Chris Hennes

Yes, last summer was very hot and dry here: my tomatoes and peppers did not do well at all. I've just planted my pepper seeds last night, and the tomatoes and tomatillos are coming along nicely, so we better get a break this year! It's actually overcast today, which is quite unusual... how about some rain! I didn't eat at the restaurant this weekend (we ate at Mutts): are you talking about the food counter in the store, or the attached Mr. Pho?

The Super Cao Nguyen is our largest Asian Megamart, and the easiest for non-Asian-readers to cope with since most of the ingredients have English on them (this is decidedly not true at the other large store down the block, where most of the produce is unlabeled in any language: you better recognize those greens!) Exterior shot (doesn't really give a sense of scale, but here in Oklahoma we do things BIG... this is a very large store, it extends far off to the left of the photo) A blurry shot of a small section of the produce section: a large selection of greens. Mostly Vietnamese and Chinese, with some others scattered in there as well. A massive, massive meat counter will all manner of offal: I have a regular butcher I go to for normal meats, but when I need something unusual this is the place to go. And some generic down-the-aisles shots trying to give a sense of how big this place is:

Sure it's bad if you leave it out at room temp for hours while you eat, clean the kitchen, have a drink, etc. So is anything else. But if you get it chilled and into the fridge quickly using day-old cooked rice is no big deal.

I do most of my grocery shopping on Saturdays. I can get normal US-type groceries here in Norman, but for anything else I take a 20 minute drive up to Oklahoma City, where there is a Sunflower Market, a Whole Foods, and a number of Asian-, Mexican-, and Indian-focused stores. No Indian on the menu this week, it turns out, but here are some shots of the others: first up, the inauspicious-looking but actually awesome Buy For Less... This is a typical lower-end big-box grocery store, except that actually have a very nice produce selection, and a wide variety of otherwise-hard-to-find Mexican ingredients. Fresh banana leaves: Fresh chiles: Nopales: Various dried Mexican ingredients: Dried chiles, of course: And the real reason I come here... fresh masa. OK, I don't know if it's actually fresh or just reconstituted masa harina, but the fact is it tastes great and makes wonderful tortillas and tamales, both of which you will see on the menu this week. And some random Mexican-ish dairy:

Good morning from Norman, Oklahoma, home of the University of Oklahoma and suburb of Oklahoma City. For reference, Oklahoma is the state just north of Texas (no, it is not a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein… that's Oklahoma! with an exclamation point. No one puts an exclamation point when they are talking about the state). Hopefully you've all heard of Texas, anyway, even if Oklahoma and Idaho and Iowa are all a blur. It is, alas, somewhat less idyllic than what Sheepish treated us to last week. Nevertheless, I eat well here. Not a whole lot of lamb, though! It's been a few years since my last foodblog, and life has changed more than a little. Some things, however, have not changed: OK, so that's a tiny change. Same mug, but now I brew pour-over rather than French press. Different coffee brand as well: Storyville Coffee sends me bi-weekly shipments of fresh-roasted beans. In my opinion, using fresh-roasted beans trumps any other factor when it comes to coffee quality. About some of the teaser photos Heidi posted: as someone who posts a ton of photos here at the eG forums, I had to work hard to find things to post that weren't dead giveaways! It's probably not well known that I love yogurt. The Fage is for eating plain, the Yoplait is for smoothies. Yes, the crocus was just meant to be a sign that it's spring here (I have dozens in various colors in my backyard blooming now, and the daffodils are just beginning to bloom as well). So, no saffron from them. Not that I don't love saffron. I just don't grow it. I think it's also not well-known that about a year ago I decided to try to learn to appreciate white wine, having been a red-drinker my whole life. So, a wine fridge. What you can't see in the photo is the identical wine fridge next to it that I use for curing salume. The wok? Well, I have a Big Kahuna wok burner, which you'll see a bit of this week. And the cookbooks are mostly what I'm cooking this week. I seldom actually plan out a week's meals when I'm not doing a "cooking through X" project, but just for you guys, this week, I have a plan. Let's see if I stick to it now…

Yes, I think that particularly for a grass-fed steak you will want a lower temperature. Be sure to check out the tremendous index of the original Sous Vide topic that Chris Amirault put together. There is a ton of great advice for sous vide cooking in there.

Hey, we got almost an inch of snow! And it lasted for almost eight hours!

For the record, I've been beating on mine since it arrived and it's still running fine. Still makes noise, but for short-time or high-temp cooks it doesn't matter. I've got big plans for it over this next week, so fingers crossed!

To be clear: I'm not arguing it's an invalid assumption—it is actually a very good assumption in most circumstances. As regards surface temperature, of course you are right about pasteurization times, but in this case that's not the time/temperature that we're concerned with. Of course over this long cook the whole roast will wind up pasteurized at the temperatures we are considering. But the temperature above which we want to get the surface of the meat to prevent bacterial growth is quite low, and occurs quite quickly even for large cuts of meat. So while it takes a (still relatively small) amount of time to achieve actual bacterial reduction at 50°C, there is no meaningful bacterial growth at that temperature, which as you show above is achieved in just a few minutes, even for very large piece of meat.

Plus, Trichinella Spiralis is a parasite, not a bacteria: you're not concerned with multiplication or toxin production. Cook to a temp that kills it (if you're concerned), that's all.

I'm not sure that's a valid concern: we generally assume that the interior of an intact muscle is sterile, thus it is only bacteria on the exterior surface of the meat that we need to be concerned about. The surface temperature of a roast comes to bath temperature nearly instantly, halting surface bacterial growth.

Right, what Shalmanese said. In this case the pork will come to temp in just a small percentage of the overall cooking time no matter how thick it is. It's a time-at-temp issue in this case, where you are trying to break down the collagen. Thickness is essentially irrelevant.

It's been a while since I've reported on anything new in OKC, but today while out shopping I drove past this place: I had no idea what it was, so of course stopped. Inside, it has a very familiar vibe—and for good reason: it's operated by the same people as Big Truck Tacos. This bode well for lunch. As did the inclusion of duck fat fries on the menu. And behold, the duck fat fries: They were well-flavored, but single fried, so a bit limp. Still. Duck fat. I also had a hot dog (of course) with sauerkraut and mustard: An excellent, well-flavored dog. Perhaps a tad over-topped to my liking, but that's easy to fix at the table (easier to fix than under-topped, I guess). My wife had the chili cheese fries: These were pretty good: the chili is clearly designed as a dog-topping and not as a standalone chili, but it's hard to fault them for that. I think my dog was about $5, as were the fries. So not cheap, but not expensive either.

I think I read a reason someplace, but can't recall where, or what it was. There is an alphabetical index to the series in volume 5, but of course that contains far, far more than just recipes. I made my own alphabetical index to the kitchen manual by OCRing their PDF and re-sorting it .

Aha! Unfortunately the kitchen manual doesn't have all the recipes from volume 5, which explains the omission. Is there a way for one of us with the book to index just the missing recipes?

Yeah, I've done it. You don't need smaller pieces of pork, you need a higher temperature. Using the rule of thumb that chemical reaction rates double for every 10°C you increase the temp, you could do something like 167°F (75°C) for 36 hours instead. Or perhaps 160°F-ish for 48 hours (since that rule of thumb starts to break down at higher temps anyway).

Also: is it possible to remove just a single recipe from a shopping list? I only see a way to clear the whole thing.

Is it just me, or is the Onion Gratin recipe from Modernist Cuisine (p. 5•265) missing? Also, is there a way to search just within a particular cookbook?

If your people are OK with the hummus in the little tubs, I wouldn't stress out about removing the skins, either. I only do it when I'm feeling really ambitious, and if you ask me the resulting hummus made with the skins is still damned good. Of course, my blender is a monster, which helps.

I randomly get cravings for brownies sometimes. Only late at night. Alcohol is usually involved. Janet Zimmerman (JAZ) gave me a pretty awesome brownie recipe a while ago that I printed out and stuffed in a corner: that's my go-to.

I've made mafé a dozen or so times since I posted above: never the same twice, of course. Tonight I added a lot more peanut butter than usual, and also included whole roasted peanuts. This is also the first time I've added spinach.

According to WorldCat, quite a few libraries have it.

Looks like hash to me.

Does this seem right, based on your reading of the description?

Right, it says as much on p. 264, but I was trying to get an image in my head of what each component was supposed to look like (so that if they didn't look right I could correct before final assembly).