Charlie Trotter's in the wayback machine

I graduated culinary school in May of 2004 and my reward for this was to visit Charlie Trotter's world famous eponymous restaurant for dinner, at the time the restaurant was #32 on the list of the top 50 restaurants in the world and considered one of if not the best restaurant in Chicago.  We had made reservations for 4 people on June 1st and three of us arrived a few minutes early.  While we were waiting for our fourth the hostess came up and informed us that the party who had reserved the kitchen table had cancelled and if we would like to enjoy our dinner there instead of the dining room.  The kitchen table usually required a minimum of 6 guests so we jumped at the chance.  I need to dig around and find the menus, but I believe it was 18 or 19 courses and the meal was absolutely amazing.  Everything from the plating to the service to the courses themselves were flawless.  As a recent graduate I was most interested in watching how the kitchen at one of the worlds best restaurants operates, so didn't take many pictures.  In fact, I only managed to get one photo of a plated course.  I wish I could go back and kick myself, but there ya go!

That was almost 9 years ago, so why am I bringing it up now?  Charlie Trotter closed his restaurant last August after 25 years, back in December they started to auction off the furnishings, fixtures and equipment from the restaurant but that auction was cut a bit short for various reasons.  So last week they finished selling off most of the remaining lots of items via an on-line auction.  As a food nerd I couldn't stay away.  When the auction was over and the dust had settled I was the high bidder on three lots.  One was some square bowls along with a bread plate and saucer.  The second lot included 5 art glass and 2 pottery vases.  The final lot was the one I was really after, it was seven large white porcelain rectangular serving dishes marked "Ola".  Besides sharing the name of my recently deceased grandmother, these dishes are the same pattern as the one shown in the photo above.  Probably not the actual same dishes, but you never know!  I was able to find the plates online and they are quite expensive, the only retail price I could find had them for $140 each.  That seems a little high to me but in any case I got an extremely great deal!  Next thing I want to do is find the menu from our dinner in 2004 and see if I can recreate the course shown in the photo at home!

Rosewill RHIC-11001 Induction cooker with Stainless steel pot

Lately I've been trying to eat a little healthier during the day by NOT going to the hospital cafeteria.  With the exception of the salad bar, most of the choices each day are fairly large portions and many seem loaded with salt and fat.  I'd rather save my "bad" eating for after work.  Lately soup has been the option of choice, but the only thing in the office to heat it up in is a commercial microwave.  I'm not a big fan of nuking food in the first place, but this particular microwave presents more issues than most because of its power.  Each time I heat a bowl of soup in this microwave some portion becomes super-heated and erupts all over the interior.  Not only does this make a huge mess I have to clean up but some of the liquid hits the dirty top of the chamber and drips back down in to the bowl. Covering the bowl would seem like a good idea, but the eruptions are often strong enough to kick off the cover and send even more of my lunch out of the bowl.  Additionally, I could only get the soup lukewarm in the center before the sides would start to boil over.  I decided to buy a hot plate to put in my office so I could make lunch the way I want to make lunch.

Since this is the office a butane burner is out of the question, so the choice was of a model with an electric coil heating element or an induction cooker.  I ended up looking for an induction cooker from various sources and eventually decided on this particular one for a few reasons.  First, it's cheap.  I didn't want to spend a lot of money on something that I'll be keeping in the office.  Second, it came with a pot so I wouldn't have to hope I would have something laying around that would be compatible with induction.  Finally, I had an Amazon.com gift card from Christmas that I could apply towards the price.  A few days before the cooker arrived I saw another induction cooker at Costco (Aroma model AID-506) for $49.99. It doesn't come with a pot but I probably would have bought it if I hadn't already spent the money at Amazon.  Oh well.

  The cooker arrived yesterday afternoon and the first thing I thought when unpacking was that it is BIG!  Overall dimensions for the cooker are 12 1/2" x 15" x 2 3/4" high.  The pot supplied is pretty chincy, very lightweight but does work with the cooker.  I brought everything in to the office this morning, heated up some soup for lunch and was very satisfied with the results.  I was able to quickly heat up the soup to a uniformly hot temperature without making a mess in the microwave and without any crusty bits of dried soup around the rim of the bowl to be scrubbed off.  The pot was a little big for one can of soup, so tonight when I get home I'll go through the tote of old pots and pans I have in the garage to look for something more appropriate for the job.

As usual, I took a little spare time to do a test on the cooker.  1 liter of water from the tap was placed in the pot, the temperature recorded at 51.5 degrees Fahrenheit and the lid put on.  The cooker was turned on full power and I timed how long it took for the water to start boiling.  In 6 minutes the water was boiling, my guess would be that a pot made of thicker gauge steel would give better results, once I find something better I'll repeat the test and post the results.  I'm looking forward to better, healthier lunches at work!

Pizza on a Baking Steel

I've been making pizza for a long time, usually on a pizza stone in the oven but when weather permits I'll sometimes pull out the 2Stone Pizza Grill and make some pies outside on my Weber Grill.  The char you can get baking at 800-1000 degrees adds a lot of flavor in my opinion, but it takes a LOT of extra effort and several days to pull off properly.  I have found a relatively nearby source for the '00" flour I like to use for Neapolitan pies (Caputo's Cheese Market) but on more than one occasion my well laid plans were thwarted by bad weather.  I had read in "Modernist Cuisine" about using a sheet of solid aluminum instead of a pizza stone but really didn't think too much about trying it until reading about a Kickstarter project for a new product called a Baking Steel on the Serious Eats website.  I must have dropped hints t the right people because lo and behold, a new Baking Steel was waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morn.

A Baking Steel is basically what it sounds like, a sheet of steel (14" x 16" x 1/4" thick) you put in the oven to bake your pizza on instead of a stone or pan.  Some of the advantages are a greater thermal mass and better heat transfer properties than a pizza stone.  I thought it would be easy for me to just have a piece of steel cut to the same dimensions, but the cost of materials and shipping would have made it about the same price and I would have had to pay extra to have the edges ground down to make it safe to pick up without leather gloves.  The Baking Steel seemed a better option.  A recipe for NY style pizza dough was included in the box so that's where we start.

The NY style Pizza Dough recipe included with the Baking Steel was originally posed on the Serious Eats website by J. Kenji López-Alt but is based on one from Peter Reinhart's Pizza Quest blog.  One thing I don't like about the recipe is that it's in ounces.  My scale has a 1 gram resolution, but when weighing in ounces the resolution is only 1/8 ounce (about 3.5 grams) so I can get inconsistent results when trying to measure small weights in ounces.  Here is the recipe, expressed in the original ounces, converted to grams and in baker's percentages for those so inclined.

22.5 oz     637.9 grams   100%   Bread Flour
0.5 oz       14.2 grams      2.2%   Sugar
0.35 oz     9.9 grams        1.6%   Salt
0.35 oz     9.9 grams        1.6%   Active Dry Yeast
1.125 oz   31.9 grams      5%      Extra Virgin Olive Oil
15 oz        425.2 grams    66.7% Water

The recipe calls for using a food processor to pulse the ingredients together for 15 minutes or until it comes together, then for an additional 15 seconds and finally finishing off by kneading by hand a little bit before splitting in to 3 parts, putting each ball in to a zip-top bag and in to the fridge for at least 1 and up to 5 days.  I prefer using a Kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook set to low for about 4-5 minutes, then scaling in to 375 gram balls and bagging for the fridge.

On pizza day I removed a dough ball from the fridge, rounded it on the counter and placed it under a bowl on a floured surface to warm up to room temperature (I gave it about 75 minutes).  For the bake I placed the pizza steel on the bottom shelf as the instructions...well...instructed and set the oven temperature to 550 degrees.  I let the steel preheat in the oven for about an hour while the dough rested.  When ready, I opened op the dough in to about a 12" pizza skin and placed it on a well floured wooden peel (I find wooden peels are best for loading the pies in to the oven).  I used a basic marinara sauce topped with some thinly sliced red onions, green peppers, kalamata olives, fresh purple and green basil and finally some slices of fresh mozzarella.  The pizza baked about 5 or 6 minutes before being removed from the oven using a metal peel (which I like to removal over the wooden one) and placed on the counter on a large brown paper bag.  After a few minutes of cooling a small drizzle of white truffle oil was added.  Here is the final result.

Everyone liked the final result!  I think the top of the pie didn't cook as fast as the crust so there are a few things I might try differently next time.  The easiest thing would be to place the steel on a higher rack in the oven which should increase the radiant heat hitting the top of the pizza. The other option would be to decrease the amount of sugar in the dough which would slow the browning.  I don't have a pic of the bottom of the crust but it was uniformly well browned.  Not the char you get at ultra high temperatures but much less work to get an awesome result!  I'm going to have a lot of fun with this!

Presto 05462 Digital ProFry Immersion-Element 9-Cup Deep Fryer: The French Fry Tests.

Last night I pulled out the new deep fryer to make a batch of french fries and took the opportunity to do a few more tests.  The fries were made using the standard double fry method.  First, the potatoes were cut in to ~3/8" sticks, rinsed several times in cold water and then allowed to sit in acidulated water (lemon juice) for 24 hours.  Before frying the fries were rinsed a few more times, drained and dried off with paper towels.

The first step is to blanch the fries at a low temperature to get the interior cooked.  I added 4 quarts of oil to the fryer and set the temperature to 300 degrees.  It took the oil 11 minutes to heat from room temp (70 degrees) to the time my probe thermometer read 300 degrees.  The fryers ready light didn't turn green until the probe was reading 307 degrees but I did notice that the heating element had started cycling at around 298 degrees.  The fries were dropped in and cooked for 5 minutes.  After about 1 minutes the oil temperature had dropped to a minimum of 273 degrees and then started inching up.  One interesting thing at this point was that the fryer's green ready light lit up when the probe was reading only 280 degrees.  This makes me wonder just how big the spread is on the fryer's thermostat.

Once the fries were blanched they were drained and laid out on paper towels to cool.  Meanwhile I tested the other temperature presets to see where they actually landed.  It took 4 minutes for the oil to increase to 325 degrees with the ready light coming on at 327 degrees.  From 325 to 350 only took about 2 minutes, but that was probably due to the heating element already being on when the set point was changed.  Actual temperature when the ready light turned on was 355 degrees.  The final trip to 375 degrees took 3 minutes with a final temperature of 386 degrees when the ready light finally turned on.

The final fry at 375 degrees takes only two or three minutes, less when the fries are still hot from the blanching and more if you are cooking fries that were blanched and frozen.  These had been refrigerated while I was playing with the temperature settings.  Dropping the potatoes in the hot oil caused the temperature to drop down to around 357 degrees in a minute before it started to rebound.  By the time the fries were done the temperature had gone up to around 365 degrees.

I shook the basket to try and get off as much oil as possible, then moved the fries to a stainless steel bowl for seasoning.  A few grinds of sea salt, some truffle oil and some Mrs. Dash and the fries were tossed in the bowl to distribute the seasoning.  Nice, crisp exterior with a fluffy interior.  No ketchup needed!

Review of Presto 05462 Digital ProFry Immersion-Element 9-Cup Deep Fryer

When I purchased the parts for my last computer several of them came with mail-in rebates.  Most of the rebates came in the form of American Express of Visa gift cards, and because I didn't have a lot of extra room in my wallet I just left them sitting in a stack on the top shelf of my computer desk.  Recently while cleaning up the desk I went through the cards and noticed that $30 in visa rebate cards had already expired, so I thought it was about time that I used the rest.  The question was what to spend them on?

Recently I've had a hankering to make some good fried chicken, but my deep fryer gave up the ghost a while ago and because I'm really the only one in the house who really likes fried food I never replaced it.  With the rebate cards in hand I figured it was time, so I started doing some research.  My goal was to find something that wasn't too big (since there are only three of us in the house), not too expensive and had received good ratings.  The one I finally settled on is the Presto 05462 digital deep fryer.  It has a 9 cup food capacity (which is probably more than I'll ever need), an 1800 watt heating element for fast heating of the oil and quick recovery time, a price on Amazon of $60 (I had $55 in rebate cards that were still good) and digital controls.

Purchasing the fryer had to be done in a round-about way, Amazon doesn't allow the use of multiple Amex rebate cards on a single order.  They do allow multiple Amazon gift cards to be used though, so I just used the Amex rebate cards to purchase Amazon gift cards and had them send to me via email.  Each arrived within a few seconds of checking out and were then used to purchase the fryer.  All said and done I had to kick in just $5 for the fryer after selecting free SuperSaver shipping and had the box in my hands 4 days later.

he first things I dd were to make french fries (turned out pretty good even though the potatoes were pretty old and I didn't let them soak overnight like I prefer to do) and hush puppies from a pre-made mix I bought at Weisenberger Mill in Midway Kentucky last time I was down visiting my parents.  Those turned out GREAT.  Now it was time to make some fried chicken and I thought it would be fun to do some tests on the fryer at the same time.

The first thing was to figure out what type of chicken I was going to make.  I stopped by Dominick's to see what was on sale and ended up with a package of chicken tenders, some buttermilk and 5 quarts of oil (the fryer needs 4 quarts minimum).  I made a butter milk marinade with salt, Sriracha, garlic powder, Old Bay Seasoning, Mrs. Dash and ancho chili powder.  No real recipe, just grabbed things from the cupboard that seemed to go together in my mind.  The chicken was put in a zip-top bag with the marinade and put in the fridge for what was supposed to be only a few hours but things came up and as a result the pieces soaked for over 24 hours instead.  Longer than I wanted to go, but OK.  Now it was time to fry.

The first thing was to set up the fryer and get it heating.  I put it on a sheet pan just in case there was any overflow and put it on the stove under the exhaust fan, this is pretty effective in keeping the odors down in the house.  4 quarts of oil were added.  The fryer can only be set to four temperatures, 300, 325, 350 and 375.  I set it to 375 and put in a temperature probe to see how accurate the on-board sensor is.  Once the oil had reached temp I let everything sit for a few minutes and checked my thermometer, which indicated that the temperature sitting around 385.  Running a little hotter than the setting was something I had read in a few other reviews, but it wasn't enough to be a deal breaker.  

While the oil was heating I prepared a dredge with Wondra flour, AP flour and some of the same seasonings I had put in the marinade (Old Bay, Mrs. Dash, salt, pepper etc...) and placed a few of the marinaded chicken tenders in the dredge at a time.  Once those pieces were coated they were put on a foil lined baking sheet wile the rest of the chicken tenders were coated.  I let them sit for a few minutes and dredged each piece again.  I put around 300 grams of chicken tenders (slightly above refrigerator temperature) in the oil for the first batch.  The oil temperature dropped to around 353 before starting to inch back up.  I set the timer for 3 minutes but the pieces looked done after a little more than 2 1/2.  The oil quickly returned to temperature and the rest of the pieces were cooked in the second batch.

The end result was chicken strips that were nice and juicy, but had a little bit of a rubbery texture which I blame on the long soak in buttermilk.  So far I've been pretty satisfied with this fryer, with the exception of the oil going about 10 degrees over the set point.  But as long as I know that this is going to happen I can make adjustments to compensate.  Next time I set it up I'm going to check the temperature at all four set points.  There are several things I want to try next, I think it would be cool to try making some falafel at home along with some pita, tahini sauce and toum (garlic sauce).  I saw a recipe for Korean style chicken wings done by the people at Modernist cuisine that I'd like to try and I also have the recipe for the Sriracha wings that Goose Island serves at their brewpubs so I'd like to see if I can make them as good at home.  Gonna be a lot of unhealthy eating at the Balhg household over the next few months!

Mamaw Durkin's Banana Bread

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about my cooking of recipes left to me by my grandmother, Ola Durkin (a.k.a. Mamaw).  The first recipe is for her famous banana bread.  The recipe is as follows:

1 stick butter
1 cup sugar

3-4 ripe bananas
1 tsp baking soda

2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

2 cups AP flour
1/2 - 3/4 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 325.
Cream together the butter and sugar.
Mash the bananas with the baking soda, add to the butter/sugar mixture and mix in.
Add the eggs one at a time along with the vanilla, incorporating completely between additions.
Add the flour mixture half at a time, mixing in completely after each addition.
Pour the batter in to a greased loaf pan, smooth out the top with a spoon or off-set spatula and bake at 325 degrees for about an hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Allow the loaf to cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then loosen the sides with a knife and turn out to cool on a wire rack.

Mamaw usually gave us a thick slice of the banana bread with a little margarine spread on one side.  This is VERY good toasted!

Cedar Plank Salmon

For our July 4th dinner I decided to make cedar plank salmon instead of the usual burgers of steaks.  The process is pretty easy.  First, we picked up some cedar planks at Dominick's since Costo had sold out.  The planks were soaked for about an hour during which time I trimmed the salmon to fit and pulled together the ingredients I would use.  Once the plank was well soaked I removed it from the water and patted dry.  A generious coating of extra virgin olive oil was applied, the a sprinkling of Mrs. Dash, a few grinds of salt and some sprigs of fresh dill.  The salmon fillet was placed on top of the dill, then more Mrs. Dash, more salt, more sprigs of fresh dill, some very thin slices of lemon shingled on top and finally a squeeze of lemon.  The Weber kettle grill had been prepared with a full chimney of lit coals dumped on one side and spread out so they formed a uniform bed covering 1/2 of the bottom.  There were no coals on the other half.  The plank of salmon was first placed directly over the hot coals until I saw a bit of char on the sides of the plank, then it was moved over to the cool side.  The corn and other vegetables were grilled on the hot side until done, then a handful of soaked cherry wood chips were placed on the fire and the grill lid placed on so the salmon would finish cooking over indirect heat with a little smoke.  It took about 5-8 minutes for the salmon to just get to the point were the flesh was starting to flake.  The results were excellent, very moist salmon with loads of flavor.  It's important to keep a close eye on the fish and remove it just as the flesh will flake when a paring knife is inserted, leave it on too long and you get dry salmon.