culinary bear

shh! be vewwy vewwy quiet... I quite like the look of the terrine too...

RooStew, out of curiosity, how much do you pay for a 250g packet of Maldon?

Very nice... quail eggs could do with a bit of a trim, but I'm picking hairs. :) At what level of study are your students? must dash - I have an appointment later on in the day with a rifle and some wild rabbits.

Well, if I know how to do it... ← I didn't wish to appear arrogant and presume you wanted to know... Arrogant? a chef? never. Use 100g (a shade under four ounces) of espresso grind coffee, and pour on 300g of boiling water. Stir to combine, leave for five minutes, and strain our the solids carefully; use muslin, cheesecloth or a fine sieve. Place the liquid in a saucepan over a medium heat and let it reduce to about 50ml. Bottle this; you can keep it in the fridge quite happily.

Have you considered making your own coffee extract? It's easier than you might think and the flavour is far better than any commercial powder.

A complete old wives' tale. The browing occurs because of oxidation, so there are three steps you can take to prevent this. 1) reduce the temperature: keep the guacamole in the fridge and it will brown more slowly (but still brown). 2) use an antioxiative ingredient like lime juice to retard oxidation (especially by spreading a very thin layer on top of your guacamole). 3) perhaps most effective, take a layer of cling film / saran warp and press it against the top of the guacamole, smoothing it to the edge ao that the surface of the guacamole is completely sealed from the air. Oxidation needs oxygen; this is a good way to reduce oxygen contact.

Braised calves' liver and onions with bacon and sage. The staff meal at work.

There are four in Edinburgh alone.

In my kitchen (meaning where I work, I don't own it), the kitchen porters have to have the same documentation as the chefs, and indeed all staff : 1) a National Insurance number (equivalent to a US Social Security number) 2) proof of entitlement to work in the UK, which is usually an EU passport, a birth certificate, or a non-EU passport with a working visa attached. No documents, no pay. A citizen of any European Union country has the right to reside and work in any other EU country, with the same inherent rights as a citizen of the country to which they move. The only kitchen porter who has gone on to cook is the breakfast chef. As we're attache to hotel, some feckless bugger has to get in at 6 to cook the bacon, eggs and other assorted hot buffet items for the hordes of residents. He started off washing pots and pans and when the regular breakfast chef left, he was "promoted". There's a very distinct line between porter and chef. The porter may get some of the less romatic jobs, like picking spinach and peeling carrots, but that's the limit of their involvement. A lot of chefs I know started by washing dishes when they were young, but I very rarely see anyone move from the sinks to the stoves within one establishment; you'd have to be pretty good to do so, as well as have a very openminded head chef.

The rumours were that Loiseau was going to lose a star; I think anyone and their dog (indeed, eveyone perhaps apart from the man himself) could have seen that it wasn't on the cards. Gault-Millau had demoted Loiseau from 19/20 t0 17/20 in their guide, which seems, at least, not to have helped his mental state. As s slight aside - has there been any instance of a 3* going to 2* without any obvious change in personnel or style?

shall I take a photo of the ones we do at work?

my f**king arse... Sorry, but no genuine commis I know comes even close to earning 400 gross in a week pro rata. that's fine if you want to be a manager. :) Where's the table for chefs? I have a resonable idea of what it buys in the the states, so I'd like to know the actual figures. Try going into the bank for a mortgage and explaining to your bank manager that you don't know your salary, but it'll buy you a case of Jack Daniels a week, and see how far you get. f**k knows - most college students are woefully, pitifully underskilled and know sweet f**k all about anything of any consequence. Why teach them how to work out gross profit if they won't even encounter such things in the real world until 5 years down the line?

I got a sample bottle (200ml) of 21 year old 50% Port Ellen for christmas. Happy happy joy joy. Burns probably enjoyed lowland or Campbletown whiskies, probaby rough as a bear's arse, and probably flavoured with all sorts. Prior to legalisation of stills in 1823 and the legal minimum maturation of three years (1900s, I think) most 'standard' whisky would have been similar to poteen, only rougher. :)

That's interesting - for the domestic market the youngest Ardbeg available is a ten year old. I've seen younger versions of malts available for export before, notably Glen Grant (available as a five year old for the Italian market), but I didn't know the practise was so widespread, and in the US too. Out of sheer curiosity, how much does it retail for?

Nearly every dishwasher I've seen in Manchester is from the Congo (former Zaire). I couldn't possibily comment on their legality or not, for obvious reasons. Strangely underrepresented in the kitchen brigade proper, though. Outside the usual collection of UK, EU and Australian/NZ chefs, there's nary a foreigner to be found. Pay, from what I've heard and read, is worse over here than in the US - granted, the American dollar is very cheap compared to sterling at the moment, but a qualified chef de partie (what would be regarded as a competent chef running a section in the kitchen) could expect to make no more than 20k in london, and realistically 4-6k less than that in the rest of the country. At exchange rates of a couple of years ago, that works out at about US$32k in london, US$25 outside. From all of your experiences, how does that compare to the US?

Adam, tell me you didn't use Ardbeg single malt in your cranachan? :)

I doubt there are more than a handful of Scots in every thousand who could recite one of Burns' poems in its entirity. I agree that it's more about Scottishness in general, which is odd considering that you'd think St. Andrew's day, 30th November, would be the focal point. Maybe we're all still hung over after the tartan-coloured, whisky-flavoured haze of Hogmanay and we need a reason to party again... Soor plooms were my favourite as a kid - ever had acid drops (no, nothing to do with the 60s)? If you're close to Edinburgh or can visit, there's a good old-fashioned sweetie shop just off the Royal Mile that does all sorts of wonderful things. My auntie's recipe for soft tablet is a closely guarded family secret - one friend of mine put a sample in a gas spectrophotometer in the lab to try and see what was in it. :)

careful! :) FM McN's book is, I think, 1929, and a damn good book it is. Have you tried any of the recipes for boiled sugar sweets? The borders of Scotland have a huge tradition, and my go some way to explain the ferociously bad level of dentition in Scotland.

That's the first time I've ever seen green onions used in clapshot, though the Irish use scallions for colcannon, which is a related dish. Can you really not use heart or lung in the US? If true, it's heartbreaking; the lungs are needed for their textural contribuition, much more so than the heart. If the casing needs to be synthetic, how does that affect sausage casings and the like? must they be synthetic too? I missed being in Edinburgh last night. edited to add : Scottish rasps truly are amazing; I think it's the one item of fresh produce we can justifiably claim to produce better than anywhere else. I used to go berry picking as a child and it would take days to get the last vestiges of red from my hands and clothes.

I know several retired soldiers who served with 14th Army who would disgaree with you. :) FB - I disagree... I don't think the food costs would be horribly unreasonable. Lupe Pintos imports a fine range of Mexicana of both the original and Tex-prefixed variety, at muy reasonable cost, senor.

I did similar with ground white pepper once, but it was more easily removed from the surface before it had blended in. Fat Guy raises a valid point, but really only salvagable if you think you've only oversalted by a factor of two or three. I'd agree with FaustianBargain that this seems not to be the case this time. I'd also agree that the potato myth is exactly that - potatoes take in water, whether salted or not. adding lots of potatoes removes salted water which you can then remove from the stew by removing the potatoes, and replace with water to bring the stew back up to the same level of liquid before you put the potatoes in and cooked them. Slightly better (althought not much more so) than using a sponge, or pouring some of the liquor off and addding water. I'd be tempted to put this down to experience and start over; you've learned a valuable lesson the hard way, which often turns out to be the effective way to learn it. Pour salt into your hand first, in the same way that it's good practise to crack eggs into a bowl one by one before adding them to a recipe - one bad egg and your dish is ruined.

One of these, also available in dinky version as one of these. They're handy in that you can spread batters and other things on a baking sheet (with rims) - the offset step allows you to do this without the blade of the spatula hitting against the rims of the baking sheets. Some people, myself included, find that you gain more control over the base of the spatula blade when it's offset. The small ones are very handy for intricate pastry work, especially placing small items on cakes, smoothing the tops of small set items, levelling small moulds, etc. edit : in the UK, what you know as a spatula is called a palette knife.

It was said of the first Queen Elizabeth (16th century) that she bathed once a month, whether she needed to or not. My tuppence worth, in addtion to the very useful reams of information very usefully (and lovingly) posted above. If you are in a professional kitchen, feeding others on a money-changing-hands basis... be very VERY careful about pathogen activity during low-temperature cooking. You may know your job, I may know mine, but remember we have a duty to demonstrate that the techniques we use are reasonably safe. I sometimes have dealings with the Environmental Health Office (every UK chef does from time to time, usually every 6-12 months) - I presume the US Health and Hygiene people are much the same. Over here, you have to show what's called 'due diligence' - That you've taken 'reasonable steps' to guarantee the safety of the food you serve to customers. Now, 'reasonable steps' may very from chef to chef, from dish to dish, cooking method to cooking method, and last bu not least, the EHO inspector of the moment. There are many different degrees of sailing close to the wind in your interpretation of 'due diligence', and as the UK is slowly but surely reaching a similarly litigious level of culture as the US, if we value our business we have to make sure that we are taking very carerful stock of the risks we're taking with the food that we prepare and sell. I'm very much a Bourdain-ite with my own digestion - but since the days of the Borgias faded into history, poisoning those you host has remained both unfashionable and questionable in a commercial sense. With that caveat aside, most EHOs I've met have been reasonable people, who appreciate a lack of bullshit and the ability to 'self-identify' points of risk in the cooking chain. I have a biochemistry degree (quite a few eGulleteers have similar scientific qualification, some a great deal more) and most EHOs know that if you have a genuine level of knowledge past the legal minimum, if you've eductaed yourself as to the risks (eG plays a part here, I think), and if you can show that your temperature checks are iron-clad, they will give you less grief than I actually thought some of my slow-cooking techniques (in past kitchens) merited from an EHO inspector. Know what you're dealing with, please. Clostridium botulinum can kill, very easily, and low temperature sous-vide cookery (C. bot. is an anaerobe) can provide ideal conditions for it. E. Coli killed 20 people in a town a few years ago, not far from where I grew up in Scotland. On a lighter note, most water baths I used at university are splendid pieces of kit; accurate, reliable and a pleasure to use. Be aware, though, of the old lab grumble that as soon as a medical/scientific use was found for a piece of equipment, its manfacturer charged triple for the privilege of a few extra buttons and a higher polish on the casing. Home-made equipment, however skillfully assembled and designed, is unlikely to find as much favour with an EHO as a second-hand lab-issue water bath. eBay, anyone?

my own humble contribution. 655g yolks 510g caster (fine) sugar 4 vanilla pods, split 1275g double cream (48% butterfat) 1275g whipping cream (40% butterfat) 240g milk 1) Scald milk, creams and pods together. 2) Mix yolks and sugar together. 3) Pour 1) on to 2), stirring until amalgamated. Pour into standard 3.5" ramekins, place in 1/1 gastronorm tray, pour 60C water 3'/4 of the way up the ramekins, gas-gun the tops of the brulees lightly to disperse surface bubbles and cook at 110C for 45 minutes. Works every time I've made it. The mix also works from cold, in which case cook at 105 for 55 minutes. I agree with Chef Koo - overwhipping during the mixing of the yolks/sugar and cream mix will result in a greater chance of the mixture soufleeing.

re: Carribbean restaurants... if Vernon's in Manchester (Rayner passim)is anything to go by, I'm not surprised there aren't many more in the UK. Spanish, Spanish, Spanish... I've no idea why. I've only eaten in a handful of Spanish places in the UK. Most were horribly hackneyed touristy places, hopelessly inauthentic (one could of course, argue that the vast majority of 'Indian' restaurants are exactly that), with the exception of Igg's in Edinburgh. Iggy Campos does some decent if unspectacular food, which really is infused with honesty and care. No, I'm not making a pitch for a restaurant review post. Are the restaurant-going public in the UK aware that Spain is close to the forefront of gastronomy? No. That San Sebastian pisses all over most cities in the world, gastronomically speaking? Nope. What they are aware of is that the paella and beer they had in Costa de los Ingleses Asados was pretty tasty, and that thy can be had at your local La Tasca... "La Tasca Restaurants Ltd - so authentic that you won’t find anything better in Spain." My arse. Ultimately, I don't think (the massed bovine herds of) people see Spain as a country of much gastronomic distinction. Name a famous Spanish chef, Britons! I bet far more could name at least one Italian.