GWS General Chat: Damn I feel like a boss when I have one in each hand.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Goons with Spoons > GWS General Chat: Damn I feel like a boss when I have one in each hand.

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SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Also how does this compare to using cast iron.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2012 08:24

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 23:06

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

wafflesnsegways posted:

I didn't watch all 20 minutes of that video, but ever since Mark Bittman switched to advocacy, he's become intolerable. I even agree with him about a lot of things, but all of his proposed solutions are kludgy, heavy-handed policies that are often pretty offensive. For example, his column arguing that people only be allowed to buy healthy food with food stamps.

Yeah, I feel the same way about Michael Pollan and mindphlux.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2012 21:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Casu Marzu posted:

What says GWS on leaving eggs on the counter? They're rinsed, but fresh from the chicken butt. My mom is all "jesus you're gonna die", but I've always left fresh eggs out.

Who is right?

Eggs will last longer in the fridge, but they're pretty much designed to be left out for weeks at a time without spoiling. Otherwise they wouldn't really work as eggs from the chicken's point of view.

And if you don't wash off the cuticle those things will last for loving ever.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2012 05:43

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mr. Wiggles posted:

Mindphlux is bitter.

You need to soak him in milk overnight.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2012 21:37

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

So it's a CamelBak for frat boys?

# ¿ Mar 27, 2012 03:46

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Darval posted:

Make me feel better guys, give me some horror stories. What's the worst you've hurt yourself in the kitchen?

Not in the kitchen, but when I was a kid one time when I'd just got done sharpening my pocket knife, I managed to fold the blade shut across one of my fingers. When I felt it, I sorta instinctively shook my hand, which sent the knife flying and slicing through the top of my index finger pretty near to the bone. There was a `dead' spot on my finger between just proximal to the first joint and the fingernail that always had that feeling like it had just fallen asleep and had that light tingling like feeling was just returning. That lasted about twenty, twenty-five years.

I think that's the worst, or at least most persistent injury I managed to inflict on myself with a knife. Worst period was getting stabbed a couple times in Ju�rez. Still have a pretty nasty, jagged scar from when a guy tried to stab me and I tried to do some badass kung fu poo poo and disarm him but I had way the gently caress too much mescal in me and hosed up the timing and managed to overanticipate his move, so I ended up getting the tip of his knife raked along from the webbing of the thumb of my right hand along to nearly the wrist. Ended up disarming him that way, accidentally, because it got wedged pretty good in my hand and in the sleeve of the jacket I was wearing. Didn't notice it at first, just felt something on my hand. Sorta shook it while I was watching the guy watching me, trying to figure out what just happened. Shaking my hand knocked the knife loose and sent this fan of blood flying loving everywhere, because I was bleeding like crazy. Guy saw this, and I guess figured gently caress this, and took off. Ended up getting some messy loving stitches that were bad enough that you can still faintly see this hosed up pinched stitching pattern in the scar.

Never really done anything that bad in the kitchen. Kinda give myself a nick every once in awhile. I really have worse luck with getting random burns and poo poo than cuts.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2012 11:43

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Nice try, KozmoNaut, but mindphlux tryouts were last week.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2012 13:46

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Let's see if I've been following:

KozmoNaut asks for knife advice
KozmoNaut gets knife advice
KozmoNaut complains about knife advice
KozmoNaut says the knives he already has are perfect

# ¿ Mar 31, 2012 21:52

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

That's a lot of words for `yes'.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2012 22:00

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

It's good that you're coming to terms with your gooniness but I still think that's a lot of words for `yes'.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2012 22:30

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

The kitchen knives I use the most are a US$30 cleaver and a US$500 cleaver.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2012 02:33

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Drink and Fight posted:

I think what I'm saying is what the gently caress go eat some fish.

This is good advice. Also those little loving bite-sized crabs, and octopus.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2012 22:55

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

NosmoKing posted:

This is my rule for oral sex as well as food.

You must be real popular during Fleet Week.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2012 23:01

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

I figure NosmoKing is more into pleasing the starfish than octopus.

Octopus wiener snype:

SubG fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Apr 5, 2012

# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 00:34

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

GrAviTy84 posted:

just build it in a blender, fool proof.

What's the technique here? I always build the sabayon (egg yolk and water) over heat (first whisking to add volume, then over heat until it starts to thicken) and then remove from the heat and whisk in the butter, then a little lemon. Are you blitzing everything with the blender and then heating the finished sauce?

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 00:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:

Build it like a mayo. Egg yolks and liquid in the food processor, blitz, then add melted butter in a stream with it running.

Without heating the yolks? Seems like the consistency would be noticeably different from `traditional' hollandaise.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 01:40

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Oral sex.

Oral snype:

SubG fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Apr 15, 2012

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 21:26

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

So I'm still not too sure about the blender hollandaise, but hollandaise in the puddle machine is pretty much falling-off-a-log easy and comes out just so.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2012 18:13

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:

Method?

Egg yolk, water, butter together in the puddle machine at 148 F/64 C for, I dunno, somewhere around 45 minutes. Shouldn't be that time sensitive because the eggs are never going to hit the curdling temperature, so it's not like doing scrambled eggs or softboiling them or whatever where plus or minus a minute and you have something completely different. Or at least that's my theory---maybe I just got lucky. Prep was pretty much nonexistent---broke the yolks in the bag, but didn't do anything otherwise to mix things up.

Coming out of the bath it looks like an oil slick, but any hand whisking immediately brings it together as a sauce. Thickens up as you go; I was using whole butter so this might have something to do with it, might behave differently with clarified. I added the lemon and adjusted with salt while whisking but before I had the consistency I wanted.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2012 22:37

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

What I got from it was that Happy Hat's safeword is `danish' and GWS doesn't believe in the invisible handjob of the marketplace.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2012 22:50

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Dane posted:

food content: I made Heston Blumenthal's Spaghetti Bolognese (from In Search of Perfection) and am thoroughly underwhelmed. Maybe I screwed something up along the way, but it was rather bland.

I'm not expert, but what I've seen from the Fat Duck Cookbook I like Blumenthal on technique, but I'm not to crazy about his actual recipes.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2012 23:13

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

i shoot friendlies posted:

This is the difference between book knowledge and experience.

225 is too high for most meats. This is not a book, but rather the practical experience of the old southern redneck who opened my eyes to proper pork cooking. Anything above 210 is going to cause the liquid in the meat to boil and steam, and that is very bad for tenderness and juiciness. According to him, you never want the meat to get that hot. He cooked pork butts for a living, and had been doing that for 50 years. He never read a book on it, but he was an pork artist.

He was right. As I have experimented, setting the oven so it goes over 210 for a significant period of time just murders the texture. After doing about 100-150 of these, I have found the sweet spot to be 195 for 24 hours. That makes the best pork I (or anyone else who has eaten it) has ever had.

That temp and time completely render the fat, so that is melts through the meat. The parts that were solid fat get a "puffy" texture that is extraordinary. The outside gets dark and crispy. You do not even need spice, as the rich "porky" flavor becomes so strong.

The only difference this time is I will be adding a couple hours of smoke to the process.

Horseshit. Pork collagen breaks down at around 190, so if you're cooking in an (air) oven at 195 you're either a) not converting as much collagen into gelatine as you can, or b) you're dessicating that poor loving piece of meat.

The fact that you're going by time instead of internal temperature means that you really don't know which is happening, you're just guessing. If you want to know for sure, put a probe in the thing. Watch the temperature. It'll claw its way up good and slow, and then hit a point at which the temperature stalls. This is where all that collagen is being converted. The temperature is stalling because the process is endothermic. It is also (one of the reasons) why you absolutely aren't in any danger of boiling the interior of your roast or steaming it or whatever the hell you're fantasy role-playing steampunk adventure horseshit you're imagining is going on in there. And a good thing, too---because if it was, the thing would literally explode. And by `literally', I don't mean `metaphorically', I mean that poo poo would blow the gently caress up.

Anyway, after the temperature stalls for awhile, it'll start climbing again. As soon as that happens, that's when you want to pull the meat and let it rest. Why? Because that's when you know essentially all of the collagen (not fat, as you say---pork fat renders at somewhere around 90 F, plus or minus a few depending on what part of the pig the fat came from) is now gelatine. I mean you can do it other ways and invoke all the down home country wisdom you want to justify it, but that's just loving voodoo and wishful thinking. You can argue with me, but you can't argue with thermofuckingdynamics.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2012 12:44

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

GrAviTy84 posted:

Also this:

The `wet bulb' theory seems to have come up in the past couple years, as far as I know as a result of Myhrvold discussing his research online. I think I probably due deserve to be chastened for suggesting that the conversion of collagen to gelatine is `the' reason for the temperature levelling off, but I'm not convinced that Myhrvold's experiment(s) demonstrate that evaporative cooling is `the' reason either. Part of the problem is that the system is complicated, and the availability of water in the meat is mediated by the denaturing of proteins and the rendering of fat. So even if evaporative cooling is one of the mechanisms of the stall, it doesn't necessarily function as an explanation of the overall phenomena. By sealing one of the test cuts entirely (and so preventing any evaporative cooling) and showing that it does not plateau only demonstrates (or rather is strongly suggestive that) it is involved.

This is sorta raw pedantry, but I'm not trying to poo poo on his work; I think it's great empirical work. My point is that identifying one of the mechanisms through which a complex, porous, hygroscopic media like meat regulates heat during cooking isn't really an explanation in the sense the graph and accompanying text seems to suggest. As I said, my suggesting that thermal denaturation of collagen is `the' reason is similarly problematically reductive.

I don't own a copy of Modernist Cuisine (from which I assume the quoted page is excerpted. Does he elsewhere explain propose an explanation as to why the plateau is indicative of doneness? The fact that it is the point at which you have exhausted the limits of evaporative cooling does not, on the face of it, seem to make a lot of sense for this purpose. It works as an explanation about why you'd expect a piece of meat to be dried to unpalatability if you cooked beyond that point, but it doesn't follow (by any logic I can see) that cooking right up to the point beyond which unpalatability lies should work as a strategy for insuring palatability.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2012 21:42

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

i shoot friendlies posted:

SubG's response was borderline psychotic, like he took it as personal insult that I had posted some old man's opinion about pork without discussing the intricacies of the physics of pork cookery.

Borderline psychotic? Man, now you're hurting my feelings.

But I'll just point out that no, in fact you were discussing the intricacies of the physics of pork cookery. You were just thoroughly wrong about them. If you manage to produce something that you're willing to eat despite relying on voodoo and wishful thinking instead of shameful `book knowledge' (which is to say, knowledge) more power to ya I guess.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2012 13:57

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Yaltabaoth posted:

I thought so too, but maybe it's the pictures. It looks really greasy.

My guess is that it wasn't properly rested after cooking. But that's probably just my :airquote:

book knowledge :airquote:

talking.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2012 01:15

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Yaltabaoth posted:

I use a wood smoker and still get smoke rings.

Edit: I was under the impression that smoke rings are from carbon monoxide, which is a byproduct of combustion. Oops got too scientific there, wouldn't want to upset Ikillhostages!

Nitric oxide, not carbon monoxide, but yeah. When nitric oxide comes into contact with water in the presence of atmospheric oxygen it'll react to form nitrous acid. This in turn will react with a pigment in meat called myoglobin (it's the chemical that gives fresh meat a rich purplish-red colour) to make nitric oxide myoglobin (the chemical that gives uncooked cured meats a pinkish tinge) which will, when heated, become nitrosohemochrome, which is the pinkish-red colour you see in a smoke ring or cooked cured pork (like bacon).

This is a simplification; the chemistry of myoglobin is actually more complicated than this: in a living creature it functions as an oxygen storage mechanism for muscle tissue, binding oxygen to form either oxymyoglobin or metmyoglobin, the concentration of metmyoglobin being enzymatically regulated. In dead tissue (that is to say, meat) this regulation mechanism is effectively absent and, because metmyoglobin is the most stable of the aforementioned molecules, the concentration of bright, comic book blood red oxymyoglobin goes down and the concentration of greyish metmyoglobin goes up as meat ages.

Nitrite will react with any of the above, but because metmyoglobin is more stable than the other forms of myoglobin, the higher the proportion of metmyoglobin in the meat, the less smoke ring formation you see. And once metmyoglobin denatures, you get the brownish colour of meat that's ~~Ducassed~~ `done', and this can't be reversed by any conditions that are likely to arise in a kitchen. Even i shoot friendlies'. So once that happens there will be effectively no further smoke ring formation.

This is a simplification, but I think it's accurate, unless Nathan Myhrvold has revolutionised the gently caress out of all this chemistry too, and it turns out smoke ring formation is actually governed by patent trolling or something.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2012 06:40

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Yaltabaoth posted:

Do some smokers (electric) not produce nitric oxide?

Yes and no. Nitric oxide is just nitrogen and oxygen. Both are going to be plentiful in the environment anywhere you're doing any cooking. NO is generated naturally whenever you just happen to have a bunch of oxygen and nitrogen handy and the temperature is high enough. In situations where you have very fine control over the conditions under which combustion is taking place (e.g., in the combustion chamber in the heads in your car) you can control the mixture of air and fuel and the combustion temperature to minimise the amount of NO that's produced. Something like an offset smoker is pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum, and an electric smoker is somewhere in the middle.

That being said, most of the heat in an electric smoker comes from the heating elements. And they're probably a pretty homogeneous heat source, more or less constant somewhere around whatever your cooking temperature is. In a charcoal (or wood) burning smoker, there's more temperature variation across the fire chamber, and (I suspect) across different parts of an individual coal. So if the smoke chamber of your offset is happily at 225 F, on the other side of the baffle in the fire chamber it's probably easily twice that, and in different spots across the fire chamber it's hotter and cooler. Since NO production is fairly seriously endothermic (on the order of a hundred kJ/mol) you're not going to see much NO produced except where you have really hot spots. If you don't have this sort of variability, you're probably not going to see enough NO production to contribute much to smoke ring production.

This is a lot of :words:

to say that the more efficient your smoker is, ceteris paribus, the less smoke ring production you're going to see. This is anecdotally supported by general consensus (and my personal experience) that a very efficient `bullet' type smoker, like the WSM, tends to under-smoke, and the horribly inefficient traditional offset smoker tends to over-smoke. Since smokers, like automotive engines, are basically complicated air pumps, you can kinda eyeball this by looking at the rate of smoke exiting your smoker. However fast it's spitting air out, it has to at the same time be taking clean air in out of the environment. The air in the environment is a gently caress of a lot cooler than the air in the fire chamber, but in the time it takes the air to pass through the fire chamber and into the smoke chamber, it has to pick up enough heat to go from ambient temperature to your cooking temperature. The larger the volume of air, the hotter the fire has to be in order to maintain the temperature in the smoke chamber. The hotter the fire has to be, the less efficient the overall process is. So: less efficient means higher peak temperature, higher peak temperature means more NO production, and more NO production means more smoke ring development.

That all being said, I haven't really done a lot of empirical investigation of the thermal behaviour of electric smokers; I'm just speculating based on what I know about the underlying chemistry and the behaviour of different kinds of `traditional' smokers.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2012 12:29

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Because you usually cauterise a wound at 125 for 72 hours or something, right?

# ¿ Apr 24, 2012 03:10

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

dino. posted:

@Wiggles: Tell me more about this rhubarb pie. The first time I ate the stuff, I was turned off by it, because I found it to be stringy. That'll learn me for eating grocery store pie.

The `trick' I use is to break off the top and bottom of the stalks by hand. If there are any really stringy...uh, strings...running along the stalk, they'll end up dangling off the end like one of those red `pull this to open' things that never work. You can pull them right off the stalk that way. This'll just get the really stringy bits but the less pronounced ones. You can also just use a vegetable peeler, but you'll end up with a less `rhubarby' result that way.

This only applies to something like a pie and if you have really stringy field grown rhubarb. Normally slicing (or dicing) thin is the answer.

# ¿ May 16, 2012 21:05

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

GrAviTy84 posted:

I really wish they hadn't raised the price on APCs

Yeah, I was hoping to stock up on M113s for Memorial Day.

# ¿ May 17, 2012 23:36

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

mindphlux posted:

safe words are for pussies

Assholes too.

# ¿ May 22, 2012 00:26

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chemmy posted:

Actually it works fine. For every shot of grain alcohol I drink I just take a shot of water, boom no hangover.

Serious, try it out.

Probably placebo. Or perhaps the moderating effect of consuming something other than alcohol (e.g., intake of other liquids results in a lower intake of alcohol). This is one of those subjects that comes up every so often and there's a study conducted to investigate the efficacy of various hangover remedies, and they never vary statistically from placebo.

# ¿ May 27, 2012 00:32

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

pork never goes bad posted:

http://www.annals.org/content/132/11/897.full seems to suggest that rehydration is an effective strategy - it certainly alleviates certain hangover symptoms (dry mouth, for example).

If you look at what that paper actually says, it amounts to the fact that some people report feeling some amount better. The authors actually highlight the problem(s) with this as a meaningful conclusion---there is no standard clinical definition for hangover, and there are no standard clinical diagnostic criteria for evaluating the alleviation of hangover symptoms. This is why the authors explicitly refrain from engaging in formal analysis.

That's pretty much the situation if you do a search on pubmed or wherever to look for peer reviewed material on the subject; a whole bunch of difficult to correlate or evaluate self-reported stuff, and essentially no hard clinical data (e.g. data collected in double blind conditions) and no overall consensus on either the subject being studied (!) or what diagnostic instrument to use when studying it.

If you look outside peer-reviewed papers, the subject is, if you can imagine, even worse, with all kinds of parroting of old wives' tales as the gospel truth and nothing but a bunch of vague hand-waving and a tangled undirected graph of self-references as support.

There's almost certainly no downside to drinking water. And alcohol is a diuretic. So there's an air of plausibility about it. And if it makes you feel better, well more power to ya. But the science just ain't there.

# ¿ May 27, 2012 21:47

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

homerlaw posted:

His name is Kirk Johnson[...].

Was? I seem to remember hearing that he died a couple years ago, although I have no idea whether or not that's just internet bullshit.

# ¿ May 28, 2012 23:31

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:

It's true. He ate poprocks and drank a coke and his stomach exploded.

He should've chewed some Bubble Yum, then. The spiderlings in his stomach would have taken care of that.

# ¿ May 29, 2012 01:16

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Who stresses over that poo poo? Aren't you people drinking? Anyway, you don't really need to plan to smoke everything the day before, just aim to have it done good and early, then just pull things as they're ready, wrap them in foil, and throw them into an ice chest. Once everything's out of the smoker and resting, start your sides. When the sides are ready, resting is done, unwrap, slice, serve.

# ¿ May 29, 2012 05:03

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Kenning posted:

What do you mean possibly the most famous rear end in a top hat? Can you really name off other famous anuses? His is the rear end in a top hat. Full stop.

The guy who lip-syncs to The Trashmen's Surfin' Bird with his rear end in a top hat in Pink Flamingos (1972).

# ¿ May 29, 2012 20:22

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

What's a good place to buy scotch online?

# ¿ May 30, 2012 06:12

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

pork never goes bad posted:

Depending on where you are shipping to, K&L is an excellent option. They aren't a good choice if you want the, well, pedestrian options available at a good supermarket. But if you want some more interesting options, many exclusive to K&L, they are great. They also have an excellent spirits blog.

https://www.klwines.com

Man, their search criteria thing is hosed. If you click that you only want to see scotches from Scotland it'll only show you 20-odd results because all the Speyside scotches seem to be listed as `single malt whiskey' (not even `Highland single malt whiskey' or `Speyside single malt whiskey') and all the Islay scotches are listed as `Islay single malt whiskey'. Of course neither of these terms is selectable. Irritating.

# ¿ May 30, 2012 22:32

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 23:06

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

pork never goes bad posted:

What do you like? I could make probably forty informed recommendations from k&l

I was just bitching about the site's navigation (telling it to list scotches doesn't list scotches). I don't really need any recommendations.

# ¿ May 31, 2012 12:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Goons with Spoons > GWS General Chat: Damn I feel like a boss when I have one in each hand.

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