ChrisTaylor

The chicken looks very good. You've inspired me to try sous vide thighs tomorrow: I don't recall ever getting around to them.

I made The Professional last night. It's nice enough but I couldn't shake the feeling it needed something else. I intentionally used a sweeter bourbon, Elmber T Lee, to offset the funk of the rum. Incidentally, I remember trying some coffee liqueur-laced Negroni variation a while ago. Might be the same one being discussed. But yeah, I don't think the flavour combination worked at all. I'm sure some amari would pair nicely with coffee liqueur (I mean, I have a bottle of Illy I don't get much use out of) but Campari? No. I mean, you'd think 'bitter + coffee' would work but it's almost like shiraz and milk chocolate. Too many bullies in the playground.

From memory, the only places I've been to--expensive or inexpensive seems to have little to do with it, altho' it seems more common at the lower end of the price scale--that piss fart around with bringing you the bill after you've asked for it also took a long time to bring out menus, drinks, food, et al. If it takes ~10 minutes to go from 'bill, please' to being handed the bill then there are probably a few grains of sand in the gears (with the exception of when it's obviously really busy).

I suspect that if you sous vide it too long it'd be all grainy and horrible. Still, yeah. Throw 'Mark Best' and 'rabbit' into Google. The rabbit dish I've had at Marque--the recipe is in the book so I guess it must be online somewhere (if not, there's a 'home cook' version floating around)--was excellent.

Hi weinoo, i'm not sure if it would make much sense to you but I use a Bannockburn free range chicken. Over here, "free range" is not a controlled or regulated term in the same way that the French have an appellation or the Italians have a DOP rating. A French Bresse chicken specifies the farming density (i.e. how many chickens are allowed per square km of land) and mandates that the chickens are fed naturally - i.e. they eat worms, insects, and whatever they can forage. An Australian "free range" chicken can be anything from a real free ranging chicken (like the Bresse chickens), to a chicken that spends most of the day and night in barns and given an hour of fresh air every day.There are some terms that do irk me - "free range" is one of them, and so does "organic" and "chemical free". None of these terms are clearly defined under Australian law, so they are essentially meaningless. But that is a separate discussion. To add to what Keith is saying and go off on a few tangents of my own: I remember a while ago The Age got a bunch of chefs together and road tested a variety of commercially avaliable chickens, ranging from $8 supermaket 'free rangers' (i.e. Lilydale and Macro) to what, I think, remains the most expensive (Saskia Beer's organic chickens). It was done as a blind tasting: people weren't influenced by a sense of, shit, this bird costs 3 times as much as some of the others but isn't 3 times tastier. They also tested a number of chickens priced between those two extremes: Bannockburn, Game Farm, et al. They covered most of the chickens I've seen for sale, anyway. I usually buy Game Farm or Bannockburn but I've also bought Macro fairly often. It's easy to find. For the sake of foreigners, these chickens are more expensive than your battery farmed ones but not overly so. Macro, for instance, is a supermarket brand but is a couple of steps up from the entry-level bird and is maybe $2/kilo more. Game Farm is slightly more expensive than Macro, from memory. You can pay a lot more. The point was, I think the 'best' bird got no more than a 70% approval rating from The Age's panel.This was the very best of them. Saskia Beer's $30 chicken wasn't that highly regarded but, then again, the worst bird got a rating of 50something%. A fair spread in prices but not in rankings (and, iirc, one of the supermarket free rangers was among the most highly regarded). I guess there's some small supplier, somewhere in Australia turning out really nice chickens but I think that we are limited. You can get amazing beef if you're prepared to pay for it (shit, if you go to Sarde's in Queen Vic you're paying only a little more for Cape Grim than you would for a regular steak somewhere else). You can get very good lamb. With chicken, tho', you can buy 'okay' birds but there doesn't seem to be anything that's truly amazing. The article sat nicely with my own experience. I've tried, over the years, most of the brands readily avaliable through supermarkets, poultry stores and so on. From barn-raised to the most expensive organic chickens. And, you know what? There isn't a huge difference. The ones in the $10-15 price range (I buy small birds and I'm guessing, Keith, you'd do the same) are either superior to the $30 chickens or aren't so inferior as to make a $15-20 price bump seem reasonable. For comparison, the 'road runner' I had in Zimbabwe, which was cooked very simply--no brining or careful monitoring of the cooking or internal temperatures here--was vastly superior to any chicken I've ever had in Australia. I could only imagine what it would be like if you bagged the breasts and cooked them at 60C or treated the whole bird to one of the popular roasting methods used around these parts (Blumenthal, Keller or Zuni--take your pick, really). Obviously this quality isn't something you could reach with a mass produced bird, at least not at a reasonable price (altho' given Beer is charging 2-3 x as much as even some very good suppliers of chickens, it might be doable for $30) but I see no reason why a small supplier couldn't achieve similar results. It's being done with most other meats, after all. If you organised a panel of chefs or critics or regular punters to, say, rate a number of beef suppliers based on the tasting of some medium rare steaks--perhaps some cheap and cheerful stuff, some Cape Grim, some David Blackmore, some supermarket Angus (yeah) and a few others--I don't think you'd wind up with the 'best' receiving such a mediocre score as 7/10, even if you'll always get one or two individual reviewers with divergent opinions.

Saute gently w/ lots of butter.

Mayo? Wow. That's really interesting. New to me, even. Why mayo and not just straight oil (canola or otherwise)?

It's delicious. It's also very expensive. When I sampled it first I right away wanted to buy some. Could get it at a couple of plays but it was about $220 per bottle. Nice, yeah, but not $220 worth of nice.

- Stuffing: No. At least not in the cavity. At times I've put things (i.e. flavoured butter) under the skin but not recently. - Trussing: No. - Cooking position: Breast side up on a tray. - Cooking time: High and fast. - Heat source: Electric. Yet to get around to trying a combo of smoker and electric. - Seasoning: Zuni has sold me on dry brining. No other seasoning. Well, I might add pepper sometimes but never anything like paprika, cayenne or etc.

Tire fire Lagavulin. I like that. I've always thought of Laphroaig as a burning hospital. But yes. Monkey Shoulder is accessible. It's, no, not compelling if you've developed a taste for Islay or some of the meatier Speysides but I'd say it's a better introduction than most other cheap blends that I've sampled. Three malts from one region. The most accessible of scotch regions, yes, but there's nothing wrong with that: I think it's intended to be a gateway drug. I probably wouldn't buy a bottle myself (I already have too much whisky) but I guess I'd gift it to someone that decided they maybe had a bit of a taste for scotch but couldn't get behind the punch of Talisker or Aberlour.

Buying food on a daily basis on the assumption it'll be fresher isn't always going to work. I mean, maybe--probably, even--the store (supermarket or what have you) isn't supplied every day. Now, maybe that individual store is ... but the warehouse or distributor of <product x> doesn't necessarily receive fresh stock every day. What's in the window on Tuesday might be the same stuff that was in the window on Monday. That said, I usually shop every day after work: not because I want to buy fresh products (although this is my motivation with fish and vegetables such as celery that don't stay crisp in a domestic fridge) but because I usually haven't decided until mid-afternoon what I'd feel like/have the energy to prepare. On weekends I'm more inclined to pick up some short ribs or pork belly on impulse, dump them in the sous vide rig for a couple days and figure out what to do with them come Tuesday or Wednesday.

Nice haul.

I do. And I have. Every time I buy a new gin or new dry vermouth--not all that often--I mix up another. I haven't tried all of the common ratios but I've tried what I guess (based on the martini threads) are the most popular around here. With most other drinks, that's been a good starting point so I don't see why it should be any different with Martinis. Even with high end gins like Junipero and Hendricks I haven't been able to get last the 'this just tastes of alcohol and alcohol and alcohol and juniper and alcohol' sensation. I don't really enjoy straight gin and I don't even use the vodka I have (I have a bottle I bought when I first got into mixing, not knowing any better, and it's still about half full--and mostly that's from making stuff for other people). I'm willing to be converted. I eventually came around on the Pegu Club, after all. If I knew somewhere/someone that was regarded as making a very good martini I would try one.

Last night I made a Final Ward using Wild Turkey for the rare and a very ... funky lemon as the citrus component. Still regard it as superior to the Last Word, even tho' I'm not a fan of Ward 8s.

Thanks for all the info. I'll remember that next time I do some deep-frying. Great tips.The batter was good. I had no problems with the batter at all. It was the calamari itself that was problematic. Another variable is the quality of the squid itself. I don't think it was very good: hence why I didn't just go to the fishmongers in the first place, as I think it's something with a short shelf life.

This morning I woke up early with grand plans to catch squid. I mean, nothing's more eGullet HarcoreTM than truly adopting the paddock pier-to-plate mantra, is there? >_> benthescientist came along too. We had no luck, tho', and on the way home I bought some squid as I really wanted to try making calamari rings. I dusted them with flour and some Japanese seven spice powder. They were dunked into a batter made with flour, corn flour, water and vodka. They were deep fried for ~3 minutes in ~180C sunflower oil. For a first attempt I guess they're okay. I haven't produced rubber bands or anything. The second batch (same recipe) is superior to the first. I'm wondering if this is because--I think, anyway--the oil was a little hotter (i.e. had crept over 180C).

Wow that's a lot of cap! Nice score! Beautiful simplicity. I want to try this, although trying to obtain specific types of canned tomato can be difficult over here.San Marzano tomatoes are readily avaliable in Melbourne. Go to a decent Italian deli (my local one sells them: next time you're over I can pick some up in advance, if you like) or to a store that peddles 'ethnic' groceries--i.e. Oasis Bakery. They've marginally more expensive than regular canned tomatoes but not overly so (ie. I pay about $2.50 a can as opposed to the $1 you'd pay for Coles' home brand tomatoes).

This. Y- and U-shaped peelers are sometimes sold as 'speed peelers' with good reason. Unlike the 'knife-style' peelers they are less inclined to get clogged with apple/potato/whatever skin when peeling a large quantity of items. I'd also vote for one that doesn't swivel. If the blade is on a swivel eventually, I think, it'll break. Born that way, I guess, but I love the order of peeling off very long, wide, neat strips of peel.

The martini. Just ... no.

Horse was made avaliable for human consumption a couple of years ago in Australia. Until this point there were rumours of French expats buying pet mince. See, you could kill and butcher and sell a horse for pet meat. You could not kill and butcher and sell it for steaks and chops and hamburgers and roasting joints. There was a small amount of, er, fanfare when the change landed. A Melbourne restaurant (the now defunct Embrasse) decided to organise a horse tasting menu. Cue death threats and etc. They ditched it. Eventually I tried it at another Carlton restaurant: an off-the-menu special mentioned to us about half way through a degustation. It came in the form of a ragu and I rather liked it, altho' being in a ragu it was flavoured with other ingredients (including chocolate) so it was difficult to know exactly what the unadulterated flavour of Black Beauty was. I called the one butcher, at the time, that was selling the meat for human consumption. He was all the way over in Perth: for Americans, I guess that's like living in Texas and calling a butcher in New York to order some steaks. The postage alone was very expensive and he was charging about $30/kg--the price I was paying for nice, grass fed steaks and salmon fillets and good prawns--just for mince. The steaks were getting up to $100/kg. Demand was high but, then again, this was just one butcher and it was a very short time after the meat had become avaliable. I'm sure lots of people were curious. I haven't heard of anyone else selling horse meat in Australia since the initial run of publicity. I certainly haven't seen it appear in the 'game and etc meat' catalogues at the local poultry/game store.

Revisiting Cooper's Vintage 2012 now that it's been aging for a few months. Subtle difference--altho' it's not like I can taste an unaged and aged specimen side-by-side, is it? I think I prefer the unaged version.

Weeknight beef ribs: sous vide at 58C (no seasoning or etc) for 24 hours then hit with a simple dry rub (salt, pepper, sugar, chipotle, garlic powder) and smoked w/ hickory for 20-30 minutes.

Staying with the Bols Genever theme, I just assembled a Last Word using Genever in place of London Dry. The other flavours manage to beat the too-strong flavour of the Genever into submission. I mean, it's there, yeah, and it contributes nicely to the overall flavour profile of the drink, but it's not pulling a Bailey's any more.

I made the Tammany Hall using Jamie 18 for the Irish component. One of the first Genever-based (well, partly, right?) drinks I've enjoyed. Stil not at all a fan of Genever. The bottle's near empty, tho', thanks to so many people trying it.

Brilliant topic. Octopus is one of my favourite uses of sous vide.