Chicago Style Pizza

oven ready

John's Stewart's tantrum about Chicago style pizza was funny but really dumb. People seem to get hung up on the fact that it's called "pizza".  It's like being mad at enchiladas for not being tacos. But hey, there are a wide variety of pizzas, and I find it pretty easy to love all styles.

The biggest problem with loving Chicago style pizza is that it's nearly impossible to get outside of Chicago. Somehow pizza weekend was declared on Friday, so for Saturday I attempted the Chicago-style. It was actually a big success. Exceeded expectations. Made two 12" pizzas for 4 of us, one with sausage and pepperoni, one with sausage, spinach, and garlic.

I am wholeheartedly endorsing www.realdeepdish.com for DIY Chicago style. I've seen different recipes over the years, and even tried some out on my own back in the 90s. But after a very long break from making this kind of pizza, this site looked best to me, and the results speak for themselves. In particular, I used the basic recipe posted on this page.

More On Food Safety, Internal Temperature, and Pathogens

or possibly moron food safety:

I'm really not bothered. I have never gotten sick from my own cooking and very, very rarely from restaurant cooking. I use raw eggs all the time. You can pasteurise eggs by holding them at 57C  internal for two hours. The proteins haven't denatured so it still looks and works exactly like a raw egg. I never do that because I use good eggs and also don't care. YMMV.

I eat rare beef, pink pork, pink poultry. I love oysters. I've gotten violently ill from bad oysters but they are worth it. I've gotten sick a few times from restaurant food. This can be down to poor hygiene by the food handlers or it can be from bad ingredients improperly cooked or tainted raw veg.

If you are nervous about food pathogens for whatever reason -- and some people have very good reason to be --  but still don't want to overcook things, definitely study the pathogens, study the time vs. temp data, get a good thermometer, and be disciplined in your cooking.

Cooking to Internal Temperatures: Duration Matters

I don't remember where I found this chart [apologies, kudos, and thanks to the originator] but it illustrates a key concept in cooking that many home cooks are ignorant of: "safe" internal temperatures when cooking depend on duration.

Usually "official" recommendations for food cooking give just a temp at which most pathogens would perish instantly and at which the taste and texture of your food also perish instantly. The government doesn't care how your food tastes, they are optimizing for reduced illness. And companies don't want to get sued because you got sick. I don't want to get sick, either, but I'm honestly not that bothered. I do want my food to taste good and I don't want to go to the expense of sourcing really good meat to eat only to ruin it by cooking it too long.

The chart above is a simplification. The poultry curve is for salmonella. Certainly there are other pathogens that might be in poultry. And I've looked at the raw [heh heh] data from FSIS, and the other simplification is that the curve changes depending on factors such as %fat of the poultry in question. But the chart is perfect for illustrating the temperature and time aspect of cooking safely.

So the FDA says to cook your chicken or turkey to internal of 165F, which is horrible thing to do to a good breast. On the previous post, Joe mentioned he got much better results cooking to 160F (for 3min).  A few degrees can make a big difference. So can a few minutes.

What the chart tells me is that if, say, I'm smoking chicken at a relatively low temperature, and thus it is taking a long while to cook, and if the lowest internal temp is 62.5C at a given checkpoint, I can pull it off in 15 minutes regardless of what the internal temp is then. So if I wanted to take it off the heat at 65C, I would go with either 65C or 15 minutes elapsed, whichever comes first.

Cooking isn't always about the lowest temperature possible. For delicate items or ones that dry out easily -- poultry white meat, pork loin, good steak, most fish -- I err on the low side. For other items, I cook them to much higher temperatures not out of safety concerns but because I think they are better that way. Best examples: goose leg confit (all poultry legs, for that matter), pork shoulder (pulled pork), various braising cuts and such.

Bottom line: if you want to avoid overcooking a particular piece of meat, think of duration when it comes to internal temperatures.

There's plenty of good information on the web about food safety. Douglas Baldwin, for example, has a really nice introduction to it, written as part of a sous vide primer but of good general interest.

Sous Vide Turkey Breast

For Thanksgiving this year I cooked the turkey breasts sous vide, to rave reviews and enthusiastic overconsumption. For years I've been cooking the breasts and legs separately, usually roasting the breats on the bone. Last year for boxing day I also tried an herb-brined smoked turkey breast on the bone, which was excellent. This year for thanksgiving I broke down the turkeys, made stock out of the backs, breastbones, and wings, separated legs and thighs and roasted those, brined the boneless breasts, then cooked them sous vide before finishing under the broiler with plenty of butter.  I plan on doing the same next year.

I used boneless breasts from 2 turkeys.

brine overnight, about 15-16 hours

from Ruhlman & Polcyn's Charcuterie:4l water
350g salt
125g sugar
42g pink salt
2 bunches fresh tarragon
5 cloves garlic, crushed with flat of knife
a couple bay leaves
20g black peppercorns
(note for next year: some sage and/or rosemary might be nice)

rinse, dry, & bag each with a hunk of butter then cook sous vide @ 61C for 3.5 - 4 hours

To finish, coat with butter and put under broiler, skin side up, until skin is dark brown and crispy.

Chocolate Ice Cream using Cocoa, Assured Nut-Free

I wanted to make a nice chocolate dessert for one of our Thanksgiving guests who is highly nut-allergic but I could not find any brand of chocolate bar that was willing to put a stake in the ground about being nut-free. I did find that Bournville [a Cadbury brand] cocoa is assuredly nut-free, so went with that.

I really wanted to try a chocolate ice cream but I lost patience about 90 seconds into googling. Every chocolate ice cream recipe with cocoa also had chocolate in it. So I invented my own. It was really good, and very well received. Here it is:

125g cocoa
400ml whole milk, used in 2 portions, 220ml + 180ml
400ml double cream
200g sugar
5 egg yolks, beaten
1t vanilla
pinch salt

(1) in large bowl, mix 125g cocoa & 220ml cold whole milk together into a smooth paste
(2) it's hard to resist tasting it at this point, so go ahead
(3) immediately regret tasting it
(4) heat the remaining 180ml of milk + the double cream, off heat at or before it reaches boil
(5) whisk hot milk/cream into the cocoa/milk mix (if this doesn't combine well for any reason, it should be fine to return it to low heat and stir until smooth consistency)
(6) whisk in the sugar & a pinch of salt
(6) whisk in the egg yolks & vanilla
(7) strain into a clean bowl, thoroughly chill, then put it into your ice cream maker

Opera Mission

In for a penny, in for a pound: went to Covent Garden last night to see our first opera and pulled out all the stops. We aimed for maximum accessibility, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

It was lovely. The Royal Opera House is just a fantastic venue. We didn't know quite what to expect but overall it was much more relaxed and engaging and flat-out pleasant an experience than I would have guessed. Everything was nice, starting with the welcoming staff at the doors, followed by some friendly assistance inside as we took a moment to get oriented, then settling gently into the evening with  pre-show charcuterie and cheddar & chutney sandwiches in the grand, airy, and buzzing Paul Hamlyn Hall Champagne Bar.

First question in the ROH FAQ is on dress code. There is none. There were some folks dressed extremely nicely, and others in jeans. The crowd was excited, enthusiastic, and expressive. Quite a while ago I'd been to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and while the performance was outstanding, the experience was overwhelmingly stuffy and uptight, which was the fault of the audience entirely and not  the musicians. Maybe it's changed in recent years. Or was an aberration. I hope so. (Chicagoans normally bring to bear a refreshing midwestern groundedness.) Or maybe it's cultural. I've gone for a bit of the symphonic at Royal Albert Hall and found it to be a pleasantly joyful occasion. (Maybe Londoners are just that awesome.)

The performance was wonderful. More engaging, to the point of engrossing, than I'd expected. Moments of comedy, a bit of tension, and quite a lot of sadness. Figaro's taunting of Cherubino in Act 1 for getting commissioned into the military was done with such gleeful mocking that it was downright mean. The song, "Non più andrai", is a crowd pleaser, and was given a whimsical translation in the supertitles ("no more buzzing about, bothering the ladies").

Supertitles! Yeah, they were easy to read, unobtrusive, and the whole thing was really easy to follow. While quite a lot of the music was familiar for a variety of reasons (seen Trading Places?), I didn't bother listening to anything or reading up on the story beforehand. Not necessary.

The confusion at the end of Act II was delightful. The supertitled "(everyone is confused)" was well received at a very specific moment. I think it's only a matter of time before someone projects "(WTF?)" there.

The Countess is the character in the saddest role. Even the "forgiveness" at the end is more resignation to her lot than reconciliation. The Act III "Dove sono" by Maria Bengtsson, in which the Countess wonders where all the love and joy has gone and why, if the good has gone, the memories of happiness still remain, was beautifully sung and just heartbreaking.

Long before Act IV was in full swing I was well and truly hooked. The whole spectacle was pretty astonishing. Yeah, I kind of knew it wouldn't be people just standing around bellowing out arias, but that's not the half of it. Opera again? Oh yeah!

Management Skills

I've identified a key management skill: Tactical Forgetting. There are some things a manager doesn't need to know, and if a team accidentally provides too much transparency, their manager can benefit from tactical forgetting.

Which leads me to a corollary observation: any sufficiently advanced management technique is indistinguishable from senility.

Wrens!

In honor of JustJoeP, some wildlife photography.

(1) Get tasty caterpillar for youngsters. (2) Test voltage.

Why yes, we DO want to eat that.

Observationally, Are We Getting Dumber?

http://xkcd.com/1252/

Two problems. XKCD perfectly describes one, which is that a relative risk increase is just about useless if you don't know the absolute risk. The other side of the problem: where do these risk values come from?

In 2001, Oxford Journals' International Journal of Epidemiology published "Epidemiology--is it time to call it a day?". Six years prior to that Science published "Epidemiology Faces Its Limits". So, 12-18 years later, have we gotten smarter about epidemiology?

Nope.

Maybe it's the amount of data or accessibility or ease of publishing or the disappearence of professional editing, but bad or trivial or meaningless stats and probabilities seem more common than ever. Our risk assessment skills seem just as bad as ever.

Two helpful guidelines for understanding any risk metric you see:

1. assume it's not from a controlled trial (in other words, assume it's low quality)
2. remember guidance from actual epidemiologists, from the 1995 article [emphasis mine, and keep in mind that, say, a "20% higher risk" is a relative risk of only 1.2]:

As a general rule of thumb," says Angell of the New England Journal, "we are looking for a relative risk of three or more [before accepting a paper for publication], particularly if it is biologically implausible or if it's a brand new finding." Robert Temple, director of drug evaluation at the Food and Drug Administration, puts it bluntly: "My basic rule is if the relative risk isn't at least three or four, forget it." But as John Bailar, an epidemiologist at McGill University and former statistical consultant for the NEJM, points out, there is no reliable way of identifying the dividing line. "If you see a 10-fold relative risk and it's replicated and it's a good study with biological backup, like we have with cigarettes and lung cancer, you can draw a strong inference," he says. "If it's a 1.5 relative risk, and it's only one study and even a very good one, you scratch your chin and say maybe.

Sous Vide Chili, Shortribs, and Chicken Breasts

Next post will not be about cooking, I promise.


Beef Short Ribs, Again
After the highly successful 72 hr, 55C shortrib trial, I decided to go for a more traditional braise texture. I smoked a slab of shortribs for a couple hours until they were near or at 50C, then cut them into individual ribs, bagged each, and put them into the water bath at 62C. I tried the first after 24 hours. It was tender and very good. The rest I left in for 48 hours. Even better! Very much a traditional braise texture -- flaking nicely, tender, moist -- quite different than the tender steak-like texture of the 55C version. They were not falling off the bone, but easy to eat without knife and fork. Rib meat should require a bit of pull to get off the bone anyway. To serve: coated with bbq sauce and popped under the broiler until browned and crispy.

Chili
While I had the aquarium going, I made a few bags of chili. Old-school Texas style chili: no onions, no tomatoes, no beans. Just brisket, beef fat, dried chilies, and salt. I picked up five bags of whole dried chili peppers from borough market and came up with a method for turning them into a chili paste:

1. stem, seed, and roughly chop the peppers
2. steep them in hot water from a kettle for 15 minutes or so, then drain
3. poach them in rendered beef fat over low heat for a while, then puree the whole thing

The result was very chili-y but pretty bitter. No worries.

For the meat I used a brisket flat, which went into the smoker for a couple hours, then I pulled it out and cubed it. Had to trim quite a bit but still ended up with plenty of beef. I coated the smoked, cubed beef with the chili paste and added salt, then divided between three bags. In they went -- 62C for 48 hours.

Result: really good! The bitterness went away, the chilies rounded out and mellowed out and blended beautifully with the beef. The beef got tender and the whole thing turned into a lovely, slightly fiery, smokey chili stew. Worth doing again. And I had extra chili paste I later used to make a more common pot of chili (with ground beef and tomatoes and onions).


Chicken Breasts
Well this was easy. I cut up a couple chickens, smoked the legs and wings, saved the carcasses for stock, and bagged the boneless breasts for a first sous vide chicken trial. (Incidentally, the smoked wings made fantastic buffalo wings later: crisped them in a smoking hot pan with butter, then coated and sauteed in a mix of equal parts butter and frank's hot sauce.) The chicken breasts went into the aquarium for 2 1/2 hours at 60C and turned out just about perfectly. One of them I just browned skin-side in a hot pan with butter. The other I didn't even bother, just cut it up for another dish. It's odd in that it goes against expectations. I normally do a perfectly good job of cooking chicken no matter what method I use, but here I still expected the thin end to be overdone. It wasn't of course. It was just as perfectly tender and done as the thickest part. Brilliant.

Cooking Broccoli: High Heat, No Water

with chicken and cheddar

I found this here: http://www.thewednesdaychef.com/the_wednesday_chef/2008/08/heston-blumenth.html
and it's my new favourite way to cook broccoli. Quick, easy, great results.

I use a cast iron frying pan. Basically:
v high heat, add some olive oil [smokin' hot]
broccoli in, lid on, don't touch it for 2 minutes
after two minutes: salt & pepper, some butter, shake it all about, lid back on, still high heat, don't touch it for 2 minutes
is it done? if not, leave it on another minute or two, otherwise it's ready to eat

Chocolate Ice Cream

Trying to get a suitably chocolatey ice cream is like doing titration quickly. You want to worry yourself that you've gone too far in order to hit the point that's just perfect. This is my modified version of "Ben's Chocolate" from the classic Ben & Jerry Ice Cream book from 1987 -- richer, less sugar, more choc (more egg, heavier cream, slightly different ratios, different instructions). I love it, but this will be too much for many people.

140g 90% dark chocolate [I use Lindt]
240g whole milk [I used a rich jersey & guernsey milk]
2 eggs + 1 add'l egg yolk
120g sugar
240g double cream
1t vanilla extract
pinch salt

method
chop chocolate and put in bowl
heat milk in microwave until almost boiling
pour hot milk over chocolate and let sit for a couple minutes
stir milk & chocolate together, should be smooth and melty now [if it is not smooth and melty, you should either panic or cry, or panic then cry, or threaten it with the microwave until it complies]

in separate bowl, which eggs&yolk
whisk in sugar
add dbl cream, vanilla, a hearty pinch of salt and whisk together to mix

mix chocolate into egg&cream mixture
chill before using
after chilling, whisk a bit before adding to ice cream maker