btbyrd

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.

Teppanyaki trio! On our first Valentine's Day, my wife and I went on a date to a chain teppanyaki place. It's become one of our traditions, but with COVID and a new baby at home, going out to eat wasn't on our menu this year. So I broke out my Blackstone flat top and we did teppanyaki at home. I wish my eyes weren't so dead in this pic, but whatever. I was approximately 3 Wild Turkey 101 beverages in at this point, and was trying to flex Iron Chef style.

Convection really makes a difference with frozen fried products. I don't have an air "fryer" but I bet they do a great job on this kind of thing. I put my tots on a cooling rack over a foil lined sheet pan and do a high temp convection bake. Nice results, quick cleanup.

Adding ascorbic acid powder helps too.

If anyone was tempted to buy a Watanabe after reading this thread, now is the time; prices go up 50% in May. And pay what you need to to avoid a plastic ferrule on the handle.

When you burn it, it turns into CO2 and water vapor and that’s what’s being vented from homes. I also realize that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but whatever.

Gas is great. Bad ventilation and leaky installations are not.

My advice is always to buy the product that's in front of you, not what's coming in an unannounced upcoming revision or in speculative aftermarket mods. And the product in front of us is not a thermometer for sugar work or fry oil (even if it might be useful for deep frying). I don't take this as a knock against it... it's just not that kind of product.

You can deep fry the probe and submerge it in liquid nitrogen. It's not a sensitivity problem. I think the main issue is that you need a longer probe for oil and sugar work so you can clip it to the side of the pot and hace it go down into the sugar or oil. This style of thermometer isn't really geared toward that application.

Me either. I had one referral, according to the “leader board” that kept track of such things, but the board has since disappeared and no code was sent.

I'm sorry to hear that. You must have gotten a lemon. I've had no issues with mine.

A VacMaster VP-112.

I have had a dry pump unit for many years and have never felt like I was missing out on anything.

I didn't realize you could save up to an additional $50 off through referrals. I would have had some friends sign up for sure, especially now that I know the price point. Oh well...

I don't know if referrals are still going, as an e-mail from Combustion last Monday said that we had until Friday (the 28th) to refer people and have them confirm their e-mail address. But hey... it's worth a shot.

Anyone want a referral?

Vegetarian night! Chana masala, spiced basmati, saag paneer. Garlic naan not pictured.

Thanks! That had somehow ended up in my spam folder. So it looks like the probe itself is $129 and the timer is $79 if you buy them individually, but the preorder will be for the bundle. $80 seems a lot for a timer, but I guess it has to do some computation to figure out the estimated "ready in" time. But $80 seems a lot for a timer. That price for the probe seems reasonable, especially if you could get 30% off of it. Meh. If the whole shebang was $129 and you could get a discount on that, I'd be all over it. But I think I'll have to sit this one out. Which is a shame because I wanted one and I doubt they'll be this cheap again.

Money aside, that's kind of a tough call. The main draw of the Joule is the form factor. It's just so dang small. I can store it anyhere. I can take it anywhere. I can cook inside basically any vessel. I do wish that it had some sort of rudimentary physical controls. I've been cooking sous vide for so long that I almost never use the visual doneness features of the app, but a lot of that is thanks to all the hard work ChefSteps did in their early years educating people about SV. Having something similar built into the Hydropro seems nice, but... I really only need a temperature display and some up and down buttons. Everything else is superfluous. I look at the Hydropro and just wonder where I'd store it. It's not even that big, but Joule is that small. Still, of all of the more expensive SV units, the Hydropro Plus is definitely the one I'd want, especially if using it in a professional kitchen. I have always wanted to have something with a probe to do some delta cooking. And the form factor is among the best of the larger circulators. The detachable clamp is nice. The repositionable jet is nice. The probe is nice. The metal construction is nice. The display, bigish though it is, is nice. I like the looks of that unit a lot. I'd swap out my Polyscience Chef for the Hydropro Plus in a heartbeat. But if the choice was between a Hydropro Plus and three Joules, I don't see how I could justify it. And that's the real world tradeoff in dollars and cents.