Cacio e Pepe with Ramps

Cacio e Pepe is a very simple Roman dish, but it's a bitch to get right. It's just pasta, water, pecorino romano cheese, and black pepper: no oil, no cream, no egg, nothing else. But the cheese wants to glop up or stick to the pot/skillet. This is our second take and we're adding ramps  which we get at the farmers market during their short season.

Not the best lighting for the finished dish :-(

One of the better discussions I've seen on cacio e pepe is on Serious Eats; he blooms the pepper in oil to bring out flavor and uses a bit of butter. Since I have to sauté the ramps anyway, I'll do both in butter; we'll try and stay pure by not adding oil. We also use Serious Eats technique of low-water boiling to increase starch; you really don't need a giant pot of water!

I've tried this before with homemade pasta and it was too soft to withstand the physical beating necessary to emulsify the cheese, so use commercial dry pasta.

225 g Spaghetti pasta (1/2 pound, 1/2 box)
80 g Pecorino Romano cheese (3 ounces)
lots of Black Pepper, freshly ground
Ramps
Butter, unsalted

Ramps are in season at the farmers market

Boil the pasta in as little water as needed to cover, with a bit of salt, stirring to ensure the strands don't stick. Cook until a couple minutes away from done, very al dente.

Grate the Pecorino very fine on a microplane or rotary grater.
Grind the pepper coarsely.
Slice the ramp stems into smallish pieces that'll fit on a fork, and the leaves into larger slices that will wilt down a bit; keep them separate.

Mise en place is essential, this comes together quickly

Heat the butter in a nonstick skillet.
Add Ramp stems and pepper, cook until fragrant.
Add Ramp leaves and cook to wilt a bit.
Remove from pan and reserve in a bowl to add later.

Turn off the heat on the skillet so the surface can cool down, to prevent cheese sticking.
When pasta is about 2 minutes from done,
ladle some of the now starch-rich water into the skillet.
Add most of the grated Pecorino and stir into the water.
Use tongs to transfer the Spaghetti to the skillet and stir into the water/cheese;
it's fine if you have water dripping from the pasta.
Stir vigorously to turn the water, starch and cheese into an emulsion coating the pasta;
add more pasta water if it's too thick, and test the pasta for doneness.
Add the Ramps and a bunch more ground Pepper, combine.

Serve and top with the rest of the grated Pecorino.

Confession: my cheese glopped together as I stirred, and I stirred quite vigorously, shaking the pan with one hand and stirring with tongs in the other. The crappy quality of the photo and the garnish of pecorino hides the glops. I had turned the heat back on low, figuring I needed enough heat to melt, but that may have been a mistake.

The TalesOfAmbrosia blog has a very simple recipe that heats the serving bowl over the pasta pot, but then combines everything off heat in that bowl.  I really do think heat is the issue.

On Republica's Scienza in Cucina blog, the article Le ricette scientifiche: la cacio e pepe is very helpful; use Google Translate :-)

Lucky Peach has 3 recipes in the print edition, but this one online is quite explicit about excessive heat causing lumps; interestingly, he makes fresh pasta.

After some experimentation, keeping temperature low solves the glopping problem.
Before adding the cheese, keep the water between 55-65C (130-150F) so the cheese won't coagulate due to excessive heat; maintain this range as you add the other ingredients. You'll probably need to let the starchy pasta water cool a bit as it will be coming off the boil.

Pastrami #3: four curing variations

Our previous pastrami was too salty, it started with commercially-cured brisket; this time we'll cure it ourselves. To dial-in the salt, we'll do four brine variations: two salt densities (4, 8%) and two durations (3, 7 days). We'll then cook sous vide to a steak-like texture with a lower temperature than most: 72 hours at 135F.

Rhulman has a bunch of writing on pastrami brining but his cups and teaspoons measurements aren't the best for repeatability, especially for pink salt with its nitrates. He's added comments about weights, and indicates he uses a 10% brine because he's going to boil it to cook, drawing out the excess salt; he adds that he'd do 5% if he was going to cook by baking where the salt won't be reduced. His book is full of conversion errors going from volume to weight and he's never bothered to publish errata, so we're a bit suspicious of trusting his recipes.

ChefSteps talks about "equilibrium brining", which uses a brine concentration the same as you'd want in your finished product, rather than starting with a high concentration and hoping to pull it out of the brine before it gets too salty. (This is a similar approach to sous vide cooking where you cook it at the target temperature so you can never over-heat it). The also have a couple excellent posts on sous vide pastrami, including the "worlds largest pastrami".  More immediately useful is their very-clear is the "sous vide pastrami" which we're going to use as the basis for our variations.

ChefSteps uses a 4.1% salt brine (plus sugar and other pickling spices, and pink salt), and lets the meat brine for 7 days. We'll split our brisket into 4 chunks and use both a 4% and 8% concentration, and brine for 3 and 7 days.

We'll make one 4% brine then split into two buckets and add extra salt to one to bring it to 8%. To expedite, we'll heat everything to dissolve Sugar and Salt in half the total required water, then add ice to bring it up to our desired volume in each bucket.

5.14 Lb Brisket (2.33 Kg) split in 2, each 1135 g
For 4% Brine: 180 g Kosher Salt

Brine

For combined, concentrated Brine:

2.5 L Water (we'll dilute to 4.5 L with ice later)
328 g Sugar
180 g Salt (we'll increase this for the 8% bucket later)
30 g Pink Salt
41 g Black Pepper

34 g Coriander Seeds

5 g Yellow Mustard Seed
4 g Pink Pepper Corns
2.3 g Fennel Seed, whole
1.6 g Cinnamon, whole
4.3 g Chili flakes
0.35 g Clove
0.25 g Bay Leaf,
5 g Garlic Powder
5 g Juniper Berries

Add half the water, 2.25 L, to a pot with all the ingredients above, bring to simmer and dissolve Salt and Sugar.
Divide between two containers, at this point they'll both be 4% salt.
Add an additional 180 g Salt  (WRONG see below) to the second container to bring it up to 8%.
Add an additional 2.25 L ice water split between both buckets to chill them down.
Add 1135 g Brisket slab to each

THIS IS WRONG: the high-concentration should be 8% of 2.25 L for the one bucket, so 180 g total; we get 90 g from the combined big brine, so need another 90 for the second bucket, not 90 g + 180 g in 2.25L = 10.8% brine. TO FIX, we can dilute: need 3.375 L to bring this down to 8%; add 7.5 g Pink Salt and 82 g Brown Sugar to balance and don't worry about the spices. Next time: 180 g in combined plus 90 in 8% bucket.)

(In retrospect, I should have made a combined batch of the dry spices and sugar and pink salt, then divided those, dosed each with the correct amount of Kosher Salt, and simmered separately to avoid confusion.)

Store in fridge for 3.5 days, turning slabs once a day to ensure they're evenly brined.
Cut each one in half, and return one half of each to their buckets for 3.5 more days;
wrap and store the 3-day brined pieces until time to smoke and rub.

Dry Rub

Remove all from fridge, drain and dry -- and note which is which! :-)
Make a rub using Chef Steps' list:

37 g Brown Sugar
37 g Salt, kosher
36 g Black Pepper corns
27 g Coriander Seed, whole
5 g Juniper Berries, whole
4 g Chili Flake
5 g Garlic powder

Grind Pepper, Coriander, Juniper and Chili in a spice grinder until a bit more coarse than fine; you probably should do these separately so you can actually grind the Juniper that tends to bounce around more than grind like the dry Coriander; mix with the rest.
Pat into the four slabs coating all surface.

Smoke

Place on wire rack to allow airflow.

Cold smoke 12 hours; it was about 40F/2C out today and we used an  "A-Maze-N" cold smoker tube that keeps the smoke going without producing much heat.

Vacuum bag each piece individually and freeze until ready to cook sous vide.

Cook Sous Vide

Cook sous vide, directly from frozen for 72 hours at 57C/135F.

Results: Disappointing

We removed each hunk from its bag, sliced and put on plates with hidden labels indicating the brine and brine time for a blind test. I could tell when slicing that some were much tougher than I expected, than the previous trial with factory-cured brisket.  Below are our tasting notes, ordered from best to worst.

3.5d @ 4%: Best

Texture OK.

Good smoke.

Too sweet.

Outer smoked edge dried out, though.

Most tender texture.

7d @ 4%

Tough again in outer edge.

Chili heat is inappropriate.

Outer edge is ropey.

More chewy than 3.5d@4%.

3.5d @ 8%

More tender than the worst one, but still too chewy.

Less salt than the worst.

Meh, barely acceptable for serving to guests.

7d @ 8%: Worst

Way too chewy.

Burn from salt.

Terrible texture even in center.

Unpleasant chew. 

Ropy edge.

Don't serve to friends.

Overall defects

When the meat cooled, even the best one turned chewy, almost beef-jerky like.

Was the 12-our smoke drying it out?

Back out sugar.

The spice crust was intrusive.

Even the lowest time and concentration was pink throughout from the nitrates, so we've got enough time/intensity.

Cloyingly sweet.

Next Time

Eliminate the smoking and use liquid smoke in the brine to eliminate ropy edge.
Eliminate the salt and sugar from the dry rub to reduce saltiness and sweetness and prevent desiccation; use only the spices and herbs.
We used bitchin' hot Korean chili flakes, reduce or use a less intense chili, or eliminate.
Remove rub for service.

Since the cure penetrated completely, our max time/concentration should be 4% for 3.5 days. Let's do a similar set of 4 variations:

3.5d @ 4%, 3.5d @ 2%
1.5d @ 4%, 1.5d @ 2%

Tortas de Aciete #1

We had these slightly sweet, anise-imbued crackers in Barcelona and really liked them. Even there they were expensive; here we saw Inés Rosales brand for $6 for a package of six 1-ounce crackers! Yes, they're still made by hand but at that price, we had to try making them.

The Inés Rosales crackers were said to be 24% Spanish Olive Oil, and many of the recipes we found had about that ratio of oil to dough. We found an excellent video on You Tube that showed the kind of texture we were looking for, but opted to start with a recipe from Fine Cooking. After making these a couple times, we've bumped up the anise, orange and oil, and changed the sugaring process a little.

Other recipes included sugar and anise liquor (e.g., Absinthe, Ouzo) in the dough, but this one used Orange Blossom Water which we happened to have. I'm converting some of the measurements to metric so I can more easily adjust and repeat next time.

75 g Spanish Extra Virgin Olive Oil (5 Tbs, 2.5 fl oz)
10 g Anise Seed (2 tsp)

280 g Cake Flour (2 Cup)
8 g Yeast (2 tsp)
3 Tbs Sugar
1/2 tsp Kosher Salt
Zest from two Oranges, grated fine on a MicroPlane
7 Tbs Water
1 Tbs Orange Blossom Water

3 Tbs Sugar, powdered in spice grinder for topping

Heat the Anise Seed in the Olive Oil and brown a bit. Let cool.

Mix the Flour, Yeast, Salt, whole Sugar and Zest in a food processor.
Add the Water and Orange Blossom Water, whiz in processor.
Add the cooled (or just a bit warm) Oil and Anise Seed.
Process until well combined, it should start forming a crumbly dough.
Form into a ball, put in bowl, cover with cling film, and let rise until doubled -- about an hour.

Place non-stick sheets like Silpat or parchment on 3 half-sheet pans.
Preheat oven to 375F with convection, 400F without.
I put rubber O-Rings on my rolling pin so I could roll these evenly, and it worked perfectly, giving an even 1 mm thickness.
Don't flour your counter, the oil will keep them from sticking.

This dough weighed 17 ounces and I was shooting for the Rosales-sized crackers which are 1 ounce each. Divide the dough into 16 pieces, easiest is by cutting it in half repeatedly.

Roll each into a ball shape.
Roll them with a rolling pin, mine came out about 5-6 inches in diameter.
Transfer to a baking sheet with the nonstick sheet.
Dust with Sugar powder, I brushed it in with a pastry brush.
Bake at 400F convection until lightly browned. Mine needed 14 minutes.

Comparing the Inés Rosales with the ones that just came out of the oven, the Rosales are very delicate and fragile:

Rosales cookies are more flaky, but ours are "crispier" and have a pleasant crunch.