phillyfoodie.com

March 28, 2010

My Morning Coffee

Vietnamese coffee is simply the best: strong, dark coffee softened by sweetened condensed milk. It’s a unique flavor and the softest possible landing in the morning.

Vietnamese coffee, halfway through the first percolation

Making it couldn’t be easier. You’ll need ground coffee, sweetened condensed milk, and a Vietnamese coffee maker. The makers can be had for under $4 from any of the Vietnamese markets down on Washington Avenue. (More on them soon!)

The Vietnamese coffee maker isn’t much, just a filter and a screw-in press. Drop in a a bit of coffee, tamp it down, then unscrew the press almost all of the way — you’re ready to go!

A few notes:

Just as when tamping espresso, the press has a sweet spot. Press the coffee too much and it’ll run slowly or get stuck; press the coffee too little and it’ll taste thin. You can jiggle the press or coffee maker to restart a stuck filtration. Use a dark roast, like Café du Monde—the budget option at the Vietnamese markets.

Don’t open the can of sweetened condensed milk all the way. Make two diametrically opposite cuts with your can opener, one larger than the other; then bend the larger one open as a spout, leaving the small one as a vent. Just rest the can on the rim of the glass, spout-end in. As the can runs low, it may take a second for the can to find its balance. I keep my can in the fridge with a bit of plastic wrap over it.

Pouring in the sweetened condensed milk

Vietnamese coffee (for one)

2T ground coffee (dark roast)
2T sweetened condensed milk, or to taste

Heat 1 cup of water to the boil. This takes two minutes in my microwave, which is ample time for the next two steps.
Add the condensed milk to a glass that fits your coffee maker (and the forthcoming coffee!). This is easiest with a can that has a spout and an air vent, which you can rest on the edge of the glass.
Put the coffee into your coffee maker, screwing the press down until the coffee is packed. Unscrew the press until it’s just barely screwed in. Set the coffee maker on top of your glass.
Fill your coffee maker with water, letting it percolate through. When it’s run dry, fill it again.
Mix, savor, and feel a little more awake.

As it gets warmer, try pouring the mixed coffee over ice!

(No. OF NOTES: 1)

February 27, 2010

Tongue

The enormous cow’s tongues at my nearby Vietnamese market (16th and Washington) have an inexorable pull on me. I recently bought and cured one. It’s a pretty easy process, a good warm-up if you plan on corning beef for St. Patrick’s Day.

A few slices of cold tongue, adorning bubble-and-squeak and some homemade wheat toast.

The only special ingredient is so-called “pink salt”, a mixture of table salt and sodium nitrite. You don’t even need it, but including it ensures a beautiful pink color. You’re going to want it for corned beef, bacon, and hot dogs, anyway, so you might as well get a pound of it. (N.B. the salt is dyed pink so you don’t confuse it with real salt. You shouldn’t eat it raw. Keep it away from anyone who might think it’s candy, like children and sweet-toothed roommates.)

The plan is simple: cure for a week then simmer for three and a half hours.

Curing

Curing is easy, and increasingly popular on a small scale. Brining a turkey, for example, is a simple kind of cure. Brining will typically use a 5% salt solution: 5g of salt for each 100g of water. This is enough to moisten the meat of a roast, bringing out the natural flavors of the meat. For tongue, I want something with a stronger, more assertive taste, so we’re going to corn the tongue. Corning is a very aggressive kind of brining, using more salt (10% instead of 5%) for more time.

To comfortably cover a 1.2kg tongue, I made 2L of brine:

2L water (or adjust using these percentages for more or less volume)
200g salt (10%)
50g sugar (2.5%)
12g pink salt (.6%)
Spices, for flavor: a dozen black peppercorns, some bay leaves, a few crushed cloves of garlic, crushed juniper berries, and mustard seeds.

To make the brine, throw all of the brine ingredients in a large pot, bring to a boil while stirring to dissolve the salts and sugar. Let it cool, so the brine doesn’t cook your meat! Then dump your brine and tongue into a ziploc bag to chill out in the fridge.

A week later, the tongue comes out firmer and faintly redolent of spice and salt.

Cooking

Three and a half hours of simmering. Following Fergus Henderson’s recipe in The Whole Beast, I simmered the tongue with carrots, onions, leeks, celery, garlic, peppercorns, and herbs.

Fergus says to keep it at the “calmest of simmers”, after which the skin should peel off easily. After uncovering the pot, I discovered that my simmer of about 160F was a little too calm. The tongue was still very tough. Now, cooler heads might say, “No big deal, we’ll just simmer longer at the higher temperature”. But not me. It was late, I was tired. No, I decided to flay the thing then and there. I’m sorry: first, ‘flay’ is a little too graphic; second, look at this pathetic picture.

This is so embarrassing.

The skin didn’t “peel” at all, and I took to hacking with my knife. Look at all of that wasted tongue! Frustrated, I wrapped up the tongue and went to bed, leaving the cooking liquid to cool on the stove.

Re-cooking

The next day, I brought the (now heavily trimmed) tongue back up to a boil in the liquid, and threw it in a 200F oven for three and a half hours. No mistakes this time: my tongue simmered while I stewed. Then, miraculously:

It sliced like a charm. Meaty and succulent, with a vague hint of spice. It’s been great with eggs and as an accent to salads. Smaller than a brisket, tongue seems like an easy way to get that delicious “corned” taste into your life more often. The process was not my finest showing, but I’ll never make the “so calm it’s not even a simmer” blunder again. I’ve been playing with using the oven for simmering (like when making consommé), but now I’m a convert!

Comments (View) so far. Add your comment! | Filed under Michael brine simmer tongue at 4:16pm
URL: http://phillyfoodie.com/post/416048611/tongue

February 14, 2010

Hello, and Consommé

Hi! I’m Michael. I’m friends with Helen and company, and I’m excited to be share some of my cooking with you fine people.

This is my kitchen; it’s in Philadelphia. (I mean, so am I.)

I love to cook: saute, steam, fry, bake, cure, smoke, brew, whatever. (You can see evidence of most of those in this picture, actually.) I like to make things myself, to a fault.

But enough about me. Today we’re making consommé. Consommé is the apotheosis of stock, made by clarifying a stock with egg whites. (Yes, egg whites.) It’s something to sip piping hot on a cold, blizzard-y day, but it’s also great as a base for soups and sauces or as a braising liquid.

The technique here is Michael Ruhlman’s, as described in his book Ratio. The idea is quite simple: to make X consommé, make X stock, then simmer the stock with a mixture of 3 parts (by weight) X, 1 part egg white, and 1 part mirepoix (which itself a 2:1:1 mixture of chopped onions, carrots, and celery). Typically, X ranges over meat and poultry: veal, beef, and chicken are all common. This time, it’s chicken consommé. (This time…ha! I’ve never made this before. Here we go!)

Our plan:

make a chicken stock

strain

cool (overnight)

skim off the fat

bring to a simmer, with more chicken, egg whites, and mirepoix

cool again for bagging and freezing

It’s a long process, but there isn’t too much active time. We’re going to use two stewing chickens and a bunch of chicken feet to build the stock. (The feet will provide lots of gelatin, which will help provide a rich mouthfeel later on.) For the clarification, we’ll use boneless thighs.

First, we’ll chop up the chicken feet and some scrap chicken from the freezer.

Small bits make sure we get all the goodness.

For kicks, I took apart the chickens neatly. You can just maul them to small bits, if you like. I went at them with the cleaver after taking this picture.

Cover with an inch or so of water and bring to a simmer, say around 180F. Don’t let it boil, or the stock will be very hazy. (Whether it’ll be so hazy that the clarification won’t work, I don’t know. But why go looking for trouble?)

Eventually fat and foamy scum will rise to the top; keep skimming this off until it stops coming.

Rather than fiddling with the heat on my stove, I set my oven to 180F and simmered for four hours.

About two pounds of mirepoix. Throw in some crushed peppercorns, bay leaves, garlic, herbs, or what-have-you, too.

Adding the mirepoix will cool the stock down again, so it’s easiest to finish it on the stove. It takes another hour.

Another 45 minutes to an hour of simmering, and we’re ready for straining. I used a sieve lined with a (very clean!) kitchen towel, but a colander will do just fine.

I should say: this is a perfectly good stopping point. After it’s cooled a bit, you can see that we already have a tasty, relatively clear stock. But we have not yet begun to fight!

We’ve been basically following Ruhlman’s recipe, though I’ve slightly increased his quantities: about 4lb of chicken made a little under a gallon of stock. We’ll use about a pound of meat (15oz) and 5oz each of egg whites and mirepoix. I’ve added some tomato, for both flavor and color. (Plus a bay leaf and some ground black pepper.)

Apart from my knife, my most important piece of kitchen equipment is my scale. Four eggs yielded 5oz of egg whites.

I forgot to photograph the chicken, but I chopped 15oz of boneless chicken thighs (with the fat cut out and rendered for something else) to a paste in the food processor.

We bring the stock, meat, egg whites, and mirepoix up to a simmer, stirring to avoid scorching. I’m using a flat-edged spoon, as Ruhlman suggests.

As the egg whites congeal, they’ll form what’s called a “raft”, floating all of the other bits to the surface. The proteins in the egg white will filter the stock as it floats to the top, like a French press in reverse. This process is a little slow and requires some attention—it took about twenty minutes.

Now that we have a nice raft, we simmer for another hour. Foam will rise up and over, filtering back through the raft, leaving the scum on top. Ingenious!

After an hour has elapsed, we’re ready to strain. The stock is already very clear (look at that shine!), but we’re going to use a sieve lined with a coffee filter to be extra certain.

It’s said that you should be able to read the date off a dime at the bottom a bowl of consommé. (Ruhlman says the bottom of a gallon.)

Let’s have a closer look.

2007, if you squint. Not bad.

So: consommé. I served it garnished with beech mushrooms and scallion greens. Definitely worth the effort. I think it’s particularly interesting that unlike many other “luxurious” dishes, consommé is very low in fat. (Not that I’m into that sort of thing, but still.) I hope this little (?) walkthrough gives you confidence to try it yourself.

It’s been fun, and there’s more in the pipeline: tongue, morcilla de Burgos, and beer!