paulraphael

Heavily marbled, grain-finished steaks work brilliantly also. Especially aged ones. Honestly, I haven't met a steak that wasn't perfect for sous-vide. There's a certain amount of anti sous-vide rhetoric concerning steaks, and I don't understand any of it. I don't believe there's such thing as a "sous-vide texture" or even a single characteristic that's intrinsic to the technique. Sous-vide simply offers perfect control, which you may use any way you like. Decide how your perfect steak is cooked, design a sous-vide process to create that, and then reproduce it precisely and effortlessly every time. Some people have commented that it's hard to get as thick and crispy a crust with s.v., without overcooking the meat. This may be the case, if you're really looking for a serious crust (like what you can get with Alain Ducasse's method). But I suspect a bit of ingenuity can solve this ... like a minute or two dunked in ice water before unbagging and searing, and then doing the sear with plenty of butter ladled on in the last minute or so.. Browning can also be enhanced by controlling the pH and using reducing sugars. I make a maillard-enhancement mix that's 1:5 baking soda and dextrose. Sprinkle it on before browning and let it soak in a bit. Magic. Also be sure to use plenty of oil in the pan, to get the heat into all the meat's crevices (yes, this is the purpose of oil in a skillet ... you cannot get solid browning with a couple of tablespoons of oil).

I was surprised to discover this, not just because of all the lore, but because Jeni Britton Bauer (of Jeni's Splendid) cooks her base at 75C for something like 90 minutes, saying she likes the flavor of cooked milk ... which she describes as sweeter. Possibly this is a marketing statement. Her other reason for the long cook is turning milk proteins into stabilizers and emulsifiers. I'm playing around with this idea also. So far I haven't noticed a textural differences with different amounts of cooking. But Jeni must be on to something, since she uses neither eggs nor hydrocolloids in her mix. [edited to add: cooked egg flavor is likely a different story. My tests weren't designed to learn anything about this, since I use so little egg. But for anyone making a more traditional french style ice cream (4 or more yolks per 1000g) it may be worth testing. However ... with this much egg, you're already getting a lot of stabilization and emulsification from the custard and lecithin.]

I haven't experimented with temperatures below 71C, but did some systematic tests cooking the mix at 72C, 75C, and 80C (sous-vide, with agitation) for times ranging from 15 to 60 minutes. I used a mix that had 2 egg yolks per 1000g (because I don't like a lot of egg) and no flavoring ingredients. It was 10% MSNF. Milk and cream were low-temperature pasteurized, from a local farm coop with grass-fed cows. I did two rounds of blind triangle taste tests on myself, and one round on my girlfriend. The differences were extremely subtle. So subtle that after tasting four or five samples, fatigue was strong enough that we couldn't tell the difference between any of them anymore. I have doubts that there would be any perceptible difference if the ice cream had any flavor ingredients. I doubt that cooking at 70C would have made much difference. We were not tasting for texture.

I'm going to suggest that milk powder is the best way to add MSNF, short of reverse osmosis. The trick is to find a good brand like Now, which 100% skim milk solids, and which is spray dried at low temperatures. If your goal is to concentrate milk solids while exposing them to the minimum amount of heat, you're not going to beat an industrial spray drier with your stove. I've found that with the package sealed in an additional ziploc bag in the freezer, this kind of dry milk lasts months without developing off flavors.

The salt is actually part of an ion exchange system; it swaps sodium (from the salt) for calcium (from the water).

This is the lore, I know, but in truth it just makes the wok slightly easier to clean. And there's no difference in practice between seasoning applied over many years and seasoning done efficiently in 20 minutes. Ain't no magic going on! The woks used by professional Chinese cooks have virtually no seasoning; they get preheated hot enough to burn off any old oil every time they cook. Jeans are another story

Super cool. I looked into those a while ago. A bit too pricey for me at the moment, but if you have a need in the kitchen they look ideal. I can see using a thin, dedicated pan with a little hole drilled in the lid.

This looks like an interesting and well-designed product. I see it having potential to complement an immersion circulator, rather than replace one. I'm thinking of the ability to go beyond heating a s.v. water bath to doing foods like custards, which you might want to cook to precise temperature in an open pot. With this in mind, I'd be curious about the possibility of adding a magnetic stirring feature, like in a laboratory hotplate. It's easy to imagine a conflict between magnetic stirring and magnetic induction; I don't know if the two are compatible. Maybe the induction coil could form a ring, with the stirring feature in the center? I would find the magnetic stirring feature more compelling, even if it meant using a standard conductive hotplate surface.

The principle is exactly the same as with a cast iron skillet: you're polymerizing oils (which means heating them to the point where they oxidize and turn to a tough plastic consistency) and carbonizing them (which means burning some of the oil to soot, which embeds in the polymerized oil and gives the nonstick characteristics). This will happen on its own just from using a wok. If you're in a hurry, you can fully season the thing in 20 minutes or so if you're efficient about it. You need an oil that's high in unsaturated fats, preferably in polyunsaturated fats, and that's highly refined so that it can take high heat. Look for something a refined canola or safflower oil. Put a VERY THIN coating on the pan, and heat the wok. You can use a powerful burner, or else put the wok in an over (for more even results). If using the oven, I set the temp to around 25°F higher than the smoke point of the oil. When the oil stops smoking, take a piece of paper towel dipped in the oil and paint another thin coat on the pan (use tongs!). Repeat. After a few cycles of this, the wok will have an even, black, durable coating. This is the same as for cast iron. Just be aware that spun steel is less porous than cast iron, so the coating will be less durable. Also be aware that if you use the wok at true stir-fry temperatures (like with a commercial wok burner) this is probably a pointless exercise because you'll burn the coating off the wok every time you use it. Any instructions you find that mention using salt, or any kind of food, or saturated fats like shortening, are based on pure folklore. There's nothing scientific or practical to recommend any of that.

"Blonde" sounds quite a bit lighter than anything I've encountered. It seems that most of the high-end roasters these days don't talk much about the darkness of the roast in traditional terms. They figure out what they like best for each new batch. It's just that they're finding the sweet spot in a lighter place than they did back when the beans they sourced weren't so good. And much lighter than the starbucks standard. It's certainly possible to underroast coffee, and yeah, you'd expect it to be super sour.

Funny you should mention, I wandered into the Bowery WF just yesterday, and specifically checked the coffee section. I was pleased to see that they now have Grumpy and Intelligentsia and Stumptown. They had a small variety from everyone ... mostly blends that did't particularly excite me. Otherwise I would have grabbed some of the Grumpy. Been meaning to try it. Although it was indeed expensive. Have you tried Brooklyn Roasting Co.? I've been hearing good things and the prices are a couple of notches lower than the more famous west-coast guys.

David Schomer on roasting for espresso.

I use a britta in NYC for drinking water, especially for tea and coffee (not for cooking water though, generally). Mostly for chlorine. There's always at least a hint of chlorine flavor in our water here, and sometimes in the summer they crank it up to the point where it smells like a pool. Unpleasant straight, disgusting in coffee. After a pass through the filter I can no longer smell or taste it, and the water's great for coffee. Also a lot of buildings have nasty old pipes. Like the one I'm in now. I don't know why some buildings are so different from others. My last building was 100 years older than this one but the water was better. Here it tastes like some of calcium and iron and god knows what. The britta does a good job eliminating these flavors also. If I were afraid of anything truly dangerous in the water (heavy metals, organic contaminants, viruses etc..) I'd want a much more serious filter. But the britta's good for keeping things tasty.

The only thing I can think of (besides pure cynicism) is that to make the bottom thicker than the sides, and it's easier with an additional layer than with a layer of variable thickness. But it doesn't explain why you'd need more than 2 layers of aluminum. I have some old calphalon (from back when it was the Commercial Aluminum Cookware Co.). This stuff is pretty nice, even when it's been beaten nearly beyond recognition. I no longer love anodized aluminum, although find it serviceable enough to keep using. Newer calphalon looks purely like a consumer brand driven by marketing people. I'd only recommend it if it were available for cheap.

I use the ziploc freezer bags, with the standard closure (not with the separate plastic zip thing). I've found these to be 100% reliable if handled carefully. I've used them up to an hour at 85°C, and 48 hours at lower temperatures. These bags have a good track record (they're what Dave Arnold and Nils Sorensen recommend at CookingIssues). If you use them at higher temperatures, handle them gently; the plastic gets soft and the seal will be less strong. I use these bags routinely for cook-chill, and cook-freeze. The biggest caveat is not sous-vide specific: if you freeze liquids in these (I use them for stock) they often leak when you thaw them. So I never thaw bags full of frozen liquid in a water bath, without double-bagging. Usually I'll just put in a bowl and microwave. I often reuse these as sous-vide bags, but not for anything critical. The chicken thighs I buy for s-v come vacuum-packed ... i just slip the whole package into one my recycled ziplocs and evacuate the air. In this case the ziploc is just for backup. The commercial vacuum packaging is designed to be easy to open, and it can sometimes be too easy. It's not 100% reliable in the water bath.

I figured out the answer. Their prices have gone from high to stupid high. I don't think anything at all is wrong with the coffee ... they still sit near the top of almost all the coffee fanatic reviews, nationally.

Re: Australian coffee, Toby's Estate has moved into NYC and has been warmly received. My local shop now carries it in place of Stumptown. It seems to be in the same league but a bit more reasonably priced.

It's possible that what you're calling "light roast" and what people at Stumptown and Heart and Counter Culture call light roast are quite different. The term is obviously subjective and ambiguous; without side-by-side pictures it's hard to know what anyone's talking about. To get into the ballpark, I believe these guys are all roasting lighter than what was common in France and Italy (at least 20 or 30 years ago) and quite a bit lighter than what you see at Starbucks. I don't think any of them do a truly pale, very light roast for their standard offerings, especially for an espresso (which would be overly bright and acidic). Which also leads me to scratch my head when you talk about light roasts making coffee that tastes like dirt. Typically you'd expect the opposite; the lighter the roast, the higher the acidity. Too light = too bright. Unbalanced w/r/t tartness vs. sweetness. How long do you rest the coffee after roasting?

What do you mean? When we cook food to pasteurization—to make it safe—we base our times and temperatures on data. At least that's what I do. I don't have a lab to analyze my food.

The guy who used to be the fish butcher at Le Bernardin in NYC (and maybe still is) used to talk about this. He was one of these near superhuman kitchen workers, who needed to be replaced by two or three guys on his days off. He cut everything perfectly without any waste. He talked about the right degree of sharpness ... too dull and and the cuts were rough; too sharp, and when filleting certain kinds of fish the knife would sever the pin bones rather than sliding the flesh off of them (if I remember correctly). This does seem to be technique-specific. Japanese fish butchers use a deba, which is single-beveled and traditionally extremely sharp, except at the heel where it's given a back-bevel to withstand cleavering through bones. But in Japan the approach to butchering fish is completely different and so the concerns are different as well. I suspect Japanese-style butchering is a slower, more involved process than what they use at Le Bernardin.

K.C. taught me how to cut, so I think I can speak to this. He didn't keep chives in the fridge as a matter of course; it was a demonstration. The idea being that if they stay fresh for days, they'll definitely stay fresh for a few hours. Which allows you to cook more efficiently: instead of the European method of cutting your herbs at the last possible instant (during service when a million other things are going on), cut them first, when your knife is at its sharpest. There's no penalty if the knife is truly sharp.

I did this test with chives and the difference was evident after 45 minutes. The herbs you're cutting there (for whatever reason) just aren't that susceptible to enzymatic browning, so they're not showing much difference.

Your meat was pasteurized when the heat went off, so the danger is from anaerobic bacteria, like c. perfringes and c. botulinum. These love warm temperatures in a low-acid environment in a bag where there's no air. They produce toxins that are not destroyed by normal cooking temperatures. It's impossible to say how likely this was in your situation. I don't think there's any way to predict the presence of these organisms on raw meat, or any way to test for the toxins (without a chemistry or biology lab). My guess is that the probabliity is low. But the stakes are high. Like daveb, I'd be inclined to eat it but not to play Russian Roulette with guests.

So, based on location, price, and possibility of reservations, we ended up at Chez Michel ... a 9:30pm reservation the night before we had to get up at 4:45 to get to the airport. And worth it. Everyone in our group loved it. Didn't exactly fit the mould of the upstart / experimental new restaurant, but I gather from reviews that the chef has reinvented the place a few times since the 90s, and has hit on something that's part traditional Breton and part unique. We spent a lot of time with the chalkboard menu. Even the native French speaker in our group needed help deciphering a few of the dishes. We were surprised by how casual the place was, and how inexpensive. Reviews had me expecting higher prices (not our usual experience). The chef himself sauntered around the dining room, answering the waiter's questions and at one point spending about five minutes recommending wine. He was expansively friendly, spoke no English, and with his rustic / Serge-Gainsbourgian good looks seemed to have been delivered straight from Central Casting. I wish we'd had the time and budget to visit some more places, especially more contemporary ones, but this was a great meal and a restaurant I'd recommend to anyone. Day to day we found the bread and pastries to be relentlessly good, but the restaurant food to be only decent ... probably because it was too challenging to get away from places that thrived on tourist traffic. Fresh fruit was absolutely perfect everywhere, including corner shops and tarts at lower end patisseries. Vegetables are more of a challenge ... our friends in Paris have to travel and research to find veggies that taste anywhere near as good as they look. The fish we found at various markets and a Bon Marché was excellent and stupefyingly expensive. i ended up cooking dorade, rather than the more interesting looking varieties, partly because I couldn't identify the others, partly because I couldn't afford them. We had a loaf of bread from Poullin, the one they call their specialty, and it was completely unremarkable. But our friends' local baguettes from la Parisienne are as good as any I've had. We could have eaten baguettes and nothing else and been happy. We loved the 4 and 5 Euro bottles of wine. Coffee everywhere came out of automatic machines ... big espresso machines at cafes, little Nespresso abominations at people's houses. It was all uniformly good ... better than the average cup you find in NYC, worse than the best cups. We spent a few days in Rome afterwards. Espresso was better. Even the touristy gelato was pretty good (nut flavors especially). But food overall was really bad. The nicest restaurants had decent food (but not memorable). Everything else a disappointment. Nice statues though. Maybe this should have its own post. Thanks again everyone for the tips!

That Konosuke is quite similar to the Ikkanshi Tadatsuna gyuto I've been using for past 5 or 6 years. It's my favorite style of knife, since the thin edge geometry lets it cut efficiently even after losing its fresh-off-the-stones magic. When it gets dull, it still works better than a heavy chef's knife ... except for the kinds of things a heavy chef's knife does better in the first place, like cutting tough, woody, stemmy things, beheading fish and chickens, chopping chocolate, etc.