Late Breaking News!

It’s been an exciting first quarter of business for us at Along Came A Slider LLC. We have made a decision to not have the trailer open this month. What will we be doing you ask??? Taking something a lot of you have come to love and making it better! We will be getting our trailer wrapped with all new graphics as well as unveiling a new spring menu with a few old favorites and a few new surprises in an all new location. This month just seemed like a good time for us to do everything we wanted to do but didn't get a chance to before we opened. The cold weather paired with an abundance of caterings helped us make the decision to go ahead and make improvements now. One of our chefs just accepted a chef position at Sullivan's and another of our chefs is getting close to sealing the deal on the Executive chef position at a downtown hotel property himself. This means we are expanding and changing up the flow of things. 2011 will be the year of the slider. Stay tuned to see what events we will be catering and what new location will host our newly wrapped and easily identifiable trailer of creativity. Those of you that just can't wait can enjoy our sliders at Antone's on February 13th at the Austin Blues Society Grammy Party. http://www.antones.net/event/28511/ Great live music and gourmet eats. We will continue to share our developments in the menu and trailer as they occur so be sure and check back to ensure that you don't miss out on any late breaking slider news. Thank you everyone for the continued support of our local business.

Sweetbreads Slider

Unfortunately we ran this special yesterday and had underestimated our fans appreciation of some skillfully prepared offal goodness. For those of you unfamiliar with this delicacy, sweetbreads, refer to either the thymus which is located in the throat or the pancreas which lies near the stomach. As far as I know they call them sweetbreads because it is a hard sell when you call them what they are? Thankfully we have euphemisms otherwise many people would be missing out. Due to the process in which we prepare our sweetbreads we are unable to run this special again today. Here is glimpse of how it went down.

We got excited to see sweetbreads on our trip to the market and immediately grabbed a few pounds and started a 24 hour soak in milk. We knew we had to get moving quickly to be able to run this as a special by Friday so the plan was start getting the sweetbreads ready for service and think about the rest of the flavors at a later time.

And then thanks to time constraints this week the next picture is the finished product. What you didn't see was rinsing them after the milk and placing them in a pot of cold water with a little salt, bay leaves, and lemon. We then applied heat and simmered for 15 minutes. As soon as the time had elapsed we plunged them into a bucket of ice water. While this blanching step is not completely necessary it sure does make it a little easier to accomplish the next step. The next step is to remove the membrane and any visible veins while still trying to keep the whole thing intact which can be a task in itself. We then wrapped all the desirable product in cheese cloth and pressed it between two pans with extra weight resting on the top pan. After another 24 hours we were ready to roll. We sliced it into thick slices and held them in the fridge to await service. So as you can see, it takes a little dedication and advance planning to prepare sweetbreads but the patience in the end is rewarded. The aforementioned later time to pick flavors to compliment ended up being Saturday morning at the market. While picking up some of the other produce items on our list we came across a bin of nice looking daikon. We sliced it up and threw it in a rice wine vinegar pickling liquid. We wanted to add a pickle to this slider to combat some of the richness of the sweetbreads and the toasted sesame and shiner bock tempura batter that encapsulated them. To this we added a little heat in the form of a sriracha aioli and topped it all off with a piece of toasted nori. As soon as we had the daikon in the cart we went ahead and committed to the Asian flavor profile. This slider flew out the window like hot cakes. Thank you to everyone who got the chance to check this special out and who continue to support what we do.

Ratio- The Simple Codes Behind The Craft Of Everyday Cooking written by Michael Ruhlman

I wanted to share with everyone today a book that has been instrumental in changing the way I think about cooking and has allowed me the courtesy of hardly ever having to reach for a recipe to use as reference. This book re-iterates the fact that all cooking is defined by relationships. For instance; bread is broken down as 5 parts flour, 3 parts water. (plus yeast and salt) Now I know there is a lot more that goes into bread but this ratio is the essence of bread. If you have had any experience making bread and have the common grasp on how long it should be kneaded you can pull a decent loaf off on the fly by grabbing a scale and your ingredients, never once having to Google a recipe or dust off a Martha Stewart cookbook. The most important thing is that you are using 5 parts of flour and 3 parts of water. You do need salt for seasoning and yeast for its leavening but the amounts used are rather forgiving unless you have a super specific texture of bread you are trying to achieve. Now that you know this you can make roasted garlic bread, cinnamon raisin bread, or any other type of bread you can brainstorm.

So, I found this information mind blowing and it left me wondering why I didn’t think of this. Let’s look at other doughs.
Pasta Dough = 3 parts flour : 2 parts water
Pie Dough = 3 parts flour : 2 parts fat : 1 part water
Biscuit Dough = 3 parts flour : 1 part fat : 2 parts liquid
Cookie Dough = 1 part sugar : 2 parts fat : 3 parts flour

The list goes on and on but I think you get the jest of it. If you have a basic understanding of the techniques involved you only need to know these relationships to pull off any variation of these items. The book is broken up into:
Doughs and Batters
Stocks and Thickening Agents
Farcir Sausage, Mousseline, and Other Meat-Related Ratios
Fat Based Sauces
Custards

For those of you out there looking to enhance their cooking prowess I highly recommend this book. As stated in the last sentence of the book: "Ratios Liberate You-when you know the ratio and some basic techniques, then you can really start to cook." Once you allow yourself to get into this mind set you will start to look at everything in terms of ratios and really examine while the work. For me it has definitely made me a better cook and expanded my abilities to create on the fly. When shit hits the fan and everyone starts to freak out that something was overlooked and something needs to happen quickly, this is when you stop everyone and calmly say, it's going to be alright, it's easy to make, I don't even need a recipe. Go home a hero. Free your mind for the low cost of $27.00