Dave the Cook

I've done two variations on this method, both for ice cream. One is in Jeni Britton Bauer's recipe for "Black Coffee Ice Cream" from her book Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home. She specifies "coarsely ground coffee," which isn't a very helpful direction. I cranked up the grind size on our grinder to get something akin to what you get in a jar of cracked black pepper from the spice rack at the grocery store. Since she has you strain though a fine sieve plus cheesecloth, I decided the coffee particles had to be big enough for that strining arrangement to capture most, if not all of the grounds. The grounds steep in dairy just off the boil -- pretty close to paulraphael's 93°C.Five minutes, then strain.Good coffee flavor, and the color one traditionally associates with coffee ice cream. The second method is laid out in the recipe for White Coffee Chip Ice Cream at cooksscience.com. There, you steep whole beans in not-quite-boiling dairy for an hour, then strain. The interesting thing about this method is that it imbues the dairy with decent coffee flavor minus the color. It's a cute trick to serve ice cream that looks like vanilla (or, in this case, chocolate chip) but tastes like coffee. I'm not sure that either of these will capture the acids that paulraphael says the closed-container infusion does. On the other hand, I'm not sure that they'd be worth much in the context of ice cream. On the third hand, I'm not great at nuances like that.

EMP is a very good -- based on the one time we dined there, I'd say excellent -- restaurant. Whether it's the best in the world this year, is not something I'll be able to decide, given the fact that I am neither independently wealthy nor on an extravagant expense account. (As an aside, I'd venture to say that many of the participants in creating this list haven't actually been to many of the places they voted for.) In any case, there are no objective criteria for this award. But that's not really what this list is about. It's about a certain tier (the very uppermost) of the restaurant business supporting two of their peers, who are widely respected in the industry, and who made it their express goal to be at the top of this list. It's also about recognizing a new-ish trend in fine dining, with a gracious neoclassical approach taking a turn after a few years of the foraging aesthetic (Noma), which followed a few years of modernism represented by elBulli.

Ooh! Ooh! I know! I think Toliver is confused, and as I attended and cooked at both Pig Pickin's, I can confirm that it was indeed Brunswick Stew. I can also confirm that, while squirrel was discussed, we ended up using rabbit, along with chicken and pork. Dean (aka Varmint) and I did quite a bit of research, but we could never nail down an "official" list of ingredients; we couldn't even determine which Brunswick (of the 15 Brunswicks in the US) the dish was named after. Having said all that, Brunswick Stew seems like a good candidate for the Instant Pot.

They say it's in honor of St. Patrick's Day (or maybe they're just overstocked in this particular color): ThermoWorks has green versions of their ThermoPop, TimeStick Trio, ChefAlarm and Dot on sale until -- I'm guessing here -- St.Pat's Day. They don't actually say. They have a few other things on sale, too: here.

Nice piece, Fred. Thanks for the link.

According to the USDA, cauliflower is 92 - 94% water, depending on how it's prepared. That's a little misleading, because most food is mostly water; however, 92% is comparatively high. Snap beans, for example, are 89% and corn is about 70%; potatoes about 75%. We only buy vodka for cooking, so we don't care about flavor (or any other) nuances. I amuse myself by stepping up to the sales counter and saying, as loudly as my nerve will permit, "A pint of your cheapest vodka, my good man!" Last time, I ended up with McCormick. Works fine.

One thing that can help with batters is to remove some of the water from the batter by substituting alcohol. We usually employ 80-proof vodka because of its neutral flavor, but you can use whatever spirits you like, as long as the alcohol content is substantial. While it's just as good a solvent as water at room temperature, at frying temps the alcohol evaporates more readily, leaving the cooked batter drier; it also (along with gluten-free rice flour) restricts gluten formation somewhat, which might (I don't know for sure) prevent the cooked batter from retaining moisture. More information in McGee's article and recipe in the NY Times. (Note that while McGee uses beer, you can substitute any carbonated liquid; we often just use club soda.)

This totally works, pit or no pit. A half an avocado would never last two weeks around here, but we've gotten five days, easily.

Seems like a good occasion for punch.

Instant Pot

You can call Husk traditionalist, but that doesn't necessarily mean Brock is. His recipes show up throughout Modernist Cuisine, and before many of us had even heard of sous vide, he was known among the vanguard of modernist chefs (Dufresne, Blais, et al) as "the methocel guy."

Most likely, it's a combination of applicability and cost. To quote Modernist Cuisine: Egg whites might work, but then you have to deal with the additional moisture. Most tot recipes for home use employ corn starch, which is okay, but if you could swap that out for something that, say, increased crunchiness (or fiber, or pick a characteristic or characteristics), you'd probably consider a modified starch. In fact, you'd probably be foolish not to.

We got an identical message this morning. The weird thing is, we got our replacement blade weeks ago -- between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Who else? -- Tupperware! -- has volumes all figured out, and has put it in chart form. You can ignore their product recommendations if you want, and just look for the volume of the container for say, five pounds of flour (about 20 cups)..

For Christmas this year, we made Milk Punch from Paul Clarke's excellent recipe. With the optional pimento dram, it was very Christmassy, and an excellent replacement for cloying, overrated egg nog.

I haven't seen a mention of Ali Bouzari's Ingredient. It has the pedigree and content that seems perfect for many advanced amateur cooks. Anyone have experience with it?

We ran into a related issue a while back, when deciding to s-v some loin lamb chops. I noticed that they were vacuum sealed, and dropped them in the bath, marveling at my own cleverness and well-developed sense of thrift. The sealing survived, but all the paper labeling on the outside (price tags and such) disintegrated. It wasn't bad enough to choke up the circulator, but it wasn't pretty. paulraphael's outer-bag method would have prevented quite a mess (and a bit of embarrassment).

Bad me; I didn't take notes. But I recall that we weren't particularly formal about it. We probably let it swim at around 8 p.m. and took it out about 3 p.m. the next day. So . . . 17 hours or so? I think ChefSteps said "overnight," and that was overnight for us during that pair of days.

Not a dumb question at all. That is exactly what we did. A warning: part of the appeal of this method is that you can just take bacon out of your grocery bag and toss it in the bath without a second thought: it's a low-effort/high reward proposition. And again, that's exactly what we did with our package of Wright's. But if you're cooking bacon that comes in a peel-open package (Oscar-Meyer comes to mind), be aware that the glue that holds those sorts of envelopes together could let go after a few hours in hot water.

We were not blown away by sous-vide bacon. It didn't seem to save much time, and we didn't experience the combination of simultaneous-crispy-and-chewy that the technique implies. However -- -- this stuff is awesome -- not the fat, but the gelatinous liquid. It's kind of Extract of Bacon, and It's almost worth giving bacon the sous-vide treatment just to get it. We use it in dishes where the bacon flavor is welcome but the additional fat is not.

Having spent some time as an innocent (and sometimes not-so-innocent) bystander and frequent lab rat while someone else worked on an Instant Pot book, I can say that, despite being a justifiably popular and very capable device, the Instant Pot suffers from an inconsistent user interface and a manual that is, at best, barely capable of explaining it. That said, its stainless steel pot is superior to other electric pressure cookers, which almost always feature non-stick interiors that are pretty bad at browning, and lack the cladding that helps spread the heat from that tiny, center-positioned element. Still, I often resort to doing initial browning on the stovetop in a sauté pan, then transferring to the Instant Pot after deglazing. I'm willing to trade washing the extra pan for the frustrating tong work and scorched forearms that often accompany pressure-cooker searing.

I'm not sure there's a lot in here that's new, but this is from today's Washington Post.

ATK is trying to get out in front of the story.

You can get those long tweezers even cheaper if you step outside of the cookware shop and head for the pet store instead.

The Washington Post has a good breakdown of what's in the suit filed by ATK: click.