slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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vegetables like green beans, favas and peas get sweeter when they are properly cooked and not served underdone.
I'm with you on the green beans and peas... but I can't agree that there is any better way to eat fresh fava beans than shelled and raw.
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An egg is nice, especially in a ramekin with some butter, chicken drippings, and cream.
Of course, one has to be careful when one is eating a soft cooked egg and using one's laptop at the same time, lest the egg spill into the keyboard... Not that I know anyone to whom such a thing has happened...
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i just came across a nice, cheap, medium sized heavy enameled casserole. does it have a place in a well-equipped kitchen?
Absolutely! This is the enameled cast iron casserole I describe in my article. One of the best pieces of cookware that can be found for stews, braises, low/slow cooked tomato sauces, etc.
just found this:http://www.cunillexport.com/produit.asp?nu...m=6504.30&gam=1
i think it looks like a good buy. do you?
A 30 cm 2.5 mm thick stainless lined copper fry pan for €96 strikes me as a very good deal indeed. You should definitely buy it.
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...I'm sort of wondering exactly WHAT it is about brining the chicken. When I did it, it seemed like it was just wayyyyyy too salty for me. Maybe I did something wrong. I've cooked chicken practically every way imaginable (except for that beer can thing) and I'm just wondering about what it is that makes the brining so alluring.
There are a few things thast could have gone wrong: Maybe you started out with a chicken that was already salted? Maybe your brine was too salty? Maybe you are very sensitive to salt?
There are two things that make brining so alluring: 1) You can get a lot of extra flavor into the meat (primarily salt, but I also use some sugar and sometimes use herbs and other aromatics); and 2) you can get a lot of extra moisture into the chicken. If you have never ever had a problem with dry breasts or underdone legs when cooking poultry, then you are one of perhaps 10 people in the world for whom that is the case. That said, people have different preferences when it comes to the doneness of poultry. I know some people who don't consider breast meat sufficiently cooked unless it is what I would consider unacceptably dry, and other people are just fine with what I would consider underdone leg meat. Brining allows the cook to achieve a chicken where the leg meat is completely cooked through and the breast meat is still moist enough that fluids run out when it is cut.
Here's the drill: I'm on my way home, a little late, but the allure of roast chicken will not be denied. There is no time for brining, no time for spatchcocking.I spatchcock so often that I find I can remove the backbone with poultry shears (which is all you really need to do) plus cut out the breast bone and those funny shaped ones attached to the leg bones in around 2 minutes, so I almost always spatchcock. The added bonus is that I throw the raw bones into a bag in the freezer which I turn into chicken stock every time it fills up.
next time, big brick on top on the grill.The brick is for tourists. Absolutely unnecessary, and actually makes the chicken more prone to burning.
I have around 50/50 success with this technique, abeit I am trying it in the oven rather than on a grill. I think one of the important elements of pollo al mattone is to preheat the brick as well. Is that what our brick-users are doing?
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dave, have you ever done this with a spatchcocked chicken? (was that the right word?)
I, too, was a non-believer, until I tried it.
Geez -- does that really work?? I've been doing the basic side-side-breast up thing at about 400 degrees and it still takes an hour or so. Can the chicken really be done in half an hour with no turning?This thread reminds me of Mark Bittman's "Fastest Roast Chicken."Put a cast-iron pan in the oven while you're preheating to 450. Season the chicken and plop it in the pan. (I put a temperature probe in the thigh before the plopping.) Wait 30 minutes, or until the temp is 155 or so.
Done. One of the best effort/result ratios to be found in cooking.
I don't want to speak for Dave, but when I employ this technique it is always with spatchcocked poultry. Works especially well with multiple small fowl such as squab, poussin, cornish hen, etc. With chickens, I sometimes like to flop them skin-side down in a preheated skillet, cook it on the stove for 5 minutes of so, and then toss it under the broiler for 15 minutes or so before flipping the whole thing over and tossing it in the oven for another 15 minutes. A great advantage of this technique is that all the juices from the poultry are conveniently preserved in the skillet, just crying out for deglazing, a brief reduction and mounting with butter.
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Ovens cook primarily by radiation, not convection.
Not true. Look it up in "On Food and Cooking." I thought that as well at one time, but it turns out to be incorrect (unless I am remembering incorrectly -- will check when I get home).
see page 615 of McGee
baking... rely on a combination of radiation from the walls and, to a lesser extent, air convection to heat the foodYep... I must have remembered incorrectly.
Strangely, however, on page 613 he says:
At typical boiling, baking and frying temperatures, conduction and convection tend to be more significant then infrared radiation. [Emphasis mine]That must be what I was remembering, and it does seem hard to reconcile this statement with what you quoted. This statement, along with McGee's statement on the same page that the rate of radiation is relatively inefficient below about 1800F lead me to conclude that ovens were largely cooking via conduction (especially when one considers the conduction effects of vaporized liquids in the semi-enclosed environment of a modern oven).
Anyway, when it really comes down to it, the main thing is that an oven is a really inefficient way to heat anything, regardless of the mechanism.
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See, now... when I saw "vegetarian burgers" I thought of "burgers made out of vegetarians" rather than "burgers made for vegetarians."
First I thought, "but... wouldn't that be kind of dry like turkey burgers?"
And then I thought, "hmm... maybe grain-fed vegetarians might have better marbling."
And then I thought, "wait! Aren't cows vegetarians?"
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Huitlacoche, anyone?
Mmmm mmmm! Pass the corn smut!
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Note there are some wood cutting boards with a lip that goes over the countertop edge -- this is a particularly nice feature for covering up some of that ugly-ass laminate.
IKEA carries one that is thick, quite large and a major bargain (I think it was $14.95).
IKEA has, IMO, the best bargain on real end-grain cutting boards to be found.
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Okay... I am definitely ordering that the next time I go there. I wonder if the chicken skin is crispy or not.
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I make the recipe using only two garlic cloves and about two cups of oil, it is quite stable. Infact it is almost like a jelly until the second cup of oil is used.
Okay, that sounds pretty cool. Must try it at home.
...it is important to consider that [aioli] came from a non-egg oil emulsion and that Mayonnaise is secondary to the original garlic emulsion sauce. There is also little historical documentation that suggests that Mayonnaise precedes Aioli.Hmmm... I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of that, but I can accept that it's a possibility. I'll have to do some reading before I am totally convinced. That said, I don't have a hard time believing that pounded garlic/oil sauces were made before egg/oil sauces. As to whether or not mayonnaise was derrived or evolved from these sauces... I don't know.
So if Aioli is the forerunner you can have your 'rosemary aioli', rather then 'Rosemary and garlic Mayonnaise', because if Mayonnaise has garlic in it then it is aioli.That would depend on several things, and they don't seem to depend on whether or not emulsified garlic and oil is the direct ancestor of mayonnaise. If one wants to consider aioli a separate class of emulsified garlic/oil sauces in which garlic is the sole emulsifier, then there could be an almost infinite number of aioli variations just as there are an almost infinite number of mayonnaise variations. Even taking this view, however, I'm not sure I'd agree that any emulsified oil-based cold sauce with garlic is automatically an aioli. As with bechamel-based sauces that include an egg liaison, one has to make some determination as to which are the most important characteristics of the sauce. I would consider any oil-based cold emulsion containing eggs to be fundamentally a mayonnaise as the egg would be the primary emulsifier.
To a certain extend, I suppose, one could just call them all "creamy-textured oil-based stable cold emulsifications" and have done with it.
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One thing I did that made a big difference in my kitchen -- not that it's for everyone -- was put in two lengths of black pipe attached to the ceiling from which I can hang most of my cookware. Easy to do and inexpensive.
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I should say that I think that we are looking at this from opposite directions, me from the Catalan Allioli side, you from the French Aioli side. While Andrew Colman and Clifford Wright both speak about adding egg to allioli, it isn't traditional, as they both indicate.
Is Allioli native to Catalan? Penelope Casas' The Food and Wine of Spain lists its version with egg. I had assumed the lack of egg in some areas was to increase shelf-life. Do most Spaniards leave out the egg in theirs or only those in Catalan (I know, I know... Catalan is not Spain
)? Allioli is Catalan, tradionally no egg, but I imagine that most garlicky, oily emulsion sauces have egg yolk added as it is much easier to stop the sauce from splitting with an egg yolk added.
I wonder whether it is actually possible to achieve a stable emulsion with just garlic, oil and vinegar.
Regardless, I would consider the Catalan and French versions fundamentally different if one contains egg and the other does not. The recipe from the page you gave contains so much garlic (5 large cloves to one cup of oil) that it would almost be a paste rather than an emulsion.
As with many things, however, there is some blurring at the edges of the various defined categories. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that aioli/allioli in its most typical incarnation is a garlic-flavored mayonnaise, but that certain traditional Catalan incarnations omit the use of eggs in the emulsification. I am reluctant to say there is a separate category of "oil and garlic emulsions" because I can't think of any other examples, and I do think aioli is more closely related to mayonnaise than to, say, chimichurri or bread-thickened rouille.
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So, how much salt is absorbed in brining a chicken?
Hmmm... Hard to say. Some? I have never felt that brined poultry had a taste I would describe as "salty" although it was well-seasoned and did not seem to require any additional salting. That said, my understanding is that people can differ drastically in their taste sensitivity to salt. This is, I think, especially so for people who routinely consume very little salt. If this is the case, one could certainly make a weaker brine and still enjoy many of the liquid absorbing/retaining benefits of brining without too much additional saltiness.
That's interesting... I have always felt that pasta cooked in unsalted water tasted insipid. Mileage varies from person to person though, I supose. Does your mother avoid salt because she is concerned about the health risks (which only actually affect a small precentage of the population) or just because she doesn't like salty flavors?My mother won't salt her pasta water. -
In lieu of brining, a kosher bird saves a good amount of time - almost "pre-brined," if you will...and to my taste, very few birds in the states come close to the taste of a fresh Empire chicken.
Can't tell you how much this validates my thinking! When everyone was brining their Thanksgiving turkeys all over television last fall (prior to deep frying them on EVERY channel 24/7!), I thought back over all the very salty Empire birds we had consumed without even using the term "brining" ...
According to this, kosher poultry is not brined. It is soaked in unsalted water for a short period of time and then removed from the water and salted for a short period of time, after which the salt is rinsed off three times.
While this will provide a certain measure of saltiness to the poultry, it would not seem to confer any of the liquid absorbing/retaining benefits of brining. The poultry should absorb some liquid during the water soaking, but I can't imagine that the major kosher poultry processors are soaking significantly longer than the minimum required by kosher law. Also, the subsequent dry salting would tend to draw out any water that was absorbed in the brief soaking.
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The "chicken in a hot pan" method depends almost entirely on the initial blast of stored heat from the pan, since the oven's convection heat (as opposed to conduction heat on your stovetop) is too inefficient to replenish the heat in the cast iron pan to any significant degree once the chicken hits the pan.
Ovens cook primarily by radiation, not convection.
Not true. Look it up in "On Food and Cooking." I thought that as well at one time, but it turns out to be incorrect (unless I am remembering incorrectly -- will check when I get home).
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I think that you are correct that it is possible to be too free and easy with the definition of Aioli, but if we are going to be so specific, then it is incorrect to refer to Aioli as simply a garlic flavoured mayonnaise. It certainly can be, but it really belongs to a seperate group of garlic and oil emulsions, the egg bit is window dressing.
Interesting... When you say "garlic and oil emulsion" do you mean to imply that the garlic acts as the emulsifier? Or might it be the case that aioli is sometimes made with no egg? Are there any stable garlic and oil emulsions that do not include egg? What other garlic and oil emulsions do you think would belong in this special group? Rouille perhaps? (These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm actually curious about your reasoning.)
My way of looking at it is that mayonnaise is a "mother sauce" and aioli is a "small sauce" from the mayonnaise mother. Whether or not egg is a major flavor component of aioli does not seem particularly germane. Egg isn't a major flavor component of many (most?) Hollandaise-based small sauces. So it strikes me that mayonnaise and aioli are fundamentally related in such a way that aioli is best described as a garlic mayonnaise.
I'd be interested in hearing your way of looking at it and why you think it might be more appropriate.
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There's a truck that parks on W.96th just west of Broadway that I've heard is good and very downscale. A lot of Mexicans who live in the area grab food there.
Can anyone comment on it? All I know is that it smells pretty good.
There is also a taco truck on 104th just West of Broadway (might even be the same one) that we enjoy. Also in the area is our favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, Noche Mexicana on Amsterdam near 102nd.
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VARMINT BIRTHDAY LUNCH, SEPTEMBER 27TH, SWEET N TART, 20 MOTT STREET, CHINATOWN
People who will be coming so far:
(question mark denotes maybe)
Special Honoree - Varmint and Mrs Varmint(2)
Dumpling and friends(3)
=Mark(1)
SuzanneF(1) ?
JosephB and wife(2)?
Blondie(1)?
Slkinsey(1)?
Herbicidal(1)?
Katie Loeb(1)
I've got singing on the afternoon of the 27th, so can't make it to lunch. That's OK, though, since I have plans to take Varmint squirrel hunting in Central Park earlier.
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You need something with high heat capacity. Given the choices, go with the All-Clad (and catch up on slkinsey's eGCI course on Understanding Stovetop Cookware).
Meanwhile, you really need a cast-iron skillet. Buy it through this link, and eGullet reaps a farthing. It's the best $13 investment you'll ever make.
I finally sat down and really read through slkinsey's course. It was excellent. Finally I understand the difference between All-Clad's stainless line and their MC2/Ltd lines!
Thanks, dude.
As for the cast iron skillet... the link you included was for a pre-seasoned pan. But I thought high heat (like half an hour at 450) was bad for seasoning--or is that not high enough to make a difference?Not really. 450F isn't all that hot in the grand scheme of things. If you leave a cast iron pan empty on a full blast burner for 5 minutes, I am pretty sure it will be a lot hotter than 450F. That is the kind of heat you have to worry about when it comes to seasoning. Regardless, the pan won't be 450 for long anyway. Once you put the chicken in the pan, the (relatively) cold chicken will suck heat from the pan and protect it from becoming too hot. The "chicken in a hot pan" method depends almost entirely on the initial blast of stored heat from the pan, since the oven's convection heat (as opposed to conduction heat on your stovetop) is too inefficient to replenish the heat in the cast iron pan to any significant degree once the chicken hits the pan. This is why having a pan with a high heat capacity is so crucial to this technique.
The one change I would suggest (and which I practice in my own cooking) is to heat up the pan on the stove for 5-7 minutes rather than preheating it inside the oven. This way, the pan is much hotter when the chicken goes in. I also like to keep the pan on the burner for a minute or two before throwing the whole affair into the oven. This allows the chicken to cook some more and for the burner to replenish the pan's heat.
I'm wondering, would a plain old unseasoned pan from the corner hardware store work for this if I didn't bother to season it?That would probably work, actually. As I suggest in the above mentioned class, I think it's a good idea to keep one big unseasoned cast iron pan around for super-high heat cooking.
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If I can butt in here with my two cents about the rabbit... domestic rabbit is very mild flavored and not gamey at all. Wild rabbit or, better yet, hare is much gamier. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely you will be able to get any of that at a reasonable price unless you know some hunters.
If Brunswick stew is prototypically supposed to include a fair amount of game, this might be exactly where you are running into the "too thin versus dry chicken" problem. Modern chicken is simply too tender for long cooking, whereas squirrel, pigeon or venison needs the longer cooking to become tender. One thing you might do is buy "old stewing hens" for the chicken component. These are typically old egg-laying hens that have passed their productive years. Very flavorful, but also quite tough and they require long cooking. For a more gamey flavor without adding either A) expensive game from the butcher or B) actual game like squirrel, I'd think of adding some sauteed livers, hearts, and gizzards. One can often buy big packages of hearts/gizzards in supermarkets, and chicken livers are cheap enough. A hunk of wild venison from a hunter's freezer could make a big difference, though.
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The cholesterol in the egg yolk helps in the emusification process. It is a bi-polar molecule that helps to form the tiny little beads of oil suspended in the liquid componant.
I believe it is actually lecithin that gives egg yolks most of their emulsification bang.
Some interesting info on mayonnaise and emulsification may be found here.
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In re to your last question, I'm not sure what you mean. Aioli is garlic mayonnaise. If you make it with other ingredients, it is no longer aioli but another kind of flavored mayonnaise.
I think you answered my question when you mentioned the Dijon mustard. I have seen it in a few other recipes, but not in the ones I've used. I have also seen a lot of other "Aiolis" referred to that may be mayonnaises, but don't seem to hold to the strict definition of Aioli. I have seen "Rosemary Aioli", which includes rosemary and parmesan cheese, seafood Aioli, which includes lobster stock, and chipotle aioli, which includes not only chipotle sauce, but sour cream as well. Do these really qualify as Aioli?
Exactly. No, those things are not aioli -- they are no more "aioli" than vanilla vodka, Cointreau and an orange peel garnish is a "martini." "Aioli" designates a specific kind of mayonnaise, just as "martini" designates a specific kind of cocktail. I chose these two words on purpose, both words have had a certain amount of "definition broadening" in the popular imagination.
In the case of "aioli" it is no doubt simply the case that restauranteurs and recipe-writers found that the word "aioli" was more appealing to customers... more people are likely to buy "fried calamari with chipotle aioli" than "fried calamari with chipotle mayonnaise." Similarly, restauranteurs and bar managers have found that the designation "martini" confers a certain elegance of style that incents customers to buy cocktails (it also tells them that the drink will come in a retro-looking cocktail glass so they can look sophisticated drinking something that probably would have had an umbrella sticking out of it in 1985).
To call a mayonnaise that includes rosemary and parmigiano or chipotle and sour cream "aioli" is like calling a dish made of pork ragu and tagliatelle "pork spaghetti aglio e olio."
Roasting a Chicken
in Cooking
Posted
I occasionally put sugar in my chicken brine. I don't think it changes the flavor of the meat all that much, but it does encourage nicely brow skin.
As for aromatics (herbs and whatnot) in the brine, I have done it a few times by boiling the aromatics in the brine, which then must be cooled. It made a difference, but not so much that it was worth the pain in the ass.