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Shalmanese

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Everything posted by Shalmanese

  1. What's wrong with cooking a meatball to 60C? I actually like my meatballs a little bit over what I would have a steak or burger.
  2. I thought low temp cooking wouldn't require a rest but I did a rib roast at 60C in a 60C oven and juice leaked out everywhere when I carved it immediately after taking it out. Has anyone else had that experience?
  3. Any chance of taking a photo of them and uploading them here?
  4. Panini doesn't mean roll or sandwich, it means a sandwich that's been toasted on a panini press and panini is the most succinct word for it. If I'm going to be ordering at an American restaurant, I'm going to say "give me one chicken panini and two ham paninis". I'm not going to say "give me one chicken panino and two ham panini" because I care more about the other person understanding me than trying to follow the grammar rules of a language that I'm not currently speaking.
  5. au jus isn't a French word any more, it's an English word with French origins. I think we've all pretty much given up on "paninis" and au jus is about at the same point.
  6. I've never found a good use for okara & whey. It seems like all the recipes were created just because there was okara/whey that needed to be used up, never to take advantage of the okara/whey as an integral ingredient in some way. It's telling that even the industrial food system that has a reputation for being able to use everything can't even come up with good uses and most of it goes towards animal feed. The one reasonable tip I've heard is that you can use the hot whey to rinse dishes as the lecithin will emulsify fats.
  7. You can use ground up duck skin but you have to be even more extra vigilant to keep everything cold in order to keep things in emulsion.
  8. You have to use the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and use MAR20OFF at checkout.
  9. I just got a 20% off up to $100 coupon to Amazon Grocery and I was wondering what's some stuff worth buying? Either stuff that's a really good deal or stuff that's hard to find elsewhere would be great!
  10. Does anyone know what happens to vegetables during long cook times? For reasons that are unimportant to go into right now, I'm cooking potatoes at 170F for 12 hours. What will I get at the end of it? Tender potatoes? Mush?
  11. I wonder if doing SV in an oil bath instead of a water bath would mitigate against migration. Is smoke soluble in oil?
  12. I ended up getting just the kitchenaid roller (KPSA). I never liked the cutters on any machine I've owned and it's not that hard to cut by hand. I figure, if I really still want a cutter, it'd be cheaper to buy a hand cranked pasta machine just for the cutters than the KA attachment.
  13. The second season of Top Chef Canada just started up. It's available online if you know where to look.
  14. Hobart makes a 5 Quart mixer called the N50. If you happen to find a used one somewhere for a reasonable price, that might be another alternative.
  15. Shalmanese

    Dinner! 2012

    Got a pasta roller attachment for my Kitchenaid so I made lasagna from scratch:
  16. These knives are meant to be used for carving in hand, not on the table like this: (eGCI Knife Skills) In truth, most knives in a knife kit are useless and you're safe ignoring pretty much every knife except the chefs, paring, bread & boning knife 99% of the time.
  17. You can pick up a hobart era kitchenaid on ebay for about $120 - $150, search for "kitchenaid K-5A". Look for the ones that show signs of use, not the ones that were bought as a wedding present and have been sitting in the back of the garage for 30 years. Kitchenaids may or may not have been built better back then but survivorship bias means that only the ones built like a tank survive until today. The Kitchenaid's of a couple of years ago had a plastic cover internally that was prone to cracking which has contributed to it's recent poor reputation. The latest models have gone back to a metal cover and time will tell if they turn out to be sturdier.
  18. Shalmanese

    KFC 2012–

    I am shocked, shocked! that KFC would allow something sub par to be associated with their name!
  19. Blinded ABX is the minimum necessary standard for making statements on taste. an ABX test involves testing 2 of substance A and 1 of substance B and seeing if you can spot the odd one out, blinded means you don't know ahead of time which is which. *All* that this tests is whether 2 things are even distinguishably different which should represent the minimum threshold to even have a conversation on taste and yet I've seen this test fail so many times. People's palates are shockingly worse that they think they are and we rely on psychological cues most of the time as a heuristic for taste. You can claim all you want that the organic peach has a richer, fuller flavor or that it's worth the money to pay for super premium eggs because you can taste the grassy notes or that the super premium vodka makes a smoother cocktail, I'm not going to believe you unless you can meet the minimum threshold of passing an blinded ABX test. They're quick and easy to do and it's been amazing, over the years how often I see people fail "trivial" tests. No vodka drinker with a brand allegiance has ever been able to tell their brand from stoli and half of them can't even tell it from the cheapest well vodka, 3 reasonably well educated wine drinkers couldn't correctly tell 3 red wines of different varietals apart, I've never met anyone who could tell premium eggs (and neither can food scientists) and, in a bacon tasting of 15 people, there was a well defined negative correlation between price and quality. After seeing these results first hand, I'm immensely skeptical about any supposed claim of food superiority unless I do my own ABX tests. If you know what you're doing, 80% of supermarket goods are as good or better than from the fancy gourmet store. People love to malign supermarket produce as being cardboard and supermarket meat as being from industrial, factory farmed murder machines. But the truth is, I've found a lot of supermarket stuff to be consistently good and some of it to be amazing. A well run supermarket has far more turnover than the fancy grocery store and produce quality is so variable in the first place that frequently, there's always, an amazing batch of something will arrive at the supermarket. Some of the best peaches I've ever had were for a glorious 2 week run at one of my local supermarket and I was a glutton for them while they were there. Due diligence is nice in theory but never practiced in reality. One of the arguments from locavores is that "I could go to the farm and see the animals myself" and I call bullshit. Hire a graphic designer to slap some artisinal logos on stuff and have a suitably grizzled man selling it at the farmers market and you could hide the most egregious animal abuse and poor handling procedures under the local sticker. Even if someone were to visit the farm, their lack of knowledge would cause them to miss most of the egregious violations and focus on surface aesthetic concerns. I don't give a flying fig about animal cruelty. No farmers are actively sadistic and, often, the interests of the animal and the farmer are aligned. Most actual, documented instances of egregious animal abuse are a result of incompetence and result in worse food that you shouldn't buy, even if you only care about cost & taste. Even in the cases where animal cruelty is an engineered part of the industrial farming process, it's not like an animal living it's "natural" life is a walk in the park either and at least animals bred for food don't have to worry about starvation, injury, predation, weather, parasites and cancer. Given the backdrop of the immense amount of natural suffering the world's animals go through, I'm pretty OK ethically with my decision to eat meat and I don't feel the need to assuage any guilt by buying "humanely raised". Most concerns about toxins in food are overblown. Everything from rBGH to BPA to Aspartame to pesticide residue, most of it is a massively overblown concern. Yes, a small minority of these might be legitimate worries but far more of them are hyperbolic fear mongering. Sometimes unpronounceable chemicals are added to make a food cheaper or last longer but sometimes they're added to just plain make food better. The heuristic of finding the food with the smallest number of ingredients sounds good in theory but sometimes, you genuinely want the wonders of modern food chemistry, which leads me to... Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver and Mark Bittman have no idea what the hell they're talking about and have no interest in learning which is a shame because they are all enormous forces of good in the food world but their interest in remaining deliberately ignorant in order to champion their cause is damaging. Anyone who talks incessantly about knives without ever talking about sharpening doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. Given that a good knife only ever retains it's factory edge for 1% of it's lifespan, your choice of sharpening solution is 100 times more important than your choice of knife. But because it's not the sexy part of knife buying, only the people who actually *use* their knives care deeply about sharpening. Modernist Cuisine is one of the biggest revolutions in food since the invention of the modern oven and historically, we're going to look at it as a sharp discontinuity in the evolution of food history.
  20. Shalmanese

    Chicken Stock

    I've switched from making chicken stock to making duck stock. I buy 3 ducks and break it down into 1.5 quarts of duck fat, 6 breasts, 6 legs and about 2 gallons of stock. When I'm done with the duck fat, I buy another 3 ducks. The reason I use 3 is because 3 duck legs fit perfectly in a spiral pattern in a bamboo steamer so I can steam 6 duck legs on 2 levels. I find gentle steaming renders out the most fat from the legs while keeping the meat tender. The most efficient way I've found thus far to rendering out the duck fat is to first allow it to gently steam/boil in it's own juices until cooked, then to give it a whirl in the food processor and then cook until all the water is rendered out. It leaves you would evenly sized, crunchy crackling that's great on salads and the most duck fat extracted. I then use the duck fat to deep fry the bones before they go in the stock for maximum brown duck flavor. I either like to keep it neutral with just onions & garlic or split it into a European duck stock (bay, thyme, carrots, celery, black pepper) and an asian duck stock (spring onions, ginger, garlic, star anise, dried chilli, cinnamom). The breasts, I score and then rub with a mixture of salt & baking powder and leave them in a baking dish in the fridge, skin side up with a 1/2 inch of slightly salty water. The water brines the meat while the fridge & salt dries up the skin and the baking powder breaks down the cell walls, allowing you to get the ultimate crispy skin and juicy meat.
  21. Keep in mind that even bothering to track, let alone publish errata is rare in the cookbook industry.
  22. The Cooks Illustrated equipment reviews really help out with this.
  23. Shalmanese

    Cooking for 26!

    Robot Coupe is the brand most restaurants use and it's built to be heavy duty. Pavlova is a traditional dessert that involves kiwifruits.
  24. The iGrill (http://www.igrillinc.com/) is a BT thermometer compatible with the iPhone but when I asked them, they said they had no plans on coming out with an API so 3rd parties could build on top of it which is unfortunate.
  25. Or give them out as freebies to regular customers as an unexpected extra.
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