nickrey

If you heat the water up before putting it in the container, surely maintaining the temperature at level is not going to take 2000 watts.

At 60C, I would have left them in for 72 hours. You'll find that they are so tender that the bone slides out. Check out the original sous vide topic and you'll find variants that include 67-68C for around 24 hours, and 72C for 20 hours.

I am not sure if this will help but when I cook poultry I cook the breast at 60C (140F) and bone-in thighs at 65C (150F). There is a discussion of cooking turkey sous vide at this link.

You also said that you rested it. There is no need to do this with sous vide cooked meat. Simply brown and serve. If you're looking for a way to serve that gives a maillard effect but keeps the integrity of the sous vide meat, try wrapping the cooked pork in prosciutto and then sear that in a very hot pan. This gives a layer to insulate the pork while giving an interesting texture and flavour to the dish.

maybe I should have clarified that I've cooked at 3 Michelin star restaurants, so to me, poaching eggs is easy. I'm sure it is easy for you and I'd love to watch you do it to get more pointers on how it is done well. The thread was started by someone who is wanting to achieve professional looking eggs. For those of us who cook one or two eggs at a time, it is far more of a challenge to develop the skill than for those who cook commercial quantities.

Why not do what the Indians and Thais do and cook the chili paste separately? In their case, they then add extra ingredients to create the sauce; here you could add the already roasted paste to the broth after you have skimmed the fat off.

The modernist cuisine version of the recipe asks you to reduce the liquid right down so it becomes a glaze for the meat. If you still have liquid as well as the pork, it would seem that you have not taken the reduction far enough.

I've looked at the video and been able to work out most of the processes. Measures, etc are a different matter. You'd need to consult similar process recipes to get these. There seem to be six different processes involved: 1. Creating a dense sugared strawberry sauce. 2. Candying the strawberry leaves 3. Creating a strawberry snow 4. Creating a toffee strawberry 5. Creating a strawberry snow 6. Creating macerated strawberries in sugar syrup Let's go through it piece by piece. Create dense strawberry coulis Remove stem from strawberries by cutting laterally. Remove strawberry bits, keeping only intact green leaf stem. Set aside, these will be used for the candied leaves. Section strawberries. Add sugar. Leave aside for two hours to allow syrup to form. Boil until the strawberries are broken down. Store for use to attach stem to candy strawberry. Candying the strawberry leaves Boil sugar syrup (I think from the way it boiled that it is syrup rather than water). Blanch stems in syrup and drain. Put a small amount of strawberry liquor (Crème a la Fraise des Bois) into a small bowl. Dunk in liquor and place on kitchen paper to drain. Top liberally with icing sugar. Place in dehydrator and leave to candy for six hours. Creating the Strawberry Snow (note, this could be relatively easily done with a Pacojet but this method seems to create a similar result) Slice hulled strawberries in vacuum bag and add sugar. Vacuum seal and cook sous vide at 80C for 10 minutes. Place in ice bath to cool. Then place in Thermomix. Add cream, condensed milk, and hydrated leaf gelatin. Cook at 80C speed 3 until well mixed and gelatin is melted through. Strain through fine sieve into glass bowl sitting on ice. Strain mixture again into 500ml cream siphon. Charge with 1 nitrogen bulb. Sit in ice. Add liquid nitrogen to open container. Spray foam into liquid nitrogen (be very careful on this step so the liquid nitrogen doesn't blow out). Agitate such that no large lumps of mixture are formed. Place into food mill (Bamix wet/dry attachment). Process until it is fine snow. It looks like crushed cornflakes are added at this time but it could be another type of sweet crumb (my gut says malted crumbs). Creating a Toffee Strawberry (I've seen a demonstration by Jordi Roca of this: it's a bit like blowing glass). You'll need to use a toffee recipe for this, he chef pulls it like taffy so I'd be looking at a recipe that creates this type of texture. Create a strawberry mix with dehydrated strawberry, cream of tartar and water. Measure out the sugar, add the strawberry mix, heat. When the taffy mix reaches 164C, remove from heat. Place on silpat in raised square mold. Sprinkle with yellow seeds (not sure what these are but they approximate the seeds on the outside of the strawberry. Remove taffy from silpat and work until it is a rope approximately 2.5cm thick. Cut into 3cm lengths. These can be set aside before embarking on the next step. Heat four of the pieces under a heat lamp until the taffy becomes workable. Remove small piece and form into a half bulb shape. Place this on the end of a copper tube (the other end has a hand operated rubber bulb attached to provide the air for blowing the toffee. Operate bulb with one hand and create strawberry shape with the other. Let it solidify. Heat the copper tube with a blowtorch near the stem end of the strawberry until you can remove the candy strawberry shell. Next heat a metal wire circle with the blowtorch (this is a tool with a handle with a wire coming out of it that has a wire circle at the end). When red hot, slice off the extra stem to create the strawberry shell, which has a hole in the top. To Complete Fill the shell with the strawberry snow. Place a small amount of the coulis on the exposed snow. Place the candied leaves on top of the strawberry to create the strawberry. To Serve Place the complete strawberry in front of the diner. Provide fresh chopped strawberries in syrup that can be eaten with the broken toffee strawberry.

That looks really good Andrew. What's in it and did it also come with a sauce?

Keith, the brining and curing section in MC is in volume 3 starting on page 169. You should find that it answers your questions. With regard to using sugar, I tend to find US palates prefer food sweeter than we Aussies: as a result, if I use it I tend to cut the recommended proportion of sugar in cures by half.

Problem is that they're not easy, everyone just assumes that they are.

There's always the one from the Momofuku cookbook. However, when I tried it the pickles came out way too sweet for my palate. Guess one has to take a recipe and adapt it to taste.

Great imitation of frypan sear there

Not trying to be a purist; however, is it just me or do they look more fried than poached?.

This is the Arzak egg. I don't really like the coin purse appearance of the finished product.

It does settle there. The main point is that is doesn't touch the metal bottom and through that the heat source.

This two-week old egg was cooked in a 2 liter saucepan with an inverted plate on the bottom. Water was around 80C, the egg was at room temperature, loose white removed by draining through a perforated spoon, vinegar in water, and placed into a gentle whirlpool in direction of the flow. Around four minutes of cooking, check doneness of yolk by lifting out of water and pressing gently. The method gets a result that looks something like a boiled egg. I find I can cook up to four eggs this way, placing the next in when the white is just firming on the first. If you need to do dozens of eggs, I'd use something more akin to Garth's technique.

I'm still not sure. As contaminants seem to lower smoke point, let's do a thought experiment removing all the variables except level of contaminants. Say we have an oil with contaminants that lower the smoke point. Let's then add that at a 10% solution with the same oil without the contaminants. Is the smoke point lowered by the dilution (representing 90% less contaminants), or does it still act as if it had the same level of contaminants? Let's now take that to a 5% solution or a .0001% solution. I really can't see how the smoke point remains the same.

I'd be using a radiant form of heat rather than a torch as it doesn't have the gas being pushed out at pressure. Perhaps a traditional salamander might be best.

I did a how to in my food blog (see this post that includes pictures. More recently I let the whirlpool settle down more than is represented in the blog and then carefully place the egg in the vortex and watch the white wrap gently around the yolk. I use vinegar and a whirlpool because it works for me. I must add that it took a lot of practice to get it right. It all comes down to what you are comfortable with and what works. I use a deep pan as I find the egg sets before it reaches the bottom. Others, such as Garth above, use shallow pans. To my mind the proof is in the product. Have a look at the product and see if it is what you want then be prepared to have a number of failures before you get it right. Another method is proposed by Heston Blumenthal who says to cook it at 80C for four minutes in a pan that has an upturned plate at the bottom to stop it hitting direct heat. He also makes sure to remove the loose white before cooking. Type "Heston Blumenthal perfect poached egg" into you tube search to watch him do it. Good luck.

Lots of people seems to be assuming that particles exist independently of their medium. As a corollary, if you mix two oils, they exist independently of each other: someone said above that they are miscible which I suspect means something more than coexisting. If smoke point is a function of the level of contaminants, then diluting the number of contaminants must decrease the smoke point irregardless of the volatility of the contaminants. Subjecting something to heat in one spot is different to diffusing it across the whole. Diluting a mixture should have the same effect. Let's experiment rather than speculate.

I'm interested in what's true. I really don't have any position in this with "rigidity". And I certainly don't "hope" for a particular outcome. Finding out what's true is what matters. If one thinks about science properly there aren't winner and losers. Who'd have thought someone with a PhD from a Science faculty could be so muddle headed? I suppose the lack of scientific references in this topic up until now led one astray. The experiment would be simple to conduct in a laboratory equipped to observe smoke point while applying different temperatures; unfortunately like many things that interest us in the food arena, the issue seems too trival to feature in the scientific literature.

Whenever I need to remove the fat from something, I use a fat separator (jug with the spout coming from the bottom so the stock pours out before the fat, which floats on top). Then reduce.

Scanning around, I came up with a statement by a graduate student in food science called Levy Pascua. His statement was that blending oil with butter doesn't raise the smoking point of either. What happens instead is that the lower smoking temperature butter breaks down but does not smoke because the higher temperature oil acts as a solvent and thinner. Moreover, the presence of the butter with its lower smoking point oil reduces the overall cooking temperature that is required to achieve the cooking outcome. This response seems to be half way between the two points of view without the rigidity of either. Let's hope the science supports it.

I'd predict the opposite. If we use the information provided in TCL's post, we can easily demonstrate how this happens. if you mixed two oils that were equivalent in all properties except the number of contaminants, by adding the less contaminated oil to the more contaminated oil you would by definition decrease the number of contaminants in the more contaminated one, thus raising the smoking point. Thus if you add comparatively pure vegetable oil to butter the smoking point is raised, which is something that most cooks will tell you from observation. Of course, if you took grapeseed oil and added butter then the smoking point would decrease but I'm assuming that we are always talking about adding a higher smoking point oil to one with a lower smoking point.