Livin’ La Sous Vide-a Loca

Well we’ve had the Sous Vide Supreme machine for four days now, and have had it running every single night (and even one morning for breakfast!)… we don’t want to waste a moment in testing out all sorts of goodies in this baby! Here’s a little run-down of our exploits so far:

Friday Night: Steaks
For the inaugural meal, we invited another couple over and cooked some strip steaks with cajun seasoning and shiitake mushrooms. One thing we discovered right away (upon reading the manual) is that while a 1″ thick steak will cook in an hour, a 2″ thick steak takes 4 hours to cook! Our steaks were probably closer to the 2″ thick variety, but a quick butterfly cut and presto – 1″ thick steaks! Per the instructions, we set the sous vide to a surprisingly low temperature of 134º (for medium rare), and after an hour they were ready. A quick sear in a skillet added some nice browning on the outside, and then I reduced all the liquid with the mushrooms and a splash of red wine to make a little sauce. For the side: a smokey Lima bean, corn and red pepper succotash. The end result: seriously good stuff! The steaks were as tender and juicy as a fillet in a top-tier restaurant. We are off to a good start here!

Saturday Night: Pork Chops
For night number two, some modern Americana: bone-in pork chops with apples and thyme. Sealed into the pouch, along with the chops, were slices of apple, a pat of butter, some fresh thyme sprigs (thank you, windowsill herb garden!), some smoked paprika, and some ground sage. Again, an hour of cooking (at 140º this time), then a quick sear in the skillet, which added a bit of brownness to both the pork and the apples. Although there was definitely less of a noticeable difference in texture than there was with the steaks, the pork chops remained nice and juicy and were cooked perfectly. More good marks for the Sous Vide Supreme.

Sunday Morning: Omelets
Now we’re getting into some pretty nontraditional territory… we beat some eggs, then added in cooked portobello mushrooms, crumbled bacon, thinly sliced scallions and cheddar cheese. Once that was all sealed up in a pouch, it went into the hot water bath of the sous vide, and after a little cooking time out came some bag-shaped omelets. Now, they probably wouldn’t win any beauty pageants, but where they would win is on texture and flavor; these omelets were like a delicate, soft custard. All this, and from an egg mixture that was mostly egg whites (leftover from a custard tart recipe that needed yolks), and had no milk or cream added. What in a skillet would likely have been a little dry and not very fluffy became like a savory breakfast flan. Amazing!

Sunday Night: Salmon
This was probably our least successful foray into sous vide cooking so far – salmon fillets seasoned with a Bankok curry blend and sealed up with an orange slice. This one cooked at 140º, and I think that was our mistake – after the fillets were browned the salmon ended up being a little dry. I think if we had cooked it to a lower temperature before browning it would have remained juicier in the end. Overall, not bad, but definitely room for improvement.

Monday Night: Beef Fajitas
Okay, so we know the sous vide can produce fantastic results with a decent quality strip steak, but what about a cheaper piece of meat? The booklet recommended a cook time of 8 hours for tougher cuts like flank steak, so this time we seasoned up a flat steak with some cajun/fajita seasoning and started it cooking in the morning. After 8 or so hours, I sliced it thinly and tossed it around a skillet with some peppers and onions. A quick wrap in a tortilla with some other fixin’s like cheese, salsa and yogurt (in place of sour cream) and the fajitas were all set. The end result was some of the most tender beef I’ve ever eaten in a fajita.

So, what’s the score so far? Steaks: big thumbs up! Pork chops: good stuff, though less spectacular than the steaks. Omelets: not the prettiest, but wow what a texture! Salmon: a bit overdone, definitely need to tweak the temperature for next time. Fajitas: another thumbs up!

We’ll let you know what new adventures in Sous Vide Supreme country we get into, but so far it’s been a very impressive journey.

SousVide Supreme Time!!!

Remember when we mentioned the new SousVide Supreme water oven back in our 45 Forkfuls of Christmas holiday shopping guide?  Well the fantastic  SousVide Supreme folks offered to send us a unit to test out here at the FF HQ for two weeks.  We had been eagerly anticipating it’s arrival.  And it landed on our doorstep today!  We are seriously super excited.  We already have friends planning to come over for dinner tomorrow night to help us try it out, and plans to get the rest of our local foodie friends over shortly to try a bunch of recipes.

We’re planning to use it as much as possible, and try out as many recipes as we can, in order to share our thoughts and review with the rest of you.  You can cook just about anything in it (except maybe cakes and cookies, don’t think that would work…) so we’re happy to take menu suggestions.  We’ll be taking photos and posting our notes as we go along the way.

In other exciting news, remember Nudo’s adopt-an-olive-tree (and get the oil shipped to you) item on our 45 Forkfuls list?  Well we won a free year of it courtesy of Cool Hunting’s blog!  So we’re eagerly anticipating our shipment of awesome Italian olive oil in the spring from Nudo.  Among other things, we’re planning olive oil ice cream…

Resolutions of the Culinary Variety

So here we are in 2010 – whoohoo!  The Foodie Forkful Fam is just home from three weeks of traveling around, visiting all of our little one’s grandparents.  We had a great time, and got a bunch of cool foodie gifts (vacuum sealer, ceramic knife, cool spices, etc) that we will surely be using for posts in the near future.  And I got a light box for food photos, along with some cool plating accessories, so there will be more photos!  So excited about that one.

But back to my topic.  Resolutions.  Frankly, I’m not interested in the eat-better, lose-weight kinda resolutions.  I’m talking culinary resolutions.  Two of mine are: learning to properly season (ie salt and pepper) my cooking, and get better at cracking eggs without making a gooey mess.

So how ’bout you guys – what are your ideas for culinary resolutions?

Merry Christmas from The Foodie Forkful!

Hope you enjoy a dandy holiday with your family and friends.  Merry Christmas from us (specifically from the youngest member of our team – Leo), we’ll be back with more foodie goodness in the new year!

Forkful #1: Twas the Night Before Christmas

This is it,the last day before Christmas. If you’re still wracking your brain for a last-minute gift, we’ve got your golden ticket: give the gift of dishpan-free hands. No, I don’t mean that you should gift wrap a bottle of Palmolive… instead, give them a gift certificate pledging to clean all the dirty dishes for the next year (or six months, or however long).

This is a gift that may not be as exciting to get on Christmas morning as, say, a new pony, but I guarantee they’ll appreciate it more and more as each night goes by and you’re taking care of those dishes!

Be a little creative, make your own coupon to give them tomorrow morning, and feel that panicky weight lift from your shoulders!

Forkful #2: Rub-a-dub-dub

Not many shopping days left now! If you’re still searching for gifts, at this point it may be a good idea to start thinking about gifts you can make, rather than pick over what’s left in stores or worry about whether something will arrive in time with shipping.

A simple yet delicious and useful gift you can make quickly is a barbecue spice rub. It looks great, smells great, and when you tell them you made it yourself it becomes a much more memorable gift than a few bucks worth of spices could otherwise be!

There are a bazillion spice rub recipes out there, and we (of course!) welcome you to tinker with this to add your own twist (or to customize it for different people by adding a little more cayenne, or whatever they’d like). This is just a basic Kansas City barbecue rub, but it’s smoky, sweet, savory, and totally yummy. Be sure and use smoked paprika if you can find it… the flavor is amazing.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup paprika
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon cayenne

Preparation:

Combine all ingredients together (a food processor works nicely to break up any lumps in the brown sugar, but a fork and a bowl will get the jb done too) and transfer to an air tight container.

Forkful #3: A Few Gourmet Ingredients

Christmas is just a few days away, and you’re still need in need of an idea – but you don’t want to get a gift card.  Well this idea just involves a trip to your local grocery store (or gourmet store if you have one).  Pick up a selection of high-end ingredients for your foodie.  I’m talking about some decent quality stuff that your store already carries.  Pick up the best olive oil they have, or a pricey flavored vinegar, a big block of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, maybe some prosciutto or stuffed olives.  You’d be surprised at the selection of decent ingredients most grocery stores carry – so pick up a nice mix of goodies and make a little basket for your recipient.  Think of the fun foods that you’d normally be too frugal to pick up – and get those.  You can make this gift as expensive or as inexpensive as you like based on what you pick up.

Forkful #4: Chocolate-Covered Orange Peels

We’re getting pretty close to the wire now, so you need an idea you can execute pretty easily, ideally without a trip to the mall.  A delicious option is making chocolate-covered orange peels.  I’ve made these myself more than once (though I seem to be incapable of correctly tempering the chocolate….) and they are delicious.  Even if you are no good at chocolate tempering like me, that only effects the appearance of the chocolate after about a week.  And chances are, these will be devoured long before then.

I made mine using a recipe from Smitten Kitchen, basically you cut up orange peels into long strips,  boil them in a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water) for about an hour to candy them, then coat in melted chocolate.  Put these in a pretty little box or bag, and you’ve got a delicious, easy homemade gift for someone on your list.  And who doesn’t like a delicious gift for Christmas?

Forkful #5: Reinventing the Wheel

We’re getting down to the wire for Christmas shopping, so here’s a simple yet super-useful one: a handheld pizza cutter. Until we got one of these, I had only ever seen the old-style pizza cutters with the wheel on one end and an angled handle. Usually the blade wheel wobbled all over the place, and you could never get good leverage to cut through a thick crust.

This little guy beats that old pizza cutter, hands down! The blade doesn’t wobble one bit, your hand is down right on top of the cutter so you get tons of great leverage and control, and the housing swivels open to let you take the blade out for cleaning.

For something as simple as a pizza cutter it wouldn’t seem like there’d be much difference, but believe me this one is well worth the investment, especially since it comes in around $10.

Forkful #6: A Farmer in a Basket

A great gift idea for the foodie on your list who wants to enjoy fresh, local eats is a CSA share.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and you’re basically buying a share in a local farm’s product.  You pay the farmer upfront for a basket of their items, delivered weekly to a pre-specified location.  They bring a bunch of whatever is in season at that moment, fresh picked.  You get super fresh goods, and the farmer gets guaranteed business for the time period.  And you eat local, while supporting the local economy.  Plus you might get introduced to foods you’re not familiar with, which is a great way to branch out.  If you don’t know of any farms near you that offer CSA shares, Local Harvest offers a great searchable listing on their website.

Plus – if you’re giving this as a gift, you really only need to make the promise for it right now, then pay for the share once the 2010 shares are available (timing varies by farm).

Forkful #7: Bubble, Bubble, No Toil, No Trouble

Okay, at first blush, an electric kettle seems really lame. Unless you live in a dorm room, you have a stove, you have a microwave… how hard is it to boil water? Well, not very hard. But and electric kettle is still well worth having! Not only does it boil water much faster than the stove, but you can just fill it, turn it on, and walk away; it’ll turn itself off once the water comes to a boil. We literally use ours every day, and most days more than once (coffee in the morning, then tea or hot chocolate at some point later).

Handily, America’s Test Kitchen recently tested electric kettles, and their top pick was this one: the Capresso H2O Plus. In addition to good performance, it’s a glass kettle, so you get to watch the water bubble away in there (seriously, so dumb, but how cool does that look?!)

Forkful #8: Drive Through? Don’t Think So!

Let’s face it, there are about a billion cookbooks out there. But honestly, how often do you feel the need to buy a cookbook? And of the ones you have (which you probably were given as gifts), how often do you crack one open to get a recipe? We cook a lot, and of the dozen or so cookbooks we have in our kitchen, we open The Joy of Cooking or How to Cook Everything every once in a while to get a basic recipe, and The Perfect Scoop when we make ice cream, but other than that they pretty much sit untouched.

A big exception is Jacques Pepin’s Fast Food My Way – we’ve watched his show on PBS for a while now, and have always liked the way he turns fancy French cuisine into simple, approachable dishes. His book is the same way – the recipes take his decades of experience with French cuisine and strip away all the pomp, leaving amazing delicious yet amazingly simple recipes. You really get the sense that after all his years as a chef he’s boiled his art down to the simple essence; what he cooks on his show and in his book is how he cooks for himself at home.

Our hands-down favorite from Fast Food My Way is his 30-Minute Cassoulet, it’s just flat-out delicious, and while 30 minutes is maybe a bit faster than the average home cook can make it, 45 minutes is certainly enough time.

This is one cookbook that’s guaranteed not to sit unused on your shelf!

Forkful #9: A Whole Deck of Deals

You may recall the post we did a month or so ago about the release of the 2010 A La Card deck.  It’s a deck of 52 cards that you buy for $30, with each card getting you $10 off one of 52 Chicago restaurants.  We think it’s pretty cool, and recommend it to anyone on your list who lives in Chicago and likes to eat out. Head to A La Card’s website to see the list of restaurants and purchase the deck.  Well what if your intended giftee doesn’t live in Chicago?  Ah well we recently discovered that the idea isn’t exclusive to Chicago!

New York City’s City Shuffle offers basically the same idea, called The Diner’s Deck.  It’s also $30, and gets you $10 at each of 52 establishments.  They offer a couple different decks: Manhattan, Brooklyn and Downtown Manhattan, and Bar & Lounge.  So pick appropriately for the New Yorker on your list.  Get details at their website.

And in California, it looks like a similar thing exists called Cozmo Card.  Details look slim on their website, but it seems to be the same idea.  Any of you Californian foodies know anything about them?

Chances are if you live in a decent sized city, this sort of thing may exist there too.  Just hit up the old Google to find out!

Forkful #10: A Carton for your Cream

If you, or the foodie on your list, enjoys making homemade ice cream (as we do – so delicious…) then you could use a slightly more glamorous container for it than your random wannabe-Tupperware.  A great option is the 1 quart carton by Sweet Bliss containers.  We got a sleeve of these for Byron’s birthday this year, and they’ve very much come in handy.  They offer a sleeve of 25 of these cartons for $18 plus shipping.  No idea what the shipping deadlines are for this company, but you should probably still be able to get these in time for Christmas (their product are also at a small number of store, listed on their website).

Forkful #11: Sharpen Up!

We all intend to sharpen our kitchen knives with some regularity. Really. But it’s been two years since we got our fantastic Global knives as a wedding present, and they’ve never been resharpened. Which really isn’t that long – but with two people who love to cook using them every day, they could use a touch up. And I’ve been meaning to take care of it, but it just keeps falling lower on the priority list. Chances are good that someone on your shopping list has also been meaning to get their knives sharpened, just as soon as they get around to it… So do it for them! You can either get them a gift certificate to get it done, or swoop in and take them yourself to get done. Just check your local yellow pages for knife sharpening services, or google ‘knife sharpening’ plus the name of your city to get local listings.

Forkful #12: A Great Read

Chances are, you’ve heard of Michael Pollan.  He’s a food writer, but not in the restaurant-review or recipe sense.  He loves to explore the cultural-industrial-anthropological side of what we eat.  His book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is one of my absolute favorite books.  In it, he digs into the supply chain journey of the foods we eat in our current industrial system, contrasting it against a more holistic farm system.  It will really open your eyes to the realities of our current food system.  Michael Pollan’s previous book, The Botany of Desire, is also quite good, and it traces the history of human interaction with a selection of plants, and the way humans and these plants have effected each other over time.

There are quite a few other books that have come out recently in this particular genre, but The Omnivore’s Dilemma was one of the first, and I think a fantastic book for anyone on your list who wants to know more about what they eat.



Forkful #13: Foodzie Lovin’

If you live in a big city, you can probably scope out some great artisanal food finds for your foodie without too much trouble.  There are probably a few decent gourmet food shops around, and Whole Foods always has interesting  finds.  But what if you don’t live near any of that?  Then Foodzie.com is the next best thing.  They’re an online food marketplace that connects you to  a crazy assortment of hand-crafted, artisanal food, from a huge array of independent producers, which you can have shipped to your door.  Even cooler – you can search to see what producers are located near you (or your intended recipient) to buy local goods.  If you don’t know what you want to get your foodie (or don’t think it will get shipped in time) they have gift cards to make it easy.  Go check out their website and start drooling now.

Forkful #14: Exotic Salts – Ghost Pepper Salt Anyone?

As we’ve mentioned before, South Bend has a great year-round farmer’s market.  One of the booths there is for a fantastic little gourmet seasonings company, s.a.l.t sisters.  We got to chat with Charmane Skillen, the company’s creator, when we were there last week.  She’s got a great selection of high-end gourmet salts (ie. fleur de sel, Hawaiian, Himalayan pink and smoked sea salts, to name a few) plus a huge selection of ‘fusion’ salts (ie flavored).  We were most excited by the Ghost Pepper Sea Salt, but the Black Truffle and Roasted Garlic also sound amazing.

Charmane’s salts are starting to get big – Giada de Laurentis loved ‘em and they were featured on the Today Show – and she’s headed down to the big Food & Wine festival in South Beach this winter to show them off.

We think her salts make a great holiday gift (and most of them are $5 a piece, so quite affordable) for the foodie on your list.  Not to mention the fact that your holiday dollars will go to a small business that really appreciates it.  She’s got some herb blends and other fun stuff on her website, so go check it out.  The website is a little rough, but there’s a phone number on there too if you need help ordering.

Chocolate Covered Orange Twists

A few weeks ago, were lucky enough to get a coupon for a free box of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry, courtesy of the Foodbuzz Tastemakers program. Mmmm, puff pastry. I could just bake it straight and eat it. But I don’t think that is quite what they had in mind! So Byron and I each took a sheet – and he made a dinner item while I chose breakfast pasty.

I made Chocolate Covered Orange Twists, and they were delish. I had candied a pile of orange peels earlier in the week for a different recipe, so I chopped them up small, and drizzled them with chocolate, rolled them up in puff pastry, then twisted the rolled up puff pasty. The result: orangey, chocolately, flaky deliciousness.

Chocolate Covered Orange Twists

• 1 sheet Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry, thawed
• Candied Peels from 1 orange (simmer peels in equal parts water and sugar for 1 hour to candy them)
• 2 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted
• Egg wash (1 egg beaten)

Cut puff pastry sheet in half.  Distribute peels evenly on each section, then drizzle with 2/3 melted chocolate.  Roll up each section to make 2 long logs.  Pinch the ends to seal, then twist each section.  Brush with egg wash.  Bake at 375 for approx 20 minutes, until top is golden brown.  Drizzle with remaining chocolate, then devour.

Forkful #15: The Ever-Fabulous Microplane

Today’s holiday gift idea is a staple of any well stocked kitchen: the Microplane grater/zester.  Before we owned one, I never knew what we were missing, but now I couldn’t imagine not having it.  It makes freshly-grating your nutmeg a snap, and makes it easy to grate just a touch of Parmesan to top your dishes.

It’s not that it does anything revolutionary, or performs any actions that your other kitchen tools couldn’t do, it’s that is does it without you needing to haul out your box grater or food processor.  It’s small, handy, and easy to clean.  If the cook on your shopping list doesn’t already own one, it makes a great stocking stuffer (maybe along with some whole nutmeg).

Microplane also makes a bunch of variations on this theme, with larger and differently shaped holes, for a multitude of other zesting/grating uses.