Chris Young gave StarChefs the dish on why baking a turkey is so complicated, and how to get around it. His secret? Treat it like a giant Peking duck. Chris told StarChefs:
“The exterior of the breasts may overcook a little, but this two-step cooking process is as close as Ive come to getting the legs tender and keeping the breast juicy without brine.”
Read all about Chris’s tips and tricks, and find a recipe for his turkey à la Peking duck here.
What do you get when you combine a water bath, pressure cooker, chicken feet, cranberries, and Stove Top stuffing? The tastiest Thanksgiving meal you’ve ever eaten out of a bowl!
Along with the multi-component recipe, we also have tips, photos, and four videos (sous vide turkey breast, sous vide cranberry consommé, microwave-fried herbs, and how to beautifully plate your stew).
As the year winds down, many people are compiling their top 10 lists. Top reality-TV moments, top restaurants, top scientific discoveries. We are happy to say that MC has garnered an honorable mention on Epicurious’s top 10 list.
This has been a year of stiff competition, with new books out by the likes of Blumenthal, Cooks Illustrated, Pépin, Ruhlman, and Momofuku.
Despite this, Modernist Cuisine has made it to the very top of Amazon’s Top 10 books in the cooking, food & wine category. Amazon says it “Pushes the limits of culinary arts and photography…a stunning six-volume set.” Amazon has also recently launched its “look inside” feature for volume two of Modernist Cuisine. You can view the table of contents, scope out photos, and read about grilling.
Modernist Cuisine has landed a spot on CNBC.com’s list of this year’s trendiest gifts. Here’s what they have to say about it:
I’ll warn you, these volumes are heavy, but for true foodies this is a staple for the kitchen.
It may be trendy, but we like to think there’s enough information in there to last a lifetime.
In my last post, I explained how vacuum-concentrating can condense flavor well below the boiling point of water, thereby leaving aroma compounds intact. Some Modernist chefs do this with a rotary evaporator, or rotavap for short. The only problem is that a full-sized version is a $40,000 piece of research equipment. Even a small one costs over $5,000. They’re fragile, and replacement parts aren’t cheap; they can leak in at least a dozen different places, requiring time to futz around and find the leak. They’re designed for laboratories, not for kitchens.
This isn’t to say that rotavaps aren’t useful for chefs. They are one of the few ways to capture distillate at temperatures below the boiling point of water. But if you want only the concentrate, rather than the distillate, there’s a much easier way to put together a vacuum-concentrating system. The photo below shows just how to do that (click the photo to enhance the image).
1. First, you need a vacuum pump that can handle a lot of liquid. Many cheap vacuum pumps use oil, but if you pull water vapor through that oil it will emulsify, gum up, and damage the pump. Make sure to get a water-recirculating aspirator pump with a capacity of about 10 liters. This looks like a beer cooler, but inside there’s a pump that circulates water. As the water flows by the little orifice in the nozzle, it creates a venturi effect, creating a vacuum. Because they’re sold to laboratories (which are less sensitive to price), new ones can cost more than $1,000. If you’re mechanically inclined, you can take a trip to any major hardware store and get everything you need to build your own. If you look around on eBay for recirculating aspirator pumps, however, you’ll find a lot of these for far less than the one linked to above.
Your pump should be able to pull 5-40 mbar (0.07-0.58 psi), depending on water temperature. The colder the water, the stronger the vacuum will be. To maintain a cold temperature, keep ice floating in the water bath while it’s circulating.
An aspirating nozzle, which has a little side arm that you can screw onto your faucet, is an even cheaper alternative. Vacuum strength will depend on how fast the tap water is flowing as well as the water temperature. The downside to these devices is that you throw away tens of gallons of water. That water goes down into the sewage to be reused, but it can add up. If you vacuum-concentrate a lot, a recirculating pump probably makes sense financially, but if you just want to try it, you should go with the faucet aspirator because you’ll save a few hundred dollars.
2. The next thing you need is a vacuum flask, sometimes called a side-armed Erlenmeyer flask. They come in myriad sizes, from a few hundred milliliters (about one cup) up to tens of liters or more. For home use, 2-5 liters is optimal.
3. You also need rubber vacuum tubing. Most flasks require a hose with an inner diameter of 5/16 in. You can find this sold by the meter in a well-supplied auto parts store, or online.
4. Your flask will need a size-appropriate stopper, which is sold separately. For example, a 2-liter flask takes a number 9 stopper.
5. You need a Teflon-coated magnetic stir bar. This will work in conjunction with item #6 below, and should be about 2 in long.
6. To go with the magnetic stir bar, you need a magnetic stirring hot plate, about 6-7 sq. in. Again, because this is a piece of lab equipment, it’s more expensive than you’d guess. Luckily, eBay is just brimming with them. Digital ones cost more, but analog is just fine.
This handy gadget not only heats the plate, but also creates an alternating magnetic field that causes that stir bar inside your glass flask to spin. Once it gets going fast enough, the stir bar creates a vortex, which expands the surface area of the liquid and thus increases the rate of evaporation. The vortex also encourages nucleation. When liquid is in a smooth glass flask, it tends to boil quite violently because there are few nucleation sites on which bubbles can form. In such situations, the temperature of the liquid can actually become super-heated, rising a couple of degrees above its boiling point. You may have seen this phenomenon if you’ve ever heated a mug of water in the microwave and noted that it barely bubbled at all until you dropped a spoon in it, at which point the liquid suddenly boiled all at once. When super-heating occurs inside a stoppered flask, a huge bubble can burst to the surface so violently it can actually cause the flask to jump off the plate and shatter. Stirring the liquid creates little bubbles that serve as nucleation sites, so the liquid boils steadily and more safely.
The key idea here is that the liquid in the flask can never be hotter than its boiling point, which is determined by the strength of the vacuum. This is just like boiling water on a gas burner because while the burning gas beneath it is thousands of degrees, the water in the pot is not above 100 ?C / 212 ?F. Turning the heat up higher will make it boil faster, but it doesn’t make it boil hotter, so your flavor compounds remain intact. You want this hot enough so that it boils fast enough to get the evaporation to make it worthwhile, to get the job done. If you go too fast, the pump can’t keep up and the pressure starts to rise, so then the temperature rises a little. We tend to set the hot plate to about 205 ?C / 400 ?F. If the water is cold enough in the pump, it will boil away at 26 ?C / 80 ?Fa warm swimming pool, but not warm enough to change delicately flavored liquids, such as a citrus juice. You could set your hot plate as low as 150 ?C / 300 ?F, but you’d be surprised, you almost never want it to go lower than that for a reasonable rate of evaporation.
During the time I spent photographing food, equipment, and techniques for Modernist Cuisine, I took thousands of photos. Here is a slide show of a few (well, a few dozen) of my favorites.
One thing we’ve learned from working with Nathan Myhrvold is that if you get him talking about a topic that interests him (and there are many, many, many topics to choose from), he’ll go on and on until someone comes and rushes him off to another meeting. You’ll probably learn something in the process, too, even if it’s a subject you think you know everything about. Recently, Eater.com‘s Paula Forbes got him talking about his cookbook collection: which ones are his favorites, which he’s most sentimental about, and why he doesn’t think much of the barbecue books out there.
At the beginning of the MC project, Nathan set out to dispel many of the myths surrounding cooking, yet some common misconceptions about liquid nitrogen still persist. Sometimes we get questions like Is liquid nitrogen dangerous? Will it hurt you? Or, You can’t cook with liquid nitrogen! It’s poisonous!
The truth is, liquid nitrogen is completely inert except for its extreme temperature. It will cause any metal it comes in contact with to become freezing cold, but wearing dry gloves is enough to protect your hands from creating a “tongue stuck to the flagpole” scenario. The liquid nitrogen itself will evaporate before it contacts your skin due to the Leidenfrost effect (see video below).
Actually, liquid nitrogen pales in comparison to the dangers involved in most applications of fryer oil or even sugar. Fryer oil is extremely hot; it spills, it splatters, it splashes. Any cook who works frequently with deep fat fryers gets burned all the time. You get little blisters on your arms and hands when heating oil. The day we shot our wok cutaway photo, Max got all sorts of burns on his arms from tossing the phad Thai and oil so many times.
When it comes to kitchen burns, sugar is enemy number one. Anyone who has had a close encounter with hot caramel knows that you really don’t want this stuff on your skin. If a little bit of the hot caramelized sugar lands on your hand, your first reaction is to rub it, which leads you to smear it onto your other hand. It just sticks everywhere, and you end up burned all over.
I’ve been working with liquid nitrogen in the kitchen for about five years now. I’ve dipped my bare hands in it, spilled it, splashed it, but never been hurt by it. I’m not saying you should go ahead and goof around with it, but you should give it a chance without fear. Go ahead and try it! It’s great for all sorts of applications. Just put on gloves, wear long pants so that it can’t drip into your shoes if you spill any, and don’t eat food until you’re sure the nitrogen has boiled off of it. (For a more complete discussion, see “Safe Handling of Cryogens,” page 2·464-466 in Modernist Cuisine.)
A number of recipes in Modernist Cuisine use liquid nitrogen to achieve special effects, from firm coating gels to foie gras torchon, from shrimp and grits to buttermilk biscuits. And, of course, we love Nathan’s method of cryofrying meat, which is to cook meat sous vide, then dip it in liquid nitrogen, and finally deep-fry it quickly to get a really nice, Maillardized outer crust with a rare or medium-rare interior. We use this technique in our mushroom cheeseburger recipe. And again, it’s really the hot oil from the deep fryer that you have to watch out for in that recipe.
Although it’s not hard to handle liquid nitrogen safely, it is also not completely without risk. In fact, I just happen to be one of the few people in the world who have actually had a traumatic experience with the substance. I once used liquid nitrogen at a dinner for some guests and afterward was transporting a Dewar of the stuff in the back of my SUV. Although the Dewar was in perfect condition, some of the dinner guests had been playing with it and hadn’t refastened the lid. I didn’t realize that, and as I was heading up a hill, the Dewar fell over. Liquid nitrogen has a very low viscosity, so it is thinner than water and flows like crazy. It quickly spread all over the bottom of the car, and as it boiled off furiously, the car rapidly filled with vapor. It also got really cold, and I couldn’t see out of my rear view mirror or rear window. It was like driving through the densest fog–but the fog was inside the car!
I pulled over and got out of the car as fast as I could. As the nitrogen evaporates into gas, it displaces oxygen in the air, so if a lot of it spills in an enclosed space it can create a suffocation risk. Emerging from the car, I looked back and saw white fog pouring out from every opening. Luckily, our photographer, Ryan Matthew Smith, was behind me and also pulled over. We opened the hatch of the SUV to get the Dewar out, in case it was still leaking. I heard the plastic in the car crackling as it warped from the intense cold.
When it was all over, I was surprised to find that despite the large size of the spill, it didn’t cause any permanent damage. If the Dewar had been filled with super-hot fryer oil instead of ultra-cold liquid nitrogen, it would have been a different story.
A special helper came to The Cooking Lab recently to help us prepare for Halloween. Find him guest-starring in our newest recipe video as he helps his dad, one of our culinary research assistants, Johnny Zhu, make olive oil gummy worms and “dirt.” We also have the recipe, along with photos and tips.
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Book Larder, Seattle’s newest food-focused bookstore, is offering a special package that includes both a copy of Modernist Cuisine and two tickets to an event with MC coauthor Maxime Bilet for a discounted price of $550. That’s $75 off the list price! Please join Max at Book Larder on Thursday, February 2, 2012, at 6:30 p.m. for a demonstration of techniques from the book, insights into MC’s creation, and a Q&A session. For more information, click here to visit the page on Book Larder’s website.
