btbyrd

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.

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.

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.