McDuff

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

meats are roasted, vegetables can be roasted. breads and cakes are baked.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

"Ensalata Caprese"? anybody else see that flash by?

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.

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.

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.

I think it's Jeffrey Hamelman's Breads. I would look for anything by Nick Malgieri. He has books on pastry, cakes, cookies. The Gisslen book is good also.

shirley corriher or alton brown once made the analogy that chocolate is like a sugar bowl into which you put a drop of water. the part that gets wet gets crunchy. if you dump a whole lot of water in, the sugar melts. You can tighten up melted chocolate by flicking water at it with your fingertips. this works great if you need to write with chocolate as it will pipe out better than plain melted chocolate. Cocolate by alice mederich has guidelines for the amount of water needed when you want to put water into chocolate without having it seize.

It's mostly protein and will get moldy after a while. I had that happen with powdered gelatin. Learned to mix it 1 part to 5 parts water, and then use one oz of that for every pound needed to be gelled. so I mixed up a bunch, and it turned moldy fairly quickly.

Raymond Oliver...Ma Cuisine

Google "Color Maker" or variations. It's what we use at the earthy crunchy groceria where I go through this all the time. We write on cakes no problem, on the spot. But I have people who rhapsodize about this that and the other thing while I have to stand there and listen while I have a bunch of other stuff I really need to do. I really resist the custom decoration idea. If they want to put cars or robots on a cake the most I'll do is to make a landscape and tell them to bring in toys. And most of the time they do, and the cake looks ok. It's when they want a border in one green and the leaves around the flowers in another green that my eyes start rolling. Generally I'll work with people while admitting that my skill level for high end decorating isn't as high as my skill level for baking the cake in the first place. I get a lot of requests for vegan and wheat free stuff that I have been able to accommodate. I also have a friend who gets the referrals if I don't feel up to the job.

cut the crust off a loaf of wonder bread. dice the bread into cubes and fold it into the lobster salad. no one will know the difference.

always keep in mind...There are no dormant geniuses. I don't have any problem finding what I need in the books of people who are better at what I do than I am. As far as creativity goes, I have good technical skills. Finest Desserts is a beautiful book, but some of the stuff looks intimidating. Quantities seem to be very small in some recipes.

looks a lot like tulip paste batter for the stripes and joconde for the skin. The tulip paste could be piped or daubed with the finger onto a silpat, frozen so it won't smear, and then overspread with joconde and baked. it's hard for me to tell from the picture is the brown part is raised up. piping it is going to give a flatter appearance to the brown stripes. you could come fairly close to duplicating this with those two recipes, which if you need them, i can post later today.

the trotters are all done, nicely rolled up and chilling in the fridge. I skipped the brining part of corrigan's method. It appears to me that what I got had this so called gammon ham attached to it, obviously not cured. There were two bones in this portion of the trotter so it must have been the part of the leg from the knee down. Ramsay's method calls for slitting the skin on the trotter and peeling it down and cooking this part separately from the gammon knuckle and I can see why. If these pig pieces weren't so long and had all that meat, I never would have gotten enough meat out of the feet to make the roll, because there really isn't any meat in there. I think if you cooked the skinned trotter carefully enough you would get nice pieces of skin to roll the stuffing in. I washed these, blanched them, rinsed them again, and started cooking in clean water with the aromatics and nutritives. They twisted up and contracted and I had to piece the skins together to make the roll. I also deviated in another respect and added a bit of white wine vinegar to the final meat pile, because it needed something tart. I'm going to save the braising liquid, get another package of trotters, and make Trotter Gear.

I think I'm going with a Richard Corrigan recipe off the bbc website for crubeens. It has roasted beets and a beetroot relish with it. timh--do you shop at the earthy crunchy groceria in bellingham? there was a guy on this board named tim who did but I thought he was moving to the left coast a couple of years back. i'm still trying to figure out exactly what a gammon ham is. I ordered White Heat from the uk a few days ago after reading mpw's autobiography. I was always put off by the picture on the cover of the book until I realized mpw is a s##t-kicker at heart. and the tim I knew lived in japan, so it has to be you. i'm over in framingham now.