McDuff

I bought the book today and have spent the last couple of hours sitting and reading, rather than figuring out how to brace the floor and move the plumbing around to get the soapstone sink in. It's a nasty late afternoon with sleet and stuff, but I just may run out to get some casings to soak so I can start some sausage tomorrow. This is what I plan on using to grind and stuff. Is this going to work all right? I find that when you take out the die and the blade, there is nothing to support the end of the auger shaft and it flops around a bit, but I'm hoping that the meat will support it as it runs through. On another note, I have a technical grammatical point for Michael Ruhlman. I know he reads this thread. Now, I'm not a published author with any kind of credentials, though I did do a lot of writing in college both for the newpaper and fine arts magazine. It's not like I don't have any background. I'm very curious how prepositions come to be missing, seemingly randomly. There are instances in the book of "couple pounds", "couple days", but I also noticed "couple of weeks". Is this editing? Is the book dictated, and then transcribed, because that's pretty much how people talk. I'm sorry to say, I'm always disappointed when I see that usage, which I've looked into in the style books at Barnes and Noble, and it is acceptable. I just wonder what's up with that? I used to sit at the typewriter and really ponder, to really try and craft the way I wanted the words to sound. There just seems to be something missing when I see the word "couple" run into another word without the buffer of "of".

I had a quick look at at while at New England Mobile Book Fair recently. Was looking for Dan Lepard, had to order him from England, but now this book is definitely coming home.

That's the series I worked up a wheat free cake from. I tweaked her recipe a little. Her flour blend is rice flour, potato starch flour, and tapioca flour. Then you make a cake mix from that with sugar, baking powder, vanilla powder, salt, and xanthan gum. And from that you make a batter with eggs, oil and lemon soda. It's a bit of an exercise in scaling, but it works. I made three 12", one 10" and one 7" cake for a wedding back in November using this recipe. I occasionally have people ask for it with no eggs, no dairy, so I use the energ egg replaces, which I think might be in her recipe, and soy or rice milk to make a covering ganache. It's very palatable when freshly made.

Maybe you got it too hot or it wasn't enough water. I've been adding hot water to callebaut 60nv lately to smooth it out so it doesn't lump up when I add beaten yolks to make mousse. There's a discussion of adding water to chocolate and ratios and so on in Cocolat by Alice Mederich. I disremember the ratios. the chocolate mousse recipe I'm following is from the current issue of CI and they get into the ratios too. I think for 24 oz of chocolate I'm using 18 tb of water. And it still stays fairly thick. I used to work for a woman who made Sacher glaze by dumping simple syrup onto an indeterminate amount of chocolate and stirring till it melted. Worked every time. Shirley Corriher was on good eats talking about this and said the analogy is a drop of water in a sugar bowl makes a lump, but enough water dissolves the sugar.

I make a wheat free cake which can be made without eggs. I use the Ener-G-egg replacer and find that you need to whip it till it looks like a semi beaten egg white, then fold it into the batter. It makes cake all right, but I'm glad I'm not allergic.

Amen to that. I wouldn't even know where to start. Throw out the measuring cups, buy a scale, google "baker's percentages", buy a book with formulas...those would be a start.

Also, when making home-made root beer and having no idea what you're really doing, keep in mind that the aphorisim "If some is good, more must be better" does not apply to yeast. I had 16 bottles of root beer go off like hand grenades while my wife was home alone with infant children and the stuff was stored in a cardboard box on top of a cold wood burning cookstove in the dining room. Glass and sticky syrup everywhere. Still would like to know how to make the stuff.

You ideally would have some things called confectioner's bars, which are pieces of steel about 3/8 by 3/8 or so which are laid onto a parchment covered upside down sheet pan and set the width of a bench scraper apart. After you make the ganache and let it cool, massage it with a spatula just until it starts to set, then spread it between the bars and level it with an offset. When it is fully set spread a thin layer of tempered chocolate on the top, let it set, use a paring knife to free the ganache from the bars, flip it over and spread tempered chocolate again and let it set. Then, make a thick paper template of the size you wish to cut. Dip a straight edged slicer in hot water, dry it, and square one end of the ganache to one edge. Then hold the template against the ganache, mark the size of each piece along both edges, and cut with a hot dry slicer. Then turn the strips 90 degrees, mark again, and cut again. Then dip each rectangle into tempered chocolate. This is time consuming, but it works, and this is how it's done. If you don't feel like spending the huge money they want for the bars at J.B. Prince, go to the hardware store and buy cold rolled steel bars and sand them really well till they're shiny. Keep them dry and they shouldn't rust.

Raymond Sokolove and Robert Courtine

I would have reminded the guy that the hungry people of the world are waiting for theirs.

What do you call a guy with no arms and legs on a grill? Frank

I once took a gorgeous young woman to Le Bocage while Enzo Danesi was still there and watched her slather butter all over the outside of her crusty little French roll. Nowadays I would definitely overlook that. Live and learn.

I used to mill a couple of hundred pounds of Bronze Chief hard red winter wheat every day and there's a HUGE difference in the way it smelled coming out of the mill compared to opening up a 50 lb bag of whole wheat flour, which smelled like dust compared to it. It smelled alive, vegatative, grassy, made unbelievable bread. I had been taught that flour needed to age for several weeks before it could be used, but we used it the next day. I asked Didier Rosada about that phenomenon and he said it could be used right away, or not, that it would then need to be aged.

Sadly, the Art of French Pastry is OP and rather scarce--I recently tried searching for one, and they're kind of pricey. Art of the Cake is readily available (and yes, worth having--excellent clear and detailed descriptions of procedures). ← Yeah, I know that's kind of easy for me to toss in there...I've got one, and I was stunned to see what they sell for.

I worked at a place where we had a dish called Sole Caprice, which was basically sole meuniere which was finished with almonds, sliced bananas, butter, parsley and a squeeze of lemon. It was probably ripped off from the first Four Seasons Cookbook, sold really well.

Yes, actually I do. I work for Whole Foods Market. We don't do much bread production in my store, but we have been given the go-ahead to start. I have all the equipment I need, 80qt Hobart, rotary rack ovens, steam injected deck ovens, three rack proofer. All I need is another pair of hands to help make the lemon bars and cupcakes and I can work up some daily breads. I gave your formula another go today and it came out extraordinary. No popping, no blown seams, feels nice and light. The couronnes pictured above had an overnight preferment, then I guess what's called the improved method...4 min mix, 20 min autolyse, 6 min. mix with the preferment going in at 4 min. Three turns, bulk fermentation till double..finish as usual. We sold all these breads in about 2 hours after making giant cold cut sandwiches out of two of them and giving away samples. Since instant yeast is the nominal subject of this thread, the 21 loaves I made used only 4 teaspoons of instant yeast, about .44 oz. But I wonder if the turns are as necessary with a dough that is as developed as this one? I can feel it make a difference in the formula under discussion here, and frankly the technique amazes me. In a standard 100-60-2-2 French dough that is fully developed in the mixer, is there any benefit to turning at intervals?

I'm seriously thinking of installing a 3 ft long, 2 bay antique soapstone sink I bought out of a guy's pickup truck this summer. The bottom will be 21" off the floor. I do most of the dishes in this house anyway, and I'm used to spending at least part of my work day hunched over a commercial 3 bay cleaning up my own mess. I have already solved the problem of rebuilding the drain connection on the bottom, and have scoped out horizontally mounted faucets that come out the high back of the sink. I don't really believe in designer faucets, the one I found is about 240 bucks. The sink needs some new filets of hydraulic cement around the bottom, but the soapstone is soft enough that any dings in it can be smoothed with a file and sandpaper. It probably weighs 300 lbs and I'm going to have to brace the kitchen floor, relocate the risers and drain, and a heating duct, and the refrigerator, and the Welsh dresser which is currently around the existing sink, but now we can look out into the back yard while cleaning up.

What I did today at work....Reinhart's French bread with pate fermentee.

I looked into doing that for a retreat house I worked at. There are a number of companies that specialize in making cookbooks for fundraisers. There is also a self-publishing thing on the web, and I disremember the name, but I have been to the website and it was pretty reasonable. Altogther, with all the time I have spent with schoolwork and just fooling around on my own, I have easily enough stuff to fill a good-sized book, but when I look at the hard copies of my schoolwork for instance, I have no idea where the digital copy is anymore. Another reason to be organized about backing up. lulu.com...that was it.

Might this refer to Bill Lalor of the trendy Manhattan eatery, The Saloon? He was your muse? Care to tell us more? ← Yes, that Bill Lalor. But it sounds like you found a link that might be very old. I found one recently that has him working for The Ark Restaurant Group and I called their office last week and he apparently still does exist. I haven't had any contact with him since 1978. I just got to work. I'll tell a couple of stories when I get home. Bill Lalor, when I knew him, was young (23 or 24) and ambitious. He drove a Volvo wagon, a Porsche 914, and an Alfa Romeo Spyder, but as talented as he was, he only drove them one at a time. He had a copy of Larousse banging around in the back of the Volvo, with notes hanging out of it that had phrases like "ouefs en gelee." Very mysterious to me at that point. He hired me off my job as a busboy after a kitchen drudge reported to him that I was in over my head trying to make 100 portions of chocolate mousse for a Halloween party. He came over to the apartment, which was only across the street and down the block, and bailed me out, then offered me a job in the kitchen and I've never looked back. Within a year, working with him and his brother, I was running the line at night, making up specials and all the other hotshot stuff. But it was his attitude about the ingredients we used, and how the customer was taken care of, that sticks with me to this day. We did nothing with the food that wasn't the "right thing." And if it took some discernment and time learning what the "right thing" was, it was time well spent. He could have been a prototype for a character in Kitchen Confidential, and since he apparently still lives and breathes, I'm not going there. We had some wild times in that kitchen. I was in and out the door a couple of times, finally for good after I apparently tried to choke the owner with his knit necktie. I showed up for work the next afternoon not remembering a thing, got talked to by the victim, and then had a sitdown with Bill. He said, Skippy's a little pissed off, give me a couple of days and I'll work on him. When I called him he said, and this is one of THE classic lines...."I'll tell you, pally. It's not looking good." I don't remember if I ever stepped foot in there again. This was all in 1975-1978. In 1998, coming out of pastry school and needing a fill-in job before the country club job I wanted opened, I got hired at a caterer in Newton Highlands, MA. The chef at one point told me that he had been trained by one of the "top guys." I badgered him until he told me. It was no one I had ever heard of, he said. Then he said the name, Bill Lalor. I was stunned. He told me stories of a trip to Paris they had made together, and I knew it had to be the same guy. And this link to the trendy Saloon, which is one of the few things on the web about Bill Lalor, makes me feel kind of special to have known him when we were both so young and to know that a lot of what he taught me has guided me for thirty years.

Bill Lalor

This took long enough. I had to stash the bowl of dough on the back porch at 2:30 to go close on a car loan. Got back at 5:30 and divided and rounded the dough. Gave it about a half hour and then shaped it. Made four loaves, two filled with garlic cooked in olive oil and rosemary, and two plain. Had some trouble with seams blowing out. The first two loaves felt heavier than the second two. House smells fabulous. I made a bread out of Dan's book that I sort of freelanced and wasn't happy with it. I stuck to the timetable up to the end of the folding and was amazed at what a silky supple dough I got with such minimal kneading. Don't know if the bulging was the result of underproofing a bit, or just lousy sealing.

The crisped, glistening, salt and pepper speckled fat that nestles around the bones of a bone-in pork roast.

That's even better. Now, that I understand. Thanks. That puts the formula into a form, if it makes a well piled loaf, that could get transcribed right into my notebook.

Thanks for the quick replies. I mixed a double batch of preferment. By Dan's schedule, I should have bread by late afternoon. If I can find the camera and batteries, I'll post pictures. I used the gram feature on the scale and did 500g each of flour and water. It made a rather thick batter but double checking the online conversion thing says that 250 ml of water is 8.4 oz and my figure tells me that 250 g of flour is 8.8 oz, so I don't think that I'm far off.