schneich

wow... lots of great tips, thanks a lot, i think i will try to get a mold with a lid since i think thats where the secret may be. i will keep you posted with a photo once i have the results cheers t.

duh! - but the art of it is to get it perfect witohut cheating... t.

since a few days iam trying to do a perfect kasutera cake that is as perfectly flat as in all those fancy japanese pictures. they always seem to form a perfect cuboid, whereas my cake is either sunk in the middle or bulged up. i tried several recipes with and without suger. more or less hoeny, with and without cream of tartar etc. etc.... since the pieces will be enrobed in chocolate the thing MUST be perfect... any hints ??? cheers torsten s.

So the activa has a "taste" and you add MSG to mask it? ← no - the msg just happend to be another product of the company. the activa stuff has no taste whatsoever. i tasted some of the slurry that turned into a gel yesterday... t.

well the interesting thing is that between the chicken layers the bond was pretty strong, and not so strong between the chicken and duck... but overall it was very very easy to handle and cut - just like one piece of meat. the pan has just little dents... cheers t.

here we go: when i took the piece out of the fridge it really welded nicely into one piece just like a pork tenderloin or so... the plan is to sear it nicely brown with some garlic rosemary and some kaffir leaves and then put it in the oven at 160C until it reaches 65C then let it rest for 15 minutes or so let me tell you it came out just beautiful very tender in the center nice and brown on the outside i served it with some nice young spinach and some robuchon style mashed potatoes the sauce was made by deglacing the pan with some lambrusco and the reduced the stock of the chicken carcass & trimming from yesterday - thickend with some icecold buttercubes let me tell you it tasted marvelous... cheers t.

here is my first attempt with the activa stuff wich came today :) its going to be what i would call a "henduckbunny" consisting of french cornfed chicken legmeat, breast & filet, two female duck breasts and some nice bunny filets... all the meat trimmed bonez go right into stockpot this is the schtuff weighed 10 grams which is 1% of 1000 grams of meat mixed to a weird slurry (use a whisk cause powder tends to be lumpy) after cutting ALL the sinews and flattening the meats between sheets of plastic i finally put things together this is layer one consisting of the legmeat which can bear more heat when searing after the first layer i salted and sprinkled some thyme. since the meat itself should be pretty tasty i just want to give it a little twist with the thyme, layer 2 is the butterflied and flattend chickenbreast. here comes the duckbreast also butterflied and flattend also salt thyme and slurry again little thyme salt slurry and 2 bunny filets sushilike wrapped in plastic, bound with kitchentwine, voila ! now the thing sits in my fridge until it will be seared in evo, and finished for about 3 hours at 80 degrees celius in my oven.. (images follow) after 3 hours i opend it to have a look and its already nicely ONE... cheers from cologne t.

hi, this stuff sounds really amazing, i just ordered samples of the "activa EB" stuff, from ajinmoto germany, pretending iam a customer who wants to place a big order :) i also ordered their new hightech MSG seasoning called "Kokumi" which kind of equalizes the taste sensation... these people do weird stuff.... once the schtuff arrives my first project will be all sorts of different meat to be put in ONE... i will call it the "chimera roast" imagine a turducken in ONE roast, or a beef tenderloin with a pork crackling crust or meat ravioli with a dough made of duckskin... or or or.... i really look 4ward to it... cheers t.

if you want a real good sauce, you might want to get you some beef bones, or even better veal bones (smoother tasting) and cook yourself a nice fond (about 3h) roasting the bones, or throwing in some veggies can help. then reduce the fond by 3/4. then when the roast is nearly ready toss some butter in a pan (no nonstick pan!!) and fry some of the trimmings, as well as some finely minced shallots, and some herbs you like (sage rosemary whatever) and fry for a minute or two, then deglace with some dry wermouth AND the reduced stock, reduce a littlebit more, get rid of the trimmings and herbs(otherwise too strong) and getyourself some icecold buttercubes (nonsalted plugra of course) draw the pan from the fire and whisk the butter into sauce like hell, when finnished put pan back on medium fire and whisk until it reaches perfect consistency turn fire very small now, since you dont want to reduce more... voila!! perfect sauce - no starch, flour arrowroot or whatever. in my eyes all the starch crap only makes your sauce look like the chinese jelly stuff.... a real espangiole can be different & good but it needs to cook out every trace of starch for at least 5 hours... (escoffier) cheers torsten s.

i try to remember the name.. one of the guys from pacojet once mentioned it to me... btw. a friend of mine uses the home version in his restaurant since more than 4 years without any hassle.... cheers t.

used pacojet auction

i did quite a few shows for Boiron who is a producer of the finest frozen fruit pulp on the european market; they teamed with the pacojet guys and so i did a lot of stuff with the machine, and i really have to say this thing ROCKS!! you can do sorbets a la minute, perfect farces, incredible herb oils, mousses, soups and and and... downside is that thing is FUCKING expensive... but i know there is a korean or chinese copycat... that even uses the same containers. to get started you could also buy the consumer version, which is no more produced, but can be bought on ebay with a little luck. this thiing is only 800 euros used. cheers t.

400 is muuuuch to high. because of the high temperature your meat cooked quite some time after you pulled it from the oven. my suggestion would be: sear in pan until nice n brown, throw in the oven at 149F for 12 to 15 h ;-) t.

deglace with absinth n try to burn the alcohol off right away, neglecting the fact that this stuff has 80%. WOOOF.... (front hair gone) t. :-(

there is not that much difference in the taste of the salt itself but alot in the way it blends in your mouth. for example when you serve a carpaccio of marzano tomatoes just sprinkled with evo, balsamico, malabar and some huge maldon pyramids, once you put that stuff in your mouth the salt crunches like fresh baked bread crust and givesthe thing a whole new texture level :-) http://www.salttraders.com/Detail.bok?no=5 t.

my marinara sauce gets its kick from 2-3 of those little suckers :) t.

of course sauce gets much nicer if your start with a sofritto and some anchovis... deglacing with some Noilly Prat gives a nice dry whitewine aroma.. pasta should be made fresh with lots (6 per pound flour) of eggyolks, then cut to taglierini. i prefer the meatballs browned and finished in the sauce at medium/low temperature a nice recipe from perugia is covering a pitted black olive with the meatballdough then bread, and fry in lots of clarified butter... hmmm :-) cheers t.

as i said before, its a crime to cook fresh pasta at all its suposed to simmer at around 90 celsius... What on earth are you talking about? Since when is it not cooking to leave something in simmering water? Whatever you want to call the process by which the pasta goes from raw to ready-to-eat, if you do it for too long it will turn to paste. are you a nit picker ?? t.

As I said earlier, AP flour based pastas are very easy to overcook - when they are overcooked they turn to paste. As long as you don't overcook it, AP is perfectly acceptable for pasta making. as i said before, its a crime to cook fresh pasta at all its suposed to simmer at around 90 celsius... i really really think more and more people should read the books of herve this and harold mcgee to make a tiny step to free the art of cooking of weird and wrong myths & legends.... cheers t.

when you talk about tajarin i guess you mean the "tajarin ricci" as tajarin is just the Piemontese version of tagliatelle and are not necessarily made with that much egg. btw. the original tajarin recipe uses durum flour... cheers t.

as i said, i was talking out of my every day experience with italian flour (i doubt you use italian flour very much in the US ;-) and my experience is that even with using just the german 405 flour which is a little stronger in gluten than the US AP flour it is hard to do a real good pasta. i never doubted the pasta knowhow of certain people here, what i doubt is the basic knowledge of the product flour. i dont know which sources you guys on the other side of the atlantic have other than some weird websites concerning italian flour. besides other things i do i was responsible for a product report on last years anuga food fair (which is known to be the larget food fair in the world) on italian products. that report gave me the chance to find out about the products of italy´s most important food companys, especially products as pasta secca & pasta fresca, olive oil and chocolate. in most product descriptions of "tipo 00" flour the protein content was between 12-15 %. this combined with knowledge of 3 of the bigger AP manufacturers in the US which declared the protein content in their biggest selling products between 7-10 % leads me to the logical conclusion that AP flour sucks for making pasta due to a lack of protein aka gluten :-) dear lameington i doubt that iam ready to learn from people who google up some websites in 5 mins. and think they can tell me in which direction the world rotates... sorry no ;-) now dont tell me there is NO ONE out there who ever tried to make pasta out of AP flour and didnt find it a gluey, slippery, slimey etc. especially when (and that was a point in the discussion above) using no egg. up to my knowledge this is simply not possible with a quality level that would satisfy me. (maybe other peoples quality approach is different here ;-) alltogether i just wanted to share my 10 y. knowledge in pasta making with people in this thread. cheers t.

when do you guys start to understand what i say ???? i didnt say that all the great chefs are wrong, all i say is: first, italian flour is not "US AP flour" and cant be compared to it. second, i doubt that one of these chefs ever worked with AP themselves! comeon your such a clever guy... you seem to have the intention to get me wrong...

Italian law defines '00' flour as having a minimum of 7% protein. That is relatively low and would not generally be classified as a strong flour. As law defines a minimum value, these flours can vary from maker to maker, in general the protein concentration remains low. This information is readily availible. Also flour doesn't have gluten, it contains two proteins that combine to form gluten when kneaded etc. Semolina is commonly used to make pasta. But in the north of Italy soft wheat flour is often used, often for stuffed pasta. The individual that originally asked for advise specifically mentioned that they could not readily get fine semolina flour. So the point of this thread would be give them other options, which most people have. ts ts ts ts..... all the 00 flours that i know of have a gluten content of min 12 % also you find this percentage pretty much everywhere you look. AP flour has a gluten content usually 4 % lower than this ( as i wrote b4) the Gliadin and Glutenin content is very commonly refered to as "gluten content", so this adds nothing new to the discussion. cheers t.

HAHAHAHAHA t. dude, stay with your coffee.....

DONT cook em at all... just simmer at 90 celsius... t.