Things are non-ideal in La Casa de Emmo lately, but awesome friends and yummy food are always a great distraction from pain and other badness. My friends Mindy and Joe came by last weekend for dinner and playing-with-chemicals and were the perfect mood-lifter.
Things didn't go exactly as planned... but when do they ever? The catalyst for getting together was to do some experiments with chemicals, and I was envisioning a trio of peanut butter and jelly for dessert. We made components for this, but by the time we finished dinner it was impossible to think about dessert and we ended up just plating one... but I'll get to that later. Since I was trying things out for the first time and the probability of failure was high (I even managed to accidentally make grape fruit roll-ups!), I made a batch of guava-alginate mixture and a calcium chloride bath before Mindy and Joe arrived so that we'd have at least one thing that worked: guava spheres to make a dressed-up vodka-tonic (pictured above). We prepped dessert components before dinner, but I'd actually started prepping dinner 46 hours earlier... The inspiration for our meal was my desire to do something fun with the skirt steak I had randomly purchased...
I've cooked skirt steak from Blood Farm in the past to unbelievably delicious results, but the skirt steaks from my local grocery were thinner and less gorgeous than those from Blood Farm (shocking, I know...) so I didn't feel like that was going to work out. As I do so often with so many ingredients lately, I decided that cooking them sous vide would be the way to go. There's a recipe in Thomas Keller's Bouchon Cookbook for Skirt Steak with Caramelized Shallots and Red Wine Jus that I referred to for my flavor profile (and my jus). It involved thyme and butter, and there was a potato side dish I planned on making with these same two components, so I decided my sous vide skirt steak better include those as well. I added cubes of (Amish) butter and some thyme leaves to my vacuum bags along with the skirt steak and seasoned (timidly) with a bit of sea salt.
The (Amish) butter melts while the steaks cook, and allows the thyme and sea salt to spread their yumminess throughout. These bags went into a 131°F water bath for a total of 48 hours. We'll come back to them in a bit. Meanwhile, I had caramelized onions vacuum-sealed in the freezer and decided I couldn't be bothered to purchase and caramelize a bunch of shallots, too. That meant that the Red Wine Jus and the potato side dish were all that remained to be prepped. (There was going to be a salad, too, but when the time came we, again, couldn't be bothered...) I chopped and sliced the veggies for the jus...
then tossed them in a pot with a bottle of red wine and some thyme, parsley, bay leaves, garlic, and black peppercorns. After this reduced to a glaze, 5 cups of "veal stock" are added and it reduced some more... This component will show up later, although I will mention here that I would probably reduce it even further than Thomas Keller recommends next time. (Not that he isn't always right, but I accidentally reduced the jus quite a bit the other day while preparing some leftovers for dinner, and it was fantastic.) On to the side dish. This is essentially a smittenkitchen recipe that I used different tools for and cooked individually. I liked this method because it's easy to do with a single potato (which is my usual need) or for a group.
Rather than using my handy-dandy mandolin, I decided to take an even easier route and "slice" my potatoes with my Japanese turning slicer. I also used this awesome doohicky on the shallots to get them sliced super-thin (with no effort) before running a knife through them for the next step.
We slid shallots in between potato layers while re-assembling each spiral-cut potato into its original shape. (I take less pictures when I have friends with me...) After adding a bit of (Amish) butter and olive oil to the bottom of a ramekin, we fanned out the potato-shallot stacks and topped with more (Amish) butter and a bit of salt and cayenne. (I substitute cayenne for the crushed pepper flakes in the original recipe because I'm sort of in love with cayenne these days...) After ~35 minutes in a 375°F oven, some plucked thyme leaves are sprinkled over the top,
and the ramekins go back in for 15 minutes more (or however long it takes you to remember that you have potatoes in the oven... ahem...) to finish baking and turning a lovely toasty brown on top. From here it's go-time. I used my new (awesome) blow torch to add a bit of char to the outside of the skirt steak when it came out of the water bath, heated the caramelized onions from my freezer in some (Amish) butter and thyme, and it was time to plate.
Dinner ended up looking not-too-shabby for something that involved very little hands-on work:
The 48-hour skirt steak? Holy crap, that is an awesome steak. Again, sous vide allows you to cook a tough (but super-flavorful) cut of meat long enough to make it tender but while keeping it medium-rare throughout.
(Look how cute those potatoes are, by the way...) So. Effing. Good. I will never cook skirt steak any other way again. As an added bonus, this method is totally stress-free, which is extra-nice when you have friends over (especially compared to trying to get a very thin cut of tough steak perfectly cooked on the grill...). Mmmm....
Finally, I'll toss in a silly video of some jelly noodle-extruding. This is basically the exact same technique as for the arugula noodles that I made before, but with a different mix of chemicals and a much better consistency to the resulting product. Noodles made just using agar agar are obnoxiously brittle, whereas if you use a combination of agar agar, xanthan gum, and locust bean gum, you end up with sturdy-yet-totally-flexible noodles that are so much easier to work with and to plate. I was super-glad we had a dude around to do the extruding. It was the hardest task of the evening by far.
Things didn't go exactly as planned... but when do they ever? The catalyst for getting together was to do some experiments with chemicals, and I was envisioning a trio of peanut butter and jelly for dessert. We made components for this, but by the time we finished dinner it was impossible to think about dessert and we ended up just plating one... but I'll get to that later. Since I was trying things out for the first time and the probability of failure was high (I even managed to accidentally make grape fruit roll-ups!), I made a batch of guava-alginate mixture and a calcium chloride bath before Mindy and Joe arrived so that we'd have at least one thing that worked: guava spheres to make a dressed-up vodka-tonic (pictured above). We prepped dessert components before dinner, but I'd actually started prepping dinner 46 hours earlier... The inspiration for our meal was my desire to do something fun with the skirt steak I had randomly purchased...
I've cooked skirt steak from Blood Farm in the past to unbelievably delicious results, but the skirt steaks from my local grocery were thinner and less gorgeous than those from Blood Farm (shocking, I know...) so I didn't feel like that was going to work out. As I do so often with so many ingredients lately, I decided that cooking them sous vide would be the way to go. There's a recipe in Thomas Keller's Bouchon Cookbook for Skirt Steak with Caramelized Shallots and Red Wine Jus that I referred to for my flavor profile (and my jus). It involved thyme and butter, and there was a potato side dish I planned on making with these same two components, so I decided my sous vide skirt steak better include those as well. I added cubes of (Amish) butter and some thyme leaves to my vacuum bags along with the skirt steak and seasoned (timidly) with a bit of sea salt.
The (Amish) butter melts while the steaks cook, and allows the thyme and sea salt to spread their yumminess throughout. These bags went into a 131°F water bath for a total of 48 hours. We'll come back to them in a bit. Meanwhile, I had caramelized onions vacuum-sealed in the freezer and decided I couldn't be bothered to purchase and caramelize a bunch of shallots, too. That meant that the Red Wine Jus and the potato side dish were all that remained to be prepped. (There was going to be a salad, too, but when the time came we, again, couldn't be bothered...) I chopped and sliced the veggies for the jus...
then tossed them in a pot with a bottle of red wine and some thyme, parsley, bay leaves, garlic, and black peppercorns. After this reduced to a glaze, 5 cups of "veal stock" are added and it reduced some more... This component will show up later, although I will mention here that I would probably reduce it even further than Thomas Keller recommends next time. (Not that he isn't always right, but I accidentally reduced the jus quite a bit the other day while preparing some leftovers for dinner, and it was fantastic.) On to the side dish. This is essentially a smittenkitchen recipe that I used different tools for and cooked individually. I liked this method because it's easy to do with a single potato (which is my usual need) or for a group.
Rather than using my handy-dandy mandolin, I decided to take an even easier route and "slice" my potatoes with my Japanese turning slicer. I also used this awesome doohicky on the shallots to get them sliced super-thin (with no effort) before running a knife through them for the next step.
We slid shallots in between potato layers while re-assembling each spiral-cut potato into its original shape. (I take less pictures when I have friends with me...) After adding a bit of (Amish) butter and olive oil to the bottom of a ramekin, we fanned out the potato-shallot stacks and topped with more (Amish) butter and a bit of salt and cayenne. (I substitute cayenne for the crushed pepper flakes in the original recipe because I'm sort of in love with cayenne these days...) After ~35 minutes in a 375°F oven, some plucked thyme leaves are sprinkled over the top,
and the ramekins go back in for 15 minutes more (or however long it takes you to remember that you have potatoes in the oven... ahem...) to finish baking and turning a lovely toasty brown on top. From here it's go-time. I used my new (awesome) blow torch to add a bit of char to the outside of the skirt steak when it came out of the water bath, heated the caramelized onions from my freezer in some (Amish) butter and thyme, and it was time to plate.
Dinner ended up looking not-too-shabby for something that involved very little hands-on work:
The 48-hour skirt steak? Holy crap, that is an awesome steak. Again, sous vide allows you to cook a tough (but super-flavorful) cut of meat long enough to make it tender but while keeping it medium-rare throughout.
(Look how cute those potatoes are, by the way...) So. Effing. Good. I will never cook skirt steak any other way again. As an added bonus, this method is totally stress-free, which is extra-nice when you have friends over (especially compared to trying to get a very thin cut of tough steak perfectly cooked on the grill...). Mmmm....
Finally, I'll toss in a silly video of some jelly noodle-extruding. This is basically the exact same technique as for the arugula noodles that I made before, but with a different mix of chemicals and a much better consistency to the resulting product. Noodles made just using agar agar are obnoxiously brittle, whereas if you use a combination of agar agar, xanthan gum, and locust bean gum, you end up with sturdy-yet-totally-flexible noodles that are so much easier to work with and to plate. I was super-glad we had a dude around to do the extruding. It was the hardest task of the evening by far. (The noodles extruded when we weren't recording made hilarious, extended "noodle-fart" noises (well, hilarious if you never matured past the age of about 8...), but this one isn't quite as cool... Apologies...) The grape jelly noodles were plated up with some peanut butter powder (made using the same method as when I made Nutella powder), and looked pretty cool if you ask me.I'm looking forward to playing with some fun recipes in the kitchen this weekend... if I can manage to make myself stop dreaming about those 48-hour skirt steaks...
I'm looking forward to playing with some fun recipes in the kitchen this weekend... if I can manage to make myself stop dreaming about those 48-hour skirt steaks...
1 comment:
Better cooking through chemistry...yummm!
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