Memorial Day: Peach stuffed banana bread

For Memorial Day I was planning on making a peach cobbler for dessert, I had a can of peaches in the pantry and all the necessary ingredients so it seemed like a no brainer.  The day before the holiday I noticed that we had some bananas that were getting really brown and that would need to be used soon.  Lately I've been making banana bread from my late Mamaw's recipe so that would be a good way to use the bananas.  But did I want to have two sweet things needing to be eaten at the same time?  The solution was to combine them and make a peach stuffed banana bread.

The banana bread recipe is pretty simple, but you need to do things in a particular order for it to come out right.  The ingredients are:

3-4 very ripe bananas
1 ts baking soda
3/4 ts baking powder
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 ts vanilla
2 cups AP flour (divided, I use the scoop and level method for measuring)
1 stick butter, melted

First the oven is preheated to 350 and a large loaf pan is prepared by cutting out a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom.  The pan is sprayed with release spray, the parchment put in the bottom and sprayed again.

Now that that's done it's time to make the batter.  The bananas are peeled and put in the bowl of a stand mixer, the baking soda is added and the mixer turned on, mixing the bananas with the baking soda seems to help them break down.  With the mixer still on the baking powder is added, followed by the sugar, eggs and vanilla.  The speed is turned down to low and 1 cup of flour is added, then the melted butter and finally the final cup of flour.  Only mix until the batter is smooth and you don't see and lumps of flour.  Quickly pour the batter in to the prepared pan.  For plain banana bread you can just bake for 60 minutes, then let cool in the pan for around 10 minutes before turning out and letting cool on a rack.

This time I decided to stuff the banana bread with peaches.  I poured a can of peach pieces in light syrup in to a colander and reserved the liquid.  The peach pieces were pushed in to the batter, trying to keep them from touching the sides of the loaf pan.  Once all the peaches were in place the banana bread was put in the preheated oven to bake, since I had never done this before I added 10 minutes to the normal bake time for a total of 70 minutes.

Here is the result.  The extra baking time was definitely needed to allow the batter around the peaches to cook.  After the oven was turned off I left the loaf pan in there for 10 minutes with the door open to help drive off a little more moisture, then allowed the bread to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before being removed.  It was a little more difficult to turn this out of the pan since I didn't want to mess up the peaches on top but with a little extra care it came out just fine.  I didn't know if the flavors of bananas and peaches would mesh, but they're actually pretty good together!  The peach stuffed banana bread was served with a whipped cream made with heavy cream, powdered sugar and some of the reserved syrup from the can of peaches and some vanilla frozen custard.

Memorial Day: Crock fermented sauerkraut

Last time I made naturally fermented sauerkraut I used a clean jar as the fermentation vessel, this time I decided to use my fermenting crock.  The recipe has only three ingredients...shredded cabbage, salt and caraway seeds.  The crock is 5 liters, and since you want to limit the size of the head space I bought the biggest cabbage I could find.  The cabbage was prepped by cutting in to quarters and removing the core.  The cabbage was shredded and placed in a bowl to be weighed.  The amount of salt to use for sauerkraut varies, 2.25% to 2.5% seems to be the what is recommended.  I had just over 1900 grams of cabbage so I weighed out 44 grams of pickling salt and mixed it in to the cabbage along with 2 Tb caraway seeds.  Over the next 15 minutes I would roughly mix the cabbage every 5 minutes or so while the salt started to pull the liquid from the cabbage, then everything including the extruded liquid and cabbage core was put in the crock and weighed down with the weight stones and short, wide cup filled with water.  The lid was put on the crock and over the next several hours I pushed down on the stones until enough liquid had been pulled from the cabbage to submerge everything, then the water channel was filled to keep out oxygen and the cabbage was left to ferment for 8 days undisturbed.  On day 8 pulled out a sample and liked how it tasted, the cabbage was still crunchy but it had a great sour flavor.  I moved the sauerkraut to a plastic container and put it in the refrigerator to stop the fermentation.  For Memorial Day the sauerkraut was served with grilled sausages and warm purple potato salad.  Crock fermented sauerkraut not only tastes great, but it provides a lot of health benefits.  That's good, because I have a LOT of it left!

Memorial Day: Purple Potato Salad Sous Vide

The side dish I decided to make this Memorial Day was a warm potato salad, but I didn't want to go for a standard German potato salad.  For the potatoes I picked up a bag of small purple potatoes at the supermarket, no reason, they were just on sale.

I usually have a water bath set up in the kitchen, but sice this was going to be a pretty hot bath I put a couple of sisal fiber placemats under the Cambro to protect the granite countertop.  I set the circulator to 90C and turned it on.

The potatoes were cut in to bite sized pieces and tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper and granulated onion.  I smashed four garlic cloves and threw them in as well.  Everything was put in to a Foodsaver bag along with 2 tbs butter and vacuum sealed, then the pouch was placed in the still heating bath.  In order to allow the bath to heat up as quickly as possible a blanket was wrapped around the bath and dish towels laid over the top.  Once the bath hit 90C a timer was set for 30 minutes.  When the timer went off the pouch was retreived from the bath, cut open, and the potatoes were dumped in a colander placed over a bowl.  A vinaigrette was made by whisking the liquid drained from the potatoes with 2-3 Tb honey dijon mustard, about 1/4 cup olive oil and around 2 Tb white wine vinegar until an emulsion was formed, which was then tossed with the still hot potatoes.  Thinly sliced onion, diced Anaheim pepper, capers, chives and a little cilantro were folded in and the potato salad was covered and allowed to sit for 30 minutes for the flavors to marry.

This potato salad turned out really well, the potatoes were tender but not to the point of falling apart and because they were mixed with the vinegraitte when they were still hot they absorbed a lot of flavor.  By cooking the potatoes sous vide and incorporating the bag liquid in the vinegraitte all the potato flavor stayed where it belonged.  I'll be adding this recipe to the summer holiday rotation.

Crock fermented, low temperature processed dill pickles

This was a project 6 weeks in the making.  A while back I stared making naturally fermented sauerkraut in glass jars, and since that was working out so well I had the urge to take things to the next level.  The opportunity came around Christmas, when I received some Amazon gift cards and decided to use them to buy my own stoneware fermentation crock.  The crock I selected has a 5 liter capacity, straight sides, stone weights and a water channel around the lid to help keep out oxygen while the fermenting is going on.  The first thing I tried was sauerkraut, and it turned out OK but not great.  After doing a little on-line research I believe that the issue is that I didn't fill the crock with enough cabbage, which left a large air space in the crock above the weights.  Next time I'll shred up two heads of cabbage and see out it turns out then.  I also read about a method of making sauerkraut where you ferment the head of cabbage whole in a brine and then shred it, might be interesting to try but I'll probably wait until it's a little warmer out to give it a try.

One of the things I've always wanted to try but never did was to make my own fermented dill pickles.  The process is simple, you take cucumbers, put them in a crock with herbs, spices, and a brine, then wait.  I looked around and found several recipes but was confused about the amounts, they all measured the salt in volume instead of weight and none specified what type of salt was used.  In the end, I assumed they were using pickling salt, found a weight for a given volume of salt on the Morton website and calculated the weights I would need.

The first step was to measure out all the ingredients I would be using.  The recipe called for 8 cups of water (Brita filtered), 1/4 cup white vinegar (5% acidity), 144 grams of kosher salt, 2 TB dill seeds, 2 TB yellow mustard seeds, 4 TB pickling spices mix (Spice House), 4 cloves of garlic, a dried chili and a couple sprigs of fresh dill.  The water, vinegar and salt was mixed together until dissolved, this resulted in a brine of about 7.4%.  I saw recipes using brines anywhere between 2.5% and 10% so this seemed like a reasonable level.  While the salt was dissolving I washed the pickling cucumbers and cut 1/4" off the blossom end, I read that if this isn't done enzymes present in that area will cause the pickles to get mushy.  The while spices were toasted briefly to wake them up and places in the bottom of the crock, then the cucumbers were packed in tightly (to help prevent them from floating), garlic and fresh dill places on top of the cucumbers and the stone weights added.  Next the brine was poured over and I shook the crock a little to let any trapped bubbles rise to the surface.  Once the lid was put on some watter was added to the channel to seal the crock but allow produced gasses to escape.  The crock was put aside in a cool corner and left alone to allow the magic to happen, a few times a week I would add water to the channel to keep the crock sealed.

The recipe I used said it would take anywhere between 4 and 6 weeks of fermentation before the pickles would be ready.  How long the fermentation takes depends on the strength of the brine, a weaker brine of about 2.5% can give you what are known as "half-sour" pickles after as little as a week of fermentation.  A stronger brine will inhibit both the types and rate of bacterial growth, which requires a longer fermentation and will result in what are called "full-sour" pickles.  After 4 weeks I opened the crock and pulled out a pickle to try.  The first thing I noticed when cutting up the cucumber
was that it wasn't completely pickled through to the center, it needed a little more time to finish.  The flavors were good, but I found the pickle to be a little too salty for my taste.  I added another cup of filtered water to the crock to reduce the brine concentration to around 6.6% and closed it up for another 2 weeks.

This past weekend it was finally time to open up the crock and process my pickles for storage.  Pickles will lose their crispness if they are heated to above 85C (185F), the temperature at which the natural pectin will start to break down.  Normal canning procedures where you process in boiling water will result in a limper pickle, so I opted to go with a lower temperature process using a water bath maintained at 180f with my Nomiku immersion circulator.

Here you can see the crock sitting next to a stockpot where I'm sterilizing jars for canning.  Apparently some of the brine was able to seep through the walls of the crock and evaporate, leaving a salt residue on the sides.  Hopefully this will provide a safe haven for the good bacteria to sit between fermentations so future batches will just get better and better.  The cucumbers here removed from the brine, cut in to spears (quarters) and packed in to sterilized jars.  Each jar received another teaspoon of mixed spices (dill seeds, mustard seeds, chili flakes, pickling spices) and a clove of garlic.  Brine from the crock was ladled in to the jars to about 1/2" below the rim and the lids placed on loosely to allow gas expanding during the heating to escape.

Here is the bath set up with the Nomiku for processing.  It's difficult to see in this photo, but I am using a cork from a bottle of wine to raise the circulator so the top of the jars falls between the Nomiku's max and min level markers.  Once the jars were placed in the bath container I added just enough water to bring the level up to about 1/4" to 1/2" below the top of the jars, the Nomiku was set to 82.2C (180F) and turned on.  I placed the lid on the bath container to help keep in the heat and the jars were allowed to process for a few hours.  Once I was sure that the contents of the jars had reached 82.2C and held there for 30 minutes I removed each jar from the bath, tightened the lid and put it back in the water.  I now added additional water to the bath to raise the level above the tops of the jars.  This was done to kill any bacteria that might have been survived by being above the water level during the first phase of processing.  after 20 more minutes in the bath the jars were removed to a cooling rack, as the jars cooled the centers of the lids popped down indicating that a good vacuum had formed.  These should be shelf stable for a good long time, but I don't intend to allow them to sit around for long.

The pickles are very good and still have a nice snap to them, unlike the quick pickles I'd made in the past.  I still find them to be a bit on the salty side, even after diluting the brine down to 6.6% after week 4.  Next time I'll try using a 5% brine and see how that turns out, I expect the weaker brine will cut the fermentation time down by a few weeks.  Before I make another attempt I'm going to do some research and try to come up with my own blend of pickling spices, the ready-made mix I used for this batch is more for corned beef than dill pickles.

Faux-aged, Searzall seared, sous vide cooked standing rib roast (with mushroom/black garlic gravy).

We have traditions.  For Fourth of July we have a cook out, Thanksgiving is a traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings and Christmas we have a standing rib roast with dauphinoise potatoes, fresh yeast rolls and a few rotating vegetables.  This Christmas was no different, but earlier in the year I had read about a technique for taking wet-aged beef from the supermarket and imparting the flavors of a dry aged cut of meat and I wanted to try it out.

I believe this process was originally described in one of the Modernist Cuisine books (at home?) but I first read about it on the Seriouseats blog.  The process takes some time, so 8 days before Christmas I went to our local supermarket (Jewel-Osco) and picked up a 2 bone rib roast.  After looking at what was available I picked one that was a good mix of lean muscle to fat, I would describe it as solidly in the choice grade.  Once at home I started the process.

The first step in the faux-aging process is to coat the cut of beef with fish sauce, vacuum seal and let it sit in the refrigerator for 3-4 days.  I grabbed a bottle of Tiparo's Fish Sauce from the pantry and tried to coat every surface of the roast, then let it sit in the run-off for a few minuted while I cut and prepared a suitably large Foodsaver bag.  The roast was just small enough to fit in the bag, which was then vacuum sealed and left in the refrigerator for four days.

The next step is to remove the roast from the bag and let it sit in the refrigerator loosely covered for a few days to allow moisture to evaporate from the meat.  The way I saw it described (which was for steaks instead of roasts) was to wrap the meat in a few layers of cheesecloth, but since I didn't have any of that laying around I just draped a couple of sheets of parchment paper of the roast and covered the whole thing with a dish towel.  Before covering I had coated the exposed meat with cracked black pepper.  This was left in the refrigerator for 3 more days.

This was the roast after three days dehydrating in the refrigerator, as you can see the fat cap had turned a bit yellowish/brown and there were some dark areas on the exposed muscle.  The next step was to trim the roast of most of the fat cap and any discolored meat.  Before starting, I set my new Anova Precision Cooker up on a 12 quart Cambro, filled it to a few inched above the minimum and started heating the bath to 132f.

I then went about trimming the roast, all the scraps were saved so I could render them down later and use the fat for other parts of the meal.  Once trimmed the roast was seasoned with salt and pepper, and I broke out the Searzall to sear all the surfaces.  There are several schools of thoughts when it comes to searing sous vide cooked meats.  I like to sear before AND after the soak.  The initial sear not only serves to kill off any surface bacteria that might be present, but the Maillard reactions that occur during the sear will have a chance to permeate the meat during the soak.  The second searing lets you develop a good crust on the meat.  The seared roast was again vacuum sealed using the Foodsaver and the bag placed in the water bath.  I added water to bring the bath up to near the max level and left it to soak for about 5 hours.

Here is the bagged roast soaking in the water bath.  Initially the temperature went down about 10 degrees when the roast was added and the water level topped off, but the circulator rebounded quickly and the bath temperature was back up where I wanted it within 10 minutes.

After 5 hours it was time to remove the roast from the bath.  This was the day before Christmas, so the roast was chilled in an ice bath and set in the refrigerator until the next day.  For serving I simply rethermed the roast in a 130f bath for about an hour, then removed from the bag, patted dry and allowed to rest for about 10 minutes before placing in a very hot oven (500f) for about 10 minutes to dry off the outer surface and develop a nice crust.

To serve with the roast I made a quick mushroom/black garlic gravy.  I've been playing around with black garlic a bit lately and wanted to find a way to incorporate it in the the meal.  Shallots and mushrooms were browned in some of the fat rendered from the beef trimmings, once suitably colored a bit of flour was added to form a roux.  The roux was cooked for a few minutes to get rid of the raw flour taste, minced black garlic was added and the pan was deglazed with some red wine.  Beef broth was added and the gravy was left to reduce and thicken on the stove top.

So was it worth it?  The resulting roast had some of the flavors you expect to find in dry-aged beef, but at a fraction of the cost.  Real dry aged beef will have more concentrated and complex flavors, but if you don't want to pay 5 times as much this technique will give you a good result somewhere between a wet aged roast and its much more expensive dry aged cousin.  

It's Here!: Anova Precision Cooker Edition

I've heard good things about the Anova immersion circulator so when I heard that they had started a Kickstarted campaign for a second generation of their circulator I jumped on board.  Since I got in so early, I was able to get one at the "Founder's Club" level for $99 and yesterday it finally arrived!

And here it is!  The packaging is very good looking, a cylinger about 5" in diameter and 25" long with a yellow cap and black body emblazoned with their logo.  Once you twist off the cap you'll find the circulator nestled in the package with some foam rings and caps.  Everything about the packaging seems to be well thought out and should provide a great deal of protection for the circulator when I'm taking it on the road with me.

Here is everything removed from the packaging.  The circulator is quite a bit larger than my Nomiku but looks good and has a really nice, bright, large display.  There is no manual included in the box so I highly suggest downloading it from the Anova Culinary website.  The controls are somewhat intuitive but there are a few things that may not be so obvious, such as how to switch from farenheit to celcius.  The clamp attaches to the cooking vessel and allows you to easily adjust the height of the circulator so you can use smaller pots.  There are minimum and maximum water levels marked on the stainless steel sleeve of the circulator, however I did see some issues with the measurement of temperature when running towards the minimum water level mark.

Here is the circulator mounted to a 12 quart Cambro.  If you look closely you can see the MAX water level mark, there is also a small indentation in the stainless steel sleeve at this level.  In the picture to the left I had filled the Cambro to the 8 quart (7.57 liter) mark with cold tap water, normally I would fill the bath with hot tap water but I wanted to see how quickly the new Anova would heat it up.  First I filled the container to the 8 quart mark and attached my Nomiku to see how much it would heat the bath in 15 minutes, then I dumped the container, refilled it with cold tap water to the 8 quart mark and put on the Anova which brough the water level to just a few inches above the MIN mark on the sleeve.  This is were I noticed something odd, when started the temperature display on the Anova started going up considerably faster than the Nomiku's had.  When I touched the power button to turn off the circulator the temperature reading dropped quickly.  A temperature probe confirmed that the reading on the Anova was high during the heating phase, but once the set point was reached the reading was spot on.  This only happened when the water level was near the MIN mark on the sleeve, when I filled the Cambro up to the 10 liter mark the temperature display on the circulator and on my probe thermometer stayed in sync.  As a final test I fulled up the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (15.5C), attached the Anova Precision Cooker and set it for a 60C bath.  On an uncovered polycarbonate container it took 63 minutes to heat the bath up to the set point.  This is on par with other circulators I've used and is why we always want to start by filling our baths with hot tap water.  My first impressions of the Anova Precision Cooker is that it looks great, is quiet and easy to use.  I have not had a chance to play around with the Bluetooth connectivity since the Android app has not been released yet, I may have to dig up my old iPhone just so I can play around with the feature until an app for my phone is released.

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!