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?
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.
We have investigated sidecars in several ways (different orange liquors, lemon vs ReaLemon, the impact of aging lemon juice), but this time we wanted to compare more types of lemon juices side by side.
We’ve previous subjected beef to 8 (sometimes tortuous) hours in a slow cooker; but what happens after 8 hours via a temperature controlled, sous-vide method?
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
It’s blueberry season here in the UP, and having picked 5.5 lbs of them, we needed to do some science! Since I am not quite up to tackling experimental wine making yet, we chose to investigate the potential thickening power a single apple can lend to a blueberry pie.
Doing Science To Stuff 