Now that I have twenty four pints of tomato sauce, made from fifty pounds of plum tomatoes (post to follow), I don’t want to see fresh tomatoes for at least a week. I kept the shopping mostly to essentials: corn, napa cabbage, yellow carrots, chinese broccoli, cauliflower, raspberries, and two thick-cut smoked pork chops. Not shown are the thai bird chiles and cilantro I had to go back for , because I’ll need them for two recipes I’m making next week.
While I was picking out the corn, I noticed an older woman who was methodically stripping away the husk from the top of each ear she grabbed, examining the end, and then depending on some internal criterion (is she checking to see if it’s corn, and not a really big carrot?), either adding the ear to her basket or tossing it back in the bin with the end exposed.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” I said. “It ruins the corn for the people who come after you.”
“Is that so?” she replied before walking off.
When I went to pay for my own purchase, the owner said “I gave up on getting angry about people messing up the corn, but I appreciate your attempting to teach someone some manners. I once watched a guy shuck an ear, take a big bite out of it, decide w he didn’t want it, and toss it back in the bin.”
They’re vegetables people, right out of the ground. If you need to eat pretty food, go to the Food Hole instead.
At the conclusion of my post about prosciutto ice cream I alluded to a use for the leftover chunks that infused the ice cream base. A friend had tasted the ice cream, pointed at the chunks, and said “french toast.”
I don’t have the level of OCD (I call it “precision” and “attention to detail”) that prevents me from allowing different foods to touch in the same plate, Â but I always kept my breakfast sausage or bacon away from the maple syrup. I understood the whole sweet/salty thing, but I didn’t apply it to breakfast. Now I had a chance to experiment.
I began with a basic french toast recipe from Cook’s Illustrated and assembled my ingredients: a sandwich loaf of french bread, a cup and a half of milk, two tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of vanilla extract, a quarter teaspoon of salt, three egg yolks, three tablespoons of light brown sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and the leftover prosciutto chunks, which I had frozen overnight.
I warmed up the milk, melted the butter, and then mixed all of the ingredients together to make a batter.
I shredded the frozen prosciutto on a microplane grater, a task made much more difficult by the small size of the pieces and a strong desire not to incorporate my fingertips into my breakfast.
I cut six half-inch thick slices of bread and soaked them in the batter for twenty seconds per side.
I pressed three of the slices (this was a test, after all) Â into the shredded prosciutto and let them sit for a minute.
I started the slices face-up on the griddle, pressing the tops to embed the prosciutto before flipping the slices over.
I was afraid that the top layer would fall off when I flipped the slices, but instead it did what I hoped it would do: crisp up and fuse to the bread. I served a plain and a prosciutto slice to myself, She Who Must Be Obeyed, and He Who Will Not Be Ignored, garnishing with some of the leftover shredded bits.
Topped with good (you do use grade B, don’t you?) maple syrup, the toast was sweet, salty, chewy, and more crispy than the plain slices. The dish received the Chez Belm Seal of Approval, but I don’t know how often I’ll be making it. It’s more labor intensive than I like for breakfast, and besides, She Who Must Be Obeyed has suggested an improvement: prosciutto french toast waffles.
I baked my last loaves of low-knead bread in March, in order to build a mostly-homemeade BLT. I was still dissatisfied with the final product: although it tasted OK, it had some texture and crust issues. Andrew, my extremely patient bread expert, suggested some possible modifications to my recipe:
Are you baking in a dutch oven, or on a stone? If you have a dutch oven, give it a try, just so you can get a sense of what proper steaming will do for your crusts. Similar results can be had on a stone, but it helps to know what to expect. The beauty of a dutch oven is the bread steams itself while the cover is on. It is a bit of a hassle to get it into the pot cleanly. I place the bread on a well dusted peel, slash, put the preheated pot on the stovetop, peel next to it, then with two hands, quickly grab and drop. But generally I use a baking stone with an aluminum roasting pan over the loaves for the first 30m to get the same.
Also, it seems like you could bake lover/hotter. My loaves are generally 800g-1k, but even somewhat smaller ones bake at 450 for nearly an hour; 30m under steam (covered or steamed), and 20-40m more until the loaves are good and colored.
All good advice, but I had to wait until the weather cooled a bit, which coincided with my desire to create the 100% homemade BLT. So, using the version 2 recipe, I filled another bucket full of dough that rested in the fridge for a day.
I weighed out a pound of risen dough, set it on a circle of parchment, gave it one more rise at room temperature, and slashed the top.
While the dough rose, I heated the oven to 450° F and let my covered seven-quart cast-iron dutch oven heat up as well. I dropped the dough – parchment and all – in the pot, covered it, and baked for twenty five minutes. I removed the cover and let the loaf bake for another twenty five minutes.
The crust was much darker than my previous efforts, but the loaf still had that almost spherical, blown-out appearance. It tasted fine, although I only tried it toasted in a BLT, and not by itself. I tried to figure out what might have gone wrong – too much flour on the surface? slashed too deeply? – when it hit me: the loaf is too small, the ratio of surface area to volume is wrong.
It’s a hypothesis that was easy enough to test. I used the remaining two pounds of dough to make the next loaf, keeping the rest of the variables the same. After a forty minute rise, I dusted and slashed the new loaf.
And, after twenty five minutes covered and another twenty five uncovered, I pulled this beauty out of the oven:
It’s hard to tell from the foreshortening in the photo, but this version was much less spherical, as you can see in the cross-section photo at the top. You can also see that it was fairly dense, with a good even distribution of air bubbles throughout. Unfortunately, it was a bit chewier than I would have liked, although it will make excellent toast.
I’ve modified my hypothesis, and will repeat recipe one more time, splitting the dough into two equal pound-and-a-half loaves. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to call in an expert to show me how it’s done. This bread-baking business is much more finicky than I ever imagined.
Back in March, following my successful bacon-making adventure, I made a “mostly-homemade” BLT, having to resort to store-bought lettuce and tomatoes, because, well, March in New England. With tomato season rapidly drawing to a close, I had to try again with everything self-sourced.
I assembled my ingredients: thick-sliced bacon from the Deep Storage Facility, a loaf of low-knead bread (variation #3, post to follow), mayonnaise, a tomato (subcontracted out to friends in Watertown who had fenced-in yard space), and freshly-picked romaine lettuce.
Where did I grow the lettuce? In the Belm Utility Research Kitchen Hydroponic Facility:
A quick fry-up of the bacon preceded the bread toasting. You know what frying bacon looks like, but this is as close as this blog will ever get to gratuitous nudity:
Slice and toast the bread, slather with mayo, then layer the bacon, lettuce, and tomato slices, a bit of pepper, et voila! homemade BLTs.
My first version was pretty damned tasty, but this version was far superior, due to the sweetness of the tomato and lettuce that tasted like something other than supermarket cellulose.
I’m owed a few more tomatoes, so I think we’ll be having BLTs for dinner again before our winter hibernation begins.
Today’s market trip, my quickest on record, could have been the ending of a Twilight Zone episode: at every turn I was prevented from buying what I needed by an obstacle course of excessively long webbed leashes attached to the smallest, yappiest dogs imaginable. I stepped on an apple that had fallen off a table, and for a brief moment thought I had crushed the skull of someone’s schnauzer.
To keep my torment to a minmum, I focused on the essentials: raspberries, cucumbers, gala apples, purple viking and yellow potatoes, pineapple tomatoes, coffee cake, white bread (for tomorrow’s previously alluded to breakfast experiment), and Taza’s new salt & pepper Mexican chocolate (not a necessity, but a necessary indulgence).
The Food Network (FN) has ceased to be an source of cooking ideas for me. It is no longer my default channel when I’m watching television, but I will occasionally check it out to see what new crop of yahoos is teaching Americans how to cook yet another version of mac and cheese. You can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this clip, a segment from The Best Thing I Ever Ate, a show featuring FN “personalities” talking about their favorite foods. (Let’s consider that for a moment: The FN won’t air shows with a single chef in a kitchen showing you how to cook, but will broadcast dozens of episodes of a show with people talking about food.)
In addition to being the chef at offal-centric Incanto in San Francisco, Chris Cosentino is also the co-owner of Boccalone, maker of tasty salted pig parts. My immediate reaction to seeing the prosciutto ice cream made at Humphry Slocombe (credit where it’s due) was I can do that.
I made my way to Capone Foods, my source of all things cured, and asked Al what he did with his unused prosciutto bones.
“Prosciutto bones? They’re cured without the bones. One of my first jobs was cutting the bone out of the shoulder before we started the curing process. I got pretty good at it, but I haven’t seen a bone in years. You might be able to get bones from La Quercia, but otherwise you’re out of luck.”
I obviously hadn’t put any thought into my plan. Of course Cosentino had access to bones, he owned the company. I wasn’t about to buy a bone-in pork shoulder just to debone it for ice cream, although that very thing arrived a day later. Plan B presented itself in the form of a few vacuum-packed chunks at the end of Al’s deli case.
“Aren’t those prosciutto ends?”
“I prefer to call them beginnings. They’re great for adding to pasta or vegetables.”
“I’ll take them all. I’m working on something.”
And so I returned home with these:
The piece in front is actually from a Serrano ham end, the other two are prosciutto; all are from the tapered end of the shoulder that can’t be sold due to the higher fat content, which is exactly what I needed. My plan was to replicate as much of the process in the video as possible, with adjustments made for using meat instead of bones.
I roasted the pieces for an hour at 250° F, until the fat rendered and the outside skin was crispy. The crispy skin was not necessary for the recipe, but it was vital to my appetite.
I prepared a sweet cream custard base with two cups of heavy cream, a cup of milk, and three quarters of a cup of sugar (a variation of this process), then whisked in the rendered fat.
While the cream/fat mixture was still hot, I added the roasted pieces and let them steep for half an hour.
I temporarily removed the meat, tempered six egg yolks, then cooked and cooled the resulting custard.
I returned the meat to the custard, and let the mix sit in the fridge for two days, allowing the porky goodness to suffuse the custard. I removed the meat and ran the base through my ice cream machine.
After an overnight visit to the freezer, the final product was ready:
How did it taste? I’ve not tasted the original, but I think I nailed it: salty, sweet, porky, nutty, all in near-perfect balance. I couldn’t eat a lot at once – the photos are “beauty shots” that are twice the size of what I’d consider a decent serving – but I could eat this ice cream every day and be happy doing it.
My satisfaction was insufficient; I needed independent confirmation. Without naming the flavor, I had a friend taste a spoonful, asking him to identify it for me. His reaction: “Bacon? No, wait, it’s… prosciutto?”
One data point wasn’t enough, so I took a sample to the only other person whose opinion mattered. I had Al try a sample, and his immediate reaction was “prosciutto.” “Maybe a bit too salty, but still pretty good. I’d serve this with a savory course, maybe with some green vegetables.”
Now I have an idea for a new side dish. One more blow for complete world pork domination.
And what about the leftover prosciutto chunks?
You didn’t think I’d throw them away, did you? I have another plan, and it involves breakfast. Stay tuned.
Were I not already married, “Would you like to split half a pig with me?” would be the pickup line that got my attention. As it was, the request came from my neighbor, who wanted to split a meat order from Houde Family Farm with me. She directed me to their CSA shares page, where this disclaimer caught my eye:
We also sell beef and pork by the half or whole when available. All prices are hanging weight and include cutting and wrapping. Hanging weight is the meat hanging on the rails at the butchers. There is some loss due to bone, fat and gristle; anywhere from 25 to 40 percent loss depending on how it is cut (bone-in or not) and how lean the animal is.
I could do without the gristle, but I wasn’t about to part with the bone and fat, especially if I was paying for it. And what about the head? A few emails and one phone call to David Houde convinced me that I’d get every bit of the half hog that I wanted, so I placed an order.
Today the hog arrived: butchered, vacuum-wrapped, and frozen.
There’s a lot of meat there: two 12-rib loin roasts, the shoulder and Boston butt roasts; spare ribs; the fresh ham (cut into nine thick steaks); about six pounds of ground pork made from the scraps and trim; the liver, heart, and tongue; three huge slabs of fatback; and more.
That’s half a head, and two legs – shanks with trotters attached. The belly is being brined and cured, then it will be smoked and cut into bacon to be delivered next month.
Since I was obviously gong to wind up with the head, shanks, fat, and offal, my neighbor got the majority of the ground pork and ham steaks, along with the larger of the shoulder cuts. This is much more meat than my last pig acquisition; I had to exercise master-level close-packing skills to fit everything into the Belm Utility Research KitchenDeep Storage Facility.
It’s a good thing the weather’s cooling down; I got me some cookin’ to do.
Hurricane? What hurricane? Earl turned out to be a big dud that watered my yard last night and left us with a perfect day. It was time to replenish some end-of-summer staples: cherry and heirloom tomatoes, green beans, peaches, the world’s best honeycrisp apples, raspberries, corn, and celery root (which, to my surprise, actually smells like celery and has little celery stalks growing out of it when freshly harvested).
Cooler weather ahead, more real cooking coming up.
A collaboration by the Foundation AlÃcia (Alimentació i Ciència), headed by internationally acclaimed chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli fame, and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has led to the creation of a new undergraduate course on science and cooking.
Debuting in the fall of 2010, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,†will be part of the new program in General Education atHarvard College. The course will bring together eminent Harvard researchers and world-class chefs, including Wylie Dufresne of wd-50 and Dan Barber of Blue Hill, as well as food scholar and writer Harold McGee, one of the leading authorities on kitchen science.
…you can simply walk in and attend the lectures. Unless things have changed since 9/11, no one checks IDs.
You could take the course as a special student (and get the lab), but my memories of how much it costs didn’t take into account 25 years of 8% inflation per annum. Yeeeeooowww!
I clearly didn’t need the lab section; I already know how to cook and work with whatever basic chemical reactions the course would cover.
The first class was today, in Hall C at the Harvard Science Center (MIT has a Humanities Department, Harvard has a Science Center) at 1 PM. I left home at 12:30 to give myself plenty of time to find a parking space and still be on time. I arrived to a mob scene: the class would be packed with undergrads who planned on using it to fulfill a basic science requirement (“This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Science A.”).
As I reached the hall entrance, I saw a notice taped to the door:
Be prepared to show your Harvard ID.
This class is for Harvard Undergraduates ONLY!
I was hosed. Not only did I not have a Harvard undergrad ID, I couldn’t even use my plan B explanation of being a special student. I saw the lecturer waiting for the student to file in, and asked him if I could sit in.
“Sorry, it’s undergrads only, we’re not even admitting special students. You’re welcome to attend the general lectures on Mondays.”
“Are they on this subject?”
“No, it’s more general interest material for the community.”
And now that he knows what I look like, I won’t be able to sneak in and sit in the back. I just hope these kids understand what an opportunity they’ve been presented with. I’ll just have to settle for this interview with Wylie Dufrense. No Foam 101 for me.
Since the court has determined to condemn me – God knoweth how – I will now discharge my mind concerning the indictment and the King’s title.
— Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons
Just as I had finally managed to purge the memory of my failed audition from my mind, Fox began broadcasting the American debut of MasterChef. Many friends and relatives have asked me what I think of the show, but I have reserved judgement until I could watch at least five episodes. I’ve been thinking about the show, trying to formulate an opinion, but I’m still not sure how I feel. The short answer is that the show has promise. The long answer is a bit more complicated.
MasterChef UK
MasterChef, like most American reality shows, is based on a British original. In order to prepare myself for the (in retrospect, extremely remote) possibility of being selected as a contestant, I watched the entire 2009 season of MasterChef UK (sample episode here). The structure of that show is described in detail elsewhere (scroll to the “MasterChef Goes Large” heading), but the summary is that six contestants cook a mystery box challenge, their dishes are tasted by the judges, and three are immediately eliminated. The remaining three must work a busy lunch service at a restaurant – their first exposure to working in a professional kitchen – then, when they return, have an hour to cook any two dishes they choose. The winner competes in a quarterfinal round against the winners from the other three weekly rounds. (The show runs Monday through Thursday for eight weeks.)
What I love about the show is it’s no-bullshit approach: you live and die by your cooking skills. There’s no interpersonal sniping, no delusional behavior, no unwarranted braggadocio – if you can’t cook, you can’t advance and you can’t win.
MasterChef USA
Structure
One hundred contestants from around the country had an hour to cook their signature dishes, which would be tasted (or not, in some cases) by the three judges. The thirty who remained would have to survive two more challenges: knife skills, in which they had to dice and slice a bag of onions; and an ingredient test, in which they had to cook a dish that highlighted a single egg. This reduced the field to fourteen finalists, which is when the real competition began.
With the preliminaries out of the way, the show has settled into its groove. Each day begins with an improvisation test, in which contestants have less than an hour to cook a dish based on the ingredients in a mystery box. The winner of that test has an advantage in being able to choose the ingredient or dish that all contestants must cook in the invention test that follows. Last week the invention test was replicating a dish after seeing it prepared by Cat Cora, “one of the top chefs in America.” (I don’t agree with that assessment. Not only doesn’t Cora rank with Keller, Ripert, Boulud, Vongerichten, Chang, etc., she isn’t even the best Iron Chef.)
This is the first opportunity for a contestant to employ some strategy. He can make a choice that plays either to his strengths or his opponents’ weaknesses. In this case, the winner’s choice of a halibut dish – difficult to cook properly – backfired on him, and he wound up in second place. The loser in this round is sent home.
The winner of the invention test gets to chose his team for the following team challenge. So far, the contestants have had to feed Marines at Camp Pendleton and truckers at a desert truck stop (do we see a theme here?). The winning team is safe from elimination, and the losing team is subject to a pressure test which so far has involved identifying ingredients. The first test involved naming as many ingredients as you could in a pot of chili before getting one wrong, last week it was identify the ingredients seen on a table:
The person with the lowest number of correctly identified ingredients is sent home. It was frustrating to see six contestants fail to identify more than eleven out of twenty ingredients. I don’t know how the final rounds will be structured, but I’ll be disappointed if contestants don’t get to cook in a professional restaurant kitchen.
The Judges
The show, which was heavily hyped during the compressed run of Hell’s Kitchen (which is now a fall season show with MasterChef to follow in the spring), is an attempt to present a kinder, gentler Gordon Ramsay, a Ramsay who doesn’t scream at contestants. He seems genuinely interested in the contestants, perhaps because they are amateurs, a welcome change from the delusional psychopaths that overrun the killing floor at the Hell’s Kitchen set. He offers advice, but also gives them enough rope to hang themselves. He’s the man in charge, if for no other reason because he’s had years of television experience.
Ramsay is joined by Graham Elliot, chef at the Chicago restaurant that bears his name. He’s younger, less jaded, and more enthusiastic than Ramsay, and has a better appreciation of comfort food, which Ramsay tends to dismiss as lacking finesse.
Last, but by no means least, is Joe Bastianich, son of Lydia Bastianich, and managing partner in Mario Batali’s restaurant empire. Despite the objections I’ve heard that characterize Bastianich as a douchebag (or worse), he’s a no-nonsense guy who knows what good food looks and tastes like, and what would be fit for a restaurant or destined for the bin. More than once he has dashed the hopes of a contestant by looking at a plate of food and refusing to taste it. He’s not a feel-good fellow, but a needed counterpoint to Elliot’s enthusiasm and Ramsay’s cheerleading.
The Contestants
Here’s where I take issue with the show. I watched the first two installments in which the original one hundred were winnowed down to thirty, and by the time the show was over I was fuming. I watched a parade of inept, uninspired, and poorly plated dishes get presented to the judges: fish tacos that fell apart when you picked them up; beer and cheese soup; and by far the worst offering, “funeral potatoes,” a casserole of potatoes, bacon, sour cream, mayonnaise, cheese, and a pound of melted butter that was baked into a thick, runny sludge. Bastianich asked the contestant if his winning strategy was to kill the judges.
How did those dishes make the cut? The guy with the sandwich at my audition was a better cook than the hick with the artery-clogging  tray of starch. Surely, there had to be better cooks in his regional competition, unless the “talent” scouts had a remit to select at least one incompetent boob from each region for humor value.
Fortunately, the final fourteen (now eleven) seem reasonably competent, with some real talent displayed by Mike, my pick to win, and Jake, the dark horse contender. The show is still mostly free of the interpersonal trash-talking, but that may get ramped up as the playing field dwindles, or due to creative editing. There were two contestants from Boston that I didn’t recognize from my audition, but now only one is left, and he’s not long for the competition.
What I Think
The show has a chance of letting contestants succeed on their own merits; it’s quite likely that the winner will actually be a decent cook.
The selection of the original one hundred entrants still baffles and infuriates me. I know I’m a better cook than the people who made beer soup and potato sludge. I have skills that are comparable to the remaining contestants, and a better knowledge of ingredients, but I also know I’m not the guy who will jump out of his skin when he wins a round, or will be on the verge of tears when he’s in danger of being eliminated. I’m not telegenic, and that may be the reason why I failed six months ago.
I wish the contestants luck; one of them will be granted a life-changing opportunity.
