I’ll remember to do that next time!
Yeah, if I sous vide a steak, I always set the temp 3-10 degrees under ideal (depending on thickness; the hotter the thicker) to account for the temperature rise from the sear.
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Not cooking, but cooking adjacent. Does anyone use a pot/pan/lid organizer that they like? I’ve been repurposing office supplies for that, but I’ve been thinking about buying something designed for cookware. Is it worth it?
Hot. Real hot.
Question on pulled pork.
I did a big pot. All on the stove top.
Most recipes call for a crockpot in the oven.
Would it be different? Why?
I kind of assume a big pot of mostly water is just gonna be at boiling temperature on the top or in the oven. So not sure how it could be different.
Or is it just the surface/edges reaching hotter temps? A bit of extra browning and caramelization?
Boiling, braising, and roasting are all very similar things. The biggest differences are how much liquid you have left at the end, and if there’s some time in the process spent at low moisture and high temperature for Maillard reactions to occur. For a closed pot in the stove vs. a closed pot in the oven, the biggest difference is that the oven will promote more even temperature all around the meat in the pot, while on the stove, obviously the heat is only from the bottom, so the pork may not cook as evenly. The more liquid in the pot, the more this difference is mitigated. I’m not really sure how much liquid was in your pot, and how big your pot is so as to deal with the liquids given off by the pork as it cooks to comment in greater detail.
Okay. Interesting. There was a lot of liquid in the pot but then I took most of the meat out and then boiled the liquid down to get a thick BBQ type sauce.
Yeah. The pot in the oven would probably simplify that step.
So, I did something new today. Homemade dumplings, with the kids!
No pics, because my kids are in them all. They are 4.5 and almost 3, but despite that, it worked really well. (Admittedly, we have had them in the kitchen doing things for a while now, even if it’s just “put these cut up vegetables into that bowl,” but they also handle tasks like putting a measuring cup onto a plate, spooning flower into the measuring cup, and then leveling off the measuring cup with a knife while mostly keeping the excess flour on the plate). Having different aromatics and seasonings that they got to choose from worked really well. They were obligated to pick ground pork and the finely chopped napa cabbage, but after that, they got to choose their own adventure, and Mr and Mrs Wookie teamed up for our own batch. We had some training wheels on, admittedly. They got to choose whether or not they wanted one of the auxiliary ingredients, and an amount up to but not exceeding Kenji’s guidelines. We did use the microwave to taste test idea, and all batches needed a bit more salt.
The fillings came together pretty quickly, and with store bought wrappers, it wasn’t too hard to make them. One thing that was really helpful and not mentioned in Kenji’s article was a pair of dumpling makers, where you can put a round wrapper on them, a dollop of filling, and then fold the two halves together. The girls wouldn’t have fared well folding their own dumplings by hand, but they did great with those (although they did end up electing to make some malformed “packages” of wrapper wadded around the dollop of filling, which, whatever, fine). They’re a decent investment if you want to try this out with kids but don’t trust the dexterity of all involved.
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Did you just plop the pork in a pot? Pork plus some sort of auxiliary liquid (beer, water, wine, stock, whatever)? Was the pot big compared to the pork, or was it pretty snug in there? Is your pot like a heavy Dutch oven or something thinner and lighter? None of of those options are necessarily right or wrong, really, but I want to understand your liquid and reduction plans.
Browned the pork in the oven.
Fried onions, spices, jalapenos, garlic.
Added chopped peppers. Tinned tomatoes. Stock/bullion. Apple cider. Brown sugar.
Then simmered on the stove top for 3 to 4 hours until falling apart. Lifted whatever meat I could out. Then boiled the remaining liquid down for about 30 minutes until pretty thick.
Added a bunch of coriander before taking the meat out. Which was probably an error, but worked out.
Added the meat back to the sauce and then it’s done.
All pretty good.
The pot is a fairly light aluminum non stick type thing. Massive. Good for stove top stews and pastas.
Probably gonna get about 10 small meals out of it
Sounds pretty great. I think the main advantage of using the oven in a setup like this is that you might have an easier time keeping the temperature low while it cooks, so that you lose less water out of the meat while the tough connective tissue breaks down, but that’s not impossible to replicate on the stove with a covered pot. It might be easier to replicate with a heavier pot, though. Maybe you have to baby it a bit and turn it over from time to time to avoid burning the very bottom of the pork? If you’re cooking it with the lid on, you’re not going to get a ton of browning (either in the oven or on the stove), and you’ll have a fair amount of liquid to reduce. If you cook with the lid off, it’ll probably be pretty uneven cooking on the stove, and I wouldn’t recommend doing that. In the oven with the lid off, you’ll get more even cooking than on the stove with the lid off, but you may dry out the outer surface of the un-submerged meat, for better or for worse: the drier outside might give some nice textural contrast to the mushier inner meat (or maybe you won’t like that). You’ll also have less liquid to reduce when you’re done cooking.
Bottom line, I doubt you have all that much to gain by using the oven for what it sounds like you’re making, and I’d love to try a bite if I were around to do so.
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Dammit, my main mission going into this thread yesterday was to post an EMC, and I got distracted. Tonight, I rectify that mistake.
Filet, reverse seared in ghee in a cast iron pan.
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Not Chinese or a Lunar New Year enthusiast per se, but I love the excuse to make the food:
Not my finest photography. Had hungry and impatient girls.
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Your kids have incredibly sophisticated palates if they would eat that (looks great to me obviously). Mine aren’t much older than yours and I don’t think I could bribe them enough to get them to even try it.
They would be fine with most if not all of the components, but when they are all combined it starts weirding them out.
The fermented bean chili paste was a little too spicy for them, admittedly, but they ate the fish after taking the skin off. But, in our household, we make one dinner for everyone, and so they eat what they’re given. The only exception being that when we have salad for a side, the girls get tomatoes and non-lettuce vegetables, and MrsWookie gets a salad with no tomatoes. The younger will sometimes ask for lettuce, too, though.
We kind of do that, but the problem (which it sounds like you have too) is the spice. Often we make two versions of the same dish. One regular and one spicy. For certain things I can just add some sort of hot sauce (e.g., we had tacos yesterday), but for a lot of things it really needs to be incorporated into the dish.
So whenever feasible, my wife will make something, take out a portion for the kids, and add the heat at the end.
This leads to another problem. If you leave out the spice, then you can leave out other stuff too that they would prefer not to be in there. And before you know it, after you add in all the extra stuff for the adults, you end up with two dishes that are quite different.
There is also other weird shit. For the longest time if we had pasta with some sort of sauce, they would have two bowls: One bowl of pasta and one bowl of sauce and they would just eat both of them separately. Now they have just started eating both together and prefer it that way.
We probably need to go back to the drawing board on this whole dinner business.
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MrsWookie is a massive wuss when it comes to spicy food, despite being (at least allegedly) from Texas and the daughter of a hot sauce aficionado. So generally we make less spicy food that I heat up for myself, but I sneak in a little whenever possible to get them all used to it: red pepper flakes in tomato sauce, the aforementioned fermented black bean chili paste in Taiwanese beef noodle soup, etc. We also give the girls liberty to accept or reject condiments and sauces that are not part of the dinner core. They’ll sometimes reject a buerre blanc or basic pan sauce that has no more heat than black pepper, but that gives them some agency over their food that they value, even while they just accept the core food we made for them. Another example from this week is that we’re eating the harira recipe I linked in here not long ago. The recipe recommends adding cilantro, parsley, and lemon juice right before serving. MrsWookie and I like all three. The girls like lemon juice but no herbs, and we let them choose that.
It sounds to me like your kids’ ephemeral preference to have pasta and sauce separate is just them exerting their agency over their food. I don’t sweat things like that as long as they eat both, and that you saw it was just a phase reinforces that.
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THAT’S SOCIALISM!!!
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I think that’s just Thai basil.
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