Shalmanese

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Preliminary update: Haven't had time for a full on tasting yet but I decided to just do a quick tasting of the broth, 2.5 days after making and report back. Had a friend over, I tasted them unblinded, she tasted them blinded. Summary: There's definitely a difference but it's pretty contrary to my expectations. Separated Broth: Tastes meatier, richer, slightly darker color, slightly saltier, she said it tasted "more tomatoey" Combined Broth: Tastes lighter, cleaner, slightly acidic, you can make out the individual flavors easier but they're less integrated. Overall, both of us rated the separated as tastier and preferred in this tasting. It's obvious the two broths are different so diffusion is doing something at least although I'm not quite sure what. I was expecting the complete opposite result and had to check my labeling several times to make sure I didn't get them confused.

I don't think it's actually that bad. I think until all the water evaporates from the skin, it can only be less than 212F on the other side of the skin, forming a gentle heat that doesn't overly cook the meat. I've often noticed when searing chicken thighs that the side seared with the skin is significantly less cooked than the side seared with the meat, even when they spent the same amount of time touching the pan. I often start chicken thighs in a cold pan as I feel like they get better rendered and crisp that way. Never tried with breasts because I never cook with breasts.

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Looks like these are "caviar" spheres commonly found in Molecular Gastronomy. The ingredient list includes calcium lactate and "seaweed extract" which is sodium alginate. It's impressive that they're managed to industrialize this. To the best of my knowledge, nobody else sells these commercially.

The law, at least in the US is that any ancillary food can be made from whatever you want but the primary thing being advertised must be made from the ingredients you get at the store. If you're selling ice cream topping, the ice cream can be made from mashed potatoes and if you're selling cereal, the milk can be made from glue but if you're selling a hamburger, you can hand tweezer the sesame seeds and use a syringe to apply the ketchup but they have to be real sesame seeds and real ketchup that you actually use for the burger.

The procedure I'm going to use is to put the whole soup in the salad spinner, then combine half the whole soup broth with the whole soup solids and half the separated soup broth with the separated soup solids. There's going to be 3 tests: combined whole soup vs combined separated soup, whole soup broth vs separated soup broth & whole soup solids vs separated soup solids. I don't have a good idea of how to reheat them evenly though, I was thinking of putting both in the microwave... I think the variance between batches is going to be larger than any changes due to aging. If someone else wants to do an experiment, they should order the same stew dish from a good restaurant 2 days apart and taste them blind, under the assumption that restaurants are better able to control consistency than a home cook.

OK, time to bring some empiricism into this. I made a Linguica, Kale & Potato Soup tonight. I've separated it into three containers: From left to right, the complete stew, just the broth separated out using a salad spinner & just the solids remaining in the salad spinner. For the two on the right, diffusion cannot happen. If the diffusion hypothesis is correct, there should be a noticeable taste difference between the samples. I'm going to let it sit in the fridge for 2 days, then taste a) the whole soup, b) the broth alone and c) the solids alone. I'll try and recruit a couple of friends and see if we can make it double blind. I'll report back in 2 days with the results.

a 3.5kg Pork Shoulder should exude about 4 - 5 cups of water/fat, even when not processed. Normally, most of this is evaporated so it can be disconcerting cooking it in an environment where evaporation is minimal. By law, processers are required to label when meat has been injected or brined. I'm guessing that you got an unbrined shoulder. Also, liquid getting into the cooker has nothing to do with the meat and is a sign that you have a faulty cooker.

There are people who still believe that menstruating women prevent sauces from thickening. I don't hold much credence in personal observation unless backed by at least some degree of rigorousness. For a long time, many people assumed that the "stall" observed in BBQ cooking was due to collagen conversion. While collagen conversion does occur and does take some amount of energy, the observed amounts were orders of magnitude too low to account for stall. It wasn't until Mhyrvold and a couple of other scientists decided to test it that we finally figured out it was almost entirely due to evaporation. Quite a jump there, from 'observation' to 'statement', since no one can accurately say they've 'observed' that the presence of menstruating women has any effect on food whatsoever; that sort of statement is a 'belief' (if you want to be charitable; 'a lie', 'imbecilic notion', or 'indication of insanity', if you're not feeling charitable), and has no basis in observation, scientific or otherwise. If I say 'I've observed that the flavour of stews alters overnight', that is an actual observation. if I say, 'I've observed diffusion/oxidation in stews', you'd be completely justified in saying that unless I've correctly used a variety of pieces of equipment to observe and document this, I'm a liar/idiot with no grasp of English. I could say that I've read in a reliable source that this takes place, but frankly, I don't believe that I have read about this occuring in stews, specifically. On the other hand, I have observed diffusion in various substances (using dyes and so on on) in chemistry classes, and it seems reasonable to extrapolate the laws of chemistry from the classroom to the kitchen. Plenty of people "observe" things incorrectly all the time. They might "observe" that their favorite high-priced vodka is far smoother than a middle ranged vodka or that this organic egg tastes far better than an industrial egg or that the MSG in Chinese food gives them a headache but it later gets revealed that the vodkas and the eggs were the same and this sample of Chinese food actually contained no MSG.

There are people who still believe that menstruating women prevent sauces from thickening. I don't hold much credence in personal observation unless backed by at least some degree of rigorousness. For a long time, many people assumed that the "stall" observed in BBQ cooking was due to collagen conversion. While collagen conversion does occur and does take some amount of energy, the observed amounts were orders of magnitude too low to account for stall. It wasn't until Mhyrvold and a couple of other scientists decided to test it that we finally figured out it was almost entirely due to evaporation.

I think a rule of thumb I read somewhere is that gelatinization rate halves (aka, you need to cook it for twice as long to get the same tenderness) for every 15F decrease.

Yes, I have it mixed into congee but it's also good as just a snack by itself.

I used a hacksaw I got from the hardware store for $6.99. The key is to buy a replacement blade with the coarsest teeth possible (2 for $3). It's not perfect but it does a serviceable job. Also, cut all the meat with a knife first and reserve the saw for just the bone.

I recently got a whole lamb for my birthday. The lamb was broken down into primals (legs, shoulders, racks, saddle) which i then further broke down into individual cuts. Doing so has gotten me interested in alternative ways of breaking down a carcass. From what I gather, the standard American cuts are optimized for ease of industrialized processing and designed so that a carcass can be broken down in just an hour or so via an assembly line process and using power tools. Often this means that you're buying a slab of meat that contains multiple different muscles, each with different cooking properties. For example, I've always thought the T-bone steak was a dumb cut. You have the tenderloin which cooks differently from the strip loin, leading to different levels of doneness, the bone in the middle is full of gristle, leading to tough meat on what would otherwise be a tender cut and the bone insulates the inner meat from cooking, often leading to a zone of raw meat just near the bone. On the plus side, with an industrial bandsaw, you can reduce a whole strip loin down to a bunch of T-bone steaks in just a few minutes. I've tried looking for information about how other countries cut meat and it seems like the standard cuts in a lot of different countries seem to respect the natural boundaries of the meat more. Unfortunately, this information seems hard to come by. Given that my lamb was raised well and comparatively expensive per lb, I felt it was worthwhile to spend a little extra care in butchering it in order to get the most out of the meat. In cutting my lamb, I tried to follow a few simple principles: Leave meat on the bone when the bone can add flavor and increase tenderness. Take meat off the bone when the bone hinders tenderness (like the T-bone example) Whenever possible, cut at the boundaries between muscles, not through them. This is called "seam boning" Whenever possible, remove as much silverskin as possible. Silverskin is connective tissue which doesn't soften when cooking and remains as tough gristle. Silverskin can often be the difference between a a cut suitable for grilling and cuts that need slow cooking. (Blade steak used to be a cheap braising cut until American processors figured out they could cut out the silverskin and instead sell it as a flatiron steak) Whenever possible, cut steaks with the grain, not across the grain. I never understood why American steaks are almost always cut across the grain when possible. If you buy a 1" ribeye, every bite you eat is going to have 1" long fibres, making it tougher than it needs to be. However, for something like flank steak, as long as you take care to cut it in the right direction, you're left with ~1/4" fibres, making it tender enough for quick cooking. In addition, cutting with the grain allows things like easily excising that knob of fat you find in all ribeyes. Minimize trim. At the end, from a 40lb lamb, I had maybe a 1/2 lb of trim (mainly gristle) and 2lbs of bones that went into stock. Unfortunately, I had meat juices on my hands the entire time so I didn't have an opportunity to take photos but I can describe some of the more interesting cutting choices I made: Racks of lamb are often frenched and the resulting fingers of meat are trim and either discarded or ground. However, these fingers come from the lamb ribs which I consider to be possibly the best cut on the entire carcass. Instead, I frenched the bones before I seperated the ribs from the rack, leaving extra rib meat on the ribs. Lamb shoulder is often sold as shoulder blade chops which are often braised. Right in the middle of the shoulder is a large eye muscle which is significantly more tender than the rest of the shoulder. Extracting that gives an incredibly tender but also flavorful and heavily marbled grilling cut. The saddle is often sold as lamb loin chops which are the lamb equivalent of the aforementioned T-bone cut I hate. Instead, I boned out the saddle to make a stuffed saddle of lamb which is possible the most impressive and delicious whole roast. Tied properly, it's a perfectly cylindrical cut with an even layer of fat to crisp up on the outside and juicy, tender meat in the middle. A thin layer of absorbent stuffing will soak up any juices from the cooking meat, locking in all the lamb flavor. Here's cooking a saddle. I've never seen a saddle for retail in the US which means you pretty much have to go to the same lengths I've gone to if you ever want to experience this cut. One of the legs, I seam boned, removed all the silverskin and then cut thinly across the grain for Xinjiang Yang rou Chuanr kebabs. Properly made Chuanr is possible one of the most addictive foods I've ever tasted and I'm slowly tinkering with my recipe to get it to taste like my memories of the street sellers in China. I make my Chuanr the traditional way with alternatively chunks of meat and fat, minimizing trim. The entire experience has been incredibly educational and it's given me a much better sense of the animal anatomy and how all the pieces fit together. A whole lamb is 40lbs which is a step up from a chicken but still within the realms of practicality when it comes to disassembly and consumption. From now on, I'm going to buy larger cuts of meat whenever possible and disassemble them in a personalized way, rather than relying on the standard American meat cuts. I'd love to hear of other people's experiences and happy to answer any questions.

If you have a wine fridge, that would be a better place to store them than a normal fridge.

You should autoclave it in a pressure cooker for an hour instead. Safer and faster!

I very much doubt it, the average stew is pretty much sterile at the end of cooking and any newly introduce microbes don't have enough time to get established enough to proceed with fermentation.

There's a couple of interesting techniques. 1. There's the aforementioned vinegar bath. 2. McGee has reported that thermal treatment can help with molding, suspending the berries in 125F water for 30s. 3. eGulleters have also reported that a vodka rinse can also help maintain berries for longer. I suppose the ultimate treatment would be to fill a SV bath with a 1/3rd vinegar solution @ 125F and rinse for 30 seconds, then dry them off well in a paper towel lined salad spinner and then toss with a tablespoon of vodka before storing in a cool place.

Sure there is, those vacuum bags don't sell themselves.

I actually find risotto to be perfect. If you start risotto the moment the last person walks in the door, it's on the table exactly when everyone's fully settled down. For me, the tricky timing thing is roasts or large cuts of meat. I now put the roast in the oven the minute the first person walks in the door and time my meal around when the roast is done. Courses can be shuffled around slightly to accomodate either an early or late start to dinner. If you're not at my house by the time the roast is done, then I've given up trying to be hospitable to you. Pre-dinner, everyone's got a drink and maybe some nibbles and are catching up. I'll usually have a salad that's ready but not dressed and a soup bubbling away that can be served any time. Both of those can be on the table in minutes. This allows quite a bit of juggling of service times so that the pace is smooth, no matter when people choose to arrive.

Is this cooked or raw chicken? 35 minutes at 145 doesn't strike me as enough time to properly pasteurize.

Offer to bring some cocktail snacks, maybe something like spiced nuts or cheese straws. That way, you can start nibbling immediately when you get there and the timing of the actual dinner becomes less important.

I've made the observation before that European is "market food" and Asian is "pantry food". That is, most European cuisines can be built from raw, whole ingredients (either fresh or dried) typically found at a market. On the other hand, Asian food relies on having a deep pantry of prepared ingredients that are integral to the cooking. Soy Sauce Oyster Sauce Fish Sauce Hoisin Sauce Dried Black Beans Sriracha Sambal Olek Kecap Manis Black Vinegar Red Vinegar Nobody would normally dream of making these at home.

I also remember not being able to find canned black beans in Australia (just cannoli and kidney beans). In fact, a lot of essential Mexican ingredients are pretty hard to find.