clowns to the left of me

Since the basic function of transglutaminase in the home kitchen is to bond one meat to another meat, I decided to do just that and see what happens:

I bonded sirloin steak tips to the outside of pork spareribs, stuck them in the smoker, and stuck the smoker in the oven until the spareribs were meaningfully tender.  I didn't cook them to the point that the bones were falling out of the meat, but enough that you could pull those bones out with a couple twists and a tug.  There's a spectrum of sparerib doneness, and that's towards the ... call it the "rare" end, I suppose.

The reason I didn't cook them longer is because the beef was already drying out.  I knew this was a possibility.  I regularly cook sirloin steak tips in braises for long periods, but long smoking is another story.  They lack the fat and connective tissue that make spareribs become tender and melting over time.

Still tasted good.  When I say the beef was drying out, I just mean it was past its ideal point.  It certainly wasn't inedible or overly tough, they're perfectly tasty ribs.  But this was ultimately ... this was the shot you take to see how you need to adjust your aim.

Ideas:

1: I didn't want to spend a fortune on meat, so I used the same cut of beef that I was already buying (I made a batch of chicken-fried steaks to put in the freezer, not tenderizing any of them this time).  In the future, a better choice would be to match meats according to how they cook -- maybe brisket, for instance, would have worked here.  Or chuck roast.  Or a layer of sausage, even.

2: I believe you could precook the pork, cool it, bond the beef to it overnight, and then resume cooking.  I think.

3: Somewhat more intriguing, but very much an object of meat-geeking: picture a rack of ribs.  Now trim most of the meat off the front, without interfering with the interstitial meat, so that you still have a rack of ribs -- just one with barely any meat on it.  Now bond a different meat to it.

People regularly cook rib roasts which have been removed from the bone, with the bone tied to it to provide some benefits while cooking.  This would be like that, only with a different cut of meat, see?

Okay, picture it: you pull a rack of ribs from the smoker, and toss them into the broiler to crisp up the skin.  Skin!  What?  OH HEY IT'S DUCK.  BOOM.  I think fish could be interesting too -- salmon, trout, maybe monkfish depending on how it takes to smoking -- possibly with an additional layer of bacon.

oh ee oh ee oh

The other thing you can do with transglutaminase is make meat-based ravioli.  You heard me.

I took two paper-thin slices of bresaola (Italian air-cured beef) and bonded them together around an egg yolk, before simmering it just long enough to slightly cook it.

Because the bresaola isn't cured with nitrates, it doesn't stay red after cooking -- so the presentation isn't as nice as I expected.  The pasta is dressed lightly with a couple drops of olive oil and Gegenbauer red pepper vinegar, but we'll talk about the vinegar in the vinegar post later.

Functionally, this worked very well.  It's fussy: this "glue" is a powder, after all, not Elmer's glue, so getting two thin sheets of cured meat to bond together at the edges enough to be reasonably water-tight took some careful doing.  Initially there's nothing to make them stick.  You just have to be careful.

Taste-wise, the pasta itself is just great.  Italian cuisine uses egg yolks to dress things fairly often, whether it's a poached egg broken open on vegetables, egg yolk ravioli like this, or an egg baked on top of a pizza.  

But the bresaola wasn't the ideal choice here.  It happened to be the one meat I had in the house that would make this dish possible, but it's not suited to simmering -- it loses its delicate flavor and texture, and there's nothing especially interesting about Very Thin Beef, which is what you end up with.  This would be better made with a different meat -- salami? ham? duck? -- or a different cooking method.  Frying the raviolo seems risky because of the agitation, and I've never fried bresaola so I don't know what that would do to the texture -- but it seems worth trying.  If not, maybe you could do "bacon and eggs" ravioli, encasing an egg yolk in bacon and then frying it -- I just think it would be tricky to fry the bacon to the point of crispiness without hard-cooking the egg.

Of course, there is another way to go with this "egg inside meat" idea, too: if you freeze whole, uncooked egg yolks, they will gradually change in texture, and remain thickened and gelatinous instead of runny once they've thawed.  You could freeze-treat small egg yolks to bring them to that point, and then wrap bresaola or another thin cured meat around each yolk (perhaps with a thin schmear of soft cheese, or some puree of spicy pepper, or a piece of pickled onion), and bond it overnight.  Bring them to room temperature and serve -- no cooking, though I suppose if you didn't want to serve them as finger food, you could sauce them with a warm sauce just before service.

you cannot serve both god and mammoth

You can thank the Pleistocene megafauna for your guacamole.

Hey! Hey! Bill! I thought of an idea! You could make a new chili dog!

See, the megafauna were, like it says, Really Big Animals.  Giant sloths.  Woolly mammoths.  TERROR BIRDS.  Giant beavers.  No seriously, TERROR BIRDS.  And you know how raspberries and strawberries have all those little seeds in them, so that when birds eat them, they crap the seeds out somewhere, and more plants grow?  So too with the avocado!  Only the avocado has a really BIG seed, because it was evolved to entice sloths and mammoths and terror birds.  Then the megafauna died off in the Ice Age extinction event, leaving more avocados for you and me.  Think about it, would you bother fighting a terror bird for your guacamole?  I sure as fuck wouldn't.  But a parakeet, shit, I could take a parakeet.  Or a dormouse.

See, you could mix transglutaminase with the chili, right, and mold it around the hot dog and let it bond -- like a Scotch egg, where the egg is the hot dog and the sausage is the chili -- so you have a hot dog encased in bonded-together chili, and then you could crush some tortilla chips on it, and get a squeeze bottle of salsa --

Did you know that Super Bowl Sunday is the day of the greatest avocado consumption?  Of course you did.  Every other blog has mentioned it while talking about guacamole.

Okay, guacamole! A squeeze bottle of guacamole! It would be chili stuffed with a hot dog!  Or something!  Sort of!

Guacamole's super-easy to make.  I think the only reason people buy it premade is because avocados take a while to ripen, so if you want guacamole today, and you don't have an avocado, you don't have many options.

I bet it would work!

I have seen a lot of terrible guacamole recipes, and they all get wrong the same thing Kraft Foods did, with their guacamole made with less than 2% avocado: they add too much nonsense that isn't avocado.  I believe the best way to think of guacamole is as seasoned avocado, the way mashed potatoes are seasoned potato.  You mash them up.  You season them to taste with a little salt and a little lime or lemon juice.  Maybe you add a little chile or a little bit of herb, like putting chives in your mashed potatoes.  But you don't need anything else, and it will taste really really good just like that, honest.  Anything like mayo, sour cream, crema -- that's just filler, that's just extender.

Do YOU think it would work?

...I mean, kind of.  Maybe.  I know beans have protein, but I'm not sure you can actually turn beef-and-bean-chili into, well, a sausage, which is kind of what you're sugg--

Pleeeeeeeeease?

Okay okay, fine:

Happy now?

So happy.

Geaux Saints.

a horse is a horse

BUT MR K, I hear you shouting, because you don't know how to pronounce my last name.  What about the chicken!?

Settle down, kitten.

The chicken-fried steak did indeed leave behind a poorly-lit skinless chicken:

And what can you do with a poorly-lit skinless chicken?  Not a fuck of a lot.  Roasting it would dry it out.  

But you've overlooked something:

That was way too little steak!

That's right, while you're all fussing over the skinless chicken, you neglected to think about the fact that a chicken hasn't got much skin to begin with, so I must have had some steak tips left over from the package.  What became of them?

They were ground up with paprika paste, scallions, pepper ketchup, and Activa, and then mixed in with goat cheese and rolled into a caseless sausage:

After cooking:

The sausage is on the dry side because the steak was leaner than you'd usually use for sausage, but that's okay -- besides, we're mostly testing technique here.  I sliced the sausage and had some of it cold with pea shoots and "stuffed eggs," another Activa experiment: I just made deviled eggs and then bound the two halves back together, and sliced them.  If you look at the egg on the far left, you can see that the Activa is visible -- Activa TG-RM includes a little protein in the mix to help make a bond, and because I used a little more than I needed to and couldn't get the eggs to stay perfectly flush against each other, the Activa sort of filled the gap like caulk.

In both cases, the result is functional but not especially exciting.  Though I expect to do more with sausage in the future.

NOW, what about the chicken?  Well, we gave it a different skin.  After marinating the skinless chicken overnight in slightly diluted hot sauce (we will discuss homemade pepper mash extensively in a future post), I bonded bacon to as much of its surface as I could:

This is a case where Activa is handy, but not necessary: berks bard birds with bacon all the btime, the Activa just helps it stay there, and keep from falling off when it cooks.  It DID work to keep the chicken from drying out -- the breast was nicely moist and flavorful.  

The fact that the bacon is cured doesn't interfere with the bonding at all -- in fact, salt helps a bit.  Cooked bacon wouldn't bond, but that's because of the fatty portion -- rendered fat has no protein, but when uncooked, the fatty portion still has a little.  Still, the bacon didn't make "as tight a seal," I guess you'd say, as the chicken skin had done.

And there you go, round one of the Activa experiments.  All in all, transglutaminase is a hell of an interesting thing to work with.

farewell to the flesh

This post involves free stuff. Check out the free stuff policy here.

So check it out, I'm giving up meat for Lent.  This isn't going to change the blog too much -- seafood doesn't count, Sundays don't count, and I'm making an exception for corned beef at St Patrick's Day -- but it'll affect me some, and I thought, hey, before Lent starts, I should use some of that Activa TG.

Activa TG is the main commercial kitchen preparation of transglutaminase, also known as meat glue.  Transglutaminases bond proteins together, without adding flavor or changing texture in ways other than the creation of that bond.  At the industrial level, transglutaminase is used for Chicken McNuggets, Spam, imitation crabmeat, salisbury steak TV dinners, the bigger brands of hot dogs (and kielbasa and a lot of other sausages) -- all of which are made the same basic way, by creating a paste of finely-chopped meat, seasonings and salt, and transglutaminase, which is then shaped and formed.  As an additive, it can be used to make the mouthfeel of milk and yogurt creamier, and (I guess because of the protein content in wheat flour) it can help make pasta firmer.

Those uses have existed for decades.  I mean, this stuff opened a door to a whole world of chopped-and-formed foods.

But in the professional kitchen, transglutaminase is much newer.  Wylie Dufresne -- who seems to be the first chef to use it in the US -- makes "noodles" by extruding a transglutaminase-spiked shrimp paste into a hot water bath, bonds meat to fish, lines scallops together end to end, and so on.  We're a long way from discovering everything you can do with it.  It bonds protein to protein -- not sticks them together, in a way that'll make them fall apart again later, like wrapping bacon around something.  It bonds them.  This is both a very very simple thing, and something that opens up a world of possibilities, many of which (like those noodles) aren't obvious at first glance.

You can't buy transglutaminase in the supermarket.  Even by mail order, you can only buy it in enormous quantities, which is beyond impractical for the home cook: not only is it very expensive, but transglutaminase is a live enzyme with a short shelf life once it's exposed to oxygen or moisture, and even if you used it for every meal every day, you would not be able to get through a full package of it before it dies.

But me ... I have a blog.  So I got two 100g sample packs of Activa TG-RM.

The first idea I had for transglutaminase remained one of the best: chicken-fried steak.

I used steak tips cut into pieces, hammering a couple of them out with a tenderizer and leaving another one untenderized, just to see which worked better.  Sprinkled Activa on pieces of chicken skin from a whole chicken and wrapped them around the steak pieces, and let it bond in the refrigerator overnight.

The next day, I took the steak pieces through my usual chicken-frying procedure (in corn oil, though animal fat would be preferable): shake in a bag of self-rising flour with a little cornmeal and seasoned salt, rest for twenty minutes, shake again and drop into hot fat.

The result ...

I mean.

Wow.

Click through to see that close-up if you're reading this somewhere where it's cut off (like on the blog page): it's important.  Notice what would look like, if this were conventional chicken-fried steak, unfried batter.  It isn't batter.  There is no batter, just a little flouring on the outside.  Instead, the combination of bonding and frying has resulted in a layer of unctuous, luxurious, subcutaneous fat -- just like in duck.  It's not uncooked, it just wasn't rendered out.  The skin is still crackling-crisp.

The piece you see the cross-section of was one of the tenderized pieces.  This is one of the untenderized:

The steak is cooked to about medium.  (Rare would be difficult because of the frying.)

The flavor is different from conventional chicken-fried steak.  For one thing, the steak is different -- these are sirloin tips, not mega-tenderized chuck.  For another, there's no batter, just crispy chicken skin.  You don't have any incidents of meat falling loose from its encasement.

I think cream gravy would be out of place here.  This is a dish called chicken-fried steak, but it's not that chicken-fried steak.  If I were to accompany this, I think the way to go would be some warmed pepper jelly, and some sauteed greens.

I was going to include the whole batch of transglutaminase experiments in this post.  I've changed my mind.  They can have their own separate post.  It would be disrespectful to clutter this post with them.  This, this is one of the best things I've done: this is my masterpiece: this is my Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones.  Today, I am a cook.