su chefs

A food blog by a bunch of InfoSec folks.

[angryrichbait]

Wherefor art thou, glycerol?

So like the Modernist Cuisine recipe for tomato confit (see http://jetcitygastrophysics.com/2012/12/06/modernist-cuisine-at-home-hungarian-beef-goulash/) talks about brushing on a mmix of glycerol and water, and no where does it explain why.

So? Thoughts?

[su-chefs]

Corn Bread (GF for them's that care)

(Adapted from "Truman Capote's Family's Cornbread" in Crescent Dragonwagon's, The Cornbread Gospels)

1.5-2 Tbsp butter

2 eggs

2 cups plain yogurt (full fat will yield a richer cornbread, but non or low-fat will work fine)

1/2 teaspoon palm sugar

2 tsp kosher salt (or 1 tsp table salt)

1 tsp baking soda

2 cups cornmeal (fresh ground is the best)

Place cast iron skillet (9"-10") in the oven.

Preheat oven to 450F (230C).

In medium bowl mix together all the dry ingredients.

In larger bowl beat eggs thoroughly, then mix in the yogurt.

Toss the butter into the cast iron skillet and leave in the oven.

Once the butter is melted, pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and stir until just mixed. (A few lumps of dry ingredients is fine).

Quickly pour the batter into the cast iron skillet and bake until the edges turn brown and pull away from the edge of the pan. This will take 20-25 minutes (or more if using a 9" pan). Server while still hot.

[su-chefs]

Fried Green Broccoli Stems

I had a bunch of broccoli stems left over from oven roasting the night before. I was going to sneak them into a Spanish tortilla but that was vetoed by the ten year old. So I started poking around online for recipe ideas when I was inspired by the idea of fried green tomatoes. So I took the stems, peeled them, sliced them lengthwise into planks, then did the traditional three-stage breading thing. Flour (in my case fresh ground whole wheat), then egg and finally corn meal (again freshly ground because I'm a geek that way). I shallow fried them in the olive oil left over from braising the potatoes for the tortilla. You want to do it at at slightly lower temperature then for fried green tomatoes (or slice the stems on the thin side) as the broccoli takes longer to cook. Next time, I may par-cook the stems first to speed up the frying. I didn't get pictures because they got eaten too fast. Next time I make this, I'll add a pic to this post.

[su-chefs]

Baking Steel Pizza

Recently, a friend backed this Baking Steel thing on Kickstarter. Naturally, I'm aware that Kickstarter gives you no privacy in the projects you back, and then there's apparent frauds like Schuyler Towne. Phew! Keep me away from that crap!

Anyway, I was over at my friend's house when this pizza came out. Wow. Holy shit. Nicely browned bottom, crisp dry crust. Done at the bottom of the oven, too (per instruction sheet). Amazing. Steel beats the crap out of stone. I am totally getting one of these babys. Can't wait to see what happens when I hit it with broil.

And it'll stop a bullet in a pinch, so it's perfect for infosec professionals.

[su-chefs]

Should I get Sous-Vide Cooking Advice from the Internet?

In my last post, I explained that, in place of a Big Green Egg, you should buy a sous vide machine of some form.

In this post, I want to briefly explore the advice that exists on the internet for how to use it. And as a security expert, I want to tell you that that advice sucks.

There's a lot of very simple rules for cooking safely. For example, always bring the surfaces that might be exposed to bacteria to 100°C for a minute or two, and keep food that's not at that temperature very cold. Unfortunately, that advice can have negative impacts on taste, texture and other desirable properties of food.

So it's helpful to know that bacterial growth is maximized between 3°-60° C (37°-140° F). The growth rates at form rough bell curves with different maxima, depending on which pathogen might be present.

The important thing to know is that just like APT, you can't know in advance which common pathogens might be lurking. As such, you want to minimize cooking time in the danger zone of 3°-60° C (37°-140° F).

So with that, for long cooking times, I look to the folks at Modernist Cuisine, who have really thought through the safety aspects, and clearly explain their thinking.

For beef short ribs, MC recommends 60° for 72 hours.

Now, to the advice you can get on the internet. For example, there's "Sous Vide Short Rib Recipes" which says " Set the water temperature for the temperature you want for the sous vide short ribs, we recommend 56C / 133F for perfectly medium rare."

There's also "Best temperature for Beef Short Ribs sous-vide." This one actually acknowledges the advice in MC, and says "According to Modernist Cuisine, the ‘best bet’ for beef short ribs is 72 hours at 60C/140F. This is the first temperature I tried. The taste was OK, but I was not impressed and the texture was too ‘loose’. The meat was almost falling apart." He goes on to recommend 48 hours at 57°C.

Neither page makes any mention of bacterial growth risks at these temperatures. Now, it may be that at 57°, nasties die off over 48 hours. I'd be happy to hear that evidence. I'll happily concede that I'm wrong. But neither mention it.

Now, I'm tempted to believe that they're right, the ribs will taste better at 57° than 60° so what to do? Me, I plan to boil a bag for 3 minutes before moving it to the 57° water, and figure that should kill the bacteria. Is that the right thing? No. You should not get your cooking advice from the internet. You should fucking test these things, and be careful about what comes out of that bag. You should trust your test gear, especially including your eyes, nose and fingers about what's coming out of the bag.

Better yet, get a reputable cookbook that covers the science like Thomas Keller and Harold McGee's "Under Pressure" or "Modernist Cuisine" or "MC at Home" (when it's available).

Don't trust random crap on the internet, including me.

And yes, I do feel better having gotten that off my chest.

[su-chefs]

Should I buy a Big Green Egg?

A friend of mine asked this recently, and I wanted to share my expert advice. A Big Green Egg (TM, BGE), for those who've been hiding under a rock, is an egg-shaped outdoor steel and ceramic oven, advertised as able to grill and smoke. One of its advantages is that you can get them really fucking hot, which is awesome, because you can't make an awe-inspiring pizza without really fucking hot. (Where really fucking hot is around 700-800° F).

However, you should not buy a BGE. Let's look at the BGE as a grill and as a smoker, and then I'll tell you how to spend your money.

As a grill, again, the BGE gets really hot (which I'll just abbreviate RFH), which is awesome if you need to cook a pizza or melt steel. However, let's say you want to cook a nice salmon. Mmm, salmon. You want a nice brown bit on the outside, and you want the inside to be about 45°C, which is nice and cooked. So you take your salmon, which you've brought up to room temperature, of 23°C or so, and you slap it on your grill. Now there's a temperature gradient in the flesh, from RFH on the edge, to cool in the center. And so what's going to happen is that you get a gradient, really quickly, through the flesh as the heat travels into it. It's too fast to control really well, and your fish will either be raw or overcooked in the middle. The same thing is going to happen to a steak. It will, however, have a delicious crust on the outside, so maybe you won't notice.

Now, as a smoker, the BGE also sucks. What you want in a smoker is a wood pile on one side, and a smoke chamber on the other. This means that you don't have to heat your food as you smoke it. Now, hot-smoking can be great, but there's also cold-smoking, and the BGE can't go below 200°F, which is well into the realm of hot-smoke.

So why would you buy a BGE? Well, one, it gets RFH, which, I have to agree, is awesome. Two, you're into adrenaline-fueled cooking. And I don't know about you, but I'm into adrenaline-fueled eating. And the way to get there is with slow, well-controlled temperature, which effectively means sous-vide.

So, rather than buy a BGE, go buy a sous-vide machine. Take your nice steak, cook it to 54°C. That'll take about 20 minutes, give or take, depending on how thick it is. Then throw it on your cheapo Weber for 30 seconds a side to sear. Serve with a nice chimichuri sauce. Notice how it's perfectly medium-rare the whole way through, except for a brown crust and a few mm of grey, dry meat. Compare that to your BGE RFH steak. A few mm of rare, a centimeter of grey, and some char. Aren't you glad someone else butchered that steak on his BGE, while you had yummy, perfect and easy steak?

With the money you save not buying a BGE, you can buy a sous-vide machine and a smoker that has more control.

[su-chefs]

First Time Smoking Brisket

I'm a huge fan of smoked Tri-Tip and have done so on many of occasions over the past few years. It is my go-to beef to smoke as it is perfectly marbled with fat that melts away during the slow cook and gives it a ton of flavor without adding toughness.

That being said, now that I live in Texas it is a rarity to find Tri-TIp at the grocery store (I need to follow Mike Bailey's advice and start buying the butcher beer). So this 4th of July I decided to try some Brisket.

It first caught my eye in the meat fridge as what looked closest to Tri-Tip in fat consistency and the variety of trimmed vs untrimmed cuts. I opted for a boneless trimmed 5lber for my first shot at it.

I used my standard beef dry rub recipe (will talk about at a later date) which is paprika based with cayenne pepper as the heat with a bunch of fillers. Let it sit for an hour or so with the rub on while i got my grill ready and fire going. I would prefer to rub the night before but didn't plan that far ahead this time.

After I got a good smoke going on the smoker I put the meat on at 10:45 AM. During which time I started wondering how long this needed to be on the grill (ass backwards I know). I looked around and asked a few friends and there was virtually no consensus but a few pointed in the area of 12ish hours. Seeing as I didn't have 12 hours before my hungry company arrived I was aiming for 6.

I was a bit nervous that the meat was going to be too tough but it actually came out great.

3 hours in after the flip:

(started fat side up for help with flavor & a little red white and blue for the 4th)

What's left after we got after it. Got to love that smoke ring around the edges.

[su-chefs]

Bill Donovan's Maraschino Cherries

It's cocktail season here at the Richard Ranch, and so I want to share with you how to make amazing cocktail cherries.

This is a recipe my mentor got from Wild Bill Donovan. Well, really, he got it from Bill's butler after a bit of fun. My mentor? Oh, he's a guy you've never heard of. One of those who gets things done, rather than talking about it. Built secure computing systems for the Department of Defense for 40 years. Built systems so secure that they'd make the OpenBSD team cry, if those guys had tear ducts.

Anyway, they were having a bit of fun with the butler, who, as you can imagine, was pretty good at keeping secrets. Suffice it to say that that was a different times, the statue of limitations has expired, and everyone involved is now gone to a better place.

You can use any sort of cherries to different effect. The Trader Joe's dark sweet ones work well.

So here's an updated version of the recipe.

Ingredients:

6 oz dried cherries.

2 cups water

4 cups sugar

2 sticks cinnamon

4-6 cloves

3 cardamom pods

Put water and sugar in a pan. Boil until you get a clear syrup. Add everything else. Return to a boil for a minute or so. While that's happening, place a quick call to a journalist and smear someone. When questioned, claim you have things boiling on the stove and hang up.

Pour ingredients into a very clean jar. (A splash of brandy or congac works as a fine antiseptic. You can leave it in the jar.) Put jar in ice water to cool rapidly. Optionally add more brandy or congac, or if you're a traditionalist, some maraschino liquor.)

Oh, and if you're lazy and French, but I repeat myself, you can throw all of that into a sous vide bag, seal it and cook it. If you don't have a chamber sealer, you can freeze the bag before sealing so that the water stays inside. You should cook it at 150F for two hours. Actually, cook it hotter or longer than that, and the cherries should plump up. Bill's butler didn't cook in no stinking water bath, so we're still experimenting.

Use in cocktails, on ice cream, or by themselves when looking for a snack that's healthier than the CIA lifestyle.

[su-chefs]

The Truth About Bittman's pizza recipe

Let me tell you the fucking truth about Bittman's pizza article. Bittman doesn't want you to know how to make the best pizza. He doesn't even know how. I make the best pizza, and you can't have any. But I will dribble out some bits here about how to make a good pizza, one that's better than Bittman's. That's obvious, because while I'm all about the red-sauce free pizza, you can't write an article about pizza and have 10 of the 13 be sauceless unless you're insane. QED.

The first thing you need to know about is the flour. Why? Because I fucking said so, and because really, that's what your goddamn lame pizza is going to be built on. You don't need 00 flour, but it's better. Make the effort. If you can't get some, get bread flour. Either way, you want a dough recipe that has two properties: first, it should use weight, not volume. Dough recipes that use volume are for idiots, because volume can vary based on sifting, humidity, and the phase of the moon. Professionals use weights, and so should you. Second, it should be in the metric system, because, hello, it's godamned 2012, the world is going to end, and you're gonna be measuring zombie parts in furlongs? Get with it. This recipe from Pete Bakes is pretty solid 00 flour pizza, but you should add more sugar. I could tell you how much, but you should really experiment. More sugar makes for a crispier crust, unless you add too much, in which case you get a really heavy cake.

It's ok to use the dough machine, but really, kneading it by hand it pretty damned easy, especially compared to going mano-a-mano with the APT, which I do every day.

But I digress, so let's move onto the sauce. I am lazy about the sauce. I throw some garlic through a little press into in a hot saucepan with some olive oil. Yeah, it's not as good. If you want to get all god-fathery on that garlic with a razor blade, have at it. I told you I was lazy, didn't I? Anyway, when the garlic is sizzling, throw in some green italian spices like thyme and oregano and basil. Don't measure those spices, smell them. Do they smell like pizza should smell? Good. When the garlic gets brown, I toss in 28oz of canned diced tomatoes. I start with just the juice and some scraping to break up all that stuff on the bottom of the pan. I don't know if it helps, but I read it in a best-practice guide once. Then I add a little red pepper flake, and pour in the rest of the tomatoes, a pinch of salt, and simmer until the sauce thickens and comes together. Sometimes there's some additional steps, based on tasting and experience, but that's the basics.

Then everyone in the world tells you to build your sorry ass pizza on a peel, and put it on a really hot stone. They're wrong. I mean, sure, you get your sorry-ass home oven as hot as it'll go for 20 or 30 minutes with the stone in there, and then here's what you do.

You take out the stone. You sprinkle some corn meal on it. Then you put your rolled-out dough on the stone. You wait until it bubbles a bit, then you add sauce, cheese, and whatever sorry sausage passes for pepperoni in your neck of the woods. See, as you do all that, the stone cooks the dough, which as I told you above, and you've already forgotten, is the base of the whole pizza.

That way, you get a crisper crust, and the rest of the pizza cooks in 5 or 7 minutes or so on the very top rack.

Unless you're Mortman and get your own damn pizza oven, in which case, you really do want a peel, because while sticking your hands inside that oven would be super-leet, umm, ouch?

[su-chefs]

Firing Up The Oven

Finally had the oven cured and ready to us. The wait is over! Yesterday we fired it up and made a ton of pizzas. Then Kathryn mixed up blueberry muffins and I added arroz con pollo and olive oil braised carrots to the mix (recipes in a later post). Finished off the night with pots of beans and oatmeal in the oven to cook overnight.

Here's the first pizza before it went into the oven.

And here it is coming out....

[su-chefs]

Whole-Wheat Hamburger Buns

Ingredients:

Fresh ground whole wheat flour  100% 800g

Whole milk 68% 544g

Salt 2% 16g

Yeast 1% 8g

Mix all ingredients together and knead until it start to pass the window-pane test.

Cover with a damp towel and rest until toughly doubled in volume.

Cut in 8 equal pieces (approx 175g each) and shape into balls. Place on a silpat covered backing sheet and cover with a damp cloth.

Heat oven to 400F w/cast iron pan or dish on the bottom of the oven.

When rolls are doubled in size, pour 1/4 cup of water into the cast iron pan and place rolls in oven.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until done.

[su-chefs]

My Rig

Since Mortman is sharing pictures of his beautiful setup in his yard here is a photo of the smoker I do my damage on. It is a simple CharGriller grill with a side firebox. I usually use a charcoal chimney with a football of coals under 2 crossed logs and just add logs as needed. I prefer Almond wood most of the time but haven't dove into many other options.

My go-to meats:

Pork Shoulder (Bone-In preferably)

Tri-Tip Steaks (AKA California Cut)

Pork Ribs

I have a different dry rub recipe for all of the above and have dabbled in other meats such as Brisket, chickens, and some assorted fish.

Future posts will include some of my cooking techniques that I've wound up using based on experience, word of mouth, and mostly trial and error.

Stay tuned!

-MattJay

@mattjay

[su-chefs]

Pumpkin-Pork Sausage

Several years ago now, we went to Slate Run Farm and while we were there we got some pumpkins. Son[0] (then 5 years old), of course, wanted to cook something with them and specifically said we should make pumpkin sausages. So we did. And they were amazing. Here's the recipe that I made up, based on a country sausage recipe I found on www.cdkitchen.com. 2.5 lbs fresh ham roast (shoulder/butt roast should work fine as well) freshly ground 1 Tbl kosher salt 1 tsp fresh ground pepper 1 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp maple sugar 1 pinch nutmeg 1/3 cup fresh pumpkin puree Mix all of the above and chill for 15-20 minutes. Form into patties and cook over medium-high heat for 3 minutes per side. Add 1 Tbl water to the pan, tightly cover with a lid and reduce heat to medium low. Cook for another 3-5 minutes, until the patty is cooked all the way through.

[su-chefs]

The Bread and Pizza Oven of Doom

The outdoor wood-fired bread/pizza oven is completely built! Now I wait impatiently for it to air-dry before the curing process begins. In roughly a week and a half, I get to try my first batch of pizza and bread in it. I can barely wait...

[su-chefs]

Welcome to SudoCooks

We are a bunch of Information Security folks who like food and like to cook, bake, bbq and brew.