dougal
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Posts posted by dougal
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4:1 means wide angle sensing so you need to be very close to your target because the area tested is too wide. Test an entire pan of food at once.
10:1 means narrow angle sensing range so you can be farther away and spot a certain small area in your target? Test a single defined spot in a pot of cooking caramel.
Is this correct?
Yes.
4:1 means that at 4 inches range, the measurement is taken from a 'spot' that is a 1 inch diameter circle.
With 10:1 you could always be 2 and a half times further away and still measure the exact same target area.
This means that you have to be more careful to point it accurately, but you can keep a safer distance from your target!
If you were at the same range, the 10:1 would be measuring from a spot that was less than half the diameter, less than a quarter of the area.
I expect that for "Food Safety" uses, one would want to know the general temperature rather than some specific spot ...
Maybe worth adding that the target (measurement) 'spot' will only be a circle if your gun is pointing straight at (perpendicular to) the surface being measured. Point it at a flat angle and you'll 'see' some sort of ellipse. Play with a torch (flashlight) and you'll see what I'm talking about.
The sensor is going to give some sort of average reading from the whole of that target spot. I'd expect different sensors to give different averages when the target is NOT at a uniform temperature. So always try and keep non-relevant things out of the target spot.
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There is a variant of the Raytek MiniTemp (the 'FS' version) which has distinctly better than average accuracy over the food safety critical temperature range of 0 to 60C (32 to 150F).
It does go up to 400C (750F) but without the same accuracy (not that it is really needed at higher temperatures).
However, it does have the (IMHO) disadvantage of a 4:1 sensor -- wide angle, so you need to get very close.
Sorry, should have added that the accuracy, at those temperatures, would appear to make this the specialist weapon of choice for chocolate work.
And indeed in the (recently discussed ) perplexing Bau "Perfect Ganache" videos, it looked like he might be using one. (Yes, its white and its smallish.)
However, the 4:1 distance:spot ratio (wide angle view) would seem to make it a poor choice for targets that are boiling and spitty ... you (and your instrument) don't want to have to be close to such things!
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Ferment to alcohol. Then store or enjoy.
What's available to you as a homebrew wine base? (Fruit/flowers/etc)
Then sugar (check), water (check), yeast ...
And once its made, the wine storage can be at room temp.
I've recently learned of "turbo" yeast - which can take plain sugar syrup to 20% alcohol (something like 40 proof) by fermentation alone. I think the idea is that you only then add the flavouring (and either store or drink) or else, heaven forfend, you might think of concentrating it further before diluting it ...
One example: http://turbo-yeast.com/
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There is a variant of the Raytek MiniTemp (the 'FS' version) which has distinctly better than average accuracy over the food safety critical temperature range of 0 to 60C (32 to 150F).
It does go up to 400C (750F) but without the same accuracy (not that it is really needed at higher temperatures).
However, it does have the (IMHO) disadvantage of a 4:1 sensor -- wide angle, so you need to get very close.
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Is that Maynard as in Maynard's Bacon - farm shop in Shropshire and the bacon occasionally appearing in Waitrose (at least here in North Cheshire) ? Fab product!
Could very well be - right area - in fact a bit odd if anyone else was using that name ...
(Not seen the products way down here, BTW.)
He has previously done two books on his life story (with some recipes - Adventures of a Bacon Curer and Secrets of) but I must admit that, despite the reverence in which he he seems to be held - I haven't read them - as yet.
However "The Manual" is supposed to be primarily his practical skill set down - at least the verbally expressible parts!
I'm confident it'll be very worthwhile.
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It feels strange to discuss pork pies in relation to Charcuterie. But I suppose if anything is representative of British Charcuterie then it's our great pork pie! ...
I didn't mean to intentionally conflate pork pies with charcuterie but I guess they do share common elements - a pork pie is just pate in a pastry case?
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IIRC, in her Charcuterie book Jane Grigson makes the specific point that the British pork pie is a pate in a crust, just the same as pates in crusts are.
Aha! Great minds ... is the book worth getting?
Its a classic text.
Great book.
Maybe not the place to start, though.
Ruhlman & Polcyn's Charcuterie is a pretty good intro to technique and doing things safely. If it has a problem, its in the Authenticity Dept. But that's where Mrs Grigson excels. Even if, in her day people were MUCH more liberal with the Nitrate ...
Regarding British Charcuterie, the book I have been looking forward to getting into is Maynard Davies' Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer (covering much more than bacon). http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/1906122083/ Despite large quantities, imperial measurements, Fahrenheit temperatures, etc - its beyond time that I had it. The author is a bit of a legend. Writing this has just pushed me over the threshold and into ordering it. Off to do that right now.
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A little more to ponder on.
A mayonnaise is an emulsion that is aqueous continuous. (McGee) Drops of oil in a water matrix.
It is made by whisking the aqueous ingredients, and adding, little by little, the oil (the organic phase).
This is done in that way in order to keep the emulsion "aqueous continuous".
If too much oil is added too quickly it "splits" -- or as a chemical engineer might say 'the emulsion flips to be organic continuous' -- with drops of water in an oil matrix.
Now, Bau is aiming for a ganache that is an aqueous continuous emulsion -- just like the mayonnaise. (McGee)
But he starts by taking all the oil (fluid cocoa butter) and adding little by little the aqueous (water-containing) cream.
This is the exact opposite of the mayonnaise technique, yet aiming for the same end-product emulsion type - aqueous continuous.
No wonder his emulsion initially looks to have 'split' - it has! It is bound to be organic continuous; there simply isn't enough water for it to be otherwise.
Clearly, it can be retrieved, with enough cream and enough intense mixing to finally 'flip' the emulsion (or un-split it).
But I don't think we yet have much of a clue as to WHY the eminent M. Bau chooses to approach his destination from the opposite direction to that which is 1/ traditional and 2/ scientifically logical (at least from the point of view of forming the correct type of emulsion - which was supposedly the point of his lecture!)
I wonder if perhaps M. Bau might simply be confusing the benefit of the intense mixing (necessary to 'save' his deliberately split ganache) with any benefit coming directly from the making of plural small additions of cream?
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I imagine between us we can come up with several reasons why the chocolate is better partially melted.
The thing that springs to my mind straight away is that it means less heat will be lost from the cream in melting the chocolate, so the temperature will remain higher longer. As he mentions, keeping the emulsion above 35 degrees is important.
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Right now, I think that its just to make sure that the chocolate is fully melted by his first small addition of hot cream.
Previously, I was thinking he was being careful to prevent overheating the chocolate, but now it seems to me that pre-heating the chocolate is going to be needed merely to get it hot enough to melt! His first ganache temperature reading was only 38C ...
Without all that chocolate being warmed almost to melting, a small amount of hot cream simply isn't going to carry enough heat to fully melt the chocolate!
If you are going to add the cream a little at a time, the chocolate would need to be already near to its melting point.
One follows from the other.
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The clip itself, though, is rather odd. In the technical part he explains the principle of emulsifiers in great detail but then does not refer to them for the rest of the clip nor do they form part of his final list of secrets for creating a good ganache. After he'd gone to such length to explain about them I imagined he was going to go on to say the secret to his perfect ganache was to augment the lecithin or something, but this never came and the science was forgotten. Moreover, despite this pseudo-technical approach he never explains the steps he takes. Why should the chocolate by partially melted, for example? (Certainly, we can fill in the gaps, but the point is he does not himself explain and, besides, a whole host of other patissiers will say this step is unnecessary so he does really need to justify it!) Nor does he ever offer a proper scientific explanation for the addition of cream in multiple steps.
... I think the friction point is slightly lost in translation because the word is used with a slightly different nuance in French but there is no better way to translate it as succinctly into English. As you say, I think we would sooner say vigorous/intense mixing.
As a novice student of the mysteries of chocolate, I welcome anyone else helping to 'fill in the gaps". Its far from certain that I could do it for myself!
Friction (the noun) in French means a rub (as well as a disagreement and mechanical friction) and the verb 'frictioner' is given by my large dictionary as 'to rub'. But it didn't strike me that he was particularly rubbing the ganache ... Though he did talk about his specific type of spatula allowing him to impart more energy - which also struck me as slightly strange.
There's a perfectly good French word for 'to stir' (remuer) - but he repeatedly chose frictioner ...
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It struck me that by adding a little (watery) cream to the (waterless) chocolate, he was determined to keep the oil/fat/organic phase as the continuous one in the emulsion.
However, in his rather short section on chocolate, McGee is adamant that a ganache has the aqueous phase as the continuous one - albeit that it is a syrup made from the chocolate's sugar and the cream's water ...
So I reckon that was what M Bau was talking about when he said that after his second and third additions the ganache 'looked bad - but just wait'. Presumably, he had at that point still got a 'wrong' emulsion, with the organic phase (the fat) as the continuous one, but then, after further cream addition and intense mixing, he successfully 'flipped' the emulsion from organic to aqueous continuous.
But why deliberately start off with the emulsion the wrong way round?
Two reasons I could offer would be to make sure that the very minimum of chocolate gets heated 'excessively' while maximising the extraction of sugar from the chocolate. By using softened chocolate and warm (no way boiling) cream, his ganache always stayed close to 40 degrees C --- though I do wonder how important those factors might be.
What other reasons could there be?
Incidentally, I felt Bau showed no understanding of the limited accuracy of his IR thermometer. It certainly isn't exactly the same as its displayed precision.
And what on earth did he mean by "friction" ? (Molten chocolate is quite lubricious...)
More intense mixing should make a finer-grained, and thus slower-separating emulsion (which is soon going to be 'permanently' stabilised by cooling to 'set' the molten oils and syrup). But 'friction' seems a strange description of intense mixing.
Why "friction"??? Was he scraping his spatula hard against the bowl? Didn't look like it to me.
Was he talking about intense mixing raising the temperature of the mix?
Or what?
Does the use of the stick-blender risk entraining lots of air? (I'd have thought that would be a bad thing.) Was his blender perhaps set to a somewhat slow speed?
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You aren't supposed to drink it neat!
Diluted in a large quantity (about a teaspoonful to a pint or more) of ice cream or whatever it should be much more pleasant!
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Go for it!
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The Cuisinart model with the compressor takes 40-50 minutes to freeze a quart. That's starting with the machine at room temperature. ...
But what about the temperature of your mix?
My Gaggia only takes that long if the ingredients were mostly at (warm) room temperature.
Although I can't see that it would impact the final result (with a compressor machine), the starting temperature of the mix does greatly affect (potentially about double) the "time to wait before its done".
But not having to half-freeze the starting materials is another aspect of the "more spontaneous, less pre-meditated" nature of self-freezing 'compressor' machines.
Obviously, the mix starting temperature DOES greatly affect the final result (or else the mix capacity) when you are using a "stored coldness" (frozen bowl) machine. You only have a fixed amount of 'coolth' to apply to your mix.
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Okay so my parents apparantly have lavender growing in their garden, which they say I can use.
Hopefully this question will make sense because weighing the stuff probably isn't the way to go. So, how about using this much lavender in my recipe:
That looks to me like an "English" Lavender. Which I think can be "less subtle" in its taste.
But plants vary, and I think the strength even varies with the weather. Being hot and dry at the moment, its probably fairly intense.
I think the very finely chopped fresh flowers from, at most, a couple of sprigs like those shown would be a reasonable starting point for your 700g (1.5 pounds) of other ingredients. It can be VERY strong. Taste a flower on its own to check what you are dealing with.
If you should want it stronger, next time just use more (of the same - now known - stuff) - but do start low! Its better to err on the side of gentleness ...
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Using Andrew Pern's Black Pudding and Foie Gras book to create a dessert.
One of his recipes calls for "60ml lavender flowers".
Why 60 mls? Do you have to blend them or something?
Also, not sure if I'll be able to get fresh lavender. Anyone use a dried alternative to flowers and how much would you use in place of "60ml"?
Okay, so if I were to use dried lavender flowers in my shortbread, would 20g Flowers to 375g flour, 225g butter and 110g sugar sound about right or does that sound excessive?
20 gms is a lot of lavender. I use 5 gms in a lemon/lavender scone recipe and that is certainly sufficient. Any more and you get a soapy flavor. ...
60 ml is a ghastly measurement. A weight would be much more communicative ...
And it presumes you have exactly the same type of lavender ... when there are quite a few!
20g is way more than 1/3 of 60 ml of flowers ...
Be subtle with lavender - just use the merest trace - like a big pinch (somewhat less than 5g I'd say) in your pound and a half of shortbread. (You can always add more to decorate.)
However, when you have something that tastes like furniture polish (or Andiesenji's soap), you can't get it out. Or out of your mouth.
Aim for "Is that Lavender?" rather than leaving absolutely no doubt whatsoever!
CanadianBakin' said "less is more" - take that to heart!
Incidentally, this week - for readers in England (didn't this thread first appear in UK Cooking?) - right now Lidl should still have some rather nice French Lavender (lavendula stoechas) plants for under £3 each.
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... {using a submerged, horizontal bag}
I have tested this countless times in my large rice cooker and the temperature equalizes quite well. I have never found a temperature differential of more than 1 degree fahrenheit if the cooker isn't overloaded once the food has come close to temp. And even 1 degree F is unusual once the food is at temp. ...
Yes, its the 'getting to temperature' phase that will show the most dramatic difference.
And that is going to have the greatest impact if you are ever doing "non-equilibrium" (or short time) sv cooking.
I can load three bags into one of my vertical racks and all three will cook pretty much identically.
Turn that same stack sideways, and the one in the middle is going to take much much longer to get to temperature.
To put it a different way, a sv cooker without powered circulation, has a greater capacity for bags if the bags are mounted vertically. And that capacity difference (before the bath is "overloaded") is at its greatest when trying non-equilibrium or short-time sv cooking.
I don't see any actual advantage to horizontal bags - other than when the only water bath available is somewhat shallow. What insight am I missing?
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Its complicated, and you really should have a word with your local Environmental Health people.
However, before you do that, it'd be a good idea to know what you need to be asking!
And you need to be aware that you are talking about two different businesses.
Much better to ask them about each one individually.
The Environmental Health people are the people that you have to register your "food premises" with.
There are some exemptions from registration.
Your local Dept will probably publish a leaflet like this one http://www.basildon.gov.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=653&p=0
But after you register, the premises become liable to inspection.
They will also probably have a leaflet setting out their interpretations of the requirements - for example does "washable surface" always have to mean "tiled".
AFAIK its only for certain trades (like meat handling) where inspection is always done before registration.
Your first enterprise ...
...In terms of the catering, the idea is that {people I} will be able to come to their house and cook a meal for them and their guests. I could do some prep in my own kitchen, but most will probably be done in their's (I will bring pots and pans - a specific set that I keep separate from what I use to do my own cooking at home). I will do all the clean up too!
... could be presented to the officials as acting as a contract cook. If you hold off on doing prep at home, that is.
Otherwise, you are talking about "party catering" and they should then be on the same wavelength.
And, at least initially, you ought be able to make use of the "5 days in any 5 consecutive weeks" exemption for doing some prep work in your home kitchen. And its also worth noting that private cars used for transporting you and your prepped (or even purchased) food are also exempt from registration and inspection!
The second aspect ...
As for the products I want to sell, I make various chutneys and drink syrups that I am interested in selling on a small scale. We have a couple of local shops that sell local products and I would like to go through them. ...... is rather different.
Unless you do a five-day buying/processing/delivering blitz and then, having completely cleared all your own shelves of saleable product, take five weeks off ...
Without wishing to be discouraging, it'd be sensible to think of insurance as well. You don't want to be poisoning anyone, but ...
And if your home kitchen is officially registered as a "food premise", you probably ought to make sure that your home insurance company knows about it before they find out for themselves! I'd be telling them you were "wanting to do some work from home" and asking them about any issues raised.
Entirely additionally, products sold through normal shops brings you squarely into contact with stuff like labelling legislation and Weights and Measures - which means a different set of bureaucrats - the Trading Standards Dept.
You had thought about ingredients listings, nutritional info and "Best Before" and "Sell By" dates, hadn't you? !!!
One way of finessing a lot of the requirements is to (please don't laugh) join the WI. There are various helpful exemptions for selling at WI markets. It would be a great starting point and it should also put you in touch with other like-minded people.
Which brings me to networking. Make opportunities. Chat up local café owners, ask the man on the burger van about his insurance, and whether he'd be interested in buying some of your Chilli Sauce ... people are generally helpful to others that they perceive as being in the same game but not direct competitors.
Another thing that I've heard of people doing is hiring the (registered etc) kitchen at a local (village/community/whatever) hall as the notional base for their operation. And if you had a friend that ran a restaurant that was closed one day every week ... !
Another different aspect is tax and book-keeping.
Do keep records of costs (and receipts) as well as income, fanatically right from the very start - even if it only proves that you aren't making any profit! Ideally, you'd like to have a bank account purely for the business, to keep its finance somewhat apart from your personal money, but that's not so immediately vital as keeping full records.
You need to turn over quite a lot of money before you need to register for VAT. You'd be doing well if that becomes needed! (And since most of your costs - food - has no VAT to reclaim, there's less point in registering before you need to.)
Yet another whole area for you to investigate is business start-up support from local, regional and national Government and their various agencies. However, that's probably best left until after you have dipped your toe in the water, and know its something worth proceeding with!
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Unless you are using a circulating pump, you NEED to have the bags vertical.
If your heat transport is not powered, a horizontal bag will lead to much greater temperature differences within the bath - and the idea is to make the temperature as uniform as possible.
Convection currents are a rising and falling phenomenon, and a horizontal barrier prevents them doing their work as well as they could.
Regarding the glass marble/bead inspiration ...
DocDougherty mentioned it back in September '06
Someone else brought it up on 27 Feb 10
And then it was nicely documented by PedroG http://sousvide.wikia.com/wiki/Preventing_bags_from_floating on 15 March 10
With weighted 'sinky' bags, rather than suspending them from above, I find a 'toast rack' to be very cheap, simple and convenient to maintain alignment and some separation between vertical bags.
I have a couple of £1 (about US $1.50) chrome-wire toast racks (from Poundland, a UK retailer), which originally looked very much like this one http://www.kendermar.ie/admin/bgprodimg/36-11Toast%20Rack_46.jpg
Removing every second 'divider' (with a bolt cutter!), gives me slots that are 1 and 3/4 inches (4 cm) wide, a nice size for 'portion' bags.
Simple, cheap and effective. A good combination!
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Not for delicate, open stuff (cauliflower & broccoli for example) - however - Vac pack when cold - with whatever (cold) butter/sauce you intend.
Store in the fridge for a few days - or a few months in the freezer.
Reheat in the bag in a 50/60C waterbath for a time dependant on the fatness of the bag (and the starting temperature. Maybe see the sous vide thread for more detail, but think of something like half an hour or so for a slim bag. At those sort of temperatures it won't overcook quickly! (But it could if you tried to really boil in the bag ... You could zap the bag in the microwave, but be sure to puncture the bag when it starts to inflate (and beware the steam!)
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There are lots of areas of cooking where "scalded" milk is called for.
At an empirical level, I've taken this to mean heating to almost but not quite boiling, but sufficiently hot that on cooling, a skin forms.
I believe the skin is a protein product ...
Wikipedia suggests that the temperature for this is 82C - but that seems to be a conversion of the round number of 180F - so don't take it as being precise!
However, I'd suspect that what is happening is enzymic, rather than pure thermal destruction of one or more specific proteins - that's called 'burnt milk'!
And the thing about enzymic reactions is that they don't happen instantly - they take a variable amount of time at different temperatures.
So, just as with pasteurisation, you'd have to specify a time at whatever temperature ...
I suspect that any taste/mouthfeel changes may be associated with the transformations that are desired - and hence unavoidable.
Any experimentation at lower temperatures is going to involve longer, possibly much longer, holding times. And here I'm thinking of sous vide methodologies ...
But, hey, if you have a milk-treatment protocol (heat pan to boiling point and then cool naturally) that works for you, then exploit it!
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So ...
After VERY VERY VERY careful drying of the outside, the sv bag would have a corner snipped off and be used as a piping bag?
Then, if the 'dirty' bags could be chilled hard, the chocolate just peeled/broken away from the top, and the bag refilled and resealed, there should be VERY little mess or chocolate wastage (and multiple cycles obtained from each bag!)
My guess would be that the melting stage could be safely done in a pan of 'hot' water, at about 40/50C, with no real need of proper PID control. After complete melting, the bag(s) would be transferred to the controlled bath, which had been pre-stabilised at the chill (tabling) temperature. After time for equilibration (and probably some bag squidging) the PID would be reset to the working temperature. Having got everything up to that temperature, they could presumably sit in the bath for as long as required...
How does that sound? ?? ???
Anyone care to offer time suggestions?
Maybe an hour for a "half inch fat" bag of chocolate to equilibrate with the waterbath? Reduced by half if squidging the bag every 5 minutes to stir the chocolate?
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Im bumping this because I really would like to know the difference between chocolate plastic/clay made with corn syrup or glucose syrup
Ummm.
According to Kerry Beal's "Confectionery 101" 'white corn syrup' is glucose ...
Dunno whether there's a Canadian white vs light thing here, but it sounds very much like the same thing with different labels.
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An inspired, and inspiring, bit of hardware hacking!
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... For the last few years though I have been using a higher end organic flour which is much finer. Ironically this flour actually needs more water than the cheaper one I used to use and requires a bit more resting. I am able to get thinner noodles though.
One of the French bakers' other uses for remoulage would seem to be holding water in the loaf, so that they can hit their target minimum weight with less flour! Finer milled bran does take up more water more quickly.
Yes, I was thinking that large bran flakes would reduce the mechanical strength of the pasta.
Making gravlax
in Cooking
Posted
Ummm.
Doesn't smoking take salmon out of the gravadlax category?
Nevertheless, I'd love to hear much more about these passive 'controlled smoulder' cold smoke devices.
Particularly about how usable they might be with non-proprietary sawdust ...
Maybe a thread under the 'Consumer' heading?