slkinsey

Erik, are you sure it "gelatinized"? It sounds a bit more like "precipitated" to me. Or are you saying that the entire volume of prune syrup reacted with the alcohol, clumped up and refused to mix? Anyway, I have seen some things precipitate when added to alcohol. Once I wanted to make an Old Fashioned with Red Hook rye (at around 136 proof) and gomme syrup instead of regular simple syrup. As soon as I added the booze to the glass, the gomme (which usually mixed in completely transparently) threw off a cloud of white particulates that never re-dissolved into the drink, even after the proof had been diluted significantly by the melting ice. This is similar to the louching that happens when water is added to absinthe, except that it's the water-soluble substances that precipitate when the proof is raised rather than the alcohol-soluble ones when the proof is lowered. So... since prune juice is very high in soluble fiber, and considering that this generally means "water soluble" -- it's possible that the addition of high proof kirschwasser caused the soluble fiber to precipitate out of solution.

Also... if you get the high accuracy Thermopen that takes Type K thermocouple probes you can not only have superfast temperature results and 0.1C resolution with spot checking, but you can also buy a variety of oven probes with cable attachments. The one thing you don't get is an alarm.

WRT switching between degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, I find that once you get used to one scale, switching doesn't really matter too much. Rare beef is rare beef, no matter what temperature scale is used. Since I've been using a Lauda circulating water bath heater for several years that measures in degrees Celsius, I have become accustomed to thinking in that scale. If I happen to have a cookbook that specifies some Fahrenheit temperature with which I am not familiar (I am quite familiar with meat cooking temperatures for various levels of "doneness" but not so familiar with, say the temperature at which egg yolks curdle) I simply visit the convert-me.com temperature conversion page, do a one-time conversion and write the temperature into the book in degrees Celsius.

"Overheating" the liquid is a technique that is familiar to most all-grain homebrewers, where this is called the "strike temperature." When you're using relatively known elements (water and cracked malt in the case of homebrewing) it's easy to predict how high you need to heat a certain amount of liquid in order to arrive in the ballpark of another temperature after mixing in a certain amount of room temperature grain. To really figure out how much to overshoot you need to know how much oil you have, how much food you want to fry, the temperature of that food, and to a certain extent the nature of that food (a pound of french fries will have a different effect than a pound of chicken thighs). Of, of course, you can just do it by the seat of your pants. One way would be to put in a small amount of food and keep on adding food in small amounts until the thermometer drops down to your target temperature.

I like the looks of the plug-mount Thermapen where you can use different probes.

Huh. It's that loud? My Lauda is quiet as a mouse.

Further to my point about international haute cuisine not being particularly French, I'd like to make a few examples: Carpaccio of blue fin tuna, eggplant caviar and mozzarella underneath, osetra caviar on top French or Italian? Chatham cod with braised fennel, raw fennel and fennel essence French or Italian or American? duck liver terrine with mission figs French or Italian? I would argue that the only dish that seems connected to France and French cooking is the last one. The first two could easily have come from fancy restaurants with an Italian name. But they're sort of not Italian either. Which is to say that they don't seem like they are "from" anywhere except being out of the kitchen of a very expensive high-end fine dining restaurant. For some reason, however (probably because they more or less invented it) we don't have any difficulty calling dishes like these "French" when they come out of a restaurant with a French name on the door, but many people would have some difficulty calling the same dishes "Italian" -- despite the fact that I don't see either of those two dishes as being any more connected to France than they might be to Italy. It's this sort of thing, I think, that can bias people against the idea of Italian restaurant cuisine that moves as far away from Italian cooking as these dishes do from French cooking. For some reason we're more protective of Italian cooking in our minds -- or less protective of French cooking, take your pick.

I'm not Toby, but I think I can answer that one. For a while now* if a cocktail is going to be served above a certain size for whatever reason, many better cocktail bars have been decanting part of the drink into a separate "miniature carafe" or beaker on the side, which is then nestled into a small bowl of crushed ice. This way the customer can have a larger pour, but the drink remains cold and is not diluted by staying on the ice. * I first became aware of Audrey Saunders doing it at Bemelman's, but don't believe they were first.

The main source of my argument is what I have been told by people living in Italy , both Italian and non-Italian, during the pre- and post-WW2 years. Not that I think it's particularly relevant to this discussion, but I also don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that cooks looking for work due to the beheading of their former employers lead to French restaurant culture around the time of the Revolution (i.e., the last decade of the 18th Century). This is why I said "and other factors" -- those other factors being things like the rise of a large bourgeoise class (which was not present to this extent in countried such as Italy, which remained more or less feudal for a much longer period). Regardless, it seems incontrovertible that France had a well-developed restaurant culture, and especially a high-end restaurant culture, more than 100 years before Italy did.

Those are retail prices for plug-and-play units. Surely the parts and packaging cost considerably less than that. That's why I'm making estimates based on retail prices. For example, an immersion blender (representing the stick around which the unit would be built, the circulator and the motor for the circulator) can be had for 20 dollars retail. How much can a heating coil to wind around the stick possibly cost at retail? Another 20 bucks? So now we have, at retail prices, a $60 Auber PID with thermistor, a $20 immersion blender and a $20 heating coil -- or let us rather assume that we're getting the parts that more or less comprise these three elements, and that they would extend out to similar retail prices. That's 100 bucks. I can't believe that putting all these parts together in some kind of housing, slapping on a clamp and doing the appropriate soldering and programming of the PID could possibly add more than 50 dollars per unit to the retail price. Now... this unit may not last as long as a Lauda. But it should certainly last as long as a $150 microwave. Now... whether or not companies have liability, volume and other concerns that are keeping them from pursuing this kind of project is another story (although, of course, it's just as easy to poison or burn yourself with a crock pot if you don't follow the instructions). But I don't see price as a reasonable excuse. I have to believe that restaurant purchases of brand-new Brinkmann/Lauda or PolyScience circulating water bath heaters are not significant to the bottom line of these companies. It should also be possible to create a culinary version of these products that has decent enough accuracy for culinary applications, but not for lab work. Again, it's likely that labs aren't using brand new top-of-the-line super-accurate circulating heaters for noncritical applications anyway.

My "specs" would include a circulator (have you ever looked at the hardware that does the circulating in one of these things? it's nothing special). I also don't see any reason why a home kit would need to include the container for the water bath -- just make something that can clamp on to the side of a stockpot. To my mind, it should be relatively simple and inexpensive to put something like this together. PID kits retail for something like 60 bucks with a decent enough thermistor. Throw in a heating coil, something cheap to squirt water through a directional port (more or less the guts of an immersion stick blender), a clamp and a plastic enclosure for the whole thing. On an industrial level, that shouldn't bring the price up by more than, say, another 90 bucks retail. Seems like this would be good enough.

This is interesting. I wonder what the target price point was. Seems like it shouldn't be too terribly difficult on an industrial basis to wrap some heating coils around a stick with a little boat motor on the end to stir the water around, then slap a PID on top, snake a thermistor down the stick, add a clamp on the back and wrap the whole works in plastic. This would offer good accuracy for home use, and circulating the water would keep the water bath uniform. Shouldn't it be possible to do something like this for $100 - $150? Of course, if their target price point is 50 bucks, no wonder they can't do it.

Yea, that's an interesting point, Max. Personally, I am excited to see that true absinthe is available for legal purchase mostly because (1) it allows me to better recreate preban cocktails; (2) because they are, in general, better in quality and more interesting than the substitutes we have been using; and (3) because we now have several products to choose from where previously we had none. Most likely (and hopefully) there will be enough frat boy drinking of absinthe for it's supposed "extra" properties (much like they drink Jagermeister and God knows what else) to make it economically viable forquality absinthe makers to continue selling in the US.

What the?!

Judith, my point is that Italy doesn't have a well-developed restaurant culture -- or perhaps I should say restaurant tradition of long standing -- compared to France. Due to the Revolution and other factors, France's restaurant culture was underway by the beginning of the 19th Century. In Italy, on the other hand, even by the Second World War there wasn't much more than the occasional roadside osteria -- and certainly there was no expectation among Italians that the food would be particularly good. Osterie were for people who didn't know anyone they could stay with in town. When restaurant culture began happening in Italy for real, post WW2, it catered largely to tourists and most hotel ristoranti served food that might be better described as "continental" than Italian. It's also worthy of note that many ristoranti at this time were owned and operated by Italians who had moved to America for a number of years, prospered, experienced America's well-developed Italian-American (and French) restaurant culture, and had now moved back home. Meanwhile, by 1950 French haute cuisine was already well past its first golden ages (Carême's work having come some 150 years before). So, at the very least, French haute cuisine has had a 150 year head start on the possibility of an equivalent Italian restaurant concept.

Interesting observation, Steven. But I wonder if Alain Ducasse is quite the appropriate frame of reference. The kind of cuisine presented at restaurants such as these has never struck me as "French food" so much as it strikes me as "haute restaurant food." It is, of course, noteworthy that the French more or less invented the restaurant in general and high-end restaurant cuisine in specific. But there's nothing about your meal that says "French" to me in the same way that, for example, Boeuf Bourguignon does. This is perhaps what leads to a lot of the conflict of opinions in this thread. France has a well-developed tradition and culture of restaurants, including the high-end. Indeed, most people would consider Alain Ducasse's food "French" despite the fact that it has not so much connection to the things everyday French people are eating. Italian restaurant culture, relative to French restaurant culture, is in its infancy. As recently as the 1950s, when my mother lived in Rome, restaurants in Italy were for foreigners for the most part, and didn't even particularly serve "Italian food." Even today, Italy is mostly a country of home cooking. There is only the beginning of an Italian restaurant tradition going in the same direction as French haute cuisine went long before -- which is to say, a direction that takes it away from its traditional everyday roots and further towards the infinite refinement and flights of fancy that are only available to highly skilled technicians with specialized equipment and near-bottomless resources. This new Italian "alta cucina," like French haute cuisine compared to traditional French cooking, only have a partial connection to actual Italian cooking. It's unclear to me how "high" Italian cuisine can go successfully before it losts a strong connection to Italian cooking and begins to simply evoke certain elements of Italian sensibility and ingredients. Perhaps this will trend in a direction so that it becomes more and more like French cooking, and perhaps the argument can be made that there is simply a "Western high cooking aesthetic" that ultimately doesn't do much more than evoke various national and local cooking traditions. If we want to call if "French" because they're the first ones who went in that direction... well, you get to the beach first, you get to plant your flag and name the place.

I noticed that Auber Instruments claims that a thermistor is a better choice than a thermocouple. I don't know enough to know if they are right, but their turnkey system uses a thermistor rather than a thermocouple. According to what I have read, it is extremely difficult to get a thermocouple with reliability/accuracy to less than 1 degree C. I'm guessing that's why Auber recommends a thermistor instead.

To be clear: I should say that there are certain instances where seasoned cast iron can be less sticky than a stainless cooking surface. But it's a far cry from "nonstick" anywhere near the same category as a PTFE-lined pan. On the scale of stickyness where dry improperly heated stainless is the most sticky and brand new PTFE is least sticky, seasoned cast iron is a lot closer to the sticky side of the scale.

WRT the use of onion skins in stock... all an onion skin is, is a desiccated layer of onion flesh. No reason not to use it in a stock, unless it's dirty.

Kerry, how large were these tenderloins? Assuming they're right around an inch thick, it takes just about an hour to get to 60C in a 61C water bath. If you're setting your bath to 60C, you might consider going longer -- say 2 hours. I say this simply because I haven't had anyone find 60C pork too pink, and I could go even more pink. Given the time/temp you're posting, I wonder if you even made it up to 60.

Cite that Japan is hunting endangered whales? As far as I know, the only whale they hunt is the minke which is currently not listed as endangered. BBC News: Japanese whalers hunt humpbacks

Subject to revision by real data to the contrary, I assume that most of the sushi is eaten in Japan or by Japanese expatriates. Not to put too fine a point to it, but we are talking about a country and a culture that still continues to hunt and kill endangered whales under the guise of "research" (and continually applies diplomatic pressure to ease bans on commercial whaling and to expand the number and kind of whales they can kill for "scientific purposes") in order to satisfy demand for whale meat. Here is an interesting and thread-relevant quote from a piece by BBC News:

First of all, what are your stainless saute pan and skillet made of? If they're nothing more than thin stainless, there are going to be all kinds of hot spots and other things that I think contribute to sticking. I also suspect that not all stainless cooking surfaces are created equal, although I don't have any scientific evidence or reasoning to back that up -- just my experience that cheap stainless pans tend to be stickier than high quality pans consisting of a thermal layer of aluminum or copper with an internal lining of stainless steel. Now that I think about it, this may simply be due to the fact that the clad-design pans are able to hold more thermal energy and therefore are better at creating a "micro-layer" of steam between the food and the cooking surface. Technique-wise, properly preheating the pan is important, as is using a reasonable amount of fat for lubrication ("hot pan, cold oil" is a good rule of thumb any time). Other things such as respecting the power of the stove and the capacity of the pan and not over-crowding the pan also help to reduce sticking. All of these things are likely to be challenging when you have a pan made of stainless steel and nothing else, and may be impossible to fully overcome. This may be the primary thing that has produced stainless steel's reputation as a "sticky" cooking material -- it's not so much that a stainless cooking surface is sticky, but rather than stainless pans are sticky due to thermal properties. It may actually be cast iron's thermal advantages over stainless steel that lead to its (undeserved in my opinion) reputation of being non-stick. I have not noticed that any of the seasoned cast iron in my collection, most of which is inherited with 100+ years worth of seasoning, is any less sticky than my stainless lined heavy copper pans, for example. Anyway... assuming you have a stainless cooking surface bonded to decent thermal materials and are using good technique, a clean pan can make a big difference. As the recent owner of a dishwasher after some 20 years of exclusively hand washing, I can say that a dishwasher simply cannot clean a stainless steel pan as well as hand-scrubbing with Bar Keeper's Friend. Properly cleaned stainless steel is shiny and free of all visibly stains, residues and discolorations.

Rob, as to the rest time, I think you may be misreading the charts. On the chart for 54.4C, for example, a piece of meat that is 25 mm thick cooking in a 55C water bath will take 41 minutes and 29 seconds to come to the target temperature. The rest time is 56 seconds. The overshoot is minimal (but not zero) in a 55C water bath, but presumably what the chart is showing is that it would take 29 seconds for the piece of 25 mm meat to start losing temperature. If you're cooking with the water bath at your target temperature, this column isn't particularly meaningful to you. If you are cooking at a higher temperature water bath than your target temperature, this chart tells you how long you should let the meat rest so that the meat equilibrates at your target temperature.

Did some digging. Seems the "new label" Campari does not contain natural carmine. But one assumes it will take quite some time for the old stock to become scarce in this country.