I'm back at my place, and I've sliced and cooked a sample of my gyro meat. In a word: awesome. It's tender, and what's more, it crisps nicely in the pan, smells amazing, and tastes the way I want it to taste. As usual, I jazzed up my gyro meat with a Middle Eastern-inflected spice blend: salt, pepper, sugar, paprika, cayenne, chili flakes, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, turmeric, oregano, basil: gyros by way of North Africa. I emulsified the beef and lamb meat in my food processor by adding a bunch of neutral oil (olive oil may or may not turn bitter when blitzed, so I used soy, then added olive oil after pasting up the meat), plus a bunch of panko to soak up the oil and improve the meat's texture. The panko definitely helped the meat turn crispy very quickly in the skillet. Result: insanely good flavor. And when the meat is matched up with the rest of the gyro elements—even more insanity.
Monday, September 07, 2020
gyro-meat update
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Fascinating article on olive oil, although unless I read it wrong the author is arguing against the idea that blending makes olive oil bitter, only holding off on a definite conclusion due to insufficient testing. I guess this is one of those "better safe than sorry" situations?
Yes, I think you're right. and other people have claimed to blend olive oil with no ill effects, so the whole notion is up in the air and more likely a subjective thing, hence my "may or may not." To be honest, whenever I make chimichurri, which I make with olive oil, I'm using either a blender or a food processor, and I too have experienced no ill effects from all the blitzing. I only recently came upon this notion that breaking up the oil somehow liberates bitter compounds. That said, I chickened out and blended my beef and lamb, this time, with a 식용유 made of soy.
I don't make a lot of mayonnaise, but I do know that pesto is traditionally made in a mortar and pestle (thus the name) as opposed to in a blender. But I've done it in a blender and haven't really noticed any adverse effects.
Although, I don't know about you, but if I'm blending or mixing olive oil into something, it's generally not going to be the good stuff. We have a bottle of really nice olive oil that we got in Portgual, and that only gets drizzled on stuff or occasionally brought out for dipping bread in. The oil I use as a base for other things is usually relatively cheap stuff, so maybe that has something to do with it as well.
Good point. I should've mentioned pesto, too, since I make far more pesto than I do chimichurri.
Not sure that I've ever tasted "the good stuff." I did, however, just buy my first-ever bottle of avocado oil, which seems to be trending among YouTube foodies. Expensive as hell, at least here in Korea: W16,000 for a small bottle that's barely 300 ml.
Hmm. We have some avocado oil, but I don't remember it being that ridiculously expensive. We got it at Costco before we let our membership expire, so that might have something to do with it. It does have a high smoke point, which is nice.
Also, really good olive oil is... well, it's just a completely different thing. And there are so many different flavor profiles. It can be buttery, peppery, grassy, etc. I've only ever gotten really good stuff in specialty shops abroad (the stuff we got in Portugal was from a shop that only sold olive oil). I can't imagine what you would have to pay for something like that in Korea, if you could even find it.
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