nickrey

I don't have access to the original article but this is the one that McGee quoted that showed differences between salt taste in salt dissolved in liquids. Drake, S. & Drake, M. (2011). Comparison of salty taste and time intensity of sea and land salts from around the world. Journal of sensory Studies, 26, 1, 25-34. This is the only published and peer reviewed study that I've seen referenced. Seems the old "salt is salt" quote may be as much of an old wive's tale as sealing steak to keep in the juices. Edited to add: I use Sicilian Sea Salt because it tastes more like the ocean to me. This seems to be what the authors are saying in the article: some salts are saltier than others.

The first talks about 'non-scientific' studies; the second contains research conducted by the eminent research institution "Cook's Illustrated." Anyone have anything more scientific?

I've heard this time and again but have never been able to find the studies apart from some run by a group of amateurs who don't seem to know anything about scientific method. I know from my studies of gustation literature that humans are able to distinguish extremely small amounts of certain tastes so it is not beyond the pale that we can detect trace elements in salts. Time to stump up the claimed literature around this statement for scrutiny I'm afraid.

I still think it's sinister, as do many of my fellow local shoppers apparently. There was a single liter of non mass produced milk in our local supermarket this morning - the rest had sold out. I've been wondering for ages why our milk had been tasting "buttery" and not in a good way. The organic tastes much better. What I can't understand is why people defend practices such as this in terms of standardization and it not hurting you. Isn't this industrially generated blandness what most of us on eGullet are trying to keep as far away from as possible?

Burning off or boiling, you're not really removing all the alcohol (check out this link for eGullet discussion of this issue). I've always considered flaming a bit of showmanship in cooks who like to make things catch on fire.

Thanks I'll try it out.

Yes please. I've use deep fried baby spinach before on a fish dish from a Nobu recipe and it would be lovely to see how it is used in the chicken dish.

In Australia we have two dominant supermarket chains. Recently they have been competing to gain customers through savage discounting of basic products (bread, milk). This has led to margin squeeze that is hurting producers who look for more cost effective methods of production to keep in business. It now turns out that popular brands of milk have been diluted using "permeate" which is a watery, greenish waste product from the production of cheese. News reports are telling us that permeate forms up to 16% of fresh milk that we drink. This seems to me very similar to the pink slime in processed meat topic that was on the cooking forum earlier this year. What other products are bulked up for reasons of profit to our detriment? What is worse, why are these practices allowed under food regulations without any additional labelling?

180 (82C) is what I confit my ducks legs at and they work perfectly. I don't add extra fat because enough comes out of the leg. Fat is not absorbed, it serves as a cooking and preservation medium. Additional fat is likely to be redundant in sous vide cookery and later storage in the vacuum packaging. I try to use sous vide cooking to achieve effects that cannot be easily achieved in other ways. If there is a bone, I'll most often serve the meat on the bone, hence the 1 to 1 1/2 hour recommendation above. I'm wondering why you have chosen this combined method of cooking to achieve something (pulling meat) that works well on the BBQ. If you pull the thighs and then repackage for later heating, you lose the advantages of pasteurisation. It would be interesting to smoke one lot and then cook sous vide and continue the other lot in the smoker until done. Pull each and compare the products. My suspicion is that there may not be much difference between the two.

I like your style. My naive stereotype of US Southern porches when I was younger involved people sipping Mint Juleps. As I got older, I found out what was in them. And to think that people used to have them in the morning!

Thighs are darker meat and need a slightly higher temperature than breasts. I'd aim for cooking at 65C (150F) the final temperature will be around 64C. Depending on your setup and how many you are doing, I'd give them around an hour and a half at which stage they should be both cooked through and pasteurised.

I agree, read the label. It will tell you if it's suitable for whipping and/or suitable for cooking. I've never had a problem whipping cream that says it's suitable for doing so. We don't have a half and half and I am mystified by its use in our North American brethren's posts (Shalmanese above seems to have the answer having lived in both countries).

Again to digress. In our neck of the woods, they don't award an "MD" for completing medical training. Traditionally they have awarded two Bachelor's degrees (Medicine and Surgery). The use of "doctor" for these graduands is a courtesy title. As such, and having one, I would defend the PhD's use of the title doctor as being technically more correct. Getting back to the original question. As the title is neither mandated nor regulated, anyone can call themselves "chef." You'd hope that they had something to do with creating food and, typically, directing others to do so. The question is whether other, proper, chefs would apply that title to them. I've heard that the jury of peers amongst the cooking fraternity in using titles such as "chef" is quite fixed and robust in their views.

When you get past the six degrees of Kevin Bacon on Google, it looks like a flat bottomed weight you place on top of bacon in the frypan.

If we use this definition Heston Blumenthal, who has no formal training but has had his restaurant voted the best in the world a number of times, is not a chef. Somehow I don't think the definition works.

My bacon releases very little liquid as well. The cure still penetrates.

My first instinct in a situation like this is to say "don't feed the troll." As others have said above, this is a social situation and this person is obviously being rude and divisive. No matter what his background, he will thrive by belittling others and causing divisions. It is attention seeking behaviour with a destructive twist. If this person has you seeking to trip them up or somehow discredit them, they have achieved one of their key objectives. I'd suggest that you are starting to play their game rather than your own. Rather than asking how you can prove if someone is a "real chef," perhaps the question should be "how do I deal with a troll in my on-line social circle?" My advice would be to not react to them in an emotional fashion. Rather if they say something rude like "Don't you ever cook anything normal?" you could either ignore them or reply with something like "Everyone has their own preferences. My preference is to post interesting food rather than the everyday. If you choose to post what you consider normal food, please feel free to do so." This is a statement of fact with little to nothing in the way of hooks for them to escalate discussion. Type "dealing with trolls" into Google for more advice.

How did it work out? In my experience you need to cook potatoes at around 82C (180F) to get a palatable outcome. Did the longer cook at a lower temperature give a reasonable result?

I've just bought Efisio Farris' book "Sweet Myrtle and Bitter Honey: The Mediterranean Flavors of Sardinia" Will let you know what it is like when it arrives.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no. Because it hasn't had the shock of high temperature cooking, you can serve it as is and know that the juices are distributed throughout the cut. If you were a bit overzealous with the sear, however, it may benefit from a bit of resting.

Looking forward to the week Rich.

Mash?

This is one modern food process that is highly unlikely to appear in Modernist Cuisine, thankfully. In Australia, we've always called sausages "mystery bags." Seems the secret is out. I always wondered where the pink colour came from in frankfurters.

Good Lord, "Bastard eggs?" Don't you love spelling checkers that "correct" your typing as you go along.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's no chemical basis behind winetasting and that experts cannot be correct about it. That's a heresy that you see trotted out all the time, but that I said above I think is BS. What I was inarticulately saying was that I don't think varietals, in general, are a good way to think about wine. If you take malbecs grown in Argentina and Cahors, they're not going to come off the same at all on the palate. The fact that they are the same varietal is not that meaningful. Guessing the varietal, when given the same grapes from all over the world, is going to be more a guessing game than a demonstration of skill. The wines will be different in concentration, texture, alcohol level, tannins, acidity, flavor, aroma, etc., even though they're from the same grape. Talking about varietals when talking about wine tasting is scientifically not very meaningful if you want to set up a controlled experiment to determine taste. So when Shalmanese says "3 reasonably well educated wine drinkers couldn't correctly tell 3 red wines of different varietals apart," that's scientifically meaningless. Maybe they couldn't tell the varietals apart (though maybe they could), but I'd bet they could talk about what the wines are doing and distinguish quality among them. If they couldn't, they're not reasonably well educated about wine. I wasn't referring to your comments with that reply but rather to those of some others earlier in the thread who were quoting "science" without actually quoting it. I agree with your points.