Shalmanese
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Posts posted by Shalmanese
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Ya' know, I'm on a weird diet this month. All liquids, but high caloric intake (2500k a day) and loads of sodium. I wonder... if I heat butter it IS a liquid... do I have to count it as a dairy item?
I want to be on your diet
. Hollandaise is liquid! So is bacon fat. -
Well, steaming and blanching are two similar but different methods of cooking. For one thing, blanching allows you to season and cook at the same time.
I'm just commenting that for all the effort people go to keep the water at almost 100C, it might just be easier to pressure blanch at far above 100C.
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Yeah, I usually aim for about one every 3 months or so. I'd burn out on much more than that. To me, a dinner party has always been a chance to stretch my culinary legs and try something new. I get bored making the same old stuff every day and I just like the chance to dedicate a solid day or two to overly elaborate, time consuming ventures.
At the other end of the scale is when dinner parties are essentially like everyday meals, except with outsiders at the table. Thats an equally valid approach but one I personally am not too interested in.
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I don't know what my dream table would look like but I know it would be designed by Raffaele Iannello!
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I think the generalization of the term "Cheap Cuts" needs to be defined. What was once under utilised and therefore inexpensive is today mainstream and price reflective. Cuts that I utilized with great price points once were flank, veal shanks, shoulder cut steaks, hangar , and tri-tip. The price has risen as these cuts became more popular, I'm using beef shanks now ,in place of the veal, beef sirloin in place of the hangar, etc. And beef cheeks? they were practically give aways back in the old days, but thanks to Mario at al, no more...
Hrmm... interesting. I only ever seem to read about previously cheap, wonderful cuts becoming trendy and shooting up in price due to excess demand. Which raises the question, whats started dropping in price and is now becoming a great buy? Are people grilling less ribeyes in lieu or oxtails? Could I get a filet mignon instead of flank now? Surely something has to becoming cheaper.
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hah, I break all my rules when I do dinner parties. I serve elaborate, multi-course meals (at least 4, the most I've done is 10), dishes I've never cooked before in my life, elaborate preparations that require 4 pans going at once and intricate platings with geometric precision. Whats the fun in a boring old dinner party where your just reheating stuff? Might as well have it catered if your doing that. To me, half the joy of a dinner party is fighting through an alcohoic haze in a kitchen of barely controlled chaos and pumping out beautiful dishes. That being said, I have had a couple of lessons along the way that I've found to be good ideas:
1. Send them the menu beforehand, prepare to be flexible. People have all sorts of wierd food allergies or dislikes you never hear of until you cook the food. If you don't send them the menu, then they might not know until they come and then become too embarrased to say anything and suffer in silence. Sure, it detracts a bit from the surprise of the event but it also means no unpleasant revelations. If I'm introducing a relatively esoteric ingredient, I try as much as possible to have a backup in place on the day. Usually, I'll get everyone to try a bit of whatever the ingredient is and switch to the more boring backup if theres a negative reaction.
2. The Dinner is for them, not you. This isn't your chance to show them how sophisticated or pretentious you are or to impress them with your elegance. This is a time for bonding and sharing and good conversation. The food is designed to support all this, not vie for attention from it. Cook the food *they* like to eat, even if it seems a bit mundane for you. it doesn't mean you don't get to stretch yourself, get a grip on their likes and dislikes, an introduce them to new flavours you think they would enjoy. A friend I have really enjoys sweet, tropical fruits but she has only really had mango and pineapple. I've managed to introduce her to lychee, passionfruit and a few other fun things which has pushed my culinary boundaries as well.
3. Sweat the small stuff. The small touches count for a lot. I always have my signature, home made lemonade on the table for every dinner party. I always have hand printed custom menus, printed on a nice, thick, textured cream parchement paper (which they can take home as a souvenier). A nice palate cleanser or appetiser to start it off. The good silverware, the good china. All of these show that you care and add up to be more than their parts.
4. Don't sweat the big stuff. That chocolate mousse made from $40/lb Valhrona chocolate that you sweated all day to make, sitting with a single divot taken out of it? who cares, it's only food. Once the party gets under way, then I completely stop caring about how the evening is going to turn out. Roast is burnt? Soup oversalted? Guests not appreciative of your efforts? Who cares, it's only food. Instead, focus your energies on what the party should be really about, friendship. All the disasters in the world will be forgotten if you can get the basics right. That time I turned my back on a lentil soup for 5 seconds and it went from a brilliant green to puke? I just apologised, they tried some anyway, pronouce it delicious but only took a few bits. I just moved to the course and smiled as if nothing had happened. By the end of the meal, it was forgotten.
5. Take your time. Your not in a restaurant, you don't have to have the dishes banged out in 5 minutes or less. Your guests are perfectly happy to wait 10, 20, even 30 minutes between courses. Take a deep breath and just concentrate on the cooking, don't watch the clock, don't try and rush it, you have all the time in the world. I guess having an open kitchen helps as I can keep the conversation flowing but I've also been self-absorbed and returned midstream into fascinating diversions. One trick I've found is to have a semi-structured interlude in a long meal. Serve all the courses before mains in relatively quick order based on reheated or cold stuff (app, soup, salad, should be easy). Then, take a 20 minute break where all the guests move into the living room to digest their food while you prepare the main, then move them back into the dining room for the rest of the dinner.
6. Portion Control. I've always had a bit of difficulty with this one but I can usually get it so people are just slightly uncomfortably full and don't feel like moving anywhere at the end of dessert. IMHO, this is the right amount of food for a dinner party. Just remember, if your serving lots of courses, they need to be small. Scale your main down to 1/2 a serving of what you would eat yourself is a reasonable first order approximation. Much smaller and it becomes like finicky restaurant food where it's gone in 2 bites.
7. impress with the starters, satisfy with the mains, taunt with the desserts. It's a general theme that I tend to go with. The starters, although the least amount of food, tend to actually require the most effort, involving sophisticated layering of flavours and impressive presentation. This is where I show off my culinary sophistication. The mains, I'm more focused on combining relatively simple flavours in a harmonious manner to provide a deeply satisfying fullness. Dessert is where I let my inner demon get out and throw in all the naughty stuff. Deep chocolate, larger than life fruit flavours, rich alcohol bases. but only in very small portions. The last bite should have you scrabbling your spoon around the plate for the next 5 minutes, trying politely to scoop up another crumb or two of that flavour while nonchalantly seeming not-desperate. The dessert is the last course and what stays with people in their memories.
8. Have fun! If I need to explain this, then no forum thread is ever going to help you
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Thomas Keller is not the only one. Just about every book I have from Beard to Peterson expresses this.
Keller specifically believes that the pot should never, ever, lose a boil, otherwise the vegtables are irreparable ruined and must be discarded. As if the bubbles had some magical quality. I highly doubt that they do and can't really imagine any mechanism apart from physical agitation that could cause it. If you put a single pea in a 100L pot of boiling water and another single pea in a sous vide machine set to 99C, I wager $100 that one would be unable to tell the difference in a double blind test. It's temperature thats important, not bubbles.
No, that's wrong. The thermal energy loss is the same, yes, but the reservoir of heat (the body of water) is much larger when you use a bigger pot, and it is the amount of water you use which determines the initial amount of heat loss when you add your vegetables; the burner is a factor only in getting the temperature back up to the boiling point.What? The heat loss is exactly the same (assuming no significant conductive loss, using the same pan blah blah). If you have 1Kg of vegtables with a thermal capacity close to water at 20C, then you need ~80 KCalories of heat to bring it up to 100C. It doesnt matter if you have 1L of water or 1000L, you still need a way to push in 80 KCals of heat and the only way is with the burner.
Personally, I'm surprised nobody has invented a pressure blancher yet. The way I envision it's like a system of 2 airlocks. You put the water into one chamber an bring it up to pressure. Then you put the vegtables in the other chamber, close the outside hatch and turn the thing upside down and open the inside hatch. SUperheated water falls onto the vegtables and blanches them. After a set period of time, you turn the thing upside down again, let all the water drain out and close the inside hatch. Open the outside hatch and you get vegtables blanched at super-heated temps which should, in theory, lead to even crisper, greener vegtables w/ far less water waste.
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Just what Brian said..... and DONT FORGET THE WATER PAN under the meat or the next day when you turn on the grill this happens
tracey
Top 10 signs your an egulleteer:
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7. When faced with a flaming grease fire, your first instinct is not to try an put it out but, instead, to grab a camera so that you can post about it on egullet.
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Very nice report from MSNBC's Jon Bonne: Iron Chef America Trades Spectacle for Serious Cooking
Looks like Iron Chef America has hit its stride. I know I've enjoyed some of the newer shows.
Showboating aside, each “Iron Chef America” episode now offers valuable lessons from the kitchen. It may have become Food Network's most serious-minded show, in part because it has transformed from mere spectacle to include a healthy dose of how-to.“There was the drama, the tension, the humor and the campiness of it, but people were actually taking away food information,” says Bruce Seidel, the Food Network's vice president for program planning. “We were like, ‘How can we build on that?’”
Chad
Thanks for spoiling the theme ingredient, MSNBC. Chad: For those who have yet to read it, you might want to add a warning.
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. Can I just replenish with fresh oil.. but that way there will always be a little bit of fat in there that just keeps getting older and older, and that sort of worries me.
It's not getting older, it's maturing
. At one time or another, I've had:Schmaltz
Duck Fat
Lard
Tallow
Bacon Drippings
Butter
Shrimp Butter (fry shrimp in butter, add water and more butter, chill, scrape of the wonderful orange fat that floats to the top and spread on toast)
in my fridge, one time, all at once. I love cooking with fats and just a tiny bit is enough to round out the flavour of a meal.
One of my most favourite secret dishes I learned from good eats is, after roasting a chicken, to take the roasted chicken fat from the bottom of the pan and use it in a salad dressing over some simple greens. The amount of flavour that gets packed into that chicken fat makes some of the best salad dressing I've ever tried. Potato chips fried in tallow is also amazing and bacon drippings are god like in their power to perfume a dish.
But probably my now favourite, all round versatile fat is duck fat from an aged duck confit.
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IMHO, Thomas Keller is a very good chef but his ideas about blanching are pretty wrong and have influenced a whole generation of chefs after him to be excessively finicky about blanching. The amount of water has not much to do with recovery time. Your still sucking the same amount of heat out of the water that you need to put back in. Instead, the problem lies with a wimpy burner.
What more water does is that minimises the temperature drop. As long as the temperature stays above 70C or so, your vegtables should be fine so theres no need to worry if the water is merely not boiling. If you are really worried, keep a probe thermometer in the water but I doubt a few florets are going to do anything much.
However, if you want something easier, microwave steaming, to me, tends to produce just as flavourful vegtables for much less hassle. Just put 2 tsp of water with the vegetables in an airtight container and heat until tender.
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The butchers on Victoria St provide good steady supplies of duck gizzards and chicken gizzards... I like them browned in oil and butter, with some garlic thrown in towards the end of cooking, and then flamed with a stiff shot of cognac/brandy/whatever strong stuff happens to be lying around. Calvados works well too...
You have to try gizzards confited in duck fat then. It's OMG good.
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I just noticed, even our local coles is selling Tripe and Lambs brains, the local snooty european butcher has liver, out on display and offal out back. The local Asian butchers predictably have every part of the pig on display. My local italian restaurant always has an offal special of some kind. I've never seen Australia as a particularly offal fearing country.
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Jack, I saw in Mme Saint Ange's technique for the souffle that she says to put it on the floor of the oven, and you have done this too. Can you explain why?
You want the heat to rise from the bottom to give more lift to the souffle.
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A kilo? Amatuers. When I was about 12, Lychees had just come into Australia and my mother was thrilled. Even though they were godawful expensive, she bought a whole 3kg for a party that weekend. Little did I know what she was planning to do with them, I only knew that this new fruit was absolutely delicious. After school, my 5 year old brother and I managed to polish off the entire 3 kg in one sitting, probably about 2kg for me and 1 kg for him.
When my mother came home, she was furious
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After I got up, I finished my mashed potato article for the Journal-News and spent more time working over my handout for tomorrow's tapas class...which really oughta go out to my boss for copying posthaste.
Are you allowed to post your mashed potato article or handouts on here? I would love to see them.
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One method which looks very intriguing by Heston Blumenthal is to freeze the stock into cubes and let them thaw over a coffee filter. The water part of the stock will thaw first and drip through while the solids are held together by the rest of the ice.
It seems to me that this method of clarifying stock would lead to larger yields and less of that eggy taste.
Personally, I don't see much point in clarifying stock unless it's for something that absolutely requires it. The cloudy bits in stock add flavour.
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Navel Oranges: I go on a huge navel splurge every early spring and then never touch oranges again for the rest of the year.
Wagyu Steaks: Wagyu has completely ruined every other steak for me ever again. I have Wagyu once a year and that completely satisfies my steak cravings for that year. Nothing else tastes the same.
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The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell by Mark Ruhlman (Ballantine Books). The author of Salt and Cod (but not Salt Cod) weighs in on the impact of the oyster from wampum to Horace Greeley and beyond. I'm not finished yet, but I suspect there is an environmental lesson as well.
I think you meant Mark Kurlansky.
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Check out the Demo: Making Chocolate at Home....From Bean to Bar thread for more info on roasting cocoa beans.
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This really stood out for me in your terrific post, Shalmanese. Have you ever tried doing this -- drying and storing it, for use later? It's so true; when I see people whining about this as they scrub pans, when they've opened a jar for gravy, it makes me cringe. I'm going to teach my students how to use fond.
In the limited occasions where I can't find a use for fond immediately, I have been known to deglaze the pan with a little water and then stored it in the fridge. It has to be used within a few days though otherwise it goes bad. It's really good in noodle soups. I imagine drying it would prolong the shelf life but it seems like way too much effort for a measly few specks of fond. (besides, I don't know how I could resist licking my fingers to "clean them" every so often until all the fond was lapped up).
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I was struck while reading the recent Daily Gullet article Reflections on the product
Until recently, it was a given that going to a gourmet restaurant meant eating products that were expensive: caviar, foie gras, truffles, lobster and other products that had become veritable myths of cuisine. We too had this view of haute cuisine, but in 1994 we began to consider the scant logic of this concept if it is thought about completely objectively. In fact, the price of a product is set by the law of supply and demand: if the product is scarce and much sought after, its price is high; if there is a glut, and not many people want it, then it is cheap, with all possible conditions in between. This is how the situation stands. A good example of this phenomenon is salmon, which was the luxury fish par excellence until salmon farming began a few years ago. Since then, its consumption has spread widely and it is affordable to a large public today.This new perspective opened our eyes to the fact that every product, regardless of its price, is magnificent as long as it is of good quality, and can play a role as important as any other product. A young almond does not enjoy the same gourmet prestige as a Norway lobster in traditional terms, but we believe that both products have the same culinary value. So we decided that as far as we were concerned, a sardine was as important as a sea bass, or an artichoke as a truffle, and that what should govern our choices was sensibility, not price or prestige. This does not mean to say that we place little value on products that, like truffles, caviar or many others, we consider to be divine.
And, when you think about it, it's true. The percieved quality of a food seems to depend, irrationally, on the price and rarity of it rather than it's inherent qualities. Slaves used to protest being fed Lobster in New England, Oysters were so abundant in London they were bar food for the working class. Glass eels were served also as bar snacks until the population plummeted and they are now one of the most expensive foods around. The prized chu-toro or fattiest cut of tuna used to be thrown to the dogs , and sturgeon used to be so prevalant in the Hudson river that caviar was used as bait.
On the flip side, foods that were once valued due to their rarity have become largely ignored once the price plummets. John Locke was so enamoured by pineapples he devotes an entire section of his treatise "Essay concerning Human Understanding" on the impossibility of describing it's taste. Shrimp was a decedant luxury in the 50's but is now sold at Popeyes and Red Lobster. Various spices at one point or another in history have been raised to exalted levels because of the cost and logistics of transporting them.
To me, this shatters the entire myth of gourmandism. In fact, to be a gourmet is a complete folly if you claim to believe that you are solely guided by taste. A $1 lobster and a $100 lobster are going to taste exactly the same when they hit your tastebuds. In essence, the eating of luxury foods is like buying in at the wrong time of the market. Your buying high and selling low.
However, I wouldn't go as far as Adria in culinary relativism. Somehow, I don't think a cucumber, however extraordinarly grown is ever going to inspire paroxysms of joy like a truffle would. Some flavours just seem to enchant and draw us in and others do not, regardless of the price.
Thus, the logical and rational way of enjoying foods would be to identify what foods would become prized IF they suddenly became rare and exotic luxuries and enjoy them today for their great value. Can you imagine if a single potato chip costs $1? If a carrot cost $10? A slice of watermelon for $100? What would we do with them? How would we enjoy them? Would a poster on egullet from 2100 be amazed at how we chowed down on buckets of popcorn at the movies when they now spend $500 to eat a single grain?
I doubt it for those particular cases but there are others for which this doesn't seem as absurb.
Berries
Sweet, intoxicating. What if a single strawberry costs $10? Simply dipped in some aged balsamic or lovingly sprinkled with a bit of pepper, it would become an aphrodisiac and romantic food du jour. A special fruit for anniversaries and celebration. Prized and bathed in mysticism. I can see this happening.
Chocolate
While relatively expensive now, what if a chocolate truffle costed the same as a real truffle? Would people buy a block a year and just sniff it every day to soak in the intoxicating aroma? Would there be advice to keep it stored in sugar so the chocolate aroma gently infuses the sugar? Cream sauces delicately laced with shavings of dark chocolate to top off a dessert would be the height of decadance.
Tomatos
Sweet, tart, and complex. Heirloom tomatos lovingly grown for $20 a pop. Simply sliced with some fleur de sel and balsamic vinegar perhaps. People would gasp and be agape at the sheer wanton wasteful abandon that we use tomatos for today. ketchup, salsa, pasta sauces... Such a waste of a beautiful fruit to be cooked like that. And hidden under so many complex flavours you never let the tomato taste shine through.
Bread
What if we ran out of wheat? Fresh, soft doughy rolls of bread. Hand kneaded and individually baked on demand for $25 a dinner roll which is then shared between 4 people so each can get a taste of that ethereal lightness. Again... shock and awe. People actually deliberately let bread go stale so that they could use it in a coating?
Bacon Fat
I can't really see how this would become rare without the entire pig becoming rare but lets run with it. Bacon fat would become like the finest olive oils. Used drizzled into a dish to infuse it with a wonderful flavour. There would be vintages and tastings and heated debates about applewood smoking vs cherry wood smoking and ageing times.
Fond
Again, something not realistically able to become rare but such a prized ingredient. Fond would be carefully scraped, dried and stored, used like saffron is today to infuse an entire dish. People would be amazed that so many people today would just let the fond wash away when washing the dishes.
Theres a couple more I'm less certain about but I'm interested in what other people manage to come up with. I know it's very hard to place yourself in such a mindset but imagine transporting yourself back into the 1950's and carefully explaining to a couple of baffled fishermen that this garbage piece of fatty tuna belly would soon be one of the most prized pieces of flesh in the world.
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For those of you who love the Cloudy Bay, try tracking down some Dog Point. It's a smaller winery made up of renegade winemakers from Cloudy Bay who have been producing a very good product.
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Someone gave me a box of chocolate candies that was like biting into a bar of butter, it was so disgusting. Sadly, Ive had this experience many times. I'm wondering if people just keep giving me expired chocolate because I can't imagine why any manufacturer would make chocolate taste that way.
Anyway, tomorrow I go to my sister's home which has a stash of Valrhona guanaja. I'm bringing Chocovic Ocumare and Guaranda to compare. What should I be looking for? Is there some type of standard or characteristics that constitute a great chocolate?
If it makes you shiver while eating it, thats great chocolate.
Restaurant Restrooms
in Restaurant Life
Posted
I think it's to stop people shooting up in the stalls. I dont quite know how it works but a lot of train stations in Melbourne have them for that reason.