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Must admit these, along with "erbs" instead of "Herbs" are the three americanisms in food that really grate on me.

Great, thanks for the response, will try it directly in the PC.

I remember making one of Jamie Oliver's roast veg recipes a while ago, it called for a whole bottle of balsamic vinegar, he even mentions the seemingly large amount and says to "trust him". I did. It was rubbish. Taught me to trust myself a bit more though, so not entirely wasted.

Wow! that sounds a pretty effort-intense way of roasting a piece of meat. What kind of timings are you looking at (total time, how long in and out in each cycle)? Still sounds like it would give you a less perfect result than the "sous-vide and sear" approach and will certainly be a lot more faff.

I agree that short ribs are probably your best bet. Hanger, as delicious as it is, is likely to be far too lean for what you want. I've made some great rare/medium-rare steaks from it but think it may get a bit dry with the long cooking you'd normally use for brisket. Interesting that your cheeks have been fatty and full of connective tissue, the ones I've managed to source so far have been about the best cuts I've found for low and slow cooking (up there with the short ribs I've managed to get hold of). Might be worth trying again from a different butcher?

I'm going to try out the caramelised onion soup, I don't have any Mason jars but do have this sort of thing, will that be ok? I notice that in the instructions, it says not to tighten the jar too much, not sure I can do that with these, they are tight closed once you clip them shut. Link to the type of jar

That looks really interesting, what were the other elements? Any chance of a recipe?

Maybe he really liked your cooking AND wanted a McDonalds breakfast... Personally I can't stand their breakfast stuff, but every now and again I do fancy one of their burgers. Enjoying crap food from time to time doesn't stop me liking "proper" stuff.

Red Chilli gets rave reviews from my other half.

Have been pleasantly surprised with how good Rosso is, it's Rio Ferdinand's place near King Street. Great interior and decent, good value food. Loved Sams Chophouse when I went there for the first time in about 5 years last week - we were a party of twenty eight but they managed to bring us all perfectly medium rare rib eyes within a five minute window, very impressive.

Just to resurrect this old thread: We've been in Cape May for a few days now and went to the Lobster House this lunchtime. To say I'm disappointed is a massive understatement (though clearly I should have read this thread BEFORE going!). We started with a pretty decent onion soup and some good calamari, unfortunately things went downhill terribly with the mains, a boiled lobster and a tuna steak were both so overcooked as to be ruined. My other half asked for the tuna to be simply seared, still raw rare inside... what came looked like canned fish from a supermarket. Shame really as it was a lovely looking hunk of meat, I'm sure that with half the time on a hotter grill it would have been amazing. The lobster was the same, far to long in the heat, stringy, tough, thoroughly disappointing. They can't even cook fries there. Had a similarly disappointing meal in Atlantic City yesterday, thank god we had a couple of days in NYC before moving south (and that we managed to find some decent meat to throw on the grill at the house we are renting). Can anyone save the culinary part of our otherwise excellent holiday with a good recommendation for the next few days?

Generally speaking it goes: sparkling>white>red in terms of sulphite content. My mum has a pretty bad sulphite allergy so we've spent a lot of time hunting for drinkable wine for her, there are an increasing number of producers who are able to give you what you need. Stellar vineyards in south africa do a few different varieties which are available in the UK pretty readily (not sure how easy they would be to get in the US though). Oddly enough, I'm on holiday in NJ at the moment and just bought an organic Pinot Noir from Mendocino, CA at a Cape May liquor store. It is labelled as "no detectable sulfites" so you should be good with it. It's from Pacific Redwood (www.pacificredwoodwine.com), not had a look at their website but I guess they may well do other varietals in the same style. I think the biggest issue I've found is that all the sulphite free wine I've had tastes different to "normal" wine. It's not that it's bad per se, I've just not found one that tastes like a nice normal savoury, tannic red (the sort of thing I normally go for). I'll admit I've had limited experience (say, fewer than ten different wines) so there may well be plenty of others out there, but so far I've not really found them. Last thing, I've read that having no sulphites makes wine have a much more limited shelf life, if you're buying a large number you may well do better to fridge them all and just warm up the reds to serve.

Tasteless? Quite.

Wow! Just WOW. I want one of those so much. Wonder if I can get something in the UK like that... Actually, I'm in New Jersey at the moment, maybe I'll try and find a Home Depot, would this fit in a suitcase? How big is it?

Agree completely, it is source of great disappointment to me that some of my favourite cookbooks (bouchon, ad hoc, les halles) have volumetric measurements. Using grams is so much easier, so much better that it's frankly bizarre that cups etc still dominate American recipes.

Tried my first full plated dish recipe from MC today, was doing some cooking with our 5-year old and he really wanted to make curry so we plumped for the Goan Lamb one. It was absolutely amazing, really really deep, interesting flavours with perfectly cooked lamb shank and a stunning fresh cucumber salad. It was all pretty straightforward too, the only things I changed were the amount of tomato puree added to the sauce - the recipe only calls for 60g but this seemed far too dry and would have gone to powder if simmered for 45 minutes. I think I used more like 250g, even then I added a bit of water a couple of times during the simmer to keep it from drying out. The sauce: The cucumber and black-eyed pea salad: The finished dish: It all went down brilliantly, darling son loved measuring all the spices out (using new gram scale that arrived yesterday) and wolfed down his plateful. The lamb shanks were spot on (after 48h at 62C), probably one of the most successful SV things we've made so far. MC is a truly remarkable book, can't wait to make more from it.

It. Has. Arrived. OMG - what an amazing thing this is, truly overwhelmed by the breadth and depth that it covers. absolutely stunning. Just one small problem now... where do I start??

Just had an update from Amazon, looks like we won't be getting it until October now :sad:

had exactly the same is there any news on the UK availability of MC?

It certainly does! was it nice?? We may be going there next year and I wonder if I should start building myself up to trying some of this...

After you rice the potatoes, work the puree through a tamis or fine mesh strainer. The retrogradation technique doesn't work well with a coarse-textured potato mash, precisely because of the graininess issue. I'm also a bit confused about this, are the grains that I can feel actually the grains of starch? So without passing through a Tamis retrograding will give a MORE grainy mash, rather than a smoother one because it keeps these grains whole and stops them bursting?

Decided to try some steak today, got a nice thick sirloin from my local butcher, their beef is ok but not really up there with the best I've had (from, say East London Steak Co.). It was about 40mm thick so I packed it up with some salt and pepper and a sprig of rosemary: Cooked at 54.5C for what ended up being 6 hours, glazed with some glucose syrup and tiny pinch of bicarb: It had a lovely even medium rare finish but have to say, after yesterday's revelatory chicken breast experience, it was a bit... meh. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, just felt like it had gone a bit mushy and wasn't all that exciting. I'm sure this has something to do with the 6 hours it ended up having, will definitely go for nearer 3-4 next time for this thickness of meat. Also, I want to try it with a REALLY good steak, something with a bit more marbling should be more interesting. Any way, onwards and upwards, tomorrow I'll try some scallops and mi cuit salmon - what are people's feelings on temperatures for the salmon?

That was good. I mean really, really good. I'm stunned at how good a simple, boring chicken breast can taste. Very, very happy with it . So here's the rest of my first adventure in Sous-viding: The chicory cooked for just over an hour at 85C, pulled them out and they felt perfectly tender so left them bagged up while I got on with the rest. I cooled the water down with some ice cubes and when it got to 61C (for some, inexplicable reason I found the idea of 61C instead of 60C felt "safer"!) the chicken went in. From the tables I'd found it looked like 1.75 - 2 hours would be fine, in the end they stayed in for nearer 3 as wife and child were late getting in (have a look at my homemade mozzarella thread for more whinging about this!). The potatoes had spent a good 40 minutes in an ice bath then went into the fridge until I was ready to go with them. I was following a recipe from the excellent Kayahara blog which suggested 25 minutes at a hard boil would be all that was needed to get them ready to puree. Unfortunately my tubers were a LOT more resistant than that... another 30 minutes more resistant. Unfortunately even then they ended up quite grainy, a beautiful flavour from the fried peelings (note to self: definitely do this again) and a lot less fat than normal pommes puree. Not really sure what the issue was here - whether they just needed more cooking after the retrograding, a longer chill period. To finish the chicken and chicory I heated two pans for a good 10 minutes, they both had a lovely texture but looked a little anaemic to say the least: The chicory I just sautéed in a little oil. I was really surprised with how quickly they coloured, it was one of the things that worried me about searing after sous-viding: even with a good heavy pan on my hottest burner raw food seems to take a while to colour. I was quite concerned that I would end up undoing all the good work of a water bath setup by having to overcook things just to get them nice and brown. Safe to say there was no need to stress about this, warm cooked food is obviously - in retrospect - a different prospect to cold raw food. Just to squeeze another new technique into today's adventures I used one of Douglas Baldwin's tips and brushed the chicken with some glucose syrup let down with a little water, again it was amazing how quickly I was able to get colour into the meat. There was absolutely no change in the subsurface, even with a decent level of browning to the skin. So, the finished dish. Not the most exciting looking thing I've ever made (all a bit "brown" isn't it?), but my god it tasted good: Honestly, I have never eaten chicken breast that tasted so "chicken-y". Both of us said this exact thing with the first bite, the herb flavour was just right (I'm glad I used such a small piece of tarragon). The texture though was unbelievable. I know there are scores of posts saying this exact thing but it's not really something that reading about a new way of cooking food can prepare you for, a normally dry boring meat cooked so evenly, so perfectly, tender, juicy and with more flavour than I'd ever had in even the best chicken I'd had before. Overall I'm delighted with my first foray into sous-vide. Can't wait to try some of the amazing things I've been thinking of for so long...

Wow! that actually tastes like proper Mozzarella! It wasn't perfect and wasn't quite as good as the better stuff we normally buy but for a first (well, second) attempt it was great. Made two balls, the one in the pic above was kneaded for about 2mins, the other less than one. The longer knead was definitely the better of the two, perhaps somewhere in the middle would be ideal - the right balance of stretchy, silky cheese with the creamy melting effect of the shorter knead. Had to add salt too, will make a note to increase the concentration in the whey next time. Overall a real success, especially as it was a pretty easy going job. Plus, for about £1 worth of milk we got two good sized cheeses.

Once I'd got the proper Rennet, it was actually pretty easy to do, two heating processes with a 30 minute rest in the middle, followed by a bit of warming and shaping/stretching. A LOT less messy than I managed to make yesterday's effort too! Have you got a copy of Ideas in Food? I STILL haven't been able to taste it yet!