btbyrd

Conway Electric.

My favorite Li Ziqi video isn't food related. Also check out Dianxi Xiaoge's channel.

The thing to do is start them out with a cup of dashi. I have been umami-bombing myself for like 15 years. It's not really all that mysterious and I think you're getting too in your head about it. I don't know how many people you're serving, but my initial thought would be to do 3-5 canapes each featuring a different classic umami-rich ingredient. Also have a shaker of MSG on the table and let guests taste it themselves by salting their finger or whatever. Parm, shiitake, miso, bonito flake, some crudo cured in kombu.... you know, whatever. But at that point you're basically just doing a mini-meal as hors d'oeuvres. That's how I'd want to do it, but I'm cheffy and pretentious. The easier route is just to start with dashi. Good dashi is simple and contains two classic sources of umami. It was by investigating the properties of dashi that umami was discovered in the first place. Start at the beginning. Free glutamic acid from kombu + isosinate from katsuobushi. Maybe serve two dashis, one classic and one with dried shiitake for an extra dose of guanylate. Or a whole dashi flight also featuring some crappy hon dashi or your own synthetic "dashi" constructed from MSG and magic powders. I don't know, it's your dinner. Go nuts.

The dinner itself should be the educational experience. Grafting it on beforehand with MSG scrambled eggs is weird.

These days I mostly get Nueske's applewood smoked bacon from an upscale grocer for $9.99/lb. I used to order it through the mail at twice the price (factoring in shipping) so I feel lucky. It's a fantastic all-around bacon... good for eating, good as a seasoning, tasty fat. Not quite artisanal, but very good.

My old Thermapen MK3 started to drain batteries down like nobody's business and it made me distressed. Santa heard me bitching about it and brought me an orange Thermapen One. While there's certainly no need to upgrade from an older model to the One, it is noticeably nicer. And it uses AAA batteries. My first use was to cook tenderloin steaks for Christmas lunch/dinner, and no headlamps were needed even though it was dark outside. The extra speed is also appreciated even though home cooks don't need it. Working in a professional kitchen where you might need to probe a bunch of chickens or whatever, the faster read time is real nice.

Only 109? Amateurs.

I always just buy the red one.

Thanksgiving is fundamentally a harvest festival celebrating the Columbian exchange (broadly construed). Think about what cuisine would have been like in the New World at the time. What the settlers would have brought with them. Serve venison, game birds, trout, oysters, and clams. Do a succotash with the three sisters. Incorporate chili and chocolate. Look to indigenous cuisines, even Mexican cuisines, for inspiration. There are so many traditions and inspirations to draw upon, so many more flavors and techniques and preparations to draw upon than we as a culture seem to be willing to allow ourselves to imagine.

I seem to have misplaced my copy of The Fat Duck cookbook, but I recall that it had a recipe for the three nitro poached aperitif things that come out first. I have made the Campari ones before, and I'm pretty sure I "cooked" a recipe from the book. Does anyone happen to have the spec for that one?

Then came the f***ing onions.

Working the salad bar station. Red bell time was my moment of zen.

It depends on the circumstance. If i am using a nice knife on a nice board, I can do it however I want and not have to worry. Especially if I'm just cooking at home. But if I'm doing half a case of peppers at once on a hard poly board with soft European steel, it usually works out best to go skin side down. The edges just don't last long enough to go skin-side up if you're cutting a bunch at once. But you can cut them skin side down forever, even with a dull knife. Compost. There's a lot of bitter stuff in the seeds and ribs that aren't delicious Haha... you should have seen the horror show blades that everyone else in that kitchen used. I had to go out and buy a NSF-certified beater so I didn't have to use their garbage house knives. And I'll tell you what... it's hard to get a better value for your money than a 10" Victorinox Fibrox for $30 on eBay.

Peps.

It's called cooking with a temperature delta. You set the circulator bath to a higher temp than the desired final core temp of the food and this means that it gets done faster, but you have a risk of overcooking things if you don't time it right or forget to pull the item from the bath in time. The easiest way to get your head around this idea is to think of SV eggs. The standard way of doing them is selecting a temperature between 60-70C and dropping your eggs in for an hour. As we all know, an hour is a long ass time to wait for a single egg to cook. The team did the experiments and found out that if you set your bath for slightly higher -- 75C -- you could get similar results to the 62-63C egg in just 13 minutes. But if you forget and pull them at 15 minutes, you will have lost the doneness you were aiming for. The size of your eggs matters more, as does their initial temperature. Cooking without a delta takes longer but produces more consistent results. Joule "Turbo" is that, but applied to steak and pork chops or whatever. It does speed things up slightly, but SV is such a convenient, timesaving workflow that I've never felt the need to cook a steak faster with it. An egg? Sure. For me, the 13 minute 75C egg is the best application of the technique. It makes your gourmet instant noodle game "more instanter." Ain't nobody got an hour to wait on a 62C onsen egg at lunchtime. The other application that this is good for is imposing a bit of a gradient of doneness on certain items where that's desirable. Some fish, for instance, have better texture if the outside is set a bit more firmly than the inside, so cooking with a hotter bath and allowing the outside to "overcook" in the sous vide bath can be beneficial. But you can often accomplish something similar or better in the finishing step when you sear or broil or whatever. On a steak or pork chop, I really don't care that much if there's a bit of a gray/overcooked band present, and I usually prefer that textural contrast to uniform edge to edge soft pappy SV protein. A final note: none of this applies to long cooking cuts that are held at temperature for extended periods to tenderize them. You can kind of do "turbo" by assuming that tenderizing reactions will happen twice as quickly for every 10C you go up in temp, but that that's not something you can give a snappy marketing name to.