Of all the crazy shit I do in my kitchen, I can safely say that the weapon of choice I return to again and again is my SousVide Supreme. When I’m busy turning pizza into flowers over a four day stretch, or experimenting with making ice cream hot (more to come on that) I still need to EAT. Sous vide is the easiest way to do that with panache but without having to babysit my dinner.  I predict that by 10 years from now nearly the same percentage of American households who possess a stand mixer will possess a means to cook en sous vide. There, I said it, it shall be so. It’s like the slow-cooker of the new millennium, only much more versatile and less prone to use by boozing grannies.

I realize the financial barrier to entry on a SousVide Supreme machine is somewhat steep, and guess what? So does SousVide Supreme, which is why they have just released a more pocketbook-friendly model called the Demi.  The Demi is priced at $299 and has the countertop footprint of a standard slow-cooker, which means that not only is it easier on the bank account, it’s also more manageable from a spatial perspective. Another huge benefit of the Demi is that it is available in five colors, so if you’re like me and you enjoy matching your appliances to your stilettos, you are in luck. Want one? Go see SousVide Supreme.

Once you are set up with your trusty sous vide unit, you will want to start messing around madly with it because I guarantee you, it will be love at first bite. If you really want to blow yourself away in a short amount of time, drop an egg in it and tell me all about your oral orgasm afterward.  Once you’ve got that covered, however, you will continue to search for ways to pleasure yourself and your guests.

Take a cue from your bedroom antics and cover your meat in something sticky and sweet. The bliss will be at first subtle, delicate, then mount into a frenzied crescendo that will steamroll you into submission and have you gnashing your teeth for more. Yes, I am talking about dousing a Frenched rack of pork in unctuous butterscotch sauce- what did you think I meant?

This recipe is steeped in notes of autumn and will likely speak to your inner locavore if you live somewhere that rains apples, weans piggies and ferments wine.  If you don’t and you still want to be a locavore ninja, you could try substituting dingo for the pork, Tim Tams for the apple and absinthe for the wine, but I cannot vouch for the results. Most of the time I cannot even vouch for my own mental sanity, but curiously, I can vouch for the otherworldly quality of this hypersplendid dish. And by otherworldly, I mean the Dagobah system- everything tastes better when you have to take an X-wing to get there and you spend your days moving large objects with your mind.

Before I go all verklempt and  give up the recipe I just have to posit one final question- why the arse haven’t I slathered pork in butterscotch before? Am I so pedestrian in my culinary skeels that I really never thought to do it? Clearly my genius badge has been revoked. Is some synapse not firing properly in my wine-addled brain? Well at least now I can make up for lost time. Oh, and you should too. Here you go, my Fantastic Sallies- Sally Forth:

Apple-Butterscotch Frenched Rack of Pork Sous Vide

Serves 4, takes 6 hours inactive time, ½ hour active time

• 1 Frenched Rack of Pork- 4 chops total
• 1 apple, your choice, sliced
• 2 tbsp salt
• 125 grams sugar
• 75 grams corn syrup
• 150 grams heavy whipping cream
• ½ c red wine
• 4 Thyme sprigs

1. Heat water bath to 185° F. Sprinkle salt all over pork rack. Position apples slices so that they touch all sides of the meat of the rack. Place the rack inside a food safe vacuum sealing bag along with sugar, corn syrup and whipping cream. Seal the bag, getting as much air out as possible (you can freeze the liquids before putting them in the bag if you really want a tight seal, but you don’t need to get that technical if you don’t feel like it). Immerse the rack in the water bath and cook for 6-8 hours.
2. Remove the rack from the water bath and pour wine into a large skillet set over high heat. Once the wine is bubbling, add 3 sprigs thyme. Using tongs, place the rack inside the skillet and turn frequently to coat on all sides with wine. Once the wine evaporates from the skillet, lightly brown the rack, then remove to a cutting board. Slice into individual chops.
3. While the rack is searing in the wine skillet, reduce the liquid and apples from the vacuum bag in a medium saucepan on high heat until you’ve reached a syrupy consistency.  Use this to sauce your chops.
4. To serve, place a dollop of parsnip-delicata puree(or whatever complementary side you feel like) in the center of the plate and top with a chop. Spoon sauce over everything and garnish with thyme leaves from the remaining sprig.

Pushing blood out of the femoral artery of prosciutto so it doesn't spoil

This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for- it’s time to vote for your favorite Food Ninja. The submissions are in and it’s the witching hour, so get your clicking fingers ready and head over to Fuji Ninja’s voting palace to vote, baby, vote. Let’s get some of these Food Ninja’s the prizes they deserve. (Voting open until Saturday, October 30th at 10pm PST)

Perfectly linked salami

I can think of very few things more Food Ninja than charcuterie, so the remainder of this post will be spent on the fine art of curing and aging the most blessed of all tasty creatures, the pig. I had the recent pleasure of auditing a charcuterie workshop taught by the infamous Gabriel Claycamp, yes, THAT one, for those of you Seattle-ites in the know. Over the course of several hours I watched him dismantle an organic pig and, with the help of his students, place various body parts into curious concoctions meant to make meat amazing, oh and safe to eat too. Safety is a big issue with Claycamp, who has essentially written the book on how to be in compliance with the FDA and their pesky HACCP plans whilst curing meat. If you have a salient interest to cover your sausage in salt, Claycamp teaches regular classes which you can see here.

Spanish chorizo filling the casing

Now let’s get to the meat of the post- haha, I am sofa-king funny.  Charcuterie, to those of you living under a lettuce leaf, is the fine art of curing meat. I’m going to go out on a limb here and completely alienate myself from Francophiles (whom I love) by saying that I cannot understand why the hell the globally-accepted term for the art is in French.  I mean, hello, uh Italy? Sure, you may have heard the word Salumi, but I’m betting a good percentage of folks think that’s just some obscure spelling for Salami. I’m also betting those are the same people who make the mistake of ordering pizza ai peperoni in Italy and being surprised when it comes back with not meat but peppers.  I digress.

Fat back can become lardo or be ground for salami

Salumi is the family which contains salami as a species. In other words, all salami are salumi, but not all salumi are salami. Say that five times fast, I dare you. Examples of salumi that are not salami are whole muscle cuts such as prosciutto or bresaola. Bresaola is made from the eye of round of beef, and prosciutto, as most of you know, is from the leg or ham of a pig.

On the road to chorizo

While I am sure you will never forget that the prosciutto is the ham if you’ve ever had a perfect slice of paper-thin San Daniele, I’m going to lodge a little gem in your brain so you’ll also always think of me when you think of pigs (wait?) and the strikingly-arcane knowledge I share with you.  After all, I have to justify my purchase of the Oxford English Dictionary at a time of my life when I was starving and boozing my way through a creative writing degree in the tundric outlands of rural Montana (aka Missoula).

The word ham is curiously associated with clumsiness and ineffectuality. You know how we like to say “hamming it up?” Well that came to us via the longer version of the word, “hamfatter,” which was coined in the 19^th century to describe an overemphatic actor who rants or overacts. Often when a person has a really great slice of prosciutto, or jamon iberico which is the name of my current paramour, they rant and overact. Therefore I have scientifically deduced that there must be something in the ham that makes people a touch off. Hence, the word ham.  Stay tuned next time, where the word of the day will be finocchio, the Italian word for fennel (it has a curious double-meaning).

Weighing curing salt

Back to salumi. Salami are a genus in the salumi family that consist of ground meat stuffed into some sort of casing (usually pig intestines). On this blissfully piggy evening, we got to try our hand at starting salami such as chorizo, and lots of salumi such as prosciutto, lomo, lardo and coppa. I say starting because, as you may know, charcuterie is an art for a patient man. Something large like prosciutto can cure for upwards of two years, and even a cut as small as bresaola still takes a month, give or take. If you want to whet your appetite whilst breaking down a pig, you can always toss scraps of skin into a big vat of stew for flavor and to fortify you while you parcel out your beast.

Separating fat back from loin

I shan’t be whittling down into the minutiae of swine (swinutiae?) in this very general post- I just wanted to touch the tip of the pig, so to speak. If you want to get slightly serious about it, think about starting with something easy and delicious like bacon. You can be merrily masticating smoky pork belly in a week or so, and it’s a fair bit of fun. If, on the other hand, you decide to go crazy and turn your randomly-amassed collection of old wine fridges into curing chambers and tackle something daunting like bresaola (my delicious nemesis), you’d do well to take a class from a pro like Claycamp. Here’s his schedule.

Every great journey should be a metamorphosis, and I can think of nothing more life-defining from the canons of literature than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In deciding to embody Alice for this, the sixth challenge for Project Food Blog, I was able to approach food from a whimsical perspective, but by the end of the challenge whimsy gave way to growth and in fact I find myself renewed for having seen it through. If you enjoy this journey, why not vote for it?

To Alice, eating and drinking is not about sustenance; rather it’s to evoke transformation. This is intrinsically linked with my own approach to food. Yes, I love to eat, but I especially like it when the food that passes my lips inspires mental and emotional reactions that lead to enveloping-contentment far beyond the physical. It’s like umami in the sense that you cannot put your finger on it but when it happens, it makes the bite that much richer, and yes, it can even change your life.

Alice eats a teacup

Ludwig Bemelmans said, “The true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection.” I’m no true gourmet, but I do strive for Bemelman’s ideal. A handful of times throughout my years, I’ve taken a bite that has brought me to tears (and no, I am not talking about eating magic mushrooms here).

through the Looking-Glass House

Maybe that makes me a food nerd of the highest order, but one of my major life goals in writing this blog is to share that singular passion for perfect food with the world.  And to have a brillig-ly jabberwocky time while doing it, so let’s party, tea-party people.  Wonderland, here we come, through the Looking-Glass House.

Because a major tenet of the challenge was to fit the food into a cooler provided to us by Project Food Blog and Buick Lacrosse (bedazzled a la Mad Hatter), portability drove my selections. I started the journey the way Alice did, with a “drink me” bottle of magic potion. Alice said, “It had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavor of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.” I thought about how to recreate it and I remembered Heston Blumenthal did an Alice-themed menu for The Fat Duck a few years ago.

from infusion to fruition

Sure enough, he made the potion using the method of infusion seen here. I started with all six of those foods and infused them into milk for 12 hours. Then I strained out the solids and thickened the layers with iota carageenan (1% by weight) so they would hold without bleeding into one another and blurring the individual flavor profiles.  I carefully layered them into bottles (with the help of my two co-conspirators, Emme and Andrea). While this drink may sound strange, it was pleasantly-staggering for the senses to distinctly sequentially identify all those flavors. It certainly made me think, even if it didn’t literally make me shrink.

I chose to miniaturize teacups, and rather than fill them with tea which might have been messy, I made blueberry foam “tea” instead. Taking a page from the Mad Hatter’s playbook, I constructed edible teacups from white chocolate using plastic hemisphere molds.

The only really difficult part of this dish is tempering the chocolate. The rest of it involves pouring chocolate into the molds, suspending them upside down until they solidify then popping out the cups. The handles are chocolate piped onto parchment and hardened, and the saucers are easily formed using round cutters. White chocolate “glue” holds everything together.

My favorite creation of the day was a riff I did on incorporating the Royal Hearts Family into the feast. I made a Royal Flush hand of cards by “tuile-ifying” dehydrated coconut milk. I stenciled out card shapes and sifted the coconut milk (along with isomalt, glucose and fondant sugar) inside the stencils.

Then I heated them at a very low temperature in the oven until they had congealed to paper-like consistency. I stenciled the heart shapes much the same way except I used paprika tuile powder instead. The added bonus- I discovered an idyllic flavor-pairing in the process: coconut and paprika. It’s worth a lick or ten.

Once again obfuscating the line between food and object, I created the Mad Hatter’s pocketwatch from an oversized raviolo in beurre noisette (since they butter the watch in the book). I filled the raviolo with a thin layer of Dungeness crab, and painted the backwards numbers on the “face” using squid ink. A little edible gold finished the look.

For the main course I deviated slightly from Alice. I thought paying homage to one of the most lauded restaurants of bygone days, The Quilted Giraffe, was related enough by sheer decadence plus I traveled back in cultural time for the dish’s inspiration. Charlie Trotter said of the Giraffe, “It was not just the food, it was the whole experience,” and I think that embodies Alice to a tee (yes, that was a really bad pun), which is why these crepes made the cut.

Barry Wine, infamous owner of The Quilted Giraffe (and this talented blogger’s father) used to serve a crepe formed into a beggar’s purse filled with caviar and crème fraiche, tied with a chive. I chose to roll the crepes instead so they’d look like little scrolls, and I am certain the golden (whitefish) caviar I used was not as decadent as the beluga from the days of old, but they were blissed-out bites of easily-portable culinary alchemy gone great.

Our blogs exist to record momentous occasions in the kitchen and elsewhere. We share our culinary creations and in the process little bits of our souls make their way to the page as well. Project Food Blog has forced me to go deeper inside to eek out posts worthy of your esteemed eyes, and for that I am grateful.

Much has been said about the project, competitive blogging in general, popularity contests, et cetera. The fact remains that regardless where you stand on these divisive issues as a blogger or reader of blogs, if you decided to take part in this contest and focused on the challenges with zeal, you couldn’t have helped but learned something in the process- made a transformation, just like Alice. Yes, I’ve *lost* my Saturdays (and most of the week, to be quite honest) but I’ve gained focus, an outlet for my madness where people seem to appreciate it, and a few new life experiences that I won’t soon forget. I deeply appreciate your votes in getting me this far, and I hope you’ll help me to continue the journey by voting again RIGHT HERE or using the Project Food Blog widget on the right side of the Salty Seattle homepage.