Weekly Menu, Wednesday 13 February: Spicy pork noodles

Weekly Menu, Tuesday 12 February: Sichuan green beans

Weekly Menu, Monday 11 February: Egg noodles with shiitake and bacon

Weekly Menu, Saturday 9 February: Lunar New Year steamboat / hotpot

Recipe: Steamed egg

Ingredients:

• 30-40 grams of dried scallop
• 500 ml boiling water
• 6 large eggs
• 2 tbsp Light soy

Method:

1. Place the dried scallop into a heatproof glass or ceramic bowl and add the boiling water.  Cover with glad wrap and leave for 20 mins.
2. After the scallops have softened break them up with a fork.
3. Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl then combine with the water and scallop. Stir to properly combine the mixture.
4. Insert a metal stand (or something else to keep the heatproof dish from touching the bottom of the wok) to a wok then add water into the wok (without totally submerging the metal stand). Bring the water in the wok to a boil.
5. Place your dish into the wok and then add a lid to the wok.
6. Let the egg steam for 7-10 minutes or until the egg is just set. It should still wobble slightly when it is ready. If bubbles start to appear in the egg mixture it is overdone.  Remove the dish from the wok when ready and add the soy sauce to the top.  
7. Serve with steamed rice and greens.

Sous Vide in a bucket

Tonight I’m cooking Sous Vide (SV for short) Lamb fillet, served with with cous cous, roasted vegetables and goats cheese.

I am becoming obsessed with cooking meat this way.  Mainly because cooking meat is something that I always used to fuck up.  Trying to cook steak or lamb chops would always result in a raw interior and a burned exterior or just dry, rubbery bullshit.  I even made fish tough once.  How. The. Fuck.

So learning how to cook SV at home has been really worthwhile for me.  There are machines that you can buy now for a few hundred dollars but really, for me at home playing around, I can do without the machinery.  It comes out so perfectly it’s almost like cheating.

A quick google of “sous vide at home” will provide a number of links to home-made machines and alternative solutions to playing with your food and having it turn out amazingly well.

There are two things you need to properly sous vide meat: a zip lock bag and water at a constant temperature.  Professionally you would have the meat vacuum sealed in plastic however you can get the home 90% version by filling a large bowl with water, placing your meat inside the ziplock bag, half sealing the bag, then nearly submerging the thing into the bowl.  The water will force the majority of the air out of the bag.  Once it is almost entirely submerged, seal the bag then take it out of the bowl.  Done.

In the past I have cooked Salmon and duck breast SV at home.  The Salmon was the easiest to cook.  I read about this method on a couple of places online but I couldn’t say where it originated.  All you do is seal your salmon in a zip lock bag and then turn your hot water tap on.  Once the water is as hot as it’s going to get, fill your sink up with water. Place the Salmon in the sink and wait for 16 minutes.  That’s it.  You can then just sear the Salmon in a hot pan and serve it as you like.

The Duck breast I made was a little more involved – it needed to cook for at least 1 hour (or up to 3 hours) at 60 degrees.  This involved me getting a kitchen thermometer and measuring the temp constantly as time progressed.

All I did was bring the water to 60 degrees and then turn the heat down until it was able to maintain that temp for a couple of minutes.  Then place the bag full of duck in there and hope for the best.  I had a pot of cold water next to it and would scoop out some hot water and add some cold every couple of minutes.  Checking with the thermometer this seemed to work pretty well.  It did need to be checked every couple of minutes and so you can’t really leave the kitchen if you use this method.  I had some WTF podcasts to listen to on my ipod, which helped.  I cooked the Duck for about 75 minutes in the end and the fat under the skin didn’t have time to properly render down.  It is recommended that Duck breast is SV’ed for a couple of hours at least to allow for the fat and sinew to soften and melt away.  The meat was good but the skin was way too chewy/fatty.

Sous Vide Duck breast

So today I read about the Serious Eats method of using the thermos like qualities of an esky (or ‘beer cooler’ if you’re American) to maintain heat for long periods and SV’ing meat this way. So not quite a bucket but near enough.

There are cuts of meat that are supposed to be SV’ed for 24-48 hours and if you were going to do something like that you would need to go ahead and buy a machine – but for me tonight, I’m going to be testing out the esky and seeing what kind of results we get.

The thing I love about the idea of using an esky is that it means that anyone can cook meat using this method.  It becomes a big ‘fuck you’ to any kind of exclusivity around SV purely due to the cost of machinery or time standing over a pot.  Basically fill your esky with the right temperature water, throw your meat in, place the lid on top and Serious Eats reckons you are good to go.

Everyone has an esky.  Everyone likes perfectly cooked meat.  This is the kind of set up they make romantic comedies about.  The thing that is missing from this is getting the right temperature.  I have a cooking thermometer ($15 online) now but a lot of people might not.  What I am going to try and see is if there is a ratio of hot and cold water that will provide the right temp to start off with and then I will gauge how long the temp lasts for in my esky at home.  The lamb is going to cook for about an hour so let’s see how it goes.

Okay, with a bit of further googling I found this page which details a mathematical method of estimating water temp by mixing hot and cold water. 

If we’re using water from a freshly boiled kettle we’re looking at this being at around 95 °C.  The tap water is more of an issue – it should be around 20 °C but I’ll add a bit of a range of temps into the calculations below.

Cold water temp	Hot water temp	Ratio (rounded up)	Litres cold water	Litres hot water	End temp
15 degrees	95 degrees	1.3	3	4	58 - 60 degrees
20 degrees	95 degrees	1.15	3.5	4	58 - 60 degrees
25 degrees	95 degrees	1	4	4	58 - 60 degrees

If you’re unsure of your tap water temperature, leave it on your kitchen bench for an hour or two before you need to use it then check what the current temperature is using BOM or your in house gauge if you have one.  Maybe a fridge magnet from Bali or something.  Otherwise just take a guess at 20°C.  Really this going to be a little hit and miss but should work out okay.  I’ll be testing this out a bit more and will see what results I get.

So I was using about 600 grams of Lamb fillet.  This will easily serve 5 people.  The meat had been marinated for a couple of days in garlic, basil and olive oil, inside the zip lock bag.  I left the meat out of the fridge for an hour or so to get closer to room temp  Then the zip lock bag went straight into the esky full of 60 degree water. 

After about 30 mins I tested the water and it had dropped a couple of degrees, which is actually what I wanted (57 degrees for medium rare – assumed that the meat would lower the temp of the water).  I had a kettle boiled and poured a little water in every 15-20 mins to keep the temperature stable.  About a cup each time.  The lamb was in there for about 80 minutes in the end.  I checked on it about 4 times.  It came out really beautifully and using this method it really wasn’t that hard at all.

After it was out, I browned the outside a little by searing it really quickly in a hot pan.  It was served with cous cous and some vegetables, some goats cheese crumbled on top.

I really enjoy cooking with this method – I don’t think überjoi really cares how it’s cooked just as long as it’s not tough but using the SV method you are guaranteed tender, perfectly cooked meat.  It is so easy to do that it seems stupid not to do it like this as long as you have the time.

The next time I’m using steak or lamb chops and will probably use the esky method again.  I’m keen to even try cooking meat like this for a stir fry or for cumin lamb.  For tougher cuts of meat I’ll probably still go with my pressure cooker but nicer cuts of meat, breast, etc are going straight to the esky from now on.

- words by pisso | image by überjoi.

His Top 5 - Westside

Pisso Possum's current Top 5 in the West (in alphabetical order):

• Ricotta cannoli - Dolcetti, West Melbourne
• Mixed ham banh mi - Nhu Lan, Footscray
• Chicken and chicken organs pho - Pho Tam, Footscray
• Sultana loaf - uberjoi's Kitchen, Home
• Toasted rice and coconut salad - Yim Yam, Yarraville

Last updated: 12 April 2012

Recipe: Sticky Rice Wrapped in Bamboo Leaves

(copied from the old we heart cats and food blog)

Hi... okay this is the explanation of how to make sticky rice parcels (or Joong).

There are many variations on this recipe, many different things you can put inside the parcels. This one is fairly traditional apart from the fact that it doesn't use the preserved egg (because überjoi doesn't like it) and that it's made by a half-turkish anglo bastard.

I made some of these to take to work when we had a sort of 'cook off' (I work in an office and it gets really boring sometimes). It's probably too much effort to make on a week night and I wouldn't do that again unless I had too... but it was fun.

You need to start prepping for this dish a day in advance - soaking all the dried bits overnight (sticky rice, bamboo leaves and mung beans if you're using them) and marinating the meat. Then the next day it's about 1 hour to boil the leaves, another hour to make the parcels and then 2-3 hours to cook them.

Step 1: Get some things together.

The 'things' I got together in the picture are (from back left):
-Sesame oil
-Char Siu sauce
-Chinese sausage
-Dried Prawn
-The meat (in the bowl at the back)
-Bamboo leaves
-Oyster sauce
-Rice wine vinegar
-Soy sauce
-Saki
-Five spice
-Dried/preserved pork
-Glutinous/sticky rice (soaking in the pot)
-Split mung beans (soaking in the plastic container)
-A pot of water (it was in the picture so I thought I would mention it...)
-Fresh Shitake mushrooms

Ingredients not in the photo:
-Vegetable oil
-2 eggs
-Cooking string

Other than the bamboo leaves and the sticky rice, the rest is extranious. Put what you like into them. But this is how I made them and they turned out pretty good. Not as good as a restaurant but pretty good.

Note: if you look closely at the picture you can see the crap that usually fills our table discreetly pushed onto one of the chairs. To the far right on the floor is a cat bowl.

Okay... above is a picture of some leaves in boiling water. I've already mentioned that you will need to soak the sticky rice, the leaves and the mung beans overnight. The next day, before you start wrapping them up, boil some water and throw the bamboo leaves in. Boil them for at least 30 mins. This kills any mold germs that might have been lurking on them. I think bamboo is also dirty because pandas eat it so maybe even boil them for an hour to get rid of any panda germs too.

handy hint: you can put vinegar in the water to make them a bit softer as well. But I find that the leaves are fine after boiling them in just water.

Dried prawn. But I've tried to un-dry them using hot water. It doesn't quite work, but they re-inflate a bit. It takes 15 mins or so to un-dry the prawns. These will go into the parcels.

Now I chop up the other bits that are too large to put in whole. In the picture is the preserved pork, the chinese sausage and the fresh shitake mushroom. You don't have to use fresh shitake. It was available so I used it.

I have noticed that there isn't a picture of the meat (überjoi, you didn't take a picture of the meat...). So I'll just tell you what I marinated it in. The Char Siu sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine vinegar. Using the Char Siu sauce is kind of like cheating. It makes things taste good. It works well in this recipe and I'm anglo so I don't need to respect any tradition. Also - I used pork for the meat (from a Yarraville butcher who cut it up especially for me. He was very nice.) but you could easily use Lamb instead. The meat comes out very tender.

Here are the drained split mung beans. They become a smooth paste in the end product.

This is an addition that überjoi asked for - some omelette. I just whisked up two eggs and lightly fried them, then sliced them on a chopping board. This is to replace the preserved egg.

Drain the rice and it looks like this. To add some colour and flavour to the rice, stir through some soy sauce.  Use your own judgement for the amount - I put in a fair amount and it's never been too salty. Also - you can add some oil to the rice at this point. This will help the rice stop sticking to the bamboo leaves when it's cooked.

This is the most challenging part... getting the hang of puttingthe leaves together. Youtube it and I'm sure you'll find a video... but I'll try to describe the process:

Firstly, cut some lengths of cooking string before you start.

Take one leaf and fold it round to meet itself, like you're trying to make a cup out of the leaf. The bottom part of the leaf should naturally fold up onto itself.

Sit the folded leaf in the palm of your hand. Fold up the bottom part of the leaf so that you have a firm base on which to pile the rice and other ingredients. Now take a second leaf and wrap it around the back of the first leaf (that's the stage I'm at in the picture above...). Make sure that the 2nd leaf 'catches' the folded over bottom part of the first leaf. This will help to hold it in place.

Now you just pile everything into it. Here is the order I followed:

1. Rice (just enough to cover the base of the leaf.)
2. Mung bean (about the same as the rice, if not less)
3. prawn, shitake & sausage
4. Meat (1-2 cubes, depending on size)
5. Egg
6. Dried pork
7. More mung bean
8. More rice

Now, depending on how much of each thing you've put in, you may need to wrap a third leaf around the back of your parcel. Do this if you need to, then fold over the top edges.

Hold the fold down with one hand and take a length of pre-cut cooking string. Place one end under the hand holding down the fold. Then wrap the string tightly around the outside and tie it off.

The natural twine I used to wrap up these ones came with the bamboo leaves and makes them look really authentic.



This is an uncooked parcel on a leaf. überjoi likes taking the pretty photos.

So then you make parcel after parcel until all the ingredients are used up. Then you throw them all in a big pot of boiling water for 2-3 hours. They will be done after two hours. The meat will get more tender if you leave them in there longer.

You will need to add more boiling water after an hour or so. Make sure all the parcels are submerged.

This is what you get at the end... the parcels become firm and all of the flavours have combined through the rice.

You can eat them with some soy dipping sauce, or with sugar or (my preference) just by themselves.

words by pisso | photos by überjoi