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I have a problem here with the cooking of the squid and cuttlefish. somehow the timing doesn't seem right. Could you please confirm that the numbers are correct barley cooked50C 10 Min Firm65C 5 Min tender654 h 30 min firm seems to be pretty short in cooking time please also check the others like geoduck and snails Robby

I don't know where Mr. Marchesi comes from, but I don't think it's Milan. For me, a risotto Milanese has to be made with bone marrow, otherwise it's just a risotto and NOT Milanese. And as I can't see any bone marrow in his recipe, it is not a Milanese. Sorry. Unless somebody proves me wrong. Robby

Do you have any recommendations for restaurants in Paris that are taking a modernist approach to cooking? Thanks

So I see this mentioned as the best option for smoking but little detail is gone into about it. Could someone elaborate?

(Inspired by other thread on SVS Professional) I just heard about a deal Costco is doing - a sous vide kit comprising the SousVide Supreme Demi, the SVS vacuum edge sealer, and some accessories for $300. Seems like a good entry level kit or a gift for relatives.

In the new recipes sent on the mailing list we seem to have a problem with the quantities of the eggnog foam in the siphons. In both recipes we're putting 1195g of preparation and three cardridge in a siphon of an undetermined size. Event if it's the largest quart size is seem that it will clearly overfill it! Are tue quantities corrects and I'n just a coward ;-) or is there a mistake with the recipe? Thanks for the clarification

I've only just begun working through Volume 1, but I'm taking a quick break to ask a question. What rights do the MC team have to their new way of presenting recipes? Meaning, could another publisher be sued for using their formatting? Would it be considered poor etiquette? What of someone using the format to publish a free recipe online? Does the MC team care or would they be glad to see their method beginning to be adopted as an alternate standard? This question is pure curiosity, but something I'd like to know going forward. I strongly expect to see this recipe presentation make headway (at least among nerdier publications) and want to know whether I should feel indignant on MC's behalf or glad.

I'm planning on purchasing a Sous Vide Professional in the next month. Before Christmas Williams-Sonoma had a great sale price, around $600, but now everyone seems to be charging the same as Polyscience does on their site, $800. Has anyone found a better current price out there?

Hi, anyone made the Pot-au-Feu Consommé (5-52, 6-45)? Consommé is a tradition at Christmas Eve dinner at my family. I'm planning to use the Pot-au-Feu recipe for this year, anyone who has tried it can tell whether it can be a good option? I was surprised to see carrot and parsnip juices directly as ingredients. In any case, I'll post the results. Enrique

Here's Max's blog post from last year, featuring recipes for Christmas ham, yams, deep-fried Brussels sprouts, and pumpkin pie! What are your plans for holiday feasting this year?

Hi there. I've been experimenting with Activa RM for several preparations, mostly pre-sous vide meat stuffing, and I'm very pleased with the results so far. I've read all the possibilities on 3-250 to 3-256 and I yet have to test other uses you propose there. Since I published two very simple recipes on my blog http://www.RamiroSalas.com, I've started to get some criticism in the twittersphere for using the ingredient. Their main arguments against it are the overuse in the industry (which I'm not personally concerned about since I'm just a home cook) and the banning of the ingredient in the EU. They also point that the only safety study used to approve its use in the US was originally paid by Ajinomoto, the main producer. Overall, the arguments seem rather weak to me, but I'm having a hard time finding conclusive scientific evidence that the product itself is safe. I really don't care about the ethical/moral aspects of its use since those are very subjective areas, but I do care about hard facts. The information in the Modernist Cuisine as well as the references in 3-257 focus mainly on the proper use of the substance, but I was wondering if you have any additional sources that could help debunk some of the "safety" related myths circulating out there regarding Activa. Thanks!

Today I tried my first recipe out of MC. I did the melon caviar and topped it on a crispy prosciutto round. I sourced the alginate and calcium chloride from willpowder. Overall the melon caviar was pretty time consuming but yielded a great looking product. Unfortunately the caviar was way over powdered by the prosciutto (my fault), and the caviar didn't have much flavor itself. However, I don't think the melon I was using was too great to begin with, so shame on me for using bad product. Overall the dish ended up looking a lot better than it tasted. For the round I just cut out my shapes using a ring mold, put them on a baking sheet lined with a slip mat, and baked them in my convection oven at 200F for about an hour. (I don't have a dehydrator)

Has anyone tried cooking meats sous vide directly from the freezer by prepping and sealing ahead of time? I'm curious if this has any unintended side effects on the final product vs. thawing first, then prepping, sealing and cooking. Thanks, -Brian

My (loaner) Polyscience Sonicprep just arrived and I have a few precious weeks tolearn as much as I can about the technique of ultrasonic homogenization. Does anyone have experience in thisarena, and if so, could you share your learnings? So far, I've heard that ultrasonic homogenizers (sonicators) are great for makingemulsions and quick infusions. However, I don't know anything about the water/oil ratios that I should be trying to achieve a really fantastic emulsion. In the first 10 minutes of use, I've been able to haphazardly emulsify different oils with water to achieve the texture (and look) of cream. But, I'd love to know what else is possible. BTW, I also have a rotor-stator homogenizer, and I plan to do side-by-side tests comparing the results of the two. Let the thread begin!!

Made this one last night as I was intrigued to find what difference pre-soaking the spaghetti would make to the taste of finished dish and and interested to see if I could knock up a dish in just over a minute. Since I don't have a centrifuge the Tomato Water was made to a recipe by Raymond Blanc which gives a very clear tomato water with infused flavours from other vegetables and herbs. The store bought spaghetti (as recommended) was soaked for an hour and then cooked in the tomato water. The recipe calls for the water to be brought to a boil and then the spaghetti cooked for 1 min 10 secs. Exactly? Not 1m 8secs or 1m 12secs? Now 500g of water is not a lot to cook spaghetti in and even in the smallest of pans does not give a lot of depth and it took all of the 1m 10secs for the spaghetti to soften enough to fully submerge. A minute later and the spaghetti was still hard and raw. In fact it took all of 6 or 7 seven minutes at a rolling boil to become 'al dente'. Even then it could have done with a minute or two more. So the recipe is clearly wrong. Possible explanations/solutions The time is a typo and should read maybe 7min 10secs - but what possible difference would that extra 10 seconds make? The recipe says 'store bought' spaghetti which I took as normal dried spaghetti in a packet but maybe this is a recipe for store bough 'fresh' spaghetti (the kind you get in a vacuum pack)? It doesn't say that. The soaking needs to be done for much longer than 1 hour - maybe 3 or 4 hours. Maybe this should be done in a pressure cooker? 1min 10 secs would then make sense. Any thoughts? Anyway, the result was quite delicious, a light flavourful pasta without the usual heavy sauce. I didn't make the Tomato Confit but instead served it with thinly sliced sun-dried shop bought tomatoes, thinly sliced bacon cooked in the oven and a few pea shoots. The occasional sharpness of the tomatoes and saltiness of the bacon were the perfect foil to the delicately infused spaghetti. One observation is that the pasta dried quite quickly once plated and I felt that additional olive oil would have masked the flavour. A ladle of the tomato water after plating gave the perfect result. Definitely one to try again when I've got a spare six hours to make the Tomato Water!

You can find them here!

I'm thinking of bringing a risotto to a friend's holiday party this week. Anybody have a favorite from the book?

I wanted to know if it is possible to reverse the normal order of sousvide, ie: sear the protein, then put into bag with seasoning to cook through. 1) will this have any effect on cooking? either cooking times or quality of final product? 2) are there food safety issues that emerge? (this is for private house not restaurant)

Where can i get this? It is for the Silken Tofu recipe... (Volume 4 page 113 I think) I have tried numerous places, but this is seriously hard to find. The big chemical companies who produce this dont sell to end users. Tarjei

Hanukkah comes a little late this year. I believe it starts on Dec. 20th. Anybody have any plans? Scott from Seattle Food Geek posted a great latke recipe! http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2011/12/the-trick-to-perfectly-crispy-latkes-instant-mashed-potato-flakes-2/

In MC, I wassurprisedto see the only mention of catalytic technique inchar-broilersas: "(charcoal) radiates heat with an intensity much greater than can be mustered by all but a few exotic catalytic gas grills." p.2-10, ...especially considering a main focus of the book is on 'exotic' methods and modern equipment! Does anyone have a review of current commercial grade catalytic charbroilers? TEC has even produced them domestically in South Carolina since 2006, and recently sold the technology to ITW/Vulcan -so we may see a new line out of Vulcan soon. I've been looking into the Rankin Delux TurboBroiler TB-3 or TB-8 series, and the TEC Searmaster II specifically. Any other brand name review and model is welcomed as well, those are the two i have found most interesting, reasonably priced, and available. Charcoal is a difficult proposition in my commercial kitchen, and indoors in general. I would like to hear from anyone who has experience with this type of charbroiler. It becomes difficult at first to give credibility to these devices when claims of "searing in juices" and juice meters are plastered all over theiradvertising, however I would also like to see if anyone has discussion on the different effects of dehydration that wouldoccurbetween this type, gas burner with radiant element/lava rock, and charcoal charbroiler. with the radiant catalytic element type, there is significantly less convection around the product being cooked -which keeps me interested in them. Does anyone have any relevant input?

Hello, one of my first series of experiments with MC was trying to get my own perfect onsen-egg at home. Having read the article in MC on pages 4-74 ff and armed with a sous-vide bath, which keeps temperature constant within ±0,01 °C (fusionchef diamond), I thought it to be easy to get there. So I gave the egg in the bath for 40 min, 63°C , got it, peeled it - no: what I got out was not what I expected. Changing temperatures in subsequent testst showed a certain influence on the result, but textures didn't relate to the pictures on pages 4-76f. That however was reasonable to expect, as the first sentence on page 4-76 is "Temperature,not time, determines the texture of an egg when cooked". My search led me to the blog by Martin Lersch who reports his own experiments he did on this subject (part 1, part 2). He was inspired by a paper by César Vega and Ruben Mercadé-Prieto, which was published 2011 in Culinary Biophysics: on the Nature of the 6X°C Egg (follow the link, and you can get the full paper as a pdf document with its interesting plots relating time/temperature with texture). I continued my experiments and *at once* succeeded when following the data from Vega and Mercadé-Prieto. Currently, I am quite satisfied with the result, when letting the egg have 75min at 63°C, than give it a finish with 2 min in a bowl with water at 80 °C. Hope, that helps others too. The question is open: does the related article in MC need a major overhaul?

Hi to all the team, and thanks for a most fantastic book Juste one little thing, I noticed a small typo : if you look at the table on the top left corner of page 357 (units conversion) you will notice that the conversion factor from Joules to Kcal is expressed as... multiply by 0.000 Does this imply that to make calories dissapear from my meals all I have to do is to convert Kcal to Joules back and forth, to end up with a zero calorie dinner? My guess is that the correct value should be 0.239. Irrelevant anyway since the concept of calories is an obsolete and inadequate method of evaluating the nutrition potential of food. Cheers from Belgium Eric

I'm very much a beginner on my journey through MC, so be prepared for plenty of basic mistakes as I get started. I'm a big sucker for crackling. I'm not using it with a roast, but rather I intend to use the recipe to make crackling hors d'oeuvres for a party. I'm trying out this recipe as I write this post, but thought it would be a good time to point out some of the things I've found a bit difficult (the dehydration step is taking a while in the oven!). 1. I pressure cooked the pork skin for an hour at 150kPa, but it seems to me like it came out a bit too soft. It was literally falling apart. I'm not sure if this is right or not, but it made it very difficult to remove all the fat from the skin. I'm not sure if this is because I neglected to use a trivet, or if I cooked it for too long. 2. Because of these issues removing the fat from the skin, when dehydrating the skin in the oven a lot of oil was produced. The skin then began to cook a bit in it. I'm not sure how long to leave it in there for, but the skin is starting to change colour and harden up a bit so hopefully it's coming along well. Once it's finished dehydrating, I'm going to try deep frying it at 200 degrees until puffy, then serve it with salt.

I bought a digital salinity refractometer for several hundred dollars. It was a horribly cheap chinese made piece of junk. Does anyone have suggestions for a quality salinity refractometer? Should I go digital or the old optical technology? Many thanks in advance.