paulraphael

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!

It could be a pan sauce or not. If a pan sauce, if you deglaze with stock and some wine, maybe some added aromatics, and reduce quite a bit, and then thicken at the end with something that gives both good texture and good flavor release. I use a mix of 1:10 xanthan gum and arrowroot starch. You can make a slurry with this and whisk it in. Roughly a half teaspoon per cup of sauce. The starch needs to be heated to hydrate, but it only take a minute. This gives a creamy mouthfeel that doesn't mute flavors the way cream or butter would. For more constructed sauces, I make a coulis (basically an intense, thickened stock ... similar to classical demiglace, but better tasting). This used to be a big deal to make; now that the pressure cooker has come along to save the day, I just make a pressure cooker stock with a high ratio of solids to water. I thicken it with 0.3% lambda carrageenan and 0.1% xanthan gum (plus all the natural gelatin). This mix is a little trickier to use, since it has to be blended in to disperse, which makes an annoyingly stable foam. And it needs to be added after you've defatted the stock. So I make and strain the stock on one day, chill it overnight to let the fat separate, skim it off, and then blend in the gums. Then I put it on the stove again to simmer it lightly (you can use this opportunity to put in some additional parsley and other herbs) to let the air com out. Then you can chill it and portion it for the freezer, etc.. This can be used as the base for any kind of quick sauce ... use it to deglaze a pan, add reduced mushrooms and mushroom liquid, or reduced wine or fortified wines, etc. etc..

You could blend coconut oil into coconut milk ... a quantity that will bring it to 33–36% fat. Flavor and sweeten as much or little as you like, chill, and whip like cream. Should work especially well in a whipping siphon.

Looking back on the evolution of my cooking over the last few years, I've noticed a lot of my newer recipes and techniques are low-fat or fat-free. The evolution hasn't been about diet; it's been about flavor. I've been finding that lower fat preparations can often have better flavor release, meaning brighter, more intense and direct flavors. Particularly in sauces. All my brown sauces of the last few years are fat-free or close to it, and they've never been better (of course they usually accompany a fatty piece of meat ... ). I've been making lower fat desserts as well, using gums and fluid gels and a siphon to make whipped creams out of all kinds of things (almond milk, booze, etc.). I'd suggest bringing the lean meat to life with vibrant, stock-based sauces that are dairy-free and thickened to whatever consistency you like with modern thickeners.

Seems like the manufacturers are dipping their little toes into the waters.

" a wide open frontier " in that the good ones are still too expensive, complex, and energy-inefficient to have much chance in the home market. There was a thread about Rational ovens here a while ago in which about half the pro cooks loved them, and the other half admitted to never touching them because the training sessions had flown right over their heads, and the control panels are intimidating. Which is another way of saying: my mom doesn't want one. Even if the price drops below $12,000. I gather some companies (electrolux included?) are trying to break into the home market in Europe. I haven't heard about the products or how this is going.

Btb, I'd agree on all points, except that in many of those examples the blade is slicing forward not just against the food but against the board itself. So it's effectively getting the same forward rolling, shearing action as other kinds of rock chopping. This separates it from push-cutting (or thrust-cutting / tsuki-giri) where the blade slides forward through the food but stops when it touches the board.

I don't know if there's a different name for it. But it's essentially the same technique. The food doesn't know if the tip is on the board or not.

This is all true. I've chosen Anova in the past because of the relatively minor differences in industrial design, and because I like the company. Unfortunately my reasons are ones that often get steamrolled when a minow gets eaten a by mass-market whale. I'll hope for the best. Electrolux seems to make good stuff ... serious bread bakers all swoon over the rather odd Electrolux mixer, and I've noticed that electrolux makes the motors for both my KA mixer and vitamix. And I still have the electrolux vacuum cleaner I inherited from my grandmother 10 years ago. Your point about the value of the technology is interesting. Makes me wonder if they have technology patents that we don't know about. Something related to combi ovens seems likely (as others have guessed) since this is their area of mutual interest, and also a wide open frontier.

When you taste your pasta before you sauce it, it should taste good. It shouldn't taste salty; it should taste seasoned to the point where its innate flavors are focussed and in balance. If it tastes flat, or like there's a hole in the middle of the flavor profile, you've undersalted the water. If it tastes salty, you've overdone it. This is assuming good pasta. Bad pasta tastes flat no matter what you do it; there's no flavor to bring out.

Around 3:40 he shows the difference a traditional rock-chop (he calls it 'the rolling method') and a more straight up and down chopping motion. When he dices the onionit's basically a rock-chop with the tip off the board. He dices the carrot with a plain old rock-chop. The Global he's using is made in Japan, but has a much fatter blade and more obtuse bevel angles than the thin gyutos I referred to earlier. Which accounts for his using it just like a German knife. This is all straight-up European cutting technique.