31 Wednesday Aug 2011
Posted in emulsions, MC at home, recipes, sous vide, vacuum sealing
I’m beginning to think that the authors of Modernist Cuisine are evil. No, I’m not talking about the whole patent troll brouhaha. I’m talking about the recipes. Surely they are out to kill me. Why would I say such a thing, you might ask? Well, let me ask you: have you ever made their corn bread? No? And how about their bacon jam? I see. Let me try to explain.
13 Monday Jun 2011
Posted in brining, combi oven, MC at home, recipes
The Cast Of Characters
The title of this dish is misleading. I mean, how easy is it to steam broccoli in a combi oven? Set the settings, put it in, wait a few minutes. No, that would not be satisfactory in the least. We’re trying to do something different here. And certainly, so are the authors of Modernist Cuisine. Turns out it is better to call it Broccoli Three Ways. Or The Broccoli Trinity. Power Broc Triple Threat, perhaps. With our humble plant from the cabbage family, we are going to not just steam it, but fry it and pickle it as well. And throw some cured fatback on top for good measure. OK, now we’re talking.
14 Saturday May 2011
Posted in MC at home, recipes
When creating the striped omelet recipe from the Modernist Cuisine cookbook, a pastry comb is dragged through the mushroom puree to create the stripes. I had leftovers, and was making another omelet, when it hit me – why just do stripes? So I put the puree in a squeeze bottle instead.
As my cake decorating skills are non-existent, my first attempts were amateur indeed but promising. Another idea would be to use a pastry bag. Because of the egg powder mixed in, the mushroom puree firms up just like eggs. You can create spirals, filigrees, quotes and messages (“Good Morning!” would be funny), even roses rising from the omelet. I’m looking forward to seeing what crazy icing designs people come up with.
Jethro
28 Thursday Apr 2011
Posted in combi oven, MC at home, pressure cooking, recipes, sous vide, vacuum sealing
After I tackled the ham and cheese omelet last week from Modernist Cuisine, I was ready for the next step: their infamous striped mushroom omelet. I had to go online and to four grocery stores to collect the ingredients necessary. About $75 later I was ready to go. This had better be a good omelet.
The Cast Of Characters
The recipe calls for several preparations: a brown chicken jus, which goes into a mushroom marmalade, a mushroom puree and the omelet base. A scrambled egg foam was also made, but I ran out of N2O chargers for my cream whipper. So the sous vide scrambled eggs sit sealed in my refrigerator until I can go to the store and pick some up. We’ll skip that step.
22 Friday Apr 2011
Posted in centrifuge, combi oven, emulsions, gels, MC at home, recipes
Now, brethren, let us turn to Book Four, Chapter Fourteen, Page Ninety-Five of The Work, and construct ourselves a tasty little omelet. Three components need to be prepared in particular: the eggs, the cheese, and the butter. Ah, the wonderful world of dairy gels. We shall go in reverse order.
21 Monday Mar 2011
Posted in combi oven, MC at home, recipes
Continuing my awesome ability to find super deals on the Internet, I stumbled across a posting on Craigslist for an unused Gaggenau combi oven for under a grand. That’s a chunk of change no matter how you slice it, but considering these things go for $3000, it was quite a find. There had to be something wrong with it. I went to take a look and heard the story: the guy bought the oven at an auction from an appliance store that went out of business, collecting a wide variety of gadgetry for he and his girlfriend’s dream kitchen. Then, she left him, and headed back to China. He was trying to get rid of all of it. No scratches and everything seemed to look good – so I went for it. A few days later with the help of my neighbor, and I had it installed and, thankfully, working up above my fridge.
My New Toy: A Gaggenau Combi Oven
28 Monday Feb 2011
Posted in centrifuge, MC at home, recipes
Recently, in a laboratory outside Seattle, I ate a piece of buttered toast that I will remember for the rest of my life. The bread itself was not extraordinary, but it was spread thickly with the brightest-green butter I’ve ever seen. It was not true butter, but rather an extract of pure green peas. Fresh peas are blended to a puree, then spun in a centrifuge at 13 times the force of gravity. The force separates the puree into three discrete layers: on the bottom, a bland puck of starch; on the top, vibrant-colored, seductively sweet pea juice; and separating the two, a thin layer of the pea’s natural fat, pea-green and unctuous.
– Paul Adams, Future of food: Drinkable bagels and beyond
As the first reviews began coming out from the 30 course dinners held by the Modernist Cuisine team, everyone mentioned the pea butter in particular. A pretty simple recipe, you take pureed peas and spin them in a centrifuge to extract the pea fat. I gave it a shot at my house, taking a can of peas, blending them, and spinning them for 30 minutes. Nothing good came of it and the layers did not seem to separate. I was stumped.
Luckily, I was able to talk with chefs Maxime Bilet and Anjana Shanker at the Modernist Cuisine book launch and they were able to clarify a few things for me:
That seems simple enough. So I went home and went at it.
Peas, Unspun
The chefs recommended a bag of high quality organic peas. My local store had Kroger brand. Well, hey, I gotta start somewhere. I brought home a bag and threw them in the Vita-Mix for their first spin of the day. It ended up being a very bright green frozen powder. I put the pea dust into one of my centrifuge containers and filled the rest of the containers with water as counterweights.
When talking with Chef Shanker, I asked how powerful their centrifuge was that she used for the pea butter, and she said it was 10,000 g’s. So I had to calculate how long mine would spin at, since my centrifuge only goes to 1520 g’s. Since the relationship is linear it’s straightforward to figure out:
10000/1520 = 6.58
6.58 x 90 = 592 min.
592/60 = 9.9 hours
Ten hours in the centrifuge? Mm. I started around 3pm and didn’t feel like waiting until 1am to see the results. So I decided 5 hours was plenty.
She also mentioned that it was good that I had a refrigeration unit attached. The reason is two fold: 1) so the food doesn’t cook; and 2) it keeps the pellet together, providing better separation. I checked my centrifuge temperature with and without the refrigeration unit. Without, the chamber got to 124F. With the unit turned on, it was at about 70F. So a significant difference to be sure.
And after five hours, I pulled out the peas and saw the results. Three separate layers: a pellet of pea meat, a thin layer of pea fat and a supernate of pea water.
One thing to note is look at the bottom of the container as compared to the photo of it prior to spinning. Five hours in the centrifuge completely distended and reshaped it. Luckily, it didn’t crack open.
I scraped off the fat and put it on a piece of bread. Pure bright pea flavor. It’s really, really good. The pea pellet and pea water were also striking in their own way as well.
I’m a little concerned about the wear and tear on the centrifuge since I will be needing to be spinning it for long periods of time to get their results, but it performed great for a five hour run. Cooking of all types teaches you patience, and in this case as in others, the wait is well worth it.
Jethro
21 Tuesday Dec 2010
Posted in MC at home, recipes
Picking up where I left off from last month, I finished making the rest of the puree recipes from the PDF excerpt of Modernist Cuisine. Well, almost all of it. Two remaining recipes involved being sauteed and then blended in a commercial blender. One required boiling and a Pacojet. A Pacojet, which quickly purees frozen products to produce a very fine consistency, can be found used online. For around $2900. This is out of reach for this home cook, so it will have to wait until, oh, a miracle occurs.
In that last post, I had some issues getting a truly smooth puree. Then, lo and behold, none other than Dr. Myhrvold himself, the author of Modernist Cuisine, kindly commented that I needed a commercial blender – in particular, a VitaMix – to get the results I was looking for. How did he know? He had his team re-test all the purees. I can just imagine how the chefs felt, having to re-do their work because some frickin’ home cook blogger couldn’t nail it down. Chefs, if you’re reading this, my apologies. Just having lots of fun over here!
So I needed to find a VitaMix. They sell for around $450 new, but that’s pretty steep. I needed to find one used. So to the Internet I went. $300 was the going rate most of the time, but I, master of the bargain, was able to find one at a yard sale for $100! So take heart, home cooks – miracles do occur. Just keep your eyes peeled.
And with my VitaMix in hand, I was ready to conquer the next set of purees.
Not So Smooth
As what seems to be a pattern for me, I learned something valuable about cooking this week by messing it up. This time it was over phrasing. In particular, the instruction “thinly sliced”. For me, thinly slicing asparagus implies lengthwise. Otherwise, it would have said “thinly chop”, right? I don’t think so. In the first round, the thin stringy fibers of the inside of the asparagus refused to be finely blended, leaving choppy floss and an uneven texture. So I went back to the store, bought some more, and sliced them appropriately.
I gave them a go in my new VitaMix and the smoothest, most beautiful bright green puree presented itself. These Vitamix’s are awesome!
This Is Some Seriously Smooth Asparagus
I served it with a 24 hour sous vide pork belly for a dinner with friends and it went over famously. If you have a VitaMix, go make some. Now.
The final puree called for broccoli stems. At my local chain supermarket, they cut off the stems because they rightly assume the vast majority will just throw it away for the good stuff – the florets. But as always my trusty Asian grocery store came through and had nice thick stems to use.
I followed the directions, which were very straightforward – saute on medium heat for 12 minutes with a neutral oil. I looked through my cabinet: canola, pumpkin seed, avocado, olive, peanut…and grapeseed. There’s a nice neutral standard. After cooking I put them in the blender and gave them the spin of their life.
About To Be Liquified In A Proper Blender
And once again I was rewarded with a thick, creamy, smooth vegetable puree. On the parametric recipe, the asparagus and broccoli recipes point to other pages for reference in the cookbook. I wonder what they help illuminate. I know the purees taste great on their own, but I bet it would be fun to do some inverse spherification on them as well. Maybe that’s what the other pages suggest. Maybe not. I’ll have to wait until March 2011 like everyone else. But I do know that’s what’s up next in my kitchen.
Jethro
09 Thursday Dec 2010
Posted in MC at home, recipes, sous vide, starches
About a month ago the team at Intellectual Ventures put up an interesting blog post about frying watermelon to make watermelon chips. With nothing more fancy than a vacuum sealer, this seemed like a perfect recipe to try out at home.
The concept behind the watermelon chip is that starch is what makes a chip a chip, whether it’s corn or potato or even parsnip and taro. Fruit, however, does not have the high starch content that these vegetables have (yes, a potato is a vegetable). Using vacuum compression, starch can be infused into the fruit, and make it suitable for frying. They settled on watermelon. I decided on dragon fruit.
The steps are simple enough:
I went to my local Asian supermarket and nabbed a dragon fruit. I then had it thinly sliced on a meat slicer. Here I pulled some strings: I don’t have a slicer at home, so asked my best friend who owns a bar if I could come in and borrow his for a minute. I’m sure I could have just cut it thinly myself, but I wanted to nail it. Sometimes it’s more fun to make it more complicated.
Next up was starch. In the blog post, Chef Zhu says he’s using something and water. Did he say Crisco? Or maybe Cryscoat? One check on the web and it turns out that Cryscoat is a “nickel-containing zinc phosphate for steel and zinc-coated steel, applied by spray or immersion prior to painting”. So, probably not that. Screw it I thought – I’ll just use the cornstarch in my cabinet. Sometimes it’s easier to not make things too complicated.
I took the dragon fruit slices, which were awfully thin and delicate, applied the starch to either side, and placed them in a sealing bag. Which I then sealed up.
After 30 minutes I fried them up on the stove. They liked to stick together so I found it easier, though more time consuming, to only do 2 or 3 at a time.
And after I let them dry out and crisp up, I had some amazing dragon fruit chips. The sweetness of the fruit came through, with the added texture of the seeds, which also imparted a sesame-like flavor to the chip. Excellent and delicious.
I’m looking forward to their completed cookbook to see what other ideas they have for transforming foods into flavors and textures they’ve never been before. In the meantime, however, I’ll just try and cook the examples they keep throwing out at us.
Jethro
12 Friday Nov 2010
Posted in MC at home, recipes, sous vide, vacuum sealing
Tags
Last month I began to cook my way through the upcoming Modernist Cuisine cookbook by using their PDF excerpt they made available for download. Out of the three recipe examples given, only two have enough information to make them in their entirety. First I created their recipe for instant hollandaise. Next up: their selection of recipes for smooth purees. Out of the five fruits and vegetables listed, three are prepared sous vide. I decided to do those first, because any chance to use my vacuum sealer makes it worthwhile for it to take up a huge chunk of my counter space. The saute recipes will be covered in Part II.
Let's Get Smooth
The recipe for pureed fruits and vegetables is an example of what they call a parametric recipe. This type of recipe gives a basic concept with several variations in an at-a-glance format. This way you can understand the basic concept and run with it. As they say in the excerpt:
We feel the parametric recipe is a strong concept for an instructional cookbook. Such a recipe does more than merely suggest methods for making one dish the same way again and again— it reveals the pattern and reasoning behind the chosen ingredients and methods, and thus makes it clearer how to apply those lessons in other circumstances. The parametric recipe thus takes the master recipe to a more detailed level, and serves as a launching point that allows you to change ingredients and quantities in a number of ways to produce dozens of variations.
That’s right up my alley – taking these new techniques and understanding the fundamental idea behind them, so they can be applied to whatever I’m cooking. I love this book already, and it’s only a PDF file.
Well, wouldn’t you know it. Artichokes are out of season around here at the moment (the peak season is August through October). But we have a variety of different grocers; there must be someone who has some. Sure enough, Whole Foods had some packaged baby artichokes available. Is one package enough? I eyeballed it and thought it looked OK to me.
The process was simple enough: get the hearts out and thinly slice them, vacuum seal them with vegetable stock and olive oil, and drop them in a sous vide bath. The scaling directions are so great. You set the veggie to 100%, and add the other ingredients in the correct proportion, no matter how big or small the quantity. In my case, these baby artichokes didn’t give up much in the way of meat, but I dutifully went ahead and prepared them.
After sitting in the water bath for 45 minutes, I put them in the blender, and promptly had my first puree fail.
Does This Look Smooth To You? Yeah, Me Either.
Turns out that you really need more than a few baby artichokes to create the volume necessary for the blender to blend well. I’m just a guy cooking at home and this recipe is aimed at culinary professionals who need to crank out 400 covers a night. The recipe just doesn’t account for single servings. Fair enough. I’ll have to wait until they’re back in season and try it again. It was a decent enough spread and I ate it within a few bites.
Undaunted, I moved ahead to the next one on the list (and conveniently needing the same temperature water bath). Once again, the first part of the directions was simple enough: peel and thinly slice some beets.
The next ingredient was interesting: cooked beet juice. Why cooked beet juice? As the book isn’t published yet, I don’t know. Well, OK then. I juiced a beet and cooked the juice. All this fuschia foam developed and floated on the juice. Should I discard it? Probably. So I skimmed the top, added the juice to the beets with butter (all carefully measured with a digital scale of course) and sealed it up.
After an hour in the sous vide bath, I pulled it out and put it in the blender, where unlike the artichokes, it did its magic well.
I had my first puree of sous vide beets. It definitely had that earthy beet flavor, and an intense bright color , but the texture was a bit…oh, grainy? Maybe sandy is a better word. Somehow I was expecting a texture like pudding – perfectly smooth. Is this the correct texture? Perhaps when the recipe calls for a commercial blender, they mean a Vitamix or Blendtec mixer. Most likely it’s meant as a base for something else, and not meant to be eaten alone. I don’t know for certain, but certainly, it isn’t bad at all – just not what I was expecting. As a matter of fact, I see a borscht in my near future.
A Beautiful Beet Puree
So the final recipe that called for sous vide was the apples. These required no other ingredients. Just slow cooked apples. I like the simplicity. I chose a mix of Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples. Peeled and quartered, I sealed them up and put them in.
After they were done I blended them together and…wow. Sous vide apple sauce. So smooth, so creamy. Just ridiculously good.
This Tastes So Good. Whoa.
It’s funny how the texture improved with each progressive recipe. I felt like Goldilocks – “Ahhh, this porridge is just right!” And now, because of the parametric recipe, I know how to apply it to other fruit and vegetables like pears and carrots as well. I am loving this cookbook that isn’t published yet. Awesome.
Jethro
Jet City Gastrophysics 