cdh

Yeah... the review has a slightly biased feeling to it. "Yeah, it kinda works, but THE REALLY GOOD STUFF comes from the machine 30x the price..." The fact that they admitted it works counts as a real win for Ninja, I think. And chef-guy's admission he bought one for his home kitchen too.

That's a good starting point- What's the minimum brix for acceptable texture chez BlueDolphin?

I've not even received my box in the mail yet, and questions are forming from all the reading up I'm doing. Has anybody figured out the absolute minimum Brix for the frozen stuff to be safe for the machine. I read that a block of frozen water is too hard for machine to grind through... yet frozen pineapple bits in syrup work fine. Everybody here working on the dairyless stuff must encounter similar issues. Has anybody with a refractometer done any measurements and come to any conclusions? Does the machine have any clutch-like safeguards built in, or is it a recipe for a hard fail/smoking motor if you go past the "too hard" threshold?

Deals on this thread almost never last longer than a month... and some disappear right quickly. I'm feeling guilty because AMZ presented me with Julia Child Vol2 for $1.99 over the weekend and I bought it, but didn't post here. Today it's back up to $20.

That would do the trick, and not require waiting on the slow boat from China...

The brew basket would allow you to do the gongfu style short steeps of lots of leaves. Or you could look into ordering something like this. It also lets you steep a lot of leaves in a little water and drop the water away from the leaves quickly. Yixing pots are fun and pretty, but they also drain more slowly than you'd get with the filter basket or Kamjove thingy. That time difference can make a difference in some teas that are tasty when brewed for 10 seconds at a time, but unpleasant when it gets to 20 or 30 seconds... (lookin' at you, dancong oolongs).

OK. I've been coopted too. Woot order placed. A fun new toy to play with!!!

Another thought, remembering you're in NY. A weekend in the Hudson Valley many years ago taught me the extent to which your water can affect your tea. If your well water is full of minerals, some of them will interact with the tea flavors. I had brought along some of Ten Ren's fancier King's Tea that was delicious at home, and while there it brewed up disgusting. Absolutely undrinkable. So If you happen to run across a tea that is just not doing it for you, get some bottled water and try brewing with that and see if it is your taste buds, or suboptimal brewing materials.

I've got one of these and am quite happy with it. https://www.amazon.com/Chefman-Temperature-Control-Electric-Kettle/dp/B08G8WX93H?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1 Though, given the picture and write up I should clarify that I've _never_ dropped tea into the infuser basket in the kettle. That is just asking for disgusting brown sludge buildup that you'll never get clean.

I've not tried the refrigerated version... never even noticed there was an unfrozen lasagna option. The frozen one that was missing from the freezer last trip is the default lasagna I go for. But the new Florentine is a worthy addition to the lineup... hope they restock on the meat lasagna _and_ keep the spinachy one around too. They usually have a frozen meat, and a frozen "veggie" whatever that is... probably ratatouille layered between noodles, which does not appeal.

Last trip to TJ's they didn't have the meat lasagna that I enjoy... but they did have a new Florentine lasagna, so I picked one of them up . Excellent addition to the TJ lineup. Very very tasty stuff.

And remember- green tea is vile if your water is north of 180F. Start oolongs at 200 and vary up or down depending on how they are tasting. Black teas at 205 to full boil. White tea is very amenable to every temperature.

Hope you find something you enjoy. There's plenty to try in there. Bookmark the page (or better yet save it in case it disappears) since it tells you which packet is which... and the packets are entirely in Chinese.

Food is cooked when the chemical reactions you want to happen have happened enough for your tastes. With meats, it is protein denaturing... changing the meat from raw to cooked. With grains it can be enzymatic, like when malts let the enzymes turn the starch into sugar, or it can be more mechanical, where kneaded dough forms a matrix that holds air and water in such a way that when you heat it, the heat will puff up the trapped air into a crumb and the water evaporates off and the crust browns... Whole heaps of chemical reactions there... So food is cooked when enough heat has been applied in the right way to get the chemical reactions you want.

I'd look into whether there are recipes for liqueurs made with fruits with a similar texture/consistency. Limoncello is about dissolving the _oils_ in the skin of the lemons into the alcohol. Getting a mango-cello would be a totally different thing because mangos are pulpy and the flavor isn't in an oil that can be coaxed to dissolve into alcohol. I'd imagine that pawpaws and mangos will have more in common with each other... and I can't recall crossing paths with any mango booze... you might be headed into distillation country if you want to get something alcoholic and full of pawpaw flavor...

I've been doing some poking around and models below the $1000 price point don't seem to get much deeper than 3-5 inches.

Nice to hear positive testimony from folks who have had good experiences with dry pumps over long periods of time. That is reassuring. The chamber dimensions they advertise are the size of a manila envelop, ~11x12 which is plenty of space in the x and y axes. Z, on the other hand is only 3 inches tall. That means that sealing a couple of thick cut steaks is about as much as it can handle. And forget dropping a canning jar in there to seal something into it. But is that something that people regularly do with a chamber vac? Sealing a whole roast would not be doable... but how often would I want to do that?

Why the hard line on an oil pump? The Anova touts a "maintenance free dry pump", and a 2 year warranty. Do dry pumps die at 2 years and oil pumps need a top up? A look at eBay tells me China has got chamber vacs in the production queue. Some coming in in at less than $350. The Anova looks more controlled, with the ability to follow steps rather than just pump and stop. Is there really an added benefit to that? And is the microcontroller going to be a point of failure? I kinda doubt it.

FWIW I tasted my way through one of those Chinese sample sets a while back on this thread. Maybe you'll find my notes interesting or helpful... or not...

Agree on the brewing basket recommendation. One of those will permit you to play with both traditional western pour-hot-water-over-a-teaspoonful-and-wait brewing as well as the chinese gong fu styles of brewing where you're only very briefly letting a lot of leaf encounter your much smaller volume of water. Also a kettle with a variable set temperature will improve the experience greatly if you start experimenting with green teas. Most of them are disgusting if brewed with boiling water, but delicious if brewed with water at 170F +/- 10.

To get started get a wide sampling and taste your way through it. There is a LOT of "good tea" in the world. Pick a region and find somebody selling ~10g samples... Join a tea-of-the-month club... Adagio.com used to have one... maybe they still do. Yunnansourcing.com has fairly pricey monthly box subscription you can sign up for if you're feeling flush. If not, poke around on Aliexpress for something like this set of tea samples. You might want to grab a book like The Tea Lovers Treasury to get an idea about just how broad the range of options is. Or watch the Mei Leaf videos on Youtube...

Oooooooooooooh. Want!

Where from? If they're frozen perhaps they've made their way closer to me. Gimme a brand to hunt for.

Your video looks like the Kossar's I remember... the place I went to a month ago does not. I totally remember those stacks of wooden cooling racks...