So I got a few new gadgets that I'm loving.
First and simplest I got a much better Sous Vide immersion cooker. Anova Precision Cooker Pro.
I bought an anova precision oven. Which is a steam injection oven that's very temperature accurate. It's awesome, I want to play with it more in baking.
I also bought an Instant Pot Duo Crisp which is something like a pressure cooker/air fryer combo. Been tinkering with it. So some things I've done
First is a sous vide carnitas with sous vide queso. I made the tortillas too but I didn't like them that much. Need to work on my forming to get thinner tortillas.
Sous Vide carnitas are seriously the best. It's a 24 hour cooking process where you take your pork butt, through in onions, orange, spices, etc. into the bag and let it rip at 165 for 18-24 hours. What I did to make it easier to work with is threw it in the freezer until I was ready to finish it. To finish it you simply get it out of the bag, save the juice for something ( could add it to a salsa for example, I forget what I did with it. I think I used it to flavor something but man I can't remember)
Sous Vide Queso or Cheese dip is super easy. That I basically have a rock solid strategy. Take your weight in cheese and chop/shred it. Say 400 grams. Add 50% weight in liquid (have used water, milk, and beer so far) which would be 200 grams. Total that weight and add 2% of that total in Sodium Citrate I typically round that up. so this totalled 12 grams of sodium citrate even. Mix all that together But most times I do it I seem to wind up at like 8.7 or 4.6. Anyway. Sousvide that for at least an hour. Sometimes longer. What I've been doing lately that I love is using my oven as I can throw a bowl into it. After all the cheese melts, you simply blend it. Easiest way is with an immersion blender but you can use a regular blender too. This will give you the best Cheese Whiz you've ever had. So for my queso it was a stick of Cabot pepper jack and a stick of cabot habanero cheddar. So those totalled up to about 450 grams and I added about 225 grams of milk and 14 grams of sodium citrate and it's unreal how good it is. Nice and spicy, super cheesy, super smooth. Reheats well.
Second I'm less proud of but part of experimenting is failures happen.
So the successes. in the steam oven my girlfriend made those biscuits which had like a pillsbury grands level flakiness to it. I made those taters in the instant pot which I loved. It took about 20 minutes total to cook. As opposed to 20 minutes to boil or spending a lot of time trying to finely dice potatoes. Then simply put it through a food mill to make the smoothest potatoes in the world. Seasoning is simple, butter, salt, pepper, and garlic. Chicken was super tender and tasted great. I'll tell you how I got it. I took a bowl, added chicken and then made a marinade of some spices, buttermilk and hot sauce. It made for a lovely tender chicken tender. What I did to prepare it was cook it in the marinade in my precision oven on the sous vide setting to 155. Then after cooking it that way for an hour. I did a simple flour and spice breading. As you can see the breading isn't super crisp. It tasted great it was just a B not an A. I want to try this method again but this time I think I'll make a separate butter milk dredge. So go from the marinade to the flour, to the butter milk dredge and back to the flour. See if that gets the crispy cut I want.