btbyrd

Bar Keeper's Friend.

Also, who eats steak cold? Seriously...

I'm in the anti-canola camp as of a few years ago. I rarely used it prior to that time (because I seldom use neutral flavored oil when cooking) but tried three or four brands of varying quality before giving up on it entirely. All brands produced fishy off flavors. I've switched to peanut oil and never looked back. (And sometimes corn oil if I'm cooking for a mixed crowd and don't know about allergies). But really, if you're going to sear a steak, clarified butter, tallow, or lard are the way to go.

I'd rather be a worry wart than give myself "the $hits all day." Or worse.

Unless there's something magic that the pro Anova offers that you really need, I see no reason to buy it over the normal home models. The "degree of precision" is exactly the same, and there are few occasions in a home cooking scenario where you'd want or need to circulate 15 gallons. If you're using it in a commercial kitchen, that might be a different story (though there you still might just be better off buying two Anova One circulators rather than a single Pro). So if it's just for normal, non-commercial use... get a cheap circulator and a chamber vacuum. It's hands down the better option. No contest.

Very nice! I wish my spouse would come home with that sort of surprise! I've been wanting to make these for a while but I don't have a dehydrator (I doubt I'd use it much) and am reluctant to use my crappy oven for the purpose... so I guess I'll have to stick with fresh ones from the local Mexican mart for now. On a related note, pork skin can instead of frying. So you could dehydrate a bunch of them, keep them on hand, and puff them on demand without the need for oil -- most convenient! I wonder how well seasoning would adhere to them given that they wouldn't be coated in oil.

Is this really that big of a deal? Just ask your butcher. My local high end grocers don't sell mechanically tenderized meat, and my local chain grocer already labels anything that's been needled. Pasteurize to core. I often Jaccard meat myself when cooking sous vide and I take the extra time to pasteurize it.

Pickling draws capsaicin from the pepper and into the pickling liquid, diluting the overall heat in the pepper. I think the effect of dilution will be magnified in heat processed pickles. I also suspect that acid somewhat masks the perception of heat. I've noticed that my instant pickled jalapenos (done in the chamber vac) taste less hot than they were before pickled. I'm sure this is due, in part, to dilution (because the vinegar takes on a spicy note) but also suspect some flavor masking. I have nothing to back that up scientifically though.

Amazing.

It depends on what temp you're wanting to reheat the steak to. But if you want to bring the core up to the temperature at which you originally cooked, it will take the same amount of time. "... Chilled food will take about the same amount of time to reach the target core temperature when reheated as it did when it was cooked from raw. Frozen food will take considerably more time. Thus, time savings occur only for foods that need to be held at temperature for long periods." - Modernist Cuisine 2:264 You might only want to bring up the core to 125 or so and then finish via searing, which would save you some time. But if you want to reheat all the way through to a uniform temperature that's the same as the original, it's going to take basically the same amount of time.

Hmm... that doesn't seem to be over the top. Since this is the main salt addition in your recipe, you might try scaling the salt in the brine back a couple of percent and see what happens. Or maybe soak it in a few changes of water over the course of an hour to drive out excess salt before you bag it.

There's not much advantage to precooking tender cuts because they take as long to reheat all the way through as they do to cook through the first time. The taste and texture don't suffer from reheating (it's not a microwave) but there's not a lot of time saved. The real advantage, as rotuts mentioned, is that pasteurized SV products will keep in the fridge for a long time without losing quality. So you can buy in bulk when things go on sale, pasteurize it, and then keep it in your fridge for a month if you want to. Cooking tough cuts for a longer amount of time is always a good choice. The same thing applies about doing it in bulk; if you're going to cook 72 hour short ribs, you might as well make a boatload of them at once.

When you say "70:30 brine," what do you mean exactly? My first thought upon reading that was that your ribs were going to turn out incredibly salty, but I'm not sure what your ratio is indicating.

Yeah, I would just serve the chops over the rice and cook them separately. You're already using stock and saffron to flavor the rice so it should have a good enough flavor without having another meat added to it; any flavor you get from the chops will be minimal and you will run the risk of overcooking them and you'll ruin whatever crust they had. And like Mitch suggested, I doubt the pork will pick up any saffron flavor. I'd much prefer to be served a pile of saffron rice with a freshly grilled/fried chop on top than a pile of rice that's been simmered with the pork. The flavor will be cleaner and the pork will be better prepared.

I wish people were more thoughtful and less snobbish about ingredients. Modernist Cuisine has a couple recipes that use potato flakes and Alex and Aki from Ideas in Food are big fans as well. There are lots of uses for them if you think outside the suggested labeling. They make a nice gluten free substitute for panko, they taste great in bread, and they're great as a thickener in creamy soups. The Ideas in Food folks like to roast them in the oven and use the browned flakes to make all sorts of potato-chip-flavored goodness, like Potato Chip Soup and Potato Chip Ice Cream. They also smoke them and use them to bread potatoes which they then deep fry. Their first book has a recipe for potato chip pasta using potato flakes. There are lots of possibilities. They also make decent mashed potatoes in no time.

In this podcast from Nordic Food Lab, they suggest that you don't pull a hard vacuum when fermenting in the bag but instead leave a tiny bit of air in there to keep botulism from growing. If you have a chamber vac that can save settings, you might consider adding a fermentation preset.

The potatoes in Potato Buds (and instant mashed potatoes more generally) have been pre-cooked and cooled, which retrogrades the potato starch and minimizes the amount of starch that comes out of the potato flakes during the final cooking process. This prevents instant mashed potatoes from becoming gluey and gross when you rehydrate them. In the context of your recipe, potato buds allow you to thicken the soup and add potato flavor without turning the final dish into a pot of glue. You could do this without the instant potatoes, but it would take a lot more work and I doubt the finished product would be significantly better.

Apart from texture issues, I don't think there's anything "wrong" with sous vide fermentation. Dave Arnold at Cooking Issues has mentioned this technique a few times (though he hasn't really discussed it in depth) and seems to think it's worth trying. His only real caution was that once fermentation gets going, there's going to be a lot of CO2 produced and the bag will puff up. If it really gets going, the bag may explode. So he suggested that you double bag it, using a smaller bag to contain the food you're going to ferment and sealing that in a bag the next size up. Over at Star Chefs, there's a profile of chef Sanghoon Degeimbre that outlines his method of preparing kimchi sous vide. It's not a "recipe" per se, but it's proof of concept. He uses a centerfuge, on the cabbage juice but that's not really necessary. The folks over at Nordic Food Lab have also mentioned SV fermentation before, suggesting that you basically just toss vegetables in 1-1.5% of their weight in salt, seal, and let it ride. I can't find the specific post on their site, but in a post on the microbiology of fermentation the lead image is of a puffy vacuum bag. If Noma's doing it, it's probably worth trying. I just sealed some napa cabbage with some salt following this program and will report back on the results. (I didn't have the time to go "full kimchi" on it at the moment). But if the OP is seriously interested in trying his hand at fermentation, there's not really a need to invest in an expensive, unitasking fermentation crock (although they're nice if you've got the money and the space). For thirty or forty bucks, you can pick up some wide mouth mason jars and some special lids that will vent excess gas (Pickle-Pro and Kraut Kaps are two quality brands) and you'll be able to ferment to your heart's content. Also, if you're looking for good information about fermentation, I can't recommend Sandor Katz's two books ("Wild Fermentation" and "The Art of Fermentation") highly enough. The first is more recipe driven, while the latter is more about the theory behind fermenting different types of food. His website also has a lot of quality information.

Those idiots don't seem to know what they're doing. The gaskets will be exposed to oil as well as steam, since the chicken will be spattering hot oil all over the place inside the cooker. If the gasket should happen to become damaged or melt out while the cooker is under pressure, you're in for a world of hurt. Most pressure cooker manuals explicitly tell you not to do this. That's because pressure cookers aren't pressure fryers. If you still want to risk it, invest in a cooker that has a bar that clamps the lid down so that it won't blow off if you build up too much pressure or if the gaskets fail. Serious Eats did a piece on this a while back.

The MC@H recipe calls for salt at 1% the weight of the vegetable during the pressure cooking step, but you went over by half a percent. But they also call for seasoning it again at the end, so that might not have been the issue. Were you using salted butter? Did you puree the squash before you tasted it? It could be that the outside of the squash was too salty but the inside wasn't.

Pot roast round 2... again with butternut squash, turnip, parsnip, and celery root.

This technique was first suggested by Bruno Goussault, one of the godfathers of low temp cooking. I wouldn't say that it's necessary, but those who have done side-by-side taste tests have found that SV meat that's chilled slowly in stages retains more juice. Dave Arnold discussed it on a recent episode of Cooking Issues; it's the first question in this episode.

How long are you cooking them for? "A couple hours" is too long unless you're trying to pasteurize at a low temp. Also, are you salting them before? If so, don't. That draws out moisture and firms up the texture.

If you're trying to avoid a watery sauce, pre-salt the noodles for 30 minutes or so, dry them with towels, then cook them separately from your sauce. When they're done, pat them dry again and add your sauce at the end.

Sounds like false labeling to me. I've run into that problem before; my local market carries real boneless short ribs (as well as bone-in versions) but I ran across a cryovacked package of something that obviously wasn't short rib yet was labeled as such. Maybe what you (and I) came across were those chuck short ribs that FeChef was talking about. I'd never heard of this cut, but found a video about the cut on the YouTubes. It's hard to tell without a good closeup, but these chuck "short ribs" don't seem to have anywhere near the marbling or connective tissue of true short ribs.