paulraphael

I can think of a couple of additives to play with for the purees. This is just theory; I haven't tried any of it. One is low methoxy or low methoxy amidated pectin. The other is xanthan gum. I'd try adding to the milk you use in the mashed potatoes (the pectins would require this; they need calcium to activate). These thickeners are freeze-thaw stable and don't exhibit synerisis, which is the official name for liquids weeping out of a gel. My guess is that potatoes separate after freezing because because potato starch isn't freeze-thaw stable, and that potato starch-thickened gels will exhibit synerisis after thawing but not before. Maybe getting some other thickener in there will help. But I wouldn't bet too much on it. Another thing to try (easy since you have a sous-vide setup) is to retrograde/set the starch when you cook the potatoes you plan to puree. There's a thread on that around here somewhere. I suppose there's a chance that this will reduce synerisis after freezing. One thing to try before messing around with thickeners is to talk to a rep at TIC gums or Kelco. They have experts who give guidance to food industry people. There may be a concoction with a name like MashMaxFreezePro9000 ... and if so they'll probably send you a free sample.

I bet a self-cleaning oven would return an enameled cast iron piece to brand new condition. (take the knob off)

Blether, I don't agree about the uselessness of enameled cast iron. Yeah, it's limited. I would only want it for dutch ovens. But these are spectacular for braises (the thermal mass evens out the cycles of the oven), and the non-reactivity of the material makes it my only cookware that goes from fridge to stove. I do most of my braises sous-vide now, but for big batches of soup/stew that i feed on for a week at a time, I can't imagine anything better. As far as sticking ... I'm all for it. The things I make in this kind of cookware brown first and deglaze later. If the fond doesn't stick, its much harder to separate the oil. If you really need non-stick, there's teflon. Once every three months I make an egg or omelet for someone, and the $20 teflon restaurant pan sees some action.

Standard abrasive cleaner with bleach, like ajax or comet. Will make short work of it and won't damage the enamel (the enamel is hard as rock ... there's very little in the kitchen that will scratch it, and probably nothing that will react with it. These cleaners have chlorine bleach, so gloves aren't a bad idea, and if you're sensitive to it make sure there's ventilation. If you don't want to deal with chlorine, you can use a non-bleach abrasive like bon-ami. This won't be as tough on the stains, so you'll need more elbow grease.

Word to the wise about spray foam: call the manufacturer's tech support before buying, to make sure it will work in a sealed environment. I have a mess on my hands with some CRC minimally expanding foam. It will not cure without exposure to plenty of air. This caveat was not at all clear on the labelling ... I had to get a chemist in tech support on the phone to find out. She advised throwing the whole thing out (fears that uncured foam could somehow ooze and come in contact with food. I've drilled a bunch of air holes around the side to see if I can get it to fully cure. We'll see.

Question for the OP: who do you imagine the book is for, and how do you imagine they'll use it?

I didn't see him calling it a cookbook. This alone is an important difference. Some thoughts on that truism, "Write about things you know and have experience with. Period"... whether you put it in bold or not, I think it's a dubious proposition. Some of the most important writing has been on topics the author had no experience with. Theoretical physics, rationalist philophy, and virtually all history, to name some of the more obvious examples. What's the fundamental problem with illuminating ideas and raising questions for future exploration? It may not be as practical as cookbook, but it sounds at least as interesting.

Old question ... rationalism vs. empiricism. I don't think a theoretical book is fundamentally a problem if it's presented as such. The question becomes: is there a market for this book? I don't have any idea. Publishers would probably have plenty of opinions.

That makes sense, but I suspect it's not so simple. Dave and Nils at Cooking Issues are as smart about this stuff as anyone, and if getting a Fagor and Iwatani to produce the same results as the KR was just a matter of regulating the heat, that would have been the end of the story. Unfortunately they never followed up on the post. So we have their initial observation, and a hypothesis, but nothing else to go on.

The recommended method in Modernist Cuisine is to SV first, then cook briefly in a warm oven to dry the surface, and then smoke. This is based on a traditional German method that primes the meat to efficiently absorb smoke. Worth a try, considering Myhrvold's BBQ gold medals. Edited to add: what Steve said. Looks like he's put it to good use ...

This 2009 post in Cooking Issues demonstrated that some pressure cookers make better stock than others. http://www.cookingissues.com/2009/11/22/pressure-cooked-stocks-we-got-schooled/#more-2561 Multiple rounds of blind testing showd that the Kuhn Rikon, which vents very little steam, made the best stock. Conventional stock came in second place, and stock made with jiggle-valve style pressure cookers came in last. These seemed to vent the most steam. I have no experience with pressure cookers, and am having trouble getting a sense of what other cookers work similarly to the Kuhn rikons. I'd like an alternative, since the 8 and 12 quart kr cookers cost a fortune. To obscure things a bit, I just found a Cooks Illustrated article on pressure cookers, which rated a Fagor duo much more highly than a KR. I wouldn't normally give this magazine any weight compared with Cooking Issues, but they measured evaporative loss, and found the kr lost more. It looks like Fagor has many different model lines ... Maybe some are different from the model tested by Cooking Issues. Any thought? Does anyone know of a 10 or 12 quart pressure cooker that vents minimally (like the KR) but for less money? Any specific experience with the Fagor Duo?

I don't know ... that's a good point. I guess when I use the oven it's usually at 170 or 180.

Has anyone done this? My oven is often busy and too hot when I need to warm plates. But if there's a tub full of water between 120 and 185F, either left over or still cooking something, why not drop the plates in? pluck them out with tongs / silicone hot pad, wipe dry, and presto.

Ahhh, ok, thanks. I missed your earlier post on the trehalose. That's an interesting application for it. Re: rotovap ... I've been coveting one for years. Ruben is right that it's not necessary. But you could say the same thing about ice cream ...

I'm interested in the foam less to prevent condensation than to prevent energy waste.

That’s a cool setup. I’d like to fill the lid with foam, partly because it’s got to improve efficiency of the thing, at least a little. And also because I’ll have a fairly thin edge of lid along the outside of the cutout, and I’m guessing the foam filling will provide some reinforcement. And reduce the sharp edges.

Jo, I’m just curious about the reasons for trehalose in the recipe. It’s a big wild card; I don’t see anything in the standard ice cream literature about it. Since almost everything effects the texture of ice cream, especially sugars, it’s really hard to troubleshoot a recipe when there’s such an unknown quantity. So naturally, my first question is if the trehalose is necessary. It would be easy to get a creamy texture, and whatever sweetness level you want with a blend of more conventional sugars. I’m assuming you have some pretty strong reason for specifying the trehalose, and I’m wondering what it might be. Re: increasing the cream … the proportion of cream is already very high. This is at the upper ends of richness among recipes I’ve seen.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of problems with high temps in coolers. I'm mostly getting it for long cooks, which would be proteins at low temps, but I didn't think a cooler would be bothered by 185F. What problems did you have? As far as the opening/closing, current plan is to just disconnect the hinges. I may experiment with a sheet of reflectix on the water, to see if that reduces condensation. I'm guessing it won't, but who knows, and I have a big roll of it to play with.

Ok, I just figured out the deal on trehalose. It's even less sweet than sucrose. This means that to achieve a given level of sweetness you need to use a ton of it—double the quantity of sucrose. Makes sense then that it would make ice cream soft. I see it being marketed as healthy, but I have trouble understanding how something that encourages you to double your sugar intake could be healthy. Popular health lit loves sugar fads ... alternately idolizing and demonizing different forms of sugar. But the differences once they're in your body are extremely small. There's very little metabolism involved before it's all just glucose. The only real health problems from sugar concern eating too much of it, so I'd be wary of this stuff.

A lot's been mentioned about this, but I'm starting a new thread, since the topic doesn't really fit under Cooking or under a specific brand of circulator. Anyone want to share tips? I just got a 30 quart coleman performance cooler, and a can of non-expanding foam ... I'd like to hear more war stories before diving in with a jigsaw.

Jo, can you fill us in a bit about trehalose? It's your most unconventional ingredient, and seems like a wild card in terms of its freezing point suppression and other structural effects. Are you using the condensed milk for its particular flavor? The general formula for making ice cream harder is either less sugar overall, or a higher percentage of sucrose vs. monosacharides. Professor wikipedia says tremolose is a disaccharide (2 glucoses) but that may not tell the whole story. Also I don’t know just how condensed condensed milk is, so the total milk solids are another wild card. But I’m guessing you’re right that the the graininess comes from too many milk solids.

Has anyone seen a similar evaluation of butter poaching? This is a technique Thomas Keller used a lot. Eventually he replaced the giant pot of beurre monté with butter in the sous-vide bags. But experiments ... real ones and my own .. suggest you don't infuse any butter flavor into proteins. I've SV'd steaks with melted or mounted cultured butter in the bags, hoping for the best. I didn’t do any kind of blind testing, but did a lot of eating, and really couldn’t detect any butter flavor. Which raises another question: if you’re cooking protein in ziplock bags, and want some liquid to displace the air, what are the best options? Assume you’re not specifically making a braise. You just want liquid for conduction, with a minimum worry of osmotically leaching more than necessary from the meat, little risk of curing or excessive tenderizing, and ideally, something wouldn’t interfere with making a pan sauce from the bag juices. Thoughts?

Interestingly—shockingly even—I saw some pretty good looking fish at Whole Foods in Uniion Square yesterday. I've always found their East Coast fish departments an embarrassment, but this looked promising. Some whole, farm-raised branzino on sale for around $10 a pound looked the most promising. A lot of the fish looked pretty beat, but the fact that some looked good is an epic improvement.

Wild Edibles has been my favorite source for many years. Starting a couple of years ago, I've noticed what looks like a pretty dramatic quality decline. Most of the fish looks a full day older than what I remember. The cut fish looks the worst ... often quite dry and ragged on the surface. The whole fish are better, but still only occasionally have the wet gloss and clear, convex eyes that most of the fish used to have. Now when I go in, there's typically only one or two kinds of whole fish, and maybe one kind of fillet that looks good. And it's usually farmed varieties. The wild fish tend to look worse. Has anyone else noticed this? Where are people finding great fish these days? I used to impressed with A Lobster Place as well. I haven't been able to check them out lately, since they're pretty far out of the way for me. I'm potentially interested in anyplace in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

Re: tenderness and juiciness being mutually exclusive. My girlfriend saw that post over my shoulder and was afraid it was cry for relationship advice.