paulraphael

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.

If you like rib-eye, try chuck. Here's a post where I described a successful long cook. (I'm working on a blog post on this, with all the information compiled in one place)

I don't think you can hold lean / tender cuts of meat for a couple of hours without drying them out too much. Long cooking times work for tough cuts, especially if they're reasonably well marbled. Anything like a rib-eye is going to start going downhill shortly after it's cooked through. The silk purse / sow's ear approach works with true tough cuts of meat. These tend to be decently marbled even when cheap, and more importantly, they have plenty of collagen that can be broken down into gelatin over time. Tender cuts don't have this. After they're cooked, their only transformation is to get drier.

That temperature is too low for 48 hours. And 48 hours is too short even at 140°F. You're wildly overgeneralizing from your bad results. All you can conclude is that 48 hours at 136.5 gives lousy results. Which most of us could have told you to expect. If you try it at the times / temps people are suggesting here, you will not get the lousy results you describe. Not unless you're doing something wrong that's completely unrelated. Prime grade short ribs are not required (I've never used these). Supermarket short ribs have a ton of marbling and work fine. You may decide prefer a more conventional braised texture (from cooking higher / shorter) but there's nothing dry, chalky, or unchewable about well executed 72-hour short ribs.

72 hour short ribs are the most amazing I've ever had. 48 hour chuck can be amazing. Not a hint of mush or "saw dust" with either, if the temps are right. The MC books suggest 100 hours at 60°C for oxtail. But for a traditional braised texture, they suggest 70°C for 24 hours, which is practically the same as your time/temp.

I'm curious if anyone's had it cooked like a steak. Never heard of that ... could be interesting. I think my first attempt would be as at braising temps.

We can assume by looking at it that if it's indeed a pressure oven, it won't achieve anything like the pressures of a pressure cooker. A door the size of a microwave's would have to hold back more than a ton of force if you pressurized it to 1 bar. That door isn't burly enough. But even at some fraction of 1 bar, you would see a couple of advantages. First, the oven would be venting much less of the moisture released from the food. This, combined with the small volume of the oven, would lead to a very humid cooking environment. Second, the increase in boiling point of water would reduce the evaporative cooling at the surface of the food, at least somewhat. Both of these factors would lead to a wet-bulb temperature that's much closer to the dry-bulb temperature, when compared with a conventional oven. This would make most things cook faster and more predictably. I don't know about a 1-hour turkey. My closest frame of reference is poaching turkeys (I poach in court bouillon, then roast at high temperature). In 90 minutes a 16 pound turkey is about 90% cooked. That size bird would probably not fit in this oven. Poaching happens at a lower temperature but at 100% humidity, so it may be somewhat analogous to what goes on in a pressure oven.

How many bottles of water can you carbonate with one cartridge? And how would this thing work for non-standard bottles (we used a regular wine bottle to make fake champagne in the soda stream)?

rotuts, on 06 Aug 2014 - 12:37 PM, said: 'grain-fed' or 'grain finished' add a high proportion of fat to the ( end ) diet which is the point of grain feeding it gets deposited in the meat and the 'fat' pure pasture fed beef is much leaner This is true most of the time, but it's not necessarily so. Cattle can be fattened on grass. It just takes a long time and is expensive, so very few people do it. There are some people raising USDA prime beef in the northeast and finishing on grass. I haven't tried it.

Could it be a mis-named steam oven (like a cheap-o combi)?