Shalmanese

Or, just use actual vegetable oil. There's a noticeable flavor difference but it's not large.

That's not freshness, that's age. Young ginger will have a thinner skin.

All of these are highly variable, which makes the whole affair something of a headache. Aside from processed cornmeal and all-purpose flour, there's whatever pasta is currently available and miscellaneous dried beans of unknown cultivar. Quinoa and similar grains are a rarity, I suspect mostly due to price. Vegetarian, thankfully. There's one hardcore vegan, but she generally just eats toast and salads. In that case, I'd probably spend the $13 on some leafy, winter greens (kale, collards, chard etc.) and some garlic/onions if you don't have any. Improvise a bean soup of some kind, then wilt and slow cook the greens with either the soup, polenta or pasta. If you want to get some kind of meat in there, cured pork like bacon is probably going to be your best bet in terms of making people feel like there's something substantial there.

Don't know if it's practical for you to get to but something like this meat market might have better prices on bulk items for you.

Who *is* the target market? There's not that many people interested in Sous Vide and I reckon we have a pretty representative sample of those who do on this board.

Another option I've used to successfully feed a crowd with a minimum of logistical fuss is to buy whole chickens and portion them out. Butcher each chicken into thighs, drumsticks, breasts & wings. Marinate the drumsticks, thighs and breasts in something flavorful (I used garlic, lemon zest, parsley and olive oil but curry powder, chili powder or harissa would also work), then roast in a 375 oven on a sheet pan until they're nice and brown. Make a chicken stock from the carcass and turn it into a soup. Fry the wings and glaze them in a flavorful sauce as an appetizer, serve the soup, serve a salad, serve the roasted chicken with some mashed potatoes (or rice, chickpeas or beans would also work) and veggie sides and then serve a dessert. The quantity of food means you only need 1 piece of chicken per person to keep everyone satisfied which means only 7 chickens for 26 people, something that's very budget friendly.

What's your exact budget and where are you located? Cooking for large groups can be surprisingly cheap if you're buying in bulk. If there's a Costco or Smart & Final near you, you can get pork shoulder for less than $1/lb or chuck for $2 - $3. I've sometimes found it easier to just serve more courses rather than trying to figure out how to scale up a recipe. Provide a hearty soup, a big salad and some kind of starchy main and something like brownies for dessert with store bought ice-cream and you're making each element in 8 person portion sizes which is manageable. A simple salad takes maybe 10 minutes to toss together, brownies can be done in a sheet pan and just sliced, a soup is basically chopping some veggies up, letting them cook and then maybe pulsing with a stick blender at the end. All of those things barely take any time at all and they mean you can focus on the main which is now manageable. It means you're boiling 2 1lb boxes of pasta in a normal pot instead of 6 1lb boxes of pasta in a monster pot.

I've found cheap, bamboo chopping boards to be perfectly acceptable, if you desire, you can always upgrade to a better chopping board at any time for a marginal improvement. On the other hand, a pressure cooker will immediately allow you to cook differently from what you are now, go with the pressure cooker.

Is there any issue with running this in anything other than a water bath? For example, if I wanted to do a stirred custard, would this work? What if I wanted to do beef stock?

Yet more scaremongering.

I believe it was Zooey Deschanel. Wrong thread. It was Natalie in Top Chef, Zooey was in Top Chef Masters. Natalie was vegetarian, Zooey was vegan.

I believe it was Zooey Deschanel.

Maybe, for 1 clove. How about 40? And if it tastes the same, which to me it does, what's the point? There are no awards for performing more work for no reason. There is a video currently circulating on Facebook where someone in one of Saveur's test kitchens "peels" a head of garlc in 10 seconds. No, that is not a typo. Place a head of garlic between two metal bowls, shake vigorously for 10 seconds and voila. Instant peeled cloves. That being said, I do not know when I will ever use an entire head of garlic as I do not foresee myself ever in that situation but it is good to know. The method I use is a variation of the one I once learned from my mom -- place garlic clove on cutting board, place cleaver on top of clove, whack with the heel of your hand on top of cleaver; instant peeled clove. A little smashed or bruised, but you can't make an omelette without breaking an egg. Time: I dunno, 1 or 2 seconds maybe? I don't think El Gordo is advocating to stop doing everything the right way as we each choose our own shortcuts. It's just that pre-peeled garlic cloves is something I will never be able to wrap my head around. Ever. edit: spelling you can do exactly the same thing, but use individual cloves instead of the head. works perfectly and you get a whole clove instead of a semicrushed one Or, do a whole head, take what you need right away and store (freeze?) the rest for later. Voila, your own stack of pre-peeled garlic! On the whole "if it tastes the same, then what's the point of it" issue- for me it would be money. I have never seen pre-peeled garlic (to stick with the example) on sale here, but I'm sure it would come at a significantly higher price than a whole, unpeeled head. Another question that pops in my mind: how did those cloves get out of their skins...? I once saw an interesting program (on Dutch TV) on tins of peeled and segmented mandarins- showing how they go through a chemical bath to get rid of their skins. I can imagine some similar process being applied to garlic and I'm not sure I want to include the (possible) traces of that in my pasta sauce. (Which, by the way almost always contains canned tomatoes, which I am too lazy to bother cutting up before dumping them in the pot). At my local mexican bodega, peeled garlic is 99 cents for a bag, unpeeled garlic is 69 cents for 5 heads. A bag is maybe 60% of 5 heads so I'm paying roughly double. Given that I go through that amount of garlic in a month, I think I'm fine paying the extra 70 cents a month not to have to peel garlic. And peeled garlic industrially using exactly the same trick used in home kitchens, they're put in tumblers and agitated until the skins fall off.

4.205

I wonder if anyone's tried to distill tobacco smoke into liquid smoke the same way they do with hickory? Alternatively, on the food side of things, if anyone's tried tobacco instead of tea for tea-smoked style foods. Both seem like potential ways to get burnt tobacco flavor into things. edit: also, if doing a flaming float of high proof, tobacco infused liqueur would bring out some of the toasted notes.

I have tried. As far as I can tell, you have not. If you have, there's $100 in it for you if you're willing to try again and you are right.

It's a 300W heater so it can pump out 491 Quart * F of heat in an hour. Put the water of the desired temp in your vessel, let it cool for an hour, measure the temperature difference in F. divide 491 by that number and you have your maximum number of quarts that it can maintain in the ideal state. eg: If you measure a drop of 10 F over an hour, that means you can at most heat 49 quarts. Note that this is the maximum capacity which means if you drop cold food in there, it will never recover. edit: note that heat loss decreases as the vessel gets colder so if it's an uninsulated vessel, it would be better to measure the heat loss after 15 minutes and multiply by 4 rather than wait the full hour.

Triple Citrus Caesar Salad

Sharpie works great but an alternative method is to get a box of colored paperclips and color code the bags based on temp.

Technically, it doesn't rupture. Osmosis pulls water through the cell barrier.

The interior of muscle is sterile so, unless your meat is jaccarded, you can do a 30 second dip in boiling water to pasteurize the outside, then 4 hours at 50C and then bring it up to 55C to cook.

One of the things I learnt from Sara Moulton is that leftover baked potatoes make a superior hash. Bake some russett potatoes whole, let them chill in the fridge and then dice and throw in a pan, they brown up beautifully with a creamy center.

If you have game stock, by all means use that.

I just tried some Iberico Pork recently and it's the best pork I've ever tasted. Currently, there's only one importer into the US.

It's pretty much superior in every way (except that you're limited by the size of your cooker and you're likely to have a bigger pot than cooker). Tests by the Cooking Issues guys suggest that covered cookers like the Kuhn Rikon do a better job that venting ones.