Kent Wang

How about ground meat, like a burger?

Wow. This is genius. The canister would also hold in the liquid in case it breaks, though you could also bring a ziploc bag to be safe.

I just did 116F halibut with a miso glaze (white miso, sweet mirin, sesame oil) that was seared with an Iwatani torch. It was excellent. I think glazes are a good alternative to directly searing the meat, especially with something temperature sensitive like fish because it absorbs a lot of the heat. The miso glaze actually tasted quite different from the usual method of browning in the oven as the torch is a lot hotter. It actually tasted like it had some fish sauce in it. But you should be aware of this for other sweet glazes.

I venture that there might be some materials that can handle lower sous vide temperatures (let's say under 140F) but not boiling.

What kind of bags are required for sous vide? We know that the FoodSaver and Ziploc brand are fine. I'm not sure what kind of bags commercial kitchens use. Is it a special kind? I buy a lot of meat from the farmers market, which comes frozen and vacuum-bagged from a meat processing facility. The bag appears to be the same kind as the professional sous vide bags that I've seen. Can I just put this directly in my waterbath without changing bags? I just tried some pork chops at 131F for 4 hours and they turned out fine, as far as I could tell, though it's possible that it leeched out some tasteless chemicals. Sometimes, with bony cuts, there is a thicker plastic sheet (similar in texture to the FoodSaver bags but thicker) placed over the bony protrusions so that they don't puncture the bag. Is that heat stable too?

What would be really sweet is if CocktailDB would allow you to create your account there and input your own recipes there. I would pay for that. A different collection of recipes would also be useful. The current collection is pretty good but has some junk and is missing a lot of modern recipes. We could make an eGullet collection. These collections could co-exist. I currently have everything in Word documents.

BeerAdvocate's style guide is very useful.

I had the Kooksoondang brand makkoli which has a bit of carbonation in it. Quite good. Does all makkoli have carbonation? Wikipedia has some more information about makkoli: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makkoli

I was just there on 21 Feb and liked it a lot. Very simple, well executed dishes that are often hard to find elsewhere. The smoked chicken was very interesting. As far as I know, very few Chinese dishes are smoked. Didn't have a chance to do Sam Woo -- there was so much other Asian food to eat.

Is there any kind of food in San Diego that can't be had better in the LA-area? I'm staying in Irvine and will be making a trip to San Diego to the zoo. I'll need to get lunch, so preferably something near the zoo, but if there's anything really special in town, I'd be willing to drive farther. No Mexican as I'm going to Mexico City and Oaxaca next month.

I'm going to be in Irvine next week. Is this the best Chinese in the area?

I've done two lobsters, par-boiled and shelled, 160F (71C) for 45 mins and thought the outside was slightly overcooked and the inside was a bit rare. I suppose I could've done it for longer but then the whole thing would've been overcooked. I recently did two tails (they were frozen tails that I shelled without par-boiling) at 131F (55C) for 2.5 hours and thought it was very good, though maybe a bit too soft. I think this is a good temperature, just could do with some less time. According to the confit myth theory, the beurre monte process is pointless. You could just as well sous vide it in a bag and then dip it in a beurre monte. I'm impressed that you brought your thermometer to a restaurant.

What fillings do you like to use? I've tried the Momofuku liver and ham terrines and they're ok. I had an excellent bahn mi from Bahn Mi Ba Le in Oakland, California that had a sunny side up egg in it. When you bite into it the yolk oozes all over the sandwich. It was $2. I haven't been to that many bahn mi shops but that place was the best I've had. Do most good bahn mi shops make their own terrines and pates? For veggies, there's the carrot and daikon pickles. Most places I've been to stuff a bunch of cilantro in there. I tried it once with arugula instead and thought it was quite interesting, though not authentic at all, but as a few people have mentioned already, bahn mi is one of those things that should be freely adapted.

I think most restaurants could go without music.

LA Times article on how the distillery has fared after the earthquake. And some other factoids:

Wall Street Journal article about US producers smuggling in charcuterie from Europe for research purposes. Has anyone ever been fined for smuggling? It seems like you just get it confiscated. Maybe after you get a warning (like Creminelli in the article did) and you get caught again.

I just triedb this and think it's a little better than Sam's recipe that I had used before. I freeze reduced (I'm making this term up) it three times. When you thaw it out half-way, you get out about 75% of the concentrated pomegranate juice. You could stop it then but you'd be throwing away quite a bit of the good stuff. But if you let it thaw out to 75% you can get out about 95% and have a leftover frozen block of almost entirely water. So to get it reduced to one-third the original volume, I had to repeat this process three times. Then I added 2x the volume of sugar to the volume of the concentrated juice. Compared to the previous batch I made using Sam's recipe, it tastes brighter, and has more of the pure pomegranate essence, but I'm not sure if it's a really scientific comparison as the previous batch is three months old and the proportions may have been slightly different. I wonder if you can make other syrups this way too. Take any fruit juice, freeze reduce it a few times, then add a bunch of sugar. Maybe pineapple juice would be worth trying? For the 1.25 liters of grenadine I just made, I spent $6.25 on the juice and sugar.

Yeah, I don't think there was much hope for these cherries. I think I need to have started out with the sugared syrup, which is I believe how proper brandied cherries are made. Anyway, a neat trick that I've found for using the boozed-up fruits from infusions is to make a smoothie out of it. I did that with the scotch apples; quite delicious.

I infused some cherries in brandy (Romate). I forgot about them in the back of the fridge for anywhere from six to nine months. It's not bad, but it certainly isn't good. It has just a tiny hint of cherry and a lot of woodsiness, like rye whiskey, and even the under-ripe pecan astringency of Old Overholt. It did take on a lot of the dark red color. The cherries themselves lost a lot of color and are so boozy that they're unpleasant.

I was just in Shanghai in September and hung out with a friend that goes out to bars a lot. He claims Bar Rouge, and pretty much everything along the Bund, is just a touristy night club. No real drinks. As far as real cocktails, there's only Constellation. There are two locations. The staff are trained by Japanese. The menu consists of mostly classics like the aviation, though a few like the screwdriver that you would never want to order. The staff is well-versed in cutting ice and can even do the carved ice sphere. Still, compared to the bars in New York, this wouldn't even be in the top 20. There's also Manifesto, which is a restaurant with a bar. At the time that I visited the menu had just a few classics like the French 75 but the head bartender Adam Devermann was about to take the BAR exam in New York, the premier cocktail program in the world, so hopefully things have improved.

I got a bottle awhile back from Spec's and don't really like it. I find that whenever you mix it into a drink the bite of the ginger disappears. Much better to use a ginger syrup or ginger beer.

How about a mignonette-like thing? Sweet-sour-salty.

So are there any good cookbooks available in electronic format yet?

I've been making the ramen broth with smoked pork hocks. They're $1.50/lb from Central Market and have a bit of smoke flavor. The only downside is that it's just salty enough where it's perfect, but you can't add any more salt like tare or bonito.

I just got these. I love them. Thanks so much for alerting me to them! Is sriracha a trademarked term of Huy Fong, or is it a generic name for a style of sauce? These don't seem to be made with the Huy Fong sriracha, and definitely taste a bit different. I find the best way to eat them is to suck on them and after all the spicy flavor has been extracted, chew up the pea. This makes it taste a lot spicier.