paulraphael

One way to think about stocks is that they let you front-load much of the labor. If you have a traditional stock that balances a basic meat flavor, gelatinous mouthfeel, and aromatics, then you have much less to worry about when assembling the final sauce or dish. But this isn't the only way to do it. We have many other ways to control texture and mouthfeel now, so it's not mandatory to extract gobs of gelatin. Some chefs prefer to leave the aromatics out, because it's more efficient to add them toward the end when you won't lose so much to evaporation. Basic meat flavors can come from pan drippings or sous-vide bag juices. If your final dish is already full of meat or texture-enhancing ingredients or aromatics, then you'll be depending on the stock much less for these contributions. The stock qualities can become matters of subtlety rather than the broad strokes of the dish.

For chocolate I get rid of the eggs entirely. I want to get rid of every unnecessary source of fat. I add a bit of lecithin, but don't know if this is necessary. My chocolate flavor's still in beta testing. Why don't you write to Jenni about the cream cheese? I never asked her about it because it's not what I'm up to. Probably there's some kind of emulsification / stabilization power that it has, but she finds it inappropriate for some flavors. Skim milk powder won't substitute for egg yolk, but I gather the cream cheese does in her home recipes.

The thing with food-born illness is you never really know. Someone can get sick anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 weeks after eating something bad, and often it's never diagnosed. And it's not always the case that everyone who at the thing gets sick. You do a much more thorough job than I do with fruits and vegetables. It never occurred to me that I could reliably wash e-coli off of salad greens, so I basically just hope for the best. Maybe not the smartest approach.

Should have added that I'm asking for a friend

Why do we assume chicken is some special case? Any uncooked food can be covered with pathogens. Most of the recent e-coli epidemics have been from vegetables. Nothing to be done about it you're eating salad, but otherwise the cutting board is probably the 2nd most common vector for cross-contamination (next to the cook's hands). Cutting boards are mostly a problem if they get deep grooves. Grooves have room not just for bacteria, but for plenty of food for the bacteria. This is also called a petri dish. Or a bacteria farm. Wood boards and rubber boards have the advantage of being sandable. Rubber and poly boards have the advantage of being dishwashable. Generally it's recommended to toss poly boards when they get hacked up, but I've heard from a couple of people who have figured out how to sand them without making a huge mess. I don't know how. But to your second question, dish soap and hot water and scrubbing is all that's necessary in most cases. It won't get 100% of the pathogens. If you're cooking for strangers or anyone who might be immune compromised, or if you just want to play it safe, you can spray with sanitizer and after washing and let it drip dry.

That's right. The cream cheese is a hack to simulate the emulsifying power she gets at the factory from milk proteins. Maybe, but I'm really not sure what improvements you'd get over using high quality nonfat dried milk. If you can't find that at a local store, it's easy to get on Amazon. Also keep in mind that Jeni's uses its protein denaturizing process purely to substitute for eggs. You should ask yourself how important this is to you. If you simply don't like the flavor of eggs in ice cream, or the flavor-masking of heavy custard, you can always just use fewer eggs. I use two yolks per liter (less than 4% by weight). This is more than enough emulsifier, and enough to influence the texture a bit. I don't notice any egg flavor or muting. You can use as little as 1/4 yolk, but will forsake any of the textural advantages yolks can offer. Using cornstarch or tapioca starch as a stabilizer is an effort at label-friendliness. Those ingredients sound "natural" to customers, while the gums that work better sound scary. In real life, I don't understand the distinction between powder dried from a cassava root and powder dried from a locust bean seed. They're both polysaccharides. The one from the locust bean tree will work better, and at 1/10 the concentration.

Do any Anova 1 users notice a sticky residue on the rubberized parts, like the clamp assembly? Mine has had this for a year or two now. I don't want to clean it too aggressively because I don't know if it's stuff that stuck to it, or if it's the rubber itself getting breaking down. If the latter, I'd be afraid of scraping it off accidentally and making it worse than before.

I have an older version of this Taylor that I like: It's got a pretty good thermocouple, and a fair-to-middling IR thermometer. I didn't have an IR gun thermometer at the time so this seemed like a good idea. Now I rarely use the IR feature. But I love that it's water resistant. I just wash it like a utensil and put it away. I don't have one of these, but want one: Not so much for the remote feature, but the dual probes. They sell other probes (the included 2nd probe is for measuring oven or bbq pit temp. I'd want a second food probe). I've shopped for scientific and technical dual probe thermometers; the Thermoworks version looks like a bargain ... possibly because it uses thermistors instead of thermocouples. It's also splash-proof. Anyone used this?

Unless you're quite uncomfortable with the idea, I'd suggest working on it yourself. It's not very hard, and as you've discovered, the web is full of how-to instructions and videos. One of the great things about these mixers is that every replacement part is available. And they're reasonably priced. You'll probably have to get at least one specialized tool, like a snap-ring plier (I'm not sure about this ... it was required for the mixer model that I have). And be warned that it's messy. There's going to be around a pound of 50 year-old, caked-on grease inside that thing. You can replace the grease with a modern synthetic that works better and lasts longer, and will help the machine run even better than new. I have a different relationship with my mixer after having fixed it. It's not mysterious anymore. It's more personal ... almost as if I'd made thing from scratch.

Well, you can't take back the royalties you already payed him. Why not keep the books for the information, but deface all the pictures of him? Or claw his name off the dust jackets? Books are such good conversation starters.

Fortunately no one ever got sick, but they had what might be a couple of close calls. They found samples of lysteria in the kitchen during monthly inspections and as a precaution recalled a bunch of ice cream. This contributed to their decision to offload the raw milk operations (including mixing and pasteurizing the ice cream) to a dairy.

That's the real question. Without having done the necessary experiment, I'll bet that protein denaturing has very, very little to do it. There are two significant things that distinguish his recipes: extremely high total solids, and gobsmackingly high milk fat. He's also got a lot of yolks in there. Duplicate these solids and fat and egg levels by any other method, you'll get basically the same result. Personally I don't like ice cream that's so high in fat. I find the mouthfeel (and stomach-feel) off-putting, and I don't like the way it mutes flavors. You may disagree. If so, be confident that you can a similar texture by just about any method that gives you those proportions. When the solids and fat and custard levels are so high, the texture is going to be very robust. It won't be messed with easily by small changes in process. Manipulating proteins through cooking is an interesting topic. I've built my own process around taking advantage of the possible benefits. I believe these benefits are relatively subtle, though ... not enough to take the place of conventional thickening and emulsifying ingredients unless you're running a very sophisticated process. In my conversations with Jeni of Jeni's homemade, she said she was able to get enough emulsification to go egg-free because she used raw milk. Then she regretted telling me this, because she was afraid I'd encourage people to try this at home, leading to all kinds of carnage.

Thanks!

I'd recommend against this method entirely. It overcooks the milk proteins, it's terribly imprecise (as you've noticed) and it's a pain. Just figure out what nonfat milk solids level you're going for, and get there by adding nonfat dry milk. The key is to use good quality dry milk that's 100% skim milk, that's very fresh (no off-odors when dry or mixed), and ideally, that's been spray-dried at low temperature. I use Now Organic brand. There are some other good ones. I keep mine double-bagged in the freezer. Jeni knows what she's talking about, but I think the method she's recommending is a misplaced attempt to mimic her industrial process. She'd get raw milk from the farm, centrifuge it into cream and skim milk, and then concentrate the milk by reverse osmosis. This is great if you have industrial dairy equipment. At least in theory. It turned out to be too problematic even for her; now she has all this stuff done off-site at the dairy.

I don't have any issues with the cleanliness of my endgrain board. It stays ungrooved, and I spray all boards with sanitizer after washing. I just don't like the sensation of cutting on poly boards. That said, I use them fairly often, and have to admit that they're gentler on my knife edges than the end-grain maple. It's not a dramatic difference, but on plastic my gyuto holds on to its freshly sharpened feel somewhat longer. This goes against some of the conventional thinking. I haven't had the pleasure of using the rubber sani-tuff boards. They're ugly and don't smell great, but I imagine are extremely gentle on knives, and offer dish-washer friendliness of plastic.

My maple end grain board never gets grooves deeper than what can be smoothed over with a regular bench scraper. I've never needed to cabinet-scrape it or sand it. But ... I don't use serrated knives on it. I have a separate face-grain board that I use for bread, and this is indeed hacked up. A bread knife is basically a saw, so it should stay away from anything that you don't want grooves in. Possibly if I used a euro-style chef's knife with a heavier hand the end grain board would get deeper marks.

I think it's at the low end in terms of fanciness, but not in terms of quality. Of everything I've seen, Bluestar stays the closest to the design and construction of a commercial range. Emphasis on burliness, not features. This could be a plus or a minus, depending on what you're looking for.

Yes, thanks, I said the exact opposite of what I meant. Fixed now.

If I were buying a range and had the budget, high quality open burners would be close to the top of my list. I like a lot of power from a range, and BTU figures only tell part of the story. Even the best sealed burner designs send much of the heat energy to the edges of the pan and way beyond. Good open burners send the fire straight up. More even heating, and more of the energy gets to the food. Look up videos for Bluestar's burners; you'll get the idea. I'd also look for a very powerful, well designed broiler, like the infra red top broilers on Wolf and Bluestar. A friend of mine has a 48" Wolf (from before the acquisition by Sub Zero) that has both a griddle and "char broiler" grill on top. When the char broiler broke down, an authorized repair guy spent the afternoon scraping burnt-on gunk from its bowels. My friend asked how to keep it from happening again. Repair guy said, "Sir, you shouldn't grill inside the house." So this is a feature I'd pass on.

I like my cast iron pans too, but they're not non-stick like teflon pans. Somewhat stick-resistant compared with bare metal, but teflon is radically more innert and stick free. I don't think this is important for most cooking ... cast iron and spun steel are much more useful overall. But if you want something that an egg will slide around on without any oil, nothing is in the same league as teflon. It's just a separate category of pan, with a unique set of advantages and problems.

I cited Kenji's article because it compares results between pressure cooking and braising. It's not the central point (which is that both pressure cooking and braising are generally better than a slow cooker). But there are some useful generalizations.

Boulud's a great chef, and I've loved some meals at his restaurants, and even reverse engineered some recipes from him, but nevertheless, that's a terrible roasted chicken recipe. I don't have to try it to know. And I'd be surprised if he cooks that for his family. That chicken will have some combination of very overcooked breasts and undercooked thighs. There is nothing in the technique to deal with the different cooking requirements of these parts, and trussing actually exacerbates this problem greatly. In this case brining is just a band-aid to help compensate for bad cooking.

This Kenji Lopez article is primarily a rant against slow cookers, but along the way he addresses some of the differences between a traditional braise and a pressure cooked equivalent.

I grew up drinking lapsang souchong, and then lost my taste for it a bit. Part of it seems like the Twinings brand I used to like now just tastes like dust (I swear it used to be pretty good). Nothing I can find in bags tastes any good. And part of the problem is that while I love the smoke, I miss the body and some of the other midrange flavors of other teas. So for the last couple of years I've been drinking Taylors of Harrowgate Scottish Breakfast. This is a big, sink-you-teeth-into-it cup a tea. So a couple of months ago I had the idea of mixing them together. What could go wrong? (cue Wile E. Coyote mixing two varieties of Acme teas and blowing himself to bits). I mixed a bag of Scottish Breakfast with a teaspoon of Harney & Sons loose leaf lapsang souchong (in a little infusor), and damn if it isn't my favorite tea ever. I'd love to know what someone with a more educated tea palate thinks of this. I'm also curiuos to know how this compares with typical Russian Caravan blends ... I never see these so I haven't tried. Anyway, that's my odd and boring tea story. Thanks for listening. Edited to add: my girlfriend thinks the lapsang smells like a burning pile of sweaty work boots, so I'm only allowed to drink it when she's out.

Seriouseats weighs in.