Cooking Sous Vide
I made pork tenderloin last night, which I will post about soon, using an interesting cooking technique called sous vide. Sous vide means under pressure in French. In high end kitchens it involves...
View ArticleFaux Fluffernutter Sandwiches
This past Sunday we had a party at our apartment. Most of the guests were from the Marion Street Cheese Market in Oak Park. I created a few hors d’oeuvres with cheese from the store. This is faux...
View ArticlePineapple Puffs with Hook’s Bleu Cheese and Balsamic Vinegar
These are another hors d’oeuvre I made for last Sunday’s party. It’s a merengue-like puff made from pineapple juice. The puff is filled with softened blue cheese and a cube of balsamic vinegar. This is...
View ArticleA Day At El Bulli by Ferran Adria
I had heard great things about Ferran Adria’s A Day At El Bulli and the cheap amazon.com price was too good to pass on. The book is dictionary size, but is mostly comprised of photographs with small...
View ArticleSous Vide Carrots
In my short experimentation in cooking sous vide at home I’ve only cooked pork tenderloin. It turned out absolutely delicious on both occasions. Especially for my Latke Encrusted Pork Tenderloin. I...
View ArticleFun with Fermentation
Yesterday I finishing a five week crash course in fermented foods. We’ve crammed a lot of material into those 5 days of class including sauerkraut, cheese making, miso, rice koji, sourdough bread and...
View ArticleHomemade Sauerkraut
Sauerkraut is amazing. It’s so incredibly flavorful, low in calories, and rich in history. Most people don’t know how it’s made however. There are two ingredients in sauerkraut. That’s right, two:...
View ArticleGarlicky Dill Pickles
These are some homemade pickles that I made along with my friend Heather in our fermentation class. These are true fermented pickles made with plenty of fresh dill and garlic. We made them by washing...
View ArticleHome Made Cultured Butter
Heather and I made this European style cultured butter in fermentation class. We used a high quality heavy cream. We simply poured 1 quart of cream into a container, sprinkled a culture called flora...
View ArticlePickled Ginger
Another treat from my fermented foods class, this homemade pickled ginger is refreshing, bold, and easy to make. Here’s a recipe: Pickled Ginger: 4 lb. fresh ginger 1 Tb. kosher salt 1/2 tsp. yogurt...
View ArticleSeared Lamb Chops
From a few years of restaurant experience and a lifetime of stuffing my face I have come to the conclusion that you’re either a lamb person or a pig person. Those who grew up eating pig find the smell...
View ArticleThe Beginnings of Vanilla Extract
The flavor of vanilla is hard to describe. It’s dark, robust, fruity, and absolutely unique. Vanilla beans owe their flavor to a very long and labor intensive fermenting process and a special flavor...
View ArticleTomato Chips with Basil Pesto
And now for something completely different. These are crunchy yet tender puffed tomato chips with a basil pesto dip. The chips taste intensely of sun dried tomatoes and are perfectly complimented with...
View ArticleMustard Pretzels
Pretzels, large or small, soft or crunchy, were meant to be dipped in mustard. In a never-ending quest to make life more efficient and more delicious, I decided to make a pretzel from mustard. If...
View ArticleCherry-Raspberry Orbs and Spherification
A very popular technique in modern fine dining is spherification. This technique allows us to encapsulate a liquid, such as cherry and raspberry puree, inside of itself. The key players are calcium and...
View ArticleCauliflower and Cocoa
Some flavor combinations are classic: parsley and lemon, beef and mushrooms, tomatoes and basil. Upon closer inspection, these foods share many of the same flavor and aroma molecules. These mutual...
View ArticleBook Review: The Big Fat Duck Cookbook
This is the biggest book I have ever seen. In fact, it doesn’t even fit on my book shelf! At over 500 pages and almost 12 pounds, it certainly is not a casual read. Heston Blumenthal is the Executive...
View ArticleFood Pairings
I’d like to introduce you to a fantastic website, foodpairing.be. Food Pairing is an ever-growing site featuring food pairing “trees” of popular ingredients. The goal is to find new and exciting flavor...
View ArticleBrix Refractometer
Garrett’s Table is now officially introducing equipment reviews. In a series of posts I’ll highlight interesting equipment that you never knew you couldn’t live without. First up is the brix...
View ArticleThe Bacon Torch, Another Practical Use For The Wondermeat
Back in April Popular Science published this article, titled “Bacon: The Other White Heat.” The accompanying video demonstrates how to melt through a steel pan using nothing but cured pork as the...
View ArticleThe Ion Ray Gun and Levitating Kosher Salt
Here’s a video of the chefs at moto restaurant electrically charging grains of kosher salt with a negative ion capacitor. The salt jumps and bounces around in seemingly impossible ways. Crazy food of...
View ArticleAddicted to Coffee Beans
The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee tree, which are a group of trees belonging to the genus Coffea. The most commonly grown and cultivated is Coffea arabica, from which we get our beloved...
View ArticleApium graveolens
Celery, or Apium graveolens, is an enlarged version of a bitter Eurasian herb called smallage. The modern form of celery began it’s cultivation in 15th century Italy, and it remained a rare delicacy...
View ArticleMustard Seeds
Mustard seeds come from a variety of mustard plants in the family Brassicaceae. Mustard seeds have appeared in Indian cuisine for thousands of years. Mustard seed was a very valuable and sought-after...
View ArticleCucumis C. sativus
The common cucumber. They’re so ubiquitous nowadays that the cucumber has become boring to most diners. The flavor is far from common however. Sweet, bitter, subtle, and aromatic, cucumbers have a rich...
View ArticleWatermelon Soup
Very few things are as good in the dead heat of summer as watermelon. It’s subtly sweet with a hint of cucumber flavor (not too surprising considering the two are very closely related). This vegetal...
View Article
