Faux-aged, Searzall seared, sous vide cooked standing rib roast (with mushroom/black garlic gravy).

We have traditions.  For Fourth of July we have a cook out, Thanksgiving is a traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings and Christmas we have a standing rib roast with dauphinoise potatoes, fresh yeast rolls and a few rotating vegetables.  This Christmas was no different, but earlier in the year I had read about a technique for taking wet-aged beef from the supermarket and imparting the flavors of a dry aged cut of meat and I wanted to try it out.

I believe this process was originally described in one of the Modernist Cuisine books (at home?) but I first read about it on the Seriouseats blog.  The process takes some time, so 8 days before Christmas I went to our local supermarket (Jewel-Osco) and picked up a 2 bone rib roast.  After looking at what was available I picked one that was a good mix of lean muscle to fat, I would describe it as solidly in the choice grade.  Once at home I started the process.

The first step in the faux-aging process is to coat the cut of beef with fish sauce, vacuum seal and let it sit in the refrigerator for 3-4 days.  I grabbed a bottle of Tiparo's Fish Sauce from the pantry and tried to coat every surface of the roast, then let it sit in the run-off for a few minuted while I cut and prepared a suitably large Foodsaver bag.  The roast was just small enough to fit in the bag, which was then vacuum sealed and left in the refrigerator for four days.

The next step is to remove the roast from the bag and let it sit in the refrigerator loosely covered for a few days to allow moisture to evaporate from the meat.  The way I saw it described (which was for steaks instead of roasts) was to wrap the meat in a few layers of cheesecloth, but since I didn't have any of that laying around I just draped a couple of sheets of parchment paper of the roast and covered the whole thing with a dish towel.  Before covering I had coated the exposed meat with cracked black pepper.  This was left in the refrigerator for 3 more days.

This was the roast after three days dehydrating in the refrigerator, as you can see the fat cap had turned a bit yellowish/brown and there were some dark areas on the exposed muscle.  The next step was to trim the roast of most of the fat cap and any discolored meat.  Before starting, I set my new Anova Precision Cooker up on a 12 quart Cambro, filled it to a few inched above the minimum and started heating the bath to 132f.

I then went about trimming the roast, all the scraps were saved so I could render them down later and use the fat for other parts of the meal.  Once trimmed the roast was seasoned with salt and pepper, and I broke out the Searzall to sear all the surfaces.  There are several schools of thoughts when it comes to searing sous vide cooked meats.  I like to sear before AND after the soak.  The initial sear not only serves to kill off any surface bacteria that might be present, but the Maillard reactions that occur during the sear will have a chance to permeate the meat during the soak.  The second searing lets you develop a good crust on the meat.  The seared roast was again vacuum sealed using the Foodsaver and the bag placed in the water bath.  I added water to bring the bath up to near the max level and left it to soak for about 5 hours.

Here is the bagged roast soaking in the water bath.  Initially the temperature went down about 10 degrees when the roast was added and the water level topped off, but the circulator rebounded quickly and the bath temperature was back up where I wanted it within 10 minutes.

After 5 hours it was time to remove the roast from the bath.  This was the day before Christmas, so the roast was chilled in an ice bath and set in the refrigerator until the next day.  For serving I simply rethermed the roast in a 130f bath for about an hour, then removed from the bag, patted dry and allowed to rest for about 10 minutes before placing in a very hot oven (500f) for about 10 minutes to dry off the outer surface and develop a nice crust.

To serve with the roast I made a quick mushroom/black garlic gravy.  I've been playing around with black garlic a bit lately and wanted to find a way to incorporate it in the the meal.  Shallots and mushrooms were browned in some of the fat rendered from the beef trimmings, once suitably colored a bit of flour was added to form a roux.  The roux was cooked for a few minutes to get rid of the raw flour taste, minced black garlic was added and the pan was deglazed with some red wine.  Beef broth was added and the gravy was left to reduce and thicken on the stove top.

So was it worth it?  The resulting roast had some of the flavors you expect to find in dry-aged beef, but at a fraction of the cost.  Real dry aged beef will have more concentrated and complex flavors, but if you don't want to pay 5 times as much this technique will give you a good result somewhere between a wet aged roast and its much more expensive dry aged cousin.  

It's Here!: Searzall Edition

I've been listening to Dave Arnolds "Cooking Issues" for a few years now and had heard him talk about the torch attachment they had been developing on the show, so when he announced that they were launching a Kickstarter campaign to I jumped in.  Today it arrived and I wanted to try it out!

The Searzall was packaged in a small box along with some hardware and literature.

Here is everything unpacked.  Included in the box is the Searzall attachment, a spare set of screens, an allen key, limited warranty sheet, initial set-up instructions and a user guide.  Also included is a small wooden stick, which confused me at first but made sense once I had read the instructions.  There is also a torch head adapter which was already inserted in the Searzall.

Here is the Searzall attached to my torch.  In anticipation of the arrival I had purchased the recommended torch head, a Benzomatic TS8000, a few months ago.  Mounting the searzall was extremely simple, since the adapter was already installed (there is a thumbscrew to secure it in place) I just slipped the attachment on to the end of the torch.  This is where the wooden stick comes in to play, you insert the stick between the tip of the torch head and the searzall to ensure proper spacing between the two, there should be a 1/8" gap.  The Searzall is then secured by tightening a lock nut with the provided allen key and the stick removed (and stored in a safe location for future use!).  The instructions at this point are to ignite the torch and position the Searzall with the screens pointing directly at the floor at a height of at least 4 feet for two minutes.  The metal will glow red during this initial burn-in.

Here's a shot with the screen still red hot.  It took about 7-8 minutes for the metal to cool to the pint it could be handled, but this thing gets HOT, so an abundance of caution is called for.  I tried to get a temperature using an infrared thermometer but the temperature exceeded its range (550 C).

Finally I was ready to use the Searzall on some food.  I've been trying to lose a little weight before the holidays so on the weekends I cook a lot of protein and sides, portion them to get the calories I want, vacuum seal the meal together and freeze.  For tonight I pulled a sous vide pork chop with Brussels sprouts and new potatoes.  The pouch was rethermed in a water bath heated by my Nomiku, removed and de-bagged.  I patted as much moisture off the pork as possible and went to work with the Searzall, which gave me a really nice crust.  I then went to town on the sides...

Getting a little char on the vegetables was a piece of cake!  This weekend I plan on using the Searzall quite a bit while making meals for the next week, it will be a lot easier (and cleaner) than searing my proteins in a skillet like I have been doing.  This is going to be an extremely useful tool!

Busy summer, hope to start posting more often soon.

Its been a busy summer and again I've neglected this blog for far too long.  The next few months should give me lots to write about, I should be receiving three items from Kickstarter campaigns I funded.  Within a few week my Searzall should arrive.  To get ready for this I went and purchased the recommended torch head to replace the really cheap one I originally bought at the hardware store to make creme brulee.  This should come in handy this winter when I won't be able to fire up the grill to sear my sous vide cooked steaks and chicken.  Next month (or soon after) I'm expecting my Anova Precision Cooker to be delivered.  I love my Nomiku but I've heard good things about Anova so when I had the chance to grab one at the $99 level I jumped at it, never can have too many circulators!  A little further down the road (estimated March 2015) will be the next iteration of the Nomiku!  This kickstarter is still ongoing for the next few days so if you want a great circulator at a good price go there now!

With the exception of Labor day I haven't really been cooking anything new.  I have been experimenting with different times and temperatures for eggs, the yolk of a 63C egg if perfect but the loose white is a turn off for me.  So far I've tried 75C for 13 minutes, which is nice but the yolk just isn't the same, and dropping a 63C egg in to simmering water long enough to firm up the white.  I think the latter technique will work best but I'm still trying to figure out how long it takes to get the firm white I want without overcooking the yolk.

I was able to play around a bit on Labor day.  Both the potato salad and asparagus were cooked sous vide at 85C for 45 minutes.  In the past I've soaked asparagus at 90C for 10 minutes, I think the lower temperature and longer time gives a better texture to the finished product.  For the potato salad I tossed the potatoes in a mixture of Dijon mustard, dill pickle juice, salt, pepper and some dried dill.  This was sealed in a vacuum bag and cooked along with the asparagus.  The next day the potatoes were mixed with some diced onion and bell pepper, sliced asparagus and Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers that we had.  I added a little mayo to half of the potato salad and left the rest mayo free for those who didn't want the extra fat.  Both were excellent, this really is the best way I've found to cook  the potatoes so they are complete permeated with flavor.

We were having polish sausages as the main course, so I wanted to make one more thing... really good sausage rolls.  I'm a fan of New England split top rolls, the kind that are used for lobster rolls on the east coast, but they're a little hard to find in Chicago.  I've grown fond of a recipe in an old King Arthur Flour catalog to which I've made a few changes.  I prefer my bread doughs to have a long, cold fermentation in the refrigerator instead of letting them ferment at room temperature, I find the long ferment allows better flavor development, improved texture and makes the dough easier to work with.  To do this you just need to decrease the amount of yeast in the formula, I halved the yeast in the original recipe for these rolls.  This technique is particularly good for pizza dough, it not only gives you a great yeasty flavor in your crust but the dough is also much easier to stretch out.  But the main advantage to this technique, and the reason that most pizzerias use it, is that it significantly increases the window in which the dough is usable.  My dough is ready to go after 24 hours, but it will keep in the fridge for up to 5 days and still give me a great crust.  The one disadvantage is that you can't just use the dough right out of the fridge, it needs to warm up first before being shaped.  In the past I've just left it sitting on the counter for a few hours but this time I still had the Nomiku set up on the water bath from the day before so I thought I try something new.  The dough had been cold fermenting overnight in a large zip-lock freezer bag.  I set the temperature of the water bath to 35C and forced as much gas out of the bag as possible, closed it and clipped it to the side of the bath.  After 7 minutes the bag had started to float due to the gasses being produced by the yeast, I flipped the bag over and let it go for another 7 minutes.  Using the Nomiku I was able to bring the dough up to temperature in around 15 minutes, something that usually takes well over an hour!  This is going to open up a lot of possibilities for week-night baked goods!