Shalmanese

I had a lot of issues with that P&T episode. First of all, the only two places they bothered to survey were New York and San Francisco, two places reputed to have some of the best water in the country. In fact, many people claim the quality of NY Bagels and San Francisco sourdough is due to the qualities of the water there. And secondly, people can be easily fooled if can convince them to be. There are hundreds of fine dining restaurants which serve crap food yet have people raving about them because they're convinced based on the setting that the food must be good. That doesn't mean the entire notion of fine dining is false. Water quality varies from place to place and rather noticably. The tap water in Melbourne is absolutely fantastic, so good that it's bottled as Mountain Springs water which is about the most popular bottled water in Australia. At the other end of the spectrum, the tap water we had in Perth was absolutely abysmal and reeking in sulfur, completely undrinkable. When we travelled around europe, we drank tap water exclusively and there was also a marked difference in quality. Rome water was noticably superior. If you live in a place with fabulous tap water, then by all means exploit it. But if you live somewhere where the water quality is poor or inconsistant, then bottled water is a safe way to go. It may not taste amazing but it's almost guarenteed to be drinkable. And even if you have amazing water, sometimes you might be in the mood for something different.

Success, I bought another standing rib roast and tried my proposed method. I set the oven to 60C and waited until the core reached 60C which took about 5 hours. Then, I set the oven to 55C and waited until the core dropped to 55C. This took another 3 hours and it certainly isn't for the impatient cook. Luckily, I started the entire thing early in the morning and had an entire day to cook it. And the best part, not a single drop of juice came out of the roast, no matter how I mauled or squeezed it. I'm now convinced that at least one of the factors behind resting is that the meat must be allowed to drop at least X degrees below the peak temperature which allows the muscles to relax enough to absorb free juices. This means instead of relying on mystical voodoo about waiting 30 minutes per pound or whatever nonsense, you can just rely on a temperature probe and carve when it hits the desired temperature. You can even rest on the bench which will give a faster rest but cooler outsides.

But the whole point of a rack is that you get radiant, dry heat from the bottom as well as the top. Using a bed of vegtables, you would get a gentle, moist heat which produces something different.

Well, first, you get a wooden shack... ← wooden shack? that for the piggy? ← It was a reference to this piece of food lore

I vote that we now start naming chocolate desserts after mental disorders. How about Muchausens cocoa surprise? The server feels compelled to lie about how wonderful the dessert is but when they bring it to the table, you realise that it actually doesn't contain any chocolate. Chocolate-lemon bipolar granita? two popsicle sticks of chocolate and lemon, placed on a spinning plate. Obsessive Compulsive truffles? A 50/50 mixture of 50% cocoa chocolate and 50% butterfat cream made into perfect 5cm balls placed in a 5x5 grid with each ball being 5 cm away from each other ball. The dessert is eaten starting in the middle and working in a clockwise direction with 5 sips of water after every 5 truffles. Post-Traumatic Stress Gateau? A cake shaped into the face of an evil clown with a microphone embedded inside it making diabolical cackling sounds, gives you nightmares such that you never approach either chocolate or the circus ever again.

It certainly seems logical and could quite well work as intended but even if it does, I'm not very inclined to try because racks are a real bitch to clean. I'm happy with my sub-standard roast potatos and a single piece of al-foil to throw in the trash.

It should be fine as long as you haven't taken it past the smoke point.

Huh? I thought the entire point of confit was to get that lovely infused duck fat. Who cares how salty it is? Just use less salt in the final dish. Unless your using gallons of duck fat in a single dish or using other salty items, it shouldn't be a problem.

I think the reason pork belly has become so popular in America is because it's the only part of a pig that tastes like pig nowadays. Personally, while I think pork belly tastes fantastic, cuts like the neck and shoulder from much fattier pigs also taste very good and the variety is nice.

When I was small, I remember on one occasion how all the adults were making such a big deal about having crystal fungus for lunch because of how expensive it was and so on. I didn't see what the big deal was, it was almost completely tasteless and had a wierd texture and I think I made my parents rather angry by saying it tasted disgusting. Now that it's become cheap and ubiquitious, I don't think anyone I know eats it anymore because it tastes like nothing.

I have a benzomatic as well found here. On the side, it says: Which sounds rather ominous yet perusing the MSDS linked to on that site yields no obvious carciongens. I think they just mean CO which does certainly cause lots of worries in high doses but should be fine as long as your using it in a well-ventilated area. edit: fixed link

Well, first, you get a wooden shack...

I also eat seeded watermelon and never seem to notice the seeds. Obviously, they are there, but when i eat, I just don't think about them. I think it's all to do with the chewing method. The seeds are exceedingly slippery and round. So unless you do a straight up down chomping motion, the seeds will slip out and not be chewed.

Whats the difference between a 145F holding cabinet and a 145F oven? One key feature about the LTLT method is that no juice leaks from the roast, not even a single drop. Which means an extra juicy roast but no pan drippings. So I don't see why a holding cabinet would behave differently from the oven. Maybe the act of handling the roast would cause it to leak if your squeezing it or putting pressure on it. And it sounds like your 120F holding cabinet idea is the same as my proposal. The process of "resting" happens when a roast drops a fraction from it's peak temperature.

If your doing LTLT cooking of roast beef, then just leave the rest in the oven overnight. The longer cooking process will finish converting the collagen to gelatin and will absolutely not degrade the flavour. You wake up the next morning with perfect roast beef for breakfast.

We're deep into the depths of winter here so I decided to make a minestrone inspired stew. First, Pork ribs were browned in the oven along with some onion, celery, carrots, garlic and tomatos, all finely diced. Then, 20 minutes in the pressure cooker with some red wine, water, beef stock, bay leaves, thyme, mustard, paprika, salt and pepper until the pork was falling off the bone tender. Lid comes off and in goes large chunks of carrot, celery, onion, red kidney beans, potatos, pasta and green beans in that order, times so they would all be done at the same time. Simmered until the pasta was done. Stirred in some chopped up parsley and served. Dessert was a Passionfruit-Chocolate Creme Brulee inspired by this thread Last night was a pumpkin soup, a lettuce, sun dried tomato, goats cheese and roasted garlic salad and a aged standing rib roast cooked in a very low oven for 4 hours with a demi-glace sauce.

I don't think it's mental attitude so much as a change in the agricultural landscape. Why bother slaving away producing wheat on marginal land when that land could be turned much more productively to watermelons or grapes and import the wheat from somewhere else? Back in the "good old days", people had to grow everything locally because they had no choice. I certainly don't think this would be a desirable condition to go back to.

I just made this tonight and it was pretty amazing. Next time I do it, I would make the mix 1/3rd chocolate, 2/3rds passionfruit as I thought the chocolate overrode the delicate passionfruit a bit. I also would have amped up the flavour of the passionfruit considerably, this time, I did 1 small passionfruit per person without any seeds and it could have done with a more intense passionfruit kick. I think it would be interesting to get a small circular ring mold and fill the centre with chocolate and then the outside with passionfruit, IMHO, this would make for a much nicer presentation and would make it easier to get a taste of chocolate and passionfruit in every bite.

I remember a certain steakhouse advertising that their special, high capacity broilers could reach up to 3000F. I assume home broilers would be considerably wimpier.

this seems to be the opposite of my understanding. The surface of the roast is always much, much hotter than the center (depending on the size of hte roast and hte heat of the oven, of course). on the other hand, it seems to me that after being pulled from the oven, the surface and outer perimeter would cool at a much quicker rate than the center, resulting in more even doneness. this theory has the added advantage of fitting with practical experience: But think of a slice of prime rib: the surface will be browned (300-degrees plus), the outer perimeter will be medium to well (160 plus) while the center is still pink (130). Granted, cooking a smaller roast in a cooler oven will result in more even doneness, but there will still be a range. As for the "sealing in the juices", i'm not going to touch that can of worms, except to point out that, practically speaking again, if you slice the meat right out of the oven, you end up with a lot more juice on the board than if you let the meat rest. ← That would be true in conventional roasting. However, the Blumethal method (which I'm just going to call LTLT for Low Temperature, Long Time from now on) is completely different. Under LTLT, you set the temperature of your cooking apparatus to the desired temp of your meat. So when I took the meat out of the oven, the outside was exactly 60C and the centre was also exactly 60C. However, even under this method, there was significant leakage from the meat when it was taken straight out of the oven, suggesting that the "thermal gradient" idea of resting, while possibly a very strong factor in leakage, is not the only factor. Clearly, something else is going on here as well.

This is an interesting point but are there really any desirable meta-stable compounds between 60C (medium rare) and say, around 130C (when maillard reactions start in earnest). In my blowtorch thread, I pointed out that I got around the need for high heat searing and browning by using a blowtorch which would only bring the very skin of the meat above 60C and leave the rest of the meat completely untouched. Thus, I have a very thin region that produces the meta-stable maillard chemicals that are needed for browning and I have the rest of the meat at 60C and in thermal equilibria, is there anything I'm missing out on in terms of chemicals? I know collagen starts dissolving at just below 60C but it takes quite a while for it to proceed at that low tempeature so it was quite likely that my roast did not have as much gelatine as it could have. Blumethals method requires 20 hours in the oven, presumably to fully dissolve the collagen but a rib roast seems to not have much connective tissue at all so I was willing to live with that. In short, is there any disadvantage to the blowtorch/low oven way of cooking compared to the conventional way apart from the time it takes?

But this ignores the fact that I wasn't using the conventional high heat roasting method. Under the Blumethal method, there is no coast so this should not be a factor.

Is this the whole thing about the sealed exterior "sealing in the juices"? I think it's been quite conclusively debunked that a seared exterior does precisely nothing at all in holding in interior liquids. The crust is porous enough such that it's no barrier at all. And what do you mean you need the roast to come into thermal equilibria with the room? You want the meat to come completely to room temperature? That doesn't sound very appetizing, besides, most people routinely serve well-rested meat thats far above room temperature. I'm not convinced by this explaination This may very well be correct and would at least be consistant with observations. It may be that meat at 55C will hold much more liquid than meat at 60C, in that case, letting it rest for the requisite n minutes will decrease the internal temperature enough such that all the juices are absorbed into the fibre. If this is the case, then a far superior way of resting would be to first cook the meat in a 60C oven until the internal temperature hits 60C, then to drop the oven down to 55C and wait again until the internal temp hits 55C. In this case, the entire chunk of meat becomes equally rested which is far superior to the benchtop method of resting where the exterior becomes over rested (and thus, too cold) and the interior becomes under-rested. However, experimentation would be needed to determine exactly how much of a temperature drop produces well rested meat. This seems to be largely the thrust of the first point and I still remain unconvinced. My main problem with it is to view the resting process from the perspective of the centre of the meat. How does the roast know where it is after 10 minutes or 50 minutes? A chunk of meat doesn't automatically know what the temperature is 30cm away from it, there needs to be some mechanism to convey to the centre of the roast that it is now sitting on the table and not in the oven. Under your theory, it seems that resting should increase fluid loss, not decrease it. After all, immediately out of the oven, it has a completely flat temperature gradient from the inside to the outside of the roast. 30 minutes out of the oven, it has a very steep temperature gradient as the core is still at 60C while the outside will be at 30C. This would imply that there will be a larger migration of fluids within the body after 30 minutes of resting and, thus, should produce more fluids when cut. Personally, I think by the process of elimination, cause B is the most likely to be what the correct answer is. The butcher is selling aged rib roasts criminally cheap so I will buy another roast next weekend and try the method 2 of roasting to 60C and then reducing the oven to 55C until the internal temp hits 55C. I will report back with my findings.

It seems to me that resting is still resting firmly in the realms of culinary voodoo and nobody I've read has really given me a satisfactory explanation as to exactly what is happening inside the meat when it rests. Until today, I thought resting had to do with the fact that a piece of meat cooked over high heat was in thermal disequilibria, Because meat can hold on to differing amounts of liquid at different temperatures, the act of coming into equilibria would shift juices around the meat, some of which will leak if you cut it open. But today, I cooked a rib roast using the Heston Blumethal inspired method of setting the oven at the desired temperature of the roast and letting the entire thing come into equilibria, under my logic, this would completely do away with the need for resting. However, when I actually cut into it, it was clear that it leaked far more juice that the well rested roasts I've cooked earlier. So what actually happens during the rest that helps keep the juices in the meat and off the cutting board?

I think blowtorches in the culinary world are in the place kitchen scales and thermometers were 20 years ago. Nobody has them so nobody writes recipes involving them so nobody has the urge to go out and buy one. But once you have one, then it changes your style of cooking so dramatically that you couldn't imagine life without one. Has anyone actually written a blowtorch cookbook yet? It seems like a quite lucrative market niche.