JaySeeDub's Blogs

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Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Jan 04, 2012, 1:08pm

The jars of the stuff are everywhere. Glass jars with thick, white sauce. Alfredo with garlic. Alfredo with mushroom. Alfredo with four cheese. Alfredo with red peppers. Sun dried tomatoes. The list goes on and on. And the way we eat them is no different. One of my younger cousins will only eat pasta alfredo if there's chicken and garlic. A simple bowl of homemade pasta with white sauce? Nope. It won't be consumed by her.

The classic "Alfredo" isn't really alfredo sauce. It's a style of dressing pasta. It's just butter and cheese. Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. If you do a Google search for "alfredo recipe," you'll come up with a lot more complicated recipes. You'll also notice a common theme in those recipes - cream. In the jarred sauces and many "alfredo sauce" recipes, cream is used as both an emulsifier and a thinning agent. The fats in cream can give a weak sauce a lot of the thick, rich, luxurious mouth f . . . More

Filtering - Sous Vide

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I feel really bad for leaving readers in a lurch. I think I may have taken on a bit more than I could handle these past few weeks. But, I did run across this really cool article on MAKE on how to make your own immersion circulator. They call it a "sous vide machine," which is fine. The upside is that it costs about $75 to make. Versus spending $400 for the "SousVide Supreme." And anyone with a lab catalog handy can tell you how much a new immersion circulator or water bath can cost. About a grand. Starting. Unless you know of a lab closing that you'd feel comfortable snagging. Not that I'd ever condone or suggest theft.

The absolute great thing about a circulator is that it maintains a constant temperature. There is no fluctuation. There is no overcooking. You can stick your food in a vacuum sealed bag and let it sit at temperature for several hours. It will maintain that temperature. Want roast beef for dinner, but don't want to wait 2-3 hours for it to cook in the oven? Pop it in a vacuum bag in the bath before you leave for work, even better the night before, with the bath set to 55C . . . More

Filtering - Equipment

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There are two important things you need before you begin a recipe - good ingredients and good equipment. Good ingredients are key because they need minimal work. Why bother hiding the inherent good flavor in a quality piece of protein or vegetable under mounds of spices and herbs? Doesn't need it.

Equipment is something home cooks don't always think of the right way. The most expensive cookware isn't always the best and flashy isn't always better. You can pick up a multitude of decent cookware at any restaurant supply store - pots and pans, storage, tools. You don't need the $130 stainless steel pan when you can pick up a decent one for $20 at a restaurant supply store (as I mentioned previously).

But there's one key piece of equipment that I cannot stress enough. Especially if you are going to go out and play with modern cuisine and the array of ingredients that read like they belong in a chem or biochem lab - xanthan gum, sodium alginate, anhydrous citric acid, anhydrous caffeine, tapioca maltodextrin. Maybe you've picked up Martin Lersch's handy guide over at khymos.org. Or maybe you& . . . More

Filtering - Maillard, Water & Errata

Views: 411 | Comments: 8
Last by Coma on Jan 31, 2011, 10:28pm

So you've got your 1-1/2 inch thick, 24-day, dry aged New York Strip, ready to try out my bordelaise, right? Now the question is, do you throw that perfectly aged, buttery piece of red meat goodness on the grill or do you stick it in a pan? Backyard enthusiasts would go for the grill. What's better than a hunk o' beast thrown onto the grill over a charcoal/wood/gas fire? What's more primal and better tasting than the juicy char derived from meat over fire? Well, they're wrong.

Now I'm not saying that backyard grilling and bbq are universally bad, it has its uses, but it isn't for that nice steak. We've all heard of the "Maillard reaction," right? Chemical reaction that happens with a lot of foods that involves non-ezymatic browning. Brown in this instance means flavor. You see, step one of the Maillard reaction is when the reducing end of a sugar reacts with the amine of an amino acid's backbone. This process produces an N-substituted glycosylamine and water.

Now that water is important. See, what are the byproducts when you burn a hydrocarbon? CO2(g) and H2O(g). That means that smoke you see coming up from your grill has water vapor. Now, if water is being formed, you want to completely limit its presence in any reaction . . . More