Ice Cream Misadventures

Between the amazing peaches and cherries that have been showing up at Costco, farmers' markets, and even my local Jewel(!), we've been eating a lot of fruit recently, and when I stumbled onto a two-dollar ice cream maker at a garage sale on a particularly balmy lunch-hour, I instantly thought of making a great peaches and cream or cherry with mascarpone*.

But the two-dollar ice cream maker's motor died halfway through the first batch of nectarine I made and I ended up finishing it by spinning the metal drum by hand and holding the dasher. Needless to say the end result was not smooth and creamy. Once it was cured--stored in the freezer overnight--it was hard like a rock and full of ice crystals. Not very pleasant to eat, even if we allowed it to thaw for quite a while before digging in.

I had the taste for this project at this point, though, so I started researching. Everything I looked at for less than around forty bucks seemed cheap and chintzy and I figured that the motor on these cheapies would quickly burn out as well.

So when I came across the ice-cream maker attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer, I figured, ok, that makes more sense, since it uses my KA's motor. (I have one of the older KA's, which are gems. )

After debating the pros/cons of spending $75 on something that's just an attachment, when all these full-on, freestanding appliances can be had for fifty or less, the next round of produce was upon us and my romantic notions of making some beautifully creamy fresh fruit ice creams motivated me to dip into my gifts/bonuses mad money account, and I doubled up on the shipping by including a copy of the new Wilco cd. Splurge!

I went looking for more nectarines or peaches in the midst of a trip over to Babies 'R Us for more childproofing stuff (Nora is into everything these days), but I found some organic strawberries that just smelled great at Fresh Farms, I spun up a batch of strawberry ice cream.

We were in a rush to eat dinner, get the ice cream made, and get out of the house for Henry's camp carnival, which is a pretty huge event here in bucolic Park Ridge, Illinois (an officially-designated Tree City, USA), so I didn't think to take any pictures.

The main issue was that I didn't allow the mixture to chill thoroughly before using the KA attachment to freeze it. Also, forgot to think about the mixture expanding while freezing, so I totally overloaded the bowl. And THEN added a bunch of chopped strawberries for good measure. Then, while it was spinning, I read the instructions where it said not to overload the bowl. Duh.

So it never quite fully froze. After about 50 minutes, it had a light, frothy, mousse-like consistency, and tasted great (I added a few drops of balsamic vinegar for tang), but it was barely cold and not at all smooth and creamy. Pressed for time, I dumped it into tupperware containers, threw them in the freezer, and headed out for an evening of bouncy slides and rubber chicken toss.

I knew it was going to be bad when I put it away, and it was. Very hard and crunchy, even after it softened and I mashed it around with my spoon a lot. Not good.

I'm holding out on any assessment of the KA ice-cream maker attachment at this juncture, because I just went about the whole thing all wrong. The ice cream mixture should always be well-chilled and allowing it to sit overnight is good for flavor development as well, so rushing the process the way I did was a boneheaded mistake. Overloading the well didn't help and, since I've never done this before, I'm just randomly pulling recipes from the web.

Anyone have a good ice cream base recipe? Maybe one that includes a measure for fruit or fruit puree? The peach one I made with the doomed garage-sale ice cream machine was interesting because it involved making a simple syrup, and then using the hot simple syrup to cook the egg yolks while running in the stand mixer. This technique seems easier to me, plus there's less risk of curdling than the traditional method involving tempering the egg yolks with the hot cream, then returning that mixture to the pot to finish cooking.


I'll try it again a few times over the next couple weeks and we'll see how it goes. As I write this, it occurs to me that I'm following Ruhlman and Leibowitz on Twitter, but it never occurred to me to check Ratio, or Leibowitz's ice cream book. Duh again. Learning process.






*ugh. huge pet peeve, here. The endless inability to pronounce the name of this soft, creamy fresh cheese. Mas-car-, folks, not mar-ska-. And don't get me started on Chee-pohl-tay.

Granola Recipe

I referred to making granola in an earlier post, but never posted the recipe. We've been working from a recipe that I got from the Food Network's recipe website for nearly a year now, and I've tweaked it to the point that it gives us great, consistent results.

This makes a big batch, maybe 2 weeks' worth for a small family, but it keeps just fine in a sealed plastic container.

6 Cups rolled oats
1.5 Cups freshly-ground flax seeds
1.5 Cups wheat germ
1 Cup brown sugar
2 Cups shredded coconut
1 Cup toasted sunflower seeds
3 Cups other nuts (we use walnuts and pecans), chopped
1 Cup vegetable oil
1 Cup maple syrup (real)
2 T. salt
1 T. vanilla paste

1. Pre-heat oven to 275°
2. Mix the dry ingredients.
   
3. Mix the wet ingredients.
4. Combine and mix until well coated.
   
5. Spread mixture evenly over two half-sheet pans.
6. Bake on bottom rack until well-browned and dry (maybe 1 hour).
7. Turn pieces over, lower oven to 200°, bake another 45 minutes to ensure it's fully dried and crunchy.

(my blogger software is changing the numbers on that list to little flowers, for some unknown reason. Somone who knows html, could you write me on how to fix that?)

It's a great breakfast option to have on hand for everyday, get-out-of-the-house type eating, combined with some nice creamy yogurt, or just milk.

I used a vanilla paste that's made by Rodelle Vanilla that's just fantastic as well. Vanilla paste is the actual pulp from the vanilla beans, pre-scraped and mixed with a bit of extract and corn syrup, so the texture is nice for this kind of application. If I poured vanilla extract straight onto the granola, it would quickly soak into only a few chunks; this pasty stuff allows it to thoroughly mix with the dry, sticky granola ingredients.

(full disclosure--they sent me some swag after I did a review of their whole vanilla beans that I buy at Costco)

No long commentary here. Truth is, I'm doing some late Spring cleaning and I almost threw out the original recipe. I haven't re-written it with the alterations, and just wanted to get it down somewhere that I wouldn't lose it. Paper is so obsolete.

Makin' Bacon

In my recent entry about Peoria Packing Butcher Shop, I talked about how I bought a pork belly to experiment with making my own bacon. Well, the process has come to its logical conclusion and I thought I'd share the results.

Bottom line; the bacon I made was good, but not great. I do, however, have a pretty good handle on what can be improved upon, so I believe that the next batch will be better.

Lacking the seminal Michael Ruhlman book, I turned, of course, to the internet for information on what, exactly I needed to do to turn my pork belly into everyone's favorite cured, smoky treat. There's precious little credible information out there, in fact, but I did stumble onto this thread on LTH forum by my idol, and virtual mentor in so many endeavors, Mike Gebert. The thread served as a perfect primer, especially because Gebert used the Weber Smokey Mountain smoker and went into some detail about how to keep the smoker running cool enough to simulate the cold smoking that is typical of bacon production.

It's really a very easy process that's worth taking on, if only for the sake of going through the motions and learning how it's done. Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of what I did.

Step One: The Belly

As already noted, my belly was purchased at Peoria Packing, and I really didn't consider the choice very carefully--I just grabbed one randomly off the pile. The belly comes as one large floppy piece. I had trouble at first figuring out how this thing would end up resembling a slab of bacon, but after I cut it into three more or less equal pieces, it started to take shape. I got two good-sized blocks that I planned on using for my homemade bacon and one piece, from the scrawny end, that I figured I could use for braising or something.

In retrospect, the belly that I got at Peoria Packing wasn't all that great. It was pretty thin, resulting perhaps from sloppy trimming when the ribs were removed from the belly section. PP offers bellies with ribs on as well, so next time I may buy that cut and remove the ribs myself, leaving as much meat on the belly as I can. Or I may check Chicago Food Corp on Pulaski. There are also some other, more expensive options for getting high-quality bellies that I might pursue.


Step Two: The Cure

I recalled, vaguely, from somewhere, that the basic ratio for curing meats is 10:5:1, meaning 10 parts salt to five parts sugar to one part pink salt (sodium nitrate, aka Prague powder). Pink salt is optional, but it helps preserve the color, adds flavor, and makes the curing process safer, inhibiting stuff like botulism, so I made a quick trip over to The Spice House in Evanston and picked some up. It's also available over the internet through websites like Sausagemaker.com.

So, using that ratio, I mixed 500 grams of kosher salt, 250 grams brown sugar, and 50 grams of the pink salt. I decided to keep this cure really simple and just add black pepper for flavor, so I coarsely ground some peppercorns (about 75 grams) in my old coffee grinder, and threw them in as well.

Then I liberally applied the cure to the belly pieces, put each one into a ziplock bag and tossed them in my old basement fridge on a sheetpan (in case the bags leaked). I turned the bags over every other day to make sure the cure soaked in evenly, and after a week in the bags, I took the bellies out, rinsed them, dried them well with paper towels, and put them in the fridge on a rack set over a sheetpan so they could dry off and form a pellicle. The pellicle is kind of a skin that forms that allows the smoke to 'stick' to the meat and also prevents too much moisture from being lost during the smoking process.

Step Three: The Smoke

The big challenge here was getting my Weber smoker, which is designed to 'hot' smoke at temps between 200° and 275° to run colder, so the pork bellies would cook as little as possible. The right way to smoke pork bellies for bacon is in a smokehouse or with an offset smoker, which allows for cold smoking.

But I don't have either of those, so I was determined to get my WSM to run at about 150° for the 3-4 hours I figured I'd need to impart a whole lot of hickory smoke flavor before the bellies would have a chance to cook much. Besides one pretty funny MacGyver-esque set-up, which some guy constructs using dryer exhaust venting, foil pie plates, cardboard boxes, and duct tape, what I found was that building a very small fire and keeping it just barely going was the way to go. That's what I did and I ran a pretty solid 150° for four hours.

Step Four: Slicing

Slicing bacon by hand is hard!

After my bacon came off the smoker, I let it cool on a rack, then wrapped it in plastic and allowed it to firm up overnight in the fridge. The next day, I put the pieces in the freezer for a few hours and then took them out to slice them, which, I found, is no easy task.

I ended up with kind of a variety of thicknesses, basically due to my inability to consistently slice evenly, but that ended up being fine, since it allowed me to see how the various thicknesses cooked up. Cutting thicker slices is easier, and the thick slices cooked up nicer anyway, so that's what I'll go with next time around.

Step Five: Cook (and eat)

So? How'd it turn out?

Well, like I said, pretty good, but not great. I'd leave it in the cure for a few days longer next time. The thinner parts of the belly had good salt and sweetness, but the thicker sections lacked flavor and tasted more like fresh pork. So 10 days of curing next time around, rather than the seven I did this time.

The smokiness was excellent. You can see by the black outer edges that the smoke really penetrated and flavored the bacon. It's got that really incredibly strong smokiness that you can smell as soon as you open the door of the fridge. I used hickory chunks and I'll do it the same exact way next time around.

The texture was varied. The thinner pieces, while crispier, also had kind of a chewy, jerky-like quality to them, while the slices that were cut thicker ended up being more tender, with that melting quality where the fat just kind of disintegrates in your mouth. Thick slices are better.

All in all, while I'm not going to subject my first run-through to the stringent review process of The Bacon List, I'm deeming this experiment a rousing success. The end result was certainly edible, and better than most grocery store bacon I've had. And while it falls short of something like a Niman Ranch or a Broadbent, I think the potential is there to approach that level of quality.

All in all, a fine diversion resulting in some pretty good breakfast meat. I'll certainly do it again and I'll keep you posted how things progress.

Burger Research

As some of you may already have read, I'm actively working on a project for which I'm researching burgers. Everything about them; the best way to cook a burger, whether it should be made thick or thin, which cuts of beef to use in the grind, the ratio of fat to lean, the perfect bun, etc, etc....

I've been running around town trying lots of different burger spots, and have been doing tons of reading on the web as well.

This post is going to serve as sort of a compendium for the information I've amassed thus far.

On the local front, The Chicago Burger Project is a promising blog that began as a quest to eat through Time Out Chicago's 55 Best Burgers article. Two years later, the guys who started this blog have managed to choke down 41 of them, and written some decent reviews, but their pace has slowed down considerably--lately they put up a new post only every other month or so.

As usual, LTH forum is a wealth of information. One can, if time allows, do a search and wade through the literally dozens of topics about various types, styles, toppings, and specific restaurants. And then there are topics like this one, from which one man's nostalgic meanderings about the burger of his childhood (Mike Gebert of Sky Full of Bacon again) a near-scholarly discussion emerges and touches on the burger's provenance, the etymology of the term, and it's history in various regions. Deep.

Expanding my scope outside Chicago is fruitful. People take burgers a lot more seriously in places like New York, New Jersey, and L.A., I'm afraid. Chicago has it share of food specialties and does a lot of things well, but it's not a burger town.

George Motz may be the foremost expert on burgers in the country (and, therefore, the world). His Hamburger America empire includes a Beard Award-nominated film, a book, and a blog, all bearing his HA brand. He's taught a course on burgers at NYU, has consulted for Wendy's and has had a burger named after him by esteemed burgermeister Harry Hawk.

A Hamburger Today, the burger blog maintained by Serious Eats is a logical command center for such an endeavor. It's one of those blogs that's maintained by multiple editors and bloggers, takes itself pretty seriously, and does a really excellent job of reporting just about every burger-related story on the web, along with generating some of its own original material.

I found this piece, which reviews 12 of NYC's best burgers using a numerical ratings system similar to the one I employ for my Bacon List to be really informative and helpful. Sometimes simply identifying and figuring out the right words to use to describe the concepts being discussed can be really difficult, and this piece goes a long way towards establishing a workable lexicon with which to discuss, evaluate, and reverse-engineer burgers.

In this piece, Chef Tony Maws of Craigie on Main in Cambridge, MA uses three different cuts of beef, two types of fat, and dehydrated miso powder in his fancy-schmancy burger mix, before cooking it up in a hi-tech C-Vap oven and browning it on a 900° plancha. That's a bit outside the scope of my project, but there's still some useful insight there.

Along those same lines, here's a rundown of how to make the Blumenburger, Heston Blumenthal's 32-ingredient, 30 hour prep-time burger that he worked up for the BBC's series In Search of Perfection, which seeks to re-work classic dishes so as to arrive at the benchmark version.

And then there's this hilarious nugget that someone dug up and put on YouTube. It's a Wendy's training video from the 80's, which, yes, does contain some interesting info about the technique the fast food chain employs to cook their patties (they keep the griddle at a very low 250°) But the appeal is more in the dated look and feel, along with the bust-a-gut-funny rap-song dream sequence. This one is not to be missed. Make sure to watch both parts.

There's much more, of course. Burger blogs are freakin' everywhere. There's The Burger Beast, HoosierBurger Boy, Portland Hamburgers, and Texas Burger Guy. And then there's Cincinnatti Burger Guys, Burgatory, a guy who just reviews fast food burgers, LA-based BurgerTour, Waunaburger out of Wisconsin, and, of course, twelve bazillion blogs and articles about people eating sixteen-pound manhole-cover sized burgers, and burgers that are so over-the-top decadent that they render themselves completely disgusting.

And then there's this:



God, the internet is just so weird.

Oh, and out of what I've tried so far, I liked the burger at Five Guys on Clybourn the best. Very juicy. Enjoy!

Ditch the Recipe and Just Cook!

I've written quite a few times about my disdain for recipes. I believe that recipes are a crutch that prevent people from learning how to actually cook.

For the most part, they're unnecessary. There are some exceptions, of course, but the overwhelming majority of recipes are simple techniques embellished with multiple flavor variations.

Case in point--my mother in law. She's a damn good cook who stows a file folder full of clipped recipes in her giant suitcase every time she comes for a visit. I snuck a look at it a few weeks ago, and, among other things, there were eight separate recipes for bread pudding and baked french toast. Eight different recipes for her to keep track of, all variations on exactly the same theme; some type of bread soaked with custard, with some sort of flavor and/or add-ins like fruit or nuts, which is then baked in a shallow dish.

She clearly likes this concept; she's making eight different versions of it. Think of the possibilities that might open up to her if she were to ditch the recipes and embrace the (really, very simple) techniques that these recipes are built around.

Most cooking simply involves hanging various ingredients on a template or skeleton. All the recipe does is name the specific ingredients involved, rather than leave that choice up to you. The great, gaping knowledge gap, which is what distinguishes cooks from recipe-followers, is an understanding of the template and how it works, and the realization that the options of what kind of bread to use, which flavors to add, and whether to use dried cranberries or raisins are infinitely malleable and really, rather arbitrary.

So let's take a look at one of my mother in law's bread pudding recipes--Cranberry Orange Bread Pudding--as an example. The template for this recipe is simple:

Bread + Custard + Flavorings + Other stuff + Bake it.

The only real knowledge one needs is what a custard is and how to work with it. Everything else is completely variable.

Here are the ingredients from this recipe, and, in paranthesis, the role they play in the template:

King's Hawaiian Bread (Bread)
Whole Eggs (Custard)
Additional Egg Yolks (Custard)
Milk (Custard)
Sugar (Flavorings)
Orange Juice (Flavorings)
Orange Zest (Flavorings)
Grand Marnier (Flavorings)
Vanilla Extract (Flavorings)
Dried Cranberries (Other Stuff)

So, by simply pulling back, understanding the role each ingredient plays in the dish, and then considering all the other various ingredients that can play the same role, you can write forty bread pudding recipes in about five minutes. Think about it:

Bread--how many different types of bread could you use? Brioche, wheat bread, challah, crusty baguettes, cinnamon-raisin bread, focaccia, cinnamon rolls, doughnuts, banana bread, sourdough...the list is endless. How about a savory bread pudding with rye bread, caraway, crispy bacon, apples, and sauerkraut? Sounds weird, but that might be a pretty cool little side dish for grilled pork chops, no?

Flavorings--Again, the list is endless. Orange, lemon, lime, vanilla, chocolate, maple, honey, every extract you can think of, every liqueur you can think of, coconut milk instead of regular milk, savory, sweet, sweet and savory, etc, etc. Think of flavors that go together and reconfigure them into the familiar framework of the bread pudding. How about a key lime bread pudding with key lime juice, lime zest, and a rich bread like brioche with bits of broken graham crackers mixed in? Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread Pudding. Bananas Foster Bread Pudding. It's literally endless.

Add-ins--Nuts, chocolate chips, dried fruit, fresh fruit, cooked fruit, crunchy toffee bits, candy, vegetables for savory (or sweet, I suppose) bread puddings....

The only thing that might be even slightly unfamiliar here is the custard. But making custard is just a question of knowing the correct ratio of eggs/yolks to liquid.

That concept--of using ratios in cooking--is the subject of a new book about cooking (I'm not calling it a cookbook) by Michael Ruhlman. I'm a big fan of Ruhlman for both his excellent writing and the way he attempts to de-mystify cooking in his books. I haven't read or even checked out this book yet, but based on his other books (The Elements of Cooking is a really great resource for budding cooks), and the concept, I think it's bound to be good.

The book is called Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking and the concept is similar to what I've described above. Ditch the recipes and begin understanding the simple underlying principles on which recipes are based. Then just mix and match the ingredients of your choice based on what you have on hand or what you feel like eating.

Ruhlman's book furnishes some of the basic ratios for various types of breads, quick breads, stocks, sauces, and, yes...custards, and allows readers begin to understand the basic principles of cooking in the same way that chefs approach the process. Alton Brown says that "having a ratio in hand is like having a secret decoder ring that frees you from the tyranny of recipes", and he's right, despite employing his typical science-geek frame of reference. It's a book I plan on reading because I enjoy Ruhlman's writing and the fresh approach he brings to the subject matter, but I'm even more interested in recommending it to novice cooks.

Ruhlman's blog has a post up about the book, and he's doing a giveaway promotion, in conjuction with Share Our Strength, which is a wonderful organization. Anyone who donates--regardless of the amount--by clicking through to Ruhlman's page on SOS will be eligible for the giveaway. You can win signed copies of the book, a fancy scale, and some other cool stuff, so I encourage everyone to check it out.

Charities like SOS typically see a big decline in donations during trying economic times like this, so it's important to keep them in mind while we're all figuring out ways of cutting back and being more frugal. Think of it this way; learning to cook will actually save you money by allowing you to more easily utilize what's in your pantry or is on sale, and you can use some of the money you save with your newfound culinary skills to help feed hungry kids. Plus, you might even win a cool prize.

Smokin'!

It's the first day of Spring and the sun is shining, so that's reason enough for me to bust out the smoker. I use a Weber Smokey Mountain smoker and generally do ribs, chicken, and pork shoulder at least a couple times a month when the weather is good.

It's easy and the results are delicious, but it's quite the process. There is a bit of a learning curve to get started. And mastering the process is a long journey. But there are resources available.

I used Gary Wiviott's excellent Master the WSM Smoker in Five Easy Dinners Course, which I stumbled onto via LTH Forum. Followed it to the letter, I did. And emerged with a good amount of working knowledge about how to handle the smoker. I highly recommend Prof. Wiviott's method for novices.

Reading GWiv's website will give anyone interested the fine details and methods, so I'm not going to cover all that. What I will do is gloss over the process, giving whoever's interested a bit of an intro into barbecue, generally, and the WSM, specifically. If you find yourself wanting more specifics after reading this, they're easy enough to find.

First, I'll define what we're talking about. "Barbecue" is a term that is often misused. It refers to a process of cooking meat (usually) for long periods of time over low, indirect heat, in near-constant contact with the smoke of hardwood. Low, smokey, and slow cooking. The trick is to keep the smoke moving across the meat while keeping the cooking temperature low; usually around 200°-250°F.

The WSM accomplishes this by having the fire burn at the bottom of the "bullet", and then placing a pan full of water between the fire and the the racks that hold the meat in the upper area of the unit. The water pan helps to moderate the temperature, as well as catch drippings from the cooking meat that could result in flare-ups if they landed in the fire.

This process allows the smoke to infuse and flavor the meat, and the long, low-temp cooking causes the collagen and connective tissue in certain tougher cuts of meat to break down, resulting in a transformation that anyone who loves good barbecue is familiar with. Cuts like beef brisket, pork shoulders, and ribs become meltingly tender and unctuous when given four, eight, or 12 hours of the barbecue treatment. It's a unique way of extracting the most flavor and enjoyment out of these particular pieces of meat.

One thing that really makes me bristle is hearing people referring to their grill (especially a gas grill) as a "barbecue" or saying that they're going to have a "barbecue" when they're planning on cooking some steaks, burgers, or dogs on the grill. THAT'S NOT BARBECUE!!! That's "grilling". There's an enormous difference.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against grilling. I own a gas grill and use it often. But I don't call the burgers, chicken, or portobellos I cook on my grill "barbecued" because they're not.

Grilling is a high heat method of cooking in which the food sits on a grate directly above, and in close proximity to, the heat source--usually open flames. The foods cook very quickly. Therefore, it's best suited to items that are leaner and inherently tender; steaks, chops, fish, burgers, etc. "Lesser" cuts like ribs and brisket would be a disaster on the grill, as the tougher fibers of these meats would not break down during the quick grilling process. Ribs are often finished on a grill, but try grilling them from their raw state and then eating them. Not good.

Even if you're using a charcoal grill, and loading it up with real hardwood charcoal (as opposed to those nasty, chemical-laden "briquettes"), you're still grilling. If the heat is high and direct, it's not barbecue.

Grilling is often considered (especially by marketing/advertising types) as the ultimate "guy thing". Take a look at the father's day gift ideas every year and all you see are these high-tech grilling gadgets and tools. But smoking is much more of a real guy thing than cooking a steak on one of those $4,000 gas grills with their infrared sear burners could ever hope to be.

I mean, think about it; anyone can turn a knob, wait a few minutes, plop a steak on a grill, poke it with their silly temperature sensing fork a few times, and then pull it off when the thing beeps. A friggin' monkey could do it.

Smoking, on the other hand, involves fire. Fire that you light with a flame. Fire that burns differently every time, depending on the air temperature, the wind, and the quality of the charcoal.

Like the primeval ancestors that came before him, a true barbecuer makes a fire and that fire is a living thing that must be controlled. It's much more of a "guy thing" to work with your fire, learn its idiosyncrasies, and figure out how to simultaneously tame and maintain it. There is much skill involved with this. Turning a knob and clicking the igniter on your big, shiny, culinary equivalent of a Hummer doesn't put you in touch with your inner caveman, no matter how much you grunt like the guy from Home Improvement when you do it.

I joked in my last entry about how I enjoy taking on projects with steep learning curves. Well, this one's no joke. All the senses are involved in the smoking process--watching the fire and meat, smelling what the fire's doing, listening to hear when the water pan needs refilling and when the charcoal has gone to ember, touching the meat to figure out if it's reached that falling-apart level of tenderness.

Not only that, but once you've got the basics down, there are an infinite number of variables to mess around with. You've got your various rubs and marinades to play with. Hardwood options include oak, hickory, mesquite, pecan, apple, alder, and more. The classic meats to use are brisket, pork shoulder, and chicken, but once you've got those nailed, you can start branching out with turkey, fish, smoking your own pork belly for homemade bacon, making your own smoked sausages, and on and on. It's also nice to smoke non-meat items while your main dish is going. I usually do a pot of baked beans that I set on the smoker for a few hours while the ribs or chicken is going, and I've also smoked onions, peppers, and even potatoes to use in side dishes.

It's one of those minute-to-learn, lifetime-to-master things. And those are often the best things.

Making REAL Mac and Cheese

It's tempting, when beginning a piece about mac and cheese, to go on a long-winded rant about all those nasty powder-cheese concoctions that line the shelves, trying to lure you with their supposed ease of preparation, their overly salty cheesiness, and strangely skinny noodles.

I'll go ahead and resist that particular temptation, as I'm sure it's been done to death. As a transition, though, I will share a funny anecdote--the story of what happened the first time I ever tried to make Kraft Mac and Cheese. I was probably a sophomore in high school, and wasn't much of a cook at the time. My range was limited to after-school microwaving and toaster-ovening and sporadic Sunday-morning pancake-flipping.

But, I was hungry after school and the usual stuff wasn't going to cut it this day, so I decided to make myself a batch of the ol' blue box. I was no cook, but I could follow instructions, I figured. So I did exactly what the box said; I cooked the pasta in boiling water, then added the contents of the packet, plus a little milk and butter. I stirred and stirred, but I was mystified about why it never thickened up. It was like soup.

What the heck did I do wrong? I called a friend and asked her and we went through it step by step. "Ok, so then you drained the pasta, and added the cheese powder, right?" she said.

"Uh...drained the pasta?"

Whoops. I guess that's where it went bad.

Seriously, though, this tells you about my level of cooking ability at the time. I didn't know to drain the pasta, and the instructions didn't even mention this crucial step! I blame Kraft's recipe writers. C'mon, people! Lowest common denominator! Plastic garbage bags have messages telling me not to wear them over my face, and my wife's hairdryer has a tag on the cord with a message that reads "DO NOT USE WHILE SLEEPING", but you can't tell me to drain the frickin' pasta?!

(As an aside, the cheese powder packet that comes with the Kraft Mac and Cheese is really good sprinkled over hot popcorn. For a real dorm-room classic, combine the cheese packet from Kraft dinner with the foil seasoning packet that comes with ramen noodles, sprinkle over popcorn. Consume while drinking cheap beer. Enjoy.)

Anyway, I've come a long way since those days and now I make what I (and my family) believe is the very best macaroni and cheese......ever! This is the very same recipe I used in my triumphant appearance at the first annual sMACkdown, at which I tied Stephanie (Top Chef) Izard.

What follows is a step-by-step guide to making my mac and cheese. Included in this presentation is a bonus step-by-step to making Bechamel sauce; one of the classic French "mother sauces" and, as such, a wonderful leaping-off point for literally hundreds of different sauces. Seriously, Google it. Stuff like knowing how to make Bechamel with your eyes closed is why chefs don't need to use recipes.

First, get a pot of water going for the pasta, and start making the Bechamel. I don't need to tell you to salt the pasta water, do I? It should taste like ocean water.

Bechamel sauce is simply milk thickened with a roux. A roux is simply butter (or oil) and flour cooked together in equal parts to make a paste. Put the butter in a saucepan over low, add the flour and let it melt. Whisk the flour and butter together as it melts. You want to let the roux cook a bit just to cook out the raw flour flavor, but for mac and cheese, we're using a light-colored, or "blonde" roux, so you shouldn't let it take on any color.

Once the roux is dry and kind of crumbly, and it's cooked for a few minutes, remove about half of it, so as to be better able to control how thick your sauce gets. You may end up using all of it, but it's better to be able to add it little by little than to have to keep adding more liquid to thin down your sauce.




Next, add the milk. Just a little at first. The roux begins thickening when it's boiled, so adding just a little milk will allow the mixture to boil almost immediately. It will quickly thicken up to the consistency of mashed potatoes (or wallpaper paste), which allows you to whisk out any lumps before adding the rest of the milk. Once it thickens up like you see in the pic to the left, go ahead and add the rest of the milk.







In the meantime, grate your cheese. I use cheddar (for flavor and color) and another cheese with better melting characteristics like Monterey Jack, fontina, or Swiss. My go-to is Gruyere, and then I add some Parmano cheese to bring up the sharpness.






Also in the meantime (the milk takes a while to come up to a boil), make the breadcrumb topping. I use panko, salt and pepper, more Parmano cheese, chopped parsley, and melted butter. Just melt the butter in the microwave, combine everything else in a bowl, and then pour in the butter and stir it all around with a fork so the melted butter coats everything else.

By now the Bechamel will be more or less ready. You want it pretty loose, since adding all the cheese will thicken it up. It should have started to thicken, and come to a gentle boil. Let it boil for a couple minutes to allow the roux to thicken it, and add more roux as necessary to adjust the consistency. It's better to over-thicken it, since you can always thin it out with a bit more milk. But once you add the cheese, you can't add more roux, since bringing it to a boil would cause the cheese to separate.

Once your Bechamel has thickened and you've allowed it to boil for a few minutes, remove it from the heat, let it cool a bit, and then add all the grated cheese to it, whisking to melt and incorporate the cheese. You'll also want to season it here. I use salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce--not for the heat, but for the acidity it adds. Make sure you taste and re-season enough times so that you get that kind of pinch in the back of your cheek that the sharpness of the cheddar provides.

The sauce should be creamy and you should see some stringy-ness from all the melting cheese when you pull your whisk out. If it's too thick, add some milk to thin it down. You want it kind of thin, since adding the pasta, allowing it to cool, and baking it will all thicken it.

When the pasta's cooked, drain it well, add the sauce to the large pasta-cooking pot, and then combine the pasta and sauce, tossing it well to coat it in the sauce.

CRUCIAL TIP: Try to make sure your pasta is hot when you toss it with the cheese sauce, since it'll absorb the sauce much better than it will if you let it cool down first. Also, once the pasta and the sauce are combined, let the mixture sit in the pot for a while before putting it in your baking dish. This lets the sauce thicken up and soak into the pasta, preventing the sauce from pooling up in the bottom of the baking dish.

At this point, taste it and adjust your seasonings again. Even if your sauce was perfectly seasoned, you may need to add more salt, pepper, or Tabasco to compensate for the addition of the bland pasta. You can also add more milk at this point if the mixture is too thick.

If you're adding stuff like peas, bacon, or ham, this is the point at which to do it.





Turn the whole mess out into a baking dish, top it with your crumb topping, and put it into a 350° oven, and bake it until you can see the cheese sauce bubbling up. Then crank up your oven's broiler and get the topping nice and brown.



That's it. The top should be all toasty, buttery, and burnt-cheese tasting from the grated cheese in the topping, the mac and cheese will be super-creamy and rich-tasting, and you'll get that great contrast of the creamy interior with the crunchy browned topping. It's awesome stuff.

Plus, once you've got the roux and Bechamel technique down, you can use it to make tons of other sauces. Country gravy and biscuits, chicken fried steak with sage cream gravy, and sauce Nantua (a cream-based Bechamel flavored with crawfish and other shellfish) are all examples of fairly well-known Bechamel-based sauces.

So that's it. My (nearly) award-winning mac and cheese recipe, complete with step-by-step photos and commentary. You now officially have no excuse for ever again buying any blue box, lecithin-laden, Velveeta Whiz-based product.

The Bacon List--Dutch Farms

One thing I'm learning with this exercise I'm calling The Bacon List is that cheap bacon often tastes as good--or better--than pricey bacon. A lot of it depends on where you buy it. Now, that being said, I've yet to review an artisanal bacon for The List (got one coming up for the next post, I promise), so once those reviews start coming down the pike, that observation may be refuted. We'll see. Suffice to say that in the world of grocery-store bacon, price and quality don't seem to be very closely related.

The bacon that I'm putting under the microscope for this entry is Dutch Farms brand "bacon". No embellishing adjectives. No mention of the wood used or the cure flavors. Nada. It's bacon. What more do you need to know? Nothing, I guess...

I picked up a pound of this at Lincolnwood Produce, which is quickly becoming my favorite grocery store (if you'll remember, that's also where I got the Andy's Deli slab bacon I reviewed). It cost $2.50 for a pound.

The package indicates that the bacon is "distributed by Dutch Farms, Chicago, Illinois". Which leads me to believe it's probably Oscar Mayer or Hormel bacon that's sold to a smaller company and then packaged under the Dutch Farms brand name. But that's just a guess. As far as I know, it could be the same stuff that's sold under Costco's Kirkland brand that I also already covered. It's possible. It's pretty similar. I need to keep this in mind for future purchases, since I really don't need to be wasting time reviewing the same bacon over and over again.

A quick google on Dutch Farms turned up a nice-looking website that tells me that the company is a pretty large distribution house serving most of the Midwest, that they're down on 107th street on the South Side, and that they've been around for about 80 years, but that they've just started carrying packaged meats like bacon in the last 10 years. I searched for some more specific info about their bacon, but although they have a pretty extensive online catalog, the listing doesn't give me any additional knowledge about the product.

Ok, so on to the review; how'd it taste? Pretty damn good. It's a quite serviceable inexpensive grocery-store bacon. For $2.50/pound, it's almost as good a deal as the Kirkland brand stuff, but you can buy this one pound at a time vs. the four pound minimum purchase at Costco. It also doesn't require making a special trip, which is probably worth the extra fifty cents. I'd say the bacon ranks right up there in all the categories. We liked it.

Here's the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Grocery Store.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $2.50/lb. purchased in a 1-pound pack.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Nice looking slices, medium thickness. Nice fat/lean ratio. Nice color.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Some shrinkage, but not huge. An appealing amount of curl. Just enough to give it that nice, rippled bacon-y look and improve the texture and bit a little.

A note: I have officially changed the cooking technique that I'm using to cook bacon reviewed for The List. Using the rack just became too annoying because the bacon always stuck to it and it was really hard to get it off the rack without breaking it all to bits, since I cook my bacon crisp. I have now switched to a straight parchment paper method (which can be viewed in the two pictures in closest proximity), which consists of placing the raw bacon strips onto a piece of parchment paper (a much utilized product in restaurant kitchens that has recently surfaced amidst the plastic wrap and tin foil at the grocery store--it's about time!) on a sheet pan, placing in a cold oven and then turning on the oven to about 300-325º. With this method, you don't need to flip the bacon strips over at any point, as the rendered fat will cook them on both sides evenly, but you do need to rotate the sheetpan to account for any uneven heating of your oven, and I actually move the strips in the center of the tray to the outside so that they cook evenly. This is now the new Official Cooking Method of all bacon reviewed for The Bacon List.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. It's fine. Attractive curl. Nice color. Some loss due to shrinkage, but nothing major.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Great texture. Salty. Salt is the first flavor you get and it's by far the strongest. There's some smoke flavor, and some sweetness, but not sugary cure sweetness, more porky sweetness. The fat is very melting and tender, which is lovely. The texture is great. Crisp, with a little chew, but not too much, and a luscious amount of melting fat that just disintegrates on the tongue. We enjoyed it very much with our breakfast, especially as a foil to sweet breakfast items, like the frangipan pancakes that we ate with maple syrup.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 6.0 Overall, this is a completely decent bacon for everyday use, especially considering the price. It's a good value. Nothing to go out of your way for, but if you see it in your store for the price I paid or less, pick up a few pounds and stow them in the freezer.

Chocolate Pudding

I've stated many times on this blog that I don't do recipes. And I don't. Usually. But when it comes to desserts, I break my own rule.

In professional cooking, there's a clear divide between the sweet and savory sides of the kitchen. It's a completely different mindset. Line cooks and chefs cook by feel, smell, sight, sound, and intuition, grounded solidly in classic technique. But they generally don't utilize recipes, because the products are not always exactly the same, and adaptations have to be made on the fly.

In contrast, pastry chefs almost always use recipes, and not only do they use them religiously, but they scale everything, weighing their flour and sugar on a digital scale to account for slight atmospheric and product variations that might throw off their precise formulas. Cooking pastry is like science whereas cooking on the savory side is like, um....basketball? or improv jazz, maybe? or...I don't know. Something.

Anyway, my point is that when I make desserts, I usually use recipes. Here's one that I've made a few times recently and is very good.

Chocolate Pudding

1 Cup sugar
1/4 Cup cornstarch
pinch salt
8 ounces Baker's semi-sweet chocolate
3 Cups whole milk or half and half
2 egg yolks
2 T. butter (unsalted)
1 vanilla bean

Mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt together in a heavy saucepan.
Chop the chocolate and add it to the mixture in the pot.
In a bowl, mix the milk and egg yolks together and then add them to the mixture.
Split and scrape the vanilla bean and add the pods and the bean to the mix as well.
Put the pan on the heat, over medium-low heat and bring gently to a boil, whisking constantly.
Allow to boil for about a minute, until mixture thickens, continuing to whisk.
Pull off the heat, remove vanilla bean, add butter, stirring to incorporate.
Divide into ramekins. Allow to cool before covering with plastic and refrigerating.
Serve cold topped with whipped cream.

This recipe was adapted (yes, I copped it) from one I found on The Food Network's website, credited to Sara Moulton of Gourmet Magazine. I made a couple minor changes, but it's essentially the same recipe.

The technique is kind of interesting. Usually pudding involves heating the dairy and flavorings, and then adding the starch and tempered eggs to the hot mixture, much like making pastry cream. This can be kind of dicey, as there's always that question about whether your mixture is too hot, whether your starch has thickened as much as it should have, and you have to be careful not to scramble your eggs.

This recipe avoids all that by simply dumping everything into the same pot and bringing it all up to temp at the same time. The eggs warm slowly so there's no danger of scrambling, and once the mixture boils for a moment, the starch thickens and it's done. No muss, no fuss. Plus, less clean-up. I love it.

Even better, this recipe employs a pretty large quantity of high-quality chocolate, rather than using cocoa powder, as many pudding recipes call for. I've detailed my disdain for the choice of cocoa powder over real chocolate in the past. Suffice to say that I strongly dislike the 'dusty' taste that using cocoa powder in lieu of chocolate imparts. Frankly, I'm not sure I understand why anyone would choose it if using chocolate is an option.

So, thanks, Sara! Good recipe.

As a gossipy aside, the fact that Sara Moulton isn't on the Food Network any more speaks to the demise of quality and the embrace of lowest-common-denominator pandering that the network has recently employed. Moulton was famously told that the network wouldn't be renewing her show, Cooking Live, as part of a still on-going effort the network was making to move away from using professional/classically-trained chefs as hosts of their shows in favor of more camera-genic, cleavage-sporting "personalities" like Rachel Ray, Giada Giganto-mouth, and--feh--Sandra Lee. This whole deal is well-chronicled all over the web. You can read more about it here, here, here, and here.

I'll stop here in order to ensure that this post doesn't devolve into an all-out rant about The Food Network and how much it sucks, save for a few decent shows. That topic really deserves its own separate entry. [This space reserved for link to future blog post]

Suffice to say that while Sara and her pudding recipe may not have been the direction that The Food Network was going, I like her--she's got a show on PBS, a network where the focus is on cooking instruction rather than catch phrases and cleavage (if any proof of that is needed, this guy is the host of what appears to be their most popular show right now)--and I like her pudding recipe. 'Nuff said. Let's make some pudding!

Dry ingredients go into the saucepan.


Everything in the pan, applying heat.

Color gets darker, milk begins to froth. Keep whisking!

Mixture thickens very quickly.

Presto! I now pronounce it to be pudding. Portion into ramekins.

After the portioned pudding cools down to room temp, cover the ramekins with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Opinions vary, of course, on the appeal, or lack thereof, of pudding skin, which forms on the top of the pudding when it's allowed to be in contact with the air. In our house, we hate pudding skin, so I place the plastic wrap over the ramekins and then gently press it down so it's in direct contact with the surface of the pudding, ensuring no disgusting skin forms.

And that's that, really. It's a deceptively easy recipe. It is a bit thicker and denser than your average pudding recipe--almost like a pot de creme. But that's a good thing in my book.

Top it with whipped cream and enjoy it--it's a classic comfort food indulgence, which, even though it's served cold, somehow seems appropriate for cold winter weather.

Finishing with Butter

Butter is the perennial MVP of food and cooking. One mention of it and everyone rolls their eyes skyward and makes their best food orgasm face. But how do most home cooks use butter?

Restaurants use butter in a lot of ways where it's not all that evident. Fish and meats are basted in sizzling butter while they're cooking, delicate proteins like lobster are poached in it, compound butters are allowed to melt over meat while it rests, and beurre monté is used all over the place.

In Thomas Keller's 1999 classic, The French Laundry Cookbook, there's a piece about beurre monté:

At the French Laundry, we use an awful lot of butter without actually serving a lot of butter, because of our reliance on the substance called beurre monté. We cook in it, rest meats in it, make sauces with it. It's an extraordinary vehicle for both heat and flavor. Butter in its solid state is an emulsification of butter fat, milk solids, and water. If you melt butter, these three components separate, but beurre monté--a few drops of water and chunks of butter whisked over moderate heat--is a method of melting butter while maintaining the emulsification.

That's the trick. Melting the butter without allowing it to separate.

And that's why most home cooks don't make butter sauces or use butter to it's full effect.

Which is a shame. Because it's not difficult to do what Keller talks about on a much smaller, much simpler scale.

But why? Is getting more butter or fat into what we cook some kind of lofty goal? No, of course not. But making the food that we cook taste better is. And that's what butter--when used properly--does.

"Fat equals flavor" is an often-uttered foodie catchphrase, but it's inaccurate. Fat, on its own, has very little flavor at all. Taste a neutral oil like canola or safflower and see for yourself--it's all fat, but there's no flavor there at all.

A more precise turn of phrase would be "fat carries flavor". Sure, it adds it's own qualities--the flavor notes present in the type of fat you choose, the richness that the fat brings to the equation--but what it mostly does is allow whatever flavors are already present in the dish to linger longer on the tongue and the taste buds. The fat coats the tongue and the interior of the mouth, causing the food being eaten to be tasted longer, which results in a perception of more flavor.

So, fat carries flavor, amplifies it. And butter does so even more than just about any type of fat due to the fact that it's already in a state of emulsification, as Keller explains in the quote above. Butter, in its emulsified liquid state, has a lush, creamy mouth feel that serves to call attention to everything else in its presence, beyond adding the actual flavor of the butter itself. Melted or clarified butter, by contrast, carries the flavor of butter, but it doesn't bring that creamy, unctuous texture to the party.

So that's the justification for using butter in certain situations where you might not otherwise think to use it. Now, I'm not saying that you should drown whatever you're cooking in butter; it's not necessary to do so to take advantage of butter's unique flavor-enhancing qualities. A little goes a long way.

And it's also not necessary to learn how to make butter sauces, although it's not like they're all that difficult to make. But they can be finicky and a bit tricky to hold--too much heat and they separate, if they get too cold, they'll coagulate and then separate. Using a coffee thermos to hold them is an easy work-around, but the famously delicate nature of butter sauces is why most people are intimidated and therefore don't bother to try making a butter sauce at home.

I make'em once in a while, but what I do more often is finish with butter. It's basically the same thing as making a butter sauce, but you're just utilizing whatever liquid happens to be in the dish rather than using a separate pan to make your sauce. And all that's required is to simply leave whatever you're cooking a little looser or more saucy than you normally would, and then toss in a few pieces of cut-up whole butter after you pull the pan off the heat.

Now, to be clear, this is not the same as using beurre monté, referenced above. Finishing with butter is referred to in French as monter au beurre--mounting with butter--something I've found to be much more useful and accessible to do on a regular basis in my home kitchen.

Try it the next time you make a pasta dish. I almost never make a "sauce" when we eat pasta at our house. I just make the sauce in the pan as I'm tossing everything together. Once you've cooked your veggies--say mushrooms, peppers, onion, and garlic--just deglaze the pan with white wine, reduce the wine by about half, add a bit of the pasta-cooking water, and your cooked pasta. Toss everything together, get it nice and hot, pull the pan off the heat, and then add your cut-up butter and some grated cheese.

This sounds easy enough, but as you toss the ingredients around and the butter pats melt into the mix, you are, in fact, making a beurre blanc. It's just that you're not even conscious of it. But as you toss, the whole butter is transforming itself into that warm, liquidy-yet-emulsified substance that merited an entire page of the FLC. It's combining with the liquids already present in the dish and causing the sauce to tighten. This is exactly the same as making a separate sauce in another pan and then adding it to the pasta dish, except way easier.

You can do this with just about every dish where there's liquid present. It's easier to manage when there's some wine or citrus juice in your liquid, since slightly acidic liquids assist in keeping the butter in a state of emulsion. The acidity also serves as a flavor-enhancer and a nice foil for the richness of the butter. Butter and lemon have a natural affinity. They perfectly compliment each other in a Zen-like yin/yang kind of way.

As an example, last night I made some pork loin chops. I seared the chops in a saute pan and then finished them in the oven. After I removed the pork from the pan I browned them in, I deglazed with white wine, added a bit of mustard, a touch of apple cider vinegar, some chopped fresh sage leaves,and a little water. After allowing that to cook together for a bit, I tossed in some cut-up butter, off the heat. Just a few jiggles of the pan so as to prevent the butter from melting and separating yielded a gorgeous pale brown pan sauce that took less time than it took the pork chops to finish cooking in the oven.

This is the same way that pan sauces for dishes like veal or chicken alla Piccata or Marsala are made. They're classics, not because restaurants perfected them, but because they are quick and easy, make use of the flavorful bits stuck onto the pan after cooking the meat, and don't involve dirtying another pan to make. Many restaurants kind of reverse-engineer the process, in fact, so as not to require making pan sauce over and over again all night long. They'll make one large batch prior to service, and then simply cook the meat, plate and sauce it, which is easier when you're making thirty-five orders over a span of three hours, but much more difficult when you're making dinner for your family or guests. And, to be honest, the restaurant versions are a bit lacking, since the sauce doesn't incorporate the cooking juices or fond from the pan. The end result is sauce over meat, rather than the more unified dish that comes from the one-pan approach.

So, sure....we love butter. Hooray for butter! But it's helpful to understand why butter is so universally revered and how to more easily and more effectively make use of it on a day-to-day basis.

(And don't even get me started talking about brown butter. That's a whole 'nother entry.)