Syzygies

My version of this was Schaller's Drive-In on Lake Ontario. I remember best drawing straws to push the "on" button for the onion mincing machine. There would be a "The Martian" rescue afterwards, two guys carrying me into the walk-in freezer and tilting my head at the overhead fan, till I recovered. Perhaps that's why I thought the scuba mask for cutting onions in Diva (1981) was so funny.

Oh I know. This forum is such a nice place, I feared that you wouldn't realize your wish to be flamed unless I took one for the team!

I much prefer potatoes pan-fried in ghee to deep-fried in vegetable oil. (Lard is a different story. Then there's the elusive horse fat.) You'll note that I advocate sous vide as a first step for pan-frying. I haven't tried it for french fries. My prejudice is that one deep-fries french fries twice at different temperatures deliberately, and that sous vide is not a substitute for the first deep-fry step. Nevertheless, these are fascinating experiments. You needlessly suited up, hoping for flames? What I often think but rarely say: Lack of imagination is not an acceptable form of reason. It isn't accepted as a form of proof in mathematics, and we mathematicians watch helplessly as it is routinely accepted as a form of proof outside mathematics. More to the point, a sous vide water bath is far more manageable than a hot oil deep fryer. Ask anyone who has sharpened using both an oil stone and a water stone. Or painted with both oil paint and latex. Oil is messy, and water rocks! Of course, if one is going to fire up a deep fryer for pass two, it is available with little additional effort for pass one. If one has equipment for a water bath, it is also available with little additional effort for pass one. So this is an empirical question, not meant to upset people who resist change.

Twice-cooked starch is an entire revered category. Fried rice is better from leftover rice. Fried polenta has been chilled first. The poster child here is a classic french fry, which is always twice cooked. Sous vide as pass one for twice-cooked potatoes is a staple for us; we've easily made it dozens of times. Prepare potatoes raw into exactly the form one wants to pan-fry (peel or not? chunk size and shape?), vacuum pack, and cook in a circulating water bath at 85 C for an hour to 90 minutes. To taste, depends somewhat on the potato, but one wants the potatoes to fully cook. Now, chill the packet(s) in ice water, or spread the pieces onto a silicone nonstick baking mat on a baking sheet and put in the freezer for a bit. Once chilled but not frozen, pan-fry at high heat in ghee (clarified butter) till very nicely colored. Salt, perhaps black, MaraÅŸ or other pepper to taste. Sous vide is vastly superior to any alternative for the first cooking pass. It neither adds nor removes moisture. It does not overcook. If one is lucky, one can accomplish an acceptable first pass by other means, and finish exactly as described after a four hours to overnight chill in the fridge. This passes my "technique disappears" test as you can't tell I used sous vide, but you're wondering how I executed so well.

I have Modernist Cuisine at Home, Sous-Vide Cuisine (Joan Roca), Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide (Thomas Keller). I have post-its in each marking the few pages of tables I use as refreshers. No one agrees. For example, a friend and I just braised six beautiful pig trotters, fresh off the pig from an artisan Harlem butcher. We went for 36 hours at 65 C, the consensus value in a range. For our actual recipe we adapted Fergus Henderson (no mention of sous vide), conventionally cooking the braise base, chilling the base, then finishing with sous vide. Other than these tables, this set of books makes for an impressive coffee table collection of questionable actual utility. Joan Roca's book is most squarely a technical tome aimed at training professionals. I managed to find it for far less than current prices, and I appreciate the dual languages as a great way to sharpen my cooking Spanish at the same time. My bias here is that one should always read original sources. If you're afraid of killing someone through complete misunderstanding of the food safety, this book goes squarely for the issues involved. With all due respect to Baldwin, he's a fellow mathematician and at best a strong home cook like any of us, who happens to understand the math and has started a franchise pitching the math. He's using models he trusts, and I don't see a problem with the models. Does he get out a microscope and double check his predictions? Not to my knowledge. All of my training therefore teaches me to take his tables as assertions, not gospel. He's just a guy who realized he understood how to model the curves with respect to meat thickness and such better than he was reading elsewhere. One thing lead to another, and this became part of his identity and income. They're still just models. If I could get good odds in a betting pool that some of his models are off by 20%, I'd jump at the chance to take these bets. Nevertheless, there are no reported deaths following his advice. My general food bias is this: Haute Cuisine is every bit as deeply embarrassing and not to the point as Haute Couture. What is far harder than edible art is to make classic dishes better than one has ever tasted them executed, without tipping one's hand on technique. There are various top chefs who will sometimes pretend to go there, then they recommend cream in Thai dishes, and so forth. If one shares my distaste for Haute Cuisine, then the most technical books on sous vide aren't that useful for home cooks. Rather, sous vide is technique, pure and simple, and should vanish by the time of presentation. With an interest in this technique, one can problem-solve on one's own making better braises, adapting Moroccan tagines and Indian curries. And good luck finding books to support this. Nevertheless, technique never works that way: If one has mastered technique, one reads cookbooks to understand flavor and ingredient combinations, then executes as one sees fit. Most cooking on the planet can be improved with classic French technique, for example, as long as someone has already hid the cream from the cook. Food safety: Avoid the lowest temperatures, because it's juvenile stunt cooking, and flunks the test that one should hide one's technique. Understand that the classic safety rules (pasteurize at temperature NN) are absurdly cautious rules of thumb for the unwashed masses: Safety is a combination of time and temperature, and the numbers we learned in childhood are for one minute, not many hours. Over many hours, surprisingly low temperatures are not only safe, but actually pasteurize. Food doneness: Vegetables don't cook until an hour or more at 85 C. That's too high for any meat sous vide. For complex dishes one needs to problem-solve here. I prefer to make the vegetable base by conventional means, cool it so it doesn't boil over in my vacuum chamber (circulators are great at circulating ice water), then combine the meat for a long sous vide cook. In short, one learns the barest set of basics specific to sous vide, then focuses on the cooking one actually wants to do. The best references for the cooking one actually wants to do will rarely involve sous vide. One adapts on one's own. It is a big mistake to learn sous vide by trying to cook dishes from sous vide cookbooks.

None whatsoever. Two however are 1/2". The 1/4" by 15" round was chosen so Laurie could easily lift it. I'm not there now to hold a ruler against it, but I've never noticed any issues as I watch fat move around on it, stovetop. Leveling the gas range is the dominant issue, not warping. I deliberately did not buy the griddle with a fat moat. I never create enough fat to be an issue, and there's always paper towels for the outliers. Don't walk away, one could imagine how a grease fire could start here. The 1/2" is an incremental improvement over 1/4", with 3/8" perhaps a happy compromise. Various vendors on Amazon sell work-alikes thinner than 1/4", and defend their economical choice with comments about how slight the marginal improvement is with thickness. But hey, do I cook on a Weber or a Komodo Kamado? The marginal advantage may vary with the application, but it's there.

The most famous of this genre is the Baking Steel. I have several. One can also custom order any diameter round in 3/8" or 1/2" thickness; one of mine is 15" round by 1/2". Pizza in the KK. Searing sous vide steak. Classic smooshed griddle burgers, KK or stovetop. The best crepes, dosas, flatbreads.

Sous vide eggs are a hook shot, relying on time and temperature as your precise instructions note, because the whites and yolks cook differently. The best discussions I have seen are by Modernist Cuisine, or by the ramen community. Here is one: Modernist Cuisine - The Secret to the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg

It would be interesting to have survey data on who prefers fast to slow, flat to point, what one typically pays for a brisket, and a description of the best brisket one has ever tasted. I have my guesses as to the correlations we would find. I prefer slow, point, and the best briskets I can find near San Francisco cost over $100 each. My favorite brisket was in Elgin, TX, riddled with connective tissue that had dissolved into a smoky braise. For a brisket featuring uninterrupted expanses of lean muscle, I absolutely would follow Michael's protocol. This is not however the only way to cook a brisket! Some briskets invite a longer, slower cook, and they happen to be the briskets I prefer. I second Michael on Aaron Franklin's tricks. Franklin's brisket protocol is 8 to 10 hours at 275 F. That would be the starting point I'd recommend to anyone. Not 5 hours. Not 20 hours. Of course, this is a restaurant protocol, and a constraint is the need to choose one cooker temperature for all purposes. Also, like a commercial bakery, this protocol satisfies their workflow timing constraints. My workflow constraint is not wanting to get up in the middle of the night, but 8 to 10 hours doesn't interfere with sleep.

I can smell my old grease, and I can taste other people's old grease. I never let the experiment get far enough to personally know for sure if I can taste my old grease, because I clean my grates. Chess taught me never to assume limitations in the other player. Here, I always imagine that I'm cooking for a supertaster. (In the case of a smoke pot, that supertaster is my wife.) The paradigm of rejecting the null hypothesis was devised when a scientist complained to a few peers that she preferred pouring milk into her cup before the tea. They were dumfounded, but she could pick out blind the four samples out of eight poured her way. Here the null hypothesis is that cleaning grates doesn't matter. I wouldn't bet on it. An off flavor to some can be a desired flavor to others. Some might be able to taste a grill that wasn't cleaned, and prefer the effect. How far to take a paella socarrat is perhaps the most divisive question of this form that I know.

I love beef short ribs. I don't make them enough! They're also an awesome braise, or for that matter a component of burgers to die for.

And your interpretation of low and slow is hotter than many of us; you report great results for example with brisket. If I always went that hot, I might not clean my grates either. I am most concerned about cleaning my grates for the second of two low and slow cooks in a row. Even if the rancidity didn't make me sick, I believe that I would taste it. And beliefs are hard to shake. This is a matter of taste. Backyard Weber chicken wouldn't be the same without that flavor of burning fat. And attempts to replicate duck confit using sous vide methods fall short because they fail to produce the characteristic rancidity of French farmhouse duck confit.

I blame Jon B.!!!

The now-classic idea of a concentrated stock is French demi-glace, where one drives all the aromatics out by fierce reduction. Several centuries ago, the true classic approach was to use one stock to make another, always at a gentle simmer. I've adopted triple stocks for gumbo, where a chicken stock leads to a crab stock leads to a lobster stock. (I then cook the reserved lobster meat sous vide in butter to serve on top, rather than destroying it in the gumbo itself.) A Chinese "supreme" stock also simmers ground chicken in an existing chicken stock. The Chinese also pioneered parboiling meats before making stock. This is vastly superior to simply skimming, and is an idea that cannot be rejected by pure thought. The spectacular, recently released Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees: Essential Techniques of Authentic Chinese Cooking devotes a chapter to stocks, with these instructions: I learned this first from Tom Colicchio. He applies this advice to protein and bones, for flavor not appearance. This proved to be such a great idea, that I then assumed it came from Thomas Keller. To my great surprise, Keller's books did not specify this step. He later came clean that of course his kitchens do this. My guess is that all great contemporary restaurants have come around to this ancient Chinese view of stock-making, they just don't believe that we want to read it from them, because we'll never take this advice. But anyone with a fraction of Thomas Keller's taste perception can discern a dramatic difference. These places stay in business by developing superior flavors in their food; these techniques are crucial. This is appropriate, even using a pressure cooker. Heston Blumenthal at Home has a chapter dedicated to pressure-cooker stocks of all kinds. He advocates double and triple stocks, and parboiling first.

My base line here is warm urban weekends, where parks reek of lighter fluid, dominating even the smell of burning chicken fat. So I don't trust commercial products as a rule. I have a friend who won a trip to Germany (to lose the international competition) after matching a dozen German wines blind from memory four hours later in the U.S. finals. He could pick out the coconut notes in my brisket cooked using extruded coconut lump. Most people find extruded coconut lump to be neutral. (To be fair, this was Richard's lump. Dennis is in a different league.) If I could set it up, would you be willing to bet $1,000 that my friend can't pick out which four fires out of eight were started with Weber cubes rather than a weed burner? I have a pretty good understanding of the chemistry of burning propane. This would be a safe bet, comparing a weed burner to a neutral alternative such as transferring glowing embers. I tried wax a few times; the smell took too long to go away for me. I wouldn't take this bet.

Here, here. After my plastic water heater pan cracked, I sprung for a metal one, with the hole stoppered with an improvised plug from found parts in same store. Even a half hour soak makes a huge difference. Then, my favorite scrubby is the thick plastic scrubby one sees in the paint department, much tougher than kitchen scrubbies. Just squeezes between the grates, naturally applying a good spring of outward pressure to clean, one just has to pull it along the grates. My drip pan / deflector is always a 16" terra cotta plant saucer, lined with two layers of heavy duty aluminum foil. Clean up after the cooker has cooled, folding both layers toward the middle without allowing a leak, and then cleanup is trivial, literally ten seconds. There's much about the ritual of using a cooker that I love, but I just can't see my love extending to washing a reusable drip pan. I ditched my rotisserie for similar reasons, it wasn't that dramatic a difference, and an absolute nightmare to clean. In Thailand, my favorite roadside barbecue never used rotisseries; they used active hands. I set my deflector on the lower grate; my cast iron Dutch oven smoke pot is generally in the way of setting it on the charcoal basket. I've given up on reclaiming drippings, as there's a tradeoff: The amount of brine and/or rub I generally use is incompatible with cooking with the drippings. Get the plain terra cotta, one never knows if a glaze meant for outdoor plants contains lead. In principle, even plain terra cotta could contain lead; I'm betting that a major Italian supplier to U.S. box stores is not using lead.

NASA caption: This schlieren image of a T-38C was captured using the patent-pending BOSCO technique and then processed with NASA-developed code to reveal shock wave structures. Credits: NASA image

I know butchers where you can. Some people actually just want flat meat, and not even the whole piece.

Bingo. There are actually four Chinatowns in New York City: Manhattan for tourists, Flushing for everyone in the know, and two more where many people live who work in the first two. The best bang-for-the-buck duck I've ever seen has been in the last two, including a slew of legs perfect for confit. Along with much else of interest. Games of name-that-ingredient are hardest in the last two, whatever one's upbringing.

It's a classic ingredient for Cassoulet, a great bean dish. Indifferent versions won't make a believer, but the best versions are astounding. This is sometimes our favorite dish of the year, but it's a lot of work. I now hover at the Basque border, making Spanish Fabada. This is often a simpler dish, but the French elaborations and technique are welcome here. (Though actually adding bread crumbs is a mythical way to accomplish the oven crust that should occur on its own, even if tourists have trained French restaurants to adopt this cheat.) (Also bear in mind that you can't get any two people in southwest France to agree on what is correct here.) The killer ingredient in any bean dish, such as either of these, is Italian pork skin sausage (Cotechino). Spotty availability, usually before Christmas; this is what chest freezers are for.

I wrap a 16" terra cotta plant saucer (from Home Depot) in two layers of heavy duty foil. It acts as both a heat deflector and an easily cleaned drip pan. I believe in reclaiming juices, but I gave up on this for ceramic cooking. Usually too much smoke, and too much salt.

Yes, those look great, and your technique is roughly the same as mine. One needs very little fat this way. If one wants some fat to borrow for pan-frying later, that's how much to use. Otherwise, less. The gelée is also worth separating, don't waste it on the fire. Various stellar cooks (Thomas Keller) have weighed in that the only authenticity one loses by this approach is the faintly rancid taste to the fat that the original technique produces. I'll pass. Same idea as burning a paella socarrat on the beach, and waxing philosophic about how good it is, because one is at the beach. I'll take golden.

Good! No lid in your picture, and you said enameled in your post. Just checking. The wood and chunk size is a matter of experiment, as is technique for getting the pot going in time. I usually light the charcoal under the pot with a weed burner, heating the pot at the same time. With a friend's cooker, I needed to heat up the cooker way in advance, so I heated the smoke pot in his gas grill before moving it to the cooker when I put on the meat. I actually like chips best, apple, hickory, pecan, or a mix. The meat is most receptive to the smoke early in the cook. Though some say one wants smoke throughout, the telltale smoke ring is an artificial token one manipulates early in the cook. Big chunks last longer.

Do you have a lid? Some of us glue the lid on each time with flour water paste; others trust a tight fit. I also worry about enamel, that the heat stress will cause it to flake. I recommend pure cast iron (funny metals such as galvanized are toxic).

I have a convection oven. The reviews make me wonder about rack setups that optimize for this "air frying" effect in a convection oven: Suspend one's rack well above the drip tray, and dead center in the convection breeze? Most of us haven't adapted our cooking habits to convection; this "portable convection oven" reveals what is possible.