btbyrd

If you care about texture, you're going to be upset at the damage done to the cell walls of the flesh when the water inside them boils violently and converts to gas.

If you read the other thread, they explain that they cook it low temp, remove the steak and crank the Cinder to full power, then sear the steak and use tongs to sear the sides. I don't get it. But I think this product would be awesome if it were slightly larger and you could unfold and use both sides as a high-powered, super-temperature-stable plancha.

You need to salt it and cure it and hang it if you're going for this sort of result. Koshered meat isn't cured meat, and as it isn't salted for a long enough time. If you're using a Koshered breast, I'm not sure how much you'd need to adjust the recipe because Koshering practices aren't standardized. If you can find out how long it was salted, you might consider reducing the time. Salting isn't enough to sufficiently dry the protein. The general rule is that you're looking to lose 30% of the weight of the meat during the curing and drying process, and that's just not going to happen with salt alone.

That explains my déjà vu. The name switch threw me off. Anyway, anyone interested in this product should be sure to check out that thread. One of the designer/developers provided a bunch of information and answered a lot of questions.

Ruhlman's recipe indicates that a humid environment with a temperature of 50F - 60F is optimal for hanging duck proscuitto. So you should be fine.

You incorporated too much air (and likely used too much xanthan). Don't blend so aggressively next time and try using 0.2% to 0.4% xanthan by weight of your sauce.

Who needs a $200 circulator when you can have a $500 whatever this is?

Why would that be faster than taking them straight from the fridge and putting them into the bath?

Seems a bit misleading to call it "cooked." I was imagining something like fish cooked in a salt crust.

Sear/grill, pressure cook, sear/grill again, glaze. (Or glaze before the final grill if the sugar content isn't too high.) Be sure to heavily season your braising liquid. If you can bring in pork stock you made ahead of time to put in the pressure cooker, that will help too. If it's not a competition, you could always cook the belly sous vide before hand and do whatever you want to it. Maybe you can pull some ideas from this: The battle starts around 9 minutes in.

If you're just using meat, the result of this technique would be jus, not stock. But it works. The Modernist Cuisine folks have a recipe for beef jus made this way. Centrifuge optional.

Roasting is a dry heat method of cooking (unlike steaming or braising) and one of the usual goals of roasting meat is to dry out the exterior and form a nice crust. If you rest meat directly on vegetables, the bottom will steam rather than roast and it won't brown properly. A better method would be to use a roasting rack to suspend the meat a few inches above the vegetables you roast. This will allow the juices from the meat to season the vegetables, but also allow a nice crust to form on the meat.

Yolks start to cook around 58C / 135F, but it'll take a while for them to set up. If you incorporate them quickly, they won't have a chance to curdle. If you want to be extra careful, you can temper them with a small amount of the hot soup base (whisking it in slowly) and then add that mixture to the main pot. If thickening is the goal, you do want the yolks to cook, you just don't want them to scramble into defined curds.

On Iron Chef America I've seen challengers make bone marrow powder a couple times. I believe they rendered the fat from the marrow and blended it into N-Zorbit in a food processor. As for grating, I'd pop the marrow out of the bones after soaking and then cook the low-temperature (like 130-135F) for long enough to set any proteins and kill any nasties that might be in there. You don't need a fancy setup to do that... an improvised setup using a cooler, hot water, and Ziplocks would work fine. Then chill, pat dry, freeze, and grate.

No surprises here. The person who I thought would win did win; they were the most consistent and produced the highest quality bakes overall. But the top three were all brilliant in their own way... some with more pretty bakes than others, while some were less consistent. In the end, I think the right person won. As someone who doesn't bake, I do wish there was a bit more about technique presented on the show. But it was miles above any of the cupcake wars or sugar sculpting competitions on US networks. There was a real spirit of camaraderie and benevolence among the contestants, and the show wasn't an overproduced mess like most of the competition shows here in the states. I quite enjoyed watching this show even though I'm not much into pastry (and I don't even really enjoy sweets).

The TG in Activa is produced via bacterial fermentation and Activa TI is certified Kosher.

A possible issue with making slurries with TI is that blending it into water can incorporate a lot of air into the mixture which weakens strength of the bond. You can pull the air out of the mixture with a chamber vacuum machine if you have access to one. The Great Lakes company makes Kosher gelatin from beef. Their products are widely available online. I know Wylie Dufresne uses gelatine a lot in TG preparations and that he uses TI most of the time.

Just take an ordinary toaster and run it at 4000 watts / 500 volts. Not a great video, but proof of concept. "10 second toast" starts around the 8:30 mark.

Help me use this: Winter is prime stock making season in my house. A foot of snow on the ground totally eliminates the need for an ice water bath to cool finished stock down to storage temperatures so I go crazy and make more than I can use. I've started to compulsively buy up prime stock-making ingredients at the grocery when they go on sale... whenever there are markdowns on short ribs, oxtail, spare ribs, pork neck bones, chicken wings, etc.I buy a bundle of them, roast them off, and move them to the pressure cooker. Then I stick it outside until it's ice cold, skim off the fat (which I also save) and then seal it up in my chamber vacuum. As a result, my freezer is full of vacuum sealed bags of nice gelatinous stock. This is awesome. But I'm not quite sure what to do with all of it. First world problems. I usually use it for three, somewhat obvious purposes. The first is to make soup, which I can produce without even blinking. Meat/bone broths are something I've mastered over the past few years, with my wife remarking that I can make a chicken soup that would make grandmothers weep. My pho and ramen game is as good as any of my local shops. And my French onion soup? To die for. I love a good soup when it's cold out, but I can't make enough to use my supply. The second purpose to which I put my stock supply is the making of sauces. Reduce a stock down, infuse some herbs, add some acid and some fat (and maybe some starch) and spoon it over a quality piece of meat. What's not to like? Finally, I use stock as the foundation for braising liquid when cooking tough cuts, stews, or pot roasts. Those are the main purposes for which I use stock. There are other side uses... glazing vegetables, cooking rice or risotto, etc. But what else should I be doing with it? Or should I just eat more soup?

If you want to get nerdy, check out "The Effect of Milk on the Deodorization of Malodorous Breath After Garlic Consumption" by Areerat Hansanugrum. Section 4.1.1.1. (starting on p.48) is most relevant. The results were basically what I expected. Some of the volatile compounds responsible for harsh garlic flavor/aroma are hydrophobic so water isn't great at removing them. Water is effective in removing other volatiles, however. But the best way to remove these compounds is by using a liquid (like milk) that contains a mixture of fat and water. An interesting result that I didn't expect was that blanched and unblanched garlic showed the same basic behavior. This suggests that chefs blanch garlic not only to remove unwanted volatiles, but also to modify garlic's texture.

I meant I don't "just" thaw with the circulator. If I'm going to cook frozen food sous vide, I drop it directly in the bath from frozen. But if I just need to thaw something, I use a smaller amount of water in the sink.

I cook SV from frozen all the time but I don't thaw in the circulator; a container of water in the sink works well enough for my purposes. It takes less water and I don't have to wait for a water bath to come up to temperature. Rapid thawing of meat in warm water does not compromise texture or appearance and actually reduces drip loss, resulting in meat that may be perceived as juicier. Chicken breasts lose slightly more juice when rapidly thawed, but the texture doesn't suffer and tasters could not tell the difference between rapid/slow thawed chicken after it was cooked.

There's a large range of qualities that one can refer to when discussing mouth feel. Gawel et. al developed a vocabulary for communicating the mouthfeel characteristics of red wine. Chewiness, for example. is said to "give the sensation that mouth movements (chewing) can displace the sensation of astringency." When talking about fats in particular, there are a number of associated textural/mouthfeel characteristics associated with lipids. These include "body, creamy, gelatinous, greasy, melting, oily, slimy, smooth, sticky, thick, thin, waxy, and wet." If you really want to nerd out about the topic, Frontiers in Neuroscience published the anthology "Fat Detection: Taste, Texture, and Post Ingestive Effects" which you can read for free. There are chapters on gustatory and olfactory detection of fat along with a good piece by Mattes on whether fat counts as a primary taste.

Another great way to create a flavorful mushroom broth is to pulse fresh mushrooms in the food processor until they're finely chopped, vacuum seal them with a small amount of salt, and cook them sous vide at 90C for two hours or so. This produces an intense "mushroom water" that you can use however you'd like.

More Than Gourmet makes a concentrated mushroom stock. I'd much rather use that than anything else that's been mentioned.