Memorial Day: Purple Potato Salad Sous Vide

The side dish I decided to make this Memorial Day was a warm potato salad, but I didn't want to go for a standard German potato salad.  For the potatoes I picked up a bag of small purple potatoes at the supermarket, no reason, they were just on sale.

I usually have a water bath set up in the kitchen, but sice this was going to be a pretty hot bath I put a couple of sisal fiber placemats under the Cambro to protect the granite countertop.  I set the circulator to 90C and turned it on.

The potatoes were cut in to bite sized pieces and tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper and granulated onion.  I smashed four garlic cloves and threw them in as well.  Everything was put in to a Foodsaver bag along with 2 tbs butter and vacuum sealed, then the pouch was placed in the still heating bath.  In order to allow the bath to heat up as quickly as possible a blanket was wrapped around the bath and dish towels laid over the top.  Once the bath hit 90C a timer was set for 30 minutes.  When the timer went off the pouch was retreived from the bath, cut open, and the potatoes were dumped in a colander placed over a bowl.  A vinaigrette was made by whisking the liquid drained from the potatoes with 2-3 Tb honey dijon mustard, about 1/4 cup olive oil and around 2 Tb white wine vinegar until an emulsion was formed, which was then tossed with the still hot potatoes.  Thinly sliced onion, diced Anaheim pepper, capers, chives and a little cilantro were folded in and the potato salad was covered and allowed to sit for 30 minutes for the flavors to marry.

This potato salad turned out really well, the potatoes were tender but not to the point of falling apart and because they were mixed with the vinegraitte when they were still hot they absorbed a lot of flavor.  By cooking the potatoes sous vide and incorporating the bag liquid in the vinegraitte all the potato flavor stayed where it belonged.  I'll be adding this recipe to the summer holiday rotation.

Crock fermented, low temperature processed dill pickles

This was a project 6 weeks in the making.  A while back I stared making naturally fermented sauerkraut in glass jars, and since that was working out so well I had the urge to take things to the next level.  The opportunity came around Christmas, when I received some Amazon gift cards and decided to use them to buy my own stoneware fermentation crock.  The crock I selected has a 5 liter capacity, straight sides, stone weights and a water channel around the lid to help keep out oxygen while the fermenting is going on.  The first thing I tried was sauerkraut, and it turned out OK but not great.  After doing a little on-line research I believe that the issue is that I didn't fill the crock with enough cabbage, which left a large air space in the crock above the weights.  Next time I'll shred up two heads of cabbage and see out it turns out then.  I also read about a method of making sauerkraut where you ferment the head of cabbage whole in a brine and then shred it, might be interesting to try but I'll probably wait until it's a little warmer out to give it a try.

One of the things I've always wanted to try but never did was to make my own fermented dill pickles.  The process is simple, you take cucumbers, put them in a crock with herbs, spices, and a brine, then wait.  I looked around and found several recipes but was confused about the amounts, they all measured the salt in volume instead of weight and none specified what type of salt was used.  In the end, I assumed they were using pickling salt, found a weight for a given volume of salt on the Morton website and calculated the weights I would need.

The first step was to measure out all the ingredients I would be using.  The recipe called for 8 cups of water (Brita filtered), 1/4 cup white vinegar (5% acidity), 144 grams of kosher salt, 2 TB dill seeds, 2 TB yellow mustard seeds, 4 TB pickling spices mix (Spice House), 4 cloves of garlic, a dried chili and a couple sprigs of fresh dill.  The water, vinegar and salt was mixed together until dissolved, this resulted in a brine of about 7.4%.  I saw recipes using brines anywhere between 2.5% and 10% so this seemed like a reasonable level.  While the salt was dissolving I washed the pickling cucumbers and cut 1/4" off the blossom end, I read that if this isn't done enzymes present in that area will cause the pickles to get mushy.  The while spices were toasted briefly to wake them up and places in the bottom of the crock, then the cucumbers were packed in tightly (to help prevent them from floating), garlic and fresh dill places on top of the cucumbers and the stone weights added.  Next the brine was poured over and I shook the crock a little to let any trapped bubbles rise to the surface.  Once the lid was put on some watter was added to the channel to seal the crock but allow produced gasses to escape.  The crock was put aside in a cool corner and left alone to allow the magic to happen, a few times a week I would add water to the channel to keep the crock sealed.

The recipe I used said it would take anywhere between 4 and 6 weeks of fermentation before the pickles would be ready.  How long the fermentation takes depends on the strength of the brine, a weaker brine of about 2.5% can give you what are known as "half-sour" pickles after as little as a week of fermentation.  A stronger brine will inhibit both the types and rate of bacterial growth, which requires a longer fermentation and will result in what are called "full-sour" pickles.  After 4 weeks I opened the crock and pulled out a pickle to try.  The first thing I noticed when cutting up the cucumber
was that it wasn't completely pickled through to the center, it needed a little more time to finish.  The flavors were good, but I found the pickle to be a little too salty for my taste.  I added another cup of filtered water to the crock to reduce the brine concentration to around 6.6% and closed it up for another 2 weeks.

This past weekend it was finally time to open up the crock and process my pickles for storage.  Pickles will lose their crispness if they are heated to above 85C (185F), the temperature at which the natural pectin will start to break down.  Normal canning procedures where you process in boiling water will result in a limper pickle, so I opted to go with a lower temperature process using a water bath maintained at 180f with my Nomiku immersion circulator.

Here you can see the crock sitting next to a stockpot where I'm sterilizing jars for canning.  Apparently some of the brine was able to seep through the walls of the crock and evaporate, leaving a salt residue on the sides.  Hopefully this will provide a safe haven for the good bacteria to sit between fermentations so future batches will just get better and better.  The cucumbers here removed from the brine, cut in to spears (quarters) and packed in to sterilized jars.  Each jar received another teaspoon of mixed spices (dill seeds, mustard seeds, chili flakes, pickling spices) and a clove of garlic.  Brine from the crock was ladled in to the jars to about 1/2" below the rim and the lids placed on loosely to allow gas expanding during the heating to escape.

Here is the bath set up with the Nomiku for processing.  It's difficult to see in this photo, but I am using a cork from a bottle of wine to raise the circulator so the top of the jars falls between the Nomiku's max and min level markers.  Once the jars were placed in the bath container I added just enough water to bring the level up to about 1/4" to 1/2" below the top of the jars, the Nomiku was set to 82.2C (180F) and turned on.  I placed the lid on the bath container to help keep in the heat and the jars were allowed to process for a few hours.  Once I was sure that the contents of the jars had reached 82.2C and held there for 30 minutes I removed each jar from the bath, tightened the lid and put it back in the water.  I now added additional water to the bath to raise the level above the tops of the jars.  This was done to kill any bacteria that might have been survived by being above the water level during the first phase of processing.  after 20 more minutes in the bath the jars were removed to a cooling rack, as the jars cooled the centers of the lids popped down indicating that a good vacuum had formed.  These should be shelf stable for a good long time, but I don't intend to allow them to sit around for long.

The pickles are very good and still have a nice snap to them, unlike the quick pickles I'd made in the past.  I still find them to be a bit on the salty side, even after diluting the brine down to 6.6% after week 4.  Next time I'll try using a 5% brine and see how that turns out, I expect the weaker brine will cut the fermentation time down by a few weeks.  Before I make another attempt I'm going to do some research and try to come up with my own blend of pickling spices, the ready-made mix I used for this batch is more for corned beef than dill pickles.

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!: Anova Precision Cooker Edition

I've heard good things about the Anova immersion circulator so when I heard that they had started a Kickstarted campaign for a second generation of their circulator I jumped on board.  Since I got in so early, I was able to get one at the "Founder's Club" level for $99 and yesterday it finally arrived!

And here it is!  The packaging is very good looking, a cylinger about 5" in diameter and 25" long with a yellow cap and black body emblazoned with their logo.  Once you twist off the cap you'll find the circulator nestled in the package with some foam rings and caps.  Everything about the packaging seems to be well thought out and should provide a great deal of protection for the circulator when I'm taking it on the road with me.

Here is everything removed from the packaging.  The circulator is quite a bit larger than my Nomiku but looks good and has a really nice, bright, large display.  There is no manual included in the box so I highly suggest downloading it from the Anova Culinary website.  The controls are somewhat intuitive but there are a few things that may not be so obvious, such as how to switch from farenheit to celcius.  The clamp attaches to the cooking vessel and allows you to easily adjust the height of the circulator so you can use smaller pots.  There are minimum and maximum water levels marked on the stainless steel sleeve of the circulator, however I did see some issues with the measurement of temperature when running towards the minimum water level mark.

Here is the circulator mounted to a 12 quart Cambro.  If you look closely you can see the MAX water level mark, there is also a small indentation in the stainless steel sleeve at this level.  In the picture to the left I had filled the Cambro to the 8 quart (7.57 liter) mark with cold tap water, normally I would fill the bath with hot tap water but I wanted to see how quickly the new Anova would heat it up.  First I filled the container to the 8 quart mark and attached my Nomiku to see how much it would heat the bath in 15 minutes, then I dumped the container, refilled it with cold tap water to the 8 quart mark and put on the Anova which brough the water level to just a few inches above the MIN mark on the sleeve.  This is were I noticed something odd, when started the temperature display on the Anova started going up considerably faster than the Nomiku's had.  When I touched the power button to turn off the circulator the temperature reading dropped quickly.  A temperature probe confirmed that the reading on the Anova was high during the heating phase, but once the set point was reached the reading was spot on.  This only happened when the water level was near the MIN mark on the sleeve, when I filled the Cambro up to the 10 liter mark the temperature display on the circulator and on my probe thermometer stayed in sync.  As a final test I fulled up the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (15.5C), attached the Anova Precision Cooker and set it for a 60C bath.  On an uncovered polycarbonate container it took 63 minutes to heat the bath up to the set point.  This is on par with other circulators I've used and is why we always want to start by filling our baths with hot tap water.  My first impressions of the Anova Precision Cooker is that it looks great, is quiet and easy to use.  I have not had a chance to play around with the Bluetooth connectivity since the Android app has not been released yet, I may have to dig up my old iPhone just so I can play around with the feature until an app for my phone is released.

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!

Whole roast chicken sous vide.

From time to time I like a good roast chicken for dinner, so when I was walking through my local supermarket recently and saw they had a sale on whole chickens I picked one up.  This was kind of an impulse buy so I really didn't have a plan and I was looking at a pretty bust week ahead at work so I needed to think of a way to get most of the work done ahead of time so I could quickly finish the cooking when I got home.  Sous vide turned out to be the answer.

The first part of the cooking was done on a day I wasn't working.  Everything in the cavity was removed and the chicken was rinsed and patted dry.  I mixed together some salt, pepper and poultry seasoning in a small bowl and generously seasoned the cavity and outside of the bird, then stuffed the cavity with some Land O' Lakes garlic herb butter, rosemary and quarters of onion.  The whole chicken was slid in to a Foodsaver bag I had cut earlier and vacuum sealed (a bird bigger than 4 pounds would have probably been too big for the bag).  Prior to prepping the chicken I had set up my Nomiku on a 12 quart Cambro with the bath filled up to the low mark on the circulator and set the temp to 62.8C (145F).  Adding the bagged bird to the bath brought the water level almost up to the high level mark on the circulator, I put on the lid and let the chicken soak for 6 hours while I went about my day.  After the soak I let the chicken cool down for 20 minutes at room temperature, then chilled down completely in an ice bath before throwing in the refrigerator.

A few days later it was time to finish the chicken.  When I made it home I placed the bagged chicken back in to the bath with the temperature set to 60C so it could start to re-therm while the oven heated up to 475F (convection).  I placed a bunch of asparagus in the bottom of a casserole dish with a cooling rack on top.  The chicken was removed from the bag and placed breast side down on a piece of parchment paper on top of the rack, all the juices from the bag were poured over the asparagus.  As you can see below, it was a little on the pale side. 

 The bird was patted dry with paper towels and placed in the oven for 10 minutes for the first side to brown, I also did a few minutes under the broiler to speed things up.  After turning the bird breast side up it was returned to the oven for another 10 minutes followed by a little time under the broiler.  Here is the final result...

All of the white meat was perfectly cooked and wonderfully juicy.  The dark meat good but a little on the red side for some tastes.  Next time I may break the chicken down and cook the white and dark meats separately at different temperatures.  The asparagus cooked in the bag juices under the chicken was amazing.

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!