McDuff

If you look on the credits page at the back, down the bottom, he's made a comment that the recipes were tested to make sure that they could be done in a domestic kitchen. ← I'm happy to read all this. I just ordered the book from Amazon.co.uk last night. I've been obsessed with this guy, for whatever reason. Been watching everything I can on BBC America. Can't wait to get it.

I just watched Mark Bittman yukking it up with Fergus Henderson, cooking a bacon chop. Now what's stopping me from curing and smoking some nice fatty shoulder chops, using the technique for pork belly, which I really have trouble finding in the stores. Should I change anything, do you think? I've made bacon and Canadian bacon and was very happy with them both.

I once declined to get involved with cooking a piece of swordfish for Gilda Radner, I don't know why. Victor Borge sent his calve's liver back at the same place. I told the chef it wasn't the best, but he said cook it anyway. At another place, Faye Dunaway, marinated beef salad she never ordered but the head waiter forced it on her, Robert Conrad, poached egg on a piece of toasted baquette, Colonel Klink, don't remember what he had but I thanked him for all the fun and he was nice, Rick Middleton of the Boston Bruins, rare strip steak at the bar before a game, the late Sarah Caldwell, veal chasseur with a big party and she had another serving as we finished the last person in the party. On a local level, Chet and Natalie way before the split, top butt steak with a mustaed glaze. Paul Simon and Sejii Ozawa came through at various times but the chef saved them for himself. An omelette and scallop ceviche, respectively. The Phoenix Suns one year when they played the Celtics in the playoffs, the J. Geils Band, one of whom threw up on the table. Why do I remember what they all had? Out of thousands of meals?

baking soda also promotes browning, which adds flavor due to Maillard reactions. try making gingerbread or honey cake without it and see. it also adds tenderness and promotes spread in cookies.

Somewhere in the archives I have an ad from a sub joint that offers "Free Homos with every order."

I was schlepping through the pastry shops and bakeries on Hanover St. in Boston's North End last week, reading labels on all the panettone. Margarine..mono and di glycerides, artificial flavors. We get one at the earthy crunchy groceria that will still be soft and edible till late March. I got a bunch of paper baking pans to make some more petite ones, hopefully tomorrow afternoon. If I get home early enough, I'm making some more stollen also. I use the recipe in Artisan Baking. Good stuff.

I made the pannetone that merrybaker references above, once last night, and again today. Last night I followed the directions for the amount of dried fruit and today I added more, and also some cocoa nibs. Delicious. Definitely going into my notebook. I took a picture of last night's, but I can't upload it to aol because it won't run on my computer right now. I used grated fresh orange and tangerine rind, soft dried pineapple and dried cranberries. It somehow has that pannetone flavor.

I've made this before. Quite easy and wacky to look at and eat.

Somewhere in the Cake Bible is a chart that shows you what amounts of baking powder are needed for different size pans. I think the technique she advocates is to fill one size pan first, then add baking powder to the remaining batter as needed. There's something about a larger pan needing less because of surface tension. I find those charts to be almost inscrutable..Rose factor this...blah blah blah. It all just goes on and on. Too much detail for me.

1 qt milk 8 oz sugar pinch salt 2.5 oz cornstarch .5 oz bread flour 2 oz butter 1 egg 4 yolks vanilla to taste Make it the normal way the night before. It's plenty thick enough to pipe and very tasty.

Pectin needs the right combination of amounts of acid and sugar to work. I think andiensj is right, not enough lemon juice, by far. And get fresh pectin. I've had the same thing happen to me.

I think I've made those. There was a box full of recipe cards at a joint I worked at that had Great Lakes Naval Training Station printed on it, and the brownie recipe had corn syrup in them. Wish I'd swiped it when I had the chance.

Wooden boxes, cookie tins, nice cloths, big napkins, flower arrangements, and cheap stick-on mirror tiles from Home Depot are what we used for this for a woman's shelter benefit gala. Chocolate petit four boxes with fruit, chocolate and lemon curd mousses and so on. People got distracted by it. They were like seagulls at the dump. I had to tell the organizers I wasn't the dessert police.

I once cooked cervelles de veau aux beurre noir for a lady who ate the dish with diet coke.

As long as the cream was not whipped you should be able to reheat the mixture.

I've been taught you can thaw food under running water of not more than 70 degrees for no more than two hours.

try the Cuban bread recipe available at King Arthur flour website. I've been making it a couple of times a week for the kid's lunches.

We get audited for sanitation 4 times a year and I once asked the guy about leaving our powdered sugar/butter buttercream out at room temp and he said it has very low water content...but he added, a great line, "Don't confuse food safety with food quality." My pucker factor is only a couple of days, if I know it's going to get used up. Otherwise, especially in the hot weather, it goes into the reefer. I've seen it, and big blocks of butter left out, grow mold.

I think I'd actually like to try chopping out a couple of lines of it......

Make a ganache with 2 parts bittersweet chocolate and 1 part soy milk. Let it set on the counter overnight, as it seems to be very hard to warm it just a little when it's been refrigerated. Slap it around a little with a spatula to loosen it, and you should be able to ice with it.

I've fooled with this stuff and just don't get it. I've got the book, make me an offer. I think it is regular cocoa butter, but it's been cryogenically treated, powdered, and steam deodorized. It does work for tempering chocolate, but it sets fast. I used it to make fruit mousses, settling on an ounce of mycryo for a pound of mousse, I think. I used a third pastry cream, a third whipped cream, and a third fruit puree. Some purees would make a better mousse than others. Blackcurrant worked very well, but passion or lemon needed to be made into a curd first. I finally got to use sheet gelatin, so I no longer need to frustrate myself with mycryo.

I used to work with a guy who had a solo act of flinging a rib cap down the line to see if he could hit the empty tomato box I ditched my dirty saute pans in. The whole thing was accompanied by the cry of "Greasy F---ing rib cap comin' down!", and with a fork and tongs he would fling it. What a mess when he missed, skidding across the already dirty floor coming to rest under the dishwasher. But then, he earned immortality by getting behind on a rib on NYear's Eve, and dropping the whole stone cold raw piece of meat into the fryalator. He could blanch anything in the fryolator and finish it in the microwave or under the salamander. Talented guy.

(I can't for the life of me figure out how to link to the image I just uploaded to ImageGullet, but I remade the Dan Lepard garlic bread, dropped the hydration to 71%, and got a beautiful loaf of bread. It's in the public folder. Is there a trick to this? I'm getting a truncated message in the dialog box and you can't copy and paste into that little box.) thanks for the help, folks. I'm having one of those days where I can't even use a debit card right. And I'm about to go cut a hole in my kitchen floor to move a heating duct. At least the bread came out better. I tossed it into a 500 oven and turned it right down to 425.

Dan Lepard's garlic bread, featured in another thread. Not entirely successful as far as looks go, but instructive and very tasty and made the house smell wonderful. I think it needs to go into a hotter oven. Very very soft dough.

glennbech---I've gotta say it looks like you've nailed it, irregular looking top or not. When you first started posting about your technique of experimenting I thought you might be a little out there, but you can make a loaf of bread. That loaf looks like more.