Food - meats and extra characters

Coffee
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Gave me an idea:

Same here. Pork shoulder/neck, leg/shoulder of 2+ year old sheep (mutton) or goat, rooster, wild boar (any), beef brisket, oxtail, pork knuckles (haxen).

I had a butcher in Greece where I was a very regular customer, he got to appreciate the kinds of meats I was buying because they were butchery/cheffy old school meats, and started setting things aside for me. Once he talked me out of buying a piece because it was “too fresh, just slaughtered last week, it’s no good for you” (needed more time hanging in the fridge and aging). There’s a businessman respecting their customers. He once said “I got something special coming up, we have a bunch of old milk cows, nobody will like them and I’ll keep much of it for myself, how about I cut you a side and let it hang for a month or two?”. I bought 20 steaks, almost 1kg each, we were eating them for many months and by God they were sublime. Of course this was about 2015 in Greece, in Switzerland that’d cost as much as a small car. I asked him once why doesn’t he get more on the dry aged hype train, he said he doesn’t like the clientele that goes for that sort of thing “rich pretentious assholes, they’d eat any old shit XYZ TV chef talked about, next month it’d be something else and I’d have lost my regulars”, he said.

LifeProTip from a US-trained chef I met in the army: pre-salting. He told me to salt tough meat well, 1 day before cooking, then wash whatever residue was still there and cook. Tenderises the meat and salts it internally. Not good to go for longer as it dries and toughens the meat. In my wife’s native Serbia they’d salt whole sheep for 2-3 days, then wash them and bake them in a sealed (with pastry) wood oven. Amazingly delicious.

P.S. I feel the US beats any other place in the world for beef. Can’t say “but Kobe/Wagyu”, as it’s a treat and not for everyday. Other than that the meat I had in the US was white and tasteless, but their beef is unmatched. That, and BBQ - won’t even say “real BBQ” because there’s only one type of BBQ: low and slow smoked meat. It grates me when we say BBQ and mean grilling in Europe.

P.S.2 I cooked tons of times for friends using a trusty, bog standard Weber Kettle with the snake method, it works like a charm every single time if you follow the guide. In fact the Weber Kettle has been so consistent and good to me that I recommend it so much my friends wonder if I should quit the day job and become Weber salesman. This is something I’d love to get at some point but it doesn’t seem that it’s readily available in Europe, and plus my building doesn’t allow coal grills… Not sold on the kamado ovens, way too expensive, finnicky and heavy.

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Yes, also known as dry-brining. The salt draws out water from the meat and creates a salty brine that then gets reabsorbed into the meat. You then have a piece of meat that is salted throughout, instead of just on the outside.

Here’s how I do it:

  1. Dry the meat (chicken, beef, whatever) with paper towels.
  2. Salt it (0.5%-0.75% of the meat weight, if you want to be precise)
  3. Put it on a cake rack or similar so air gets to it from all sides, and into the fridge, uncovered, for at least 2 hours, up to 24.
  4. If you didn’t use too much salt, there’s no need to wash anything away. Also, this would make the meat wet again, which you don’t want if you want a nice sear e.g. on a steak (the heat would not sear the meat but instead first boil the residual water, and with it cook the meat before it’s getting any sear marks).

If you have less than 2 hours, don’t bother. It’s actually worse, as the brine wouldn’t have reabsorbed into the meat by then and you’d be cooking of the brine, leading to a dry piece of meat.

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I suddenly have a desire to get invited for lunch by you all.

BBQ:When I heard those three letters together I always thing at the abomination that is BBQ Sauce. I personally think it’s an insult to spare ribs

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You mean for a delicious entrecôte à point with oven baked potatoes?

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Damn you!

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#foodp0rn :drooling_face:

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Today I ate tofu for lunch :stuck_out_tongue:

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Oh well, I‘d probably be on his sh-list multiple times.

A reasonably thick dry-aged Angus cote de boeuf, dry-brined overnight, then put into a sous-vide bath for a couple of hours to get the temperature to an even 54-55 degrees throughout (medium-rare, and none of those ugly grey layers), followed by a short reverse-searing on the very hot grill to let that Maillard reaction do its goodness…

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No gold leaf?

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I’m disappointed …

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That sounds about perfect, the reverse sear is another game-changing, cracking technique I use too… I’ve been trying to explain to my wife that there are very VERY few instances where very high heat is needed in cooking.

Big chunks of pork, marinated in grated tomato+peppers, garlic, mustard, oregano, lemon juice, skewered, tightly wrapped in several layers of foil and cooked at very low heat for a few hours, then finished on the grill - amazing!

Another tip, this time from Gordon Ramsay, is liberal use of soy sauce. I sometimes use it instead of salt and find its taste rarely makes it to the food if you don’t drench it with it. I don’t believe I ever cook beef without any soy sauce.

Borrowing a brilliant expression from Roald Dahl: I’m a discerning pig when it comes to food.

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You didn’t use enough french words.

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Can’t help with more French words, but here’s how Mr. Bean would phrase things

Imagine, if you will, a rather robust dry-aged Angus cote de boeuf, almost as thick as… well, a very thick book that nobody wants to read! Dry-brined overnight, because who doesn’t enjoy a good soak? Then, we plunge it into the sous-vide bath, like a decadent spa day for meat, aiming for a luscious 54-55 degrees—medium-rare, mind you! We want it juicy, not a glimpse of those ghastly grey layers that make your heart sink like a bad soufflé! Finally, a brief whirl on a sizzling hot grill, allowing that glorious Maillard reaction to work its magic—like alchemy, but for your taste buds! Voilà! Cooking nirvana achieved, without losing a finger. Fingers crossed, eh?

(courtesy of Rowan Atkinson Speaking Style Translator | Anything Translate).

If you need a real translator, I’d recommend this woman: I Can Translate

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OMFG I was thinking of linking this video as a response to whatever you could have posted, but also thinking it’d be too unPC for 2024, so I clicked on your link only to find…Catherine Tate :slight_smile:
Clearly you’re sais pas bovered. :smiley:

Edit: the translator video has me in tears without fail, but I’d known Catherine Tate from my UK years.

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Reliably works for me, too.

Back to food, this time in the “extra characters” category: the best fries you will ever eat in your life, personally last experienced with my son on last Sunday evening, first discovered a couple of years ago in my beloved NZZ: Toscana Pommes | Richard Kägi (richardkaegi.ch)*

* Maybe I should put in a calendar entry to watch this at maybe 10 a.m. every day or whenever I feel a lowpoint in my day statistically approaches ... ;-)

** I personally would use 2 liters of oil (peanut oil, definitely!) instead of just 1.5 l per one kg of potatoes. Also, feel free to splurge on the spices instead of using a kleiner Bund each.
If you like more detailed experiences descriptions for the background of the recipee, check out the NZZ article on it: Toskana Pommes frites: Rezept von Richard Kägi (nzz.ch).
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Harumpf, not on board with this recipe, this is a casus belli. As a discerning pig I don’t like fried potatoes that haven’t been washed of a lot of the starch, I find it burns and turns bitter at the edges - can even see it in the picture there! Also no faff with garlic and herbs, a crystal-like crust and fluffy semi-sweet interior, salt and good mayonnaise is all I want.

Best fries…chips I mean I ever ate are any sort of English style triple cooked chips and are an absolute pain in the ass to cook. Cut thick, wash a lot of the starch out, gently simmer for a bit until the edges become a bit translucent but centres are solid, remove from water and put on paper towel to lose the water and steam, then gently fry in sunflower oil until light golden, then drain and dry again and then fry in higher heat until deep golden in sunflower oil+/-duck fat/lard.

On duck fat, I did a roast goose once where I’d coated it with a mixture of orange zest and Chinese five spice. The goose itself wasn’t anything to write home about but that FAT, gently infused with the spices was gold dust. I saved about a litre of it and used it to do oven-baked potatoes which we called “magic potatoes”. That fat lasted us for over a year in the freezer.

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I declare forfeit.*

* But your preperation method only works for someone with lots of time on their hands. Like, a long term investor kind of bloke … you know, not really, … well, … hm, ok then. Maybe I’ll have to try it out!

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Hey, I’m living in Romandie, and I didn’t even use ‚Voilà’, unlike „Mr Bean“ :wink: And well, we are talking food after all :laughing:

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