On the other end, I’m really enjoying “getting into wine”. So far I’ve checked out Windows on the World Complete Wine Course by Kevin Zraly from our library and read it before I left on vacation. While on vacation I did 3 things:

• Took along Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Guide 2011 to help me make wine selections for dinner.
• Participated in a “wine education” class being offered by the ship’s Sommelier. It was well worth the $18 investment and 1 hour of time.
• Ordered a bottle of wine every night with dinner using whatever I had learned so far about pairing.

The cruise gave me ample opportunity to try different wines, pair them with different foods as well as gauge my success on pairing. All in all I felt good about my selections. Some were more planned than other but I didn’t hit a dud. I always shared my selection with the table and even had my fellow compatriots join in the fun by offering the buy the evenings bottle. The best wine I had while on board: Firesteed 2007 Pinot Noir – very easy drinking and changed my opinion of that varietal.

Now that I’m home the exploration continues. The current MO is to find a good “regularly priced under $10″ Sauvignon Blanc that I enjoy. I have 1 glass of whatever I purchased over the weekend throughout the week both as an aperitif while making dinner and then with the meal. The goal is to be done by Thursday/Friday and write up/form an opinion. So far Cono Sur’s Bicycle is winning the contest, although I have a ways to go.

On the weekends (Friday/Saturday) I play a same/similar game, only with a “more than $10, less than $20″ bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

Can you tell I’m enjoying these objectives?

Just spread a layer of soda on a foil-covered baking sheet and bake it at 250 to 300 degrees for an hour. You’ll lose about a third of the soda’s weight in water and carbon dioxide, but you gain a stronger alkali. Keep baked soda in a tightly sealed jar to prevent it from absorbing moisture from the air. And avoid touching or spilling it. It’s not lye, but it’s strong enough to irritate.

Baked soda is also strong enough to make a good lye substitute for pretzels. In order to get that distinctive flavor and deep brown color, pretzel makers briefly dunk the shaped pieces of raw dough in a lye solution before baking them. Many home recipes replace the lye with baking soda, but the results taste like breadsticks, not pretzels.

Baked soda does a much better job of approximating true lye-dipped pretzels. Just dissolve 2/3 cup (about 100 grams) in 2 cups of water, immerse the formed raw pretzels in this solution for three to four minutes, rinse off the excess dipping solution in a large bowl of plain water, and bake.

I’ll have to rember that when I make pretzels.

An emulsion is typically about fat and water – one dispersed in the other and they don’t like to stay together, hence they need an emulsifier like eggs or dairy to keep them joined. Sure you can create an oil and water emulsion like a vinaigrette, but that will separate over time. An emulsifier would keep the disparate parts from separating.  But too much of an emulsifier can be a bad thing. A stabilizing agent, typically a starch, is necessary to keep the emulsifier from repelling against each other.

So examining “binders” we have fat and perhaps some liquid in the meat, an emulsifier like eggs and dairy containing protein as well as liquid and finally starch in the form of breadcrumbs acting as a stabilizer. Quite the handsome quartet!

That the meat itself contributes to the emulsion didn’t occur to me until I read a post on why fresh ground turkey burgers fall apart during cooking. Fresh hamburger patties don’t suffer from this – you can make stable patties that don’t fall apart just by pressing the meat together. Turkey on the other hand doesn’t have the fat content of ground beef so they can’t form stable patties. Adding salt to denature the proteins in the turkey and a little oil promote better cohesion.

All this got me interested in a little experiment. Given that seafood has even less fat than turkey, I wondered if just adding oil and salt would be enough to make stable patties. Turns out it won’t. Adding salt and some olive oil to a package of salmon didn’t yield substantially more cohesive patties than the salmon alone. Even adding breadcrumbs didn’t help much. Granted I didn’t let them sit for very long but the mixture wouldn’t hold together at all. Since I had very little salmon (7 oz) for this experiment I didn’t want to crack an entire egg on it. Instead I used dairy – heavy cream in fact – and just like that I had a stable patty! I could tell from the moment I stuck my hand in it that it would hold together.

Turning to On Food and Cooking page 628, I read that:

The yolk proteins in eggs and the casein proteins in milk and cream are the best protein emulsifiers.

I guess On Food and Cooking did cover the topic after all – I just needed to look in the right place! It also means that dairy/cream at the mix stage does contribute to binding by acting as an emulsifier.

In looking at this fat-liquid-stabilizer-emulsifier quartet that make up “binders” in meat mixtures, it’s no wonder tables and ratios don’t exist. Too much depends on the fat content of the meat, the amount of liquid in it, the type of stabilizer and how much it can absorb, not to mention the type of emulsifier and the other ingredients in the party, i.e. salt, acid, etc. It is defiantly a touchy/feel-y process.

Binders are used in a number of meat mixtures – meatloaf is probably the best example in my mind. Not surprisingly I found an article about making meatloaf in which Alton Brown talks about binders – finally! However, beyond the basics there’s no discussion on ratios, applications, etc. Even before reading the article I was starting to think about binders like I would emulsifiers – their job is to hold together a mixture that otherwise would fall apart.

After reading the article and browsing a few recipes that included binders – meatloaf, crab cakes, etc. there seem to be only a few “natural” items that are considered binders – eggs, dairy products, and starch. Like double action baking powder, there are two kinds of binding that need to happen – one at mix time and the other at cook time. After all, if you can’t get it into the pan as a unit, you can’t cook it.

Starch, in the form of breadcrumbs, crackers, etc, would be active in the mix phase since they will soak up moisture, swell and stick to the foods that surround it. I’m guessing that too much starch and the mix will crumble apart since all the moisture will be gone. When cooked, the starch will expand and perhaps explode spewing the starch grains in the mix and tighten things up further.

Dairy, milk and cream in particular, seem to denature during cooking, although I suspect that acids and salt can get the process started sooner. Unlike eggs, I don’t think air alone can cause denaturing in dairy. It would seem then that other than providing moisture, dairy doesn’t contribute much at the mix phase, but can play a roll during heating/cooking. Dairy can also be an emulsifying agent.

The proteins in eggs will start to unravel, tangle and thicken somewhat in the mix phase, especially if exposed to air, acid and salt. This denaturing process will allow the egg proteins to tangle with each other and thicken the mix. Since they are a natural emulsifier, they will bond to watery and oily substances. When cooked they will tighten and pull the items they are bonded to together. Salts and acids also cause eggs to thicken at lower temperatures, but dairy raises their thickening temperature. Humm…

Chef Paul’s recipe calls for all three binders – bread crumbs, eggs and cream – all at mix time. No doubt that cream is being absorbed by the breadcrumbs but those crumbs are also absorbing liquid from the eggs, crab meat (the recipe doesn’t call for draining), and other liquid items hanging around. All 3 binders are added at the same time – right at the end before letting the mixture rest for 1.5 hours. The resting phase would seem to be there for the starches in the breadcrumbs to absorb the liquids and swell as well as give the eggs a chance to denature and begin to bind with each other and the surrounding mix.

Whew.. almost as complex as baking, which is probably why binders are not an exact science. Too much is dependent on the kind of liquid, the absorbency of the starch, what the eggs are exposed to (and when) and the temperature at which the dish is cooked.

An interesting experiment would be to add breadcrumbs to a wet meat mixture and see at what point it begins to “fall apart” – if it does. I think I’ll give that a whirl with tuna and some ground crackers.

Baking by James Peterson, one that I want in my collection, is there in the Baking and Dessert category. Salt To Taste sounds interesting as does The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Pastry Arts.

[He] is a good cook, but not the kind who sees time in the kitchen as a moment for free-association with ingredients. The notion of playing around with recipes in the spirit of experimentation is one that has never occurred to him. Tad is the type of cook who prefers to find a few recipes he likes and master them..

I chuckled and thought “that sounds like me” which got me thinking almost immediately ”but I want to create recipes too”.

Recipe Construction

I’ve been thinking about creating recipes since I started getting into cooking. Googling “creating recipes” doesn’t reveal much on the subject – inspiration, perspiration, investigation and even desperation can and do seem to play a role in the process. Like Tad, I’m usually interested in mastering a recipe so I can make it time and again and enjoy it with family and friends. I’m not one to just “play around” for the sake of creating a recipe. Or am I?

I recently picked up a 1997 copy of The Joy of Cooking and was wading through the recipes on salads over lunch. As I’m eating my hand-made garnished green salad I had one of those “Ah Ha” moments. I realized that I can and do create recipes. I created that salad that morning out of what was on hand in my fridge – a recipe for a salad:

• 2 cups chopped Romain (about 1/2 a stalk)
• 10 cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
• 1/4 of a cucumber sliced thin and the pieces quartered
• 1 scallion cut into 1/4″ pieces, white and green parts
• 1 carrot peeled and grated
• 8-10 seasoned croutons
• 1 left over piece of fried fish

Combine in a small traveling container, store in the fridge until lunch time and dress with 2-3 tbsp of balsamic vinaigrette just before eating.

Now I’m sure that other people have created that same salad before and the ingredient list is not unique, but I consulted no book or Internet site to make it. Likewise, my fish fry recipe is mine – another “seat of the pants” combination as was the one for Chicken Romano. The one for hash browns was the result of a problem solved.

Different Paths

In looking at “my” recent recipes each one started from a different creative point:

• Salad – I needed to fix a lunch and had left over fish and some fresh veggies
• Fried Fish – I wanted to explore frying and needed a simple example
• Chicken Romano – Can I make a passable chicken dish with what I have on hand
• Hash Browns – I wanted better texture

With the exception of the Chicken Romano, all the others are quite simple. In looking through the salad recipes in Joy, some of those are 3 ingredients! Avocado citrus salad for example has sliced avocado, grapefruit and oranges. That could be sliced up fresh at work for lunch. Recipes do not have to be complex to be good, they just have to be, well, good to eat!

In my day job I write software and people have asked me about how I do that. My usual reply is that its a “creative process” – sometimes it’s inspiration, some times perspiration, or a problem to solve or a “I bet I can do it this way” or “better”. I guess good cooking and recipe construction isn’t that different from writing good software.

On the education front I’d like to:

• Finish reading “On Food and Cooking“
• Read a James Peterson book on a cooking subject
• Pick up a copy of the “Flavor Bible“
• Take an on-line culinary class

As far as actual cooking I want to:

• perfect those hash browns!
• work on making pie dough
• become more proficient with making pastries