Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Way more time consuming than the tamales that my family makes! Hats off to you!

@simon: Thanks for the tip! Curious to know what you think of it.

@infomofo: It's been a few years since I've had their ramen. Back then, the soup had chashu pork, straight Hakata noodles, and a milky tonkotsu broth. It was a small portion, but my memories are favorable.

@Michele: Porkberry! The creative misspellings make Rockmeisha that much more adorable. I also like the section on the menu called "Odds & Sods."

@passionateeater: Lady, when are you coming 'round here again?

Tam, using standard polyethylene plastic bags is dangerous if you approach the temperature at which the plastic melts, which is 195F. The safety of polyethylene plastic use, whether heated or not, is still highly hotly debated. And people have contacted ZIPLOC to ask them, and maybe it's just a CYA response from their lawyers, but they DO NOT recommend using their bags to cook anything at a temperature approaching the softening point of the plastic.

As I said in my comment, if you are heating your water bath on the stove top, the bottom of your stock pot will be much hotter than the water itself above it because that's the place where the metal is being heated by the flame. Just so you know, the temperature of a natural gas flame from a typical stove is about 1900F. If your plastic bag is sitting on the bottom of your pot, you will definitely be running the risk of melting the bag or at least softening the bag, possibly contaminating your food. Use a trivet inside the stock pot to act as a heatsink. Temperatures well below boiling and keeping the bag away from the heating element, whatever it may be, should be ok...

Also, it is a very bad idea to use immersion circulators that were not designed for food use, an even worse idea to use one that was previously used in a lab, especially if you don't know what they were using it for. Here is a good explanation of why.

Is the experience of cooking sous vide so important that you are willing to take stupid risks by using the wrong equipment? I'm fascinated by it, but I sure as hell am not going to buy some random machine off ebay, and cook in an off the shelf baggie that was not designed to do what I'm asking of it. It's kind of like having sex with a prostitute and using an expired condom, if you ask me. Sure, I may have the time of my life, but the risks just ain't worth it. To me. What you do with and put into your body is entirely up to you.

@PerkyMac, intheyearofthepig, jlbrach, Kerosena, dikaryon: Thanks for the kind words. Cooking with sous vide does bring to mind those halcyon days of chem lab practicals ;).

@ gastronomeg: Indeed! Alinea, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, and Under Pressure seem to be competing for the same readership. These are all beautiful, expensive, and almost impenetrable books.

@sailordave: We do our more ambitious entertaining at Al's. The kitchen is roughly 100 square feet. We have a length of 6 feet of usable counter space and a folding table set up for appliance-spillover. The immersion circulator sits on top of the folding table; the FoodSaver sits on top of the microwave which sits on top of the folding table. The Vita-Prep is on the floor more often than not. A tight squeeze for sure but it could be worse ... We could be cooking from my kitchen!

The breakdown of big-ticket equipment used in these recipes is roughly:

Immersion circulator ($300 from eBay)
FoodSaver (more recently priced around $100)
Vita-Prep (roughly $500-600)

Groceries ran about $40-60 (the buffer is for the cooking alcohol). Items on the shopping list included octopus, almonds, navel oranges, fennel, fingerling potatoes, basil, bay leaves, rosemary, tarragon, thyme, cilantro, baby watercress, flat leaf parsley, Spanish chorizo, and Pernod. We subbed 2.5 pounds of baby octopus for the Mediterranean/Japanese octopus, and subbed Marcona for green almonds (the latter are only in season in spring).

@dikaryon: The PID type of device you mention is what we use when the larger immersion circulator is in use. For this write-up, we used it to poach fennel. It doesn't actually circulate water in the bath and you can only sous vide items as large as the capacity of your cooking vessel (e.g., rice cooker, crock pot, etc.). It is a reasonable alternative though, especially for people looking to try it all out. We've managed to produce pretty good seafood dishes with it.

@Veron, simon: Noted food scientist Harold McGee discusses the safety of cooking with various plastics on Ruhlman's own post of 'Under Pressure': tests show standard cling film, Saran wrap, and commercial wraps in general aren't likely to release chemicals into foods.

@NCthenNY: You've brought up an interesting point. Very little seasoning is required in sous vide cooking and a little spicing goes a long way. With groceries from the local Wegmans, we've surprised ourselves by cooking dishes rivalling what we've had at some well-regarded restaurants. Though I'm not sure ingredients need to be quite so pristine, flavors are improved with the use of fresh and seasonal ingredients.

@dbcurrie: I like your sense of adventure.

@alwang: Hallo, Handsome.

@passionateeater: Hello, fellow Meat Whore!

@GoodEaterKenji: As Al mentioned, we've learned to be more attentive to thickness, time, and temperature when cooking delicately textured items like seafood. I can't tell you how many dinners through which we've suffered, gnawing on cottony, over-poached fish ...