nathanm

Thanks for the authoritative reply!

The goal is to show the geographical places where great barbeque style comes from. The criteria is that I want to find towns that are famous for having the best barbeque in Texas, and/or helping set the standard for what great barbeque should be. The Texas hill country towns are of course prominent - Lockhart and so forth. That is probably the philosophical home of Texas barbeque. However, if there is really great barbeque another place, I want to know about it which is why I am asking. I looked at the Texas Monthly 50 best. I only took the top 10 places from that list, but that added a couple towns Abilene Harlingen

Your point about different styles is very true. Do you have any towns to recommend for the styles outside of the Texas hill country?

The map is for a large cookbook project that I am working on. The NY Times wrote an article about it. Although science and technology is one In terms of Louisiana, I agree it is not known for it, but I would expect that there would be some good barbeque in the northern part of the state. I also don't have any towns for Virginia or West Virginia. Surely there is some barbeque there...

Standard pasteurization methodology for "LTLT" (low temperature, long time) is to bring milk to 63C/145F, and then hold it there for 30 min. This works very well sous vide. The time it takes to reach 63C will depend on the size of the container. You can certainly try putting your jug into the water bath - just stick a themometer into the jug to monitor the temperature. If it comes up to temperature in roughly an hour or two then I think you are OK. Once it is at temperature, hold it there for another 30 min. I would set the water bath to 64C/147F. Putting milk into bags, or smaller containers would heat faster, but convection in the jug may be sufficient.

I am making a map of regional barbeque across the southeastern US, which includes some of the midwest. The map will list the towns that are centers of excellence for regional barbeque style. I have towns in Texas and across the southeast already. Within the region for this forum I have Kansas City, Missouri St Louis, Missouri Murfreesboro, Illinois I suspect that there must be some notable and famous barbeque town in Oklahoma and Kansas, and possibly elsewhere. Any help would be appreciated!

OK, I have taken Dallas off the list, and I have added the other towns suggested in posts above. At the moment I have no towns in Mississippi or Louisiana. That seems unlikely to be true. I posted on the Louisiana forum also. Anybody have any recommendations in Mississippi or Louisiana? Or more towns in Georgia? How about the Florida panhandle?

I am making a map of regional barbeque in the United States. On the map I will highlight towns that are famous for barbeque. I have a list of quite a few in the southeast, but at present I don't have any for Louisana or Mississippi. There must be some. The point of the map is to show where regional barbeque styles come from. Basically to qualify the town has to have at least one really great barbeque place. Thanks for your help!

I am making a map of regional barbeque styles. I want to mark the towns that are famous for barbeque Here is my inital list for Texas Lexington Llano Lockhart Lulling Taylor I would appreciate any additions or comments.

I am sure that it can be shipped to Ireland. We will also have it available from Amazon.co.uk. The current estimate of shipping date is toward the end of this year - November-December.

I will assume this is directed at me, and my book - apologies if it isn't. eBooks are great for some things (I love my Kindle), but at this stage of development the best way to communicate a mixture of pictures and text is still a book. Kindle has no photos, and cookbookos that I have bought on Kindle are not very successful in terms of random access and reference. iPad is obviously much better for display aspects, but iPad is brand new - we had to commit to our launch platform like a year ago and we decided then that a physical book was the best way to go. We plan in the future to address tablets (whether iPad or other) but doing this right takes a lot of work. Like probably a year's worth of work if we want to use the slick features, add some videos and animations etc., do some testing. It's basically like software development. I am sure that we will do this at some point, but not in the short term. I think it would be unrealistic to think we could have a big impact with the audience of food lovers and chefs that we want to reach if we went eBook only. So we need both versions, and it is pretty easy to come to the conclusion that physical books are higher priority and should be done first. Also, I will note that Amazon has discounted the book rather substantially to $421.87, which frankly is cheaper than I thought they would go. I don't know if that they will hold that indefinitely, or not.

That is just an error on Mr Brown's part - cube steak has nothing to do with Jaccarding.

Totally different! Jaccard is a set of knife blades. Here is an example of the consumer machine. Here it is in use. It is very hard to see any difference in the meat afterward - except for a few tell tale marks, usually in the fat. Once cooked you cannot tell the difference. The commercial Jaccard, or this is similar. Cube steak machines are very different - they cut mostly through the meat changing the texture totally. The result is very obvious both visually. They can only handle thin meat, whereas Jaccard can go as deep as the blades are long, and typically are used on whole rib roasts. Cube steak is a VERY different thing. I didn't understand thing myself when I first encountered the Jaccard - I thought that all mechanical tenderizers were like cube steak - a desperate way to make low quality meat edible. That is also the attitude taken my many of the posts above. The truth is very different. I suspect that some of the people who have posted negatively just haven't tried it - or more likely have tried it many times at steakhouses and just never knew it.

It is almost impossible to tell by looking at the meat itself, because the Jaccard holes close up and you just can't see them. So look at the fat. You can often see the holes in the fat, but you need to look very closely. They are small and are quite inconspicuous. Note that the big industrial sized Jaccard machine that Costco uses can be used in different orientations. A rib eye steak can be Jaccarded while it is still part of the rib roast, in which case the Jaccard holes are going to be along a different axis. As a result, you may need to look at the edge of the steak, not the top and bottom. Or, you can see the Jaccard holes as linear streaks in the fat when you look at the top and bottom of the steak. In the case of a beef rib roast, or Spencer roast, you typically see the Jaccard holes in the fat cap. I have seen this in my local Costco and asked the butcher there about it. He said that all Costco steaks (except tenderloin) and most beef roasts are Jaccarded. I recently bought some USDA Prime rib eye steaks at Costco and they had been Jaccarded.

We have done a lot of experiments with Jaccarded meat in the last several years while working on my cookbook. In short: 1. Jaccard works - as reported back in 2004. 2. The meat loses less juice with Jaccard than if left alone. The intuition that it will lose more is just wrong. There is a very good explanation of this - juices leave meat by contraction from cooking. Jaccarded meat contracts less during cooking and thus wrings out less juice. 3 It is used routinely by high end steak houses. It is rumored to be universal but unless you really check all of them it is hard to say it is every last one. However, it surely is most of them. It is generally done by the meat packer that supplies the restaurant. 4. In addition to steakhouses, all (or virtually all) of the rib eye, ny strip and other cuts at Costco are Jaccarded. 5. Jaccarding does in principle introduce a food safety issue because you are poking into the meat. This could introduce pathogens into the interior. However, this is offset by several other factors. The pathogens don't generally have much time to grow if you Jaccard yourself prior to cooking. The blades are easily cleaned - you pop the thing in a dishwasher. So in practice I don't think that Jaccarding is really anything to be concerned about safety wise. 6. Jaccarding works well with sous vide. Saftey is higher with jaccard + sous vide because you can easily cook the meat to pasteurization level. Plus it helps tenderize tough cuts that you can finish tenderizing with long cooking.

I am making a map showing the geographical distribution of barbeque. For that purpose what matters most is where the really good barbeque is located geograhically. Knowing the town name is important to that. A list of great barbeque pits/restaurants is also a great thing, but then you tend to get into disagreements about which one is best. As an example, many people can agree that Kansas City, Mo, or Lockhart, Tx are great barbeque towns, but there is a lot of disagreement about which of the multiple establishments in each of these towns is the best.

I just discovered this thread, or otherwise I would have responded sooner. The book is marching along, and we expect to ship it in late 2010. The size has grown to about 2300 pages in 5 volumes. Consequently the price has increased also. The list price has been set at $625. The actual street price will depend on discounting and will evolve once the book comes on the market. If the discount is similar to other books in this price range then it likely will be available from somebody for about $500. The name is "Modernist Cusiine, The Art and Science of Cooking".

There is no website yet, but there will be one up by autumn. We have a lot of exotic equipment - freeze dryers, spray dryers, autoclaves....

Also, e-book platforms are evolving quickly. Kindle does not allow pictures. iPad does but it only just came out, and the software platform issues are evolving quickly (i.e. controversy about use of Adobe Flash). So realistically it will take a while to get an e-book format. Although I love the digital world, the best way to deliver this amount of content, with large high quality photos, is paper...

We will try to get distribution in Australia so that the books go by boat, then are only shipped within the country by post. This is not arranged yet. Eventually we will have e-book but right now getting it to exist at all is the challenge!

I totally agree. I go even lower. My favorite temperature for salmon cooked normally is 113F/45C However, you can go even lower to have salmon "mi cuit" at 102F/38C. At that temperature the color does not change from raw salmon. The texture is more like cooked salmon however. If you have copper river salmon either way is great. I love doing this with the belly meat, and then serving with some coarse salt...

The list price of the book will be $625, because the total project has grown to about 2300 pages in 5 volumes. The list price is not the same as the street price, because there usually is some discounting. My guess is that street price will be about $500, but that is just a guess - the discounted price depends on the retailers (Amazon and others) and it is not up to me. Pre-orders on Amazon will get the benefit of the discounted price charged at the time of release. We are working for a release date in late 2010. The book will be expensive, no doubt about it. People have an expectation that books should be cheap, and most cookbooks are very cheap. As a result, most cookbooks make lots of compromises to hit a price point. We made fewer compromises - for this many pages, with tons of color photos, and huge page size, and nice weight paper .... well, it is hard to make it really cheap. So it a bit like dinner at a top restaurant - Per Se, or L'Arpege or similar restaurants have a top quality product, with a price to match. The book will cost less than dinner for two at Per Se (before wine, tax, tip). Eventually we will look at doing a cost reduced version, but the focus right now is getting the full edition finished.

55C for two hours is good combination for pasteurizing eggs. Basically it takes about 35 min for an egg to come up to temperature and then another 1.5 hours for pasteurization. The time is relatively independent of the size of the egg - varying by only a few minutes. 57C is too high, in my view, for egg pasteurization. You can do it but you will modify the yolk more than you would want. A pasteurized egg ought to seem raw inside so you can use it for raw egg dishes.

It is actually quite hard to find inventions in food that are both novel and worth patenting. Novelty is hard because most food ideas are pretty old. Sous vide dates to the late 1970s for example. Another factor is the market size. Techniques which are only used by high end chefs would never return the cost of filing the patent. The only food inventions that make sense to patent are things that relate to high volume commercial food. If we do come up with a food invention relevant to large scale commercial food then yes, we would consider patenting it. However our cookbook project is not aimed in that direction so it is pretty unlikely.

Thanks for the replies so far! I hope somebody can comment more on Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. There must be more towns there...