gfweb

I'm divided on GMO. The Vit A golden rice is wonderful, but I don't like the BT corn that kills butterflies. Most of my objection though is to the sleazy Monsanto lawyers who sue any neighboring farmer if a GMO seed blows onto his property.

cilantro

Charcoal is pretty flavorless. Its smoke has flavor & what hot smoke does to meat makes flavor. I bet there's more to making this than extracting charcoal. Did the tartare taste smoky or more like meat with a char?

Big parts of the rest of the US are saturated with Mexican restaurants, mainly due to the huge numbers of Mexicans that now live here. It wouldn't surprise me to find that it is the major type of restaurant in lots of the country. But they are all the same, in my experience.... Mexican "diner-food" , a lowest common denominator. They seem popular with Mexicans in my area, so I assume that they are authentic enough, but the cuisine (cocina?) is not for me. I'd love an NYC restaurant that elevates Mexican to catch-on and spread elsewhere.

You can blend in blanched spinach to maintain the green color a while longer.

Good points. I peel toward myself. I don't do pounds and pounds often, usually only for holidays. The straight Oxo is my daily peeler. I also have a julienne peeler that is great for a quick prep for cole slaw or latkes etc.

Straight peeler for a few potatoes, Y peeler for a lot of them. My hand gets tired with the straight peeler after a while, but initially it is more comfortable.

Gfweb, what are the browned nuggets in with the sprouts, please?They are the halved and browned sprouts. Perhaps a few detached leaves that browned too. Occasionally I will put bacon in this dish but not this time.

Has Shola moved to another site or given up? The most recent entry at Studiokitchen was last fall.

How much jus depends on the size of the meat. A typical brisket gives at least a cup of salty jus. Depends on SV temp of course. Hotter = more meat contraction = more liquid expressed.

And now for an alternative to the preceding lovely and healthful and restrained dinners. NY Strip, potatoes augratin, & maple seared Brussels sprouts.

Just so long as they aren't eating Airedales...

You could that. I just gently tilted the pan up and down. Perhaps slosh was an overstatement.

What's the advantage to putting an insert in a SVS?

Hard to measure the oil temperature "without liquid". There wasn't enough oil for a probe thermometer. The pan was steel.

You assume incorrectly. Evaporation of water from the frying potatoes cools the oil. In a small amount of oil this can have a large effect.

Frying some julienned potatoes (not quite a latke) in a little oil. The center just wasn't cooking at a rate comparable to the edges. I used a laser thermometer to take the temp of the slow-cooking center and the edge. Edge was 400 deg and the center was 290! I know that this is not news, but I was impressed at the magnitude of the temperature drop. Gently sloshing the oil back and forth raised the temp of the center to 350 and frying sped up nicely. If only using a little oil, clearly sloshing is in order

Why don't rice maker companies make a couple of modifications, change the label and call it a sous vide unit? Probably for the same reason that it took 40 years of toaster ovens before Breville had the wit to make one that really works well.

I have no particular trouble with eating horse, if one cares to. That dish looks awfully tasty. I do worry that contamination of "good" beef with meat from cattle at risk for BSE might well also be occurring if horse can so easily find its way into the beef supply. Horse meat is , after all, detectable. Meat from BSE-at-risk cows would not be. Is the fate of questionable cows trackable? Do we really know that its been destroyed? Beef is more expensive than horse and there would be economic pressure to use those BSE cows.

Very nice discussion of Montreal Smoked Meat and curing techniques here http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/794033

I grind it.

I use the same spices that are in the rub that I cure with... minus the salt and nitrate. The mix varies a bit and typically has allspice, cardamom, black peppercorns, onion powder, mustard seed and a clove or two. I use much less for the preSV rub than the curing rub...a light dusting.

Soaks take away some of the spice. I tend to re-apply a bit of the spices for the SV cooking.

I like 140 for two days. I'll use brisket if I plan to serve it as dinner and the less fatty round if I'm making lunch meat. I corn my own using a mix of spices that I find tasty.

Let me say at the outset that I have no experience with either unit. But when I see wording like this, I suspect marketing people are trying to differentiate the two products and not cannibalize their more expensive restaurant unit's sales.