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Cast-Iron Cooking Primer

Heating properties of cast iron (top) vs. aluminum (bottom). [Photograph: Cooking Issues] Over on the French Culinary Institute's Cooking Issues blog, Dave Arnold has created a great cast iron–cooking primer that explains the science behind the cookware, including this great bit that dispels the notion of even heating: The popular wisdom that cast iron cookware provides even heat is misleading. A cast iron skillet placed on a gas burner will develop distinct hot spots where the flame touches the pan. If you heat the center of a cast iron pan, you will find that the heat travels slowly toward the pan's edge, with a significant temperature gradient between the center and the edge. The pan will heat very unevenly...

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24 Comments | Posted by Adam Kuban, February 18, 2010 at 12:30 PM
Tagged: cast iron cookware, Cooking Issues, Dave Arnold

How to Get, Store, and Use Liquid Nitrogen: A Primer by Dave Arnold

[Photograph: Cooking Issues] For anyone looking to freeze the heck out of stuff in culinary applications, the FCI's resident kitchen geek Dave Arnold has prepared a primer on liquid nitrogen that covers safety, procurement, storage and handling, and uses. The stuff sounds dangerous, so if you seriously are thinking of exploring its use, you'd be smart to read this....

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5 Comments | Posted by Adam Kuban, January 12, 2010 at 4:15 PM
Tagged: Cooking Issues, Dave Arnold, how-tos, liquid nitrogen

Dave Arnold's Immersion Circulator Turkey

[Photographs: Cooking Issues] Leave it to mad scientisty chef Dave Arnold to think, forget the oven, I'm going to prepare my Thanksgiving turkey in a double immersion circulator. Here's how it worked, as explained on the French Culinary Institute's blog Cooking Issues: He filled a stock pot with duck fat and butter, and jammed the cavity with herbs. He then used two circulators set at 65°C. A hose was attached to one of the circulator's spouts and pushed into the cavity of the bird so that hot fat was not only circulated on the outside of the bird, but also injected into the center. It was circulated for two hours, chilled in a blast freezer, and then packed it...

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1 Comment | Posted by Erin Zimmer, November 18, 2009 at 3:45 PM
Tagged: Dave Arnold, French Culinary Institute, immersion circulators, science, Thanksgiving, turkeys