Wholemeal Crank

The new teaware feels very nice in the hand, good size, weight, and is pleasing to the lip when sipping, and the cup complements the coarser Hagi-ware I have quite nicely. Today, however, all tea so far at work, so no new teaware here. Drinking some Bai Hong green tea from Yunnan, the last of some I ordered from Yunnan sourcing (nearly a year ago, I think), a little overdone because I decided to empty the last bits from the bag, and ended up with tea that needed dilution. Then on to Anxi TGY, this time the fall tea from Jing Tea Shop. Mmm....spring, fall, I love this tea.

Just want to add an unsolicited plug for this tasting: I ordered one of these teas (the San Nen Bancha) and got a free sample with my order of the Sunpu Boucha, and have quite enjoyed both of them. They are not so finicky as the average sencha, that wants very precise time and temps to give its best. So, if you're sitting on the fence, nervous about your tea brewing skills, go ahead and give these a try.

No virus warning from Firefox on my Mac.

I do this Spices in their keepers and this They're sorted by things I used together--spices for sweets, savory seeds, savory herbs, ground spices, oddballs. The baskets make them easy to grab & use. Bulk bags from which those are refilled are in a pair of large tupperware bins in another cabinet. (need to update those photos since I got a labeller and made the labels neater)

Put together a photo set documenting the process on my flickr site here. Chocolate chantilly by debunix, on Flickr I think I've got it. Thanks, teonzo, for your patience and detailed replies.

I think part of the problem is simply the name of the book itself: "Modernist cuisine" certainly gave me the impression that it would be all about spherification and other techniques of molecular gastronomy that take food farther away from what it was when it grew from the ground or was walking/swimming/flying as part of an animal. While that might be fun to eat, it is not something I'm going to do in my kitchen, at least not regularly, and so I ignored the threads and reports about the book for a long time. I'm not likely to be asked about the book in an interview, but if I were, a month ago I would have been equally dismissive (and equally wrong). Then I actually read the Q&A thread, and realized that there was going to be a lot more than that in the book, lots of things perfectly applicable to my cooking and everybody's cooking, and immediately ordered a copy.

Yesterday was a limited tea day: only one tea all day, the 2007 white bud sheng puerh from Norbu, first a thermos full, then more infusions from the leaves through the evening. Today, a more varied group of teas: finished my Honyama sencha this morning--not going to make it to shincha on my one packet of sencha from Norbu remaining; then a much better session with a Yuuki-cha oolong midday, got the temp and proportions right for some good gongfu infusions; then finished with Norbu Diamond TGY, always so nice, brewed in a new gaiwan and drunk from a new teacup, both from Shawn McGuire of GreenwoodStudios (on Etsy):

Much better this time! 55 grams of 70% scharffenberger, 23 grams of fat, with 68 grams of water, and a sprinkle of cinnamon and chili. The texture at room temperature is soft, and it melts right in my mouth. Very, very nice! This one shows how dark the original chocolate was And this close up shows the texture Does this seem like an appropriate increase in volume?

Exactly!

I would never assume that! I've used lab centrifuges, cleaned up dirty rotors, and after a spill of a radioactive liquid in one--usually from a failure of a tube or bottle placed into the rotor--that cleaning is really instructive, because it may feel clean and look clean but the geiger counter tells you there's still stuff left on it. These were not rotors being used with stuff that would make the rotor radioactive, just biological samples with very low-level radioactivity in them that would sometimes be very very hard to clean off. I absolutely would NOT assume the materials used cannot be contaminated. That's why we kept special centrifuges for use only with certain types of materials (the 'hot' 'fuges for working with radioactivity, the 'clean' 'fuges used only with cultured cells and never general lab chemicals, etc). One other consideration for working with centrifuges: maintainance. These get inspected and maintained in labs, records are kept of how old particular rotors are and, IIRC, especially for the really high-speed ones, I think records are sometimes kept of how many hours a rotor has been used, and then they are removed from service before they get over their rated limits. You have to keep them very clean, because a sticky cup for your centrifuge tube may mean you can't get your lovely separated liquid back out, or that your rotor becomes unbalanced (and you saw lots of photos of that above), and you have to be careful too about what you put in them--never taking a chance that 'this tube looks sort of ok' because that leads to dirty rotors and back to the beginning of this post. That said, it would be quite a lot of fun to have one around, if someone else was taking care of it!

I did some googling and discovered that this sort of map is a lot harder to find than I would have guessed. I did find a Green Tea Map of China, but it was a lot of searching and not a lot of finding. Bet there's a ton of info available if we could just read chinese....

It was my first meal at Hunan in San Francisco. I used to find my father's cooking often inedible due to an excess of pepper, and was terrified of the menu with all the pepper symbols throughout. But then, I took the first bite of one of the dishes--it was one of the pork dishes, and prepared Hunan hot--and suddenly I GOT what my father had been saying forever, that pepper properly used could wake up your tastebuds and make the taste of everything else in the dish more intense. I drank probably a couple of liters of water and tea, and my nose and eyes were streaming, but it was so very very good that I didn't care. That opened a whole new world for me: today, I occasionally use habaneros in my cookies. Not coincidentally, one of the saddest food memories I part two of that epiphany, also at Hunan, when I suggested that as the site for a bachelorette party. It turned out that only two of the 7 or 8 of us would eat hot food, so we ordered a bunch of dishes made not-hot. The not-hot dishes were so flat and depressing without their zing that I almost cried.

Today started with Honyama sencha, mmmm, nice series of infusions. Then on to the serious abuse of good tea: 2008 Yi Wu Bamboo aged sheng from Norbu--a lovely tea put through a tea torture test: Fill kettle with water. Pour some (cold) over chunk of tea in kamjove. Let sit a few seconds, pour off rinse water. Add more water, now slightly warm. Let sit while doing things in another room for 45 minutes. Return, pour off first cold infusion into thermos, add boiling water, leave for a 1 hour meeting. Return, pour off the long steep into the thermos, and pour hot water through the leaves several times while tossing papers together for afternoon clinic on another floor. Thermos filled with water, all of which has touched the leaves, at least. How can it possibly be good? And it is! Gotta love this stuff.

Yes, I think I have that part right. I cannot find a 'nutrition facts' type of label for that on the Callebaut site to make things simple, and per their brochure they appear to have a range of different cocoa butter contents with very similar labelling--most with another letter in front of the NV. But there is nothing that gives the grams of cocoa butter for the different viscosities they sell.

Honyama sencha start, Jing tea shop autumn TGY, and a wonderful final session with 2006 Yong De Hand Braided Wild Arbor Pu Erh Tea today from Norbu. This was the end of the sample I got, and to drink more of this lovely stuff, I will have to start breaking up the beautiful beeng. I will need to take some good photos before I start that, but it is so delicious that it will not survive long as simply beeng art. Sweet, caramel, anise, gentle earthy sweet humus, mmmm.

I don't think you've created a mess. I think you've created a formula that is simple and clear, and different from the approximately 2 parts water to 1 part cocoa butter that is implied in the original This recipe in the first post in the topic. I will do my next batch with the 3 parts water to 1 part cocoa butter as you suggest. For another 55 gram block of Sharffenberger, I'll use 68 grams of water. Fortunately, the small practice batches are easy to make disappear, even when not perfectly textured. Remelt, add some milk and spice, and voilà, hot chocolate!

That's how I understand it.

The basic question is: the fat in the recipe should be (1) 34% of the weight of the combined total (weight of water plus weight of fat) in the recipe, or (2) 34% of (the weight of the added water alone)? And we're here ignoring the weight of the sugar and cocoa solids portion of the chocolate, which are not asrelevant to the whipping properties of the final mixture. If you have 34 grams of cocoa butter in your piece of chocolate--let's say for simplicity's sake that you have a chocolate that is 34% cocoa butter by weight, and you're going to use 100 grams of chocolate for your recipe--you could add (1) another 100 grams of water: 34 grams of cocoa butter is 34% of 100 grams of water or (2) 66 grams of water: 34 grams of cocoa butter is 34% of 100 grams of (66 grams of water plus 34 grams of cocoa butter) (1) uses 'baker's percentages' where we can end up with more than 100% when you sum the ingredients in the recipe, e.g., pound cake that uses 100% as much eggs, sugar, and butter as flour. (2) uses a percentages of the combined total of things were measuring, because you can't have more than 100% (and where you'd express the same 1:1:1:1 ratio of eggs:sugar:butter:flour by saying the cake is 25% flour, 25% butter, 25% sugar, and 25% eggs). In reply to my question, teonzo said: BUT: the original recipe, if it were made with a chocolate similar to scharffenberger's 70% baking bar, which has 23 grams of fat per 55 grams of chocolate, would contain (23/55)x225 grams of cocoa butter or 94 grams. And 94 grams is 47% of 200ml (or 200 grams) of water, or 32% of (200grams water plus 94 grams chocolate). Unless the original recipe were based on chocolate that was less than 25% cocoa butter, it suggests that he was using something very close to this: Just add 2 grams hot water for every 1 gram cocoa butter in your chocolate (as in option 2 above). teonzo suggests something closer to 3 grams for every 1 gram of cocoa butter for maximum whipping--can that be right? And is it all clear as mud yet?

Today started with some yunnan green tea, moved on with a batch of anxi white tea--somehow managed to make that one less than fabulous, should be flogged with a beeng of puerh for the wastefulness, have never done that before, then redeemed myself with a gorgeous session with golden needles white lotus shu from menghai. Whew.

Pecans go rancid so quickly I have a hard time imagining something made with pecan oil lasting well--could rancidity be part of the problem, or is this a defatted flour?

Baker's percentages, got it. I used 45 grams. It was marvelously delicious, despite the textural issue, a perfect marriage of peppermint and chocolate--I used a few drops of peppermint oil for extra kick.

We don't have videos, but Vol. 2 does include a fantastic, two-page annotated cutaway photo of a pressure canner and jars of multicolored tomatoes (which are also shown in cross section). It's one of my favorite shots in the book. Excellent! To this fan of the pressure cooker, it sounds suitable for framing as wall art. Bet you could sell posters of some of these incredible shots. Any plans to do so? I can see them being every bit as popular as periodic tables of the vegetables etc.

If your kettle holds heat well, that can work fine to start. That's one of the few weaknesses of my pino kettles--they have no insulation and tend to cool down pretty rapidly. So unless I start with one quite full and take advantage of high thermal mass, I do keep them set to reheat as needed to keep temps up. But eventually, the leaves will seem pretty much done, and a good reheat on the water may coax some extra infusions from them.

Haven't gotten this one down 100% yet, but Chocolate Chantilly is just water and chocolate. I think another couple of tries and it will be a go-to standby, along with a variety of simple breads (flour, water, yeast, salt); garlic potatoes (garlic, potatoes, olive oil, salt & pepper)....and that's about where I hit a wall. Several other super simple recipes just cross the threshold--like Mujadarrah, lentils, rice, onions, olive oil; or zuppa di farro (spelt or barley, mint, pecorino cheese, good stock).

Exactly. I found that when I was try young shengs like these in anything but my gaiwans, I have to start pouring out just as soon as I finish pouring water into the pot--because my little 'yixings' aren't really so quick to drain. And they need to be drunk quickly too, because an infusion left to sit a while, that started out delicious, can turn bitter on standing. A bit tricky, but so rewarding when you get cup after cup of sweet marvelousness.