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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.
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Saturday, November 30, 2002 |
Winds Of Change
The air was still when I hopped in the car to go to the store on a 6pm emergency mushroom run. The radio was on the weather sayin' there would be 25 mph winds with gusts to 40. Wonder when that will happen?
It happened when I got back home, 12 minutes later.
I heard the beeper on my porch as I walked by it to the front door. The chicken had reached 165F, maybe at the same moment the wind arrived. Inside, I checked the remote, it told me the alert temperature had been reached 37 seconds earlier.
Gotta tell ya', nothing beats the ol' 'Ove" Glove for inserting and removing digital thermometer probes. It is a digital glove. every finger can work freely. Mrs. Chicken isn't as dark as I would have liked and, despite all my trussing and girdling, I'm sorry to report that her breasts have fallen. I suppose that's why the skeleton is in there. She'll hang on a bacon hook at room temperature about an hour, then I'll remove her stitches and bindings, and put her in the fridge to chill. Tomorrow, she'll be sealed up in a bag. The skin looks just enough underdone that she could be warmed up in the oven anytime, maybe even nuked.
6:43:41 PM 
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Remember the mushroom kit? I screwed it up by too much water and then compensated by letting it dry out slowly by opening the box an placing a trash bag loosely over it. They're in something like day 33 now and the surface is completely covered with wonderful moldy growth! It's a little behind schedule, but doing well.
The stuffed chicken is in the smoker now, warming up for the smoke. It is uncured, so the ambient temperature will be kept pretty high for smoking, around 200F. Liz is a genius - that blanket stitch is completely her independent idea. Each stitch secures the last, so one person can easily stitch a bird without needing another to hold edges together.
Deboning took 25 minutes this time and, for the first time, I was able to get a wishone out whole. The deboned chicken was trussed up (Google on "chicken in bondage") and hung from the top of the smoker, secured by a skewer inserted between the ulna and radius of each wing and through the bird itself. A double-looped V-shaped piece of twine lets me hang it from a smoke stick at the top of the smoker. Each wing was individually tied together, "wrist" to "shoulder", to keep them close to the breasts.
It's not really complicated and that's just one approach. The whole idea for trussing a bird is to make it fetal - or "up tight", as Graham Kerr used to say in the days before he started putting bulgur wheat in every recipe instead of booze. Since a boneless chicken (in the middle anyway, the legs and wings are still intact) gets bloated when stuffed, and "funny-looking", a little reconstructive surgery with strings girdling it makes its appearance a lot better. It should hold the new shape when the strings are removed after cooking. You could mold it into nearly any shape you want. I decided to try for chicken.
12:30:15 PM
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Treading Lightly In Boldface
No more big projects this weekend, but I still went on the Saturday morning market cruise. Lowe's had okra, thank you, now the mind recipe of fried okra breaded in manioc flour instead of cornmeal can be tested. There are two easy-to-find recipes; Texas Fried Okra and French Fried Okra. The latter uses buttermilk. Wonder which kind they prefer in Paris, TX?
I could use the leftover buttermilk to make a quark, wouldn't that be strange?
There's still a ziplock filled with dressing in the fridge. The chicken took only 30 minutes to debone. There was another one on sale (buck-fifty instant off coupon) at Harris Teeter. Deboned whole, stuffed, and smoke-cooked sounds good.
9:48:58 AM
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Cooks' Illustrated did an article on butter 4 years ago that I desperately tried to find after I bought a half-pound of high-fat butter a while back. It was the most concise explanation I've ever seen on the subject. Since joining their website last year (you have to pay extra, even if you subscribe, but you can reference past issues back to September 1992), I've tried many searches from the front page to find the butter article. Never found it.
I went through an entire stack of back issues. You can't throw them away. They jump right out of the trash when you spot them. It seemed that the butter article was recent and, like most from the tasting labs, featured on the front cover. It still eluded me.
Last weeekend, I was cleaning off a bookshelf when I discovered three issues squirreled away at the very end - away from the monster stack. There was the issue with the cover blurb Rating Unsalted Butters.
It still eluded me using "butters" and "unsalted butters" in their online search. A site search with Google couldn't find it either, so I went to the back issue directory and looked it up there - "May 1998", though the cover says "June 1998". The article's title is Freshness, Not Fat, Makes Best Butter. Their search engine apparently goes no deeper than the title.
Here are some useful observations in the article:
Despite tight government regulations for butter, batches of butter made by the same brand are prone to inconsistencies of color and texture. That is simply because butter is an agricultural product affected by factors like seasonal changes. During good-weather months, cows that graze in fields produce cream rich in carotene pigments from grass and other plants, which will make a butter more yellow. In the winter, cows eat feed and grains that will result in a whiter butter. The color of butter can also be affected by the cow’s breed. Certain breeds, such as Jerseys, produce deeper yellow butters.
Having grown up on a farm, I knew that. Maybe read it in the old Joy Of Cooking too. It's reassuring to see it again in print.
You can be sure that a Grade AA butter originated in premium form because of tight government standards on the quality of butter. But unfortunately, by the time you go to purchase it, you have no way of knowing how long or under what conditions it was sitting in frozen storage or in a market. And you cannot estimate its age by its expiration date, because there are no industry standards for such information. Each brand differs. So even if your butter is used before its expiration date or even immediately after purchase, you cannot be guaranteed the good taste of fresh butter.
That's really too bad, because the article's conclusion is the same as its title Freshness, Not Fat, Makes Best Butter. The one exception:
It was primarily with the buttercreams that we found that there was a certain luxury to the high-fat butters, with Plugrá, the more affordable of the pricey choices, clearly outperforming all others. So if you are making a recipe in which the delicate yet rich flavor of butter is particularly pronounced, then we suggest a little fatty indulgence.
7:41:28 AM
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