Cous cous is pasta.

I'd serve it with an acidic salad with bitter notes and fruit, and some kind of vegetable.

Wait what? No it isn't.

How do you think it's made exactly?

Yeah couscous is semolina - but it's certainly different than "pasta"

What is it then?

It's a carb. Carb= bad. Bad= death
Or so I hear

Lazy cooks,

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2...jo-recipe.html

Maybe best bang for your buck effort to deliciousness ratio ever. I'm mainly talking about the pork, but everything is super easy and delicious.

Way too much effort. There are like 50 ingredients in that.

Here's a true low effort / high deliciousness pork shoulder play:

1. Drop a bone-in pork shoulder in your slow cooker.
2. Add root beer until shoulder is covered.
3. Turn slow cooker on low, go do something else for next 18 hours.
4. Pour out root beer & discard bone.
5. Give pork shoulder a stern look, which causes it to fall apart into pulled pork deliciousness.

Optional: add some bbq sauce and/or get some chewy crusty bread to use as an edible utensil.

Chop,

Yeah, I've had that. It's tasty.

But five minutes of chopping some stuff results in 5x more delicious version of pork. It's really so so much better. Trust me, just try it.

I find it difficult to believe anything could be 5x as tasty as root beer pulled pork, especially something with that ratio of cumin & mint. I'll give it a try, but primarily for the purpose of complaining later about how you tricked me.

On the plus side, I'm now reminded of lechon, another low effort high deliciousness pork option.

Even poisson cru is not a 5x, and that stuff is literal mana from heaven.

chop,

The biggest difference here is that the pork taste is so much more intense. It tastes like a whole roasted pig or a suckling pig - way more intense meat flavor vs seasoning/sauce flavor.

Check it out, I think your only complaint will be if you claim it's only 4x as delicious!

Had my eye on that recipe since they posted it, gonna give it a shot this weekend if I can find a suitable pork shoulder at the store.

Polenta + roasted broccoli or asparagus
Spanish Chorizo, roasted potato, romesco sauce
Orange and fennel salad
Citrus buerre blanc, some kind of veggie
Kale sauteed with garlic, pepper flakes, Italian sausage

Indoor cooks,







Not really BBQ and nothing like real smoked brisket but pretty damn tasty.

Roasted like 5-6h @ 250 with some liquid smoke and Worcestershire plus spice rub. Some water/liquid smoke underneath, roasting pan covered w foil. Wrapped brisket for last 90 mins or so to get from 170 to 190+.

Made a sauce from juices and glazed/broiled to get nice sear.

Yum.

Food Lab Cuban pork shoulder is in its last hour or so in the oven, pics/review to come.

Yeah, this is really good. Could've used maybe another half hour in the oven, but 90% of it shredded up easily. That mojo sauce is great too.

Love that dish there

Looks awesome!

I mentioned in another thread that I had ordered this Cuisinart gizmo, which is toaster-sized combi oven that's < 1/10th the cost of the next cheapest ones on the market. It's $265 right now, but I picked it up for $218 and it seems to go on sale frequently. Somebody in the other thread asked me to share my thoughts after some use, so here goes. (Here's the wiki page for combi ovens if you don't know what one is.)

The Good:
It's a fraction of the cost of a professional combi oven, and it works. It has modes for convection, steam, steam bake, warm, broil, and a bread mode. Oh, and it makes toast too, because it's really just a fancy toaster oven that gets steamy if you want it to.

Several of the modes have very low temperature options. Steam goes as low as 100f, so you can proof your dough in it before you bake the bread you're going to use to make toast.


The Bad:
LDO, it's small. It's a toaster oven.

It's not programmable. You get mode, time and temperature. That's it. So if you want to cook something using several different modes at different times you have to make the changes manually. Humidity levels aren't adjustable at all.

Very low temperature settings have significant swongs, like 10+ degrees each way. This thing ain't a sous vide replacement.


Things I have cooked so far:
Broiled some sausage. Broil mode works fine, nothing to get excited about.

Steam baked a cornish hen. Cooked really fast and was incredibly juicy even though the breast meat got up to 170f, but skin was not crispy. Was basically identical to a good supermarket rotisserie chicken, which makes sense since most of those rotisserie ovens also use steam. I thought maybe the lack of crispy skin might be because of the steam, but others claim their poultry skin crisps up so maybe it was operator error. See below.

Tried cooking up some frozen french fries because supposedly they come out well in a steam oven, and they did. Not as good as deep fried of course, but definitely better - and crispier - than a regular oven. So steam doesn't prevent crispiness? idk, I need to try chicken again and see what happens.

Steamed a bunch of veggies. Sticking them in a steamy box is way more convenient than doing it on the stove top. Ditto mussels. I fit 1.5 pounds of them in there, and they were done in about 15 minutes. Probably could have fit more.

Proofed and baked some bread. I know most good breads benefit from room temperature rising, but it's still cool to have my own proof box. Bread mode is awesome. It steams the oven for the first few minutes then switches to just convection heat. Great crust without having to keep opening the door to squirt water in my oven.

Steak! Yeah, you can bring your steak up to temp with steam and then sear. Note swongs mentioned above, tho. I had to set the oven to 140f to get the steak to 120f internal, and I had to keep an eye on it to make sure it didn't go over. Again, it ain't sous vide.

Made some char siu last night with the fattier end of a pork loin. Probably would have come out better if I had just used convection mode, but I have steam so I must now steam bake everything! I'm assuming the novelty will wear off eventually.


Variance:
There's a drip pan on the bottom which collects condensation and needs to be emptied from time to time. This is probably mentioned somewhere in the manual, but I had to learn the hard way.

Sticking your hand in a steam filled oven is very different from sticking your hand in a dry oven. Not recommended!


Overall, I'm pretty happy with this thing and looking forward to playing with it some more. I took some pictures, but they all suck because I'm too lazy to spend time taking good pictures. The steak also had #SearFail and I'd rather keep that to myself. Here's a plate of mussels with butter and chili garlic sauce. Yes, I ate them all.




There's an entire eGullet thread about this thing if you want to read more. They seem to like it.

Thank you for an excellent, interesting, and useful review. You write well.

Breville has one of these things, and I am curiuos to compare.

Brisket fans,

Had one serving of brisket left. Chopped it up and warmed it up in the sauce I made. Mmmmmm.



Should cook more briskets. That one made dinner for 3, a few sandwiches, and this last meal. Great value for awesome meat.

Mia,

And I should make that amazing mojo pork! Yours looks awesome.

Dave Chang pens one of the most interesting conceptual articles about food i've ever read!

http://www.wired.com/2016/07/chef-da...deliciousness/

Bucky,

That was a really good article by Dave!

Best non-tomato based pasta sauce recipes?