Syzygies

I have pretty much the opposite problem. If I get busy and find the KK at 650 F, dinner is going to be late, there's not much I can do quickly to cool it down. It has a lot of thermal mass inside the insulation, which radiates a lot of heat. And it's larger than a BGE. The Extra Large BGE is 205 lbs. The KK weighs 458 lbs, not counting the grills. My ideal for many types of high temperature cooks (e.g. chicken) is to cook as much as possible from retained heat, once the fire is nearly spent. This is hard to do on a schedule, and bread is on a schedule: Once a loaf is ready to bake, one often has a narrow window for best results. Nearly shutting down the KK vents (not entirely, to avoid flashback) is almost as good as catching the fire on the wane. The radiant heat can be uneven if the fire was uneven, and I have to remember to rotate the loaf.

I used to have #7 Kamado before my Komodo Kamado (http://www.komodokamado.com/). I thought they'd cook fairly similarly, but they don't. The K7 was basically steel wire and Portland cement; the KK is made from more advanced materials including substantial insulation. One can rest one's hand on the outside while a 600 F fire burns within. One can stop down the airflow nearly completely, and the KK will hold its temperature long enough for the steam to have its effect, if not to bake the bread. (One is required to mention at this point that one doesn't want to completely shut off oxygen to a hot fire, because of "flashback" when oxygen is reintroduced.) Here's a more detailed comparison, reviewing the KK: Komodo Kamado OTB 23-inch Charcoal Grill http://bbq.about.com/od/charcoalgrillreviews/gr/Komodo-Kamado-Otb-23-Inch-Charcoal-Grill.htm Bouchon explains nicely what "steam to have its effect" means. It's an effective way to moisten the crust. Tartine leaves bread in a combo cooker for half the bake, but it doesn't follow logically that one wants steam for half the bake; the Dutch oven approach is a workaround, and workarounds have different requirements. Bouchon's steam is largely at the beginning of the bake. In any case, by far the best oven spring I've experienced so far involved boiling water and that one 15 inch skillet in my KK. A friend wants to build a bread oven after seeing that loaf. I've tried all the variations on combo cookers and Dutch ovens, and the effect isn't quite the same. Your question does make me wonder how conventional wood-fired outdoor bread (pizza) ovens manage the necessity of steam. One coasts on stored past heat, like I do with my KK. Perhaps by baking enough bread at once, one is simulating the Dutch oven approach. I've certainly noticed this for low & slow barbecue cooks in a ceramic cooker (BGE, K7, KK): A very full cooker is more humid, and this has a beneficial effect. In short, Keller et. al. are on to something. As you note, there are issues implementing this outside, or inside. That's a problem I want to solve.

Rocks (and chains, I guess) can get a lot hotter than water and therefore can store a lot more heat - which the water can use to change phase from liquid to gas (steam). The amount of water will limit the amount of steam and the size/amount of stone will determine how much energy is available for the conversion. I've been waiting to reply to this while I made various experiments. Here's a great link on the physics: Counting Calorieshttp://www.mansfieldct.org/schools/mms/staff/hand/countingcalories.htm The key numbers: It takes 80 calories to thaw a gram of ice, 100 calories to bring that gram to the boiling point, and a whopping 540 calories to then turn that gram of water to steam. Different sites discuss the relative heat stored by different substances. Cast iron holds about 13% as much heat energy as water, degree by degree. Stones hold about 20% as much heat energy as water. So if one runs the numbers, a 15 lb cast iron skillet at 500 F will boil off around 250 ml of water. It makes scant difference whether one uses hot tap water, or boiling water, and the convenience of using ice cubes isn't that inefficient. Of course, one will eventually boil off more water, but once the stored heat is released as steam, the eventual rate will depend on the rate at which one's oven can reheat the pans/chains/rocks involved. Slowly. For an initial burst of steam one can basically ignore this later effect. Bouchon bakery is proposing rather more mass than one 15 lb cast iron skillet, and these numbers make it clear why. However, stainless steel is rather expensive in any form (chains, balls) and substitute metals such as galvanized can release poisons; they're avoided in the barbecue community. Rocks can explode. Cast iron would appear to me to be the most cost effective and easily handled/moved form of thermal mass for this purpose. Pictured is the first of these skillets, in a Komodo Kamado ceramic cooker (http://www.komodokamado.com/): Lodge Logic Pre-Seasoned Skillet (15-inch)http://www.amazon.com/Lodge-L14SK3-Pre-Seasoned-Cast-Iron-Skillet/dp/B00063RWUM Lodge Logic L17SK3 Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet, 17-inchhttp://www.amazon.com/Lodge-L17SK3-Pre-Seasoned-Skillet-17-inch/dp/B00063RWVG Based on these calculations, I'm planning to buy a second 15 inch skillet to stack on the first for my ceramic cooker, and I'm considering a stack of two 17 inch skillets on the floor of my indoor oven. It looks pricey, but not compared to swapping ovens. The thermal mass can only help for most applications, so they'd just live there. The stack of two buys me the liberty to use ice (shown here to be only slightly less efficient), which is safer indoors, and less likely to spatter and dampen my fire outdoors. (I wish there was a term of art for forum responses of the form "I don't use sous vide and my food comes out fine!" Of course it does! Such responses don't give credit to commercial bakers who understand this problem far better than any amateur, and consider ample steam worth the trouble. As in, more steam than most of us have ever experienced, making bread for ourselves. If one can't make the comparison, one just doesn't know.)

To return to the original question, at ordinary atmospheric pressure alcohol boils off at about three times the rate of water. This rule of thumb always is stated with an asterisk, saying that the actual relationship is quite complicated. At 250 F in a modern pressure cooker, is the ratio higher? Is this an effective technique for reducing alcohol? Put differently, is there any advantage to involving the pressure cooker? This is a straight physics question to which I am wholly unequipped to guess the answer. At least I'm aware that I would be just guessing, and I'm not going to guess. Does anyone know? (I found this old thread, researching how to use high alcohol beer as a liquid for making sourdough bread. In that application, alcohol can limit the growth of sourdough organisms, except those that feed on alcohol itself, changing the lactic acid / acetic acid balance of the result. But I am not interested in workarounds for my specific problem. I want to understand if there's a technique here. All of the proposed workarounds and commentary for the OP's question dodge answering the basic physics question he poses. My reason for needing the answer is entirely different, and a few years from now others will wonder this, with again entirely different motivations. So the physics question itself is worth answering, as stated.)

If a hedge fund were using Google's raw data to predict Zagat ratings, and was placing bets representing serious "skin in the game", they'd apply statistics to Google's raw data in a very different way. Remember the Netflix Prize? At least Netflix tries to figure out reviewers in common with you, to predict individually what you'll like. I'm just back from Brunswick, ME where I used Tripadvisor's ordered list to pick a couple of great dinners. One needed a model for why each entry was positioned where it was, having conversations exactly like this thread. Such analysis works, looking beyond the aggregate scores.

The reviews convinced me not to want this meat-centric we-invented-the-wheel tome, but also lead me to this great web site: http://www.hippressurecooking.com/

I sometimes swap my credit card for the dinner plate, if I can't manage to pay in advance.

As Not Seen on TVRestaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Squarehttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html Dunno, maybe he's better at squirt bottles?

Second that. I recall startled glances over to my wife's station, to see her using a Bamix on wet solids I'd only consider suitable for a mortar and pestle. Doesn't even get hot. She prefers light tools but doesn't mind the weight.

I'm into my share of charmingly retro food preservation techniques (e.g. fermenting hot sauce) but canning isn't one of them. Throw a dart at the cookbook section of Barnes & Noble and you'll find a recipe (e.g. Colicchio, Keller) for a fussy tomato conserve. Dumb it down, and make enough to freeze for the year. If you have to revert to cans partway through the year, your recipe was too fussy. Think 30 lb batches. I skin, salt, and partially dehydrate tomatoes, then bag them in chamber vacuum pouches with an impulse sealer, and store them in a chest freezer for the year. They last several years in perfect condition. I use CA tomatoes from my garden, and NY tomatoes from farmers markets. I dread ordering dishes that involve tomatoes, off-season, even in $100 restaurants. They taste canned. It amazes me that restaurants don't freeze tomato conserves for the year, selling the excess through say Eataly.

Just to help calibrate your point of view, what's the best ramen joint you've been to in NYC? If you've found supposedly good ones to be can't-finish-the-broth awful, I'd agree. But that's no reason to dis the category. My answer would be Jin Ramen http://www.jinramen.com/node/61 though it doesn't even make various top ten lists. The tonkotsu broth is for real.

Oh, I was picturing parody just from the thread title, and so often I'm disappointed. What a relief here! Thank you.

We freeze just the basil, olive oil, and some salt. Soupe au Pistou is the primary off-season application, and beside, the Provencal don't add pine nuts. This is a perfect application of chamber vacuum bags and a $40 impulse sealer. I'm quite sure I'd do it this way even if I had a chamber vacuum machine handy; the impulse sealer is faster. Burp the air past the sealing edge, and seal. In a deep freeze these pesto pouches are indestructible.

The Fissler Vitaquick Pressure Cooker, 8.5qt (top rated by Cooks Illustrated) is back in stock various places, such as Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00873AOIU). I ordered one; the last straw was dealing with the bones and trimmings from short ribs for a Daube Provencal, and picturing the quick stock I should be making in a pressure cooker. I've read elsewhere (here?) that buzz is only increasing for pressure cookers in general, and Fissler in particular, so stock may be erratic for some time to come. MC@home got to me, but also Heston Blumenthal at Home (http://www.amazon.com/Heston-Blumenthal-at-Home/dp/1608197018). Eight pages of pressure cooker stocks, with a confident authority and calm to the layout and typography, these recipes enough reason alone to master this tool. In comparison, I was having the strongest sense of deja vu reading MC@Home. I simply couldn't place it. It wasn't early Wired magazine. A new kind of cookbook? Then I realized, I have all these home repair tomes from Home Depot and similar sources, a category where I really need the help, and the layout and presentation is spot on identical to MC@Home. Not that that's a bad thing (I love these books) but that's a comparison one can't unsee.

I use a silicone steamer with the legs chopped off in a commercial rice cooker setup, but it's still tall. This chile rack is still available at Surly Table: http://www.surlatable.com/product/PRO-625756/Chile-Pepper-Grill-Rack-and-Corer I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But hollow stainless steel tubes?

I use every size of steam table insert that will fit. "water cooling" computer fanatics are petrified of mixing metals, because of cross-metal corrosion. Sous Vide Supreme seemed blithely ignorant of this issue, when I complained that their aluminum "elevate the insert somehow" rack had corroded. You'd think they'd offer a stainless option. I use a Sous Vide Supreme in one kitchen, but I do feel that they're in it for the money.

The Fissler Vitaquick Pressure Cooker, 8.5qt is back in stock various places. I ordered one today from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00873AOIU

Yep, my first PID controller went on my ceramic cooker (http://komodokamado.com), made by BBQ Guru (http://thebbqguru.com/). They're all the rage at BBQ cookoffs; people really want to abandon their smokers to automatic control so they can go schmooze. These PID controllers adjust the proportion of time a fan is blowing air into the fire, over six second intervals. Suppose you want a 220 F barbecue pit. If you blow all of the time when the pit drops to 200 F, none of the time when the pit rises to 240 F, and a proportionate fraction of the time for temperatures in between (e.g. half the time at 220 F) then the fire will stabilize at some temperature in between. Unfortunately, this might not be the midpoint, 220 F. To a topologist (a kind of mathematician) this is the same kind of problem as two hikers starting towards each other from opposite ends of the same trail. They're surely meet, but probably not in the middle. The PID algorithm is a famous engineering solution to this puzzle, where the device adjusts the rules of the game until the stable point is 220 F (or whatever one desires). These work with many different applications, such as walk-in freezers. "Learning" different control problems (e.g. different rice cookers with a Sous Vide Magic (http://freshmealssolutions.com/)) can lead to overshoots and the geeks among us actually adjust algorithm parameters by hand. The bottom line is I can set my charcoal fire with a twist of a dial, like an old-school oven. This is way cool. I'm making Provencal daube this week, which required a long slow cook long before the advent of sous vide, and a Spanish clay pot in my ceramic cooker will be my "slow cooker".

Yes. It boggles the mind that one can't set an exact temperature with any slow cooker on the market. PID controls should be an option with stoves, slow cookers, you name it. Another industry where we're waiting on a generation of executives to retire. I've never bought the argument that an expensive juicer pays for itself, though it may for some people. But better control simmering a stew? How many meat stews have to have their quality at stake to pay off any difference in slow cooker costs? PID controllers work great with hot plates, your pot. The Achilles' heel of sous vide cooking in plastic is the lack of feedback. A restaurant has recipes dialed in, but all-over-the-map home cooks needs to taste what we're doing as we go. Luckily, PID controllers are just as good at controlling "bain marie" setups. I like putting a ceramic bean pot in a PID controlled water bath, for very slow beans or for any stew. Of course, besides cost there's space and component complexity. Thus, my original point: Why don't slow cooker executives see a market for PID control?

So last Sunday my wife and I pulled several corks, because each bottle of wine tasted off. We both said "pine mouth" but purely as a descriptive phrase ("boasts striking inner perfume" is too affected for us), as we hadn't been cooking with pine nuts in months. Then we remembered the salad from the banquet on Friday night. A step up from rubber chicken, but do you think a caterer will buy Italian pine nuts when a species the Chinese will label as pine nuts sells for less? The symptoms cleared, and the leftover wine tasted fine. Know your pine nut sources, use Mediterranean pine nuts or use something else. And assume a caterer is either unaware of the issue, or is willing to mildly poison you to make a buck.

A reference back to this thread got me interested enough to buy the Kindle edition of the book. While I'm happy to help support the authors' research, I was taken aback by the lack of weights. Searching the Kindle edition, the word "hydration" simply doesn't appear. Luckily, I found Zoe's comment above, so I can make an experiment using my spreadsheet recipe. I get the impression from this thread that the authors consider their method a viable choice for anyone, even people with experience baking. Was it the publisher who insisted on avoiding such terms? The UK edition is published later, by a different publisher: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Five-Minute-Bread-revolutionary-kneading/dp/0091938945 I really need a plug-in for my Amazon.com account, that stops me when I try to buy a cookbook, and opens instead Amazon.co.uk. Can anyone confirm that the UK edition uses weights? I was under the impression that, just as it is hard to get published in the US using weights, it is hard to get published in the UK without using weights. And traveling, they do seem to speak a more complex, nuanced version of the English language, at least as far as I can tell.

This isn't some mountain terrain where the marble only balances in two places, "knead" or "no knead". There's a continuum of possible techniques. My favorite bread making guide is the Tartine Bread book, with gentle folds in a bowl. Compared to my original preconceptions about kneading, that's closer to no knead. No knead could appeal not because it's easier, but rather because it better fits one's schedule. If I miss by an hour or two the ideal schedule for Tartine bread, it doesn't come out as well.

The cleanest burning charcoal I can get my hands on for regular use is made from coconut shells, from the same guy who makes my best-of-category ceramic cooker. He ships anywhere, but most affordably if one buys or shares a pallet: http://www.komodokamado.com/komodo-kamado-coconut-charcoal To do better one would have to buy Japanese bincho charcoal, which costs even more. I've used coconut charcoal to bake cherry pies when my oven was out of service; it really burns that clean. For low and slow barbecues I add the smoke I want, by putting wood chips or chunks in a two quart cast iron dutch oven, with holes drilled in the bottom and the lid sealed on with library paste. For less critical uses I make regular pilgrimages to Lazzari charcoal outside San Francisco, and fill up the car with their hardwood charcoal. They're known for mesquite, but at their distribution center (a disintegrating building with a Mad Max feel to it) they sell many types of charcoal and wood. Eventually I figured out that they use the same hardwood in their briquets as their lump, and a neutral binder I can't taste. I find the briquets burn a whole lot cleaner and more predictably in practice. I can reach 800 F as easily, not that I want to. So why was I part of the obsession over lump charcoal? Something about Kingsford tasting like a petroleum refinery? This isn't true for all briquets, one might consider broadening one's search.

Yep. I go to the Alemany Market in San Francisco each year to buy the red ripe version of a chile like this to ferment for hot sauce. Is Martin selling his 60 different cultivars at different stands there? It would appear so. Very important to take a bite before purchase. This should be a terrible mistake, otherwise don't bother buying those chiles.

I tried sous vide corned beef once, and we weren't entirely happy with it. This is a bit mixing up centuries as technique goes, and might have worked out better conventionally. I was making New England Boiled Dinner, and conventional technique on the Irish side of my family was to bring to a slow simmer when the letter arrived announcing our visit. It was good, just not amazing, and conventional methods would have left more room for feedback. To be fair about this would require multiple trials and a control; my source was Cafe Rouge in Berkeley, CA, which as a rule sells phenomenal products. This however may have been brined a bit tight. One might repackage to * first reduce the salt by soaking, if one fears the brine was too salty * remove the herbs, if one believes as often claimed that herbs are more intense sous vide * change to a heat-tolerant bag, if the original bag has unknown heat properties So this question is somewhat religious/political. Anyone new to sous vide should make certain to purchase bags rated for sous vide. I've noticed that the most vocal opponents to this idea generally have a stash of 1000 bags they bought before thinking about heat safety. Of the three reasons, I worry most about the third. Our understanding of health risks is a moving target; I have cookbooks that call for the use of asbestos pads.