slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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What do you use the perforated one for?
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I think probably what you're looking for is that midwestern-style "cracker crust." And guess what? Most of this is done using a pre-made crust. You might try, then, pre-baking your crust 3/4 of the way through with no toppings. Then take it out, top as usual and re-bake until the cheese melts. Docking the crust before you pre-bake will probably help keep it flat and cracker-like. And you might get some inspiration by perusing some actual cracker recipes and adopting some of the principles. Or google for cracker pizza dough.
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There's not even much need to do this in a heavily controlled way. There are bars I know that do their infusions by putting the herbs/spices/citrus/whatever into bottles with the booze and putting them all into a sink of hot water. Taste a sample bottle periodically until the desired flavor is reached, then chill and strain.
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The Pill?
Once the two-income family became the norm, there was far less time available for cooking and alternatives had to be found.
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Has anyone ever home-canned hominy? I have a lot of gigantic dried hominy corn, but seldom have the forethought to soak and cook it. Canning it in pint jars would be very convenient. But maybe the pH is too high? I'd be pressure canning.
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Speaking to a point raised upthread, he mentions that almost all fresh mozzarella makers start with Polly-O curds, but notes plenty of difference between the cheeses made with those curds.
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It's kind of hard to give advice without knowing where the "shell block" comes from. This is a cut of meat I've never heard of. I suspect it comes from the shoulder, which means that it's probably not a naturally tender cut. You either have to cook it LT/LT to get steak-like tenderness, or you have to slice it very thin across the grain (which I assume is what your butcher meant when saying that it was highly recommended for sliced steak). Calling it "shell block" seems like one of those naming conventions to make you think it's shell steak (a.k.a. strip steak) when it really isn't (see: "butcher's tenderloin," which isn't actually tenderloin, etc.).
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Andy, I should hasten to add that it was a good drink regardless. And I wouldn't say that the Kronan didn't make any difference at all. Just that to my palate it was a mostly-apricot-flavored drink with a hint of something else.
I have some barack pálinka at home and will give that a go with Kronan tonight. Using a base of barack pálinka helps make more sense of the original proportions for me, because I find that eaux de vie have the effect of making a drink taste drier. If we figure it's a 3 ounce drink, that would give us 1 1/2 ounces of barack pálinka, 3/4 ounce of gin, 3/4 ounce of Swedish punsch and a quarter-ounce to a teaspoon of lemon juice. That doesn't seem like much lemon juice to balance out 3/4 an ounce of Swedish punsch, but my guess is that the barack pálinka will reduce the perception of sweetness making it possible to balance the drink with only a "dash" of lemon juice. Meanwhile, the richness of the Swedish punsch will hopefully provide some mid-mouth feel and keep the drink from being too lean and light (always a difficulty with eau de vie based drinks).
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One thing that surprised me, having no real frame of reference, is that Swedish Punsch is not particularly emphatically flavored. For most cocktails where it's used as a modifier, it really adds just a subtle hint and some background notes rather than anything readily identifiable as "Punsch flavor."
Case in point: I tried making the Havana Cocktail using Andy's formulation with Kronan and Orchard Apricot. For my palate it was a bit too sweet with 2 ounces of sweet against only 1/2 ounce of sour. More to the point, though, I thought the Orchard Apricot almost completely overwhelmed the Kronan. I tried it again with 1.5 ounces of gin and 3/4 each of Kronan and Orchard Apricot, figuring that less sweetness and less overall liqueur might help the Kronan come forward. This was better balanced and it was perhaps a bit easier to detect the Kronan, but the Orchard Apricot was still in front. I can only imagine how Kronan wold be stepped on by something more emphatically flavored like Apry in this drink. I might try it again, with 1 1/2 gin, 1 Kronan, 3/4 Orchard Apricot and 3/4 lemon. Or maybe 1 ounce gin, 3/4 Kronan, 1/2 Orchard Apricot and 1/2 lemon for a smaller drink with a touch more Kronan in the ratio.
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If you're getting a sour flavor, that suggests that you are growing some kind of bacteria in the bag that produces acid. This could be from the spices or it could be from the surface of the meat. Why don't you try thoroughly searing the outside of the meat before bagging it, and don't use any spices. Then cook as normal and see whether you still get the same result. If you don't have the sourness after doing this, that tells you something.
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1 cup per pound! That is serious. Do you have any idea what the paste to powder ratio is - i.e. if your pastes were dry, how much chili powder would be in them? 3 tbs? 4 tbs? More?
Yea, that's hard to say. I tend to be a bit suspicious of chili powders, because I'm not sure how much of that is actually seeds, skin, sawdust, whatever. And powder seems extra sensitive to age, often resulting in a "powdery" taste I don't love. My overall philosophy is to use a ton of chili paste so that really all the thickening comes from chilies. And I like for the chili base to be mild chilies so that I get lots of chili flavor without blowing everyone's ears off.
I used to make the paste by rehydrating whole dry chilies and then running them through the fine disk of a food mill, which held back the skins and seeds. This took a long time and was very labor intensive. Then I graduated to the VitaPrep and ran the resulting puree through a fine sieve to hold back the skins and seeds. Then I discovered that Kalustyan's was stocking tubs of D'Allessandro chili paste made from a variety of different chilies. These are great to have around, and are so concentrated that they don't even freeze solid. So whenever I want to make a quick sauce for some hangar steak tacos, for example, I can just go the freezer and scoop out a few tablespoons of chili paste. So nowadays that's what I use. I highly recommend it. Available to order direct from the processor here, along with a lot of other good-looking products.
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As chance would have it, I'm making chili as well. Here's my recipe:
5 pounds beef shank, coarse ground on my home grinder
2.5 cups ancho chili paste
2.5 cups pasilla chili paste
2 tbsp sweet Spanish paprika
2 Spanish onions
3 pounds cherry tomatoes
2 tbsps whole cumin
1 tbsp Mexican oregano
3 whole star anise
- Tomatoes were pressure cooked at 15 PSI for 20 minutes. The exuded liquid was reduced to a glaze, the tomatoes scraped through a fine sieve, then both parts combined
- Onions were diced fine, then browned to very dark over high heat in copious bacon fat with the star anise
- Cumin was dry-roasted in pan until fragrant, then ground to powder in spice grinder
- Tomato, chili paste, spices and onions (minus star anise) were combined, brought to brief simmer, and cooled
- Cooled chili base was combined with the ground meat, and the whole works was vacuum bagged and cooked 48 hours at 62C (in process)
Once cooked, I will freeze it and reheat on super bowl sunday, adjusting seasonings as necessary, add a pound or two of pork butt that I've cut into 1-inch cubes, browned extra-dark, pressure cooked for 20 minutes and coarsely shredded, and stir in some red bell peppers that I've roasted and pureed. I will offer a spicy chili butter along with creme fraiche, etc. so that that people can adjust the heat up or down to their preferred level.
As you can see, my recipe is predicated on the idea that chili con carne is really mostly about the chili component. I like to use about a cup of chili paste per pound of meat. I'm using beef shank and sous vide so that I can get all the meaty gelatin without the dry, grainy texture that often comes from simmered long-cooked ground meat.
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From the thread on Cooking with Modernist Cuisine:
Yes, home presure cookers in the U.S. usually do 8 & 15 PSI or some models 5, 10, and 15 PSI. In Europe and the rest of the world they are 6.5 & 13 PSI -- except for Asia, where they are 8, 15, and 21 PSI (this is known as "turbo" mode) - I am not personally familiar with the Asian models. BTW, only in the US "grades" pressure cooker pressure using PSI. The rest of the world measures pressure cooker pressure using kPa and Bar (just in case you need one). As if miles, inches, pounds and onces weren't enough!
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That's what happens when I post too hastily.
Anyway, I don't question that it might be a useful way to specify that one is talking about the original cocktail formulation(s). So long as we acknowledge that it's an artificial distinction that we are making in this thread. And that it doesn't (as yet, anyway) have any real meaning outside of this kind of small-group slang use.
Imagine that we were talking about basketball instead of cocktails. And that some people had found it useful to call it "basket-ball" when describing the era before the 1955 adoption of the 24 second shot clock, and "basketball" for the sport as it existed in greatly changed form thereafter. This might be a useful shorthand for describing the older style of basketball without having to qualify what is meant every time. But that doesn't mean that "basket-ball and basketball are two different things." No, it's just two different spellings of the same sport, and a small group of people has made an artificial distinction for shorthand use in their discussions. It's not like Tri2Cook can go into a bar and ask for a "cock . . . tail" or participate in a discussion on the Chanticleer Society boards or elsewhere and write "cock-tail" and have people know what is being talked about.
Because, shorthand understanding in these forums or not, there is no generally accepted distinction between the two spellings and they do have the same meaning. If anything, it's like the difference between "olde tyme" and "old time."
That's all I'm really saying: Useful distinction? Sure. Real distinction? No.
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The reason we want to use a gas with poor solubility into liquid at atmospheric pressure is because the technique works due to the rapid formation of bubbles (this is why we use N2O and not CO2 -- because N2O comes out of solution effectively immediately once the pressure is released and CO2 doesn't).
I'd like to see the evidence that this is what's really happening and is the major effect, rather than a dual solvent extraction.
The "evidence" is that it's believed to work by the same action as very-closely-related nitrogen cavitation. Absent someone willing to run extremely expensive tests on extremely expensive scientific equipment to verify exactly what happens, the most plausible explanation is that it work similarly to N2 cavitation. Certainly we should expect similar things to be happening (i.e., disruption of cell membranes, etc.). We know this is a root cause of decompression sickness, for example.
Especially since the above article shows a difference with different infusion time but no difference with slow vs fast relief of pressure.
Modernist Cuisine has a short section on pressure marination (3-207). They explained that in their tests meat gained 2% of its weight in marinade after 1 minute, 4% after 3 minutes, 5.3% after 5 minutes and 6.3% after 20 minutes under pressure. This explains why there is a difference with infusion time: because the alcohol/water (and dissolved N2O) penetrates more thoroughly into the flavorful substance as time increases.
The reason there is no pronounced difference between slow versus fast relief of pressure (whether there might be a measurable difference is another question, and one to which we don't have an answer) is that there isn't all that much difference in this technique. More accurate might be to describe it as "fast versus very fast" relief of pressure. It's hardly the case that "slow release" is following an 18 hour decompression schedule, like a diver ascending form depth, so that no bubbles are formed. Rather, what we're talking about here is blowing all the pressure out with one big blast of the trigger ("fast") versus letting the pressure out slightly more gently over the space of a minute or so ("slow"). In the slow method, there is still plenty of bubbling.
The best guess, then, is that the effect is accomplished by some combination of (a) increased penetration of the solvent into the flavorful material (as per the Modernist Cuisine example); and (b) disruption of cell membranes, etc. by cavitation (as comparable to N2 cavitation in laboratory cell work). A similar effect of rapid infusion can be observed using CO2 instead of N2O. This is not preferred because some of the CO2 stays in solution, resulting in a carbonated liquid with added H2CO3. So there's nothing special about N2O except that it has poor solubility in water and ethanol at atmospheric pressure.
I suppose if you wanted to do an experiment to show with certainty whether cavitation was responsible for a large portion of the effect, you'd have to figure out a way to compare a rapidly-released infusion versus one which was released slowly enough to outgas the N2O with no bubbling (normalizing for contact time between the solvents and the substance).
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Oh, I think it's fine enough for people in this thread or even in these forums to make that distinction. But it's by no means something that's achieved anywhere near critical mass to be a generally accepted practice. If/when it does, it will be a modern distinction.
So that's the point I'm making. Sure it's clear that some people (largely Adam) have drawn a distinction between "cocktail" and "cock-tail" in this thread. And we know what they're talking about when they do this. But this is a far cry from saying "there's a difference between a 'cocktail' and a 'cock-tail' " in any way that applies to or has meaning in the larger world. We could, for example, make a similar distinction in another thread in which some people said that a "Manhattan" is made with bourbon and a "Man-hattan" is made with rye. But that, too, wouldn't have any generally accepted meaning.
All that one really needs to understand is that the original meaning describes various iterations of spirit, sugar, bitters, water (and certain additions such as absinthe, curaçao, and citrus peel). And that this usage of "cocktail" is different from the modern usage. If it is a useful shorthand to introduce a dash into the former in a forum discussion, then that's useful. But it doesn't make "cock-tail" a thing.
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Nah, not really. I mean, one might make a distinction to say that it stands for the original concoction of alcohol, sugar bitters and water when using the dash whereas without the dash it represents the modern definition of "general purpose term for spirit-based mixed libation." And this might be a distinction that makes sense to you or others. But from what I can tell, it would be an artificial distinction with little historical basis. For what it's worth, to the best of my knowledge the earliest citations do not include a dash.
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If it weren't for this discussion, I'd have no idea that a cock-tail and a cocktail are two different things...
They are?
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Aren't we talking about N2O, not nitrogen? I would guess it's ability to enhance extraction of flavour compounds has more to do with the pressure allowing diffusion in and out of the material and its resonance structure giving favourable polar/non-polar attributes to transfer the compounds to the alcohol/water phase.
Yes, we're talking about N2O and not N2. But this is just because it's not practical to use N2 at home or in a bar or kitchen. It takes much more pressure to get N2 to dissolve into liquid than it takes for N2O. It's a lot easier to get ahold of N2O. And you can use a cream whipper. The reason we want to use a gas with poor solubility into liquid at atmospheric pressure is because the technique works due to the rapid formation of bubbles (this is why we use N2O and not CO2 -- because N2O comes out of solution effectively immediately once the pressure is released and CO2 doesn't).
Let's say you want to make a basil infusion into tequila. You put some basil leaves and tequila into your cream whipper. You charge the whipper with N2O. This does two things: it dissolves N2O into the tequila and it also forces the tequila into the basil. Then you rapidly release the pressure and the N2O rapidly comes out of solution. Inside the basil leaves, the rapid formation of N2O bubbles tears apart cell membranes, etc. And this liberation of cell contents causes accelerated infusion of the basil into the tequila.
The mechanism (rapid formation of bubbles upon release of pressure) using N2O is the same as it is using N2. I'm sure that N2 would be even more effective, but it's just not practical to use in a home, restaurant or bar.
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1. Cavitation in ultrasonics is the collapsing of the bubbles, not the bursting of bubbles.
This is a different kind of cavitation.
2. I am not sure how deep the nitrogen can actually penetrate the meat (food), and if nitrogen can indeed penetrate can it bring other flavors into the meat (food).I think you might be misinterpreting what's going on here. You'll note that this thread is in the Spirits & Cocktails forum. What we're talking about is infusing flavors out of something and in to the liquid. We're not concerned with bringing flavors into meat or whatever.
3. If bursting of the molecules is what is happening, would this make the food completely mushy?As far as this technique goes, it's not generally the case that one is using ingredients where this would happen or be detectible. It's normally going to be herbs or spices or vegetables or something like citrus peel.
In one of the link above showing the disappearance of soy sauce. It seems to me that the soy sauce had not disappeared into the meat. The soy sauce was coating on all the chicken pieces. I can see disolving gas into liquid (carbonation), but I cannot see forcing liquid into meat.This is force marination, which is different from N2O cavitation infusion. In force marination you are trying to put the flavorful liquid into the meat. In N2O cavitation you are trying to get flavorful substances out of the substance into the liquid. Having performed force marination, I can tell you that the liquid penetrates quite far into the meat -- effectively all the way into thumb-sized chunks.
I am just curious if all the above successes of infusion are due to another mechanism.Read up on the nitrogen cavitation technique. It's commonly used to lyse cell membranes without otherwise damaging the contents. This is exactly the sort of thing that would lead to rapid infusion of flavorful molecules out of herb/spice/vegetable cells into alcohol.
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In short, "nitrogen cavitation" is the name of a biomedical technique whereby a "suspension of cells is subjected to high nitrogen pressure, which is suddenly released so as to cause the cells to burst as nitrogen bubbles form inside." *
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What is Nitrogen cavitation?
I have heard about ultrasonic cavitation and I can understand how that works. But I cannot understand how Nitrogen can cause cavitation.
NO2 is dissolved into the liquid by pressure. When the pressure is released, the NO2 comes rapidly out of solution and cavitates (i.e., forms cavities or bubbles in the liquid). These bubbles disrupt various cell membranes, etc. and this causes rapid infusion of the aromatic substances into the liquid. Under the most common usage, this wouldn't strictly speaking be cavitation. But since it is the formation of bubbles specifically that creates the effect it's not clear that something like "outgassing" is particularly apropos.
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LINK Would say a 2" stainless steel sphere stored in the freezer work better? No Ice to melt, no chance of picking up odors from the freezer, and alot less money to have a few in the freezer.
True, but I'm not sure how well they'd perform at cooling the drink. Steel has a specific heat capacity of ~0.5 J/gK compared to ice, which is around 2 J/gK. So you'd have to have a a lot of steel to cool the drink down and maintain that temperature. They make something like what you're suggesting: whiskey stones (http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/ba37/), which are made of soapstone (~1 J/gK). Puts a whole new twist on whiskey on the rocks *rimshot*.
More to the point, the reason ice is so good for cooling a drink is precisely because it melts. The heat of fusion for ice is 334 J/g. In fact, virtually all of the cooling action of ice in a cocktail results from melting. Ice and stones and whatnot don't melt, and therefore their cooling effect is dwarfed by that of ice.
Sous Vide: Recipes, Techniques & Equipment, 2012
in Cooking
Posted
Its unclear to me that there is much to be gained from making meat stock using low temperature sous vide techniques. Quite the opposite, really. There is plenty to be gained from using high temperature techniques (i.e., pressure cooking). The only time it makes sense to use LT/LT sous vide techniques is when making a stock or broth where higher temperatures would be detrimental (i.e., kombu broth, certain vegetable stocks, etc.).