Blue Sky (Heisenberg's Methamphetamine)

No Mom, I'm not running a bloody meth lab.

Elliot is completing his Master's thesis on AMC's Breaking Bad, a truly great television series that you're probably familiar with unless you live in a vacuum or something. On that off chance that this is the case, all you need to know is that the series' main character makes a particularly potent type of Methamphetamine distinguished by its blue colouring. Elliot will probably kill me for such a shoddy precis but this isn't the place for it. Do yourself a favour and watch the show. 

I wanted to give Elliot some of the notorious Blue Sky Meth for his birthday as part of a larger Breaking Bad themed present. According to the show's prop master Mark Hansen, the meth crystals used on the show are just chunks of blue coloured rock candy. Buying some would have been relatively easy, but that's no damn fun at all. Besides, doing it myself means I can make it exactly to my specifications. Walt would be proud.

My first idea was to grow a group of blue crystals on a string suspended in a super-saturated solution. This method would have produced more natural looking crystals but was going to yield unpredictable results, not enough overall and take a matter of weeks. No good. I needed something I could experiment with repeatedly until I got a result I was happy with.

Way back in my board treading days I learned how make sugar glass to be used as a prop in stage combat. Done well, it produces fairly convincing, clear, transparent panes that shatter like glass. My head went through more than one. Shattered fragments of coloured sugar glass would be perfect, with the bonus of being delicious and not having to pick it out of my hair this time.

I experimented with a few different methods to achieve the result I was looking for. Making the glass is easy enough, but colouring and flavouring it complicated matters more than expected. Below is a comparison of three of the coloured batches. The sample on the far left looks green due to being heated to too high a temperature. It began caramelizing and yellow + blue = you know what. I also noticed that after adding the blue colouring the sugar began recrystallizing in the solution, creating an unwanted opacity. No good. I tried adding a little more water and reheating it slowly but this resulted in much too soft a texture and couldn't save the clarity.

With the top sample I heated the solution far slower and removed it about 5°C sooner. It was much clearer and hadn't caramelized but as soon as I added the blue colouring it began to crystalize again and ended up grainy. Bad texture, bad clarity. No good.

I decided embrace the spirit of the show and get a little scientific with the next sample. I added the colouring to the original solution before heating it in the hope of suppressing whatever chemical reaction was shocking the sugar back into crystal form in the previous batches. I also added a small amount of tartaric acid to the sugar in order to break down the disaccharide Sucrose into its constituent monosaccharides Fructose and Glucose, which individually crystallize far less readily.

These steps seemed to do the trick and resulted in the beautifully transparent pool of glass on the bottom-right. It hardened well and shattered perfectly. A little too perfectly actually. Heisenberg's meth on Breaking Bad is a little bit duller looking and smoother around the edges but still seems to retain a kind of brilliant lustre internally. To achieve that look I threw the whole batch in a glass jar and shook the hell out of it. This roughed up the edges and covered all the crystals in a fine sugar powder that took just enough shine away from the surface. Next, I sifted the whole sample through a colander to remove the finest particulate and was left with what you see in the photo at the top of the post. Throw it all in a small dodgy looking zip-lock and voilà! Heisenberg's Blue Sky Methamphetamine, with extra authenticity owing to the fact that my name actually is Jesse. 

Don't have it all at once, bitch.

Strawberry & Black Pepper Jam

Seeing as strawberries are still outrageously cheap, I decided to overcome the lack of conveniently available preserving supplies and make some damn jam.

I'd been hearing for a while that black pepper and Balsamic vinegar were great complimentary flavours to Strawberries but I'd never tried making anything with this supposed Holy Trinity (actually, there's a fourth ingredient that apparently works well with all of the above but I'll save that for a later post...)

I was itching to make some jam and the frustration from not being able to find supplies to do so easily finally became to much and pushed me on in spite of a lack of proper accoutrements. I couldn't find any pure pectin at the store so I settled for CSR's Jam Setting Sugar. It's a blend of sugar and 0.7% fruit pectin, which is a fairly good ratio that won't result in anything too sweet if you're just making one of the straight up fruit jams they provide recipes for. I had no intention of anything so simple. This complicated things somewhat.

When making jam you need to find a good balance between acid, pectin and sugar. Too much acid and your jam won't set properly. I was working with a fixed ratio of pectin and sugar here, so I didn't have as much control as I wanted. Unfortunately, adding the Balsamic Vinegar (read: Acetic Acid), was enough to push it over the edge and resulted in a bit of a sloppy jam. The taste was all there but it didn't set quite as well as I'd hoped.

The other issue I faced was finding affordable jars to seal this deliciousness into. Back home this is no problem. There are violently cold and hateful winters there in which nothing grows, so an annual preserving and hoarding of food has been the norm for several hundred years. This means re-usable jars and lids are everywhere and affordable. Second home does not have this problem. It's mostly hot here and close to the coast where 98% of us live, various things are growing all the time. So preserving hasn't really ingrained itself into the culture, which means getting cheap jars and lids ain't that easy.

Happily, in our house we save just about every jar we use. They make excellent storage containers for dried goods. You can reuse glass jars as many times as you like but you're not really supposed to reuse lids. They have a tendency to degrade and not provide a perfect seal, which can be a food hazard. Screw it though, I'm not paying three bucks for a new jar and lid. I picked the best looking and ones and sterilized them once in the dishwasher, then again the oven and packed the jam into them. Fortunately the seals held (little button popped down!).

In terms of flavour, the end product was pretty ace. All delicious strawberry and spicy pepper but there wasn't as much Balsamic vinegar evident as I'd hoped. Adding any more would have resulted in an entirely liquid mess though. It's definitely worth trying again if I can track down some 100% pectin to control the ratio. I'll shell out for some proper Balsamic Vinegar in that case too. A word on the stuff: Balsamic Vinegar 'of Modena' (ie, 99% of what you get in the store) is an imitation intended for salad dressing. The real, good, prized stuff is always prefixed 'Traditional' and is D.O.C.  protected.

Moreton Bay Bug Risotto

My housemate Caitlin won't eat risotto or shellfish. The shellfish I understand - everyone has their weird food hang ups. I didn't eat seafood for the first three quarters of my life. I have also always found mushrooms entirely unappealing if not utterly repulsive on their own. The closest I've come to actually liking them were some wild Chanterelles I picked once,  but it doesn't really count because I sauteed them in butter and put them on top of fettucine aglio e olio. The dirt they grew in probably would have tasted good.

Back to Caitlin, it might just be prawns and not all shellfish that she doesn't like. Not that it really matters, as she's sworn off risotto anyway. To this end I'm convinced she just had a terrible risotto once and it left her scarred. Like drinking several glasses of warm vodka at your friend's birthday party when you were 16 and not being able to even think about the stuff again for a long time...

Yeah.

But I mostly got over that so I'm also convinced that I can change her mind one day. So far she's avoided my attempts. Regardless, when she's out the rest of us will often eat seafood risotto. I decided to get a bit fancier this time and shell out (HA!) for some Moreton Bay Bugs.

I didn't want to use a fish stock for the risotto because it would overwhelm the delicate flavour of the bug meat. Instead I let some of the split bug shells infuse into a vegetable stock while it came up to temperature. It added just enough saveur de la mer while still taking a back seat to the rest of the dish.

In hindsight I should have used more bugs but they're stupid expensive and they yield maybe one third (if you're lucky) of the weight you pay for in cooked meat. Happily there was use for the shells in the infused stock and the plating. I also totally forgot to monter au beurre at the end, which is why it's not nice and glossy in the photo like it should be. It was nowhere near as dry or stiff as it looks. Speaking of the photo, I need to learn to take better ones. If anyone has any food photography tips, especially concerning composition, I'm all ears.

Double Strawberry Pie

There seems to be some kind of strawberry glut going on in Queensland this year. I don't know if it's been the especially cold winter we've had but this weekend I bought a kilo of the juicy little bastards for four dollars.
FOUR BUCKS A KILO FOR STRAWBERRIES.
And they're good. It's outrageous.

Not as outrageous as filling a tub with strawberry juice and bathing in it, even if that idea seems somehow affordable and frankly sensible lately.

Still, what to do with them? I really wanted to make some freaky-deaky experimental strawberry-balsamic-black pepper jam but I couldn't find any pectin at the store. It's actually kind of hard to find food preservation supplies in this country. I suppose it never really gets cold and inhospitable enough at any point during the year here to have ever necessitated the hoarding of food for winter. A commonplace practice that persists in cultures further away from the equator and one that I kind of miss.

Whatever. Instead I took my kilo of strawberries and did the next most sensible thing: baked them ALL in a pie. It's 'double' strawberry because in addition to the glazed fresh ones on top there's a layer of delicious strawberry compote beneath. Cooked strawberries have different taste to fresh ones but by no means an inferior one so this thing really delivers twice.

Actually, make that thrice. It's all framed by a final bottom layer of white chocolate and cream cheese ganache that really lays down a nice sweet-fatty base taste for the distinct strawberry flavours to burst through and really pop.

My housemate said it might be best thing I've ever made. I'm pretty sure the piece I had got me high.
Honestly, it tastes like this. Nothing is real. Excuse me while I finish it off and get lost in the mysteries of the cosmos.

Cold Drip Aeropress / Kenyan Gethumbwini Estate AA

I'm a big fan of black filter brewed coffee. Espresso may be quick, effective and have near total market dominance in this country but there are better ways to treat a coffee bean. I drink coffee for the taste, not the effect. Brewing processes with lower temperatures, lower pressures, and longer extraction times allow a more full expression of a coffee's individual characteristics. Especially when you're dealing with single origins (what Quentin would refer to as the serious gourmet shit).

My favourite brewing method is the Aeropress, a product with the worst packaging in the world. Nonetheless, it produces an outstanding cup; something fairly akin to cupping for my money. It's also straight-up retardedly easy to use. It leaves behind almost no mess and is made by a company who's primary concern is frisbees and yo-yos. Hooray!

There is a whole cult built around this thing and all the different ways to use it. There's even after market accessories. I've got that piece of kit, by the way, and it really does make a difference. I've recently started using mine to do an at-home cold drip and the results are great. More evidence of the versatility of the Aeropress. The process is simple - use a paper filter, add coffee, fill with ice cubes, top up with cold water, place over a glass, wait. No need for the plunger.

The only drawback is that it only makes about a cup at a time. I suppose I could experiment with making a much more concentrated brew and diluting it afterwards though I haven't really had the need for much more than a glass at a time yet.

By the way, the serious gourmet shit I used in the picture above is Kenyan Gethumbwini Estate AA. It's a total knockout but unfortunately once the existing stock runs out it'll be gone forever. The plantation has recently been sold for residential development and the 90 year old trees bulldozed. Sad.

Try it while you can, you'll never be able to taste it again.

Burgers à la Jess

I tend to think that some things are best done yourself. Or, myself, to put it more arrogantly and correctly.

When I make burgers I like to grind my own chuck steak (Elliot took the honours this time) and add nothing but salt and pepper to a good half-pound patty. Potatoes are hand-cut, skins left on and deep fried properly. That is; twice, at different temperatures with a rest in between. 

In this photo I didn't bake my own buns for lack of time, but given 36 hours notice a nice batch of toasted sourdough can't be beaten. All the toppings aren't visible in the photo but the way I like it is mayonnaise, ketchup, dijon mustard, a slice of cheddar, a slice of bacon, a sliced dill pickle and some diced raw onions. That's it. Lettuce can stay the hell away from my burger. Don't even get me started on beetroot.

Chocolate Brownie Cookies with Peanut Butter Frosting

A customer at work (thanks Jen!) made these and then gave me the recipe (which you can find here). I've made them twice now and have been put into chocolate shock both times. I've found that whisking for a full 15 minutes as recommended if fairly outrageous and unnecessary. Just make sure your eggs are at room temperature first. Baking them towards the lower end of the recommended 8-10 minutes and allowing them to cool and dry on racks completely will result in a more moist and gooey interior, as will chopping the dark chocolate coarsely instead of fine.