rdale

A tank of helium was purchased gave the buzzfeed recipe a try, and failed, the best I could get was it starting to form a nice balloon and popping. The mixture had to get to about room temperature before it acted like it might work. I tried a variety of sizes in hoses to no avail, even though there was a moment or two that it looked like I would get there. I may try their recipe with a different choice in sugar, but methylcellulose is on it's way and I should be able to give the Master Chef Australia recipe a go. I bothered to take pictures of the progress but being it was a fail, am not going to bother putting them up.

Fantastic!

I need to buy another tank of helium, little girl is turning 8 in couple of weeks and we have fun blowing the balloons together, so threw in a bag of f50 into my last amazon order, if I get cracking on it before you do, I'll post the results. I'm curious to try the buzzfeed method too, might even try to cobble together a video of the process/results for giggles. If it comes together she is going to get a pretty cool cupcake display. I have a hunch it is F-50 as it is pretty common globally and if not will splurge on LV and HV, because both of those should cover it and if I wind up having to combine will have the range to give start giving it a go.

You are well on your way to the joys of smoked, cured and fermented meats! I haven't gone full nuts and got a sausage stuffer that is effective yet and am using a gun (which works better than the thing at work) that I got on sale at the end of deer season in Indiana at a sporting goods section of a Meijers (like walmart more variable pricing). I'm using the kitchenaid grinder too, it was a gift and I like it, but would have went for the third party metal deal I saw on amazon if I bought it, but to stuff a sausage I like it colder to keep the fat from melting, and the metal gun works better when stuck in the freezer for a few minutes. A pricker is also pretty helpful when making sausages and is cheap enough to maybe push you over the near miss of free amazon shipping when a couple of bucks short.

The place I started after asking someone who ran the charcuterie section of a restaurant before marrying well what books to get is Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn, and then slowly start adding gear that you might not have, smoker, sausage stuffer, meat grinder and a mixer. The last piece of equipment that I'm still waiting on to build is a curing cabinet, that will put dry aged hams and sausages in the list of things to experiment and eat. The recipe for duck breast hams (Hot Smoked and Prosciutto) in the book are easy to get by with making something tasty with out a cabinet and worth a try! It is a ton of fun making sausages, and years that I'm lucky enough to take a deer out of the woods, sausage making takes precedence over most other cooking.

I'm rdale a line cook with an interest in all things edible, my background is in traditional cooking but have got the bug for charcuterie and modernist cuisine in the past couple of years, and love the endless discovery in food whether it is technique that is new to me or flavor combinations. My day job as line cook is pretty standard, but I have taken the opportunity to try and find my voice with food at home by cooking my family meals they won't find at any other table. Thanks for the add, I guess I'm not a lurker anymore.

I've tried to figure this out a few times, each time leading to failure, when I saw the buzzfeed recipe thought I have nearly all of that stuff right now, except need a tank of helium, the last birthday party wiped it out. I was also thinking that it probably wouldn't work as shown with out some help, but would be a good start, possibly replacing the sugar with a different one, and using a better thickener than corn starch. Things I have tried that failed a locust bean gum, xanthan gum, isomalt concoction, it kind of gooped and started a small bubble but never expanded nicely although it looked liked it had merit, an agar agar, xanthan gum, isomalt mixture that made a mess in the pan and had no real merit and a gelatin and syrup recipe that had no hope. My notepad from that project is missing and probably has weird stick figures with long legs drawn in it by now so I don't have the ratios of the failed attempts. In the masterchef au recipe, which of the many methylcellulose do you think they are using? They didn't show a bag of it laying around which I was hoping to see in the background. I was kind of leaning towards https://www.modernistpantry.com/methylcellulose-lv.html or https://www.modernistpantry.com/hydroxypropyl-methylcellulose-f50.html as a good start.