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slkinsey

eGullet Society staff emeritus
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Posts posted by slkinsey

  1. I know that carbon (aka "mild") steel is different from black (aka "blue") steel, which is annealed.

    I learn something new every day. I've always used the terms interchangeably; I've never heard anybody make the distinction, which seems entirely obvious now that you've said it. What I have is all black/blue steel, but I've always referred to it as carbon steel, blue steel, French steel, black metal, whatever -- never made any distinctions.

    Yeah... according to "The Well-Tooled Kitchen" they're different. The blue/black kind are annealed. I don't know if that makes them harder or not. Your link to Gaspary's Kitchen & Home Products has different listings for black, blue and carbon steel pans. How different they are, I really don't know.

    What I can say about mine is that they were definitely not black or blue when I got them, so I have assumed they are regular old unannealed carbon steel. They are quite soft -- easily scratched with a Scotch Brite pad.

  2. So since you need to use energy to make a fat, the process is less effecient.  So when it is said that the conversion of protein to fat is 30-50% effecient, that means that in the process of converting the protein to fat, you use up half of the enery you would have yielded, had you directly "burned" the protein.  This excess energy is given off in the form of heat.  So to answer where does it go?--It goes into the environment.

    Ah! Very interesting. Thank you for making that explanation, as that clears up quite a bit.

    Just to be sure that we're on the same page, it would seem that the efficiency of turning these things into fat is only relevant to losing/gaining weight if the person consumes practically no fat. Otherwise, the body will simply store excess calories by converting dietary fat to fat storage, which is extremely efficient -- yes/no? So, basically what this information tells us is that, if you are going to consume excess calories, it is better from a weight maintenance standpoint if you eat zero fat and high protein so you make your body burn the maximum number of calories converting the protein to stored fat.

    Wouldn't this tend to suggest that the best diet for fat loss would be a zero fat, high protein, moderate carbohydrate diet?

  3. If you like, you can scour out and restart the seasoning on your carbon steel pan every time you use it

    I scour my cast-iron after each use.

    I'm sure you do. So do I.

    That's why I said "scour out and restart the seasoning" instead of just "scour."

    Look... if you think they season just like cast iron, then I guess we have a difference of opinion there. My carbon steel pans are soft enough that I can easily scour the seasoning pretty much completely off with a Scotch Brite pad. I do not find this to be the case with my cast iron pans, nor would I want it to be.

    Maybe my pans are softer than yours, or maybe you treat yours differently than I do mine, or maybe I treat my cast iron differently. Who knows? I know that carbon (aka "mild") steel is different from black (aka "blue") steel, which is annealed. Maybe we don't have quite the same kind of pan.

  4. I did the "whole pig buried in a big hole in the back yard" thing when I catered a friend's wedding in Arizona. Lot of fun, not too hard, and delicious results. We stuffed ours with sage and rosemary for the roast. Served it with a balsamic reduction, fire-roasted fennel and soft polenta with stracchino.

    Two web sites that may be of interest to you are:

    The Team Mumu Pit Cooking Page

    and

    Pig Roast and BBQ Links

  5. With a domestic fresh mozz that has been stored in water, is there a way to reduce the moisture without ruining the cheese?  (Squeeze, let it sit out for a while, or what?)

    I have found that there is a significant difference in the moisture content just after one day of sitting in the fridge. And I leave mine in the liquid.

    Difference in what direction? :smile:

    Tightens up the texture. Makes it less watery.

    If you're going to eat the cheese "straight" it makes a huge difference in taste and texture to eat the cheese on the day it was made without ever subjecting it to refrigeration.

  6. it's not such a big deal if you need to scour out the pan and start over again

    The same is true of cast-iron.

    Well, except that most cast iron has a rough texture whereas carbon steel has a smooth texture. This is to say that cooking eggs on a cast iron pan that has recently had the seasoning ruined, removed and restarted might be a fairly dicey proposition. It's no big deal with carbon steel. If you like, you can scour out and restart the seasoning on your carbon steel pan every time you use it (this is easy to do because carbon steel is fairly soft) with little trouble. I would not want to try this with cast iron.

  7. So does anybody have these pans outside of a commercial kitchen besides FG? I recently took a cooking course and that's all they had (besides pots) on their range. I'm really interested in trying one out but like Suzanne, I know nothing about care and seasoning.

    I have a carbon steel crepe pan and a carbon steel omelette pan. Got them for cheap at Bridge. Wouldn't give them up for anything. Although I don't have a carbon steel saute pan, I'd definitely think of getting one if I had a need for more.

    FG, do you season and care for these pans like cast iron?

    The nice thing about carbon steel is that it doesn't really need to be seasoned exactly like cast iron. This is to say that it's not such a big deal if you need to scour out the pan and start over again. A film of cooking oil and 10-15 minutes on low heat are all that is required. In fact, I find that my omelette pan tends to work better if I give it a little scrubbing with a Scotch Brite pad, brush it with oil, let it heat up for a while and then wipe it out and proceed with the butter, eggs, etc.

  8. By the way, I though WHAT THE DIET INDUSTRY WON'T TELL YOU, the article by Paul Campos in the New Republic earlier this year, was an excellent overview of diet myths.

    This, I thought, was one of the most telling things in the whole article:

    Blair's research shows that to move into the fitness category that offers most of the health benefits of being active, people need merely to engage in some combination of daily activities equivalent to going for a brisk half-hour walk. To move into the top fitness category requires a bit more--the daily equivalent of jogging for perhaps 25 minutes or walking briskly for close to an hour. (Our true public health scandal has nothing to do with fat and everything to do with the fact that 80 percent of the population is so inactive that it doesn't even achieve the former modest fitness standard.)

    This suggests to me that America suffers more from an epidemic of sitting on our asses than we do an epidemic of unhealthful avoirdupois.

    ...obesity researcher Paul Ernsberger has done several studies in which rats are placed on very low-calorie diets. Invariably, when the rats are returned to their previous level of caloric intake, they get fat by eating exactly the same number of calories that had merely maintained their weight before they were put on diets

    That pretty much answers that question, I'd say.

  9. fat is turned into fat with 95% effeciency.

    carbohydrates are turned into fat with 77% efficiency.

    proteins are turned into fat with 30-50% efficiency.

    So If I take in an excess of calories that means that the source DOES determine how much fat I lay down. If I take in all of my excess in protein, then only 50% of it will become fat.

    What does the other 50% become?

    Yes... that is exactly my question. What happens to the other 50% of the calories?

    Let's look at a hypothetical example:

    Let's say we have a person who, through a combination of exercise and basic metabolic activity, burns off 2,000 calories a day. This person never eats anything but protein. Every day this person eats 2,500 calories of protein for an excess of 500 calories per day, which the body will store in some form as we know. My understanding is that excess calories are stored as fat and that the body does not store excess calories in the form of protein. I have never, ever read anything suggesting that extra calories are stored as anything else other than fat, so maybe you could explain how this might happen otherwise. So, what I am saying is that this person would gain a pound of fat -- fat having around 3,500 calories/pound) -- every week until equilibrium is reached between calories consumed/burned.

    I welcome any other explanation you could offer as to what would happen with those extra calories. Given your explanation, I can see how in a hypercaloric diet composed of mixed protein, carbohydrates and fat that the fat would most likely be stored as fat, as this would be more efficient. But, in such a case, we come back to the calorie is a calorie issue. If one is eating a 2,500 calorie diet that is 500 calories per day over what is required, I don't see how monkeying with the relative caloric contributions of fat, carbohydrates and protein could possibly change the storage of fat in the body.

  10. When you suddenly deprive your body of food, our body goes into starvation mode--as in use as little fuel as possible, thanks to our evolutionary instinct to stay alive.  And when a diet fails, as it inevitably will, your body is now inundated with excess calories, but it's still in starvation burn-as-little-as-I-can-get-away-with mode.  And you know where this ends.

    It's not entirely clear to me that the whole "starvation mode" thing has ever been scientifically substantiated. It has always struck me as a hypothesis that some diet people came up with to explain why it is hard to lose weight and why rebound weight gain is so common after overly strict dieting.

    I beg to differ. Kindly see Keys A, Brozek J. Henschel A, Mickelsen O. Taylor HL. Human starvation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951.

    Or this abstract from an NIH workshop: http://www.healthy.net/asp/templates/artic...article&ID=1675

    Interesting. Thanks for the link. I stand somewhat corrected. That said, I have several issues:

    1. I would very much like to see something that is less than 50 years old, although I imagine that Keys' findings have been corroborated.

    2. I wonder how much of the decrease in basic metabolism after a certain amount of calorie restriction is due to the lower caloric requirement of supporting less body mass after weight loss. The NIH Workshop link seemed to indicate that most of the metabolic change Keys observed was due to a decrease in body mass. Indeed, they say, "...hypocaloric diets will induce a drop in RMR [resting metabolic rate]. This seems to be in proportion to the loss in LBM [lean body mass]." I wonder if there are any studies that show a reduction in RMR following, say, one week of caloric deficit.

    3. It is unclear how long it would take the body to rebound back to "normal calorie burning" if/when such a metabolic phenomenon occurs. After 1-2 days of normal caloric intake, why wouldn't the body respond with a switch in basic metabolism back to "normal?" If we are to assume that the metabolic change happens quickly and is caused by the calorie decifit rather than the reduction in body mass, would not a reversal of this effect also take place quickly if there were a change in caloric intake?

    4. It is unclear how long the period of calorie restriction and how great the extent of calorie restriction must be for such a thing to happen. People talk like it is something that happens at the drop of the hat.

    I think it is important to understand what the Keys study was looking at. They had these (presumably healthy) young men on a 2/3 calorie reduced diet over the course of 24 weeks. That is quite a bit of starvation indeed. I would expect to lose around 37 pounds of fat (and perhaps an additional 17 pounds of muscle) if I were among those test subjects, which is quite a lot of weight in a relatively short period of time. To give you some feeling for the effect of this diet: I am a relatively healthy 200 pound male and as such I burn off around 2400 calories/day with just my metabolism (12 calories/pound/day). A 1/3 reduction in my caloric intake would put me at 1600 calories/day. This is the proper caloric intake for someone who weighs 133 pounds, which is what I would weigh if I continued such a diet until I was no longer losing weight.

    All this is to say that it does not seem to be the case that a reasonable program of reduced calorie consumption necessarily induces a "starvation metabolism." While this phenomenon may help to explain rebound weight gain, I think that this offers a more plausible explanation for how this commonly occurs.

    Thanks for the info.

  11. I don't believe it.  Show me the research.  And I mean real research, not something done by a low carb diet clinic or quoted from an Atkins book.

    Here's a page full of research which supports low-carb eating:

    Low Carb Research: Low carb diets

    Results of some of those studies:

    A Randomized Trial of a Low-Carbohydrate Diet for Obesity

    Conclusions: The low-carbohydrate diet produced a greater weight loss (absolute difference, approximately 4 percent) than did the conventional diet for the first six months, but the differences were not significant at one year. The low-carbohydrate diet was associated with a greater improvement in some risk factors for coronary heart disease. Adherence was poor and attrition was high in both groups...

    A Low-Carbohydrate as Compared with a Low-Fat Diet in Severe Obesity

    Conclusions Severely obese subjects with a high prevalence of diabetes or the metabolic syndrome lost more weight during six months on a carbohydrate-restricted diet than on a calorie- and fat-restricted diet, with a relative improvement in insulin sensitivity and triglyceride levels, even after adjustment for the amount of weight lost. This finding should be interpreted with caution, given the small magnitude of overall and between-group differences in weight loss in these markedly obese subjects and the short duration of the study. Future studies evaluating long-term cardiovascular outcomes are needed before a carbohydrate-restricted diet can be endorsed.

    Atkins' Dieters Lose More and Improve Lipids Over Conventional Dieters

    Atkins' dieters lost twice as much weight during the first six months of the study. However, over the next six months, dieters on both plans tended to regain weight, and there was no statistical weight difference between the groups at one year.

    "A calorie is still a calorie, whether the calorie comes from fat, carbohydrates or protein," Klein says. "But it might be that certain types of calories are more filling than others and result in an overall decrease in total calorie intake."

    It is not clear whether or not the studies were controlled so that the caloric intake was the same across all groups.

    I could go on... but let me just say that these studies are not exactly ringing endorsements for low-carbohydrate diets. Furthermore, they do nothing to demonstrate that the body processes calories that come from fat and protein fundamentally differently from calories that come from carbohydrates in terms of weight loss/gain.

  12. In terms of weight loss and weight gain, if you have the caloric equivilents of anything, of course its the same.  If your body stores "100 calories" then it doesn't matter what its made of.  But as I suggested before it does indeed seem to make a different as to whether it does store it.  As stone says, what you eat effects your metabolism of it.

    That makes no sense at all. Your body has a metabolic need for a certain number of calories per day. It will burn those calories. Any calories consumed in addition to that number will be stored as fat. What is so hard to understand about this?

    Now... look... it is certainly a fact that certain calories become available more quickly than others. If I take in 100 calories of glucose together with 100 calories of fat, it seems fairly certain that my body will use the 100 glucose calories faster than the 100 fat calories. But so what? I mean, let's say that your body burns 2,000 calories per day. Let us further say that you have already consumed 1,900 calories on a given day, at which point you eat 100 calories of glucose and 100 calories of protein. It is pretty much a given that the 100 glucose calories will be converted into metabolic energy faster than the 100 calories of protein. Therefore, the 100 protein calories would be the "extra" calories and would be stored as fat whereas the 100 glucose calories would be burnt up as the last part of your body's daily requirement. Do you see how nonsensical this is? It doesn't matter what order you ate the calories in, only that you ate too many. What matters is the sum total of the calories you took in that day.

    So, no, what the calories are made out does not make a difference as to whether of not one's body stores those calories. The only thing that makes a difference as to whether or not one's body stores extra calories is whether or not there are any extra calories to store. If there are extra calories, the body will store them. It really is that simple. To believe otherwise, you would have to believe that 2,000 calories of carbohydrates are somehow different from 2,000 calories of fat are somehow different from 2,000 calories of protein on a caloric basis. This is untrue on its face, despite the fact that people are making zillions of dollars telling people that one or more of them is weight loss magic while one or more of them is weight loss hell.

    Look... I'm not arguing that the food in which the calories are contained has no effect on health, or even that it has no effect on weight loss/gain. There are plenty of reasons why certain foods can be beneficial for weight loss, even though weight loss always inevitably comes down to a calorie deficit. What I am saying is that calorie for calorie there is no difference in terms of weight gain. Atkins and all those guys may say that their super magic method changes the metabolism and does blah blah blah... and maybe it does. But the fact is that, if you follow the Atkins diet and consume more calories than you burn over time, you will gain weight. It is not clear to me, and I have never seen it proven, that any of these special diets succeeds in fundamentally changing the human metabolism so that it burns significantly more calories on a daily basis.

  13. And yes the body most certainly does, figuratively speaking, line of the calories from carbs and fats and says you go this way and you go that way.  The calories from fat are are stored as gylcerol based fatty acids and the caloires in carbs are from glucose, which the body handles differently.

    No. This is a mistake. The body does not handle the calories any differently. It may handle some of the other stuff differently, but in terms of weight loss and weight gain, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

    People can argue whether or not it is fundamentally better for one's health to get most of one's calories from fat or carbohydrates or protein, but that is a completely different discussion. I don't think anyone would argue that the body will process 100 calories of fat differently from 100 calories of protein. They are two completely different things and the body will break them down into different things and use those end products for different things. But the 100 calories of metabolic energy are 100 calories of metabolic energy no matter what they are made of. If you take in too many calories of fat, you will gain just as much weight as you would from taking in the same amount of extra calories from carbohydrates.

    The one caveat to the above is that calories which are stored in a complex form may take more metabolic energy to break down into usable components than the equivalent number of calories in a simpler form. This is to say that it may take 5 calories of metabolic effort to process 100 calories of food X while it takes only 1 calorie of metabolic effort to process 100 calories of food Y. This equation may or may not favor fat (I am inclined to think not), but I imagine that any such effect is very slight.

  14. The fundamental issue of world hunger is massive overpopulation

    There's plenty of food-production capacity. The fundamental issues of world hunger are incompetent government, poverty, and inadequate (sometimes intentionally so) distribution.

    Well... yes. But IMO the fundamental issue underlying it all is overpopulation. I mean, we certainly could plow under every spare patch of land, bulldoze the rainforests and whatnot to raise wheat, corn, etc. and feed the world. But there is some question, in my mind anyway, as to whether or not that is such a great idea. Personally, I think we're paying the price for that kind of thing too much already.

  15. With a domestic fresh mozz that has been stored in water, is there a way to reduce the moisture without ruining the cheese?  (Squeeze, let it sit out for a while, or what?)

    I have found that there is a significant difference in the moisture content just after one day of sitting in the fridge. And I leave mine in the liquid.

  16. In case anyone missed it, the only proven diet for weight loss is... wait for it... to consume less calories than you burn.  In other words, eat less and exercise more.

    Actually this is not entirely true, research seems to indicate (at least the research that atkin's used to present) that the composition of your diet influences if you lose or gain weight. You can eat the same number of calories on an atkin's diet that you can on a high protein or high carb diet and you will lose more weight on the atkin's diet.

    I don't believe it. Show me the research. And I mean real research, not something done by a low carb diet clinic or quoted from an Atkins book.

  17. And it seems a fundamental madness to research such a pill when we haven't even solved the problem of world hunger.

    The fundamental issue of world hunger is massive overpopulation, particularly in "starvation areas" of the world that are not and never will be able to sustain human populations approaching the size they do now. Only when this problem is tackled -- and I have little confidence that it will be any time soon -- will it be reasonable to speak of "solving the problem of world hunger."

  18. The suggestion that we may one day have a pill that enables us to eat what we like without worrying about the consequences is an example of how unlikely it is a solution will be found.

    What's so unlikely about that? Certainly, an effective psychoactive drug -- a nutritional Prozac -- that limits the propensity to overeat is easy to imagine.

    That's a pipe dream. I don't see how a pill, if possible, could solve anything.

    It's not a pipe dream at all. There are already psychoactive drugs that have been shown to result in moderate weight loss due to reduced consumption of calories as a side effect. The mechanism for hunger and eating is largely regulated by the brain, nervous system and bloodstream. I see no reason whatsoever that a drug could not be developed that acted to suppress the mechanism in the brain that makes us want to (over) eat. In my experience, consistently eating beyond the point of satiety is often a significant part of the problem for people with weight issues. I know it is for me. This is something that could definitely be affected with drug treatment.

  19. Some foods energy will more quickly be used while other food enery is more likely to be stored as fat.  This is what the atkin's diet is based on.

    That's not my understanding of the basis of the Atkins diet. As I understand it, the Atkins diet is based on extreme restriction of carbohydrate intake in order to induce a state of ketosis.

    My understanding, based on conversations with several doctors in the extended family, of the way the Atkins diet really works is the same way every diet works: it gets you to eat less calories than you burn. Period.

    The trick of the Atkins diet, and the way it accomplishes this calorie reduction, is to eliminate allmost all carbohydrates. As it turns out, carbohydrates taste good and we tend to eat a whole lot of them. The range of foods that are completely devoid of carbohydrates is very limited, and many otherwise palatable foods are not all that tasty in their carb-free form. One reaches a point where it just becomes boring to fill up on steaks with no potatoes and hamburger patties without the bun night after night after night. So, inevitably what ends up happening is that the dieter ends up taking less calories than they burn. The result of this is weight loss.

    In case anyone missed it, the only proven diet for weight loss is... wait for it... to consume less calories than you burn. In other words, eat less and exercise more.

  20. There was an article in the NY Times about the best places to get slices of pizza in NYC. Granted the very best pizza is not sold by the slice, but it was interesting most of the pizza makers did not use fresh mozzarella and were quite outspoken about that.

    I actually think that fresh high-moisture mozzarella would be horrible in the amounts one finds on the typical NYC slice. For that style, I also would choose a lower moisture mozzarella. OTOH, I typically choose a different style of pizza alltogether. There just aren't all that many pizza places in the City that do it for me.

  21. Just don't use buffalo mozz for cooking.

    When a pizza recipe calls for "fresh" mozz, what should one use? :unsure:

    Are there any places in your town that make mozzarella? Here in NYC we have Alleva and DiPaolo's, which make fresh fior di latte mozzarella and ricotta every day. This is amazing stuff, but lower in moisture than imported mozarella di bufala that has been soaking in liquid for several days.

    When I make pizza at home, I always use mozzarella from Alleva. But I also don't use all that much cheese. My typical pizza has maybe 50% or 60% cheese coverage at most.

    I agree that it doesn't make sense to use mozzarella di bufala on a pizza unless one is in a part of the world (i.e., Napoli) where it is fairly ubiquitous and reasonably priced (which is pobably no longer the case even in Napoli). You also have to have a really hot oven and a very thick stone on the oven floor to make it work with a wetter cheese.

  22. When you suddenly deprive your body of food, our body goes into starvation mode--as in use as little fuel as possible, thanks to our evolutionary instinct to stay alive.  And when a diet fails, as it inevitably will, your body is now inundated with excess calories, but it's still in starvation burn-as-little-as-I-can-get-away-with mode.  And you know where this ends.

    It's not entirely clear to me that the whole "starvation mode" thing has ever been scientifically substantiated. It has always struck me as a hypothesis that some diet people came up with to explain why it is hard to lose weight and why rebound weight gain is so common after overly strict dieting. But I don't think there have ever been any studies showing that people on highly calorie-restricting diets somehow experience a profound metabolic change whereby their bodies burn fewer calories and absorb more.

    This page here has the best and most sound explanation for rebound weight gain I have seen, and no mention is made of any such metabolic change.

  23. Only source of orange bitters I'm aware of is Fee Bros. in Rochester, NY... almost exclusively available by mail order from them...  They're very nice in that they'll send you (or whoever you desire to send a few bottle to) the goods, and then invoice you later.  They'll also sell by the single bottle, which is, again, a really nice accomodation to buyers like us.  A web search for Fee Brothers bitters should turn up their phone number... I'm feeling too lazy to do it myself now.

    When I'm in Houston, I get Fee Brothers Orange Bitters at Spec's. They also sell Peychaud Bitters.

    If you want to contact Fee Brothers directly, see their web site. Fee Brothers also makes an "Old Fashioned Bitters" that is excellent and a great alternative to Angostura Bitters.

  24. I have cooked Chicken at low temperatures to this point several times now and get perfect results everytime. The chicken needs to be 65 degrees centigrade.

    That is just about 150F, for those using the old scale.

    Matthew, what is your method for low temperature cooking? What parts of the chicken do you do this with? Do you crisp the skin, or do you go skinless?

  25. Here's the thing: I believe Inventolux knows what he's doing. But there's a breakdown somewhere; I'd like to get to the bottom of it.

    I think the breakdown may be that Inventolux isn't really using a 135F water bath when he does this. When he says:

    ...the temperature of "just below simmering water" is around 135f...

    and then says:

    Poach at 135f for 25 to 30 minutes

    Let rest for 5 minutes.

    Perfectly cooked chicken

    I think he is basing his 135F instruction on his earlier assumption that water just below simmering is 135F. I, rather, would suggest that water just below simmering is closer to 190F, and that water "just below steeping" (if we should take Inventolux' word usage to indicate an even lower temperature than that) is right around 180F -- much below that and we start to enter the range of "tea that needs to be heated up" temperatures.

    Inventolux' statements above lead me to believe that he is not measuring the temperature of his water bath with a probe, as you did, but merely making the assumption that "just below simmering" equals 135F. Would you describe the water you measured at 135F as "just below simmering?" My guess is that his water bath is a lot closer to 180F or 190F.

    By the way, there is an interesting chapter in The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore by Harold McGee about cooking meat below the boil. He includes timing charts for meats of various sizes in water baths of 200F and 180F. Of note are McGee's descriptions of "simmering" and "subsimmering" temperatures. He describes "simmering" as "a point just below the boil ... in the neighborhood of 200F." The temperature he chooses for "subsimmering" -- which is to say "just below a simmer" is 180F. According to McGee's timing charts, a 1.5 inch steak (which is around the same thickness as a large chicken breast tied up as Inventolux describes) in a 180F water bath will reach 150F in around 34 minutes. This is the "just done" temperature for chicken breast in my experience, and I do not think it is a coincidence that McGee's timing coincides exactly with the timing Inventolux gave you in his detailed instructions (35 minutes).

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