28 oz Wine Glass 40 oz Whisky Shot

A Very Special guest post by Ender

Hey, look at this, it’s an update! And one by a sane person at that! (Ed.--At this time we have not received documentation of the author's sanity from any licensed medical or psychiatric professional.) This post contains no ham cakes, cake hams, spatchcocks, or Chinese rocks that appear to be meat but are in fact rocks. This post is about ribs and beer. Specifically, the combining of the two into Guinness braised ribs. Do I have your attention there? I thought so. Let us begin the lesson.

What do you need for this party? Ribs and Guinness obviously, but you need a bit more than that. Let’s try:

- 4 lbs of ribs (I used boneless pork ribs because they were cheap)
- 1 Guinness bottle (drink the rest while waiting for it to cook or while eating)
- 1 cup low sodium beef broth
- Plenty of kosher sea salt
- Plenty of fresh ground pepper
- 2 diced carrots
- 2 diced celery stalks
- 1 diced onion (I used yellow)
- 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
- 2 teaspoons dried thyme
- 1 overloaded tablespoon of tomato paste
- 4 cloves worth of minced garlic (or spoonfuls to taste if using pre-minced stuf)
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1 bay leaf


Crank your oven to 325 F and we’ll get started cooking.

First up is the meat.



I got a pretty decent cut of it here, but the nice thing about the recipe is that you can swap out the meat with other kinds and just adjust cooking time accordingly. Take it, cut it into manageable pieces and thoroughly coat it in ground pepper and kosher sea salt



Now I know what you are thinking- why kosher salt if you are using pork ribs? The answer is a religious joke that I’m pretty sure they won’t let me get away with on their blog. (Ed.--Probably not, but we'd enjoy hearing it for ourselves.) So let’s go with a scientific explanation.

Salt is hygroscopic, that is it attracts water molecules. This is why it used to be used as a desiccant. For our purposes here we want that, it draws out the water molecules from the meat. This is why it is kosher incidentally; it was used to draw out blood in the act of koshering meat. Thanks for the history lesson Dan, but how does this relate to cooking me delicious ribs? Well now that the water has been drawn out, osmosis will bring it back in, along with it some of the dissolved salt. The salt denatures the protein, making the meat extra tender, and leaving behind any additional minerals brought in giving it a bit of flavor, hence why we used sea salt. Now you have established a low level fluid flow in the meat. If you were doing anything else you would want to wipe off the salt now, but this stuff is going to be submerged shortly so don’t worry about it. You want the process to continue to really inject the flavor into the meat and the low sodium beef broth will ensure the end result isn’t too salty.

This concludes the unnecessary detour. Hopefully you didn’t waste time and coated the rest of your meat while reading this. Take the meat and set it to the side.



Now get out a large pot and put the olive oil in it. Get it hot and put the meat in.



Thoroughly brown the meat on all sides.



Once you’ve gotten it all browned, take the meat out and set it to the side. Toss your diced carots, celery and onion in the same pot with the hot and now flavored olive oil and sauté them until they are soft. This should take maybe 10 minutes depending on your stove and heat.



Add the garlic, rosemary, and thyme, continue to sauté until the garlic is mixed in (you can tell because the garlic smell overpowers the others)



Now add the tomato paste, and mix it thoroughly. I sent with about a tablespoon here, but adding more will increase the richness, color, and thickness of the final sauce. This could be desirable depending on your personal tastes. In the future I’m personally going to go with more.



In goes 1 cup of beef broth, 1 bay leaf, and finally…



1 cup of Guinness. Drink the rest of it you wasteful savage.



This should be your sauce. Mix well over low heat, then add in the ribs.



While stirring to keep the meat coated, bring it all to a boil. Look at it boil:




Now at this point I made an error. The pot I had been working in had plastic coated handles, so it couldn’t go into the oven. That was mistake #1. I transferred it to a large disposable foil tray, which was mistake #2. In the future, I will use something with a smaller surface area and greater volume. That way the meat is more immersed in the sauce and there is less chance of it drying out. They still ended up really juicy, but they could have been even better. Take your pan/oven safe pot full of boiling ribs and sauce and cover it and put it in the oven:



Braising gives you some leeway in cook time, I just kept checking with a meat thermometer until it was done. I’d estimate it took about 90 minutes though.

Boomshakalaka



Serve with the sauce drenched on it like gravy. It goes well with mashed potatoes or rolls to sop up the extra juice. And more Guinness to drink .

Enjoy!

St. Patrick's Day Part II

True to my/our word, I made Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes tonight so I could try getting buzzed off of cake.
In the course of gathering ingredients and such, I discovered I am a squirrel yet again:


On the left: the existing cupcake liners in my pantry. 

On the right: the package of cupcake liners I bought today because I couldn't remember if I had any.

My cupcake pan is AWOL so I just put the foil liners on a baking sheet:


Right. On to assembly!

The first thing you do is stir a cup of Guinness and a cup of butter together in a pan which is kind of weird but okay.

Looks scary.

Then you measure out cocoa powder

And add it to the simmering fatty-Guinness:

And you whisk it until it looks like pudding, which it almost is:

I have no pictures of the rest of the batter assembly but you basically beat eggs and sour cream, add the fatty-chocolate-Guinness mixture to make what is essentially Guinness chocolate pudding (minus the sugar), then add flour and sugar and baking soda and suddenly it's not scary chocolate beer pudding anymore, it's cake batter.  

The one thing I did differently from the smitten kitchen recipe was to decrease the sugar from 2 cups to 1 2/3 cups, because seeing "2 cups flour" and "2 cups sugar" together in a cake recipe is terrifying.

Anyway this is what the cupcakes looked like naked:

I used a clean cheapass vegetable peeler to core the cupcakes:

You can see clear down to the bottom!

There were 24 cupcakes, but only 23 made it to this stage. One got kind of smushed during the transfer to cooling racks. Sad.

Here are all their guts.  I ate them, as it was my perogative.

I was expecting the cupcakes to be quite dense and rich due to the heaviness of the beer and all, but the texture turned out to be light and fluffy, and they all had perfect lightly crisp tops. They were quite chocolatey without being too rich, because the Guinness added body and flavor.  I didn't miss the 1/3 cup of sugar I left out (but then again, I like semi-sweet chocolate so your mileage may vary).  I would totally make these again any day of the year (except maybe tomorrow).

But enough about the cupcakes themselves, let's keep violating them!
In order to do it properly, I needed whiskey and dark chocolate ganache. Here is a picture of Nick's bottle of whiskey that I borrowed:

Here is a picture of a lovely tempered chocolate ganache with cream and butter and Jameson in it. It's about half Valrhona, half Toll House, because I was too lazy/cheap to run out to a fancy food store to make up the difference in nice chocolate.

Nick thinks "ganache" sounds like an STD.  Say it out loud.

The resulting pile of reamed cupcakes, filled with ganache.  Ewww.

Foreground: the large freezer bag I sacrificed in the name of ghetto piping technique.

Alas, I have no pictures of the finished cupcakes, since final assembly was done at Emily's. It's easier to transport a bowl of frosting + tray of unfrosted cupcakes than it is to wrangle 2 dozen frosted cupcakes into a car without making a mess.  

I am hoping Emily took a photo, but for now, just imagine the cupcakes topped with a thin layer of white buttercream with a shot of Irish Cream in it, because that's exactly what they looked like before we ate them.

The ganache was quite alcoholic and I think I got buzzed from eating two.

TAKE HOME LESSON: Pastries are a prime vector for alcohol delivery, if you are a wimp like me who can't metabolize alcohol.

Note for this St. Paddy's day

Car Bomb Cupcakes the newest meme from Smitten Kitchen.  Except it's me and these really just need to be doused in Jameson so I can get sloshed off of cupcakes.

And since we're talking about alcohol ANYWAY, tonight's project was fill an old vanilla extract bottle with leftover rum (see last week) and vodka dregs and a vanilla bean. Theoretically this can hang out for a few weeks and make vanilla extract BUT WE SHALL SEE.

Other things to do with a $16 bottle of rum

We have this book that tells us what to do.  I picked it up on a whim (and apparently, for a song) from our local Half Price Books one day, thinking I would inflict it upon Emily for Christmas as a semi-gag gift.  (She's paranoid about preserved foods, and thus has never experienced the joy of jam or delicious pickles.)

It's a great book written by two British food dorks with a good sense of humor and a solid knowledge of drying, smoking, curing, canning, infusing, freezing, fermenting, and a few other mind-boggling things like how to suspend baby octopus in aspic.

Turns out the book has a section on alcohol.

We had actually bought the rum for the primary purpose of making a recipe from the book.  The fact that we were making bananas foster the same night simply provided impetus for the trek to Costco.

The recipe is called "Lai's Fruits of the Forest Rum" and the basic premise is as such:  Put frozen mixed berries into a bottle, add some sugar, and top it off with rum.  Seriously, who needs to measure?  So we didn't.

Mise-en-place, lacking sugar.  Ignore the flour.  The rainbowcake likes to watch.

Rum strata.

I'm so glad we bought this funnel.

Once we had filled our various bottles, we sealed them and wrapped them in foil to keep out the light, then stashed them somewhere dark.  The instructions said to let them sit for a year, so maybe in a year we will get really drunk on it and report back on the status of rum n' berries.

Epilogue:  We had about a cup of berries left, so I made two tiny cobblers in ramekins.  They were delicious.

Limoncello, part 3

The bottling setup. Note the matches.




It burned for waaay too long at first, so we added more sugar water.




The ladle was heavy and my arm got tired after the first two bottles.





Now all that's left is to leave them in a dark place for at least another 3 months to mellow out. I may stuff them in my closet so Emily doesn't get any premature ideas...

Limoncello - part 2

After about 1 month of steeping in a dark closet, the alcohol looks to be a darker yellow and the citron slices have become less buoyant.

Tonight we filtered the alcohol, added a TON of simple syrup to it, and got it down to around 100 proof. At various stages we would put a little bit in a shot glass and try to light it...after the first sugar addition it still burned for a good 2 minutes in the shot glass.

Once we were fairly confident it wasn't going to kill/blind anyone, we bottled it in pretty swivel-top bottles (and a small glass flask that previously held maple syrup). Emily has those pictures.

In the steeping jar now: another handle of Everclear + all the husks of the juiced limes from yesterday.

Limoncello - part 1

Step 1 completed:

- 1 handle of Everclear
- 1 Buddha hand citron, washed and thinly sliced
- Zest of 2 lemons
- Giant glass jar

It felt really, really wrong to pour the entire jug of Everclear into the jar.

The alcohol started turning yellow within about 15 minutes because we used a microplane to zest the lemons. Luckily, the Buddha hand didn't need zesting, as its pith was sweet rather than bitter like that of lemons. Zesting a Cthulhu citrus would have been a pain in the ass.

Now comes the waiting. Most recipes say the initial steeping time is about a month (until the peels turn white, indicating all aromatics have been extracted). I'm keeping it in my closet so Emily isn't tempted to keep poking/sampling it.