McDuff

The guy across the street forages these all fall. He comes home with pounds and pounds. He soaks them overnight to loosen any dirt, cores them out like a cauliflower, and then sort of strips them. Pulls them into strips, which they will do easily. He simmers them for 10 minutes or so and then freezes them. I had some recently which I put into some leftover sauce from a short ribs and gratineed them. He sautes them with garlic and keeps adding stock and letting it reduce. They come out nice and crisp. At the end he throws in some bread crumbs and lets them brown up. Once you boil them you can add them to anything you would add other mushrooms to.

You want to be shopping for nougat cutters. Cheap flimsy cutters will crumple if you have to do this a lot. Nougat cutters are expensive, but will last your lifetime.

Or you could just go ahead and make the damn pot, in much the same spirit of Ferdinand Point's comment that painting the garden gate allows a person to claim to be a painter.

I made the mistake of adding several new cakes to our product mix at work, all charlottes with a chocolate or fruit mousse filling made with mycryo. I've been freaking out with the ladyfinger flopping over, so the tip about the meringue powder glue is a good one. I line a cake pan with acetate, drop a parchment round in the bottom and start building. But I wanted to speed up the process so I just made the cakes by piping the mousse onto each round and stacking them, then running a skim coat of mousse around the outside, stuck on the ladyfingers, wrapped it in acetate and then put a gay ribbon around it. Much faster and less frustrating. When I build them in the cake pans, I freeze them, invert onto a gold cake board and then pipe the whipped cream. They pop right out because of the acetate. Yesterday's were pear mousse and gingerbread.

I have a couple of issues with that recipe, over and above the omitting of the degreasing. Garlic really has no place in haute cuisine so I would leave that out. I would deglaze with stock, unless I could find a reference to flambeeing, add the demi, then when that was reduced enough, the Madeira, which is a fortified wine and not supposed to be boiled. Then finish with the butter. Oh, and I wonder what's up with the foie gras. Is it canned pate, or slices of fresh foie gras one lays apparently au naturel onto one's meat? I have a book called The Cuisine of The Belle Epoque, and I'm gonna go look this up right now.

What's next for me is to surreptitiously slide the plate containing the confection to the edge of the table, and dump it into the trash. It's a fun little project, but I'd rather waste the calories on pizza or ice cream.

The Houndstooth on Boylston St in Boston, all the cooks and waiters had drag names, some were in fact actual drag queens. Bob, Mr. Pee Pee, comes in the kitchen and grandly announces, "My name is Loretta, my face seats five, I'd like to pick up table 8." Overheard in the dining room. Another night Rex Reed was in the dining room and Kenny, The Diva, came to the service bar with a cocktail rejected by Reed and hissed, "Miss Reed says if there's any liquor in this, it's foreign to her."

Most importantly, make sure your flame is not so high that you boil all the liquid away -- that could eventually result in a fire. ← I was once awakened at 3 am by choking smoke when a stock I was making boiled dry and then charred the bones halfway up the pot. No smoke detectors and no brains.

I'm fairly certain that, as someone said earlier, the exact recipe for Sarah Nelson's gingerbread is kept secret. However, a "shortbread" recipe may well be closer to the actual recipe than anything else I have seen. Grasmere gingerbread is definitely more biscuit-like than cake-like. It is fairly hard - and definitely lends itself to dunking. It is also fairly thin - a bit under 1/4 inch thick from memory. Reading this thread is giving me withdrawal symptoms as I haven't had any Grasmere gingerbread in years! My parents used to live near enough to the Lake District that we could visit Grasmere at least three or four times a year... ← I've made the stuff in the Blake/Collister book and it is more like a shortbread. didn't really blow my skirt up at the time. Maybe I'll try it again. Speaking of gingerbread, I've been making a gingerbread and pear mousse cake at work. Yumm.

I think the sugar solution must be very acid because when you put the soda in there, it turns brown and foams gigantically in a split second. You can knock it down if you stir it too much. If you put in too much soda, you'd really taste it. This is something that I would never have thought that Cook's Illustrated would be doing. Macaroni and cheese over and over, but not this.

Knock yourself out.... 1 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup corn syrup 4 t honey 3 T h2o Bring to 300 degrees. Add 1t baking soda, whip 5 seconds (or less) then pour onto a greased sheet pan. This stuff comes up fast fast when you put in the soda. Quite instructive.

Make the Levy rye from Roses's Bread Bible. Not bad at all.

Take close look at the ingredients on said batard. Is azodicarbamide(or whatever the hell it is) included? I'm not familiar with Price Chopper, but I'd bet bagels to bialys that with a name like that you're getting some quality chopped somewhere along the line. If the ingredients list a whole slew of jaw-breaking chemical names then they are using dough conditioners which basically eliminate bulk fermentation, which we all know is detrimental to flavor and structure, so that they can literally pump this bread out. Conditioners make it possible to run dough through shaping machines and extruders and all kinds of nasty, ugly stuff. It's the exact opposite of artisanal bread...bizarro bread, as Jerry would say.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for. The Baking Book by Linda Collister and Anthony Blake has a recipe for Grasmere shortbread and a picture of Sarah Nelson's gingerbread shop sign. What's the rules on posting the recipe in an edited fashion?

I used to bake san fran sourdough in a double rack rotary hobart oven and always had the same problems of paper thin crusts and cuts that healed and never broke open. I think it's inherent to that kind of oven. They're not really any kind of hearth oven.

I helped move a vintage 1950's Hobart 30 qt that was amazingly big. A good strong dolly, hold-downs, and come-alongs did the trick. The pallet jack sounds like a great idea.

I'd have to think about that. I just polished off the last little bit of the mushrooms.

Guy across the street called me over the other day and popped the trunk on the lebaron conv. I could smell the mushrooms before I could see them..trunk was full of hen of the woods, he calls them senoritas. Huge..pounds and pounds of them. He soaks them, rinses well several times, cores them like a cauliflower and then sort of rips them by hand, then boils them and freezes them. He usually squeezes out a hot Italian sausage and browns the meat, adding the mushrooms and then deglazing and reducing several times with chicken stock till the mushrooms are "like padada chips." I treated a smallish one to the same thing, but added the leftover gravy from short ribs brisket style and several cubes of well cooked stew meat. Gratineed it in the oven with good parm reg and some fresh bread crumbs. Good.

Yeah, well i just got in, and I'm a little stunned. It was 8 zip a few minutes ago but they apparently just got something going. game ain't over yet, but I'm going to bed with the two vintage cheesemaking books I just got from ebay.uk. One from 1919 and one from 1924..cost a bloody fortune, wonder if they're still relevant. As far as the ball game, there's alway tomorrow.

I went on a chicken wing thing last NFL playoffs watching the Patriots. I dry them, dredge in seasoned flour, saute till lightly golden brown and finish them in the oven in the frying pan. Then pour off the fat and pour in a bunch of Texas Pete wing sauce and reduce till thick. May have to come up for something for the Red Sox, but not tonight as I'm working till 9:45, at which time the Yankees hopefully are toast.

Hi Chef Peter---I talked my way into auditing a class of yours a few years ago after you were on The Connection with Chris Lydon, and then ran into you at graduation in 2000. I was building an Alan Scott oven and asked you to come to the first firing but you were too involved with American Pie. Well, I finished it, and it works, but even though my bread passion has not abated, I don't use it much. It just sits in the back yard taking up real estate. It's quite capable of putting out as many pizzas as you feel like making, as long you occasionally rake some hot coals over the hearth for a bit. I've always been too impatient to let it cool off enough to bake some fabulous bread, but the last time I fired it I got some great looking stuff that I made from the C&C focaccia formula. I always use that for ciabatta. I did have a chance in the spring to work with a guy named Ron Ullman in Smithfield RI one Sunday morning helping him with his bake. He brought a bunch of samples into the Whole Foods where I work and we're thinking of bringing his stuff in. A semolina fennel raisin bread was particularly toothsome. I just spent a week in London and saw some great looking bread. Way different than what you see in a grocery store in the States. I was attracted to the bread made by St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfield and wangled an invite to help the evening guy for an hour or so. I don't know that I have a specific question. It seems that the more I know about bread, the less I know. Been trying the turning technique when I bake at home. Made a mother lode of Neo-Neopolitan pizza for a party for my daughter, by hand instead of the univex and it came out great. Bakers seem to live large...you enjoy being in the universe, apparently. Calise was a barrel of laughs, Ullman is truly an iconoclast and this guy Christophe at St John was fun for the two hours I spent with him. I guess that's my question. Why do you suppose that is? I always have looked on my now 30 year career of feeding people and making things for them as nourishing both them and me. Nothing I like better than saying..."You're welcome."

Kuan!!!!! Nice to see you....TBH

I always liked the term "Statler Breast" for this treatment. Actually never heard or saw of it referred to as a Frenched chicken breast.

I have a plastic barrel down in the cellar right now which has been there for several weeks, and it's not really cool down there. I peeked at it the other day, it has white film on the brine that's sticking up around the plastic bags I used to hold it down. I don't know. I'm scared to eat it. I was away for 8 days and couldn't tend to it, not that I was doing anything to it other than looking and obsessing. It was cheap enough that I don't care if I need to pitch it. But it sure looks and smells like pickled cabbage. How does one know if it's gone off?