The best roast beef

Beef rump was on special at the supermarket on Tuesday, for $9.99/kg. That's cheaper than mince, and there's nothing wrong with beef rump! I bought a 1kg hunk for another sous-vide experiment.

Last night I vacuum packed it and submerged it in my waterbath, with the water at 55°C, and left it for four hours.


I'd made a cover for the waterbath the other day from some polystyrene I'd been not throwing out in case I found a use for it. This serves the dual purpose of keeping anything in the waterbath from floating, and keeping the heat in.


After four hours I took the beef out, unpacked it, salted it, and seared all of its sides in smoking hot oil. I used the juices that had gathered in the bag to make a sauce - added a bit of brandy and some smoked garlic and reduced it.

Result:


The tenderest, most succulent, roast beef I've ever eaten. A perfect medium rare all the way through.

And tonight I've been finding it very difficult not to keep slicing more and more of it off to eat cold with a dab of horseradish and a sprinkle of salt. It's just heavenly.

Turquoise wedges

This pair of shoes was not only waiting for a cream skirt, it was waiting for a turquoise cardigan as well.


They were a measly $12.50 from No 1 Shoes a couple of years ago, and I bought them to go with a skirt I have which is the exact turquoise of the shoes. It is also mid-calf length, silky, and circular with sun-ray pleats. In other words, I'd look very odd wearing it to work. I did wear it to a wedding shortly after I bought these shoes though, and the combination was much admired.

Today I'm wearing the shoes with my new-ish cream skirt, a cream blouse, a darker cream belt, and the turquoise cardigan I bought on Monday. It's very close to the same colour, not quite exact if you hold them right next to each other, but good enough when worn the length of my body away.

Yet more sensible sandals

This should have been yesterday's post. Totally forgot I hadn't worn these in years until I got home.


I bought them in I Love Paris, must be 20 years or so ago. They are very comfortable, and I used to wear them a lot.

This is the 90th different pair of shoes I've worn to work since I started on my "must wear all shoes" project. There are a few pairs that just won't get worn - I have a couple of pairs of "stripper shoes"; enormously high platforms and heels - and then there are the water shoes and the gumboots and some croc things I bought on my podiatrist's advice when I had heel-spurs and in which I'll not be seen in public. BUT there are still a good few pairs to go.

Spanish chorizo and the year's final cheeses

Christmas is approaching at a frightening speed. I have to actually start doing something about preparing food for my cheese-eating guests who are due for lunch on the 20th. I'm not sure I've made these sausages in time - we'll see if they're dry enough in two weeks, if not it won't be the end of the world and I'll have something yummy to eat the week after. I hope. It's a bit experimental.

Spanish chorizo is my first attempt at a fermented dry sausage. The live cultures the recipe says to use are not available (as far as I can find anyway) in New Zealand. But I figure that people were making this sort of sausage for centuries before the discovery of bacteria, so hopefully they will pick up something useful from the atmosphere. And I added a dollop of yoghurt and a bit of mesophilic cheese culture for good luck - it can't do any harm.

Here's my 1.5 kg chopped pork plus a spoonful of glucose syrup and some yoghurt:


Here's the salt and spice mix; 35 g salt; a bit more than 1/2 tsp 6% sodium nitrite in salt; a bit more than 1/2 tsp 4% potassium nitrate in salt (curing salts are unavailable here too - I make my own); 1 tbsp smoked hot paprika; 1 tbsp powdered ancho chillies; 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper:


Here's the pork with the salts, spices, and garlic added:


And here are the finished sausages hanging up in the shower in my spare bathroom:


I put a bit of water into the tub under the shower and closed the door, hopefully that will keep the humidity high enough that the outsides won't dry too fast.

My last cheese of the year are three more Camemberts (shown here in their home-made drainpipe moulds):


And some feta:


The feta is now cut into four pieces, each of which is in a zip-lock bag of brine in the fridge.

That's it for cheese for the year; next weekend I'm visiting a friend to try out his new pizza oven, the weekend after that I have my cheese party, the weekend after that, well, I'll be recovering from eating too much at Christmas and then hopping on an aeroplane to go to Australia and the grandkids. I was talking to the elder one, Emily, yesterday on Skype. She had just been to see the Wiggles in concert and was sporting a very attractive, if somewhat bulky, Dorothy tail. She said, sounding very surprised, "I wanted to see Mickey Mouse, but he wasn't there"! She did tell me all about Murray, Jeff ("Wake up Jeff") , "Afony" and Sam though. And Wag the Dog and Henry the Octopus.

Recipe

Spanish Chorizo (from Charcuterie)

Ingredients:
2.25 kg pork shoulder
50 g kosher salt
1 tsp No 2 curing salt (that's the one with nitrite and nitrate in it)
2 tbsp smoked Spanish paprika
2 tbsp ancho chili powder
1 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp dextrose (that's glucose, and I used syrup rather than powder)
1/4 cup Bactoferm F-RM-52 live starter culture (this is where I used a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt and some mesophilic cheese culture and crossed my fingers)
1/4 cup distilled water (I used tap water because I'm not using it to hydrate bacteria)

10 feet of hog casings, soaked in tepid water for at least 30 mins and rinsed.

Method:
Combine pork with salt, curing salt, and dextrose. Grind through the large die on your mincer.
Dissolve Bactoferm in the distilled water and add it, along with the remaining ingredients, to the pork. With the paddle attachment, mix on low speed for about a minute to incorporate the ingredients.
Stuff the sausage into the hog casings and use string to tie into 12 inch/30 cm loops. Using a sterile needle, prick the casings all over to remove any air pockets and to facilitate drying.
Hang the sausage (ideally at 15°C with 60-70% humidity) until it feels completely stiff throughout and/or it's lost 30% of its weight, 18 to 20 days.

Yield: About 3 pounds/1.5 kg of sausage; 5 large rings.

Note: I started with 1.5 kg of pork, and scaled everything down accordingly. I made my sausages somewhat longer than 30 cm - more like 40 cm I think - and I still ended up with four of them. I'm hoping this means that NZ "hog casings" (we actually call pigs pigs, not hogs) are a bit skinnier than American ones, and hence will dry proportionately faster, making them edible by the 20th. Sausages in sheep casings are supposed to dry in a week, which gives me some hope.

Burt Munro Challenge and my new camera

Last weekend I went to Invercargill for the Burt Munro Challenge. I was pit crew for a couple of friends who came down from the North Island.

The weather was miserable. I thought I'd taken enough clothing to be prepared for anything the far south of New Zealand could throw at me, but I was mistaken. I hardly removed my possum fur-lined jacket (don't throw up your hands in horror - any use we can find for possum fur helps save our native forests and birds) all weekend, and I had to go and buy more socks and another pair of jeans.

I tried out my new video camera, and am very happy with it. I still need a good bit of practice keeping it steady, so I went out and bought a tripod (half price in Kathmandu's pre-Christmas sale) as soon as I got home. The one major problem with it is the difficulty in seeing the screen in daylight, there is no optical viewfinder. Mind you, with my old-age induced long-sightedness I probably couldn't see through one of those either. I can also see how people with big fingers (i.e. men) could find the controls awkward, but they're just fine for me.

Here are my video recordings of the 2009 Burt Munro Challenge.

First of all, a little bit of the Bluff Hillclimb (Thursday) followed by a walk around the Teretonga pit area during practice and some footage of the racing (Saturday):



The beach racing (Friday) was cancelled because of the shocking weather - a howling Southerly wind straight off Antarctica accompanied by horizontal rain:


However the Munro Special was on display. I'm pretty sure this is the replica built for the movie "The World's Fastest Indian":



On Saturday night after Teretonga we went over to watch the Speedway event. None of our team was racing in it, they're not quite that mad. By the end of the evening the light was low enough that I could see through the LCD screen enough to follow whole races.



On Sunday at the Wyndham street races the actual Burt Munro special was on display, minus its cowling. You can see why the authorities at Bonneville were not too keen on letting him ride:



The residents of Wyndham really get behind their annual street race. It's a tiny rural township, and this is one of the few opportunities they get for fundraising. Every church group, school, daycare, the Volunteer Fire Brigade, everyone, sets up a food stall. I had whitebait fritters from the local marae (hangi was available, but I wanted to try other things), a cake (Presbyterian Church), delicious lamb wraps (a pre-school), and would have liked to eat more.

Here's some video of a walk around the pit area and a bit of racing:



And here's some more racing:



My friend Malcolm won the pre-1972 Classics event on his Triumph Bonneville. Luck played a large part in this though - he got two seconds and a first, whereas the person who came first in the first two races fell off in the last and got a "Did Not Finish". Two seconds and a first beats two firsts and a DNF! Malcolm also came third in the pre-1972 Classics at Teretonga, so he was pretty happy. Winning is just a bonus really though, the main reason for racing is being allowed to go as fast as you possibly can.

Grey and Black

Here's another pair of shoes I've had my eye on for a while:


They were $40 and I waited until they were $25. Not leather, obviously, but rather nice.

I'm still recovering from five days away at the Burt Munro Challenge, where I was being pit-crew. For once I actually had a little mechanical work to do too - it wasn't just drinking beer. The weather in Invercargill was more like winter than summer; there was a southerly blast coming straight from Antarctica, the beach racing was cancelled, and I froze most of the time. Except of course for the street racing in Wyndham on Sunday, when I forgot to put my lipstick on and got a sunburned lower lip! I looked as though I'd had collagen injections on Monday morning.