SG Archive:Corned Beef and Cabbage

A Day without Sunshine



The sun didn't come up yesterday. Or, if it did, I didn't see it. The weather was darkly overcast — the sky a rag of gray flannel stretching from barren treetop to dreary hillside. The wind was cold and gusting, hurling flourishes of rain and ice. It was the epitome of an East Tennessee January day with no color to provide visual warmth or snow to add romance. It was just plain cold and nasty.

There's only one way to deal with a day like that — cook. And I knew just what I wanted.

One of these days I'm going to think of having corned beef long enough in advance to try corning my own brisket. But not this day. A quick trip to the store garnered a three pound packaged corned beef, some potatoes, turnips, carrots, and cabbage.

It was the epitome of an East Tennessee January day with no color to provide visual warmth or snow to add romance.

Back at the house I made a mug of cocoa, rinsed the brisket, and dumped it in my Dutch oven with assorted pickling spices and beer. It went on the stove until it simmered and then into the oven to slowly braise though the afternoon. Filling the house with a thick blanket of savory scent to ward heart and soul against the whisperings of wind and sleet.

Corned Beef and Cabbage
Serves 6 - 8.

1 3 - 4 lb corned beef brisket — trimmed of visible fat
1 bottle of beer
2 tsp mustard seed
2 tsp coriander seed
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp dill seed
1 tsp whole allspice
1 tsp juniper berries
1 bay leaf
3 carrots — peeled and cut into 1" lengths
2 lg. onions — cut into quarters
1/2 head cabbage — cut into quarters
3 lg. turnips — quartered
3 lg. waxy potatoes — cut in half

Heat oven to 325F.

Rinse corned beef and place in a large dutch oven. Add beer, 1 carrot, 1 onion, and all spices. Add enough water to barely cover brisket. Place over medium heat and bring to a vigorous simmer. Cover and place on lower-middle rack in oven.

Cook 1 hour, turn brisket over, and add enough additional water (if needed) to bring level half-way up meat. Repeat 1 hour later.

After 3 hours, remove from oven and remove brisket from broth and set on a plate. Strain out carrots and onions and discard. Add all remaining vegetables, place on stove over medium-low heat, cover, and cook for half an hour or until vegetables are fork tender. Remove from heat.

Slice brisket across the grain and add it back to vegetable mixture to warm up.

I like to serve this with a collection of mustards: Dijon, Polish, honey-mustard, whatever. Then I'll smear one slice of meat with Dijon, another with honey-mustard, and a potato with Polish. The various mustards give each bite a unique flavor.

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Corning Your Own Beef

Be Gorrah!



Corning beef has a long, if not particularly savory, history as a means of preserving meat. You can certainly just salt and dry beef much as hams are cured, but soaking the meat (brining it) in a salt solution became popular during the hay-day of the British Navy when it became a staple on ships. According to Salt: A World History (by Mark Kurlansky) the Irish became particularly known for their beef's longevity and quality. British, German, and French corned beef was regarded as being generally inferior and in fact the British product was called "salt junk" by sailors.. By the way, the "corn" referred to in corning is a reference to the kernels — corns — of salt used in making it.

The standard cut of meat for corning is the brisket, which is a tough muscle with a layer of fat down the center and over the top. Salt breaks down muscle fibers so corning it in a brine that will seep into the meat it a good start on tenderizing it. And salt, through the process of osmosis, also carries the brine's spices into the meat. The brisket is also particularly suitable to the long, slow stewing or braising that is the usual cooking technique.

The Irish became particularly known for their beef's longevity and quality. British, German, and French corned beef was regarded as being generally inferior.

I typically corn at least one brisket a year. I get a small (3 - 3.5 pound) cut and even though that's a lot of meat for one person, I don't mind the leftovers in the least — try corning your own beef for the best reuben you've ever eaten. However, I have this site on Cooking for Two that I manage and although there are lots of foods that are better leftover (corned beef among them) I at least attempt to pay lip service to not cooking enough food to feed four for a week. So I thought about how I might corn a smaller beef.

Buying a brisket and just corning half of it while freezing the rest for another day occurred to me, but right now my freezer is packed so I considered similar cuts of meat and immediately thought of flank steak. Although it comes from the opposite end of the cow, it's also from the belly and shares brisket's long, stringy loosely-spaced muscle fibers. I gave it a try.

It worked beautifully.

Flank steak is long and flat, without the bulk of brisket, so I rolled and tied the steak to produce a piece of meat more similar in shape to a bulky brisket. You can use a commercial pickling spice for flavoring, I always prefer making my own based on a recipe published in Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. Note that if you use the flank steak you still need to slice it across the grain which means slicing with the roll, not across it.

If you have the urge to try corning a beef but don't want to take on a big brisket, this is a great option.

You can find the recipe here and my recipe for corned beef and cabbage here.

By the way, I used to cook corned beef in a big pot on the stove top until a Jewish friend suggested using a Dutch oven in the oven instead. The difference was striking. This was many years ago and I don’t recall the specifics but I do remember that not only was the dish more evenly cooked but the flavors were more mellow. These days I use my 6.5 quart Le Crueset Dutch (or French) oven in the oven. Once hot, the cast iron delivers very uniform and gentle heat throughout the cooking process. I now cook all braises and stews in cast iron in the oven.

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Italian Roast Beef Sandwich

Collections



I have three collections that I've pursued over the years with relatively little vigor — meaning lackadaisically. The first was a collection of boxes that I collected prior to adulthood. I was never interested in ordinary boxes so my collection only has 10 members and my favorite is the first, a box handmade and intricately carved with a geometric motif by my father's father, a man who died before I was born.

During my early adult years I collected hats, a collection that began with a beret I bought when I was around 13 and most recently with my acquisition of a straw cap (you know the kind, the sort of things people driving sports cars wear, but made of straw instead of tweed). My most prized item in that collection is a very old straw boater.

I have one more thing I've collected with some assiduousness over the past 10 years: sandwiches.

I also have around 25 cork screws. Some old, some new; some were gifts, some I purchased in my travels; some quite efficient, some almost worthless. All are distinctive except for three that are nearly identical. I purchased one of those similar cork screws and then was given the other two within the next four months — an odd coincidence.

But I have one more thing I've collected with some assiduousness over the past 10 years: sandwiches.

No, they aren't arranged in a display case or strewn artfully around my house. Instead most of them are displayed in this blog. I'm particularly interested in sandwiches associated with a particular place or culture. So while I consider the basic hamburger/cheese-burger a member of the collection (as a supremely American cultural icon) most other burgers don't count. And although the ham sandwich is the most popular sandwich in America and has been since at least 1970 there is no particular format considered Kosher — figuratively speaking.

I do consider the Muffaletta a member of my collection as well as the Rueben, Bahn Mi, Cubano, a prosciutto panini, and the grilled cheese. In fact, last year I won a prize for my grilled cheese sandwich, beating out dozens of imaginative competitors by concentrating on getting the details right on a basic cheddar-and-white-bread version.

Before adding a sandwich to my "collection" I do as much research on it as I can, trying to home in on all the common elements. Then I put together a recipe and make it. The initial recipe gets tweaked until I'm happy with it. So here I present the latest addition to my collection: the Chicago Italian Roast Beef. This sandwich is awesome.

Italian Roast Beef Sandwich
Makes 10.

3 lb. rump roast*
4 c beef stock or broth**
Dried Italian herb mix
Garlic powder
Onion Powder
Salt and pepper
10 hoagie rolls***
Gardiniere (Italian pickled salad)

Heat oven to 300F.

Generously season the roast with herbs, garlic and onion powders, and salt and pepper. Allow the seasoned roast to warm on the counter for two hours.

Pour stock into a medium roasting pan and bring to a boil on the stove. Then place a rack over the pan (I used a cooling rack), place the roast on the rack, and set in the middle of the oven. (Note: You want the roast above the jus, not resting in it.

Cook for about 3 hours until the internal temp is 130F. This may seem like a long time (and do keep an eye on the roast's temperature) but the liquid below the roast will slow the cooking. You're shooting for a medium-rare roast.

Let the roast cool, then refrigerate for at least four hours or, better, overnight. Store the jus separately.

Skim any fat off the jus and pour it into the roasting pan. Bring to a boil over high heat and reduce to about 2 cups. Taste and adjust seasoning. Reduce heat to a simmer.

Cut hoagie rolls in half — but not all the way through, leave a hinge. Slice roast extremely thin (a circular meat slicer is your best tool for this job, but I just use a very sharp carving knife) and add to jus for about 2 minutes — just to warm through. Spoon about 4 ounces of meat with plenty of jus onto each roll then top with gardiniere. Serve with plenty of paper towels and the rest of the jus for dipping.

*Although rump roast is the most common choice, I used chuck with great success.

**I had homemade stock in my freezer and used that, but it's equally authentic, perhaps more so, to use bouillon cubes and when I tasted the juice I'd made I ended up adding a tablespoon of Better than Bouillon beef base to the mix.

***Look for rolls that are somewhat chewy (meaning well-developed gluten) or the rolls will simply dissolve in the juice. In fact, in some joints in Chicago they dip the whole roll in the juice before adding the meat.

Try this sandwich with...
Tomato/Garlic Soup
Italian Apple Cake

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | main dish | sandwich | beef

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Beef Stew

Hearty Fare

Beef stew is an American classic. A cheap cut of meat (chuck roast is best) is cut into chunks, dredged in flour then browned. Some liquid is added, a few vegetables are tossed in and voila (or "viola," as my buddies and I used to say) supper in a pot. This version is pretty standard (albeit with a few key tricks) and although it requires time, it's way easy. As with so many of the dishes featured on Cooking for Two, it freezes well thus saving you the effort of cooking at some future date and, again like many dishes here, it's better on the second day.

Recipe here...

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | cooking for two | main dish | beef | stew

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Standing Rib Roast

Fundamentals



When I was editing programming magazines I sometimes had writers object to an assignment as redundant: "Lots of people have already explained a hash sort, why should I reinvent the wheel?" or, "Everyone knows how to do phonetic parsing, it doesn't make sense to do it again." To which my response was, "Trust me, know one has ever explained it the way you can and there are programmers — experienced programmers — who will learn some new take or suddenly gain an insight they were missing when they read your article."

I told them this knowing the article I'd written that received the most response from readers was on a topic computer science majors studied in their first year. And yet the e-mails said things like, "I'd forgotten that algorithm and it's perfect for a project I'm working on." and, "I never really understood why x and y were swapped, now I do." In short, I'd made something old, new again and given it my own spin. And that's why I'm addressing the King of Roasts — a prime rib.

Nomenclature

Enzymic action in the presence of oxygen breaks down muscle fibers (making the roast more tender) and creates more complex flavors (especially glutamates — umami).

There are two sources to the name "prime rib" and in most cases they don't apply to what we cook at home. The primary source is that the beef rib is known as a "primal" cut because it's a fundamental devision of an animal. The ribs from the center section of ribs are the rib primal cut. This cut typically includes 6 - 7 ribs, weighs around 25 pounds, and will serve 12 - 15 people. This large primal rib cut is then often divided into a large end and small end. These are what we find at the store and they are not, by this definition, "prime ribs."

The other source of the name is from the Prime grade. This is the highest grade of beef, well-marbled with fat, and exceptionally tender. You can no longer find prime grade beef in most stores, in fact even choice is getting hard to find. Nevertheless, a Prime grade, well-aged primal rib roast is carnivore heaven.

Given the above, what you can buy in the standard Safeway, Kroger, and even Whole Foods is a standing rib roast — a smaller, lesser-grade roast. Someday you should save up and get a genuine, aged Prime-grade rib roast mail-order just to find out what the fuss is about, but a 3 pound roast from Lobels will set you back almost $150 or about $25/person. And I am serious, if you love beef one day you should try this meat.

However, even if you head down to the supermarket for a Select-grade roast, make the effort to select one with as much marbling in the meat as you can find. The fat strewn through the muscle adds flavor, mouth-feel, and juiciness. I recommend at least a three-rib roast, although I have had some success with a two-rib, large-end roast. But I suggest the larger roast because I recommend aging it. This will improve both it's flavor and tenderness but will reduce the servings by one. (Note: There is some risk here of food poisoning, how much I have no way of determining. The US Government recommends cooking eveything to 160F. It's your call.)

Aging the Roast
Dry-aging beef accomplishes two things. First, some of the water in the roast's juices evaporate. This concentrates flavors just as reducing wine enhances its flavors. Second, enzymic action in the presence of oxygen breaks down muscle fibers (making the roast more tender) and creates more complex flavors (especially glutamates - umami).

Pick up the roast seven days before you plan to cook it. Choose a roast with good marbling and, a thick layer of fat (at least 1/4-inch) over the flesh. If you're lucky enough to have access to a real butcher (even at a supermarket) or to a local supplier you can request this — just be sure to give them two to three weeks warning before you plan to pick it up.

Place the roast on a rack in tray (to promote air circulation and catch any drips) on the lowest shelf in your refrigerator. But avoid the coldest corner which can freeze the roast and prevent aging. Do NOT Cover or wrap the roast. It it's wrapped it will spoil.

Let it sit, just sit, for five to seven days.

Remove from fridge and using a very sharp knife trim off the dried fat and flesh from the meat sides — don't worry about the rib side. And don’t be overly concerned about a pristine appearance with no spot of slight grey flesh or slightly brown fat. By the time it's those minor imperfections will disappear.

Cooking
Restaurants that specialize in "prime rib" typically have special ovens to cook the roasts in. The ovens are large enough to contain several primal ribs at once and are geared toward very slow cooking.

The roast is first blasted with high heat to both begin browning the meat and to kill any surface bacteria. Then they are slowly cooked, sometimes over as much as eight hours, to assure the entire roast is cooked to a uniform rare. Then if someone orders medium rare, medium, or (God forbid) well-done the meat is sliced off the bone and quickly heated to 135, 145, or 160 degrees. You can do this at home.

Recipe
This is as basic a recipe as you can imagine, but if you've followed the steps above you already created a great deal of complex flavor. Don’t futz with the work you've already done. Take it easy.

1 3-rib standing roast
3 lg cloves garlic — smashed
Kosher salt
Black pepper
2 tsp ground rosemary
3 tbsp olive oil

Rub the roast all over with the smashed garlic. Salt generously and warm, covered with plastic, on the counter for 2 hours.

Heat oven to 225F. Season roast with pepper and rosemary.

Heat olive oil in a large, heavy roasting pan over medium high heat. Brown roast on all sides, finishing bone-side down.

Place in lower third of oven and cook until center of roast reads 120F for rare or 135F for medium rare according to an instant read or probe thermometer — 3 to 4 hours. Remove from oven, tent with foil, and rest 20 minutes. There will be almost no carryover cooking, but the juices will redistribute.

Cut roast from ribs, slice, and serve.

I'll leave it to you to decide on sauce or no sauce and what to do with the goodness left in the bottom of the roasting pan. But I like tossing some par-boiled potatoes and carrots into the roasting pan and sticking the pan back in the oven at 400F while I make a port wine demi-glace to grace the meat.

Try this roast with...
Potatoes Savoyarde
Leeks with Anchovy Butter
Cranberry Mousse

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | main dish | beef

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SG Archives:Beef Short Ribs

Keep it Simple



So far we’ve had an unseasonably warm and dry fall and I'm getting fed up with it. There are soups and stews and casseroles and roasts to make that can't really be enjoyed properly when it's a bright, clear sunny 78F outside. I find myself envying the flooding in New Hampshire and the snow storms in Colorado. The weather may be bad but the food makes up for it.

Nevertheless, when I was at the farmers' market last week Valley Farms (a local farm) had beef short ribs on special so I bought some despite the mild weather. Monday night I braised them.

Dr. Biggles recommended ale and I decided to take his advice and picked up a bottle of Brown Sheep ale.

The ribs were pretty fatty so I trimmed off most of the fat (which still left a lot) then I pulled out my Le Crueset dutch oven. This is the pot I bought last spring and have barely used so far. It weighs about 150 pounds and holds around six gallons -- at least it seems so. Though it hasn't seen much use to date, that's because it's a pot for stews and braises and soups and summer is not its season. Now it can make up for lost time.

I started by cooking about three strips of thick smoked bacon. Setting the bacon aside, I generously seasoned the ribs, browned them in the bacon fat, and put them aside. A couple of sliced onions several carrots and celery stalks went into the pot next to brown.

In thinking about the ribs I'd gone back and forth about the braising liquid -- wine or beer. Dr. Biggles recommended ale and I decided to take his advice and picked up a bottle of Brown Sheep ale (an English ale). The ale went into the pot to deglaze it, then the ribs went back in along with some homemade beef stock. I decided against adding any herbs or seasonings beyond the aromatics I'd browned and salt and pepper.

With all the ingredients in place, I brought the pot to a simmer and then put it in a 300F oven for three hours.

Obviously I needed something starchy to soak up and complement the broth and I settled on polenta. To round out the meal, I cooked up a mess (that's the proper Southern term for "a bunch of") of collards seasoned with curry powder. I learned in South Carolina that curry really complements collards.

Even though the weather refused to cooperate and remained warm and pleasant, the meal was delicious and the grass-fed beef had a wonderful meaty flavor. I was right to keep the ingredients simple.

Try these short ribs with...
Braised Red Cabbage
Roasted Rutabaga
Fudge Brownies

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | main dish | beef | braise

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SG Archives: Meatloaf

Just Like Mom's



The urge to nostalgia seems universal. We are most aware of it when nostalgia for some aspect of our past becomes fashionable again as with automobiles like the Ford Thunderbird and Chrysler PT Cruiser. And whoever thought we'd see bell bottoms again? (Thank heavens paisley hasn't come back.)

Rituals and traditions are also nostalgia in disguise. The Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas Mass, even birthday parties reflect this desire to reconnect with the past. Lately, diners and diner food have become retro chic. My inclination is to celebrate this effort to taste again the foods we grew up with — except that too often they're that in name only.

The Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas Mass, even birthday parties reflect this desire to reconnect with the past.

Baked whole-wheat rigatoni with gorgonzola cream sauce may be very good, but it's not mac-n-cheese. Avocados, bean sprouts, and turkey pastrami on five grain bread is not a reuben. And barley has no place in meatloaf.

I do confess to having tried a lot of variations in meatloaf over the years adding grated carrots or glazing with plum sauce or using rice for the filler. But the only variation from my mother's meatloaf that has become common in my recipe is making a free-form loaf and wrapping it in bacon. Well, and I usually skip the ketchup glaze, but then, so did my mother. And isn't that the ultimate description of a nostalgic dish: Just like Mom used to make.

Meatloaf
Serves 4.

3/4 lb ground beef
1/4 lb ground pork
1 tsp oil
1/2 md onion — chopped
1 egg
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp ground mustard
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp tobasco
1/4 c milk
2/3 c bread crumbs
8 - 10 slices bacon

Heat oven to 350F. Heat oil in a skillet and saute onion until softened. Set aside to cool.

Put meat, bread crumbs, parsley, and onions in a large bowl. In a small bowl mix together all moist ingredients and seasonings. Add to meat mixture and mix thoroughly, being careful, however, not to overwork.

Shape mixture into a loaf and wrap in bacon slices. Cook on a broiler pan for about 1 hour or until center registers 150F. Allow to rest at least 20 minutes before slicing.

Try this Meatloaf with...
Horseradish Mashed Potatoes
Okra
Braised Brussles Sprouts

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | meatloaf | main dish | beef

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SG Archive: Swedish Meatballs

Eating Groovy



When I was a kid my parents entertained fairly often having dinner parties and cocktail parties. For a while they had a big garden party (not that we had what's usually meant by "garden") every summer and would invite as many as 50 guests.

With big parties the popular serving style of the era was the smorgasbord — a buffet where people would serve themselves and eat from trays on their laps. This was the time when aspic and crescent rolls were featured on every menu. It was also the time when Swedish Meatballs swimming in a wine sauce and served in a chafing dish were considered the last word in elegance.

It was the time when Swedish Meatballs swimming in a wine sauce and served in a chafing dish were considered the last word in elegance.

I haven't had a Swedish meatball since those days and never had more than one or two at a time back then (they were "for the guests"). So are they as good as I remembered? Or were my memories a fiction of a child's palate and imagined elegance?

Swedish Meatballs
Serves 6.

Meatballs:
1 1/2 lb ground chuck
1/2 lb ground pork
1 sm onion — finely minced
2 tsp oil
1 c fresh bread crumbs
2 egg lightly beaten
1/2 c beef broth
2 tbsp minced fresh dill
2 tbsp fresh thyme
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper to taste
Sauce:
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
2 c beef stock
1 tbsp fresh thyme
1/3 c red wine
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oven to 450F.

Sweat onion in oil until translucent. Mix all meatball ingredients together. Form mixture into 1" - 1.5" balls and arrange on a foil-covered baking sheet.

Bake for 12 - 15 minutes.

Melt butter in a 10" skillet over medium low heat. Whisk in flour and cook for five minutes, stirring frequently. Add beef stock and thyme and increase heat to medium. Continue stirring until sauce thickens. Stir in wine and salt and pepper to taste.

Reduce heat to medium low, add meatballs, and warm thoroughly.

Serve meatballs over buttered egg noodles seasoned with minced fresh dill.

And yes, they are pretty good — even in this century.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | beef | main dish | meatballs

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Mexican Pot Roast

Deeply, Darkly, Delicious



I'm not sure what prompted this Mexican Pot Roast. Although I like Mexican food very much, I don’t make it very often, but as I was trying to decide how to cook a chuck roast I'd bought this recipe leapt to mind and, in my mind's mouth, it tasted absolutely delicious. So of course I had to make it. I also decided to steal a couple of licks from other Mexican/Southwestern dishes and shredded the beef before serving it on corn tortillas.

Recipe here...

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | cooking for two | beef | main dish | mexican

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Ruby's Mushroom Burger

Still Im gonna miss you...



In 1970 (give or take a year or two) a student at the University of Tennessee named Sandy Beall and two of his buddies open a restaurant off-campus that they named Ruby Tuesday. Ruby's great claim to fame in the beginning was it's burgers, which were completely different from anything else around. For one thing, they were quite thick (around 3/4") and hand formed. For another they were served as open-faced sandwiches on English muffins instead of hamburger buns. And lastly, they had sauces.

As I recall they offered four different burgers and my two favorites were the bacon cheddar burger (which featured a sharp, cheddar sauce akin to Welsh rabbit) and the mushroom burger which was covered with a mushroom/wine sauce. I only ate at the original restaurant a couple of times, but the second restaurant they opened was in the same strip center as the Pier 1 Imports where I worked and I ate in that one frequently.

Ruby's great claim to fame in the beginning was it's burgers, which were completely different from anything else around.

As Ruby Tuesday began it's expansion, Beall would come into Pier 1 with his designer whenever they opened a new store. By this time I was managing the Pier 1 and those were red letter days — or, perhaps more accurately, black letter days because they'd drop $3000 in an hour or so, which made my month.

It's hard to believe now that Ruby's was an unusual restaurant back then, but it was. It was an up-scale place that served up-scale burgers. I still eat at a Ruby's every couple of years or so and the last time I was in there I was remembering how the company started and those burgers, so I had no choice but to try to recreate one and I went for the mushroom burger.

Burger with Mushroom/Wine Sauce
Serves 4.

Burger:
1/2 lb chuck — cut into 1" pieces and partially frozen
1/2 lb sirloin — cut into 1" pieces and partially frozen
4 oz beef fat — cut into 1" pieces and partially frozen
1 tsp. soy sauce
2 tsp. tomato paste
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
2 English muffins (I like the
Sauce:
1/2 lb mushrooms — sliced
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 sm shallot, minced
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 c red wine
1/2 c beef stock
1 tsp arrowroot mixed with 2 tbsp water
Salt and pepper to taste

Burger:
Combine chuck, sirloin, and fat (fat can be trimmed from a chuck steak or roast) and grind. Mix in all remaining burger ingredients, form into four burgers, and refrigerate, covered, for an hour to let flavors combine.

Build a two-level fire in your grill.

Sauce:
Heat a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Add mushrooms to the dry skillet and sprinkle with a generous pinch of salt. Cook until mushrooms begin to give up their liquid. Increase the heat to medium high and cook until mushrooms being to brown. Stir in butter, shallots, and thyme and cook another 1 1/2 to 2 minutes.

Add wine to pan and reduce by half. Add stock and reduce liquid by half. Mix arrowroot with a couple of tablespoons of water. Stir in arrowroot slurry and cook until thickened. Remove from heat and keep warm while you cook the burgers.

Try this Mushroom Burger with...
French Fries
Potato Salad
Cookies

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | hamburger | sandwich | beef | main dish

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Braciole

Harvesting Ideas



Sometimes an idea infiltrates your consciousness. Starting like an inconspicuous tuft of green in a stone wall it begins to climb spreading shoots and runners until one day you notice it as though it sprang overnight to cover the entire collection of stones. This is how braciole grew in my mind.

I first heard of it on a cooking show but, involved with something else, I wasn't really watching. I heard the name, noticed a couple of the ingredients, and looked up at the end to catch a glimpse of the finished dish. That was around nine months ago and during the time the idea of braciole had grown until it was something I had to fix.

I suspected the rolling, which would in effect change it from a steak to a roast, would improve results. I was right.

Braciole is not a particularly complicated or elegant dish. It's simply a piece of meat — most often beef or veal and sometimes pork — wrapped around a stuffing and then braised. Sometimes it's made using scaloppini in individual portions and sometimes it's prepared as a large roast. I had guests coming for dinner last weekend and decided it was time to harvest.

I looked up a dozen or more recipes in books I had and on the Web. I began my search with a couple of prejudices that had already formed in my mind. First, I wanted to do a roast and not individual rolls. Second, the sauce should be based on fresh tomatoes (that's one reason I hadn't already made it). Eventually I put together a recipe.

For the meat I decided on round steak. This isn't a cut I use often. It has a good flavor — nice and beefy — but as a working muscle it's tough. Furthermore, it has little fat to lubricate and ameliorate the tough fibers and because it's a steak and not a roast, slow cooking typically just wrings what juice it does have out of it. But I suspected the rolling, which would in effect change it from a steak to a roast, would improve results. I was right.

The meal and the braciole were a success. The meat was reasonably tender and richly flavored with a luscious broth (serve with plenty of bread for sopping).

Braciole
Serves 6.

2 lb round steak
3 lg ripe tomatoes — cut into chunks, not seeded
5 lg cloves garlic — coarsely chopped
3 tbsp olive oil
3/4 c finely chopped mixed fresh herbs — thyme, oregano, parsley, lavender, sage
1/2 c grated pecorino romano
1/2 c red wine
4 - 6 thin slices prosciutto

Heat oven to 350F.

Pound round steak to 1/2" thick. Season with salt and pepper. Line with prosciutto, then sprinkle with 1/2 cup mixed herbs. Sprinkle with pecorino. Roll up and tie with twine.

Heat oil over medium heat in a large dutch oven. Add roast and brown on all sides. Add wine and reduce, scraping up fond. Add tomatoes, garlic, and remaining herbs. Cover and place in oven. Cook for 2 hours, checking one or twice to make sure there's plenty of liquid in the pot. (Add beef broth is you need to replenish liquid.)

Remove roast from broth and allow to rest for minutes before removing twine and carving.

Try Braciole with...
Cece Fritos
Vidalia Artichoke Tart
Italian Apple Cake

And here's another take on Braciole.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | main dish | beef | italian

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Paprikás with Beef

Hungarian Notions



Recently a fellow named Charles Simonyi returned from his second trip to the space station. Simonyi isn't an astronaut per se, he's a space tourist with lots and lots of money (his two trips cost him $65 million dollars). Although I don't know Simonyi I know of him. He's a former Microsoft engineer who developed something called (in honor of his natal land) "Hungarian Notation." This is a particular way of identifying variables in a computer program. It's a supremely bad idea, but clearly he's been well-rewarded for it.

Hungarian Notation is a convention for naming variables in a computer program. For instance, a number may be designated as an integer, a long integer, or a floating point number. Doesn't sound too bad until you're handed a one million line program and asked to change a particular integer and all uses of it to a floating point number. If you fail to change even a single case the program will fail - unpredictably. And people marvel at Microsoft's quality control issues (and by the way, Macintosh has it's own problems).

Paprikas is a generic name for a Hungarian stew featuring paprika and sour cream but I always add a healthy dose of fresh dill to my paprikas.

But I'm a cook now and the Hungarian's notions about variable notation are no longer something I have to deal with. Instead I deal with my own notions about what tastes good and how to cook it. So the other day I had a notion for some Beef Parpikas. Paprikas is a generic name for a Hungarian stew featuring paprika and sour cream but I always add a healthy dose of fresh dill to my paprikas

Beef Paprikas
Serves 6.

2 lb chuck steak - cut into 3/4" cubes
5 tbsp olive oil - separated
1/2 lb mushrooms - sliced
1 onion - diced
1 sm ripe bell pepper - cut into 1/2" x 2" strips
2 cloves garlic - sliced
1 c beef stock
1/3 c white wine
1 tbsp tomato sauce
2 tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika
1 tbsp hot Hungarian paprika
salt and pepper
1/4 c minced fresh dill
1 c sour cream

Liberally beef with salt and pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Brown 1/2 of beef and reserve on a plate. Add another tablespoon of oil and brown remaining beef. Reserve.

Add another tablespoon of oil and sauté mushrooms until they begin to brown. Add onions and peppers and cook until onion is translucent. Add garlic and cook another minute.

Add white wine to pot and reduce, scraping up the browned bits. Return beef to the pot along with beef stock, paprika, and tomato sauce. Bring to a simmer, cover, and reduce heat to low - do not allow to boil. Cook at a medium simmer for one hour. Stir in dill and serve over buttered egg noodles with a dollop of sour cream.

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Pepper Steak

A Stir-fry Staple



When I was a kid my mother made pepper steak on a regular basis. She'd use a round steak and cook it too hot and too fast so it was always tough as could be - but it tasted mighty good. I hadn't thought of it in years until a few days ago. Sirloin steak is much more tender than round steak, and because the recipe only calls for 1/2 pound for two people it's pretty cheap. Don't be tempted to add more meat, the steak is only one ingredient. Recipe here...

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | cooking for two | main dish | beef | asian

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Toutièrre

Christmas Dinner



My parents won't drive at night, so if I want to have them over to my place for a meal it has to be lunch and on most holidays I end up going to their house. That's fine except it usually means I can only cook one or two things and they either have to be transportable or simple enough to prepare in an hour. So when I learned my sister was coming down for Christmas I insisted we have Christmas dinner here - driving at night isn't a problem for her so she could bring the folks.

We began our meal with champagne, a smoked trout and cheese spread, and a mushroom pâte my mother had made — and we opened gifts. It was a significantly bookish year gift-wise. But given we're all fanatic readers that worked. (Dad gave me Fearnley-Whittingstall's Meat, which has been on my list for ages.) Then we had Christmas dinner.

Like everyone else, money is really tight for me right now so roast goose or prime rib were out.

Like everyone else, money is really tight for me right now so roast goose or prime rib were out. But this wasn't a huge problem as I've been wanting to make a traditional French Canadian (Quebecois) Christmas dish — Toutièrre. This is a savory meat pie made of pork and beef and it's not only extraordinarily good, but as you can see in the photo above it makes an impressive, albeit rustic, presentation.

To accompany it I sautéed kale with garlic and pork confit and made cauliflower puree. I've done cauliflower puree before but I ran across a recipe on Serious Eats that added shredded Parmigiano to the mix. For me, this was the surprise star. The cheese was an extraordinarily good complement to the cauliflower.

Inevitably, dessert was Bourbon Cake.

Tourtièrre
Serves 8 - 10.

pastry (see below)
1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground pork
1 lg onion — diced
3 cloves garlic — minced
2 tbls bacon grease or vegetable oil
1 1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 c beef stock
3 ea medium potatoes — peeled and quartered
salt and pepper
1 ea egg
1 tsp milk

Make pastry and refrigerate (see below).

Boil potatoes until fork tender. Drain and cool.

Heat bacon grease or oil over medium high heat. Add beef, pork, onion, and garlic. Season with salt, pepper, and allspice. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring to cook evenly. Add beef broth, reduce heat, cover, and simmer 10 minutes. Cool. Drain liquid and reserve.

Heat oven to 400F.

In a bowl, coarsely crumble potatoes with a fork and add meat mixture. Stir in enough of the reserved broth to thoroughly moisten mixture but no more.

Remove pastry from refrigerator and allow to warm up until top edges are pliable -- about 10 minutes. Fill pastry shell to within 1/2" of top. Moisten edges and lay on top crust and press to seal. Beat together egg and milk and brush pastry. Cut several slits in top and bake in middle of oven for 40 minutes or until top is golden brown.

Pastry

You can substitute shortening for the lard if you wish, but the lard really works in this recipe.

2 1/2 c flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
3/4 c cold lard
1/2 c cold butter
5 tbsp ice water

Thoroughly mix flour, salt, and pepper in a large bowl.

Add the lard and break up with your fingers until the mixture is the consistency of a coarse corn meal.

Add water, a tablespoon at a time, until mixture clumps together. Use your hands to mix in the water.

Form two balls from the dough, one a bit larger than the other. Press the larger ball flat on a floured work surface and roll it out to form a circle. Line the inside of a 9" springform pan. Cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate.

Roll out second ball and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate.

On this occasion I made a mushroom sauce using red wine and veal demi-glace to go on the pie, but it isn't necessary.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | main dish | pot pie | savory pie | beef | pork

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Beef Short Ribs

Keeping It Short



So far we’ve had an unseasonably warm and dry fall and I'm getting fed up with it. There are soups and stews and casseroles and roasts to make that can't really be enjoyed properly when it's a bright, clear sunny 78F outside. I find myself envying the flooding in New Hampshire and the snow storms in Colorado. The weather may be bad but the food makes up for it.

Nevertheless, when I was at the farmers' market last week Valley Farms (a local farm) had beef short ribs on special so I bought some despite the mild weather. Monday night I braised them.

I decided against adding any herbs or seasonings beyond the aromatics I'd browned and salt and pepper

The ribs were pretty fatty so I trimmed off most of the fat (which still left a lot) then I pulled out my Le Crueset dutch oven. This is the pot I bought last spring and have barely used so far. It weighs about 150 pounds and holds around six gallons -- at least it seems so. Though it hasn't seen much use to date, that's because it's a pot for stews and braises and soups and summer is not its season. Now it can make up for lost time.

I started by cooking about three strips of thick smoked bacon. Setting the bacon aside, I generously seasoned the ribs, browned them in the bacon fat, and put them aside. A couple of sliced onions several carrots and celery stalks went into the pot next to brown.

In thinking about the ribs I'd gone back and forth about the braising liquid — wine or beer. Dr. Biggles recommended ale and I decided to take his advice and picked up a bottle of Brown Sheep ale (an English ale). The ale went into the pot to deglaze it, then the ribs went back in along with some homemade beef stock. I decided against adding any herbs or seasonings beyond the aromatics I'd browned and salt and pepper.

With all the ingredients in place, I brought the pot to a simmer and then put it in a 300F oven for three hours.

Obviously I needed something starchy to soak up and complement the broth and I settled on polenta. To round out the meal, I cooked up a mess (that's the proper Southern term for "a bunch of") of collards seasons with curry powder. I learned in South Carolina that curry really complements collards.

Even though the weather refused to cooperate and remained warm and pleasant, the meal was delicious and the grass-fed beef had a wonderful meaty flavor. I was right to keep the ingredients simple.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | beef | short ribs | braise | main dish

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Beef Stroganoff

From Russia with Love



A couple of weeks back I got an email from the PR agency representing Golden Gourmet Mushrooms asking if I was interested in sampling their products. Being a mushroom lover I leapt at the chance and shortly thereafter received a box containing four kinds of mushrooms I'd never eaten before: Maitake, White and Brown Beech, and King Trumpet. I started planning my own private mushroom festival, and then developed a staph infection (nothing to do with the mushrooms which I hadn't even opened) and spent the next week in the hospital totally zoned out on massive doses of IV antibiotics. Fortunately there was a brief period of lucidity before the drugs kicked in and I thought to tell my mother to grab the mushrooms before they went bad.

When I returned home a week later the mushrooms she didn't take were still good. In fact one package of White Beech mushrooms was good three weeks after I received them. I have never, in my entire life, seen mushrooms keep for such a long period of time. However, I didn't get to try everything I'd been sent and the company has been kind enough to send me another sampler - so I'm back to planning my mushroom festival again. In the meantime, though, I did try the White and Brown Beech mushrooms both raw and in two dishes. They have an oddly sweet flavor raw and would be excellent in a salad, but they cook to that savory goodness we all associate with mushrooms.

I made a sausage and mushroom pilaf with one batch and Beef Stroganoff with another. I pan on trying them in my Mushroom Bisque and a Mushroom Strudel, but I thought I'd share my recipe for stroganoff now. It doesn't require the mushrooms from Golden Gourmet, but they work beautifully and I really like their appearance in the dish.

Beef Stroganoff
Serves 6.

1 1/2 lb sirloin steak
2 - 3 tbsp vegetable oil
Salt and pepper
1/2 sm onion - diced
1 lb mushrooms - halved or quartered if using white button mushrooms
2 tsp dried tarragon or 2 tbsp minced fresh
1 tsp dried dill or 1 tbsp minced fresh
1 c red wine
1/2 c water
1 tbsp veal demiglace
1 1/2 c sour cream
1 lb egg noodles

Freeze steak for 1 1/2 hours, then slice vey thin across the grain. Season with salt and pepper.

Cook noodles according to package directions. When done, drain and add butter and salt to taste. Meanwhile…

Heat oil in a large, sauté pan over medium-high. Quickly brown steak in two or three batches, reserving browned meat on a plate.

Reduce heat to medium. add a bit more oil if needed and cook onions, stirring frequently, for 4 minutes. Add mushrooms and sprinkle with salt. Cook another 4 minutes, stirring. Increase heat to medium-high, add wine and herbs and reduce to 1/2 cup. Add water, demiglace (stirring to dissolve), and steak and reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes.

Stir in sour cream and serve over noodles.

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Steak & Guinness Pie

A Pint and a Pie



I recently taught a class on English Pub Grub. In researching recipes for it I discovered that both hamburgers and, of all things, Buffalo Wings are standard pub fare these days as are the more expected Cornish Pasties and Fish and Chips. I wasn't surprised to find a number of Indian dishes on the menus — the British have become notorious for their love of Indian.

I started the class with Chicken Tikka Masala, which some claim is now the English National Dish. I don't know if that's true, but I did find it on several menus and it seemed like a good starter.

The pièce de resistance was the Steak and Guinness Pie.

Bangers and Mash is one of the more famous pub dishes, and although I couldn't find genuine bangers here in Knoxville some research showed that bangers are not particularly different from a mild Southern country sausage so I used country link sausage. Then I added horseradish to the mash (as a good English friend had taught me) and added onion gravy. I also made beer and cheddar soup at the suggestion of another British friend.

But the pièce de resistance was the Steak and Guinness Pie. Traditionally the dish is made in an ordinary pastry crust as a true pie or individual pies. But I took a note from Jamie Oliver and topped it with puff pastry. I'm going to have to make this again.

Steak & Guinness Pie
Serves 6.

1 lb sirloin steak — cut into 1/2-inch cubes
3 - 4 tbsp vegetable oil
1/4 c all-purpose flour
1 lg onion — cut into large dice
2 md carrots — peeled and cut into 1/4" rounds
1 lg stalk celery — cut into 1/4" half rounds
1 lg parsnip — peeled and cut into 1/4" rounds
1 tsp dried thyme
12 oz. Guinness
15 oz. can chopped tomatoes, drained (reserve liquid)
Salt and pepper
1 pkg puff pastry
1 egg

Generously season meat with salt and pepper, then toss with flour to coat.

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Brown meat in two batches, reserving browned meat on a plate and adding a bit more oil if needed.

Reduce heat to medium and add more oil if needed. Add and onions and cook, stirring frequently, until onions are translucent. Add carrots, celery, parsnips, and thyme. Cook, stirring frequently for five minutes. Add any remaining flour and cook another 2 minutes, stirring. Increase heat to high, add Guinness, and bring to a boil, deglazing pan, then add tomatoes and return meat to pan. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer gently for 30 minutes. If sauce is too thick add reserved tomato juice or water.

Cool filling to at least room temperature to minimize the pastry becoming soggy — better if you can chill it. And better yet if the filling can be refrigerated overnight, which allows the flavors to thoroughly meld.

Heat oven to 400F. Thaw pastry according to package directions.

Scoop the filling into a 2 quart casserole dish. Beat egg and brush edges of casserole with egg. Place the pastry over the dish, it should overlap, and lightly press edges to seal to casserole. Brush pastry with remaining egg and cut a couple of slits in the top to vent.

Bake in center of oven until the pastry is browned — about 40 minutes.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | pub food | casserole | english | pot pie | beef | main dish

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Cheap Roast Beef

Making the Best of a Cheap Roast



This is an article I've been wanting to publish for a few years. But it's huge for something posted on the Web so bear with me.

Pause for a moment and look at the photo above. Notice that the meat is a perfect reddish-pink (medium rare) from the center all the way to the edges. Unlike most roasts it isn't grayer (more well done) towards the outside. It is perfectly cooked from edge to center. What you can't see in that photo is that it also has a deeply-browned, flavorful crust. You also can't see that it cost me $3.99 a pound at the grocers.

If you're a beef eater there is little to beat the flavor of a prime rib roast.

If you're a beef eater there is little to beat the flavor of a prime rib roast. The best rib roasts are prime-grade beef and are dry-aged for 20 or more days. The best roasts are well-marbled with fat, juicy, fork-tender, and packed with beef flavor. But at $25 - $30 a pound, bone-in, this is not an everyday meal. You may be able to find a choice-grade rib roast, un-aged, for as little as $10 - $12 a pound. Still not cheap and certainly not as good with poor marbling, less juice, requiring a knife to cut, and a bit bland. Turn to a cheap supermarket roast like rump or bottom round and the eating experience is far poorer - hardly worth while. Such low-end roasts tend to be both bland and tough however they're cooked.

But there are two tricks you can employ on a cheap rump or bottom roast to drastically improve the experience: aging and slow-roasting.

Aging Beef

People have been aging beef (and other meats) for hundreds of years. Typically a side of beef is hung in a cooler (originally an ice house or even spring house) for around 20 days. During this time two things occur. First, a dried crust of meat forms on the outside of the meat. This crust keeps bacteria from growing (because it's too dry for bacteria to survive - the low temperature also inhibits bacteria) and it inhibits moisture loss.

As the meat ages, natural enzymes in the meat alter both the chemical and physical structure of the meat resulting in a more flavorful and more tender roast. You sometimes run across meat advertised as "wet-aged" that has been vacuum-sealed in plastic before aging. This does eliminate moisture loss and waste from drying, but some oxygen is necessary to promote the enzymatic action that gives such a big boost to flavor and tenderness so, although wet-aging does help, it doesn't help much.

The drawback to dry-aging is waste. First, you lose some volume in the form of water that evaporates, this can translate to as much as a 15 percent reduction in weight. Second, the dried flesh on the outside needs to be cut off and discarded resulting in another 15 percent reduction in weight. (Note: the larger the roast you begin with, the less waste you'll have by percentage.) This waste increases the cost per pound of the finished roast. However, you will still spend less than you would for a non-aged rib roast and with proper cooking you'll end up with almost as good a result.

Slow-roasting

Roasting is the process of applying indirect heat to the outside of a roast and having the heat conducted, by the meat, into its interior. To demonstrate this process, hold a knife about an inch from the end of the blade and heat the tip in a candle flame. Even though you’re only applying heat to the tip, the heat will eventually be passed on to your fingers, this is the way roasting works only it's more like applying heat to the outside of a solid ball and having the heat conducted to the center. So the goal with roasting is applying heat to the outside and getting it to the inside.

But as you noticed with the knife experiment, the transfer of heat isn't instantaneous, it's gradual - how gradual depends on the material being heated. If too much heat is applied too quickly the distribution of heat is uneven - the parts directly exposed to heat get far hotter far more quickly than the parts further from the heat.

In slow-roasting the goal is to apply heat to the outside no more quickly than the heat can be passed on to the inside. Doing so avoids overheating the areas closer to the heat and results in a more even heat distribution throughout the roast. The result is that the meat is cooked much more evenly throughout. A roast slowly cooked to medium rare will be medium rare from about 1/4-inch inside through the center. On the other hand, a roast cooked at higher heat is often well-done at the outside, medium toward the center, and only medium rare at the core.

Furthermore, heat cause muscle fibers to contract. This contraction forces out the juices in and between the fibers drying out the meat. The higher the heat, the more juice lost. A more gently heated roast loses far less juice than one cooked at high heat

Good enough, but cooking a roast from start to finish at a low temp has a serious drawback: flavor. Meat that is cooked at high heat (375 degrees F or higher) browns. The browning is a result of chemical reactions (called Maillard Reactions) in the meat's proteins that produce deep, rich, and savory flavors. These reactions primarily occur in the meat directly exposed to the intense heat, which means they’re skin-deep. Nevertheless, they're a key to great tasting meat.

So at some point, beginning or end, of the cooking process you want to blast the exterior with high heat to produce those wonderful flavor compounds. In general I prefer blasting the meat in the beginning for beef, pork, and lamb because it seems to me the flavors then intensify even while slow-roasting. However, I've never performed a proper experiment to verify this. My evidence is a matter of impressions, but a friend of mine, Chef Robert del Grosso who writes A Hunger Artist, says he has done the experiments and his results bear out my impressions. Further, he notes that the searing reduces surface moisture to around 12 percent, which is ideal for forming the Maillard compounds.

How to Do It: TANSTAAFL

TANSTAAFL means, "They're Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." You can save money, and get an outstanding roast by following these directions, but the process requires time. Not direct, involved, effortful time. It's almost all just letting things take their course. But to get the best results you can't decide this afternoon to have a roast for dinner (although, the slow-roasting alone will help if you want to cook the roast today).

Aging

1. Begin six days in advance by buying a rump or bottom round roast. The bigger the better as you'll have less waste, but the minimum size is 3 to 3 1/2 pounds. In the example here I bought an Angus beef, 3.42 pound bottom round roast. It cost me $4/pound.

2. When I got home, I lined a cookie sheet with foil, set a wire rack on it and the roast on that, fat side down. A cookie sheet and wire rack allows air to circulate all around the roast and the foil collects any liquids that leak out. Air circulation is critical - always use a wire rack and I prefer the lack of sides on a cookie sheet (as opposed to a baking sheet) to enhance air flow.

3. Set the roast on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator, but avoid the coldest corner, which often hovers around freezing. Ideally the ambient temperature surrounding the roast should be 35 degrees F.

4. Wait five to seven days. That's it, just wait. The roast will get very dry, dark, and crusty, don't worry, this is what it should do.

5. Using a very sharp knife, carefully shave off the dried flesh and dried fat. Discard dried flesh - your dogs will love it.

You now have an aged roast ready for cooking.

Slow-roasting

1. Allow roast to rest on the counter for 2 hours to warm up.

2. Heat oven to 225 degrees.

3. Season according to your preferences. I like a bit of ground rosemary, a touch of granulated garlic, and a liberal dose of salt and pepper.

4. Heat a tablespoon or two of oil over medium-high heat in an oven-proof skillet and brown roast on all sides - about 2 minutes per side. Turn roast fat-side up and place skillet in center of oven.

5. For medium rare, cook until 135 degrees F in the center according to an instant-read thermometer, this will take about 1 1/2 hours for a 2.5 pound roast.

6. Remove from oven and tent with foil for 15 minutes. When slow-roasting there is almost no carryover cooking, but you do need to give the juices time to redistribute.

Slow-roasting produces few additional juices for making sauce or gravy, but by using the skillet to roast in you will have some goodies in the skillet that you can work with.

Notes
The roast pictured was a 3.42 pound bottom round roast for which I paid $3.99/pound.

After aging for 7 days in the refrigerator the weight had dropped to 2.88 pounds or $4.74/pound.

After trimming the final weight was 2.38 pounds, which works out to a final cost of $5.73/lb.

I lost 1/3 lost of the original roast to drying and trimming.

The roast was delicious - packed with beefy flavor. It was not fork tender, it required a knife and some chewing, but prepared any other way it would have been far more tough.

Again, my thanks to Bob del Grosso for making sure I didn't get anything wrong.

Elise has a similar slow-roasted recipe at Simply Recipes.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | roast beef | aging | slow roasting

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Polpette Napoletane (Neapolitan Meatballs)

Recipe Development



I recently appeared on ChefsLine's weekly pod-cast at BlogTalkRadio. Actually, I appear on it weekly playing Ed McMahon to Jenn Beiser's Johnny Carson (she's not as funny as Carson, but knows a lot more about food). This started with the second show when her guest was late and I called in to give her someone to talk to. Since then I've been on the line for every show - just in case - but usually Jenn pulls me in for just a couple of minutes at the end of the show.

This past Thursday, though, her guest didn't appear and so it was Jenn and I. As usual she asked what I was coking that night and it so happened I was refining a recipe for Italian meatballs. I had begun a few weeks before with Marcella Hazan's recipe and included notes from other recipes I found on the Web. Thursday night was (I hoped) the last iteration.

You have relatively little "sauce" for the meatballs, but it is so intensely-flavored you don't want much.

This led Jenn to ask me about how I develop recipes. For something traditional like Italian meatballs I begin by reading anywhere from half to a couple of dozen recipes. I think about what I like both in that dish and in general. Then I type out and print a recipe.

Next I make the recipe, tasting and adjusting elements as I go. I note the adjustments on the printed recipe. Then I eat the completed dish. Finally, I go back and adjust the written recipe to reflect what I actually did and below that add notes about what I want to change next time and why. This becomes the template for my next test.

I was right about this being the final meatball recipe. Instead of pasta, I ate it on sourdough bread as a sort of open-faced meatball sandwich. If you try it you will find you have relatively little "sauce" for the meatballs, but it is so intensely-flavored you don't want much.

Italian Meatballs
Makes 18 meatballs, 6 servings.

1 lb. ground beef
1/2 lb. ground pork
1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs (sour-dough recommended)
1/2 cup milk
2 Tbsp. finely chopped yellow onion
2 Tbsp. finely chopped Italian parsley
2 tsp. finely chopped fresh Rosemary
1 egg - beaten
4 Tbsp. freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup dried, finely ground bread crumbs
4 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 cup red wine
15-oz. can diced tomatoes
6-oz. can tomato sauce
2 lg. garlic cloves - minced

Combine beef, pork, fresh breadcrumbs, milk, onion, parsley, rosemary, egg, Parmigiano Reggiano, and nutmeg. Form mixture into balls the size of ambitious golf balls (about 1 1/2 inches in diameter) and roll in dried breadcrumbs. Place on a baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 1 hour or as long as 8 hours.

Heat oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat until oil begins to sheet.

The meatballs will have flattened so re-round each meatball by rolling between you palms. Add half the meatballs and brown on all sides. Reserve browned meatballs on a plate lined with a paper towel and brown remaining meatballs. Add to plate and drain off all oil.

Return sauté pan to heat and add garlic. Cook for 30 seconds, stirring, then add wine and deglaze the pan. Reduce wine to a couple of tablespoons and add tomatoes, tomato sauce, and reserved meatballs. Bring to a vigorous simmer, cover, and reduce heat to low. Simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Serve on toasted bread.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | meatballs | italian meatballs | italy

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Paisano: Boeuf en Daube

Paisano: Beef en Daube



My "Paisano" column on Gather.com is focused on peasant dishes from around the world, but you may wonder what constitutes a peasant dish. First and foremost, the ingredients are local and cheap. The food is grown on the farm, or the farm next door, and it's often food that either can't be sold, or isn't worth selling. Offal — heart, liver, pig ears — is a common ingredient as are the tough cuts of meat like shoulders, shanks, and ribs. The vegetables are also, often, of relatively poor quality: bruised onions, partially rotten potatoes, and bug-infested fruit are all made-do with. The style of cooking is designed to take these grade-B (or -C) ingredients and transform them into something not merely edible, but actually delicious.

One technique for improving the taste of borderline ingredients is marinating. A marinade can do a great job of hiding and even transforming the flavor of a cut of meat that's going off. Keep in mind, too, that in Europe prior to the 19th century (and even into the 20th century in some rural areas) meat was often intentionally allowed to age far beyond what we would consider edible, so by "off" I mean seriously off.

French daubes are a perfect example of a peasant dish that deserves a place of honor.

Another common technique was cooking low and slow. Stews and braises made tough cuts more tender and, properly seasoned, would hide and even transform the flavor of impending rot. Particularly if gently simmer for two to four hours. Note: When making a stew or braise the cooking liquid should be brought just to the boiling point and then reduced to a simmer. Boiling the meat will make it even tougher, the opposite of what you want.

These days we avoid ingredients that are beginning to rot and we often don't have access to local ingredients. But we still have tough cuts of meat that need transformation into something tender and delicious. So both marinades and braises still have a place in every cook's repertoire — and during the fall and winter such dishes are particularly welcome.

French daubes are a perfect example of a peasant dish that deserves a place of honor. These are stews or braises where the meat is typically marinated in wine with aromatics for 12 to 48 hours before being gently cooked in the marinade.

Boeuf en Daube (Beef Daube)
Serves 8.

3 lb beef chuck roast — cut into 1" cubes
Marinade:
2 carrots — finely chopped
1 lg onion — chopped
1 stalk celery — finely chopped
12 peppercorns
3 sprigs fresh thyme — bruised in your hands
2 sprigs fresh rosemary — bruised in your hands
3 cups robust red wine (I like an Australian Shiraz)
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
three strips orange rind
Daube:
1 tbsp olive oil
3 oz salt pork
1 c beef stock
1 medium onion — diced
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste

Place meat and all marinade ingredients in a large zipper storage bag, and place int the refrigerator to marinate for 8 to 48 hours. Turn bag over and mix up a bit every four to six hours.

Pour marinade through a strainer into bowl and set aside. Discard everything except the meat. Pat the meat dry and season with salt and pepper.

Heat oven to 325F.

Cut salt pork into batons about 1/4" square in cross section and 3/4" - 1" long. Place a large dutch over medium heat and add the pork, cook until fat is rendered and pork is crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and reserve. Increase heat to medium high. Brown beef in three or four batches (to avoid over-crowding) and set aside.

Reduce heat to medium low and cook onions stirring occasionally, until they begin to brown. Return beef and salt pork to pot and add reserved marinade, beef stock, bay leaf, and saly and pepper to taste. Increase heat to high, bring just to a boil, then immediately cover and place pot in the oven and cook for 2 - 2 1/2 hours. Note: the liquid should not quite cover the meat.

This is one of those dishes that is significantly better the day after cooking. I usually serve over mashed potatoes or soft polenta so I don't lose a drop of the sauce.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | seriously good | beef daube | beef stew | french

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Bacon-wrapped Meatloaf

You can find the recipe here.

Technorati: Food | photo | meatloaf

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Corned Beef

Fugue State



I know. You were thinking if you hung around me long enough I'd eventually publish all the recipes — subject to my adaptations — originally published in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman. In fact, you may be right. But it will take me years to do so and I may not publish them in the order that interests you and besides, I only publish my adaptations or examples in a review. Relying on me is a sucker bet.

This week I made the Italian Sausage recipe and was disappointed. The learning curve on sausage is not what I hoped and is going to take longer than I wished. I'm reminded of learning to make soufflés 25 years ago after a five-year effort to produce something that looked as good as it tasted. I'm reminded not because making soufflés is anything like making sausage, but because my difficulty in each case is a fundamental lack of understanding.

With soufflés my somewhat obsessive/compulsive personality led me to mix all of the

The big thing here is corned beef and cabbage. In Ireland, you'd have to go looking for it. It's not served on St. Patrick's.

air out of the whites I had so carefully beaten air into when I combined them with the sauce. I learned my lesson. In fact I learned a deeper lesson about not obsessing so much on the rules and developing a deeper understanding of what is going on in a recipe — chemically, mechanically, and, even, philosophically.

With sausage I immediately recognized my problem and the solution; Make more sausage. Although I was disappointed in the Italian sausage I made from Charcuterie, you may not be. The recipe may be closer to what you have in mind than it was to what I had in mind. That's common in recipes and the solution is knowing your ingredients and how to tweak them.

This week I also corned a beef due to either an alarming inability to understand a calendar or because Microsoft Outlook was lying to me, or both. The fact is I spent most of the week before last thinking it was last week and so I ended up making corned beef a week early for next week. But Outlook did (and does) lie and tells me that this year St. Patrick's Day is on Sunday the 18th of March. I'm not entirely to blame.

I got the recipe from Charcuterie and last night, after a week of curing the brisket, I made corned beef and cabbage. This was seriously good stuff, even though I screwed up and cooked the beef in the brine (resulting from too many dishes going on at once and poor production notes to myself). The final dish was too salty, nevertheless, the flavors were marvelous and far better than any corned beef I've ever bought.

Best of all, the hardest part of corning your own beef brisket really is remembering to start a week early — or two weeks early if you're temporally challenged. Like me. Sigh.

Technorati: Food | essay | charcuterie | corned beef

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Steak & Mushroom Pie

Pie Happens



I pictured a mound of overlapping circles of golden-brown potatoes strewn with sprigs of green. Instead, I ended up with a single circle of potatoes surrounding a bird's nest of potato strips. Such are the uncertainties of creation.

This month Jeanne at CookSister is playing the role of hostess for the online event, Waiter, there's something in my... Pie!. WTSIM is an online event being conducted by Jeanne, Johanna of The Passionate Cook and Andrew at Spittoon Extra. Each month they pick a theme and invite bloggers to submit recipes — this month the theme is pies, either sweet or savory.

Four and twenty black birds, baked in a pie...

I have a deep-seated fondness for pies in almost any form, and recently published an article at Kitchen Window on NPR's Web site about pot pies. It was while reading about this version of WTSIM that I had my vision. I imagined a steak and mushroom pie, flavored with juniper and rosemary, and encased in a "pastry" of sliced potaoes — a twist on the English cottage pie.

I checked the rules and the only real restriction was that the pie had to be enclosed. No problem, I thought. I jotted down my ideas — a proto-recipe — and got to work.

In general the pie came together smoothly and much as I'd envisioned, with one exception. I underestimated the number of potatoes I'd need and at the end found I didn't have enough potato slices to cover the top. My solution was to rinse the peelings and cover the center with them. I knew they were thin enough to cook completely in the oven, but I didn't anticipate them curling up into light delicious potato chips — hence the birds nest in the center.

Steak and Mushroom Pie

3 ea md. Yukon gold potatoes
2 ea sm. carrots — cut into 1/2” dice
3 tbsp olive oil
1 lb sirloin — sliced very thin and seasoned with salt and pepper
1/2 lb baby portabella mushrooms — sliced
1/2 ea lg. onion — diced
1/2 c cut, frozen Italian beans
1 tbsp juniper berries — crushed
1/2 tsp dried thyme
salt and pepper to taste
2 tsp fresh rosemary — minced
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 1/2 c beef stock
1/2 c red wine
3 tbsp butter — melted

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Peel (reserving peelings) and slice potatoes into 1/8 inch thick rounds. Add potatoes to water and cook until just tender — about 5 minutes. Scoop out potatoes and drain, reserving water. Bring pot back to a boil and toss in diced carrots. Cook until tender — about 10 minutes. Drain.

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Brown sliced meat in two batches and save in the pot you cooked the potatoes and carrots in.

Add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil to the skillet and reduce heat to medium. Add mushrooms, onion, thyme, juniper, and minced rosemary to the skillet and cook until mushrooms have given up most of their liquid. Add mixture to steak.

Heat oven to 400F.

Pick the end pieces from the potatoes and mash — You need about 1/3 cup of mashed potatoes.

Deglaze skillet with wine and reduce by half. Add stock and reduce by 1/3. Stir in mashed potatoes. Add to meat mixture along with carrots and frozen beans. Mix thoroughly.

Line a pie plate with overlapping slices of potato. Add meat mixture to pie. Cover outside edge of the pie with overlapping slices of potatoes. Rinse and dry about hlf the potatoe peelings and layer those over the center. Drizzle potatoes and peelings with melted butter and season with salt and pepper. Strip the leaves from the sprig of rosemary and sprinkle over the top.

Cook on the middle rack of the oven for 35 - 45 minutes until lightly browned.

Technorati: Food | recipe | pot pie | savory pie | | wtsim | waiter there's something in my

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Dale's Minute Steak

What's in a Name?



These days "Kevin" is, if not a common name, not unusual either. But it was unusual when my parents named me that. In fact I only knew of one other "Kevin" until I reached college. So where did my parents get it? From the funny papers.

There was a Prince Valiant-type comic strip in the newspaper named Kevin the Bold and so I was named after a comic strip character. But it gets worse.

What I need is a strong drink and a peer group." ~ Ford Prefect, by way of Douglas Adams

Neither of my parents were, nor are, religious so when they got married rather than have the wedding in a church (and deal with their respective parents arguing about which church) they got married in a restaurant. Dad was working there helping a friend of their's get it ready to open while Mom finished getting her Bachelors degree. So the night before the place opened they got married there.

They told the owner they were going to name their first son after him but he objected. He was Italian and his name was Josephe Daole and he said neither Josophe nor Daole went well with Weeks. He had a point, there. So instead my parents gave me the middle name of "Dale," which happened to be the name of the new restaurant: Dale's Cellar. Consequently I'm also named after a restaurant.

Joe Dale created a steak sauce for the restaurant and alse called the sauce Dale's Steak Seasoning. I forget who bought rights to the sauce, but it can now be found all over the country. It's good stuff with a strong soy component.

I don’t ordinarily put steak sauce on good steak because it tends to hide rather than highlight the flavor of the beef, but I have no qualms about putting steak sauce on minute steaks or ground beef and the following is a case in point.

Dale's Minute Steaks
Serves 4.

4 ea 6 - 8 oz minute steaks or hamburger patties
1 lb mushrooms — sliced
1 sm onion — sliced 1/4" thick
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1/4 c Dale's Steak Sauce
pepper to taste

Season minute steaks or patties with black pepper.

Heat oil in a large, covered skillet over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms and onions and cook until mushrooms are browned. Remove to a plate. Add a bit more oil if needed and brown minute steaks on both sides. Return mushrooms and onions to skillet, add steak sauce, reduce heat to low, and cover. Cook covered for about 4 minutes until steak is completely done.

Technorati: Food | recipe | main dish | beef | hamburger | minute steak

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