nickrey

Is your credit card from an Asian bank Erin? This may possibly be an issue.

Same

As Noilly Prat is aged in oak casks presumably further aging the martini in a cask would intensify the characters associated with using this vermouth rather than a non cask-aged vermouth.

I roast most of my spices, particularly when making Indian curries. When roasting, I treat them a bit like pine nuts: if you can see that they are cooked, they're going to wind up overcooked. Thus they are roasted over a moderate heat, agitating the pan to ensure all sides are cooked. I remove the pan from the heat when I can smell the aroma of the spice (they do have a bit of colour by this stage) and transfer the spices to my mortar to cool before grinding. Many Asian dishes use roasted dried chillies. In this case, you actually want the spice to burn (colour) to give a smoky flavour.

Apparently it was July 2004. Recipe is called "Ultimate Ribs." It can be found on various web pages including here and here.

I suppose it's a bit like having a cookbook dedicated to one type of cooking (eg frying). There are not many books devoted to a single style of cooking but many that use it as part of the repertoire of techniques that are used. As sous vide cooking has become more mainstream, we're seeing more recipes using sous vide as a normal cooking process. Jordi Crux's book Logical Cuisine is one such book. Most proteins in the book are cooked sous vide. Is it a book on sous vide cooking? Not really. Does it have many sous vide recipes? Yes, it does. Equally, books by restaurant chefs that are not dumbed down (think The Fat Duck cookbook) also use sous vide processes.

Are.those seared strawberries in your dish? What a clever accompaniment to game.

I recently bought an Australian foodie magazine called Gourmet Traveller that had a feature on Korean food which contained a recipe for Korean Fried Chicken. As usual, I didn't follow the recipe exactly and created instead a beer tempura batter (115g plain flour, 2tbsp potato starch, lightly beaten egg white, 170ml cold beer). Beat egg white, mix in dry ingredients, add beer, stir with a chopstick. The chicken is battered, deep fried, drained on kitchen paper and cooled and then deep fried again to give a lovely golden colour. I only used legs. The sauce uses Gochujang (Korean fermented chili paste), soy sauce, rice vinegar, honey, grated ginger, chopped garlic, caster sugar and sesame oil. All I can say is WOW, this is one of the best fried chicken sauces I have ever tasted. The cooked chicken is dredged through the sauce before serving. The recipe can be found at this link.

I went to a really good butcher and bought a whole lot of meat, including some brisket which was not expensive compared to the other cuts I bought. The brisket was visibly a fine piece of meat from which I trimmed all the excess fat. Bottom line was when I cooked it (72 hours at 57C), the product was far superior to other briskets I have done sous vide. I know I've been banging on about it a bit but the quality of the meat matters. Go for the cheaper cuts by all means, they are the most tasty, but make sure it comes from a quality animal. Otherwise we get the failures that have been reported in this forum.

This is a really good question but I'm sure you will have as many answers as there are people reading the thread. I've given up searching for "authentic" recipes as there seem to be as many authentic recipes as there are mothers or grandmothers who popularised the dishes. In many cases, when the authenticity card is played, I'm reminded of the apocryphal person complaining that "soup du jour is mushroom, not asparagus." Initial experience is a hard marker to move away from. You mentioned Italian food. If you really want to start an argument over authenticity, just ask which rice should be used in Risotto. Get people from different parts of Italy and you will have a fight on your hands. Thus, even giving Italians "the benefit of the doubt" can lead to irreconcilable differences. There is a whole psychological literature on categorisation that could be brought into play here. Eleanor Rosch's work on prototype theory springs to mind. Instead of an Aristotlean view of carbonara having certain ingredients, prototype theory would suggest that carbonara would have ingredients that were unequally associated with the dish. For example, eggs would figure in most people's prototypes of carbonara. Thus if eggs were not present, it is unlikely that a dish would be considered carbonara. Of course we run into local interpretations of dishes based on experience. Thus you could try a dish in the area where it originated and state that the dish is not a good example of your prototype of that dish. How many Austrians have said that the original Sacher torte is a very dry version of the dish? In that case, because of the evolution of the dish, the original does not necessarily match the prototype. In sum, a dish is authentic to the degree to which it agrees with people's prototypes of the dish. If the dish is from another culture, be very careful about putting forward your prototype as the definitive version of the dish. To make matters more complex, sometimes the ingredients in the culture of origin are not as good as those used when you first tasted the dish. In this case, your memory is probably closer to an ideal for the dish. But an ideal doesn't necessarily represent the prototype.

Interesting post. What quality was the meat you used? The sous vide process will alter the properties of meat cooked long and slow. It is best with "cheaper cuts" such as brisket or cheek which are tough under normal circumstances but can be made fork tender through sous vide cooking. However, one should not mix up cheap cuts with lower quality cuts: No amount of cooking is going to turn a poor quality cut into a good piece of meat. I personally don't use fatty boned cuts of meat, preferring instead a fat free but well exercised, and hence flavourful, piece of meat. Again, the liquid from a lower quality cut of meat is not going to be any better than the meat itself. As a recommendation for the sauce, take the cooking liquid and boil it briefly. Pour off and strain the clear liquid (the osmazome). Heat up your pan and create a maillard effect on the remaining residue. In essence, you are trying to replicate the bits that stick to the pan in frying. Deglaze with wine and reduce. Add some demi-glace or similarly reduced stock as well as the osmazome. Reduce to desired consistency being careful not to reduce too much if you have previously salted your meat. If this is the case, try reaching your desired taste and thicken with a real starch such a potato starch rather than flour. Strain the sauce to remove any residual meat bits. Season and whisk in a few drops of sherry vinegar before serving. If you want a richer sauce add some softened butter pieces, allowing them to melt in the residual heat rather than reheating. Good luck with your experiments.

I've used my cookbooks more since I joined the website than I think I have in total over the past few years. Looking forward to checking out the new site.

Bruichladdich has produced its first ever gin made entirely with Islay botanicals. See this link for the article. Not sure what it will taste like but if it parallels their malt whiskies, it's definitely worth a try.

I've got both and use the butane by preference. Note, it is not a "creme brulee" torch but rather a head that attaches to a butane canister. Steer away from the toy torches sold in kitchen shops and head to a professional catering shop which will have the real deal.

Spurred on by Fat Guy's comment, I just remembered another: Coconut essence in evaporated milk as a substitute for coconut milk. Wrong on so many levels.

You can wrap a small piece of paper towel around the end of the bone to make it less likely to puncture the bag.

Green coloured horseradish for wasabi. They taste really different.

Congratulations on the new acquisition. Expect a lot of fun as you experiment. If it were me, I wouldn't bother brining it, would cook it at 134F or 57C for 24 hours, and would definitely sear it on an extremely hot pan or with a blow torch. The oven is simply not hot enough to give a decent Maillard effect without extended cooking and a consequent spoiling the sous vide cooking process.

As I saw it, Eternal was trying to fully cook the chicken before deep frying and using the frying as a finishing technique. The problem is not overcooking but undercooking and this is determined by total timed exposure to heat and thermal conductance of the meat. Cooking the meat such that only the outer layer reaches target temperature in two ways still means that the centre is not cooked.

Even with breast meat, I'd never cook chicken at this temperature for less than two hours.

Spaghetti Carbonara This recipe is scalable. Work on 100g pasta per person, 1 egg, 40g grated parmesan, 1 tbsp cream per person (optional) and 50g bacon/pancetta. Slice up the pancetta or bacon, fry it and set it aside. Put eggs in a bowl and whisk together with cheese, salt and freshly ground black pepper, add a small pinch of freshly grated nutmeg and the cream if you are using it. Cook the spaghetti to preferred texture. Drain the spaghetti into a bowl. Add the egg/cheese mixture and stir. This will cook the eggs. Add the bacon/pancetta. Serve with extra parmesan.

Apart from a few Bayless and Kennedy books, a few favourites that I use regularly are: Authentic Mexican Cooking, The Border Cookbook; Authentic Home Cooking of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, and a quirky little book that has some very good recipes called simply Mexican Cooking.

Just a note on making sauce with the juices from the sous vide bag. In earlier posts, I showed a process of removing the pure osmazome by coagulating the solids through heating the juice and then straining. At this stage I discarded the solids. Thinking about what the solids resemble, I've had a change of heart and practice that I'd like to share. The solids are in essence what comes off the meat to give the tasty bits that stick to the pan when you are frying. When making sauces conventionally, these are lifted by deglazing and incorporated into the sauce. To replicate this, I cut the package on a corner and tip the sous vide juices into a saucepan. I put the package back in my rice cooker to keep it warm, shutting the open corner in the lid to ensure that no water enters the package. I then heat the juices and pour off the clear liquid (osmazome). The sludge is heated until it undergoes a maillard reaction and sticks to the bottom of the pan. Then the pan is deglazed with wine/brandy/whatever and this is boiled down. A pre-prepared stock is then added as well as the osmazome. This is then thickened down, some veal demi-glace added, the sauce is seasoned, an acid is then added (such as sherry vinegar). You can thicken the sauce at this stage with some potato starch or beurre monté. Finally the sauce is strained and served with the meat that was seared while the sauce was reducing. All up the process only takes around ten minutes and produces an extremely tasty sauce.

Agree, I'd use salt in preference to sour. This would allow you to keep the overall flavour profile of French Onion soup while adjusting the flavour profile. If the product is still out of balance after using salt to rectify, then use some sour to give a three way balance.

Unfortunately we can now genetically modify it, so think of this as an area potentially resembling a dangerous blank slate.