April 14, 2015 Lunch - Thai Orchid Dinner - Meat Sous vide four ways, sautéed spinach and mushrooms, and Gratin Savoyard

April 14, 2015  Lunch -Thai Orchid   Dinner - Meat Sous vide four ways, sautéed spinach and mushrooms, and Gratin Savoyard

I ate lunch with Nizar and Rahim at Thai Orchid.  They ordered the sautéed vegetables with tofu and brown rice.  They ae going to live forever.  I ordered Lo Mein noodles with chicken off the lunch menu ($6.95).  It was wonderful; Lo mein noodles stir fried with chicken, green onions, carrots, and bean sprouts.  Nizar and Rahim let me poach pieces of zucchini, bok choy, broccoli, carrots, onion, and water chestnut from the large platter of vegetables, so I had a lovely lunch.

I called Charlie around 4:00 and found out Susan was driving to Salt Lake City for her brother’s memorial service.  Charlie suggested that he bring four sous vide meat dishes over for us to try.

I had thawed a steak and Suzette and I had decided to eat steak and the PPI Gratin Savoyard (potatoes a gratin baked with beef stock instead of milk).  

I wanted a green vegetable, so I drove to Lowes and found a lovely bunch of fresh baby Spinach leaves for $1.49 and bought mixers that were on sale for $.79 for two liters.

I washed and spun the spinach and Suzette sliced five mushrooms and we sautéed them in the wok with olive oil and sherry.

Charlie had requested a good red for his dinner and Suzette said that meant cabernet sauvignon, so at about 6:30 p.m. I went to the cellar and found a bottle of Beaulieu Vineyards Signet Collection Central Coast 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon and opened it.  Charlie arrived around 7:00 with four plates of meat fresh off the grill, each contained three slices of meat:  one of brisket cooked with BBQ sauce, one with brisket cooked for three days with liquid smoke, one with some of the Rib eye steak we bought at Albertsons and the final one with some of the Rib eye steak we bought at Albertsons that had been aged by Suzette’s kitchen staff at the Greenhouse Bistro and bakery for 24 days.  Charlie had sous vided all the meat.

We each took a piece of each of the meats to try plus a healthy scoop of potatoes and Suzette and I took a scoop of the sautéed spinach and mushrooms.  Charlie eats very few vegetables.

This was a dinner that a Texan would love; beef four ways.  Suzette said it reminded her of Tucano’s Brazilian steak house.  We all agreed that the BBQ’d brisket was tender and delicious and that the Smoke flavored brisket was tough and had a strange chemical flavor.  As to for the rib eyes, we both preferred the one that was not aged because it was cooked to medium rare and was the more tender of the two.

Even though they were off the same slab of steaks at Albertsons, Charlie had prepared the one that was not aged.  When we gave Charlie the aged steak, he applied the same recipe to the one that was aged.  It seems  that the Greenhouse Bistro had put what appeared to be a salt and pepper rub on the steak before aging it that intensified the saltiness and pepper flavor to an unpleasant level for me.  Also, Charlie said that the grill flame had flared up on the aged beef and overcooked it to a greater degree of doneness/toughness.

All the meat had been cooked with the sous vide method.  The clear winner in my mind was the non-aged rib eye and the BBQ’d brisket was second.  What this teaches me is a very simple axiom, it is important to control all the aspects of preparation beginning with the original cut of meat until the final serving.  If others do things to the ingredients that you are not familiar with, their actions can alter the flavor in a way that you cannot predict and accommodate and the final result can go off the tracks and fail.  This was evident when the best piece of meat, an aged steak, cooked in an identical sous vide method as an un-aged steak from the same cow failed our taste test.

We all liked the wine, it was super smooth from spending 8 years in our cellar.  It did not express a lot of character, perhaps because it had been smoothed out over the years, but it also did not have any harshness or rough edges.  Suzette and I judged it the perfect wine for a dinner devoted to tasting the nuances of flavor differences in meats cooked in the same manner.  

The potatoes were stellar for the second night in a row, due in large measure to the use of Abondance Fermier cheese, instead of Raclette or Swiss.

Bon Appétit