btbyrd

This is how I do it, with freakshow amounts of butter. It produces excellent results. I like to butterfly them and then tuck them back into their shell before cooking. Untuck after cooking and serve or finish with the heat source of your choosing. You can sear or broil or grill them after to add some char and firmness to the outside or the shell. Save the butter, chill it down, and pour off the watery phase the next day and you'll have some nice lobster butter for cooking. Use it to make a roux for the base of a chowder or something.

The Bianco Napoli tomatoes have been on deep sale at my WF, and I keep stocking up. It's an almost perpetual sale, it seems. I also just discovered that Masienda's blue corn masa was on sale at my local WF for the sale price of 2 for $7.99. That's insane. The normal price from Masienda (direct or from Amazon) is 2 for $24, so that' s an insane deal. I bought 4 kilos...

Finished up this ribeye I started a couple weeks ago. Here was the initial sear: I cooked it SV for 8 hours at 130F. Then chilled and stored until tonight. Rethermed at 130 for two hours, then pat it dry and let it hang out on a rack until it was time. That garlic thyme butter is delicious.

Your probe is a knockoff of the Meater Bluetooth thermometer. There’s not really anything directly comparable to the Combustion Inc available. It has more temp sensors, non Bluetooth mode, predictive cooking, and the ability to find the core temp of your food even if your probe isn’t placed quite properly. All the other wireless probe thermometers I’ve seen are much less sophisticated.

Not to swamp the forum with Anyday discount codes, but I just got an email that Anyday is offering a 30% off discount with code COMMUNITY30. My set is arriving soon but I'm sadly not going to be able to enjoy them until Christmas because they're technically a gift from my parents. So I'll give it to them to wrap and put under the tree to act surprised. Though the surprise will be feigned, the enthusiasm won't be. I like nice lids and glass that won't explode, what can I say?

It's usually a mix of egg and stock (mostly stock). It's not like you're bringing a batch of stuffing together with 12 eggs.

I got the Everyday set, so one shallow and one deep of both the medium and large sizes. I’m thinking about getting some of the small bowls too just to round out the set. What sizes do you use the most? And you’re right, there are a lot of recipes that look usefully reliable. Cooking things like grains or potatoes in them is going to help me out. Or so I think…

I’ve been looking for a good deal on Anyday microwaveable cookware, and Food52 currently has the best prices I’ve seen with an additional 20% off using code CYBER. I’m sure that Food52 has good prices on other stuff too, but I was in it for the expensive bowls with fancy lids. You do have to pay for shipping, but it is still cheaper than buying direct or Amazon’s Black Friday deals.

Smoked Old Fashioned. Wild Turkey 101, Angostura, demerara, Luxardo cherry, orange, applewood. On some clear ice. Turkey Crown.

This year is a small crowd. I am roasting a turkey crown as well as making dressing and gravy. I’m making a double stock for the gravy, so that should be nice….

Iwatani torch heads are kind of the industry standard for smaller brûlée type torches.

The tips on the TiStix are so fine they disappear in your mouth. Almost all of the other metal chopsticks I've seen look like chonky, unappetizing dental instruments to me as well.

My wife has purple light sabre ones that she got from Star Wars land at Disney World. They're mostly for her hair though.

I don't know how much curve was in the original knife, but profiles vary a lot and what is good or not depends on cutting style and personal preference. If you had to remove a lot of steel to get rid of the chips, you may want to thin the blade to improve cutting performance.

Some of my fancy sticks. My favorites out of all of them are probably also the most expensive. And boy are they expensive! They're TiStix anodized titanium chopsticks by knifemaker Alan Folts, and you can find them for sale at EatingTools.com. Please nobody ever visit that site. You'll find yourself wanting stupid, lovely, expensive things that you can't forget about for years. Like a ****ing $85 pair chopsticks. Look folks, I know that's a crazy thing to buy. But I had these on my public birthday/Christmas wishlist for half a decade. And while I think that $85 is a reasonable budget for a special gift, nobody wanted to buy such an incredible extravagance. Nobody understood. For years and years and years. So after much frustration, I treated myself to a pair. As it turned out, the maker stopped producing the color scheme that I wanted (The Midnight Edition in "Dew") because it was apparently difficult to get the anodization/color consistent with that particular color combination. So I ended up with a pair of "factory seconds" for a light discount. In the photo below, the top one is more or less perfect, but the middle one has some purple tinges to the middle section instead of the sort of turquoise it was supposed to be. But I like the "wabi sabi" imperfection of it all. In terms of shape and size, they're like elegant tapered Japanese chopsticks with a bit of texture to the tip section. Korean metal chopsticks tend to be slightly wider and with less taper than Japanese chopsticks. They're also made of stainless steel, which conducts heat much better than titanium. The thin tip (low thermal mass) and relatively poor thermal conductivity (25% of iron) makes it a great pair to eat hot noodle soups with. And, dear readers, I eat a lot of noodle soup. The sticks don't get hot and the light bead-blasted-y finish on the tips makes them just grippy enough to handle slippery broth-coated noodles. The build quality and machining of the chopsticks is phenomenal. I do feel as though I could probably kill a person with them, as they are quite pointy, and quite rigid, and quite likely to be an heirloom that my children fight over. Or else they'll look at them with the same bewildered indifference that everyone else does when they contemplate my extravagant TiStix. I wish I had another pair. My second most favorite pair is a mystery to me. It's a pair of lacquered cherry bark chopsticks produced in Japan, but I have no idea where I got them or who made them. I went through all my chopsticks orders and emails and found nothing -- NOTHING! -- about where they came from. They're the pair to the immediate left of the titanium chopsticks in the first picture I posted. Japanese chopsticks are typically small compared to Chinese chopsticks, but the "serving" chopsticks are slightly larger than ordinary Japanese chopsticks and therefore better at shoving food into my giant American gullet. Anyway, I did some sleuthing recently and found a similar looking pair on Bezos.com. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) They arrived a couple days ago and appear to be the "individual size" version. They're like six bucks and they handle *really* well, so I ordered another pair as a backup. The shape of both small and large is basically a tapered rectangular prism, and the tapered squared off tips make them great for grabbing noodles. Look, I eat a lot of noodles, okay?! Anyway, here's my old favorite along with the new pair from Amazon. Y'all go nuts and buy the rest of them, but someone find out who makes them so I can order a backup pair of the serving chopsticks! My other favorite pair are also Japanese serving chopsticks. They were also the second most expensive chopsticks. I think there are some trends forming here. Anyway, they're Kohchosai Kosuga Nedake bamboo root chopsticks I got from Toiro Kitchen. Again, wallets beware! These sticks feel elemental or magical or something. My wife thinks of them as the Elderwand from Harry Potter, though we know that's not "really" what the Elderwand looks like. They're her favorite. She liked them so much but was afraid to ever use them, so I gave them to her to use with reckless abandon. Reckless abandon: My overall preferences seem to be for the longer length of Chinese chopsticks but with the tapered tip and precision of the Japanese style of chopstick. And I also prefer for it to be made from a very nice substrate. The unreasonable pair of chopsticks I want for Christmas this year but nobody will get me is another bamboo Japanese serving style from Toiro, this time with a wisteria vine wrap at the top. I could totally eat some noodles with those...

Chickpea stew with coconut milk, chard, turmeric, and ginger.

Wood grilled chicken breas, creamed shishitos, and roasted ancho rubbed delicata squash dressed with hot honey and lime juice.

If you cook a lot of protein and use cast iron or carbon steel, one of the best investments you can make is in a powerful portable butane burner. My favorite is the Iwatani 35FW, which is rated at a very powerful 15,000 BTUs/hr. The combination of high heat and heavy black steel is amazing and lets you develop a stellar crust in very little time. This is my preferred method for pre and post searing on sous vide protein. In this case, I'm searing a raw 36oz ribeye for about 45 seconds per side in an original Darto No. 27 that was heated over the Iwatani on high until smoking. I also use the Darto No. 15 as a grill press. The amount of quality crust you can develop in under 3 minutes is astonishing. The smell was amazing. There is no way I could do that inside my kitchen (or any other home kitchen I've had) because there is not adequate ventilation. But with a 35FW in your batterie, you have a high output commercial quality burner that you can use anywhere. You will find a million uses for it. Camping. Tailgating. Whenever you're cooking fish. When the power goes out. When it's Thanksgiving and you need to get away from all of your relatives who are swarming the kitchen...

All the comments for this video are about this sweet grandmotherly person making ramen, but honestly this is what my kitchen looks like when I'm drunk and it's 2am. Maybe I turn into a Korean abuela after midnight.

The CCK is twice the knife at (less than) half the price. If you like the all metal construction of the Global, try the CCK KF1812. $80 from Action Sales.

Emergency chicken noodle. I felt a cold coming on, so… Broth was poulet rouge and Nueske’s bacon with a shio and Yondu tare. Egg noodles, sous vide chicken breast, shiitakes browned in roasted chicken fat, 63C egg, chives.

Chicken noodle. Broth was poulet rouge and Nueske’s bacon with a shio and Yondu tare. Egg noodles, sous vide chicken breast, shiitakes browned in roasted chicken fat, 63C egg, chives.

If you're in the market for a thinner Chinese slicing cleaver, I highly recommend buying from a reputable brand like Shi Ba Zi (stainless model F208-1) or CCK (model KF1303 for carbon steel, KF1912 for stainless). Mystery Amazon brands are best avoided. My CCK cleaver destroyed almost all desire for a nakiri (though I'd love to test drive a tall 185mm Watanabe sometime).

Westerners primarily identify cleavers by shape. They're tall rectangles. But there are many types of tall rectangular knives. Butchery cleavers are extremely thick compared to standard western chef knives. They're not general purpose knives and aren't especially useful to ordinary home cooks. There are also thinner cleavers that are general purpose blades designed to cut basically anything boneless. They're essentially the Chinese equivalent of the European chef knife and are great for home cooks. Most Japanese made Chinese-style cleavers (chuka bocho) are patterned after this thinner style of cleaver. Including Watanabe. The lightest type of this cleaver is a songdou or mulberry knife, which is great for delicate work an There's really an entire spectrum running from thin slicer cleavers up to thick bone choppers. Most cooks don't need a butchery cleaver, but could find a lot of uses for a thinner, general purpose cleaver. Here's a not terrible overview of some different styles of Chinese cleaver:

They're fine. They're just fine. Supermarket birds were designed to taste good despite being slaughtered at like 14 weeks and despite being cooked by rank amateurs who almost always do it poorly. That's why the birds are like 8-15% flavored salt/phosphate brine by weight. I don't know that I'd say they remain tasty, but rather that they're remarkably tasty in spite of everything that brings them to most people's tables once a year. My local Whole Foods sells what they label as heirloom turkeys for $3.99/lb. I don't think that's an unreasonable price to pay for a whole animal. $80 for a huge 20lb centerpiece to serve at a huge family gathering? I don't think you even need a trust fund for that. It's also nice that cheap birds taste good too.