paulraphael

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.

Interesting. My only thought is that your pressure cooker did a good job of keeping things below the boil, so whatever fats were released didn't get emulsified. In the batch you boiled, the fats got emulsified and gave a richer flavor and texture (this can make a stock muddy if it's overdone, but is a staple of ramen stocks). This is just a guess.

The idea behind a double or triple stock is to concentrate the non-volatile flavors without losing all the volatile ones. It's substantially similar to the classical technique of reducing a stock in stages—reducing half the stock by 80% or so, then adding another quarter of the stock and reducing that a bunch, and then adding the last quarter and reducing hardly at all. It's simpler these days just start with less water, if you're using a pressure cooker or sous-vide. The catch is that you'll end up with a way higher proportion of aromatics. The pc lets just some of the aromatics out; the s.v. bag doesn't let out any. So you have to adjust your recipe. I cut way back on the mirepoix, especially carrots, which for some reason dominate in pc and sv stocks. And I leave garlic out of the sv bag entirely. If I want garlic, I'll steep it in later. SV'd garlic makes everything taste and smell like a tire fire (moral: not all aromatic compounds are sacred ... )

[I realize this tangent is only mistakenly about white pepper, but why not ...] If you use a ton of white pepper, a Unicorn mill would do the job nicely. At its coarsest setting it just cracks the corns. I don't use it often enough to justify this, so the white peppercorns live in the freezer, and use a mortar like you do. Or a saucepan on a cutting board.

The circulator in question here looks a lot like the commercial / lab units that made by several other companies. If you want something that burly, check out an Anova or Julbo or PolyScience commercial circulator. These companies make them for the 120v world.

Yup. The only common exception is the few appliances that require a dedicated 20 amp circuit. Like bigger air conditioners and espresso machines. You can recognize these things by the air conditioner plug that won't fit in a standard outlet. These appliances are allowed draw 2200 watts, maybe up to 2400. I've never seen this on a circulator. Not that much point. There'd be an advantage if you're starting with cold water and are racing to get it to temperature, or if you're heating a huge volume of water in an uninsulated container. But there's almost never a reason to do either of these things. 800-1200 watts is really plenty.

Awesome video, Donk79. I've never seen such a thorough teardown of kitchen stuff. And those aren't malapropisms; he's speaking his own language. I'd like to become conversational in it. It's like a Canadian engineering Cockney rhyming slang. Poetry. The engineering on these things is really in a class above anything else KA has made. I say this as Pro 600 owner who thinks that's a great mixer (I've had one problem with it, and rebuilt it as good as new for very little money). The blogger's one complaint is the quality of the circuit board. He thinks it's a failure point. My complaint is (as far as I can tell) they don't sell parts for the motor or transmission, so in the unlikely event that you break a gear or wear out a motor bushing, you have to replace the whole motor/transmission assembly. The good news here is that it's surprisingly cheap—$70 or $80 last I looked. That's about the same as a replacement motor for the lighter-duty mixers.

I was dissuaded by Dave Arnold's strong recommendation that you only use the Searzall with the most powerful torch heads. I checked and saw that my Bernzomatic head is at best second-tier ... substantially wussier than the one they suggest. How important do you think this is? I'd be more tempted if I didn't have to add the price of a top-of-the-line torch head.

Probably mentioned a million times upthread, but the Unicorn peppermill is still by far the best I've used. I have the small one (6" tall). They make one that's about twice as tall ... same mechanism, more pepper. It grinds pepper so quickly and effortlessly that you could probably empty the thing in under thirty seconds if wanted. And the mechanism adjusts to such a coarse grind that there's never a reason to manually crack pepper anymore (for dishes like steak au poivre, etc.). At the other extreme, the finest grind isn't quite as fine as it might be. Only other complaint is that can be slippery if your hands are wet or greasy. I put a strip of skateboard grip tape around the knob, which fixes it. The tape's lasted years. It doesn't offer the convenience of one-handed use, but I haven't found anything that I like which allows that. If I become arthritic I'll consider a powered one, but not before that.

Yeah, I was excited about that thing and ended up recycling it.

Of course I'm making up those numbers. What I'm not making up is how big the diminishing returns are on increasing reliability. Making something twice as reliable typically costs more than twice the price—if you're dealing with something that's pretty reliable in the first place (no major, obvious flaws, etc..). Would I pay more for a 10% failure rate instead of a 40% failure rate? No, I wouldn't buy the stupid product. A 10% failure rate (over a few years of normal use) is unacceptable and would probably be unsustainable for the company. These are made up numbers, too. I would be surprised if the failure rate has been much more than 1%, not counting their initial manufacturing run. If they've sold tens of thousands of them, that would account for hundreds of pissed customers. No one runs to the internet to trumpet that their immersion circulator didn't break today. When things fail, owners get vocal.

This. If you look back a year or two, you'll see a lot of participation from Anova's product manager, trying to assess the priorities of all of us in the eGullet peanut gallery (presumably a core customer base). He asked some tough questions, like to what degree do we value a touch screen vs. longevity. These are all engineering decisions that require compromises. We all say we want our stuff to be completely reliable—but how many of us would pay twice as much for something that's functionally identical, but promises, say, a 0.1% failure rate over 5 years vs. a 1% failure rate? If I'm buying rock climbing equipment, I can be hard-nosed about that kind of thing, but let's remember ... we're talking about a $200 electronic appliance that replaces an $1100 equivalent from just a few years earlier. This probably isn't explained entirely by economies of scale. It's not about the brand. Both Anova and PolyScience make stuff at different price points for different uses and expectations. You can get a lab-quality unit from Anova if you like. I'm sure it's much more reliable. It also costs over three times as much and is bulkier (but if you're a collector of antique computer technology, it will please you with its RS-232 connector, and potential to interface with god-knows-what biology lab software).

I started making bread for the first time in several years this summer. The goal was to finally make pizza that can compete with what I normally spend too much money on in restaurants. I live in Brooklyn, so the standards for serious pizza are daunting ... among other things, they requires a sourdough culture, which I'd had no experience with. So I started with regular sourdough bread, just to learn the process. Short version of the story: my pizza is still nowhere near good enough, but the bread is so good, that even though I live in a town with bakeries like Sullivan Street and Amy's and Balthazar, I'm never buying bread again unless I mess up and run out. I'm certainly done with commercial yeast. The flavors I'm getting out of the sourdough culture are insane ... like nothing I've had before. And the process isn't so hard. I was very worried about the hassle of dealing with the starter. Almost to the point of abandoning the project before starting. But I'm glad I didn't. My starter stays in the fridge, and I take it out the morning i need it. I feed it, and an hour later it's ready to go. This is likely because I use it about once a week and so it never goes completely dormant. If a couple of weeks or more go by, I'll try to take it out of the fridge and give it a small feeding the night before. But it's really a pretty low-maintenance pet. My advice to anyone who wants to try sourdough: do not start your own starter. There are reasons people buy or borrow starters that others have kept around for decades. Some are unusually good—not just in terms of flavor, but in terms of robustness and ease of use. And if you buy a starter that other people are using, you have an instant support group online. I'm using the Ischia Island starter sold by Sourdoughs International. It seems like 3/4 of the people in the world who make Neapolitan-style pizza use this culture. If you have questions about it, someone's got answers. It's a matter of making your life easier. As someone put it, if you want to learn how to surf, AND learn how to build surfboards, that's great—just maybe don't do both at the same time.

If you come across the red, hand-cranked Berkel prosciutto slicer, I suggest buying it just to display in your living room.

I've been using the My Weigh KD8000 for a couple of years. It works fine. It's sometimes handy that it holds a full 8kg (like if I want to measure food directly into a Dutch oven). This scale has a pretty unique feature in that it lets you measure with bakers' percentages. I invented this feature for them ... in an email exchange about service for an older scale, I asked them if they had a scale that did percentages. They were intrigued and said they'd give me a free scale I plotted out the user interface and the math for what I was talking about. I designed the thing for them, they sent me a (very nice) free scale, and that was that. A few years later the nice scale broke, and since I didn't have a receipt or warranty card, I had to shop for a new one. Lo and behold, there was the scale I designed. So I bought it. It's a perfectly good scale, but I have to admit, I've never once used the feature I designed. Does anyone use this scale, and if so, do you use the bakers' percentage function? Edited to add: I use an AWS scale for smaller quantities. It reads to 0.01g and holds up to 200g. Was cheap ... under $25. It's ok, but it can be slow to stabilize and give an accurate reading. This is inconvenient when you're measuring things like gums and leavening ingredients in tiny quantities. When it dies I'll try to find one that's better (hoping one exists).

That was no kind soul, that was me I'm glad that method's working out for you. It's an amalgam of techniques I've picked up along the way, with cooking times calculated by the SV Dash app. I haven't had a chance to try all the sizes, but it's been spot on for the couple that I've done.