A Foodie Moment

Ever have a salty gooey cheesy craving? I woke up one morning about two weeks ago and had one of those cravings, and the first thing that popped into my mind was a melted aged hard cheese. Aged hard cheeses tend to accumulate these flavorful salt crystals and can be excellent in natural or melted form.

Think of an aged pecorino, Parmesan, Padona, Mimolette, or Gouda. Or even an extra sharp cheddar (impossible to find on Bonaire, I should add)!

The next thought was that I had a package of boneless, skinless chicken thighs in my freezer and broccoli in my fridge. I prefer using dark, fattier chicken meat when cooking dishes with chicken pieces in them. Chicken breasts chunks are boring lumps of threaded protein as far as I’m concerned.

The only thing I was missing was the cheese. A rather important component, and I did not have it readily available.

I set forth on an expedition in search of aged cheese, and in particular aged, or “oude” (old) Gouda, which on Bonaire, as a Dutch island, shouldn’t be too hard to find, right? Well, it wasn’t easy – oh what I’d give for a Whole Foods with a real fromagerie! I had to hit four markets before I found anything other than the ever common young Gouda or shredded mild cheddar. For those who know Bonaire, I went to Warehouse Bonaire, Cash & Carry, and Cultimara. I finally found my aged Gouda at More For Less, a small market tucked away in the local neighborhood of Nikoboko.

Two of the stronger flavored cheeses I found here on Bonaire - a Vincent and an aged Gouda (prices in Antillean Guilders/Florins - Exchange rate is Naf. 1,75 = $1.00)

I also found some nice Vincent cheese, which is another aged Gouda-style cow’s milk cheese which is not quite as crumbly as a really aged Gouda, but still firm and very flavorful. I purchased a couple of pounds of each cheese, thrilled that I could make my culinary desires for the day come true, especially after the first three markets and their lack of the right cheeses were making my prospects look very dim indeed.

Back home, after thawing out the chicken, I cut it into small pieces and then marinated it for half a day in a blend of white wine (a 2007 Bel Echo Sauvignon Blanc), rosemary, sea salt, white pepper, sage, lots of garlic, and olive oil.

I used boneless, skinless chicken thighs for my broccoli cheese chicken casserole

Marinating the chicken in white wine, rosemary, garlic, olive oil, salt, and sage

In the evening, Krystyana shredded all the cheese for me, and to add a little more gooeyness, I added a bag of pre-shredded cheddar and Monterey jack blend.

After all the cheese was shredded, and blended with cheddar and Monterey Jack as well

The next trick was making a good cheese sauce. My only prior experience with large amounts of melted cheese has been fondues, so I adapted my fondue knowledge to the task at hand.

In advance I prepared a small cup with lemon juice and another with a bit of water into which I dissolved a few tablespoons of arrowroot flour (although tapioca flour or cornstarch will do as well). The reason for dissolving the starch into cool or cold water is that if you add the starch directly to hot dishes it clumps, and there are few things worse than having an enjoyable meal interrupted by biting into a lump of starch. Ick.

I also had the bottle of Bel Echo wine nearby.

I heated up a can of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup (along with the obligatory can of water to thin it out) and a teaspoon of white pepper in a sauce pan to use as my base, and at low heat slowly added the cheese, a clump at a time. Once the clump dissolved, I would add more, occasionally interspersing with a bit of the starch water or acid (lemon juice or white wine) until all my cheese was dissolved.

The cheese sauce for the casserole - cream of chicken soup, cheese, wine, and a bit of starch and lemon juice and white pepper

The acids, in the form of lemon juice and wine, as well as the starch, are needed to prevent the cheese sauce from clumping, although with the amount of cheese involved, a small bit of clumping seemed unavoidable. Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking” has a nice section on cooking with cheese (see pages 64-66), and describes how starches coat the protein patches and fat pockets of the cheese and keep them apart in order to stabilize cheese sauces and molten cheese. The lemon and wine also as a bit of tartness to complement the saltiness and fat of the molten aged cheese.

Cooking the chicken, a bit of it at a time

At the same time as I was making the cheese sauce, Linda was cooking the marinated chicken, which we had first drained in a colander to remove all the marinating liquid. And Krystyana had cut up and lightly steamed the broccoli in the microwave so it was barely cooked and still crisp.

We also preheated the oven to 375°F.

The idea was that all the ingredients would already be mostly cooked before being blended in the casserole dish. The baking of the casserole was intended only to finish the dish off and infuse the broccoli and chicken with some of the richness of the cheese

Once the sauce, broccoli, and chicken were all separately ready, we combined them into two casserole dishes (keep in mind that small portions appear to be something I have yet to master – and anyhow, I have a vacuum sealer and freezer, and I love leftovers), pouring the last bits of the cheese sauce over the top of the mixture.

On left, the broccoli, chicken and cheese sauce mixed, and on right after being topped with more cheese sauce

Both dishes were then covered and put in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. After those 20 minutes we removed the lids and baked for another 15 minutes or so until we had a nice golden brown cheese crust on the surface.

The finished broccoli cheese chicken casserole

And thus the broccoli cheese chicken casserole was fully cooked. And, I should add, hungrily devoured. The blend of cheeses, the seasoned chicken, and the texture and flavor of the broccoli was excellent, especially with the glass of Sauvignon Blanc still left in the wine bottle.

The gastronomic craving I had awoken with had been fully sated. And I had ample left over to satisfy future salty gooey cheesy cravings.

I am a tough person to buy presents for – at least that’s what my family tells me. They claim that if I want something, I will just go out and buy it. So about a year ago my family decided to surprise me with something they knew I didn’t have nor even knew about to order it for myself: a La Caja China roasting box. Linda and Krystyana saw the La Caja China on Bobby Flay’s Throwdown show on Food Network and thought it was the perfect gift for me. It was a nice coincidence, as I was fortunate enough to have had a great birthday lunch at Flay’s Mesa Grill in New York City a few months prior.

Roasting instructions for a whole pig for he La Caja China Model #1

The La Caja China, which comes in three sizes (I have the Model #1 – the smaller of the two larger units – it can hold a 70 pound pig), is a metal roasting box in a wood frame with wheels. You put the charcoal on top of the box, and the heat emanates through the metal lid into the enclosed space below, roasting any meats found there. Incidentally, the name “La Caja China” translates from Spanish into “The Chinese Box”, based apparently on a roasting box that Chinese workers in new world used to cook meals, but the actual design stems from pig roasters of Cuban origin, as I understand it.

Alas, while being on the road for most of last year, I did not have a chance to use the La Caja China beyond one initial experiment with a small pork shoulder (which turned out excellent).

However, we were having a dozen and a half people over a couple of weeks ago for a barbecue, and I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to put the La Caja China to the test with multiple types of meats. So I planned to use a large 20 pound pork shoulder we found here, a 14 pound turkey, a pair of ducks, and 11 three pound chickens. It was a great experiment, but not without some complications, as I relate further below.

The first step after thawing out all the meat (because fresh meat other than goat is pretty much impossible to find on Bonaire) was to brine the pork shoulder and turkey overnight in a blend of brine and a marinade. The marinade brine mixture I used was the Mojo Criollo sauce found on the La Caja China web site. This mixture features sour orange juice, garlic (which I had fortunately prepared just days before), and a blend of other spices. And lots of brine (salt water), of course.

Marinating and brining a turkey and a pork shoulder in Mojo Criollo

After using a huge syringe and needle to repeatedly inject both the pork shoulder and turkey with the mixture (something Krystyana took great delight in doing – should I be worried?), we submerged both meats in a cooler filled with the marinade/brine mixture and ice cubes to keep it cool overnight.

The next day, in the morning, we used the remaining batch of the marinade/brine mixture to soak the eleven chickens and two ducks (no needles this time).

We had carefully plotted out the projected cooking times based on the directions from the La Caja China web site in order to try and have all the meats ready by about 6:30-7pm.

It should be noted that the directions require something on the order of about 40-45 pounds of charcoal to run through a complete cooking cycle with the La Caja China. Most of the charcoal on Bonaire is charred wood chunks, but over the prior couple of weeks I managed to locate sufficient quantities of briquettes (I bought about 55 lbs.) to meet the project requirements of the roasting box.

Starting the charcoal for the La Caja China

You start with about 15 pounds of charcoal in a mound in the middle of the top tray. Not ever having been very good with getting charcoal going, I used copious amounts of charcoal lighter fluid. Because of the design of the La Caja China, any petroleum odors rise away from the box instead of affecting the meats inside, so I welcomed my ability to liberally apply the flammable liquid in as great a quantity as possible.

The charcoal is ready

I started the charcoal at about 2:30pm, and by 3pm had it all nice and gray and hot, and spread it out over the surface of the box after putting the pork shoulder inside the roaster.

At 4pm we (it’s a two person job to move the charcoal laden lid off the box) flipped the pork shoulder and then added the turkey. And then another 8 pounds of charcoal on top. We also inserted an electronic meat thermometer into the pork shoulder, which the directions said should read 179°F before we should remove the pork shoulder. The pork already smelled fantastic and the part facing up had started crisping up nicely, but the temperature was pretty low, below 100°F. But, after that was after only an hour, for a chilled piece of meat. So far, so good!

The first meats - the pork shoulder and the turkey, done on one side - note the meat thermometer at lower left

At 5pm we opened the box again to find the pork nice and crispy except for a small piece of extra crispy (black) skin and the temperature was rising nicely. We covered the pork with aluminum foil to prevent further burning of the skin, then flipped the turkey over, and then added the two ducks and ten chickens. We couldn’t fit the eleventh chicken.

The chickens, also brined and marinated, get added to the La Caja China

Not a big problem – I just went and popped that last chicken into the oven in the house to slow roast there. We then covered our box of roasting meat with the metal lid and applied another 8 pounds of charcoal. Things were still looking good.

Our La Caja China held 10 chickens, 2 ducks, a turkey, and a pork shoulder

At 6pm we took a quick peek. The turkey was looking pretty good, but the smaller poultry had not browned very much at all, and the pork shoulder was only at about 132°F. Hmm. A 6:30pm or 7pm dinner was looking a bit tenuous at best. We added more charcoal. Around now our first guests arrived as well, so we started plying them with beer and wine, hoping they wouldn’t notice food being served later than expected.

Turkey is done, but nothing else is yet

At 7pm we looked again. The little red doohickey on the turkey had popped. It was done. But the pork was only around 145°F – still far off from being done properly. And the smaller poultry? Just barely browning. Obviously something was not going right, and we figured the problem was that we had been letting far too much heat escape each time we added meat or flipped things. But we had to take the turkey out before it overcooked. So we did. I also pulled the chicken out of the oven in the house. It was perfectly cooked.

Then we added another 8 pounds of charcoal in the hopes this would somehow accelerate the cooking inside the roasting box.

It didn’t.

Cooking extended well into the evening, with the glow of charcoal obvious

When we checked things again past 7:30pm, with people starting to get a bit cranky due to hunger and enticing smells from the roasting box, it was finally time to flip the chickens and ducks, but the pork was only around 150°F. Argh!

The turkey and 11th chicken (cooked in a regular oven) are gobbled up as we wait for the rest to finish

Bonnie enjoys a well roasted turkey leg

We punted and served the turkey and one chicken we had cooked in the oven. Both got rave reviews. Several people commented that they had never had a moister, juicier turkey (and I agree – it was phenomenal). However that meant it was devoured altogether too quickly. Our guests were polite and claimed to be full when I apologized for the delay in having an edible pork shoulder and the other poultry ready for them. More wine was poured, more beer was consumed.

All that was left was the turkey carcass

At 9pm things were looking grim. The pork shoulder was finally just a bit north of 163°F, but still a far cry from the target temperature of 179°F. The poultry had not browned yet sufficiently either. I added more charcoal.

I discovered I was almost out of charcoal.

Not good. But the smells from the roasting box were amazingly wonderful, offering just a glimmer of hope of a feeding ahead.

People starting leaving soon after 9pm, and my entreaties to have them stay “just a bit longer” to help us enjoy the pork were insufficient to get them to stay. I don’t think they believed me. I didn’t really believe me either.

By 10pm the last of the charcoal had been used. The pork’s temperature was promising – we were at 172°F – almost there! There were only six guests left. I bribed them to stay with some of the nicest wines from my wine cellar-fridge (a Rusack 2006 Syrah and a Rusack 2006 Pinot Noir), served in my best Riedel stemware instead of the plastic cups we had out earlier due to the larger volume of people present.

Finally, the roasted pork shoulder is ready to enjoy

And the chicken and ducks are done to perfection as well

At 10:31pm, the meat thermometer related glad tidings. The pork shoulder was finally, amazingly, at temperature. And just in time, as our remaining guests had been making very serious noises about finally getting ready to go. We emptied the La Caja China’s edible delights onto trays and cutting boards, and then brought both ducks, a couple of chickens, and the fabled pork shoulder to the sole populated table in our backyard.

The remaining stalwarts are rewarded for their patience with succulent meats and excellent wines

The smells of the meat and skin were overwhelming. People stopped talking, and were salivating instead. And their patience and involuntary bodily response (salivation) was rewarded. The pork meat was moist, hot, and heavenly, and the pork skin even better.

Close up of the carved pork shoulder roast - incredibly juicy and flavorful

The duck skin was perfectly crisp, the meat moist, and the chickens were great too

In the words of Jim, one of our guests: “Oh (pause) my holy God!!!”. And the duck was a hit too (although I found some of the meat to be a wee bit dry – the skin was excellent though).

For some time after that, the only sounds heard were lips smacking, groans and moans of culinary euphoria, and “Oh, you have to try this part – it’s even better than that other part”.

Our last six guests stayed until nearly midnight, and we had the best time together, eating, drinking, and being generally convivial (or “gezellig” as the Dutch would say).

As we wound down, we still had an abundance of food left, so we vacuum packed eight chickens and many pounds of pork meat (no skin left to save – it all got eaten), gave a duck to our friend Dan, whose wife was ill and had asked for some duck leftovers. Another of our guests (who, amusingly enough, works at KFC), took home a chicken as well.

We then put most everything that was left in the freezer.

The charcoal got dumped on the gravel in our backyard, but upwind, so in the morning everything downwind was coated in gray dust.

Overall, the evening was quite the learning experience. But we had a great time, and our guests, even those who missed out on the crowning event of roasted pork shoulder, said they did too (I hope they are not just being polite). And the food, oh my. It was heaven.

Here are the lessons I learned (or re-learned) that night:

1) I love my La Caja China, but will do a better job of using it properly next time.

2) Roasting boxes work via heat (duh!). Open them too often or introduce cold things and they don’t work nearly as well. Work with that concept.

3) Buy twice as much charcoal as you think you will need.

4) Budget more time to cook more meat.

5) Patience will be rewarded.

6) Wine can make life good, and really good wine can make it even better.

7) Good food makes people more relaxed and social. Thus it is a good idea to plan social events around good food.

8 ) Brining meats is good! Do this more often for moisture whole birds and pork.

9) Charcoal should be dumped downwind from where you are, not upwind.

10) Use the La Caja China more often.

The way a pork shoulder should truly be enjoyed

About a year and a half ago, we took a private docent-led tour in New York City with Elizabeth Knight as part of a “History of Tea” tour arranged by Context Travel. Context no longer offers this tour, but you can still take custom tea tours and get tea training with Elizabeth via her own company, Tea With Friends. I highly recommend it if you are in New York City and have the time.

You might think that New York is a rather odd place for this, but as it turns out it was a brilliant choice, as it offers a broad range of cultural, historical, and culinary traditions that immigrants and business people have brought to this urban environment. Perhaps the most stunning thing we discovered even with all the diverse types of teas in the world is that they come from one type of plant – Camellia sinensis.

The base types of tea – white, green, oolong, black – are produced by processing the leaves and buds of the tea plant in different ways. There’s a great article on tea processing at Wikipedia.

Be that as it may, one of the things we learned with Elizabeth (and elsewhere) is that most tea-bag tea is made with tea “dust” or “fannings“, which are typically (but not always) lower grade leftover bits of tea leaves. In various tea tastings over the last couple of years we have also found that for certain types of teas, such as green and oolong, the flavor and aroma of brewed whole leaf teas is generally far superior to tea-bag teas. Subsequently we have raised our tea standards, as life is too short to drink mediocre tea.

My tea making accessories

While there are some great companies that specialize in tea bags with whole leaf teas, including Tea Forte, Mighty Leaf, and some of the teas from Harney & Sons, I generally find it more satisfying and less expensive to buy tins or bags of loose leaf tea and use the tea that way. The other nice thing about brewing your own loose leaf teas is that you can blend your own tea combinations to brew the perfect tea for the occasion.

Speaking of brewing, I have a drawer full of tea strainers, tea balls, and other tea infusion gadgets, but honestly I have not found anything which competes with the Teavana tea maker for properly and easily steeping and brewing tea.

Tea balls and infusers tend to be a pain to fill – leaves tend to fall out and things get messy. And tea strainers tend to be either too tough to clean after use, or have sieve holes which are too large and let tea bits through.

Teavana offers two sizes of tea makers - large and personal

The Teavana tea maker, on the other hand, has a very dense pair of screens at the bottom which both prevents tea bits from getting through as well as getting stuck after brewing. Better yet, the tea maker also acts as a steeper so that you can steep and brew your tea for however long the tea requires and then drain the steeped tea into an appropriate vessel.

Let me diverge with a quick comment on steeping tea. The lighter the tea (e.g. white or green), the more delicate it tends to be, and thus the more care you need to treat it with when brewing. If you over-steep or use water that is too hot, you could burn the leaves and/or make it very bitter, thus ruining your tea experience. There is a nice basic chart to follow here.

For a while I was very anal retentive about measuring the water temperature of my hot water, but then an elderly Japanese lady in an underground market near the Shibuya Station in Tokyo showed me a cool (literally) trick. To get her boiling water cooled off to an appropriate temperature for the green sencha tea she was brewing for the tea samples she was offering, she would pour the boiling water into a room temperature tea cup, swirl it around, and then pour it over the green tea leaves (sencha) in the small teapot she used for brewing. That decanting into a colder container was enough to cool off the water temperature, and also served as a way to warm up the tea cup to avoid “shocking” the tea when it was poured for consumption a couple of minutes later.

So now, when I brew my white or green teas, I pour the boiling water into my cup or pitcher first, swirl it around a bit, and then pour it over my tea leaves to steep them without burning them with water that is too hot. For a 16 oz cup of tea I normally use a bit more than a teaspoon of loose leaf tea, while for a pitcher (almost two quarts) I will use about five (5) teaspoons of loose leaf tea, or even a bit more if I am decanting over ice to make an ice tea.

Gyokuro green tea in my large Teavana tea maker

The Gyokuro tea steeping in the tea maker

The steeped tea drains into the tea pitcher

And my tea leaves are invariably in one of my Teavana tea makers (large to make a pitcher of tea, small to make a big cup of tea) as pictured above.

One of our two Breville electric water kettles

To heat my water, I have found the best thing is an electric hot water kettle like the one shown above. It’s faster than using a traditional stove top tea kettle, and easier to see exactly how much water you’re heating up. A microwave will do as backup for a cup of hot water, but I don’t have any assurance that I’ve reached boiling temperature in a microwave so I only use one when I don’t have a better way to heat my water (like in a hotel room).

My favorite teas are green teas – I particularly like the grassy nose of a decently brewed sencha, and also have become fond of oolong of late, with a splash of vanilla extract. In terms of blends, I like to steep fresh lemongrass and then add green tea leaves to it to produce my own lemongrass green tea. Oh, and I almost never sweeten my teas, with the exception of a chai-style blend.

I have been finding that more and more supermarkets appear to carry loose leaf teas now, but in a pinch you can probably find dedicated tea shops in a local shopping mall or town. Teavana appears to be the most populous in the U.S., with a very broad selection of teas. If ordering on-line, I have had great success with Teavana, Mighty Leaf, and Harney & Sons. I find the Japanese green teas to be best from Harney & Sons, but like Teavana’s Moroccan Mint and Masala Chai better than the equivalent products from Harney & Sons. Mighty Leaf has an amazing Orchid Oolong as well as the fragrant Celebration blended black tea.

All in all, I think if you have an interest in tea, once you go to loose leaf tea, you’ll find it hard to go back to plain old tea-bag tea. In fact, for my upcoming Antarctic trip, I bagged a bunch of loose leaf teas in my own tea bags because I didn’t want to suffer with normal tea, and couldn’t fit the Teavana tea maker in my limited luggage space. I also packed some low-sugar hot chocolate mix and my own datil and ancho chili pepper blend to make spicy hot chocolate to keep me warm on the inside. But that will have to wait for another blog post.

I think this would be something of a NOT Foodie Moment – eating live octopus, apparently a delicacy in South Korea.

I’d be terrified that the octopus would grab my uvula on the way down and hold on for dear life, and that would be the end of me. (Video found at National Geographic)

I happened to stumble across a recent article from Food & Wine this morning about crispy fried chicken skin. Looks like I’m not a lone voice in the woods about this delectable treat, which I wrote about exactly one month before the aforementioned article from Food & Wine.

Food & Wine suggests that chicken skin may be the next bacon. And another article in Toronto Life mentions that David Chang of Momofuku Ko (a restaurant that’s on my dining bucket list) uses crispy chicken skin as a garnish with pasta. Wise chef!

I believe self congratulation is in order for my being, unwittingly, a trend setter.

Fresh garlic is a wonderful thing. Did you know that if you rub a garlic clove over the bottom of your feet you will soon have garlic breath? But I prefer my garlic to not have touched feet, and instead cook with it frequently. However, we can’t always find fresh garlic, and frankly, even when we can, we’re admittedly a bit lazy when it comes to peeling garlic and mincing it each time we want to use some.

The solution we’ve come up with is to make our own jars of minced garlic, which requires extensive effort only once every six months or so.

We start with a big bag of fresh garlic – typically 5-8 pounts (2.5 to 3.5 kilograms), and then park ourselves in front of the TV with a movie while we remove all the “paper” from the garlic and separate all the cloves from each other. For our most recent “garlic night”, we rented a download of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” from iTunes, based on a comment that due to all my gadgets I was becoming more like Steve Zissou every day. We collectively agreed that the movie was a dud. But we were still peeling garlic, now removing the skin from the cloves, so we watched the latest episode of Fringe, also courtesy of iTunes.

After peeling the garlic we trimmed out the hard ends of the cloves

After we had naked cloves, the next step was to remove the hard little nubs at the end of the cloves as well as any noticeable blemishes.

Once that was complete it was time to mince the garlic. Doing it all by hand would take forever, so we use mechanical processes to mince our garlic. We have used food processors in the past, but find that they puree the garlic too much, plus with the amount we typically make during our “garlic nights” we have to keep emptying the machine too often. The solution we have settled on is the grinder option of our KitchenAid – the same thing you would use to grind meat, for example.

Our tools - a KitchenAid with grinder attachment, salt, canola oil, and garlic

It’s still time consuming, since you can only feed a few cloves of garlic at a time into the opening of the grinder accessory, but it produces a constant flow of minced garlic.

The KitchenAid grinding garlic

Once all the garlic has been ground, we liberally mix it with a neutral tasting oil, such as canola oil, and sea salt. The oil and salt act as preservatives to prevent a deterioration of flavor due to oxidation. You can use olive oil as well, but that tends to impart a strong flavor to the garlic, and could affect the flavor of foods you cook with the garlic unless those foods already include the use of olives or olive oil.

The garlic/oil/salt blend is then used to fill jars that we have collected. I will oil the jar a little bit first, then add garlic up to the last half-inch, and then pour more oil on top to create a better seal against air.

Note that over time the jarred garlic will turn brown, but that does not impact its flavor negatively at all.

The end result - jars of minced garlic

The amount of garlic pictured above will last us about 6-9 months of regular cooking.

One additional tip – take a heaping teaspoon of minced garlic and blend it with a cup of mayonnaise to create a quick and dirty garlic aioli.

While I love chicken, I absolutely adore duck in all its many forms, from duck confit and Peking duck to duck liver and duck a l’orange, and everything in between. Unlike a chicken, which at best struts about and thus only has dark meat around its legs and thighs, a duck is designed to walk and fly, thus using all of its muscles. That means that all of a duck’s meat is rich, dark meat, laden with delicious bits of fat.

My goal, therefore, was to cook a duck, sous vide style. I searched around for ideas on how to best prepare sous vide duck and found components in various places, including the Foodie at Fifteen (now 17) Blog, Thomas Keller’s “Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide”, and my own father’s recipe for slow-roasted duck.

For our sous vide duck we started with a thawed frozen duck

First step was procuring a duck. Being that other than goat and occasionally chicken, we have no access to fresh meat on Bonaire, I managed to procure a frozen whole duck from the aptly named “The Island Supplier”. After thawing it out over a couple of days in the refrigerator, I split the duck up into six parts (thanks to the directions of Nick of the Foodie at Fifteen blog) for easier cooking in my water bath later on.

The duck is sectioned to make it easier to cook in the water bath

Adapting part of a duck confit recipe from Thomas Keller’s book, I made a salt rub mixture containing garlic, thyme, salt, pepper corns, and bay leaves which I then applied to all of the pieces of duck liberally and then leaving in a refrigerator for several hours. The salt rub both draws out moisture from the duck while also seasoning it at the same time.

Our salt rub mixture - salt, peppercorn, garlic, bay leaf, and thyme

The duck after being thoroughly rubbed with the seasoned salt rub

Next step was to rinse off all the salt from the meat. This went pretty well except for the wings, where I later discovered I had not rinsed quite as rigorously as I perhaps should have. I then vacuum sealed the duck parts, and set them to cooking in a water bath at 83°C for over five hours. Because duck is such a fatty meat, this resulted in rendering the fat to liquid form and then self-basting the duck in the meat juices and rendered duck fat, much like how one would prepare a confit.

After rinsing the salt rub off with water, we vacuum seal the duck parts

We start the duck in the water bath

Because of the high temperature of the water bath, we were generating a lot of steam, which was causing both water loss and forcing the immersion circulator to work a lot harder to keep the bath at the right temperature. We solve both problems by insulating the water bath with aluminum foil.

To avoid excess heat and water loss from steam we cover our water bath with aluminum foil while cooking the duck

The final step was to crisp up the skin of the duck, as there’s nothing quite like crispy duck skin to make a meal of duck complete. But this is where we ran into some problems.

After over five hours at 83C, the duck is now perfectly cooked, with much of the fat rendered to liquid

The first attempt at crisping the duck was to simply take all the rendered duck fat and juices and try to fry one of the pieces of duck in it. However we could simply not get this to brown the skin. We figure that’s because there was too much fat to get it up to the temperature we needed.

We tried using the duck juices and fat to fry the duck parts to crisp them, but that failed - too much liquid

We solved our browning/crisping problem in two different ways. One was using a small broiler. This, by far, did the best job of giving us the uniform brown, crisp exterior we were looking for. The other was to use only a little bit of duck fat in a hot pan and sear the outside of the duck. This worked, but not as well, because duck is, well, lumpy, and we could not evenly heat all of the exterior of the pieces of duck we tried to finish off this way.

A sous vide duck leg section, fresh from being crisped in the broiler

A sous vide duck breast part after being crisped in a pan with a very little bit of duck fat

However the duck was browned, it turned out excellent. The meat was moist, tender, and flavorful, and the crispy skin was mouthwateringly delicious. Definitely a meal to repeat (with the caveats listed above).

After eggs, our next thing to try cooking sous vide was meat. We have consistently had excellent beef served to us at restaurants which use sous vide cooking to get their meats to the perfect internal temperature and thus wanted to see what if we could do the same.

The results have been great for beef, and mixed for pork.

In our family, all of us enjoy our beef medium rare (with my son leaning towards medium, but that doesn’t stop him from enjoying steak tartare either). My research found that the temperature of medium rare beef should be in the vicinity of 130°F /54.5°C, so I took a small roast beef, gave it a nice salt and pepper rub, vacuum sealed it, and cooked it in a water bath for about six hours at 54.5°C. After taking it out of the bag, I heated up a pan with a bit of sunflower oil and quickly browned the outside of the roast.

The beauty of sous vide cooking meat is that you also don’t have to rest the meat for 10-15 minutes as you do when you oven roast, since it’s already at the right temperature. You also don’t have to worry about the meat cooking more after you’re done cooking it sous vide style. In fact, quite the opposite – since it’s already at the perfect temperature internally, you should serve it quickly before it cools off.

One of the interesting things we noticed about our sous vide roast was how much redder the interior was. This gave it a bit more of a rare look, but the texture was perfectly medium-rare, and it was also very tender (a surprise considering the cheap cut we had used). The redness, as I understand it, is a result of the cooking in a vacuum. As there is virtually no oxygen in the bag, the meat does not oxidize and turn brown from oxygen exposure.

Beef roast cooked at 54.5 degrees Celsius for five hours and then seared on the outside

We have repeated the roast beef sous vide with an even cheaper and leaner cut of beef with similarly excellent results. Definite a thing to repeat.

Our pork sous vide experiments have been less successful, and in retrospect it’s entirely due to the cuts of meat being used being too thin and lean, and being cooked at too high a temperature (70°C for the most part), followed by too long in the pan to crisp up the meat. This will require more experimentation with other cuts of meat, such as pork loins.

Pork short ribs cooked at 70 degrees Celsius for a few hours to dissolve the collagen

However, the one cut of pork where sous vide turned out great was with pork short ribs. I created a marinade made with oranges, apples, and onions, pureed in our Vita-Mix blender, and then vacuum sealed the small racks of ribs.

A bag of the pork short ribs when done cooking Sous Vide

I cooked them at 64°C for a couple of hours, and then at 70°C for three more hours, and then finished them off in the broiler to give them a nice brown crisp exterior.

The Sous Vide pork short ribs while broiling to crisp up the exterior

With ribs, there’s a lot of chewy collagen in the meat, and cooking at 70°C breaks that collagen down and makes the meat very tender. The result were tasty ribs where the meat just about fell off the bone.

The final product - Sous Vide cooked pork ribs after a touch of broiling

As mentioned in my previous postings about sous vide cooking, my own adventures and exploration of sous vide started with the noble egg. Eggs are a wonderful natural food, and for those of you interested in the specifics of an egg’s composition, characteristics, and cooking, I again have to recommend Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking, 2nd Edition“, pages 68-117.

I still recall my first encounter with a sous vide cooked egged in a restaurant a couple of years ago, and after trying it I was in gastronomic heaven – the whites were like a soft, delicate custard, while the yolk was thick, rich, and gooey. I could not believe that I had simply settled for chewy, poorly textured, and mediocre eggs all my life. But if you don’t know about alternatives, you never know what you might be missing.

I personally am a huge fan of liquid yolks, and prefer my traditional eggs over easy or poached, and so my first sous vide cooking foray was to make the perfect soft-boiled egg.

McGee explains that egg whites and the yolk are composed of a variety of different proteins, all of which coagulate (solidify) at different temperatures, with the proteins in the egg whites thickening at higher temperatures than the egg yolks. He indicates that egg yolks tend to thicken at around 150°F / 65°C, and the various proteins in egg whites thicken at temperatures ranging from 145°F / 63°C to 180°F / 80°C.

Experiment #1 – Eggs au Naturel @ 64°C – Failed

My first attempt involved just putting the eggs in a water-bath at 64°C to get still runny but nearly solid yolks. Turns out it was a bad idea to put the eggs in the water directly, as they cracked slightly from both the temperature and from bouncing around as a result of the current caused by the immersion circulator, gumming the immersion circulator up with wisps of egg white as a result. I managed to get it clean, but it provided a great first lesson about cooking in a water bath – make sure that your ingredients are sealed away from the water to ensure the water remains clean and pure.

Experiment #2 – Eggs Sous Vide @ 64°C – Better

For the next experiment in cooking eggs sous vide, I actually used sous vide – I vacuum sealed the eggs to prevent them from cracking into the water bath and gumming up the works.

A Multivac vacuum sealer with a pouch with two raw chicken eggs

Here too I learned something. Normal sized eggs are less likely to crack when you vacuum seal them into a bag than bigger eggs. I assume that’s because big eggs are likelier to have thinner shells. I learned my lesson quickly, and only cracked one egg out of the dozen or so I used during my experiments.

Two vacuum sealed raw eggs in a Multivac vacuum sealer

One of the interesting things about cooking in a low-temperature water bath is that for most things, as long as your temperature is within a proper range for the thing you’re cooking and you have reached the point where the food has reached the target temperature throughout, you can cook the item for a wide range of time and still achieve the same result. Thus, the result of cooking an egg at 64°C for an hour is not hugely different from cooking it for three hours or five hours. The same applies to many meats in my experience.

Putting the vacuum sealed eggs in the water bath

With that in mind, I cooked my sous vide eggs at 64°C for around two hours. When I took them out of the bath and cracked them open, I found the yolks were unfortunately a bit more solid than I would like, but the whites had that wonderful light custard texture. The rest of the family agreed the yolk was too firm, and found the whites a bit runny.

A Sous Vide cooked egg at 64°C with a barely solid yolk and creamy whites

Experiment #3 – Eggs Sous Vide @ 63°C – Perfect Yolks

Undeterred, I sealed up some more eggs and cooked them for a couple of hours at a slightly lower temperature – 63°C. The result was the whites were a wee bit runnier, but still like a delicate custard, and the egg yolks were perfectly cooked – gooey and rich but fully cooked. However, the rest of the family was still not wild about the consistency of the egg whites.

A Sous Vide cooked egg with a thick and gooey yolk and creamy whites - cooked at 63 degrees Celsius

The yolk of the 63 degree Sous Vide cooked egg - rich and thick

Experiment #4 – Long-cooked Eggs @ 70°C

As I was curious about the effect of long cooking of eggs to see whether time really doesn’t make a difference, I also cooked some eggs at 70°C for about 10 hours while I was experimenting with cooking pork ribs in the water bath at the same time.

The yolk was firm, but creamy, and the whites less runny but still delicate. This inspired the next and final (for now) experiment.

Experiment #5 – Separately cooking the whites and yolks

For the final egg sous vide experiment, I took eight eggs and separated the whites and yolks into two cooking-safe bowls. While I am certainly capable of separating whites and yolks using just the egg shell itself, I find I am more productive with a dedicated separating device as pictured below. Plus, it’s cute. Trick to using it properly is to slide the egg innards into the device instead of dropping the egg insides onto the device, as the drop creates enough force that the egg yolk membrane might burst.

Jake's way to separate egg yolks and whites

Eight eggs - separated into whites and yolks

Once I was done with separating the eggs, I vacuum sealed each bowl. Another two lessons learned here: First, use bowls or jars that leave about one-third of the top empty – do not fill them to the rim; and second, don’t seal to maximum vacuum – 85-90% vacuum (or 150-100 millibar or so) should be sufficient. Not having known these things, I found my whites and yolks sucked a bit out of the containers during the vacuum sealing process, which in turn burst a couple of the yolks. Fortunately burst yolks still taste good.

The whites and yolks after being vacuum sealed - note that a couple of yolks burst

Both were cooked for about an hour at 63°C (to cook the yolks just right). The yolks were then removed along with enough water to keep them warm while the whites got cooked for another hour at 70°C.

Starting the eggs in a water bath - both at 63C, and then the whites for a while longer at 70C

Result? The yolks were great, of course, and the whites far less runny – just like when I long-cooked the whole eggs, but still custard-like, and most importantly, more to my family’s liking.

Meanwhile, the eggs have been unbagged - creamy rich yolks, and custardy whites

However, when we are next up for another egg sous vide experiment, we may try the whites at somewhat higher temperatures to see if that makes a difference, since coagulation of some of the egg white proteins is not complete until around 80°C.

After a year of making chili rellenos with jalapeño peppers instead of the poblanos required in the original recipe, we finally found poblano peppers here on Bonaire! Even making the recipe for the last year, it is far from perfected, but we have discovered ways to make it easier on my mom and myself.

Krystyana and Linda's low carb Chili Relleno

What makes our recipe low carb is that regular chili rellenos recipes require a corn flour batter to coat the peppers with. Flour is obviously not low carb. So we use beaten eggs instead.

The first thing to do when looking for the perfect pepper for this recipe is an unblemished jalapeño or preferably poblano pepper.

- 6 poblanos (or 10 jalapeños)
- 3 x 8 oz. packs of full fat cream cheese
- 1 x 8 oz. Four Cheese Mexican blend pack
- 4 eggs
- 3 paper bags

First of all, set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then wash the poblanos and dry them off well. On a gas stovetop, lay a flat grill rack on the burner area. You need an open flame for roasting the peppers. Strategically place the peppers so that they are directly over the flame. Turn the pepper when the side facing the flame is entirely black with bubbling skin. When the pepper is black on all sides, stuff the pepper into a paper bag and roll up the opening to keep the steam in. After about 5 minutes, the peppers should be cool enough to pick up.

At this point, and when using jalapeños, I would search for gloves or a victim. The burn in a jalapeños can vary but I would not ever take a chance with getting a hot one while barehanded. This is due to a previous accident when making chili rellenos with jalapeños. After gutting about 10 of them, my fingers started hurting like crazy. My mom and I tried everything to make it stop, from sour cream to aloe. It did not work…. And that is why I suggest gloves.

Take a pepper out and start peeling off the skin while attempting not to break apart the flesh of the pepper. My mom used a small knife for this, but finger nails are almost as successful. We peeled the skin into the sink because this is long process.

Take a knife and slit one side of the pepper, from the stem to the very tip of the pepper. The seeds will be just as hard to take out of the pepper as the skin was to remove and just as sticky. The likelihood of making a gaping hole in the opposite side of your slit is high, so be wary of pulling on strings of the flesh. And wear gloves if it’s a jalapeño.

Mix the cream cheese and the four cheese Mexican blend in a bowl until thoroughly mixed.

Take out a large casserole dish and spray with Pam or grease it with butter. Lay the peppers on the bottom of the casserole dish and start stuffing the peppers with the cheese mixture. Don’t overstuff them. The rest of the cheese can rolled up into little balls and placed around peppers. They melt really well and are yummy to eat separate from the peppers as well.

Beat the eggs in a bowl and brush it over the peppers and dump the rest into the dish. Put the peppers into the oven for 30 minutes, or until the egg is cooked.

Bon appetite!