KennethT

Funny enough, my oven is usually more free than my circulator, so it's typically used for warming the plates! If both are occupied though, I'll give the plates a quick rinse (just to get them wet) then stick them in the microwave for 30 seconds... you can stick the whole stack in and it works fine.

I think a better result might be obtained by using a standard batter for frying, then dust with the malt vinegar powder afterwards.

That's what I was referring to. It was duck they tested, and they blind, triangle-tested several variations - cooked with no fat, then with no fat added; cooked in fat; cooked with no fat, then brushed with fat; then other variations brushing with other non-duck fats. They could absolutely tell the difference between non-duck fats and brushed with duck fat, but could not tell the difference between cooked in duck fat and no-fat cook and brushed with duck fat. Because of this, when I do confit at home, I just package the duck legs naked - and you know what I find after the cooking is complete? The duck leg is surrounded by duck fat - no brushing required!

OK - I get this for a restaurant situation turning out tons of the same dish.... another analogy would be the cooking water for chicken-rice - hawker stalls will recycle this liquid forever...

That's a very expensive idea to try!!! Other than the glory shot or advertising ability, what's the advantage to circulating butter (or any other fat or liquid) versus bagging the product with butter and circulating water like normal? To the same point, Modernist Cuisine points out that cooking in fat does not help cooking or add flavor to the interior of the meat - the fat molecules are too big to penetrate muscle - so you might as well bag naked then brush with butter once fully cooked. Otherwise, some of your meat flavor is going to making flavored butter. The only purpose I can see to circulating non-water is if you are cooking something that is too big to bag - like Dave Arnold's bionic turkey that he had to keep whole due to family expectations.

As far as I was aware, in the US, crab meat in containers is already fully cooked. I don't think you can buy raw crab meat other than whole crabs - which are usually alive when you buy them.

Just an update - I picked one of my limes to make limeaide... I got literally 1/4 cup of juice from 1 lime!

In one of the earlier SV threads nickrey had posted comments on using bag juices to make a pan sauce.

Exactly... I've been growing a dwarf bearss lime tree in my small NYC apartment for years now (there are some photos in other threads). It has never been outside... and right now, I have a tree full of limes at this very minute. And like Jaymes said, anyone can do it anywhere... check out four winds growers - they are a nursery for dwarf citrus trees and have almost every variety imaginable. The trees are dwarf because they ahve been grafted to dwarf rootstock - but they bear full sized fruit. My apartment is pretty sunny, but nowadays, it's pretty inexpensive to get a 100W LED grow light to give it supplemental lighting. Get a 200W light and you could grow it inside a closet!

I've been using zip locks for years with no problems - even with cook chill. That being said, here and there I've had a problem once in a while with doing high temp stuff in a ziplock - like a confit at 176 for several hours - here and there one bag would leak. But for most things, especially below say 150degF I've had no problems, and it's much more convenient.

I find that 5 min. in the bath helps drop the surface temp while leaving the inside still warm. I find it helpful when searing in a really hot pan for 10 seconds - which is definitely not enough time to get a good crust. If you need to sear longer, depending on thickness, it's best to cook in advance and completely chill, and sear straight from the refrigerator.... as you have seen. I can relate to using an old phone... so, you can always go old-school and use the tables either in Douglas Baldwin's website, or in the relative beginning of the original sous vide thread provided by nathanm. I actually have these printed and I keep them in a file just in case. They were used with great success pre-app.

I'm not familiar with the Club cut, but I assume it's supposed to be a tender cut if it comes from a rib steak. If that is the case, I think 3.5 hours is way too long. The longer it sits at temp, more and more juices get squeezed out. Especially with beef, which is typically eaten rare or med. rare, really, I find the best results using a time that would just bring it to temp, which is dependent on thickness - but depending on what you're calling "rather thin" - that could be 30 min? Do you have eGullet member Vengroff's Sous Vide Dash app? It's very useful for figuring timing for thin cuts - but, unfortunately you need an Apple device - I don't think they ever came out with an Android version. In any case, I think Enrique's explanation of why the two came out differently makes sense. I find searing in a hot pan tends to raise the temp of thin cuts too much to do just after removing from the bath. If I do this, I usually set my bath temp a few degrees lower, or I'll do a 5 min. dunk in ice water to chill the surface a bit before searing. I find the torch the easiest way to do a thin piece - it doesn't require pre-chilling or other playing around.

When subbing in tamarind, how much should you use? Do you first prep it like in other SE asian cuisines and knead it with hot water and then strain out the pulp/seeds?

My mother's All-Clad LTD stockpot has some minor pitting on the bottom. Quite a while ago, I wondered how it happened, so without telling her and without her realizing that I was watching carefully, I observed how she prepared the water for boiling pasta or vegetables. She'd take cold water out of the tap, put it on the burner, turn it on, then immediately dump (literally) in a bunch of kosher salt. The kosher salt stayed largely undissolved on the bottom of the pot, even as the water heated up and came to a boil. At one point, while boiling, I took a wooden spoon and scraped the bottom and found a lot of salt "welded" to the bottom, which would come off with quite a bit of scraping. The reason why they recommend adding the salt to the water when boiling is that, chances are, it dissolves before it gets a chance to collect on the bottom of the pot. No matter how salty you make your water, salinity at that level for short periods of time will not harm s/s... but imagine the microconcentration of salt at the point of where the clump is welded to the bottom!

Is fresh turmeric used much in kerala, as opposed to the dried powder form? I assume this recipe uses the powdered turmeric.

Infrared thermometer's accuracy varies depending on the surface you're measuring, since every surface has a different emissivity. Most IR thermometers can adjust the emissivity setting so you can get an accurate and consistent reading on any surface, so long as you're always measuring the same surface. I have a thermoworks IR thermometer (got it during one of their open box sales) which also has a type K thermocouple input. I can use that thermocouple input to directly measure the surface, then adjust the emissivity setting so that the IR temp. matches the thermocouple temp. Thermoworks also has a list of quite a few different surfaces and their typical respective emissivities on their website.

What temp do you use when butter poaching SV for 20 min? I've tried a bunch of different combinations, but have never been satisfied with the resulting texture....

I haven't had much success with any form of lobster SV - and I've tried many times and temp combos. I find the best and most consistent way to do it is the Eric Ripert method from A Return to Cooking: simmer the tails for 5 min. then take off the heat and let steep in the hot liquid (he makes a veggie broth with some champagne vinegar) for about 20 min. more. If you want to shell the tail before cooking (I would do this for SV, but not for simmer method) you can pour boiling water over the tail, and then the shell comes off pretty easily with some kitchen shears.

My circulators are home made. I'm a manufacturer of non-food related products, and a few years ago, was entertaining the idea of making circulators for SV. So I made prototypes for testing and de-bugging. I don't want to get too much into the details, but our design is very different from the types currently on the market as the device does not go into the cooking chamber, which leaves more room for bags. With that being said, my circulation isn't as strong as some of the immersion circulators, which is why I felt it necessary to do circulation tests.

At one point a few years ago, I tested my circulator's water circulating ability by putting a bunch of bags in the bath and then putting a few drops of food coloring in the corner (away from the bags). In a matter of seconds, there was food coloring everywhere - even between the bags that were pretty closely packed together. I did this in several trials and found the same results each time.

I do a lot of SV now, and have a few circulators, but years ago, when I first discovered eGullet and SV, I started doing it in a pot on the stovetop. It's certainly fine for things that don't take a lot of time - fish, chicken breast, etc. Like the OP, I didn't want to sink a lot of money into something I wasn't going to use, or get something and have the results not be worth it. After just a few experiments on the stovetop with a thermometer, I was hooked! One thing I learned doing it this way is the value of covering (or uncovering) the pot. When cooking fish at low temp (I cook salmon at 115degF), I actually kept the pot uncovered because I found the temp crept up a bit, even with my burner (electric at the time) at the lowest setting, if it was covered. Chicken breast at 140degF was best covered and I found that once up to temp, keeping the burner on the lowest setting kept the temp stable. So just a stir once in a while to make sure there are not hot/cold spots. Once the water was up to temp, and the burner turned to low, I found that it didn't make a difference if the bag sat on the bottom, in contact with the pot, or not. Using a long thermocouple probe I borrowed from work, I found that the temp was the same - even the pot temp at the bottom, so long as the burner is very low.

You can seal practically anything in a bag and reheat in the water bath. I do it all the time. It's great when you have a dinner party - everything can be precooked, then 10-20 min. before each course, just drop the bags in a 120-130degF bath to reheat. Works great for mashed potatoes, sauces, etc. - especially for those of us with very limited stove-top space! Like rotuts said, just keep in mind that it's no longer pasteurized, so treat it like you would any normal non-SV food - no longer than a week in a cold refrigerator, etc...

I've also noticed the bit of "dark meat" on a pork chop - you're talking pork rib chop, right?. Whenever I ate it, it always reminded me of the strip of meat on the outside of a beef prime rib that is very different from the center cut meat. Back when I had more time and was cooking more often, I would make a flank steak pretty regularly. 24h at 131 plus pre-jaccard... very flavorful cut but needed extra time to get that "steak-like" texture.

I've been doing something that I think enhances the grill flavor, SV. I trim most of the fat and grizzle from the steak, then render the fat in a pan and heavily sear the grizzle/trimmings in the rendered beef fat. I put the fat and seared trimmings in the bag with the steak with no seasoning. SV to whatever temp you like, then I'll season with salt only and sear with the torch, then pepper afterwards because I find that the pepper granules tend to burn under the torch.

A wort chiller works very effectively for this. You can either use it recirculating and keep adding ice to your reservoir, or attach it to the cold faucet and a drain. The key to using a wort chiller is the speed of the water flow - faster is not better. Running the water slowly is better as it has more time to absorb more heat.