thock

Yes, that's true, and you can also use it as a canner. That's what I have done, although I did inherit a 6L T-Fal from a friend who was moving away. I use that one, too, but not as a canner, just as a cooker.

Yeah, they're pretty fibrous.

I don't know about starred restaurants, but in September, I was in Lyon for a day, with my partner, and we stopped at a bouchon, Café Comptoir chez Sylvie, on rue Tupin. We had a wonderful meal.

I haven't tried making candy with it, but I can't imagine it would be much different than with regular sugar. I did try a syrup with it, 3:1, and it precipitated out a large crystal in the jelly jar I put it into.

You're right, it has no effect on contamination, however, it CAN have an effect on resistance effects due to consumption of antibiotic residuals in meat. And no, they didn't say they found antibiotics in the meat they tested, but it is a consideration for me.

How do they make their seal? It's a smoothly-machined metal-to-metal contact, which you lubricate with petroleum jelly. You don't have to lubricate every time you use the contraption, which is nice. You do have to make sure that you don't ding the sealing surfaces, but you don't want to drop the lid, anyway, so as not to damage the pressure gauge.

Yes, 198 is not a significant sample size. It appears that there is probably less to this than it seems, at first glance. Still, I do think that antibiotics have the potential to be overused. Not only in meat production, but also in treating human illnesses, and that can lead to antibiotic-resistant strains of almost any bacterial source of infection. IMNSHO, it would be good to avoid using antibiotics prophylactically, and to have some sort of waiting period after treatment for an illness before an animal is slaughtered and used for food. This would avoid actively infectious meat from being brought to market, and would reduce the chances that antibiotics would linger in meat used for food. Unfortunately, I don't think this is practical in mass-production scenarios. I'm with you on the sides lining up the way they do. It's a bit odd. I am skeptical that the National Pork Producers Council has anything but their members' bottom line as their primary concern. I wouldn't want to encourage NO antibiotic use, just prudent antibiotic use, with guidelines to ensure that one, animals become healthy, and two, antibiotic residuals don't exist in meat.

I saw this, today. http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2012/11/28/almost-70-percent-of-pork-in-stores-unsafe-consumer-reports-says/ I'm not sure how cooking affects Y. enterocolitica. I know that for the longest time, U.S. consumers were warned to cook pork to an almost inedible doneness in the interests of safety, but it was my understanding that was to deal with the possibility of trichinosis. Any thoughts?

Another reason I like the All American pressure canner/cookers. No gasket.

As an experiment, because it's all about the science, you know ;-), I bought two half-gallon cartons of ultra pasteurized heavy cream at Costco, yesterday. They both carry best-by dates of 19 January 2013. I put them both in the garage fridge, upside-down. I plan on leaving one there, more or less for a year and a half. The other, I will be using, when I run out of the current house-fridge cream. I'm going to see how much "light" cream I can pour off the long-term-storage one when I finally open it, and will sacrifice myself to make ganache out of the remaining heavy stuff. Because, you know, it will be SUCH a sacrifice. I think I will write myself a note on the stored one so I don't forget to update this thread. A year and a half is a bit too long to leave to my memory.

No aversion to powdered gelatin, here. It's just more of a PITA to use, for me, than popping open a jar of home-canned stock. No need to wait for it to bloom, etc. Plus, I hardly keep it around. And frankly, I'm a geek. I LIKE extracting my own gelatin from the source, as it were.

I agree. I have a couple of pounds of chicken feet that I'm going to make stock out of, just for that reason. Sometimes, I just want the body, without the flavor. Without adding powdered gelatin. If that makes me weird, so be it. I've been called weird about a lot of thngs, so one more won't hurt.

I just made a stock from a package of legs. I took the meat out and used it for a one-pot meal, and returned the skin, bones, etc. to the crock pot. After a while, I strained it, and put it into the fridge, without reducing it. It was wonderfully jelly-like, without too much fat. I skimmed what fat there was, and reduced it by half. It's in the freezer, now, and will be canned when I have enough stocks for a full canner load. IMO, the skin adds a lot of gelatin and flavor.

Yeah, I made myself some chocolate "milk" with about a third of the glass the lighter version of that heavy cream. I'm still not hungry.

Mmmm, sounds good. May have to try that. I've never made ganache, before.

Now this is interesting. I typically buy heavy cream from Costco, by the half gallon, as it's fairly inexpensive. It's Horizon Organic. I hadn't noticed, before, that it contained carageenan, but I just checked on a carton I had in the fridge, and it was listed as one of the ingredients. The others were organic grade a cream and sodium citrate. Carageenan is the last ingredient listed. What's REALLY interesting, though (and the reason I went searching pasteurized cream in the eG forums to begin with) is that the carton of which I speak was sitting in the fridge in my garage, still sealed, for a lengthy period of time, until yesterday. I pulled it out, having run low on cream in the house fridge, with which to make dinner. I knew it had been sitting there for a while, so I opened it carefully, gave it a sniff, then tried to pour some out. It smelled just fine, but did not pour. It spooged, though, when I squeezed it. Now, I'm used to the Horizon cream having a somewhat thicker layer just at the opening, so this was not unexpected. What was unexpected, especially after seeing the carageenan listed, is that it wasn't a homogeneous mixture. Most of the cream was thick. Very thick. And none of it was sour. The stuff that wasn't thick resembled whey. The Horizon cream is, according to the package, ultra-pasteurized. It also had a best buy date of 6 April 2011. That is not a typo. Twenty months ago. And it's still not sour, but very thick. That speaks to the pasteurization, of course, not the carageenan. Now I have to figure out what I want to do with all this super-heavy cream, and if there's a good way to separate the less-heavy stuff from the heavier stuff. I'm almost reluctant to use it for something that isn't special. Edited to correct arithmetic error. 8 + 12 is 20, not 22, Tracy

Rancho Gordo's beans made Bon Appetit's list of "Essential ingredients you shouldn't cook without." http://shopping.yahoo.com/news/50-essential-ingredients-we-can%E2%80%99t-cook-without-and-neither-should-you-224923462.html?page=2 "Rancho Gordo Dried Beans "One of the main reasons that BA is obsessed with these heirloom beans is because of the Napa-based company’s high turnover rate: In other words, they’re some of the freshest dried legumes on the market, so they cook in less time. And also because, well, if Rancho Gordo is good enough for the French Laundry and Per Se ... turn it into dinner: A pot of beans is the start of bean salads, hearty soups, burritos, quick hummus, rice and beans, or, if you really want to go for it, a big, beautiful winter-is-officially-here cassoulet." I've never bought any, but lots of people on eGullet have, and have raved about the quality of RG's beans.

Wonderful information, Andie. Thanks!

Thanks! I have a lot of fat in the freezer, as yet unrendered, and I'd like to render it and can it, to make room. I have a lot of venison fat, which is unsuitable for cooking, but which will make good soap, I think, but I don't have the time to make the soap at the moment.

Andie, Was the rendered fat canned in a water bath, or in a pressure canner? Did it ever become rancid after canning, that you can recall?

Andie, thank you! Now I have a good method to test my vanilla extracts. I had often heard of combining it with milk or cream, but wasn't sure what volume percentage should produce what effect. This will be very helpful.

Doesn't make much sense to me, either. The energy required to digest ones food is minimal, in terms of the total energy expended in life.

I'm not Andie, but I haven't added water. The ratio of Everclear to vodka in the extracts I've completed to date has been about 12%. The new extracts I just started will be a quite a bit higher, close to 40%, but I still don't think I'm going to dilute with water.

Ok, something a little worrying happened with my simple syrup and vanilla extract mixture. I saw cloudiness at the top of the bottle I put the syrup into. I'm wondering whether this should be stored in the fridge. I started out with 1.5 cups of the Tahitian extract in the Crockette, and ended up with 3/8 cup, to which I added enough Everclear to equal 1/2 c. I'm letting it sit a few days, to see if it improves, but at this point, it's tasting a bit bitter and off. I transferred from the Crockette to a Little Dipper, which was probably hotter than the Crockette. I'm going to run those with water next week to see what the temps end up to be. I air-reduced (kitchen fan on high) some Back Bay Trading Post vanilla on the kitchen table, last night. It's not bitter or off-tasting. I added a bit of Everclear to up the alcohol content, but I haven't yet tried either reduction in anything. I'm going to try a bit of warm milk, lightly sweetened with white sugar, and a couple of drops of extract. I smelled my two new vanilla extractions, and the coffee/cocoa/vanilla extraction. They all smell heavenly, but I'm still going to wait until next month to top up with vodka. I may not wait quite that long for the coffee/cocoa/vanilla, as it's meant to be a liqueur, eventually, but I may wait, anyway. I can always cut it with plain vodka if it's too strong, but it's harder to up the concentration quickly if it's too weak. What do y'all think about the vanilla simple syrup? It's 1/3 sugar, 1/3 water, 1/3 vanilla extract, by weight.

Thanks, Andie. Here's a picture of mine.