Merry Christmas! Remember our tree? I wanted to make more this year at as gifts but couldn’t wrap my head around how to transport them. Perhaps a very long tube?

Welcome to the adventures of shelf install in the kitchen! This post was almost titled “How to break an easy, no-explanation-necessary project down into several illustrated steps.”

As you can see I’m not very good at taking actual [right] before pictures. The above left image of the sink is almost 4 years old (I can’t believe we’ve been here that long!), and the image on the right is about 2 years old. But, they both serve to illustrate the shelving issues in the kitchen. By the sink, there isn’t a convenient, sturdy place to store soap. When the dish rack gets full it’s impossible to reach soap all the way over on the little counter to the right. By the stove, the shelf installed by a previous tenant is useless—anything placed there gets covered in grease and out of reach. In order to keep things at hand, they have to occupy space on the tiny counter space to the left of the stove. In the new configuration, this space become usable as a working countertop.

We’re all breathing easier without the nasty “look-at-me!” brackets of the old shelf, aren’t we?

I started this project Halloween weekend, first shopping for lumber and a mahogany-colored stain to match the existing un-painted wood in the kitchen. While our neighbors were applying glitter to their fairy wings, I was staining pine planks out back. Fortunately I managed to avoid getting any glitter stuck in the wet stain. This was my first time staining anything by myself, so I did my homework. Step 1: ask a random man in the stain aisle (no, not a store employee) if one should use a regular paint brush. The man will surely tell you that you’d be better off using a rag. It is best to use a rag to which you have no great attachment. Later, you will throw this rag in the trash because it will be impossible to clean; according to the label on the little tin of stain, it could even spontaneously catch fire if not disposed of properly. Step 2: phone your father (any knowledgeable, experienced stainer in the family will do) and share an in-depth discussion on the application of stain with said rag. He will go into detail about the instructions on the side of the stain can, placing emphasis on the importance of removing excess stain and avoiding drips for fear of an uneven finish. Step 3: don a pair of latex gloves, or similar, and get cracking. Allow the wood to dry over night.

Now that the wood is dry and you are satisfied with the color, it’s time to get out the tool box. You’ll want to mount the L-brackets before attempting to attach the shelf to the wall, unless you happen to be an octopus. For the shelf above the sink, the positioning of the brackets was based on the edge of the sink itself and the edge of the small counter below. In the case of the shelf by the stove, the brackets are evenly spaced from the ends of the board. As you decide where to place your brackets, a measuring tape and a pencil will come in handy. You might even consider putting a T-square on your Christmas list if you are lacking one as I am, wink! I placed the brackets against each piece of wood on the floor and used the floor to make sure they’d be flush to the wall. This step is based on the assumption that the floor and the wall are actually level—in my apartment they are not, but it’s close enough. Once the brackets were in position, I used a set of bar clamps to hold them in place while drilling.

The most important part of drilling is making sure not to go through the boards. You spent a lot of time staining them, remember? As I learned from Rod, the easiest way to do this is to wrap a small piece of tape around your drill bit that indicates how deep you want the bit to sink.

With the brackets in place, it’s time to mount the shelf on the wall. You’ll need a level and your pencil again. Since I have only 2 hands (again, I’m a human—not an octopus), I don’t have any pictures of this part. Taking a tip from Anna of Door Sixteen, I painted out the bottom half of the brackets so the shelves would appear to float.

Now that the shelves are in place, it’s time to put them to work. Give them a purpose, make them feel wanted, and make sure they feel pretty. As I said, the main role for the shelf above the sink was to give us a solid place to store soap. But, as you can see in the above images, there’s room for a bit more than that. I read recently that all decorating is part function, part display. I was thinking 100% display with everything that came after the dishsoap, but it turns out this open storage is also highly functional. Tom and I are actually using these pieces now that they’re within arm’s reach. That, of course means our pretty bowls feel useful again and these shelves feel pretty useful—esteemed, even.

Special thanks to the man in the stain aisle, my father, and Tom for contributing a second set of hands.

Since the bánh mì is the sandwich of the moment—with a New York Times article and plenty of blog coverage—I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus.

My relationship with the venerable Vietnamese sandwich started well before I knew its name, when Emeril Lagasse (a man who I am not ashamed to admit inspired me to cook in a big way) featured a recipe for “Vietnamese-style Poor Boys” on one of his many Food Network shows. Emeril was taking a bit of liberty with his nomenclature, but I recognized a good thing when I saw it and made this sandwich several times over the years. My other bánh mì breakthrough was when I began working as a cook at Blackbird Café in Minneapolis, which features a pretty excellent version on its menu. Nothing like making a sandwich a hundred times to come to appreciate its nuances.

So there are my two big influences in banh mi-making: a creole TV chef and a South Minneapolis neighborhood restaurant. I’ve never been to Vietnam. But, great food knows no borders—earlier this week I set out to make my banh mi from scratch.

As with any sandwich this popular and widespread, or any sandwich at all for that matter, there is no exact consensus on what ingredients go in it. But from my experience eating the sandwiches, I knew what I wanted: liver pâté, roast and pulled pork, pickled carrots and daikon, sliced cucumber, cilantro, jalapeño and mayo all on a baguette-style roll.

Just as every house needs a foundation, every great sandwich needs to be built from a strong, tasty base; the first thing to tackle was the bread. Because it works very well for me, I used my standard sourdough bread recipe, which consists of mostly white flour with a little wheat flour thrown in and is hydrated to about 68%. This produces a nicely airy crumb while not being so wet as to be unworkable. After the initial rise I cut off 8 0z pieces and shaped them into rough bâtards. After a rest, a slash and 20 minutes on a 450° baking stone, I had respectable rolls on which to build my sandwich.

Although some restaurants omit it, in my mind liver pâté is essential to a great bánh mì—something about its rich fattiness and that funky liver flavor. Ever since finding an old copy of Terrines, Pâtés and Galantines in an antique store in Red Wing, MN I have been thoroughly immersed in the world of potted meats. Since it was going to be a spread for my sandwich, I needed to make a smooth pâté, rather than my usual chunky, rustic terrines. A food processor made this really easy: chunks of lamb liver, chunks of pork fat, spices are pureed in a matter of seconds. (Not really a process for the squeamish, you’re basically making liquid meat). If I were really anal retentive (ok, more anal retentive) I would have passed the resulting puree through a drum sieve to make sure it was perfectly smooth. To cook the pâté, without overcooking it, I utilized a double boiler. I cooked the ruby mixture until it had become more beige and granular and looked done. Pâté!

With the pâté resting in the refrigerator developing its wonderful flavors, it was time to tackle what is in some ways the star of the show: the pork. The question of the preparation of the pork is another area where pretty much everybody differs, but I fell back to experience. For one thing, I know that I prefer tender pulled pork to pork cooked more quickly.  Many of the bánh mì I have tried seem to use some kind of hoisin barbecue sauce, but I just rubbed the meat with salt, pepper and chinese five-spice. The warm, sweet spices are already somewhat present in the pâté and complement the heat of jalapeños.

Since the chunks of pork form a craggy, uneven layer, for a level sandwich you need something to build up while filling the cracks. This is where I like to bring in the pickled carrots. Since there was daikon at the farmers’ market, I used that as well (apparently this is traditional), shredding both.

I fell in love with making quick pickles at Blackbird. It’s as easy as taking a vegetable, cutting it into small pieces (or shredding), tossing it with a hot pepper, a garlic clove, whole peppercorns, coriander seed, and/or whatever other pickling spices call to you, and pouring boiling vinegar, water, salt and sugar over it all, then letting it sit in the refrigerator over night. I put a lot of sugar in to make a sweet pickle, since pork loves sweet things.

With a solid level built up by my pickled roots, I was ready to stack on the fresh vegetables. This was the only part of the process that felt like cheating since I didn’t have to do anything except for clean and cut the vegetables—it felt like it would have been more “from scratch” to have grown them myself. But since I won’t be growing hot peppers in my northern-exposed apartment windows anytime soon, store vegetables would have to do. It’s not like I raised the pig.

Thick slices of cucumber are essential to cool your tongue from the punishment meted out by thin slices of jalapeño. If you are one of those unfortunate individuals to have been cursed by God with a distaste for cilantro,that’s too bad, because the best bánh mìs pile it on, both the fragrant leaves and the crunchy stems.

With the sandwich elements perfectly balanced structurally, there remained only to add the finishing touch to top it all off and bind it all together: mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise can be put together from scratch really easily and can taste a bit richer and have a silkier texture than the heavily processed stuff from the jar (but honestly, if it weren’t for the ‘from-scratch’ gimmick behind this post, I probably would have whipped out the Hellmann’s). It’s just a matter of whisking an egg yolk with some lemon juice, salt, pepper and sugar and then slowly whisking in olive oil until you have mayonnaise.

And so, applying the top piece of bread, I had the scratch bánh mì: built from the ground up, each element custom designed to my exacting specifications. Was it worth it? Well besides the fact that it was more like fun than work to build each element of the sandwich, the sandwich itself was very good; I wouldn’t to call it “the ultimate bánh mì” because I have yet to meet a bánh mì I didn’t like. With pork, pâté, cool cucumbers, jalapeños, fragrant cilantro, sweet pickled carrots and rich mayonnaise on good bread you can’t go wrong. So while I instinctively bristle at all the hype, there is scarcely a sandwich that deserves it more than the bánh mì.

You can hardly read anything about food today without running into sous vide. Sous vide, invented by the French, means  ”under vacuum” and is a technique for cooking food, especially proteins, in a vacuum-sealed pouch in a water bath kept at a highly specific temperature. This requires both a vacuum sealer and a piece of lab equipment called an immersion circulator, which allows you to maintain a pool of water at a certain temperature with an exacting degree of precision. The effect of all this is to be able to bring meat to its ideal internal temperature: a piece of chicken sitting in 160° water for 4 hours will be 160° internally, externally, and existentially.  It also allows infinitely long cooking times which can produce some textural effects that would not be possible by traditional methods.

The equipment list makes this technique more suitable for expensive restaurants than for the home cook. A search for immersion circulators shows that one can be had for as little as $100 (or much, much more) though I am not sure how precise these would be. Vacuum sealers cost about $30, plus the various supplies. So, it wouldn’t exactly break the bank, but I have a number of items on my to-buy list for the kitchen that I consider higher priorities. And then you have to store it all. Given its high price and novelty, I was pretty quick to dismiss sous vide.

While it was cheapness that turned me away from sous vide, it was cheapness that brought me back to it all of a sudden this weekend. Cheapness in the form of a chuck steak that I bought for less than $5. There are a lot of problems with chuck steak. It can be fatty and gristly, it doesn’t taste all that beefy, and man oh man does it get tough. Chuck meat is mostly used for hamburger or stews, where mechanical stress or long, slow cooking helps break down connective tissue so your teeth don’t have to. But I had a steak sandwich in mind, and for that I wanted red meat damnit! The lowest my oven goes is around 200°F, a temperature that would after even a short time render my steak brown and grey. The challenge was to cook my steak for a long time to weaken the connective tissue without cooking it beyond 120°, rare. The solution: sous vide?

So, did I run out and buy a vacuum sealer and immersion circulator at my local laboratory supply? No! Inspired by this (somewhat annoying) video of Grant Achatz making thanksgiving dinner, I realized that while it would  be nice to have the fancy equipment, the same effect can be achieved with stuff that I had around. Vacuum sealed bags? That’s basically a Zip-Loc, right? And sure, an immersion circulator would keep water at an exact temperature, but I could do pretty well with a thermometer, a pot of water and a gas stove.

Here’s the steak:

First order of business was to cut out as much fat, cartilage and silverskin as I could, which was quite a lot. It is now sitting in a bag in my freezer, ostensibly for stock or pie but in fact to be thrown out in about a year. Cutting all this out causes the steak to separate into a few pieces, but I was planning on slicing it thin in the end anyway so it wasn’t a problem. I heavily salted and peppered the trimmed steak and threw it in the bag with some butter and then did my best to get all the air out. Then, into the pot of water!

When I first put the steak in the water temperature was actually 140°F since I hadn’t been paying attention while attending to the steak. I figured the introduction of the steak would lower the water temperature, but it didn’t by much. I had to add a few ice cubes to get it into the mid 130s. After about ten minutes I had gotten it into my ideal 120 temperature range. Since it was early in the cooking I didn’t think it would matter too much, but in the future I’ll be sure to watch the initial temperature.

I decided arbitrarily to cook the steak for an hour. My technique was basically to check the water temperature every few minutes and keep it between 120 and 125. Eventually, I established a rhythm where I would bring the water up to 125 and then after about ten minutes it would drop back to 119-120. This pattern was very predictable and ended up being very easy to work with. Of course, an immersion circulator would have done all this checking and adjusting for me.

After the hour passed I took the steak out. As I probed various areas of the steak with my thermapen and got readings all within 120-123 a wide smile broke out on my face—this steak was perfectly rare! The internal temperature was right on. Now to deal with the external appearance.

Obviously, intense direct heat of the kind not afforded by sous vide but rather by more primitive techniques (grilling, for example) does more than just cook the meat through. It also produces a delicious crusty-brown/black exterior that is full of great flavors courtesy of Maillard reactions. Since browning only occurs at higher temperatures, it cannot be achieved through sous vide. So what to do? Well, brown the meat. I used a skillet with smoking hot oil. 

Actually, I would have liked a much crustier, deeper brown crust, but I was worried that since my steak was already right where I wanted it internally a longer time in the skillet might have overcooked parts. And, whatever you might say about the crust, you can’t argue with this cross-section:

Perfectly pink out to the edges! No ring of grey, overcooked meat! One side is not pinker than the other! It made me wish I had used a better steak!

The whole point of this was, of course, to make it tender. According to Harold McGee connective tissue doesn’t actually start to break down into collagen and gelatin until it reaches 160-180°F. Most of the steak never got above 125°. In spite of this, the steak was notably tender. Cutting out a lot of the gristle before hand certainly helps with this as did slicing the steak very thin before eating it. McGee also offers up another explanation:

“One useful ingredient in long-cooked braises can be a prolonged cooking time—an hour or two—during which the cook carefully manages the meat’s temperature rise up to the simmer. The time that the meat spends below 120°F amounts to a period of accelerated aging that weakens the connective tissue and reduces the time needed at fiber-drying temperatures.” (163)

So does this “accelerated aging” explain the tenderness? The steak certainly would have spent a long time near this temperature, although probably more time slightly above than below. In the future, I should try keeping my water temperature below 120°. This would not only better achieve the aging effect but also allow more leeway for browning in the pan.

Perfectly cooked as this might have been, it was still chuck steak, so I went with a pretty heavy dressing of onions, tomatoes and capers and put the whole thing on ciabatta that I had.

In the end you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to do sous vide (or something like it) as long as you are willing to pay careful attention. That said, I wouldn’t want to watch a pot of warm water for the 6 hours it might take to cook a bigger piece of meat. So I conclude with a word of caution: you can cook sous vide with a pot and a plastic bag, but once you see how perfect that meat looks, you’re going to want an immersion circulator even more.