John Braise

What other point could there be? It's a contest.

They have this sun-dried pork appetizer that is freakin' awesome. Not exactly the most healthy option on the menu, but holy pork is it good.

E-Noodle Cafe is worth mentioning. It's south of 36 on Rice street in Roseville. I've mostly stuck to the soups, but everything has been well prepared. For the money, it can't be beat.

And I'm your vector, Victor Subservient chicken was good, but this is better. Any chance this will hit US airwaves? Does it even matter?

The anagram genius server came up with a few promising ones: COD ROW HO CORD OH OW DR OW COHO ORCH WOOD CHOW DOOR CHOW ODOR CROW HOOD Chow Door has a real down-home appeal. The rhyming is nice too.

How about $7/lb? http://www.secure-kew.com/grimaud/display.mv?1099018927 ← How about $5/lb?

Re: the texture thing If you mush the mashed potatoes (or I suppose anything else) through a mesh strainer with a spatula once or twice, they get crazy smooth. It's almost like they become something else. Of course, a lot of butter/cream helps with the lubricity . I thought they would get pasty, but the mesh must incorporate enough air to keep things lovely. I'd imagine this would work especially well for transforming the more fibrous root veggies into a smooth product.

Weird. Literally 20 minutes ago I was flipping through a USPlastics catalog and thinking how funny it was that they were marketing stainless stockpots as "Heating and Storage Tanks with Covers." Anyway, they also have sheet pans and deep pans made by Polarware. Googling "Polarware" turns up a few more vendors. A more general search for stainless labware might turn up even more. I'm not sure that they're standard sizes, but I'm not sure that matters either.

It works very well. Boiling water comes in at 210 or 211 or so, which is probably about right given that I'm maybe 1000 ft above sea level. Higher temperature liquids (oil) seem to be accurate as well, but I don't own anything to compare it to. It doesn't have much mass in the tip, so it comes up to temperature very quickly, and it doesn't need to be very deep to get a good reading - only 1/4" or so is all that's required. I think that's what you were asking. If not, I guess I haven't tried boiling the case... I don't think the outcome would be good. There really isn't much I would improve. It's a model of brutal simplicity. Maybe a little smaller display so you could slim up the case. The numbers are HUGE! Or maybe added ballast to make it feel more substantial - for 80 bones it should feel like there's something in it. But the actual performance is superb.

For me, a good thermometer is an essential tool. After going through a few dial type "instant read" thermometers (which never died - I just didn't like them) and about 5 or 6 probe type electric thermometers (which go bad the instant any liquid graces the crimp), I gave up and got one of these bad boys . Best kitchen investment ever. It's fast enough that you can get a pretty accurate temperature profile in seconds. You push it in a little, take a reading, push it in a little more get another reading, etc. Of course, you can do the same thing with any thermometer, but the Thermopen makes it practical. You can easily take 10 measurements in the time it would normally take for 1. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I love mentally mapping out temperature gradients of roasted chicken thighs. I thought I would miss being able to leave the probe in the oven/oil/whatever, with the display at a safe distance, but it takes measurements so fast that it's not an issue. For all practical purposes, it's instant. Put it in the oil, pause for two beats, take reading. Accuracy has been excellent so far - it's lasted far longer than any other thermometer. Anyway, I can't recommend the Thermapen highly enough. It's a great gadget. I'm actually kinda pissed that it's recently started popping up in cooking catalogs and stores. Do you have any idea how many hours of googling I put in to find these things in the first place?

I'm waiting for a non-caloric (or low caloric), non-carcinogenic, tasteless, colorless food grade heat transfer fluid that's good up to 500 deg F. Automatic Nobel Prize.

That's one of my favorite bits of food trivia. I think I learned it from "How to Read a French Fry"... oh wait... Another one (which I haven't verified) was from Lynne Rossetto Kasper. Supposedly, onions cut longitudinally (root to tip) stay more crisp than when cut the other way (into rings or half-rings or whatever). I'm guessing that it preserves more of the onions internal structure, similar to slicing a flank steak across the grain vs. with it.

Oh heavens no! Mangoes are cliché!

Those are certainly all good tips, but imagine how much more powerful these messages would be set to music.

And nothing matches. If you were stuck with a shard of pottery and a nail, you adapt or steal someone else's stuff. It'd be great fun.

Proof that even the "absurdly simple" can be a lot more complicated than you'd ever guess. I work with/design pretty complicated research instruments all day and I can't remember the last time I've used a natural log - now I'm supposed to use one for boiling an egg?!? I guess if you break it down enough, cooking is all about chemistry, heat transfer, and materials science. Not exactly real simple stuff. It just seems that way because we're familiar with the results.

I don't know why or where I heard this, but I thought "corn" more or less referred to a small, hard chunk of something. So mustard seeds, coriander, pepper, etc were called corns. Even things like gravel, rock salt, etc could have been referred to as corns (as well as the "corns" on your feet). So anyways, in that sense, corned beef makes more sense. It's made with whole, hard spices. Corns.

This definitely fits into the "wild ass speculation" category. I'm wondering if there might be something special about the surface of the cast iron that could be polished off (but not burned or chemically cleaned off). In all castings, the outer surface is harder, denser, and finer grained than the interior. The metal at the surface cools almost instantaneously as it hits the mold, everything that piles up behind cools much more slowly. The rate of cooling dramatically effects the material properties. I have no idea how much material a motivated machinist would remove from a cast iron pan to get an acceptable surface finish, but it's probably less than a few thousandths. Which, I'm guessing, is a lot less that the "skin" from the casting process. So it probably wouldn't change much at all... but what do I know?

My personal pho rankings would go: 1st Saigon Close 2nd Pho Tau Bay Close 3rd Pho 79 (I go to the one in St. Paul on Energy Park Drive) 4th Quang They are all really good, but I guess I like the broth at Saigon a little better. To me, it seems beefier and more star anisey. In truth, I've only been to Pho Tau Bay once (in large part due to snowangels recommendations:smile: ) and I really did like it, but I was weaned on Saigon. Plus Saigon is right in the neighborhood and Pho Tau Bay, Quang, and the Nicollet Pho 79 are more of an excursion for me. If you do go to Saigon, the Bahn Mi cannot be skipped. I'll accept dissention on my soup rankings, but the sammiches are untouchable.

I think you could make a strong argument that the best Italian in the Twin Cities is in St. Paul. Luci in Highland is fantastic. Right down the street is Punch, which is the standard-bearer for Neopolitan style pizza in the cities. It's on a different vertex of Pizza Greatness than Red's Savoy Inn, but great nonetheless. I went to Osteria i Nonni maybe a month after it opened and was underwhelmed. The food wasn't bad, but it didn't seem in line with the prices they were charging. I hate paying the bill at the end of the night and thinking about the dozen other places I would have rather spent my filthy lucre. The service was completely out of sync. Anyway, it's good to hear that have turned it around - I'm rooting for them. I'm just not excited about going back. Thanks for the review!

The texture would be very different from a pork/beef/chicken larb, but I bet a fish larb would be excellent. That way you could sneak in the fish sauce no problem (an essential ingredient, in my opinion) I'm imagining a poached tilapia or catfish or something, flaked and mixed with the rest of the traditional larb ingerdients... I might have to try that...

I think curdling (in general) is due to the protiens binding up in the presence of heat and/or acid. By tempering it, you're basically diluting the yoghurt, spacing the protiens apart so they have less chance of snagging each other in a nasty clotted mess. Fat also helps to "insulate" them from one another. I'd imagine whipping it to incorporate air does the same thing to some extent. So lowering the heat, whisking like crazy, adding small amounts at a time, and tempering, used singly or in combination should help. Also, the less time on the stove the better. I think you're always going to get curdling, but by limiting the amount of contact between yoghurt protiens at high temperature, you should be able to keep the big (unappealing) curds from forming. Basically, everything that's already been said. Give me a break - I've been reading Harold McGee for weeks on end! My head's going to explode.

<drooling> God, a bacon crusted pot pie sounds like the greatest thing ever.

Another article from the New York Post. It's amazing that it all happened within a month's time. Crazy. And his wife is a vegan chef!!!

I believe this is the reason they say to never heat your non-stick pan without at least a little bit of oil. The oil will smoke up long before the teflon starts to vaporize. So it's like an early warning system. Plus, the oil should help to keep the pan near the oil's smoke point (at least until all the oil is gone). In general, though, teflon is ridiculously inert and perfectly safe stuff at normal temps.