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On the Cooking with Modernist Cuisine on eGul­let, there are some tips on how to get the gummy consistency and texture right. The timing as to when to mix, stir, emulsify, etc. is addressed in detail.

I tried making this the other day. I don't have a vacuum sealer, so I just used a ziplock bag. While I tried to get most of the air out of it, the bag shifted in the refrigerator, and all of the liquid that was sucked out of the fish fell into the opposite corner of where the fish was. As the corner with the liquid was actually hanging down, I was afraid that some of the cure had dripped down, and therefore, there was not enough cure on my salmon any more. As Maxime Bilet said on eGullet, you don't cook the salmon or anything after it's cured, and since it looks completely raw, I sort of freaked out and tossed it. This was my first time curing fish, so maybe it could have been fine, but better safe than sorry. By the way, people will give you really weird looks if you accidentally tell them that you are planning on making "salmon-cured grapefruit." Even if they are chefs who worked on MC, though perhaps this was because when discussing what to do with leftover cheese water I had jokingly suggested ice cubes...yeah, I don't WHAT they must think of me.

On the Cooking with 'Modernist Cuisine' on eGullet, there has been some confusion as to whether or not you are supposed to drain the mustard seeds before putting them in the food processor. You are, in fact, supposed to drain them, and we've added this to our errata page. Some eGulleters, however, ended up liking the taste of the added vinegar, though they agreed it made the mustard too thin. Have any of you tried this yet? Did you leave the vinegar in or drain the seeds?

I have wondered about this subject for quite some time: why not use baking soda to increase the maillard reaction when browning a sous vide steak for example? Is there a reason why not to do so?

Thanks to a discussion on eGullet, we noticed that some of the steps are incorrect in this recipe. We also noted this on the errata page, but for the record, the correction is as follows: steps two and three should be replaced with "Combine in blender with cooked corn, and puree until smooth." In step eight, "Bake in 130 °C / 265 °F oven to core temperature of 88 °C / 190 °F" should read "Bake in 175 °C / 350 °F oven for 10 min, and then reduce oven temperature to 130 °C / 265 °F and bake to core temperature of 88 °C / 190 °F, about 20 min."

Some people have had awesome results with this, and some people...not so much. On eGullet, Maxime Bilet gave some tips, such as making sure that the carrots are cored and the butter is melted first.

Has anyone tried dehydrating in their oven? Over on eGullet, Maxime Bilet mentioned that you should calibrate it first, because you need a really, really low temperature: "The most important thing is to calculate just how low your oven really goes (and not just how low it says it goes). You don‚’t want your oven to get above 80 °C / 176 °F to 90 °C / 194 °F." Has anyone been able to get their oven to go this low?

I make short pastry at college a lot but the problem is my hands go to warm, cold water doesn't work ether, i've even just tried using my finger tips and again my pastry keeps over working because my hands are too warm, i don't know what to do because my lecturer only wants us to use our hands just because it works for her, she has colder hands than other people and we all vary in body temperatures, me i run a little more hot especially when walking up and down the kitchen.I need some better ways of rubbing the margerine and lard into the flour without touching it as much, there is a robo cook but i doubt she will let us use it, probably come up with some other excuse as to why not just so we will do it her way, no offense to her i mean she's nice it's just like a lot of people these days she can't see past the fact what works for her doesn't work for all people, rather annoying really. So any other ways i can do it? and we don't have ice in the kitchens ether. Reference material:http://www.akkus-adapter.com/fujitsu-squ-809-f01.html

A couple months ago on eGullet, coauthor Maxime Bilet responded to a question about the best recipes for putting a thermomix to use. He suggested eggs or bases like ice cream or custard bases. Anybody have one? If you don't, anybody have a recipe they really wished they had a thermomix for?

Who has tried this? I've tried it twice and both times I've ended up mojito jelly, not spheres. I even have the benefit of being able to ask coauthor Maxime Bilet for tips...only to have him finally tell me it must have been some user error. I should have taken pictures, but, well, I was kind of embarrassed! I promise that next time I try them--and there will be a next time!--I'll take pics and post them here no matter the outcome. If you did finally get spheres, I envy you. But, I am also curious to know how you served them. As Max noted on eGullet a couple months ago, they don't actually serve them in a cocktail glass at the cooking lab. The photo of the sphere in the glass in the book is purely to demonstrate the fizziness. So, how did you give them to your guests?

A lot of people want to know how long this will keep. Coauthor Maxime Bilet answered this on eGullet a while back: "We can‚’t give you an exact time as we have not tested it ourselves. We do expect though that you will experience some syneresis, or ‚“weeping,” just as you do with any condiment kept in your fridge." He also suggests using a little xanthan gum to help this. Has anyone been keeping some stored in the back of their fridge? What's the result?

A while back, someone wrote in to ask us: "The section of vacuum filtering for essences/consommes I'm very intrigued by, but being charged by the L of water I use, the faucet aspirator although inexpensive may overall end up costing more due to the amount of water I use. So I've been looking and there are kit's being sold with the Buchner funnel, flask and all of the vacuum hoses and other accoutrements but they attach to a hand-held pump. Unfortunately it doesn't give an idea of the PSI it's able to achieve or anything really and I was just wondering if you had any experience using these." Anyone have any recommendations?

One reader wrote to us to ask: "I tried the kerala curry sauce (6-224). I tried to be as accurate as possible. Nonetheless I feel it didn't end the way it was supposed to be. 1. The recipe calls for curry leaves. I had dry ones. As I was pouring them I felt there were too many (5 grams!), then I thought, maybe they meant fresh curry leaves! Is that correct? 2. Second, my "sauce" ended like a curry paste. THere was no way I could "simmer" this for 45 minutes. In an attempt to recover what was clearly a failure, I added 200 g more of coconut milk and that seem to have averted a total failure. I checked egullet and somebody seem to have had the same problem: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/136959-cooking-with-modernist-cuisine/page__st__840 scroll to find the posting by anna: So it just seemed possible this morning to attempt an MC recipe and I chose the Goan Curry Sauce (page 224 of KM). [...] The last step in making the sauce is "Simmer for 45 minutes". At this stage of the recipe, and I followed it very closely, one ends up with a very small amount of "sludge"... So it seems that there might be a "bug" in these recipes, or the variability in the ingredients is not making them work for some of us. ----- Thanks again, for all the hard work, daniel german" From coauthor Maxime Bilet, and Anjana Shankar of the kitchen team, I received the following advice: 1. Yes, the curry leaves are supposed to be fresh. You can buy them at Indian or Asian grocery stores (personally, when I made the Masala curry, I bought mine at Uwajimaya in Seattle. Though I just tossed in the called for amount, I might have been better off chopping them up). 2. Thickness of sauce can depend on a variety of things, such as the actual heat of your range (even on low) and the width of your pan. How finely you chop the shallots called for in the recipe can also be a factor. While the goan sauce does indeed have an error in it (as noted on the errata page) in the amount of water, the amount of coconut milk called for in this recipe is correct. That doesn't mean that you can't use more, of course, especially if you are trying to balance out working with a particularly fickle stove, for instance. Has anyone else found this recipe to be too thick?

Has anyone had any experience with Sigma Aldrich? One reader wrote in to ask: "I want to purchase the xanthan gum and other ingredients and the easiest supplier I can find (based in India) is Sigma Aldrich. Their products are for tissue culture use. What is the difference between lab grade and food industry grade gums (including other gelling agents like alginate or carrageenan). Is it safe to use sigma aldrich products in food?"

Mac and Cheese has been one of the most discussed recipes from the book so far. Coauthor Maxime Bilet has already answered several questions about the recipe on eGullet's Cooking with Modernist Cuisine thread. He, along with several other eGulleters, noted that you can probably save the cheese in the freezer for about a month, and explained that the use of carageenan makes this possible. Later in the thread, however, he does note that if you are using all the cheese right away, you can omit the carageenan, but details some of the benefits of the constructed cheese. We hope that answers a few questions, but if not, please ask! We'd also love to see what you have done with your leftover cheese!

I'm revisiting methods for sauces, stocks and glaces, and am assuming there are better thickeners available than what my current habits dictate. Long ago I abandoned roux and heavily-reduced gelatinous stock for milder reductions thickened with xanthan gum and arrowroot. The three thickeners involved (natural gelatin, a gum, and a starch) each have their shortcomings but when used together give a nice synergy. But now I'm thinking the starch element is probably obsolete. There must be a gum or other colloid that will mask flavors even less than arrowroot and bring other advantages. Has anyone used methylcellulose for this? I like the idea of something that will work in opposition to the gelatin's tendency to thicken upon cooling. I'm wondering if a combination of gelatin, xanthan, and methylcellulose could give a nice, creamy/syruppy texture with a fairly temperature-independent viscocity. Any other ideas?

I need help. I came home from the store today with an approximately 6 oz frozen "lobster tail" -- one of those warm water crayfish like things, not real lobster tail. My thought was to bag it up and cook it sous vide from the frozen state. After a couple hours study I was more confused than ever. Some cook lobster tail to what I would charitably call raw. The last two "lobster tails" I had (from the same package, cooked on different days) made me rather sick, hence my preference for pasteurization. They sure were good though. I've read that one should not cook lobster between 55 and 60 deg C or the meat will become mushy. Not sure if this applies to the creature that I have or only to real lobsters. Assuming it does, looking at Douglas Baldwin's tables, it is thus only practical to pasteurize above 60 deg C. Will this ruin my meat? All in all I would rather err on the side of over cooked. I'm thinking now of 61 deg C for four hours for the frozen tail. What say you? Or should I defrost first and remove the shell?

Some recipes call for a long slow cook in an oven for a whole chicken, followed by high heat for around 15-20 minutes to crisp the skin with the danger of overcooking, I was thinking about trying the torch to crisp the skin as I think this would be much less likely to overcook the meat and would be faster and more controlled. Anyone done this?

Hopefully someone can help here, I reached out the MC via email with no luck. I had gone into work a and brought my guide with me to read. i ended up leaving it in the car during the day. The next day when I went to open it, a bunch of the pages were "glued" together. It's as the the page coating had melted and sealed the pages together. Some came apart with some pulling but a few ripped. Any suggestion on how to separate the pages? I'd hate to tear more page especially considering I just got the set from my wife as an anniversary gift. Thanks for any input.

Polyscience has published an iPhone application that computes sous vide cooking time as well as 6.5 reductions and other metrics. It is very nicely done, it includes a chart and countdown and coutup timer -- all in all a professional applcation. However, the cook times do not correspond with those in the MC 1-5. Also, all of the recommneded times are not highlighted. Any chance the MC kitchen can develop its own application? Work with Polyscience to offer an alternative? From the data collected, this should be relatively easy. Polyscience sells its applcation for $4.99 via iTunes. I do recommend it, but with temperature reservations. I have verified that the termperatures in the MC 1-5 correspond better for my tastes.

Hey all, so today Amazon is having some sale prices on FoodSaver vacuum sealers (about 50-70 off on a bunch). Since I don't have the books handy to see what the recommended one was, I was wondering if you all could help out. Just looking for a recommendation here. I will be using it mostly for sous vide cooking and not so much for storage, and if there is one up there that can do marinated food as well, thats a whole lot better. Thanks, Alex

I've been reading that using a wet bulb thermometer will give me better results for smoking. I usually smoke overnight and slow cook the pork inthe smoker for 18 hours total at low temperatures (190F), but I've read that a smoke then sous vide would be more effective as the meat would keep more moisture and I could use lower temps. This is where I'm at so far: I've brined 16 lbs of pork shoulder for 24 hours in a weak salt and paprika solution. I have a bradley smoker that I control using an Auber instruments PID.I've threaded my thermometer probe into a shoelace which is dipped in a water container so that the thermometer is reading as a wet bulb. I've set my PID to use this wet bulb temp to control the smoker's heating element. Set the smoke for 7 hours and the 'wet bulb' temp at 135F. I also have another thermometer to measure the IT. In the morning the IT of the pork after the smoke was 171F. I vaccum sealed it and into the water bath it is going at 150F for the next 2 days. Is this the correct method of using the wet bulb thermometer method? I'm concerned that the IT of the pork went up too high during the smoke. Does anyone have experience with this method?

I'm looking at that recipe and since I don't have a CVap yet I was wondering if it would be possible to cook the breast sous vide before doing the cryosearing to prevent the reabsorbtion of water? The order would probably be perforate, cook sous vide, dehydrate, freeze and sear. It seem simple. Did anybody tried something like that and want to comment? Thanks for your help Louis-Frederic Michaud

I went shopping in the asian grocery yesterday and I decided to try buying a fresh bamboo shoot. I went on youtube to find a video on preparing it, and the poster explained that they need to be par boiled until they are tender "to remove the cyanide." that sounds dangerous. The poster also explained that it's important to throw in rice bran into the water to help "extract the bitterness," which I guess is the cyanide? I was curious, though, would par cooking at 185F be superior to just boiling it? can a better texture be achieved without sacrificing the important cyanide removal? Any thoughts or suggestions?

Hi, I have searched but have not found any answers to a question I have had for some time, I'm hoping someone here can help me. A while ago I was served a nice amuse, a duck liver mousse with small crispy granulates of beetroot. The granulates were irregular in their shape and about 1-2 mm in size. They were really firm and crispy and did not melt in the mouth like maltodextrin creations. According to the restaurant the crisps were made of beetroot juice, some kind of starch and then baked in the oven and finally crushed to granulates. Any ideas how to make such granulates? I have tried normal household grade corn starch, but the granulates turned out not crispy enough and quite chewy, not the way I wanted them. Would appreciate any help you can give me on this issue. Regards, Marcus