KennethT

I haven't done garlic yet, but I'd assume 180 would be pretty good since other veggies do well at 180... I'll be curious to hear your results! With the duck skin, I'd go with the nose... the nose knows! You can smell when the fat is rendering and skin begins to crisp... plus, you can always check it every once in a while by lifting up the silpat for a second... I like to do it between two sheet pans - never tried the silpats - I always assumed that the silpats would insulate the skin too much and not let all the heat in... The other night, I did chicken breasts at 140F with a tablespoon of butter, some fresh thyme sprigs, and some rehydrated porcini mushrooms... The chicken wound up getting a really nice earthy flavor and was super tender and juicy... plus, the mushrooms turned out great too.... made a sauce using the rehydrating liquid as a base, reduced adding a bit of dijon and creme fraiche... then added the bag liquid when the chicken finished... The rest of dinner actually took a lot longer so I left the bags in the 140F waterbath for like 2.5 hours with no adverse effects... I love this method!!!

The tomalley is light green in color... if the lobster is a female and has roe inside, the roe will be a very dark green in color, which will turn orangy-red when cooked... Personally, I like to remove the dark green roe from the females prior to cooking... you can then push this through a fine sieve and mix with crushed ice and use to make a raft for clarifying lobster consomme... using most egg whites will extract flavor from the consomme, but using the lobster eggs does a good job of clarifying, but does not remove the lobster flavor...

Interesting... did you add any liquid to the bag with the rhubarb, star anise, vanilla and cinnamon? Also, was the rhubarb stringy at all?

The tail was about 1" thick at the thickest part... so according to the tables provided by NathanM in the sous vide post, it should take about 46 minutes - and I think I left it in for about an hour, just in case... it was one of my first sous vide experiments after I got my circulator... I typically slice lobster depending on the presentation - I don't think the slicing direction affects tenderness like it would with meat - so sometimes I slice crosswise across the tail to make 3/8" thick medallions... and sometimes I'll slice it lengthwise through the middle (to cut it in half)... I usually try to remove the claw in one piece and present it whole...

I've cooked lobster SV at 45degC according to NathanM on the Sous Vide post... but I always find it a little undercooked - each time, I find the claw meat has tons of jelly around it - and the tail meat is cooked, but still a little chewy - the raw kind of chewy, not the rubbery over-cooked chewy.... Also, it's best to first remove the shell, which is kind of a pain, prior to bagging... you can do the tail in the shell - but you have to put a folded aluminum foil "pad" over the spiny parts of the shell or they tend to pierce the bag. One day I was going to try again but at about 46-47degC... but I haven't tried it yet...

So, after some experiments, I came to a few conclusions... First - my setup.... I had a couple of 5 pound blocks that were broken into small chunks... and then further broken by putting the chunks into a towel and hitting witha rolling pin until there was small pieces, and fine ice dust... I used a standard hand mixer on low speed using the egg beater attachments - in hindsight, not the best, but more on that to come... Total time from cream to soft serve ice cream was about 5 mintues.... Some things I found: First, the base must already be COLD - like refrigerator temp cold... the reason is that when the dry ice hits a warm, or even cool base, it froths up for a while looking a little like Mount Vesuvius or one of those volcano science projects I did as a kid... much less frothing when the base was cold. Also, my first experiment was using small pieces of dry ice broken from a large block... this proved problematic for a few reasons - sometimes the small pieces (size of a marble) would have cream frozen around it and you'd have to beat it apart with the beater... I was a little paranoid that there were small chunks of dry ice throughout so I beat it like crazy, putting in more air into the mixture than I'd like... it didn't come out carbonated, but it wasn't as dense as it usually is with the same base recipe... I think the best way to do it, is to pulverize the dry ice into a powder - like snow... my first experiment did this by putting the dust/small pieces through a strainer to get only the dust... much better, more even distribution, and no worries of biting down on a chunk of dry ice! So that means less mixing, for a denser product - well, you could always whip it extra if you'd like, but I think it would be possible for a gelato like product this way... The chunks/pieces broke apart pretty easily -I haven't tried it yet, but it seems that it would work fine if put in the food processor - maybe even the blender... All in all, it was pretty good - not hte best ice cream I've had, or made, but an interesting experiment...

Check out the Martha Stewart video with Heston Blumenthal linked above in a previous post... he did it with the dry ice, but it didn't seem like he carbonated the ice cream - Martha and some other guy (maybe the producer?) both said it was really smooth textured, but no once commented on a fizzy feeling... it didn't seem like he added that much - and he didn't add it all at once either - he started the mixer then added a spoonful, the another spoonful, then another until he thought it looked right... Another thing Blumenthal mentions in the recipe attached to the video is that the base should be chilled in the refrigerator before freezing with the dry ice... maybe that would keep it from getting to fizzy??? I'm going to try to do a test this weekend - will post how it goes...

I agree... food grade is the way to go - but I have no idea where to get it... a quick google search found 3 companies in Manhattan that sell dry ice... one of them never heard of food grade dry ice and had no idea if his stuff was or wasn't (I've actually bought some from him a few years ago for an industrial purpose - and it looked pretty clean)... another said "why would you want it food grade - you can't eat it!" I haven't called the last one yet.... Any ideas where to get it in the NYC area?? Preferably in Manhattan? Thanks!

I just checked out the video clip of Blumenthal doing this... thanks for the link!!! A few times he refers to the idea that you can do this at home very easily, and he never says "just make sure to get food-grade dry ice" or anything like that... I wonder if there is such a thing as food grade dry ice... Maybe I'll just try some, and hopefully I won't go blind...

Interesting - I wondered how an immersion blender would work... I'm a little confused on your method... When you put the liquid base in the bowl, you then add teh dry ice to the bowl and use the stick blender?

I like the idea of Blumenthal's method - and Alex and Aki's method with the dry ice... None of the supermarkets in my area carry dry ice - but there are a few ice places that have it... I'll have to inquire to see if it's food grade... if it is, then it makes the task a lot easier... I can imagine that as soon as I stick my ice cream container in the container of alcohol/dry ice, the ice cream against the wall freezes instantly and all of a sudden I've got an ice cream rock... Putting chunks of dry ice into the mixer solves that problem... plus, the paint stirrer at high speed, I definitely think it'll have no problems... FOOD GRADE DRY ICE, WHERE ARE YOUUUUUUUUUU??????!!!!!!

Ice cream makers don't actually stir the mix so much as continually scrape the base and sides - the gap between bowl and "dasher" is critically small - and important I believe in controlling the final texture. The other function of the dasher is to incorporate air into the freezing mix. "Overrun." My Gaggia machine's dasher rotates at maybe 10 rpm. Can your drill really go that slow? Incidentally, if one uses the Gaggia as a bowl-within-a-bowl, alcohol is used between the bowls as a non-freezing, conformal (liquid!) thermal link between the inner bowl and the freezer coils. If you already have a chest freezer and a stand mixer (like a KitchenAid), then the simplest thing would be to get the mixer "ice cream maker attachment". This is a bowl that gets frozen and an appropriate paddle acting as a dasher. If you store the bowl in your freezer, you can pack flexible bags of stuff like peas inside and around it - so the amount of wasted space it takes is minimal, and its always chilled ready to use. But if your freezer has built-in shelves, check very carefully that there is enough shelf-to-shelf height to take the freezeable bowl. ← I've used an inexpensive ice cream maker before - years ago - and the rotation of the bowl serves to scrape the sides of the canister and continually mix the contents of the bowl - if I remember correctly, the dasher was angled so that the frozen cream that sticks to the wall is scraped and shoveled into the center of the bowl... but the difference is that the canister is only at maybe -10degF (the absolute coldest my freezer will get, not including averaging the temp. for the defrost cycle, door opening, etc.) So, the ice cream doesn't freeze that quickly up against the wall because it's not THAT cold, so you can scrape it slowly which will incorporate air, and continually expose surface area to non-frozen cream. The stand mixer is a great idea - unfortunately, I don't have a stand mixer (wish I did though), let alone the space that one requires!!! The dry ice sublimates at -109degF (or something around there) - so even if I dump a bunch of it into a bowl of alcohol - maybe the alcohol (after the bubbling stops) will be around -75degF??? I'll check with a thermocouple when I get to try it... anyway, I'd imagine it'll be a LOT colder than what my freezer can do.... I figured I'd need to stir really fast in order to keep things more uniform in the quick freeze (and incorporate air and not have a solid frozen chunk)... plus, I figured that as the drill spins, I could drag it up and down the sides of the canister (effectively scraping the side of the canister) every few seconds which will continually re-introduce the warmer cream...

The freezing will only be at the sides, so you will have to constantly scrape the walls of the container. That is pretty much how an ice cream machine works. Why not just get an cheap ice cream machine? The variety where you put the bowl in the freezer can't be that expensive and does the same you want to do. ← yeah, I know ice cream machines aren't very expensive - probably between $50-$100 here... but I wouldn't use it very often, and I have very little space - both countertop and cupboard space... (it's a tiny nyc apartment kitchen)... so, I'm tyring to find a way around this for the "once-in-a-blue-moon" that I actually decide to make ice cream... I already have a drill, and the paint stirrer is cheap and easily obtainable (and takes up almost no space)... Plus, this seems a lot more fun than sticking the base in the machine!!! I think, since the materials are so cheap, I may just try it one of these weekends when I have some time... I"ll try to take pictures to document my failure, I mean hopeful success!!! haha.... hopefully there won't be any pics in there of me in the emergency room dealing with cryogenic skin burns!!!

I thought about adding the dry ice directly to the base, but I didn't know the "purity" and food grade-ness of it... I wonder if there would be trace amounts of who knows what in there that I don't know if I'd want to eat... It also occured to me that the sides of the canister would freeze much quicker than the middle - and would probably need to be scraped every once in a while in between stirrings... or I figured I might be able to scrape the sides with the stirrer as it's stirring... I guess it's something I'd have to try in order to see how it goes...

hey Bob - what's the purpose of the upside down cooling rack? If you want them to drain, wouldn't you want the cooling rack the normal way? Or do they slide through the bars??

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about making ice cream with liquid nitrogen... A) because it sounds really cool and B)I love high quality home-made ice cream but don't have an ice cream machine (or the space for one!).... I think we've all seen the demo where you take your ice cream base, pour in some LN, stir like crazy and in 15 seconds... POOF! Ice cream! With a really fine texture, no less... My biggest problem is sourcing the LN... and also, I don't have a Dewer (sp?) flask to store it in, if I can procure the LN.... Another idea hit me today as I was reading a different topic on the EG... what if you took a bunch of dry ice pellets (much more readily available than LN) and added to rubbing alcohol (freezing point lower than the dry ice) and put that in some kind of container... then the ice cream base (in it's own metal container) is put in the container with the cold alcohol, instantly freezing the sides of the container.... if this is done while stirring like crazy - I'm thinking of an industrial paint stirring rod attached to a drill - it works great for paint! and available at sears... I would think that it could reproduce the same effect as a churning ice cream maker, but a lot faster, and with smaller grain size because of the quicker freezing... Can anyone think of anything I'm not thinking of as to why this might be a bad idea? Edit to correct bad typos....

so I did some experimenting this weekend... I salted the squab legs for about 3 hours using the Diamond Kosher -I didn't measure how much I used, but on the surface, it looked about the same as when I followed Paula Wolfert's advice for duck legs confit... I then cooked the squab legs SV at 82.3degC (roughly 180degF) for about 3-1/2 hours... Upon tasting, the saltiness was fine - I think 3 hours is the upper limit of how long to salt them.... and the texture was good - maybe 4 hours would be ok... but it was right at the cusp... for the squab legs, I think my personal preference is not completely falling off the bone (like for rilettes) - but I actually like with a bit of texture....

well, if it's a bunch of small sized cans totaling 2lbs (not one big 2lb can), you can just use them for what you normally use them for, and just save a bunch of money in the long run... the shelf stable canned ones should last forever without deteriorating in quality....

Has anyone tried doing a squab leg confit? If so, how long did you salt it and how long did you cook it in the fat?? I've done the moulard duck legs confit with decent success - salting for about 12 hours with Diamond Kosher (thanks Paula Wolfert!), then cooking SV (much easier cleanup) at 180degF for about 7 hours... I'd assume that the squab legs would take considerably less time both salting and cooking since the thickness is maybe 1/3 that of a duck leg... also, I think a squab leg is a bit tenderer to start out with.... Any thoughts or experiences???? Thanks...

I'm looking into different exhaust options for my kitchen... a little background - I have a standard NYC tiny rental apartment kitchen - probably about 8 x 12 x 10' high... but it has a full sized window located near the oven/range... I was debating putting in a seemingly robust window exhaust fan rated at 3400 CFM, but I don't know how this would compare to a similarly rated hood exhaust.. In theory, I would think that all CFM are the same - that's the volume of air that the fan will move per minute - whether it's located in a window, or in inline with an exhaust hood and outlet duct shouldn't matter... Anyone have any thoughts about this?? ps - I am currently ducting the exhaust from the standard built-in microwave hood out the window with a rather Rube Goldberg-esque type setup... but, unfortunately, the fan capacity of the built-in "exhaust" is pretty meager, and really won't cut it when grilling indoors or doing anything really fun... so I was hoping to boost the fan capacity with the addition in the window (that's the easiest for installation).... Thanks!!!

I've done an experiment with flank steak - I took 1 piece of flank steak and separated it into 2 pieces - jaccarded and seasoned both equally, cooked one piece SV at 131.5F for 24 hours, cooled, then patted dry/seared in hot pan just before service... the other was cooked the "standard bistro way" - seared then pan roasted until medium rare (just about the same degree of rareness as the SV version)... My blind taste test subjects (the test was blind, not the subjects - haha) all concluded that the SV version was signficantly more tender than the standard pan roast version with better mouthfeel... and slightly more "beefy"... they concluded that the non SV version was more "chewy" and overall less enjoyable... they compared the texture of the SV version to filet mignon (although I don't know if I'd go that far - I thought it was tender, but had a much different mouthfeel than filet) Unfortunately, if you like a really good hangar steak bloody, this doesn't really apply... but the medium-rare crowd thought the experiment was interesting... how you could take $6.99 a pound flank steak and make it tender enough that you could pass it off as $20 a pound filet medallions... BTW - I can't say enough how much I've learned from this post - this post made me join EGullet in the first place and now I'm an addict... thanks especially to nathanm and DouglasBaldwin....

I live in NYC and have a couple of dwarf citrus trees in my apartment - a lime and a lemon... they're dwarf sized trees but yield full sized fruit... I got both from Four Winds Growers in CA.... they have a lot of variety, including the Calamandins...

I agree with this - although I find that the clarification process removes a lot of flavor from the broth... one way help avoid that is to add a bunch of finely chopped meat to the egg whites before adding to the cold stock... so if making a beef consomme, for example, you'd take a bunch of fine chopped (or ground) chuck or other flavorful beef and mix it well with a bit of finely chopped mirepoix and the egg whites.... then follow the directions above... that way, while the coagulating egg whites are trapping the fine particles, they won't completely rob your broth of a lot of flavor... Also, it is a good idea once the raft forms, to poke a hole in the center of it so that the broth can "bubble" through... otherwise, it is possible for it to boil too hard once the raft is formed... the key is a gentle simmer... a hard boil will emulsify some of those particles into the liquid...

Infernoo - that is awesome!!! Plus, I'd imagine that any cooking you do at that temperature will have the added benefit of cleaning the oven at the same time haha.. I've been thinking about making a "benchtop tandoor" recently... I was thinking I could make a 5 walled cube out of 2" thick poured concrete, then stick some red hot coals in the bottom - that way you get the charcoal smoke and the heat... any ideas about how to go about this??? I'm a little worried that normal concrete (not the quick drying vinyl stuff) may give off some funky tasting/smelling/potentially hazardous fumes when it gets really hot though... Any ideas from all the pyros out there???

I'm a big fan of slicing them about 1/8 - 3/16" thick, then season with s&p, and saute in butter... once the butter starts to brown, add a bit of cognac and flame on! Finished witha bit of tarragon... mmmmmmmm.... nothing like the combo of butter, black pepper, cognac and tarragon.... oh yeah, and the pears!