vengroff

Esquin is not especially close to the U district, but they have a great selection across a wide range of prices and their staff is very knowledgeable. They deliver, but I think there is a minimum order for free delivery.

I hate to hijack Lark's thread like this. Maybe some kind moderator can move some of the posts to a new thread. I thought the main causes of serious foodborne illness were bacteria like salmonella and campylobacter that are commonly present in chicken and eggs long before they arrive in the restaurant kitchen. Whether cooks are wearing gloves or not, if they handle raw chicken and then cooked food they risk spreading the bacteria. It's whether they wash your hands or change gloves in between that matters. Is one really that much better than the other? On the cooling, I misunderstood the nature of the violation and withdraw my claim that it is comparable to the glove issue.

No, just implying that the red violations for common things like touching food seem a bit overblown. If it was really that dangerous hospitals would be filled with ill diners. I don't mean to imply that restaurants shouldn't be inspected, merely that the focus should be on the areas that really do lead to serious problems.

The one about, "food workers not minimizing bare hand contact with ready-to-eat foods," is slapped on fine-dining establishments all the time. It has never bothered me much. The simple fact is that there is a tactile element to cooking certain foods. A quick touch of the finger can tell you a lot the doneness of a steak or piece of fish. I trust these guys to be professional about their manual hygene. And do I understand "Hot potentially hazardous foods not properly cooled," properly? Does this mean they serve some of their food too hot? Does every Tex-Mex joint that puts refritos and cheese under a heat lamp get the same violation? What about pizza places that serve pies straight from a 900 degree oven? Some of these are legitimate problems, but many are trumped up. I'd rather eat some place that I can get perfect medium rare lamb and a good gray-market raw milk cheese* than a place with a spotless inspection record and a menu of pre-packaged heat-and-eat crap. *I have no idea if Lark serves such cheeses or not, in case anyone is wondering.

Third Floor Fish Cafe is the only one marked as a new participant. Who dropped out to make space for them?

This moring I made pain ancienne. It's amazing that those cavernous voids in the crumb are the end results of such a simple technique. I started with 400g of bread flour and used the percentages in the book. Here's how the dough looked just after mixing. It's quite cold at this point because of the ice water. It's very wet, but somewhat gummy and holds together well. After overnighting in the fridge and then spending two more hours on top of the fridge the dough was double its original bulk and just below room temperature. I used a spatula to turn it out of the bowl, repeatedly dipping in water to prevent sticking and working as gently as possible in order not to degass the dough. Reinhart is right about the need for a ton of flour in order to be able to handle the wet sticky dough. Here it is after rounding and resting for a few minutes. The next step is to carefully cut it with the scraper. Dipping the scraper in cold water and then pushing straight down pinches the dough together and seals it reasonably well. The dough is really soft and loose and this point, and I wasn't quite sure about how I was going to stretch it. It turned out that letting gravity do most of the work was a perfectly good approach. The mere act of lifting the sections of dough with heavily floured hands caused them to stretch out to the right length. Here they are on the peel just before going in the oven. As before, I used a pan of water heated to boiling on the stovetop and then put in the oven on the rack below the stone. Someone asked earlier what kind of pan I use. It's a 2qt AllClad. I also sprayed the oven walls this time, once 30 seconds after the bread went in and once 30 seconds after that. I pulled the water pan out of the oven at the 10 minute mark, then baked for another 12. At that point the internal temp was 208F so I pulled the bread. Here it is cooling. Finally, here are some close ups of the crust to go along with the crumb picture from the beginning. I brushed a bit of the excess flour off to expose the crust a little more. I said it before, but I still can't believe how simple this approach was. You have to be a little careful handling the fragile dough, but other than that this bread pretty much takes care of itself. As always, comments and criticism are appreciated.

We had crisp-skinned black bass over rich creamy faro with herbs and tiny cubes of brunoise carrots. It was so good we had to order a second one. My dinnermate, who has been to Union probably a dozen times, pronounced it the best dish she's ever had there. I started with poached artic char. Ethan has been poaching fish lately and presenting it in soups and salads with nice effect. It's a nice change from the usual saute or grill treatment most seafood gets these days. We also enjoyed the Treana 2001 Mer Solier. At 61% viognier it's pretty much a shoe in that I was going to like it. For the cheese course they've switched from a selection of five cheeses to five individual cheese presentations, each with a specific accompaniment. For example, I had fourme d'ambert with pears. Ethan will be cooking at the Beard house in New York in a few weeks. I think its March 5 it I remember correctly. I never really thought about the logistics before, but he's planning to bring coolers full of supplies on dry ice along with him on the red-eye flight the night before.

I ended up with a group at Brasa. We didn't know this going in, but they had trapeze artists performing in the bar area. Apparently it was a hit at New Years so they brought them back for Valentines. The calamari stuffed with chorizo is a winning appetizer. I also had some nice medium rare venison chops. Others had the Kobe strip steaks, which were reported to be excellent, and the Paella, which was apparently not up to their ususal high standards.

I use a Canon G3. It's a mid-sized digital from a few years ago. The current generation is the G6. For macro work I typically switch to manual focus. More important than the camera itself, I think, is the flash. Most built-in flashes are just terrible. I added a Canon Speedlite 420EX with a diffuser to mine, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Today (actually starting last night) I made brioche a tete. I used a recipe between the rich and middle class recipes in Reinhart's book. I shaped them using a variant of method 2 on page 126, but only after seeing it demonstrated in the baking class I'm taking. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a demo is worth 1,000 pictures. As for the earlier question about kneading lean doughs, I do it by slapping the dough down on the counter, folding it in thirds, rotating ninety degrees, and repeating. It's faster than the KitchenAid mixer, and much less effort than the traditional knuckle or heal of the hand approaches. Of course for the brioche I just used the mixer since the dough is really sticky. More pics and details on the brioche here here.

I also made a batch of Gabe's cinnamon rolls for those with a sweet tooth that brioche doesn't satisfy. These babies have 5T of cinammon in a recipe that makes 15 rolls.

Last week in Gabe's baking class we made enriched doughs, my favorite of which was brioche. Today I made brioche a tete at home. The process began last night. The first step was to make the sponge from warm milk, yeast, and flour. Here's how it looks after about 30 minutes of fermenting. The rest of the dough, consisting of butter, eggs, sugar, salt, and more flour is mixed seperately. Here it is just before addition of the sponge. It's already soft and wet, and the sponge will make it more so. After mixing in the sponge, the dough has to ferment for an hour. Here it is before fermenting And here it is after fermenting, in the same bowl From there it was into the fridge to cool, firm up, and expand just a bit more overnight. Fast forward to this morning and the shaping. I don't have pictures of the process itself, since I only have two hands. Basically one forms a ball as if for a roll, then rolls a pinch into in so that you have the main body and the head formed, and connected by a thin strand of dough. Then you flatten the body, push a hole with your finger, stretch it open a pit and then pass the head up through it from below. The two piecese never seperate. Here's what they look like immediately after shaping. Once shaped they are given an egg wash and them left to proof at room temperature for about an hour. Here they are just washed and starting to proof. Now fully proofed they are ready for the oven Twenty minutes later they are golden brown on the outside and creamy yellow on the inside. Just in time for brunch.

Agreed. If you can track him down and get him to teach you to serve espresso half as well as he served his cheese course you will do very well.

Congratulations Ryan and Nick. I can't wait to see you guys in Seattle. Murky was my regular hangout when I lived in DC. I'm glad to see national recognition coming your way.

In the absence of any help from the factory service technicians the management at Albert Lee agreed to take it back and brought us a new one this afternoon. It's great that they stepped up to the plate like that. Hopefully they'll give their Amana rep an earfull and things will improve.

Hey, at least they are tan and not greenish gray. Without going into the gory details of where and why, I had a couple of really horrific canned mushroom experiences recently. I'll try Via Tribunali's again when I'm fully recovered and see if fell into a trap of relativism.

Latest news from Maytag: They gave us a one hour time window today that we can't make, and other than that claimed they are fully booked for the entire rest of the week. So much for the bored lonely Maytag repairman. This fridge is going back to Albert Lee.

A great buying experience has turned into a miserable service experience. Some time Thursday our six-week old fridge died. The light works fine, but the food is warm and spoiling. The digital fridge and freezer setting readouts just have dashes and no amount of fiddling with the buttons has any effect. We called Albert Lee and they told us a technician would be out today (Saturday). It turns out they use a Maytag technician for the Amana refridgerators as opposed to an in-house technician. Now it seems that Maytag decided they were too busy and rescheduled us for Monday at some time of their choosing between 7am and 5pm. Most of that time neither one of us can be here, so we'll see what happens.

One class with Gabe and I'm on the cover of Keller's book? There can't be any better advertising for the culinary communion than that! Thanks for the complement, but I've still got a long way to go. I'm especially looking forward to the class where we get to croissants. That's still a few weeks out.

I'm taking the baking series now. I've only been to one class so far, but I found it informative and well presented. And I've been able to reproduce the results at home, which is really the ultimate test. I've put descriptions and pics of some of my bread up over in the pastry and baking forum. Click here and here.

Thanks glossyp. It's a pretty standard American wall oven. 27" size I think. The stone I use is 14" by 16", and the loaves are about 13" long, so three can fit side by side, though I usually make just two at a time. Thanks Marcia. I put two or three cups of water in a 1qt All Clad pan. Basically as much water as I can get in there without it bubbling over when it comes to a strong boil. It holds a lot of heat for a small pan, and they are not that expensive, at least relative to the rest of the All Clad stainless line. My instructor used a cast iron skillet for the same purpose, but the boiling water isn't the best thing for the seasoning of the pan, so I used the stainless pan instead.

I'm still concentrating on a basic 65% lean dough. There is still just a little variation in feel and fermentation time from batch to batch, so I'm trying to correlate that to the final results. I'll probably keep doing this for several more weeks or until I get bored and have the urge to try something else. This week's dough was a little stickier than the last two, but not so sticky as to be unmanageable, except when it came time to slash it. Even my sharpest knife stuck once the blade was in more than a few millimeters. I'll need to get a razor blade. Fermentation was about two hours, with four turns. I then rounded the dough, proofed 30 minutes, rolled and shaped, then 20 more and into the oven. Here are some pictures of the results. First, the exterior view: Each loaf is a little over a foot long, which means two or three fit nicely on my peel and stone. The shape is getting fairly uniform, but still not perfect. Should I just call it rustic and be done with it? Here's a cross section showing the crust and crumb: The crust was crisp and well-formed, except for the bit at the bottom right of the photo. I think there may have been an issue there with the parchment sticking to part of the dough that was not in contact with the stone, and thus it didn't get the benefit of the steam. Once again I used a blazing hot pan of rapidly boiling water from the stovetop, which I put in on the lower rack. The upper rack had the stone and bread. No spraying was done, but there was plenty of steam when I opened the oven to pull the water out after 15 minutes. Comments, criticisms, or suggestions from forum members greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the PNW Craig. It's great to have you here. If (or I assume when) your work at Anne Amie brings you to Seattle let us know. I for one am still learning the ins and outs of Oregon Pinot, and would love to sample some of your product under your guidance.

Another vote for the salt caramels here. A recent guest of ours brought some of these over and they were fantastic. It was my first experience with Fran's but it won't be my last.

And did you have lunch at Market Grill? Someone at the counter mentioned heading here for dinner Friday. ← No market grill lunch for me Friday. Must have been someone else.