dscheidt

About 20 years ago, I had a tour of an egg processing factory. They had, among other things, an hard boiled egg line. The eggs weren't actually boiled, it's just 180ish water. They get dunked twice, and then go into a very cold water bath. That cools them to 40 degrees or so iin very short order, which pulls the membrane away from the egg. Then they go through a peeling machine, which is a bunch of rollers, that crack the shells and squeeze the egg out. the other thing I saw was a machine for making loafs of hardboiled eggs. about a foot long, suitable for slicing for salad toppings, etc. same things as the pictures in the first post, but tubular.

If they're ETL certified, they won't be. ETL are a NRTL, same as UL. Little benefit, much expense, in getting a dual listing. (NRTL = nationally recognized testing laboratory. People who certify that stuff meets various safety standards. If you read a code, and it says something like "only listed appliances may be installed", they mean "appliances that one of the labs we recognize has certified to meet the appropriate standards." UL are the best known, but not the only one. ETL are another, there are few more, who do more limited stuff. )

I used to make myself potato chips in a two cup stainless steel measuring jug. it was nice and tall, but narrow. I used less than a cup of oil. Even the crappy electric stove I had in that apartment could keep that hot.

If the bag is going to fail, I'd want it to fail now, while I'm paying attention to it, and not when its in the freezer.

My thought is as long as you have an oil pump, you are fine. The vacuum pump is designed for uses where it pulls a hard vacuum and maintains the hard vacuum for quite some time. Intermittent use, like in a chamber sealer, isn't going to shorten the life of the pump. What will change is how fast you can vacuum out the air in your chamber, which impacts sealing cycle time. The VP215 has only a timer, so I end up setting the vacuum for a fairly long time (my machine is set for 33 seconds most of the time) so that my typical bag (6x9 is my most used size) gets a proper vacuum. With a big bag, that's longer than required, but I don't generally care. It's annoying if i am sealing 10 bags at the same time, and if were doing it all day, I might actually care. I'd buy based on price, size, availability of service, reviews, etc, with pump size being a small factor.

I vacuum seal mason jars all the time. The regular canning sort, with a two piece lid. Leave the band loose, and air goes out, and when the vacuum is released the lid is firmly held in place by atmospheric pressure. Jars that are too tall to stand up right can go in on their side. Obviously, that doesn't work if they're full of liquids, but for stuff that can take it works great.

My take is that if you read 'mutant rabbits from Mars' every where you see blockchain, you'll be just as accurate.

camelcamelcamel are great, but in past years, amazon has not made the prime day pricing available to third parties (there are other tracking sites, too). So they won't know if there's a prime day deal on what you're looking for. I see no reason they'd change that.

I have one of these. I bought it, according to Amazon, on September 27, 2007. It still works fine, and is accurate. The display has gotten hard to read, there's some thing in between layers of hte display. I also have a little scale by american weigh scales. 1Kg by 0.1 g. It sucks. switch doesn't work right, the tare switch sticks, and it's generally chinese crap. Amusingly, for a while after I I bought it, Amazon was convinced I needed very small zip lock bags.

I was, yes. I am sure the pro is much more flexible.

I don't remember exactly, but something like two or three inches from min to max, with basically no flexibility from the clamp. In fairness, I should say that I gave the thing to a friend, and he is pleased with it. It's his first 'meat Jacuzzi', as he calls it, and he doesn't do big cooks, so using it in a stock pot or whatever works fine for him.

There's no good reason to do anything more sophisticated with the controls. you are heating a mass of water, it reacts pretty slowly, so dumping 800 W (or whatever the ratings are) into it for a few seconds is fine grained enough. You could figure out about what the heat loss is, and adjust the output accordingly, but it changes all the time. Things get put in the bath, taken out, water evaporates, and there are a lot of phase transitions in cooking (which suck up heat without a change in temperature.). All of that means you have to adjust all the time, so coarse PWM works nearly as well, as much easier to get right. Yeah, the little one was the nano. I couldn't stand it. It has a fixed non removable clamp, which doesn't fit a cambro food storage box (WTF were they thinking?), and because it's fixed, you can't drill a hole in the lid and drop it in. And the range of water depths is small, so in a pot you might have to remove some water when you put food in it. Just a whole bunch of poorly thought out corner cutting.

The anovas I have tested (two of the BT ones, one of the piece of shit mini thing) all drew slightly more than their claimed heater output the entire time the heater is running; the excess is in line with what it draws when the heater isn't on. In a big container, starting with cold tap water, and going to a high temperature, that can be a couple hours. Once they get close they cycle the heater on-off, no intermediate power setting.

I guess you think it's wrong that you can buy a Chevrolet, and not just a Daimler.

No. 10K hours continuous use is entirely different from how the consumer models are intended to be used.

I don't think the classic DLC series Cuisnarts are ugly, either.

Thermapen has the blue and yellow Mk 4 thermapens on sale for $79.20, instead of $99.

For reasons I fail to understand, I am required to keep my vacuum sealer in the basement, instead of somewhere sensible, like the living room. (There really isn't a place for it the kitchen.) I still use it a lot. I keep some bags in the pantry, and put stuff in the bags, and then carry them downstairts (on a tray, if it's more than a couple bags). It's not really that hard, and doesn't take too long. A lot of the stuff I'm sealing is going into the basement freezer, so i'd be making a trip anyways. When I go upstairs, I carry replacement bags. Were i designing a kitchen from scratch, I would definitely find a way to get it in, though.

I've had bad luck with used toasters. Even if they work when I get them, they fail soon after. Generally, there's a reason people get rid of them. So, I bought the used Breville from amazon. There's no damage to the toaster. It came in a different box, and had no documentation (is there an instruction manual? Do I need it?). My experience with Amazon's used stuff is that the people who grade it have no idea what anything is, so they judge the condition of the box. And when it turns out to be crap, it's easy enought to return. I've only toasted a supermarket bagel, which it did a good job with. The toaster being replaced was burning one side of the bagel, while the other was still cold. Only complaint is that the buttons are on the side, which means it didn't fit in the counter space the other one did. I had to swap the blender and the toaster on the counter, and turn the toaster 90 degrees. No big deal. I'll see how it does with other stuff.

I need a toaster. Not a toaster oven. Not a steam oven. Just something to, you know, make toast, and toast a bagel occasionally. Two slots. Not a million bucks, and not huge. What's good in current production?

the ez-duz-it people started selling the opener because current production (and for the last decade or so) swing-away is made in China. Out of cheese. I bought one, it failed to open the first can I tried it on. It wasn't sharp enough to puncture the can, it just deformed it. The second time I tried to use it, ti broke. I have an ez-duz-it. It's so-so. The blade isn't as sharp as the old swing-aways were. I suspect they have quality control issues with the cutters.

Some of the small sealers have a port to attach a hose, so you can suck the air out of something. The usual use is for evacuating canning jars, which let you store stuff in reusable containers. Most of my extra spices are in such jars, they keep quite well.

Speaking of Rooster brand stuff, this ran today: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/01/16/681944292/in-home-of-original-sriracha-sauce-thais-say-rooster-brand-is-nothing-to-crow-ab tl:dr Thais who sample it don't think it's very good. Too much heat, not balanced.

It seemed pretty clear to me, as a Chicagoan, that it was a transparent ploy to extract money from them. The complaint (singular, as I recall) was from some relative of a politician....

Was. They've all been turned off, even the upgraded eLoran stuff, that was intended to work with GPS. That does mean he can use his stove at sea, without worrying that he'll confuse the navigator!