McDuff

A cold beer I could drink without worrying about being home for Christmas.

I mean I wouldn't dip it out of the rain barrel on the back porch. Or slurp it off a cupped hosta leaf in the garden. And as far as the water in the pond down the street, W.C. Fields said it first and best. I like a little chlorine and whatnot, make that stuff inert if you don't mind.

Last time I ate snow I got stomach cramps almost immediately. I can't imagine the particulate matter it picks up on the way down. I wouldn't drink rain water either.

They are really three separate distinct preparations. Pastry cream is a cooked custard containing eggs and yolks and/or flour or cornstarch. It is brought to a boil and simmered for a few minutes to get rid of a starchy taste. When one adds whipped cream to a cold pastry cream, the result is Diplomat cream, which may or may not be stabilized with gelatin. Adding Italian meringue to a warm pastry cream gives you creme Chiboust. A Bavarian is made from a starchless custard base, similar to a creme anglaise, which is poured hot over softened gelatin, cooled, and then whipped cream is folded in. This must be used immediately for molding. Pastry cream is the appropriate filling for a Boston Cream Pie. All the other preparations have a different texture and mouthfeel and different applications. I put pastry cream in a chocolate glazed eclair, but Diplomat cream in a sugar-dusted cream puff, just to show off the differences. If my boss brings it in today, it will have taken over a year to get some gelatin into the earthycrunchy grocery store where I work, so I can make charlottes with raspberry Bavarian.

If you pipe a pastry cream in a spiral on each layer as you build it, and then wrap the cake in acetate, you can get a nice tall three layer BCP with a flawless top of chocolate glaze, or ganache. And before that sets pipe some white chocolate lines and run a knife through them. Piping the pastry cream doesn't put any pressure on this pile'o'cake.

I hung out with people in the 70's who were big into musicals and everything you mentioned, and more, was the soundtrack for our lives for those 3 years. It just got ridiculous. Three of them snuck into Pacific Overtures EVERY NIGHT it played in Boston, I saw Bobby Short so many times in so many cities that when I ran into him on the street in Boston I casually said HI. I got to touch Ethel Merman, and when my brother got remarried at the age of 48, the lovely bride entered the room to Ethel braying, You can't get a man with a gun. This book we're reading about here...someone gave me a copy, and I gave it away to some poor soul on another web site who desparately wanted to be a chef. Too much information for me.

Actually, wasn't she bright as a penny, and her equal will be hard to find? I don't even remember what that's from, but I sure remember hearing it a lot in that apartment there, in the 70's , with all those Sondheim addicts. I do remember that's not him, though.

After detailing the refrigerator, I'd like to finesse making some Thai dishes. I've tried pad thai a couple of times to subdued reviews. What sets my head spinning is the long list of ingredients. I'd also like to finally make a Christmas pudding. Bailed out again this year..and get more use out of my brick oven.

I'm making cabinets for my bathroom with a linseed oil and shellac finish. Have a lot of wood in the house finished that way and it will look great after a couple of years. Biggest problem with shellac is that the second you put a wet glass down on it, you get a white ring. Don't think I'd put it in the kitchen.

I'll tell you what's more dangerous...even thinking of buying a rib roast these days. I paused by the scale in the meat dept in the earthy crunchy grocery store where I work to watch a rib roast get it's price tag....$181.00!

After reading how simple it was to have bread every day by using the machine I got excited. That would be too cool. But after reading the rest of the thread, I think I'll stick with my 12 qt Univex and the 5 ton brick oven in the back yard. I might not be making bread every day, but questions of crust bother me not at all.

We run out of everything all the time, except that right now we're holding an 11 lb tub of Schokinag cocoa and about 25 lb of Callebaut 835nv. Might be a while before we're scrounging for a hot chocolate.

You could get really sleazy and use mayonnaise set with gelatin.

Steamed persimmon pudding

I would go with Crust and Crumb. The barm as elaborated in that book completely changed the way I looked at baking bread, and I was doing it for a living. I have most of the books mentioned in this thread, except silverton, and whoever said there are many bad bread books is right. Artisan Baking Across America is a favorite, and I do like The Bread Baker's Apprentice, but the new Bread Bible is drivel.

Beautiful summer morning. I'm the first guy into the country club kitchen as the baker. Big wedding that night, power had gone out the night before, walkins have mass quantities of dry ice, sublimating away all night, on every empty shelf so as not to lose thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of food, and I opened the door and walked in. Two breaths and I was on the floor, crawling for the door to save my life.

I've baked a lot of cheesecakes in springform pans with double foil and rarely had a problem. You do have to take it off right away in case any water did get in. And Cook's Magazine, if it still exists, is not Cook's Illustrated. I generally like Cook's Illustrated, but the previous poster is right, not all the recipes work well. I once made a lemon icebox cake that I got razzed for next day, Hollandaise cake, the sous chef called it.

I make mousse with callebaut 835 nv, double chocolate pudding with valronha manjari, milk chocolate pot de creme with valronha jivara and ganache with cocoabarry chocolate chips. In a chocolate class at school we used Felchlin couverture and it seemed pretty foolproof as far as tempering, and it was tasty. I get confused by all the callebaut numbers but I noticed they have new packaging on the big blocks and have little symbols indicating viscosity. big help for a chocolate dummie.

Opened corn syrup can sour at room temp, as can molasses. I have a big bucket of glucose that I know is at least a couple of years old that I opened a while ago and it has a very fine thin dusting of mold on top. But I have seen molasses get fizzy, and corn syrup start to smell sharp.

They had an article about NY cheesecake that was started in a 500 oven with no water bath. Kimball is one of those guys who would get cut trying to sneak a carrot baton out of the pile on the cutting board in front of me. I generally trust the stuff they put out in the magazine, having worked my way through a bunch of it. I actually use some of their recipes at work, where I'm supposed to assign all rights blah blah blah to the Corporate Entity. Little do they all know.....

Freeze to release works really well with a flexipan. I found it was the only way to get them out without ruining them. I would fill the cavity with the batter,then sprinkle the crust mixture carefully on top, smooth it out, and bake till done in a low oven. Cool, freeze and pop out.

This is my first post here so I'll identify myself as a sort of newbie/pro, seven years of baking/pastry fulltime, but 25 years in the kitchen, with a large cookbook collection, which range from Fannie Farmer to Pierre Herme, and I have to say I am very skeptical of a LOT of what passes for quality nowadays. I just bought Rose Levy Beranbaum's Bread Bible and was appalled to find the first recipe I wanted to make was garbled. I managed to find out how to email her, and she answered right away, but still I was so annoyed I almost returned the book. She, in her own quirky way, has reduced bread baking to minutiae in this one. Who ever made a loaf of bread with 1/3 cup sourdough starter? I spill that much every time I make bread. I once spent an afternoon making the little Love's Nests from Michel Roux and couldn't believe what I was looking at amidst the wreckage. And his raspberry parfait cake, I'd love to make but seems to hover at the edge of unhuman skill. How do I make a pate bombe with such minute quantities of ingredients? I have a lot of books I wished I'd held off on buying. They cost money, take up space and are not very useful. I want pictures in my books, lots of them. If I can get an item to come out looking most of the way like the picture in the book, then I'm happy.