Sous Vide Nashville Hot Chicken

Nashville Hot Chicken is starting to become more and more available outside Tennessee, basically a highly spiced piece of fried chicken that after cooking is coated with a paste of cooking grease and hot spices.  While I've never had the chance to try it at the source we now have several places in Chicago that serve the dish.  Not too long ago I can across this article at Kentucky.com and decided I'd try to do my take on this regional specialty.

I made a spice blend based on the one in the article with a few minor changes based on what I had in the cabinet.  The blend I came up with is:

3 TB cayenne pepper
2 ts dry mustard
1 1/2 ts table salt
1 ts sugar
1 ts chipotle powder (didn't have any hot or smoked paprika)
1 ts black pepper
3/4 ts garlic powder
1/2 ts celery salt (mainly because I have a crap-ton of celery salt)

Because I had them I decided to use boneless/skinless chicken breasts.  I generously dusted all sides of the chicken with the spice mix before putting them in a gallon size Ziploc bag and letting them sit in the refrigerator for 24 hours.  The next day I filled a 12 quart cambro up to the 10 liter mark, attached the WiFi Nomiku and set the target temp to 150°f.  Once the bath was heated I put in the bag containing the seasoned chicken breasts and let them soak for 90 minutes.  When done the bag was removed from the bath and put in the refrigerator to chill.

Now it was time to play with the Paragon Induction Cooktop.  I figured I'd make some fries first to go with the chicken, I cut a russet potato in to batons and let them soak in cold water for about 10 minutes before rinsing several times.  About 6 cups of grease (corn oil with a little bacon grease) was put in a 3 quart sauce pan and the wireless probe put in place.  The potatoes were drained, patted dry with paper towels and put in the cold oil.  Finally the Paragon temperature was set to 370°f, rapid precision mode selected and the unit turned on.  Once the oil temp got over 212°f I switched to gentle precision mode and made sure to shake the pan every two minutes or so to keep things from sticking together.  This method worked pretty well, however as you can see in the picture there were a few fries in contact with the bottom of the pot initially which caused to brown a little before the others.  I may look in to using a small, round cooling rack next time to keep them from coming into contact with the bottom next time.

Now on to the chicken.  A two stage breading station was setup with plain flour on one side and a mixture of buttermilk, the spice mix and some of the purge from the cooking bag in the other.  One of the cold chicken breasts was first dredged in the flour, then coated with the buttermilk mix and then back into the flour.  Once everything was nice and coated it was allowed to rest on a piece of parchment paper while the oil got back up to temperature (which doesn't take too long for that small quantity of oil in rapid precision mode).  The chicken was carefully lowered in to the oil and cooked until the crust turned a nice golden-brown color.  Since the meat was pre-cooked there was no reason to worry about the internal temperature reaching 165°f, it just needs to be heated through.  I turned the chicken breast once, which can be a little tricky in such a small saucepan so care is needed to prevent being splashed with boiling hot oil.  Once done a tablespoon of the hot oil was added to about the same measure of the spice mix and used to coat the chicken breast.

The chicken had great flavor and the sous vide fried chicken method ensures that the meat remains tender and juicy.  I could have done with a little more heat, next time I'm at the store I'll need to pick up some hot paprika to try and dial it up a bit.  All in all a successful first attempt, but still room to tweak the recipe.  I'll have to stop by Gus's Fried Chicken for some authentic inspiration!

Playing with the Paragon Induction Cooktop

Over the weekend I had finally some time to play around with my Paragon Induction Cooktop.  Before I could do that however, I needed to invest in some induction-ready cookware.  My T-fal professional skillet  is induction ready as well as my cast iron and carbon steel skillets, but none of my pots or saucepans would work with the new cooktop.  I went out looking for some suitable pots to use with the Paragon.

When I first became aware of the Paragon Indigogo campaign I thought it would be ideal to control the temperature during the mashing phase of homebrewing.  For this I needed an induction ready stockpot large enough to contain the mash, and because it would be exposed to acidic conditions it needed to have a stainless steel interior rather than aluminum.  The Tramontina 22 quart stockpot pictures to the left fits the bill nicely and at a low price to boot.  I also wanted a smaller saucepan to use for deep frying, soups and of course, sauces.  I ended up buying a 3 quart non-stick saucepan from Nuwave.  The Duralon non-stick coating is ceramic based and can withstand temperatures up to 475°f so it should have no problem with the temperatures needed for deep frying.  I plan on making some hush puppies later tonight so I'll get to see how it fares.

As a test I filled up the stockpot with around 14.5 liters of cold tap water to see how long it would to bring it up to 150°f.  Pairing the wireless probe to the cooktop is simple, just plug in the Paragon and push the button on the side to the probe battery case.  A Bluetooth symbol will flash three times and the probe will sync with the cooktop.  Once that is done you can select the rapid or gentle precise mode and set the desired temperature with the +/- buttons.  My understanding is that rapid mode will allow the maximum power level to go up to 10, while in gentle mode it is restricted to 5.  The starting temperature of the water was 50°f and in an uncovered pot is took 1 hour 10 minutes to reach 150°f (quick tip, the adhesive on the sticker started to loosen at around 110°f allowing it to be peeled off).  I did notice that the temperature consistently read 2°f higher using my Thermapen than what the wireless probe was showing, I'm not sure if there's a way to program in an offset but if not I'll just know to set the temperature 2°f lower than I want.  While I had the cooktop on I took the opportunity to sync it up to the FirstBuild app, I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet so I'm not sure what additional features it opens up but will try and do so this afternoon.

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.