paulraphael

Bacteria are a serious issue. Dyes are a non-issue. Triclosan is a public health issue, but it's not something hurts your directly.

At 54°C it takes 96 hours, but the textures are like nothing else.

These are artisan objects. They don't have any of the qualities I look for in a working knife. Both camps have always existed in the knife world, although the artisans themselves never seem to make the distinction. I have the same reaction to some local knives that have caught the attention of chefs. They are beautiful objects which don't reflect a especially deep understanding of knife performance. There are ugly, $60 gyutos from Japan that will outperform them in every way.

I hope so, the stuff really should be abolished. It's a public health crisis in the making. Re: sponges, I like the blue scotch brite or o-cello versions, which don't scratch pans. No problems with color bleeding. If it did bleed I wouldn't worry about it. The worse problem with sponges is that they're unsanitary. It's actually a violation if the health dept. finds a sponge in restaurant in NYC. I use them because they're convenient, especially for dishes. But I wish there were a better solution. If I boiled them daily that would be a different story, but that's just not likely to happen.

Ok, it's hardened now, and I'm not so happy. It's icy and lacking creaminess. It actually tastes much lower fat than it is. Not a good quality! I wonder if the lower temperature is just producing a thinner egg custard with my two measly egg yolks. This would be annoying ... based on charts in the MC series, I'd need to more than double the quantity of yolks to get the viscosity I got at 85°C. Which would defeat the purpose. The fresh milk flavor is nice though. One possibility is that when cooking the mix sous-vide, it spends much of its time below the water bath temperature. Which would suggest a longer cooking time might help.

I use it once or twice a week. SV chicken thighs have become a kind of staple. It's killer for ice cream. Any kind of steak or chop. Tempering chocolate. Insanely long braises. Best kitchen thing I've spent money on in many years. And ok: duck legs. Gotta try it.

I started entertaining the idea of lower fat ice creams when I staged with Michael Laiskonis's and got to taste all of his flavors. This was probably the best ice cream I'd had, and it was all 10% milk fat. He uses 5 or 6 yolks per kg, so it's not entirely low fat, but it was still lean by my standards. The cleanness of the flavors and the mouthfeel made some of the ultrapremium local ice creams taste cloying in comparison. I realized that I didn't like the pasty film they left on my mouth. He does it this way because his ice cream is always part of a multi-component plated dessert, served after many courses of Michelin 3-star food, and he doesn't want to demolish his guests with a butterfat wrecking ball. My constraints, needless to say, are different. So my standard recipe is around 15%—pretty high fat. Just not super rich. And I've had good luck with lower fat levels for some flavors. I think the important thing is to not be dependent on the fat level for a smooth texture. This lets you change the richness from one flavor to another based on your tastes.

Please post! I bet Mr. Martel would be interested in seeing this also. I've personally never handled a Global that was actually sharp.

I did an experimental batch (vanilla) using the lower temperature, and so far I'm really pleased with the result. I've thought about experimenting with cook temperature, mostly to see if it would lead to a fresher flavor from the milk. I wasn't aware of potential texture benefits. I put this off, though, because I used a stabilizer blend that includes locust bean gum, which needs to reach 90°C to hydrate fully. So for this experiment I did some research and substituted lambda carrageenan for the LBG. I use this in sauces, and thought it would be an interesting choice for ice cream. It has a very creamy texture, a clean finish, and it hydrates cold. It probably doesn't have the heat-shock resistance of LBG, but I don't have to ship my ice cream to stores. I just want it to stay smooth in my freezer for a couple of weeks, and to survive trips in a cooler to friends' houses. I cooked this batch sous-vide at 72°C for 40 minutes. It's hardening in the freezer now. I'll try again tonight, and then see how it holds up over several days. I'm optimistic—so far it seems to have a cleaner, fresher milk flavor than what I usually get, and it's as smooth as any batch I've made. The mouthfeel and melt are really nice. No greasiness, no pastiness. None of the artifacts of overstabilized or overly rich ice creams. My methods are different from Ruben's in some significant ways. I go for lower fat ice cream than he does. I generally don't like ice creams with more than 15% or so fat. For some flavors (fruits, chocolate) I drop down to 12%. I also like to use a minimum of eggs, because I don't like any noticeable egg flavor. I use 2 yolks per 1000g. Zero for chocolate flavors. I use added nonfat dry milk, and just under 0.2% of a blend of hydrocolloid stabilizers. This year I started cooking the mix sous-vide, which absolutely rocks.

I'm only saying the the EP can't remove the wire edge.* If you believe that it's doing so, then I'm betting you you've just grown accustomed to cutting with a wire edge. Which is pretty common, even on much easier to sharpen knives. All my knives are easier than Globals, and still, the removal of the wire is the hardest part of the job to do reliably. I'd been sharpening with a reasonable sense of proficiency for about five years before this was pointed out to me. When I realized there was this other frontier to cross, I was fairly quickly able to create knife edges that performed better and that lasted about four times as long. Waterstones don't do a good job of removing it either, but they allow for some steps with a slightly steeper angle that can help a bit.

Edgepro just takes the manual skill out of the equation, but it doesn't do anything about the wire edge issue. It can't. You're knives could actually retain their edges a lot longer than they do now. It's just no picnic getting there. Plenty of other knives are easier to sharpen, will get sharper, and will stay sharp longer.

Ruben, I've been reading your site and am especially interested in your experiments on cooking temperature. I've thought of doing similar experiments, but I use a stabilizer blend that contains locust bean gum, which needs to hydrate at 90°C. Your work has convinced me to mess with this. I plan to do an experiment with my formula, with a new stabilizer blend, cooked sous-vide at 72°C. My inclination is cook for 40 minutes, to guarantee that all the mix in the bag gets to temperature and can stay there an adequate amount of time, but I'll reconsider if you different ideas about this.

I do basically the same thing. Felt does a pretty good job on my knives. Some people use a soft piece of wood or heavy cardboard. The sharpener / co-owner at Korin uses newspaper or a circular motion on the finest stone. But I don't know what might work on Globals. If you shoot an email to Dave Martel, he's usually generous with advice. His giving up doesn't mean it's impossible on globals; just that he finds it too time consuming to be profitable.

You can get it sharp. Ish. The trouble is that the steel is gummy and produces a wire edge that's very difficult to get rid of. This means that you're left with a very fragile false edge that will be prone to rolling or chipping.

You can certainly "season" stainless steel the way you can an iron pan. But the coating of polymerized oils will be much more fragile because it won't have much to grab onto. And you'll be undoing some of the biggest advantages of stainless steel: that it's non-reactive, durable, and that its bright color lets you easily see the color of pan drippings as they brown, so you can deglaze at the right time. I've seasoned a raw aluminum griddle. It works pretty well. But the polymerized surface is likewise a lot more fragile than the equivalent on an iron pan. Very easy to flake off. The problem would be worse on stainless.

Stainless steel doesn't cause food to stick; bad cooking technique causes food to stick. Happily this problem can be cured for free.

The problem with Globals is that their peculiar alloy makes them very difficult to sharpen properly, while offering no advantages over the better alternatives. A knife is only as good as your sharpening job, and you need to be a master sharpener to get a decent edge on a global. By decent edge I mean something that a reasonably skilled sharpener can achieve on good steel using Japanese waterstones; a lot of chefs spend their whole careers using sub-decent edges. But these days there's no reason to. If you talk to Dave Martel at japenesknifesharpening.com, he can go into detail about global's steel. The short answer is that he doesn't have the inclination to mess with it anymore. If you send him a Global, he'll sharpen it on belt sander the way he does European knives. He reserves the waterstones for knives made out of the better Japanese and Swedish steels. Questions of knives come up on eGullet often. It's really impossible to make a recommendation without knowing someone's commitment to sharpening, and to modifying their cutting techniques for a high performance knife. For many cooks, a jack-of-all-trades Western chef's knife is going to remain the best choice. They are versatile, nearly indestructible, and can be maintained on a steel with very little skill or effort. Others want to go all-in and are willing to relearn everything. For them the highest performance knives are a reasonable choice, although it can make sense start with an inexpensive version so you don't have to be nervous about making mistakes. And there's a whole world of knives between those extremes.

I like it with really good spring asparagus. I haven't tried with onions, shallots, leeks, etc., and would like to hear more about it. I'm also intrigued by corn on the cob. I assume you'd need a pretty heavy weight to keep it from floating.

I heat pans to 500F or more all the time. It's a matter of storing up as much energy as possible to compensate for a weak burner (I have a typical home range ... probably not much more than 12,000 btu/hr). It takes several minutes to preheat a pan, then the oil goes in, and within a few seconds the food goes in. The food drops the temperature of the oil and the pan dramatically and almost instantly. All that loud sizzle is water turning to steam, pulling gobs of heat energy into the air. The extreme pre-heat is a hedge against the pan temperature dropping too much, turning your sear into a stew. You can't do this with teflon. I'll preheat a teflon pan till it's pretty hot, but I try not to go above 400F or so. The teflon won't break down until much hotter than this, but there's also the concern of cooking oil polymerizing on the surface. Depending on the oil this can happen at temperatures not much higher than 400. If oil polymerizes on stainless steel, you can scour it off with BKF. If it happens on spun steel or cast iron, you've added to the seasoning. But you'll never get it off of teflon. The resulting polymer is tougher than the teflon itself. A non-stick pan with cooked-on oil goes into the recycling. I consider non-stick pans specialty cookware. They're good for eggs. They're good for fish that has the skin on, although I prefer to use stainless steel and good technique. If you're putting a hard sear on something, there's never any reason to use teflon, so this limitation shouldn't be an issue.

Splenda, instant coffee, Smart Balance Buttery Spread. I accept these items out of love for someone who uses them to torment me (the last item, for instance, she now insists on calling by its full name: "can you pass me the Smart Balance Buttery Spread?")

I buy boned chicken thighs from the local food coop that come vacuum packed. I don't completely trust the packaging to hold, because it's been made "easy opening" on one of the corners. So I just put the whole thing into a ziplock and evacuate the air by immersing it. The ziploc is just backup. If the inner bag doesn't leak I reuse it.

That Tojiro looks excellent. It looks identical to the Mac, which I have. The Mac's the nicest I've used. I got it for around what the Tojiro costs now, but the price has gone up 50%. My girlfriend has the Forschner, which is also quite good. It has pointy serrations, so it's messier. And it isn't curved, so it's not as easy to use. But I use the thing a lot and it's good enough that I don't notice it.

Copper vs. Stainless isn't really the question ... besides cheap pans for camping, there's no cookware that uses stainless as its conductive layer. Stainless is used as the layer that you cook on. It's great for this. It's sometimes also used as outside cladding, to make cleaning easier. The actual heat conduction in stainless pans is done either by a layer laminated between stainless claddings, or a disk attached to the bottom of the pan. The conductive material will usually be aluminum or copper, or some sandwich that's mostly aluminum or copper. The questions are more likely copper vs. aluminum vs. iron or steel, and thick vs. medium. A lot of us cook on pans that are copper clad with stainless. These are great, but the prices have gotten insane for the thick ones. The thin one's aren't any good, as others have said. Personally, unless you're interested as a collector, I'd forget about copper unless you have specific needs. If you're a serious saucemaker, a copper evassée type pan somewhere around 1.5 liters is a great luxury. But for most pans and most types of cooking, the differences between copper and the right aluminum pan aren't going to make a difference in your cooking. Plenty of Michelin 3-star restaurants use aluminum pans.

I'd think of xanthan as much more than a stabilizer. It's true that you have to go easy on it. This often means using it in combination with other things. I make a really nice, easy last-minute sauce thickener with a 1:10 blend of xanthan and arrowroot. If it's well mixed you can make a slurry with it and stir it in. The xanthan hydrates instantly; the arrowroot needs to be heated to around 140F to thicken. On top of this, xanthan is synergistic with many other hydrocolloids, including guar, carrageenans, methylcellulose, and locust bean gum. This means the combined effect is greater than (and sometimes different from) the sum of the components. So you can use less of everything, and in most cases minimize or eliminate their negative effects. The drawback to some of these blends is that you have to precisely mix minute quantities, and some of the ingredients are less convenient to hydrate (you may need a blender and / or a lot of heat).

There are some good things about this, but really, it's just a smart feature integrated into an induction hob. To quote Steve Jobs, "it's a feature, not a product." With this in mind, I'm inclined to first comapare it to the existing products, which are induction hobbs: The GE thing is 1) bigger, uglier, clumsier, and 2) underpowered. I'd love an induction hob with the same power and sleek form factor as other 1800W versions, but with a built-in and well-deisgned PID controller. It wouldn't substitute for a circulator most of the time, but would be great for many things. It could be a spare cooktop. It could reheat and hold anything, including cook/chill S.V. meals. It would be a champion chocolate melter. And it could be a second S.V. water bath for when the circulator is busy doing something that needs more precision. The GE thing would handle this stuff reasonably well, but the industrial design is too hideous, and 1400 watts is a bit on the anemic side for searing things or heating big stock pots. I suspect Anova could develop a better version on a Sunday afternoon.