Bratwurst snack

This is not the work of the brilliant famed Wisconsin artisan charcutiers, no, this is regular ordinary run-of-the-mill non-brilliant sausage for regular people and so it is jazzed up in ways ordinary sausage does not deserve, braised for a long time with malted beer and roasted garlic to become so soft as pậté, and the garlic spreadable.  

Bread, bratwurst, bacon, cheese

And then suddenly I'm all, "Dude, what happened to your hands? They went all soft. Get out there and wash the truck, aerate the yard or something, your hands are freakishly childishly womanly, beyond bankerisly soft." And then I realized I kneaded this dough that has butter in it. Lecithin does that same thing.

Bratwurst, purple cabbage, mashed potato

Braising means cooking something for a long time in shallow water and covered so that it creates a contained environment in there where the moisture keeps raining down on itself and coating itself over and over, for hours sometimes, but that can be speeded considerably with pressure. 

And something happens to sausages that transforms them, their natural casing dissolves to a flavorful goo and the meat with its added ingredients blend to a delicacy that is unmatched by grilled sausages, or blanched and grilled, or by any other method. 

This cabbage is old. Apparently it has a half-life of a thousand years. I did not realize they last so long.

I served this to bratwurst-lovering type people, skiers and such, who pile on sharp sauerkraut and slather on mustard and plunk a crackling grilled bratwurst onto a steamed bun, those guys, and they said,

"Damn. I didn't know bratwurst can be this good."

They never had it so tender, so mouth-meltingly splendid before. They hadn't had cabbage that tasted confusingly sour and sweet at the same time, which is actually ordinary.

That then was wedges of regular savoy cabbage and braised  the usual way for well over an hour.

Spaghetti with bratwurst meatballs

Bratwurst, homemade mustard sauce, sauerkraut, French fries, tomatoes

This is bratwurst without a bun. 

I forgot to buy mustard. I never made mustard condiment before so I went with instinct. 

The dull light-brown mustard powder scooped out of the bulk spice jars at Whole Foods and brought home then and mixed with plain white vinegar and water turns out to be the best mustard I have ever tasted in my life. It is simply outstanding. A tiny taste confuses at first because sweetness comes across immediately. And then the isothiocyanates kick in and Yoza! right on the side of the tongue arises a horseradish-y burn that is very strong, but without the sinus flush of Chinese mustard or of wasabi or of regular horseradish. I added nothing sweet and no horseradish at all and yet those two flavors come across directly and powerfully and the effect is mesmerizing.

I would say that it tastes like Dijon-style mustard except a lot stronger and better. 

*  Four level tablespoons mustard powder from Whole Foods Bulk spices. 

*  Three tablespoons plain white vinegar. Two tablespoons filtered water. The powder continued to absorb water for an hour or so. Additional filtered water added by the tablespoon until the thickness settled, actually, I am not certain it has completely stopped absorbing. It might need to be thinned again. 

I do not know how mustard from the regular spice rack would work but I am going to go right back there to Whole Foods and get a lot more of this mustard powder and make more of this mustard condiment. I am amazed how well this worked. And do you know what? This is causing me to experience confirmation bias again. I already concluded that food companies convinced a busy and unsuspecting public that their guild  alone are keepers of the alchemy and high science of mustard. Of course it is nonsense and all this time my mustard could have been awesome had I not accepted that bogus message myself. Conversely, had it not worked then it would not have affected my bias one way or the other because that is how confirmation bias works. *smugs* 

I have also uncovered the final mystery of perfect French fries and for this no award bestowed upon me can match my own satisfaction. * smugs again*  These potatoes were parboiled in salted water that was acidified with vinegar and then the fries were frozen. I think the acid toughens the surface of the fries while allowing the interior to blow apart and go fluffy in the final oil fry. These finished fries are what I was aiming for. Firm crisp fried exterior that stayed that way for more than a few minutes out of the oil and soft fluffy interior, the perfect combination of two textural delights. They would be even better had I cut broader fries because when the starchy interior blows apart it really blows apart and these thinly cut fries had hardly any interior to them to blow. Taken together I suppose these extremes, boiling water, acid, freezing, hot oil, are among the most violent treatments that a potato would undergo. 

The sauerkraut is the type that comes in a plastic bag, but only because I did not want to bring home another huge jar. I considered rinsing the sauerkraut. Tasted it. Decided it was not too salty and not overly vinegary but it could use some cracked black pepper and whole fennel seed. It is very good. 

Salted water with cider vinegar added ↑. Boiled lightly for six to eight minutes. Not completely done but almost. 

Frozen ↓.

Fries in oil not shown. 

Frozen fries with a thin ice coating and internal starchy cell structure that is damaged by ice crystals and then dumped into hot oil means a crackling good drama that is rife with danger and the chance of personal harm. A ridiculously oversized pot is used for protection against oil bubbling over onto the burner. But that still leaves the hazard of spilling and for that I can only say to turn in your handles and don't be such a klutz around hot oil. 

Fried egg, bratwurst, greens

The egg was fried in a biscuit ring to corral its wayward wanderings. The bratwurst is sliced and freed of its restrictive casing whereupon it breathed the sweet air of liberty and then promptly and with calculated cruelty it was smashed into a disc and by doing so the brat was forfeited its wurst. The greens were pressure cooked a few days ago, chilled, and a portion reheated. 

Bratwurst

Step 1: make hotdog buns. 

The Cuisinart processor was used to produce a fast batch of bread dough starting with 3.25 cups of mixed whole wheat and all purpose flours, aprox 25% / 75% respectively. 1/2 teaspoon dry active yeast was included with the dry flour along with 1 +1/2 teaspoon kosher salt flakes along with two rounded teaspoons rubbed sage. The liquid was milk with 1 tablespoon butter amounting to 1 + 1/2 cups heated beyond body temperature which one can tell by feeling the heat of the glass container. 

The dough was left on the counter overnight. It rose insufficiently, the result in the morning too dry and too dense. The batch was corrected by removing and discarding a portion and restarting using the dough as a starter for a new batch. Discarded instead of doubled because I didn't want to overload the machine nor did I want to end up with surplus dough this morning. The dough was cut up and returned to the Cuisinart along with fresh commercial yeast just for a refreshed kick, 1/2 cup hot water was added through the feed tube to loosen the old dough to a wet sticky mass. A/P Flour was added in increments until the dough pulled away from the sides and processed in pulses until a sample would stretch for the windowpane test whereby a small sample is flattened in the fingertips and stretched as a tiny pizza to test the gluten development and elasticity as if it were a window for, say, a goth dollhouse. 

2.5 oz weighed segments of the dough were broken off, stretched and flattened, folded in thirds, flattened again, folded in thirds again, then pinched shut resulting in a tiny dough pillow. The puffy little dough pillows consisting of six folded layers internally and pinched on three sides are rolled on the work surface using the fingertips of both hands stretching the pillow shape out to the shape of a worm. A short fat worm. A big, short, fat worm. 

This resulted in six extra ounces of dough, divided in two and themselves formed into two puffy pillow shapes, but not rolled into worm shapes, and kept separate from the hotdog buns because that tray holds only ten. 

The dough worms were placed in a pan designed for East Coast style hotdog buns. The pan is designed for a single sheet of dough to be placed in the pan as a thick rectangular pizza, and cooked as a single flat loaf which is cut into strips after baking along the bases of the mounds that are formed by the indentations in the bottom of the pan. These hotdog buns shown here do not go along with the original purpose of the pan, rather individual hotdog buns are formed and kept separated by liberal brushings of olive oil, and that is just as easily done in a brownie pan except the bottoms would then be flat instead of curved as these are curved, as the top dome is curved also. So, oddly, the tops and bottoms are curved while the sides of the rolls are flat where the rolls abut against and tend to attach to adjoining rolls. Weird, innit. The pan does that. 

Steam The waiter at Bittersweet must have thought it odd for a customer of my demographic to interrogate so deeply about dinner rolls. For my part I was pleased with his answers and conversational celerity. When I asked how the cook managed such excellent thin crisp crust that veritably crackles and delicately flakes he answered without any apparent thought, "Steam." "The stove has an built-in steamer, or does he spray it manually?" "The stove has a steamer built into it. The first ten minutes is steamed." "High heat?" "Yes." "Then that would be more than half the baking period of continuous steaming." "Yes, for dinner rolls, more than half." Impressive. I tried that technique before and it didn't work. I tried two things, in fact. Standing there with a spray bottle and cracking open the oven door and giving the whole chamber a series of sprits. I also used a lower rack to fit the oven with a tray of water that would hold until it evaporated. Those two things worked poorly. But now I have a new idea. In lieu of an internal sprayer I could use the oven's chimney to deliver dribbles of water directly to the chamber floor continuously for ten minutes thus keeping the door shut and having the water vaporize immediately on contact, especially important during those first few minutes of baking when the surface of the dough must remain elastic so that the expanding internal air pockets within the dough can expand outwards. I can now report the new technique works brilliantly, and I owe it all to our waiter who showed so much patience toward me.

They expanded so much by the intense moist heat that they broke through their sealed edges and partially unraveled in the oven. Lesson: seal the edges better. 

Step 2: cook brats. These were seared in the pressure cooker with the lid off, then the water added, the lid attached, and cooked under pressure until I imagined they submitted. They could have used less pressure and less time cooking. 

Previous hotdog buns:

homemade buns with bratwurst
hotdog buns with description of pan
hotdog buns
hotdog buns

Previous bratwurst:

bratwurst
bratwurst with potatoes
bratwurst