Shalmanese

I've found you only need a single layer of cheesecloth provided you discard (aka: drink) the first 5 minutes of water coming off the tomatoes. As the tomatoes settle into the filter, they naturally form a dense mat that's enough to filter out the particulates.

Working gently is correct for 100% raw meat because raw meat has too much adhesion so you want to minimize it to get a tender, airy structure. Cooked meat doesn't really have adhesion and 40% cooked meat is a lot so you need to modify your procedure to get adequate adhesion for the correct texture. Ground meat can fall anywhere on the burger-sausage spectrum depending on how you process it. Ideally, you want something that has just enough adhesion but not too much that it becomes sausage-like.

If you want better cohesion, salt the meat ahead of time, let them rest, then mix into patties. The salt will draw out the myosin and form more of a sausage like texture. Experiment to see where you prefer on the crumbly/sausage texture spectrum.

Strawberry Margarita Ingredients 1.5oz Herradura Silver Tequila at room temperature 2oz Clarified Strawberry Lime juice at fridge temperature 0.5oz Cointreau at room temperature For the juice: Puree half a pound of strawberries with 2 limes. Add half a pack of gelatin to a few tsp of water (I would do a quarter pack next time), let sit for 5 minutes. Heat gelatin mix in the microwave until completely clear (30s), add to puree. Put in fridge for 2 hours, then in the freezer for 4 hours. Take the frozen puree and put over a cheesecloth lined strainer in the fridge overnight. To prepare: Mix the tequila, juice & cointreau in a container, stash in freezer for 2 hours Brush the outside of a glass with saturated salt solution, roll in sugar, stash in freezer Take both out, pour mixture into glass, drink. I didn't have any Pectinex or a centrifuge so I decided to use gelatine freeze-thaw to clarify the juice. I put a little bit too much in which means my yield was only 2 oz of clarified juice. After taking the photo, I measured the drink to be at -5.5C. The strawberry flavor was present but relatively muted at that temperature. After letting it warm to -2C, the strawberry flavor was much more pronounced.

I would argue if you're cooking from frozen, the ATK method produces a superior product. Searing the meat when frozen is going to result in a thinner band of grey meat and the subsequent dry heat of oven cooking preserves the crust better. In a low oven, the temperature banding for meat is minimal to imperceptible. Plus, cooking from frozen allows you to spend time better searing the fat cap on the sides of the steak, leading to crispy rendered fat. The one downside is that you have to monitor your meat so it doesn't get overcooked and you get less flexibility on when to serve.

From cooking issues:

It's a 4.5 oz pour which is perfectly in line with the classical preparation and way below the 8 oz monstrosities you see today.

OK, time for me to put my money where my mouth is: Tomato Martini Ingredients: 3 oz Q Gin from freezer 1/2 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth from fridge 1 oz Tomato-Olive Water from fridge 1 Basil Leaf 3 Salt Encrusted Cherry Tomatoes For the Tomato-Olive Water: Puree half a pint of cherry tomatoes with 2 olives (I would use 3 next time). Pour into a cheesecloth lined sieve and let sit in the fridge for 4 hours For the Salt Encrusted Cherry Tomatoes: I decided the cocktail still needed a bit more of a briny bite so I decided to make a simple garnish. Mix 50/50 salt and water in a small bowl & heat up in the microwave until boiling and enough salt has dissolved to make a saturated salt solution (you will know you've made it when you see tiny salt crystals floating on the surface of the water). Dip each tomato very briefly in the water, then let dry on a piece of parchment paper. The water will evaporate, leaving tiny salt crystals on the outside of the tomato. Repeat this step again to add a second layer of salt. Skewer on a toothpick and set aside. To assemble: Take a chilled glass from the freezer Smack a basil leaf, rub it against the outside of the rim Pour the gin, vermouth and tomato water into the glass Float the basil leaf on top Add the toothpick, making sure at least some to the tomatoes remain outside of the drink The cocktail had a subtle but distinct tomato flavor while still retaining the signature oily viscosity of a martini. I used a thermapen to measure the drink right after I took the photo and it was -6C which is a tad cold for a stirred drink but I let it warm for 60 seconds and it was already at -4C which was perfect. Next time, I'd use a slightly smaller basil leaf and add maybe another olive or two to the tomato water. Other than that, it was pretty damn good. I contend that there is no possible way to make a superior tomato martini using an ice shaker. There's simply no way to pack enough tomato flavor while still maintaining the signature oiliness of a well made martini.

Yes. I was using the 25% figure to keep the discussion simple. To me, the ability to adjust the dilution is the less important part of this. Whether it's 20% or 25% or 30%, you're still unavoidably adding water to a cocktail. The far more interesting thing, IMHO, is the ability to replace that water with a more flavorful liquid.

So, doing some math, if you take the 8:2:1:11/4 daiquiri recipe and use rum in the freezer at 0F, limes from the fridge at 40F, SS at room temperature at 70F and cold water from the tap at 50F, you get a drink that's 21F which is 2 degrees colder than perfect serving temperature. If you use the 4:2:1:7/4 daiquiri recipe, you get a 26F drink which is just a little bit warmer that ideal. So, in real life, you don't need to bother with chilled water or keeping mixers in the fridge, all you need to do is to keep the base spirit in the freezer for this to work.

I never advocated putting pre-diluted bottles of booze in the freezer. I don't know where you got that impression. If you insist on absolutely having the exact same rigid convenience requirements of a commercial bar then sure, you're only option is shaking drinks. The same way that if you absolutely insist on having a risotto 5 minutes after you want one, par cooking is the only way to go. But for most people at home, the requirements are not as strict which allows for a different way of preparing drinks. It's superior because anything you can do the traditional way can be done via the pre-chilled way but there's lots of things that can be done via the pre-chilled way that can't be done the traditional way. The benefit is less apparent when talking about classic cocktails because they're designed around traditional techniques so you're left just tweaking ratios but I'm arguing doing it the pre chilled way opens up a whole new world of variations because it's now possible to sub the water for something else.

We take the quality of the ingredients as a given. Obviously, you need to start with good ingredients but we're asking if technique changes can make the drink even better. Ratios of daiquiris are all over the place. Just from a quick perusal online, I see 4:2:1, 8:2:1, 8:3:3, 10:3:2. I'm sure you have your own personal ratio that you've tried and dialed in to be perfect for you because everyone's preferences are different. Even a quarter ounce difference in any of these ingredients would result in a completely different daiquiri. So my question then is, how do you know that the *exact* right amount of water for a 6 oz daiquiri pour is 1.5 oz? Maybe it's 1.25, maybe it's 1.75. You've never tried a 1.25oz water pour because that's impossible to achieve with a shaker. You've probably never tried a 1.75oz either because there's no daiquiri recipe that instructs you to add water. How do you know you've found your perfect daiquiri recipe unless you dial in this parameter? If it ends up that your perfect daiquiri requires exactly 1.5oz of water for a 6oz pour, then consider yourself lucky and go back to shaking with ice. But given how the ratio of all the other ingredients differ, I can't see how this one wouldn't too.

Or actually, let's take the ubiquitous strawberry margarita as a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I love the concept of a strawberry margarita but every time I've tried one, it's inevitably been disappointing because to get enough strawberry flavor into the drink, you've introduced so much extra water that it's impossible to balance out with any ratio of the other ingredients. Instead, I would contend that if you were to puree, sieve and freeze fresh strawberries, then use them in the shaker instead of ice, you could produce a strawberry margarita that you would actually want to drink.

But you could, for example, have used frozen pineapple juice in the shaker instead of ice when making the zombie. It would have been exactly the same strength but the pineapple would come through stronger because it's not being diluted. If you were at a restaurant and you had the choice of ordering 100% pineapple juice or 75% pineapple juice topped up with water, pretty much everyone would order and prefer the 100% pineapple juice. If that's the best thing to drink straight, why wouldn't it be the best thing to put in your cocktail?

I'm saying if you're going to make a "classic" daiquiri, the superior way to make it would be with rum from the freezer, limes from the fridge, SS from the fridge and chilled water from the fridge and maybe a slight shake with ice or 5 minutes in the freezer if it's not cold enough. Think about it this way, people debate endlessly about the "correct" ratios for a daiquiri because each person has a different preference. I don't see how water could be immune from that debate. Some people might want a slightly more dilute daiquiri, some people might want less. With a shaken daiquiri, the people who want less are out of luck. With the chilled version, you can precisely dial in your preference for water just like you can for the rum, lime and SS. And by doing it this way, you open yourself up to a whole raft of alternative plays on the daquiri. Perhaps you could try a coconut daiquiri just by subbing the chilled water with chilled coconut water. Or a cucumber and basil daiquiri by subbing water for cucumber juice and making a basil SS. Or maybe a more assertive hemingway daiquiri by using all grapefruit juice instead of half juice/half water. Using the pre-chilled version, you have options that you wouldn't have with the shaken ice version.

For a commercial environment where speed and cost effectiveness are paramount, I totally get why the cocktail shaker dominates. Shaking liquids with ice is a remarkably fast and cheap way to get a liquid down to optimal serving temperatures. But I think in porting bar recipes to the home environment, we've adopted them rather uncritically without looking at the assumptions underlying them. In the home kitchen we don't par cook risotto and then cool it on sheet trays, we don't sear off a bunch of steaks and then roast them many hours later, we don't meticulously complete every single piece of mise en place before we start cooking. And the reason is because a home kitchen is a very different place from a restaurant kitchen and a home bar is also a very different place from a cocktail bar. The problem with any bar recipe is that shaking a room temperature cocktail with water ice unavoidably adds a ~25% dilution of water to your recipe. It's always easy to add more water to a recipe but exceedingly difficult to take any out which means you're stuck with a baseline of 25% water dilution before you've started constructing the rest of your recipe. If we look over to the culinary world, when liquids are added to a dish, water is sometimes used but far more often, it's stocks, wines, dashi, milk, tomato sauce or coconut milk to list just a few examples. The reason why is because these ingredients not only add liquids but also flavor to a dish. Not having the constraint of a 25% water dilution strikes me as a wonderful opportunity to infuse more flavor into our cocktails. Somewhere in the vast universe of cocktails, there's a cocktail involving tomato water or tea or coconut water that can't be balanced via shaking with ice and, as a result, has not been invented yet. Fortunately, for the home bar, we can have certain freedoms that commercial bars can't have. To wit: We can keep ingredients chilled or frozen rather than at room temperature. Any non-alcoholic ingredient can be kept in the fridge and any alcoholic ingredient can be kept in the freezer. This would be unaffordable for a typical cocktail bar that has hundreds of bottles of spirits and a dozen mixers. But for an average home bar, keeping a half dozen of your most commonly used spirits in the freezer is totally practical. You don't even have to put the entire bottle in the freezer, you can just decant a small amount into a separate container (again, something a commercial bar can't do). If you're never planning to make more than 3 or 4 cocktails a night, then you only need a couple of ounces in the freezer at any one time, topping them up as you use them. We can make non-water ice cubes. Commercial ice makers don't work well with anything but pure water but ice cube trays allow us to make ice cubes out of almost anything, bag them into labelled ziplocks and have them stored almost indefinitely. If you're making a bloody mary, use tomato juice ice cubes. If you're making a screwdriver, orange juice ice cubes etc. We can make then chill a drink. In a commercial bar, people order a drink and then expect it within minutes. At home, you can plan ahead. For example, make the cocktail you want as you're starting dinner and then throw it in the freezer. Take it out as dinner's ready and you'll have the perfectly chilled cocktail, without any dilution. If all else fails, we can still default back to shaking with water ice but, with a colder base, so you might only have to deal with a 5 or 10% dilution.Remember, if you want to make a "classic" cocktail using any of these methods, you still can. Simply add chilled liquid water of the appropriate amount to the cocktail in substitute for ice. So sure, if you just want something that's cheap, fast and easy, continue to shake with ice like a bar uses and you'll have an acceptable cocktail. But if you really want to start pushing the boundaries of where cocktails can go, you should consider abandoning the shaker at home and start exploring what new opportunities that leads you.

The video clearly states that a fresh steak is superior to either of the frozen steaks and it's not advocating you should freeze fresh steaks just to use this method. As for why you might have frozen steaks, you could be buying an entire quarter/half/whole cow and freezing it. You could be buying an entire primal to save money. You could have planned to have steaks for a dinner party and then your guests cancelled. There's lots of reasons why you might have frozen steaks on hand. You can see the cross section of the steak as they cut into it, Anything in the thin band is going to be cooked via the searing but anything outside of that is cooked via oven heat. For any steak thicker than a thin slice of bread, you're going to still have a pink middle.

The searing is just to brown the outside, the actual cooking is done in a low oven so the effect should be the same regardless of the thickness of the steak.

There's not much that's great near the airport but the light rail to downtown is pretty fast and affordable.

I used to not care for grilled corn for the exact same reason until I discovered I was cooking it wrong. If you grill them them the entire time, they get tough before they get cooked. Instead, slather them with a compound butter, wrap them in foil and cook for 3 minutes a side. Then, unwrap and cook them for just a minute or two a side to brown. The corn soaks up the butter in the foil and then crisps on the grill.

Over 6 hours to pasteurize means you really should consider cutting whatever you're cooking thinner since that doesn't give you much wiggle room for spoilage to happen before pasteurization occurs. What are you cooking and how are you portioning it? One of the big mindset shifts that comes from SV cooking is the switch from "cook then portion" to "portion, then cook". Don't try to do whole roasts or large muscle cuts SV, the thickness works against you.

There's a particular type of grape that I used to enjoy in China as a child, black with a slip off skin and a juicy, jelly like interior. Every time I go back to China, I gorge on those grapes because I know I'm not going to be able to eat them for a very long time. Recently, on a vacation to Japan, I found the same grapes and discovered they are called Kyoho Grapes. Unfortunately, the Japanese ones are ungodly expensive (the cheapest have been $6USD for a small bunch but they can get up to $50USD a bunch to be given as gifts) so I did not get to indulge too much. Are they available where you are? If so, count yourself lucky because those grapes, along with Xinjiang lamb skewers are two food memories I still dream about to this day.

I'm in Japan right now on vacation. We've not had Kobe specifically but have had quite a bit of Japanese A5 wagyu. Here are the facts as I understand them: * Technically, Wagyu refers to all Japanese Beef and Tashima-Wagyu refers to the type of beef Americans know as Wagyu beef (and what I'll be calling it). * Although Kobe wagyu is the only type known in America, there's many different beef regions in Japan that produce wagyu. * The availability of wagyu in Japan is insane. High end groceries can have up to 1/3rd of their beef case devoted to wagyu and even fairly ho-hum grocery stores & butchers will generally have some wagyu for sale. * The marbling on Japanese wagyu is so much incredibly higher than the stuff I've eaten in America or Australia and the marbling is incredibly even and consistent. * Prices for Japanese wagyu seem to start around $40USD/lb and go up from there. $60 - $80USD/lb would be typical mid range but some of it fetches over $300USD/lb. * Meat in general is expensive in Japan and non-Wagyu beef is around $20-30USD/lb so wagyu is not a huge step up in price. * Wagyu, if properly raised, should have fat with a very low melting temperature so it can absolutely be served rare. Wagyu sashimi is very popular and the fat melts in your mouth, even when raw. * A5 Wagyu is so rich, a traditional American style steak style preparation would be inappropriate. Instead, it's typically served raw, quickly simmered shabu shabu style or grilled a piece at a time yakiniku or teppanyaki style.

I'll forgo my usual rant about people's obsession with Garlic and Botulism despite Garlic only being responsible for 3% of Botulism. Soil Botulism only grows above 10C and above a pH of 4.6, even in an anaerobic environment. If you're marinating meats, you should be getting it below 4C anyway, regardless of botulism and most marinade contain acids that should bring the pH low enough. It would take a lot to abuse a marinade in such a way that botulism becomes a concern and if you do, you probably have other pathogens you need to worry about anyway.

It's not the vacuum chamber, it's that SV meat temperatures aren't high enough to cook garlic. Vacuum marinated meat that's later roasted or grilled is fine. For SV, use either roasted garlic, sauteed garlic or garlic powder.