nickrey

I have had the Masterbuilt 30 inch for a few months now. I've done brisket, ribs, Pastrami, bacon, cold smoked salmon and cold smoked cheese. The latter two were done using the A MAZE N Smoke Generator sitting inside the smoke box. While agreeing with some of the others above that it doesn't give the slap you around the face experience that you get with charcoal and fire based smoke, I'd have to say it gives depth and subtlety and some of the best smoked products I've tasted. I smoke a lot at around 77C (171F) to really slow cook and have found that there is a difficulty getting the chips to ignite because the thermostat doesn't start the element heating that often at this temperature. To counter this, I dial in a higher heat and let the unit heat until I'm satisfied that the chips are smoking and then dial the thermostat back down. I'd totally recommend this unit if you are looking at an electric smoker.

How about then tunnel boning a Poussin and then a quail and cook them one inside the other? You could even stick them together with transglutaminase.

One of the worst examples to my mind is loading a product up with sugar and then selling it as being low fat. Technically correct so not illegal but that sugar converts to fat unless you burn it off. Low fat, perhaps, but in reality a major cause of creating fat.

It is the SA550X60 retractable range hood exhausting to the outside. I needed one that would fit the space and bought the one with the best specifications.

It's a fairly dense fleshed fish and as such would work well with frying. I use it for a Fish Balti curry and it maintains its texture very well.

Interesting topic. Indian beef Vindaloo is made by initially marinating the meat in vinegar and spices overnight. Lizzie Collingham in her book "Curry a tale of cooks and conquerors" related that this dish comes from Goa and is based on Portuguese vinegar marinated meat. My bet is that this dish comes from a similar foundation. The lime juice is likely a local variation that I'd add as a late addition flavouring before serving.

All my life I've had kitchen exhaust fans that make noise, act as a grease trap, and completely fail to extract any smoke from the environment. After my first experience making blackened fish when every smoke detector in the house went off, I'd reconciled myself to cooking this outside on the wok burner on my barbecue grill. Same thing with tea-smoked duck. And if I made curry, the house would smell like an Indian restaurant for days. But this all changed yesterday when I had a Smeg retractable range hood installed. 800 cubic meters of air extracted per hour. The first test was blackened fish, which worked like a dream. What piece of kitchen equipment have you bought that has really changed your cooking behaviour?

I think it lost its soul when they stopped wrapping it in newspaper but suspect that's just betraying my age

I have a lovely rice cooker but occasionally it is tied up doing sous vide cooking. On these occasions I return to my old stand-by: a microwave rice cooker. Add rice, wash it until water is clear. Tip off water. Put fingertip on top of rice. Add water so that the level is up to the first knuckle. Cook for 12 minutes on high. Sit for eight minutes. Serve perfectly cooked rice. Note this method is for the basmati rice that I usually use.

I wouldn't bother with a "disaster" steak. Instead, I'd cook and chill steaks cooked at different temperatures to show the uniformity of texture and differences in doneness between them (say 55C, 60C, and 65C). During the class you can reheat at the lowest temperature that you used. This will not impact on the doneness of any of the steaks so the demonstration will work well. I'd also sear one and not sear another to show the difference that a Maillard reaction can have to the eating experience. I'd also pre-cook some chicken breast (60C for over one hour) and reheat it in the same unit. The reason for this is to show the moisture and succulence of meat prepared using the technique compared to their normal experience of this meat which is typically overcooked.

This debate seems to reoccur with regularity. There seem to be a lot of opinions about human capacity to perceive very small amounts of diluted elements. Before you make any assumptions, however, consider that the liminal threshold for sucrose is 10 millimoles per litre. That's what you would potentially consider a trace amount. We perceive many things that we cannot consciously sense or report but time and again they have been shown to have measurable effects on behaviour. Just because someone is not confident enough to report a sensation doesn't mean that they haven't perceived it. I've not seen any studies of this issue done by perceptual psychologists so for me the whole question of whether it is shape or content of the salt that makes for different sensations is still open, despite what well-intentioned amateur experimenters have written or the what the personal opinions are of chemists (I defer to them on matters physical not psychological). Oh and by the way if anyone wants to conduct such trials scientifically, there is also a time of day effect in perception of salt that could potentially contaminate results.

I believe that a Pluto pup is a corn dog. If a corn dog is a hot dog sausage on a stick battered and deep fried, that's what it is.

In that case, I'd definitely second Jason Atherton's Maze cookbook. Also have a look at Shannon Bennett's My Vue. Shannon trained under such luminaries as John Burton Race and Marco Pierre White. The book won a Gourmand award as best French cuisine book in 2005.

If you are a moderately skilled cook, what tends to make restaurant type dishes unapproachable is the sheer number of components involved rather than the complexity of technique. I'm sure you know the drill: First prepare three different stocks and then use a tablespoon of each. If you want to improve your basic techniques in preparation for approaching some of these dishes, I'd totally recommend "The Complete Robuchon." Be warned, however, there are no pictures, just tried and true versions of French classics.

Be light handed when making them. If not, you will again get hockey pucks.

Having had an unexpected drop in of some vegetables, I decided to try out some old favourites as well as some new Indian recipes from Pushpesh Pant's "India Cookbook." So Indian vegetarian tonight [thought of you Jenni ]: From top left clockwise we have: Kumhare ki Subzi (Dry Spicy Pumpkin), Aloo Gobi Methi ka Tuk (Cauliflower with fenugreek and potatoes), lentil leftovers converted to Indian with the addition of spices, and hard-boiled egg curry. Dishes were served with boiled basmati rice, Greek yoghurt and cut banana (top left of photo), home-made lime pickle, and bought mango chutney.

And just to put another complexity in. What about a slow simmer and a fast simmer? I've always gone by frequency of bubbling. I'm totally in support of defining different types of cooking in liquid by temperature range.

I'd just add some tasty extra virgin olive oil and salt to the, hopefully, aged balsamic.

Just a note about an experiment I conducted (by accident). I bought some brisket and was going to slow cook it in my new smoker at 100C for around eight hours. After around four hours, I felt the meat and decided that it was just going to go tough and chewy. Maybe I was wrong but this is where the experiment began. I tasted the meat and it was chewy although it still had some juice in it. Here is where I decided to follow the latter stages of the MC recipe for brisket. I bagged the meat and put it in my SV rig at 62C. Tonight we tried it after around 30 hours. It was absolutely delicious. The chewiness had disappeared to be replaced by a tender and nicely smoked piece of meat. Just letting you know that the smoke then SV method is a bit more flexible than you would think in terms of the initial smoking temperature.

I'd hasten to add that it is not only the different types of meats that makes it tricky. It is also the shape of the whole. Try spatchcocking the bird and it is easier to cook because the heat is more even across the surface. Other ways of using a whole bird effectively include introducing fat under the skin of the breast (by making a small incision, loosening the skin, and placing butter or some other fat underneath). You could also inject fat into the bird to achieve a similar effect, in essence this is "high-tech" larding. In MC, they recommend when cooking poultry sous vide, for example in the Moroccan Tagine recipe, that the breasts be cooked at a lower temperature than the thighs. If you cook the thighs at the lower temperature, it has a raw appearance near the bone which is not pleasant for the diner. The question of how to cook a chicken, whole or in parts, is however not a new one. Using conventional cooking techniques, many commentators will recommend sectioning the bird and using a different cooking technique for different parts. I'd suggest that the move from waiters carving and presenting food in the dining room to it being both prepared and plated in the kitchen has led to virtual extinction of the carving of the bird. As a consequence, I'd come down strongly on the side of letting each of the different ingredients be treated differently and with respect for what makes them most tasty. This is potentially a "Modernist" view but is one that classicists may agree with: if they can get past not carving the chicken at the table.

Thanks. That makes it clear.

I load as you go. Mind you because we typically cycle through the same dishes I have a specific place in the dishwasher for each class of item. This allows for optimal loading without losing the sink in the process.

Hi Peter. Just wondering why after the discussion of ratios above you chose to scale the onions to 200% in the recipe rather than the 100% I use or the 80% you referred to?

A whole chicken is a combination of meats with a number of different properties so making a recommendation for a whole bird is going to give different results dependent on the piece of the bird you are considering. As you are doing it sous vide and you want to double cook it, I'd suggest using dark meat (thighs) only. Smoke them low at a temperature that is safe for cooking bur probably only for half of their normal cooking time. Then bag and finish off sous vide. For thighs, I'd use a sous vide temperature of 62c (144F).

Knife sharpening. Thought I was too clumsy, did a course run by a local Japanese knife supplier and found it was easier than I'd thought.