paulraphael

In general, how does everyone like the Anova bluetooth compared with the Anova One?

This makes sense, but doesn't have anything to do with efficiency or with the amount of air in the fridge. You've just got more thermal mass in there in the form of food, adding to the total thermal mass (which includes the interior of the fridge itself). This will absolutely keep things cold longer when the power goes out, but it won't affect efficiency at all. As far as how this affects the defrost cycle in the freezer, I have no idea. And I never get a chance to observe changes to this, because my freezer is always too full. But it shouldn't be an influence on efficiency. Defrost cycles are usually just follow a timer.

Here's my rejiggering of Hazan's recipe (with some input from the CIA textbook). This is converted to weights, because seriously, wtf is a cup of basil? Your measure could be off from mine by 200%. You might as well measure by fistfull. 100g basil leaves 50g toasted pine nuts 10g garlic cloves, minced 125g olive oil 100g grated parmesan Toast the pine nuts in a pan (I've also used almonds). Grind everything but the cheese in a food processor or mortar and pestle. Grate the cheese and stir it in. I haven't experimented with blanched basil, but read an article based on a single test. It concluded that the blanched version looked much better, tasted much worse. If I were to repeat this experiment I'd steam the basil instead of immersing in boiling water. I've found this affects the flavor less, while deactivating the enzymes just as well. But I'm not optimistic that it's a good idea.

The key to saving energy with a fridge is to buy an efficient fridge. And keep coils etc. clean (this thread reminded me about point #2 ... I'm almost scared to look).

That's the folk wisdom, but it doesn't turn out to be a big deal. The amount of thermal mass of the air in the fridge is minute ... it takes very little energy to chill a few cubic feet of air from room temperature to 30-something. If you calculate the thermal mass, of say, 20 cubic feet of air, and look at the amount of energy it takes to raise it from 4°C to 22°C, it's equal to 0.0004 kilowatt hours. If you assume a refrigerator isn't that efficient, and takes twice as much energy to cool that air back the other way, you've got .0008 kwh. At our current price of 19.2 cents per kwh in NYC, this is 0.015¢ to open the door and let out every molecule of cold air. So it should go without saying that it makes no difference if you open the door for 5 seconds or half a minute. You use more energy putting in a jug of room temperature water and letting the fridge cool it.

Chocolate marquise with a fruit or herb or booze creme anglaise. Always kills.

Jeni's method sounds pretty close to mine, although I seal it up before chilling it, and don't find the cheesecloth to be necessary (but it might help you squeeze some of the last drops of coffee out of the grounds). IME 5 minutes is slightly long, and extracts more bitterness than I'm after. But this is the kind of thing that you have to experiment to find where your tastes are, and it's going to be dependent on the coffee itself to some degree. Boiling the whole beans is a new one to me. Some people do overnight cold extractions with whole beans. I'm not a big fan of cold extraction generally, because along with reducing bitterness it reduces acidity and some of the fruitier aromatics. I think the results are bland (but it's probably a great bet if you're forced to use lousy, over-roasted beans). Getting good acidity requires coffee beans that have plenty of that flavor to begin with, and even so, it's probably going to be muted by the sugar and the dairy. In my last few batches of coffee ice cream I've compensated by adding a few ml of sherry vinegar.

Coarse, like for French Press, or even coarser. I don't think it has to be precise with longer extractions like this, but a fine grind would probably overextract and be bitter, and you'd have a much harder time straining the grinds out. If you use the coarsest setting on a non-espresso burr grinder, you should be able to strain it all out with a chinois.

I'm a little suspicious of this product called espresso powder. Espresso is almost uniquely unsuited for being powdered, since so much of what distinguishes it from regular coffee is the intense dose of aromatic compounds. These are the exact compounds that get lost during freeze drying, which is why even the best instant coffees taste relatively bland and indistinct. The marketing copy says it's more concentrated than regular instant coffee ... but how can something be more concentrated than instant coffee? The stuff is 100% concentrated. Is it made from a much darker roast? That just reflects a misunderstanding of espresso. Coffee beans roasted black do not make espresso. They make ruined coffee beans. I've never been sold on using coffee to enhance chocolate flavor. But I like coffee. The best way I've found to get great coffee flavor is to infuse freshly ground beans into the dairy. For donuts, I assume there's butter; you could infuse the coffee into the butter sous-vide (chefsteps has a recipe). You get all the aromatics and all the acids, but none of the bitterness (the alkaloids aren't fat-soluble). If you're infusing into milk or cream, do it in a sealable container (like a ziploc). Use 93°C milk/cream, shake it up, seal, and after 4 minutes plunge into icewater. Don't unseal until it's room-temperature or cooler. This gets all the good flavors, including the usually elusive acidity.

I don't believe you need any kind of special permit for an immersion circulator. The big kerfuffle over sous vide in NYC years ago led to a rule that you needed to file a HACCP plan if you had a chamber vacuum machine in your restaurant. That was the machine that freaked out the (under-educated) health dept. officials. But the circulator's fine, unless the rules have changed in recent years. Pastrygirl's question may come up—will the health dept. accept that your eggs are actually pasteurized? They should—they're fine with things getting pasteurized through conventional cooking methods. But I wouldn't count on them being rational. FWIW, I got my NYC health dept. food protection certificate in 2008, and there was no mention of sous-vide anything in the study materials or in the test.

The question is if there's really a way to keep volatile aroma compounds from behaving like volatile aroma compounds. It's their stock in trade to evaporate quickly. This is not only why they disappear in the oven, but why they have such intensity of flavor and aroma in the first place. If there IS a way to contain the aromatics—say, by extracting them into oil instead of alcohol, and solidifying the oil, is there any way this won't mute the flavor release? And what's worse ... having most of the aroma compounds vanish, or having them remain, but sequestered and muted? As Chromedome suggests, we'd have to test it. And for something that's likely to be this subtle, I'd be skeptical of anything short of a blind triangle test with at least a few tasters. You'd need to start on an even field—a good quality extract vs. a good quality powder. And you'd need to account for the biggest variable, which is concentration. There's no way to know what counts as an equivalent quantity of each, so ideally you'd make a few samples with each kind of vanilla, ranging from too little to too much.

silicon dioxide is also the main ingredient in beaches and sand castles (!)

I'm imagining some kind of sculptural presentation made from some kind of fluid-gel capellini. But not sure I want to eat it.

Maltodextrin is technically sugar. It just isn't sweet. But it breaks down in your body to glucose so quickly that it has roughly the same glycemic index as glucose. Maltodextrins are sometimes used as bulking agents, because they have a neutral flavor and aren't hygroscopic. More interestingly, some forms of them are used to solidify fats. If you've ever wondered how they got vegetable oil into powdered cake mix, the answer is tapioca maltodextrin. A version marketed for this purpose is called N-Zorbit. It's possible that the maltodextrin just acts as a bulking agent in the vanilla powder; it's also possible that the extract itself was oil-based, and the maltodextrin was used to solidify it.

I do what Anna does, but often just use hot water from the tap. Ours is about 130°F (will be a little cooler by the end). This plus the jolt of heat from browning is just about right for beef.

Polyester is a plastic, just like nylon. It can be made into fibers and threads, or just about anything else. My guess is that these aren't meant for for use in the oven. They look like they're for assembly and presentation. I don't think you're likely to melt them and ruin the food, but they might get discolored and warped and and a bit on the crisp side. Maybe the manufacturer can clarify?

No one has said that fake vanilla is better than real vanilla. They're pointing to cooking circumstances that destroy any differentiation between the two. In those circumstances, it makes sense to use whatever's cheapest. If there's a significant price difference.

As Deputy Field Marshal of the Public Ridicule Division of the Logic Brigade of the Secret Steak Police, I feel the need to weigh in here. It has not been my experience that a well-marbled but tender cut (like rib eye) stays sufficiently juicy and tender when cooked well-done. But it has been my experience that people often disagree on the levels of doneness and what to call them, so it's possible we're talking apples and oranges. What temperature are you cooking to? Among the factors that influence perceived juiciness (actual juice, collagen rendered to gelatin, and rendered fat) I believe fat to be a distant 3rd place in importance. It makes a difference, but I don't believe fat can rescue tender meat that's cooked to 170°F. The juices are gone, there's no gelatin, and much of the fat rendered from the marbling is gone as well. I believe it will be subjectively juicier than a a well-done lean steak, but that's saying very little. Sadly, there is much more flavor in the juices themselves than there is in the contracted, dried out muscle fibers that remain. I find that good steaks lose flavor along with texture with extended cooking. Which really speaks to Anthony Bourdain's point, if you go back and read what he says. In his experience, people who order steak well-done will not be able to tell the difference between a good piece of meat and crappy one. So he and his fellow chefs are thankful for the well-done crowd: they have someone to give the butt-end, gristly, less appealing butchery leftovers to, without fear of the steak coming back to the kitchen. And this is where the advice that's often perceived as condescending comes from: don't bother with an expensive piece of meat if you're going to cook it well-done. You're just going to be killing the qualities that made it an expensive piece of meat in the first place. This isn't calling anyone a barbarian for liking the well-done meat. It's imploring them to see it as an opportunity to save money. You see the same dynamics with coffee beans; once they're roasted past medium you can't taste the original bean anymore. Only the roast. So the roasters don't generally bother mentioning the plantation or country of origin of their Vienna roasts. It's irrelevant (and seeing this as a profit opportunity, Starbucks made a fortune convincing people to drink dark roasts. It let them buy cheap-ass coffee). Same story with extra virgin olive oil. If you're going to sauté with it, you're wasting your money. Once cooked in a frying pan, it's going to be no better than a grade that was extracted with heat.

I can imagine being tempted by fake vanilla flavor if it weren't so cheap and easy to make your own extract. It's more expensive now than in past years, due to a vanilla shortage, but still, I think you can make a pint of extract with around $10 worth of grade-b beans and $5 worth of bottom-shelf vodka. I bought my vanilla bean stash for a fraction of this, but still, this gives you extract for less than $1 an ounce. A little less than low-grade extract; way less than the good stuff. I'm not shy with it. I'd agree that you lose all but a hint of it in anything that spends much time in the oven. But a lot of flavor sticks around in things that cook quickly (pancakes, etc.). It's actually pretty easy to overdo it.

We just need a potion that can turn pink meat gray without changing the flavor. It would resolve so many epicure-barbarian standoffs.

Ahh, sorry. I read that wrong. That doesn't sound as bad. I still suspect a little acid would be a big improvement.

Looks like a recipe that needs work. It's a mild cut of meat with a milk and cream sauce, seasoned just with onion. The most obvious fix would be adding an acid. This could be some tart white wine to deglaze the pan (reduce it a lot before adding the other liquids) or just some sherry vinegar stirred in at the end. That said, a cream sauce on tenderloin seems a bit pallid and unappealing. I understand the desire to add some richness, but suspect that if you got both richness and flavor from the sauce, the meat would just disappear. I like to tart up tenderloins with a relatively lean and bright sauce. Something with acidic fruit or chutney or reduced stock or wine / vinegar—bright flavors that act more as a condiment that complement. Tenderloin needs some kind of accent.

Time must be a factor as well, since I got off flavors in 90 minutes at 85C.

Searzall?

I see a lot of cooks at NYC delis using their cheap serrated knives for absolutely everything. These guys are usually really fast and efficient at what they do. I think they use the sandwich knife because that's what they're given, and because doing everything with one knife is quickest. But I wouldn't follow their example unless working at a deli. As far as "there are ways to use a serrated knife besides sawing," yeah, if by sawing you mean cutting back and forth. But the knife will always cut like a saw ... which is to say, it will tend to rip, rather than separate the food cleanly. This is a simplification ... under a microscope, you you'd see that all knives rip. But serrated knives do it on a macro scale that causes more damage to the food.