paulraphael

Somewhere between octagon and dodecahedron you'll get so wired you'll be up all week.

Interesting about the time/temp relationship. I'm not sure I use invert syrup in anything where the difference between 70% and 99% inversion would be serious (I just use pure dextrose and fructose in ice creams and sorbets now ... much easier). But in the interest of doing a better job, how do you think a pressure cooker would work? Will acidulated sugar brown at 120°C?

The water's very good. It's almost ideal for coffee, if you live in the parts of the city that get all their water from the Catskills reservoirs. Some might like a bit more mineral content, but you can always add some magnesium and calcium. I've tried ... it's interesting but not really worth it IMO. If you're in parts of Manhattan or the Bronx, your water is mix of Catskills and Croton reservoir water. The mix changes all the time. So the water can be a little harder, or a lot harder. Sometimes good for coffee, sometimes less so. The infrastructure that affects the water is the pipes in your building. Lots of old buildings have nasty, corroded galvanized pipes that add rust and silt and who knows what to the water. A filter takes care of this. If you use a carbon filter it also takes care of the chlorine. Edited to add ... regarding infrastructure investment, they've been building a whole new aqueduct, as a backup for the other two. It's been in progress for 40 years and is the biggest capital investment project in the history if NYC. Supposed to be completed this year. It won't change the water quality. It will let them shut down the other tunnels for maintenance for the first time ever.

Picture? I just looked and it's possible that our teacup shelf is also a wine glass rack (which means that your wine glass rack is also a teacup shelf ... everyone wins). At first it seemed that there wasn't enough head room for them on that middle rack, but it's looking like they just barely fit into a cutout.

Because we don't have a good enough range hood. When I cook, smoke and steam go everywhere, and the wine glasses, which don't get used a whole lot, get coated with a film of grime. Which makes us really not want to use them. Hoping for a rescue.

Beware of getting into pissing contests with food scientists. You'll say "I like it this way better than that way," and they'll say, "how do you know? Have you done a blind triangle test?" If you haven't, you'd better be willing to. Otherwise you're likely just passing off cognitive biasses as opinions. Savvy chefs have figured this out. In many circles it's "triangle test or shut up."

I'll be curious to see reviews. I'm not completely clear on how it maintains pressure at the puck while it's extracting. If the extraction is too long, that's a problem; if it's short, then that tiny boiler is going to have to work hard to equalize the pressure. But I'll give the jet engine engineer the benefit of the doubt on this one. As Rotus suggested, you'll need a grinder that costs a few times what this thing costs before good espresso becomes a possibility.

We just joined the Bosch dishwasher club. It rocks. Only complaint is that the racks on ours seem designed to be efficient for very dainty dishes. The slots are a bit too close together. There's a specially contraption for holding teacups but nothing for wine glasses. Just started looking for a solution to this.

In the Can't Leave Well-Enough Alone Dept., Dave Arnold has modified a hand-cranked coffee grinder for pepper. He offers the 3D printer files: https://publish.twitter.com/?query=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FCookingIssues%2Fstatus%2F1193579570366169089&widget=Tweet It's unclear what problem he's solving, but I'll bet it grinds the hell out of some pepper.

You can now get Wilkin & Sons tawny orange marmalade on Amazon. And it's not crazy expensive. It's bitter, It's dark, it has big chunks of rind, and it makes all things in the world better. There must be other good brands in the UK, but I've never found one over here. Possibly the only other choice is making it yourself. In which case, yeah, seville oranges.

Invert syrup can be used to replace a portion of the sugar in most baked goods, chocolates, icings etc. to improve texture and longevity. I'd recommend it if there's anything you make that tends to dry out or crystalize before you finish eating it, or if you're giving cakes or cookies as a gift and you don't know how long they'll sit around. When I write my own recipes I often just include trimoline as 10-15% of the total sugars, with a note that it's optional most of the time. I do it because I keep some in the fridge, and it can only help. At these levels I haven't noticed anything browning too much. Invert works as a humectant (an ingredient that holds onto water and slows dehydration) and as a sugar crystal suppressor in things like icings and ganaches. It can also increase the creaminess of some things. The only downsides are that you have to have it around, and it's kind of messy and annoying to work with. I would only include it in recipes that use weight measures. There's also the option of simply adding equal measures of powdered dextrose and fructose. This is much easier, but the ingredients are quite a bit more expensive. I do this for ice cream, because of the ease and because it doesn't add any additional water.

I've never worn out a microplane, but my oldest one is definitely slower than newer ones. Probably you should replace if it ever drives you nuts.

Do you have a source for this? I've read that it survives "up to 140F." My inclination would to keep it and eat it myself. Actually I'd share with my girlfriend ... she has that strange genetic marker that makes her immune to norovirus. You shouldn't have to worry about making yourself sick again. You now have immunity to that particular strain.

That's really low. You're at the extreme end of medium-rare steak-like ribs. This is kind of a sous-vide magic trick, and isn't to everyone's tastes. I suspect the reason this is more often done at 60C is to get the fat to melt to a more pleasing texture, but I can't vouch for it. There are many different textures available between what you've done and a traditional braise.

Yes, the point of the steam is not to make the bread wet. It's to create a humid environment in the oven that slows the formation of the crust, so the bread can rise more before being constrained. That's it. You want high humidity for maximum oven spring, then low humidity to dry out the surface and promote browning. I don't think there's a more effective method that Jim Lahey's Dutch oven idea (if you don't have a real steam injection oven). All these schemes of splashing water into the bottom of a regular oven are pretty limited. Ovens have vents, and that humidity never builds very high and it can't stick around long. But I think it's better than nothing. To answer the ancient original post, you can indeed break your oven window. It's easy. I've done it! Used to use a bike water bottle to squirt water into a roasting pan or skillet in the oven bottom. It just took one splash to break the glass. I use a Dutch oven now. The downside is that it's a pain in the ass to handle the dough, especially if it's a really wet dough. And it's much harder to do loaves back-to-back.

At what time / temperature?

You can get whatever texture you want, by varying time and temperature. Steak-like textures are the most famous sous-vide trick, but they're not the only option. Lots of people don't like this. You can get a traditional braised texture as well. Although you could argue that if this is your goal, you might as well just braise. I use s.v. to go for textures that are between those extremes. I also do very little traditional braising these days, because our current oven smells like a gas leak when it runs at low temperatures (the gas company has come over three times and insists we don't have a gas leak ... that the oven just smells like that. Go figure).

They're called Ends Meat. The main store is downstairs at the new Essex Market. They have a satellite store at Industry City in Brooklyn.

I just cooked a big short rib meal sous-vide, with a recipe I developed a couple of years ago and never had a chance to try. The big question is always the temperature/time combination. I spent some time thinking about what texture to go for, and decided against the extremes (modern s-v like-a-steak / the classic s-v like-a-braise). I wanted some qualities of each: a bit of pink, good juiciness, cohesive enough to plate but fork-tender. I decided on 69°C for 48 hours (but did the first 4 hours at 40°C to get more enzymatic flavor development). This was after a pre-sear on all sides to kill surface bugs. I found a great new butcher in NYC who gets all his meat from and upstate farm where they raise a cross between angus and French charolais cows. I'm not usually a big fan of east coast grass-finished beef, because there's so little marbling, but this stuff looked like prime, grain-finished meat. Really wild. The butcher said it's because of the breeding. The ribs I got had about 2-1/2 weeks of dry age ... not much, but the age flavors were amplified by the low temperature start. I was really happy with how these turned out. I got one piece that was dry and stringy, but my other pieces and everyone else's were just as I'd hoped. Not sure what happened to the dry bit. The sauce was made with some some jus de viande (a pressure cooked take on meat glace), porcini mushrooms, port, and a background of winter spices that included star anise. At the end of the day this was way more work than just braising it in the oven, but I'll do it again for a special occasion. The consistency and appearance of the meat was a treat and probably not possible with other methods. Didn't take any pics of the plated meal at the dinner. But I'll try to remember to get one of the leftovers when we heat them up.

I've since read an article with comments by Anova (can't remember where) . Surprisingly, they said that professional cooks have reliability problems with professional lab circulators. The lab models are built to very high standards, but with the expectations of a controlled work environment. Kitchens get hot and full of steam. And they're not staffed by lab technicians. A kitchen circulator gets banged around and dropped on the floor and probably dropped into the water bath. The new Anova is built for this. They say it can survive falls off the counter and being completely submerged. It's a scientists vs. gorillas thing. When my Anova 1 dies, I'll probably spring for this thing. I'd appreciate the peace of mind.

Trophy goes to the first person with a ranked ist of aromatic organic chemicals.

Katie's advice for trying it at a café is a great place to start. If you do that, pay attention to the body of the coffee more than the flavor. FP coffee can be tweaked to have almost any flavor profile, but it will always be pretty full-bodied. And there will usually be some sediment in it, which bugs some people but not others. It's really a small investment. I don't think there's a coffee quality difference between a cheap press pot and an expensive one ... the latter might look nicer. But I don't care about this because I always just decant it into a thermos. If presentation were a big deal I'd keep my plain-jane press pot but get a pretty thermos. A decent burr grinder is much more important than the pot. It needs to be one that can adjust to a pretty coarse grind; some of them don't. I also find a scale and an instant-read thermometer very helpful. But all of this stuff will be equally helpful if you stick with Aeropress. If you end up not preferring the press pot, you can keep it around as a spare for when you run out of filters.

If the recipes are in your own words, you wouldn't be violating copyright. The only thing copyrightable is the exact language. Recipes themselves aren't considered intellectual property.

All my recipes are formatted very simply as text files (.rtf), so they can be read by any software. I use Apple's Text Edit on my desktop and laptop to create and edit these. But could use any word processor. I store them all in my DropBox folder. This means they're always instantly synced, and can be accessed on either of my computers, on my phone, or on the web. The phone screen is a little small for this, but it works fine. Usually I print out a copy, as ecologically dubious and 20th century that might sound. A sheet of paper is a little more manageable in the kitchen than a gizmo, and I can scribble on it; everything's a work in progress and I like to be able to make notes. I manually do version control. Which means, a file might have a title like "Yak Butter Cake v7." Versions 1 through 6 are in a folder labelled "Old." This is not especially elegant; there is software that will do version control for you automatically. My girlfriend thinks I should use GitHub. But the simplicity of this system works for me, and I'm used to it. Something like Evernote or Apple's Notes would offer similar functionality, and would handle the syncing without DropBox or Google Drive. But I like the idea of keeping this stuff in generic formats, and not subjecting it to the whims of a private company.

Dull knives make you use force to cut things. If you're using force, you can lose control. If the knife or the thing you're cutting slips, the knife will suddenly be moving fast. Maybe toward your other hand. When you see huge gashes on people's hands in the kitchen, it's almost always a dull knife that did it. If you have a truly sharp knife (very few people do ... even most pros get by with blades that are just serviceably sharp) it will cut with little more than the weight of the blade. The only way you'll ever lose control of a knife like this is if you drop it (please don't). Or if you're trying to cut something you shouldn't. When I cut myself on a sharp knife, it's almost always because it was sitting on the cutting board and I reached past it without paying attention. This is annoying and embarrassing, but has never been serious. I also sometimes shave some skin off my knuckles, or shave off a thin slice of fingernail. This is scary but rarely even merits a baindaid. If you want a very sharp knife—the kind that requires no force—you either have to learn to use water stones or an edge pro. The former is quicker, the latter has less of a learning curve. But they both do the same thing as far as the knife is concerned. I only keep 3 of my knives this sharp. I appreciate the low-maintenance versatility of a traditional European blade that you sharpen once in a blue moon and just keep banged into shape on a butcher's steel. I have a burly German chef's knife that I maintain like this (for rough stuff), and also a cheap Forschner utility knife. These guys see a lot of action. I can understand why some people would be uninterested in anything more high-maintenance than this. Very sharp knives can be a bit of an addiction, even if they're not necessary. They do allow some things that regular knives don't. For example, you can do your most delicate cutting (herbs) before you cut anything else. They won't go brown or lose freshness, even if service is 6 hours away. No one believes this, but it's true. Traditionally, cooks have to add herb prep to the dozens of other last minute tasks before service. You can also very easily slice things so thinly that people will assume you used a mandoline. But you probably finished the task in the time it takes to pull a mondoline out of the cabinet and set it up. Fruit won't brown. Onions won't make you cry (at least not as much). Those Chef's choice machines aren't terrible. The important thing is to only use the coarsest slot when absolutely necessary, like when repairing edge damage. It removes a lot of metal and will greatly shorten the lives of your knives. The machine sets bevels at a pretty stout angle compared to what a Japanese cook would choose. Which is to say, it's about durability, not sharpness. It will do pretty sharp but not very sharp—probably a little better than the factory edge on German knives.