Brighter Flames Arrayed

Here’s the thing: I love brisket. It’s basically my favorite cut of cow. I also love geese. This is because the town I grew up in is sandwiched between a town that’s known for its brisket and a town that’s known for its roasted geese. And although it’s hard to get roasted geese around here the local co-op always has briskets for sale. It’s hard to make brisket the traditional Southern Chinese way properly lacking the proper spices, the secret recipes and the time to make really good soup stock. Usually that’s compensated for by adding MSG, but since I don’t ever use MSG (except in Japanese curry) that doesn’t quite work. So I’ve been experimenting and trying to figure out other interesting ways to make brisket.

After a year of learning and experimentation I think I’ve finally found the tastiest way to cook brisket in a crock pot and since I need to write it down before I forget what it is I think I should share this with you! The basic idea is that it takes a Jewish recipe (replacing ketchup with a real tomato and real sugar; none of that HFCS stuff goes near my kitchen) for sweet brisket and a collard green recipe from Louisiana, put them together and cook everything using a southern Chinese method. It’s in some ways exceptionally contrived but it works functionally because you get collards and brisket and soup in the same recipe! And it involves Southern food which is always a great idea. I don’t put in too many spices myself but more spices could definitely work with this. Also, the only reason this recipe is for 1/3 to 1/2 of a brisket is because my crock pot is too small for the whole thing. Scale and enjoy! (Note: You may get slightly less enjoyment out of this if you don’t use grass-fed beef, organic vegetables and free range chicken broth like I do because I clearly am raking in the money teaching math and have too much to spend on food.)

Wing’s Brisket and Collard Soup/Couscous

Serves 5 to 6, or 1 for five meals.

Ingredients:
1/3 to 1/2 flat cut brisket
1 large onion
1 tomato
1 bunch of collards
n pieces of bacon (where n is a non-negative real number)
6 cloves garlic
Siracha garlic hot sauce (however much you want)
apple cider vinegar (however much you want)
sugar, salt, ground black pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper
chicken/beef stock
couscous (lots)

Preparation Time: 16 hours, at least…

1 - Cut the garlic cloves into small, but not too small, pieces.

2 - Dice the tomato.

3 - Cut the onion and the collards into 1/2in pieces.

3.14 - If n > 0, fry up the bacon in a cast iron skillet as you’d normally make them. Don’t overcook the bacon! Chopped the bacon up into small pieces. Pour a small bit of the grease into the crock pot if you want to die an early but satisfying death.

4 - Add half the onion and all the tomato into the crock pot. Put some of the salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne powder, and about half the garlic on top of the onion/tomato mixture.

5 - Pour the (bacon and) collards in! Squish them in if there’s no room. Collard greens squish well.

6 - Put the rest of the salt, pepper, etc. and garlic on top of the collards. Add a small amount of Siracha and all the vinegar on top of the collards as well.

7 - Gently place the (part) brisket on top of the whole stack of veggies. Squirt some more Siracha over the brisket.

8 - Pour enough stock and water in (I use a 50/50 mix) to cover everything up.

9 - Turn the crock pot on high and cook for 6 hours.

10 - Add the rest of the onion into the crock pot and cook for at least 2 more hours.

11 - Take the brisket out and store the brisket and the soup in separate containers. Let them cool and then refrigerate overnight.

12 - Take the brisket out and slice it into small pieces.

You can serve the brisket and soup by tossing the brisket back into the soup and then bringing everything to a light boil. It goes well with noodles or rice. But that’s not the best way of serving this…

13 - Place the brisket back in the soup and bring everything to a slow boil. Scoop all the vegetables and brisket and a small amount of soup out. You may also want to save some extra soup because next you’re going to…

14 - Bring the soup to a full rolling boil and use it to cook couscous to go with your vegetables and brisket. You may not need all the soup to cook the amount of couscous you need, so that’s why you want to save what you don’t need. You can also only do steps 13 and 14 in small batches if you’re only cooking one or two servings at a time.

15 - Enjoy!

Wing :: Aug.18.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

Last week, for my birthday, my friend John (who first posed to me the question of whether bacon could be used as yarn) and I decided to make a knitted bacon BLT. Or would that be a knitted BLT? Knitted bacon LT? KBLT? (KB)LT? Oh whatever. Let’s not argue syntax and move on to the taxing sin of, once again, knitting bacon.

The toothpicks are holding the bacon together.

Now, John’s a much better knitter than I am, so this time the knitted bacon is much improved. Also, since I can take pictures and drink beer while he knits, this entire process is much more streamlined and joyous than the last time around… The first improvement is easy to see: he used toothpicks to join the bacon together so he did not have the problems I got with tucking bacon into other bacon. The bacon consistency this time around is much better.

Notice the cabling that's going on here.

The second thing is that it now has cabling. I am not sure whether that makes it tastier, but I am sure that it multiplies the awesomeness by a rather large positive factor—I feared that the universe would end due to sheer awesomeness if he cabled bacon, and just because he knows I fear it, John had to cable the goddamn bacon.

This is after an hour in the oven.

Because there is now 3/4 lbs. of bacon in this patch, it took forever to cook. According to the timestamps on the photos, it took about 70 minutes in the oven for the bacon to look like the picture above. And the sad thing is that it wasn’t done yet. In fact, it was so raw in the middle that our friend Matt—who usually goes oh ho ho I lived in France for years and ate raw meat as part of my fancy French cuisine—considered it not done. It took a total of over 90 minutes at 400 degrees for the bacon to fully cook to not-hospitalizing-us standards.

The veggies make the bacon better! Truth!

Combined with delicious organic mayo, delicious strong mustard, delicious fancy sliced bread, delicious tomato and delicious lettuce, the knitted bacon BLT was born.

Knitted bacon is knitted.

You can see from the picture that there is a lot of bacon in this thing. A normal BLT at a diner contains maybe two strips of bacon. This baconlicious monster contains 3/4 pounds of bacon. According to the sample of bacon I have in my fridge that is about 11 slices of bacon. And since the knitting, as I scientifically discovered last time around, seals the fat in this is 11 slices of extra-greasy bacon. Let me try this again, spelling out the number and using the magic of HTML for emphasis: this is a BLT with eleven frackin’ strips of extra-fat bacon.

Sure, you can pile 11 strips of bacon on a BLT normally, like a normal person would, perhaps. But they will fall off. This is one specifically crafted BLT-sized patch of dense baconknit. It stays on the bread and it provides a consistent, even distribution of bacon. I dare say that this was the best BLT we’ve ever had. It may have taken exactly 118 minutes to make but it was worth every single minute; especially since, you know, 90 of those minutes consisted of drinking beer and hanging out while the bacon cooks.

Wing :: Feb.28.2009 :: Posts :: 9 Comments »

This morning I created an abomination; it was a nexus of lust, greed and gluttony weaved from the purest desires of man. When I came to, I was covered in fat, grease and the slimy manna of sin. Perhaps I have doomed all of humanity by unleashing this upon the world; if the world explodes tomorrow you’ll know that it’s all my fault.

A raw mess of bacon. Nom.

It all started when my friend John asked me, possibly inspired by my tale of the bacon explosion, whether bacon could be knitted instead of simply weaved. Since I was on vacation and was bored because I was waiting for my stew to cook and just got a pound of bacon last night, I knew I had to do this. For science!

The hardest part, he thought, would be taking strips of bacon and combining them into one long “yarn”. So he enlisted the help of The Basil Queen, who recommended some fancy cooking technique that involves fine needlework or something. Fie! My KNITCRAFT skill may be poor, but I do not need fancy cooking techniques to knit bacon. I simply used my LEVEL 40 YARNTECH: THE JOINING and weaved more bacon in at the end of each strip. Twenty minutes later, I had, according to Google, the Interweb’s first patch of knitted bacon.

A proper establishing shot for scale.

Knitting bacon is, in case you haven’t guessed, hard. The fact that the bacon is exceedingly greasy makes it somewhat easy: they slide on to the chopsticks really well. (I used a pair of chopsticks for each knitting “needle”. I actually have been knitting with chopsticks a lot years ago. That was really the only natural part of this exercise.) The problem is that it’s hard to make out where the bacon strips end and where to stick your “needle” in.

As you can see, I knitted only three and a half rows and then gave up. The mess of bacon was just so… messy… that I couldn’t figure out where to put the needles in anymore. Also some of those strands were so thin that I was afraid the whole thing would fall apart if I pulled too hard. Perhaps next time I’ll twist/spin the bacon into bacon-yarn first.

This is what happens when a bacon knit meets gravity.

The bacon knit is an unholy mesh of fat and meat, a writhing mass of grease engaged in an eternal orgy of gluttony. (If you’ve been reading Jack (NSFW link!), the bacon knit is basically like an edible Valley of Lust (NSFW link!).) It can only really be appreciated if it’s lifted up in the air though… Dripping, oozing, oh so delicious.

Time to shove this sucker in the oven! I followed the recipe for a mundane bacon weave: bacon in cast iron skillet, skillet in oven, 400 degrees, 15 to 20 minutes.

After twenty minutes of baking at 400 degrees.

It turned out that I needed to leave it in there for half an hour. Since the bacon was knitted/knotted it took longer to cook through. Also, because I left the “needles” in there (you’ll notice that I switched plastic chopsticks with bamboo ones before putting it in the oven) most of the knit was not touching the hot skillet surface.

Draining the fat so it isn't too deadly...

The biggest problem (and also the best part) about a bacon knit is that the knotting and knitting, along with the multiple layers of bacon where strips are joined, seals the fat in. Half a pound of bacon should not produce this little grease when cooked. (You can see the grease level in the previous two pictures.) In fact, cooking three strips of bacon last night I ended up with twice as much grease. This is because all that artery-destroying oil is sealed inside each stitch.

This means that the bacon knit is deadly, but also delicious.

You can kind of see the stitching here.

You can get the same fatty, chewy effect of bacon by beer battering strips of bacon and then deep frying them. However, knitted bacon gives the satisfaction of being only bacon and having that “sheet” integrity that makes it possible for you to eat the thing off a “knitting needle”. I found that the most satisfying way of eating one of these things is to just dangle it off a needle and bite it from the bottom. Om nom nom. Maybe I’ll call this a Bacon Knit Ka-Bob? Bacon Flag?

Ultimately, bacon knit is not as useful as bacon weave, harder to make and way messier. However it is more delicious (more bacon per square inch?) and, well, it’s bacon knitted into a patch. Seriously. I’d imagine that this would be epic if you put it in a burger…

I feel like I did science today. Awesome science.

Update: The bacon knit patch has been improved (with cabling) and applied to the most delicious BLT ever made! Check it out!

Wing :: Feb.10.2009 :: Posts :: 14 Comments »