I picked it up at a local butcher (a place called Master Meats in Calgary). I think I paid around $12-13 for that 2.5lb slab.
If you're doing the magic melting chocolate ball thing, DO NOT cheap out and use balloons. They will stick, your balls with collapse, and there will be a lot of tears. This is also after the first one popped at the touch of hot chocolate. I still haven't gotten it cleaned up. I burned the hell out of my hand and it was all over me, my glasses, the countertops, the blinds, the cabinets, and it even managed to get on the washing machine in the nook across the way. Fuck. Here they are, setting up nicely.... http://imgur.com/a/A2KTO Nettdata Edit to embed the pic in-line:
Understatement much? Seriously, though, this is the first I've heard of this. Can you give more detail or a recipe link? That looks awesome.
Lots of variations on a theme: What I was supposed to do was buy a bunch of fillable ornaments off amazon (like so), drop melted chocolate through one end and move it in circles until it coats the interior, let set in fridge or freezer, and then open up. You can even get rid of the seam with a hot spoon. With that same hot spoon, melt the bottom away, stack what you want on the inside on a plate, and cover with the chocolate globe. Supposedly you can coat the outside of a balloon for the same effect. This is a lie. I made about 2 quarts of sweet cream sauce to drizzle on the globes and for the inside, I had 2 soft chocolate chip cookies, a scoop of ice cream, topped with a homemade mousse ball and decorated with strawberry roses. We ate all the guts anyway. I had a good evening, but it still ruined my afternoon. PS They are still in the deep freezer because I cannot even yet bear to look and throw away all that effort. Like literally throwing away good effort. It's been awhile since I failed a project so spectacularly.
In case you're interested, one of my personal heroes, Anthony Bourdain, is doing an AMA on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/53p6kb/i_am_anthony_bourdain_and_im_really_good_at/
Just received my latest order of hot sauce... I got a selection from Savage Jerky after hearing some good things about them from a friend. Just popped this open, and it is fucking amazing: It's exactly the right proportions of spicy mustard, pineapple, and habanero. Two huge thumbs up. More details HERE if you're interested.
Last night we celebrated my heritage. Homemade conecuh corndogs with field peas and spinach. Also some hushpuppies to get rid of my cornbread batter.
Hank Shaw is a talented cook, writer, and outdoorsy person, and a few years ago he published Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast. It's a fantastic book that basically covers how you can turn whatever you can find on land and in the sea into tasty food- including foraging and making wine with wild fruit, awesome stuff like that. I like his perspective and how he appreciates the little things- he's the exact opposite of, for example, those here in my home state who exclusively just fish for and eat walleye and damn the rest. Rather, Hank is the jack of all trades who could find value in anything. Last month he published another book, Buck, Buck, Moose, and my copy arrived last night. If you are reading this and you like hunting and/or cooking critters with horns- get it now. Holy shit. I touched over most of it and am already blown away. I feel like I fell in a bit of a venison rut (hehe) this year with butchering and recipes, and I plan on using this book to pull me out (assuming I'll bring another deer home in a few weeks). We've tried a couple of his recipes, the venison barbacoa is already one of our favorites, and I'm excited to do more.
Seconded, he has a really cool perspective with making gourmet foods with hunted game. I havent gotten his books yet but his website is a treasure trove of information for cooking and hunting enthusiast. Explores a lot of the popular DiY stuff people are getting into these days, home cured meats, smoking, dry aging,etc. His podcast is pretty good too but he only releases it sporatically.
You can get a LOT of recipes off his website, but I just like books too. I have a little mini-fridge that I want to turn into a charcuterie curing chamber, I have the recipes now I just need to shoot another deer (or get some pork on sale) so I have a good reason.
Also along the same line of game cooking. Scott Rea is a butcher/chef with a youtube channel that is great. Lots of videos of him fabricating game in non traditional ways to get usable cuts from the animals. Ill be trying his deer rib "lolipops" this year instead of just throwing all the meat in the grinder. I always chuckle at the size of the deer they have in the UK though. You think he was using white tail fawns.
Having heard much about cooking, seasoning and what not with them, I ordered this last week. It came today and it is spectacular. Especially for the price. I wasn't sure what the quality would be like, more due to the price than anything else. I am pleasantly surprised. Of course I made fried chicken for dinner Saturday. I forgot, I also bought a Food Saver on Saturday. I went with the middle one being $130. The top one was 200 bucks! Anyway, apparently I'm going domestic.
The care instructions that came with it say it's "preseasoned" and goes on to say "To clean after each use, use hot, soapy water and a gentle brush. Never put in the dishwasher and never use harsh scrubbers. Dry it immediately, and use a paper towel to apply a little vegetable oil." It also lists how to season it...but it's preseasoned. WTF? As for the Food Saver, we destroyed more than a couple bags but we've got it down now.
I hope you and Kato got the clam shell type food saver. The slot style ones become a pain in the ass because you need to have inches of extra bag to insert and set off the sensor to vacuum seal. The clam shell ones give a little more room to guess and fiddle. Clam Shell: I got one of these pain in the asses and took it back to Costco after an hour.
SO much this. I ended up keeping the automatic piece of shit and use it in conjuction with the clamshell. Basically use the POS to cut and seal one end of the bag while vacuum sealing with the clamshell. Otherwise the cooldown period when using a single machine was too long to bear, never mind the fiddly nature of the POS. But it does have a handy built-in cutter. Using both I could barely keep up and the process is pretty fast and efficient.
Regarding vacuum sealers I got this one, it is the clamshell type. Initial testing says it is not hard to use and overall awesome, it can both vacuum seal and just heat seal the bag too. I will put it through its paces tonight, I've got over 60 pounds of venison to pack up- we'll see. While I mention venison, I gotta say that deer I just shot was the fattiest buck I've ever butchered. It was 1 1/2-2 1/2 years old and pre-rut (hoping this means it will be more mild than the much bigger and older buck I got last year), and the amount of fat inside the cavity and over his back and ribs was amazing. Very healthy. I am excited for backstrap steaks tonight now. For the curious here's what it all looked like when we were done. Spoiler: do not click if you're vegetarian Not the prettiest picture but that's a whole lot of meat on the table. We did it in a neighbor's garage, here was my brother working on sawing ribs with my dog supervising: You can see a bit of the carcass hanging on the left side. This goes against the general wisdom I've been taught with cast iron, what I've been told is to never use soap as it can remove the seasoning. Could be wrong though. We clean our iron stuff with hot water and scrubbing, followed by drying on the stovetop over a burner and refreshing it with a thin coat of oil while its still hot. After a lot of use they become super easy to clean. The seasoning is basically black carbon-y residue that fills in the pores in the iron surface and builds up to form that super hard, slick surface you want. The more you use the pan, the better it gets. You probably don't need to go through the whole seasoning process but if in doubt to do a quick seasoning I get the pan ripping hot to open up the pores in the surface of the iron, take it outside, then dump oil in and carefully wipe it around while it smokes- hence why you're outside. Let it cool and wipe off the excess oil, then get it ripping hot one more time and let it cool again and you're good to go. Some methods have you bake the oiled up pan in the oven, more effective than the quick job but smokier in the house too.
Yeah, they recommend the Crisco and in the oven at 350 for an hour, turn it off and let it cool before removing method for seasoning it. This is the FoodSaver I went with. That big fancy schmancy one was the one that was $200. I'm really glad I didn't go for that one now.
"Seasoning" a cast iron pan is about baking carbon into the crevices of the cast iron to make it as smooth as possible at a microscopic level. The smoother it is, the harder it is for food to stick to when it cooks/burns. The Crisco is a high source of relatively clean carbon when burned at high temps, so it flows into the "holes" in the cast iron and bakes. When you scrub with a wire brush or something, you're effectively cleaning out that clean carbon from the cracks. Soap and water won't affect it at all, unless you scrub the shit out of it, or don't re-apply some sort of oil afterwards. Personally, I'm a fan of sanding the fuck out of it before seasoning, so that it's crazy smooth to begin with. Then when you first season it, it's that much closer to being where you want it to get to. Cheap cast iron is fucking "mountainous" at a microscopic level... that's why it's so cheap... there's little to no finishing after the casting. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
I have a full set of cast iron pans and the ones I use the most are like glass. I have a couple other pans but the bulk of it is cast iron and I love them. We have friends with a large cast iron skillet that constantly has rust in it. So sad. El husband knows not to touch them. I showed him once how to care for the pan and that solidified the fact that he wasn't going to touch my pans.