btbyrd

Thanks! And congrats on your purchase as well! I'm a bit jealous of the Joule functionality and am excited to see where it goes from here. Please keep us posted! My new Breville is also replacing a Cuisinart -- a lower end model we got 13 years ago when we got married. That was in a world before "smart ovens," and while this one does a halfway decent job of warming up Bagel Bites, it's definitely more toaster than oven (and it's a kind of lousy toaster at that). So happy to have something that's bigger, has convection, and has good temperature control. The high speed "air fry" modes are also welcome, even if I hate the phrase "air fry." Will do! I'll even buy a bag of Wonderbread for the team to make that toast demo happen. I think from what I've seen, the toasting function is a bit darker in the middle of the oven and cooler near the edges... but I'll be sure to report back with some sample photos.

If Traeger ovens were all one cubic foot, well-insulated boxes containing a high speed convection fan, I don't think there'd be much of a market for using a wireless probe to measure the ambient temperature inside them. But the ones they actually sell are comparably drafty large cylinders that don't heat nearly as evenly as a something like the BSO or APO, so having multiple probes measuring ambient temperature at different points inside the oven is not the worst idea. I think the main thing though is that people hate wires in this day and age. If you can pop multiple probes in multiple pork butts and monitor them on your phone inside the house, that's a much nicer situation than having to go check on your wired probe every 30 minutes or whatever. Anyway, I see the appeal of using a wireless probe in the Joule Oven, but again am not super sold on how beneficial having a probe that measures the ambient temperature would be (assuming that the oven is as accurate as it seems to be). The Combustion unit's multiple sensors and predictive timing is a different story altogether. It'd be cool if they could integrate that with the Joule Oven software, but I'd never buy anything on the basis of unannounced features based on the promise of updatable firmware. I will follow the development of the oven and app with much interest, but I just pulled the trigger on the non-Joule version which I'd been planning on buying anyway. With the sale price, I couldn't see paying the 43% premium right now. Maybe in a year or two I'll upgrade.

I'm sure there are. I'm just saying that if you have a well regulated environment controlled by a PID, having an additional widget measure ambient temperature isn't going to tell you anything new. It'd be like having an extra thermometer reading the temperature of a sous vide bath when there's already a thermometer measuring that temperature in the circulator. The Breville ovens have excellent temperature control. If I set them to 350F, I don't know that I'd want or need an additional gizmo to tell me that the oven is set to 350F. Maybe some people would find that information worth paying for, but a smart thermometer is of diminished utility in a smart oven (or on a Control Freak, or for use with a circulator). Pellet grills are larger and more prone to having hotter and colder zones, so that's kind of a different ballgame. But I take your point... different strokes for different folks. If people have the Joule Oven and also have a Combustion probe, it'd be cool to use them together. But I think the number of people who would buy Chris Young's thermometer just to use with the Joule Oven is quite small.

I don't really see the need for a probe that monitors ambient temperatures in tightly thermostatically regulated environments like a PID controlled oven, water bath, or induction burner. And while the Combustion Inc thing seems cool with its many sensors and predictive timer/app, it's also $200 and I'm passing on that. (It's also still kinda vaporware, but global supply chains are screwed and I'm not blaming Chris Young for that.) I don't know that anyone is going to shell out $700 so their $350 toaster oven can have a probe and an app. Or maybe they would. I can't say. Speaking for myself, I guess it'd be cool to have, but as with the $150 premium on the Joule Oven over the non-Joule version of the same oven, I don't know that the unique value proposition of that setup is especially high.

And the new Polyscience Hydropro Plus circulator.

You can also get the Joule Oven in a black and red color scheme for an added $50, but that black finish is going to be harder to maintain than shiny stainless over time. And if you're spending $550 and want a black smart oven, you might as well spend the extra $50 and get the APO. It's got steam, it's got a probe, and it's capable of true low temperature cooking. The PID on the Breville seems to be accurate to +/- 5 degrees F, which might not be a big deal if it spends roughly the same amount of time over and under... but you're still working with dry bulb temperatures and any protein cooked in there will be meat-sweating itself to cooler temps... so it's not really going to be safe to try to do sous-vide-esque low temp cooks in the Breville. But that's not really the point of the unit anyway. I for one would not expect the Combustion Inc. thermometer to work with the Joule Oven at any point. I guess that'd be cool, but I don't see Breville taking the time to integrate a niche third party accessory into their product. Now if Breville came out with their own cheap wireless probe thermometer, that'd be something. I think they missed an opportunity by not integrating a probe. Or adding steam. Oh well.

The Joule Oven the exact same product as the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro but it has wifi and an app with recipes. You can download the app yourself and see what's on offer. The app can "run" recipes that have multiple cooking stages, but as of right now you cannot program your own recipes and have them run "on autopilot." I assume they'll add this functionality sometime, but maybe not. The SOAFP is on sale right now for $350. The Joule Oven is $500. That's a 43% premium for added wifi and an app with little content as of yet. I have faith that there's going to be a lot more recipes added in the coming years, but I don't think the value proposition right now is worth the very significant expense. I also think it's stupid to introduce a new flagship model at full price and put an otherwise identical model on sale at the same time. The Joule Oven is available exclusively through Breville and Williams-Sonoma. I have tried in vain to find discount codes that would help make the oven cheaper.

You can look inside on Amazon UK.

The Aviary's book "Zero" focuses on alcohol free cocktails, as does Salway and Water's book "Redemption Bar (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)."

I'm going to buy a smart oven sometime soon and I've been following the major contenders for a few years. I was intrigued by the CSO, but it's too small for my desired use. I've been waiting for a "CSO Plus" that's large enough to hold a quarter sheet pan and tall enough to accommodate two racks, but that does not seem to be forthcoming. The APO is certainly large enough (possibly too large for me), it's expensive (though justifiably so), and doesn't really toast (womp womp). I've thought about getting both the APO and a Bit More Toaster, as it seems like a killer combo, but that's a bulky and pricey proposition. I also am under the impression that steam ovens seem to develop faults and be less reliable than other countertop ovens. So now I'm leaning strongly toward the BSOAP which is spacious, has good convection, seems to be relatively reliable, and makes decent toast (at least toward the middle of the oven). And while it's expensive at $350 (on sale), it's still a far cry from the $700+ I'd have to shell out for the APO and a dedicated toaster.

I don't know that there's much of a place for heavy cleavers in the home kitchen. Or in a professional kitchen. Or even a butcher shop. (Most butchers that need to cut through bone are going to use a saw.) The one place where I think a more robust cleaver may come in handy is in finishing some Asian poultry preparations that involve cutting (hacking) cooked chicken or duck legs... but apart from those, I can't think of when I'd use one. I do know that if I *did* want to get one, I'd buy one of the heavier CCK cleavers like their bone chopper. In my kitchen, the thing that's closest to a cleaver and does all of my dirty jobs is a Tojiro DP 240mm western deba. It's shaped like a French chef's knife, but it's half a centimeter thick and weighs almost a full pound. It slays.

No, there’s just a wifi (or Bluetooth, I can’t remember) version of the SOAFP called the Joule Oven.

Breville and ChefSteps (which was acquired by Breville a couple years ago) recently released the Joule Oven, which is a Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro with integrated software control via a smartphone app. There's not a ton of information on what exactly it can do online, but the app is a free download and you can browse the recipes on there even if you don't have an oven. This is very interesting, but it seems that the oven isn't programmable by the end user and that you're locked into using the ChefSteps recipes if you want to do put a cook on "autopilot" (where there are several programmable stages). This is in contrast to something like the APO which allows users to program their own recipes. The Joule Oven is $499 (or $549 for their black stainless version, which looks cool but would probably be less easy to clean in the long run). This is a $100 premium over the normal price of the SOAFP, which happens to be $50 off right now at $349. I wonder if having a smartphone controllable version of the SOAFP is worth a $150 premium. If it's not programmable, I'm sort of dubious. If it is worth the premium, I hope they make some more in-depth marketing videos that explain what it's capable of. The CS promo video: I've wanted a new countertop oven for many years but have held off. I am attracted to the APO, but it is huge and doesn't make decent toast. I've thought about getting the APO and a Breville Bitmore toaster (well reviewed online) but having one giant thing and a toaster on my counter would cramp things. The combo would also cost $700. The normal SOAFP, by contrast, is smaller and makes decent toast -- at least in the middle. It seems there are some colder zones on the sides of the oven that don't toast as evenly. It does lack steam, which kind of bums me out. Actually, what bums me out is that the Joule Oven lacks steam. In my imagination, a Joule Oven is a countertop combi. (Your imagination may vary.) But I already have a few circulators, so the sous vide mode wouldn't be that interesting... and I don't bake bread, so getting improved oven spring isn't a top priority for my usage. Which makes me wonder if paying twice as much for the giant APO and a toaster is worth it when I can just get a non-smartphone-ified SOAFP for $350 and (probably) be very happy with it.

That's the one! I highly recommend them for all kinds of knives, from the mundane to the extravagant. They can do everything from a basic sharpening to full restorations, chip repairs, major thinning, and regrinding/reprofiling. The prices are extremely reasonable (almost unreasonably reasonable) and the turnaround is super fast. I sharpen most of my knives myself, but sometimes you need (or just really want) to have a pro do it. And Ryan at District Cutlery actually knows what he's doing (unlike most of the "professional" sharpeners offered locally in the places I've lived). Almost all of their Instagram feed is focused on sharpening. Check it out.

Some good stuff already mentioned. Modernist Cuisine and MC @ Home. The Pepin technique books are fantastic. I like Cookwise/Bakewise as well. The Food Lab is good, as is the CIA's "The Professional Chef." Some books I'd add are: The Institut Paul Bocuse Gastronomique book - Technique-driven, lots of pictures, covers a bunch of classical groundwork. Accessible and high-brow all at once. James Peterson's Sauces: Classical and Contemporary - A classic in the field of saucemaking. Recipes are scaled more for restaurants, but there's nothing else out there that covers sauces in such breadth and depth. The CIA's Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen - A textbook, also very restaurant/pro-chef focused. But it covers a lot of ground quite well.

Apart from the beef and the spices, anything else in the bag should go in the trash. Especially if it's thick and creamy. You might consider soaking the brisket for a few hours if it's not low-sodium.

But now that I've thought about it for a second, a shio koji cured corned brisket has potential. Appropriate all the cultures!

Exogenous enzymatic tenderization is no bueno. Sorry for your loss.

Got my beastliest knife back from a spa day at District Cutlery. Definitely something fun.

Bones contribute mostly body/gelatin to a stock, where meat contributes flavor. Ham bones are an exception, especially if you're dealing with a dry cured ham that may have been smoked. I wouldn't bother with a city ham, but maybe there's something to be said for a country ham bone. Still, 10-12 hours is a long time and ham bones aren't super big, so I'd expect extraction to be close to complete after that much cooking. Gnaw on one and let us know! As an aside, my move in the past few years is to make a ham hock/bone stock in the IP and then use that as a braising liquid or soup base (often cut with some chicken stock). Father's Country Hams sells my favorite hocks and bones for this purpose -- super duper flavorful and the hocks have a goodly amount of meat on them. Their naked hambones are a great size too. Anyway, 90 minutes in the IP, pull the hocks out, dump in a bunch of aromatics (onions, garlic, celery, peppercorns, sometimes bay leaves) and do a 30-45 minute simmer/steep to layer in a fresh vegetal layer. Stuff is pure gold. Adds so much depth and aroma.

Fish and grits and all that... good stuff. Oh yay-er! Blackened wild grouper and shrimp, Marsh Hen Mill unicorn grits with smoked gouda, grilled pepper melange, and a veloute “gravy” made from a dashi of Benton's bacon and Father's country ham bones. Garnished with scallion and Neuske’s lardon. Collard greens braised in that dashi were served on the side. And yes, I buried the fish under a bunch of garnish. It was stupid good.

There are a lot of advantages to induction and induction burners can be great depending on the task. They're easy to clean, don't heat up the kitchen, are very energy efficient, are as responsive as gas, can boil water in a hurry, and some of the nice ones offer an unbeatable level of temperature control. If you're doing pastry work or running a catering operation or something, I'm sure they're great. And I assume that somebody somewhere is making hobs with giant induction coils in them. But for all the chefs raving about them, I've never seen anyone rocking induction on a hot line for service. High end places will have gas or wood fire or charcoal setups or planchas for that kind of thing. Induction is nice to have around, but if it's all that you have around, you're missing out.

I have a love/hate relationship with induction.There are three things I hate about (most) induction cooktops. The uneven heat is perhaps the most bothersome. The other things I hate are a lack of fine grained temperature control (10 power levels isn't enough, people) and not having a control knob to control the temperature (membrane switches suck). I have a commercial induction burner in the form of the Vollrath Mirage Pro, which has 100 power levels and a knob so it avoids two of the three pitfalls. But it still unevenly heats larger cookware because of the relatively small size of its induction coil. As others have noted, cast iron is a bad conductor of heat but cast iron isn't the culprit here. I have a similar boil pattern in my All Clad Copper Core and D7 cookware, and it never gets better no matter how long you let things boil. And if I put something massive like my Modernist Cuisine baking steel on it and let it heat up slowly for an hour, it's still abysmally unevenly heated. This promotional photo is a stupid lie: Induction coils only heat what's directly above them. And they they don't evenly heat even that circle; they create a ring of heat with a colder spot in the middle. For some applications, like boiling water in a medium sized pot, this uneven heat is not really an issue. For other purposes, it can be intensely irritating. Trying to get an even sear on proteins in a 12" pan isn't going to happen. Trying to fry three or more eggs evenly isn't going to happen. It sucks. Even super expensive units like the Control Freak have this problem. Here's the scorch pattern of a cast iron pan on the Control Freak: You can mitigate this with more conductive cookware, but it never fully gets rid of the problem. Did I mention that you should be careful about slowly heating up your pans because they're liable to warp? Grr... so stupid. I had to hammer the bottoms flat on some of my Dartos because I used them at high heat on induction. No longer. I now use portable butane burners for high intensity searing. I don't know much about what's on the market for 240V induction rangetops, but because they have multiple burners, they can "solve" the problem by offering induction coils of different sizes. I hope that some of them actually have large induction coils so that you can evenly sear or boil in 12"+ pots and pans. The one system that seems to avoid this problem is the Thermadore Freedom induction cooktops because they use an array of small induction coils instead of large ones. It dynamically detects the position and size of your cookware and turns on only the coils beneath it. Seems like a cool system, but it it multiplies the number of parts that can fail because you're using like fifty induction coils rather than five. And it's very expensive. And you have to control your range through a touch screen. Grr. Induction has so much potential but it also kind of sucks.

RE: fried chicken and browning, it's important to incorporate baking soda to buttermilked chicken if you want a golden brown crust. The acid in the buttermilk shifts the pH enough to retard the Maillard, as they say. Bumping the pH back up with baking soda corrects this. Another bit of frying knowledge gleaned from Dave Arnold and Cooking Issues.