Landjaeger is done!

 After fermenting for 2 days, then smoking, then hanging for 2 weeks, the landjaeger is done.  Here's a photo of the fermented sausage hanging in the smoker.  I used apple wood, figuring it's something reasonably local: Landjaeger is a southern German, Swiss, Austrian sausage, and there's plenty of apple trees in the area.  After smoking, I hung it at about 60 degrees/50% RH .

The recipes all say to monitor the mass to know when it is dry enough; so it started weighing about 35 ounces, then a few days later was down to 26, and still pretty squishy.  By a week, it was down to 21 ounces, and yesterday, it was at 17 ounces, about half the original weight. As it dried, it got darker, which is nice, because I was afraid that I hadn't put enough smoke into it, but it turns out that it's more about oxidation (I assume) than smoke that does the color. 

And here it is in cross section (because, hey, you have to cut some off and eat it!).  Tastes like landjaeger I've had before, so it's a winner. If you've not had landjaeger, it's basically kind of like jerky, serving the same general purpose of a dried, preserved meat for traveling.   I'm thinking about getting ready to do a slow fermented sausage next.. salami.

While we're looking at food from southern Germany, I also made some sauerkraut from a leftover half a head of red cabbage.  It's crunchy and sweet, just like it's supposed to be.

Landjaeger & Pate

The landjaeger has been stuffed and fermented for about 2 days now. A mixture of beef and pork with spices, stuffed into hog casings. (we had fun with the extra casings.. now I know where balloon animals came from).  I don't have official wooden landjaeger molds, so I squished them between a couple sheet pans for 48 hours.  The bacteria inoculation wants to ferment at 80F or so, which is convenient since it's been 80 in the garage for the past few days. 

You're supposed to dry the sausages for a bit, so we did that today, giving me a chance to take a picture.  Tomorrow evening, after another 24 hours of fermentation, (and I might add, they smell like they are fermenting.. a distinct acidic odor), I hit them with low temperature smoke for 4-6 hours, and then they go to cure for a couple weeks at 50-60 F (e.g. the temperature of the wine).

I got ambitious yesterday.. watching the DVD that comes with Jacque Pepin's new book I saw how you can bone out a chicken while keeping the skin intact to make a ballotine. It actually worked (although I'm not nearly as proficient and speedy as Jacque).

And, I made a pate (my first)... a pork tenderloin with a pork forcemeat around it, with a garnish of andouille. Tastes pretty good.

Viognier dessert wine

While making the Landjaeger, I opened a couple of bottles of Viongier dessert wine for a horizontal tasting. Both from Santa Ynez, both from 2010, from Bridlewood and Dascomb. What a difference.., The Dascomb was sweeter and much more complex, caramel, apple, etc.   The Bridlewood... apple juice.  Really.. that's the first impression for the Bridlewood.. tastes like apple juice.  The Dascomb has the apple-y flavor, but has more to it.

Interesting.

And the sausage is curing in the garage.  It needs to ferment for 48 hours at 80 F, and conveniently, it's been hot outside, so the garage is in the 75-85 range.   After that, 10-14 days of drying at 50-60 sort of temperature.  I forgot the sugar.. the recipe calls for dextrose, which I didn't have, and I was going to substitute sucrose or honey, but I forgot.  Oops.  Oh well.  Those hardy Swiss didn't have buckets of glucose sitting around 100 years ago.  The meat probably has enough sugar in it to feed the bacteria.

(dessert wine tasting was AFTER the sausage making, so consumption of wine had nothing to do with the omission of sugar)

Canadian Bacon

I made some Canadian Bacon using the recipe from Ruhlman's Charcuterie.  It's pretty simple, you cure in a brine (with pink salt as the curing agent) for a couple days, let it dry for a day, then smoke it to an internal temp of 150F.  The brine has a few spices in it, but basically, this is a smoked cured ham (made from pork loin).

It came out pretty much as expected.  There's a small non-pink spot in the middle: perhaps the brine didn't diffuse quite far enough in in the two days?  With the commercial product, they pump the brine into the meat under pressure to get better perfusion.

I want to try Kassler Ripchen which is a similar product, but in theory is smoked first, then brined.  Or maybe it's cured, smoked, brined.  It's hard to get a straight story online: there's tons of recipes, the vast majority of which are basically identical to the Canadian Bacon.  The original Kassler process is about 100 years old, and may have done things that aren't good practice today.

Also on the list to try is Landjaeger: a dried, cured, smoked sausage made from pork and beef. Think of it as southern German jerky.  It's a dry cured sausage, but not the months hanging like salami, just a couple weeks; but it is fermented (unlike the Pancetta).  I also have a tub of sauerkraut fermenting in the wine locker.

More Charcuterie (Saucisson, a'la Pepin)

More sausage...

I got a Jacque Pepin cookbook for Father's day, and there was a series of recipes in there for a country saucisson.  A pork sausage with garlic, red wine, and seasoning.  It looked good, so I got out the grinder, a kilo packet of frozen pork shoulder, some fatback, and went for it.  One of the recipes called for chanterelles or similar.  I didn't have those, but I did have dried porcini, which I like the flavor of, so I used those.   It's a mild cure.. add curing salt, cure in the refrigerator for 2-7 days.

I wrapped the sausage in plastic wrap and foil, per the recipe, and let it cure.  It's been a week now, so time to test it.  I saw the recipe for saucisson in brioche (sort of a fancy pigs in blankets when you get right down to it) and decided to make it for breakfast, although it's really more of a dinner or lunch dish, but I was hungry this morning.  I didn't want to make bread dough for the brioche, but I did have puff pastry in the freezer, so I figured I could wrap the 2"x10" log o'sausage in the puff pastry and bake it.

OK.. it tastes pretty good.  Distinct red wine taste (I used a cheap Apothos red which isn't great to drink), some heat (I think I put some pepper in), nice earthy porcini taste.  Very, very different than the usual breakfast sausage or my standard spicy Italian sausage.  The puff pastry, though, pulled away.  Probably need bigger vents to let the steam escape during baking. Or maybe do smaller chunks of meat, or stretch the pastry, or, gosh, actually make brioche dough?

Froze the rest.  Pepin's recipes call for either roasting next to potatoes and onions (yum), or poaching in hot water and using with potatoes to make a potato salad.  So I vacuum packed the remaining three logs, and we'll see how it goes.  Some sausage freezes better than others.

The andouille worked great.. I did a peppers and onions saute with andouille this week and it was wonderful.  Next batch needs more heat, though.

Love that vacuum packer.. I also  packed 4 pounds of pork chops cut from a 8 pound loin that Sally got at Costco.  The other 2 pound chunks are going to become Kassler Rippchen and Canadian Bacon.  The former needs to be smoked before curing, the latter needs curing before smoking. I need to get some juniper berries, and I need 3 or 4 days to do the curing.  Sort of a German and Canadian take on what you can do with a lean pork loin!

Sorbetto ( Fruit Gelato)

I'm converging on recipes and processes for fruit gelato/sorbetto.  Technically, if it doesn't have dairy, it's a sorbetto, not a gelato; a southern Italian thing, as opposed to the northern thing where dairy rules.

In any case, Cooks Illustrated had a recipe for raspberry sherbet and that clued me in to a couple key facts.  Number 1: pectin is your friend; Number 2: don't churn too long.   I still have my refractometer, but so far, I've been going by taste.

Pectin (of which there is a lot in some fruit, and not much in others) helps maintain the structure so it's creamy and doesn't freeze into fruit icecubes. And, yes, there's  "yellow box" and "pink box" pectin, for "sugar added" and "no sugar added" jelly making.  The former expects to see TONS of sugar (as in cups per pound of fruit) and apparently, there's a whole complex sugar, pectin, gelling chemistry.
Not too much churning, because air whipped into it makes ice foam, not creamy sorbetto.

The goal is saturated taste, and the sobetto not melting into juice when it sits on the plate/bowl. (although Saddle Peak cheats on this by serving their sorbetti on a block of ice with depressions in it).

Strawberries don't have much pectin (as opposed to raspberries, and even less than apples). So I made a first batch with strawberries, sugar, and "add sugar pectin" because that's what I had.  about 5/8 cup sugar for a couple pounds of strawberries.  Zap it in the food processor until smooth, then spend 10 minutes ramming it through the chinois. (something I learned in cooking class at the Athenaeum.. get that little ladle out and beat it through the screen).  It was great, taste wise, but froze rock hard after a day.

Try #2.. got pink box pectin (processed to require less sugar, apparently.. it's on the web, google pectin and you'll find out more than you want to know). Spun up some fresh strawberries (bought yesterday) in the processor, churned it this morning, and it's freezing now.

Also did a raspberry according to the Cooks Illustrated recipe this morning, beating it through the chinois as well.   Just churned it, so it's freezing (curing) now too.

We'll see how it comes out.   Raspberry on the top, Strawberry on the bottom.

Next, up: real gelato with dairy. Caramel, chocolate, vanilla (vaniglia), etc.

A spectacularly bad restaurant meal

I'm back in DC for a workshop, and I'm staying at the Hilton Garden Inn near the workshop location.  Getting here was a mite weird: I got bumped from the overbooked flight to Baltimore (my preferred airport) but they got me on the flight to Dulles that actually got here sooner.  I did have the last seat on the plane (and was the last to board, after running from gate 75 to gate 68 at LAX): a middle seat in the next to the last row next to a large gentleman who coudn't get the armrest all the way down.  But no matter, my seat on the Baltimore flight wasn't much better. I can take it for 4 1/2 hours, and I've definitely had worse.

The hotel is, so far, unexceptional, but hey, it's a place to sleep, and it's basically across the street from where I need to go.

There is a restaurant in the hotel called Todd Gray's Watershed, or something like that, so I headed down to get dinner (not having eaten on the plane, and feeling a bit peckish by now.. about 5PM home zone time). The menu was sort of interesting, a lot of shellfish and seafood, sort of mid Atlantic seaboard styles. So I decided on the "Carolina Style Barbequed Shrimp with creamy white grits, andouille sausage, and green onion butter".  The Reuben sandwich also looked good, but, hey, might as well try something new, and the combination of shrimp and andouille looked interesting, if a bit more Louisiana than Carolina. It's just a name, after all.  Part of it was they didn't have beer listed on the menu anywhere, and a Reuben needs beer, really. And nobody should eat fresh fish in a restaurant on Monday; fishermen don't work on Sunday, after all. 

The wine list wasn't all that exotic, so I went for the Clos du Bois Sauvignon Blanc: safe, by the glass, a basic supermarket white bordeaux I'm sure I've had before. I figured the acidity would work with the buttery grits and sausage.

The whole thing goes downhill from there.  The waiter finally shows up. Monday night, maybe 20-30 people in the place, total, at a dozen or so tables, half a dozen waiters.  I do the ordering thing, ask for some water.

A while later (a long while), my waiter shows up with a glass of red wine (most likely a Malbec, based on the bill, about which more later).  Oops.. Dude, I ordered a white, even pointed to it on the menu, it's in the white column as opposed to the red column.  He trundles off.  Another long while later, and my glass of wine shows up. It's sort of ok, but not what I've been drinking recently (Santa Barbara county white bordeauxs for the most part). No matter, it's cold, it's wet, it's got some acidity.  But still no water.  A reminder, and he shows up to fill the glass with water.

No bread or rolls, but maybe that's just not something they do at this place.

The entree shows up a bit later.  I asked for some bread or something to go with it, and the waiter disappeared to fetch it (I guess they have bread in some form here).  It's hard to actually see it, because it turns out there's no real light near the table, but it is clearly shrimp on top of something creamy and grits-like.  Using the cellphone as a flashlight confirms this.

It tastes fairly good.  A sort of plain grilled shrimp (I was sort of half expecting a vinegar mustard sort of glaze), and some smoky bits of sausage.  The grits were good. The green vegetable material was sort of unidentifiable, but even as just color, it wasn't bad.  I thought maybe chard or some mild greens.  I'm not sure if that's the green onion butter, but it sure didn't taste like green onions.

My waiter brings a little 2 inch cubical piece of bread that looks kind of like a pretzel (salt on top, dark brown crust) on top, but is basically fluffy dinner roll underneath. No big deal, it's bread, and can be used with the sauce.  There's a small dish of clear liquid with it, which I thought might be olive oil or something, but it's pretty clear for that. It's oily, has almost no taste. I'm guessing peanut oil or corn oil or maybe (real) light olive oil, something useful for sauteing, but not really what you want to have on your bread.  I guess there's a reason they don't serve bread with the meal.

And it gets weirder.  The sausage is cold. They're little chunks: like you took your andouille and sliced it lengthwise into quarters, then chopped it to make sort of cubes.  And when I fork up a couple, and chew them, they're distinctly cool. Not refrigerator cold, but cool, and definitely not "fresh out of the saute pan" (which is how *I* would have done it.. zap them into the pan with the shrimp and get some sizzle on it).  And as I eat the shrimp I realize, they're not really hot, just warm.  Hmm, looks like they have a couple big pots of grits and greens, and a steam table tray of shrimp that have been previously cooked, and a bin of sausage bits. No wonder it didn't take too long to make this dish.. all they had to do was "spoonful of grits, smaller spoon of greens on top, sprinkle sausage chunks, stack shrimp on top, and serve".  It could have been so good (and probably was, when Chef Todd did it the first time).

And the bowl is dirty on the outside. At first I just thought it was a sort of rustic texture, but it wasn't even around the bowl, and upon closer inspection (cellphone as flashlight again), yep, food residue on the outside of the bowl. Well, hopefully it's just sloppy plating and not a derelict dish machine operator.

Meanwhile, the waiter never comes by, nobody fills the water glass, etc.  I finish and wait. And wait. And wait.  Another waiter walking by buses the dishes.  Finally my waiter reappears and he has the bill.  By this time, I'm ready to do the zero tip thing and put a long written list on the back of the bill.  Except.. there's no pen to sign the check with (or to make my ranting list).  The waiter comes up with a pen when asked.  So I start my listing on the back of the bill, and then turn it over.  Whups... the entree price is different than what's written in the menu (less, as it happens), and the kind of wine is wrong (later, on comparing with other wines by the class, the abbreviation matches Malbec), although the same $9/glass price.  So I ask for the manager.  As does the guy at the table next to me, who has ALSO had appalling service.

The guy comes over and I point out that the prices on the bill don't match the prices on the menu, but beyond that, there's some problems, which I list.  He disappears for a while, and comes back with a revised bill with no entree, but still the wrong kind of wine.   I was willing to pay for the entree.. it's not the first, nor will it be the last, where I gamble and lose, but the guy insisted.  I asked about the variety of wine (an old fraud between bartender and waitstaff, or manager and owner, is to ring up different items than actually sold, especially if the margin is better on some than others. ) Oh well.. I sign the tab for $9.90 (no tip) and resolve never to eat there again.  The conference is feeding us, I think.

So here's the list...

• No water offered, but water glasses on table. Had to ask, and it took forever. Glass never refilled, until after bill brought.
• Wrong wine brought, and exorbitantly priced: $9/glass for a $12/bottle supermarket wine? $4-5 seems more reasonable, but hey, it was marked at $9, and I was willing to buy it.  I still think it tasted kind of pallid and thin, but I'd have to go buy a bottle and compare to be sure.  Maybe that's the Clos du Bois style, but it tasted like some of those almost tasteless $4-5/bottle whites we bought at Cost Plus. Sure didn't match some tasting notes I found online which talk about zesty citrus and crisp acidity.  Maybe they brought the wrong white.
• Sausage chunks cool, but not cold, nor hot. I'd be interested if the inspector or chef ever shoved a thermometer in the sausage chunk bin.  I'm betting around 50 degrees. It's a partially cured sausage, so the nitrites will kill the bacteria.
• Shrimp warm, but not hot.  140F (the usual holding temperature) is pretty toasty warm.  If you touch it, it feels hot.  I eat quite a lot  medium rare meat which is around 130-135 internal temp, and this shrimp was around that temp (by my calibrated tongue<grin>), and certainly no warmer.  It's pretty clear that this shrimp didn't just come off the BBQ grill or saute pan when plated.
• Unclean bowl.
• Bill incorrect in amounts and itemization.
• Remarkably inattentive service, for a $20-25/entree (without salad, etc.) price class place, especially when it was only 1/3 full.

We'll see how it goes.  Rarely do I eat at a place in the US where I actually worry about temperature control on the food, but there's just so many other little evidences of inattention that I just wonder. Is this a place where the eponymous Todd built the menu and then left others to run the place and they've sort of drifted into bad habits? Maybe it's because it's Monday night.

Take home summary:  The food concepts are good, the taste is good, the execution and (especially) the service is the pits.

Judging the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF)

A non food post, for a change.

I just returned from spending several days in Pittsburgh, PA (a nice place, green and hilly) judging the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, known as ISEF.  This is the big deal in the high school science fair world with about 1000 projects from all over the world. By this time, the projects have competed at a school or city fair, and then a regional or state fair, to be selected to compete at ISEF, so the standard of performance is pretty high:  As the director of judging said at the judge's orientation, they are comparable to a decent journal article or master's thesis.

In this post, I'm talking about what they call the "grand awards", the first, second, etc. place ribbons (and cash), as opposed to what are called "special awards".  About 25% of the projects will receive a "place" (first, second, third, fourth), with a few firsts, more seconds, and the rest thirds and fourths. There's also a "best in category": the first of first.  The special awards are judged and presented by various sponsoring organizations (like the US AirForce, or IEEE, or King Faisal) and they use their own criteria and methods to pick winners.

There were some 800-900 grand award judges for the 1000 projects, which are divided up into a couple dozen categories of various sizes.  My category was Engineering-Mechanical and Electrical, and was the largest, with about 120 projects.  We had about 70-80 judges for the category. So how do we go about picking the winners?  It's done in two steps, really.  First, judges interview the finalists in front of their project display and submit scores (0-100).  Then, all the scores are tabulated and all the judges meet in one room to caucus to pick the winners.  What's interesting to most people is that the scores do NOT directly determine the winners, they're more to help the judges decide which ones to talk about and discuss.

Each judge only interviews a small fraction of the projects (less than 10%) on the one day of judging.  We have 17 "appointment slots" that are 15 minutes long, and we're assigned a specific project in each slot (or we have an empty slot).  This year I judged 10 projects, and last year a few more.  The idea is that each project gets judged by at least 6-7 judges, and hopefully a few more, and that there's a sort of random spread of judges around the projects.  I'm an electronics kind of guy, so I got all projects that had electronics involved in some way, but I only got one of the several projects dealing with antennas.

The night before

The night before judging day, we get our slot assignments, and we go out to the exhibit floor to see the project displays.  Most of us have spent the afternoon looking at ALL the projects (without the finalists present), and that evening, you look especially at your assigned dozen, so that you can kind of calibrate yourself on what else is happening. There's some casual conversation among the judges about the projects, and this is where you can find out if there's something special you should be asking about the next day. I read the abstracts, look at the board, and make some notes about what I want to ask.  There's a form on the display if they worked at a research institution or were working with a scientist or specialist. In those cases, I want to see what the finalist did and whether what they did was their idea, or at the direction of someone else.  Working with a team is ok. Being third assistant bottle washer, not so ok.

 It's also a chance to get an assignment changed: maybe you know one of the finalists, and you don't want a conflict of interest.  I suspect the other reason they want us there the night before is to be able to deal with no-show judges.  It happens: planes don't arrive, other commitments take precedence, people get sick or injured.  When you have hundreds of judges, you can pretty much guarantee there will be some with a problem. I do not envy the fair's staff their job working all these issues.  We're all volunteers (we pay our own way to the fair and for lodging, etc.) and I'm impressed at the level of commitment. 

You can also do a bit of strategic googling when you get back to the hotel.  I didn't google the actual finalists (some judges do, but I didn't bother), but googling to find out the "current state of the art" in the topic areas is useful.  It's a poor finalist who isn't aware of what other people are doing in their field of inquiry: If I can google it, so can they.

One of the interesting aspects of judge training and orientation is that they warn us about a couple aspects of modern science fair finalists.  All these kids are scary smart, and it is VERY competitive.  With modern smart phones and internet access, it's entirely possible that if you ask a question about something that they don't know, they will get online and research it before the next judge comes around. The "educated BSer" problem grows by leaps and bounds.  It used to be that you could "test" the finalist by asking a few key background knowledge questions to see if they knew the field, but now, if you're interviewing in the afternoon, you'll get a different answer than a judge first thing in the morning.  This has always been a problem, and after judging a while, you know to ask questions that don't telegraph the correct answer

We were also warned that the finalists would google us.  They get their judges' names first thing in the morning, and apparently it's now standard practice among finalists to do a quick background check on their judges.  I don't know that anyone googled me, I didn't hear anything during judging that might have indicated it.

The day of judgement

We do our interviews. There's a PA that announces "now is the time when you should be interviewing the project in schedule slot N".   Periodically through the day, you fill out your scan form with you numeric score and turn them in.  We have to score on a 0-100 scale, but every judge has their own scheme for this.  Some judge easy, some judge hard.  Some spread their scores (I do.. my scores run from 20s to 90s), some don't.  A lot of judges basically score a median of 75 with 50-100 range.  They've tried various training schemes, but by now, they know that doesn't work, so they have a different tabulation scheme (which I'll describe later).

The interview process is sort of ad hoc.  For entrants that don't speak English, they have translators of varying proficiency, but overall I don't think anyone really suffers from being a non-English speaker.  Even in English, some finalists are voluble and talkative, and others are pretty quiet.  It's probably pretty overwhelming for them:  they've flown half way across the world (or from across town), they're getting grilled by a dozen people over a day in 15 minute shots.  It's kind of like getting interviewed for 10 different jobs in a day.   Both the judges and finalists worry about missing some essential piece of information that might make or break you. "Darn, I forgot to ask about X.  I hope some other judge asked about it."

When I interview, I ask my questions, which tend to be pretty specific.  Contrary to science fair lore, most judges don't start with "tell me about your project", because that starts what we call "the tape recorder". Sure, finalists all have a rehearsed capsule version (an elevator pitch, if you will).  Presumably, though, they've put that on the display, so I don't want to burn valuable interview time with it.  Learn it well though, you'll need it to explain to others (e.g. news media) about your project, but the judges are good at "stopping the tape"; we even get suggestions in training on how to do it, and we do compare notes about ways that work well.

I usually have picked out a few things from their display that I'm interested in, and I'll ask about them.  "Why did you decide to do X?" is a question that all judges use.  They want to know what you did, and that you did what you did for a reason, not just happenstance.  Everyone has some sort of "origin story" for why they did that particular project, some more interesting than others.  I don't know that the "my friend was injured in a motorcycle accident" or "my uncle suffered from X" works any better than "I was fooling around and noticed this odd thing happened".  We're all engineers and we love to solve problems, and we want finalists to be the same.  The kiss of death is "my teacher, adviser, brother's professor gave me a list of 3 projects and I chose this one".  You don't get many points for creativity for "doing homework problems".

I don't score as I interview.  I take notes (real important for the caucus later) about stuff that's good or bad or particularly interesting.  Then, at a break, I do my scoring.  I (and most judges) look at 3 or 4 projects before we do our first scoring, so we don't box ourselves in by giving the first project a 90, and it turns out to be the lamest of lame.

They provide a rubric dividing the score up into rough percentages for creativity (30%), scientific/engineering method (30%), thoroughness(15%), skill(15%), and clarity(10%).  Clarity doesn't get a lot of weight directly, but hey, if I can't understand what you did and why you did it, you're not going to get great scores in the first two heavily weighted buckets.  Some judges ignore the weights, some don't.    I basically start with about half the credit in each bucket, and run it up and down later, based on whether the finalist is better or worse than "average", where average is my take on the general level of competition at the fair (in the category!.. I'm not comparing against the "cure for all cancer" over in biochem, or the "solution for Fermat's last theorem" in Math).

There are certain things for which I will bomb the score in a bucket.  If the project is a "do the homework assignment", you don't get points for creativity.  If the project is a "fooling around in the garage with no plan" then you don't get points for method, no matter how good you are at machining. If the project is a "snow job" with lots of fancy words and no real content, well.. you can guess how well it does.

The Caucus

The caucus is the best and most powerful part of judging. We have a mini caucus a couple times during the day (before we start judging and at the lunch break), where we can write project numbers up on flip charts or a blackboard that we think are of particular interest.  That's a cue to other judges to take a look at them, or pay special attention when they interview later.  It turns out, though that the flip chart scores don't actually affect the final results very much, but they do prevent a sterling project from being overlooked, or a lame project about which you have subject matter expertise from getting more credit than it should.

The caucus starts after all the interviews are done around 5:30PM.  The fair takes all the individual scores for a judge and rank orders them and turns them into quintile scores (i.e. high, high med, med, low med, low), which has the effect of equalizing the "spreads" and easy/hard judges.  Then they sum the ranks on some basis, and produce a preliminary ranking of all the projects in the category.  A project with all high quntile winds up on top, all low quintiles winds up on the bottom.

Our first task as a panel is to decide "who is in the ribbons" and who isn't.  If you're not in the ribbons, it's not worth arguing about whether you are 50th place or 51st.   There's a definite time factor.  We have to have our placings nailed down, so the fair management can start the "best in show" judging (they work through the nite after we're done... we finish about 9PM, typically).  The fair incentivizes us to finish by providing free food and (alcoholic) drinks starting around 7:30 PM.  Spend too long in caucus, and all there is crumbs, empty beer bottles, and vacuum cleaners when you get down to the reception.

The first thing we do is look for outstanding projects that, for some reason, wound up in the bottom of the pile, and for lame projects that, for some reason, wound up in the top of the pile.  These are generically known as "polarizing projects"... they'll get a few top quintile and a few bottom quintile rankings, and not much in the middle.  If you are the lone judge who tanked a project which everyone else rated highly, you have to stand up and explain what you saw.  Sometimes, it's subject matter expertise.  Sometimes, it's a question you asked, that the others didn't.  And it works both ways.  In our category, there were maybe half a dozen projects (out of over 100) that either moved way up or way down.

Then it's a matter of negotiating the placings of the remaining projects.  In our category (each caucus runs it their own way), you basically had to identify someone to "swap" with if you wanted to move a project up or down. For each proposed move, judges who ranked the project high or low stand up and give their pitch for why they thought it was good or bad, relative to the other projects.  Hopefully, there's a judge or two have actually judged BOTH of the projects being evaluated.  Interestingly, statistical analysis shows that there's not much value in a single judge having seen both, as compared to none having seen it.

This process changed how I took notes compared to last year, though.  If you have a project that is especially good or bad, you want to be able to stand up and articulate clearly, WHY you believe it should move up or down.  If a finalist is one of those projects with mostly good and one bad, or mostly bad but one good ranking, and your judge isn't willing to stand up and talk (the judging isn't blind, you can click on the score and find out who gave it), then their score gets discounted in the discussion.

As the evening wears on, some judges leave.  They have planes to catch, or other things to do. So we make an effort to pick the top winners first, and the real negotiating comes in at the end: do you get third, fourth, or nothing. There's a fair amount of swapping across the bottom boundary, and practically speaking, it depends on the extemporaneous speaking skills of the judges involved, if they are present.

Finally, you have all the placings decided. You take a vote, call it done, and head off to the reception.

Then, at the reception, you talk to the other judges and rehash some of the decisions.  I think that the whole caucus and post caucus discussion process is incredibly valuable.  A lot of the judges are multiyear judges, and I think this is how we get to a consensus about what is good or bad, in the general sense.

Strawberries

As Sally points out, snacking off the half flat of strawberries, we live in the perfect place.  The strawberries started coming in real early (mid February) because of the warm winter.  Those first strawberries are huge (apparently, low temps mean they grow a while before ripening; later, as it gets warmer, they ripen before they get big).  Now that we're in April, it's sort of of a mix, at least for the Oxnard berries we're getting now. 

So we typically go through half a flat per week, buying them Saturday ($12/half flat today), and finishing them by Wednesday.  This afternoon, I was hulling half the half flat, so here's the picture

It rained a few weeks ago, so we have a fair number of "white shoulders" in this batch. What happens is that the fruit doesn't ripen evenly. The part that wasn't covered by the calyx (the leaves) ripens, but the cool inhibits it under the leaves, and then the warm after the rain causes the whole thing to ripen very quickly, so the color doesn't have time to develop.  They taste pretty much the same.. maybe a bit less intense, but there's a fair amount of variability anyway.  Just like wine grapes, there's a sort of balance between ripening, the sugar, the flavor, and the acid content.  When they're "ripe" you have to pick.  When it all works out right, you get that great intense flavor, sweet but with enough acid. 

There used to only be maybe a half dozen varieties (Cavendish, Sequoia, Camrosa, etc.) but now there's customized varieties for everywhere, all looking for that balance and tied to the average growing conditions. If conditions aren't average (like this year), then maybe it will be better, maybe not as good.  I will contend though, that it's rare to get bad strawberries. The worst it gets is sort of insipid sweet without much flavor.

In the picture, you can see we're starting to get the mix of sizes from the "bigger than a golf ball" down to the 1 cm hazelnut size.  Since we're buying at the roadside stand in quantity, I think we're getting a wider variety than you might see in a more upscale location.  I recall seeing "Oxnard Strawberries"  in the food hall at Harrod's at 10 pounds/pint.  At that price, you can have someone make sure they're all exactly the same size.  Or maybe it's just the place we get them.  There's someone selling strawberries on almost every major street corner this time of year. (Which is what prompts Sally's comment)

Later in the year, Oxnard gets too warm, and the berries come down from Watsonville (which is up near Monterey and Santa Cruz), but still, we can count on fresh berries well into the summer and fall.  I'm still looking for the perfect gelato di fragola (or is it fragole?) recipe. I've learned that sugar content in the mix is critical, so I bought a sugar refractometer last year, so this year, I'm ready for some serious experimentation.

Yes, I pity those folks who live where strawberries are a "special thing in July".

Andouille!

It's been a few weeks, and I've been working on the whole sausage thing some more.  I made the garlic and marjoram kielbasa out of the Ruhlman Charcuterie book.  Came out great, but I forgot to take pictures.  It was the first time I used natural casings and my new stuffing machine.  A few challenges with untangling the pieces of casing, but it worked out ok.  The natural casings are much easier to use than the collagen casings I used before.  And the hand crank stuffer is much easier than the auger on the KitchenAid mixer. (Thank you Sally, it was a wonderful Christmas present!)
I also figured out the linking in 3s thing. It's easier than you think.  Now if I can get my links even lengths, I'll be a happy charcuterist (or whatever it is en Francais).

The kielbasa came out pretty good, but it's a fairly mild sausage.. lots of garlic flavor, but beyond that, not something to knock your socks off and say "wow, that's the best sausage I've ever had".  We cooked a bunch up with cabbage and polenta & kale (sort of a hybrid Irish/Italian dinner). The rest got frozen after vacuum packing.  I need to figure out how to vacuum pack sausage without it squishing out, though. Maybe freeze the sausage first, then vacuum pack it?

So on to more flavor!  and that's hot-smoked Andouille, again from Ruhlman's book.  Hot smoked is cooked during smoking, so it can be eaten right after taking it out of the refrigerator. There's a cold smoked recipe, too, but that one needs to be cooked before eating, and I'm used to the hot smoked stuff from the store (Aidell's as it happens).  Did the grind and seasoning (it takes a bit of pink salt as a cure) and stuffed it, then put it in the smoker last night.  I used hickory, since that's all I had (I understand that pecan is what you're supposed to use).  It took a lot longer than I expected (started smoking at about 7PM, finally finished at 10:30PM.  And here's the product, sliced up for jambalaya (what else would you use Andouille for as a test?).

It tastes pretty good, but not much heat. Sort of a mildly spiced summer sausage with the dominant smoke flavor. Next time, more cayenne, I think.  I'm always a bit cautious on the pepper after trying some recipes from Bobby Flay that are blazing hot.

Each time, it gets easier. The whole stuffing process went a lot smoother, the links are generally more uniform.  I did make a small mistake, though: I linked in threes again, but it turns out you don't want them bundled like that when smoking, because the inside of the bundle doesn't get much smoke, nor does it get hot.  You want separate strands of links to hang from the hooks in the smoker. 

In the end, I pulled it out of the smoker when the internal temp got to 150 (I ran the smoker a bit hotter at the end 200 vs 180 recommended, because I wanted to go to bed).  Brought them inside, plunged them into icewater to cool it down and stop the cooking.  I cut the links apart, dried them off, and they went into the refrigerator. 

Now, what do I do with 2-3 pounds of Andouille?  I've sort of standardized on 1.5 kg batches of meat: it's a convenient amount to handle and grind and stuff.  Gosh, though, if I do 3 pounds of sausage a week, we only eat about a pound or so a week, and we'll have a freezer full of sausage before you know it.  Maybe I need to get going on the long time cure stuff.

And the pancetta emerges...

It's been a few weeks now, and it was time to pull the pancetta out of the chamber.  The humidity is way too high, and I saw the beginnings of the dreaded green and yellow mold.  So here's the picture of the nice sliced pancetta. It made a very nice spaghetti alla carbonara (Sally made fresh pasta)

And, now that humidity thing in my chamber

I was worried about too low a humidity, but it turns out that I have the opposite problem. My little refrigerator runs close to 90-95% RH all the time.  I think it's because when the compressor comes on, the moisture freezes out on the cold plate, but when it turns off, it just re-evaporates or drips off. The guys converting refrigerators are using frost free ones, which send the water out to an evaporation tray under the refrigerator.

You can see that the temperature is holding pretty well around 13C, with momentary dips
I was able to bring the humidity down by putting a tray of salt in (which is somewhat hygroscopic and gets damp), but that's not a good approach in the long run, because the salt needs replacing every few days.  Since the run time on the compressor is very, very short, maybe just bringing in outside air would do.  Some sort of tray to catch the melted ice off the "coils" would be needed.

Looking at the details of a couple cycles, it looks like the refrigerator cools down pretty quickly in about 20 minutes, but the humidity drops like a rock: the moisture probably condenses on the cold plate almost immediately (and then freezes). The warm up is much slower, more like 150 minutes.  What's interesting is that the humidity starts coming back up before the temperature reaches the low point, I think that's because we're looking at relative humidity, which varies with air temperature.  The dew point looks more consistent (since dew point is a proxy for "water content").

Bacon comes out of the smoker

A couple hours later, it looks like the bacon has reached 150F internal temp. Took longer than I expected: I was watching the temperature and it was rising and then sort of hung around at about 120-130F without moving up much.  Probably the surface moisture evaporating off the meat.

Went through about 5 or 6 bisquettes. At $6/dozen, this is about $3 of wood chips.  On the other hand, I have no idea if this is going to come out too smoky or not smoky enough. As always, there's some amount of experimentation needed.

So here's what the finished product looks like.  Next, into the refrigerator to chill it, then we'll try slicing.

New Smoker! Bacon!

I got a brand new Bradley smoker for my birthday (Thank you, Sally!) and this is its maiden voyage (if voyage is the right word here? Outing perhaps?). Here it is sitting in a temporary home out in the back yard (note the very un-winter-like Southern California weather we're having).  I think I'm going to build/buy a little shelf or table to put it on that's somewhat lower than the counter top it's on now (because I hate "reaching up" to things).  Maybe a rolling cart of some sort?  A bit of use should help converge on the right height and configuration.

After running the initial break-in empty, I had the Ruhlman recipe bacon (see previous posts) cured, trimmed and sitting in the refrigerator, so why not smoke it. Stick the probe into the bacon, clip the air temp probe to the rack, fire it up, and away we go. Mesquite wood for now (because that's the first package I opened).

Here's the bacon slabs on the racks, probed and ready.  Per Ruhlman, I'll get the smoker up to 200F and wait til the meat temp is 150F.

I'm using a Maverick ET73.  I found that it was cheaper to buy a whole new unit with two probes for $30 than to try and buy replacement probes for the thermometer I already have.  Consumer electronics pricing is certainly odd.

And just because I'm that kind of person, I'll probably look into PID control using a Arduino with a web interface.

Hanging complete?

The bellies have hung now for about 5 days, so they're ready to come out.  Over the past week, I've sort of been watching the temperature, and it's been running between 12-14C the entire time. I think I am getting some drips from the cold plate, so I'll have to fix that.

The first one to come out was the Len Poli recipe Honey bacon, which had been treated with the liquid smoke (so it doesn't need to be smoked). It was a bit weird coming out of the chamber, sort of a combination between tacky and slimy (which, to be honest, is what I'd expect).  So I rinsed it off and commenced to remove the skin.  This is a huge challenge, as it happens. You want to get the skin off, but leave hard fat behind (the white stuff between the pink meat stripes in the stuff you buy at the store).  The particular piece of belly for this one was at the end, and so it isn't a nice slab, and it had chunks of soft fat hanging on it which I trimmed off.

The physical configuration was such that after skinning and trimming, what I really had was a bunch of what looks and feels like flat canadian bacon, which was pretty lean, without much of the intervening fat you'd see in traditional "streaky bacon". The individual chunks were perhaps an inch thick. So I sliced it up (note to self, chill that stuff so it's stiffer next time, and easier to slice thin). The final product is basically a bunch of strips that are fairly thick (1/4") rather than the 1/8" or thinner I think I'd like. The photo shows all the strips on a half sheet pan.

Fried up some samples, and yes, it's definitely bacon, but the fact that it's so lean makes it hard to get a good sizzle. And the honey in the cure tends to burn.  In any case, it tastes good, not too salty (which I was worried about). And definitely a cured meat taste (nice and pink), but perhaps more canadian bacon like?  I think it will work just fine.  Here's the unsliced, ready for smoking, bacon with the Ruhlman recipe (more seasoning, cracked pepper, garlic, etc.  Almost a pancetta, I think).  This has better slicing properties.

And now for the pancetta!

This is what we're really going for. Same basic process, pull the belly out, rinse it off, skin it, and then, roll it up.  That rolling process is easy to say "remove the belly after it has hung for X days, then roll it".  But which way do you roll it? Front to back along the pig, or side to side.  Medial to lateral or vice versa? Does it even make any difference?

I had cut the belly (which was about 18" wide and 24" long) into 4 chunks, in the sideways to the pig direction, so my pancetta strips seemed to roll properly when done laterally. Lots of butcher twine, crank it tight (so that after some more curing, it sticks together when sliced into nice round slices). Ruhlman doesn't bother rolling, since usually you're going to cube the stuff before cooking, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

So here's a nicely rolled pancetta, ready for hanging back in the chamber for a few days (how long? I have no idea. maybe til the outside gets drier?)

The whole rolling thing is kind of interesting, because, after all, you're rolling something that is a composite of squishy and firm, and it tends to squeeze out the end of the roll. If you've ever made a braciole or involtini, and rolled up a long thin piece of meat, you know what it's like.  I think in the commercial market, they use longer pieces (so the weird looking end is is a smaller part of the overall salumi) or they use some sort of mold or form.  The Len Poli recipe talks about using a synthetic casing and wrapping that around, which might sort of "squish" the ends into shape. And here's a picture of some scraps I trimmed off the bellies before rolling (to make the edges squarer).

Pork Bellies hanging

Got 4 bellies hanging in the chamber.  2 bacon and 2 pancetta, from left to right above).  In each case, one recipe from Len Poli (http://lpoli.50webs.com/) and one from Michael Ruhlman (http://www.ruhlman.com/). They all sat in their 2 gallon bags with the curing salt and seasonings for a week, with periodic flipping, agitation, and rubbing.  I cut the original 13 pound belly into 4 roughly equal pieces.

We'll see how they come out.  Looking forward to it.  One of the bacons needs to be smoked, and all have to have their skin removed.  The pancetta will get rolled in a couple days.

the aging chamber for charcuterie

Now that I've got some bacon and pancetta curing in the refrigerator, I'm a few days away from pulling it from the salt, rinsing, and hanging it to finish the process.  To do this, one needs a suitable place replicating the environment of a mountain cave in northern Italy. (about 12C and 50% RH.. pretty much the same as storing and aging wine.. there's a reason that wine and sausage are found in the same places in the world) Short of moving to the Bay Area and digging a hole, something artificial is needed.

It seems that the popular scheme is to modify a refrigerator. One needs to keep it warmer than the normal refrigerator and one needs to deal with the humidity.  My scheme is to hook up an external temperature controller to a 4 cu ft "dorm" refrigerator I have (and pictured below), and then control humidity with a controller that controls the wet bulb temperature. Most of the writeups I've seen on the web use a humidistat and humidity sensor. And there's all this discussion about calibrating your humidistat. Heck, I've already got water in the thing AND I've got temperature sensors, so all I need to do is set a controller up to control wet bulb temp.  And somehow, I don't think this is one of those "must be controlled to 0.01%" applications.  The key is probably making the inertia of the system large (so putting stuff in that can absorb and release moisture slowly is probably the key.  Maybe rocks or bricks?)

My trusty Sanyo refrigerator, having been originally
used as a water chiller for cooling wine.

What temp?  At 55F, 50% RH is a wet bulb of about 46 degrees.  Down to 44 and you're at 40%, up to 48 and you're at 60%. Seems pretty straightforward.  Water reservoir, small pump to circulate/spray the water, and sensor that gets wet.

There should also be a fan to circulate the air in the box. That's easy, I've got boxes of old muffin fans around.

Some issues that I have to figure out:
1) short cycling the compressor is bad. I need to make sure the temperature controller doesn't cycle too short. I think with enough thermal mass on the freezer "coils" (really a plate) that will be ok.
2) Defrosting - Humid air, cold freezer coils. I think frost is inevitable.  Maybe a timer that turns it off for a couple hours a week? (that's basically what auto defrost refrigerators do).  Maybe a heater on the freezer plate?  And then I have to figure out how to keep the water that drips off the freezer from hitting the salumi, etc. hanging under it.

Psychometry
Here's my Psychometric table, which I manually read off a chart and transcribed at the stunning precision of 1 degree F. (I'll have to convert to C eventually)
dry bulb  RH  wet bulb
50    40    40
55    40    44
60    40    48
65    40    52
70    40    56

50    50    42
55    50    46
60    50    50
65    50    54
70    50    58

50    60    44
55    60    48
60    60    52
65    60    56
70    60    61

Grinding pig for sausage

Just some photos of grinding pork cushion meat up for sausage.  It's pretty straightforward using the KitchenAid grinder. As the cookbooks say, keeping things cold is important, so we start with chilling the grinder down before attaching it to the mixer.

And, then, you have your almost frozen meat.  I get the big hunk o'pig from the store (10-25 lbs in a package, cushion meat is around 10-12 lbs) and portion it into 2-2 1/2 batches, cut into 2 inch cubes then freeze it.  When I'm ready to grind, I thaw the batch out, partially, then cut it into 3/4-1 inch chunks (about the right size to drop down the throat of the grinder).

This the bag of frozen cushion meat before grinding, partly thawed.

There is no question that the whole "partially frozen" thing makes life much easier.  Not only is it easy to cube the meat, but it keeps the grinder cold.  Cold grinder means fat doesn't melt, which makes for much better sausage.  Note that this is pretty lean meat here because I've trimmed the fat and am going to grind it separately.

Keeping things cold while grinding is important, so the bowl catching the ground meat sits in a bowl of ice and water.

 

Hmm. Have to figure out how to rotate images

Here's what it looks like coming out of the coarse plate and in the bowl.

Finally, you get to the end, and there's this annoying sort of plug of meat at the end when you pull the auger out. You can run some paper towel down the grinder to push this out, but, on the other hand, it's not all that much.
So what is this "cushion meat"?  I wasn't up for buying a whole package of shoulder at Smart & Final (about 25 lbs, which is actually two shoulders), so I got the cushion which is about 9-10 lbs.  Turns out it's a leaner cut lower down on the front leg than the shoulder (I guess, it's the bicep, rather than the deltoid).  Often it's used for pulled pork and such, or cut into "ham steaks", even though it's nowhere near the back of the pig, where ham comes from.  In any case, it makes fine sausage, but you have to get some fat to mix with it, and that's a bit of a chore.  All the sausage recipes (e.g. Alton Brown) talk about using "fat back", but no supermarket around here seems to have fat back.  Fat backis the fat layer on the back of the pig, under the skin, above the loin/ribs, and is a nice hard fat which makes good sausage.  Think of the fat layer in good bacon or on a steak: it's firm and dense, and grinds well without turning into mush.

Sometimes you can get scraps of fat at the supermarket that they've trimmed off the pork they've packaged, but it's an iffy thing. Somehow, paying $3/lb for scraps of fat to mix with your $1.50/lb lean meat seems weird.  I found that I can get pig back (with skin on..) at a local meat market that does Mexican style cuts, but you have to strip the skin and trim the meat off.  It's what they make chicharrones from. I have no idea what the cut is actually called. 

Breaking down a pork loin

So we needed some boneless pork chops (which we cook all the time for dinner).  Rather than buy them already neatly sliced and in a tray, we've started buying a whole loin at Costco and slicing it up.  Pork.. the new inexpensive protein (yeah.. $2.19/lb for a 9 pound loin. )  Here's a picture of our brand new loin:

There's a helpful little diagram on the back of the loin to tell you how to slice it, but basically you chop off the head and tail to make roasts, and slice the middle to make chops.  Last time I did this, I made some chops and then made 1.5-2 pound roasts, because that's a convenient size.  This time, I only did one roast, I basically turned the rest into roughly 4 oz chops (that being a convenient size.. 1 per person, or maybe 1/2 per person if you split them and make palliards).

This is the end I want to make the roast of, because it has the two muscles in it, the darker muscle having more flavor, in theory. So I cut off about 2.5 lbs

Then it's just a matter of slicing off 4 ounce portions.  My slices are about 3/4" thick and weigh 4 to 4 1/2 ounces.  A good guide is the width of your finger, or the handle of the knife.  You can check it with a scale periodically, but once you get the rhythm going, you can zap off a dozen or so without much variation.

The large division on the scale is 1", but the camera angle is non-optimum.  In any case, maybe 2cm thick?

And, see.. right on 4 oz.  Here's a picture of the entire loin, all broken down. There's a pile of chops and then the roast, and some other ends of the loin, which I leave separate, because maybe I'll make Chile Verde or something needing chunks of pork.  The fat you see in the upper left isn't all that thick.  This is a pretty lean piece of meat (which some folks think is a disadvantage in modern pork, I think I agree). The picture of the chop above shows a typical fat layer. 

Finally, I take all those chops and vacuum seal them 3 at a time (about 12 ounces) as a meal's worth.  I suppose I could sous vide them as is, but for now, it's thaw and cook in whatever.  I kind of like Jacque Pepin's palliard recipe: split them, smash them thinner, salt pepper and thyme, then into a hot frying pan for about 40 seconds/side, hold the palliards, make a pan sauce, done...