Recipe Pro-Tool

Michael Ruhlman’s recent post about cookbooks that teach got me thinking about how much I used to love cookbooks. Back when I was a novice cook, books like “The Joy of Cooking,” “The Professional Chef” (the basis of The Culinary Institute of Americas’ “The New Professional Chef”), Henri Pellaprat’s “Modern Culinary Art,” almost anything by Ada Boni and Julia Child and, of course, “Le Guide Culinaire” by Auguste Escoffier and La Scienza della Cucina by Pelligrino Artusi were an important part of my culinary education. Some were goldmines of information about technique (e.g. The Pro Chef, “La Methode” by Jacques Pepin) and recipes while the ones I liked best were backward looking works chosen more for what they could tell me about the history, culture and ideology of European culinary tradition.

Nowadays, I’ve little use for cookbooks. I have a few that I refer to when I need to be reminded of the the name of a dish or the ratio of it’s ingredients, but there aren’t too many things in the western culinary canon that I have to cook (or chose to cook) that I can’t make up on the fly without having to refer to somebody else’s recipe.

That’s about how it should be for a cook I suppose. I mean, is not a big part of the reason we decide to center our lives around cooking so that we can create recipes that reflect our values and tastes? There is certainly nothing wrong with working from recipes written by other people and trying to satisfy our creative drive by say, changing an ingredient or applying a different technique to one or more the steps. But I find building my own recipes more fulfilling.

I don’t usually write recipes unless I am creating them for work and I rarely include the instructions for method unless I’m working on something that is very new to me. Then, if the dish doesn’t come out well and needs refinement I have a precise record of what I did to review.

I write my recipes for commercial production in a form that would probably madden cooks who like to measure liquids and semi-solids volumetrically.

1. Every ingredient is weighed and each weight is expressed as a decimal.
2. All weights are expressed in metric units (mostly grams)
3. All ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the main ingredient to facilitate scaling up and down (called a baker or formula percentage)

Here is an example in the form of a recipe for Chicken Sausage with Ginger and Green Onions

Ingredient	Weight	Percentage
Chicken meat	8636g	1
Salt	121g	0.014
Pepper, black	34g	0.004
Ginger in syrup*	173g	0.020
Green Onions	224g	0.026
Mustard, dry	13g	0.0015
White wine	604 g (~604 ml)	0.070

* Whole unpeeled ginger cooked in simple syrup and ground through the fine on a meat grinder. The ginger has to be cooked if the sausage will sit uncooked for more than a few hours. Otherwise the proteolytic enzymes in the ginger will turn the meat to mush.

I initially made this recipe by weighing small amounts of each ingredient and recording the weights before adding them in. Each time I added something sniffed the mixture to determine if it was properly seasoned. I can usually nail the seasoning of a sausage recipe via an olfactory and visual check but on those occasions where I am unsure I’ll cook up a sample and taste it.

I always salt fresh sausage at a rate of either 14-15g salt per 1000 grams of meat (see note below) depending on the kind of meat being used and the taste characteristics of the other ingredients. The percentage of each ingredient is obtained by dividing the weight of each by the weight of the main ingredient.

The beauty of this kind of recipe is that it makes it very easy to increase or decrease the batch size while keeping the ratio of ingredients consistent and producing a consistent product no matter how much or how little you make.

Want to make more or less? Then enter the new weight of the meat and multiply it by the percent values of the subordinate ingredients and you are done.

The example I gave here is for sausage, but this format works for any kind of recipe. Just pick a main ingredient (It does not have to be the most abundant, it could, for example be the most expensive. Then divide the weight of each subsequent ingredient by the weight of the main ingredient to determine its percentage value.

Finally, one can purchase software that will scale recipes up and down for you automatically. Or you can write the formula recipe into a spread sheet, apply costs and so on. (I’ve done this.) But typing on a keyboard when your fingers are fouled with food is not such a good idea. So writing them out by hand is usually the best way to go.

Note: The previously given rate of 0.014-0.015g salt per 1000g meat was in error and has been corrected to read 14-15g salt per 1000g meat.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

A gift of Globe

Jearl Pino, one of the guys who likes to come around to the farm and help with various projects, bought a Globe slicer from some guy who advertized it on Craigslist. I suppose the machine was too big to keep at Jearl’s house because he asked if he could leave it at the farm. We are free to use it at will and I’ve already begun breaking it in. And check this out: he paid $75.00 for the thing! It’s probably thirty years old but it’s in perfect condition.

Today I used it to slice up a prosciutto made from Berkshire pork. I hung this about 12 months ago. It’s cured only with salt (sodium chloride) nothing else, and tastes just like the real thing -I suppose because it is the real thing.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Lettuce for Blues

I’ve been a pretty lousy blogger these last few months. There are several reasons for my negligence but the most significant have been a major bout of the blues following the death of a close friend and a serious effort to spend less time on the computer and more time doing hands-on constructive things like gardening. The garden, happily, is beginning to come in.

Here are some pictures.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Another tempest in a teapot

Embedded video from CNN Video

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Deep Thought: Best thing is no thing

I usually don’t pay much attention to bumper stickers. Most of them seem to express ideas I don’t want to care about: someone’s favorite band; the place or pet they “HEART;” the politician they think is going to make life demonstrably different and, increasingly, vulgar assertions that in more polite times were only found scrawled on the walls of restroom stalls and subway tunnels. But the other day as I was walking from the gym to my car, I saw a bumper sticker that stopped me dead in my tracks. It read

“The best things in life are not things.”

Well, you could have knocked me over with an iPhone application after I read that, and not because –as might be assumed- I’d never thought of it before. Rather, I simply never expected to see anything like that on the bumper of a late model car in the parking lot of an “upscale” gym in the hyper-materialistic United States of America of the 2000’s. But there it was: metaphysical truth on the bumper of a Toyota Camry.

The best things in life are not “things” (material objects), they are experiences like looking at your children and seeing that flame (or whatever the hell it is) burning behind their eyes. They are those moments that transcend mundane thinking and you see the world as it really is and become simultaneously aware of its beauty and propensity to mete out misery. (Of course, it is also true that many of the worst things in this life are not things either. But any discussion of this here is unwarranted by the feel-good nature of this blog 😉

Food is great, we could not live without it, but far better than the food itself is the experience of eating something that has been so well-prepared and is so wonderful that it sends you elsewhere.

I not sure that I care much about food beyond it’s ability to provide my body with nutrition and myself with a way to earn a living. But what I care deeply about are it’s collateral cognitive and emotional affect within the people I feed and, of course, myself.

How about you?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Iowa-sciutto

Sky Full of Bacon 10: Prosciutto di Iowa from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Egyptian Pig Slaughter

I’m putting a hyperlink to this unbelievably horrible video of the hog cull in Egypt instead of posting the video because it is just too disturbing to include in this blog. If there is anyone out there who can explain to me how what the Egyptian government is doing makes any sense at all, I’d like to hear about it.

Stuff like this renders almost trite all complaints about the way that animals are treated in American slaughterhouses as it magnifies the fact that there is no animal in this world that has the potential to be as wantonly and efficiently destructive of life as we humans.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

‘Tis the season….

by Mike Pardus

All winter, I watch the weather for skiing, by the end of March most of the snow is gone and it’s time to think about my favorite spring sport- Mushroom Hunting! I start to watch ground moisture and temperature, air temperature, and precipitation. When it’s moist and the ground temp climbs above 55F degrees it’s time to start looking for Morels. This spring has been good in the Hudson Valley and more than morels have been popping up in abundance. My first find happened as I got out of my car at work – in the grass at the edge of the parking lot were three large Meadow Mushrooms (portablello relatives). Sauteed with olive oil and garlic they topped off linguine well for that evening’s dinner.

A few days later, cycling through the woods outside of New Paltz , I found a few shelves ( they grow on trees in layers, like shelves) of polyporus squamos growing on trail side trees- appropriately, they are also known as “bicycle seats” because of their shape and size. Although they become too tough to eat when large and mature, these were young, tender and buttery. Again, sauteed with oil and shallots, they made a fine addition to a warm salad tossed with bacon lardons and topped with a poached egg.

But it’s Morel Season and, although I’d been hearing tales of successful forages by some of my students, I’d yet to find any of my own. On Tuesday I made a date with my GF to ditch out of work as early as possible and go wandering through the woods near the banks of the Hudson river – my perennial favorite and most fruitful source of morels each spring, this year did not disappoint.

It was a beautiful, warm and sunny afternoon and the forest was clean and relatively free of underbrush. We walked and chatted, keeping our eyes on the ground, but also watching the tree tops for dead elms (morels are reputed to favor growing under dead or dying elm trees). Just when it looked like we might have to be satisfied with a simple walk in the woods we went to check out an elm and found not morels, but several shelves of fresh, young, oyster mushrooms. Favored by beetles and slugs as well as humans, it’s important to catch these soon after they emerge, we felt lucky to have beaten the bugs.

But it was morels we’d come for and after another hour of wandering we decided to give up the quest and be thankful for the half full sack of oysters. On the way back to the car, ambling up a hill, I glanced to my left and was astonished to see a doublet of morels – each the size of a pint beer bottle! Since morels most often grow “gregariously”, where there’s one there are usually many more, we forgot about the car and started scrutinizing the forest floor. Within 30 minutes we discovered three productive colonies, harvesting a total of 78 gems ranging in size from huge to tiny; our sack full and we fulfilled.

Returning home, we took turns prepping dinner and showering off the ticks. Soon we had dinner on the table – Roasted chicken and asparagus, large, crunchy croutons tossed in the rendered chicken fat, and sauteed mushrooms. With a bottle of cava, it was a rare and delicious meal.

So, now for the disclaimers:

Never – NEVER – eat wild mushrooms without first studying with a professional and having your harvest inspected for safety.

Join your local mycological society and go on organized forages to learn the basics (almost every county has one – google to find one near you)

Buy and use a good Mushroom field guide. My favorite is Mushrooms of North America by Roger Philips.

Never eat or serve anything you aren’t absolutely sure of.

Remember the old adage:

” There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no OLD, BOLD mushroom hunters”

Don’t be bold – or foolish – mushrooms are fun to hunt and wonderful to eat, but acute liver failure is a slow and painful way to die. You want to be an OLD mushroom hunter.

Happy hunting

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

This Morning

When I pulled in to the farm this morning, the air was thick with fog. The fog made everything look fuzzy. It was like I was looking through the lens of a camera that was covered by a shear nylon stocking.

Even though I was sure that I was not observing the world through a nylon stocking. I got so worked up that I became really hungry. So, I dragged out a prosciutto from the aging room and pulled off its cheesecloth clothing. Then I tidied it up by scrubbing off the mold from its skin and cutting off areas where the fat had turned rancid and made myself a proper breakfast.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Roast Beef Recipe Circa 1955

Here’s a roast beef recipe that is sure to raise an eyebrow. It’s from comedic genius Gracie Allen. I’ve included a YouTube video of the The George Burns and Allen Show that contains a reference to the recipe @ circa 25 minutes into the show.

FW: Gracies kitchen magic

Gracie Allen’s Classic Recipe for Roast Beef

1 large Roast of beef
1 small Roast of beef

Take the two roasts and put them in the oven.

When the little one burns, the big one is done.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.