Following up on the DIY article, I thought I’d show a specific example of the extra refinement that a sous-vide rig can bring to your regular old standards.
Category: Gadgets
The induction burner that I bought to cook on while I waited (with less and less patience) for the new stove has now transitioned from being the bootleg bachelor construction kitchen to being a useful appliance that now allows us to enjoy something I’ve been hankering to have for quite some time: shabu-shabu. Cooking at the table is fun, and customizing the doneness of every morsel makes for an excellent eating experience. Good broth is…
So I got a deli slicer for my birthday. Which I sort of asked for, in that not-exactly-asking-but-making-it-pretty-obvious-way that my expert wife has figured out over the years. It was a tough call, since I really want a new juicer (the old one suffered a child-related mishap, rendering it useless) but the one I want is three times more money than the slicer. So I got a slicer. It was win/win, really, since she knew that the minute I opened it I’d rush out and buy hunks of meat to cure, hang, and then slice into glistening tissues of salty splendor for us all to enjoy.
And that is pretty much exactly what happened.
So this isn’t about the excellent shellfish-kielbasa stew in Vermont. I’ll get to it later, though I don’t actually have a picture of it. Maybe some fall foliage instead for atmosphere. This is about a wife coming down with something, and the lack of anything easy to prepare in the house. A quick trip later, we were the happy owners of some lovely short ribs. And since we have a pressure cooker, shreddy, falling-off-the-bone-ness was…
I’m too tired to write much about our dinner last night; today was such a giant, frustrating waste of time that it has given me a new understanding of the phrase “wit’s end.” Those of you who stalk follow me on Facebook may have already read all about it, but suffice it to say that I drove 220 miles round trip to Brooklyn for an appointment that was canceled the very minute I arrived. There’s…
I didn’t have a ton of time yesterday, so I convection-baked chicken thighs with a spice rub and put them on top of polenta with some roasted Roma tomatoes (roasted alongside the chicken) and a salsa made with more tomatoes (Roma and pink Brandywine) plus red onion, cucumber, lemon juice, and poblano broiled until the skin blistered and came off easily. I had thought about going the chiles rellenos route, but the wife is not…
I do so love having a pressure cooker. Apart from all the exotic things it can do (peppercorn purée, caramelized condensed milk) it also makes it easy to enjoy perfect beans with little more than 30 minutes of lead time- even if, say, those beans went unsoaked all day because I had other things to do and I can’t do everything, can I? But what I did manage to remember were the chicken bones in…
High quality ingredients inspire. Yesterday I made a vegetable curry with cauliflower, sweet potato, carrot, and peas; puréed radish greens with yogurt, fenugreek and mustard seeds; and tofu simmered in one of my patented mutant soups. It started as the dashi in which I cooked the radishes for Sunday’s dinner, then turned into a funky addition to some pappa al pomodoro- Tuscan tomato soup with stale bread- which I made for lunch. That puréed bread…
I hardly ever used to cook steak; lamb and duck are more interesting (and also best cooked rare.) There are not so many cuts of beef that I love. But now that we have a water bath, steak is much more interesting. First off, any flavoring agents really get pushed into the meat by the vacuum-sealing. Second, it’s always perfectly done all the way through with no possibility of overcooking. And last, less tender cuts…
If Christine were here, I would have made this into sushi, but containing hurricane Milo while preparing dinner requires some compromise. I did get a chance to play with my new (used) water bath, which is all that matters. Trimmed grass-fed organic ribeye cooked sous-vide at 130˚ for a bit over an hour, then seared in a skillet to get a nice brown on the top and bottom. Sliced thin over Thai black rice with…