Boiling, smoking, steaming, cutting eating.

OK so part 2 of the meat fest continues. Once again this recipe is from Tim Hayward at the Guardian. I highly reccomend it for a great day / event. We got lunch and dinner out of it for 6 people. And 6 greedy people too. Well no I have to admit that I was the hungriest hippo of the lot and had a total of 5 sandwiches before the day was out.

First photo look at the brining. You have to rotate the meat every 24 hours. I just like how a clove of garlic got mashed into the meat.

Where to next. Here is a photo of the oak chips. I was fortunate enough to get them from a guy who smokes all year long. Otherwise its impossible to get wood chips at this time of year.

Here is the spice mix for the prastrami. I added cumin seeds because I like cumin seeds.

Now this photo is called trying to light a bbq in the rain, at night, in 100 km winds. It was chaos. I decide to go inside and make it in the morning.

So this evening will be the evening of the salted beef. I wash it and pat dry. Then it goes into a pot with carrots onions and bay leaves. What I never realised was raw carrots sink and raw onions float.

And then after 4 hours on a rolling boil the cooked onions sink and the cooked carrots float. It like they've got an inverse relationship.

While this is going on I make my dinner tonight of John Dory with scallops. And this is what that looked like. I think I may have a photo addiction.

But who cares about floating onions and sinking carrots. Its about the beef. Here it is. Again.

And here is a close up.

I don't know how long blog pages normally are. Maybe the prastrami should be another post. But I'm already typing so I'll continue. I'll keep writing until I reach the limit. So Saturday morning I light up the chips. I think this may have been a mistake as they burn really fast. I turn on the gas underneath to keep it smoking and I add more chips.

Here is the prastrami covered in the spice rub. It gets smoked until it has an internal temperature of 70 degrees. It looks like the original but without the prague powder neither of them have that pink colour. After the smoking I place it on a wire rack and then fill a roasting tin underneath with water. Then wrap the whole lot in tin foil and then it goes into the oven for 3-4 hours.

But here are some slices of it. My hands are shaking in anticipation and also covered in spice so thats why this ain't so clear.

Ok I think the sandwiches need a page on their own. And I need to do some editing. Maybe rotate a photo once in a while. Or hold my camera the other way.

And to think I used to be a vegetarian.

And 13 years as a vegetarian. But thats for a different post. This one is about meat.

This is a photo record of my attempt to make salted beef and prastrami from scratch. This recipe is from Tim Hayward at the Guardian whose an awesome food writer. This is the spice mix.

And this is a load of salt. Well I guess you can't make salted beef without salt.

Wheres the beef? (I don't even know what that means, but now thanks to Graham in the comments section I do). And this is free range beef. None of that caged beef here;

And here is the water. What a pot of water it is. I should have rotated these photos before uploading them...

So I roasted and ground down the spices. Don't know if I was supposed to do that but its what I always do;

Then add to said pot of water boil and then wait for it to cool;

Smells like mulled wine and I'm tempted to taste it but I don't.

Now is where it got messy. It is supposed to be put in ziplock bags and put in the fridge. It was carnage in the kitchen with the brine going everywhere. So I put the meat in 2 containers and wrapped in cling film and left them out in the utility. It was also recommended to add prague powder but it was optional and sounds mental so I left it out. Its supposed to give the meat the pink colour so lets see what happens. The next stage is cooking it in 5 days time. Have to find wood chips for the smoking.

Update: 2 Days in and I'm flipping the beef every day as instructed. It smells amazing. These sure are some weird sentences I'm writing.

Dugdogsblogdog

Well its not my dog but it is a photo of a dog eating a curly wurly. Still in the wrapper. And for that it needs to be shared.