paulraphael

Interesting. I've seen all kinds of protein rafts used in classical cooking, but hadn't seen ground meet suggested before the MC books. I don't recall them specifically claiming it's a new technique. That was just my assumption. I haven't seen it mentioned in traditional texts (with the exception of ground meat combined with egg white when making consommé from an existing stock). It works beautifully.

Sushi is just one of many kinds of food where the quality of the product is affected by the quality of the cutting. Herbs are another. Cooked proteins. Fruits. Vegetables that will be served raw. Arguably, raw meat that's going to be cooked doesn't put much demand on cutting technique. But good technique will still make you more efficient, and the job more enjoyable.

The basic principle is that you'll make a rough cut if you change directions while cutting. What you can't see in that video is that he's (probably) letting up on the pressure when he changes directions. The result is a cut that looks as clean as if it had been done in a single draw. The 1-2 cut is fast and efficient, but you'd get the same result if you had to do it in more strokes, as long as you're not actively cutting at the moment you change direction. Sometimes if I have a knife that's too short for the task, I'll cut a big piece of meat with multiple drawing strokes. When I push the knife forward to begin the next stroke, I'll remove pressure so there's not cutting on the forward push. It's slower than what you see in the video, but still gives a clean cut. I worry about this more with cooked proteins that are about to be served. If it's a steak that hasn't been cooked yet, small imperfections will rarely show in the final dish. This is even more the case with a stew or a braise.

Yeah, sounds fishy. Of course I haven't done an a/b test and so am guilty of trusting the conventional wisdom. FWIW, the clearest stocks I've made have been in a pressure cooker, kept below a boil, with a bit of raw (unbrowned) ground meat in the pot to clarify the proteins (a Modernist Cuisine technique). These stocks also taste and smell better than the others I've done, so I'm not really jumping at the chance to experiment.

I saw it on Fresh. Still haven't decided if we want to spend the premium for this.

I like them both. They have different qualities. The AC heats a little more evenly and is more responsive. And I like a stainless steel cooking surface for its brightness, especially for sauteing or roasting where you want to be able see how browned the pan drippings are. For saucepans I would always prefer AC. For frying pans and saute pans each has its place. For putting a hard sear on a big piece of meat, or browning a pile of mushrooms, I'd reach for the carbon steel or cast iron. That said, if you like AC, there are many pans with similar construction and performance that cost less. And a few that cost more. Shining up the AC is a piece of cake with Barkeeper's Friend.

Has anyone eaten at Roberta's in the last several months, since Nick Barker left as chef? A friend told me he went recently and everything was terrible. Broke my heart. It's been my global pizza benchmark for the last 10 years. The brilliant small plates were just icing.

I think they're now the best in the city. It's nearly a 2-hour round trip for me but it's where I get just about all my seafood. If you're in the city you can have them deliver via Amazon ... something I haven't tried yet.

Storage aside, I'm glad to hear they do this. One of the many many sources of my Amazon guilt is the packaging waste. Do they use the reusable totes in all their markets? Re: camembert, yeah, in the U.S. cheese has to be pasteurized unless it's going to be aged a minimum of 60 days, presumably so the cheese salts and acids can kill all the pathogens (which just this minute I read is an arbitrary standard, adopted in 1949 without any evidence ...)

Stainless alloys are much, much less conductive than carbon steels (which themselves are only modestly conductive). But It's generally not a fair comparison, because what we call stainless cookware usually has just a thin veneer of stainless steel over a more conductive layer, or on top of a thick conductive disk. So these pans are really aluminum or thin copper pans with stainless cladding. Carbon steel pans are like lighter weight cast iron skillets. How much lighter depends—they range from very thin to gauges that feel as heavy as typical cast iron. I think the middle weight ones are the most popular. Every restaurant cook I know loves cooking on carbon steel. It's fast and easy, it's not precious, hits the balance between heat retention (for a great sear) and responsiveness (so you don't have to wait forever for it to heat up or respond). They don't distribute heat very evenly, but for fast cooking where things are in motion, it doesn't matter. They develop a fairly stick-resistant finish, but not as durable as what forms on cast iron (the surface doesn't have big pores for the finish to adhere to). The finish really doesn't matter when you're cooking fast and hot with good technique. I happen to have American-style cast iron pans, but would be just as happy with carbon steel. It does some things a little better, some things a little worse.

No one's going to condescend to you. You don't have to like this stuff. BT and I are just trying to show that people aren't getting "ripped off" ... the Wagyu thing is a totally different product and different approach. It's one that many happen to covet, for reasons different from the ones that draw people to other kinds of beef. YMMV.

It would be great to have extra bottles in different sizes. Caps would also be nice. A weakness of these siphons is they don't handle small quantities well (anything under half capacity can cause problems). Isi obviously wants us to deal with this by buying them in multiple sizes, but $$$ ... Has anyone found a way, maybe a hack, for getting additional bottles?

I'd call Vitamix. I have trouble imagining this combination even slowing the machine down. This is a pretty light application. I've never seen the VM "choke." It does work hard and begin to heat up when doing pure nut butters. It does them well; I just keep a hand near the exhaust vent to mind the motor temperature. I want the thing to last a while, so I'll give it a break if it gets hot to the touch. I've only had to do this once, when making multiple batches of nut butter back-to-back.

Read up on Wagyu beef, marbling, quality and BMS scales. It's a whole nuther approach to beef. [article in link is titled "everything you need to know ... " but it's little more than an intro. I just offer it because it has a concise chart on the grading system.]

Your experience doesn't match the good number of side-by-side trials that have been conducted to test this idea. And the science is there to back it up. All else equal, you'll get a smaller gradient with frequent flipping. Kenji Lopez: http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/07/the-food-lab-flip-your-steaks-and-burgers-multiple-times-for-better-results.html Harold McGee: https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/harold-mcgee-on-flipping-steaks-resting-meat-and-char-from-electric-grills/ Russ Parsons: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/01/food/la-fo-calcook-20100701

I don't like using the oven, because I can't see what's going on in there. Differences of a couple of degrees make a pretty big difference. Finishing a steak (or any protein) in the oven is a restaurant technique developed for pragmatism. It frees up your precious burners so you can get on with something else. When you cook several dozen identically cut steaks a day, you can dial in your technique for your oven. It becomes a simple matter of timing. If you're cooking at home, you probably do this once in a while, you get steaks of varying cuts and thicknesses, and you probably have enough burners on your stove to get through the meal. So the challenges are much greater and the justifications aren't so compelling. I'd advocate for doing it in a pan start-to-finish, if your priority is a thick crust, or sous-vide with a pre- and post-sear if your priority is perfectly cooked meat with minimal gradient.

Constant flipping isn't for show. There's science behind it. It will result in a much smaller gradient.

It's labor-intensive, but cooking over modest heat and flipping every half minute or so takes care of this quite well. Not as well as sous-vide, but surprisingly close. But yeah, in my experience 1-1/2" is about perfect, both for sous-vide, and for pan-cooking without losing one's mind. If this is traditional looking wagyu (more white than red) it needs to go quite a bit higher that 128°.

I doubt it will rise more than 5°F. Less, if you finish cooking over low heat, which makes sense with any steak that thick. Whether you sear it at high temp or do the low-heat Ducasse method, you'll have to finish over low heat, and preferably do so while cooking often. So there won't be much to drive the inner temperature up. Same would be true if you cooked sous vide and seared afterwards ... the searing is a high heat process, but is over too quickly to put a lot of energy into the meat below the surface. I agree with Kenji (and Ducasse) on the frequent flipping; that's pretty well proven if you're searing and cooking through at the same time (don't do it if you're searing after a sous-vide cook). But I'm shy about salting overnight. There's a small risk the meat could start to cure, in which case you'll pick up corned beef flavors. Which I assume you don't want. Salting a few hour ahead or a few minutes ahead are both fine. Kenji uses the salt's (mild) power to draw moisture from the surface, to improve searing, but paper towels by themselves should be fine. You've got a big fat piece of meat; there won't be any challenges searing it properly over the time it will take to cook through.

Even if you choose to cook it sous-vide (as I would), I'd suggest consulting Japanese sources on wagyu. If the DeBragga wagyu is similar to authentic Kobe in the density of its marbeling, it should be cooked to a somewhat higher temperature even than other grades, prime included. If you cook it at the low end of medium-rare (55°C / 131°F) too little of the fat will melt and you'll get a rubbery texture. I don't have 1st-hand experience with wagyu so can't recommend an exact temp. For general cooking ideas on thick steaks, here's a thread that goes back to 2008, starting with stovetop method advocated by Alain Ducasse, and probably never ending.

We should ask tech support at Anova if a clean sine wave is important. Anova's scientific circulators output data, but it's via an RS232 port, which I have seen since sometime in the 20th century. Not sure what software they can talk to.

I was thinking you'd need a pretty burly UPS, but since the circulator will just be maintaining temperature, it wouldn't need much capacity at all. Especially if you're cooking in something insulated.

I'm betting you're right. Probably the reason pasta never contains salt is tradition. That's often the answer with Italian food. And since you can count on everyone salting the water when they cook the pasta, there isn't much motivation to change. A writer at Serious Eats experimented with salting fresh pasta dough: My dough was almost perfect; the only thing I wanted to test was whether I'd get even better flavor by adding salt directly to the dough, instead of just my cooking water or sauce. The simple answer is yes. Do it! Salting pasta water is still well and good, but there's no compelling reason not to salt your dough—I tried fine-grain iodized salt and slightly coarser kosher salt. Both work; I prefer the flavor of kosher salt. Just don't use a coarse sea salt, which will keep your dough from developing a silky-smooth texture. Hypothetically, you could salt your pasta even more and skip salting your pasta water, but I choose to make a dough that still tastes good after cooking in salted water since it gives me a little more flexibility when it comes to the flavor of the final product—I can make and freeze batches of dough and then decide how salty I want my pasta to be on a case-by-case basis. Not exactly a scientific account, but her results make sense. edited to add: I just checked my own fresh pasta recipe that I worked out over a half-dozen or so trials, and see that I include 1% salt by total recipe weight. Didn't even give it much thought; it's in there just on general principle. 1% isn't very much, and some might leach into the water. I still salt the cooking water.

For sure, but there are a some failures beyond the manufacturer's control I'd like to be texted about. Like a power failure, or if too much water evaporates and causes the thing to shut down. Granted, the latter shouldn't ever happen, and the former poses some challenges (how's it going to text me if there's no power?) But suppose the power goes off for an hour. The people at Anova said that they didn't include an auto-restart feature because it introduce all kids of danger and liability issues. So Why not get a text, some other notification? The food isn't ruined instantly. You have many hours to deal with a problem like this. Even if you're away for the weekend, you'd have enough time to have the cat sitter or a neighbor go in and reset the thing, or maybe you could do it remotely. This is the one class of remote feature that appeals to me. The rest? I don't see the utility. And circulators that only have a phone interface (Joule) would really annoy me. I can see having one as a second unit, or for travel, but I'm not excited about that interface for everyday use.

I have great faith that one day Tuscan bread bakers will discover salt. Next step: sous vide!