paulraphael

Have you had a chance to consult the time/temp/yolk/texture table in the MC book? It lets you dial in whatever consistency you want in a custard, by varying the yolk percentage and/or the temperature. I haven't worked with the table, but it looks like a good place to start.

http://www.brooklynbarmenus.com

I face decisions like this a lot (while I talk a good game on the internet, my fridge organization skills struggle against entropy). It often comes down to who I'm feeding. If it's just for myself I usually go for it. If my girlfriend's joining, then I'm a little more cautious. If there's someone pregnant, or people I don't know, or my 80+ year old parents, I do it by the book.

If you have cold packs in the freezer, these work too. Not nearly as efficient as ice in my experience, but it's easy to run out of ice around here. One thing you can do to conserve ice, if you're chilling something that cooked at a high temperature, is not throw the food in straight out of the ice bath. You only have to chill it rapidly after it gets below 130°F or so. Pre-cooling it in plain water works great. Then an ice bath, and then into the fridge after it's down near 40°.

Possibly the biggest danger when storing sv'd food a long time is spores from anaerobic bacteria like c. botulinum. The spores aren't killed by normal cooking temperatures, and the oxygen-free environment inside the bag is exactly what triggers the spores to activate. The two things that keep this from happening are high-acid environments (which you don't have with meat) and temperatures below 38°F (for c. botulinum type-e). So yeah, it would be a good idea to get a conservative read on your fridge temp at the location where the meat was stored. One way to do this is to put a container of water in there for 24 hours, and measure its temperature after a time of day when the door gets opened a lot.

I'm still not sure I understand the gastrovac. It looks like a serious professional piece of kit; I just don't understand the low-temperature frying aspec. I understand using it for rapid infusions or for no-cook reductions, but frying thing needs better explanation.

Yup. I boil a fairly wide pot, like what you'd use for pasta. So far I've found it easiest to just hold the bag by the top while wearing a silicone mit. I use ziplocs, and boiling temperatures weaken the plastic a fair amount, until they cool again. So I don't like tossing them in or using tongs. It also helps to keep stray parts of the bag from touching the rim of the pan ... this can be hot enough to damage the bag. I'd like to come up with something more efficient for big jobs. This may just be a time when chamber vacuum bags are superior. You could probably just toss them into a pot and pluck out with tongs.

The bacteria in question are spoilage bacteria, as opposed to the pathogenic bacteria we're usually talking about. They can gross you out but are generally harmless (not that you'll ever be tempted to find out). There are myriad varieties of spoilage bacteria, and they're not nearly as well understood as pathogens. If someone brought a sample of baby-diaper short ribs to a biologist it might end up being original research. But anyway. I'm emphatic about dipping in boiling water before long cooking at low temperature. Even if I pre-sear. Searing can't be counted on to get all the surfaces. A dip in boiling water probably isn't foolproof either, but has a better chance. I would suggest 30 seconds full immersion if using vacuum bags, and 60 seconds if using ziplocs (the added fluid required in a ziploc bag puts a bit more insulation and thermal mass between the meat and the hot water). I haven't ever had problems with this method, either with spoilage or with the quick boil overcooking anything.

This is important for any method. And it's one of the reasons my ice cream's been suffering. I moved to a place with an old fridge, and it's getting older. I can only get the freezer down to 0° to 4°F. At my old place I could get it to -5. These few degrees make a big difference. Consider that commercial ice cream goes into a blast freezer that's between -20 and -40. I've been trying to compensate by using more effective stabilization, with mixed results.

I'm curious about this thing. It's hard to imagine the advantages of low-temperature frying (it seems the point of frying is the high temperatures that it allows). But low temperature reduction offers worlds of possibilities. The Rotovap is probably the most powerful tool for the job, allowing precise control over temperature and pressure, and capturing the distillate you can make all kinds of things that are impossible with conventional tools (and some of the most amazing tasting spirits ever, if you don't tell anyone about it). Unfortunately these gizmos are awkward, complex, and generally cost even more than a gastrovac. They're designed more for a lab environment than a production environment. On the topic of sous-vide terminology, yes, it's misleading and annoying. I blogged about it in the intro to my sous-vide series.

Cool, we'll check it out. Thanks.

We're looking for recommendations on a great, un-stuffy, contemporary restaurant. Something representative of the new garde of anti-Michelin young chefs. The Parisian David Changs. Thoughts?

You shouldn't have to worry about price. In Brooklyn this meat cost $10/lb, before aging. It would be perfectly good without the aging step, I'm sure—you could skip it if the butcher wasn't into doing it, or if you just needed a couple of steaks. If you are buying a big chunk for aging, you might get a discount. BTW, it looks like the store you linked gets its meat from these guys. You might have better luck going to the source; they probably do all the aging and butchering.

You should be able to find someone in Boston who'd do this for you, no? I'd think anyone who dry ages and isn't a total crank would be happy to sell you a big chunk of meat and throw it in the cooler. It was indeed delicious. Unfortunately if you want it aged you have to be cooking for a big crowd. This was only the second occasion I've found for it.

Here's a quick pic from right before serving. Warmed in a pot of water on a wood stove and seared on a griddle. (These are slices across the grain ... many slices to one of those steaks)

No one's ever shown that it makes any difference. The old argument is that edge-down wears out the edges, since you're rubbing them against the wood. But you rub them against wood a lot harder when you cut things. My block holds the blades sideways. I can imagine this causing problems with carbon steel blades (moisture could accumulate between the wood and the big flat surface of the blade). But it doesn't happen. Never has, even in the most humid conditions. The only issue I would have with with the edges pointing up is the extra bit of contortion required when grabbing or putting away. Don't see any danger here, just don't see any reason to do it this way. You can safely get whichever knife block you like most. Consider the orientation of the blades an esthetic choice.

Funny, the link you posted seems to me to support my argument more than yours.

I was hoping to add to ingredients for some beef coulis that would be a sauce bass. There was other meat and meaty bones. The extraction from the trim was gray and musty ... not very appealing on its own. I strained out the trimmings and browned them in a pan, added the gray goo, and reduced it all the way down until it browned on the pan. After deglazing that with some stock, the mustiness was gone, but so was most of the unique character of the trim. It did have a nice concentrated / browned flavor at this point. With my next batch I'm going to to try quickly blanching it first, to remove any god-knows-what from the surface, and then browning it before extracting in the sous-vide bag.

Agreed. I suspect sous-vide (at least in its current forms) is too fussy for most home cooks. But if someone can make combi-oven affordable, and tame the user interface, that could cause a paradigm shift. We're probably going to see a lot of gizmos like this thing over the next few years. Most them will probably fail or be marginal successes. But something will stick. Remember that not too many decades ago ovens with a thermostats were a novelty.

because I'm making the rest of my jus on in the water bath and I'm lazy. And I want to know if in the future I can add it along with regular meat. It's separate; if it smells and tastes good at the end it will get mixed in, if not, I've taken a hit for team science. [edited to add: infusing at 90°C, not 95.]

I'm not after ultra precision ... but had some experiences that had me wondering if it could be off by a degree or two. Which I don't want. So now I'm pretty sure it's accurate at one temperature, but no idea if it could have a non-linear error (or how likely a problem that is).

I've got a bunch and am tempted, but not sure if it will be awesome or horrifying. If I don't hear in the next hour or so, I'll try infusing it into water in a 95°C sous-vide bath, just to see what comes out.

Yeah, it's basically just a rib or 2 forward from being rib steak. But since it's chuck my butcher sells it for 1/4 the price. He doesn't charge me for the aging (but I pay based on pre-age weight). It really is an outstanding hunk of meat ... nicer looking than the one I got last year. The steak in this photo is the best looking of all of them. I love the tiger stripes of marbling. After cooking it may not be possible to know which is this one.

A bit of confusion with SV dash is that it uses a different standard for different pathogens: log 5 for e.coli, 6 for listeria, and 6.48 for salmonella. These correspond to reductions of 100,000 to 1, 1,000,000 to 1, and 3,000,000 to 1. I assume this is just based on conservative recommendations.

It doesn't have to reach 141 to pasteurize.