paulraphael

You probably have days worth of batter left. One of those plump blueberries just got stuck in the valve. Try talking to it gently.

You'll probably want to blanche the bacon first to pull out some of the sauce. The simplest thing, if you have some demi-glace or meat coulis, would be to simmer the bacon along with some shallots in the wine as you reduce it. Then add the glace and any finishing herbs. If you do it with a stock reduction, it won't have as much flavor but can still be good. Make sure it's a good quality unsalted stock. Add to the wine reduction, reduce until the flavors are balanced, and then thicken. Arrowroot starch is an excellent thickener, and is made better by a pinch of xanthan gum.

Always happy to find new uses for my retired battle armor!

I imagine that works nicely. A spatula / scraper is still handy if you have any spots of gunk you need to pop off (like from the burned-on sugar you mentioned). The only thing that works reliably poorly is kid gloves.

If you PM me I can point you to some tips for that knife. It's pretty easy to put straight razor-like edge on. In my experience it doesn't hold an edge very long, so it needs to be touched up a lot. But it's so thin it can outperform most other things even when it's kind of dull.

It's helpful to scrape cast iron regularly with a metal spatula. I don't see much online about this. If you're cooking at highish temperatures, you're adding more seasoning every time you use the pan. Eventually, it's not a nice thin functional coating anymore; it's a big crusty bunch of gunk. I find a regular fish spat works well for this. It's springy, so it keeps you from pressing too hard. The end is flat, and a bit sharp but not too sharp. I just give the surface of the pan a working over with it every once in a while during cooking. High spots like where something burned onto the pan usually just scrape right off.

I've never had to sous-vide ribeye longer than to cook to core temperature. It's always been tender enough that going longer would risk both drying it out and creating mushy textures. Flank steak times aren't a good guideline for rib.

I'll echo that the dry-aged steaks should be tender. I used to get excellent dry-aged rib-eyes from my old butcher, who did some of his own dry aging. He did it on a shelf of his regular walk-in fridge, with a jerry rigged drip dray and fan and no reliable humidity control. The results were always excellent, but not predictable. I never had issues with tenderness, but there was no guarantee that steaks aged 8 weeks would have more dry-aged flavor than ones aged 5 weeks ... that kind of thing. There was little correlation between aging time and aged qualities. I know this isn't your issue specifically, but I bring it up because it's possible that your butcher's aging setup isn't ideal, and so it is isn't giving the predicted results. FWIW, those steaks in your picture look very nicely marbled, but don't have the color i'm used to seeing in dry aged meat. I expect to see more of a ruby color to the meat, and slightly yellowed fat. Granted, color is tricky on the web and without controlled lighting. Nice Tadatsuna Gyuto!

Ok, Mitch. Let's go.

Pretty obvious, but I'd never thought of it. What kind of bristles work best in the kitchen?

Well ... you can get a refurb for around $300. You still get a 3-year warranty. That's for a US-made machine with Swedish (Electrolux) 11 amp motor with a great reliability record. And you're not just getting a motor and shaft. You get the jug, which is designed for optimal flow and shear characteristics (sadly not for being easy to clean) ... and the stainless blades and sealed bearings. And excellent speed control. It's durable and well designed. The tamper is a killer feature, but would be fairly easy to copy. I assume a patent keeps the other companies from doing so. If I wanted a blender that was almost as good and cheaper, I'd just get one of the perfectly good knockoffs, like a Ninja or Blendtec. I'm betting they'd be more efficient and easier to use than a hot-rodded router. But probably not as fun a project. BTW, here's a video teardown, plus abuse, by my favorite potty-mouthed Canadian machinist/engineer/comedian. The VM is just about the only kitchen tool he has kind words for.

I wonder if water quality (hardness, alkalinity, something else) might account for differing results.

I use a cheap plastic caliper like this one to measure food for calculating sous-vide times. Mine's smaller than this one... only opens a few inches. Also, industrial nylon or polyester filter bags, down to 5 microns. These are the same thing as Superbags, but come in more (and finer) mesh sizes, and cost a fraction. Great for anytime a chinois isn't fine enough, but you don't need to actually clarify something. Make sure to get the mesh ones and not the felt ones (you can't clean and reuse the felt).

Spoken like someone who hasn't sampled my WD-40 vinaigrette.

For short pasta shapes a skimmer works well.

I've had a 12 qt stockpot with a pasta insert since around 1990, and have used the insert maybe 3 times. I just don't find it useful. It seems to add to the time the water takes to boil, and it's harder to clean than a regular colander. Also, I've long rejected the traditional advice that you need gallons of water per pound of pasta. So I mostly use a 5 qt rondeau and a regular colander. I can see the insert being great if you wanted to reuse the same boiling water for multiple batches of pasta, as restaurants often do. The insert on my pot also stops a couple of inches short of the pot's bottom, so it would make a great steamer (if you needed to steam something big, like a bunch of lobsters). I haven't used it for this yet.

This is all quite mysterious. As far as their indestructibility, wouldn't recipes where you melt it take care of the problem? As far as the psychedelic vision quest, no idea! But I'd like to try.

Maaaaaybe. Much of the boiled linseed oil that gets sold for finishing wood has volatile organic solvents in it to speed drying. So you could get some bad fumes whiles heating. Once the seasoning is cooked on, you'd expect any solvents, and anything else that separates linseed from flax oil to be long gone. But be careful.

99% agree, except the type of oil will effect your process. I think you'll find that with a mostly unsaturated oil, you'll get where your going in fewer layers than with bacon fat. The result probably won't be any different, you'll just be saving time.

The pan won't season properly from cooking bacon properly. You need to get the pan past the fat's smoke point. This would mean wiping the pan after cooking the bacon, and putting it in a hot oven, or on a very high flame. The "greasy" quality of the oil isn't relevant. There's no greasiness to a seasoned pan. It needs to be partially carbonized, fully polymerized oil. If the pan's greasy, it's just not clean. Bacon fat works, but being high in saturated fats it will be less efficient than the unsaturated options, meaning it will take more coats to get a durable seasoning. And being a very unrefined fat, the smoke point is relatively low, which means you'll have to season at a lower temperature, and possibly have a less durability than with a more refined oil.

The theoretical differences between these oils are real. But I think it's unlikely that in practice you'll tell the difference between anything high in mono- and poly-unsaturated oils. Grapeseed, safflower, sunflower, and canola all work very well. Flaxseed should theoretically work at least as well, but it's not a standard kitchen oil. Animal fats like bacon will work less well. Oils that are more unsaturated will just get the job done faster, because you can get away with fewer coats (each coat should be as thin as you can make it; otherwise it's easy to get an uneven finish that chips off). If you use whatever high-heat, unsaturated oil you normally use for sauteeing, you'll be fine. I pay most attention to it being a refined oil with a high smoke point, because this is most useful for sauteeing anyway. To make the seasoning stick-restant, it needs to be heated past the smoke point. It's the carbonized particles within the polymer that are slippery. But you don't want to go too far. Beyond 700°F or so, you'll break down the polymer to gray ash and it will just flake off. As if you'd put it in a self-cleaning oven. Take a look at a grill pan that's been used on a restaurant's 20,000+ btu/hr burner. There won't be any seasoning. I like to season / reseason pans in an oven set to the oil's labelled smoke point plus 25°F. I use safflower oil, and it usually takes around 5 thin coats. Not counting preheating this takes half an hour or so.

In Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence, he talks about nitro-muddling and blender muddling to defeat PPOs (polyphenol oxidases, the enzymes that brown fresh herbs and make them taste like a swamp). In this case, nitro means liquid nitrogen, so the blender method is in reach of more people. In nitro muddling, you freeze the herbs with LN2, pulverize them to dust with a muddler, and then thaw by pouring alcohol over them. Ideally the alcohol should be over 40% ABV and should have some citric acid (maybe just some lemon juice) added. The alcohol and acid will infuse into the tiny herb particles so quickly as they thaw that the PPOs will be inactivated before they can do anything. Blender muddling just means blitzing the herbs into the booze / acid in a high speed blender and immediately straining out. It works by the same method, although is maybe 10% less effective by Arnold's estimation. But still really good. I'm working on the problem of mint infusion into ice cream, which is compounded because I don't want to use alcohol. I may experiment with blending into citric acid-spiked sugar syrup.

Me too. I've rarely met a vegan Indian dish I didn't like. My luck's been much worse with California-style vegan restaurants and cookbooks, where it sometimes seems the chefs don't have any roots in food that tastes good.

A Dremel would be much better than a bolster. The bolster makes a knife impossible to sharpen properly. I don't understand why they continue to exist in knifeland.

You really can't compare teflon to seasoned steel and iron. They excel at different things. If you think the steel / iron pans are as nonstick as teflon, then your teflon is completely wrecked. I'd agree that steel / iron pans are much more useful. Teflon pans are great for eggs, middling to terrible for most other things, and essentially disposable.