Chris Hennes

Aw, man... not even a hint? Recipe's going to be in volume seven, right?

Thanks, Larry, those lab notes are very helpful. I made a version of those crispy beef strands for dinner tonight, but don't recall seeing anything like a corn tortilla in the book anywhere (though I haven't examined the book in quite as much detail as you!). What was the texture of it like? I'm trying to figure out if it was basically a gelled corn juice, or a dough made from dried corn juice, or something else entirely.

I think this is a good observation, Mitch. Adria is globally relevant (it seems to me, anyway), and his cuisine has certainly proven controversial.

I just took a pencil to the KM, I've already started beating on it pretty hard: its value as a collectors item is going to be nil in pretty short order, I actually use it in the kitchen. Plus obviously I'm going to have to buy the whole set again when they release volumes seven and eight, right?

Larry, can you comment on the Tacos de Asador? What exactly is it that we are seeing there (besides a totally sweet service piece)? ETA: In particular, what was the fluid gel, and what was the shell made out of?

Same place I buy everything else in the universe: Amazon.com

Braised Short Ribs (p. 5•42) Crispy beef and shallot salad with sweet, sour, and savory glaze I mentioned a few days ago that I had started on this recipe (it's what the garlic chips were for): I finally got around to serving it tonight, although most of the components were prepared ahead and just reheated today. The short ribs are cooked at 60°C/140°F for 72 hours along with some white beef stock. Here they are coming out of the sous vide rig: And here they are out of the bag, but still on the bone: And cut off the bone and bagged up for storage and eventual reheating: Next up, all that cooking liquid gets reduced to a glaze and infused with some herbs and spices: And in the glaze before it gets strained: That is strained, seasoned with tamarind puree and palm sugar, and reserved until service. Next up we have the flank steak threads I mentioned the other day: you marinate a flank steak in fish sauce and soy sauce for two days: Take it out and pat it dry: Then microwave it until you have beef jerky, 3-4 minutes in my microwave. A cautionary note here: don't over-cook it! It will taste good, but it won't shred right if it gets crispy at this stage. Now shred it (this is a bit tedious, but for a volume five recipe it's not really a big deal): And now you deep fry the strands until crispy: I ought to note that I've tried to do something like this before, when cooking from Bayless's "Fiesta at Rick's", and it didn't work very well at all. The beef in Bayless's version has a ton of moisture in it, so it all clumps together in the deep fryer and spatters like mad. The MC method is WAY easier, and way less messy, and gives better results to boot. These are made ahead here and reserved with a silica gel packet so they keep crisp, which worked perfectly. Next up some thinly-sliced shallots: Also deep fried to crispiness: Those also got done ahead and reserved with silica gel. Up to this point, everything has been done ahead, and now it's all assembly. 30 minutes before dinner, you put the ribs back in the sous vide rig at 60°C/140°F to reheat. While that's going on, you make a little herb salad of mint, cilantro, thai basil, scallion, lime zest, and bird's eye chili: When the ribs are reheated, they get zapped with the blowtorch for a few seconds and brushed with a bit of glaze. The remaining components are tossed together and served with the beef: (sorry the garlic chip is overexposed... RMS's job is still safe, I guess) This was great: in particular, the salad was a really nice foil for the beef. The short ribs had a flawless texture and tasted great. With this particular recipe, I'd suggest that even if you own NONE of the fancy tools from MC, you could still do a conventional braise on some short ribs and serve them with this glaze and salad and get 90% of the way to this dish. It's not difficult at all, nor even particularly time-consuming, at least compared to the rest of volume five. If you wrote V5 off as just a bunch of pretty pictures and recipes that you'll never make I encourage you to check out this recipe: I'd bet that everyone reading this can make it.

Rachel Ray

That's interesting, I wonder if there is any soundness to that rationale. To the best of my knowledge the temperature of water used to wash dishes is at least several hundred degrees too low to affect the crystalline structure of the metal. And after reading Modernist Cuisine I now make sure to wash my knives with soapy water regardless of what I am cutting. After all, the most recent salmonella outbreaks in the US have been due to produce, not meat.

Even within a country pronunciations vary widely, of course. I'm no linguist, just conducting a bit of impromptu research into the most common pronunciations of the word. How do you say it?

Can a tartare really be made from cooked meat? I always thought tartare was by definition raw meat. Just wondering. To call 122°F "cooked" is stretching the definition of "cooked" I think: the texture of the meat was raw.

I made a really nice steak tartare out of skirt steak last week: it gets tenderized sous vide at 122°F for three hours first, and had a really great flavor and texture.

At least with absinthe the two pronunciations are relatively close to one another. I went to grad school with a guy who insisted on using the italian pronunciation of "biscotti": I never saw a clerk in the US understand him on the first try in the whole time I knew him! There are always subsets of people who insist on using the pronunciation from a word's original language out of some sort of idealogical purity: it seems at least with absinthe that's not really the case, it's just that historically the only people who talked about it spoke French! So perhaps as the word is further assimilated into English that usage will fall even further away.

A few of us are working on the WikiGullet Project article on Absinthe, and a question has come up about the exact pronunciation of the word: not necessarily how was it originally pronounced, but today, in modern English usage, how do you personally pronounce the word? More like AB-sinth or more like AB-santh? Or something else entirely?

I like rendered beef fat myself, but it too is going to have too low a smoke point, and will break down too quickly at those temperatures.

It looks like you're only supposed to wind up with 200g of sauce, but in the photo it looks pretty liquid. Given that the scaling is based on the quantity of onions I'd guess they are the main contributor of moisture here, but that 45 minute simmer does seem suspect.

Kerry, are you going to want pre-payment via PayPal, or cash on site (or something else)?

Can we actually go back a few steps here -- flank steak somehow works its way into braised short ribs? Yes: the short ribs have a salad served with them that consists of herbs and deep-fried crispy threads of flank steak. The flank is made per the jerky recipe, then pulled to shreds and fried.

Video, please!

Nope, no blaming the tool here. It's ALL end-user error.

This. It's also why the Cambro dries and the Glad doesn't: the plastic from the Cambro holds onto enough heat to evaporate the water.

Hard to justify spending $20 on a gadget to create a garnish for a single dish. Maybe I should just work on my knife skills.

I've only got one of those V-slicers: it's great for normal stuff, but the thin setting doesn't quite get THIS thin (1/32 inch).

They have a Best Bets for Dehydration on pages 185 and 186, but they don't seem to mention this exact preparation there. I think I read somewhere that the KM includes "selected" recipes from Volume Five, but I'm not sure where that was.

Going with that theory then, I just blanched another set to 170°F (about 76°C) and made sure it stayed there for a minute before rinsing. I'm now cooking them in my smoker, which allows me to set a lower temperature. Plus, it's really windy outside today, so it's got better circulation than my oven. Of course, now my garlic chips will be mildly smoke-scented (the machine is well-used, anything I put in there is going to pick up smoke flavors whether I add smoke or not).