Home made bacon

OK, maybe not home made, since I made them in a professional butcher kitchen, but I made it, and I'm surprised at how simple it is, and how much better it is than the stuff you get at the store, pre-sliced.
I started with an equal mix of brown sugar and sugar, rubbed it into the pork belly, bagged it, and let it sit in the walk-in for 48 hours. It would normally have needed to be turned after the first 24 but it was buried so deep in the cure that it wasn't necessary in this instance.
After 48 hours, I pulled it out of the cure, washed it off, and cold smoked it for about two and a half hours over alder wood chips.
It needed to sit in the reach in for another 24 hours just so that it would firm up enough to slice. I sliced it up this morning and baked it off in the oven (bacon is better when baked, rather than fried - it keeps its shape better, and doesn't sit in its own grease) - man, it was good. A little salty, so I'd probably adjust the cure next time, using a little more brown sugar than salt, but if I put the bacon into something, say, a BLT, it would be fantastic.

The real advantage of doing this yourself is that you get a much better piece of meat. Leaner, more toothsome, and you can pick how thick you cut it. Granted, most people don't have a cold smoker at home, but you can work around that. Alton Brown, on his show Good Eats (the best thing on the Food Network) makes a cold smoker for Salmon out of a hot plate, a cardboard box, a few wooden dowels, and spare parts from a grill.



This seems easy enough to adapt to smoking anything. Or you could just go get a smoker, which would let you do all sorts of good things. I'm putting one on my Christmas list.

Drink - A Cultural History

Clever readers will note a change in my "Top 5" food books - and if you are reading my blog, you must be clever - replacing the fantastic "Sauce Bible" with Iain Gately's wonderful "biography" of alcohol.
Where to start with this one? Gately goes a long way back in history - essentially to the start of recorded time - and catalogs the human love affair with liquor. He takes the reader through time right up until about 2005 (the book was published in '08, but his data stops in '05). After reading this I have a better understanding of not only history, but of human nature. I have so many good things to say about this, that I find myself at a loss for words.
Suffice it to say this is an immensely entertaining read, remarkably informative, and engrossing. It really was hard to put down. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who has ever had a drink, will have a drink, or just wants to have a drink. You can buy it here.

Speaking of which, my vacation starts today, so I think I'll have a drink myself.

Bunnies are good eats

I've had rabbit before, but this is the first time I've been able to break down a whole carcass.
Yes, those are what you think they are spilling out of the body cavity.
The whole process isn't all that involved. The rear legs (when spread out like the picture to the left) have built-in lines that you can cut along. There is an easy to find joint that a good boning knife slips right into, and the legs just come right off.
I'd have liked to have gotten more pictures, but my hands were covered in rabbit bits, and a digital camera is hard to sanitize.

Anyway, once the rear legs are off, the front legs come away with no problem. Weird thing is, the bones of the forelegs don't seem to be connected to any other bones. Once the muscles are cut, there is no joint to get through. After weeks of butchering all sorts of animals, eating a variety of organ meats, and being elbow deep in viscera, this was the most disturbing thing I've come across.

The forelegs remind me of frog's legs. Not a lot of meat on them, and a similar shape. You'd need a lot of them to make a meal. Probably better to use them to fortify a stock or broth.

There is a thin layer of meat over the ribs and saddle. A little tricky to get off the body, but worth it. Spread some sort of filling over it, roll it up, sear it, finish it in the oven and you'd have something quite tasty.

The "saddle," the part right behind the ribs and in front of the tail bone, is supposed to be the best part of the rabbit, but I don't get it. Not all that much meat. I'd rather have the hindquarters, but I've always been a fan of drum sticks.

Unfortunately, the only part we were able to eat (the rest of the rabbit was destined for use serving customers - the nerve) were the "tenders," - located along the back, above the ribs. Dredged in a little flour, salted, and sauteed. True, they do taste a little like chicken (I hate that cliche) but they were like flavorful white meat, which makes it much better than regular white meat.
So when all was said and done, the picture on the left is the total yield from one rabbit. Done right, you could probably get two meals out of it (serving two people each). Honestly not sure what the price per pound is, or where you'd get it, but it's worth trying it at home.

Assuming you're not too squeamish.

Spice: The History of a Temptation

Recently finished Jack Turner's book on the history of spices, and I thought my reader would appreciate a review.

Turner reaches far into the past to lay the groundwork for humanity's fascination with spices - from pre-Hellenic Greece to the breaking of the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade. He does this with solid prose, and an approachable scholarly bent. Sometimes things get a little dry, and unless you are a dedicated reader of food history, it may drag a little (I didn't have that problem, but I'm a bit of a geek).

Turner's book is full of good information, well researched and documented, and has already become a staple reference for me. It is a "must read" for any student of colonial history, though. It adds a great deal of depth to a time period that is commonly oversimplified as being about "god, gold and glory," which aids in understanding the motives of those who colonized (and ultimately oppressed) most of the rest of the world.

I would have liked to have seen a little more information on the biological reasons why humans crave spices (some research is being done by Kansas State University and Cornell as to the anti-microbial properties of spices that is really remarkable) but a lot of that research is fairly new, so I'll forgive him for leaving it out.

All-in-all, I'd recommend the book. I don't think I'd put it on my top five list, but it would probably find a spot on my top ten.
And what the hell, I'm a capitalist, so I'll link to a place where you can even buy it.

Overthinking a Cheeseburger

The other day in cooking school we had a competition for best hamburger. We only had an hour to prepare it, but we had about 24 hours to think it over. We were working in groups of three, which is maybe a few too many people for making one dish, but resources are limited.

I was adamant that I wanted a non-screwed with burger. None of the foie gras sandwiched between ground sirloin and sautéed truffles for me - simple ground chuck, cheese, and basic condiments. I wanted to highlight the meat, which should be the star of any burger.

But I knew full well that others in class had the same idea. What was needed was a way to set this burger apart, show creativity without compromising the platonic ideal of meat, cheese and bread.
Fortunately, I was working with a certified food scientist. So we decided to play with our food.

The plan was to take all the basic condiments of a burger - lettuce, cheese, tomato, pickles, onions, ketchup (catsup?) - and make them fill a different roll. In other words, we were going to make one ingredient appear to be another, without changing the taste.

After kicking it around, we decided to make mayonnaise appear to be cheese, pickles would become ketchup (catsup?), cheese would become lettuce, tomatoes would be made out of red wine (a bit of a departure there, but as it turned out, very tasty), and onions would become pickles. All of this was to be accomplished through the use of gums and gelatin, with a dose of food coloring.

A couple of problems immediately surfaced. The first, and hardest to overcome, was nomenclature. When someone said they were working on the pickles, did that mean that they were working with pickles, or working on making pickles? We got around that, finally, but it ate up more time than it should have in working out the details.
The second problem (and ultimately the one that hurt us the most) was a question of color palette. We didn't have time to experiment, we needed to get it right the first time, and that was...unrealistically ambitious.

The first things we needed to do was turn onions and pickles into the most liquid form we could manage. That was solved by running them through a robot coupe, then finishing them with an immersion blender. We then added color and gelatin. The pickles worked out as a pretty good ketchup - the gelatin thickened up enough to give it a viscous, ketchup-like consistancy. The onions (which were going to become pickles) were gelatinized, placed into molds, and placed in a blast chiller.

As you can see, they were a bit too green. They also did not set up the way we anticipated.

The cheese was going to be made into lettuce. This actually turned out pretty well. We took a white cheddar and shredded it with a microplane. A few drops of green coloring tossed together gave us a pale green iceberg lettuce color (we needed to do the mixing in the walk-in cooler, though, since the fine shredded cheese clumped really badly in the warmth of the kitchen). The cheese was then placed on crumpled foil that we sprayed with non-stick cooking spray, placed in a very hot oven for five minutes, then moved into the walk-in to set up. Right before service we peeled the "lettuce" leaves off the foil. It worked like a charm. We didn't get the full "crunch" that iceberg gives, but we were close.

The ersatz cheese was going to be made of mayo. We broke the emultion under heat, and incorporated the zantham gum (apparently gelatin doesn't work well with non-acidic substances). We added color, and placed it into a blast chiller.

Color, again, became a bit of a problem. This is not a trick of photography, it really was this orange.
It also didn't quite set up the way we wanted. More gum would have maybe been a good idea, but without further experimenting, there is no telling if this would have ever worked the way we wanted.

The "tomatoes" were a last minute addition. I wasn't crazy about the idea, but there wasn't time to argue. I'm glad we did it, though, because it tasted fantastic. I encourage all of you to, at the very least, do a red wine reduction for your burger at least once.

We set the wine into makeshift molds (along with more gelatin) inside our now very crowded blast chiller. When they came out we added sesame seeds to them to mimic the appearance of a beefsteak tomato slice. The color was wrong, but it was a nice touch.

We got everything de-molded and plated in time for judging, though the overall color scheme ended up being a bit off-putting. Several of the judges would not taste it until we explained what was going on. I can't blame them. The whole thing had a sort of "Loony Toons" appearance; food is rarely in that shade of technicolor, and we eat with our eyes as much as with our mouths.

Strangely enough, the only judge who unequivocally liked the burger was the hard-core European traditionalist. The person who I would have expected the most outrage from. I suspect it is because, as a European, he had less of a preconceived notion of what a burger should look like, therefore he wasn't as disturbed by the cartoony color.

The burger tasted great, though, and I am sure that, had the tasting been done in a dark room, we would have done better in the judging. I'm also certain that, given another opportunity (or two) we would have the color problem fixed. I'm not sure if this is something that would be practical in a restaurant setting - too many specialized bits of equipment and too much prep time - but it sure was fun, and I think I learned more from this single experiment than I have in years of just cooking regular burgers. By taking everything out of its normal context, I have a better appreciation of the role those condiments normally play.

But seriously, try the red wine reduction.