Dishwasher Salmon
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Side note - in a different video she also did debunking on other food hacks and ended up investigating Russian bot networks who uploads both food hacks for hits and then slips in propaganda.
It's one of the best and strangest and best Youtube channels, it has the appearance of a fun cooking channel, and often, 90% of the time, is exactly that, but then occasionally slips into some fascinating areas like, for example, global coco production lines and exploitation.
Off the top of my head over the years she has also uncovered some very strange child exploitation videos where the audio is different to the content. She has also almost definitely saved a huge amount of lives with her fractal wood burning debunking videos [2].
It's a little off topic but I thought you all here would find it interesting that a Youtube channel called How To Cook That with cookies and cakes as it's logo has done all of the above [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSwzau2_KF8
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/23/1059920/youtube-...
See "Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193748
Bacteria appear when preparing the meal. A salmon, uncut, is internally sorta safe, but once cut open, bacteria is introduced.
This is why you don't see cuts of salmon for sale, at room temp. You see cleaned salmon on ice, or in a fridge.
The risk profile is not the same as eating undercooked salmon that is not intended for raw consumption.
Depending on where you are the salmon might be less likely to contain parasites and your government food hygiene institution might not consider raw salmon unsafe.
My point is that the original comment seems like US-defaultism.
There's just so much misinformation out there about food safety it's insane. If you understand basic hygiene and aren't immunocompromised, there's really not much need to be so terrified of food.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-at-home-...
What you will find is that there are multiple sources with slightly differing times, even from reputable agencies. What I have stated is actually on the conservative side. Here's one source that is on the faster side.
https://scdhec.gov/food-safety-freezing-parasite-destruction
For instance the eggs need to be stored in the fridge because they are dipped in checmicals, the rest of the world is fine without doing that. Same with chlorine in the water, it's not necessary.
It's fairly common in parts of Europe to store eggs in the fridge too, not because they have to be stored in the fridge (like American eggs do), but because it makes them stay fresh longer.
My lack of organisation gave me several times the opportunity to try eggs stores eggs longer than that - maybe 50days - and never had a problem. The only outdated egg I can remember (they are easy to notice by smell !) was “fresh”, strait from the shop, probably small cracks in the shell…
Apparently tests have been done here and found our eggs were perfectly fine in a cake after a year in the fridge[2], but the taste of the egg itself changed a bit after 7 months. YMMV...
[1]: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2023/03/norway-pushes-for-exe...
[2]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/eggene-varer-_nesten_-evig-1.759...
Regardless of the source I always crack it in a mug to give it a sniff first because you never know when you'll get a bad one the slipped through the cracks
Take Ivermectin or other parasite killer once or a couple times per year.
Also one of the main reasons for chlorine-washing eggs is to reduce the instance of salmonella. But the salmonella is only there because the US will not pass regulation requiring farmers to vaccinate hens, as Europe does.
https://waterandhealth.org/newsletter/new/summer-1998/disinf...
It is much safer to freeze even fresh caught salmon. If you are eating raw salmon at a commercial establishment, like a sushi restaurant, it was frozen.
Pacific and various types of river salmon must be properly cooked or hot smoked. The same is true for farmed salmon from freshwater ponds.
Farmed Atlantic salmon can be eaten raw, marinated, or cold smoked, but is best deep frozen. Wild Atlantic salmon must be deep frozen.
https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-n...
You should never eat any fish or flesh cooked that you wouldn't eat raw.
But frequently even fishmongers and chefs themselves don't know the exact spicies of the fish they selling or serving. There is so much of mislabeling in that industry, so it's impossible to know without DNA testing.
I encountered even some celebrity chefs preparing raw dishes from freshwater fish.
Some even doing it to save money, knowing that it may cause liver cancer to their customers.
It's not that eating raw freshwater fish will always lead to the health problems, the fish should be from an endemic region, but it's still a lottery.
Heck, this isn't even true with vegetables. Kidney beans need to be properly cooked so they aren't toxic. One kidney bean is enough to cause stomach distress. This is the reason you shouldn't cook raw kidney beans in a slow cooker - they need boiled. Other legumes have this toxin, but in lesser amounts so it isn't as important and as such, safe with most cooking methods.
I recall reading that that’s extraordinarily rare these days, no pun intended. It’s often okay to cook pork medium rare (or lower).
You get similar differences with chickens: Not all areas require salmonella vaccines, and areas that don't have more cases.
I don't know how many times I've heard people say they need to cook their meat well or need the restaurant to cook it well to kill those parasites. Don't buy meat you don't trust the quality of! Don't go to restaurants where you think the meat has parasites!
Instead of repeating things by habit that they've been told, why can't people stop and think about what they are doing?
Thank you! I take care of what I eat and haven't had any food-related problems in many years. I'd rather skip a meal, buy something else, or go somewhere else, than buy something I think is infested.
As for pork meat, I prefer mine medium rare. There are regions and countries that have effectively exterminated pork-born parasites since decades, there is virtually no risk at all for getting parasites from pork within these regions. If you live in a region or country where this is not the case, you shouldn't buy pork meat at all. The parasites are still there, even if you kill them by cooking them. Do you want to eat that?
And one of those things is to simply not eat raw meat. It isn't about 'trust' but reality. You aren't going to know about the parasites, and the risk is mitigated through cooking. A lot of food-born pathogens are like this.
Put in another light: We pasteurize milk. Despite our best practices, raw milk will always pose a risk of severe food-born illness. The prudent answer isn't to 'find milk you trust' - it is all like this. The prudent answer is to drink pasteurized milk.
Same with meat. Properly cook your meat. Don't eat wild salmon raw if it hasn't been frozen. And so on. You can apply the same stuff to all food - none of it is 100% safe, and you simply won't be able to verify where it all came from. You won't be able to tell by looking or how much you trust the farmer that grew it.
Do you mean the parasite destructor process doesn't work on all species? If so, do you have some info on that?
Is cold smoked salmon considered raw or cooked?
There are other stories in this discussion that are similarly fun but should not necessarily be taken as good advice on how to prepare food. Of course, the devil is in the details and maybe it works for one person because they know how to make it work but without explaining a lot more than is mentioned here, you can't necessarily know if it was really safe.
Please don't go off half-cocked and risk your health because of people sharing fun stories here.
That video was great! Although I notice she cooks it in a large jar of water. I suspect that it would take a long time to heat up all that water, hence it never reaches 62°C. Whereas if you just wrapped it in foil, it might transfer that heat to the fish much quicker.
Also, most bacteria actually begin to die at around 130F, which her chart I think shows it gets well above. (It looks like it gets into the low 60s, which is well above that.)
Also I’m pretty sure the only food-borne pathogen that forms spores is clostridium botulinum, and that’s not found in fish.
Modern energy efficient dishwashers only reach 50 °C. And they also take three or four hours, which makes this idea even less appetizing.
I believe most modern dishwashers simply sense the incoming water temp though and basically just pump the water through until they get to hot water.
She should do the experiment with a dishwasher on higher temperatures
PS: I can't wait to check back tomorrow and see how being at the top of HN impacted the page views. Interesting that it had a small bump in views on Tuesday (probably posted/mentioned somehwere popular) and now a few days later showing up on the top of HN.
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
I guess if you like overcooked salmon.
Food safe temperatures aren't a hard line. Bacteria die off at much lower temperatures than 65ºC (from around 54ºC). What does change with temperature is the rate at which bacteria die. The usual safety goal is to get a 6.5 log10 reduction in bacteria.
The reason that 65ºC is usually chosen as a safe temperature is because once you reach that temperature the time to reach that reduction is very short (about 1.5minutes), at 70ºC it's instantaneous.
At lower temperatures, you have to keep the food at that temperature for a longer amount of time (there are reference charts to be found online[1]). For this to be safe you have to be able to measure and/or control the temperature reliably. This is obviously more difficult to do than just cooking to a specific temperature. In many commercial applications it's just easier to cook to a high enough temperature to not have to worry about it.
There are also other ways to kill the bacteria. I usually cure salmon overnight in the fridge (2:1 ratio brown sugar and salt) before smoking it to 54ºC. The temperature doesn't kill the bacteria but the curing does.
[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...
Her channel was originally a high quality baking channel, but then she did a video titled "Is So Yummy the worst channel on YouTube?" or something like that. It basically highlighted how all these "hands and pans" content farms just have these sped up, interesting to look at videos, but their actual "recipes" were total nonsense. Most importantly, she highlighted how these channels were basically killing the view counts of real baker's on YouTube. I'm sure she saw that these debunking videos were here most popular ones (nothing addicts like outrage) and she leaned hard into it.
The sad corollary is that her original premise was so right - so many video algorithms end up just promoting these flashy, "bright colors and good music" type of videos. People always say "TikTok is so addictive", but I find it addictive the way a room full of cotton candy is addictive to a 3 year old. I can hardly stand modern content sites (of lots of different variants) because it's the mental equivalent of empty carbs.
As someone who has dealt with food safety (both as a hobbyist and professionally) a lot I can tell you most of what you read is based on government recommendations, which are designed to keep the dumbest and unhealthiest people from hurting themselves. The government doesn’t get thanked when you eat delicious, not-overcooked food but they do get blamed when people get sick, so their incentive is to tell you to overcook everything. There’s no reason you need to get that thanksgiving turkey to 165 or whatever the hell they recommend, but they do it because they know a lot of people will measure the turkey in the wrong spot so if they told you the actual 145 a lot of people would be eating breasts that never got close to 130.
I don’t know why you’d want to cook your salmon in the dishwasher, but the time/temp is absolutely fine for anyone not immunocompromised.
So I would say that her video showed that it doesn’t bring it up to the temperature recommended by (I assume) the FDA, but not that it is unsafe, as those are two very different things.
I was contrasting it to things like smoked salmon which have had listeria issues due to poor processing.
Maybe in some places but nor all. Raw salmon is fresh when sold. Most of this fishes are domestic. It does not have sense economically to spend energy freezing a product that you can kill and put in the market by plane the same day.
Also there would be a problem with re-freezing a frozen fish. Sushi bars store the products in a special ultrafreeze storage,for some time. They are obliged by law to do this.
But still her own graph showed it was well above 140C (the temperature at which parasites are all dead) and she was talking entirely about microbes.
So even if you purchased Never frozen farmed salmon and cooked it this way, you’d be very safe. Even if you didn’t cook it at all you’d be very safe, as evidenced by the fact that the government allows it.
Say what you want about our government’s food regulations, they are not at all risk tolerant.
I wouldn’t want to cook salmon in a dishwasher, but I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it for food safety reasons, and her video made me less concerned, not more.
Completely wrong, Spain relies on imports from Norway and Sweden for farmed salmon and the US for wild pacific salmon. Domestic production is negligible: https://www.tridge.com/data-insights/market-price-atlantic-s...
> Sushi bars store the products in a special ultrafreeze storage,for some time. They are obliged by law to do this.
Maybe in Spain, this is not required by the restaurant in the US, some jurisdictions require recordkeeping to prove their suppliers froze this for them (NYC) and most source from a parasite-free supplier but the restaurant itself only needs to maintain safe storage temperature. The FDA guidelines are enforced by local health jurisdictions in the US and may not be in complete alignment. More on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from...
With domestic I mean a domestic animal, one breed in captivity, not one from Spain. I should probably used "domesticated" instead.
> I’d wager the vast majority of sushi restaurants are using regular freezers.
After the 7 days at -20 the fish can just be transferred to a regular freezer. So you're right, most places probably don't have the special freezer in house.
Well yeah every freezer does that.
Ahi Tuna and most farmed Atlantic salmon (Norway is especially safe: https://web.archive.org/web/20200426100625/https://nifes.hi.... ) have low to no parasite risk. However, I would not buy and eat wild salmon sashimi without at least freezing for a week first. Even retailers as big as Costco don't have freezers meeting the guideline.
That's because other people have prepared the fish for you. [0]
> Sushi-grade fish must be frozen before being consumed, to further prevent any of those food-borne illnesses, and this is usually done via flash freezing, sometimes immediately after sushi-grade salmon, for example, is caught.
Her temperature charts show it getting well above 140°F, which is the temperature at which all of the parasites die, and they do not form spores or come back later. So it is completely safe in that regard also.
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/05/25/cooking-meat-chec....
“The safe cooking temperature for all poultry products, including ground chicken and turkey, stays the same at 165 ºF.”
These are the same guidelines you encounter in the restaurant world, however in packaged food production you submit your recipes to process authorities who actually do consult time/temperature charts. But for restaurant and home guidelines they assume (not incorrectly) that it is basically impossible to ensure the restaurant or home chef cooked the chicken until the coolest part was at 145 for 2 minutes or whatever TF time/temp is needed to get the required salmonella reduction.
I didn't know that they officially reduced the temperature and added a rest time, despite the article announcing the changes being over a decade old, so thank you for the link. I'm curious if it was in response to something like so many people ignoring the recommendation that they were getting sick, or if the baked ham industry advocated for it.
This reminds me of a food video I haven't been able to find for years; a dude was doing the Gordon Ramsey recipe for scrambled eggs, he then slipped in a 2 minute rant about money being worthless and the need to buy gold.
He had a replacement for Creme Fraiche, which was useful as Creme Fraiche didn't exist where I lived at the time, but I thought the interlude was so bizarre that I never bookmarked it.
He is also a recreational fisherman.
He would catch a salmon, filet it, wrap it tightly with butter, aromatics and lemons in several layers of tin foil, and bury it in the middle of the truck full of hot mix asphalt. When they reached the fish, it was time for lunch.
Less dramatically, when I lived in Germany, where I had radiators for heat, I stored baby bottles of water on top of the kitchen radiator. It kept the water the perfect temperature for my infant with zero risk of it being too hot, so zero risk of scalding. All I had to do was add powdered formula when he got hungry.
Took almost no time to train and a tap is usually available.
Against: Nothing really, I guess the baby might not drink it (in theory they’re expecting warm breast milk). It’s not recommended to use straight tap water here, only filtered, due to bacteria which is harmless to older children/adults but could be a problem for a newborn.
I’m very currious about the filter you mention. How do you filter bacteria out in a household setting? How do you keep the filter itself clean and how do you QA your solution?
I find it likely that any filtering done by average people is more likely to add bacteria than to remove it. But maybe there is some magical method I don’t know about yet.
But there is also a different reasoning. A more philosophical, heuristic based one: The water where I live is treated by professionals with professional grade equipment. They also take regular samples and try to grow the bacteria to be able to tell if they are doing their job right or not. And the quality, at least where I live, is generally good. To improve something from good to excelent you often need to put in as much work as it was already put in to move it from mediocre to good. It is possible of course, but I would expect the process to be either energy intensive, or fiddly, or resource intensive, or require even more specialised equipment. Most likely all four at once. A simple, easy to use, and convenient filter doesn’t pass my sniff test. Like if it is that easy why wouldn’t the pros just do it at the water treatment facility?
Now of course this is just a heuristic, it can go wrong many different ways. And I admit I can be wrong of course. This is very far from my expertise. But this is how I was thinking about the question.
1: https://www.livestrong.com/article/193977-what-do-carbon-fil...
The filters are things like this https://www.tommeetippee.com/en-gb/product/perfect-prep-repl...
For older babies (6+) then maybe not so important.
In the weaning period when I took over with a night bottle and the wife shut down her boobs I would just sleep with a pre-mixed (not from powder) formula pack next to my body. It would be more or less body temperature and the kiddo would like it :D
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/InfantandToddlerNutrition/form...
Edit: This also seems like a recent development. My children are grown.
https://foodpoisoningbulletin.com/2022/timeline-chronobacter...
The NHS in the UK for example, says to do so (under "Reducing the risk of infection"):
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/breastfeeding-and-bottle-...
However some, in particular Emily Oster, argue that the risk is negligible and that having an overly complicated set of steps for tired parents to follow is counter-productive:
From my understanding the current general advice from public health authorities is to use 70C/160F water.
I left my original comment as a fun anecdote in response to another fun anecdote. In reality, I think it's probably not a good idea to cook food in hot asphalt but didn't feel that really needed to be said, so didn't say it. (How many people are even going to have the opportunity to try that?) Now I am feeling like perhaps it does need to be said and cringing in anticipation of people hating on me for saying it and thereby raining on their party.
I looked up the info rather than go "citation needed." My children are grown. They have already survived whatever mistakes I made in raising them and life has changed, so some of what I did worked just fine at the time but is no longer a good idea.
I provided citations and accurate information to the best of my ability and as neutrally as I knew how in the interest of promoting food safety for people currently or in the future in need of actually feeding babies.
I am also a bit pragmatic and think that it’s most likely not dangerous. But I liken it to using a seat belt. You don’t need it until you crash.
If I was unlucky and my kid got really sick because I was lazy with water handling I would feel bad.
The recommendation appears to be just another attempt by the government to coddle and infantilize (no pun intended) their constituents.
Unless of course you were being sarcastic, in which case i recommend denoting it as such.
> If you do decide to warm the bottle, never use a microwave. Microwaves heat milk and food unevenly, resulting in “hot spots” that can burn your baby’s mouth and throat.
This seems wrong to me. How can any fluid have a “hot spot”? Can’t you just, you know… swirl it a bit and let the temperature even out? Wouldn’t this take no more than 5 seconds?
I diligently followed this advice with my first child and had to wait 5+ minutes every time for my bottle warmer to warm up the milk, while he was crying with hunger and getting both of us stressed out. Now with my second child, I just toss it in the microwave for ~18 seconds for a 4oz bottle, and it’s fine. I swirl it for 5 seconds and drip it on my wrist to be sure.
I sometimes feel like recommendations like these are written for the most braindead possible person, who would put the milk in the microwave for 5 minutes to boiling and feed it to the baby without checking the temp first. I don’t see how the slightest bit of common sense couldn’t prevent any issues here.
I think America could learn a lot from other cultures about improving quality of life just in terms of housing practices.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Cave, isn't that dangerous?" Well, listen up, sport: science isn't all rainbows and unicorn farts. Sometimes, it's polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons! Those big, fancy words might scare the lab coats, but not us. We're the brave souls, the pioneers who push the boundaries and get our hands dirty.
That's the spirit we need to keep alive! Remember, fear has no place in the laboratory. If we're going to make the next big breakthrough, we've got to be willing to take a few risks. So what if we end up with a little cancer? A little cancer never hurt anyone! It's just another challenge for us to overcome in the name of progress.
Let the fumes fuel your passion for innovation.
Cooking is just applying heat to food. Stovetops, grills, and pans conduct that heat to food using metal; ovens conduct it using air; fryers use oil; sous vide uses water. Each provides increasingly precise temperature control. The dishwasher method uses both water and air and doesn’t have much precision of temperature control, but it turns out alright because food is pretty tolerant of imprecise temperatures in cooking.
I like to use the reverse sear method to cook my steak, and I have jokingly referred to it as pas sous vide (“not under vacuum”) because I’m imitating sous vide except using an oven to keep air at a certain temperature rather than using an immersion circulator to keep water at a certain temperature. But in principle you could say dishwasher salmon is pas sous vide as well.
The vacuum sealing (which doesn’t actually leave a vacuum, because its not done in a rigid container, so name aside, sous vide cooking is not, in any substantive sense, cooking under vacuum) is a technique in achieving temperature control, because it means the food is in direct contact with the bag which is in direct contact with the water bath, rather than there being air in the bag insulating the food from the water bath.
> The reverse sear method mimics the temperature control element of the technique, but is just done in an oven, so it’s very much not under a vacuum.
In an oven, the food is in direct contact with the thermal medium without a layer in between, but the thermal medium is air rather than water; air has a similar specific heat but much lower density than liquid water at constant pressure, so even if your heat control is as good as in a sous vide system (with most ovens, it is not) you still aren’t really getting the same effect. Reverse sear is a faster, hotter, less even method than sous vide, with the advantage (for steaks, and things where this is an advantage) of producing greater surface evaporation which provides a better sear.
I imagine if you tried to cook in an actual vacuum, you'd end up with dessicated food instead, as all the volatiles will evaporate.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/what-...
Or better known as 'The Battle of Sous Vader'
Yep, clay. It doesn't really matters (you can use anything) but clay pots have a thick walls and keeps the temp for long, so they are often used for that long after a wood and coal burning stoves became extinct in regular homes. All Eastern Europe has a tons of variations of different recipes for cooking meals in pots.
There's a reason restaurants add an asterisk after meat dishes. There's risk involved in consuming rare foods. The risk is just very small in the US and Europe. Not so small in other countries.
I should say those that it's not so much a question of the cleanliness of the kitchen, but of the confidence in quality control of the meat. Parasites and tainted meat are a lot more common than in more wealthy countries.
I just think stereotyping “Eastern Europe” as some mid-20th century agrarian backwater is very counterproductive to good discussion.
It’s still a useless term.
Also lot of people (rightfully) don't trust the supermarkets - my friends were shocked I just buy raw fish in supermarket - no need to find a personal fisherman!
I probably fit into this group, because in my mind it's better to be safe than sorry. While most of the food you'd get in stores is going to have good quality control and should be safe, "most" is still not "all". I recall a story from a number of years back in the news, where a person had found worms in some sushi that they got, for example.
While that's an outlier, there are also many people that enjoy hunting and eating game meat, not cooking which fully would be just asking for trouble, because you could end up with trichinellosis, essentially with parasitic worms in your muscle tissue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella
Of course, the meat that comes from farms is quite different, but regardless, you only need to get unlucky once to have plenty unpleasant experiences, from food poisoning to worse. So for the foreseeable future, "overcooked" meat it is for me, others can enjoy their raw or rare meats and fish as they please.
If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what radiation would practically do and whether eating something like that would be safe for me either way.
As for the steak, if I was sure that it was quality meat, I might opt for medium well due to social pressure, otherwise leaning more on the side of well done, which some might view as a social affront. As for tartare, I wouldn't eat it either way, the same way how I don't eat raw salmon or other raw meat like that - while there are people over here that do enjoy that sort of thing, it's a matter of taste or perhaps an acquired taste.
As for raw food - can't acquire taste without trying! Raw salmon per se isn't impressive - so many people get it wrong and are not using the fatty salmon belly. I haven't tried tartare yet myself.
I wouldn't be weary of microwaves per se, but rather their effectiveness in making food safer to eat.
Even if we think just about it heating the food up enough to be safe, I've found that it doesn't heat up evenly, especially in the center of a rotating microwave. I guess that's what you get with standing waves, but it makes me a bit concerned.
I did try looking up more information, but found nothing conclusive, sadly.
But purpose of microwave heating it is not for sanitisation, it’s for taste
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis
That may not be totally unfounded. More developed countries have tighter livestock regulations. Not saying Eastern European farms or kitchens are "dirty", but there is just less oversight which leads to more opportunities in the swiss-cheese model of disease prevention.
Actually my default program in the dishwasher is 55C water temp. Which is brutally overcooked for farmed salmon IMO (I prefer it around late 30-s, early 40-s), but it is precise. you can use it as a poor man's sous vide in a pinch I guess.
It might have been a day or so after the grass had been cut rather than that day.
I don't know how safe or clean it was, or how long it actually took to cook, or whether or not you _should_ do this, but we did, and it worked at least a few times
More than one barn has exploded over the years...
(Most let it dry before storing it in the barn...)
I'm curious what circumstances besides desperation not to lose your cutting would lead you to put it up with high enough moisture content that there's risk of explosion.
As a little girl, my grandmother got blown up is a barn explosion, around 1900. She's was fine, but passed on a couple of decades back, so I can't ask why they did it.
Just that every once in a while, she'd make sure I knew "don't do that!"
Most people fantasize about leaving tech and starting a farm.
I know two tech exec 'power-couples' who did just that - its WAY harder and more expensive that you can imagine.
Apropos of nothing, Vincent Price only played bad guys because he was such a nice guy that playing nice guys wasn't acting in his mind.
Edit: Wikipedia describes him as an American actor, art historian, art collector, and gourmet cook.
(Although in his case, "RIP" would involve quite a bit of mischief!)
Here's a clip[0] of that Tonight Show episode, from Nov. 21, 1975. The fish in this case was trout, not salmon, but it -- and some zucchini, etc. -- were cooked in a dishwasher.
(The link below is cued up to just before they walk over to the cooking area, but the earlier part might be of interest too, as they talk about art-forgery, etc.).
FWIW, the guest from the segment prior to Price's said it was the best fish she'd ever tasted.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/1409-cooking-on-your-eng...
I don't know why, but it always brings me back to the memory of my first Mission burrito, years ago — learning the secret menu words [1]; unwrapping our delicious meals as we talked [2]; talking about this startup or that startup, and what we were all going to build... those were simpler times, and we were still young and full of dreams.
[1] Slide up to the counter when it's a little less busy, ask for your burrito dorado, and prepare to have your mind blown.
[2] I remember ours was one of just a few tables that evening. The night was winding down, everyone huddled over their burritos, and the cool breeze drifted through the open storefront. It was like our own SF version of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Of course, this was way back in the day when the taquerias sometimes wouldn't have a line at all, if you knew the right time to drop in and order.
I played around with the idea with my first Jeep Wrangler, a burly car with a perfectly exposed engine block. Never cooked anything, but I was endlessly entertained by the idea that I might. I suppose the transition to EVs will steal this particular daydream from my kids…
https://electrek.co/2023/03/29/rivian-deletes-camp-kitchen-a...
What happens to the rear end kitchen in the event of a rear-end
plus with the through-tunnel - I wonder how easily the machine is completely totaled in the event of a crash causing the tunnel structures to warp/bend/buckle.
I love these trucks - but I hope they took them out for eaither engineering/safety or more simply suppliers/supply-chain issues.
As with dishwasher cooking, the food is wrapped in aluminum foil.
Turkey in a dishwasher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Y4RV8pcY0
Turkey in a car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niegc7QcilM
I wonder if anybody's tried cooking in a lithium battery fire yet?
So a 17% increase in the cost of the fish.
Totally wasteful, but food for thought.
I'm not so sure. IIRC, about a decade or two ago, dishwasher energy efficiency regulations forced design changes that really neutered dishwasher drying cycles. It does seem like they don't get as hot as they used to while drying. I wouldn't be surprised if this recipe worked in older dishwashers that were around when it was first popularized, but doesn't in more modern ones.
Side note - sous vide steelhead is incredible, thinner pieces in my experience work out noticeably better
Most fish you buy will have a warning specifically saying not to eat it raw if it wasn’t frozen safely in this manner.
[0] http://factmyth.com/factoids/most-sushi-is-previously-frozen...
Tapeworms do not develop from bacteria.
Dishwashers are already pretty much air tight. You just need a pump. How strong does a vessel have to be to resist an atmosphere of pressure? But I guess it’s sous vide rather than non vide.
It makes sense, if you think about it, since you would absolutely want some way for the humidity to gradually equalize if you left it alone with the door closed for a while.
According to a brand of dishwasher detergent, machines run within the food safe danger zone.
So, while it'll improve the texture, cooking salmon actually makes it less safe to eat.
Edit: I now see that parent was talking specifically about parasites. Indeed those are killed by freezing beforehand. But a long bath at >130F kills the bacteria.
Oven at 400F. Season to taste. Cook 12 minutes +/- until fish flakes apart but not dry.
Topping: mayo with fine diced onion. Sprinkle dill, black pepper, ad a drop of red wine vinegar, mix. A slice of fresh lemon on the plate.
Presto! Perfectly cooked salmon every time. Your dishwasher won't taste like fish, and your fish won't taste like dishwasher.
At any rate, Brillat-Savarin relays a story wherein he attends a dinner party but the host is stuck with a turbot too big for any pot. Brillat-Savarin saves the day by cooking the fish in the washer/bath tub, using another basin to catch the steam and effectively steaming it. Fisher notes the connection to more modern cookery devices, but it seems like an early-1800s-era precursor to this!
It's worth a try - precision cooking is a way for anyone to have excellent results when cooking. Pretty soon you'll have an immersion circulator, a therma-pen, and a kitchen scale!
There is no precision to the temperature or time control of a dishwasher, and there’s no dry cycle on a sous vide.
Yes it goes without saying it's lacking the precise controls, but it's still the same mechanism of cooking in the end.
A sous vide bath won't replicate any of those steps (except maybe the steaming if you run the bath at practically boiling). Sous vide will cook good salmon but it's not a drop in replacement.
Mine is just a single constant temperature the whole time.
There's certainly no high heat much less sterilization, just bringing the water up to temperature and keeping it there, through pre-wash, wash, and rinse cycles. (Only commercial restaurant dishwashers get up to sterilization temperatures.)
And if the salmon is wrapped airtight, there's no conceptual difference between broiling/steaming/baking. It's all just sous vide, which is none of those. Because it's sealed.
If you wanted to be super pedantic about it, you'd say that none of this is anything like "sous vide" because "sous vide" implies "under a vacuum".
At any rate: dishwasher salmon and sous vide salmon are, literally, the same dish.
Of course the workers would surreptitiously snip a bit of choice meat from the carcass, and drop it in the water to cook. They were not supposed to, but it was difficult to police.
It is possible to sous vide without a vacuum bag in a steam oven, or in certain ovens with temperature probes.
I've cooked 'sous vide' under a running hot tap in a backpacker, which worked great. The water temp happened to be close to perfect (I have a method of measuring temperatures > 40c based on how long I can hold my hand under the running water before pulling out from the pain - surprisingly accurate).
Its about temperature control and efficient thermal transfer; vacuum sealing and using a circulating, temperature controlled water bath are mechanisms of achieving that.
En Papillote and via Dutch Oven are other similar techniques utilizing the same concept. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing?
No bags, humidity control, replaces everything. Immersion circulators, therma-pens, toaster ovens, microwaves, dishwashers - it won't wash your dishes after you make the salmon in it but it will self clean. :)
All that goes on there is an evaporating tray of water and wet bulb temperature sensors (finicky to measure accurately). Imagine an environment similar to a dishwasher or rather, a sauna, where you play not just with the temperature but also the humidity by controlling the steam bath.
The Chinese commercial ones I am referring to use a fill valve with a float (not dissimilar to a toilet tank) to replenish the water from the evaporating tray found at the bottom of the oven. So might get away with an analog circuit.. I digress..
Instead of keeping your food in a plastic bag and recirculating the water through a heating element to keep the temperature you are just constantly boiling water and releasing steam so the entire oven cavity settles at an exact temperature AND humidity level. Hope I didn't bungle that explanation too much.
Anyway GM probably has super fancy home ovens of this nature for $10,000 a premium home gamer version of the sort of thing restaurants/fancy-hotels use. The pros simply front load food trays into them like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cfll7tUcuA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJb9cYXo-4g
The Anova thing is basically a tiny toy version of that.
If you've made the same thing a million times, you probably stopped measuring after the 10th time or so, and if you had arrived at the same exact steps without the tools through trial and error there's literally no difference in the results.
Except for the lunatics writing recipes with imperial volume measurements for dry goods of course.
Funny to think about now, but it's surprisingly clever. The dishwasher just so happens to be about the right temperature and time for salmon specifically.
You've never heard of steamed hams? Clearly you're not from Albany.
I don't know where you're getting steamed steak from though. There's no steaming involved anywhere. This is for salmon only. You'd need higher temperatures and longer times for steak, which is why it doesn't seem like anybody invented dishwasher steak. ;)
I learned this method from the Surreal Gourmet (as mentioned in the article) as a teenager and gave it a try soon after. It came in handy when I went off to college, because it didn't stink up the apartment and bother the roommates.
If you try it, be sure to use a full, normal cycle. Energy saving and other modes might not get up to the right temperature.
Those are the water temperatures. I have no idea if it circulates hot air in the drying cycle, but I don’t think it does.
50 is great for salmon and tuna. 65 might be better for white fish
We used to place a can of spam on the tank's gearbox before a long drive, and by the time we reached our destination, the spam was heated up and ready to eat.
Also not to be outshined by coffeemaker rice if you don't enjoy ingesting heavy metals from mostly American-grown rice (soil issue).
- rinse salmon thoroughly under cold water
- put salmon in a dish
- Add Salt and pepper
- cut a few very thin slices of lemon and cover salmon with it
- add fresh rosemary on top and around the fish
- add a spoon if crème fraîche and some butter on top
- cover with serin wrap
Microwave it at slightly lower power than max power. For 4-5 minutes. Check salmon and cook more if needed in bursts of 30/60 seconds.
The first time you make this in your microwave, cook in bursts of 2-3 minutes to make sure the microwave power isn’t too high.
Typical household microwaves I’ve run into generally didn’t offer me to change the wattage, but instead had a number between 1-10 to choose from.
Just start at a 1/6th power or less if you’re worried and see if the fish cooks at all.
So how likely is it that you'd want to run the dishwasher before dinner instead of after? (not to mention getting imperfectly-cooked salmon)
OK, there's energy savings. Can't argue with that.
This. It can turn disastrous when not done properly. My aunt attempted to make a family dinner this way back in the 90s, and aside from being inedible, it also made the dishwasher unusable.
I use duct tape to keep it all together.
(and btw since salmon can be eaten raw I don't see how the temperature could be an issue)
I'd like to know, too... for the record.
(Is "Tom Scott Did It" going to be the new "Simpsons Did it"?)