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@haresfur, my usual lamb shoulder/leg is done between 138°F and 144°F (whim) for 2 or 3 days. I use the higher temperature when I want less fat in the finished product.

I just posted my NEVER AGAIN story to the Anova Precision Oven here.

This belongs in the I WILL NEVER AGAIN . . . thread but concerns the Anova Precision Oven and so . . . For several years in the 1980s a few friends had barbecue picnics in Golden Gate Park. My friend Jim always barbecued the chicken. He had been a cook with the Navy (Vietnam) and so he was familiar with preparing vast quantities of food. He had no issue with using public grills because got the fires so damn hot. Fast forward to 2001 when Jim and his wife came to my house which had been recently vacated by my ex— and Jim decided to take over my Weber barbecue. In the interceding years I had often barbecued chicken and turkey on the Weber, always by the Indirect Method, started with coals in a coffee can with newspaper packed underneath. The Weber lived on a newly renewed (epoxy) roof deck. You can see where this is going, can't you? Jim sloshed in some accelerant and Woosh! 10+ years of cooking grease went up into a wall of fire, licking at the wooden I-beam holding up the roof deck and throwing sparks all over the epoxy coating. Fortunately that scary fire was soon extinguished. 12+ years ago DH (new) and I were investigating a way of getting barbecue-style searing on vegetables in the oven with GrillGrates (https://www.grillgrate.com/). We decided they didn't work well enough because we couldn't get the oven hot enough. A few days ago, I was searching for pans which might fit inside the Anova Precision Oven which resulted in the discovery that GrillGrates is now marketing themselves directly to APO owners. So, I dug the grill grates out of the garage because I had just completed a 48 hour sous vide (Joule) of beef brisket at 133°F. I planned to pre-heat the grill grate so that I could get sear on both sides of the meat quickly. LESSON 2: Pre-heating a not-entirely-clean pan in a hotter oven (than prior experience) produces lots of smoke. (See story above about circumstances that you didn't know you had gotten yourself into). The APO gets very hot. Mine is sitting on a counter under kitchen cabinets—this looked and smelled very dangerous. LESSON 3: Learn how to turn meat so that less space is required. I.e. the GrillGrates were too low (from the top grill of the oven) because I wasn't sure how much room I needed to turn the meat; therefore, it took too long for the surface to develop a char. Maybe I should have cut the meat into more manageable sizes. The GrillGrates produced good sear marks on the underside of the meat. The oven was hot enough to melt the fat though. LESSON 4: Develop a method for containing the melted fat. It sounds nice that the convection works best when air can get all around the meat being cooked, but there are definite drawbacks to having the grill grates on one rack and the baking pan on a different rack; there's no way to pull those two racks in/out of the oven at the same time. So there was a lot of melted smoking fat in the oven. Worrisome. and, most of all, LESSON 1: Learn how to trim excess fat from meat right after getting home from the butcher, before putting meat into bags for vacuum sealing. Once I thought that the fat produced better flavoured meat, but that's not true, right? I don't know for sure but this experience felt very dangerous. P.S. The Anova Precision Oven needs a self-clean cycle. What a mess!

Spam, @liuzhou?

@weinoo, how long can you keep those jars of pork fat in the fridge? I.e. will you make it into smaller packets and freeze them?

Hello @Snoopy15. When were those photos taken; is that car from the 50s? Hope you enjoy yourself here on eGullet; there are some very fine members. Welcome!

Hello @MaryIsobel. Congratulations on retirement! I have had to postpone a trip with my sister to visit famous gardens in Québec and the Maritimes. Welcome to eGullet.

Hello @43bakes. I know very little about making pies, but I love to look at them and read about them. So, please post about what you learn! Welcome to eGullet.

Hello Chris. I think you'll find the folks here at eGullet very friendly. Looking forward to learning more about you!

https://www.eatthis.com/news-effect-red-wine-study/

Hello Anthony. Welcome to eGullet. I look forward to learning more about you!

@gfweb, how far in advance do you make your sauce?

I'm sorry that this post is so roundabout but I'm hoping to paint a clear picture of my dilemma. In anticipation of a post-Covid world, I need some help resetting my mental orientation. Some part of my learned behaviour is designed around entertaining. I'm a very distractible person. I really don't like the anxiety of worrying about the state of dinner combined with wine and socializing, so I tend to want to get completely underway early. For nearly 10 years, my first step when returning from the butcher is to cut meats into cooking sizes, then vacuum-seal each in sous-vide-ready bags. This meat is never pre-seasoned in any way (My early reading had reasons for this). A few days away from a dinner, I'll find a piece of meat in the freezer and start the sous vide. While the meat is cooking sous vide, I'll investigate that cut (e.g. "beef brisket" + "sous vide") from my SV Diary, my own database of recipes, eGullet, and the internet. I'll have selected a few recipes and considered the fridge contents. For a couple of days I'll putter around adding a bit of this and that to my concept for dinner. I'll find a vegetable dish which I can prepare during the day, so all that is required is to pop into the oven before dinner. Sometimes this dish is really interesting. Very rarely I'll reduce the cooking juices to make a sauce. This is complicated by not knowing what to do with the hunk of meat; it has to be kept warm. Do I slit open the bag, pour out the juices, then peg the opened bag to the top of the sous vide water? Putting it in the oven will dry it out, no? Does the Anova Precision Oven change this calculation in any way? The meat is given a fast crust under the grill or with a blow torch . That's it. The meat always tastes good. It's not dry, exactly, but I'm bored. So, in addition to the questions above: What does this dinner-started-days-in-advance dance look like for you? Should I open my vac-packed meat bag before the start of sous vide in order to put on s+p or a rub? Presumably I could reseal in the same bag if I started using larger bags, somehow keeping the grease out of the vacuum sealer. How do you organize your timing so you start to make a sauce during the time the meat is in the sous vide? How far in advance can one make a sauce? What components go into your sauce? Do you have tricks (habits) which help you get a sauce underway before company comes? And, lastly, can you give me some examples of meats you cook sous vide and sauces you make to accompany them?

Hello Tia. I'm fascinated by your ideas. Looking forward to hearing you develop them. Welcome to eGullet.

There's still time . . .

Curious people want to know, @JoNorvelleWalker, do you have spares of everything?

The Lodge 10 1/4" (25 cm) fits diagonally with room to spare, so I think that 12" skillet might fit.

@JoNorvelleWalker, do you plan to put the Demeyere in the Anova oven?

Welcome, Laura. I'm not much of a dessert baker, but read about them all the time as there are many enticing photos and posts from members of eGullet. Looking forward to reading more of your posts!

Also, @Kim Shook, I did FIX all the other lousy cabinets in my kitchen with these aftermarket pullout shelves from this company https://www.shelvesthatslide.com/ with some samples here.

@Kim Shook Check out Lee Valley's blind corner unit.

Yes, very close. 🙄 I had double the volume of oxtail, so was a bit loose with spices. I chose to make wet caramel vs. dry caramel (as recommended by NYT) because of ToughCookie's post and her recipe at the bottom of this page. I really like oxtail, but I've never had one taste like this before! Definitely bears repeating (with the advice given herein, thanks )

Prior to this gift (link), I had no braising experience, and I don't have much more now. I have been reading the books on braising mentioned in the earlier thread, but many of those recipes don't relate to a specific cooking vessel. In my mind I'm trying to understand if there's a difference between using the slow cooker in the Instant Pot and using an enamelled cast iron pot in the oven. I need some help understanding what happens in a braise in an enamelled cast iron pot. (Do all closed Dutch ovens cook in the same way?) The photo below is my interpretation of a NY Times RECIPE for Jamaican oxtail stew, recipe here, which calls for almost burning sugar in the pan at the start. Instead I looked up (how to) and made a wet caramel. The oxtail were not sautéed in the caramel very long because I was afraid to burn it. With the lid on, I put the cast iron in oven at 300°F for about 4 hours, possibly turning heat down to 250°F halfway, removed from oven to stovetop without uncovering, and eventually put in the fridge overnight. In the morning I removed the fat layer. The oxtail meat was also not falling off the bone. So I put the cast iron back in the oven for some more, maybe about 4-5 hours, again starting at 300°F, then lowering to 275°F partway. I put the cast iron on top of the stove and the top surface of the contents was black. I wasn't sure if the blackness was because the dish was burnt or because the caramel had darkened. Took me about 2.5 hours to separate meat, fat, and bone. Some of the meat seemed dry and hard, some of it soft. I cut the black bits into very small pieces in the hopes that might minimize any burned flavour. It was pretty tasty, but I don't understand much. Sorry the photo below is so poor, four servings had already been dished out. It was served with red beans and brown rice with a side of asparagus. So here are my questions: Do the contents in a covered enamelled cast iron pot eventually reach the same temperature as the oven? How long does that take? Is the goal of using a covered enamelled cast iron pot to cook for a very long time at low heat? Is the goal of using a covered enamelled cast iron pot to use less liquid? When disassembled, some of the meat -- particularly the black bits -- was hard and seemed dry, and needed cutting with a knife. Some of the meat was very soft and could be squished between my fingers. Would there be a reliable way to get all the meat done to the same degree of doneness? What is different about the results from a slow braise in a covered enamelled cast iron pot and those from a slow cooker?

Here is a photo of my spice cabinet when it was new in 2018. It has considerably more types and quantity of spice in it now. It is 4.5" deep, 41" wide, and 87" tall. https://forums.egullet.org/p2174414 Asking me, and someone who has 4 spice bottles in the cupboard, about kitchen spice organization is asking different questions. Our answers are necessarily thinking about the organization in different ways. There's no way to collect that kind of information without asking different questions than you are. More probing questions (rather than a fixed multiple choice) will yield more information also. Good luck!