Braising

A few weeks ago, my friend Alex sent me an e-mail, wanting to connect me with his friend Rich who had just started up a food blog of his own. Of Feasts and Yeasts is some really interesting stuff, featuring not only recipes and chronicling home-brewing, but also discussing food science. So Alex saw potential for some good collaboration between Rich and myself.

So some time in the near future, expect to see either some cross-posting, or one of us experimenting with the other's recipes. Reading Rich's posts on the science behind marinades and capsaicin inspired me to do a little research of my own.

About Braising

Ever since I started trying to re-create my mom's Haitian dishes, I've loved the technique of braising. Simply put, braising is slow-cooking something partially submerged in liquid, covered and at lower temperatures. When done right, you could end up with the tenderest and most flavorful meat, the epitome of "falling off the bone."

One of the best applications of braising is with tough cuts of meat with a good amount of fat and connective tissue. I'm talking about briskets, chuck roasts, and pork or lamb shoulder.

Beef chuck top blade steak

Think about if you were to take some chuck top blade, with that strip of gristle right down the center, and just pan-sear or grill it. That gristle isn't going anywhere, and it's not going to feel very good in your mouth. Braising, however, not only helps to break down the gristle, but it also uses that connective tissue to keep the meat succulent.

Succulent

According to Cooks Illustrated's explanation of braising, once meat reaches 150˚F, the muscle tissue becomes fully tightened and releases its moisture and juices into the cooking liquid. So the liquid will be nice and flavorful, but if you were to pull out the meat, it would be tough. However, keeping it in the liquid longer and raising the temperature some more will break down the connective tissue, which is primarily made of collagen.

At 200˚F, collagen completely becomes soft gelatin and the tightened muscle fibres begin to separate a little, drawing moisture back into the meat. In the end, your tough and chewy cut of meat can be cut with a spoon. And it only gets better with more time in the pot.

Easy Pad Thai

I was inspired to try a pad thai recipe recently. Could it be because I spotted a jar of tamarind juice at Central Market, and my mind was flooded with memories of past Indian/Thai recipes that involved tamarind and failed miserably? Probably, yes.

Store-bought tamarind comes in many forms. There's whole fruit that you can pick up from the Hispanic markets, or the pre-packaged fruit pulp. And then there are the containers of tamarind juice that come in all sorts of concentrations. I've tried a couple of recipes with tamarind, and they were annoyingly vague about how much tamarind to utilize.

Imagine my disappointment the first time I tried tamarind with a scratch Vindaloo curry recipe. The tamarind juice I bought was so concentrated that it wasn't quite compatible with the original recipe. My first indication of failure was that the curry was dark as night and thick as sludge. The first taste was beyond sour, and borderline inedible.

After that, tamarind was dead to me. Fast-forward about 3 years, I've been on a Thai stir-fry kick lately, and I saw this guy on the market shelf.

Tamarind Juice Concentrate

Add some sugar, fish sauce, and a dash of soy, and you've got the main ingredients for the sauce in pad thai. After a few iterations, I've managed to get the procedure down to where the noodles weren't practically disintegrating on me, and the finished product wasn't a dried out mess at the end. And fortunately, I diluted the tamarind enough that you can pick up its signature tangy flavor but not be horribly overwhelmed by it, like I've had in the past.

I can't believe I forgot the wedge of lime