Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

Beer me, part 4

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , — Justin Dunham on April 30, 2011

A winning combination of solid beer + solid marketing ("Occam's Razor Ale: If this beer's no good, the simplest explanation is that we're no good")

Action shot!

Note: this is a followup to this post.

Having met with little success in our last homebrewing attempt, my friend David and I tried again, with the goal of having something ready in time for a Wharton homebrewing competition. This time we made several significant changes:

  • Brewing a whole batch instead of a half-batch
  • Buying bottles and bottlecaps well in advance
  • Paying close attention to brew start/end dates

I also noticed a general increase in the level of confidence and understanding of what we were doing – we probably spent only about half the time on this batch. Can any instructions, no matter how good, compensate for developing an intuitive understanding or “feel” for what you are doing?

Though we didn’t win any awards, the beer came out well enough this time that it is actually a pleasure to drink! I also made some snazzy labels to go along with it; we named this batch “Occam’s Razor”, on the basis that if the beer is bad, there are many explanations we could offer but the simplest is that we are incompetent. I made some Guinness-flavored (and also philosophy-themed) marshmallows to go along with the beer, too, which I’ll write an entry about later.

For our next beer, we are considering Nietzsche’s Abyss Stout: “As black as the soul of man.”

What is a pomelo?

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , — Justin Dunham on April 22, 2011

A pomelo.

Trader Joe’s sometimes has interesting things on sale – I remember one of the first times I went to a TJ’s, I bought dried rambutan.

A little while ago, they were selling pomelos, which I don’t think I had ever heard of before. Naturally, I bought one. When I was a kid, the only citrus I knew about were lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit. Later I learned about mandarins, clementines, blood oranges, tangelos, key limes, and more recently yuzu and buddha’s hand. And now these…

On getting the pomelo home, we cut it open. Disappointingly, it had rather a lot of rind and pith; I’ve gotten used to cutting orange sections out, but I’d guess about half the weight of this pomelo was stuff you can’t eat (unless you’re willing to do some work). The juice and sections had a pretty mild, sweet flavor, which was surprising given that other citrus I’ve tried – particularly the grapefruit, to which the pomelo seemed to bear the greatest resemblance – has a sharp taste that in some cases makes the fruit sections inedible (e.g. lemons).

Pomelo’s species name is “Citrus maxima”, i.e. “the biggest citrus”, which is unsurprising and makes me think that at least some plant taxonomists are not very creative. I didn’t know this, but citrus fruits are botanically berries, in particular a specific type called a hesperidium which is not a “true berry” but close.

Interestingly, though many Americans (well, me anyway) think the fruits we grew up with are standard citrus, most of the stuff we know is hybrids. The grapefruit, for example, is actually a hybrid of a pomelo and an orange. The orange? Unclear, but according to Wikipedia, possibly a hybrid of a pomelo and a mandarin (citrus reticulata). The lemon’s a hybrid too, but nobody seems to know of what.

Polymers are magic

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on April 21, 2011

Chemicals.

Example spheres, made with water and blue food coloring.

For this meal, I mentioned that I made some apple cider “caviar” to go in the soup. This is a post about how that happened.

Quite a while ago, I read this article on Instructables about how to spherify liquids. Basically, you take a fixed amount of whatever liquid you want to spherify (e.g. carrot juice), add a tiny amount of sodium alginate, which is a thickener, and then drop the liquid into a bath including calcium chloride. The outside of the liquid drops immediately form into a thin membrane.

We tried quite a few experiments with this, and we only got it to work with apple cider and water. We didn’t get it to work with: olive oil, milk (or cream), or white wine. We suspect that all of these liquids have acidity, or other properties (the fat content of cream is too high and it immediately turns into whipped cream) that interfere with the reaction. It really needs, it appears, fairly neutral liquids with no special properties. Although in researching this article, I have learned that sodium citrate can raise the pH of acidic liquids high enough for the reaction to take place; the pH needs to be above 4.

Why does this happen? Fortunately, this blogger has covered this before, and the entry is a quick read and points to the relevant scientific material:

One part of the glucose has been changed into the sodium salt of an acid. When the sodium alginate is squirted into the calcium chloride, an exchange reaction takes place. The calcium ions replace the sodium ions. Because the calcium ions have a +2 charge, several polymer chains may be cross linked to form a thicker polymer…

Full setup. The sodium alginate solution is on the left (can't remember what we were testing in this picture), the calcium chloride bath is on the right, with a skimmer for easy sphere retrieval.

Cider spheres.

Sodium alginate has a tendency to thicken, which is why it’s used as a gelling and thickening agent. What seems to be happening, then, is that the sodium is replaced with calcium, which has a tendency to thicken even more. The mechanism for this is cross-linking between all the new molecules, and my guess (which is probably wrong) is that the outside of the ball becomes one giant polymer that keeps the liquid inside.

You know where else a reaction like this happens? When you’re seasoning a cast iron pan. The nonstick coating that eventually develops is… one giant polymer of crosslinked fatty acid molecules.

Pâté with balsamic onions, olive oil ice cream and polenta cake, carrot ginger soup with spheres, trout meuniere

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on April 16, 2011

Sauteeing some chicken livers with capers, anchovies and oil

Toast components: pâté, pâté with parsley salad, pâté with salad and balsamic onions. Yum!

Trout meuniere and salad with roasted tomatoes.

Polenta cake, olive oil ice cream, and some pears poached in marsala

Had some friends over for dinner last weekend. This meal was my return to serious cooking (I took a break for most of January and February), so I wanted to make it interesting. Also, my fiancée was back in Philadelphia for the weekend, and she loves pâté, so I thought that would be a nice surprise. Accordingly, I made the following:

This was a fun meal to make. Pâté is surprisingly easy, and this one just consisted of chicken livers, capers, anchovies, white wine, and a couple of other things, pureed. That’s it.

Another advantage (besides impressing your significant other) is that if you were to buy a pound of chicken liver pate at the store, it would cost you, what, $10 or $20? A pound of chicken livers costs about $3, and then you add maybe $1 or $2 in additional ingredients to make it yourself. And you know exactly what’s in it.

One other thing, too. By making pate yourself, you might learn to like it if you didn’t already. My original experience with pate, as it was with mayonnaise, is that I found it rather… unpleasant to contemplate. But when I saw what actually goes into it – basically just a few incredibly strong and delicious flavors – and how it’s made, I lost my dislike of it. Pate will probably never be my favorite food, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for it now. The combination of the pate, parsley salad and onions sauteed in balsamic vinegar was also… pretty awesome.

As for the carrot-ginger soup, I’ve made it before. But this time, I added an experimental ingredient. If you add some sodium alginate to a relatively neutral liquid (such as carrot juice, apple cider, or certain other things), and then put drops of the resulting combination into a bath of water and calcium chloride, the liquid immediately becomes solid spheres that burst in your mouth when you bite them. This is exactly the same experience as eating caviar. I will write a separate entry about this later, but I (actually we – I invited everyone to help) performed this procedure with some apple cider, resulting in little spheres of cider that burst in your mouth when you bite them. We then put these spheres in our soup… and also tried putting them in our water as well, which was actually sort of interesting.

I’ve written about trout meuniere before, so I won’t say too much more about that here. I served it along with a simple salad of arugula and some tomatoes that were roasted for an hour or so in oil, garlic and onions. Delicious.

Finally, there’s the dessert. I’ve been waiting to make polenta cake again for quite a while, but I didn’t know what to serve it with; the grapefruit mousse I made last time was not repeatable and not amazing. Recently, I came upon a recipe for olive oil ice cream, which seemed like the perfect complement

Let me tell you, this stuff is weird. First of all, the recipe uses raw egg yolks – no cooking as with normal ice cream. Secondly, it is made out of freaking olive oil. But man, it is really delicious. The first time you take a bite, it tastes a little unexpected. But then you want another bite… and another. I served this whole thing with some pears poached in marsala, which were a good accompaniment but which I’m not sure I’ll make again.

Eating sprouted potatoes is fine, and eating eggplant is like smoking

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on April 7, 2011

These look fine. From flickr user spike55151 (click picture for photo page)

I recently noticed that a potato in my vegetable bowl was sprouting. Quite a lot, actually.

I’ve been told all my life that once a potato has sprouted, you can’t eat it anymore. But I was ready for dinner, and I don’t like throwing food away. I also found this increasingly suspect, the more I thought about it. So I did some research.

There are a couple of specific toxins that people worry about. The main one is solanine, which is also present in the deadly nightshade plant, to which the potato is related, and from which the potato family, Solanaceae, gets its name (other plants in this family include eggplants, tomatoes, petunias, and tobacco – nicotine is specific to Solanaceae, which means that eggplants contain nicotine as do tomatoes, though in very small amounts). The other toxin that people worry about is chaconine, which I haven’t been able to learn much more about.

It turns out that these toxins are largely concentrated in the sprouts themselves (as well as just beneath the skin), and don’t really diffuse through the potato or anything unsettling like that. So presumably if the sprouts and skin can simply be removed, as one might do anyway, the toxins should be gone as well.

So I tried it, and I am fine! Don’t throw away your sprouted potatoes!

In fact, maybe one day, just let a potato sprout all the way; apparently potato plants have quite beautiful flowers and interesting-looking (though poisonous) fruit.

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