Genius Week 2: Oh, it's you. I thought you were salmon else.

Ready for a terrible joke? "Why did the hipster salmon suffocate? Because the current was too mainstream." Here's creds for that. All puns aside, this week was dedicated to salmon. I used my precision (sous vide) cooker for the first time, which was very very exciting (and scary too...shhhh I didn't say that).

This week I learned just how disoriented and unorganized I have been while cooking. Instead of gathering ingredients ahead of time and memorizing the recipe to make the cooking process smoother, I frantically ran from the kitchen to the cookbook about a million times. Like conducting a science experiment, cooking a dish involves knowing what to do ahead of time (the procedure, the method, the materials, the amount of materials, etc.) to be able to quickly finish it without any hassle. My mom suggested that I visualize myself cooking a dish before I cook it, which has been proven to help one become quicker and more accurate when doing something. Other than that, I had a lot of fun making the salmon dish and I'm especially looking forward to cooking next time. While last week was more of a "starter" to ease myself into the kitchen, this week was more of hands-on experience and I felt as though I was actually "cooking", which was a good feeling.

So far, progress has been good and I feel like I have been learning a lot about the process of cooking as well as the involvement of science in that process. I've made a minor change to the timeline, so here it is now (I pushed pressure cooking back to week 4 and made week 3 steel-plate cooking):

Week 0: Intro to Modernist Cuisine
Week 1: Blanching

Week 2: Sous Vide

Week 3: Steel-Plate Cooking

Week 4: Pressure Cook
Week 5: Create My Own Dish

My recipe for the fish spice mix and salmon is featured below. As always, it came from the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook, although I did make a few modifications, such as...

Original Recipe (Fish Spice Mix)

Fish Spice Mix:

• No toasting! - The original recipe called for toasted sesame and coriander seeds. I decided not to because (a) I did not have enough time and (b) the spice mix would end up in a frying pan anyway.
• Less is more! - I put in less of all of the ingredients (esp. salt), since I wouldn't need all of it for the salmon.
• Black over white! - My poppy seeds and sesame seeds were black, which caused the end product of the spice mix to look exceptionally dark (still tasted great though)

Flagrant Sous Vide Salmon:

• Rock sugar! - It was the only type of sugar I had for the brine.
• Over temp and time! - The recipe called for 113°F and 30 minutes of water bath time, but I did things a little differently.
• Less is more! - I put in less salt, oil, etc. to make the end result more mild



Original Recipe (Salmon) pt. 2



Original Recipe (Salmon) pt. 1

• Water displacement method...What?? - Instead of using the water displacement method as proposed by the book to seal the plastic bags before they went into the water bath, I just sealed them as best I could (as you will see in the video below).

Fish Spice Mix                                                             ❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦ ******************************************************************************************************** Gather 1/2 cup of raw walnuts, 1/3 cup of sesame seeds, 1 Tbsp of coriander seeds, 1/2 Tbsp of salt, 1 tsp of poppy seeds 1 Tbsp of dried chamomile blossoms. Grind in a mortar and pestle.

Flagrant Sous Vide Salmon                                                             ❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦ ******************************************************************************************************** Set up a brine solution by adding three cups of water, 1 Tbsp of salt, and 2 rock sugars into a bowl and mix. Place three raw fish fillets in the brine solution and refrigerate for four hours. After four hours, preheat a water bath (with the sous vide cooker) to 115°F or 46°C. Take the fillets out and place them in separate plastic bags. Add 1 Tbsp of Olive Oil to each of the plastic bags. When the water bath is ready, clip the bags with salmon on the sides of the water bath and leave them in for 45 minutes. Make the fish spice mix while waiting. Melt 3/8 cup of butter in a frying pan. Once it has been melted, put in the fish spice mix (amount to your taste). Once the butter starts bubbling and the salmon is done being "sous vided" (that's not a word...), gently place the salmon in the frying pan. Fry the salmon for one-two minutes per side. Serve!

The salmon was great. Compared to a restaurant's salmon, which can be extremely dry sometimes (believe me...I know), my salmon was somewhat juicy and soft. For my taste, it was still a bit too dry, which is probably because I left the salmon in the water bath for an extra 15 minutes just to make sure the salmon was cooked all the way. Furthermore, the fish spice mix offered a much desired crunchiness and overall, there was a strong melted butter taste. It was absolutely scrumptious, and I would say this past week was a big success (considering I took a giant leap from salad to sous vide salmon).

The ANova Precision Cooker

The technique/technology used was "sous vide". This involves vacuum sealing food in plastic bags and then submerging those foods in a water bath, which cooks slowly and at a low temperature. Orthodox methods of cooking food (searing, grilling, etc.) result in the food reaching various temperatures in every layer from the outside to the inside of it (this is apparent when searing steak). In a water bath, the food is slowly cooked and the temperature is not high, so overcooking would not occur and every layer of the food is allowed to gradually reach a constant core temperature throughout. Theoretically, the vacuum sealing of the food prevents the food from oxidizing and changing color (if the food is submerged for a day or more), and from being insulated by air (so it can be fully cooked). Afterwards, top chefs typically use a blowtorch or a quick searing/frying to brown the food after it has been submerged, since browning does not occur at the low temperatures of the water bath.

Although this may not seem obvious, sous vide poses a food safety concern. Since it involves cooking food slowly and at a low temperature, food may spend a while in a "bacteria-friendly zone above fridge-cold and below oven-hot" (a brilliant New Yorker article that discusses Modernist Cuisine and kitchen science in general). This is why some health officials do not approve of the technique (in fact, according to the New Yorker article, there is a health department in New York that is notoriously against the process of cooking food using sous vide). To learn more about the science behind sous vide, check out this article (one of the coauthors of this article is Nathan Myhrvold, who is the main author of Modernist Cuisine and who I briefly described in my last post...small world, huh?). 

Temperature Gradient of Salmon (from Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook)

My method of cooking sous vide, contrasted with the explanation provided in the above paragraph, is slightly different than the methods of big-time chefs. While cooking my salmon, I did not vacuum seal the plastic bags (since I don't have a vacuum sealer). To be honest, I wish I did, because it might have made the salmon taste a bit different ("cooking is just like fishing...[unless you don't pay close attention to what you're doing] you never know what you're going to get...it's unpredictable and it doesn't disappoint...if I move over there to fish, I might just be successful...you never know why you were successful and why you failed [if you don't understand this reference, just ignore it]..."). In addition to that, I noted that I do not have an official cover for my water bath (while I was perusing the Internet, I saw that most sous vide water baths had lids), since the ANova Precision Cooker just included the red thingy you see in the picture above (yep, the pot is mine). My mom gave me the lids of various Tupperware containers to use as a cover, but it doesn't look very professional...oh, well; that's only a minor detail.

Table of Best Temperatures to "Sous Vide" Various Fish  (from Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook)

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in the kitchen while making the salmon was food safety. In the beginning of the salmon-making process, it was required that the raw salmon be soaked in brine solution. This called for me to get my hands "dirty" and handle the raw salmon, which seemed frightening to me. However, I learned an important lesson that can even be applied to conducting science research: be careful when handling raw materials (or hazardous materials/toxins in a lab setting), and be meticulous and thorough when cleaning up after you've handled them. Everything that I touched (after moving the salmon into the brine) and everything that the salmon touched had to be cleaned. To be completely thorough, the counter-top surrounding where the salmon was and the sink had to be bleached, since germs and bacteria can spread. After this experience, I realized how important food safety is, since ignorance or neglect of a simple action (such as washing your hands) can lead to devastating effects (such as death). To learn more about the basics of the importance of food safety, watch this video.

Aaaannnnddd finally....here's the video; enjoy!:

Sequence of Events (from the vid):

1. Adding two cups of water to a bowl
2. Adding two pieces of rock sugar into the bowl.
3. Adding salt into the bowl.
4. Mixing the brine solution.
5. Adding raw salmon to the brine solution.
6. Setting the water bath to 115F.
7. Putting the salmon in plastic bags.
8. Putting oil in the plastic bags with the salmon.
9. Placing the bags into the water bath and clipping them to the sides.
10. The water bath + precision cooker (sous vide cooker)
11. Melting butter in a frying pan.
12. Adding the fish spice mix to the pan.
13. Adding salmon to the frying pan.
14. Awkward moment when I attempt to flip the salmon over and I majorly fail.
15. The rest is history.

Ain't she a beaut?

Keep it real folks,
~A

Links/Resources:

• The Modernist Cuisine Blog. Ughhh the latest post is amazingggg (for Valentine's Day, they created a "human heart" made out of tonka beans).

My Comments:

• Han-Banan
• My Euro Studybuddy
• Catelynnnn