cdh

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...

And didn't one of the old school food writers do a whole book on bialys and the people who brought them to America? Mimi Sheraton or Florence Fabricant or somebody of that stature and vintage. I seem to recall hearing Terry Gross do an interview with the author back when I was listening to the radio during the hours Fresh Air was on the air...

I was in NYC for the first time since the plague hit a couple of weeks ago and went down to Kossar's for bialys and bagels. The temple of the bialy was topping theirs with some tomato paste stuff and not onions. I'm still weirded out by that. Pretty good, but not the old standard.

I've already got the coffee atlas... but couldn't resist the José Andrés book.

Something fun I did with it once is make the syrup, then throw some water kefir grains into it, and let them slowly convert the sugar to acid enough to flip the color.

That stuff is fun and tasty. Have you noticed that it doesn't get the bright pink color unless you acidulate it? If you just extract the juice from the leaves into a syrup it is murky green/brown. Add a bit of citrus juice or citric acid and it flashes over to pink.

Mitch- Have you run acid through it to descale? Or is the problem obviously not related to water making its way through the tubes?

Does anybody have any experience with Seedlip and its relatives in the non-alcoholic but distilled genre? The idea seems interesting, but I've not taken the plunge because I can't imagine them having any body or mouthfeel... Clarified herbal teas are unappealing.

Also, for everybody who doesn't work on the literal Wall Street, "Wall Street" is easy shorthand for "the financial services industry". Most of New York's "Wall Street" (that hasn't jumped across the river to Jersey City or up to Connecticut) is in midtown now anyway... the only relevant things near literal Wall Street are NYSE (which is on Broad Street, anyway) and the offices of a few of the traders who hold seats there. Perhaps we might want to talk about the tax advantaged status of owning great swaths of midwestern farmland now, and how it has become an asset sink for risk averse fincancial managers.... Wonder why Bill Gates owns as many acres there as he does, no?

Sad news. He was great at hosting the tea tasting and evaluation threads. I learned a bunch from all of them that I'm putting to use in my purchasing and drinking today. His in with the Cultured Cup folks provided lots of interesting stuff.

I noticed on my last trip to Aldi that the prices on dry goods seem to have returned from the brief bump. The crackers that used to be $2.95 then jumped to $3.45 after being gone for a month or so, are plentiful and back down to $2.95 as of yesterday.

I'd read that there were DiFara expansions in other places in the works... hopefully he had worthy apprentices to handle the new ventures.

I don't mind that at all. Owning a Lelit has subjected me to the single point of English-speaking service in the US, and its surly employees... Breville seems more CS oriented. I won't miss having to supplicate certain surly New Jersey guys for information that they have a policy against divulging... like measurements for parts. (btw, I'm not happy to pay a 10x markup for stupid stuff like o-rings and gaskets... but certain surly "no measurements" policies did inspire me to get a caliper and take my own damn measurements and go to the hardware store.