paulraphael

At least traditionally, bones were a perfect source of cheap scraps. They're always sold with plenty of meat and connective tissue still on them, and some also include marrow. These days they're not always a great value ... I see places charging boutique prices for them, presumably because in some markets they've become special order items for wealthy gourmands. But if you have access to a butcher shop that still sells them cheap, they're a good value. I make stock with a mix of bones and meat, FWIW.

Your bone's been flavored by the meat, not vice-versa! The science doesn't come from abstract theory; it comes from blind taste tests of meat cooked on the bone and off.

They are somewhat porous, although not enough that flavor from the marrow is going to bleed through the wall of bone and season the meat. Even if the meat were directly exposed to marrow while cooking, it won't absorb it. We know this from experiments in confit; meat cooked in flavorful fat doesn't get seasoned beyond the surface.

Bone-in cuts are also beneficial to braises, because they render marrow. But Serious Eats is right; bones don't magically leach flavor into the attached meat, because bones have no flavor.

If you jaccard, just remember to adjust your cooking times to pasteurize all the way to the center, since the pierced meat can no longer be considered sterile on the inside. Re: baking soda ... it's an interesting idea, but there's no way that any kind of presoak penetrates more than a millimeter or two in 15 minutes. It's a surface treatment.

Have you tried just giving it a little extra time in the bath? Too much would dry it out but maybe 20 or 30 minutes past cooking time would soften the texture.

It's important to separate the temperature of the wood from the temperature of the smoke. You always want the wood smoldering at a hight temp ... 300 to 400°C. Lower than this and you produce fewer of the good flavored phenols and instead produce acrid-tasting compounds (acetic acid and formic acid, among others). Temperature of the smoke is controlled by how much it's allowed to cool on the way to way to the food. This very much affects the flavor; heavier, less volatile compounds will condense from their gaseous form at lower temperatures, and will no longer be able to penetrate the food. This is why in cold-smoked foods you won't get vanilla and clove notes as strongly as you do in hot-smoked foods. The phenols responsible for those flavors and big and heavy and drop out of gaseous form at cold-smoking temperatures. A lot of the art of smoking lies in controlling the humidity. Smoke from smoldering wood is very dry, and will tend to quickly dry out the food's surface. This prevents it from absorbing the important gaseous compounds. But if humidity is too high, the surface of the food will actually be wet, which results in the compounds being absorbed by the water layer and dripping off. The ideal humidity level is one that leads to moist and tacky surface. It's very hard to measure the humidity in a smoker with any reliability, so it usually has to be done by feel. Unless you have one of these. People are tempted to increase humidity by throwing water on the coals, but this is always a bad idea. It drops the temperature of the wood down into the bad-tasting range. Humidity needs to be added separately from the fire. Pans of water, or steam injection, etc.

Assuming your pan is laminated with stainless steel (vs. the older style tin lining) it can take all the heat you can throw at it. Put in on a restaurant burner cranked all the way, or toss it in a 600°F oven. It will be fine. And there are situations when that's exactly what you want to do. If it's tin, you do have to baby it, because it melts at a lower temp than what you'd traditionally preheat to for searing. Let the copper turn whatever colors its whims dictate. I've never heard of destructive corrosion there. Here's everything you need to know about the performance of copper (and most other cookware materials). This is one of the site's most useful resources.

What really matters is the glycemic index of the meal. Which isn't the same thing as the glycemic index of individual ingredients. French bread has just about the highest glycemic index of any food, but if you slather it with butter, which slows your body's digestion of the starches, the glycemic index drops way down. Do a google search for a glycemic index chart. Don't automatically avoid foods that are high; just make sure you balance them with a fair amount of fat and/or protein that will be consumed at the same time.

A thing to consider with tea is that is an herb. You can use it in all the ways you'd use herbs. Strong ones, anyhow. I've ground up lapsang souchong leaves and made a rub for them with salt and pepper, melted butter and some wine, and painted on the outside of meat before roasting. The aroma really sticks to the meat. It's not a generic smoky flavor ... it's that distinctive pine smoke and old saddle leather combination that reminds me of a cup of the tea. It works well with lamb or very grassy beef. It would probably be great on game.

I love drinking lapsang! Only in recent years discovered it could add smoke to meat (before that I discovered that it was less good for adding smoke to dessert).

For the mainstays, like knives and pans, I'd suggest getting good stuff that's inexpensive. You're not going to want to have to baby this stuff while you're learning basic skills. And you'll know when/if you want to trade up. At that point, you'll know why you want to trade up, so deciding what to get will be easier. There are plenty of chef's knives under $100 that are solid, properly shaped, capable of decent performance, fairly durable, and easy to maintain. With these you won't freak out if you make a mistake while cutting or learning to sharpen. The forschner knives are popular among restaurant cooks for these reasons. They're cheaper than most of the higher-end euro brands, and they out-perform most of them as well. But there are plenty of good choices, including some of the budget Japanese knives (I strongly recommend against most of the Japanese knives you find in chain stores in the U.S. ... they're terrible values).

I saw David Chang on TV eating a brick of dried ramen noodles like a candy bar.

Interesting about baking soda. There's a good wiki article on slaked lime. Also, please report back with the Cantonese word for Nixtamalization.

Good point. I'll amend that.

I'm talking about ethics, not health. I'm a carnivore, but am willing to go out of my way to reduce cruelty to animals. I consider steak a luxury food, so don't feel entitled to it at any price. That's an attitude that's going to be reflected in my posts here and in my blog.

I'll leave that experiment to someone else. For one thing, I'm interested in the responsible raising of livestock, so even though I don't have a lot of disposable income, I avoid cheaply-raised meat. I would rather eat steak less often and eat the good stuff. And I would much rather eat a cheap cut from well-raised steer than a rib-eye from one that's been tortured by mass-production. I'm not a zealot about it, but I do what I can, when I can. And when buying food that I consider special occasion food (like steak ... especially in this quantity) it's always going to be a time when I can.

In my part of the country there's no such thing as $7-$10/lb choice grade rib-eye. The choice rib-eyes that I've had cost more like $15/lb and were fine but not memorable. They would have been improved greatly by dry aging, but the only butchers I know who dry age sell prime meat exclusively. So there ends up being nothing to talk about ...

I just addressed this topic in some depth here, in a post titled "high steaks for cheapskates."

Is anyone using a compressor machine with spinning times under 20 minutes? That would be a requirement for me. 10 minutes would be even better. This is for a drawing temperature of -5°C. Capacity wouldn't have to be more than 2 quarts.

Cardamom! I substitute it for the cinnamon. Love it.

The kinds of spoilage bacteria that can lead to baby-poo smell are understood much less well than pathogens or pathogenic toxins. Some of them can reproduce in temperature ranges that kill all the relevant pathogenic organisms. It's rare, but it may be possible to do everything by the book in a low temperature cook and still get a bag of stank. But this is completely unrelated to health hazards like botulinum toxin. The presence of one doesn't tell you about the presence of the other. The organism that smells like poo can't harm you ... not that you'd be tempted to find out.

According to this more recent study, 5 minutes at 85°C should do the trick. Only the abstract is available for free. As always, beware free advice on lethal toxins ...

Time will have to tell if remote-control apps prove to be a real benefit. I'm not convinced, but am glad Anova and Nomiku are experimenting.

I probably wouldn't serve them to other people, out of paranoia, but I'd eat them. Botulinum toxin breaks down rapidly with high heat, and unless you did something odd (rolling the meat, binding pieces together with activa, piercing with a jaquard tenderizer) you can presume the inside of the meat to be sterile. You can also presume that you pasteurized the bejeezus out of the outside, so the only thing that could still live there would be spores. C. perfringens generally doesn't produce significant amounts of toxin before being eaten, so botulinum is the obvious thing to worry about. The toxin would accumulate on the surface, if anywhere, and it's not heat-stable. A quick solution would be to brown the meat by deep-frying very briefly, which would get to all the surfaces. A relatively quick blanching, as you suggested, could work. Here's info on time/temp for denaturing botox. I'm NOT recommending this. I'm not a bacteriologist, and who knows what I'm leaving out. But I'd probably go for it I were the only guinea pig. I hate throwing out food.