paulraphael

Katie, I have no doubt that Twinings probably isn't as great as I remember, but I'd be surprised if my impressions have changed this radically. I'm not talking about anything subtle ... this is about the tea I remember as a mighty and almost overwhelming experience now seeming lifeless and bland. Like the old stuff watered down until you can just taste a hint of it. I've cooked with this tea a bit. mostly for desserts. creme anglaise infused with lapsang souchong (or earl grey) is nice with pears. A chef I know uses lapsang souchong for marinades to impart smokiness. he moistens leaves and covers meat with them, before and sometimes during cooking. I've been meaning to try it.

Same cut? and can you tell us what cut? And can you describe what you mean by "tasted better?"

I don't doubt that someone out there is selling some nicely blended, high end preground meat. But all else being equal, it won't be as fresh as what you grind yourself. And ground meat loses freshness very quickly (lots of fatty surface exposed to lots of air). And considering that almost all of the ground beef I see is low quality to begin with, I see no reason to do anything but grind my own. I never tire of of the looks on my friends' faces when they take their first bite of a fresh ground burger.

You're right, it doesn't make sense. In a perfect world you'd have a huge pot of water and a lot of BTUs, so the water would come back to a boil almost instantly. More often it takes a while ... but the food is still cooking at the reduced temperature, just not as quickly, and in most cases not as well. I start timing the minute the food goes in, and no matter what, use time as the roughest of guidelines. Cooking actual time has to be based on taste and texture. Salt will have no meaninful effect on temperature (water at the salinity of sea water will boil at 1 degree F hotter than unsalted water; this represents a 0.15% increase in thermal energy). Most vegetables will cook faster in salt water, at least on the surface, but this is because salt softens the cell walls ... not because of temperature. If you do an experiment at home, you'll find that the difference in boiling time between salted and unsalted water is probably too small to measure.

I'll try the LS from Ren Ten ... they have a shop in NYC and I like being able to pick it up locally. I'd love to find a good version that comes in bags, too. Often I'm lazy and like to throw a tea bag into a cup.

Lapsang souchong was always my favorite tea. i drank it growing up and for years afterwards. Usually the Twinings in the purple box. It was always a mighty tea. It reminded me of an island scotch, the way it was so robust, and the way that people who didn't share my tastes would smell it from across the room, and then leave the room. But over the last few years, the lapsang i've had, especially the twinings (but to a lesser degree Taylors) has started tasting insipid. Like a watered down shadow of its old self. I've had a couple of cups of loose leaf lapsang that tasted better, but nothing as good as what I remember. Have I just developed some kind of tolerance, or has anyone else noticed this?

Well, it's for Christmas. Giving a Dexter Russel is kind of like giving someone a bic razor. Useful, but ... Forschners are serviceable knives, but the chef knives aren't especially good values, especially compared with many of their others. In a case like this it really comes down to how willing this guy is to take care of the knives and to learn how to sharpen them. After a couple of months of use without any sharpening, no knife is nice. After a couple of months of flat out abuse, many great knives will be worse than many mediocre ones. I don't have experience with the Togiharu knives, but from what I've heard they may be perfect. Same with Tojiro. If the person is likely to bang the knives around (and lets face it, most people are) a bomb-proof German knife like Messermeister might be a more practical choice. But only if you can find a really good deal ... prices on these have been going up.

Bringing this thread back from the dead. I've been living with a barely functional toaster (free!) and my broiler since this topic first came up. Now I'm thinking about negotiating with Santa for the real deal. My first questions are about the Cuisinart Brick Oven. How do you lovers of this machine like the toast? I don't expect toast to be perfect ... in fact I've never had perfect toast. But if I can consistently get toast that's browned everywhere and blackened nowhere, I'll probably be happy. Especially if it doesn't take much too long. Also, how useful do you find the convection feature? I see now that they have three models: plain, convection, and convection plus rotisserie. I have no need for the rotisserie. But if the convection feature works well, I might use it for cakes. My last question is about that cool Kaloric toaster oven. I like the description of it but can't find any reviews anywhere. Has anyone used it??

And what is meant by sea level saltiness? Is there a certain ratio of salt to water? ← About 3% by weight. Salt helps with green vegetables, because it speeds their softening, so in effect they'll cook faster. It also speeds the softening of starchy root vegetables; in this case it's usually a bad thing, since the surface will naturally tend to soften too much before the center is cooked. Generally best to avoid salt if you're cooking whole ones or big chunks of them in water. With all vegetables, alkalinity and water hardness are much more important than saltiness. If you live in a place with weird water, you may have issues. With pasta, all salted water does is contribute seasoning. Forget about what you might have heard about salt raising the boiling point. It does, but not enough to matter. That 3% solution ("salty as the sea") will boil 1 degree F higher than unsalted water. To try to compensate for the reduced boiling point at high altitude, you'd have to go nuts ... 2 pounds of salt per gallon to compensate for being at 5000 feet above sea level.

Could you do that with the ripe bananas (forgot to say ripe in my post). That would be simpler than pan frying... Thanks. ← I haven't tried it, but I believe it's traditional. And delicious. Would probably roast much faster than pears, since bananas are already soft. I'd try using a very hot oven.

Roasted fruit. The simplest and maybe the best thing I ever serve. My favorite is pears, with a butterscotch pan sauce. Put a bunch of halved pears (peeled and cored) in a roasting pan with chunks of butter and a generous sprinkling of sugar. Roast on medium high heat until soft, and until the drippings and sugar have caramelized on the bottom of the pan. Put the pan on the stove top, set aside the pears, and crank the heat. Deglaze the drippings with cream. If you like, finish with a bit of cognac or poirre william. strain. Serve each guest a pear half plated with a small pool of the sauce. So good!

I tried it this morning with a very small amount of salt (I've read elsewhere that as little as a 1/2 tsp of salt per 10 cups can taste salty). I used 1/8tsp in 48oz water. No scientific conclusion, but it MAY have tasted a bit mellower and sweeter than what I'm used to. I did notice something that's come up before, and I doubt has anything to do with the salt. My first cup tasted just slightly thin and bitter. 2nd and 3rd cups (poured from a thermos) tasted mellower, fuller, and sweeter. Coffee beans were Summatra, freshly ground, roasted about a week ago by porto rico in NYC. I think the beans are pretty good but not amazing overall. Any thoughts on what causes this transformation?

The lore about salting is based on osmosis, and the idea that salt will draw moisture out of the food. This is all based on the idea that meat and vegetable cells are covered with semipermeable membranes. In fact, very little osmosis goes on when you pre-salt food. The amount of moisture drawn out is insignificant. And when the food starts cooking, there is no osmosis at all; cell walls and cell membranes open up, and the food behaves like a sponge, not like a semipermeable membrane. Brining depends largely on an osmotic process, which is why it takes a long time. It also has negative effects along with the benefits. Personally, after a year of messing with brines I've stopped doing it. The one advantage I found was that food was more resistant to overcooking. But I feel that a better solution is to not overcook it in the first place

it weighs 7lbs now (8 weeks dry age). will lose a bit more weight over the next week and a half. don't have an alto sham; will be a home oven that probably goes down to 170, but i doubt it will work reliably at this temp. what drawbacks do you see to resting and then crisping in a very hot oven at the end?

I'm trying hard not to! And I'll be bringing a probe thermometer; the reason I'm asking for guesses on cooking time is that I'd like to be able to tell people when dinner will be ready. Much friendlier to say "7 O'clock" than "whenever this thermometer says 120 degrees, and not a minute sooner or later." I am not sure my companions will be ready for such a funky piece of meat, so I've started warning them well in advance. For that matter, I don't actually know what we're getting into. The most dry age I've had is 6 weeks. It was amazing and delicious and like nothing else I've ever had. No idea how this will be in comparison.

Oh no, dry aged all the way. I didn't realize this reduced roasting time (the only dry aged roasts I've done were tenderloin, which probably had a maximum of 10 days age). How big a difference do you think a lot of dry age makes?

Ha! That's the short of it right there. And I'm not paying for it. And I stand to suffer the ridicule of my entire family for the next many decades if I do mess it up. I'm going to guess that the oven there will go as low as 170 or so. Even so I'm inclined to cook closer to 200, since home ovens are often wildly in accurate and cycle unpredictably at their lowest settings. I'm intrigued by Blumenthal using a blowtorch. Especially since I just got one. It would serve the dual purposes of efficient browning, and scaring everyone out of the kitchen. What I'm actually leaning towards right now is cooking at 200, starting around 5 or 6 hours before serving the meat, and pulling it out when a probe thermometer reads 117 or 118 in the center. Then I'll cover with foil, and let it rest for at least an hour. Finally, I'll baste with butter and pop into a 500 or 550 oven (with the roasting pan preheated) to put a crust on it and rewarm it, right before serving. The torch sounds fun, but I think browning in the hot oven will do more to rewarm the outer part of the meat, which will let me have a very long rest if the timing requires it. Does this sound reasonable? I'll definitely take some pics when I take possession of the meat.

My butcher is setting me up with a 7lb, USDA prime rib roast that he's aging for me for 10 weeks. I checked it out today; it already has 8 weeks on it. The marbling is out of this world. I've never roasted a piece of meat like this, and am wondering if anyone has experience with it. Most of the roasting I do is high temperature, short time. I'm thinking this lovely hunk of meat might benefit from longer cooking. It's a tender cut, and it will already have had a stupefying amount of enzyme activity, so I don't see any need to cook it for ten hours. But maybe for several. It will be done in a home oven, so I'm assuming 170 to 200F is the lowest it will go. Searing at the beginning is generally recommended for safety reasons; searing at the end will most likely give a crisper crust. Has anyone compared methods? And does anyone have an estimate of cooking time (not counting sear) at say, 200F? I'll bring a remote probe thermometer, but want to be able to time things reasonably so the roast isn't done way early or way late.

Yup! two great things about doing it this way: -it works better than any specialized double boiler -you already have what you need. I had a specialized double boiler insert for a saucepan. Turned out to be inferior to a bowl in every way. So I drilled it full of holes. now it's a steamer.

Has anyone experimented with this? I've been adding very small amounts of salt to all kinds of recipes (particularly desserts, like ice creams and anything with chocolate) and finding that it often opens up and adds dimension to the flavors, without asserting any actual saltiness. Some experiments that Hervé This reports on confirm this effect. Salt both increases the ion density of solutions, speeding the release of aromatic compounds, and influences our perception of flavors through complex physiological effects. I'm curious to know if anyone has exploited these effects with coffee (beyond the old lore that it removes bitterness from bad coffee ... which may be true, but I'm more interested in good coffee!)

What you're seeing in the pork may be a different phenomenon than what you see with poultry (although I could be wrong about this). With a chicken, you're actually seeing different muscle fiber types; white (or fast twich) in the breasts, red (slow twich) in the legs. To my knowledge mammals aren't so cleanly divided into different fiber types within one animal. the ratio of white to red fiber is largely determined by breeding, and to a lesser degree by the kind of exercise the animal had. The appearance of light and dark muscle is strongly influenced by the age of the animal at slaughter. Younger ones are lighter (think veal). This atrocity known as "the other white meat" was a marketing campaign in response to America's growing fat phobia. Farmers and grocers were more than happy to deliver younger, leaner (and whiter, and mostly flavorless) pork, because for all the obvious reasons it's cheaper to produce. When you get a really good pasture-raised, heritage breed pig, the meat is decidedly not white. Or lean, or flavorless. As far as your main question, concerning different coloring within the same cut of meat, I have no idea. I haven't noticed this before, and don't know what the cause or the flavor difference might be.

I'm interested in blundstones (i've wanted a pair before I even knew they were popular in kitchens). Do cooks use the regular ones, or do they have a special kitchen model? are they at all hot? Do they favor a particular foot shape?

Agreed. For actual saucemaking, small saucepans are generally more useful than large ones. Depending on the sauce, a quart will be anywhere from 8 to 16 servings, so 3qt. and larger pans are more useful for other things (unless you're running a restaurant and making non-integral sauces in advance of service). One of the advantages of a slope sided pan is that it works more easily with a range of sauce volumes (especially helpful when you're making reductions). The ratio of volume to exposed surface area stays closer to constant than with a straight sided pan. So when the volume gets low, you don't deal with the sauce evaporating at out of control speeds.

That only applies to things that actually draw power, like computers (when asleep, or when keepting the battery charged), tvs and vcrs (to retain programming and clock settings, etc.). And it applies in a big way to anything that uses a wall wart power supply. Those things consume power whenever they're plugged in. You can tell ... they're always warm. One solution is to put appliances with wall warts on a power strip that you turn off when it's not in use. Most things, like toasters and mixers and washing machines, don't draw power when they're off. For things that consume power to maintain programming and clock settings ... well, you'd live in a world of unprogrammed electronics and blinking 12:00 displays if you didn't leave them plugged in. It's no big deal ... the amount of energy drawn by a VCR compared with a toaster oven is barely worth mentioning.

I couldn't find dextrose anywhere in town (if you think New York Cake Supply would have it, you'd be as wrong as I am). So I picked up some overpriced Wilton glucose syrup. There is no information on the package (besides "ingredients: corn syrup"), or on Wilton's website. Can anyone hazard a guess on how to substitute this for powdered dextrose? I suppose there's no way to know how much water is in it, without measuring its density, and I'm not even sure I'd get the math right ...