McDuff

I'm intrigued by what Keller spells out in Bouchon too. We have the salt cod in the boxes at work and I want to make brandade de morue after watching Jacques make it last week on the tube. I looked it up in Balthazar, Bouchon, Les Halles and they all have potatoes, I think. Balthazar uses a garlic cream, Bouchon uses garlic confit. An old Raymond Oliver book says that brandade "most emphatically does not contain potatoes...." The stuff at work is from Canada, but there are enough Italian and Portugese markets around here to give me a good choice. Or I just might try salting a piece myself.

The earthy crunchy groceria sent me to London in Sept, and I got to be very fond of the Danish with the pastry and the fruit I found everywhere. Even the little takeaway Sainsbury's kind of things had good ones. Having made more than my share of them, I do like a good Danish and light sweet coffee. But, now that I think of it, a bialy with cream cheese, smoked salmon, a little red onion and some capers isn't bad either. I found out, pretty much to my horror, at the doctor's yesterday, (won't go near the scale at home) that I've put on a few lbs. What's a fella to do? I love my own baking. I made Malgieri's spice pound cake a week or so ago and we ate it in less than a day.

Amateurs. Miller High Life and cold pizza, Breakfast of Champions.

We have a line of cakes meant for kid's birthday and we were going to get a little frisky doing them. I almost couldn't care less. I put nice bouquets of buttercream roses and leaves on some of the cakes yesterday and came in today to find that a new worker had put low domes instead of high domes on all the cakes and flattened all the roses. Her quote, "You learn by your mistakes." The first one was a mistake, to do it to 6 more was just effing stupid. I have enough to do without having to re-do the decorations. My co-workers just insist on stacking up the freshly baked coffee cakes, to the point where it spoils my day to find them like that. It was suggested to me by one of them, an idiot remark, not to make them so high. I've threatened that the next time it happens, the culprit gets assigned to me for some production training and they are going to make a batch, from filling to streusel to mixing, scaling and finishing and we'll see how they like it.

Well, it worked. I came back from lunch and my boss had "decorated" a cake with it. I tried it earlier in the am, but I'm kind of unimpressed. I had to finish about 15 more cakes, but they got buttecream flowers and whatnot.

I only looked at it quickly and the gun thingie has a little cup on it where the color goes. Suppose it makes sense that it will handle oil based materials with some particulate matter, that sort of sounds like paint. Much too busy today to get near it. Dipped 32 pounds of strawberries in chocolate at one point.

Can you huff it?

We can't use artificial colors or flavors at the earthy crunchy groceria. That's the reason for the spinach, beets, annato, turmeric and blueberry overtones to your kid's birthday cake. I'm doubting that widely available food colors conform.

We got the loan of an airbrush from CakeCrafters or someone, just to check it out, and I don't have a lot of experience with one. Used one at school to spray my little marzipan fruits. My boss has used one a lot, but she won't have time this week to fiddle with it. We use plant based/oil based food colors from something called the Plant Colors Group. Does anyone think I can spray these, with a little thinning out with water?

use them to flavor panna cotta.

A cup of flour weighs about 5 to 5.5 ounces. A stick of butter weighs 4 ounces and 1/4 cup sugar, if it's granulated, weighs about 1.75 oz. Notice the way in which people are recommending a 1-2-3 ratio for this type of dough. You need to use a scale to be more precise. This one should be more along the lines of 2 oz sugar, 4 oz butter, 6 oz flour. 1-2-3. By weight, not by cups and spoonsful. Get the weights correct and the cookies should come out better.

In general I like Cook's Illustrated, but there are only so many ways you can put words together to express the same ideas over and over. The writing all seems to follow a mold. They picture themselves in the test kitchen, doing research, finding out how things work, what are they going to say, "I realized the bread was fully proofed when it looked like every bread baking book author said it would."? It's just their schtick The thing that really gets me is the reliance on sentences with the word "then" just stuck there. "The difference between regular Philly cream cheese and whipped Philly, then, makes the former ideal for cheesecakes and the latter not so ideal." Or whatever. You know that Chris Kimball or a Kimballclone is all over the copy with a red pencil in one hand and their style book in the other.

You're really really light on the flour. 3-2-1 cookie dough in this case would be 12 oz flour, 8 oz butter, 4 oz sugar. I make a lot of this stuff and always use granulated sugar, but I use it for bar bases. I think it will be more tender with confectioner's.

I followed the recipe exactly, except for no smooth dijon and no panko. It came out fine with regular crumbs. I didn't feel like spending as much for the herbs for the gribiche as I did for the meat so I faked it. (Let's be honest here. Three days before payday is not the time I go wacky for one meal.) I still have a hunk of pig puck left so I will do the right thing with the mache and so on this weekend. The guys in the meat department at work are anxious for a bite. My bedtime reading lately has been Keller and Fergus Henderson. I had the roasted marrow bones with parsley salad at St. John in September and wonder if I could do it better. The texture of the stuff was like barely congealed snot mixed with sperm, not a plug of beef fat flavored butter that I had been led to expect. Anyway, the hocks was an easy introduction to the glories of the pig.

Yeah, plenty. But who makes English muffins? The one time we tried them in school the dough just sat there and did nothing. We refigured the formula and realized the dough had 6% salt. I've made them a bunch of times, but never thought they came out like anything you can buy. Good, but not Wolferman's.

Any body notice that this board seemed to hiccup in the last few minutes? 5:00 pm EST? I have five lbs of fresh hocks out on the counter waiting till I finish vacuuming the winter grit off the floors to make the above pictured dish. I'm glad to see the picture, as I couldn't really picture what the plated thing looks like. Three big hocks, $1.49 lb at Whole Foods. Thought they'd be more like 5.99 Several hours later, this is what I got. I had only whole grain dijon. There is no worry that the pile of meat won't stick together. I couldn't believe how sticky the stuff got as it cooled while I was picking it over.

I was taught the same technique, but you know what?, as a fairly good woodworker I don't mind seeing tool marks on a piece of furniture, unless they're really ugly. The slight ridges on the apple are like the ridges left when one planes a board with a slightly crowned blade. You can see the handwork.

I had a pizza stick a little bit on me tonight too. A little more cornmeal, plenty of flolur on the bench when you push out the dough, and fast fast with the sauce and the toppings. I think the longer the dough sits on the peel the more chance there is of a section of dough that may be a little moist with not enough cornmeal sticking. Food Unwrapped was inside Domino's tonight and I saw a guy just absolutely cover both sides of a dough round with cornmeal.

I'm not taking credit for Pierre's formula, no. But I have made these in the past and didn't care for them, and with some of the tips I read here I got them to come out the way I wanted. I have them all costed out and made a triple batch, got 60 rounds, so that makes 30 cookies. I figure it's something we'll sell out of the pastry case rather than bagging them up. The store's big boss liked the first samples so much he bought the ones I put together for some pictures. We have what we call a pastry summit on tuesday and I'm going to finish off the rest of them and bring them along with the paperwork. I'm also bringing a passionfruit curd tart with creme chantilly and raspberries.

I'd really be curious to know which Whole Foods you got them at. As far as I know, no one in the new england area is making them, until these hit the pastry case......

I bought the book the other night and was pleasantly surprised when I opened it because it already feels like an old friend because the layout is so similar to the French Laundry. I'm intrigued by the trotters also and if I can find fresh ones, I'm going to make it. I bought beets and mussels on the way out of work tonight, tomorrow is a snow day so I'll see what I can do with them.

From my admittedly limited experience using mycryo to temper chocolate, it makes it almost brittle. Gives it a nice snap, exactly what you don't want.

Beautiful looking stuff. Seeing pastry like that only makes me want to try harder. I only have one question...when did the spelling of Sacher change to Saccher, or is that some arcane version?

There's an Armenian flatbread recipe in William Sultan's book that I've used for seeded flatbreads, bread sticks, and thin crust pizza. And Reinhart's flatbread with the cornmeal is fabulous stuff. I used to roll them almost two feet in diameter for display on a buffet.

I want to make the chocolate macs, and looked them up in Herme and Greenspan. I don't care for the idea of the water on the pan thing. Healy and Bugat recommend doing that and it's just such a pain. Herme says to moisten the paper so you can get the macaroons off right away, I imagine they would continue to bake if left on the pan, but having made multiple thousands of almonds macs which cling with the same tenactiy, I used to pop the sheet pans right into the freezer, and when the pan was cold, you could pop the cookies right off. Wonder if it works with these.