Food, among other items...

[alexpgp]

On the culinary front, I used my sous vide controller yesterday to cook a 1.8-lb piece of a cut called "beef tip" (bought because it was about the right size and about the cheapest cut in the store) at about 140°F for about 6 hours. It came out as described, uniformly pink all the way through the tissue, and incredibly juicy.

As a data point, the meat released about 1/3 of a pound of liquid while it cooked, which represents a loss of about 20% of the overall weight (so you can either think of the liquid as costing $1.30 on its own, or the meat costing $4.90 a pound with the liquid as a worthless byproduct). This release of liquid is due to a combination of natural release of juices from meat and (perhaps) liquid that was injected into the meat before it was packaged; the way to verify this one way or another would be to find a comparably sized piece of "natural" beef and cook it the same way.

Be that as it may, the prepared beef tip is absolutely delicious.

In other culinary news, I recently bought something called The Perfect Pickler, which was mentioned in Tim Ferriss's latest book, and the kit basically consists of a plastic cap (that screws onto a wide-mouth quart canning jar) and rigid plastic tubing that allows air to escape through a hole in the cap, via a water trap, thus creating an anaerobic environment for the fermenting goodies.

My first batch was sauerkraut, and I was surprised at how much room there was left in the jar after I put the better part of about a pound-and-a-third in it. The kraut was crispy when it was finished, which I found a little unusual, perhaps in the same way folks who try natural pineapple juice find the taste a little "off" because the juice hadn't had a chance to react with the tin can in which such juice is normally packaged.

My second batch—bubbling away as I type—was undertaken a bit more systematically. I cut up about 1.2 kilos of fresh, heavy cabbage and determined that the capacity of a quart canning jar is about 1 kilo. The proof of the process will be tasted this weekend.

Galina and I ate lunch out at Red Lobster today; we split one of their combos. It was good. Afterward, we drove around a while, stopping in at the World Market just down the strip mall from the Barnes & Noble. Lots of interesting stuff there, but the place sure is proud of its pricing, that's for sure.

When we got home, there was a package waiting for me, from Natalie. I'd have opened it by now, except for a flurry of highly irregular late afternoon gotta-expedite-this work. (I should probably also take pictures of the unboxing, so I'll do that tomorrow... :^)

Comments

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that sounds very yummy. I often make corned beef (aka boiled corned silverside) in a pressure cooker - the resulting beef stock is quite good as a soup base. Just have to remember not to put in any salt, as corned meat is already quite salty.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Roger that on salt. We've gotten to the point where we add almost no salt during cooking, and I don't really miss it at all. (If anything, it makes eating out that much harder, because so much of what's served tastes overly salted.)

Cheers...

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

Same here. I've even stopped using stock cubes when making soups - they are just far too salty! I hear you on the eating out, too... I've somehow managed to develop a sensitivity to canola oil, out of all things. And guess which cheap oil most Aussie restaurants and cafes use? I am fine in Asia, they mostly use palm or coconut oil, but here, it's a hopeless quest to find something without canola oil.

Now that we have a dog and it's summer, we've found another application for left-over stock - at least, the stock left over from poaching chicken, obviously without salt. Put a few chicken necks in small containers (about a cup in size), pour in the stock, freeze, and voila - a doggie ice block. Mashka loves them on hot days :)

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I already made a heating/cooling temperature controller out of essentially the same parts, but for brewing fermentation. I decided to make another one to give to a friend for cooking, as I don't typically cook stuff that would benefit from sous vide. Should be interesting to see what she does with it. She'd never heard of sous vide before.