Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

Braised Short Ribs, Beet Chocolate Cake, and Salad with Flowers

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on June 24, 2010

"Preview salad" of pickled carrots, tomatoes, mozzarella and edible flowers

Salad with tomatoes, blackberries, flowers, and feta cheese

Main course: braised short rib, polenta, braised celery and celery leaf garnish

Chocolate beet cake, vanilla ice cream, and raspberry syrup

About three weeks ago (way behind on posts here), I decided to try my hand at braised short ribs again – they are basically foolproof, and I was cooking for my fiancee and a friend of hers so did not want to screw up too badly :)

The last time I made these ribs, I complained that while they were delicious, I thought the lid had come off the dutch oven, since the vast majority of the sauce seemed to have boiled off.

So this time, I was very careful to make sure the lid was on tight, and to check the ribs as they cooked.

A lot of the sauce did appear to have boiled off again – where it could have gone, I do not know – or to have disappeared or thickened so as to be unrecognizable. However, there was enough left to dress the ribs after they came out, which I wasn’t able to do last time. At the picture of the left, you can see the carrot cubes, for example.

I served the ribs over the same polenta I made last time, and alongside some celery braised in beef stock,
since I happened to have some leftover celery, and since I thought that would go well. I garnished the celery stalks with the trimmed celery leaves. I really like using the culinarily-unconsidered parts of vegetables, such as beet greens, celery flowers, chard stems. I often buy carrots with the tops still attached (cheaper that way), and I would love to try cooking carrot greens sometime. These odds and ends often have, or can be endowed with, good flavor, and they are free!

For a starter salad, I served this summery blackberry salad, with some edible flowers on top. These flowers are available at Whole Foods and probably other grocery stores, and they taste like, um, flowers.

But they’re good. And mostly, they’re a useful cheap trick to make a salad look amazingly colorful and appetizing, which is especially nice in summer. Because my fiancee wanted a snack before dinner, I also made a “preview salad” using some of the same ingredients, along with some tomatoes and mozzarella, and carrots I had been “pickling” (in quotes because I would consider what I did more of a long marinade).

For dessert, I served these chocolate beet cupcakes with some store-bought vanilla ice cream (Haagen-Dazs “Five” was on sale), and a quick raspberry syrup. “Five” is interesting – it’s named that way because it only contains five ingredients: cream, sugar, eggs, milk and in this case vanilla. But why is it so expensive? Is it because other ice creams use fillers or something like that, or add ingredients that extend shelf life?

Harlequin Pepper Soup, Fried Tomatillos, Fajitas, Jicama and Ice Cream

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on June 19, 2010

Harlequin pepper soup with fried tomatillos.

The main course.

Tomatillos.

Peppers, ready for simmering. Note that the waxy membrane has been removed.

Grilling peppers and onions.

Deliciously repurposed leftovers.

Recently I cooked probably my most complex meal yet. The first course was a harlequin pepper soup with a slide of fried tomatillos. For the main, I made fajitas together with an orange salsa, and sliced jicama. Finally, for dessert I made ice cream! (Strawberry ice cream, and basil-lime sorbet, which I talk about in detail here). Let’s take each piece by itself:

Soup and tomatillos

One of the very first things I ever seriously cooked was a “harlequin soup”, half tomato and half yellow pepper. What is a harlequin soup? Check out this link for an example. You make 2 separate soups, with similar consistency. If you pour them simultaneously into the opposite ends of a bowl, the soups will not mix, and you get a beautiful color effect. (You could probably do this with more than 2 soups, but they all need to be poured simultaneously).

Normally you do this in order to serve 2 separate soups simultaneously. However, I decided to make 2 soups that tasted exactly the same, using 2 different colors of pepper in this recipe.

Since I essentially had to make this recipe twice, each one with a tiny quantity of peppers and half the normal ingredients, it took forever. But I think sometimes it’s worth it to do something complicated if the result is especially beautiful. (Whether this is one of those times I leave to you to judge).

Together with the soup, I served this fried green tomatillo recipe. I wanted to make normal fried green tomatoes, but couldn’t find them locally. Tomatillos were a great substitute, and they went well with the main course since they were fried in cornmeal.

One note about frying these: you really shouldn’t do it for very long. If they start losing their color, it’s too long. Slight tenderness is desirable; anything more than that quickly become sogginess. Another note: this was the day I finally learned about smoke points.

Fajitas

Fajitas are delicious. They also use a relatively cheap cut of meat, which is great (I talk more about that here). I used Tyler Florence’s “Ultimate” recipe – these are usually pretty reliable. The mojo (marinade) he proposes is also ridiculously delicious, being composed mostly of pureed chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Check out the Wikipedia article for adobo to see what I was dealing with.

Preparing the ingredients for the fajita was interesting. I needed to grill quite a bit of meat, though I do not have an outdoor grill. I used my cast iron pan, and I must say thank our dinner guests for being extremely game; the apartment quickly filled up with thin smoke and we all coughed heavily for about 20 minutes. Still, it was worth it in deliciousness. The peppers and onions took another couple of minutes. Finally, I grilled each tortilla on an electric burner for about thirty seconds.

The sides were fairly simple. I used the clementine salsa from this recipe (substituting oranges), and I also cut up some jicama, which I tossed with cilantro and a couple of other ingredients. Jicama, for any readers who don’t know, is also known as “Mexican potato”, and tastes mostly that way. It is, however, usually eaten raw.

For dessert – ice cream! Again, I’ll refer you to that entry for more. Oh, and the next morning my fiancee cooked up some of the leftover fajita ingredients with sour cream and eggs for breakfast. Most delicious breakfast I’ve had in quite a while.

Smoke Points

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , — Justin Dunham on

A thermometer showing oil temperature of 379°. Note that we are past the smoke point of olive oil (375°), which I normally use, but mercifully short of the smoke point of canola oil (at least 464°), which I was using when this picture was taken.

Up until recently, the same sequence of events would occur every time I fried in my cast iron pan.

  1. I’d get the pan nice and hot.
  2. I’d add some oil.
  3. The oil burned, filling the kitchen with acrid smoke.
  4. I’d throw the oil out, scrub out the pan, wait for it to cool a bit, and try again at Step 1.

But last time I fried, I realized that this was senseless. Every type of oil has a known “smoke point”, though this can vary a little bit, and reusing oil will also decrease its smoke point by ten degrees or so for each reuse.

At the smoke point, several things consistently happen. According to Wikipedia, the oil breaks down into glycerol (also known as glycerine, which shows up all over the place in food) and free fatty acids. The glycerol breaks down into acrolein. Acrolein is responsible for the distinctive smell of burnt oil (and indeed its name is from Latin acer, meaning “sharp” or “acrid”, plus olere, “to smell”, compare English olfactory).

So how could I avoid exceeding the smoke point?

  1. Start using a thermometer, duh.
  2. Use the right oil. Not knowing about the smoke point, I figured I may as well use olive oil as canola oil, which most recipes call for. But not only does olive oil impart a particular taste to the food, which may or may not be desirable, it also has a smoke point that is almost a hundred degrees lower (375° vs 464°).

Once I made these changes, things started to go a lot more smoothly. Ah, measurement. Is there anything you can’t do?

Beer me

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , — Justin Dunham on June 15, 2010

Empty bottles, waiting to be filled.

Bottling setup.

Uncarbonated (yes, uncarbonated - all the bubbles are on the top) beer.

The filled bottles.

About this time last year, I became very interested in brewing my own beer. As far as I can tell, over the past few years home brewing has become increasingly popular (though it is possible it has always been popular, and I just hadn’t heard about it). At the time I was in one of the most important beer cities in America, so I headed to a local craft brewing store to pick up the necessary equipment.

About $200 later, I was on my way to making my first beer, an IPA – I really like their bitterness and hoppiness.

After much frustration, I ended up with about a dozen bottles of OK beer – and a dozen more that for some reason didn’t carbonate at all; I have some ideas as to why that might be.

I often find that the first time I do something it’s extremely difficult,  annoying, and expensive, but once that’s out of the way it’s much easier. And so I was looking forward to brewing a second batch of beer.

So, about two weeks ago, I bought a wheat beer kit from Amazon, took down my brewing equipment, and started a new brewing process. After letting the beer ferment for about a week, it was time to bottle.

You can see my bottling setup in the second picture.

  • The big white bucket is where the fermented beer is. Basically, to make beer, you add water, malted hops, sugar, and yeast to this bucket. The yeast turns the sugar into alcohol, and that all happens within this bucket. I’ll talk in more detail about this process in a future post, but this is a good initial simplification to use in understanding the process.
  • You’ll also notice an airlock, and a bottle of sanitizer that I did a bad job of getting in the picture. Both of these things are important as part of the sanitizing process while the beer is being made. Basically, all equipment is soaked in a solution of water and sanitizer before being brought into the actual beermaking process. This makes it easier for the yeast to grow by eliminating competition from other microorganisms.
  • The airlock on the top of the fermenter allows air to escape during the fermentation process, without letting more (contaminated) air in.
  • What else? You’ll notice I have a bowl of “priming sugar”. This is added to the bottles just before they are sealed. The yeast will convert this priming sugar into carbon dioxide. As I briefly mentioned above, this process didn’t go so well for me last time, which resulted in flat beer.

When the beer has completed its initial fermentation, it’s drawn out of the fermenter, and into the measuring cup where I add the priming sugar. It’s then poured into bottles, and the bottles are capped using a special hand-powered machine that makes a tight seal between the bottlecap and the bottle.

Here’s a great site that summarizes the process and gives much more information as well. I intend to refer to it in the future: http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html.

Beet Cakes

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , — Justin Dunham on June 13, 2010

Batter for the beet spice cakes.

Completed cakes (the one on the right is chocolate, left spice), with some buttercream frosting. Notice that the red color has basically disappeared.

Ever since I heard there was such a thing as beet chocolate cake, I wanted to make it. But while looking around for a beet chocolate cake recipe, I also found this beet spice cake recipe. So I did the smart thing and made them both, in cupcake form naturally.

The chocolate beet cupcakes were good, although they also had a slightly strange earthy tang. I found myself liking the taste, not loving it, but not being able to stop eating them. Nobody could tell what the secret ingredient was.

But the beet spice cakes were the star. These were absolutely delicious. Again, nobody could tell what the secret ingredient was, although someone remarked that they tasted similar to carrot cake.

For a beet lover like myself, these were really fun to make. Even one of the test tasters, a self-professed beet hater, seemed to enjoy these, especially the spice cake. Interestingly, for some reason that probably has to do with the chemical properties of beets, they stayed incredibly moist and delicious for over a week!

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