longroper

I do them (professionally) at 155 for about an hour, then into a frying pan or hot oven to crisp the casing. The advantage of the oven over the pan is that the whole casing gets brown and not just the part touching the pan. You can pull them before an hour, but they'll take a little longer in the pan to finish cooking through. If you need to hold them, they hold at 137 for basically forever. They'll shed a little fat, but not enough to matter.

Mayonnaise made with duck fat is awesome. To go along with the OP's fish tendencies, I've used duck fat mayo as a binder in fish cakes. It gives them a deep savory note that people love but cannot pinpoint.

It makes lovely savory biscuits. Interesting in a warm vinaigrette as well.

We read plenty of criticisms about all the general things that restaurants do that displease people. What do restaurants do that make you happy?

It doesn't really look like a medium steak. It's a firm texture, though not dry at all, red all the way through due to the cure. The texture is something like lightly cooked dry-cured bacon, which is more or less what it is. I served some of it crisped a bit in the pan on sandwiches and again, it wasn't dry or overcooked or falling apart.

Did a corned brisket last week 138F for 48 hours. I smoked it lightly first, not long enough to raise the temp. Came out beautiful. Lots of raves.

Yeah, this. I missed the part in the OP mentioning the pressure cooker. You still have to clarify it to make consomme, but the point of doing it in the pressure cooker (aside from speed) is that there's no boiling and hence little opportunity for fat to emulsify. You can't make a consomme out of emulsified stock. I've tried.

Consommé. Aspic. Glace de viande. Chaudfroid. The first two assume a very-carefully-attended-to stock. The latter two not so much. Head cheese. Scrapple.

a principal difference between finance and the restaurant business is that no one has to buy, deliver, store, and prepare highly perishable goods in finance. opening the door of a restaurant for a day costs time and money that you may not recoup. opening on a day you are ordinarily not open on costs even more time and even more money, particularly since most people are not on salary and could easily be running into overtime. a restaurant is part service business, part factory. flexibility in a factory is more expensive than flexibility in a pure service operation. there are any number of reasons why a particular restaurant is not open on a particular day, but in the case of any place anywhere that's been reasonably successful for any length of time, they are not likely to be that the restaurant is not attempting to maximize its profit. but maximizing profit and maximizing the number of customers you serve are not the same thing.

never used the kitchen aid, but the most important thing is to cut the meat so that it easily fits down the throat of the grinder, and to feed only as fast as the machine can handle, or slower. let one bit be ground before dropping the next. long strips are best as they wrap around the worm and self-feed at the correct pace. if you're feeding at the proper speed, you should never have to use the tamper. the slower you feed, the faster you can grind.

I stole my technique from Cook's Illustrated. Raw salmon, finely diced. Bound with fresh bread and a little mayonnaise. Grated onion, salt, pepper, whatever spices blow your skirt up. Form into patties- the mixture will be very soft and sticky - and put them on a sheet pan. Stick it into the freezer for fifteen or twenty minutes- however long it takes for the patties to firm up a little. You still have to handle them gently when you flour, egg, and panko them. They don't really hold together well until they're fried. The idea is that the fish proteins provide most of the structure as they cook. I do this with every kind of fish, and they take very well to the treatment.

I have one of these: http://www.thermos.com/products/gourmet-coffee-press.aspx Works very well. Insulated. I get about three large mugs out of it, and the last is close to as hot as the first. My wife got it for me; I don't know from where.

It reminds me of very rich beef. There is little marbling but quite a bit of fat on the outside of the meat. It is deep red. I get it from a friend who traps in the winter. I typically cook the backstrap hot, fast, and rare and braise the hind quarter. I have smoked it before the braise as well. This really opened my eyes to the possibilities of game pâtés. You avoid the textural problems you can sometimes run into with game, smooth the flavor (which for some people can be too intense), and turn it into a ready-to-eat form that can serve considerably more people than many other methods of cooking. And people think it's cool.

Thank you. I've had it at 425 for the first 20 minutes or so. I'll try it for longer. Do you have overcooking issues cooking it so hot, or does the crust keep the temperature inside it more moderate?

Beaver pate en croute: The pastry was not one of my best; I think the flour was old and I had to add too much water to make it workable. Also, my only pate mold is a nonstick, and I've never gotten the sides to brown as well as I feel they should, in both a commercial and a home oven. Would an ordinary tinned steel mold make a difference?

You're all wrong. The answer is black cod.

Perhaps you would consider my post more responsible if I added: If you are in doubt about eating any particular part of an unfamiliar animal, you should directly consult people who have been eating that animal for thousands of years in order to determine which parts are and are not traditionally considered safe, or tasty. Alaska Natives traditionally avoid polar bear liver. They do not traditionally avoid walrus liver. Perhaps they do not eat much at a time; I can't say.

Yeah, no kidding! But that price is all about the shipping, I'll wager. No doubt. I could probably get $12 for a live Alaskan scallop in the lower 48. Of course, it would cost me $15 to get it there... This is the newest wrinkle in fish. Populations are being affected by warmer water temperatures and beginning to migrate north. While the selfish side of me thinks that it would be great to have whole new species to sell and eat, the pragmatic side realizes that the kinds and quantities of fish that are landed now in these and all other waters in the next thirty to fifty years are likely to be very different from what they are now, and not due merely to overfishing. Sustainability may very well take a backseat to climate change as a fish market buzzword. Already the Arctic nations have instituted a moratorium on potential Arctic Ocean commercial fishing until data can be collected on an ecosystem we know almost nothing about, since it has been nearly inaccessible until now.

$8 a scallop!! I could retire in a season! Perishability is definitely the reason for shucking the meats at sea. Bags of meats last a long time well-iced; the guts not so much. We did have one friend of ours with a restaurant who wanted live scallops, so one year we'd toss a couple of bushels from the last day's last tow into water and bring it to him. We did it for a few trips, but then there came some question as to whether or not it was really legal to do, so we mutually decided it was better to just stop. He said people were a little bit sketched out by scallops on the half shell anyway. They're more anatomically complex than oysters.

Not them specifically, no. There are a small number of direct-marketing fishermen, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through to be able to do it, and it's quite an undertaking. We used to sell scallops right off the boat, but there isn't the same culture of direct boat sales here that there is in, say, the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, outside of a few places in Anchorage, the fish market situation in Alaska is a little grim. If you want the widest selection of fresh Alaskan seafood, your best bet is probably Seattle.

I spend my time in the central and western Gulf of Alaska.

Then again, there is such a thing as farmed British Columbia salmon. Yep. That's the source of the Atlantic salmon that every year find their way into the nets of the Pacific fleet. So it's at least mathematically possible that this restaurant wound up with a wild-caught-Alaskan, farmed-British Columbian salmon. But I'd still bet on them bullshitting their customers. BTW, I apologize for missing your post earlier in the thread. I haven't spent much time in Southeast, but I know Petersburg lands a lot of salmon and Dungeness crab, and they are, as a heavily Norwegian town, also big into halibut fishing. The halibut fishery was dominated by Norwegians for a long time, and a significant number of guys in the Seattle fleet are still Norwegians. There are usually a lot of boats in Alaskan ports showing Petersburg as their home port.

It happens because some fish cost more than others. I've heard lots of stories of people buying "halibut" at upscale restaurants that was in fact cod. Halibut fetches 5-6 dollars a pound at the dock. Cod gets thirty or forty cents. Somebody between the boat and your belly is pocketing the difference. Most of the cases I know about are at the retail level. I'd bet that this kind of thing happens a lot more in fresh markets than frozen. Truth-in-labeling laws and rigorous enforcement are really the only way to deal with it, outside of trusting your source. Related to this, my wife and I were in a fish restaurant several years ago in the North End of Boston and asked, as we are wont to do, the provenence of the salmon they carried. The waiter went into the kitchen, asked the chef, and came back to inform us that it was "Farmed Alaskan Salmon." This would have been interesting if true, as salmon farming is illegal in Alaska. He disappeared pretty quickly, before we had even processed what he had said, but my wife's parents asked about the rather astonished looks on our faces. We clued them in and my mother-in-law sweetly informed the waiter the next time he passed that clearly somebody was making things up. He went back into the kitchen and returned to let us know that the chef had been mistaken and the salmon was farmed Nova Scotia salmon. The point being that "Wild Alaskan" salmon is, in fact, a redundancy, and if anyone ever tries to tell you that your fish is farmed and Alaskan, they are at the very least confused. If you still want the salmon dish at that point, you should get a discount. But I'd order something else, probably from somewhere else.

It happens because some fish cost more than others. I've heard lots of stories of people buying "halibut" at upscale restaurants that was in fact cod. Halibut fetches 5-6 dollars a pound at the dock. Cod gets thirty or forty cents. Somebody between the boat and your belly is pocketing the difference. Most of the cases I know about are at the retail level. I'd bet that this kind of thing happens a lot more in fresh markets than frozen. Truth-in-labeling laws and rigorous enforcement are really the only way to deal with it, outside of trusting your source.

None that I am aware of. If it varies according to supplier, I assume it's some kind of processor-specific method of keeping track of... something? Other than the branded fish, the only people who really care where, exactly, fish come from are the various regulatory agencies charged with management.