It's Here!: Searzall Edition

I've been listening to Dave Arnolds "Cooking Issues" for a few years now and had heard him talk about the torch attachment they had been developing on the show, so when he announced that they were launching a Kickstarter campaign to I jumped in.  Today it arrived and I wanted to try it out!

The Searzall was packaged in a small box along with some hardware and literature.

Here is everything unpacked.  Included in the box is the Searzall attachment, a spare set of screens, an allen key, limited warranty sheet, initial set-up instructions and a user guide.  Also included is a small wooden stick, which confused me at first but made sense once I had read the instructions.  There is also a torch head adapter which was already inserted in the Searzall.

Here is the Searzall attached to my torch.  In anticipation of the arrival I had purchased the recommended torch head, a Benzomatic TS8000, a few months ago.  Mounting the searzall was extremely simple, since the adapter was already installed (there is a thumbscrew to secure it in place) I just slipped the attachment on to the end of the torch.  This is where the wooden stick comes in to play, you insert the stick between the tip of the torch head and the searzall to ensure proper spacing between the two, there should be a 1/8" gap.  The Searzall is then secured by tightening a lock nut with the provided allen key and the stick removed (and stored in a safe location for future use!).  The instructions at this point are to ignite the torch and position the Searzall with the screens pointing directly at the floor at a height of at least 4 feet for two minutes.  The metal will glow red during this initial burn-in.

Here's a shot with the screen still red hot.  It took about 7-8 minutes for the metal to cool to the pint it could be handled, but this thing gets HOT, so an abundance of caution is called for.  I tried to get a temperature using an infrared thermometer but the temperature exceeded its range (550 C).

Finally I was ready to use the Searzall on some food.  I've been trying to lose a little weight before the holidays so on the weekends I cook a lot of protein and sides, portion them to get the calories I want, vacuum seal the meal together and freeze.  For tonight I pulled a sous vide pork chop with Brussels sprouts and new potatoes.  The pouch was rethermed in a water bath heated by my Nomiku, removed and de-bagged.  I patted as much moisture off the pork as possible and went to work with the Searzall, which gave me a really nice crust.  I then went to town on the sides...

Getting a little char on the vegetables was a piece of cake!  This weekend I plan on using the Searzall quite a bit while making meals for the next week, it will be a lot easier (and cleaner) than searing my proteins in a skillet like I have been doing.  This is going to be an extremely useful tool!

Whole roast chicken sous vide.

From time to time I like a good roast chicken for dinner, so when I was walking through my local supermarket recently and saw they had a sale on whole chickens I picked one up.  This was kind of an impulse buy so I really didn't have a plan and I was looking at a pretty bust week ahead at work so I needed to think of a way to get most of the work done ahead of time so I could quickly finish the cooking when I got home.  Sous vide turned out to be the answer.

The first part of the cooking was done on a day I wasn't working.  Everything in the cavity was removed and the chicken was rinsed and patted dry.  I mixed together some salt, pepper and poultry seasoning in a small bowl and generously seasoned the cavity and outside of the bird, then stuffed the cavity with some Land O' Lakes garlic herb butter, rosemary and quarters of onion.  The whole chicken was slid in to a Foodsaver bag I had cut earlier and vacuum sealed (a bird bigger than 4 pounds would have probably been too big for the bag).  Prior to prepping the chicken I had set up my Nomiku on a 12 quart Cambro with the bath filled up to the low mark on the circulator and set the temp to 62.8C (145F).  Adding the bagged bird to the bath brought the water level almost up to the high level mark on the circulator, I put on the lid and let the chicken soak for 6 hours while I went about my day.  After the soak I let the chicken cool down for 20 minutes at room temperature, then chilled down completely in an ice bath before throwing in the refrigerator.

A few days later it was time to finish the chicken.  When I made it home I placed the bagged chicken back in to the bath with the temperature set to 60C so it could start to re-therm while the oven heated up to 475F (convection).  I placed a bunch of asparagus in the bottom of a casserole dish with a cooling rack on top.  The chicken was removed from the bag and placed breast side down on a piece of parchment paper on top of the rack, all the juices from the bag were poured over the asparagus.  As you can see below, it was a little on the pale side. 

 The bird was patted dry with paper towels and placed in the oven for 10 minutes for the first side to brown, I also did a few minutes under the broiler to speed things up.  After turning the bird breast side up it was returned to the oven for another 10 minutes followed by a little time under the broiler.  Here is the final result...

All of the white meat was perfectly cooked and wonderfully juicy.  The dark meat good but a little on the red side for some tastes.  Next time I may break the chicken down and cook the white and dark meats separately at different temperatures.  The asparagus cooked in the bag juices under the chicken was amazing.

Busy summer, hope to start posting more often soon.

Its been a busy summer and again I've neglected this blog for far too long.  The next few months should give me lots to write about, I should be receiving three items from Kickstarter campaigns I funded.  Within a few week my Searzall should arrive.  To get ready for this I went and purchased the recommended torch head to replace the really cheap one I originally bought at the hardware store to make creme brulee.  This should come in handy this winter when I won't be able to fire up the grill to sear my sous vide cooked steaks and chicken.  Next month (or soon after) I'm expecting my Anova Precision Cooker to be delivered.  I love my Nomiku but I've heard good things about Anova so when I had the chance to grab one at the $99 level I jumped at it, never can have too many circulators!  A little further down the road (estimated March 2015) will be the next iteration of the Nomiku!  This kickstarter is still ongoing for the next few days so if you want a great circulator at a good price go there now!

With the exception of Labor day I haven't really been cooking anything new.  I have been experimenting with different times and temperatures for eggs, the yolk of a 63C egg if perfect but the loose white is a turn off for me.  So far I've tried 75C for 13 minutes, which is nice but the yolk just isn't the same, and dropping a 63C egg in to simmering water long enough to firm up the white.  I think the latter technique will work best but I'm still trying to figure out how long it takes to get the firm white I want without overcooking the yolk.

I was able to play around a bit on Labor day.  Both the potato salad and asparagus were cooked sous vide at 85C for 45 minutes.  In the past I've soaked asparagus at 90C for 10 minutes, I think the lower temperature and longer time gives a better texture to the finished product.  For the potato salad I tossed the potatoes in a mixture of Dijon mustard, dill pickle juice, salt, pepper and some dried dill.  This was sealed in a vacuum bag and cooked along with the asparagus.  The next day the potatoes were mixed with some diced onion and bell pepper, sliced asparagus and Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers that we had.  I added a little mayo to half of the potato salad and left the rest mayo free for those who didn't want the extra fat.  Both were excellent, this really is the best way I've found to cook  the potatoes so they are complete permeated with flavor.

We were having polish sausages as the main course, so I wanted to make one more thing... really good sausage rolls.  I'm a fan of New England split top rolls, the kind that are used for lobster rolls on the east coast, but they're a little hard to find in Chicago.  I've grown fond of a recipe in an old King Arthur Flour catalog to which I've made a few changes.  I prefer my bread doughs to have a long, cold fermentation in the refrigerator instead of letting them ferment at room temperature, I find the long ferment allows better flavor development, improved texture and makes the dough easier to work with.  To do this you just need to decrease the amount of yeast in the formula, I halved the yeast in the original recipe for these rolls.  This technique is particularly good for pizza dough, it not only gives you a great yeasty flavor in your crust but the dough is also much easier to stretch out.  But the main advantage to this technique, and the reason that most pizzerias use it, is that it significantly increases the window in which the dough is usable.  My dough is ready to go after 24 hours, but it will keep in the fridge for up to 5 days and still give me a great crust.  The one disadvantage is that you can't just use the dough right out of the fridge, it needs to warm up first before being shaped.  In the past I've just left it sitting on the counter for a few hours but this time I still had the Nomiku set up on the water bath from the day before so I thought I try something new.  The dough had been cold fermenting overnight in a large zip-lock freezer bag.  I set the temperature of the water bath to 35C and forced as much gas out of the bag as possible, closed it and clipped it to the side of the bath.  After 7 minutes the bag had started to float due to the gasses being produced by the yeast, I flipped the bag over and let it go for another 7 minutes.  Using the Nomiku I was able to bring the dough up to temperature in around 15 minutes, something that usually takes well over an hour!  This is going to open up a lot of possibilities for week-night baked goods!

Naturally fermented sauerkraut at home.

I had half a head of cabbage left over from St. Patrick's day this year and needed to find a good way to put it to use.  Normally I would just fire up the grill for a cook-out and use the left over cabbage for some slaw, but this year spring seems to be having a difficult time getting started.  Instead of waiting for a warm day I decided to turn the cabbage in to fermented sauerkraut.  

The ingredient list is short...


1/2 head cabbage
2 tsp kosher salt


Several recipes also included caraway seeds as an option, but I couldn't find the ones I was sure I had in the pantry so I substituted 1/2 tsp dill seeds.  Remove any dirty outer leaves from the cabbage but don't wash, you need the bacteria naturally present to do the fermenting.  The first step was to remove the core from the head of cabbage and cut in to 1/8" strips.  That was placed in a bowl and the salt sprinkled over top.  Using gloved hands the salt was mixed and massaged in to the cabbage and allowed to sit for about 10 minutes for the liquid to start coming out.  While that was happening I sterilized a 1 quart mason jar (and a canning funnel) in boiling water.


While the jar was cooling a bit I went back to the cabbage and mixed in the dill seeds, then started loading it in to the jar using the canning funnel.  When the jar was filled almost to the top I took a small juice glass and used it to push everything down in to the jar, then continued adding more cabbage.  Eventually all the cabbage fit in the jar, so I added some water to the juice glass and covered everything with a towel secured with a rubber band to keep anything from finding its way in.  I went back about once an hour the rest of the night to pack the cabbage down in the jar, by the end of the night enough juice had been exuded from the cabbage to submerge everything.  By the next morning it was obvious that something was happening, there was a slight vinegary and lots of bubbles were coming up from the cabbage.  Over the next week the jar was allowed to sit out at room temperature covered with a towel.  Twice a day the fermenting cabbage was packed down in to the jar using the juice glass to make sure everything stayed submerged in the juice.  At day 5 I pulled a little out with a fork and tried it, it was good!  Finally on day 7 I figured it had had enough time so I loosely put a lid on the jar and put it in the fridge.



The results are fantastic.  The sauerkraut is nice and tangy, but unlike the stuff you get the the grocery store it still has a lot of crunch.  Since it's fairly acidic I would guess that the shelf life is decent, but I'm thinking I may vacuum seal some and pasteurize in a water bath using my Nomiku, I figure 140F for 90 minutes would kill off any pathogens but still retain the crunch of the cabbage.  Now I just need some warm weather so I serve this with some grilled sausages!

Irish Cream Bread Pudding with Guinness caramel.

This was a really good dessert for our recent St. Patrick's day dinner.

Irish Cream Bread Pudding.

1 loaf bread (I used challah)

1 cup Irish Cream liquor
1/2 cup raisins

1 cup whole milk

2 tablespoons butter, softened

4 large eggs
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 pinch salt

Cut about 1/2 to 3/4 of the bread in to 1" cubes, you want enough to fill the loaf pan you'll be using.  Dry in a 170F oven for a few hours or let sit out overnight.

Add the raising to the Irish cream liquor and allow to sit overnight.

Preheat the oven to 300F.

Grease a loaf pan with the 2 tablespoons of butter.  Prepare a water bath for the load pan.

Bring the milk to a simmer.

Beat the eggs with the sugars, vanilla, nutmeg and salt, slowly whisk in the hot milk.  Add the Irish cream and raisins and mix in.  Pour the custard mix over the dry bread cubes and gently mix until adsorbed.  Press the soaked bread mixture in to the buttered loaf pan.  Bake the bread pudding in a water bath for 50-60 minutes.  Can be served warm or cold.

Guinness Caramel.

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
Juice of 1/2 lime (or lemon)
1 pinch salt
1/2 - 3/4 cup Guinness draught (allow to go flat or be prepared to deal with boil-over)
2 tablespoons butter

Add the sugar, salt, lime (or lemon) juice and water to a saucepan and cook over medium flame until the sugar has caramelized.  Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.  Slowly whisk in the Guinness, there will be a lot of steam and sputtering so be careful.  Once the bubbling has died down whisk in the butter.  The caramel will thicken as it cools, if it is too thick heat it us and add more beer (or cream if you prefer).

Sous Vide Corned Beef for St. Patrick's Day.

I've been having fun laying with my Nomiku immersion circulator, so I decided to put it to good use for our traditional St. Patrick's day meal.  We usually cook the corned beef, the centerpiece of the meal, in the crockpot for about 10 hours.  The result is very tasty, but leaves something to be desired in the texture.  It is usually falling apart and kind of stringy by the time we get home, or if we cook at a lower temperature it may still be tough and dry.  This year I decided to cook the corned beef sous vide.

There are several recommended time/temp combinations for corned beef on the internet, from 82C for 10 hours to 58C for 72 hours.  I decided to cook ours for 48 hours at 64C, which fit the best in to my schedule. Because I had a rebate check for Costco we picked up a corned beef (Sy Ginsberg brand) there along with a second component of my plan...a case of guinness.

Corned beef in water bath with frozen Guinness/spice puck still visible.

The first step was to make a guinnesscicle, I poured about 2/3 cup of Guinness in to a plastic container, added a tablespoon of corned beef spices I bought from The Spice House, sealed it up and put it in the freezer.  The next day it was frozen solid and ready to use.  I filed up my 12" x 18" x 9" polycarbonate box with hot water from the tap, the minimum and maximum levels are written in Sharpie on the box so I filled it to about an inch below the max level and attached my Nomiku.  After touching the screen to turn it on I set the temperature to 64C and left it to heat up.  Meanwhile I removed the corned beef from its packaging and rinsed off as much of the salty brine as possible.  Because we would not be doing the traditional cooking method of simmering in lots of liquid I wanted to eliminate as much of the salt as possible.  Once it was rinsed and patted dry I put the Guinnesscicle in a vacuum bag along with the corned beef and sealed it up.  In the picture above you can see the still frozen Guinness in the bag.  The bag was put in to the bath and the waiting began.

Nomiku screen with "Power Outage" icon displayed.

During the soak an unusual thing happened... the power went out.  I say that it's unusual because this is only the second time in the 15 years we have been living in this house that I can remember a power outage.  It happened on Sunday while we were all at home and only lasted about 10 minutes.  I found it interesting because it showed off a controversial feature on the Nomiku that I had never tested, if the power goes out the Nomiku will remember the set point and resume once the power is restored.  When this happens an icon lights up on the screen to alert you of the outage.  I say it's controversial because it can be a food safety issue, if the power goes out while no one is around and stays out long enough for the bath temperature to drop in to the danger zone (between 4C and 49C) it could allow harmful bacteria to grow unchecked.  If you don't notice the icon you could end up serving dangerous food.  The way I see it is by resuming after a power outage and letting me know that there was one I get to decide if there is a risk, and take the appropriate actions.  If the same outage had happened while we were all out at work and I was using a circulator that didn't resume afterwards then food that would have been otherwise fine would end up getting spoiled and thrown away.  It would be REALLY nice if the Nomiku folks could add a feature that not only will tell you that there was an outage but also what the bath temperature was when the power was restored, that way you could make an informed decision.  In the meantime I'm looking at buying a digital aquarium thermometer that has min/max capability like this one here.

St. Patrick's Day dinner

Now on to St. Patrick's day.  When I got home from work I pulled the corned beef out of the bag and allowed it to cool in the bag for about 10 minutes.  During that time I quartered some new potatoes and sliced half a head of cabbage in to 1/2" thick slabs.  A corner of the bag was cut off so I could pour off the juices (and there were a lot) through a strainer and in to a sauce pan.  To those juices were added the potatoes and carrots with the cabbage lain on top.  The lid was put on and the flame set to low, after about 15 minutes everything was cooked and we were ready to eat our St. Patrick's day meal with some soda bread and Guinness.  The corned beef was excellent, tender but not falling apart with strong flavors and not too salty (thanks to the rinse).  I don't have a picture, but for dessert I made an Irish Cream bread pudding served with some Guinness caramel.  I'll post those recipes in a future entry.  With the leftover half of cabbage I'm making some home fermented sauerkraut, we'll see how that goes in a week or so.

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.