btbyrd

It needs an antioxidant. It's the ascorbic acid in lime juice that helps, not the acidity itself. I add a dash of vitamin C to any batch that I'm not going to eat immediately. Vacuum sealing is also an option.

As long as it takes depending on the heat of the fire. I use lump hardwood most of the time, as binchotan is expensive and isn't really necessary. It's nice for special occasions though.

Konro grills for the win. Also deep frying.

Pre-sear then SV. The breasts will just be seared again, but the legs are going on the smoker before they get shredded, coated in bacon fat, and crisped up under the broiler.

Amazon Prime members get an extra discount off turkey at Whole Foods this holiday season. I'm picking my 18-20 pounder up tomorrow. The turkey should be done and the stock should be made by mid-day Sunday. I pity the fool that wakes up early on Thanksgiving to put the bird in the oven.

Hate is a strong word, but so are my feelings about making some poor schlep do a common kitchen task tableside for no reason.

Unless you can find a technological work around, this is the answer. Especially if you're a southwestern/Mexican establishment. If quality guac isn't on the menu -- even as a premium "upcharge" menu item -- it would set off a lot of alarm bells in my mind. This is how many of our local "Mexican" establishments operate, though I hate tableside guac service. HATE. It's a freaking bowl of guac, not a freaking Dover Sole. Most places have stopped doing tableside guac and now just offer a "fresco" or "house-made chunky" guac for a price premium and then use lower quality stuff for garnishing. That's my preference, unless it's an upmarket establishment (where my preference is for all guac to be proper guac).

Thanks! The lighter colored stuff is cheese and the darker stuff is andouille sauteed with the cajun trinity. I usually make it rain bacon on there too, but it was getting late.

Shrimp and grits.

Sourcing: (Almost all of this goes for chicken too.) The things that make a non-garbage turkey a non-garbage turkey are its genetics, feed, environment, and processing. Modern farmed turkeys are freaks of nature designed to pack on as much breast meat into a spheroid shape as fast as humanly possible. They grow too fast. They're kept inside all the time, not that it matters since can barely move on account of dem tig ol' bitties. After they reach a gigantic slaughter weight at an astonishingly young age, they're killed, plucked, and processed. Usually this involves chilling the birds in water and then pumping them full of a sodium and phosphate solution. All that water from the chilling and brining processes dilute flavor and make the skin soggy. Ideally, what you want is a bird that wasn't bred to pack on as much meat as possible, as fast as possible, with as little effort as possible. You want a bird that takes more than two weeks to weigh 20 pounds. You want a bird that's lived a life... that's walked around, flexed its muscles, eaten some grubs and worms... something that's maybe even seen a half birthday -- or more. These can be tricky to find. The first stop would be your local farmer's market. If you can't do that, but are made of money, you could order a heritage bird from Heritage Meats USA or D'Artagnan. But even if you can't find or afford something like this, you can usually find something at the supermarket that's been air-chilled and hasn't been pumped full of brine. Bell and Evans is my favorite, kinda-widely available brand. If you don't see it, talk to the meat dude. Or meat lady. You know, whatever... Cooking: There's no one right way to cook anything, but... For the love of God, don't cook the white meat to 165F. The best way to cook a turkey is to take it apart and cook the dark meat separately from the light meat. Cooking it whole requires compromise. Breaking it down improves quality. That goes for "stuffing" too. My go-to method is to break the bird down and do the white meat according to ChefStep's SV recipe (131F/12-18hours) and confit the legs in duck fat before smoking them on the grill. Roast off the carcass and wings to make stock. (Fortify that with additional wings and ground turkey). I mostly just follow this playbook: The finishing step is up to you, really. Grill it, fry it, sear it, smoke it, broil it... If you don't want to do sous vide, I've also had great results using the Chefsteps "Turkey Crown Roast" recipe in a traditional oven.The butchery for that makes for a striking presentation. I may do that this year, actually... Anyway, CS has a nice video on how to break down the bird for that recipe. Apart from these recipes, I've also made great smoked turkey, great deep fried turkey, and great turkey that was cooked underneath a trash can. There's no best way. But the way NOT to do it is to cook a Butterball and rely on its built-in pop-up thermometer.

The sujihiki and the nakiri came from Japanny / Seisuke Knife. Honesuki from CKTG. And I found the 240 gyuto from D.C. Sharp. Good buying experiences all around.

Gotta run before you can walk! I wasn't sure about this knife at first, honestly, but I came to love it almost immediately. The belly on the knife is very slight, and almost entirely at the front of the knife. A good four or five inches of it sit totally flat on the board -- about 2/3 of the bade. The tip is liable to dig into the board if you're rocking too high. BUT... I realized that for most cutting tasks, I do approximately zero rocking. I'm pretty much entirely push/pull, and this knife is a beast for those tasks. And the tip is perfect for slashing onions horizontally. This knife is also really thick; it's the thickest thing I've got that isn't a deba. And I've been on a buying spree recently. But the weight and profile mean that it chops and dices like nobody's business. The weight does the work for you. It's sort of a battle axe, though a battle axe whose tip should be treated with respect. I'm glad that it has a saya, because that tip needs a guard -- for its sake and for your sake. Anyway.... Here's a gang of Anryu blades. The gyuto just got here today.

There are certain things that home cooks typically do not own but are common in restaurant and bar kitchens. Things like salamanders, planchas, and deep fryers with cold zones. 240V induction units, blast chillers, wok burners, combi ovens, and real ice cream machines. Where home cooks have their Cuisinarts, the pros have Robocoup-jujitsu that can dice a case of tomatoes in two minutes flat. My question to the professionals in the audience is: Of this class of appliance -- of any type or application --which particular models/brands do you love? Why do you love them? Bonus points if they could conceivably be used in a dream home kitchen. I realize this is an extremely broad question, but I'm hoping to elicit people telling heartwarming stories about how awesome their broiler is, or anecdotes about which model of plancha the Adria brothers use in their kitchens. Maybe you're a bartender and there's a specific ice maker that makes perfect cubes for cocktails... or maybe you worked grinding brunch shifts and made a million tedious-but-perfect waffles using an especially trustworthy waffle maker.... whatever it is, write a love note to your favorite gear. Let us home cooks know what we're missing.

Lobster avocado roulade. Apple, Asian pear, cucumber, blood orange, tarragon. Avocados were 4 for $5. I got 8. Lobster tails were on sale... I got 2. Apples are in season. What else was I to do? HT: Daniel Humm at EMP whose dish this is based on.

No.

It's strange that your whites were still on the "egg soup" end of the spectrum -- especially if they were medium eggs. They shouldn't be soupy, though I wouldn't describe them as firm. They should definitely be opaque and non-fluidlike -- at least for the firm white. Anyway, the real draw of SV egg-cookery is precision with yolk texture. The egg whites are always a little gross. Dave Arnold's egg chart video is a good indicator of what you can expect at various temps for the yolk and white. As far as soft boiled eggs are concerned.... I mean, SVing a soft-boiled egg isn't always a total waste of time. It depends on how much time you've got and how much you care about producing a particular result. It's just that to get a proper soft-boiled texture on the whites, you have to do 2-stage cook, and that's very fussy for most cooks and applications. But if you were doing a tasting menu in a fine dining context, it could make sense. I mean... I've done the "boil it first, then SV it" trick on a couple of occasions when making ramen. But nowadays I just do it on the stovetop like an ordinary chump... because I know I can get good-enough results in very little time.

People think they don't like turkey because: 1) They suck at cooking turkey 2) They buy garbage turkey with no flavor. 3) The turkeys they make, or their family makes, are dry and flavorless because of (1) and (2) 4) They cook turkey once a year - at most - because they think the crappy turkeys they make are the best that can be done. Which is why they suck at cooking turkey. These people typically also enjoy deli turkey, which is almost always a low-quality abomination. My extended family is full of such people, bless their hearts. Last year, they all brought about a billion side dishes "because Thanksgiving isn't about the turkey -- it's about the sides." I, of course, was in charge of the turkey. It was well prepared. Several people said it was the best they ever had. Only half of one breast was consumed. Americans.

As I was typing this, Anna beat me to the punch. But. If you want a soft boiled egg, soft boil an egg. It takes less time and will give you the firm whites you seem to be wanting. And it should be noted that I've never seen anyone advertise a SV egg as a close alternative to a soft boiled egg. A poached egg, sure. But not a soft boiled egg. You may have set yourself up for failure simply by having inaccurate expectations about the result. I don't know how you're eating them, but if you're using a "clacker" to do it and eating it directly from the shell... I'd just leave SV eggs alone. Best practice for serving SV eggs is to first crack them onto a plate or into a slotted spoon so that the loose whites will run off. Using fresh eggs can help things there, but you'll still have problems some of the time. There's always some percentage of egg white in low-temp eggs that's goopy and less than appetizing. Or you could boil your SV eggs for 3 minutes before-or-after their time in the bath to set up the whites. But that's silly. I'd just boil an egg.

And as always with SV fish... quick cure that stuff in sal-gar for 20-30 minutes before you get going.

TLDR: 110F for 40 minutes; unbag; hard sear. Long, fancy version involving duck bacon: Remove the skin. Dust with Activa RM and apply duck bacon. Vacuum seal and press overnight. Unbag and trim filets into portions. Immediately fry up any trimmings in butter or bacon fat and consume post haste. Rebag portioned filets and cook SV for 40 minutes. Unbag. Sear. Serve however. SV halibut+duck bacon "2 ways" - (1) hazelnut romesco with braised endive; (2) squash/tomato with orange and lemon vinaigrettes and chive/cilantro oil. Fish+bacon+meat glue: Glued, trimmed, and ready to portion. You know dem scraps were good, ya'll. Plate: Under no circumstances are you to substitute tilapia.

I'm with Dave Arnold on tilapia. He has some epic rants on it. I can't find my favorite one, where he calls tilapia swimming garbage that tastes like garbage because it lives in and eats nothing but garbage. But I remember vividly where someone wrote into Cooking Issues asking for a substitute for tilapia, and his response was : "Have you tried using dirt?" . In another episode, he joked that his New Year's Resolution was to get other people to stop eating tilapia. Because "there's got to be some other crap fish that they can grow in its own filth for almost no money that tastes better. There's got to be something." For any given application, there are 15 other fish I'd rather use first, and if tilapia was the only available option, I'd cook chicken instead. My pro-tip for tilapia, apart from not cooking it at all, is to heap mounds of spice and gallons of acid on it. Tilapia either tastes like nothing at all or it tastes like dirt. Actually, to be fair... tilapia themselves only taste like nothing. The dirty taste is caused by cyanobacteria that breed in the fish's environment and secrete nasty flavor compounds that get uptaken by the fish. Mmm mmm good. Anyway, the "blast it with cayenne, cumin, lime juice and vinegar" strategy solves both the "tilapia tastes like nothing" problem and the "tilapia tastes like dirt" problem.

I also do a slaw-like thing based on shredded brussels sprouts. The easiest way to get going with that is to buy pre-shredded ones from Trader Joe's (or wherever) and pick through the bag to remove the larger chunks. Then cut everything else up into matchsticks (a task made easier with a mandoline). This was sprouts, granny smith apple, and watermelon radish, tossed with shaved parm and a pomegranate garnish. The dressing was TJ's dijon mustard, raw honey, apple cider vinegar, and a tablespoon or two of mayo. The only issue is that you have to toss it a la minute, or it'll sog-out on you. But when it's fresh, it's crunchy and bright and delicious.

This is some good stuff. The consomme itself is intense -- bright and clean and flavorful and a little sweet. Store-bought "cranberry juice" is a pale imitation. I find new uses for this each year. I think I'm going to do a gellan-based "cranberry sauce" this year. I might even set the gel in a can so I can unmold it and it'll look like a can of Ocean Spray. The yield sucks, and you're going to feel bad about all the softened cranberries you throw away. But that's life without a centerfuge for you. (I did make a cranberry "bbq sauce" once with some spent berries... it was alright.) There's also no need to use a circulator... boil-in-a-bag works just fine (or better)/. Weigh your bags down. Cranberries be like: WE ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE! Comic Sans makes everything scarier. Even cranberries. Anyway, the obvious use is for cocktails and mocktails. This guy was 1.5oz cran, 2oz gin, a dash of simple, fill with seltzer. (You can see the National Dog Show in the background, so you KNOW it's Thanksgiving.) This was a Thanksgiving "taco" I did with smoked confit turkey thigh, sweet potato, turkey skin cracklins, radishes, bbq sauce, and pickled onions. The onions were pickled in the cranberry consomme and they look and taste awesome. The sauce is that BBQ sauce I mentioned. I don't really remember what went in apart from spent cranberries, molasses, and paprika... but it took a lot of doctoring and experimentation to get it right.

I'm mostly on that 13-to-14-minute 75C egg tip recently. Yields a slightly firmer white than "usual" SV eggs and takes a fraction of the time. But yeah, SV eggs aren't "poached eggs" and if you want a poached egg, you should poach that egg. A poached egg on a salad? YES! A SV egg on a salad? GROSS! But on a benedict? Who cares. I hosted a Mothers' Day brunch for my family this year and did benedicts for 8 people. I would not have done that without a circulator. I could have. But getting 16 poached eggs hot and ready for service isn't my idea of a fun challenge. SV eggs also make perfect "onsen" eggs for ramen. My mother HATES eggs. She never eats them. Unless I make them. And one of her favorite things in the world is a 63C yolk. Last Christmas she asked me to SV a dozen eggs for her to enjoy in my absence. I keep telling her to get a Joule so she can have eggs whenever she wants. Still hasn't happened...

Dave Arnold mentioned that he recently attended a kitchen trade show in China and was amazed by the number of knockoff circulators. I have no idea why you'd buy one of these as against one of the proven models already on the market (which are roughly the same price). The SVE guys are goons. I will never be able to take them seriously after seeing their video about using garlic SV. I won't bother to link to it, since it's not worth watching.