dcarch

Instead of making meatballs, I decided to make soup buns. dcarch

SobaAddict70, that is one amazing Roast poussin. Nice strawberry dissert to round up the meal. Prawncrackers, Very nice smoked brisket. Mouth-watering sausages. Nothing wrong with enjoying BBQ with chopsticks. Mr Holloway, Home ground burger is the best, always. ChrisTaylor, I am very impressed with your silkie meal. It is copied to my reference file. I will have to play with making silkie in the near future. percyn, Nice plating, your Grilled Chicken w/King Trumpet Mushrooms. Dakki, Nice tablecloth indeed. Goes well with the plate. :-) Genkinaonna, Cola and Jam Baby Back Ribs sound like a delicious recipe. Dejah, beautifully photographed grilled veggies. Kim, I can’t believe you can turn out such quantiy and quality dishes. If I cook like you, I will need a month to clean up afterwards. rarerollingobject, You have inspired me with many of my dishes. ---------- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - rarerollingobject inspired me to make this. dcarch

It is much harder to cut a rock hard Kabocha squash. Especially if you want to cut it in a particular way. Here was one I did, using my shop pneumatic reciprocating saw. dcarch

Ya mean toothpicks? Are you trying to gross me out! I have bamboo ones. They last longer and you can reuse them (Not for interdental applications). dcarch

Blades for surgical scalpel are cheap. I use a scalpel to score tough skins like pork rind. Works great. Pliers works better than tweezers for pulling fish bones, and to hold on to a slipery fish tail to scale a fresh fish. dcarch

I can be very interesting rotating the same picture 45 degrees. In this picture (which is very artistic chromatically and texturally), by rotating it 45 degrees, somehow all the ingredients becomes equaly important to the eyes. dcarch Before After

IMHO: 1. The profile (top) of the burger is obscured by the French fries. 2. There should be more French fries showing. 3. The way all the other objects are arranged do not add any drama to the picture, might as well eliminate them. 4. The table top wood design/pattern can be played up a little. dcarch

If you do that once-in-a-life-time bathtub long duration sous vide, how about pouring vegetable oil on the water to prevent evaporation? You can recover all the oil later. dcarch

Restaurants like hard surfaces for sanitary reasons. Unfortunately hard surface = noise. Carpeted floors are a problem. Acoustic ceiling tiles collect dirt. Another factor is just economics. With real estate so expensive, restaurants have to pack tables as close as possible. Based on the law of radiation, I think if you half the distance, you quadruple the noise. dcarch

I want to try it with black garlic sauce on black rice. dcarch

I had silkie once, just out of curiousity. Not a very appetizing bird both in taste and in appearance. A live silkie is very attractive. People have them as pets. Look forward to seeing your results. dcarch

I would assume the pump will have to be below the water level. It does not look like it's a self-priming pump. I have found that it's helpful to have a filter at the intake to prevent clogging. dcarch

"-----Paul, could you document the pumps that worked (and didn't) for you, please? A low voltage (rather than mains voltage) water pump makes a great deal of sense from the safety angle, and adjusting/controlling the speed of a DC pump motor is simply a matter of giving it a lower voltage, simply achieved by using a different power brick. ---" The aquarium pumps are made for wet use, I think they are very safe. DC pump may be using solid state devices to drive a brushless rotor. Solid state devices are not very heat resistant. AC motors are very simple induction type, nothing much to go wrong. Most pumps have adjustable water flow ports. All motor pumps use centrifigal impellers. When the ports are blocked to restrick flow, the motor actually gets less load. dcarch

No smell at all and the fire is very hot for hot pot. As a mtter of fact, all Chinese stores here (NYC) carry them for hot pots. dcarch

You're right. An air bubbler will pump loads of energy out the top and accelerate evaporation as well. The little centrifugal pump I am using circulates 110 GPH and uses less than 2 amps @ 12v DC. You can also get 110vac pumps. No adapter needed. The watts used by the pump is not wasted. One watt = 3.4 BTU to heat up the water. dcarch

I am sure this may have been discussed. I couldn't find the topic searching here. I don't understand the use of air bubblers. Don't they carry away a huge amount of heat and moisture? Besides, It just does not seem to me that bubbling circulates water as well as a pump. dcarch

I use a propane camping stove. No extension cords. dcarch

Do you have any links or books about that? I'm starting a garden this summer, so that might be a fun project once the easy stuff gets going. I don't have links saved. I think you buy trees inoculated with spores from the supplier, prepare the ground according to their instructions and in time, you will get truffles. What I don’t remember is where you can get a pig or a dog that is trained to sniff out truffles. Without the sniff-er, the whole effort may be meaningless. dcarch

HowardLi, based on the pictures, it is unlikely that you can get even temperature throughout the bath even with the auto-ranging PID controler. A small aquarium submergeable pump ($10.00) with a long vinyl tubing plugged at the end and perforations along the tubing will give you pretty good circulation in you ultra-high density cooking style. dcarch

It is possible to grow truffles. Not easy. There are people doing that here in the USA. dcarch

"-----but two of the bags have maybe a 1/2 inch to inch of meat that just barely sticks out of the top of the water. I'm doing 150 degrees for 72 hours (as per MC).------" If your cooker has a cover, all you have to do is to measure the air temperature inside the cooker. It may be not too far from 150 degrees. If that is the case, by convection and conduction, the meat above the water will be very OK, not ideal, but OK. However, specific heat of air is not as much as water, you will need to turn the meat around to submerge frequently when you first start so that you can get the meat up to temperature quickly. dcarch

Where are the truffles from? May I ask? dcarch

Also, I would assume all you food will be inside food-safe bags. dcarch

Whatever it is that you are smoking, its not good for you. Read this instead - (from the British Stainless Steel Asssociation) - http://www.bssa.org.uk/topics.php?article=89 No need for new theories. Aluminium in contact with a 'large' area of stainless steel, and a conductive liquid, will result in the Aluminium corroding. In the absence of a final proven determination of the cause of the situation, it may not be a good idea to use one theory to rule out all the others, no matter how unlikely. The tranformer effect and electro plating effects are just possiblities. I am fully aware of the possible interaction between aluminum, aluminum alloys and the numerous stainless steel compositions. Whatever I am smoking apparently is not the same as what you have been inhaling. dcarch

Regarding corrosion: Anytime you have an alternating magnetic field near a conductive material, electric current will be generated. If you have a 1,000 watt heater in the bath, a lot of electric current could be circulating in the metal components. This can set up an electro plating situation and metals can be corroded. Just a theory. dcarch