McDuff

Why bother? You'll probably eat them so fast you won't notice the difference. And if you dip them and refrigerate them, they shouldn't bloom Tempering chocolate is actually easier than you think. Couverture is a name for chocolate which has extra cocoa butter, it's more fluid when melted and covers in a thinner layer. I don't think it's any more difficult to temper.

Once you have the cake assembled with straws and whatnot, drive a sharpened quarter inch dowel right into it, pinning all three layers together. Get a sheet of foam insulation at Home Depot, some of the wire thingies used to hold fiberglass batts between floor joists to pin the foam together and some duct tape to make sure and make a box that the board the cake is on exactly fits into. Use bamboo skewers to pin the cake board to the foam. If you have planned this part well, you can slide the last piece of foam into the opening like a door and pin it in place. Set this contraption on a level surface in your volvo station wagon and you can drive it to san diego and back no problema. I've delivered cakes 50 miles doing this.

If you notice the sub title of Crust and Crumb--master formulas for serious bakers. Formulas is the tipoff that the book will have weights. His books are published by Ten Speed Press, I think, and his latest, on pizza, does not have all the weights and percentages. And his earlier ones don't either. Once you get conversant with weights and baker's percentages, there's a subtle but detectable snobbism creeping in. If you ever saw my bread notebook, all in pounds, it looks like gibberish, compared to what most home bakers are used to seeing, two cups of this, one cup of that, add flour till it feels right. It really is so much easier to look at a formula expressed in weights and percentages-- you can make an evaluation of it fairly quickly. 70% water-wet rustic style dought. 55% water, no fat, probably a bagel type of thing. It's also easier to scale formulas up and down in yield.

I brought this up with an instructor at J&W and she said it was too much work for the author and publisher, but this omission would keep me from buying this book. I find it really annoying when bread books in particular don't have weights. Nice bunch of pix though. that must have been fun.

My wife is 6 years down the road from an autologous bmt for non-Hodgkins lymphoma and suffers daily from acid reflux and indigestion. She can eat almost anything, but abhors the smell of boiling vinegar and can't stand the feel or look of raw meat. She seemed to be able to tolerate almost anything when on chemo, but was noodgy about the raw vegetable thing and really followed the recommendation to stay away from buffets, especially after we saw an old man flick a booger into egg foo yung at a local Chinese buffet.

I think you were probably done right there. It really sounds to me like you reduced it too much. If if coats a spoon and has a nice well rounded not too sticky mouth feel, I call it done.

Pastry cream made with flour will freeze...made with cornstarch not. Made with arrowroot is ok. It all has something to do long chain amylopectins, or something. The weeping is called synerisis.

That book is not at all hard to find. Go to abebooks.com and it will turn up. I bought it off there recently after a sneak attack at EBay, where someone scooped it out from under my nose. It mentions a book called Skuse's Complete Confectioner, which has apparently been reissued, and I want it.

I've used it several times now, but I am having trouble getting Cacao Barry to verify that it is what we at America's biggest earthy crunchy groceria would call "Clean." So I can't really use it in any products to sell until they can verify that. I used it to temper chocolate the other day and it worked great. I spread some on a sheet pan to try making ruffles, forgot about it, and it's still sitting there on the rack, not a trace of fat bloom. I've used it in Bavarian creams, made a lemon mousse with lemon curd and whipped cream and next time I make chocolate mousse, it's going into that. My boss said he would spring for the book, but I haven't seen that happen yet.

No, I don't that's the case all the time. Sometimes it isn't so much what more one can pile on, but what can be taken away, distilling something down. This recipe just has too much going on in it for me to take it too seriously.

I have a blueberry sour cream coffee cake in the oven right now, in that very pan pictured above. But as far as the little liquid center chocolate cakes go, I looked at that recipe and it looks a little contrived. You don't need ground almonds in there, that's some pastry chef showing off. In fact, you don't need to make these at all, at least this week. They're on sale at Whole Foods.

I dissolve one third of the sugar in the whites at about 120 degrees, add one third after the whites begin to mount, then fold in the final third. Works too. p.s. I've always found that one way to get along with the boss is to let the boss be the boss.

Once you find and fix the mistake in it, the Levy family rye in Rose's bread bible is a fabulous loaf, if you need a jumping off point. I agree on the underproofing thing. Rye can pop open to make some really ugly bread. But there is nothing more satisfying than one done right. Screaming for nitrate-laden fatty cold cuts, sharp cheese, hot mustard, pickles and draft Heineken.

Right here, Wendy. I'm also wondering if the yeast produced for grape and beer fermentation is formulated to eat different kinds of sugars. Yeast for breadmaking feeds on sugars that are released by enzymatic action. It can't feed well on sucrose. But grape juice and wort are full of what, fructose? It wouldn't even occur to me to try using champagne yeast for breadmaking. I tried it for root beer, and used TOO much. I lost 14 out of 16 bottles to concussive explosions. I had to stop making the stuff when I realized that drinking a batch of root beer meant I just consumed a 5 lb bag of sugar. Try a web search for Craig Ponsfords beer bread if you want to fool around with flavor. It has roasted hops and dark beer in it, made with both a poolish and sourdough mother.

I took the class at Johnson and Wales in Providence. Basically we took each major baking ingredient and dissected it in the classroom and then did an experiment with it in a bakeshop lab. Things like hypothesizing how you could replace sugar in a cake with invert sugar and what you might expect when it was baked. Or changing a leavening, or how much gelatin was needed to stabilize whipped cream. I've got a whole three ring binder full of that stuff, and my guess is that her book is based upon the class notes we took. She's also published a bunch of articles in Chef Magazine with Martha Crawford.

Lucky me....I had Paula Figoni for classroom instructor for Baking Formula Technology. How could you not be irresistibly drawn to someone who described a picture of a test muffin as "perky." She must be the rising star of the food scientist circle, as she has appeared in a sidebar in Cook's Illustrated. I had to take the class to get an A.A.S. in baking and pastry arts and I found it to be invaluable.

There is a good recipe in The Chocolate Bible by Christian Teubner. It has the cooked chocolate candy glaze, which I found crystallized a little. I used to work for an elderly Rumanian Jewess whose family had owned a pastry shop. She made a good one, and an excellent Linzer, which bears an eerie resemblance to the recipe in the Time Life book mentioned earlier in this thread. I have that book and will see if the Sacher is anything the same. Her's was flourless, had bread crumbs instead. Creamed butter and sugar, eggs, melted chocolate, then meringue and crumbs. Glazed all around and stuffed with apricot, then chocolate.

I would very definitely like to find those seeds. Those are delicious.

Are you kidding me? "The rare professional chef....." When I cook at home it's almost always food I shopped for and paid for, lugged into the house, put away, prepared, served, cleaned up, and emptied the trash and sorted the recycling stuff, and lugged it out to the curb on Sunday night. The women I live with lack the muscle groups that professional chefs use to nourish other human beings. One daughter lives on macaroni and cheese, won't eat meat, but makes an exception for Bell and Evans chicken wings in Texas Pete hot sauce. I don't know what the other daughter eats, as she is hardly ever home and won't be eating much for the next week or so after having her tongue pierced over my objections today. 15 next Friday! My wife will eat almost anything I cook, but comments on it. I can be upstairs and smell when she has the fire too hot under a saute pan. I can't go in the kitchen when she cooks, and she doesn't want me there. She'll cleanup after herself, but in what I don't know is either a fit of exhaustion, or passive aggression, leaves one pan soaking in the sink. She absolutely hates it when I freelance something. Wants to see a cookbook there. Doesn't understand that a guy who worked all those years as a saute cook can improvise all night long. I can make a meal out of the dregs of the cabinet and refrigerator, not swill, understand, but a box of pasta, a little oil, whatever veg and cheese or gardenburger is hanging around. Won't kill you, tastes ok, but it isn't grilled shrimp, and I am unfairly judged by the amount and frequency of grilled shrimp that comes out of the kitchen. I was trying to explain to daughter no. 1 the other night how a person can have an intense intellectual interest in a subject, with Fergus Henderson propped on my belly in bed, and an emotional disconnect from it, as in NOT wanting to cook anymore for people who whine, won't eat it, or don't come away from the computer card game when I say the leg of lamb with roast tourneed potatoes, haricot verts with garlic, and the six dollar jar of mint jelly is ready, served on the damn Wild Rose antique platter I bought on Ebay, carved with a Hammacher Schlemmer horn handled knife. I'm into the accessories. This myth of dinner being a family time, with everyone helping out and Buffy and Jody setting the table while I sip my orange juice and she her laughing Kangaroo or whatever plonk it is this week...don't worry dear, I'll clean up tonight. You go watch the Star Trek marathon....I'm telling you..it wears me out. At least in restaurants you get paid for it. And speaking of restaurants..there is a comment somewhere above that there is no room for straying off the reservation as far as what's being plated. I'm sure that's true, but in my last job, some time ago now, I was able to go out into the dining room, chin with the customer and make up their dinner. Not for everybody, but I had people who egged me on, and that was a lot of fun. To a certain extent I can do the same thing now at the bakery in the earthycrunchy grocery store. I go way out of my way for people and collected a nice prize this morning for a month long contest for customer service.

The biggest difference between professional and home cooking is this..when you step away from the stove with a steaming heavy pot of cooked pasta, heading for the sink to drain it, at work people instinctively get out of your way. At home, they just stand there and wait for you to say, "Excuse me." In 17 years of living with me, I've never been able to make my wife understand that I behave the same way at home as I do at work. I'm still working, this is what I do, get the hell out of the way. This is not relaxing. If I want to relax when I cook, I'll cook when no one is home. Otherwise, it's just like work. No, it is work. It amazes me how many people stumble through life with the peripheral vision turned off. If you weren't aware of where everybody was, and learn how to tuck in at your station when someone came behind you, you'd be burned and scarred.

First thing I thought of too..love that smell in the woods when you walk by them, but can't see them.

I've done them both way, tempering, or not. Lately I've been using cocoa barry extra dark amer, I think, melts nice and fluid. If they're kept refrigerated, they don't seem to bloom. And like others, I think, so what? I'd rather eat a little lemon curd tart with a strawberry on it.

I'll bet the mycryo stuff mentioned in another thread would work. It's vegetarian.

I ate there one night. Divine was doing an off off Broadway thing called Women Behind Bars and we went to the rest. after the show, and so did she. I went over and said "We all thought you died for art." She fluttered her eyelashes in what appeared to be an exhausted stupor, and said "Huh?

Ziti with olive oil, garlic, shallots, red pepper flakes, strips of Roma tomato, capers, artichoke hearts, green olives stuffed with feta, rosemary and tuna. I got home from work to find my wife's car in the driveway with the hood up. Tax refund on the dining room table. Is this gonna cost, or what? And how lucky to have a few bucks if it does. But I think the new battery that she actually paid for might have done the trick. Bought The Whole Beast by Fergus Henderson last night, and had a package of nice marrow bones in my hand at work today, but can't pull the trigger on that one yet. Anybody ever cold-bloodedly eat marrow, and is it as fabulous as we're led on?