slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Should I avoid canned tomatoes that contain citric acid?
If you buy the ones that contain lysergic acid, I think you'll find the eating experience greatly enhanced.
Are these acids used as preservatives?
Absolutely! Produced in small batches by... er... artisans, usually in either "windowpane," "microdot" or "blotter" form.
Seriously, though. Acidic products are generally thought to be safe from botulism when canned. There is some question as to whether tomatoes are acidic enough for this, and as a result citric acid is usually added (presumably to reach a certain pH point). Although Pomi doesn't add citric acid, most brands seem to do it. I can't say that I detect a difference.
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Should I avoid canned tomatoes that contain citric acid?
If you buy the ones that contain lysergic acid, I think you'll find the eating experience greatly enhanced.
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I don't like the "fruit salad" variety of Old Fashioned. For me, it's superfine sugar, bitters and a lemon peel in the bottom of the glass; muddle together so the sugar "abrades" the citrus peel and extracts its oils; add ice and whiskey; stir; enjoy. Turns out that's super old-school, but that's the way I like them.
Too bad that the author decided to confine her search to the Lower East Side. It's an interesting concept, but the likes of Barramundi, Epstein’s Bar, Motor City, Sin-e and Whiskey Ward don't excite me too much. Milk and Honey, where I am quite sure a definitive Whiskey Old Fashioned can be had, is only a mere half block South of Delancey. Too bad she didn't visit there.
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Also interested to see that poultry and pork in the US may not say "hormone free" or anything like that.
Hormones are not allowed in raising hogs or poultry. Therefore, the claim "no hormones added" cannot be used on the labels of pork or poultry unless it is followed by a statement that says "Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones." -
I think in the UK (and the EU for that fact) have very stringent rules on free-range classifications.
I think that for it to qualify for a traditional free range it has to have have 24-hour access to the outdoors, to breathe fresh air, to have access to a large meadow, field or orchard, to peck and scratch about and to have a truly natural existence; to be protected from foxes and other predators by an electric security fence; to have shelter from the weather when needed; to have a place to roost and a plentiful supply of grain and fresh water.
In order to qualify for the "free range" Special Marketing Term in the UK, chickens must have continuous daytime access to open-air runs, comprising an area mainly covered by vegetation, of not less than one square meter per animal for at least half the lifetime of the animal.
In order to label chicken "free range" or "free roaming" in the United States, "producers must demonstrate to the [uSDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service] that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside."
I was interested to read that the term "chemical free" is not allowed at all.
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How about The International Olive Oil Council? In particular, this document probably has more information than you could possibly want. I am given to understand that terms like "cold pressed" and "first pressing" (etc.) are completely unregulated terms that are used nowadays mostly for marketing.
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. . . sounds small but when you picture 2 chickens in a cage smaller than that with nothing to do for a year but look down at a food and water trough . . .
Er, chickens are usually slaughtered at something like eight weeks of age.
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Here is what Quaker says:
Grits are made from the milling of corn kernels. The first step in the process is to clean the kernels; then, the grains are steamed for a short time to loosen the tough outer hull. The grain kernel is split, which removes the hull and germ, leaving the broken endosperm. Heavy steel rollers break up the endosperm into granules, which are separated by a screening process. The large-size granules are the grits; the smaller ones become cornmeal and corn flour.This sounds to me like there is no lye involved in Quaker's grits. But I wonder how accurate this actually is. I can see how the Quaker folks might think it was bad PR to say that the corn is treated by soaking in slaked lime or lye. Interestingly, though, if you look at Quaker's information page for their Old Fashioned Grits, it says it is made from "white hominy grits made from corn." This leads me to believe that they are selling actual hominy (i.e., treated with slaked lime or lye) grits.
It would be interesting to cook some Quaker oats and Quaker cornmeal side by side to see whether it tasted different. Having cooked up plenty of Quaker grits (although I'm on to better these days) as well as polenta from Quaker cornmeal (ditto), my tastebuds tell me that they are different.
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The crust was soggy at the tip. And when I suggest that I look for a crisp crust, I don't mean that I expect tomato sauce and cheese on a water cracker. Without going into great detail about crust strata, I think that the outermost part of the crust should have a wafer-like crispness. Patsy's has never served me a pie with a crust that's entirely crisp in that way. To say that the entire crust is ideal, I'd have to cut out of the pie a circle in the center of the pizza with a diameter of about five inches.
Hmm. I've never found that to be the case, but I'll have to pay attention to that specifically the next time I go. I will say that "wafer like crisppness" isn't one of my particular criteria, though.
If you're still not happy, Kinsey, put your money where you mouth is an buy me a pie.Oh it's on, you bottomless-gulleted freak! I'll make you eat that pie, too! Er... yea!
The combination of sauce, cheese, and olive oil at Una Pizza is so tremendously flavorful that it has become my standard by which I judge other pies.No arguments from me there, although you need to go to Franny's too. Somewhat different aesthetic, but every bit as outstanding IMO.
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I would agree that Sal and Carmine's is NOT the best pizza in the city, and I'm sorry if my earlier post implied that, but is the best of the common pizzarias IMO.
Oh, I agree. It is highly rated for a common pizzeria.
Well i have my heart set on this place now.. So i definately am going to walk the 15 blocks it takes to get a slice.. Anyone know of a good restaurant in the area i can eat at after I grab my slice at S+C'S.There are a few good Mexican places in the neighborhood on Amsterdam. At around 101st Street is Noche Mexicana and at around 108th is Taqueria y Fonda la Mexicana.
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In my experience at Patsy's (East Harlem) the crust at the tip of the pizza slices has not once stood up to the cheese and sauce and stayed crisp. And I have never ordered toppings there. Every time, I get slices that droop. But once I eat past the tip, the crust is excellent and crisp.
Huh. I've never been disappointed with the crust there. I think it's a bit of a mistake to expect that the crust will be crisp at the tip of a slice, however. That's not what makes the crust great. If you have a crust that is "crisp" all the way through and "stands up to the toppings" all the way to the tip without being folded, I think you are sacrificing the etherial flexible moist middle layer that is what makes a great pizza crust truly great.
Though I enjoy the place, I've come to realize that what tops the crust at Grimaldi's is bland.Really?! I think the toppings are Grimaldi's real strength. That sausage is imo hands down the best pizza sausage in the City, and the roasted peppers are also right up there. Now, the sauce may not be as "zippy" as some people prefer (I think it's nothing more than crushed tomatoes, salt and maybe a little evoo), but I like that simplicity.
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So, which is the "official" Patsy's?
East Harlem.
. . . though both crusts came out crisp and lovingly burnt, I thought the Patsy's crust was a little thin, and didn't hold its own against the cheese. Lombardi's seemed to have the better cheese, too. The Lombardi's pepperoni was excellent and there was a great deal of it, Patsy's was a little lacking in this department.Yes, the pepperoni at Patsy's leaves much to be desired. This is the one area where I feel that Patsy's has a lot of room for improvement. But I prefer the thinness of Patsy's crust.
Ok.. Going to Sal and Carmines tonight.. I just cant imagine this place existing.. Good pizza on the Upper West Side huh? I will go with much reluctance, but i hope you guys are right.Cal & Carmine's has been my neighborhood slice joint of choice for going on 14 years now -- but that's more reflective of my neighborhood than anything else. For what it is (a steel oven pizzeria selling slices of flavorful but fundamentally "most of America style" pizza) it's very good. But I wouldn't call it a destination place, and I wouldn't put it remotely in the same category as Di Fara, never mond Patsy's or Franny's (then again, I also thought L&B Spumoni Gardens was horrible, so Cru and I clearly don't share the same pizza aesthetic).
Want to try Franny's in Brooklyn. Anyone recommend this place?I certainly do. It's overall my favorite pizzeria in the City, but it's a minimalist crust-centric approach that will not appeal to everyone. See here for some detailed comments on Franny's.
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What does "3004 aluminum alloy" mean, and might it be less reactive than raw aluminum?
The aluminum used in cookware is typically not pure aluminum, rather it is aluminum alloyed with other metals. The "3000 series" aluminum alloys are the ones most commonly employed in non-cast aluminum cookware. The other metals presumably make the metal easier to work with and may provide other desirable properties (e.g., hardness), but they also unfortunately reduce the thermal conductivity somewhat. Here is the composition specification for a 3003 and a 3004 aluminum alloy:
3003 Aluminum Alloy 3004 Aluminum Alloy
Component Wt. % Component Wt. %
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Al 96.7 - 99 Al 95.5 - 98.2
Cu 0.05 - 0.2 Cu Max 0.25
Fe Max 0.7 Fe Max 0.7
Mg 0.8 - 1.3
Mn 1 - 1.5 Mn 1 - 1.5
Other, each Max 0.05 Other, each Max 0.05
Other, total Max 0.15 Other, total Max 0.15
Si Max 0.6 Si Max 0.3
Zn Max 0.1 Zn Max 0.25For the most part, when we say "aluminum cookware" we are really saying "aluminum alloy cookware." And while the alloys may be less reactive than pure aluminum, they're still plenty reactive.
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Damn -- how many are there?
Yes, we went to the one on 1st and 117th, which, to this provincial, seemed to be a pretty East Harlem address.
Now that you mention it, though, I do recall there being a dust-up among several claimants to the name, however. How far from the "true" Patsy's were we?
There are a number of pizzerie named Patsy's in Manhattan, but they are not really related to the real thing up in East Harlem (imo the best traditional coal fired pizza in NYC). The deal is that the original East Harlem place licensed the name out to the other places, but they are not involved in the management, training or quality control of those other places.
Interesting to hear that you preferred Lombardi's. To a certain extent it depends on what you ordered and what your preferences are. Patsy's is all about the coal oven crust, which is why the toppings are so light. Really, their best pizze are the marinara (just sauce and garlic), the plain tomato/mozzarella and the mushroom ones. Any pizza ordered with multiple toppings in the "typical American style" won't really do Patsy's justice, because the crust really suffers. Lombardi's is a lot closer to what most people expect in a pizza: denser crust, heavier toppings, etc. It's not bad compared to 90% of American pizza, but it doesn't seem to have that NYC coal oven magic like it could. What was it that attracted you more to Lombardi's pizza than Patsy's? (I should mention that the Patsy's style really needs to be consumed immediately. It doesn't travel or hold well.)
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Charles, which Patsy's did you visit? If it wasn't the one on First Avenue and 117th Street, I can well believe that Lombardi's was better.
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Make ricotta gnocchi. Everyone thinks you can only make gnocchi with potatoes, but it ain't so. Ricotta gnocchi are delicious and easy to make. Just drain the ricotta well if it's a little watery, put in a few egg yolks and maybe a few gratings of nutmeg, then enough flour tomake it come together. Shape and cook as usual for gnocchi.
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I might have to order one of these: the retailer I always recommend for stockpots, A. Best Kitchen, has heavy duty "braziers" made from 3004 aluminum alloy in a thickness of 6.4 mm -- that's a little more than 1/4".
6.4 mm is an awesome thickness for aluminum. Unfortunately I wouldn't recommend this for braising because it's raw aluminum. Well, to be more precise I wouldn't recommend it for braising if you ever want to braise using anything acidic, like wine, tomato paste, etc. Even most meat stocks are somewhat acidic, coming in at atound pH 5.5 (7 is neutral). This is the real weakness of aluminum. You can often find aluminum at amazingly thick gauges and at ridiculously low prices... but raw aluminum is very reactive and therefore has a lot of limitations.
Then again, I might have to order one of these: there is a super sale on the Calphalon 8.5-quart "saucier" at Amazon right now. Only $33.88, and free shipping. The claimed list price on this pot is $180.Seems like a good deal for people who like Calphalon. I don't know why they call it a "saucier" when it's clearly not for making sauces (looks like a rondeau to me), but that's neither here nor there. Of course it's probably only about half as thick as the Johnson Rose casserole, and I would have serious concerns about warping at that size if you use it to brown meats on the stove. On the other hand, it is more compatible with acidic products than the Johnson Rose casserole.
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As I posted elsewhere in the eG Forums:
Re hominy and grits: They are different forms of the same thing.Hominy is simply dried corn that has been processed by soaking in lye or slaked lime.
"Grits" originally meant any coarsely ground grain (wheat, oats, corn, rice, whatever). Technically, regular coarse cornmeal and semolina are both kinds of "grits."
Way back folks said "hominy grits" when they were talking about coarsely ground hominy. But there is no escaping the fact that hominy grits is the most common kind, and "grits" has come to largely mean the same as "hominy grits." A similar thing has happened with "polenta" which has some to be understood by most people as a cornmeal-based dish when it can in fact be made with any kind of coarse grain.
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You could make a Blood Orange Cosmopolitan
1.5 oz : Charbay blood orange vodka (or other citrus vodka)
0.5 oz : Cointreau
0.5 oz : fresh blood orange juice
0.25 oz : fresh lime juice
There is the Mandarin Sunset
2 oz : Mandarin orange vodka
2 oz : blood orange juice
1 oz : Lilet Blanc
1 oz: lychee juice
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I don't have a totally firm grasp on how a vessel's heat capacity relates to the metal's specific heat capacity and the construction of a Dutch oven.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. A cooking vessel's overall heat capacity is determined by the specific heat and the amount of the materials of which the cooking vessel is composed. Since iron has a higher specific heat than aluminum by volume, a 1x10x10 cm piece of iron at a given temperature holds more thermal energy than a 1x10x10 cm piece of aluminum. In order for the aluminum piece to hold the same amount of thermal energy, it would have to be 1.45 cm thick.
FWIW, technically a "Dutch oven" is not really what we're talking about. Those are designed (usually with feet and a special lid) to be used in cooking with live coals.
I understand that twice as much of the same metal will give the vessel double the heat capacity, but in terms of practical effect I'm not sure what that means for a braise.Here's something that I had posted earlier:
I then thought about parallels in other types of cooking, and realized that in baking the mass/thermal capacity of a baking surface makes a big difference. Given a 300 degree F oven, a thin metal cookie sheet performs very differently from, say, a baking stone. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that the baking stone absorbs heat from the oven and radiates it into the food, whereas the thin metal sheet mostly just transfers the ambient heat. As a result, there is what appears to be an amplification of heat.It's actually a little more complicated than that. Theoretically, a hot baking surface (thin sheet or thick stone) conducts (not radiates) heat into the cookies. How much heat it conducts into the cookies depends on how much heat it can hold. Since the thin cookie sheet has a minimal heat capacity and the baking stone has a high heat capacity, the stone conducts way more heat into the cookies. As a result, the cookies on the preheated stone should cook much faster (and much more on the bottom).
This is for a hot baking stone, though. What about a cold stone put into a hot oven? Well, the flip side of thermal capacity is that the higher the capacity, the longer it takes to fill up with heat. If a cold thin cookie sheet and a cold baking stone go into the oven, there is a good chance that the cookies on the thin sheet will bake faster. This is because the stone has to suck up a lot of heat before it can effectively conduct heat back into the cookies (for a while it may actually absorb heat from the cookies). I have experienced this phenonenon many times while baking pies because I have a metal pie pan (low thermal capacity) and a ceramic pie pan (higher thermal capacity). The pie in the metal pan always cooks faster.
How does this translate into oven braising? It could work in several ways.
First, the pans with a higher thermal capacity work to keep the heat more even as the oven cycles on and off. Some people noted that the liquid in the foil container stopped simmering when the oven door was opened. This is because, when the oven stopped pouring heat into the cooking vessel, the foil container didn't have stored heat to fall back on and maintain the heat.
Second, unlike when baking cookies, the braising vessels are in the oven long enough to come up to temperature completely long before the food is finished cooking. This means that they are all "filled up" with heat and conducting heat into the food inside, which is more efficient. It is likely that the heavier pans gave plenty of heat to the food items by direct conduction from the pan to the meat (as opposed to from the liquid to the meat), whereas the thin pans didn't have any extra heat to give this way.
Third is the question of thermal conductivity. Boria_A noted that his copper vessel came up to temperature the fastest and stayed the hottest. This is not a surprise, because copper has excellent thermal conductivity at around 4.01 W/cm K. The aluminum and iron vessels also appear to have heated very well (it's harder to say much about the ceramic and pyrex vessels because they are much smaller than their metal counterparts). For the foil vessels, the metal part is so small and inconsequential in terms of thermal capacity relative to the contents that the thermal conductivity is effectively the thermal conductivity of the contents: mostly water. Well, water has terrible thermal conductivity, coming in at around 0.0058 W/cm K.
The transfer of heat from the oven to the cooking vessel by conduction through the air and by radiation is incredibly inefficient. So it appears that there may be a real advantage to having a cooking vessel that is able to store a lot of heat and thus "free itself" from the constraints of this method of heat transfer, and instead rely upon its own inherrent heat properties to cook the contents inside of it.
For example, what is the relevance of the lid's thermal capacity? Is the lid somehow radiating heat back into the environment of the vessel's interior? I thought the idea of the lid was mostly just to keep the steam in -- assuming it wouldn't crush it, if you put a 5-pound iron lid on an aluminum foil braising tray, would that increase in overall vessel heat capacity actually make a big difference?When the pan is all of one (or reasonably similar) construction, the thermal capacity of the lid effectively adds to the thermal capacity of the cooking vessel. It's all available heat that can be conducted from the lid down to the sides, etc. The lid does radiate some heat back into the environment, but I am not sure that this is nearly as significant as the contribution to the overall thermal capacity. The problems with the "iron lid with aluminum tray" model are 1. that it isn't all of one construction; and 2. that the most important part is the weakest part in terms of thermal properties. If, on the other hand, you added a 5 pound iron lid to a cooking vessel with reasonably good and reasonably similar properties (e.g., thick cast aluminum) it would make a difference, I think. The other advantage of a heavy lid is that it is more effective at keeping the steam inside.
Also, just as the liquid and pot contents contribute to weight, they should contribute to heat capacity. Water has a pretty good heat capacity, I think. I wonder if, the more braising liquid you use, the less the vessel matters.By mass, water has an excellent heat capacity. In fact, as explained above, it is the reference standard: water has a specific heat of 1. By volume, however, water's specific heat is nov very good. It's still 1, whereas aluminum 3003 alloy has 2.44 J/cm^3 K and iron us up at 3.53. This is because aluminum and iron are much more dense than water. The Law of Dulong and Petit relates thermal capacity to density in telling us that most materials have the same heat capacity per mole.
You are correct, however, in suggesting that it is possible to use enough water to largely mitigate the differences between otherwise similar cooking vessels made from different materials with respect to oven braising. I think it would end up being a lot of liquid, though. Your experiment used far less than the real-world amounts in the various cooking vessels you tested, not really using them the way they were designed to be used. This may be one reason behind some of the observed differences. It's possible that the aluminum and iron casseroles, and perhaps even the foil tray, would produce much more similar results if each one had held 20 short ribs in 5 cm of liquid instead of 2 short ribs in 1.5 cm of liquid. FWIW, I am not entirely convinced we would find wide differences had the various cooking vessels been fully loaded.
I'm also wondering whether there's a point at which enough is enough in terms of heat capacity. For example, a 15-pound iron pot may braise better than a 5-pound iron pot, but will a 500-pound iron pot braise any better than the 15-pound one?Yes, there is obviously a reasonable limit (although having an infinite heat source would theoretically be ideal). But we have to be careful not to do the old reductio ad absurdum thing. It's possible that a 30 pound braising pot would perform better than a 15 pound one with the same volume capacity. There does come a practical limit, of course. In the real world there is a tradeoff with thermal conductivity and heat capacity. A 500 pound iron pot would be prohibitively difficult to heat and would therefore probably be a less effective braising pot.
In terms of thermal conductivity, I'm wondering how this becomes important. In an oven, it should be a pretty minor consideration within reasonable tolerances. On the stovetop, it would seem to promote even heating but be problematic on electric cooktops that cycle -- again assuming the cycle speed and conductivity combine to make a difference.Well, clearly it is important on the stovetop. How important it is in the oven is more difficult to say. The principle behind using a high thermal capacity/low conductivity cooking vessel is that once it hits the target temperature, it likes to stay there. Also, if two cooking vessels have the same heat capacity and different thermal conductivity, the vessel with lower thermal conductivity should come up to temperature more slowly all other things being equal. How significant this is in the context of an oven's extremely inefficient heat transfer is more difficult to say.
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I agree with that, but I might also suggest that the "real world" may be making the wrong choice based on tradition rather than engineering: it is possible that a superior braising vessel could be made out of anodized aluminum and would be half as heavy (not to mention probably half as expensive) as its enameled cast-iron equivalent. And while the walls would be beefy, it's not as though they'd be a foot thick.
It's definitely true that one could construct an aluminum braising vessel that would have the same heat capacity as a similar iron braising vessel with the same internal dimensions without getting too whacky with the thickness. I did a few calculations and came up with the following:
- To have the same heat capacity, the body of an aluminum pan has to be 45% thicker than the body an iron pan
- However, since iron braising pans have heavy lids that increase the overall thermal mass considerably while aluminum braising pans do not, an aluminum braising pan has to be twice as thick as an iron braising pan to have the same thermal capacity.
- At the same heat capacity, the iron pan will weigh almost twice as much.
- With the lid removed, the iron pan weighs about 50% more than the aluminum pan.
- With a representative amount of braising material inside (e.g, 5 cm of liquid in an 28 cm diameter x 14 cm height casserole) the iron pan is around 55% heavier than the aluminum pan with the lid on, and around 27% heavier with the lid off.
In the real world, of course, even a seemingly small difference like 27% can be significant because it is the absolute differences that matter. If one loaded pan weighs 4.5 pounds more than the other, that is likely to be what matters most when someone is trying to lift the pan. This is overall an advantage for aluminum.
That's just the heat capacity, however. To my mind, there is an advantage to be gained in low/slow cooking by having a cooking vessel with lower thermal conductivity. For most any cooking task there are one or two optimal combinations of heat capacity and thermal conductivity. If we make the iron and aluminum vessels have the same heat capacity, then the main variable is thermal conductivity (3003 aluminum alloy is around 1.63 W/cm K compared to 0.8 for iron). On the other hand, some people love clay and ceramic for braising. These materials don't have anywhere near the heat capacity per cc of iron and aluminum, but may make up for that in the context of oven braising by having extremely low thermal conductivity.
My other nitpick with anodized aluminum is that it's extremely difficult to keep clean. This is something that will become a factor in the context of low/slow dishes where food items may cook on to the surfaces of the pan for a long time. One of the nice things about enameled cast iron is that you can soak it overnight in the sink and most everything will come off. With anodized aluminum, I find that I have to scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub to get it clean.
- To have the same heat capacity, the body of an aluminum pan has to be 45% thicker than the body an iron pan
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If you take an aluminum pot and a cast-iron pot of the same internal diameter and height, the aluminum pot can weigh half as much yet have the same heat capacity as the cast iron. The walls of the aluminum pot will be thicker, of course.
What I am suggesting is that, in the real world, the walls of a Calphalon pot will never be thick enough that it has the same heat capacity as a Staub pot of the same internal diameter and height. Of some significance is the fact that the traditional enameled cast iron casserole has a very heavy iron lid, which adds to the overall thermal capacity of the pan.
Conductivity may be important as well, especially if the "insulation" hypothesis holds true, however it is worth noting that if it is important the Corningware and Pyrex must be by far the best materials -- their thermal conductivity is worse than that of cast iron by something like a factor of 70.Yes, that might be true in certain circumstances. The deal with Corningware and Pyrex is that they have a low thermal capacity per unit volume because they have low density compared to metal. As a result they would need to be gigantically thick in order to match a cooking vessel with the same internal diameter and height in either iron or aluminum.
What I'm reading from the lab results in terms of cooking vessels is that the traditional vessels seem to be the best choices. That means heavy enameled cast iron (and perhaps also clay/ceramic, for different reasons).
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It seems at least somewhat clear from the experiments, which in all cases favored heavy metal vessels over aluminum foil and in most cases favored the heaviest vessel (Le Creuset) over others, that for whatever reason (and a few theories have been bandied about) the materials with greater heat capacity provide better braising. If you have more stuff in the oven, this will also have an effect related to heat capacity I think.
I should add, however, that weight is not the only factor in heat capacity. The nature of the material is also important. According to this list of engineering material properties the heat capacities of the materials I used are, in J/kg*°C:
Aluminum 963.00
Borosilicate glass 710.00
Iron 440.00
In other words, the borosilicate glass (which is I think the basis of the materials we call Pyrex and Corningware) has half again as much heat capacity per kilogram as iron, and aluminum has more than double the heat capacity of iron. So an aluminum pot weighing 1 kg has more heat capacity than a cast-iron pot weighing 2 kg. This is why I think my aluminum (Calphalon) and glass (Corningware) vessels, though smaller and lighter than the iron (Le Creuset) vessel, did so well at braising, such that I didn't detect any real difference in final product.
This would also tend to support the notion that, by weight, aluminum is the most desirable material for braising. It has far greater heat capacity per kilogram than any of the other commonly used cookware materials. In addition to the ones listed above, copper is 385.00 and steel runs from 419.00 to 503.00 depending on the alloy.
Steven,
If I may, I will suggest my eGCI class on cookware for a more comprehensible and accurate description of what heat capacity is and how it applies to cookware.
Here is a quotation from the relevant section:
Heat CapacityThus far we have mostly been talking about heat in its pure scientific sense: as it relates to the transfer of thermal energy. Now, we will turn out attention to the second meaning of heat, as it relates to internal thermal energy. Every object -- for our purposes, every chunk of metal -- can not only be described as being at a certain temperature, but also as holding a certain amount of heat. For example, if we have a one pound piece of iron and a five pound piece of iron, both at 200 degrees C, it doesn’t take too much thinking to wrap our minds around the idea that the 5 pound piece of iron is holding more heat than the smaller piece. This is easily understood by nothing more than the fact that it had to sit on the stove a lot longer before it came up to temperature. A more scientific experiment would be to drop each piece of iron into equal sized containers of water and measure how much the temperature of the water goes up in each container. If you do this experiment, you will find that the water in the container with the large piece of iron is significantly warmer than the water in the container with the smaller piece. This is because the large piece of iron stores more heat than the small piece, even at the same temperature.
As it turns out, various materials differ in their ability to store heat. In other words, some materials can hold more heat at a given temperature than others. For example, a one pound chunk of aluminum holds a lot more heat than a one pound chunk of copper at the same temperature. The scientific term that quantifies a material’s heat storage capabilities is called Specific Heat. Specific heat is the amount of heat it takes to raise one unit of a substance by one degree. The most common way specific heat is expressed is the amount of heat, measured in Joules it takes to raise one gram of a substance by one degree Kelvin, or: Joules per gram per degree Kelvin (J/g K). That said, you may also see specific heat expressed as British thermal units per pound per degree Fahrenheit (Btu/lb F) or calories per gram per degree Celsius (cal/g C) and so forth depending on the measurement system used. We’ll stick with good old J/g K for this article.
Confused yet? It gets even more complicated. We also need to settle on a reference standard. Specific heat is not an absolute measurement like a meter or a kilogram. A meter is an absolute quantity -- something that is a meter long is a meter long and something that is two meters long is twice the length of a meter. Temperature systems, on the other hand, work differently. Take the Celsius scale, for example... the values of 1 and 100 are arbitrarily set at the freezing and boiling points of water. Why? Why are there 100 units between the freezing and boiling points of water? Is 20C twice as hot as 10C? How? Well, as it so happens, water has an unusual ability to hold a lot of heat, so scientists have arbitrarily designated the specific heat of water as 1. Thus, all specific heat measurements are given relative to the specific heat of good old H2O. The illustration below lists the specific heat values for the most commonly used cookware materials.
As we can see, aluminum has a very high specific heat indeed – over double that of iron. This would lead us to conclude that a one pound chunk of aluminum holds more heat than a one pound chunk of iron at the same temperature. But wait... cast iron is supposed to hold the most heat, right? Yes and no. It is true that the chunk of aluminum holds more than the chunk of iron, but we haven’t accounted for the density of the materials. The illustration below shows the density of the same materials.
OK... now we can see that iron is a lot more dense than aluminum. A one pound piece of aluminum would be almost three times the size of a one pound piece of iron. Since cookware is described in terms of its thickness (i.e., the volume of the materials rather than the weight) it is more useful for us to understand the heat carrying capabilities of a given volume of metal rather than a given mass of metal. To obtain these figures, we can simply multiply the specific heat by the density to arrive at specific heat per cubic centimeter.
Now the picture looks completely different, doesn’t it? Aluminum is way down there on the bottom, iron and copper are in the middle, and steel is up at the top. These are much more useful numbers that more accurately reflect the way materials are deployed in cookware. A understanding of these numbers can take us a long way towards understanding the difference between a 3 mm thick aluminum bottom and a 7 mm thick aluminum bottom -- also between a 3 mm thick aluminum bottom and a 2 mm thick copper bottom. This is because we can use these numbers to understand the Heat Capacity of various cookware.
Heat Capacity is the term we will use to describe the total heat holding capabilities of an entire piece of cookware. For example, if we have an 11 inch sauté pan with a 7 mm thick aluminum bottom, we can calculate the heat capacity of that base. If I plug in a radius of 14 centimeters (half of the 11 inch diameter) and a height of .7 centimeters into this handy online calculator we get a volume of 431 cubic centimeters. Multiplying that by the specific heat per cc number from above, we get an overall heat capacity of 1043. Now let us compare this aluminum bottom to a copper bottom at 2.5 mm. The volume of the copper bottom is much smaller -- only 154 cubic centimeters. Using the number for copper from above, we arrive at an overall heat capacity of 531, or around half that of the aluminum bottom. This may seem fairly esoteric, but in fact we have just used materials data to compare a 67 dollar Sitram Profisserie sauté pan with a 7 mm aluminum base to a 140 dollar Sitram Catering sauté pan with a 2.5 mm copper base. What does this tell you? It tells you that you’re better off buying the cheaper pan if you want a sauté pan with a high heat capacity so you can dump a whole bunch of stuff into it all at the same time.
A good way to conceptualize heat capacity is to return to our “heat bucket” illustration from above.
The illustration above shows the difference between two otherwise similar cooking vessels made with different amounts of the same material. Because they are made from the same material, the thermal conductivity (as illustrated by the size of the faucets) is the same. As we can see, the pan made with more material has a larger heat bucket and is able to hold more heat at a given temperature -- it has a larger heat capacity.
Where this pokes a hole in your "aluminum is best for braising due to heat capacity" argument is that, while aluminum does have a higher heat capacity then iron by weight, iron is so much more dense than aluminum that an iron vessel with approximately the same dimensions as an aluminum vessel will have a far greater heat capacity. In order for an aluminum braising pot to have the same (not better, just the same) heat capacity as an iron braising pot of the same size, it would have to be quite a bit thicker. Iron also has the significant advantage for low/slow cooking of having relatively poor thermal conductivity (aluminum has fairly high thermal conductivity). This means that, if the heat is removed from two "equal" braising pots, the aluminum pot will cool down more rapidly. Iron's low conductivity is especially beneficial for those who have an electric stove and wish to braise on the stovetop: although the burner may cycle on and off, the actual temperature of a heavy iron pot won't change that much.
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So I'm thinking that 25 years later, I need to get over my gin aversion and try it. Now, I love vodka martinis, usually with Pearl vodka. Would Saphire gin be the way to go to try a gin martini?
As I said upthread, I think a gin martini is just about the worst way for the ginphobic person to approach of re-approach gin. Much better to try drinks in which gin is only one element among many, and then work your way up to a gin martini. Even then, some people who like gin never develop a taste for modern-style ultradry 8:1 gin martinis.
Some recommendations:
- Audrey's Gin Gin Mule: gin, mint, lime, simple syrup, ginger beer. Probably the best introduction to gin I know. I have never known anyone who didn't love this drink.
- A Pegu Club Cocktail: gin, orange curaçao, lime juice, Angostura and orange bitters. I think you had one of these at my house recently.
- A Corpse Reviver #2: gin, Lillet Blanc, Cointreau, lemon juice, absinthe/pastis.
- A Monkey Gland: gin, orange, absinthe/pastis and grenadine (or the so-called "American Version" with Benedictine instead of absinthe/pastis).
- Audrey's Gin Gin Mule: gin, mint, lime, simple syrup, ginger beer. Probably the best introduction to gin I know. I have never known anyone who didn't love this drink.
Canned Tomatoes
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
Interesting, Stephen. I thought it was something like that. This may be one reason the Pomi products don't contain citric acid (I believe they're ultrapasteurized) and also why they don't seem to sell whole peeled tomatoes.