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Pittsburgh, PA. Amateur; have immersion circulator, next up is chamber vacuum sealer. Research programmer.

Yes, but if you *do* go there between 2 and 4 pm, the results are spectacular. I did drive to Sonoma County Poultry and personally talk to his duck man Jim Reichardt to pick up a duck, and got regaled with accounts of how (paraphrased) he asked Corey Lee whether you really have to use all that salt to cure the duck legs for duck confit, and they said no, not really, it's jus to fill the container and make sure all the surfaces have salt touching them. And the duck was noticeably better than the duck I tried from other places. So the specificity of ingredients isn't all bad. And the stuff worked just fine with the other ducks. It was still spectacular, but didn't have that extra oomph from the super-duper duck.

+1 for Under Pressure. I've done recipes with liquid in the bag, and I don't have a chamber packer (I wish). I don't have a FoodSaver, either. I just use ziploc bags; if there's liquid in the bag, it conveniently fills most/all of what would be air pockets without a liquid. Rendered or melted fat is the best for that; I've gotten ziploc bags that looked a hell of a lot like they were vacuum-sealed when doing duck confit this way. Everything I've tried from Under Pressure ("pastrami" duck breast (60 C, 20 min), duck legs and tongues confit (85 C, 8 hours), vanilla ice cream (85 C down to 82 C over 20 min)) came out exactly perfectly as specified. I don't have an immersion circulator, either; I have an Auber PID and an industrial food warmer. I've also gotten good results with the Auber plugged into an electric griddle with a pot of water on top. Compression is a pretty small portion of the book. The problem is that the vegetable section is first, and most fruits and vegetables are compressed to flash-marinate them, so when you leaf through the book at the bookstore, you say WTF, what the hell does that do, and run screaming. I did this, and regret it. Under Pressure is a lot closer to The French Laundry Cookbook Part 2 than to a study of specifically sous vide. A fair amount of the stuff in it is sous vide, but that's just because that's what they do there, which in turn is just because it tastes better and is more consistent for a fair amount of stuff. There's also a huge amount of traditional stuff, too: all the old standby veal stock, "quick" sauces, etc are still there, and you'll find that you spend more of your time and attention in each recipe on those things (since sous vide by nature doesn't require tending the pot). The only problem with it is the previously mentioned danger zone crap, so no recipes with cooking temperatures below 60 C, even though the introduction mentions medium-rare short ribs, which are fundamentally less than 60 C for 25-50 hours. There is some medium-rare stuff in the book, but it's tender cuts cooked at 60 C for short enough of a time that most of it doesn't get above 55 C.

I have that one too, although I've cooked less from it, since its genre is sufficiently close to Keller's (especially Bouchon), and the latter is significantly more reliable. Cooking by Hand and the Keller line both have pretty good coverage of all the necessary information to make even very complicated dishes not suck, even if you were very recently so utterly ignorant of all things food and cooking that you attempted to cut strings of cheese and weave cloth out of them when a recipe instructed you to wrap herbs in cheesecloth. They will tell you, here is what a stock is, here is how to make a good one, here is why this makes a good one, this is what this is supposed to look like, etc, etc. They will tell you, crucially, that you must not stack uncooked lobster ravioli (p. 175 of Chez Panisse Cooking) on top of one another, or they will stick together and self-destruct, and your Thanksgiving dinner will be pretty seriously untasty as a result. That said, Bertolli's Chez Panisse book is definitely the best of the Chez Panisse cookbooks.

I doubt that's necessary. Obviously it's up to Doug, but for potential buyer X to decide not to buy because there's so much free video, there would have to be, I think, more than half the value/content in the book available via video. And that (I assume, not yet owning the book) would be a lot of video. It's really common when publishing on the web to be several times more stingy than is optimal because of the frightening-to-publishers nature of the medium, and I think it's important to fight that impulse. The target market is an enthusiastic, well-off bunch of home cooks who to reasonably use the book have to have already dropped at least $150 and probably more like $450+ on brand-new equipment.

Blue Bottle Coffee had yuzu juice in their lemonade when I was there in June, and it was probably my favorite variation on lemonade, including straight. It ended up really intensely flavorful.

I subscribed to your channel, and plan to use it to explain to people how their ribs can be like my ribs. For that purpose, you may wish to mention the more ghetto forms of sous vide, like plugging a PID into a rice cooker. The glucose bath was news to me, and I am very encouraged that it may allow me to both *not* burn my face with projectile oil *and* have my meat browned evenly *despite* having stupidly tilted heating elements on my very crappy stove, where before I had to choose one or the other. It also was a good sales pitch for the book; I may end up buying it if the videos become sufficiently appealing. Edit: Isn't this thread big enough that a sous vide forum is needed?

I've had really good success with Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli, the founder and former chef of Oliveto. There's a lot of really good explanation of different flours and processes, which gives a lot of insight into why a simple pasta recipe without the necessary understanding often comes out rather unhappily. After surprisingly little practice, semi-objective parties notice marked similarity between the book's pasta and the restaurant's. It also made me understand the story in the book about the guy from Italy who strongly prefers pasta with no sauce, only butter or olive oil and sometimes good parmesan: pasta from this book, at least, even when made from simple (fresh) white flour, can have sufficiently interesting flavor and texture to satisfy only with a little seasoning.