Mayonnaise

Homemade mayonnaise has very few ingredients in it. It's basically a vegetable oil and egg yolk emulsion, so it's all technique. Some would have you believe it's difficult, but it's not. It's just a matter of adding the oil slowly enough...

I used the recipe from David Lebovitz, and I love it. It's silky, garlicky goodness. Delish. (Warning, don't proceed if eating raw egg yolks disturbs you in the slightest).

3 cloves of garlic

½ tsp salt
1 large egg yolk
1 cup (250ml) extra-virgin olive oil

Take the egg out of the fridge and warm the egg to room temperature. Room temperature eggs emulsificate more easily. Mash the garlic in a mortar and pestle or food processor until it's properly turned into a paste.

Mix the garlic into the egg yolk, and then *VERY* slowly mix in the oil. EXTREMELY slowly to start, and quite slowly towards the end. If you add the oil too quickly, you will break it - i.e. the oil will separate from the egg yolk, and you'll have globs of egg floating in oil. You don't want that. I took about 5 minutes to add one cup of oil.

Beat in all the oil, then beat in the salt. That's it. You've just made mayonnaise, and it'll be delicious on your sandwiches. Thick. Creamy. Salty. Yum.

A lazy Saturday calls for...

a Dark 'N' Stormy!

The Dark 'N' Stormy is a rare bird indeed. It's a copyrighted cocktail. So if you want to make it, and you want to call it a Dark 'N' Stormy, you have to make it with Gosling's dark rum.

But here, we start (as with everything fun) from scratch. Let's make fresh ginger beer!

I used the recipe at Jeffrey Morgenthaler. Seemed like a good start:

2 oz ginger juice (juiced from 1 large ginger root)
4 oz fresh lemon juice, finely strained
6 oz simple syrup
20 oz warm water (cold if using the soda siphon)

¹⁄₁₆ tsp Red Star champagne yeast

You'll need to sterilize your bottles. I picked up a chemical bottle sterilizant (some sort of peroxide, I think) at the brewing store, same place I picked up the packet of champagne yeast. Follow the directions to clean your bottles. I used the nice capped bottle shown above, because it'll handle the pressure of carbonation without exploding all over your home.

Funny aside: 10 years ago, I briefly got into homebrewing, and made some mead. Mead is fermented honey, and as such, it ferments rather slowly. Well I bottled 5 gallons of mead that I thought was done, and loaded up the wine bottles in my basement. Over the next few weeks, I guess there was a wee bit more fermentation going on in those bottles... One day, my roommate came home and slammed the door, just enough excitement to decarbonate a bottle. It blew the cork out, and sprayed carbonated mead all around the room. Well he rushed over and grabbed that bottle, knocking several more bottles... Pretty soon, there was a chain reaction of wine bottles blowing corks and spraying carbonated mead all around. When I arrived home, half my mead was gone, and he was not amused.

But that is not this story...

Okay, chop up a decent sized piece of ginger root.

And run that root through a juicer or food processor. Squeeze the ground ginger through a fine sieve to recover ginger juice.

It's an opaque yellow colour. Yum! Mix all the ingredients together, and pour into a pressurizable bottle. Wrong kind of bottle, and you'll be blowing carbonated ginger beer all over your home.

Let sit for 48 hours at room temperature, then put it in the fridge. You really don't want to go longer than that, or you'll explode the bottle.

Now comes the relaxing part. Mix 1 ¹⁄₂ oz Gosling's dark rum with ginger beer to taste, over ice.

Enjoy.

Home-cured, home-smoked bacon.

You know how delicious bacon is? It makes everything else better. There's almost nothing better than bacon. Except homemade bacon. As a comparison: store-bought bacon is to tofu as homemade bacon is to store-bought bacon. Yes, homemade bacon is that good. It's meatier, more flavourful, smokier and all-round more delicious. And if you have a charcoal grill, it's really easy to make. All you need is a pork belly, and a few items to cure with. I get my pork belly at my local butcher, or at the neighborhood Asian grocer.

I use the recipe from Charcuterie. You'll need a couple things that aren't available at your neighborhood grocery. Thankfully, everything you need is cheap and available online.

Start by making a basic dry cure:

1 pound kosher salt

13 oz dextrose

3 oz pink salt (also called InstaCure #1, at Sausagemakers)

Now, you make the seasoning blend. Start with something tasty, like bay leaves.

For each pork belly [edit: 3-4 lb pork belly], grind up:

3 bay leaves

1 tbsp black peppercorn

Grind 'em into a nice coarse mix. Mix them with:

¼ cup dry cure (from above)

5 chopped garlic cloves

Wash the pork belly, dry it off, and rub it all over with the seasoned dry cure.

Place the belly in a ziploc bag, squeeze out all the air, seal, and put it in the fridge. You'll cure it in the fridge for about a week. Every few days, open it up and pour off any extra liquid that accumulates. The salt pulls out a fair amount of water, so don't be surprised to see the liquid accumulate, and the meat firm up. After 7 to 8 days, you'll be ready to smoke.

Rinse off the spice and cure in the sink, and pat the pork belly dry.

While the pork belly comes to room temperature (for half an hour or so), fire up your grill for indirect heat. I light a small fire on one side of the grill, and put the cured pork bellies on the other side. You'll want a bbq fire around 200°F, and some wet hickory wood to make a little smoke. Lay the belly down skin side up.

Tend the fire to keep the temperature in the smoker 200°F, adding wet hickory periodically to create smoke. Smoke for 3ish hours (+/- 1 hour), until the pork belly is a lovely color, and the internal temperature measures 150°F.

Keep in mind, this meat is not cooked. It's not ready to be eaten. Treat this like raw bacon from your grocery store (only more precious - treat it like it's bacon you paid $30 a pound for).

While it's still hot, slice the skin off. I like to use a pair of tongs to hold the skin up while I gently slice it off. It'll end up looking like this:

The belly on the left is showing the side that was facing the grill. The second belly is after the skin has been sliced off the top, and the third one is the smoked belly with the skin still on.

Let the belly's come down to room temperature, at this point either wrap them and freeze or refrigerate them. When you're ready to serve them, slice them thinly on the cross section. This is the only tricky part, slicing them thin enough to get nice-sized bacon slices that are thin enough to render the fat properly. The last inch of belly can be chopped into lardons or bacon bits for serving on salads or in sauces. But you richly deserve something delicious. Fry and serve.

Boar Ribeye with Port Grape Sauce

In my continuing adventures in eating new and unusual protein - I bring you boar. Boar medallions, that is.

This was a bit of a lazy dinner. We had boar in the deep freeze, and I didn't want to go to the grocery store for ingredients, so I threw something together with stuff we had around the house:

1 cup port

1 shallot

25 seedless grapes (green or red)

1 dried ancho chile

1 tbsp sriracha

2 tsp sherry vinegar

1 tsp agave syrup (or simple syrup)

salt

pepper

Start with some shallots. Fry them until they've darkened a bit.

Meanwhile, toss a few grapes into a saucepan with the port and the ancho chile.

Boil until the sauce reduces and the grapes break open. You want this sauce to be reasonably thick.

Add the shallots. Meanwhile, fry the ribeye medallions in the shalloty oil, just a couple minutes until done.

While the medallions are frying, add the seasoning (hot sauce, vinegar, salt, pepper) to the grape/port reduction, and fish out the ancho chile. Remove the medallions from the pan, and move them to the plate. Deglaze the pan with the sauce, and serve a dollop of sauce next to your medallion of boar.

The taste was quite nice. My wife would have preferred a more refined sauce (blend and sieve), but I enjoyed the chunky grapes and shallots in this sauce. The boar medallions were indistinguishable from pork, so I wouldn't buy them again, but I'll be playing with port reductions again.