Shalmanese

I would have thought a decent non-stick pan would be OK? All Teflon coated pans will become dangerous if they exceed 500F which can quite easily happen with a dry pan.

I'm Australian and I have no idea what Australian comfort food is.

It's safe, even by the USDA's rather anal standards. The USDA decided to aggressively simplify food safety standards down to a single time and temperature range. 2 hours at ~120F is going to promote roughly the same amount of bacterial growth as 10 hours at 70F. Given that the USDA considers 2 hours at 120F safe, you can safely store food for at least 8 hours at room temperature and never get close to any danger. Given that your product spent less time at a lower temperature than that, it's going to be fine. I wouldn't take any additional precautions you wouldn't take with ordinary poultry. Enjoy your chicken!

I'm in need of a new probe thermometer and I was wondering if anyone has any experiences with the iGrill: http://www.igrillinc.com/ . It's a thermometer that's compatible with iPhones and iPads using bluetooth. It seems like a fun toy but at $99, I'm wondering how much extra utility it has over a generic $20 probe thermometer.

Have you tried Alton Brown's method of putting the chimney starter on top of the meat instead of the other way around? No I haven't Shalmanese. I like this way, but I'm going to put my "Lodge Cast Iron" pan on the upper grill. this way fat drippings won't cause fire ( ) as in my last searing of a butter poached Porterhouse. It was a wee bit late New yrs eve. The point of putting the heat above the meat is precisely so that the fat drippings won't cause flareups and carbonation. You can see the relevant section of the episode here

Have you made the dishes in their original quantities? It's more likely that the dish was originally unbalance than that scaling unbalanced it. The major thing I watch out for with scaling is if evaporation is an integral part of the process. If you want to scale those recipes up, you often have to do entire ingredient substitutions to get rid of excess water, like draining the tomatoes or using evaporated milk instead of fresh.

Have you tried Alton Brown's method of putting the chimney starter on top of the meat instead of the other way around?

Stoves are labelled as being rated in BTU but are actually rated in BTU/hr.

Did he cook that steak in a non-stick pan? Seems pretty dangerous to heat non stick the way he was advising. Also, how hot could the pan have been if the oil in it wasn't even smoking (even grapeseed oil can't get above 500F).

I defat but keep the fat and use it to saute with. It's always easy to add fat to a dish but harder to take it away so I like having a defatted stock as a base.

Yes. It's hard to think of a category of food that Melbourne doesn't have better than Canberra.

Uh, Melbourne has Flower Drum...

If I'm buying them in the US, they're presumably coming from US milk.

How much stuff did you bring and how much was locally sourced?

I push it to the back of the fridge where it proceeds to grow a uniform layer of green fuzz, then is carefully disposed of and the process repeats every six months.

I've never bought cheesecloth before. It's either filtered through a fine mesh strainer and I live with a bit of sediment or I use paper towels instead.

All three are available at my local mexican market. How are they different?

Scored a virtually new food mill for $8 (retails for $60). It's wonderful for making spaetzle and I can't wait for tomato season.

I think industrial farming would not be considered modernist in the same way that the twinkie is not considered modernist cuisine, even though it uses a lot of the same techniques and chemicals. I see modernist farming as borrowing a lot from the techniques of industrial farming but adapting them towards optimizing flavor rather than yield.

For Sous Vide preparations that take more than 24 hours like short ribs, brisket, shank etc, I'm wondering why nobody has thought to sell them at a retail level. Even if you own a Sous Vide machine, there would be times when you would like SV meat now instead of 2 days later and it would be great to be able to go to store and pick up a pouch. Like the pre-marinated meat at the meat counter, SV meat could come in a number of common flavor combos or plain if you intend to augment later. And because it's pre-cooked, you don't even need a SV machine to enjoy it, just a method of warming it up without overcooking it. I know there have been various aborted attempts to sell SV prepared food for decades, but I'm wondering what caused all of those attempts to fail and whether it could be viable now.

The caustic soda is plausible but I have a hard time imagining 100C water doing anything significant to the chemistry of steel. Consider that steel pans regularly get heated up to 250C and down again with no apparent change in it's physical characteristics, I can't think of anything that happens to steel at 100C that would affect sharpness.

Right... I'm serious about this wager. PM me if you want to talk terms.

For all the crazy experimentation that goes on in the kitchen, the raw ingredients coming in the back door are still being produced via a process that would be recognizable by 18th century agrarians. In fact, it seems like the more modernist the kitchen, the more old fashioned the suppliers tend to be, with small farms and heirloom varieties predominating. Is there going to be a modernist farming revolution similar to the modernist cooking revolution? If so, what form is it likely to take? What would modernist farming look like?

I just did this and could taste the difference in the pure bitters but absolutely no difference in the finished drink (color wise or taste wise). I'm willing to wager $100 USD that you couldn't either in an adequately controlled, double blind study.

75% bitters briefly become 37.5% bitters before they become a drink as they dilute out into a limited volume of the drink. Imagine this as a thought experiment: Your drink has a hollow piece of ice that holds 2mL of water in it and, as you drop 2mL of bitter into the drink, it accidentally hits that cup of ice and mixes into 37.5% bitters. 5 seconds later, you stir the drink and that 37.5% bitter disperses into the drink. Unless you're willing to make the statement that how you apply bitters to a drink can make perceptual alterations in the flavor, then you must admit that this drink will taste identical to the ones where the 75% gets dashed straight in.