Low & Slow

How Fast or Slow do you Simmer Corned Beef?

Moderately slow, you might even want to poach your corned beef. 

Later in the week I'll blog about the concept of simmering: temperature, how it's different from poaching and boiling and why a cook would want to simmer - what's the point of having a nitro burning stove top if you aren't going to turn it up?

One of the very first good posts I did on this blog was about corned beef - you can read it here. Recap for those unwilling, unable or uninterested in linking...Corned refers to salting meat with grains (corn is a generic term for grain) of salt. Historically, corning could be done to any meat - lamb, ham or non-brisket, and in the UK corned beef means any meat from a can, while in the US corned beef means beef brisket. 

In modernity, most corned beef is not going to be studded with large pellets of salt. I wouldn't call brining the current fad, but in lieu of air drying, aging or canning, brining is the go to method these days for imparting flavor and moisture (this is related to how livestock is raised in the new millennium, younger heads spend less time in the field, if at all). In Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie, the author recommends 5 days of brining to 3 hours of cooking. Ruhlman is a smart dude, thoughtful cook and a good writer - there is no reason to doubt him or suggest this style of cooking is so anachronistic we might as well brine in wooden barrels.

But there are basically there are 3 different temperature ranges to braise tough meat like a brisket:

• 135-150ºf if you are going to cook for 12-48 hours. 
• 160-170ºf  for cooking times ranging 8-12 hours.
• 180-190ºf if you only have 3-4 hours to cook. 

Who has time for 48 hours of low temperature cooking? Your crock pot/slow cooker does. It's hard to keep a stove top, even a back burner, even with lids at  consistently low temperature. Ovens are worse, even if a heavy duty cast iron pot that will retain heat, the lowest setting is around 200, the heat comes on and off frequently. And even though I am nonplused by leaving the house with oven or a burner on low, this is not an activity I can talk into participating in. "Want to get a couple beers?", sure, they say. "Want to see a bad movie?", only if that smug Bradley Cooper isn't in it, they respond. "Place it on the smallest burner at the lowest setting and go to bed" and they tell me they don't want to die in their sleep. 

I am making pot roast right now. I should have set it on the stove last night. Instead of doing 15 minutes work, I took some cough syrup, watched an episode of Parks and Rec and then slept for 10 hours. Yes, I was exhausted. So in order to have fork tender pot roast by 7 tonight, I'm poaching at around 160 for about 9 hours. 

If your cooking medium never gets too much above the desired temperature (rare is 135 ish) it is impossible to overcook something. The tough muscle fiber, like the kind found in brisket, dissolves at 160º degrees, meat dries out at 140º. The longer you can afford to brine or keep the cooking temp below 120, the more the meat's connective tissues will break down. It is a balancing act. The best answer is always low and slow. The question is, how much time do you have. 

3 Short Subjects

So Paula Deen has diabetes. Ms. Deen, along with her sons, either host or appear on 16 to 23 shows on the Food Network at any given moment. In the past, Ms. Deen has been criticized for her high fat, high salt, pour some sugar on everything recipes. She co-authored a children's cookbook that angered the ladies on The View by suggesting the young ones eat cheesecake for breakfast. 

It seems the internet was invented for this moment of schadenfreude.Anthony Bourdain has a few funny and not particularly supportive comments here. Of course the vegans are out in force, for which group is more likely to let someone else's misfortune pass without scoring their own points. (Maybe TeeVee preachers win that). Although Ms. Deen has had diabetes for three years, it wasn't until she took a reported 7 figure endorsement deal to push a drug that Huffington Post suggests maybe has some issues, that she bravely decided to make her illness public. And everyone is piling on, suggesting the very unhealthy food she cooks may have something to do with her current predicament. I object to this last point, I have little sympathy for Ms. Deen, who looks like she has spent more of her life scheduling cosmetic surgery  than exercising. Then not surprisingly, she decided to push a pill rather than a lifestyle change, but it's not individual foods that are good or bad, it's diets in their totality that are healthy or unhealthy. You can have my buttermilk fried chicken and cold beer when you pry it from my greasy fingers.

I like Whole Foods.It's located one block from work, I can easily pick up their 365 brand foods - not an endorsement, but these branded foods offer a high quality to price ratio - the cornerstone of how I shop for groceries. That and daily specials, which have to be loss-leaders, help improve the quality of my diet. I also appreciate some but not all their policies on food - Sometimes I just need freakin cornstarch and that isn't going to frustratingly happen at Whole Foods, but with fish and seafood, I just want dinner, not 20 minutes of calculating whether the catch was sustainable or not. I'm glad they have a system in place so all I have to do is decide if my secondary protocol for shopping - the price to desire ratio aligns. And it looks like big box stores are catching on to this trend - this could mean less tilapia and catfish, more ocean fish for me.

I was recently challenged to write something exciting about parsnips. Instead, I chose to write some funny things about parsnips. Although the parsnip has a history of being funny, there is a whole episode of Blackadder based on the shape of an unseen parsnip, I find constraints always help, not limit comedy. But that's just me and maybe you don't think this is a chucklely as I do.

More next week

Classical Elements in Cooking

A friend and I were emailing back and forth about making stock – Be sure that the bones are meaty or add meat. Some advise onion only but I like to add carrot, celery, onions, thyme, parsley and bay. Season at the end but season generously, the most heavy handed salter won't come close to the sodium content in canned stock/broth. And take caution not to overcook the bones, if the stock isn't strong enough – don't keep cooking, strain and reduce.

Reduction, a concentration of flavors by boiling off excess liquid, is a staple in the cook's tool kit. It's a little more nuanced than throwing anything/everything in a pot, covering with water and walking away. Before you can even get to the reduction stage of you have to extract the flavors from your ingredients. And this series of actions isn't being all fussy and French for the sake of showmanship – Bones (to roast or not, that is a question) take longer to cook than veg (with beef reductions, tomato paste, a common ingredient, has already been cooked), dried herbs a little before the initial cooking is complete but fresh ones are added at the very end. Than there is the straining, the return to heat and the idea of when to stop.

Reductions are a type of cooking that is at once largely unsophisticated and requires, if not experience, at least forethought.

As we were hashing technique and ingredients in emails, I was reading passages from Adam Gopnik's The Table Comes First. Like his Paris to the Moon, “Table” is both a joy and joyful, as Mr. Gopnik brings his well-honed skills of thinking and writing to the subject of food. After spending years as an American in France, or as a successful writer/traveler, it would be easy enough for him to pursue the popular line of thinking of food as hedonism. He does acknowledge eating as a pleasure, but not in the chasing down of a little hard to obtain morsel and enjoying more than you or I could. Instead cooking and eating are a cornerstone of past remembrances, but most of all, he presents food as something that is at it's best when it's shared.

The conversation about stock proper, flashed me to an earlier passage in “Table” where Mr. Gopnik quotes Mark Peel who said, “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes. We don't tell you we used 1 ½ pounds of butter and cream with 1 ¾ pounds of potatoes. You don't need to know.” I once horrified a dinner guest by throwing a stick of butter in riced potatoes before setting them in the oven to keep warm. “That's indulgent”, she said with the tone of a Lutheran in a North Dakotan winter, a side of her I had never experienced before. “Don't worry, the potatoes will serve 8”, although I was secretly glad she didn't see the cup of cream and the container of sour cream that went in before she arrived.

That quote about potatoes in turn made me wonder about the results 1000s of miles away. The people my friend was cooking for, they will notice her effort. That stock will be in the pot of soup they recollect when they think of soup. That stock will be the reason they want seconds of the braised chicken. They will understand the food is good, better than same dish than the last time it was served. But will they know why: The effort, the thought, the straining, the reduction, the cooking until the stock was just heavy enough to cling to the tasting spoon. Or is that the true joy of cooking, making it all look like magic rather than work. Is it like Mark Peel suggested, we don't need to know or would knowing make us appreciate the effort more?