Shalmanese

Non pathogenic organisms are far less studied in food science than pathogenic organisms and food safety guidelines are centered around toxicity, not palatability. Once in a while, you hear something funny going on with SV foods and it's likely some kind of thermophilic bacteria that's non-toxic but is producing all sorts of funky compounds during it's brief reproduction period. Remember, it doesn't take much to make food smell unpalatable, concentrations in parts per million are enough to be detected by the human nose.

The problem is you rolled it. The interior of (non-jaccarded) meat is sterile, only the surface of meat has pathogens. For standard flat cut of meat, the surface goes from 4C -> 130C fairly quickly and any pathogens have barely enough time to breed before dying. For a rolled piece of meat, the surfaces in the center take a very long time to reach 130C and it's likely some pathogen in the middle was quickly reproducing while it was coming up to temp. All of the pathogens would have been dead after a 22 hour cook but the byproducts remain. There's no telling if they were actually harmful or not but it's irrelevant since they're undesirable. There's no good reason to cook meat rolled in SV, pasteurization time increases as the square of maximum thickness so you want your foods to be as thin as possible. If you really insist on rolling, blanch the outside of the meat in boiling water before rolling and sealing.

There's an old thread on eGullet Dinner for 40 that has lots of great ideas for the kind of mass scale cooking you're thinking of.

Sure, but there's maybe 3mm of play over a 10cm shaft, meaning a bending of less than 2 degrees is enough to damage it.

Also, an 800W heater instead of a 1000W from the v1 apparently. From the looks of the picture, they didn't fix the flawed impeller design which, from even the slightest bending of the stem, would cause the impeller to hit the housing and cause a loud rattling.

Even if you're not planning on getting two, I suggest checking the kickstarter page often anyway. There are people who are switching from lower tier pledges to the $229 level. When I checked, there was a $135 and a $145 tier slot open.

You can use a circulator to cook and warm plates at the same time. It seems like it would be relatively rare for a circulator to be so occupied that you can't fit a set of plates in. Plates are flat and don't take up much room.

Get a chinese noodle strainer thing. They're designed to shake water off of noodles and they should work for ice as well.

Beef cheeks might be the cheapest on display but every butcher I've been to, when I ask them if they have any scraps out back, has been willing to sell me bones for chump change.

Um, every season. That's the basic structure of the show. I'm honestly surprised that anyone is still surprised about this.

The cooling is neat but with a 50W Peltier cooler, I'd temper expectations of what to expect performance wise. Zem: I've found the thing I care about a lot with SV devices is noise. Do you have any specs on dB?

Cooling is 50W and the maker already states that you cannot do cook-chill in this device. However, you can safely do chill-cook (ie: add chicken in the morning, chill until 4 pm, bring up to temp and have dinner on the table at 6).

A 1000W heater can bring a 4.5L water bath from room temp to 85C in 21 minutes. Heat loss is apparently on the order of 35 - 50W so even taking that into account, you're still well within the margin of safety.

If you made confit, you should have enough duck fat to store confit, no? Vac sealing is a good idea but if you want to be extra safe, I'd put the vacced bags in boiling water for 5 minutes, just to re-pasteurize the outsides. Next time, just make confit in vac bags and you won't have to worry about storage.

Also, you should ask if the program would be willing to seam butcher the meat. Standard American cutting style emphasizes large flat cuts with a bandsaw, yielding cuts with pieces of multiple muscles. Traditional, European style butchery cuts along the seams of muscles, yielding whole muscles that cook more evenly. It's more time consuming and a slightly steeper learning curve but you end up with cuts that don't even have a name in America. I've found great grilling cuts from traditionally slow cooked areas like the chuck. For example, the muscle that stretches the length of the shoulder blade bone makes the best tasting fajitas you've ever had.

Yeah, the hindquarter is a lot of round and not much else. That's not ideal for grilling. Personally, I tend to ask for as large a cut as possible and fabricate at home. That allows you maximum flexibility. Also, I'd consider either using your food processor or buying a meat grinder and asking for no ground meat. You can always turn cuts into ground, but never the other way around. Plus, fresh ground meat is unoxidized and tastes way better. I'd strongly consider asking for a forequarter instead, there's way more interesting cuts there.

Cranked to max, it also doubles as a really great plate warmer and a good place to stash a turkey/roast/ham for big meals like thanksgiving. They had some quality control issues when I first got mine and I ended up having to get it replaced 3 times but the one I have now appears to be working great.

Another use for non-water circulation is if you're doing high volume of a single item, placing them directly in the bath will cause the bath water to eventually equilibriate with the item. This is similar to the principle behind "dirty water" hot dogs in NYC. The advantage is that you can add and remove items at will and not have to deal with opening and closing plastic bags.

Just a whisk is fine.

16 million is the max for pure capsaicin. It's amazing to think we're breeding peppers now that are basically 6% capsaicin.

Where does Myhrvold say no? From what I remember, he says you eliminate oxidation using vacuum bags which can increase keeping quality of cook chill foods. When you have a bajillion chamber vacuums like him, this is a no-brainer and he does stuff like chamber vac beans and water to hydrate them instead of just putting them in a bowl like a normal person. For everyone else, just use ziplocks and don't think about it.

Ah, I get it, you mean it gets put down somewhere and sticks to a piece of dough and gets folded in. I was imagining someone slashing a piece of dough and the blade catching and getting stuck and the person being so oblivious they didn't notice the razor in their hand was now no longer there.

I'm still unclear on this, how the hell do you lose a razor blade?

Singapore has extremely high alcohol taxes ($88 SGD per litre of alcohol) and the SGD is ~80% of the USD so experience with US prices is unhelpful. A $20 SGD bottle of wine will be equivalent to a $8 USD bottle of wine.

In Western pastry tradition, the default is butter so if you see a recipe with oil, that means a) It's in a misguided attempt to be healthier in which case you should ignore that recipe and look for a better one or b) the author is using oil for a specific quality that they believe to be superior to butter like more moistness or a more tender crumb. If see a recipe using oil, make it with oil first before tinkering with it. If you really want to make a recipe with butter, choose one of the thousands of alternatives that uses butter. Trying to backport a recipe seems counter intuitive to me.