slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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For edge-sealing machines, the mesh also acts as a channel for the last bit of air that would be difficult to evacuate otherwise.
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Yes, anything you can do to reduce the temperature differential between the food and the water will help the water return to the boil faster. That said, there are certain circumstances where you would like for the vegetables to be cold (e.g., blanching tomatoes to remove the skin) because you want to mostly cook the outside and not the inside.
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The roller cutters never work very well on any model. Better to flour the sheet of dough, roll it up and cut it to size with a sharp knife.
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Right. If you're, say, blanching vegetables and the temperature of your water drops only 5-10 degrees, that's not such a big deal. The way the vegetables are cooking won't be all that different. If the temperature of the water drops by 50 degrees, you've got another situation on your hands. So you definitely want a large thermal mass (in the form of a body of water) relative to the thermal mass of the food you wish to cook. In this sense, it is no different from putting food into a frypan.
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Is it not possible to make a big batch and freeze it? I would assume that something with that much fat content would be fairly easily scooped out of a frozen container.
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Where having a large pot of water helps is in not breaking the boil in the first place (this is Keller's technique, which he describes as "large pot blanching").
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"Frequently purchased together with 'Second Helpings of Roast Chicken by Simon Hopkinson'"
I always wondered about those things.
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In the context of home cooking, adding salt does not have much affect on boiling point. As a general rule of thumb, every time you add about 58 grams of salt to a liter of water, you raise the boiling point by one-half a degree Celsius. This means, for example, that if you have an 8 liter cooking vessel, you would need to add 928 grams of salt (almost a kilogram of salt!) to raise the boiling point up to 101C/214F.
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Exactly. They hold a lot more pieces per linear foot, but this also makes it more of a hassle to get the things you want off of them. And they're short. So, the real choice is between a 2.5 foot long pot rack or a 9 foot long pot bar. If linear space is at a premium, I say go with a pot rack. If not, I say go with a pot bar.
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Many places sell, for example, ground chuck at 20% fat, or ground sirloin at 10% fat, etc. I'm not aware of any markets selling preground short rib meat (which we found especially good) or brisket or things like that.
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I can't speak for Janet, but the problem I have with hanging racks is that they're not very stable. You go to grab a pan (or hang one) and the whole thing swings back and forth, seeming to threaten the integrity of the ceiling. That's one thing when you own the place; something else when you've installed it illegally.
Then don't install a hanging rack. What I have is a simple length of black pipe held in O-rings that screw into a piece of threaded bar, which in turn screws into a ceiling plate which is attached to the ceiling studs with 1.5 inch wood screws. When it comes time to move out (not that anyone in NYC ever moves out of his apartment), all I would have to do is spread a little spackle over a dozen tiny screwholes. Long wood screws have plenty of grip, and I could probably do chin-ups on my bar. Once the bar is up, all that is needed are some S-hooks. I personally find the long, single hanging point arrangement better than the short, multiple hanging point arrangement of the typical pot rack. And my solution is probably a lot less expensive on a capacity basis.
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For sure there is a distinctive flavor to oxidized ground meat. I wouldn't say that it is a bad flavor, per se, but quite distinctive. And I taste this flavor every time I have a less-than-medium cooked burger that I have not made myself with meat that I ground a few minutes previously. For lack of a better descriptor, I'd say that to me it's a certain iron-like, "bloody" flavor.
For all intents and purposes, the test that Steven and I did was just how Chris Hennes proposes. The ground meat we purchased had the same fat content and was ground from the same beef that we would be grinding ourselves later in the day. This is a large, high quality, high turnover market with the beef ground and packaged on premises in full view. They likely turned over all their ground beef while we were still in the market. So, really, the difference was that the prepackaged ground beef was (1) around 5 hours post-grind as opposed to a maximum of 30 minutes post-grind when cooked; and (2) was ground in a machine that was certainly very clean, but nevertheless had been grinding meat for several hours already by the time our beef came out (meaning that a tiny percentage of even more oxidized meat was present in the preground sample).
One reason Cutlets and others may feel that La Frieda Black Label is the pinnacle of preground beef is because it is very high quality, flavorful beef... and also because there is most likely no restaurant in the city that is serving hamburgers made with beef that is ground to order (okay, maybe places such as DB Bistro Moderne). So even if, say, Shake Shack is getting its beef ground daily "in house" at Blue Smoke or one of the other USHG restaurants, it is still very likely the case that a day's worth of beef is being run at six o'clock in the morning, which is plenty of time for it to develop that "preground beef flavor" Steven and I noted. So, if the presence of PGBF is a given in all samples, then it is still possible for La Frieda to differentiate itself on the basis of quality. There are also things that a producer of ground beef can do to minimize oxidation (rigorous and frequent cleaning of grinders, packing in nitrogen-flushed packaging, etc.).
Finally, and with all due respect to Cutlets, et al. one has the sense that they haven't actually tried the experiment themselves (not that it matters if you're comparing restaurant-to-restaurant, since they are all likely to be using oxidized ground beef). I wonder what they might think if they were able to get La Frieda to give them the various meats he uses in his blend in whole cuts, so they could take that home, grind it themselves to order, and test it side-by-side against an end-of-the-day sample from City Burger's walk-in. I would be shocked if the ground-to-order sample didn't blow away the preground one.
ETA: I am all for the idea of scientific rigor and all that, when appropriate. But honestly, the flavor difference Steven and I observed was so far from subtle as to obviate the need for double-blinding or something like that. It was shocking how much of a difference there was. So much so that, well, let me just say that I'm glad no one was around to observe the two of us giggling.
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I can think of other examples where you might want the pure, unadorned and unaltered flavor of the ingredient to come out. For example, let's say you were going to make a cauliflower purée... You don't want to get any browning. You could steam it or boil it, but that might leach out a lot of the flavor and the cauliflower would be watery, needing reduction to be thick. Or, you could bag it and cook it SV. This would preserve the white color of the vegetable, prevent over/undercooking better than steaming or boiling, keep the vegetable from getting watery, etc. You'd end up with pure, snowy white, just cooked cauliflower that you could run through the Vita-Prep (my next must-have piece of equipment) into a nice thick, silk-smooth purée hat tasted of nothing but cauliflower.
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On Dec 12 2008, 01:32 PM, jsmeeker said:On Dec 10 2008, 04:29 PM, slkinsey said:
Unless you chill the pint glass, you'll get a colder stirred drink by using the metal tin.
I too create my stir drinks in a pint glass. And it's always at room temperature. I've never even considered using a chilled pint glass. Which is kind of funny, since I keep a couple in my freezer all the time. I guess I should try this out.
FWIW, I also build my shaken drinks in room temp pint glass. Then, I add the ice, slap on the tin, then shake.
Personally, I don't think there is ever a good reason to use a room temperature pint glass. See here for more information and explanation. -
There's nothing magical about a spoon. In fact, a rod may be a better stirring implement.
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I tried something like that once, and did not find it a particularly good method.
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I usually make stirred drinks in my pint glasses.
Unless you chill the pint glass, you'll get a colder stirred drink by using the metal tin.
I usually find that by the time the drink is properly chilled, it has just about the right amount of dilution. When I chilled the pint glass, I didn't get enough dilution. Well, it was ok for me as I don't mind the drinks really stiff, however my wife and many guests don't always enjoy "the burn".
I haven't tried stirring in the tin as I'm usually making a couple drinks at a time and have multiple pint glasses (brewery tours ftw) and only 1 tin. If the dilution ends up being the same and the drink colder, that would be welcome. I'll have to give it a shot side by side.
one man's proper chill is another man's tepid mess. sam can certainly walk through the thermodynamics of the situation, but if you use a chilled mixing glass, you better stir for a longer period of time to get adequate dilution. your end result will be much, much colder than if using room temperature glass.
so i use chilled pints at work. and they can really chill things down really quick even with not so ideal ice. so to make something with comparable dilution to normal i'd have to let it sit for a few seconds or so and dilute.
well i'm primarily mixing manhattans. and i only have overholt at 80 proof. i'd like to give that more concentrated higher proof rittenhouse feel. is it appropriate to just let my drinks "cook" less. i try to do the same with 80 proof gins to increase their proof and intensity... i don't do this for every drink but there are lots of times when i want a higher proof feel...
a viable technique?
I've moved this over from the thread on cocktail strainers.
Absolutely it makes sense to vary the amount of dilution according to the proof of your ingredients. You might want more dilution when the ingredients are high proof and less dilution when the ingredients are lower proof.
This is only possible, however, if you have the ability to chill the lower proof drink sufficiently with a relatively low amount of dilution. This will depend on some combination of equipment and ice. If the mixing vessel is cold, and especially if it has a high thermal capacity, and your ice is cold, you are ahead of the game. You can further enhance your chances by using larger pieces of ice. All of these things, in different ways, can contribute to a situation where the low temperature is reached before the desired minimum dilution is reached -- meaning that you are primarily controlling dilution by stirring the drink and deciding when to strain it off the ice. If your primary task in making a stirred drink is chilling the drink, your ability to control dilution is reduced.
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Unless you chill the pint glass, you'll get a colder stirred drink by using the metal tin.
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No reason to use one. But some reasons to have one. For example, they ave very useful in scooping up crushed ice that's getting a little wet.
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I'll also experiment a bit with corn flour, which I see as an ingredient in the commercial mixes.
This is probably at least partially responsible for the better browning, since corn flour has more sugar than wheat flour.
Have you thought of using a low gluten flour, such as Wondra, for the batter?
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Sous vide is definitely the way to go with owl. I like 80C for 72 hours.
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The difficulty in doing that is that the very act of pouring the vermouth out of one bottle into another will oxidize it.
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It seems likely to me that this means they are doing a double-bevel, with the coarse wheel grinding it down to an 18 degree back bevel, and the find wheel putting on an edge bevel at 22 degrees.
A 22 degree bevel (44 degrees included angle) is not particularly acute. Japanese knives are sharpened to a much more acute angle than that. Something like 14 degree bevels (28 degree included angle) wouldn't be unusual for the Tojiro-DP Gyutou.
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Significantly harder than the Wusthof.
About roux
in Cooking
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One thing that would be tricky in doing this is making sure that the roux doesn't burn. When preparing roux for typical use, when the roux achieves the proper level of darkness, you can more or less immediately stop any further browning by adding a (relatively) cold ingredient (usually the trinity vegetables). When making a dark roux that is meant to be saved, you don't have the ability to quickly cool the roux this way. Rather, you either have to go for a lighter roux and hope that some of the holdover heat will finish the browning, or you have to use a highly conductive pan and quickly put the base of the pan into an ice bath when you want to start the cooling (as one does with a dark caramel).