My favorite place to get them in the Twin Cities, Smack Shack, serves them both ways. Points for serving both sides of the aisle, but I have only ordered them the proper way.

I felt the exact same way that you did. I never even owned it until recently. But while it is true that any liquid smoke which contains anything other than water & smoke is crap that belongs in the trash, if you have decent quality stuff and use it carefully, you can get very good results.

Equating the results, not the method. Like I said.

The hilarity is that I am being accused of being haughty & dismissive. Apparently I am not allowed to reply to the people who are haughty dismissing me.

I did not equate them. Don’t tell people what they do or do not understand based in your own misunderstanding. The fundamental mistake that the purists here are making is equating process with results. The processes may be different, but the results are equally delicious. And it is insane to keep arguing with things…

I have no doubt that the cocoon you have lived in for your entire life is calm & comforting. I apologize for having threatened that sense of security.

The only nonsense is dismissing things that you have never tried. Try it, declare it inferior, and you will get no arguments from me.

If you think that cooking sous-vide means boiling, then you clearly have not read the directions on your circulator.

You are missing a key difference. I have had them both ways. You have not. Yet you persist in judging something based on biases rather than experience. To be fair, I did the exact same thing. I admit that I was wrong. And I am not pulling all of this out of my ass, either — I learned how to cook them this way from J.…

Do you understand how sous-vide cooking works? We are not talking about boiling here. Sous-vide cooking takes place in vacuum-sealed bags. The water simply provides a medium to circulate heat more efficiently than air can possibly do.

Keep knocking it until you have tried it. Your loss.

Like most others who are questioning me, you are basing your judgment on assumptions rather than experience. I also thought that there was no way that cooking ribs in a circulator could compare. I was wrong, but at least I was willing to try them out to find out for myself. Thing odd, in some ways they are better. You…

I’m sorry, you seem to think that you can make emphatic statements without realizing that refusal to think outside of the box can limit your enjoyment of food.

Vietnamese coffee, which is one of the greatest beverages in the world. Incredibly strong coffee mixed with sweetened condensed milk, served over ice.

Sorry, Charlie, but in some ways it is even better. The texture of meat cooked in a circulator beats anything else.

Yes, just yes. In fact, since it cooks at a guaranteed constant temperature, the meat gets even more tender, with more margin for error.

Believe it or not, there are multiple schools of thought there, like in many other cases. If you like a Maine-style lobster roll instead of a proper Connecticut-style one, you still have room at the table, even though you are wrong.

A sous-vide circulator and a little liquid smoke (plus Prague powder, if you really want the pink smoke ring) is every bit as good. A little finishing in the oven, and voila. (Yes, these are sauced. Sue me.)

Another greyed up foodie here — would pictures of the Vietnamese beef in lot leaves that I had last weekend be a sufficient inducement to let me join the club?

“Winning.”