Category: Sustenance

It seems I have been a little too much in my head of late, and so I am going to concentrate on the more quotidian side of things for a bit.  Today I am in the kitchen.

Sunday I did a lot of work in the garden, Monday I mostly read and puttered.  I had a potato, two leftover roasted beets, and the end of the last corned beef, so I made red flannel hash.  I also had a couple of fennel bulbs so I roasted those and made fennel pesto with the feathery green leaves.  I had a dollop of the pesto for breakfast with my eggs and hash.

This was the second corned beef, the one I dry-brined, and my opinion is softening over time.  See my initial comparison here. As I mentioned in that post, I liked that second corned beef thinly sliced and browned in a skillet, much like a corned-beef version of bacon, but I did not like it as much on its own.  It kept reminding me of pastrami, and I thought I would reserve that technique for the next time I made pastrami.  Now I am not quite so sure.  The dry-brined corned beef definitely makes a better hash, and my initial complaints may have been more about the cooking, not the brining itself. Corned beef hash continues to be my favorite use for corned beef.

Yesterday I finally started the sauerkraut.  I did something a little different than the way I have done it in the past.  I sliced the cabbage into ribbons rather than shredding it.  I have found that I like the toothsomeness of pieces of cabbage in kimchi, and I occasionally get annoyed with the fine threads of shredded cabbage in a traditional sauerkraut.   So I decided to try slicing rather than shredding the cabbage.

Sauerkraut and kimchi are in many ways simply variations on a theme.  Sandro Katz uses the term “kraut-chi” for the ferments he makes, a hybrid between the two versions.   I like the idea of this term because it feels less constraining to me, and in the end, all ferments, like all cooks, are unique.  I may simplify the term in my own mind to simply “chi”, and in this case I am making a simple cabbage chi, in the manner of sauerkraut.  I am not flavoring this chi with caraway, or peppers or in any of the many ways sauerkraut can be flavored, just simple fermented cabbage in its own glory.

After slicing the cabbage, I began brining process, which basically involves  using salt to pull the liquid out of the cabbage and begin the ferment.  You slice or shred the cabbage, add salt, I used 2% by weight, and then massage or pound the salt into the cabbage.  I had too much cabbage to fit in one bowl, 2.7 kg, so I needed two bowls.  The work of massaging the cabbage was harder with thicker pieces, and my arthritis acted up.  Since I started the sauerkraut in the evening, after dinner, I covered the bowls and left them on the counter overnight.

I wasn’t certain that I had massaged the cabbage forcefully enough.  I had brine, but it felt like I needed to massage the cabbage a bit more, so I did.  The contents of the two bowls now fit into one bowl, which is the top picture you see.  The cabbage will sit in its brine for a total of 24 hours before I pack into a crock or jars for fermentation.

Once the bowls are free, I can start the kimchi. For this batch I am using David Chang’s version from Momofuku.  This was my second-favorite version overall from my initial kimchi exploration in 2016.  Chang writes that this is a kimchi best eaten when it is young, when it is still in its “prickly, sparkly” stage, and I agree.  Chang specifies that the kimchi is fermented in the refrigerator, to extend its youth. This may be my favorite young kimchi, but it does not age well.  It is markedly different from my favorite kimchi, the red cabbage kimchi I wrote about making here, from Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot’s cookbook, Ideas in Food.  That kimchi is good young, when it is funky and spicy; it grows increasingly layered in flavor through middle age, and at 2 years it has a soft, yet still complex roundness that reminds me of a fine old wine.  I haven’t yet created a napa cabbage chi that hits all those markers, but I will continue to work on it.  In the meantime, I love Chang’s version and consider it essential.  Once I have it in house, I can once again start pursuing the idea of the perfect napa cabbage chi.

It is cabbage season in East Tennessee.

I did not plant cabbage.  Cabbages are space hogs. Cabbage is readily available from local farmers.  The goal was never self-sufficiency.

The green cabbage was a planned farmer’s market purchase.  Napa was a surprise, and a pleasant one at that.  Sauerkraut and kimchi are the order of the week.

I made my own kimchi before I ever made sauerkraut.  Initially, I made my own kimchi because much commercially available kimchi contains either soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients and if I wanted kimchi I had no alternative.  I first wrote about making kimchi in this post, in 2016.  I ended up loving kimchi more than I imagined, ended up loving the process of fermentation, and eventually decided to try my own sauerkraut as well.

So in a way the garden was about having something I wanted and needing to make it myself, it was never about self-sufficiency. Nor really is it about independence, but rather about dependence, about connecting my life to the world beneath my feet and the air I breathe.  The plan was to grow some things, but also to depend on local farmers for some things.  It is about interdependence, about relationship. Fermentation too has reminded me that life depends on relationship, relationship to each other, relationship to the earth, relationship to the seasons, and processes and nourishment that this earth provides us, and also then about the cycle of life and the relationship between life and decay.  

There is a myth in this country, in this society, that we are independent and self-determinant, that we can pull ourselves “up by our bootstraps” and make it on our own.  But of course we can’t.  We may be privileged beneficiaries of a system that allows us to perpetuate this belief.  We may have invented many wonderful things that have allowed us to believe that our fate is not tied to the fate of this earth and its own cycle of life. We may think we can reduce life and food and even success to simple formulae, but in the end all of these schemes miss the essential transformation of community, of the community of elements, and minerals, and life that make up our bodies, our environments, our societies and ultimately that feed our soul.

Perhaps this time-out the world has been going through has only strengthened my already burgeoning understanding that we are really not separate from the cycles of this planet which gives us life, despite our repeated determination to prove ourselves masters of our own fate.  Perhaps, for me at least, it started with kimchi.  Fermentation,  a process of slow transformation, renewed my connection to earth, to food, to life, to death, and to community.  Perhaps kimchi, and sauerkraut, remind me also of the way we are connected to each other, and that our relationships, and our need for them, are not instant things that can be manufactured, that they are a process of slow evolution.  Perhaps social distancing has reminded me of these same slow processes, reminded me that we need community, but not shallow community.  We need the deeper community of connection, the community that transforms and makes something bigger than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it reminded me that control is an illusion, and a drug.  The problem with control is that someone always pulls the strings, and everyone else buys into the illusion and is controlled.

This week, perhaps I will simply take my chances with cabbage, with sauerkraut and kimchi. I can control my own actions, but I cannot control the outcome. With luck, and there is always an element of luck no matter how we tell ourselves otherwise, I will end up with something wonderful.  Or I will start again.

Back in February the idea popped into my brain that I needed to make corned beef.  I cannot actually remember which came first, the thought, as March was rapidly and somehow the idea of corned beef and cabbage was floating around the world, or seeing the brisket in the store.  I suspect the brisket came first, and although I grew up occasionally eating a “New England Boiled Dinner”, corned beef and cabbage is not really a part of my culinary lexicon, although I like both corned beef and cabbage separately.

Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea of corning my own beef was not new. I cured my first corned beef in my late 20s, after George and I were married, when we could get really good corned beef and pastrami in NYC but not really up in Poughkeepsie.  Perhaps I was also a bit of an overachiever, but making corned beef is not difficult, and I make corned beef a couple of times a year for 30 years or so, until George got sick, I got overwhelmed, and I simply stopped.  I have no idea why I wanted to start again, but I suspect it was more about wanting corned beef hash than anything else.

So I bought the brisket and had to order some Prague powder, which arrived in a day or two and started brining the brisket using a traditional wet brine, in a pot in my fridge, much the way I have always brined a brisket.  After two weeks I cooked the brisket and absolutely loved the final corned beef. And then, just this past week I did it all again.

Truthfully, the repeat process began before I even finished cooking the first brisket.  I started on a whim, doing something known and true, something that had worked well for me, but it has been a decade since I last made brisket, and I have learned things in the intervening years, changed things, and have become perhaps even more curious, even more of a nerd in the kitchen than I was in my youth, even though as a single older woman I indulge those nerdy kitchen impulses less frequently than when I was feeding others.

Sometime while that first batch was in the brine, but before cooking, a notice popped up in my inbox, an old post from Serious Eats about making corned beef by Kenji Lopez-Alt, probably simply an annual St. Patrick’s Day marketing ploy.  But this year I had corned-beef on the brain, even though I tend to think of corned beef as it was adapted my the American Jewish culture rather than Irish American culture.   Either way though, corned beef is corned beef.

Reading the article, I noticed that Kenji compared the traditional wet-brine with a dry brine technique and I was intrigued by this, but my meat was already in the brine so it was a little late for that.  When it came to cooking he recommended a slow braise in a low oven or cooking the meat sous-vide.  Well, that did intrigue me.  Initially I had boiled my corned beef simply because that was how i knew to do it, but somewhere along the line I had stopped boiling it and started cooking my corned beef in a low (200°F) oven for somewhere between 8 and 12 hours.  The change occurred mostly because I had tried another recipe for brisket that cooked it in a slow oven braise and liked the results, so I adapted the technique for my semi-annual briskets with good results.  I did not indulge in rigorous testing, but was tickled that Kenji liked the slow braise, and also that he recommended cooking the brisket sous-vide.  I had never thought about cooking a corned beef sous-vide although I could not think of a reason not to do so.  I have been cooking sous-vide for about a decade now, although I actually had not made a corned beef during that time.  It was time therefore to try something new.  I removed the first brisket from the brine, rinsed, and cooked it sous-vide at 180° for 10 hours, the time Kenji said he preferred.

And I loved that brisket.  It was perhaps a little less firm, with a more shredded texture than some might prefer, but reading the article I was wondering if this was as much due to the wet brine as opposed to the dry brine.  I have always liked my corned beef to be soft, fork-tender, and ready to fall apart, and am not fond of it with too much bite.  In his article you can see a photo of the difference in the meat between dry and wet brine techniques, and looking at that photo I see much the same result I as found in the two brining techniques, shown above (first) and below (second).  The cut, grade, and source of the meat was the same, the cooking time was the same, only the brining was different.  In the second brisket I used the dry-brine technique in a vacuum-sealed bag in the refrigerator for 1 week.  This is certainly more convenient in terms of timing, although that ay be more adaptable, and space, since beef in a sealed plastic bag takes less space and is easier to turn than a big hunk of meat sitting in a large bucket or pot in the refrigerator.  

And  the final brisket was also good (sorry for the smaller picture here, I ate most of that serving before remembering to take the picture).  You can see the difference in the texture of the meat.   The second batch is firmer, meatier, and holds together better.  This is also what is shown at the top of this post, although that photo was taken cold, before steaming the meat, which does soften it up further.  

The problem is that although I see advantages, I am not convinced that I like the second batch better.  I can admit that perhaps the texture of the first batch was a little far to the falling-apart side of things, but the second batch was perhaps a little too firm and dry for my taste.  It is possible that this is simply a question of cooking time.  The second batch may perhaps have needed to be cooked longer, at a lower temperature, the first batch for a slightly shorter time.  These are minor points and I can play with them.  At the moment however, I am wondering if, the next time I simply need to simultaneously cook two briskets, wet-brined, and dry-brined, assume that the final cooking time might be different for each simply based on the effects of the brining process on the texture of the meat, and work side-by-side from there.  I am also wondering if I can wet-brine in a vacuum sealed bag. Perhaps I am just getting too much in my own head.

I did like the second corned beef, seared briefly in a hot skillet for breakfast, kind of hybrid, corned-beef/bacon texture and flavor.  Not traditional perhaps but who cares.  In fact, this second corned beef is making me think about pastrami more than corned beef, about the idea of using the dry brine on a pastrami.  I’ve never made pastrami.  I don’t have a smoker.  That doesn’t mean that it might not be time to start thinking about it a little more seriously.

Saturday I went to the Farmer’s market.  It has been a warm winter and there has been a lovely crop of greens and cool-season vegetables. 

I didn’t actually buy these, although they looked lovely and I may wish otherwise.  I bought more carrots, admittedly mostly for the gorgeous greens, which I have chopped, washed and frozen for future soups.  i will use the carrots too, probably mostly roasting them and they are handy for flavoring dishes especially soups and stocks, but these are so fresh and young and lovely, then deserve to be eaten and enjoyed, even if they are not my favorite vegetable.  Perhaps I am just a greedy person and the carrots are the price I must pay for a love of the greens.  Although the thought of a curried carrot soup sounds nice as we face another rainy week.

I also bought fennel.  I was having some friends over dinner Sunday night, and thought I would roast the fennel wedges with local garlic and Belgian endive which was not local.  I would like to grow some endive, and it might be a worthwhile project considering how much I love endive and its price in the store.  I know it is a two-step process.  Perhaps next winter I will be able to eat my own home-grown endive.  I will have to figure out the frost date and work backward.  Even though I have lived in Knoxville for eight years now, I am still a little more vague on the weather than I was in Hyde Park.  Having a garden and working in it will tie me more closely to the seasons over time.

But back to the fennel.  I knew I was roasting the bulbs, and I also knew, from experience that these local fennel bulbs were often tougher than the tender bulbs often found in grocery stores, so I knew they needed to roast at fairly low to medium heat, allowing them to caramelize slowly, a technique that also works well for both endive and garlic. 

But what to do with the rest of the fennel.  Look at those gorgeous feathery green fronds.  I knew I could cut the stems off and make a batch of broth with them, the basis for a lovely fennel soup, or perhaps even a seafood stew.  I had chopped and frozen my stems from my last farmer’s market foray, including the tender green fronds.  But somehow these fronds were so generous and so lovely it seemed that turning them into stock would be a waste.

Two weeks ago I made pesto from tender young carrot greens, and it was delicious.  I wondered if I could do the same with the fennel.  It certainly couldn’t hurt to try.  I stripped the tender fronds from the leaves and tossed them into the food processor with a fairly traditional mix of a fruity olive oil and pine nuts.  I added a little salt, but later, deciding it needed more, I added some goat milk feta, also made by a local farmer, and it was the perfect thing to round out the flavor.

I was so excited, I had some fennel pesto on a simple plate of scrambled eggs yesterday morning.  I might do that again today.  Apologies, I was apparently also so eager that I forgot, and took a bite before I took the photo.

This whole process makes me happy, happy to support local farmers, eager to grow and produce some of my own food, even if only a few small bites, happy to use as much as possible of what is offered with less waste.   The chicken bones from last night’s dinner are in the freezer waiting to become stock, along with the onion and garlic peels and those aforementioned fennel stalks.  Increasingly, it seems that what I think is important, balance and connection, seem tied as much to my relationship to this earth of which I am a part, as it is to other people, who are of course equally a part of this earth.  I worry that in our quest for convenience, and in elevating our lives outside of our basic dependence on the very earth of which we are a part, we have lost something essential to ourselves.  And of course this adds tension because I live a modern American life and I love my life. Well, life is an evolution after all.

Now if only I can weed myself off ziploc bags.  That seems to be a goal worth pursuing, but it is a task that has proven to be more complicated than I initially assumed.  A freezer filled with bags of vegetable peels and stems and bones is a testament to that.  At least the bags that contain vegetables can be washed and reused.  I am not sure that is true for the bags that contain bones.