KennethT

Thanks... although I don't think the advice given by any of these takes cooking SV into account, especially since the target temp is the same as the bath temp, so overcooking the exterior is impossible. Also, when companies give this kind of advice, a lot of it is "cover your ass" as they don't want to be sued if someone defrosts it by leaving it out on the counter, gets a lot of bacterial growth and someone gets sick. Their advice is the same as the FDA, but none of it takes SV into account.

@Shelby In general, I agree with everyone but I don't know if the others have considered one thing - I had always thought that lobster becomes mushy due to enzymatic action when not frozen. That's why you're always supposed to either buy it live and kill it just prior to cooking or buy it frozen. I worry that defrosting overnight in the refrigerator will leave it for a few hours unfrozen and allowing the enzymes to do their thing. I don't know how long it takes for the enzymes to work to mushify the lobster meat. So, I'd probably cook from frozen and add say an extra 15 min. or so to account for defrosting at temp. I'd be curious as to what everyone else thinks about this... @weinoo @gfweb @rotuts

I had a thought recently about making beef for roast beef sandwiches. My local Wegmans supermarket commonly has shaved beef slices - I guess to use for stir fry or for Korean BBQ? I was thinking - you could put a bunch of slices in a ziplcok bag and SV at like 120F and have easy, thin sliced roast beef for sandwiches - but they just wouldn't have the maillarded edge. Thoughts?

To me, that level of rare is just perfect. Beautiful.

Do you have space indoors? Growing chillies indoors is really easy and contrary to what a lot of people on the internet say, you don't need hot weather to grow chillies - what dictates their heat level is genetics and ample light. I use a couple LED grow lights and my chillies taste just like I was there. I actually just cut down my rawit plant today as we're planning to go away in a few days and it was getting unwieldly large. I have probably harvested at least a full gallon ziplock bag full of those little pieces of plump, juicy dynamite, now happily IQF'd in my freezer. If you have the space and desire, let me know - I'd be happy to send you a few seeds of the rawit and/or the keriting chillies - send me a PM if interested. They are the most commonly used in Indonesia/Malaysia. Quite a few sambals are "fried" like that. Dabu dabu from North Sulawesi and sambal matah from Bali are both made that way. What's interesting is that a common Javanese sambal - sambal terasi (means shrimp paste) - the ingredients are pretty much exactly the same as the sambal ulek (I dont' think it uses palm sugar though, just a bit of white sugar to balance), except it is a fried sambal and it is ground very fine (like in a blender or really worked over by hand in the cobek).

Interesting - most of the recipes/videos I've seen of people in Indonesia making sambal ulek (aka ulekan aka cobekan), the chilli paste is made in the Indonesian mortar (cobek) and rather than being a fried sambal, it's typically spread in a thin layer across the cobek (which is almost flat, rather than deep like a Thai mortar) and smoking hot oil is poured over the paste and then mixed through thoroughly. I just made a batch a couple weeks ago using some of my home grown cabe keriting (curly chillies) and cabe rawit (often translated as Thai chillies, but they're actually different - more plump with a fruitier flavor, but just as spicy). I used a lot more rawit than normal and jeez that stuff is spicy! But really tasty. Keeps really well in the freezer and when defrosted is just about impossible to tell the difference. Most recipes/videos I've seen use only the rawit - I added the keriting to make it less spicy and it was crazy hot even still. So maybe using those Fresno chillies rather than the Holland spur chillies wasn't so far off! But everything looks great! I find it funny that the book calls the pickles "acar kuning" - (kuning meaning yellow). I've only seen it called acar without any other descriptor - it's always got turmeric in it!

I'm always in awe of your Indian meals. How much time would you say it takes to prep/make all of the components? I assume the masala/ground ginger/garlic/etc is different for the chicken, dal and chutney, plus the flatbreads!

Wow... I grew up in Peekskill and I don't remember anything like that there!!! Then again, it was a long time ago and I don't think birria existed anywhere in NY at that time...

Yeah, you can almost not water basil too much.... unless it's not getting much light, but yours looks like it's getting enough. It could always like more, but you can tell by the "internode length" which is the distance between trusses. But you're a master gardener so you would know more than I!

At least when this picture was taken, he looks like he could use a drink... when the leaves start curling in like that, it could be a sign of water stress. I once had a basil plant (it was really big) that could go through almost a gallon of water a day!

We need a Simpsons-like Homer drooling button....

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I also think that these batteries have no "memory" so you don't need to worry about losing capacity when not fully discharging/recharging most of the time.

I assume he's (one of) the founder(s).

I don't think so because when you make rice, there's a lot of water surrounding the rice and the rice is brought to a boil directly from the heating element. So, under pressure, the water surrounding the rice is at 248F at high pressure (assuming the IP works like my PC). This is different from the idea of putting a bowl of water/rice into the 250F steamy oven because the oven doesn't heat the water by conduction - so I think cooking rice in a PC would be different. When @Shelby makes teh gizzards, they're basically steamed in teh PC on a rack above the liquid, so in that case, it would be the same as in a 250F steam filled oven.

I wonder if it's more of the freshness than thickness. I haven't been to a Chipotle in a while, but I remember their tortillas being quite thin - and certainly tender enough so that when you bite into one that's bigger than your head, all the fillings don't try to squish out the other side. Or maybe it's the fact that they haven't been refrigerated.