btbyrd

If it says “heritage” or “heirloom” but doesn’t specify the variety, I walk on by.

+1 for the generic squeeze bottle (like the generic red tabletop bottle) as the superior ketchup dispensing option. The upside down ones are fine for dispensing big blobs of dippable ketchup, but if you need to lay down a controlled amount on a bun, the classic squeeze bottle is unparalleled.

The classic Vitamix is on sale for $278.99. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008H4SLV6/

Of course, having a long wait list for something doesn't mean that it makes sense. Business sense, sure. But selling $335 vegan meals as "sustainable" is either laughably naïve or grotesquely disingenuous. Humm's implication that anything animal-based is somehow unsustainable is obviously false and does a real disservice to farmers, fishers, and purveyors who responsibly produce and source animals for culinary use. There are a bunch of good reasons to have a plant-based fine dining menu, but sustainability isn't one of them. Nothing about fine dining is sustainable. It's a luxury pleasure business.

I got a similar credit.

Did my first spin of the year with some Philly style vanilla with some cryoshattered Snickers shards. It was my father in law’s birthday, and Snickers are his fav. I froze the Snickers bars in liquid nitrogen and bashed them up inside a bag. The size and shape were perfect but, in retrospect, I ended up using too many and the inclusions made the ice cream a bit too chunky for my taste. Luckily I saved half the vanilla base and can use the remainder in moderation as a topping. Shattered Snickers: I didn’t get a good photo of the final plated scoops, but did get a not-so-beautiful shot of the base just before serving. It was delicious and a good time was had by all.

Not really. All the knives are more or less purpose driven, so I tend to use one or two knives per task. Use one knife to cut off a fish's head and remove its filets, another knife to remove the skin and portion it. Use one knife to remove the bones from a rib roast, another to slice it. For butchery knives, I have two Western debas (one large, one small), two poultry knives (one large, one small), one knife for boning mammals, and two western style boning knives (one stiff, one flexible) that I got way back before I got seriously into kitchen knives. The top knife is a Tojiro DP 240 Western deba. It has the profile of a chef's knife, but is almost 5mm thick the whole way down. Debas are technically fish butchery knives, but a 240 deba with a double bevel is a monster knife that is game for almost any abuse. For butchery tasks, I use it whenever I need to go through poultry bones, like for bone-in fried chicken. I also use it to separate cooked ribs. But it's good for pretty much any heavy kitchen use. A true multi-tasker. Everything else more of a specialist knife. The smaller Western deba is used to take the head and filets off fish. Because it's double bevel, it's sturdy enough to deal with poultry bones, but I generally use the big one for that. I have used it to trim my Christmas tree for the past several years. Under the big deba are the poultry knives, a garasuki and a honesuki. The larger garasuki is super thick and useful for breaking down turkeys and ducks (and also chickens) while the smaller honesuki is thinner and primarily suited to chickens (though it can also be used for trimming). I took a pretty deep dive on yakitori a couple years back, and these knives are the backbone of yakitori butchery. The hankostu is for boning out beef, lamb, and pork. I use it the few times a year I French a rib roast, debone a lamb leg, and to remove the bone from the occasional pork shoulder. I have 3 slicers/sujihiki. A 300mm one that's very stiff, a 270mm hollow ground one with a good amount of flex, and a lasery thin 210mm suji/petty. They're all useful for different things. The small one lives on my knife block and gets used alongside my normal chef's knives in daily rotation. It's good for trimming, butterflying, and for slicing smaller items like cooked chicken breast or whatever. The flexy suji is useful for removing the skin from fish and portioning it. It's also a good slicer for things like country ham and smoked salmon. The longest, stiffest suji is my carving knife for large roasts. It's also good for slicing raw fish for crudo or nigiri or whatever. The other two knives in the portioning/slicing section are just chef's knives that also work well for butchery-adjacent tasks. The big one has a balance point way out front, and this makes it great for slicing, say, a striploin into steaks or a pork loin into chops. It's also my go-to watermelon knife. The shorter one with the drop-point has an extremely flat profile and is thicker than many of my other chef's knives, exhibiting zero flex. This makes it work very well as a slicer for both meat and fish. But the flat profile also makes it an absurdly good chopper. It's a great knife for cutting vegetables. Do I need all these knives? No. Are they the best tools for their respective jobs? Pretty much. I think this is my favorite poem of yours.

My butchery knives. These are all meant to work around bone (and sometimes go through fish and poultry bones). These are for slicing, portioning, and trimming.

Chips in the blade can be sharpened out, especially if they're small.

Just because something is cleaver-shaped doesn't mean it's useful for cutting through or around bones. That Dexter pictured above is one such example. Cleaver? Yes. Butcher knife? No. Same for that Lamson/Leone take on the Serbian cleaver. If you want a Chinese cleaver designed to hack through bones, get a CCK Bone Chopper (or, for somewhat less demanding but still heavy tasks, a Big Rhino, which has the same design as the knife liuzhou linked above).

All their wood core boards are dishwasher safe, as per their website.

I've looked far and wide to find smoked NC country ham that can compare to what's on offer from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but sadly I haven't been able to find anything decent. Johnston Country Hams used to produce some good products, but they unfortunately went out of business after a listeria recall. Here smoked hams are the exception, and I haven't been able to find one that is both smoked and aged long enough to develop the sort of rich savoriness I associate with good ham. Most NC ham is unsmoked, made from commodity pork, and seldom aged much longer than 90 days. If young, unsmoked hams from unexceptional pigs are your thing... I guess NC has a lot to offer. But sadly, here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, I have to import the good stuff from elsewhere.

Line the pan with foil?

It would be clearer if they used words instead of symbols. "X Dishwasher Safe" is far less clear than "Not Dishwasher Safe." The good news is that if your boards aren't warped yet, they'll be fine.

I use Hi-Soft boards from Korin, but Hasegawas are excellent as well. And they can go in the dishwasher, unlike the HI-Softs. But I don't have a dishwasher, so... Our main Hi-Soft board is item number TK-201-H40, which is a pretty good general size, but we also use a smaller model TK-205 that will sit next to the large one and function as a seamless "extender" board. They are *extremely* kind to edges of very hard and brittle steels. They're heavy enough and "sticky" enough that they won't slide around on a hard countertop. This means that if you plunk the small one down next to the larger one, they'll basically function as a single seamless unit. Here's a photo of them with two of my largest knives -- a very large 300mm Takeda gyuto and a 270mm Sukenari:

Isn't the problem not with what non-sugar is being used and rather with ice crystal growth? Add some stabilizers. Gelatin, pectin, locust bean gum, carrageenan, guar...

Unless the induction element is perfectly sized to match your pan, you will always need to do a slow-ish preheat to get more even temperatures across the pan -- even with heavier All Clad stuff like the copper core and D7. Even then, there is a sizable hot spot (or hotter spot) directly over the induction element. I'd avoid turning a cold pan to high immediately, since this runs the risk of warping the pan.

Looks great.

If it's fat that is going to be rendered, it will eventually get hot enough to kill off any potential nasties (or their toxins, in the case of botulism). Especially if you render it in a pressure cooker. But even if you don't, you can always bring the rendered fat up to 300F for a few minutes and hold it there when you're done. Ain't nothin' gonna survive that kind of treatment.

Boiling is the problem. You can cook them sous vide, but will want to use a strong bag since you’ll be using higher temps. ChefSteps has a mashed potato recipe where you cook the potatoes in a bag with milk and butter and I’ve had zero problems with it.

Thanks for pointing that out; I misspoke. What I meant to say was that citric acid isn't an especially powerful antioxidant in the context of controlling enzymatic browning. The primary mechanism by which it inhibits browning is by shifting the pH (since polyphenol oxidases don't like acid) but to do this enough to appreciably slow browning will alter the flavor significantly. Citric acid also can function as a chelator, but gram for gram, ascorbic acid is much more effective at preventing oxidation and enzymatic browning and it has very little impact on flavor.

Strip steak with blue cheese. Also a massive arugula/parm salad and the better part of a bottle of Malbec. Maybe I’m watching the Eurovision Song Contest… maybe I’m not…

Citric acid isn’t an antioxidant. You want to add ascorbic acid to prevent browning. Its much less acidic tasting than citric acid, so it impacts the flavor of your dish much less.

Apparently you can dunk it in LN and deep fry it. More detailed specs: I may finally give cryofrying a try this summer, but I'll just use a circulator so the Combustion thermometer won't be especially useful there. But for frying chicken? Maybe!

Speaking of, all colors of the MK4 Thermapen are only $69 right now. And I've been loving my recently acquired Timestick Trio.