McDuff

I made the bagels a couple of weeks ago, following the recipe to the letter, and mine collapsed a little also. They were kind of underwhelming after all, but then, I have an Iggy's bagel for lunch some days. I haven't looked at the recipe for the multigrain in a while, but I seem to recall that it was Struan by another name, and that's a fabulous bread.

Thanks for the show. There was more useful information there than in a lot of the books I was looking at recently. I bailed out of doing my niece's wedding cake for last weekend because it was just too daunting. She wanted that topsy turvy mad hatter thing, which now I think I could have pulled off, but I also would have had to transport it 100 miles. The cake they wound up with looked the part, but tasted like crap. I have a bucket of Satin Ice I may pull out and play with after seeing your tutorial.

That's the one..I've made it and it turned out ok. You make the mousse and pour it into a crust, then press on the bubble wrap and freeze it. Then pull off the bubble wrap and pour on a glaze and decorate with bees made from ganache and sliced almonds.

I once made a fake birthday cake out of cardboard, decorated with cherry tomatoes, capers and olives, for my boss's birthday. He was a priest, this was at a retreat house in front of a room full of aging nuns. I pretended to trip while they were all singing and there was this horrified silence. I turned to the kitchen door and said, bring out the other one, and someone came out with the real cake. Kind of like life imitating life, if you know what I mean. I also did the salt in the chocolate mousse thing. My boss's wife(another boss, though the first guy mentioned is now married) asked me if I were going to taste the mousse. I said, no, if it mounds like this, it's fine. When she left the room I tasted it, and I had used salt instead of sugar. And another time I sent a meal out for the editor of a tony horticultural magazine, the waitress said, Mr. Fibkins said no rice, I said, tell him the chef said he doesn't have to eat it. Seconds later, the real chef was in the doorway with the plate, shaking his head and saying, no pally, you can't say that. Anybody that's worked in kitchens for any length of time has hundreds of stories.

Well, you're little bit sol right now. I just typed a reply with the course outline and objectives, then my big fat fingers did something stupid on the keyboard, and I lost it.

Thirty years ago when I first started cooking and baking for a living, angel food cake was one of the first things I made. It's easy, cheap, teaches you a lot of good lessons, tastes good, and is worth the time and effort to make from scratch. Go for it.

We get visited a couple of times a year at the earthy crunchy groceria by an outside sanitation auditing outfit and I asked the question about our buttercream, which is sometimes left at room temp. The technician said it was ok, because of all the sugar and the low moisture content, but he also memorably said, "Don't confuse food safety with food quality."

That's encouraging, as I have about 10 lbs of Schokinag cocoa powder left in an 11 lb tub. I had a bunch, about 30 lb of Callebaut sitting in the pantry, most in it's original wrapping, and discovered little white worms coming out of it. At that point it was pushing 4 years old. Had to trash it all.

Ah, well...for those of you who haven't read Fergus Henderson's book, or eaten at his restaurant, his marrow bones are roasted. And one who knows how to cook would soak sweetbreads and brains in ice water for several hours. I was only wondering if doing the same to marrow bones would draw out some of the blood and whiten them, and maybe firm them up. And the answer is..look at page 188 of the French Laundry. I knew I'd seen that advocated somewhere. I also most emphatically did NOT liken the taste of bone marrow to snot and sperm, only the consistency.

I've used Hero pistachio paste before, and it makes a delicious icing.

I was at St. John's in September for the express purpose of having the marrow bones. I had seen them described here as beef-flavored butter..but I found the consistency to be more like poached snot and sperm lightly scrambled together and poured into a brittle bone tube. I ate them, but remained uneducated about them. We have very nice ones at work, but I dasn't try to duplicate the experience, even with the book in my hot little hand. Did you notice that the whole restaurant smelled like smoking animal fat..that there was almost a haze in the air, as if giant roasting pans had been left in very hot ovens. Not saying that's a bad thing, but it was almost like the smoke of incense floating around the altar at the Vatican. I think i've seen it recommended to soak the bones in ice water to draw out some of the blood. Think that makes a difference?

Passover is coming. Any reputable grocery store will have potato starch in Passover section, small as it might be.

This is the pumpernickel rye from page 246. I added some onion and caraway to it, and got some liverwurst, as this bread screams for nitrate laden fatty meats and sharp cheeses and hot mustards. I have a bowl of firm starter ready to make a basic sourdough tomorrow. The mother culture is several years old, from Crust and Crumb, and I've made that book's sourdough a lot. BBA is a little different in that Reinhart cuts way back on the amount of firm starter, down from I think 127% to 49%.

I made that once for dinner service at the country club. It came out like a chocolate rice rubber ball. btw Ms. Greenspan...I missed out on a chance to meet you in back in the fall at the Whole Foods pastry thing at the Columbus Circle store. I had too much to do at work, don't like the 1 day trip thing, and thought someone else could handle it. I entered the ice cream cake, which I still haven't had time to put into production.

1978 copy of The Great Chefs of France by Anthony Blake and Quentin Crewe. It would be on the top of the bag which had the Bocuse, Troisgros, Verge, and Guerard books, all from the 70's, in case of a fire.

Maggie Glezer's new book on Jewish Celebration Breads has a recipe for chocolate babka which I made using the Lithuainian (sp?) challah recipe. I wasn't happy with the bread itself, but that was probably my fault, as the dough was very cold and literally took all day to rise. But the filling and unique shaping were fine.

These are a couple of loaves of the Anadama bread and the cinnamon raisin walnut sans raisins and walnuts, but with the optional cinnamon swirl and cinnamon sugar topping. Smells unbelieveable, but I can't slice it as it's for a guy at work.

So is a parm wheel cutter one of those two handled knives? ← No, that's a mezzaluna. A parm knife has a short handle, a round sort of ring of metal like a guard and a short almost teardrop shaped blade. I still think a rigid serrated knife is the best way. Guess none of you had Martha Crawford in pastry school.

I always use a rigid serrated knife, always nibble on a corner or a point, not a long edge, keep the palm of my non-knife hand on the end of the blade, fingers splayed up and out of the way, and put a lot of pressure on the heel of the knife where the cutting is happening. Lately at work I've been wearing a kevlar glove, partly because it's a new safety rule, which doesn't apply to serrated knives, but I don't want to be the first test case of getting cut without the glove.

I have to make a dairy free cake for Friday and they're getting a chiffon genoise with soy milk ganache. If it had to be chocolate, I'd make chocolate chiffon genoise or chocolate angel food cake.

I used to work for a guy who was always yakking about a reduction of toe jam, but he never got around to the demo.

I thought I was very clever coming up with a cake filled with a Bailey's flavored mousse made with mycryo for the earthy crunch groceria. The regional president was in the store today, so they pulled one out of the case to sample and as I was leaving today a co-worker was digging into the remains of it and commented that it "tasted like tiramisu!" Damn!

I made that. I make them all the time, and they hold up really well. But I use a prebaked shell and bought pastry cream. the shell is fairly thick and can take the extra 35 minutes in the oven. The pastry cream is just like anything you could make. They look great for the first two days, then the apples start to shrink a little. I made 30 of them at Christmas this year, double last year's production. Takes a little time. But I used a handcranked peeler this year and that made all the difference in the world in prep time. Check here for pastry cream formula that's very similar.

So I made the brandade. And sure wish I'd thought to buy some black olive tapenade to go with it. It was ok. I made Keller's garlic confit, poached the desalted fish in milk, whizzed it in the cuisinart, put it in the kitchen aid, added some boiled Yukon golds I pushed through a sieve, several cloves of the confit and whipped with the paddle, adding olive oil as I went along. then I ground some pepper into it, put in some paprika because that word jumped out of Keller's recipe at me, plopped it into a gratin dish, sprinkled it with panko and grana padano, drizzled it with olive oil and baked till brown. We ate it spread on home made baquettes. Had it reheated this afternoon with cold fried eggplant slices with a clove of the confit smooshed onto them, and more French bread. I'll be moving on to some other gem of the repertoire de la cuisine.

I tuned into Jacques right at the point where he was zipping it through the cuisinart. He put it in a gratin dish and sprinkled it with Parmagiano and browned it, then served it with toast triangles. Never had it, but don't imagine I wouldn't like it, as I am a big fan of the salted cured fish. And speaking of Sable Island, ever read Farley Mowat's The Boat That Wouldn't Float? I'd love to visit Sable Island, Miquelon and all those places. Went to PEI once and came back and called the Canadian consulate to see how to emigrate.