Food Lab 44: The Perfect Reuben

Having on hand a 4 pound chunk of brisket, curing salt (aka “pink salt”), and a Big Green Egg, one’s mind drifts to pastrami. Upon learning than pastrami starts from corned beef (was I the last person to learn this?), Reuben Lab seemed obvious.

It goes without saying that the Reuben is one of the best sandwiches known to humankind, and, sure, we know that corned beef is the typical foundation of a Reuben. But in the spirit of Food Lab, why not try a pastrami Reuben to compare? Plus, a fully homemade Reuben brings together other fermentation activities that warrant regular practice as well.

To prepare the meats and to ferment as needed, this Food Lab had to start well before the actual day of Food Lab.

First off, the sauerkraut. Or more specifically, the sauerkrauts. Would a Reuben be better with a red cabbage kraut? How would a sweet pickled red cabbage fare on a Reuben? I started with the regular kraut: thinly sliced half a cabbage, layered into a ceramic crock with sea salt, celery seed, allspice, juniper berry, and caraway seed. I used the perfect amounts of each, good luck getting those data out of me. After about three weeks, the kraut was sufficiently sour but still a bit crunchy. A couple weeks later, I followed the exact same recipe with a small red cabbage.

Next was making a corned beef from scratch. From the Interwebs, I decided to largely follow Tori Avey’s recipe, although I made a homemade variant of “pickling spice.” The brine for the corned beef used was:

• 3 quarts of water
• 1 cup kosher salt
• 1/4 cup pink curing salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• ~3/4 inch ginger root
• 2 Tbsp mustard seed
• 1 tsp whole allspice
• 1 tsp whole black peppercorns
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 2 tsp fennel seed
• 1 tsp dill seed
• 4 tsp whole coriander
• 1 tsp ground mace
• 4 bay leaves, crumbled
• 4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
• 1 whole dried red pepper

After heating the brine until all the sugar and salt dissolved, I cooled it back down, dropped the chunk o’ brisket in and put it in the fridge. Five days later (yes, flipping the beef daily as recommended), I removed the now-corned beef, drained it for a few minutes, then into a Ziploc and into the freezer.

Fast forward to Food Lab eve morning, we soaked the defrosted corned beef to desalinate it. In the evening, after cutting off a chunk of corned beef (to compare to commercial corned beef), we gave the beef a good rub (below) to rest overnight.

Into the spice mill and grind:

• 4 Tbsp whole black pepper
• 1 Tbsp whole coriander
• 2 tsp minced, toasted onion

Then add:

• 1 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp paprika
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp mustard powder

Then we proceeded to day-of meat preparation:

For the home-corned beef, I boiled the small chunk of meat for about an hour and 45 minutes (thinking the boiling time should be somewhat scaled to size). The commercial-corned beef was boiled for three hours. Upon tasting, the flavor of the home-corned beef seemed richer, but the fat didn’t seem to fully infuse all the meat. So perhaps the shortened boiling time was an error (albeit not so severe as to lead to ordering pizza).

For the pastrami, it was smoked for about four hours in the Egg at ~225 °F, until the meat reached an internal temperature of 165 °F. After about an hour’s rest for the meat, we steamed the pastrami for about two hours. About all I can say is “yum.”

The next variable to prepare for: regular caraway rye or pumpernickel? So I made two “torpedo” loaves of sourdough pumpernickel bread and two regular-style loaves of milk-based (soft crumb) caraway rye.

Pumpernickel Sourdough Rye

• About 3 cups of freshly fed sourdough starter
• 2 cups of pumpernickel flour
• 1 cups of whole wheat flour
• 1+ Tbsp salt
• ~2 Tbsp caraway seed
• About 2 cups of all-purpose flour

With those ingredients, I made a sponge the weight of a thick batter and left for an overnight rise. For each of two halves of the sponge, we kneaded in about about 1/2 cup of flour to form the torpedo loaves. After a second rise of about three hours, the loaves were baked at 425 °F directly on a stone, spritzing some water into the oven at the beginning of the bake. For these loaves, I might have added a bit more flour and kneaded each loaf a bit longer before the second rise, because the loaves as baked flattened out a bit. They still had a decent lightness, but made for skinny sandwiches.

Caraway Rye Bread

• 1 1/2 cups of milk
• 1 1/2 cups of water
• 2 Tbsp yeast
• 3 cups rye flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 Tbsp salt
• 1/4 c caraway seeds
• Enough all-purpose flour to make a decent dough (about 2 cups)

After the first rise of almost two hours, I kneaded a bit more flour into the dough and placed in two 9” loaf pans. After a second rise of a bit over an hour, the loaves were baked at 375 °F for roughly 40 minutes.

Finally, with all the elements assembled (thinly sliced Bavarian Swiss cheese and homemade Thousand Island dressing, based on this recipe but using homemade mayo, and with more garlic, shallot in place of the onion, and added Worcestershire sauce and sriracha, filled out the basic ingredients), we were ready to assemble our Reubens and test our variables...

First test: griddled vs ungriddled Reubens, classic ingredients (caraway rye, corned beef, regular kraut, cheese, and Thousand Island). Quick and simple outcome: griddled wins.

Second test: corned beef vs pastrami on caraway rye. Though we all loved the pastrami eaten out of hand, the Reuben was actually better served by the corned beef rather than the pastrami. Across the board, we all favored the traditional.

As we started thinking about additional testing, some other friends piled in and we started making different variations and serving ‘em without formal tasting and comparison. It did seem that the red kraut was well received, and the pastrami Reuben on the pumpernickel seemed popular. The pumpernickel maintained better structural integrity for the sandwiches as well. Our guests brought some excellent potato salad and cucumber salad, to join the green salad with pomegranate arils and walnuts and various and sundry pickled yummies.

Meanwhile, Chef Spouse plied us all with tiki drinks, details of which I’ll have to leave to another correspondent...

Food Lab 43: Hawaiian Cuisine

Last winter, Chef Spouse and I celebrated a milestone anniversary with a trip to Hawaii. We spent our first week on Kauai, and our second week on Oahu. I don't have enough time to tell you all the things that were wonderful about the trip (although perhaps the above photo, of what was functionally our private waterfall, beside which we drank our coffee every morning we were in Kapa'a might provide a clue), but one thing we loved in particular was our Hole In the Wall food tour of Honolulu's Chinatown (and thanks to one of my good foodie friends for recommending it).

After consuming kalua pork and manapuas and saimin and a zillion varieties of poke and shave ice and Leonard's famous malasadas and Liliha's equally famous coco puffs and fresh-made chow fun noodles and discovering the wonder that is li hing powder (and buying a GIANT bag of it to bring home), Chef Spouse and I knew we'd want to try to recreate some of these dishes at home.

Obviously, that full list is a little too, well, full, and this time (for once) we exercised some restraint BEFORE we committed ourselves to making 4,365 dishes in one day. From that list, Chef Spouse selected manapuas (which involved making regular kalua pork and char siu style pork) and poke (four varieties - tuna and salmon, traditional soy-based and spicy). I also wanted to make malasadas with guava and lilikoi (passionfruit) filling, but I got over-ruled, not least of which because Mad Kitchen Scientist has already made from-scratch ice cream sandwiches with from-scratch hazelnut ice cream (verdict: the Good Humor version can suck it).

Mad Kitchen Scientist took over prepping the kalua pork, and Chef Spouse and I took on sourcing the  fish for the poke.

Kalua pork recipes are interesting. They don't tend to start in a smoker, but rather recommend liquid smoke, Hawaiian alaea salt, and a slow cooker. And it *is* supposed to be quite soft. But Mad Kitchen Scientist has a Green Egg, so we decided to do the salt sub as prescribed, skip the liquid smoke, and smoke the pork, THEN put it in the slow cooker overnight. That turned out to be a good plan. The pork was resting in the slow cooker in its cooking liquid (aka FAT) when we arrived, and when we pulled it out shortly thereafter to sample, it was DELICIOUS.

You can put all sorts of things in manapua, but we opted for some of the kalua pork just as it was and some turned into more of a chai siu (Chinese barbecue) style pork. Inspired by the recipe at Genius Kitchen, we made Chinese barbecue sauce and dressed a pile of the shredded kalua pork with it.

That was all pretty straightforward.

The manapua dough, on the other hand, was not. Actually, making the dough was quite simple. We followed the recipe at Genius Kitchen and did two risings (each about an hour outside the fridge, although I would be interested in trying it again with the slower cold rise). The place we ran into trouble was with the "divide dough into 12 pieces" instructions. The dough uses six cups of flour.

Those look reasonable, right? I'm really kicking myself that I didn't get pictures of the manapuas post-steaming because they were ENORMOUS. Manapuas are supposed to be a palm-sized snack (or breakfast). Because they were so large, the ~15 minute steaming time instruction was not enough, either - several of the first batch came out unpleasantly raw doughy, so those went BACK in the steamer with the second batch.

Verdict: I want to try these again, but I either need to make a LOT less dough or cut it into a LOT more pieces.

The poke was pretty straightforward, particularly given our previous runs at raw meat. Buy good quality fish, cut it carefully, dress it yummily. Traditional poke uses a soy base. What else you add is pretty much up to you: furikake, fresh ginger, lime, onions or scallions (or both), avocado (or not), maybe a little sugar (for sweetness) or crushed red pepper (for spice), maybe top with a little fresh cilantro, or some fried shallots or garlic for crispiness, maybe serve with some sushi rice (for a poke bowl) or in nori (for a hand roll). We made tuna and salmon, and I thought the salmon was better, but they were both quite tasty.

However, I insisted that we had to make Foodland-style spicy poke, too. If you're never been to Hawaii, Foodland is a local grocery chain. "Wait! You're getting RAW FISH from the deli counter of a restaurant?" Damn right - Foodland has about a dozen varieties (or more) at any time, and they're all fresh and delicious. When we were on Kauai, we were staying in a cottage, so we made ourselves dinner many nights. We'd have our coffee by our waterfall, climb back up to the cottage where, coming through the yard, we'd pick fresh organic oranges and tangerines to squeeze for breakfast (and feed some deadfalls to the owners' pet pig Lucy), go out and hike or snorkel or kayak, and swing into Foodland in Kapa'a on the way home to pick up some poke to nosh on while we grilled our fish and cooked our veg, accompanied by daiquiris made with fresh organic limes from the yard and local Koloa rum. Yeah, you right.

The main difference is that you still marinate your fish in a soy base, but then you add a Sriracha and mayo combo sauce and, if you're feeling ritzy (which we were this weekend), some tobiko. It was SO GOOD.

(The poke was actually all so good that I neglected to take photos. Oops.)

This summer, I also challenged Chef Spouse to up his tiki drink game. Tiki gets kind of a bad rap, due to too many crap, processed, high-alcohol-and-not-much-else-to-recommend-it "tiki" drinks. Having had the opportunity to visit several authentic tiki bars in the past few years, I've learned that REAL tiki drinks are works of art that showcase an incredible range of rums, matched with complex combinations of freshly squeezed juices, accent alcohols, bitters, spices, and (ideally) from-scratch syrups (like homemade grenadine and orgeat).  To get a sense of the potential of tiki, I highly recommend checking out the Smuggler's Cove book. Chef Spouse used it as a guide to make us Dr. Funk, Planter's Punch, chartreuse swizzle, and hibiscus punch (using the homemade hibiscus liquor Mad Kitchen Scientist made with some of the MASSES of dried hibiscus flowers we had leftover from our homemade bitters lab). Incidentally, Dr. Funk may be my new favorite cocktail. Don't let the list of ingredients in tiki drinks intimidate you - most are relatively easy to come by (although you almost definitely WILL have to augment your rum holdings), and even the "make it yourself" stuff isn't too challenging (well, other than the orgeat - that's a bit of work, but it really is better than the bottled stuff).

I guess I'll have to do malasadas another time.

RIP Anthony Bourdain

Your gonzo approach to food and life was a major inspiration to the Food Labbers.

A few personal favorite quotes:

• Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I’m not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I’ve eaten them.
• Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can. If you’re planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won’t be able to help you.
• I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one's own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

You had more impact than you knew.

Food Lab 42: Alkaline Noodles

It's been quiet on the blog, but that's because your intrepid Food Labbers have been quite busy.

Mad Kitchen Scientist has changed jobs.

Chef Spouse and I spent two weeks in Hawaii celebrating a milestone anniversary.

I've been on several business trips (including two outside the US - fancy!).

We shared a peaceful Friendsgiving together at which we had the same number of desserts as we had guests, and a unique desert tipple to pair with each. (Apparently, Mad Kitchen Scientist and I are trouble together at the liquor store AND the fish market.)

We prepared our usual themed New Year's Eve feast with Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee for their annual party (this year: nouvelle Russian, to prepare us for our new overlords, comrade).

We put on the annual Super Bowl party, and this year, winning their FIRST Super Bowl ever and ending a 57 year conference championship drought, celebrated the victorious Philadelphia Eagles! But we did not have as good a day as Jason Kelce, who truly was living his best life.

The man is wearing an authentic Avalon String Band
Mummers costume WHILE RIDING A BIKE

We also had the opportunity to use our cooking skills to benefit some members of our local community here in DC, and Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee visited and re-created Chinese banquet for International Dilettante and Dr. Fruit Bat.

But after all that cooking and eating and drinking and serving and celebrating and traveling fun, we decided it was time to get back to labbing this past weekend.

Several years ago, a tiny ramen joint opened in our neighborhood. Turns out, it's outstanding - some say, better than Momofuku (I would be one of those). Chef Spouse has been obsessed by ramen ever since.

Here's the thing: it's always a long wait for a table there (it is TINY, no joke), but they do carry out, and you can easily order kaedama (extra noddles) for your leftovers for lunch the next day.

But he wants to make his own anyway, because that's how we do. (Hey, if you're a regular reader, you already know that.)

Ramen has four basic components:

1. Broth
2. Tare
3. Noodles
4. Guts/goodies

Chef Spouse has made some progress on a rich pork stock to form the basis of the broth. And he's messed around with pork belly (and Mad Kitchen Scientist's homemade kimchi and nori and soft-boiled eggs and kale and homemade pickles) for the guts/goodies on top. But he hasn't really worked on the tare or the noodles yet.

Here's the thing, though: I can't remember the last time I had pasta from a box. Chef Spouse makes fresh pasta ALL THE TIME. In fact, he's so fast at making it now that he puts the water on before he starts and he has the noodles ready to go before the water boils.

But you start reading recipes that call for kan sui (lye water), sodium carbonate, or potassium carbonate, and you get scared off. LYE IS DANGEROUS STUFF, YO.

We resolved to overcome our fears and give it a go.

In theory, you can get kan sui at an Asian market, but we have several VERY well stocked examples nearby and struck out at all. Potassium carbonate is something you have to order online.

But sodium carbonate is another story. All that is is baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) that's been baked in a 200 degree oven for about an hour, which bakes off water and carbon dioxide. Voila! Sodium carbonate!

Interestingly, Chef Spouse had baked up a batch probably two years ago, and it's been sitting in the pantry patiently waiting ever since. We also had about two quarts of pork stock hanging in the freezer.

For our Lab test, we tried the following:

Test 1 - old sodium carbonate
2 3/4 c. all purpose flour
3/4 c. water
1 tsp. sodium carbonate
1 tsp. salt

Test 2- new sodium carbonate (baked fresh that day)
2 3/4 c. all purpose flour
3/4 c. water
1 tsp. sodium carbonate
1 tsp. salt

Test 3 - MORE sodium carbonate (new stuff)
2 3/4 c. all purpose flour
3/4 c. water
1 1/2 tsp. sodium carbonate
1 tsp. salt

Test 4 - commercial ramen

Yep, this stuff:

Noodles only! Not the "flavor" packet. Anyone else flashing back to college?

All the sites we checked warned that the dough is dry and hard going in the kneading, and they were right. Start it in your Kitchen Aid with the dough hook and let horsepower do the job as long as you can. We took dough out when the dough hook stopped making any progress on forming it into a whole, and then had to knead each by hand for another ~5 minutes, which doesn't sound long, but this is TOUGH dough. As one site we read noted, "If you're not sweating, it's not ready yet."

We then rested them for ~20 minutes each, wrapped in plastic wrap.

When the dough came out of the plastic wrap, it was significantly more supple.

We also tested making two thicknesses of noodles. In the first test, we rolled the dough to the "five" setting on the Kitchen Aid before cutting. For the second test, we rolled it only to the "three" setting.

In handling the dough, there wasn't much difference between the old and new sodium carbonate batches. The MORE sodium carbonate batch was different, though - much less smooth.

Then we cooked them all - including the Top Ramen - in batches in the pork stock. We didn't mess around with tare or guts because we were trying to assess the noodles qua noodles.

We all agreed that the fresh sodium carbonate noodles had the best texture. The MORE sodium carbonate noodles had a slight off flavor. The Top Ramen had the customary curly texture (how DO you do that with fresh noodles? we couldn't figure it out), and were lighter but less flavorful than fresh, and oddly sweet. Opinions differed on preferring thin to thick (I thought the thick seemed a little gelatinous, but not everyone agreed). All stood up well to the broth over time - they didn't get mushy at all.

To go with? Mad Kitchen Scientist had gone pig-crazy (in fairness, we started it by tasking him with picking up and smoking a pork shoulder for a fundraiser we're hosting this coming weekend), so we had Chinese red pork and roasted pork belly to nosh on the side.

We experimented with making seaweed salad from scratch, too. Since the packages were mostly not labeled in English, we just picked up a variety. First step is to reconstitute the seaweed with hot water - and man, did the dining room smell like the ocean when we did - and then drain it and squeeze out as much water as possible.

Then you just create a basic dressing of Asian flavors - sesame oil, soy sauce, etc. (we also used rice vinegar, ponzu, honey, and some grated ginger), dress it, add sliced green onions and sesame seeds, done. We had picked up some prepared seaweed salad to compare it against. We hadn't lucked on grabbing the same type of seaweed you usually find in ready-made seaweed salad, and I do love the texture of that type, so that was a bummer. But the flavor of the homemade, by comparison, was much better. Once we had it to compare, we realized that the stuff you normally get at sushi joints is REALLY REALLY sweet.

Commercial on the left - homemade on the right

All the delicious nibblies (including some tiny pickled octopus
we picked up and a quick spicy Napa slaw with sriracha pickled radishes)

What did we drink? Chef Spouse started us out with a rum-based cocktail with ponzu and pimento bitters, garnished with lychee. Mad Kitchen Scientist had taken some of the absurdity of dried hibiscus flowers we were left with from making homemade bitters (which I never wrote about, because there really isn't much to say - you buy a bunch of odd ingredients from places like Mountain Rose Herbs, put really small quantities of them in Everclear, and wait) and turned them into a hibiscus liquor (rum based, with some "warm" spices and a little honey), and Chef Spouse was messing around with rum and rye and bitters and citrus, and what we eventually realized is: just put the hibiscus liquor in a glass with some silver tequila. Simplicity on the other side of complexity, my friends.

What we learned is that it takes a little longer to make fresh alkaline noodles than fresh pasta - but not much. They taste a lot better than Top Ramen. And you can do it with ingredients you already have in your kitchen, so don't be afraid of the mad chemist-sounding names.

(But Chef Spouse ordered some potassium carbonate and kan sui from Amazon anyway.)