paulraphael

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.

Well, sure, that's a one-trick pony by design. No one tries to sell it as a chef's knife.

For anything requiring precision and a sharp knife, nothing I've used can touch a Japanese Wa handle. For heavier tasks that need a duller, sturdier chef's knife, I prefer a plain old Western handle. The exact handle size and style is unimportant. Two factors that matter: a rounded spine on the knife (so you don't get blisters) and no bolster. Traditional bolsters are stupid. They making proper sharpening impossible. My heavy German knife, which I like in other respects, had a big dumb bolster. I had Dave Martell Grind it down to get it out of the way. If I were buying a heavy knife now, I'd get a Messermeister or any lower-priced Japanese yo-deba (western handled, heavy chef's knives made for abuse). All these innovative handles look to me like they were created by marketing departments, or by inventors who don't really understand they're making one-trick ponies.

Cold brew seems to be a popular method for coffee ice cream, but I'm not so interested in it because it actually de-emphasizes the origin character of the beans. You extract fewer of the acids and aromatics than when hot brewing. I think this is why it's popular with casual coffee drinkers ... if the coffee beans aren't great quality, you can still get a satisfying cup out of them. But if the coffee beans are awesome, you lose a lot of what makes them so. The sugar and dairy tend to mute those acids and aromatics, so I think you'd risk getting coffee flavor that's all low notes. A final issue is that you get less extraction overall than you do from hot brewing, so to get equivalent strength you have to use more coffee. I'm already putting about $6 worth of coffee into a quart of ice cream ... it would be nice to not spend even more.

Interesting article at Serious Eats on the flavors of different garlic prep techniques. It's all based on one guy's non-blind tasting, so far from definitive, but worth a read.

I'd imagine "low" means speed 2, which is the only speed that KA recommends for bread. On 1 the motor doesn't get enough air flow and is danger of overheating. I don't know if the MC crew define their speeds. I think most people think of 4 to 6 as "medium." If you've got really soupy high-hydration dough I can imagine this working ... if for some reason you really need to beat the crap out of it. With firmer dough this seems pretty dicey to me. KA's top-end machines aren't really what bakers think of as commercial mixers, even though plenty of them get used commercially for smaller stuff. The one labelled "commercial" is distinguished by a few tweaks that make it easier to clean, so it gets an NSF approval. All the real commercial mixers (Hobart, Globe, etc.) change speeds through changeable gears, so they have monstrous torque in low speed, with no sacrifice of cooling power. But it's still not terribly hard to break them!

Kitchenaid's guidelines are not very useful for bread. They don't take into account hydration or degree of gluten development you're going for. You really just have to pay attention to the machine. Watch it, listen to it, keep a hand near the vent to feel how warm the exhaust air is, smell it. Don't wait for the motor to labor, or for the smell of sizzling hot motor windings. The only problem with the higher speeds is that when the mixer gets overwhelmed, it happens much more quickly. You'll have less time to react. You'll be more likely to break a gear than to just overheat the thing. But as long as it the mixer isn't showing signs of struggle it's probably fine. It's telling that actual commercial mixer companies like Hobart give more precise—and conservative—capacity recommendations.

Really? Has any researched actually linked aluminum to anything? I haven't seen any new evidence. If aluminum were a problem, then spinach and other leafy greens would be be a bigger problem than cookware. Unless you make acidic sauces in uncoated aluminum. Which would taste bad.

I can imagine that with some very lean, delicate proteins there could be an advantage to defrosting before cooking. At least with larger portions. Not because the speed of defrosting makes a difference, but because defrosting and cooking in one step will necessarily lead to the outer portions staying at cooking temperature longer than if you started thawed (the outside will defrost quickly; the insides much more slowly as they're getting heated by conduction). This could lead to the outsides being a bit drier. But I haven't tested this. It's possible that other people have and found no problems.

Very much so. In that evaluating taste requires more scientific rigor than most other senses. Scientific methods are designed to eliminate the influence of bias. Bias (expectations, associations, moods, habits) play a huge role in taste. Scientific methods also work against experimental bias (biases toward one result or another that are inadvertently built into the experiment), unrelated variables, and chance. It's not so uncommon today, when one chef says to another "X method tastes better than Y method," to ask, "did you do a blind triangle test?" 10 years ago no one would have known what that meant. Soon it's going to be Triangle-Or-It-Didn't-Happen.

There's a link at the end of the first post in this thread. The blog series includes a few recipes, mostly to illustrate the many pages of theory. My hope is that people can use the recipes as jumping-off points. You should be able to use the ideas to tweak a recipe in whatever direction you like.