My friends are shocked to know that I watch “Hell’s Kitchen” over “ America’s Top Chef.” I get it: “Top Chef” entails actual culinary skill whereas “Hell’s Kitchen” is more about how to be a glorified line cook. But that’s kind of the appeal; these people are unstable and uncreative which somehow makes me feel better about my own cooking. Does that make sense? It's kind of like how watching “The Biggest Loser” makes you think, “Damn, I ain't that fat.” And I also do like Gordon Ramsay’s cooking philosophy. He’s all about simplicity and quality of ingredients over presentation. Such a philosophy demands less skill.
The clip in question comes at around 32:10
But in last week’s episode, one of the contestants blasted another over serving undercooked pork. She said something to the effect of, “if you serve raw pork, it will make you seriously ill,” and Ramsay agreed. This made me choke on my screwtop sauvignon blanc. This is utter pigshit. Pork is happy to be served medium rare.
It’s true, growing up we were told that we shouldn’t eat raw pork and that it will lead to trichinosis. So here’s the down-low on trichinosis, a.k.a., trichinellosis: It’s a parasite caused by eating the eggs of the Trichinella worm. They’re found in pork, horse, bears and whatnot and once they incubate inside you, symptoms include nausea, diarrhea and other icky stuff.
It sounds awful except for that over the past couple decades there have been around a dozen instances of trichinosis per year and most of those cases were related to wild game and not farmed meats. Meanwhile Americans suffer from around 30,000 incidences of salmonella and 70,000 incidences of E. coli food poisonings annually. But salmonella occurs more frequently in poultry and E. coli occurs more frequently in beef. So why does pork get a bad rap?
My guess is that it’s just a pervasive old wives’ tale like how searing meat seals in the juices. The bottom line is that I’ve been eating medium and medium rare pork for my entire adult life and have never had any resulting illnesses. And most importantly, it tastes better. I have fond memories of my mother’s pork chops that were marinated in soy sauce and honey but the truth is, they were broiled to a crisp and dry like particle board. But when I had a medium rare pork tenderloin at Café Bizou, it was a revelation. How could this be the same meat as that brittle, dusty chop I had as a child?
I’ve been resistant to buying pork after seeing that special on HBO where they showed sick pigs being shoved around by a forklift and Food, Inc., where they showed other ovine abuses, but over at Harmony Farms they sell Beeler pork. It’s not organic or wholly sustainable, but the pigs are raised in the open and piglets nurse with their mothers so I feel I can eat it a couple times a month without crippling guilt. They even have a movie to demonstrate the happiness of their pigs. I appreciate this isn’t an ideal situation, but it’s not completely barbaric.
Relatively happy Beeler pigs
So I bought a couple pork chops and marinated them in a manner that my mother would have approved of – ¼ cup of sugar (or honey), 1 clove of garlic, ¼ cup low-sodium soy sauce, 2 tbsp. dry sherry, some green onions and ginger, blended together. After an hour I brushed them off and grilled them at high heat for a couple minutes a side so that it was medium rare in the middle.
Still pretty yummy
To be fair, they did better when they were medium in the middle (while the tenderloin is better rare to medium-rare as it's more tender), but they suck when they’re cooked anything beyond that. And if you have a tenderloin, don’t be a sucker – keep it medium rare. Unless you’re Ted Nugent and killed a wild pig with a blow dart.
My favorite cut of beef is the ribeye. It’s tender and it has the most marbling of any of the steak cuts. And marbling = fat = decadence. When you get a ribeye from a Wagyu cow, it’s uber decadent. Of course, this is the breed used for the famous Kobe beef, which is massaged with sake and fed beer (though this may be superfluous). The real deal can cost several hundred dollars per steak but I managed to procure some Australian stuff at Harmony Farms for under 20 bucks a pound.
Here they call you "Ma'am" and "Sir"
Of course grain fed beef from halfway around the world is not very carbon friendly – it takes 11,000 pounds of grain on the feedlot for the cow to add another 700 pounds of cow flesh, not to mention the diesel used on the freight journey. But I’ve already admitted to being a hypocrite in the previous entry and I had a tough day. Most of all, I’ve never actually cooked Wagyu before and I thought it was my duty to give it a whirl. So how to do it proper(ly)?
Aussie Wagyu@ $20/lbTrue Kobe @ $135/lb
If I were in Japan, I’d slice it super thin and dip in boiling water shabu-shabu style. But what is more uninteresting than boiled beef? There is a reason that Ruth’s Chris cooks their steaks at 1800 degrees and not 212. My sister insists that shabu-shabu is worth it for the sauces to which I say, gimme the sauces but grill the meat. Win-win.
But slapping my steak on the Weber isn’t necessarily the best choice, either. Wagyu has a lot of unsaturated fats which means that they melt at a lower temperature. I don’t want to drain out all the good stuff so I had to figure out a way to cook it at a low temperature while still getting all the caramelized goodness of a well cooked steak.
It is heat-safe.
Enter sous-vide. Basically, it’s the fancy pants version of boil-in-a-bag. You take your food, dump it in a plastic bag and cook it for a long time at a low temperature. Though it’s exploded into the culinary zeitgeist over the past few years, it’s been in use in haute cuisine since the 1970s. It’s great because it cooks food while giving it a very tender, luscious texture. If I were to do it like food nerd/consultant, Dave Arnold, I would get a vacuum sealing machine and then comb eBay for a thermal circulator that some lab is trying to get rid of. But since I’m cheap and lazy, I use a Ziploc bag and a big pot of tepid water.
The goal is to bring your meat to around 125 degrees internally, so my thought was to sous vide-ify my beef at around 110 degrees and sear it in a hot pan afterwards for a minute a side. I lightly seasoned my beef with salt, pepper and mustard powder out of reverence to my carnivorous grandfather. I popped it into the pot for around 15 minutes. At this stage there is no real fear of overcooking it since you’re cooking it basically at the temperature of a cow with a fever.
A NOTE: Sous-vide translates from French to be “under vacuum,” meaning that there is no air in the plastic bag that holds your food. Vacuum sealers have air pumps that do the job for you but humans have a God-given air pump that works just as well. Just use a decent zip lock bag, close it 90% and, too paraphrase Lauren Bacall, you just put your lips together and suck. If the seal is good, you should get all of the air out and you won’t suck in any beef juice.No air bubble via sucking
So after pulling my sack of beef out of the McGuyver-esque sous-vide set-up, I slapped the beef on a hot, dry pan and seared it for two and a half minutes on one side, a minute on the other. It still felt pretty soft pulling it off but after letting it rest for a few minutes, it was clear that I screwed up and overcooked my precious Wagyu.
Good but not great
Don’t get me wrong. It was still delicious and luscious and tender – almost to the point that it had the soft texture of liver – but the meat was medium and I, like any rational, respectful beef eaters, am a medium rare kind of guy.
After my tears dried, I had a cursory self-debriefing where I determined that my method was correct (duh) but my meat was cut too thin. For a half inch thick piece of steak, either I should have done it sous-vide and eaten it all lukewarm and unbrowned, which is weird, or I should have just grilled it without that hoity-toity sous-vide business. Next time, I’m keeping the technique the same and doubling the thickness. Sorry, cow.
It turns out I’m completely full of crap. After all my talk about organic this and sustainable that, I’m just a big glutton destined to be a future pity contestant on The Biggest Loser.
This weekend I went on a little outdoor excursion and when I reached civilization again, it was necessary to refuel. After eating two days of freeze-dried crap, I deserved, nay required, real food. While on the return trail, I had fantasies of poaching some wild salmon with chopped fresh tomatoes or defrosting a grass-fed ribeye. But once we got to the parking lot, hunger overwhelmed me and I manhandled our caravan to the nearest Black Bear Diner, one of a growing chain of restaurants on the West Coast. They specialize in comfort food in large quantities and do it well. So well that we decided that they must be owned by the same foreign conglomerate that started The Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang’s – just one more cog in the international conspiracy to make Americans even more obese.
But what could I do about it? Once my eyes settled on the menu, I couldn't help but focus on the appetizer sampler platter, the one with the quesadillas, chili cheese nachos, garlic fries, chicken tenders (yes, chicken), and onion rings. What wasn’t deep fried was covered in cheese. Wait, everything was deep fried and covered in cheese. Anyhow, the point is, the seductiveness of their offerings eclipsed my political correctness. When the platter arrived, I took the prison posture where I protected my plate with my left hand while shoveling food into my mouth with the right. It was impressive. But what earned me true hypocrite/glutton status was my ordering a side of macaroni and cheese on top of the appetizers. Who cares that it was mediocre? My calories per dollar ratio was off the charts.
Thus, I feel it’s my responsibility to blog this great shame. All my talk of boycotting poultry means nothing. And I’m sure there was nothing on that plate that didn’t involve genetically modified crops and/or high fructose corn syrup. So you should stop reading this blog, toot sweet. I can’t be trusted.
It sounds awful except for that over the past couple decades there have been around a dozen instances of trichinosis per year and most of those cases were related to wild game and not farmed meats. Meanwhile Americans suffer from around 30,000 incidences of salmonella and 70,000 incidences of E. coli food poisonings annually. But salmonella occurs more frequently in poultry and E. coli occurs more frequently in beef. So why does pork get a bad rap?
My guess is that it’s just a pervasive old wives’ tale like how searing meat seals in the juices. The bottom line is that I’ve been eating medium and medium rare pork for my entire adult life and have never had any resulting illnesses. And most importantly, it tastes better. I have fond memories of my mother’s pork chops that were marinated in soy sauce and honey but the truth is, they were broiled to a crisp and dry like particle board. But when I had a medium rare pork tenderloin at Café Bizou, it was a revelation. How could this be the same meat as that brittle, dusty chop I had as a child?
I’ve been resistant to buying pork after seeing that special on HBO where they showed sick pigs being shoved around by a forklift and Food, Inc., where they showed other ovine abuses, but over at Harmony Farms they sell Beeler pork. It’s not organic or wholly sustainable, but the pigs are raised in the open and piglets nurse with their mothers so I feel I can eat it a couple times a month without crippling guilt. They even have a movie to demonstrate the happiness of their pigs. I appreciate this isn’t an ideal situation, but it’s not completely barbaric.
Relatively happy Beeler pigs
So I bought a couple pork chops and marinated them in a manner that my mother would have approved of – ¼ cup of sugar (or honey), 1 clove of garlic, ¼ cup low-sodium soy sauce, 2 tbsp. dry sherry, some green onions and ginger, blended together. After an hour I brushed them off and grilled them at high heat for a couple minutes a side so that it was medium rare in the middle.
Still pretty yummy
To be fair, they did better when they were medium in the middle (while the tenderloin is better rare to medium-rare as it's more tender), but they suck when they’re cooked anything beyond that. And if you have a tenderloin, don’t be a sucker – keep it medium rare. Unless you’re Ted Nugent and killed a wild pig with a blow dart.
It turns out I’m completely full of crap. After all my talk about organic this and sustainable that, I’m just a big glutton destined to be a future pity contestant on 
But what could I do about it? Once my eyes settled on the menu, I couldn't help but focus on the appetizer sampler platter, the one with the quesadillas, chili cheese nachos, garlic fries, chicken tenders (yes, chicken), and onion rings. What wasn’t deep fried was covered in cheese. Wait, everything was deep fried and covered in cheese. Anyhow, the point is, the seductiveness of their offerings eclipsed my political correctness. When the platter arrived, I took the prison posture where I protected my plate with my left hand while shoveling food into my mouth with the right. It was impressive. But what earned me true hypocrite/glutton status was my ordering a side of macaroni and cheese on top of the appetizers. Who cares that it was mediocre? My calories per dollar ratio was off the charts.
Thus, I feel it’s my responsibility to blog this great shame. All my talk of boycotting poultry means nothing. And I’m sure there was nothing on that plate that didn’t involve genetically modified crops and/or high fructose corn syrup. So you should stop reading this blog, toot sweet. I can’t be trusted.