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Kim, Not fiddling at all. Here's the recipe... http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/11/turkey-porchetta-food-lab-recipe.html Basicly,...butterfly a turkey breast... make a sage/garlic/salt/peppercorn schmear and coat the slab of breast...wrap the breast in the skin that covered it (plus the skin from a drumstick)...truss it..bake at about 280F...when the internal temp hits 145 take it out of the oven and brown the skin in a pan with 1/8th inch oil (takes about 5 or 8 min of turning with tongs). Rest x 10 min. While resting, deglaze the browned bits in the pan with chicken or turkey stock...season with s/p..and thicken with Wondra.

Barilla no-boil lasagna sheets (brilliant product, thin good texture) Thought about tortillas but I didn't trust them to hold up boiling in liquid.

Mexican lasagna with chorizo, jalapeno, tomato, queso fresca. Cheese on top was queso hebra which looks and feels like mozzarella, and melts, but then gets leathery with continued baking. Que sabia? Tasted good anyway.

I'm not sure about the length of time to reach 120F, sounds very long to me. Factors to consider... If present, Botulism spores won't be deep in the meat, they'll be on top of it more or less, so they will get hot very quickly....in minutes to reach 120 in the SV bag. As long as the SVd bag remains sealed after cooking, the chilling and the second cook in the oven will be of an already pasteurized butt...and therefore no risk. According to the CDC there were fewer than 200 cases of botulism in 2012 and many of those were from home-canned and stored foods. I saw no mention of a sous vide-related case http://www.cdc.gov/nationalsurveillance/PDFs/Botulism_CSTE_2012.pdf

Fantastic meal RRO! I've missed seeing your food. I've done that porchetta SV in the past and then finished it in a pan of hot oil to crisp up the skin. Its a little better that way, but I didn't have the three hours it takes to cook it SV so I did it old school in a low oven.

Sound like duck leg confit, but with turkey. With duck the texture is firm but not rubbery or corned-tasting. If I salt beef or pork pre SV I do get a sense of cured meat, but not as blatant as a nitrate cure.

Turkey porchetta from a Kenji Alt recipe.

True enough. Certainly much more than an order of magnitude...more like 5 or 6, I'd bet. But botulism isn't the only food poisoning and who wants to get sick if a little good technique will prevent it?

If the meat is kept sealed in its sv bag and was cooked at a pasteurizing temp it will be safe until the bag is opened. At that point it can begin to grow whatever might've been introduced when the bag was opened. Easy solution is to do separate SV bags of meat for each day. How dangerous is the current method? Certainly you are alive and well, so the odds of food poisoning would seem to be low. But low probability things still happen given enough time.

Kim, pretty stuff! Whats in the cheese spread?

I tried the PC version. It was OK. Traditional was better. Adding base sped up the reaction, but even a tiny bit broke down the pectin into an onion slime. Not attractive or tasty. I'm pretty satisfied with the stove top or oven methods.

The bug isn't going to grow in an open container. The less oxygen, the better for the bug. Other aerobic bacteria can help out by consuming O2 and reducing the environment so anaerobes can grow in closed but not airless containers. A far better precaution is controlling the temperature..keep it cold or keep it hot. Then you need not worry about how much O2 is there and whether Clostridia can grow.

Love this! Why not use xanthan to thicken it and cut out the chilling and re-blending?

It requires an oxygenless environment to grow. An evacuated food saver bag will suffice.

A nice casserole, that.

I have big ones and little ones. Stores everything. Freezes well. So cheap you can give them away... http://www.amazon.com/Delitainer-Deli-Food-Containers-Lids/dp/B006KG80Y6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1419962186&sr=8-2&keywords=delitainer

Long low temp SV cooks might have a chance for the bug to grow. I forget the magic temp...(130F or so?) above which this isn't a concern.

I looked hard at that...don't know. No wine in sight on tables. Hmmm

Good for them. But no wine to be seen....

Try wrapping it in foil. You get no burning at all, only smoke if the wood is dry. I keep a big can of pruned and cut-up branches from my fruit trees that dries out pretty quickly.

I get blue smoke with dry wood. The traditional advice to soak the chips makes a steamy smoke, which to me tastes acrid. Dry wood wrapped tight with foil (exc for a single hole) mostly eliminates air and keeps the wood from catching fire on my hotplate set-up

It is plenty smoky..

I smoke my bacon for an hour and it is almost too smoky. Way more-so than the supermarket stuff

I've arrived at a cold-smoker that is dirt simple. A $7 hardware store hotplate, the weber propane grill that I already have, and a roll of aluminum foil. The hotplate goes in a corner of the Weber. A bunch of applewood twigs are wrapped tightly in foil and laid on the hotplate. Put a new packet on after about 15 min so it'll start smoking when the first dies out Figure out the lowest setting that gets the wood smoking after 5 or 10 min. The meat never gets hotter than the ambient temp and get smoked nicely.