Demi-Glace

Appreciate to pointers on local spots. I almost always bring back a couple of things from Cochon at least (especially if I have a direct flight) so I will check them out.

Does a 60 qt pot count as a cauldron?

Yes, apparently an essential component of Japanese kitchen sorcery.

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I am told that the low wide version did get used as a bathtub when my stepson was a baby!

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I looked and I guess they come as big as 240 qt; probably you’d use one like that to deep fry a turkey outdoors or something or make enormous amounts of sauce for canning. You probably can’t also easily move it while full as it’d weigh ~480 lb plus the weight of the pot haha

The biggest I’ve ever seen in use were in ramen shops, and since some of those have been simmering for years, I’m guessing moving the pot isn’t much of a concern for them, lol.

It was, however, a concern for us, which is one of the reasons we put in a dumbwaiter from the kitchen down to the basement where the walk-ins are located.

Yeah the one at Tsujita annex has been simmering since they opened ~17 or so years ago. I think some pho places also have had oxtail going for years or decades too.

I realize we do have one 60 qt pot as well, but the people we’d bought our house from had built this corner drawer with a rotating carousel thing that fits it as well as a bunch of 5 lb jugs of protein powder.

Our stock pot is 26 quarts and I’m feeling…inadequate :smiley:.

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60 quart pots are routinely used in southeast Louisiana to boil seafood, primarily crawfish. Almost always used outside or an open shack on a propane burner. Pots to fry turkeys have much less capacity and are more tall and narrow to conserve oil.

Funny you mention - our 26qt is on the stove today foe chicken stock, and I was thinking how big it looks on its own.

Sarah - I know that your home kitchen can be considered professional. But I’ve understood that no matter how high end stoves and ovens are, one is limited by a residential natural gas feed into the house, with commercial gas lines being significantly more powerful. Trying to bring liquids up to boiling in such large pots would be time consuming with your average residential gas supply. Are you able to compensate for this?

Yes. If we need it to come to a boil more quickly, we put it on the wok burner, which puts out 250k BTUs and can bring that pot to a rolling boil in like 10 minutes. But in most cases, we aren’t in a hurry and just use the hottest burner on the Bluestar. It takes a while, but when you are going to simmer it for 16, 18 or more hours, we’re not really in a rush.

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Wow. A house partly designed around storing a stock pot. I am in awe :bowing_man:
How big is it?

I don’t know its dimensions offhand. We have two shapes - one normal shaped for a stock pot, and the other shorter and broader.

Honestly, I think everyone designing a kitchen for a remodel or whatever should measure all their small appliances and make sure their cabinets and sized to fit. Almost all our cabinets, except the ones high up above the fridge or similar, have pull out drawers (so much better than things getting lost at the back of a shelf!) and we made sure that the drawer that will hold the KitchenAid and Cuisinart will accomodate their height. It’s not that hard, but a lot of people don’t think of it. We designed a customer drawer for the chamber vacuum sealer as well. I think @Zachgoldstein might have said it was the most impressive thing in our kitchen, lol.

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Michael I didn’t know you were in NO….

Do you know of any access to the original Crawfish Monica? I used to order from one of the regular Creole food sources but they don’t have any info for several years. I think Rouses sold it for a bit but never shipped.
I’ve made it a bunch of times but just love the original of course. They just sold the sauce and you add the Crawfish and pasta.

20 years ago there was a Folse outlet that would actually ship Death by Gumbo! (Yeah I’m a big dark roux fan). Even the folks at R’evolution don’t believe me on that one :joy:
It’s much more difficult to recreate.

The short answer is no, I don’t have a source. The dish was created by Kajun Kettle Foods many decades ago and the name “Crawfish Monica” is trademarked. So there are plenty of people making variations of the dish being called by other names commercially. It shows up at JazzFest every year being called by the original name so someone is still making it. If I was looking for a knockoff recipe John Folse has a good one.

I think I remember Tom Fitzmorris having one as well. Either in his hungry town book or the 100 dishes magazine.

Fitzmorris also did a cookbook called New Orleans Food.

The original at Jazzfest

Come to think of it, I have a large heavy duty pot that I use as a turkey fryer. Not sure the size, but it is at least 40 quarts (80 pounds of water) and is probably over 50 quarts. Now all I have to do is find the veal bones.