FYI, some potentially useful information. I assume this works because releasing the carbon dioxide dissolved in the beer (which is already below the freezing point of water) raises the freezing point. On the other hand, perhaps the drop in pressure just reduces the entropy (heat) of the beer on the bottom causing it to crystallize.
Anybody?
Filed under: how to, video | 18 Comments »
It feels like it is taking forever to finish. But our oven project is inching towards completion. I’ve been off the project for over a month to concentrate on building a custom meat butchery. However, Steve Crozier, an ex pat Brit and long time friend of the farm stepped up and took charge of finishing the masonry. Yesterday Steve -who was a bricklayer somewhere back in his long ago- laid the last arch of the oven vault and Trent, lit a fire to see how it drafted.
There is still a lot to do. Rebar has to be bent and laid over the roof of the vault. We have to build a form to hold the concrete that must be poured for the roof. Bricks for the front must be bedded, a chimney erected, the ledge around the perimeter finished and more. But it will get done and I predict that by spring we will be baking bread and roasting meat in this monster.
About the title
I had no idea what to name this post so I just pulled out the first words that came out of memory. “Focus” is Latin for hearth and it is resolving in that it is becoming what it is meant to be.
Whatever. I’m tired.
Filed under: farm stuff | 6 Comments »
It feels like it is taking forever to finish. But our oven project is inching towards completion. I’ve been off the project for over a month to concentrate on building a custom meat butchery. However, Steve Crozier, an ex pat Brit and long time friend of the farm stepped up and took charge of finishing the masonry. Yesterday Steve -who was a bricklayer somewhere back in his long ago- laid the last arch of the oven vault and Trent, lit a fire to see how it drafted.
There is still a lot to do. Rebar has to be bent and laid over the roof of the vault. We have to build a form to hold the concrete that must be poured for the roof. Bricks for the front must be bedded, a chimney erected, the ledge around the perimeter finished and more. But it will get done and I predict that by spring we will be baking bread and roasting meat in this monster.
About the title
I had no idea what to name this post so I just pulled out the first words that came out of memory. “Focus” is Latin for hearth and it is resolving in that it is becoming what it is meant to be.
Whatever. I’m tired.
Filed under: Hendricks Farms | 6 Comments »
If there is anything I hate more than crispy, hard and stinky fried eggs, I’ll be sure to tell you about when I remember what it is. Eggs that are fried too quickly in a pan that is too hot coagulate too fast and dry out. The result is hard whites and yolks and crispy brown or -god forbid- blackened bottoms. Moreover, such eggs end up stinking of hydrogen sulfide because, of course, they got too hot.
I prefer fried eggs that are tender, runny and with little to no browning on any surface. Now while the reason I prefer to cook eggs this way really boils down to a matter of personal preference (i.e., “That’s the way I like them because that’s the way I like them.”), it’s a preference that turns on a philosophical point. I’m of the opinion that if I am lucky enough to have food that is very fresh and of very high quality, the best thing I can do to it is the least I can do to it. My goal is to maintain the character of the raw product as much as possible and not transform it into something that bears scant resemblance to what it was before I cooked it.
Eggs are pretty subtle zygotes: no matter how good they are, their intrinsic flavor and texture is very easy to bury under careless technique. They are arguably best eaten raw, at close to body temperature. So if agree with me, then when you propose to cook an egg you would do well to ask yourself how you can preserve as much of the character of the raw egg as possible yet still regard them as cooked.
Now while the specifics of the answer you get will depend on what process you plan to put the eggs through (e.g. poaching, scrambling etc.), the basic technical challenge will always be the same because how an egg changes as it heats is ultimately determined by its physical composition -which varies very little from one egg to another. Sure, some eggs will be fresher than others (lower pH & more water) and of course, you can alter the physical properties of the egg by mixing in salt, or some other substance that affects the behavior of the proteins or alters the ratio of water to protein (as would be the case if you added wine or milk). But even then, if do not heat the eggs gently they will still become tough and squeeze out water. Here’s why in a nutshell.
Egg whites and yolks are suspensions of protein in a watery and fatty (in the case of yolks) medium. When they heat slowly, the proteins open slowly, collide gently with the other proteins and form a loose spongy gel structure that traps the water. Heat the eggs too fast though, and the proteins open quickly, collide too often, bond too many times and create gel structure that is so tight that the water gets squeezed out resulting in a hard, dry cooked egg.
Of course there is a lot more to the story than this. For example, if you get the egg too hot, the water in the egg also gets too hot and evaporates too quickly. Also the proteins may “blacken ” and begin to break down and release stinky amino acid compounds (similar to what happens in overcooked fish)…I could go on but I’m out of time.
Okay about this video.
I did it in one take because I only had two eggs. So it’s a bit rough. My narration is unrehearsed and punctuated by really annoying coughing – the natural consequence of asthma and allergies. I’d love to be able to edit that stuff out but my software is not up to it. I also misspeak slightly when I say the pan needs to be pre-heated to 350 degrees F. That number only works for the kind of pan I’m using and the manner in which I cook. See, I heat the pan to about 350 and pull it off the fire, by the time I put the butter in the temp drops to under 250 degrees -which is all the heat you need to get the eggs to begin to coagulate.
The net-net is that if you don’t have an IR (frankly, I mostly only use mine when I’m studying or teaching) just heat the pan so that when the butter goes in it melts slowly, bubbles but does not brown. Oils are another story for another time.
BTW If the heat is cranked the temp of the pan can exceed 600 degrees F! When you consider that whites coagulate at about 140 degrees, and that browning in eggs occurs at about 325 degrees, it’s easy to understand why that is way too hot.
I’ll eventually figure out how to elevate the qualities of these things, in the meantime I hope this makes sense!
Filed under: how to, musing, video | 15 Comments »
If there is anything I hate more than crispy, hard and stinky fried eggs, I’ll be sure to tell you about when I remember what it is. Eggs that are fried too quickly in a pan that is too hot coagulate too fast and dry out. The result is hard whites and yolks and crispy brown or -god forbid- blackened bottoms. Moreover, such eggs end up stinking of hydrogen sulfide because, of course, they got too hot.
I prefer fried eggs that are tender, runny and with little to no browning on any surface. Now while the reason I prefer to cook eggs this way really boils down to a matter of personal preference (i.e., “That’s the way I like them because that’s the way I like them.”), it’s a preference that turns on a philosophical point. I’m of the opinion that if I am lucky enough to have food that is very fresh and of very high quality, the best thing I can do to it is the least I can do to it. My goal is to maintain the character of the raw product as much as possible and not transform it into something that bears scant resemblance to what it was before I cooked it.
Eggs are pretty subtle zygotes: no matter how good they are, their intrinsic flavor and texture is very easy to bury under careless technique. They are arguably best eaten raw, at close to body temperature. So if agree with me, then when you propose to cook an egg you would do well to ask yourself how you can preserve as much of the character of the raw egg as possible yet still regard them as cooked.
Now while the specifics of the answer you get will depend on what process you plan to put the eggs through (e.g. poaching, scrambling etc.), the basic technical challenge will always be the same because how an egg changes as it heats is ultimately determined by its physical composition -which varies very little from one egg to another. Sure, some eggs will be fresher than others (lower pH & more water) and of course, you can alter the physical properties of the egg by mixing in salt, or some other substance that affects the behavior of the proteins or alters the ratio of water to protein (as would be the case if you added wine or milk). But even then, if do not heat the eggs gently they will still become tough and squeeze out water. Here’s why in a nutshell.
Egg whites and yolks are suspensions of protein in a watery and fatty (in the case of yolks) medium. When they heat slowly, the proteins open slowly, collide gently with the other proteins and form a loose spongy gel structure that traps the water. Heat the eggs too fast though, and the proteins open quickly, collide too often, bond too many times and create gel structure that is so tight that the water gets squeezed out resulting in a hard, dry cooked egg.
Of course there is a lot more to the story than this. For example, if you get the egg too hot, the water in the egg also gets too hot and evaporates too quickly. Also the proteins may “blacken ” and begin to break down and release stinky amino acid compounds (similar to what happens in overcooked fish)…I could go on but I’m out of time.
Okay about this video.
I did it in one take because I only had two eggs. So it’s a bit rough. My narration is unrehearsed and punctuated by really annoying coughing – the natural consequence of asthma and allergies. I’d love to be able to edit that stuff out but my software is not up to it. I also misspeak slightly when I say the pan needs to be pre-heated to 350 degrees F. That number only works for the kind of pan I’m using and the manner in which I cook. See, I heat the pan to about 350 and pull it off the fire, by the time I put the butter in the temp drops to under 250 degrees -which is all the heat you need to get the eggs to begin to coagulate.
The net-net is that if you don’t have an IR (frankly, I mostly only use mine when I’m studying or teaching) just heat the pan so that when the butter goes in it melts slowly, bubbles but does not brown. Oils are another story for another time.
BTW If the heat is cranked the temp of the pan can exceed 600 degrees F! When you consider that whites coagulate at about 140 degrees, and that browning in eggs occurs at about 325 degrees, it’s easy to understand why that is way too hot.
I’ll eventually figure out how to elevate the qualities of these things, in the meantime I hope this makes sense!
Filed under: how to, musing, video | 15 Comments »
As much as I consider myself a New Yorker (I lived there more than 50 years) the reality is that I live now live in a suburb of Philadelphia which, like the city that it exurbed itself from, is out of its mind with excitement over the coming contest between the Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays.
There seems to be almost as many Phillies logos arond town as there are political campaign signs. Anyway, today I was on my way to the local music store to drop off a French horn that we do not need because the school band has one to lend to my son when he switches from his regular instrument (trumpet) during certain pieces, when I noticed that the pretzel store (soft pretels are big stuff here) was selling pretzels shaped into the letter “P” -for Phillies, and not pretzel as you might assume in any other month.
Now, my son is a big Phillies fan and he loves pretzels. So I thought ‘WTF, I’ll get him one.’ Of course, I have two kids so not wanting to leave my daughter (who loves pretzels but hates the Phillies) out of the equation, I bought two.
Flash forward to the return of my daughter, who is always ravenously hungry when she walks in, from school. After a brief hug and ‘How are you” I grab the bag of pretzels and offer her one. Her response? “No thanks, I hate the Phillies.”
Wow, if that wasn’t ever a primer on how people will reject foods that they associate with a despised “other” I don’t know anything.
Filed under: foodways, musing, sociology | 5 Comments »
As much as I consider myself a New Yorker (I lived there more than 50 years) the reality is that I live now live in a suburb of Philadelphia which, like the city that it exurbed itself from, is out of its mind with excitement over the coming contest between the Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays.
There seems to be almost as many Phillies logos arond town as there are political campaign signs. Anyway, today I was on my way to the local music store to drop off a French horn that we do not need because the school band has one to lend to my son when he switches from his regular instrument (trumpet) during certain pieces, when I noticed that the pretzel store (soft pretels are big stuff here) was selling pretzels shaped into the letter “P” -for Phillies, and not pretzel as you might assume in any other month.
Now, my son is a big Phillies fan and he loves pretzels. So I thought ‘WTF, I’ll get him one.’ Of course, I have two kids so not wanting to leave my daughter (who loves pretzels but hates the Phillies) out of the equation, I bought two.
Flash forward to the return of my daughter, who is always ravenously hungry when she walks in, from school. After a brief hug and ‘How are you” I grab the bag of pretzels and offer her one. Her response? “No thanks, I hate the Phillies.”
Wow, if that wasn’t ever a primer on how people will reject foods that they associate with a despised “other” I don’t know anything.
Filed under: foodways, musing, sociology | 5 Comments »
While it would be way reductive to date the moment in time when chefs began to pay attention to the provenance of the ingredients we prepare to the appearance of Alice Waters on the national stage, I have no qualms about giving her credit for making it loud-and-clear that we ignore how food is produced at the risk of imperiling the quality of our lives. If we choose not to know where food comes from and how it is comes to be, well, we may be able to cook it and make it taste great, but we miss out on the opportunity to know what makes it what it is.
At the moment when thousands of baby boomer chef wannabes were discovering that there was a big market for refined and innovative American cooking, Waters stood up and challenged us to discover who was producing the raw ingredients that we meant to cook, and to be confident that we understood the nature of each animal and plant that we meant to transform through our “art.” I know that others have their own interpretation of Water’s message, but when I dig down into it and strip off all the most obvious meanings, what I hear is a call to search for the itness or the ingredients that form the foundation of our work.
Yeah, you read that right itness.
Now I know that some of you winced, perhaps because you sensed that it (ness) smells of incense and indicates a modality of thinking that always ends up with the thinker unable to find his car keys. And that might be a fair assessment if you had reason to believe that I was really the Beavis character that I affect in the posts I write when I’m feeling cranky and anarchic. But this is not one of those occasions. I’m actually drop-dead serious here. You’ll have to trust me on this, but I would never risk using a word like itness without letting you know I was screwing around. (Such posts are usually tagged with “Goofin” or “Satire.”)
Itness is a (Socratic) concept that I use as a tool to help me when I’m trying to understand the characteristics and implications of the existence (or non-existence in the case of extinct things) of some material thing. Put another way, it is a device that I use to put together a description of the physical properties of living and non-living things and the fields that surround them. (The word “field” here refers to all of the culturally generated stuff that gets applied to the thing e.g., folk tales, beliefs about the purpose and proper use of the thing, how the thing interacts with other things and the quantum of information that develops from those interactions and so on.)
When I want to know something well I ask “What is it?” After the first (usually the most superficial) “It is…” answer comes back, I ask “Is that all it is?” and so on, all the while reminding myself that if there is an ice cube’s chance in hell of knowing what the object of my curiosity really is -if there is any chance of knowing its itness– I better keep asking questions.
Of course the questions never stop and the answers they beggar never yield a complete understanding of what makes a thing what it is, so an absolute determination of itness is an unattainable goal. However, just because something is unattainable, it does not naturally follow that you should not bother to pursue it -not at all.
It is from the pursuit of the itness of things, and the recognition of how they are put together and what they mean and have meant to hundreds of millions of sapient beings, that there begins to emerge a profound appreciation for the extraordinary complexity and heart-breaking beauty of this life.
So when Alice Waters told us to pay attention to where, by whom and how our food is produced, I understood that she wasn’t just offering us the means to become better cooks and sell better food. What she was also doing was warning us that if we did not start searching for the itness of the things that made up the foundation of our craft, we would never know what we were doing.
And that, I aver, would suck.
Here’s a brief video that represents the partial result of my pursuit of the itness of pork.
It stars me and the 5 Berkshire hogs at Hendricks Farms and Dairy -where I cook and slop hogs with the stuff that at another time I might have thrown into a dumpster.
I LOVE slopping the hogs, it is one of the high points of my day. They are always hungry and absolutely revel in scarfing up the most revolting stuff. They never say thanks of course -not until we eat them anyway.
Filed under: charcuterie, chefs, farm stuff, musing, video | 27 Comments »
While it would be way reductive to date the moment in time when chefs began to pay attention to the provenance of the ingredients we prepare to the appearance of Alice Waters on the national stage, I have no qualms about giving her credit for making it loud-and-clear that we ignore how food is produced at the risk of imperiling the quality of our lives. If we choose not to know where food comes from and how it is comes to be, well, we may be able to cook it and make it taste great, but we miss out on the opportunity to know what makes it what it is.
At the moment when thousands of baby boomer chef wannabes were discovering that there was a big market for refined and innovative American cooking, Waters stood up and challenged us to discover who was producing the raw ingredients that we meant to cook, and to be confident that we understood the nature of each animal and plant that we meant to transform through our “art.” I know that others have their own interpretation of Water’s message, but when I dig down into it and strip off all the most obvious meanings, what I hear is a call to search for the itness or the ingredients that form the foundation of our work.
Yeah, you read that right itness.
Now I know that some of you winced, perhaps because you sensed that it (ness) smells of incense and indicates a modality of thinking that always ends up with the thinker unable to find his car keys. And that might be a fair assessment if you had reason to believe that I was really the Beavis character that I affect in the posts I write when I’m feeling cranky and anarchic. But this is not one of those occasions. I’m actually drop-dead serious here. You’ll have to trust me on this, but I would never risk using a word like itness without letting you know I was screwing around. (Such posts are usually tagged with “Goofin” or “Satire.”)
Itness is a (Socratic) concept that I use as a tool to help me when I’m trying to understand the characteristics and implications of the existence (or non-existence in the case of extinct things) of some material thing. Put another way, it is a device that I use to put together a description of the physical properties of living and non-living things and the fields that surround them. (The word “field” here refers to all of the culturally generated stuff that gets applied to the thing e.g., folk tales, beliefs about the purpose and proper use of the thing, how the thing interacts with other things and the quantum of information that develops from those interactions and so on.)
When I want to know something well I ask “What is it?” After the first (usually the most superficial) “It is…” answer comes back, I ask “Is that all it is?” and so on, all the while reminding myself that if there is an ice cube’s chance in hell of knowing what the object of my curiosity really is -if there is any chance of knowing its itness– I better keep asking questions.
Of course the questions never stop and the answers they beggar never yield a complete understanding of what makes a thing what it is, so an absolute determination of itness is an unattainable goal. However, just because something is unattainable, it does not naturally follow that you should not bother to pursue it -not at all.
It is from the pursuit of the itness of things, and the recognition of how they are put together and what they mean and have meant to hundreds of millions of sapient beings, that there begins to emerge a profound appreciation for the extraordinary complexity and heart-breaking beauty of this life.
So when Alice Waters told us to pay attention to where, by whom and how our food is produced, I understood that she wasn’t just offering us the means to become better cooks and sell better food. What she was also doing was warning us that if we did not start searching for the itness of the things that made up the foundation of our craft, we would never know what we were doing.
And that, I aver, would suck.
Here’s a brief video that represents the partial result of my pursuit of the itness of pork.
It stars me and the 5 Berkshire hogs at Hendricks Farms and Dairy -where I cook and slop hogs with the stuff that at another time I might have thrown into a dumpster.
I LOVE slopping the hogs, it is one of the high points of my day. They are always hungry and absolutely revel in scarfing up the most revolting stuff. They never say thanks of course -not until we eat them anyway.
Filed under: charcuterie, chefs, Hendricks Farms, musing, video | 27 Comments »
Twelve months out and thousands of pounds of meat after I began making sausage on weekly basis, I’m still amused enough by the process to keep drilling down into it en route to making the best damn sausage I am capable of making. Yes, there are certain nodes along this region of the continuum of cooking related activities that are painful, while others are merely soul-stuntingly boring.
Mixing by hand, forty pounds of viscous and nearly frozen forcemeat will turn the bones in your hands into throbbing conduits of anxiety.
Cranking down the piston on the sausage stuffer is usually pretty gratifying because there is always a payoff as the meat extrudes into the casing and becomes what it was meant to be: sausage. But I have been seen mocking my reflection in the kitchen window as I watch myself crank the piston back up from the empty cylinder. I mean, who wants to think of himself, even for a moment, as someone who’s job it is to turn a fraking handle on an empty sausage stuffer?
However, when I weigh these tests of my body and ego against the satisfaction that comes from knowing how to make -and make well- what to many is just another option for mastication and digestion, they seem like a fair price to pay. See, for me, making sausage is one small but essential part of my plan to stop wasting time and grapple with -while attempting to grok-the fundamental elements of my craft and -because my craft is inextricably bound up with who and what I am- my self.
Here is a slide show that describes some of the steps involved in making sausage. It begins with the washing of the hog casings and ends when the piped and crimped links. Of course, there is more missing from the show than ought to be included for a complete recounting of events. I don’t show the animals (chicken in this case) being bred and slaughtered. The casings are not shown being fabricated from hog intestines and so on. You will have to use your imagination if you want to see any of that. Or perhaps you might choose to go off, as I have chosen to do, and try to experience it all directly while leaving the imagining to others.
And here’s a video that shows my hands piping the forcemeat and twisting the rope into links. Please note that when you make links for fresh sausage (as opposed to cooked and air-dried preparations) there is no need to tie them off. As long as you make sure to squeeze an adequate amount of forcemeat away from both sides of what will become the junction or “link” between the sausages to prevent the filling from flowing out when the links are cut, you will not need a ligature.
The soundtrack has nothing to do with content of the video which, as a fan of dissonance, is exactly the reason I chose it.
Filed under: how to, musing | 14 Comments »
A Hunger Aritist (Redux) 
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