Baselerd

I recently made one of the hors d'oeuvres from the book - chicken liver cracklings. First, some chicken skin is roasted in the oven between two parchment-lined sheets until crispy. It is served with some chicken liver mousse and garnished with pickled mushrooms (I used some shiitake pickles instead of enoki), a red grape slice, chives, and shaved frozen foie gras. I didn't have any black truffles, so I drizzled it with some truffle oil. It turned out really tasty, but super rich. Perhaps I served it with too much liver mousse, but it was a bit much for me. With that said, the recipe makes a TON of liver mousse. The stuff is amazing, and will probably be my go-to recipe for pate, etc.

I would substitute fingerling or other waxy potatoes if you can't find sunchokes. With that said, I love sunchokes and it's a shame you can't find any.

I recently made a plated dessert, kind of inspired by the Ben'n'Jerries Chunky Monkey flavor: -Banana ice cream -Soft chocolate dome (milk + sugar + agar + dark chocolate) -Walnut brown butter powder (finely chopped toasted walnuts, brown butter, walnut oil, n-zorbit maltodextrin, powdered sugar, salt) -Whipped vanilla creme fraiche -Puffed pastry

Very impressive dinner Bojama. How did you make the yuzu cream? Speaking of yuzu, I recently threw together an oyster appetizer (somewhat inspired by this). I made a yuzu vinaigrette with yuzu, lime, and lemon juice then added some white soy sauce and simple syrup. I foamed it by adding some xanthan gum and soy lecithin. I shucked some oysters, topped with finely chopped jalapenos, shallots, chives, and lime zest, then topped them with some foam.

Sounds tasty. I've always glued thawed meat - are you planning on putting the frozen, glued meat directly into the SV still (mostly) frozen?

I've made that soup a couple times and after the first time I didn't bother to core the carrots. I couldn't tell the difference (although I didn't do a side-by-side comparison). I guess technically it should be sweeter, but I am more than happy to suffer through a soup made with un-cored carrots.

Dcarch, that looks great. I recently made some tempura-fried Dover Sole with fennel-potato puree, fennel-orange salad, yuzu foam, and spicy tomato puree. I used this recipe for the tempura batter - turned out delicious (and super easy).

The time and temp depends on what part of the deer you are cooking.

While I do agree with the above posters that making scrambled eggs traditionally is very easy and repeatable, I have also made them sous vide before as well to great success. I started with Modernist Cuisine recipe for scrambled egg foam, but reduced the amount of liquids since I wasn't planning on using the whipping siphon. I just blended the following (by weight) with some eggs. I added a few extra yolks only as well. 100% eggs 20% butter 20% milk salt Blend it all together, cook @ 167F for 15 minutes. I had to take the bag out and massage it once or twice. If you want the ham flavor without the hassle, I would add it in after cooking or just infuse the milk/butter with ham prior to using. The resulting texture is definitely softer than most traditionally scrambled eggs, almost a bit like a custard.

A TJ's just opened up near me recently and I've been a few times. I've felt the quality and prices of the food are all over the place. Some of the produce I've purchased there was pretty meh, although I got some really good cheese, and they had cured beef bresoala that was great as well. However, I bought some of their frozen fish following some high praise and was utterly disappointed with it. Their frozen Sole (which was obviously the Pacific variant due to the $7/lb price point) did not smell fresh once it was thawed.

Well, high temperature electronics do exist but they're pretty cost prohibitive. Usually they are used on heavy equipment, engines, etc.

I keep coming back to the Uchi Cookbook for sashimi related matters. It's not a comprehensive sushi encyclopedia by any means, but has a good amount of recipes for composed sashimi courses and sushi rolls. The recipes have a modernist slant to them, but few require any special equipment (a few sashimi condiments use agar or another gelling agent, there are also a handful of meat dishes that use sous vide). The link below is a recipe from the book to give you an idea of what's inside. http://www.foodarts.com/recipes/recipes/12251/yellowtail-ringo-with-amberjack-green-apple-fennel

Considering how many cases of salmonella have been reported (278) and how many people are consuming chicken in the US, it seems like it is still more dangerous - statistically speaking - to drive a car.

In my humble opinion: it's better to cook with what high quality, fresh ingredients you have at your disposal rather than to try and cook with canned ingredients just because it's what a recipe calls for. I'm lucky that I can get fresh galangal, lemongrass, and kaffir leaves around here. I've cooked with the canned stuff too, and there simply is no comparison. Good luck, either way.

mm84321 and prawncrackers, those grouse/squab dishes look amazing. I recently made a chicken terrine with pea puree and pear mostarda (adapted from The Uchi Cookbook). The original recipe called for rabbit. The chicken terrine was made by first curing some chicken legs (sugar, salt, juniper, coriander, pink peppercorn, cinnamon) for about 6 hours, then cooking them sous vide (1.5 hours @ 150 F) in brown butter, along with some shallots, thyme, and garlic. Afterwards, I pulled the meat and made a terrine by sprinkling the meat with Activa RM (transglutimase). In the middle of the terrine I put a line of pickled quail eggs (pickled for ~5 minutes in rice wine vinegar and sugar infused with kombu). The mixture was set overnight in the fridge in a terrine mold, with a heavy weight on top. To finish, I sliced it, glazed it with an asian caramel sauce in the oven (400 F for 4-5 minutes), then seared it in brown butter.

Looks awesome PB. Here's a dish I adapted from this recipe. Sous vide egg yolk (1 hr @ 150 F, cooked in hazelnut oil), sous vide carrots (30 minutes @ 193 F, finished with brown butter and thyme), and hazelnut-arugula crumble.

You have the idea right. If I'm taking pictures of what I'm cooking, I get the camera set up before I plate the food. If you're unsure of your photography skills, try even a few test shots on a non-food subject in the exact configuration you plan on taking the photos in. Once you get it right, plate the food and take the photos. The more photos you take, the higher chance you'll get one that works for you. As far as your lighting goes - are you shooting in automatic mode? What camera do you have? I would strongly recommend against using an on-camera flash without using some sort of reflector or diffuser. If you are taking your photos during the day, near a bright window would be a great spot to take photos. If you don't have access to natural lighting, get a flash unit (if your camera supports one). As far as the blue plate goes, this indicates your white balance is off. Most cameras have a white balance program feature (access it in your camera settings), which you generally use by photographing a plain white subject (a sheet of white paper) under your lighting conditions. The camera can then calibrate itself to the correct white balance. You can also correct the lighting in post-processing using photoshop, lightroom, gimp, etc.

I don't see how he can claim it is capable of vacuum compression - ziploc seals can't hold much pressure. Chamber vacuum machines can take pressure down to and past 5 millibar, which Ziploc bags definitely can't hold. I'm not sure how much pressure you need to compress fruits/veggies, but I would love to be wrong.

I use my vitamix almost as much as my oven. Vegetable purees are great - basically just puree a cooked vegetable with a bit of flavorful liquid. Sometimes I'll add a pinch of xanthan gum to get the texture just right. Similarly, you can make a soup with different ratios of liquid to solid. If you're into modern food, fluid gels are great too. They typically act as flavor bombs in my cooking, and I also end up using it to puree most fruits going into flavored desserts (ice creams, sorbet, flavored custards, gels, etc).

Those desserts sound great! I recently put together a dessert: strawberry-goat's milk ice cream, vanilla cremeux, vanila-poached rhubarb (sous vide), vanilla shortbread crumble, basil fluid gel, crispy rhubarb (poached in vanilla syrup sous vide, then roasted at 220F for ~1 hour). The only problem was the transfer of the basil to the ice water bath after blanching - I guess I waited too long and the color faded to dark green. At least it still tasted delicious. `

I recently made some Chicken Karaage (link to recipe): Fried/Marinated chicken with ginger rice, thinly sliced jalapenos and onions, herbs, and a sweet chili sauce. I wasn't using enough oil so it didn't get as golden as I would've liked, but it was still very good and easy.

Very cool Teo - how does the "special" flour taste?

Teo - just a few quick points: As you increase exposure time, you get a brighter image (more light hits the camera sensor), but the image will become blurry if the camera or subject move. Often times you can get away with using longer exposure times in food photography with use of a tripod. As you increase aperture size (lower the f-number, also called the aperture stop), the image becomes brighter (more light hits the camera sensor), but depth of field is reduced. Each stop setting generally reduces the amount of light in the final image by half. Increasing sensor gain (ISO setting, referring to film days where film sensitivity to light was sold according to International Standards Organization standards) will increase the exposure of your image, but will increase the noise in the image. Usually you want to keep this as low as possible to reduce the noise in the image, but this may not always be practical. Depth-of-field refers to the amount of space that appears sharp or in focus. This is related primarily to the aperture (f-number). As you increase the f-number (decrease the aperture size), the depth of field becomes deeper, allowing you to keep more of your subject in focus. Similarly, lowering the f-number allows you use the shallower depth of field to dramatic effect sometimes. An important concept to think about is the camera sensor, which is made up of a 2-dimensional grid of light sensors. These sensors (pixels in the final image) can only produce meaningful measurements if the amount of light that hits it during an exposure is within its dynamic range (which can be altered with your ISO control). The whole goal of all of these settings (mainly exposure time and aperture) is to get most of the image details within that range so you can show contrast between the desired parts of the image. I'm sure you've seen overexposed photos before, which indicates so much light hit each of the pixels that they can no longer resolve any contrast between pixels.

Unless you're using a lens that does not rotate during autofocus, such as most ultrasonic / piezo motor driven lenses.

I prefer sous vide for "braises" because it is dead simple and gives you the exact texture you want (whereas you don't have much control with the pressure cooker). The meat comes out super flavorful, and often the liquid/jelly left in the bag can be used as a flavor booster in sauces, stocks, etc. Not very good for a single pot stew since the veggies need to cook at higher temps and for less time, but this further illustrates the weaknesses of traditional methods (meat cooked at too high of a temperature / vegetables cooked for too long). Pressure cookers work pretty well for stews so long as you want a more flakey/stringy meat texture - which works great for chili, pulled pork, etc.