I have a prime rib roast that I pulled out of the freezer last night (overnight in the fridge) and out of the fridge this morning that I am going to unceremoniously dump into a dutch oven at 250F* with potatoes, carrots, and parsnips (plus salt, pepper and a tiny bit of olive oil) and throw into the oven for 3-4 hours and hope that it’s edible when it comes out.
I will post pictures, but it won’t be anywhere near as good as what you did (which means sense! I’m doing a fraction of the work!)
I’m ever so jealous of an oven with a steam mode. I’m of the lava rock persuasion, as you can see in my bread-baking setup:
Firebrick splits set above a cast-iron pan loaded with the sort of lava rocks meant for gas grills. I bake most loaves at 460°F (240°C) for the entire time, about 42 to 45 minutes. The oven gets a good spritz before the loaves go in, followed by a substantial pour of water into that rock-filled skillet. The extra surface area of the lava rocks does wonders for creating a ton of steam.
Most of my doughs are a minimum of 35% whole wheat and rye, often 50%+, and even then they keep a crisp crust for hours - baked midday, shattering while I slice at dinnertime. Never lasts until the next day, but that’s the tradeoff with sourdough and whole grains.
That and the fact that I have to stack and unstack bricks every time.
Seared chicken on a bed of farro with carrots and piquante/chile peppers, topped with a basil pesto/fromage blanc sauce (which has managed to mostly obscure the chicken in the photo, oh well).
The box after that was:
Seared chicken with goat cheese sauce (literally you just loosen the cheese with some water), mashed potatoes, and sauteed carrots, sweet peppers and raisins in an agrodolce sauce.
Grilled cheese sandwiches with a combination of fontina and gouda for the cheese, a fig spread, and sauteed sweet peppers in vinegar; as well as a butter lettuce salad with sliced pear. (I tend to find lettuce salads boring and this wasn’t especially memorable, but the sandwich… )
Italian-seasoned chicken, basil pesto/piquante pepper brown rice, and pan-fried zucchini with lemon juice. This was apparently sponsored by HBO Max, god knows why. Pretty simple and yum, though.
Risotto (including garlic, shallot, mascarpone, butter, and romano) with cherry tomatoes, poblano pepper and jalapeno, garnished with chives and the rest of the romano. I am a total sucker for risotto and wouldn’t have thought to use spicy peppers with it. This was also very .
the recipe writer can’t give you a temperature at which chocolate becomes shiny, because it’s a phase transition of cocoa butter, which is a complicated mix of fatty acids, and exact temperatures depend on the specific chocolate involved. You want 'form V crystals, which melt somewhere between 92 and 94 F (a few degrees lower for milk chocolates.). They reform at slightly lower temperatures, but there’s weirdness in how that happens. The manufacturer of the chocolate, assuming they work at real scale, can provide you with remarkably detailed spec sheets.
edit: this is why tempering instructions have you melt everything, cool to high 80s, and then hold at 91 or so F. (every medium sized chocolate kitchen has at least one machine to do this automatically. ) If you have an imersion circulator, you can hold the stuff at 91 or 92 and avoid the issue entirely.
A note about firebrick: most of it is intended as an insulator[1], to keep heat inside a forge or firebox. It takes a relatively long time to heat up, and takes a relatively long time to transfer that heat into what’s placed on it. (and most of it has a pretty low heat capacity, too). For some purposes, that’s what you want; many commercial pizza ovens have a similar ceramic buttom, with a gas burner impinging or nearly impinging on it. The low rate of heat transfer keeps the crust from cooking instantly. There are other cermics that have higher rates of heat transfer, one common one is corderite. It’s used for catalytic converters, shelving and spacers in ceramic kilns, and sold as pizza stones. Heat transfer is about 3 W/m-k, and the mechanical properties (strength,resistance to temperature shock) are very good. I used to have fire bricks in my oven; I replaced them with a corderite pizza stone ~15 years ago. It never comes out of the oven, except to clean the oven or the rare occasion when more volume is required. The mass is a moderating force, and keeps the oven temperature more constant, even for non bread/pizza uses.
[1] covers a spread of about 0.5 to 2 W/m-k., most of it around 1. but unlss you have a spec sheet, it’s hard to know hat you have. There are special insulating bricks that are lower, but they usually have lower maximum temperatures, so they get used in the middle of a structure.
Thanks for remembering to let us see these delicious pictures
My partner is curious about your smoker setup–he’s looking to upgrade once we move in a couple of years and is wondering if this is something you built yourself or bought?
I bought my patio heater and all its furnishings online, from a firm called “Aussie Heatwave”. The only alteration I made was to fit a thermometer to the hood. It’s one of their “cast iron chimineas” with the heavy-duty tripod; the “BBQ/pizza oven” is one of their optional extras. I bought it about three years ago for about A$1 845 delivered (including all the accessories except the roller deck), and I have had huge use out of it, mostly cooking. But then, the climate here makes outdoor cooking pretty appealing.
No idea what I’ve got, of course. I’m limited to what I can find in a rural hardware store.
I keep an old, non-specific pizza stone on the bottom of the oven to help moderate the temperature swings (and catch sugary drips from pies), but I shift the racks about often enough that a near-permanent cordierite stone wouldn’t work. A smaller tile arrangement might, provided I can stack them in the adjacent cabinet like I do the bricks.
For a time I tried using a Baking Steel slab for breads, but it overcooked the bottoms of the loaves. I like the results it gives for pizzas (550°F, as hot as my oven will go) and pitas (450°F). Handy as a stovetop griddle, too, or would be if we might ever host big brunches again.
I have remembered another alteration. The tripod as supplied was a bit too tall, so I got my middle brother to cut the legs off it using an angle grinder, cut 75 mm off the tops of them, and then weld the shortened legs back on using an arc welder.
I think I would not be willing to try using such a service. This description mentions three ingredients that I avoid eating for medical reasons (gouda, sour cream, and tomatillos); one that I would expect to find physically painful to eat (jalapeños); and one that I just personally find repugnant (any form of slaw). And beyond that, I quoted the list to C, and she said that the ingredients seemed not to be harmonious, which I think is my own feeling as well; it rather suggests the bizarre lists of “ingedients you have to include” that get offered on cooking competition shows. Perhaps I lack adventurousness.
Sounds like it - they were an absolutely delicious combination, in my opinion.
But yes, if you have dietary restrictions, meal kit services range from very limited to a terrible idea, generally. Blue Apron does let you select which recipes you’re sent (and I think the same is true of most others, having not used them) but there’s generally around 8 or 9 options for any given week, including one that costs extra, and the extent of the accomodations they make to diet is to have three vegetarian options generally, and flag certain recipes as diabetes friendly or carb conscious. (But not reliably offer either.) I think certain other services do make an effort to serve particular common dietary restrictions (vegan, gluten free, etc) but I imagine that would still be potentially a minefield with actual allergies or similar. At the very least, quite limiting. Personally I don’t limit myself deliberately, may have food allergies but don’t know what they are, and so I just avoid the occasional meal they offer with fish or green beans. (And I don’t even dislike either under the right circumstances. I just don’t like them enough to test those meals out when I could have something else.)
So do I. They’re amazingly classy for something I got at Target a couple decades back. Unfortunately I don’t think they sell them anymore. And I’ve broken one of the set.
I have some Japanese porcelain bowls with a dark green outside glaze, black inside. They’re utterly gorgeous, really pleasant to use. But I bought them in the early 1990s in an indoor market at the Yaohan Plaza (shopping mall in north London primarily for Japanese expatriates, which thanks to the zaibatsu structure was used as collateral for something unrelated and turned into a generic chain supermarket) and I’ve never seen anything like them again. Three survive of the original eight. No maker’s name or anything like that; they’re probably generic factory ware that you’d be ashamed to show your friends, in Japan…
Yeah, if I knew what I had issues with I’d definitely have to strongly consider removing that stuff from my diet. But I don’t have any intention of specifically going vegetarian or vegan or paleo or whatever other regimen that would force me to stare at a cookbook or menu and go “well, I guess I can have these two things, yay?” absent a very clear medical reason.
A common accompaniment of getting older seems to be that the list of things you can’t eat for medical reasons gets longer. Not just “if you eat this it will shorten your life” (which I think is a choice people have a right to make) but fairly immediate serious physical discomfort or outright pain.
I was born in 1949; my list has had plenty of time to accumulate.
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