paulraphael

Gelatin is a pretty good stabilizer. I used to use it in conjunction with xanthan gum (in a ratio of 3 parts gelatin to 1 part gum). This recipe has the advantage of using ingredients that are easy to find and use. It has the disadvantage of not having the very best stabilizing properties, and of not being vegetarian (some people order sorbet specifically to avoid animal products). I briefly discuss a more sophisticated sorbet stabilizer blend here. This is still a work in progress, but it's the product of some evolution and has been tested a few times. It gives a better texture than either the gelatin blend or locust bean gum alone.

I'd be wary of local knife sharpeners. A lot of them are commercial services who sharpen the practically disposable knives used by butchers and low-end restaurant kitchens. They use a grinding wheel and will take off noticeable millimeters of metal each time. Your knives will get thinner and thinner, will have a very toothy, concave edge, and will disappear entirely after a couple of dozen sharpenings. If you want your knives to be really sharp, you have to bite the bullet and learn to sharpen them yourself. Because a knife doesn't stay sharp for more than a few days of hard use. It doesn't stay exceptionally sharp for more than a couple of hours of use. Most of us learned how to cut with European knives of middling sharpness and brutish geometries, that could be whacked back into serviceability on a butcher's steel ... but these knives were never actually sharp. IF this level of sharpness is ok, then you can send your knives off every decade or so and just maintain on a steel. But it would still make sense to send them to someplace good. I'd recommend sending knives to a real pro (like Dave at Japanese Knife Sharpening or Jon at Japanese Knife Imports) if you have a major repair, or need a serious reprofiling, or just need a benchmark for what's possible. But unless you learn to sharpen, you'll spend most of your time using unsharp knives.

I'm packing my v.1 Anova to Chicago tomorrow. Going to turn some prime chuck into rib-eye surrogates and save my mom a couple of hundred bucks. This is one application where I'd be interested in the Joule ... it's tiny and would be great to travel with. Otherwise, I'm not too excited about being locked out of the thing if I don't have my phone / don't have a charge / the app's not working / there are wifi issues, etc. etc..

I doubt they'd do that, and we could never do justice to the dough in a household oven. That would be a disaster. I think it will be fine. I've ordered neapolitan pies often from Roberta's in Brooklyn, and heated up leftovers the next day in a toaster oven. Reheated isn't as good as freshly delivered, which isn't as good as straight out of the oven. But it's very good. People who find the napolitana style too limp and soft might actually prefer it.

It sounds like the slow cooker really isn't up to the task, at least for relatively short cooks. I'm surprised by this; it shouldn't take much power to get the water back up to temperature in a few minutes. Manually intervening as others have suggested is probably a good idea. In general, though, a temperature drop in the beginning will make very little difference to your overall cooking time. At the start of cooking, the temperature difference between the food and the water bath will be very high, even if the bath temperature has dropped many degrees. So the food's temperature will rise quickly. It really only matters that you the bath temperature is exact during the final several minutes of cooking. This is assuming relatively quick cooks of food that doesn't need to be tenderized. If you look at a time/temperature graph of the center food in a water bath, you'll see it rise very quickly to within a few degrees of the final temperature. Then the curve flattens out as it gets to within the final degree. That last degree can take a very long time (which is why it's usually best to set the bath temperature a degree higher than your actual food target temperature). I go into some detail on this here.

Sardines is shorthand for "enemies of the Gambino family." My mom has given Forno Rosso the thumbs-up, so that will be our Christmas eve dinner. Unfortunately, they close at 3pm, and we'll be eating later than that. The pizza will have to suffer delivery and reheating. Not a fair test, especially for something in the napolitano style. I'm guessing we'll still like it more that Giordano's. I hope to try the pizza fresh out of the oven sometime.

Also ... a new and seasonal post on Booze Flavored Ice Cream.

In an older post (maybe in this thread) I suggested adding the cream to the recipe AFTER cooking / pasteurization. The idea was that the cream is already industrially homogenized, so there's no point in undoing that good work by melting the fat over heat, and then trying to re-homogenize it with a mere blender. I posited that keeping the cream cool, and putting it in toward the end, would slightly improve texture. I was wrong! I've tested this a few times now, and in every case I've gotten much better texture by throwing the cream in with the other ingredients in the beginning, cooking it all together, and then blasting the whole mix (still hot) in a high-powered blender. I don't know for sure why this is. One possibility is that it's during the cooking process when the emulsifying molecules (egg lecithin, or whatever else you may be using) bond to the fat globules. But that's just a barely educated guess. At any rate, my ice creams are much smoother now, even though I'm making them in a freezer bowl machine, and my old freezer is struggling to maintain 0°F.

I may put them with some water in a bag and sous-vide at 90°C for a bit to see what gets extracted. If it isn't delicious I'll toss it ... nothing lost but a few joules from the wall.

Ha! Thanks Anna. That thread references the same trimmings; they've been in the freezer since then.

But not on Christmas Eve. Looking now at Forno Rosso ... this place is certified VPN Neapolitan.

Coalfire looks pretty good, and they deliver.

Everyone knows you can't make a decent pie without fresh, unfiltered East River water.

Those high temperatures are for rendering fat from fatty tissue. The actual fat melting point is much lower. It's usually somewhere around body temperature of the animal it belonged to. That's why cold water fish oils are mostly unsaturated ... they need to stay fluid at ocean temperatures.

Last year I had a beef chuck eye dry-aged, and did all the trimming myself. It was only a 4-week age, so the trim wasn't moldy. Just desiccated, and deeply funky. It seemed like too much flavor to throw out, so I bagged it and threw it in the freezer. This holiday I'm going to sous-vide some chuck steaks, and didn't plan it far enough ahead to get the beef aged. So I'm thinking about doing something with that trim. Has anyone tried to make an infusion with the trim? Or found another way to get good flavors out of it?

I agree with Soupcon and Joe. The only danger here is anaerobic spores blossoming to life as active bacteria (c. perfringes, c. botulinum). That becomes a possibility below 130°C. Could they do it in enough numbers to create dangerous levels of toxins? I can't find any data on how long it takes spores to germinate into active bacteria at various temperatures, and what their growth curves are. But I doubt that much is likely to happen in a sous vide bag that's been pasteurized, and that dips to 104F over 3.5 hours. That's longer than the USDA maximum allowable time for meat in the "danger zone," although this is an estimation based on active bacteria in unpasteurized food. It's not about anaerobic spores and toxicity. I would eat it! If I were a restaurant chef, I'd be inclined to toss it. Or at least I'd do more research.

I'm reposting this because I think it's the best advice in the thread. There's no reason to buy a branded superbag. These are commodity items, and they're available in much finer mesh sizes than the superbag people are reselling. You can find identical bags made by other companies. I got a whole assortment on ebay, down to 25 micron. Edited to retract the following!— Check out McMasters standard mesh bags and high performance bags. I just ordered High Performance bags from McMaster and they're not useable in the kitchen. There are two or three layers of material, with one of them being a thick felt that you'll never be able to clean properly. The ones I've used in the past (generic, found on ebay) were like the superbags—single layer of woven synthetic fabric. The rep at McMaster is taking them back, and is unsure which filters in their stock have the right structure (they don't catalog them this way). Looking for a new source ... In practice, I can't tell the difference between the nylon and polyester filters. I use the 25 micron size most often. My fine chinois is probably around 200-300 micron, so this size represents an order of magnitude decrease in particle size. It removes a LOT of stuff the chinois leaves behind. But it won't clarify a cloudy stock or other liquid. You need more powerful medicine for that, like a protein raft or agar / gelatin filtration. The filter bags aren't terribly difficult to clean. I just turn them inside-out and spray them down, and work dishwashing soap into them by hand. Rinse and hang to dry.

By which I mean, the opposite of Chicago-style. Fightin' words, maybe, but I was raised in Chicago on a diet of Giordano's, Uno's, and Papa Milano's ... and then moved to NYC, where, pizza-wise, at least, I grew up. Now I go back to Chicago for the holidays, and the family x-mas tradition of Giordano's and champaign is hard to get through. It's not just me. My sister's teenage kids, who had the privilege of growing up down the street from one of DC's best Neapolitan pizza places, couldn't stomach more than half a slice (a brick?) of stuffed pizza. Surely there are options in the Neapolitan / neo-Neapolitan style. We'd need something for takeout. Ideas?

That seems peculiar. I've made a bunch of hummus, even using the blender to turn sesame seeds into tahini as part of the process. It's a pretty light-duty task. How are you going about it?

Hmmm, interesting report. I find the Vitamix excels at these tasks, and when making smooth pastes like nut butters, greatly exceeds my expectations. The spatula that Btbyrd links is great. It doesn't make it easy to clean sticky stuff out of the jar, but it makes it reasonable. With nut butters, the real concern is the oil content of the nuts. Second to that is if you've roasted the nuts or not; roasting seems to liberate the oils and help the nuts turn to butter. Lower-oil nuts like almonds may need some added oil to turn smooth. Higher-oil nuts like pecans should blend to a very smooth paste no hesitation. I make a butter that's equal parts almonds, pecans, and walnuts, and the total oil content is plenty to get a smooth paste. It's smoother than the supermarket nut butters that I've bought (which, even though milled, probably have some texture intentionally). You have to use the the tamper, and you have to use high speed. I use ear plugs when I make nut butter (it's stupid loud) and I keep a hand on the housing near the exhaust vents, to make sure the motor isn't getting too hot. Usually it doesn't. Once when I made back-to-back batches, it got hot, so I stopped in the middle and let the fun run fast and unloaded for a couple of minutes. This babying is optional—the motor will go into thermal shutdown if it gets very hot. But backing off before you get to that point will extend the life of any motor. I don't think any blender is better for culinary applications than the vitamix or vitaprep. Some are a bit better designed for smoothies, or for making frozen bar drinks, but there's a reason you see these in most pro kitchens. Here's some nut fat info: Less than 5% fat: Chestnuts Lychee 40%–49% fat: Cashews Pine Nuts 50%–59% fat: Almonds Pistachios Black Walnuts 60-69% fat: Brazil Nuts Hazelnuts Hickory English Walnuts 70%+ fat: Macadamia Nuts Pecans

Ieatrio, do you find that if you make two batches in the Lello back-to-back the freezing time suffers? Also, how does it do with 3/4 liter (of mix)? It's unclear to me if the company rates the capacity before or after overrun. My recipes are about 0.8L of mix, and at least in my current machine, freeze to make about 1L. If the machine could handle that in one batch that would be ideal; if it could handle it in two 15-minute batches that would be ok.

I wrote a post on the different varieties of ice cream machines (and related tools and techniques) here. I covet the Lello machines. Unfortunately the small one has a bit less capacity than I'd like, and the big one is ... big. And not cheap.

My sourdough loaves are finally starting to look presentable. They've been delicious from the beginning, but have usually looked like something that's been sat upon. The lactobacilli are in charge of the flavor; they seem to know what they're doing. I'm in charge of the esthetics, and have been a bit of a slow learner.

This is cool and everything, but I miss Dave and Nils' blog. It was just about the most informative food site on the web. Then they became entrepreneurs with the searzall, and all the delicious flow of knowledge just stopped.

I would recommend against developing gluten in cookies. The result is a tougher texture that is generally not an improvement, even it makes the dough easier to handle. I refrigerate dough and just use a strong scoop to ball it up the next day. The dough softens a bit over the course of scooping, so I line up the balls on another pan (1/2 or 1/4 sheet pan, covered with plastic) and put in the freezer to harden up again while the current batch is cooking. It makes it very fast to fill a sheet with new dough balls and pop it in the oven, and they'll always be firm enough cook properly. If you have trouble scooping the cold dough, you could always do what was suggested above and make the balls when the dough is soft, or partially chilled. Just be sure to wrap well, maybe with two layers of plastic, so you don't get oxidized flavors.