btbyrd

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.

Even at $140 with the 30% discount, that may be a bit too rich for my blood. The main competition is probably the Meater, and the OG Meater probe and charger is $70. I know that this probe has 8 sensors as opposed to the Meater's 2, and the Combustion Inc. one comes with its own display (which doesn't seem especially expensive to build). And it's yellow. And I don't doubt that it will probably be a better product given who is behind the project. But that's still a lot of $$ for a single wireless probe. @adey73 Where did you get the $199 figure from?

Spicy southwestern poblano burger with Neuske’s bacon, Colby-Jack, and guajillo chipotle Duke’s aioli.

I have a donabe smoker that I like to use as a finishing step on sous vide pork (and occasionally beef short ribs). There are other delicate items I'd like to use in there as well. The problem is that once the the lid closes, you can't really open it to temp check things without letting the smoke out. Wired probes don't work either. I just have to guess, and there's a *lot* of trial and error - mostly error - in getting the times and temps right with the donabe smoker. A similar sort of scenario is cooking sous vide with a temperature delta. It's easy to seal a wireless probe in a bag with a piece of protein and monitor the core temp to make sure that it doesn't overshoot the desired final temp. Vac bags, like a donabe smoker, are kind of black boxes where you can't look inside without significant hassle. Sure, you can futz with hypodermic type K thermocouples and closed cell foam tape... but a wireless probe is much easier. And if it can accurately predict cookt times, all the better. Apart from these scenarios, I do a fair amount of conventional cooking in grills and ovens, and being able to monitor the temperature of something that's cooking outside while I'm finishing up other items in the kitchen seems very valuable. Or being able to keep an eye on the roast in the oven while hosting my family in the living room during the holidays. Or whatever. Right now I mostly rely on a Thermapen for temperature duties. I have a cheap wired probe for large roasts in the oven. They're both just fine, but I think this would be a nice upgrade -- at least if the price is right. I have an IR thermometer too, but they're useless for checking internal temps and they can be somewhat misleading depending on the thermal emissivity of the target. I find they're mostly useful for checking the temperature of cookware. Nice to have, but I'd much rather have a probe.

They also sometimes sell wine fining agents like chitosan and kieselsol, but those are mostly used with a centrifuge. If you’re looking for a good source of modernist ingredients at good prices in home cook quantities, Modernist Pantry is the place to go.

Which probes are those @JoNorvelleWalker?