paulraphael

It should be great for deep frying. If aluminum were bad for you, we'd have a problem, because the biggest dietary source of it is leafy green vegetables.

There's interesting information on cookingissues.com. Do a search for Dave Arnold's experiments in sous-vide turkey. His best browning/crisping results came from "pour-over frying," which basically means ladling hot oil over the skin of the cooked bird. All attempts at using very high dry heat (torches etc.) failed. I think the oven got rejected on grounds that it would overcook the meat.

To the OP, it doesn't sound like you're really talking about espresso, so these are general guidelines for any coffee process. Coffee beans: darker roast = more bitter (and up to a certain point, also more sweet) lighter roast = less bitter, more acidic, more coffee origin flavors and aromas Extraction: Hotter water = more bitter (and up to a certain point, also more sweet) Cooler water = less bitter, more acidic The acceptable range is 90°C to 96°C. For brewed coffee, I like 93°F for the lighter roasted beans I favor. With some natural process beans (often my very favorite) I get the best balance as low as 90°C. Finer grind (drip) or longer extraction (press pot) = more bitter Coarser grind (drip) or shorter extraction (press pot) = more sour, weaker development of flavors Larger dose = heavier body, stronger flavor (if you go too far, subtler flavors will be masked, and it will be hard to know what you're tasting. It might not be obviously too strong). Lower dose = lighter body, weaker flavor The acceptable range is around 5% to 7.5% coffee relative to water (consider water to be 100%, so 7% means 7g coffee to 100g water) I use 6.4% with a press pot. My advice would be to leave the water temperature and dose (brew ratio) alone in the beginning, and play with grind size. 93°C will be reasonable for any good coffee. As will a 6% brew ratio). If you're using a press pot, grind size will be coarser, but really doesn't have to be as coarse as some suggest. Somewhere between the coarsest setting people recommend and drip-size works well. 4 minutes total brew time will give good results. But first make sure the coffee is good. If it's overroasted, it's going to be bitter, and it's going to suck no matter what you do. There will be no way to balance bitterness and sourness or insipidness with it. This describes 90% of the coffee available at stores and everyday coffee shops in the US, so don't assume your coffee's ok just because it cost a lot or is convincingly branded. Coffee roasters should be presumed guilty unless proven otherwise.

This will vary tremendously with different roast levels, and to a lesser degree with different coffees. A rule of thumb is that the lighter the roast level, the longer it's going to take to offgass, so the longer it will be before it's ready (and before it's no good anymore). My favorite roaster roasts on the light side; his beans are ready for brewed coffee after about 7 days, and for espresso after about 10. They stay fresh-tasting for a good 10 or 14 days after this, although the flavor profile changes. Darker roasting makes the hull of the bean more porous, so gasses leave faster, accelerating all these processes. Natural process vs. wet process coffees differ here as well. The natural process beans may do better with a slightly longer rest than the more common wet processed beans.

This. Your machine should be giving you some overrun unless there's something really funky with the basic formula. I doubt this has to do with process or with stabilizers.

There won't be data on that because it's not how stabilizers work. They form a loose (or tight) network in suspension in the water, which slows the motion of water molecules past one another. They increase the viscosity and change other rheological properties of the water, but don't technically absorb it. So there's no absolute formula. You have figure out the concentration of gums based on empirical observation ... your own or someone else's. It gets a bit complicated with blends, because all gums are synergistic to one degree or another. Using two gums will have a stronger effect than an equal amount of either one. And sometimes the synergy will radically change the behavior (by creating a gel, for example). I always suggest starting with stabilizer formulas that have already been tested (which it looks like you're doing). You can tweak to get the specific textures and other qualities you're looking for.

I don't doubt there are a few good spots. My point is that it's not like Rome, where almost every cafe will do a pretty good job, or Portland, where almost every one will do a pretty great job. In Paris you'll either need coffee-nerd knowledge very, very good luck. In Rome, it's not even 3rd wave-style espresso. It's super traditional, and not particularly interesting. But it's made well, it's familiar and satisfying, it tastes good. What I had all over Paris was just poorly crafted.

That David Lebovitz article is from 2007, and describes acceptable espresso from that era. If you're looking for really good, though, most of what he says is obsolete. Good coffee is a very young idea (relative to good wine, good booze, good beer, good tea, which have all been pursuits for over two thousand years). We're learning about coffee in leaps and bounds year after year. Illy's idea of coffee got left behind by the 3rd wave.

What did you like about it? When I was in Paris for two weeks a couple of years ago I had uniformly terrible espresso everywhere. Not Starbucks terrible but definitely leaning in that direction.

I'll check them out when I'm in the neighborhood. Always seeking good espresso. I've been striking out in Manhattan lately. It's been around 2 years since I've found a good espresso in any of my old haunts, or any of the new ones that have been recommended. O's website is all fluff. Nothing about the coffee. It will be interesting if it was Brazilian coffee you had, since most coffee from there is usually more big and chocolaty than bright tasting. But if it's a single origin it could well go against the regional expectations.

I checked out the kickstarter. It looks pretty cool. I would prefer it worked more like a stirring hotplate that allowed you to use the vessel of your choice on top. Or at least if the vessel were plain stainless steel. I can't stand everything being gratuitously coated with teflon that's going to scratch off in a couple of years.

"A slightly kitchenized lab stir plate" is what I've been begging the universe for. Generally I'm pretty cautious about crowdfunded manufactured goods ... there's so much that can go wrong for early adopters. But I'll keep an eye on this gizmo. It seems to me the killer app for this kind of thing is liquid foods that need to be cooked to a precise temperature ... custards, ice cream bases, etc.. You could maybe temper chocolate in it. Cooking liquids sous-vide is often a guessing game with regards to timing, because the liquid in the bag is not getting stirred, and we don't have any good thermodynamic model for convection and conduction of goopy liquids in a floppy ziploc.

This. Not all fine chocolate is fruity. And while I love fruity chocolates, I agree with the OP on Scharffen Berger. It tastes like cherry cough syrup to me—one-dimensional, unbalanced fruitiness. If you read reviews, you'll find mention of chocolates that emphasize bass notes ... cocoa bitterness, caramel, leather, smoke, wood, spices. Chocolate variety, processing, and roast level all play a part in this.

Cool to see this. Too bad that you sacrifice 30% of the max power when you use non-ferrous pans. I'll guess that this is due to some fundamental physics and not an engineering compromise ... anyone know? A workaround would be to use ferrous pans for the high-heat stuff, like searing and boiling pasta water. 2500 watts should be more than enough for saucemaking.

I don't think consumer immersion blenders are designed to work at full power for long stretches, as you might with a Vita Prep. Commercial versions with similar ratings are usually bigger, heavier, and with more ventilation, like this: https://www.missionrs.com/waring-products-wsb40-quick-stik-plus-immersion-blender-10-inch-24-qt.html?st-t=i00600001&mrsdc=chill25&gclid=Cj0KCQjw6fvdBRCbARIsABGZ-vRL5DJwY6RDWIjtck7zykUCM4gJqDWwcLr7MNaBS9SCXnXO-lZ9Wd0aAuEkEALw_wcB I don't know about about this one in particular, but ones I've seen in the flesh are clearly meant for use in big pots and would be pretty unwieldy for the kinds of things most of us grab a stick blender for. I like the idea of high rpms for some uses. I don't think I need the thing to be excessively burly. If I need to blend a big volume of something thick I'll use a countertop blender.

That's interesting. Do you think the pricing difference between this and a regular Bamix is largely because of different markets? Like the way there was no such thing as a sub-$1000 immersion circulator before the companies discovered cooks? Or is there something inherently expensive in a rotor-stator mechanism? Or does the motor itself need to be much more powerful?

Check out this study: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.622.5104&rep=rep1&type=pdf I've only just glanced at it, but think you're safe with a few days to spare. Just chill that meat quickly, and keep it on ice. (This study was designed to look at the effects of higher temperature cooking on c.botulinum germination time, but they also an uncooked sample as a control. The uncooked sample is probably the one to look at, since your 72 hour cook will probably be lower than any of their test temperatures. Check out the chart on p. 1784)

Beware simplified information like this. All bacteria have a temperature / time curve for pasteurization. Salmonella, e-coli, campilobacter, and trichinella are killed to pasteurization standards at 130°F in under 6 hours. In 72 hours they'd be dead dead dead. I don't have listeria data handy.

My first question is if you're thoroughly chilling the base before spinning it. This makes a huge difference. Consider that much of what you're doing is making whipped cream in the ice cream maker; the milk fat needs to be partially crystallized. 8 hours below 38°F usually does it. Although 6–7% fat is pretty low and probably adds to the challenge. If this doesn't get you anywhere, you could try skipping the lecithin and glycerides and using polysorbate-80 at 0.02% to 0.04%. I haven't used this stuff, but its reputation as emulsifier is that it's especially effective at improving foam structure. A jar of this would last close to a lifetime. Does the ICE-70 tend to produce dense ice cream? If it's a slow spinning machine that favors low overrun, and you're going for a very low fat recipe, this could be challenging.

These are great questions, and they're way beyond any research I've even skimmed. My personal experience is with plain old skim milk powder. I've written a bit about the functional differences between casein and whey, but when it comes to what the specific effects of monkeying with the ratios, or of denaturing whey proteins to one degree or another, most of this knowledge is probably locked up in the commercial labs at companies like Haagen Dazs and General Foods. One person you might try contacting is Dr. Cesar Vega, who's one of the world experts on ice cream science. He's on Twitter at @CesarVega76

You could probably leave it out of these recipes entirely. There's already such a high level of solids form the chocolate and cocoa. The textural difference should be small.

Ha. I know people who wish they didn't. Maybe you can work something out.

I just finished a post on chocolate ice cream. This was a long time in the making! 15 prototypes. There are two recipes; one that uses both couverture and cocoa powder, which I think represents the best compromise for right now. An one that's 100% cocoa, for when we can get our hands on really good single-origin cocoa powders. I think that day is coming. Some of the big manufacturers are advertising them (but I don't know where to find them), and many small makers are selling them now (but they don't seem able to mill the powder fine enough yet). But I'm hopeful. I may slightly update these recipes with some tweaks to the stabilizer blend, but I think they're very close.

I'm compiling a list of single origin cocoa providers. If anyone wants to add, please do. Right now this only includes brands with US distribution; I think there are a few who distribute only in Europe. Callebaut / Bensdorp https://bcfmpreview.barry-callebaut.com/products/single-origin-powders?segment=cereals http://www.bensdorp.com/natural-são-tomé (many regions including a sau tomé natural) Askinosie https://www.askinosie.com/single-origin-natural-cocoa-powder.html (tanzania) KYYA https://www.kyyachocolate.com/products/cocoa-powder-4-oz (ecuador) Omanhene http://omanhene.3dcartstores.com/Cocoa-Powder-Natural-Cocoa-Powder_p_5.html (Ghana) Map Chocolate https://www.mapchocolate.com/holiday-baking-supplies/craft-cocoa-powder-sampler-set (Honduras) Match Chocolate (warns that grain size is too large … not smooth) https://www.matchchocolate.com/current-offerings/ (several origins)

Here's the Indian version: milk solids, sugar, vegetable fat, glucose, emulsifier E471. Stabilizers: E407, E412, E466, water and artificial vanilla flavour http://www.kwality.ae/product/vanilla/ Dr. Parekh is probably making something a little closer to his roots. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's eggless. He's a food scientist, so he should know how to get any texture he wants without eggs. The Times article shows that he gets the importance or lower sweetness ... that's encouraging.