Simmering Prerec: Boiling Water

How to Boil Water, both the book and TeeVee iterations, are aimed at basic cooking, first semester in the kitchen type of Cooking 101. Today's topic, how to simmer liquid, is a little more abstract, definitely a varsity level topic.

Boiling is an easy. Water boils at 212 degrees at sea level. 212 f isn't that high of a temperature – ovens mostly run at 350-375, deep frying 350, stovetop surfaces reach over 1,000. It isn't that cooking food in boiling water, the lowest temperature of that group, offers the greatest perils to food – this blog will continually posit two ideas:

1. Foods are neither good nor bad – Is a Big Mac better or worse than acai berry probiotic smoothie? Eh. Is the occasional burger a big deal if you eat plenty of fruit and veg and are physically active? As opposed to being vegan chain-smoking, couch potato who eats only highly processed foods like tofu and cheetos (yes these people exist). It's really about the diet in totality.
2. People need to turn the temperature down. It's not just the high temperatures; culturally we need to slow down and enjoy both the cooking process and the eating.

Boiling isn't always the best method for cooking in liquid for two reasons. First, boiling is a somewhat violent act. Yes, the bubbling motion can theoretically mess up food, but it's the molecules violently colliding against each other that are going to damage food. And secondly, be it meat or veg, you want even results – with the outer part of the food being roughly the same temperature and consistency of the inside. Pasta, durable pasta is going to be fine in boiling water, tender dumplings will fall apart in a hard boil.

Before boiling we have two graduated stages – poaching and simmering. Poaching happens around 160 degrees, you will hear the phrase enjoined in instructions for fish and eggs. A poached egg or fish, are going to be done at about 140 degrees. The closer the cooking temp is to the final temp the hard it is to over cook an item.

Simmering happens between 180 to 200 degrees, the term is maddeningly vague; 200 is boiling in Denver after all and the bottom of a pot is hotter than the surface, so it's hard to assign a precise number to the activity, but without getting all metaphysical, simmering is a state of balance, where the cook is gently extracting flavor and gelatin from ingredients: Too hot and you leach fine particles, impurities and overcook food, too low and you may not over cook foods but you aren't going to cook to extract any flavor either.

To be able to simmer, a cook has to either have the patience,confidence, experience and the knowledge – sometimes paid with the price of a few mistakes - to know what the ultimate result will be or own a crockpot.

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?

2 Notable Items

Last night, after 375 days, my self-imposed restaurant boycott ended. How did it end? I closed the circle, ducked into Fire on the Mountain and ordered the exact same meal I ordered in December 2010, the last time I ate out. Then I ordered another beer and a side of fries and hung out and watched another quarter of basketball. I don’t know if Chris Paul and Clips had a bad night or my beloved Blazers finally figured out how to defend the pick and roll, but it was hard to walk away from the game. My favorite part, Chris Paul, stuck his elbow into a defenders neck right in front of the official and then bitched when he was called for the foul. Basketball may be the greatest sport ever invented and realized but there are parts of it that really need to change - it isn't a problem in college or europe but here everyone feels their opinion is equal to the Truth - yes I'm talking about basketball (mostly).

Back to the end of the resolution…I’m happy it’s over, it was becoming a thing – what meal would be good enough to end the experiment. Instead the decision was oddly non-food centric, circumstances dictated the occasion, coming home from class, after a week of fighting a low grade flu, cold, fever, I had a refrigerator full of food, but it would have taken an hour to get something made and on the table or it’s bachelor analog, ready to eat over the sink. I was tired, hungry and just wanted someone to take care of me – if only a small comfort and even if I had to pay for that pleasure. That plus televised basketball and it really was an easy choice.

I can’t quite summarize how my resolution/goal in a sentence, that will be written up in a longer piece, but everyone should try a variation on this – pack a lunch once a week, spend a week making everything from scratch, to go a month without entering a restaurant, drive thru or dialing a to-go order. The act of doing going without something as fundamental as grabbing food, will change the way you think how and why you eat out. I bet, like my choice to end the streak, eating out will have more to do with circumstances than craving food.

The 500

Nearly 4 full years into my blogging adventure, this is the 500^th post on Saucyman. A milestone of sorts, except milestone implies a more noteworthy event than is actually occurring.

I started blogging because I need to write more and was frustrated by periodic adventures in Freelanceville - both in frequency and topics. I had a dual endgame in mind – get better at writing and produce a body of work that could serve as a living resume - with the added bonus of getting to write about what I wanted to write about. I assumed if the plan went well, at some point I would get paid for producing content for the web.  

I have accomplished both: Make a plan and execute it. It’s a good feeling.

Now that I have realized my initial goals, I want to keep on blogging. Even if the Market gets more of my word energy these days, even if it’s harder to find time to post at least twice a week, even if I can see the set of circumstances, not as improbable and maybe not that far off in the future, where this site evolves into an aggregator for other things I am writing. Still, I am very attached to what I accomplished with this blog, here I really learned the value of consistency. (True story, consistency has been a lifelong problem: being smart, thoughtful, having good ideas and occasional flashes of brilliance - never a problem. Working steadily and dependably on a goal/project/issue, I've come up flat - this body of work has helped more than any other idea I've stumbled across.) So maybe I'm overly proud, but who cares, lessons that come late and have a steep learning curve are the ones that t are most valuable. 

ON BUFFETS

Post by Charles Seluzicki

Whenever I see the word “buffet,” I think of my Aunt Annie who pronounced it “buff-it,” like the singer’s name.  My aunt, like my mother, her sister, loved good quality but eschewed anything even suggesting pretense, as in favoring a French pronunciation.  This resonates with me as I write because I had lunch at Hometown Buffet today.  And I liked it.  So, I am not writing about fancy buffets in classy hotels and starred restaurants. I’m talking about the places where the regular folks go when they go out to eat. You can take the boy out of East Baltimore but...

Family influences are critical in how we look at food and, equally importantly, the social contexts in which food exists.  I was blessed with a heritage of ethnic traditions- Polish, German-, a mother who cooked some things very well and a father who loved trying an ever expanding range of new things to eat.  My Dad never talked about buffets; he used the word “smorgasbord” for venues that offered a big array of foods and he would wrap mouth around that word as if it was a ripe piece of melon.  However, practical considerations- read, “how much does it cost”?- ultimately touched everything. And this is recognizing that my Dad, the man who pronounced that “it only cost a little more to go first class,” had his limits. Life is deliciously complex.

Lunch is, like, $7.50. Seniors pay $6.79. Drinks are more. I start out at the salad bar and the soup (there are three kinds) and taco station.  It is all terribly interesting.  I can put a pile of Mexican rice on one half of my plate, cap it with taco ground beef whose taste is familiar and welcome, a little of the raw onion chopped with cilantro and two kinds of fresh salsa.  

On the other half I can lay down baby spinach leaves, top them with grated carrot, thawed peas, red onion, sunflower seeds, canned beets, dried cranberries and a dollop of Thousand Island dressing. I forgo the prepared salads mostly: Caesar, potato, macaroni, ...

You eat. You people watch. There families- Anglo, Latino, Asian- almost equal in number. Groups of seniors who come together on buses talk about someone who is not getting along with everyone els. And then there are the “types.” The hefty gals who wear peddle-pushers, tops with sequins legends like “Sexy Grandma”  and have butterfly tattoos artfully positioned above their ankles. The guys who construct pyramids of fried chicken on their plates like there are no second visits to the buffet.  There are curious creatures who do things like pour gravy over their Parker house rolls and teenagers who think it is funny to put Cool Whip on their mashed potatoes.

Sundays are amazing. Is everyone there coming after church? They bow their heads and pray before eating. They have such animated conversations about onion rings, brownies and how they like their soft serve ice cream. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Once the preliminary trip has been made, the clear glass salad bar plates yield to solid colors- green, yellow, red- for the main course.  I select a piece of fried chicken, a small scoop of (canned) green beans, corn bread, a tiny portion of baked fish and a carefully extracted piece of meatloaf. Now I like meatloaf finished with a final thin glaze of ketchup. It gets carmelised, shiny, golden brown. But even I was horrified when the young woman tending the tables poured a pot full of warm ketchup over the otherwise good, everyday fare.

You could find spaghetti on that island and fettucine alfredo style noodles along with cross sections of something like calzones filled with those strange little pellets of sausage and pizza. There are three flavored butters next to the rolls.  You will find hot dogs with or without a bun, two fish offerings, a selection of Chinese dishes, potatoes four ways and perhaps a half dozen different vegetables.  I am struck with the knowledge that the beef offerings are all made from ground beef.  There are no breasts or wings that I saw with the chicken.  Actual cuts of meat are reserved for dinner where the price jumps more than three dollars person.  

The dessert display is the back of the room makes me dizzy.  I counted no fewer than 25 different offerings plus soft serve ice cream with a half dozen toppings.  Cakes, brownies, pies, puddings, cookies and fruit crumbles of every sort are offered.  Do people come to gorge on desserts only? Is that what ultimately lures the families with three little kids, Grandma and Aunt Helen? You do not have to work at eavesdropping in this big open rooms. Many people seem aficionados of the buffets around town and get in lively discussions comparing one with the other.

I go to these places two or three times a year.  They intrigue me. I do not think I recognize most of the kinds of people that I see there.  But I remember them the summers that I worked in factories.  I remember them from the old neighborhood.  Long ago I learned that as a form of restaurant, buffets are enormously economical to operate in comparison to the model where individual meals are prepared to order.  The model is egalitarian yet they appeal to a wide range of idiosyncratic eating habits and behaviors.  They are inclusive in a way that will not allow pretense.  Scoff at the Jello, the chiffon pie or the overcooked vegetables if you must. As long as they produce a reasonable variety of decently made dishes that speak to the middle American palate, they cannot help but please for the dollar.  


Charles Seluzicki

Something Borrowed, Something Reposted

I really thought I was going to answer 2 questions this week. I have a backstock of questions right now and I'm not getting to them. The culprits - nap time, a little run down/lingering cold, a little more busy than usual combined with poor time management. Anyway, instead of a brand new exclusive post, I am reposting a recipessay™ that I wrote for the Farmers Market. Really next week, I'll answer a couple questions, and maybe rant about nonfat yogurt - I picked the wrong thing up in the store, don't like it won't return it (my bad), won't throw it away (it's not bad)and am deeply curious about how they get a sand like texture in freaking yogurt. Still restaurant free, it's become a thing. Enjoy this now...

There are actually very few areas of knowledge I will claim expertise – I usually, but not always, can say something funny; I possess an encyclopedic knowledge of really bad Cubs teams from the 70s/80s; I can bore the most patient person with my Rainmanesque recitation of NBA stats; but here is my greatest strength – I know what I am doing in the kitchen. Sounds like a boast, but I could cook meals for my family before I was out of High School. After that there were jobs in restaurants, cooking school, more jobs in restaurants, but it wasn’t until I landed in a kitchen where I had to make two soups every day that I really learned how to cook.

Learning how to extract flavors from the most humble ingredients, leftovers and oddities taught me how to combine flavors better than any other cooking experience I have ever had. One day, my food budget spent for the week, I had potatoes, onions and garlic to work with. I started off thinking of a garlic Vichyssoise but who wants a cold soup in winter? I thought both the onion and garlic would add a complexity of flavor if they were caramelized and when I put the ingredients together, it worked. Necessity helped create a favorite first at the Cafe, then at home.

For all the fancy meals I can prepare, this soup is the single most requested item when I ask my friends what they want me to make. I don’t know if this has to do with flavor or it’s the communal nature of soup, a food that lends itself to closeness and friendship – I’m always unsure what they really crave.

The key to this soup or really any soup is a hearty foundation, a strong stock. Yeah, you can buy stock in the store – it comes out of cans and cartons, but so does soup. The pre-made stuff can be good or bad, but it’s never the same as doing it for yourself. This recipe for stock is easy and it makes a huge difference in the final product.

Before we get to the stock, start on the roasting the garlic: Slice the top ¼ of off 2 heads of garlic, make a nest of foil and place the garlic in it so the top is exposed. Pour a teaspoon of olive oil over the exposed cloves and place in a 375 oven, cook until soft and squishy and brown – depending on the garlic and oven, this will take about an hour. You can do this a few days in advance.

Back to the stock…

2 tablespoons butter or olive oil

2 onions – medium dice

2 carrots – sliced thinly

2 stalks celery broken in half

12 parsley stems cut into 1 inch pieces, save the leafy part for something else,

3-5 sprigs of thyme or teaspoon dried

5 cups water

Salt and pepper

Heat a small stock pan to medium with oil, then add all veg, cook for 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cover with water, add healthy amount of salt, well not healthy in a visit to the Doctor sense, healthy as in generous and you still won’t come close to the sodium in canned stock or broth. 3-4 turns of a pepper mill.

Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, cook for 20 minutes, turn off heat and cover until ready to use. (You can also throw everything in a slow cooker for 2-3 hours. The color won’t be as rich but the flavor is there.)

3 Potatoes, just like these

Roasted Garlic Potato Soup

1 small onion

1 tablespoon butter or oil

3 potatoes – baked potato sized – peeled and cubed

2 heads garlic – roasted as per previous instructions

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Salt pepper

1 cup cream optional

On Caramelizing Onions – Thomas Keller writes that it takes at least 4 hours to properly caramelize onions, the first hour requires constant attention. Lora Brody says it can be done, hands free, in a slow cooker in 12 to 14 hours.

Sure? Maybe? Who am I to disagree?

For this recipe we want color and a little sharpness from the onion, not onions so perfect that someone will write a 2,000 word essay about them in next quarter’s Gastronomica (Really good Journal BTW). 30-40 minutes should be enough time. Slice the onion thinly, add it to a small sauté pan with oil or butter, cook over medium-low heat, cook the onion until brown, stirring occasionally. Deglaze the pan with water or stock – get all the fond, as the French call it, that colorful, tasty stuff off the bottom of the pan.

While onions are caramelizing, place stock (strained) and potatoes in a stock pot together. Bring to a boil and cook until soft – just like mashed potatoes. Add onions, cooked garlic (cloves removed from skin) and puree. I like those immersion/stick blenders for the job but food processors, food mills and blenders all get the job done.

It’s not done, you’ll need to fine tune the soup. Taste the soup. It’s going to need something acidic like vinegar to cut through the velvety texture of the potato, but only a hint. Potatoes require salt. Don’t be afraid to season generously. Maybe the soup could use a little richness that only cream or butter can provide. Chopped herbs, maybe – Tinker, taste, test, don’t feel a need to be bound by the recipe above, any soup recipe is just a guideline anyway. My final advice; try not to eat this alone, it always goes better with people.

See What Sticks

Where do you come down on the spaghetti against the wall test?

Urban legend and some not quite done in a lab with goggles, safety gear and double-bind standards scientific research claims that when flung with decent velocity that cooked spaghetti sticks to walls/ceilings/refrigerators.

I wish your question was a little more detailed. Throwing food is fun – slightly transgressive or perhaps only naughty. They line up to chuck citrus at one another in Italy during Carnival. Across the Mediterranean in Spain, Tomatina is the annual celebration where people throw, smash, crush tomatoes at/with/on other revelers. Ritualized of not, throwing food is a no-no, that's why it's fun and that's why I can't really get upset a flinging a few pieces of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Plus, I think throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks in a metaphorical sense is a good way to keep curious and intellectually engaged rather than using brain space to calculate the best way to stay risk averse.

Sauce changes the dynamic

If your question is more about is throwing spaghetti against the wall is an effective way to test if pasta is properly cooked, then no, I can't really endorse the method. This activity is more likely to tell if pasta is overcooked.

The best way to tell if pasta is cooked is to remove a noodle from the pot, let it cool then taste it – al dente, generally considered the best way to eat pasta, the noodle will remain a little chewy. And the mouth is a much better judge than a wall – in part because most mouths have a much better palate.

Short answer, like many fun things, this is something I avoid doing.What's my problem? Too big of a question to answer here.