jorach

I'm a big fan of air drying things in the fridge.

Pedro: I clean and dry my SVS Demi as soon as I'm done cooking because of the corrosion issue; it develops significant precipitates during the 90 minutes or so it takes me to cook steak. Again; the SVS Demi is a $330 water bath. You should be able to use tap water and not have to worry about it corroding to death if you want to try 72hr short ribs. I'll be fine, I got it cheap and have gotten my money's worth. I'm an engineer and understand the how and the why, I just want to warn others of the drawbacks of the product. If I had to choose between the $330 SVS demi and the $100 more expensive SVS or the $170 more polyscience circulator I think these are important things to share.

I'm almost positive it's a galvanic interaction (n.b. I'm a mechanical engineer). I've tried insulating it, I've tried leaving the stainless rack out so it's only aluminum, but no dice. Agreed with other people saying it might depend on hard water, but I've lived in four different places with this and it's happened at all of them.

I own a Sous Vide Supreme Demi and I think it has an inherent design flaw; The inside of the unit is coated aluminum and it comes with a stainless steel bag rack and an aluminum bottom plate that the manufacturer says is important for conduction. The problem is that the aluminum bottom plate corrodes. Mine is horrible looking and fills the water with floating white particles of some material that's coming out of the rack during the cooking process. Now the inside of the bath is starting to corrode. I exchanged the bottom rack which didn't fix the issue. The manufacturer then replaced the entire unit and that didn't fix the issue. I'd be willing to take some blame for my tap water but it's happened at four separate apartments in two states. I'd avoid the Sous Vide Supreme Demi. I only paid $199 for it on special so I'll use it until it corrodes a hole in itself and dies. The Sous Vide Supreme seems to have an internal steel bath and replaces the aluminum plate with a stainless plate which likely mitigates the issue.

The only places with 100s of locations are going to be Applebee's, Red Lobster, etc; chain restaurants with bars that will serve you green appletinis.

I'm not averse to carrageenan (I keep some in the pantry) but I try to buy cream without it since I don't see the point. At Whole Foods (both in CT where I used to live, and CA where I live now) you can normally find a couple different brands of cream without carrageenan from local dairies.

I've told this story a bunch of times; but I bought a ceramic paring knife from Kyocera that went dull almost immediately despite being cared for properly in my eyes; only used on an end grain wooden block, hand washed, etc. I couldn't sharpen it, and it wasn't worth sending it in and paying $15 to have it sharpened. I stick with steel.

Other bad ideas with fun names? Drink an entire box of wine by yourself in one night: the Tour de Franzia.

I couldn't care less about it being "disrespectful" (I worked in an office printing shipping labels and sticking them on envelopes all day and got told that listening to my iPod was disrespectful), but in a kitchen with knives and hot liquids it seems dangerous to not be able to hear as others have said.

Great. Here I was laughing away at "Fish Face" liquor, "what sort of maniac would drink that?", and now I want some.

Am I the only one who thinks this trend is super annoying? "Nitrite free" except it's just full of celery juice and therefor just as many nitrites as proper cured meats. I think stores like Whole Foods do their customers a disservice by selling expensive inferior cured meats under the guise of them being healthier instead of explaining that "nitrite free" doesn't mean anything.

I saw it at BevMo yesterday.

I save carcasses in the freezer until I have enough to make stock, also sometimes I go to the market they have ethical chicken backs or wingtips super cheap and I'll buy a couple pounds. That's normally when "stock day" happens. Sit on the carcasses until you see a deal on the backs / tips, and make stock whenever you can.

I was visiting my dad on Thanksgiving. He's not much of an alcohol drinker, when it comes to wine he'll have a small glass of white zinfandel on a holiday. I offered to pick up some wine for dinner and was told that someone already was bringing wine. Perfect.The dinner guests arrived and the person responsible for wine brought her favorite: Thunderbird. To quote BumWine.com:

You guys bake meatballs? Is there a way to avoid having flat meatballs? I've resorted to deep frying them. Works pretty well.