The passing of labor day may mean the end of grilling season for some, but that doesn’t have to mean an end to delicious steaks. Cooking an excellent steak comes down to three simple things: 1) a high quality piece of meat, 2) getting the correct internal temperature, 3) getting a good sear on the outside. We find that a good rib-eye steak passes the quality test, and sous vide solves the correct internal temperature problem. But what is the best way to get a perfect sear?
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Low and slow vs a pressure cooker – which will win a taste test? which will use fewer electrons in the effort to turn pork ribs into tasty noms?
The Gastropod podcast “looks at food through the lens of science and history”, so it’s only natural that they’ll cover stuff relevant to our interests here at Doing Science to Stuff. The May episode The Cocktail Hour provides a fascinating look at not only the history and craft of cocktail making, but also some modern techniques for enhancing the cocktail experience.
Initial observation:
Toward the end of the episode, they discuss a technique called boozewashing. The fundamental idea, expanded upon in Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence
Question:
How big an impact does boozewashing have on the flavor of tea-infused vodka? Does it impact mouth-feel at all? What about the overall appearance of the vodka?
King Arthur Flour had a very intriguing blog post recently about the steps necessary to create brownies with a shiny and flakey crust. They had some outstanding follow-up questions which we decided to investigate. Keep reading for more brownie science!
Here at the primary testing facility we are always looking for ways to improve how we cook delicious meats. So, when vacuum sealable zip-top bags recently appeared on the market we wanted to see how well they work for sous vide cooking. In this post these bags are put up against the older style bag while cooking rib-eyes steaks.
Pi-day, the perfect day for pie. While this post is pretty belated, we did celebrate on the appropriate day – for science, of course! This time, how does pie plate material impact the finished pie?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a quantity of blueberries, must be in want of baked goods [citation needed]. Having acquired blueberries and converted some of them into desserts, we set our sights on things breakfasty, and commenced The Muffinning. Continue reading
Here at the primary testing facility, we recently acquired our first sous vide immersion circulator. Since this is a novel cooking technique for us we have many questions. In this post we seek to find out how important searing really is when cooking steaks?
Here at the primary testing facility, it’s no secret that we like red meat. So, when we found standing rib-roasts on sale shortly before Thanksgiving, we couldn’t resist doing a science to one of them (getting two for control, seemed a bit excessive).
Initial observation:
Roast recipes have always seemed to be a bit of a dark art, with mysterious temperature changes in the middle, cooking times based on mass rather than linear dimensions. These peculiar practices seem to produce delicious results, and presumably have something to do with how heat flows into the meat during cooking. In this post we hope to shed some light on how heat flows through a roast.
