paulraphael

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).

I'm working on a stabilizer blend that may be the most effective and easiest to use yet. It's based on a cellulose gum ... specifically, a low-viscosity carboxymethylcellulose. You can get this stuff from Modernist Pantry or from the chef store at TIC gums. It has two properties that suggest it's in a class by itself: it's possibly the most effective hydrocolloid for suppressing ice crystal growth, and it has minimal effect on texture. This means you can use the quantity you need to prevent ice crystals without worrying much about other side effects. There aren't many ice cream ingredients you can say that about! I'm going to use it in concert with locust bean gum, which suppresses ice crystals but also contributes to the body (especially the chewiness) to the frozen state, and lambda carrageenan, which mostly contributes to the creaminess and mouthfeel to the melted state. These ingredients can be adjusted independently of each other, to fine tune the qualities. That's what's so unusual with this blend. If you make ice cream with a lot of egg custard, or prefer a thin, Philly-style texture, skip the carrageenan. If you like your ice cream soft and yielding, skip the LBG. If you like chewy, New England-style ice cream, use more LBG (or add a bit of guar gum). I think in a high-end recipe like mine (15% butterfat, 40% total solids) the total amount of all these stabilizers will be about 0.3%. Quite a bit lower than what you typically see in commercial ice cream. I'm waiting for my CMC to show up and will experiment as soon as it gets here.

Also ... I followed the instructions and allowed the Anova to stabilize for 15 minutes. Totally different story now. My thermocouple now registered just 0.3°C lower, and my remote thermometer registered 0.5°C higher. Just did it at one temperature, but the results are way different from yesterday when I didn't wait to stabilize. The circulator may be fine. I'm still interested in the basal thermometer though, as insurance.

I'm loving the price of the basal thermometer. The high accuracy digital ones are tempting, but the good ones cost more than the circulator itself ... seems a bit overboard. Since the temperature range of the basal thermometer is so narrow, it forces one to assume any error from the circulator is linear. How safe an assumption is this?

Also, is it possible that accuracy could be off if the probes need cleaning? I hardly ever do anything besides rinse the thing.

Any way to do this without a lab-grade thermometer? I've been getting suspicious lately ... my medium-rare burgers look medium, and I've noticed in a few threads that my temperature recommendations are 1 or 2 degrees C lower than everyone else's (and it's not because I'm advocating for anything unusually bloody). Today I tested my Anova One against a Taylor thermocouple thermometer and a Polder remote probe thermistor thermometer. These are both probably one or two orders of magnitude less precise than the Anova ... at least when the Anova's calibrated right. In my tests, the external thermometers mostly agreed with one another, and gave readings 1 to 1.5°C lower than the Anova. Thoughts on what to do? I'd be tempted to send back to the factory, assuming their out-of-warranty repair charges are reasonable. But I have some big stuff I need to cook real soon.

That's a cool setup. I wonder how it would do with a steel plate on the bottom as well as the top. The higher conductivity might give as much heat transfer as a stone that's 100-200° hotter. Sadly I gave up on trying to make awesome pizza at home. Never had access to anything but a home oven, and in the middle of my efforts a couple of the best pizza shops in NYC opened up within walking distance.

I like to cook as soon as possible after grinding. One of the benefits of grinding your own meat is the freshness. There's so much surface exposed to air that meat oxidizes quickly after being ground. It goes from red to gray and gets that not-so-fresh smell. Packaging for sour-vide helps, but you really can't evacuate all the air from the bag ... the meat's now full of air. And you pretty much have to use water displacement. A vacuum machine will squash the burger and make it tough.

I always look for mint ice cream to be white. Green just screams food coloring. Maybe if you're blending the herbs in you'll get some color. Then it would make sense to fix the enzymes first with heat. But as I mentioned earlier, it's much easier to get good results with an infusion that lets you remove the leaves at the right time.

It was probably an infusion, since there was no hint of green, but I'll probably never know for sure. I believe infusion is a better method than blending in the leaves. Herbs are like tea; there's always going to be an ideal range of times/temperatures for getting the best flavors. If you go beyond this, you end up extracting things you don't want ... typically bitter or grassy / vegetal flavors. The trouble with blending the herbs is that there's no way to separate the infusion from the rest of the ice cream making process. The herbs will infuse hot for whatever time and temperature you choose for cooking and pasteurization, and will infuse cold for as long as the mix ages. If you infuse beforehand, you have precise control over the infusion, and then can pick times and temperatures of the rest of the process based on other concerns.

Jo has all the best toys.

You're right, "arbitrary" isn't exactly right ... what I mean is that the guidelines are based on estimates, based on probabilities that involve very high standard deviations. Not just in what bacterial load will make someone sick, but in what bacterial load a piece of food will carry before cooking. I think it's helpful to consider both variables ... and it would be great if we had better tools for estimating them.

My favorite flavors are herbal, but mint is low on that list just since it's the most familiar. Herbs like thyme and sage and basil make incredibly delicious ice cream, and even though it's not a new idea, these flavors still surprise people. If you're lucky enough to have an herb garden these are especially rewarding to make. Thyme ice cream is special for me. In 1990 I had just finished my 2 year stint at an ice cream shop in Colorado. Like every other mom 'n pop shop, we thought we made the best ice cream in the world, and weren't shy about letting you know. After leaving that job, I took a trip to Paris and got taken to dinner at Taillevent—back then it was one of the best restaurants in France and had had 3 Michelin stars longer than anyone. One of the dessert courses was thyme ice cream, made by pastry chef Gilles Bajolle. One bite, and I was like, "Oh. So I guess we didn't make the best ice cream in the world. I guess I've never had good ice cream." Anyway, I don't know if that would still rank among the best I've had, but it made an impression. I think of it whenever I make a batch of my own, which is quite a few times each summer.

Cast iron retains heat a long time because of its thermal mass. This is the specific heat multiplied by the mass. Aluminum has a much higher specific heat than iron, but also has a much lower density, and in clad pans like these, is usually much thinner. The result is that iron will usually be the thermal mass champion. Which is either good or bad. If you want to sear a big piece of meat it's good; if you want temperature control it's bad. Iron has poor conductivity, so even fairly thin aluminum will generally give you more even browning on the stove. Disk-bottom pans are a different story. The aluminum disk can be thick enough to have a very high thermal mass, and be good for searing; potentially even better than iron. Heating will be exceptionally even. Responsiveness will be slow, but generally better than iron. I like iron for browning big chunks of things where I don't need any control and don't need to worry about the color of the pan drippings. It also excels in the oven for maintaining even temperatures of a braise. Thin clad aluminum like AC is great for high control and general purpose stovetop use. Their 10" fry pan is great for quick sautées. I don't have any of their saucepans, but can tell they'd perform very well.

There are enzymes in leaves responsible for turning them brown (and possibly dulling the flavor). When you temper the mint with the yolks, you're killing the enzyme before it can do any harm. Another approach is to make sure whatever liquid you add the herbs to is hot enough from the start. I believe if you plunge the herbs into 180°F liquid, this will deactivate most browning enzymes. It may vary from herb to herb. To be absolutely sure, you can do what mixologists do and plunge the herbs into boiling water for 15 seconds. They will stay green no matter what after that.

I'd like to see more investigations along these lines. It makes perfect sense. The simplified instructions we get give the impression that if you don't reach the magical pasteurization time, yer gonna die. When in fact the pathogens have been reduced, unless you're using unusually low cooking temperatures; just not to the somewhat arbitrary 6D level. And 6D IS somewhat arbitrary. Consider that this standard about the reduction from the pre-existing pathogen levels on the uncooked food. But we never know what those pre-existing levels are. It's quite possible that they vary by orders of magnitude, depending on source, age, storage conditions, and god-knows-what.