inventolux

dissolve 2 sheets of gelatin into the hot liquid. You will find a nice quenellable luscious quality to your problem.

Lesley -- It might be easier to post a response instead of editing an old one that is now being burried. "you people" no matter the context can be construed as offensive by any given person in any given circumstances. Why limit this to the professional chefs????? I'm in the biz. I get indulged by our highly trained and skilled Executive Chef. I wish to pursue further training. Doesn't my opinion count too? I think it has merit too. Yes, your socio-economic prejudices I find to be very apparent from your previous posts. edit: boo boo fix -- it's getting late. I'm tired. Not all professional chefs are professionals. So lets begin there. Gastronomy is for anyone who sacrifices time, focus and energy for the betterment of the culinary arts. If thats you, then dont waste another minute contemplating, go full force and enjoy the ride. I think this guy is onto something

What about a war on low fat?

I use to live in the bend/medford/ashland area. I hope your expectations arent too high.

I.ve been using my kitchen aid grinder attachment to grind nuts with lately. Coarse disk. I made a hazelnut sponge cake with them, turned out awesome. Better luck next time Grind some hazelnut meringues and make hazelnut meringues with the "hazelnut meringue powder" as a sugar substitution. Let me know how it turns out.

My family of five shared one Cowboy Sandwich (being, in this case, the bottom half of the hamburger bun with the spam/velveeta mixture spread on top), and there were leftovers. Peter and Heidi were young enough that they could go "gaak" and spit (hork) the stuff out on the floor and it didn't seem too uncouth. Diana, Paul and I quietly swallowed (gagged) and then brushed our teeth. Onto the congealed salad topic, somewhere in this place, I have a circa 1963 Jello grocery store pamphlet-style cookbook. I recall seeing recipes that called for celery jello. Celery Jello????? Celery jello? I wasnt aware of avant garde white trash cuisine. One may go all the way with a frito chili pie sno cone.

Lesley -- It might be easier to post a response instead of editing an old one that is now being burried. "you people" no matter the context can be construed as offensive by any given person in any given circumstances. Why limit this to the professional chefs????? I'm in the biz. I get indulged by our highly trained and skilled Executive Chef. I wish to pursue further training. Doesn't my opinion count too? I think it has merit too. Yes, your socio-economic prejudices I find to be very apparent from your previous posts. edit: boo boo fix -- it's getting late. I'm tired. Not all professional chefs are professionals. So lets begin there. Gastronomy is for anyone who sacrifices time, focus and energy for the betterment of the culinary arts. If thats you, then dont waste another minute contemplating, go full force and enjoy the ride.

Thanks, slkinsey. The advantages you see are the same ones I see. It took me a while to realize that my conclusions actually addressed the original reason for qualolote's post -- he was short of duck fat, a problem I confronted myself not too long ago. (Props to Inventolux for suggesting it.) I think this technique would work, even in ziplock bags, though I'd feel more secure with a FoodSaver. One of those is not my my budget, however. The plastic wrap is over the top, prep-wise. I can't imagine doing twelve of those packages for a dinner party. However, the idea of just snatching a single envelope of confit for a solo dinner or an impromptu lunch is charming. And then I recalled that I've seen this before -- is this how D'Artagnian ships confit? I know I've seen it somewhere. But frankly, I have no problem with adding chicken fat or evoo (or goose, as JasonCampbell suggests, if I had it -- I'm jealous of anyone who does) to confit duck -- I'm a big fan of mixing lipids (I would try evoo and chicken fat with lamb shanks, for instance, and the potatoes in the last photo were done in duck fat, butter and peanut oil). Here's the thing: I believe Inventolux knows what he's doing. But there's a breakdown somewhere; I'd like to get to the bottom of it. And I'd like to apologize to qualolote for temporarily hijacking his thread. (Sorry, Dean.) Great Field work DTC, I am very impressed at your curious course of action. One of my many weaknesses as a chef is my lack of precise recipes. I use a lot of "a pinch of this", "about that hot", "until it feels like this" sort of recipes. Its worked well for me to this point because I am accustomed to daily changing menus and exact recipes would take longer to generate than the just producing the dish. Recipes for me are almost against my nature. What if the herbs are too strong today? What if the chicken breast I use is smaller than yours? What if it rained yesterday all over the mushrooms I will be recieving tomorrow and now they are wetter than yesterday? What if, what if, what if? Standrdized recipes are far too difficult to use when I subject myself to the mercy of mother nature on a daily basis. More often than not CT's would not serve chicken at all and pheasant was the preferred alternative. This recipe utilizing the "just below simmering" temperature I can best describe as just barely too hot to put your hands in. When used with a pheasant breast which is much smaller and more forgiving when it comes to medium and medium-well temps, it works quite well. My apologies for the misinfo, however it sounds like you have seen the benefits of the pouch technique. When the technique is taken steps further you can experiment with the following: Obviously confits and braised items. Fish like Turbot, Seabass, Japanese Tai, St. Pierre, or most white fleshed flat fish lightly brined with aromatics and seaweeds to enhance their minerally nature. Lobster tails with brown butter in the bag cooked slower and lower to maintain the beautiful sweetness that is lost in so many other dry heat methods. Vegetable purees, ill just give one example here and you can apply it to whatever plantlife you wish: Place sunchokes, a touch of yuzu or lemon juice, s&p, half of a diced shallot that has been sweated with olive oil all in a pouch, cook until soft. Puree. Cook less for use in whole form. Legumes, Starches like potatoes, Curries, anything you can fathom works. A method that I am currently playing around with is the following: Take all the ingredients you would normally put into a fish or shellfish stock. Cryovac the entire thing, water and all. Poach until it separates or the sediment falls to the bottom of the bag. Strain. Much tastier than allowing the "steam" to escape. Cryo/pouch cooking isnt the answer to most problems in food but I believe its a step in the right direction. Once again DTC, great work, hopefully you will continue to exercise the benfits of this method. Last but not least a method that opens doors for creativity: Raw bread dough cooked inside a cryo bag. The possibilites here are promising and exciting. Ill let you know what I discover as I play around with it. My apologies for straying too far off subject.

I like this kind.

OK, I'm going to try this tonight. inventolux, could you be a little more specific about the chicken? Bone-in whole breast? Boneless half breast? When you say "tie...like a roast" do you mean roll the breast into a cylindrical shape as well? Do the other ingredients get piled on top, wrapped inside, or distributed as evenly as possible? Any tips on maintaining such a low temperature for half an hour? Double boiler? Lets get specific: Take a boneless, skinless chicken breast and season it with salt and pepper, let the seasoning dissolve into the meat. (about 7 minutes) Take 1 clove of crushed garlic, 1/2 of a minced shallot, 3 sprigs of fresh thyme, 6 tb of buttermilk and a couple of lemon peel slices, yellow part only (1/2 inch wide X 1 inch long) and place onto a piece of plasic wrap about 1 foot squared. Wrap up like a package. Repeat the wrapping procedure 5 more times. This will depend on the quality of your plastic wrap, restaurant wrap is better. Tie the pouch like this illustration and add one more tie the length of the breast. Make sure it is tight. If you would like to roll the breast then you will need a longer cooking time. If it is about an 8 ounce breast, about 35 minutes. Poach in water that is just below steeping. Make sure the breast is firm to the touch, not translucent and is opaque. But most of all, make sure you frequently pull the pouch out of the water to shift the ingredients to maintain even flavoring and cooking. The even heating takes practice unless you have a thermometer.

I will be the first to say I am no chemist. I am just beginning to understand that side of food.

I did it that way before I had the capability to cryovac. Didn't seem like rocket science to try doing it that way. I have also done it with heavy-duty ziplock bags with the air sucked out of them. What I think you don't quite understand is that the expanding of the plastic from the air does not necessarily mean that there is significant pressure being built up inside the plastic. Take this example: Put piece of chicken inside a balloon. Blow the balloon up with air. The balloon expands. Do you think that the chicken inside the inflated balloon is under significantly greater pressure than it was under previously? This is to say, do you thinkthe air pressure inside the balloon is significantly greater than the air pressure outside the balloon? Hint: Google for Boyle's Law. Air inside a balloon and air inside a heated cavity are 2 totally different scenarios. You arent just using pressure, you are using heat over a longer period of time than you would normally use. The google search doesnt help my case or your case because it doesnt take into consideration of slowly heating the item inside the cavity, holding at a constant temperature for a period of time, then finally allowing it to rest for a period of time. If you were to try this zip lock bags, the bags would surely burst because the zipper seal isnt strong enough to hold the pressure. (I know because I have tried it to lower costs on bags which typically run higher than zip locks.)

What if the chicken breast is 1/8 th of an inch thick? What temperature would you cook that to? If you go to a 165f internal? If so, then you will have one dry as a bone bird. Typically I cook chicken breast to 155, unless it's been brined. In that case,you can go a littlle higher. But again, you're not answering my question. I guess you will have to either perform the exercise for yourself or wait to watch me do it.

Yes, Wiley is working hard to get the book completed. The biggest problem for Wiley is to put together a book of such high cost and to find the correct market to sell it to. At $225.00, there isnt much of a market out there.

What if the chicken breast is 1/8 th of an inch thick? What temperature would you cook that to? Will you go to a 165f internal? If so, then you will have one dry as a bone bird.

Wait? You're saying you do this in plastic wrap?! Dude, there's no way that builds up any pressure. And yes, I've done that before! I don't care how much string you tie around the package, there is no way any pressure builds up. I mean, how strong do you think the plastic wrap is? Does it not occur to you that any significant internal pressure would easily burst multiple layers of plastic wrap? For that matter, you could wrap the whole package in duct tape, and any significant internal pressure would burst that too. (My apoligies if I am misunderstanding your technique and use of materials.) Multiple layers of plastic wrap. (6) Then you tie it like a roast. It will build a lot of pressure depending of the temperature of the air that gets trapped inside the pouch. If you indeed have already done this experiment,(and I find that remarkable if you have already used this exact technique) then you would see my point. And for Dave The Cook: We would serve at least 100 of these things at charlies some nights and the same exact guidelines would be followed. Nobody would ever get sick, it has nothing to do with skill or luck. The texture of the chicken is gorgeous, and the color is non-translucent opaque white, the perfect texture for chicken. Its a texture of moist tenderness that isnt stringy or chewy. It brings the chicken to the point of necessary coagulation. Any more and the chicken is ruined.

According to my reading of this, the visible vapor rising from a hot faucet is, indeed, "steam" -- as is the breath that comes our of your mouth at cold temperatures. Popular usage of the word "steam" does include the vapor coming off your head or the hot asphalt street in the cold, etc. I'll grant you that. When we're talking about the science of cooking, however, we're talking about science. Definitions need to be more precise than than the popular usage. In that universe, steam has an extremely simple definition, and it's as described before. You're not going to use the "steam" coming off your head, no matter how hard you try, to cook broccoli. Ok thats funny

That's where one cooks in the steam created by the application of my hot naked body to a mixture of aged spring water and dutch process cocoa. Delicious, if a little sweaty. That sounds like some progressive technique I can only begin to comrehend.

I have a hard time believing that any significant pressure is created this way. There is no way that bag isn't going to swell and reduce the pressure. Even if you took the sealed bag, poured concrete around it, allowed the concrete to harden and then raised the whole thing to 135F, I still think the pressure created by the expasion of the duck leg, etc. would be insignificant. You have to try it and see it to believe it. Dude... I've cryovac-ed things and cooked them in a water bath before... and I still don't think it builds up much pressure inside the bag. When you cryovac, you remove a lot of air. Thats less air to heat up and expand. When you simply wrap things in plastic wrap, you trap in more air and are heating up a larger air mass. Like a hot air balloon.

I have a hard time believing that any significant pressure is created this way. There is no way that bag isn't going to swell and reduce the pressure. Even if you took the sealed bag, poured concrete around it, allowed the concrete to harden and then raised the whole thing to 135F, I still think the pressure created by the expasion of the duck leg, etc. would be insignificant. You have to try it and see it to believe it.

According to my reading of this, the visible vapor rising from a hot faucet is, indeed, "steam" -- as is the breath that comes our of your mouth at cold temperatures. Your faucet must be like mine.

Now That sounds like fun, sign me up What is a cocoa steam bath?

I just used this technique for 12 friends last thursday out of my home, and nobody got sick. I use it for everything from french turbot to lamb loins and I have never become ill or made anyone else ill. Its a technique that has served CT's well for a long time now. The chicken is cold when it goes into the pouch, as you heat the pouch the pressure builds inside the bag. The kitchen string holds the bag together so it doesnt explode. There is the appreciable pressure. If you are cooking dark meat, (and the recipe is for a breast) then cook it until it is fork tender. (Which in my opinion is the best way to eat dark meat.)

Steam is produced by the transformation of water from liquid to gaseous state. At sea level, this only happens at 212F/100C. It doesn't happen at any lower temperature. You're not making steam (at least steam from water) at 135F. Sorry. By definition, steam is always hotter than water. If it weren't, it wouldn't be steam, but rather water! Pressure does have an effect on the temperature of steam. The temperature of produced steam under no pressure is 212F. It then increases 3 degrees F per additional pound of pressure (sorry, can't do the metric conversions in my head), so at 3psi, steam is 218F. Steam coming out of an espresso/cappucino machine is going to be hotter than 212, though I'm skeptical that you can tell the difference between 212F and 225F with your hand. As for steam having "flavor", I think what you're smelling are the chemicals released by the cooking food being mixed in and carried with the steam. Have you ever turned on a hot faucet that wasnt boiling hot water (212f or 100c)? What happens? It steams. So you can create steam without boiling water. Unless my faucet and every other faucet on planet earth is different from yours. So when we bring water to 140f (poaching temperature) it doesnot steam? It in fact does. Bottom line: When you pull a pot of hot water of the stove that WAS boiling, and 2 minutes later ceases to boil..........it still persists to steam. Water doesnt just decide to no longer steam after it hits 89c. And yes the statement "steam has flavor" does include the compounds that steam carries with it.

However who is going to separate these chemicals that are volitized (that do have flavor) from the natural vaporized h2o(that dilutes flavor)? They combined, for the sake of simplicity for cooking puposes, make up steam.