Tri2Cook

Subway's not great. I don't think anybody realistically expects it to be great. But if you stick with the simple stuff, the basic cold cut type sandwiches, it's not horrible either. I think a large part of the popularity is, you can get a 12" sandwich with meat and cheese and stuff it full of as many veggies as you want for under $7 (a little more than that here in Canada). You can easily beat the quality but you can't beat the sandwich volume to cost ratio at too many other places, if any. For a lot of people, that matters. I tend to avoid it for the most part, even though I could hit the local Subway with a half decent golf shot from my house, but I'd be lying if I said I never go. Then again, the restaurant choices where I live are very limited.

This is all great information. I plan to start putting together a list of the points being made here to store in my "chocolate" folder on my laptop. There are a lot of things to take into consideration that I hadn't thought of. I'm not at the point where most of it is an issue right now but I hope to get there eventually. The chocolates I mentioned that I've sold were all plain shells or, at most, maybe a little splatter or swipe of a contrasting color (still just chocolate, not colored cocoa butter) so no decoration time or special materials were involved. The packaging I'm using now isn't particularly cheap at the quantity I purchased but I could cut the per package price almost in half by buying in bigger quantities. I just didn't want to commit to too much until I see how this goes and I'm not particularly in love with it. But it's good enough for where I'm at right now. One advantage I have where I live is I have zero competition at this time for handmade chocolates (though it comes with the disadvantage that it's a fairly remote area with a small population). I'm starting to get my flavors out there and I'm working on getting to a point where I'm happy with my results with decorating techniques so hopefully this information will come in handy at some point.

I always do my beans that way. A pan of beans below the meat. I frequently toss a pan of mac and cheese on the shelf above the meat as well. But when the meat has been in the smoke for what I consider enough time, I always move everything to the oven to finish. I just find it easier and more efficient than keeping my electric smoker to temp for that much time. But I agree completely that doing what they original poster was asking about full term in the smoker is definitely doable.

No reason it shouldn't work. But unless you just want to do it in the smoker, seems like it'd be much easier to just toss the uncovered pan in the smoker for a couple hours to get the smoke you want and then cover it and transfer it to your oven to finish. Once the item being cooked is covered, the smoker is just acting as an oven that will be less efficient than the one in your kitchen. I don't know what type of smoker you're using but mine is electric and would be hard pressed to maintain those temps. A wood, charcoal or propane smoker would be better able to hold the temps but would probably need a reload (wood or charcoal) or a lot of propane for the timespan you're talking about. But again, no reason it shouldn't work if you want to do it all in the smoker and it should do fine even if you can't maintain the higher temps you want.

Not really. The thread is titled "Hollandaise Techniques". The first question related to using a siphon but that's just one technique that can be covered under the blanket of the thread title. Anna asked about repairing a broken Hollandaise, which brings up other techniques that can be covered under that same blanket. But I agree that the siphon is a bit overkill for home service unless you're configuring it so it will foam and hold it's shape on the plate.

What would you consider an average per-piece price? I'm not at a point where I'm advertising or considering it a home business yet, I still want to get better at a lot of things before I take that step, but I get occasional requests and I've been charging $10 (Canadian) for a 6 piece box. That works out to about $1.67 Canadian - $1.27 US - per piece. I always cringe just a little when telling people the price because I'm afraid they'll think it's too much but I'm not sure I'd consider it worth doing for much less. And I'm certainly not at the level of most of the people here or those doing it as a full time business.

Thanks! I was going to see if I could find that article and edit a link into my post. Now I don't have to, that's exactly the one I was talking about.

Or just continue to use the water unless you want to experiment for fun. Harold McGee showed in an article he wrote years ago that the emulsifiers in the yolk from a single egg are sufficient to emulsify a ridiculous amount of fat (something in the area of 5 or 6 gallons if I remember correctly)... as long as the water phase remains sufficient to avoid overcrowding of the fat droplets that form the emulsion. Water will almost always pull a broken water/fat emulsion together.

I'm not too picky when it comes to yogurt but I don't buy it all that often. Never seen the Noosa brand locally so I can't comment on it but Yoplait used to make what they called a custard-style yogurt that I liked. It was thicker, creamier and slightly sweeter than the average yogurt. I don't know if they stopped making it or it's just not brought into the area where I now live but I haven't seen it in a really long time. I'm guessing based on how much I liked that yogurt and your description of the Noosa that I would like it.

I'm not going to start rethinking it yet again but in the interest of knowledge and for future reference, can it be too lean if you're going to cook it sous vide? The reason I'm asking is, I'm not a fatty meat person. I'm one of those finicky pains in the arse that will waste some of the meat to avoid a hunk of fat. Even high quality, nicely seasoned and cooked fat. When I buy deli pastrami or corned beef or even just roast beef at the grocery store, I've been known to trim out some of the slices before making a sandwich if I consider it too fatty. Yes, I am that bad. So is there a downside to a really lean cut for this purpose if it's going to be cooked in a manner that eliminates the risk of overcooking and drying it out?

SV is the plan, so top sirloin it shall be. Thanks!

Brisket's not going to be an option this time and there's a sale going on at the local store with top sirloin and top round at the same price and bottom round $1/lb cheaper. Somebody give me a firm shove towards a choice so I'll stop second-guessing it.

That's pretty much all I wanted to say but I felt fairly certain it wouldn't end well if I did.

You can also use a blend of gelatin and agar. It makes it firm enough to cut and move to a plate, even at room temp, and doesn't mess with the mouthfeel too much if you get it right. I've never tried enrobing it though. If I were inclined to try, I'd probably prefer to spray it... but I wouldn't be inclined to try, I'd just shell mold it. Regardless, I would think you would need the chocolate to be well thinned with cocoa butter if you were going to try dipping or even just pouring it over. It's still pretty delicate even when bolstered with something unless you add so much it's not really recognizable as a curd anymore.

If this is indeed the case, it gives me a small sense of relief in a way. Not because the alcohol doesn't make a substantial difference, it's a nice tool to have available if it did. My relief comes from the idea that if adding it doesn't make much difference, then neither does leaving it out. Because I have a tendency to prefer not to add booze to my chocolates unless I'm doing a filling where it's a specific part of the desired flavor profile. Thing like cocktail mimics and the like. Edited to fix a dumb spelling error that would have bothered me if it remained.

Worst case, if experiments show it to continue to be a problem, you could dip them and roll them in something to coat. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I only call it "worst case" because it's not what you had in mind.

I actually remembered to make my waffle batter before going to bed last night, so I had yeasted waffles this morning. They were tasty but I wouldn't say a great deal more tasty than the usual waffle recipes I've used. What set these apart the most was the texture, they were very crisp on the outside and soft and slightly chewy inside. That difference makes them worth repeating for me. Plus the entire house smelled like I was baking bread. Oh, and I have lots of leftovers in the freezer that I can pop in the toaster to reheat.

So what you're saying is, if a person, hypothetically, of course, has in fact already made this particular item, without the benefit of being able to blame it on late night post-bar kitchen adventuring, it may be in said person's best interest to refrain from admitting it? I ask merely out of curiosity, of course.

I didn't know pork wings were an actual thing. I made pork wings for a catering job several years ago by cleaning the meat off of chicken wings (the drumette portion), boiling the bones to get them completely clean, wrapping them in slices of pork loin and then chicken skin using transglutaminase to glue it all together. Each one tightly wrapped in plastic wrap to hold the proper shape and a night in the walk-in had them ready to be cooked. Worked really well but they were too labor intensive to become a regular thing. The job was for a rock 'n' roll night event the local entertainment series was doing, I themed the entire menu on song titles. The pork wings were a nod to Pink Floyd, I called it Pig on the Wing.

Sous vide, combi oven, induction. You have a better equipped kitchen in your break room than I have in the kitchen at the restaurant where I work.

More like: $170 knife for $4! Yay!

Butter melted in caramelized sugar as a cookie base! I wish I'd thought of that. I'll definitely be steal... errr... "borrowing" that one.

Just realized St. Patrick's Day is on a Friday this year. I'm probably going to have to settle for a St. Patrick's weekend corned beef.

This is probably going to sound like silly overkill but I'm thinking I'm going to toss a small cheap hunk of beef in some brine at the same time I'm brining the roast for my corned beef. That way I can cook the roast sous vide and cook the other piece in a pot on the stove with the potatoes and cabbage. It's purpose will be to add flavor to the vegetables but I'm thinking I could use the meat for hash or something.

It is a shame to see it end, though I'm guilty of not being a very good participant. I think I did it maybe 3 or 4 times at the most during the time I've know of it's existence but I always took the time to check out what others did. I like these types of things, they push me to do things I probably wouldn't otherwise. There used to be a food related monthly challenge where the host picked the ingredients and people submitted whatever they created with it. I was a much more reliable participant in that one but it too came to an end (after a much shorter run). It's fairly easy to get people to participate in these types of things, the difficult part is keeping people participating over time and getting others to take turns with hosting duties on a consistent basis. That this one managed such a long run is a testament to the cocktail community.