paulraphael

How would it know what you're measuring? And if you're measuring something like flour that can be compressed, how would it know how you scoop / pack your cup?

I lucked into a deal on a scale that reads to 0.1g, so for most things it's plenty accurate. Ordinarilly, the most cost effective approach is to have a scale that reads to 1g from general purposes, and a pocket scale with a low capacity that reads to .01g or so for things like leavening, hydrocolloids, or vitamin concoctions.

Sorry, had to go look. They're Cuisipro. Got on the recommendation of other people here a few years back.

Yeah, I thought to measure mine a few years ago and was pretty surprised. I started a thread about it and people recommended brands that were much more accurate. I got a set of better ones. It doesn't come up much anymore ... I use the scale for just about everything now. When I use the measuring spoons it's generally just as scoops, so the accuracy doesn't matter.

The habits you cultivate with carbon steel knives are good ones to bring to stainless knives. Knife alloys aren't nearly as stainles as the ones used in pans and silverware. Very generally speaking, the higher the quality of the knife steel, the lower the quantity of corrosion-inhibitting chromium. Many high quality knives are just barely stainless. Even if they don't rust outright, the most superficial oxidation can dull the edge. So keeping a clean knife is especially helpful after cutting anything acidic, like onions, garlic, etc.. My stainless gyuto actually stained once from the acids in wild garlic. I needed to use BKF to get rid of the oxidation.

The hot water thing is a myth. As Chris says, water can't get hot enough to do anything to the steel's temper. Hot water is better, because it does a better job of cutting grease. It will also evaporate more quickly, so it's easier to dry the knife. Especially important with carbon steel or any of the less stainless stainless steels. It's ideal to wash with hot, soapy water and dry immediately after use. If you're doing a ton of prep and need to keep moving, a side towel soaked in sanitizer is a reasonable way to keep clean between washings. Just don't use anything containing chlorine bleach; it corrodes steel. I think it's a good idea to cultivate good habits of motion when washing and drying knives. You're going to do it a lot when you're distracted and tired, so it's an easy time to cut yourself.

That's mostly my impression, too. But it's hard to generalize accurately about the place. Some of their ingredients are expensive (medium-quality, stratospherically priced chickens), and some prepared foods are cheap (I satisfy my Clif Bar addiction at WF ... it's the cheapest source in the city).

Essentially no microwave energy escapes from a microwave oven. Cell phones, however, are microwave transmitters, and we hold them directly against our brains. Microwaves are long-wave, low-energy rays that are considered non-ionizing. They are not capable of breaking molecules apart, so they don't have the same mutogenic effects that you get from gamma rays, beta particles, x-rays, or even UV radiation from the sun. This doesn't mean that they're necessarily harmless. Studies on the health effects of longterm microwave exposure (from cell phones) come to mixed conclusions. I'm sure they'll know a lot more by the time we're all dead.

I just looked at a boozy ice cream I've made a few versions of; the method is a little different than what I described. It's for cognac-vanilla. Cognac doesn't have a very assertive flavor in ice cream, so I found I had to use a lot of it. Here's what I did: -for a quart of ice cream, take 4oz of cognac, bring to a simmer in a saucepan, flame, and take off heat. After the flame goes out, cool it, and add to the ice cream base. -dd 1 to 3 TB of uncooked cognac, to get the flavor and bite right. Do this to taste ... it's a bit of a guessing game, because the simmering and flaming doesn't do a very consistent job of removing alcohol. (Be sure to use a clean spon every time you taste. Ice cream is mix is a ripe environment for bacteria). I'm not 100% happy with this flavor, but it managed to get a decent amount of cognac into the ice cream without texture problems.

What pastrygirl said. If I'm making a flavor with a lot of alcohol, I'll reduce the sugar, especially any sugars with greater freezing point suppression, like glucose and trimoline. Upping the nonfat solids (powdered milk, etc.) helps. Still, more than an ounce or so per quart of ice cream is a lot. If I need more booze flavor than this will give, then I'll divide it and flame / boil off most of the alcohol from a portion of it. So for instance, I'll take 2 or 3 oz of booze, divide in half, and flame one half on the stove, letting it simmer until it goes out. This removes about 75% of the alcohol. It removes a lot of flavor, too, but some of the flavors will actually get more concentrated.

Agave syrup is some combination of fructose and glucose. It can vary a lot, but my impression is that it is generally higher in fructose than most corn syrups or table sugar, and so will be sweeter. This variablility makes it a wild card. 100% of the negative publicity concerning corn syrup is sham science. There isn't a single shred of scientific evidence supporting any of it. All we know is that too much sugar is bad for you. The type of sugar makes very little difference (there is some evidence that fructose can cause problems that glucose does not, but this does not say anything about table sugar vs. corn syrup, and could suggest that agave is worse). I don't know the degree to which the fructose / glucose ratio will influence success with ganache. My inclination would be to stick with known quantities unless you want to experiement. There will be no advantages to agave besides marketing hype.

Mine's lasted 10 years, including a few unprotected times in an oven 75° hotter than its rating. I suspect they use phenolic because it stays cool when the pan's on the stove. If mine ever breaks or melts, I'll probably replace it with something hilarious looking from the hardware store. That or spend $10 on the official stainless one.

I'd like to know the quantities of stabilizer they use, mostly because I use cream for ice cream. The carageenan content could make a real difference. If I ever use pure cream from the farmer's market, it would be nice to have a clue how much to compensate.

Do we really have reason to believe that added gums cause the cream to clump together? I've had cream clump, but the most clumping I've gotten has been from unhomogenized cream that didn't have additives. I assume gums are added to make whipping easier. Do they serve any other purpose?

I've been meaning to do this. I spent some time in a pastry kitchen that made their own butter, and it was probably the best I've tasted. They bought their cream from the local farmer's market (it's a brand you can get in a few places in NYC ... a bit pricey but has much more real dairy flavor than the supermarket brands). I believe their formula was 2/3 heavy cream and 1/3 creme fraiche. They bought the creme fraiche from the dairy rather than making it themselves.

A scale can't measure fluid ounces, so forget about that. Most scales allow you to choose different units. I use mine metric 99% of the time. There are some kinds of things that I still think about in pounds ... like the weight of a whole chicken ... so I'll ocasionally switch units for that. But it's unimportant. To my knowledge, there aren't any scales that use baker's percentages. You have to do the math yourself (super easy if you're working with metric units). I designed a baker's percentage user interface for MyWeigh a few years ago. They gave me a nice scale in exchange for my efforts, but it seems there wasn't enough demand for them to actually make the thing. I'm sure all the Myweigh scales that people are recommending will do the job. They're a great value. I got one that goes to 0.1g. It's a nice convenience for things like leaveners and colloids, but it's much more cost effective to get a high capacity scale that reads to 1g, and then a second low capacity scale that reads to 0.1 or finer.

That's the law in New York, too. I'm sure any NYC chefs can give you an idea what's involved.

Yes, I use xanthan gum in all my ice creams and sorbets. I've experimented with a bunch of stabilizing ingredients, and the combination of gelatin and xanthan has worked best for me. use it in minute amounts ... generally around 0.3g xanthan and 1g gelatin per 1000g of ice cream. This allows me to use less egg. I only use 2 yolks per 1000g. Eggs give great texture but I don't like tasting them in ice cream, ever. The xanthan and gelatin also help prevent ice crystal formation, and together they help tailor the mouth feel of the ice cream, both when frozen and melted. Carageenan supposedly has even better ice crystal suppression than xanthan, but it's more difficult to use. I haven't played with it yet.

This whole business is very strange. Usually this kind of fearmongering comes from someone with mostly imaginary credentials. This time it's by an MD PhD with a legitemate research background in nutrition and endocrinology. But I did a PubMed search for his published papers, and found that none of them supports his public conclusions that sugar is somehow toxic. He's published a few papers that show that (surprise!) way too much sugar is bad, and that it can be bad in some previously unconfirmed ways. But there's nothing about it being some kind of evil substance, like plutonium, or even trans-fats ... and this is the thesis he's put forth publicly. It often seem suspect when a scientist seeks a public audience in a non-reviewed forum. It's not unlike the pundits who spread their climate science denial messages on youtube and in public lectures, but who have no publication record (or even publication attempts) in legitemate peer reviewed journals.

Precooked slowly (sous vide, steam oven, or low oven), then cut into steaks to order and seared?

Scrub sponge and detergent. The lore is wrong; if you're not cleaning the pan then it will just be dirty. A properly formed seasoning will not be harmed by normal scrubbing. You'd be surprised what it would take to damage it. That said, the seasoning is porous, and it will hang on to some odors. This is why it's traditional to have a separate spun steel pan for omelettes. Eggs are especially susceptible to absorbing odors from their environment. Cast iron is a wonderful material, but it has many limitations. Retained odors is one of them. Poor conduction and very slow response to temperature changes are others. It doesn't make sense to use it for everything. Use it for its strenghts, and avoid its weaknesses by using something else.

Please tell me this is a temporary glitch.

What temperature are you cooking to? This is really more about time and temperature than method. The only way grilling is going to render off a significant amount of that fat is if you're overcooking the meat. My guess is that when cooking sous vide, you're somewhat undercooking it. I always order this kind of meat rare at restaurants, which made me assume 49°-51°c would be right for these steaks, but I greatly prefered them cooked to 54°C ... what a lot of chefs would call the low end of medium rare. That's the point at which all the marbling was effectively melted. I suspect this is because with conventional cooking methods, there's always some gradient, so only the meat at the very center will actually be as cool as your target temperature.

That's the standard Poly Science circulator that you'll see a lot of people using. They go for about $1000, which is why I don't have one. There are other options, though ... quite a few people here have a Sous Vide Supreme. I'm sure someone can comment on its suitability for a project of this scale. I used a 20 quart stock pot for a container. I might have been able to use a somewhat smaller one. I brushed the meat with this formula: -100g water or water plus pan drippings. -1.5g dextrose (or 2 to 4g corn syrup or glucose syrup) -0.5g baking soda A light coat of this on dried meat before browning should theoretically help. Its real benefit is to allow better, faster browning with less heat (it's ideal with a 400°F pan temperature). I haven't experimented enough to have a verdict. I got this idea from conversations here and from some techie research. Possibly the best way to brown this meat would be with a deep fryer. It would be so brief that you would need no breading; the meat wouldn't have any fried qualities. Short of that, it would probably have helped if I'd used a pan instead of a griddle, and poured in a thicker layer of oil. It would have allowed crust on the whole surface of the meat, including indendations. A circulator would be great in a small NYC kitchen. Cook for an army (while you're doing domething else) and then hide it when you're done.

Last fall I needed to serve steak to a dozen people. I had four burners and no help in the kitchen, so the Ducasse method (and other methods I've used) weren't going to work. The solution was both obvious and trendy: sous vide and relax. I borrowed an immersion circulator from a friend and bought test meat to run some trials. I was interested in how to get some of the butter overtones from the Ducasse method. I was also curious to discover what my actual favorite internal temperature is for beef. Here's the winning methodology: My butcher hooked us up with some very prime, 8-week dry-aged beef. Five from the loin, one from the rib. I salted and peppered the steak and sealed each in a ziplock bag with about 1.5 oz melted, cultured butter. The butter was for flavor and also to help evacuate the air (I don't have a vacuum machine, so I get the air out by immersing the bagged food in water). The winning combination was 2-1/2 hours at 54°C. This is below the pasteurization temperature for beef, so going much longer isn't adivseable. The results were also so tender that I'd be afraid of a longer cook having excessive tenderizing effect. I then trimmed the meat from the bones, dried it, and brushed lightly with a weak glucose / baking soda solution to boost the maillard reactions. I seared it on a very hot griddle, flipping a couple of times. Total sear was probably less than a minute per side. Everyone got a a few slices of strip, and a bit of tenderloin and rib. I served it with a sauce made from beef coulis, wild mushrooms, and sage. The moral of the story is that returning the circulator broke my heart. This method allow the steaks to be cooked perfectly, and also absolutely consistently from steak to steak, and with just a few minutes lag between the first steak coming off the heat and the last one landing on the table. It's always a challenge getting rare / semi-rare meat to the table warm, since it isn't more than warm to begin with. In addition, this required NO SKILL. Once I'd worked out the method, it could have been executed by monkeys. Compared with the Ducasse method, I'd say that the crust wasn't quite as thick or as buttery. But the gradient was smaller and the doneness was more reliably perfect, and it was much easier. It should be possible to increase the crustiness with some refinement, if that's your goal. There are many variables to play with when searing.