paulraphael

What are the advantages?

Exactly. Companies offer different value propositions for different categories of customer. Not many years back, a circulator designed for constant professional use cost $1100. Then you could get one for $700. Now $400, without any apparent compromises. It's amazing that for $140 to $200 we can get a circulator that will do anything you'd ever need one to do. But we know we're buying a piece of consumer gear, and so don't expect it to take professional abuse, or to have anything like 3-sigma quality control certification. My consumer Anova has worked without a problem for over 5 years. But when it's time to replace it, I MAY decide that some extra piece of mind is worth an extra $200. It's nice to have the option.

The value is that it's built for reliability. Restaurant kitchens have proven to be hard on circulators, even pro lab models, because the lab ones aren't designed to get kicked around by line cooks or to run all day in a steamy environment. For amateurs this model isn't necessary, but it offers extra peace of mind for just a $200 premium. It's not even bulky or heavy like the pro circulators of yore.

Cool article. I'd never heard of all those those drawbacks to lab circulators. In my brief experience the problems were size and price, and sometimes succumbing to steam. But the real takeaway ... there's such thing as a centrifugal evaporator. Am I the last to know?

The dimensions are 1.29kg, 350mm tall, with a 60mm barrel. The barrel is the same size as the Anova One (so it will fit through the cooler lids and cambro lids I've cut out). And it's actually a bit smaller and lighter than the One. I plan to keep my One as long as it keeps chugging along ... but it's nice to know there's a high quality replacement if ever needed. My ideal kit would probably be an Anova Pro, plus a Nano for travel or for those rare times a 2nd circulator would be useful.

Kinda sorta. Anova was originally a lab equipment company. After they developed their first culinary circulator, they spun off the division as Anova Culinary. This was later bought by Electrolux (but seems to remain independently run). For a minute there may have been some kind of relationship between Anova and Anova Culinary (the original Anova Pro culinary circulator was identical to the lab model). But now I can't find any evidence of the original company existing anymore. They're still listed on some lab suppliers' sites, but generally as unavailable. The wikipedia article on the company makes no reference to the original lab equipment company, which seems odd.

Polyscience makes great stuff, but I think their industrial design and their pricing are a decade out of date. If this new Anova lives up to its potential it will light a fire under PS's butt.

$399. https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision-cooker-pro/

https://anovaculinary.com/introducing-the-anova-precision-cooker-pro/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Pro_Launch_Email_5_1_19 Looks promising ...

Sounds like a feature, not a bug ... 😀

I suppose you can't assume that a coffee (or wine, chocolate etc.) will go with something just because there are hints of that thing in the tasting notes. I've never tried Ethiopian coffees while eating actual blueberries, or a wine with "barnyard" tasting notes while eating actual ... never mind.

I think this is how the authors imagined the book would be used. It's much more about surprising possibilities than about the AVOID suggestions.

This might depend on the coffee. My favorite coffees are single-origins roasted light enough that the fruit flavors shine through. Berry flavors are pretty common in East African coffees. I had a wonderful natural process Guatemalan coffee a few months back that tasted distinctly of strawberries.

I wrote an article on modern approaches to chocolate ice cream a couple of months ago. There's an addendum with more notes, including tasting notes on some chocolate. The goal was to convey a sense of dark chocolate (as opposed to milk chocolate), and to capture as many of the origin flavors as possible from a single-origin couverture. TL;DR: Chocolate ice cream is challenging, because cocoa butter is bad for texture. It's rock-hard when it's cold. You can't use lots of couverture and have good texture, no matter how many technical hoops you jump through. You can get a pretty good compromise by supplementing a moderate amount of couverture with cocoa powder. If you could get high-quality, single-origin cocoa powder, you could achieve the best possible results. Just ditch the couverture. Unfortunately, most cocoa powder available today is just byproduct, even you're buying from Valhrona or Cluizel or Amedei. It tastes good, but it's not interesting. Who even knows what you're getting. They don't treat this stuff like their single-plantation varieties. This seems to be changing. Some companies are starting to offer SO cocoas. Callebaut/Bensdorf has a line (but I can't get my hands on a sample). Lots of smaller chocolate companies are offering them, too, but typically are unable to mill the cocoa fine enough for smooth textures in ice cream. But my fingers are crossed that options will appear soon. In the mean time, I make chocolate with a mix of couverture and cocoa. It's pretty great. Some of the tricks for best flavor are to eliminate eggs, keep the milk fat below 10%, keep the sweetness down, and to use sugars with maximum freezing point depression (dextrose, fructose). Total solids should be high ... 40–43%. Finally, serving temperature is important. Cocoa butter is more sensitive than milk fat to temperature. If you don't let the ice cream warm up adequately before serving, it will be slow to melt in the mouth and will have a muted flavor release, no matter how much chocolate you've crammed in there.

I love my end-grain maple board (made by the Boardsmith in US, so probably impractical for the OP). I've been using it happily every day for over ten years, but have to report that it doesn't completely live up to its promise of being gentle on edges. It's gentler than edge-grain and face-grain boards, and gentler than those terrible bamboo boards, and of course gentler than all the boards made out of stuff that boards should never be made from. But my sharpest and most fragile Japanese knives have much better edge retention when I use crappy poly boards. I don't enjoy cutting on these boards. But in practice they let me hold onto that fresh-off-the-stones feeling for about twice as long. I don't have much experience with hard rubber boards, like sani-tuff. I suspect these may be the overall best for performance, although they're kind of ugly and don't smell great.

Eggs are also a stabilizer Most of the problems people are describing here are from too much stabilizer. These gums work in tiny quantities. Also keep in mind that ingredients like polysorbate 80 and mono/diglycerides are emulsifiers which serve quite different purposes. If you're using even 1 yolk per liter, you don't need those (although they're generally included in commercial stabilizers, and you may like the effect). I usually use 0.15% stabilizer by weight. If your blend includes emulsifiers, you may need more. 0.5% is lots. Unless you're using a commercial blend that includes neutral ingredients like dextrose or maltodextrin. They sometimes include these to help disperse the gums or to add bulk to make weighing easier. If you're making a recipe with a whole henhouse full of eggs (looking at you, Jo!) you'll need less stabilizer than with a low- or no-egg recipe. Here's my stabilizer article. And on one emulsifiers.

We've relaunched our site and blog at under-belly.org. It's got all the old content and comments, with a clean new design and a more accessible format (no ads, no account needed to post a comment or question). Emphasis of late has been artisanal ice cream and sous-vide techniques. More is on the way on both topics, as well as a in-depth series on modern saucemaking. Responding to demand, we've also started a consultancy. We advise culinary professionals around the world on ice cream recipe development, and are also available to consult on other areas of expertise. And we're building a recipe archive ... we hope to have it online in the next couple of months. Come by and have a look!

I'm consulting an ice cream shop in Kuwait City. One challenge is that they haven't found a local dairy company that sells fresh cream. They've been forced to use packaged UHT cream from France, which is less than ideal. Any thoughts on how they could get fresh cream in wholesale quantities? Possibly direct from a farm? Or from Abu Dhabi, Doha, or Riyadh? Thank you for any ideas!

What you call snide I call generous. I'm offering lighthearted mockery rather than my unfiltered response to the presumption that readers would have the choice to buy a new house when they don't like their counters.

Yeah, just get a different house. How about one in the South of France? Or Catalonia. Or both. Each with lots and lots of BTUs. And a wood-burning oven and a view of the sea. And horses. Treasured advice.

It seems to be up to the whims of the local Whole Foods manager whether or not to put more specific labels on the chocolate. The ones where I've shopped usually let you know the cocoa%, which gives enough of a clue as to which Callebaut product it is. Sometimes it just says "bittersweet" or something similar, in which case it could be anything. I like most of the 70%+ callebaut chocolates I've bought there. They aren't special ... just solid workhorse chocolates for making cakes and things. The prices are excellent. Quality-wise they're a step below Valrhona and few steps below Cluizel and some of the other smaller production SO chocolates you can get these days. People still love the stuff in baked goods.

The idea is that your workspace is adaptable to whatever you need. If you need to cook something, grab a hob. If you don't get it out of the way. As the article says, this is how they've done it at Alinea since the beginning, and it works brilliantly for them. I'm not sold 100% substitute for a home range, for a few reasons. I use a range enough for it to justify some permanent real estate. And those hobs aren't going to be very powerful. Pretty sure at Alinea they'd be using 220v models that can equal the real world heating power of a commercial range. These aren't those. But as additional burners, that can be put anywhere or stowed, I'm down with the idea. Maybe not this exact product (I don't care about hanging on the wall ... sticking it on a shelf is fine) but the portable hob concept is great. I can see this reducing the temptation to buy a big 6+ burner range.

The differences are significant, but complex. Most of the research on this seems to be behind closed doors at companies like Haagen Dazs. I think that unless you've found some particular insights on how to work with these proteins separately, and have a strategy in mind, you'd make your life much simpler just by using dry milk powder.

If you want it to look like new (which I wouldn't ... I like the age showing) I'd check with Dave Martell at Japanese Knife Sharpening and see if he'd like to take it on. If you want to keep the battle scars but make it useful, it probably won't be too much work. I'm guessing it's carbon steel, and not terribly hard, so it should be pretty easy to sharpen and work on. If you already have a full set of water stones you're pretty much ready to go. The first step would be removing the active rust (anything red or brown) with Barkeeper's Friend and a scouring pad. This will take off all the patina, too, but it will come back. And don't forget to take care of the wood with some conditioner, like the beeswax / mineral oil blends used for cutting boards. After that it's just going to be about repairing edge damage with your coarsest stone, putting on a new edge with a medium stone, and then polishing with finer stones, if you like. None of us can tell you how fine a grit to sharpen to. That's going to depend on what you like, and on what the steel will take. If it's a soft or coarse-grained steel, going much beyond 2000 grit will be pointless. Depending on how you use the knife, and how you like to cut, you may not want to go past a toothy 1000 grit. FWIW I go to 1000 with my German chef's knife and anything I use for butchering, boning, or ripping open packages. My gyuto and slicing knife I take to 6000–10000. This gives a polished edge similar to a straight razor, but doesn't really make sense for a butchering knife like this. I believe one traditional use of scimitars is butchering meat that's hanging from the ceiling. The curved blade makes it useful when cutting overhead. Another use is slaying your enemies when they're on foot and you're on a horse.

I've experimented a bunch with hot chocolate over the years. There's a spectrum from intense chocolate flavor to high richness, and you need to find the sweet spot. So to speak. Tastes will vary. The most intense hot chocolates I've had are dairy-free, and are closer to the way cocoa was originally drunk. It sounds like a ripoff ... just chocolate and water. But the chocolate intensity is bonkers. I find it a bit too much, for anything more than a demitasse-sized chocolate dessert. But it's worth trying. I use it as a starting point, and add a bit of whole milk to mellow it out. But I generally like the water / milk blend more than pure milk. If you prefer richness to chocolate intensity, you can go all the way in the other direction and use ganache. This is a handy formula for restaurants, because the ganache is basically an instant hot cocoa mix. Just stir it into hot milk or hot water. Overall I prefer bittersweet chocolate to cocoa powder. Not because it's inherently better, but because in practice it's better. Very few companies make cocoa powder that's as good or as interesting as their chocolates. With a handful of exceptions, it's a byproduct. There are some signs that this is changing. For the time being I use a blend of both. Chocolate for the interesting flavors, cocoa for added intensity with less added fat. Here's a version I've enjoyed: 360g / 1-1/2 cups water 60g / 1/3 cup sugar 120g / 4-1/4 oz Bittersweet chocolate 24g /1/4 cup dutch cocoa 1g / 1/8 tsp salt 240g / 1 cup whole milk -Heat sugar in a saucepan. -boil the water separately -when sugar starts to caramelize, stir vigorously until amber -pour water on sugar, and keep stirring and heating until clumps liquefy -whisk in cocoa -stir in chocolate, continuing to stir until melted -stir in milk -keep on heat until the first bubble pops on the surface -remove from heat and whip (with a whisk or a stick blender) until slightly frothy notes: -you can make it with all milk, if you want less chocolate intensity. -you can make it without the cocoa, if you want to mellow the chocolate flavor. if so, reduce sugar to 1/4 cup. -you can dispense with the caramelization (if you don't caramelize, it will be a bit sweeter).