Chris Hennes

It figures that it would snow now... first flakes we've gotten all winter. I think the cilantro made it through OK, though, that stuff is amazingly hardy. How did it come to be so associated with Mexican cuisine? It's hot there! I think the tomatillos that I am growing are just the normal kind (at least, I hope so), but I'm looking forward to hearing about your pineapple-flavored ones.

I'm a big fan of Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie, so I'm definitely looking forward to Salumi. Anyone know if anything interesting related to Mexican cuisine is coming out this year?

Like many others above, I tend to go in phases: in particular, if I get a couple disappointing ones in a row I start to wonder what the point is. Maybe I should just stick to Modernist Cuisine and Fiesta at Rick's. Of course, then I get suckered into another one, it turns out well, and I'm back buying them left and right.

I'd love to see the results of other items cavitated and then deep fried, actually. The point of the cavitation in the fries is to rough up the potato surface a bit, right? What else might that be beneficial for?

I'm going to make a hash with a leftover chunk of sous vide 72 hour brisket, I think tomorrow for dinner. I'd like to get a texture in between what David is getting with his baking and food-processor technique and hand-dicing: potato that is sort of the texture of Ore-Ida hash browns. Any ideas how to do that?

I don't know why I bothered writing this when I could have just gone into the kitchen and done it. Thankfully, when starting from 18°C water back in 5 liters of water, even at full blast it is back to being silent. Which makes sense if the noise is due to boiling water at the heater, I guess, since we're nowhere near boiling. I'm going to bring this batch of water up to 65°C to see what happens.

Well, it seems that the unit's logic to figure out how much power to apply was messed up: when I reset it and the unit saw that the water temp was perfect it settled itself down nicely, with minimal further noise (but also never having to go above three bars of heating). When I used the unit again today in a much smaller vessel, again with water preheated mostly, but not completely, it again made significant noise whenever the heater was at three bars or above. I need to try it again starting with room temp water like I did the first time when it was silent, to see if it goes back to being quiet then or if I've done something permanent to it. I really don't think you want to do that: 300W is already a bare minimum, and at 75% output mine still makes plenty of noise at the moment.

I'm going to call this "inspired by" the recipe for: Lentil Salad (p. 5•267) The Volume 5 version of this recipe has you make a foie gras parfait faux cherry: while that sounds delicious, I was more interested in the lentil salad as a weeknight side dish, since it's really not that involved if you don't follow to the letter each of the garnishes. In particular, the idea of making a cherry vinaigrette that the lentils get dressed with sounded excellent. To cook the lentils you add 350g of lentils, 1000g of water, and over 400g of aromatics (in a sachet) to a bag and cook at 90°C for 1:15 -- It's a LOT of vegetables for the amount of lentils, they contribute a ton of flavor. I imagine you could instead cook the lentils in a vegetable stock and achieve a similar effect. Now, since the SideKIC maxes out at 85°C, I actually cooked the lentils at 80°C and doubled the cooking time: Unfortunately, I made one approximation too many: instead of using distilled water I used filtered tap water, which left the lentils just slightly too firm in the end. However, the cherry vinaigrette was a fantastic success (though I didn't use MC's exact recipe I followed the gist of it); I also added toasted pecans and dried cherries to the lentils right before serving. At some point I am going to have to make the recipe as written, because even severely bastardized it was excellent.

Note also, however, that the Cooking Issues post on the subject isn't the last word: the Modernist Cuisine team disagrees with the CI conclusions. So you might have to experiment on your own as well.

This is true, but if the pantry is already stocked with "a generous cache of root vegetables and irregular produce deliveries. There's also milk, supermarket cheese, yogurt, tofu eggs, and for some unknown reason, huge quantities of sour cream" I think a nutritious meal is doable. When you say "irregular produce deliveries" just how irregular are we talking? A couple times a week, or a couple times a month?

I'm looking at the product packaging from McCormick. 0.12 ounces according to the website, which is 3.4g.

For those of you who've made the sous vide lentils... did you assume that the quantity of bay leaves (2g) was for fresh? The entire jar of dried bay weighs in at 3g, and putting in 2/3 of it seemed like an awful lot of bay, so I just put in a couple leaves.

I think it clearly comes down to "what do you like to eat and how many people do you cook for?" In terms of cooking potential versus space requirement I think full-size ovens are at the bottom of the efficiency scale, but if you are a bread baker it's worth the tradeoff.

I haven't done it, but it's similar to the technique for cryosearing the duck breast they present, so you might have a look at that recipe for pointers.

Mjx - while adding oil changes the texture of dough, I don't think it's correct to call it a "relaxer" per se: the oil doesn't affect the structure of the gluten itself, whereas the relaxer actually splits the gluten apart (I think). So you achieve a different texture in the final product as compared to using no relaxer, as well as causing the dough to flow more. It behaves like a higher-hydration dough to some extent, but with a finer crumb. Philip Le - Obviously I'm in agreement about the value of adding ingredients if they can improve the final product. I don't know what an excess of L-cysteine would do, but the quantity you ingest when it's added to bread is so tiny that I think by the time you could taste it you would have added WAY too much for the dough's structural integrity. Modernist Cuisine suggests 0.01% for their buns. I added 0.05% to my pita and thought it was probably too much (when I made MC's buns I though it was too little, so wanted to ramp it up to see what happened).

It's in the right range: the recipes I've got vary in the ratio of egg white to butter, but yours is in the mix with them. Really, I think it's almost certain that your problem was your sugar syrup temperature being too low to set the protein in the egg whites. Obviously for a buttercream you want to use the best-tasting butter you have, but I'm sure cheap butter wasn't your problem. ETA: Also, I see you mention you used the paddle attachment to incorporate the butter: I always use the whisk. What do others here do?

It sure doesn't seem like it's possible to overwhip: I go until it's about room temp, and that can take a pretty long time (like ten minutes). Edit: Whoops, i suppose you mean after the butter is added, not before. Dunno about that, I just whip until it's together.

I imagine that a wheel that can abrade through your chain mail will not do pretty things to the ginger. I'm thinking you're safe.

I agree with what others have mentioned, and would also like to chime in to encourage you to give it another try. In my opinion IMBC is the best of the buttercreams, and is worth the effort of getting it to work.

One man's "unnecessary stuff" is another's "reach for perfection." I've had a lot of crappy hamburger buns...

I'm hoping to try the sous vide lentils this week or next, but I need some timing advice. The recipe calls for them to be cooked at 90°C for 1h15m: my new Sous Vide rig tops out at 85°C: I seem to recall that for stuff like legumes you can simply adjust the cooking time to compensate, but I can't recall the formula. Can someone point me in the direction of the required adjustment?

OK, my first long-time, low-temp cook with the SideKIC has come to a successful close. After that weird initial noise thing it settled into a constant temperature of 63.0°C and held it for 72 hours. The heater stayed at two bars nearly the whole time; when it kicked up to three on occasion there was some noise (of a different sort than before, but probably only different because it was a much lower power setting). The noise issue is going to require more investigation, but since it was dead silent for about 99% of the cooking time after the reset, I managed to stay married, and so far stand by my "buy" recommendation.

It should definitely come back together, though sometimes you really have to whip the !@#$ out of it. In the end it will look like normal buttercream.

As someone who makes bread because homemade tastes better, not because I distrust the ingredients in commercial bread, I don't really worry about it. L-cysteine is sold as a dietary supplement, in fact (for what purpose I don't know). And the pita recipe is from the King Arthur Flour cookbook, which is not exactly a hotbed of culinary Modernism — the relaxer is an optional ingredient to make shaping easier. I went ahead and tried it and the L-Cysteine worked well as a dough relaxer, in incredibly minute quantities. It turns out that the size bottle they sell as a nutritional supplement is basically a lifetime supply for dough relaxation purposes. And using the relaxer allowed me to hand-shape the pitas without using a rolling pin, which was nice.

Right, here's an article about last year's abysmal Texas peanut crop. Once they are in season, however, if the season is good you should be able to find them all over the place.