Shalmanese

My routine for SV steaks now: Bag a steak naked, no salt or oil. Cook, then chill the steak, still in the bag. When it comes time to eat, fill a pot with the hottest tap water and drop the bag in for 20 minutes or so. Heat up a cast iron pan until it's rip roaring hot, sprinkle an even layer of maldon sea salt onto the bottom of the pan. Dry the outside of the steak, drop into the pan, unoiled. Lightly press the steak with a weight so it's making full contact with the pan. After 2 minutes, lift up the steak, sprinkle some more salt onto the pan, let it heat up for another 30s and then drop the steak on the other side. After another 2 minutes, take out and plate. The hot tap water is the exact right temperature to warm the meat up without a risk of overcooking the center. Using salt instead of oil produces a lovely crusty outside and the weight ensures the crust is completely even. I don't like to put a weight on the second side since it causes condensation to soften up the crust. The first side becomes the presentation side.

At this point, every circulator is good enough that price is pretty much my only determining factor. With SV, once you reach a certain base level of functionality, it's impossible to spend more money to produce better results.

Can you take a photo of the other side?

Kenji responds to criticisms of his decision to use volume measurements in The Food Lab.

Null findings are very much published in epidemiology, especially when they go against the common consensus. But on top of that, if there truly were no link, you would expect not only positive correlations but also negative correlations. That is, findings that show that cured meats decrease the chance of colon cancer.

That's what I was envisioning using the Meater as. They've already done the hard part of the physical product development, if the two things can talk to each other, then there's no need to duplicate their effort.

Any way to partner with Meater and have the meater probe be compatible with the smart hub? That way, I could use the Meater probe with any pot I own.

But that's the entire point of this report. We've known nitrates cause cancer for a long time but the preponderance of evidence finally moves it into group 1 designation. What that means is "We're as sure that nitrates cause colon cancer as we are that smoking causes lung cancer". Even after the evidence for smoking came rolling in, there was still a period of time where most people continued to reject the scientific consensus and used the exact same arguments being used in this thread. Nowadays, there are obviously people who still smoke but pretty much every smoker accepts that what they're doing is an unhealthy activity. You can continue to eat all the processed meats you want but you shouldn't be under any illusion that the science is unsettled on this point.

Luckily, the book doesn't contain any pizza recipes so it's safe to consume, even for the purists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvsWibR_nsk

It looks like you have fairly young chives. Mature chives can grow up to 2 feet in length and definitely have a stronger flavor. They're nothing like the tiny western chives people are used to. I prefer chives that are about a foot in length, right balance of pungency, tenderness and heft.

Cookware manufacturers have been doing this forever. Presumably, the official line is that the 3 layers of aluminium are slightly different alloys that have different performance characteristics but in reality, the reason is because ignorant cookware purchasers mistakenly assume more ply = better and buy the most ply. Cookware manufacturers don't make their money on informed shoppers who research obsessively and buy the best gear for the lowest price, they make it from people wandering around department stores and picking out the nicest looking set for a wedding registry.

Depends on the kind of electronics. There are chips and batteries designed specifically for high temperature. Plus, normally, the operating temperature of the device is going to be in the 140 - 160F range. Standard desktop CPUs operate at higher temperatures than this and last for years. You can buy an optional WiFi bridge that you place besides the oven and will relay the signal. If you buy the bridge, you can receive the temperature even from the other side of the planet.

It's using standard Bluetooth LE which is generally fine in anything except a microwave (ie: a device built specifically to contain 2.4Ghz radio waves). Because it's waterproof and wireless, it could be a good option for time-to-temp SV. Most SV nowadays relies on setting the bath temperature to the desired internal temperature but this isn't optimal for certain fast cooking proteins, especially fish. Instead, it's often better to set the bath temperature to slightly above the desired temperature and pull at the right moment. Previously, this relied on charts to predict core temp which are clunky and not 100% accurate. Instead with this, you could just seal the probe with the meat and know when to pull the bags.

Pretty much any butcher who knows what they're doing will maintain upkeep on scary sharp knives. The usual way of doing so is buying something like Dexter Russell and sharpening every single day or sometimes multiple times a day. Take a look at this video for an example of how much easier a scary sharp knife makes the job. Or take a look inside of this chicken processing plant where the workers appear to be using scary sharp knives that take barely any pressure to cut through the chicken.

There's quite a few everyday techniques where scary sharp knives can make a meaningful difference. Cutting raw meat, for example is noticeably different. Meat compresses and bulges to the extent that pressure is applied. Even a decently sharp knife will have problems cutting meat into thin slices and the commonly suggested advice is to let meat slightly freeze so the slices can be thin enough. With a scary sharp knife, you're applying almost no pressure to the meat and can cut thin slices much easier. All I know is I've not yet held a knife and wished it could be a bit duller. Also, unlike the example of the $500 wine and the $100 wine, it's not exponentially more expensive to keep a knife scary sharp vs merely sharp. It's maybe an extra 10 minutes every month or so at most.

The Food Lab has always been relentlessly populist which means sticking to techniques and ingredients the median person is familiar with. I remember they did a look at Sichuan Fish Fragrant Eggplant that tested a bunch of different ways of cooking eggplant but not the traditional deep frying. When I asked why not in the comments, Kenji said that deep frying would be so unacceptably complicated to their readers that it wasn't considered a practical technique.

The Anova One is 800W, the first generation Anova was 1000W.

He still makes reference to living in New York despite having moved to San Francisco over a year ago.

Just got this book today and I did a quick pass through it. It's definitely an amazingly solid book for beginners. In fact, I'd probably place it at the top of my "If you just had one cookbook to start cooking with" recommendation list. Not sure how much of the information is genuinely new for people who have been following Serious Eats for any length of time or just been following the general progression of food science in general. If you're unfamiliar with recently popular techniques like the reverse sear, constantly flipping burgers/steaks, straining the whites from poached eggs, spatchcocking turkeys, etc, this might serve as a useful primer to get you up to date. The recipes are all pretty great versions of the American classics. Paging through, there were definitely a good 30 or so recipes that I wanted to make immediately but all the dishes were ones you've seen before elsewhere. If you're looking for what is essentially Cooks Illustrated for the 21st century, this is a great buy. If you're already an experienced cook, it's a handy reference work but it's probably a subset of info you already have on your shelves/online. If you're looking for a Christmas present for your food loving friends, at less than $30 it's a no-brainer.

Sous vide is cooking in a 100% humidity environment so the skin won't lose any moisture and subsequent crisping will be much harder. The reason to cook in the oven is to dehydrate the exterior and get crackling crisp skin. I would simply set the oven to as low as it can go and temp the thighs and pull it out once the thighs hit 65C. If you want to make broiled sous vide chicken, then make sous vide broiled chicken but understand that it will be a very different end result than what's demonstrated in that recipe.

I've been trying out Just Mayo recently, the high tech vegan faux mayonnaise and I might actually like it better than real mayo. I think availability is still spotty but try it out if you get the chance.

A constant temperature will work fine but if you want the best results, start at a low temp until the meat is mostly there, then give it a blast of very high heat at the end to crisp up the outside. You'll get more even results and the meat will brown faster since the outside will be drier.

What's the advantage of cutting it this way? Do you sear on all 4 sides or just two? Personally, my favorite way to eat saddle is deboned and rolled. It's a cut you can't find in the US unless you specifically order a whole saddle but it's a wonderful presentation and maximizes the amount of crispy saddle fat.

Syneresis involves forming and then breaking a gel which allows the liquid to seep through while the gel holds the solids. Gelatin freeze-thaw syneresis involves adding enough gelatin to form a weak gel in the fridge, then using freezing to break the gel and letting the frozen gel slowly thaw in the fridge over a strainer. Agag syneresis can be done by forming an agar gel and then manually breaking it with a whisk before pushing it gently through a cheesecloth to extract the clarified liquid.