Shalmanese

A good middle ground for people having trouble finding all the ingredients for a Thai curry is to spike a pre-made curry paste with fresh ingredients. Almost everyone can get a hold of shallots, garlic and lemongrass and galangal and kaffir lime leaves are becoming increasingly common. Just a few fresh notes perks up a curry paste immensely and it's still pretty low effort.

Netflix has release it's first original food programming with Chef's table. For people who have watched it, what are your thoughts?

I wonder if you could thinly slice the onions and toss in the sugar for an hour. The sugar should pull out the onion juices via osmosis while making sure there's no dissolved solids. I'm fairly sure it's the solids that are burning and turning bitter.

Did you stir the water at all? It's designed to be constantly stirred and I can't imagine it would be that efficient at heating relying purely on convection currents.

You might try CO2 charging a siphon of stabilized chocolate ganache and then piping it into a chocolate shell. From what I remember, it's the dissolved CO2 hitting the tongue that causes the fizzing sensation, not the bursting of bubbles (they did experiments where they got underwater divers to drink a soda and it still felt fizzy, despite there being no bubbling). Also, pop rocks will work in a mildly moist environment. The outside is coated in a candy shell that will resist moisture until it's bit into. Worth giving both of these a shot.

Would pop rocks work for this purpose? You can buy unflavored pop rocks and fold them into the ganache.

I really like David Chang's Miso butter asparagus. Super simple and great for a crowd. One of my favorite spring potluck dishes is a massive platter of asparagus with some sous vide poached eggs on top. Just burst the yolks before serving and it's a visually stunning dish that barely takes any effort to prepare.

I also really like the Pok Pok cookbook for the detailed instructions and really tasty recipes.

It's pork floss. Delicious in a bowl of congee.

Speaking as a Californian, I'd much rather see Top Chef choose a previously unfeatured city like Portland or Atlanta vs doing LA and SF over again.

Small amounts of salt reduce the sensation of bitterness. Most people go overboard and it tastes like ass. But a slight dusting around the rim helps a lot.

Depending on the max temperature on the probe, the biggest "win" for me would be effortless deep frying. Deep frying in cast iron on the stove is far superior to any countertop appliance due to more heat being available but you lose the automatic temperature control. Being able to walk away from your deep frying rig rather than constantly twiddling a knob would be fantastic. Also, sugar, candy & jam work would be another huge application area.

Is it really that hard to twiddle with vents and throw more coals on the fire every 10 minutes? The people who just mindlessly dial 350F on their fancy new "auto adjusting ovens" won't have any idea/intuition about how baking really works. Seems like it's a product trying to solve a "problem" which doesn't exist. I think Meld is a clunky solution to a real problem. Cooking with traditional methods, you end up controlling the first or second derivatives of the variables you want. We're slowly moving towards devices that directly control the variables. Starting with the oven, then the sous vide machine, then things like Cinder and Meld, it's a real step forward in how cooking is done. Just like recipes now say "Bake your cookies for 8 minutes at 350F", recipes of the future will say "Sear your steak at 500F for 3 minutes on each side, then lower the heat to 140F, cover and cook until the center reads 130F". That being said, I wouldn't back the Meld on kickstarter. It seems like the classic v2 product where you want someone else to work out all the inevitable kinks before getting the much improved version.

I personally don't reuse ziplocks but I don't see what the concern would be. I don't see how sous videing 10x for 1 hour could possibly be much worse for the bag than 1x for 10 hours. When you look at the unavoidable plastic waste that each of us generates (most of it in the intermediary stages of production which we can't control), I can't imagine sous vide bags being any more than a microscopic blip.

Costco once had sealed, pre-seasoned racks of lamb inexplicably for $3 each. You better believe I cleared out the entire case and froze the lot. I put them directly in the bath from frozen for 2 hours, then a quick sear for an easy weeknight meal. The ink from the labels faded in the cooking but apart from that, it was a great. Would do again.

I've been getting into Xinjiang cooking recently and am piecing it together from various blog posts and photos as there's no English language Xinjiang cookbook. Similarly, the food I grew up with, Dongbei food is slowly making inroads into America but there doesn't exist any Dongbei cookbook and the English written resources are even more scant. I imagine many African and central Asian cuisines suffer from the same fate. I'm curious what are other cuisines that are currently difficult for Westerners to learn about due to a lack of English language resources?

You need to be more specific. There's a couple of different ingredients that get translated as Sichuan vegetable. Most common would be ya cai (preserved mustard greens) or zha cai (pickled mustard root), maybe even dong cai (Tianjin pickled cabbage). edit: Check out The Mala project for great Sichuan recipes and resources.

The video appears to have been made in SF which has naturally great tasting water. None of the top cafes in the region do anything to the water beforehand as far as I can tell. It's understandable why they forgot to mention it since it's not part of their process.

I've found Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice the best cookbook for home style Chinese food. There's some great, simple recipes in there.

No Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art?

At 180F, the proteins would already be coagulated so they won't cloud when you bring the bag juices to a boil. As for why 10 hours vs 1? Mainly the meat will be more juicy and more gelatine will remain between the muscle fibres rather than leach out into the sauce.

Have you tried short ribs at 180F for 10 hours? That's the version you should compare to PC cooked short ribs before you declare you're done with SV short ribs for good.

Using the spent bones of a primary stock alone is called Remouillage (second stock). Using spent bones in combination fresh bones would get you something in between a primary and secondary stock. Personally, I wouldn't do it purely because it increases the amount of water required to cover the bones. I like to make my stocks with as little water as possible so as to avoid reducing them down later. Personally, the only time I would make a quick stock is if I need it immediately for a dish I'm cooking right now. Making a stock properly requires the exact same amount of active time as making a quick stock, just more inactive time simmering on the stove. If you really want it quicker, I'd rather invest in a pressure cooker than take shortcuts on the stove.

Unless you have an extraordinarily good deal on eggs, your eggs are probably costing $0.16 or 16 cents, not 0.16 cents. The cost of the yolks is 20/55 * 16 = 5.8 cents. The cost of the whites is 35/55 * 16 = 10.2 cents. Yolks + Whites = 5.8 + 10.2 = 16 cents which is the cost of the whole egg. Don't bother trying to get the program to calculate this. Just create two new ingredients, egg yolks & egg whites with the appropriate costs.

Not really. You can hydrate conpoy and they'll expand to roughly their original size, which is about twice as big as the dried size. The math works out, a 2x decrease in all 3 dimensions is a 87.5% decrease in volume.