Wontonamera

I was wrong.

Having bought groceries for the week with a couple of meal plans in mind I had a fairly well stocked fridge and veggie selection waiting for the opportune moment to be shoveled into duty as experimental fodder, and that moment struck after I woke up this morning, of course.

One of the more well-advertised images from Modernist Cuisine is the burger. They’ve basically used the Heston Blumenthal recipe, tweaked to their liking. They even have a couple of different grind ratios for the meat types they like. The main difference of the M.C. version seems to be in the use of Beef Suet to brown the buns with, mushrooms on the burger, and how they make their cheese singles.

Wait. Back up. Let me start earlier.

When I first read up on Blumenthal’s “Perfect” burger, I had little doubt in my mind I’d try and make it. Minus the buns. Maybe.

After getting M.C. and reading their recipe, I knew I’d make one working with both recipes and using what I liked.

Combined with the food we had on hand, that plan went down.

Let me start by saying, I didn’t do the whole shebang: I didn’t make the mushrooms, the mushroom ketchup, or the buns. I didn’t have suet to brown things and stuff. I didn’t make the lettuce infusion exactly as per the M.C. instructions. I didn’t use three cuts of beef to make my burger patties.

I did make the cheese “singles”. I did grind my own meat (60% beef chuck, 40% pork loin chop). I did vac-u-seal the tomatoes. I did blanch the onions. I did align the burger strands together. I did the loose patty forming. I did chill the grind for a couple hours after grinding. I did infuse the lettuce. I did flip the patties every 30 seconds or so while they cooked.

I did enjoy a very good burger. Best ever? Not quite. Perfect? I didn’t add bacon, and I think there’s a few tweaks I could do next time to make it better, so no.

Of all the things I did do, I can’t say they all were steps I’d redo the next time I make burgers. The lettuce? Hard to discern any flavor from it, particularly smoke flavor, once on the burger. I tasted a few pieces of it to make sure that there was some flavoring, which there was, but once on the burger it was overwhelmed.

The onions, though, I am a fan of. If you like onions on your burger, i would encourage a quick blanching of them before you add them on next time. Not the easiest step for some but if you have other prep work for other recipes that may involve blanching, then go for it. That or if you’re just a picky onion eater.

The patty making and grinding were interesting ideas, and I will definitely re-use them in the future. Blumenthal used three cuts to make his patty, and M.C. recommends doing so. I have had good luck with a combo of pork and beef before, and was conveniently in possession of a good chunk of chops to use with my beef chuck. These both were pre-cubed and seasoned, then refrigerated for a couple of hours (Blumenthal calls for 6 on his chuck). I tossed them together before grinding and used the coarse filter to run them through. Since my Kitchen Aid’s up about a foot from the counter, I ended up flipping a stock pot over, and placing a plate on it.

This allowed me to do a single-person run through on the grind. I was able to get the cubes pre-positioned, and as they’d grind, used one hand to catch and orient the strands, occasionally laying a handful down on the plate, and the other hand kept stuffing cubes into the grinder. A pound and a half took me maybe ten minutes to run through this way. I kept shifting the plate as I went to keep making room. Ground meat acquired, you then form a log of it with the strands kept in what will be the ‘vertical’ alignment–that is, they are parallel with the motion of your teeth biting through. You also do NOT re-press or knead the grind, and leave it in a fairly loose state. Wrap in plastic wrap, then refrigerate for a couple more hours.

Considering my love of cheese the next steps were…odd. I wasn’t certain that I’d want to boil a beer, shred some quality cheese, then chill the result so I could make a knock-off ‘American’ style cheese single. Safe to say I’m glad I made it happen. I used a Freestyle wheat ale, along with a selection of quality cheeses (M.C. calls for a wheat ale, Blumenthal calls for Sherry). These are emulsified with citric acid and water, then cooled in a mold (for M.C.) or on a sil-pat (for Blumenthal) before you end up slicing them and topping your burger with them. I used my cookie molds on my silpat, worked out nicely.

I’m skipping the infused lettuce, but with all those steps I was easily 4 hours of prep time in for these things, and the end was finally nearing. After slicing patties from the meat ‘log’, they were cooked in a pan, flipping frequently. Buns were toasted, ketchup added, onions/lettuce/tomato added to the other half, and cheese sliced. Patties were cheesed up, then built up, and suddenly…voila, a burger was born.

A good burger, with a really good patty and some tasty cheese.

But maybe not the perfect one.

Yet.

A Food network show host one opined that food on a stick always tastes better. Not certain this always holds true, but I have found use for such a mechanism lately as a holding and serving method (all in one).

Plus if you use skewer-length implements, you can have ridiculous stabbing fights at the dinner table with them. Quality time with friends.

As part of a dinner I made for some foodie-type friends the other week I made a celebration of tomato course where I fiddled with some ideas about tomatoes. Three parts made it up–a ratatouille (loved), pizza fiddlin’ (meh. I wanted that to work better), and a deconstructed BLT (the point of this post). As it was also gluten-free, I had to avoid traditional flour (and some yeasts, some cheeses!). This lead to doing pizza dough with gluten-free flour, making pasta dough that way as well, and learning more about gluten’s prevalence than I really wanted to.

BLT’s minus bread, though, have a small problem. Nothing else hold them together well. Solution: toothpicks…or for more fun and plating potential, skewers. A couple of test runs of these in and they’re pretty damn simple. And you can sound impressive when you make these and tell people it’s deconstructed BLT’s with Chipotle Aioli.

(pics courtesy of Foodiethenewforty)

Ready for this? Too bad.

Chipotle Aioli:
1/2 c. Garlic-infused olive oil
1 egg yolk
one whole chipotle, stem removed

Blenderate the chipotle into as close to powder as you can. Mix with the egg yolk. While stirring, slooooooooooooooowly add the oil. If you do it right, it all holds together and makes a creamy sauce. If you do it wrong, the emulsion breaks and you have a lumpy looking mess. After you’ve blended and it’s held, it should have a pretty orange color. Refrigerate.

Bacon:
lay on a wire rack over a cooking tray (to catch the drippings) in a 200f oven for 90 minutes to two hours. Yes. This is a ridiculous way to cook bacon and you will love yourself for it later. You want the bacon to be cooked well, but still pliable. If you have no self control, you can do microwave bacon.

Lettuce:
Wilt lightly-salted romaine hearts in a saute pan over high heat.

Tomato, fresh:
Find appropriate cherry tomatoes. Wash.

Tomato, dried:
Whole Sun- or Smoke-dried tomatoes work ok, but if you can get dried sliced tomatoes, they’ll work better and make these more manageable bite-sized items.

Assembly:
Bacon should be pliable but not to the point of breaking. Add a line of the chipotle aioli to what will be the inside of the bacon. Wrap a cherry tomato with a slice of dried tomato. Wrap that with wilted lettuce. Wrap the bacon, aioli side to lettuce, around the rest. Skewer with a skewer (or toothpick). Place into still-warm oven for a few minutes. Serve warm.

As an alternative, you can do these with Prosciutto, a cousin of bacon:

(photo by q!)

Through sheer luck and a combination of other factors I have been blessed with a copy of “Modernist Cuisine” by Myhrvold et al.

When’s the last time you picked up 20 kilograms of cookbooks in their own Lexan storage unit? These things are a work out program waiting to happen.

If you ever look at this as a simple cookbook, then you’d probably find it lacking to say the least. It is indeed a cookbook, to be sure, but the focus of this is more…encyclopedic? Textbook? than simply aiming to be a cookbook. Comprehensive does not even begin to cover this set, and I’ve not even completed the first volume.

It’s ridiculous.

Can’t wait to try out some of the actual recipes (probably in a couple of weeks). Now to stock the gadgetry up before the funding dries up.

(this post can get you killed. Seriously. Read at your own risk, experiment with this at your own or someone else that I don’t know’s risk)

While flipping through TFL, one recipe (Rib roast with chantrelles and pommes anna, with bordelaise) caught my eye, as it’s Keller’s take on the classic meat-n-potatoes dish. Granted I don’t normally parlay my way into the glorious tuber often but I read that recipe through and gleaned a couple of things from it.

1. A good sauce will make any dish go from bad ass to straight up pimpadelic.

2. Keller seasons his beef that gets cooked rare to medium rare the night before.

I cooked the sea bass dish that night, but I remembered about the pre-seasoning blurb for some reason, as the vast majority of tips you’ll see about seasoning steaks in particular say to hold off until near cooking time (or while you’re warming them to room temperature). After some experimentation, I have now moved into the pre-seasoned camp.

The first test run I started out just to try the pre-seasoned theory. A pair of strip steaks (club steaks for you international readers) done in a fairly straightforward manner: season, rest, pat dry, and seared with oven finish. Both came out of the overnight with slightly tough-feeling exteriors and hardened fat on the edge. Interesting. After cooking, they resulted in two delicious and medium rare steaks that were quickly devoured.

So far so good.

When it came time to run though this again, a side-by-side comparison of two ribeyes was made. Both were rested overnight, but only one was actually pre-seasonsed. After resting overnight, both were similar looking, with the hardened fat edges and slightly firmer-than-expected meat. Once again I seared and oven finished these. When it came time to taste test, pieces of each were blindly presented both to my subjects. The overwhelming and unanimous decision was for the pre-seasoned steaks. With emphasis. Interestingly (see pic) the pre-seasoned steak had a very clearly different texture when it was sliced. Did I mention that it was much preferred? I was a bit amazed by how different the two were.

Firm in the knowledge that this technique could enhance the flavor, I then went towards determining how to best apply it. Round three started with another pair of strip steaks. One was seasoned and aged overnight, the second was aged overnight, and seasoned about 12 hours before cooking. To cook I used my science project setup and held them at 128F for an hour before searing with a torch. They rested for ten minutes before serving, at which time, no clear favorite was immediately chosen. These were also about an inch thick, perhaps a bit more, pre-cooking.

Odd, I thought. While there were some minor differences in texture, but both were quite good. Flavors were very close between them. But over the course of the meal, it became apparent that the saltiness of the 24 hour version was becoming slightly more noticeable than the 12 hour version. The steaks were about an inch thick.

Most recently, I took a pair of prime-rated strip steaks that were cut about an inch and a half thick. These I rested overnight, seasoned 12 hours ahead, and sous vide them at 128F for one hour and forty five minutes. Pan seared them over high heat for a good crust, then served them with blue cheese butter. I think I convinced two people to get sous vide setups from that dish alone. I believe that using the rest and pre-season technique was the key factor in making the steaks good. The s.v. portion simply ensures the doneness involved more than anything.

Is this worth trying on your steaks? In my opinion, absolutely for steaks you would cook rare/medium rare. Beyond that, I can’t really say.
How long do you pre-season for? My SWAG on this is 6-8 hours per inch thickness. Not more than 24 hours.
How long do you rest them for in the fridge? I’ve not tried more than 24 hours.
Why is this effective? The salt denatures the proteins in the meat, making them easier to break down more fully when cooking. This is a sort of like curing on the quick. The overnight dry helps remove moisture from the crust, which will help in browning.
What kind of beef should be used? Wet-aged or unaged beef. Anything that’s dry aged is probably well into the process already, don’t screw that up. You might look into pre-seasoning it, but I wouldn’t let it rest out for 24 hours.
Did you really do a scientific experiment on steak? I wouldn’t call this science…

Is there a quick summary of what to do instead of reading this blather? Yes. Rest steaks covered with a paper towel overnight in fridge, season with salt/pepper a few hours ahead (figure 8 hrs/inch of thickness), then cook as you normally would.