Xan: Char Siu pork

Check it:

I cooked the pork shoulder sous vide for 24 hours at 150F, then diced it, tossed in a char siu sauce and broiled. Not to be outshone, the Brussels sprouts also rose to the occasion:

I am especially pleased to have tentatively solved a technical problem that had plagued me since I started sous vide cooking so many years ago. The juices from the cook bag can be used as the base for a sauce, but because they cooked at a low temperature, the proteins have not yet denatured. When you heat them in a sauce, they tend to cross-link, coagulating into an unappetizing mass that needs to be filtered out. I feel dumb for never realizing this before, but if there is already liquid in the pan and the juices are added slowly, they denature separately and don't cross link to other proteins that have already denatured. The result was a very good sauce which I cooked down to a glaze. I still need to do some further testing and tinkering to make sure this method is robust, but it's exciting.

Here's my porky sauce, happily bubbling away:

By the way, given the COVID situation, it's just unrealistic to have a full stock of herbs available whenever you need them. So I decided, I will just have cilantro all the time. It's quite at home in this dish, but I have also been putting cilantro on a lot of things that normally would not get cilantroed. I'm pretty happy with this situation, personally.

Anyway, gosh, you cannot take a bad picture of that pork.

Xan: Chicken piccata

If you browse the Vongsafood history, you will find many roast chickens. Lately I don't roast as many whole chickens as I used to. I got bored of it, to be honest. Now I often prefer to separate the chicken into parts, and use the dark and white meat for different purposes. In the most recent case, I used the dark meat for a pressure-cooked lentil stew (no photograph sadly, but I will share when I make it again). I saved the breasts for chicken piccata.

Boneless yet skin-on, the best of both worlds. Why do we see either boneless skinless or bone-in skin-on, even though it's hard for consumers to remove bones but easy to remove skin? Why not just leave the skin on in both cases and let us decide for ourselves if we want to remove it? I imagine the blame lies not with Tyson but with consumers who ignore this fact - that skin is easily removed - and that boneless skinless therefore sells much better. PSA: There's recent research that chicken skin is much more healthy than previously believed, being high in "good fats." I'm not sure our definition of "good fats" is done evolving, but that's what I hear lately. In any case, crispy chicken skin is delicious.

Rant aside, it makes little difference to me personally. Breaking down chickens is one of my more favorite kitchen tasks, and by your 100th chicken it's pretty quick, too. I mean, I will never be Jacques Pepin fast even after watching his chicken deboning video dozens of times on Youtube, but...either I don't have time to cook, or I have time to break down a chicken to my preference. Moreover, industrial chicken processing often does a poor job of leaving enough skin on the chicken breast, so your own results will be better.

Anyway, here is my latest chicken piccata:

Generally for any pan sauce lately I will use ghee instead of butter, and thank you mr. liquid soy lecithin for your smooth emulsifying ability.

I have two more chickens in my freezer and am seriously considering doing this again for both of them.

Not pictured above, Pacific Coast Harvest sent me celery root, so I cooked that up too.

I hate the taste of celery, and I guess I was hoping that celery root would taste different. Like you know how cilantro and coriander are from the same plant, but those people who hate cilantro (the leaves) are fine with coriander (the seeds)?  Well, celery root did taste different. It tasted a thousand times WORSE. It was like the unique celery flavor component that I hate but so intense that I couldn't eat it. Broccoli instead to go with my chicken.

Xan: Vongsafood in the time of coronavirus

After a long hiatus, Vongsafood is back due to popular request! As I write this post on March 14, 2020, Seattle hospitals are down to a 3-day supply of gloves. The coronavirus on our doorstep is keeping us away from restaurants, so we must busy ourselves in the kitchen more than usual. We have a well-stocked pantry, freezer full of meat, and a weekly vegetable delivery.

A note on coronavirus and food safety: See this great article - https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavirus-a-comprehensive-guide.html

Anyway, on to food pictures. I will go back about a month and hit the meals I managed to photograph even though I wasn't expecting to start food blogging again.

We recently signed up for a weekly vegetable delivery from Pacific Coast Harvest (PCH), which is not a CSA exactly. Each delivery is fully customizable, and they make it easy to see how far your food is coming from (so you could eat "local" if that's your thing), but you can also get stuff from CA/Mex if you want.

Pressure-cooked those carrots to make them fudge-like:

They were pretty good. But. Most people who are like, "These local organic fresh vegetables taste so much better than supermarket veg"...it's like 50% in their heads, right? They often can't tell them apart in blind taste tests, or the difference is much smaller than they had perceived, right? Well, I wish I could be one of those fully bought-in people so I could experience these more expensive vegetables as truly revelatory. They are good. But the first-order thing is buy vegetables you like, don't let them sit around too long, and prepare them well. Cut out the bitter cores out of carrots if you care so much about flavor. You will notice I did not do that here. (Doesn't mean much since they are small carrots, but one time PCH also sent me these monster fat carrots and I also didn't do it then, so what does that tell you).

PCH also has some other items besides produce, like fresh pasta, which has resulted in us eating more pasta than normal. Now that I know from Mom that al dente noodles and pasta have a relatively low glycemic index due to some side-effect of the noodle-making process lengthening the gluten chains (Mom, can you provide a link? not sure I got the details right), we have also been happy to eat more of them.

With pasta in hand, I made this Caramelized Shallot Pasta from NYT Cooking that everyone has been raving about. I thought it was good, although not raveworthy. Caramelized shallots and anchovies are great, but I already add them (and many other "flavor bombs") to food on the regular. So how much of the hype is "This is a truly great combination of flavors!" vs "This is great compared to my normal cooking that doesn't make gratuitous use of flavor bombs." Personally, I have been logging and rating everything I cooked in the past month, and this pasta got the lowest rating so far ("ok"), which seems a bit unfair in retrospect, but still not exactly a ringing endorsement. You probably shouldn't listen to me, though, when so many other people love this dish. Actually, I would love some of you to try it and report back to Vongsafood!

My ratings have so far ranged from "ok" to "good" to "good!" to "great" to "great!" (Only a matter of time before variations on "bad" show up; we have been lucky this month). What I'm more excited about is this next pasta sauce, which received a "great!" rating. I'm actually using the same fresh pasta in both cases. But the sauce is quite different. OK so there's Italian sausage, which is a big unfair advantage. But the "secret ingredient" that really gets me excited is a pressure-caramelized globe eggplant. The eggplant came out a deep brown, and I lightly pureed it and added it to a fairly standard tomato sauce which was left over from another purpose (pizza).

It's very easy to pressure-caramelize eggplant: 500g eggplant, 30g water, 2.5g baking soda for 20 minutes at high pressure. This will caramelize the eggplant straight through by lowering the caramelization point (via baking soda increasing pH) and increasing the boiling point (via pressure). We have talked about pressure caramelizing vegetables on this blog before. But I never thought to try it on eggplant before, nor can I find any evidence of other people pressure-caramelizing eggplant. This is my new solution to the problem of eggplant: full of water, sucks up oil, generally annoying to get any browning -- and the most common variety in American supermarkets (globe eggplant) is the worst performer in all these categories! So instead of dealing with these issues, we rig it so the eggplant will caramelize in a wet environment, even though browning normally doesn't occur until well above the boiling point.

There's another problem I have with eggplant, which is that certain menbers in my household will eat it. This preparation solved that problem!

What I want to try next: Caramelize other parts of the sauce at the same time as the eggplant. Onions, that's a given. They aren't great out of the pressure cooker if your goal is stand-alone caramelized onions (inferior flavor and you will be left with a lot of liquid to strain or boil off), but as a sauce component it might work well and save enough time to justify the tradeoff. And what about the tomatoes themselves? An issue here is that tomatoes are acidic, which fights against the baking soda for attaining a minimal pH to caramelize at 240 degrees. And you generally don't want to add too much baking soda to things; you will start to taste it. But on the other hand, I know Modernist Cuisine has a recipe for caramelized ketchup, so I'll look into that. The solution may involve tomato paste.

UPDATE: I tried it! It earned my first "Bad!" rating! Vongsafooders, I went too far. I probably should have anticipated this. Just as pressure-caramelized butternut squash puree is too rich to eat on its own, you don't want to caramelize your entire pasta sauce. So now I have two pounds of a new flavor bomb in my freezer...

Anyway, I guess this turned into a pasta essay. So against my better judgment, I will share one other slapped-together lunch which tasted surprisingly good. Mind, it does not look good. But, I had leftover angel hair (Owen likes pasta), leftover guacamole (Owen likes guac). And did you know you can poach an egg in a coffee mug in the microwave? So I just combined these things for a quick lunch and it was pretty satisfying.

Don't get me wrong. The Caramelized Shallot Pasta was better. But points for novelty and simplicity, and look at that egg!

PCH has also been sending me eggs, by the way. The above is not one of them. The PCH eggs have a deep orange yolk, which people strongly prefer in taste tests. By this I mean that they prefer the deep orangeness, not the flavor. When regular eggs are dyed orange, no one can tell them apart any more. I am cursed to know this, but I still do like the experience of orange eggs. Hey, you know what else turns them orange AND improves the actual outcome? Salting the beaten eggs 15 minutes before cooking!

It's good to be back, but I'd better stop here. I will get to non-pastas in a follow-up post.

Blueberry Crisp

It's been a long time since anyone posted here, and I have some Halloween themed treats that in particular need to be posted.  But I just thoroughly enjoyed my Easter dessert, so I thought I'd post it!

There were lots of berries at low prices at the greengrocer's this past week, and after a quality check, I settled on taking home a few pints of blueberries.  I can't remember the last time I baked with blueberries, so I was looking forward to searching up a recipe.  I wasn't very enamored of the cakes, crumbles, and tarts, so I settled on making a blueberry crisp, very simple, following Martha Stewart's recipe. It turned out very tasty indeed!

Xan: Linden and Chris Wedding!

We had a great week in England for Linden and Chris' wedding in June!

I've been going to a lot of weddings lately, but this was a unique wedding for me. The microscopic size -- 14 of us in all -- meant that, much like Antman, we could do some amazing things that have never been physically possible at larger scales. We all spent the week at Middleton Hall and cooked our own food and went on day trips to interesting places. As every cook knows, it's three times as hard to cook for twice as many people in a foreign kitchen, and four times as hard to clean up after them. But we just about managed it, and had a great time. We pulled off some real upscale dining, at least in the sense that the numbers on our bathroom scales have moved in the general direction of up!

You will not find any pictures from the ceremony here, because this is a food blog, and because Linden asked us not to eat during the wedding ceremony. Sorry to rain on your parade, but you can't very well expect sunshine from a wedding in northern England, can you?

Even so, I will include a few pictures that could plausibly be considered food pictures from some perspective. For instance, from a puffin's perspective, a beak full of minnows is a hearty lunch:

Puffin on Farne Islands, captured in flight by holding binoculars to the lens of a camera phone.

Furthermore, it must be said that from an Icelander's perspective, the puffin itself is lunch:

We did visit Iceland on the way home, and yes, when in Rome...

And from a French perspective, the walls of Bamburgh castle are lined with escargot:

I just like this photo.

You know what, I'm just going to post my favorite photos and I'll be damned if they don't have something to do with food.

Here's a sheep -- eating!

"Sheep in Sheep's Clothing"

Here's a mushroom -- calling all hobbits!

Moosh-roooms!

Here's a delicious Arctic tern-over!

Photo credit: Dad.

You see how it goes. Just you try and stop me! I spent just about 30 years mastering the English language and it will damn well say what I say it says! We actually have to discuss the matter of the terns on the food blog, because if I had to pick one word in the entire English language to describe terns, it would be PECKISH!

If I had to pick a second word in the English language to describe terns, it would be graceful. If I had to pick a third, it would be misanthropic -- they hate people. But English lacks the word I'm really looking for, which is a searing hatred for all multicellular lifeforms not currently involved in the raising of their young.

Calling all peckish graceful misanthropes! Anthropos sighted! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!

The incredible thing is that terns seem to seek out opportunities to take offense, in much the same way that squirrels seek out opportunities to make you feel guilty for turning them into roadkill. Unlike other birds, terns build their nests right along human walkways, and then they go ballistic and dive-bomb anyone who walks by*. There will be pecks, so be sure to wear a hat.

[*Actually, a better theory is that while terns hate humans, they hate other birds even more. So they nest inches from the humans because at least the seagulls won't bother them there.]

And it's not just pecks. Before we visited the Farne Islands, we were told to abandon all hope -- everyone gets pooped on. Indeed, the ranger sported a convincingly white-streaked hat. However, this hardly being my first rodeo, I immediately reassured everyone that only Dad would be pooped on. I can't say why birds always go for him, but I am pleased to say that my preregistered prediction proved 100% correct as usual. The "streak" continues!

O tern of terns, I shall name thee Peckin-Pa.

As you can see, the Farne Islands were a highlight for me. There were also some nice castles, and Grandma enjoyed a round of Skittles:

Do you really want to be the one arguing that Skittles aren't a food?

Rehearsal Dinner

The wedding week activities were fun, but at some point we really do need to get cooking. Linden asked me to handle the rehearsal dinner. This was to be the big meal of the wedding, and since I like constrained optimization problems, I gladly accepted. I needed a menu of foods that (a) scale well to 14 people, (b) are robust to an arbitrarily lousy kitchen, (c) could be cooked in a 3-hour window, and (d) satisfied an extensive list of dietary restrictions.

Empirically, it is pretty clear to me that constraints in the kitchen generally enhance creativity. But before I even got cooking, I faced a more significant constraint: the dress code was formal, yet I couldn't very well cook in a suit! I solved this problem by purchasing Genuine Chef Clothes, which are surprisingly cheap on Amazon:

Photo by Chris Day

It was a good call, too.  I got carrot soup all over myself! (Honestly, who designs an immersion blender without a splash guard? The British, that's who! Soup is done when it sticks to the walls!)

I will be wearing my chef clothes ironically at all future dinner parties.

Anyway, we started with a first course of pressure-caramelized carrot soup, forged in the fires of Mt. Doom:

Linden and Chris each got one-carrot rings in their soups.

This is an easy soup, provided you have access to the high pressures found in the heart of Mt. Doom, which, at Vongsafood, we do. Caramelization reactions ordinarily begin at upwards of 300 F, well above the boiling point of water. If you want to caramelize carrots in a skillet, you must first boil off the surface moisture before the carrots start to brown -- and even then, only on the exterior. But if you double the pressure, the boiling point rises to 250. And if you add a bit of baking soda to create an alkaline environment, the caramelization point drops to 230, below the new boiling point! The upshot of this is that you can now caramelize your carrots in a wet environment. The pressure forces baking soda inside the carrots, which end up brown on the inside. We are talking about perhaps a 50-fold increase in the concentration of delicious caramelization reaction byproducts. Then all that's left is to carefully puree the carrots, thin with carrot juice and garnish.

For the main course, we roasted a couple of chickens and some leg of lamb:

I didn't take enough pictures. But if you want my opinion, the soup and the chicken were pretty good. The lamb was probably in my bottom quartile, but that's an unfair comparison since normally there is a lot of technology involved.

I was let off the hook for dessert. Yuandi made a lemon tart, which was really good!

Parade of yellows: Lemon tart with mango sorbet

I have a theory that yellow foods are the best on average. There aren't many of them, but they really are an amazing group. Anyway, you should all be very impressed with this lemon tart. In the grand scheme of things, meat is pretty forgiving. Roast lamb will always be okay, even if the oven is off by 50 F. But baking in an unfamiliar oven? Good luck!

Hungry for more?

Here are some other yummy foods we ate over the week.

Linden's pork ragout

"Who Kippers the Kippers?"

Fish and chips

"Now you salmon, now you don't..."

Duck Egg McMuffin

Inadvertently pulled chicken tikka masala

Unnecessary Miscellany

I will never forget...

Were-rabbit sighting! Dear Linden, I'm definitely NOT implying that rabbits could ever be a food.

Chris VA with trusty pun whisk

"Cayenne, Cayenne, wherefore art thou Cayenne? A pepper by any other name would taste as spicy..."

Photo by Dad "It Was Worth a Bit of Tern Poop" McPapagrumps

Conclusion

Linden and Chris are married!!!

...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Xan: Sous Vide Brisket!

This brisket was brined, cooked sous vide at 155 F for 48 hours, then roasted in the oven for a few hours to develop the bark. 155 F is a nice compromise -- the texture is still like typical barbecue, but noticeably juicier.

Next time I'm going down to 24 hours, which should make it even juicier. 

Barbecue is such a religion. I feel like I'm expected to have an opinion. But my only opinion is that it's a silly thing to be religious about. I'm still waiting to encounter a regional BBQ style that isn't delicious. I guess I like KC barbecue sauce the best, but that's probably just the sugar talking.

On the other hand, BBQ a great thing to be scientific about. If you're friends with science, you can get away with things like not having a smoker. Liquid smoke is legit, my friends. And there's no need for a smoke ring, because smoke rings don't contribute to taste. Actually, you can create a "smoke ring" by brining meat in curing salts for a few hours, but never in history has there been a better time to call something lipstick on a pig*. It's cosmetic!

* Sorry, I just couldn't save this one up for the next time we are cooking pulled pork.

Kathleen: Weekend Baking

This weekend I was meant to go for a long ramble with a couple of my friends.  Sadly, our walk was cancelled (especially sad since the weather was quite good), and I felt it would be a waste of my weekend to use it watching TV and playing games.  So in addition to errands, mowing the lawn, cleaning, and so forth, I have done some baking.

This week the greengrocers had some very cheap blackberries on offer.  Cheap blackberries is not often something I come across, so of course I had to make a blackberry pie.  This is my first latticed blackberry pie in twenty years.  Obviously I have a bit of practice doing lattice ahead of me, but I'm immensely pleased with the results.

Yesterday was more normal cooking; I made a red curry and basic muffins.  The muffins are the same type that Mum used to make when we were children, nothing special but my favorite muffins to make.  This is the muffins, 36 hours after they came out of the oven.