McDuff

yes, well, i'm expecting my economic incentive check from the gummint hopefully tomorrow. I've got other plans for it than driving to John Dewar's and spending it all on liver. i just looked over the ramsay recipe in a chef for all seasons and it doesn't say what to do with what's inside the trotter. and it calls for a gammon knuckle. I don't have one, don't know where to get one, but these trotters are almost a foot long and there's plenty of meat on them.

I scored three nice long meaty pig's trotters at work today and I'm wondering which way to go. A Fergus Henderson thing, where they wind up stuffed with garlicky mashed potatoes, or a Gordon Ramsay thing where they're boned out, the skin and meat cooked separately and then a kind of a ballotine results. I've done the hocks from one of keller's books. Ramsay suggests his cooks can bone one out in 12 seconds, but I have never done it. I'd believe that though, because at one point I could bone 40 lbs of chicken breasts in 10 minutes.

1 lb confectionery sugar 1 lb almond paste 4 oz fondant 4 oz glucose put, in this order, into a bowl, the sugar, paste, fondant and glucose. mix till combined. throw onto the bench and knead briefly so it's all one mass. store in a plastic bag. this one works.

When they renoed the store I work in they took out the nice three-bay sink in the production area and left us with a small utility sink, which as we all know, is not really for washing and sanitizing. But we have to wash stuff in there all the time or else walk into the produce prep room where the three bay sink is usually full of debris, and oh yeah, knives of all sizes and shapes. Recently I was asked if I thought a 30 or 40 qt mixer would be helpful. I have an 80 and a 20, and I said use Alice's Law of Compensatory Spending and with the money saved by not buying a new Hobart, put the bloody sink back in. We'll see. I could easily be the country's second highest paid dishwasher.

that went by quick, but I noticed it also.

Michel Roux's Finest Desserts has Old Gentleman's Rumtopf, or some such thing in it.

I think the 1,500 g is a convention in languages other than English. I was puzzled by all the seeming mistakes in this book until I saw a sign in Brazilian that used the same comma convention. If you look carefully at the recipes in the book they all use it and it cracked me up when I got the book that I needed to make, oh, a ton and a half of ganache. 130 to 140 seems awfully warm. that's almost cooked. I would stir the eggs with some of the sugar( the rest being used to cream with the almond paste), then put the bowl over barely simmering water and beat not too forcefully to very warm to the touch, then transfer to the mixer and beat, till no more than one drop falls off a spatula when lifted out of the eggs. You can overbeat an egg sponge, I don't care what they say. 255 seems awfully low for the baking temp too.

I've got the same unhealthy fascination. I also bought his three star chef cookbook. He is a totally different person on The F Word, the British Kitchen Nightmares, and Ramsay's Boiling Point. Obviously the producers of this show are pandering to typical American tv tastes. This Sunday morning he made two dishes on The F Word that were made with the pigs he raised in his back yard.. Herb and Lemon stuffed Roast Loin and Pressed Belly. He also did pan seared halibut on top of red wine glazed pancetta, shallots and mushrooms. I was literally drooling on the couch. He's much more relaxed on the British shows. I'd love to spend some time with him. Anybody who thinks the Hell's Kitchen version is really him is uninformed.

in providence you could call hallsmith sysco or maybe perkins supply in taunton. the bloody scales are expensive, around 275 bucks, but the scoops are probably cheap. they didn't have the laminator in there when I took that class in fall of 96, but it pretty much looks zactly the same.

if you're reading this Richard....what's with the hair? Didn't we have a guy last year with the same do? Is there some kind of rule they gotta have a guy with hair on that show?

I once worked in a place where we made a disgusting no-time baquette dough and I could always tell when it hit the nine minute mark in the mixer from the other room. I listen for the change in the sound when cream is whipping, when butter is creaming when it gets all mixed and creamy the bowl stops rocking on the cradle, mushrooms will squeak in the pan after a point when sauteed. Eggs will hiss just a certain way in hot butter when you make an omelette. You can always tell when fries are still frosty when dropped in hot oil rather than thawed or slacked (dumb word. And you can always tell when fries are dropped in cold oil, because nothing happens. I'll tell you who really works by ear and that's machinists. I used to do that part-time and the guy I worked for had an amazing ear for the way a tool was running on the piece. I once came in with Frank Sinatra in a walkman and he said, great line...Headphones are voodoo in a machine shop.

I'm not arguing against your right to your opinion or questioning your experience but, just for the sake of discussion, cooked apple tarts weren't in the books either until someone tried it and put it there. Where would food be if nobody ever thought outside the book? Books are guidelines, not rules. I very rarely use books. I don't have your credentials or experience but I don't get many complaints either. Your credentials make it inappropriate to consider you amateurish. However, the fact that there is your way and anything else is wrong does make it difficult not to picture you as "arrogant and closed-minded" even if that's not actually the case. How do you create if anything you don't already know can't possibly be acceptable? ← Believe me, I am not putting down anybody at any level who cooks and bakes. There are lots and lots of people who don't do it for money, but for the love of it, and there is every possibility they have better skills than I do. My point is that every dish has a tradition, that countless people have made it before us, and more than likely every variation has been tried, adopted, discarded and so on. You really won't find examples of raw apples on fruit tarts in any book or source that understands and respects the essence of a fresh fruit tart, or an apple. The person who made the fruit tarts in the photos I referenced had very good skills...the item was beautiful. I don't want to provoke another personal attack, but the photo also showed, to me, an unknowing of the manner in which a fruit tart is traditionally made. I repeat, look through the literature, apples are most often baked in a fruit tart. Doesn't make me closed-minded and arrogant...just perhaps a little more informed.

go ahead then...find and quote me a recipe in any pastry book other than The Golden Sunset Book of Pastries that describes using raw apples in a fruit tart. I've got a summa cum laude degree in pastry arts and 33 years of culinary experience. I meant amateurish.

I think of soft berries, ripe peaches, mango, that kind of thing on a fruit tart. I just don't think raw apples belong there. I've been looking through some books and can't find one reference or picture of a fruit tart with raw apples. Some suggest poaching them. And isn't the Melody the one with the 20 hour apples and cinnamon caramel mousse? I've made those 20 hour apples and when they come out right, and you basically have to ignore his amounts of sugar and adjust it to the apples in front of you, it's delicious. Makes sense to have those apples on that cake. I'll tell you what level of insight we're dealing with....I got a baked French apple tart with pastry cream filling added to our product line, and it was spotted in the pastry case at another location made with raw apples. Again, amateurish.

I saw a picture of a fruit tart that people were positively being obnoxious about...So beautiful...can we all make them like this.... It had a fan of raw apples and a couple of slices of orange or tangelo on it. With the pith. Peeled, but with the pith. I had to bite my tongue. Kind of amateurish, in my exalted opinion.

look up rose levy beranbaum's method of reducing fruit puree in the microwave in the cake bible. it does make an intense raspberry.

would that be murbeteig? (sp)?

Joconde, which is used for some of these cakes, doesn't really flow. It's not a really thin batter. At school we were taught to spread joconde on a parchment paper, or silpat, on the bottom of a sheet pan, then take a yard stick and slide it under the paper and drag it back and forth to level out the batter. You can bake the joconde on the upside down pan, or drag the paper by the edges into a right side up pan.

I had Paula Figoni for baking formula technology in pastry school. You really got to love a teacher who describes a muffin as "perky."

I had to go to bed...too tired to finish watching. I couldn't do that again. I'm older than tony. I think the monument is a great idea, but only if it includes Todd Englsih. I swear his pub licist gets paid by the hour.

Thanks for all the helpful responses. Yesterday I tried a lower bench and a shorter icing spatula, but I was distracted because it wasn't my normal work space, and I'm nothing if not territorial. Don't move MY cheese. today I tried a big tip in a bag and it worked all right. I didn't have to lift my arm up at all and came home with about the same degree of discomfort I took to work with me. I have a big knot on the upper outer aspect of my left elbow. For the last couple of years I've been having parasthesia in both hands, almost to the point where it was 24/7. Really annoying. At first I thought it was being caused by wearing suspenders, so I stopped wearing them and there was no change. Then I stopped using aspartame and it diminished greatly. That's about 6 weeks now. I am aware of a lot, and I mean a lot, of muscle tightness around my whole body. So maybe there is something to David J.'s comments. If chefpeon is seeing something in the way I write that leads her to believe I'm younger than I am, I'm sure it's a couple of my archetypes showing themselves....The Smart-Ass and the Know-It-All. They're the muses for The Failed Writer. I spend time at work amusing myself by making in my head what I call the "Earthy Crunchy Groceria Movie" (names disguised to protect the innocent.) People typically do things to include themselves in this imaginary movie. People are always asking me what my scene is and I had no answer till the other day when a team from another store was visiting and I was scaling cornbread batter into a sheetpan with a frame and it slipped off the scale and slopped all over me, the flour bins, and the flour. I thought "there's my scene. They're looking in here and thinking, That's him? the big important pastry chef? He's an effing slob!"

I think this is a very old fashioned way of making sure the yeast works. I made a dough once with this technique, much against my Interior Baker's advice, and he was right.

I had bad tendonitis from shaking frying pans for all those many years and acupuncture pretty much cured it. Maybe I'll look into that. "I suspect you are a bit younger than I" Possibly not. I'm almost 58, but like Frank Sinatra says, "In my mind, I'm 28." Wish we had live chat here. Jackal10 is cruising the boards right now.

I spend most of my time at work, for the last year now, decorating cakes and my left arm is about to fall off. Anybody else have a problem with possible repetitive motion injury? Yesterday I raised my arm to flatten the top of a cake and it hurt all the way up to and it felt like around the socket the top of my arm bone rotates in. It hurts to even heft the clicker up tonight to find something interesting in the wasteland of tv. i use fairly long narrow spatulas. Maybe I could use a lower bench, short spatula, do the sides with a bag with a huge tip. I don't know. On days when I'm just filling the freezer I'll do upwards of 80-90 cakes. That's not often. I usually do what I need for the next three or four days, and that can be 30 cakes finished.

Worked at a now defunct Frenchified place where we bought ice cream in by the half gallon to make the coupes, cutely named after the owner's daughter's and nicknamed by us using their family nicknames...Coupe Dodi, Coupe Mumfi, and Coupe Boom Boom. the luncheon chef buried a rabbit's head in a tub of vanilla ice cream and we were all highly gratified when a waitress turned it up with a scoop and screamed. He also put one in a bucket of side towels to be washed by the wait staff, but it was missed and wound up shedding bits of meat all through the wash.