Churning homemade butter.

In December we tried a new restaurant that had recently opened in the neighborhood named Stella Barra, a pizzeria operated by the Lettuce Entertain You group.  We ordered a red pizza (pepperoni) and a white (shaved fennel) along with some appetizers, salad and dessert.  One of the appetizers we ordered was their house made bread, which came with a nice herb and roasted garlic dipping oil and for a small additional upcharge a ramekin of house churned butter.  I'm a big fan of good butter, and this was excellent.  Later, when discussing the meal on a local food based message board, I mentioned the house churned butter and another poster wondered what they did with the whey churning would produce.  Another posted suggested they might use it as part of their crust recipe or for the bread.  This intrigued me, so I decided to make some homemade butter myself and try it out.

After reading through several articles on butter making on the web, I came up with a plan.  I had a few pints of whipping cream in the fridge that I had bought at Dominicks for 75% off when they were trying to sell off everything before closing the stores.  If I had the patience to wait I would have ordered a buttermilk culture online so I could make cultured butter, instead I mixed some buttermilk directly in to the cream to add a bit of tang.  The mix was covered and left out overnight to both warm up to room temperature and allow any bacteria that might be present to add a little flavor.

As per several of the web sites I had read, I first chilled the cream/buttermilk mixture down to 60 degrees fahrenheit.  This is supposed to produce the best results.  I put the cream mixture in the bowl of my trusty Kitchenaid stand mixer fitted with the paddle and turned it on low.  Everything was fine until the speed was ramped up, then drops of cream began spraying shooting out of the bowl.  The paddle was replaced with the whip and we moved on.

Because I had thinned the cream with buttermilk it took quite a while for the mix to whip up to the point it formed peaks, about 30 minutes.  This was the point where I switched back to the paddle and let the machine run at the second speed setting.  Things started to move quickly at this point.  First the whipped cream started to look grainy, then you could clearly see the butterfat separating from the whey and forming large clumps.   Because the cream had been cool at the start it was easy to press the butter to the side of the bowl and drain off why through  a sieve, this was set aside to be used in making bread.


Now came the fun part, cleaning the butter of any remaining whey.  To do this, the butter was placed in a small steel bowl and some cold, filtered water was added.  Using a spoon, the butter was kneaded against the side of the bowl until the water had become cloudy at which point it was discarded and replaced with fresh.  This was repeated until kneading the butter no longer made the water cloudy (about 5 times in this case).  The next step drain the water and continue to knead to butter to get out as much remaining water as possible and finally to knead in a little Himalayan salt for preservation and flavor.

The end result was a little under a pound of butter from two pints of heavy cream and about a half cup of buttermilk.  It isn't as tangy as I would like but far superior to the sticks of butter you get at the supermarket. Articles I've read indicate that using cream that hasn't been ultra-pasteurized will give better yield, next time I'll source out better cream and have some buttermilk culture on hand.  Unless you can find cream on sale the resulting butter will probably end up costing more than just buying it at the supermarket, but it will be far superior.

Now to weigh in on the whey.  I substituted whey in place of the regular water in my standard bread recipe.  The formula is:

AP flour         40%   200 grams
Whey             60%   330 grams
Honey               2%  10 grams
Yeast (IDY)     1%   5 grams
Bread flour     60%   300 grams
Salt                   2%   10 grams
EVOO              2%   10 grams

The AP flour, whey, honey and yeast are mixed together and allowed to ferment until bubbly.  Next the bread flour and salt are added and mixed using the bread hook for about 2 minutes, then the oil is added and kneading continues until a smooth dough is formed.  The dough is allowed to ferment until doubled, about 2 hours, then folded down and given another 30 minutes to an hour to rise.  To form the loaf the dough is flattened out in to a rectangle about 18' long, then the ends are folded to the center, sprinkled with a little water and rolled up from the long side to form a log.  The probe from a remote thermometer is pushed in the end and the load is covered and allowed to rise for about 45 minutes.  The bread is baked in a 375 degree oven until the internal temp reaches 200 degrees.  The loaf is allowed to cool at least 20 minutes before the thermometer probe is removed.

The resulting load has an extremely fine, soft crumb and great flavor!  I'm not sure how it would do in a pizza crust, but the addition of whey is a definite improvement in a load of bread.  Next time I'm going to try a longer cold ferment to increase the yeast flavor.

Christmas Dinner

Been a while since I've posted.  I've been using my Nomiku often and loving it!  On Thanksgiving we did a sous vide turkey breast along with all the traditional fixings which all turned out excellent!  We've also been making chicken breasts, steaks and some vegetables sous vide.

For Christmas I decided to use a beef tenderloin that I vacuum sealed and froze last christmas, I've been trying to use some of the stuff that's been accumulating in our freezer.  To make it more "christmasy" I decided to butterfly the roast and fill it with sauteed garlic spinach.  The process was pretty simple, first I sauteed down some spinach by sweating a minced clove of garlic with some pepper, then adding fresh spinach and cooking it down.  Once done the spinach was dumped in to a colander and allowed to drain a bit while I  butterflied the tenderloin.  This portion of tenderloin was already a bit flat due to the vacuum sealing and freezing, so I just cut it about half way down stopping about an inch from the other side.  I opened it like a book, covered with plastic wrap and used a meat mallet to flatten to a uniform thickness.  Salt and pepper was sprinkled on the meat, then a layer of the garlic spinach.  The tenderloin was then rolled up and tied to keep the spinach inside, then I tried to stuff any stuffing that squished out back in the sides of the roast.  I seasoned the outside of the roast and vacuum sealed it along with a few tablespoons of butter.  This was cooked in a 56.7C bath for about 90 minutes, then allowed to cool in the bag for 10 minutes before being debagged and seared on all sides in a hot pan.

For sides we did potatoes dauphinoise, roasted brussels sprouts with smoked roasted red pepper and a salad.  Potatoes dauphinoise is one of the easiest dishes I know of that always gets raves.  It's just potatoes sliced on a mandolin and cooked in cream that's been seasoned with salt, white pepper and minced garlic.  For this time I added some minced onion and topped it with parmesan cheese.  I like to cook it in a shallow casserole to maximize browning.  For the first 30 minutes the potatoes are cooked in a 350F oven covered with foil, then the foil is removed and they cook until the top is nice and browned.  Sometimes I'll increase the oven temp to 400 to speed up the browning process.

The brussels sprouts are based on a recipe I saw on a cooking show earlier this year.  I cut off the stem end of the sprout and then cut it in half lengthwise, then they're put in a bowl of cold water to soak for a bit.  When I'm ready to cook I drain the soaking water, add salt, pepper and olive oil then toss to evenly distribute the seasoning.  The brussels sprouts halves and arranged on a baking sheet cut side down, covered in foil and then put on the top shelf of an oven preheated to 500F degrees for 10 minutes.  At that time the foil is removed and the sprouts are roasted for another 10 minutes until they start to brown.  To add a little christmas color I roasted a red bell pepper, allowed it to steam a bit in a covered bowl and then removed the skin.  The pepper was cut in to 1/2" by 3/4" pieces and placed back in the bowl, then covered with plastic wrap and smoked using my Polyscience Smoking Gun loaded with apple wood chips before being allowed to sit covered for 5 minutes to absorb the smoke flavor.  The smoked, roasted red pepper pieces then tossed with the roasted brussels sprouts.  My original intention was to try and mimic the taste of Brussels sprouts and bacon and this was a pretty good attempt, I'll be refining this recipe and pulling it out for cold weather dinners often.

Next time I'll try to get some pictures!

My first Nomiku meal!

My first Nomiku centric meal.  The chicken breast, carrots and potatoes were all cooked with my new Nomiku.  For the chicken breast, I made a marinade with equal parts ponzu, soy sauce and fish sauce.  To that I added some powdered ginger, granulated garlic and seasoned pepper.  The carrots were peeled and bagged with some dill weed, lemon zest salt and butter.  For the potatoes I just cleaned them and bagged with crushed garlic, butter, salt and pepper.  I pierced each potato with a fork to allow the flavor to penetrate.  The carrots and potatoes were cooked at 85°C for 45 minutes, then allowed to cool for about 10 minutes before being put in an ice bath to chill.  Later in the day, the chicken breasts were cooked at 65.6°C for 45 minutes.  After the chicken was removed to cool the carrots and potatoes were put in the bath to retherm.  To serve the carrots and potatoes were put on a foil lined baking sheet and roasted in a hot oven to dry out a little.  The chicken breast was put over a screaming hot charcoal fire to sear.  Also served was some freshly baked bread (100% flour, 66% water, 2% honey, 0.75% active dry yeast, 2% salt) and grilled portobello mushroom caps that were doused with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper and cooked on the grill.  Since it is fall I grabbed some oak leaves from the patio and threw them on the fire to smoke the mushrooms.  Very nice meal!

Nomiku Immersion Circulator

I was first introduced to sous vide back in culinary school, but it wasn't quite the same technique that's popular today.  Sous vide is french for "under vacuum", and what they covered in class was the "boil in bag" method of vacuum packaging pre cooked items at a central commissary to be reheated on site by immersing the bags in simmering water, unbagging and plating.  The sous vide technique that's popular today is a low temperature cooking method where items are vacuum bagged in a raw or almost raw state and cooked by immersing in a water bath maintained at a precise temperature using rather specialized equipment.

Back in 2009 I first became interested in playing around with the low temperature version of sous vide.  I started lurking around on Ebay until I was able to pick up an old Fisher Scientific immersion circulator in 2010 at a good price.  It was pretty dirty when it arrived and needed a lot of TLC to get working.  I took everything apart, cleaned all the electrical connections, descaled and scraped off a lot of gunk and was rewarded with a (mostly) working immersion circulator.  I say mostly because there is some issue that I haven't been able to remedy which causes the circulator to trip any GFCI protected outlet, like all the outlets in the kitchen.  Because of this I had to do all my sous vide cooking out in the dining room.  I wanted something a bit more reliable and modern, but new immersion circulators suitable for kitchen use were all in the $500-$1000 range.  That changed in June 2012 when a Kickstarter campaign started for a low cost immersion circulator for the home cook called the Nomiku.  For a mere $299 contribution a backer would receive one of the first Nomiku units, which were supposed to ship out by November 2012.  I jumped at the chance, knowing that there was no guarantee I would ever see anything.

The Nomikus were originally estimated to ship in November 2012, but that month came and went with no Nomiku.  The founders of the company had to deal with repeated delays, changes and roadblocks along the way but they persevered, and on October 1st I came home from work to a brand new Nomiku sitting on my doorstep!

The Nomiku is a much more attractive circulator than my old Fisher Scientific model, it consists of the circulating/control unit and a separate power supply.  In the box is a user manual, an illustrated "getting started" sheet and a sous vide primer.  The circulator feels solidly built, the only thing I noticed was that the green ring that you rotate to set the target temperature seems a bit loose but that seems to be by design.  I grabbed a large stockpot (about 28 quart capacity), attached the Nomiku and started filling until the water level reached the "Max" level indicator on the stem of the Nomiku.  That took 14 liters of water.  Normally I would fill the bath with hot water from the tap, but since I wanted to stress the unit to shake out any bugs I used cold water (about 20°C).  The reason I like to stress new equipment is that it allows my to find any faults early on that may require the item be replaced while still under warranty.

As the inaugural dish I decided to make sous vide carrots, this required a 90°C water bath that should be the hottest I'll ever need.  After filling the bath with the 14 liters of 20°C tap water I plugged in the Nomiku and tapped the screen to turn it on.  The desired bath temp is set by rotating the green collar around the screen, which I did until the display showed 90°C.  It took a LONG time for the bath to heat up.  At the 2 hour mark we were just getting up to around 76°C, so I tried to improvise a lid to help reduce the effects of evaporative cooling.  That helped, but I needed something a bit more effective so I ended up covering the pot with s sheet of aluminum foil and covered that with a dish towel.  That turned out to be effective and by the 2 hour 40 minute mark the bath had reached the desired 90°C temperature.  I made a simple preparation of carrots, just the vegetable, some butter, a little cumin and salt.  This was bagged using a Food Saver Vacuum Sealer and dropped into the bath for about 20 minutes.  As long as I had the foil top on the pot the Nomiku was able to maintain the bath temperature within +/- 0.1°C of the target point, I could see the light over the stove dimming as the heating element cycled.  Once the 20 minuted was up the bag was removed from the bath and I lowered the set temperature on the Nomiku to let it start cooling down.

If you've never tried sous vide carrots I suggest you give them a try.  The technique allows all their natural sweetness to some out and they retain an intense flavor.  The Nomiku performed like a champ, I think I can definitely get by with a smaller bath size for most applications and finding a bath container with a cover that I can cut to accommodate the circulator unit will help reduce the energy spent maintaining temperature.  Since I will be able to use my Nomiku in the kitchen I'll be able to pre-heat the bath water rather than let the circulator do that extra work on its own.  Now that I have a circulator that is so much easier to set up that my old one I'm going to be able to really play around with sous vide cooking.

One of the things I often hear from people is that sous vide cooking of meats is dangerous because you aren't raising the internal temperature to what the USDA recommends.  People need to understand that the USDA recommendations are based on a short exposure time at that temperature while pasteurization is a function of both temperature AND time.  A longer exposure at a lower temperature will kill pathogens just as well as a short exposure at a higher temperature.  Douglass Baldwin has an excellent sous vide guide including pasteurization tables located here.

Visit the Nomiku website for more information.

Edit:  I heated up another bath of 14 liters from 20°C to 90°C with the pot covered in foil and a dish towel from the start, this knocked almost an hour off the heating time (1 hour 45 minutes down from 2 hours 40 minutes).

New England Style Split Top Hot Dog Rolls

Chicago has several "gourmet" sausage spots, like Hot Doug's and Frank 'n Dawgs.  Frank 'n Dawgs in particular uses these awesome split top buns that are buttered and toasted on the sides giving a nice crunchy exterior, and while they are supposedly available on the east coast I've had little luck finding them around Chicago.  So after seeing an article in the King Arthur Flour mailer I set out to make some for myself.

The first thing was to source the proper pan to bake the rolls in, naturally I went to Amazon.com first and found what I was looking for.   This pan  was just what I was looking for.  Since I was about to go down to visit my parents, I just had it shipped to their address so I could try it out before I made the return trip home.

There are several recipes to find on the internet, the first one I tried was here.  The buns were tasty, but the first batch was a disaster.  I think it was just a case of bad yeast, the rolls didn't rise at all even after an overnight ferment.  I tried to dissolve some fresh yeast in a little water and knead it in which did get a little rise, but the final buns were small and dense.  I set the pan aside for a few months before trying again, this time I just went to the original source of inspiration for the recipe, King Arthur Flour.  The recipe can be displayed by volume, ounces or grams (which is my preference).  This is what I used for 10 rolls...

AP Flour          361 grams     100%
Water               222 grams       61%
Sugar                 25 grams       6.9%
Yeast (IDY)         6 grams       1.6%
Salt                       7 grams         2%
Dry Milk             28 grams       7.8%
Potato Flour        43 grams        12%
Large Egg            47 grams       13%
Butter (soft)          28 grams        8%

I put the sugar in the bowl of my Kitchenaid stand mixer and poured in 200 grams of water to dissolve it a little bit, then the yeast was added and allowed to hydrate a little.  Next I added the egg, dry milk powder, potato flour and topped it with the flour.  The salt was added on top along with the soft butter.  The bowl was placed in the mixer and the bread hook attached.  After a few minuted of kneading it was apparent that more water was needed, so it was added little by little until a smooth dough ball formed.  The kneading continued for about 4 minutes longer.  I weighed the dough ball after kneading and determined that 22 additional grams of water had been needed, good to know for the next time.  The dough ball was placed in an oiled bowl, covered with plastic wrap and allowed to ferment for about 2-3 hours.

The finished dough ball weighed 767 grams, so I scaled it in to 10 76 gram balls.  Each ball was flattened and rolled up as if it were a tiny baguette and placed in the bun pan that had been pre-sprayed with Pam.  I also sprayed Pam on a sheet pan and placed it over the buns with some stainless steel bowls on top as weight while they were rising.  The total rising time took about 65 minutes, toward the end of this time I preheated the oven to 375°.  The buns were placed in the oven with the weighted sheet pan still on top and allowed to bake for about 18 minutes, the the sheet pan was removed and the buns baked uncovered for another 6-7 minutes to brown.  They were allowed to cool in the pan for 5 minuted before turning them out on to a cooling rack.  Since I had to put the rack pretty far down in the oven, just above the Baking Steel, the bottoms weren't as brown as I would have liked, so I put them back in the oven (this time set for convection) to give them a little more color.

This is the final result, the rolls filled the pan up to the sheet pan cover, are full size and fluffy.  They also smell great!  Just before the sausages are ready I'll cut the rolls apart, butter the sides and griddle until crisp.  I think they will go great with the assorted sausages I picked up from Gepperth's Market yesterday.  I know it's a lot of trouble to go to to make something that play a supporting role for the sausage, but if you're going to spend the money on a premium sausage you might as well serve it on a premium (and home made) bun!  These are also the style of roll you would use for lobster rolls, but that will have to wait for another day!

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!