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McDuff

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  1. McDuff

    Sfogliatelle

    there was a cake boss episode where they made these. First they made a dough and then ran it through a sheeter several times. When it was thin enough they sheeted it out onto a long worktable and while of them skated shortening over it with his hands, buddy began rolling it up and pulling it into a longer and longer log. then he cut the log into thick disks and basically the drill is to push the center of the pastry out, telescoping the layers. buddy then piped pate a choux into them so they won't collapse when baked. looks like skilled labor to me. i had one from modern pastry in the north end of boston and you could see and taste the pate a choux. neat trick. i tried them at home and it was a no-go. you need a big lump of dough to make a roll with enough diameter. a pasta machine just won't do it.
  2. McDuff

    Xanthan

    I tried to keep cole slaw from leaking too much by using xanthan gum recently. I didn't care for the mouthfeel, but I probably used too much. A week later the cole slaw hadn't leaked a drop.
  3. We went Friday night when it opened. I enjoyed it. Not as much actual cooking as I would have liked, but I doubt the average movie goer would much care if one floured before braising or not. I didn't mind the present day scenes. The J/J book I found to almost unreadable, just too much blah blah blah. I just picked up Julia's biography from the library and have spent some time recently browsing through MTAFC, kicking myself in the butt for not attending a meeting of the Professional Pastry Guild of New England several years ago at Julia's house in Cambridge.
  4. every time i walk by the coat rack at work and skid around on the hangars on the floor i think how it must be the worst part of the linen guy's job to deal with coat hangars. some comedian, maybe woody allen, had a theory that coat hangars "did it" in the dark in closets and that's why there are so many of them.
  5. Anybody know how to get at the fluorescent light on the left side of the door jamb of a double rack Revent? I looked all through the documents that came with it, nothing. it's not fun working with it when you can't see inside.
  6. meats are roasted, vegetables can be roasted. breads and cakes are baked.
  7. do a site search for the word "gelatin" and you find everything you need to know. this has been gone over time and again. it's tricky, I find.
  8. There's music pouring out of the ceiling in every corner of the earthy crunchy groceria where I work, except in my bakeshop. I used to work with a gentle Sikh who would shake his head at the caterwauling crap other people had blaring at 6 in the morning and he would say, "In my country we have morning raga..." I couldn't work in an environment where there was constant music, unless I had total control over it.
  9. to answer my own question...it was two bellys in the bag, meat side in. I wondered why there was fat on both sides of it. so i have 5 lbs curing for bacon, 5 lb curing for pancetta, some is on the stove right now using a recipe from FAT for red cooked pork belly and the rest is chilling under weights in the reefer after being braised with white wine, a lot of garlic and some other aromatics and herbs.
  10. I just came home with a whacking big pork belly from whole foods. 16.5 lbs and it's the size of a sirloin strip. I'm going to make bacon, try pancetta, and do a gordon ramsay thing with some. It's got a lot of fat on the outside, no skin, and after I trim some of that off and find that it may be too thick still to roll nicely, does anyone think it would be a problem to butterfly the piece I'm going to use for the pancetta?
  11. I used at work at a bakery where some of the breads were 20% honey. We used fresh yeast and had no problems. You may be right about seeing that in Glezer's book. It's hard to find SAF Gold on a grocery store shelf. The red is available retail in 1 lb bags for less than 5 bucks. the only place i can think of to get a single bag of Gold is King Arthur Catalog.
  12. "Ensalata Caprese"? anybody else see that flash by?
  13. From another old-timer--it made me cringe to see her break into the cheerleading routine. And have you ever seen Ramsay's wife? No comparison.
  14. Just bought The River Cottage Meat Book, and I'd be gratified to have time to look at it, but my wife is more interested in Obama's dog.
  15. I'm watching the rerun and wondered about the "red wine bernaise" and Carla just referred to it as "bordelaise beurre blanc." C'mon now. Which is it, and Ripert must be some kind of genius to make "red wine bernaise." Even i have made red wine beurre blanc, though i think it's an abomination.
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