cooking

Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat
07/23/2011 - 12:43

 Last night I made an excellent leg of goat. It's been really really really hot here in NYC (104 yesterday!) so I haven't had much desire to further heat up my apartment by turning on the oven. Thank goodness for crockpots and toaster ovens. I also got to try out my newest toy, a Jaccard Meat Tenderizer. 

It allows your meat to cook more quickly, but it also allows you to marinate things faster. I've been able to get shoulder to be grill cut for curries rather than a braising cut with this neat device. For the goat leg I used it to get a good lime-curry marinade. I also did a dry cooking method, which worked amazingly. Usually I cook with some sort of liquid in my crockpot like wine or broth, but this time I didn't use anything. In the morning there was a nice fatty broth. The meat had a better texture too. 

Someone posted on paleohacks about the layer of solid fat that such leftovers develop when you put them in the fridge. While it looks unappetizing, when you heat the leftovers up it will melt into the meat. It's also worth saving to use on cuts of the animal that are less fatty. There is no need for added fat (butter/ghee/coconut) in cooking most grass-fed meat if you buy a whole animal as long save fat from some braising cuts to use on the leaner parts. Some animals will be leaner than others though, depending on the pasture, age, breed, and season of slaughter. 

I learned about this meat tenderizing from The Butcher's Guide To Well-Raised Meat, by Joshua and Jessica Applestone, a married couple who own an organic butcher shop called Fleisher's. They have a location north of the city in Kingston, but will be opening in Park Slope this fall. 

Now while I have my meatshare buying club that allows me to buy good meat for very affordable prices. I'll be writing a booklet about how to organize one soon. But I do sometimes go to butcher shops like Fleisher's, The Meat Hook, and Dickson's. A butcher shop is going to cut with more of an eye towards customer needs and be able to make more delicious secondary products than the slaughterhouse butchers that my meatshare meat goes through. If I am strapped for time, I often go to the butcher and pick something up, like marrow bones or sausage. I don't get these in my meatshare. If you have more money than time, a butcher shop is probably a better place to get meat than a meatshare. Sadly, good butcher shops are few and far between. NYC is a rare hotspot of butcher shops selling pastured meat, some of them sell it exclusively. I've heard of such shops in Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Portland, and Chicago...but even some major cities seem to lack them. I couldn't find one in Boston when I was there recently. 

The Butcher's Guide explains how this happened, how small butcher shops were crowded out when the industrial model emerged that emphasized cheap meat by cutting out the middleman. The cost of this cheap meat was disconnection from the source of the meat and a low-quality product pumped with additives. At the butcher shop you can learn so much about how to cook cuts you didn't even think about buying before and you can also quiz the butcher on the conditions that the animals lived in. Joshua Applestone was a vegan for over a decade because he objected to the way most animals were treated, so he vets his suppliers with care. His suppliers are mostly people who wouldn't work with a meatshare. They represent a different niche of medium-size operations where the farmer often has other jobs and lacks time and marketing know-how. Most meatshare farms are tiny operations that don't have enough product to fill a butcher counter for even a month.

A butcher shop needs a regular supply of consistent products. That's a bit of a limit, as truly grass-fed beef is a seasonal product, so some of the meat they sell in the winter is grain-fed. They also couldn't find a supplier that could provide them with enough pastured chickens, so they buy organic chickens instead. It reminds me of something I've been thinking about, that in the past chicken and pork were secondary products on a small farm. They were fed waste from grain and vegetable agriculture, which was a sustainable model, but didn't produce the amounts of chicken and pork that Americans are used to eating now. There was a kerfluffle in the paleo blogosphere about bacon, which I pretty much ignored since my suppliers are very small and slaughter seasonally. I really only end up getting pork once or twice a year. If they were truly only feeding the pigs secondary products, it would be once a year. Some of my friends who are from Eastern Europe fondly remember the yearly pig their family raised with spoiled crops and leftovers, which was slaughtered on Christmas. Soon the EU will make this home-slaughter illegal. 

A butcher shop also needs to move a variety of products because whole animals aren't just a butch of tenderloins and steak. I am skeptical when I visit restaurants that market themselves as sustainable, but that serve the same meat dishes day in and day out. A sustainable system is represented by restaurants like Northern Spy Food Company, a restaurant that goes through a whole Fleisher's pig a week, each day serving a different delicious part. 

Besides lots of information about the economics of meat and why you should buy pastured products (did you know that chicken waste is still considered an acceptable feed for cattle??), I also appreciated the book's practical tips on supplies like knives and cutting boards. Also information on basics like tying a roast. I didn't grow up cooking meat so some of this basic stuff is new to me. I was also interested to know that vacuum packed meat lasts much longer when sealed in the fridge than I thought, around 2-3 weeks!!! They also tell you what cuts need to be braised. For the more advanced, the book has instructions on DIY pig roasts and breaking down a lamb. There are also some interesting recipes I'm looking forward to trying. Overall this is a great and easy to read book that can help you purchase meat with more awareness of how the process works and also prepare it properly. 

Comment?: 0
Weekend Menu + What to Eat at Takashi
06/12/2011 - 19:38

Weekend meals are waaay fattier for me since I have time to cook and Chris is here and lower in carbs since I seem to suck at storing roots and found that all my potatoes had sprouted. 

Friday: fasting, ate some Thai Papaya salad at office lunch

Saturday: 

Breakfast was eggs, plantains, and Spring Lake Farm bacon from Meatshare. Chris had some yogurt and berries. 

Dinner was at Takashi with Patrick from PaleolithicDiet.com. I've mentioned this temple of raw and lightly grilled meat before. The first course is raw meat and the second is cooked. We enjoyed the raw liver (seriously it's good and I don't know how they make it taste so awesome), raw chuck flap with sea urchin, raw chuck eye tartare, and flash-boiled shredded achilles tendon. Second course we had "the tongue experience," heart, kalbi, sweetbreads (HIGHLY recommended, like a piece of delicious fat), and beef belly. I also recommend the stomach and cheek.

Sunday: 

Oops, I exhausted my eating out budget for the week, so I only ate what was already in the fridge. For breakfast we had "double yolk" baked eggs adapted from Michael's Genuine Food, a cookbook from a chef in Miami. They have a layer of tomato sauce and sour cream, a layer of eggs (mostly yolks), and a layer of cheese. I just made a small dish of these baked in the toaster oven (my summer oven since it doesn't heat up our tiny apartment) and it was very satisfying. 

For lunch we had some pork chops from Spring Lake Farm and yogurt with berries. We drank some cold-brewed Oolong tea. 

For dinner we had a leftover hash inspired by the hash at Red Rooster in Harlem. I baked some sweet potatoes in the toaster oven until crispy, tossed in some chopped bacon, cooked some plantains in the bacon fat, and topped with key-lime Hollandaise sauce. Fantastic! We had some small, but fatty goat chops from Glynwood farm and some hibiscus cinnamon tea. I like that Hollandaise tastes pretty darn good even when I mess it up and it's lumpy...I'll try the Alton Brown method next time. 

 

Comment?: 0
Fail Weight-Loss Tip #1
06/02/2011 - 22:31

 A new series inspired by my bad cooking. Follow these tips and your appetite will be so low you won't want to eat anything!

Tip #1:

Slice plantains into strips with vegetable peeler. Forget to season. Dehydrate in dehydrator for 12 hours. Try to eat. Total cardboard taste kills your appetite. 

Wow, imagine how rich I'll be when I market that as a snack.

BONUS TIP: 

Buy a new spice blend. Don't taste it at all. Throw a bunch of it in your food. Realize that it's incredibly spicy and causes your entire face to melt off. 

Comment?: 0
Cool Kitchen Tools for Mother's Day!
05/08/2011 - 09:59

 I thought about getting my mother chocolates or flowers, but instead I got her something much more useful and healthy: kitchen tools! I hope she is enjoying them:

A microplane! If you like flavor you should get one of these. The design maximizes the surface area of the ingredient you are working with. I mostly use mine to grate cheese and zest citrus. I really don't think I could go back to a regular grater, microplanes are much easier to use.

A garlic peeler! Simple, small, and saves me time when working with delicious garlic. I can peel several cloves at once!

A brew basket! Last time I was home I noticed all we had were tea balls, which don't really allow the leaves to unfurl for a flavorful and healthy cup of tea. I also may have stolen the only nice tea steeper we had... Tea pots are OK, but these allow everyone to brew their own favorite tea and are much more portable. I use them both at home and in the office. The awesome thing is once you are done steeping, the lid doubles as a stand!! I wrote about them on cool tools. 

Edit: my sister got her another of my favorite tools!

A digital oven-safe meat thermometer. I love cooking with this because I don't have to open the oven to check on meat and lose valuable time by letting heat out! It also decreases the supervision time I spend. I can put it in the roast and just set it to alert me when it's the right temp. When I'm cooking meat in the frying pan and also cooking a side dish, I just stick it in the meat and can focus on the side dish and not worry about the meat too much.

 

Comment?: 0
Why You Should Buy a Goat
05/08/2011 - 00:06

 I bought a goat from Glynwood farm last weekend. I didn't make it a meatshare because goats are small enough for my two roommates and me alone. In fact, a whole goat can fit in a normal-size freezer. They are often less than 35 lbs total hanging weight, which ends up being like 25 lbs. I will be writing a guide to whole animal buying soon, but I have been pleasantly surprised with this goat. I buy lambs often and they vary in quality. Sometimes their fat just is very gamey tasting and has to be trimmed off or heavily spiced. I've had goat at Nigerian and other African restaurants that was like this. 

But this goat's fat tastes amazing. I had the loin chops tonight. I simply rubbed them with curry powder, black pepper, salt, and added a dash of lemon juice. I had a random buckwheat craving (magnesium???) so I made a simple buckwheat pancake by soaking the local buckwheat flour in a thin raw milk yogurt for an hour or two and then mixing in an egg and cooking in a frying pan with butter and coconut oil. Yum. 

Comment?: 0
A Recipe A Week: Roasted Lamb Shanks
05/07/2011 - 11:47

 A few weeks ago, after one too many mediocre meals created by my standard issue cooking technique (which is put a piece of meat in the crockpot, cover it with water and broth, dump in some spices, and hope for the best in the morning), I decided to make a goal to actually start following recipes. I haven't been lately because I've been so busy and I've had some living situation issues. My last apartment unmotivated me to cook because my roommates weren't very clean and constantly left food out. 

Then I moved to a nicer place, but with a postage-size kitchen without many amenities. After moving I ate out more. But now I'm trying to get back into the game. I also have a bunch of cookbooks some folks have sent me to review. One of them was The Paleo Recipe Book. It's one of the few of them that has recipes that involve braising, which is important to me. I buy whole animals from farmers and that means I get mostly braising cuts. I had some shanks left over from my meatshare at B&Y farms, so I decided to make Roasted Lamb Shanks. 

It was a challenge because my goal was to actually follow recipes, not just be like "lalala I don't really want to go to the grocery store to buy this so maybe I can use this other thing." I like the idea of small family-run stores, which are encouraged by the zoning and density of the city, but damn is it annoying to have to go to three stores to get relatively common ingredients. I only had to go to two for this recipe, since at the first one all their sage was spoiled (I need to start growing my own herbs again and I have no excuse since I have a small front garden). I kinda wanted to also make some potatoes, but organic potatoes were only available in one pound bags and honestly I don't eat enough of them to justify that.

If you don't grow your own, fresh herbs are very expensive and can quickly run up the cost of the food. Another obstacle for me is that I hate raw onions. Sure, I'm fine with onions in a soup, but I can't stand them fresh. Chopping them is a form of torture and I'm horrified that people put fresh onions on salad. 

But luckily this recipe only called for you the halve the onion! Whew, saved. I used my own lamb stock and put in the stock veggies. Braising took some time, but luckily I had work to do at home. The braising liquid was used to make a wonderful brown sauce. That was definitely what made this so delicious. When this was done it was definitely a whole level above my normal cooking. Check out the recipe and pick up a copy of the cookbook here: 

Preliminary review:

Pros

  • Recipes have a more gourmet bent
  • Many recipes for braising and using the whole animal!
  • You'll learn many good classical cooking techniques
  • Beautifully illustrated and designed!

Cons: 

  • Some ingredients expensive or hard to find
  • Some more difficult techniques may be hard to learn from text-based recipes 
Comment?: 0
We are going to have to rethink things, won't we?
04/16/2011 - 10:43

 When I was a freelancer and I worked from home it wasn't so obvious to me why Americans are so unhealthy. Now it's tottally obvious. Cooking and the housekeeping the accompanies it takes time and when every adult member of the household works 40 hours a week, that becomes very difficult. It's even worse because most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs and would like to come home and do something they enjoy. Wouldn't it be great if everyone loved cooking? But it just doesn't work that way. 

I don't have children and I struggle to cook every day. What's the point of all the productivity gains we've made if we all have to work the same amount of hours? When I first started working I once tallied up the percentage of my life that would be spent at work or commuting at the current rate and it was too depressing a calculation to repeat. 

Housekeeping is very difficult when there is no one keeping house, when it's an afterthought in an exhausting day. Me? I'd love to work fewer hours and while I'd have to cut back on some things, I feel my quality of life would be higher. But there aren't many jobs available for 15 or even 30 hours a week and almost none provide any kind of benefits. 

Perhaps we should just give up and acknowledge that the price of the American workforce is that few people have time to cook healthy meals. Then we need to focus on having better restaurants. Right now if you are eating out a lot, you are probably getting tons of vegetable oil. Even Thomas Keller, Michelin-Starred Chef, uses canola oil at his enourmously expensive restaurants. 

Workplaces could also pick up some slack, but in an era of budget cuts, few will. You are lucky if your workplace has a microwave and even luckier if it has a fridge. I know a few highly-skilled technology workers at very succesfull companies where they have excellent food, but that's an exception. 

The idea that career is a form of fulfillment is a fantasy for all but a lucky few. In reality, this idea is just a way to make people feel better about having to give their lives away for trivial things. By the time they retire, their health is so battered that they spend the remaining years shoveling pills into their mouths in a nursing home. It's time to put work back in its place- it's a way to make a living for most of us and a lot of us would be willing to trade off some income for more time. More time to acquire healthy food, cook it, keep house, spend time with our own children, enjoy life...

This article in the NYtimes just bolsters the fact that our lifestyles are untenable: sitting is deadly. Um, that's a problem since most jobs involve sitting. i'm not sure that standing in one place at a standing desk is really that much better, though it's a start. 

Comment?: 0
No recipes: tropical shrimp
03/05/2011 - 11:56

 

Yesterday I was reminded of this shrimp dish I ate in Stockholm when I was reading Anne's Blog, an excellent Swedish food blog. I don't know why, but I encountered such shrimp + lime + colorful vegetables/fruits recipes in Sweden. This dish had mango, chili, scallions, and lime. Last night I made a variation of it with chili-garlic paste, ginger juice, mango, kiwi, lime, shredded dried coconut, a little dash of coconut aminos and some wild shrimp. Unfortunately, wild shrimp is quite expensive here and not exactly local. I might try this with local scallops next time, though my secret dream is to buy a giant warehouse and raise freshwater prawns in NYC. 

My new favorite ingredient is ginger juice. I always used to buy ginger and not be able to use all of it before it shriveled up. But ginger juice is a great way to get all that flavor without much work. I'm also a big fan of chili garlic paste, which is called Sambal Oelek at the local Indonesian markets. I know it's cheaper to just buy ginger and chilies and chop them myself, but I've been so swamped with work lately that these ingredients are a must.

Comment?: 0
Acid Trip
02/15/2011 - 21:57

 I'm in the process of moving, so I haven't had time for fancy recipes. Luckily there are a few things that can make anything tasty: salt and acid. Adding a dash of acid to a dish can really improve the flavor profile. For example, on Sunday I made pork chops for Chris with rosemary, sea salt, pepper, and a dash of peach vinegar that I got from this awesome store called The Filling Station. Some great ideas for adding acid include: vinegars, fermented vegetables, and acidic pastes. 

My favorite vinegars are coconut vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and flavored vinegars. You can make your own flavored vinegar, like this fig vinegar or this peach vinegar. Trader Joes has some excellent vinegars like tangerine vinegar. The aforementioned Filling Station has at least 10 varieties and many online retailers also sell flavored vinegars. 

Fermented vegetables also add a tangy acid kick. Many restaurants I like serve pickled vegetables alongside entrees. Lot 2 in Windsor Terrace used to serve chicken confit with silky pickled mushrooms, which was amazing. 

Many acidic pastes are obvious: like tomato paste. There is a reason why tomatoes have been enthusiastically adopted by so many cultures. Another great one, which is the secret in many authentic Thai recipes, is tamarind paste. Many BBQ sauces actually contain this and it definitely tastes great with meat. I often marinate liver or heart with tamarind paste, lime juice, chili, ginger, and garlic overnight, which balances out some of the "mineral" flavor of these offal cuts. 

What acidic ingredients do you cook with? 

 

Edit: And duh...citrus! Using exotic citrus is also lots of fun!

Comment?: 0
Melissa Had A Little Lamb
01/28/2011 - 00:29

January Food+Tech Meetup With Wholeshare and Meatshare from Food Tech Connect on Vimeo.

This week I spoke at a panel at the Food + Tech Meetup about Meatshare. There are some good tips in there I hope for those of you interested in truly good meat. I credit the program with really improving the quality of my diet since I now have regular access to meat and don't have to shop very much. I shop only for fun items and not as a chore. All the meat I need is in my chest freezer. I do shop for vegetables, but usually not often since I usually have some pickled carrots, beets, or cabbage in the fridge. Gallons of pickles + chest freezer = never venture out in the cold for an annoying shopping trip again. Now if only I had a seafood share...

I strongly encourage people to look into purchasing whole lambs or goats. They are 20-60 lbs. 20 lbs is not a lot and most people can fit that in a normal freezer. And yes, every part is worth eating. You'll discover parts you didn't even know you wanted! You'll have plenty of tallow for cooking with too! And bones for stock!

As for things being hard to cook, I think people set themselves up for failure by trying to do things too perfectly. Normally I just sear the cuts like chops in tallow with rosemary, black pepper, and cumin. The braising cuts go into the crockpot on low overnight with a cup of wine and a cup of water. Then I put that in the fridge in the morning collect the tallow that hardens on top, save the liquid to use as broth, and eat the meat seasoned with sea salt and pepper. Sometimes I do fancy recipes, but most of the time I keep it simple. 

Comment?: 0
Syndicate content