paulraphael

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.