paulpegg

I like the Chilaquiles with spinach, zucchini and cheese. This is sort of a Mexican lasagna with a nice tang. I agree the Pork Loin with White Beans and Bacon is another good one.

I can only add an observation: Last week I did 20 pounds of well trimmed beef tenderloin (24 hours @ 55C) and saved a bit over 2 quarts of juices. They did not gel in the refrigerator. Two weeks earlier I did 10 pounds of well trimmed picnic pork (24 hours @68.3C) that produced a bit under a quart of juices that gelled very nicely overnight in the refrigerator. Both produced great tasting stocks.

I save the juices, make a roux with some duck fat (or any other fat you have on hand) and Wondra and then whisk the juices in to make a sauce. it works great and has tremendous flavor. Try this with the juices you get from short ribs done in the momofuku recipe and you will be convinced that this is a good way to use these juices. Last week I did Beef Wellington for 50 people and saved the juices. last night I made a sauce as I described above but the protein coagulated and made it very "lumpy". A quick spin in the blender made it into a powerful beefy gravy.

I assume you are talking about Woodbridge, New Jersey. A few miles south on US 1 in Edison is The Skylark Diner.. This is not your grandfather's diner. The menu was designed by Craig Shelton who was NJ's premier chef a while back. Read about this here. They have a very nice and inexpensive wine list and a great bar. you can get standard diner fare also but the Shelton menu is tops for low $. it is probably no more than 5 miles from downtown Woodbridge and well worth the trip. (I have no connection to this restaurant or anyone associated with it.)

No, we walked from the railroad station all the way through the city and then took a rickshaw back to the main shopping district. We were really beat by the time we got back to Shanghai.

Wow! I joined eGullet just after my wife and I took a tour of China. We left the tour in Shanghai and traveled to Shuzou on our own to see the "Venice" of China. I have posted some pictures of our one day visit that some of you might enjoy. My China Gallery Day 12 was in Shuzou. I wish I had been a member earlier, we might have been able to meet and get a different perspective altogether. We did enjoy our day and loved the Master of the Nets Garden. Your blog and photos bring back the sights and smells of Shuzou very nicely. Please let me know if I made any mistakes in my descriptions of the pictures.

Thanks, that is what I thought would be the benefit. The convection oven will cook the pastry pretty quickly and we would not have to worry about the meat.

My club is planning to prepare Beef Wellington for our Valentines Event. I have researched many recipes and wonder if it makes sense to sous vide the beef ahead of time, perhaps to 43.3C (110F) for a few hours prior to searing and coating with the puff pastry etc. We will purchase Prime Beef Filet from Restaurant Depot. We will be preparing this for 40 people and have a good commercial convection oven to finish the dish. Any thoughts?

Four of us dined at SHO last night and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. A Saturday night in the winter in the Wall Street area is desolate! We parked on the street a block away and found the restaurant almost empty. I assume that it is very busy on weekdays. The three course dinner is a fantastic bargain at $75 and the choices were all wonderful. They start you off with a few amuses bouches and sprinkle little tastes in between the courses as well. The tasting menu at $125 should be a great experience if everyone at the table is ready for it. Wine pairings are another $70 and make sense with so many tastes over the course of the meal. Not all of us felt up to it so we stuck with the three course menu. I had spent a number of hours looking at their wine list and checking them out on the web, so I was prepared to make the selections we had with dinner before we arrived. The sommelier seemed to appreciate that I had done this and helped solidify my thoughts. The wines we had were excellent and within our "budget" of under $150 each. There are plenty of good selections under $100 which is quite nice in a restaurant of this caliber. I make a habit of asking for a tour of the kitchen, particularly if the kitchen is not busy. Chef Shaun graciously gave all of us a comprehensive tour of his facility which is clearly his pride and joy. Two of us are members of Les Marmitons New Jersey Chapter and have recently embraced sous vide cooking at home and at our monthly events. Chef Shaun showed us the hoops that the NYC Dept of Health requires for all restaurant sous vide preparations in the city. it is a formidable task and requires a strict and disciplined approach to food safety and record keeping. I applaud Chef Shaun for his high level of expertise and the great food he and his team produce every day. The regular lunch is $35 and the menu looks equally enticing. They are participating in Restaurant Week later this month and I highly recommend it if you are looking for a bargain in one of NY's top restaurants. Bon Appetit.

Nick, I am new to Eg and am stunned at your fish market tour. I have never seen such a wide selection of great looking product. Here in central New Jersey we have plenty of Atlantic fish but I never seen a Bay Bug before. What are they? I mostly cook fish that I catch myself. I fish in New York's East River and lower Hudson River for striped bass as they travel through to New England in the Spring and back down to the Chesapeake Bay in the Fall. here is a recent shot of one. We only keep what we eat and release the big females.

Take a look at my version of this approach. I didn't care for having all the electronics in a plexiglas box directly over the water bath and wanted to be able to plug in different size heaters and multiple circulators. I spent a few bucks more since the heater is larger and I bought the PID from Canada with relatively high shipping costs. There is also no soldering to be done in my approach. I can have the control box on a counter and the water bath on the floor or in a large sink. I usually put the stock pot in a large sink in the basement and the cooler on the floor. This doesn't need to be in the kitchen at all.

No, I filled it two days ago and it holds 55 liters. The 1000 Watt heater kicks it up about 1C every two minutes. I just did a 48 hr Momofuku Short Ribs preparation and they came out FANTASTIC! I used your method of sealing wet stuff in a Foodsaver, double sealed the bags and then double bagged them. There was a little air in the interior bags so I weighed the outside bags down with some glass beads (I am a stained glass artist from 30 years ago). 48 hrs at 60C and they came out perfect. The bags did not float and the outer bags did not leak, nor did the inner bags. My guests just left muttering that they have to learn about sous vide! Thanks for all that you do. Paul

Pedro, Thank you for the link to the guide for tuning a PID. It is the first time I have seen such a lucid and comprehensive article on this subject. My big cooler has been working just fine but now I will fine tune it according to the article.

Sorry Pedro, my off the cuff comments were not based upon a rigorous test of the setup. I built it in November and have no idea what the starting temperature was or how full the containers were and did not record the times for a scientific analysis. I immediately came to the conclusion that it would be easier on the heater and circulator to start with hot water and use the system to top off the temperature, which I have done every time since. Thank you for your table. It is certainly instructive and will be indispensable if hot tap water is not available.

You would have to put the wet mix in a very large bag to allow room for the carbon dioxide that the yeast releases in the fermentation process. The rise generally doubles but the volume of gas released is larger still. The fermented mix would stick to the inside of the bag and be pretty messy. You would probably need several pounds of weight to hold this thing down and you still need up to 24 hours for the fermentation to finish. I think it would be better to let nature take it's course in a covered bowl.

My 1000W bucket heater does heat up my stock pot in about 10 minutes and my 20 gallon cooler in 30 minutes. I find it a lot faster to fill them with hot tap water and then let the heater finish the job. My hot tap water is 50C so I can get going right away. you can see my setup on page 137 of the new index or go to my sous vide cooker. I used a 20 amp SSR which will handle two of these heaters and could probably keep a bathtub at the set point if I wanted to do something that big!! The PID pulses the heater as it reaches the SP and I have seen no overrun at all in either container. Once it reaches the SP the pulses drop off to one or two every few minutes.

here is another good reason to post a sign at the door. I suffer from the aftereffects of treatment for prostate cancer. I can be cheerfully walking down the street and all of a sudden I absolutely have to go NOW! In France I would run into any bistro or bar where they are required to allow the public to use the loo, no questions asked. At least your sign on the door forewarns me that I had better find someplace else because I don't have time to explain myself and certainly don't have time to have you say no. I usually come back out and buy something to show my appreciation, so the next time you see a man coming in doing a dance please point him to you facility, he may just be in dire need!

Pedro, Thanks for your comments and links. I did cut a notch in the cover of the cooler. It is just big enough to allow the wooden blocks that hold the heater to grab the edge of the cooler. I have not yet used it for a long cooking time but immediately saw that the uncovered surface was evaporating a lot of water. I am going to do 48 hour short ribs this weekend and will be monitoring the water loss closely. The stock pot certainly is radiating a lot of heat but I have found that the temperature does not change at all. Initially I was using the PID as it came from the supplier and the temperature would overrun by a few degrees. After I set it up using the parameters I included in my article it is rock solid. The 1000 Watt heater has plenty of power to maintain the temperature and the controller does a great job of keeping it on the set point. I am using a Thermopen thermometer to check the accuracy and everything is spot on. I am really happy with the performance of this setup.

I am using a 1000 Watt bucket heater with great success. I built my first sous vide cooker using this heater in a larger cooler. You can read an article I wrote about it at Les Marmitonsnj Links page. The article is the second one in the list. This setup is based on the Seattle FoodGeek but has no soldering and allows more flexibility. You can have two pumps and two heaters for really large containers or just move the heater, pump and thermocouple to any convenient vessel you want to heat. You can also use smaller heaters for smaller vessels as well. Good luck, Paul