btbyrd

Deviled ham is redneck rillettes.

I just make my bacon in the oven. But I still want a set of Chef’s Presses in various weights. They’re not exactly bacon presses, but they’re not exactly not bacon presses.

Hahaha... yes, of course! I edited the original post to fix the error. Thanks for pointing it out.

Made surf and turf for my dad’s birthday. Cut the fat cap off the rib roast and rendered it down. Used that beef fat to throw an epic sear on the roast in my trusty Darto No. 27. Then into the bag with more beef fat for five hours at 135F. Then a final oven sear at 500F with convection. When I pulled the roast from the bath, I upped the temp to 140F and dropped the lobster in. I butterflied the tails and tucked the meat back into the shell. Then I put all my mother's teaspoons into a Ziplock bag and sealed it up using the displacement method. I put those spoons in a chamber vacuum bag with a pound of Kerrygold butter and some lemon zest. The spoons keep the bag from floating, since butter is lighter than water. The lobster tails went in for like 45 minutes while I finished up. The mashed potatoes hung out in the bath too, keeping warm for "service." When everyone was ready, I pulled the lobster tails, untucked the meat from its shell, covered the flesh with a generous amount of cubed butter, and broiled them briefly. The texture was exquisite. I wish I'd made more. Another bonus of cooking the lobster this way is that you end up with a bag filled with lobster-infused butter, and you can just pour the clarified butter off the top of the bag. The lemon peel does impart a nice flavor to the butter as well.

Made surf and turf for my dad’s birthday. It was perfect.

Looks like the Riedel Ultra decanter or something very similar.

I have the smallest Blackstone and like it a lot. I use it for smash burgers, mostly, but also for hash browns and pancakes. They aren’t the most even heating things in the world, but they get the job done and are relatively inexpensive.

I've had a dry pump machine for almost ten years and it has not given me any problems. If you're doing high volumes or sealing a lot of hot liquid for some reason, maybe an oil pump would be worth paying extra for. But for casual use at home, dry pumps are fine.

40oz porterhouse. Video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cr4Z8PAsdCW/

Spaghetti? Really?

Dewars are self venting so there’s not a separate venting process from which you could glean some surplus nitrogen gas. It’s hard to dish out just the gas phase of nitrogen if all you have is a dewar, and since the gas is invisible, it would be difficult to know that you’ve done it correctly. I know that Dave Arnold’s bar crew at the now defunct Existing Conditions used liquid nitrogen to exclude the air in the headspace of bottled cocktails before capping them. It only takes a dash, and a dash of LN is many more times the amount than you actually need of gaseous nitrogen (which is like 900 times less dense than than its liquid phase). I guess you could add a splash to an airtight container with food before sealing it and wait for the nitrogen to fully sublimate, but you run the risk of freezing some of your product. Honestly, I’d rather use one of those valves containers designed to use with vacuum machines than try to recreate gas flush with LN.

Grilled halibut with green chilli adobo and grilled vegetables. Fish on charcoal, most everything else on gas.

For some reason, I missed the part about dad being allergic to fish and only saw the shellfish allergy.

If they can eat fish but not shellfish, you could look into surimi shaped like shellfish. Surimi puts the "K" in "krabstick." Mushrooms are a good call too. In addition to oyster and lobster mushrooms, I think lions mane has some good seafood-y flavor. Enoki might be worth playing around with if you're going to cook them first and them make them into a "crab cake." There's a tinned faux snow crab product made from enoki from Seed to Surf that's supposed to be pretty tasty, but at around $10 a tin, it may seem like kind of a lot to spend on canned mushrooms.

The Pinhais mackerel is really good, but I've never had the spicy in tomato sauce (just the spicy). Jealous that you'll be cramming your suitcase full of the stuff!

I had some leftover fajita veg (peppers, onions, mushrooms) that got used as a filling for an omelette. The eggs were beaten with some green chili adobo, giving a verdant tinge.

But there's always blue painter's tape, the official label maker of the Guild of Culinary Professionals.

I use a label maker.

I have those OXOs in various sizes, quite handy. I also have a half dozen generic plastic ones with red caps in 2, 4, and 8oz capacities. I keep 8oz bottles of neutral oil and water by the stovetop. Having a squeezie of water makes it easy to add a splash if a pan starts to overheat or a sauce starts to overreduce. I keep another 8oz bottle full of ketchup in the fridge that I fill up from the "normal" Heinz squeeze bottle, which always seems to poop out too much ketchup for my needs. The tiny 2oz bottles are nice to hold finishing oils or vinegar so that you can dose out drops to finish a dish or use as condiments. The OXOs are very well built; I tend to use them for things like flavored mayonnaise or sour cream.

Ah, I thought you were addressing me specifically. Western debas are plenty heavy. There is no doubt about that for anyone who has held one. But weight is only part of the story. Weight per se doesn't matter much; how that mass is distributed matters more. That determines the balance point of the knife and how much the weight of the knife does the cutting for you. My CCK stainless #2 cai dao weighs 280g and is 205mm long. My small western deba from Kajiwara weighs just 15 grams more than the CCK and is 170mm in length. Here they are side by side. First, the spine of the knives: Now the choils: I'm certain that the knife on the left weighs less than your cai dao, but I'm also certain that it's way better at cutting through bones. It's obviously better than my CCK, even though they weigh basically the same. The Tojiro 240mm works in many ways better, even though it's thinner, because the balance point is so far forward. It lives to hack through things. Is it as robust or heavy as a bone chopping cleaver? No. But like I said, I don't have much need for cleavers of that kind. It's my anti-cleaver meat "cleaver."

Because the OP specifically said they weren’t looking for a cleaver to chop through bones. And I know what a cai dao is.

This thread isn't really about bone chopping cleavers, but if it was, I would say two things. The first is that I don't use one of those because I don't have much use for one. Instead, I use another knive that I don't have much use for. The Tojiro 240mm Western Deba. It's my anti-cleaver meat cleaver. It has the profile of a chef's knife but the blade is so thick you can basically do anything to it and not have to worry. It is a monster. An absolute unit. This video gives a good idea of the experience of using it on chickens. It'll just hack through a carcass without asking questions. The blade is so freakshow heavy that it will smash of garlic with basically the force of gravity. But it still has the classic profile of a French chef's knife, so you can rock chop things into oblivion. I use mine to mince rosemary and other woody herbs, for instance. Smackitty smackitty. But if I was to buy a bone cleaver, this is the daddy.

I have no idea what might have caused that sort of discoloration, but hopefully you can take care of it with a bit of elbow grease. Hasegawa's scraper is the obvious tool of choice, though I suspect you could probably achieve similar results with a sanding block and a coarse wet/dry sandpaper. The one I got from Korin is basically just abrasive with a handle on it, looking much like the Hasegawa one. I used it to refinish my Hi Soft and it worked well, but you'll have to remove a lot of material to get rid of deep gashes. You have to do something similar to hinoki cutting boards, which are akin to cutting on balsa wood. I'd never use a serrated knife on boards like these... we have beater wooden and Epicurean boards to use with our bread knife. Be kind to your kindest boards.

Maybe. I don't know, I've just tried the chicken, beef, and veal products. I usually keep a roast chicken one on hand and either a beef one (like glace de viande) or veal demi glace. If you use them kind of straightforwardly for pan sauces, I suppose they can taste similar because they're all reductions made from roasted bones. But the veal demi is probably the most neutral, followed by the chicken. The beef one I usually buy is roaster and meatier tasting than those two, but is still in a similar ballpark. I like them mostly because they're reductions of well made, gelatinous stock that isn't full of yeast extract and hydrolyzed soy protein or whatever. That stuff is fine, but if I'm buying stock, I'd rather buy actual stock than water that's been tarted up with exogenous glutamatic acid and had a chicken waved over it.

The best products of this type are made by More Than Gourmet. They come in small 1.5oz pucks or in a 16oz tub, the latter of which will make 5 gallons of stock. That's 19 liters. But I never use it that way... I just add it to stocks, stews, or sauces to enrich the flavor and add body. It's very high in gelatin, and sets up *very* firm in the fridge, where it keeps basically forever.