Food in the time of isolation: Idli

Since we are not able to party with friends, I wanted to cook something fun and special. So we are having picanha steak. This is a South American cut of steak, the sirloin cap, with fat cap.

If you have been to a Brazilian steak house, you have seen the skewers of beef that is put on the skewer in the shape of the letter C. That is picanha. It has a generous fat cap and well marbled beef. I bought mine from Grand Western Steak in Florida. I found this outfit through my favorite sous vide YouTube channel, Sous Vide Everything. This hosts are 2 South American men and a Cuban. They are absolutely hilarious and have great tips and directions for learning how to sous vide food and how to finish it.

Back to dinner plans. I ordered some lumpfish caviar and shrimp for a bit of caviar on idli (instead of blinis), shrimp cocktail, then steak and veggies.

The sous vide of the steaks will take about an hour +, idli will be done shortly before that and the shrimp cocktail will be ready by then as well. Maybe bubbly, but not sure yet. Bill is not a fan, and I must say, I prefer cava.

I made the idli, which are steamed rice cakes. I really love them, they are Indian breakfast food eaten with soup and curries. I made a pretty platter and put the jar of caviar in the center. Another two dishes had chopped scallions and some sour cream.

This is the batter. I used a packaged dry mix and added water and sour cream. I read the instructions and they said to add sour curd. I know in most Indian recipes when they write curd, they mean yogurt, so I assumed sour curd was not yogurt but sour cream.

Found out this morning that sour curd is still yogurt!

Here we have the steaming little rice cakes. They are steamed in these special idli trays that you can make out the little black plastic knob which unscrews and the trays separate from each other. I also decided to add a little bit of scallion to some of the rice cakes.

The steamed rice cakes are resting on some paper toweling to remove any moisture. You can see the little bubbles on the edges of the cakes. They are sooooooo tasty. Light and fluffy little delivery bases for anything you can think of.

TADAH!

Now on to the shrimp cocktail. I did buy a ring of shrimp from Fresh Direct that came frozen. I defrosted it and then after tasting the cocktail sauce that came with it. Decided I could do a lot better in that department. I had some cocktail sauce in fridge, along with horseradish, ketchup, and lemons. After tasting and adding, I finished up with a pretty good version.