Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine at Home" (Part 1)

Was greeted with display shelves full of honeycrisp apples when I went to the market today, so the parsnip and apple soup is definitely on the menu tonight or tommorow!

I have a question about the red wine glaze in the book if anyone has tried that recipe yet. In the first step you brown almost 3 pounds of ground meat, set it aside, then use some of the rendered fat from it in the next step. None of the remaining grease nor the meat is mentioned again, so am I correct in assuming that you are only using the ground meat to obtain rendered beef fat, and then are left with a bunch of ground meat that you will need to repurpose?

I would think that if they only wanted beef fat there would be better ways to get it than browning 1.25 KG of lean ground beef until dark brown. I made a note that I thought it should be put in around step 6. But I could be wrong.

HTH.

Larry

great reads here, great input from everyone, but it confirms my decision to wait for a good discount on this book. At $140 I'd expect little to no experimentation and fiddling on my side, things should work and be tasty, or there should be warnings or suggestions on how to "come up to flavor". Spending all this time (and money) should not be a hit or miss kind of thing IMO.

I'll find the time to cook from the big brother of this book, before I splurge again. Of course having a 1st edition (mistake) of that one adds an other level of error research I'm really (still) not happy about. Particularly since it still seems to be impossible to at least get an updated version of the manual....

Almost feels like being a crowd tester for the latest Windows iteration, LOL

(so glad I'm on Mac now, so glad)

But I'll keep reading here, as I'm sure eventually the book will be on my shelves :-)

Was greeted with display shelves full of honeycrisp apples when I went to the market today, so the parsnip and apple soup is definitely on the menu tonight or tommorow!

I have a question about the red wine glaze in the book if anyone has tried that recipe yet. In the first step you brown almost 3 pounds of ground meat, set it aside, then use some of the rendered fat from it in the next step. None of the remaining grease nor the meat is mentioned again, so am I correct in assuming that you are only using the ground meat to obtain rendered beef fat, and then are left with a bunch of ground meat that you will need to repurpose?

Very interested in the apple/parnsip soup, please let us know how it comes out!

Todd in Chicago

My copy should arrive any day now and I cannot wait. In the meantime, a question for the MC@H team and the discussion participants: do you know the effect of various MC procedures on nutritive value of food? I know many techniques are used to optimize for flavour but how about vitamin preservation in foods. If I cook my veggies until tender in the pressure cooker for super smooth purees, do I end up with food that is tasty but has no significant nutritive value (other than caloric)?

Any views, insights, research done in this area?

Bojana,

As you probably know, boiling is the worst technique in terms of vitamin loss, since many vitamins are leached into the cooking water and then disposed. Heat sensitive vitamins, like C, are diminished while pressure cooking, but no more than other high-heat techniques, like sauteeing or roasting. In fact, there tends to be slightly less vitamin loss because pressure cooking times are often lower than other techniques. For example, if you make a vegetable soup by simmering everything in a pot for 4 hours vs. pressure cooking for 30 minutes, the effect of the higher heat of pressure cooking is more or less negligible, but the reduced exposure time to high heat lessens the destruction of many nutrients.

So for most things (I'm sure there are certain vitamins or minerals that don't fit this guideline, perhaps others know), if you're cooking with any form of high heat, the nutrient destruction is (more or less) the same past a certain temperature, but the time exposed to temperature past that point determines the loss.

Crispy Chicken Wings, Korean-Style (pp. 252-253)

These wings are marinated and then battered and fried, giving them an extremely crispy crust:

I have never made battered wings before, but it worked great: they were the crispiest wings I'd ever had. The Korean-style sauce tasted great, though could perhaps use a bit more heat. Overall a very successful recipe.

Merkinz, thank you for your suggestion. To clarify, I do not own MC.

Apple & Parsnip Soup

So for those who have cooked the carrot soup from MC this recipe is almost the same but the carrots are swapped out for ... you guessed it: Apple and Parsnip. And the carrot juice is replaced with stock. I used vege stock (because I had good quality vege stock on hand) but the recipe calls for chicken stock.

Into the pressure cooker:

Once done:

And finally constructed:

I loved this soup. It had the same rich and luxurious flavor and feel as the carrot soup but with a different overall flavor. Personally I prefer this soup to the original carrot soup! I didn't pickle any apples for it (one of the garnishes called for) but would recommend you do if you try the recipe. It needs that little something to cut the richness.

Overall excellent! Very happy with that (...not sure why they labeled the difficulty as "Moderate" because it is dead simple).

Please would some one care to comment on the Broccoli-Gruyere Soup ... they way I read the recipe the cheese is cooked in the pressure cooker. Is this correct? I'd rather get it right the first time

Bojana,

As you probably know, boiling is the worst technique in terms of vitamin loss, since many vitamins are leached into the cooking water and then disposed. Heat sensitive vitamins, like C, are diminished while pressure cooking, but no more than other high-heat techniques, like sauteeing or roasting. In fact, there tends to be slightly less vitamin loss because pressure cooking times are often lower than other techniques. For example, if you make a vegetable soup by simmering everything in a pot for 4 hours vs. pressure cooking for 30 minutes, the effect of the higher heat of pressure cooking is more or less negligible, but the reduced exposure time to high heat lessens the destruction of many nutrients.

So for most things (I'm sure there are certain vitamins or minerals that don't fit this guideline, perhaps others know), if you're cooking with any form of high heat, the nutrient destruction is (more or less) the same past a certain temperature, but the time exposed to temperature past that point determines the loss.

Thank you for your answer. I have not done much research myself in this area. Generally, I tend to cook healthy for my family, steaming veggies for no more than 5-10 minutes, and eating a lot of things raw. Fine cooking I consider a treat, but wouldn't it be ideal if the MC way prepared food was also good/better for you than the traditional one?

My copy arrived last night, and since I am at work the whole day, I'll be making the quick microwave eggplant dish tonight, I figure I can do it between 5.30 and 7 PM, before my kids start eating their wood toys and screaming of hunger.

In my opinion, it's very difficult to accurately judge whether, say a carrot raw versus A steamed versus pressure cooked versus some other way will have more vitamins. Or, rather, it's possible to judge which version has more vitamins but this doesn't speak to the bioavailability of those vitamins. A cooked potato, for example, has much more bioavailability of its vitamins and other nutrients compared to a raw one, which is largely indigestible. Indeed, one of the reasons we cook vegetables is to make them more digestible and to make the nutrients more bioavailable. Think about primates that live on raw vegetables... what do they do all day? Eat and defecate. They have to eat massive quantities of food all day in order to metabolize enough nutrients to thrive. Meanwhile, of course, people in so-call first world countries do not exactly suffer from a deficiency in nutrition. Rather, we suffer from an abundance of nutrients in our diet.

Chris,

I bit the bullet and ordered MCAH yesterday, but before that, I made the Korean wings as written on Chow (http://www.chow.com/recipes/30492-korean-chicken-wings), and they turned out nothing like yours! I'm no stranger to frying, but when I made them, they turned out rather pale and insipid looking, and weren't particularly crunchy. I'm curious whether this recipe/frying technique is the same as what's presented in the book. Especially since you called them battered wings, and there's no batter present in the recipe on Chow.

Rereading the recipe, I'm wondering if my problem was draining too much of the marinade from the wings before tossing them in the Wondra and potato starch? Mine ended up looking like wings tossed in flour, but if the wings are supposed to be fairly wet when they go into the flour mix, I can see a kind of batter forming--what was your experience?

You drained the marinade? I think that was your problem: the marinade is used to form a batter with the starches.

ETA: Yeah, I see now that the "adapted" recipe on Chow calls for that step. The real recipe in MCaH does not have you drain off the marinade.

Thanks so much for the info! Good to know that the authentic MCAH preparation will be better; thankfully it'll be here tomorrow!

ryansm I've also learnt over the last year or so that fresh (like out of the bottle - first time use fresh) oil is pretty poor at browning foods while deep frying. It'll cook it ok but it won't necessarily give you that nice golden brown crust. I overcome this by filtering the used oil (paper coffee filter) and storing it for repeated use. Once it starts to get off smells I'll discard it ... BUT I'll keep 1 or 2 teaspoons of this old oil and add it to the new oil to help break it in...

... I think I heard this on one of Dave Arnolds podcasts but have heard it echoed here and there. It works for me.

Merkinz, this is definitely a good tip, but that wasn't the issue here as I wasn't using new oil.

As a side note, I worked at KFC in high school, and it's 100% true about new oil: not only is the coloring lighter and less appealing, but the flavor is also nothing compared to what you get when using old oil.

Definitely: the results I showed upthread were with "old" oil (second or third use). There's more info on the science behind this in the original MC if you've got access to it.

Capicola Pizza (p. 306) -- Composed of

Neapolitan Pizza Dough (p. 296)

Pizza Sauce (p. 112)

Oven-Fried Pizza (p. 305)

The taste of this pizza was excellent: I liked their sauce recipe, and of course the topping combination is a great one. I used the Neapolitan pizza dough for it, and I really hope I messed something up, however: it was almost impossible to work with. I have never attempted to maneuver such a slack dough before, and had a very difficult time doing so. It flowed so much it was practically liquid, and tore at the slightest provocation. For the second pizza of the evening, in fact, I gave up on trying to shape it on a peel, and instead pushed it into the pan directly, trying to work quickly so it didn't burn. I found that to be a more effective technique, though it still required some finesse and careful watching in the oven.

Great stuff Chris! ... I've got a 12 mm thick slab of steel at home I have been experimenting with lately and I am looking forward to trying the MCAH dough recipe. I made the Neapolitan dough recipe from the Serious Eats website and it was as difficult to work as you describe this one to be so I'm guessing it is supposed to be that way. It did also taste more delicious than my regular dough recipe so I found the frustration and hassle to be worth it. I've used the steel plate a few times now and I can tell you that it works amazingly well but I'm still trying to get a good system going as my grill can be a little too powerful at times.

Why don't you guys use the shell of a springform pan as a mold for the pizza, if it's as liquid as you describe? Just pull it off when the crust hardens.

It's not that liquid, and the problem isn't making the pizza round, it's getting it to hold together while you transfer it to the cooking surface.

It's not that liquid, and the problem isn't making the pizza round, it's getting it to hold together while you transfer it to the cooking surface.

No luck with forming it on parchment, then using a peel or baking sheet slipped under that, to transfer it to the oven?

I just got my copy, and wow, it's absolutely incredible!

About the pizza: I looked at the recipe, and the hydration in MCaH is incredibly high, 75%. Way too high, in my opinion, unless you have extensive experience working with high-hydration doughs (even then, a Neapolitan pizza with hydration that high seems like an outlier).

For reference, Jim Lahey's no-knead dough (which the headnote says theirs is based on) is 70% hydration, and the Serious Eats Neapolitan dough mentioned by Merkinz is 65%. So if you thought the Serious Eats dough was hard to work with, this'll be much, much more difficult.

Most Neapolitan doughs have hydrations in the 60s, when it's up in the 70s its extremely difficult or impossible to work with. Most doughs with hydrations that high are things like Sicilian pies, which are stretched into a pan, not shaped by hand.

I just stumbled across this and was hoping someone can tell me what it means. In the creamed spinach recipe (p. 199), it says Ultra-Sperse 3 can be used instead of Wondra, and that it has "better flavor release" than wheat or corn-based starches. I've never heard the term "flavor release" before, and was wondering what it means in this context.

The original MC talks extensively about the flavor release of various thickening techniques: it's talking about how well, and how quickly, the flavor goes from the food to your palate. It's one of the key improvements in the Modernist Mac & Cheese for example: a classic M&C made with bechamel has quite poor flavor release, resulting in a muted cheese flavor. The Modernist M&C has very little starch in the sauce (just whatever was on the surface of the pasta, usually) which results in a very fast and complete flavor release, giving a much more vibrant cheese flavor.