In honor of my birthday, and the upcoming anniversary of the Kosher Blog’s first post, we’ll have some great content this week:
• 2 restaurant reviews
• New cheeses
• More Adventures in Beef
• …and a Boston-area kosher rumor
Stay tuned.
By the end of my last post, I had a tray of raw Andouille sausages, in casings, drying overnight in the refrigerator. The next step I’m going to describe is smoking the sausages. (I’d like to apologize for the limited number of photos – I didn’t think about writing this up until I was mostly finished. I’ll keep trying to be as descriptive as possible. This photo IS NOT a picture of my smoker. I just wanted to set the mood.)
DISCLAIMER: The process I’m describing is for informational purposes only. Improperly smoked/cured sausages can harbor bacteria and lead to food poisoning. I don’t want anyone to try what worked for me, get sick and sue kosherblog or myself. This was my first time smoking sausage, and if I didn’t get food poisoning this time, it might have just been dumb luck. Please follow proper food safety rules in your kitchen.
Still with me? Great. Let’s move on.
I’m an avid outdoor cook – As often as possible I’m BBQing, grilling, smoking and turkey frying. Our garage isn’t used for a car – it’s full of cooking equipment. (OK, not only cooking equipment, but lots of it.) I own 2 charcoal grills, a water smoker, a charcoal smoker and a gas grill. For this project I’m going to be using my Smokintex PRO Series Model #1300 electric smoker. It has a thermostat to control the smoking temperature for consistent results – it makes the smoking experience as hassle-free as possible. It may not be as authentic as using my charcoal smoker, but I’m sticking with it on this occasion. It was a Father’s Day present from a very kind and very patient wife.
After the sausages have been drying in the refrigerator overnight, they have shriveled up slightly, and the casings have gotten firmer. That’s important because I need to cut them apart. After the drying, I can snip the sausages apart, and the meat won’t run out of the casings. That leaves me with about 30, 5″ long sausages. I spread them out on the racks of the smoker, closed the door and set the thermostat. I put 2 or 3 chunks of hickory wood in the smoke generator – I think pecan wood is more traditional for Cajun cooking, but I only had hickory.
I need to revisit a point I made in the last article. After some research, I have determined that Morton’s Tender Quick® didn’t have as much curing-salt as was recommended in the instructions I was following, so I didn’t have enough of it in my mix. What led me to this conclusion? The recipes on Morton’s website. In all of their sausage recipes, they were using 1 ½ teaspoons of Tender Quick® for each pound of meat. My recipe had 5-pounds of meat mixture, so I needed at least 7 ½ teaspoons – that’s 2 ½ tablespoons. I had used only one teaspoon of it. Looking back on the recipe, I think that if I make this recipe again, I should probably replace some of the salt and sugar (2 Tablespoons each) with Tender Quick®. What was the difference this time? I guess that I wasn’t as protected as I could be from bacterial growth. Everything turned out fine this time, but it’s food for thought. Re-read that disclaimer, if necessary.
What temperature did I set the smoker to? The book says that sausage should be cold-smoked between 90 and 130° Fahrenheit or hot smoked between 170° and 250° Fahrenheit. I didn’t have the cold smoking kit for my smoker, so I compromised and set the thermostat at about 135°. That’s about the lowest temperature that I’ve been able to generate smoke at.
Time for a little digression. Besides for being a foodie, I’m also a huge computer/hardware geek. I mention this because this smoking session led me to come up with a great invention. I think it would be a marketable product – if there are enough cooking/computer/hardware geeks out there.
First, I need to give you some background information.
1) On the morning I was smoking my sausages, I was invited to a school assembly that my 1st grader was performing in. So I had to figure out a way to get the smoking done and attend the assembly. His school is 20 minutes away from home, so it was very doable.
2) I never smoke anything without my RemoteCheck double probe wireless thermometer. I use the first probe to measure food-doneness and the second probe to monitor chamber-temperature in the smoker. Sometimes both probes will go in the food, as in the case of a thermostat-controlled smoker. I need to know exactly what is going on during the cooking process.
3) One of my proudest geek achievements is wiring my home with X10 so I can control many of the lights and appliances in my home from my computer. My most common use of this system is to eliminate the need for lamp-timers on Shabbos – everything turns off and on when it is supposed to, controlled by a Linux server in the basement. The server knows what time Shabbos starts and varies the schedule accordingly. I also have a private website that I can use to control the lights remotely, using a web-browser.
4) The PalmOne Treo 600 is a multi-function, cell-phone and PDA with internet access. It’s the most used device I have – after my Tivo. Totally indispensable. On occasion I have used my Treo to turn off lights and appliances that were accidentally left on, using that private website I mentioned.
And now, for my product pitch to wrap all these interests into one idea: an Internet-enabled thermometer with temperature logging! What do you think? BBQing a 15-pound brisket? That easily takes more than 18 hours. Set it up before you leave for work. Go to your personal website and check the progress throughout the day! If you have to leave something cooking, use a PDA or mobile PC to see if it’s done, and plan how much time before you need to get home! Check the temperature history of your smoker and learn to control the heat better! On the day in question, I could have kept tabs on my sausages while listening to my son’s presentation. That’s a great idea, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Why are you looking at me that way? You don’t like it? What do you mean that it’s a ‘niche-market’? OK, let’s back away from my insane techno-lust, and get back to the sausages. Sorry for that outburst.
The sausages were left to do their thing for about 3 hours. I did leave to go to the assembly and by the time I had gotten back they had reached about 135°. I considered that done enough, since cold smoked sausages shouldn’t exceed 130° and I DID have curing-salts in the mixture protecting me. Re-read that disclaimer one more time.
The scent of the sausages was sublime. (I should have mentioned before now – I did get to actually taste the sausage mixture before this point. There’s usually a small amount of sausage mix that doesn’t get all the way through the stuffer – when I was finished stuffing, I collected it, made a small patty and fried it up. It was extremely good and I had no doubt that the smoking had improved on it. Useful tip: Smoking seems to cancel out salt somewhat, so the fried patty was saltier than the finished sausage.) I put them in a tray, covered them tightly, and put them in the refrigerator to cool. Having only reached 135°, these sausages were not fully cooked and couldn’t be eaten as is. They were par-cooked, and were going to be crumbled and sautéed for my purposes. Since Thanksgiving, I have taken some of these sausages from the freezer and broiled them for dinner – they are so good. This is a photo of those broiled sausages – Aren’t they pretty things? If you can’t handle a little fat in your diet, then you had best look away now.
After finishing the sausages, there was only one ingredient that still need to be cooked before I could start on the actual turducken – the cornbread for the cornbread stuffing. With apologies to jabbett, who has been searching for the perfect pareve cornbread – I just went with the recipe on the back of the package (I replaced the milk with soy-milk). I figured that since I was using the cornbread in another recipe, I could make up for average cornbread with the ingredients I used later. I made a double recipe, and when it was finished I cut ¾ of it into 1″ cubes and set them out to get stale. My wife wanted the rest of the cornbread for breakfasts.
In the next post, I’ll remind us all why being friends with your butcher is so important. See you then.
If you noticed that site outage today, I do apologize for the inconvenience. The good folks at TextDrive got us back up and running.
At the Super Stop & Shop #89 in Allston, I noticed Empire boneless chicken breasts on sale for $4.99/lb. I imagine all Stop & Shops have that price, so stock up while you can.
All the commonly available kosher fresh mozzarella products I’ve seen bear hekshers our family does not accept, so it was exciting to find a new choice from Gad Dairies of Israel. Their Baby Mozzarella is available at the Butcherie in a smallish reclosable plastic container, holding several miniature balls of fresh mozzarella in liquid. These bocconcini had a soft, slightly chewy texture, as was expected, but its very mild flavor was skewed by a hint of spice (something like cinnamon, oddly) which I could have done without.
This mozzarella is good for tossing in a hot bowl of pasta, stuffing into a calzone, cutting in half and placing on a pizza, or broiled on bruschetta. Or just make a snack out if it: mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil, and some fresh, chopped herbs.
Another nice thing about this product is its clearly written expiration date. The label spelled out fully the month of expiration, which is very important when dealing with non-American cheeses (i.e. does 4/9/04 mean April 9 or September 4). Such confusion has led to some unfortunate experiences with Danish blue cheese in my kitchen.
Thanks to supermarket innovations like pre-chopped onions (Star-K), pre-diced potatoes (OU), and pre-made soup (Kof-K), delicious corn chowder is now easier than ever. It’s perfect for a snowy winter afternoon or even Shabbos dinner, and your guests will have no idea that you barely lifted a finger.
Feel free to add diced, cooked chicken breast for a heartier chowder, or to add some cream for extra, milchig richness.
EASY PAREVE CORN CHOWDER
2 quarts Creamy Sweet Corn Soup
1 box frozen sweet corn kernels (approx. 10 oz.)
1 cup chopped onion
1 bag pre-diced potatoes (24 oz.)
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
salt
pepper
1. In a soup pot, saute chopped onion in oil until translucent.
2. Add potatoes and saute briefly.
3. Add corn kernels and pour in both boxes of corn soup.
4. Simmer gently for 30 minutes to an hour, to cook the potatoes a bit. Season with salt and pepper.
Chef Giada De Laurentiis offered up a neat little recipe on a risotto-focused episode of her Food Network program, “Everyday Italian“: Arancini di Riso, fried balls of leftover risotto stuffed with chunks of mozzarella. Stuck with a dish of leftover risotto and Chanukah’s call for deep-fat frying, I found the recipe and simplified it for fleishig use, as my particular risotto was infused with beef broth. I nixed the mozzarella and parmesan, but if you’re in a milchig mood, add a handful of freshly grated parmesan to both the rice and the breadcrumb coating and stuff a sliver of mozzarella into each patty.
To make these lovely fleishig “rice latkes,” you’ll need:
** 2 cups leftover risotto (mine was a wild mushroom and rosemary varient)
** 1 1/2 cups breadcrumbs (throw your leftover challah in the food processor)
** 2 eggs, beaten
** oil for frying (try using olive oil, or a mixture of canola and olive)
Mix risotto, 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs, and eggs together. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Form 2-tablespoon balls of risotto batter in your hands, roll in the remaining breadcrumbs, press slightly to form patties, and set aside.
Heat about 1/4″ of oil in a large frying pan to about 350 degrees. If you don’t have a thermometer handy, carefully drop in a very small amount of batter; if it bubbles instantly, you’re probably at a good temperature.
Without overcrowding your pan, fry patties until nicely browned, turning once, in batches if necessary. Place browned patties on paper towels to draw away any extraneous cooking oil.
Serve immediately, while hot. Garnish with herbs and serve with a sauce that complements the flavors of your risotto. We used chopped parsley and a light tomato sauce.
In honor of the wild accusations going around about kosher shechita these days, I hereby introduce what I hope to be a regular column on the blog: Adventures in Beef.
Tonight’s installment: TAIL OF PRIME RIB
Thursday night meant Shabbat shopping, so I picked up my chickens and some beef broth at Gordon & Alperin, my meat purveyor of choice. I also needed dinner for Sarah and me that night, so I put the problem to Ricardo, master butcher. He thought for a moment and then knew exactly what we should try, what he called a “tail of prime rib,” a cut of beef that is left behind when he carves out a prime rib. As you can see from the photo, it looks almost like a small brisket. The 1.5 lb. steak was about $17, but I looked at it as a little present in honor of my new job.
From what I’ve read, I suspect this “tail of prime rib” is a similar cut to a “hanger steak,” which is also known as “butcher’s steak” because it’s the cut the butcher takes home. And now I know why he does.
I brought mine home, seasoned it only with a bit of freshly cracked black pepper, and broiled it for 5 minutes on each side. The thicker end was perfectly rare and the thinner end was more to my wife’s liking. The exterior developed a bit of that great natural caramelization, a slight crust that contrasted beautifully with the extremely tender meat. Plus, it was marbled with just enough fat to give an excellent beefy flavor. I sliced it against the grain and served it with a simple accompaniment of Near East rice and lentils. The beef stole the show; we were both in awe of this perfect cut. Give it a try, and tell him I sent you.
In Part 1 I had chosen the recipes that I was going to use to make my Turducken. Now I’ll start on the prep work. Andouille Dressing (or Stuffing) requires Andouille sausage, and wouldn’t you know it – I was all out. OK, I didn’t actually have any to start with, but I had dabbled in sausage making before, so I just needed to make my own. What is Andouille sausage? Well, I’d never had any, but it is a Cajun sausage – and my experiences with Cajun food have been very delicious. It’s described as a spicy, smoked sausage – what more do you need to know? Let’s start with the recipe. I took this recipe from ‘Bruce Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book‘, p. 44 – Cajun Style Andouille.
3 T sweet paprika
2 T minced garlic
2 T kosher salt
2 T sugar
1 T freshly ground black pepper
1 t crushed dried hot red pepper
½ t dried thyme
¼ t ground mace
1 t curing salts (optional)
5 pounds pork butt, fat and lean separated, cut into 2″ chunks
½ C water
Sausage casings
Until the curing salts, it’s all commonly available stuff. Let’s talk about the three less-common ingredients. “Curing salts” is a generic term for a mixture containing sodium-nitrate and/or -nitrite, and some other ingredients to simplify its usage. Morton’s Salt makes a product called “Tender Quick” – it’s .5% -nitrite and .5% -nitrate in a mixture of sugar and salt designed to be neutral in flavor. It’s also O-U certified. What do we need curing salt for? It’s used to make the mixture inhospitable to food-borne bacteria, so later the sausage can be smoked for long periods of time at temperatures that bacteria would normally thrive in. As an added benefit, meat that it treated with curing salts stays pink, even when cooked. It’s how we (or at least I) expect sausages to look.
Now let’s talk about pork butt. If you’re not aware, the ‘butt’ does not come from the rear-end of a pig – it’s actually a shoulder roast. Why is it called a butt? I don’t know – it’s not something we regularly discuss at the Shabbos table. What we need to determine is what can we replace it with to make this recipe kosher. Fortunately, I watch a lot of cooking shows – the one that comes to the rescue here is Good Eats with Alton Brown. In his episode on making sausage, he states that an average pork butt is 20% fat. Fine. For 5 pounds of pork butt, I’ll need 4 pounds of some kosher meat and 1 pound of fat. I choose to use veal stew meat. Makes sense to me, since both veal and pork are ‘white’ meats. To match my fat quota, I ask the butcher for a pound of hard beef-fat. He was more than happy to oblige and it didn’t cost a thing. Specifying ‘hard fat’ is important because having solid pieces of fat in your sausage is important to the finished product. If the fat is the softer kind it will melt before your sausages are finished and your product will end up dry.
The final ingredient that you probably don’t have in your pantry is kosher sausage casings. The optimal casing for sausages is pork or beef intestines. I’m told that it’s illegal to sell intestines to the general public – at least in New York. And besides, who wants to eat intestines? I’ll leave that kind of things for the people who eat Haggis. If you google for “kosher sausage casings“, you will find kosher collagen casings from Devro. These casings are very manageable and shelf stable. They last for years in a cool dry place. Stuffing them is quite easy – they come ‘shirred’, which means scrunched up like an accordion. Slip a length of it over your sausage-stuffer and it will expand as you fill it. In case you’re wondering, collagen is a protein that is extracted from cowhides. (The Devro website makes it sound like the cows are Orthodox, too. Just kidding.) The Hechser is available, here. The U.S. distributor was kind enough to send me a sample case. I have enough for the next ten years.
The procedure is fairly simple: Mix the spices together and toss most of it with the meat and some of it with the fat. Get it all good and covered. Refrigerate separately overnight.
The next day, it’s time to pull out the meat grinder. I use the meat grinder attachment on my Kitchenaid mixer. The meat gets ground with the small-hole disc, and the fat gets ground with the large-hole disc. Everything needs to be really cold when you grind, because any heat will start melting the fat – and like I said before, you need as much of the fat as you can get, to insure a juicy product. Did I mention that I’m currently on the Atkins diet, and that I can eat greasy meat products all day long? When the meat & fat are ground, add the water and knead the mixture well to evenly distribute everything. This mix goes back in the fridge while I ready my sausage stuffer.
Now, Kitchenaid makes a sausage stuffer attachment to use with the meat grinder attachment, but I don’t like it. Why? For two reasons. The attachment uses the same screw-mechanism to push the meat as was used to grind the meat. When putting already ground meat through it, I find that it makes a paste of everything – too much friction. More importantly, it’s not powerful enough for me. Do you remember the show Home Improvement, with Tim Allen? Remember the trademark “More Power!” and the Neanderthal grunts that accompanied it? That’s me in the kitchen – I like to do things in a big way. That’s why I own a Dakotah Water-Powered Sausage Stuffer. It’s about 2-feet long, has a 10-pound capacity and it’s powered by water pressure from a garden hose. This is a sausage-making monster. The whole batch of sausage fits into the chamber in one shot. I slip a length of sausage casing over the output nozzle and tie the end. When the inlet-valve on the stuffer is opened, water starts filling the space behind the plunger. When the pressure gets strong enough the plunger and the meat will start moving towards the stuffer nozzle, and into the sausage casing that I’m holding on the end. It takes a little practice to get it just right – you need to hold the casing so that it moves at the right speed. Too fast, and the casing won’t be filled enough. Too slow, and you could pop the casing. It took me about 5 minutes to stuff the whole batch. It took another 7 minutes to twist the sausages into 4-5″ lengths. Aidell’s book details the whole process. I tied a knot in the last one, and we’re back to the refrigerator for overnight curing. Don’t cover the sausages – they’re supposed to be evaporating. Makes a better surface for the smoking step and the meat will hold together better. Your refrigerator will start to smell from garlic & spices. My wife (who was a little repulsed by the strong smell) was forgiving and I made sure to put a few boxes of baking soda in the fridge when I was done.
After another overnight rest in the refrigerator, the sausages were be ready to be smoked. To be continued…
NEW YORK, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire/ — A broad coalition of rabbis and certifying agencies involved in the supervision of kosher meat slaughter in the United States has reaffirmed the humaneness of kosher slaughter (schechita) in the wake of charges by a radical animal rights group. In an unprecedented statement, uniting diverse segments of the kosher community, the 12 signatories expressed concern that the recent publicity “may lead to misconceptions about the practices depicted on the videotape [released by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] and, more generally, about the shechita process itself.”
I can’t say it was Todd English’s original concept, but I do recall seeing a dessert called Falling Chocolate Cake on his PBS cooking show several years ago. It was a dark, decadent souffle, baked in individual ramekins, served warm and still gooey inside — a consistent favorite at his Olives restaurant. Nowadays, the chocolate-cake-with-liquid-center phenomenon has achieved cliche proportions, being featured in countless restaurants and countless cookbooks, though usually as individual cakes and not English’s souffles. That’s not to say stardom has necessarily lessened the “molten chocolate cake” concept. I recently enjoyed such a dessert at New York’s Le Marais restaurant — a perfect conclusion to a delicious dinner.
Thanks to modern industrial wizardry, you too can enjoy this dessert — from the comfort of your own home! Graciela Chocolate Souffles ($9.99 for six at the Butcherie) are ready-made in your (kosher) grocer’s freezer; a short visit to the oven produces a tasty treat oozing with liquid chocolate. They’re pareve and certified by OU and KAJ. A few caveats: I wouldn’t consider them souffles… it’s really a dense cake. The requirements of mass-production seem to dictate that each cake should have a hole on top, so it’s not exactly like what you’ve seen in restaurants. Overall, worth a try.
If you have copious amounts of free time, consider making them from scratch. Local author Lora Brody offers several stellar recipes in her recent book Chocolate American Style, including both a chocolate souffle and a molten chocolate cake.