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coraaParsnips with lemon-butter, warm German potato salad, and salmon mi-cuit. With pictures.
Also, a dose of personal nostalgia. ;)
Lemon-Butter Parsnips
Yesterday I made the parsnips, and I was going to make parsnips and then salmon, but I realized that the parsnips would be enough for me and I wasn't really hungry enough to do the salmon justice. So I just had the parsnips.
Simple enough that there's really no point in laying out the ingredients: I finely chopped a quarter of an onion, added it, a couple tablespoons of butter, and the juice of one lemon to the bag, then added four peeled and chopped parsnips and a tablespoon of brown sugar (not enough to make it sweet, just enough to cut the acidity). Sealed it up, and put it in the sous vide at 195F for three hours. (It only needed two, but I let it hang in there for an extra hour, until I was hungry.)
I pulled them, spooned out the parsnips (I left most of the juice, since the point was to infuse them), and tasted. It needed something else, so I topped it with another small sprinkle of brown sugar, and some sesame seeds. Came out looking like this:
The parsnips were perfectly tender. (I seem to be saying that a lot.) I really like the taste of parsnips -- they're mild and nutty and slightly sweet -- but I often have a hard time getting them tender all through, especially since they have a tapered shape and often the thickest part is still tough by the time the thinnest part has turned to mush. But these were very nice and tender.
I think I added too much lemon to the sauce, but that's an easy fix for next time.
Warm Potato Salad
My understanding -- someone correct me if I'm wrong -- is that German potato salad is distinguished by using vinegar rather than a creamy/mayonnaise-y sauce, by including bacon, and by often being served warm. Since I knew I was going to serve the salmon flavored with pickle, I thought that kind of potato salad would go nicely.
I consulted Google for temperatures and times, and came up with 181F for two hours or more. So I heated the sous vide to that temperature, put two chopped Yukon Gold potatoes in a bag, added a chopped leek, a splash of white wine vinegar, a couple of pieces of pancetta (I was out of regular bacon, but had some pancetta left over from another dish), a little salt, a smidge of sugar. Sealed it up, cooked three hours. It looked like this:
Basically, it looked like potato salad. It was good but not spectacular, I think because the potatoes were a little too firm for my taste. (I like potato salad with potatoes that are almost falling apart, but not quite.) Possibly I need to use russets instead, or possibly I need to tick the temperature up by ten degrees or so. I did like the way the flavors got deep into the potato pieces, though.
Salmon
My initial plan was to cook the salmon very plainly, using just salt and maybe a tiny smidge of ginger, but when I was poking around in the fridge this morning, I saw a jar of baby kosher dill pickles. Bang! Nostalgia minute.
When I was a kid, the Presbyterian church that I went to had a yearly salmon feast: some of the fishermen at the church caught a bunch of salmon, and then brought them back to grill. They were grilled in a specific way: scaled, cleaned and gutted, and then stuffed with kosher dill pickle spears. They were finally wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked on the grill. The pickles gave a really nice punch of flavor to the salmon meat: saltiness and tartness, plus the flavors of garlic and dill, which go well with salmon. (At the end, we'd fight over the warm kosher dill spears.)
So I decided to sous vide the salmon with one sliced baby dill pickle, and a splash of the pickle juice. I sealed it into the bag (and had some trouble keeping the vacuum sealer from sucking up the juice).
I wanted to try the salmon mi-cuit, which is a popular way to sous vide salmon. Mi-cuit, according to Google, means part-cooked; it's salmon that's in between raw salmon (as in sashimi) and fully-cooked salmon. Essentially, rare salmon. I looked on the sous vide cooking guide and found temperatures for mi-cuit salmon: 101F for very rare (yipe, I thought, that's barely above body temperature), 116F for rare-medium-rare, or 126 for medium-medium-rare. I decided to try 120F to start out, so in the fish went at that temperature.
And out it came, looking like this:
(It's got the white albumen that often comes out of salmon when you cook it. Theoretically you can brine the salmon and muck around with it to keep it from producing albumen, but I don't bother because it doesn't affect the taste that I can tell.)
You can sort of see how moist it is there, but then I poked it with a fork so you could see more easily:
If you look at the top of the piece of salmon, you can see where I 'flaked' it, and it split into two smooth, moist pieces -- no flakes at all. It's got the taste of cooked salmon, and it's opaque, but the texture is very moist and very, very smooth -- not quite the texture of salmon sashimi, but surprisingly reminiscent, and also reminiscent of ceviche or other raw-cured fish. And the pickle gave it a lovely and very subtle flavor -- not at all overpowering, just hints of garlic and dill. Mmm.
I think next time I'll try dropping the temperature even more, perhaps to 115F or even 110F, and see how that goes.
And now I think I'll have the other pot de creme, which has been waiting patiently for me in the fridge.
(It's been feeling really weird to write these -- I've been so pleased with the sous vide, which makes me excited and I want to share it, but the only way I can really do that is to talk about how well the food has come out, which basically means squeeing about my own dishes. Which feels awkwardly self-congratulatory! But the sous vide supreme really is pretty darn awesome, and a lot of the amazing things -- like the super-juiciness of the meat dishes, and the way the flavors meld -- are more it than me.)
Also, a dose of personal nostalgia. ;)
Lemon-Butter Parsnips
Yesterday I made the parsnips, and I was going to make parsnips and then salmon, but I realized that the parsnips would be enough for me and I wasn't really hungry enough to do the salmon justice. So I just had the parsnips.
Simple enough that there's really no point in laying out the ingredients: I finely chopped a quarter of an onion, added it, a couple tablespoons of butter, and the juice of one lemon to the bag, then added four peeled and chopped parsnips and a tablespoon of brown sugar (not enough to make it sweet, just enough to cut the acidity). Sealed it up, and put it in the sous vide at 195F for three hours. (It only needed two, but I let it hang in there for an extra hour, until I was hungry.)
I pulled them, spooned out the parsnips (I left most of the juice, since the point was to infuse them), and tasted. It needed something else, so I topped it with another small sprinkle of brown sugar, and some sesame seeds. Came out looking like this:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
The parsnips were perfectly tender. (I seem to be saying that a lot.) I really like the taste of parsnips -- they're mild and nutty and slightly sweet -- but I often have a hard time getting them tender all through, especially since they have a tapered shape and often the thickest part is still tough by the time the thinnest part has turned to mush. But these were very nice and tender.
I think I added too much lemon to the sauce, but that's an easy fix for next time.
Warm Potato Salad
My understanding -- someone correct me if I'm wrong -- is that German potato salad is distinguished by using vinegar rather than a creamy/mayonnaise-y sauce, by including bacon, and by often being served warm. Since I knew I was going to serve the salmon flavored with pickle, I thought that kind of potato salad would go nicely.
I consulted Google for temperatures and times, and came up with 181F for two hours or more. So I heated the sous vide to that temperature, put two chopped Yukon Gold potatoes in a bag, added a chopped leek, a splash of white wine vinegar, a couple of pieces of pancetta (I was out of regular bacon, but had some pancetta left over from another dish), a little salt, a smidge of sugar. Sealed it up, cooked three hours. It looked like this:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
Basically, it looked like potato salad. It was good but not spectacular, I think because the potatoes were a little too firm for my taste. (I like potato salad with potatoes that are almost falling apart, but not quite.) Possibly I need to use russets instead, or possibly I need to tick the temperature up by ten degrees or so. I did like the way the flavors got deep into the potato pieces, though.
Salmon
My initial plan was to cook the salmon very plainly, using just salt and maybe a tiny smidge of ginger, but when I was poking around in the fridge this morning, I saw a jar of baby kosher dill pickles. Bang! Nostalgia minute.
When I was a kid, the Presbyterian church that I went to had a yearly salmon feast: some of the fishermen at the church caught a bunch of salmon, and then brought them back to grill. They were grilled in a specific way: scaled, cleaned and gutted, and then stuffed with kosher dill pickle spears. They were finally wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked on the grill. The pickles gave a really nice punch of flavor to the salmon meat: saltiness and tartness, plus the flavors of garlic and dill, which go well with salmon. (At the end, we'd fight over the warm kosher dill spears.)
So I decided to sous vide the salmon with one sliced baby dill pickle, and a splash of the pickle juice. I sealed it into the bag (and had some trouble keeping the vacuum sealer from sucking up the juice).
I wanted to try the salmon mi-cuit, which is a popular way to sous vide salmon. Mi-cuit, according to Google, means part-cooked; it's salmon that's in between raw salmon (as in sashimi) and fully-cooked salmon. Essentially, rare salmon. I looked on the sous vide cooking guide and found temperatures for mi-cuit salmon: 101F for very rare (yipe, I thought, that's barely above body temperature), 116F for rare-medium-rare, or 126 for medium-medium-rare. I decided to try 120F to start out, so in the fish went at that temperature.
And out it came, looking like this:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
(It's got the white albumen that often comes out of salmon when you cook it. Theoretically you can brine the salmon and muck around with it to keep it from producing albumen, but I don't bother because it doesn't affect the taste that I can tell.)
You can sort of see how moist it is there, but then I poked it with a fork so you could see more easily:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
If you look at the top of the piece of salmon, you can see where I 'flaked' it, and it split into two smooth, moist pieces -- no flakes at all. It's got the taste of cooked salmon, and it's opaque, but the texture is very moist and very, very smooth -- not quite the texture of salmon sashimi, but surprisingly reminiscent, and also reminiscent of ceviche or other raw-cured fish. And the pickle gave it a lovely and very subtle flavor -- not at all overpowering, just hints of garlic and dill. Mmm.
I think next time I'll try dropping the temperature even more, perhaps to 115F or even 110F, and see how that goes.
And now I think I'll have the other pot de creme, which has been waiting patiently for me in the fridge.
(It's been feeling really weird to write these -- I've been so pleased with the sous vide, which makes me excited and I want to share it, but the only way I can really do that is to talk about how well the food has come out, which basically means squeeing about my own dishes. Which feels awkwardly self-congratulatory! But the sous vide supreme really is pretty darn awesome, and a lot of the amazing things -- like the super-juiciness of the meat dishes, and the way the flavors meld -- are more it than me.)
