Shalmanese
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Posts posted by Shalmanese
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The entree = main course is pretty much uniquely American thing (maybe Canadian too). When I've been to Australia, the UK and other English speaking countries, entree always means appetizer.
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I think in any country, during any stretch of history, you'll find a significant portion of people who have an inferiority complex about their country and another portion that has a superiority complex. The issue is sufficiently complex that it's hard to reduce down into a simple throughline.
Some factors of note that play into this though include:
1) From it's founding, America's always stood out for it's bounty. Meat for every meal for the middle class was a relative novelty and much of America's culinary traditions have focused on an emphasis on quantity over quality. Everything from Thanksgiving feasts & cornucopias to modern portion sizes to "Everything's bigger in Texas" reflect America's bountiful culinary traditions.
2) It's pretty widely agreed that America's post war prosperity led it head first into an embrace of modern "convenience foods" and agricultural supersizing that was a pretty dire time for America's culinary tradition and a general dumbing down of the American palate (c.f. Lileks). Europe, because of it's post war poverty, managed to avoid a lot of those same mistakes.
3) Despite what's happened in the past, I don't think anyone is really in dispute that present day America is an incredibly exciting place for food and that there's emerged a distinct "New American" cuisine that rivals any other country on the world stage. America's restaurants regularly top world "best of" lists and the quality of dining up and down the entire spectrum is improving at a rapid clip as people become more invested in the food that they're eating.
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Well, yeah, by definition, the most popular recipes are the ones with the most broad based appeal. I think people in the food world often forget that for every avid food enthusiast, there's 10 casual food enthusiasts and for every casual food enthusiasts, there's 10 complete beginners. So if you take a poll of the most popular anything, it's going to be aimed at a relatively unsophisticated audience.
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FWIW, the temperature bug only affects the displayed temperature. The temperature accessed via the API remains accurate.
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I've also been playing around with the unofficial bluetooth API and it's making me unreasonably excited that I can control the thing from my laptop after an hour of tinkering.
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I got my Anova Pro today and am in the middle of calibrating it when I discovered a bug. For temperatures between 0C - 10C, the Anova appears to lop off the first digit and display 0.XC. Similarly, between 30F and 40F, the Anova displays 30.XF. Can someone else confirm if they can replicate this?
Calibration seems to be pretty on point. The circulator read between 100.0 and 100.1C when immersed in boiling water, was within 0.1C of my thermapen at both 80C and 60C.
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What about Sambal Oelek? The Huy Fong webpage claims it's only chillies without added sugar/vinegar/garlic etc.
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Only somewhat related but can't think of anywhere else to ask:
Looking at the website of a new local-ish distillery, for their gin cocktails they say to keep the gin in the freezer so you don't need to add ice. Recipe simply states to put ingredients into shaker, shake, strain and serve. No ice. Now i know I'm still new to cocktails, but I thought the water dilution was also considered an 'ingredient'. I am very disinclined to buy their products after reading this on their site.
You need to add chilled water to reach the appropriate dilution. I did some experiments in another thread
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""" Super heated water (more than 212F) can be dangerous. Super heated water is not easy to make. You need pure water in a very smooth vessel and no vibration. ""
its very easy to make ( and hurt yourself if you are not aware of it )
I make it every morning w tap water and a pyrex glass measuring item
for my coffee. Im very careful to tough the water w a looooooooong spoon and stir before I add the coffee grounds
the water looks a bit cloudy before it explodes.
PS this is done in the microwave, forgot that important part !
Instead of potentially scalding yourself every morning, just put a toothpick in with the water when you microwave. You can even reuse the same toothpick!
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I just got a shipping notification email for my 2 red precision pros.
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It doesn't matter. All of them will work. You should be chiefly concerned with getting the right dose of habanero in there as it's so strong that it's extremely easy for it to become overwhelming.
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Yet if the restaurants had prepared just a parsley and oil mixture, nobody would have batted an eyelid as parsley oil, stored at room temperature is a routine preparation. This is despite parsley being as likely to harbor botulism spores as garlic. Garlic has simply emerged in the popular consciousness as inextricably linked with botulism, despite it not even being the most common vegetable (that would be asparagus).Here in Phoenix, in the past 5 years two restaurants were cited by the health department for having fresh garlic oil (that is, chopped raw garlic, plus parsley, and olive oil) of indeterminate age in bottles left out on the tables. Employees at one establishment stated that they made the oil about once a month to refill the bottles.
It's not always about how many fall ill, it can be about how many times preventative measures need to be taken to prevent outbreaks.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, there's more of a chance of you dying from a car accident going to the store to buy garlic than from garlic botulism. There were 2 cases of garlic linked with botulism affecting 4 people between 1990 - 2000. By my calculations, in those same 10 years, approximately 400 Americans would have died during that same time period from garlic buying expeditions (100M households * 20 garlic buying trips per household per year * 10 years * 2 miles round trip to the grocery store * 10 fatalities per billion passenger miles).
So you're better off strapping on a racing helmet and installing a roll cage in your car than obsessively monitoring the temperature of your roasted garlic oil if you're seriously concerned about the real danger in the world.
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That'd work too, but I don't know the tube are spaced and if my hand (or my thermopen) would be sensitive enuf to know where the edges were.
Anybody know where I can find a Modernist Cuisine stylee cut-away picture of a chest freezer?
Only one side has the coils and they're packed tightly enough that I wouldn't attempt to drill between them. Just drill from the side that doesn't have coils.
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Or: Turn it off, then turn it on for 3 minutes and feel which of the walls is the coldest.
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I'm fairly sure what they refer to as "Japanese Pepper" is, in fact, Sancho (Sichuan Peppercorns).
Sansho and Sichuan Peppercorns are related but not identical species (similar to Ginger and Galangal). They can be used somewhat interchangeably but they do taste different.
You can get Sansho Peppers from The Spice House somewhat affordably.
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I actually like that this season, everyone has dropped the pretense and are fully embracing that this is a game and that you should play strategically. With restaurant wars, the safest place to be has always been the best player on the worst team. It was obvious to Gregory and Katsuji that they didn't have much of a chance of winning so they pushed their two weakest members to team leader and FOH and then quietly sat back and executed solid, blameless food.
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You can also pan fry with a little bit of oil in a pan with another pan weighing it down for a crisp fish skin cracker.
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People are fixated on garlic and botulism because of the media but garlic actually ranks pretty low on the way you get botulism and the risk of botulism is extraordinarily low in the first place. You have about as much chance of dying driving to the grocery store to buy garlic than via botulism from the garlic.
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Do you typically have to blanch vegetables before freeze drying? If so, you could blanch the green beans in heavily salted water.
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Have you tried drying meat and then rehydrating in a marinade? Do you get greater penetration of flavors this way than a conventional marinade?
Also, I'm really curious why freeze drying raw meat hydrates easily while freezer burned raw meat is extremely difficult to rehydrate. Seems like both work on similar principles.
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....Put in an egg at 62C in for exactly 75 minutes and calibrate using the
if you take the egg out of the freezer, does not work
if you take the egg off the counter, does not work
if you take the egg out of some part of a refrigerator at some unknown temperature, doesn't work.
science is based on science, not eggs.
The egg equilibrates to the water temperature at the ~45 minute mark, regardless of starting temperature. 75 minutes is just to bring it in line with the Khymos chart. There are slight texture changes that vary by cook time but they're on the order of several hours.
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For example, let's say you receive an egregiously bad machine that reads:
1) 5C in an ice bath
2) 103C at a rolling boil (PS: forgot to mention this assumes you're at sea level. If you're at an elevation, look up the water boiling temperature at your location)
3) Your egg looks most like the 65.6C egg in the picture
This means your sensor is off by 5 degrees at 0C and -0.02 degrees for every degree rise. This means you should adjust the thermometer up 3.7 degrees so that it's accurate at 65C and you will be 0.4 degrees too warm at 45C and 0.4 degrees too cold at 65C (you can manually compensate for this if you're really anal).
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If you don't own a high quality thermometer, simply do the following steps
1) Calibrate at 0C in a circulating ice bath
2) Put in a pot of water on the stove and bring to a rolling boil to calibrate at 100C
3) Put in an egg at 62C in for exactly 75 minutes and calibrate using the Khymos charts: http://blog.khymos.org/2009/04/09/towards-the-perfect-soft-boiled-egg/
4) Plot the 3 lines on a graph, draw a straight line through them. This is the temperature response curve of your thermocouple. If the 3 points aren't close to being on a line, then something went terribly wrong somewhere.
If you perform all 4 steps, you'll have a very good idea how your sensor is performing across a range of temperatures and can calibrate accordingly. Typically, you want to calibrate so that it's accurate around 65C, that way, so long as your thermocouple isn't off my more than 1C/20C, it will be at most a degree off when cooking seafood at 45C and cooking vegetables at 85C (Apart from eggs, a difference of 1C is rarely noticeable).
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The 220V Anova one is available now and the 220V Anova Precision will be available in Jan 2015 and they ship worldwide. Personally, there doesn't seem to be much that you get from going more expensive. Accuracy is pretty good at every level, you can heat up pretty pretty huge baths if you're willing to insulate and the controls are mostly the same. Noise is one issue and build quality can be better on more expensive units but the technology is dropping in price so quickly you're better off buying the cheapest one you can now and replacing it when it breaks.
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Top Chef: Boston
in Food Media & Arts
Posted
It seems like this latest episode largely confirms my interpretation of the Doug/Katsuji relationship as a lovable one.