This is a brilliant video - amusing and informative - that explains how a pinch of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) can make all the difference when frying onions. It's a useul lesson in the importance of the Maillard Reaction.
You can read the full post relating to the video at blog.khymos.org.
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If you are into your baking and live in the UK, scurry off to the newsagent and reserve a copy of next Saturday's Guardian. There will be a free supplement, The Guide to Baking, from their baking correspondent and my first podcast guinea-pig, Dan Lepard.
From the previews that Dan has posted on his forum, it looks like it will be one to keep - a rare treat for the weekend food sections, which at the moment are overflowing with bloody Christmas recipes.
I recently wrote about a really enjoyable meal Silverbrowess and I had at The Goose. I was particularly taken by the mushroom consomme.
Chef patron of The Goose, Matthew Tomkinson emailed me introducing himself after I wrote my article. He has very kindly offered the recipe for the consomme which I have copied below. I understand from him that the recipe is very loosely based on Nico Ladenis' clarified wild mushroom stock.
One addendum to the recipe is that Matthew is contemplating using a different method for clarifying the stock. In the recipe below he uses the traditional method of egg whites. However, in his email to me he said that they are considering ditching the egg whites and using the ice filtration technique, as demonstrated by Heston Blumenthal when he was trying to make the perfect Peking duck in a recent episode of In Search of Perfection.
Supposedly the egg whites dull the flavour slightly. The beauty of Heston's suggested method is that the resulting liquid is pure and unsullied. To explain it quickly: you cook the stock, you then freeze it. Then you place the frozen stock in muslin or similar, over a bowl and allow it to melt in the fridge and drip through the muslin. The result is that all the fat, bits of veg etc is caught in the muslin, whilst the liquid drips into the bowl. It is important to defrost in the fridge, because if it defrosts too quickly, you risk the fat emulsifying with the liquid and slipping through the muslin, into your otherwise pure liquid. For a far more technical explanation read this.
Before you go head long into making this, I should say that I haven't yet tried it out. I'm sure it works - he is a chef afterall - but this is the first recipe I've ever posted that I haven't first cooked myself.
Many thanks to Matthew for agreeing to me posting his recipe.
Mushroom stock
Clarification
To make the stock firstly sweat the shallots and garlic in butter until lightly caramelised, add the mushroom trimmings and cook slowly until dry. Next add the tomato puree and cook out until starting to catch on the bottom of the pan, deglaze with the white wine and reduce until syrupy. Add the mushroom soaking liquor and reduce by half then cover with the water, add the herbs and bring to the boil. Skim well, turn down to a simmer and cook for about 30 mins. Remove the pan from the heat, season and allow to cool. Next pass the liquid through double muslin and chill.
To clarify the stock lightly whip the egg whites and season well, whisk these into the cold stock and place over a medium heat. Bring the liquid up to near boiling making sure the bottom doesn't burn by occasionally stirring. As the proteins coagulate a 'raft' will appear on the surface made of the cooked egg. As this starts to happen, stop stirring and leave to simmer very gently for about 20 mins breaking the surface of the raft as necessary to allow some of the pressure to escape. Do not allow to boil at this stage.
Using a ladle, pass the clear liquid off through muslin again and season well with salt and a pinch of sugar if necessary (wild mushrooms can be a little bitter) finally finish with a good glug of madeira to taste.
It works well with the gnocchi or a raviolo and particularly with coriander or chervil in it.
I sometimes suggest to Silverbrowess that she could afford to be a little more adventurous in the kitchen. It's not that she's not a good cook, she is, her roast potatoes and banana cake - N.B. not eaten together - are talking points in the finest salons of North London. But, she has no confidence to move beyond her comfort zones or rely on our over-flowing shelves of cookbooks. Or at least that was what I thought until earlier this week when I lifted the lid on a saute-pan and smelled something fantastic. Turned out it was verze sofegate, or less romantically, suffocated cabbage.
She had been mulling over what to do with the head of cabbage in the fridge and all those cookbooks provided inspiration, in particular, Joyce Goldstein's Cucina Ebraica, a history of Jewish food in Italy. One method for cooking vegetables was by suffocating, read slow cooking, them in goose fat. Although we didn't have any goose fat on hand, we did have some recently rendered duck fat and I was flabergasted to learn that Silverbrowess used that, she normally recoils from it in horror.
This should be served as a remarkably light but strongly flavoured side-dish with gutsy meats.
Serves 4-6
Cut the cabbage into narrow strips, removing the core.
Warm the fat in a saute pan over a low heat. Add the onion, garlic and rosemary and saute until it is tender. Don't let it brown, you want the onions to be translucent - remember this is all over a low heat.
Add the cabbage, vinegar, sugar and salt and pepper. Cover the pan. Cook until the cabbage is very tender. In her recipe, Joyce Goldstein recommends about 30 minutes, but she also notes that the traditional method was to really slow cook this, sauteing for up to 3 hrs. Silverbrowess, used the shorter time period. I imagine if you go for tradition you need to make sure your heat is way down and you might need to add a bit of water as well to make sure it doesn't all burn. Just keep a close eye on it.
This is not a link for those of us that keep kosher, nor for those of you who are squeamish. But, if you want to see the epitome of nose to tail cooking, check out what Aki and Alex at Ideas in Food have been up to recently.
Smoke and be damned. It's as simple as that. Ignore the health warnings. Evolution has taught us that sweetness equals energy and sourness equals off food, then so smokiness must equal nectar. I have decided there is no better way to eat a 4kg slab of fresh brisket than after a 12 hour shvitz in a smoker, equally, can chicken ever be more majestic than eaten cold after a four hour smoke bath? I think not.
The smoking session came about as a result of a perfect storm: too much time on my hands, guilt at not having used a birthday present I'd specifically asked for and a dinner party for my family. Several years ago, in the run up to an insignificant birthday, I had mentioned in more detail than is polite, the amazing attributes of the Weber Smokey Mountain. It is true that the attributes I was extolling were those on the Weber website and other marketing guff I had read. I had never eaten something cooked on one, nor obviously had I cooked on one. Nonetheless, I sensed a calling - I bought into the PR and knew my life would be worthless without one. So for two years my WSM has been sitting under its tarp, singing like a harpe, luring me in, but I never quite fell for it until this weekend. I am deeply pissed off that I have wasted two years of my life not smoking.
Hopefully you can tell I like it. I like the fact cooking on it becomes a zen-like experience. Less of the brassiness of a traditional barbecue, more caressing and nudging and tweaking. I love the fact that the finished product tastes unlike anything I've had before. I particularly like that smoking has allowed me to fall in love again, this time with cold chicken breast. Yes, I know chicken breasts are not great cold - but try one the day after a smoke. It will restore your faith. However, this post is not about chicken breasts, it is about beef and lots of it. I plan to get around to the chicken post shortly.
I detail below what I did to the beef, how I did it and what the meat looked like at various stages. However, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Virtual Weber Bullet, a website with a disturbing level of enthusiasm for its rather specialised focus. My method detailed below is basically their method, so any successes I had, were theirs.
From putting the meat on the grill to serving it was approximately 12 hours, that included about an hour and a half of resting in kitchen foil.
This serves 8 people, or 6 with decent amount of leftovers, which you will want.
For the rub
You need a big hunk of meat for this. Mine was enormous - the largest cut by area that I have ever cooked. Remember though that given the length of cooking, it will shrink considerably. Also remember to keep some of that fat on the brisket, do not be tempted to remove it, despite the fact there is so much of it. Much of it will be rendered down during the process and it will help keep the meat moist during the cooking. What is left at the end, you can simply trim away before serving.
Start off by making the rub and marinading your meat overnight. Use as much of the rub ingredients as possible, but bear in mind not to use too much salt as you will dehydrate the meat unnecessarily. Usually I don't add salt to marinades, because it leaches the water, but having done some reading it seems par for the course for smoking so I dutifully followed the trend.
I cocked up slightly - forgetting what a mammoth cut it was, it wasn't fully defrosted by the time I put the rub on. Being the first time I have done this, I have no idea what impact this had on the outcome. However, it tasted to me that the rub had had an effect and I had more than one guest ask was covering the meat.
So far, so simple. The main part of the cooking process comes down to playing with the heat.
I started the smoker using the ingenious Minion method to fire it up. It was ridiculously easy and I was surprised how little charcoal I used during the cooking: 1 and a quarter 3.5kg boxes of lumpwood charcoal. I think, with a bit more experience I could probably have got away with just one box.
Once the lit coals were sitting on top of the cold coals, I added some lumps of hickory wood and filled up the water bowl.
At this stage the beef went on, fat side down and the cooking began.
I tried to be as accurate as possible compiling the details for the table below. I have listed the temp in the body of the smoker and the times I took the temperature. Where I noted it, I have also detailed the temperature of the meat itself. The method I used to determine the heat was by sticking a digital Polder thermometer in the lid vent, which remained open throughout the cooking process. All temps are in Celsius. If you're a luddite, click here.
It should be noted that the vent column represents how much the vents on the bottom of the smoker were open. 100% means they were all open all the way, 0% they were all shut all the way. 2x0 / 1x50 means two were shut entirely and one was open half-way. On the Virtual Weber website they list which vent was open to which percentage, personally I can't see it makes any difference which actual vent is open, rather the percentage. The only caveat to that is if there is a strong wind. If there is, then the vent that is face on to the wind will obviously have a greater impact on the heat in the coals than one that is leeward.
Finally, please note that I was cooking a chicken as well. This resulted in the beef getting shifted around a little, the temp dropping when the chicken went in and so on. Therefore, it did have an effect on the cooking process, so bear that in mind. However, I don't think its impact was too significant.
[If you are reading this on a RSS reader, you might want to click through to the post itself, so you can see the table of temps and timings.]
Notes
1. Meat goes onto the lower grill
2. Meat is flipped and basted with apple juice PHOTO
3. Got very scared with the plummeting heat. Added cold coals to the grate and used my kitchen blow torch to make sure all coals in grate were lit
4. Put in the chicken on the lower grill. Beef moved to top grill. Turned & basted the meat w/apple juice. Added wood. Internal temp of beef 77°C
5. Internal temp of beef 88°C
6. Internal temp of beef 95°C. Beef removed PHOTO
When the meat was taken out, I let it sit in a blanket of silver foil for about an hour and a half. I left it in the warmest place I could find - on top of the washing machine.
So how did it turn out? Simply put it was a revelation. The meat was moist (whilst hot) it had a fantastic depth of flavour and has converted me to 'cue. I made a pretty spicy and vinegary sauce to go with it. I'm not going to list it here, because I forgot to write down how I made it, but it was basically a good mix of vinegar, tomatoes, chillis, sugar, onion and garlic all sauteed down and then blended. I'm sure it's considered heresy in some places, but we loved it.
These are some of the photos during the process.
The brisket after six and a half hours
The brisket after 10 hours
The brisket after ten hours - in profile
This is not a barbecue, this is 'cue. Learn the differences and go forth and smoke.
With winter stubbornly receding, I had an urge to see off the last days of the season with a full-on hearty dish. Until I saw it in the butchers I had always thought (and assumed) that oxtail wasn't kosher. My assumption was based on the fact that a) I've never eaten it and b) I've never seen it on a kosher restaurant menu. It may be the ultimate hackneyed and massacred gastropub food, nonetheless it was something I was longing to try.
I bought a couple of tails and some chuck steak to bulk-up the stew and headed home to find a recipe that would guide me through my culinary ignorance. Cooking things you have never eaten but longed for is a strange experience. You have a mental picture of what it will taste like, but if it doesn't you have no way of knowing if you have ballsed up, or your dreams were always misplaced.
I used the indominatble The Cook's Book as a base recipe - figuring that I couldn't go too far wrong following Marcus Wareing's lead. For those who haven't got this book, you really should buy it. It could easily be the only cook book - as opposed to recipe book - you ever need. Each chapter is written by a leading chef: Marcus Wareing on meat, Charlie Trotter on vegetables, Shaun Hill on poultry, Ferran Adrià on foams and Pierre Hermé on desserts and sweets, to name just a few of the chefs and chapter headings.
This recipe is a variation on the one on p300 of the book. My changes reflect what I had in the kitchen at the time.
Mash seems to be the natural accompaniment. However, because of kosher restrictions of serving milk with meat I had to find an alternative. I boiled up some potatoes until they were nice and soft, heated some oil in a frying pan and crushed them into that until they were brown and crispy.
This serves 4 although not in the largest portions.
For the vegetable garnish
Preheat the oven to 180C (350F, gas mark 4)
Marinate all the meat, herbs and garlic for up to 48 hours before cooking. Even a couple of hours will have a beneficial effect.
Heat the oil in a large frying pan and brown the oxtail well. Turn them when they are browned. Once browned all over, remove with a slotted spoon and drain of any liquid. If using stewing steak, sear until brown as well. Remove and drain.
Add the carrots, onions, celery and leeks to the frying pan, ensuring to coat them with the residue of the meat. When vegetables are browned add in the tomatoes, thyme, bay and garlic (retrieved from the wine) and continue to cook for a few minutes more.
Put the oxtail in an oven-proof casserole dish, I use a large Le Creuset dish. Top with the vegetables. Pour in the wine and boil over a high heat until it is nearly evaporated, then add enough stock - or water if desperate - to cover the meat. Bring to a simmer, cover and braise in a hot oven for about 2 hours.
Lift out the oxtail and the meat. Pass the sauce through a sieve into a pan and skim any fat and scum, like a banshee. You can't skim a sauce too much. Boil the sauce for 10 minutes, continuing to skim.
Blanch the garnish vegetables (except tomatoes, if using) for 5 minutes, ensuring they don't overcook and become too soft. Drain and add to the sauce (with tomatoes and parsley, if using) and simmer for a couple of minutes.
Sprinkle a touch of fleur de sel over each portion for a bit of sweety saltiness.
