41–50 of 144 posts
Salting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead. So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair. Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's a…
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I was cooking at a two Michelin star restaurant last year where a large majority of proteins and vegetables were cooked sous vide. Don't underestimate the importance of a good salting, but sous vide will make everything you cook perfect, and consistent. There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/ This i…
Aren't you worried about the plasticizers from the bags?
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What if I live near a "commercial" plant, so it's local to me? Local is nonsense. If you want grass finished say so. Don't say local. And calling it commercial is misleading too, since grass finished is also commercial.
Until the whole "USDA Organic" program came along, 'organic' was a reasonable (if inane) proxy for decent-tasting produce. The lack of pesticides never had much to do with the quality, except that it attracted people with graduate degrees to farmwork. The 'local' thing has been a reasonably successful attempt at taking the place of 'organic' as a proxy marker for non-crap. It has the nice property of still mostly wor…
OK. Sous Vide looks more interesting to me that overly salting a piece of meat. tptacek care to weigh in? I am about 23 hours away from buying a rice cooker + pid controller to make this happen. I do the pid part at work so it is interesting to me from a work point of view too. Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html It looks amazing to me.
I really want to do sous vide, but basically everything I've read says you get bad results unless you have a serious-dude vacuum chamber packer sealer $4000 thing, which seems mildly impractical. Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those. You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated back…
If you want to (a) make watermelons with the texture of a strip steak or (b) cook SV in huge volume, you need to investigate high end equipment.
Otherwise, the concept behind SV is extremely simple. Precisely controlled temperature over long cooking time. The $120 PID controllers do that job just fine.
What have you read that says you need a cryovac to do SV well? The Baldwin guide actively endorses the ghetto setup, and there are numerous blogs of people succeeding with it. The Keller sous vide book isn't a home cookbook any more than the Alinea cookbook is. You're not making French Laundry food at home no matter how you equip your kitchen.
This article never gets specific, but I get the impression the author doesn't really know what "prime" means: how well marbled the cut is with fat. Salt isn't going to change that (although, again, it will improve your steak).
If tenderness is all you're after, you can use a jaccard on the meat; Google it, they're cheap. They put tiny little cuts in the meat to break up the fibers.
When people say "cheap steak" they usually mean skirt or flank. Can you even get prime skirt steak?
OK. Sous Vide looks more interesting to me that overly salting a piece of meat. tptacek care to weigh in? I am about 23 hours away from buying a rice cooker + pid controller to make this happen. I do the pid part at work so it is interesting to me from a work point of view too. Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html It looks amazing to me.
I was cooking at a two Michelin star restaurant last year where a large majority of proteins and vegetables were cooked sous vide. Don't underestimate the importance of a good salting, but sous vide will make everything you cook perfect, and consistent. There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/ This i…
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Empirically, Giant Eagle (the crap chain supermarket in PA) beef tastes like crap, and local butcher beef tastes really good. Locality is a good proxy for people caring about food tasting good, and for not going through enormous horrible disease-ridden meat-packing plants. The latter tends to produce meat that tastes bad and periodically makes you sick.
AFAIK, there are only 4 cattle slaughterhouses in PA: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/import_export/downloads/slaughter_... Only one of the 4 is not owned by Cargill or JBS. Unless your beef vendor is taking delivery on whole carcasses and then packing it themselves, the beef is probably packed at the slaughterhouse, as well.
Salting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead. So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair. Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's a…
Dry-aged is more expensive than fresh, and always better.
Prime is more expensive than choice, and always better.
These things all matter. You're right, but I still want to stomp on the confusion about what "prime" means.
I heartily endorse Ruhlman's "too stupid to cook" chicken recipe. Buy two chickens when you do it, save the other for leftovers. Whole chicken is much more economical than breasts.
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What good does local sourcing do? Is it freshness? I'm not a meat expert, but I would guess that a big company with an economy of scale would be able to produce higher quality meat for a lower cost. Also, if you're sourcing locally from non-big brand names, don't you have concerns about their cold chain?
Locally sourced meat tends to be grass-fed or at least grass finished. It also tends to have WAY better living conditions than any commercial plant. A happy animal is a tasty animal. I highly suggest you watch Food inc. :-)
A happy animal is indeed a tasty animal. That's why we raise cattle in dry pens (away from predators) with abundant fresh water and feed them carefully formulated food twice a day. Our cattle get better dietary planning than I do; they don't eat pure corn (as the term "corn-fed" might lead you to believe), they eat a mix including alfalfa, grass hay, corn, barley, silage, cannery surplus apples, oats, molasses, and other ingredients. The fact is, big or small, any cattleman is going to try and keep the conditions as good as possible. If your animals are standing in 2 feet of mud and eating moldy hay, they're not going to produce and you're not going to make money. Also, nobody goes into the livestock business hating the animals--we who grew up on farms probably have a better understanding and empathy for livestock than your average city-dweller, and we want to act kindly toward them.
As for grass feeding, you want to know something? One of the biggest grass-fed beef producers back home only eats corn-fed beef. Corn-fed beef is more extensively marbled and more tender. Like organic produce, grass-fed beef is a niche market for people who think something tastes better because it has a crunchy image and damn the price/scalability/sustainability.