I had a pretty torrid affair with spruce this spring, and there are still a couple of containers of dried but unused tips lurking around in the corners of the kitchen as I write. I’ve used it to cure meat, flavor sauces, and dehydrated and ground it to make a spice. The spruce vinegars smell absolutely heavenly, though they’re not ready yet. But this summer I may have found something as profound and versatile that threatens to usurp the hallowed number one spot that spruce has so far nobly and justly occupied in the “fragrant garnish/condiment/stealth aromatic” category for 2011.
Category: Technique
When I was out procuring short ribs for the ill-fated hot dogs, I also stumbled upon some local lamb breast. I got four hunks of it for $8, which ranks as one of the better scores in recent memory. It can be pleasurable indeed to covet the cheap cuts, and guiltlessly filling one’s basket with meat is a major reason why. I’m especially glad I found these when I did, because the unmitigated hedonistic triumph of the lamb bacon–smoked at the same time as the dogs–really took the sting out of the beef debacle. Lamb bacon is seriously wonderful, and highly useful in a wide variety of culinary contexts.
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.
A few years ago I read that lilacs are edible, so I made lilac ice cream. Now it’s become a bit of a tradition, and since today would have been my Mother’s sixty-sixth birthday, the timing is pretty evocative.
I finally finished the painting and now I have to wait three days until it’s fully dry so I can assemble the hundreds of pieces and put it in the crate (which I get to build in the meantime). There have actually been some foodular developments here at cookblog HQ, but they’re of various other process-heavy things and as such not ripe for the posting. But not very much visually dramatic is going to happen to this cheese over the next six months, even though the interior will be undergoing all sorts of cheesy alchemy as it transforms into sharp, crumbly cheddar, so I figured I write about it now.
This month’s Charcutepalooza project was hot-smoking, which is something I’ve done a fair amount of since buying my trusty smoker back in 2001 when we moved to the Brooklyn place with a deck. It has gotten a lot of loving use since then, helping ducks, chickens, pork bellies, briskets and many other things attain shiny umber patinas and diabolically delicious depths of flavor. As with so many other culinary urges, the seeds for smoking were planted long ago by since departed family. My Grandfather had a smoker, and his smoked chickens were truly things of beauty. Being an engineer–and one who built furnaces at that–he had long, complicated theories about how to control the smoking environment to achieve the best-tasting results: his favorite formula was that the humidity should increase over time in inverse proportion to the temperature inside the chamber.
The best thing about succeeding at something new and technical in the kitchen is that it builds one’s confidence for other projects. The Camembert and other cheeses made me realize that doing is everything; after a few tries one develops the beginnings of a feel for the method, and the results provide positive feedback in the most encouraging form: excellent food. Every time I make a food that seems to fall outside of the “normal” homemade category (vinegar, cheese, bacon, maple syrup, etc.) I am astonished not only at how easy it was but at how much better the result is than almost anything I could hope to buy, even for a lot of money.
I worked in a welding shop as a summer job between sophomore and junior years at college. For the princely sum of $5.50 an hour, I cut, bent, ground, drilled, and otherwise manipulated various forms of mild steel into the shapes the welders needed to make the trailers, truck racks, and various other things that were the bulk of their business. On my lunch breaks I taught myself to stick and MIG weld. It was an interesting learning environment; Bob, one of the welders, who drank a six-pack and smoked a joint in his Camaro every day at lunch, would wander back in, look at my work, and say something like “I fuckin hate mawdin aht” and beat my work apart with a hammer. Obnoxious? Yes. Funny as shit? That too. But also a hell of an incentive to learn; within a month I could really weld and he couldn’t knock my stuff apart any more. Right before I quit (to go be a carpenter’s helper for a whopping $8 an hour) I stick-welded a big rectangular pan of 16 gauge sheet steel without making a single hole. The grudging praise of the guys in the shop meant a great deal to me. I bought myself a welder later that summer, and made a lot of sculptures over the ensuing years. I still have it in the garage.
Why does this matter? Well, the shop foreman, Charlie, who was about 90 at the time, had this brilliant piece of advice if ever I had an issue with a piece of uncooperative steel. He’d look at the thing and say “Why don’t you hit that with a hammer?” and walk away.
An inevitable result of making cheese is having lots of whey on hand, which can be either a curse or a blessing depending on how well you can dispatch it in ways that are more useful and nutritious than pouring it down the drain. If you have pigs, you’re in luck; they love it and will reward you with excellent proscutto. Otherwise, after extracting fluffy, gorgeous ricotta–which is ludicrously easy compared to making whatever the first cheese was–you’ve got to use it up or the ghosts of your peasant ancestors will torture you with heavily-accented guilt and spectral finger-wagging. To spare you that Dickensian horror, here’s a list of some things I’ve been using it for.