Content about Beef
December 11, 2008
How to make the best burger at home.
You know the burger obsession is going off the deep end when semi-serious discussion takes place over the burger making skills of a cartoon. Please stick with me. This cartoon happened feature J. Wellington Wimpy, the burger-loving sidekick of Popeye. Hamburger America author George Motz found this clip and was there to comment on Wimpy's burger making skills: "Notice how even in cartoons back then they got it...
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November 30, 2008
A baby step towards making salami.
It's similar in appearance and texture, and has that unmistakable salty tang of cured meat. I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, but the idea is simple. Pork tenderloin, which is already in a convenient salami-like shape perfect for slicing, makes a perfect dry-curing project.
There is already one traditional cured meat called Lonzino, Italian, which is made not from the tenderloin but the regular boneless...
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November 20, 2008
Because fresh pasta deserves a sauce this good.
Once I figured out how to make fresh pasta, I waited all of 12 hours before I set out to create my own Ragù alla Bolognese. It was a goal of mine ever since watching an episode of Heston Blumenthal's TV series In Search of Perfection. The premise of the show is for the acclaimed chef to reexamine some stodgy British classics by going back to the roots of the original dish. His final recipe usually involves...
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October 13, 2008
Well, just look at that! After all my anxiety and the lack of sausage stuffer before I started this adventure, on the third day I ate hot dogs. They looked like hot dogs, smelled like hot dogs, and tasted like that perfect hot dog you always dream about (well, at least I dream about hot dogs). Unbelievably beefy and with a hard snap from the sheep intestine, this was a truly wonderful dog.
Too bad it was such a pain to...
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October 6, 2008
(Scene at the Paulina Meat Market in Chicago)
Butcher: "Number 37!"
Me: "Yeah, that's me."
Butcher: "What can I get for you?"
Me: "Yeah, I'll take 10 feet of sheep casings."
I don't say that often enough in life, and up until this Saturday it had never crossed my mind. But here I was at Paulina Meat Market ordering sheep intestines from butchers that make their own fine sausages. The...
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August 26, 2008
Keep that spatula at hand.
At first everything was fine. Taking a cue from Adam Kuban, we decided to make our own onion rings instead of the normal burger pairing of fries. The recipe was taken from Simply Recipes, which soaked the onions in buttermilk and coated them in flour and cornmeal.
We fried them in canola oil set to 350 degrees for a few minutes, until nice and golden brown. We stashed them in preheated oven and got to the beef...
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June 12, 2008
Before I start detailing this ridiculous project, I’d like to point out that I fail in the end. There is no great yogurt recipe hidden in here, no surprising technique that changes everything. I tried some methods, some reasonable and some quite stupid, and none of them worked. I just want to make some respectable yogurt at home, and I’m hoping some of you can help.
I thought this would be an easy exercise...
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April 21, 2008
“American cheese (processed cheese)”
-Wylie Dufresne, describing the type of cheese he likes on his burger
I haven’t exactly made my peace with American cheese. I still don’t like it cubed, melted in grilled cheese, or laid across a deli sandwich. I’m not that into reliving my childhood and, really, actual cheese always tastes better. I thought that was the end of it. When I was young I...
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February 22, 2008
How to make a better burger at home.
Grinding meat may seem like an exercise for those with too much time on their hands, or those overly devoted to doing things from scratch--which I am. But I'm here to argue that there are more compelling and more logical reasons for doing so: for one, the meat will taste better. You'll also know where it omes from, unlike with a styrofoam tray from the grocery store, which is likely the sum of countless cows...
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February 12, 2008
Sometimes you just have to start. I have been wanting to make beef jerky for a while now, but had always stumbled on how I was to actually dry out the meat. I don’t have a smoker, and it didn’t sound like any of the other methods were going to work. But hey, I thought, cowboys did this; I can do this. So I bought some lean beef, sliced it thinly, and coated it with some salt, onion powder, garlic powder, and...
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January 2, 2008
Welcome to 2008! Abby and I spent New Year's Eve constructing the ultimate meal. We spent a small fortune at Whole Foods and walked away with a lot of shellfish and a fillet mignon or two. Since we weren't going to some fancy black tie event, we felt okay about spending more money than we would for a weeknight meal. We sort of had a carte blanche to create whatever we could dream up. Here's what we had: ...
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October 28, 2007
I torture myself with spicy food. This can take form in many various cuisines and dishes, but they all have one thing in common: unbearable heat. It’s not that Abby doesn’t like food with spice in it, it’s just that I usually push things way too far. Like I imagine people do with certain dangerous drugs, I plan an evening when I’m home alone with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I eat a lot of...
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October 17, 2007
As you may or may not remember, I’m attempting to go somewhat local. Click back to Week 1 to see how it got started.
We’ve written about short ribs twice before and I’ll be honest in saying this isn’t the master recipe. Part of the problem is that both previous recipes were really Blake’s babies. It was his pot and his enthusiasm that spurred the effort. While I was there for the first go...
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September 17, 2007
First was the rather easy substitution of bourbon for the cognac
I tend to spend way too much time researching what I'm going to eat. Nearly every recipe is cross-examined against other works I have, just to make sure I'm doing things correctly. But I was on to this recipe the moment I saw Alton pull out his steaks. I didn't check if this was the authentic way to make this, I just went for it.
What could cause me to go into such enthusiastic fits? Steak au...
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August 22, 2007
I eat a lot of tacos. I keep a pack of corn tortillas around at all times. Thanks to folks like Rick Bayless, I’ve even branched out to mushroom and swiss chard tacos, huevos rancheros, shrimp, and the granddaddy of them all, our very own Fish Tacos. Glorious, ethereal fish tacos.
This is all rather strange coming from someone who only ate hard shell tacos for the first 16-17 years of his life. Tacos used to mean...
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August 19, 2007
We don't usually have hot dogs on Sunday night. I've got nothing against the sausages, but Sunday night is usually dedicated to my more adventurous cooking escapades. You know, Shrimp Etouffee, and other meals that take hours and hours. But tonight was going to be different. We needed some time, so we planned ahead and got perhaps the easiest comfort food to prepare.
Why such a hurry? Well, because of the...
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July 10, 2007
Last weekend, some of Elin’s friends that she met while getting her master’s degree in England came for a visit. Max and Chris are both from South Africa. They spent a long weekend with us and we did our best to show them our way of life in New York—playing the good hosts. Often, guests find New York overwhelming, or they find the idea of it overwhelming. “Where do I start?” they ask....
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By some miracle, my girlfriend and I have recently moved into a beautiful, spacious, freshly painted apartment with a backyard, a washer/dryer, and a dishwasher: three luxuries that most New Yorkers offer up onto the pyre of compromise very early on. It’s simply assumed: you won’t have those things. You live in the city because the people that live here are interesting, and there are opportunities, and it’s...
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May 24, 2007
Lest you all forget my infatuation with the pickled cabbage, it is powerful. When I worked in Manhattan, the attraction to the stuff had me trudging over to the Korean buffet at least once a week. But I no longer work in Manhattan, and while I'm very happy with my new job, I do miss my kimchi.
I’m not sure why it never occurred to me until now to secure my own stash. Like a lot of ethnic foods, I always wanted to place...
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May 8, 2007
I have been meaning to get around to this earlier: I really like the food blog New Orleans Cuisine. I have no real connection to New Orleans outside of a dead great aunt and gorgeous visit a month before that storm came when my girlfriend and I flirted with the idea of staying. But that's really it. I listen to Louis Armstrong occasionally. I've heard of Juvenile. But I do love the food, and this site has...
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Sometimes all you can hope for at the end of a long day is a little bit of harmony. Whether through yoga, walking your dog, or blasting Bona Drag, you find it and somehow the day washes away. Often I find this harmony by cooking (sometimes with the Morrissey at the same time)--a chance to relax, create, and then have something delicious to show for it. I have a recipe that, while deceptively simple, works so well that it...
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March 19, 2007
The most well-documented failure on this website was the first time we cooked beef short ribs. Tough, sinewy, and ugly--a big fibrous brick of protein fastened onto a sled of white bone by tendons and mysterious pieces of grizzle. Short ribs are the beef equivalent to a Salman Rushdie novel: willfully difficult, at times indecent and gross, but after an extended period of histrionic outbursts and piquiant flavors, in which patience...
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November 29, 2006
There is "no doubt early man cooked his meats using dry heat," claims Madeleine Kamman, author of the esteemed Making of a Cook and a very friendly-looking lady who I sometimes wish was my grandmother. She speculates that he might have discovered this gastronomic feat in the instance of two different accidents, producing two enduring ways of cooking meat. The first, a discovery of whole animals while foraging for food...
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November 15, 2006
Every weekend I quickly scan Fairway's specials to see what deal I'll get off with this week. This time, I thought it was a joke, because I saw this sucker staring back at me. Filet Mignon for $5.99, which is a minor miracle on par with shooting stars and finding a real pastrami sandwich. Considering this cut regularly fetches prices that stumble towards the $20 mark, something had to be wrong. This is the leanest...
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November 5, 2006
I screwed up. During the last throes of summer, I treated my grill with the utmost love and care. But I'm apparently a fair-weather fan, for as soon as the temperature dipped I completely forgot about it and retreated into the warmth of my kitchen. Not only did I neglect my cooking apparatus for a solid month, I didn't even bother to cover it. I didn't even set it close to a wall. It sat in the middle of the back...
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October 30, 2006
I had no idea. Abby and I are staring at this picture of skirt steak with string beans with mouths agape, salivating over the chance to make this fine meal, when we notice that nowhere in the ingredients are those beans listed. We double check, and then wonder what it was exactly that we were looking at. All they they had was something called haricot verts. "I'm not sure what that is," I blabbered out trying to...
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September 22, 2006
Just like your grandmother, I now own a cast-iron skillet. It seemed like the logical choice after I realized the finite possibilities of non-stick, yet was not ready to burn my whole month's salary on an All-Clad frying pan. This cost $19. It's heavy as a brick--actually, more like a couple bricks. You can toss this war-horse around with glee and it will take it all. Clang it around as loud as you can, see if it...
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September 14, 2006
Besides meatloaf, it's the ultimate mystery meat. Coated with a thick brown sauce and usually hard as a rock, Salisbury steak was the meal I most genuinely hated during my school years. Its presence institgated the hoarding of dinner rolls and the unfortunate act of talking to girls, just so I could make off with one of their mini cobs of corn. It was a tough day on the streets, and one I don't like to think about often. But is there more...
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September 11, 2006
If you were functioning on the subway this morning, you probably saw a steady stream of backpacked kids parading around with wide mouths and unsure stares. That daze was the stern face of school, the great unknown and the official end to summer. Standing amongst those kids, I tried remember my own back-to-school feeling, the churning stomach, the moment when I knew it was all over, and that I'd have to enter those classrooms again....
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August 18, 2006
We christened him Kurt and set about trying in vain to keep him alive. The ride back from Fairway was not long, but we needed some wine, and the car was quite stuffy and hot. Blake, strangely, began developing an affection for the creature, and cared for him so deeply he wouldn't leave him in the car alone. So we carried him into our liquor store, LeNell's, and asked the owners what wine would best go with him. And with two...
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June 1, 2006
Tackling the art of braising
When I got to the grocery store I had no idea what short ribs look like, so I simply asked for 2 pounds of them, and that amounted to 4 short ribs. Thankfully the butcher didn't look at me funny or say "They're right in front of you, bub" (which they were). They were only about 6 dollars a pound, amounting to 12 dollars of meat feeding four people. This was looking good. It was time to learn how to braise....
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Saturday and Sunday of this weekend were among the best days this year, second only, perhaps, to last Saturday, the proclaimed "Day of the Year" by Manhattan Users Guide with a delightful essay about the joys of walking New York's streets. Call this post the Brooklyn Users Guide--our own Day of the Year--spent soaking in a day dry and warm in the sun, cool and breezy in the shade.
Spring may have officialy started...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
