Category Archives: Dinner

  • King Salmon With Tarragon-Chive Butter (Sous-vide or Baked)

    June 25, 2012

    18 Comments

    Sous-vide king salmon with tarragon-chive butter.

    After an enforced absence of a few years, king salmon fishing is back along the California coast. Regardless of the sometimes difficult politics and economics of fishery management, it is always encouraging to see a natural fishery recover when it gets some time. And one thing we see here on the farm (and all over the world) is that nature often rewards patience and comes roaring back, if given the chance. And now our local community is reaping the benefits of its patience and we get to eat our local king salmon straight from Monterey or Half Moon Bays. And there are few fish as tasty, or pretty, as fresh wild king salmon.

    Wild king salmon has a beautiful color and deep rich flavor that, at least to local tastes, surpasses most wild and all farmed salmon. The wild salmon’s high fat/oil content and varied diet makes for big flavor and meaty texture, yet is still healthy (depending on how much butter you add to the dish ;-). The king salmon also lends itself to many different styles of cooking. You can serve king salmon as sushi or crudo, poach, roast, bake or grill it and even the crispy skin is a tasty treat. Great stuff, but with one caveat, the fresh wild salmon does not come cheap. It is best to make the most of the fish, so in this case we decided to cook our king salmon using our sous-vide cooker. (But there is a good oven-based method, so please read-on).

    Simple ingredients, but big flavor.

    As we mentioned in an earlier post, sous-vide cooking involves sealing fish, meat or veggies in a vacuum bag and cooking in a temperature-controlled water bath. It is a very popular cooking method in high-end restaurants, but you can buy sous-vide cookers and vacuum sealers for the home. Our inspiration for sous-vide cooking came from Stefan’s Gourmet Blog– and he has a great introduction and many good sous-vide recipes here. We cook sous-vide regularly with both meat and fish, but particularly like cooking fish in this way. The temperature control and doneness of the fish are quite exact and you can “build” a sauce in the bag while you cook the fish.

    As for the recipe itself, we simply adapted our basic oven-baked fish recipe to sous-vide cooking. Our approach is to season the fish filets, layer on a generous dollop of herbs and butter per filet and top with a slice of lemon. As the fish cooks, it bastes in the lemon/butter/herb mixture, and that mixture becomes the basis for a quick sauce. In the oven, we cook the prepared filets in a greased baking dish with a splash of wine at 425 degrees for about 10-12 minutes depending on the thickness of the filets and desired doneness. In the case of sous-vide, we simply seal the prepared filets in their bags and cook in the water bath for 30 minutes at our desired temperature. (Note: One drawback of sous-vide cooking is difficulty sealing liquids into the vacuum bag along with the fish. Using “solid” ingredients like cold butter, lemon and herbs solves this issue.)

    Simply season the filets then add the herbs and butter and cover with lemon slices.

    Cook sous-vide or in the oven. These filetes are vacuum-sealed for sous-vide cooking.

    While this is a simple dish to prepare with either cooking method, you get a lot of big flavors. The richness of the salmon and butter is matched by lemon notes and bright, vegetal herbs. If you cook the salmon rare to medium-rare the texture will be soft and juicy, if you cook to medium the texture will be flaky but still rich from the high fat content of the salmon. And here is where personal judgement comes into play. Many cooks will serve salmon rare at 109 or 110 degrees, medium rare in the mid-120 degree range and medium at 130 degrees. Tastes vary and we prefer rare to medium rare fish, but to be fully “cooked” many references suggest cooking fish to at least 130 degrees and even up to 145 degrees. Again, use your judgement based on tastes and the freshness of your fish. And a digital thermometer is a big help if cooking in the oven.

    Some of the best California has to offer…

    As the local king salmon season is short, we enjoyed this dish a few times in the last week or so. We can’t get enough of the salmon, and our kids love it. We take every chance to make sure our kids enjoy eating good fresh fish (think of it as selling healthy eating habits). And the king salmon is more than good, it’s a real treat. Sometimes patience truly is rewarded. Let’s hope we have another good season next year.

    King Salmon With Tarragon-Chive Butter:

    Notes Before You Start:

    • If you don’t have California king salmon, a trip to California is in order…;-) Otherwise substitute your fresh local salmon or other firm fish filets. This basic recipe works for most fish.
    • Salmon usually has small pin-bones you can remove with tweezers or pliers. Remove them before cooking or ask your fishmonger to do it for you.

    Continue reading →

  • Grilled Eggplant With Salsa Verde (And A One Lovely Blog Award!)

    June 21, 2012

    26 Comments

    Grilled eggplant with salsa verde.

    Recipe below, but please read on..

    We recently received a nomination for the One Lovely Blog award from our friend Erin at Erin’s DC Kitchen. We are big fans of Erin’s take on simple, tasty food and the overall positive spirit of her blog. Check out her site, it will be a pleasant visit. Thanks Erin!

    So now we must pass the award along to one lovely blogger and tell you seven things about ourselves (not sure there is much left, but we will try..;-). As for the nomination, we nominate Cooking in Sens, a blog about cooking and life in Burgundy. If we cook and take photos half as good, we would be thrilled. We love the blog and have made a few of the recipes with great success. Please check them out.

    So here are seven more things about us:

    1. We do read cookbooks for fun. And our kids are starting as well. Now we need to put them to work.
    2. As noted before, we have less success with zucchini than we should. Somewhat embarrassing.
    3. We buy too much kitchen gear, but are getting better…a little. Sort of. Maybe.
    4. Sometimes we cook simple food because we don’t want extra dishes.
    5. Once we got to 40, wine started giving us the occasional headache. Cocktails and beer took over at the farm.
    6. Sometimes there are so many gophers we (I) feel like Bill Murray in Caddyshack (and want to “solve” the problem with similar measures).
    7. We can’t wait for tomatoes and fresh corn…like it really bothers us it’s not here yet.

    Now back to cooking. The Grilled Eggplant with Salsa Verde recipe is a simple one, but worth sharing simply because it answers the question of what to do with eggplant. Such a beautiful vegetable (technically a berry, btw), but often many cooks just put it in Eggplant Parmesan or Baba Ghanoush. Both great dishes, but we like quick preparations and grilling the eggplant does the trick. As for extra flavor, salsa verde packs a big punch from the herbs and oil. It is great on many dishes and we use it often on fish, like this dish. But it is great on almost any grilled vegetable.

    Just a few ingredients for the eggplant.

    Make your salsa verde and slice the eggplant.

    Brush oil on the eggplant, sprinkle with salt and pepper and cook on a medium grill.

    Assembling and cooking this dish is as simple as it gets.  Most of the work with salsa verde is in chopping the herbs and then adding the oil and other ingredients. For the eggplant, simply slice it lengthwise into 1/4 inch slices and brush with olive oil and then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook on a medium grill until browned on the outside and soft in the center. The temperature here is key, if the fire is too hot the outside will burn before the center is soft. Lower the heat a bit and take your time. A grill pan indoors will also work, again use medium heat and take your time. You will still need less than 10 minutes. And then you can enjoy one lovely dish.

    Continue reading →

  • Sushi Balls: Sushi At Home

    June 21, 2012

    28 Comments

    Sushi balls. Fun sushi at home.

    When we started writing this blog, one of the promises we made ourselves was to use the blog as motivation to cook new things at home. And so far we are making progress, but mostly with new tools like sous-vide and using “molecular gastronomy” ingredients in baking. But the next step was for us to explore new cuisines, and we went right for Japan.

    We love Japanese food and have a favorite local sushi bar and are even members in a Sake tasting club (great fun), but rarely cook anything other than tempura at home. But we decided that needed to change. So we bought Debra Samuels’ “My Japanese Table”, a cookbook with Japanese recipes adapted for the American kitchen. Samuels is a well-regarded food writer for the Boston Globe and lived /cooked in Japan for ten years, so we took the plunge. So far the cookbook is a good read, with plenty of simple recipes for Japanese basics like teriyaki and tempura. But we know what we wanted to do at home, sushi. And this recipe is why we bought the cookbook. Sushi balls are very pretty sushi that you can make at home. And its fun…really.

    Smoked salmon, salmon roe, seared ahi, shrimp, cucumber and shiitake mushroom.

    Usually the big issue with making sushi at home is actually constructing the rolls. Sushi rice is super-sticky and the shaping tools are uncommon for most home cooks. Without constant practice, home sushi can look like a train wreck. And while the flavor of the sushi can be good, the presentation is a big part of the dish. One way to handle this challenge is to simply prepare the rice and ingredients and then present them with nori as a buffet for hand-rolls. But with Sushi balls, anyone can make an attractive individual piece of sushi. You can even have fun and experiment with presentation.

    The trick is to simply place the fish or veggie on a square of plastic wrap, then place a tablespoon or so of rice on top (be sure to keep your hands moist with water when handling the rice).  Then bring up all the corners of the plastic wrap and twist tightly into a ball. When it unwinds, you have a well-shaped sushi ball. It only takes a few tries to get the hang of it, and then you can experiment with different combinations of ingredients. Samuels suggests cooked shrimp, lightly salted cucumbers and smoked salmon. We added some seared ahi, salmon roe and browned shiitake mushrooms. Cooked crab or scallops would also be very good additions. But feel free to experiment based on taste and budget (and this is an inexpensive dish).

    Rinse the rice and drain.

    Ingredients for Sushi-zu seasoning

    Cooked rice, sprinkled with Sushi-zu seasoning.

    Now that shaping the sushi is less of a challenge, the real effort goes in making the sushi rice. While in sushi bars “mastering” the rice can take years, it is something you can do well at home- on the first try. The trick is to buy the correct rice and follow all of the steps. For the rice you need short grain japonica rice, which is available in most supermarkets. Don’t substitute long grain rice. As for the steps, you must rinse the rice and then either soak it for cooking or use a rice cooker- the recipe deals with both. While the rice is cooking you make the Sushi-zu seasoning of rice vinegar, sugar, salt and mirin. When the rice finishes cooking, you place it in a bowl and then gently sprinkle and mix the Sushi-zu seasoning with the rice. Then fan the rice to cool it down. The rice should stick together but not be mashed or “gluey”.  But if you use the right rice and follow each step you will get consistent, tasty, results.

    Slice cucumbers, sprinkle with salt, wait for 5 minutes and drain. Done. Continue reading →

  • Cooking Sous-Vide At The Farm

    June 8, 2012

    15 Comments

    Sous-vide cooker for the home. It works.

    The more we cook, the more we understand that time and temperature are the keys to good cooking. And it has always been this way in the kitchen. For generations good cooks understood that, for many dishes, low-and-slow transforms even the lowliest ingredients into the best meals. And we use our dutch oven, slow cooker and smoker in many meals to take advantage of low-and-slow, particularly for larger, tougher cuts of meat. We do like our beef brisket and pork shoulder.

    Temperature-controlled water bath with racks to manage space.

    But when cooking steaks, chicken pieces or fish, the slow cooker or smoker are usually not practical options. Most of these meats are fried, seared or roasted in the pan and/or oven, or grilled on the barbecue. The problem with these high-heat methods is that the heat is applied unevenly on the meat. So even with good technique  you get a well-done exterior that moves towards the desired doneness in the center of the meat (assuming you don’t overcook the whole thing). The only real bonus of high-heat cooking is the extra flavor you get from browning / caramelizing. Most traditional cooking methods can’t fully overcome a fundamental challenge- how do we cook and brown this irregularly shaped food without overcooking it?

    Grass-fed ribeye steaks. These are real good- best not to screw it up.

    Sous-vide (French for “under vacuum”) cooking is a solution to this challenge. Basically a slow-cooker for individual cuts of meat, fish and poultry, sous-vide cooking gives the home cook exact control of cooking temperature that’s applied uniformly to the meat. And it works pretty much every time- as long as you have the time. The approach here is pretty simple, a water bath is heated to a specific temperature and the protein (or vegetable) is vacuum-sealed into a bag and the bag is placed in the water. The bag keeps the meat from leaking juices or breaking apart into the water bath. The proteins slowly, and uniformly, cook to the temperature in the water bath. Once done, the protein can be briefly seared to add the tasty browned flavors and improve appearance. It is a neat trick and it really works. If you ever wonder how busy high-end restaurants get their steaks or fish right every time, sous-vide is often the answer.

    Vacuum-sealing the steaks. This takes less than a minute.

    We’ve been reading Stefan’s Gourmet Blog and his results cooking sous-vide always looked great. And as we recently purchased 1/4 of a grass-fed cow from Stemple Creek Ranch, we wanted a cooking method that made the most of the flavor of the beef. So we took the plunge and bought a sous-vide cooker (we got one on sale, but expect the setup to run somewhere between $350 – $500, so it’s not cheap). So far we have tried cooking halibut, salmon and Stefan’s cod recipe. All were perfectly cooked.

    Cook for 1.5 – 2 hours at 125 degrees.

    The next thing we tried was making a good steak using sous-vide. Not ones to be cautious, we went right to making ribeye steaks. We followed the new procedure, sous-vide cook at desired temperature (in this case 125 degrees for rare-to – medium rare) for 2 hours and then sear the meat briefly to brown the surface. Frankly, the meat, while perfectly cooked, is very unattractive unless you brown it. You can use a hot skillet, grill or even a blowtorch, but we just went with a rocket-hot cast-iron skillet. This browning method worked with just 30-45 seconds of searing on each side. Then we rested the meat for a few minutes and cut it into slices to serve. The first thing we noticed was that the meat was seared on the outside but then the same pink color all the way through, no gray layer, just perfectly cooked meat. So we found the sous-vide approach to cooking steaks was a real success, as long as you have the extra time. Our standard cooking method is here, and that takes 20 minutes. But with expensive, high-quality steaks, we think the extra time is worth it. And if you are entertaining, you can hold the meat at the perfect temperature and then sear just before serving, so sous-vide is a good tool when cooking for a group. Continue reading →