Rib Eye Steak

Ever since William introduced me to Good Eats, I’ve been hooked.  I’ve seen almost every episode, and credit the show with some of the most useful culinary instruction I’ve received.  Whenever I make a new dish, I usually start with the Good Eats version first to help learn all the necessary techniques and to learn to pick the proper ingredients.  Alton Brown just released a new book Good Eats: The Early Years, which has selected recipes, trivia, and pictures from each episode up to episode 80 (which is most of the way through season 6).  This will eventually make up a trilogy of books, with the eventual release of 2 other books.  The release of this book gave me an idea to revisit the early episodes of Good Eats, and to make a recipe from each episode to post on the blog.  This leads me to the first episode: Steak Your Claim.

Searing the 1st Side

Steak Your Claim has an amazing technique for cooking steak that most people haven’t tried at home.  Instead of using the grill, Alton opted for what he refers to as “Black Gold” or a cast iron pan.  It involves getting the pan blazing hot and searing the steak on both sides and then finishing it the rest of the way in the oven.  It yields a delcious, brown crust on the outside of the steak while the inside remains juicy.  The cooking time also only takes about 5 minutes for medium rare, so it hard to beat a perfectly cooked steak in minimal time.  This cooking method does produced a decent amount of smoke, so I would recommend opening some windows in your house before you drop the steak in the pan.

Searing the 2nd Side

Ingredients:
1 Boneless Rib Eye Steak, 1 1/2 Inch Thick
Canola Oil
Salt and Pepper

Directions:
1. Place a 12 inch Cast Iron Skillet in the oven and preheat the oven to 500 F.  Allow the steaks to warm to room temperature.
2. When the oven preheats to 500F remove the pan from the oven and place on a burner over high heat for 5 minutes.
3. During this time, lightly coat the steak with canola oil and salt and pepper both sides.
4. Place the steak in the pan and cook for 30 seconds without touching the steak.  Flip the steak over and cook for another 30 seconds.
5. Place the pan directly in the oven and cook for 2 minutes for medium rare (3 minutes for medium).  Flip the steak and cook for 2 more minutes for medium rare (3 minutes for medium).  The internal temperature should be around 135F for medium rare and 140F for medium (the temperature will rise some while resting).
6. Place the steak in the draining rig composed of a bowl, collander, and lid (see picture) and allow to rest for 5 minutes (This allows for the juices to be retained for a sauce).  Dig in and enjoy!

Draining Rig

OMG so tasty on anything.

The possibilities to use these up are nearly endless. Burgers, hot dogs, steak, rice pilaf, omelettes, and nearly anything else can all be greatly improved by the addition of caramelized onions.

After this long, slow cook, the taste of these onions is completely unlike raw onions (or even onions cooked in most other manners). Raw onions can have a harsh, biting taste. When cooked a bit, onions loose some of their harsh edge, but still have a lot of bit and pungency. But when caramelized, onions become a different thing altogether. They transform into something sweet, earthy, and aromatic. If you do it correctly, the texture contrasts between crunchy, almost burnt-but-not-quite, and soft, cooked-though goodness. What is not to like? Nothing. Nothing.

Another huge bonus is that it isn’t hard to prepare. It just takes some time, a large skillet, and some onions. There is no real trick to it, just keep the heat around medium and give it a stir every so often.

One more reason everyone should do this is that they freeze beautifully. I always make a large batch, about 4 or 5 onions worth. The cooked onions can be stuffed into ice cube trays or into small zip-lock bags and frozen until ready to use. I use the ice cube trays so that I can portion out small amounts whenever I need, for whatever I need.

These guys seriously made my eyes water.

Directions
1. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Add the olive oil.
2. Add the onions and the salt. Reduce the heat to medium and stir.

The onions go into the pan.

They will continue to shrink. You could probably eat them now, but why? Wait until they are really awesome.

Now wasn't this worth the wait. Put them on everything.

Finished Chicken Stock

Once you make your own, you’ll realize that it is much better than any of the dozen or so of the brands offered at the supermarket. Sure, one or two may be serviceable, but making it yourself is truly stunning.

Interested in making the simplest chicken stock? Click through to find out how.

This recipe comes courtesy of Mark Bittmann’s How To Cook Everything. There are several variations on chicken stock and broths, and this is one of the easiest I have come accross. I do keep parts of cut up chickens in my freezer to roast and and make a rich stock, but this time I took the easy way out. Just boiling a whole chicken with some vegtables got the flavor I was looking for to help me feel better.

Just add water and boil to get stock!

Ingredients

1 whole (3-4 lb) chicken
1 quartered onion
2 chopped carrots
1 chopped celery rib
1 pinch thyme (or fresh rosmary)
3-5 springs of fresh parsley
1 teaspoon or less salt
about 14 cups of water (or enough to cover everything thoroughly)

Directions

1. Put the whole chicken and the vegtables into a large pot. Add the water.
2. Bring to a boil, cover partially, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook for 45-60 minutes.
3.  Strain the broth and press on the vegtables to extract as much liquid as possible.
4. Refridgerate, then skim off the fat that hardens on the surface.

The stock will keep for 4-5 days in the fridge. It will last longer if you boil it every couple of days. It can be frozen for much longer.

I should probably add a tip of what to do with that whole cooked chicken you now have. Lot’s of choices: sandwiches, salads, shred/dice it and put it in chicken soup with the broth, shred it and mix with barbeque sauce, put in a pasta dish, make chicken wraps, use to stuff vegtables…

I do this nearly every time I prepare a chicken dish. It’s just so simple and easy to do and results in a huge boost in flavor. Even a half hour soak in salty water is noticeable.

But how does this work? Why salt? Should you add anything else (sugar, pepper)? How long to soak it? Click through the jump to find out why it works and how to quickly make your own.

If you just need a quick reminder of proportions, scroll to the bottom.

How does it work?

• First, surrounding meat with water will result in some of that water being pulled into the meat.
• Second, along with the water, other dissolved flavors will be pulled into the meat. Anything that can dissolve can be added to a brine. I have even brined a turkey in a mixture of sugar, salt, pepper, vegetable stock and other spices.
• Third, the added salt reduces evaporation during cooking, helping keep the meat tender and juicy. This is because anything added to water must be removed for it for the water to leave. Have you ever seen the salt crystals left behind when sea water is left to evaporate—the water just changes state, from liquid to gas, and the salt is removed from it and remains behind.
• Fourth, salt changes the nature of the cells in the meat causing them to pull in and hold more water than before. Cell membranes allow water and other things (i.e., salt) to pass through. Once salt gets in, it begins to denature proteins—all that really means to us is that the proteins change shape and get too big to move out of the cells. Because of the salt, these “denatured proteins” are basically trapped in the cells. As more stuff is trapped in the cells, osmosis tries to pull more and more water into it to dilute the cells.

Whew, enough technical stuff. Just put your meats in salty water and they’ll be juicer and taste better.

What exactly do you include, how much, and for how long?

Always use salt (it is what makes a brine a brine). A good rule of thumb is for every two pounds of chicken, use about 1/4 cup salt and a quart of water. Sugar is optional. If you use it, use the same amount or less than salt. Sugar aids in browning and improves flavor (hey, it’s sugar). Other spices are even more optional. It’s really more of a personal preference, but I feel that you get diminishing returns by adding extra spices so I rarely go to the trouble. Because most other spices don’t dissolve as easily as salt or sugar, those flavors won’t be as noticeable. I’d rather just add them directly to the meat rather than lose them in the water. Sticking to just salt and sugar, which is cheap and everyone has in their pantry, means less trouble for you and an already vastly improved dinner. This means that your average whole chicken should use about 2 quarts of water, 1/2 cup salt and 1/2 cup sugar.

Now that your meat is swimming in salty liquid, how long should it soak?
For chicken, an hour will do fine. As little as 30 minutes makes a difference, so go for it if you can. Turkey requires a lot longer. A whole turkey can brine for 6 to 12 hours and turkey breasts alone can brine for 3 to 6 hours. Pork should brine for at least an hour.

So, in short:

• For every 2 lbs chicken: 1 qt water, 1/4 cup salt, 1/4 sugar. Brine time: 1 hour.
• For a 15 lb turkey: 2 gallons water, 1 cup salt (no sugar). Brine time: 6 to 12 hours.
• For a 20 lb turkey: 3 gallons water, 1 1/2 cups salt (no sugar). Brine time: 6 to 12 hours.
• For 5 lbs of pork: 3 cups of water, 1 1/2 tbsp salt and 1 1/2 tbsp sugar. Brine time: 1 hour.

Feel free to look up other proportions. There are no concrete rules about how to brine, but be aware that too much salt will yield meat too salty, and too little salt will not be enough to brine properly.

Cooking for Engineers has a very good explanation of what a brine does and some more suggested proportions.

Cook’s Illustrated also has a great article that gives suggested ratios on how much to use for different kinds of meat.

P.S. No interesting pictures for this post. It would just look like a ziptop bag of water with raw meat floating in it. Not terribly appetizing, so I thought I’d skip posting that!

Chicken with Garlic and White Wine Pan Sauce

One of my favorite things to do for a meal is to cook some sort of meat in my 12-inch stainless steel pan and then use that to make a pan sauce. Pan sauces are able to take the remnants of the meat you’ve cooked and incorporate those delicious flavors into your sauce. Plus there’s also the added benefit that you don’t need to dirty an extra vessel to make the sauce in. For those of you who love nonstick cookware, you need to try and avoid that convenience for this. A nonstick pan just won’t give you the same rich flavor that you will get using a stainless steel pan (I’ll explain this below). The wonderful things about pan sauces, is that once you get the hang of the process you can experiment and come up with your own sauces. Here are the steps for a successful pan sauce:

1. Fond: The reason you need to use a stainless steel pan.  When you brown meat in a stainless steel pan, little bits of meat stick to the surface of the pan and brown. This is called fond. In this case any shade of brown is good, especially deep brown. Black, however, is bad. If you notice that bits of fond are getting too dark while you are covering the meat, you can move the meat on top of the bits of exposed fond that are burning.

Fond

2. Aromatics: This is where you add additional flavor from things like garlic to your sauce. Garlic and shallots are two of my favorite things to add at this stage. You basically want to cook them until they are softened, and then proceed to the deglazing before they burn.

3. Deglazing: This is where you incorporate the fond into your sauce. Basically you are now adding a liquid while the pan is hot in order to incorporate the fond into your sauce. In my opinion the best liquid for this job is some sort of alcohol. Most of the alcohol itself evaporates in cooking and it leaves behind wonderfully complex flavors in your sauce. You can also use things like chicken broth or stock if you don’t want to use alcohol. Technically, you could even use water, but that doesn’t add any additional flavors to the sauce.   During this time you will usually simmer the deglazing liquid and scrape the bits off the bottom of the pan. You will notice how the fond gives the sauce a rich color when it is incorporated, and that if you used a nonstick pan your sauce will be much more pale in comparison (in taste as well as color).

4. Reduction: This is where you get the sauce to the consistency you want. Reducing it will make it more viscous, or you can thicken it with a bit of flour (it won’t take much, maybe a teaspoon). This is also where you will cook out the alcohol if you decided on that as your deglazing agent. You can tell when most of the alcohol is cooked out just by smelling the sauce. I often will add a Tablespoon or two of butter at the end of this stage to increase the volume a bit and add a richer flavor.

5. Seasoning: This is the stage where you add your salt and pepper to taste. Also at this point you can add things like mustard, that will produce an off flavor if cooked too long in the sauce. Now you ready to enjoy your sauce. Just spoon it over your dish and enjoy!

Deciphering scallop labels

I must say Alton Brown’s Good Eats episode Crustacean Nation does a fine job explaining what all those funny numbers are when choosing shrimp, you know, you’ve seen them like 50/60, 15/20, et cetera. These numbers apply to other shellfish as well. To sum it all up, a 20/30 means that there are about 20-30 scallops per pound. U-sizes like U/15 (U stands for “Under”) indicate that there are under 15 scallops to make up a pound, a pretty large size. U/15 may seem very large, but for many cases this is what is needed. The largest I believe is up to a U/10, which is again, 10 or less to make up a pound.

What a scallop should look like

Key points to keep in mind when choosing scallops:

• The color should be off-whitish-beige, even a little gray to pink but not white.
• Look out for scallops that look like they are in water, this can ruin their flavors.
• In some places (like France :) ) the adductor muscle that is orange is still attached. It is a little firmer and has more of a distinct fish taste than the body of the scallop. It’s a matter of personal taste, but I wouldn’t discard this-I think it’s a nice treat.
• Scallops should be firm and their shape should be uniform, not uneven or lopsided.

Actually, where I am in southern Louisiana, I could not find any fresh scallops unless I drove an hour away to the nearest Whole Foods. Therefore I used frozen sea scallops which came out beautifully. Again apply the same number measurements with frozen scallops to choose your correct sizes.

(Unless you live near the coast, I recommend buying most of your shrimp and other shellfish frozen and defrosting it yourself. This is one of the few cases where frozen is normally better. Commercially bought shrimp is frozen on the boat and then shipped frozen. The “fresh” shrimp your normally see in the supermarket is normally the same ones that are sold frozen. -William)

Split Vanilla Bean

In case you have never seen a vanilla bean in your life, you may be wondering how you split one correctly.  It’s pretty basic once you know what you’re doing.  You want to take a paring knife and insert the tip in the center of the bean.  Pull the bean, not the blade, along the length of the bean (the bean is now cut halfway).  Then turn the bean around and repeat.  (You are only splitting the bean once, but you do it with two cuts.  This prevents you from going off line during your cut which would yield a smaller amount of seeds to scrape.)  After you have split the bean in half take the back of the knife and run it along the length of each bean (see image above).  Repeat this for the other half of the bean.

As for buying vanilla beans, I would definitely check out the Internet.  Beans you buy at a supermarket will be at least twice as expensive, and nowhere near as fresh.  I buy my beans from The Boston Vanilla Bean Company.  I would recommend Madagascan Vanilla Beans.  They have the flavor that I look for in a vanilla bean and are very consistent.   Store  your vanilla beans in a ziptop bag inside an airtight container.  Stick that in the fridge and they should last 6 months to a year.

Tempering

Do you like the sound of scrambled eggs in your ice cream?  I don’t think that sounds very good either.  Tempering is one of the essential cooking techniques for working with a custard.  It’s useful for everything from Crème Brûlée to Ice cream.

Anytime you are working with adding hot liquid to eggs, you need add it slowly in order keep the eggs from cooking too quickly.  This is done by adding a small amount of hot liquid into the eggs while whisking continuously (see image above).  After adding a small increment, keep adding spoonfuls until about half of the mixture has been incorporated into the eggs.  At this point in time it’s usually safe to add the rest of cream into the eggs by pouring straight from the pan (still whisking continuously).