slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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William Tyrrell Macoun, after whom the apple is named, was Irish-Canadian of relatively recent extraction (his father, the famous naturalist John Macoun, was born in Ireland).
"Mah-cowne."
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I agree it would be difficult - but if you were handy with welding, not impossible... rather than using such a thick piece of metal, you could use say 1/2" thick stainless, and weld 2" x 1/2" ribs in a crossed pattern which would significantly increase the moment and stiffness without all the mass...
The real trick is welding stainless which typically requires a lot of experience. If a weld fails at some point, consider the jet of high pressure extremely hot steam that would emerge from the void!
The way they do it at Accutemp is by welding in a ton of internal posts connecting the bottom and top plates.
Steam can get to extreme high temperatures under pressure.There is a much better way to conduct heat without going to very high pressure, that is using the principle of "heat pipe" design.
It's not clear to me how a heat pipe design would confer the same benefits of using steam -- namely that greater condensation under colder parts of the upper plate mean that greater amounts of thermal energy are conducted exactly to the places where it is needed, creating a much more even cooking surface with a much better temperature recovery time.
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I wonder if it would be possible to have someone fabricate a "steam plancha" for stovetop use?
For those of you just tuning in, the way these work is that there is a sealed chamber below the cooking surface that is half-filled with water. The water is (super) heated and the steam is what heats the cooking surface from below. What makes this especially good is that when you put something on the plancha and thermal energy is transferred into the food, it creates a localized "cold spot" on the plancha. Underneath, in the chamber, there is increased condensation of water vapor onto the localized cold spot, which transfers greater amounts of thermal energy right to the exact spot where it is needed. The end result is that the temperature of the plancha surface is incredibly even and doesn't get lowered underneath the food items placed on the plancha.
I'm thinking it ought to be possible to create a hollow rectangle out of relatively thick aluminum (or whatever) that is welded closed with some water inside. Needless to say, you would want to massively over-engineer the thing so it couldn't possibly explode from built-up pressure.
Just curious as to what pressure you think would be generate? Is this something, like a flat top pressure cooker, let say 15 PSI. Could achieve?
Oh no, you would want to go much higher than that. Water at 15 PSI over atmospheric is only getting up to around 250F. You'd want to get a griddle up to, say, 350f to 400F. You're talking about maybe 200 PSI over atmospheric.
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The process is too slow, is the main problem. Especially when you include the time you spend putting the shaker into the machine securely, turning the machine on, turning the machine off, and taking the shaker out of the machine.
Here's the thing: most cocktails don't need to be shaken for such a long time. In the video posted, the machine starts shaking at 0:12 and is still going at 0:31. Meanwhile, the guys working the back counter don't exactly look anxious to stop the shaking process as they go about their other tasks. That's just too much shaking time. The usual shaking time in most cocktail bars is going to be less than ten seconds. It's certainly not going to be 30 seconds or more, unless you're making a Ramos Fizz or something like that. And while it may be true that you can turn your attention to other tasks while the machine is doing the shaking, in a cocktail bar setting this is solved simply by preparing multiple shakers (I've seen as many as six at a time prepped at Pegu Club) and then shaking/straining them sequentially (or two at a time, if you have that skill).
I also have some issues with the speed, orientation and extent of the shake provided by the machine.
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I wonder if it would be possible to have someone fabricate a "steam plancha" for stovetop use?
For those of you just tuning in, the way these work is that there is a sealed chamber below the cooking surface that is half-filled with water. The water is (super) heated and the steam is what heats the cooking surface from below. What makes this especially good is that when you put something on the plancha and thermal energy is transferred into the food, it creates a localized "cold spot" on the plancha. Underneath, in the chamber, there is increased condensation of water vapor onto the localized cold spot, which transfers greater amounts of thermal energy right to the exact spot where it is needed. The end result is that the temperature of the plancha surface is incredibly even and doesn't get lowered underneath the food items placed on the plancha.
I'm thinking it ought to be possible to create a hollow rectangle out of relatively thick aluminum (or whatever) that is welded closed with some water inside. Needless to say, you would want to massively over-engineer the thing so it couldn't possibly explode from built-up pressure.
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Nickrey is off on both of his suggested pronunciations for "Staub."
Try writing phonetically in an Australian accent trying to guess generic American pronunciation and see how far you get. That's why I included the link to actual pronunciations.
Yea, it's hard to write out in "English spelling" rather than using a more specific system like IPA.
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I think Alcuin makes a salient point... In opera, we are often heard throwing around various words and titles of works that come from non-native languages. The point is not necessarily, I think, to use these words in an every day (which is to say non-performing) context with perfect original-language pronunciation, but rather to employ a pronunciation that is a reasonably faithful English language approximation. This keeps yon from sounding like a rube on the one hand for referring to Puccini's famous opera "La bow-heem" but also from sounding precious and pedantic for always calling Verdi's opera "rrrrrrrrreeegohlayttttttoh."
It's also a bit hard to give accurate pronunciations in "English spelling" because we have so many different ways of pronouncing things. Clearly I was off in giving my example of "bow" above. On second consideration, "bawsh" is probably as good approximation of "Bosh" as there is, the main point being that you move through the vowel rather quickly. It would probably be better to write these things out in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Moving on...
Nickrey is off on both of his suggested pronunciations for "Staub."
In French, "au" signifies closed "o" as in "boat" (unless followed by the letter "r" in which case it signifies the open "o" sound as in "rot"). Thus, "Staub" in French = "stobe." Since it is a French company, this approximation would seem appropriate.
In German, "au" signifies the diphthong "ow" (as in, "ouch I stubbed my toe"). So the German company "Braun" is pronounced as "brown" and not as "brawn." If Staub were a German company, it would be pronounced "sht-ow-b" (due the peculiarities of English spelling, it is actually impossible to spell this out in English-equivalent without separating the phonemes with dashes).
It's always tricky when there is a product from one country/language that seems to have a name from another country/language. I will agree with those to whom "Staub" seems German, even though it is a French company. I have a similar cognitive dissonance with the vermouth Perucchi -- which seems Italian, in which case it would be pronounced "peh-roo-kkee." But, as it turns out, it is a Spanish product pronounced "peh-roo-chee."
Berndes is a German company = "bearn-duhs"
Bourgeat is French = "boor-zha" ("boor" having the same vowel sound as "pool")
Mauviel is French = "mow-vyel"
Laguiole is French - "lah-yawll"
Syllabic stress is tricky in French, as the way it is actually stressed in speech is often completely the opposite from the way it is "supposed" to be stressed. For example, many French speakers would say "bonjour" whereas a French composer would set this word with the emphasis on the second syllable as "bonjour" because the stress is "supposed" to be on that syllable. Many people would say that French words don't actually have a stressed syllable in and of themselves, but rather only in the context of the sentence.
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Bosch = "boshe" (with an "o" as in "bow")
Miele = "mee-luh"
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I think the point of the admonition is that you don't start the pan with oil in it and heat them up together, but rather pre-heat the pan dry and add the oil just before you drop in the food. This seems like the common-sense interpretation of "hot pan/cold oil" despite the fact that, as you point out, the oil immediately becomes hot once it hits the pan.
This is generally good advice, as one would often like to heat up the pan considerably above the smoke point of the oil. But if you add the "cold" oil to the hot pan and then immediately the food item, the oil generally does not smoke for the obvious reasons.
Of course I was being facetious in my comments -- I do realize what he was getting at. But in my experience, adding oil before the pan is hot isn't usually problematic. It doesn't make food stick more, at least as far as I can tell.
I think it depends on how hot you want to get your pan. A point of this advice would seem to be that the pan will be heated up until it is very, very hot. This, in my experience, does tend to lead to less sticking if the temperature is kept high (perhaps due to some Leidenfrost effects). If the pan is heated below the smoke point, then there doesn't seem to be much point in waiting to add the oil.
Clearly some of this will depend on the cooking technique used.
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I think the point of the admonition is that you don't start the pan with oil in it and heat them up together, but rather pre-heat the pan dry and add the oil just before you drop in the food. This seems like the common-sense interpretation of "hot pan/cold oil" despite the fact that, as you point out, the oil immediately becomes hot once it hits the pan.
This is generally good advice, as one would often like to heat up the pan considerably above the smoke point of the oil. But if you add the "cold" oil to the hot pan and then immediately the food item, the oil generally does not smoke for the obvious reasons.
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I recently bought a large All-American pressure canner, mostly because I wanted to make large volumes of pressure-cooked stock and can the results for storage. But now that I have it, I've been canning various things as well. Since I live in NYC and don't have a large garden, I'm not positioned to take advantage of a fall bounty of inexpensive produce with canning. But I have been able to do a few things.
One thing I've done recently is can beans. It's convenient (and far less expensive!) to have access to home canned beans compared to opening a can or cooking from dry. In home-canning dry beans I've followed the USDA recommendations, but I admit that I find them a bit puzzling when it comes to dry beans.
The USDA instructions say that you should soak the beans several hours (I forget the recommended time, but it's sufficient to fully hydrate the beans), then simmer them 30 minutes, then hot-pack them into quart jars, then process at 10 PSI for 90 minutes. Why all the cooking? I guess that simmering them for 30 minutes is to ensure that they have absorbed all the liquid they will absorb and to ensure that they're no less than 90C when put into the canner. So that makes some sense. But then why process them for 90 minutes? This seems a lot longer than the time recommended to sterilize other conductive non-acidic foods. The guidelines for beets, for example, is only 35 minutes. Does anyone have any idea whether this recommendation is entirely safety-based, or whether there is some culinary aim of the 90 minute processing time for dry beans?
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Yes, that's right. Steak covered in chicken skin. Along the same lines as a traditional chicken fried steak, but more delicious. I've seen recipes that call for bonding the skin to the steak and then frying, but my shiny new Sous Vide Magic is calling to me. I was thinking along the lines of the MC fried chicken, cooked SV and then finished in the fryer.
Well, as you can see here, I did something along the same lines (although not using chicken skin) and did not find it at all worth the effort Once you get the gravy on there -- and this is a crucial component of chicken fried steak -- then all the other stuff you might be able to do is a bit less impactful. If you're going for something that's more whimsical, and minus the gravy, then it might make more of an impact.
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AFAIK the rules haven't changed. You can't sell cheese made form raw milk that is less than 60 days old. More than 60 days is, and has always been fine. This leaves out plenty of great cheeses, however.
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As explained in Modernist Cuisine (3•235), salt extracts "the meat protein mycosin, which forms a strong, elastic gel when cooked. That may be desirable in sausage making, but it produces a rubbery burger."
This is why salting the meat during grinding, or salting the mixture overall, produces a tighter, more "sausage-like" burger -- and why it is advisable to salt only the outside of the burger just before (and during, and after) cooking.
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How do you mean "chicken fried steak"? Are you proposing to bind chicken skin to pieces of beef? And do you want the end product to be anything like traditional CFS?
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Depends on how soon you want to serve it. With ours, we probably leave it on the lees for around 11 months and then think about pouring off the clear liquid around a month before the annual holiday party. Or, yanno, whenever we get around to thinking of it. It can be tricky and tedious to carefully pour off the clear liquid, so I wouldn't recommend doing it right before service, or when you might otherwise be occupied preparing for your party.
Much like decanting wine, you want to leave the jars upright and stationary for some time before you prepare to decant them so that the sediment sinks to the smallest possible layer in the bottom of the jar.
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I'd think so, yea.
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Acid. Either ascorbic or citric.
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That comes from the lemon juice, etc. It is not very filterable, in my experience. Your best bet is to carefully decant the clear liquid off of the sediment, and carefully segregate the sediment-congtaining liquid in another jar. Then you can try various filtering techniques on that if you like. My experience is that this will have limited effect and that centrifuging is really the only way to filter this stuff out. On the other hand, you may be dealing with a lot more time and patience, and a lot less volume than we normally do with our 12-months-aged Fish House Punch.
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You might try lowering the temp, too. I recall MC's recommendation for pork ribs is 60C for 48 hours.
The issue with the prolonged time, for me, is scheduling. I find such long times a bit of an issue with my life-style. But thanks for this suggestion. I did note that even Douglas Baldwin offered a longer time/lower temperature option.
One of the great things about LT/LT sous vide where you have pasteurized the food is that you can do cook/chill. This creates more opportunities for convenience. Cook the ribs for 48 hours and rapidly chill them down in an ice bath. After that, you can keep them in the back of the refrigerator for around 10 days, or in the freezer more or less indefinitely.
I have found that many sous vide cooked meats freeze very well, by the way. I regularly bag, cook SV and freeze whole deboned spatchcocked chickens. Then, whenever I want chicken for dinner, I have only to toss the vacuum-sealed chicken into a sink of cold water to thaw and then crisp the skin and rewarm the chicken however I like (broiler, torch, frypan, whatever).
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For a number of reasons I've been switching between beans for espresso and it is a pain recalibrating the machine each time you change beans.
There is no getting around this. The only solution is to use one kind of beans for a longer period of time before switching.
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Given that I'm eating less and less fat, I'd like to make the best fat choices when I do eat it. So, can we generate some criteria and guidelines?
Somehow my eye skipped over this the first time around. This is a boat I've been in for years, so I've given it some thought.
These are some of my general rules of thumb:
1. Use the smallest amount of fat you can get away with to accomplish the cooking task you have before you. Often times, properly preheated pans need a lot less fat than you might think, and many cooking tasks need a lot less fat than you might think.
2. If the cooking task is a high-heat task that requires fat, then use a highly refined oil. Otherwise, don't.
3. Use highly flavored fats more often. If you are going to use a very small amount of fat, then it really doesn't matter as much what kind of fat you use. So why not use something with tons of flavor? This is where the various emphatically-flavored animal fats come into play. If you're roasting three pounds of sliced potatoes coated in a mere tablespoon of fat, why not use duck fat or bacon fat?
4. Use fat strategically to maximize its impact. This largely means adding most of the fat at the end rather than at the beginning. Let's say you're making a spicy tomato sauce with garlic. So far, it's a very low fat sauce because you softened the garlic in a minute amount of fat. If you swirl in a tablespoon of really nice extra virgin olive oil off the heat at the very end, you will get a really nice olive oil presence in the sauce using a much smaller amount of oil than you would have to use if you added it all in the beginning. This is probably also dependent on the kind of fat you are adding. I'm not so sure I'd want to swirl in some rendered animal fat at the end, but a touch of olive oil or butter at the end can make a world of difference.
So these techniques can be combined, of course. You can melt a small amount of duck fat and toss that with several pounds of root vegetables (#1 and #3), roast the vegetables in the oven and then toss them with a small amount of butter and herbs for service (#4).
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The soy sauce fish is awesome.
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When it comes to sauteing, the bottom of the pan at the burner gets hotter than 400 degrees but the cook is not paying attention to the food if the food and the oil in the pan get that hot. Sometimes you get the pan so hot the oil smokes but then you immediately add the food and the temperature drops, otherwise the food will taste of burnt oil.
If the temperature of the saute pan drops that significantly when you add food, then you are either crowding the pan or have an insufficiently powerful stove. Yes, the temperature at the interface of the food/oil/pan will be lower in temperature (around 100C due to evaporating liquid from the food), but much of the surface of the pan should remain still quite high in temperature. So if you're cooking in a blazing hot saute pan with extra virgin olive oil, it seems likely that significant amounts of the oil will go above the 160C smoke point. If, on the other hand, you're using soybean oil with a smoke point of 255C or avocado oil with a smoke point of 270C you are not likely to run into this problem.
Definitive pronunciation of Macoun (apple variety)
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
This is where "definitive pronunciation" gets to be a bit tricky.
The Macoun apple was developed by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in 1923 and named after Irish-Canadian horticulturalist and apple expert, William Tyrrell Macoun (1869-1933). We know that his family pronounced the name as "mah-cowne" because his family is still around to tell us that it is pronounced this way (as are organizations such as the Macoun Field Clubs for Young Naturalists in Canada). I imagine that the towns and features in Canada named after John Macoun are also pronounced "mah-cowne." So it stands to reason that the NYSAES also pronounced the apple as "mah-cowne" when they named it in 1923, especially in consideration of the fact that its namesake was still alive. But I suppose the NYSAES would have the definitive answer on that.
If there is any "definitive pronunciation" I think this would have to be it. Nevertheless, it's clear that there is wide variety.