slkinsey

Re the Anson Mills coarse grits: presoaking for 12 hours and then 30 minutes at 15 psi seems to have done the trick, although it still takes a few minutes in a pan for it to fully come together. Next I'll do some experiments cooking from dry. And I suppose I should compare that all to the texture and character when cooked with the traditional methods.

Cooked, cooled/congealed and then thinned/reheated grits are not anywhere near as good as freshly cooked.

My hunch would be that they tested the recipe with Bob's Red Mill Grits, as they mention the product line in various other recipes. BRM makes several kinds of grits, but the one I most often see are basically coarse yellow polenta, which I would say generally takes an hour to cook conventionally. If that hunch is right, it would explain why they felt 20 minutes was a significant time saving, but wasn't enough for the kind you were cooking. Yes, I think it must be something like that. Some of the pieces of the grits I'm trying to cook are quite large. Yesterday I tried soaking the grits for 12 hours and then pressure cooking them for 25 minutes. They still needed another 10 minutes or so of pressure cooking to fully soften all of the big pieces. As an interesting piece of data: I and a lot of other people have been historically confused with the Southern term for grits as "hominy grits," and have supposed that grits were therefore supposed to be made from actual hominy -- which is to say, corn that has been treated with lime water. According to Anson Mills this is not so. They say that the functional difference between grits and, say, polenta is that polenta is made from hard flint corn that is processed with multiple-pass reduction milling to have a uniform particle size, while grits is made from soft dent corn that is processed with single-pass milling and has multiple particle sizes. Also, the white corn varieties usually used for grits have a more mineral/floral profile in contrast to more "corny" yellow corn varieties that may be used (count me among those who thinks yellow and white grits don't taste the same). I'm inclined to agree with this, although I may think differently once I am able to dial in the time for the Anson Mills grits I'd like to use. It would sure be nice to be able to decide on the spur of the moment that I want some grits without having to spend 90 minutes in front of the stove. The issue with figuring that out, unfortunately, involves a lot of test batching and then opening up the pressure cooker to see how they are doing.

Sam, did you find that this resulted in something more "onion-y" than the original stock? I tried it tonight and while it's clearly got other flavors going on, the onion is the one that comes through clearest, to the point that I'm going to have to treat it like an onion stock rather than a vegetable stock, I think. Hmmm. Maybe? I'll have to do a comparison. It definitely picked up more of the black pepper.

The only MC of MCAH fail I've had thus far has been pressure-cooking grits in a canning jar. With Anson Mills' antebellum coarse white grits, the product is still not tender even after 25 minutes at 15 PSI. I will have to experiment with seeing whether I get a better result by either pre-soaking the grits or longer cooking times. Either way, however, diminishes the utility of using this pressure-cooking method, because I'm not sure what's so great about it other than getting to tender in a significantly shorter timeframe. It's a bit disappointing because I had assumed, probably erroneously, that when the MCAH recipe called for "coarse grits" they were speaking of something like the Anson Mills antebellum coarse grits. Something like Quaker regular grits hardly takes more than 20 minutes without pressure cooking, so surely this can't be what the recipe is designed around. Considering that Anson Mills recommends cooking their antebellum coarse grits 90 minutes (!) if they are not presoaked, I wonder what length of time I should be looking at for MC/MCAH pressure-cooking if I want to cook from dry.

A few things here. First is that it's not PDT's Jimmy Roosevelt. In fact, I'm not sure the cocktail has been featured on a menu there, although it's certainly a cocktail well within Jim Meehan's wheelhouse. But it's Charles Baker's Jimmy Roosevelt, from his book "The Gentleman's Companion." This is a cocktail that has long interested readers of Baker but largely confounded them as to a satisfactory execution, especially in a size that would work in a bar setting (the original was served in a 16 ounce glass!). It wasn't until Audrey Saunders developed an adaptation for the opening of Pegu Club that I'm aware of it achieving popular success on the menu of any noteworthy cocktail bar. One significant key to the success of her version was coating the inside of the glass with a little bit of rich demerara syrup -- a detail which is not found in Baker's original. The Jimmy Roosevelt recipe in the PDT book omits Audrey's demerara syrup rinse, and as a result does not particularly succeed as a cocktail (I'm guessing this is an editorial mistake, since Jim made the cocktail to Audrey's spec at Pegu Club and mentions the demerara rinse in this interview). So, just to be clear and give credit where it's due, if you're making a Jimmy Roosevelt, what you want to be making is Audrey's adaptation of Charles Baker's original. It is interesting that you mentioned the Jimmy Roosevelt with respect to cider, however. Last Winter, Martin Doudoroff brought a bottle of Eve's Bittersweet Cider (a great product!) to a Super Bowl gathering at my place. To celebrate the Giants' victory, we used the same technique as Audrey's Jimmy Roosevelt adaptation, but using Laird's bonded applejack, the cider, yellow Chartreuse and Dutch's Colonial Bitters. It was very successful, and we dubbed it the Teddy Roosevelt since it was made with NY/NJ ingredients.

Bones were raw. I took all the meat off the bones of an 18 pound turkey. Cured the dark meat and meat-glued it into a terrine with rosemary and chestnuts. Brined and meat-glued the white meat into a cylinder with a center of mushroom and turkey liver mousse. Cooked the above at different temps sous vide. I roasted the bones separately. To be clear, I had bought the neck bones, etc. a week or two before Thanksgiving, ground them up, browned them and chucked it all in a bag in the freezer for later use in making jus. In fact, I highly recommend this if you have the freezer space. Then you can make jus "to order" very easily whenever you might want some (probably more versatile to do with chicken than turkey, but you would have to use wings or something similarly collagen-rich instead of necks).

Exactly. I made MCAH-style pressure cooked brown turkey stock with the bones and scrap from a large turkey (I cook the white and dark meat separately and with different treatments). Then I had bought some turkey drumsticks and a ton of turkey neck pieces very cheaply. These I ran through my grinder, aggressively browned and pressure cooked with turkey stock, shallot and thyme per the MCAH recipe. Reduced that down and got around a quart of turkey jus. For service, I heated some rendered turkey fat and liquid lecithin together and emulsified it into some warm turkey jus using a stick blender.

Very interesting - so did you actually use the second stock "as is" or are saving it use with/in addition to water for your next batch. I also made a quadruple batch of the vegetable stock and should last me a while. But next time, I think I'll do as you did and then reserve the second stock to add as water or in addition to water next time. Todd in Chicago I haven't used it yet, actually, but I did drink a cup of it with a little salt when there was too much to fit into my storage container. It was delicious and perfectly able to stand on its own as a broth. In other news, I made a turkey version of the jus gras last night for Thanksgiving dinner. Wow. Amazing. The turkey jus was already incredible, and emulsifying in some roasted turkey fat blew the doors right off.

I have made the sous vide vegetable stock and the pressure-cooked brown pork stock, white chicken stock and brown turkey stock. All turned out very well indeed. One thing to keep in mind is that a stock is not the same thing as a broth. What you end up with is supposed to be a flavorful liquid that can be used as the basis for other things such as soups, broths, sauces, etc. But a stock isn't something you can typically just use as-is and have it be all that spectacular. This is why, for example, part of making the MCAH chicken and noodle soup involves infusing the chicken stock with herbs and spices. I also tried something interesting with the sous vide vegetable stock, of which I made a quadruple recipe. Once I strained out the stock I looked at the huge pile of vegetables and thought, "surely there has to be some more flavor in there." So I bunged it into the pressure cooker, barely covered it with water and pressure cooked it for 30 minutes at 15 PSI. Kind of like a vegetable remouillage. The resulting "second stock" wasn't as deeply flavored or delicate as the first stock, but it was pretty damn good.

Right. Part of the reason we chew food is so that we can (a) break apart the things like cellulose, etc. to expose the human-compatible nutrients to the digestive process; and (b) to reduce the pieces of food to a size that the body is able to more fully digest while it is in the system. The author's thesis seems to be that cutting things up into tiny pieces with a food processor is so prevalent, has so far reduced the number calories that would have been engaged in the work of mastication, and has so increased the bioavailability of the calories in these foods that it's making us fat. Although I hope I am misinterpreting the author here, because otherwise this seems like a ridiculous thing to assert.

There's a lot of research on the role of sucrose and fructose on the body, You're absolutely correct in that fructose is pretty terrible for you. The amount of HFCS that has made its way into processed and pre-prepared foods, and the extent to which these foods are eaten nowadays, certainly have been major contributors to obesity. However, people keep on missing the point with HFCS in their demonization of fructose. High fructose corn syrup is not actually particularly high in fructose. The formulation of HFCS used in soft drinks is 55% fructose, and the kind of HFCS used in pretty much everything else is only 42% fructose. Consumption of caloric sweeteners has gone up since the 80s. But it's not like we have any reason to believe that things would be any different if we had used sucrose instead of HFCS during this period. Meanwhile, honey has a higher fructose content than HFCS but everyone seems to think it's great.

One has to consider the bioavailabilty of the calories (not to mention other nutrients). For example, you might have portions of cooked potato and uncooked potato containing an equal number of calories, but the bioavailability of the calories in the cooked potato is much higher. This means that if you 3,000 calories of cooked potato every day you are likely to get fat, whereas if you eat 3,000 calories of uncooked potato every day you are likely to starve. I think it's probably true that the above applies to processed foods to some limited extent, but primarily because processed foods contain many "hidden calories" in the form of fats, sugars and other added ingredients we may not know are in there. But this doesn't seem to be the point the author in the quoted excerpt is making. Rather, he seems to be making the argument that the calories spent in chewing up a whole cooked carrot versus one that has been cut into small pieces is large enough accumulated over time to result in a significant difference in the net balance of calories absorbed, and that this is a significant contributor to obesity. This seems like quite a stretch to me, to say the least. If he is making the argument that a person is likely to absorb more calories from carrot puree compared to big pieces of carrot, I would agree with that. It's clear that mastication won't reduce the big pieces of carrot anywhere near as finely as a blender, and as a result some of the big pieces of carrot will pass through the system without having been digested. But it's not like we all live on a diet of baby food. It still seems like a big reach to suggest that this has been a meaningful contributor to obesity in the modern world.

You can do it that way if you're not too worried about sanitation (in your situation you would have no reason to be worried). Or, you can fill the tubing with water, pinch both ends closed, put one end into the pot of liquid, letting go of the pinch on that end once it is below water level, and then lower the other end of the tube into the target vessel and let go of the pinch. You get some small amount of water in the target vessel, but no mouth germs. You can also let the water discharge into a glass or something and switch to the target vessel once it starts pulling liquid from the pot (this can be a little messy).

I second the siphoning idea. That's how I get the stock out of my gigantic pressure cooker.

I've already started prep work for Thanksgiving Dinner. I find that doing as much as possible far in advance makes things so much easier. So, my menu will go something like this (we do plated courses): Amuse bouche of salmon tartare in an avocado "cigar" (inspired by this dish at EMP) Caramelized carrot soup from MC with cardamom "air" Anson Mills grits with SV-poached shrimp and red eye gravy (using the MCAH grits technique with homemade crustacean stock) SV-cooked turkey white meat with black truffle/turkey liver mousse, butter-poached brussels sprout leaves, king trumpet mushroom, MCAH turkey jus gras and arugula adaptation of MCAH romaine lettuce dressing SV-cooked turkey dark meat terrine cubes with turkey adaptation of MCAH red wine glaze, cornbread dressing, pressure-cooked baby root vegetable, crispy boneless turkey wing (center piece only) So far I've made the red wine glaze. I've bought, killed, shelled, cooked and eaten three lobsters so I can make crustacean stock out of the shells. I've browned off all the meat and bones to make turkey jus once I make turkey stock with the carcass bones. I'll pick up the turkey on Sunday so I can break it into the parts I want to use, brine/cure the various meats (I'll do a pink cure on the dark meat), get them all Activa-ed into the shapes I want and sealed. I'll cook-chill the dark meat terrine a day ahead of time, so I can cut out the cubes and crisp them for service in a frypan. The shrimp and salmon I'll pick up on Wednesday morning, and I'll use the salmon trim to make spaghetti with salmon and cream for dinner that night. I'll probably do the caramelized carrot puree and make the carotene butter this weekend.

Twyst, I've had good success pressure-steaming potatoes or gnocchi. Takes very little time & doesn't result in watery potatoes.

The technique should work on whole unpeeled potatoes, although it would take longer for them to come up to temperature. Why wouldn't you want to at least peel them, though? Actually, in a restaurant setting, I would think that having the retrograded potato already peeled and cut up would make things much easier.

Carbon steel doesn't really season the same way cast iron does. Carbon steel is also soft and, as you noticed, the seasoning has a tendency to come off. Typically you want to heat up the pan and reapply some fat every time you get ready to use the pan, effectively "reseasoning" the pan before using it.

What's the point of infusing it "regular" for 7 days and then doing the nitrogen cavitation technique? The whole point of nitrogen cavitation is to do rapid infusions.

No snails?

Too long and you'll go past extracting vegetable flavors and go into the realm of vegetal flavor which is pretty undesirable. Imagine what broccoli and cauliflower cooked to mushlike consistency tastes like- that's vegetal. In this connection, the specific vegetables used in the MC recipe may not suffer from this problem. In particular, I can't imagine why anyone would want to put cruciferous vegetables in a vegetable stock.

As above, I have made it successfully with pork butt cubed up. Not as good as with belly, though. Make sure you use a fatty cut of pork with plenty of connective tissue and don't trim it up. Definitely don't use a lean tender cut.

So... I made the pork belly BLT tonight. Delicious!

Didn't trim the butt at all. Left in all the sinews and pieces if fat, and left the skin on the outside. Just cut it into strips as-is, and cut those strips into chunks. It's definitely not as good as it is with belly. But it's still pretty damn good. Completely tender. If anything, the leaner pieces are a touch dry (although not unappetizingly so).