Good Eats: The Return -- We have a date, people

[Maus_Magill]

@zombywoof

As a big fan of the original show, I’m enjoying it as a return to form - I like the food history/science, humor, characters, etc.

As far as his recipes, though…there are a few that I think of as solid that have made their way into my repertoire over the years, but there have always been a significant percentage that I’ve thought of as unnecessarily “different-for-the-sake-of-being different”, if not downright unappealing (I love avocado, but won’t be making chocolate pudding using it anytime soon…)

I’ve made chocolate pudding with avocado before. It works, Avocado is bland enough that it is easily overpowered by the cocoa.

That being said, the pudding itself was decidedly bleh. However, it used regular cocoa, not dutch processed and the avocado was the thickening agent. I am unsure how well this pudding would be, but it’s worth a try.

[bump]

@Tatterdemalion

Actually, raspberry might go well with steak.

Whenever I tried to sous-vide a steak, it always came out tasting like pot roast. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you are trying to cook pot roast, but when you wanted a steak …

The other week, I was at one of those Portuguese roasted meat-on-a-stick places, and all the meat tasted like pot roast. I suspect they were keeping it in a sous-vide bath and bringing it out and searing it when it was time to serve. I wasn’t impressed.

I didn’t notice a different flavor, but the steaks are considerably more juicy than a conventionally cooked steak. I thought it was fine, but my wife doesn’t like it.

My personal opinion is that sous-vide steaks are probably a colossal improvement for people who chronically overcook their steaks and end up with shoe-leather. But if you know how to properly cook a steak already, sous-vide is not as huge of an improvement- you get more of the steak volume at whatever temp the middle is supposed to be at, and it’s not as tough.

Which brings up the thought- if people don’t like sous-vide steaks, it could be because they were ordering them/cooking them such that the middle was rare(or whatever), because the majority of the steak is edible at that internal doneness. But when they go to sous-vide, they find that rare isn’t actually their preferred doneness- they might actually really prefer medium-rare or even medium-well in actuality.

[DCnDC]

I’ve been watching and enjoying the new episodes, but is it just me or does his retro-futuristic-space-age flatware bother anyone else? It just looks so uncomfortable to use, like eating everything with a butter knife. It’s very distracting to me whenever I see him use them.

[Balthisar]

@bump

Which brings up the thought- if people don’t like sous-vide steaks, it could be because they were ordering them/cooking them such that the middle was rare(or whatever), because the majority of the steak is edible at that internal doneness. But when they go to sous-vide, they find that rare isn’t actually their preferred doneness- they might actually really prefer medium-rare or even medium-well in actuality.

I wish I’d done sous vide on my tenderloin today. It was an odd end piece that I didn’t recognize in the Costco package, meaning that its dimensions were awkward, and I ended up overcooking about 9 mm all around, and (according to my wife) undercooking the middle 12 mm or so.

Because it was Costco meat, it was awesome, even mostly overcooked, but it was “au poivre” so the sauce and pepper helped, certainly.

Oh, my point is, sous vide would have ensured that my preferred, rare doneness was through and through, rather than that middle 12 mm.

(I’m picking nits as this point; it was still an awesome meal.)

[muldoonthief]

The Lady of the Refrigerator is back! I loved both the gags in that episode - she had taped pictures of herself onto all her “vacation” pictures showing the history of refrigeration, and the canned whole chicken in the fridge that was actually hiding the last piece of Icebox cake.