What's for Dinner?

You guys are killin me, I'm telling ya, just killing me. Johnd with the wine, you guys with the awesome food, I've gotta get to bed before I start drinking and cooking.

So this happened last night.

Salad course, Baby Spinach Salad with Mandarin Orange and Red Onion

Main course, Southwestern Lobster Mac and Cheese. The tweak to make it southwestern was I added 3 roasted Poblano peppers to the mix that gave it another layer of smokey goodness. Local grocery store had lobster tails (small for like $5 each so 4-5 of those and you have a really nice amount of Lobster. The kitchen still smells like lobster, shallots and garlic this AM!

Paired very well with.......

Nothing fancy. Just had a potato craving.

Ran to the LHBS today to get some grain for my next batch (Guinness draft) since Friday afternoons have additional nasty traffic. Stopped at the local Giant and bought some spicy Italian snausages for $1.92 for 5. Grilled and served with some peppers and onions, yum. Will use the leftover sausage for Pizza on Friday night. Also got a Butt portion of a ham for $0.89 lb, that will be one of the weekend meals for sure.

Pancakes, bacon and eggs tonight!!!

A little Roadside Chicken.

Baby Backs on the Egg

Hmmmmmmm [emoji108]

Ribs, yum!

It was beautiful, gorgeous, stunning day here, sunny and 66F. Where the hell did that come from? I defrosted a THICK, nicely marbled New York Strip steak I have been hoarding, and fired up the grill. My wife made a dish of "green Israeli cous-cous" from the cookbook Plenty, which has, among other things, pistachios, onions, green chile, arugula, parsley, cilantro, tarragon, dill, mint, and olive oil, smothered in feta. I also made green beans on the grill, with thyme and olive oil.

For the steak, I just did a simple dry brine, then seasoned with paprika, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder. (Basically, I make my own Montreal Steak seasoning, but without the salt, because the dry-brining adds enough salt up front.) It came out nicely -- med. rare. (I was shooting for rare to med. rare.)

Homemade ramen with a konbu mushroom broth garnished with chili oil.

Interesting dinner tonight. We found monkfish (aka "poor man's lobster") at a local grocery store. The tail of this ugly beast is similar in size & shape to a pork tenderloin, although a bit more tapered. I cut it into ~3/4" medallions, then cooked this sous vide at 122F, sealed up with lots of butter and fresh tarragon. I made a beurre blanc sauce to go with this, and wound up incorporating the cooking juices of the fish and more tarragon into the sauce. I was unsure whether to serve the medallions as they came out of the sous vide bath, or possibly to sear them. So I hedged my bets and seared about half of it hard for about a minute on each side in smoking hot butter. It turns out that, after smothering in the creamy beurre blanc sauce, both seared and unseared were lovely.

We also had more of the green Israeli cous-cous mentioned upthread, and I also made braised Savoy cabbage with ho-made chicken stock.

This was all washed down with a Chateau Ste. Michelle Chard, which performed its role admirably!

Well, I guess it is up to me again!

Along with roasted broccoli, we made a lovely crab/pasta dish. In addition to yesterday's monkfish, the little grocer we went to yesterday had Dungeness crab clusters. We adore Dungeness crab, but it is very hard to come by out here, so we nabbed it. I made a aglio e olio sauce with copious amounts of olive oil, garlic, butter, and some Chardonnay. Boiled up some pasta, dumped it into the sauce, reheated crab in the pasta water, then served over the pasta. It was delicious. Also, DW made a salad with herbs out the wazoo (and we all know how painful that can be ;^) She used fresh tarragon, arugula, dill, and basil in addition to some good ol' Red Leaf.

Washed all this down with some Cline Viognier. (I really have to get my Viognier and Pinot Gris batches bottled!!)

Seafood is the theme, it seems. We did steamed, spiced shrimp, hush puppies and a simple salad.

sour_grapes said:

For the steak, I just did a simple dry brine,

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SG,

I have never heard of dry brining. Care to elaborate how this is done and what it does for the steak? Sounds very interesting.

JohnT said:

SG,

I have never heard of dry brining. Care to elaborate how this is done and what it does for the steak? Sounds very interesting.

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Sorry, I thought this was widespread knowledge. You just dump a bunch of kosher salt on both sides of the steak, completely covering it. You let it rest for a period of time, then you rinse it off. I set a timer for 10 minutes, so I don't forget. It can get too salty if you let it go too long. As I say, you then rinse the salt off, and then I dry it with paper towels so it can brown nicely.

Brining has a few nice benefits. One, of course, is the delicious salty taste! But also the salt causes some beneficial changes in the protein structure of the muscle. Counterintuitively, these changes both dry the surface, and make it more juicy. Brining also serves to tenderize the affected areas.

How? Well, when you put salt on the surface, osmosis drives moisture from the muscle to the salt outside. But then the salt diffuses into the muscle, and serves to denature the muscle proteins. As described by Harold McGee, “the salt begins to modify the meat. The sodium attaches to the long, intertwined muscle proteins and causes the proteins to push apart from one another. This … weakens the muscle fibers,” and it “disrupts the structure of the muscle filaments.” You can see why this serves to make the meat more tender. But why does it make it more juicy?

We need to stop and ask why overcooked meat is dry to begin with. In addition to simply drying out due to heat, there is another deleterious effect. Normally, the muscle fibers contract upon heating, and expel the moisture that is held between the muscle fibers. After the modification by the salt, however, the muscle fibers cannot contract in the same way, so they don’t lose as much moisture. (They still lose some, just not as much as they usually would.)

Now, all of this is true both for wet brining (i.e., soaking in a saline solution) and for dry brining. Wet brining is better in many ways, as additional water diffuses in to partially offset the moisture that is inevitably lost. This is why I like to brine my turkey, for example. But, for meats that I want to brown, I prefer dry brining. Partially drying the surface of your steak with chemicals (e.g., salt) means you don’t need to spend time for the heat of your fire (or frying pan) to dry it. Rather, you start to get the delicious Mailliard reactions going sooner. So, you can get a nicely seared steak before you overcook (and dry out!) the inside.

When I dry-brine a steak, it is only for 10 minutes, so really only the surface region gets affected. Thus, all the stuff I wrote there about moisture is not so important in the case of a steak -- it is mostly about the sear. (It is important if you wet-brine a turkey overnight, however.)

On a related note, you should try the Cafe Zuni-style dry-salted roasted chicken:http://www.eater.com/2013/10/8/6362421/zuni-cafes-roast-chicken-for-two

I've seen 'recipes' that call for dry brining a steak for up to 3 days. Never tried it myself, but it sounds interesting.

Dry brining 3 days (but not "covered" in a layer kosher salt). Put my cast iron pan in a cold oven set temp for 450 and let it heat up for about 30 mins (this way heats the cast iron evenly). Removed pan from oven and put on a med high burner, added a tablespoon of oil, added steaks flipping every 2 mins for a total of 8 mins. Let rest 15 mins and topped with a homemade herb butter. Seriously the best steak I have ever cooked.

Amanda660 said:

Dry brining 3 days (but not "covered" in a layer kosher salt). Put my cast iron pan in a cold oven set temp for 450 and let it heat up for about 30 mins (this way heats the cast iron evenly). Removed pan from oven and put on a med high burner, added a tablespoon of oil, added steaks flipping every 2 mins for a total of 8 mins. Let rest 15 mins and topped with a homemade herb butter. Seriously the best steak I have ever cooked.

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That steak looks good, but I was told only turn a steak once and no more or it gets tough. What's your opinion?

What kind of steak was that, Amanda?