McDuff

Here's my notes from school. I can't remember what of this is me and what is Martha Crawford. I have made a lot of this stuff over the years. this formula can be doubled and it's still not too hard to handle. In all the places I've worked where I've made puff dough, Danish, croissant, I have never used a sheeter, not once. Notes on puff pastry

The tarte tropezienne in one of Pierre Herme's book is a fabulous item. You can also make a baba au rhum by cutting a cap off the top of the brioche a tete, hollow it out, soak it in rum sugar syrup, let it drain and pipe it full of pastry cream and glaze it with hot apricot. A rosette of creme chantilly, a sliver of candied cherry and a mint leaf, and it's 1966 again. I used to work for a Romanian pastry chef who made a cheese filling with ricotta, sharp cheddar, cream of wheat to hold it together, and a lot of black pepper. She would wrap squares of brioche around it and bake it. Called it a blechinka. I've used brioche dough a lot with a cinnamon pecan filling to make braided coffee cake rings.

Slap a couple of egg yolks into this recipe and then bake the filled tarts for about ten minutes. That ought to tighten them right up. Or bake the filling in a shallow pan, let it chill, and then pipe it.

My refrigerator was running warm last week, what wasn't, and I couldn't find the little broom thingie on a stick to clean the coil underneath. The vacuum cleaner doesn't do such a great job, and when you have two dogs and four cats, there can be a fair amount of stuff under there, even though I try to keep it clean. So I reached for the leaf blower. It worked, but you don't ever want to do that.

I think 48 hours is way too long for the pre-ferment, and 2 hours bulk and an hour proof nowhere near enough. A young dough like that needs more heat to brown. I bake with a poolish every week on my day off and it's something like .2% instant yeast and ferments from 12-16 hours. The dough gets a spike of yeast, and bulk fermentation of three hours, and an hour and a half proof.

That's very clever. The whole temperature thing as outlined in Ricki Carroll's books put me off a little bit, wondering if I could finesse it. How can you possibly control raising the temperature a degree every five minutes, or whatever it is. The only thing I would get nervous about is wasting the water. I'll bet the little pump I bought to make a fountain out of a hunk of lava rock could be incorporated into some kind of recirculating device. Have the milk in one side of my new giant soapstone sink, a big bowl of water in the other with pump in it. Have to think about this.

This is an interesting subject. To answer your question, I would assume they are publishing them for the home baker or cook. If a bakery was to sell them under their name, then that would open up the door for liability. A bakery could sell them under "Jacque Pepin's creme caramel" title on their menu and that would be fine, crediting the chef/author. ← That could be tricky, because if you sell a product called "Jacque Pepin's creme caramel," you might actually end up infringing on a trademark, just like if you tried to sell a beer called Sam Adams or open up a lingerie store called Victor's Secret. But as far as I can tell, from everything I've read, there is no legal reason why you could not do what McDuff is saying -- selling goods made from published recipes. Selling a recipe taken verbatim from a cookbook (i.e. the specific literary expression) or using a trademark is a different matter. ← Of course I'm not putting source names on products. But if any customers are interested, I tell them where I mooched the recipe. Why not use the best of the best? Recipes really are nothing more than lists of ingredients. It's technique that makes them work well.

A recipe, in the sense of a set of ingredients and procedures for producing a certain food product, I don't think is or can be protected under any intellectual property laws in the US. The specific literary expression of a recipe is of course protected -- you can't simply copy and republish a published recipe. ← Yep, the ingredient list of recipes can't be copyrighted. So if the bakery already has chefpeon's recipes, they can probably continue to use them (but not, say, publish them in their own cookbook - or if they did, it'd be a matter of who could prove authorship). But if they don't have them, and chefpeon doesn't want to give the recipes to them, well they're probably SOL. As they say, it pays to get stuff in writing - but I've never seen any such legal IP contracts in any restaurants I've worked in. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't (for example) somebody open up a pastry shop and just use recipes verbatim from the latest top cookbooks, without having to worry about any legal ramifications? As I understand it - yes. ← I do that all the time. No one knows I use Jacque Pepin's creme caramel, or Payard's lemon tart, or Cook's Illustrated panna cotta and chocolate pudding. Why the heck are they publishing them, if not to use?

Where's Wendy DeBord when you need her? I'd tell the weasel, Look, I'm leaving, you know and I know, and you know that I know, that a lot of what we do here I brought with me. We either work out a royalty payment on future sales, or it's coming with me. And then I'd effin' take my recipes. The last job I left I was more than gracious about helping them with stuff they wanted that I did because it was a private club. the job before that, I copied THEIR formula book before I left, in spite of a noncompete thing. And all that stuff is safe and sound in my notebook, and they went out of business, through no fault of mine, but because they were idiots. Currently, anything I develop or bring in automatically belongs to "The Company." So they're not getting the cream of the crop. This is my craft, my skill, my passion that tweaks these things to be so good. You gotta take care of me like you want me. I do not at all mind being stroked a little.

I've been reading Gael Greene's book Insatiable, a great read by the way, and she describes being seated in the outback at a NY watering hole, the name of which is part of a frog's anatomy, which is where I was seated the only time I ever ate there in the early 70's. The waiter couldn't have been bothered with us two rubes. I got a huge kick out of stiffing him, and shrugging and saying, "quelle fromage," on the way out.

I usually make ganache with Guittard 4m chips, because they're there, and they're not bad. 5 lbs chips to 4 lbs 36% heavy cream. No problems, ever. Lately I've been trying to use up a box of Callebaut 55% discs just to get it off inventory. Again, no problems. When I went for the box today, it was a little light, and since I have two boxes of Amer Bitter 60% couverture, I used that, and it came out a little grainy, lumpy, not smooth. I whisked about a half pint of cold cream into and it came together. Too much fat, not enough liquid, I guess. Next time yours looks likes swill, try a little more cream, or even water. To reheat, I pulse it in a microwave at 30-50% power depending on how much I'm trying to heat, for 4 to 6 minutes as needed.

You need the acidity from the lemon juice to clabber the condensed milk.

I'd give my left cucaracha to be able to make cheese like that. I am impressed. I bought the mozzarella kit from NECheesemaking and it worked, but that was as far as I went. Found a source for raw milk in the next town, he even had a cheesemaking suite of rooms for lease, with marble tables, big aging room, pasteurized milk pumped right into the room, but I'm not that into it...yet. Can you really make this stuff like yours at home? What do you age it in? I'm fascinated by your seeming nonchalance at this skill.

I once saw a Food Unwrapped where they showed this stuff being made. If you try the Beranbaum toffee recipe, a teeny bit of baking soda added at the end just before you pour it out will help make it a little lighter and more tender.

Here is a copy on abebooks for $55. ← that's extremely reasonable for that book. i've seen it as high as 400.

Quick chicken skin trivia--who said, in what movie, "Never buy gribines from a mohel."?

if you can afford it, and find it, Mastering the Art of French Pastry, by Bruce Healy and Paul Bugat.

Pierre Herme's Lemon Cream. Line the cake pans with plastic wrap, freeze the cream in the pan, then lay it right into the cake as you construct it. ← I've done that before, e.g. in Herme's Riviera, but never in a 12" cake that will likely be out of refrigeration for several hours before serving. I'm afraid that it would not stand up well. ← why do you think lemon curd would stand up any better? the lemon cream is really nothing but a curd with the butter added at a different point at a different temp and then whizzed with a stick blender. You could make a lemon gel insert that won't melt. I did that once with passion fruit and it worked ok.

I just looked it up. (Nick Malgieri is very underrated imo. I've got a lot of his books.) You could easily put pastry cream in there, in fact, since it has a top crust, I think it would work better that frangipane. Don't worry about the pastry cream being in the oven. I make a tarte aux pommes at work that has a layer of pastry cream spread into a pre-baked shell that has about 4 big apples fanned on top and then baked for 40 minutes, and it works every time.

Holy lally columns! We're talking some serious weight here. How pricey are they?

Pierre Herme's Lemon Cream. Line the cake pans with plastic wrap, freeze the cream in the pan, then lay it right into the cake as you construct it.

which book is this from? what's the batter like? why couldn't you use pastry cream? what about frangipane?

I tapped out lines of flour one night and convinced a waitress it was really good blow. A dead rat in a take out container for another waitress. The elliptical breaded cardboard passed off as veal parm, which caused a fistfight. the toilet covered with cling wrap. the shoes and pants strategically placed in a stall in the men's room, which had the manager wondering for hours. the raw egg slipped into the pan of cooling hard boiled eggs.

if you google "Nutex liquid shortening" you should get a hit for a place called icaviar.com and they sell three 5 qt cans for about 60 bucks. I don't know if the chiffon genoise will hold up to fondant. You can cut that formula down and make a couple and try. the best solution i've found for moving big cakes is to to go Home Depot and buy a sheet of blue foam insulation to build a big box out of. cut the bottom to just fit the board the cake is on, cut all the pieces to size carefully with a serrated knife, use bamboo skewers and duct tape to hold it together. I also would skewer the cake board to the bottom and believe me, that cake ain't going nowhere, plus it's insulated against the heat. Get to the site, take off the front of the box, pull out the skewers in the cake board and slide out the cake, and away you go with the cake in perfect condition. I sent ice cream cakes from Boston to NYC with dry ice in a deal like this and they arrived so frozen they were hard to cut. eta--I just browsed the icaviar site and they sell goose fat in a can! You know how much duck fat I threw away over the years because I never heard of confit being made in this country? of course, this has nothing to do with cake.

The whole tits on the hot plate thing was a riot. I'm sure the "customers" are aware of what they are getting into, and I thought that woman was out of line and feeling particularly entitled. I've never worked in a kitchen with a physical layout like that, we didn't call it a "line" for nothing. they all work like my dreams used to be when I worked as a cook. In slow motion, can't fire anything, can't get anything plated, tickets piling up, nothing moving forward. Those dreams were more exhausting than the actual turmoil that caused them. Keith might please Ramsay with his food, but he acts and looks like Shrek. Out of all the characters on this show, Ralph was the only one who I can picture actually running a kitchen as if it were his own, and he was truly in charge. And I'm so sick of Heather's pouty little game face. Rachel had the same expression. I'd like to see it come down to Keith and Virginia, but I don't think either of them has what it takes to do what Ramsay does, which is to drive the bus.