Brasshopper

The other day, my grandchild, who is almost four, was over and we had bought bananas and vanilla ice cream. So I decided to make Banana's Foster. I started eating Bananas Foster at a fairly nice restaurant in Richmond, VA in the mid 1970's and they prepared it tableside, it was a place that has a prix fixe menu and this was one of their few extra cost options. They would carmelize the *white* (I've made it with brown, I don't like it as much) sugar with butter, and then mix it with triple sec (or cointreau), a liquor for flambee, and then squeeze in about half an orange or a bit more or less. Also, in my feeling, half of your bananas should be crisp, and half of them should be underripe, just off green, even a tiny bit starchy, while the other bananas should be well sweet of yellow, even brown spots all over the skins, and even a little soft. Cut your unripes into halves the short way, then into sticks by cutting it into quarters the long way. The browner bananas disintegrate a bit as stirred, this is desirable. I find the perfect burner to make this dish on is one of those little gas burners that takes the same sort of butane can that the torch takes. I was using a good sized chef's pan and so I had no problems. I tried a hint of cinnamon and it was not a hit - people said that it put them in mind of apples and they wanted bananas. So, what to do. I added the butted first, once it just started to brown the sugar went in. Then once the sugar is well melted, the bananas go in. People know the usual way of making it, but with the orange juice there is one extra step. I make the sauce a lot hotter than Brennans seem to because my rum was boiling quickly and I got it lit and had a three foot flame that lasted about 4 seconds. Now last time I sitting on a chair working on the coffee table to make this after dinner, and when I lit the flambee, his eyes got as big as saucers, and he took me by the shoulders when the flame was out and said, "Grandpa, you should never, ever do that again! You have to promise me!" I told him that it was a way of cooking and I promised not to do it for a while. You have done the flambee, and what happens is that you have a fairly thick sauce. It thins with the addition of the dark rum (I like the dark rum better, but I don't object to bourbon being used in making this dish, lord knows it doesn't taste that good when you try to drink it, and Brennan's uses Banana Liqueur) but then it thickens when you keep cooking. You should have a citrus juicer. Squeeze in one lemon wedge and then squeeze in oranges, an eighth at a time. Stir between additions. Squeeze, stir thoroughly to incorporate. You will probably get about a half in before the sauce thins all at once. Now stop adding juice and cook it just a little more, while stirring. You have fallen off of a sort of knee if thickness and you want to be in the middle of the knee, so just as soon as you feel the sauce climbing it in thickness, you are done. Turn the heat off and dish the sauce out. I usually don't like vanilla ice cream but this is the one exception. When done properly, the sauce should have a good banana flavor. Remember that the point of this stuff is to make it tableside, in front of family and friends.

Sorry, no, because I just don't like it much, I don't have any. I have a suggestion, though, I'm willing to try some, if you go on amazon.com and search the Grocery category for Miso Paste, you probably get at least 20 kinds. Want to look there and see if there are any that are not in the category, "taste of home for budget minded Japanese Students"? Then suggest a recipe and how to adjust it...I'm willing to try. Try to stick to stuff that is eligible for amazon prime.

I'm almost 60 years old and I remember individual serving cups of ice cream from when I was a young child - you got a wooden "spoon" that was flat and spoon shaped (I see there is a plastic spoon in the lid) and you used it to scrape every nugged out. These were not meant to be "take home", although you could buy a package of them to take home. It is easier to give a child a cup than to spoon the child out a portion. But I believe that these have been found for a long time. Blue Bunny Ice Cream Cups are well described on the net. A cup is 49 grams, which is 1.72 ounces, a small child's portion. That portion is probably small compared to the cup above. But it is a 100 calorie cup, speaking of portion control.

Miso makes good soup. Every time I've tried to use it as an ingredient, it tastes like crap. I have followed recipes, they taste like crap. I think this way: Japanese cuisine has a number of dishes that taste good, even wonderful - and they have natto, which tastes a lot like spoiled soybeans marinated in loose warm snot. In the Nagano area, a common dish is honeybees in their own honey, and, well, raw horsemeat. I ate the horsemeat, but the last time I was in Japan, I completely avoided natto. I think that miso is an almost natto - unlike Natto that arguably never tastes good (some Japanese will agree) miso occasionaly tastes good. But, frankly, I think that it tastes better out of a spoon than it does as a sauce on fish, or vegetables. The wikipedia article is actually pretty good, although they don't mention recipes, they do talk about which miso is made from what and which has what flavor.

I have a friend who works in food safety in NY State. "In NY state we are on it investigating. Our lab can run tests for presence of antibiotics, presence of lead, and standard of identity (what % of it is really honey)" If they come up with anything I'll ask to be kept posted and I'll relay to here. But if NY State finds problems, they will be able to cite and to get the feds involved, maybe. In any case, their labs can provide evidence if needed.

I live in the middle of orange groves so I can get all the beeswax and honey locally I want to. What I find hard to imagine is that artificial sweeteners can't be detected. Far as I'm concerned, they could sample some sue bee at a supermarket and when they find lead, recall the whole lot or more. Some of those things are hard to test for, like the pollen dna, but things like heavy metals have to be easy to test for, relatively.

Absolutely. I wrote one of those Amazon Guides and a "listmania" list that gives links to all the parts you need to make one on Amazon. Seattlefoodgeek has the canonical set of instructions, but I had a hard time with his approach until I realized that the whole idea of building an immersion circulator is wrongheaded (for me, anyway) and way too complex, while at the same time being not reliable enough because of the complexity. If you look at the appliance world - from manual rice cookers, to slow cookers, to tabletop roasters, to hot plates, to electric frying pans pretty much everyone has a device that can heat water and can be controlled by feeding it power or not. Plug the device into a straightforward PID controller hooked to a Pt100 and an SSR, and the whole thing can be done for under $100 in parts. I had two roasters and an old rice cooker that could be controlled as well as an electric pressure cooker and an electric slow cooker that could not be controlled. So three of my five appliances are OK for sous vide. There are people who don't want to do the wiring but many do - I built two of the devices. The "Guide" thing is here and The "Listmania" thing is here.. The guide is the more complete writeup, there is a different in the allowed format so I had to do the writeups differently. Both are at the maximum length Amazon allows for such a list. When I built mine, I didn't know whether the stuff I wanted was exactly what the stuff on the internet was talking about and ended up trusting Amazon's "people who buy X frequently also buy Y." I guess that the quantity 1 retail on a device that does what you need to do for sous vide regarding tight temperature control, the PID, is about $39, and it needs to control a SSR to provide the 110 volt power control. That device is about $10. If you actually plan on controlling a hot plate or something that runs up around 1800 watts, you will want the heat sink. And you need a thermocouple or, better, a Pt100 temperature probe that is OK for water. Yep, that is more than an old router, but you get your display, it is all done. If the router was still on wi-fi so that you could log in to it, get it to do strip chart style recording and stuff, that would be cool...and it might be worth just adding the probes to one of these so that you could record how well you were holding temperature... Now the lowest cost scheme I know of is that the same PID I point to has an internal relay that can handle 300 watts (which is very close to its capacity) but many of those immersion heaters that can be used to heat a coffee cup of water to boiling are 300 watts. I have seen plans that uses the cord from the 300 watt immersion circulator to provide power to the PID, and then the PID's internal relay is used to power the immersion heater - so, literally, the whole thing is done for less than $50 in parts - you don't even have a second line cord. I thought that was a bit skimpy. Recycled chopsticks are used to hold the probe and heater in the water :-) In terms of whether you need circulation for the device, well, there are several schools of thought. If your device heats the water from the bottom, like a rice cooker, you probably do not need a circulating pump. If your device heats from the side, like a slow cooker or a roaster, you probably do. There are two sizes of circulating pumps: Too small, and too big. I have 2 working pumps and one melted pump which I keep to remind me that I should be careful and not let the thermocouple fall out of the water. One of the pumps I have is the 6 volt 100C pump that lightobject sells - it is a 1 liter per minute pump and is in the "too small" category, I use it to stir a small rice cooker that I use for a pork chop or single bag of vegetables. I tried it in the roasters, and you can't feel the circulation at the other end of the pan, which makes me think that it is not large enough. I use it with a "many different voltage" brick that I got off the net, and I found that the voltages on the slide switch were printed on April 1. Many people complain that the power supply overheats. Of course it does, when the device is being run with twice the voltage it is supposed to have it is pushing twice the watts. It produces 4.9 volts, perfect for this pump, at the 3 volt setting - and it does not change the voltage significantly when the load is attached. There are people using heating elements that sink into a bucket or a pot, and those frequently use an aquarium air pump to stir with bubbles. There are a bunch of different pumps that are used for those little fountains, and they work great if the water is not too hot - one run at 180F will break them, and they work fine at about 150F, and somewhere between 150F and 180F they melt just enough to fail. Lightobject has pumps that can handle 100C but not immersed, since they are pretty much always used immersed in this application, they are less than useful. You can get food grade silicone tubing that is the same size as aquarium air hose - you can plug the end with a 1/2" stainless nut by folding the end over, and a couple holes in the side of the hose makes a bubbler which stirs real well.

So, no one sees the need to have temperatures that change over time, or, say, the ability to program an entire cycle for tempering chocolate at once? Would it be OK if there was a simple mode that worked like today's PIDs do, with a self programming mode and then just up and down to change the setpoint if there was a "hidden" way to go into complex mode but it was usually in simple mode? Would you rather not have a timer if it added an extra mode to the controller? Anyone see any value in being able to computer monitor the temperature over time?

So, if you could make a sous vide controller do anything, what would you want it to do? Some choices: Simplicity of interface OR Ramp/Soak, multiple program steps, multiple internal stored programs, computer Interface.. Higher Wattage or lower cost? Is there any advantage to going beyond 1800 watts? Theoretically, going beyond 15 amps/1800 watts would require a different style plug, both a wall plug and a plug on the back of the unit - the first step is half compatible, at the plug range. Going beyond 20 amps would require a completely different plug that would require electrical work at both ends. Timer or not? Is there any advantage to having a timer on the sous vide machine? As I read instructions, there are two choices. One is a single step controller that simply reaches a temperature and holds it. It can be set to ap mode with a single long button push, and the simplest use of the up and down arrows sets the temperature. The other choice is the more complex type of controller. It has the ability to run a program that can be in multiple steps, The steps can mean that it will try to hit a linear rise or fall in temperature over time, or it can do something like, "run to 180 in 20 minutes then drop back to 131 and hold that - that sort of thing would be simple. But setting a single temperature to be held would be a 5 step process. Of course, if your computer has an interface and if the PID has the same interface, you could do everything from the computer. So, which would you buy, simple or complex? Some variation of the two? Which features are important?

People suggested that I ask about beef kidney sous vide here - I usually slice 3/4" thick, flour them and cook them in a pan with garlic and salt and pepper and an herb mix, then add some water, and they frequently come out tough from overcooking. I was thinking about doing a sous vide prep - maybe a dunk in hot water, the slicing, the flouring with wondra, maybe, a quick surface fry and then into the bag for about 8 hours. I saw one table that gave a temp of 180F for about 4 hours, and now I can't find it. I don't think I want them rare or even medium, but I don't want them cooked to toughness, a mistake I've made before when pan cooking them.

So, it was in about 1980 when someone told me, "I have a secret for you that I just learned. You can replace hours of simmering of a tomato sauce, give it an overall better, fresher flavor, and it is so simple. Watch." I had been planning on making a spaghetti dinner, that night and it was about 10AM. I was getting out my canned tomatoes, Tomato paste, dried herbs and such (it was going to be a meatless sauce, one of my guests was vegetarian) and was going to stir them all together, adjust for simmer and then simmer until thick and reduced enough to get the flavor that a sauce gets after hours. And Pasta with a non-meat sauce was something that one could make without it slapping the guests in the face that one of the attendees was a veggie, this was a long time ago. The ingredients taste raw when not simmered for some time, though, justifying the time to make sauce, or the purchase of prepared sauce when you didn't have time for the long simmer. He then put a layer of oil in the pot, and tossed in the garlic. When it started to brown, he added the tomato paste. It started out bright red, over medium high heat, then after a few minutes of stirring in the intense heat, it changed all at once to a darker color. He then said, "Give it as long as you want once it has had that color change, but the change is important." Then he stirred it for a couple more minutes and it really didn't change any more, he threw in one of the cans of tomatoes, and stirred it until it was all mixed. "Taste it," he said. I did. It had a fresh taste from the chopped tomatoes that had no time to reduce, but the tomato paste was clearly no longer raw, it tasted like it had simmered for way more than the 10 minutes or so it had been cooking. Since then, whenever I start a sauce and use paste in the cooking, anywhere, I cook the paste until it has that color change and, I think, the sugar carmelizes like I think it does and it no longer has the raw flavor. Even when I start with a puree, I try to fry it off somehow. It still takes a half hour to whip up the sauce with a can of paste and a big home style can of chopped tomato, but if you start it at the same time you start the big pot of water boiling, you can eat them at the same time. Add (to taste): 3-4 TBSP minced garlic 1-2 TBSP olive oil 1-2 small can paste - and "fry off" 1-2 large home can chopped tomato 1-2 tablespoons Italian Seasoning 1-2 tablespoons dried Oregano 1-2 tablespoons dried sweet basil 1/2 to 1 teaspoon dried red pepper Salt and pepper to taste To the above you can add parmesian cheese, chopped beef that has been fried and drained, sliced Italian Sausage, or anything else you want to add for flavoring. You can even roast and slice peppers, chop garden vegetables, add onions and a zillion other things, but this is the base. I've web searched for this before and found nothing - then I just looked for it again, and found a couple references to "fry off" tomato paste until you get a color change on the Food Network, so maybe this is common knowledge that I'm just unfamiliar with. But a few years ago I made pasta sauce for a local spaghetti dinner and no one I was cooking with knew the technique, so I don't know. My grandmother, from Bare, put the tomato through the cranking food mill, and then simmered it for hours, adjusting it with paste early in the reduction if needed, so this is a trick she never learned. Is this common knowledge these days? Is it someone everyone knows?

I like a serving of beef kidneys from time to time. I usually slice them about 1/2", dust them in pepper and flour, cook them, and then make some gravy in the flour dusting, and serve them. To get them thoroughly cooked, I find that I have made them tough - the flavor is fine, but they are toughened from the cooking. So I am thinking sous vide. 180F, 4-5 hours, with the flour (wondra so that it does not lump) and also some onion and, well, herbs...it has been a few years. Does anyone have any suggestions or a favorite recipe, sous vide or not, that they want to point me to? What I want is thorough cooking, flavor, and good texture...

When my grandmother was about 68, she was told that she had to change the way she ate forever more - cut out certain foods, never eat a portion larger than a pack of playing cards at any meal, and to insure that she ate at least a half banana per day...and she followed many of the suggestions, and she was not a light woman and never lost weight. She had to move to six-eight small meals a day, lived for 30 more years eating that way. I never learned exactly what happened, she continued to cook for others at the three typical meal a day level, while eating a small portion at that time and another portion of something a couple hours later. While I learned a little from her, (the family recipe for onion pie is one) I never thought she was an amazing cook, other than that she could make bread and I can't without a breadmaker. But it is possible to make a life changing alteration in the way you eat (my grandmothers was not so extreme) and still live a full life, still make food every day. I read the woman's essay, it was touching and well done. I hope she is successful, and seeing that she is going to eat one bite at a time from now on, I hope that those bites are the best that they can be, and that her life is as good as it can be. Food is important, but it is not all. She loves her husband, they will find something else.

I've canned tomatoes before, in fact, Romas, precisely once in my life. First question: Whole? Chopped? Peeled? With Skins? Are your tomatos Acid? Do you need to add Vinegar? I decided to peel my tomatoes, to put them in whole, and to add three tablespoons of vinegar to each jar, and about 1/2 tsp of dried basil to each bottle. To peel tomatoes, briefly scald and remove skins while still hot - fingernails help as do . I imagine commercial kitchens put the skins into the paste, you probably won't get enough. You should maintain at least one bottle for chopped tomato - I ended up putting jalapenos and making a simple sauce with the few I broke. Your final question is, "Boil or pressure." With pressure, you won't need to worry about acid as much, with a boiling water canning, you need to keep the tomatoes acid. Tomatoes used to be acid enough, now more varieties are being made sweeter and sweeter, and you need to insure that they are a bit acid. PH 4.5 is what I've read - and that might be hard because I've also read that pure apple cider vinegar is required to make a PH of 4.5 - it might be that the vinegar I added was just for flavoring. The problem is that botulism spores can live in boiling water temperatures, it takes a pressure bath that thoroughly heats the contents to properly can the stuff. But this is all a mosh of information and none of it can really be trusted. The USDA used to publish recipe pamphlets and such, and you could buy books of recipes. Now people look online. I'd go to a site like this one: http://extension.psu.edu/food-safety/food-preservation and stick with scientifically tested recipes - too much chance of death if you don't. It is that simple.

I used to be stationed in Norfolk, VA and I would go fishing off a pier in the Chesapeake. They had croaker recipes, horrible little greasy fish that I always threw back. Brought up memories. I found the recipes, specifically, here: http://www.virginiaseafood.org/chesray/recipes.htm. They had a "Notes for Chefs" as well, which said Chesapeake Ray is a very lean meat Only 100 Calories per serving A low fat alternative to red meat Rich, red coloration like #1 Tuna. Has the mouth feel of veal. Mild flavor profile allows Ray to work with a wide range of herbs, spices, and sauces. Cooked to medium rare there is very little shrinkage. Suitable for any course: Soup, Appetizer, Entrée, Salad Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner And of course....so I'd make sure it had been frozen for a week or so to at least -10 or so, then I'd consider crusting it like rare tuna. Interestingly enough, this is also known as the "cownose ray". Its main predator is the shark, and humans have mostly wiped the shark out - so the cownose ray population is booming. Ecologists are claiming that we need to put humans in as a new predator for the ray before it wipes out shellfish that it predates on..and the description makes me wish that we could get the same seafood down here in Florida that I used to get in the stores in Virginia. I used to take huge trout that was sold at, appropriately, the "Giant" and I would get all the pin bones out with Japanese tweezers, then stuff the poor thing with cornbread and pecan stuffing, put the stuffing around the outside as well, add more pecans, and butter, and chopped parsley. I had a friend of mine over for dinner one night and, well, I didn't know he wrote a newspaper column until he wrote one about this wonderful meal he just had. Yep, here I am in Florida, and the seafood is horrible, and most of the best comes in frozen. Sigh. You should feel lucky. Of course, someone will educate me about Florida seafood, and I'd accept an education in this case. I grew up in Florida, and I can't remember ever having good seafood down here.

I bought a 3 lb package from Walmart, cleaned the silverskin for an hour and got about 1 pound 10 ounces of meat. I thought, "Interesting, but never again". The yield is more expensive per pound than boneless chuck, and it is not any better. I followed the Rioja Braised Beef Cheeks with Creamy Polenta recipe, found here --- except that I used dried spices, Italian seasoning instead of essence, and I did a second reduction of the broth into the vegetables, then I packaged the reduction, vegetables, and the meat into sous vide bags and cooked at 140 for 35 hours. It got things nicely tender - but would the cheeks have been better than chuck roast? The process of getting the silverskin out of the cheek gave me one large lump of meat, one smaller lump and a bunch of nasty mince. The dog appreciated the scraps. Then, as I said, all the browned meat and the wine reductions and the minced meat went into a bag. Creamy polenta was easier to make once I realized that the proportions called for were way low regarding the liquid - you were expected to adjust it - I adjusted with double strength dry milk (reconstituted dry milk that was mixed double strength - the polenta came out nice and creamy). Put in a layer of the creamy polenta on the bottom of a deep plate and then spooned bits of beef, the browned veggies and the reduction - it tasted really good, but I'll make it with chuck the next time.

love these ideas. What do you call this drink? It would be green, so can't be "bloody." Spock's bloody mary, or Vulcan Bloody Mary?

I love rodizio, and one of the best rodizio restaurants I've ever been to in my life (and I've been to Brazil and eaten at high end places there, entertained by corporate hosts) is in Miami Beach. Texas de Brazil, Miami Beach, FL -- I know it is a chain, but it is a really good one. About $75/person with drinks and tip. Of course, Joe's Stone Crab 11 Washington Avenue Miami Beach, FL 33139-7395, which is one of those legendary places that might be a bit oversold, except during stone crab season. A really great steak house? Like arguably world class, arguably the world's best? Too bad he is not going as far as Tampa (which, depending on how you drive, could be on the way from Orlando to anywhere - and I'd drive more than 100 miles out of my way to go to Bern's Steak House, about $200-$400 on up per person for entrees and dessert. Well worth it - I just looked at their online menu and noted that they have raised the price on the largest porterhouse to $136, and there is not another steak I'd order, thoroughly aged, just a wonderful piece of beef. Always plan on the dessert room, always take the kitchen tour. This place is arguably the best steak place in the world, and they have a complete menu of things like caviars and such that, well, you can pay more than I mentioned for the caviar, I am assuming you are going to stay at the bottom end. Plan on 12% service plus 20% tip as well. I'm sure you'll get other answers, but these are just some suggestions.

I would not be surprised to see some variation of Bananas Foster make it - there was an episode of that restaurant rescue thing, the one where the marine had his taste buds blown out because of the Kuwait oil fires, and they were supposed to put a variation of Bananas Foster on the menu, maybe it was Bananas Foster French Toast? Anyway, I was thinking that the dessert was dog simple to make, a restaurant in Richmond, VA had it as a specialty item and it was prepared tableside on a gas burner. You carmelize sugar, cut it with the juice of an orange, squeezed in tableside, a lemon, same, and a flambe of brandy in their case - the bananas were cooked a little in the sugar and it was then put over Vanilla Ice cream - but I was thinking, wow, wouldn't this be great with a strawberry pie as a base? Then this show, years later, did it - a bananas Foster topping on something, maybe French Toast. So that is my prediction, Bananas Foster over anything. That will be the next big dessert.

Well, I tried and tried to find this stuff in small quantities, commercially, like for molecular gastronomy sample kits, because I wanted to play with it, and I found Chinese sources that had it for large amounts (a kilo of 35% for many hundreds of dolars) and 2 tonne minimum quantities. I finally found a source that would sell relatively small quantities (like 40 pound bags) and decided to repackage it for home cooks. You can get it through Amazon now, see here, at least until I run out. The sugar and maltodextrin are stretchers, if that was not clear. You want to use the Super Envision so that Lactisole is at about 100 ppm in the final product, so the cut to 1% lactisole in the Super Envision is to get the lactisole to where you can measure it on a gram scale as a typical home cook. Without the 1% cut, you'd need a milligram scale or a .1 milligram scale to measure the Lactisole for a simple recipe. 100 ppm of a half kilogram recipe (a pound) would be 0.05 grams, seriously hard to measure accurately for a home cook. A home cook with a typical scale can measure 5 grams, though, and the 2.5-5 gram range is 0.5%-1% of a 500 gram serving of whatever. With the cut to 1%, the stuff can be measured. Now, if you look on the Domino Specialty Ingredients web site for recipes, select "Flavor and Texture Modifiers" from the top selector, then select the recipe you want from the bottom list, there are a bunch of recipes that show the ingredient "Envision". Here is an example from their site, apple pie filling: Envision® Flavor & Texture Modifier 28.00 grams Domino®Granulated Sugar 102.13 grams Water 227.50 grams Apples 316.40 grams Mira-Thik 468 grams Cinnamon, Ground 2.10 grams Dry blend granulated sugar, Envision®, Mira-Thik and cinnamon. Place water in a medium mixing bowl and add dry mixture while beating at low speed. Stir in apples with a spoon. Fill pie shell and bake. YIELD: One (1) Pie NOTE: When using Super Envision® Flavor and Texture Modifier, use 1/8 the amount of Envision called for in formula and make up the difference with sugar. For a new formula, add Super Envision‚ at between 0.5% and 1.0% as a starting point. So because this is Super Envision, instead of 28 grams, you use 3.5 grams of Super Envision, and 24.5 more grams of sugar, for a total of 126.63 (anyone think that they cut this from a larger recipe? Maybe up to 100 pie fillings worth?) In any case, I looked for it on a number of different commercial ingredients sheet but never found it, and when I got the MSDS and info from the seller, I figured out why. It only needs to be listed as "Artificial Flavor", and the sugar and Maltodextrin in it can be combined with other Sugar and Maltodextrin. So no one lists Lactisole on labels, I guess it is not one of those things that people are allergic to. It is also heat stable, so it can be added before a cooking step. My understanding is that someone noticed that some coffees didn't taste as sweet as others when a certain amount of sugar was added. They discovered Lactisole, and it is now on the GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) list. So if you have bought a copy of Cooking for Geeks and you wanted to play with savory meringues but couldn't find the Super Envision, well, now you can. Hope this helps. I wanted to play with it too, if I learn anything, I'll post it here, or in the appropriate place.

Best yellow rice recipe in the world....with all simple stuff that you can get at almost any supermarket or maybe Wal-Mart Ingredients: Yellow rice powder (contains annatto, food coloring, other stuff, comes in little tiny cans in almost any supermarket. Just shake it on, like 4 good shakes. I like Bijol brand. 2 cups Texmati rice - I think that Texmati has arguably done basmati one better. This works well with the really long grain rice. 4 cups College Inn Chicken Broth 1 each Knorr Cilantro cube, ajo (garlic) cube, onion cube, and chipotle cube. Plenty of salt, I think. Crush the cubes into the broth, add the rice. Shake on the yellow rice powder, stir. Put into electric pressure rice cooker on rice cycle. Fluff when pressure comes off. Or cook in any rice cooker, or use pot on stove, but then you gotta watch it, boil until the water is almost gone then turn the heat off and let it finish with residual heat. Long time ago, I learned that rice cookers worked well because the best rice was made with a hard boil until the water was just gone, then off the heat, and rice cookers do this automatically. Well, let's put it this way: Pre-rice cooker, my rice was intermittently bad. Now my rice is as good as the rice that goes into the cooker. My ingredients no longer screw up the rice. Many recipes will have you frying an onion into the rice - honestly, I believe that it is better without the oil and fat. But if you think you will like that, well, transparent up an onion in not too much EVOO, and put in pimento or red pepper, and green pepper, and even chicken. You can use your own annatto, toss the rice in it as well before adding it to the broth and the cubes - and why add spices from cubes rather than fresh? Because they carry this stuff in wal-mart, all year, and that was one of the rules. My father was a chef, in Miami Beach, then Sarasota, then on around Florida. He refused to use any rice at his job other than Uncle Bens, felt that the superior consistency of the parboiled rice, the way it separates and stuff, meant it was the only kind he would use. I guess I ate Uncle Bens through my 20's, then I started using American Dry Paddy short grain rice, and it kicked Uncle Ben's ass for flavor - brands like Kohuko Rose will go up against the best of Japanese wet paddy rice - and I started eating basmati and it put the final nails in the Uncle Ben's coffin - the rice was so tasty, so utterly superior in all ways, except for the separation and texture - and so I have started wondering what else my father told me that was outright wrong. :-) Uncle Ben's co-brand, for non-parboil, was Mahmatma/Water Maid. I looked at a bag recently, and it was all broken grains, short, random bits of rice. I put back the big bag I was about to buy and bought the small bag, cooked it, and it cooked as badly as it looked, so I wonder if they are just using sweepings and someone else is selling better rice. In any case, I won't buy Mahmatma any more unless they do "visibly" better, and I can't get the big bags of kohuko rose any more (no local oriental food store I know of handles it). So it is texmati for me, which is not a bad thing. Few are as good, but it is long grain, not short grain.

This sounds like bakkwa, which is based on a traditional way of preserving meat in China with sugar and salt. If they are making a very sweet jerky, then I think I've had similar. A number of years ago, I went to Bali, and I brought a lot back with me, probably illegally. At least I think it is bakkwa, I looked it up tonight because of an odd coincidence. See, I liked the stuff I brought back from Bali, but have never been able to find it in the states, not that I have looked hard, it was just a pleasant memory. I ate the jerky over months when I came back, and the last was starting to be too dry. I remember that the meat had a rather distinctive flavor. I used to make a lot of jerky, and I tried making small batches to duplicate the flavor but never even got close because I could not deconstruct the flavors. I have recently duplicated at least part of this flavor, let me explain: I started by sous videing a whole brisket. I cooked it for 72 hours at 131 (and the bag leaked badly the last 12 hours or so). But none the less, the meat was cooked thoroughly and tender. I used it in a number of different dishes, stew, for example, and finally had some fat with a little meat in it. I trimmed it and got about 2-3 points of fat, with about a pound of meat which was reasonably fatty. If you'd made burger I'd guess 75-25. So I had this last bag, and I decided to be experimental. I decided to sweeten the meat, and go with a chocolate chile mix. I then put this stuff back into a sous vide bag with about 3 tbsp of dark amber agave nectar, about 2 tbsp dark Hershey syrup, about 1/2 cup cheap cooking sherry, and 1 whole (slightly crumbled) dried Orale brand chili guajillo, seeds in, cap out. This is labeled medium hot, but, well, I would call it mild. It made its presence known, but more for chili flavors other than capsicum. There was a little heat, but not overbearing, not demanding, not missing either - and there was another presence that was a tiny bit like chipotle, maybe it was just dried chili. All these flavors worked together, the odd sugars that are in the agave, the chocolate, the wine, and the chili gave the meat an interesting note, and I had tasted this combination before, and as I thought about it, the stuff I brought back from Bali was what I was tasting. I was not trying to duplicate that flavor, I was just guessing, playing, fooling around. I really don't know how - I think that part of it was definitely the chocolate and chili and a little was the sweetness in general. I now believe that there was a dusting of cocoa on that dry beef I brought back from Bali. I don't think that they used agave nectar, but I don't think that they were sweetening with sugar, this agave was closer than the last time I tried it.. The agave nectar claims a different, slower glycemic index, so I think that they use a longer chain sugar. That sort of worked in there. There was a hint of chili and that was in there. Now I want to try treating beef like this, in some agave and some Hershey's dark syrup, and maybe a stronger chili, or not, and see what happens when the beef is dehydrated. It will be a while, but it is something I want to try. If I can get this flavor reflected in the dry beef, well, it will be a success that I will be happy with, even though it has taken me years of low key effort.

I've made a dish like this, it used powdered ginger and garlic in the boil with some mushroom soy and water. The tripe would be completely cooked (simmer time was about an hour), then cut into strips, and dusted with a little starch and depending on my mood, and the taste of the tripe after the boil, a bit more ginger, allowed to dry and absorb the starch and crisped up in the wok, with a few drops of sesame oil. Takes a little time, and no one else in my house will eat it, but I love it. It goes well with scallions and such for a bit of contrast as even after the double cooking the tripe is a little greasy. Had I thought of it, I would have added a little five spice to the boil. When I used to make this regularly, I had a candy stove set up with a high power burner (The candy stoves rings were perfect for wok holding, but the burner was a waste of time), so I had as much heat as a Chinese restaurant wok stove, the whole bottom of the wok could be coated with blue flame. This seemed essential for the crisping process. I've tried making it since, it does not crisp properly. YMMV.

So, how about this: "The person cooking sous vide must be aware of their equipment and the tolerance that their equipment has relative to the actual temperature. When calculating pasteurization times, the lowest possible temperature should be used - in other words, if the equipment might be +-2C, pasteurization times should be calculated as if the temperature was 2C below the indicated temperature. The same margin should be used when approaching 55C/131F. When cooking for a long time (days or any time longer than 4 hours at above Refrigerator temps) the minimum temp that one sets on their machine must be 55C plus the same tolerance that is used when the pasteurization time is calculated." For safety reasons, when setting the offset on a PID controller that might be in a range, set the offset so that the temperature reading is at the low edge of the range. The comment that excursions on the high side can be tolerated is interesting. I just found a cheap controller that was being advertised as suitable for sous vide, it was not PID based, it was thermostatically based with no proportional capability. You set a target temp and a tolerance which could be as low as 1F. When the temperature, as read by the thermocouple, dropped below the target - tolerance (in other words, if you set 131 and 1 degree, when it hit 129) the heater would turn on full bore until the target temp was reached. For at least one of my appliances, that would mean a 4 degree swing on the high side. So if I was insuring that it stayed at 130+, I would have to set the machine at 132 so that it would turn on when it hit 130, and it would probably wobble between 130-135. I think that is bad relative to a tuned PID, but would it be OK for sous vide?

I have read the topic through, and I am trying to figure out what the answer to the original question is, how closely does a sous vide controller need to control the bath temperature? I think I understand the answer. I will summarize, and anyone who disagrees should, we will all learn something. Let me see if I understand: NSF requires that a sous vide setup holds temperature within 2F. Since NSF requires this, we won't even discuss tolerances less tight than this. The most critical thing that you might cook is a boiled egg - because of the fact that when you cook an egg, a series of proteins denature at fairly close temperatures. Thus, in order to get repeatable results, you want to have that .5C control (about 1F, loosely). Control within two degrees is most important at the lowest end of the scale, where 2F from 131 puts you at 129, and that is on the very edge of the danger zone. This is also probably why most temperatures call for 131F rather than 130F. If the sous vide cooking range is defined as from room temperature, for tempering chocolate, up to boiling, (since water not under pressure won't go any higher) we can say that, in general, control at the low end is more important than control at the higher end. Vegetables other than starches cook at about 85C/185F and that is not such a critical temperature - the higher end temperatures have, in general, more tolerance than the lower end temperatures. Even for things like cooking meat, there is more difference in reactions at the lower end of the scale over, say, 2 degrees, than there is at the high end. Meat cooked to 133 may be noticeably different than meat cooked to 135, but a vegetable cooked to 185 is probably not distinguishable from one cooked to 187. There has been discussion, elsewhere, of using a PID to control the temperature of a fryer. (I have a metal K thermostat that will probably handle frying temps and a fryer. I should try it.) Many home cookers, specifically crock pots and tabletop roasters, heat from the side. Those can have stratification in temperature that is greater than the error allowed (I've personally measured 4F top to bottom in a 12 quart roaster). Those cookers need to be stirred. Cheap fountain pumps work up to 160F, then they melt. Above that, an aquarium air pump with silicone tubing (It can be had in food grade) can be used to stir (I plug the end by folding it and stuffing it into a stainless steel nut and clipping holes into the side of the tube so that the bubbles are spread out. The nut also weights the end.) There are two problems with air pumps, one is noise, and the other is that the air flow can cool the bath. I have used an air pump in a roaster for 72 hours and gotten no more than a half inch of evaporation, if that, using silicone baking mats as lids. (I have bought an immersible pump that is rated for 105C, but not rated at that temperature when immersed. They don't give you the immersed temperature. The pump does not self prime as far as I can tell, but filled with water, it will continue pumping. It pumps 1L/Min, not nearly as much as other circulators. It works on 6 volts DC, and I found a cheap adjustable brick that produces 5.9 volts when it is set to the 3v setting. I use it to stir my rice cooker.) You are best putting your thermostat nearer the heat source, not away from it, it will make your end result more accurate. A small initial overshoot is not a problem and might be a good thing. So, what I get from all this is that tolerance tighter than 0.5cish is meaningless other than for bragging. And if you are not cooking eggs, tolerance tighter than 1C (1.8F, 2Fish) is for bragging rights. Is that basically it, the summary answer? 2F for everything but eggs, 1F for eggs?