Fat Guy

What is it with some people, they can spend decades living on this planet preparing meals every day but they still can't perform basic cooking arithmetic. If dinner is scheduled to be served at time X, and the oven needs to preheat for Y minutes, and the food needs to cook for Z minutes, then you need to turn on the oven Y+Z minutes before time X. Am I the only person annoyed by this issue?

Today I concluded that without acquiring a million ingredients and devoting significant time to the project, I can't make curry pastes better than the Mae Ploy brand. There are several things like this on store shelves. What's on your list?

"This is a pretty common trick down here in Ecuador" "In LA we don't bother to turn them upside down" Once again New York is playing catch up. I guess for something that needs to be contained the lip is helpful so right-side-up makes sense. For something like pancakes, where you want to be able to slide the turner under at a low angle, upside-down might be better.

She was using Pam cooking spray or some commercial equivalent. I suppose aluminum sheet pans are the same in terms of stickiness as non-anodized aluminum cookware (which is what I see most often in non-fancy restaurant kitchens) and roughly equivalent to stainless.

It's possible I'm the last to hear about this trick, or perhaps it's really as clever as it seemed to me when I saw it yesterday. I was at a street fair for my son's school and one of the booths was selling pancakes. The chef/owner of the restaurant Kitchenette was cooking pancakes on a charcoal grill. Rather than using a cast-iron skillet or heavy cast-iron griddle, she had laid several inverted aluminum sheet pans over the grill and was using those as a griddle surface. The pancakes came out great, so the idea is valid at least in this application. Not-great cell-phone photo:

I know the MC team wrote the @home material with owners of the original set in mind. Even though the primary goal is to reach a new audience, the old audience was considered such that the new book acts as volume 6 and the kitchen manual is kitchen manual part 2. In advance of actually seeing it, I'll say I believe the material is mostly different enough that the @home acquisition is worthwhile even if you have a full original set.

The Local Milk people emailed back to say they do 165F for 18 seconds. I think in addition to using a lower temperature than some others, their product is just better. I get more, better-tasting curds from a gallon of their milk than from any other I tried. Most others wouldn't coagulate enough to form a mass of cheese. The ones that would didn't develop proper texture. That's quite aside from flavor and yield.

Here's the scene at the science fair:

I've made an inquiry. We'll see if they answer (the Farmland people didn't).

The website for the Local Milk product has one more specific comment about pasteurization, buried in a different FAQ answer: "What’s the difference between your milk and organic milk? The biggest difference between our milk and any other milk is that it’s fresher and tastes better. Most organic milk has a 60-day shelf life because it’s ultra-pasteurized, while our milk has 17-day pasteurization. Organic milk is more about the farmer’s agricultural practices and how the herd is fed than the purity or quality of the milk. In terms of the use of antibiotics, we believe that when a cow gets sick, you should remove it from the milking herd and treat it, and once it’s healthy and the antibiotics have been washed out of its system, return it to the herd. Organic farmers don’t have this option and must remove the cow completely. If they choose to treat the cow, they can’t return it to the herd."

So this is how the display board looked, roughly: We used different brands of whole milk. We found that some brands worked, and some didn’t. We heated the milk to 85 degrees F. We added citric acid, which curdles the milk. When the milk heated up to 100 degrees F, we added ½ of a rennet tablet, which coagulates (brings together) the curds. We used vegetarian rennet. After we added the rennet, we allowed the milk to rest for 15 minutes. Then we separated the curds from the whey (and we recited Little Miss Muffet, and laughed). We scooped the curds out of the pot and pressed them to get the whey out. We heated the curds in the microwave to get more whey out. Then we kneaded the curds and made a ball of cheese. With attempts 1 through 4 we did not succeed! We tried 3 different brands of milk with rennet tablets. We ended up with something like ricotta cheese (which was yummy on pizza and in baked ziti). It was very frustrating, but I did not want to give up! We were worried we wouldn’t figure this out in time for the science fair. Success! We made mozzarella cheese. It took us 5 tries to get our first success. We did that with Local Milk (a brand of milk) and rennet tablets. After so many failures we thought maybe the rennet tablets were the problem. So we switched to liquid rennet that my dad ordered on the internet from a lab. We repeated the first milk we had tried, and a new brand. We ended up with more ricotta. On Friday, May 18, the day before the science fair, we still had only 1 success out of 12 tries. We were very frustrated and disappointed (and our refrigerator was full of ricotta!). Mom said “Why don’t you go back and do exactly what you did the one time you succeeded? Use the Local Milk and the rennet tablets, not the fancy mail-order liquid rennet.” We were successful! We made 5 new balls of mozzarella cheese – all on Friday, the day (and night) before the science fair! Please try a sample of our mozzarella cheese. It is the most expensive mozzarella you will ever taste. It took us approximately 16 gallons of milk to end up with these 5 pounds of mozzarella, but we did it!

The science fair was today. I'm trying to figure out the best way to post the presentation. Stand by.

Using the 100% Chymosin Liquid Rennet from thecheesemaker.com and retrying with the first type of milk we used, I was able to make mozzarella just now. So, having isolated every variable we could isolate, it seems the most important one was the rennet. Now I just need to figure out how to make cheese that doesn't suck.

I haven't found that adding the citric acid at lower temperatures makes a difference.

Yesterday we received a 4 oz. bottle of 100% Chymosin Liquid Rennet from thecheesemaker.com. Either it is superior to the vegetable rennet we were using before, or Trader Joe's makes better milk for cheesemaking than anyone else. Since we changed both variables today, we can't be sure, but I suspect the rennet is responsible. In any event, while we will backtrack and try to isolate the real weakness in the earlier process, we are now clear of the curd-coagulation problem. We can successfully coagulate curds. Making decent mozzarella from the curds is still an elusive goal, however. Today's mozzarella came out like a pressed loaf of dry cottage cheese. The earlier successful attempt was too much like cold butter. This is the area where we need some instruction, and soon -- the science fair is coming up on Saturday.

Just ordered 4oz.

He's no longer at the synagogue nursery school he went to. He's now in the regular NYC public-school system, where anything goes. There are, however, plenty of vegetarians and such around so I'd rather use something that's not directly from an animal. I have no problem using the genetically engineered stuff; I just haven't been motivated to order a ton of it from a lab-supply place and I haven't found it locally.

The multiple initial failures are going to change the nature of the presentation. I think the display board will be mostly about how we had initial failures and had to isolate the different variables in order to succeed. Our working hypothesis is that most milk in supermarkets (organic included) is pasteurized at such high temperatures that it's not suitable for this kind of cheese making. We're also hoping, in the days before the science fair, to make about 10 pounds of the stuff so we can give out approximately 500 small samples on toothpicks, ala Costco. PJ is a big fan of the free samples at Costco and is really looking forward to giving out samples of his own. This is a non-competitive event with no real rules, so we're not doing anything all that rigorous.

I've looked at many websites and watched many videos. I may at some point test the Curd Nerd theory, but to make it worthwhile to do a 48-hour rest it would have to work with milk that the quicker recipe doesn't work with.

Having tried this a few times now, I can say with some confidence that the milk is the most significant variable. Some brands work, some don't. I can adjust the other variables quite a bit but the same brands work and the same ones don't.

In a startling upset tonight, Modernist Cuisine triumphed over The Art of Living According to Joe Beef at the Beard Awards.

Talk about an unfair fight: Modernist Cuisine is up against The Art of Living According to Joe Beef at the Beard Awards on Friday night.

Word on the street is that Bluestar is the best if you don't care about price, Capital is the best value, and Bertazzoni is the most attractive and pretty good quality at a reasonable, non-Viking price. It's hard to be sure, though. The available models keep changing and it takes a decade to accumulate reliable data.

Performance is solid. My main complaint is that burners have a tendency to self-extinguish on the lowest settings, so you have to operate them just above that level if you plan to walk away for a while. This may be a question of making some adjustments. I don't know.

I've been to both. Two very different styles. Di Fara is the apotheosis of the NYC slice shop. This style has been in decline everywhere, except Di Dara has managed to improve on it. Pepe's represents a subset of the American coal-oven pizza style. I wouldn't really characterize either as having particularly thin crust, and they're not really comparable on a specific level.