paulraphael

Oils can add flavor, but it's been pretty well shown to be a superficial phenomenon. Just like with traditional confit. You get the same effect by adding the oil after cooking.

That looks like a good method in a lot of ways, but for all the work it makes compromises I doubt I'd be happy with. It neglects—entirely—the real challenge of roasting a whole bird, which is that the dark meat ideally cooks to a higher temperature (5°–7°F) than the white meat. This is difficult to accomplish, especially considering geometry of a bird, which makes the white meat cook faster. Trussing exacerbates the problem, despite what some people write about it. ChefSteps implicitly acknowledges that they're going to overcook the white meat, so they inject brine (so we won't notice). Brine denatures the proteins a bit so they don't don't expel as much liquid upon cooking. But most of what's going on is just adding water. This gives a juicy sensation in the mouth, but it also dilutes the flavors of the chicken juices. This is a problem I have with most brined poultry, fwiw ... it seems juicy, but is bland. The cool thing about this method is the uniformly browned skin. I've never bothered trying for that, since I'm not serving the meat from the back. But it does look nice. This is a best-in-show chicken from an esthetic perspective. In terms of cooking / flavor / texture, the method should be modified to slow the cooking of the white meat. Selective barding (with fat, or just with several layers of foil) is an ideal way to do this. You'd probably have to leave foil over the breasts for the entire low-temp portion of the cook. Getting this right would take some experimenting. You'd also need to invent an effective way to hold the foil in place on a vertically hanging bird. I think if you did this, you could dispense with the brine. Get a good, air-dried chicken, salt it and leave it overnight in the fridge and it will brown up just fine. If you want to give the browning action a kick, brush the bird lightly with something containing a reducing sugar (honey, or just a tiny bit of dextrose).

I've never heard the claim made by someone who cited evidence, experience, or even a theory. Really doesn't make sense to me. Oil won't enter the meat (molecules are too large). And juices will leave the meat (whether there's oil there or not). The only things I can think of that will effect the travel of anything in or out of the meat are ones that work osmotically, like aqueous solutions. Brine is an example. For obvious reasons I don't put brine in sous-vide bags. I often put in a bit of stock, because I use ziploc bags and need to push out air. But increasingly I've just used water, and really can't tell a difference in the meat, or even in the bag juices after they're reduced and browned.

We'll need another thread on how to calibrate your altimeter / barometer. Maybe with a thermapen?

First time through I missed that the kick is gluten-free. I'm stealing that.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-2014-haters-guide-to-the-williams-sonoma-catalog-1667452305 Sample ... Item #66-5832014 – Hot Chocolate Pot ($60) Copy: "New & exclusive! Award-winning mid-century design from the Dansk Kobenstyle collection. Engineered for uniform heating in heavy-gauge steel with a stay-cool teak handle." Drew Says: Yes, a hot chocolate pot. Because a fondue pot wasn't quite useless enough. Hey, you know what other kind of pot is good for making hot chocolate? A POT. Like, any regular pot that you already have. I know sometimes it dribbles down the side when you pour the chocolate out, making you want to kill God. But if you use a ladle, you'll be fine...

If the question is about All Clad, then no question, cast iron will make searing easier. The bigger the piece of meat, and the weaker the burner, the more difference it will make. If you're on a 2200 btu/hr restaurant burner, I doubt the difference would matter. The key is that all clad stainless pans, structurally, are lightweight aluminum. They're very responsive, but don't store a lot of energy. FWIW, I have a 10" AC stainless pan and relatively weak stove, and I use them in concert to sear stuff all the time. But if I'm dealing with a bigger piece of meat, or something I want to sear very quickly without risk of overcooking what's underneath, I turn to other choices. These include cast iron, 2.5mm copper (stainless lined), or stainless with a fat aluminum disk bottom.

Hardly any stainless steel pans use stainless for more than the cooking surface, so there's no way to generalize. A thin aluminum pan with stainless cladding won't sear as well as most cast iron pans. A heavy copper pan with stainless cladding will sear better than most. Searing ability comes down to two factors: heat capacity (which is the specific heat of the material multiplied by its mass), and conduction. High heat capacity means the pan can store a lot of energy, and high conduction means it can deliver it quickly to the food. Cast iron has fairly low specific heat, but since cast iron pans are usually massive, they have very high heat capacity. Iron is a moderately good conductor of heat. Cast iron pans sear better than most others, although heavy copper or very heavy aluminum can be even better. I like stainless steel better than other surfaces, partly because the bright color makes it easy to see how browned the pan drippings are. As much as I like my cast iron pans, they're my least favorite for searing when I want to make a pan sauce.

It's pretty safe to sear things by eye. IME, there are too many variables (temperatures of the pan, of the food, dryness of the food, proteins and sugars available on the surface etc.) to be able to pinpoint a time that will always give the results you want. One thing that can help is to prepare a concoction that accelerates the Maillard reactions. I used to make a solution in water, but find it's easier and probably better to just use dry powders. Mix 2:3 (by weight) baking soda and dextrose. Sprinkle a dusting onto the surfaces you'll sear. you can do this along with salting. Browning will take off much faster than without. If you have a very high output range, and are able to sear with your pans at restaurant temperatures, this may lead to charred pan drippings. But I find it helpful most of the time on my typical home stove.

You're a little confused here. Spores don't reproduce. They activate, and in doing so, become bacteria, which do all the reproducing and toxin production. The bacteria in question here are clostridium botulinum, which are mostly of concern to us because they reproduce on food in anaerobic, low-acid environments. In doing so, they contaminate the food with botulinum toxin. The thing to understand about spores is that they are produced by certain bacteria as soon as conditions become inhospitable to the active form of the bacteria. And they are designed to survive. They just hang out, like inert little concrete bunkers, until conditions become favorable. Then they wake up, becoming active bacteria, reproducing at rates determined by temperature, pH, and available nutrients. Shalmanese is right that the risk of botulism from garlic-infused oil is low. The trouble is that if botulinum spores are present on the garlic (certainly possible) the anaerobic environment of the oil at room temperature is a perfect environment for botulinum to do its thing. Odds may be low, but stakes are very high. The refrigerator is obviously much better, but fridge temps just slow down the reproduction. You'd ideally want to use refrigerated oil within a couple of weeks.

Last week it was duck jus used as a foundation for the turkey sauce. Last night, two bags of chicken thighs to give us some quick and easy protein for a busy week.

Yeah, me too. I like cinnamon, but my girlfriend hates it. I've found cardamom substitutes well in every context, and I often like the new version better than the original.

I've just blogged about this method in some depth here, and posted an updated recipe.

All good advice from everyone here. In general you can expect to get wildly different time/temperature recommendations for long-cooked sous-vide dishes, because there's a range of effects people might like. The 10-hour times at high temperatures are going to give results like a traditional braise. The longer times at lower temperatures are going to give results that are more steak-like ... pink and tender, but cohesive. And there's everything in between. It's important to understand the effect someone was striving for before taking their recommendation.

I pre-salt the turkey with 3-5 grams salt / kg turkey, about 24 hours before cooking. If it's an air-dried bird (greatly preferred, I'll do this with the bird loosely covered in the fridge. If it's not air dried, I'll leave it completely uncovered. I don't go as far as calling this dry-brining, because the salt levels aren't really high enough. With high enough salt levels to truly brine a large bird, this process would take well over a week. If you calculate the diffusion rate of salt though flesh you'll see why. You also risk curing the meat, because, the salt concentrations will be very high at first, and will stay high until the salt has diffused a ways (a long time). In general I think unbrined poultry is better. But you have you have to cook it well, which is a challenge. Brining provides insurance against overcooking, but comes at a cost. Not just the time required (which is also time during which the bird is becoming less fresh) but also in the dilution of the natural juices. You get more liquid in a brined bird, but the flavors aren't as concentrated.

I'll be doing the Turkey and sauce and stuffing at my girlfriend's family's place. It's a few hours away, so dinner will depend on my not forgetting anything important back in Brooklyn. The turkey will be poached and roasted, with a sauce made from a duck coulis, and stuffing made with wild mushrooms. Blog bost with turkey theory and recipe here.

And of course what's on the outside. The bones I use are roughly trimmed carcasses from birds I've roasted. Quite a bit of meat on each one. If you buy bones from a butcher they're always roughly trimmed as well. I care about the meat more than the marrow. Agree that clean bones don't contribute flavor unless the marrow gets out (and then it's marrow flavor, nothing else). This is pretty well established now.

Interesting about the glaze. However, my general sense is that if a living creature can be raised, slaughtered, processed, shipped, and sold at retail in the developed world for under $4/lb, something's probably amiss.

Thighs often cost less per pound than wings and have much more meat on them. Great flavor. They're my favorite supplement to bones. If you want even more gelatin you can add some feet ... tons of gelatin and cheap.

I suspect the problem is that skin gets saturated when you sous-vide it, and there's no way to crisp it without burning it, unless there's some other step to get the excess moisture out of there first. I don't know if anyone's found a good sous-vide solution to bird and fish skin (besides removing it before sv and crisping it afterwards). The one exception is sous-vide in oil, which Dave Arnold does with his infamous bionic turkey. He heats gallons of oil in a circulator (which I'm not about to do at home) ... I don't know if you could duplicate the results by putting oil or butter in the sv bag. The problem with using a bag is that all the liquid expelled by the meat stays in the bag, rather than dispersing far and wide. Enough liquid may accumulate in there to saturate the skin ... but maybe not. It would be worth trying.

Is this poultry skin that's been sous-vided?

It's easy to kill campylobacter at medium-rare temperatures. I can't find a time/pasteurization curve for campylobacter, but what I've found at Douglas Baldwin's site and in this study suggest we don't have much to worry about. Campylobacter is not very heat resistant. At 45C, it dies about 12 times as fast as lysteria, which is what's typically used to determine pasteurization times in poultry. 45°C is a very rare temperature for poultry. Pasteurization time would be about 50 minutes. At 60C (I imagine most people would call this medium) pasteurization time for campylobacter is just 8 minutes). What you can do is look at the pasteurization curves for lysteria (use a table or an app like sous-vide dash) and divide the time by 10. That should get you close enough at any temperature between 45C and 60C.

I haven't seen the searzall yet. You can get an idea by watching the videos on the cookingissues site and their kickstarter page. It appears to do a much better job than any unmodified torch. If you look back to Dave Arnold's original posts on how to sear a sous-vide turkey, you'll see the limitations of a roofing torch. They work very poorly. Besides "torch taste," which is caused by all the products of incomplete combustion, they tend to scorch the skin of a bird without making it crisp. This is because part of the crisping process comes from dehydration. If a flame is too hot, the outer layers of skin will burn before the inner layers are able to desiccate enough get crisp. Arnold was unable to get crisp skin from the roofing torch. A searzall does a few things: it converts a much greater proportion of the heat of gas combustion into radiant heat, making the torch more efficient. It almost completely eliminates partial combustion products. And it defuses the radiant heat over a large area, which tempers the heat enough to allow crisping without burning. I use a plane old propane torch quite often, and can tell from watching the videos that the searzall is much better.

You probably don't need it for this project, but the SV dash app is a great resource. Takes out most of the guesswork and helps answer just about any kind of "what if" question. Playing with also helps you develop a better mental model of heat transfer ... it will help you guess better if you ever have to

It's got nothing to do with hanging out in the open. The issue is that with forcemeats, you've got meat that's been exposed to pathogens that's now at the center of a big piece of food. With whole pieces of meat, this only happens to the surface. The surface of meat reaches pasteurizing temperature very quickly with any cooking method. But the center can take a long time, and is at risk of spending too long in the temperature range where pathogens multiply very quickly. Because of this, with forcemeats, or any kind of ground meat, rolled meat, or cut and reassembled meat, you want to make sure that it's thin enough and that the cooking temperature is high enough that the center gets out of the danger zone in a reasonable amount of time.