stick blender mayo

Making mayo at home is one of those practices that have fallen out of fashion. The whole raw egg/salmonella thing can be intimidating but it’s pretty easy to find pasteurized eggs in groceries stores. If you can’t find them you could still pasteurize them at home but it will require sous vide gear. If you’re interested you should check out my article on sous vide egg pasteurization which also deals with mayo pasteurization which in a nutshell talks about listeria and salmonella safe log reduction levels by application of heat bellow egg setting temperature. But if you wanna skip all that hassle, try getting pasteurized eggs.

amazing fermented habanero hot sauce

I love lacto-fermented vegetables. Homemade sauerkraut and kimchi are fun to make and one of the first things I got into when I started this cooking blog. Along with bread making, vegetable fermentation has always been fascinating to me. Recently I’ve started experimenting with a broader spectrum of vegetables, spices, seasonings… the combinations are endless and the flavor profile that can be achieved are incredibly complex. Fermentation, aside from all the health benefits and the preservation perks simply makes things taste awesome.

pork tenderloin sous vide 58C 3hr and mango habanero sauce

And we’re back with some more sous vide cooking! A few things about pork tenderloin. It’s delicious but only if cooked properly otherwise is just boring. Cooking this cut with traditional methods requires some practice and a thermometer but if you’re looking for that medium rare finish and a pasteurized product then going sous vide is the easiest (and possibly the only practical …) way of getting there.

Hello World…and Hello Steak and Eggs

Just when you thought I would finally shut up, I come back again for more food blogging. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to blog about. Plenty has gone on but I don’t have a kitchen of my own yet. I left my old apartment, the rain and my job in Vancouver and decided to go back to LA which is where I currently am and the city in which I started my blog a few years ago. I won’t bore anyone with the details of the last 2 months of amazing and much needed time off. I’ve been relaxing , exercising , cooking and going to the beach. I’m pretty sure this idilic existence will be soon be over as I will need a source of income and a dose of reality but I will enjoy it while it lasts. Without my own kitchen (I haven’t rented a place yet), blogging and cooking have been less than usual but never come to a full stop. I have been posting a few things on instagram (hopefully you’re following me!) and I wanna share those here in the next few posts as I catch up.

I have posted about steak and eggs previously but I haven’t documented a more traditional presentation of this dish yet, well.. until just now. Facts about steaks and eggs. Yes, my favourite breakfast period. Any hour of the day is a good time for steak and eggs. Sunny side up is the path to enlightenment. Takes 10 mins to make, or 15 if you make home fries from scratch (the one in the picture took a lot longer but that’s because I wanted to get all fancy with my sous vide equipment and prolonged fridge curing times, but you can do without and it would seriously take like 10-15 mins).

Recipe list? seriously? eggs and a steak. Ok, throw some potatoes in there and bunch of rosemary. Fish sauce for those who aren’t afraid of the dark side. 

Sous Vide Beef Tenderloin Medallion. 52C 1h

Really quick post. Not really a recipe. I mean, the recipe is in the title if anything. Not much more to it other than mentioning that the golden brown crust came from flash frying the whole medallions in Ghee @ 450F for about 15 secs. I just wanted to log this to keep record since is probably the best piece of steak I’ve cooked in a long time and I am very proud of it. Salt the steaks. Add to the sous vide pouches right away, and add vegetable oil . I don’t have a vacuum sealer here in Vancouver, so using the water displacement method is good but isn’t great. Adding fat to the bag gets around the issue of having some pockets of air around the meat and it probably helps the meat retain its shape better. A theory of mine…. 😛 Anyways, cook away. Remove from baggies and serve immediately. No need to rest the steaks. They are already at the serving temperature. Happy Sat. I had fun taking some pics. Hope you enjoy.

The Simplest Roasted Chicken I Can Think of.

On this blog I have a bunch of chicken recipes. Two reasons. It’s delicious but it’s also tricky, right?  Anyone can overcook a chicken. I do it all the time. By proper standards the chicken above is overcooked. The only way to not overcook a chicken is to break it down and cook the different muscle groups in different plastic bags and off they go in the sous vide bath at their respective temperatures and cooking times.

Not everybody has sous vide equipment but it’s slowly becoming mainstream. I remember when I started cooking, I had to buy my first immersion circulator second hand on Ebay and it still was a lot pricier than the super cool ones they sell in stores today.

Not everybody has the patience for sous vide cooking. It takes a bit more planning. We live in a world that spins a little too fast constantly. Takes time learning about cooking sous vide and takes longer than traditional techniques to cook things sous vide. Probably not fish but definitely chicken and any other land animal I can think of. Ok Mr Octopus, we won’t leave you. You too take forever for a sea creature. 

Sous Vide Chicken Liver Pate. 2h 68C.

 

I start every post with a photo. Another fact about this blog. No ads. Ok, another one. It’s not a site about recipes, It’s a journal. I write about my adventures in cooking and I share them.  That’s how this blog started and that how it stays. One more, ok.  As much as I bash on traditional cooking (I really don’t but I have had questioned it in many posts), I love traditional cooking and wish I could cook as deliciously as our beloved basque grandma. Ok, last one… even though there’s not a single post about spam on this blog, I love it. There it is, I said it. Deal with it. Unsubscribe. Do what you gotta do.

Chicken Nightmares.

If you’re a bit OCD,  you like chicken and you like to cook it yourself , this post might be of interest. I know I keep talking about chicken. I talk about chicken a LOT. Because I love chicken and I can recount the few times I have had a good chicken dish at a restaurant. In many cases is just a disaster. If at a BBQ, I will politely turn down grilled chicken breasts and stick to eating only the more heat resistant dark meat but even that goes wrong very often. A grill isn’t exactly devised for precision cooking. A smoker… it’s a step up in the right direction and can render some amazing results but how many of us have a smoker sitting in their backyard. I don’t even have a backyard. If I had one and some money, I’d get a smoker. Guess where I’d put it. In the backyard.

Today’s post. Chicken nightmares. In honour to all my overcooked chicken dinners. My chicken cooking improved dramatically after learning a few things about proteins and the effect of heat. Understanding what heat does to food is essential in improving cooking in genera. I find that cooking chicken is a great, relatively cheap and delicious way to fine tune the skill of heat application. Chickens are very complicated creatures. I’m talking about their meat, I’m sure they have very complicated lives too. They can be cooked whole at the same temperature but this isn’t ideal (I love roasting whole chickens, don’t get me wrong, but when on my OCD mood kicks in hard, the notion of roasting a whole chicken just makes me super anxious). Each muscle requires a different temperature and cooking time (same goes for pretty much any animal tissue).  We can average those temperatures and cook the whole bird that way for as long as the longest of the cooking times required… obviously there are compromises and the end result although pretty delicious won’t be “perfect”. Cooking chicken sous vide requires the extra step of browning the skin. This sounds easy. Pan sear the thing and done. Well. That’s ok, but I want better browning. I want even browning everywhere which means the chicken meat must be fully submerged in hot oil. Which means deep frying. If you know of a better way, I’m all ears. 

Crispy Oven Rosted Potatoes : 24h Kosher Salt Brine

 

It’s always the simple things.

In cooking, at least in my experience, a single ingredient cooked simply can steal the show even if it’s the “side” thing. If you like potatoes, this is usually the case. I never thought I’d be writing about baked potatoes on my blog… but I got over myself and did it! It’s all part of the same thing. Simple or complex preparations, the whole point of cooking is to nurture ourselves and the ones we love, to eat well,  and if you can have some fun while doing it and share some thoughts and pics about it even better. Potatoes are pretty much at the top of list of favourite ingredients anyways. I love them and have been cooking them for a long time so they do deserve a space of their own in here I think.

Long before I got into cooking more seriously a few years ago, I was already cooking potatoes. Specially, mashed potatoes. Love love love mashed potatoes. Nothing more comforting than a creamy potato puree with copious parmesan cheese grated on top and broiled to golden brown deliciousness. I seriously don’t need anything else to go with that.

 

This post should be one of my quickest. I really wanted to get this written down for.. well, for my own sake. The original purpose of this blog was to document my own cooking learning curve so there.

A Simple Ham and Tomato Omelette : Homegrown Purple Basil

 

Quite possibly the simplest recipe I’ve ever posted here. But if you have been cooking for some time, you know simplicity is usually a good thing. The ham I used on this recipe comes from an older post. I’m calling it ham, although ham usually involves a pink salt cure containing nitrites… so it’s a bit more technical and requires a long curing period. The nitrites do have an effect on flavour, colour and texture (in a positive way that is). My ham was simply brined in kosher salt  and other spices and cooked sous vide. I recently posted the recipe here.  It’s been a while since I’ve cured anything using nitrite salts but I love the results when I do. Anyways, any ham from the store will obviously work just as well.

The tomatoes I got at the store. Haven’t been able to grow my own tomatoes yet and it will have to wait until next summer. I just missed the window and I think it will get too overcast and rainy by the time the tomatoes need good sunlight to develop well. I did use a few leafs from my homegrown purple basil plant which btw is flowering now and those flowers are so pretty. I need to feature those in a recipe soon before they go. I’ve been growing my own herbs this summer.