Shiny Metal Good Mask for Cluelessness

I made a lot of progress on the pig motor today.

I decided not to use welds for all of the fabricating. I had a steel plate scrap I planned to use as the mount, and it turned out it had some holes in perfect locations for bolts, so I decided to bolt it to the steel-tubing upright that will hold it up. It also has a couple of curves that make it fit snugly against the tubing, and they should add rigidity.

I took a piece of square tubing Val Prieto gave me, and I cut it to length using the grinder. I have faster cutting tools, but the grinder was handy, and it’s a little more artistic. Then I put a wire brush on the grinder and cleaned the metal. Wire brushes on drills and drill presses are pathetic compared to the ones that fit on grinders. Take my word for it. The only problem is that they throw bits of sharp wire all over the place, and they can actually fly in curved paths, so you really need a face shield AND goggles.

I opened up the holes in the plate. They were too small for 5/16″ bolts. This was not fun. Holes in sheet metal don’t like being opened up with drills. My drills kept catching. Surprisingly, they also caught when I drilled a fresh hole. I have no idea why. I ran the drill slowly and used pipe threading oil.

I used the drill press and my snazzy South Bend vise to drill holes in the tubing, and then I mated the tubing and plate, and it was beautiful.

I realized I needed reamers. That’s what you use to open existing holes and make them round. I’m trying to find out what kind to get.

Incidentally, I found out there’s an amazing tool called a bridge reamer. You’ll love this. If you’re doing what I did tonight–drilling a bunch of holes that have to line up and take bolts–a bridge reamer is what you need. Apparently it takes your crappy, misaligned holes and makes them pretty and makes them line up. I think. Anyway, that’s what the Enco catalog implies. I need a couple of these things. If they work as advertised, they would be incredbly useful. Making holes line up is not easy.

I only put one hole in the plate. I installed the motor and tightened the nut, just to see how it would look. I can’t put the other holes in until the bearing is installed. The bearing will tell me where the holes have to be. If I do it now, I could be off by an eighth of an inch, and then I’d have to commit ritual suicide.

Here are some bad phone photos.

The bearing will rest on a horizontal piece of square tubing perpendicular to the motor shaft. The tubing will be welded to the side of the upright tubing.

You can’t see it, but there’s a lot of room to the right of the motor. I’m going to get a light switch and put it there, in a nice box. That will allow me to turn the motor on and off.

I’m working on the charcoal pan. I found aluminum sheets today for about $14 each. They’re only 24″ by 36″, so I may have to use two. I would prefer this to galvanized. They won’t rust. I keep reading that aluminum will take the heat of barbecue charcoal. I hope that’s right. I can do a test tomorrow with a small piece of aluminum.

The motor shaft is a little loose in the 1/2″ hole in the hub I made. On top of that, it has a key instead of a flat spot. That means I have to make a keyway. I plan to do that by sticking a ground tool in my lathe tool post and pulling it in and out of the hub. But I think I need to make a new hub, because the looseness will be a problem. Unless the bearing allows some movement (search me; I haven’t seen it yet), I think any eccentricity in the pole’s fit will cause problems when the motor operates in its rigid mounting. If there is play in the bearings, I’m fine as I am.

I love the way that polished steel looks. I want to paint it, but that’s pointless because the burro will gouge it up. I think I may season it like cast iron. I’ll throw it in the oven with oil on it. It will look good, and it won’t scratch like paint.

The steel plate has to be shaped a little, because the bottom edge is rough from plasma cutting. I think I’ll use the bench grinder. Then I’ll clean it up and blast it with truck bed paint, which should last forever.

The other end of the apparatus will be a joke. A bearing, a T-shaped piece of metal, and some bolts.

It looks like this is going to work, and when it’s done, the whole thing will fit in a very small space. The burros go back to Val until the next pig event.

Stay tuned for more updates.

More

This is really sad. Someone just suggested I use step drills for enlarging holes. He’s absolutely right. And I already have them! I can’t believe I didn’t think to use them.

Techno-Hog Rumbling to Life

The pig project is going to take a big leap today, assuming the motor arrives. I’m going to mount it on the supports. The bearings aren’t here yet, so I can’t machine the spit ends to fit them.

I don’t have a link to the motor I bought. I think Grainger discontinued it. But I can show you one just like it, except for the speed. Imagine this motor, running at 6 RPM with 250 inch-pounds of torque.

CLICK TO SEE MOTOR.

Naturally, I did not spend that much. Knock 80% off that figure.

I didn’t want the angled shaft, but now that it’s on the way, I think it’s the best choice. It’s easy to build a platform parallel to the spit support, which is what an angled shaft requires. A straight shaft means a platform which is perpendicular to the support, and that means welding.

I have to figure out what to do for a charcoal pan. I’m thinking I may just get a cheap galvanized sheet and bend the sides up. I know some people moan about zinc fumes being released, but Val Prieto uses galvanized, and so far, nobody important has died. I’ve also noticed that Lodge makes a chimney starter from galvanized, and it’s also common in barbecue stuff in England.

I would be perfectly happy to use bare steel, but it’s not like it falls from trees.

I’m a little nervous about achieving success. I’m researching to make sure it’s okay to roast a pig without an enclosure. I can recall three rotisserie pigs cooked at Mancamp. One was turned by hand, and it sat in a makeshift oven built from stacked cinderblocks. The oven had plywood on top to hold in heat. The advantage there was that in addition to heat from below, the pig got a nice 200-degree sauna. The other two pigs were not enclosed to any great extent.

I guess I’m worried about nothing. The Mancamp pigs were fine. Here’s a video of two Filipina ladies roasting a pig, and you can see it’s out in the open. If I had two ladies like that, I wouldn’t need a motor.

I had concerns about the spit speed, but I’ve learned that some rotisseries turn at much higher rates.

The new lathe will be here on Monday. I’m tooling up. I’m a little annoyed, because I thought I picked the best one, and I just found out it may lack a nice feature. In the past, small Asian lathes had metric screws on the compounds and crossfeeds, and they were marked with inaccurate imperial graduations. I believe the idea is that they pretended one inch is 25 millimeters, whereas it’s actually 25.4. So I guess you get a movement of 25 millimeters when you want one inch. Or maybe I have it backward. Anyway, Micromark claims it has the only lathes with “true inch” wheels and screws.

It shouldn’t matter much, since the final dimensioning is never done with wheels, but it’s irritating.

I don’t know if it’s possible to make a really accurate screw on my own lathe. I guess it should be, but I have a feeling it’s not easy to make one that works easily but doesn’t have tons of backlash.

I better get myself to the store. I have to make sure I have a pig by next weekend. I still haven’t decided what to put in it.

This should be a good time. It will be an interesting mix of Christians and highly tolerant backsliders. I think we’ll get along, as long as the food is okay.

Sometimes it Seems That Way

What a day I’m having.

I made a second aluminum hub for my pig roasting spit. It’s nicer than the first one. I had the cutting tools too high on the first shot, so I got chatter. Now the finish is very good, even though I’m using carbide. I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m too lazy to look things up and do it right, so I learn a lot from experience.

I threaded the bolt holes on the hub, but I fouled the threads on two of the bolts. I didn’t know that aluminum swarf could become one with a steel bolt, but apparently this is a hazard of threading. It must be, since it just happened.

I knew aluminum had a very low melting point compared to stainless, so I tried to fix the bolts by heating them with a plumber’s torch. I got one of them red hot and then tried to put a nut on it. I gave up. That stuff is on there for the duration. But after I did this, I picked up the nut with my bare hand. I didn’t realize how much heat had gone into it.

I felt that I had burned myself on the pad of my index finger. I hate that. Such a useful finger. It had that flat, shiny look burned skin gets, and it hurt pretty bad. But I remembered something the Holy Spirit told me a while back. I was lying in bed, and I kept hearing the words, “You are protected” in my head.

What the heck, right? God has instantly healed me of two kidney stones while or shortly after praying, and a few weeks back when I started getting a cold, he took it away in a couple of hours. My sister is still alive (and in total remission), a year and a half after being diagnosed with extensive small-cell lung cancer; I prayed a great deal about that. I decided to pray about my finger. I “reminded” God of what he had told me. And I started thanking him. The finger still felt like it was in the process of blistering.

Guess what? My finger is fine. It has been around half an hour. I have no pain at all. I can use the finger. I can put pressure on it. The skin doesn’t look flat and shiny any more. I went and looked at it in the light, because I was so amazed. It looks like any finger that has been working with tools all day.

I just don’t know what to say. I told God I would tell people about it. You have to do that. I’ve heard preachers say you should make a monetary sacrifice when God does something for you. Maybe that’s true; I tend to discount it these days. But you definitely, DEFINITELY have to tell people.

Now you’ve been told.

Here’s something funny. I went to a machining forum and mentioned the pig work I’m doing, and several people expressed concern about the galvanized pole I’m using. I had to reassure them. I’ve done this a bunch of times, and Val even has a big charcoal pan made from galvanized. It doesn’t cause any problems.

The funny thing is that Og dropped by the blog the other day, when I wrote about lathes. Og and I are both hard-headed. Well, he’s persistent and determined. I’M hard-headed. Anyway, we had a big fuss over the hazards of backyard galvanized pig tools a few years back, and here I am discussing them right when he happens to be dropping by.

I guess zinc is like religion and politics. One of those things best not discussed socially.

Buy This Immediately

This is genius. I’m about to make pizza for lunch, but I’m frustrated with opening #10 cans of commercial sauce and then having to deal with the excess. It occurred to me that there ought to be some kind of dispenser made for this purpose.

Guess what? There IS. Check it out at this link.

Apparently, you open the can, attach that thing, and pump your sauce out like ketchup. That ought to isolate the sauce from mold and stuff for quite some time while the can is in the fridge.

I may have to get one.

The Ultimate Lunchmeat

I’m so glad I made a boneless turkey stuffed with a boneless chicken this year. I just made a sandwich from it, and the work is still paying off. The turkey slices like a loaf of bologna, super easy. The meat is tender and juicy; much better than a roasted turkey, which gets dry when you put it in the fridge. The stuffing is still in there, and it comes out with every slice. It fills the sandwich with flavor.

I don’t know why it’s so tender and juicy. I suppose gravity draws the juice down out of the breast of a leftover turkey that still has bones in it, but this thing was superior even when it was hot.

MAN, this was a good idea. Everyone should do it this way.

I highly recommend the Forschner bird’s beak paring knife I used. I paid five bucks. It’s much better than an expensive Japanese job, it takes a new edge in five seconds, and nobody cares if you break it. I also used a cut-resistant glove on my left hand. Wonderful.

Loaf of Joy

I feel like I swallowed a cannonball.

the turducken came out great. It turns out the “correct” term for a turducken with no duck is “turken.” Whatever.

I delegated some of the shopping this year, so I ended up with two birds that were roughly 13 and 7 pounds, if memory serves. Anyway, the chicken was on the large side for this application. For this reason, I was not able to cram all the andouille stuffing into the turkey, and I had to roast half of it separately. Made no difference, but it shows you have to put thought into it.

I used lump crabmeat in the chicken stuffing. I figured it was about the same as lump meat, in smaller pieces. I don’t know a whole lot about crab meat. The only crabs I pay any attention to are stone crabs, and they all look and taste the same. Now that I think about it, I suspect that lump crabmeat is whiter and tastier. If so, it would be a better choice.

Sewing this thing together was a challenge. They always tear up the lower opening when they slaughter turkeys, so you have to piece it back together. Then I had problems because the skin barely went around the chicken and stuff. It worked out okay, however. I think the key is to sew a bird up halfway and then stuff it.

I made sure I stuffed the legs and wings this time. That’s one of the great things about boned turkeys. More places for stuffing.

I cut the wing ends off, and I boned the whole bird. I know that’s against the rules, but it makes for a better feed.

I ended up with an object resembling a dwarf. It’s not photogenic. It looked better than the photo.

It was extremely tender. I was amazed. And the juice poured out of it. Too much, maybe.

I roasted it, covered, at 275. After about five hours, I realized I was going to be dining at midnight, so I cranked it up to 350. I took the foil off in the last hour. It browned up nicely. I pulled it when the internal temperature hit 165.

These things take a thousand years to cook. I put mine in the oven at 10:15, and I ate at 5 p.m. I was too lazy to smoke it. That can take half a day.

Here’s what I take away from this. Don’t cook turducken. Seriously. Instead, make deboned turkeys stuffed with really good dressing. The chicken doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not as big an asset as you would think, and it runs up the cooking time. Ducks are greasy and gamy, so they don’t improve things.

For Christmas, I’m thinking I’ll do a boneless turkey with andouille sausage. I’ll bet a goose would be better. I’ve never had goose. I just have a hunch. There has to be a reason why buying a goose is more expensive than adopting a child.

If you insist on using more than one bird, make the second one very small. No more than one-third the weight of the outer bird. I should have looked for one under 5 pounds.

I’m pretty sure I ate some dental floss. I didn’t detect any, but I used about twenty feet sewing up the bird, and I didn’t see any left over when I ate.

Pleasure’s Slave

I must have been nuts when I decided to make a turducken.

I’m cooking for two people. TWO. My father and me. That’s it. I should have thrown a turkey loaf in the microwave and been done with it. But I’m making two pies, a turducken, beans, cranberry relish, cranberry sauce, oyster dressing. cornbread dressing with andouille, bread dressing with crabmeat, mashed potatoes, and yams. If that doesn’t seem like a lot, try doing it yourself.

I had to make three pones of cornbread, which made it necessary to nuke a whole lot of bacon. That made Marv happy. He and Maynard helped dispose of the excess meat.

I deboned two birds for my abridged turducken. That was fun. Each one took at least half an hour. I still haven’t put them together. I have to get up, turn the bread and cornbread into stuffing, and then sew the whole mess up. I hope I have it roasted by ten p.m.

My dad has to have the stuff his mother made, so I am stuck with the extra dish of oyster dressing. That stuff reeks like you would not believe. He swears it’s wonderful. I wouldn’t touch it with my shoe.

He also insists on cranberry sauce, which is totally inferior to relish. I don’t have a relish recipe. I grind up cranberries, an orange, and pecans. I add Grand Marnier, sugar, and raspberry or cherry gelatin. BAM. I’m done. It’s always excellent. It’s hard to screw up fruit and Jell-O.

I haven’t even looked at the tubers yet. I plan to cheat and use the microwave. I don’t think it really matters.

A few years back, I ran out of dry ginger, so I used sushi ginger in a pumpkin pie. I thought it was great, so I do it every year now. But this year I grabbed the wrong Carnation can in the store, so I found I had to come up with a substitute for evaporated milk. Either that or fight a “2012”-style frenzy at the store. I mixed condensed milk, cream, and half and half. Pretty close. Who cares? Pumpkin pie is never going to be exciting.

I stuck Jack Daniel’s in the pecan pie again. I can’t figure out how such a disgusting beverage turned out to be such a magnificent cooking ingredient, but that’s how it is.

I’m wondering if the Karo pies I’ve always eaten are a substitute for something better. Corn syrup is the worst form of sugar imaginable, so you would think it came into use as a replacement for something more expensive. How about sorghum? I’ll bet that would be fantastic. I’ll have to try it some day.

Have a great Thanksgiving. This might be the last one before the Obama Depression, so live it up. If you’re not in line with God’s blessings, this would be a great time to get your game face on and start living in power.

Food Orgy Preparation Begins

Thanksgiving is almost here.

I’m trying to rein myself in. I tend to make too much food. It will be me and my dad again. Maybe my sister.

The logical thing to do is to fix a small turkey. Unfortunately, I have the turducken bug. I was making a list today, and I started out with one bird on it, and then a second one sort of jumped onto the list without warning.

If I can’t make myself take it off, I’m going to end up with a two-bird entree. We can’t eat three, and I’m not crazy enough to bone three birds, so I’m thinking a 10-12 pound turkey and a fryer inside it. I’ll put cornbread dressing in the turkey, and I’ll put white bread dressing with crabmeat (sauteed in Marsala) in the chicken.

One great thing about turducken is that it has no bones, apart from ornamental ones you may leave in the outermost bird.I should probably remove those, too, though. I like a nice bird loaf you can slice. The good thing about a boneless bird is that you don’t end up with a dried-out bird skeleton in the fridge, with little bits of stubborn meat stuck on it.

I tell Marv his real name is Birdloaf.

Mike is telling me to use the Popeil Showtime Oven. It’s tempting. On the other hand, a turducken is not very rigid, and I’m not sure how well it would stand up to being turned on a rotisserie.

Someone was trying to sell me on turkey frying today. I’ve only had one fried turkey, and it was hard and rubbery. My roasted turkeys are moist and tender. I bake them at 175 degrees so they don’t turn into cement.

I’m thinking one pecan pie, one pumpkin pie, pole beans with some type of pork, yams, mashed potatoes, and conceivably some sourdough. Also cranberry sauce and cranberry relish. I’m not a fan of cranberry sauce, but my dad has to have the same exact thing he ate when he was a kid. We’ll also have to have a horrifying dish of oyster dressing. I don’t even like to be in the room with that stuff. I don’t know how to make it, so I cram oysters into regular dressing and bake it. No complaints yet.

This is going to be really good. It’s nice to have a gift for cooking, even if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.

Sausage is Terrifying

I’m learning more about sausage.

Yesterday, I did something really stupid. I researched chorizos, to find out what was in them. Oh, man. If only I could turn back time.

Hog spit. That’s what’s in chorizos. Hog salivary glands and lymph nodes. It may be a while before I can eat chorizos again.

It’s a shame, because they’re really tasty. You can use them to spice up all sorts of dishes.

I realize animal parts DO things while they’re in the animal, so they may come into contact with gross stuff. I’m cool with sausage casings, for example, even though they’re part of the poo system. The poo doesn’t turn into real poo until it gets to the large intestine, so I figure casings made from the small intestine are okay. And I’ll eat the skin off a lechon, even though it’s not that clean when the pig arrives at the slaughterhouse. But hog spit…that’s hard to take. It’s like kidneys: I will not eat meat flavored by urine, no matter how good it tastes. You have to draw the line somewhere.

I won’t eat private parts if I can help it. It’s creepy and somehow intimate in a really inappropriate way. And the thought of eating brains is pretty awful.

As I read up on chorizos, I learned that the least revolting ones are Spanish. Maybe I’ll start looking for them. Palacios is a brand that came up a lot while I was Googling. I’m sure they sell them here. This is Miami, after all.

I might have to start making my own, but I would need a good source of fat. I cheat with lard, but I think chunks would be better.

Andouille is another idea. I like Aidell’s, but it would be nice to make my own and get some control over the flavor. The only other brand I’ve found here is grey and tastes like it has sand in it.

I don’t really understand why such disgusting meat goes into commercial sausage. I realize it’s the traditional way to get rid of things like penises, sinus meat, and pig breasts, but these days better cuts are not that expensive. You can sell the truly horrifying parts for pet food and still charge a reasonable price for sausage. Good pork runs two dollars a pound or less. I can spring for that, if it means eating fewer uteruses and bladders.

Chorizos have to be smoked. That will be a pain, I guess. But food is important.

Get yourself a grinder and a vacuum sealer. You won’t regret it.

Easy & Full of Life-Giving Grease

I took on a new challenge today. Bratwurst.

This is a wonderful sausage; I figured it was worth it to make my own. Today on the way home from church I picked up some cheap veal and pork, plus sage and a six-pack of amazing Dogfish Head Raison d’Etre beer. I hate to say it, but that beer is as good as my own brew.

Turned out I did not need sage. I found a bunch of recipes on the web, and here is what I ended up doing:

INGREDIENTS

5 pounds veal and pork, mixed
20 g salt
42 g sugar
1/2 a nutmeg or nut or meg or whatever it’s called
3 g celery salt
4 g black pepper
6 g ground coriander
3 g dry marjoram (this is like half a small bottle)
2 teaspoons garlic powder
3/4 cup lard
1/4 cup butter

Sorry for the weird units. I’m in a hurry.

I ground it all up and fried test pieces in the microwave until I was satisfied. I left the coriander out, so I mixed it into one of my one-pound loaves, tested it, and found it really mattered, so I broke up all the loaves and mixed it in.

The garlic should be fresh, but this is kind of an offhand effort, so I grabbed powdered garlic on impulse. I think you should use maybe 9 pressed cloves.

I had to grind the nutmeg in a coffee grinder. It would have taken two years with a grater.

It was too lean at first, hence the delightful El Cochinito lard and the butter. ALWAYS sneak butter into a recipe if you can get away with it. ALWAYS.

This is a good starting point for your own efforts. You can add all sorts of stuff to bratwurst. Real German recipes include stuff like ginger and mace. There are different varieties. Naturally, I’m thinking about powdered homegrown cayennes, and how about addiing some Champagne to the mix?

I am not a great fan of sausage casings. I don’t see the point, really. They don’t hurt anything, but they certainly don’t help, so I don’t go out of my way to get them.

I’m going to fry a big wad of this, and I’m going to serve it with sauteed onions on a toasted buttered baguetty sort of roll, with Mister Mustard, my all-time favorite. It will be amazing.

This beer is very nice. I highly recommend it. Pretty strong, however. I am using the backspace key quite a bit right now.

You can also mix bread and eggs into bratwurst.

Maybe Randy from Cold Fury will give this a shot and tell us what happens.

There are three reasons I’m keen on making sausage. 1) It’s cheap. 2) You can do anything you want to the recipe. 3) Sausage is best when you, yourself, can choose nice, fresh meat. I usually like meat that’s nearly rotten, but for sausage, super-fresh seems to be the way to go, and if you make it yourself, you can also avoid boar taint, which is the kiss of sausage death.

Enjoy.

More

This was really good, but now that I’ve eaten it, I think a softer bread might be a smart idea. A huge sandwich with a hard crust can scrape your mouth up pretty good.

I threw a 10″-long mass of sausage into a cast iron skillet and fried it in butter, with piles of onions in there with it. Toward the end, I hit the onions with salt, paprika, and pepper. I think the right way to do this involves a bigger skillet, because you really need to be able to dedicate 2/3 of the pan to onions. Minimum.

The sausage was tasty and full of excellent fat. Very nice. I didn’t miss the casings at all.

Opium is for Pansies

Here’s one of the things that amazes me about cooking: if you get a recipe right, you can turn something you don’t particularly like into a ticket to ecstasy.

This happened to me over and over while I was writing my cookbook. For example, I decided to make BBQ beans. I like BBQ beans fairly well, but it’s not a favorite dish, and I’m always keenly aware of the risk that I will end up lying awake at 3 in the morning, watching the sheets flap every thirty seconds. When I made my first mess of beans, in a 2-quart dish, I ended up eating the whole batch. I could not stop. They weren’t just good; they had a marvelous complexity, like a nice Cuban cigar. First you get the obvious beany taste. Then the bacon hits you. Then the hot mustard starts drifting up into your sinuses. After that, the black pepper settles in the back of your throat, and you relive the pleasure of eating the beans, over and over.

I made these things for friends, and the same thing happened. They’d tell someone to try them, and that person would say, “I don’t really care for them.” And the friend would say, “No, TRY them.”

I always knew I was finished with research when I had to throw food away to keep from eating it. If it’s that good, the recipe is a success.

I’m thinking about this because I made chili today.

I’ve always liked chili, but it has never been a top-ten food for me. I probably eat it twice a year. The chili they serve in restaurants is no good, and the canned stuff is like dog food. But I have my own recipe now, and I keep adjusting it to make it better.

Today I tried a new ingredient: black cardamom. I opened a pod, ground the seeds, and dumped them into the pot. Oh, boy. Talk about good. These little seeds react beautifully with anything containing tomatoes or red peppers. I can’t explain it. The taste is smoky, peppery, aromatic…there is nothing else like it except green cardamom. Which isn’t REALLY like it.

I hate to say this, but the TV show Cheers is one reason I did this. There was an episode in which Sam Malone tried to beat the bloody Marys made at Gary’s Old Towne Tavern, and he found out the secret ingredient was black cardamom. I very much doubt the writers really knew what black cardamom tasted like, but once I had some on hand, I had to make a virgin Mary and give it a try. It was excellent. My chili has tomatoes in it, so the next move was obvious. I also use this spice in wing sauce. It has extraordinary potential.

I finished my second bowl of chili fifteen minutes ago, and I’m still riding the wave. It’s like a drug.

I can’t move.

I am starting to think I’m better at cooking than anything else I do. But I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not a great business tool. Restaurants run on marketing, not great food. And they have low profit margins, and they’re a ton of work.

I can’t use this gift purely to benefit myself, because if I do, I will explode next month. Most days I eat something really pathetic–like a small serving of oatmeal–for breakfast, and for lunch I have something equally sad, like some kind of fried meat and two boring vegetables. I usually have a couple of good meals every week, but I can’t eat much more than that. I make one pizza a week. That, I cannot forgo.

I did something horrible last week. I made pineapple upside-down cake with banana nut bread instead of crappy yellow cake, and I added Barbancourt rum to the sauce. Then I had Bluebell banana pudding ice cream on the side. I nearly fainted from pleasure. I had to throw out maybe five pounds of food, just to be safe from it. I think a milder rum like Flor de Cana might have been a better choice, but anyway, it was a true shock and awe experience. Very rich, which is a bad thing, when it’s so good you can’t quit eating.

A fabulously rich person who has made peace with his or her fear of death should hire me as a personal chef. I should send Michael Moore an email.

Some people have criticized my chili. It’s one of those foods that attract fanatics and zealots, so if you do anything remotely creative, they fill their diapers and start screeching. Offhand, I can think of three things the Puritans hate: beans, ground meat, and tomatoes. So naturally, I named my chili “Totally Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Chili,” and I included tomatoes, ketchup, two kinds of ground meat, and kidney beans. You know, I really don’t care what’s in “real” chili. This stuff rocks my world, and I’m not alone. The Chili SS are so blind, there is no possibility they could allow themselves to enjoy my chili, so I write them off. They’re like the “brew to style” homebrewers who spit up blood if you can’t tell them which creaky, dusty, boring German beer you’re slavishly imitating. Some people make themselves impossible to please.

I think I’m coming down now. At least I won’t have the munchies.

Costco Jones Gets Worse

This is an exciting day. I’m about to make sausage. Using ELECTRICITY.

A couple of years ago, I bought a hand-cranked grinder from Northern Tool. It works, but you would be surprised how hard it is to use. I made twenty pounds of phenomenal sausage, but then I put the machine away.

Since then I’ve gotten myself a Bosch Universal Plus mixer. I got one because I had been using one at church, for pizza. If you make bread–in LARGE amounts–this is probably the greatest machine in the universe for less than a thousand dollars. You can make dough for 14 pizzas at once, which is beyond amazing. In a Hobart Kitchenaid, you might be able to make three. In the biggest Cuisinart made, the number is six, if memory serves. I routinely made dough for nine pies at once in the Bosch. I’m talking about nine pounds of dough.

The mixer is not that great for other things. For example, if you use it to make cheesecake, you have to make sure the batter is very warm and loose, or else a lot of it will get stuck to the bowl and fail to mix. Live and learn, I guess. But it’s a versatile machine and a real workhorse. You can even use it to make pasta and berry juice.

I broke down and got the hideously expensive grinder for it. I could have gotten a stand-alone grinder for the same money, but the Bosch has stainless extruder plates (if that’s what they’re called), and it serves as the basis for other attachments, and it will take up less room. Could be a bad decision; we’ll see.

When I started making sausage, I originally intended to can it, but I froze it in vacuum bags instead. I can’t recall why. It may be because I learned that canned sausage can’t have sage in it.

I was hoping to duplicate the sausage my grandmother used to can. This is a real Appalachian treasure. You make sausage balls and can them in hot lard which is full of sausage flavoring. Best breakfast sausage I ever ate. The stuff I make is about as good, but slightly different.

I had a hard time finding fat. If you use lean pork, the sausage will toughen up like rubber in the skillet. I solved this once by adding pure lard, but you can also grind bacon up in the sausage. It’s very good.

Today I’ll be using Costco boneless shoulder. I can’t believe they sell this stuff. It’s a dream come true. It’s $1.89 a pound, and it’s a lot fattier and tastier than loin, so I’m pretty excited. I have a frozen cured jowl (jowl bacon) I may throw in there just to get rid of it.

It’s irritating that we have come to hate pork fat so much. It’s a wonderful part of good food, and the Nazis have made it hard to find.

I’m about to pop the shoulder open. I hope I don’t smell anything “off.” If I do, it means boar taint, and I’ll have to brine the meat with baking soda to get rid of it. I’ll post the recipe:

INGREDIENTS

10 lbs. pork (shoot for 40% fat)
3/8 cup brown sugar
3 tsp. pepper
2 tsp. cayenne
2 tbsp. sage
1/4 cup salt
1 tbsp. paprika

I’ll be using apple juice concentrate instead of sugar. I’ll need about half a cup. I found that when you substitute apple juice concentrate for sugar, you have to add about 25%. OOH! I have some snooty Hungarian paprika from Penzey’s! Guess I’ll be using THAT today.

I ought to make some Italian sausage for pizza. Mike suggested it. I am too lazy to use casings. I don’t think that would matter. Truthfully, they tend to detract from the sausage-eating experience, and they shink and cause problems when cooked.

I wonder if I could make chorizo. I’m pretty sure most chorizos are made from things like belly buttons and tonsils. I know how Hispanic businesses like to save money. Surely real meat would be better.

This Sunday my church is doing a play. I got buttonholed on the way out last week, so now I have to make food for the cast. I’m planning to make a pineapple upside-down cake using banana nut bread batter. This is really good. When people found out about it, they got on me to make a spare cake, so now I’m making the cast cake plus a stealth cake.

Pineapple upside-down cake is one of earth’s greatest foods. I don’t know why we don’t make it more often. I’m seriously considering making some for myself and serving it hot, with rum raisin ice cream. That would be sick. Also wondering if it’s a good idea to add rum to the cake. Surely it would be. It’s like a pina colada, and those go with rum.

I have like 12 pounds of frozen bananas to get rid of, and this is a great way to do it.

I’ll post sausage photos if it’s not too much work.

You should try this yourself. Play with the ingredients. Add garlic or whatever. Start with one pound, get the recipe right, and go to town. If you start with what I’ve written, you won’t make anything that isn’t fit to eat unless you go completely nuts. Give it a shot. You might change the world.

More

This is stupendous. This thing ran through 10 pounds of pork shoulder and 1 pound of bacon in about 15 minutes. Most of the time, I was cutting the meat so it would fit in the hole. If it had been pre-sliced, I think I could have done two pounds a minute with ease.

The machine rocked a little. I think I failed to tighten something. But it worked. Here is the meat after I mixed in the seasonings.

I used chipotle instead of cayenne. I had a couple of chipotles lying around, so I ran them through the coffee grinder. It seems like chipotle is milder than cayenne. I used about three tablespoons. I added an extra teaspoon of sage and a second tablespoon of paprika. I used half a cup of apple juice concentrate.

It smells wonderful, even raw. Costco is extremely picky about quality. Perhaps for that reason, the shoulder I bought had no boar taint. Here are the “loaves,” ready to go in the freezer to firm up. When they’re frozen, I’ll vacuum-seal them. I’m keeping one out for immediate use!

Next time I’ll use two pounds of bacon and eight pounds of pork. It’s slightly lean this time. I used a ratio of roughly 1:10. I ended up with eleven pounds. I believe the final cost is around $2.25/pound, before factoring in freezer bags. That’s not bad. This stuff is even better than Winn-Dixie, which is the best bulk sausage I’ve found around here.

The good Lord has given me all sorts of fun skills and hobbies. I really love doing this.

The Shakti Stones of Cooking

A while back, I mentioned Mundial knives. I used some while working in a commercial kitchen, and I thought they were great, so I bought a few.

I bought a Santoku with a hollow-ground blade (divots running down the side to make food fall off), a 14″ slicing knife with the same feature, and a cleaver. I was hoping the cleaver would be as good as the amazing $10 job I got from The Wok Shop, only stainless.

The cleaver turned out to be pretty heavy. You can’t cut vegetables with a thick knife, so the cleaver didn’t work for me. A thick knife will be hard to push through tough vegetables like potatoes and yuca, regardless of how sharp it is. You’ll have to push until the food gives, and then you may cut yourself when the knife finally busts loose. My Wok Shop cleaver is very thin, so it’s easy to cut film-like slices of just about anything. The Mundial cleaver seems to be very well made, but it’s not tough enough for meat, and it’s too thick for vegetables. I decided to follow up with a stainless Forschner cleaver, which is much better, but still a little thicker than I would like. The Wok Shop still rules. Best kitchen knife I’ver ever owned.

The santoku is also well made, but it just doesn’t work for me. Something about the shape of the blade. My regular knife is a Forschner chef’s knife, and it’s perfect. The curved edge works wonders when you rock the blade. It’s thin enough to cut vegetables well. The handle is great. It takes an edge in a few seconds. The santoku is too straight, and food doesn’t really fall off the sides of the blade. It doesn’t have enough weight to work for things like mincing. I may go back and order a chef’s knife. The Mundials I fell in love with were chef’s knives. It’s funny; many Americans are convinced that the Japanese are always right, but I’ve found European-style chef’s knives to be much more useful than santokus.

The slicer is great. Zero complaints. I probably should have bought a smaller one, though. They come in three sizes, and I went with 14″ because I have had problems with slicing knives being too short. I think the best answer is to have a long one and a short one.

I went on the web and said a few things about the Shun knives (made by Kershaw) that I had bought. I didn’t expect to make Shun-lovers angry, but that’s what happened. It’s funny how people will get angry when you criticize a product. You would think they had given birth to their knives.

I had a Shun santoku and a cleaver, plus a Tojiro nakiri. I found them useless. The Shun site states that Shun knives are dishwasher-safe, but chunks fell out of my knife when I washed it. The cleaver was short, way too thick, and poorly balanced, and after the santoku incident, I knew I could not put it in the dishwasher. The nakiri was just stupid. I cannot understand why they exist. Thick and fragile. I gave away all three knives. They were taking up space and doing nothing for me.

Shun-worshipers told me I was a “moron” for putting my knife in the dishwasher. I guess Doug Kershaw is a moron, too, because his website says the knives can take it.

I don’t get the Japanese-knife-adulation fad. The knives are extremely well made, and the quality is attractive, but they just don’t perform. What good is a tool that doesn’t work? You could make a chef’s knife with a gold blade if you wanted, and I’m sure it would be pretty, but what’s the point if you can’t cut anything with it?

The Kershaw site says that while Doug will not actually put a voodoo hex on you for using the dishwasher, it’s better to hand-wash. And they even give instructions for doing this:

The best and easiest method is simply to wash the knife using a damp sponge and mild soap right after you use it. Make sure you do not run the sponge-or your hand-directly along the blade at any time. Towel-dry the knife and let it air dry for a few minutes before retuning [sic] to its proper storage.

Good Lord. Is it a knife or a sick baby? Here’s what I do with my Forschners and Mundials: toss in dishwasher, turn on, flop in front of TV. They never chip. They are just as sharp as Shuns. They don’t cost much. You can even get them with color-coded indestructible NSF handles. The choice is obvious.

I’m thinking I should get a couple more chef’s knives, so I will be able to go back and forth between ingredients without spreading germs. Imagine buying enough Shuns to do that. Three knives…$400. I could have forty carbon-steel cleavers for that.

Picture yourself working with, say, four Shuns. When you’re done, you have to pick each one up, find the “mild soap,” wash it the way nurses washed Richard Pryor after he burned himself, set it aside to air dry (!), and then put it away in your special Japanese knife kimono or whatever. I don’t know about you, but I work hard in the kitchen. I’m not just slicing “boil-in bags.” When the night is over, I want OUT. I can clean four Forschners in four seconds. Dump in machine; turn on.

I will never buy a sissy container to protect my knives, unless I need something to carry them around. I use a magnetic bar on the wall, just like a real chef.

I still have to hand-wash the cheap cleaver, but it’s worth it, because that thing BURIES a Japanese cleaver. I can sharpen it in thirty seconds, to the point where I can hold a paper towel in my left hand, wave the cleaver through it with my right, and watch half of the towel drift to the floor. It crushes garlic. It tenderizes meat. It works as a shovel. It minces effortlessly. It’s so good, it’s weird and inexplicable.

People say I misunderstand. Japanese knives are great if you TAKE CARE of them. Excuse me…I thought they were supposed to work for ME.

It’s really this simple: they don’t work better than cheap knives, they cost much more, they are much harder to maintain, and they are extremely fragile. Where, in all that, is the reason for buying them?

I think I know what’s going on. Insecure people like buying stuff that validates their existence. The Shun people are probably just like the guys who spend $10,000 on CD players and claim it’s worth it. If you have Shakti stones under your clock radio, you will probably love Shun knives. A fool and his money…

I know Alton Brown recommends them. Of course, they PAY him to do that.

Tools are confusing. Sometimes the pricey ones pay off. Sometimes they’re money sinks for the weak-minded. I have been sucked in more than once.

Here’s an illustration of the choices people face. You want sharp knives, right? You can spend billions (small exaggeration) on a machine called a Tormek. Some people who own them will swear they’re essential. Other people will insist you buy expensive Japanese water stones, which you have to keep in containers of water, which, I’m sure, get funky after a few days in the garage. But it turns out there is a sharpening method which is better and cheaper, at least for some applications. It’s called the “Scary Sharp Method.” You buy a piece of flat glass and some sandpaper, and you go to town. Probably costs $20 for supplies that will last five years. Personally, I use a coarse diamond hone and a fine ceramic hone, and the results are spectacular. But you can see how confusing it can be.

A knife’s edge is something that only lasts a short time, anyway, and no one can tell how you sharpened it when they look at the food. You shouldn’t spend an hour trying to get an edge that will be gone after three heavy cooking sessions. Manufacturers know this. Non-Japanese cutlery makers know how to make knives just as hard as the Japanese ones, but they also know that hard knives are brittle and hard to sharpen, so they deliberately limit the hardness. If you think it costs a lot of money to make a hard knife, go to the hardware store and check the prices on files, which are extremely hard.

You can spend a million dollars equipping a kitchen. But you have to ask yourself: what kind of stuff do they use in restaurants? Mundial and Forschner. Aluminum pans. I use Update International cookware and old cast iron from Ebay, and my food is so good it shocks me. Sometimes quality matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. Money ALWAYS matters.

The more in love people are with their tools, the less capable they are of producing results. That’s a rule of thumb arising from my own observations. A lot of people love appearance more than substance. I’ve known dozens of “writers,” but most never wrote much of anything. Most people who own Ferraris don’t know how to drive them. Do you love doing what you do, or do you love thinking of yourself as the type of person who does it? A real cook will do better with tools from KMart than a Food Network fanboi will do with All-Clad and Le Creuset. This is why we have the expression, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

It’s pointless to write this. Some people are incapable of looking past tool quality. If it’s made really well, it must be the right thing to buy!

Get yourself one of those Wok Shop cleavers. You don’t know what you’re missing.

Fake Injera Using Cabbage Germs

If you really like torturing yourself with spicy food (as I do), you need to learn about Ethiopian cuisine. I know almost nothing about it, but I managed to come up with a really good recipe for doro wat (chicken stew), which I stuck in my cookbook.

Incidentally, I have decided you’re better off cutting up a whole chicken than using chicken breast, which is possibly what I suggested in the book (don’t remember). Chicken breast will eventually tighten up and expel a lot of its moisture if you cook it too long. The fat in darker cuts makes them less problematic.

Anyway, I’m writing about this today because I have a way of making better pancakes.

Doro wat is usually served on unsweetened pancakes (injera) made from soured batter. The proper grain to use is a dark millet called teff. Personally, I think teff tastes the way cow manure smells, but that’s just me. You can make excellent pancakes using white flour.

Today I decided to see what I could do using sourdough starter. I have starter made from kimchi juice and white flour, and I added instant yeast and let the whole thing ferment until it died. It gets rubbery at first, but when you let it go all the way, it gets runny again, and it’s easier to handle. I guess it went two days, on a table with no refrigeration.

This morning I mixed about 75 grams of this stuff (milkshake consistency) with around 1 1/4 cups of bread flour. I also beat two egg whites until stiff, and I stirred them in. I added salt and–probably unnecessarily–about half a teaspoon of sugar. I also added a teaspoon of salt, although it would have been smarter to stir that in later.

I let the mixture ferment on the counter all day, stirring every once in a while to distribute the bacteria and yeast.

I am no sourdough expert, but from what I’ve read about the performance of starters made from airborn bacteria or commercial cultures, I think the kimchi bacteria may be unusually speedy. Whatever the case may be, by five p.m., the batter was pretty sour. I think 18 hours would have been better, but it was definitely sour. I stirred in a couple of tablespoons of cheap olive oil, and I fried myself some pancakes in a 14″ Teflon skillet.

When I was a kid, a French lady told me how to make crepes, and that’s what injera is, pretty much. You put a thin layer of batter on a hot pan, distribute it evenly, and wait for the top of the crepe to look dry. Then you flip it, and when sweat pops out on the top side, it’s done. You can brown it if you want, but when the little beads of moisture show up, it’s cooked through. This is how I cooked today’s faux injera.

The result was excellent. I didn’t even need baking powder. The pancakes were foamy and light, and they were tough enough to do what had to be done. When you eat Ethiopian food, you tear off chunks of injera and use them to grab and wrap up the other food, and the crepes have to have a little backbone. In retrospect, I think I might have been better off with half as much egg white, but it’s a tough call.

Try this yourself.

INGREDIENTS

75-100 grams milkshake-consistency sourdough starter made from kimchi bacteria and instant yeast
1 1/4 cups bread flour
2 egg whites, beaten stiff
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons oil or other fat

Mix the ingredients, except for the salt, and let sit for 12-18 hours at room temperature. When the mixture is really sour, add the salt and mix it in. Make crepes using a 14″ Teflon pan on medium-high heat. They should be around 3/16″ thick.

I also used sweet Hungarian paprika from Penzey’s, as well as fresh nutmeg, freshly ground cumin, and black cardamom, which is THE BOMB. I can’t say enough about this spice. Buy some and try it. I don’t know why people think green cardamom is better. The black stuff has a smoky flavor that seems to improve everything it touches.

I grind my spices in a dedicated electric coffee mill. I even ground cloves today, although I’ve found that ground cloves exude something that fogs plastic, so you have to wipe it out of your mill before it causes problems.

I ate my doro wat and injera with a glob of sour cream on the side. It’s a phenomenal combination, but you really have to jack up the habaneros when you use sour cream, because it kills the heat.

Anyway, this was super tasty. Try it.

Paradise

A while back I aged a choice rib roast and froze it. I can’t help buying roasts when they’re on sale. It’s a thing.

I decided to cook it. A few days ago I put it in the fridge. As expected, it took eternity to thaw, so I put it on the dining room table for a few hours a day. To prevent death from bacteria, I salted the outside heavily and smeared it with pressed garlic.

Today I buttered it, stuck it on the Showtime oven spits, wrapped foil around it, and tied the foil in place with twine. I roasted it for quite some time. Ordinarily, I’d shoot for maybe 115 degrees, but I was also cooking for my dad, and he won’t eat beef until it’s carbonized, so I went to over 120. I removed the foil at the end to get some browning.

Geez, it was good. It was overcooked, sure, but it fell apart, and the taste was buttery and beefy and amazing. The fatty outer part (the part I love most) was full of the funkiness you get from dry-aging.

I would have baked it at 175 in the oven, but the oven was on the blink. I had to get it fixed today, and by the time it was fixed, it was too late to put the beef in.

I also baked a couple of small potatoes, not wanting to stuff myself silly at lunch. I baked them using my recipe. Rubbed the outsides with wet salt and put them on the rack at 450. They were magnificent.

I also made sourdough bread. I’ve been replenishing my starter stock, and I made some changes, so I wanted to do a test.

Earlier this week, I found that I only had one packet of frozen starter left, so I thawed it, mixed it with water, and used it in a big bowl of wet dough. I divided it in half, and I put instant yeast in one half. I wanted to see how well a mix of yeast and bacteria worked.

This is a starter I made a long time ago from kimchi juice. I don’t know what regular starter is like, but this stuff FLIES. Put it in dough tonight, and the dough will be sour tomorrow.

Last night I took about 1/4 pound of the yeast and bacteria starter, and I mixed it with three parts unleavened dough. I started by Cuisinarting the starter with dry flour, and then I added about 130 grams of water and blended it just until it was wet and mixed. I rolled it into a ball, and I put the ball on a sheet of floured nonstick foil. I put a big glass bowl over the foil, inverted. This way, when the dough rose, it was flat on the bottom, and it didn’t get big enough to be deformed by the walls of the bowl. The only purpose of the bowl was to keep humidity in.

Today when the dough looked sufficiently large, I slid the foil onto a stone at 450 degrees and baked the bread. I had a loaf of store sourdough on hand for comparison.

It turns out my sourdough is ten times better. It’s not as dry, and the flavor is much more intense. I love it. It has a tough crust, but I think that’s normal with sourdough.

I didn’t punch it down. Maybe I should have.

The crust didn’t have those cute little blisters everyone likes.

This is pretty satisfying. I don’t know of anyone else who uses cabbage bacteria to make bread. It has turned out to be easy to use, and it gives excellent results.

I didn’t have real horseradish sauce, so I stirred some prepared horseradish into heavy-duty mayonnaise. It was very good, and it only took a minute.

This is an eye-popping meal that doesn’t take much work. The bread is kind of a pain, but you don’t really need it.

Incidentally, I stirred some of the beef drippings into the garlic butter I used on the potato. It’s a little sick, but it works.

I can’t believe plain old choice beef can be this good. The only seasonings were salt, garlic, and butter. The horseradish wasn’t even needed. Next time I may skip it.

Next time your local grocer has rib roasts on sale, remember this. People will think you’re God’s gift to cooking, and it’s easier than making something stupid, like a casserole.

If you want to kill your guests with pleasure and heart disease, make this stuff and make brownies using my recipe. You can make them days in advance. Nuke the brownies before you serve them, and pile on whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, and hot fudge sauce, plus nuts. If you don’t have my brownie recipe, sorry. You should have bought my book. Now you pay the price.