Sriracha-Honey "Caviar"

I've read about the process of spherification for a long time, but never tried to do it myself.  It always seemed to much trouble to order the sodium alganate and calcium salt by mail order and set up all the baths, but on a recent visit to The Spice House in Chicago I was pleased to find that they are now selling everything I needed to give it a try.  I had to wait a few weeks due to a planned vacation, but this morning I made my first attempt at spherification.

My first thought was to make something that looked similar to beluga caviar, those very expensive salted sturgeon eggs that can go for hundreds an ounce.  But I really didn't have any ingredients to pull that off (although I think a reduction of concord grape juice would probably work), so when I started to think of other similar things I could replicate I finally hit on hot sauce salmon roe.  Of course, this has already been done but it was a good place to start.  There wasn't any fresh hot sauce in the house so I decided to go with Sriracha sauce as the base, cut with some honey for sweetness.

The recipe I came up with for a first attempt was...

15 grams Sriracha sauce
10 grams honey
15 grams water (plus an undefined amount to thin the mixture)
2 grans sodium citrate (as a buffer)
3 grams sodium alginate

I wasn't using a particularly accurate scale so I may have added a little too much sodium alginate since the mixture seemed to gel up immediately.  I started adding water and mixing it in with an immersion blender until the mixture was a little thicker in consistency than maple syrup.  Then it was allowed to sit in the fridge for about an hour before I placed the container in a Food Saver Canister and applied a vacuum to pull out any residual air bubbles.  After several cycles we were ready to go.

I mixed 9 grams of calcium salt in 1 liter of water until everything was dissolved for a calcium bath and poured most of it in to a tall glass.  Using a 10 ml luer slip syringe I "borrowed" from the office I pulled up some of the sriracha mixture and while holding it about a foot above the bath slowly depressed the plunger so the sriracha would enter the calcium bath in drops.  The alginate in the sriracha drops instantly gelled when they came in to contact with the calcium ions in the bath to form spheres.  After a few syringe fulls of sriracha mix, I strained out the spheres, rinsed them in a water bath and then dumped them in a second water bath for holding.  This was repeated until all the sriracha-honey mix was spherified.  Here is the result...

I mixed a little olive oil and grape seed oil in with the sriracha/honey spheres to keep them separate, they really do look like salmon roe and have the same pop in the mouth feel to them but a completely different taste.  Since this was direct spherification I'm not sure if they will eventually solidify or remain liquid in the center, reverse spherification would certainly retain the liquid center.  I have a decent supply of the required ingredients so I'm sure I'll be messing around with this technique quite a bit in the coming months!

"Melty" Queso Dip

Prior to Cinco de Mayo Modernist Cuisine posted a recipe for a Melty Queso Dip consisting only of pepperjack cheese, beer (or water) and sodium citrate.  The only ingredient that I had to order was the sodium citrate, which I eventually bought from Amazon.com and was delivered shortly before I left for a weeks vacation.  While I was down south visiting family I thought I'd give it a try.

At a nearby grocery store I picked up a pound of pepperjack cheese, the brand chosen mainly because it was on sale.  It was a little below the weight listed in the recipe (285 grams) so I threw in some Land o' Lakes white american cheese I found in the fridge to make up the difference.  The only beer that was available was some Sam Adams Boston Lager, which in hindsight wasn't the best choice for this application.  The 265 milliliters of beer was warmed up to a simmer and 11 grams of sodium citrate was added and dissolved.  Now the fun part, the cheese was added to the simmering beer in batches while using an immersion blender to fully incorporate each addition before the next was added.  There was some foaming here so if you try this be sure to use a big enough saucepan and stop occasionally to let the foam subside.  The result was a smooth cheese dip with a silky texture and great cheese flavor.  The downside was the strong hop flavor contributed by the Sam Adams beer, it distracted from the cheese which should be the star of the show.  When I do this again (and I will since I bought a full pound of sodium citrate) I'll be sure to use a much less hoppy beer, like the wheat beer they suggested.  A Goose Island 312 should fit the bill nicely!

The Polyscience Smoking Gun

Last week I bought a new toy on Ebay that I've coveted for a while, a Polyscience Smoking Gun.  The Smoking Gun allows you add smoke to foods without adding any heat, so you can "smoke" delicate things that you don't want to cook like fruits and cheeses.  Obviously this isn't smoking in a traditional sense as there is no cooking and no penetration of the smoke in to the food, it just settles on the surface.  Two small cans of sawdust come with the Smoking Gun, hickory and apple wood, there are several other varieties available from Polyscience but they seem a bit expensive so I ordered this from Amazon which looks to be the correct grind for the gun.  Once I've had a chance to try them out I'll add the results to this post.  Other smoke sources people seem to be using are tobacco, tea and dried herbs, so many things to burn and so little time!  For my first foray in to cold smoking I used some hickory sawdust to smoke strawberries and sharp cheddar cheese...

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!