I get sent home with a fair amount of food.  Working in kitchens, you don’t go hungry.  Often, pre-seared lamb won’t get sold, and won’t make it until Monday.  Enter the fat kid!!!  And how about a deli cup of those delicious fucking beans with the shredded duck confit? That would go great with this lamb.  I’ve got that balsamic glaze from Italy in the cupboard at home, for drizzling.  All the cooks know they can get rid of their various use-able odds, ends, bits and pieces.  I used to have a line on some halibut scraps, but I haven’t seen him in a grip.  Yes I will have two deli cups of garlic oil.  Yes I will take home a day old loaf of brioche.  (French Toast, bitches!!) How’s about Chimichuri marinated flank steak? Why yes I can find a use for that.  To feed my ever growing teets!!  With power-lunch-stlyle sammy action on old blue.  Enjoying  some vino from the vineyard  always helps wash this all down quite nicely. In light of some rather alarming new statistics, it’d good to know that food isn’t going to waste, but to my waist.

So Jaybill and I have been experimenting with our steak process, well at least part of our steak process.  We always sear in smoking hot cast iron, and finish in a 400 degree oven.  Jaybill read somewhere we could achieve a better crust by drying out the meat over a rack in the fridge for a few days.  We first tried a quick-fast drying with a tenderloin that involved an elevated cooling rack and a fan (above, right.)  This did give us a noticeably quicker sear, and a decidedly crisper crust.  It makes sense, I mean it’s culinary 101: to brown, you must remove moisture.  Here we did it before it even hit the pan.  This got us to thinking that if we did the drying slowly, over more time, say a week, we’d get an even better result.  Next thing you know we’ve got two ribeyes kicking it in the fridge all week, over a wire rack.  Every time I opened the fridge I thought about sauces, side dishes, but mainly about that super-crust we were about to create.  The steaks when we finally seared them even sounded different.  The sizzling noise of water vapor was replaced by a deeper, more meaty sound.  As it turns out, you can over-dry the beef.  The rib-eyes were succulent and delicious, mind you, but the drying process had altered the tetxure slightly.  I think in the future we’ll dry two days, and then do a generously salted 30-40 minute rest at room temp. This long period will start to break down the connective tissue, and then absorb some of that salty goodness before it is patted dry, lightly oiled, and dropped into that smoking hot pan.  Enter Maillard reaction.  I whipped up a Sage Bearnaise for slathering, we still had our sage infused clarified butter in the freezer.  While I was making that the protien rested in Beurre Monte, because that’s what the French Laundry does.  While Jaybill prepared the cheese course, we heated up some New Seasons stunt potatoes to soak up the left over butter-egg yolk emulsion.  It was a damn tasty experiment.

Old Blue firin’ up some burgers from New Seasons.  Boy Howdy!

Old Blue is my 30, 000 BTU candy stove. It has many great uses.  It rules.