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For some time now, I’ve been frustrated by Thomas Keller. See, I’ve tried and tried to make glazed vegetables using the recipe in his Bouchon cookbook, but I can never seem to get it right. There’s just something about the precise combination of cutting the carrots properly, adding the right amount of water, and heating [...]

After my first attempt at ultra-long-time cooking, I decided to go the other direction, cooking for a short time at an ultra-low-temperature. Salmon “mi-cuit” was the order of the day: wild salmon fillets, brined for 10 minutes in a 10% salt solution, dusted with ras-el-hanout from Philippe de Vienne, and vacuum sealed with olive oil. [...]

After posting about my sous vide pork chops last week, I got some great feedback, especially in the eGullet sous vide thread. On the whole, it sounds like other sous vide enthusiasts don’t cook pork chops very often. What they do cook is beef. Lots and lots of beef. I was told that if I [...]

After the 64-degree eggs, the next logical step in my exploration of sous vide was to cook a tender cut of meat. Although the effects of long-time, low-temperature (LTLT) sous vide cooking are most dramatic on cuts with lots of connective tissue, they aren’t a good choice for instant gratification. I happened to have some [...]

When my PolyScience Sous Vide Professional arrived on Friday, I had to decide what to cook in it first. It ended up being an easy decision. Eggs are such a primal food, and so delicious. Also, I had them on hand, which was useful since the immersion circulator arrived more than a week earlier than [...]

I recently decided to order a Sous Vide Professional immersion circulator from Polyscience – or, rather, from their Canadian distributor, Testek Instruments. After a couple of years of debating it, I’m finally diving head-first into the world of sous vide cooking. There’s lots of information on the web about what sous vide is; if you’re [...]

After I posted on Friday about quick infusion of spirits in a whipped cream siphon, I came across Martin’s excellent post on the subject on his blog, Khymos. I encourage everyone to read it, if you haven’t already. In the post, he mentions a couple of other non-traditional uses for whipped cream siphons. The first [...]

Not all the equipment used in avant-garde cooking was invented in the past two decades. Some, like the dehydrator, have essentially been around for centuries, if not millennia. All cooking can be broken down into a few simple processes. One of them is understanding and controlling water, and that’s exactly what a dehydrator allows you [...]

After posting about the PolyScience Antigriddle a few weeks ago, I came across a YouTube channel called “Procrastination Pictures,” with videos demonstrating various avant-garde culinary techniques. In particular, there are videos demonstrating a homemade version of an Antigriddle using a regular cast iron griddle chilled in liquid nitrogen, which boils at -196° Celsius. From what [...]

In my last tech rundown, I talked about ingredients that avant-garde restaurants use for some of their tricks that are just as easy for home cooks to find and use. This time, I want to show you the Antigriddle, a piece of equipment that’s probably out of reach for most home cooks. (Though that hasn’t [...]