jay pettitt on 30/1/2010 at 01:32
Oh for god's sake, as if the steak shenanigans wasn't bad enough you lot need help with omelettes also.
At least there's some good advice about pans. A heavy one is best - it'll keep it's shape and will heat evenly. The other thing you'll need is a chicken; commercially produced eggs, like commercially produced meat, tastes mostly of water. A proper egg is thick, creamy and rich in flavour. Break your eggs - two is a good number - into a cup or bowl and mix the white and yolk well with a fork. It shouldn't be a great surprise that if you add water you get watered down omelette. If eggs are rationed that'll help the food budget along, otherwise it's a hand-me-down that is best forgotten. Prepare your filling, but keep it simple - you won't want anything fancy that will clash, the flavour of non watered down omelette is pretty intense on it's own - grated chedder cheese is classic, but not too much. Heat butter in the pan until it is just about to turn brown - it's no great loss if you over do it slightly, though the flavour will be a little different. Olive oil and egg is a novel suggestion - save that stuff for steak where it can't do any harm. Salt and pepper also do strange things to egg.
Add your egg.
Carefully stir the surface evenly with the back of your fork being mindful not to penetrate the bottom or scratch the pan. As soon as the liquid is omeletised kill the heat, a little bit of runnyness is fine here, eggs hardly take any cooking and you don't want to over do it. Add your filling and fold with a spatular and let stand for a few moments - the eggs will finish cooking under their own heat. Tip out onto a plate, sprinkle any remaining cheese on top and serve while hot with a simple, leafy salad (not chips).
Tocky on 30/1/2010 at 04:38
Quote Posted by Namdrol
That's smoking, curing is either leaving in a tub of brine (wet cure) or rubbing salt/sugar in and leaving (well, there's bit more to it) which is a dry cure.
If you don't hickory smoke bacon you may as well piss on it.
And I fry my omlette in bacon grease with green peppers, onions, redrind hoopcheese, and bacon. Sometimes tomato. I can't abide that fluffy IHOP scambled egg shit covering and agree on thin and light fork stirred. It slides easy on a cast iron never washed skillet but spatula the underside if you need to while it cooks to get the slippery going.
Rug Burn Junky on 30/1/2010 at 05:36
Quote Posted by Tocky
If you don't hickory smoke bacon you may as well piss on it.
While I would love to be able to hickory smoke in my apartment, pork bellies are the single greatest cut of meat ever created. It would be a crime to only ever prepare it one way, and my miso butterscotch bacon beats the shit out of Oscar Mayer.
Fafhrd on 30/1/2010 at 06:09
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
I do puff the mix up a little using milk, which both
RBJ Piglick and
LL Cool J have told me is a mistake.
Have I told you lately that I love you?
And holy shit butterscotch bacon. I need to taste this.
Master Villain on 30/1/2010 at 07:27
Dammit now I want eggs. Fried and green and omelette and whatever. Adding eggs to the shoping list.
You are all to BLAME.
Also, for those arguing about the spelling: Some people here pronounce it "omlit". :tsktsk:
Tocky on 31/1/2010 at 03:58
Quote Posted by Rug Burn Junky
my miso butterscotch bacon beats the shit out of Oscar Mayer.
I do believe you're inviting me to dinner, darling. I've eaten some horrible overcooked poorly seasoned bacon before but I think I can trust a man who knows his other scotch so well. Just give it to me thick. It helps mitigate the edge burn the sugars cause.
You know, I should feel ashamed I've never cured my own. I can look out my window at a smokehouse well over a hundred years old. This used to be a working farm. Eh. The Piggly Wiggly has locally cured bacon with little bits of peppercorn still on the rind and I'm lazy.
Y'all know all this fatty food is going to take 10 years off of you right? But it's the LAST ten years you would have spent praying to die in a nursing home so eat up.
Rug Burn Junky on 31/1/2010 at 20:35
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
And holy shit butterscotch bacon. I need to taste this.
Quote Posted by Tocky
I do believe you're inviting me to dinner, darling. I've eaten some horrible overcooked poorly seasoned bacon before but I think I can trust a man who knows his other scotch so well. Just give it to me thick. It helps mitigate the edge burn the sugars cause.
Well, it's still a work in progress... but even the mistakes have been tasty. I was inspired by two of my favorite dishes ever - the butterscotch bacon at Alinea (the entire reason I went there in the first place) and the Miso Butterscotch pork belly at Tailor. Homemade butterscotch is easy as fuck to make (melt brown sugar and butter till it liquifies, and then dump in heavy cream and whisk it while it tries to explode all over your kitchen), and instead of the cream you add at the end, I just water it down a ton, dump in a shitload of kosher salt and some pink curing salt to make it a brine, and stir in the red miso for that added touch of umami. Once it cools, add your pork belly and let it sit for a week. Watch the temps in your fridge, and you're golden - in a week you have something approximating bacon, or the best tasting mistake in your fridge.
Quote:
You know, I should feel ashamed I've never cured my own. I can look out my window at a smokehouse well over a hundred years old.
Jesus christ, why didn't you tell me, I'll be there in the morning.
CCCToad on 31/1/2010 at 21:10
Got a request this time.
Does anyone know a good pasta salad recipe?
Rug Burn Junky on 1/2/2010 at 00:47
All right, one of the things I've been turning over in my mind since this thread started is the heavy dissing that Ramen always takes. I can understand that, because I know the rep it has as a poor college student's best friend, but it is so much more than that. So I decided I need to add some Ramen love to get you guys thinking differently. And I know I said I wasn't going to bother with an actual recipe, but why not.
The main problem is that people eat them with those god awful spice packs as the seasoning. It's like judging chicken soup based on broth made with a bouillion cube. Or if your only experience with spaghetti was in individual serving packs with dehydrated sauce, you'd think that was shit too, but anyone who's had freshly made pasta with home made pesto sauce knows otherwise. At the end of the day, ramen itself is just noodles, and even the shitty Nissin and Maruchen packs are just fine as noodles go - it's the broth you use and how you season them that makes a difference. If you're so inclined, you can hunt down a good japanese supermarket and get better noodles. It's worth it, but that's only going to make an incremental difference for most people.
Now, I actually make a really good Tonkotsu stock - boil down pork bones, flavor them up and use that for the base. I'll also use dashi or miso based stocks, and fresh pork. But those are entirely different recipes and I'm not getting into any of that here, because I want to keep this simple enough for Renz to try.
There's a GREAT substitute for the asian pork stock if you're so inclined - you know those boneless ribs you get at cheap take-out chinese places? They're perfect for this. Order them up with chinese food, keep them as leftovers and make ramen with them a day or two later.
[indent]Here's what you need:
2 packs Ramen noodles
1/2 lb Chinese take-out boneless ribs - diced into half inch cubes, or 1 inch strips.
1/4 cup chopped scallion
1 tablespoon chopped ginger
1 tablespoon minced garlic (or two to three cloves, chopped)
1 cup soy sauce
3 cups water
OK, first off get yourself a heavy bottom pot. Pour about a half tablespoon of oil in the bottom. Now, there are three optimal options here. A) Bacon grease. I keep a chunk of it in my freezer at all times (whenever I do cook bacon, I strain the grease through a coffee filter and add it to the bowl. I use it sparingly because it's powerful flavor: A lb of bacon should get you enough to last 6 months or more.) Since you're not using a pork stock to begin with, this is a good way to get an imitation of that flavor into the broth. If that's not an option, a close second is B) sesame oil, and a distant third is C) peanut oil. I think any other oil would be a mistake, so be forewarned if you decide to try corn, olive or canola. They just don't really work with asian cuisine.
Start it over medium/low heat, and add your scallions, garlic and ginger. You can add red chili pepper if you're so inclined as well.
Once the scallions soften but before the garlic browns, turn the heat down real low and add the pork.
Heat the pork through a bit (2-3 minutes is enough) and add the soy sauce and water. The amount of water used is entirely to taste and based on salt tolerance. 3:1 ratio will be fairly strong, and can be watered down later if you want a milder broth. A little sugar (tablespoon or so) will cut down some of the saltiness as well. If you want to, you can throw the spice packet in at this time, but I don't know why you would.
Bring this to a boil, stirring constantly.
Once boiling, cover it, turn the heat down real low and continue to heat through for at least 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. (I usually go for about an hour. That renders the fat out of the pork and brings more flavor to the broth. Too much longer and the flavor 'turns.' But if you're impatient you can cut it shorter).
Bring it back up to a full boil and add your noodles. Cook it for about three minutes, stirring regularly as you would normally. You're done.[/indent]
This is not even close to an autentic ramen recipe, and it's really a mishmash of a bunch of different recipes and styles (cantonese soup, tonkotsu ramen, Shoyu ramen). But it's a really easy way to simulate the kind of flavorful ramen broths you'll get if you go to a legit ramen shop. Once you get practiced, you can look up the real recipes, or you can just experiment with other flavors that compliment (I mentioned chili peppers. A little sake works. An egg drop works as well - but is kind of tough to get the silky texture right wthout getting rubbery chunks).
For anyone who's ever dismissed ramen as just a cheap trashy meal, it's eye opening.
