Syzygies

Haven't eaten there, but I was the "dumb end of the board" helping my woodworker neighbor install a fancy shed for extra storage, before their remodel. Thomas Keller pays attention to detail, I got to meet him twice. I mentioned using his sous vide cookbook, and he didn't look surprised at all. He later asked about the roof color, and I suggested no, it should match on Google Earth. That elicited a bit of surprise. The veggies being dropped off were mind-boggling. Our favorite sous vide vegetable is also potatoes. I've sold friends on sous vide this way, that feel they have meat otherwise mastered: Peel and quarter (or to size) potatoes, vacuum pack, and cook sous vide at 185 F or above (this is the threshold for most vegetables to actually cook) for one to two hours (to taste, revisit this on subsequent trials). Chill the packs completely, ideally overnight, or in ice water if in a hurry. A few hours before cooking, open the packs and spread out the potatoes on a cooling rack, with a fan blowing on them, to dry off as much surface moisture as possible. (A brief time in a dehydrator would also work, but that's more cleanup.) To serve, fry hard in ghee, with salt and pepper to taste, till they pick up lots of color and cook completely through. Twice-cooked starch is transcendent. That's the whole idea behind french fries done right. This is a riff on that. Thomas Keller discourages sous vide for most vegetables. I don't make complete dishes from his first cookbook, The French Laundry, but there are some amazing techniques in there. For example, cooking lobster just long enough to remove and reserve the meat, then using the shells for stock, then gently cooking the meat in mostly butter, some water (which translates well to sous vide). I've used this to top a gumbo to die for. His favorite vegetable technique is "big pot boiling". I mean big, like a 16 quart pot. (There is online debate on how big is necessary. Diminishing returns, of course, but people are revealing that they can't tell the difference, not that you can't. It's not easy to cook beyond one's perceptions; I'm convinced Keller is a super-taster.) Nearly fill with water salted to sea water (decide to taste), bring to hard boil, and plunge vegetables to cook exactly to taste. Plunge next into ice water to arrest cooking. This preserves flavor and color, which matters at his prices. If you save tomato harvests as we do by skinning, partially dehydrating with salt till "gooshy", and freezing, then adding those tomatoes to Blue Lake green beans cooked big pot boiling and dressed with your favorite vinaigrette makes the best green bean salad I've ever made. I've brought this as a vegetable side to Thanksgiving by very serious cooks; this is the only "pot luck" veggie course I know that can break through the cacophony of other dishes.

As it happens I managed to join the Rancho Gordo bean club when it was taking members a few years ago. For those elsewhere, Rancho Gordo is the premier source of heirloom beans in the US, grown domestically and imported from Mexico. They've been slammed since the pandemic; everyone who isn't baking bread wants to cook beans. Club members get six surprise pounds of beans every quarter, plus a few bonus items such as the above Farro Grande. That's what I've been using recently. Their facebook forum had a debate today on Farro / Spelt, exactly your question. The article About Farro on the Anson Mills site is taken to be authoritative. Anson Mills is a similarly premier source of artisan grains, without as fervent a fan base only because it lacks a visible charismatic leader like Rancho Gordo's Steve Sando or our Dennis. And one cannot name-check sources of this caliber without calling out Masienda, where I get many varieties of Oaxacan corn to make nixtamal to grind into masa for tortillas, and The Mala Market, whose ingredients elevate Sichuan cooking to transcendent heights. Truth be told, I'll grind anything. I've noticed that what's called farro from an Italian source in the US looks different and tastes better than what's labeled spelt in a health food store bin. Spelt brings back bad memories of eating hippie bread in the 70's. But the grains are related. And I've used emmer and einkorn in my bread "guest slot", whatever I bought recently in a small bag at a farmers market, whatever looks good.

COVID has cost me all of my personal integrity. Stand mixer, loaf pan, no steam. At least we still grind our flour. I even ordered an upgraded loaf pan with straight sides, the Vollrath 4V. We've storing more grain than ever before, but working through it feeding sourdough starter, making bread twice a week, fresh pasta and other baking. For this loaf I swapped in Guiness stout for water, cooking it down as I cooked the potatoes, then topping back up to the target weight. We like this recipe, a lot. Sourdough Whole-Recipe.pdf

There's a tag inside each KK that would help figure this out. I bought my 23" well over a decade ago. I'm very proud of my serial number. Apparently there were only eight people before me.

Farmers market kale on polenta. When we're vegetarian we don't realize it till we're eating. I wanted to try making the polenta in the Vermicular Musui Kamado ("Indoor K") but Laurie likes to make it her way. And we had a deadline to get dinner on the table (Laurie had a Zoom tai chi class; we weren't going anywhere!). So I got the kale braising, then played with my Solo Stove to roast the peppers, then made an onion/pepper soffritto in the indoor K to mix into the braised kale. Got to play with all of my recent toys. Handy having three front burners. My brother has end-of-life care instructions that no one is to feed him if he can't raise a fork to his mouth himself. I'd been thinking to amend mine about "if I can't cook for myself" to include something about gas stoves. But induction is remarkable, more heat without burning. One of my earliest revelations about stews was that the whole is always less than the sum of the parts. (My brief foray into film convinced me the same about acting, screen charisma reveals a mere shadow of really developed personas.) Can one tell for sure that I fire-roasted the chiles? The braised kale was good, I'd think I'd miss the fire. Anyhow, fire is more satisfying than any other form of cooking.

And that's basically the cost of the electricity. We got out of the Great Depression through pork barrel projects like building dams everywhere we could, even though this generated far more electricity than we needed. Then came along World War II. We could build aluminum fighter planes faster than the Germans could shoot them down. Ohne Aluminium würden wir Deutsch sprechen.

Spatters don't generally reach the walls, I keep it clean, and I regularly reach temperatures that Dennis would probably consider ill-advised.

I first bought the wrong kind of butcher paper for BBQ: white, coated. One wants pink; the brown pictured on the commercial dispenser is probably also fine. I hung my white roll in the garage for general use. My "cutter" is a pair of shop shears. I measure by paying attention to the landscape as I pull down paper.

Here's a picture of my drip pan in position, on the lower grate.

Cast iron rusts. For many years I used an unglazed 16" terra cotta plant saucer from a box store. I'd use it by itself as a heat deflector, lined with heavy duty foil to double as a drip pan. Each one would last a few years then crack, but they don't cost much. Still the inexpensive solution I'd recommend to anyone. I love my "official" double bottom heat deflector, drip pan, but one could buy decades of terra cotta plant saucers for the same money.

Mine sits easily on the lower rack, with an ideal margin all around for airflow, and no interference with handles. Which KK do you have? Which drip pan did you order? Are you sure they're matched? Dennis can surely help.

I've been using mine one way or another every day since it arrived. Even last night's pasta sauce, that I do versions of for decades in other pots, just to calibrate my understanding of what it can do. The computer programmer in me loves how I can offload work to it, less attended, with none of the limitations of sealing food in a plastic pouch. While ingredients sautéed, I was outside roasting chiles on my Solo Stove Campfire, another tool I love because it's not an attention hog. A Moroccan tagine of lamb, fava beans, artichokes (all fresh from our farmers market) was an interesting exercise in adaptation. First steam roast the vegetables, a classic mode of operation for what Laurie has dubbed our "indoor K". Set aside, sear then cook the lamb and spice mixture, with ample mounds of parsley and cilantro on top. Arranging ingredients in a thoughtful stack as the Moroccans do for clay, works here because the induction delivers more uniform heat. Then add back the vegetables with the preserved lemon to finish. This sequence would allow cooking the vegetables above 185 F (a known sous vide threshold) and the meat below 185 F. We didn't this time, because I ran out of time. I'll experiment with the plainer lamb Tangia to dial this in. We're eyeing the space occupied by our high end Zojirushi rice cooker (though I keep this K close by the cutting board, under our range exhaust fan, for uses like tagine). I'd heard the praise for rice made in a purpose-built clay Kamado-san Double-Lid Donabe Rice Cooker. And I love mine, though rice in it is more work, and simply different, not a compelling reason to give away one's Zojirushi. Following Vermicular's brown rice instructions to the letter using Massa Organics brown rice, we made the best rice I've ever tasted. I've been in correspondence with Vermicular.us. They're thinking about starting a forum like ours. There's so much to figure out, adapting this K to international cooking.

Burning Love (Elvis Presley)

I believe that I understand its purpose better than any English language review I've read. In the 1980's I'd read somewhere (Patricia Wells?) that some French chefs with access to restaurant vacuum packers were "steaming" fish by instead vacuum packing the fish with marinade to cook in a water bath. And Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen was published in 1984, discussing how the boiling point of water is an arbitrary crutch in cooking. Putting two and two together, I looked in various science supply catalogs hoping to set up a sous vide cooking system (without having heard anyone was actually doing this, e.g. for foie gras in France). It was beyond my budget. I was a bit aghast that I hadn't pushed harder, when many years later I saw sous vide cooking emerge. One misses most advances in math or science by simply not pushing hard enough. Plenty of people are smart enough, or much smarter than the people who make breakthroughs. The people who make breakthroughs are pathologically stubborn and don't give up. I'd given up. Agitated, I started playing with the same kind of temperature controller used in the BBQGuru, and modifying soup warmers to bypass their thermostat. Then over time actual equipment designed for this became affordable. Now we own various Joule circulators, with clumsy earlier circulators in the garage or discarded. And as you say, we don't make skyscraper food. Sous vide becomes a standard technique. A step, never the complete process. Sous vide cooking a finished dish is throwing a ball blindfolded, hoping it lands somewhere near your intended target. Fine for a restaurant that gets a thousand tries. Takes all the fun out of cooking at home. One often wants to sear first, often in the same pot, then fiddle, taste, and season as one cooks. Add or remove ingredients on a timetable. For this reason it completely baffled me that slow cookers remained so primitive, weren't stepping up their game. I've met "titans" of weaker industries; they only triumph because anyone with two brain cells to rub together gets out of that industry. They have self-serving explanations for why they're dragging their feet on progress, which ususually comes down to customers already not wanting to pay the $60 they're asking for $4 of Chinese electronics. So I've been watching this market. The Breville | PolyScience the Control Freak costs $1500 and is nowhere near as effective as the Vermicular which encloses its enamel cast iron Dutch oven. I wish that the Vermicular didn't cost $670, but it doesn't cost $1500, and it's not going to cost $60. I bought my most recent Staub Dutch oven on sale, but the Vermicular Dutch oven is fairly priced for what is a top-of-the-market pot. I've also gone fairly deep down the Japanese cooking rabbit hole. My last international trip before quarantine was to Japan. I imported a Katsuobushi bonito shaver. I own many Donabe pots from Toiro Kitchen. There's something austere yet deeply comforting about the Japanese approach to vegetables. Various of the Vermicular cooking modes make most sense in the Japanese tradition from which it springs, though they translate well to other cuisines. My braised cabbage, my first use, is a good illustration. If one had been thinking of something like the Vermicular, wishing one could build one, then it's wonderful they'll build it for you. Simply being told one wants this isn't going to sell many units, and will lead to disappointment. Though it may be advanced, it's also freedom. We were drinking rose in the shade during a hot California evening, when we'd normally be inside cooking. If you found this thread by googling Vermicular, look around. There are many serious cooks here, and they're here because the Komodo Kamado is the best ceramic charcoal cooker made. It's worth every penny.

My last trip before quarantine was to take a weeklong woodworking intensive with Jeremy Tomlinson at The Urban Woodworker in North Vancouver. I met him at a Lie Nielsen hand tools expo in Oakland, and knew the weeklong would be well worth the trip. I'm not in a hurry, I came out of this deciding to prep and finish (resaw, true) my wood by hand, like our ancestors did. Not that it's warm enough to work outside in California, I'm just waiting to finish other pressing chores. Today I finish reworking our garden irrigation system, to take out some corroding unions and add a flow meter, and inline strainers before each valve. Not my idea, the valves were getting stuck open. I'm good enough at plumbing for "handy" friends to ask for my help, but I enjoy sweating pipes the way one enjoys a prison sentence. Like, not. Wood, and bread, on the other hand, invites and responds to love.

Our favorite loaf pan bread yet. Lots of farro available from unrealized past aspirations, and it really works as a guest flour here. And it dawned on me that I can have lots of rows in my history spreadsheet for every possible ingredient combination, yet I can automate only showing the ingredients in use for my recipe printout. Sourdough Whole-Recipe.pdf

I went for it. Am I really the first, here? Can't be. After all, like orangutans these be Kamado cousins to us. Vermicular We're pretty thrilled. Much easier to use by playing with the control panel than by trying to understand the directions. Though the imposing hardbound recipe book gives some idea of potential range and technique. Our first try was Lion's Head Meatballs. We get awesome ground pork from a local farmers market. Local cabbage, our house chicken stock, good fino sherry, hand-stirred Zhongba soy sauce (now back back in stock) from Mala Market. A gentle dish that shows its flavors. Rejiggering the recipe for the Vermicular, I first cooked the cabbage on low for an hour, with just a pinch of salt and some lard. Stir a couple of times, otherwise away from the kitchen, I love how unattended this is. One could of course use a low oven, but this is more predicable and in my face when I want it to be. The cabbage browned and melted, with little risk of burning, exploiting the special tight lid design. I then set aside the cabbage to simmer the meatballs in broth. Here I first tried an hour at 180 F. Did you know meatballs could be too tender? We've made this recipe before, conventionally, and perhaps it is tuned for more aggressive heat. Though the flavors were unworldly. I turned it up to 200 F while flipping the meatballs and adding the braised cabbage on top. A lot to learn, the best of sous vide and meddling as one cooks, with the opportunity to brown first in the same pot. I'm thinking Moroccan tagines will shine here.

I do feel like I've lost my convictions, using a loaf pan, but they're more forgiving and the bread is more useful. We always add a bit of yeast as insurance to sourdough recipes. Laurie buys it by the pound, using it in many other ways. (She also has a separate yeast for sweeter breads.) We got lucky that our health food store had stock today.

Yes, sorry, I'd probably design the spreadsheet differently if my primary goal was to show it to others. It would be too complicated for me if I were doing this once. I'm going on a hundred loaves, and I want to home in on new recipes as quickly as possible. To give one example of the dozens of issues that a spreadsheet resolves for me: I can change my sourdough starter from 100% hydration to 50% hydration, then back to 80% hydration, without changing the true hydration of my bread recipes. The spreadsheet adjusts for me. I find it mind-boggling how many recipes out there just ignore the hydration of the starter. The authors have no idea what the true hydration is for their recipes. Mathematicians find it easier to figure out what someone else is doing by learning their goals, then reverse engineering their methods. Only by trying to figure it out by ourselves can we understand what someone else is doing. Here, my goals are these: I'm making bread from potato and 100% home ground grains, using a sourdough levain and an autolyse step. The spreadsheet takes bakers percentages and similar inputs (smaller print in upper left box), and converts them to the grams I need to measure (larger print in upper right box). 1. Grind the grains for this loaf. While I have sourdough starter food made up for many days at a time, I need to grind grains for this loaf. I find that with the current state of my grinder, and the sieve I use, I get a yield of 82%. The spreadsheet computes how much grain to grind, based on this. 2. Feed the starter. There's a minimum I want to feed the starter each time, but when I'm making two loaves using lots of starter, I want to make sure I make enough starter. I'd rather code this and follow directions each time, than try to remember to do this in my head. Of course I did this in my head for years. Having numbers prepared for me, to check off, is easier and more reliable. Even if I only screw up this calculation in my head once every six months, I'd rather not. 3. Autolyse the flour. I cook potatoes in water, top up the water to correct for what boiled off, and add it to my dry ingredients to soak overnight. I love the effect of the potato. Soaking overnight has a big effect, particularly on whole grains. I've tried leaving out this step. I always return to it, even when adapting recipes that don't call for an autolyse. 4. Knead the dough for the bulk rise. The next morning, I assemble and knead everything together. Then bulk, bench, proof, bake as usual. The timetable helps me start early enough to also be able to walk the dog when Laurie gets off work. Grind, feed, autolyse, knead, this is a straightforward and common way to make bread. I need numbers to check off as I work, or else once every six months I leave out the salt. For this style of bread, anyone's recipe would look something like this.

We really like this loaf. 100% home ground grains. We cook the potato in the autolyse water, blitz it with an immersion blender, and top up the weight with more water. Mix in a stand mixer. The potato has a really nice effect on texture, and smoothing out the grain flavors. We actually bake 385 F for 35 minutes in the loaf pan, then 10 minutes out of the loaf pan.

Surprise! (The couch isn't actually that uncomfortable...)

Bread Loaf Baker Well, if it's European that makes it ok. I don't understand the lid. My portion control isn't good enough to just miss the lid as my dough rises. What am I missing?

How did you sprout the rye? My last loaf was also in a loaf pan. It felt like a crisis of principles, but it was in fact liberating to not have to restrict myself to doughs that can support themselves.

Actually, Laurie wouldn't let me shave my head when I was in Thailand for a month in 2005, but I'm thinking of surprising her soon.

Ahh, the seventies. Any good pictures of Dennis from then?