Hugh Anderson

I have Artisan Soda workshop and can't really recommend it, because some of the recipes are bizarrely diluted. For example the cinnamon syrup recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of agave mixed into 1 1/2 cups of water, and then it recommends that you use 2 tablespoons of this "syrup" mixed with 10 ounces of seltzer water. A back of the envelope calculation tells me that you'd end up with less than 4 grams of sweetener per 10 ounces of liquid - by comparison a can of Coke has 10 times that amount of sugar. The book is also rather small (6x6 inches) and flimsy. On a positive note, the flavor ideas are interesting & mostly focused on using fresh fruit/produce, so if that strikes your fancy & you're willing to adjust the recipes then it might fit your needs.

I've found that my sauce comes out pretty runny using 93% liquid, but once the macaroni is added the starch thickens it just right. However I made the sauce last night to drape over broccoli, and while it thickened a little as it cooled, next time I'm going to use less liquid because it was a little too soupy.

Thanks Judy! Moving the decimal over a place for the xanthan definitely sounds right. As for the bananas, I think my problem was the distance of the blowtorch - I need to keep it further away. I know you're looking for a substitution, but what I ended up doing was buying bone-in skin-on chicken thighs for the chicken stock & chicken jus, saving the skin for pressure-rendered chicken fat and using the meat & bones in the stocks. Last night I made a few more recipes for the first time, including the Honey Mustard, Marinara (pizza variation), No Knead dough, and Cheese Slice.. I adapted the cheese slice recipe to make a cheese that is relatively unknown outside of my hometown (St. Louis): Provel. It's a processed cheese made of sharp provolone, sharp white Cheddar, and Swiss (2:1:1 ratio) plus a few drops of liquid smoke and is used in "authentic" St. Louis-style pizza. I grated it & used it on pizzas and was happy that I nailed the texture and would like to think improved upon the taste. The marinara was fine and the no knead dough worked out great, although I've done the Lahey version before so it wasn't really anything new.

If you were to add the extra ingredients from the Chicken Jus recipe, you'd have to add extra water to cover those ingredients and extract flavor...which would result in more normal stock. You can only fit X amount of ingredients in Y amount of water, so the Chicken Jus recipe solves that problem by using already flavorful stock in place of water - commonly known as a double stock (and triple stocks exist as well). I imagine one shortcut would be to start the jus with store bought low sodium chicken broth.

The pressure cooked pumpkin tasted good, but not enough to whole-heartedly recommend it. I do like your idea to use it as a thin layer with a cream variation on top. The one mistake I made that I forgot to mention was to take into account the salt level of the Autumn Spice mix, which I had used to spice the pumpkin. It pulled the flavors a little too much towards the savory side. As for the confit, I haven't had enough regular confit to be able to compare. The more I cook out of MCaH, and use sous vide in general, I keep reminding myself I should do some dishes the "traditional" way as a reference point. I'm in no rush to do the turkey breast again, or not for a big feast. It was juicy and flavorful but couldn't compete with everything else going on in that meal. If you were to serve your dinner in courses, rather than family style like I did, it might make more of a splash if paired well. But that's me being nit-picky - my grandmother pulled me aside & said it was the most tender turkey she'd ever had.

I used what I believe to be the stoichiometry by multiplying the weight of the citric acid by 1.312 to find the weight of the baking soda. I ended up evaporating the water off, because I wanted to make a larger batch of sodium citrate than I needed at the time.

I'd say it bumps up the flavor maybe 5-10%, if it's possible to quantify such things. I changed two variables though - fresh vs store bought juice and regular vs carotene butter, so it's hard to say which helped the dish along more. I suspect the carotene butter. More than anything I think the best path to maximizing flavor is using good carrots for the caramelization step.

The book recommends turkey breast cooked in a 135 bath until the core temperature reaches 133. Due to their warning that it would have a "surprisingly" pink color, and keeping my less adventuresome family members in mind, I opted for their back-up recommendation of cooking it to 142 in a 144 bath. It was plenty juicy.

Yes, 60/140 for 24 hours. Are there other temperatures that are popular? My experience with confit is limited, so it's hard for me to draw comparisons, but I really liked it, much more than the breast.

Last night I made a full-on MCaH Thanksgiving dinner for my parents who are going to be out of the country for the next couple weeks. We started with the caramelized carrot soup, which I finally did the "right" way with carotene butter & fresh carrot juice (using about 12-13 pounds of carrots all told I think). Then we had the creamed spinach, potato puree, baked macaroni & cheese with cheese crumble, green salad with romaine dressing, modernist sandwich bread as dinner rolls, and sous vide turkey breast & turkey leg confit with home jus gras. To feed a dozen people I doubled the macaroni, potato puree (but not the butter), and creamed spinach, and I halved the bread recipe, making everything else as written. For dessert I made a pumpkin pie using pressure caramelized pumpkin added to the pastry cream recipe and spiced with the autumn spice mix, as well as the gingerbread dough. It didn't set up like a traditional pumpkin pie - were I to do it again I'd definitely add gelatin as recommended in the book. All told it was a good amount of work, but all of the "make ahead" sections were extremely useful and something I wish more cookbooks included. Some of the favorites for people were the creamed spinach, romaine dressing, potato puree, and turkey confit. Never having messed with turkey legs before, I didn't realize removing the tendons is more than just fussy French technique & would've made carving 10x easier. Lesson learned. I made a few other mistakes as well, but all the recipes from this book have been very forgiving for me so far. Finally, the macaroni & cheese recipe was made using homemade sodium citrate. I've had some on order for a month now & have been having trouble with the supplier, and I was committed to making mac & cheese so decided to try making some at home with baking soda & citric acid. Anybody else tried their hand at this? Basically I combined citric acid with water, then very slowly added baking soda, before evaporating off the water. Was this dangerous/dumb/ill-advised?

If you like to make stock, I'd recommend the 8 quart/liter size. This is the size I own, and I haven't come across any recipes where it was too big or where I needed to make any adjustments. And it's nice to have that extra size if you want to make larger batches of stock for freezing.

It's interesting to hear everyone else's reaction to the book. I've liked it from day one, and the more time I spend with it, the more I like it. I've cooked several dozen recipes so far, with plans to cook maybe 80-90% of the book. Whether or not a dish blows me away is almost beside the point, as I see many of the recipes as practice or demonstrations of various cooking methods. One of my favorite finds right now is the pressure-cooked braise master recipe for carnitas and specifically the idea of cooking the meat with nothing more than stock and building the sauce separately, opening up the door for more control of the final flavor and consistency of the sauce. Tonight I used that idea to make chile con carne, pressure-cooking beef in stock while separately making a chile paste from chiles, pressure-cooked garlic confit, and the chili spice mix from the book (which come to find out is a little too heavy on the cinnamon for my liking in a chile con carne). I was able to get the sauce to a consistency I liked without needing to thicken with masa harina or cornmeal and all in under an hour from start to finish.

I've been cooking from MCAH a lot these past weeks, so I thought I'd dive into the discussion and report some results. I'd say the winning recipe/technique so far is pressure-caramelization. I had dabbled with the carrot recipe in the past but am now starting to see its wider application. The apple-parsnip soup was a big hit, and last night my family absolutely raved about the butternut squash version. The pressure-caramelized banana puree smells and tastes like spreadable buttered banana bread. As an experiment I cooked sweet potatoes only using water, baking soda, and salt, completely leaving out the butter. The results weren't nearly as good, naturally, but there was still some good caramelization going on so in the future I might dial back the butter for everyday cooking. This would also be a good technique to make sweet potato or pumpkin puree for pumpkin pie. I've made three of the cream pies - Apple, Banana, and Coconut. I have very little pastry experience so my crusts haven't looked like much, but they certainly taste good. The apple was my favorite. I didn't have much luck with blowtorch-caramelizing the bananas without them cooking to mush, so I need some practice there. The passionfruit glaze did not work for me (1.5 g xanthan per 20 g juice?) - it turned to rubbery goop and was unspreadable so I left it out. Could be I didn't strain the juice fine enough. De-boning the boneless yakitori chicken wings required more finesse than I was capable of. I can see this technique being a wow dish for very polite company, but my family is perfectly content nibbling on bones, so I don't plan on trying it again. I did about nine wings, out of a couple dozen, before I threw in the towel. I wasn't a fan of the yakitori sauce either, but I'm withholding final judgment until I hunt down a better quality mirin than the ubiquitous Kikkoman. Taking a page from the original MC, I made 72 hour short ribs with the Crispy Beef & Shallot salad. Lots of work, and looking at the book I realize my beef strands weren't nearly as thin as theirs, but still it was a homerun dish. I started to make the pressure-cooked chickpea salad, and for giggles I brined one batch of beans, as is popular these days, and soaked another batch in plain water. Didn't make a difference appearance-wise (YMMV depending on the type of bean), but the brined beans were slightly more flavorful. I never ended up making the salad, instead opting to eat plain chickpeas. Other things I've made & liked have been the satay sauce, garlic confit, white sandwich bread, ultrafrothy shake, raspberry panna cotta, grilled applesauce, vacuum-infused celery, chaat masala, shiitake marmalade, low-temp oven steak. Impatiently waiting for my sodium citrate to arrive in the mail. Cheers Hugh