paulraphael

I've been making the rounds over the last couple of months, and Lobster Place at Chelsea Market is the big winner. The quality is as high as Wild Edibles several years ago, but more consistent and a bigger selection. And the prices are great. I'm really impressed. Usually I buy whole fish when possible. But the steaks and fillets at LP all look extremely fresh and well taken care of. I'll be back a lot. I just wish they used the same sustainability tags that Wild Edibles uses. I try to make an effort to pay attention to that. Maybe there's a phone ap with up to date info. My last couple of trips to Wild Edibles has revealed more of the same. The place is completely down the tubes. Eataly also has some impressivel looking fish. I haven't bought any because the price is very high.

I use a regular propane torch from the hardware store, mostly for touching up the browning on roasts, and occasionally on desserts (browning meringue icing, caramelizing stuff, etc.). This startup by the cooking issues guys has a great product called the searzall. It converts much more of the flame's energy into radiant heat (which is what we use), and spreads it over a larger area. I haven't seen or used this thing. But I trust these guys, and looks like it removes many of the difficulties of using a plain torch. I'd suggest getting the torch they recommend in their FAQ. It's a somewhat more powerful one than the cheaper hardware store versions like mine. They demonstrate that it works much better with their product. That way if you ever decide to get a searzall, you'll already have an ideal torch for it. At the very least, get a torch with a regulator, so it will work when you tilt it upside down. Ones without regulators stop working when tipped after the cylinder is about half empty. And you'll almost always be tipping it to use it.

If you're doing a smoking step after SV, it's recommended to dry the meat in a warm oven before smoking. Smoke compounds cling best to a meat surface that's just moist enough to be tacky to the touch. Dryer than this and they don't stick. Wetter than this (likely after SV) and the compounds will go into solution in liquids that will just drip off. I think that whatever you do, to preserve the bark at least some of the reheat time would have to be in a dry oven. This kind of thing begs for a combi oven. But one of those requires a lot of begging.

It's going to be 100% humidity in there no matter what you do.

If you're talking tomato sauce, the trick is to find a brand of canned tomato that you like. A lot of us like Cento and Muir Glen tomatoes, which are pretty easy to find most places. You can get them whole or crushed, depending on the texture you like. The most basic sauce involves dicing an onion, sweating it in some olive oil, and then throwing in the canned tomato. Add fresh herbs if you have them and simmer briefly. Season with pepper (you probably won't need salt ... there's usually enough in the can). This is simple and delicious. It can be embellished any way you like. I usually add a bit of red wine, which I don't think is traditional, but I like the added tartness and complexity. Start to finish, a sauce like this is a 15 minute operation and you can piles of it easily.

I'm a fan of this brand partly because they're one of the few to use BPA-free cans. I think in general BPA is way-overhyped issue (you'll have to pry my polycarbonate nalgene bottles from my cold dead hands). But in canned foods, especially acidic ones like tomatoes, there's a chance for the levels of the chemical to get really high. They're also available at my local store, and as Weedy says, they're tasty.

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."