rballard

Thanks all. You sufficiently scared me out of eating them as-is. Instead I looked up a chart of temperature/time for botulism toxin deactivation (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC291232/), which said that 40 minutes at 165f will do the trick. I turned up the circulator to 165 for the last hour of cooking. This didn't wreck the ribs... they were still plenty juicy :-)

I've got some lamb riblets from a friend's pasture-raised lamb, which I received frozen; I brined the ribs overnight in the fridge and then put them in my sous vide setup at 145f for 36 hours. Unfortunately, I neglected to put plastic wrap over the water pot and due to evaporation my immersion circulator shut off at some point during the night last night. I don't know how long it was off for, but the water had reached room temperature by the time I found it. I wouldn't serve these ribs to anyone else at this point, but I really don't want to throw them away and am wondering how much of a risk I'd be taking by eating them. They've got another 12 hours at 145f left, and then I was going to grill them before serving, so they should get re-pasteurized. The risk I see is if there were enough botulism spores to produce toxin that won't be destroyed by pasteurization. So I my questions are: -- Does meat like lamb riblet generally contain botulism spores in the first place? It sounds like they're much more common in fruits and vegetables, or food that has touched dirt. -- The vacuum bags didn't puff up at all. Does this mean that no significant amount of botulism grew? -- Is botulism toxin just on the surface of the meat? If so, if I dipped the ribs into boiling water briefly to denature any botulism toxin on the surface, would I be making them safe to eat? I know it's easy to say "when in doubt, chuck it", but I was pretty excited about these ribs and that'd be painful. So, how much of a risk is this? Thanks, - Rick

Hmm. When I went to cook my eggs the morning after doing a full oven seasoning and put oil in the pan first, wasn't that "reapplying some fat"? Having the full seasoning layers actually caused more sticking, rather than less. What's the material difference between the quick reseasoning you suggest and the full seasoning I did? Interesting; do you have any info you can point me at for what it means to "build up some carbon" in the seasoning? I thought the seasoning was just polymerized oils; what does cooking a steak do to the pan beyond just adding its own fat which polymerizes from the heat? Maybe that's worth a shot; according to the literature that came with the pan, the beeswax coating is actually supposed to aid the seasoning process, not impede it, but I guess that's what I'll try next. I'd love to know more about what's going on chemically here and why layers of polymerized flaxseed oil would cause increased sticking.

I got little sticking on carbon steel until I seasoned it – and now eggs stick like cement! Please help me understand what I'm doing wrong. I recently got a carbon steel De Buyer frypan. New, with the beeswax finish it came with + one quick seasoning pass on the stovetop, I got only a little sticking; eggs were not a problem, and omelettes came out pretty good. This past weekend I finally got around to doing a real seasoning job on it, though: 4 thin coats with flaxseed oil in a 500 degree oven for an hour + 2 hour cooldown for each coat (the method advocated here: http://sherylcanter....ning-cast-iron/). When it was done I was a little puzzled to note that the seasoning coat didn't look particularly even; rather than a hard seal coat there's a lot of variation in coloring across the pan. The next morning when I made eggs, as soon as they went into the pan they stuck hard – so hard that I could not scrape them off the bottom of the pan. Note that I do use oil and do preheat the pan (I add my eggs just when olive oil starts to smoke). Later, as I tried to scrub the stuck egg bottoms out of my pan, I noticed that the seasoning comes off surprisingly easily with a little scrubbing. What am I doing wrong? Why would I get _much more_ sticking after seasoning the pan than before? I really like this pan and I'd love to figure out how to make it nonstick enough for perfect eggs and omelettes. I thought I could treat carbon steel similarly to cast iron, but it doesn't seem to be working. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! The pan I'm using is this one: http://www.debuyer.c...p?id=778&cat=63 Thanks!