Preservatism

I saw my brother early in the year on the East Coast and was fortunate enough to be there when a package arrived for him from the PX and it contained this object which he promptly unpacked and tested in front of me. He was so impressed that I was impressed that he sent me one and it arrived three weeks later here on my coast. I always like useful new technology that does what it is marketed to do, in the kitchen or elsewhere, and this is one such product. Here it is on the right, complete with blue lights and shiny steel surface and as sleekly robotic as any new seventies' Braun invention was in the olden days.

The Foodsaver is marvelous. Left over chili? Create a custom bag from the internal roll roughly fitting the quantity of the chili and heat seal one end. Then pop it into the slit at the front of the machine and sensors allow the machine to pull out the air and then seal the open end. Write "chili"  on the pouch or just throw it into the freezer and open in a month or three with little or no freezer burn and tasting just as good, or better, than when it was freshly cooked. I take a pork loin from Costco and cut it into roasts and cutlets and then vacuum seal them with the Foodsaver and freeze them. Not cheap to run, the pouch rolls and premade bags can be pricy but I have less wasted food and the flavor freshness is preserved over time so the added expense is well worth it. I highly recommend it.

Cooking From The Books 1

I was thumbing through the newly condensed edition of Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck Cookbook at my local bookstore and was naturally impressed by its sumptuous pictures, no doubt culled and re-dressed from his huge three volume original. What exquisite joy, what superb colors and combinations, what exotic reverie! Then I snapped out of it. Slick and luxurious, this book seemed to have more in common with the fashion industry than cuisine. I might have been flipping through the pages of Vogue rather than a cookbook. Actually, this was more like flipping through Tatler or Vanity Fair.

The cult of chef-auteur often obscures the fact that this is just cooking, dishes offered for gastric consumption. It's all very well being a Blumenthal or Keller, and they are often truly inventive and immersed in deep knowledge, but the back-work and elaborate preparation and assembly of an executed recipe in their kitchens is carried out by a multitude of sous-chefs and assistants in their employ. Like most amateurs I don't employ anyone to cook with me and I doubt if we would fit in this kitchen anyway. It's an extreme challenge for an individual to reproduce one of the more elaborate dishes within these pages, let alone a menu. Blumenthal even has a "lab" where scientist cooks carry out experiments to test his "recipes".

I must admit I have the Fat Duck Cookbook on my Christmas wish

list, but I have not succumbed to Keller's tomes even though his Sous Vide book is very tempting. It may be partly because, if I detect a precious element, I resist. Grant Achatz's Alinea cookbook is the closest book I own from the molecular gastronomy pack, and I confess I get great pleasure from it, despite never having cooked from it. If I ever choose to I do possess local sources for all the ingredients and chemicals cited within Alinea's seductive pages. I find I learn more about the philosophy of using cooking to create something rare and unique from these books, albeit a temporary and singular uniqueness, from these arcane alchemies. But perhaps food has always been about fashion. I would like to emphasize that the recipes in all these books give new meaning to the term "processed food".

Illustrated here: this year's Thanksgiving Turkey with Italian sausage stuffing before and after cooking.

A Tender Turkey Breast

The Microplane, that ubiquitous favorite of TV chefs and professional cooks across America made it into my cooking drawer a couple of months ago. I usually resist those trends, fearful that their use is all about a cut of the profits for the chef and not the utility of the tool, but I finally gave in and bought one a couple of months ago on sale at the aforementioned Sur La Table. Now I confess that I get an instant thrill every time I use it to zest a lemon or to pulverise a garlic clove so that the natural oils and juices are carried out into the dish in the most conservative and efficient way. I use the zester model, which is a fairly fine grater but there are many many variations and grades to meet your personal needs. Obviously developed from the common or garden woodworking file but with gleaming steel in place of cast iron, I do worry sometimes that I might zest some finger as it is extremely sharp, and I use it with extreme caution in the same careful way I do my mandoline.

I have taken to brining fowl and pork before cooking and it makes a remarkable difference to the tenderness and flavor of the meat, adding garlic and lemon peel to the brine using a microplane. A turkey breast with star anise in a 5% brine with sage and oregano and dry white wine is perfect and imparts a subtle tang to the turkey. What is a brine? We swim in it when submerged in The Pacific, sea salt evenly dissolved in clean cold water.

Musical Notes

I was given my Bron Mandoline, a year after I moved into this little apartment. An online reviewer describes this glittering amalgam of steel blade encased in more steel as "the Cadillac of the kitchen". Invented by Jean Bron, in Switzerland, about 1950, it does have the strange, dated and outsized looks of another time. A Bron, sitting inanimate on the kitchen counter, just about shouts out that one is not merely prepping a meal but constructing it and I had wanted one for a long time to help me make beautiful dishes. Now there are many imitators and updated incarnations but none slices and cuts quite like this one which positively demands one's attention when finely slicing precision rounds for a Confit Byaldi, or delicate leaves of potato for a pavé or symmetrical slivers for shoestring fries.

One of the great results of The South Beach Diet is that one thinks before one eats, almost every bite. And I do a lot more thinking before I cook. I am also more careful in my food preparation and more inventive too. I have scoured my cookbook collection to concoct new variations of favorite recipes using the allowable and ever increasing ingredient list. I have not yet used any of the many recipes from the book and the weight loss is very real. More than anything I feel healthier and more alert, but it is also a great pleasure to be getting the mandoline out, to prep manually without the use of a food processor and to subsequently dine on dishes with improved texture and that are even more of a pleasure to the eye.