Sous Vide Miso Chicken, Garlic Tofu Emulsion, Carrot Puree, Celery

I'm a big Top Chef fan, and the most recent season in Seattle just finished up with Kristen Kish emerging as the winner. Kristen dominated all season long until that one week where she got screwed by Josie and got voted off unfairly, so I was glad to see her battle through Last Chance Kitchen and come back all the way to win. She also works for Barbara Lynch at Stir, so it was also great to see a chef from the Boston area succeed and represent!

A few weeks ago during the elimination challenge of Episode 9, Kristen put a twist on a familiar classic - chicken pot pie. She put together a deconstructed version and added some Asian flare to the dish by marinating the chicken breast in white miso and making a garlic and tofu emulsion as the "gravy". I thought it was a really creative way to reinvent the dish, and I was inspired this weekend to make it myself at home.

After my wife and I had lunch today in Quincy at Pho Countryside, we stopped by Kan Man supermarket to grab some groceries. We picked up some celery, carrots, white miso, chicken breasts, tofu, and garlic. Later in the afternoon, I started preparing dinner.

The chicken takes longest to cook, so I started with that first. I mixed together some white miso with  chopped herbs like rosemary, thyme, and parsley and then smeared this all over the chicken breasts. I sealed the breasts in a Ziploc bag, removed as much air as possible using the water displacement method, and then dropped the bag into my Sous Vide Supreme at 140 degrees F for about one hour.

I then put together the carrot puree, first simmering some peeled and chopped carrots until fork tender and then blending in my Vitamix with some carrot juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.

I also brought some chicken broth up to a boil and then poured the hot broth over some celery that I finely sliced using a mandoline. I let the celery poach in the warm broth until I was ready to plate.

For the garlic and tofu emulsion, I first cleaned a head of garlic and then blanched the cloves in boiling water six times, replacing the water each time. The blanching of the garlic helps remove the sharp, raw garlic flavor. I then added some half and half (Kristen uses soy milk), salt, and tofu, simmering the garlic cloves until they were tender. All of this went into my Vitamix to be blended together.

After the chicken breasts cooked in the immersion circulator for about an hour, I took them out and put them in a sautee pan over medium-high heat. I added in some agave syrup and some of the chicken broth the celery slices were soaking in. The syrup and broth combined with some of the miso on the exterior of the chicken to form a nice glaze. After a few minutes in the pan, I took the chicken breasts out of the pan to rest to let the juices reabsorb and redistribute before slicing.

With all the components prepared, there was nothing left to do except plate up and eat! Overall, I thought the flavors combined well and were subtle yet sophisticated. The chicken which was sous vide was incredibly moist and tender. My favorite part was the miso glaze. There wasn't much to complain about but if I had to criticize one thing, I would say that there weren't many contrasts in texture. The chicken, carrot puree, and soy garlic emulsion all were velvety and smooth in consistency. There was some crunch from the celery but not much as they were lightly poached. Kristen's dish includes olive oil dumplings, which I did not make, but that wouldn't have added any texture either. Overall though, the dish was very refined and tasted great. Here's the final dish again.

24 Hour Sous Vide Short Ribs

It's been a while but I'm back finally! Life has been crazy lately between managing projects for work, shopping and buying a new home, and preparing for a baby on the way!

So a while back I had posted about short ribs that I sous vided for 48 hours. Those were ultra-slow cooked at a low temperature to achieve "medium-rare" short ribs, something that cannot be achieved through traditional cooking methods. The short ribs turned out great but the downside is that they took a long time to achieve the end result.

I recently tried sous viding short ribs again but this time at a higher temperature, closer to what you would find in a traditional braise on the cook top or in the oven but still using more gentle heat - 165 degrees F for 24 hours in my Sous Vide Supreme. The short ribs ended up losing the medium-rare, pinkish/red color obviously, but the meat was still phenomenal - and perhaps more enjoyable than at the lower temp. Cutting down the cook time by half was nice as well. The higher heat rendered more of the fat but the meat was still moist and meltingly tender. The texture reminded me very much of that of a smoked short rib I had at my local BBQ joint recently.

The taste was great as well - I went for a more traditional French Burgundy style flavor profile, using some of my own twists of course. This included some soy sauce, oyster sauce, granulated garlic, granulated onion, salt, pepper, worcestershire sauce, dried thyme, and bay leaf. I debated adding some red wine but left it out, figuring I could add it to the sauce at the end if I desired. In the end, I left it out entirely and didn't make any difference in terms of flavor in my opinion. I highly recommend this method!

Sous Vide Pork Loin, Five Spice, Hoisin BBQ Sauce, Gailan

This past weekend my wife and I picked up a pork loin from BJ's for around $3 a pound. We decided to go Asian and do a riff on the roast pork you often find at Chinatown BBQ joints. Chinese roast pork, also called "siu yuk" or "sio bak", is typically pork belly that is marinated with Chinese five spice and then roasted to perfection until the skin is crisp.

With the pork loin we purchased, I rubbed the meat all over with Chinese five spice powder and let this sit for about 24 hours in the refrigerator. After coming back home from work tonight, I seasoned the meat with salt and then sous vide it for about an hour and a half at 144 degrees. I have an old school Sous Vide Supreme, but there are many better, cheaper sous vide options available now such as Joule and Anova. After taking the meat out of the immersion circulator, I dried off the exterior of the meat and seared it in a hot pan with some oil.

As I was sous viding the meat, I cooked up some plain white rice and blanched some Chinese broccoli tips in salted boiling water. I also made a quick Asian barbeque sauce of sorts, combining in a small sauce pan a quarter cup of water, a half tablespoon granulated garlic powder, and around 4 tablespoons each of hoisin sauce, ketchup, and honey.

The meat was incredibly tender and moist and had great flavor from the barbeque sauce, which was savory from the hoisin, sweet from the honey, acidic from the ketchup, and fragrant and aromatic from the five spice blend.

Momofuku Style Pork Shoulder, Soba, Poached Egg

 

I've only been to Momofuku Ssam Bar in NYC once, but the one time I did eat there, the food was great. One of Momofuku Ssam Bar's most famous dishes is the Bo Ssam, which essentially is a slow roasted pork shoulder. Over the weekend when I saw pork shoulder boston butt available at BJ's, I thought of Momofuku's version and wanted to try to recreate it.

The NY times has a recipe posted online for the Bo Ssam, and it basically calls for doing a cure on the pork shoulder, then slow cooking it in the oven for several hours. In making my version, I decided to change a few steps in the process.

Instead of rubbing the salt and sugar curing mixture on the pork, I created a brine using Modernist Cuisine's basic brine recipe of 7% salt and 3% sugar. I figured the brine would allow the sugar and salt to penetrate the meat more quickly. Before work in the morning, I removed the bone from the pork shoulder and put the pork into the brine.

Here's a picture of the pork shoulder I purchased from BJ's...

 

Deboning the pork shoulder...

 



Measuring the water for the brine (although I really didn't end up needing this much)...

 

....and measuring the salt (not pictured is the sugar)...

 

 

 

Brining the pork shoulder in the fridge...

 

When I came back home from work later that night, I removed the pork pieces from the brine, rinsed them off, and placed them in new Ziploc bags. MC recommends letting any protein rest for a period of time after brining to let the salt finish diffusing throughout the meat, but I just skipped over this step as I wanted to get the cooking started so the pork would be ready for dinner the next day.

Instead of roasting the pork in the oven, I decided to sous vide it for a couple of reasons. One, I had other things to do (e.g. sleep, go to work, run errands) and didn't want to have to baby sit a hot oven. Two, the low and slow cooking of sous vide would really benefit the tough cut that is pork shoulder. So I set my Sous Vide Supreme to 160 degrees F and then dropped the pork in to cook. I put the pork in around 6pm and let it cook for the next 24 hours, taking it out the following day to eat for dinner.

Pictured above is what the pork shoulder looks like right out of the water bath. As you can see, a lot of liquid and fat has been expelled by the pork.

Don't throw away all of the accumulated juices in the bags. The fat can be skimmed off, and the remaining pork liquid can be used later as a pork broth or base for a soup (e.g. ramen, other type of sauce).

 

I took the sous vide pork shoulder and then placed it in a roasting tray. I covered the pork with brown sugar and then blasted it in a hot 500 degree F oven for 10-15 minutes until the pork was nicely caramelized and brown, as shown below.



 

After the pork came out of the oven, I shredded all of the meat and mixed it together with the sugar and juices at the bottom of the roasting pan.

As I was preparing the pork, I prepped the other ingredients for the dish. David Chang recommends eating the pork shoulder with lettuce cups and all kinds of different condiments, but the pork is very versatile and I decided to use the pork for a noodle dish instead.

Here's what I used for the noodle dish - lime, scallions, oyster mushrooms, one thai bird chili (seeds removed), two garlic cloves, soba, and a few eggs (to be poached).

Soba cooking in boiling water...

Slices of garlic being fried in oil and then reserved for garnish...

Oyster mushrooms being sautéed in the garlic infused oil left over in the pan...

After poaching the two eggs in some simmering water and white vinegar, I plated up the dish. I mixed the soba noodles with some ponzu, sesame oil, and rice vinegar and piled a mound in the center of a deep bowl. On top of the noodles went the scallions, sauteed mushrooms, chili, fried garlic slices, and poached egg. I placed some pork next to the noodles and then microplaned some fine lime zest all over the top. Here's the final dish once again:

Butter Poached Sous Vide Lobster Tail

During last year's summer, there was a point where Maine lobsters were incredibly cheap and going for as low as $1-2 dollars a pound. There was even a NY Times article covering the issue, documenting the hardships of Maine fishermen struggling from record low prices caused by the glut of lobsters flooding the market.

Since lobsters were so cheap, we purchased a whole bunch of lobsters to cook up and serve during a family dinner. I've had lobster cooked in all different kinds of ways, but I had read about French Laundry's technique of poaching the lobster tails in butter and wanted to try this method.

To start, I boiled up some water along with some white vinegar and poured this over the raw lobsters, letting them steep for a few minutes. Next, I disassembled the lobsters, pulling apart the body, claws and tails. While the lobster tail was still hot, I twisted off the flat end and then pushed the tail meat through the shells to remove.

I then placed the partially cooked lobster meat (practically still raw) and some unsalted butter in a zip loc bag, removing as much air as possible using the water displacement method. Similar to Thomas Keller's method, Modernist Cuisine has a recipe for poached lobster tails, and in that recipe, the book recommends using a water temperature of 125 degrees F, cooking to a core temp of 123 degrees. I decided to follow this, and I let the lobster tails sit in my water bath for about 15 minutes before removing - I have an old school Sous Vide Supreme, but there are many better, cheaper sous vide options available now such as Joule and Anova.

Modernist Cuisine recommends doing a quick 10 second sear on the tails to firm up the surface of the lobster but I skipped this step. The results are shown below. The lobter tail meat was certainly very buttery, tender and smooth but I somehow still felt like the meat was a bit undercooked. I was fine with the texture but it was more the faint taste of raw lobster that I wasn't overly thrilled about. I doubt the 10 second sear that I skipped would have made a significant difference in the end result, but I could be wrong. If I were to do this again, I'd try the final sear step or possibly just cook the tail meat at a higher temperature.

Honey Soy Glazed Chicken Wings

A few weeks ago while reading through Modernist Cuisine at Home, I saw a recipe for sous vide chicken wings and put it on my list of things to try. Tonight I finally got around to giving it a go. MC recommends soaking the chicken wings in a brine for a few hours, cooking the chicken wings sous vide for an hour, and then finally frying the wings in hot oil until crispy. The MC version finishes the wings in a buffalo sauce but my wife and I decided to go Asian with a honey soy glaze.

To make the brine, I measured out approximately 500 grams of plain water using my kitchen scale.

After adding the water, I used the tare feature to zero out the scale and then added approximately 35 grams of kosher salt.

I just used my hand to mix the salt and water together. In a ziploc bag, I added the brine and chicken wings and let them soak in the refrigerator for about 2 hours. We bought chicken wings from BJ's, and they came with the wing tips attached. You can trim them off or just leave them on. I started cutting the tips off initially and then my wife told me to keep them on since she actually likes eating them.   

After the chicken wings were finished brining, I took the wings out of the bag and dried them off using paper towels.

I put the dried off chicken wings in a new bag and then removed as much air as possible using the water displacement method. We cooked up about 20 wings, so we needed two ziploc bags to accommodate all of them. I set my Sous Vide Supreme to 148 degrees F as MC recommends and then let the wings cook for about an hour.

After an hour in the water bath, I removed the wings. You can stop at this point and eat the chicken as is. It'll resemble a hainanese or salt-baked chicken that you can get in Chinatown from a BBQ joint. The wings are great with a little a ginger and scallion oil. The step of brining the chicken makes a big contribution to the flavor of the chicken.

If you want a crispy version of the wings, then you can continue as I did and fry the wings. Before frying, make sure you dry the wings off very well with paper towels because any moisture left on them will cause the oil to pop during frying (the next step).

Using a wok with about a half inch of vegetable oil in it, I fried the chicken wings in batches. MC recommends frying the wings at around 390 degrees F. For the initial fry, I used my candy thermometer to make sure the oil was at this temperature, but I didn't keep checking the oil temperature. I think this could have been my downfall since not all of the chicken wings were quite as crisp as I would have liked. I think the oil temp ended up dropping at certain parts throughout the frying process. If I were to do it again, I'd more diligently monitor the frying oil temp and also try using a coating on the wings (e.g. potato starch and Wondra) to get more of a crunchy exterior. Another separate MC recipe I saw had recommended the coating.

Once the chicken wings came out of the fryer, we tossed them in a sauce we made using soy sauce, honey, microplaned garlic, butter, siracha chili sauce, and chopped scallions.

The wings were definitely tasty and comparable to what you'd get at any wing take-out place around Boston, but I wasn't really satisfied with the crispness of the skin. This is something I'll have to work on for next time.