paulraphael

The link you cited really just showed generic information on the behavior of a bunch of sanitizers. It doesn't address the measured performance of any of them when sanitizing produce (you can read the same descriptions of these chemicals, practically word-for-word, referring to their performance on nonporous surfaces). Here's an FDA study analysis that directly addresses sanitizers on produce. This is the only one I could find that even addresses peroxide. It's not surprising that H2O2 isn't so popular; It's effectiveness is spotty, and it causes browning of some vegetables, bleaching of others. Excerpts of shortcomings: "Treatment of whole cantaloupes, honeydew melons, and asparagus spears with 1% H2O2 was less effective at reducing levels of inoculated salmonellae and E. coli O157:H7 than hypochlorite, acidified sodium chlorite or a peracetic acid-containing sanitizer (Park and Beuchat 1999)."" "Use of a 1% H2O2 spray on alfalfa seeds and sprouts did not control growth of E. coli O157:H7 (Taormina and Beuchat 1999b)." "... however, obvious visual defects were noted on the treated lettuce." None of this is damning. It appears to be safe to use. But it's also only marginally effective, and can discolor food. If I were looking for a produce sanitizer, I'd keep looking.

Escofier's recipes? Those were written back when veal grew on trees. Maybe not literally.

After the smoke clears and you sweep the rubble away, the surfaces should be safe for preparing a salad.

Another source of minimalist stock is plain old sous-vide bag juices. I accumulate them in the freezer to add them to stock, but in a pinch have used them in place of stock. The flavor is pure and intense. Definitely benefits from some onion / shallot, and wine or other spirit, and it needs acid. But a little goes a long way, the flavors can be pushed in whatever direction you want.

Disinfectants and sanitizers are not quite the same thing. I use a peroxide-based disinfectant at home and love it; it's pretty non-toxic, it works well, and it smells good. There's no nasty residue. It's sold as a commercial product for hospitals, so it's not so easy to find ... I'm not sure why. Sanitizers are used in somewhat lower concentrations and in much larger quantities, and need to stay stable in an open sink for a whole shift. Peroxide is unstable even in a plastic bottle. In a sink it will off-gas to basically nothing very quickly. Peroxide is much more expensive than the usual suspects (quaternary ammonium, chlorine). For reasons I don't know, it hasn't been approved as a commercial restaurant sanitizer by health departments (at least not as of the last time I looked into it). It used to be a popular sanitizer for breweries. They used it in higher concentrations than household peroxide. Mostly for stainless steel and copper surfaces. From what I've read it's no longer popular; that industry has switched to stuff called PAA, which is a strong peroxide/acetic acid blend that is nastier than anything you'd want in your kitchen. It must be pretty effective for people to put up with it.

Sanitizing works on clean surfaces (no organic matter hanging around) and there's no guaranteed way to get that stuff out of the deepest reaches of a hacked-up cutting board. That's why most sources say to toss a poly board when it gets scored. Or sand a wood or rubber board. Someone around here said they had a method for sanding poly boards that didn't wreck them. I'd be curious to hear it.

You can't count on me doing it all the time at home. But at restaurants and food trucks you can absolutely count on it. Health codes just about everywhere in the US require it. Probably elsewhere in the developed world. Commercial dishwashers are either heat-sanitizing or chemical-sanitizing. The latter runs a solution just like the one I describe through the rinse cycle. Commercial dishwashing sinks are all triple—for wash, rinse, and sanitize. If you don't have a sanitizing dishwasher or 3-basin sink, you won't get licensed to open. One of the first things a health inspector checks is if the three sink basins are properly filled and that the water isn't dirty. They cary test strips to make sure your sanitizer isn't exhausted. Commercial kitchens I've been in have a sanitizer-filled tub full of clean cutting boards, and bussing tray to throw used ones into. This is all commercial kitchen 101.

Extremely acidic. I like some brightness in a tomato sauce but this was over the top, at least in the Margherita where there weren't other fatty ingredients to balance it in any way.

In the basic sourdough recipe, with the machine mixing instructions, do they clarify what they mean by "mix to medium gluten development?" I use a 6qt KA mixer with a spiral dough hook, and have gradually been shortening mixing times when using medium to high-hydration doughs and autolyse steps. If I go longer than 90 seconds, the dough seems to get soupier rather than firmer. I'm assuming the gluten will break down if I go longer than this, but everyone online who writes about mixing bread mechanically mentions mixing times of several minutes. Should I ignore the apparent weakening of the dough and mix longer? My dough ends up being extremely extensible, but almost entirely without elasticity. At hydration levels above 65% my boules get floppy and almost resemble focaccia. (using half KA AP flour, half KA bread). But it's delicious ... like the best tasting bread I've had. When I lower the hydration, I get beautiful, professional looking boules that just taste ok. Should I mix longer or change the dough development steps in any other way? Right now I'm making the recipe as written, with regard to autolyse, mixing, and stretch / fold schedule. I've increased the hydration to 70%, and am using a lower percentage of starter, to facilitate a longer warm ferment. My starter gives the flavors I like if it gets a few hours in the 90°F range. For one trial I tried adding a couple of extra stretch / fold steps. This made a stronger dough, but gave a tightly organized crumb that was less chewy, and resembled commercial sandwich bread. Not awesome. Any tips on how to get a stronger dough that will hold its shape, without compromising flavor, will make me oh so happy.

Cocktails are maybe the preferred way to keep everyone healthy. When not imbibing, I use soap and water, and then give a quick spray with restaurant sanitizer. I bought a gallon jug of the stuff about 8 years ago, and have only used about 3/4 or it. One capful dilutes in a quart of water to make the working solution. Put it in a generic spray bottle. The stuff I like is made with quaternary ammonium compounds. It's colorless, odorless, tasteless, and doesn't attack metals or textiles (bleach attacks just about everything). It has a very long life in working solution, so you don't have to throw it out ever. It has a wetting agent, so you can use it as the final rinse when hand-washing dishes, and you won't get spots on glassware. As with all sanitizers, it's only useful on surfaces that are actually clean. Quaternary ammonium compounds work better than bleach on organic surfaces (like wood). They're less effective than bleach against some viruses, including norovirus. When my gallon jug runs out, I plan to replace with the same type of chemical in tablet form. This $5 bottle makes 150 gallons of working solution.

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.