Mjx

I'm partial to dried thyme, rosemary, marjoram, sage, and savoury, which seem to withstand drying very nicely (on the other hand, I find dried oregano appalling, and I don't care for dried basil, either; I always detect a weird chewing gum note). Quality can vary significantly from brand to brand, which makes 'worth using' as much to do with the source (and personal preferences) as the herbs themselves. By the way, if watering your plants is the main obstacle to growing fresh herbs, do you have any way of rigging some sort of self-watering unit? They're very simple constructions, and work well.

A sort-of complaint would be servers who decide to confide in me while I'm eating. I'm talking about complete strangers, here. It's happened several times, usually when the restaurant was very quiet. And while I'm always glad to hear all about your private life/personal philosophy/that your disease yielded to treatment/turned out not to be an STD, maybe at least wait until bringing the coffee to unburden yourself? Some of these revelations do not really enhance the experience of eating actual food. Over coffee, I'm cool with hearing all about your happily resolved impetigo.

You're essentially asking a group of people interested in food to do a financial exercise. The things is, we get the point about the alleged savings, but 'cheap' is not enough, if it compromises quality (something very quickly noticeable in eggs); how has the quality of your product been assessed by your target market? Without having any idea of what your specific product is (other than cheap), how it differs from what's currently out there, and what it is about the product that might make it cheaper than what is already available (manufacturing process/location? ingredient grade? other?), there's no way of telling whether or not your product would be of any interest to your target market. Pasteurized yolks, whites, and whole eggs (both conventional and organic) are readily available in many countries at acceptable to highly competitive prices, even in the very expensive country where I currently happen to be.

My recollection of hot dog ingredients is that they include emulsifiers, to keep the mixture in emulsion when they're heated; you might need more/a different emulsifier.

Thank you, I'm looking forward to trying this! By the way, is there a particular base recipe you use?

Regardless of what you do with your pumpkins (in fact, any winter squash), I recommend splitting (or breaking down into smaller pieces, depending on how big they are), removing the seeds, rubbing the cut surfaces with a fat that works well with your plans, and roasting at 200 C/400 F until it's tender when you poke at it gently with a vegetable knife (I usually go for half an hour, but I'm usually using small hokaidos; if you need a longer time, you might need to cover the top surface with foil after half an hour, if you don't want it to char). A lot of the time I then just run the pumpkin (or whatever winter squash I'm using) through a food mill, and use it like mashed potatoes (as a side, or in things like shepard's pie). It's also great cut into chunks in stews (I love this with lamb and beans), or pureed with stock as a soup base (e.g. pumpkin chestnut is pretty amazing). I also use the puree with meat and other ingredients, as filling for things like empanadas.

What happens if no oil is used, if the canister is kept warm (not questioning the use of oil, but curious about this)? Also, couldn't CO2 be used instead of N2O?

I find creamy, milky substances in savoury contexts retch-inducing. This takes the following off the table: creamy sauces, cream soups, most cheeses; I'm put off by things that even look creamy or have a creamy mouthfeel (e.g. sauces with a lot of nut butter). I find any form of dairy/dairy simulacrum in coffee quite repulsive (ditto, Irish cream and their ilk), and although I'm mostly fine with dairy/dairy-like components in sweets, if I was told that dairy would never pass my lips again, it would not break my heart. I find the texture of cooked eggs off-putting, although I can swallow a raw one with no problem (although what with salmonella and all, I seldom do this). Even the smell of bananas will make me leave a room to avoid messy unpleasantness, although as a child I could eat them if they were green and essentially flavourless. Weirdly, although I could once eat nearly raw steak with no problem, it often puts me off now. No idea why. In case anyone is wondering how I navigate the cream soups, cream sauces, and compound butters that show up on friends' tables when I'm invited over to dinner, I have to admit that I do my best to discreetly determine whether one of the problem items is going to be present; if it is, or I'm not sure, this virtually guarantees that I'll be sitting down to dinner a bit buzzed, since in that state, my food issues recede from gag-inducing to merely 'somewhat unpleasant, but manageable'. At restaurants, I just ask a bit about what's in the various dishes, and choose something that poses no problems. None of this is my parents' fault, by the way; they did their best, but even threats of violence couldn't tame my gag reflexes, and they eventually became tired of my being sick at table, and gave up

@Tri2Cook Back in 2008 you described a delicious-sounding aerated chocolate you made. I realize you're not likely to remember what you did four years back, but on the off-chance that you've made aerated chocolate (using a cream whipper) since, would you mind elaborating a bit on the process? You mention using two kinds of chocolate, but did you add any cream/other fat? At what temperature did you hold the whipper? Aerated chocolate is something I want to attempt with the whipper I recently got my hands on, but I have images of the chocolate quickly turning into a solid mass and having to be melted/scraped out in a lengthy and frustrating process. Thanks! M.

You were perfectly clear As I said, as long as the fact that it will be liquid at temperatures that the traditional version would be solid is not an issue, it seems worth trying, although the grapeseed oil, which is light and has an unobtrusive flavour, probably won't bring much to the mix (olive or walnut oil might be interesting); I'm interested in hearing about the results.

Hm. That range seems too high (based on what pastrygirl, who's a pro, said in another topic). If there aren't any decent kitchen supply shops in your area, what about lab supply shops?

When I can't spend a lot of time of meals, a stir fry is my first choice, and I try to keep roughly two days worth of prepped meat and vegetables handy. Another alternative, when I know a hectic period is looming, is to to make a good sized braise or stew, both of which reheat very well, and don't involve any real work to get on the table. I try to make sure that I've got some easily prepped vegetables (bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, carrots) around, too since eating no fresh produce does not work out well for me. Still, if things land on me all at once with no warning, and no end in site, breakfast/lunch is usually frozen peas/maize (meaning, I don't even bother thawing), tinned beans, possibly some bresola actually earmarked for my boyfriend's lunch, and insane quantities of Wasa and sweets. My boyfriend then comes home, expresses amusement/mild horror at all the empty sweets packets, and makes dinner. I'm lucky.

Where are you located (i.e. nearest city or town), and what's your budget? Given the temperature range involved, a basal thermometer should do the trick, and according to eG member Robert Jueneman, they're reasonably priced and accurate, and they seem to be widely available (e.g Eckerd, Rite Aid, Target).

Clarified butter solidifies, whereas grapeseed oil doesn't; if this isn't an issue, then using grapeseed oil should be an interesting experiment, if nothing else (although unless you have problems with your cholesterol level/some related health condition, butter is not unhealthy, and has the same number of calories/gram as any oil).

I'm not surprised the chef in question initially balked at answering this question, since the two concepts can exist completely independently of one another, really have nothing to do with each other. 'Organic' addresses the level of ingredients, while 'Modernist' refers to techniques and approaches. You can cook organic (and locally sourced, humanely-raised and slaughtered, etc.) beef sous vide (and maybe cut into strips, braided together with some strips of chicken, the whole held together with transglutaminase), and you can also use this technique to cook beef from animals raised under confined conditions, laced with every conceivable chemical used to optimize mass-produced beef: the technique is still regarded as modernist. You could argue that there are underlying philosophies to these concepts that have a broader effect of how a cook or chef chooses ingredients/techniques, but there's still no implicit conflict (or accord).

I've had some extrmely good soft cookies that were made with pumpkin swapped in for apple sauce; would something like that work? You could just skip the sugar in the actual recipe. But even if nothing springs to mind immediately, don't bin it, freeze it!

I've had some extremely good soft cookies that were made with pumpkin swapped in for apple sauce; would something like that work? You could just skip the sugar in the actual recipe. But even if nothing springs to mind immediately, don't bin it, freeze it!

For a really intense flavour, I'd be inclined to go with a fruit powder. There seem to be a quite a few brands of these around (e.g. nutrifuit, powderpure), and powders might also be easier to manage, since they wouldn't be bringing water to the mix to make the cream more liquid.

This is sort of...troubling; I misread 'On the other hand, why would the NYT review what is clearly a tourist trap aimed at patrons who are looking for a hillbilly Applebees with a raging meth habit?' as 'On the other hand, why wouldn't the NYT review what is clearly a tourist trap aimed at patrons who are looking for a hillbilly Applebees with a raging meth habit?', and I found myself thinking that made perfect sense. My perception of the patrons of NYC tourist traps seems to have hit bottom and begun blasting operations to get a bit lower. Mitch, sorry I was unable to help you enrich your medical posse while i was in NYC

Thank you for the extremely comprehensive explanation! I've copied this into my ongoing kitchen notes, since there's a fairish chance that a sous vide setup is in my (admittedly somewhat distant) future. I'm hoping the Thermapen I'm waiting on will do the trick for now (at well over 100 C, the issue of bacterial growth is less of a concern, even if it turns out to not have quite the accuracy I seek), and it has simply got to be a a step up from the cold water test. Thanks; were did you get your scale? I haven't stumbled over anything in NYC these days, although I haven't done what could be described as a proper hunt for this yet, either.

Some foods are actually more poorly digested when they're cooked.

I use it pretty much any time that I might use an anchovy (e.g. beef stews, a lot of braises, to ad a bit of kick to stock). I don't make that many Asian dishes (maybe one a week), but I seem to have got through half a bottle of fish sauce pretty quickly.

Do you mean the What are you reading? topic?

Yes, but you have to calibrate near your intended usage temperature(s) as temperature deviations are usually not (or at least: don't need to be) linear. Calibrating at 37 °C is pretty useless for accuracy at 120 °C. I was wondering about that (part fo the reason I asked).

Heck, to see your review of it, I'll happily stand you a couple of drinks (or a fifth of Jack?) first, to get you suitably primed for the experience!