nathanm

FYI - Ryan is the photographer for the book

I am embarassed to say that I don't recall at the moment - I will check and post. We discussed both but I don't recall where we came out...

I basically agree, but the issue is complicated. Pure fat (i.e. rendered lard or suet) does have a relatively low melting point. It is not a sharp number because it is a mixture of different fats as pointed out in other posts. When we talk about melting fat during cooking, we really mean rendering, which is largely about converting the collagen in the fatty tissue. Raw fat as it occurs in piece of pork or beef is NOT pure fat - it has lots of connective tissue in it, which is mostly collagen. So rendering fat out of a piece of meats is about both melting the fat, and breaking down the collagen. This is all pretty obvious if you try to render a piece of beef or pork fat - it takes a long time and a lot of heat. Compare that to melting some (already rendered) lard or suet. The conversion of collagen into gelatin occurs across a wide range of temperatures, at a rate that increases exponentialyl with temperature. That is why we must cook 48 hours at 55C/130F to get tenderness that we might get in an hour at much higher temperature. Anyway, it does take some heat to melt fat, and it does take some heat to convert gelatin. That will cause SOME stall, but I don't think that is large enough to be a real explanation. My guess is that in a typical smoker cooking a big pork shoulder or brisket, the wet bulb temperature stays below 74C until such time as the crust of the meat is very dry, at which point dry bulb is more important. This is, of course, discussed at length in my book. This seems like a much better explanation to me.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! We have done studies of meat in a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). This is a device that looks for "stalls" as you heat things. It puts constant heat in, then watches how the temperture increases. The most dramatic sort of stall is a phase change (ice melting, water boiling) but a DSC is made to have great precision in how it looks for ANY difference in heat versus temperature. When you have a chemical reaction - like collagen converting into gelatin - it will show up with a DSC. We have measured this transition and it is real, as is fat melting. Both contribute. However, neither one of them is big enough to really account for the "stall" observed by BBQers. I think that a better explanation is wet bulb temperature. Basically, if you have a wet thermometer, it reads a lower temp than a dry one, due to evaporation (unless relative humidity is 100%). Food mostly cooks at wet bulb temperature - until the outside is totally dry. I suspect that is that is the origin of the stall.

Exactly! You have the control to get exactly the results you want every time. Different people may want different things; that is a separate issue. But given a definition of what you want, You can also optimize so that each part gets it optimum treatment. In the case of duck breast the issue is skin and meat, but with a whole bird there is the issue of breast versus leg.

Just to be clear, my post above was about the "perfect roast duck" posts by Chris, Pam and others. It was not in response to Douglas' post about chicken legs.

This is, of course, a matter of definition. You could say that you like the meat dry and gray, or you like lots of rubbery fat under the duck skin. Then yes, you can achieve that with traditional methods. However, most people like the skin crispy, with much of the fat rendered, and remaining fat soft and unctious rather than rubbery. This takes fairly high temperature - very high for the crispy skin (must get about 180C/356F) at the very surface and the fat must cook at least 70C/158F for a long time to render, or even higher if the cooking period is short. Many people like duck breast rare to medium rare, which means cooking it to an internal temperature of 55C/130F (or there abouts). The optimimum cooking time and temperature for the skin is just different than for the meat. As a result, you really can't get a duck with perfect skin and medium rare breast meat (under those definitions) via traditional methods. Can't be done. In France, with a really great traditional chef you usually get skin that is nice looking but underneath the fat and skin will be still quite rubbery, but the meat will be perfect. Many traditional methods go to elaborate extremes - look at Peking duck, where you inflate the skin with air, lacquer it, air dry it for days , fill the duck cavity with water, use a super hot radiant wood burning heat oven.... all to get decent to excellent skin and (usually overcooked) meat. The ideal thing is cook the skin and meat separately. Then each can be optimized. If you don't want to do that, then you must consider the various approaches discussed in recent posts. This requires some additional steps - but frankly I think they no more complex than Peking duck, or a classical French ballotine.

Food safety discusses cooking, but not curing. Food and health discusses salt intake and health. The meat chapter has a subchapter on curing which discusses safety aspects of nitrates and nitrites. So yes, we cover all of that, but not all in one place.

The best way to treat skin is separately from meat. Pull the skin off. Blanch in boiling water, or steam (or cook sous vide at fairly high temp). Then press between two silpats held down with weights and bake in an oven at say 180C/356F until really crispy. Then serve on top of the meat. We have several other strategies in the cookbook, which are more elaborate. You can blanch the skin off the bird, then reattach via Activa. If you want to leave the skin on then the dry ice or liquid nitrogen way works great. The dog brush perforations let the fat drain. You definitely can freeze the thing first. One thing I do is: - Cook the food (say chicken breast) sous vide. - Take it out of that bag, and put it in a small pan (like a small saute pan without the handle) with some high temperature oil rubbed on the pan first. - Put the breast on the pan then vacuum seal the whole thing. This presses the meat very firmly against the pan. Freeze it, then remove the sous vide bag. This gives you a chicken breast with a very flat frozen side. - Sear the meat on a super hot burner. You can crisp the flesh as much as you like. - Put the breast, skin side up, on a wire rack in an oven at low temp (65C/149F, or maybe a bit higher) until it thaws all the way through and warms up. This will take a while, and only works well if your oven has good temperature control at low temperature. This same techinque also works very well with scallops.

Douglas can respond for himself, but times and temperatures are ultimately a matter of taste. Some people like their chicken thighs cooked more than other people do. There is no single right answer. 60C/140F for an hour will certainly cook them. If you want to be careful about food safety I would make that 1 hour 45 min or 2 hours. However, some chicken thighs may still be a little tough then. Also, the fat won't be rendered as much as it would at a higher tempertature for a longer time. We did some tests for my book and I think our preference was 62C/145F for an hour, but I don't have that file handy at the moment. The chicken also matters - a mature chicken will have much tougher legs/thighs that most frying chickens which are quite young.

We like MAPP gas better than propane . We also like oxy-acetylene or oxy-MAPP torches. These are more expensive, but burn even hotter, which is useful for many things.

The books are being printed in China. It takes about a month to six weeks for the books to be shipped by boat. We can air freight them but it is very expensive ($100 per book). As a result, we might be able to get a few review copies available for loan about a month before the book actually ships, but we won't have very many because they are expensive to air freight. Indeed, we may have already promised the few that we will get. Some books have a relatively large print run of galley copies for reviewers. We decided that was impractical for our book - it was just too expensive, but even more important it would delay the real copies. So our galley proofs are only a single copy, and unbound. Once the book actually arrives and starts to ship, then we will have some more copies. However our policy for reviews is to do loaners - the reviewers must return the books (or buy their own). This loaner policy is typical of expensive art books.

I am not sure quite what your issue is, I don't get this result with my sous vide. Depending on the meat, brining or marinading is always a possibility. There are MANY approaches. My upcoming book has big sections on dry rubs, brining and marinating, so it is a bit hard to summarize briefly.

Buy a propane torch, but use MAPP gas. MAPP is similar to propane but it burns hotter, and has less of an issue with flavor transfer. I prefer "self-lighting" or "trigger start" propane torches. They are about $50 - available at Amazon, or Home Depot. Even better, in my view, are torches that give you a hose between the tank and the torch - they are much less tiring to hold. here is an example. The non-self lighting torches are cheaper - less than $20.

THANK YOU! I particularly appreciate the vote of confidence when you haven't seen the book yourself yet. I'm confident that you won't be disappointed. We'd be happy to talk to your friend at KQED (and I think that may be in process). At the moment I am putting all of my efforts into finishing the book - we will turn to promoting it once that is done.

We thought long and hard about the best medium for our content. Because I have been involved in the computer industry, many people assumed that I would choose to do the book as a web site, or an interactive application or an e-book. The reality is that if you want to communicate large high resolution photos, a printed book is still a good way to do it. This is particularly true when you consider the target audience - we want this book to reach food lovers all over the world. The penetration of e-book readers or tablet computers to that audience is not very high. Those of us on eGullet are at the cutting edge - we all use computers and the internet or else we couldn't be reading this. But that does not include everybody in the cooking world who might benefit from this book. Interactive content is also much harder to create than information for a book. So, we had to make a strategic decision as to what platform we would tackle first. We made this decision two years ago, and at that point it was obvious that a printed book was the best thing to do. It wasn't even a close call - the decision was very simple. Printed books have lots of great features, and in 2008 it was totally clear that it was the best inital target. We considered being partially digital, and having a CD ROM (like the elBulli books do) or a thumbdrive, which contained recipes. However we ultimately decided that a spiral bound kitchen manual on waterproof paper was an even better way to get the recipes in a form that people could use in a messy kitchen. Another interesting thing as that even as people say that paper books are dead, there has never been a better time to make them in terms of the infrastructure. We lay out files in Seattle, where they are adjusted, color corrected and sent to China digitally for printing. The Internet makes this all vastly easier. The Chinese printers use very advanced technology like stochastic screening to give us printing superior to virtually all other books - even to art books. Using the internet (including eGullet!) we can reach a wide audience to let them know about the book, and via online companies like Amazon and others we can sell the book. Our web site for Modernist Cuisine got hits from people in 91 countries within its first three days. This makes it difficult for the big publishing companies beacuse they used to take advantage of the fact that they had huge advantages over individual authors. That is much less true today, which is one of the reasons they are having a hard time. I am hoping that this book will have many editions in the future, and be a standard reference book for many years. If that happens then we will certainly make an electronic form at some point, but I think that is a minimum of a couple years away. It will take a big effort to really take advantage of interactive features. We also need the hardware platforms to evolve and improve. A lot of people are asking about an e-book version because they want a cheaper book. While I understand that, the thing that is most important to me is the potential to make a better book. E-book platforms are unlikely to be as good as paper in terms of resolution or screen size, at least in the near future, but interactivity can compensate by adding new features, like video, animation and calculation (scaling recipes, converting temperatures). It would take a lot of effort to make a cookbook that uses video and computer animation extensively. There were some CD-ROM based cooking titles that tried this back in the mid 1990s, but the internet basically snuffed those efforts out. I am not aware of a really successful effort in this direction. On the topic of cheaper, it is far from clear to me that a truly interactive, video heavy version would be cheaper than a paper book. It is true that if you have a simple text-only book like a novel, then making an e-book version is easy, and ought to be cheaper. In that case the main benefit of being electronic is eliminating paper (weight, printing, shipping cost, shipping delay...). I really love my Kindle for that. I have a bunch of cookbooks for Kindle, and frankly they do not provide a very satisfactory reading experience. A novel or non-fiction trade book on Kindle is a very good reading experience - I think as good as paper for legibility, and better for things like weight and convenience. Math books, on the other hand, are usually a very bad experience on Kindle because the equaitons are not handled well - they are treated as pictures, and Kindle does not do pictures very well. Cookbooks are somewhere in between. The recipes don't format all that well, and pictures don't come out well. However, if you make a e-book version by shooting video, making computer animations, and adding other interactive features, then it may well be more expensive. Indeed if you look at cooking DVDs, they are typically $20 for an hour or two of content. That is very expensive in terms of the cost per hour, or per recipe, or per topic. Finally, we won't make a e-book or interactive version if the print version isn't popular. While I have every expectation that the paper form is going to be a great success, only time will tell. If nobody likes it, then we won't have a e-book edition. If people do like it then an e-book will be one thing to consider. However, we also have to think about spending the resources on other topics. Modernist Cuisine is savory only - we don't do pastry, dessert or baking. It may make more sense to do a pastry book than to sink effort into an e-book, especially if the hardware platfroms continue to evolve.

You are right. We pulled this together quickly. Volume 1 will not go through final review for the printer for another 2 to 3 weeks, so we rushed this part of it out the door. Thanks for finding it, we will make the correction!

I forgot to add that the photo below the recipe is a step in making the dried halibut, which we also give a recipe for, not a step in making the brandade.

The yield is 800g because the salted halibut is dry and it absorbs milk that it is soaked in. 160g of salted halibut will weigh much more after soaking. The 1kg/1 liter of water is meant to be drained, not included. I suppose that could be more clear, and I will check to see if it is that way in the actual recipe (what you are seeing here is the about-the-recipe example). In some cases a soaking or cooking liquid is not that important - that is the case with the milk used to soak the dried fish in the first steps. Since the amount is not critical we do not give a dimension and say "as needed to cover" or something like that. In other cases the recipe works best with a certain amount even if the liquid is not included. Here, we want enough water to make it easy to get the starch out, so we call for 1kg for 250g of sliced potatoes. The ratio of potato to dried fish is 1.6:1 in this recipe (250g potato to 160g fish). Many brandade recipes have different ratios - this example has 2:1 ratio (1 lb potato to 8 oz fish). Some brandade recipes are all fish with no potato at all, while some others are more like fish-flavored mashed potatoes. This ratio is what we liked best for our application. The actual application of this particular recipe is that it is mixed with choux pastry batter, and injected into zucchini blossoms, which are then deep fried as a fritter. You could serve it as is however without those added steps.

We started a new publishing company to publish the book.

We just added a new feature to the web site, which is a long excerpt about the story of how we came to create the book, the photographs and the recipes. It is available here .

Chris is right about that - we don't want to print any more than we can sell. And we don't have any good way to project what sales will be, so we tend to be cautious. So, we are not going to have tons of books to sell at a deep discount, if we can possibly help it.

Expensive books have different discount structure, so assuming that Amazon will discount it by 30% is a bad assumption. I was actually surprised that it went as low as it did. It is unclear whether the low price will come back.

Yes, we thought about having the recipes on a dvd, or thumbdrive so they could be printed. Ultimately we decided that the waterproof kitchen manual was a lot more useful.

Yes, to compress the tomato you need a chamber style vacuum machine, but that is a small part of the recipe. The lettice smoke infusion can be done with a food saver using the rigid containers.