[Mike Nolan]

My concern about using powdered milk from the store is the smell, how do you keep that from permeating the frosting?

[Mike Nolan]

An immersion circulation heater is used for sous vide cooking.

In some ways it's similar to a convection oven, but much more efficient because water conducts heat better than air. Because the water is always circulating it produces a constant heat at the specified temperature everywhere in the pot, as opposed to having a pot on a stove where the temperature at the bottom is going to be much warmer than at the top.

Fish and chicken are the most frequently mentioned proteins in sous vice cooking, but you can cook nearly anything this way.

For example, if you want a steak cooked to 135 degrees, you just put it in a boiling bag, set the immersion heater to 135 and when you're done it is a uniform 135 degrees throughout, which means it's the same degree of redness from edge to edge.

If you want a seared outside or grill marks on the outside, a minute or two in a pan or on the grill will finish it off.

By contract, when you cook a steak in a pan or on the grill, by the time the center gets to 135 degrees the outside is probably at 170 or higher.

Restaurants often use sous vide techniques to par-cook foods to save time later on and ensure consistent results.

Something I learned about cooking potatoes from Harold McGee's book On Food and Cooking is that if you cook them at 130-140 degrees for about 20 minutes then raise the temperature to finish cooking them, they'll stay firm even after they're fully cooked and diced. This makes for a nicer potato salad. In essence this is a sous vide technique.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Sounds like the cooked flour frosting that was the one originally used on Red Velvet cakes before most bakeries switched over to using a cream cheese frosting on them.

Sarah Wirth recommends that frosting, I tried making it once and must have done something wrong, because we thought it was inedible.

[Mike Nolan]

We don't drink coffee, and the non-dairy stuff (which, btw, is generally NOT vegan) is awful in tea, so we never have it on hand. I wonder if the baker's dried milk that KAF sells would work? I'd probably use high ratio shortening, too.

[Mike Nolan]

Noting wrong with a point-and-shoot, all the shots I took at Chocolate Boot Camp were with a Nikon Coolpix S6200, that's also the camera I was using for shots on this site before mid-July when I bought my Canon T6i. My wife has an even older Coolpix that she uses all the time at work, taking shots of students in Agronomy and Horticulture at UNL.

With all the ornate Bundt pans that have come out in the past few years, I'm glad to know they work well.

[Mike Nolan]

It was opposite Project Runway, so I recorded it and hope to watch it this weekend.

[Mike Nolan]

Possibly the two most frequently televised techniques in molecular gastronomy are spherification and foams, the latter especially having been overused on multiple cooking reality shows.

Many techniques involve chemicals, but some involve new cooking tools.

The tool I'd love to play around with is an anti-griddle, which has a constant 30 below zero (F) surface that you can make ices on, but since they cost about $1500, that doesn't seem likely to be in my kitchen at any point.

Immersion circulation heaters have gotten very reasonably priced, though, one model of the Anova was selling for under $100 on Black Friday. (Kenji Lopez-Alt says you can do some sous vide cooking using a beer cooler, which costs even less.)

One technique I do NOT expect to play with is using liquid nitrogen, if mis-handled you can hurt yourself badly or cause major damage in your kitchen.

[Mike Nolan]

Can you post some pictures?

[Mike Nolan]

Molecular gastronomy is about exploring the limits of food properties and appearances. Let's face it, there's only so many ways to cook a steak before you're just repeating yourself.

[Mike Nolan]

Around the time that were first married (1972) someone gave us a small jar of brandied fruit. It was great on cake or ice cream. We would add canned fruit to it (usually fruit cocktail in sugar syrup) every now and then to keep it going, it didn't require refrigeration.

We even bought a big blue glass jar to keep it in. It moved with us to Nebraska and from the duplex we had when we first moved to Lincoln to our first house, and I think it was still going when we moved to this house in 1997.

At one point we must have screwed something up because it developed mold, we probably weren't using it enough. We threw out the fruit but kept the big blue jar, it currently has refrigerator dill pickles in it, not brandied fruit. Those pickles are probably about 10 years old at this point and are pretty potent!

[Mike Nolan]

I would assume the most important ingredient in a Winston Churchill fruitcake was brandy. Or given Sir Winston's reputation, maybe port?

[Mike Nolan]

I hope it is an improvement over the version that ran a few years ago, the 'host' tried too hard to be funny rather than let the humor and drama of the show drive itself.

Here's the Variety article on this show.

The 2 hour premier episode is running opposite Project Runway, which is likely to split the audience somewhat. I know which one I'll be watching!

• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I think this is one time when most of us would buy a small tube of colored icing. I've used black icing in a tube because black is another color that is terribly hard to get right.

However, I would have my doubts that they've improved the tips or the icing itself in the past 20 years. If anything, I'd almost expect quality to have suffered somewhat. (Call me a pessimist.)

One of the local grocery stores with an in-store bakery sells icing in pint and quart deli containers, I suspect they buy it in 25 pound buckets, I don't know whether it's made with high-ratio shortening.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't seen the Bobs Red Mill unbleached white pastry flour locally, all I can find locally is whole wheat pastry flour.

I buy KAF pastry flour several 3# bags at a time and keep the unopened bags in the freezer. I like their regular pastry flour better than their pastry blend. You can freeze an opened bag, but any flour that isn't well sealed will absorb odors in the freezer.

[Mike Nolan]

Royal icing is what is traditionally used for gingerbread houses, both because it does not require refrigeration and because it sets well and can be used as glue to put your house together. (Professionals making showpieces often use an aerosol freeze spray to set it faster, but that's not something found in most home kitchens.)

You can mix it up in advance, refrigerate it, and color it in small batches (once colored it should be used within a day or the colors might get blotchy, gel colors seem less likely to do this than liquid or powdered colors.) Allow it to get up to room temperature before using it, and keep it covered with plastic wrap so it doesn't develop a skin.

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