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Food Thread: Salad As A Meal? Not On Your Life!

Salad is great!

At the beginning of a meal it is delicious, with smoked duck breast, or the French classic, crispy chicken gizzards and lardons on a bed of some green stuff that is unimportant. At the end of a meal, it is a wonderful palate cleanser, especially with a crisp and bright vinaigrette.

But as anything other than a counterpoint? Nah...it's not worth the trouble. How many dinner salads or lunch salads have you eaten in which the best part was the green stuff...no matter how high quality and artfully dressed and displayed? When was the last time you ate the green stuff and left the last of the steak tips or grilled chicken?

Every once in a great while I will have a salad that stands on its own. Many years ago at a restaurant in D.C. (called "The Pig!"), I had a summer salad made with incredible produce. It was a marvel of the farmer's art.

But I still liked the pork chop better!

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I read an article in "Imprimus" about the dangers of price and wage controls, and the author claimed that current total inflation was "22%."

I am unsure on what planet he shops, but anyone who believes that number needs to call me about a great deal on a barely used bridge across the East River!

I use a lot of grape tomatoes, and they have doubled in the last few years. Eggs have tripled. Olive oil has doubled. Bread has gone up significantly, but I don't buy much of it except for burger buns (and I should bake them more often!), but I'll guess at least 50%.

Yeah...yeah. Food and energy prices are "volatile," so they are excluded from the published numbers. Isn't that convenient!

Stop believing and repeating the Junta's lies.

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Clarified butter is a wonderful thing, but is a pain in the ass to make. And if you want to buy it, that's going to cost you! The Indian version is called "ghee," and is the version of clarified butter that is most readily available...for more than $1/ounce! Ouch.

But there are ways to make it at home, and commenter "Tom Perry" has been thinking about it...a lot!

A little background: I used to be a line cook. I got all my training on the job, and had the good luck to work with some real chefs. The apogee of my cooking career was back in the early nineties when I was the saute cook at a mid-to-upscale Cajun Bistro.

Having done that, I always thought of myself as a good cook, but that was a long time ago and there came a point where my skills got rusty and my repertoire was very limited. Lately, I've been getting a lot of satisfaction (and some failed experiments) from home cooking, and I'm learning new stuff, some of which I should have known a long time ago.

When I worked at that bistro, I used olive oil or whole butter for everything in my station, but there was clarified butter in the grill station for blackening steaks and whatnot. The way we made clarified butter was quick and dirty; there was always some residual milk solid in there. I learned recently that this style of "clarified butter" isn't the same thing as truly purified butter oil. That's the background.

Now here's something your readers might like: a couple of insights and one weird trick about clarified butter aka butter oil.

First off, pure butter oil is superior stuff. It's shelf-stable, solid at room temperature, has a rich aroma, and will bear just about any heat you can get into a skillet, without smoking. On the down side it's expensive and you have to make it yourself. To make it properly tends to be time-consuming, fidgety and wasteful.

The hard part is separating the pure oil from the milk solids and other crud. If you heat the butter until it bubbles, foamy crud floats to the top. Can you skim this stuff off without taking a bunch of oil with it? A ladle works poorly, a shallow spoon is better, and a rubber spatula might be best.

But then there's the crud that sinks to the bottom. If you let the butter rest in a glass container for a while, this crud will settle out thoroughly, leaving beautiful clear oil on top. But when you try to pour off the oil, the crud wants to float with it. You can either leave a fair amount of oil behind, or try to filter out the crud with a coffee filter, which will clog up, or cheesecloth, which allows some crud to get through and also traps some oil.

I watched Chef Jeanne-Pierre's video about making clarified butter. He likes to heat the butter for a long time until it really stops bubbling, then let it rest in a glass measuring cup. Once it's settled out, he pours the top oil off and uses cheesecloth for the final stage. I decided to try it his way, even though I didn't have any cheesecloth. I put my butter in a clear mason jar to let it settle. By chance, I put the mason jar on top of my chest freezer.

The top of my chest freezer is slightly cold. When the milk solids settled, they cemented to the glass. When I poured the oil off, the crud on the bottom didn't want to pour at all; it was glued in there. The resulting clarified butter was perfect.

I think there are a few minor tweaks to Tom Perry's technique that might be fun to try, but it sounds like he has it down pat.

Clarified butter is simply grand for cooking. It has a wonderful flavor, doesn't burn like regular butter, and will impress the hell out of your snooty 2nd cousin who fancies himself a chef!

I'm going to try this technique and calculate the yield and cost/ounce. Yes...I am a geek.

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I had the pleasure of helping out a bit with the cooking at the recently completed 2024 Texas Moron Meet-up. While I feel confident that I can feed 12 people without much trouble, feeding six times that number is an altogether different process. Luckily, Cowhorse Queen, Ben Had, and Rancher Bob were on top of everything, but even with their excellent planning, it was a lot of work. Just slicing food for that many people takes a very long time!

One lesson that was really hammered home was how the depth of food in pans has a significant effect on how quickly and how well it cooks.

Well...duh! But going from seven pounds of potatoes in a big roasting pan to 11 pounds makes a huge difference, not just in the amount of time needed to cook them but the final consistency and level of browning. Everyone reads about "crowding the pan" being a no-no, and it's true!

Ben Had made some delicious Gyros on the first night, using a modification to the classic spit-grilled technique. It was essentially meatloaf, but damned delicious!

Then the next night she had fajitas on the menu, and they were damned fine eating as well, especially the grilled onions that I would have made in the oven had I been allowed to be stupid.

Saturday night was plain old pulled pork and coleslaw. For about 75 people! What's a synonym for delicious? Because these were it! And the serendipity of a sort of burnt ends on the bottom of the pans was noted and will be trotted out at Chez Dildo!

These meals could not have been made without the enthusiastic participation of a bunch of Morons who happily rolled up their sleeves and did a huge amount of prep work. Thank You... Thank... You... Thank You!

But there's more! People brought snacks and a few side dishes (Stephen Price Blair's eggplant was a revelation!). There were curry empenadas, and bacon bread and stuff I sadly missed, and all sorts of things to eat.

Commenter "Aviator" and his lovely wife and son (he's not lovely, but he's nice) brought water and beer and soda and ice for everyone! What an undertaking! And they pulled it off without a hitch.

I am certain that I am forgetting a bunch of people who stepped up and helped make this event a success, so please accept a general "Thank You!."

Except the Bacon Wench. Harrumph! I didn't get any! ;)

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What if you made French toast in a waffle iron? Then you would have little divots for all the syrup, and CBD would have no idea why the back of his head is suddenly knotted up and his eye is twitching.
Posted by: Warai-otoko at October 16, 2024 05:05 AM (DDGz9)

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I have written often about the technique of braising, and since it is a pretty straightforward technique, and one that lends itself to stretching one's food dollar, it is a popular thing to do.

But...it isn't foolproof. Paradoxically, food cooked in liquid can and does dry out. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. I made the same dish a short time apart. I froze the leftovers, and tried them almost side by side with the newer version. One was noticeably drier. Still pretty tasty, and had I not been able to compare I might not have had the lesson driven home so well.

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A Proper BLT

[Hat Tip: dhmosquito]

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We are entering tomato hell, so beware. And send me garlic that isn't grown in heavy metals and human waste in China, well-marbled hanger steaks and elk chops to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.

Who are those poor deluded soulsWe know who shake their Manhattans! These are the same people who drink fine bourbon with coke, and probably shake red wine with ice too.

$1,200 for a bottle of bourbon is just stupid, insulting, and a ghastly affront to most people's palates and wallets. I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.

The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty of fifty years, but it is worth it!