paulraphael

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.

I'm heading off to an island in Maine in a couple of days, where all food needs to be driven and boated in. Last year the aged/sous-vided chuck steak went over so well I'm doing it again. My butcher aged a prime chuck roll for three weeks, and I just brought it home yesterday. Check out this piece of meat: There's 8 lbs of it, after trimming the dried stuff. We only lost about 13% to evaporation and trim. I cut the steaks to 1.5", seared on both sides, bagged, and then dropped into simmering water for a minute each to pasteurize all the surfaces. Then a 40°C water bath to pre-cook for 4 hours, and now another 40 or so hours at 55°C. We'll cart them up to the island in a cooler full of ice. They'll be re-warmed in a pot of water the wood-burning stove, and then seared on a griddle. Prime steak for 16 people, in the middle of nowhere, for around $80!

So the stuff doesn't taste like chickpeas? I can see this as something un-wastefull to do with chickpea water, but other than that it would seem like there are better solutions. There are all kinds of hydrocolloids that make stuff whipable. Most are flavorless and offer excellent flavor release. You can even whip chocolate by itself ... for reference check out Hervé This's chocolate chantilly.

based on that thread, I got a basal thermometer. It says my circulator's fine ... within 0.06°C at 30°C. The assumptions are that 1) the basal thermometer is accurate and 2) the circulator's calibration is linear. Without fancier tools I can't know, but this test is at least encouraging.

At cooking temperatures well above 131F, you can reach pasteurization before the center of the food reaches the target temperature. Could that be what you're seeing?

Ah, ok. Then a different answer: "stainless steel" is really a gigantic family of alloys. Just about any steel with at least 10.5% chromium can be called stainless. Many stainless steels are of little use in cookware (including the ones used in knives). And it's easy to imagine stainless steels that would be worse. No idea about stainless alloys that contain aluminum, and if they exist how soluble the aluminum is in typical foods. The best solution is to stick with stainless alloys you have reason to believe are appropriate. Anything marketed as 18-8 or 18-10 (these are likewise families of alloys and not specific alloys) is probably fine. Some "official" names of alloys to look for include type 302, 304, and 316.

Even if you did make such a mix (which would be a type of steel alloyed with some amount of aluminum), you couldn't necessarily predict anything about its thermal properties. Metals don't just mix together like sweet and salty. As a thought experiment, if you were to just split the difference ... say, an alloy that's half as conductive as aluminum and half as corrosion resistant as stainless steel ... you'd be describing a pretty crappy cookware material. Clad and bonded structures are what give you the best of both worlds.

Aged meat in a burger would be delicious, but it's usually hard to find in anything but the most expensive cuts ... which I'm not going to grind up. I have a butcher who ages chuck rolls for me. The catch is, I have to buy at least half of a subprimal. After aging losses this works out to about $9 a pound. Not outrageous, but it's usually a minimum of 7lbs of meat. You'd better be hungry. Re: sirloin, I only bring it up because so many restaurants advertise this as part of their burger blend. As if it's something to brag about. It's possible that the way they butcher beef in a restaurant kitchen, they end up with a lot of sirloin trim. I don't why else it would be.

The reason is that the SV-dash app calculates everything precisely, while recipes are more typically written with a little fudge-factor thrown in. It has to do with the long stretch of time it takes for the core of a piece of meat to rise that last degree or fraction of a degree to get to your target temperature. If you were creating the recipe based on look and feel and taste, you'd call the meat done quite a while sooner than that. The temperature at the very core would be a degree or two lower than the bath temperature, and you wouldn't notice. My method for using the app is this: Suppose you want the core temperature to be 55°C. Set the core temperature in SV dash half a degree low, to 54.5°. And set the circulator water a full degree high, to 56°C. This is for the kind of short, non-tenderizing cook you're asking about. It works perfectly, and gives reasonable cooking times. This is probably like what the recipe writers are actually doing; they're just not spelling it out. For more details check out my blog post on the topic.

There hasn't been much talk of beef cuts lately. Here's my current blend: 1/3 each chuck, brisket, and shin. Buying meat is imprecise, so sometimes it's edged more toward half chuck and 1/4 each of the others. This gives a great, balanced flavor, good texture, and is relatively economical. I'm not interested in luxury burgers (which you know know you're making when a piece of meat so fine that feeding it to the grinder feels like a crime against nature). Chuck gives the classic burger flavor, has excellent ground texture, and if you get good pieces, has plenty of fat. Brisket is full of acidic and grassy flavors, which can really brighten up a blend. And shin is just pure, intense, deep beef flavor. The latter two cuts are often on the lean side, which is why I add butter, and the marrow from the shin (around 5% the total weight). I've used oxtail instead of shin, which tastes even better and has plenty of fat. Unfortunately, once you account for the weight of the bones, this stuff is expensive. It can be over $10/lb net, and is a lot of work to trim. I've also gotten some gristly textures from it. I used to use a blend with hangar steak, but this cut has gotten expensive as well. And it can sometimes lend a livery flavor that I'm not crazy about. People crow about short ribs and sirloin in burgers, but I've found the former to be uninteresting and latter a total dud, both in flavor and texture.

1/4 tsp per lb of meat is about 0.25%. That's bordering on too low to make a difference. I've settled on 0.7%, which is lower than what a lot of people use, but I find it focusses the flavors nicely without being noticeably salty. It's not enough to cause any kind of firm/cured texture if you add it to the meat before grinding, IF you're cooking conventionally. It will effect the texture if you grind it with the meat and cook sous-vide—unless you sequester it by mixing with added fat (which I recommend).