nickrey

I've seen Buchner filters mentioned on recent forums (sorry, can't remember which one; it wasn't this one) and thought I'd give it a try. I connected it up to my food saver (which had been retired when I bought a chamber sealer) using the vacuum canister attachment duct taped on a piece of tubing. The original funnel is 60ml with a built in fritted disk so I tried coffee through that: The drip coffee water was cold. I used around sufficient coffee for a single shot basket. 50ml went through the filter in around 20 seconds. It tasted very good. Next came tomato water. Even after putting it through a fine and a very fine sieve, it would not go through the original funnel fritted disk. So I got some sous vide foam tape and wrapped it around the bottom of a funnel and tried a few different filters. In the end scrunched up cheesecloth at the bottom of the funnel mouth worked. This is the setup. The clear liquid in the flask is tomato water. Now to play with some other things.

Unfortunately cooking also depends not only on the cut of meat but also on the animal that it came from. Combine this with personal preferences and it is impossible to suggest a time that would suit your own tastes. My bet is this is why you are finding apparently contradictory information. I'd recommend getting your meat from a single source that has consistent suppliers and experimenting with different times to find the band that you prefer.

One wine tasting trick (no guarantees where it is an urban myth or not) is to reset your olfactory system by sniffing some coffee beans.

Fillet it. This is not a fish for cooking whole. Don't grill it unless you have some heavy duty marinade on it to keep it moist and even then make it really brief so it doesn't dry out. It is a really good fish deep fried in batter. Try tempura made with one cup ice cold water, one cup flour, one tsp baking soda, 1 egg, 2 tbsp of either cornstarch or potato starch. Mix all dry ingredients. Beat egg and add to flour with water. Whisk to mix. Be sure to leave lumps as these add character to the final batter. Dredge fish in flour, shake off excess, coat with batter, and deep fry. Or just cook it lightly in butter, poach, or steam. Whatever you do, unless it's battered and deep fried, don't use high heat. Cook it until it just goes white 1/2 way through the fillet. Turn and cook briefly on the other side. Rest slightly before serving. It will continue to cook once it's off the heat so the best time to finish is 2/3 done rather than fully done. If it is fully done when you are cooking, it will be overcooked when it hits the table. Sorry can't give times, depends on too many factors. It's better to watch how the fish cooks and turn/ take off when appropriately done.

Would you believe that in almost six years of sous vide cooking, I've never done a rack of lamb? Tonight was the night. I double bagged the lamb with tough plastic from the original packaging over the bone to stop it from ripping the bag. Lamb was cooked at 52C (125.6F) for 52 minutes. I then dried the lamb and then rubbed grapeseed oil onto it and salted the meat. The lamb was seared over a cast iron frypan that had been on the top heat of my wok burner for five minutes. You can see the sear and the cooking that this led to as a band on the right hand side and bottom (top part) of the meat in the picture. It was quite possibly the best lamb I've ever had. Will be doing this again. It was served with some charred vegetable ratatouille.

That would work but as I was doing this for immediate consumption it was unnecessary.

I'm pretty sure it's the tenderloin.

Chicken breast marinated in Teriyaki sauce with ginger and garlic, cooked sous vide at 65C for an hour then seared on a grill pan over high heat. Served with wok seared bok choy in oyster sauce and home-made kimchi [adapted from home-made sauerkraut (see this post)].

Try sous vide 52C for an hour Chris. Post cook sear on a blisteringly hot pan.

I recently purchased a Harsch fermenting crock and made up my first lot of Sauerkraut, which is absolutely delicious. I've also wanted to make some Kimchi but feel that I won't use the large amount that using the crock would create. Short of giving it away to friends (a reasonable solution), I decided to experiment with transforming the kraut into kimchi. Reasoning that the sauerkraut is already full of lovely fermented goodies, it seemed that I'd need to add some other elements such as carrot and onion as well as some additional flavourings. What I did was put some sauerkraut in a vacuum pack bag along with some finely sliced onion and some shredded carrot (again finely cut on a mandolin, this time with the medium slicing blade added). To this I added three different types of chili: A squirt of Sriracha sauce, some crushed fresh chili, and some ssamjang fermented chili paste. I also added some crushed garlic. In order to infuse the extra flavourings into the sauerkraut and to part process and force the mix plus sauerkraut juice into the onion and carrot, I used my chamber vacuum sealer. By running a full vacuum four times with no sealing I was able to mix all the ingredients and infuse them into the vegetables. The result was very tasty, still crunchy, and a very good substitute for conventionally made kimchi. I'm going to do it again, next time experimenting with some additional elements.

The stand looks useful. Some people report tastes on food after using propane (including my wife). The butane seems more benign.

Use Madeira or Sherry in the stock, it really boosts the flavour.

I bought an Iwatani a while ago and am very happy with it.

Smart people those.

Only problem with paper or any form of wrapping that keeps in the heat is that the fish and chips steam and lose their crunch. On the rare occasions when I purchase fish and chips, I immediately unwrap them to stop them from getting steamed. My preference is for less warm and crispy than warm and soggy.

If all you want to do is disinfect the surface, dunk the steak in boiling water. It's much more quantifiably controllable than searing.

As far as I am aware, Blether is correct in his assertion from primary sources (oh how I resisted using a pun there). Wikipedia is subject to the vagaries of contributors and thus must be approached sceptically and definitely not used as an evidence base. Even so, I'm left wondering where on this page on mother sauces or this page on vinaigrettes is it included as a mother sauce.

This was 2004. I wonder if the Eurocentric nature of the list would have changed in the past nine years with greater understanding and recognition of Japanese ingredients, techniques, and chefs.

Agree on odours escaping from properly sealed bags: cloves and smoke in particular. I've never seen the flakes either. What sort of bags did you use?

I've seen cooks in restaurants pre-cook pasta and reheat it in a frypan with a bit of added water (and sauce) for service. Looking this up on the web, I found this link. It is worth a pre-try to see if it works.

I agree that when you're using different temperatures or non-conventional approaches, then the modernist starches are appropriate - but for bog standard gravy... For 200 ml of gravy, you'd probably only need a teaspoon of potato starch. It has no discernible flavour and is a more effective thickener than corn starch. Moreover, you can dissolve it in water and add to the gravy without fear of lumps or that undercooked, pasty taste you get from flour. It seems to me that modernist acolytes are a bit like the person with the hammer: if it is all you have, everything is a nail. You see similar things with overuse of sous vide cooking: sometimes conventional really is better. I'd be interested in a reference on greater flavour release using ultrasperse, my understanding was that it was more effective in cool temperature mixes like pbear said above; I haven't seen anything on its other properties.

If it's a gravy that will be served heated, why not use potato starch? Sometimes a thickener is just a thickener.

I had a slight disaster with a home prepared ham (overcooked sous vide, mushy texture) so had to buy a small mass produced ham. It had a reasonable texture and level of saltiness but there was no way that it had seen any real smoke. It also had an unusual texture on the outside from the cooking process that I decided to trim that off. I wound up smoking it for an hour (from cold) with hickory chips in an electric smoker set to 95C. The glaze that I used was a small amount of apricot jam, french mustard, bit of salt and a bit of sugar. Melted everything in a saucepan and then painted it on the ham with a pastry brush and baked in a hot oven for around 10 minutes. It worked very well and you couldn't really tell that it was store bought at all.

My prediction is that using the proposed time and temperatures with a pre-cooked and pre-sliced ham you may end up with softer connective tissue but the meat is likely to become softer still. You are risking a mushy texture. I wouldn't recook it, rather just reheat it. I'm with ahpadt on this.

I've read good things about Leiths How to Cook, which comes from Leiths school of food and wine. I've seen it in Australian bookshops.