Shalmanese

If pomegranites are in season over there, you HAVE to try a pomegranite sorbet. It's out of this world. Otherwise, I was quite impressed by my lemon-mint sorbet with dark chocolate: I guess you could also make a quail egg ice-cream of some sort .

Will brown rice leach starch? I imagine that what you would end up with is little distinct kernels of brown rice in a vaguely thick soup.

I have a theory... The earth was hit by a comet sometime last year and we all perished... The entire of egullet is now in hell... Punishment consists of Magus telling us about his burgers and NOT WHERE HE FRICKEN IS!

Speaking of cheap eats, if you ever find yourself in the Haymarket, walk down quay street for a bit an theres an excellent hole-in-the-wall Xiamen noodle shop. They hand pull their noodles everyday and it's a great cheap eat in an area which seems to be rather devoid of decent food.

In most of those descriptions, the qualifier seeks to add some degree of clarity to the method of preparation. If I see barley risotto, I can guess that it's probably cooked with ladles of hot stock, constantly stirring. Other times, it's just simply pretension. However, fish saute is not only wholly inaccurate, it also has a completely accurate alternative. I don't see any reason to use it.

Two quick tips: Don't have frozen stock in your freezer? Don't have the time or inclinition simmer bones? I like to make what I call a quick broth. Saute lots of spring onions in 1 tbsp of vegtable oil. Throw in a glug of dark soy and spread it rapidly around the pan with your wooden spoon, then after a few seconds, dump in a load of water. The hot pan caremalises the sugars in the soy and leads to a deep amber, complex and tasty soup base without hours of effort. Of course, adding stock at this point is also welcome but I always like to do the caremalisation step for any asian soup. Second tip: If your adding in thinly sliced meat at the end, don't put it in straight away, it will overcook. Turn off the heat, add some leafy greens, stir and wait for 2 minutes, THEN add the (still slightly frozen) beef. Wait at least 5 minutes, the beef will look distressingly raw, but it will eventually come up to a perfect medium rare rather than be overdone.

A couple of more tips: salt the fish 30 minutes before cooking, the salt will pull moisture from the surface. drag the knife blade across the skin to squeeze out yet more moisture. Score the fish so that it doesn't curl

Your Techne is a scientific waterbath. What that means is: 1. If it somehow screws up in a scientific setting, you could have lost $100,000 worth of experimental equipment 2. If it gives you the WRONG result in a medical setting, you might be facing several million dollars worth of lawsuits 3. The purchasers are generally buying it with someone elses money 4. Lots of that money is going to schmoozing potential large clients who might want to buy hundreds at a time 5. The RRP, per unit cost is likely to be significantly higher than if you were to buy 1000 6. It needs to withstand abuse in a lab setting. All of these cost money and are not neccesary within a home sous vide set up. If you want an analogy, look at the computer water-cooling community. About 7 years ago, they were largely in the position that sous vide is in now and a decent setup might cost $1500 and not work very well. Today, you can buy COTS systems for aroun $300 that are backed by warranties and work very well and prices are still falling. Apple apparently built a prototype system that would cost less than $100 mass produced but never released it.

I'm not sure this is the case. For super long cooks, perhaps, since a couple hours at 52C isn't likely to make that much of a difference in the context of 28 more hours at around 55C. For fish and other shorter cooking items, however, certain reactions may not take place if the protein only reaches the target temperature for say a few minutes out of a 20 minute cooking process. In my experience, only a couple degrees makes a huge difference in fish, on both the + and - sides. To mess with that wouldn't product very accurate results. ← Yes, but theres nothing wrong with leaving a 20 minute fish dish in sous vide for 3 hours is there? With your more inaccurate devices, your just going to have to cook it slightly longer, thats all.

1. Why does the water have to circulate? It seems like your making the solution to a problem into a problem of it's own right. As long as constant temp can be maintained throughout the entire medium, it doesn't matter how this is achieved. In any case, we could create a simple circulator by using a cheap wire mesh screen (10c), some sort of stepper motor ($5) and a fan made of scrap metal (0c) and some silicone glue to waterproof it (10c). However, it seems to me that a circulator is going to introduce more problems that it solves. 2. I admit this is going to eat up the bulk of our cost. 0.1C probes are not widespread and are very expensive. The cheapest probe from Thermoworks is $66 which eats up the bulk of our cost. However, if you relax the requirement to a 0.2C Probe, then the costs drops significantly to only $12. You'll need to waterproof it though so thats another 50c. 3. Sure, we get a broken electric deep fryer from the dump ($0). It's well insulated, has a lid with a convenient slot for wires. 4. Get 1 100W Light bulb (20c), 1 spare light socket (0c) and an ungodly amount of silicone glue (50c), attach a 240/110V voltage regulator on the end ($1) and hook it up to a spare PC ($0). 2 degrees temp latitude is trivial and it really defeats the purpose of having a 0.1C thermocouple. The thermodynamic response of water is predictable so you can make predictive rather than just reactive changes. Just FYI, here is how I would do it for maximum reliability. You insert the food in and set the temp at 55.8 and it goes into it's heating phase. During this, it sets the target temp to 52C and is mainly concerned with bringing the food from room temp to 52C. Once it has detected that this occurs, it moves to the maintaining phase where it treats the food an water and water as one homogenous thermodynamic mass and uses a simple physics model with feedback to keep it at temp. Because it's a predictive rather than reactive model (like presumably every other circulating water bath), it should be able to keep within 0.2C with even a relatively crude heating device. 5. Costs: 1 broken deep fryer - $0 1 0.2C thermocouple - $12 1 10cm heatshrink cover for waterproofing - 10c 1 100W lightbulb - 20c 1 spare light socket - 0c 1 voltage regulator - $1 1 spare 486 computer - $0 lots and lots of silicone glue - $1 Total costs: $14.30 With Circulator: 1 stepper motor - $5 1 wire mesh screen - 10c 1 fan made of scavenged metal - 0c Total cost: $19.40 With 0.1C Accuracy: 1 0.1C thermocouple - $66 -1 0.2C thermocouple - -$12 -1 10cm heatshrink cover for waterproofing - -10c Total Cost: $73.30

At the moment, the sous vide community is looking like a lot of amateur and marginal groups, working with scavenge or repurposed gear. Theres nothing inherent about sous vide that requires it to cost so much or require expensive equipment. The japanese have vaccum cookers which can hold in heat remarkably efficiently. In theory, you could do sous vide in one of those without using any heat at all. Augment that with just a simple thermocouple, PID and VERY small heating element and mass produce it and I wager you could get the costs to very close to a crockpot, maybe $20 more. Homebrew sous vide setups using 20W lightbulbs have been built that cost less than $20 all up.

A 70% belgian chocolate that I get from my local farmers market. Comes in 500gm packs an costs $10 AUD. Works out to be something like $7USD/lb. It's got an amazing flavour though, balanced, warm, layered. It's one of the few 70% chocolates I've had that doesn't try and clobber you with darkness. Very nice.

Actually, you can. Just put a roast in the oven set at 65C for 12 hours and you get the exact same effect. Except you can't use marinades. I'm far more interested in the applications of sous vide on the low end rather than the high end. To me, the main appeal of it is that you can pop a few meals in your home sous vide machine in the morning, return home and have dinner on the table in 5 minutes.

Huh? Commercial salt is 99.9% NaCl. I doubt the 0.1% extra would make a perceptible difference.

How do you tell the roe on a shrimp?

You can order plates of whatever you want, however, you are charged by weight for whatever you have left uneaten at the end of the meal. The broth is also periodically topped up by roving waiters with big kettles. The place is located in Ma On Shan shopping centre, way out in the sticks.

Uh, you obviously didn't read further:

It's not haute but theres an all-you-can-eat shabu shabu in Shatin that we used to go to a lot. The quality was pretty good and it's cheap as well. I don't know anywhere else in HK, sorry.

Does the milkiness come from the emulsification of the fat?

Oh Sweet Mother Of God!

Sounds like Shabu-Shabu

Huh, our family of 4 sucks down 4L of orange juice a week or 50L a year. A bit more than average. Recently, we've discovered the orange juice produced by a local grocer which is miles ahead of the supermarket stuff. It tastes almost just like if you had squeezed it yourself without any pastuerisation or preservatives. It's fantastic but you have to drink it within 2 or 3 days.

1. Cook with animal fats: Duck fat, Bacon fat, lard, tallow, schmaltz, even butter. All of these will add a deep, rich flavour you can't get from vegtable oil 2. Roast Garlic & Garlic Oil: Add a deep and rich yet subtle garlic flavour to many dishes. Leafy green vegtables sauteed in just a little bit of garlic oil and salt in a non-stick pan is a healthy and very tasty side dish. 3. Get a thermometer and use it in everything: Once you starting thinking of foods in terms of temperature instead of time or colour, then your cooking will become more consistant and you will gain a better understanding of how to cook 4. Get a set of accurate scales: Same deal 5. Brown something completely: The more you brown something, the more flavourful maillard reactions happen and the richer in flavour. Ideally, you want to cook it until just before it starts burning and producing acrid, bitter components. Most people are often surprised at how far you cook something before it starts burning and usually back off to early for fear of burning. It takes a good 20 minutes or so of cooking to get something fully browned. 6. KISS: Keep the flavours simple and complimentary. Don't dump seasonings on willy nilly or pile plates full of assorted sides. Think about the role of each ingredient in a dish and how it will serve to complement the whole.

I made a mushroom reduction sauce tonight for a rack of lamb which involves squeezing the liquid out of finely chopped mushrooms and then simmering with bay leaves, thyme, rosemary and cracked peppercorns. Mushrooms have no natural thickening agent so you can reduce them as far as you want and then thicken at the end to get your desired texture. You can use any thickening agent you want to get different textures. This time, I added just a touch of gelatine to simulate the texture of a meat jus, except completely vegetarian.

Can't believe it took me this long to find the thread. Steamed Egg custard is a tradition in my family as well although I don't know if it's a classical northern dish. A neat trick is that you can steam the eggs on top of the electric rice cooker as the rice is cooking. That way, you don't have to deal with the hassle of an extra pot and using up a stove burner. Just use the provided steaming basket and it comes out perfectly. However, you have to be careful to use room temp eggs and hot tap water, otherwise it won't steam fully by the time the rice is done. I've had it served before at restaurants with fresh scallops and shrimp in the custard.