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General food questions

Lennard__34626

Hey everyone, Im new to the forum. I just want to say first of all that I am incredibly grateful for the wealth of knowledge and experience available in this forum. I have been dabbling with modern cookery for a while in my home kitchen, and I have a few general questions that I hope some of you may be able to help me with

1) Hestons hot and iced tea. I am trying to understand the components of this dish.

Am I right to say that the sodium citrate acts as a sequestrant for the Low acyl gellan, so that when heated to a simmer, the gellan is able to hydrate without the impediment of ions. Only then is the calcium chloride added to provide the necessary calcium ions for the gellan to form a gel? Also, is the malic acid added only for flavor purposes? Will I be able to substitute citric acid for a more citrusy flavor?

2) Duck confit

From what I've read online, cooking duck legs in duck fat does not actually impart the characteristic flavor of a duck confit because the oil does not actually penetrate the leg during cooking. It is only during the cooling process that the leg absorbs a small amount of duck fat, which gives the dish it's characteristic richness. My question is, will there be any difference if I cook a piece of duck leg sous vide with some duck fat, then proceed to chill it in the bag. And, if I cook the duck leg sous vide with no liquid, then as it is cooling, I brush duck fat over the thigh constantly?

Additional question: If I inject melted duck fat into the cooling duck thigh, will the duck thigh be able to hold onto more fat?

3)Hestons mashed potatoes

The recipe calls for the potatoes to be cooked sous vide at 72C for 30 mins before proceeding to boil them. What is the added benefit of the sous vide cooking step? Is this a retrograding step?

4)Hestons triple cooked chip

Why does the recipe call for the cut potato slices to be thoroughly washed so the starch gets washed away? I thought that starch in this case would aid in the chip getting crisper?

5) Tender cuts sous vide

I remember that when I first started cooking sous vide, one of the first mistakes I made was cooking a tender piece of meat at a low temperature, but for a long period of time, the texture of the meat was incredibly mushy, almost like a paste. What is the science behind this happening? I understand that there is minimal collagen being melted into gelatin for a tender cut of meat, but I am confused about the incredible contrast in texture for a tender cut cooked for a long time

6) Resting meat (Sous Vide)

Okay, so every book has been telling me that resting meat enables the meat fibers to relax and thus hold more of its juices during slicing. But I think in MC it was mentioned that although this is partly true, the main reason to rest meat is so that the juices have time to cool down and partially gel, thus they do not flow as freely when cut. Also, it allows the meat to reach an equilibrium temperature before cutting. Considering cooking meat negates the latter point, is it still important to rest meat that has been cooked sous vide?(ie allowing the juices to gel slightly)

7) Fried Liquids

If I were trying to make some sort of modernist fried encapsulated sauce, is this a good general starting point?

a) Gel sauce and cut into desired shape

b) Dredge in modified starch

c) Dredge in methylcellulose foam

d) Dust with Crisp coat/some flavorful crumb

e) Fry

I've had these questions floating around in my head for some time, I may have a little more that I forgot about, but I think it'll be useful to have a general questions thread like this to prevent too much clutter, if anyone wants to use this for their own questions, please feel free to do so!

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Lennard__34626

And one more additional question regarding convection ovens: how exactly do convection ovens speed up cooking? By increasing the rate of heat transfer to the surface of the meat? Because my thinking is that the fan circulates the air a lot better which also means that the vapor in the oven is constantly being forced out and thus lowering the humidity of the oven, wouldn't that lower the wet bulb temperature?

Chris_Young_80640

@Lennard:

I'll do my best to answer the questions that I can.

(1) Yes, the citrate is being used as a sequesterant to facilitate hydration. Citric acid will not work.

(2) When we did side-by-sides of duck confit cooked in fat versus fat added later, none of the various chefs we had conduct a controlled triangle test could distinguish one from the other.

(3) The first cooking step hydrates the starch granules, the subsequent cooling step retrogrades the starch, the simmering step softens the potato. The reason we did this was to reduce the amount of "free" starch in the mash that would otherwise make it slightly sticky.

(4) There probably is no real difference of washing the excess starch versus leaving it in place. In any event, washing the excess starch of the sliced chips was really just a kitchen habit.

(5) There is still plenty of collagen even in a tender cut. Every muscle fiber is surrounded with a collagen sheath, and these fibers are bundled into bigger bundles with more collagen. In a tender cut this collagen is fairly weak and easy to hydrolyze, so normally you can ignore it. Prolonged sous vide cooking of tender cuts can hydrolyze too much of this collagen so that you get a mushy, mealy texture. There is such a thing as too tender.

(6) Yes, I wrote the material on resting meat. And there is no physical evidence of fibers relaxing. That's just something people say. The proteins have denatured and gelled, relaxing of fibers has nothing to do here. But as the meat cools slightly, especially near the surface, more of the proteins begin to crosslink, which thickens the juices enough that they don't flow as readily when you cut into the meat.

(7) Sounds about right to me.

(8) Convection ovens speed up cooking only be accelerating the drying at the surface. Once the surface becomes drier, you have less evaporative cooling, so the effective baking temperature increases. A higher effective surface temperature increases the rate of heat transfer to the center, so the center gets hot sooner. But there are no hard and fast rules, like, convection ovens are 20% faster. It depends enormously on the size and shape of the food, as well as how wet or dry it is to begin with. Humidity rules everything when it comes to cooking in an oven.

Lennard__34626

@chris thanks for the reply, a lot of useful information in there. A few follow up questions I hope you don't mind helping me out with

1) So what exactly does the malic acid do in the hot and iced tea(apart from the apple cherry flavor)

5) so the main difference between a tender and tough cut of meat are two things: tough cuts have more collagen, and it's collagen is more difficult to hydrolyze. Would it then be possible to 'over tenderize' a tough cut of meat and this have it become mushy as well? For example if I cooked short ribs at 60C for two weeks

6) is there an optimum temperature to serve rested meat? General cookbooks just have a very rough guideline such as 'rest it for half the amount of time you spent cooking it', this seems very inaccurate since t largely depends on the temperature gradient of your meat post cooking, the thickness of the cut, ambient kitchen temperature etc etc

8) I see, so this sped up evaporation at the surface of the food effectively reduces the constant-rate period and pushes the food into the falling-rate period?

Lennard__34626

Whoops, the website doesn't seem to register paragraphing from my iPhone

pgcath

@Chris, regarding your second point. So would an 'updated' confit go something like:

Sear - lightly crisp duck leg in duck fat, drop it in a pot filled with it, if you want.
Blot off oil, chill.
Season as desired.
Vacuum seal with a bit of duck fat (not very much).
Sous vide to desired doneness.
Remove duck legs and dry.
Back into the duck fat for more crispy!
Garnish with duck skin crumble from Chefsteps.

Or is more fat in the bag still a thing? And why?

Brendan_Lee_56950

I did a rabbit leg confit using @chris's advice a while back and how i went about it was:

Light cure on the leg
Bag with a few aromatics like rosemary, black peppercorns, and garlic
I added a small amount of duck fat, maybe a tablespoon, to the bag so that after cooking I could just chill quickly and leave it in the bag to sit with the fat.
Cook SV for X amount of time and then chill in ice bath and let it sit in the fridge overnight, or in my case for 2 days before searing and serving with a wonderful cassoulet.

Chris_Young_80640

@pccath and @Brendan_Lee — What you both describe works well as an easier way to prepare nice confit.

Chris_Young_80640

@Lennard

Although malic acid is found in apples, cherries, and many other fruits I wouldn't say that it tastes of these fruits. But its a very pleasant, mouthwatering kind of tartness, which is why Heston adds it to the tea.

Your description of the difference between tough and tender cuts is accurate, although there are some other factors that come into play such as the average diameter of the fiber size and how many contractile proteins are packed into those fibers. And, yes, you can overdo tough cuts too. It just takes a lot longer.

As for resting, there is no simple rule, but cooling juices near the surface is not the only thing you're trying to do. Unless you've been cooking sous vide to an equilibrium temperature, you'll have built up more heat near the surface and that wave of heat energy will continue to propagate towards the center. Said another way, the temperature at the core is going to continue to rise for quite a while. And the larger the food and bigger the difference between the surface cooking temperature and core temperature, the longer this will continue. So resting until the core plateaus, and maybe even starts to fall in temperature slightly, is about how long you want to rest for.

Lennard__34626

@chris would it be possible to get a photo of the spoon you use in your rocher videos and on general when you make quenelles? Also any information on the brand/model of the spoon would be greatly appreciated!

Chris_Young_80640

@Lennard — This was asked and answered earlier in the forum:

Those teardrop shaped quenelles are made with a spoon from a British silversmith named Robert Welch. The specific ones are from the Vale Bright series: http://www.robertwelch.com/Products/Default.aspx?id=1092651&tid=126
I've had these spoons since my Fat Duck days.

- See more at: http://forum.chefsteps.com/discussion/comment/1840/#Comment_1840

Lennard__34626

Does anyone know how much % of citric acid I should add to water to make a solution that prevents or at least greatly retards oxidation of avocados?

Brendan_Lee_56950

You can cook them sous vide and deactivate the enzyme. I think @tim did some experimenting on the forum and I tried it and had an avocado last at least a week without browning at all and the texture held up fine.

Lennard__34626

@brendan Thanks for the heads up! I saw that @RED did the same thing too, so procedure is to:

1) Bag the whole avocado uncut

2) SV for 1-2h at 43C

3) Chill in ice bath

4) Slice and use as intended?

Brendan_Lee_56950

Yup. I cut mine in half and pitted it because I wanted to see the effects but uncut would work just as well.

ipreferale

@Lennard - I did not even bag them as they were whole.