paulraphael
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Posts posted by paulraphael
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44 minutes ago, heidih said:
I think it was @paulraphael who brought up a pet peeve and a good concern. One - the damn glass window - hard to clean (my Bosch is 2 layers and aerosolized whatever gets in there. Useless as any cooking update. Why?? Two - small pans falling through grates - who'd have thought but I've cooked on nice stoves and had to micromanage location of pot to avoid tilt.
I've shattered the windows by spilling water on them when they're at roasting / bread baking temps.
They also make ovens heat unevenly. Glass doesn't radiate as much heat as dark enameled steel. It's just physics. This is the main reason ovens usually brown better in the back, especially at high temperatures.
The Decor we just got has one of the better grates as far as keeping things from tipping over. Not perfect but pretty good. Bluestar could be improved here. Some of the worst grates we looked at were on the Bosch and a couple of Italian ranges (Bertazzoni, Verona).
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I've infused ground coffee into milk and cream for making coffee ice cream. It's possible to get much better flavor than you'd ever get from instant coffee. But it's got to be coffee that has flavors that you like, and you need to get the infusion times and temperatures right. I outline some of my methods (product of a lot of trial and error)in a coffee ice cream post. Sweetened condensed milk is probably going to change things up quite a bit, due to the higher concentrations of everything. Also, sugar syrup is a powerful solvent for some compounds. This might affect the flavor balance you get from the coffee, and possibly even the amount of coffee you need to use. I think it's worth experimenting, at least if coffee is a dominant flavor in what you're doing, and you've got some time to kill. And some good coffee.
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11 minutes ago, Marya said:
The BlueStar's appeal is that it has the same burners Garland was lauded for. I've had my BS range top for 16 years. No issues with grill, griddle or burners.
I just saw a video where a Bluestar rep confirmed what I'd suspected: when the company split off from Garland, they negotiated to keep the star burner intellectual property. Those burners are the darlings of the commercial range world. Bluestar added their own refinements to get the things to simmer.
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18 hours ago, MassWineGuy said:
So, can anyone make further suggestions for a stove?
TL;DR is that there's no perfect option, and you'll need to figure out which compromises are best for you.
A piece of advice I'm glad I took was to go to a big appliance store and look at things in person. Don't rely 100% on advice and online research. For example, we discovered that some ranges have grate patterns that are so open, a small sauce pan could easily tip over if you're not careful. This wouldn't be obvious from pictures and no one talks about it. Some ranges felt much flimsier than others.
I'd keep an open mind toward induction. It's the future. Gas appliances are going to be phased out of existence, probably in the next 10 years. It wasn't an option for us; our building doesn't have the electrical capacity for electric ranges. And I'm stubbornly nostalgic about cooking on fire, and don't want to eBay my copper pans. But the revolution is coming.
Commercial ranges: no. This has been a pipe dream for many of us, but once you do the research, it seems crazy. Reasons:
1. They're not as cheap as they used to be
2. Even the nicest ones look like industrial equipment (maybe this is a plus for you. I'm ok with it, most aren's)
3. They are 6" to 10" deeper than your counters
4. To make them safe, you will need a full-powered commercial hood, oversized, with makeup air ventilation.
5. You will also need to build a certified non-combustible firewall behind it. This alone will more than kill any cost savings.
6. You'll need at least a foot of clearance between it and any combustible cabinetry.
7. Kids, pets, and the unwary will burn themselves on the oven door.
8. Your homeowner's insurance company will laugh at you and walk out of the room
9. Authorized service people will probably refuse to work on it in your home.
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23 minutes ago, weinoo said:
Methinks you thinks to the point of overthinking things (sometimes). It's almost a solution looking for a problem. I've never caught anything on fire, neither here nor when I was cooking on a line. (Admittedly, you're a lot taller than me).
Anyway, the other 3 burners on my range are only 15K BTU's, so I refuse to self-immolate. Also, the broiler works great, and the temp is spot on and consistently even in the oven, which are, of course, just a couple of other considerations.
And - it has red knobs and a matching hood.
If not wanting my side towel to burst into flames means I'm overthinking, then you are a cooler cat than I.
(This is not a towel draped rakishly over my shoulder, but the one on the pan handle that lets me pick it up)
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On 10/19/2021 at 2:50 PM, MassWineGuy said:
Of these, is any better made than another? Or are they all cheap junk?I think "cheap junk" might be going a bit far. Some of these cheaper ranges can work fine. My landlord from several years ago put in a Frigidaire range that worked fine—I used it to cook underground restaurant dinners, and did years of culinary experiments on it. It even had an oven that went to 550°F, which is rare, and made it almost possible to make decent pizza. It needed a minor repair once. Not counting the time I shattered the oven window (I wish there were no such thing as oven windows ... what a dumb idea).
One of the sales guys at an appliance store confirmed the suspicion of many people here: the thing that fails is the logic board. Never mind that it's possible to have a reliable logic board in a fighter plane or space shuttle. The appliance companies seem to cheap out on this, and put as little engineering into it as possible. Cheap electronics + heat + moisture = gambling.
I don't think the high-end, dirt-simple ranges are necessarily lower maintenance than the cheap stuff. Some of them need quite a bit of maintenance. The difference is that on the better ones, you can do it yourself. The Bluestar stuff comes apart like lego, and there's a youtube video for most fixes. You can do many of them without tools. You can take the whole thing apart with a philips screwdriver. And many of the parts are generic industrial things you can buy from anywhere. This is how you know something was actually designed like a commercial range (rather than just styled like one). You'd have to be a lot braver to try to fix a Samsung Connected Smart Oven. That's like doing DIY on a 300lb gas-powered iPhone.
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On 10/2/2021 at 9:51 AM, KennethT said:
... I don't think I've ever stir fried at a power level greater than what it calls 1200W. Any more than that and things burn before you can move your hand from the control panel and lift your wok scoop.
Interesting. Makes me wonder about old-school commercial wok burners. How many of those 100K+ BTUs are actually making it into the pan?
Edited to add: 100,000 btu/hr (typical for a Chinese restaurant) is equal to about 30,000 watts. I'm guessing an induction burner this powerful would turn a wok into a glowing puddle of steel juice in just a couple of seconds.
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1 hour ago, weinoo said:
I think (or at least it appears as if I'm able to) if I turn down the flame, or use the small 9K BTU burner on back left, all these problems are solved. YMMV of course.
I still do need to point out I'm cooking at home, 99.5% of the time for 2 people.
Yes, using a small flame or a simmer burner works. But I'd call this a workaround. If I have 18K btu/hr burners, I'd like to use them to preheat a pan quickly, and to be able to keep up with evaporative heat loss when the food hits the metal. If I have to turn the flame down halfway, then I might as well be cooking on my old tenement range. That big donut of fire you get from the sealed burner is only able to deliver its promise in a narrow range of circumstances.
A slightly more dramatic version of the problem: I was sauteing mushrooms in a 12" cast iron skillet on the 18K burner last night, and my side towel kept catching on fire. I've cooked on a 35K btu Wolf Commercial burner, and my towel was not bursting into flames right under my hand. Because the burners aim the flames up at the pan, not out at me.
This guy does a pretty good demonstration. He's showing a Bluestar open burner vs. some version of Wolf domestic sealed burner. These Wolf burners appear to be slightly better than what I've got, but it's hard to know for sure from the video:
Edited to add: the stuff he says about simmering isn't really part of my argument and is more relevant to this particular model of Wolf burner (which I don't think is current). The stuff about heat distribution, though, applies to every sealed burner I've used.
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Ranges are a pain in the ass. We just spent 2 months shopping for them, after a plumber convinced us that our old reliable 1980s Crapmaster was a ticking time bomb (all the gas pipes were corroding).
We were hoping to spend under $2K. At this price point, everything is loaded with features (Air frying! Smart connected WiFi! 5 proprietary baking modes!) and motherboards that are doomed to die 5 minutes after the warranty is up. The closets things are some Chinese knockoffs of higher-end "pro-style" ranges ... Thor and NXR. But these have a bad reputation for reliability, and the guy who sold them even talked us out of them.
We ended up spending a little over our budget on steeply discounted Dacor. It was a discontinued floor model. Made in USA, pretty solid, all analog knobs, no dumb features (except self-clean, which we'll avoid). This thing was about $3500 when new. I've only cooked on it a bit so far, and have to conclude that the target audience is wealthy people who like shiny things and who cook a little bit.
It has a nice oven. It looks like a nice broiler ... will have to test it. But I just don't think that a range with sealed burners is a serious piece of equipment. I've cooked on dozens of different makes and models, this one included, and I'm convinced the sealed burner is a deeply flawed design that's not capable of heating evenly or working well with more than a narrow range of pan sizes. The Dacor is a poster child of this phenomenon. If you want to boil water in a 12" diameter stock pot, the 18K burners will be beasts. But if you put a sauté pan on it, even the one with the stacked rings, 90% of the heat is hitting the outer edge of the pan (or going into the room). And a small saucepan? Most of the fire will completely miss the target. It's just dumb.
Of course you can make anything work. I cooked some of my best meals on the old Crapmaster. But for this kind of money, you should at least be able to get the kinds of burners they put on commercial ranges that cost half as much. It irks me.
From what I've learned, the last remaining home ranges with open burners are Bluestar, American Range, and Capital. They're all expensive. If I get a chance to build a kitchen that I'll stay in for a long time, I'll either find funds for a Bluestar, or go way downmarket to the $1k level. Some of the Frigidaire ranges looked pretty good (if you can get past the idea of buying something that makes fire being called frigidaire).
Of course by then open flame cooking might be banished entirely. It will be all about chasing the dream of commercial-power induction, and finding ways to get 3-phase 240 volt wiring into the kitchen, without selling the farm. Good times ahead!
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On 10/19/2021 at 5:31 PM, MassWineGuy said:
When I bought it my Blue Star (not Viking, sorry) the company had recently taken over the consumer line from Viking. At least that’s how it was explained to me.
It was Garland, not Viking. Bluestar's parent company (Prizer-Painter) made ranges for Garland, including Garland's consumer line. When Garland dropped out of the consumer market, Prizer kept making the ranges, and branded them Bluestar. They picked up some of Garland's design ideas, most notably the star burner, which is why Bluestar's burners are so much better than the ones on any other consumer range.
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On 8/12/2021 at 6:51 PM, ccp900 said:
for those who use an immersion cooker to cook your base. how would the temps/times change when you use a mason jar to cook instead of a zip lock bag. im tired of throwing these things out. such a waste!
im going to go use a 1L ball mason jar just to limit the waste but need the insights of those who have shifted. depending on the flavor and my mood i use 3 temps/times. 65c for 1 hour / 75c for 30 mins / 85c for 5 mins. these are all usinf zip lock bags though, i am wondering how it will change going to mason jars
This is hard to answer, because it's not easy to model the heat transfer from a water bath into a liquid in a container. The speed of heating changes with the size and shape of the container and the viscosity of the liquid. No matter what, it takes a long time for the liquid to come up to temperature. This is why cooking an ice cream base sous-vide is more pretend-precise than actual precise.
I still do it this for my own ice cream at home, because it works well enough, and with the batch sizes I make (in ziploc bags) the process is repeatable and gives consistent results with good control over the final temperature. But for my commercial clients I always recommend a pasteurizer, or some equivalent thing that directly heats the liquid while stirring it.
If you want to try jars, it would work better with a few smaller ones than with one big one. And you might want to interrupt the process to shake or stir them a few times in the first half hour (you can use this as an opportunity to get a temperature reading and check your progress).
Throwing out the ziploc bags is indeed wasteful. If I made ice cream more often I'd consider switching to a pasteurizer, or a lab hot plate with magnetic stirrer and temp probe.
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On 10/3/2021 at 1:36 PM, weinoo said:
I wonder how many times I can go out for pizza for the cost of the books + 25 lbs. of flour?
This is a New Yorker conundrum for sure. Years ago I was neck deep in trying to make decent pizze, and then Roberta's opened up a 10 minute walk from my kitchen. End pizza experiment.
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We're finally getting a new range, and it will be the first time I've ever had anything with a useable broiler. What do you like to broil in?
I have the ugly generic enameled broiler pan that shipped with our current range (probably 40+ years ago). These just seem like messy things to clean.
I assumed there would be a standard heavy wire rack that would sit in a half-sheet pan for this purpose. But when I search for things like commercial broiler rack I get nothing. There are some similar things called baking racks that double as cooling racks. Not sure what the real intent is. It seems like in restaurants they just slide a pan or sizzle platter under the salamander and call it done. Is this the best approach? If I need nothing, so much the better.
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It used to be super illegal, but some of the laws have changed. They now make it easy for people to get microdistilling licenses, etc. ... it's why there are so many small-label bourbons and gins all of a sudden. I don't know how this affects moonshine. It might still be verboten, but maybe they care less (like the places where weed's still illegal but casual users don't get hassled anymore).
BTW, I love that these beautiful things are selling at near-hillbilly prices.
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The standard approach is to cut up the fruit and add sugar. Kind of like how you'd do a salt-rub on a piece of meat. Sprinkle generous amounts of sugar on the fruit, cover it, and let it sit in the fridge for several hours until the sugar has drawn water out of the fruit, dissolved, and been reabsorbed. It will now be resistant to turning into little rocks. And because we're less sensitive to sweetness when food is very cold, it won't taste as cloyingly sweet as you might expect.
Disclaimer: I haven't done this since I worked at a commercial ice cream shop way back in the 20th century. I don't tolerate super sweet things now the way I did then. So I don't know how much I'd like this. I have not made ice cream with chunks of fruit since those days. And my ice cream consulting clients don't ask me about stuff like inclusions, so I don't know how they're handling it either. But this idea is worth trying.
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I'm guessing you'll find the best answers in farming small industrial food manufacturer forum. Most of us here have scales that go up to a few kilograms.
If you learn the best way to do this, I'd love to hear it. Out of totally random curiosity.
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On 7/12/2021 at 7:00 AM, weinoo said:
Is there any need to use an homogenizer when starting with homogenized milk?
I don't believe I use any emulsifiers either. I've pretty much settled on Dana Cree's methodology.
If you're making uncooked bases, there probably isn't any benefit to a homogenizer. When you cook/pasteurize an ice cream base, the fat globules get more mobile and glom onto each other, making fewer bigger globules that result in a worse foam structure and texture. The homogenizing step happens right after cooking, when the fat is still hot and liquid. In order of effectiveness:
doing nothing < regular blender / stick blender < high-powered blender < rotor-stator homogenizer (like Jo's) < ultrasonic homogenizer < high-pressure homogenizer (like what the dairy uses).
Emulsifiers, in my experience (and depending on flavor) make a small but noticeable difference in smoothness and foam quality. Contrary to common sense, they're not used to emulsify the ice cream at all. Milk and cream are already perfectly good emulsions; the surface-active components of the milk proteins do the emulsifying, and the industrial homogenizer at the dairy makes everything stable. We actually add emulsifiers to partially destabilize the emulsion. Added emulsifiers pluck some of the milk proteins away from the fat globules, making it easier for the fat globules to partially coalesce and form a foam structure.
Consider that part of the structure of ice cream is whipped cream ... we're trying to make whipped cream with a much lower fat percentage than we usually would. Anything that helps destabilize the milk and cream make this much easier. It takes very little ... there's probably enough lecithin in 1/4 egg yolk to do it for a liter of ice cream.
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On 7/1/2021 at 12:26 AM, Synerge said:
Actually, I think that the fat relation with taste goes the other way around. For example in USA they increased a lot fat content as it gave the ice cream a different texture and flavour
One thing is certain, while more fat you have, more creamy is the ice cream. Because fat does not freeze, so you have less water, so less ice problems
Obviously, on the other side, fat is extremely unhealthy, specially if you are planning to eat ice cream on a regular basis. A 10% fat content is a lot more balanced, and it comes out great. You can also go for italy's gelatos that go from 4% to 8% top. In argentina, the gelatos usually go from 7% to 10%. For me, 6% is a little to low, 8% sounds better in all the cases. I try to get values between 8 and 10
Chocolate is probably the most difficult ice cream to do, because the main compontent, that is chocolate, is quite complex, and changes everything in the formula. It has fats, sugars, solids. Everything. Also, the quality and type of chocolate change everything aswell
Your finding is interesting, you say that with a smaller POD, the chocolate taste doesn't stand out too much. In the contrary, if you increase sweetness, the flavour is better. That maybe depends on the chocolate you are using. Also have in mind that chocolate itself is really high on fat.
Post your recipe so we can check what is going on. Although I have no experiene in this, maybe others that do like chocolate can say something about it. I can only say that chocolate is really bitter, specially if you go more to pure chocolate. Milk chocolate on the other half, or maybe even white chocolate, completely different taste
The relationship of fat to flavor really depends on the flavor. Some flavors are carried by it, others are muted by it. I don't believe any flavors benefit from a fat level above 16% or so, but some, like fat-soluble spices (vanilla) seem to do best around there. Other flavors, like fruits and coffee, are most vibrant and intense at low fat levels.
I agree with you about chocolate. The main culprit is cocoa butter, which causes problems not just because of its abundance but because of its hardness at cold temperatures. The sugar and solids aren't so hard to compensate for, but the cocoa butter's always a problem. Using cocoa powder would be the solution, but chocolate companies still think of it as a byproduct. It's what's left over after extracting cocoa butter (which they use for white chocolate or to sell as an industrial ingredient) and they don't pay much attention to the powders provenance. Companies like Michel Cluizel and Valrhona do sell better cocoa powder than other companies ... but it's nothing like the quality of their own single-origin chocolates. This is not because it has to be so; they just haven't identified this as a market.
Callebaut is now advertising single-origin cocoa powders to their professional customers. But I don't see a distributor in the US and they won't return my calls. Some smaller makers in the US are making fancy cocoa powder. But last I checked none had the (expensive) machine needed to mill it to a fine texture. So your ice cream would be gritty.
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On 1/25/2021 at 10:57 AM, rotuts said:
don't get one w a pear in it , as that starts the
Tasty Cycle Again
That would be a conundrum.
There's a scene in the novel Corelli's mandolin where someone's hiding from the authorities in church balcony where a case of wine is being stored. He desperately needs to pee, and can't think of anyplace to go but one of the wine bottles. But they're all new bottles. So he uncorks one and—since he can't bear the thought of wasting the wine—drinks it before relieving himself in it. You can imagine how this ends, or doesn't.
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On 4/19/2021 at 12:56 AM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
Most of the cost is in the rotor-stator probe:
Someone with autocad and a machine shop could do this as a kickstarter project. I think the simplest approach would be a Vitamix attachment, since that thing is more modular. The cost of the replacement jugs for the VM would keep it from ever being really cheap, even if you could get the blades made in China.
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I don't have one because they're huge. A vacuum machine doesn't offer enough advantages over ziploc bags for sous-vide.
There are many other things chamber vac is necessary for (vacuum infusion, instant pickling, etc.) but these aren't interesting enough to me to justify the size and expense.
If I move someplace with double the square feet, I'll rethink it. But my eye will probably be on more expensive ones that I can trust to not break.
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On 4/14/2021 at 11:43 PM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
I'm sure by now I must sound like a broken record, but for anyone contemplating a stick blender, consider an homogenizer. Price is high but the technology is game changing.
I assume the price is high only because it's a specialized tool sold to science labs—the same reason that once upon a time you couldn't get an immersion circulator for under $1K. I'm waiting for someone to wakeup and make a rotor/stator head for a vitamix or higher-powered stick blender. How hard could it be?
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On 4/13/2021 at 4:27 PM, jimb0 said:
the counter issue is a fair criticism but a little dish soap and blending would remove any batter issues imo.
I'm not talking about cleaning, I'm talking about getting all the food out of the thing. The vitamix is clunky at this. Which is why I almost always use it for large batches.
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5 hours ago, jimb0 said:
fair, but i'm not sure how the vitamix turns it into a bigger project than the stick blender.
Because it's more work to scrape food out of the jug, and because it's rather heavy and doesn't live full time on our counter. Has to be pulled out and put away. Bamix is more like grabbing an electric toothbrush.
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Gas Range Advice, Please
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
I think that's about right. Garland had Prizer making their residential ranges from 1991 to around 2002 (at least 2002 is when Prizer took over the business and launched the Bluestar brand). They did get to hang onto some of Garland's IP to make the burners. But the burners aren't identical; they don't even look alike, aside from the star shape.
I don't know exactly why Garland got out of the home business. Just about everyone does. I think if you're used to selling equipment and services to businesses, dealing with homeowners is just too big a big a pain in the ass. The rules are different. And also Garland changed ownership many times over the years; this might have coincided with it.