My Mayo Will Make Your Mayo Sad. With Sadness.

I've had problems with mayonnaise. For years I did just what Julia Child told me and no problems. Then I moved and because of stuff I didn't have space for my blender. Now I can't follow JC's instructions. I know there are many ways to make mayo, and I have been told that the food processor works just fine. I beg to differ. I tried making an herbed mayo sauce and it split and I added an egg and tried again and it still split and I just threw it out. 

Things that make mayo:

Whisks
Blenders
Stick Blenders

I'm now using my stick blender, it works great, just use a small bowl. 

I was talking with some chefy type people and they were saying they have trouble getting their mayo not to split and I asked if they were measuring their oil. They were. This is fine, if you also measure your egg yolk. Eggs are not exactly the same and they vary from chicken to chicken and egg to egg. This means that you can't say two yolks to a cup of oil and have mayo come out. I actually have no idea what the ratio is supposed to be, I do it like JC said to, I add oil until it's done. So, if you want to measure, look up the amount of yolk you should have to oil, come on, it's the future, and you can go dance in the field. 

Today, I decided to pasteurize some eggs, as my theory is that the mayo will be good for longer. Sous vide, not hard, you poach them at like 135 or so for about 2 hours. While this was going on, I decided that I would make an infused oil. Infused oils cook for about an hour around 120-130 so I figured this was fine. 

Real quick, let's talk food safety. It's not something to sniff at. Listen up. Raw eggs can be dangerous to some people. And that information is private to those people (age, medical conditions, ect.), so you don't know who they are. I mean you might, if you look at that 2 year old and then offer him a deviled egg you made with your own mayo and then think, huh. If you plan to serve your homemade egg based salad dressing or mayo, pasteurize your eggs. Also, when you make oil infusions there is the chance that you can get botulism from them. You know the stories for people who died from eating the beans? That's not messing around. So, minimize risk. Wash your herbs and dry them (you know, oil doesn't get along with water), garlic needs to be used with caution and the result not kept around for long periods of time, or frozen; keep in the fridge. That being said I've made non sous vide oils with low heat before from fresh herbs and had no problems. I'm not having problems now. I don't want to scare you, I want you to be cautious. I blanch my garlic before use, and you should too, also it makes it easy to peel. 

Between these two things I have made a topping for my various foods (I like a Mexi egg omelette in the morning and this will keep me from wishing I had sour cream).

So let's get to it. 

You can tell he's pasteurized because he's marked. 

Sous Vide Pasteurized Eggs

Follow your sous vide instructions and heat the thing up to 135 and set the timer for 2 hours. Add the eggs in the shell. I put mine in a little bag with some water around them and attached them to the edge of the pot to make them easy to pull out. Remove, ice bath, mark. 

The Most Mexican Spiced Mayo

3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 jalapeno, diced
1/3 bunch cilantro chopped (stems too)
3 tsp Mexican oregano
2 tsp Ground cumin (I didn't have it but whole cumin is better just toast it in a pan first)
About 1/3-1/2 cup avocado oil

Avocado oil
1 lime
1 tsp the plainest mustard you can get
salt
1 pasteurized egg

Put the garlic, jalapeno, cilantro, oregano and cumin in a bag suited for sous viding. I use seal a meal for these as you don't want ANY air in the bag. Add the spices and oil, shake everything to the bottom and seal.

In the same pot as the eggs add your packet at the last  hour of cooking. Make sure it's submerged, I use magnets. 

When time's up remove and set aside while you fuss with the eggs. 

Open and pour into a fine sieve over a bowl and press the remains to get all the oil. Throw out the remnants. 

The Mayo

Depending on how you are doing it, you might need to adjust the instructions. I will give them for a stick blender. 

In a small bowl put your pasteurized egg, the juice of 1/2 - 1 lime (it depends on the size, my lime was huge and I ended up making more mayo than I wanted, looking for about 1 Tbs, 2 Tbs if you want it more like an aioli), a little salt and mustard in the bowl. Add about 2 Tbs of oil and start blending. In a slow steady stream add the flavored oil until you are out. Those little bits at the bottom, add those too. Add avocado oil until it turns into mayo. You can tell because it's not foamy and it gets a little thicker. Just stop and check it, does it feel like mayo? Remember that your mayo will firm up in the fridge a bit.  Also homemade mayo is thinner than commercial mayo. It also has less calories.

Now make me a sandwich! And don't skimp on the mayo.

A New Adventure - Mexican Inspired Oxtail Soup

I want a place to put my adventures. In life I've eaten many kinds of ways, and now I do my own thing. It's largely gluten free, often paleo or close to it, homemade with no cheats. But if you bitch about my food I will throw down and make a gluten filled, covered in dairy meal. I just might make my own cheese. And yes, I would be making the bread.  

Apparently Photos Count As Content. I made this meal with a friend, and the plating could have been better but we'd been at it a long time and were tired. Yay tacos!

I don't want to share with you my life history or what I like to do in the summer. I will tell you about food and how to cook it, and share my knowledge about food with you. I might talk about places to shop and things that pertain to food and my feelings about it. But I'm not telling you about my grandma or what I like to do on my perfect Sunday. I might tell you about food I've eaten. 

Apparently if you don't blather on for a while and talk about random ass shit browsers think that you have no 'content' and won't list you in the results, also how much time people spend on your site and blah, blah, blah. Also, everyone wants money for everything so all the sites are teeming with ads. Such bullshit. So, I have to have 'content'. 

I will give you a little story about my post I'll Bet Your Gluten Free Dumplings Suck. I took the recipe off. People were stealing my methods and then passing them off as their own (such is life and I'm not saying I haven't done it), I had an idea to start a business and needed to keep that a secret. It didn't happen (though I had much support from many fans, and several moms of rich children who can't eat anything but bark begging me to supply them with dumplings). I'm not giving you that recipe. I know what it is. I know how to do it, it's time consuming and a pain in the ass. Get the book Asian Dumplings by Nguyen and figure it out yourself. 

So.. Let's begin.

3 Day Mexican Inspired Oxtail Soup

I recently got a sous vide machine stick thingy mabobber. It's not the machine that holds water. It's a stick that you use a pot to make your own jerry rigged sous vide. You can buy these for a about $110-$200 online. I was very excited, the things I could cook slowly! I have been thinking 'what's the difference between this and a slow cooker?' Easily answered, slow cookers cook at one or two specific temperatures, and this can cook at any temperature I want it to. You want flavored oils? Easy (I now have like 5). You need pasteurized eggs? Done. Perfectly cooked meats, blah, blah, blah. 

I also came into possession of a pressure cooker. Between these two things, I've really upped my game. 

The one thing that apparently you can cook in your sous vide, that you might not think about is soup. I've been doing it, and it's really the way to go. Though, I've devised the slowest way to go about making soup known to man. But I'll bet my soup will blow your socks off. 

Let's get started. NOTE: There's several parts to this, you do what you want, you want to use unicorn blood instead of broth? Go ahead, but I don't want you posting comments that you changed the recipe and it didn't come out and this sucks, or that it did come out and was amazing. That's not my recipe and I don't give a rat's ass how your recipe went. I'll just delete it. 

This is a multi day recipe. It took me three days to make. 

Mexican Inspired Oxtail Soup

4-5 bowls

The Broth

Save your various veggie scraps in a gallon bag in the freezer until you have it full. Items might include:

Onion ends and skin (the skin has flavor)
Green onion ends
Carrot bits and peels
Celery bits and leaves
Pepper bits
Tomato ends
Herb stems (basil, cilantro, parsley, thyme)

Once your bag is full, pull out your pressure cooker and dump the contents in. You might add to it:

An onion
A broken up carrot
Garlic
Bay leaf

For this recipe I had processed a bunch of Hatch Chilis and saved the tops from about a pound or two of them and put those in. 

Add water (NO SALT)

Cook according to your pressure cooker's instructions. I cook mine for about 40 minutes. Strain. Put into ice cube trays and freeze and seal in freezer bags. You can also (if you are crafty about it) put it in your seal a meal and freeze flat bricks of broth. I make 2 C. bags and label them. You will need 4 C. of stock, frozen.

The Other Things

2 lbs Beef Oxtail (if you can go to the butcher and get the biggest pieces you can, about 3 of them, I don't want to digress, the little pieces = FLAVOR, but sous vide often has space constraints)
1 Onion diced
1 Carrot diced
1-2 Jalapenos (seeded, not seeded, whatever you want) diced
1 can diced tomato
2 bay leaves
1-3 tsp Mexican oregano
1-2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp Avocado oil

SCROLL DOWN THERE'S MORE INGREDIENTS!

In a pan heat the oil and add the onion and carrot. Cook for about 5 minutes over medium heat. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a pan, add a little oil and heat over medium high heat. Brown the ox tail on each side until crispy looking and golden brown. This doesn't need to be perfect, we're just adding flavor. Set aside. Deglaze the pan with a little water. 

In a bag that is going to work with your sous vide machine and hold all the ingredients (I use my seal a meal, it works fine and better than ziplock bags for long periods of time), put 4C. frozen stock (it needs to be frozen so you can seal the bag), the deglazing, veggies (all of them), spices and ox tail into the bag. Add about 1 Tbs kosher salt, more or less as you please, but about a tablespoon will be enough. Check your ingredients to make sure you put them all in the bag. Did you check? You can't just go add those things your forgot, go check again. Seal up the bag making sure there is no air in the bag (you might find as it cooks that there's some, this is ok, it's soup). At this point you can put it in the fridge overnight if you need to. 

Heat your sous vide machine up to 155 degrees F. Set the timer for 24 hours. When it's up to temp add the bag and attach it to the side of the container. I use my metal stock pot and some very strong magnets for this. Wait.

When it's done take it out and put the whole bag in a pot, sealed, and then in the fridge overnight. This GREATLY improves the flavor. 

Open the bag and scoop out all the oil and fat, this should be easy as it should be mostly solid. Remove the tail and put the rest of the soup into a pot and put over medium heat. Test for salt. Remove the meat from the bones and discard the bones (I actually kept mine, I added them to my beef stock bag, I wonder if there's more life in them. We will see). Chop up the meat, don't worry that it's not grey, it's perfectly cooked. Wait until the soup is heated up to add the meat and just warm through, or you could divide it up among bowls and just ladle the hot soup over. 

The Accouterments 

2.25 C Drained and Rinsed Pinto beans (I make my own, they're better that way)
2 Tbs Garlic oil 
2.5 oz Queso Fresco
2-3 Radishes
2 Tbs minced Cilantro

Using a mandolin and care slice the radishes and then stack up and cut into little strips. Crumble the Queso. In a pan over medium/medium high heat - heat the oil (make sure it's a big pan, and more oil won't hurt here). Fry the beans until they are crispy and set aside. 

Ladle the soup into bowls and top carefully with 1/4 C beans, .5 oz Queso Fesco, several radish slices and cilantro. 

Enjoy!