Extreme Cooking Blog

In the wonderful movie, Julie & Julia, de-boning a chicken is presented as the biggest challenge facing Julie in her quest to cook through Julia’s book. In reality, de-boning a bird is fairly simple, and with practice takes just a few minutes. I take a little longer with turkeys since I like to remove all of tendons in the drumstick.

This turkey was stuffed, smoked, and sliced up for sandwiches using this sourdough bread:

Also served with cherry chutney.

I’ve had a couple of requests for a post about my sous vide battery. Here are the details:

• GE Countertop Roaster Oven.
  I purchased this at Walmart for around $30. This particular model doesn’t seem to be available, but GE and others such as NESCO make similar products. I particularly like the 18 quart capacity compared to the ~11 quarts of the SousVide Supreme. When the temperature of the water stabilizes, it doesn’t budge.
• Auberins Temperature Controller
  I purchased this from Auberins for $140. Although the large mass of water in the roaster maintains an extremely accurate temperature, it can take some initial fiddling to get it to stabilize. With this device, I just set it to the desired temp and it goes there with very little bounce. Of course, the moment you add the pouches to the roaster, the temp is going to drop, but the controller recovers quickly.
• Water Circulator
  This little immersible pump was $22 from Amazon. I’m not sure how necessary it is since the the large thermal mass of water isn’t going to permit much in the way of temp gradients. It probably isn’t going to help pockets of water trapped between pouches, but the large capacity and horizontal orientation of the roaster makes this less of a problem. It is VERY IMPORTANT to note that this pump is rated to 95F. I have had no problems running it for a few days at 146F, but I keep a close eye on it. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Maybe someday I’ll get a professional-quality immersion circulator, but for now I see no reason for it.
• Chamber Sealer
  This is definitely the most important part of my setup. There are many who say a FoodSaver or other household-class vacuum sealer is adequate. I’ve used one for several years with OK results. The main problem is that the FoodSaver really, really wants to suck out any liquid in the pouch along with the air. Even when there is no additional liquid, you can see juices being sucked out of the meat. Freezing the liquids helps some, but trapped air is often released during cooking. The resulting air pockets can produce uneven cooking since heat transfer from air is different from that of water. Floating pouches can also be pain, although racks and other other kludges can help. I purchased the VacMaster VP210C from Sam’s Club for $932 including shipping. I use it for so many different tasks. Perhaps not as good as the higher-quality commercial grade ones that cost a few thousand bucks, but I haven’t encountered any limitations. (Well, there was the time I didn’t have the sealing time set long enough, When the pressure equalized, some of the marinade shot out of the pouch and covered every inch of the interior of the chamber with sticky sauce.) Lots of swearing and paper towels later, all is well. Many of the recipes in Thomas Keller’s magnificent book, Under Pressure, really require a chamber sealer. My sous vide efforts have been an order of magnitude more successful since I started using one.

Tomorrow we’re going to have bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon for brunch. Two days ago I cured a beautiful piece of sashimi-grade salmon. Today it is being cold-smoked from a small fire of pecan logs. Meantime, I’m making the dough for the bagels. The dough will ferment overnight and be boiled and baked tomorrow.

To be continued ….

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I made this fresh pasta to serve with a cream sauce made with chopped porcini stems.

Cooks Illustrated this month has an article on frying potatoes in cold oil. That is, you throw the cut taters into a pan with cold oil, then turn on the heat. CI claims the resulting fries will absorb less oil (ask me if I care) than the traditional two-step frying process. But are they better?

My subscription to CI goes back to 1993. I used to be a big fan of  their spare-no-effort process for coming up with the best recipes. But at some point a few years ago, they began cutting corners to appeal to a wider audience who would rather not go to so much effort. Lately, I think they have steered a course back towards the original rigor.

So yesterday I cooked up some fries using the cold-oil method with some ruby reds that were getting a little old. The fries were served with grilled rib-eye on a fennel and sweet pepper roll with onion marmalade. Were they better tasting? No. Were they as good. YES! Were they easier to make? Much easier. Isn’t it strange how we will stick with complex methods based on conventional wisdom when simpler can be better. File this one under “Why didn’t I try that a million years ago?”

Why can I never get a decent order of onion rings? So easy to make, so delicious. But for the past few years, whenever I order them, they are usually limp, overcooked, or undercooked. Today I made up a batch since I just purchased a 3000 pound bag of Texas Sweet 1015′s from Costco. Slice, double coated with a dip in buttermilk and dredged in seasoned flour and corn meal. Fried just until golden. Sprinkled with sea salt. Eaten immediately.