05 Thursday Jul 2012
Posted in brining, curing, dehydration, MC at home, microwave, recipes
Beef jerky seems so expensive at the store. I always pass by it because I never feel like I’d get a good value out of it. Then I came across the recipe in Modernist Cuisine and thought I could do it for cheaper. Well, not really.
27 Monday Feb 2012
Posted in brining, curing, dehydration, sous vide, starches, thickeners, vacuum sealing
Eric
22 Wednesday Feb 2012
Posted in curing, dehydration, emulsions, foams, gels, hyrocolloids, starches, thickeners
Eric
23 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in brining, combi oven, cookbook, curing, old school, recipes, sous vide, vacuum sealing
Tags
Duck Press, Escoffier, Grant Achatz, Industrialist Cuisine, Next Restaurant, nitrogen cavitation, Paris, Tour D'Argent
Last week, Next Restaurant released its first in what I assume will be an endless series of digital cookbooks featuring the recipes of all the courses of each incarnation of the restaurant. They are currently in the midst of their third iteration of the menu, called ‘Childhood’. Prior to that was a ‘Tour of Thailand’. And before that, the opening salvo to their concept, ‘Paris, 1906’.
Why Paris in 1906? Kinda random, right? No, not for these guys. As they state in the opening of their iCookbook:
Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier opened the Ritz Hotel in 1906. A new upper class thrived; visiting the Ritz, along with restaurants such as Maxim’s, became something more than just dinner. Part fashion show and part social scene, the restaurant was now the entertainment.
Paris, 1906 — Escoffier at the Ritz was an easy choice as our opening menu at Next.
Ah, Escoffier. As Heston Blumenthal said, “We eat how we eat because of Auguste”. They decided to go boldly into the future by acknowledging the past. I, too, have a fondness for what I jokingly refer to as Industrialist Cuisine. And there is one dish on their menu in particular that exemplifies the restaurant as entertainment theme circa 1906: Caneton Rouennais à la Presse. Why? Because they used a big old brass contraption to press an entire duck to get at its juices. Entertainment, indeed.
Continue reading
21 Tuesday Jun 2011
Posted in brining, curing, gels, pressure cooking, sous vide, starches, thickeners, vacuum sealing
Tags
Cheese, Cooking Blog, Dinner, Flowers, Food, Forage, Marrow, Morel, pressure cooker, Recipe
Additional ox tail/morel broth served table side.
Eric
24 Tuesday May 2011
Did you know that you can cure meat at home using nothing more than a wine refrigerator?
This was my first attempt at meat curing, and I’d say it went fantastically well. This project was inspired by Matt Wright and his insanely beautiful blog, WrightFood. Matt has some serious curing experience under his belt, and offers detailed recipes and techniques for home curing. For this project, I followed his recipe for Duck Prosciutto (recipe is towards the bottom of the post).
The recipe calls for curing duck breasts in salt for 24 hours before hanging them up to cure at 55F with 60% relative humidity until they have lost 30% of their original mass.
Although I’ve got big plans in my head for building a high-tech curing chamber (one day), I also remembered that I had an unused wine refrigerator sitting in the basement. Nothing is sadder than an empty wine fridge, so I decided to repurpose it for a bold new mission. The fridge has an adjustable temperature setting for champagne, whites, reds and long-term storage. Luckily for me, one of those settings corresponds to 55F. I didn’t bother measuring the humidity in the wine fridge, but I reasoned that it would have to maintain a reasonable humidity level to keep wine corks from drying out. The fridge also has a small fan, which is great for circulating the air inside and a desirable condition for curing meat.
12 Thursday May 2011
Posted in curing, dehydration, emulsions, gels, hyrocolloids, maltodextrin, starches, thickeners, transglutaminase, vacuum sealing
Tags
30 of these.
Eric
03 Thursday Feb 2011
Posted in curing, dehydration, maltodextrin
Jet City Gastrophysics 