Cookbook Challenge #9: And you get a sous vide! And you get a sous vide! Everybody gets a sous vide!

Or at least everyone should. The sous vide is wonderful and I love it, especially since I snagged mine for $50 at Aldi. It’s the logical answer to “What if I hate the way the slow cooker dries out my food but I still need to cook in advance?” (Other people ask this question, don’t they?)(Also, the slow cooker doesn’t really dry things out if you use the correct size but David insists that some things taste like they came out of the deflavorizer so I’m on the hunt for more ways to make dinner before I leave for work so I can be lazy at night.)

I’ve used the sous vide to make yogurt and oatmeal for running-out-the-door-today breakfasts that weren’t from McDonald’s. I’ve poached about 300 pounds of chicken (really not exaggerating on this one, I used to work in a restaurant that served a very popular chicken salad). It’s brilliant for fish, one of the few things I’m legitimately still afraid to cook. I’ve made desserts in it, including a fantastic black pepper-pineapple thing that was so, so good. It makes perfect steaks and tender pork chops. And, if you really want to plan ahead, it makes char siu that is better and more tender than anything I’ve had lately in a Chinese restaurant.

Not gonna lie – this is not a quick-and-easy dish, as you have to get it started pretty far in advance. And I can respect that fact that most people’s kitchens aren’t going to have all these ingredients just laying around (although mine did, and that’s a topic for a different post about condiment hoarding). But given sufficient planning, this is utterly delicious and well worth the relatively minimal actual effort. I made it right before we left on vacation, and served it chopped up in bento boxes with soba noodles and vegetables as an alternative to throwing ourselves on the mercy of roadside restaurants. We ate the leftovers around the campfire later that night, but they would have also been delicious thrown into some fried rice.

From Sous Vide For Everybody by America’s Test Kitchen, the same people who bring you Cook’s Illustrated magazine in all its exhaustively detailed glory.

Char Siu

4 lbs. boneless pork butt roast, trimmed and sliced crosswise into ¾-inch steaks
1 cup soy sauce
1 cup sugar
¾ cup hoisin sauce
½ cup Shaoxing Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
¼ cup grated fresh ginger
2 tbsp toasted sesame oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp five-spice powder
½ tsp ground white pepper
¾ cup honey

Whisk the soy sauce, sugar, hoisin, rice wine, ginger, sesame oil garlic, give-spice powder, and pepper together in a large bowl. Reserve 1 cup of the mixture and put in the fridge. Add the steaks, toss to coat, and refrigerate, covered, for 10-16 hours.

Remove the steaks from the marinade and divide between two zipper-lock freezer bags. Seal the bags, pressing out as much air as possible, and cook at 149 for 12-16 hours.

Whisk the honey and reserved marinade together in a medium saucepan. Cook over medium heat until reduced to 1 cup, stirring frequently and looking out for boil-overs. Boil-overs are sad and also a bitch to clean up thanks to all the sugar.

Cover a baking sheet or broiler pan with foil and put a rack on top of it, then spray with cooking spray. Transfer the steaks to the rack and pat dry with paper towels. Brush the top of the steaks with a generous amount of marinade and broil on high 2-6 minutes or until mahogany in color. Repeat on the other side of the steaks.

Brush both sides of the steak with more marinade and broil another 3-6 minutes until lightly charred. Transfer to a cutting board and let rest for 10 minutes. Slice crosswise into ½-inch strips and serve.

A Real-Life Fairytale about Olives: Cavatappi Nicoise

This is my olive face.

Once upon a time, there were two people who met and fell instantly in love but didn’t do anything about it for a good long while. Once they (OK, she) spent some more time making bad choices and then grew up a little bit and they both came to their senses, they very wisely got married and went on the sort of honeymoon that amply justifies her control-freak tendencies for the next two decades. While a great many silly things happened on that trip – things that were not one damn bit funny at the time but make excellent stories now – the very most unlikely thing that happened was the meal during which she ate an olive and didn’t die of disgust.

This wasn’t just any olive, of course; it was a very teeny and lovely Nicoise olive, which only tastes perfectly delicious when consumed at an outdoor table across the square from a fountain in Nice on one’s honeymoon. Nonetheless, our intrepid heroine has persevered and tried to like Nicoise olives under other circumstances, because she is a heroine and not in fact a princess. She has even tried to like other olives (which was singularly unsuccessful until friends gave her Castrelvatrano olives after their trip to Italy, and now she needs to go to Italy and try them there to see if they’re exponentially tastier on-site). But still: she’ll pick out pieces of olive from most dishes and they really don’t belong on pizza and the smell is still nasty AF, which is why her children adore olives and will eat them by the pound.

Alas! unless our heroine wins the lottery she won’t be going back to France – or any of the other places she had marvelous meals in Europe - anytime soon, which is a damn shame. The next best thing is cooking and eating things that are reminiscent of those marvelous meals; and since Nicoise salad is endlessly varied, tasty, and filling, it’s a great place to start. This particular recipe is a pasta-based riff on said Nicoise salad, and you should feel free to fiddle around with it and add whatever makes you happiest. As long as there are olives, of course.

From Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2009, with only minor editorial comments. Note that you can make this vegan for your friend’s picky daughter by swapping the tuna with chickpeas, skipping the anchovies, and adding a splash of soy sauce or white miso for a bit of umami in the dressing. This recipe also doubles and triples easily, constrained only by the size of the bowl you have for mixing and your tuna budget; makes a fantastic lunch the next day; and will stay toothsome even if you use gluten-free pasta thanks to the dressing.

Cavatappi Nicoise

8 oz. harticots verts (or regular old green beans), trimmed and halved
8 oz. uncooked cavatappi pasta (or any other small twisty shape)(GF pasta is fine, obviously)
1 can solid white tuna, packed in oil; spring for the fancy premium stuff or swap out some poached salmon
1 cup grape tomatoes, halved
1/3 cup Nicoise olives, pitted
2 tablespoons minced shallots
2 tablespoons capers, drained
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 anchovy fillets (I know, I know - but trust me on this. Don't skip them. Just....maybe don't tell anyone else they're in there.)

Cook the beans in boiling water for 3 minutes; remove with a slotted spoon and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking. Place the beans in a large bowl.

Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook according to package directions, omitting fat and salt. Drain and rinse with cold water. Add the pasta to the bowl with the beans.

Drain the tuna in a sieve over a bowl, reserving the oil (if you use salmon instead, add a couple of extra tablespoons of oil in the next step). Flake the tuna with a fork and add to the bowl, along with the tomatoes, olives, shallots, and capers.

Combine the olive oil, reserved oil from the tuna (if using), vinegars, salt, pepper, and anchovies in a food processor or blender. Pour over the pasta mixture and toss to coat.