EnriqueB

All the recipes in Modernist Cuisine at Home require high pressure (1 bar / 15 psi).

How much more? Pressure-cooked stocks always yield more than the water you put in, as water is extracted from the solid components also, and it is not evaporated as in conventional stocks. You can get as much as 50% more in a vegetable stock, or about 20% more in a bones/meat/vegetable stock, according to my experience.

I follow Francisco's blog but wasn't aware of the book... Which have just ordered when reading this thread

I was equally surprised.. One hour and nutmeg, Mjx you either have a strange taste or are a ground breaker. :-D

Pressure cookers can scorch and makers try to ensure against people using them in a wrong way by putting such things on the manual. If it is a non-venting PC and you use the PC correctly, you can use much less than 250ml liquid without any problem. But you must ensure that there's no overpressure at any moment (as some steam would be lost), and also monitor times carefully. For steaming vegetables in the PC for less than 10 minutes I never use more than 100ml of water. Caramelized soup from MC also use less liquid and they have never given me a problem.

Interesting Enrique: I really like the parsley there. Yes, it was a lot, but I thought the flavor balance worked very well. In that case, I'll try the whole amount next time! Thanks Chris

Coz, I made the quinoa salad yesterday. I drained the quinoa, otherwise it would be too soft. I also used much much less parsley (10 g vs 40 g). Another pressure-cooker option for quinoa is 1 minute and natural release, according to Laura from hippressurecooking.

That seems contrary to tradition and the experience and recommendation of many chefs... nevertheless it has a point (continue reading). I think it is not poosible to make a general statement: different components of a stock have different optimal extraction temperature & time profiles. Gelatin from bones needs the longest times, much longer than one hour. For beef meat one hour simmering may be optimal in many cases (actually 60 minutes at 85ºC was found optimal in this study). Vegetables likely have a similar profile (in my experience). Aromatics are often considered to produce highly volatile aromas that do not stand long times, so some suggest to add them at the end of the cooking (either some time before finishing, either when the heat is stopped -infusing while it gets cold-, either putting them when reheating the stock for using it). Heston Blumenthal stocks seem to acknowledge this and he suggests to add different items and different points in time, even in his pressure-cooked stocks. On the other hand the Modernist Cuisine team, which claim to have tested tons of stock making procedure combinations, prefer to simplify and propose to put all ingredients together at once in the pressure cooker and cook for times ranging between 1.5 and 2.5 hours.... For a good summary and some scientific references on this topic see this post on the excellent blog "La margarita se agita". It is on Spanish, but you can see the articles references at the end or click on the links to see the abstracts.

Another one: their rendition of "paella" would make most spaniards laugh, purist around would simply scream... Two distinguising features of good paellas are that it is a completely dry rice, and that it has a crust from Maillard reactions on the bottom (in contact with the paella pan, called "socarrat"). I think none of them is respected in the MCaH version. The hard part of making a great paella is to control the liquid so that the rice ends up completely dry, especially because all or most of the liquid is added at the beginning and it is not stirred. This is hard and usually makes people use exactly the same variety of rice and exact fire settings so it can be obtained in a consistent manner. Minor changes on type of rice or strength of fire alter the rice/liquid ratio to get this, and although minor aditions of liquid can be done to adjust, most should be guessed at the beginning. In my opinion, much as I like pressure cookers, this simply cannot be done with a pressure cooker. Also getting the "socarrat" crust would be hard (and they don't attempt to do it in their recipes). What we search with modernist versions of classical dishes is to improve them somehow, but I think their version only detracts, you cook faster but the result is not better. In fact, the rice pictures that illustrate the paella dishes does not look like a dry rice, and they would be called around here simply "Arroz de" ("Rice"), but not paella. Of couse it can be excellent but it would not be a paella. Note that there are neverending discussions between Spaniards themselves of what really is a paella, but I'm not in that camp, I do not favor tradition and fixed rules per se, but in this case they move away too much from the spirit and features of the dish. For what I consider a good modern/modernist rendition of paella, see for example this one (in Spanish) and its comments: http://www.umami-madrid.com/2012/07/25/mejorando-el-arroz-y-el-marisco-en-paella/

Actually Thermoworks as a company is mentioned somewhere, if I remember correctly, but the Thermapen product is not on the probe page. Given that they don't provide SV time-to-core tables, mentioning tools such as SousVideDash also would have been useful. I was also surprised that the quinoa recipe does not require pre-soaking it to remove the saponin... am I wrong or this is an important safety issue, isn't it? Another "nice to have" would have been more "Best Bets" tables. I find them one of most useful items in the original volumes, and simpler tables could have been included here. There are only "best bets" for some SV temperatures. I think that, in addition to recipes, best bets for stock aromatics, pickling, pressure-cook times, etc would have been great and would have made the Kitchen Manual the best all-in-one place-to-look-up when cooking.

In fact I also think one of the very few shortcomings of the original sets was that the time-to-core tables were included in the main volumes but not in the kitchen manual, deceiving much of the value of having the KM in the kitchen (I am constantly going to pickup volume 2 for those tables when I'm cooking SV, it would have been so useful AND EVIDENT that they had a clear place in the KM...) I am sure it will be of great value, I think the book is wonderful, it's just a pity those few details that make it miss the mark of absolute excellence...

So I've finished reading the book cover to cover. For an enthusiast like me, who has been trying to adapt MC to home cooking since its publication, this is a wonderful book. It tackles the same task but with the knowledge and capabilities of the MC team, so we get many new recipes or adaptations of existing ones, and the distillation of what they consider to be the tools, techniques and ingredients most applicable to home cooking. As expected, nothing new in terms of theory, mostly recipes and the selection of the appropiate subset of MC. Even having read the 5 volumes of MC cover-to-cover almost twice I have found a number of new nice tricks (maybe they were also in MC and I did not realize!) such as using diastatic malt for Vichyssoise, vacuum-packing meat with fish sauce to get a "rapid aging" type of result, of blanching chicken for roasting as a way to improve the skin. For people who already own the original volume set I would recommend the new one only if you're an "enthusiast" and/or the price tag doesn't make you blink. For those without MC, this is an excellent volume that I recommend without hesitation. Nevertheless I found a number of things that, to me, make the book not to be the "absolutly highest standard of excellence" for modernist home cooking. Which in fact I expected it to be. First, a minor "packaging" issue. I don't quite get the point of the box to keep the main text and the kitchen manual together (which did have a clear function in the original volume set). I would expect the kitchen manual to live in the kitchen and the main text to live in the library in another room, so why increase the price with something that in most cases will not be used? Also, the original acrilic box left some free space between the books to allow easy retrieval of the volumes, but in the new box there's no space at all around the main volume, and retrieving it, well, it's not that easy. I loved the first three chapters on tools and SV, although there are things I could not understand, like a full page devoted to the PacoJet, an out-of-reach tool for home cooks. The fourth chapter about ingredients... well, I consider it pretty poor, really not to the quality level of the MC team. Mainly pictures with cursory explanations of the set of selected modernist ingredients, or telling where to buy exotic ones (a two page spread to tell that Mirin should be bought in japanese shops and fish sauce in asian shops?, come on!) The rest of the book (most of it) is then devoted to the recipes. As several others have said, it is mostly a cookbook, so this is the most interesting part and where the new content is to be found. There are many new recipes and variations of MC recipes, and they look wonderful, as the "Cooking with MCaH" shows, I cannot wait to try most of them. The recipe format from MC has been extended to include volume as well as weight measurements (very useful!) and then enlarged with a repetition of each of the steps in a more visually-appealing format, sometimes with more details about the step, and ilustrating some of them with nice pictures. While I found the "pictured" steps useful in many cases, showing what should be the texture to achieve or how to perform some specific steps, I also found that many pictures where not really needed (the n-th picture of a container with vacuum-sealed food and the Polyscience circulator does not add much value, does it?) and many of the steps where just repeated without additional info. Which means that many recipes take more space that I think they required, taking pages that could have been devoted to more useful things (though maybe this is not a real trade-off as once you take some place in the page you must devote the full page given the way the book is conceived, and the edition work is really terrific). What are the real shortcomings to me? First, even for an "at home" set, I think it's a bit too cursory on the science explanations. Knowing the "whys" is a main tenet of modernism, and while the book contains a lot of "whys" sidebars, they're scattered here and there on the different chapters and recipes and I think it's not so easy to get the big picture if this is your main or only "modernist" title. For an example, I think "Heston Blumenthal at Home" dealt with this much better, with brief "theory" introductions to each chapter that are really excellent. In fact I would recommend everyone wanting to do this type of "modernist" cooking at home to get both books, MCaH and HBaH. Especially bad in my opinion is that the book contains NO TIME-TO-CORE TABLES FOR SOUS-VIDE, and also very short discussion of the food safety issues involved. This means that the home cook who only has this volume does not have all the tools he needs to fully define his SV cooking strategy. While I understand the book has a very practical focus to make it more palatable to home cookers, this is IMO too much of a dumbing down of sous-vide. So each recipe gives one or several time/size recommended combinations and then instructs the cook who happens to have a piece with a different width... to use a probe! Sorry? Are they asking home cooks to use an hypodermic probe and foam tape to get the SV times right? Is this a joke? Is that home cooking anymore? Finally, I think there are a few things that could have had a place in this volume and are not included. The following come to mind: clarification techniques such as gelatin and freeze-thaw, or using agar (one of the modernist ingredientes included), both are dead-simple and consommés have their place at homes; dry ice for ice creams, fast-freezing and other usages; of french fries (there's no recipe for fries! Leaving out the ultrasonic version is understandable, but why not the basic triple-cooked?).

I have just finished reading it and... yes. If at least you don't plan to have a SV rig in the future, you will not get so much value out of the high price tag of the book, as many recipes require either SV or pressure-cooking.

I have just receive it from amazon.co.uk and, like others, there is no outer cardobard box, only clear wrap :-( Mine is not in perfect state, a corner is sligthly damaged, but not enough for me to spend time & resources to ask for a change...

I used to cook chicken breast at 140F (60C), then I went down to 133F (56C) and found it much much better. Everyone I've served it to agrees it's the most tender breast they've ever tried. About one hour for temperature-to-core or about 3 hours for pasteurization.

Thanks!! I knew I was going to learn something, I have to check out those books.

Thanks!! I knew I was going to learn something, I didn't know the books.

mm84321, I really like the messages where you explain what you did!! And then, if they come from a book, I would love to know the source...

I recommend you visit Lakasa de César Martín. Good prices, excellent produce, perfectly prepared (not modernist).

I did a side by side comparison, same ingredients in both samples except one included iota carrageenan, the other didn't. It wasn't exactly the recipe for MC's Mac&Cheese, but it was similar (I don't recall now the exact proportions, though I'll soon publish the test on my blog). I did not prepare M&C with it but some other dishes (melt it on toast, on a ham sandwich, on a leek gratin and some others). The texture was different both on the cheese and on the dishes, with the iota sample resulting in a firmer gel that also spread less when melted.

I have made some tests where I made constructed cheeses with and without iota and tested in several recipes, as well as freezed them with and without iota in paralell, and also found no noticeable difference whatsoever on the freeze-thaw stability. Both samples with and without iota did thaw and then melted equally well. On the other hand, the iota does clearly affect texture.

Hi, does anybody knows whether the vacmaster vp112 is sold in Europe? I have not been able to locate a European source for it...

I steam for hard boiling, about 15 minutes for large eggs. This is not longer than other methods, once you factor in the short time it takes to get a small amount of water to boil and produce steam. It's gentler so no more cracks or broken eggs, and I feel they also peel better. Laura from hip pressure cooking even steams them at high pressure and claims they peel even better, but I have not found any differences between steaming them with and without pressure.

Is it this one? "The Greens Cookbook: Extraordinary Vegetarian Cuisine from the Celebrated Restaurant" by Deborah Madison?

Hi DianaB, nice information, I bought a Kenwood Chef recently and I'm evaluating some attachments. I already have the mincer. Have you tried other attachments? I'm considering the pasta maker, the colander&sieve, and the continuous juice extractor. I hate that they sell two different full sets for pasta roller & tagliatelle, instead of just adding the different-sized cutters to the roller....