paulraphael

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.

I appreciate the dilemma this kind of thing poses for a company. They can’t say it’s ok to circulate anything. Gasoline, sulfuric acid, raw sewage, nitroglycerine: not ok. There’s no way they could come up with an exhaustive list of what not to put in there. But that’s not the same as saying nothing’s ok besides water. BTW, I personally don’t have any need to circulate other stuff. I’m not about to do a bionic turkey. I’m just curious about why they’re so restrictive after seeing how easily cleaned the unit is.

This one probably belongs in the No Duh file, but I decided to buy some chicken thighs that were already shrikwrapped and just throw them in the bath. I didn’t consider that the package was designed to be easily openable (most packages seem designed to violently resist opening, IME). Anyway, the predictable happened, and I had some chicken soup circulating for about 20 minutes. The good news is that the chicken didn’t suffer noticeably, and the circulator was almost effortless to clean. Kudos to Anova such a smart design. Which brings me the question, why do you think they’re so insistent that you only circulate water? People circulate all kinds of stuff with the PolyScience lab units, including oil. I’m thinking it’s either 1) liability paranoia or 2) the patented low-water indicator could freak out in non water-based solutions. If it’s not one of these two, it’s hard to imagine what it could be. The Anova’s actually an easier unit to clean … there’s no closed-off pump unit.

The vita prep will probably pulverize the vanilla seeds and disperse them invisibly. interesting, but not required. Otherwise, I think a whisk or immersion blender will work fine. I doubt that you’d incorporate less air with a vita prep. A whisk should be fine for anything that doesn’t require extreme shear forces to dissolve. Some gums need a blender, and some are probably helped by a really fast one. But creme anglaise is pretty low maintenance.

I think the more significant issue raised by the paper involves cooking time. At the same temperature, increased time seems to reduce juiciness as it increases tenderness. I'm not 100% convinced of the universality of this, or at least of it universally happening to a significant degree. I wish they'd used a lower temperature range. And I'd like to see the experiment repeated with some different cuts. I made two chuck steaks a few days ago, at 55C. I pulled one at 24 hours and the other at 48. I thought the 48 hour one was as juicy, and (predictably) more tender. Granted, this was a long shot from scientific, but it raises some questions for me.

Has anyone seen this discussion, on a paper that concludes tenderness and juiciness are somewhat mutually exclusive? The paper is unfortunately expensive to view without subscription. And was performed at higher temperature ranges than what most of us would probably prefer.

See above ... it's actually disolved salt. Undisolved salt can't do anything to metal.