btbyrd

We do a fair amount of backpacking and camping in NC (and the surrounding high country of TN and VA). I'm going to leave backpacking out of this, because that's its own weird thing with its own weird constraints. But for car camping, I've found that few things are as valuable at the campsite as having a portable butane burner. I use an Iwatani 35FW, which comes with a handy-dandy carrying case. It's actually better than the burners on the 3 cheap gas ranges I've used long-term in rental properties. And the nice thing is, it's not a camping-only unitasker. Most people's kitchens, myself included, have garbage ventilation that doesn't allow them to properly sear meat without smoking out their entire house. The Iwatani allows you to take the fire outside. Or anywhere you want, really. It cranks out a ton of heat for its size and craps all over the standard 2-burner Coleman camp stove (which I also have). Just as important as having access to a reliable heat source is having cookware that cleans up easily. There's nothing worse than doing dishes in the freaking woods. Or trying to. So I take a nonstick pan with me, that can be wiped out with a paper towel before a quick rinse. I don't have a nonstick pot, but if I did, I'd take it with me too. I'll also plug for cook->chill sous vide as my preferred way to deal with protein. This is one place where "sous vide for insurance purposes" really shines. You can cook and pasteurize your proteins at home, chill them down, and pop them in the cooler until it's time for dinner at the campsite. You know everything's been thoroughly cooked through (and all the germies are dead), so it's not the end of the world if your fire's unevenly hot or the meat is a few degrees under in the center. I also like to bring my TS8000 blowtorch along for firekeeping duties. I also throw in my charcoal fan to work as a bellows. It's amazing how much wind (and heat) you can generate with a handheld fan. One of the most important things you can do when cooking is taking chance out of the equation. Primitive campsites introduce a lot of variables. But having access to proper heat sources (and torches/fans) can quite cut down on the most troublesome variable of all -- temperature. And if you can't have reliable heat on-site, sous vide can take care of that at home.

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This is the slightly more detailed ChefSteps guide to SV turkey. No grilling, no Meathead.

+1 for the ChefSteps time/temps. Do the legs for 12 hours at 150, then drop the bath to 131, add your white meat, and go another 12 hours. 131 sounds insanely low for poultry white meat, but the results speak for themselves. The breasts can just be seared in a pan to crisp up the skin. I usually smoke the legs and shred them, though I did do the CS SV dark meat turkey tube one year and deep fried it for the final sear. If deep frying is an option, it's worth doing. Sears all sides evenly at once, and much faster than using an oven or broiler. If that's not an option, I'd chill the legs down a bit after unbagging them and use a very hot oven with convection. I have no idea why gfweb reports it being a PITA. I've never had an easier cooking experience than SV turkey breasts, and they always _always_ get rave reviews.

When I break down the big birds, I take off the white meat (with skin) and remove each leg at the thigh trying to get as much of the oyster as possible. The wings and carcass get roasted to make stock. I confit the legs/thighs SV in duck fat (like 144F for 24 hours), chill, unbag, and retherm on a 225F smoker for a couple hours until the skin looks crispy and amazing or I just can't stand it anymore. The skin gets removed (it usually comes off in one piece) and cut up for smokey cracklins. I pull the legs/thighs, trying to discard any tendons I might come across in the process. The result is fantastic. I'm from North Carolina (where were have actual barbecue) and I'd put my turkey-cue up against any pulled pork from anywhere. It's kind of amazing how closely smoked dark meat from a turkey can resemble smoked "the other white meat." I've also been known to reheat shredded smoked turkey in a nonstick skillet with some Benton's bacon fat. Delicious. I know this is all very sous vide-y, but after cooking a few turkeys this way I don't know that I'll ever go back to doing them conventionally. I don't particularly care for sous vide chicken, but SV turkey was a total gamechanger for me.

I did some cursory Googling and couldn't find much of anything about this style of "BBQ" (which, being neither smoked nor sauced, is about as much barbecue as the PA Dutch are Dutch). Anyway, my turkey move for the past few years has been to smoke and shred the dark meat while doing the breasts SV. White meat doesn't want to be pulled, and if you get it to the point where it's pullable, something horrible has happened. Sure, you can drown it in "juices" and pretend that the meat itself isn't dry, but we're all familiar with this kind of subterfuge -- it's the "drown it in gravy" strategy that so many have adopted to make their Thanksgiving meals more tolerable. (There's also the "drown yourself in bourbon" gambit, which can also be useful on Thanksgiving... but that's a solution to another problem.) All that's to say, I'd opt for the half-pan 'o shredded, and the half-pan o' sliced solution. The ChefSteps turkey breast is the best I've ever had, though I go just a bit higher temp-wise than they do (8-24 hrs at 135F). And it's *EASY*.

Sometimes I cure them, sometimes I don't; sometimes I'll cold smoke them, sometimes I won't. Sous vide 48 hours @ 60C is a good starting point (works well for beef cheeks too). Works great as a topping for ramen. You can also braise them to death in whatever fashion you most find delicious. Stew them down with wine, tomatoes, and aromatics, and you've got the starting point for some solid porkface pasta or pollenta. If you ain't got time for that, you can also pressure cook them.

My knowledge of the refrigerator technique comes from Modernist Cuisine and Dave Arnold. I frankly don't feel the need for it most of the time, as paper towels do a fine job. It can be useful on poultry skin if you want it super crispy. But I don't believe water vapor is going to condense on a warm piece of meat in the fridge, as condensation forms on cool surfaces rather than hot ones. And since I'm deliberately being a bit provocative in this thread, I'll go ahead and say it: If you feel compelled to blow dry a steak/chop/whatever (or put it in the fridge after blotting with paper towels) then your problem with searing isn't moisture-related. Your searing medium just isn't hot enough. Oh, I use my hair dryer for many uses for which it was not intended. I've certainly used it to light charcoal before, though my leaf blower does a better job. It's not the departure from intended use to which I object. But using a hair dryer on sous vide protein strikes me as unnecessary, unhygienic, and a bad technique that makes you more likely to overcook your meat.

Roasted a chicken.

Here's a controversial opinion that I don't think should be controversial: blowtorches suck. For searing, I mean. I would rather use pretty much anything else. Cast iron, carbon steel, deep frying, grilling, a charcoal chimney starter, a cheap nonstick pan from Ikea... all preferable to the abominable torch. Even with a Searzall. Do you like "crusts" that are somehow both weak *and* scorched beyond recognition? Do you like spotty, uneven sears that take forever to form? Do you find torch taste delicious? Do you live in a dorm? Are you, perhaps, on a camping trip, or driving across the country, or doing something else that involves being far away from a kitchen and actual cooking equipment? Then perhaps a torch is for you!

Good lord, people. Don't use a hair dryer on your meat; blot it dry with paper towels. If that's still not dry enough for you, plop it on a rack in the fridge for like 10 minutes. Refrigeration sucks moisture from the air, so your fridge is a great place to let surface moisture "flash off" (as Dave Arnold refers to the process). The air in your fridge isn't cold enough or conductive enough to really drop the core temp of your meat in that short amount of time, and it gives you a bit of extra insurance against overcooking during the final sear step. Hair dryers. Honestly.

I've cooked a lot of SV short ribs and the best approach I've found is to bone them out and trim off any exterior fat/connective tissue before cooking. Don't try to do with heat what you can do better with a knife. The whole point of low-temp short ribs is that they're low temp -- tender and steaklike. Anything much over 60C is a waste. If you want braised short ribs, then braise them (or pressure cook them).

Julia Child dropping some poultry knowledge. She goes over the difference between broiler, fryer, roaster, capons, and stewing chickens. Julia's opening is sure to put a smile on your face. Or my face, at any rate.

If you need to re-download the book, email them at nextebook@nextrestaurant.com .

I wish they would get on that No# 31 saute pan. I would have preordered one if it was available.

All this talk and I still have no idea what one would do with such a contraption.

In my view, the third episode (on home cooking) should have been the first of the series, as it introduces us to the notion of "ugly delicious" and sets the tone and context for the rest of the series. That discussion comes about eight and a half minutes into the episode. I found this to the best episode of the series -- at once the most heartwarming and cerebral, the latter without trying to be. Other episodes can end up with somewhat artificial conversation in the form of panel discussions on the nature of ____________. Instead, this one just shows you beautiful people cooking ugly, unpretentious food whose validity and deliciousness is obvious and without question. It invites the haughtier among us to transvaluate their culinary values and realize that there is something incomparably wonderful to be found in simple, coarse, and ugly cooking. The rest of the series looks best through this lens.

That's an old joke immortalized in Woody Allen's monologue at the beginning of Annie Hall.

As far as ordinary language is concerned, the basic alternative at issue is whether or not we want to apply food categories like "meat" or "mayo" or "milk" by reference to an underlying substance (such as animal flesh or egg yolk emulsions or mammalian secretions) or by reference to the category's characteristic function. If what we mean by "mayo" is "white, tangy, oily stuff that you spread on sandwiches or make tuna salad with" then vegan mayonnaise is possible. But vegan status precludes the possibility of mayonnaise-hood if what we mean by "mayo" is an emulsion made from eggs and oil. The same basic alternative applies in the case of nut milks. If by "milk" we mean "a whitish aqueous emlusion of fat, sugar, and protein that you might put on cereal or drink a glass of or put in your smoothie," then sure... nut milks are possible. But if milk refers to a substance secreted by hairy mammalian teats, then nut milk ain't milk. Neither is soy milk. As Lewis Black puts that argument, "We know there's no soy milk because there's no soy titty." I'm not convinced that's the best way to view things, and am content to make, buy, and use nut and soy "milks" without any sort of linguistic or conceptual shame. It's not like anyone's confused about whether or not these "milks" are real "moo-cow **** milk," as Mr. Black calls it. These distinctions are mostly without a difference in our everyday lives, but they can come to matter in the context of our byzantine regulatory environment. Is mayo essentially an egg-based product? How the law decides could have a multi-million dollar impact. I seem to recall Hellman's trying to use the regulatory baton to badger the makers of "Just Mayo" into changing the name of their product. A lawsuit to burden their much smaller competitor. Kind of a dick move on Hellman's part. But so is putting a picture of a freaking egg in the logo of your egg-free "mayo." (It appears that the makers of Just Mayo have since removed the egg from their logo.) Are hot dogs sandwiches? What about burritos? There are legal rulings on these matters that impact real people's bottom lines. Are tomatoes fruits? Yes, botanically -- they're edible ovaries. But for customs purposes, the feds say they're vegetables. Are the mutants in the fictitious X-Men universe human or are they non-human? Toy Biz, Inc. v USA argued that their X-Men figurines should not be taxed as dolls, but as toys on the grounds that the X-men are "non-human creatures." What's the metaphysical truth about the humanoid status of the X-Men? Are they even men at all? The world may never know. But for the purposes of import tariffs, the X-Men aren't human. But I digress...

It looks like Amazon has a Prime eligible 2-cup model for $99, They're only for gas burners though. I don't know why a flat top wouldn't work; I just know that every single resource I've found has said not to use them with anything except a gas flame. You can also put them in the oven. But if you're heating it directly, it's gotta be a flame for whatever reason. Anyway, they're a great way to cook rice. If you add a tablespoon or two of oil to the donabe and let it go for a minute or two longer, you can get a wonderfully golden brown and delicious crust on the bottom of the rice. Speaking of golden brown and delicious crusty bottoms, you can see a bit of that in this video for chicken ginger rice: You can check out how they're made in the following video; the donabes made by Iga Mono are featured in the first segment. Here's a link to the best single English-language book on Japanese donabe cookery, Naoko Moore and Kyle Connaughton's "Donabe: Classic and Modern Clay Pot Cooking." Warning: Donabes can be habit forming.

I've been using a donabe rice cooker for the past couple of months, and the results are pretty spectacular. The one featured in this video is the largest offered -- a 5 cup model. It's definitely overkill for a single person, as is the 3-cup model that I have. But they also offersmaller 1 and 2 cup versions that would be great for singletons. They require a gas flame, but you can get a powerful, portable tabletop Iwatani butane burner for like $35. Those are great for camping/catering/outdoor searing/fish cookery as well as donabe cooking.. But I digress. The ceramic also requires some special care compared to your 30 function electric nonstick multipot rice-cooking thingamabob. It also requires slightly more technique than plug-and-play solutions. But not much. I love cooking with mine.

I think you may be underestimating how many injection sites there are when properly injection brining. The MC guidelines suggest that you should aim to distribute the shots so that there is no meat more than an inch from an injection site. It's more than just a few interior spots. It's also not really the case that water soluble flavors penetrate meat while fat soluble ones don't. In general, most all flavor molecules are too large to penetrate protein more than a few millimeters. Salt has some ionic activity that will draw it much deeper inside, given enough time. But the idea that marinades are a "surface treatment" holds true regardless of whether the marinade's flavors are based in water or fat. While I have done injection brining with a brining needle, my new method is to Jaccard whole muscle cuts and then seal them in a bag with marinade or brine using a chamber vacuum machine. The needling creates channels in the protein which are then flooded with liquid when the pressure comes back into the chamber. The bag and the atmosphere act as the "injector."

That will do what you want. Korin's non-knife kitchen stuff is 15% off this month with coupon code KW818.

Chicken ramen 🐓 🍜 🍲

Ziplocks aren't recommended for cook->pasteurize->chill->store. And unless you bag one yolk per bag (yikes) then your container will no longer be pasteurized after you open it to get a yolk or two out. Cooking them in the shell is a better way to cook, chill, and store, SV eggs safely. But if you want to cook a bunch of yolks at a time and then retherm them, I separate a bunch of eggs (easier when raw) and cook batches of yolks in Ziplocks in copious amounts of neutral oil. I retherm at 58C because the yolks won't cook or appreciably change in texture even if held for a long time. That's how I banged out two dozen perfect yolks for a dish at an event a while back. It was a "Bacon, Egg, and Cheese" dish made of a big hunk of deep-fried, cured smoked SV pork belly stuffed with cheese and then topped with a SV yolk and Maldon's salt. This was my last bag, but you can see that seven or eight yolks will sit comfortably in a gallon zippie. Chefsteps does a similar technique, but they use a small hotel pan filled with oil and then heat that with a circulator like a bain marie. That seems like a lot of work when you can just use a bag. If I was going to try to pasteurize them and hold them beforehand for some reason, I would have just cooked them in their shell and re-thermed them on site, but I'd have to crack them out a la minute, and that's a pain in the ass. It's much easier to separate a raw egg than it is one that's been cooked SV. My personal favorite yolk texture for a lot of stuff is around 64.2C. It's a "tweener" yolk that's fudgey but still will flow slowly and meltingly form a "sauce." But to get back to pasteurization, eggs are a relatively safe food to begin with and people tend to overestimate their danger. The interior of the egg is more or less sterile, and eggs can survive at room temperature without spoiling. You sort of have to try to make a rotten egg. Many of the food recalls due to salmonella in prepared products that contain eggs (like raw cookie dough from the store, for example) were recalled due to a microbial threat from the eggs, but often from other ingredients like flour or lettuce. All that's to say, I don't bother to pasteurize them. But I don't have a compromised immune system and don't cook for anyone who does. Even still, I feel like eating a runny fried egg yolk that hasn't been pasteurized is extremely safe and I don't know that I'd bother to pasteurize even if I did. That may say more about me than about eggs though.