paulraphael

My Anova went a little weird on me last night. I was cooking in a cooler at 59°C. I stopped it at one point to change the temp to 58. It had been rock steady at 59, but I looked up and noticed it was dipping to 57.9. Then 57.8. When it got down to 57.6, I realized it just wasn't heating at all, even though the circulator was on, and the screen showed everything running. I restarted it, and it almost immediately came up to 58 and stabilized. No issues for the last 2 hours of my cooking. So ... it seems to have crashed when I paused it to reset the temperature. Has anyone else experienced this?

Olive oil when I want it to taste like olive oil, or very refined safflower oil when I want something that's neutral or can handle high heat. I do a lot of sous-vide cooking of proteins, which means browning food as quickly as possible in a hot pan. I find olive oil unsuitable for this. I don't get scorched oil, because I can get food in fast enough to cool it, but the pan frequently goes up in flames from oil vapors carried up in the splatter. This never happens when I use more refined oils. There are many high heat oils that just as good as safflower. I made my choice based on the quality and price of products where I shop. Besides heat tolerance, I often don't want an oil with an assertive flavor. Olive oil has one, and so doesn't go with everything. I don't usually cook in butter when searing. I'll use a neutral oil, and then if finishing in the pan, turn the heat down and add butter. Baste with it while it browns. Much better butter flavor than you can get from clarified butter.

Water 100% Carrots 15% Leeks, whites and 1” of greens 15% Celery 10% Tomato, seeded 7% Parsley 1.5% Chives 0.3% Garlic 0.2% Coriander seeds 0.15% Black Peppercorns 0.15% Star Anise 0.07% Cloves 0.05% Bay Leaf 0.01% Next time I'm going to put in mushrooms, probably 7%, and a bit of white wine. This could be really freely interpreted and still be delicious.

It's a nice chart, and I'm wondering how well it corresponds with other people's experience with salmon ... like the "too toothy" range of temperatures. I haven't heard that elsewhere.

Dave Arnold and Co. at cookingissues.com made some remarks about SV salmon that I haven't seen elsewhere. In their chart they found different ranges where they liked the texture, separated by ranges that had flaws. I don't know how much of this is quirks of their tasting panel, or of the variety / sample of fish they used. I'm looking at other people's recommendations and they're all over the place. No comment yet from me because I've yet to try it. I'm hoping to get really close on the first try, because the only salmon I really like (culinarily and ecologically) costs a bunch.

You have a lot of leeway with the amount of water. No matter what, you want to use less than you would with a conventional stock, because as you said, there won't be any evaporation. But beyond that it's up to you depending on how strong you want the stock to be. As a starting point, I'd suggest the same quantities of ingredients you'd use for a conventional stock, except for the water. Base that quantity on the final yield you expect. In other words, If a recipe normally gives you 2L of stock, start with 2L water. You should end up with roughly 2L stock, depending on how much liquid the ingredients contribute and absorb. And the strength of flavor should be similar, although the flavor profile will be different, and the aromas should be stronger. I find the stock recipes in the MC series to be designed for very strong stocks. I'm making stocks more for everyday use so I use more water. I get amazing flavor, but at conventional concentrations. Nickrey is right that a pressure cooker is the better tool for most stocks. SV is ideal for more delicate flavors, like vegetable and seafood stocks. The sv veggie stock I made last week is amazingly vibrant, and was pretty easy. Next time I may use the slicing blade on the food processor to make shorter work of it. These stocks only need to cook for 3 hours.

Some more cooking time puzzles. I picked up some Berkshire pork chops for a lunch tomorrow. I'm used to loin chops, but they had some beautifully marbled shoulder/butt steaks. The butcher told me I had to try those ... that the flavor was even better than the loin. I'm used to butt as a brazing cut, and assumed they'd require a long cook. But she said she cooks them up fast on the grill and they're as tender as you could ever hope for. I remain skeptical. And she didn't know much about sous-vide. I've got them in a 59°C bath right now, and plan to try them after 2 hours. If still tough I'll go for 6, or go overnight. Has anyone tried this cut before? The only thing I've SV'd is a similar quality kurobuta chop from the short loin, which was predictably tender as soon as it came to temp. I noticed that Doug Baldwin gives times of 7 hours for chops from the rib end, and 10 hours for chops from the sirloin end. I find this curious, since with conventional cooking I don't treat these cuts so differently. Thoughts?

Do you not use Nathan's tables because you found them unreliable, or because they're harder to use? According to my comparison, if the MC tables are accurate then the SV Dash times will work. They'll just be overkill, by a lot. But if the SV Dash times are accurate, the MC tables have serious problems. Which I'd think we would have heard people screaming about by now, right?

Ok, I have a new contender: Delapietra's Gourmet Meats, on Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn Heights/downtown Brooklyn. I called several shops, including Heritage Meats, Otomanelli & Sons, and Florence about dry aging a chuck roll for me. Everyone hemmed and hawed about it ... either they couldn't get the cut in the quality I wanted, or they had reasons (dubious) why it was a bad idea. Rob Delapietra said no problem, that they have prime chuck subprimals in all the time, and that they'd dry age any portion that I wanted for as long as I wanted. And when he found out my plan (steaks, sous-vided for 48 hours) he said "that's gonna be freakin' amazing." I went in and discussed the options and the yield and everything else, and he cut for me while I watched. No charge for the aging (I payed up front for fresh weight) and he gave me a very friendly discount for buying a big piece. The meat itself looked excellent ... not insanely well marbled but well above average. And the aging cabinet looks like a very clean, custom installation. Not just an improvised corner of the walk-in, which you see in a lot of shops. They're about a 5 minute walk from the borough hall station, where quite a few trains stop. Definitely not the most convenient location for me, but reasonable for special purchases. I can't wait to try these steaks at the end of June.

Has anyone heard about this high-frequency induction technology? It allows induction to be used with non-ferrous metals, including copper. Aparently it's been around since 2009, but I can't tell if it exists in any products. The wikipedia article on induction mentions it, but says little except that the components are "relatively bulky." Edited to add: this chowhound thread suggest a product exists in Japan. There's some info on it.

Also keep in mind that those ideal temperature for the maillard reactions are the temperatures of the food surface, not the pan surface. The food is going to be rapidly cooling itself while searing even if the pan temperature itself doesn't drop. All that sizzling you hear is water rapidly evaporating from the surface and bubbling through the fat. And there's the conductivity of the pan surface, the conductivity/convection of the cooking medium (oil) and the conductivity of the food itself, each of which is less than 100% efficient.

What are your experiences with SV Dash? I just downloaded it. The concept is great, but I can't explain the gigantic discrepancies between its recommended times and the tables in Modernist Cuisine. For example, for a 1" thick steak brought to 54C in a 55C bath, starting at 5C, the MC table predicts 34 minutes and SV Dash predicts 55 minutes. Over 60% off.

The ideal temperature is probably around 450°F. But! Unless you have 10s of thousands of BTU/hr pouring into your pan from a commercial range, or a fantastically heavy and conductive can (like maybe a griddle you need help picking up) your pan is going to cool significantly when you drop a piece of food on it. In order to keep the pan up into the ideal range for searing, in most circustances you have to start higher. Chris's rule for using the smoke point of the oil might work for you. If you have a weaker range and a big slab of meat, you may have to go higher, which means pouring the oil in the pan and then dropping the food in before the oil gets too hot.

I don't know about shielding, but they could probably design something like the balanced connectors used in audio. The design cancels out any electromagnetic interference.

What are people's favorite temperatures for wild salmon? And has anyone found a good way to cook SV with the skin on, for crisping up afterwards? I notice the approaches in MC all advocate removing the skin and cooking separately.

Interesting. I use the ziplock freezer bags regularly at 85C, and once at 90. Never had a leak. Maybe there are conisistency issues from one batch to the next? One possibility is to to use the open bag method. Let the water seal the bag, and secure the tops of the bags to the edge of the container or to some kind of rack with a bulldog clip.

I'm looking at a picture on their website. The dasher and the bowl come off, yes? I don't know if this is different (or better in any way) that what you do now, but I grab a couple 1qt takeout containers and a couple of silicone spatulas and keep them handy. I pull the dasher out and with a spatula scrape all the ice cream off and into the bowl. Gravity helps. The bowl is cold, so there's no worry of anything melting in there. Then I pull the bowl over to the takeout containers and use the spatulas to scoop the ice cream into them. One of the spatulas is concave, so it holds a lot. The other one is flat and is better for scraping the last of the stuff off the bowl. I guess this still amounts to scooping stuff out, so maybe it doesn't help. Unfortunately I don't know of an easier or more automated way. Except ... who's eating all this ice cream? Maybe someone can be conscripted into duty?

Is it difficult to get out because the ice cream is hard? Do you know your drawing temperature (the ice cream temperature when it's done freezing?) Generally the ideal drawing temperature is -5°C / 23°F. A mix designed to have good texture at serving temperature (about 5C lower than this) should be pretty soft at this temp ... not much harder than soft serve. The solution might be to spin for a shorter time, or to increase the freezing point suppression of your mix. Getting it out of the machine should be easy!

That was my point. I know there are a million counter-examples. I still think that polish sends a different message than tarnish ... based on what I see most often. And I personally prefer the tarnish. It's all just esthetics.

http://www.oldwillknottscales.com has a great selection and prices and service. You can easily narrow down your choices with the tools on the site.

The bottom of the wok and the oil in it get hot, but they don't have the heat capacity to store very much energy. And a home stove can't replenish the energy very quickly. So when you dump a bunch of meat into the bottom of the wok, it sucks most of the stored energy right out of it. The meat gets hot, but not hot enough, and your left with steaming meat on a warm wok. It's not for nuthin that chinese restaurants have 100,000+ but/hr burners.

I bet it would be an improvement over my unmodified burner. But not such an improvement that my pseudo stir-frying would be considered the real thing.

Kenji at Seious eats posted a review. It looks like a heat focuser. The bottom of the wok will get blazing hot for a good sear, but there won't be enough energy to maintain that heat, except with very small batches, as everyone's saying.

Sure, impressions can be wrong. I've seen restaurant kitchens in Paris and NYC where some poor worker had to polish all the pans every night. And I have a close friend who was both a serious cook and a compulsive polisher. I laughed at him, but he ignored me (he finally stopped when mom heard him polishing over the phone. "David," she said, "stop polishing your pans and go out and make some friends.")

That's exactly right, and is one of the points made in that study I cited earlier. They basically said, "here's what little we know about some of this stuff." It's surprising we don't hear more random spoilage stories from long, low-temperature cooks. I may add a blanching step just as a matter of routine insurance.