a little daube'll

First things first: this part has nothing to do with food.

Over there in the corner, as you see, it says I'm "a full-time writer who happens to cook."  I think this pretty much sums up the stance of the blog -- cooking isn't my profession, but it IS something I have a lot of time for.  Anyway, usually that writing involves things you don't want or need to know about, but this time I have a novel:

Low Country is NOT a novel about food.  It is not a quirky mystery taking place at a gumbo cook-off.  It is not Liquor, a really nice book you should read if you haven't.  The protagonist is a food writer until he retires to South Carolina to move into a haunted house, but I don't want to mislead you -- the only thing Low Country has in common with this blog is that I wrote them both.  Still, people who like haunted house stories are definitely a subset of people who eat food, so it may be something you're interested in, in which case, click on the picture there to be taken to the Amazon page.

Second things second: food.

Daube glace is an old school New Orleans dish, wherein you take leftover daube -- slow-cooked beef -- and solidify it with the addition of gelatin, and then serve it cold like pate.

It's extremely satisfying food.  I braised about a pound of chuck roast in the oven with some pork stock (it's what I had - obviously beef stock would make more sense), bay leaves, celery from my mother's garden (better- and fuller-tasting than supermarket celery), and onions; let it cool; shredded the beef and strained the stock; combined the stock with gelatin; and combined the stock and the beef with sauteed celery and onions, and seasoned with red miso, Louisiana hot sauce, smoked paprika, saffron, and pebrella.  The latter three ingredients were added to slightly inflect the Spanish elements in Creole cooking.

Served with a baguette.  Very nice.

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.

holy roman empire

Just as the Meyer lemon is not a lemon, the cocktail grapefruit is not a grapefruit: it's a cross between a mandarin and a pummelo.  Since a grapefruit is a cross between a pummelo and the sweet orange, you can see why there are some similarities.  But both the pummelo and the cocktail grapefruit lack the true grapefruit's characteristic bitterness: the cocktail grapefruit is instead a sweet, juicy, low-acid fruit with a mild grapefruit flavor.

(An easy way to cut supremes, as you can see, is to "carve" the grapefruit like you would a pineapple, and then slice the segments out in wedges.)

The cocktail grapefruit supremes were part of a composed salad, if you like that term: blanched charred chilled Savoy cabbage, lamb's lettuce, three hard cheeses (Pecorino Romano, gouda, cave-aged gruyere), bresaola, salami, cocktail grapefruit, cocktail grapefruit/lemon juice, hazelnut oil.

(Bresaola is sort of like beef prosciutto, though it's not especially salty: air-dried lean beef, sliced tissue-paper-thin.)