1821 replies to this topic

[emannths]

Re: brining/curing...

The size and shape certainly make a difference in how long it will take stuff to equilibrate. But even half a brisket is going to easily exceed the weight of their test piece, and the thicker point end will probably not have any shape advantage of the (unnamed, though probably loin or shoulder) piece of pork those guys used. One way or another, the results seem at odds with each other. FWIW, they think their experiment shows that it takes at least 19 days per kg to reach equilibrium.

If I were to design a curing recipe, the parameters I think I'd use would be the mass of the meat, the leanness of the meat, and the width of the thinnest cross-section. The mass and leanness tells you how much brine you need, and the width tells you how long it will take to diffuse in. Obviously the guys at sausagemaking.org tried to incorporate some of this, but they didn't incorporate all of it. I was hoping that perhaps MC used this approach, or provided the rationale for an alternate one. Sounds like the answer may be that it doesn't, at least when it comes to determine the time necessary to reach cure equilibrium.

[jmolinari]

The nice thing about equilibrium curing is that it can't "over-cure". I would lean towards leaving i too long than too short.

[vice]

Wouldn't you want to take into account width at the thickest point if you're going for an equilibrium method?

[emannths]

Wouldn't you want to take into account width at the thickest point if you're going for an equilibrium method?

How do I word this--I knew "thinnest cross-section" wasn't very precise language. What I mean is you want to know the minimum distance the salt has to travel to get for the outside of the meat to every piece inside. So if you assume a piece of meat can be defined by HxWxD, you time your curing based on the smallest of those three values. So if you take a brisket flat, it would be the "height" of the brisket (what, maybe 2" for a flat and 4"+ for a point?)--the main idea being that point and flat cuts of brisket of equivalent weights will have different curing times because one is flatter than the other.

Regardless, it sounds like MC doesn't use this approach to determine brine times, so for the purposes of this thread, the discussion is moot. I suppose we can continue in the Corned Beef topic or the a charcuterie topic.

Edited by emannths, 02 March 2011 - 03:07 PM.

[vice]

Ah, that makes perfect sense. Thanks.

[jmolinari]

I believe the word you are searching for is "thickness" :)

[PhyllisBFP]

Thanks, all of you who have posted. It is really amazing to read your information and work arounds.

P

[Guy MovingOn]

could someone please post the ratios or % mass of the ingredients for the macaroni cheese please?

[Shalmanese]

If you poked some slits in the brisket, would that accelerate brining time?

[Chris Amirault]

I'm going to make the mac & cheese tonight when I get home (to serve with some pulled pork sandwiches and a few other things), so I thought I'd share a tweaked version of the ratios in the book. We found that it was a bit too salty, and I wanted a stronger cheddar component. I also tweaked the techniques a bit.

Whisk & simmer

• 100g water
• 75g (wheat) beer
• 10g sodium citrate
• 4.5g salt
• 1.25g iota carrageenan

Grate and combine over low heat:

• 140g aged gouda (was 200g)
• 145g aged cheddar (was 80g)

Stir until melted/emulsified. Pour into container; bring to room temp; freeze. Just before serving, pull it from the freezer and grate/shred 160g.

Boil over high heat:

• 300g water
• 100g macaroni
• 1g salt [down from 2.4g]

Don't drain it. When pasta is al dente, add cheese and heat through until smooth and combined.

I then put it in a Le Creuset au gratin pan, topped it with seasoned breadcrumbs, and let it sit until the broiler for a couple of minutes.

Oh, and, yes, that's dried macaroni, not fresh.

Edited by Chris Amirault, 24 April 2011 - 12:39 PM.
typo fix -- CA

[Guy MovingOn]

I'm going to make the mac & cheese tonight when I get home (to serve with some pulled pork sandwiches and a few other things), so I thought I'd share a tweaked version of the ratios in the book. We found that it was a bit too salty, and I wanted a stronger cheddar component. I also tweaked the techniques a bit.

Whisk & simmer

• 100g water
• 75g (wheat) beer
• 10g sodium citrate
• 4.5g salt
• 1.25g iota carrageenan

Grate and combine over low heat:

• 140g aged gouda (was 200g)
• 145g aged cheddar (was 80g)

Stir until melted/emulsified. Pour into container; bring to room temp; freeze. Just before serving, pull it from the freezer and grate/shred 160g.

Boil over high heat:

• 300g water
• 100g macaroni
• 1g salt [down from 24.g]

Don't drain it. When pasta is al dente, add cheese and heat through until smooth and combined.

I then put it in a Le Creuset au gratin pan, topped it with seasoned breadcrumbs, and let it sit until the broiler for a couple of minutes.

Oh, and, yes, that's dried macaroni, not fresh.

I would like to thank you personally for taking the time to post the recipe, with concise directions, and your own feedback and suggestions. I really appreciate it! Thank you!

[Guy MovingOn]

Oh, and with the above measures, how many people can be served? Thanks!

[Chris Amirault]

There were six of us at dinner and it was a side that everyone loved. A double batch provided about a cup of leftovers.

Posted from my handheld using the Tapatalk app. Want to use eG Forums on your iPhone, Android or Blackberry? Get started at http://egullet.org/tapatalk

[mkayahara]

Drawing on the notes from Chris Hennes and Chris Amirault above, I tried to make retrograde-starch mashed potatoes last night, but I wasn't thrilled with the results. They had a grainy texture that, I later realized, resembled polenta more than anything else. I know I fudged a few of the steps: I bagged the potatoes with water, but not as much water as Chris H. used above, I cooked them at 70 degrees for 45 minutes, I didn't cool them all the way down to fridge temperature... but I'm not sure what accounts for the grainy texture. Any thoughts from those who have done this before?

[Chris Hennes]

I'm thinking it was the cooling: I think that's the really critical step, to make the starch behave correctly. I don't recall what the magic temperature is that you have to get the potatoes down to, but both MC and McGee emphasize that you have to cool them "all the way."

[mkayahara]

Thanks, Chris. Next time, I'll be sure to start them earlier in the day so that I can cool them more thoroughly. Certainly they're worth trying again; it was fun to be able to play with them as much as I wanted and still not have them get gluey. (Not that I play with my food, or anything. )

[KennethT]

Also, after the cooling step, did you cook in boiling water? If so, for how long?

I've also found that with the retrograde potatoes, there are some small granules that seem to never cook through, so I always run the puree through a tamis to weed out the grains....

[mkayahara]

Yeah, after the cooling step, I de-bagged the potatoes, put them in fresh water, and cooked at a full boil for about 20 minutes, the passed them through a food mill. Putting them through a tamis seems like a whole lot more work, and I'm not sure it would be worthwhile, since my partner prefers a chunky mash to a smooth puree anyway...

[RDaneel]

Chris H - thanks so much for posting your experience with the mojito spheres. I'm planning on making these in a couple weeks, and REALLY appreciate being able to learn from your experience!

I was also curious about the cocktail into which the spehere was dropped (in the book's photo). I was thinking of using club soda, but might just do like Minibar and serve them on a spoon.

[davidkeay]

I tried the macaroni and cheese a few nights ago, and do agree with Chris that it came out too salty. In retrospect, I think I used gouda that was too aged... I forget exactly which I used, but it was harder than even a prima donna, and very heavy on the caramel notes. I think next time I'll give it a go with something like a milder goat gouda and see what happens.

Also, for people who want to make precisely enough cheese sauce to go with the amount of pasta they want to cook, I made a spreadsheet to calculate how much of everything I'd need. To edit it/use it yourself, I think you need to either save it to your computer, or create a copy of it in google docs.

On the left side of the doc, it lists all the ingredients for the recipe, and changes the weights based on the value you enter for dried pasta at the top.

The column on the right is the sub-recipe for the cheese sauce using the ratios from Chris' post. If you want to tweak the cheese sauce, modify those, and then the values on the left will be updated to make the precise amount of sauce you need for your pasta using your new ratio.

Overkill? Yep, but I was just happy to be playing with a recipe that was all by weight, so I could do something like this easily!

[davidkeay]

Stir until melted/emulsified. Pour into container; bring to room temp; freeze. Just before serving, pull it from the freezer and grate/shred 160g.

Chris, how solid did you let it get in the freezer... did you actually get it to the point where you'd call it frozen? I'm curious about what that would do to the texture, and if the emulsifiers would actually let it recover gracefully from a full on freezing.

I just kept it in the fridge, it never got hard enough to grate, so I just went to town on it with a pastry cutter and had to let it sit in the pan a little longer to melt.

[Paul Kierstead]

Hmm .... a package of spreadsheets, or an iPad/whatever app with all the recipes (ingredients only, keep the book valuable :) ) would be lovely so you could baseline any ingredient quickly. Mind you , with metric measures it sure isn't hard in general.

[Chris Hennes]

They've gone one better than just using metric weights for everything: they include scaling percentages too. It's wonderful. I expect for the second edition they'll embed calculation circuitry in the paper itself.

[RDaneel]

David, thank you for the spreadsheet. It is absolutely, and wonderfully, overkill. :-)

It will guide my cheese processing in the next week or so.

[roygon]

The wait is killing me... a week or two ago we had lots of pictures and updates but now that more people have the book there is very little being posted about it. I'm being really hypocritical because I'm sure when I get my copy I'll lock myself in a room for a while but please, post some pictures of the magnificent dishes you've been able to put together either directly from recipes / tables in the book or by using things learned from the book. I hate to beg but come on, throw a dog a bone!!!

rg

[Chris Hennes]

I don't think this is quite what you are looking for, but for lunch today I had some leftover pork loin with the Aromatic Alsatian Mustard from page 5•37. The mustard is interesting: I'm not sure what the target flavor is given that I have never had Alsatian mustard before, but in my case the vinegar, cinnamon, and cloves are pretty assertive, with the actual mustard less so. I'm not sure if this is intentional or if I blanched the seeds too long. I'd be interested to hear others' experiences with it.

[Chris Hennes]

Sous Vide Vegetable Stock (pp. 2•303 and 6•13)

I've never made stock sous vide before so I thought I'd give it a try with a vegetable stock first. I was amazed at how little water you add: only about 70% of the weight of the vegetables. I made the "white" version of this stock, which is to say, I didn't sauté the vegetables. The finished stock is excellent, practically drinkable: very well-balanced, though sweeter than I tend to make vegetable stock. I don't know if this is the result of the sous vide process or just the balance of ingredients. For me the big problem is that the amount of stock I can make at any one time is very small: the recipe as written makes on 600mL of finished stock, and my sous vide setup probably could at most make twice that. So something like a liter at a time, max.

Edited by Chris Hennes, 09 March 2011 - 10:06 AM.
corrected math error...

[roygon]

Thanks for posting. I've got a question about the stock, does MC indicate a preference between standard stock pot vs pressure cooker vs sous vide or a combination of them for the creation of stocks? That review by Ruhlman had an adapted chicken stock recipe from the book that was pressure cooked and he said it was amazing.

[Chris Hennes]

Yes, in fact they have a fairly extensive table where they lay out their preferences for each type of stock (they list twelve types). Most of them the preference is pressure-cooking: only the fish, shellfish, vegetable, and Japanese stocks are listed as preferring sous vide.

Edited by Chris Hennes, 09 March 2011 - 10:32 AM.
missed fish in the first list

[Jenni]

^^
Chris, could you talk about how concentrated the vegetable stock is? Is that 600ml of pretty concentrated stock?

I'd be interested to know if you try it again with the extra step of frying the vegetables first, and how you feel it compares strength and flavour wise. Incidentally, from the picture it appears reasonably carrot-y, which could account for a lot of the sweetness. Are there strict specifications on what vegetables to use, and in what proportions?

Final question: Is there a legume based stock, as in dried beans or lentils?

Sorry if this is too many questions!