Monday, December 1, 2014

Meat, CURED BY ME!

I have always been under an impression that making a decent cured meat at home without having underground cellars or owning some kind of special equipment was impossible. Therefore, every time we visit Italy for vacation, we buy some (as much as the air luggage could care) pieces of cured meat and “prolong the taste of the vacation” for a few weeks at home. And then begins the long waiting period – until the next vacation. When I found this idea in a culinary magazine, I simply had to try it to see the results for myself. To make a long story short – the result is amazing. My guests couldn’t believe that this was home-made and not bought at some deli. And the fun part – the toughest thing here is to find enough space in the refrigerator…. So, anybody up for some cured meat? :-)
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Ingredients:

1 kg meat (*)
40 gr. sea salt
30 gr. sugar
4 gr. ground coffee
10 gr. black pepper, coarsely ground
10 gr. ground juniper berries (**)
5-6 bay leaves
* It is recommended to use a long piece of topside beef
** In one case, I didn’t have either juniper or ground coffee at home (and it was weekend, so going to buy these was somewhat complicated), so I just used a spoonful of coriander seeds and a pepper mixture (English Pepper, White, Black and Green Peppers) instead. These are, by no means, equivalent, but the result turned out to be great as well – the cured meat ended up being more spicy.

Preparation:

1. Mix all the spices with salt and sugar, and then cover the meat with the mixture from all sides

2. Place the meat in some kind of a narrow “form” (not leaving any space on the sides), for example an English-cake baking form
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3. Wrap the form with the meat using a kitchen nylon wrap, put some sort of a narrow plate on top of it, to cover the upper surface of the wrapped meat and put some weight on top (some cans with preserved food, for example). Leave this “construction” in the refridgerator for 7-8 days. Every two days turn the meat upside-down and drain all the liquids from the form.
This is how it looked in my case after two days:
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During these 8 days, the meat could loose between 10% and 30% of its weight. In my case, I’ve started with 1451 grams and ended up with 1293 grams. After the week, remove the meat from the form and dry it with paper towels. At this stage, you could also remove the spices from the exterior of the meat, as they’ve already served their main function. Leaving them can appeal visually and also add some extra spicy taste when eating. In my case I decided to leave them.
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At this stage, if you have a huge refrigerator or a cellar with the right conditions, you are supposed to hang the meat on a rope. If all you have is a normal refrigerator (like me), then use the idea illustrated above (put the meat on some sort of a grill, on top of a deep plate or baking form, to allow air access to the surface. Leave the meat this way in the refrigerator (for drying and curing). Turn the meat over every couple of days and continue the process for 1 to 3 weeks. The above photo shows the way it looks after 1.5 weeks. After the whole process, the weight was 998 grams, so the eventual weight loss was 32%.
In the end of the process, keep the meat wrapped in a baking paper in a refrigerator. The meat should not be kept longer than a month.


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Saturday, June 14, 2014

Menstruation and Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM): What is the evolutionary benefit or purpose of having periods?


Suzanne Sadedin's answer to:

Why can't women just get pregnant without the menstrual cycle?

Sorry I omitted biological from the question so late into the question guys, I realized it was resulting in some deviating answers :)
Suzanne SadedinPhD in Zoology from Monash University.
Votes by Ray Duncan (MD, FAAP. Graduated from UCLA Medical School 19...),David Chan (MD from UCLA, Stanford Oncology Fellowship)Frank James Wilson (Retired Pulmonologist, Critical Care Physician,...)Igor Ksenich, and 8471 more.
I'm so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:

HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD

Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it's a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What's more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it's bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.

Isn't pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There's the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.

If you've actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they're interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you'll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.

From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they're delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother's blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don't even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.

Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.

What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother's blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother's bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.

This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it's sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother 'wants' to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus 'wants' to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn't about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)

There's also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother's because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother's expense.

How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.

The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It's a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.

What does all this have to do with menstruation? We're getting there.

From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn't worth it.

That's where the endometrium comes in. You've probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it's quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.

Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother's rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.

But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.

The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn't result in a healthy pregnancy. It's not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it's easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it's just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It's not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.

We don't really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically 'ate the fruit of knowledge' – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.

Links:
The evolution of menstruation: A new model for genetic assimilation
Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy.
Menstruation: a nonadaptive consequence of uterin... [Q Rev Biol. 1998]
Natural Selection of Human Embryos: Decidualizing Endometrial Stromal Cells Serve as Sensors of Embryo Quality upon Implantation

Credits: During my pregnancy I was privileged to audit a class at Harvard University by the eminent Professor David Haig, whose insight underlies much of this research. Thanks also to Edgar A. Duenez-Guzman, who reminded me of crucial details. All errors are mine alone.

*Dogs undergo vaginal bleeding, but do not menstruate. Elephant shrews were previously thought to menstruate, but it's now believed that these events were most likely spontaneous abortions.

** Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Living in Mothers’ Brains (Thanks to Robyn Adair for the link).

***I initially said 7-10 times based on my course notes, but haven't been able to source that statistic so I'm assuming I misheard. One older published estimate for hunter gatherers was around 50, but this relied on several assumptions that suggest it's a significant over-estimate. In particular, it includes 3 whole years of menstruation before reproduction (36 periods) for no obvious reason.

We can make an estimate from studies of the Hadza of Tanzania, who reach puberty around 18, bear an  average of 6.2 children in their lives (plus 2-3 noticeable miscarriages) starting at 19, and go  through menopause at about 43 if they survive that long (about 50%  don't). Around 20% of babies die in their first year; the remainder  breastfeed for about 4 years. So this is 25 years of reproductive life, of which about 20 are spent lactating, and 4.5 pregnant. That would leave only about 6 periods, but amenorrhoea would cease during the last year of lactation for each child, so this figure is too low. On the other hand,  this calculation ignores the ~50% of women who died before menopause,  miscarriages, months spent breastfeeding infants who would die, and periods of food scarcity, all of which would further reduce lifetime  menstruation. Stats from: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ehb...
  
Upvote • 214+ Comments • Updated Tue May 13 2014

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Tandoori-esque Marinade

Combine:
  • 6 tablespoons sweet paprika
  • Generous pinch ground turmeric
  • 1/2 tablespoon ground cayenne pepper
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons ground coriander
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons cumin seed
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons ground ginger
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom
  • 3/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons sea salt
  • 4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
  • 2 tablespoons tamarind paste
  • 1 cup honey
  • 1 cup plain low-fat yogurt
Do things with it (I cut the recipe in half since it makes A LOT).

Beer Cooler Sous-Vide

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Prepping a beer cooler for low-temp cooking [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
By this point, there is absolutely no question that the method of cooking foods at precise low-temperatures in vacuum-sealed pouches(commonly referred to as "sous-vide") has revolutionized fine-dining kitchens around the world. There is not a Michelin-starred chef who would part easily with their Polyscience circulators. But the question of when this technique will trickle down to home users—and it certainly is a question of when, and not if—remains to be answered.
The Sous-Vide Supreme, introduced last winter, and of which I am a big fan, is certainly a big step in the right direction. But at $450, for most people, it still remains prohibitively costly. In an effort to help those who'd like to experiment with sous-vide cookery without having to put in the capital, a couple weeks ago I devised a novel solution to the problem: Cook your food in a beer cooler.
a beer cooler is just as good at keeping hot things hot as it is at keeping cold things cold
Here's how it works: A beer cooler is designed to keep things cool. It accomplishes this with a two-walled plastic chamber with an air space in between. This airspace acts as an insulator, preventing thermal energy (a.k.a. heat) from the outside from reaching the cold food on the inside. Of course, insulators work both ways. Once you realize that a beer cooler is just as good at keeping hot things hot as it is at keeping cold things cold, then the rest is easy: Fill up your beer cooler with water just a couple degrees higher than the temperature you'd like to cook your food at (to account for temperature loss when you add cold food to it), seal your food in a plastic Ziplock bag*, drop it in, and close your beer cooler until your food is cooked. It's as simple as that.
*FYI: The air in a plastic bag can be removed by slowly dipping the open bag with your food in it into the water, sealing it just before the water starts to pour inside. It's not as air-free an environment as a vacuum-sealed bag, but it's enough to keep the food submerged, and in contact with the water, which is all that's really important.
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At the time that the original article "went to print," as it were, I'd only actually tried the method out on lamb racks, so I decided that some more rigorous full-scale testing was in order. To cut to the chase: I wanted to put my cheap-o hack using a beer cooler and Ziplock bags head-to-head against a FoodSaver and a Sous-Vide Supreme.
To test it, I first jotted down what I perceive to be the main benefits of sous-vide cookery:
  • 1. The ability to cook proteins to a precise temperature all the way from edge to center. With sous-vide cookery, you cook at precisely the temperature you want your food to finish at (say 125°F for a rare steak). No part of the meat can possibly overcook, giving you evenly cooked meat from edge to center.
  • 2. The ability to hold cooked foods at serving temperature for several hours without any loss of quality. Low temperatures and a sealed bag prevent overcooking or loss of moisture from cooked foods. This is an invaluable asset, allowing a line cook (or a harried spouse) to serve hot food at a moment's notice, without the need to worry about precise timing. Those roasted potatoes in the oven taking a bit longer than expected? No problem—the steak will be exactly the same in 30 minutes as it is right now.
  • 3. The ability to tenderize tough pieces of meat. Cooking a tough piece of meat like a short rib or a slab of pork belly for extended periods of time—24 hours and above—helps enzymes naturally present in the meat to break down tough connective tissues, resulting in extraordinarily tender and savory results.
  • 4. The ability to cook vegetables without loss of flavor. Vegetables cooked in vacuum-sealed pouches naturally soften in their own juices. In some cases, this can be overpowering (ever try sous-vide celery root?), while in others, the results can be downright extraordinary. Sous-vide'd carrots taste more like a carrot than any carrot you've ever tasted (if you can imagine that).
Before I even began, I threw in the towel as far as parts 3 and 4 go. There's no way my beer cooler is staying warm for the requisite 24 hours—previous testing had shown me that it loses about 1 degree per hour when it's in the 140°F to 150°F range.
Vegetables are an even bigger problem. Pectin, the tough glue that keeps vegetable cells connected doesn't begin to break down until 183°F. Even after 15 minutes, a beer cooler this hot cools by several degrees—it just doesn't work. So for the time being, it looks like if prolonged (2 hours +) or relatively hot (160°F +) cooking are part of your requirements for a sous-vide cooker, you're going to have to spring for the real deal.
On the other hand, I'd easily argue that parts 1 and 2 are in fact the primary use of a sous-vide cooker—particularly for home cooks. A quick search of the types of recipes home cooks have been playing around with confirms this.
Confident, I moved on to the field tests.

Staying Cool Under Pressure

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First things first: Price difference. If budget isn't at least a partial concern of yours, then you probably have someone cooking your food for you anyway and can stop reading now. For the rest of you, you'd be happy to know that the beer cooler rig has the Sous-Vide Supreme beatby a factor of 26 to 1. Not only that, but unlike expensive FoodSaver bags, plastic ziplock bags are reusable. Score!
Next up, I cooked steak at 125°F for 1 hour and chicken at 140°F for 2.5 hours* in both the beer cooler, and in the Sous-Vide Supreme. The results?
*Follow the links for our recipes.
In both cases, the proteins were indistinguishable from one another.
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Can you tell which steak was cooked in the $450 machine and which was cooked in the beer cooler? I certainly couldn't. Both were perfectly cooked from edge to edge, and both were as tender as you could wish.
I decided to put my money where my mouth is and launch the beer cooler technique on an unsuspecting public
I've catered plenty of parties in which I've relied on the Sous-Vide Supreme to streamline the process by keeping each course hot and ready to serve right when I need it. Could the beer cooler pull off the same feat? For the final test—holding foods at serving temperatureI decided to put my money where my mouth is and launch the beer cooler technique on an unsuspecting public. The 24 guinea pigs were each paying $50 a head for a wine tasting dinner organized by my good friend Lindsay Cohen at Gordon's Wine & Culinary Center in Waltham, MA.
The menu consisted of four courses, two of which were cooked sous-vide: salmon cooked to 115°F and hanger steaks cooked to 130°F. Both proteins were cooked via the beer cooler method one hour before the event started, and held in their respective beer coolers until ready to serve. Because this was an interactive event with discussions of both wine and food, there was no way for me to know exactly when I would be serving each dish—I relied solely on the heat-retention properties of the beer cooler to keep the food hot and ready-to-serve.
It worked like a charm. Both the salmon and steak were cooked perfectly, requiring only minimal work for me to complete the dishes, and allowing me to interact better with the audience through the whole process—something which is equally useful when entertaining guests at home in the kitchen or the backyard.
I just can't wait to try this on a camping trip
The best part? The beer cooler is more easily transportable, and doesn't require an electric outlet. That means that the other night, for example, I was able to start cooking a two-pound dry-aged ribeye in my kitchen, carry the whole beer cooler out to my deck two hours later, slap the beef on a blazing hot grill for 30 seconds just to mark them and brown the exterior, then enjoy the most perfectly cooked meat that's ever come off my Weber. I just can't wait to try this on a camping trip.
Now, is all this to say that a real high-quality low-temperature water oven like the Sous-Vide Supreme isn't worth owning? Certainly not. I wouldn't even consider giving mine up. Absolute precision and the ability to hold higher temperatures more steadily and for much longer periods of time comes in handy in many situations (particularly when you have friends and spouses who habitually late for dinner—ahem).
But for those of you who have thought of playing around with sous-vide cookery (and I highly encourage that sort of behavior!) but have been thrown by the costs, this is a cheap, reliable, and pretty much foolproof way to do exactly what the more expensive machines do. Play away.
So tell me: how many of you would be willing to give home sous-vide cooking a try now?
Note: This technique will work with any of the sous-vide recipes we've published on the site including:

About the authorJ. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Curry Town?

Garlic Paste 2 tablespoons heaping
Ginger Paste 2 tablespoons heaping
White Vinegar 7 tablespoons
Salt 4 teaspoons
Black Pepper 2 tablespoons
Curry Powder 2 tablespoons
Cayenne Pepper 3 tablespoons

Curry Leaves (I substituted with bay leaves)
Cinnamon Sticks 2
Cardamom Pods 8
Whole Cloves 4

Diced Tomatoes 1 can
Vegetable Oil 6 tablespoons
Onions 2 large

1. Mix garlic, ginger, vinegar, salt, pepper, curry, and cayenne together.
2. heat oil in dutch oven.
3. add curry leaves, cinnamon sticks, cardamom, cloves, and onions and cook til onions are clear.
4. add tomatoes and spices.
5. simmer covered for about 1 hour. check occasionally and add more water if needed.
6. add 2 cups coconut milk or plain yogurt before serving.

We'll see how this goes with some potatoes and green beans