chromedome

I see them more in the spring than the fall, generally. They're more common in the farm eggs I get from a neighbour as opposed to the Safeway kind, but I get them a lot from the supermarkets as well. When we raised our own chickens, years ago in Newfoundland, about 1/3 of our flock laid double-yolkers on a regular basis.

Printed, and magnetted to the fridge awaiting a day off. Mooohooohoohawwwhawwhaww......

That's probably your culprit, right there. You're right that you should get less carryover cooking with a smaller roast; it's got less mass and therefore holds less heat (basic physics). Cranking your oven right at the end would change the heat distribution, though, and probably put you a little further along than you'd like. A better bet, next time, would be to brown up the roast before putting it in the oven. Sear it on all sides in a skillet to make it nice and brown and crusty; then deglaze the skillet with water or wine or whatever and pour the drippings over the roast. It surely doesn't "seal in the juices," but it does give you a nice flavour. Especially if your roast still has a bit of a fat cap on it.

We used the stuff out of our alcohol burners. Don't remember what it was. Doesn't matter about it being potable, since it's only going to evaporate.

In school we made bubble sugar with regular sugar, all the time. Melt the sugar as you would for any other purpose (ie caramel), but don't let it get hot enough to discolour. On your work surface, lay down a sheet of parchment paper. Wipe it with a cloth soaked with strong alcohol; or spritz it with a spray bottle. Quickly, before the alcohol evaporates, pour the sugar onto the parchment about 1/3 of the way down. Lift up the end of the parchment and let the sugar slide toward the bottom. Then pick up the other end and let the sugar slide back. Wherever there is alcohol the sugar won't stick, creating a pattern very much like the two-silpats method Sinclair discusses. Leave it sit on a flat surface until cooled and hardened, then break it up and use as desired. We used about 1 1/2-2 cups of molten sugar for a full-sized sheet of parchment; this made a nice thin sheet. The sugar can be tinted with food colouring before pouring, which makes a nice colour accent on your plates. We used this a lot at school. We also occasionally used the two-silpats method, though IIRC the instructor had a different name for that. I'd have sworn we used regular sugar, too, rather than isomalt, but I could be wrong about that.

The same principle applies to many other products. In my home province of Nova Scotia, the bulk of the best apples (we're a major apple grower) get shipped to the eastern seaboard of the US. To get the good ones, you pretty much have to drive down to the Annapolis Valley and pick your own. A former co-worker from New Zealand tells me that it's the same there, with lamb.

I haven't tried Oculus either, not having the budget for that, but everything I've read about it has been good. The only quibble I've heard is that for the retail price, international wines of similar quality can be had for significantly less. As for Natalie, I've read her columns several times and found them to be generally informative. Recently, though, she's been criticised for inflating her scores.

Just a few additional points... Use heavy sauces. Anything bechamel-based helps a lot; or anything derived from a puree of peas, beans, etc. Serve things over a big ol' slab of starch. Yorkshire puddings are great for that (that's what they were designed for). Wrap things in pastry, whether made or bought. Having roast beef and gravy? Make it hot roast beef sandwiches. Serve biscuits, or milk. Buy clearance bread from the local bakery's clearance outlet, and make savoury bread puddings and strata (or sweet ones, for that matter). Corn breads and suchlike are a great thing. The cornmeal will still expand in their bellies, and will keep them full longer. Serve a bowl of home-made soup at every meal. As the first course. Don't serve the entree until the soup is cleared. Serve lots of bread and rolls with the soup. Leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge are a fast and filling snack. So are leftover potatoes diced up for panfries/hash browns, and then the young 'uns can take responsibility for making their own. A decent parm or asiago cheese is more expensive than the regular cheddar-style product, but it takes relatively little to put an emphatic cheese flavour onto any dish. Wanna be really sneaky? Use a small amount of parm to "spike" your dish, and you can cut back quite a bit on the cheddar...use it more for top-dressing. Use less but display it more, kind of a thing. Home-made noodles are great, especially if you make them with pumpkin or buckwheat. In fact, use a bit of buckwheat in any pancakes or biscuits you make and they'll be more filling. And sweet potato pie is one heck of a substantial dessert. My son has grown three inches in the last few months, and filled out to the tune of 25 pounds. He's not what you'd call a light eater.

Well, Chris, at my night job such requests are met with a crisp "Tell 'em to order something else!" from the chef/owner. And our game entrees will not be cooked past a certain point...the bison will not be cooked past medium, and the muskox and caribou will not be cooked past medium-rare. They just don't work anymore after that, and we simply won't serve them.

At school we always popped 'em into the freezer for 20-30 minutes before baking. That worked well.

We don't think we have two personalities, and we're doing all right...[twitch, twitch]

On an earlier thread here, a suggestion was made which intrigued me (I haven't tried it yet, mind you). Word has it that frying your oatmeal in part of the fat (butter, margarine, whatever) that's called for improves the flavour dramatically. Only problem is, I haven't had time to make cookies at home lately...and the batch we make at work is 40kg of dough, which is a bit much to experiment on.

I'm "Fabulous Feasts" as well. From the description, I wonder if that's their catchall for people who don't fit very cleanly into one of the other books?

I added one to my scores of souvenirs last night. Reached absentmindedly into the lowboy for a brulee, and stuck my finger right into the fan. Don't think I'll be doing that again, anytime soon.

I've seen recipes for several types of Christmas cookies that call for an overnight drying stage. These, like macarrons, are usually based on egg whites.

Insulting the chef's seasoning chops would certainly get a rise out of him. Personally, I'd send a note to the kitchen suggesting that he return to McDonald's at his earliest convenience.

During my first year at cooking school, in Halifax, I participated in a couple of competitions. My biggest interest (aside from seeing how I stacked up against students from other schools) was to eavesdrop on all the post-competition critiques from the judges. One of the judges I was particularly interested in hearing was Christophe Luzeux, executive chef at the World Trade & Convention Centre in Halifax. Not only is he an exceptional chef, he competes at the highest level as a member of Culinary Team Canada. He got onto the subject of sauces with one of my rivals, from the cross-town Akerley campus. He pointed at the plate, which was decorated with two-tone drops (I forget what they were...perhaps drops of reduced balsamic centred in drops larger drops of an infused oil. Something like that, anyway.). He asked the student, "You like the little drops, eh? Tell me...is that your sauce? Or does it just decorate the plate?" The student, seeing the trap in this question, stammered that it was his sauce, he guessed. Luzeux gave him a look, and said, "Is this enough sauce for the food that is on the plate? No, it isn't! If this is your sauce, you need enough for the diner to taste it on his food...every bite. If this is decoration, then the food needs a sauce besides this! It's okay for the drops to be a little bit of extra flavour, it's okay for them to be just a decoration, but there has to be enough sauce for what's on the plate." Lalitha, as for the pork loin thingie... We had some pates that hadn't sold, and were nearing their pull date. Not expired yet, you understand, but getting close; and we'd already gotten in a new batch. So we decided to make the next day's carved special a bit...well, special. We butterflied a couple of long pork loins (the store I work for is the offspring of a family hog farm, and produces some of the finest pork in the country) and stuffed them with the pate. Then we tied them up nice and tight to keep the pate from leaking out, and breaded them with a bit of parsley (just for the looks). Cherry season had just hit, and we'd been overshipped on fresh cherries (the sweet, not the tart). So I pitted a bunch of cherries, and had been planning to take them to the bakery. When we hit on the pate-stuffed loin, though, I thought about putting the cherries with the pork. After all, traditional sauces for pate are frequently fruit-based, like Cumberland. So I cooked up a big pot of cherries, and then drained the juice off. I made a fairly dark caramel in a big saute pan, and deglazed it (off the flame, natch) with a couple cups of brandy. I stirred that well and let the brandy cook off, then diluted it further with the reduced cherry juice and let it simmer. When I was satisfied that I had the proportions about right, I added some cranberry juice for the acidity (orange would have been good too, but I was looking for colour and clarity). Then I thickened it slightly with a cornstarch slurry, and added some of the cherries back in. Oh, and since the pate had game and juniper berries in it I wanted something of a pine-y note in there, just under the radar; so I had some cardamom in the cherry juice as it was reducing. That's about it! We served the pork loin with the cherry sauce and glazed baby carrots and asparagus and (IIRC) orzo pasta. Not a bad lunch for $9.95 CDN, eh? (That's about $6 US)

During my first year of school I attended a meeting of the CFCC (now CCFCC), the Canadian professional association for cooks. We had a salt tasting hosted by a retired chef, who had organized about 20 different salts for us to evaluate. Now I have to tell you that 20 salts is a whole lotta salt to taste in one evening; I wound up being a heavy hitter at the beverage table that night. But it was very, very interesting. Ordinary iodized table salt has a very recognizable chemical taste to it, once your palate has adjusted to the cleaner taste of pure salts like kosher salt. It tends to have a sharper "bite" to it than some of the more exotic salts. Ordinary coarse ("pickling") salt has a cleaner flavour, like kosher salt; the flakier kosher salt is nicer when added at time of service. Sea salts, as long as they're not too refined, have varying degrees of flavour and subtlety (depending on where and how they're produced). Scandinavian "smoked" salt, and Indian "Black" salt, have very strong and recognizable flavours. Other salts, like the Maldon crystals that Sneicht linked to, are more about the textural differences. It's a fascinating study. All of them, more or less, season your food the same way; but there are definite differences.

We use it at one of my workplaces for some applications. I find it to be an in-betweener...better than the cheapie "coating chocolate," but not as good as the big names. Worth buying for everyday use, if the price is right, but for anything extra-special you'll still want to shell out for the good stuff.

Like a lot of cooks, I'm ambivalent about the huge repertoire of "classical" sauces. Certainly, it is a very good thing to know the main families of sauces and their derivatives. And, just as certainly, you will seldom be called upon in the real world to know the difference between two finely-distinguished sauces bearing the names of 19th-century celebrities. Personally I think it's worth knowing a handful of the old warhorses. There's a reason that these sauces have lasted (in some cases) for centuries...they just taste good! Robert, for example, is recognizable in cookbooks going back half a millenium; it's easy to make and it still tastes damned good with pork. In fact, I put it on with a pork roast at my day job, and people loved it. I've done Poivrade and Bercy and yer basic beurre blanc, among others; all of them solid hits with my clientele. Most of these people had no idea what the sauce was, before I told them; to them it was just a surprisingly tasty lunch option in a busy downtown outlet. Now mind you, there are a world of other sauces out there to draw on. I've made a variation on avgolemono sauce to go with a leg of lamb; I've done pork adobo to the delight of my Filipino cashier; and a beautiful Romesco sauce to go with a salmon baked in parchment. Improvisations work well, too...I've turned an embarrassment of cherries into a spectacular brandied sauce to go with a pate-stuffed pork loin. Learn the classics, by all means. Learn their characteristics, and their flavour profiles. Ask yourself why they work the way they do. Then, when you want to create a sauce for your new dish, you'll have a context to work from. Cool sauce matrix, Lalitha! I'm training a couple of my staff to take over sauce-making duties from me; I'll be sure to e-mail them that bookmark.

If I can ever get away from work long enough, I have to get over to the little Chinese shop a few blocks across the downtown for a Benriner. At school we used the traditional heavy-duty French-made mandolines, and frankly I thought they were crap. They're big and heavy and awkward, and the blades only stayed sharp for about a year (at least, with the level of usage these ones saw). After that you either got new blades, or fobbed the beastie off on another kitchen and ordered a new one. The Benriner, in similar usage, also lasts about a year, oddly enough. Then you dispose of it (carefully!) and get another one. Here in Canada, the price difference is significant enough that one French-made mandoline can equal 5-7 Benriners. I like the way the math works...

I've been buying the green ones; a one-pound bag about every 3-4 months. Freshness, therefore, is not really an issue! I use them a lot for baking, in tea, and also just to chew as a breath freshener. I'm also planning to incorporate their flavour into a few of my desserts in caramel form: infuse the seeds into the water I make the caramel with. I think that would go wonderfully with a few of the pastries I'm going to introduce at work over the next few weeks. Until recently I'd not been aware of the green/sweet black/savoury tradition. Next time I get down to the Punjabi store I'll have to get some of the black ones and experiment a little.

...and I'll be happy to offer them, as soon as I can read the article. I'm planning to do these at work, sometime during the fall, so an improved recipe will be a bonus. We have a next-door "sister store," a wine shop, and the manager there is Portugese. I plan on surprising the heck out of her with these. I initially found your site, btw, while researching recipes for "Iberian day" at school. It was a pleasant surprise to find you here at the Gullet, a few months later; and to read your how-to on food writing.

I could see perhaps using transparent rice noodles instead of sliced gelatine sheets. Maybe soak them in a light syrup, or poach them, as needed. That would probably work. I've made a chocolate "ravioli" consisting of thinly-rolled cocoa shortbread, cut into squares and laboriously hand-filled with ganache. I served them warm (not hot) from the oven with a vanilla anglaise and some raspberry coulis. They were pretty good, but not really "pasta" I suppose. Just a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile, so to speak. My wife's grandmother, a Mennonite, makes dessert varenike (perogies) from the normal dough, but filled with cherries or plums according to what's in season. They're served in a simple sauce of reduced cream, with a sprinkling of sugar. Damn, they're good! You've got me thinking, though. I expect that if I was to make a basic egg pasta, and used confectioner's sugar instead of flour for the rolling, it would probably be sweet enough to do the job without mucking about changing the recipe. Perhaps I'd fill them with fruit purees, or fresh fruit lightly poached (blanched, basically) in a light syrup then drained. Hmmm. Lots of possibilities. Gonna have to give this some thought, there's a competition in April that I'm thinking of entering. That might be a fun dessert to do...

I found this spreadsheet on an artisan-baking site. If you enter the original recipe into the "basic meth" section, you can then use the "scaling" feature to reduce the recipe to a size you're comfortably with. I'd say that the passionfruit are probably your most-limited ingredient, so perhaps use them in lieu of flour as the "100% ingredient" to scale from. If you live anywhere near the Canadian border, lemon gin is not hard to find at liquor stores here. Otherwise, perhaps just infuse whatever neutral spirit you have with some lemon zest.