It's Here!: Paragon Precision Induction Cooktop Edition.

My latest gadget just arrived, the Paragon Induction Cooktop!  I haven't had a chance to play with it too much, probably won't be able to do so until the weekend, but wanted to post a few pics of the unboxing.

Here's the box as delivered.  A little damage on the corners and the box wasn't taped at all to prevent the box from being opened en route.

Here is the box opened to show all the gadgetry goodness!  The cooktop itself is a bit larger than I expected, the cooking surface is 12" across with an 18" diameter including the controls and feet.































Here is everything removed from the box.  The most interesting thing to me is the wireless probe shown in front.  When paired to the cooktop and attached to a pot of liquid it is supposed to allow you to control the temperature of the liquid in the pot to +/- 1°f up to 375°f.  My original thought when backing the campaign was that it would be very useful for home brewing beer, during the mash you need to bring the pot up to a precise temperature and hold it there while the enzymes in the malt convert starches to sugars.  This should make that job much easier.  Sous vide cooking it another cooking method that could be performed with this piece of equipment, but I'll probably stick with my Nomiku for that.  I can see myself using it for deep frying, I do have a dedicated fryer, but it requires 5 liters of oil and is a pain in the arse to clean up.  That's fine if I'm cooking for a crowd but not worth the trouble if it's just for two ot three.  The Paragon cooktop will allow me to use whatever size pot is most suitable for what I'm making.  This should also shine at low temperature poaching in whatever liquid I want to use be it court bouillon, olive oil or even butter!  I have the probe charging now and hope to put the Paragon Induction Cooktop through its paces soon!

Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen Biscuits

A few years ago I had the TV on in the background while I was working on the computer, as I often do.  The program on at the time was "Food Paradise", a show on the travel channel that does short clips about various restaurants based around a particular theme.  An episode titled "Drive Thru Paradise" was on which highlighted places around the country that have outstanding drive-thru offerings.  One of the featured restaurants was Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen in Chapel Hill, NC.  I've never had the opportunity to try their biscuits myself, but as a southern transplant to a northern state anything biscuit related piques my interest.  As I was working on the computer I heard them go over their biscuit recipe, but I was unprepared and by the time I could grab a pen and paper it was over.  I searched on-line but the only version of the clip I could find omitted the recipe part, there seem to be several versions of Food Paradise's Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen clips but I never could find the one that included the recipe description.  Fast forward a few years and again I'm working on the computer with the TV on in the background.  Travel Channel is playing back-to-back-to-back episodes of Food Paradise and when the episode I saw a fews years back comes on I stop what I'm doing and get ready, just in case it's the version with the recipe.  And it was!

The recipe they gave is for a commercial size batch, it's also very short on details with only the list of ingredients and oven temperature.  The ingredients they listed are:

10 pounds flour
24 ounces margarine
1/2 gallon buttermilk
16 ounces water

I had to make a few assumptions about the ingredients.  Since no leaveners were listed I assumed the flour they used was self-rising, and since they are in the south I assumed they were using a soft wheat flour like White Lily (which was convenient since I had some White Lily self rising flour in the pantry!).  They didn't specify the margarine brand so I basically chose the one that was on sale that week (Blue Bonnet).  It has a pretty soft consistency which matched what was shown on Food Paradise.

The next step was to reduce the amounts to something more manageable.  First I converted the recipe to baker's percentages which came out like this:

100% Self rising flour
15% Margarine
43% Buttermilk
10% Water

For the first batch I went with two cups of flour, which is 226 grams, and calculated the rest of the ingredients based on the flour weight.  This resulted in a recipe consisting of:

226 grams Self-rising flour
34 grams Margarine
104 grams Buttermilk
22 grams water

The oven was pre-heated to 450°f.  Flour and margarine were weighed into a bowl, I rubbed the fat into the flour with my hands (they used a mixer for this in the clip) until it looked like cornmeal but with a few larger pieces still remaining.  The buttermilk and water were weighed, added to the fat/flour mix and everything was quickly mixed together with a spoon.  Once all the loose flour had been incorporated into the dough it was turned out onto a lightly floured surface, flattened and folded.  This was done three more times before the dough was flattened to about 1" thickness and biscuits cut out.  The biscuits were put on a parchment lined tray so they were just touching, the tops were brushed with a little buttermilk and put in the oven for about 15-18 minutes until the tops were browned.

The end result was a pretty damn good biscuit.  The repeated flattening/folding procedure produced some flakiness but the biscuit was sturdy enough to use for breakfast sandwiches or to douse with gravy.  I would probably add a little salt next time and I didn't get as much lift as I would have liked, probably due to the self-rising flour being a little old (about 10 months).  The oven temp could probably go up a little as well, next time I'll try 475°-500°f.  I'll have to try it with the locally available self-rising flour to see how that affects the final product.

I haven't had the opportunity to make another chocolate pie, but I still want to post the recipe.  May have to do so sans any pictures.  I've also just received a shipping confirmation for my Paragon Induction Cooktop, haven't decided for sure what I'm going to do with it first but I recently found a recipe for Nashville Hot Chicken so I'm thinking I may sous vide a chicken breast with the spice blend, bread it in seasoned flour and fry using the Paragon cooker.

It's Here!: WiFi Nomiku Edition

My first real culinary immersion circulator was the original Nomiku, which I received from backing their first Kickstarter campaign.  Prior to that I was using an old surplus Fisher Scientific lab circulator that I had bought off Ebay and would constantly trip the GFCI if I plugged it in to a kitchen outlet.  I found the original Nomiku to be easy to use, well designed and had a lot of fun with it.  Later when Anova launched a Kickstarter for a bluetooth enabled Precision Cooker I jumped in for one.  The Anova Precision Cooker is a nice circulator but I found the bluetooth connectivity very limiting, to utilize the feature you have to be in close proximity and it's just as easy to adjust the settings on the circulator itself.  I liked the idea of being able to remotely control a circulator but wanted something that would allow controlling from further away than bluetooth would allow, so when Nomiku announced their new WiFi enabled circulator in mid August 2014 I was in.  As soon as I heard about the campaign I logged in to Kickstarter, made my pledge and became backer #40!

The original delivery date was in March 2015, but of all the projects I've backed on Kickstarter not a single one has shipped on time.  The original Nomiku was supposed to be delivered in December 2012, actual delivery happened quite a bit later than that but they did deliver so I wasn't too worried.  I'm happy to report that my WiFi Nomiku was finally delivered today!

When I opened the box I was surprised to find the circulator packed with a shirt, I had completely forgotten about that!  The box itself takes up much less space than the original model which should make it easier to store when not in use.

Here is the WiFi Nomiku attached to a 12 quart Cambro filled with 10 liters of water.  Unlike the original Nomiku (and the Anova Precision Cooker), the screen faces away from the bath.  This is something that several people had suggested when giving feedback about the original model and something I was pleased to see implemented.  The new model also doesn't have the external power brick that the original model had, I never minded it that much but others thought that it could be easy to inadvertently splash water on it damaging the circulator.  Local controls are pretty simple, there is a menu button below the screen to the left with a action button immediately the right.  Without reading the manual I was able to figure out how to connect to WiFi, entering the router password is a little clumsy since you have to scroll though all the lowercase letters to get to uppercase and scroll all the way through those to get to numbers/symbols.  It can take a while if your router password is strong with a mix of upper/lower case and symbols/numbers.  It would be nice if this could be done automatically like the Google Chromecast works.  Once the circulator was connected to WiFi I was having problems pairing it to my phone, I eventually had to uninstall the Tender app and reinstall.  After that it seemed to work fine.  Tomorrow when I'm out I'll see if I can turn the circulator on from standby and heat up the bath, the ability to have the bath already heated up when I get home from work will save me a lot of time!

The only testing I had the time to do today was to see how fast the WiFi Nomiku can heat up the water bath.  I filled the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (I know, I usually fill it with hot but this was a test!), the initial temp was 52.4°f and I set the circulator to heat it to 130°f.  Yesterday I did the exact same thing with my Anova Percision Cooker, it took 50 minutes to go from the same starting temp of 52.4° to 130°, the WiFi Nomiku did the same thing in 27 minutes and 36 seconds!  Both baths were uncovered, I expect the time to go down a little once I cut the Cambro lid to fit the new circulator.

So far I'm really liking this new circulator, even without the WiFi connectivity it's a solidly build piece of equipment and I foresee it becoming my go-to circulator.  That being said, I think the clip could stand to be improved.  I've been thinking of a way to make a bracket that I could use to attach the circulator to the side of a beer cooler without having to make permanent modifications.  If I come up with something I'll put DIY instructions on the blog.

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.

Homemade digital temperature controller for New Original Bradley Smoker

I've been having fun using my Bradley smoker but the control on the model requires a lot of fiddling with to achieve and maintain the desired temperature.  To make things easier I decided to add a digital temperature controller to my setup, but to make things harder I decided to make one myself instead of purchasing a pre-made unit.  Pictured to the right is what I came up with.  It consists of a Mypin TD4 PID controller with 25A SSR and heatsink, a K-type thermocouple probe, a IEC320 C14 main power switch with 10 amp fuse all housed in a styrene plastic project box .

Power is output through a standard 15 amp duplex outlet.  These come standard with both plug sockets connected so you only need to wire up one set of terminal connectors to power both outlets.  For this application I wanted one outlet to be regular uninterrupted AC power while the other would be run through the solid state relay (SSR) to control the heating element.  To make each outlet independent you just need to use a set of clipper to cut out the copper tab that connects the two terminals on both sides.

Once I had all the parts it was time to get started.  The first obstacle was to cut openings in the styrene project box for the PID controller, power connector/switch and outlets.  My first attempt didn't work out too well, I tried to use a rotary tool with a cut-off disk attached to cut out an opening.  This resulted in big globs of very hot plastic landing on my hand and the cut-off wheel shattering.  I then used a zip saw attachment for the rotary tool, but wasn't really able to control it very well and ended up with a hole that was too large for any of the components (if anyone asks I'll claim that the odd hole on the bottom is there for ventilation).  What finally ended up working for me is using the cut-off wheel to cut a slit on each side of the cutout and then using a jab saw with a metal cutting blade to finish the cuts to make the openings.  The outlets and PID controller were mounted right on the open edge of the box to save a few cuts. Holes were drilled for the mounting screws for the SSR heat sink, switch and outlets and a hole was drilled towards the top large enough to thread the thermocouple leads through. Now came the wiring.  Three wires come from the power switch, black (hot), white (neutral) and green (ground).  The ground wire was connected to the green terminal on the outlet.  Wire nuts were used to connect three leads to both the black and white wires coming from the switch.  One set (black and white) was connected to the PID controller to power the instrument.  The other two neutral (white) wires were connected to the silver terminals on the outlet.  One of the two remaining hot (black) leads was connected directly to the top gold terminal of the outlet, the final black lead was connected to the bottom gold terminal after passing through the SSR.  Finally, the control signal wires (in this case I used thinner black and white wires because that's what I had) from the PID control were connected to the DC side of the SSR.  The polarity of these connections matters so you need to be sure to connect (-) to (-) and (+) to (+).  The thermocouple was threaded through the drilled hole connected to the PID controller (again, polarity matters) and everything was mounted to the styrene case with nuts and bolts.  Finally, the top of the case was screwed in to place.

This project took a lot longer to complete since it was the first time I had attempted something of this nature.  I have not been able to try out the control box on the smoker, but I did plug a lamp in to the SSR outlet and verified that it does what it's supposed to do, when the thermocouple probe was immersed in hot water the PID started turning the lamp on and off and finally keeping it off once the measured temperature exceeded the set-point.

I spent a lot of time trying to plan out this project to end up with something that would not only work for the original purpose, but also be able to be used for other things.  Besides being used on the smoker I could see using it for home brewing to control the temperature of the mash.  I could also switch the PID controller to cooling mode, plug in a small refrigerator and use it for lagering beer.  Plug a submersible heater in the bottom outlet and a circulating pump in the top outlet and you'd have a decent sous vide setup.  The other benefit of building a stand-alone controller is that I didn't need to make any modifications at all to the smoker itself, which will be handy if I ever decide to sell it for an upgrade.

It's here!: Bradley Original Smoker Edition.

For years I've had a charcoal "bullet" smoker, and while it can produce some great meals it has a lot of drawbacks.  The main thing is that it's difficult to maintain temperature, doing so requires constant attention and fiddling which can be a challenge for long cooks.  As a result, after an initial flurry of smoking things I really haven't used it much over the past several years.  Lately I've been seeing a lot of barbecue programs on TV and have become re-interested so I started looking for a new smoker that would be easier to use and require less attention.  I looked at several types of smokers, fueled by charcoal, propane and electric.  In the end, a warehouse deal from Amazon sealed the deal and I ordered a Bradley (new) Original Smoker.  The Bradley is an electric smoker that uses sawdust pucks called "bisquettes" for the smoke.  The bisquettes are loaded in to a hopper and are fed one-by-one on to a heating element in the smoker chamber to produce smoke at a rate of one every 20 minutes.

Here is a video of the unboxing.

One thing that I didn't know until the day after ordering was that the smoker itself does not come with any of the required bisquettes, so I ordered a variety pack which was set to be delivered the day after the smoker itself.  I had intended on smoking a whole chicken, had it prepped, rubbed and ready to go.  Unfortunately the bisquettes didn't come until late in the evening so I had to go ahead and just roast the chicken in the oven rather than let it sit overnight with the rub.  Still wanting to make sue of the smoker I went out the next morning and picked up some baby back ribs.

Preparation was simple, I pulled the membrane off the bottom of the rack of ribs and liberally applied a rub (salt, pepper, sugar, paprika, cayenne pepper, celery salt, lemon pepper) then allowed it to sit for a few hours in the refrigerator.  While the ribs rested I set up the smoker, turned it on and put in 5 bisquettes for the seasoning process.    That involved about an hour of smoke at temperature to drive off any manufacturing residues and get the smoker ready for business.

The night before I had run all the removable pans, grates and bowls through the dishwasher.  Assembly of the smoker is pretty easy, the drip pan goes on the bottom and a water filled metal bowl is put in place.  The water-filled bowl is there to catch the still smoldering bisquettes as they are pushed off the heating element by the next one, this keeps ashes from flying up on tot he food.  Above that is a heat deflector followed by up to four metal racks.  The smoke generator slides in the side and attaches to a couple of metal pins, there is a power cord running to the smoke generator box and another running from that box to the smoking chamber for the main heating element.  Controls are simple, just a power switch and a dial that allows you to set the temperature from low to high.  There is also a button to advance the bisquettes.  Once you get the smoker loaded and closed you'll have to baby the temperature a bit by adjusting the dial and top vent, but once you get it where you want it seems to be pretty stable.  I put the ribs in and adjusted the temperature to about 225 degrees f.  For smoke I used a mix of apple and mesquite bisquettes for the first few hours, then again for the last 20 minutes or so.  All told the ribs were in the smoker for about 6 hours.

The ribs turned out pretty darn good, and since the smoker was running anyway I put the chicken I had roasted the night before in as well for a little smoke flavor.  All in all I'm pretty happy with the Bradley smoker.  I feel that I'll be able to do things with it that weren't possible with the old bullet smoker, like leaving it running unattended while I'm away at work or asleep for long cooks.  In order to improve the temperature stability I'm looking at wiring up a PID controller with a thermocouple and solid state relay to let me dial in a desired temperature and not have to worry about overshooting it when I'm not around.  Those parts should be here tomorrow.  I'm thinking of picking up a bone-in pork shoulder roast for this weekend to make some barbecue pulled pork.  Other things I want to try out before the end of summer is short ribs and eventually brisket.  That was something I was afraid to even try with the bullet smoker, but now may be a possibility!

July 4th Menu

For the 4th this year the menu included cedar plank salmon with grilled corn/mango salsa, sous vide potato salad, grilled asparagus and grilled corn.

The only salmon I had access to was pre-portioned, frozen the individually vacuum packed.  I placed the packets in a 125f water bath for about 45 minutes to thaw and get up to temperature, next time I'll probably go a little lower (like 115f-120f).  The salmon was then put in the refrigerator until time to grill.  I placed the salmon fillets skin side down on a soaked cedar plank, spread some honey Dijon mustard on the top, sprinkled with lemon pepper and topped with a slice of fresh lemon.  The grill was set up with a standard two level fire, the plank was put over the hot side until it started to smolder, then moved to the cool side.  Since the salmon was already cooked I just needed to let it heat through and absorb some of the grill flavor.  Once done I topped with a grilled corn/mango salsa consisting of some previously grilled corn, diced mango, diced red onion, diced hot red pepper, cilantro, lime juice, salt, pepper and olive oil.

The potatoes for the potato salad were cut in to pieces, tossed with salt, pepper and champagne vinegar and vacuum bagged with a knob of butter.  They were cooked in a 185f bath for about 3 hours, I kind of got distracted and forgot about them for a bit so they were in the bath longer than intended but doneness turned out great.  They were chilled overnight and mixed with the dressing and other ingredients a few hours before serving.  The dressing consisted of mayonnaise, balsamic vinegar, champagne vinegar, celery salt, black pepper, chili/garlic paste, diced celery, thinly sliced radish and thinly sliced green onion (white and green parts) along with red pepper left over from the salsa.  I dumped the potatoes in the bowl where I had mixed the dressing and folded them in, next time I'll dirty another bowl so I can put in just enough dressing to coat the potatoes, these were a little over dressed.

The other sides were grilled asparagus (tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper before being grilled) and grilled corn (just soaked for a few hours before going on the heat to get a char).  Both turned out great.

Dessert was an apple pie from the Hoosier Momma Book Book of Pie cookbook, I picked it up a Costco last year when the author was signing copies.  Turned out great!  It was served with a vanilla/caramel gelato.