Chris Hennes

Well, cold-smoking is going to give a dramatically different result, particularly with fish (which will cook at the temps for hot smoking). I'm sure it will taste good, but it's not really at all comparable to the recipe as written. So you aren't going to want to concern yourself with smoking for any particular length of time, just smoke until the fish is cooked to your liking, because unfortunately you will actually be cooking it, not just smoking it.

I did have the right amount of water...the extra time cooking was more of a simmer than a rolling boil. Does that mean you weren't on high heat? It's really key for this recipe to work right: if you weren't blasting it, that's why you had water leftover at the end. I've now made the recipe four times and my pot has been almost dry by the time the pasta is al dente, in about six to seven minutes.

Whoa, wait... another 10-12 minutes?! Are you dead certain you had the quantity of water right? I mean, on high heat the water should completely evaporate in 20 minutes of cooking, even if none of it was absorbed into the pasta at all. Something is not right here.

I think the reason for cooking in just enough water is to preserve the starch from the pasta in the sauce, so you don't lose it when it's drained. I agree that making pasta this way is a bit more work, though I didn't have a problem with soupiness. Are you running your burner full-blast? Is the burner big enough for your pot? And of course I'm sure there is plenty of variability between burners: maybe I just got lucky having one similar to whatever they tested the recipe on.

I love living in a world in which a peanut butter bacon cupcake is "predictable."

Tonight's dinner was sous vide chicken breast, sous vide carrots in butter (a.k.a. "carrot confit") and Modernist Mac & Cheese. The carrots were cooked in 30% their weight in butter with a touch of salt, 83°C/181°F for 45 minutes: this leaves them cooked but quite firm; al dente, if you will. They tasted fine: nothing remarkable, basically carrots in butter. The MM&C was made using cheese that I froze two weeks ago, so I can conclusively state that yes, you can freeze the cheese with no ill effects. I actually didn't bother to shred it at all. It was in a vacuum pouch, so I tossed it in with the carrots until it was heated through. It then works just like the cheese stuff in the Velveeta Shells and Cheese, you snip off a corner of the pouch and squeeze it onto the macaroni. Give it a quick stir, and serve. Doesn't get much easier than that.

Really? That would very much disappoint me. There's no index in the other books? Really. The index is in volume five: it's long. I would guess that its size is the reason it's not in all the volumes. They probably figured that there is so much cross-referencing already that one more thing that requires another volume was no big deal.

Looks like Ed and Kenji from Serious Eats were at breakfast this morning: here are their reactions.

With turnips as 100%: 12.5% butter, 12.5% water, 1% salt. Sliced thin, SV at 85°C/185°F for 20 min.

South Carolina Barbecue Sauce (p. 5•70 and 6•219) Sous Vide Turnip (p. 5•33 and 6•139) The barbecue sauce is the one I mentioned the other day: it only takes 20 minutes or so to make, so when reheating some leftover pulled pork for dinner tonight I made it again. Still good. I also made sous vide turnips to go with the BBQ: this was pretty simple, just sliced turnip, butter, salt, and water, cooked SV at 85/185 for twenty minutes. This method preserves a lot of the flavor of turnip that is lost otherwise, and I think the quantity of both salt and butter called for is spot on, I didn't have to adjust at all before serving. I also appreciated the texture, firm but not raw. All told very good, except my water bath took two hours to get up to temperature. And I'm sure someone other than me could plate this up nicely, I just put the turnips in a pile.

I was just checking out the recipe for "Braised Turnips with Saffron" on p. 5•123 and 6•140: it calls for 2 grams of saffron to 250 grams turnips. That seems like a lot of saffron to me, especially cooked sous vide: do you suppose it means 0.2 grams?

Huh. I guess maybe I'm wrong about the importance of adding the egg slowly, it sounds like you've got everything else under control. I can only report that when I made them they worked fine (except I made them too big). Lots of variables here, I guess.

Well, let's be careful here: acid "cooks" fish in the sense that it causes a reaction in the proteins that give it a "cooked" appearance. But a ceviche is still raw fish, and if the fish was crawling with, say E. coli, you'd still be ingesting a lot of bacteria. In this case, you are making a cured salmon, not a ceviche. However, I think the conclusion remains the same: eating properly handled completely raw fish is more or less safe: curing it adds to the time you can keep it and still eat it, but in either case, you are relatively safe.

That's possible, though naturally nearly impossible to diagnose over the internet . Have you made gougeres or pate a choux before?

I don't think the recipe for the gougeres is THAT sensitive to the way you add the eggs, so that's probably not it. Obviously beyond that it's tough to debug: the possibilities are a problem with the ingredients, or a mistake with a measurement, right? I don't know what grading system your eggs use, do you know how large they are? Is it possible that they correspond to the US extra-large egg size? Though even then I'd be surprised if that was the problem. Could be the flour, maybe?

Chef Rubber sells glucose syrup, that's where I got mine: http://www.shopchefrubber.com/product.php?productid=14223&cat=1585&page=1

Kerry, I don't think you can make that substitution in most cases: propylene glycol alginate is used when the acidity is too high for the other alginates, I think. My understanding is that it is frequently used to stabilize the head on beer, so you might look at a homebrew supply store.

Well, I sure wouldn't buy one sight unseen: if you are considering it, I'd definitely try to find someplace where you can try it out first. Like I said, I definitely think it's better suited to some cooks than others. The people who I know who own them rave about them, but I have no interest in one.

Kerry Beal was kind enough to bring her Thermomix to the Heartland Gathering last year, so I've at least seen it in action. I think it's easiest to think of it as a heated blender with a built-in scale, though of course that doesn't quite capture it. The speed range is larger than a conventional blender, allowing much lower-speed mixing. I think it's much more useful for some styles of cooking than others.

MC does not list sodium citrate as an optional ingredient for direct alginate spherification (in the "Best bets" table on p. 4•187). Does that mean that the direct technique is not sensitive to low-pH bases, or that it can't be used for them at all? The reverse method has you add sodium citrate as an optional buffer (and also calcium sequestrant?) with acidic bases.

Modernist Cuisine suggests that reverse spherification is their method of choice, but there really isn't that much info on spherification in there at all: Khymos has far more detail. But MC doesn't list sodium citrate as an optional addition in the direct, and they do in the reverse. It's not clear to me if this is an oversight or a statement that it's not needed.

Also, they should wear Dallas Cowboys hats.

Looks like just a typo to me: the "strong" version of the brine (scaling 2) lists 10% as well.

Right: no food production is going to be without consequences, the resources have to come from someplace. It's impossible to really guess where at this point, though.

OK Philly folk: a couple of us over at The WikiGullet Project started up an article about the Cheesesteak (of course). Step one was to read what Wikipedia had, which led me to the comments there, where I found this: ...so, of course, my question is: is there really a local Philly cheesesteak ordering taxonomy, or is the whole "whiz wit" thing tourist BS? I must admit that last time I was at Pat's I did in fact order a "whiz wit" and they gave me what I was expecting. But I don't know how the locals in line were ordering theirs.