jrshaul

My nibs came from Whole Foods, and are not so good. I'll try the brand you recommend. What temperature was the vodka during infusion?

Has anyone here done chuck steaks? I've heard these are very nice cooked medium (~53C), but I've also heard that ~65C is required to break down the connective tissue.

I recently discovered my "sold as working" Foodsaver Compact II is missing the rubber bit that pushes the bag into the heating element. Foodsaver doesn't list any replacement parts on their websites, and I can't find one on eBay. Does anyone know where I can find one of these?

I'm not so sure. The US has had a strong urban population for over a hundred years, and I've seen variants on "Milk comes from COWS?" jokes dating back to at least WW1. People have been separated from farms for a while now. On the other hand, it's worth considering the implications of industrial transport and storage. The average Wal-Mart tomato is more durable and stays fresh longer than the tomatoes of yesteryear. On the other hand, the year-round tomato comes at a price - it tastes like soggy cardboard. The significance of preserved food has also changed over time. Canned food today is generally considered a second-rate good inferior to fresh or frozen counterparts, but 70 years ago it was the only option for much of the year. There's an old tradition in upstate Wisconsin of drinking home-canned tomato juice during the winter - not because it's particularly tasty, but because it prevents scurvy. If you'd been drinking straight tomato juice for five months of the year, you'd be pretty keen on canned fruit too.

An Italian learning to cook Chinese isn't much different from an American learning to cook Italian. Most of us try and use familiar ingredients to produce familiar results, and then label it as something else. I'm not brilliant with any asian food, but here's a few observations: 1. Cooking techniques really are genuinely different between Asian and American food - despite the "quick-n-easy" interpretations of many cookbook authors, there's really no direct comparison. The best example is high-temperature stir frying, which can be done in a wok at up to 1,000 degrees fahrenheit. Some of your cookware will actually start to delaminate at that temperature. It's hot enough to melt pewter. I can't cook stir-fry particularly well, but I can guarantee that the less you substitute, the better. If the recipe calls for lard and a wok, it won't work with olive oil in a saucepan. Ground meat, in particular, is often processed to a fine paste, and substituting western-style ground beef or pork won't work properly. 2. Getting flavorings entirely correct is borderline impossible, but the general combinations can be mimicked. The best explanation I've heard is that Chinese food frequently features contrast in flavors, while western food features complimentary flavors. Sweet glazes on meat are a good example. Once again, substitution is to be avoided whenever possible. Szechuan food, for example, uses the szechuan peppercorn, and nothing else tastes quite like it. However, if you can get some and the end result is explosively spicy, you're likely on the right track. Sometimes, little things can make a big difference - I probably couldn't identify sushi rice from jasmine rice if you showed them to me dry, but you certainly can't substitute the two. 3. No one ever cooks as well as their mother-in-law. Even if their mother-in-law is a Bisquick fanatic. This is a universal rule of human psychology.

I've been to one or two consumer cooking classes, and wasn't hugely impressed. They tend to focus more on novelty than solid technique, and I didn't feel qualified to reproduce the items demonstrated. You'd be better served with some Alton Brown DVDs. In contrast, the cooking classes at the local tech school are often very, very good. Many of these are geared towards professionals and meet twice a week for a few months, but the cost per class is often lower than some demos and the quality is very good.

I suspect that the death of cooking was, at least in part, a result of the difficulty in preparing food. My grandmother grew up in an era where making a cake required significant manual labor and ingredients that perished in hours, not days. I can now get sixteen different kind of imported cheese at the corner store bodega and until the age of seventeen had never seen anyone make a meringue without an electric mixer. Cooking food today is spectacularly easy. A combination of cheap automation and incredible logistics have turned something that was once intensely tedious into a recreational activity. Take away my microwave and giant fridge and electric blender, and I'd be eating Campbells too. I feel this must be brought up. http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=17002&page=1

What temperature did you use for the meyer lemon?

I tried a cocoa infusion using the method on the Cooking Issues blog. The end result had a very faint cocoa flavor - next time, I'll try grinding it in the food processor to increase surface area. Definitely did something, though. http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/09/29/star-chiefs-%E2%80%93the-cocktail-demo-with-recipes/

Are we really sure that lead was the cause for the recall of these models? click Someone at the shop pulled up a picture of my particular crock pot (it's from the late 70s or early 80s) with a lead warning. I suspect, however, that the majority are probably fine.

The engineer I spoke to said to turn down the derivative ("D") on the PID controller. I tested it with water, and it held a neat 53C. It worked fabulously. Also, my crock pot is pretty cheap - basically, just a small electric stove with a big ceramic pot on it. I might try an insulated beer cooler with an immersion heater. I like the double safety of a crock pot, though - even in the event of a PID or relay failure, the crock pot will just be a crock pot. Worst case scenario, I have to eat some seriously overcooked beef.

I have a very fine nylon mesh bag from a brewers' store that I use for this sort of thing. It cost about $8 - a lot more than a cheesecloth - but I've been able to use it quite a few times. I'm not sure how suitable it is for draining a stock, but it works very nicely for squeezing juice from fruit puree.

I can't find the link he showed me, but here are a few examples: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/recalls04/holmes_slow_cookers.html

After a few months of fumbling, I found someone who could configure my $17 Chinese PID controller and bashed a sous vide setup together. However, while at the shop, a rather spectacularly eagle-eye'd individual noticed that my garage sale crock pot had been recalled for lead contamination....in the 1990s. I had purchased it at an estate sale, and had yet to use it; presumably, the past owner was not so lucky. Can anyone recommend a good crock-pot for use with my PID controller? Something with a big, thick-walled vessel to evenly distribute heat would be good, especially if it had some thermal insulation to keep the electric bill down. A plastic lid would be a bonus, as it would make it very easy to fit a rubber stopper to insert the temperature probe.

I was replying to the comment on fishtank charcoal. I used to keep an aquarium, and can confirm it's not very suitable. Thanks for the link, actually - I may be ordering from there shortly. I hadn't considered boiling the citrus peel, though it is a glaringly obvious solution. I'm not that familiar with bitter orange - is it a question of the flavoring boiling off, or is it a temperature reaction? Canning jars can be used to raise alcohol to 200F without exploding, which should help retain the flavor.

After several months and a lot of cheap-o Chinese parts, I finally finished the world's cheapest - and most janky - sous vide setup. ($40 doesn't buy you much. That said, risk of shock aside, it works pretty well.) In the continued spirit of cheapness, I'd like to use it on some beef chuck and feed a large crowd. According to this guy, three days at low temperature and a few seconds on a wicked hot frying pan makes for quite a steak: http://meandmytorch.com/recipes/72-hour-sous-vide-chuck

I'm pretty sure that some charcoal is more suitable than others for this application, in part due to particle size - I use it for filtering cheap vodka. Also, the bitter orange peel contains an awful lot of pith, which makes for some funny-tasting booze.

From my experiences, Trader Joe's Bacon Ends are just really tiny pieces of bacon - about 1" x 2.5" or so. They're great for carbonara, and should work fine in your oven.

I make a lot of liqueurs, and the local wine 'n hop shop has ceased stocking the activated charcoal required. I also go through huge amounts of ascorbic acid as a preservative. Can anyone suggest a vendor that sells these items cheaply, and might carry uncommon ingredients like bitter orange?

If you had any bits of chocolate that didn't completely melt, they'll plug it up. Other than that, I'm not sure. I made it (and variations of it) a few years ago just to be sure I could and haven't done it since but I didn't use a cream whipper to do it. The mousse whipped up fine. The problem was that the foamed mousse was all in the ISI whip instead of going out the nozzle as originally intended. Very frustrating.

I made some chocolate chantilly cream today, and it all got stuck in the isi whip. Did I shake it too much?

The Cooking Issues guys had success with chocolate nibs. I'm hoping to try it myself.

Thanks for the explanation. Coconut cream (as removed from the top of the can of coconut milk) is at least 70% fat, and you don't need much to get the chocolate to re-emulsify. It's theoretically possible to do the same thing with butter to save a ganache, but I've never been able to pull it off.

When preparing chocolate, the one hard-and-fast rule is to avoid adding water. Even ambient moisture can make pounds of gourmet chocolate permanently sieze, leaving a horrible grainy mess. The only way I know to fix it is to add huge amounts of coconut cream, which makes a sort of rubbery truffle. However, I've seen several recipes for a chocolate "chantilly cream", consisting of chocolate and water, milk, or orange juice which are blended together. In theory, this shouldn't work; in reality, it looks excellent. Is this dependent on the emulsifiers in the chocolate, or is it a manual emulsion via whipping? Also, does anyone know if it works with white chocolate and/or an iSi whip?

I'm not entirely so sure of that. The homebrewing community has started picking up on "nitro", and some canned beer is actually nitrogen-carbonated as well. The pressures required are much lower, of course, but high-pressure vessels aren't that expensive. Nitrogen can, however, impart a flavor to the liquid, much as CO2 can leave behind a "flat soda taste." I'm not sure if it's the cause, but I do know that bubbling nitrogen through water produces nitric acid (slowly!)