Mary Dan Eades, M.D. » sous vide

Paleo Recipes: Really Old Time Comfort Food

mdeades — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:55:05 +0000

When you find yourself longing for a return to the ‘old ways’ of eating, you may be thinking about Granny’s Sunday pot roast. But if you really want to return to the old ways, Julie and Charles Mayfield’s Paleo Comfort Food is the ticket.

They’ve carefully crafted a guidebook to comfort food eating that harkens back, not to your old granny, but to your biochemical and physiologic roots: the paleo diet that we, as humans, were molded by the forces of several millennia of natural selection to thrive on, before the dawn of agriculture (by which I mean wheat and corn farming) when our human diet was primarily meat (meaning that which we could hunt or catch with a pointy stick and our wiles) supplemented by seasonal roots, shoots, nuts, and berries.

The book is a comprehensive tool for the paleo kitchen, offering recipes for appetizers, sauces and staples, soups and salads, side dishes, mains, and yes, desserts (afterall, as we’ve always said, even the paleo hunter stumbled into a honey tree from time to time.)

Mike and I love their Steak Roll (stuffed with onions, celery, mushrooms, leeks and spinach) but we put a sous vide twist on it so that we can have it reliably medium rare but still tender. And cooked sous vide, it’s something you can prep, roll, vacuum seal, and drop in the bath at 134F to cook all day while you’re at work or busy doing something fun. Then it’s just a quick sear in hot lard to put a golden crust on it and golly Bob howdy, that’s good eats!

Paleo Comfort Food is sure to become an indispensable go-to resource in any low-carber’s kitchen, whether devoutly paleo or not.

A Little Piece of Piggy Heaven: Mangalitsa Pork Neck Roll

mdeades — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:42:12 +0000

Couldn’t resist passing on the information in this blog post from Chef It Yourself about cooking a Mangalitsa pork neck roll. As readers of Mike’s blog know, he and I took a three-day seminar a few months back on the proper techniques for butchering and cooking Wooly Pigs, or Mangalitsa as they’re more properly called.

Among the delectable treats we enjoyed was some pork collar (neck roll) and I can attest that it’s truly beyond divine. A meat-lover’s Nirvana. Savory and succulent and filled with sweet, tasty fat. Just one look at a photo, such as this one from the Chef It Yourself blog:

Does that look luscious or what? I am going to try to get my hands on one and sous vide it!

Salmon with Lemon Wasabi Aioli

mdeades — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:28:44 +0000

When it’s hot in the summer, cooking outdoors on the grill can be a lifesaver, so I am always on the look out for or dreaming up new recipes for grilling. I just posted one for salmon up on the SousVide Supreme blog that would be delicious, even if you don’t have a means to cook sous vide, so I thought I’d share. Granted no other cooking method will guarantee the buttery, succulent, rare to medium rare texture that you can achieve with a water oven set at 116F, but it will still be good eats.

Just grill the salmon, top with the aioli (recipe on the SousVide Supreme blog) and enjoy!

The Best Turkey EVER

mdeades — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:52:00 +0000

This Thanksgiving we had a larger crowd than usual and were the recipients of not one, but two turkeys, courtesy of Mike and our son, Dan, having won a pair of them at the local Thanksgiving week golf tournament aptly named The Turkey Shoot.

I decided to cook them both. One I did the traditional baste, roast, turn, baste, roast, burn your hand, OUCH, turn method I’ve used for years. The other I did in pieces in my SousVide Supreme.

The comparison of the two was a revelation. You can read the whole story here.