ChrisTaylor

Been drinking a bit of standard Coopers Sparkling lately. For a cheap beer it's exceptional. In fact, even when money is no object, it's exceptional.

I'm a big fan of intentionally vague menus--i.e. Alinea or Attica.

Pick yourself up some Westvleteren.

Try the Momofuku recipe.

Experimenting with lamb shoulder chops. Made a dry, sosatie-style rub to serve as a marinade. Thinking 60C for 20ish hours. Real lack of information online about sous vide shoulder chops. Hope I don't end up dialling for pizza.

Nice things to say about Fagor's service, at least in Australia. So. Day two or so of having my 6L Fagor. Set the pot part aside to air dry while I took care of other dishes. And boom. The pot slips onto the tiled floor and the handle snaps off, meaning I'm unable to lock the lid in place. Stupidity, on my part. Yeah. I emailed Fagor and, maybe because I said outright I was happy to pay for a new handle (~$10 plus postage), they posted one out within a few days. Nice. I'll try not to turn this one into a dozen black plastic shards on my kitchen floor.

Save the juices that come out of the packages of meat and steak that you sous vide in a bottle in the freezer. When you need to jack beefiness this stuff can't be beat! I made the Momofuku short ribs last night. Am I the only one who finds the sauce almost unbearably sweet? I almost always cut back on the amount of sugar in American recipes, unless I have reason to believe it's already savoury enough. Keller's lemon tart, damn near any BBQ recipe (and yes, I still get a crust) and, yeah, basically anything in the Momofuku book: the short rib marinade and pickle recipe included. iirc the Momofuku cookbook thread has a revised pickling recipe with the water:vinegar ratio switched to 30:70 from whatever it was in the book, which in itself kind of nicely tones down the sweetness.

Picked up two new bottles today--Unicum and Illy coffee liqueur. Used the former in a beta cocktails Fall of Man (bourbon, Unicum, Cherry Heering, Cointreau and Punt e Mes) and the latter in an alpha version of my own invention, with I'm going to give a super lame name like the Godfather's Afternoon Tea or something. Started with 2 oz Illy and added .5 oz Strega. Then, for good measure, 3 dashes of chocolate mole bitters. It's drinkable, but I just spent a day dealing with school swimming and a six-year-old flashing the general public. So right now turps are drinkable. Any suggestions for improving it? I guess I'm aiming for a bittersweet mostly-coffee flavour with a spicy kick to it. Sort of what I might want a Black Russian to be.

Is nocello something I want/need in my life? You kind of know my palate.

I highly recommend the chicken wings as your next move.

Results of my first experiments: Rack of lamb: I followed the recipe in Blumenthal at Home, which prescribes 60C for 60 minutes. I was preparing these after work so I wanted something I could get on the table quickly. That meant anything aside from maybe eggs was bound to be problematic, I guess. That and, hey, I was kind of surprised by how long it took the slow cooker to stabilise at 60C--I figured when it overshot the mark by 2 or 3 degrees that it'd come down very quickly. It didn't. Next time I'll opt for a longer cooking time (2 hours, perhaps) at a lower temperature. To sear the skin I might take a leaf from David Chang's book and deep- or at least shallow-fry the racks. Beef short ribs: 60C proved to be too high a temperature for beef short ribs. They were nice, don't get me wrong, but I think next time I'll cook them at 56C or 58C. I was following David Chang's recipe from the Momofuku cookbook. I also think that the marinade, which was meant to be reheated and reduced to serve as a sauce, didn't stand up to 48 hours in a plastic bag with a piece of meat. Next time I think I'll make double the quantity of marinade: half will be sealed in with the meat, half will be reserved in the fridge and I'll use that as the sauce. To compensate for the lack of beefiness, I might jack it with a little bit of beef stock. Thoughts? Octopus: A few minutes ago I dropped my third experiment into the bath, a 650g-ish occy tentacle (skinned and cleaned by the fishmonger). I'm following Thomas Keller's recipe from Under Pressure: 77C for 5 hours. I kept his spice mix and the chorizo and potatoes, although feeling like that wasn't enough to make a single course meal I've decided to add a couple of extra vegetables, meaning aside from the chorizo it's basically a version of the warm occy salad in Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Sicily. Oh well. Things I have sitting in the fridge, awaiting vac bags: Pork belly: I'm torn between Blumenthal's 18-hour pork belly from At Home and the spiced BBQ pork belly from the Alinea cookbook, which sounds like something I could slice and put into sandwiches for work. Cooked for decidedly less than 18 hours, that one. Thoughts on cooking time and temperature? Veal 'osso bucco' (meaning slices of shin). I read some article that compared a 12 and 24 hour shin and argued that the 12 hour one was vastly superior, but I've seen someone else argue that 48 hours gives you the best osso bucco. Thoughts?

Made the short ribs. Very good. Easily the best short ribs I've had, altho' my loyalty, rib-wise, is still with the pig. Nice way to try out my new toy (SV@Home), tho'.

Fatigue. Equal parts Jack Daniels (I used the Gentleman variant), maraschino and Angostura bitters with a grapefruit twist. It's okay. Somewhat kind of totally dominated by cinnamon. Drinkable but not repeatable.

A few recipes in beta cocktails and PDT Cocktail Book call for Tennessee whiskey, which I haven't actually had. So. Time to expand the whiskey collection. A bit of research told me that the Dickel, which the PDT guys seem to like a whole lot, was hard to find and retailed for about ~$150AUD. I don't have that kind of budget. I mean, I've paid that for the odd bottle of rye and scotch, but for a truly, totally, utterly blind buy? Well. Maybe not. So far as I know, my two Tennessee options in Australia are the Jack Daniels (and many of its variants) and one or two different kinds of Dickel. And then I found Gentleman Jack on special. The reviews on PeatsSake and whatnot were pretty much on par with what I'd expect of a whiskey at that price point. Yet to crack it open. Curious.

The seven vegetable soup is very good.

SV@Home kit landed on the doorstep yesterday. Have bagged up a few short ribs with the Momofuku marinade. These will go into the bath in a couple of hours, but for tonight's dinner I have a rack of lamb. Following Blumenthal's method from Heston at Home--60C for 60 minutes.

Could use the fat in the confit stage of the Momofuku wings recipe.

Smoked pork fat has its uses. Don't be too hasty to bin it. I mean, gumbo.

No, the main point of the show is to attract viewers. The viewers are exposed to advertising. The television network makes money. That's the point. Bonus points if the show is cheap to make.

I'll try that. Based on some advice I read here I thawed them (still sealed in plastic, of course) under the tap.

To be honest, I don't cook or eat as much seafood as I probably should or would like to. It's an expense issue, I guess. But that aside. Prawns. Imported, frozen prawns--from China, Vietnam, wherever--are still expensive here, although obviously (well, generally) not as expensive as the local prawns (be they fresh or frozen). I only buy local seafood. Why? The rare time I've thought, hey, a bag of frozen prawns--which generally means imported ones, unless I want to travel specially to find them, which defeats the whole point of a convinience product--would be a nice thing to store in the freezer, I've ended up regretting it. The intent was to use them in paella or curry, say. But after thawing and cooking them, I thought the quality was lacking. The flavour and texture weren't very nice. I ended up feeding them to my stray cats. But really. Frozen prawns here, even the bad ones from the supermarket's home brand line, are anywhere between $20 and $30 per kilo, which is close enough to $10-15USD/pound to not matter. Unless you're after monster-sized king prawns from somewhere costly like Prahran Market, mostly you'll be paying that--well, maybe just a little more--for the fresh ones. Still farmed, I think. But superior to the frozen imports. And both examples of prawn are too expensive for many Australians to enjoy regular 'shrimp chow downs' or the wildly inaccurate but stereotypical favourite of 'shrimp' (or, you know, prawn) on the barbie. Unless you catch them yourself (which isn't so bad if the water is warm and you're on holiday somewhere coastal) or are quite well-off, I think prawns--especially if you want to have a feast--are by default, no matter the quality or provenance something for special occasions. There are places, here and there--I remember posting some photos of the Springvale shopping centre in my blog thread, and if you're in Melbourne and really want cheap seafood (although you want to know what you're looking for, quality-wise) you could always swing by there or, perhaps, somewhere like Footscray Market--that will sell you prawns, even fresh locals, for a slightly lower price. Slightly. But there's no way to sidestep the expense of prawns here in any meaningful way.

I've just ordered the SV@Home kit (essentially an Australian rebranding of some other company's probe/PID combo, intended for use with rice cookers and slow cookers). The kit is rated up to, iirc, 3000 or 3300. Anyway. I can easily (thanks, eBay) get water heaters that sit at ~2500w. And can go up to boiling point, if need be (i.e. they're not those fish tank heaters only designed to take water up to the sort of temperatures you might find off the coast of an equatorial island). My idea, basically, is to follow a home build for a proper sous vide oven--i.e. big arse plastic tub, a heater and something to act as a circulator. In the guide I'm looking at, the guy is using a simple fish tank pump (which, for context, can be had for literally 1/10 the price of the sort of pump you'd use in home brew setups). So. Fish tank pumps. I assume that someone, somewhere in the great expanse of the eGullet wilds has upgraded from a rice cooker to a plastic tub with heater. What should I be looking at in terms of pumps? Obviously I'll need to ensure it won't crack the shits at being exposed to higher temperatures than your average fish tank pump, but aside from that will basically *anything* do?

Felt like something in the Negroni family, wanted to try Aperol, wanted to finish off a bottle of Punt e Mes ... and, so, maybe this is too much of a good thing (although I feel like it needs some work--maybe an addition .5oz of regular sweet vermouth? regular sweet instead of bittersweet? maybe a touch of something sweetish like averna?): equal parts Punt, Aperol and Campari w/ a slice of orange and one large rock. This isn't for everyone but I'm happy with my bitter baby.

Recent posts encouraged me to check out the Vieux Carré. Amazing drink, that. Might even topple the Saz as my favourite New Orleans classic.

Just tried the 4:1:1 version with Bol's Gen instead of, say, Tanq. Mostly me making the effort to like--or, at least, get--Genever. It's certainly better than drinking the stuff straight or in a G&T, as I made for a couple people the other night on request, but it still seems a bit like the red-headed stepchild of the gin family. It might grow on me. Maybe. But likely not. I mean, with whiskies and such, and when I'm trying basically anything for the first time--food or booze--I kind of like a big 'hi guys, fuck you, I'm Talisker' flavour punch. But Genever's flavour punch is clearly one that I will need to acquire.