Again with the dead blog!

It's been a long time since I've posted, just been busy with other things I suppose.  I spent a lot of weekends playing with the Bradley Smoker and the PID temperature controller.  There were some intermittent issues with the controller just losing power randomly, not a good thing to go out to check on things and find the smoker off and cool.  I assumed it was just a flakey electrical connection but the issue kept coming back even after rewiring everything, after rebuilding the thing several times I was able to finally determine that the issue was the fused main switch I had used.  Since bypassing the switch/fuse it has worked flawlessly.

Both of the food-related items I had backed on crowd funding sites that I was hoping to have delivered before Christmas have had their shipping dates backed up.  The new WiFi Nomiku (Kickstarter) has just started mass production so hopefully I'll be able to post a review of that soon.  The Paragon Induction Cooker (Indigogo) has had the expected ship window backed up to sometime in February, once that little piece of tech arrives I'm going to try and get back in to homebrewing!

For Christmas I like to make a standing rib roast, and this year was no exception.  We picked up a nice loin-end rib roast at Mariano's, since opening up a store near us a few months ago it has become my go-to grocery store.  Not as cheap as Jewel but they seem to be a little higher quality, now that they've been bought by Cincinnati based Kroger's we'll see if that continues to be the case .  I had the butcher cut off the bones and tie them back on, then on Christmas morning I seasoned the roast liberally and browned in some rendered beef tallow in a carbon steel pan.  The carbon steel skillet is something I wanted to get after reading an article in Cooks Illustrated about them, unfortunately by the time I saw the article it had been out a few days and the pan they chose as their best buy was sold out everywhere, the only ones I could find were selling for over 10 times MSRP (around $400 for a $40 list pan).  I picked up the skillet shown at Cost Plus World Market for under $20, but it isn't showing up on their website anymore.  Here it is on Amazon for a little more.  After searing all sides of the roast and letting it cool down a bit I placed it in a big zip-lock bag along with a few closes of garlic, herbs and more beef tallow then evacuated as much air as possible and placed it in a 130°f water bath for about 5 hours.  At that point the roast was removed from the bath and allowed to cool for 30 minutes before being finished in a hot (400°f) oven to produce a nice crust.

I had heard about these amazing popovers they serve at BLT Steakhouse in New York City and wanted to try them out.  They make the recipe available on their website so I decided to give it a try.  I'm not a big fan of volumetric measurements for things like flour so I tried to weigh everything out so I could reproduce the results if they worked out, they did so here are my weights for a 1/2 batch (6 popovers).

4 eggs (200 grams)
2 cups whole milk (scalded)
2 cups bread flour (240 grams)
Salt (5 grams)
Gruyere cheese (170 grams, grated)

Preheat the oven to 350°f.  Put the popover pan in the oven to heat up, I put some beef tallow in each cup to melt.  Mix together the flour and salt.  Scald the milk.  Whisk the eggs until frothy (I did this in a stand mixer fitted with a whisk).  Slowly pour the hot milk in to the eggs while whisking to prevent scrambling the eggs.  Fold the dry ingredients in to the egg mixture just until you get a smooth batter.  Remove the popover pan from the oven and spray with vegetable spray.  Fill each cup about 3/4 of the way full with batter.  Top each with 1-2 Tb grated gruyere cheese.  Bake at 350°f for ~50 minutes, turning the pan 1/2 way through baking.  These turned out fantastic and I think they'll be a new Christmas tradition.

The meal was rounded out with potatoes dauphinoise (I used some that I had vacuum sealed in the freezer from last year, don't tell anyone!), asparagus, a mushroom/pearl onion beef gravy, dinner rolls (in case the popovers didn't work out) and a chocolate cream pie for dessert (that deserves it's own post so I'll do that next week).

Food related gifts included a book (The American Plate:  A Culinary History in 100 Bites) and a Modernist Cuisine Spherification Kit.  I've played around with spherification before but now that I have a decent kit I'll have to revisit the technique.