ChrisTaylor

The circulator 'blade' on my recently-purchased Anova One has started to strike part of the skirt, resulting in a loud noise when the unit is switched on. It'll cost upwards of one hundred dollars to ship a unit Stateside for them to repair/replace it. Non-refundable. That's a bit more than half the cost, minus postage, of a new unit. For a unit that is a few weeks old. I have questions about the build quality that will, I think, prevent me from picking up a Precision. EDIT I'm pleasantly surprised about Anova's customer service. After I objected to the cost of postage, Shermie requested I go through some simple troubleshooting and then offered to replace the unit. No shipping costs. I'm obviously happy with the result, particularly considering the date--late on 25 December, locally--although perhaps they do need to look into some kind of 'return postage paid' setup for foreign customers.

Apologies for the poor quality photography and sub-standard plating. Salad of duck tongues, snow pea shoots and freshly-picked sugar snap peas inspired by a similar recipe from Mugaritz. Mugaritz uses chickweed. I didn't. Next time I'd be inclined to try the crispy duck tongues from Modernist Cuisine. I reckon they'd be better. More texture. Gazpacho (three ways) from Brent Savage's Bentley. White: sourdough, blanched almonds, confit garlic, e.v. olive oil and white wine vin. Green: dill, basil, parsley, mint, cucumber, green tomato, green chilli, confit garlic, e.v. olive oil and sherry vin. Red: tomato, red capsicum, cucumber, red chilli, confit garlic, e.v. olive oil and sherry vin. The garden salad from Heston Blumenthal at Home. The vegetables--carrot, asparagus, beetroot--were cut down to sit and then cooked sous vide as per the 'best bets' guide in Modernist Cuisine. I needed more soil and more gribiche, as the photo makes obvious. The soil was made from Kalamata olives and All-Bran, my workaround when faced with a lack of Grape-Nuts on the Australian breakfast cereal market (unless I felt like paying USA Foods the best part of $20 for a box of breakfast snap/crackle/pop). Of course, the problem with more soil would be the flavour. The soil tasted good in small quantities but was, as you'd expect from something mostly comprised of oven-dried olives (i.e. concentrated flavours), salty. If I was to repeat this I'd look at the edible soils in other cookbooks I have on hand, such as Rene Redzepi's. Maybe a composite soil. Maybe a layer of soil made with some kind of oven-dried vegetable (beetroot? mushroom?). It's a good dish but I think it could be ratcheted up a few notches. Duck breast glazed w/ lavender from Daniel Humm's cookbook. The duck was glazed w/ lavender honey and dusted with a simple spice mix: 2:2:2:1 lavender flowers:coriander seeds:Sichuan peppercorns:cumin seeds. The puree was comprised of fennel and potato. The peaches were prepared two different ways: 'confit' (slow-roasted after being douse in olive oil and lime juice, dusted with black pepper and confectioner's sugar) and soaked in dessert wine. The latter was my half-arsed workaround for peaches compressed with a chamber vac. The duck sauce was simple but time-consuming: 3L of chicken stock serves as a base for a duck jus (along with chicken feet, roasted dark carcasses leftover from various trial-runs of this dish, red wine, port and vegetables) which in turn acts as a base for the sauce (duck jus jacked with a lemon/lime/orange/star anise syrup and seasoned with raspberry vin). Something of a pre-dessert for four out of five diners. Strawberry sorbet (Heston, again) with a slow-roasted strawberry. Ugh, those colours. This photo is the least horrible of a horrible bunch. Slow-roasted strawberries, fresh strawberries, strawberry sorbet and burnt orange syrup (jacked with Angosutra bitters). This was for a person that mislikes traditional Christmas pudding. This person has a conservative palate that discouraged me from doing what I wanted: making a balsamic vin syrup. Dessert for the rest of us: traditional pudding with vanilla creme anglaise and burnt orange syrup. I think this needed some additional elements. Some kind of tuile, maybe. Something with a bit of crunch. A praline.

I live in a multicultural area. To varying degrees all local butchers sell all component parts of animals, not just the fillets and common roasting joints. Duck tongues seem expensive--$45AUD for one kilogram--but it's not like I buy many. Sixteen tongues worked out to cost a couple of dollars. I see that Modernist Cuisine has a recipe for crispy duck tongues as a small component of a large dish. I didn't get around to trying this method prior to Christmas. I've only tried the Mugaritz method: bagged with a little olive oil, a little salt and bathed for 12 hours at 66C. Before searing them for service you remove the hard piece of cartilage. At least when the tongues are slightly warm, removing this piece of cartilage is painless.

It takes a long time for alcohol to evaporate. Unless you actively burn it off (bring to boiling point, light fumes with match). Just an aside, is all. And, yeah, I'd add it the way andie described.

This. That is not to say it needs to be expensive wine. Or wine you'd drink as first choice if you were opening the bottle purely to drink. Put it this way: if you used 500mL in the dish, would you drink the rest? EDIT But in answer to your concerns about normal wine, could it be that you didn't cook it enough? Didn't reduce it enough? In braises and such I just use cheap clean skin bottles of local Merlot or Shiraz. They're competitively priced with airplane bottles.

Sous vide root vegetables. If I bag and cook them without fat or salt (or any other additive, for that matter), would they be fine if served one day after being cooked? They'll be served cold. Probably. Can I also do this with asparagus?

I'm aware of the scientific name and, so far as I know, it's called chickweed here. It's not something the local fruit and vegetable purveyors carry. I know of a couple of places that carry that sort of thing--the kind of place that'd maybe have chickweed and mache in stock--but I don't have enough time over the next ... day to dick around in traffic and markets. On impulse I purchased snow pea sprouts. eGulleteer Keith_W introduced me to this product a long time ago, albeit in cooked form. I'm sorely tempted to throw some raw (podded) sugar snap peas in there too, fresh from the garden. Mild, 'green' flavours. I tried some fresh wasabi. The flavour is too distinctive, the spice too overpowering for this. Sugar snap peas, tho'? And sprouts? I think they'll work.

Kizakura Yamahai. A nice step up from last night's perfect shite. Yamahai sake is different to other sakes in a way I don't really understand and don't presently feel like reading up on. But it's different, ja, in terms of how it's made. It's meant to be 'different', too, flavour-wise. And it is. Not wildly so from some of the sakes I've tried but ... for a kind of sake that's meant to be 'wilder' this example, at least, is one of the more refined drops I've tried. A bit of bitterness on the entry with the first sip but otherwise it's clean and smooth with a mouth-filling rice booze savouriness. I say mouth-filling but it's still ... subtle. It's not the big punch in the face some of the junmais I've tried offer the imbiber. I like this one. Makes me want to seek out some of the 'wilder' examples of yamahai sake available on the Australian market. And, yeah, I'm drinking from a Mr Burns-style oversized brandy balloon. I'll release the hounds on anyone that has a problem with that.

A dish in the Mugaritz cookbook caught my eye: a salad of 'tender leaves' and duck tongues. The recipe is, by Mugraritz (and perhaps normal) standards, simple: the tongues are cooked sous vide before the tough cartilage is removed. I've made this component of the dish before. The dressing is easy, too: a reduced duck/chickpea stock blended with some diced leek and apple cider vin. The sticking point, for me, is chickweed. I've looked at countless photos of chickweed. I've been out in my backyard and found a weed that looks very similar to the photos. So, carefully, I took a nibble of a single leaf. Based on the flavour description of chickweed I've read online, this stuff isn't it. So forget foraging in my backyard. I understand and accept that any substitution will result in a different flavour profile/texture to what the chickweed must provided Mugaritz's original dish. I accept my solution to a lack of chickweed will be worse. That's okay. Ideas that have occurred to me include cos hearts (the leaves separated), young wasabi greens and baby rocket/arugula. I'm open to suggestions.

Perfect snow? We'll see about that. This is Kikushi's 'excellent refined Japanese sake'. Refined but, er, not refined. Or not filtered, anyway. Refined but unfiltered. This brings back flashbacks of this cherry-flavoured cough medicine I had as a child. Fucking hated the stuff. Hatest hate. The flavour profile is nothing like the cough medicine but the appearance and texture is. Mmm ... gritty liquid. A bit like a yoghurt drink. A bit sour. A funky finish. Got to love hints of bile and notes of kale. Even at its most 'excellent' and 'refined', unfiltered sake still tastes unmistakably of what it is. And that's grand, I guess, if unfiltered sake is your thing. Not that I'm drawing on a large sample but I feel this is not at all an 'excellent' or 'perfect' unfiltered sake. It's not overtly bad and it has more character than the last one but ... too much marketing pish, not enough serious sake brewing. Five chalky bits of grit out of ten. EDIT Actually, I'm pushing it down to a three. This is the first sake I couldn't finish.

Sawanotsuru Akane Iro. This one is, er, interesting. On the nose: red wine vin, sherry. Fino. Oloroso. Fucking shaoxing rice wine. You get the idea. Palate is sweet. Not sticky but ... oloroso again. Colour's close enough too, I guess. Not my favourite sake thus far--far from it, even--but compelling enough that I might partake again at some point. I don't know why it's that colour, incidentally. Nothing in the ingredients list--distilled alcohol, rice, rice koji--seems different from your run-of-the-mill sake. EDIT If anyone's interested in 'red sake', here's a blog post on that very topic: http://sakeworld.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/red-sake/

This. I'd chill it--not necessarily to fridge temp, but certainly lower than the temperature of the water bath--and get the surface as dry as possible before searing it. It's worth cooking a rib eye steak sous vide once or twice for the hell of it but the others are right in arguing that neither the technique nor the beef shines when you bag up and bathe a rib eye. You'll achieve a superior result with very delicate products (eggs, salmon fillets) or products easily taken to the point of being too tough (octopus, beef short ribs).

I'm preparing a dish from Daniel Humm's cookbook. One minor component of this dish is a compressed peach. Thin 'half moons' of peach are vac sealed with Sauternes. I don't have a chamber sealer. My usual approach with a liquid or fat is to freeze it and add it in solid form to the vac bag. Obviously that's not going to happen in this case. What are my options? I understand I will not attain a result as good as what Humm does but I am prepared to accept this. I accept that there will a textural difference. Would marinating the slices of peach in a tub with the wine be 'close enough'? Using the displacement method and a zip lock bag? Could I attain a better result with a more left-of-field approach--injection 'brining'? What about burning off (as in, with a match) enough alcohol so I could freeze the wine and marinate it in a bag using my strip sealer? If I manage to get it in a bag would applying weight to the bag in any way replicate what vacuum compression does to a piece of fruit?

I'm looking for 'sides' to serve with the pudding. Usually I serve it with rum and raisin ice cream and vanilla creme anglaise. I'd like to do something different this year. Leaning towards a PX granita and burnt orange syrup with some kind of crumble for texture. Any other ideas?

Or make an apple cider/apple vider vin reduction to serve with the chops.

I wonder if I'm better off making some kind of honey 'glass' using spray-dried honey? Or, you know, just cooking conventionally ... which I'd hoped to avoid.

I want to prepare a modified version of 'Duck: Lavender-glazed w/ fennel and peaches' from Eleven Madison Park. Humm roasts breasts on the crown with a lavender honey and a spice rub. Would this modification work? Apply spy rub lightly to duck breast.Vac seal. Cook using my normal method, applying the honey before searing.Or ... Follow the above method.Remove from bag. Apply honey and spice rub.Sear.

A friend gave this recipe to me a few years ago. It's from the RACV Club.

You might've left it a bit late. I left it a bit later than I usually do. I can upload my recipe when I get home but, basically, the fruit is marinated in a combination of stout and brandy. You could use whisky or rum instead of brandy. I let it marinate for a few weeks (any longer and the tub would occupy too much room in one of my fridges for too long). I use just enough dough to hold the boozed-up fruit together. The dough has suet in it. Albeit, the 'instant' suet stuff you can buy at a supermarket. Only recently did a local butcher start selling kidneys covered in fat. I might use the real deal next year. Once the puddings have been steamed I store them in a large plastic tub, separated by greaseproof paper. Every couple of weeks I brush them with with a little brandy.

El Companero. Made in a somewhat half-arsed way when I realised, just as I started mixing, I'd run out of both fresh coriander and Tabasco's chipotle variant. Enter the regular stuff plus smoked salt to stand in for it. Not the same, not at all, but it'll do. A really nice drink.

The dish is temperamental. When I went there the chocolate sauce was too cool to cause the top layer of the cake to melt properly. It's still a very good chocolate cake. I mean, they say 'chocolate cake' on the menu and they're not messing around. The cake does what it says on the tin and then some.

I stumbled upon an interesting bottle-o in Kyneton. Local wines. A few interesting beers.

The trusted method for heating sake is in a water bath. Fill a sink or container with warm water. Park your container of sake in said sink or container. Walk away for a while. Here's another unfiltered sake: Hakutsuru's Sayuri junmai nigori. Appetising off-milk hue. Sweet. Clean rice booze finish despite the slightly gritty texture. Maybe unfiltered sake just isn't my thing but this is unremarkable. Not wonderful. Not bad. Not particularly interesting.

I made a small quantity but the base recipe falls for the ribs and seeds of four jalapenos, plus the chopped flesh of one jalapeno, to be infused in a bottle of silver tequila for about twenty minutes. You need to taste every so often to ensure the heat isn't overpowering.

I think it's just a marketing thing. An air of the regal or ... whatever. And different types of brandy? Shit, man, brandy is about a broad a term as any--encompassing everything from Pisco to those mysterious bottles at your local bottleshop that hail from Eastern Europe to sweet Pedro Jiménez-based products. It's a bit like asking for a list of the kinds of noodle. Are you interested in a specific kind of brandy? My point is: you're going to have to be a bit more specific about what you want, even though I suspect you don't want to be, to get good information. Asking about the child category that is 'filled noodles, Italian-style' as opposed to the mother category of 'noodles' will probably yield a better outcome.