origamicrane

I believe that the egg white and yolk will reach an equilibrium with the salt concentration in the brine. What I need to know is the solubility of salt in the egg white and egg yolk. And what is the ideal salt concentration within the egg to produce a tasty salted egg. I'm hoping that lowering the salt concentration will produce a less salty egg white. As my first batch after 4 weeks brining, the egg white was too salty to eat. At 3 weeks its was very good. The solubility of salt in water @25C is 25.9g/ 100ml So really you shouldn't need more then 259g of salt in a litre of water. i'm going to test some eggs at 250g/l , 200g/l , 150g/l over 3 weeks and see if there is a noticeable difference between them. Mine was a soft boil. 20 minutes will be the correct cooking time i believe. just remeber to prick a hole into teh shell or you will end up with grey/green yolks.

what a conincidence i just made my first batch of salted duck eggs this week. recipe was 300g of sea salt in 1 Litre of water then 6 clarence court duck eggs and a tetley tea bag in a tight lid tuperware for 3 weeks at room temperature. (mum says if you don't add a tea bag the yolk will be pale yellow rather then golden yellow) I tested 1 egg at 3 weeks and then another at four weeks and my preference is on the 3 weeks one as the 4 week egg white was overly salty. I pin pricked the egg shells before boiling boiled for 15 minutes and the whites are still runny but the yolk it perfect. I finished this one in the steamer. boiled 25 minutes and its hard boiled all the way through next batch I am dropping the salt to 250g, keeping the brining time to 20 days and boiling for 20 minutes.

To get good crackling it seems that you need to get as much moisture out of the rind as possible and you need to degrade the tough surface layer of the rind. I think this is also what the hot water and vodka is doing. I guess puncturing or scoring degrades the outer layer of tough rind and allows more moisture to escape out of the rind due to an increased surface area. The increased surface area probably allows for the salt to draw out more moisture too. Also the crackling starts to form at the score and puncture points first probably due to the hot oil escaping from those points first. there no hint of vodka at all as it will have evaporated off during the overnight drying and the cooking. Although if you used whiskey or some stronger flavoured alcohol you might get some flavour left on the rind.

probably not but why risk it?

This got me thinking - on the assumption that larger stirrer bars aren't manufactured (I'm thinking something taller, or X-shaped if a narrow bar falling over is a concern), how much effort would it be to make one's own? A bit of ferrous alloy, and a coating - I've heard 'tool dip' is cheap (but not necessarily food-safe). Perhaps there exists some other way of fashioning a more useful stirrer? It may appear that I'm imagining replicating a StirChef, but criticisms posted elsewhere suggest it's too weak, fragile, etc. - to say nothing of cleanup, which would be much easier with a stirrer bar solution. ← they have laboratory overhead stirrer that you could use. or there might be away of adapting a food mixer to with a metal paddle ?

have a look at the sous vide thread in the cooking forum someone made dashi by vaccum packing kombu and bonito flakes into a sealed bag with water. Then poached the bag at 80C to extract the most flavour but with no sliminess.

arr.. i think that proves that the lye causes the rind to peel away from the meat. Maybe the concentration of the lye is too strong? anyway when you get a chance to try the vodka please let us know how you get on. I'm hoping you get similar results to me. For my next one i'm just going do a whole piece with vodka and adjust the cooking times slightly and hopefully third time will be perfect

thats interesting did yo do anything different the second time? or was it just the cut/quality of belly that was different?

Hi thanks for replying. When you cooked the rice did you reduce the amount of water you used? As I would imagine that as there is no steam lose the amount of water required to cook the rice would be less then in a rice cooker? Also what texture did you get after the few hours at 104? was it edible? as i had the starch cooked? or was it just fully rehydrated rice? Also for paella I am thinking you could SV the rice and then finish it off on top of a stove to get the socarrat? think i will have to give thi a try

has anyone done sous vide curry or sous vide rice dishes? I am looking specifically at risotto or paella? Usually for curries you marinade the meat and use yoghurt to tenderise. Vacuum packing would reduce the marinating time and depending on the cut of meat cooking sous vide will help tenderise could we omit the yoghurt? Also the area of interest for me is the flavour concentration of sous vide cooking would mean that the amount of garlic and other spices would have be reduced alot. Seeing as spice like saffron are expensive I would imagine this to be a plus point for sous vide indian cuisine. And for risotto and paella I am wondering if sous vide could help in reducing the labour required to cook these dishes. Just measure the rice and the stock, seal and drop it into a waterbath. Is there an optimum temperature for sous vide rice?

Make up your own minds. these manufacturers all sell IC units as well as unstirred waterbaths for sous vide http://www.cliftonfoodrange.co.uk/range.htm http://www.cuisinetechnology.com/thermal-baths.html http://www.julabo-sous-vide.com/products3.htm and as far as I can tell a pid crockpot/ricecooker is a cheap homemade unstirred water bath. Some professional chefs upthread have said, they use a combi steam oven for sous vide.

Prawncrackers that looks so good!! The recipe and method is pretty much the same as the one we use in our shop. Think might be really hard to find a way to improve/ simplify this one. But will be fun trying The only things I can see that could be varied are the initial blanching liquid of the skin and the cooking times. I will do a control test and cook one using standard recipe then cook another 2 ducks with a different blanching liquid. I'm comparing this to our siu yook preparation where we blanched the skin with hot water then applied a denaturing chemical. I am thinking blanch the duck with just hot water then brush the skin with one of the denaturing chemcial ie: lemon, vinegar, vodka, bicarbonate of soda solution, etc. I might seriously try the bicycle pump thing, lucky for me I have an electric air compressor at home so that will help in the preparation.

man that duck looks good!!! yep think i will definitely give that a try next nope didn't have time to take a photo of the cross section this time my dad pulled rank and started chopping and eating. All the workers at the shop were really impressed as the crackling was really good and the meat was still moist, usually our siu yook meat is dry and overcooked not any more. I doubt I will be able to go to chinatown and eat siu yook any more it just wouldn't compare to homemade! I want to try a leaner cut of pork next time as would be nice to have a healthier "siu yook" Jaccards are not really available in the UK and the shops that do sell it only stock the 16 blade version costing £17. I got my jaccard off ebay from this US seller http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/tenderizemeat it was £18.50 and that includes postage, although it does take 14 days to arrive. It's about 4 times moire expensive then the spiked hammer from china town. But the jaccard a lot more fun/efficient to use then the spiked hammer, it actually feels like you are preparing a dish rather then beating the crap out of it. Its also great for tenderising other meats.

Hi Finally had time to try this again. This time it was Lye Water versus Vodka. This time I used a 45 blade jaccard to spike the skin, I must have passed the jaccard over the skin about 80-100 times so we are talking 4000 puncture holes Then as previous poured a kettle of hot water on the skin. Patted it dry with paper towels. Rubbed 3 teaspoon of salt into the skin. Then brushed one side with Lye Water and the other side with 40% Vodka. Hung it above the restaurant stove for 2 days to dry. Just before cooking sprinkled another teaspoon of salt evenly over the skin and cooked it in the oven for 40 minutes as previous. Like last time the lye water crackling started to rise and peel away from the meat. Where as the vodka side crackling didn't rise away from the meat. You can see the big blister in the above photo. The lye water side had small and very even blistering and a light yellow colouring. The vodka side blistering was not even but was more pronounced with bigger blisters and had a darker red/brown colouring. The lye water side crackling was crisp but was definitely harder and tougher. The vodka side crackling had a lighter crunch and formed a thicker crackling but with less density. But the real difference was in the flavour. The vodka side crackling tasted a lot, lot better. The lye crackling had an after taste of a cross between burnt oil and soap probably due to saponification of the fat. Without a side by side comparison it would have been perfectly acceptable crackling but tasted next to the vodka crackling the lye crackling was almost unpleasant in comparison. So in the end my conclusion is vodka is the best Give it a go and let me know if you draw the same conclusions. I was always more comfortable with the vodka rather then the lye or the baking soda mainly becuase I love drinking vodka and now I have another reason for loving it My next experiment will be char siu or roast duck, once i have gathered enough test scenarios

each cutlet would be individually vacuum packed and pre cooked, then cooled quickly and then put back into the fridge/freezer until required for service. When an order comes in, you would stick 1 of the lamb cutlets into the water bath and bring it up to temperature.

Hi has anyone tried using a laboratory digital hotplate for sous vide? They are precise to 1 degree and have a temperature range from ambient up to 350C. something like this https://extranet.fisher.co.uk/insight2_uk/g...ltSetPosition=0 Looking at them on ebay seems like they cost a similar amount as pidding a rice cooker and are a less fiddly setup. A lot cheaper then a used immersion circualtor or a dedicated hot waterbath and you can avoid having to cleanse it as you can just stick a normal pan on it. Some even have an inbuilt magnetic stirrer so you can have water circualtion too. The temperature range goes up to 350C could also use it as a deep fat fryer too. Anyone see any problems with this setup? a stirred digital hot plate with a 200mm deep, 1/2 aluminium gastronorm pan on top?

yep same thing in mind. I did sous vide hainese chicken last week 65C for 3 hours. Deboned a chicken, jaccarded it and vaccum packed it with a slice of ginger, a crushed garlic clove and some chopped spring onions and a little bit of chicken stock. Turned out really nice but i will have to use better qaulity chicken next time as i was using standard supermarket chicken so texture was not as super smooth as i wanted. Will try the jaccard on a sous vide steak on sunday.

I only used it once so far, so can't really comment on how effective it is yet. But i will try it on a half a steak next week and do a comparison test. What i can say is that its a lot bigger then I expected and seems to be quite well designed and constructed. I actually bought it to be used on pork skin to make the puncture/score marks for pork crackling will try that too next weekend.

Hi Joesan i just bought one of those, not many places seem to stock it in the uk. Scott of stow charging £17 for the 16 blade one. I bought mine off ebay from a US seller "tenderizemeat" http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZtenderizemeat he's the cheapest on ebay. I bought the 45 blade jaccard and including uk delivery costed US$37 not bad for £18.50 only thing is that it takes 14 days to arrive.

That would be very precise poaching. What are you planning to cook that way? Not sure if you would have any advantages over using a bag? unless you wanted to reduce the broth as you are going along. but in that case i would just put another container into the water bath would be easy to clean afterward.

hi there I am attending a wedding in the Isle of Bute up in Scotland this December. Is anyone familiar with this island? If you are i be grateful for any info you have on the area. I'm wondering if there any places worth eating on the isle or if self catering is more the way to go? If so where would I stock up on foodie goodies? I be driving so can venture into Glasgow beforehand and stock up on supplies. thanks

msg is everywhere that it's hard to avoid I think you might have to train your palate to not like msg. I think pho should be relatively simply. If i was you I would try the back to basic approach get your meat, bones, onions, etc and chuck all into a pot and simmer. Then taste the broth after two hours and then add your spices bit at a time until you get the taste you want might take longer but might get you closer to what you are looking for.

yep overkill unless you plan to serve this as fine dining pho as the clarification step doesn't add any flavour just removes the debris from the stock. a quicker version would be just to filter it through muslin or a fine coffee filter or some kind. As said above you might be trying to get the taste of a pho with msg in without using msg. The only way you going to do that is to add more meat and stuff to get more flavour in the stock or reduce the stock to concentrate the flavours. One of the things that restaurants do is that they add stock from a previous batch to make a new batch, so you are adding concentrated stock into making a new batch.

just for geeky fun I measured the ph of the different solutions lemon juice 2.3 vinegar 3.1 baking powder 6.5 alcohol 8.5 Lye water 14 so it seems that the quality of the crackling is proportional to the alkalinity of the liquid.

I'm not a food safety officier so if anyone is more qualified to respond to this please do. From a food health and safety point of view scalding it with hot water and then leaving it in the frdige for 2-3 days probably isn't the best idea. But also from a classical health and safety point of view poultry should be cooked to an internal temperature of +75C to be completely safe, which would equal very overcooked and dry meat. But what i do know is that the food danger temperature zones are between 5-50C you leave any food in that temperature range long enough and it will degrade (there's a fascinating thread in the cooking forum about sous vide which goes very indepth into food health and safety). When you scald the meat put the wire rack at an 45 degree angle and just try to scald the skin rather then the meat. After we scald the pork quickly dab it dry and start rubbing salt into the skin then we put it in the fridge. All this probably take at most 30-40 minutes i think this time frame is not enough to have much bacterial growth. Also we scald the exterior with the boiling water which will kill any surface bacteria and then we dry and rub a lot of salt into the skin which again will slow bacteria growth due to the reduce moisture and high salt content and finally we stick it back in the fridge and cool it back to a safe temperature to dry. The main rule is not to have the meat hanging around in warm humid temperatures for too long and you should be safe. But having said that my parents used to pierce and rub salt into the skin and then hang it above the shop stove for 3 days and i believe that was teh real classical way of making siu yuk. We never got ill from eating it and i think in that situation it was a combination of high salt and enough heat to dry the skin and meat so that bacteria didn't have enough time to grow on it. I think there is a thread in this channel about lap yuk (wind dried wax pork/duck) http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=93137 where they marinade the raw pork and hang it in front of a electric fan for a week or so. Now that will get any health and safety officier in a twist but chinese have been eating it forever. Ultimately do what you feel you are comfortable with and the main thing is to make sure you have quality ingredients, make sure your hands and equipment are clean and that you don't leave food in a warm and humid environment for extended period of time and that if the meat smells funny throw it away.