Hi, I guess it’s time for another cameo post that is as long as a novel from me. (Holy crap, I typed out enough that it must be split into three posts! Maybe I can fit it into two . . . no apparently not.)
I’ve been recently very interested in food and drink! I’ll share my tidbits on food safety first, if only because I can get through the little of what I know more quickly. My personal habits: I dedicate my cutting boards (and have a strong preference for the biggest ones I can possibly find, and I also like bamboo for its hardness as well, even if it's tougher on knives). I have dedicated particular boards to 1) meat 2) veggies 3) onion/garlic/ginger, and the others include general purpose, a huge one for those particular occasions, a slotted bread board, a plastic one that folds with two creases for easy dumping into pots, etc. While I do have a meat board, I do almost all my chicken work in the left side of the kitchen sink (I pretty much exclusively buy whole chickens vacuum sealed in 2-packs; and for those that don’t know, get the smallest/youngest/tenderest; I shop by date first, and then of those remaining, I buy the pack with lowest weight/cost). I use gloves often, and have both food grade vinyl and nitrile gloves sitting in a drawer nearby. For cleaning the sink in particular, after chicken in particular, I will rinse, spray undiluted white vinegar to sit for a while, rinse, and soap it down for good measure. I’ve done bleach in the past, but it’s pretty offensive, and is so not food grade. For cutting boards I’ve done both IPA and vinegar, but I tend towards vinegar for so many things now (all of these spray bottles sit below the sink). The one thing that I can’t use vinegar on is granite, due to such high acidity, and I use IPA there. (Some people use window cleaner.) For that matter, I keep anything acidic away from granite, including lemon juice. While more of a care issue, I don’t keep up with mineral oil/wax as much as I should, though I am good about “seasoning” them or whatever the proper term is.
Wherever the above might be, between minimal and overkill, I feel pretty strongly that you will get sick at a restaurant before at my place. The stress, the speed, the amount of dishes being made, oh how long were these raw eggs sitting out for, stuff like that make restaurants more risky IMO. Yes, there are rules, but how well are they followed.
The danger zone temperature range is a really, really big temp range. The “clock” on certain foods is not “resettable”. What that means is that if a certain food can have a 3 hour window in the zone, and was already out for an hour, and if you fridge it overnight and bring it out again, you still only have 2 hours left. 3 hours is just an example, because bacteria can literally double within minutes, given the right circumstances. I learned about this from The Professional Chef, a pretty cool +1000 page reference book for food. It’s not nearly as practical as my Brown books, but I’m glad I have it.
Alton Brown says anti bacterial soap doesn’t do anything more than regular soap. However, I realize that he probably has in mind only the proper technique, which is something like hot water, all the way up to the forearms, for something like 30 seconds? I often don’t have hot water (because I don’t want to waste/wait), almost never go a full 30 seconds, and don’t go to the forearms, except only occasionally after handling chicken.
I use a Kitchen Aid probe thermometer for cooking meats. Super duper handy, it can for the beginner turn a perhaps daunting recipe into something very easy; throw it in and wait for the alarm. Chicken, I stick it to the inner thigh, but not touching bone, I set it for 165. (Now, certain "very safe" references might say as high as 180, but that's just overcooked IMO; for that matter it's the same for pork, I forget how high, but AB will call for 145 in one recipe, and Keller goes significanlty lower than that; they know meat still continues to cook during the rest period). I’m a fan of low temp, slow roasts. I have many thermometers, a frying/liquid one, and I think I have 3 of them in the fridge (huge discrepancy between readings, unfortunately, I get what I pay for sometimes). I have about a 10 degree difference between the top/bottom shelves, and 7 degrees between top and bottom door shelves. I also have an instant read IR thermometer gun.
I date many things in my fridge, with a Sharpie. Often times it’s for freshness, but it’s also often for safety.
Something that you’ll almost never see in a home, but is commonplace in a restaurant, is an ice bath, to get something out of the danger zone as quickly as possible, while also not throwing your fridge (and perhaps everything else in there) into shock. I’ve done it a few times with a particular dish I like to make. While I don’t need to for the dishes I usually make, others use ice baths to instantly stop the cooking process for certain things.
Meat, well at least beef, should be kept between 32-36 F, according to The Professional Chef. Alton Brown seems to ask for the upper range of that when dry aging. Home dry aging is a real PITA for reasons I may or may not get into, but it does make the cost of the meat about 50% less this way, at least for me. Ok, I think I’m done with my safety jive.
The Food! Yes, Food!
I’ve already mentioned Alton Brown a couple of times, but the two books of his I have are great, I’m Just Here For The Food V2.0, and Good Eats The Later Years (I prefer this one). BTW, you can find just about any Good Eats recipe online, since they've aired already, but not so much with the former book. (I haven’t had cable TV in many years, but have seen some of his episodes, and I can tell you it is certainly easier following a recipe with a book than from a show.) I don’t like everything I’ve tried, but when he nails it he just really nails it. I have even been surprised by the smallest/easiest things like his sherry vinegar sardine toast. I also enjoy that he does include some cocktails (if only the most well known), even some heavy duty punches. I’ve done his blueberry soda recipe too, it’s yum yum. (I rinsed the cheesecloth so many times before using, but I’m not sure what the best/easiest method for that is, maybe someone here has a tip for me.) Anyway, what’s great is that his recipes are generally easy for the tastiness. The parts lists, for example, are always in whole integers it seems, whether 1 this, 2 that, 3 there. He divides things into “hardware” (the tools), and “software” (the ingredients). The trivia is frickin’ great, I could type out a lot lot lot of it (Kingsford was Henry Ford’s buddy, and the old Model Ts had a roof made with wood supports, and they didn’t know what to do with the scraps until they made BBQ briquettes with them; Tampa Bay Bucs are named after island natives who made enjoyed cooking barbacoa and allegedly were catching the pigs that escaped Columbus’ ship; Weber grills were first designed using marine buoys), and his humor gets me often. OTOH, with Julia Child, the text might only be 1 page, but it still will take 4 hours to do; blanch tomatoes for exactly 10 seconds before hand peeling and deseeding; hand dry each and every small segment of eggplant individually with paper towels; stuff like that.
Otherwise, I grab other recipes off the internet. I did just recently acquire Keller’s Ad Hoc, and I’m glad it’s “for the home” and so far it seems quite promising. Yes, I found the French Laundry book to be pretty cool . . . but you know what, the Eleven Madison Park book is FREAKING GORGEOUS. But unfortunately, it’s probably rather useless to me for the most part, and so I didn’t pick it up, at least not yet. I don't feel like making recipes for ingredients towards a larger mothership main recipe, or do sous vide anytime soon, or anything like that. I’ve read mixed reviews on the Volt book.
I am very lucky to have a particular food mentor. He teaches wilderness/nature stuff to home schooled kids, and in my mind he is *the* survivalist. He’s tracked a number of animals, stuff like that, and is just a cool dude. Ok, what gets me though is his insane knowledge of vegetation, how to grow and care for them, food products in general, and how they’re made (not so much the cooking as how things are cultivated or processed before they are put on shelves). Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that I advise trying to find a good and willing food mentor, and the more the merrier. My mom and brother have definitely been good food mentors to me as well. In a short time, I have gone from being a ho-hum cook, to being one of the better cooks my friends and family might now. It’s actually not very hard at all. Though there is a learning curve on many things (particularly chopping things, or how to store a variety of vegetables, things like that; for example I keep potatoes in the dark, single layer, spaced out), it’s simply a matter of time, and finding your own ways and tastes. Hm potatoes, oh yeah, I hear it’s with these you really want organic. Supposedly the farmers of non-organic potatoes won’t even eat their own stuff as they know what’s going on, and search out organic ones elsewhere. I’m glad to see watermelons don’t have to be organic in the OP’s linky, because in my limited shopping experiences with them, there is a very large price difference, maybe double.
Anyway, here is some (“fried” according to AB) chicken in garlic and shallots, French style, where it’s been browned, just about to be put in the oven. He is a bigger fan of this recipe than I am, I think it’s alright, and I've done it more than once. Maybe I'll give it just one more shot, because I think he said it's his favorite recipe.
