Merridith

There are two simple books for beginners with lots of good flavor combos: The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home

I would definitely suggest that you calibrate your circulator. I don't know what you mean by "pappy" but if your circulator is properly calibrated then at those temps (assuming you are using good meat and you are cooking it for the appropriate amount of time) you should be getting a good product that is evenly cooked and delicious. On the other hand, sous vide cooking really shines best on the less tender cuts of meat, IMHO. Short ribs cooked for 48-72 hours can be sublime. Pork shoulder with lots of fat is some of the most tasty meat around. Perhaps, if you are eating high quality tender cuts you will be better off just searing and serving and forgetting the SV method. SV is not for everything.

So have you all seen this? Nomiku: It is going to retail at $359. It is the cheapest circulator yet...really going to make it accessible to home cooks on a small budget http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nomiku/nomiku-bring-sous-vide-into-your-kitchen?ref=live What do you think?

I just bought one from Cabela's. It is called a "Commercial Grade" slicer and it is very nice for home use. I did a lot or research before buying this one. My first test was to slice a slab of home-made bacon and it did a fine job of it although it is a little difficult to coordinate the pushing of the meat tray, the holding of the food bar and at the same time pull the slices away from the blade to lay them out neatly. I think I will get the hang of it, though. I studied the market in detail. It had to be made of metal, with a metal food tray and metal food guard. It had to be amenable to regular cleaning and it had to have plenty of torque so I can slice extra thin. I don't have room for a "real" commercial slicer and that would really be overkill anyway. On the other hand, I have had the cheaper portable varieties such as the Krups and the smaller Chef's Choice and they are all way too powerless and have stupid safety mechanisms which require you to press a button while slicing to get the blade to move. This new machine is modeled after a professional machine and made of aluminum with a steel blade. It comes with a blade sharpener. It weighs about 30 pounds and has a nice solid feel. It is plenty big enough for doing my bacon, turkey breast, lamb roast, potatoes (for Pommes Anna) and tomatoes. I am hoping to be able to slice a proscuitto that I have hanging in a friends curing cooler when it is ready for eating (maybe next March). I have not had it long enough to put the thing through the paces but I think I will be happy.

I don't know if Pastrami Queen is connected to Pastrami King - their web sites certainly look different. As for dairy restaurants, I am old enough to remember the king of 'em all (drum roll) Ratner's. I did not know Grand Dairy but there is a tiny little dairy restaurant on 2nd at 9th called B & H Dairy and it is not only delicious it is dirt cheap.

I would encourage you to try the Pastrami Queen at 77th on Lexington. It is the best pastrami I have ever had except for what I used to make for myself (since I moved to NYC last year I had to give up my smoker). I am evil so I ask for it "fatty" but you can ask for medium fat or lean, as well. It is definitely worth the calories.

Chris, I have been mostly absent over the past year as health and life threw me a couple of curves but I did not stop watching from the background. I want to express my deepest gratitude for all you have done, all I have learned from you and all that you give. You have nothing but my sincerest admiration! I am glad to know we will still have you here online even if you are stepping back from the director's post. I hope you get that breather! By the way, that christmas foodblog was an incredible learning experience and great joy for me personally!

I did a butter poached lobster and talked about it here: http://fabulousfoodfanatic.com/2011/01/30/lucky-lobster-lover-lives-to-eat-her-words-and-lobster-as-well/ It was delicious and a perfect way to do lobster as part of a dinner party meal because you can hold it until the last minute, etc. But mostly, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVED the resulting lobster butter which I could use to dress pasta, make a sauce with and be creative otherwise (fresh corn on the cob with lobster butter???).

Guanciale is the traditional "bacon" used for spaghetti carbonara. It is a fantastic thing for using to make little crispy bits for garnishes, etc. Incredible in Mac & Cheese, perfect on a fancy salad, and most commonly used in a pasta Amatricana (sp?), and I love it in potato dishes. It is EASY to make. I roughly follow Michael Ruhlman's recipe out of Charcuterie. The traditional seasoning is fresh thyme. I use lots of it but I also add juniper berries and pepper. Just put the cure in a ziplock bag with the jowl and leave it for about a week to 10 days - you will know when it is right because the meat/fat will feel rather hard. Take it out of the fridge, wash it off thoroughly and then hang it from a rack in the fridge so that it can dry out well. I usually hang it for another couple of weeks. Guanciale does not traditionally get smoked like many other types of bacon. I slice it into 3" square chunks and bag them separately with the Food Saver. You can freeze the stuff forever. It is a real treat. Let me know if you need the specific cure proportions and I will look them up for you. Oh, and one important thing to know: make sure you get all of the salivary glands out of the jowel before you cure it. These glands will make the product have an off taste or be bitter.

Are the cheeks still in the jowls? I leave the whole thing together (cheeks are inside jowls) and I cure it all for guanciale. Pork cheeks themselves are rather small, the whole jowl, on the other hand can be quite large and it makes the best cured pork. Do you have a photo?

Nick, that is how David Chang (Momofuku) does his pork belly and it is amazing. The sugar in his Marinade really makes for a crunchy finish which frying really enhances.

Amusing article about the errors: http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sbrc7FW835ixX9Rqiqhn_YA/view.m?id=15&gid=books/booksblog/2011/may/04/classic-book-mistakes&cat=books I would still love to own my own copy - errors or not. Having edited and worked on books of my spouse, I know it is damned hard to make an error proof book. Also, at least at our publisher (one of the largest text book publishers in the world) the copy editing sucked!

Yes, I agree with Chris - the difference is in the bite, i.e. the way it chews and the mouthfeel, on a subtle level. I have done 48, 36 and 24 hours. Each are very tender but the shorter time chews/feels more like a tender steak. The longer chews/feels more like a stew but without the stringy texture. Of course, it ALWAYS depends on the quality of your product. (Most here know that I only eat grass-fed, direct from farmer, meat. Since I buy large amounts at a time, chuck essentially costs the same as rib-eye so I tend to treat them all the same.) At either temp and time, you won't get fat for eating. Try your torch. I am loathe to hold the torch on the fat long enough to achieve something I want to eat because I am always afraid of overcooking my meat. So I just justify this by the saving of the calories. I would torch it anyway, for looks, but I cut it away on my plate for eating.

I have an SVP which holds it heat extremely well - I have never seen it vary more than .5 C. So I cook my chuc at 54.5 for 24 hours. I put frozen cubes of strong stock and I rub the meat with seasoning - onion powder, paprika, herbs, salt, pepper, etc. Trim as much fat as you can before seasoning and bagging, by the way, because at that temp you don't get good fat for eating. Heat and strain the bag juices, caramelize what sticks to your pot with some minced shallot, deglaze with wine or cognac and then serve over the meat - amazingly delicious.

What temperature and time do you use for the wings? Do you sauce them in the bag? Thanks

I recently did some according to David Chang (Momofuku) which were INCREDIBLE. I did them at 55C and they were perfectly pink. His method for browning is to toss them in some very hot oil and deep fry. I think that this method is perfect for short ribs because the outside gets a little crunchy but since you put them in to the hot oil right out of the fridge, they only warm up inside and do not get more done. Since I use a Food Saver, I froze the Momofuku marinade first before I bagged up the ribs. Then I tossed it all in to the water bath for 48 hours. Sumptuous!

Problem is that you want it rare (as do I) and it is not safe to cook it for long enough to tenderize it while at the same time keeping it truly rare. You must be willing to cook it at 55C or above (which is, in my book, not rare enough) for a longer period of time, say 12 hours or more, to get it to break down a bit. I tried sirloin once at 53.5 C for 3 hours and it was unchanged in texture. I decided that I would just use the SV for this cut as a method of getting it even and that I would put up with the toughness. Others have suggested the jacquard but I don't have one. Still others use marinade which I don't feel really tenderizes at all. Ultimately, I think the flavor of the sirloin makes the toughness worthwhile. I just cut is across the grain and very thinly for serving. Also, I find that it is a little more tender when cold, so I use it for salads, too.

In not a technical person but I would love it if my SVP had a place to plug in a probe that could be inserted into the bagged product with a readout on the display so I could easily keep track of the internal temp of what I am cooking. Does that make sense to any of the techno-geeks?

When you made the ribeye whose fat you were unhappy with, did you sear it so that the outer surface of the fat was crispy? For me the perfect ribeye is almost red in the interior and has a nice browned crust. I find that I can achieve this much more consistently via sous-vide than via traditional techniques. For me this is at around 128F (53.3C) with the crust created by a hot torch or a VERY hot pan with no oil for about 30 seconds per side. And when I say very hot, I mean a pan that has been on a high flame for about 10 minutes before the steak goes in. The result should be a nice browned exterior with somewhat crispy fat. The interior fat will be soft but won't have rendered out. I prefer very thick ribeyes with good marbling but trimmed of huge chunks of fat. Anyway, that's my take I'm with e_monster. I like my steak "under" cooked in the water bath and then crusted in the pan or with the torch. I use only grass fed beef and the rib steaks I get are usually nearly as fatty as traditional beef with plenty of marbling. I trim as much of the fat as I can, preferring to leave less than 1/8 of an inch on the outside. If I can trim out the inside chunks fat, I do so, as well. Then, when the steak is ready to take out of the bath, I put a thin coat of grape seed oil in the pan, heat it to the smoke point and put the steak in to get the crust. The thing that works best for me is a bacon press - it helps the make the crust happen evenly. As soon as the meat releases, I flip it and do the other side, getting the weight on as quickly as possible. It is probably not more than about 30-45 seconds a side. If the fat on the outer edges is not crisp enough, my handy Iwatani torch will finish the job in short order.

What are you using now Merredith? Why did you swap/cease using it? Hi Nick. I am now using the Sous Vide Professional (sold by Williams Sonoma). The SVS was a wonderful machine and I have NOTHING negative to say about it. However, I had several reasons for wanting to make the change. For one, I like my beef rare and I would often find myself operating on the edge of the danger zone. The SVP has much tighter tolerances - I have found that it varies only by +/- one tenth of a degree centigrade, where as the SVS varied by +/- .5 degrees centigrade. For most people this is not a problem but I just wanted the higher accuracy. Second, I really like the flexibility of the SVP - it is small enough to put away in a kitchen drawer and uses vessels that I already have and which are multi-purpose. I like that I can use it with a big Cambro or a 20 quart, 12 quart or a 7 quart stock pot. Third, will be moving to a New York City apartment in about 15 months. Everytime I look around my life here in a rather large house in the suburban midwest, I think about what can be scaled down. When the SVP became reasonable money, I looked at the trading out of the SVS for the SVP to be a scale down. (I am especially nervous about my addiction to kitchen stuff.) Though the SVS is by no means terribly large, the SVP is way smaller. Thanks for your interest. PS: I was able to sell my SVS for enough to make it worth while.

Hello abooja. I was formerly a user of the SVS and I think it is a great tool. However, I do not think that you can use the rack as the sole guide for how much you can put in the SVS at any one time. It is possible to stuff the bags in to the rack in a way that limits circulation between them and this is probably not a good thing to do. Actually, the purpose of the rack is to help things stay submerged but it is also to help you portion things out. Were you to stuff the machine so that there is little or no circulation around the contents, you would defeat the purpose. I would try to ensure that there is water between the packages and on the outside. Not using the rack is ok, too, so long as you use the perforated metal thingy on the bottom and, again, so long as you don't stuff it - keep things from touching the walls, as best as you can. That having been said, remember that the SVS uses the principles of physics to do its job - as water cools it becomes "heavier" and it flows to the bottom and the heated water rises to the top. Because of the design of the SVS, with the heat sources scattered throughout the walls of the machine, this natural circulation process keeps the temperature within an acceptable range of uniformity. Go up thread and read about how the SVS works and you will get a better explanation of this process. When that makes sense, you will understand how much product you should or should not use. Hope this helps! Oh, by the way, dark meat poultry definitely cooks differently than white meat. It is not just a function of thickness but also a function of the muscle you are using. The leg and thigh, for instance, are parts of the animal that are exercised far more than the breast. They have more connective tissue and they are characteristically much tougher Hence, the cooking time and temp will be different, if you are cooking the chicken and planning on consuming it right out of the SVS. In that case, you will want to cook the dark meat at a different temp and for different times than you do the breast/white. I refer you to Dr. Baldwin's chart. However, since you are just par-cooking the chicken to prep it for going into the deep fryer, I am not sure if it really matters. My best advice to all people new to SV cooking is that they should start thinking in terms of the purpose for which the animal used a particular muscle, in addition to other characteristics of their meat. A well exercised muscle will always be tougher and thus require different treatment than its less used counterpart. Good Luck.

I read about the new book on Ruhlman's blog - he was doing some "previews" of sorts, talking about his trip to Italy doing research for the book, some of the things he learned, etc. I think it is supposed to be out in March, but I am not sure about that.

I have this book and three others in the CIA professional series, including Baking & Pastry, Garde Manger and The Professional Chef. I have found editing problems like this in all of these books including incomplete recipe conversion, ingredients left out and steps in recipes omitted. I wrote to the publisher and received no response. I still like the books, especially Garde Manger, but they are a bit frustrating to use because of this. You just have to review all recipes carefully before following them and if you suspect an issue, trust yourself! I would love it if we could find someone at the CIA to respond to these issues, too. By the way, I don't know about the Charcuterie book but the other three books are, in fact, used as text books at the CIA.

I took Doug's advice(131 for 24hr)for boneless leg of lamb which I made for a holiday meal. It was PERFECT. Tender, plenty rare, with practically no sinew left in the meat. People said it tasted like lamb prime rib! Why should a bone in leg be much different from a boneless? Also, my understanding is that since it is cylindrical, the thickness of a leg roast (with or without bone??) is less important.

Is it for home use? If so, if I were going to buy on I would definitely get this one: Vacmaster Pro 112 Chamber Vacuum Packaging System. Alanjesq, another member swears by his. It is a tabletop portable model and costs under $700.