Quick Elvis Ice Cream

Step one – way beforehand – vacuum seal and freeze ripe bananas.  You should always have vacuum-sealed frozen bananas on hand.  For most bananas, you want to use about 25 seconds of vacuum in a chamber sealer to keep the consistency perfect; 40 seconds will compress them a little too much.  Here, we’re happy with the compressed texture, because they end up sweeter.  So vacuum the shit out of those suckers.

Step two – cut the frozen bananas into pieces, stick in any device with a fast-rotating blade (food processor, Vitamix, etc.), pulse until chopped well.

Step three – add a bit of coconut milk and blend to create an ice cream-like consistency.

Step four – add a swirl of peanut butter.

Eat.

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Pressure Cooker/Steam Oven Beef And Mushroom Stew

Three modernist steps to an easy beef stew.  Total time outlay can be under 30 minutes if you cheat a little and cut step 3 short.

Ingredients: beef, mushrooms, carrots, peas, red bell pepper, salt, black pepper, red wine

1. Pressure cooker: brown stew beef, then deglaze with red wine.  Add water or beef stock and mushrooms.  I used 3 lbs of beef, a cup of wine, cup of water, and about 2 cups of assorted mushrooms.  Bring to high pressure and cook for 25 minutes.
2. Steam oven: for fresher vegetables to add to the stew, cook them separately in a combi-oven while the stew pressure cooks.  I used baby carrots, shelled sugar snap peas, and a red pepper, and cooked them on Bake-Steam at 450F for 10 minutes in my Cuisinart steam oven.
3. Filter and saucepan.  When the stew is done pressure cooking, strain a cup of the liquid into a saucepan and simmer to reduce.  (Or, if you have the equipment, rotovap it.)  Mount with butter.  Add beef, mushrooms, and steam-oven cooked vegetables.  Season to taste.

Dehydrated Cashew Butter: Fail

Last night, I tried to dehydrate homemade cashew butter (process: put cashews in Vitamix; turn to 10; tamp down corners in sequence vigorously until it becomes cashew butter).

I spread a thin layer of cashew butter on a Paraflexx sheet and put it in the dehydrator.  I was hoping to get a peanut brittle or similar hard-consistency crackle sheet, which I could eat as is or grind to powder to use in other recipes.

Instead, after 12 hours of dehydration at 135F, I had a sheet of warm cashew butter.

Makes sense.  Nut butters have very little water content; the powderizing process used by most molecular gastronomy recipes is to add tapioca maltodextrin, which turns oils into powders.  Unfortunately, tapioca maltodextrin – as the name suggests – is a polysaccharide starch.  Not Paleo.

 

Umami Biltong

Ingredients:

• Lean beef – top round, eye round, London broil, etc.
• Curing mix:
  • Coarse salt
  • Apple cider vinegar
  • Red Boat fish sauce.  Red Boat is sugar-free, and is better tasting than any of its competitors anyway.  You can order it on Amazon if your local store doesn’t carry it.
• Spice mix:
  • Black peppercorns
  • Whole coriander
  • Portobello mushroom powder

Process:

1. (1-2 days beforehand) Dehydrate portobello mushrooms.
2. Day 1 @ 0 hours: Cut beef into 1-2″ thick slabs.  Thicker means more drying time, but a better final product.  Too thin and you’ll end up with a more jerky-like outcome instead of moist biltong.
3. Coat each side of the beef liberally in coarse salt.  This starts the curing process and draws out moisture.  Leave the beef for 1-1.5 hours, then scrape off all the salt.
4. Day 1 @ 1-1.5 hours: Put the beef in Ziploc bags and pour in a few healthy splashes of vinegar and fish sauce.  It doesn’t need to soak; just enough to coat is fine.  Do not vacuum seal, or it will end up too vinegary.  Refrigerate for 8-12 hrs or overnight.
5. Day 1 @ 9-13 hours, or Day 2 @ 0 hours: Toast coriander by dry-frying in a pan.  Remove from heat, add whole black peppercorns and dehydrated mushrooms, and crush or grind together.  Ratio is a matter of taste; I prefer 3:1:1 or so coriander:pepper:mushrooms.
6. Remove beef from refrigerator and pat dry.  Coat beef liberally with spice mix.  Hang beef on meat hooks from top tray of dehydrator, with Paraflexx sheet on bottom to catch drips and make for easy cleanup.
7. Dehydrate at 95-105F for at least 24 hours, and probably more like 48-72.  Feel the biltong each day to test water loss; when it’s dry but not brittle or hard, it’s ready.

Portobello Mayonnaise, Take 1

Process:

1. Dehydrate portobello mushrooms – I think I ran mine at 135F for 7-8 hours.
2. Grind dehydrated mushrooms to powder in small food processor or coffee grinder.
3. Add mayonnaise and blend in processor or with immersion blender.

I used Duke’s Mayonnaise to make these batches.  Duke’s has no sugar in it.  You could, rather easily, mix your own mayonnaise out of oil and egg yolk instead.

 

Tasting notes:

Awesome.

Lessons learned:

I actually experimented with two separate batches of dehydrated mushrooms.  I dehydrated all the mushrooms together with the process described above;  however, half stayed in a mason jar in my house, and the other half went into a plastic container with me to Burning Man.  The half that stayed home were leathery.  The half that journeyed to the desert were bone-dry.

These produced two different textural effects.  The leathery batch had some residual oil, which created a better mouthfeel and taste in the mayonnaise but separated out after several hours.  The bone-dry batch produced a much better grind and more evenly-mixed final product, but wasn’t quite as satisfying.

Future Iterations:

I have a couple ideas.

One, I could simply use a two-tiered dehydration process to fine-tune the powder/oil mixture of the mushrooms: pull some at 7-8 hours, leave the remainder to dehydrate for 12-24 or more.

Two, I could try to use a solvent or CO2 extraction method to pull any esters or essential oils from the portobellos, and use that in the mayonnaise.  I have no idea if this is feasible; from research, it appears that supercritical fluid extraction works on mushrooms, but I don’t have an SFE machine.  The other CO2 extraction method is dry ice and a screen, but I can’t see conceptually what that would produce from portobello mushrooms.

Paleomodernism

Modernist food preparation, with paleo ingredients.