Text 31041, 74 rader
Skriven 2012-11-17 16:39:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: pho 2
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MMMMM-----Meal-Master - formatted by MMCONV  2.10

     Title: How To Make Awesome Pho In 1-Hour Pt 2
Categories: Vietanmese, soups, info
  Servings: 4

    pho

My next thought was to use more cuts of beef, or to try and find a
more flavorful one, but I quickly shot that one down. From my
previous explorations in pho, I knew that even with the most
flavorful cuts of beef, flavor extraction still takes several hours
at least.

But here's the thing: that flavor resides within long muscle fibers
that slowly heat and squeeze out their contents into the water. So
why not just make those long fibers shorter?

Cubed chuck: Cutting the meat into small cubes speeds things up
considerably, but even better is to do this:

Ground chuck: Gross? Maybe. But fast and flavorful? You bet. I found
that by grinding the meat before adding it to my simmering liquid, I
could decrease the time it takes to extract flavor by a good 3 or 4
hours, getting the job done in record time.

Flank: The only downside is that after cooking, the meat becomes
un-servably dry and flavorless. But since we're getting all the good
stuff out of it anyway, I was perfectly content to discard the spent
beef and serve my soup with some freshly sliced cooked and raw flank
steak in place of the selection of long-simmered cuts.

Using ground beef poses one other problem: It clouds up the broth as
bits of extracted protein and gunk dissolve too finely to be
strained out. To solve that problem, I turned to a classic French
technique used to make a consomme. By combining the ground meat with
a bit of egg white before simmering it, the entire mass forms a
single, fragile raft of proteins that float on the surface of the
stock.

Raft: As the broth slowly simmers, it rises up through that raft in
little geysers, falling back down its net-like structure. The raft
ends up performing double duty, both adding flavor, and acting as a
super-fine filter to entrap all kinds of impurities. By then
carefully skimming off the raft and discarding it, you're left with
a crystal-clear, brightly flavored broth underneath.

Chopping meat finely helps you extract flavor much faster, but
unfortunately it does nothing for hastening the creation of gelatin.

Boosting Body: The issue is that the conversion of collagen to
gelatin is a time-dependent operation. Higher temperatures can speed
the process a little bit, but with a normal pot, your temperature
range is restricted to under 212 F, the boiling point of water at
standard atmospheric pressure. For this reason, making a broth in a
pressure cooker that can get hotter than the normal temperature of
boiling water makes for a very fast broth with plenty of body.
Unfortunately, pressure cookers are expensive and not everyone owns
one. I wanted a way to do it without the pressure cooker.

One way to do this is to simply start with more collagen. Beef
connective tissue contains some, but there are other, much more
concentrated sources.

MMMMM-------------------------------------------------

YK Jim


... You can't control the world. You can control your reactions to it.

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