Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah, I know. Still, that's 600g of meat, I figured anything else as a side was pushing it.

Inspired by Australian masterchef, breakfast tomorrow is eggs benedict, but using crumpets instead of muffins.

Feedback shall follow.

Make me eggs benedict.

those short ribs look aces. How did you do them?

Lamb wise I do 30 mins with it in an empty pot, then 3 hours with whatever mint laced stock i can find. All at 150c.

You need to get it out of the pan with a sieve its that tender. I'm doing it sunday as it happens

I make poached eggs on crumpets for breakfast regularly. It's great.

Sous-vide. 48 hours at 60 then very quickly seared. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever tasted. It's like the best parts of the opposite ends of the steak world - twice as tender as fillet, and twice as beefy as skirt.



Objection: Insufficient butter.

It's a ridiculous idea to consider this for derby isn't it?

...

Obviously, more butter can only improve matters further.

Stuff I made last week for my guests: roast chicken dinner, slow-braised lamb shank, corned beef sandwiches, corned beef hash. All turned out really good.

We also ate at Casamia in Bristol. Excellent tasting menu there, highly recommended.

Oh, how was the salt beef ( )?

Excellent. Brined for 2.5 weeks (which was ample, even without unrolling; one brisket had a tiny spot in the centre that was grey but other than that the brine penetrated fully). Braised for 6 hours at 140degC in four cans of Boddingtons with carrots, an onion, and an entire head of garlic. I spread the butter-like garlic on the sandwiches, of course.

Cras - I'm sure I've asked you this before, but I couldn't find it on the search.

What's that meat supplier you have used?

Using what? More details please!

I have a sous-vide supreme. I'm far too lazy for homebrew.

£250 for a water bath? and that meat supplier is well expensive! You must be wadded Craster!!!

I have a local supplier of shorthorn and galloway beef and saltmarsh lamb and occasionally have others like dexter and they are really reasonable. I got two massive salt marsh mutton neck fillets the other week that I slow roasted in a mint-heavy stock for 5 hours for just over £6. It was F-ing aces.

I shall pay them a visit on monday methinks!

He would be wadded if he shopped at Netto and used a microwave like the rest of us

Nah. I just spend all my money on food.

o/
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You can't take it with you! Unless you use it to get fat.

I'll hang around longer post-mortem than the average man, and I think that's really what we're all looking for at the end of the day.

*adds to shopping list*

how much do you use your sous-vide supreme Craster? What else have you made in it?

On average probably 3 times a week. I use it for pretty much anything that involves a chunk of meat - steaks, roasts, 'braises'. Also for other things that are particularly temperature-sensitive, so hollandaise, custards, etc. Even for making stock.

At up to 48 hours per cooking cycle, this implies you rarely turn it off

Heh. Only braising cuts need a long cooking time for the breaking down of connective tissue. Fish is 30 minutes, steaks are 2-4 hours, a roast is 10 or so.

Still, don't tell kalmar.

Is there a limit on how big you could make one of those things, I wonder? Could you, with a loft cold water tank and some clever electrics, make one big enough to do a whole lamb in, or something?

Totally. More efficient with a bigger tank, too - though it'll take MUCH longer to get up to temp.

Microwave it.

See, those strike me as really awkward times. That means if I want steak for a midweek dinner it needs to go in between 4-6pm, which is mostly before I get home from work. And if I want a roast for weekend lunch it needs to go in 4am. I have the same problem with slow cookers, which is why I eventually gave up on them altogether.

Overcooking isn't too much of a problem though. So the roast can go in the night before.

Dinner last night was (premade) gnocchi baked in tomato-butter sauce topped with mozzarella, served with fried fillet steak. A slightly random combination inspired by the fact that the ingredients were all past their use-by date and needed eating. It was delicious though. I really recommend the sauce, which is extremely easy and very tasty -- far more than you would think, given it only has three ingredients.

Here's the steak, mid-fry. The gnocchi wasn't very photogenic because I overdid the butter in the sauce a little so it had rather too much oil (tasty, tasty oil) floating on the surface.

I popped into Tesco on my way home from the pub allotment yesterday to get some beer tea beer, and ended up buying 3.6kg of meat at 50% off - 1.8kg of Finest silverside beef and 1.8kg of boneless extra mature pork leg. This is added to the chicken in the fridge and 1.3kg of lamb shoulder in the freezer.

The lamb is likely to become 50-50 chilli and curry. The chicken will be simply roasted with bacon, lemon, garlic and onion this weekend, I think. The pork will, I assume, become pulled. I may try smoking it first.

No real idea what to do with the beef, though the first thing that came to mind is to slice some thick medallions, sear them in a pan then slow-cook in ale. It's a very embryotic recipe; any suggestions?

It's silverside. That means it's very, very low fat, and has next to no connective tissue. Anything that cooks it above medium is going to leave it a bit tough and dry, even braising it in a slow cooker, which runs at around eighty degrees.

I'd roast it, to be honest.

Oh. Darn, I thought it was one that needed a bit of cooking. Cheers.

Recipes for food found inside games: http://www.gourmetgaming.co.uk/

I've got a chunk of venison haunch for tea tonight which is going to be sliced into thick medallions and panfried.

I'm thinking of what to do with it, I know chocolate is meant to be nice with venison, but not sure about doing that as if it tastes like pooh then its £12 of quality meat ruined!

Any thoughts on what to do with it?

Calling on my elite cookery skills, I can suggest pan-fried venison medallion sandwiches. You'll only need bread and ketchup.

Salt beef. 2.5 kg of beef brisket, brined for 2.5 weeks, cooked in beer for 6 hours. This half of the brisket was served as-is for sandwiches.


The other half was chilled overnight, diced, and used to make corned beef hash, served with a poached duck egg.

THAT looks lovely Doc! How did you go about brining it? Where was it kept?


I've got 2 nice Bowland beef sirloins for thursday night, and a nice chunky marrowbone... want to use the bone marrow with the steaks, any suggestions?

Thanks! I followed this process. They lived in the fridge, wrapped up in a couple of well-tied freezer bags, turned every day.

Good stuff. Whereabouts do you think the temperature was?

Good question, I didn't have my meat thermometer in it. I probably should have one, if only for academic interest. It came out of the fridge and straight into the (room temperature) beer, I brought it all to a simmer on the hob, and then the oven was set to 140degC. It was nicely cooked -- not overdone at all, as you can probably see by how tenderly impossible to slice it was in the first pic. Flavours were great but perhaps a little too strong on the juniper.

It wasn't too salty either (I was concerned as last time I used the same strength brine but only for a week), but I'm not sure it wanted a lot more salt. I'm intrigued that your sous vide method isn't over-salted as the meat can't lose salt to the cooking liquid. Maybe it doesn't lose that much?

Oh, absolutely, it looks spot on. Hence my interest



I suspect it doesn't. It's taken 2 weeks for that brine to penetrate into the centre of the meat. Is the salt really going to dissolve out again in 3 hours of cooking?

I can only think of one way to resolve this, which is make more via the same process and this time put a thermometer in it.

It's a chore, but I'd be willing to take one for the team.

I guess. The forums.sausagemaking.org folk think it does -- they recommend a weaker brine for sous vide final cooking, or an overnight soak in clean water before cooking to get excess salt out of the edge of the meat. I dunno though.

So it was just Beef rather than Salt Beef?

I've not been hugely successful recently.

On Sunday I pulled a 1.8kg lump of pork shoulder (well, braised it, I haven't shredded it or reduced the sauce yet) and got my spices wrong - the sauce has a very tomatoey smell and casseroley taste. Hopefully the reduction will intensify it.

Last night I made jambalaya (with chicken thighs and prawns) and it's... very tomatoey, with a less than pleasant spice aftertaste because of too much cayenne power. Totally mucked up the spicing and quantity of chorizo.

Hel roasted half the silverside of beef and it did fantastically though, thanks for setting me straight on that Craster. T'other half is in the freezer, along with a huge lump of lamb shoulder I forgot I'd bought the other week. I'm thinking probably half pulled-oriental-style and half slow-cooked chilli.

Oh, but the hot sauce worked quite well; the base sauce (5.5 jars) is more like how I imagined, and I mixed the spillovers (quarter jar) from the naga and jolokia variants (3x 100ml bottles of each). It's hot enough for me as a condiment, so I expect the plain-jolokia is slightly hotter. I didn't double them up; I decided to leave further experimentation for next year. I can always break a jar and hot it up if I want to kill someone.

Made green thai curry last night, but made the curry paste from scratch as well. Incredible the difference that makes, the flavours and smells were just incredible. I had to go seek out the Asian food store in Glasgow yesterday to try and get a couple of the ingredients but it was well worth it. Everybody loved it.


The pictures aren't really of the standard we've come to expect from Gaywood and Craster but hopefully they look ok. I just took them on my cameraphone

Jen is making jars of chutneys and jams and putting them in a hamper for a Christmas present for her dad, so I think I might make another batch of that paste and stick that in as well with a wee handwritten recipe and the other ingredients for the curry.

After dinner, I made Champagne and Berry soup. I wasn't in work yesterday so couldn't get champagne from the staff shop so I just used some Prosecco. The recipe also wanted raspberries, blueberries, redcurrants and blackberries but I could only find the raspberries and blueberries so I doubled the amounts of them. It was put in the blender with some double cream and some yoghurt, then a few mint leaves and finally the Prosecco and a bit of caster sugar. It was delicious. I used 2% yoghurt and weight watchers double cream so with full fat ingredients I think it would just be incredible.


Tonight, to make use of some of the abundance of Thai ingredients we have in the fridge, Jen has made tuna fishcakes with chilli, lemongrass and coriander. They look amazing, I can't wait to eat

Awesome! And you're not making this at the cottage because...?