origamicrane

oouuhh!!!! different types of pork never thought of that. Think i will have to take a visit to the Ginger Pig buthcers. My parents actually said last night that although the crackling was good they have made better. They been in the restaurant trade for over 30 years now and they said that back 20 years ago they could get the most amazing crackling with the minimum of effort. They said they just pierced the skin, rubbed salt and hung it to dry for a few days and the whole piece would blister perfectly. One of the reason i started this experiment was that they complained that when they make siu yook nowadays the result are quite variable sometimes good sometimes bad and they are convinced it because of the quality of the pork available to us.

just enough to wet a pastry brush and brush the skin lightly and evenly. Enough so you can definitely see there is thin layer of lye water all over the skin but not soo much that you can see it dripping off. I look forward to hearing your results

it's possible as usually when i make siu yook with the spiked hammer the crackling never lifts off the meat.... but then again previous to last night i never made siu yook this way maybe the lifting is a result of scoring instead of piercing? Test 8 the scored piece had the most scoring of all the pieces and you can see that it has lifted a bit but not as much as the lye water piece. I need some people to repeat these recipes to confirm if they get the same results as I had my fill of roast pork for at least a few weeks my own roast pork sampling menu hehehe

hiya tepee thanks haven't posted in a while but back now. Please give them a try as need to know if others can replicate the same results. I think that next time I will try using different types of alcohol too. I wonder if using a brandy or a whiskey will add a detectable flavour or colouring to the crackling? Might try overkill next time and triple up on some of the methods like flame it then, pierce it, then multiple score, then brush alcohol/lye and dry for 2-3 day in the fridge also just added this to recipegullet full recipe

Roast Crispy Pork ( aka Chinese Siu Yook) I did an experiment using 8 different methods of making chinese crispy roast pork and this is the best recipe. If you like to read the thread please click here crispy roast pork experiment Equipment sharp knife pastry brush blowtorch wire rack spike hammer or a jaccard or craft knife paper towels chopping board Meat 2 kg Pork belly - try to find a dry and flat piece with a good layer of fat under the skin Marinade for meat 2 tsp salt 2 tsp five spice powder 2 tsp sugar or honey 2 tsp ground pepper 6 cloves of minced garlic 1 T hoisin sauce 1 T "meen see" chinese fermented bean paste or can use miso paste crackling preperation 2 T 40% vodka 4 l boiling water 4 tsp salt 1. Lay the pork belly on a chopping board and stretch the skin out so that it is taut. 2. Use a blow torch, singe off any bristles, pass the torch over the skin a few times at different angles. Try not to burn the skin you just removing the bristles 3. Take a sharp knife and scrap it along the skin to remove any burnt bristle ends and burnt debris. 4. Pierce the skin all over with a spiked hammer, a jaccard or a sharp fork. Or you can cut score lines all across the skin with a sharp knife at 5 mm intervals. Try to penetrate the skin into the fat layer but not to cut into the meat below. 5. Place the belly on a wire rack and place into a sink. Pour the boiling water on to the skin this will cause the skin to contract. 6. Pat dry the skin with paper towels and then rub 3 teaspoons of salt into the skin. 7. Using a pastry brush, lightly but evenly brush the skin with the 40% vodka. 8. Make the marinade, mix the salt with the pepper, five spice powder, minced garlic, hoisin sauce and meen see bean paste. 9. Turn the belly over and then cut the meat down to the first layer of fat at 1 inch intervals and rub in your marinade. 10. put into the fridge and leave over night uncovered to dry (you can leave in the fridge for up to 48 hours to dry) 11. Next day take the belly out of the fridge an hour before you cook it and sprinkle another teaspoon of salt evenly over the skin. 12. preheat your oven to 240C. Put the belly on the middle shelf of your oven and cook for 20 minutes. 13. Turn down the heat to 200C and cook a further 20 minutes. 14. Turn the heat back up to 240C and cook a further 10 minutes. 15. now place the belly under a grill and grill it for 5 minutes. Constantly monitor when this is grilling or you could end up with burnt crackling. 16. Remove from oven and allow to rest for 10-15 minutes uncovered. Keywords: Main Dish, Intermediate, Pork, Dinner, Chinese ( RG2100 )

ok just cooked my pork bellies. so took the bellies out of the fridge and then lightly sprinkled some more salt on the top. I used a salt shaker and probably used less then a teaspoonful of salt on the 8 pieces. Cooking times and temperatures: put in middle rack of a preheat oven start with 20 minutes at 240C then 20 minutes at 200C then 10 minutes at 240C followed by 5-10 minutes under the grill whilst carefully monitoring that crackling isn't burning. Even before i finished cooking i could already see which ones were working and which weren't. After the initial 20 minutes at 240C you could see that the lye, torched, soda and vodka was already blistering and the kiwi one looked like it was burning. so the results are as follow here's a picture of all of the pieces after being in the fridge for 24 hours you can see which ones have dried more by the slightly dark skin tones the white ones are the ones that are still more wet. here's what they looked like after cooking a little bit of burning but nothing a good knife scrap won't remove. and here is a cross section off all of them together TEST 1 - BLOW TORCHED SKIN torched skin after 24 hours in the fridge out of all the pieces this was pretty much the driest skin, touching it you could tell if was very dry and hard. torched crackling had a pretty even bubbling and colour torched cross section Verdict: very even colour and even crackling, good crunch with a little resistance. TEST 2 - LEMON JUICE lemon skin after 24 hours in the fridge this looked dryish but the skin still had some suppleness. lemon crackling good crackling again not as even but good colour lemon cross Verdict: a harder crunch then the blow torched and slightly chewy. TEST 3 - VINEGAR vinegar skin after 24 hours in the fridge similiar to the lemon skin but seemed wetter still. vinegar crackling pretty similiar to the lemon in colour and blistering vinegar cross Verdict: this crackling was lighter and had a softer crunch compared to the lemon crackling. TEST 4 - KIWI kiwi skin after 24 hours in the fridge the skin was the wettest out of all of them kiwi crackling err..... picture says it all, it didn't form crackling but instead turned into burnt plastic skin. kiwi cross Verdict: complete failure i guess a protein digestive enzyme is no good for crackling, maybe it digested so much of teh skin that there was nothing to blister? I know that if I use kiwi juice to tenderise meat for more then 6 hours it turns the meat into meat paste. TEST 5 - VODKA vodka skin after 24 hours in the fridge this was surprising, as the skin seemed pretty dry vodka crackling very even crackling and colour whilst this was cooking i could see this was the one that was forming the most uniform crackling vodka cross Verdict: a very good crackling, light crunch, very even blistering and colouring. TEST 6 - BAKING POWDER baking powder skin after 24 hours in the fridge skin was pretty dry and seemed hard, not very supple. baking powder crackling This looked like it was forming good crackling at the end of the designated cooking time but the middle still hadn't blister completely so I left it under the grill for a further 3 minutes. End result was not as even colour or blistering. baking powder cross Verdict: reasonably crunch but was noticably more chewy then the previous ones. TEST 7 - LYE WATER lye skin after 24 hours in the fridge this skin was very dry and took on a hard waxy appearance lye crackling hehehe a picture says a thousand words? this was easily the best crackling in colour and blistering, the crackling actually rose and seperated from the fat layer. In fact this was already blistering in the initial 20 minutes of cooking. lye cross Verdict: easily the best looking crackling and crunchiest but also had a very slight chewiness. TEST 8 - SCORED scored skin after 24 hours in the fridge this still looked pretty wet in comparison to the torched and alkaline brushed pieces. scored crackling this one had the best golden colour and even blistering but might have been due to the fact it was the middle piece. I scored this one a lot more in both horizontal and vertical directions. scored cross Verdict: this crackling was tougher and chewier then the rest although having said that it would still be acceptable to most people. This was great fun and the winner of the best crackling was easily won by the Lye Water. The baking powder did surprisingly well and next time i will use pure bicarbonate of soda rather then baking powder and see if i get an even better crackling. So it looks like the chinese restaurants were right about lye water. Lye water did produce the best crackling but it didn't produce the best siu yook in my opinion as siu yook should have the crackling still attached to the meat. Surprisingly the best siu yook in my opinion was my wild card vodka as it had the best colour and crunch and most even blistering and still had the crackling attached to the meat. Think i will repeat this using a 60-80% alcohol solution next time and pit it against pure baking soda and lye water. the worst one was the kiwi as it just started burning rather then blistering. so my order of preference 1. vodka 2. lye 3. baking powder 4. torched 5. vinegar 6. lemon 7. scored 8. kiwi - not really counted as it completely failed BTW just to clarify apart from the kiwi all the other 7 were really sucessful. If I had to taste all 7 cracklings in a blind taste test, the lye and vodka would have been clear winners but for the remaining 5 it would have been very hard to distinguish between them. So basically all the different methods do work very well but the lye and vodka do have the edge on lightness and crunchiness. I will repeat this experiment again next month with the following changes I will just use a spiked hammer to pierce the skin rather then score it and i will do three tests 1. lye water 2. a 60-80% alcohol solution 3. a 50% bicarbonate of soda solution and leave them for 2 days in the fridge. If anyone has any observation or suggestions please let me know

good point hmmm... oh well... scrap one piece. will get the proper stuff for the next attempt.

yeah will be repeating this experiment until i get it right all in the name of science of course yeah there is definitely a difference between spiking and scoring the skin but hopefully we be able to tell which method gives the best results. I've been wondering where my spiked hammer has gone actually maybe my dad taken it down to the shop.. hmmm..... anyway i ordered a 35 blade jaccard the other day so I definitely will be repeating this within the next few weeks using only spiking. Just had a peek this morning and the torched, lye and lemon sections defintely looked a lot drier then the rest followed by the vinegar, soda, vodka. The wettest looking where the plain scored one and the kiwi one. just 10 more hours in the fridge and then i can cook them, can't wait to get home from work today.

hiya yeah i haven't been posting much for a while guess i've been busy back now

yep didn't have any plain soda in the house but baking powder has baking soda in it so hopefully this will work. the one i am betting on to work well are the lye water and the lemon as they are the most alkaline and acid of the lot. But the one i be most interested in seeing are the kiwi and the vodka because as far as i can tell no one has tried either of these.

hi all after reading this thread and the pork belly thread in the cooking forum decided to do a little experiment on how to get the best crackling. So everyone agrees main prerequisites are dry skin, good fat layer, scored/pierced skin, salt and lots of heat. But after reading the two threads I learnt that sometimes the reason we don’t get good crackling is that we haven’t denatured the skin enough as the tough skin prevents the blistering and crackling from forming. So we can denature the skin by scoring, piercing, heating or using chemcials to attack it So here I have two pieces of pork belly and I plan to divides these into 8 pieces and prep each one slightly differently to see which gives the best cracking results. bellies overview so here's the fat layer on my pork bellies. it’s a little hairy so used a blowtorch to just singe off the bristles . then I scraped the skin with a sharp knife a few times to removes the burnt bristle ends then I made 5mm score lines using a clean craft knife. For sui yuk we have that spiked hammer thing but for some reason I can’t find mine anywhere so I just settled for score lines instead I boiled 5 litres of water put the pork bellies on a wire rack in the sink and slowly pour the boil water on to scald the skin. the skin contracts a lot when you do this. lots of steam I pat dry the skin with paper towels and then sprinkle 2 teaspoons of salt over the skin of each belly and rub it in I cut the flesh in 1 inch sections down to the first fat layer rubbed in my marinade of 1t salt ½ t sugar 1t five spice powder ½ t white pepper 5 clove minced garlic 1 T meen see/miso 1T hoisin sauce (but I didn’t have any in the house today) so far this is a pretty typical siu yook preparation. Now I divide the pork bellies into 8 pieces for my 8 tests so the 8 tests are Test 1. make more score lines both horizontal and vertical, this will be my control piece. Test 2. use a blow torch and lick the surface of the skin with the flame until I see the skin dry and change colour but I don’t burn or blister the skin. Test 3. brush lemon juice on. As it is acidic it should denature the skin. Test 4. brush vinegar another acid to denature the skin. Test 5. brush lye water (kan sui) or 50% potassium carbonate in solution. An alkali used to denature the skin and is the traditional Chinese method I believe. Test 6. brush baking powder/ bicarbonate of soda – 50% sodium bicarbonate in solution. Probably the most common alkali in a western kitchen and you are more likely to have this then lye water. Test 7. brush alcohol – 40% vodka – dehydrates and denatures proteins, although I read that I actually need a 70-80% solution to really do the job. Test 8. brush kiwi juice - contains a protein digesting enzyme called Actinidain and i use this to tenderise tough cuts of beef. so here are the 8 piece on a platter these go back into the fridge uncovered for 24 hours to dry some more. I will cook these tomorrow stay tuned and fingers crossed I get some success. oh and happy new year!!

hi yep that was my mistake i was meant to order hight gluten (strong) flour but i actually ordered gluten flour/powder. Don't want to waste it so wondering if i can just substitute it for normal flour in a bread / dough recipe? either that our i can cut it with plain flour. thank for the advice

Hello all my first post in the baking and pastry section i believe. I had a look using search but not found exactly what i wanted. I have due to an ordering mistake got 8kg of gluten flour/powder. I've been looking for recipes to use up this flour. I had a google and it seems i can just make bread with this, does anyone know if i can just substitute gluten flour for normal flour? or will i need to modify the recipe? I believe my gluten flour is 90% gluten. thanks in advance

It's exactly how you imagine them to do it. very sharp knife or meat cleaver in an expert hand next time you in a china town have a look for the ducks and roast pork hanging in the window displays. Behind you will see a guy chopping up suckling pig with a meat cleaver. He cuts the skin off the flesh, turns the crispy skin over and then chops it into perfect rectangles then does the same for the meat and then layers the skin back on top.

maybe something like this? http://www.bigalsonline.com/BigAlsUS/ctl36...ydorpico300pump or I think one of those electric coffee milk frothers like the aerolattes could work or could adapt it with an aquarium impeller assembly. on another topic has anyone got a thermo haake or fisher immersion circulator?

I've been looking around online for Immesion Circulators unit in the UK. thought this might be helpful to uk egulleteers There are a several lab suppliers that sell new IC unit http://www.fisher.co.uk http://www.coleparmer.co.uk http://www.cliftonfoodrange.co.uk/ http://www.cuisinetechnology.com/thermal-circulators.html http://www.julabo-sous-vide.com/products1.htm http://www.julabo.de/session_uk.asp http://ecomcat.jencons.co.uk/action_catalo...asp?sat=2&saa=3 http://www.camlab.co.uk/ http://www.grantsousvide.com/checkout.aspx the cheapest new IC unit I found was a Haake C10 at £496 from Fisher https://extranet.fisher.co.uk/insight2_uk/g...tSetPosition=14 You could try Ebay where I got a cheap new C10 or i also found this site for used scientific equipment website. www.thebranfordgroup.com They actually got a lot of waterbaths and IC units on the Syngenta auction ending next month. Some of the photos of the equipment look pretty crudey!! but there were a few IC and water bath units that looks reasonably clean and new. if anyone else knows of a cheaper new IC unit please let me know

think we are splitting hairs here. horses for courses If you are SViding on very regular basis or on a large or commercial level or doing very long cook times then invest in an immersion circulator. But if you are at home, cooking for your family and friends, I think it would be hard to justify the expenditure unless you got money to burn. I'm sure there are lots of us out here using pid or induction hobs, etc. that are turning out perfectly good food that you would be very hard pressed to differentiate from food cooked using lab equipment. Proof is in the eating. If you are adamant that you would not be able to do SV without the lab equipment then so be it but seems that might be stiffling creativity? For instance I am using an induction hob and and a Galtek shuttle chef (thermos pot) and getting excellent results. of course excellent is a subjective thing so all IMHO but i have a haake c10 IC ordered so hopefully I can do some tests next weekend if i do i will post my results.

Hi I've been reading this thread with great interest and have just made a great SV fillet steak and a duck confit using a pot and an an induction hob. This setup works well but I do get a +/- 2C temperature fluctation. I was wondering instead of getting lab equipment is there any reason why I couldn't use a conventional bain marie? Nisbets has a cheap buffalo one for about £100 that has a temperature control of 50-90C seems like a good and cheap method of doing sous vide without the expensive lab equipment or the fiddling with pid and rice cookers? link to bain marie I know that the bain marie isn't stirred and there might be some temperature fluctuations /gradients but has anyone got a electric bain marie and tested to see how much the temp actually fluctates by? thanks in advance

hmm... for the same size pot try doubling or tripling the amount of chicekn carcasses you have

hmm... I can't explain the red wine disappearing. But some random thoughts 1. The stock you make, how long do you simmer it for when you make it? One thought is that if you not simmering your stock long enough maybe not enough gelatine is being extracted from the bones? and when you reduce there not much left? 2. another thought is what kind of pan are you using to reduce? again a shot in the dark but maybe your pan might be a really wide one and you getting dry out at the edges before you get the stock to coagulate? 3. also when reducing i would use high heat to get the volume of liquid down to a quarter of what you started with and then drop the heat and simmer away until it gets to the right concentration you desire. try again and document your process from start to finish and post it here, i'm sure someone will be able to spot whats going wrong.

hi what are you putting into your stock? you might need more bones in there ?

have you tried a thermos shuttle chef? http://www.galtak.com/thermos.html i use this to make stock all the time and get a prefectly clear and well flavoured liquid

you talking sushi hiro or hiroba? sushi hiro has about 3 sakes on the menu 2 hot 1 cold hiroba no idea

Ok, so it was clearer on Friday's program. The three judges had allegedly spent the evening before 'agonising' over which pair from each group of four would be allowed back to cook again and after a brief summary of the four dishes in consideration one of them explained the reasons for their decision. In the case of the puddings John Burton Race said how disappointing they had found the standard (nice guy!) but they had selected Monday's Frangipane and raspberry tart and Thursday's Sticky date pudding. The Friday winners got a cheque and the chance to appear in the national final, although whether that means they all appear or the judges perform another off-camera cull isn't yet clear. ← win some, lose some..... actually win and still lose ho hum next time

Hey alex how you been? sorry to hear about the bike accident hope you are all recovered. Yeah wasn't really that bothered with it as I was just having a laugh anyway