lesliec

Hi Montreal. A while ago I managed what I consider (humbly, of course) to be the world's best beef cheeks. Major credit must go to Nick (nickrey) from this forum for his initial guidance regarding time/temp. First, I sautéed some diced vegetables until soft - from memory onion, garlic, celery, possibly fennel (there would have been carrot in there too but we'd run out that day). I put the veg aside and gave the cheeks, cut into maybe 2-3cm chunks, a good browning in oil - depending on quantity, you should do this in more than one batch so it doesn't stew in its own juice. Meanwhile, I had a cup or so of red wine reducing. When the meat was brown and the wine down to half its original quantity I mixed everything together, seasoned it, let it cool then bagged and sealed it. I didn't have much trouble with liquid escaping (I use a FoodSaver); it seemed that the wine had mostly soaked into everything else. But be careful and ready to hit the 'seal' button if you're not using a chamber machine. At that point you can either freeze it for later, or proceed straight to SV (or both). Put it in the bath at 70°C and leave it for 30 hours (mine was more like 33 by the time I got it out, but what's a few hours between friends?). Serve straight from the bag over very buttery mashed potatoes and with a nice big red wine, and prepare yourself to be very happy. Good luck - we expect reports.

Not sure if the brining would affect timing, but my favourite pork belly setting, gleaned from various postings on this very thread, is 78-80°C for 10-12 hours. The fat melts, the meat gets stunningly tender and all's right with the world. Based on the texture of mine, I think anything over 12 hours at that temperature would certainly be too long.

Hi Peter. We had a visit a few months ago from Robert and Lynda of Rely Services in Melbourne, demonstrating the MyCook (among other nice toys). They were very helpful, even to the extent of sending me a copy of the manual and recipes in English. Turns out mine is doing everything it's supposed to do, so I'm rather more confident with it now. If you're looking, I'd recommend getting in touch with Rely. My most recent experiments involve using the beast as a steamer. The instructions for this are a bit lacking, but it didn't take too much faffing about to get good asparagus out of it. Start with cold water and run at 120°C for around 15 minutes. The benefit is you don't have to watch and wait - just get on with the rest of your preparations while the MyCook does its thing. Good luck, Leslie

When we redid the kitchen a couple of years ago we went with glass (lexical note: why do Snadra and I down the bottom of the Pacific call them 'splashbacks' and everybody else calls them 'backsplashes'?). No regrets at all - easy to clean, strong and looks great. The reflective surface also make the place look bigger. One caution about colour matching: you may not get precisely the colour you're looking for because it will be seen through the glass, which may give it a blue-green shift (unless you spend heaps on special glass to avoid this - iron-rich, I think). But it's pretty close.

Wish I'd seen this yesterday ... As part of the recent Wellington on a Plate festival, we attended a White White dinner with precisely the theme Zacky's looking for. Menu as follows, with explanatory notes as required (and if I can remember!): Two amuses as we mingled before dinner; first, cauliflower scented with truffle - a warm soup served in a shot glass. Fabulously truffley Then Prawn Pops - can you imagine prawn lollipops? No, neither can I, but these were very solid spheres of prawn on sticks, presumably deep-fried with a crispy coating Grana Padana and Chevre gellan with pickled white anchovy, lamels of scallop and rice wine vinegar - bit vague now, but I think the cheese mix was presented as a disk at the bottom with everything else piled thereon Chicken and spanner crap galantine on white turnip purée with horseradish - my dish of the evening. We didn't get the menu until we were leaving so there were many guesses during the meal about what the meat was, but it was falling apart and juicy but still managed to stay in the cylindrical shape it had been moulded into. I suspect sous vide but can't confirm Freeze dried fruits with tapioca and Malibu sorbet - the freeze-dried fruit was lychee, which had an almost popcorn texture. The tapioca was pretty gluey and the Malibu sorbet was more or less pineapple foam. It was rather better than that makes it sound ... Marshmallow - huge plates of pure white marshmallow, flavoured with lime. Great, but potentially lots of powdered sugar on my black suit Candy floss - piles of the stuff, pure white and again tinged with lime. I've always liked candy floss and loved this one All this was served with a selection of (naturally) white wines. The food was very good but we and others felt there was too little of it. Hope your white dinner goes well.

Thanks for keeping the thread alive, guys. I still haven't got my hands on any TG, but I'm close - my favourite local chef has good contacts with the importers and has promised to get me some. Nick - nice blog! A new venture, I take it?

Fruit cake and/or biscuit mix. A caring father would have introduced his son to this pleasure from my childhood, but it was just too hard for me to give up.

Finally ordered mine ($500, not $420 any more - procrastination has a price) and was stunned that Amazon (US) thinks it will cost $9 for shipping to New Zealand. Is this a bargain, or is the myth that Americans don't know where NZ is true??

I propose a compromise: Carry your camera in whatever bag you've got, with as many lenses etc. as you like When you get to the restaurant, take what you'll need out of the bag and check the bag to pick up at the end of the meal. Convenience, security - AND, we hope, a good meal!

Your gauge is brilliant, Peter - thanks very much. A laminated one would be nice - maybe I'll try sticking one in a vacuum bag. What cooking time would you suggest ... ?

Using an antigriddle for cooling is like using a real griddle for cooking - a big difference between inside/outside temperatures. I'm with Chris on the ice/water mix. It's going to be much faster and more thorough than the antigriddle.

Hi SLS. Sounds like fun! Have you seen Jason Atherton's BLT (Maze in London and/or Great British Menu)? Although you seem to have the tomato bit sorted (and you say you don't want to use gelatine, which Jason's recipe does), it's an entertaining concept.

All of the above, almost. I particularly want to see Shamanjoe's show around food production, markets and interesting uses. I like José Andres' 'Made in Spain'. It's not perfect - I wish he wouldn't keep popping home to Washington all the time; the poor man must get exhausted (I know I do) - but it's a lovely mix of scenery, culture, food and techniques. What I DON'T want to see is more 'cooking as competition' shows; Masterchef, Great British Menu, Iron Chef ... you know who you are. They might be mildly entertaining once, but cooking should be about ENJOYMENT, not huge stress and slagging off the other guy. Shouldn't it ... ?

Hi Percival. I can't answer your specific questions, but have you tried burning the alcohol off? Even relatively low-alcohol liquids like wine flame happily once they come to the boil. Mind your fingers - I use a quick blast from my blowtorch to get the flames going, rather than faffing about with matches.

Paul, you're right that it may not be too hard to sell. I have a wife with a similar view of my cookbook collection; I simply showed her the photo of the 'exploded' hamburger and a couple of the cutaway shots and she's convinced. Now the problem will be getting the book to New Zealand without freight costing more than the book. Ho hum.

Similar to Peter's suggestion but much more fun: a Superbag. These are wonderful things made of fine plastic (I use the term generically) mesh. Simply put your raw material inside and squeeze. 'Getting caught red-handed' will take on a whole new meaning! I've used them for blackcurrants (to make cassis); with a bit of effort you end up with lots of juice outside the bag and quite dry pulp inside. You can also (I haven't tried this) simply suspend a bag filled with fruit over a bowl and let gravity do at least some of the work. Not sure where in Canada you might find one, but I've had them from Le Sanctuaire in the past. The 250 micron mesh should be fine for what you're doing.

Hi Douglas. Congratulations on the videos - I think the level/tone/content was just right. As others have mentioned, they may be a little quiet, but I didn't have too much trouble hearing them. By all means make more - maybe one of the more obscure SV topics, like preparing the custard for ice cream, might be a good one. I'm looking forward to your book being more generally available to us foreigners. I see Amazon US is now listing it, but they're not selling it directly; it comes from the SV Supreme people. Any word on when Amazon will be selling it 'properly'?

I've done Heston's steak several times (granted it was before I discovered sous vide, but the results aren't quite the same). The end result is ultra-tender and tasty and may spoil you for steak any other way! I believe the 'official' name for the technique is 'accelerated aging'. Some points: The initial onceover with the blowtorch is primarily to kill bugs. As has been discussed in the sous vide thread, the inside of an unbroken hunk of muscle is effectively sterile; the little nasties, if any, are going to be on the outside. Given how the meat ends up after 24 hours, any effect of browning in the initial torching will be minimal at best. My oven claims to be able to do 30° and 50° (but nothing in between!). But using a separate oven thermometer, I found the oven's opinion of its own temperature was way off. I think I ended up cooking at 75° (according to the oven) and using creative rack placement to get the temp I wanted (according to the thermometer). It wasn't that hard - no faffing about with open doors and such - but I did find when I checked in the morning after the first 12 hours or so that the temperature had crept up. More creative rack shuffling fixes it, and from the results I'd have to conclude the recipe isn't THAT finicky. At the end of the cooking time the meat has a dry, dark, (somewhat) tough outer crust and smells incredibly 'meaty'. The crust is quite edible - the last guests I did this for were horrified I was cutting it off to throw away and insisted on being given it - but it's nothing like the inside, which stays quite pink and very juicy. Because (as with sous vide) the meat is already cooked when you take it out, the final sear needs to be very quick. As &roid says, the meat is quite soft. I like it, and so have my guests so far, but maybe it's not to eveyone's taste (what is?). For me, I don't believe I've had better steak anywhere, anytime.

Chris, if I remember from your earlier postings on your new/old kitchen, the existing ovens are built-in. The manual for the Cadco says, in large friendly letters, Your oven is not designed for built-in applications or for side by side positioning. They even underline it, so it must be important! Apologies if I'm wrong about the old ovens and/or teaching you to suck eggs, but the language if you bought one and then found you couldn't put it where you intended doesn't bear thinking about in a family forum like this one.

Re: infused oil ... I have no experience with it in bags, but a big pot of oil with sage, rosemary or bay leaves works very well at 90°C. Bring it up to temperature (with the herbs already in it), let it stay there for a few (ie 2-5) minutes then let it cool down again before bottling. And - can't rememebr whether I've said this in a previous post - the stuff keeps well. I recently finished off a bottle of rosemary oil I'd made maybe eight months ago, and it was fantastic.

I also wish I had Tom's problem. Plus it's the middle of winter for us so I can't even buy fresh figs! Try fig tart: base of shortcrust pastry topped with frangipane (lightly toast 75g each whole almonds in the oven at 180°C or so, when cool blend with 75g sugar, add 75g butter and an egg and pulse in food processor until combined - you'll only need about a quarter of this, but try finding 1/4 of an egg!) then with 10-15 quartered fresh figs arranged over the top. Sprinkle with sugar or brush with egg wash if you like. Cook at 200°C for 45-50 minutes. Or ... find a good black pudding - you want one that almost melts when it's hot, so some experimentation may be required. Gently fry slices in butter. Halve figs and warm them up in the same pan, aiming for slight browning of the cut side. Serve with a light drizzle of honey. Sounds strange; tastes fantastic.

And we mustn't forget my favourite destination on a Saturday morning - Ontrays. The site doesn't appear to have online ordering (yet) but they'll look after you on the phone, and the shop itself is a place you must visit if you're anywhere near Petone. Tell Steve I sent you!

Great idea to have a directory for us Australasians. Our eG colleague Brianenome has a 'Where do you find that' page on his Foodology site. In NZ, Souschef is great for all manner of things - they've recently added equipment to their range. And I've ordered successfully from RedSpoon Company in Sydney (on Nick's list) - prices were good, and he had a few things I hadn't been able to find elsewhere. Dispatch time to NZ was good too.

I don't have any problem with slashes since I started using my scalloped bread knife (see post 578 for a closeup of the blade). I do my flouring (not very thick; just a general dusting over the whole surface) before slashing; the edges of the slash spring back from the blade, revealing the 'raw' surface underneath (I've always imagined that the contast between the floured and 'raw' surfaces is what gives the lovely striped appearance of a cooked loaf. Any dissenters?). Again just theorising, but if your dough doesn't spring away from the knife, could it be under- or over-risen? I mean mine really springs - just as I would if somebody ran a sharp knife over me!

Can't argue with that! Luke, the only reason I can think of that your dough misbehaved when you followed my loaf-folding instructions was that maybe you folded it a bit too enthusiastically! The first part of flattening the boule does get it fairly squashed, but the folds themselves just involve flattening the edges you're folding. (That sounds really clumsy now I read it again ...) Or, as Heartsurgeon mentions, maybe it wanted longer to rise afterwards. I generally only let mine rise for half an hour or so using the basic recipe, but with variations in ingredients, ambient temperature, whatever, you may need longer). Persevere, sir, persevere. This is a fabulous way to produce magnificent bread with, really, very little effort.