paulraphael

I don't see a need to change mess the water. I'd work to eliminate added water entirely, but it often helps the fruit blend to a nice puree.

I wrote a brief, maybe usable passage on how to use brix at the bottom of this article. That will probably be most helpful if you're using software to calculate your recipe. If you aren't, a shortcut that should work: 1) calculate the amount of sugar in the fruit that the recipe was written for [eg; 100g fruit at 15°B = 15g.] 2) calculate the amount of sugar in the fruit you've measured [100g at 18°B = 18g]. 3) calculate the difference, and us this adjust the sugars in the recipe.

2nd thoughts about the seed hypothesis: I just made strawberry sorbet. 750g strawberries / kg, blended to a smooth puree while frozen. No heat in the process. There is no bitterness. I'm thinking the heat and the enzymes are the most likely offenders here. The strawberry ice cream I made with the method described earlier was outrageously bitter. This was about 350g berries / kg.

The green one's become my favorite. Followed by the standard red hot sauce. I haven't tried that garlic pepper one ... how is it?

Welcome back, Teo. I think you might be right about the seeds. And I think an additional problem is that I pureed in the berries when the mix was still cooling from pasteurization—probably not hot enough to deactivate the phenyloxidase enzymes, but plenty warm enough to accelerate their action.

Not new, but classic: Portlandia / Mixologist It's got egg white, egg shell, egg yellow ...

Microplanes, all day. In the past I had a few of the flat ones (rectangular grater with a handle). Mostly marketed for home use. When I wore those out I got one of the long skinny ones, because everyone I know who cooks professionally uses them. I think you can go with either. The main advantage of the long ones seems that they fit easily in a knife roll. The flatter ones are easier to use one some things. Their protective cover design annoys me.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm interested in the Penzy's that everyone likes, but will try that later. Very expensive right now. For the near term I grabbed some spice Lab tellicherry from Amazon for a good price. Probably not as good by I'm hoping it's decent.

Around 10 years ago I bought some tellicherry peppercorns on Amazon that were amazing. Spicy, floral, pungent, 3-dimensional lingering flavor. After that pound ran out, I looked again, couldn't find the same brand, and tried another that looked similar. It tasted like ... plain old boring pepper. I've tried a few others in the ensuing years; some were better than others, but nothing great. What have I been missing? What's available that you love?

Oh, man, I didn't realize they replaced the Rivington location with that. Too bad. I'm in that neighborhood more often than the w. village.

Although Jo likes ice cream that aims for 110% milk fat, so VL might be more her style. I'm with you on Il Lab. But also Morgenstern's a few blocks away. Seriously good stuff.

By one on the other, you mean the different types of berries? I hadn't thought of that. It definitely spent enough time at warm temperatures for enzymes to go to work. Takes a while for 1kg of goop to drop from 70C.

The thing is, the berries weren't bitter on their own. The ice cream mix wasn't bitter in the hour after the berries were added. The bitterness showed up the next day in the finished ice cream.

Or to punish children.

Here's a head scratcher. Hoping someone with fruit science background has an idea. I made a batch of strawberry ice cream to test a recipe. Calculated for 300g strawberries / 1000g mix. I was about 45g short on strawberries, so made up the difference with raspberries. Both kinds of berries were medium-quality ... from Whole Foods, pretty ripe, pretty fresh, tasted fine but unremarkable. Berries were added to the mix after pasteurization and homogenization. I washed, cored, thickly sliced, and froze them. Then blitzed them into the freshly homogenized mix with a vitamix for 30 seconds. Idea was to use the berries to start the mix cooling, and do so without cooking the flavor out of the berries. I chilled the mix down to about 13°C in an ice bath. At this point, my girlfriend and I both tasted it and thought it tasted good. LIke strawberries. My only concern was textural; the viscosity was higher than normal. I refrigerated it down to 0.5°C overnight, and spun it today. It hasn't hardened yet. We both tasted it right out of the machine and almost had to spit it out. It's like when you try to hide a crushed pill in the cat food, but all you do is make the whole meal too bitter for the cat, and he's pretty sure you're trying to kill him. I've never experienced this before. Something introduced seriously bitter compounds into this brew while it chilled overnight. ChatGPT thinks it could be polyphenol oxidase reactions, which I would have inadvertently allowed by keeping the berries out of the pasteurizing step. It also suggests that there can be polyphenol oxidase reactions that are affected by milk proteins. I'd never heard of this (or anything) turning berries into bad medicine overnight. Thoughts?

I had to retire mine, because it drifted too much, and Xrite's calibration fee was rather insane. Mine has the Greytag-Macbeth branding, so is probably quite a bit older than yours. After some research I settled on a Calibrite Color Checker Display Pro. As a colorimeter it has some advantages over a spectrophotometer (more accurate in shadow areas, much cheaper) and a big disadvantage (can't calibrate printers). I don't like the industrial design as much as the i1's. But so far it works well in an art photography printing workflow.

Teo, 5 years later I've finally had a chance to experiment with this method. It's excellent—the best of the many methods I've tried. It succeeds at getting that fresh herbal flavor, without any of the grassy, woody, or vegetal overtones that come with the more common methods. A friend dropped off bushels of herbs from her garden, so I've been experimenting. The spearmint flavor is perfect, with 18g leaves / 1000g base. I skipped the peppermint because it lacked flavor. Anyway, thanks for the excellent tip. I haven't encountered this method elsewhere.

Most of these kettles sold in the US are 1500 watts, so they'll mostly boil water in the same amount of time. We had one that a couple of hundred watts more powerful, and you noticed the difference. It broke for unrelated reasons. Manufacturers avoid doing this, because if you plug them into a 15 amp circuit, and use just about anything else on the same circuit, the breaker trips. In other parts of the world the wiring standards give a higher ceiling for powerful gadgets.

Once in a blue moon Facebook shows me something good.

It would be cool if you vacuum seal in bags that have a release valve for CO2. This is what my roaster uses. I don't actually know how big a difference it makes ... but seems like a good idea.

I've never noticed any degradation from freezing. The important point is that freezing is for bulk storage, not for the beans you're using every day. The beans you freeze should be sealed, frozen, and then allowed to come up to room temp before unsealing. And then they stay at room temp for however many days it takes you to use them. This eliminates the one problem with frozen beans—that they take on moisture from condensation every time you open the cold bag. This is pretty standard practice in the 3rd wave coffee world. The only pushback I ever got was from someone who was trained at Starbucks and thought he was an expert. I do think people need to reconsider what fresh means in coffee beans, especially now that we have higher quality beans and roasts available. I used to assume that fresher is better. Now that I'm mostly buying lightly roasted single-origin beans, I can say with certainty that this isn't the case. Beans like this that are too fresh off the roast give poor results. You get huge blooms of CO2, which lends a carbonic acid acridity to the coffee, and interferes with the aromatic flavors. For brewed coffee, results seem ideal between 5 days maybe 14 days after roasting (I'm not talking about freezing here ... just room temperature storage in a sealed back, preferably one with a relief valve). For espresso, it's more like 7 to 20 days. Espresso is more sensitive to CO2. The darker the roast, the sooner the coffee will be ready to brew and the sooner it will lose quality. Degree of roast corresponds with increased porosity of the beans ... darker ones lose CO2 faster, and take on oxygen faster.

Exactly. And the food service industry needs to be paranoid about immune-compromised diners. And in the industry, the math is very different. If you read that in the US, 1 egg in 20,000 is tainted with salmonella, that might be close enough to zero for your purposes. If you're running a chain of restaurants that serve brunch to 2000 people every weekend, that number starts to sound like a problem. I think it's a good reminder for anyone who's got an immune-compromised person at home. I personally drink tea that's been sitting out all night pretty regularly. I've seen it get moldy over the course of a weekend (trying not to make a habit of that). The good news from the article is point #1: there's no record yet of tea being a problem.

Is this true? I just jumped through so many hoops to find a lid to fit my 2.5L Mauviel saucepan. Do you have a good source for metric commercial pan lids?

I asked Cargill, the overlords that make DC salt, how to be sure I'm getting the actual kosher salt and not the new imposter version. They write: We have updated our packaging but the product inside the box has not changed. We are really excited about our new brand Diamond Crystal Salt Co. and the new look for our favorite Diamond Crystal Kosher salt packaging. So, we are all imagining that there's anything wrong with our salt, and furthermore, we should all be really excited about the new packaging. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

Mine have that little raised line also. I'll take a closer look at my pan. Surprising that teflon could ever scratch steel.