scott123

First off, I must say that I'm very impressed by your pizza oven. That is really spectacular. As far as the tandoor goes... I'm a little skeptical about the terra cotta lining. I really can't see terra cotta standing up to that kind of thermal shock. The walls shouldn't be getting direct flame, but still, that's a lot to ask of terra cotta. Is that the largest pot available? I was thinking that if you could get a larger one, you could line it with fireclay. That way the outer pot could crack but the inner liner could take the heat. I'm not expert in these matters, though, so maybe the terra cotta can take it. It's quite an exciting process. Thanks for sharing it with us! :)

Mary, I have your answer :) First off, although some wonderful suggestions have been mentioned as to how to make great Indian restaurant style food at home, no one has adequately addressed the difference between British and American Indian restaurant cuisine. They both: Utilize base sauce(s) Use lots of ghee Add MSG Add varying amounts of food coloring Utilize fenugreek leaves both dried and fresh (in certain dishes) None of these areas change as you travel across the water. One difference, one BIG difference that hasn't been breached, is brutally simple. UK Indian restaurants are staffed by great chefs. I've eaten Indian food in just about every restaurant between E. 6th street and Pennsylvania, all the way down to Philly and I can say, without a doubt, that if you live near Princeton, you're not getting great Indian restaurant food. If I had to pinpoint the 'great Indian food' area on a map, I wouldn't go South of Freehold nor would I go West of Morristown. And Chicago... well, I've never had the pleasure to eat Indian food there, but I have had St. Louis fare and it was the worst I've ever eaten. Once you leave the tri-state area, forget about it. In other words, you've lived in areas with mediocre Indian Food (Princeton, Chicago) and you visited somewhere with some of the best Indian food on the planet (outside India). That's your answer. Btw, if you want some UK quality Indian food without shelling out for airfare, I suggest a road trip up 206/287. There's really some breathtaking stuff up North.

You can juice them. They'll still taste bitter (if they're old) but you get a lot of nutrients (supposedly).

I've taken anchos and toasted them to just about every shade imagineable, and I can say, with utmost certainty, that I don't like toasted anchos. Untoasted they have a strong raisin and light chocolate/dried tomato notes. Toasted, it all goes murky, almost like the dark/irony quality of an overcooked tomato sauce. At least that how it is for me. I'm not anti-toasting, btw. I would never think of eating 'raw' cumin. But anchos... not for me, thanks.

Thanks!

Thanks everyone, those are all great ideas. I've had friends with very non-green thumbs grow chilis in my area. That sounds like a plan. I think chilis could be one of the few plants the deers in my yard won't violate ;)

Tongo, I have considered it, but to be honest, I think dried chilis and fresh chilis are little like dried and fresh ginger - completely different animals. Although for some dishes, dried chilis are wonderful, for buffalo wings, I really prefer the flavor of the brined chili.

I find the term 'cocoa solids' to be very misleading. The perception is that that higher cocoa solid chocolate means darker chocolate. Nope. Not necessarily. Cocoa butter is a 'cocoa solid.' You can have high cocoa butter chocolates that are very pale/milky but still be considered high cocoa solid chocolate. What I'd like to see is labeling that showcases both the percentage of unseparated cocoa liquour and the percentage of added cocoa butter or added cocoa powder. That would really tell the whole story.

Over the past few months I have morphed into a buffalo wings fanatic. I've been playing around with bunch of different hot sauces - no matter which I work with, by the time I get the intensity of flavor/heat that I'm looking for, the salt content is through the roof. So I'm going to take a shot at making my own sauce. Does anyone know anything about the process Tabasco/Franks/Texas Pete's uses to age peppers? Also, I'm not sure I can get Tabasco peppers in my area - will other peppers produce a similar sauce? I can picture anaheims, jalapenos, serranos and habaneros at my supermarket, but neither fresh tabasco or cayenne peppers ring a bell.

Lou, has it occured to you that your customers may actually enjoy wasting food? I think, for some people (not me) waste is a sign of status. It could also be people trying to be restrained or even just trying to look restrained in order to impress someone else (a first date, for example). I think if you going to get insulted/bent out of shape by uneaten food, you're setting yourself up for dissappointment. Get over it ;) You can lead a horse to water...

Kush, it's a bit of a trek for you and it's take out only, but if you have some time, take a trip up 287 and east on 80 to Fattal's in Patterson. It's definitely worth the trip.

A local grocer that seems to cater exclusively to Koreans carries a few types of shiritake noodles(konjac/yam bean noodles). Do Koreans utilize this traditionally Japanese ingredient? And, if so, what for? What do they call it?

I think you might be picturing one perfect crack right down the middle of a stone. A crack from thermal shock can occur in a countless number of ways, depending on where the points of weakness in the stone are located. If an imperfection lies near the surface, a chip could flake off. When you remove the pizza, the peel could drive this chip into the crust. Is this probable? Not terribly. But if you bake with materials that aren't made for baking, the probability increases. If I can forgo granite/marble/quarry tiles and spend 1 or 2 dollars (literally) more on fire brick and have some additional piece of mind that a shard isn't going to chip a tooth, then definitely, 1 or 2 dollars it is.

If a child has issues with 'ethnic' food and you've got them for one night, trust me, it's not the night to try something 'different.' If burger king is their favorite place to go, then burger king it is. Just give them what they want and they'll have fun. Speaking of having fun... If you had a kid on route 10 and didn't take them to Maggie Moo's, you blew it ;) And, while we're on the topic, don't forget to swing by the sports and game funplex near taco bell (behind it maybe?). Kids go ballistic over that place.

Do a search for marble or granite baking stones. Try it. They don't exist. Wouldn't you think that if these materials could handle the thermal shock of baking, someone, somewhere, would sell them as baking stones? I'm all for DIY solutions. If there's a cheaper homebrewed approach that works, I'm the first one to stand behind it. It has to work, though. This is just a square peg in a round hole. Granite and marble can't withstand the thermal shock of baking. JohnnyD, if you're going to put a frozen pizza on a thoroughly pre-heated piece of marble, please, wear eye protection.

From the Vermont Woodstove Planning Guide (bold mine): That fact that it undergoes very little expansion/contraction is why it is so suitable for baking. Granite and marble don't have the same stability when it comes to resistance to thermal shock.

Poultry bones and meat contribute very little flavor and body to stock, imo. Although it's common knowledge that skin contains the most collagen, and thus appendages with a high ratio of skin will produce additional body/gel, I contend that skin produces the lion's share of flavor. At some point I'm going to perform a stock experiment and prove my theory. Three different stocks, prepared separately, all with the same amount of water, the same pan and simmered for the same amount of time. One with a pound of skin, another with a pound of meat and a third with a pound of bones. I am absolutely certain stock #1 will be the clear cut winner, not just from a perspective of body, but from a perspective of flavor as well. Since I am a firm believer that skin is the source for the majority of stock making magic, yes, there is nothing better than chicken feet. Chicken feet are best, then wings.

Johnnyd, unless it's soapstone, I wouldn't recommend using it for baking.

A poor conductor can conduct heat very effectively if there's heat already in it. Because of it's poor conductivity, it takes forever for firebricks/ceramics to get blazing hot, but once they do, they stay blazing hot and transfer that heat quite effectively to items in contact with it. I baked pizzas for many years on aluminum cookie sheets, always wondering why my pizzas were never as good as what pizzerias produce. The lack of a baking stone was the reason. Aluminum is a great conductor - it doesn't store heat like fire brick or ceramics do. Without the stored heat of a stone and direct contact of the dough with the stone, you're talking 12+ minutes for a pizza - too long.

Pizza stones are for conductive baking - direct transfer of heat. Think of the difference between holding your hand 2" above a red hot element and holding your hand on the element itself. That's the difference between convective/radiative heat and conductive. Thin crust pizzas need very intense heat or they'll cook too long and get dry rather than moist/puffy/chewy.

Is this just a matter of putting in two stones, one on each rack, letting them come up to temperature and then sliding the pizza onto the stone on the lower rack? Or is there more to it than that? I have thought of trying this approach but I haven't yet because I only have one stone. ← That's it precisely. Although I'm very anti-quarry tile for hearth baking, for the ceiling quarry tile work fine, as they aren't exposed to the same type of thermal shock as the hearth.

Stephen is right. The contained energy in the preheated stone is the primary source for cooking the pizza. Although the oven provides some convective/radiative heat, the lion's share is conductive heat stored in the stone. That intense heat from below gives your crust excellent oven spring, cooks the crust quickly so it doesn't dry it out and bubbles the cheese rather than browning the top. The thicker the stone, the more thermal mass. The more thermal mass, the greater the thermal reservior, the more contained heat you have to cook with. A thick enough stone pre-heated sufficiently should store enough energy in it to bake a pizza all by itself. In other words, you could turn the oven off when you put the pizza in and the pizza would still cook. If you're a real pizza fanatic like myself, you build yourself not just a ceramic hearth, but a ceramic ceiling as well, to recreate the qualities of a Vulcan pizza oven. That gives you stored heat from below and above.

I have tried starting eggs in cold water and compared them to the results to adding them to boiling water. Without fail, regardless of how fresh the egg is, the eggs started in cold water are always more difficult to peel. I have a yet-to-be-proven theory on this. I believe that the same peeling advantage achieved by placing the cooked eggs in ice water is achieved by the shock of placing raw eggs in boiling water. When you place cold eggs in boiling water, the air pocket violently expands. That's common knowledge. My theory relates to where this air expands to. For those eggs that don't break from the stress, I believe the pressurized air pocket drives it's way around the egg forming a momentary barrier between the egg and the membrane. I have even noticed that the eggs that go in the pot first are the easiest to peel than those that go into the pot after the temp has dropped a bit, due to the decreased thermal shock involved. The downside to this process is you do get some cracked eggs. I don't know about you, but a couple of nasty stringy cracked eggs are much more preferable to me than 5 minutes spent cursing at an egg that won't peel. As I said, I have nothing solid to back this up, only observation. From the hard cooked egg experiments I've done, though, it does appear that an initial shocking in boiling water does increase egg peelability.

From my google search, it seems firebrick can be a variety of different materials, from clay to silica (e.g. sand). My understanding is that firebrick is typically not very dense and is not meant to 'hold' heat (i.e. has a low heat content), while I think what you want for your pizza stone is something that holds a lot of heat, to stabilize the temp inside the oven. ← Firebrick is what's used in traditional wood burning ovens. If you've ever baked in one of those, you'll witness firsthand firebrick's ability to 'hold' heat, as the oven stays hot for hours after you finish heating it. When baking in a home oven with firebrick, the thermal mass is only a fraction of a wood burning oven, but the bricks stay hot for quite a while - much longer than any of the thin <1" pizza stones/quarry tiles people use. GordonD, neither quarry tiles nor slabs of slate/marble are made for baking. All rocks have potential imperfections that could cause shards to break off when exposed to thermal duress. Soapstone, on the other hand, is extremely heat tolerant, but very very expensive. The type of stone you choose is highly dependent on what kind of pizza you're striving for. If you want authentic Neopolitan pizza, then forget the stone and build an oven in your back yard. If you want thin crust NY style vulcan oven type of pizza, then you'll need lots of thermal mass (I recommend fire bricks). If thin crust pizza isn't your thing, then go with a a cheap pizza stone, as you don't need a lot of thermal mass for quick baking, as a thicker crust will require longer, lower temperatures to cook in the middle. Regardless of what you choose, I think quarry tiles are a very poor choice (sorry Alton). Dough has water in it. Until that water evaporates, it's going to stay at 212 degrees. It may only be for a second or two, but you're talking about a quarry tile/slab of rock being preheated to 550, then plummeting down to 212 for a couple seconds (on the surface). That's a lot to expect of something that wasn't engineered for that purpose. Baking/pizza stones and fire bricks are made for this kind of treatment. You're not gauranteed that flaking/chiping won't occur, but your odds are a LOT better. I wouldn't mess around here. If a piece of the quarry tile ends up in your crust and you don't find it in time, you're looking at some very expensive dental work. Believe me, I know. Fire bricks are not that much more expensive than quarry tile. Spend the extra dollar or two.

Hot dog signage and a bucket o' dimes. Sounds good, I'm there! :)