Shalmanese

It's generally not possible to pasteurize seafood sous vide as the time and temps involved would overcook them.

Julia Child lived in a time when cooking knowledge was largely passed down through folklore and tradition and she's probably just repeating lore that was commonly accepted in French kitchens at the time. I wouldn't put too much credence by it. Along with commonly repeated but wrong beliefs like searing seals in the juices and you should never wash mushrooms, there were also some truly wacky beliefs like menstruating women couldn't whip egg whites. I think this falls into the same category.

A technique that works well for too thin cuts of meat is to primarily sear just one side only for twice as long, then just give it a quick 10s flash on the other side to remove the pink & serve seared side up. It's not ideal but it's better than trying to get both sides brown without overcooking the middle and I'm often surprise how I can't tell that the second side isn't browned, especially if there's a sauce that goes over it.

Chicken Parma is an Australian shortened version of Chicken Parmigiana which means "Chicken in the style of Parma", a region of Italy that produces both Parma ham and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. While all 3 are a products of the same region, the primary cheese used on Chicken Parma is usually mozzarella or some other kind of melting cheese (with Parmigiano as a secondary cheese) and ham seems to be entirely an Australian innovation.

I've taken to using mostly ziplocs and not very carefully using the displacement method directly in the bath to start with. 10 minutes later, I can come back and all the air will have been pushed to a single corner and you can use the displacement method again to get it out. Especially with vegetables, some degree of off gassing is inevitable which means you end up having to let air out multiple times anyway. It helps to have asbestos hands when you're doing this but I end up preferring ziplocs to foodsaver bags because of this ability.

Serious eats has a new article on using sugar osmosis to create syrups. Looks like an interesting thing to try at least.

You can also make Kulfi which is an Indian ice-cream that you can just freeze in a freezer.

If you haunt thrift stores, ice cream makers seem to be one of those things that people buy, use once and then sell 5 years later. I've seen plenty of brand new looking machines for $5 or less.

To make your own ginger juice, just finely grate ginger then press against a sieve to extract the juice.

Back when Pepsi did the "Pepsi challenge", people preferred the sweeter Pepsi when drinking a single mouthful but preferred Coke when drinking an entire can. I think the same principle applies on TC, TC judges are served such an overwhelming amount of food that they have no choice but to eat a tiny bit of every dish. I know when I've made dishes, there's plenty of things that seem delicious on the first bite that become overly seasoned and fatiguing on the palate when I'm halfway through the dish. Eventually, you learn to dial back the seasoning commensurate with the expected serving size. What I think trips up a lot of chefs is that they're used to seasoning amuse bouche portions with amuse bouche levels of seasoning and entrees with entree levels of seasoning but they need to break that habit and season entrees as if they were amuse bouches. Also, I think chefs that are known for their "big, bold" flavors like Carlos seem to go much farther in the competition than those known for subtle, refined flavors for the exact same reason.

You should try fish sauce next.

Smoke molecules are small enough that they can move through the lining of a plastic bag. This is why people commonly advocate smoking after SV.

In the Western tradition, perhaps. In the E/SE Asian tradition *some* fat is always a good thing. With Ramen broth (as I posted about above) lots of fat is a good thing in many cases. In many Chinese-type soups unctuous fat is appreciated. Ditto SE Asian soups. One need not go overboard, but a "soup" with zero fat in it is not the most appreciated soup in all cases in those traditions. While many Asian stocks and soups have emulsified and unemulsified fats in them, there's definitely many highly prized clear soups and broths with no fat in them. Birds nest soup, for example, would be considered marred if it were clouded by fat.

Why not just get 4 20 qt pots instead of 1 80qt pot?

The concern is not that there will be any live bacteria after the cook, it's that the bacteria that used to exist had enough time to produce off flavors before they died.

Heavy cream is about 37% fat, so you should get that about that percentage of the weight of the litre. But butter is only 80% fat so you should get a 46% yield ideally.

Just FYI, there are certain instances where garlic studded in meat can turn blueish-green. The garlic is still perfectly fine to eat but some people find it unappetizing to look at. Personally, I've never found garlic studded meat to be a great method. But if you're fine with the appearance and it's what you want, there's no harm.

Did you vent the popovers after they come out of the oven? It's essential to let the hot air and moisture from the insides escape before they have a chance to condense. Not doing so leads to gummy interiors.

I think you're going to get biased answers in this thread since people who don't have a use for food mills aren't going to be inclined to answer. I bought a food mill on a whim from a thrift shop because it was only $3. It's ok. If you're doing one of the few things that a food mill is great for and you're doing it a LOT (like making tomato sauce or apple sauce), then it might be worthwhile to get one but you should know that already if that's what you're doing. But apart from that, it's a pretty niche instrument and almost anything you can do with a food mill, you could also do with a blender & sieve, albeit slower. In truth, most people don't have a good use for it which is why it's not found in many kitchens.

If you have a full service butcher near you, have a chat with them and tell them what you're after. Often, they're left with a lot of bones that they can't sell and would be happy to give away to you. In particular, some of the bones I like for their cartilage are shoulder blade bones from pigs with their long thin plate of cartilage, neck bones from pigs/sheep, rib tips from pigs, chicken carcasses for the central breast bone. Alternatively, if there's an Asian or Mexican butcher near you, they often have a lot of the aforementioned cuts for pretty cheap.

I was raised in a Chinese household and it didn't even occur to me until a couple of years ago that some people considered cartilage to be non-edible. To me, crunching on the cartilage is one of the favorite parts of the meal. They're like meaty, extra thick potato chips. I also love to crack open bones and suck out the bone marrow. You can tell if a chicken is well cooked by the texture of the bone marrow. Undercooked chicken will have red, coppery tasting raw bone marrow, over cooked chicken will have chalky, dusty bone marrow. But a perfectly cooked chicken will have tender, custardy bone marrow that will come out in one suck, leaving a perfectly clean bone tube. I also love sucking and chewing on pork rib bones to extract the bone marrow soup embedded in it. To me, it's the most intense, porkiest morsel of the entire animal.

Mhyrvold has demonstrated that steamed and brushed with duck fat confit was indistinguishable from traditionally cooked, unaged confit. I would imagine a braised confit would be slight less flavorful since some of the flavor would be absorbed into the braising liquid but apart from that, I can't imagine many huge differences. The traditional cooking method is chosen NOT for it's cooking ability but for it's keeping ability. Confit was traditionally used to preserve meat over long winters at room temperature. Despite this now no longer being a major requirement for confit, the traditional techniques haven't received much re-examination.

Don't vac seal them, You want to keep them loosely stored so moisture doesn't condense onto the surface. Also, don't store in the fridge as that can also cause condensation. If it's only for a day or two, just storing them loosely in a bag or jar at room temperature should be fine. If it's especially humid or you're trying to store for a bit longer, you can either add some silica gel packs to your storage container or, gently re-heat in an oven until crisp and then allow to cool down to room temperature again before eating.

If it was only an hour, then basically, it was the same as putting the meat on a warm counter for an hour and bringing it to room temp which is still within acceptable food safety guidelines. I'd find a way to sterilize the outsides before re-sous videing it though. Either a quick sear or a dip in boiling water.

You can't dry age a tenderloin effectively. You need whole primals to be able to dry without excessive loss.