paulraphael

A quick wipe with soapy water is probably good enough most of the time, but it doesn't assure anything. The whole point of sanitizers is to provide assurance. I'll also risk belaboring the point that when you say "I've never had a problem," you're saddling yourself with a an almost impossible burden of proof. There are literally dozens of types of foodborne illnesses, with wide ranging symptoms, and onset times that range from minutes to several weeks. When I'm just cooking for myself, I'm pretty lax. But when I'm cooking for other people, I feel it's my responsibility to take more precautions. And if I'm going to be cooking for strangers, who's health condition I may know little about, the responsibility is even higher. The health risks of mishandled food wildly outweigh the risks of keeping a jug of chemicals under the sink ... where many people already keep bleach, ammonia, and even bug spray. This chart should give you an idea of the range of pathogens and toxins that are out there, and how far beyond the usual "food poisoning" symptoms the effects can be. As an example, if you or anyone in your family has ever gotten 24 hour stomach flu, that's caused by noroviruses, which are usually transmitted through food. And they're not killed by vinegar, which has become a popular kitchen sanitizer.

And there are others among us who like a house that smells like meat.

ha! if i had a chocolate shop i wouldn't be procrastinating on the internet. just another thought ... you could check out the current thread on water ganache. i'm sure anything those guys are doing with water could be done with wine. i have no experience with this, but i assume you'd get a different texture and somewhat more direct flavors. it's really the same thing as a chocolate butter sauce, but without the butter enrichment.

Scrubbing with soap and hot water is probably all you need to do in most cases. If you're cooking for other people it's a more serious endeavor. You may not know if someone's immune compromised or not. Scrubbing removes most pathogens but not all. Sanitizing cutting boards is a very small part of the picture when it comes to working clean. I actually think sanitzing sponges and side towels is more important, but the same discussion of chemicals applies. All that being said, when you say you have never been sick from eating contaminated food, how do you know? Have you never been sick? And if you have been sick, how did you reach your conclusion about the source of the illness?

Ok, acording to my secret formula, a good starting point would be 150g chocolate 44g butter 56g wine This should give you close to the consistency of 150g chocolate/100g cream. If the consistency is wrong it can be remelted and adjusted. Since the emulsion is fragile, it's best to let it come to room temperature on its own (if it's been chilled) and then warm it very gently in a double boiler. once melted, more of any of the ingredients can be stirred in.

In Britain, "hanging" typically means aging. I'm curious about hanging the sense of hanging it upside down by the feet during the rigor period. Not sure if it's supposed to be chilled for this, or how big a difference it makes.

If you tell me what proportion of chocolate and cream you'd use, I can figure out a good starting point for you with butter.

What's the consistency you're looking for? I linked to a pretty foolproof and delicious recipe in my first post in the thread. As written it's a sauce, but with a bit of tweaking (lots more butter) it could easily become a firm ganache. Just keep in mind that cream is typically 36% milkfat and butter is typically 80% milkfat (with most of the rest being water in both cases). To mimic the consistency of a cream ganache you just need to get the butter/wine combination to mimic the quantity of cream in that recipe. It's late ... let me know if that was incomprehensible.

I tried it on 1-1/2" thick pork chops. Since I was going for medium, I used lower heat, and cooked for about 14 minutes on a side. They were great, but not noticeably different from my usual method, which is to brown on high heat and then allow to finish cooking on very low while covered, basting in butter (similar to how I do steak, but the final cooking is lower, slower, and usually covered). The one significant advantage to this method was being able to brown in butter on both sides. The minor advantage was being able to use rendered fat for the initial cooking, instead of oil.

Good to know; that explains why my butcher's birds are so good late in the day of slaughter. I'm still curious about the hanging part. I've read that meat, including poultry, should be hung during the rigor period, otherwise it won't relax properly. But that doesn't seem to be people's experience here.

was your old hobart a hobart kitchenaid or a commercial hobart? how much dough are you making? if ka is giving you the runaround, i'd suggest going to the forums at their website. there are some world class goofballs over there, but some really helpful people too, including ka reps.

That chart's an interesting idea, but I don't know if tells you anything besides relative values if you don't know their exact precedures. Simmering for a specific time doesn't remove a fixed percentage, it removes a fixed quantitiy (in any given pan). So simmering 4oz of booze for a minute will remove a much greater percentage of alcohohol than simmering 8oz of booze for a minute. To proove the concept, try simmering a tablespoon of booze for a minute ... you'll lose 100% of the alcohol (and water) before the time's up. The relative values are definitely worth noticing, though. Intersting how little alcohol flaming removes compared with some methods. It makes sense; you can't flame booze that's lower than a certain alcohol percentage. It never builds up the right concentration of vapors and oxygen to ignite. So once you've burned up enough alcohol to get the percentage down to this level, the fire goes out.

Do you know what year it was made? Could you post your dough recipe? I'm curious. I've had two pro 600s, both newer models with the cast metal gear case. I replaced the first one because of minor problems, but both could handle any dough I threw at them. The only task that even makes them warm is grinding piles of meat with the grinder attachment. KA has definitely had its share of quality control problems (just like all the makers of home mixers). I suspect that if a pro 600 fails at making dough that it used to be able to make, or dough that you could make no problem in a 4 or 5 qt mixer, then there's something actually wrong with that particular mixer.

Does anyone know of a good discussion on what flaming does to the composition of booze? There's some conventional wisdom that it burns off all the alcohol but this clearly isn't the case. I just did an experiment where I weighed some cognac, flamed it, and weighed it again (don't worry; it was cheap). It lost 30% of its mass. It was originally 40% alcohol (by volume, so we can assume it's a bit less than 40% alcohol by mass). If all the lost mass was alcohol, then we'd expect over 3/4 of the alcohol to be burned off, leaving cognac that's less than 10% alcohol. But it tasted much stronger than this. In fact it didn't taste all that different from the unflamed cognac. Which makes me wonder it a lot of water was being evaporated in the process, leaving behind cognac that's slightly lower in alcohol, but in general more concentrated. Thoughts? This came up because I'm experimenting with cognac in ice creams, and I'm trying to get as much flavor as possible wiithout too much anti-freeze.

ahhh, so you're talking about running plastic boards through the planer? that's really interesting. conventional wisdom is that any kind of resurfacing will just melt them. that's great info to pass around ... most people just throw the things out when the surface gets dinged up.

Especially since this is a project for a winemaker, I think you want to avoid any technique that drastically changes the character of the wine (not counting, um, mixing it with chocolate ...) This precludes cooking it, and definitely reducing it. When you cook a wine, all of its subtlety is destroyed. Most of the aromatic compounds are released or oxidized, and you end up with with a vague sense of the original wine's body, fruit flavors, and acidity. Red wine gets altered more; if it's reduced without the right amino acids present in sufficient quantity, the pigments and tanins can drop out completely (though I doubt this would be an issue in a ganache). I think you should look closely at butter ganaches, because they don't require any reduction of the wine ... the cream portion is the butter, which is under 20% water. The wine only needs to be heated to the melting point of chocolate. Not much higher than body temperature. Which is the temp that all good wines end up, eventually If you have trouble forming a stable emulsion, you could experiment with small quantities of added emuslifiers, like lecithin or gelatin.

just to be clear, that panel of scientists did not express an opinion one way or another about the safety of BPA. They were critical of the FDA's approval process, which they said was completely inadequate. so all we know is what you first said, which is that the jury is still out. The only thing I've heard about the difference between flavor from cans and bottles came from an engineer I knew who worked at Coors. He said that in blind tests their trained tasters couldn't tell the difference between beer that had been poured from one vs. the other. This was a while ago. At the time I was under the impression that cans were lined with mylar (polyester ... not sure where I learned that, or if someone made it up).

I've done this many times. An approach that works well is a chocolate butter sauce, which is basically a thin butter ganache. Depending on the final use, you can increase the proportion of butter to thicken it. This is the basic method. I've done this with fortified wines, which are already sweet and which I knew would work at leat passably with chocolate. Port is the obvious choice. With some experimenting, you should be able to find a chocolate that works with your client's wine.

Do you put your wood boards in the dishwasher? I wouldn't do that with mine. Residential dishwashers don't usually get hot enough to sanitize effectively. Unless they have a built in water heater and a sanitze feature like commercial models. I've heard of using chemical sanitizers with dishwashers, but don't know how to do it (I don't have a dishwasher). Commercial dishwashers that sanitize use water that's around 190°F. I've head of these temps warping sanituff boards. Plastic boards hold up fine, but I hate them! I just scrub my wooden boards in the sink with hot soapy water, and then spray with a light mist of quats at 200ppm. The protein board gets this treatment after every use; the vegetable board much less often. I also keep a side towel soaked in the quat solution by the vegetable board. It's useful for wiping the board down between uses and keeping knives clean. In this application, the sanitizer serves mostly to keep the rag from becoming a germ spreading medium.

not bad for under 20 bucks! the stuff I bought is actually more home use friendly ... an ounce makes a gallon, not 5+ gallons. so you use it at the same dilution as bleach. about a capfull per pint. not nearly as good a deal as the superconcentrated stuff, but more than good enough. if you're curious, just look around next time you're at a restaurant supply store. they're bound to have something.

I said to use a capful of the diluted stock solution that you mix up from the concentrated product. If the stock solution is diluted 1:4 with water, then it's a 20% solution. Using a capful of that per pint is the correct strength. Or at least close enough for government work. The final working solutions are a 200 part per million solution of the ammonium salts. This is considered a no-rinse solution. Spray it on a cutting board and let it dry, or give dishes a final 1 minute soak before air drying. Quats are often used in stronger solutions for cleaning equipment or for disinfecting, but in that case they must be rinsed off, at least if you're dealing with any surface that contacts food. You basically treat them like chlorine bleach. A 1TB/gallon bleach solution is no-rinse; any stronger you should rinse. I've been using the quats for a month now. I have a spray bottle for wetting down cutting boards and work surfaces, and a couple of takeout containers filled with the solution: one for sponges by the sink, and one for side towels by my cutting board. The trick is to rinse the sponges and towels well before putting them into the solution. No sanitizer works well when it gets dirty. I've been using the same three sponges for weeks now, and they smell good as new. Mmmmmmm, sponge!

My source is Harold McGee, whose book doesn't give many details on the timing. "...most meat in the United States is aged only incidentally, during the few days it takes to be shipped packing plant to market. This is enough for chicken, which benefits from a day or two of aging, and for pork and lamb, which benefit from a week (the unsaturated fats of pork and poultry go rancid relatively quickly)." "Rigor sets in (after about 2.5 hours in the steer, 1 hour or less in lamb, pork, and chicken) when the muscle fibers run out of energy, their control systems fail and trigger a contracting movement of the protein filaments, and the filaments lock in place. Carcasses are hung up in such a way that most of their muscles are stretched by gravity, so that the protein filaments can't contract and overlap by much; otherwise the filaments bunch up and bond very tightly and the meat becomes exceptionally tough. Eventually, protein-digesting enzymes within the muscle fibers begin to eat away the framework that holds the actin and myosin filaments in place. The filaments are still locked together, and the muscles cannot be stretched, but the overall muscle structure weakens, and the meat texture softens. This is the beginning of the aging process. It becomes noticeable after about a day in beef, after several hours in pork and chicken." So it seems possible that a significant amount of aging happens in 8 hours ... maybe that's all a chicken really needs. What I take from McGee is that there is at least a chance that more than a day of aging is beneficial, but that more than two is not. From personal experience I know chickens can be delicious and tender 12 or 14 hours after slaughter. But I don't think I've had any that were fresher than that.

Chicken feet are a great source of gelatin. Right up there with pig's feet. Butchers and ethnic grocery stores sell them, but the best way to get them is also the best way to get chicken backs: buy a whole chicken. The farmer at the market should be able to sell you whole chickens, feet, head and all. Keep the carcass, neck, and feet in the freezer for your stocks. And enjoy much better tasting birds.

Most of the chicken used in my stock is carcasses from roasted birds. The amount of salt remaining in thesse probably contributes at least 1/4 tsp per final quart ... another reason I'm shy about adding more.

I'm happy with my plain aluminum 20qt stock pot. True that it's less versatile than stainless, but this hasn't been an issue. It gets used for making stock and poaching turkeys ... nothing acidic. Heats very evenly (it's about 6mm thick) and was cheap. I'd rather have a similar quality stainless one with a disk bottom, but all the ones I've seen cost much more. I saved the money for sexier cookware. If you plan to do more with yours ... like make 16 quarts of chili ... then by all means pony up for the stainless.