Our kitchen is a little bit of all right. Once you get past the issues of space, light and the silly oven that gets way too hot and destroyed two tarts and a cake in one day. (This issue has been fixed by the introduction of an in-oven thermostat thing)
In the first month of being here I’ve already started off with my experiments. Well, I’ve started off the smaller experiments to see if they’d be worth doing as big experiments.
Currently I have three long-term experiments going. This will probably change in the next day or two.
The first is my testing of preserving fish in olive oil for long term keeping in the cupboard. With all the supermarket tuna being tinned in Thailand and all the Salmon coming from Canada, I decided it was better to buy my own fish and preserving them. This way I’d be getting a variety of fish, and they’d be much more local than what is in a tin.
So with my leftover half of bay trout from the other night I made a jar to see how it is all done and to see that it tastes good after being kept for a week or two.
Experiment number two is a simple test to see how I’d make cured pork products. Rather than getting a nice bit expensive chunk of belly to try this, I’ve decided to use some pork hocks. These are cheep (at $1 each you can’t go wrong) and if they work would do well in my soups during the colder days.
After days and days of reading (that’s what makes you an expert apparently…) I decided to start by resting the pork in a brine of salt, pepper and a touch of brown sugar. Depending on how patient I am this should be rest for a good 7-12 days. There’ll be updates along the way.
The third and most challenging experiment is producing good sourdough bread. In the past I’ve failed at this really well. I could never get that perfect loaf in the past.
Only on day two I’m waiting for the started to get bubbling. This one could take a few days as well.
So now that the experiments are up to date as well things should probably get shorter and much more to the point.
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