chromedome

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.

Years ago in Vancouver, I was at the table next to this exchange: DINER: I see this stuff mentioned all the time, this..."ratatouille." What is it, anyway? WAITRESS: (face squinched up in a look of disgust) It's some kind of a vegetable stew, with, like (shudders) eggplant in it, or something. [pregnant pause] (then, brightly) It's supposed to be really good! The diner, oddly enough, did not order the ratatouille.

My night job "pools," but it seems to be on a different basis from what's been discussed here. Each of the servers surrenders up a percentage of the night's tips, which are shared out to the bussers and kitchen staff according to a fixed arrangement recognizing tenure and hours worked. We're a small place with low turnover, and (amazing to me) everyone gets along well. I've never worked anywhere that I could say that, and I've had a varied 20+ years in the workforce. Nobody takes advantage of the system, and if the tips are insufficient to cover a share for the back of the house, the chef/owner ponies up the difference. They feed us well, too.

I tend to go through more rice than most white guys, considering a family of four and no ethnic pre-disposition. I mainly buy Indian or Thai long-grain rice in a 20kg sack, and Pakistani Basmati in a 10kg sack. I've been meaning to get into some of the sticky rices, but haven't as yet. American rices are widely available in the supermarkets and are generally aggressively-priced, but I find them much harder to cook successfully. I am assured that there are numerous premium American rices, so perhaps it's just a matter of which ones are available to me here. At any rate... I always rinse my rice thoroughly, which I find is one of the biggest keys to making it non-sticky. With basmati, because of its longer, more delicate grains, I soak it for at least 30 minutes and preferably 2-3 hours. This makes it less prone to breakage. I make rice in several different ways, depending on what I plan to do with it (leaving aside risottos, which are a whole different thing entirely). I generally cook rice on the stovetop, in a 4L pot with a nice, tight lid. For long-grain rice cooked plain, I'll go with about 3 cups of water/2 cups of rice. For basmati, because I soak it, I'll cut back the water to 2 1/2 cups. This seems adequate to properly hydrate the rice without turning it to mush. The 2:1 ratio given on the label of many rices is just asking for trouble. If I am cooking an elaborate meal and need my stovetop space, I'll throw the rice into my oven once it's come to a boil. Rather than take the lid off to stir, I just give the whole pot a good swirl with the lid on; then into the oven it goes. I find that a 250F oven does the job nicely, and it won't have to cool off very much if I need to use it as a platewarmer. When I'm making a pilaf-style dish, I invariably fry the rice in my cooking fat for a few minutes first; then add the water/stock/whatever. Generally the rice gets added to whatever aromatics and spices I'm using, and stirred until it's well coated with the flavourful oil. The business with a towel between the lid and the rice is widely used; I came across it in Najmieh Batmanglij's Persian cookbooks. When I'm making Iranian food I do the rice her way: cook the basmati uncovered at a full boil for just a few minutes; then drain and rinse. Place it back in the pot, gently mounded into a cone-shaped pile; add some saffron-infused water, then cover with a towel and lid and let it steam. In Iran, as well, the crusty layer at the bottom of the pot is highly prized; their rice pots are designed specifically to ensure a crust. When cooking large quantities of rice, it is important to reduce the amount of water used. This sounds counter-intuitive, and I have no idea what the mechanics of it are, but I can assure you that it's a factor. Even stepping up from two cups of rice to four means that I need to reduce the water I use. I find that omitting about 1/4 cup of water for every two cups of rice is a good rule of thumb, but bear in mind that I don't have a pot capable of dealing with more than 6 cups of uncooked rice. I'd have to dig up one of my textbooks to see what the recommendation is for larger batches. The cool-down period, as noted above, is also important. Your rice may be cooked perfectly, but if you pop the lid off of just-cooked rice and start plopping it onto plates it's going to be sticky. That's just the way it is. Leaving the rice rest for 10-20 minutes allows the starches time to "set up" nicely, ensuring that the individual grains regain their firmness. Duguid and Alford used the analogy of a loaf of bread fresh from the oven, which will always seem damp and doughy compared to the same loaf after it's had time to cool. Allow yourself adequate time for the rice to sit, and your problem is half-solved.

Thanks for your interest, Red! You're right, those are some big-ass recipes. What's really frightening is that the night bakers are making up batch-and-a-half quantities, rather than what's shown there. We refrigerate the muffin mix in 5-gallon buckets, and scoop as needed. We are a busy downtown office/mall location and the muffins are a constant seller for us. We make up to a dozen kinds of muffins per day, and in quantities of up to 4 dozen each, which amounts to 500-600 muffins per day. This, I'll point out, is during our slow period! We'll do a lot more through the fall when we're busier. The muffins are portioned with a #6 scoop (5.5 oz), so we burn through a bucket of mix pretty quickly (the 5 gal. buckets are not filled all the way, as they'd be unwieldy owing to weight). Currently my night bakers are both rather inexperienced (they came to us from Tim Horton's, where it's just scoop-and-bake). Starting tomorrow I'll be working my Monday shifts with the bakers from afternoon until midnight, so that will give me an opportunity to a) learn their routines, so I can cover when they're sick; b) observe their work patterns to find improvements; and c) find areas where their methodology may be open to improvement. Also some day soon I'll be training additional night bakers, and it would help if I knew what to do! We do currently have "standardized" recipes, but they're a ghastly mess (the phrase "dog's breakfast" springs to mind). I'm going to be porting them over the next few months to weight measures, and generating more-accurate costing from that. Along the way, I also intend to improve the recipes themselves to the extent that I can. Of course, in the quantities we make, I also have to keep an eye on the bottom line; but having more-accurate costs is the first step in that direction. After doing that, I'll be converting the newly-revised recipes into % formulas for my own reference, which will make life much simpler when I want to compare recipes from elsewhere to what I'm using. As for the leavening thing: I'd given that some thought, but the muffins at the end of the batch usually spring just as well as the ones at the beginning of the batch. I'd assumed that this means the leavening is still doing its job. I'm thinking that perhaps these recipes need more in the line of "softening" ingredients; perhaps some additional egg or a titch more oil in the case of the carrot, and suitable substitutes in the oat bran. McDuff: 72 cups is a 5 gal/20 litre bucket almost full. The guys over on the hot side shred one of those for her every day when they're prepping their own veg. And thanks for the methodological suggestions; I use an unconventional recipe at home for small-batch muffins so I'm somewhat deprived of context.

Hello again, all. Continuing to go to school on the cumulative expertise of everyone here, I'm bringing an irritation from my workplace. We bake our own muffins from scratch, and I'm slowly trying to sort the recipes into some sort of coherent order. Overall they're pretty decent muffins, but there are two that I'm not especially happy with. One is the low-fat oat bran, the other is the carrot-raisin. We make big batches of these puppies, about 30kg at a whack (60lbs or so). The oat bran has been pretty crappy. They've been loading it with applesauce and fruit to give it some flavour, but it tends to be gummy and unappealing. The flavour is bland, the colour is blah, and it goes from underbaked/sticky to overbaked/hard & dry in a very short time. The recipe in its current form is as follows: I viewed and printed several low-fat muffin recipes from the internet, by way of comparison, since I'm not by nature a low-anything kind of cook or baker. While there were various approaches, most of them incorporated plain yogurt and/or egg whites. In the most recent batch, I had my night baker add 2 quarts of plain yogurt to the mix. This gave us a much better colour and texture. It was still not what I was looking for (I think it was both overmixed and overbaked, but I'll find out for sure as I work with the night bakers); but it was a big improvement. The muffins browned nicely and had a better flavour and mouthfeel. I'm thinking I'll step up the yogurt to 4 quarts next time and see how we fare. Any further suggestions? Ideally I'd like a muffin that's almost indistinguishable from the regular ones, but that may be unattainable. The carrot-raisin is a somewhat different situation. The basic flavour of the muffin is fine, but I've got concerns about the proportions and methodology (which strikes me as a bit odd, but I've never done muffins in big-batch format before). The muffin tastes good and sells well, but generally comes out feeling tough and overmixed. I know overmixing is not the problem (or not the whole problem), because I've made a batch myself to show the night baker how little mixing a muffin batter takes; those were better but still not ideal. This is the recipe: This muffin tends to have a tough, chewy cap; it usually has that smooth, stretched look that indicates overmixing. As I said above, it comes out looking/feeling overmixed even when it is not. Any suggestions?

Halibut in pistachio crust, served on yogurt/caper sauce, with saffron rice and a handful of mixed veg. Just the way we serve it to the customers; but with a bowl of the boss's clam "chowder" (I'm sorry, I'm from Nova Scotia...if it ain't white, don't call it chowder) on the side. Have I mentioned that they feed us pretty well?

I wanted to show this to my artist/design junkie wife, but I just get "image not found." They were there before!

I went through most of those Edmonton sites before I moved here, scoping out potential workplaces. I knew about Jack's, Unheardof, and Hardware before I ever started. Didn't think I had a hope in hell of getting in at Hardware, which has been borne out by my local contacts. When I got to the Century Grill website, I just about puked. Holy Crap!! I eliminated them from my list of possibilities immediately. Any company that could concentrate such a high level of wrongness on their website was a compay I didn't want to work for (also borne out by my local contacts). I do freelance research, which means I spend a lot of time grubbing around badly-designed websites looking for info. Flash is a personal bugbear of mine. When will people figure out that Flash and usability exist on a continuum? More Flash=less usable. Some major players have been guilty of this. I remember last year one of the CIA Prochef site's "Worlds of Flavour" offerings was just appalling. The menu options were represented by unlabelled, moving (??!!??) photos. To follow your choices, you had to track a photo with your mouse until the rollover text popped up, by which time there was little opportunity to read it - never mind select it - before the photo scrolled off the screen and you had to start over at the other side. Gotta wonder what they were thinking! Website design is a lot like cooking, I guess. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If you don't know what I mean, check out a student cooking competition some time.

The chef/owner at my night job has no qualms about giving away recipes. In fact, the recipe for our ever-popular seafood bisque is even on our website. She just shrugs and says, "If I'm not making it for you, it's not gonna be the same." And she's right.

If you can find a copy in your neck of the woods, check out Edna Staebler's book "Food that Really Schmecks." Although Staebler lives (lived? I dunno) among the Mennonite community in the Kitchener/Waterloo area of Ontario, the food is almost identical to that of the Amish country. In fact, many families have branches in both places. There are chapters on cookies, cakes, pies, other desserts, and home-made candies. Pies are probably the most characteristic Amish/Mennonite dessert, though (often served at three meals a day), so one or another pie seems appropriate. "Schnitz" pie (sliced apples) is a stalwart, but is not noticeably Amish to the outsider. It's basically a one-crust pie of the type we think of as "Dutch apple". The version made with dried apples, perhaps, is a little more distinctive. Sour cream raisin pie? That's a true "damn the calories" dessert! Lotvarrick is a custard pie made with apple butter, that's a good 'un. Gwetcha is a prune-custard pie, and a real hard-core Pennsylvania item. Cottage cheese pie? (good with fruit or maple syrup) "Thick" (slightly sour) milk pie? How about Botzelbaum ("somersault") pie? That one starts off with the pastry on the bottom and the filling on top, and ends with the pastry on top and the filling underneath. Let me know if you can't find the book, and I'll PM you one or more of the above. ISBN on the book is 07-077392-0, if that helps.

My parents did wholesale for the first couple of years that they owned their bakery in Nova Scotia (eventually they decided it wasn't worth the aggravation). One of their customers was a real nutbar. He didn't buy a whole lot, he was terribly demanding, and he was always slow to pay. One day when I was there, he came out to the bakery to bitch. My father looked him in the eye (my father is 5' 6", the customer was 6' 4") and said very quietly, "Get out of my f**cking store. When I was in the Navy I worked with any asshole they put alongside of me, but now I run my own business. And I'm not doing business with you anymore. If you set foot in my store again, I'll kick your ass out the door." The customer left. My father says that every day of the remaining six years they ran the bakery, he'd think of that moment and smile. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That course of action is not universally applicable, mind you.