Chorizo. AKA: probably my favorite meat.

Scrambled egg and chorizo breakfast burritos are easily one of my favorite homemade breakfast items.  They can be as fancy and dressed up or as plain and simple as you like depending on whatever ingredients you have on hand. (And in general, [imho] any food wrapped in a tortilla is instantly improved.) That being said, making chorizo was immediately placed on the top of my to-do list after obtaining my meat grinder.

Chorizo is a Mexican pork sausage that gets most of its flavor from several peppers, in this case pasilla(ancho), chipotle, and paprika.  Ancho, and chipotle powders can by hard to find so Charcuterie recommends drying fresh peppers and then grinding them, so I just bought pre-dried ones in the ethnic food section at Fred Meyers and ground them.  Spices in that section are so much cheaper than in the baking section.

After the long, involved process of de-stemming/seeding my peppers, I ended up with this:

At which point I was ready for the even longer process of cutting this thing:

Into little tiny pieces small enough to fit in my grinder.

It's really important when trimming meat for sausage to get as much of the sinew as possible out of the meat.  I don't seem to be very good at this.  The reason is that, when you are actually grinding the meat, all that sinew will get wrapped around the blade and will slow down the process.  You can tell this has happened when you get what is known as "smearing" on the die. When grinding is going well, the appearance should be like a bunch of individual little worms coming out of the die, exactly like ground beef in the supermarket. Kind of like this:

kind of...

But with smearing, the meat all comes out in kind of an amorphous blob. Like this:

At which point you have to stop, take the thing apart, and clean out all the gunk. Pain in the ass.

But anyway, eventually you end up with wonderful sausage yay!

Corned beef!

I never knew how good corned beef could be until this happened on my stove.  The process is somewhere between curing bacon and brining a turkey and you will absolutely not regret trying this yourself. But you may regret not trying it. Also, true story; this corned beef is responsible for Brittany getting a job.

Once again, this is a recipe from Charcuterie. One important thing you'll need before you start is a stock pot (or crock pot) big enough to hold a 5 lb beef brisket and space in your fridge to hold it.

For the corning:

1 gallon water

2 cups kosher salt

1/2 cup sugar

1 oz (5 tsp) pink salt (This is a bit of a specialty item.  Here in town I get mine at Meadows on Mississippi.  You can also ask at the counter of a specialty meat market and sometimes they'll have some for sale. This stuff has a lot of different names but the stuff you want almost always ends with a  #1. Pink salts ending in #2 are for things like dry-cured sausage and the like.

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 Tbsp pickling spice (you can find recipes for pickling spice or buy it pre-made at a lot of bulk spice stores, like Sheridan's)

One 5-pound beef brisket

Combine all the brine ingredients in your large pot. Bring to a simmer and stir until the salt and sugar have dissolved. Remove from heat, and once it has cooled to room temperature, refrigerate it until chilled. 

Plop the brisket into your brine and weight it down with a bowl or plate so that it stays submerged and leave it alone for 5 days.

I ended up having to cut my brisket in half to make it fit and as far as I can tell, this was to no ill-effect.

For the cooking:

2 Tbsp pickling spice

1 head cabbage

1 carrot

1 onion (Or 1/2 a Costco onion. Those mothers are huge)

a few potatoes (Yukon golds! Or not, but they're my favorite.)

After 5 days are up, rinse the brisket thoroughly in cool water. Toss the brine.

Throw the brisket and all of your chopped up vegetables back in the stock pot and cover it with enough water to cover everything. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 3 hours or so.  Make sure to check the water level every once in awhile and add water as necessary.

Absolutely delicious.  But really, the main reason I wanted corned beef is this:

 

Mmmm... corned beef hash...

Super Money-Saver Mayo!

I decided to make tuna salad for lunch today only to find I was nearly out of mayo.  Fortunately, Brittany happened to, at that very moment, come across a recipe for it while looking up corned beef in Charcuterie. So I made some.

 

This stuff is almost stupidly simple. And remarkably cheap, you probably already have all the ingredients already in your house. I don't think I'll ever buy mayonnaise again.

Adapted from Charcuterie:

1 egg yolk
1 tsp water
1/2 tsp salt
1 to 2 tsp lemon juice, to taste
1 pinch white pepper (or black, white is just more aesthetic)
1 cup veggie oil
1 Tbsp white vinegar

(yields about 1 cup)

Mix the yolk, water, salt, lemon juice, and pepper in a small bowl with a whisk.
Once combined, slowly (very thin stream) add the oil while whipping.
Once the mixture starts to combine and thicken you can start adding the oil a little faster.
Once it's all blended together, mix in the vinegar. This wasn't in the original recipe, but mine came originally came out tasting a bit strongly of the veggie oil so I read the jar of Best Foods and saw vinegar on there so I tossed some in. Perfect! Tasted just like the store-bought stuff!
Add more lemon juice and really pretty much any other seasoning you like (garlic, chipotle, etc.) to taste.
If it comes out too thick, whip in a little more water.

Done! The hardest part is all the whipping.

Enjoy!

Sausage grinding, and further adventures at at Macy's

This was a particular exciting endeavor because I got to use CHRISTMAS PRESENTS!!1!

 

I will never again shop at Macy's; this is the third kitchenaid mixer I've owned since Christmas and the second grinder attachment.  Macy's does everything wrong.

Once again, I used a recipe from Charcuterie; "Da Bomb" breakfast sausage according to the authors.

5 pounds pork shoulder butt (available at most butchers, most likely behind the counter)(I always use

     Sheridan Fruit on MLK because they are awesome)

1 1/2 ounces kosher salt (3 tablespoons)

5 tablespoons peeled and finely grated fresh ginger

5 tablespoons tightly packed finely chopped sage

1 tablespoon minced garlic

2 teaspoons ground white or black pepper (I used half of each, but more on that later)

1 cup ice water

There is a picture of all my ingredients in my last post.

The pork shoulder I bought ended up being 5.5 pounds or so. Your first step is to dice it up into chunks that will fit into your grinder; mine were roughly 3/4".  While you're dicing, try to pull as much sinew and stringy bits as you can while leaving the fat.  I didn't do this and had some issues with sinew getting tangled up in my grinder.  Be forewarned though, dicing 5 pounds of meat takes FOR. EVER. My arm was sore by the end of it. 

Next prep all your seasonings; peeling and grating that much ginger is also a bit time consuming and messy, but it smells amazing. I love ginger.  Also note that that the recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of pepper, not tablespoons.  Oops.  I was wondering why mine is a touch warm on the tongue.  And, like I mentioned, I used a mix of white and black just for fun.

Once all your ingredients are prepped, toss everything except the water together until it's pretty well blended and stick it in the fridge for anywhere from an hour to over night. Again, see the pictures in my last post.

Everything I have read about using a meat grinder so far (Charcuterie and user reviews), has emphasized the importance of keeping everything cold prior to and during grinding; if the fat gets too warm, it will start to liquefy leading to sausage with a grainy texture.  For me this meant freezing the grinder die and blade prior to use and, as pictured, putting the mixing bowl in an ice bath while grinding.
While grinding,  and this applies to any meat grinding, you want the meat to come out in a wormy kinda texture, if it comes out like a blob and sticks to the die; you've got sinew tangled in the blade/die and need to clean it out.  I guess I should point out that I used the small die (1/8" holes) for my sausage.

 

Once your sausage is all ground; stick it back under the mixer, add the ice-cold water and mix it for about a minute or so until it has an even texture.

Now just saute up a bit to test the seasoning and you're done! yummm

I'll post a picture of it in all its cooked up glory as soon as I cook some again, but I'm full at the moment.

Baby, it's cold outside, or "the song pandora played most often while i soaked tiny birds in salty water"

Well, at least I've gotten that out of my way very early in my blogging experience; I just accidentally deleted an entire post at the exact moment the thing decided to auto-save, so it's gone.  So this post my second, bitter, attempt.

For Christmas Eve dinner this year, I decided to try a second attempt at brining birds. The first time I'd tried brining was this past Thanksgiving's turkey, which turned out AMAZING.  This time around I thought I'd go for cornish game hens (or tiny chickens).

For those of you that are unfamiliar with it, brining is a magical process wherein you soak meat (or vegetables in the case of pickling) in a salty solution along with herbs and seasoning.  The difference in salt concentration between the solution and the moisture in the meat's cells leads to a phenomenon that could only be comprehended by the highest caliber of chemist; widely referred to as osmosis.  During this alchemical process, the salty solution passes into the meat cells carrying with it any flavors you have added to the brine.  Did you catch that? The flavor literally gets into the meat.   The end effect of this whole thing is that the resulting bird is extra juicy and flavorful.

The brine recipe I have comes from what is probably my absolute favorite food book (as I have mentioned before) Charcuterie (Ruhlman and Polcyn):

1 gallon water
1 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 bunch fresh tarragon (about 1 ounce)
1 bunch fresh parsley (about 1 ounce)
2 bay leaves
1 head of garlic, halved horizontally
1 onion, sliced
3 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 lemons, halved

Basically you just throw all this stuff together in a large pot (and I mean large, I just expected to use my largest pot which turned out to only hold exactly 1 gallon so it was a little overflow-y) and then bring it to a boil and simmer it until the sugar and salt are dissolved.  The convenient thing about chopping all this stuff is that, you don't have to worry about the skin or peel or whatever; this stuff is just for flavor so it all goes in.  I usually just quarter the onion and don't even bother cutting the parsley or tarragon at all.  A trick I learned for using black peppercorns is that, wherever you use them, toss them in a frying pan and give them a quick roast, it brings out the flavor a little better.  Give the lemon halves a good squeeze before tossing them in.  It is important that you make sure you will be making enough brine to cover whatever you are brining and also that you have a container in which the bird fits without too much extra room.  A good way of checking this is to put the still frozen bird(s) in your container and then add water with a measuring cup until the bird is completely submerged.  If you need more than a gallon, just multiply the recipe.  I had to do this with the turkey (2.5 gallons) and didn't have more than the originally called for herbs and it came out fine.

Once you've dissolved the salt, allow the brine to cool to room temperature and then chill it in the fridge.

Next you are ready for the bird. I should note that on both occasions I've done this, I made the brine several days in advance to no ill effect.  I like to rinse the bird before placing it in the brine, but I'm not sure that's necessary. Once the bird is in the brine, weight it down with a plate or something so that it doesn't float, it's really important that it stays completely submerged during brining.  Then stick the whole thing in the fridge (or garage or shed or other cold place) for the proscribed time.

Charcuterie has a simple chart for figuring out brining times for various amounts of meat but I also found one here. The 15 lb turkey I did for 24 hrs, the two 22 oz game hens I stuck in the same container for 3h hrs. (over brining can lead to excessively salty meat)

Once the time has come, remove the bird from the brine and rinse it well. Pat the thing dry and stick it, uncovered, back in the fridge for 2 to 24 hours depending on the size of the creature.  This resting period gives the saltiness a chance to work its way throughout the rest of the bird.

Finally, finally we get to cook the thing.  The recipe for turkey in Charcuterie says to go for 450 deg F. So far the wrappings on most birds I've seen say 350.  A mantra I've heard many times in reference to meat is "low and slow" so I tend to go for 350-400 which just takes a little longer.  I also start the roasting with the bird breast-side down which supposedly makes for a more moist bird as well. Then, when the bottom side is nice a browned, I flip the bird right-side up and finish roasting.  The USDA recommends an final internal temperature for poultry at 165 deg F.  The best way to measure this temp. is to stick the thermometer in the meatiest part of whatever you're cooking.  The even better best way is to go find yourself a digital alarm thermometer (about $20 wherever kitchen gadgets are sold) which has a probe you leave in the meat while roasting and an alarm that goes off when it reaches whatever temperature you've set it to. A brilliant piece of technology.

Once you've hit your internal temp; the thing is done! Pull it out, stick dessert in the oven and let the bird rest for another 20 minutes or so before serving, then enjoy the most flavorful, juicy bird you've ever roasted.