paulraphael

At 150F / 65.5C, the core will be pasteurized before it reaches final temperature. There's no required hold time. This is with a water bath temp. of 66.5C:

There's no lysteria on the interior of the meat. Pasteurizing to the core is a good idea for cook/chill or if you're serving anyone who's immune compromised, but I wouldn't bother if eating right away. If you need to pasteurize the core at 140F you have to hold for 20 minutes. Here's a graph from SV dash (water bath temp. 61C). I arbitrarily chose 20mm for the thickness.

You can safely hold it that long at that temperature, but not deliciously. It will be losing moisture to the bag the whole time ... a slow leak. Pink and pasteurized, but dry. For tender cuts, in general, I try not to hold more than an hour or so beyond cooking time. Less if I can get away with it. The drying process is continuous. If your cooking temperature is below 55C / 131F, you also have to be concerned about pathogen growth, because you're below the range where pasteurization is guaranteed. General guidelines are to keep the refrigerator to table (or fridge to fridge) times under four hours if you're cooking below pasteurization, but this is quite conservative. If you include another step that pre-pasteurizes the surface of an intact piece of meat (dipping the bag in boiling water for 2 minutes, etc.) you can go longer safely. But you still need to be concerned about dryness.

The way to guarantee safety with horizontal cuts is hold the onion with your hand flat on the top. That way if you're overzealous and the knife goes all the way through, you won't be in its path. It's also good technique-wise to use a long, drawing slice, which will allow you to use very little pressure. If you have to push hard even when drawing the blade, it's too dull to use safely.

Sorry, if that was something shot for this discussion I didn't realize. It looked like one of the many technique videos from the web, and I thought it was just being linked.

Videos like that are impressive on first glance because of the speed. It's when you pause them and take a look at the aftermath you can see the skills of the person. It doesn't take much to machete a vegetable into a million chunks of completely different sizes and shapes. There's nothing wrong with this if you're doing something that requires little precision, like putting the onions into a stock or sauce... but it makes for a lousy technique demo. If you want to show a skill, show it slowly. Then show it fast if you want to impress, but be honest and zoom in on the result (which is what prep is actually about).

The science of this is pretty complex and depends in large part on the size of the molecules in question. Salt molecules are very small and diffuse easily through cell membranes. Fat molecules are large and don't seem to do so at all. This is why brining works as advertised, but confit does not. There's no difference in taste between something cooked in flavorful fat and something with the fat slathered on afterwards.

Yes! I found it a couple of hours after making that post. Haven't put it to the test yet. I tried another one published by a New Zealand organization, but it seemed mostly relevant to fish available in that corner of the world. The NOAA has probably the most comprehensive site. I wrote to them; they said they're working on an ap.

I'm guessing it's an east coast cultural thing. Other stuff in NYC has always leaned toward chi-chi, but we've been a Gimme a Cup a Cawfee, paper-cup-on-the-street blue-colar-Joe town for a long time. It also took a long time for decent beer to show up.

After many trips to Stumptown, Joe, Intelligentsia, and the various 9th Streets, I think it's safe to say NYC coffee has arrived. A decade or so behind the west coast, but some things are worth waiting for. I'm suspicious of anyone's adamant favorite from among these places. The variation from week to week or batch to batch at any one of them seems greater to me than the variation from one shop to the next. They're all at that level.

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.