Jonathon

I use my Thermomix for making the dough, rather than my KA. I don't know if it's the stop-start kneading pattern or the shape of the blades, but it seems to mix doughs wonderfully well and very quickly.

My Anova (220v) has a CE sticker.

Yes no stopover in Chicago and now sitting in my office in Melbourne, looking very well. Packaging held up pretty well, the smallest dents in the black anova box where it was crammed into the outside box, but who cares about that. The circulator itself is in perfect condition. The temptation to take it to my office kitchen to try out is very hard to resist...

Thankfully in Australia we have a $1,000 threshold for VAT, so stuff like this goes through customs fairly instantly. Mine made it from Texas, via Chicago and past Australian customs in 4 days. Hopefully it'll arrive at my door in the morning. (Monday)

Yes I'm happy enough with the shipping charge to Australia, especially given the very low cost of the unit, at least by Australian standards.

Absolutely. Even high quality chocolate usually contains ~30% sugar, and therefore 15% fructose. We don't have any fructose medical issues in my family but we try to limit it from a general health and weight loss perspective. So when we cook with chocolate we'll use a very dark chocolate, at least 85%, so that the fructose component is minimal. For example, if making ganache, I'll typically use 200g cream and 200g 85% green & black chocolate but while heating the cream I'll add 30-45g of dextrose to sweeten further. That then leaves the ganache with about 3% fructose (15g out of 440g). Not ideal, but low enough for me, given the overall lack of fructose in my general diet.

These guys specialise in making sweet things using dextrose and rice malt syrup, both fructose free www.thesugarbreakup.com

Re the 220/240v version, I emailed Anova last week and they said it was a few weeks away. Hopefully that means this side of Christmas.

Thanks, I agree it's the hygroscopic nature of dextrose that's causing the problem with meringues. Ideally there would be some kind of agent I could add to change the hygroscopic nature and allow it to dry out? As for the health reasons, you're correct that you'd need to use more to get the same sweetness as sucrose, but when I vastly reduced fructose from my diet a couple of years ago I reduced by taste for sweetness considerably. Glucose certainly isn't a valid 1:1 substitute for sucrose for those with a normal western palate, but it's becoming very important for those who want to remove fructose from their diet and avoid sugar alcohols or artificial sweeteners. Cheers Jonathon

For various reasons, but largely to avoid avoid fructose, I've been playing around with dextrose as the main sweetener in my cooking. I've had no real problems using it in ganaches, I tend to use 85% green & blacks, which is sweet enough for me, (and tops out my fructose intake) but for others I add some glucose to the cream and it's fine, especially when coated. But when making French meringues, it's proving very difficult to get a crust. This is a well documented problem, when cooking with dextrose, so at least I know it's not just me, but I'm really keen to find a solution to getting a crispy crust on a meringue, without using sugar (sucrose). Is there perhaps some kind of drying agent I can add, to get the meringue to dry out? Thanks Jonathon