paulraphael

It can even be confusing going from one part of the U.S. to another. Different names for the same things. Before then internet it must have been worse. At least here the differences are mostly just regional naming conventions. If you go from one region of Italy to another the actual cuts are different. And they're different in France and in Germany and just about everywhere else. You have different cuts of the same muscles, sometimes with similar names, and different names for identical cuts. It's a mess. I bought beef once in Rwanda from a butcher whose French was only a little better than mine. I eventually figured out the cut by pointing to different parts of my own carcas and getting him to nod.

Heated up the leftovers today and took a pic ... not a great one but i was hungry. This should give some idea of texture. 60°C, pink, and we didn't need knives.

You can get whatever result you want with pressure cooked risotto. Just like with traditional risotto, the main variables are rice variety, liquid ratio, and cooking time. The tricky part is that you can't see what's going on in the pot. It's not quite as simple to compensate as you go. Unless I've really nailed a recipe for a particular rice type, I'll usually pressure cook for a couple of minutes less than my best estimate. This gets the risotto most of the way there, and I can finish conventionally after depressurizing. A couple of minutes of cooking/stirring softens the rice some more and make it less soupy; doing so while adding liquid makes it more soupy. Then correct the seasonings, stir in cheese, butter etc. at the end.

Yes, but the question is how much. You can calculate the R-value of insulation by measuring the surface temperature of the vessel relative to the ambient air temperature, and comparing to the temperature differential between inside and outside the vessel. The higher the R-value, and the lower the temp. variation between in and out, the less warm you'd find the outside of the vessel. If the cooler were filled with 1/2" closed cell foam, which has very high r-value, I'd expect the warmth of the cooler on the outside to barely perceptibly warm to the touch. At least with a 140F cook, which is only about 70F warmer than the air in the room. I haven't done the math, so I could be wrong about it. Maybe it's well insulated and I should expect it to get as warm as it does. If that's the case, though, a 30 quart cooler with that much warm surface area makes for a pretty big radiator. It's definitely burning up some watts. Imagine the light bulb it would take to warm up a big cooler that much.

Thanks Darienne. I'm just glad the book includes the breakdowns. Not really trying to clone a clif bar, but I'd like to be able to work with her recipes without having to do all the math myself. On another note, does anyone remember the original power bars? I've had the misfortune of trying to eat them in cold weather, miles from other food. I think the main ingredient is fiberglass.

Kenneth, can you elaborate a bit on your testing and what you found? I don't have a meter and haven't done any. I was a bit surprised when doing a long cook in a cooler at 60°C that the outsides of the cooler were pretty warm. I keep a layer of reflectix on the water, and have a lid that's cut with a pretty tight fit. The lid's also insulated with spray foam. I have no idea how good the insulation in the cooler itself is. It's just a $30 coleman.

Do the recipes in the book include nutritional information? People eat bars for different reasons, and I find that some are suitable for one purpose while being useless for another. I'm kind of a clif bar addict but have developed some digestive problems and am starting to suspect the soy isolate. If this turns out to be the case I'll play with making my own with other ingredients. This book looks like it might have some good starting points.

I mean the efficiency of the whole system, which comes down to how much of the electric power ends up heating the food vs. heating the house. I imagine the biggest factor is the insulation of the container, but even so, I have no idea if a circulator maintaining temperature in a cooler averaging 10 watts or 200.

The trouble is that most cuts go across multiple muscles. There's a butchering method that's basically disection, where you actually separate everything along the seams down to the individual muscles, but this isn't a traditional or common method.

Chuck eye is great! Delapietra's is dry aging 8lbs of it for me right now ... going to cut into steaks, cook s.v. for 48 hours, and bring on a trip to maine where we're cooking for a crowd. It's like rib-eye for 12 people for $60.

Maybe let them know you're posting about your, um, positive customer service experience on egullet, and your blog that's read by millions. Phrase it in a way that's more carrot than stick. It might encourage them to offer reasonable service to everyone.

A butcher in my neighborhood is selling "Beef Chuck Tenderloin."

Has anyone plugged their circulator into a power meter over the course of a long cook? It would be interesting to see how efficient they are, and to compare different water containers.

Cuisinart does a desperately uneven job, unless you go all the way to pulp (but I use it, with the slicing blade, for stocks). I think that for even cooking an onion should be cut reasonably evenly. Better than a food processor, but not better than any of the techniques in this thread. I'd be willing to put this to the test, but haven't done so. Going for extreme evenness is for presentation, or else for fun. Or spiritual edification.

I assume so. But I can imagine a couple of issues. 1) if power goes out during that initial heating, will it trip a fuse and shut the whole thing down? 2) if the the UPS is limited to, say, 500 watts, will it have a fuse or breaker that will trip if you go beyond this, even when you still have a.c.?

Maybe. Do we know if anyone's done a blind comparison? It's amazing how many of cooking's sacred cows have only been scrutinized recently, if ever. It's easy to imagine some kinds of dishes where evenness of an onion would matter to the flavor. But I'd bet against the chef who thinks he or she will taste the difference in a stock, sauce base, soup or other typical setting.

"First order derivative" sounds like finance, and makes me want to hide. I get that even cutting is important for even cooking, but I think that for onions all the methods mentioned here are good enough for even cooking. Edited to add: I've read Ruhlman's book, and the couple that followed it. I enjoyed them. More than his recent writing.

Perfect dice only matters in dishes that have a geometric component, and where precise presentation is important. If you have tweezers in your kitchen, or more than one saucing spoon, then you're probably not laughing at this description. Or maybe you get bored during prep and enjoy a knife skills challenge. I think it's handy that your can choose techniques from different parts of the anal / fast continuum. Whatever your inclinations, the OP makes a good point. Horizontal cuts all the way up an onion are both slow AND sloppy.

I like this kind of fine slice too. Some Japanese-trained guys I know do it this way almost always. They think little cubes are unnatural looking. But the original question was about dice. I don't have a problem with dice.

If you can't fix it, maybe you can shame them into repairing it for a reasonable price. If they really insist on $85 plus shipping to look at a defect, that's a serious strike against the company.

The ones I've had in the past mentioned a lag of some number of milliseconds. It never made my Mac blink. But, mine used a kind of power supply which I think is common in less expensive units .... one that doesn't generate a true sine wave pattern alternating current. It makes a square wave, which may be hard on the power supplies of some electronics. My monitors would buzz and flicker whenever the UPS kicked in, and I had two expensive professional graphics monitors die early deaths in the years I had the UPS. I can't prove causation, but it was suspicious enough that I eventually got rid of the thing. It turns out that most of the power outages/lags around here are so brief that they don't shut down my computer even without the UPS. Someday I might consider a UPS for for the cooker, but I'd be inclined to check with Anova about the specs of any model before buying it. BTW, my UPS was by APC ... a pretty good brand. But it was not one of their higher end models.

I realized this is unclear. What I mean is that if you just need a rough dice, do it the conventional way, like in the image I posted on the left, but skip the horizontal cuts. It works fine, but you'll get some long and uneven shards.

Thank you Caren. I suspected there were hydrocolloid gurus hiding in the shadows. Do you know much about ice cream stabilizer blends in general?

It would make sense to check the specs of the individual UPS, and then see what the circulator manufacturer says. But I suspect most UPSs click over in a tiny fraction of a second. How much does a decent UPS cost than supply a kilowatt? Granted, these circulators are usually asking for much less than that, but you don't want to trip a breaker when the circulator's doing its initial heating. And I don't know what happens if the circulator does ask for more than the UPS batter can provide.

I wonder about a software solution that uses a desktop computer in your house to act as a go-between. This would be a 3rd party software project. And maybe not so easy to set up ... you'd have to navigate firewall settings and all that. If someone could do it simply, I'd be intrigued. I'm less intrigued by the prospect of teenage hackers from Kyrgyzstan giving me salmonella.