On KitchenAid-ed Pasta

This is just to say, after many, many times of screwing up the extruding process in KitchenAid-aided pasta making, I finally realized the key to making the best fresh noodles (with a pasta maker tool attachment):

The best thing you can do not to screw up noodles is read the instructions — this is an endemic problem, I realize, being someone who often does not read instructions, or more accurately all the instructions. The best thing I learned from reading the instructions were the recommended length of the noodles once they’re being extruded which is only 24 centimeters long (after Googling that appears to be 9.448818898 inches). With a pasta maker, although it’s hard to stop at nine inches, you should stop then — which brings us to the second thing to do: turn off the machine. I was feeling silly that I’d never thought to turn off the machine. Duh.

The third thing I finally realized — and this really was a “duh!” moment — was that by leaving the noodles hanging on the machine before trying to separate the sticky fresh noodles, it made it much easier to actually separate the noodles. I’d always just grabbed a bunch, which kind of mashed them together and made them impossible to separate. So yes, very useful — it’s too bad we’ve been trying to eat less white flour and pasta.

Another Day, Another Cocktail

Also, another cocktail book: this time, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie and Beyond: 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them by Ted Haigh. First off, it’s a great book: 1) it’s spiral bound to stay in place; 2) the artwork and accompanying images are fantastic — each drink has its own image, many of them historical; 3) the notes are great, and lively and down to earth but still informative. It’s also from 2009.

In general there’s a strange fetishization about old tymey-tyme cocktails. I don’t know if it’s a Nick & Nora sort of [insert worldwide hand motion for jerking off] this or that or what it is. It’s interesting, for sure, but I don’t totally buy that what’s old was necessarily better. Technology is important and real, and building on human learning and experience is what progress is all about.

But at the same time, it is really interesting to think about what dumb-ass rich 20 somethings were drinking back in days of yore. Sort of.

Apparently they liked fruit juices. So many of these cocktails in Vintage seem to revolve around orange juice or pineapple juice or lemon juice or (my favorite) orange and lemon juice. It’s like Al Fuckin’ Swearengen is trying to impress cocksuckers at the Gem; break out the fuckin’ canned peaches.

I mostly disregard orange juice but we have lemon juice around all the time: the Santa Cruz Organic Lemon juice is great; one of the local stores carries it.

[Looking back at what I’ve glibly jotted down, I should add that vintage cocktails are a glimpse into an evolving culinary tradition, and are a fascinating micro-level look at what life was like nearly 100 years ago.]

Anyway, back to the cocktail: tonight, the Barbara West Cocktail (page 59), which has gin, sherry (amontillado preferred, which is basically the first time in forever that we have the appropriate sherry on hand), lemon juice and Angostura bitters. It’s good (duh, all cocktails are good). I would drink this again. I think it’s also missing something — ever so slightly. The flavors kind of bob around each other — floral gin, nutty sherry, puckery lemon juice — without melding. It’s possible more Angostura would have been good, but the recipe clearly called for “one small dash.” In summary, I’m not sure this needs “fixing,” per se. Maybe it’s just an excellent starting point: gin, sherry and lemon juice is boss, and worth returning to [think about tweaks].

London Fucking Broil!

Beef, in case you’ve missed it, is really fucking expensive now. I wanted to make steak and the rib-eye at the grocery store and the butcher shop was $10.99 a pound, making that like a $40 meal. So the second choice was this cut of beef I got when I asked the butcher for something cheap to stir fry with (here; look for “some beef that isn’t ridiculously expensive for a stir fry”). He didn’t tell me what cut of beef it was he gave me, but it was perfect — and cheap(er), too. So this time I asked him: it was the shoulder, or top round: “You know, London Broil.” OK, I nodded.

So now I’m looking it up: it’s the top round (which is what it looked like). It’s certainly not buttery and flaccid like a goddamn tenderloin but it’s also not too chewy and cheap tasting either. It is perfect for stir fry, by the way.

But tonight I was thinking we should try to sous vide it, reasoning that the exactness of the cooking might benefit from a precise temperature. I googled what folks cook it at and saw, basically, between 131 and 140. The 140 was reported to be a little too cooked. I did 131. It passed the kiddo test, in that a real life kiddo ate it, but I think it could have gone up a few more degrees. Oh, and I marinated it overnight in a mixture of miso, sake, soy sauce, spicy pepper, garlic and sesame oil; basically a preparation I found in Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat’s The Japanese Grill: From Classic Yakitori to Steak, Seafood, and Vegetables for either skirt steak or flank steak, I forget which. Miso, incidentally, is so versatile and great for enzyming protein and salty flavor. (Also, that book includes a traditional home cooking recipe for spinach with ground sesame seeds which I will get to some other time and which is so unassailably airtight that you’ll want it all the time.)

And while we’re at it, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give it up for mushrooms sauteed in the schmaltzy chicken fat rising to the top of chicken soup. Yum!

Sous Vide Carrots, Too

Memory is a funny thing. I’ve been convinced until about 45 seconds ago that the sous vide carrot recipe I love using is this López-Alt one, except it’s kind of not. Where that one uses parsley, I’ve been using dill, mostly because I was convinced that was what the recipe called for (in fact, that’s what I reported, even after linking to the recipe before; Christ). Also, I don’t add sugar — not that I’m opposed to it, just because I didn’t realize it called for it (and I probably assumed it didn’t need it [I can’t believe it does]).

So anyway, that happened. But what I really wanted to say is that I used ghee this time instead of butter and it’s even better. I used ghee last time but that was in a ziploc full of mushrooms and mushrooms have so much water that I think the ghee got lost.

So, like I said: ghee.

Can Sherry Regrow Your Hair?

The Dewey D. from the PDT book (page 105) is constructed from rye, Lustau East India Sherry, Aperol and Angostura bitters. We had cream sherry, which is sort of, kind of close to the Lustau thing. Also, I picked up the wrong bottle of bitters and dumped two big dashes of orange Angostura bitters in there (it’s not even the same color). All the same, this was good.