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.

Plenty of places offer butchery classes, and the bonus is you get to take home some meat. You should look around in your area. For example here's 4505 Meats' classes in San Francisco: http://www.4505meats.com/fmStore/list.php?itemtypeID=it000012

I'd try making the parmesan constructed cheese from Modernist Cuisine's spaghetti carbonara recipe as detailed here-ish: http://egullet.org/p1806417

Do either of these fit the bill? http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dining-and-entertaining/dinner-plates/square-rim-large-plate/s531653 http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dining-and-entertaining/dinner-plates/square-large-plate/s545140

I decided to see what the hype was about on ceramic knives a few years ago. Bought a Kyocera paring knife and used it on some small jobs. Stored it in a wooden knife block, hand washed and dried, always on a butcher block cutting board if it touched anything that wasn't food: never abused at all. Four weeks after I bought it it wasn't sharp enough to cut anything. I have sharper butter knives. I figured something was up, called Kyocera who had no interest in helping me other than offering to let me pay to have it resharpened. No thanks. I'll stick with my steel knives which stay sharp longer than four weeks and I can sharpen myself.

Good riddance.

You shouldn't need to jaccard a ribeye; it's a pretty tender piece of meat already. If you want "smoky" flavor I'd consider using liquid smoke rather than boiling the alcohol off scotch.

I always lay out a mise en place on the cutting board though I'll use small bowls for things like spices, wet ingredients etc. My main cutting board is about four feet wide so I can chop and push things to the side and keep working on it. Plus with things on the side I can sneak a piece of something here and there.

Maybe off topic but: I think it's funny that if the recipe used real sugar and real vanilla flavoring it'd be in Modernist Cuisine and we'd all be high fiving each other for being smart enough to make a milkshake with hydrocolloids.

A job interview asked me the question about when to add cream to milk to keep it as hot as possible. If I land the job I'll consider my MC purchase completely justified, but even if I don't: thanks MC staff!

I live in Fairfield County and I understand where weinoo is coming from: here the "regular" grocery stores jack their prices up so much that Whole Foods isn't more expensive. In Hartford where my mom lives, groceries at the "regular" store are about half the price of what I'd pay, but her Whole Foods is the same price as mine. I shop at Whole Foods because it's across the street from my apartment and I'm lazy. Sometimes I pay too much for things but they're always at least high quality.