paulraphael

Studies have gone back and forth on this over the years. Most of them have been poorly funded, and so far from definitive. The closest thing to a consensus I can tease out: wood, plastic, and rubber are all fine. They all need to be maintained, and if they get to a point of having grooves in them that you can't get out, they're no longer safe. Wood doesn't really have magical antibacterial properties, nor does it have pro-bacterial properties. It can draw bacteria down away from the surface where it dies on its own, but this isn't something you want to rely on. You want to keep the surface smooth, and wash well with hot soapy water. Just like any board. Plastic has the advantage of the dishwasher, the disadvantage of being much harder to refinish.

The assumption used to be that the best coffee (espresso or brewed) would come from a perfectly uniform grind. This idea persisted because there was no accurate way to measure grind distribution, and very few people who cared enough to figure it out. Now the coffee science community has the drive and the budget, and all kinds of tools, including laser interferometry and statistical image analysis. One of the first things these newly-equipped, over-caffeinated scientists did was measure the grind distribution from the most respected and beloved high-end grinders. They did not find what they expected. In all cases they found a widely ranging particle distribution, with a peak at the selected grind size, but a slope in the histogram extending far in both directions—toward fines and boulders. And in grinders with certain bur designs, they discovered what they call bimodal distribution—2 peaks, indicating high quantities of grinds at two different sizes, along with the same slope into boulders and fines. The conclusions to be drawn from this are complex and evolving. The especially tricky part has been trying to map these various distributions to predictable flavor profiles. The only thing that really holds up from the conventional wisdom is that the good grinders do produce a tighter distribution than bad grinders. But none produce a very tight distribution. TL;DR: There are more things in heaven and earth and your coffee cup, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

I've thought about this. It's helped discourage me from this particular flaming rabbit hole. One approach would be to get community involvement. How many people can you meet who would bring their own dough to your place on fire day? What about bread bakers and other bakers who could use the residual heat? You could be a local hero. Designing an oven that excels at all these things ... you'll need a serious kung fu master to help with that.

Any decent hood can handle smoke. Most domestic hoods have a hard time with plumes of atomized grease. Then there's the problem with what happens to the grease after it's ingested. The centrifugal theory used by ventahood works poorly in practice and makes a mess. The standard restaurant-style baffles can work well if there's enough air flow (in linear feet per minute ... cfm by itself won't tell you enough here).

I think most boards are polyethylene. Not sure which would be softer. Subjectively, not all polyethylene boards even feel the same, so you probably just need to trust what it feels like (and if your knife seems to dull faster).

Ventahoods are fundamentally useless; the technology doesn't work. I'd suggest looking up threads on Houz (formerly Garden Web). There are couple of engineers who post there who have cracked the code on hoods, and explain pretty well how and why most consumer hoods fail. The answers have more to do with creating a large boxed-in space above the range ("capture area") than with cfm. But also, standard restaurant-style baffles do the job for removing grease as long there's adequate air speed going over them. The centrifugal ventahood method is a mess. Edited to add: I've been planning a kitchen renovation for a year now; the hardest part (besides coming up with the money) has been figuring out how to get decent ventilation. The consumer options are mostly terrible. And it's hard to find a commercial installer who will talk to a homeowner. The best solutions I've seen are by people who hired an HVAC engineer and had a custom installation, but I'm hoping not to spend my life savings on a vent.

Getting rid of fossil fuels is a great idea, and I look forward to the day I can replace my gas boiler and hot water heater with heat pump models. The gas use of a range is negligible in comparison. I like to cook; I don't believe my gas stove use contributes to my Big American Carbon Footprint by much more than a rounding error. Indoor pollution is still a big deal. But pointing the finger at gas ranges is just plain stupid. The real problem is that we don't require effective range hoods. We barely even make them available for residential installations. Almost all the range hoods designed for homes are terribly designed compared with real restaurant hoods, and the differences aren't even expensive. Hoods are THE solution to the indoor pollution problem. Because all high-heat cooking, even on an induction range, produces smoke and particulates you shouldn't breathe. If you sauté or stir fry, you're sending plumes of irritants and carcinogens into the air. It's absurd that building codes don't require real hoods. In NYC, in most buildings, you're not even allowed to have them.

What induction cooktop did you settle on? With the bluestar simmer, are you sure it can't just be adjusted lower? I haven't heard this complaint before. Here's a how-to.

Dry towels. Cotton ones ... we have some microfiber towels kicking around, which are great for some things, but they'll melt if you're pulling something out of a 500°F oven. I do keep a pair of big dumb silicone mits for times I have to wrestle something big and heavy out a hot oven. Like a turkey on a heavy roasting pan. They're not essential, but they offer protection up your forearm, and you don't have to worry about a towel slipping and exposing some metal, or bumping your knuckles into a hot surface. It's nice that they don't absorb water. The real drawback to things like this is they can get gross inside and are hard to clean. You should make sure your hands are clean before putting them on. This adds to the hassle, and is a reason towels are usually more convenient.

You're right; I misread the MSDS. I reread the passage in MC; he attributes the difference not to air, but to ash. Which also might run counter to the Cook's Country test result:

It's a rabbit hole. I've got a house full of Hue bulbs, and now 7 of the Soraa Vivids. It's cheaper than redecorating the place ... this is the story we tell ourselves. One nice thing about Soraa is they also publish TM-30 data, which is a much better standard than CRI. A bulb can have a CRI of 95 and still look terrible, but TM-30 is very reliable.

I just looked up the LD50 for borax (the amount, in mg/kg bodyweight that it takes to kill 50% of of unlucky ingesters). On rats, LD50 is 4500-5000mg/kg bodyweight. This means that table salt is about 50% more toxic to mammals. They do believe that borax may be dangerous to unborn fetuses. But it's probably moot, because borax is very flammable, and you're supposed to burn briquettes down to glowing coals before cooking. By the time you get to that point, there will be nothing present but carbon, with some inert limestone in the ash. And I think this is the crux of it. No matter what additives are in the briquets, they're gone by the time you put the food on the coals. This is why it's unsurprising that there weren't any taste differences between brands, or between briquettes and lumps. The one situation that's sketchy is when the coals burn down in the middle of cooking, and you want to add more. This is where impatient people sometimes end up smoking food on top of briquette additives. I think this is the best use of lump charcoal: when you need to add more in the middle of cooking. The part that surprises me is temperature. Nathan Mhyrvold and company reported that lump charcoal burns hotter and faster, simply because there's more air in it. I wonder if they and Cook's Country tested different types.

For anyplace you want great light, I strongly recommend the Soraa Vivid LED bulbs. The color rendering is as close to perfect as I've seen. We put them in our kitchen track lighting (recommended by the lighting designer who tried to post here) and everything under them looks ready for a photo shoot. I've actually just bought a couple of the PAR38 size to use for proofing photographs. The color looks as good to me as the halogen viewing lamps I used to use. They come in different color temperatures. Expensive. Not sure how they hold up to heat and steam.

This was my rationale, but I think it's been called into question. Anyone checked out the latest research regarding soaking vs. farting?

Interestingly, in Dave's cocktail book he gives instructions for building a home carbonator that's much more like Deephaven's setup in the first post. Uses the same fitting for a 2-liter bottle.

For the last few years I've been consulting people on ice cream recipe development. My secret weapon has been software that I designed that basically encodes all the stuff I've researched, and then does the math for me. Since these are basically math and science problems, It's abundantly clear that someday AI will put me out of business. But a few attempts with ChatGPT have convinced me that that day isn't today. The nice robot very confidently calculated a bunch of recipes that just plain wouldn't work. Right now one of its biggest weaknesses is that it makes stuff up out of thin air ... and doesn't seem to know the difference between doing that and using real genuine knowledge.

My biology PhD friends partied hard and did a lot of drugs.

I see this drama playing out over and over. Manufacturer makes thing in bizarre size. Someone buys it and builds custom cabinets around it. You end up with this kitchen, and the thing breaks. You are screwed, or you get (sort of) lucky, and find an obscure thing that happens to be more or less the same size. Choices are: spend ungodly sums to replace everything, or live out your days with a new thing that has nothing to recommend it besides an ability to fit the odd-sized hole in your wall. If we ever manage to renovate our kitchen, one of the rules will be to stick with standard sizes. Just a minor effort to break the cycle of violence.

Yes, I've been advocating for this for a while for long cooking. I've scalded for 1 minute, not based on any rigorous testing.

Duvel is right about using dextrose (or any reducing sugar) and baking soda (or any base). I use a 1:5 ratio by weight of dextrose powder and baking soda. The mixture is deliquescent and will eventually turn to syrup in whatever container you use (and then start maillardizing itself). When this happens I apply it with a silicone brush. Before it happens, I dust it on. A little goes a long way. After browning, correcting the seasoning with some acid is helpful. No idea if adding amino acids will help the process. The sugar+base works so well it doesn't need help. I believe pre-searing plus post-searing helps. I do this often with sous-vide cooking. Some people have disputed this. Dave Arnold and crew at cookingissues.com actually did a blind test, with chefs and culinary students as subjects. There was a significant preference for the flavor of meat that had been pre- and post-seared. Pre-searing can also help kill spoilage bacteria on the surface of meat before long low-temp cooking.

How did the PX fluid gel turn out? What did you gel it with? I don't think the coffee speckles look like a flaw. They probably enhance the coffee flavor in people's minds (just as people swear vanilla ice cream tastes better when it has specks of vanilla pod showing).

That's great to hear. The surprising part is that they support home installations at all. Most commercial equipment companies won't even talk to you. They specifically say non-commercial use voids any warranties, and the installers don't want to have anything to do with it. Is Rational unusual in this respect, or are things different in the US and Canada? I'm having a hell of a time finding a range hood that works ... there are no domestic hoods that work even a fraction as well as commercial ones. But the commercial hood installers won't return my calls.

Those look just like the ones we used use while backpacking. Some camp cookware doesn't have handles, to save weight. I haven't seen these in ages, and I've never seen them in a kitchen. There have been a couple of times I've gone to the toolbox for regular pliers to grab something hot.

It's also good with anything dark chocolate, especially if you need to stay up late.

This looks good. I'm wondering how you're getting the locust bean gum to hydrate? Typically it needs to be cooked at a temperature that I'd be afraid would kill the fresh blueberry flavor.