Homemade Beef Jerky

It was so easy, once I convinced Erica to let me leave our electric stove on overnight.  Yes, that's right, carnivore's rejoice I have proven you can make your own delicious beef jerky in a 550sqft apartment.  Behold!

So dry, so meaty

I followed the recipe in Ruhlman & Polycn's Charcuterie basically to the letter, except I didn't add the chiles and my oven only went down to 170 degrees so I had to leave the door open.  The results were solid with a couple important notes.  First, i didn't get the salt evenly distributed and so some pieces ended up quite salty, while others didn't.  Second, my butchering skills need some work so the cuts were all over the place.  Here are a couple more glamour shots of beef:

This was the test run for a Super Bowl appetizer and it encouraged me enough to try it again.  Going to go with a cheaper cut of meet, London Broil, and see how it turns out.  Really working to get the cost down to where this is more cost effective then anything Oberto has to offer.

FYI - I've been really digging the recipes in Charcuterie recently.  I've already executed a salmon and shrimp mousseline and will be attempting a pork terrine with pork tenderloin inlay this weekend.  Your standard Super Bowl snacks, they are not.

Keep cooking.

Beef Jerky Time

It's been quiet over here at Drinking, Cooking, Eating despite the fact I've been doing plenty of all.  Hopefully I get some posts up soon, but I had to share what's on the agenda for this weekend.  Press play:


Oh yes, it's beef jerky time.  I've got over 2.5 pounds of eye of the round roast sliced and hanging out in delicious spices.  Tonight I'll begin the 16 to 20 hours process of drying it out.  Deliciousness or death will follow.  Stay tuned.

Duck Prosciutto Pizza

As I mentioned yesterday, with all this duck prosciutto what's an amateur chef to do?  Given it was a week night and when I bought ingredients I didn't know if the prosciutto would be good or not I decided pizza would be a good idea.  If the duck prosciutto had been awful, I could pivot to something else edible fast.  Thankfully it did turn out so I went with my original idea of duck prosciutto pizza with mozzarella, arugula, red onions, and balsamic reduction.

First I made the balsamic reduction which simply requires taking some balsamic vinegar, bringing it to moderate heat so it does reduce and then stirring in some sugar.  It take a bit of time, and I guess on proportions until I think it tastes right.  One word of warning, making balsamic reduction makes your house smell like balsamic vinegar, but it's worth it later on.  Once it had lost about 1/3 to 1/2 it's liquid and I'd added about 4 to 6 teaspoons of sugar I pulled it off the heat.  While I was letting that reduce, I sliced 1/4 of a red onion into thin strips.  Next, I preheated the oven to 425 degrees.  Why 425?  Because that's what the Pilsbury pizza crust told me to do.  Yeah, I took a big shortcut here, but again, it was a Monday night after work.  Besides the Pilsbury classic pizza crust is a great blank canvas to work on and far better then the pre-baked discs you'll find.

I laid out the pizza crust and once the oven was preheated I put a little olive oil on the crust and stuck it in the oven for five minutes.  After five minutes I added the onions, the mozzarella, and the duck then back in the oven for five minutes.  Finally, I pulled it back out and put the arugula on it an drizzles some of the reduction over it then it was back in the oven for a final five minutes.  This staged process was meant to do two things.  First, I was concerned the rich fat of the duck with render in the oven if left in for 15 minutes.  Second, I was concerned the arugula would wilt too much.  When it was all said and done, the first concern was handled, but the arugula was a bit too wilted.  Here's the finished product after I drizzled a bit more reduction over it.

As you can see, the arugula is quite wilted, but otherwise the taste was solid.  Erica made a salad with mixed greens, arugula, walnuts, blue cheese, apples, and cranberries to go with it.  We used the reduction as a dressing for the salad as well.  All and all a great meal.  The pizza took about 40 minutes to make and 25 minutes of that was reducing the balsamic.

Duck Charcuterie At Home or Trying to Not Kill Myself or My Friends

I have to admit something.  I'm a whore for good charcuterie.  That's probably already been established by my glamour shot of a meat and cheese tray and further confirmed by Erica and some friends who saw me moan my way through the charcurterie board at Brassiere Beck.  You can see the fetching little devil hiding so coyly, dare I say coquettish, behind some delicious oysters in this photo.  I disturbed the table next to me with my intonations of delight and I am not ashamed.  It was that good.

Look who's hiding back there

And then was this bad boy I had over the weekend in Minneapolis.  This is like the charcuterie horn of of plenty right here, complete with copa, prosciutto, salami, rillete, terrine, and head cheese.  How much of a whore am I for charcuterie?  I had to negotiate with the restaurant to serve it a few hours before the menu it's one took effect.  Behold!

Tasted every bit as good as it looked.

Yet as much as I love to eat charcuterie, I have dreamed of making it too.  I've bought what many people say is the definitive book on the subject called Charcuterie as well as "borrowed" my dad's copy of Rytek Kutas's Great Sausage Recipes & Meat Curing.  By now, most of my friends know of my dream of a charcuterie chamber and roommates, and even Erica, have been concerned it might someday become a reality.  Alas, as that dream remains unrealized, I knew I needed an outlet and so I took to the internet, googling for in-home recipes for charcuterie and I found several center around duck prosciutto.

I could do this, I thought.  I mean is it slightly dangerous to plan to let raw meat that's been smothered in salt for 24 hours just hanging up in your apartment for a week or more without fully regulating temperature and humidity?  Probably, but life and cooking is adventure.  This idea of duck prosciutto hung out in my mind for a long time, but I never could find duck.  The Whole Foods on P Street let me down so many times and it wasn't until they opened a new location in Foggy Bottom could I find duck breast.  I bought it instantly.  From there is was just a matter of buying some (a lot) of kosher salt, cheesecloth, and meat string.

So I opened up the packaged duck breast and to my surprise I found two complete duck breast, or rather four individual breasts.  I set aside a pair for latter and then laid out one whole duck breast on the cutting board like so:

The bits you see just a little above are parts of the tenderloin.  From here I split the breast with my pairing knife so I had two pieces.  From there I took a 9x9 glass Pyrex baking dish and covered the bottom with a solid foundation of salt resulting in a 1/4" to 1/2" layer of salt in the dish.  I laid the breast, skin side up, into the dish and then just poured salt over the duck breast.  In the end I used at least 2lbs of a 3lb kosher salt box.  When pouring the salt in I made sure that I was getting around the edges of the duck, even taking a moment to make sure it was nestled into the salt.  Once completely covered I wrapped the top of the baking dish with cling wrap.  Here's how they looked, covered in salt and wrapped up:

I made sure, once it was wrapped, that you couldn't see the duck anywhere.  I even lifted up the dish to make sure no duck showed through the bottom.  Satisfied the duck was sufficiently covered in salt I threw the dish in the refrigerator for just over 24 hours.  Even in that short time period you realize how much moisture the salt pulls out of the duck.  I took the duck out of the salt, rinsed it off, and dried it thoroughly.  Here's what they looked like after 24 hours in the fridge, one skin side up, one skin side down.

You can notice even just between the picutre above and the picture below how the salt has had an effect.  From here I wrapped each breast in about two full covers of cheesecloth and then tied them up with some butcher's string.  You'll notice in a lot of recipes this is where you can add different seasonings to change the flavor.  This being a first attempt, I decided to keep it simple.  Here's a single breast wrapped and trussed:

Now to perhaps the most important part.  All the recipes I read said the duck should lose about 30% of it's weight through lost moisture during the curing process.  But how do you know what 30% is unless you weigh it ahead of time.  So I weighed them both, noting ounces and grams.  I think took two dry cleaning hangers, cut part off and formed some make shift meat hangers then leveraged the hangers between the recipe books on my fridge.  I hung them up along with a piece of paper with their initial weights on them.  Of note, the breasts don't touch anything while there hanging.  Here's what Erica came home to after her internship one Sunday afternoon:

Welcome Home Erica!

And so I waited for over a week, weighing them periodically.  In fact, I ended up being out of town when they were finally ready so Erica took them down, unwrapped them from the cheesecloth, and then wrapped them up in plastic wrap.  Of note, they were much smaller then when I wrapped them.  That sounds pretty obvious when it's supposed to lose 30% of it's weight, but striking to see in reality.  Last night was the big tasting, so I busted out my mandolin, set it to 1/16" thickness and trimmed one of the duck breasts into little pieces.  Here's what it looked like after slicing.

Sliced Duck Prosciutto

Erica, my buddy Ben, and I all tasted it just like this and it was really good.  Ducky, not too salty, great fat content.  Just good prosciutto.  I'm marking this a success for a few reasons.  First, it happened just like the book said it would.  Second, it's been over 12 hours and to my knowledge no one who consumed the duck as gone to the hospital.  Third, it was really freaking good.  Tomorrow I'll put up the recipe for what I did with all this beautiful sliced duck prosciutto for dinner last night.  Hint: Duck Pizza.  Oh, and in case you were curious, yes I did order two duck breasts online last night (because Whole Foods in Foggy Bottom failed).  They should arrive on Thursday and be curing by Sunday.  I am still negotiating for the charcuterie chamber.

Pork chops w/ Apples, Wilted Garlic Kale, and Wild Rice

On Tuesday I was considering what to cook for dinner and knew I didn't have a protein thawed out, so I headed to Harris Teeter to pick up a meat and instead decided to design a full menu.  It's been awhile since Erica and I had had pork, I knew apples go well with porkchops (and are kind of seasonal, right?), but that I also wanted a vegetable that would counter the sweet taste of the apple.  I also knew I had wild rice at home.

In putting together any meal the sequence of steps in the cooking is very important if you want everything to be done at the same time, so I started with the rice following the porportions on the package, but I also added two chicken bouillon cubes and a tablespoon of butter.  It took about 45 minutes, but came out with a good flavor from the bouillon.

Next I decided to work with the kale.  I took about a third of a pound of kale, threw it in an ovensafe skillet, and seasoned well with salt and pepper.  I sliced up 4 cloves of garlic and threw that in the skillet as well, then poured about 2 tablespoons of olive oil over all of that.  While prepping that I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and once preheated I threw the skillet into the oven for about 20 minutes.  Pulled out the skillet and then using tongs I took the kale from the skillet onto a cutting board.  I did a rough chop to make the kale more manageable and threw it back into the skillet on the range and took the heat to medium-high.

Wilted Kale & Garlic

I used that heat to take out some of the water that the kale sweated off in the oven, and once satisfied that the water was mostly gone I pulled it from the heat and set it aside.

While the kale was in the oven I brought a different skillet to medium-high heat and cooked up the pork chops in the skillet.  They took about 3 to 4 minutes per side, I took them off the skillet and put them on an ovensafe plate.  After the kale was out of the oven, I took the heat down to 190 on the oven and put the cooked pork chops in the oven to keep them warm.  This has been a favorite trick of mine to cook the meat and keep it ready to go while working on a sauce.  In this case, I deglazed the pork chop skillet with a rose wine and then tossed in thinly sliced pieces of a jazz apple.  I threw in a heaping tablespoon of sugar and some cinnamon and stirred it around, then let it reduce.  After about 5 minutes I tasted it and it wasn't as sweet as I wanted it so I threw in two more tablespoons of sugar and some more cinnamon and let it reduce down till almost all the liquid was gone, then I pulled it off the heat.  This is what the sauce looked like in the skillet once I pulled it from the heat.

Cooked Apples reduced in wine

Amazingly all these components came together at the same so I plated up everything.  Here is the fully assembled plate.

Pork chops w/ Apples, Wilted Kale, and Wild Rice

In the end it was a great success.  The apples were sweet and went really well with the pork chops.  The kale was a great contrast to the apples with a strong garlic taste.  The wild rice was good and served the purpose of having a starch on the plate.  It was a fun dish to make and great to try out something without a menu and with ingredients I'd picked up just an hour before.

Sometimes You Fail - Last Night's Dinner

Last night I made dinner.  Chicken breast with penne pasta in a white wine, cherry tomato, and asparagus sauce.  It was awful.  Like damn near inedible awful.  I could see Gordon Ramsey yelling at me, asking if I respected myself and my girlfriend for feeding us something so bad.  Yet this is part of cooking, particularly if you are an amateur like myself.  Sometimes things go awry, but I want to go back to the scene of crime and figure out what happened in the hopes it wouldn't happen again.

I've made a number of white wine cream sauces recently and they've been turning out really nicely.  I'm getting the hang of it, but they are always pretty thin and I've been racking my brain to try and thicken in up.  Inspired by some recent reading about the master french sauces I decided I would make a roux to add to the sauce in the hopes of thickening it up a little.  So I prepped my roux (2 tablespoons butter & 1/8 cup flour) and left it over low heat.

The chicken I was using was the Perdue Italian seasoned chicken breast.  It was an oversight on purchase, but still needed used so I dropped the chicken in a hot frying pan and cooked it up.  As the chicken cook, the Italian dressing that has been marinating the chicken starting to cook away until it was burning to the bottom of the pan. Once the chicken was one I threw in some sauvignon blanc (Barefoot) to deglaze the pan, but all the burnt Italian dressing came up as well turning the white wine from orange to brown.  I dumped the pan, trying to get most of the brunt bits out, then attempted to deglaze again with more wine.  I threw in some garlic and let the wine reduce, then I tossed the wine into my roux.  It all seized up and became a paste.  Like any reasonable chef I decided to throw in another 2 tablespoons of butter to try and thin it a little.

Turning back to the frying pan I threw in chopped asparagus and let that go for a few before tossing in the cherry tomatoes.  Little salt, little pepper and they were sauteing nicely.  Pasta was cooked.  Chicken was keeping warm in the oven.  I dropped my veggies into the still too thick sauce and then tossed in the pasta.  Globules of sauce were catching on the noodles.  Panic set it.  I grabbed what was left of some chicken broth and dumped it into the sauce pan, stirred a few times, plated, and served.  And then that first taste, that horrible, regretful first taste.  The wine and cheery tomatoes gave everything a sour taste.  It permeated everything.  The only bright spot was the chicken which was in good shape and pretty tasty, but it was a fail over all.  But with a failure should come lessons learned.

First, I need to add maybe a slight dollop of roux to my sauce not add my sauce to a 1/4 cup of roux.  Second, I shouldn't have tried to deglaze a pan with burnt Italian dressing on it.  That's the decision that set the whole meal toward disaster.  Third, cherry tomatoes were a poor choice.  They are just too sour.  If I had been committed to using them then I would have needed some heavy cream and probably even some sugar to cut through that initial sour taste.

I share this failure with you all because you can't be afraid to fail.  It sucks.  It's crushing to work on a meal only for it to be awful.  And even if my girlfriend told me it "wasn't that bad," I know the truth.  You just learn from the mistakes, remember were things went wrong, and try to never do it again.

Quick and Easy Fish Tacos

My girlfriend was visiting her family over the weekend and they sent her back with a bag of some great looking jalapenos so we were talking about what to cook for dinner last night and settled on fish tacos.  This is something I've done a few times before, but I think I got it right last night.  So here's my recipe for fish tacos:

Fish Tacos & Lime-Cilantro Rice

Ingredients

Fish Tacos

.75lbs - fresh tilapia

2 - vine ripened tomatoes

1/2 - white onion

1/4 head - red cabbage

2 - small jalapenos

1 - avocado

1/2 - lime

1 cup - cornmeal

1/8 to 1/4 cup - cilantro

Olive oil

Salt

Pepper

Lime-Cilantro Rice

1/2 cup rice

1/2 lime

1/8 cup cilantro

I made the rice first because I knew it could sit.  Make the rice to the instructions on the package, and then just as I took it off the heat I added the juice of the half lime and threw in the 1/8-ish cup of cilantro, stirred, and then set aside.

The next step, and to be sure the most time intensive, was dicing up all the vegetables.  I did a small dice on the tomatoes, onion, and jalapenos.  Next I did a thin chop of the red cabbage and put all the different elements into different little bowls.

All diced and nowhere to go

After all the dicing and chopping I took the tilapia and put a little sea salt and pepper on both sides.  Then I split the tilapia at the middle seam turning three tilapia filets into six strips.  I poured the cup of cornmeal into a reusable Chinese food container and dredged the tilapia in the cornmeal until it had a nice coating but wasn't caked in cornmeal.  I put some olive oil in a frying pan and let it heat to almost smoking and then put three of the six pieces in the pan.  They only took about 2 minutes per side and then I repeated with the remaining fish.

Avocado, tilapia, and rice.

My girlfriend cut up the avocado and we plated up and enjoyed.  The rice turned out okay.  I think I put in too much cilantro (and thus would say 1/8 cup versus a 1/4 cup) or maybe not enough lime.  Obviously the rice is a rip off of Chipotle's rice, but that didn't make it a poor option.  The fish came out exactly the way I wanted in no small part because it was fresh.  Frozen tilapia would have crumbled or I would have been inclined to heat the hell out of it because it was frozen.

I will tell you this secret for great fish tacos.  It's all about dredging, whether it's corn meal or flour, a very light coating to the fish takes care of excess moisture and gives it just a slight crispiness.  Without it, the fish can be mushy.  With a full on breading you lose the fish in breading and oil.  Start to finish, less then 90 minutes and cost around $25 for two people.

I went back for seconds.

Just one more picture for good measure.  I put a little Nali sauce on this one to give it an extra kick.  Happy cooking and remember, anybody can make this.

Just Keep Stirring

Sundays tend to be the best days for me to try something even remotely ambitious in the kitchen.  During the week, the lack of time necessitates a hasty meal, but Sundays are for exploring.  Folks who know me might be surprised to learn I've never made risotto before.  It's not a hard dish, but a time intensive dish that requires near constant attention.  A couple weeks back I bought some Trader Joe's Arborio rice so I could try my hand at this oft admired Italian starch.

Whenever I set to do something like this I look for recipes online, just to get a sense of the steps, and what is supposed to happen.  I'm usually less concerned about measurements in any exact since, because I take more of a "food as jazz" approach.  So I found this recipe for an asparagus risotto, but my girlfriend likes broccolini and Harris Teeter always has it in stock, so I thought I'd mix it up a bit.  I'm also a big fan of mushrooms, so I picked up some cremini mushrooms to go in their as well.

To start, I chopped up the broccolini into 1.5 to 2 inch pieces that I then blanched in boiling water for a few minutes and then put them into an ice bath.  This is basically what the asparagus recipe called for and the green color the broccolini took on once hitting the ice bath was fantastic.  Next, I washed the mushrooms and halved them.  I melted a tablespoon of butter in a frying pan, melted it, and then threw the mushrooms in on med-high heat.  After sauteing the mushrooms for about 10 minutes, giving them some good color, I set them aside.

I took about three and a half cups of chicken stock and got it heating up on the back burner, per the recipe.  I think took three more tablespoons of butter and melted it in a saucepot at med-high heat and then tossed in two diced shallots. I turned the shallots through the butter until about translucent (just a couple minutes), then I tossed in a cup of the Arborio rice and turned it in the butter letting it take in some of that heat for a couple minutes.  Next I added a half-cup of Bare Foot Sauvignon Blanc (I use Bare Foot as my primary cooking wine, it's cheap, but I'd drink it on it's own, which is the test of any cooking wine).  I kept stirring the rice until it soaked up all that wine, which took less than two minutes and from their I added the simmering chicken broth a half to three quarter cup at a time stirring almost constantly.

I say almost constantly because I took the frying pan I sauteed the mushrooms in and brought it back to a medium/med-high heat and dropped in two chicken breasts (I have a mental block about a meal not having a  protein).  So at this point, I've got chicken browning in a fry pan and I'm stirring the risotto with every free moment I have, while also monitoring a loaf of Grapenuts bread I had baking in the oven for breakfast the next day.

The Arborio rice is really quite remarkable.  It sponges up any moisture incredibly fast and you have to keep it moving to avoid scorching it.  And so it continued until I'd put in about 3 cups of the chicken stock in and flipped the chicken breast in.  I tasted some of the rice and it had the texture, I think at least, you're looking for.  It was very soft on the outside with just the slightest resistance in the center.  The chicken breast was done and resting, and I took the risotto off the heat.  At some point doing all that stirring I had managed to grate about a half cup of Parmesan cheese.  I took the bulk of that and sprinkled it over the risotto, stirring it in.  I used a fine shred and the cheese melted away in the the risotto with ease.  After that, I threw the broccolini and the mushrooms back in and stirred a little more.  After plating the risotto and the chicken breast, here's what it looked like.

Broccolini & Mushroom Risotto w/ Chicken

Overall I think it turned out pretty well.  It lacked a little punch, but I couldn't decide if that was just how a risotto should be, if I had under seasoned, or if the vegetables I had couldn't stand up on their own.  The Parmesan flavor definitely came through though, which is one of my favorite flavor.  Now, if you're a Top Chef watcher (or just know risotto really well) you'll notice my risotto has Trae's disease.

Trae, the chef sent home after restaurant wars in Season 3 and sent home after a lackluster risotto during Top Chef All-Stars, was sent home during All-Stars because his risotto wasn't creamy enough.  It stood up on the plate.  Mine did too, and I think I know why.  There are two reasons.  First, the rice could have tolerated a little more chicken stock, probably another half cup or so.  Second, I pulled the rice off the heat at the wrong time.  I pulled it right as it has finished soaking up the last half cup of chicken stock I threw into it, versus right after adding a bit more chicken stock.  This is a minor thing that didn't impact taste, but certainly texture.

Overall, I think it was a successful attempt and I was able to crank it out much faster then I feared (the whole process took about 90 minutes from first cut to eating), but as with any first attempt there are lessons learned.  I've still got plenty of Arborio rice and my girlfriend asked why I didn't just use the asparagus because she likes that more then broccolini, so I'll be making more risotto in the weeks ahead.  I hope you find a random risotto recipe and give it a shot.  It's really not complicated, it just takes the right rice, enough chicken stock, and a lot of stirring.

Welcome to my blog

Hello to you, lonely blog search wanderer, or one of my friends regretting that association now that I have another outlet with which to share my random thoughts.  When I looked around the blogosphere, I noticed something.  There aren't enough blogs about food.  Okay, maybe there are, but I'm not contributing to any of those and thought I'd start one for my self.  So beyond the obvious topics of drinking, cooking, and eating, what am I going to be writing about here is:

Drinking
I've been going to bars since before I was 21 and I've enjoyed many of them.  I'll be talking about different drinks, beers, bars, and my own home brews because life is too short and you can detox when you die.

Cooking
I am an amateurish cook with no formal training and very limited skill.  You will be able to see my creations and here how they came to be triumphs or tragedies.

Eating
You can't cook all the time, and sometimes you don't want to.  So I'll throw in some restaurant reviews, but also just great meals with great friends.  My palate is the refined one of a Midwestern who's mother believed in only Lawry's Seasoning Salt.  Please take that limitation into consideration.

Along the way, I hope you learn a little more about cooking and maybe find a new spot to eat or drink.  Hope you all enjoy.

Thanks,
Jason