Shalmanese

From the creators: "Hello All, There was a typo in the perk descriptions. It should read "$75 off retail price" and not 75% off retail price."

The minimum the Anova can be set to is 5C and there's a weird bug (at least with mine) where the temperature display is inaccurate below 10C. Probably the easiest way to calibrate is with eggs. Egg chemistry is very sensitive to temperature and you can use reference charts available on the internet to check.

Mediocre for what? What would you propose replacing it? Enameled cast iron frying pans and tea kettles never made much sense to me but the traditional enameled cast iron dutch oven for braising is the default choice for a reason.

I used to always take the meat from beef stock and make a cottage pie with it. the other flavors are so strong the meat is mainly there for texture and protein.

I keep my Anova in the bathroom because a) the noise is not a distraction and b) it's super fast to fill it from the bathtub faucet.

The NYT has a piece on cooking steak directly on the coals. I remember Good Eats also did an episode a long time ago on, IIRC, skirt steak cooked directly on coals. Has anyone had any experience with this technique? It's pros & cons? Ways to improve it? Seems too good to be true for a technique that's existed for several decades and yet has languished in relative obscurity.

China might not be the first country that comes to mind when you say bread but China has a phenomenal range of breads. From the fluffy white bao, to the crackly you tiao. There's the crispy scallion pancakes, the flatbreads of Xinjiang, you could write an entire multi-volume book on just Chinese breads.

If you're doing that, make sure to get very lean lamb. Lamb fat gets unpleasantly waxy when cold and is not at all appetizing IMHO. Lamb with a lot of fat on it is best served warm.

Broilers will still shut off if the internal cavity temperature is too high. For a device with cameras & lights in the cavity, I imagine they want to keep careful control of the max temp.

I'm guessing what they mean is that it's 30% better insulated so you lose less heat to the outside world than a conventional oven. Most ovens are actually designed to be inefficient because people expect that lowering temperature on the dial will lower the temperature in the oven relatively quickly. The downside is that your kitchen heats up appreciably when you use the oven and your electricity bills are higher.

The roast chicken in the demo video is laughably fake. She takes a perfectly browned chicken out of the oven, nestled among completely raw rosemary and obviously skillet charred lemons and garlic. Also, it's carefully staged to not show you the underside of the chicken, which would be pale and flabby nestled among the vegetables. You also don't see the signature ridge of undercooked skin between the thighs and the body which is characteristic of roast chicken. I'd wager the chicken was actually cooked with a heat gun and had never spent time in an actual oven.

But you could just buy 2 Anovas to circulate an even larger volume of water for even cheaper. The $800 Polyscience exists because people bought them before any of the cheap ones came on the market and people who bought them before continue to buy them. In general, there's very little a SV circulator could do to compel you away from buying the cheapest one.

The June Intelligent Oven is a new countertop device from a Bay Area startup (disclaimer: I know people who worked on it) that is like an oven on steroids. It just launched today so the details are a little bit unclear but it seems like they really tried to re-engineer the oven from the ground up with modern technology. Most exciting to me is, instead of the standard on-off controllers that can give an oven temperature swings of 50F or more, June appears to use variable heating to keep the oven temperature rock solid. Right now, cooking in an oven is essentially guess work since the variables swing so widely. If you can precisely control all the variables, then you can consistently and reliably, for example, brown the top of a casserole at the exact moment the inside becomes cooked and not have to fiddle with aluminum foil. Also, I'd be interested in it's stability at low temperatures. Sous vide is great but you're inherently cooking foods at 100% humidity. Devices like combi ovens let you both cook and dehydrate the surface (for better browning on the post-sear) but they're expensive. If this can bring combi-oven like performance to an affordable price, it may be a way more accessible low temp cooking device with no plastic bag waste. One thing that's disappointing about the June announcement is there's no mention of humidity control. Myhrvold showed that humidity was a huge factor because dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures vary based on humidity. I guess for the average consumer, humidity control still means nothing but being able to programmatically control humidity would push this even closer to combi-oven territory. Along with Nomiku, Anova, Cinder & Meld, we're starting to see a serious interest from the technology industry in smarter cooking devices. It seems like an exciting, albeit expensive time to be a cooking geek. edit: Jesus christ, this thing is $3000. I love ovens but I don't think I $3000 love any oven. They need to cut the price by a factor of 10 before this thing is viable. No restaurant is going to buy this, the volume of food produced is way too low for it to be justified. What's the target market for this? People who have combi-ovens in their home and want to upgrade?

There's nothing any SV circulator can do to produce "better" food than any other. All of them just bring water up to temp and keep it there and all of them can do it equally well. Some may be quieter, less bulky, have mobile apps, be more reliable, bring water to temp faster etc and you have to judge how important those attributes are to you. Personally, I can't see any reason to go for anything but the cheapest model.

For reheating, the hottest water coming out of the tap is perfect for anything an inch or less. Reheat, then sear and the centre will be just the right temp at the end.

If you want actual insight, this much better article by Bill Burford in The New Yorker from 2006 is an amazing, analytical look into the evolution of the Food Network.

I know that's the general consensus among BBQ circles but there's no scientific principle that would illustrate why fat basting would have an effect. Fat can't penetrate between the gaps of meat fibres, there's nothing the fat is doing that's making the meat juicier or more tender. BBQ, and most of cooking, seems long on tradition and short on rigorous experimentation and there's a lot of practises that persist and concepts that are misunderstood. For example, it wasn't until Myhrvold that someone showed that duck confit was indistinguishable from steamed duck with duck fat brushed over the top. I suspect something similar might be happening here.

I have one. What do you need it for?

I've been going by eye every time so I honestly have no good idea. Maybe 100% scaled to eggs when uncooked?

I've only made it a single serving at a time (although I'll use some of the leftover sauce for breakfast the next morning) but yes, I'd bag them in roughly single serving quantities before cooking if I were planning to make a lot.

Yes, 4 cups of egg to 4 cups of liquid, which is then tempered with another 8 cups of pasta cooking water, giving the 4:1 ratio.

The fish is first cooked in a pan and then in the oven which is why the time is shorter. 110C is meant to bring the fish up to temp, not brown it. Other recipes have you start with a cold fish and rely on the oven to brown the outside as well. As with all things, you should be cooking to temp, not time. Either use a thermometer or a fork to flake the fish to check whether it's cooked all the way through.

I've been playing around with sous vide carbonara these last couple of days. I couldn't find any recipes for it online which is baffling because It's so good I can't understand why anyone would make it the conventional way. As a rough skeleton: Ahead of time, set a circulator to 79C Sautee some kind of cured pork until crispy (I use guanciale but pancetta or bacon also work) Combine 100% egg, 100% water/milk/cream, 25% parmesan/pecorino, crispy pork with fat & pepper. Do not salt at this point. (I find ~ 1 - 1.5 large eggs per serving is a good rough guideline although it can also be made in bulk). Cook for 30 minutes in the bath, occasionally massaging the bag to break up any lumps. Take out and store in the fridge until ready for service. If you're cooking for immediate service, drop the eggs in cold water for 15 minutes instead. As a bonus, if you sous vide in a cooking pot, you can then immediately reuse the pot to cook the pasta. When ready to serve, cook pasta in salted water, drain, reserving cooking water separately. In a large bowl, whisk together equal parts of the egg mixture and the reserve cooking liquid, taste and then adjust seasonings at this point. Toss with the pasta to combine and serve. A couple of notes: Sous vide carbonara has a significantly larger liquid:egg ratio than conventional carbonara (close to 4:1). Because of precise temperature control, you cook the egg to it's maximum gelling potential which gives you an incredibly silky, supple sauce. Despite this, the sauce also ends up coming out eggier than a conventional carbonara as the cooked egg notes only come out more at that temperature. Because the eggs are cooked to pasteurization and there's no significant botulism vector, the cooked sauce theoretically has a shelf life of months in the fridge. This means you can make a large batch and have carbonara whenever you want. I was really surprised how high I had to set my circulator to get the eggs to gel. Even at 77C for 1 hour, the eggs were still completely liquid. Goes to show just how sensitive eggs are to temperature. I still don't understand why whole eggs are hard boiled at 77C but scrambled eggs are still liquid. Because the pork and eggs spend way more time in the bag, I also find the sauce significantly porkier for the same amount of meat. Another big win. In short, sous vide carbonara is a huge win over the conventional approach in my books!

Ironically, skillets are way better for sauteeing in than saute pans.

I'm a bit of a thermometer nut and I've been curious about thermal imaging cameras for a while. They seem to be riding the cost curve down, similar to where IR non-contact thermometers were 10 - 15 years ago. I remember splurging on a $70 IR thermometer 8 years ago which radically changed my cooking. When it finally broke last year, I picked up a replacement for $15 which was just as good and a no brainer purchase due to the price. Just in the last year, we've seen new, low cost thermal imaging modules hitting the market which starts to make them practical for the mass consumer. Hopefully, they'll be half the price in just a few years and half the price again a few years later. One thing that has me hesitating about buying one at the moment is that the cheap ones all rely on your smartphone as the display. One thing I love about my IR thermometer is that it's so quick to deploy. I'll find myself using it half a dozen times when preparing a meal because it's right there. Another reason is simply because I have no idea what sorts of stuff it would be good for. A lot of my usage of my IR thermometer has come about through trial and error. For example, when bringing a big pot of liquid to boil on the stove, I love the ability to quickly peek at the temperature of the liquid so I know how long I can safely leave it unattended. I never would have even thought of that before I started playing around with it. I'm curious hearing from people who have used thermal imaging cameras what sorts of new things they've learned. Are there any especially cool things you do with it and has it changed the way you cook in any way? Where would you rank it on a list of essential kitchen gadgets?