pep.

Got mine yesterday, looks gorgeous. Now I just have to get my replacement MCaH from Amazon UK to put it in

"Enzyme" is not a name for fermented fruit drinks.

I got mine from Amazon UK today, unfortunately also only in the shrink wrap. The corners of my sleeve are fine as far as I can see, but the packaging tape cut into the sides a little

I just got shipment confirmation for my order through Amazon UK. Should have it next Friday! I asked my local cookbook shop about it, but they hadn't even heard of it yet (apparently MCaH is self published like the first two printings of MC). They tried to inquire through Taschen, but as of yet, no international edition and no international distribution (besides Amazon) is planned, apparently.

The CI quote referred to a venting pressure cooker. They did another experiment comparing two venting PCs, a non-venting PC and a conventional stock pot. The result was that the non-venting PC produced the best stock, followed by the conventional stock pot. The stock from the venting PCs was sub-par.

For my sous-vide demo today I did the 13 minutes at 75 °C eggs from Ideas in Food, which should work very well in oeufs en meurette. Of course those are also chilled in ice water and then reheated to 60 °C.

I don't think that's actually necessary, as long as there is enough sugar to reach the desired concentration for the total amount of liquid (initial syrup and nuts). It should be similar to equilibrium brining. However, packing the nuts into jars will probably leave too little space for the syrup. Probably better to pack everything in a bag and fill the glass jars after the candying is done. The question is, what should be the final sugar concentration in the nuts? Most candied fruit are around 65 Brix. To follow up on the candying nuts in the sous-vide bag, I've had mixed results. I packed the nuts with a syrup that had 65 percent sugar for the amount of nuts + water combined. I let the syrup cool to room temperature before vacuum packing. I cooked the nuts for approximately 10 hours at 85 °C, then let them cool and put the bag into the fridge for a week or two. After that time, I compared them to the traditionally candied nuts from last years harvest. The dimpled (top-most) nut is the sous-vide one: Inside they look pretty much the same (the sous-vide nut is on the bottom here): Tastewise, the sous-vide nuts are not very interesting at the moment. However, I think I'll have to compare them again in a few months - some time to mature might help in that department. The biggest surprise was what happened to my sous-vide bath. While I've long known that certain flavor compounds may leach through the bags, this is the first time I've seen an actual color leach. The bag was NOT damaged! Edit: The whole writeup for the experiment can be found on my blog if you read German.

Really? According to Dave Arnold and Cooking Issues: Do read on, however, as it get much more wonky. It's worthy of note that the Modernist Cuisine guys don't seem to agree. I also have a hard time understanding how the aroma could be better on one but the flavor better on the other, since flavor is mostly aroma anyway. Actually, Dave doesn't agree himself, if you read on: Pressure cooked stock is only better if you use a non-venting pressure cooker.

http://www.cookingissues.com/2009/11/22/pressure-cooked-stocks-we-got-schooled/ :-)

How big is your pressure cooker and how much raw materials are using (excluding the water)? For pressure cooked stock you would use a lot less liquid.

I assume you are already using the pressure cooker method for making the stock?

I recently started a food blog (it's in my signature, but unfortunately German language only) and well, what's a food blog without food porn? So in a few weeks I went from knowing nothing at all about photography and an old IXUS 60 to a Panasonic TZ25 (ZS15 in the US, I think) to an Olympus E-PL2 with some nice prime lenses and at least some theoretical knowledge about what I'm doing. Of course, theory and practice are two decidedly different creatures ;-) Anyway, here's some stuff I've done at restaurants in the recent weeks: These are all taken under restaurant lighting conditions in the evening, ISO and therefore noise is a bit high, but I do find them usable at least on screen. The focus point on the last one is not quite where it should be, but I liked the shot of the ox tail ragout inside the pasta too much to discard it. Host Note: The current food photography topic may be found here.

I just re-read this thread because I'm holding a sous-vide presentation next week at the Foodcamp Vienna (sorry, German only). I'll prepare some sous-vide meat and vegetables to reheat and show different the textures, but the main event will be SV eggs. Has anyone tried genuine onsen-tamago? What would be the best temperature to approximate the texture? 63.5°C? I'd prefer to do it without delta-T to not be time critical (I can pre-cook the eggs at home or start them a bit earlier than the session).

I don't think that's actually necessary, as long as there is enough sugar to reach the desired concentration for the total amount of liquid (initial syrup and nuts). It should be similar to equilibrium brining. However, packing the nuts into jars will probably leave too little space for the syrup. Probably better to pack everything in a bag and fill the glass jars after the candying is done. The question is, what should be the final sugar concentration in the nuts?

One of the threads on candying fruit mentioned "cold candying" by sealing fruit and syrup and putting it into the fridge. MC has tables for cooking fruit in syrup until tender, but that's not quite the same as candying. Googling didn't turn up anything worthwhile. So, has anyone here tried any candying using sous-vide equipment? Specifically, I've got a bunch of green walnuts that have been soaking in water for the last two weeks (changed daily, of course). Last year, I used the traditional steps for "black nuts" (boiling in syrup three times). This time, I'd like to do at least half of them sous-vide. Any tips? My initial idea would be to pack them in the jars, fill up with a 2 parts sugar/1 part water syrup and put those into a 88 °C water bath. Or will the sugar concentration not be high enough in that case? Should I pre-blanch the nuts in slightly sugared boiling water once (as in the traditional recipes)?

I disagree: while you won't get great response time with it, 750 watts is capable of heating and maintaining temp in a 19L bath. Start with hot water if you don't want to wait. Of course its doable, but a hassle. Personally, I think my Polyscience circulator is a bit underpowered at 1100 watts. I need a second circulator to do two different temperatures at the same time (especially for vegetables). At the moment, the SWID seems like the best value for money (in Europe). The new version has a 2000 watts heater, so getting to the necessary 85 °C should be easier.

I think their heater is way underpowered at 750 watts, especially compared to the 5 gallons (= 19 liters) maximum vessel size that they claim.

It looks a lot like one of the older Allpax machines ...

Oh, and I've got another 2.5 kg of fish bones in my freezer right now from the filets we used for the bouillabaisse, so I will be making MC fish stock sous-vide very soon. I'll thaw some of the white stock from this batch to compare. I've found some double-thick bags on the net and I'll get large ziplocs if that doesn't work out!

I have made the sous vide fish stock quite a while back (maybe the first thing I made out of MC?). It turned out very well for me. Those were my pre-chamber vac. days if I recall correctly, so I did it with two (large) ziploc freezer bags. I didn't have any issues with punctures, but I certainly didn't/couldn't pull a 'hard vacuum' on the ziplocs (removed air via the 'submerging' technique). Definitely worth making, I thought it was the best fish stock that I have ever had (not that I've tasted a ton of them straight though). I don't think it would be the same with a pressure cooker. I didn't have any large ziploc bags, so I made it in the pressure cooker. Of course, even my 12 liter model is not large enough to hold the ingredients based on > 6 kg of fish bones. Since I had mistakenly hoped that after cooking the vegetables, all the stuff would somehow fit in, I had to roughly divide everything on the fly. That means the ratios were probably off by a relatively wide margin, so the results are difficult to compare Anyway, based on an old Heston Blumenthal recipe from In Search of Perfection, I used a cooking time of 30 minutes on high pressure. I didn't add quite enough liquid or didn't mix thoroughly enough, so I got a crust on the bottom and what amounted to brown fish stock: It didn't taste burnt per so, just very strong with a detectable star anis aroma and maybe a tad too much gelatine. So for the second batch I used more liquid, removed some of the remaining star anis and stirred again before covering the pressure cooker. Oh, and I reduced the cooking time to 25 minutes: The resulting strained stock: In the end, I used a mixture of the two stocks for my bouillabaisse and it worked very well. I posted about the whole feast on my blog mundschenk.at (German language, but the images speak for themselves).

Has anyone made the sous-vide fish stock? Does the liquid (and maybe the vegetables) buffer the fish bones enough to have them not pierce the bag? I will be making bouillabaisse with some friends tomorrow and I'm currently in the process of preparing the necessary fish stock. I wanted to do it sous-vide, but after cleaning and blanching the bones and heads, I'm getting second thoughts about the thickness of my bags. Some of the fish carcasses were quite large (I calculated that I'd need ca. 6 kg of fish bones and my fishmonger gave me frozen ones). Am I better of doing a pressure cooked variation, or will that ruin everything with a fish stock?

I'm not quite sure what the point of your comment in this old thread is. The thread is not about what the proper protocol for calibrating thermometers is or what thermometer would be best. It's about the technical procedure to actually store that calibration in the device, nothing more and nothing less. That aside, I re-checked after some time with a Greisinger GTH 175-Pt-K that was actually calibrated at 60 °C and the offset was correct.

I'm not sure I like the new website. The original one wasn't that great, but now it seems even harder to find anything. Where have the errata gone?

Are you sure that the Rippchen are pre-cooked and not just cured (gepökelt)?

I think phillie means something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurter_Rippchen which is cured pork loin cutlet. Personally, I would do this in the mid-50s as well.