Cherry Smoked Bacon (or more product placement than Apple in Starbucks)

Warning: This post features oodles of product crap and not one of the product-producing bastards gave me a nickel.

For xmas, the wife gave me a Smoke Daddy smoker offset box. A well-machined bit of aluminum and steel made to fit into a chamber with hand-tight fittings via a 7/8" dia hole. The smoke comes from wood and today I'm using Traeger smoking pellets hoping to get a longer smoking session without having to do more than sip beer and stare at it. I used plain old chips off the shelf, but they burned too quickly. The pellets I got for just under a buck a pound were just what this rig needed.  One charge of 200 grams of pellets goes for 3-4 hours.  The line into this thing (that blue line) is hooked to a small aquarium pump. This is necessary to keep the combustion going, the lit pellets will suffocate without a perk of air. I'll try slowing the flow of air to get a few more hours out of it.

So that's it, see below for a few action shots. I prepped my pork belly according to Saucisson Mac's bacon manifesto and tossed it on.  I especially like Saucisson Mac's thoughts on a solution brine rather than a solid/surface salting, more uniform and faster to get the belly cured.

The stainless steel cylinder that extends my kettle into a pseudo Smoky Mountain isn't sold anymore.  However, the smoke from this thing could be pumped into a wooden box or pretty much any chamber you can drill a hole into, the receiving chamber isn't hot.

I put the pellets in and lit it with a brief zap of a propane torch like the instructions suggested, capped it off and started the aquarium pump.

My pork belly, about 2.5 lbs.  This is where economies of scale scream "MORE BACON."  The brining of a pork belly is easy; that chamber has two racks of space and given how fast I gave away the last batch, I should've made pounds and pounds.  Fear not, you may see xmas gifts that bear some resemblance.

After searching throughout Columbus, I gave up and found my cherry pellets at Amazon (isn't that sad, to get a fuel source from Amazon?)  They are a nicely manufactured product though, perfect for this type of apparatus.

See through the door?  That's me sipping whiskey and strumming my banjo.

fin, tomorrow's breakfast will be special.

My first batch o bacon!

It's cool to see something that looks (almost) like bacon starting from a pork belly.  It's cool, but it's a little like never having seen macaroni from anything but a blue box. See smoking apparatus used for smoking the pork belly after it brined.

Teeny weeny offset smoking box to cold smoke bacon. (Smoke Daddy smoker)

Thanks my love (finally used my xmas gift).
This rig was assembled from a standard 22 1/2" Weber kettle, a Thunderbelly stainless steel insert (don't even know the website for that anymore) and a SmokeDaddy (.com) cold smoking thingy. I smoked using some chips I had lying around (maybe mesquite?) for about 8 hrs. Ambient temp inside was low, only about 60°F. That little blue tube comes from an aquarium pump and blows smoke from the offset into the big chamber, it's all part of the SmokeDaddy.

 See finished product.

Chickpea flour (besan) noodles, the experiment (in images)

Given a kid's zeal for noodles, I wanted to try to fit some more nutrition in by using chickpea flour (ground chickpeas, purchased at Mediterranean Food Imports for the locals). Beans have a little higher protein and about the same carb count as flour, although the carbs must be more complex and better nutritionally. BUT, they lack gluten, so the extensibility of a final dough is in question at high levels of bean flour. I took an arbitrary stab at 50:50 besan:unbleached white flour.

I made a dough before work from unbleached white (150 g), besan (150 g), salt (4 g), 2 eggs (100 g), olive oil (ca. 1 T) and mashed it together. I intended on using an electric pasta machine type roller so I pick up the extra kneading there and barely mix the lump. I wrapped it in plastic and let it sit in the fridge for the day.

The lump of dough was broken into 4 pieces and I started sending it through rollers. Yup, much less gluten, lots of tearing, not much stretch. But I persisted and got to squish the dough down to a "4" setting, much thinner and it fell apart going through the rollers. Above is depicted the sheets. I let them dry out a bit before cutting into noodles, this keeps the noodles from sticking to each other.

Here's a closer view of the surface of the dough after many passes through the rollers. With all flour, the dough becomes tough and smooth after this operation. In this case, the dough is always more fragile than with only flour (or flour and semolina).

Here's what happens sometimes after a pass through the rollers. This gets folded and rerolled and eventually it comes out acceptable.

After my sheets rested and dried out a little, I trimmed them using only a pizza cutter. I like the wide uneven noodles.

How were they?  They held up to boiling water just fine, they were tougher than I thought.  I boiled them like any other pasta, in salty water and served them with butter, oil and cheese.  They had an interesting flavor, very good I thought.  Tough noodle to get right.  Need a lot of patience and no way would I hand roll these things.  I think I'd make them again.

What a fun market, La Plaza Tapatia

The other day @Hungry_Woolf tipped me off to an incredible piece on white bread.  Few topics interest me more than the baking methodology used for industrial strength pillow-soft white bread.  In that piece is mentioned "mejorante para pan blanco," or white bread improver.  Bethia pointed me to a well stocked market on Columbus' west side behind what is left of Westland Shopping Center, La Plaza Tapatia.  I went in and asked for this mejorante stuff, I had it written on an index card, but they didn't recognize the name, then I asked for baker's yeast and figured I'd find it nearby on the shelf.

This simple search for a product named yeast brought me back to Lyon, France 20 years ago, my first time out of the country on business.  Me and my little cue cards struggled to communicate the simplest of words.  Back to La Plaza, after 3 employees and finally a little kid hanging out by the meat counter, we realized the translation for yeast (levure) and I was set in the right direction.

I couldn't find the product, but I already hit a jackpot, I got to discover a community I never knew existed in my back yard.  While there, I got a bunch of beans including these killer spiced, roasted lima beans (reminded me of my expt with cannelini).

So, the hunt continues, thanks for the tip Bethia, it was a fun little adventure.

An unconventional method for making biscuits results in puff pastry, and we're glad about that.

o

A big motivation for this site is from the question "what's the recipe?"  Few questions overwhelm me to point of being speechless.  A recipe is a list of ingredients, to put them together is a bigger proposition.  I used to go into the details, then I perceived the trapped person glazing over and I realized the person asking was simply trying to give a compliment but wasn't really interested in the preparation.  The website was an easy way to get off the hook.  I could point them to the site and details.

It's Sunday and that's often a morning of biscuits and fruit.  My typical biscuit prep is 300 g flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, salt, a T sugar, cut in butter (100 g) and moisten with 180 grams liquid (water or milk), mix, fold a few times, cut in circles, bake at 450.

Today, since I was in croissant mode, I took a different tack with the same biscuit ingredients and stumbled on something nice.  I made a dough mixed from water (90 g), flour (150 g), salt (3 g), sugar (1T) and baking powder (2t) - which could just have easily been made from self rise flour (150 g) and water (90 g).  That was kneeded in a bread machine while I made a 55 gram butter pat in a small ziploc bag using my butter trick.  The dough and butter were treated just as in the croissant method (albeit much smaller rectangles, but still 81 layers) and cut into squares.

It was a lean dough, leavened with just baking powder.  Butter was then added, and the folding/chilling/rolling went off in about 15 minutes.  I cut the final dough into 6 cubes and baked at 450F.  The delectable morsels are depicted above.  They were reminiscent of puff pastry (obviously not as thin, but just as delicate) and are going to be a serious building block for all sorts of stuff, popovers for starters!

Croissants, needs work

I made croissants and pain au chocolat about 10 years ago and got an itch recently to give it another go. It's basically an enriched dough, plus a bunch of butter folded in carefully and made into funny shapes, a little like a multi-layered biscuit only leavened with yeast instead of dough - and more layers. My enriched dough was a straight dough (everything mixed together and allowed to rise): milk (300 g), butter (38 g), salt (9 g), sugar (15 g), yeast (instant active, 7 g), and Montana Sapphire unbleached white (500 g) and mixed into a stiff dough with a bread machine. It did it's first rise at room temp for a few hours. Then I rolled it into a 10 x 15" rectangle and that's where the images begin.

Above is the dough rolled out and I'm unwrapping my 300 g of butter prepared about a week ago using my spiffy trick to get the butter into a 10" square.

The square rested on 2/3 of the rectangle (above) and the dough flapped over in thirds.

First flap...

Second flap to make the first 3 layers.  The rectangle is now about 5" x 10" and placed in the refrigerator to chill.  Then it is removed and rolled out to a 10" x 15" rectangle and folded in thirds.  Repeat this until you get to 81 layers of butter. (3 to the 4th).

Roll 1/2 of that rectangle while keeping the other half in the fridge into a 20" x 10" rectangle, cut into 5" x 5" squares and cut the squares diagonally and roll 'em up.  Let rise about 20 minutes, they're chilly to start but still proof only about 20 minutes.  If this stuff warms up, it'll get ugly.  You're going to rely on the oven spring to get the volume in them.

Bake on a piece of parchment that is placed on a cookie sheet in a preheated 425F oven and glaze with a whole egg wash.

I wasn't thrilled with them.  They were ok, but the middle was a tad dense, maybe the proof was too short.  Anyway, there they are.  Because of the butter trick, they were pretty easy.  After all the folds to get the 81 layers, the rectangle sat in the fridge overnight and the final rolling was done the next morning (at 4 am, ugh).  But it was still pretty fun.  I look forward to making them again, just have to change some: final rising times and/or baking conditions, still thinking about it.

Recipe for these from Wayne Gisslen.

Butter trick, preparing for croissants

I'm sure I have nothing on any French bakers out there, but I think this is slick.  I got 300 grams of butter into a 10" x 10" tile with barely any effort by using a ziploc.  It chills in the fridge into a nice wafer.  When ready, I'll trim the sides, peel off the plastic and voila, fold, fold, fold - croissants!

The Stonehenge of chilled butter

Use of this in croissants

Heat sources and data logging

Click on images for an awesome view...

The other day I scored a stirring hotplate from the thrift store for $6.  It looked new and is originally about $500-$600.  The value in this heat source is the stability of temperature over time.  I used a datalogger and collected about 7,192 data points to illustrate it.  

• On the left: the blue box, the profile represents the heating of 2 gallons of water on heat setting 3, 
• Next is the black box showing the cooling period when I turned the heat down to "2"
• The green box shows the same 2 gallons heated at the lower setting and finally, 
• The black box on the right shows water heated in a slow cooker, observe the oscillating pattern. 

While the slowcooker is ok for chili, it would suck for a sous vide bath (or something).

Below is a scale expansion of the blue box to show the range of temperature:

Cool or what??

Cold smoking adventures to follow.

Local business, a consumer's perspective. (Columbus, OH edn)

When I visit the Starbucks on N Broadway and N High I sit at the bar and study the line that builds between 7 and 8. This line is profoundly different than any line at a McDonald's where customers stare at their phones while ordering rarely acknowledging the unfortunate soul behind the counter. Customers at Starbucks holster their devices 3 places out waiting for their turn to engage with their barrista with anticipation rivaled only by a meeting with the kid at the Genius bar.

My favorite employee, Jen, works mornings, the spirited and giggly Cia works nights, Shawn is friendly and polite, his father loves gadgets, the unshaven guy sometimes at the register got his skateboard backpack at a thrift store and a newly-mustachioed Jason plays at Wild Goose once in a while with his band. One young lady is delightfully pleasant and talkative when business is quiet. Annie is a little standoffish toward me, but I know she's a psych major who decided grad school just didn't do it for her, she enjoys her work. Kelly is diligent, damned efficient and knows how to run a shift. They all know things about me.

At a popular Short North cafe, I recently had a pourover that was lukewarm because the young lady, managing at least another customer or two, didn't care. I've been about four times: two visits were bad and two were mediocre. It's not where I'll go to consume my ration of caffeine or spend my limited funds. Oh, their coffee's outstanding and local and all that.

Something about the too oft-maligned Starbucks' employees is magic. They are the soul of the successful franchise because their coffee is insipid; I wish I had the nerve to bring my own and offer them a sitting fee. Yet, I go, I sip, I enjoy, religiously. I yearn for a social connection with my consumption - especially when I'm slapping down cash for food. Don't hate successful businesses, study them.

Dave is a frustrated amateur food scientist and former chemist who blogs about food at weber_cam and occasionally blathers at Dave's Beer. Today he provides unsolicited advice to local business owners.

Mom and the kid made me spaghetti!

Bread for the teachers (again)

The other morning, I made bread for the teachers at Frankie's school. It's a fun morning of baking which I've done once before where I make about 40 pieces of bread for our hardworking public teachers as a small tribute to their dedication.  This run was a little different than in the past and I learned a lot.

Testing yeast and flour on smaller scale is helpful, but nothing is like the real run. I used to cook on perforated thin sheets of stainless steel for convenience and other reasons but have turned back to clay tiles. The most significant factor in baking crusty loaves at home, I believe, is humidity in the oven. Anyone can humidify an oven with any "trick" they think works but I also believe most crust faults result from too much humidity. Anything else I say is without substance because measuring relative humidity in an oven at 400-450F requires a really expensive probe. Until I do some measurements, feel free to read Julia Child's famous recipe on how to make crusty baguettes. Her too many ways to humidify the oven convinced me none of them are very effective.

In this run, I tested no steam and relied on a pretty full oven full of bread to provide the initial moist environment. I cooked about 2 lbs of dough at a time in 75 g rolls using 450F and convection on preheated tile. The convection was a further attempt to dehumidify the oven in late stages of baking. 

Dough prep: I went with a basic lean bread dough: water 360 g, Fleischmann's fast yeast 1 pkt (7 g), olive oil 10 g, salt 10 g, unbleached white flour (Montana Sapphire) 600 g, and kneaded in a bread machine. I did this 4 times and set the blobs in a 15 qt stainless pot on my ca. 40F deck for the day. 7 hours before baking, I pulled in the pot to let warm up, when I woke up, it was 60F. The dough was portioned in 75 g balls (about 65 g after baking), rounded, let rest and shaped them into minis. I cooked 12 at a time for about 20 mins each. The total baking session was about 2.5 hours. The crusts were slightly crackled on the surface and the crust may have been the best I ever achieved. This is a sloppy post, I just needed to document it. Here's some action shots:

I made the dough about 24 hours before and left it outside at about 40F the entire day.

I took the pot in 7 hours before baking to warm up in a 60F house.

Merguez: three painful hours

The last time I endured 3 hours of French-related agony was in grad school when, in an attempt to convince my girlfriend I was all that, I sat through Germinal.  It was the longest, darkest movie I never understood.

Lucky enough to still have that woman in my life, I tried to make something she and I would enjoy to relive a past adventure to Paris.  I tried my hand at merguez.  A spicy, really red, greasy link sausage most perfectly served with couscous.  Despite SaucissonMAC's expertise and directed readings, I was overwhelmed  trying to find a recipe.  Having had it in Paris once long ago, I believed I could recall enough to alter a recipe that would reproduce what we ate so long ago.  I'm recording this less than successful episode because I'd like to try again.

Here's some details:

• Lamb, 2000 g, from a 9 lb halal shoulder from Mediterranean Food Imports, cut by the butcher into pieces, ground twice using a small die (yield about 3 kg, kept some for later)
• Pork fat, 250 g, (so much for the halal thing)
• Salt, 30 g (only 6 g/lb, but I was relying on getting some additional  salt from the harissa)
• Garlic, 25 g finely minced
• Paprika, Spanish sweet, 2T
• Paprika, spicy, 2T
• Cumin, 2T ground
• Coriander, 2T ground
• Cinnamon, 1t
• harissa, 60 g, a commercial preparation from the same market (this is where SaucissonMAC may yell at me), this was the brand I used.
• water, 60 g

See a few pics below of the process.  Should've been more images, but my hands were busy trying to muffle the f-bomb attack.

After mixing until slightly sticky, I fried a sample patty.  With $45 dollars of lamb on the line, I feared too much salt or too much hot (harissa) and I fell content too quickly.  The salt was perfect but (in hindsight) it lacked heat and it wasn't red enough.  I really, really wanted the blazing red color.  I now realize the signature of this sausage is harissa and I should've made my own, but the stuff I bought tasted good and  was smokin' hot; I think I was simply too light on it.

To this point, the prep was a delightful walk through the kitchen.  Then came stuffing into the sheep casings and I was immediately transported to the mines with Depardieu choking with black lung.  The casings were tough to thread on the stuffing funnel, they tore, etc.  I forged ahead for a few hours. I manged about 3 lbs of links and saved the rest as bulk.

While not a total flop, it's a darn good lamb sausage, but definitely room for improvement.