Posted in Pizza on March 23rd, 2010 by ExtremeCook – 2 Comments
Not “Russian” in terms of the toppings, but the crust is made with my sourdough starter from Russia. This is a very powerful starter which I normally reserve for whole grain doughs to keep them from being too dense. But it made a sensational pizza. My Italian starter cultures may end up sleeping in the back of the fridge for a while.
This month’s challenge at pizzamaking.com was to make a pizza without dough. Without dough? That sure isn’t anything I would ever call a pizza, but I decided to give it a try.
My “crust” was made from sticks of sweet potato soaked in slaked lime (calcium hydroxide).
These sticks were then combined with a binder/batter of rice and tapioca flours and fried into a disk in peanut oil:
Then topped with shrimp, mint leaves, cilantro, roasted peanuts, red onion and a sauce made of lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, sugar, and thai chiles.
A friend recently served us some of the best potato pancakes I have ever had. They were based on a Wolfgang Puck recipe; I was very surprised at some of the ingredients (milk? butter? caviar garnish? …. ), but they were excellent. We made them today. Highly recommended, even for purists.
Had some smoked turkey leftover from the weekend. Wanted to try a white pizza using a recipe I like for the legendary Big Bob Gibson’s White BBQ Sauce. Shredded the turkey, mix in the leftover stuffing and gravy. This was more of an attempt to make use of leftovers rather than create something delicious. Surprise! It was very delicious.
There was enough residual heat in the WFO to make calzones today with the leftovers of the leftovers:
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:
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.
So I’ve long been a big fan of pastrami from scratch, but this corned beef – cured beef brisket – was amazing after being cooked at 146F for 48 hours. Tender, juicy, and delicious.
