btbyrd

Just dropping by the thread to express my undying hatred for "The Kitchen" on Food Network.

I was reading up on biscuits when I saw this comment by Chris Young about why ChefSteps' biscuit recipe calls for both salt and salted butter. "Salted butter has a different flavor profile due to the fact that salt promotes the oxidation of the butterfat, which leads to the development of different flavors than you get in unsalted butter. "

Wow! Insane skills.

Porthos: Fantastic job cleaning up those pans... they look brand new when you're done! I searched (to no avail) to find your technique for getting the big glunky rocks of black stuff off the exterior of the pan. What's your process there?

I'm with Baron. Burned flavor is bitter and tastes bad. Contrary to FeChef's question, a few minutes is more than enough time to caramelize a piece of meat (or produce Maillard flavors). If a cooking method is sufficient to burn part of a piece of meat, it's sufficient to produce caramelized/Maillard flavors in those parts. Browning reactions happen at a lower temperatures than burning/blackening does. Much of the grilled flavor imparted to meat comes from juice and fat dripping down onto the coals (or other heating element) and then vaporizing and combusting. These flare ups create a meat-based vapor / smoke which wafts up and flavors the meat. You can produce a steak that has great grilled flavor but has very little (if any) blackening. Here's a nice video from ChefSteps on flareups and grilled flavor.

Different butters contain different salt levels, so it makes sense if you're trying to create a consistent result. Who measures salt by volume anyway? The difference between table salt and various types of kosher salt can vary by more then 100%. The difference between 1.5 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp is far from insignificant. You'd have to use 12 times as much salted butter to match the salt level. I call foolishness on those who ignore such a giant difference. I agree that the recipe should specify the sodium content of the broth, but people should be using (unsalted) stock for cooking anyway.

Nope. I bought lard and cold smoked it, and then used that to fry like 5 pounds of smoked pork belly. It's basically bacon fat without the salt. Since this is the SV thread, here's a pic of the pork belly dish, "Bacon, egg, and cheese." Brined, cold smoked belly cooked 48hrs @ 62C. Chilled, pressed, portioned. Stuffed with Kerrygold cheddar. Topped with 64.3C yolk and Maldon salt.

Last night's dinner: 48 hour short ribs, chive butter, ChefSteps triple cooked chips. Fried everything in smoked lard. Served with a hyperdecanted cabernet sauvignon.

I KNEW IT! Sweet setup.

For beef, pork, or chicken, I often cook from frozen. For fish, which is more delicate and whose texture can really suffer from enzymatic breakdown, I thaw before cooking. I usually throw it in the fridge a day or two before I think I'm going to cook it. If I'm in a time crunch, I'll thaw it in cold water.

I used to obsess about this kind of thing but I don't anymore. Most commercial cryovac bags are polyethylene, so there's not much of an issue. Even if they were one of the nastier BPA containing plastics, the temperature and time on something like fish (or a medium rare steak) isn't high enough to concern me. I assume that if it looks like a SV safe vacuum bag, it probably is a SV save vacuum bag. YMMV.

On a related note, the first ingredient in Shel's preferred brand of cream of mushroom soup is water. This is followed by mushrooms, mushroom flavor base, and mushroom concentrate.

That would be "BeefaRoni." Rice-a-Roni's jingle was: "Rice! a-Roni... The San Francisco treat!"

I did some math and figured you're overpaying for short ribs. But +1 on your technique suggestions. I find that flank or skirt steak are great mixed with short rib for a burger blend. Kenji over at Serious Eats likes oxtail too, but that can be sort of a pain to cut and clean before grinding.

That would work. It is common in Asian cuisines to use the steeping liquid from rehydrating dried mushrooms to make stock. It's quite flavorful.

Use more bones.

Ah. My understanding was that he was cooking in bags inside a water bath inside an oven set to a low temperature.

Oven thermostats are notoriously unreliable, especially at low temperatures. My oven is garbage and I'd never dream about using it for sous vide work. If you have a combi oven or a higher-end consumer model, this is not really an issue. But if the OP was using such an oven, I doubt it would have randomly shut off in the night. My vote is squarely in the "when in doubt, throw it out" camp. If there aren't any off-smells and you're feeling adventurous (and you have decent health insurance) then go for it. But I wouldn't serve it to anyone else.

The Kraft flavor houses have a large line of "natural grill flavors." The grilled steak chips I researched have corn maltodextrin at the base of their seasoning. They also contain MSG, yeast extract, grill flavoring, smoke flavoring, and "natural beef type flavoring."

If you don't add water it will burn. Add water, pressure cook, natural release, strain, and chill until you can scrape the solidified layer of fat off the top. Alternatively, you can grind the fatback, put it in a mason jar, barely tighten the lid, and pressure cook the jars with a few cups of water. This will keep the fat and the water separated.

I'd never seen that before. Apparently it was a bit of a scandal when that recipe first aired. Sandra Lee's Wikipedia page even has a whole subsection dedicated to the Kwanzaa Cake: "A war crime." Classic!

There are better resources than a thousand pages of eGullet if you're just looking for times/temps for SV. The Cooking Issues Time/Temp SV Charts The ChefSteps SV Time/Temp guide / PDF version The ChefSteps Short Ribs Time/Temp guide Doug Baldwin's Practical Guide to Sous Vide Vacmaster's Time/Temp Chart Between these guides, I don't see the need for an app. Then there are more extensive resources like Modernist Cuisine at Home (which is basically a "Must Buy" if you're going to spend the money on a circulator).

I'm mostly with you, but here are some applications for which the SVS seems better suited than a circulator. You could still pull off most of them with a circulator and a bain marie, but the SVS would be easier/cleaner. Low temperature steaming: Cheese making: Meat stock: It's also better for any traditional crock pot style application. I'd still prefer a circulator most of the time. And the Anova is $150 cheaper than the SVS; you can almost get 2 for the same price. (Edit: not sure why that last link isn't embedding properly, but it links to the correct video).

Looks like a jack of all trades/master of none. The street price seems high for a SV device that doesn't circulate. It also doesn't have the precision of most circulators since you can only set the temperature in whole degrees. That's not an issue for most things, but for eggs it can make all the difference. So can circulation. The water at the bottom of the pan is invariably going to be hotter than the water at the top where the probe hangs out. The circulator I use is stable to roughly a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, so there aren't any hot spots. Bluetooth connectivity and phone apps strike me as gimmicky and practically worthless if you already know the basic time/temp suggestions for SV. But leaving the app aside, Bluetooth's range is only like 50 feet or so... why not just walk to the kitchen? Wifi would be better since you could leave your house, but even that would have limited applications. What do you really need to check on anyway? If the water is up to temp, it's up to temp; and it's not like you ever really need to change the cooking temperature during the cook cycle. If it had a separate thermocouple that could tell you the core temp of your product along with the bath temperature (and these were integrated into something like the Polyscience SV app) then I could imagine some use for a remote monitoring/controlling app. But mostly not. I also worry about the battery life on the wireless thermometer; is it up for 72 hour short ribs or 100 hour oxtail? EDIT: They say it's good for up to 3 months under "heavy use" of 2 hours a day. So it'll probably be fine for extended cooking. I do wish the probe could withstand temperatures up to 450F or so, as this would be ideal for deep frying. It tops out at 375F. It seems like this product would have been a great idea two years ago before the current crop of circulators made it to market. But I don't really see the appeal... at least as a sous vide rig. Using two or three of these to hold and serve soup, stews, sauces and whatnot would be pretty nice. You could also use it as a suped up crock pot, or to make stock while leaving it mostly unattended, or to do low temperature steaming. The ChefSteps crew came up with some interesting applications for the Sous Vide Supreme that would probably translate to this device pretty well.

Cut into chops and cook it on the ground over the coals of a still-burning fire using a cast iron pan and loads of butter. If you'd like to add herby flavors, simply reach for the nearest tree.