Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine at Home" (Part 1)

[ChrisTaylor]

I made the tsukane with Korean wing sauce. The meatballs seemed a little moist, but I suspect that's because I used 500g of mince but didn't think--until it was too late, at least--to adjust the quantity of Wondra. On that Wondraful note, as other people have observed earlier in the thread, Wondra isn't avaliable in Australia. I purchased White Wings Gravy Flour. Someone earlier in some other thread or maybe even this one said it's the same thing. I suspect that with this recipe in particular I wouldn't be able to tell if Gravy Flour was a BAD CHOICE but I'll report back if I have any problems with it in the future. Might be, it's just a rebranded product. Rebadged. Maybe.

Anyway. The meatballs are nice enough as is the sauce. 20 grams of sesame oil sounded like a lot so I cut it down to 10 grams. Tasting the sauce, it seems like I made the right decision.

[Bryce Pilaf]

I made the pho this week and really, really enjoyed it. I did find myself seasoning the pho pretty aggressively (as I hadn't seasoned my brown beef stock, which is the base of this soup) with a few additional pinches of salt and extra fish sauce and a squirt of sriracha. Next time around, when making the beef stock, I will make sure to drain off the oil used to sautee the ground beef. Should have been obvious at the time but was something I forgot to do and I was too lazy to bust out my gravy-fat separator when the stock was done so the final product was a little oily and slick.

I will definitely quadruple this recipe next time, as the final product per the directions only yielded me around 3 1/2 cups of pho broth. I'd say the downsize of this is the cost for the ingredients, mainly the oxtails and red wine needed, especially since pho is so dirt cheap at Vietnamese restaurants.

[HowardLi]

The caramelized carrot soup was way too sweet for me.

[Reignking]

Since I didn't have my copy yet, I had to plan Christmas dinner with what MC had on its web site. The mac & cheese was a hit, of course, and the injection brining worked flawlessly on the fried turkey. It was nice to avoid creating a salt lick.

Since I had to order sodium citrate online, I also ordered some tapioca maltodextrin. With some leftover hazelnuts from my raw brussel sprout salad with hazelnuts, apples, and brown butter vinaigrette, I pureed the nuts into a butter and blended in the starch. Creating the powder was incredibly easy, and added another subtle dimension to it all.

[ChrisTaylor]

I was happy enough with the caramelised peanut sauce. It's very easy, altho' I think the recommended quantity of fish sauce is a little high. The fishy funk was felt a bit too strongly. Serves me right for not starting at 20g and working my way up to the full 40 gradually. Still the best sauce I've made from the book, tho'. I'd make it again.

[pep.]

I'm doing the SV vegetable stock for the first time and have just realized that it's getting a bit late. Any harm in letting the bags in the waterbath overnight instead of 3 hours?

[ChrisTaylor]

Er, it's hardly an extra hour here or there. I'd be inclined to set an alarm for the three hour mark, wake up, chill the bags and go back to bed.

[pep.]

Er, it's hardly an extra hour here or there. I'd be inclined to set an alarm for the three hour mark, wake up, chill the bags and go back to bed.

Ah, posted in the wrong thread - it's from the original MC (probably quite similar, though). Anyway, 3 am is not a fun time to be woken up to do kitchen stuff ;-)

I'm mainly concerned about overextraction from the spices, and maybe about cooking the vegetables to a complete mush, making straining more difficult. On the other hand, the recipe calls for an additional 30 minutes in a hot ultrasound bath, as well as 12 hours of refrigerated extraction. So five hours at 85 °C may just replace the 12-and-a-half in the original recipe ...

[ChrisTaylor]

Why not do a pressure cooked vegetable stock instead?

[pep.]

Why not do a pressure cooked vegetable stock instead?

Because it's all already bagged and in the water bath (which can sit unattended, in contrast to the pressure cooker). It's already 00:30 am overhere.

[haresfur]

I'm not sure I see any harm in letting it go if you are at pasturization temperatures.

[Yariv]

Carmelized onions - anyone try them. I didn't yesterday and 1) I needed way more than 20 minutes in the pressure cooker. More like an hour to see them become dark (used the amount to baking soda mentioned) 2) It came out with a bitter after taste.

Any advice would be welcome.

Edited December 29, 2012 by Yariv (log)

[ChrisTaylor]

The chickpea salad. It's pleasant enough but I wish it had some fresh element. Some diced tomato? Maybe some parsley just before serving? A bit of diced red onion?

[pbear]

Carmelized onions - anyone try them. I didn't yesterday and 1) I needed way more than 20 minutes in the pressure cooker. More like an hour to see them become dark (used the amount to baking soda mentioned) 2) It came out with a bitter after taste.

Any advice would be welcome.

Psst, that was supposed to have been 40 minutes at pressure. Twenty minutes is the estimated prep time.

Anyhoo, I tried them. They came out fine (though watery, as mentioned in the recipe). Frankly, I get better results by conventional methods, so this one isn't going in the toolbox.

[Yariv]

Thanks, maybe it was the onions I used. I'll try again

Carmelized onions - anyone try them. I didn't yesterday and 1) I needed way more than 20 minutes in the pressure cooker. More like an hour to see them become dark (used the amount to baking soda mentioned) 2) It came out with a bitter after taste.

Any advice would be welcome.

Psst, that was supposed to have been 40 minutes at pressure. Twenty minutes is the estimated prep time.

Anyhoo, I tried them. They came out fine (though watery, as mentioned in the recipe). Frankly, I get better results by conventional methods, so this one isn't going in the toolbox.

Thanks. Maybe it was the onions. I also got good results using the conventional method before. Maybe I'll stick to it.

[pep.]

I'm not sure I see any harm in letting it go if you are at pasturization temperatures.

My concerns were more tastewise. I decanted and tried the vegetable stock just now and it is very good. Having no comparison, the celery notes seem to be a bit too much in the foreground for my liking (but as the stock will be the basis of a beetroot consommé, it doesn't matter much.

Unfortunately, for my main stock I poured everything out of the bag into a double cheese cloth in a colander and let it drip through. It appears that the weight of vegetables was enough to press small particles through the cloth. I had an additional bag of leftover trimmings that I filtered differently: I just cut the opposite corners of the bag and let the stock drip out without the actual vegetables coming into contact with the cheese cloth. The second stock was crystal clear while the first one is somewhat cloudy. I guess i'll have to do agar clarification now

[pbear]

FWIW, I hardly ever use cheesecloth for straining any more. Instead, I use a gold-mesh coffee filter. (Which, of course, doesn't get used for coffee.) Less fiddly and doesn't absorb any of the liquid being strained (better yields). For something like this, I'd drain in a regular colander to remove the solids, then pass the liquid through the filter.

[pep.]

FWIW, I hardly ever use cheesecloth for straining any more. Instead, I use a gold-mesh coffee filter. (Which, of course, doesn't get used for coffee.) Less fiddly and doesn't absorb any of the liquid being strained (better yields). For something like this, I'd drain in a regular colander to remove the solids, then pass the liquid through the filter.

Yes, I've been wanting to get one of those for some time now. Alternatively, I've been thinking about getting this (the 30 oz. one).

Edited December 29, 2012 by pep. (log)

[HowardLi]

FWIW, I hardly ever use cheesecloth for straining any more. Instead, I use a gold-mesh coffee filter. (Which, of course, doesn't get used for coffee.) Less fiddly and doesn't absorb any of the liquid being strained (better yields). For something like this, I'd drain in a regular colander to remove the solids, then pass the liquid through the filter.

Sounds like it would be faster to pass through an OXO 8" strainer rather than a colander. I imagine certain types of soups would clog the gold mesh filter very easily without a decent prefilter step.

[pep.]

My colander has pretty small holes, but unless I'm making a lot of stuff (in this case: pre-clarification yield of 2.4 kg of SV vegetable stock), I use the ISI strainer to filter out chunks before using a (non-gold) coffee filter or a cheese cloth (since I'm out of coffee filters). I also own a large and small superbag, but cleaning them is no fun and the 100 microns are still to big to do anything truly useful with them.

Anyway, I misjudged the concentration necessary for a an agar gel because my brand (Biozoon) contains some maltodextrin to prevent clumping. Using 0.2 %, things stayed liquid even after chilling. I wanted to add some more Agazoon when I noticed that the particles seemed to have acted as nuclei for the (very, very weak) agar gel, so I just filtered it through my cheesecloth again. Voilà! A lot of crystal clear broth, a bit of not so clear broth (resulting from agitating/pressing the cheesecloth a bit too much, although I anticipated that and changed vessels beforehand) and a little bit of dark grey goo ;-)

[pbear]

FWIW, I hardly ever use cheesecloth for straining any more. Instead, I use a gold-mesh coffee filter. (Which, of course, doesn't get used for coffee.) Less fiddly and doesn't absorb any of the liquid being strained (better yields). For something like this, I'd drain in a regular colander to remove the solids, then pass the liquid through the filter.

Sounds like it would be faster to pass through an OXO 8" strainer rather than a colander. I imagine certain types of soups would clog the gold mesh filter very easily without a decent prefilter step.

Fair point. No doubt the liquid should be relatively clear before passing through a gold-mesh filter. In this case, though, I think a colander would be sufficient, as we're talking about chunks of vegetables.

It's trickier if doing something with proteins - for me, this mostly comes up with sous vide braises - but there I generally don't bother with a gold-mesh filter, as I'm usually preparing a sauce where absolute clarity isn't necessary or even noticiable. What I do want, though, is to remove and discard the coagulated proteins. If I used a sieve only, those would stay in the dish. If I'm okay with that, I still use a colander and puree the proteins smooth with an immersion blender. Whereas, if for some reason I want a very clear stock, I do three passes, a colander for chunks, a siieve for coagulated proteins (which I discard), then the filter. In fact, I generally do only the first two steps.

[Bojana]

Made two more recipes yesterday: the creme patissiere and pork belly adobo, this time sous vide.

I liked the creme, the consistency was soft and silken but even cold it did not hold shape as well as the traditional one. I would not use it as a straight replacement, especially in applications that need to "stand tall".

Pork belly was a big disappointment. I have made it twice in the pressure cooker and loved it, hence had high expectations of the SV one. I cooked it at 62C as recipe said, for 48 hours. In the end, it was very dry and mealy. My meat was very meaty piece of pork belly, with fat only on top under the skin but I cannot help thinking that 62C was perhaps too high. Would I have had a better result at 60C or maybe 62 for 24 hrs?

[TheTInCook]

Regarding the stuff cooked in the pressure cooker in the mason jars;, garlic confit, onions, etc. Do you have to use a mason jar? Can you just do it in a sv bag or a ziploc, or even just a foil covered bowl?

[KennethT]

You can't use a plastic bag of any kind, since it won't tolerate the heat. You can use a retort bag, but they're expensive, and not easily obtainable. You can use a metal or glass bowl, just make sure you keep it off the bottom of the pc with a rack.

[haresfur]

Why not try a recycled glass jar? You aren't trying to get a seal for storage so the quality of the lid shouldn't matter.