Shalmanese

Bun Cha Ha Noi is a grilled pork belly dish that's spectacularly good.

Use an egg to measure the temp and you can get it to within 0.2F or so. Just compare your egg to published charts.

I agree with gfweb, fully desiccated meat has a jerky like quality to it and is not appetizing. It's a sign of bad BBQ or BBQ that's been left to sit and then reheated. It seems to me most of the bark is dissolved fluids. A simple way to test would be to take a piece of BBQ with good bark and rinse it under running water until all the dissolved solids are rinsed off. I suspect the bark should be mostly gone and the meat underneath would be mostly pale and soft. I might be wrong though, try and report back with what you find.

non-stick maximum temperature.

Probably due to loucheing

I'm immensely skeptical about that technique. It's one of those old school French techniques that is passed down via unquestioned tradition. Any chemicals in garlic will leech out into milk until the two mixtures equilibrate. Given that there's often 10x more milk than garlic, each simmering should reduce the unwanted components in garlic by at least 10x. I can't see the benefit of doing it more than twice as that leads to at least a 100x fold reduction. Also, I don't know of any food where repeated heating and cooling modifies the texture more than just a single cycle.

I don't understand, you're using the same water to thaw and circulate so there's no extra water. Also, you don't have to wait for it to come up to temp before starting to thaw, just drop the frozen meat in room temp water and let it come up to temp along with the bath.

They don't have to be warm. Cook an egg at 57 for an hour, take it out, bump the temperature up to 60, cook another egg, repeat etc. If you really want them to be warm, mark them in some way, then retherm them all at 57 before presenting.

Even easier: Cook whole mushrooms in the microwave covered for 10 minutes, pour off the resulting liquid, squeezing the whole mushrooms against a sieve to get more juice out. If you want even more of an intense mushroom flavor, cook quartered mushrooms in the microwave as before, squeeze out the liquid and then saute in butter for a good 20 - 30 minutes until very well browned. Add back the mushroom juice and let simmer for another 30 minutes, then strain. Even using ordinary button mushrooms, you get an intense mushroom jus that's phenomenally tasty. If you puree the jus with some roasted garlic, you have a ready made sauce that's a great vegetarian substitute for demi-glace.

Ferber Jams have a higher fruit:sugar ratio and are cooked less to preserve more of the fresh fruit flavor. And her anal skimming techniques result in crystal clear jams. If you've ever had Frog Hollow jams, Ferber's book will let you make something of comparable quality at home.

Oh man, I miss cheap starfruit/carambola. Around here, when I see them, they're $3 for one! And they're usually overly ripened and getting brown around the edges. 50c for 15 would be a dream. I used to sit by the tv with a giant pile of starfruit as a kid and polish them off one by one.

Yeah, the Ferber method is phenomenal for small batch jam making. Most jam making books are geared towards getting an abundance of fruit preserved very quickly but if you're prepared to put in the extra effort, Ferber style jams are noticeably higher quality.

Interesting article at fivethirtyeight today about some research done by Australian researchers who posit that fat might actually be a distinct taste, with dedicated taste receptors on our tongue.

For baked goods, if there's no other salt in the recipe, I bet I could. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between a baked good with no salt vs one with 1/8th tsp of salt, which is why good pastry recipes advise you to add a pinch of salt.

Are you defrosting to cook later using conventional means or sous vide? If sous vide, set the bath to the final temperature and put the frozen product in. This will bring the core up to temp the fastest, minimizing food safety issues. If cooking conventionally, set the circulator to 100F and circulate for no more than 1 hour or set to 40F and circulate until the bath temperature exceeds 40F (up to several hours potentially for something like a whole pork shoulder).

The pectin in the jam is going to interfere with the texture. If you want that same jammy note in the cream, I'd try making syrups instead. Take whatever sugar is in your creme anglaise recipe and toss it with cut up chunks of fruit and let it sit for at least a couple of hours, preferably overnight. If you want a fresh fruit flavor, strain and add to the anglaise. If you want a cooked fruit flavor, cook briefly, then strain and add.

America's Test Kitchen did this recipe on their most recent season. You can watch the video on the site.

Lamb tends to be only eaten by Muslims in China since they're forbidden from eating pork. The best lamb dishes in China come from the Xinjiang region. Unfortunately, there's currently no English language Xinjiang cookbook right now. Probably the closest is Beyond the Great Wall. The Mala Project has an excellent Cumin Lamb they put up in celebration of the new year though. Other great Chinese lamb dishes include Yang Rou Chuan, Chinese lamb skewers with cumin and chilli and thinly shaved slices of lamb for Sichuan style hotpot.

The only difference between oils and fats is whether they are solid at room temperature. I don't know where the Wikipedia article got it's info from as it's uncited but it's obviously wrong since it's contradicted by it's own sidebar. Just apply a bit of common sense, animal fats have a melting temperature of well below 184C as anyone who has deep fried using lard or tallow knows. All culinary fats have a smoke point below their boiling point. Putting fat in a pressure cooker would *raise* the boiling point, increasing the gap between smoking and boiling.

What the hell are you talking about? Animal fats have a melting point around body temperature, anyone who's been around a deep fryer knows they obviously don't boil at 200C (they don't actually have a boiling point since they decompose before they boil) and while they might ignite at around 280C, since they're not vaporizing and they're in a non oxygen rich environment, they'll more likely just decompose into unpleasantly burnt tasting tars.

This is the best cooking show I've ever watched:

Sugar depresses freezing point so no. If you're freezing for it's preservative effects, it doesn't matter what state it's in. Just store it as a slushy liquid instead of a solid.

That's the exact same bottle I have from an Asian grocery store in SF.

Depends on application. For baking, you generally want neutral flavored lard. For savory, you might want porkier. My point was regardless of whether you want brown flavors or not, you're not going to get them in a slow cooker, regardless of heat level, as long as there's still water left in the pot. Setting it on low or warm won't affect the final outcome except that one will be slower.

You want simmering and bubbling to drive the water off.