Chris Hennes

Anything made with the juice is going to go through a lot of them: so how about a sorbet?

One thing you might try is searing before bagging as well as after: those Maillard flavors tend to get incorporated throughout the steak that way. I don't find the flavor to be the same as a conventionally-cooked steak, per se, but I like it as well.

A few heads is a lot of cabbage! I am a sucker for coleslaw, so that would be my first impulse. Another obvious route to using a bunch of it up is a homemade sauerkraut.

The Khymos Recipe Collection has a number of recipes for alcoholic foams (though not whiskey in particular): I'd start there.

The concern is that the circulation action causes the eggs to bang around and sometimes crack: pretty much anything that limits this will do. Some people use mesh baskets, some press the eggs into a whisk, I personally have a small bag meant for sending pastry tips through the dishwasher that works great. A plastic bag is probably not a great option since it will tend to trap air and cause the eggs to float, but it can be done.

I highly recommend reading Volume 1 of Modernist Cuisine, which spends nearly a hundred pages explaining precisely why the USDA and FDA make the recommendations they do, and why they are wrong. It's an interesting, if infuriating, read.

This is not true: none of the pathogens we are concerned with in the kitchen grow at 131°F: Salmonella, for example, begins to die at 120°F. If you have a look at the table on p. 1•193 of Modernist Cuisine you can see the "thermal death curve" -- technically to achieve a 6.5D reduction in Salmonella at 55°C/131°F it takes 1 hour 31 minutes. Allowing some margin for error in our equipment we see that a 6.5D reduction at 130°F takes 1h 54m, or about two hours.

My reading of her post was that unpasteurized eggs are her suspected culprit, so she's interested in using pasteurization to prevent the problem in the future: 135°F is certainly not too low to pasteurize.

In terms of food safety there is a range of times and temperatures that will work: while Baldwin's time and temp work fine, I use the time/temp from Modernist Cuisine (chart on p. 4•76), 55°C/131°F for two hours. I don't note any differences between the pasteurized egg and the completely raw.

As I read this I'm enjoying a glass of tonic doctored with a fresh batch of Pomelo Coriander tincture. It turned out very well: just slices of pomelo skin and pith along with toasted coriander seed infused in Everclear for a month or two. The inclusion of the pith gives a nice amount of bitterness, I think.

Sous Vide Dash has a setting in it where you can specify the type of device you are using: according to the app's documentation, it affects how the app calculates how efficiently heat is transferred due to water circulation rate. In my experience the "generic circulator" setting works fine for the Anova, and probably for the whole generation of related circulators (Sansaire, etc.).

It sure sounds like one of those cocktails that gets invented (or re-invented!) at some random corporate event. Since there are about a hundred different "Allied Energy" corporations my money's on it being from one of those. Did the guy have any idea what was in it?

I regularly make the vegetable stock from Modernist Cuisine, it's the best I've ever tasted, by far. I've tried it using the same ingredients but cooked conventionally, and the sous vide version is much superior, particularly in aroma. It's also pretty quick to make and can be batched and frozen.

I'm not very precise about it, but my mental image is that jelly is completely smooth, preserves have some of the original fruit texture, and marmalade is a citrus preserve that includes the skin. I'm a sucker for marmalade.

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I make my Carbonade a la flamande with Chimay red (you're going to need a bigger bottle, though!).

Absolutely: for anything where I am trying to get a flaky effect by getting the butter particle size down to a specific point the FP is the way to go.

Mjx, what other dairy products might one use in a curd? I've only ever used butter. I agree with Panaderia Canadiense that it was probably purely a "stretch" move, though I suppose we could be generous and allow that maybe the diner didn't want the intense flavor you get with just lemon juice.

Yes, my experience has been the same as Smithy's: I don't know if it's the higher speed, or the shape of the blade, or what, but I've never gotten good results trying to cream butter and sugar in the food processor. If I was you I'd go with heidih's suggestion of just using the hand mixer for creaming stuff like that.

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Personally I find I am able to more completely evacuate the air from the bag using the Foodsaver than I can with any of the various Ziploc techniques, including immersion. As you note, you do want to do a good job of getting air out of the bag: but as gfweb and Oliver note, it only has to be good enough to ensure even heat transfer and minimal loss of liquid during the vacuum process. Again, I use this technique regularly (to make the Modernist Cuisine vegetable stock), and haven't had any significant issues with it to date.

Well, that may be, but I haven't killed mine yet, and almost all of my sealing is of bags containing liquids! I elevate the FoodSaver above the bag, and press the "Seal" button as soon as the liquid starts to get pulled up the mesh of the bag. If your reaction time is good, you can often stop the vacuum before any liquid is drawn all the way up to the seal area. I also double-seal, running another strip along above the initial seal.

I haven't made any confections for probably over a year now, and figured I had better get warmed up for the 2014 Chocolate & Confections Workshop: I sort of hoped it would be like riding a bike, so of course I didn't bother reviewing any written instructions or anything intelligent like that. It took me three tries to get the temper right (tabling), but I did finally manage to nail that. However, I overheated the colored cocoa butter, I forgot to smack the molds when casting the shells, and I let the chocolate get too cool (so the shells are too thick). Doh! Moral of the story: read over your notes before trying something you haven't done in a long time!