IndyRob
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Posts posted by IndyRob
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This season is a yawner so far. Bring back Hung's Black Chicken with Geoduck please.
Well, we got the black chicken.
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I freeze pizza dough all the time (frozen after kneading and balling). I usually make enough for six pizzas and put one or two in the refrigerator to cold ferment and freeze the rest.
I also buy frozen dough loaves for when I want freshly baked bread.
The regular instructions for the bread is to put in a greased loaf pan, cover with plastic wrap and leave to thaw and rise for 6 hours. In practice this method seems to a take a bit longer so it might be possible to do this before going to work and come home to a fully risen loaf.
For my pizza dough, I usually just transfer it to the refrigerator 1-3 days before I need it. In emergencies I've found that I can thaw it quickly by putting the dough in a ziplock bag, getting rid of as much air as possible and putting it into a sink of room-temp water.
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Well, a nathanm appearance with MC as the Quickfire prize was a pleasant surprise. I didn't know that he had won a barbecue competition.
He hasn't.
Well, I don't know. Wikipedia seems to think he has. Although elsewhere I did notice a reference to "...was on a team that..."
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I hope that we'll see a long run to the end. Having the last chef eliminated pop right back in the end would be less satisfying than a sleeper candidate who has been quietly knocking off a succession of rivals.
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Well, a nathanm appearance with MC as the Quickfire prize was a pleasant surprise. I didn't know that he had won a barbecue competition.
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I had the impression that sous vide was adopted by commercial producers long before it hit fine dining. But I may have that confused with molecular gastronomy techniques in general.
After some searching I found an abstract that does seem to indicate that sous vide is widely used in commercial food service (including products for hospitals).
I suspect that it's just not being advertised as such. 'Meat Cooked for 72 Hours in a Vacuum' is probably not great a marketing message (plus, 72 hours is a lot of time and energy for commercial producers). Even many chefs who've used sous vide have seemed reluctant to admit to it.
But I do think there is an opening for 'fresh sous vide', or more generally, just freshly cooked, take away heat-and-eat. I was talking to someone who is a manager in a supermarket recently and he said that, by far, the most profitable area of his store was the salad bar.
I think that if someone were to expand that to a variety prepared foods that just need to be assembled and lightly heated, they could do well for themselves. Put it in an office building atrium and do donuts, danishes and bagels in the morning, a salad/sandwich bar in the afternoon, and take-home around quitting time.
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I did a small one (4.5lb with bones) on Christmas Eve for four. I had some challenges with transport issues and dodgy thermometers, but it turned out okay.
One objective observation...We wound up with two 'butt' slices (as my wife and I like to call the end slices - be it beef or baguette) and two interior slices. Carving for three will leave just one interior slice, which is what I think of when I think Prime Rib. But arguably, the butt slices are better.
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Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food" books are really good for the basics. Very approachable, but in a way that led me to 'invent' sous vide (only to quickly find that I was 40 years too late).
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*facepalm*
Reading this, I just realized I left the bones (and some meat and fat) from a rib roast I made to take to my son's house. And I just got a pressure cooker.
*doh!*
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A thermometer is the way to go. Get a remote thermometer with a probe cable. To see that others are doing, if you can find it look for a thread I started several years ago on cooking a roast low and slow. Good luck.
I did this this year (as I have in the past) and had an odd occurance. I have a probe thermometer with the cable that plugs into a unit. This unit will display the temp, but also transmit the temp via radio to another unit I can put in front of me while I, say, watch a football game on TV. That last bit is unrelated, but I think it's kind of cool.
Anyway, I inserted the probe and while the roast was sitting on the counter, the temp eventually read 38F. Totally expected as it was just out of the fridge. I put the roast into a 500 degree oven and immediately turned the temp down to 200. Within a few minutes, the temp read 56 degrees.
No way. The tip of the probe was as close to the center of the (admittedly smallish) 4.5lb roast as I could get. I reasoned that the 500 degree temp was conducting heat down the probe and figured that it would eventually resolve itself with the lower roasting temp. I used a second manual probe thermometer periodically to do sanity checks. Initially, the temp was off by 17 degrees and by the end it had gone down to 10-12 degrees off.
This was a thermometer I had used without issue before. And it seemed to start out reasonably this time, but quickly got out of whack.
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I've thought that a gratin can be cheese or bread crumbs or both. I checked the gratin entry on wikipedia and that appears to be the case.
But interestingly, the scalloped part appears to come from slicing the potatoes in a scallop (as in seafood) style.
But I agree with incorporating both aspects. Preferably in a thin layer to balance the scallop(ing?) with the gratin.
[ETA] crumbs
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I just watched a couple of episodes of Chef Hunter and was pleasantly surprised. It's been mentioned here but doesn't appear to have its own thread.
Two chef candidates square off for one job opening at a notable restaurant (the first one I saw was the downtown Les Halles location) by developing some specials and running the kitchen for a night.
It's wonderfully devoid of artificial drama, suspense, voiceovers, gimmicks, or celebrity chef interlopers. It does sound like they got the announcer from Gordon Ramsay's Fox shows, but his contributions are mercifully brief. Yes, there is the last minute choosing of the hired chef, but beyond that, they simply film each night and present them in a well edited format.
If there's a fatal flaw, it may be that there's too little suspense. But I found it refreshing to see an honest contest play out without much artificiality.
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I'd agree with that except for the following....
And get used to working in Celsius, as that is what most of the international recipes use, and we in the US ought to use, if it weren't for our medieval insistence on obsolete measurements systems!
I like using grams and milliliters, There are clear advantages, especially when working with liquids of a water-like density (since there are direct, easy to calculate correlations between volume and weight).
But temperature measurements don't really benefit from this in any practical sense in the kitchen. It really comes down to the difference between two scales. And the Fahrenheit scale is a bit more accurate if we're giving temps using integers. There are 180 notches on the Fahrenheit scale between freezing and boiling, and only 100 notches on the Celsius scale.
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Can anyone give an update of what's going on at Last Chance Kitchen? We can't watch it in Canada.
Perhaps we should have a separate topic for Last Chance Kitchen. There's a spoiler aspect since even those who can watch it on the 'net may not do so immediately.
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I use a Presto Kitchen Kettle (I think they're calling them Multi-Cookers now), Food Saver and a Thermapen. But I have gotten by using a pan, a Ziplock bag and a cheaper digital probe thermometer. I don't have any circulation and I don't think it's an issue for what I do. I routinely test with the Thermapen at different locations in the bath and never notice much, if any, difference in the Kitchen Kettle.
The biggest downside is needing to stabilize the temp at the beginning. I have to set it initially to some marks I've made on the dial with a Sharpie. Then as it gets into the ballpark, I keep tweaking the dial until it's holding the temp I want. From there it requires minimal attention and doesn't vary beyond 1-2 degrees F. That's close enough for what I do (meat primarily).
I've been meaning to test the manual Ziplock pumps. I think they'd work pretty well for low temp applications. Then, one could get into sous vide for under $50. 80% of that is the Kitchen Kettle, but you're also getting a deep fryer, slow cooker, and with its frying basket, it proves pretty handy for pasta as well.
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... - generally Americans trying to pronounce French as French people would come across sounding absurd....
Indeed. While reading some earlier posts I was thinking that I'd never say frahnce when referring to France in a conversation in English.
And of course, regional variations become local dogma. New Orleans is pronounced N'awlins, and Louisville is pronounced Loowahvul (after Le Roi Loowah, I presume).
And I take care never to miss an opportunity to mispronounce crudite. "Oooh, look...crud-ites!"
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Regarding the Christmas episode - Hubby and I sat through that one scratching our heads and giving each other WTF looks. THEN, at the end, the Samantha Brown thing was hilarious! Made watching it up to that point well worth it.
I had the exact same reaction. I was rolling on the couch. Once in a while, they start off on a tangent and wind up hitting it out of the park.
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I expect the pronounciation of Noilly Prat relates to the history of the Noilly name in a similar way to why the Moët in Moët & Chandon is pronounced with Mow-et, rather than Mow-ay. Just a guess though..
Don't tell Freddie Mercury! "She keeps the Mow-ay & Chandon in a pretty cabinet...."
How about this pronuciation? To my ear she's saying 'noy-dee prat'.
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That looks awesome. Is that a full sheet pan, or a half?
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How about Noilly Prat? I've never even attempted pronouncing it since I was pretty sure that with my pidgeon French I'd be wrong in any event. A quick search seems to reveal some disagreement.
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I have seen math people put out numbers on things like this but they doing a math exercise and weren't really bakers. I am not a math person by a long shot and I bet as soon as I say what I think, someone will come along and argue with me but just remember I'm giving my limited opinion because no one else has done so yet.
Okay, I'll play the math guy and back you up. The difference between the (top and bottom) surface areas is 77 sq. in. (11x7) vs. ~68 sq. in. (8.25x8.25) We don't know the thickness of the dish in either case, but because the depth is directly proportional to the area (assuming you're using the same recipe), we know that the smaller pan will be piled about 13% thicker.
As you say, the smaller one should take a little longer. Because the heat transfer will most likely be quicker from bottom to top/top to bottom (much thinner) than from the sides. Then again, a square pan will conduct heat more quickly to the center from the sides than an oblong one (a circular one would be most even as heat from the sides goes).
So with the square pan we have a quicker sideways heat transfer, but slower up and down. We also have a ton of other variables we haven't accounted for (insulation of the oven... just a bottom heating element or top and bottom...gas vs. electric...Is the spinach fresh or thawed from frozen and squeezed?)
So the math can guide us, but we still have to be cooks. And as Shalmanese suggests, the eggs seem to be the things to watch here. But all-in-all, a little more time for the smaller, thicker dish seems right.
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I think ribeye is used for Philly Cheessteaks. I've heard using the chain of a tenderloin for this as well. But I've wondered if Arbys might be using top round for their beef.
I've had decent results roasting it in a slow oven or sous vide to med-rare. But you have to slice it as thin as you can get it (God I wish I had room for a proper deli slicer).
But it's usually not cheap enough for me to want to spend a lot of time to end up with an 'okay' result.
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No, all basting does is slow down the stall. The stall only ends when sufficient free moisture has escaped the meat.
I think with the sort of roasting we're talking about here, we never really enter the stall. But that's not to say that moisture isn't evaporating from the surface of a turkey from the beginning of its stay in the oven. By basting frequently, we could be slowing the cooking and allowing for a more even result.
Of course, I would probably just lower the oven temp and save some work. But I can see why basting might improve the result for someone operating at a fixed temp.
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I've been thinking about this and considering what has already been discovered about The Stall. There we learned that the internal temperature of the meat stalls at ~160F for a while until the outside of the meat dries out enough that the evaporation isn't preventing it from getting hotter. This is when we're trying to get the meat to higher temps (180+) to break down connective tissues.
So it seems possible that by basting with pan juices we may be providing some sacrificial evaporative moisture. Moisture that might otherwise have evaporated from the meat itself. As suggested above, this would lengthen the roasting time since we're effectively lowering the temperature. But that could be a good thing, since we know that lower, longer roasting results in a better distribution of "doneness".
Top Chef Texas: Last Chance Kitchen
in Food Media & Arts
Posted
Underdog special (Really...? Not one eliminated chef could throw Bev a bone?).
I like that Bev came through, but Nyesha would've been the more dramatic comeback after fighting through more challengers.