scott123

Infernoo, your assessment of all the different cuts is on the money, although I think it might be worth taking another look at chuck steak. Chuck steak might have a ribeye-ish appearance, but the large amounts of connective tissue/collagen make it a completely different animal. When melted, the collagen provides a tremendous succulence. I'll take a braised well marbled chuck steak over ribeye any day. If the marbling is good (and it frequently is), it can give brisket point a run for it's money. You have to cook it correctly, though- long, lowish, moist heat. Beef short ribs are superior to both chuck and brisket point, but, unfortunately, the whole world is very much aware of this and it's reflected in the price. Because of the usually extreme amount of marbling, you lose a lot with cooking, driving up the cost even further. If you can afford to always eat short ribs, all power to you, but, if you're looking for something good at a lower price point, I'd give chuck steak a shot.

I'm sure you're aware of this, but, because of the thickness of the cream, you'll need less flour. More importantly, though, I think it's worth mentioning that bechamel isn't necessarily improved with the addition of cream. There's a pretty good reason why, historically, it's almost always made with milk. Cream coats taste buds and impairs flavor. Starch is also a known flavor impairer (hence the modern trend away from starch thickeners), but starch is less of a culprit than cream. If your wife wants half and half, make it that way, but, if you have time, you might want to try a test run half and half bechamel today to see if you like it.

Considering that garlic sauce and sesame sauce are both known offshoots of brown sauce and that General Tso's and Orange are most likely brown sauce offshoots as well, I'm thinking it's highly likely that black bean sauce is augmented brown sauce also. Just like Indian restaurants save time by making a base and using it for many of the curries, I'm relatively certain that Chinese short order cooks treat brown sauce in a similar fashion. Even if black bean sauce is an entirely unique creation, unless you're getting it at an upscale establishment, I think the odds that there's some form of sugar in it are astronomical, an ingredient that none of the eGullet recipes include. The razor clam recipe contains Mirin, which is sweetened, but, imo, there's not a Chinese short order cook on the planet willing to shell out the money for Mirin. In my quest to make old school NY Chinese restaurant food at home, I tried a lot of prepared sauces. In theory, someone should be able to bottle an authentic tasting sauce, but, in practice, I've never seen it. Corn starch, in a cooked sauce, will break down and lose it's thickening abilities overnight, so that makes mass produced sauce a bit trickier, but there's modified starches that should sub nicely. For whatever the reason, bottled sauce is one big bag of fail. Expect any prepared sauce you buy to be close, but not quite right. Woks, by the way, are not that critical for making Chinese take out at home. A solid large frying pan and a red hot burner will work fine- as long as you don't crowd the pan.

Overcooking it just boiled away additional water. Heat it up gently and add some water back. Also iron stores more heat than other cooking materials, so it will continue cooking the caramel when you take it off the burner.

Superheating

Tips for pulled sugar art using isomalt METHOD FOR THE PRODUCTION OF SUGAR SUBSTITUTE SYRUPS Isomalt Sugar - Pure Isomalt for Chefs & Sugar Artists The isomalt in your solution crystallized. It shouldn't do that. At least, not according to the first two links above. I'd wager to say that you might have polyol adulterated isomalt on your hands. Corn syrup and or glucose syrup will help prevent sugar solutions from re-crystallizing, so they might help in this instance as well, although I'm not sure how much it would take. I use polydextrose, a high molecular weight corn syrup, for keeping erythritol from recrystallizing in syrups, but erythritol is incredibly crystallization prone and it takes a lot of polydextrose (about 3:1) to make it work. An adulterated isomalt, depending on what the adulterant is and how much of it there is, should require considerably less crystallization inhibitor. What do you need an isomalt syrup for?

I think, as far as vegetarian 'bacon' goes, tempeh is going to be the hardest to get the right flavor from. Both TVP and Seitan would be better choices to begin with. Even with those ingredients, it can still get kind of complicated, though. It's not the cheapest route, but there are some pretty good brands of vegetarian bacon available. Not that smoked tempeh wouldn't taste good. If you are going that route, I'd start off simple- just make the tempeh and then smoke it for a bit, then adding salt during preparation (frying, I would think).

Polydextrose, a corn syrup derivative, low carb ingredient and sugar replacer, is 10% as sweet as sugar, allowing you to control the sugary texture of a baked good without substantially increasing sweetness. I use it to make a brownie that's gooey/chewy, but not cloyingly sweet.

I appear to be the minority opinion here, but tomato paste, regardless of the brand, has almost always been cooked too long and has lost almost any semblance of bright tomatoey flavor. Further cooking may bring out sweetness, but at a cost of dark metallic notes. I can't speak for other dishes, but for pasta sauce, I would never cook paste any further than it's been cooked. If I want sweetness to balance the slight acidity of the paste, I'll find it elsewhere (caramelized onions, sugar, etc.).

The biggest difference between cream and coconut milk/cream are the naturally occurring stabilizers. Cream can tolerate fairly aggressive boiling while coconut milk can't. They put stabilizers in coconut milk (usually guar), but that's more to keep the milk from separating in the can, not preventing it from separating during boiling. This all being said... sugar, in copious amounts, is a pretty powerful stabilizer, assuming you keep it in a glass/noncrystalline state with the addition of corn syrup/glucose or by inverting it. The other difference is that the maillard compounds you get from browning the cream are most likely not going to be the same ones you get from browning the coconut milk. They might be close, but the coconut milk will most likely give off nuttier notes as it browns. Like all great caramels, you will want to caramelize the sugar first, on it's own. Because of the lack of stability in the coconut milk, you might not want to add it directly to the 300ish degree caramel, but instead, add a little water (carefully). I would then heat this back up to a soft-ball stage and then add the coconut milk/butter. Coconut milk has a little more than half the fat of cream. You can use more butter, or, double the coconut milk. I think that, by the time you bring it up to a caramel like consistency and brown the coconut solids a bit, you're going to lose a bit of the coconut flavor and want that punch from twice the quantity.

I've purchased lecithin granules about 4 times, stored them in a 'cool, dry place' and 3 out of 4 times they've gone off before I've had a chance to use them (less than two months). The one time where they were still viable, I was able to use them once, but once the air hit them, a few days later they were toast. When I tried pre-powdering granules, the time frame shrunk even more dramatically. Lecithin, imo, isn't viable for the home chef. It's practically impossible to find a store with fast enough turnover to insure a fresh product, and even if you did luck upon a good source, you'd have to have a recipe to use the whole bottle at once (or use a small amount and lose a good chunk of cash on the rest). Cteavin, spoiled lecithin is gummy and very hard to dissolve. Are your granules at all gummy? If they are, toss them.

I'll echo what others have already mentioned. You can't win without skin. I tried cooking breast meat in butter in a crockpot in an attempt to make it fattier and that didn't work. Buffalo sauce on breaded tenders is, imo, a very poor imitation. Sure, you get a little fat from the breading, but it ain't chicken skin. In theory, with America's infatuation with boneless skinless breast, one would think there would be a surplus of skin, but where that skin ends up, who knows? The consumers sure aren't seeing it. If I could actually walk into a supermarket and buy chicken skin for less than $2 a lb. that would make my decade. Chicken wings are like the new lobster. Who would I have thunk it? Maybe once a year I'll splurge on wings, but, on a daily basis, I make do with thighs. I take the thighs, bake them up so the skin is crispy, debone them and then remove about 2/3rds of the meat. When I sauce them and roll the skin around the remaining meat, I get a a fairly pleasant, slightly wing-ish experience. But I'm also left with skinless meat, which, with hot sauce... is pretty darn mediocre. I get one bite of semi-bliss to two bites of mediocrity. The biggest upside to my buffalo thighs is that I can almost always get thighs on sale for $.99/lb and be comfortably fed with about 75 cents worth, rather than eating a solid $8 worth of wings and still end up feeling hungry.

Naan is a lot like pizza. If you extend the baking time, the end product suffers tremendously. The right baking stone material can make the difference between great naan and mediocre naan (and great pizza and mediocre pizza). No baking stone on the market will bake naan in less than 5 minutes. 5+ minutes is the kiss of death for oven spring and good speckled charring. If you've ever watched naan being baked, it should be about a 2 minute endeavor, max. 1/2" steel plate preheated to 550 f. is conductive enough to mimic the oven spring and baking times of an 800-ish tandoor. At least it will for the bottom of the bread. For the top to char properly, you'll need an oven with a broiler and the steel plate positioned in close proximity to that broiler- 3" max. So, yes, it can be done, but it requires a little ingenuity to compensate for relatively anemic home ovens.

Come on, Mitch, this isn't Chowhound I thought this is the home of the culinary purist. Am I wrong in that assessment? Nathan is certainly a sous vide purist. All I'm asking is the same respect for Neapolitan pizza and what it represents.

Nathan, have you used many home ovens? Unregulated broilers? 99.9% of home ovens have a thermostat probe, that, when the oven hits the temperature on the dial, the thermostat cuts the burners off. Both burners. Do you not see the potential safety issues of having a broiler that doesn't turn off? You can crank the broiler to your heart's content, but that probe is going to be in the exact same vicinity as the plate. You might be able to get the broiler to stay on for a few seconds and drive the surface temp of the plate up a bit past the peak dial temp, but the impact will be trivial, and, more importantly, it might prevent the broiler from kicking in while the pizza is being baked- and that will prevent proper browning on top of the pizza. Peak oven temp is peak oven temp- regardless of whether or not it's reached with the top burner or the bottom, and for most home oven owners, that peak is less than 550. I'm fixating on 550 because that's typically the highest temperature home oven dials go to. In reality, a good portion of home oven temps peak out at well below that. Cook's Illustrated recent article "Thin-Crust Pizza" (January 1, 2011) operates under the assumption that most home ovens don't go above 500. So, you're telling me that it doesn't say this? I don't see how anyone reading this statement could interpret it as anything other than a guarantee of Neapolitan baking times and Neapolitan quality results. It doesn't say "you can cook a pizza that's better than a pizza cooked with a pizza stone," or "you can, with a freak home oven utilizing an unregulated broiler, cook a pizza that's as fast and good as any you'll find in Naples." If you're going to guarantee Neapolitan bake times and quality, you have to have some semblance of what makes Neapolitan pizza great, namely, oven spring (and the associated char that comes with it), and if your method can't reproduce that for the majority of your readers, you shouldn't be promising that it will. ...and, had your researchers done their homework, they'd be aware that Heston's technique has been thoroughly proven to produce inconsistent and mediocre pizza for just as long. If you read the Kenji Alt-Lopez article you posted, you'll see that he completely dismisses the Blumenthal approach. In the pizza community, Blumenthal's method is ridiculed. If Heston wanted to refine his technique and publish it, I'd have nothing to say. Heston doesn't really have enough clout to influence the public's perception of Neapolitan pizza. Same thing for Chris. But your name is attached to this and that carries weight. This volume has historical significance. Many people will read this sweeping claim about Neapolitan quality and bake times, purchase 1/4" steel plate, make mediocre pizza that looks just like the one in the picture and, because they read it in your book, falsely associate that pizza with Neapolitan style. If someone came along with a $40 sous vide technique that produced results slightly better than boiling but promised their readers that it could match the best equipment on the market, how would you feel? By spreading the idea, inside or outside the book, that 1/4" steel can "cook a pizza that's as fast and good as any you'll find in Naples," that's what Chris, and, by extension, you, are doing with pizza.

Well, that decides it. There's no way in heck I could scrape together $467, but if that's how this 20th century Guide Culinaire is going to portray pizza, then I'm going to daydream about buying something else.

Chris, 'well-prepared and baked bread' doesn't have a gummy core. For that dough, with that flour, hydration, length of fermentation, and that oven temp/bake time, the only way a gummy core can be avoided is by producing char. It's almost impossible, with those temperatures, not to produce char. I've seen countless numbers of Neapolitan pizzas and not one has ever lacked char. Take any Neapolitan pizzeria and do an image search using the term 'upskirt' Here's the one's that I could think of: Da Michelle pizzeria upskirt Il Pizzaiolo del Presidente pizzeria upskirt Antica pizzeria upskirt Motorino pizzeria upskirt Paulie Gees pizzeria upskirt Lucali pizzeria upskirt Donatella pizzeria upskirt Keste pizzeria upskirt a16 pizzeria upskirt Now, I'm not cherry-picking these to support my hypothesis. This is every single pizzeria I could think of. Think of another one and try it. Any one.

If I'm not mistaken, DOP requires cooking directly on a stone surface so char would be moot if we're looking for meeting regulations. There are also multiple other requirements outside of our discussion here (e.g. wood fired oven, 900F temp). Char isn't technically a component of the DOP, but the high oven temp is. With those temps, in order to cook the pizza all the way through, char is a natural byproduct, so my contention is that char is a de facto component of the DOP.

Here's a pizza baked on 1/2" steel plate for 3 1/2 minutes at 530. As far as coal oven style pizzas go (Patsy's, Lombardi's, Totonno's, John's) this is a pretty amazing offering, but again, in no way is this Neapolitan.

That, my friend, is a pizza peel.

This is Neapolitan dough, made by a professional that sells Neapolitan pizzas for a living, baked at 650 on 1/4" steel plate for 3 minutes. This may look a little like the photo I posted, but in no way could this ever classify as Neapolitan pizza, and it's 100 deg. higher than Nathan's instructions and an extra minute.

My experiment was obviously quite crude/spur of the moment, but it does give a glimpse of the time it takes for energy to conduct it's way through that 1/4" of metal. Even if the change in temp is 15 deg. during that time, it's still not consequential enough to have that much impact on the undercrust of the pizza. What you were testing was the ability of air to transfer heat to the metal plate: I will grant you it's quite poor indeed! However, place a pizza in contact with a sheet of steel that is 550°F and I think you'll find that the steel-to-pizza heat transfer rate is a touch higher. Chris, I think you missed my point. Nathan made the claim that, because the oven he uses in the book has the ability to have both top and bottom burners in use at the same time, that's one of the reasons why 1/4" steel plate can produce a Neapolitan pie. I countered that argument by showing that, during those 2 minutes, the heat rising from the bottom element is taking time to travel through the steel plate and isn't actually impacting the bottom of the crust.

Actually, steel has a slight drop in conductivity as its temperature rises. My experiment was obviously quite crude/spur of the moment, but it does give a glimpse of the time it takes for energy to conduct it's way through that 1/4" of metal. Even if the change in temp is 15 deg. during that time, it's still not consequential enough to have that much impact on the undercrust of the pizza.

I don't think I understand what this experiment was meant to test. Can you clarify the rationale? That 1/4" steel plate isn't conductive enough for the heat radiating upward from a red hot bottom element to reach the bottom of the pizza in 2 minutes. Hearth wise, pizza has always relied on the stored heat in the stone, not the heat coming from the bottom element/bake feature.

Neapolitan pizza has two defining properties. Oven spring and char. Without char, it's NY style pizza, not Neapolitan. Here is a photo of the kind of char I'm referring to The high heat that produces char also generates oven spring- you can't have one without the other. I've tested this extensively and 1/4" steel plate at temperatures of 550 and below will not produce anything close to this amount of undercrust char/oven spring in 2 minutes. 1/2" won't either. 3/4" should, but that's only for homeowners with ovens that actually go to 550. You'd be amazed by the number of ovens that can't go too far above 500. 3/4" steel plate, cut to the 'size of the oven shelf' will weigh upwards of 90 pounds. Cut to a comfortable size for launching a traditional 14" pizza onto (16"), it still clocks in at 50 lbs. Oven shelf integrity varies considerably from model to model. I've seen shelves that can handle considerable amounts of weight and I've seen others that started bowing at well below 50 lbs. 3/4" steel plate is going to break a few oven shelves. If you want to tell your readers that they can make NY style pizza at home with 1/2" steel plate, that would be accurate, as would telling them they can make Neapolitan, with the right oven, at the right temp, with 3/4" steel. But Neapolitan with 1/4" plate? Not in a million years. And aluminum, seriously? Come on, Nathan, you have to be aware of the aluminum's conductivity. You can pre-heat it for as long as you want and the moment you open the door, the temperature will plummet. Aluminum will not store heat- and for pizza, stored heat is critical. You clearly don't have the actual book recipe, so you are making some bad assumptions. We recommend having the oven at high AND having the top broiler element on. Most electric ovens have this feature. Some gas ovens do, but they don't all have it. With the broiler on in it will get very hot indeed. Without the broiler you would be right, but that isn't what the recipe actually calls for, so your comments are not revelant to the actual recipe. 1/4" steel plate heated this way will make a much better pizza crust than you could do with a normal pan. It will not be the same as you would get with a thicker plate, but for people who don't want to buy (or lift!) a thicker plate, it is definitely worth doing. Your comments on aluminum are completely off the mark. I am very aware of the thermal conductivity, indeed we count on it. As another post points out the low heat transfer coefficient of air means that the temperature of the plate will not plummet just because you open the oven door to put the pizza in. The high thermal conductivity is why the plate will put a lot of heat into the pizza quickly, which is the whole point. As to the issue of char on the bottom of the pizza, that is something that some people want, and some people don't. Your opinion about Naples vs New York style pizza is just that - your opinion. Not everybody wants or needs the bottom of the pizza charred. If you do want char, the only way to get it is to have high heat transfer to the bottom of the pan, which is what a metal plate helps you achieve. In the tests we did for the book we used several different home ovens, with a 3/4" aluminum plate. If you look at the picture that is exactly what it shows. It does work. Finally, I will point out that this is an improvised way to get high bottom heat. It really makes a difference. But the "right" way to do this is with professional baking oven with a heated ceramic floor. I know, because I have two of them at home. They are great but very expensive. The metal plate method is an inexpensive way to approximate that kind of oven. The metal plate isn't perfect, but it lets you achieve pretty good results. Show me a photo of any Neapolitan pizzeria, in Naples or the US, that has less char than the photo I provided. Keste, Motorino, UPN, A16, Da Michelle, De Matteo, Sorbillo- This is not my opinion, it's an industry standard. If someone doesn't like char, they don't like Neapolitan pizza, plain and simple. Writing a book, even if it's the most comprehensive and informative work the food world has ever witnessed, doesn't give you the right to redefine a product with centuries of history. 1/4" steel plate @550 cannot produce undercrust char in 2 minutes. 2. I just preheated my oven until the bottom element turned red hot and then put a 1/4" steel plate with a cup covering the top on the top shelf. I left it there, with the bottom element on full blast for 2 minutes. After that time I measured the change in temp of the top of the plate. 5 degrees. In pizza terms, that's meaningless. Having an oven with the ability to have both top and bottom elements on at the same time has no bearing on whether or not 1/4" steel plate can produce a Neapolitan pizza.