slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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These are good points. I just wonder (a) whether there is really a significant enough number of people who want ice spheres and aren't able to figure out a simple ice mold to make a market for this product; and (b) whether these people wouldn't just have someone else figure out the ice mold (or whatever).
I mean, if I was a zillionaire I might have super premium ice delivered to my home. But it would be blocks of clear sculpture-quality ice cut into cubes (or whatever). Because if you're someone who doesn't care about spending five bucks on an ice sphere, you probably don't mind spending ten bucks on a hand-carved one. Or, yanno, you make your butler learn how to carve ice spheres.
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Why is that anymore ridiculous than a $500,000 watch?
Really? A $500k watch should be a magnificent work of art and engineering that will last a lifetime. This is . . . $5 ice spheres. It's like a $500k Swatch.
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Has anybody heard of seasoning tin lined copper cookware? I just got a ten piece set of cheap Portugese copper pots from craigslist, and the tin is wearing off.
I have enough experience brazing/welding/soldering that I can retin them myself - and they aren't worth paying more than I've got in them to have it done professionally.
No, this will not be possible. The temperatures needed for seasoning are far in excess of those that will melt tin. Your only viable option is to re-tin them, although if they are cheap and thin they may only be good for table service anyway.
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Yea, I don't quite understand what is to be gained by pressure cooking a jar of blonde roux. Now, if you were able to pressure cook up a jar of dark cajun-style roux, that would really have some usefulness because making dark roux takes some doing and it would be nice to be able to throw a spoonful of dark roux into things whenever the mood strikes. But I doubt that a pressure cooker gets hot enough for that.
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This is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen.
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Given the paucity of references to steamed brown bread from Wales, Caernarfonshire or Llanuwchllyn (where Freeman speculates the Caernarfonshire recipe might have originated), doesn't it seem more likely that this recipe was actually imported from New England where this style of bread is famous?
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I cooked several TOP INSIDE ROUND pieces, 1 inch thick, and at 12 hours they came out YUCKY mushy. Took one bite, couldn't eat it and spit it out. Tried several times.
Top inside round is a specialty tender cut separated from the round. Think of it as being like tenderloin, only leaner, not quite as flavorful and not quite as tender. Not a very exciting cut of meat, but that's why it's inexpensive! I would think it would be best in a kind of scallopini application, with a sauce or crust or other ingredients providing much of the flavor. Also probably good cooked whole to temperature, then chilled and sliced for roast beef sandwiches.
This is not a cut of meat that you should subject to a long cooking time. You have to treat it like a tender cut, and 12 hours is way too long. For tender cuts you want to cook them only for the length of time it will take to come to temperature. Otherwise they have a tendency to be, well, mushy.
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FWIW, I have used the same copper "whistle top" kettle for around 15 years. I replenish if there is water in there from a previous boiling, but it's also not uncommon that my usage empties the kettle. It's quite easy to see inside the kettle, and there is clearly no appreciable scale.
It seems pretty clear that this idea grew out of places where the water had a high mineral content (in which case reboiled water probably would taste worse than the already not-so-great-tasting fresh water), and then turned into an old wives' tale that spread to parts of the country where it didn't make any sense. There are plenty of parts of the country where even a single boiling of the water will leave a small amount of white scale on cookware.
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Scale comes from "hardness" in the water -- i.e., calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate, and magnesium hydroxide. This is not something that is going to be picked up out of old plumbing. Yes, I suppose if Steven always replenished a half-full kettle and never ever emptied it, it would eventually concentrate enough minerals to scale. But this is unlikely to happen. Most of the time with ordinary use of a kettle it is emptied every so often. The point is that there's not much use of emptying it every time, because replenishing the kettle rather than filling it with fresh water isn't going to make much difference with NYC tap water at least for 5-10 replenishments.
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Leaving it on an open plate in the refrigerator for a few hours would be better. The reality is that crisping skin on SVed poultry doesn't work all that well regardless. This is why there are all those tricks for separating, cooking and re-bonding duck skin, or making chicken skin "chips." The best I've been able to do is with chicken that I've prepared cook-chill, where I've crisped the skin in the oven and re-thermed it using conventional means (i.e., under the broiler). All these methods have their problems, though. Perhaps the best way to do it might be to brown/crisp the chicken skin using a paint-stripper hairdryer.
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There should be no benefit gained by cooking a larger cut sous vide. And, in fact, in some cases it is bad to do so because the larger cut is too large to come up to temperature within a safe timeframe.
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So the upshot is that if Steven's water is inferior the second time around, it can't possibly have anything to do with dissolved oxygen, right? The only real possibility is if it has accumulated something from the pot itself, and using fresh water minimizes the effect?
I don't think that's the upshot at all. I think the upshot is not that Steven's water actually is inferior the second time around. I think what he's saying is that he doesn't actually reboil water because he has the idea that it would be inferior the second time around.
New York City tap water is better quality than most bottled water, especially if you have removed the small amount of chlorine used (either by filtration or by degassing through boiling). More to the point, it is naturally very soft water. So it's pretty much impossible that his kettle would concentrate enough dissolved solids to produce a negative taste effect unless he never ever emptied the kettle and rinsed it out. Even if he always only used half of the water and always replenished the kettle without ever pouring out all the water, it would take many, many kettles of half-reboiled water before the nonvolatile substances approached the concentrations that many parts of the country consider normal.
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I know folks on both sides of this camp. I think it's also different if the kettle shuts off just at the moment it hits a boil vs. if you're leaving it at a boil for minutes at a time. A lot of people do feel that letting the water boil too long takes out too much oxygen; I'm not enough of a scientist to prove or disprove that claim.
These people are wrong. The water is continually losing dissolved oxygen as it approaches the boil (this is all the bubbles that come out of the water before it actually reaches the boil) and once it does reach the boil the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water is effectively zero. Even below the boil at 95C, you're talking about around 1 mg/l of dissolved oxygen. Consider that a glass of cold water has around ten times more dissolved oxygen than that. What this tells us is that the boiling the water for only a few seconds or starting with fresh water or even heating the water only to under the boil will have no effect that is attributable the concentration of dissolved gas in the water.
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Are you also selling them at A y A?
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Guess how much dissolved oxygen there is in water at 100C? If you guessed "none" give yourself a prize! Solubility of oxygen in 100C water is 0 mg/l.
Does it slowly lose dissolved oxygen as it heats up and by the time it hits boiling there's none left, or does it start shedding oxygen at the boiling point?
The solubility of oxygen in water doesn't quite decline linearly as temperature rises, but it might as well. It's right around 14.5 mg/l at 0C, right around 9 mg/l at 20C (room temperature), right around 6.5 mg/l at 40 C, right around 5 mg/l at 60C, right around 3 mg/l at 80C and 0 mg/l at 100C. I should hasten to point out that once water undergoes the phase shift from liquid to solid at 0C, the solubility of dissolved gas plummets to zero.
Effectively what this tells you is that there is very little dissolved oxygen in any water that might be perceived as "hot."
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Interesting point that you make. I confess that I have a perhaps irrational bias against plain (non-nonstick) aluminum pots.
It's true that you can buy a different top for the All American Sterilizer that will convert it to a "regular" canner, if that's what you want. Even cheaper, I think you could replace the pressure regulator with more conventional jiggle weight.
What altitude are you working at?
I'd probably be happier if it were lined with stainless or something like that (although I understand this would probably be impossible to do at this size and thickness of material). And I wouldn't cool tomato sauce in it or make a gigantic batch of gastrique.
I am in NYC, so compensating for altitude is not an issue. My procedure of putting quarters on the jiggle weight was entirely predicated on the idea of making the venting pressure canner (and pressure canners must be venting) into a non-venting pressure cooker for making stocks, based on the premise that stock quality is better when the cooker is non-venting.
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Guess how much dissolved oxygen there is in water at 100C? If you guessed "none" give yourself a prize! Solubility of oxygen in 100C water is 0 mg/l.
The only reason to not re-boil water is if you have high levels of non-volatile substances in your water, e;g;, if you have hard water or if you're concerned that you might have mercury or lead in the water. Reboiling this kind of water would have the effect of increasing the concentration of these non-volatile substances. Although I should point out that the effect would be negligible if we're talking about a kettle where there is very little evaporation.
Luckily you live in a city that is known for having some of the best, if not the best quality municipal water in the country. So don't sweat it.
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Interesting, but I wonder if all this is really necessary.
I have an WAFCO All-American pressure canner that is more or less the same thing you have, with a different top. Stocks don't strike be as acidic enough to particularly worry about the fact that it's made of aluminum, and none of the stocks I have made in there have suffered from metallic taste. So putting a stainless pot in there is probably a waste of capacity. I have also had perfectly good results in converting it to a "virtual unvented pressure cooker" simply by putting the weight on the vent at 15 PSI, placing 3-4 quarters on top of the weight, keeping my eye on the pressure gauge and backing off the heat when the pressure hit 18 PSI or so over atmospheric.
The one way that you may have a real advantage is in knowing the actual temperature inside the cooker. When pressure canning, the only way of being sure of the temperature is to vent steam for 10 minutes or so that the entire interior is filled with water vapor and not air. If the pressure cooker is not vented, the temperature is certainly not as high as one might suppose it is.
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I don't think it's offensive, although others might disagree. The issues I might have with it are:
(a) clever joke/pun names are rarely a good idea;
(b) the name evokes the Salty Dog but the drink clearly has nothing in common with it.
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Maybe call it "tears"?
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Things like this bug me a bit. I suppose they must have thought "salt tincture" sounds cool and old-school alchemical/scientific. But really it just seems to reflect a lack of understanding as to what a tincture is.
If it's salt dissolved in water, why not just call it "brine" or "liquid salt" or, I don't know, "salt water" or "salt solution"?
A "tincture" is something that is infused/extracted into alcohol, which is needless to say not what happens when you dissolve salt into water.
Even if the so-called "salt tincture" is actually off-the-shelf booze with salt dissolved into it, it's still not a tincture any more than booze with sugar dissolved into it is a "sugar tincture." This is not least because salt has very poor solubility in ethanol. So to the extent that some does dissolve into 40% abv booze, it's really because of the 60% of the solution that's water. Try dissolving salt into Everclear and see how salty it turns out. Not very.
Given the amounts of salt one is likely to use in a cocktail, it's unclear to me what advantage, if any, is to be gained by making a salt solution over just putting in a pinch of salt. I suppose if one is turning out a zillion salted cocktails it might be worthwhile to pre-salt the batch in order to titrate the salinity by taste, or perhaps in a professional bar setting it might be easier and neater to dash liquid salt out of a bottle than to pinch solid salt out of a container. I suppose menu-writers may have thought it expedient to call these salt solutions "salt tinctures" instead of just "salt" so that customers knew it wasn't a salt rim or something like that.
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What is a salt tincture?
Boston/Welsh Steamed Brown Bread
in Pastry & Baking
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