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Edward J

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Everything posted by Edward J

  1. IQF = individually quick frozen Just look at the labeling when you shop. You will come across pork chops and pork loin roasts that are vacuum packed and boast "flavour enhanced" or some such. Look at the nutritional chart and you will see the sodium content ( as much as 33% of your daily intake) on there. the $9.00 chicken beast burger available at every diner and bar is vacuum tumbled, usually some kind of a soy protein with some kind of flavouring. Not only does the marinade ( called "pump" in the meat biz) add extra weight, but it also has the advantage of ensuring the meat stays moist--even if the living (deleted) has been cooked out of that poor chix brst, it still stays moist. If you look in the freezer section of your supermarket, I guarantee you will find 5 lb bags of iqf skinless, boneless breasts ideal for summer bbq's and such. If you look on the bottom of the breasts, you will see a grid mark imprinted in the meat. After the breasts are vacuum tumbled they are layed out on a grid and flash frozen, hence the grid marks.
  2. You might want to look into "Vacuum tumbling", a method that, at first, large meat producers were using in the early '80's and now every butcher shop is using. Items are placed in s/s drum with the marinade, the drum has baffles in the inside. The lid is placed on, and the contents are placed under vacuum.The drum is placed on rollers and rotated for a prescribed length of time--very much like a rock polishing/tumbling kit. Since meat can absorb up 80% of it's volume in liquids with this method, the butchers looooove it. I hasten to add that there is an unofficial industry standard of about 17% marinade added. You usually see this on the packaging as "flavor enhanced" or "added protein". The ubiquitous IQF b'less, skinless chicken breast is done with this method as well. I have used this method at a local poultry producer to do some custom chicken satays --highly flavoured chicken strips on bamboo skewers. Worked well.
  3. Yup. Each to his own. Although I\d stick my neck out and wager that nobody likes the "experience" of having a bone splinter jammed in between your gum and tooth. Don't get me wrong, I love bone marrow, and love sucking it out of bones , but not at the expense of removing bone fragments from my gum line....
  4. Good ol' Mr. Mcgee, he can explain it better than anyone else. If I ever caught an employee doing that( leaving an pot of soup on the stove with a lid on it) I wouldn't bother explaining why it's wrong to do that to the employee, it's food safety 101. No, I'd fire his/her (deleted) on the spot, and would seriously consider calling the cops with attempted manslaughter charges (poisoned soup...)
  5. Yes, I am very familiar with that technique, having lived and worked in S'pore for over 6 years. I hate it! (the technique, not the chicken or duck, that is...) Both chicken and ducks are birds, and as such, have hollow bones. In order to maximize the bird, the chop-ee chops straight down through the rib cage and through wing and leg bones with a heavy cleaver. This results in a lot of bone splitters in the meat. I hate it. Char siew is a lot better under the chopping cleaver, but you can also use a cutting motion with the cleaver. As for myself, I have portioned thousands of birds, both raw and cooked with a simple chef's knife, cutting through joints and not straight through the bone. Also, if you look at the cutting boards, they are hollowed out, in some cases more than 3 0r 4 inches deep. How such a large block is sanitized is unknown to me, but obviously it doesn't go through a commercial high-temp dishwasher
  6. Natural may be best, but how do you sanitize a wood cutting board? Don't get me wrong, I love wood, and am a hobby woodworker. But at work, I am a professional cook. My choice is nylon cutting boards. The sole reason for this is ease of sanitizing: I toss them in the dishwasher, Boom! sanitized. Mo mixing of quats, no applying sanitizer, that's it. I also have problems with the word "Chop" Chopping is for firewood, in the kitchen we cut with a knife. The lower the knife is to the cutting board, the more control you have, and if you are cutting meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. all day, it 's all about control. I also have problems with "little bits of the cutting board getting in the food" Cutting boards--regardless of the material will scar. Only if the board is heavily abused with violent chopping actions will you create particles. If this happens, it's virtually guaranteed that your knife edges are heavily abused as well. With scarred boards, they can easily be smoothed by running the board through a woodworker's thickness planer. I've done this with nylon boards very easily
  7. Thank you ! Now, can you please explain why it's not a good idea to leave a pot of freshly boiled soup, with a lid on it, on the stove overnight?
  8. Ummm, no.. a large pot of boiling soup in the refrigerator won't mess up the thermostat. If you understand the basic of refrigeration, the compressor compresses gas, and the gas is allowed to expand in the evaporator coil. When you put hot items into the fridge, steam rises and collects on the coil. The coil, being cold, will freeze the steam, icing up the whole coil. The refrigerator can not function properly now, the temperature goes up, and the compressor shuts down. The big difference between residential refrigeration and commercial is that commercial goes on a defrost cycle every 8 hours. This allows any ice on the coil to melt off. This is also why any Chef or owner will not allow hot foods to put into the refrigerator or freezer . Sanitizing is one thing, allowing food to dwell in the hazard zone for 4 hours or overnight is another. Am I right in assuming you did your test as described in your post #27 (written in red) without using a cold water bath?
  9. Marmalade Lemon curd But my all time favorite is candied citus peel, either mixed, or separted.
  10. Did you put your hot water test in a cold water bath in conjuction with the ice? Conclusion: You comprehend the principle of cooling down hot liquids. Heck, ya gotta, it's been explained three times now very clearly, you just choose not to do the test according to the described procedure.
  11. O.K. the more I re-read through this thread, the more I see one of two conclusions. The first is that you can not comprehend the cooling process as explained by me in the last two posts. The second is that you do comprehend this process, but choose only to acknowledge certain aspects of it. So, to clarify the whole process, once again, and for the benefit of everyone reading this thread, I will go over it, again. -Finished soup is poured into several15-20lt (4-5 US gallon) mayo buckets. -Buckets are put into a sink filled with cold water, the water level comes up to or slightly lower than the soup level in the bucket. The cold water may be augumented with ice, or it may be replenished with fresh cold water as it warms up. -An ice wand is placed into the bucket -Ice wand is agitated every few minutes. -Once soup has hit 10 - 15 C, it is taken out of the water bath, the ice wand removed, and is trucked into the walk-in cooler where cools down further to +- 5 c. Are we clear? An ice wand with 8 lbs of frozen water PLUS a water bath is sufficent to cool down a bucket of soup. This combination of ice wand and cold water bath is endorsed by many municipal health depts. Please, for gawd's sake, instead of argueing with me, take the time to call up your local health dept. to verify this. I know it's easier to argue on this site, but, just do it, O.K.? Filling an ice wand with a thermal gel is worth discussing--it's a lousy idea. I do own and use similiar equipment--thermal gel filled plates and blocks (ie Cam-chiller and Cambro lockers) used for transporting food. However, the gel filled containers never touch the food, and the gel-filled containers do not go through extreme temperature swings like an ice wand does. The icewand goes from -20 C in a frozen state straight into hot liquids of around 90C in a matter of seconds, but more importantly the wand is in immediate contact with food. After repeated cycles of this freeze and thaw temperature swings, the plastic on the icewand will fatigue and crack. -If the icewand is filled with clean, potable water and it leaks, it's not a big deal. -If the icewand is filled with glycol or some other thermal gel and the wand leaks, at worst you may poison people and at the very least, you have to throw out the soup. Mr Pepin's method of adding ice to concentrated soup is also worth discussing. This method, which Mr. Pepin writes was used by him in the Howard Johnston Kitchens and in the World trade Center (NYC) kitchens was developed for large batches. With this method you have to use very precise amounts of salt, seasonings, and liquid. Once the soup has cooled down, tasting and adjusting salt/flavour levels is very difficult. Yes, heat pipes and geothermal equipment are good ideas. But at what cost? In order for a heat pipe to work you have to pump liquids through it. This means cleaning and sanitizing a pump and other equipment, provided you can pump a 3-bean soup or a chunky chicken noodle soup throught the heat pipe. So, to recap, Icewands in combination with cold water baths work well. So well, that this method is endorsed by many municipal helath depts. The method is very cheap, very effective, and has a proven track record.
  12. I was afraid of that..... Steinbeck once remarked in his novel "Sweet Thursday" that the stupider the question, the more intelligently it can be answered. In other words, you want the soup to cool down by itself, lurking in "the danger zone" of 40- C -20 C for extended periods of time, and then cool it down? Please don't speculate with food safety....
  13. Beat. beat, beat. Ice wands work, and they work well. Please don't take my word for it (you don't anyway...) get in touch with your local health dept and get their opinion. I can tell you that most health dept's require them for cooling down stocks and soups. I can also suggest you get in touch with a few commercial kitchens and get their opinion on them. Me, I've only been using them since the late 90's and I know they work well. Yes, if you read my post, I did say that closed loop water cooled systems are very expensive--prohibitively expensive. Yes, there is a need to cool down the soup to 5 C. Most, if not all commercial refrigeration operates inbetween the 5-8 C range. Any colder and your products (like dairy or produce) will freeze--not a good situation. This is why commercial kitchens have separate walk-in coolers and freezers. Once the soup has cooled down to 10-15 C it is out of the danger zone and is immediately moved to walk-in cooler where it is brought further down to 5-7 C---in accordance with most health dept. and HACCP requirements. Commercial refrigeration is designed to take items from room temp (22 c) to the 5-7 C range, and 10 C soup falls well within this requirement. 100 liters of soup is 100 kg or roughly +- 200 lbs. As I mentioned in both of my posts, this amount is divided into 4 or 5 portions to make it easier to move about and easier to cool down. No single human being can move about this volume of a hot, spillable item, it needs to be broken down into smaller amounts. So, you can invest in hydraulic lift systems and pumps (as I mentioned in my post) but this kind of infrastructure will only be feasible for much higher volumes of product. I'm not saying your ideas and suggestions don't have merit. I'm saying for these suggestions to work, you need a lot more volume--say 2000- 3000 liters of product per day to become financially feasable, and the OP is not prepared for this kind of investment at the moment, but he does need a method to cool down his soups immediately. So for now, for 100 liters of product a day, ice wands make the most sense, are the most economical choice, and take advantage of existing infrastructure. Since I now have the last word, I eagerly await your last word..........
  14. Yes, but if you read my post, I made the point of that hot liquids are usually taken from the steam kettle and portioned into 15 or 20 lt pails (the ubiquitous mayo, pickle, or fryer short. pails with bails). Anything larger is very hard to manage, and these pails need to be lifted from the floor underneath the steam kettle spigot, lifted onto a trolley, wheeled to sink, and lifted into a sink, and when cold, lifted out and further transported. Moving 100 lts of hot soup around in one vessel is not only suicidal, but would cost the employer mega-fines from the local labour board. So the soup is in mayo buckets in the sink, usually two pails to a sink compartment, smaller portions cool down much faster, right? They also require less ice. One ice wand per pail ( a mayo bucket won't have room for two ice wands plus soup, unless you only fill it half full, so what's the point?) and few frozen 2 lt pop bottles or a few frozen gallon jugs in the water per sink. You can use ice cubes, but raiding the ice machine usually earns you holy (deleted) from the service staff and/or the bar guys. If you have a dedicated ice machine for the kitchen only, great. I usually get it down to 12-15 C within 15 mins, and then wheel it into the walk-in, but if the OP wants it at 10 C that's fine too, it may take a few minutes longer. The cooling process takes very little labour, you grab the ice wands and frozen jugs out of the walk-in, (any meat in the walk-in freezer is heavily packaged and frozen rock solid...) give the wands a stir every 5 min, and when cold, truck the soup off the the walk in, and the ice wands off to the dish pit. All the labour is in emptying the soup into buckets, and transporting the soup around. 1/3, 1/4 or whatever, a compressor does put out heat, sure, But like I said in my above post, the basics of refrigeration dictate that heat is displaced or removed, and that heat has to go somewhere. It doesn't matter what size of compressor you have or how much heat the motor of that compressor generates, the heat put out into the kitchen comes from the soup which you have just removed the heat from. Right? Any kitchen that prodcues 100 lts of soup on a daily basis will have a walk-in freezer. That's a given. You're right, many municipalities have banned open water cooled systems, but I expressly descriped closed loop water cooled systems in my post. Based on my dealings with various health depts and HACCP protocol, the method the health inspector chooses relies on: -UL/Underwriters inspected equipment with calcuated guaranteed temperatures and times per rated amount. -Cleanliness and santitation method of cooling vessels (mayo buckets) -manually inspected and manually written down notes on cooling temperature and time per batch -Cleanliness and sanitation method of ice wands It could be either or method. The main thing is how equipment is sanitized and how temperatures and elapsed time are noted.
  15. Actually, it is very easy to remove that much heat from from 100 ltrs of soup, and I can remove heat from 90 C to 15 c in less than 15 minutes. (for those of you not familiar with Celcius, water boils at 100 and freezes at 0). Matter of fact I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. Back in the 80's ice wands didn't exist, but we would fill sorbetiers (s/s cannisters) with water and freeze them and drop them into the stock. I absolutely agree wth you on removing the heat from stocks/soups as quickly as possible. Ice wands in comination with frozen 2lt pop btls or 1 gallon jugs in the water bath work very quickly. Here I have to remind you that 1 liter is precisly 1 kg, so 100 lts is aprox 200 lbs, give or take. In most commecial kitchens hot liquids are dispensed from the steam kettle into managable sizes of aprox 15-20 lt pails. These are easily carried from the kettles to the sinks and then into the walk-in or freezer, and again back into pots or kettle to be transported or re-thermalized--by hand. Large production kitchens have infrastructure to handle huge amounts of liquid, --pumps, and specialized chillers for this purpose, but the general kitchen is not so specialized. Yes, heat will be removed in a well ventilated kitchen. Most kitchens have a ventilation system over the cooing ranges and fryers, not in the prep area. The prep area may or may not be air conditoned, but the ventilation system over the range removs a lot of air, and this air has to be replaced, and most local codes require this make-up air to be "tempered" as well. Look, a 1/3 hp compressor can generate quite a bit of heat--remember, refrigferation doesn't make things cold, it removes heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. Work in a shoe-box prep area with one 4 ft refrig.sandwich table for a day or two, and you'll know what I'm talking about. By now I guess you can tell I hate air cooled compressors, a closed loop water cooled system makes a lot more sense, but those systems are very expensive. The big compressors--the walk-in cooler and walk in freezer in virtually every commercial kitchen almost always have remote compressors, so the heat (and noise) is disposed of outdoors and not in the kitchen. Having dealt with various health depts in several continents, I can tell you that a kitchen producing 100 lt of highly perishable product on daily basis will attract attention. In most cases the health dept will want to see a haacp plan for soups and stocks, and a lot of emphasis will be placed on cooling. If the sole method of cooling 100 lts of perishable stock rests on a used air conditioner and a few ounces of gas charge, assembled by unlicensed staff and without UL or any other commerical inspections, as well as that the whole cooling process is done without any supervision(unattended), well, it ain't gonna happen. On a side note, constant agitation (ie paint stirrer) of a soup or stock is not a good thing. All soups and most stocks contain some kind of oil or fat, and as the stock cools this fat will emulsify under constant stirring. DAMHIKT....... ********* A walk-in freezer operates all the time, throwing in a half-dozen icewands into a 8' x 10' walk-in full of already frozen product isn't going to have much impact on compressor load or power consumption. You are taking advantage of existing infrastructure and using it wisely. *********** Perhaps you could visit a few commecial kitchens and see what I'm talking about for yourself?
  16. Hmmmm.. Let's pretend I'm the G.M. or Exec Chef, or owner of the O.P.'s establishment. Here's a decision I have to make: Option 1: purchase several ice wands at $50-60 each. These can be used immediately in conjuction with the existing freezer. Option 2 -purchase a 1/3-1/2 HP compressor -Hardwire the compresssor at labour rate #1 at say, $60/hr -Purchase a worts cooler -Run soft or hard copper line from compressor to worts cooler and charge unit with freon gas -labour for above at rate #2, HVAC typically runs at $75/hr plus truck fee - Minimum of a week before the set up can be used -increase in power and water costs, plus increased heat output from the compressor Which would you choose?
  17. Exactly what andiesenji suggests. You can get them in larger sizes as well. Fill the thing up with water, cap off, and freeze. Some modesl have "fins" which really incrase the surface area and cool down liquids fast. Get several and always have at least one in the frezer. You can also fill up plastic milk jugs and freeze them and drop them into your water bath in comination with the icewand for even faster cooling. Best thing about this is you don't have to raid the icemachine and get heck from service or the bar guys.....
  18. I guess your frame size is dependent on your guitar size....... That isn't much help either, is it? I got my frames from D&R in Montreal, and they are 340x 340 mm (roughly 13" square) Here's the kicker, they come in a set of 5 mm, 6 mm 7,mm and 8mm high frames. So now the question is how high do you want your slab to be? The set comes with two tools, the first is a long folded piece of s/s that acts a scraper or leveler and rides on the frame. If you've ever worked with cement or watched people pour cement slabs you would understand this technique to be called "Screeding" The second tool is a similar piece of s/s but is cut to closely fit inside the frame, making your frame kinda/sorta "adjustable". Say you have a batch of ganache and pour into the frame and realize you don't have enough to fill the fame properly. You pop this bar in the frame and adjust it so your ganache mass will fill the rest of the frame properly, you will just have a small void area within the frame, but the ganache slab will be your desired height. If you want your next batch of ganache to fit the frame properly, you can weigh your smaller slab after it crystalizes and tweak your recipie from there. Am I making any sense?
  19. Yup. The big chains tell you what price point they want. Me, I'm just a very smaller mnfctr of chocolates, but I do have experience with retailers. Now take for example "X", a local chain of 7 high-end supermarkets and about 40 middle-range supermarkets. I've got my products in all of thier high end stores, and have for the last 4 years now. For the last 2 years I've been getting into 5 of their middle-range stores. My stuff sells, or they wouldn't be ordering it. Now head office informs me that if I want to continue with their middle -range stores I have to belly up and supply each store with one free case of each item (22 items/barcodes). Stores are already making well over 50% mark up on my stuff, and I have a proven track record of decent selling stuff. If anybody needs a break, it's me. These are the nice guys, they pay within 14 days. Other chains want even bigger freebies or insist I rent shelf space. Some insist I go with a distributer because they don't want to deal with individual suppliers, and most distributers want at least a 35% mark up. Biggest kick in the crotch I ever got was when I approached the Vancouver Int'l airport, 7 gift shops and tourist-y boot-teeks----all owned by one (1) mega Spanish conglomorate who has 90% of the world's airports in thier pocket. Those guys want 167% mark up. One-hundred-sixty-seven-percent-mark-up. Ah, but K.A mixers.... I've got a 7 yr old Costco special in my business, gets a work-out every day and works just fine. Stay away from the tilt-head mixers and you'll be fine, stay away from designer colours and you'll be fine. It's funny though, I visited an old employer last week and we were just talking about K.A. mixers. He's still got the same one I worked with 12 years ago, he bought it at Sears in the early 80's, paid over $300 for it then, in 1982 dollars. Now you can buy a tilt-head in neon pink for less than $250.00. Prices always go up: Labour goes up, materials go up, fuel and transport always goes up, but crap just keeps on getting cheaper and cheaper.
  20. With crap, you have to remember there are two guilty parties: Obviously, the first is the seller The second is the buyer. If the buyer doesn't buy, the seller can't sell.... I remember a "discussion" I had with a "member" of a big-box home center concerning the quality of imported plywood. I deduced it was "Crap", and the "member" agreed with me untill I told him the someone representing his company had spec'ed, ordered, accepted, and paid for the crap from the factory. Didn't go over too well....
  21. Oh, the poly boards warp, especially the thin ones. The only good thing about them is that you can toss them in the dishwasher, which is probably the easiest and best way (as well as the cheapest) to sanitize them in a commerical kitchen. The oldest trick in the world, and one that my Chef would rap me over the knuckles with a ladle with if I didn't do it, is to set the cutting board on a damp rag or wad of paper towels. Even if it is concave or convex, it won't slip or slide.
  22. I candy my own ginger at work for confectionry purposes. As you might be aware, candying consists of steaming or blanching the ginger for about an hour, then soaking it in increasingly higher levels of sugar syrup for a period of about 14 days. The purpose of course is to preserve the ginger, which is, theoritically "embalmed" in sugar. Yeah, yeah, you ask, what's this all about? The syrup. The syrup is left over from the candying process and it is intensely flavoured. I use this for drinks at home, or I boil off the water and have ginger flavoured sugar that I use for baking. I do the same thing with ornage and lemon peel.
  23. I'd hesitate to "boil' the tea. Steeping works best, but when boiled, the "tea" becomes bitter, and has a tendancy to split the cream. I'm also hesitate to "boil cream for shelf life reasons". If typical cream is 33-35% b.f., then the remaining 65% is water. Same holds true for booze, typical booze @40% acl. content is still 60% water. I typically have 3 week shelf life of bon-bons using warm cream and tempered couverture in the ganache.
  24. I use white chocolate in the ganache. For one, I find the bergamont flavour really comes through if I use the white choc, and two, I find the tanins in the black tea (which is 90% of Earl grey) "fight" with my dark chocolate.
  25. Thanks for the answers!
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