paulraphael

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.

If fat represents a distinct taste, it wouldn't be the fifth ... it would be the tenth or twelfth, and counting ... Sensory research is a hot field right now, and they constantly discover more tastes. At a recent lecture I attended with Hervé This, he discussed the discovery of at least two distinct types of umami, at least two distinct types of bitterness, a distinct metallic taste, and a distinct alkaline taste. All this research is quite young, so we can expect more even more complexity in the future. Re: the weird flavor of distilled water ... this is because our sense of "neutral" is keyed to our own saliva. To truly taste neutral, water needs to have the same acidity and mineral content as saliva. Tap water and mineral water are likely to come a bit closer to this than distilled water.

When I've bought salted butter by mistake, I've calculated the salt content based on the sodium listed in the nutrition info. For recipes that use a lot of butter, this adds up to a lot of salt. In some cases more salt than you'd intentionally put in the recipe. In any case, it would be bad news to neglect these calculations and add the usual amount of salt on top of what's already in the butter. Since the only thing I ever use salted butter for is buttering bread, and I do this only rarely, I don't buy the stuff. It's not worth the extra work and the lost flexibility.

The wondra flour trick works for any pan-seared seafood. As with any dredging where you don't want the food to seem breaded, dry the scallop carefully, and dust with the flour very lightly (I use a small chinois) right before putting into the pan. Doesn't matter when you salt, as long as you dry the food right before dusting and cooking. I'd skip the clarified butter. You lose too much butter flavor through clarification. Use a refined, flavorless oil for the sear, and then if you want butter flavor, add some whole butter and baste over the top as it browns in the pan. At this point the scallop will have cooled the pan enough to keep the butter from burning.

A surprising place to get good fish in Brooklyn: an unassuming looking Korean grocery on Flatbush by the 7th Ave. Q stop, called DNY Natural Land. They have good everything, but be sure to check out the seafood counter. It seems to be a shop-within-a-shop, run by Japanese guys who also make some sushi. Very limited selection. But every piece of fish I've had from here has been amazing.

I usually use safflower oil for high heat searing. I choose this over over light refined oils just because it's the cheapest at the stores where I shop. I'm close to 100% sure that the off-flavors from Canola come from low quality oil and aren't innate to canola. I don't notice any change in flavor (or much flavor at all) when I've used it. I also saw it used exclusively for sautéeing fish at Le Bernardin when I staged there. Eric Rippert has a more refined palate than I do. In general, smoke point has a lot less to do with the variety oil than with the degree of refinement. The more refined, the higher the smoke point, and the less flavor. Dark, cloudy, unrefined grapeseed oil is for salad; light, clear refined grapeseed is for sauté.

Cream sauces from the Nouvelle era were generally reduced, and sometimes even had butter swirled in at the end. It's hard to get more rich than that. Hilarious that this tradition is still thought of as "light." You can get the same mouthfeel today with a lot less fat (and the associated flavor-masking) by using hydrocolloids, like carrageenan, locust bean gum, and xanthan.

Haven't tried Co yet. The best I've had (ever) is Roberta's in Bushwick. Motorino (Williamsburg and East Village) is practically as good. I'm fond of Wheated in Ditmas Park, because it's close to home, but don't think I'd make a long trip. After a return to Tottono's this year, I was so horrified that I eviscerated them on Yep. Complete joke. p.s. ... go to Roberta's on a week night. The waits are awful on weekends.

I don't know, guys, the new menu looks awesome.

Wow, I haven't been here since the southern food days. Maybe it's time to return in spite of the memories ... I was in a band at the time and we played a gig there that literally no one came to.

Methylcellulose is the typical gelling agent for this. It gels when it gets hot, liquefies when it cools. I'd be surprised if no one's played with combinations of methylcellulose and gelatin (or something similar), to get a gel that would be stable at any temperature.

Jo, do you have a recommendation for carnarolli from Amazon? I get mine from Eataly in NYC (love it ... haven't looked at other risotto rices since) but it would be nice to have other sources. The pressure cooker rocks. This formula has worked great for me (adapted from MC, Marcella Hazan, and others): 400g / 100% Rice (any short grain rice high in amylopectin*) 40g / 10% Oil or Butter 80g / 20% Shallots or Onion 900g –1100g / 225–275% Liquid (stock—at least 80%, remainder—vegetable juice, wine, fortified wine, water)** 1000g / 250% is a good starting point. 80-200g / 20-50% Aged Cheese (parmegian, asiago, gouda, etc.) 24g / 6% Butter, cubed Salt, Pepper, Vinegar -sweat onion/shallot in oil or butter in pressure cooker until translucent -add rice and stir until translucent, about 2 min. -add liquids and turn up heat. lock lid but do not pressurize. when steam shows that liquids are boiling, pressurize to 15psi and turn down the heat for minimum evaporation -cook 5.5 to 9 minutes. less for al dente, more for soft. 8 minutes is a good starting point. Start timing when cooker reaches full pressure. -depressurize with valve or cold water. -if risotto is still a little wet, excess moisture will absorb on its own. if there’s a lot of remaining liquid, finish uncovered on the stove, stirring over medium heat. if risotto seems dry or undercooked, add more liquid and finish on stove, stirring over medium heat. -stir in butter and cheese, then adjust seasoning to taste with salt, pepper, vinegar.

If you really need to serve it a half hour after getting home, that's tough, cook-chill should work nicely if you can afford a bit more time. Just cook any steaks SV, and chill, storing in the fridge in their bags. When you get home, fill a big pot with hot water from the tap first thing (know your tap water temp and make sure it's not hotter than your final cooking temp. Mine is about 52C, so this works out well. Toss in the bags of steaks and cover. Give them a half hour or so .. the core temperature will rise to 30C or 40C, depending on thickness. You can set the table, change, prepare other things in this time. Then preheat the bejeezus out of a pan and sear. The internal temperature will continue to rise as you sear, and will continue some more for a few minutes. If you're making a pan sauce, move the meat to heated plates and loosely cover. By the time you serve, the meat will be warm all the way through. Not hot, but medium-rare meat is never actually hot. If you're planning to do this, make sure your steaks are no more than 1.5" thick. 1.25 will heat through faster.

In my experience this salt level doesn't give the tough, sausagy texture some people complain about, but it does add a bit more toughness than what I prefer.

This is what I do when cooking conventionally, but people have problems with the salt curing the meat when they do this before cooking s.v.. I think it's because of the longer cooking time, and possibly because of time spent at temperatures that accelerate the process.

I'm experimenting with ways to get the salt into the burger before cooking without wrecking the texture. One idea is to work it into butter (suet should also work), cut the butter into chunks and freeze them, and add along with the beef to the grinder. The idea is 1) add some tasty fat, and 2) sequester the salt from the proteins until late enough in the cook that it doesn't cause problems. The reason for this added step is that I've found a salt level that I like (0.7%) which is actually a pretty big pile of salt. Maybe rolling a patty around in this and getting it on all sides would be ok, but the suggestions to sprinkle it on top sound unappealing. For thinner burgers I'd just sprinkle. For a big fat one, I wouldn't want so much salt concentrated in one place.

I haven't seen any evidence that meat reabsorbs juices. It's possible that a pressure cooker is a special case. I'm guessing that with slower chilling, it's about not losing as much additional liquid during the chilling process. When resting conventionally cooked meat, juices aren't reabsorbed (or redistributed, as the lore suggests). All that happens is that proteins in the juice near the outside of the meat cool enough for the viscosity to increase. This helps hold it in place when the meat is cut, rather than spilling all over the place. This has been demonstrated in experiments.

There are many other enzymes, including calpain and cathespin. These have both been shown to tenderize meat. Their peak activity levels are around 40C and 50C, respectively. They're both deactivated by 60C, but in any large chunk of meat cooked in a 60C water bath, the interior is going to spend a long time in the activity range of these (and other) enzymes. Cathespin is possibly a problematic enzyme. It's been implicated as a producer of off-flavors. I don't know if it's also capable of producing bad textures. In general, I try to minimize time meat will spend in the 45C–55C range. It's one reason that SV can be tricky for anything big.