Chris Hennes

These are the Andes Mint Chip cookies whose recipe I took issue with in When Recipes Attack. The baking instructions were annoying (1oz dough balls when nothing else is given by weight... Who portions cookies by weight at home?!?!) and the cooking time was about two minutes short, but despite all that they wound up pretty decent.

Time for a decade-of-hibernation bump! A cookie recipe on the back of the Andes chip bag: Basically the instructions are to dump everything in the bowl and stir. Which yields a lumpy mess with room temperature butter. Maybe it would have baked out fine, but since basically every other cookie recipe on the planet at least mixes the butter and sugar together, if not creams it, I tossed attempt one and made the dough following a normal procedure instead.

Getting super fancy tonight, these are off the back of the Reese's peanut butter chip bag:

I made these tonight, but swapped white chocolate chips in for the nuts. I found that the dough spread too much when baked on parchment, but on Silpat it turned out fine. What causes that overspread?

I'm making cookies tonight: these are intended as gifts for various family members, so I'm trying to make cookies I think they will each like. I'm keeping it simple. No aging, no moscavado sugar, etc. But I realized that I might be carrying it too far (or at least I think there is room for discussion). Take, for example, the cookie recipe on the back of the Reese's chip bag: The recipe calls for Hershey's cocoa, of course. Now, I have a bag of Valrhona in the cabinet. But I figured that the person receiving them would be totally happy with Hershey's, so that's what I used. When you bake gifts do you pull out all the stops, or do you reserve the "good stuff" for other occasions?

Thanks for the tip, I'll give those a shot. In the meantime, I've got a brisket in the cooker doing a 63C 72-hour cook. A quick spot-check of the bath temps around the brisket shows near-perfect uniformity and good accuracy, with the temperature reading either 63C or 64C everywhere I checked. I do have the little stainless tray in place to keep the brisket off the bottom surface, though.

Do you seal them somehow, or just tie them closed?

One item I make where the large liquid volume is advantageous is vegetable stock. When making this sous vide I use gallon bags, which actually don't yield a particularly large amount of stock and are cumbersome to work with (I don't have a chamber sealer). To make the same stock in the Oliso I just dumped all the ingredients into the water bath (scaled to a four-liter yield), set the temperature to 90C, and let it do its thing for a couple hours. I found the stock to be essentially indistinguishable from its "true" sous vide counterpart, and I was able to make significantly more in one batch, without having to mess about with multiple gallon bags full of liquid.

I am far from an expert on Oklahoma cuisine, but the chicken fried steak seems pretty central to me, and I've always thought of that as being a "southern" dish more than a "midwest" or "southwest" dish. We don't put chiles in enough stuff to be southwest.

Exactly

Has anyone here tried this technique? What are your go-to resources? Home brewing is such a vast topic, I don't have a good handle on where to even start!

For long-time/low-temperature cooking, where circulation has minimum importance, I expect the advantages of a well-insulated, well-sealed, no-pump bath to be things that I am not equipped to measure (e.g. energy efficiency), and I expect the end product will be indistinguishable from what I've been achieving with a circulating bath to this point. So I'm not going to bother with "testing" such things, I'm confident the Oliso will perform just fine. One of the areas where a non-circulating bath is actually advantageous, however, is cooking eggs. The problem with a circulator is that the eggs tend to bang around a bit, and I've cracked quite a few in the process. So I figured I'd go ahead and make sure that the lack of circulation wasn't a problem for getting eggs to where I like them (65 degrees C). Right away I ran into the standard limitation of non-immersion circulators: the fixed bath size. I wanted to cook two eggs, but to get the water to the minimum fill line I needed five liters of water. I tried to go lower than that at first, but it appears that the temperature probe must be somewhere near that fill line because with water well below it the induction hob's temperature reading plunged precipitously when I opened the lid, even though the actual water temperature measured with a Thermapen did not. So, I added enough water to get to the minimum fill line and everything worked as expected. I set the onboard timer and let the egg cook: it beeps three times, relatively loudly, when it is done, and the timer stops at zero. Personally I'd prefer that the timer switch into count-up mode, but honestly I hate on-device timers for sous vide and am unlikely to ever use it. The egg was properly cooked at the end of it, and a couple of quick checks with the thermapen showed the water bath a solid uniform 65C.

Welcome, Kim. Where are you from, and what sorts of food do you like?

I thought Quartino was fine but not amazing: it was loud and busy when we were there, which is a fun vibe as long as you aren't looking for a romantic getaway . It was pretty reasonably priced, including the wine list, and was walking distance to our hotel, which won it points as well. The food wasn't exciting, but it was well-prepared once they brought us the right pie (at first one of the two we ordered was the wrong one, but it wasn't a huge deal and they brought out the correct one in pretty short order).

Can I tell you how annoyed I was to discover that as far as McDonald's is concerned we are not "South"!? That "all day breakfast" they are advertising doesn't include the biscuit!! I figure we're at least South enough for that.

My first test was to simply heat 10 liters of water from 66 deg F to 150 deg F: this took 29 minutes. The machine gives a single beep when the temperature has been reached. My Thermapen indicated 151 deg F throughout the bath (recall that it's non-circulating), which is within the margin of error of the thermometer. Overall I like the ergonomics of the water bath: it's well-insulated, with a good lid, and easy-to-grab handles. I was surprised at how loud the induction hob was, however. This device is not any quieter than any of my circulators due to the fans on the hob. It's pretty big, too, about the size of a large crockpot.

My Oliso induction hob and water bath arrived a couple of days ago, so I've started running it through its paces...

What do you all figure the current buy-in cost is for a decent espresso setup at home? At first when I started looking at it I was excited ("ooh, look, a Silvia for under $700") but I was then reminded of all the other stuff you need. A PID, a high-end grinder, maybe a new portafilter, etc., etc., etc. I'm not talking about the "bare minimum to beat Starbucks" setup, I'm talking about the "make espresso worth drinking" setup.

Pouring multiple shots presumably also had the effect of warming the internal plumbing: do you typically discard your first couple of shots so you are starting with a hot machine?

Got it. Where is the PID measuring the temperature?

But aren't you brewing at 62C (based on the temperature of the water coming out of the portafilter)? I'd expect you to want to have it hitting the grounds at 95C, not coming out of the boiler at 95C, right? That's what I brew pour-over at.

Wow, that temp seems really low if it's the boiler temp: what is the temperature of the water when it hits the basket, then?

Do any of you with a PID's Silvia make lattes, or are you all doing purely espresso? Any longevity problems in the couple of years it's been since this topic started?

Do you recall what kind of caviar that was? It's a pretty sizeable serving!

Are you looking for something with more flexibility than royal icing (to better absorb shocks) or something that sticks better? Do you remember what the issue had with it was?