paulraphael

I've been moving in the direction of lower milkfat, not higher. I find the high levels of fat reduce the intensity of most flavors. I'm also not convinced by the lingering mouthfeel when the fat percentage gets much higher than 16 or so. I like a cleaner finish. Most of what I make hovers around 15%, which you get with about a 50/50 mix of whole milk and 36% fat cream. Going as low as 12% I think is preferable with a lot of flavors (fruit especially) or if you're following a heavy meal. If you do go for a higher percentage of cream, be aware that cream has a lower percentage of milk solids, so it would be helpful to compensate with something else. [Host's note: In order to avoid an excessive load on our servers this topic has been split. The discussion continues here.]

Just made some almond butter. Very smooth. Smoother than the almond butter I get from the store. Not quite as smooth as mass-market peanut butter. Possibly it would get a bit smoother with continued processing. I'm finding it helps to add a bit of neutral oil ... both this as the cashew butter had a bit of a dry texture without it. I also added a little salt and maple syrup to the almond butter, to mimic one of our favorite things at the local food coop.

Amazing prices. I don't think I paid much less than that when I got my 12" fry pan over 15 years ago.

I'm pretty sure it's all just PTFE. They may be adding stuff to it for different purposes, but teflon's teflon. Even non-Teflon® teflon is teflon. The stuff that's given off when you overheat a pan is widely misunderstood. While PTFE can break down into potentially toxic monomers at very high temperatures (greater than 600°F), what happens at lower temperatures (upper 400°F range) is the sublimation of PTFE from the surface, which condenses into very fine particles in the air. The particles are made of the same inert substance as the pan. But very fine particles of any type can be irritating to the lungs, and can be fatally so to some small animals—especially birds. You really shouldn't keep birds near the kitchen, btw. They'll be killed just as quickly by smoke coming off a cast iron skillet.

And you'll find few portable appliances like this that even draw 1800 watts, because most people have outlets on shared circuits. I think most of us would find it especially troubling if an immersion circulator threatened to blow a fuse. We like to leave these things running while we get on with our lives. Granted, almost all the danger would be during the first hour when it's heating the water, but still ...

Veal stock is great stuff, largely because of its neutrality, but it doesn't make as much sense today as it used to. Mainly because people eat a lot less veal, so the bones are no longer a cheap commodity (as btbyrd points out). It's also prized for its gelatin content, but you can get gelatin anywhere nowadays, including from a box of gelatin. You can also opt for any of dozens of different hydrocolloids, that may be tailored to produce even more desirable qualities. It's also a lot faster to make a good stock these days, with the help of a pressure cooker. For all these reasons I'm more inclined to make stocks for specific purposes ... chicken, beef, duck, etc... If I come across an affordable veal source, I'll snap some up and make a stock, but it's not a staple in my freezer.

To heat much faster, the circulator would need to always be plugged into a 20 amp circuit, and not be sharing it with anything else that draws a lot of power. This kind of constraint goes over better in a commercial kitchen than a home one. I've never found it to be an issue ... as others do, I start with hot water from the tap, and often cook sous-vide jobs back-to-back.

I've never used whole milk powder but would be much more inclined to use nonfat dry milk, and to make up the difference with a little butter. Milkfat is perishable by way of oxidation, and will develop off-flavors pretty quickly. You could probably offset this by vacuum sealing and storing in the freezer, but what's the advantage? FWIW, I look for nonfat dry milk that's 100% skim milk solids, and that has been spray-dried at low temperatures (Now brand is very good—I checked with them and they say they dry at 72°C for 15 seconds, so there's very little cooked flavor). I evacuate the air and put the original container in a ziploc bag and store in the freezer. Even nonfat dry milk picks up off flavors easily. I use quite a bunch of this stuff in ice cream and don't want any weirdness.

That was in response to someone saying they had a hard time pre-searing without overcooking.

It should be fairly easy to pre-sear without overcooking. If you have trouble getting a pan or griddle really hot, you can get some chemical help. I make a 1:5 mixture of baking soda and dextrose, and sprinkle it very lightly on the searing surfaces. You get very rapid browning, even on a medium-hot pan. The bigger trick, I find, is getting to all the surfaces, especially the sides and any uneven parts of the meat. This is why I like to dip. I find torches a bit tedious for this kind of thing, but someday might get a Searzall. That gizmo looks promising, at least for smaller quantities. A deep-fryer would make short work of all of this.

I suspect you're most likely to see spoilage at these temperatures in cases where surface contamination was allowed to get somewhere that isn't on the surface during cooking. Like, if two ribs are butted up against one another. Or if one of the ribs got stabbed with a knife during prep. Then you get spoilage bacteria into a place that might take a long time to get up to cooking temperatures. There was a thread a while ago where someone sous-vided something like a rouladen ... a piece of meat pounded flat and rolled up. The bag juices were green and smelled like baby diapers. I don't even think it was a low-temperature cook. Pbear is right about the limitations of dunking. I think if you keep this in mind when you pack the ribs, you can work around it. Make sure your bag comes in contact with every surface. It might mean using a greater number of bags. I use ziplocs, so the gaps are filled with liquid. Because of this I dunk in boiling water for a full minute. It's not important for the surface to actually reach boiling temperatures; you get 6.5D pasteurization in under 5 seconds if the surface reaches 72°C.

I like the idea of using the dark meat. If I were butchering whole chickens, then yeah, I'd give up the breast (or maybe try to find some lean meat elsewhere, like the back). But if I'm buying parts? Why not just buy an extra boneless thigh? I stock up on these to cook s.v. anyway. It's cheaper, and would probably contribute a bit more flavor.

Hi Johannes, I think Chris is correct on this. Part of the problem we face is that unlike pathogens, spoilage bacteria (and fungi) are poorly understood. We don't have ways to predict what might be lurking on the surface of the meat, able to thrive at over 50°C. Because of this, I always immerse s.v. bags into boiling water briefly before long/low cooking, to attempt to pasteurize the surface. I discuss the method briefly in this blog post. While I cannot guarantee that this will always be effective, in my experience it has worked reliably, even when doing pre-cooks at 40°C for up to four hours. I believe it is probably more effective than pre-searing (which can still be done in addition to this) because you can't reach every surface and indentation of the meat with a hot pan, especially on the sides.

Definitely, as soon as we eat up the store-bought almond butter in the fridge.

That's a promising looking technique. My only hesitation is that it's pretty wasteful to use a lean chicken breast as a sludge filter. I know some will say this is best possible use for a chicken breast, but still ... Has anyone heard of variations with cheaper protein, or with scraps or byproducts? I gather that being fat-free is important. I've looked around a bit at things like powdered gelatin, whey protein, and soy protein. Whether or not these work, the catch is that they're all more expensive by weight than a stupid chicken breast. The agricultural byproduct industry must have some healthy profits ... Any other thoughts?

Pure titanium is considered inert in the body as well, so if you ate it you could expect it to pass right through. There are cases of people having allergic reactions to titanium implants, but in these cases it always seems to be alloys that contain nickel (a common allergen). If you're looking for something to be paranoid about in blender chemistry, it would make more sense to look at the jar material. Almost all of the "BPA-free" blenders use a polymer called Tritan. This is a proprietary and very new plastic by Eastman Chemical. Most of the safety testing has been done privately and without publication (meaning: take the manufacturer's word for it). Published studies have been mixed. Some say it leaches bad stuff. I'm not personally worried about this, but recognize it could be an issue for some people, especially those making baby food, etc.. In comparison, I do not consider PTFE specks to be a health issue for anyone. You probably get more toxins from chromium ions released by the stainless steel blades.

I just used the v.m. to make cashew butter, and the results were as smooth as anything I've gotten from the store. I wouldn't hesitate to use this in ice cream. Maybe some other kinds of nuts are harder to blend smooth?

So I made some nut butter (cashew) in the v.m., and surprisingly the texture is smoother than the nut butters I get at the store. It's a bit dry. Some added neutral oil would help. But there's no discernible grittiness.

One way food dulls edges is through oxidation from acids. Even stainless steel knives. Stainless alloys get their oxidation resistance from chromium, and the best stainless knife alloys have very little chromium content compared with the steels used in pans and utensils. This means they're quite a bit less resistant to oxidation than you might expect. When you consider that a very sharp knife edge might be only one or two microns across, you can imagine how even the shallowest oxidation could contribute to weakening and rounding the edge. This is one reason I always wash my gyuto immediately after cutting acidic ingredients (especially onions, garlic, etc..). Ramps can actually discolor the edges of my best knives. This is one reason I prefer stainless to carbon steel for a chef's knife / gyuto. While not immune to being etched by acids, they hold up better than steel that has no chromium content. I like carbon steel for my slicing knife ... it just gets used on protein. Woody ingredients like herb stems can dull a knife mechanically. They're not harder than the steel, but they can be tough, and translate the force of the knife into bending or twisting forces that put little dings in the edge—spots where the edge either chips or rolls, depending on the brittleness of the steel. And some some ingredients are full of sand. I've stopped using my gyuto on leeks, because no matter how carefully I wash, there's always enough residual grit to give my knife edge a working over. The fatter, softer edge on my German chef's knife handles this better, and can just be banged back into shape on a steel. My gyuto usually needs to visit the stones afterwards. On the topic of grit, a lot of cutting boards are made out of woods that they shouldn't be. Some woods naturally have a high silica content (sand), like teak. Bamboo boards are really composites, made from bamboo fibers and copious amounts of glue. Some of the glue used is very hard. I stay away from these. I find that polyethylene boards (like what you see in a lot of restaurants) have a tendency to grab at knife edges. If you don't use a light touch, and keep the motion exactly inline with the axis of the knife, these can chip or roll thin knife edges. It's certainly possible to use these without harm (they actually help teach you good technique) but I don't much like the way they feel.

My thyme water turned olive drab in around a half hour, but the flavor didn't suffer in any significant way. I should do a side-by-side, comparing infusion to blending. I'll use sugar water as a solvent (it's practically as good as alcohol for dissolving phenols).

Strange, I've never had that happen. The only precaution I take is with carbon steel knives, to prevent rust if moisture gets trapped in there. If the knife is going to be in the protector for more than several hours in a humid environment, I put a strip of paper towel around the knife before it goes in the protector. I just have one knife that this is ever an issue for, like when I take the knife role somewhere coastal in the summer.

Has anyone experimented with blending herbs vs. infusing them? I just blasted several sprigs of thyme (about 4g) in 2 cups of water in the v.m.. Made a lovely, cloudy green suspension that smells pretty strongly of thyme. The flavor isn't as strong as I might expect .. and a bit more green-grassy than thyme-like, which shouldn't be too surprising. I didn't do an infusion in plain water for comparison. Just wondering if anyone's found utility for this. I'm keeping it on the counter to see if the color and flavor change from enzymes and oxygen.

It's kind of an apples / oranges comparison. Woodworking tools and kitchen knives generally dull by different mechanisms. Most of the dulling in woodworking and machine tools is from abrasion. What keeps these cutting tools sharp is wear-resistant steel. The wear resistance comes from hardness, and also from the carbides that are abundant in many of the steel alloys used for this purpose. Kitchen knives (at least ones with higher-end metallurgy, like what's typical in Japanese and Swedish steels) dull from the edge rolling or chipping. Most of the dulling comes from forceful contact with the cutting board. Sharp knives are vulnerable to this because they typically have a very acute bevel angle, and so the edge is thin. To resist chipping and rolling they need a steel with high edge stability. This comes from a combination of strength and toughness (toughness in engineerspeak = the opposite of brittleness), from a well-shaped bevel, and from a lack of sharpening defects, like wire edges. Many of the qualities that make a machine tool resist dulling would actually make a kitchen knife dull faster. For example, lots of carbides in the steel leads to poor edge stability in a kitchen knife—you get a very sharp edge that chips away quickly. Conversely, a machine tool made like a kitchen knife (very acute edge geometry, steel with low carbides) would dull very quickly from abrasive wear.

I can imagine Carter's knives are sharp as hell out of the box. He's a reputed master sharpener, so it's probably expected that some of the many dollars one sends to him goes toward that ...

I've never had a knife that was sharp from the factory. German knives are often as sharp as I'll expect them to be, but not really sharp. Japanese knives range from decent to dull. Like Skubadoo said, the assumption with these knives is that the user knows exactly what kind of edge they want and knows how to get it. Some consumer-oriented Japanese knives come with a pretty good edge (Shun, etc.) and maybe some pro brands do too, but nothing I've owned.