BadRabbit

I ran an oyster bar for 5 years and never had anyone do anything but shuck in hand or in a folded towel sat in the bar trough. The above item is unlikely to work that well with Gulf Oysters as they have wildly varied shapes and sizes. Cold water oysters are generally closer in size and shape so maybe it would work better with Kumomotos or something simlar.

Update: I spoke with customer service and they claim it is PID controlled and will hold within 1 degree. That's not quite as tight as I'd like but unlikely to be a big deal unless I'm playing around near the danger zone. I may try it out and will give my review.

Nobody is denying that it's a repurposed deep fryer but if there is a PID controlling mechanism it won't matter. I'd guess that 25% of the people on this forum use repurposed gadgets for sous vide. I've seen countertop roasters and rice cookers tranformed into rigs that will hold temps within .5 deg C (some tighter than that). If this company has really just changed the name on a fryer and claimed it works as a water oven, they'll end up killing somebody. Maybe they're that reckless (or ignorant) but I hope not. I personally couldn't find a fryer that had a control panel like that (or even very similar). All of that is why I was hoping someone had actually used the thing and could offer a real review instead of pointing out the obvious that it looks like a deep fryer.

Looks very much like the Waring Pro deep fryer adapted for another purpose. Have doubts that it is a serious sous-vide set up. It's really all about how they have the thing controlled and the quality of the temperature measurement (I'd assume it's probably a thermocouple). A "serious sous vide set-up" isn't a very complicated thing. It would be better if it was insulated but I've done plenty of very precise SV in Rubbermaid containers.

Has anyone tried or seen the AquaChef Water oven? It's relatively inexpensive compared to the Sous Vide Supreme (about $140 compared to $400). I've been wondering when someone would be throwing a competing piece of equipment out there since I've built a DIY version for $50 bucks and assume it could be made commercially for practically nothing. I love my homemade one but would like to have something a little more pleasing to the eye when on the counter. I wonder how precise the thing is and if it's a PID controller or just thermostat. I don't think I'd buy it if it's just a thermostat. The free trial is intriguing but I've been fooled on those before with "restocking fees" or just a return process so convoluted that the customer gives up. http://www.kitchenadvance.com/aquachef.php

What was the total time out of the fridge? It probably took 4-5 hours to thaw if it was just on the counter but if it was out for more than 8 hours total, you're probably better off getting another. Edited to add: I've cooked chicken that I've left out before for longer than that but I usually make sure to cook it in a manner where the chicken will be held at bug killing temps for longer than the required bug zapping times. For example, soup that I plan on holding at > 145 for 15 minutes or more. That should be plenty of time to kill the excess bugs. Then all you have to worry about is off tastes from the start of decomp.

I usually make a chicken, lemongrass and rice soup with some ginger and chile to open my sinuses.

No help on your general topic but I would suggest using Google Chrome with translate enabled to search through some of the French sites. Google translate is not perfect but if you need some info that's mostly available in another language, I've found it very helpful.

No pictures but I ended up doing the following: Roasted in 500F over for 12 minutes until brown. Pulled roast turned oven to 170 (though I moved it up to 225 towards the end to speed it up) and opened over door until oven thermometer showed around 200. Cooked to an internal of 125 then pulled and tented. Roast rose to 133 during 30 minute rest. Perfect rare to med-rare throughout. Sliced and served with horseradish sauce. There were not enough drippings to make au jus so I also made a sauce of demi-glace, red wine and ultra-reduced beef stock. I also needed fat for my Yorkshire puddings so I cut a little of the fat cap off as I removed the roast from the oven and rendered it in some beef broth. Turned out really delicious.

How much rise in temp did you get during the rest?

I've read about this technique but it seems a bit dodgy to me as there are just too many variables for such an inexact process. My oven might lose temp at twice the speed as another and two different roasts can have vastly different sets of thermal properties. In addition, I'm hesitant to use any method that doesn't use internal temperature as the guiding factor as to when the roast is done. I really don't want to mess up the one meal of roast beef my FIL gets a year by overcooking a roast.

That's usually when I try something new from a cuisine I don't usually cook. I've had house guests going on 2 weeks now and have run through most of my go-to recipes. I was tired of cooking and tired of menu planning. For inspiration, I thought about all the things I like at asian restaurants and thought "I love pho but have never made it." I searched out a recipe and made it last night. It inspired me to look a little deeper into Viet cooking and I've got a few more recipes waiting in the wings.

My inlaws are in town and my FIL loves prime rib and never gets to have it. There will only be three of us eating it (my MIL does not eat beef hence why my FIL never gets to have it). I ended up buying a two bone roast though it's pretty large and weighs in at about 5 lbs. It's also roughly square though ever so slightly shorter longitudinally than it is tall(bones down). Should I cook the roast at low temp (e.g. 200F) to get as much rare to med rare as possble? Will my temp rise during rest be significantly smaller than with a larger roast? For that matter, will I have much temp rise if I do it at 200F? Would I be better off browning with a torch rather than putting in a 500F oven?

I am not sure as I've always used a stand mixer and the mixing action is considerably different from a hand mixer and may cause more friction (read: heat). Maybe someone else could comment on that. You can certainly do it by hand (it was done that way for centuries) but you may need to mix a little longer and more vigorously than what you did last time. Adding crushed ice during the bind helps keep everything cold if you need to go mix a little longer.

Yes. All pressure cookers/canners CAN NOT be used as pressure fryers however. This will likely cause a explosion and a bad case of kitchen napalm.

5 Lb vertical sausage stuffer All-Clad Saucier pan A-maze-n smoke generator Cylinder style cheese grater (the kind that's operated like a pepper mill) Keurig Platinum Brewer My weight in pepper jelly and pickled okra.

It looks like the forcemeat is broken and that would account for the grainy texture. That also may be the reason for the empty space in the sausage as opposed to air pockets during stuffing. If you are positive that you kept everything properly cold, you probably didn't achieve a good primary bind for some other reason. After my first few sausages had broken forcemeats, I became hypervigilant about temperature and was keeping everything in the freezer. I was freezing my meat to be ground to the point of crunchiness and was even stopping partway through my grind to put the ground stuff in the freezer. After controlling for all that, I finally realized that I just wasn't mixing well enough to get a good bind. I was so concerned about temp that I was cutting the mix short. For most sausages, I've found that if I mix until it starts to look a bit "fuzzy" I get a perfect sausage every time.

Thanks, MJX. I just found this which was helpful though I still have questions about replacing dextrose with trehalose: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2638/is_11_21/ai_n56870167/ I can't find the actual study so who knows how well this was controlled but it seems to support trehalose's benefits I've seen reported elsewhere (and what L.E.M. says about their trehalose). ETA: The statements about it mellowing out "harsh flavors" makes me wonder if it is actually flavor suppressant across the spectrum and if I'll need to ramp up the other flavorings when substituting for dextrose.

I recently purchased some trehalose for use in sausage making but there is a real dearth of information on the internet to its exact use in food so I have a few questions. First, can I substitute directly for dextrose? Both seem to have similar reported sweetness (dextrose 60% of sugar/ trehalose 50%) but trehalose has additional positive properties like antioxidation and water retention. I just want to make sure I'm not giving up anything with the dextrose that I should account for. Is the flavor of trehalose similar to any other common sugar? Are there any other common food uses other than sausage making? Finally, where does trehalose stand caloricly with other common sugars?

Any suggestions on which recipes to try?

I agree smoking is better. The OP said he didn't have the means to smoke so alternatives were given. Roasted pork shoulder while delicious really doesn't approach the full flavor of pulled pork for BBQ hence the suggestion for adding smoky flavor through LS. As for the brining, I prefer my butt brined and I've been preparing smoked butt for 20 years and I know for a fact that several very famous BBQ joints in my area use brines for their pulled pork. To dismiss it as an illegitimate or useless technique is ridiculous.

I would need to see some pretty well performed research to convince me that the small difference in the amount of benzine forms would be significant on health (unless I'm planning on drinking liquid smoke daily with breakfast or cooking all of my food in a brine of pure LS). In addition, it should be easy to test to see if that more benzine forms are even present in the final product but you've provided no evidence that this is the case other than an "authority" on an internet message board. All of this reasearch would have to be expansive and reproduced many times for me to be so convinced that I would suggest that others advocating its use were appalling me. I've seen far too many of these studies convince people to rage against a perceived danger just to be shown to be incorrect later. I've found however that the food preachers are willing to jump on any study that enables them to once more declare some product an edible sin. Edited for clarity

You are making an argument from authority using an anonymous individual. That's a logical fallacy not even done well. First off, if I believed every pop-press covered "study" that said things were bad for me, I'd be down to eating just radishes and dirt. I need to see a very well controlled experiment that has proven to have reproducable results. Secondly, liquid smoke like you buy in the store has exactly the same contents as smoke that you would produce on the smoker because it is just smoke that was pumped into a hyperhumdified room and distilled. So, frankly I don't believe any study that says one if fine and the other detrimental unless they can provide a proposed property or mechanism by which one would act on the body differently. Finally, I think all of you who like to get self righteous about "food safety" need to read up on Jonathan Schooler's work and what he proposes are the seasons for the "decline effect". Schooler suggests that a lot of these studies that are pimped in the popular press (and even by govt agencies) are single, small sample studies. They get picked up by journals because they show large effects that are statistically significant. Unfortunately, 1000s of studies could have been done on the same subject but most of them find no effect and are therefore often not even submitted for publication. This causes the statistical outlier studies to be the ones most likely to be published. This effect is why we hear about so many items that are "bad" for you only to hear years later that that is incorrect. Here's one of Schooler's articles in Nature where he proposes ways to study this issue to determine if his interpretation of the reasons for the decline effect are correct: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110223/full/470437a.html

You are making an argument from authority using an anonymous individual. That's a logical fallacy not even done well. First off, if I believed every pop-press covered "study" that said things were bad for me, I'd be down to eating just radishes and dirt. I need to see a very well controlled experiment that has proven to have reproducable results. Secondly, liquid smoke like you buy in the store has exactly the same contents as smoke that you would produce on the smoker because it is just smoke that was pumped into a hyperhumdified room and distilled. So, frankly I don't believe any study that says one if fine and the other detrimental unless they can provide a proposed property or mechanism by which one would act on the body differently. Finally, I think all of you who like to get self righteous about "food safety" need to read up on Jonathan Schooler's work on the "decline effect". Schoolers's studies suggest that a lot of these studies that are pimped in the popular press (and even by govt agencies) are single, small sample studies. They get picked up by journals because they show large effects that are statistically significant. Unfortunately, 1000s of studies could have been done on the same subject but most of them find no effect and are therefore often not even submitted for publication. This causes the statistical outlier studies to be the ones most likely to be published. This effect is why we hear about so many items that are "bad" for you only to hear years later that that is incorrect.

I regularly cook bacon on Sunday and use it throughout the week. It's horrible right out of the fridge but is really quite good if you reheat it in the microwave or the toaster oven. I do it strictly for speed and cleanliness in the mornings. I need pork first thing in the morning or my day is shot but I hate to dirty pans first thing and don't have much time anyway. It's not quite as good as fresh fried bacon but once you throw it on a biscuit it's still delicious.