paulraphael

I suspect you'd want something as thin and light as possible. You don't want heat retention, and you don't need to spread uneven heat evenly. You just want something that will respond as quickly as possible.

I don't understand why those foil pans exist, unless there are really lots of people who decide to host thanksgiving, but are sure they'll never use their oven again ever. If you don't care about deglazing on the stove top (sad!) just get a half sheet pan. You'll use it for a million other things, and you can probably pick one up for next to nothing. You'll even benefit from more even browning than you get in a roasting pan. You just have to be careful not to let the bird slip over the low sides and onto the floor.

See And the followup comments. TL;DR: All sweeping generalizations are wrong.

That headline really stood out for me also. I didn't read the article. Usually by the time I'm done eating the produce bag I'm too full for the stickers.

Anyone try Ford's gin? I discovered it last year and it's become my favorite. It unseated Plymouth in my liquor cabinet. For context, I mostly think of gin as the primordial ooze from which a Negroni rises. So many of the gins that work great in other cocktails (Hendricks, etc.) aren't really on my radar. Plymouth for me made an interesting negroni. I understand why it's a controversial choice. It's on the subtle side. Ford's is much more juniper-forward, but it has Plymouth's earthiness and oiliness, which makes it work great in this cocktail. It's also a few bucks cheaper. Only drawback is it's a little harder to find.

And because they don't melt into the drink, they can't get the drink anywhere near as cold. So this kind of thing is used more for cooling scotch (or something similar) just a bit. Not for really chilling a drink like you do when stirring or shaking.

My favorite is just straight thyme. I first had it in Paris in 1990. My dad took us out to the fanciest meal I'd ever had, at a restaurant called Taillevent. This place has gone down the tubes since then, and the proprietor has died, but back then many people thought it was the best restaurant in the city. Courses piled on top of courses, including the desserts. One of them was simpler than the others—a small quenelle of thyme ice cream, alone and unadorned. I'd just left my first after-college job as the manager of a homemade ice cream shop in Colorado. I thought I knew something about good ice cream. This little scoop of thyme nearly took off the top of my head. It was so good. The flavors were almost 3-dimensional, and it wasn't as sweet as most ice cream. Perfect texture. The pastry chef was a guy named Gilles Bajolle, who I haven't heard much about over the years. He was the first chef I ever stole ideas from. Herb ice cream was one. His chocolate marquise was another. I've experimented with thyme, lemon thyme, sage, basil, peach-basil, and mint. Mint is the most conventional, but is by far the hardest to get right. I'm still working on it. The dream is to get the flavor of fresh mint and not candy canes / mouthwash. All these flavors work well in a creme anglaise also. I like mixing a fruit and an herb, like peach and basil, apple and rosemary, blueberry and lavender, cherry and sage, raspberry and thyme, etc. These kinds of ideas are all over Bajolle's menus, and also Pierre Hermé's I know what you mean about how thyme can be overbearing. It hasn't been a problem in ice cream. Thyme infuses nicely into dairy, and isn't especially delicate or prone to overextraction or to giving bitter or vegetal flavors. I can see how it could come on too strong if you infused into alcohol.

Thyme ice cream and sage ice cream.

Interesting. None of the ranges on that page look like the old school always-on Aga style. These are just standard luxury ranges with unimpressive sealed burners and retro styling.

I thought this was a whole product category. You see them at diners: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/search/griddle-press.html Is the innovation that they made it really heavy?

Without having used the Searzall, I can imagine advantages and disadvantages. I think your big broiler will be better for most big jobs. It has more total horsepower and spreads its heat out over a wider area, and so will go much faster. If you often do little things, like croque monsieurs, or sous-vide scallops, it will be faster and easier to use the searzall than to fire up a broiler. You also have more control with the little guy, because it's in your hand, on the countertop, and gives instant feedback. The thing with big bad infrared oven broilers is that they're hard to be precise with, unless you get down on your hands and knees ready to pounce when the food hits the sweet spot. You quickly understand why restaurant salamanders are mounted at eye level and don't have doors.

Yes. He got his start as a traveling Aga salesman.

Like planet Earth. I'll be surprised if in 10 years it's legal to sell a gas appliance or build a house with a gas / propane hookup. And for all good reasons. I won't miss internal combustion cars (at all), but I will sorely miss cooking on a flame. I hope when the day comes I can afford a monster of an induction cooktop.

They have cod, halibut, and sablefish at Wild Alaskan? I mustn't have looked carefully at the website. That would be great news.

Also back in the day ... that Aga sales manual assumes many households will have a full-time cook in residence. Suggesting that the stove will get used for 3 meals a day every day, making it slightly more credible that keeping the thing hot 24/7 wouldn't be a colossal energy waste. https://www.agamarvel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/aga_ogilvy_booklet.pdf

We've been ordering from Wild Alaskan for a few months and have been happy with the results (except for a salmon burger that seemed riddled with parasites ... we're now sticking to the Sockeye and Coho fillets). I haven't experienced any mealy texture. I did try thawing in salt water in the fridge (an experiment in simultaneous thawing and brining) and it took so long as to not be worth it. I believe the best way to thaw is right in the cryovac packaging in cool water. Thaw it rapidly, then open the packages, cover and hold in the coldest part of the fridge until you cook. The company does not recommend this; but when I spoke to them on the phone the rep did not seem to know anything about food, food chemistry / biology, or cooking. Just wrote instructions. I suspect they fear that customers might leave foot vacuum sealed at temperatures that could allow activation and growth of anaerobic bacteria, which would be bad. But if you make sure that the fish doesn't get much above freezing, and then expose it to air if you have to hold more than a few hours, there will be zero risk of this. So far I've cooked with and without brining (seafood is the only thing I brine ... it firms the texture and reduces oozing albumin), both sous-vide and in a pan. I can get closer to perfect gradient-free results sous-vide, but the improvement is usually not worth the added time & effort & plastic. So usually I just thaw, bring to room temperature, dry the surface with paper towels, dust with salt and wondra flour (an Eric Rippert trick for perfectly crisp skin) and throw skin-down in a very hot pan with generous amounts of neutral oil. After it browns I turn the heat low, flip, and when the center looks almost perfect, transfer to warmed plates, skin-up. I give my girlfriend's fillet about a minute longer than my own. I like it melt-in-your-mouth tender (~43°C); she likes it a little firmer. Overall I'm quite happy with the quality. It's in the same league as what I can get at the 2 or 3 best fish shops in NYC. Much better than what I can get conveniently. I just wish they had more kinds of fish. I understand there are some tasty things in the sea besides salmon.

My dad's old boss, David Ogilvy, started his advertising career by selling these things door-to-door. He then wrote the sales manual that the company continued using for decades. Considering how expensive and ungainly these things are, I'm rather awed by the guy's gift for B.S. rhetoric.

I'm curious. Dave Arnold is not full of B.S. ... I've been following his escapades for years and am indebted for quite a bit of useful (if sometimes esoteric) teachings. But the thing is large, and I don't have room for one-trick ponies, unless it's a really impressive trick. I also wish it were cheaper. Version 1 just looked too slow to be useful in real life. If this one's much better, I'll keep a cautious eye on it.

I read that. It involved a blind test with a bunch of people including bartenders and liquor industry reps, so it sounded legit. Needs to be mentioned that by "good stuff" they meant vodkas that had done well in their previous blind tasting—which did not correspond with price or reputation or top-shelfiness. Typically Smirnoff wins blind tests because it isn't as offensive tasting as most when you drink it straight. Many of the top shelf brands are just badly distilled swill. None of them has enough flavor (good or bad) to make a difference once you mix them with coke or cool aid or cranberry juice or whatever else people do with these things. I think the really flavorful ones (like the potato vodka I mentioned earlier) are outliers that don't make it into typical blind tastings. If they did they might be polarizing. If you like them, you wouldn't be able to mimic them by pouring Grey Goose into a Brita. But you might be able to make the potato vodka taste like Smirnof.

I've had some tasty vodka. It wasn't the usually (bad-tasting) top-shelf stuff. It was a Polish potato vodka that one of my grandmother's friends had brought her from Eastern Europe. It had an earthy, potato-ey flavor that was really nice. It wouldn't make much sense for mixing. But I can see being in the mood to drink it straight. I assume from the flavor that it had neither been filtered nor distilled many times, but had been made from some kind of mash that tasted good to begin with. For parties, for people who want to mix vodka with ... whatever ... I buy the big bottle of whatever's cheapest.

My favorite feature on these things is the broiler. It's great for crisping things up in a hurry, especially the kinds of leftovers that will come out too steamed and soggy in the microwave. Also great for things like grilled cheese / croquet Monsieurs. The bake feature is nice for small portions when you don't want to fire up the real oven.

I've occasionally grabbed a Victorinox utility knife for this and it works great—better than any actual steak knife I've used. Things marketed as steak knives are usually serrated and dull. They'd be great at cutting sheetrock for putting in electrical fixtures. But they just tear up meat. Usually we just use regular table knives. If they couldn't cut the steak then I'd be worried I'm serving tough meat. But to make things even easier on diners, something with a blade like the Forschner/Victorinox utility knives would be perfect. They're fairly cheap, have good steel, good geometry, and you keep them in shape with a nice aggressive edge just by hitting them with a butchers' steel. You'll have to do this regularly, because the steel isn't hard, and steak knives lead a life of abuse (cutting against ceramic plates, etc.) Are the Victorinox steak knives similar to the utility blades?

Serendipitous timing that this thread is back from the dead. 3 years later our Breville smart(ish) oven is dying. The bottom heating elements only come on when they feel like it, resulting in jeckyl/hyde slices of toast. And it's started shrieking at us. It sounds like a bad fan bearing, but we see no evidence that there's a fan anywhere in there. It's not a convection model. Nothing deep in the bowels looks fan-like. So I can only conclude that it's either haunted, angry, or in some kind of deep psychic pain. At first we could distract it back into quiet servitude with a crisp zen slap. But after a while it needed multiple slaps. Eventually it needed one or more full-on haymaker punches, right to the midsection. Now it's dented, madder than ever, and defiant—violence no longer works at all. The happy news: Breville has offered to fix it. It's way out of warranty, but our story must have made them feel sorry for us. I suspect fixing it will take a long time, and we don't want to be without a toaster oven (the untoasted life being not worth living, etc.). So we've ordered a new one. Same model, to test our luck. When it shows up, we'll send the old one for repairs, and when that eventually comes back we'll give it to someone. Someone who likes toast, and doesn't mind a slight fist-shaped dent.

No, but I've saved the dry trimmings from dry aged beef and frozen it, thinking maybe it could be used for something. Maybe steeping them in hot water or melted butter to infuse some of that funk. Haven't tried yet. Odd that they're selling tenderloin fat. There isn't much fat there, and people don't usually age tenderloin separately (if you did there'd be hardly anything left).

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.