paulraphael

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.

Based on brief testing, I've abandoned this blend. Did not live up to its promise, and in fact led to the first batch of ice cream I've ever thrown out. There were other variables at play ... I made this batch on vacation in a place without electricity (we used those rock salt and ice soccer balls, and kept the ice cream in a not-very-cold propane freezer). Because of conditions I used 50% more stabilizer than normal. But the results were categorically worse, not just 50% worse. Very pasty texture ... left a coating on your tongue and the roof of your mouth. I'm now experimenting with guar / lambda carrageenan / locust bean gum, at 0.4g, 0.4g, 0.6g per liter. So far it's the best (and most conventional) blend I've ever tried. This is a tiny percentage of gums, but seems to impart all the right qualities. Unlike some previous formulas, it does not form any kind of gel, which makes it much easier to work with. I'll post more when I have a bit more experience wit it.

I just got a vitamix, and plan to test a lot of these ideas over the next few weeks. I'm interested, among other things, in comparing blended almond butter to the stuff I get at the store, which, now that you mention it, isn't especially smooth. It probably has some residual texture because people like it that way. Gives it more of a homemade quality, which would less than ideal for ice cream. Truly smooth nut butters (which presumably are made with a colloid mill) would probably be like cream cheese. Blender technology hasn't changed in any significant way since MC came out. I think you could look at all these different machines as homogenizers that produce different amounts of sheer force. High-powered blenders are on the low end, ultrasonic and high-pressure homogenizers are on the high end, and rotor-stator homogenizers are somewhere in the middle. I haven't had an easy time finding a quantified comparison, but my sense is that a rotor-stator minces the fat globules about an order of magnitude smaller than a vitamix. But the vitamix still gets them really small. I've seen one allegation that high powered blenders can actually create the kind of cavitation produced by ultrasonic homogenizers. Which could change this equation quite a bit. But I'm not convinced. This seems a bit like a sponsored ad, and leaves a few sticky questions unanswered. Yesterday I made my first batch of ice cream using the vitamix. The texture is indeed a lot better than what I've been getting—but since impatience outwitted my scientific curiosity, I changed many variables at once. So take with a grain of salt. One other change I made is a return to the way I did things years ago. I didn't add the cream until after the cooking/pasteurization step. The heavy cream I get is homogenized at the dairy, probably with a high-pressure homogenizer. Way finer fat globules than you'd even get with a rotor-stator. So rather than cooking the cream, which would melt the fat and encourage the globules to glom onto each other, I added the cream after cooking, blasting it into the mix in the blender right after vita-homogenizing. This also gives a head start on chilling the mix before aging in the fridge.

The point about poaching is that I'm not aware of a hard delineation between poaching and frying. Possibly it's considered frying if done anywhere above the boiling point of water, but I'm not convinced of that. There's likely a pretty big no-man's land in between. And yes, I understand the benefits of frying at a lower temperature w/r/t development of toxins, but not w/r/t the other stated cooking benefits, including oil absorption. It does seem to be related to the boiling point of the water relative to the oil temperature, BUT—your descriptions don't explain the mechanisms, the scientific articles don't explain the mechanisms, and one of the articles comes out and says the scientists don't understand it either. So my broader point stands—I don't understand vacuum frying. The only thing I've learned over the last few days is that no one else seems to understand it either.

I don't find that clear at all. You can cook food in oil at any temperature. At what point it stops being oil-poached and starts being deep-fried seems ambiguous. Lowering the pressure has the effects of lowering the boiling point of the oil (which would seem unimportant) and lowering the boiling point of water (as you've said). This latter effect seems central to what vacuum frying is about, but why? Why should we care about the boiling point point of the water? According to Myhrvold and company, water boiling from the surface during deep frying contributes to agitation of the oil and improved heat transfer, and at the same time keeps the surface temperature at or below the boiling point of water—briefly. Once the surface dehydrates and gets crisp, the temperature rises rapidly and the surface browns. So why do we care so much about the brief period when water's boiling from the surface? There's clearly something going on here ... vacuum frying has become a real thing in the snackfood industry. But the mechanism is not obvious. Reading the manufacturer's info has not clarified anything, nor has reading the two research papers I've found on the topic. This particular study says, in regards to vacuum-fried foods absorbing less oil, that "Scant information is available on this topic because scientists are only just beginning to perform research in this field. However, it is clear that vacuum frying of non-traditional fruits and vegetables has great potential."

Not all restaurants even have a dishwasher. If you don't heat sanitize you chemical sanitize. Just dunk the jug in a sink full of sanitizer. The commercial vitamix site gets specific on the bleach solution they recommend, but lots of people probably use quaternary ammonium compounds, or whatever else they keep around for the dishes. But I bet you're right that a lot of restaurant employees do throw the thing in the dishwasher. If this is their habit, it probably just takes some life off the bearings. Those are parts that get replaced on the commercial machines every so often anyhow.

Well, it's impossible to prove something harmless. You can only site reams of research that fail to show harm. That's just the nature of science. The reason teflon's believed to be harmless is that it's completely inert with regards to any known tissue or fluid in the human body. This is one reason it's used in artificial joints and heart valves. We have much less evidence that losing teflon is harmless to the blender itself. On another note, I'd hesitate to put a blender pitcher in the dishwasher even if the manufacturer said it was ok. All these high powered blenders have some kind of ball bearing, with physical seals to try to keep the lubricant in and the food out. I don't like the idea of subjecting to them to jets of near-boiling water and caustic detergent.

One other subject I think we ought to address—the bioavailability myth. Some communities-of-truth on the internet actually believe that only they, with their $400 blenders, are getting all the nutrition from their food. Not surprisingly, there isn't a shred of scientific evidence supporting this. The blender manufacturers can't even produce any. Here's a pretty good article on the topic. Some scientists were asked their opinions (all they could offer, since there's essentially zero research): "Oh please. That’s what teeth are for," says one. "If we needed those kinds of blades we would have those in our digestive system," says another. There are lots of other reasons to have a decent blender. But please don't torment your vita-mixless friends with fears of malnutrition.

I'm on my first week with a vitamix 5200 (refurb) and am mostly impressed with it. Any discussion of which blender to buy should address the user interface. Different controls and readouts appeal to different dispositions. For me the choice was easy—I like simple, manual controls, like the VM's on-switch and speed knob. Digital control panels and program modes like the Blendtec's make me want to strangle someone. The performance differences between these machines are minute compared compared with this basic industrial design rift. I also felt that for the kinds of purees I make, a design that incorporates a tamper is the best idea. If you're in it mostly for smoothies and drinks you might come to different conclusions. My blender has the black flake issue. If it persists after a couple of weeks I'll call the company. My concern is purely about whatever engineering mishap led to this. If teflon is flaking off its substrate, is this going to impair the function of a seal or a bushing over the long haul? Worse comes to worse they won't have a satisfactory answer and will send me a new jug. Overall I'm quite happy with the machine. It seems expensive for what it is (I've owned 3 or 4 commercial bar mixers over the last several years, as a reference). I'm guessing the motors in these things are expensive. And to a lesser degree the blade assemblies. The other parts seem quite basic, without anything in the way of expensive looking materials or manufacturing. I'm definitely giving it the benefit of the doubt. I know these things stand up to years of abuse at restaurants (where they do break a lot, but are usually fixable) and to decades of use at home. No expectations of it changing my life. But I like the idea of smooth purees without straining, and expect to have an easier time making almond flour and oat flour. Making nut butters should be pretty nice. And I'm really hoping it will work as a quasi-homogenizer for ice cream mix. That's going to be my first serious experiment.

I'm surprised activa isn't giving you sausage textures. Juicy burgers are easy if you trust the meat and cook it medium-rare. If you have to cook more, it's traditional to compensate by adding more fat. It's surprising how hard it is to even get 20% fat with the cuts that are easily available these days. I'm guessing most of us are making 85/15 burgers. Weedy's 70/30 may go far for some people's tastes. A little butter or marrow added to the grind also works fine.