DaveJes1979

Egullet folks, I'm struggling to make gelato in my new gelato-maker (it is the countertop Delonghi model). The gelato keeps thickening up so that a thin layer of the gelato on the bottom of the bowl gums up the paddle and the paddle stops rotating. I thought the motor might be too weak, but it can be sticky enough that I can't even rotate the paddle by torquing on it with my hands. Of course I can scrape this thick layer of gelato out with a fork (it is dense but still tastes delicious), but it just forms again once the machine gets running again for a few minutes. The recipes I am following are all from the Making Artistan Gelato book. The culprit might be one of two things: first, everything we've tried so far has included chocolate. I wonder if the chocolate is trying to re-solidify. The chocolate gelato recipe uses 2 cups whole milk, 1 cup heavy cream, 4 eggs, 6 ounces of dark chocolate, 1 cup of sugar, along with a bit of cocoa powder, salt, and vanilla extract (to make a quart). We also tried a mint chocolate recipe that cuts the dark chocolate by half. The other culprit might be the fact that we are using our Sous Vide Supreme to make the base rather than the more traditional methods. So we are just putting all of the ingredients into a blender and blending it until smooth, then we pour it into a ziplock bag, and it goes in the sous vide machine for 20 minutes at 182 degrees F. Once it gets out of the machine, we chill the bag in an ice water bath and then pour it into the gelato maker. The funny thing is that the bases we have made all taste great. We salvaged the bases by chucking them in the freezer overnight, and while the end product is rather hard and dense, it tastes better than anything we can buy at the store. There is no sign of any ingredients splitting. So I don't know what we are doing wrong. Any ideas?

Egullet folks, I'm an American looking for a few (2-3) of the best British cookbooks that include modern takes on traditional British cuisine (or, at least British ingredients even if the dishes are not traditional). I have started with Gordon Ramsay's Great British Pub food (and I also regularly cook his shepherd's pie from Cooking for Friends). This is a good example of what I am looking for - nothing too advanced for me to cook at home; modern dishes without being too posh. Where should I go from here?

Guys, does MC recommend a minimum size or type of pressure cooker for the stocks? My copy of the book isn't in yet (I'm one of the supposed "April 18th" delivery customers), but I'd like to order a pressure cooker ahead of time so that it arrives before the books do. I have my eye on the Kuhn Rikon 7 3/8 quart model.

I just got my Aristre Texturas kit (the 600g kit). Does anyone know where I can buy a slotted spoon that would be appropriate to go with this?

At home I really only use tomatoes for spaghetti, and I usually use some combination of canned tomatoes and fresh tomatoes grown in Mexico during winter. What interests me, however, is what restaurants do to cope during winter. I made a reservation yesterday for Scarpetta (the Beverly Hills one) and was surprised when the hostess told me they were offering the spaghetti w/ tomatoes and basil. Wow, in early March. I'll be very curious to see how it tastes. I wonder if those guys ship the tomatoes in from South America via overnight air or something.

Does anyone want to stick their neck out and buy a batch of Activa/transglutaminase and sell smaller quantities to us Egullet folks? I'd do it myself except I don't have a vacuum sealer to divide up the portions and mail out to others. Activa RM is going for $84 for 1 kg bag, $96 for Activa GS (not sure which one MC usually calls for). One could make a nice little profit if one sold, say, 50g portions for $12.

Does the book cover adjustments for environmental factors, such as altitude and humidity? I live at 6000 feet, so I'm sure I'll have to make adjustments to things like pizza or most anything that is baked.

There is no shame in simply being wrong about something, but it is another thing to be so critical of Nathan and Chris when this statement and "experiment" demonstrate a lack of basic understanding of heat transfer/thermodynamics. Think about the heat gradient you have set up by putting a cold metal sheet into a hot oven. Where is the heat going to go?

As soon as my copy of the book comes in I'll try the pizza recipe since I have easy access to aluminum plate at work. My home oven doesn't go above 500 degrees, so I'm going to see if putting the aluminum sheet on top of my BBQ grill will do the trick. As for the price of aluminum, I did check McMaster Carr and, yes, 2' X 1' .75" thick aluminum is indeed above $200, but that is for 6061. Unfortunately they do not carry cheaper alloys in this thickness. I'll search around for other online outlets that might be a better bet for aluminum sheets.

It seems to me that for all the advantages that many modernist techniques bring in contrast to traditional cooking, inevitably there are unintended consequences that the modernist approach yields. An obvious example would be the fact that one cannot make a classic pan sauce in the traditional way if one is sous videing the meat. Yes, the meat comes out immaculate, but I know I have a hard time getting the sauce to be anywhere near as good as I used to when pan-frying or simmering the meat in the same pan the sauce was made in. Does the book suggest strategies for dealing with these sort of side-effects (if not this particular example) one encounters when making the switch from a traditional dish or technique?

I got nervous about the potential price fluctuation, so I went ahead and just ordered it on Amazon. I'm just a home cook with a sous vide machine (aerospace engineer by day), I hope I didn't just spend a lot of money to get in over my head.

I wonder if Amazon is going to jack up the price in the next month or so.

Pedro, I think it would be critical to regulate the initial temperature of the eggs. Are you putting them in straight out of the fridge?

There would be no impact on any ecosystem. You don't exactly see something like brown algae, for instance, becoming endangered since the demand for sodium alginate has gone up due to the spherification craze over the last decade.

Egullet folks, I've been trying to track down recipes and techniques for making luminescent (glowing) dishes and drinks. Google searches and even egullet searches haven't turned up much. Obviously there are plenty of substances and materials that are luminscent or can be made luminescent, but almost none of them are edible. I'm not necessarily looking for a way to make a dish that is luminescent in normal lighting conditions (which may not be possible at all), it will probably be reduced light or completely dark (glow-in-the-dark). The only thing I've managed to find so far is the glow-under-blacklight (ultraviolet) method of using quinine in drinks. I also recall Heston Blumenthal making a glow-in-the-dark jelly tower, but that, too, may have used a blacklight. If so then these would both be florescent techniques. Everything that is phosphorescent seems to involve chemicals that aren't safe to consume (zinc sulfide, strontium aluminate), but I can't find solid sources to confirm this. The same goes for chemiluminescent materials (like the stuff in glow sticks). The most promising approach might be to find a bioluminescent bacteria or algae that is safe to consume. As a matter of fact, you might even be able to cook and kill the bacteria/algae and have it retain its bioluminescence for some time afterward. Has anyone experimented with any of these approaches? Any thoughts?

Patris and Paul, I understand that (per Doug Baldwin's book) there are some pathogen spores that survive the relatively low heat of sous vide cooking. I understood this to mean that we *always* need to rapidly chill our meats if we aren't eating them right away. And I can't realistically see restaurants telling their customers that they can take their food home as long as they promise to chill it in an ice water bath before putting it in the fridge. I did perform a search in the old (original) egullet sous vide thread, and I couldn't turn up any explicit mention of this topic regarding doggy bags/takeaway.

What do you folks who work at restaurants do when a customer asks for a "doggy bag" of their sous vide meat dish? I assume restaurants must be put into the awkward position of refusing to let their diners leave with their dishes in a box due to the fact that for safety they would have to rapidly chill their food for storing in the fridge and consuming later. And I assume this also rules out running regular takeout/takeaway restaurant service with sous vide food.

Thanks for the follow-up, Douglas. Yes, our thick leg of lamb came out perfect at 131 F for 24 hrs. It was a huge hit with everyone. Marvelous.

Egullet folks, I just put a rather thick leg of lamb into my Sous Vide Supreme for a dinner party tomorrow, and I'm a little worried that it may have been too thick. It will be at 131 F for 24 hours. I seem to recall folks saying not to try to sous vide anything over 2.75" thick. I had to pound the leg down with a mallet, and even then it was just below 3" thick. The leg is only 3.5 lbs. in mass, but it is just rather thick. Should I be worried? Should I cook it longer than 24 hours? Should I take it out right now and try to cut the thing in half to bring the thickness down (it seems like it would do violence to the muscles to cut in this direction). Also, I should mention that I'll be finishing the leg of lamb with Doug Baldwin's mint pesto recipe per his Sous Vide book. Any suggestions for a side dish to go with this? The pesto makes me want to whip out some spaghetti (I've gotten pretty good at copying Scott Conant's spaghetti with tomatoes and basil dish; it is still pretty good even when one is forced to substitute 1/2 canned tomatoes 1/2 mexican-grown tomatoes this time of year), but lamb and spaghetti strikes me as...strange. Will my dinner party guests think I'm strange? Thanks in advance for any advice.