Disclaimer: this post will mention sous vide cooking, I know, I know, again.  It will have value for anyone, though, since good garlic powder is something all of us should have in our kitchen arsenal.

The lovely pulverized goodness that inspired this post came to be as a result of mucking and fuddling about with my newish favorite kitchen gadget- the Sous Vide Supreme.  Now that it’s been out for a few months there are plenty of converts and just as many naysayers on their respective bandwagons. All I can say is that it has revolutionized the way I cook, but no more than, say, my food processor or stand mixer. Funny how you don’t hear a bunch of divisive derision on either of those culinary staples. It’s not like by adding in the sous vide machine someone’s taking away your frying pan, blow torch, or dutch oven, it’s just another notch on the belt, people.  Ok, enough of my rant.  On to the garlic powder.

One thing I’ve learned from sous vide that I am now considering with various other cooking methods as well is that different foods are ideally cooked at different temperatures.  You would certainly cook a steak in the sous vide bath at 134°, though if you throw in some onions or garlic to give it extra flavor they won’t cook properly at such a low temperature.  In order to work around this quandary, you have to come up with a way to get the flavor you want without expecting the sous vide bath to do the cooking.  Same goes for lots of other flavor-enhancing ingredients in the sous vide such as wines, vinegars, ginger, some herbs, et cetera.  Often a chef will pre-cook an ingredient, or merely add it via sauce after the meat is done cooking on its own in the sous vide bath.  I really wanted to experiment with post and pre flavor additions in sous vide, however, to see if the slow and low approach lent any depth or detracted in some way.  This is how I came up with the idea of making garlic powder (aka pre-cooked garlic) to add at will to my sous vide concoctions.  I found a great post on the matter on Pablo Escolar’s blog and I decided to shake things up a bit by adding smoke. 

I was smoking some bacon and artichokes that day anyway, (bacon, always a success, artichokes, not so much) so I figured no harm done by throwing the garlic in the smoker and cooking it that way.  After two hours at 200° in the Weber Smoky Mountain, my garlic had taken on a burnt sienna hue and smelled like savory ambrosia.  I also really liked how I could truthfully state I was smoking cloves, but without the nasty smell and lung-hacking most clove-smoking high-schoolers experience.  Talk about umami- the fifth taste was all up in this piece that day.  That’s when the waiting game started.  Regardless whether you decide to make garlic powder by smoking or roasting the garlic first, unless you own a dehydrator you then need to air dry your garlic to the point that you can successfully pulverize it and it turns to powder, not paste.  I air dried my garlic for three weeks before I ground it in the mortar and pestle followed by the blender for good measure.  I didn’t mind much, though, because whenever I wanted to use some I just spirited away a clove or two from amongst the drying bulbs. 

I’ve been experimenting with the finished product for a week now and I couldn’t be happier with the result. The only thing I wish I had done differently is make more of it.  You might heed that if you try it.  For the trouble you go to, you may as well yield a greater quantity than half a cup, which is what I got from five heads of garlic.  In retrospect I probably would do twenty at a time- that way you would only need to repeat the process maybe twice a year.  It is absolutely perfect sealed into the sous vide bag with a grass-fed filet, a touch of fine salt and nothing more.  I considered pre-mixing some salt with the powder, but I kind of like to individually administer both because different foods require different amounts of both garlic and salt.  The smoke really lends a kick to the flavor, by the way.  Any notions I had of it softening the taste of the garlic are gone.  Instead, it intensifies it, much like smoke intensifies pork belly when making bacon whereas pancetta (which is the same thing sans smoke) has a more subtle flavor.

Corned beef doesn’t exactly conjure images of glamour and sophistication; nevertheless it’s one of those things I get a craving for it roughly once a year. How convenient that my craving happened a short while before St. Patrick’s Day so I can share my results with you lot (I’m told that’s a right Irish way of saying things- correct me if I’ve misspoken). 

Supermarket corned beef, in my experience, is tough, plagued with a lingering flavor of skeevy salt, and downright bilious in many cases.  Doing it right, which means doing it yourself, really only takes a bit of planning, is more economical and tastes infinitely superior.  I borrowed the corning technique from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie with only minor adjustments based on my own taste preferences.  I’m a bay leaf fanatic, so I doubled up on those since my bay leaf tree is only too happy to oblige me with her radiant foliage.  I started with a lovely first-cut brisket that I picked up for a song from my favorite butcher in Pike Place Market.  The capable butcher men are always eager to help now that they know I write a Seattle food blog and they can log on and check out the crazy things I do to their meat. 

The brisket needs to sit in the cure for five days in order to achieve proper “corning,” which is great because it gives you lots of time to think about which sundry delicacies you’ll serve alongside it.  I also pickled some vegetables using a salt-brine rather than vinegar and let those get nice and infused over the five day period.  I came up with two appetizers that at first seemed slightly incongruous to me but in retrospect I realize there was, in fact, a common thread uniting the meal.  Appetizer “A” consisted of bresaola, which is air-cured beef, wrapped around stracchino cheese topped with a leaf of mache lettuce.

 Next up was an inventive take of seared foie gras.  I had gluten-free folks coming to dinner so the toast squares I might have normally served the foie gras with were out.  I decided to be inventive with the base of my dish and use baby artichoke halves as the “bread” to the foie gras’ “butter.”  I halved them and cooked them in pear butter in the Sous Vide Supreme for two hours at 183° and they were perfect in texture.

  They took on a touch of sweetness from the pear which matched the rest of the dish well.  I topped the artichokes and foie gras with a pear-Sauternes sorbet I whipped up while the artichokes were stewing.  I steeped anise, cardamom, clove and nutmeg into the sorbet and those flavors really brought out the delicate taste of the foie gras. 

Have you realized what everything has in common yet? Every course features something that has been cured, aka something that falls under the vast realm known as charcuterie.  It is interesting that charcuterie is today considered a delicacy.  Much like necessity being the mother of invention, charcuterie at its source was really just a means of preserving food so it would last longer before the era of refrigeration.   Nowadays we don’t technically need to cure meats, so it’s moved into the domain of luxury and often the price of good charcuterie reflects that.  It’s a fun world in which to dabble; oftentimes all you need is an inexpensive cut of meat, some salt and a bit of time. 

Back to the corned beef.  After it finished curing in its rock star juice, I rinsed it and bagged it along with some homemade pickling spice liquid and plopped it into the sous vide bath at 176° for 26 hours.  For those of you battling with the sous vide/foodsaver bagging liquid issues, I’ve finally come up with a bit of a workaround.  I know many people freeze the liquid into a solid so they can suck all the air out. I also know Thomas Keller feels the foodsaver is unacceptable and everyone should really be using a $3,000 cryovac that really does the trick of sucking all the air out even when there’s liquid in the bag.

  Short of spending three grand or taking the time that I don’t often plan for to pre-freeze my liquids, I’ve found myself SOL on several occasions now.  It helps to use gravity, ie hold your bag below the foodsaver as you’re sealing and it will be harder for the foodsaver to suck up any liquid.  The other really great trick that has been working wonders for me is a double bagging system.  First I pack the corned beef (or whatever) and liquid into one foodsaver bag without sealing it.  Then I insert this bag sideways into a second, larger foodsaver bag.  I seal the outer bag and it’s able to get a ton more air out since the liquid is all trapped in the inner bag.  It’s not a perfect solution but until I have a spare three grand lying around, it will do. 

The time and temperature seemed to be just right, and I’m glad I went with my gut instead of listening to all the random voices on the internet.  If I had an extra day or two to play around I would have been really tempted to do a 48 hour cure at a lower temp, perhaps closer to 134°, but now that I’ve achieved a result I’m immensely satisfied with I think I’ll stick with it next time too. 

 The only truly great solution to this problem would be a parallel tasting. Don’t you think the good folks over at Sous Vide Supreme should lend me a second sous vide machine so I could throw in two briskets, two sea bassies, two Silkie chickens and two Jerusalem artichokes all at different times/temps to get down to the real nitty gritty of culinary perfection?  There are plenty of scientific studies on the affects of different sous vide temperatures and what happens to the sinews and muscles not to mention gasses released by the meat. 

 I would opt for a different approach, however, one that defies scientific logic in many cases.  After all, aren’t some of the greatest culinary feats in history achieved by happy accident? I’m thrilled to note that my typical “cook-by-feel” approach seems to work in the sous vide bath thus far, I only regret not being able to mess around with multiple times, temps,and preparations simultaneously so I can arrive at a final consensus sooner.  After too many words (why am I so long-winded) I will leave you to your gastronomic devices, any questions on sous vide corned beef? Leave me a comment and I’ll hit you back.

*One final note: I will be on vacation away from the land of technology in the coming weeks. I haven’t forgotten about my amazing readers, I just need a bit of r and r.  When I return I’ll be back with a vengeance, but in the meantime please enjoy this lovely springtime and join me in a virtual clinking of wine glasses. Salute, Linda :)