Syzygies

A heads up, if one has an established sourdough starter for making bread, one can easily ferment the batter for Indian dosas. Commercial yeast isn't quite right, and trusting the ingredients alone can be hit or miss. A sourdough starter is already in the ballpark, and works nicely with predictable results. Googling for recipes, note that the ideal fermentation temperature is about 31 C (86 F to 90 F), well below that of a yogurt maker (110 F). One can probably get by with a warmed oven. I have an Anova One immersion circulator, so I rigged a water bath. Not a reason alone to buy one, but tools that take up space need to earn their keep. Note also the add-ins. Standard is urad dal and rice, we ground the urad dal after soaking in a Vita-Prep (much easier to clean than the Indian stone grinder I have in the back shed somewhere). We ground Massa Organics brown rice in the same Wolfgang Mock grain mill we use for flour for baking. Typical add-ins include a bit of fenugreek (actually also a dal), and chana dal (chick peas) to give that restaurant crunch. The pan is a 15" round, 1/4" thick Baking Steel. They will sell 1/2" thick as a special order; Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid for example recommend clay tawas for their thermal stability. Nothing offers the combination of nonstick and browning of a well-seasoned baking steel, and I can compare with more pans than any sensible person should own. Go with 1/2" thick to get the thermal mass, though 1/4" is fine and heats faster. A bit of sourdough starter is plenty to get a dosa batter fermentation going. The wheat is a welcome addition. Six hours may be plenty; like the sourdough starter itself, the batter continues to sour with longer ferments. The usual guidelines to watch expansion of the batter only apply if the batter is thick enough to trap bubbles. A batter thin enough for use without further thinning won't expand while fermenting.

My favorite pans in the cast iron / carbon steel range are Spring USA Blackline (I've tried many alternatives, vintage to modern cast iron and French carbon steel). My hanging pan rack is very crowded, but I kept a large All-Clad stainless steel skillet for acidic sauce reductions after searing. I don't like the effect of acids on cast iron pan seasoning.

So I had a bit of a mess, trying to package some chilled Okra Sambar to freeze before leaving town. Just thick enough that the air pockets eject food rather than slipping by food. (Having urged chamber machine owners to try a basic impulse sealer (not a clamp machine), I felt a responsibility to give my chamber machine some more chances with liquids. A Heloise Hint for cleaning up around the hardware that grips the bag: Get up what one can with a wet paper towel, then blow out the water and debris with a can of compressed air. Rinse and repeat. Once one gets the hang of the impulse sealer, it's faster and does a better job with less risk of a mess.

The VP 112 had an image problem for me; had I studied one in person, I might have bought one over a year ago. The pictures made it look like a plastic knockoff of a "real machine", squished so it could be used by opening the long way on a kitchen counter, without banging the cabinets overhead. My kitchen counter space is way too precious to give up for such a beast. The space nearby has no overhead obstacles, and favors opening a lid to face out at me. Their market research must have found I'm not alone, for the VP 115 addresses all of my prejudices, founded or unfounded. It shows more actual metal like a "real machine", while maintaining a lighter, smaller form factor that one person can easily lift. And it opens and closes in an orientation that makes sense to me. So yes, I worried about the price difference between the VP112 and the full-sized, oil pump machines we should probably all be getting. And the size and weight; the price difference keeps shrinking. When I saw the VP115 for sale, I saw the machine I'd wished they had sold as the VP 112, and I didn't perceive any price difference. Just that this was going to save me hundreds of dollars over a machine I'd have trouble lifting alone. The ability to seal 12" or two 6" bags would be very nice. Were I to do this over again, however, I'd go up to some oil pump machine. That search is a rabbit hole; the VP215 is a fine machine but one reads sound arguments for spending twice as much...

You do mean one of these, right? Your description of the mess sounds exactly like my experience trying to seal liquids in an external clamp vacuum sealer such as the FoodSaver (or more upscale, something like the Minipack Cyclone 30). I dislike external clamp vacuum sealers for all the same reasons as you. Is that what you thought I meant? An impulse sealer like shown above sells for a song in various lengths. Its only control is a seal timer, engaged when one presses down the top arm. I place it near the edge of a kitchen counter. I take a tiny block of wood (intended for texturing handmade pasta) to prop up one end. Using ordinary (not textured) chamber vacuum sealer bags, set up a liquid-filled bag to seal, with one hand on each side of the sealer, supporting the bag as it hangs off the counter. Squeeze the hanging liquid to force the remaining air up and out. Because of the slope, the liquid will want to escape at the high point of the ridge over the sealing strip. After it escapes, smooth the plastic along the sealing strip, and seal. If a small amount of liquid cleared the ridge onto the counter, clean it up in a couple of seconds with a paper towel.

$696 versus $629 on Amazon, a $67 difference. (I paid $689 a few months ago.)

Well, I own a powered sliding miter saw, and yet there are plenty of times I reach for a hand Japanese pull saw. Someone could ask exactly your question, and we'd both be right. If I describe my concerns, perhaps my chamber technique can be improved through forum comments. One has to try an impulse sealer to appreciate its advantages. This question takes many forms. If one has a Ferrari and loves it, one still doesn't roll it down the driveway just to check the mail. That may be obvious, but I've tried not to find myself rolling the Ferrari down the driveway in other problem domains. My VP115 has an air pump, not an oil pump. With water in an oil pump, one can just change the oil. With water in an air pump, one loses use of the machine for weeks, and has the hassle of a bulky shipment and an expensive repair. I don't really understand where this line is that I don't want to cross, and I don't want to learn the hard way. So I'm naturally cautious about the warning signs when working with liquids. I chill liquids thoroughly, and hit the seal button as fast as I can when I see boiling. I end up with less liquid per bag (to avoid spills and for safety) and a bit of air left in the bag. My throughput is much faster, burping the air out as I seal with an impulse sealer. This is a manual dexterity task that I've noticed challenges others more than me, but I end up with less or no air in a tidier packet. It is then a luxury to be able to work with liquids as hot as one can comfortably handle, using the impulse sealer. One always needs to chill liquids to have a hope of good results with a chamber machine. Wine! I recently looked again at Argon systems for preserving wine, and realized that all my options would involve a complex, badly build apparatus to deliver an unverifiable gas blanket that only works ideally in one's simplified dreams. For short term use, just buy a spray can and convince oneself that it works. For weeks, good luck. Then I realized that I could store quartos of wine indefinitely in chamber vacuum sealer bags. If one later snips the corner to pour off a little for cooking, the sides cling to each other to form a one-way valve seal, like one of those plastic obscuring sheets that can cling to your kitchen window for years just using a slight film of water. This is an application for an impulse sealer, even if one has a chamber machine. One doesn't need to chill white wine to cook with it. And one is going to chill red wine, just to be able to preserve it using the chamber machine?

Yes! I've had my VP115 for a few months. Nearly the same price as a VP112, and I prefer the form factor, size being as big an obstacle as price. I almost bagged some cold (jelled) chicken stock today, then thought better of it. A $30 impulse sealer is the way to go with liquids and chamber vacuum bags, no matter what chamber vacuum machine one has conveniently at hand. Otherwise, yes, I use the VP115 for everything.

I have one; I use it to clean the (very hefty) grates on my Komodo Kamado. When I tried it on an old cast iron pan (not one I've been responsible for maintaining) I saw it leaving dull lines. Probably ski tracks in hardened gunk passing as seasoning. No idea what it would do to a properly seasoned pan, mine clean with water and a quick wipe of a paper towel. I then always do a quick season before putting away, a bit of duck fat and a blast of heat, then wipe out what I can. My favorite pans in the cast iron / carbon steel category are Spring USA (not Lodge, "vintage" or any of the French brands, all of which I've tried). I have and don't like All-Clad stainless steel. I have a few Henckels Thermolon ceramic nonstick pans, and they're a game-changing new category, with the heft of All-Clad and a worthy successor to conventional nonstick. So my carbon steel pans are a romantic indulgence, that I use when I can.

Over in various ceramic cooker forums (I frequent http://komodokamado.com/forum/) we worry a lot about smoke quality. There are two camps; the one I'm in likes subtle smoke, required that the wood not actually burn. For years I've been using a "smoke pot" consisting of a two quart cast iron Dutch oven with three 1/8" holes drilled in the bottom. I fill it with wood chips and/or chunks, and seal the lid with flour paste (as one would do in North Africa with an ill-fitting couscous pot). I then set this pot on the charcoal, and light the charcoal underneath the pot with a propane wood burner. I worked this out after many experiments, and various people have adopted this exact protocol. This sounds like way too much wood, but it isn't with this approach. An expensive variation is to buy a stainless steel pipe threaded at both ends, and caps, and drill similar holes. Why SS? Before getting novel with metals around fire, understand the science. Various compound metals turn out to be toxic. I recently bought an entry level chamber vacuum machine (the VacMaster VP115) which threw me further into sous vide cooking than I've gotten before. (I was a holdout, and those years are now gone. Don't wait, clamp machines aren't the same, pick a price point and do it!) It is very clear that flavors are naked and clean with sous vide, and a little goes a long ways. I'm reminded of cold extraction coffee, where there is no place to hide, and most coffee beans turn out undrinkable. Here, to smoke then sous vide, I'd certainly use something like my smoke pot rather than open wood. If one doesn't care about smoke rings, then experiment with smoked fats in the sous vide packet. One can collect already smoked fats, grind and render them sous vide for later use, or one can directly smoke e.g lard or butter or duck fat for later use. Again, the effect can be very pronounced, so go very easy. Think Moroccan smen, fermented not smoked, but they never use much.

I own what research suggested would be the best pressure cooker, and I only use it for beets. Even for beets, it's a compromise, but there's a Moroccan beet salad I can have far more often this way. I tried pressure cooking chicken, and it tasted institutional, ghastly. Life is too short, I threw it out. I've made various components from Ivan's book, and improvised noodle dishes from what I'd completed. Not ready yet to give the full shebang a fair test.

Yeah, point taken, I loved these beans in Louisiana, and I've made them. This treatment makes any bean taste good. But if you love red wine, you want to try other wines besides Cab and Merlot. If you love red beans, some of the earth-colored Xocxoc Project beans will blow your mind. They'd be fantastic with this treatment. Also as good as an austere Italian side, plain with salt and olive oil. No, though I've heard of it, and it was pretty much what I was simulating. What any such method risks is less evaporation, a clay pot in an oven really is ideal. A Moroccan tangia is the poster child for such endeavors. Make one by the book once, and it'll change how you make any stew again.

Did not know that. http://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/causesofillnessbadbugbook/ucm071092.htm I could not find a temperature/time curve for destroying phytohaemagglutinin. The "boil for ten minutes" rec is coming from the same people who say cook chicken till inedible. At least beans taste great after this initial boiling. I don't actually like red kidney beans (they're just boring) but my favorite Rancho Gordo-Xocxoc Project beans have probably never been studied by science, one should assume this toxin danger for any bean.

My interest is in effective alternatives to authentic sauces. My periodic dumpling/ravioli binges always get stymied by the question of how to sauce them. For Italian, one can only eat so much butter and sage in one lifetime; pesto and nut sauces aren't everyday fare, and aren't light tomato sauces already a staple? For Chinese, I can only cook so far before rejecting $1.49 brown sludges in jars. Roasted Chilli Paste (Nahm Prik Pow) is a stellar Thai homemade paste, but I can't find enough recipes like this to never open a bought jar. And whenever I ponder cooking Asian to the exclusion of ever cooking Mediterranean again, I'm repelled by the amount of soy sauce I'm setting myself up to consume. Barbara Tropp's books help here; China Moon Cookbook has a quartet of dipping sauces, varied, but with the juice from her homemade pickled ginger as a key ingredient. I've come to accept Thailand as a (very interesting) region of China. (It is a mistake to confine oneself to cooking those Thai dishes that don't look Chinese, and the new flavor notes are welcome.) If I must buy jars, the Thai versions are more expensive but I have fewer questions about their ingredient lists and provenance. Thai sauces come to mind as alternatives for dumplings, thought one is substituting a dependence on fish sauce. Improvise, but look at Authentic Thai Recipes by Kasma Loha-unchit (the sauces). Robert Delf's The Good Food of Szechwan is long out of print, but available used for a song. Loud food he loved in his twenties, that I loved in my twenties. His Dan Dan noodles are based on broth from his braised beef, which I now believe is best made sous vide with short ribs. This becomes a version of a general principle: Even the French aren't making demi-glace that much anymore, preferring to deploy liquids from other steps in the cooking process. Standard dumplings start with raw meat, but Nicoise meat ravioli starts with leftover beef from a daube, again best cooked as if a Moroccan tangia, in earthenware in the lowest possible oven. I've had the best luck improvising dumpling and ravioli sauces by tweaking and redeploying meat liquids. The game of Dictionary comes to mind here. If one isn't being strictly traditional, one should be problem-solving from a broader perspective, showing tradition what it meant to say. In that spirit, what sauces do people like when they're not striving to be authentic?

I've cooked beans all day and/or overnight at 190 F in a controlled water bath. (I immerse an earthenware bean pot, a way of praying to all possible gods just in case.) I love how they come out, better texture and flavor this way. My beans are either Rancho Gordo or imported from Spain, but for this question I suspect age is more important than provenance. However, the people most stunned by these beans haven't tried Rancho Gordo beans before; it would be a mistake for my method to take credit.

http://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/SAV-100-2011-Frozen-Peas

Yes, I can confirm that this is a remarkably effective solution. In a home kitchen, to clean a brass or teflon pasta die (for a pasta extruder such as the Dolly or a torchio or bigolaro), first soak the die for a bit and use a toothpick to remove the bulk of the dough. Then clean thoroughly using a dental waterpik (power flosser, oral irrigator) such as: Panasonic Oral Irrigator EW-DJ10-A

And I wonder if it can be abused as a duck press.

Well, there are two essential rules for date-night cooking (those were the days!): The food must come out incredible but appear effortless. It must be possible to interrupt preparations at any point for several hours with no harm to the meal.The deep fryer flunks both of these rules, unless you mean coming to your class is the date night. But I'll assume otherwise, as date night cooking itself is a very interesting topic. Sous vide can make for wonderful date night cooking, scoring high on both of these rules. The SVS doesn't exactly look effortless, however. I'm thinking an Anova circulator or similar, stuck in the general-use pasta pot. And, say, a Moroccan tagine that requires no further prep, that can be eaten say in bowls sitting on the edge of the bed. Now sealing the bag, huh. One needs to sell this like a magician. Just direct attention away from this question, and no one will ever notice.

Yes, my bad for also being swept into this confusion. Here is the complete die catalog for pastabiz.com, vendor for my Torchio : complete-die-catalog.pdf. The contemporary choices are brass or teflon. If one actually uses brass or teflon dies, one experiences a difference. The goal of theory should be to explain this observation.

I own a Venetian Bigolaro (aka Torchio, vertical hand pasta press: http://pastabiz.com/torchio-hand-press.html) which happens to accept the (thicker, more expensive) dies meant for the "Dolly" electric extruder. Leaning rustic in ways that were dropped by even the Italians a century ago, I grind my own flour, sieving out variable amounts of bran and adding variable amounts of semolina. As an experiment, I deliberately bought a teflon die rather than a bronze die for bucatini, reasoning that my rougher flour eliminates the need for a bronze die as my flour also contributes texture. I'm not sure if that was the right call, but my point: There is an evident difference, I'm a bit astonished that this could be called into question. In my experience with actual science (far from cooking) there's a perennial conflict between "what stands to reason" and what one experiences empirically. It takes an Einstein-grade mind to successfully get out in front using reason. For the rest of us, "what stands to reason" is invariably wrong until it expands to explain what people actually observe. Tight little hermitically sealed logic nuggets always make sense in isolation, but leave something out, and it's always hardest to spot the person that's not there in the photo. My facebook feed is littered with comparisons between a national budget and a household family budget, as if driving to the store bears some relation we can all understand to intergalactic travel. (I have to wonder if even the person posting believes this bunk? Sadly, probably.) Same problem here with pasta: what's at issue isn't the picture, which looks great in isolation, but what's missing from the picture. Yes, also in my experience, one wants a very dry mixture, which is problematic no matter what you do, but which shows up differences in dies. Nevertheless, I'd agree that how one then dries the extruded pasta is the more significant factor, why Italian pasta is generally better. Marc Vetri makes this point in Rustic Italian Food, where he advises the home cook to dry extruded pasta in the fridge.

I have a high-end pressure cooker, sous vide equipment, and various clay cooking vessels such as tagines and bean pots. I bought the pressure cooker to follow Heston Blumenthal. Stews tasted institutional from it, and I only use it now for beets. Even this is a compromise, as an oven-roasted beet is better. Sous vide can and should be a clinical triumph, yet I'm drawn back to the clay. I want to believe nothing beats a tagine, but in fact my favorite stews have come from the "tangia" approach (so far, using bean pots), using very little liquid. Place pot in 450 F oven, immediately turn down to 250 F, cook up to five hours, to replicate a tangia left in the ashes at a Moroccan bath house. Looking at texture is focusing on "what is" rather than "what isn't". What's missing from the more clinical approaches are variations in texture, and the effects of reduction.

Oops, I'm just seeing this now. I wish I'd seen it when you wrote it. The Wolfgang Mock mill isn't so great for corn; I've used a hand mill, or a hand mill first. One can adjust to a coarser grind (the mill must be running as one pours in harder grains) then grind again finely if desired; this could do the trick for smaller corn kernels. The broad kernels as one uses for masa are a no-go. One can control extraction by the choice of sieve, and how many times one sieves. Fantes.com has a selection; I prefer a 12" sieve over an 8 quart stainless steel bowl, for throughput. The finest sieve for pasta, a coarser sieve for bread. As for ash, protein? Yes, grain choice. I found out about aging flour in Suas (some say he borrows freely from Calvel). Since then, I use 40 parts per million ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in my artisan hearth loaf breads. Yes, this little, and it has a dramatic effect. So dramatic that the idea of taking a gram for health sounds like poisoning myself; I've seen what it does to bread dough. How does one do this? Cut 20:1 with white flour, sieve seven times (like my math paper on card shuffling). Cut that 20:1 with white flour, sieve seven times. One now has a 400:1 blend, and the amounts called for by my spreadsheet are easily measured by an ordinary digital kitchen scale, to sufficient accuracy for the purpose. I found this topic again, searching eGullet for ruis bread (Ruisreikäleipä). Yes, after the first day from the farmers market (http://www.nordicbreads.com/) it "evolves", there are some hilarious accounts of the stages, online. That hole in the middle is for storage near the kitchen rafters. In parts of Finland where the heating stove was the baking stove, one baked regularly. In parts where there were separate stoves for each purpose, one kept ruis bread a long time. This account is interesting: http://uralica.com/leipa.htm I like the bit about shaving bits into a bag for people with poor chewing abilities. I'm reminded of how the invention of masa added a decade to the life expectancy of new world inhabitants, a sacred food if there ever was one. In any case, I finally made ruis today, and the depth of flavor blew away the farmers market version. I'm rarely this excited by first versions of breads. There is a dearth of actual recipes online, and those that one can find are suspiciously adulterated, e.g. more white flour than rye. (If that's ruis bread, then a French recipe using a teaspoon of curry powder is a curry.) But how much can one say about baking ruis, for an experienced baker with some practice at flatbreads, once one says it is a flatbread made only from 100% rye, salt, water, wild yeast? I went with 85% hydration, which could actually be low, using water from boiling potatoes. I'd seen potato water online somewhere, and there was a faint but distinct note from the potatoes in the fermentation aroma, which contributed to the depth of flavor. I used 25% starter, converting my usual starter to 100% rye several days earlier. I used 2% salt (all bakers percentages, where the flour is 100%). Autolyse, very long bulk ferment, rolled to 3/4" flats, long proof, baked around 400F for 40 minutes on a stone outside in my ceramic charcoal cooker (http://www.komodokamado.com/, because I have it, an indoor oven would be fine). Not sure what I'd even change, next time. I believe I'll be working with execution for a while, before adjusting this recipe. I worked by hand, and the dough is sticky, like Marin mountain biking in mud season; use a stand mixer. One is unlikely to develop gluten, but kneading serves also to wet every flour particle, and to create air pockets for the yeast. Controlling what happens to the starch is probably critical here, and for now I have no idea.

Naomi Duguid's ebooks are steeply discounted this month (for a few more days), on Amazon and elsewhere. See http://www.workman.com/ecookbook-club/deals/ Browsing "other recommendations" from any of these books on Amazon, one sees other interesting books for a song. My buying patterns in used bookstores are primarily limited by my limited shelf space and my limited attention. With some notable ebooks costing even less, shelf space is not a problem, but attention is more of a problem. I do think the Amazon programmers are being fools by not supporting a uniform folder structure synchronized between all devices and apps. Some people churn through trashy novels, only to abandon them like yesterday's newspaper. For people who collect books to keep, returning years later to books they know they own, Amazon's lack of organizational support for one's collection is going to limit their best customers. We'll simply slow down, there's a limit to the number of books one can appreciate owning with their current file systems, akin to "flat" file systems of the earliest personal computers. Apple learned this lesson nearly 30 years ago, only to realize there's money in keeping iPod interfaces as stupid as possible. Amazon seems mired in this latter view.

Cambro has two grades of lids. Neither is polycarbonate. Either can be cut trivially with shop scissors, a utility knife, even a cooking knife. The hole doesn't have to be exact. This isn't rocket surgery!