KennethT

I've done a lot of foie SV over the past few years - but slices, rather than the whole one. I always use a zip lock bag - but I use the one that has the one way valve with the hand pump since the foie is dry when it goes in the bag. One thing - foie floats! So you'll need something to weigh it down to keep it submerged.

If I'm doing something with no liquid in the bag, I usually use the zip lock bags that have the one way valve and the included hand pump. I was sick of having to dig out the food saver every time I wanted to seal one or two bags (I have very limited counter space). I find the displacement method works great if there's some liquid in the bag, but sealing something that's dry always leaves an air bubble for me. then again, the nice thing about ziplocks is that you can always open the seal, let out the airbubble (once it's surfaced to the seal area) and reseal while keeping the package under the water line.

Yes - any kind of particles will be a problem - you should strain whatever you put into your whipper otherwise it will clog. If your whipper clogs, you have to be careful - usually, you unscrew the top very carefully, and just a little bit, until you hear pressure releasing (don't unscrew all the way or you could get hurt and will certainly have a mess). Once the pressure is released, you can completely unscrew the top, clean the valve and then repressurize.

Since I rarely use my oven, and have practically no counter space, I set my oven to as low as it'll go. Winds up around 180F. My parents have tons of space - they have an electric hot-tray which works very well.

I usually do it the way most do, remove the skin, then sv at 57... but I was wondering - what if you did skin on SV first, then chilled completely, then skin side down in a medium pan. Maybe by the time the fat renders, the meat will be brought back up to temp without going too high?

Recently, I had a dish at Mintwood in DC - wild Scottish pigeon breast, surrounded by a mince of the legs, thighs and innards, wrapped in savoy cabbage and then wrapped with a slice of uncrisped bacon. It was awesome! That sounds great! I love when the Scottish game comes into season... my buddies at Ottomanelli used to hold some Scottish partridge for me when they got it in... great, just really expensive though! Sadly, right now I don't have the time to do a lot of fun (read time consuming) cooking so I don't get to see them as often as I'd like.

I love doing small birds. You're not going to get nearly as much flavor out of a squab in NY as you would in France. I gather they hang them in France for a few days to age them, but that does not happen here. I've had good results doing squab sv. I typically get a bit more flavor out by first browning the skin in foie gras fat (just a few seconds to get color), then putting in the bag and seal with more rendered foie gras fat. I'll do the MC "turbo aging" holding it at 115-120F (I forget the exact number - but it's in MC) for a few hours (no more than 3) then I'll turn up the circulator to 131 and cook until pasteurized using Vengroff's sous vide app. For the legs, I cook them for like 4 hours at 156F or something like that, then a quick sear in more you guessed it, foie fat. Like FP said above, quail and foie are a great combo - but so is squab and foie. Years ago, I had at Atelier Robuchon in Paris a squab dish where he rolled a squab breast and a slice of foie (cooked sv, not seared) in a leaf of cooked savoy cabbage, then wrapped with a single slice of gently cooked bacon (so it was tender, but not crispy) with a line of piment d'espelette. It was awesome. They had it for a whle in the NYC Atelier, but it wasn't the same - the squab didn't ahve as much flavor. But I do it at home with the rendered fg and the turbo aging, and it's a little closer.

I've made a dark roux in the microwave. It actually works really well and only takes abou 10 minutes. The only problem is (for me since I have an over the stove microwave) that you have to take it out every minute or so and give it a stir and it's hot!

Can you be a little more specific? How can the product be used? Only as a component in other products (ie pasta, cakes, batters, etc) or by itself (ie omlette, scrambled eggs, etc) ?

I don't think that will foam when warm though - the gelatin won't hold its structure when warm and will quickly deflate... hence the suggestion above to make an agar fluid gel - that will hold its foam very well even when warm.

Another way to do it to have a hot foam is to make a bacon stock (use the rendered fat as well) then make an agar/xanthan fluid gel using roughly 1% agar and like 0.2% xanthan. You can heat the fluid gel up to 180degF, then add to your whipper and foam away!

I find Fresh Direct's quality to be very good, in general. Here and there, something's not great, but most of the time it's as good as you'll find anywhere else in the area. For all things Italian, you could head to Eataly on 23rd and Broadway - they have an excellent selection of canned tomato products, pastas (both dried and fresh) and a very good produce and meat and fish selection. Their prices aren't always the best but they're actually not bad for most things. Some items are quite pricey, but a decent value for the quality. Their Piedmontese beef is expensive, but excellent quality. When it comes to duck, I haven't noticed a variety of brands, necessarily. Most prepackaged ducks are very similar (if not the same), but you can get different varieties by going to the Chinatown meat markets on Mott btwn. Hester and Grand, or in the butcher dept at Eataly, or by going to one of the specialty butchers like Ottomanelli on Bleecker. But I'm sure you don't want to run around that much... I've found that the meat markets in Chinatown have the best fowl selection outside of a specialty butcher - lots of different types of birds and all good quality. Other than what you'd find there, most supermarket chickens have been bred for large breasts and no flavor.

I've never been able to get turkey breast skin to be very good. The times and temps that make the meat perfect just aren't enough to soften the tough skin - so it always comes out a little rubbery. I've tried pour-over frying, torch, smoking hot saute pan... just about everything but a deep fry. But in order to leave it in the fryer long enough to do some good, you'll have to really chill down the surface - I'm thinking the MC 30 second dunk in LN type cold. Putting in a standard freezer won't work fast enough, I'd think. Another thought just came to me thinking about Singaporean chicken-rice - they get a great texture on the skin (granted, it's chicken skin, not turkey, so it starts out much thinner) by dunking the chicken in boiling water then putting in an ice bath. I've done similar things at home and it works well with parts too - if you get the meat really cold - not necessarily freezing - then give it a few minutes in simmering water, maybe that would be enough to soften the skin a bit, while the meat underneath is still uncooked. Then shock in the ice bath, bag and cook SV. Hopefully the skin will have softened a bit during the simmer so that it will be able to get crispy once cooked with the high heat post SV.

My first thought is what are yougoingto use as a cold trap for your vapor? The rotovap's condenser is under vacuum as well. If you don't have some form of cold trap, then all of your vapor will go out your machine's exhaust before it can condense on your dome. Plus, rotovapping takes quite a bit of time. I don't thinks a chamber vac is made to run the pump continuously for that long.

I've done pork belly without brine and it still came out amazing. I did 158F for 36 hours (I think ScottyBoy did this a long time ago, and it looked great) - meat went into the bag completely unseasoned, skin on. I did it cook/chill - then wound up keeping in the fridge for a week or so... When getting ready for service, I cut into pieces, took the skin off, seasoned with salt, then fat side down on a medium-high cast iron griddle until nice and golden, then flipped just until heated through (not long). Both the meat and fat were so silky, juicy and porky, it was ridiculous. Served with a chorizo puree (chorizo broth turned into a agar/xanthan fluid gel) so barely salting the belly was fine since the puree had plenty of flavor/salt already.

I don't think I've ever seen fork tender pork loin! I worry that cooking a very long time (to tenderize) might exude too much liquid and make it dry. Have you tried the MC turbo aging? Maybe that would help tenderize without making it too dry. Or Jaccard?

I don't agree. In NYC where practically every restaurant delivers, we have a collection of menus that is quite impressive. Not one of them is a black/white photocopy. If it were, I personally would think it unprofessional. It doesn't have to be fancy - 4 color process, glossy paper, etc, but I think a matte 2 color Pantone spot would help set your menu apart from the myriad of others. Back to your question, where to source, and how much to pay, I don't have a real answer. Years ago, before the Internet, my company used glossy 2 color spot pages as sell sheets. We found a printing company in Canada that had really good rates, even with shipping. I can try to look up the name tomorrow when I'm back at work. For now, I'd google spot color printer or something, and just get a bunch of quotes - you'll see pretty quickly what the going rate is, and who the outliers are.

I agree with many of the posts above, but in my experience, fluorescents and CFLs do not have enough light intensity for a mature plant. They're great for seedlings and young plants, but if you want your mature plant to do well indoors, I'd recommend a stronger light. For one plant, you could get away with a 150W sodium lamp, or a 90W led UFO. Run them with a timer - roughly 12hours on/off. Neither setup will be inexpensive, but you could grow your plant in a closet and have the output of a normal summer day. Check these guys out: http://urbanhydro.org - they haven't updated their site in a while, and they focus on hydroponics, but they've also done quite a bit of research into lighting.

I realize you don't have the problem anymore, but an Asian store with no mung bean noodles??? Maybe they have them under a different name "cellophane noodles". They turn translucent when cooked.

Vengroff designed a great ipad app that many of us use called Sous Vide Dash. It's available in the apple app store. Highly recommended.

Actually it turns out this is wrong! I lost power last night along with the rest of Manhattan below 39th St. on the East Side, and am happy to report that the gas still flowed from my burners this morning, thank God, and was lightable with a match. Even on the 11th floor. Would be curious to hear whether others in high-rises still had their gas even though the power was out. KennethT, I think you are in my neighborhood so a similar situation? Well, that would be the main reason, since many people who live in the city don't have an outside. I actually do have an outside, but I'm pretty sure the building would frown on me putting a generator out there. I'm very sorry for the mis-information I gave the other day. I actually didn't know it to be true 100%, but made an assumption based on equipment I have at work. As Patrick said, it turns out that the gas flows just fine with the power out. I too am below 39th St. and will prbably have no power for the next week, but I was lucky enough to get a hotel room with power for tonight through Sat. The gas flows in my range burners just fine - you just have to light it manually with a match or something. My oven doesn't work because it uses a hot-point igniter rather than the old style pilot flame. One additional problem I have is with my hydroponic plants - nothing is going to last very long when the pumps don't work!!!! I never imagined (other than for something like the blackout almost 10 years ago) that midtown Manhattan would lose power for this long of a period of time.

I was in Hong Kong during the summer of 2011. There is a very long thread here started a few years ago, but then was updated before and during my trip. http://forums.egullet.org/topic/107932-reports-on-hong-kong-dining/ I would recommend Yung Kee for anything goose related - their roast goose is incredible, and their other Cantonese dishes are excellent as well - char siu, suckling pig, steamed whole fish,etc. For Dim Sum, I would wholeheartedly recommend West Villa in Tai Koo (it's in a mall by the skating rink) - we thought it was the best dim sum that we had (and we had it every day for 7 or 8 days). They specialize in char siu. Note that you really shoudl have a reservation there (have your hotel make it for you unless you speak the language) as it's very popular with the locals - when we were there, we saw a lot of people turned away. There's anotehr West Villa in Central - but they don't have dim sum, but they have excellent Cantonese food.

SV sausage is a great idea - I think it was discussed in the first SV thread..

That's pretty cool. How do you drain it?

Step 2 can be done in a dehydrator, but definitely doesn't require one. You can use a very low oven instead. Since I don't have a dehydrator, and I only have a crappy gas oven, I set it to the lowest it will go, then prop the door open a bit with the handle of a wooden spoon - this keeps it about 140-150F which is good. When I make it at home, I just buy the prepackaged Italian fresh pasta in the grocery store. I took a cooking class in Chiang Mai and specifically asked to do Khao Soi, and my teacher used fresh noodles that looked like it had some kind of italian label on it... but the writing was in Thai... but there was an Italian flag... go figure... in the end, I don't think it matters that much, she just said to use a fresh wheat noodle. It's not like a Chinese lo mein noodle though... more like the Italian. BTW - if you want to make your own fresh pasta, you can definitely do that... don't worry about having the proper cutter - once you roll it to the proper thickness, you can cut the linguine or whatever you want to call it with a knife rather than using the cutter.