btbyrd

I'm fond of the genre that walks the line between travel video, guest experience, and documentary. Most of the videos are street food, or other forms of cooking where the food is prepared in front of the customer. High quality video with no real talking. Learn by watching. I can get lost in this type of video for hours. That's from "Travel Thirsty." They have a ton of similar content, but is one of the videos I learned the most from.

I use Diamond exclusively when cooking. I tend to use sea salts as finishing salts (Maldon or fleur de sel) rather than as something I'd cook with. Dishes where salt is an integral component (like salted caramel) might be an exception. I don't have anything against cooking with sea salt per se, but it all depends on which sea salt we're talking about. Some sea salts are better than others for different purposes.

Sure. This is within the context of cooking, not using on the table. (Though I will admit, I hadn't purchased table salt in over a decade until I was recently forced by circumstance into doing.) Table salt often has unnecessary additives such as iodine and anticaking agents like magnesium carbonate and sodium aluminosilicate. The particle size of table salt is the smallest of all the most common salts, which means that it weighs much more by volume. This small particle size is designed to facilitate flow from a shaker, but it's a liability when trying to dose salt by the pinch, dash, or spoonful. Because it's so highly concentrated by volume and because it's designed to flow quickly, over-seasoning is a constant worry. Also, I just don't like to touch the stuff. It's unpleasant on the fingers. Neither do I care for the giant flakes of Morton's kosher salt. That is a good choice for actually doing koshering or salting meat, but the large particle size makes it difficult to get an even coating without over-seasoning. The large grains can also pose a liability when baking. The giant grains also take forever to dissolve in a brine. Diamond Crystal kosher salt is the ideal particle size to actually touch with your hands. It's actually a mix of fine to medium sized particles, which makes it easy to grab and dose out with your fingers. It's easy to get even coverage when seasoning meat and vegetables without over-seasoning. Anecdotally, Diamond Crystal seems to be preferred by the vast majority of chefs for the reason that it's the perfect salt to actually season food with while you're cooking. And because the grains aren't super huge, you can bake with it as well, and it dissolves into brines relatively quickly. It's the best general purpose kitchen salt.

No. But standard table salt is pretty garbage. If someone wanted to wax on about the virtues of switching from table salt to something else in the context of cooking, the correct alternative is Diamond Crystal Kosher salt.

One of the first times I wrote in, Dave went on a rant about how my name sounded like some arena where they apparently used to have monster truck rallies. Or was it professional wrestling events? In any event, he ended up screaming my name in the manner of a monster truck rally TV commercial. "SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!" Another classic Dave digression.

My, that's some pricey snake oil.

The flax oil solution isn't to go the furniture-grade boiled linseed route, but to get the refrigerated stuff sold by hippies as a dietary supplement for goop-loving woo-worshipers. It will cost a fortune. It will not do anything special for your cast iron, and a lot of people find that it leaves a brittle layer of seasoning that fails by flaking off in big chunks. It also smells terrible. If you want a drying oil with a low smoke point that has a similar fatty acid profile to flax but isn't totally worthless, walnut oil is the best choice. It has a low smoke point. It polymerizes fast. Like flax, the omega 3 content makes your house smell like burning fish. It seasons no better than anything else I've tried, but it does smell much worse. I don't recommend using either. I do recommend using pretty much any oil that you already have in your kitchen that is designed to be put in your mouth. Not oils for treating your wooden cutting boards. Not drying oils for finishing woodworking projects or mysteriously applying to your gardening tools. Not any product you might have originally purchased to use on boots or a baseball glove. Don't be tempted to use lotion. Vaseline is right out. Likewise for Turtle Wax and anything else that is meant to buff cars to a mirrorlike shine. That includes Armor All. Hair products such as VO5 hot oil treatments are not suitable for seasoning cast iron. Neither is WD-40 or any other industrial lubricant. If you happen to be near a shipyard, do not attempt to season your pans with pitch or tar. Just use an oil you'd normally put in a salad dressing.

For God's sake, just use a culinary oil.

It has no special virtues and is otherwise useless in the kitchen. I'd cancel your order if you can. Also... if any of you are sitting on surplus bacon fat, cook with it. Using it to season metal is a waste.

There's more voodoo nonsense out there about seasoning cast iron (and carbon steel) than almost anything else in cookery. And that's saying something. Cast iron is basically indestructible. Back in the day, folks used to throw their pans in a bonfire once a year to burn off all the crud. Retrieve it from the coals, scrub and wash, and re-season from bare metal. You can bring back cast iron from the crustiest and rustiest of conditions. It will outlive us all. All the obsession with what lipid to use is misguided nonsense. I've used all kinds of oil, and now I use "whatever." The weak link in your seasoning chain is you, not your lack of superluxe Organic Peruvian flaxseed oil handpressed by virgins at the base of an active volcano on the night of the first full moon after the autumnal equinox. The most common error is using too much oil. The layer's gotta be so thin that it's basically not there. I wait for the pan to get hot and just before it starts smoking, I'll do a final scour with a clean paper towel to get any excess oil. Thick layers end up being gummy and disgusting. They're not even seasoning. They're just gross. Don't be that person with the sticky pans. Just don't. Apart from using too much oil, the other most common error is not doing enough layers. If you're trying to lay down a consistent base level of seasoning, you've gotta do it a bunch. Five times. Eight times. Ten or more times. Extra thin. Lotsa times. That's the recipe. As an example, this is a pizza steel that rusted out on me. I went at it with a lye soak and all kinds of sandpaper designed for metal. After a weekend of battle, this was about as close to "bare metal" as I could get it. Then a bunch of thin layers in the oven. Ten cycles. It was a total horror show before I started. Now it's bulletproof. Or as close to bulletproof as cast iron or carbon steel can be. Thin layers. Lotsa times.

As a time saver and courtesy, I place jarred garlic directly in the trash can.

I just got the Auscrown Rambo. It's kinda pricey, but the build is very nice. Peizo ignition, braided stainless steel hose, chunky connectors, solid construction everywhere. It looks like it was put together by a team of people who were afraid of being sued by the end user. That's a good thing in my book. The burner itself looks almost exactly like the one in the original post that infernooo had shipped to him from Thailand. The high pressure regulator is a lightly modified Chen Fong CF103 and the braided stainless high pressure gas hose was made by ALO. So I suspect that the Rambo isn't much more than a rebranded Thai wok burner with a Chinese-supplied hose and regulator. But as a package, it hits all the right buttons. I was also looking at the offerings from Outdoorstirfry.com which seem very nice as well. But none of their product names were "Rambo," so... Here's the Auscrown product video.

Burger night.

The question was about vacuum levels for cook -> pasteurize -> chill -> store SV workflows. The displacement method only works for cook -> serve workflows. Vacuum packaging offers a number of additional functional benefits in the first context.

My main concerns with extra air in the bag are primarily about food quality rather than bacterial spoilage, although part of the reason you're vacuum sealing is to create an environment that's hostile to aerobic microorganisms. But if you're also cooking sous vide at times and temps that are long enough to pasteurize, I don't think it makes a huge difference (though I may be wrong about that). Once you've killed the microbes, you've killed the microbes. But another aspect of spoilage is lipid oxidation. More air = more oxygen = more oxidation = rancid food and "off flavors." And if you're freezing, extra air in the bag invites freezer burn. Concerns about "shelf life" are largely academic to me in this instance because I'm almost never vacuum packing delicate items with the intention to cook SV to pasteurization and then chill and store for extended periods. You aren't -- or you shouldn't -- cook fish for long enough to pasteurize anyway. And I sort of think sous vide chicken isn't all that awesome compared to other ways of cooking chicken. Everything else is robust enough to handle a strong vacuum. Do you have a particular application in mind? What needs a low vacuum level yet also is conducive to cook -> chill -> store SV practices?

The angles on most cast iron pans makes them better suited for making cornbread than doing what you'd normally do with a flared skillet or frying pan. The shape makes them not great to saute with, or even do simple things like flip a fried egg. The Dartos are also probably thicker than most vintage cast iron, which tends to be thinner than modern stuff like Lodge. I use the carbon steel much more.

Listened to them all, and I've called/written in a few times. About two weeks ago I finally made the connection that Hassouni was "Chris from the Green Zone in DC." Good times. There's a good amount of ranting and rambling and raving on Cooking Issues, and that's a benefit as well as a drawback. If it doesn't bother you, then you're in for a free-wheeling treat. If you need a host that doesn't have attention deficit disorder, it may not be the show for you. It's definitely the show for me though.

I use the largest ones the most, in part because the flared edges mean the smaller ones are pretty darned small. The redesign changes that considerably, so it's hard to say. But I'd still say to go with the two largest handled pans. The 15 is very small, almost a novelty. Almost. I end up using it more than I thought I would... usually when the stovetop starts to get crowded. It still gets used less than anything else though. I've always wanted to try the paella version, because i think that'd be great to cook and then serve to guests individually. The only reason I didn't get one of the 15cm paellas is that I fear I'd end up buying eight of them. I am also a fan of the Number 34 paella, though I've never actually cooked paella in it. Thick, spacious, heavy... It's almost like someone took a big heavy cast iron dutch oven and just lopped of everything except the bottom two and a half inches (or however tall it is). For a big, flat searing surface it's hard to beat. Its walls are high enough to shallow fry, as you saw in my chicken video above. It's also where I make my pancakes. It kind of just lives on my stovetop. I use it more than I thought I would. I cannot even begin to imagine how large the Number 50 is in person. It's even thicker than their other pans, apparently. Weighs 7kg. That's over 15lbs, if you count in the King's English. I bet it would rock the party on my wok burner. Definitely a "special occasion" or "professional/catering" sort of thing. Looks awesome though. Anyway, I can't say that I'm feeling the need to buy anything since I already have a full set of handled models. If they'd made a Number 31 available, I would have gotten it and replaced my Matfer. And if I had infinity billion dollars, I'd buy two of every animal and buy a set for you fine folks as well. But I don't. The redesign and the new paellas are an exciting move. One of my only complaints of the Dartos was that the flare was a bit too gradual so that the actual cooking surface of the pan was much smaller than its total diameter would leave you to believe. That lead the pans to cook like they were smaller than they are (though the 27 is still pretty dang big). That's been fixed in the redesign, and the slope of the walls is supposed to improve the saute action. If that's all true, it's a win win. And +1 to the notion of using the little paellas in the CSO. That sounds like a dangerously good idea. Spoonie G and the Treacherous Three's "New Rap Language." From 1980. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

The problems with texture aren't primarily caused by crushing but by rapid boiling of water in the protein at low pressures. Sealing your proteins when they're very, very cold can help with this. But there are some textural problems with squishier meat that are brought on by having the bag press down on it. That's where some mushiness can come from. If you want to avoid crushing while vacuum sealing, get a chamber vacuum that has a "gas flush" option. These pull a vacuum on your bag but then fill it with inert gas before sealing it up so that the atmosphere doesn't crush your product when it floods back into the chamber. Speaking for myself, I don't really feel the need to pull a vacuum on fish because I'm never sealing to store it for extended periods. Or cook it for more than like 30 minutes. I don't even seal the bag most of the time... just clip the top to the cambro to keep it from swimming away. For everything that I do pull a vacuum on, I end up sealing at whatever the maximum pressure my VP112 achieves is. And it's mostly robust stuff like beef and pork where there's no texture loss from high vacuum. I'm not really a big fan of sous vide chicken; I'd almost always rather do something else with it. SV turkey, on the other hand...

Here's the piece at Cooking Issues.. The vacuum levels in KennethT's post above are much too low. 90% was the lowest vacuum level they tested. The takehome points are that robust meats like beef and lamb don't suffer much, but the texture of chicken and fish do (fish moreso than chicken). Sealing the protein with oil seems to help. But lower vacuum levels -- 90% -- were strongly preferred for chicken and salmon.

While I won't pretend that this has never happened to me, I won't pretend that it was the knife's fault. But even if it were the knife's fault, the solution is a bolster or a Dremel, not making the blade go directly underneath your hand.

If you have Netflix, you should check out Mind of a Chef Season 2: Episode 3, which is dedicated to rice -- Anson Mill's Carolina Gold in particular. If you're going to place your first Anson Mills order, the rice is probably essential. And if you're getting the rice, you might as well get some of the sea island red peas so that you can make some proper Hoppin John. Apart from that, the other main thing I've cooked with is the grits and cornmeal. The grits in particular are especially good. And I love the visual pop of their blue grits (which taste just like the normal grits, only bluer). I've eaten their farro at restaurants but haven't cooked it. Not sure which varieties I've had, but they were delicious. My next Anson Mills adventure will be attempting soba with their buckheat flour. Wish I had more experience with more of their products, but it's just a matter of time.

Thank you! I did a stovetop sear and then moved it to a low oven. The "bookends" are mounds of horseradish-beet.

I didn't know you could embed Instagram stuff on the forum until today. So here's a few Insta pics of the bottom of my paella. And here we are making some fried chicken and seared endive. Good times.