beef and whiskey

My entire motivation for buying a Sous Vide Supreme was to have a tool that made really good food, like steaks, pork chops, chicken, burgers, even, taste even better. And it does exactly that. And more.

I never imagined, then, that I would be sitting here one day, telling you, dear reader, that I used that same tool, my sacred Sous Vide Supreme, to make my food taste bad. Yes, I used my 400 dollar appliance to make my food taste, um, worse. On purpose. Well, not bad, exactly, but let’s just say, less good. Bland. Boring. Here come’s the new buzzword, yes, folks, I tried out the food-reward diet.

Hamburger, sous-vided, no seasoning, no searing. Looks good, no?

Never heard of it? Neither had I until recently. There are a few egg-head blogs out there going on about it. This seems to be the main one:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/

That blog and a few others like it aren’t really my style, I find them way too obtuse and technical, but apparently a lot of people do read them. Anyway, they’ve been going on about this food reward theory of obesity. I can’t be bothered to read it all to figure out what it is really about, but here’s the jist of it, I think: We modern humans eat too much because we are able to make our food too damn tasty. Make your food boring, and you’ll end up eating less. And you’ll lose weight. Or maybe you don’t eat less, but you still lose weight. Something about changing your set point. Yawn…

After some digging around, I finally found a description of how to go about implementing a low reward diet. You can look here for more details, but here are the guidelines that I followed:

No seasoning
Meals consist of meats and vegetables.
Meats are cooked gently. No grilling (egads!)
They also recommend eating starchy foods cooked the same boring way, but I declined that advice.

Unseasoned, boneless, skinless chicken thighs, sous vided. Eggplant cubes, also sous-vided.

The recommendation was to cook your meat in water, but what the hell, who would actually do that? This is where the Sous-Vide Supreme comes in. I figured I could cook the meat the way I normally do, except I would skip the seasoning, and would skip the post-sous-vide searing.

See what I mean about boring beef?

So what I did I eat?

Over the week, I ate some burgers, some briskett, and some boneless, skinless chicken thighs. All cooked without seasoning, in the svs, and without any follow up searing. And I ate plenty of brocolli, spinach, etc. Also cooked without seasoning. I could have used the Sous Vide Supreme to cook those as well, but I simply steamed them instead.

Did it work?

Actually, yeah, it seemed to work. I started out at 189 pounds. After a week of eating this way, I clocked in at 184 pounds.

One problem with eating this way is that it’s very anti-social. Not as anti-social as the type of diets recommended by the insane-quack-squad (Ornish, Furhman, Campbell, etc.), but pretty close. As in, nobody else wants to eat this way, and its a huge pain to do so, especially when you have houseguests. I only went a week on this plan, mostly because my inlaws were here for an extended visit, and it was just too much trouble to keep it going and still be properly sociable. But they’re gone now, and I am revving up for another go at it, this time for a much longer period. I’m planning to try it for the next six weeks (with weekends off, of course, Thanksgiving off too!).

Stay tuned…

For some odd reason I recently decided to make up a big ole batch of burgers from scratch. That is, I decided to take some chunks of grass-fed meat and grind them up myself into ground meat which I would then form into delicious discs of hamburgery heaven.

I’m not sure why I decided to do this. It’s not because I don’t trust supermarket ground beef. I don’t trust it but I still eat it anyway. It’s not because I like the idea of eating grass-fed beef. I do, and I certainly eat my share of grass-fed burgers and steaks. It’s not because I like to know where my food is coming from, because, to be honest, I don’t actually care that much. I only care about minimizing sugar and starch. And to some degree, vegetable oils. Beyond that, well, you know, yawn….

I think I did it just for the sheer hell of it. My idea of fun. Go figure.

I think I heard on some show like Top Chef that Richard Blais likes to make his ground beef from a mix of brisket, hangar steak, and short ribs. So I decided to do the same.  I ordered a bunch of those cuts from U.S. Wellness meats, and when they arrived, I sharpened my knives and started chopping.

Here’s a close up of the brisket, looks kinda lean, doesn’t it?

And here’s the hangar steak, more fat there, that’s looking better:

And here’s the short ribs, loads of fat, that’s more like it:

And Sami enjoyed the bones!

Lots of juice left over, I call it dog soup, because its usually the dogs who wind up enjoying it. When there’s beef on the counter, they are usually on their best behavior. Sitting and pretending they are the best doggies in the world. Best doggies in the world who deserve to have a share of that beef up there that smells so good. But when they hear the bowls coming out of the cabinet, well, that’s more than they can take, all sorts of shameless crying and shoving and begging breaks out. They usually get what they want.

Here’s all the meat, all chopped and ready for the grind.

One good thing about doing this  yourself, you can control the fat content. If for some odd reason you are working with lean meat, you can always mix in some beef lard improve the situation.

Unfortunately, when I made this batch, I was using the Cuisinart food processor for the grinding action. It works but not that great. It’s tricky to get it ground up just enough, you know, not too chunky, but also, not a puree. Ground beef is good, puree’d beef, yuck.

Here’s the meat all ground up. I erred a bit on the chunky side.

By now I’ve been working quite a while, this is a bigger job than I expected it to be. Time for some refreshment!

Next time I think I’ll 1) Skip the brisket, and just go with hangar and short rib mix, and 2) Use less meat, this just took too long!, and 3) Get a proper meat grinder attachment for the KitchenAid mixer.

Ever heard of Moqueca?

That’s pronounced Mo-KECK-ah. It’s a fish stew from Bahia, Brazil. I actually lived in Brazil (in Campinas, near Sao Paulo) for 3 years during my teen years in the seventies, and have been back below the equator many times since. But I had never tried a moqueca until  about five years ago. I had my first taste of this fantastic dish while I was on a little surfing vacation in Itacare, Bahia. (Btw, if you’re thinking about going somewhere to learn how to surf, I highly recommend the Easydrop surf school there in Itacare. They will take great care of you!).  I found myself in one of Itacare’s cool little rustic restaurants (I’m not positive, but I think it was the Berimbau), and decided to try their moqueca, even though at the time I probably had no idea what it was or even how to pronounce it.

That moqueca sure left a lasting impression-I sometimes find myself daydreaming about how much I had liked it. Recently I started to wonder if I could make it myself, and if I could, could I make a reasonably low carb version of it?

After a quick bit of googling, I can report to you the answer to both questions is a resounding YES! It’s quite easy to make and none of its ingredients are particularly high sugar or starch. Well, except for the rice it’s usually served with – but you can easily do without that, or use it in small quantities. Or replace it  all together with shredded cauliflower.

I know its always better to go with fresh ingredients, but if you’re kinda lazy in the kitchen like me,  you can do a pretty damn good moqueca using mostly stuff from jars and cans, heh heh.

You can google yourself for some recipes, they’re are dozens out there, and even some good videos showing how to make it. The main ingredients are fish (any white fish is best, any kinda fish at all is good), onions, garlic, cilantro, hot peppers (I used jalapeno), and coconut milk.

Here’s how I made my moqueca:

1. Put the chopped up fish in a bowl, drizzle with bottled lime juice, add salt and pepper, let it rest like that for a bit.
2. Saute some chopped onions in a pan with olive oil.
3. Add in some of that chopped garlic that comes in a jar.
4. Add in a can or so of diced tomatoes.
5. Chop up some jalapenos (also from a jar!), add that to the mix.
6. After everything is nicely sauteed, drop the fish into the mix.
7. Add a can or so of coconut milk, and let it cook for 10 – 15 minutes.

Here’s what my version of moqueca looked like:

I can’t wait to get back to Itacare to sample the real thing again (and get some surfing in too!), but for now, this is a pretty good substitute.