Tri2Cook

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.

I actually hadn't thought about that aspect, doesn't apply to me. I was just thinking I'm not likely to do it by the time I get home from work that day.

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.

I pulled a container out of the freezer that turned out to contain meatballs. Not in any sort of sauce or anything, just extras from a previous use. The seasoning in them is Italian in nature so that was the direction I started thinking. Then, in a fit of what I thought was creativity while listening to the cold winter wind blowing outside, spaghetti and meatball soup popped into my head. And, as usual, a quick google check later showed that 10 billion people had already had that idea before me. That didn't stop me from doing it anyway. I made my usual spaghetti sauce but went heavier on the seasoning, thinned it with chicken broth, added the meatballs and let it cook for a bit. While it was cooking, I pre-hydrated some spaghetti noodles that I'd broken into ~1/3's in a bowl of cold water for about an hour and a half. Those went in the pot to cook and it was done. In the bowl with a little olive oil, parmesan and basil and it was pretty tasty. The only problem is I added too much pasta so it's a bit on the thick side for a soup but, fortunately, not to the point where I might as well have just made regular old spaghetti and meatballs. So I paired meatballs with mistake via the pasta overload.

I understand that was the most unhelpful possible answer and was probably well deserving of your withering stare but I do always appreciate a good smartass answer (yes, those directed at me as well)... even if wasn't intentionally done.

While I never feel inclined to bet against anything you say you're going to do (or not do, in this case), I think I know which side of the betting pool my money would have to go on this time. Seeing this thread rise to the top today just helps shine a spotlight on my shame. I had everything ready to go yesterday to make a batch of yeasted waffle batter so it could spend the night doing it's yeast reaction thing. I was looking forward to those waffles for a nice Sunday breakfast. I was going to take a few of my homemade breakfast sausage patties* out of the freezer to go with it. I woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that I went to bed without making the batter. It was somewhere around 2 am and I just wasn't willing to get up and do it then... so next Sunday it is. *I can't speak for all parts of Canada but it's impossible to get anything even remotely close to southern U.S. style breakfast sausage anywhere near where I live. The bland, squashy, joyless tubes of fat and gristle they call breakfast sausage in the local restaurants and grocery store aren't the slightest bit tempting. I need flavor, a nice touch of heat and plenty o' sage in my breakfast sausage.

I took your advice, read through every thread on the subject that the search function found for me and came to a conclusion. The one common thread to all of the sous vide corned beef discussions is that nobody really agrees on much of anything. But that's probably a good thing because it leads to a large number of suggestions with accompanying information regarding the result using that person's preferred method. So I have some ideas in mind for how I want to approach this now. I try my best to steer people away from that idea. The idea that food safety has a direct correlation to how difficult an ingredient is to pronounce. There are a lot of completely natural and safe ingredients or ingredients derived from completely natural ingredients that don't just roll off the tongue when trying to pronounce them. I don't in any way try to tell people how to eat or how to decide what to eat or not eat, it's just that particular phrase in regards to food safety has been a pet peeve of mine since they started using it as a marketing gimmick in commercials.