Total breakdown
Of yesterday's culinary lessons, that is. I'm doing fine. Here's a sumary of what we made and what I learned.
Beef round strips and veggie stir-fry
"Beef round strips" is a term I always struggled to parse because it always seemed to be talking about strips that were round, and not about strips cut off of the "beef round" or whatever. I have a poor understanding anyway of where on a cow different cuts come from, which doesn't help. But I know I know what "beef round strips" look like, on sight:
Apparently this is a tougher cut of meat, and my friend introduced me to the Chinese concept of "velveting"---coating the strips in baking soda for 30 mins before cooking. Apparently this raises the pH of the surface of the meat, slowing down its tendency to contract and squeeze out moisture when it's cooked, meaning it stays looser, i.e. more tender. You have to wash the baking soda off before you cook it though or it will taste like metal.
I don't remember what all went in the sauce besides soy sauce and brown sugar. There was back-and-forth about adding corn starch. It was eventually omitted on the grounds that the sugar would thicken things up in a caramelly way. It seemed to.
Things learned:
- beef round strips aren't round strips
- coating tougher meat in baking soda for 30 mins before cooking helps tenderize it (velveting)
- you have to rinse the baking soda off first
- cook the meat, then clean the pan out and cook the vegetables; don't just throw everything in together from the start (combine only at the end)
- a super hot wok would have been better but the normal pan sufficed
- watch total salt when seasoning at several different phases (meat, veggies, sauce (which already has salty soy sauce))
Pork cutlets "Cutlet" is a very cute word. And a pork cutlet is kind of a cute piece of meat. I'm intrigued by pork because: I don't eat it that often; pigs are really interesting and seemingly misunderstood animals; and I also spend a lot of time watching implicitly Islamic content because of studying Arabic, which makes eating pork seem edgy! and transgressive! You gotta get your thrills from somewhere.
These cutlets went in a really cool and unexpected direction---we made a pan sauce with pineapple sauce! It was so nice to break out of the straitjacket of thick, riiich pan sauces. This was thin, obviously fruity, and bright, and yet still savory and lip-smacking. The cutlets got coated in salt, pepper, and this cool spice combo called Herbes de Provence, "a mixture of dried herbs considered typical of the Provence region of southeastern France" (Wikipedia). The combo used also had lavender, which seemed cool and exotic. After searing it on the stovetop in oil (grapeseed oil, I believe), we made a sauce with butter and good old sage (which my friend interestingly did not chop up into little pieces like I have done), to which we added salt, pepper, pepper flakes, and, exotically (again!), juice from a cup of diced pineapple! Eventually the chunks of pineapple themselves got dumped in there too.
Things learned:
- Pork is good and doesn't have to bring you back to a mediocre midwestern potluck
- Herbes de Provence exists and is delicious
- Provence exists and looks really beautiful in pictures
- Be on the lookout for uses for completely unexpected ingredients like pineapple juice (which I understand could just as well have been pear juice or peach juice or something)
Salad
I am "not a salad guy", not in that I dislike all salad, but in that I don't usually think about or procure it without outside prompting. But I do, and did yesterday, appreciate occasional outside prompting. Literally we cut up some peppers and mini cucumbers, coated them in salt, pepper, sugar, and rice vinegar, and called it a day. That was a salad. I would never desire a dish like that in isolation but it wound up being a nice contrast/compliment with everything else.
Things learned:
- Salad exists (jk)
- Sometimes it's not about craving a dish by itself, it's about painting a beautiful meal-picture of which something boring on its own can take on new importance and interest
- Sugar on veggies
Rice
The rice was interesting as my friend cooked it in a totally different way than I do. "Totally" different---perhaps better to say "notably" different. He used way less water than I would have supposed---2.5 cups of water for 2 cups of dry rice. He boiled the water first, then poured the rice in (as well as a tablespoon of salt) and stirred it until the water was no longer "scoopable", or in other words, until the water level had dropped to about the point where you could scoop up water with the spoon without also getting a lot of rice in it. It makes sense when you're doing it. Then he poured in a whole tablespoon of oil, stirred it a little, turned the heat to low, put the lid on, and set a timer for 18 mins. And that was basically that. It made very puffy, separated rice. It had a nice brownish crust on the bottom, totally unlike mine which honestly is always soggy on the bottom despite being more or less "perfectly" cooked as far as the consistency of each individual grain of rice is concerned. I like it. I may try that, though my only pan is unfortunately non-stick which will affect results.
Things learned:
- Alt method of rice cooking: experiment!
The final result was a pleasant combination of foods that was "random" enough to not feel like we had just made an airtight recipe to mindlessly imitate later, but instead a diverse base of experimentation to endlessly permutate.
Unfortunately the starving brute in me often forgets to take a picture until after the first bite