slkinsey

Magictofu: What makes you think that there are necessarily animal welfare benefits to meats that are labeled "organic?" There is nothing preventing someone from raising "organic" chickens in a battery farm every bit as odious as Tyson's, so long as the chickens are fed "organic" feed.

Daniel, are you talking about a pork loin or a pork tenderloin? I have a hard time believing it would be possible to have a 10 pound tenderloin.

Pork tenderloin can actually be quite delicious cooked SV to low temperature. Which is just about the only way it's delicious.

Exactly, Mike. Small farm is WAY more important than organic in my book. purplechick, small local farms are a much better indicator of the way the animals have been treated than organic. daisy17, it is against the law to give hormones to chickens. Batard, the EWG's list and the recommendation to "buy these organic" fails to account for several things. Most notably, the fact that plenty of organic fruits and vegetables are treated with organic pesticides (many of the allowable ones being far more dangerous than the synthesized ones). And, no less significantly, that "measurable pesticides" does not equal "present in meaningful quantities." It is especially noteworthy that the list makes no differentiation as to the relative "badness" of the pesticides identified (most likely because, whenever actual doctors and epidemiologists have been interviewed about the amounts and kinds of pesticides found, they say that the amounts are far too minute to be any concern). In addition, the way the list is presented is misleading. It is not the case that strawberries at 90% have nine times more pesticides than some vegetable that rates out at 10%. It just means that they were able to detect some measurable quantity of pesticides on 9 out of every 10 strawberries. It could very well be the case that some fruit that they rate at 20% has a much higher concentration of pesticides on that 20% than the concentration present on worse-rated strawberries.

It's not clear to me that the rep is being entirely forthright. My recollection is that the new NP is definitely more up front with the herbs.

Keep in mind that "organic" doesn't equal "no herbicides, pesticides or antifungals." It just means that you have to use "naturally occurring or derived" herbicides, pesticides or antifungals. Copper sulfate, for example. It's not often difficult to identify the produce that has not been treated with herbicides, pesticides or antifungals of any kind. First of all, these won't be found in the "organic section" of your local supermarket. Second, they will usually show evidence of having been eaten by pests, attacked by funguses or various other blights, etc. The stuff that looks more or less the same as the "regular" produce, but just costs twice as much? That stuff was treated with herbicides, pesticides and antifungals.

For that money, you should be able to get a reconditioned clip-on laboratory recirculating water bath heater that you could use with any vessel you wanted. I don't understand paying $483 US on a non-recirculating PID heater with size limitations.

Here's the only reason to ever pay full retail for All-Clad or to pay a lot for a nonstick pan: If you buy it from Williams-Sonoma, they will replace it if it "breaks" at any time, no questions asked. All you have to do is bring it back and say, "this isn't nonstick anymore" and they will give you a replacement. I have a friend who has done this through several generations of All-Clad nonstick pans.

. . . people smoked in bars?

I suspect that many of the seemingly mundane things that never turn out as well at home compared to a restaurant are due to the fact that we're reluctant to use the massive amounts of fat that restaurants use. Take that chicken parm. Now try cooking the breaded cutlets in an inch and a half of hot fat.

Bean-related distress is largely caused by the indigestible sugars present in beans (oligosaccharides, primarily inulin). These are not digestible by humans but are digestible by the bacteria in our guts! Bean cooking water will contain some oligosaccharides, of course, but not as much as would be present in the cooked beans themselves. Meanwhile, bean cooking water has plenty of cooking applications. Using it to cook rice is a good idea. And it could be used as a base for any number of soups.

Further on the issue of handles... one of the advantages of traditional handles (such as you see on this piece, for example) is that you can grab the handle close to the body of the pan and brace the remainder of the handle against the underside of your forearm. This tranfers the load further up your arm and makes lifting heavy, full pans a lot easier on the hand and wrist.

...bacon in everything was new and exciting?

Granted, it would be easier to recognize her poolside... This puts me in mind of the time I spent half of a charity concert sitting next to an extremely charming, somewhat barrel-chested woman with whom I passed the time in between numbers with interesting conversation. It was only later when questioned by my friends that I realized I had been sitting next to Marilyn Horne! So, I think it's pretty clear that this is not a skill at which I excel. On the other hand, there are others who are remarkably skilled in this area. I remember being very impressed when, after having chatted with me for maybe 10 minutes some six months earlier, Dale DeGroff not only remembered my name but remembered some things about me the next time we met. Successful people in the hospitality business tend to be pretty good at this kind of thing.

Yea, it definitely shouldn't have taken that long. How deep was the vegetable mixture?

deltadoc, I don't quite understand your post. Are you saying that you had your mirepoix on the heat for 5 hours and it hadn't browned? What were you heating it with, a candle?

HUH? I thought that maillardization is what happens with proteins and caramelization was with sugars. I don't think onions have protein, but I know they're loaded with sugars. From What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert L. Wolke: He offers more in What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science: This is the Maillard reaction working at a temperature where it is clear that caramelization can't happen. Perfect example.

We should understand, in case it is not clear, that we're talking about maillardization, not caramelization.

Discussion and some recipes here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=113688

Canned tomatoes are a worthy ingredient in their own right. Most of the most popular tomato sauces are properly made with canned tomatoes (I'll have to disagree with Chris as to whether high quality canned tomatoes can make an outstanding simple tomato sauce with nothing more than canned tomatoes and butter). I would never be without several large cans of DOP San Marzano tomatoes in my cupboard. Additionally, some few other vegetables are traditionally and appropriately canned. For example, in Spain canned (jarred, usually) asparagus is quite traditional. Some other traditional canning preparations that are understood to be intentionally transformative are quite good. A few others (some legumes, posole) are not as good as "the real thing" but acceptably good when one is in a pinch. Others... well, it's either a mystery to me why anyone would buy them (potatoes? really?!) or I can't understand why you wouldn't rather buy frozen (corn, peas, etc.) at much higher quality.

First of all, Le Creuset is a bad choice for this task. The cast iron won't respond very quickly, so if your onions start cooking too quickly you will not be able to save them very easily. Additionally, enameled cast iron is notoriously not good for browning. And finally, Le Creuset really isn't thick enough to spread the heat around and avoid a "burn ring" when doing this sort of thing (I always use an aluminum disk under my Le Creuset to spread out the heat). Browning onions... it all depends on what you want the onions to be like. If you have a large amount of onions that you want meltingly tender and broken down almost to a mush, you can put them in a large, even-heating pan on very low heat with the lipid of your choice and a disk of parchment or wax paper cut to the size of the pan placed directly on top of the onions. Stir every so often, and resign yourself to the fact that this is a long process. Once the onions are softened and broken down to the degree you prefer, they will be mostly browned. If you want further browning, finish over high heat (you will need a responsive pan to avoid burning). If you want the onions to retain more texture (browned on the outside, but still with some resistance to the tooth) then there is no substitute for high heat and cooking in appropriately-sized batches.

Well, yes. And most French people would drink Cognac "neat" and not in a cocktail. Nevertheless, there is a strong American tradition of very long standing of making cocktails with both Cognac and genever.

Yea. I've always been given to understand that any distinctive "individual character" in a premium vodka came not from the primary ingredients or any careful distilling, since the primary effect of quadruple rectification and charcoal/quartz filtering would be to remove all of that stuff, but rather from small amounts of sweeteners, glycerine and other flavorings added at the end (and the water used to cut it down to bottle proof, of course).

Any "straight" whiskey.

Right. The direction of the lateral movement isn't important in a shearing cut. Just that there is some. And, with most cooks who have good knife technique, there is always a certain amount of lateral movement. In the grand scheme of things few kitchen knife, even the ones with acute angles and microfine polished edges, are optimized for true push-cutting. For this, you want something like a razor or a scalpel. The geometry and fineness of grain, etc. that you want in a true push-cutting knife would not be so great in the kitchen anyway. What you can notice is that the thinner the kitchen knife, the more acute and polished the edge, the less lateral movement is required (this is also why these knives need very frequent touchups and polishing to maintain these desired properties). But some lateral movement is usually going to be good. This is one reason that I think so many people are disappointed with the santoku design, because the flat edge almost forces the user to push cut. It's interesting to see how different blades and different sharpening strategies do the same things. I have some acutely angled and highly polished Japanese knives that fly through food with very little lateral movement. I also have some less-acutely angled cast steel knives with big fat carbide crystals and a much lower level of polish that fly through food just as much, but require more lateral motion to "bite."