 10 minutes the pulao was ready to go (an overexposed shot, but you get the idea).  The added toasted almonds and pistachios gave it a nutty crunch.

Final Torches Touches

Once I cut up some dates, I had the components ready to assemble and plate the dish.  Granted, the dish also includes a honey saffron foam and rose petals.  I couldn’t find any rose petals that were edible.  Since they’re out of season, the ones that are available probably have been treated to a panoply of chemicals, and suffice to say I didn’t think that was worth it.  As for the foam, have you ever bought saffron?  For the sauce alone, the saffron cost me over $20.  I can do the foam another time.

My guests were fed the appetizer, and it was time for plating the lamb.  Since they were fresh out of the water bath, a little prep was needed. They were gray and ugly, and cried out for a little maillard reaction to brown their bits.  So, I pulled out a MAPP torch and seared the suckers.

A little sauce, some chopped dates, a sprinkling of rose water, and pulao on the side.  Done. Not the prettiest plating, but it was all about the flavor.  The curry is pretty intense and rich, so the pulao was a perfect complement to offset it. The meat, of course, was fall-off-the-bone tender from three days of cooking. It went over very well and made for some delicious leftovers too.    What can I say?  March went out like a lamb, I’m telling you.

Jethro

OK, so this is what you do:

1. Take some strawberries and add 7% of the berries weight in sugar and 5% of the berries weight in isomalt.

2. Vacuum seal them and cook them sous vide for one hour at 65C.

3. Pull them out, let them cool in a bowl, then strain them.

And you’re done.  Sous vide berry juice.

Actually, it’s more like a sous vide berry simple syrup, so I added sparkling water and made a refreshing sous vide strawberry soda.  Ahh.  Cooking modernist style.  Just like that.

Jethro

A main course cooked in 6 minutes?  And it’s not stir fry?  This sounds like something worth looking into.  And all you need is your trusty microwave.  The New York Times already has covered the glory of microwaves and the making of this dish, but they were using the recipe from Modernist Cuisine at Homeinstead of the mighty Work.  I could work my way through that book – Modernist Cuisine At Home At Home, I suppose – but I’ll save that for someone else.  For this one, it’s Book Three, Chapter 11, Page 115.  Let’s continue.

Fish Nuke-n-Fry

OK, first thing: the Asian flavors of this dish make your kitchen smell excellent. Second thing: it takes longer than six minutes.  Why?  Preparation, of course.  Taking scallions and splitting them into thin strings takes time.  Not a huge amount of time of course.  And if you let them be a bit thicker then it’s really not that big a deal of all.

The first step is to throw 150g of scallion whites with some sliced ginger and Shaoxing rice wine onto the fish and nuke it. I have two bottles of the rice wine courtesy of Eric as he unloaded his extra ingredients on me when he left for Chicago, so that wasn’t an issue.  But 150g of scallions for 800g of fish?  That seems like a lot.

I had 105g for two fish, and that seemed plenty.  Nothing in the Corrections and Clarifications.  Mm.  I checked Modernist Cuisine At Home – they have 50g of scallion whites for 900g of fish.  Aha!  I knew it.  They can add that to the list of corrections.

I put the ingredients on the fish, wrapped it up, and placed it in the microwave.  The plastic wrap ballooned up as the steam was released, but thankfully, it never popped.

From there, I scraped off all the scallion whites and ginger (just meant to infuse flavor into the fish), then topped the fish with the fresh scallion greens and ginger and poured hot oil over it.  The greens and fish skin made a satisfying hissing sound as the oil fried them up.  I pulled the fish over to a clean plate, poured soy sauce and sesame oil over it and I was done.  Now, I could have done what the recipe suggests:

10. Lift fillets from bones, and serve with sauce and garnish.

I knew my filleting skills on a hot cooked fish were going to mean a pile of mush, so I skipped that and served it whole.  The authors fixed that up in the At Home version, suggesting to cook fillets instead of whole fish. But I had no problem digging in, picking out the bones and pulling out the spine.  No big deal – I mean it was just something I threw in the microwave.

Jethro

Scott approves of experimentation in the kitchen

Scott and myself have been hanging out with “Rotovap Chris” lately to do further food experiments in our kitchens.  We came up with themes for each session so we can focus a bit while having fun.  The last two were “Meat and Sweet” and “Cheese Infusions”.

Meat And Sweet

This cooking session was devoted to – you guessed it – combining meat with sweet flavors.  With came up with three ideas: chicken liver in a sugary shell, sous vide ribs cooked in various sweet flavors,  and a meat cannoli.  We took over Scott’s kitchen and went at it.

Candied Chicken Livers

The initial idea of Chris’ was to make a bacon Turtle without the bacon getting chewy.  It evolved into candied chicken livers (as you would of course expect, right?). I didn’t get any good photos of the chicken livers, but here’s a fuzzy phone pic to give you an idea:

The chicken livers were glazed with muscovado sugar and topped with szechuan peppercorns.  We couldn’t get the hard shell we were looking for but the flavor was promising.  The peppercorn bites were a bit harsh.  We think if we grind the peppercorns and dust the livers it will be more even.  Another idea is to use ElBulli’s method of encapsulating pumpkin oil to create the hard shell.

Sweet Ribs

Sweet rib infusions from left to right: chocolate, spiced rum, coffee, cherry cough drop (Photo: Scott Heimendinger)

Next up with vacuum sealed ribs with various flavors – chocolate (and I think some sort of pepper? I don’t recall.), spiced rum (and honey, I think? I should really take notes.), coffee and, yes, a cherry cough drop.  The results?  Except for the chocolate, they were all pretty gross.  The chocolate had echos of a mole sauce, so it isn’t too surprising it tasted decent.

Prosciutto Cannoli

Prosciutto Cannoli (photo: Scott Heimendinger)

Now this, this was pretty amazing. We took prosciutto and wrapped it around a metal bar that we then deep fried to create the shell.  The filling was white chocolate and caramelized onions that we siphoned out of an isoWhip.  The flavors matched and with the prosciutto nice and crunchy, it was a delicious treat.  I think it’s right up there with the deep fried egg yolk we came up with back in 2010. Yummmmmm.

Cheese Infusions

Our next meeting was at Chris’ place and we focused on cheese infusions. If Momofuku’s Christina Tosican make desserts with flavored infused in the milk, why not cheese as well?  We chose four flavors: Goldfish crackers, Cheetos, Bonito and Kimchi.

Hot Dog Cheese

But first, Chris had a strange infused cheese he had already made – hot dogs blended with mozzarella and xanthan gum.  And he had a bunch of freshly baked homemade crackers ready to go too.  He took a syringe and pumped the cheese into the crackers.

He plated them with two dipping sauces – ketchup and mustard.

These little hot dog cracker puffs were addictive.  Like those frozen egg rolls you’d eat as a kid, except they tasted exactly like a hot dog.  Tasty!

Cheese Infusin’

We were ready to go make our special cheese board. First we blended the ingredients into the milk.  We then heated the milk and added rennet and waited for the curd and whey to separate.  Then we put all of them into the centrifuge for a 20 minute spin.

The definite winners were the bonito and kimchi (or kimcheese, as Scott coined it).  The bonito dipped in soy sauce was excellent, and the kimcheese was good all on its own.  The goldfish and cheetos cheeses were mushy and strangely not that flavorful.  Maybe they’d be better fried.  So we did that.

I thought adding the fried crunchiness back to the Cheetos cheese improved its flavor.  Maybe the flavor memories triggered different receptors.  Who knows, but it worked.

Overall our test and trials were a success and I think we came up with some new treats to serve to our friends and family, and definitely stuff ourselves with.  We’re, as always, having a total blast.  Cooking, man.  Awesome.

Jethro

This was going to be a Halloween post but I had trouble with it and had to revisit it later to get it right.  I mean, really, nothing says ‘Happy Holidays’ like a champagne glass filled with hot blood pudding custard.  Actually, everything does besides that.  Anyway, I made hot blood pudding custard.

The New Tool: The Thermomix

In order to concoct this particular treat, I needed to use my Thermomix.  In a nutshell, a Thermomix is basically a blender that can heat up.  But that undersells the thing.  It also functions as a scale and has a 60 minute timer.  It can knock the skins off off garlic or mill nuts into flour within seconds.  With the Varoma attachment, you can steam whole meals above the stainless steel container. The blades can spin at ten different speeds while something cooks so you can leave it unattended while it does the work of stirring for you.  And if you live in the US, you can’t get one.

Yes, for some reason, they aren’t sold here.  They have a strange system where a salesperson comes to your home to demonstrate it first, then you can purchase one through them.  So how did I get mine?  Craigslist. It was brand new and the guy was going through a divorce and wanted to get rid of it.  I got it for 33% off the normal price.

In Modernist Cuisine, there’s only one recipe that explicitly uses the Thermomix, and that’s the blood custard.  It’s adapted from Heston Blumenthal, but I couldn’t find any recipe for the original. Making it wasn’t as easy as the Thermomix, but I got it figured out, with a little help of a friend.

The Land Of Milk And Blood

The first part of the recipe is simple: toast some spices, lightly crush them and make a sachet.  In this case, the combination is star anise, ginger, cinnamon, Sichuan peppercorns and cardamom seeds.

The very next step was a stumper, though.

Heavy cream, stabilized with hydrocolloids (or processed at ultrahigh temperature)

Well, there’s a lot of assumptions going on there.  What hydrocolloids?  How much?  What is meant by ‘stabilized’?  There was nothing mentioned in the corrections.  When I first tried it, I used ultra-pasteurized heavy whipping cream, but it never gelled together.  I had to find out exactly how to do it.

Since I’ve been into this cookbook even before it was published, I got to know the chefs who have written it (the advantage of living in the same city, you see).  I contacted Anjana Shanker, one of the primary chefs, and told her my tale of woe.  She in turn consulted with fellow chef Sam Fahey-Burke, who worked at the Fat Duck and knows the recipe very well.  Turns out there are a few things to note:

1. Use all natural cream.  Store creams often already have a stabilizer in them like carrageenan.
2. With the cream and blood at 100%, add 0.5% Kelcogel F (a low-acyl gellan) to the mixture as a stabilizer.

OK then.  I, of course, immediately forgot and added in the Kelcogel F to the cream alone, then heated it up with the sachet to infuse the cream with the spices.

The next step calls for fresh pig’s blood.  Like that’s easy to find.  I’m not sure how fresh they meant.  My local Asian grocery carries pig’s blood, but the ingredients listed say blood, water and salt.  I spoke with a butcher about getting some without anything else added, but they couldn’t offer it.  Short of attending a hog slaughter, this would have to do.

The first time I tried the recipe, I just spooned the blood out of the container.  The butcher suggested I blend and strain the blood first.  That made sense as the blood was partially coagulated and I probably wasn’t getting the proper full mix.  So, mix and measure the blood I did.

After the cream had cooled down, it was definitely thickened by the additive.  I put the cream and blood into the Thermomix and was ready to cook it up.

Thermomixin’

The next step in the recipe is as follows:

Cook in 70° C / 160° F Thermomix or beaker just until pudding has thickened to custard, about 4 h. Emulsion will split if overreduced.

Once again, the recipe was unclear.  The Thermomix has ten speed settings.  Which one was I supposed to use?  I consulted with Anjana, and she suggested to start at speed 5, and go down one speed each hour.  I tried that with my first attempt and it didn’t work, so this time I tried a little slower, starting a speed 4 and working my way down. As it blended, the mixture began to darken and bubble up through the cap on top.

The recipe talks about reduction.  It can’t really reduce if steam is not allowed to escape.  But at the higher speeds, the mixture kept spattering out of the top.  At speed 2 and 1 I took off the cap to allow steam to escape so it could reduce.

Oh, did I mention how it spattered at high speeds?  Yeah, I found out the hard way.

Anyone know how to get blood pudding custard out of a windowshade?  Otherwise, I have a lovely reminder of my cooking exploits. At least in the end it cooked and thickened and worked out.

I added the salt and sugar and gave it a taste.  It was too salty for my palate. I tried adding a bunch of sugar to a cup of it to see if it would be good sweet, but the flavor didn’t lend itself very well to the idea.  It is a savory custard, and I’m not sure how I’d serve it.  If I was feeling mischievous, perhaps in a Jello pudding serving container.  Or presented as a nice gift for that very special someone.  I’m not sure who that someone would be, though!

Jethro