It’s not too often that you get to use that phrase in a non-metaphorical sense, but if today’s meat CSA pickup was any indication, many sheep had been recently dispatched. This months share included pork spare ribs, a pork hock, ground beef, a whole chicken, two lamb leg steaks, and lamb chops. I added a dozen eggs, two strip steaks (soon to meet their sous vide destiny), a lamb shank, and some pork chops.
The giveaway box, where I have previously scored fatback, leaf lard, and other lovely neglected animal bits, was full of lamb remains, some of which I brought home: lamb neck bones, kidneys, and hearts. I didn’t help myself to any lamb heads. Lacking a bandsaw, I have no way to split them for roasting.
It’s Lambapalooza! The bones will be roasted and converted into stock, the hearts will be grilled, and the kidneys will be served with the lamb steaks. Time to consult the Book of Fergus for recipe ideas. Stay tuned.
Four recipes down, three to go, resulting in ramen for dinner. It was time to make the second crucial component.
Recipe 5: Alkaline (Ramen) Noodles
There are masters who walk among us, possessing the amazing ability to make noodles by hand. Here’s an example of the miraculous transmutation of flour, water, and salt into ramen, which I saw on He Who Will Not Be Ignored’s Kung Fu Panda DVD:
I am not a noodle master, nor will I ever be. I’m just a guy who wanted to try his hand at making ramen from scratch. I’ve made pasta, how different could ramen be? In Momofuku, David Chang explains the main difficulty:
Ramen noodles are traditionally fresh flour-and-water noodles made with alkaline salts (sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate, mixed and sold as “kansui” in some Asian supermarkets). They are firm and chewy and, because of the way the salts and flour interact, an oxidized yellowish color that makes them look as if they’re made with eggs, though they aren’t and shouldn’t be.
… But, and this is a big but, I really don’t think you need to track down alkaline salts or kansui and make these noodles. Finding the ingredients is a pain in the ass. Of course, if you want to do it, kudos to you.
I read Chang’s qualifier literally, that the hardest part of making ramen is tracking down the alkaline salts. I have a secret weapon, I thought, She Who Must Be Obeyed has access to chemicals at her company’s lab. And indeed, one phone call resulted in my being presented with this:
That’s enough to make 70 batches of noodles; I only needed one. I assembled my ingredients: 800 grams of 00 pasta flour, 300 grams of water, 7.2 grams (two teaspoons) of sodium carbonate, and 0.8 grams (almost a quarter teaspoon) of potassium carbonate.
I mixed everything together in a stand mixer with a dough hook, adding additional water a tablespoon at a time until it came together in a ball. I kneaded for a total for ten minutes at medium-low speed.
I wrapped the dough in plastic and let it rest in the fridge while I contemplated how to cut it into noodles. Chang suggests running the dough through a pasta roller to get thin flat sheets, which should be cut on a narrow pasta cutter. I have a pasta roller attachment, but not a pasta cutter, however, I do have a pasta machine capable of making angel hair pasta. I fed the dough into the machine and waited for strands to extrude.
The dough is very elastic compared to egg-based pasta, so it took quite a bit of coaxing to get it down into the feed screw. I let the noodles extend to about sixteen inches before cutting them and giving them a heavy dusting of flour.
I pulled the larger bundles apart into smaller bunches and floured them again.
An hour later I had six six-ounce servings, three of which I put in the fridge, and three of which I froze.
Recipe 6: Slow-Poached Eggs
I’ve made slow-poached eggs before in an improvised “ghetto sous-vide” rig, this time I used something new:
Is that a new SousVide Supreme? Yes, yes it is, and it will figure prominently in future posts.
Recipe 7: Bamboo Shoots (Menma)
This is the last of the garnishes I had to prepare. I drained a twelve-ounce can of sliced bamboo shoots, drained them, then rinsed them under running water. I added them to a saucepan with a splash each of canola and sesame oil, added a splash of light soy sauce and a pinch of salt, and set the pan over low heat for about half an hour, until the shoots were tender.
Final Assembly
I set a large pot of salted water to boil, and heated up the ramen broth that had been in the fridge. It came out of the container as a solid block of gelatin, a testament to the power of all of the collagen that had been rendered out of the pork and chicken bones.
While the broth heated, I sliced three half-inch thick slabs of roasted pork belly, cut then in half, and warmed them until they were soft.
I assembled all of the components: squares of toasted nori, pulled pork shoulder, menma, sliced scallions, blanched sliced snow peas, pork belly, and kamaboko (fish cake, the white slices with the pink outline). It was time to boil the noodles.
And it was here, dear readers, at the very end of the journey, that everything quickly went to hell. I assumed that the heavily-floured noodles from the fridge would separate into individual strands while they boiled. They did not. In fact, they quickly fused into chunks of inedible glop.
Fortunately, I had a backup plan. I wasn’t certain that I would obtain the alkaline salts in time to finish the recipe, so I purchased pre-made noodles during my ingredient shopping run.
Much to my surprise, fresh genuine alkaline noodles are difficult to find. These were Vietnamese, and made with egg yolks, but they’d have to do. I started another pot of water and boiled my noodle stand-ins.
I drained and rinsed the noodles, portioned them into bowls,and added the garnishes.
Lastly, I ladled hot broth over everything and topped each bowl with a slow-poached egg.
Much to my relief, this was a tasty bowl of noodles that I’d put it up against any of the local ramenyas. Soft and chewy pork, crunch from the peas and bamboo shoots, sweetness from the fish cake, the sharp bite of the scallions, and the ocean flavor of the nori all came together in a perfect balance of flavor and texture. I’ll grudgingly admit that the noodles were cooked correctly and had the proper chewiness. But the star of the dish is the broth: it was simultaneously light, meaty, smoky, and salty. We all slurped up every last bit of it, tilting the bowls so as not to miss a drop.
I realized that the traditional ramen bowls, which are much deeper than what I had at home, are essential to the recipe. Chang’s quantities are intended to provide a large serving; I had to leave out about a cup of broth in each bowl because it wouldn’t fit.
As for the noodle failure, I attribute to to two factors: 1)Â A sheet-style pasta cutter would have allowed me to handle all of the noodles as individual strands, which would have remained separate after dusting with flour. 2) Because my noodle bundles weren’t adequately floured, they released moisture during their rest in the fridge, which bound them together.
I may try to make the next batch with the noodles I froze, but I’ll be sure to have a backup. In the future I think I’ll devote my energy to locating authentic pre-made fresh noodles instead of improving my homemade noodle technique. Seeing the strainer full of failed glop, He Who Will Not Be Ignored asked “Why didn’t you make them like the Kung Fu Panda noodle chef? That would have worked.”
Maybe it would have. After all, it looks easy.
Sources
Bamboo shoots, scallions, snow peas, kamaboko, nori, noodles: H Mart
Ramen isn’t just about the noodles, it’s equally about the broth: without a decent soup base you’re left with a bowl of wet noodles. I knew the Momofuku ramen broth would be the most time-consuming of the sub-recipes, but also one of the most critical, so I got an early start on what became a day-long process.
I assembled my ingredients: two 3-by-6 inch pieces of konbu, two cups of rinsed dried shiitake mushrooms, four pounds of chicken legs, six pounds of pork neck bones, and a pound of smoky bacon (not shown).
I rinsed the konbu under cold running water, then added it to six quarts of water in a large stockpot. I brought the water to a simmer over high heat, turned off the heat, and let the konbu steep for ten minutes.
I removed the konbu and added the mushrooms, bringing the water back to a boil before returning it to a simmer. While the mushrooms simmered for thirty minutes, I heated my oven to 400 °F.
Konbu, mushrooms — that’s a solid umami base upon which to layer more flavors. After removing the mushrooms, I added the chicken, which simmered for an hour.
While the chicken simmered, I roasted the pork bones on a sheet pan in the oven for an hour.
I removed the chicken, then added the bones and the bacon, keeping the pot at a gentle simmer, skimming foam off the surface, and adding water to maintain the volume. After adding the bones, I had a pan full of fond that couldn’t go to waste, so I disolved it on some boiling water and added it to the pot.
I also picked the chicken meat off the bones since it was still firm and seasoned with mushroom and konbu. I stored it on the fridge to use as a component for a quick meal.
Forty-five minutes after it was added, I removed the bacon and discarded it. I know, I discarded bacon. I just couldn’t figure out what to do with boiled bacon which had given up most of its fat and flavor, but now I had a huge pot of bacon dashi with more meaty goodness added. I continued to simmer and skim the pot for six hours, but stopped replenishing the water after hour five.
For the last hour of simmering, I added a bunch of scallions, a medium onion cut in half, and two large chopped carrots.
At the end of the final hour, it was time to strain out my final product.
I reduced the remaining broth by half and portioned it into cup and a half servings, which can be reconstituted with an equal volume of water for later use. I froze these in the Deep Storage Facility.
I first encountered ramen noodles in college, when I was the gaijin in a suite full of Japanese students, but it wasn’t until 1985 that I learned about the real thing. My introduction to the cult of ramen was Tampopo, Juzo Itami’s “Japanese noodle western.” If you’ve seen it, you’ll remember this scene:
I didn’t develop a ramen obsession to the same level as truck drivers Goro and Gun, but I did start seeking out the real thing, Today I can walk to the Porter Exchange and eat at three different ramenyas, but twenty-five years ago the real item was in short supply. My interest in ramen was eventually eclipsed by my growing fascination with Vietnamese phở. Then I heard about David Chang and his restaurant, Momofuku.
Chang’s Momofuku cookbook begins with the declaration “Koreans are notorious noodle eaters. I am no exception.” He then goes on to document his own ramen obsession, which grew into a desire to open a noodle shop in New York. (The restaurant is named after Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen.) Since I had already cooked other recipes from the book, I thought it was time to attempt the Noodle Bar signature dish, Momofuku Ramen.
The master recipe is nothing more than the assembly instructions for a single serving of ramen, which has eight separate sub-component recipes. That’s a lot of cooking, even though it’s not particularly difficult. On day one I completed one recipe and started two more.
I began with two pounds of chicken thighs that I hacked in two with a cleaver. I placed them in a large skillet which went into a 450 °F oven for an hour, until they were browned.
I removed the pan to the stove, added a cup of sake, and deglazed the pan over medium-high heat. I then added a cup of mirin and two cups of light soy sauce (usukuchi), brought the liquid to a boil, and let everything simmer for an hour.
I strained out the chicken and added a few grinds of black pepper to the sauce. I wound up with about a pint, which I stored in the fridge.
I mixed the salt and sugar together, then spread the mixture all over the outside of the shoulder.
I placed the shoulder in a glass dish and covered it with plastic wrap. After an overnight rest in the fridge, I drained off the excess liquid and roasted the shoulder in a 250 °F oven for six hours, basting with the rendered fat and pan juices every hour. When it was done, I let it rest for thirty minutes.
Using two large forks, I pulled the pork apart into strands. I removed any obvious globs of fat and reserved the bone for making the ramen broth.
I placed the pork in a container, adding some of the fat from the pan, and stored it in the fridge.
Recipe 3: Pork Belly
I was working synchronously, so as soon as the pork shoulder got its rub and hit the fridge, I used the same treatment on a three-pound slab of pork belly.
This is the same pork preparation as that used for the Momofuku Pork Buns, so you can look up the specifics there. The only difference is that I used a whole slab of belly instead of strips. (I advise you to use a pan that you can scrub with steel wool, because the sugar in the cure melts and then fuses to the bottom of the roasting pan.)
I wrapped the finished belly in plastic and found some space for it in the increasingly crowded fridge.
Last week She Who Must Be Obeyed emailed me this photo, taken in the produce section of the Whole Foods in Fresh Pond, Cambridge. The sign reads:
MIREPOIXÂ celery + carrots + onions
Use as a starter for soups, stews, sautees, and sauces
Those are one-pint deli containers, each costs $2.89.
I reposted the photo on Facebook, with the caption “Lazy, lazy people.” Much to my surprise, people defended the existence of this high-end convenience preparation. “If you know it will take you a half hour to chop up carrots, celery, and onions, and you don’t have the time, I can see buying that.” “It might take me half an hour to chop up those veggies and they wouldn’t be as evenly cut. My knife skills are not the best.”
If you’re using mirepoix as a base for a dish, the regularity of the dice isn’t that important. It’s not like Thomas Keller is hovering over your shoulder criticizing the size of your brunoise cuts. If irregular cuts bother you, that’s a strong motivation to improve your knife skills. If it takes you half an hour to chop a pound of assorted vegetables, then you’re not doing it wrong, you’re not doing it enough.
About ten years ago I was given a gift certificate for any class of my choosing at Cambridge Culinary Academy. I signed up for the Basic Knife Skills class, hoping that my self-taught technique wasn’t so far off that it couldn’t benefit from some professional correction. What did I do for the first half of that two-hour class? I cut mirepoix. Pounds of the stuff. Enough to make gallons of soup stock. But by the time that hour was over, I knew that at home I’d be able to bang out a pint of chopped vegetables in less than ten minutes.
Take the time, cut your own damned vegetables. Why pay a ridiculous $2.89/pound for someone else to improve his knife skills, when you could be improving your own? It’s such fundamental part of cooking; you owe it to yourself.
The Yo Gaba Gabba! episode featuring Anthony Bourdain aired last week, and it was just as surreal as the preview made it out to be.
There’s a tradition of notoriously foul-mouthed celebrities appearing on children’s shows: George Carlin was Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station (as was Alec Baldwin), go back and you ‘ll find Uncle Floyd and Soupy Sales, but those hosts didn’t drive home the creepiness the way Tony did when he said “That’s right, Toodee, I am.” Just look at that smirk: what is he really thinking?
As an extra bonus, the episode contains the wacky tune from Of Montreal:
Snark for the adults, snacks for the kids – what more could you want from television?
Last Friday, special masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims released their findings on the second phase of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings, and found no evidence of a causal link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. (The first phase, decided last year, addressed the claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism. ) Test cases were filed by the Mead, King, and Dwyer families, each seeking financial compensation from a Federal program established to award damages in instances where injury or death was the direct result of a vaccination.
The final paragraphs of each (extremely lengthy) decision tell the story best:
Mead v. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Petitioners’ theory of vaccine-related causation is scientifically unsupportable. In the absence of a sound medical theory causally connecting William’s received vaccines to his autistic condition, the undersigned cannot find the proposed sequence of cause and effect to be logical or temporally appropriate. Having failed to satisfy their burden of proof under the articulated legal standard, petitioners cannot prevail on their claim of vaccine-related causation. Petitioners’ claim is dismissed, and the Clerk of the Court SHALL ENTER JUDGMENT accordingly.
Dwyer v. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Petitioners have not demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that Colin’s condition was either caused or significantly aggravated by his vaccinations. Thus, they have failed to establish entitlement to compensation and the petition for compensation is therefore DENIED. In the absence of a motion for review filed pursuant to RCFC, Appendix B, the clerk is directed to enter judgment accordingly.
King v. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Nor do I doubt that Jordan’s parents are sincere in their belief that vaccines played a role in causing Jordan’s autism. Jordan’s parents have heard the opinions of physicians who profess to believe in a causal connection between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. After studying the extensive evidence in this case for many months, I am convinced that the opinions provided by the petitioners’ experts in this case, advising the King family that there is a causal connection between thimerosal-containing vaccines and Jordan’s autism, have been quite wrong. Nevertheless, I can understand why Jordan’s parents found such opinions to be believable under the circumstances. I conclude that the Kings filed this Program claim in good faith.
Thus, I feel deep sympathy for the King family. Further, I find it unfortunate that my ruling in this case means that the Program will not be able to provide funds to assist this family, in caring for their child who suffers from a serious disorder. It is certainly my hope that our society will find ways to ensure that generous assistance is available to the families of all autistic children, regardless of the cause of their disorders. Such families must cope every day with tremendous challenges in caring for their autistic children, and all are deserving of sympathy and admiration. However, I must decide this case not on sentiment, but by analyzing the evidence. Congress designed the Program to compensate only the families of those individuals whose injuries or deaths can be linked causally, either by a Table Injury presumption or by a preponderance of “causation-in-fact†evidence, to a listed vaccine. In this case, the evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating such a link. Accordingly, I conclude that the petitioners in this case are not entitled to a Program award on Jordan’s behalf.
You can’t get any clearer than that, but these decisions are not sufficient for the vaccine-deniers. According to CNN:
Rebecca Estepp, who attended the hearings and said her 12-year-old son, Eric, has been diagnosed with autism she blames on vaccine, described herself as “devastated” with the rulings, but not surprised.
“The deck is stacked against families in vaccine court,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Poway, California, about 20 miles north of San Diego. “You have government attorneys defending a government program using government-funded science before government judges. Where’s the justice in that?”
Yup, we’re back to conspiracy theories to explain why the conclusions are not to their liking.
The reasoning of the special masters is very thorough and detailed. If you have further interest in the cases, you can read an excellent summary here at Neurodiversity Weblog. You can also search the vaccine cases filed with the Court of Federal Claims.
Once again it has been shown that correlation is not causation. No amount of arguing will make it so.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered this comment on my BLT post:
hi david,
now you’ve got me wanting a BLT! nice chicken post as well.
would you email me please. I need to ask you something.
thanks,
michael
“Michael” was Michael Ruhlman, who has been mentioned here more than a few times (seven, to be exact). How did he find me, and what did he want to discuss? I emailed him immediately, and received this reply:
my wife donna is now able to print photographs efficiently. she also put a lot of work into the ratio chart and would like to sell it in a large nice format. I’ve just put up a page about this on my blog http://blog.ruhlman.com/the-ratio-chart
When I was offering a pdf of the ratio chart, you put it in a blog post of your own. I’m writing now to ask if you would be kind enough to remove the pdf of the ratio chart from that post.
would you mind? hope you understand!
thanks very much, and all best wishes on your blog and in your kitchen.
A perfectly reasonable request. I had linked to the PDF only after the initial print run of the Ratio chart had sold out. Now that it is available again, I have removed the link, replacing it with a link to Ruhlman’s post (updated here). If there was one thing I learned from Risky Business, it was “never fuck with a man’s livelihood.” (I also learned “keep the parking brake engaged on a Porsche,” “call girls will accept savings bonds as payment,” and “Princeton admits pimps,” but I have yet to find myself in any of those situations.) If you downloaded the PDF and found it useful, I encourage you to purchase a high-quality print direct from the creator.
Who knows what would have happened if I had refused to comply with his unfailingly polite takedown request? A midnight visit from Tony Bourdain or Michael Symon? It’s best not to think about it too much.
Even though I cooked this dish last weekend, my writing about it today makes it the perfect conclusion to the bacon trilogy (trilogies aren’t just for fantasy novels). So we’ll pretend that I used my newly-smoked bacon instead of a slab of locally produced commercial product.
I had been casting about for a recipe that would let me use some of the trotter gear I prepared a few weeks ago. I had a chicken from my CSA that needed to be cooked, and Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating came to my rescue. As I read the recipe I realized that the entire first half, which took the most time and effort, was nearly identical to the trotter gear recipe I had used. So with more than half of the work already done, I assembled my ingredients: a quart of trotter gear, a pint of chicken stock, twelve whole peeled shallots, a whole chicken (broken down into ten pieces), and a pound of slab bacon cut into chunks. Henderson calls for the bacon rind, but my slab was rind-free. Fortunately I had ham rinds in the Deep Storage Facility, and used those instead.
I added the trotter gear to a pot with the chicken stock. Even at room temperature, the gear was a solid slab of pig jelly.
While the stock simmered and the gear dissolved, I browned the ham rinds and shallots in a bit of duck fat.
When they were thoroughly browned I added them to the simmering pot.
While the pot simmered for another half hour, I browned the chicken in the same pan I used for the rinds and shallots.
I moved the chicken to a dutch oven, covered it with the bacon chunks, then poured the sauce over everything.
The covered pot went into a 425 °F oven for forty minutes, then another ten minutes uncovered. The sauce reduced slightly, and everything browned a bit more.
I served the chicken with mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, green beans with lemon butter, and a loaf of bread to soak up the sauce.
I paired a hearty zinfandel with the dish, a ’93 Ravenswood Cooke from the Belm Cellars.
The chicken and bacon, not to mention the porky bits from the trotters, were meltingly tender. The sauce had a mild sweetness – from the shallots and the Madeira used in the trotter gear – which mellowed the smokiness of the bacon and ham rind. Why bother with coq au vin when you can eat this? Now that I know how simple it is to prepare, and as long as I have a supply of bacon and trotter gear, this will be my go-to winter chicken dish.
What to do with my newly-smoked bacon? Put it to the test in the vehicle designed explicitly to highlight its flavor: the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, the humble – potentially mighty – BLT. Inspired by Michael Ruhlman’s BLT From Scratch Summertime Challenege, I decided to create the ingredients myself.
Sadly, it’s March in New England, so I had to settle for making only three out of the five ingredients. First up: the bread. I baked another loaf from the batch of low-knead dough I prepared last week.
Next up: the bacon. I cut the slab I had stored in the fridge into thick slices. That end chunk on the left? It was destined to become an extra snack for the two bacon preparers.
I fried the bacon until browned and crisp. A prominently placed knife warded off any bacon snitchers.
Lastly, while the bacon fried, I made mayonnaise. I used the quick recipe from Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, taking longer to assemble the ingredients than it did to make the mayo. I started with an egg yolk, a teaspoon each of lemon juice and water, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and six ounces of canola oil.
I added the yolk, lemon, water, and salt to a two-cup measuring cup, buzzed them together with an immersion blender, and then slowly added the oil in a thin stream, moving the blender blades up and down to create the emulsion. In less than a minute I had fresh mayonnaise.
I gathered my two non-original ingredients.
I sliced the bread and tossed it into the toaster oven. While I waited, I washed and sliced the tomato and lettuce. At last, it was time for the final assemblage. I spread mayo onto each slice of bread, laid down two strips of bacon, then the lettuce, and the final tomato layer.
How did it taste? He Who Will Not Be Ignored offered this evaluation: “It’s crunchy and salty, and I love the smoky aftertaste!” (Keep it up, son, I’ll make a cook out of you yet.) Each component made a contribution, but all were perfectly balanced. Unquestionably the best BLT I’ve ever tasted.
But I won’t rest until I can make the entire sandwich from scratch. I have friends who grow tomatoes in the summer, all I have to do is convince them to plant some lettuce. I already have a sandwich to offer them in return.
, David Chang explains the main difficulty:
? Yes, yes it is, and it will figure prominently in future posts.
came to my rescue. As I read the recipe I realized that the entire first half, which took the most time and effort, was nearly identical to the trotter gear recipe I had used. So with more than half of the work already done, I assembled my ingredients: a quart of trotter gear, a pint of chicken stock, twelve whole peeled shallots, a whole chicken (broken down into ten pieces), and a pound of slab bacon cut into chunks. Henderson calls for the bacon rind, but my slab was rind-free. Fortunately I had ham rinds in the Deep Storage Facility, and used those instead.
