Salt encrusted burger with brie

A friend of mine told me about a technique he had heard of for cooking hamburgers. The basic idea is that you cook your burger on a bed of kosher salt to create a salty crust on the outside of the meat.

I thought this sounded like something I should try, so one day for lunch I gave it a shot.

Usually when I make burgers I try to get ground beef that has about 15% – 20% fat and I shape it into 4 ounce patties.

I use my digital kitchen scale and a steel bowl to measure out four ounces of meat, add a pinch of salt and a grid of pepper, and the shape the burger.

Mise en place, Beer in place

This time around I didn’t season the meat very much, because I knew that I would be cooking on top of a pile of salt, so added just a pinch. For a regular non-salt-encrusted burger, I season each burger pretty liberally.

Too much salt

mmmm. salty.

I grossly over estimated how much salt I’d need to do this. As you can see in the photo on the left, I have a hefty pile of kosher salt in the pan. This produced a really nice crust, but it was too salty (still tasty, but overkill). The next time I try this I’ll use about a quarter of the salt.

I put the salt right into a dry pan without oil. I never oil a pan to fry a burger. Ground beef has plenty of fat on its own and if you are patient and let a nice crust develop the burger will release from the pan very easily. Just let the meat cook over medium-high heat for about 4 minutes on the first side and you’ll get a nice brown crust. The second side will only need 2-3 minutes because by this point the beef is no longer cold and doesn’t require as much time to brown.

Crusty burgers

The salt basically melts into and embeds itself into the crust on the meat, giving you a nice salty crunch with each bite.

I’ve been using english muffins as burger buns for a while now. They’re just the rights size to hold a four ounce burger, they have a nice crunch and texture, and they hold up better under all the juicy goodness (they don’t turn to mush and fall apart like regular store-bought buns).

While perhaps laden with entendre, this does capture a bit of the prep-work I did over the last day and a half catering a friend’s bridal shower.

I knocked off of work early to go shopping.

Green beans land artistically among the potatoes while shopping.

I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing food to cook the next day.

Salmon roulade after preparation

I decided to try out making a salmon roulade, and cooking it sous-vide style. I layered two skinned salmon fillets together, with chopped fresh spinach in between, lightly seasoned with salt.

This assembly was rolled tightly into many layers of plastic wrap, creating a salmon log. I left this in the fridge over night. The following day, I cooked it sous-vide style by dropping the whole log, still wrapped, into a big roasting pan and  covered it with warm water. On the stovetop I brought the water up to 125º F and left it there for an hour (periodically adjusting the temperature by removing some hot water, and adding cold).

When it was done, I carefully sawed the log into disks with a bread knife (plastic wrap and all) and deposited the disks onto a serving platter.

The piece(s) I stole sampled were quite good. Very moist and tender. To the platter I added a tidy stack of blanched purple asparagus and a nest of blanched green beans. At the party I included a lemon and rosemary aioli for dipping, seasoning, or spooning into your face when no one is looking.

I also tried out making some twice baked potatoes. I boiled two small bags of potatoes,  then let them cool. Once cool enough to handle I cut them all in half lengthwise-y and laid the halves out on cooking sheets. Then, using a little spoon, I scooped out the innards into a bowl, leaving the potato shells on the cookie sheets.

To the potato innards, I added salt, pepper, sour cream, heavy whipping cream, 4oz of melted butter, and dill. I whipped this into a smooth consistency with a hand mixer, then piped it back into the potato shells. I baked these (400º F) for about 30 minutes, until browned. I served these with a small dollop of caviar on top.

Potatoes and salmon

I also made roasted vegetable skewers (with two more flavored aiolis) , crab and avocado dip, and two loaves of bread (with a selection of cheeses to go with).

Overall, I’m proud of myself.

Ready for guests

Unfortunately, this was a bridal shower, so I didn’t get to hang around and eat my food (unless I was willing to dress as a fireman and dance).

There are now home sous-vide ‘water ovens‘ which are within the price range of your average yuppie, but still not something I want to spend money on. ($500 will buy a lot of food and drink. Also an iPad.)

Since I’m not in the market for a $4000 laboratory quality thermal water circulator or a $500 dollar yuppie toy, I figured I was out of the running until I saw an article about people using coolers for low temperature cooking.

Well duh. Coolers are big insulated boxes and will keep hot things hot just as well as keeping cold things cold. You might have add some hot water to the cooler from time to time to manage the temperature, but it should be as simple as bringing water up to temperature on the stove top, sealing up some food in a bag, putting the whole mess into a cooler, and waiting.

I decided to do a small scale test with my thermos, which is like my cooler, just smaller. If I messed up, the worst thing that would happen is that I have to put the food into the oven to finish cooking it.

Mise en place

My thermos has a convenient flip-top lid which allows me to insert a probe thermometer inside without removing the lid. It’s also big enough for a steak.

I bought a 12oz New York steak, rinsed it, patted it dry, seasoned it with salt and pepper, then shoved it into a Ziploc bag with a splash of Worcestershire, lime juice, and olive oil. When you are trying to seal up food in a bag and make it as air tight as possible, it helps to have a little liquid in the bag – assuming you don’t have a food vacuum-bagger-device.

You can get a near vacuum in a Ziploc bag by sealing up the bag, leaving one end open and submerging the bag slowly into a bowl of water, leaving the open end just up above the water. As the bag sinks, the water pressure pushes the air out of the bag. When the opening of the bag is just at the surface of the water, seal up the bag, creating a near vacuum inside the bag.

I heated water on the stove top to 145º F – I wanted my steak to be medium rare at about 130º F – the higher temperature allows for both a small amount of heat loss from the thermos and for the fact that the relatively cold steak will cool off the water a little bit. I dropped the steak-in-a-bag into the thermos and poured the water on top.

In the 'water oven'

I put the lid on top, covered it with a tea-towl, and threw a bowl on top for good measure (to help keep the heat in).

And then I waited.

40 minutes later this emerged:

It's a bowl of meat

This didn’t look terribly appetizing, but I patted the steak dry and seared it in clarified butter and then WOW.

Medium rare

Perfectly medium rare, with a nice crust on the outside. Also, delicious. Best steak I’ve made.

(These photos kind of suck. I discovered my good camera’s battery was dead right as I was going to take a picture, so these are all crappy iPhone shots)

Streetcar rails at 23rd and Burnside

It’s been fun to watch the construction. They close down a few blocks at a time and excavate the street. In the process old streetcar rails have been been dug up.

In one place, the old tracks peeked out from underneath the end of the uncut street.

End of the line

There are stacks of railroad ties that have been unearthed, in surprisingly good condition after being underground for years.

Pile of old railroad ties

This all feels like a recent-history urban archeological site: “Portland at the turn of the twentieth century.” I wonder if any of this stuff is worthy of preserving for historical reasons.

I am tempted to swipe a cobble stone for a door stop.

A new website?

You shouldn’t have.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new WordPress theme. It’s still a little rough in places, comments need formatting, lists need sweetening, various twiddles need to be twaddled. But it’s mostly there, so why not take it for a test run?

This theme is fully ‘widgetized’ (to use the WordPress nomenclature) which means it’s a lot easier to customize. I’m also working on a few fun little tricks like shortcodes (like for the image above) to allow for a little more aesthetic control of the published web content (while not borking the internal tools)

I have a couple of goals with this design: Use nice typography and keep it minimal. I realize the primary way people interact with a website nowadays is to follow a link from somewhere to the specific article. That link might be in an RSS feed reader, a search result, a twitter posting, or whatever. Very few people are going to websites directly to browse for content.

This has two implications: Reading is your user’s first priority. Searching is probably second, and actual clicking around on the site is a distant third (maybe fourth if you have some funny pictures of cats).

With this in mind I decided to keep the navigation minimal, and present the content front and center. Archives are off on their own page now (it’s widgetized, I could bring them back whenever), ancillary links are down at the bottom for when a reader gets done reading.

Technical Notes

Right now this theme should work in modern browsers including Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Internet Explorer 6 is probably making a mess of this site. I’m not sure if I care or not.

You may have noticed that this type ain’t Arial. I’m using new-ish font embedding techniques which should be rendering everything in a lovely Bodoni-esque typeface for you, unless you’re using an ancient version of Safari or Firefox. I am using Font Squirrel to create font kits. They host many open source or non-licensed fonts and provide a tool to roll your own font kits.

The rest of the theme is straight-forward HTML and CSS with a minor bit of tweaking to some default WordPress functions.

In it, Mr. Ebert writes about the humble, yet powerful, rice cooker.

I had always shunned rice cookers. When people would talk about how great their rice cooker was I would snark “I have a rice cooker. It’s also called a ‘pot’. The nice part is, it’s also a pot.”

I have similar feelings about oven mitts. I have an oven mitt. It’s called a ‘towel’. The benefit of using a towel, is it’s also a towel.*

I can make a good pot of rice in a standard pot. I can make a nice risotto too.

However, Mr. Ebert’s blog changed my tune.

Yes, the rice cooker can cook rice. It can also cook anything that needs to be steamed or cooked in water.

I worship at the alter of our Lady of the Ladle, Julia Child, but I’ve been wanting to broaden my horizons and eat more vegetarian and generally healthier dishes.

I purchased a 6 cup Zojirushi rice cooker with a steamer basket. It makes darn good rice. It also cooks beans to perfection. Tonight it made me a lovely batch of quinoa.

Quinoa (keeeeeeen wah) is a small little grain that when cooked has a nutty flavor and a pleasant texture.

Quinoa makes excellent salad. The small grains are fairly dense and when cooked they tend to stick together a bit. This allows you to mix all kinds of various things in without them all settling to the bottom.

Quinoa salad

This lovely salad is a mix of quinoa, shredded lettuce, fresh parsley, kidney beans, peas, onion, garlic, feta, salt, pepper, paprika, dill, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. All to taste.

Hearty and filling but not heavy. Nice mix of textures and flavors. Lovely while still slightly warm, good chilled. Highly portable for lunches.

*Yes, I know where my towel is.

I’ve been learning about baking bread.

This all started by reading (most of) the book Ratio – which is a fantastic book about the fundamentals of cooking. I bought the Kindle version of this book for my iPhone so I could read it on the train – which is great – but it’s also horrible because I don’t mind getting buttery fingerprints on a cookbook but I do mind dropping my $400 toy into a bowl of wet dough.

From this book I learned that bread was not that mysterious and started making a few loaves.

After that I started learning a little bit more. The internets are full of wonderful, sloppy, contradictory information about bread making.

But I’ve learned a few things which I didn’t really understand before. e.g. Kneading is an option, not a requirement.

Before I tried any bread making I had run across a couple of “no knead” bread recipes. My gut feeling was that this was some hocus-pocus nonsense that resulted in some bread-ish product that wasn’t very good.

I was as surprised as anyone to discover that I was wrong.

The first several loaves I made were good. They looked good, tasted good, they were good. But I wasn’t getting that big open crumb you see at the fancy bakery. I thought maybe I wasn’t kneading enough, or I wasn’t letting it rise enough, or something. The problem was that I misunderstood kneading and bread.

Bread – not a cracker, pie crust, cake, or biscuit – is the way it is because it is built from an intertwined web of gluten. Gluten is what happens when the proteins in wheat get together with water and have a party. The resulting aftermath is a stringy network of proteins. Water also breaks down some of the starches in bread into simple sugars. When yeast shows up to the party, yeast is all like ‘sup sugar, chows down, and farts out carbon dioxide.

The web of gluten holds the yeast farts in. Once the bread is baked, gluten hardens, the yeast is killed (the glorious bastards), but the shell of their fart bubbles remain as the only evidence of their existence. This also makes bread spongey, sproingy, and delicious.

So to make bread you have to have some water. If there’s a lot of water molecules can just slip and slide around, the yeast gets fed, and gluten forms all by itself. This takes some time – like 12 hours or better – but it happens all by itself.

If you have relatively little water, you have to help things along with kneading. Kneading is like pouring your shy protein molecules a drink (of water) and forcing them to dance. Yeast goes along for the ride. Yeast likes to party.

When there’s a lot of water, the naturally formed gluten network is random, open, and irregular.

When you knead bread you are mechanically forcing the creation of this network, which usually results in a much tighter and compact network of yeast fart bubbles.

This is your classic trade off.

If you want a tight, well structured dough that you can shape into anything you want (and have it ready to eat in a couple of hours), then you knead.

If you’ve got time to kill and you want something flavorful, rustic, with big holes you can fill with olive oil – you go for the no-knead-let-it-rest-in-a-bowl-overnight method and let the magic happen.

There are, of course, places in between on this spectrum.

We tasted each whisky first by smell. Whisky is commonly drunk from an old fashioned glass, which is just fine, but if you want to get a nose full of yummy aromas, try a proper whisky glass. The narrower opening concentrates the aromas so you can get a good whiff. Hold the opening of the glass a good 6 inches from your nose. That way you can enjoy the smell, but not inhale alcohol fumes and set your nostrils on fire.

Following the smell we sipped just a tiny bit – enough to wet the tongue – and then inhaled deeply through our nose (mouth shut tight). This has the effect of combining the aromas and the taste at once.

After all this silliness we just drank the shot.

Someone had the bright idea that we should write down some notes as what we thought about each whisky. Someone else had the bright idea that we should share the prices of each bottle so we could remember later what we liked and how much it would cost us to enjoy it again.

And now I have the bright idea to share it all with the internets. Hopefully this will introduce someone to something new and delicious.

Eagle Rare Bourbon 10 year – $28

• Sweeter than expected (but not too sweet)
• Smelled and tasted of licorice, cherry, and cinnamon

Corner Creek Bourbon – $28

• Nicely sweet, slightly spicy
• Grassy, fresh aroma with fruit

Bushmills Malt 21 – $116

This was the most expensive whisky we tried that night – I was pleasantly surprised. My only exposure to Irish Whisky has been cheap stuff at pubs

• Smells and tastes of vanilla and Anise
• Very, dangerously smooth

Bushmills 1608 400th Anniversary – $70

• Bright aroma, almost citrus
• Taste of vanilla and cherry
• Also dangerously smooth

McCarthy’s 2009 – $50

This was the first Oregon whisky we tried – again I was pleasantly surprised. I had tried some regional whisky once before and thought it was frankly awful. (I won’t name names). The McCarthy’s was quite good and each year varies quite a bit.

• Strong aromas of peat and smoke
• Flavors of grain (like bread) and butter

Rogue Dead Guy Whiskey – $56

I had mixed feelings about this whisky – it’s made with the same grains used in Dead Guy Ale. It’s tasty, very drinkable – but I hesitate to call it “good”- it’s more interesting. Like if a beer graduated to whiskey but not with honors.

• Peppery flavor
• Not very aromatic
• Quite smooth and sip-able

McCarthy’s 2008 – $50 (not that you’ll find any)

Very distinct from the 2009 – which is very Oregon of them. Wines very from year to year, because the weather changes, the landscape changes, etc. This Oregon whisky is the same.

• Light aroma of peat and smoke, but with the addition of caramel
• Tastes just a little like a crème brûlée

A’bunadh – $67

This is a cask strength whisky, meaning it isn’t cut with water before bottling. This means it will be approximately 60% alcohol by volume or 120 proof. It can be drank straight – but really should have a splash of water.

A’bunadh is made in small batches, and each batch (roughly one batch per year) can differ greatly from the year before. Each bottle is numbered with its batch. (I cleverly forgot to write the batch number down – but I think it was 26)

• Aromas of burning wax candles and peat
• Surprisingly sweet – I think in part due to the high alcohol concentration – but with a hint of fruit

Laphroaig 10 year – $50

This is the bottle I brought to the event – it’s the scotch I first grew to really enjoy. It’s an Islay scotch which means peaty.

“Peaty” is a hard quality to describe – you definitely know it when you taste it. It’s strong and aromatic. Smokey yet slightly vegetative. It tastes like walking through a wet pine forest on fire.

Peaty scotches are often considered for “advanced” drinkers and it’s definitely an acquired taste. Once you acquire it though you’ll turn your nose up at the various colors of Johnny Walker.