Oh yeah, grilling season is here again.

I grill a bit in the winter but not as much as I hate freezing my ass off.

We recently got a Weber Q300 gas grill and it's just fantastic. I was a bit skeptic with gas instead of charcoal, but you just grill SO much more with gas because it's so easy, turn the gas on, hit the igniter and bam, 5 minutes later you'r grilling instead of getting a starter going and waiting 30 minutes, then the cleanup and mess. I think winter grilling will be more frequent to now that it's so fast to get started.

Any grill heads in here? We just did chicken with barbecue sauce last night and also added some smoking chips to get some smoke flavor and it was to die for. Next up will be salmon I think, best grilled fish ever.

Any American rub recipes? Can't ever have to many rubs on hand

As I've mentioned before, I cook using the sous-vide technique at home. One of the chefs evangelizing this technique is Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck (3 Michelin starred restaurant in England)

Here's Heston sous-vide cooking a whole damn pig in a hot tub using an endoscopy camera to position stuffing inside the pig.

http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/03/the-trojan-hog-on-hestons-roman-feast-...

If you want to see more of Heston, grab the TV series "Kitchen Science" with Heston Blumenthal. I think there's even a couple episodes on youtube.

Here's an awesome sweet I make whenever I run out of it. caramelized ginger snacks!

Ingredients:
2 large ginger rhizomes.
Sugar.
Water.

Peel ginger rhizomes with a teaspoon, doesn't have to be perfect, just take most of it off as it can be bitter if the rhizomes are old.

Cut into thin slices.

Put in pot and add roughly equal amount of water and bring to a boil. Boil until water is reduced to at least half.

Add as much table sugar (or cane sugar if you wanna be fancy) as the original amount of sliced ginger and boil until the sugar starts to crystallize. Carefull to not burn, but it's ok and even good if it browns a bit.

Quickly spread out on a cake rack or cool plate.

When cool it goes completely dry, hack in smaller pieces if it clumped up a bit. Store in a plastic food container.

Fucking delish I tells ya! It's HOT, but not chilly hot, very warming.

This stuff has a million uses. In cakes, as a snack, over cereals (Godlike in homemade trailmix, excellent with coffee or tea etc..

Ok, this has got to be seen to be believed. Masaokis teaches cooking, sorta like a mix between a hardcore alcoholic and a raving mad hobo, Nouvelle cuisine for slobs if you will.

ENJOY!

OMELET FOR OBAMA:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3C2F2D9A806FBD3A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRGYVDb2_xM

Part 2 is my favorite WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED? IT'S BURNING!!!

More here: http://www.youtube.com/user/masaokis

A couple of years ago I bought a bag of Jasmin rice, it was fucking amazing but I could not find it again, the store couldn't get it anymore

Since then I have tried hundreds of different brands to find that quality again, none came even close.

I finally found them by drilling my asian cuisine pusher and pestering him a couple times a month to see if he could find them and he finally came through.

They are exported from Thailand under the name "Golden Lotus"

http://www.kcrice.com/index.htm

Seems like it's crazy of me to care this much about some damn rice right?

All I can say is try them if you can get them, and you will see what I'm raving about.

When you open the bag your kitchen will fill with the most powerfull smell of Jasmin Rice, when you cook them the whole house will be filled for hours with this delicious sweet aroma, nothing like any other jasmine rice and the taste... oh mama!

Seriously, I could eat nothing but these rice all year round, they are that good.

Being fucking fed up with the horrid excuse for beef here in DK that has all been pumped with water so you can't get a good crust because of all the water that drains off when you fry it, I started to age my own beef as an experiment to see how much better it would be and if it could be done at home.

All I can say is "Oh mama is this good"

If you wanna try it yourself here's how:

Buy a good cut of meat, doesn't have to be that expensive, but try to find something with good marbling, it helps. Not less than would get you 5-6 good sized steaks.

Check your fridge temp, has to be around 35F. Stick in one of these things that measures air humudity, you want something around 60 which you will probably have with a temp around 35F.

Wrap a kitchen towel around the meat, put meat on a cake rack or similar so any juice can drip off.

Check once a day and if the towel gets to damp from meat juice change it to a new one.

Go for around 6-7 days, you will lose a good 30% of weight. The meat will smell "good" for lack of a better term, and there will a slight sour note in the smell, this is fine, and indeed what you want. Any "bad" flavours is a bad sign, your nose will tell you, trust your nose.

When you'r ready to try it, cut of the ends if they got to dry and tough and fry some good sized steaks to no more than medium rare. The meat will have been broken down a lot more than fresh meat so even medium rare will be great even if you like medium.

The "beefyness" will have gone trough the roof, the crust you get from frying will be totally brown instead of just the normal pathetic crust you get from fresh meat.

I'm in the process of getting a spare used fridge just to have meat aging in there all the time, it's that much better.

omg check out this meat storage room at Peter Luger

Money vault? Fuck that I want a meat vault.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/22/nyregion/20081222-rooms-pa...

Watch this uncensored interview, the world needs more people like this:

"Politicians are glorified parking attendents"

Also LOL at mamas boy interviewer getting red faced and acting all upset when Gordon swears, fucking little sheltered twat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOX5XoW2EEI

Some of you may remember my Previous post on Sous-vide

I been using this technique for a while now and I can't begin to explain how much this has done for my cooking.

Good meat is off the chain expensive in DK, don't know how expensive it is in other countries. But for example a kilo of Filet Mignon is around 40 US dollars, most other meats is not worth buying unless you make stews out of it, tough as shoeleather, commercially brined to increase the water content so a kilo of meat will turn into half a kilo when cooked. Fucking bullshit. Impossible to get a reliably tender steak, it's a crap shoot and then you spend a lot of time and effort and sit down to eat and it's touch as an old shoe, grrr.

Sous-vide has allowed me to go out and buy just about any cheap cut of meat and it consistantly turns out to melt in my mouth. I recently found a good offer for flank steak and I tried cooking it normally, even at rare it was tough, even when pounded flat it was STILL tough.

Sous-vide cooked it, tender as filet mignon.

I've experimented a lot with Sous-vide to see if I could make it accessible for people that don't want to go total nerd on thier home cooking and yes, it realy is quite easy to get started and you DON'T need to turn your kitchen into a laboratory.

A rice cooker, a voltage regulator, and a decent thermometer and you can do it allmost as well as with expensive lab equipment. You may be a degree of here and there but it's still miles better than normal cooking of meat and fish. You don't realy need the vaccuum sealer, it works fine with ziplock bags, just squeeze the air out and close them up.

If anyone's interested in being able to buy cheap as shit meat and turn it into mouth watering, melt in your mouth goodness let me know and I'll write up some info on how to get started for under 50-80$ bucks, less if you allready have a rice cooker and a decent thermometer. It's NOT hard, try it once and you will be SOLD.

Here's a short easy and cheap version, sort of faux Sous-vide that you can try, just to see how amazingly Sous-vide works, it doesn't work for meats that needs to be cooked long and low to dissolve collagen into gelatin, like meats with lots of tough connective tissue, but for a steak or some other clump of meat that doesn't have tough connective tissie it works superbly well.

Grab your meat and a ziplock bag. cut of a slice of butter, salt and pepper the meat and place the butter slice on top. Now grab your digital meat thermometer and stick the probe into the midde of the meat lengthwise. Put the meat into the bottom of the ziplock bag, squeeze the bag so there's as little air in it as possible, best way is to zip the bag almost all the way, then sqeeze the air out and zip the last part.

Got your bag with the meat in it and the thermo wire sticking out of the bag?

Now heat a pot of water so it's just below boiling, we don't want any bubbles, just gently steam from the water. Put the bag into the pot so it floats, set your thermometer to go off at 60C or 140F.

When the beeper goes off remove the ziplock bag from the water. Heat a skillet to searing hot, in with a drop of oil, quickly sear both sides for 30 seconds.

Slice meat and marvel at the perfect color all the way, try a slice and taste just how good and tender the meat is. The meat is so tender because sous-vide doesn't need high heat to penetrate the meat fast, it just cooks the meat until the desired doneness is slowly reached so the outside becomes dry and the heat is not high enough that the fibers in the meat contracts.

Flavour paring can be used to substitute ingredients or put things together in interesting combinations for dishes that you would not have imagined otherwise.

By looking at the component flavour compounds in foodstuffs and finding more than 2 compounds they have in common we can mix them with each other and have them blend and work amazingly well, even when our instincts tells us that would not work, for example chocolate and cooked chicken? Sounds pretty ewwww right? But it works.

This has been something that for the home cook have been out of reach because you need to send shit in for expensive molecular analysis in order to find out what different ingredients have in common. There's a massively expensive database you can buy (20K+ $) that many high end restaurants buy that I have been lusting for, but fuck that price for home use.

Now theres a website with some heavy financial backing that have put a ton of these analysis online into a database format and you just pick from ingredients, the database looks up other ingredients with the same flavour compounds and displays them in a graphical tree showing you what can be mix or substituted.

Seriously, try some weird combos and be amazed that they actually work great together. It's miles of fun freaking out people by serving odd combinations. You also get a lot more mileage out of whatever you have laying around because you find that you can combine things that you normally wouldn't.

It's also fun to see combinations that you have tasted before and see that the reason they go so well together is because of matching flavour compounds. For example Chicken and sesame seeds.

http://www.foodpairing.be/

This was fucking yummy I tells ya. Man I love thai and chinese food.

Since I've been pigging out on deep fry dishes with thick tempura coating I thew my colosterol levels a bone and used a nice Tilapia fillet as the main protein.

Poach some julienned dikon radish, sliced ginder, a stalk of lemon grass, some Shiitake mushrooms and chopped scalion onions, stalk of celery, 1-2 large red mild chilis, and caremelised garlic cloves. Then heat your wok to jet engine hot and stir fry for 30 seconds and set aside in seperate bowls. If you want some more umph mash a couple garlic cloves with 2 "rat food" thai chilis in a mortar and brown that in some oil and blend in.

Slice a tilapia fillet into strips, dry of in dry flour so the batter will stick better, then coat in tempura mix, stir fry in lots of oil so hot it's about to combust into flames.

Combine all poached veggies, heat 2-4 tbs of grapeseed/peanut oil until smoking, dump in veggies, tip wok to reach flames and stir at the edges inwards into the wok to get flames, don't piss yourself, you want HUGE flames, keep it up as long as you can, when flames die tip the wok into the gass flame and use your spatula to sorta pull the flame into the wok and it should flame up again, keep doing that into the oil is gone and no more flames spark, this is what your thai/chinese are missing and why they never taste right, this is what's called "wok hei", the breath of the wok and it gives your dish this delicious smoky flavour, this is imperative to get that real restaurent taste. Now we want a little taste of cat food so sprinkle 2 tbs of fish sauce, don't worry about the smell of public urinary it won't show in the dish but add some lovely umani taste. If you absolutely can't stand fish sauce add some soya and a pinch or two of MSG salt. (No it won't kill you, it's produced by your body allready, without monosodium glutamate (MSG) in your body you will keel over and die, your taste receptors have cells specifically designed to taste MSG, MSG is present in vegetables like tomatos, in meat, in tofu, in soya, in mushrooms and lots of other things and you'r still alive, so tell the health hippies spouting of scaremonger shit to go kill themselves.)

Cook some jasmin rice and setup on serving plate, drizzle generours sprinkling of mung been sprouts, add a couple greem lemon slices and serve.

YUM!

For making easy tempura, just buy some premixed tempura flour. To prepare mix in water with a chopstick or end of a spoon, you don't want a smooth mix you want it lumpy and ugly as fuck about the density of pancake batter, those lumps will sweel up when fried and add extra crisp.

Something I was thinking about recently.

Organic foods are supposed to be more nutritious and contain more vitamins studies say.

People living on a normal vestern diet already take in WAY more vitamins than we need, not to mention nutrients in general, most people are to fucking fat anyway and excess vitamins are simply discarded by your body.

So what the fuck is the point of paying 200% more for food which supposedly contains more of what you don't need? Only malnutrioned people in 3rd world contries would benefit from it, but they sure as fuck can't afford it.

And no, "organic" food doesn't taste better, food that are grown properly, and animals that are taken care of properly taste better, it has nothing to do with being organic.

I just stumbled over this site today and thought I'd share:

http://www.foodsubs.com/

Just an amazing resource for anyone interested in food.

Food freaks only!

I just found this technique, it's fucking amazing.

I like my stocks to be clear, crystal clear, but results have been dismal so far until I found this technique.

After your stock is done, strain it like normal to clear of large food particles.

Now add a few sheets of gelatin to the stock and disolve it, allow to cool to room temperature so the gelatin sets.

Now for the magic. Stuff it in the freezer until it's frozen solid.

Take it out, put in a sieve with a sheet of kitchen paper towel in the bottom of the seive and let it defrost.

Frezing gelatin breaks down the gelatin by a process called syneresis. What happens is the gelatin looses it's power to keep the liquid contained, it seeps out, leaving particles as small as 0.1 microns trapped in the geletin.

Result... Stock as clear as a glass of white wine.

You can use the techique for anything you want to clarify. For example tomato or carrot juice as clear as water but still tasting like it should.

You can use it for flavour extraction to. After you clarify just let the water evaporate and you have 99% pure flavours of whatever you clarified.

I started learning this technique of cooking meat/fish some time ago from Heston Blumenthal (Science of Cooking) and it's a culinary miracle.

It's quite simple to get started, get yourself a vacuum pack device, they can be had quite cheap.

Now let's say you'r cooking a chunk of meat, if you want this to be tender and medium rare you traditionally cook it so the inside is medium and have the outer meat get's overcooked and dry.

With sous-vide, you drop whatever spices and salt pepper on the meat, then vacuum seal it. For medium rare meat you want to cook it to a temp. of 56C. So all you do now is heat a large bowl of water to 56C, drop in the vacuum sealed meat and let it cook for around 4-12 hours depending on the width of the meat. seal in your temperature probe inside the meat to monitor the internal temp, once it's reached your meat is done. If there's a lot of collogen (The white chewy stuff) then the meat needs 12 hours, it doesn't matter, as long as you hold the correct temp. you can cook it for days and it will be ok and it can't dry out because it's vacuum sealed.

After it's done you have a piece of meat that's the same pinkish color from the outside in, perfection.

We have a problem now, no browned layer outside so less flavour due to lack of Maillard reaction (The flavours comming from browning)

So grab a kitchen gass tourch and brown that fucker up good, there's your delicious outer crust.

I can go and buy any piece of meat now, cheap shit that would be as tender as a shoe and it will be tender enough that it almost falls apart.

If you want to go one extra step, brine the meat first, say a large chunk of meat you need to soak it in a 5% salt solution with some vinegar overnight, chicken and pork less time, around 4+6 hours, due to osmotic pressure the meat will reach equilibrium with the salt solution and will be perfectly salted all the way and not just lots of salt on the outside like normal salting, and the osmotic reaction will have drawn water inside the meat so it will be extra extra extra juicy and tender.

Yay for science!

I finally got tired of roasting my coffee using a wok and a heatgun or messing with popcorn poppers so I got myself a commercial grade home roaster, the Gene Cafe.

Been wanting one for ages but it's fucking expensive but I finally caved since when I roast with a heatgun I have to do it outside in a toolshed in the garden because of the smoke, and it's freakin cold right now.

Here's a couple pics:

Video of this beast in action: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-21754440054705737

Yeah, I like my Coffee, what of it?