Red Fusion's Journal

Subject:	The Egg Project
Time:	8:00 pm.

The Egg Project

I made all-day eggs today:

Starting with cold eggs, place them in boiling water and reduce the heat to a simmer. Leave them for six to eight minutes depending on the size of the egg. Because my stove is frustrating and I had trouble getting the water to come back to a boil after the cold eggs brought it down, these cooked for 7:30.

Immediately place the eggs in an ice bath with lots of ice. I didn't use enough ice, and it melted very shortly after the eggs were added, which meant that the yolk stayed warm. The idea is to cool the eggs down fast enough that although the white is hard-boiled, the yolk stays soft -- even runny, if you're on the short end of the window. I was aiming for runny; between the 7:30 boil time and the insufficient ice, I didn't get it. (Keep reading, it turns out I am happy with what I got.)

Leave the eggs in the ice bath for 3-4 hours. Peel them and put them in a marinade. It's worth noting that although these eggs were fresher than I usually care to use for hard-boiled eggs, they peeled just fine after a morning-long ice bath.

The traditional marinade is one part soy sauce to one part water to half part sugar (I used maple syrup, I'm out of sugar), with an addition of dark soy and slices of ginger. I made one batch of that, and one batch of spicy marinade: one part Louisiana hot sauce to one part water, bolstered with Marmite and maple.

Leave the eggs in the marinade for 3-5 hours. Afterwards, they look like this:

Inside, they look like this:

The white picks up some of the taste of the marinade, but not enough to "pickle" it, which I was a little afraid of. You do get a distinct vinegar taste with the hot sauce eggs -- a little less than what I hoped pickled eggs would taste like, in other words far far less than what they do taste like. The spice is not as strong as I expected; next time there will be booster shots of habanero.

With the soy sauce eggs, the ginger is prominent (I used fresh, which may have something to do with it). I don't taste any maple in either egg, or any particular sweetness, so I don't know how necessary it is.

But here's the thing. Look at the yolk. It looks like an underdone hard-boiled yolk, the kind of thing we hate to find when we're making deviled eggs -- it looks like it should be chalky on the outside, rubbery on the inside ...

... and oh my God is it not.

This is unlike any egg yolk I have had. It's unctuous. It's creamy. None of the chalkiness of a hard-boiled egg, even on that edge there where it sure as hell looks chalky. None of the runniness of a fried egg either, though. It's its own thing. It's ... it's like the pork belly of egg. This is awesome.

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.

Time:

8:08 pm.

I asked about this on eGullet, but I'll ask here too:

Has anyone slaughtered and cleaned a mature hen?

My mother has two dozen hens that aren't laying anymore, and told me I can have any of them if I "take care" of them myself -- killing and cleaning them. I'm good with a knife, and I can get a duck down to its constituent parts in a couple minutes, but I've never had to eviscerate or de-feather anything.

Mature poultry is really only good for braising, and judging from the many roosters I've cooked, the breast meat isn't even good for that. So it's not a bargain exactly -- there'd be a lot of labor for little meat. Though it is still meat I won't find elsewhere -- it's perfect for coq au vin, which I don't bother to make anymore since I don't have an Asian market I can buy rooster from.

If I pass on this, am I missing out?

Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.

Time:

3:09 pm.

I don't think this is of any particular use to anyone reading this, but a friend getting her first apartment asked me for advice about cooking for yourself affordably, so to sum it up --

Stop buying boneless skinless chicken breasts. Where I live, they're the same price as steak, literally three times the cost of chicken on the bone, for the luxury of someone else's thirty seconds of labor. If I can't talk you out of cooking white meat, at least stop overpaying for it.

The best bet, really, is to buy a whole chicken. It only takes an hour to cook, only two or three minutes of which require any attention from you. Cold chicken is better than cold beef or cold pork, and you can make chicken salad, chicken sandwiches, chicken soup, chicken fried rice, during the week. It'll cost you about the same as lunch at Taco Bell.

Stop being grossed out about food.

Stop being grossed out about food.

Stop being grossed out about food.

You can't be an adult if you can't cook, and you can't cook much if food makes you say ew. Most people think raw chicken is weird to handle at first, but you get over it quickly unless you continue to indulge in the revulsion. It just isn't a big deal. If food grosses you out, you'll wind up spending more paying other people to touch it for you than you are on the food itself, even if you're not eating out -- and that's just ridiculous, especially for anyone on a budget. This is why so many people rely on unhealthy things like Hot Pockets for their fast cheap meals -- they don't require premeditation or physical contact with ingredients.

Stop thinking in terms of recipes. If you think in terms of recipes, you won't get past "oh I can't make that because I don't have X." Take some of that leftover chicken and toss it in the pan with leftover rice, soy sauce, and whatever vegetables you have around. Don't skip fried rice just because you don't have any eggs or onions.

When you're first starting cooking, perceived time-consumption will be greater than once you're used to it, and you'll come home feeling unmotivated and will wind up ordering pizza or eating ice cream. Either fight that for a few months, or shift as much of your cooking to the weekend as possible, and get over any reluctance about eating leftovers. Making something like a chicken -- as opposed to a pot of stew -- is an especially good thing because it's flexible, you can do multiple things with the "leftovers."

Stop being grossed out by food! Given the speed with which some people abandon leftovers, you'd think that cooking actually reduced the shelf life of food.

With the exception of lasagna, Asian noodle dishes keep better than Italian pasta dishes.

Learn to make soup, because it's pretty easy to make a single serving of it.

Rice poisoning is not uncommon. It's caused by bacteria which thrive in cooked rice left at room temperature for long periods. Don't leave your pot of rice on the stove overnight -- put it in the fridge.

Keep rice, noodles, a bag of frozen peas, a sauce of some kind, and Zip-Loc freezer bags on hand. The best way to buy meat is to buy the "family packs" (when applicable) and redivide them among the Zip-Loc bags, freezing everything you aren't going to use the next day. The bags are handy for leftovers too.

Like I said, this is probably all obvious to anyone reading this.

Comments: Read 12 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Savu Smoker Bags
Time:	4:09 pm.

Savu Smoker Bags

The deal with these is that they're heavy foil bags with wood chips (and "hardwood syrup and natural sugars") in the lining, so that you put food in the bag, seal it, put it in a very hot oven to get the smoke going, and let it smoke for a while. No smoke sets off your alarm, the food cooks, bingo. They're single-use.

It looks like you can fit about two, two and a half pounds of food in the bag comfortably.

This is essentially an oven bag + smoke, which means you're steaming the food -- instructions for chicken call for removing the skin, which would just come out flabby and rubbery otherwise. That's a major limitation, but for some things it won't matter.

I got four bags. I want to try a variety of different things -- like what happens if I fill a bag with chili?

Bag One:

1 ear, corn on the cob

Nicely smoky. Tasting it, you understand why they warn that smoked foods are carcinogenic -- this tastes pleasantly bad for you.

It's a little overcooked since corn really doesn't need to cook as long as the other items, but that's not a big deal.

Hot Italian sausages (uncooked)

They're so hot that the smoke flavor is very light, but it's there.

1 hot dog, skinless

No real noticeable smoke flavor, despite being the smallest item in the bag. Is it because of the mild smoke flavoring in hot dogs? Is it because hot dogs are already cooked? I don't know.

So far: This is a pretty light smoke -- the kitchen smells smokier than the food tastes, though there's no visible smoke around -- but the smoke is definitely there. The steam issue means this will be a very different process from a barbecue pit, or even a home smoker -- but I'm looking at it as potentially analogous to the Bialetti Moka: it isn't espresso, but it certainly isn't plain coffee either.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Time:

8:43 pm.

I had slow-cooked pulled pork for dinner. This is the only time of year I can find skin-on cuts of pork here, so you better believe I take advantage of that -- cooked skin-side-down, at the end of ten hours the skin of the pork picnic was unctuous and rich from the fond at the bottom of the pan.

This is a fatty cut of pork, so I like a very vinegary sauce. This was very very simple, but worked perfectly:

1 part ketchup
1 part cider vinegar

And then smoked maple syrup and Crystal hot sauce, in equal proportion, until it tasted as spicy as I wanted it to.

The ketchup is just to thicken it enough that the bun doesn't get soggy -- this isn't a molasses-y tomatoey barbecue sauce, this is very vinegary. You wouldn't want it on chicken, I don't think, except maybe a very fatty thigh.

Peppadews -- which are spicy, a little sweet, crisp when cold, and lightly pickled -- are an amazing complement to pulled pork, I found out. Tomorrow, with the leftovers, I may eschew the sauce and just chop up some Peppadews.

Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.

Time:

6:38 pm.

Some of my favorite burger things, with Memorial Day coming up:

1: If you aren't grilling, use cast-iron. Not a covered pan, no finishing in the oven, none of that. Hot cast-iron that's almost (or beyond almost) smoking when you put the patty on it, three to five minutes a side for medium-rare to medium, depending on how cold and thick the patty is. Ideally, salt the burger on both sides, it helps to form the crust -- and the crust, the deep dark layer on both sides, is why you're using cast-iron instead of winding up with some grey patty.

If you have so many people over that you need to use the oven broiler to crowd 12 patties in at once, so that you're really just steaming them (which is what's going to happen if you don't have three inches between each patty), send many of those people home. Or don't do burgers. Or do them a couple at a time and make people wait. Burgers are sandwiches made to order, and so they're actually kind of terrible for large groups unless you can stagger the eating enough that someone can just sit there making burgers, and people will materialize to eat them as you do.

2: Grind up bacon to mix in with the patty. If you chop it up and freeze it first, it grinds just fine in your Cuisinart or stick blender. The more well-done you cook your burger, the more noticeable the benefit here is: it "bastes the burger from the inside" (that's Dad Talk for you, but basting a burger is not actually something you want to do), which keeps it from drying out at the extremes.

3: Food does not magically stick together and become a patty just because you pushed it a little, or we'd all be doing that to oranges all the time just for fun. If your beef is too lean, not only is it more likely to dry out, it's more likely to fall apart; sirloin is likely to fall apart because of the lack of connective tissue (which is what you want in burgers) compared to ground chuck, beef, or round. Hamburger recipes that use any kind of binder or filler like breadcrumbs and eggs are

a) not hamburgers, dammit, they're just small meatloaves -- and those can be good, but they're no more the same thing than a "hamburger steak" is a steak

b) often the product of Depression-era meat-stretching techniques or granola-era meat-leannening frenzies.

Beef tastes good. Good burgers take advantage of that instead of covering it up.

4: Okay, this is horrible. This is terrible. Do not do this. But there's that place that's been on the Food Network and whatnot that does butter burgers. No, not Culver's. Yes, I know they call them that. That is not these. Culver's just butters their buns. These use butter ... as a condiment. Like a big pat, big hunk of butter, enough for six damn ears of corn, just sitting there on the burger. It melts and pools up on the plate. Add some hot sauce and it's this crazy Buffalo sauce thing. I can't bring myself to use the quantities of butter I've seen used at that place, and even the (only comparatively) modest amounts of butter I've used make me go "oh fuck, I better not do this again for a year." But you know what, it's probably not much worse than bacon, cheese, and mayo, none of which you will want on a burger that is as dripping with butter as freshly-dipped lobster. And it's probably still lower in fat than a Big Mac or something.

5: Heinz 57.

I only tried it the year before last, having never really thought twice about it before. I'm not sure I had even known that Heinz 57 is a non-ketchup Heinz product. It's great.

6: Pimento cheese stuffed burgers.

Make two thin patties. Put a cold lump of pimento cheese on one of them, and press the other down on top. Err on the side of using too little cheese.

7: You actually can baste the burger after all:

Once in a while I want a really spicy hamburger, and there is a particular kind of spice I love -- the spice, sweetness, and saltiness of Louisiana hot sauce, which is like a slightly tamer Tabasco sauce with, to be honest, fuller flavor.

After you flip the burger -- while using cast-iron, because if you did this on the grill you would probably kill somebody -- shake a lot of Louisiana hot sauce on it as it cooks. Like, a lot. Bathe that motherfucker. Cover it in sauce, to the point that the sauce that has dripped off the patty is reducing and will stick to the sides and sort of glaze everything.

Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	fruitcake
Time:	12:21 pm.

Fruitcake Season Begins Now

This is for my benefit. P.S. to me: bookmark the fruitcake tag.

Soaking in cupboard: home-candied blood orange sections and Barry Farms candied orange peel, in homemade triple sec with Regan's orange bitters.

(This will go into a chocolate-orange-cinnamon fruitcake, which is largely the same as my chocolate-cherry fruitcake but sub candied oranges for the dried cherries, add Ceylon cinnamon, clove, and bergamot oil, and use triple sec and lightly tea-infused whiskey as the alcohols.)

Hershey's new premium dark chocolates look like they'll save me a bundle on fruitcake this year, because -- from what I can tell trying one by itself, not yet baked into anything -- they seem better than Baker's, Lindt, or Ghirardelli, and are cheaper and more easily available than anything else.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	ramps
Time:	7:33 pm.

Ramps are wild leeks, native to North America, rarely if ever cultivated, and found most commonly along the Appalachians. Supermarkets aren't likely to have them, but farmer's markets sometimes will.

They're pungent, maybe a little like the armpit of an onion when they're raw, closest to garlic than the rest of the allium family. You use the bulb, the purple stem, and the green.

This year, I've done this with ramps:

Froze some.

Pickled the bulbs of others, like pickled garlic.

Chopped one up and covered it in olive oil (previously seasoned with marjoram, thyme, peppercorns, pepperoncini, and oven-dried tomatoes -- this was leftover oil after I used the last of the tomatoes, preserved in the oil last summer). I'll use that seasoned oil on sandwiches, probably steak or cold roast beef. Maybe pork roast and raab.

Fried potatoes with bacon and ramps, the classic ramp dish.

Eggs scrambled with ramps and bacon.

Puttanesca sauce: tomatoes, a little carrot (like as little as you would use of garlic in ordinary tomato sauce), diced kalamata olives and ramps, onion, anchovy, tuna roe, crushed red pepper. Believe it or not, the olives overpowered the ramps here; I tend to favor a puttanesca that's heavy on the olives and allium, with everything else in the background.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Time:

9:17 am.

The smell of fresh rhubarb (both "not cooked" and "recently picked," not this $12/pound stuff they had at the grocery two months ago) reminds me of growing up. I had no idea rhubarb was something you could buy, at the time -- most of my friends didn't know what it was, even, except that it grew at our house on the other side of the raspberry patch. I grew up eating it raw.

It wasn't until later that my mother made pie with it, though she may have made some for my grandparents and sent it home with them -- I knew they'd had it before. I had asked her to make a grape pie, and she said I wouldn't like it; she was right; asked her to make a raspberry pie, she said I wouldn't like it; she was right; asked her to make a rhubarb pie, and when she relented, I loved it.

Anyway, I got a bunch of rhubarb from my mother's rhubarb patch -- a different one than the one just mentioned, different house. I frozen a third of it -- which as you know if you've done it, is practically like cooking it, because when it thaws it'll be soft and will have released seemingly its own volume in liquid. A third of it went into a strawberry-rhubarb pie. The rest I'm fiddling with a bit, and I'll get plenty more in the next month:

Roasted rhubarb
Rhubarb with duck
Rhubarb gastrique
Rhubarb with custard
Rhubarb with fish -- it's sweet-sour the same way pomegranate is, so it's perfect for Platonic fish
Rhubarb khoresh (a meat stew with rhubarb)

I also have a bunch of raw rhubarb sitting in a jar of sugar. As the sugar leeches the water out of the rhubarb and turns to syrup, I add a little more sugar. I'm trying to get and use that raw flavor, the same way I've done with strawberries in the past. I may make sorbet with the result, I may just combine with cold water for "rhubarb-ade" (maybe with some added lemon or lime juice).

Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	if you lived here you'd be home by now
Time:	9:53 am.

More stuff you probably can't make because you don't have my idiosyncratic kitchen:

Okay, I've been hooked on this yuanyang stuff: a mixture of coffee, black tea, sugar, and milk. You can have it hot or cold. I've made it a ton of different ways, with good tea, not-so-great tea, drip coffee, Moka, milk, half and half, condensed milk, basically whatever I happen to have handy. I like it to have just enough strong tea to be noticeably tannic, with just enough coffee and sweetness to tame the tannicity. That's the balance I aim for.

So anyway. I'm low on sugar. I have a cup of sugar, and four lemons, which means I want to keep that sugar for lemonade, dig? It's why I have the lemons. I don't want a hot dog bun situation on my hands, where I use up the sugar and have these lemons unaded.

My kitchen has lots of almost-sugars in it. The honeys and syrups don't count, because their numbers have dwindled: corbezzolo honey and New Zealand honeydew are not things you use in beverages, and they cost a fortune; birch syrup, smoked maple syrup, and bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup are also prohibitively rare.

The syrup that resulted when I candied some vodka-soaked watermelon, I used that for a pitcher of cherry Kool Aid.

For the coffee, I almost used this strong strong vanilla bean syrup, and I might for another batch; but in looking around, I found an ingredient I don't use much: Filipino caramelized coconut milk. It's gooey and brown and thick, and it's just dulce de leche made with coconut milk instead of dairy milk -- cooked down with sugar until it caramelizes.

"Never had coconut coffee," I thought to myself, "but then again, I'm adding tea, too..."

So hot black tea, drip coffee, caramelized coconut milk, they all went in, and for good measure I added a few heaping teaspoons of a Filipino instant ginger drink.

It's really good. You probably can't make it at home. I probably won't be able to make it too many more times, since I don't have a Filipino market nearby anymore.

Comments: Add Your Own.

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