jrshaul

I've never done pasta y fagioli. Anyone have a preferred recipe? Also, any sort of gourd-and-peanut stew would be excellent. I've had some at restaurants that are extremely palatable, but the homemade recipes I've found are universally awful. The banh mi are a good idea. It's usually more trouble than it's worth to assemble all the ingredients, but for 26, it's no trouble.

I get my bags on ebay...haven't had problems. Seller?

Can anyone recommend a cheap vendor of vacuum bags? I've heard some of the cheaper bags won't seal properly when used with a low-rent device like my Foodsaver. Also, has anyone experimented with low-priced circulators? I've seen some small pumps on eBay that aren't particularly expensive, but I'm not sure how well they'd hold up for 48 hours of use.

Holy smokes! Cooking at the ICH is generally pretty casual - people make a big casserole or some pasta, maybe a salad, and put it out on a table. I'd definitely be up for suggestions, though. (And maybe those spreadsheets?) Cooking for this particular venue are somewhat complicated. I'm required to have a vegetarian option (I can stir-fry tofu at lightspeed in the event I can't do a meatless version) and the budget is tiny: I'm limited to $13 plus the contents of the pantry, which are highly variable. There's a pretty wide spice rack, though nothing fancy. Anything other than pulled pork or chicken is almost an impossibility outside perhaps of a soup; fish is pretty much out of my price bracket. Also, there's not much equipment. I have a stove, a blender, and for some inexplicable reason, no mixer. There's a tiny French girl making bread every week; I'm really glad I'm not her. One option I've been looking at is a nice cheese sauce. I can get 2lbs of Trader Joe's parmesan and some heavy cream for $13. Pasta always goes over well, and it's certainly vegan. Is there anything I should know before making one on this scale? In this case, I happen to be in luck. Most of the residents will eat almost anything, and the remainder will politely make themselves peanut butter sandwiches. Compared to the "Mysterious Mystery Meatless" some of the less skilled cooks make, I can't go wrong. I've never done this before, but I'm definitely going to try it. Any other suggestions?

I don't have much experience with Indian food, but that's a pretty good idea - I also have to provide something vegetarian/vegan every nice, and gluten-free is a major bonus. Any specific recommendations? On a related note, suggestions for novel chili recipes would be good. I'll probably be making a lot of chili, and it's an easy thing to get sick of. Madison, WI. The local grocery stores want $2.50/lb for pork shoulder, and beef chuck is as much as $4.50 - and that's not even organic! I'll see if I can bum a pass into Costco; $1/lb is much more reasonable. For some reason, chicken thighs at $0.88 to $1.30 are available perpetually at at least one local grocery store. Sometimes it's the whole leg-and-thigh section.

This has officially crossed the surreality event-horizon into the realm where only the incurably mad dare to realm. Needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely.

I've recently joined a local student food cooperative where, in return for having meals provided for me ~20 days a month, I must prepare food for a whopping 26 people. I have no restaurant kitchen experience, and have never cooked for this many before; most of the recipes I know, while perfectly suitable for one, aren't so efficient when cooking for a crowd. I also have an extremely limited budget - all meat, fish, and poultry save for ground pork or chicken thighs is out of my price range - and some thoroughly rubbish equipment. Can anyone suggest some recipes that scale well? I'm thinking of tempura vegetables and tofu and some sort of pasta sauce, but beyond that, I'm stumped.

It's like someone found a way to pipe Whole Foods directly into my brainstem. The recipes are good, but the Whoopie Pie of the Month is pretty much the antithesis of everything I believe about food. The possibility of "vendor lock-in" also gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. When Apple designed the computers to seamlessly connect to iPods to encourage sales, they treated all all other music device as a sort of electronic cinderblock. Designing a recipe specific to a vendors' product isn't difficult, but it is awfully worthless to those who can't afford it.

I'm sad to hear that. I've had some trouble finding good depictions of cooking, and these videos have been very useful.

My bad - I can never keep the voltages straight. That said, the same advice applies to going from 100v to 220v - without a big transformer, some very strange things happen.

I sometimes help cook for an international students' cooperative house. A very adventurous bunch of eaters - they'll try anything once. Of course, I live in Wisconsin, so I erstwhile make a lot of box brownies.

Interesting. Is coconut oil an emulsifier?

Apparently the comments on lignin were bupkis, but the issue remains - not all connective tissue breaks down at cooking temperatures. I've been warned this can be especially tricky with briskets. What do I look for?

And you know this exactly how? I used to work tech support.

Philadelphia Cream Cheese is now advertising heavily how their products can be used to thicken sauces. Instead of, y'know, a roux. And people wonder why we're fat? Most people under the age of 40 have a very low failure tolerance, and not unreasonably so. Most food worth the labor is very cost intensive, and blowing $10 on a new recipe with a tricky cooking technique has a much higher risk/reward ratio than buying some burgers. I'm not what I'd call a talented chef, and it took me a several tries and a lot of burned pans to make Bananas Foster properly. Of course, I can now knock off $50 in restaurant-grade dessert for eight people in about ten minutes using maybe $10 in ingredients. Such is the pay-off for cleaning all those pans. But most people can't be bothered. My grandmother has been cooking for over seventy years. She's still awful. Of my remaining 90+ relatives, the food made by the remainder generally favored complexity over technique and cost too much money.

I'm not sure if this device has a 110v setting, but if not, you'll have very poor results on American voltage. Japan runs on roughly double the voltage of what I have in my home, resulting in roughly 1/4 the output power. The good news is that step-up/step down transformers are very inexpensive - you can find one on eBay for $15, and I have one that can power an entire house in a storage bin. These should not be confused with cheaper switching adapters that boost voltage with sometimes curious results: a real step-up transformer will have a huge chunk of iron in it somewhere and will be very, very heavy. Industrial applications use the right sort almost exclusively, and with a useful lifespan measured in centuries, they often outlast the equipment to which they were attached.

IIRC, cholesterol is actually a steroid, and forms a white crystalline powder if you isolate it. It's essentially a minor by-product of eating tasty, tasty animal fat, and isn't found much in vegetables or fungi. Coconut oil has effectively no cholesterol. It's heavily saturated like an animal fat, though, so it can be used the same way. However, it's not a fully hydrogenated fat like Crisco - it's basically cholesterol-free bacon grease. It also makes chocolate ganache kinda rubbery. I can't answer as for why.

I'm a little nervous about the safety issue myself. I'll probably cook from 55+ from now on. On a related note, I've been informed that part of the problem is that lignin - unlike collagen - doesn't dissolve when you cook it. I'm not very good at telling the difference, though. How do I find an SV-appropriate piece of meat?

For those who are handy, it's possible to buy a water heater pump, PID controller, and SSR for less than that. Of course, the size issue is significant.

Thanks for the info - the loss is only about $3 all up, and 55C for 24h+ should give a very nice result. The flavor was much, much better than any previous use of chuck. Can anyone else recommend some other economical meat options four sous vide?

I just cooked a slice of chuck for ~12 hours at 53C. It came out kind of stringy - to be honest, very chuck-like. The flavor was very good, though. According to meat smoking websites, higher temperatures (~170F) are required to dissolve the collagen into gelatin. I see people cooking short ribs much lower than that, though. What sort of temperature should I be looking for?

I hate vegans because they're so incredibly sanctimonius. Anyone who kvetches about my chicken thighs gets a lecture on Ivory Coast chocolate slavery, banana republics, and the workings conditions required to make organic food profitable. After you find out where your Hersheys bar and tomatoes come from, snapping the neck of a chicken doesn't really sound so bad.

The difference between haricuts and cars or food or beer is that haircuts are arbitrary, and the remainder are objectively different. The preference between two haircuts and the amount of detail required has varied significantly by decade, as has the significance of a particular haircut. What was once an unkempt, wild hairdo is now considered dull and orderly. Beyond keeping hair out of your eyes and soup, there's no real functional difference between the two. In contrast, an automobile is easily judged objectively. Fit and finish, while somewhat subjective, have definite metrics; safety, performance, and longevity can be determined with a ruler. In almost every way, a Honda Civic is better than the old Volkswagen Beetle. There's definitely a large amount of personal preference in food, but there's also an equally large amount of objective quality. Fresh ingredients are easily distinguished from their preserved counterparts, and a $13 bowl of ravioli at Olive Garden is inferior in many ways to the $13 bowl of ravioli at a proper local restaurant. Even someone with no prior concept of tomatoes or cheese or Italy will go for the one without the food gum. Am I a snob? Probably. Some people really can't be bothered about the difference between Olive Garden and the real deal, and that's a question of personal preference, much as wear ugly shoes because I can't be bothered to spend the time and money on non-ugly footwear. The overarching question, then, is why food is now less important than shoes.

Can anyone else suggest cheap SV-appropriate cuts of meat? I'm getting tired of chicken. I'd also be interested in some SV-able sauces. A question: Has anyone had weird results from including alcohol in the bag?

I bought mine secondhand; the gasket is missing entirely. I've managed to fashion one from foam and duct tape, and it seems to be working so far. I'm debating just buying a better vacuum sealer, as this one doesn't produce a very impressive vacuum.