Shalmanese
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Posts posted by Shalmanese
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I never really got the whole "sear quickly, then put in the oven" thing. Does quick searing over high heat produce a differnt *kind* of sear to longer searing over lower heat? If not, why not just lower the heat, avoid a lot of the smoke, avoid having to turn on your oven and just sear for longer? The only time I ever use a smoking hot sear is when I have Wagyu or some similar cut of steak in which I want the outside intensely crusted and the centre pretty much blue.
If you want a truely excellent crust, don't wash your meat, sprinkle with salt about 30 minutes before cooking, and then sear over medium-low heat in a pool of butter. You get a wonderful, brown crust you can't get any other way.
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I made pizzas last night and, while they were good, I had a lot of problems making them big and thin enough. The problem was that I could stretch the dough out, but once I put it down, it would start contracting.
Now, alton brown says that I should knead dough to the windowpane stage, ie: the gluten fully develops. Yet I've read varying kneading times from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. Would less kneading yield a thinner, less chewy crust?
What about the choice of flours? Again, Alton reccomends bread flour for presumably extra gluten. How does the choice of flour change the texture?
edit: I also gather that how you form your dough ball might also have an effect. If you don't have a tight seal on the bottom, then it will tend to form layers rather than one, single flat layer. Would this have an effect as well?
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Absolutely love it. Given I live in Australia, I probably should buy more of it. What do you mean it tastes too gamey? I say bring it on, thats the entire point of eating lamb.
When I do buy lamb though, it's usually when legs of lamb are on special (they go for about the equivilant of $2USD a pound). I buy 4 or so legs, debone them, make a nice dark lamb demi-glace out of the bones and roast one. The others get cut into chunks for stews, curries, mini roasts and steaks.
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Hrmm...
I wonder if you could do a banana sorbet by cutting a reasonably firm banana in 1/2 and then scooping out the flesh. Use the flesh in something else and make a sorbet with a relatively ripe banana and pipe it in.
Could you do a riff on chocolate dipped strawberries by making some chocolate shells and then piping in strawberry sorbet and garnishing with very tiny mint leaves?
I've been trying to turn kiwifruits into stable containers for serving and I can never manage. I always tend to tear the skin.
What about serving a tomato sorbet where the pit was in an avacado?
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I spent today on my first attempt at making a veal stock. After 6 hours+ of simmering 1.5 lbs of very meaty veal bones and a few veggies in a 3 quart pot, I ended up with a very thin stock and some extremely tender and (surprisingly) still tasty stewed veal. Unfortunately, I wanted a rich stock, and was expecting all the flavor to be cooked out of the veal. Any ideas what went wrong?
Apart from the things already mentioned, don't forget that stocks are unsalted. Try taking 1/4 cup of the veal stock, adding just a touch of salt so that it is seasoned and then tasting it again. I'm often very surprised about how much of a contrast there is.
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We use a piece of beef that fits relatively snugly in your pot, mix up about a 1:1 or 1:1.5 mixture of dark soy to water and then add enough 5 spice so that it tastes 5 spicey. I dunno, maybe 2tbsp but taste it as you go along. Fill the marinade so that it goes about 1/2way up the beef, keep it at a medium simmer and periodically flip the meat and cook for at least 3 hours, overnight is best.
The meat *will* be overcooked at the end of it, thats ok. This is probably more like a corned beef style recipe than a braise so don't worry if it seems dry at the end. Remove from the marinade and cool completely. Then, slice into very thin slices against the grain. Paper thin if you can do it. The thinness of the slices ensures that it will be tender.
You need to chop the garlic, not mash it or blender it, you don't want any of the garlic juice leaking out otherwise it will be acrid. Maybe 4 - 5 cloves worth chopped fine and sprinkled over. Maybe 5 or 6 sprigs of cilantro chopped coarsely as well. Then, just sprinkle over enough light soy so that it is seasoned. No oil in our recipe although a few drops of sesame seed oil wouldn't go amiss.
Incidentally, if you've been reading the jook thread, a cube of leftover braising liquor and lots of cold beef is *excellent* for jook the next day.
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Whats the fried, crunchy garnish that often accompanies congee in restaurants?
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(cold beef appetizer = jiang niu rou)
My parents make this, take a piece of lean meat with lots of connective tissue and no bones, I think the top round is usually used. The method is similar to hzrt8w's ngau jeen. Blanch it to purge the blood, then simmer in a mixture of dark soy, 5 spice and water for a long time (sometimes overnight). Slice thin, arrange on a platter and sprinkle some chopped raw garlic, finely chopped cilantro and light soy over the top.
The excess braising liquor can be chilled, have the fat skimmed off and then cut into cubes. The cubes are excellent added to soup for an extra hit of flavour.
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My oven heats up the house as well and I have a brand new DCS oven. It's cool to the touch, but vents in the front and thus heats the kitchen. Plus, every time you open the oven heat escapes.
It's a function of the oven itself and the ability of your air conditioning system to keep up with the heat.
Maybe it's all about venting. I don't see any noticable venting in the front of my oven so I assume it vents from the back. Also, I tend to prefer not to open the door when using the oven. A probe thermometer tells me when meat is done and baking I might open it once near the end to check how long it has left then another time when it's done.
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...I would suggest putting it in a 65C - 70C oven the night before and letting it cook for over 20 hours unattended to achieve the most succulent stew. Since the meat never gets above medium rare, you can get away with using cuts relatively low in fat since you don't need as much fat to lubricate the strands. Anybody willing to try?
This would be fairly easy to do using a sous vide technique. I've cooked short ribs for around 30-36 hours sous vide at 60C. It's good, but nothing like a traditionally braised short rib. So I don't think a stew with tender, medium rare chunks of meat would be very "stew like." One trick might be to cook it LTLT and then, just before serving, take it quickly up to a simmer.
So what makes stew meat tender? Is it the moisture or the fat or something else? If the meat is over 65C, then how does it keep moist?
And I'm unconvinced "gentle simmering" has much to do with anything. Using my probe thermometer, a "gentle simmer" reads about 98C and a rolling boil reads 100C. It seems to me that simmering probably does something (although I haven't actually tested) but I can't think of any mechanism that would cause it.
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I keep on reading threads here about how people are unwilling to bake in summer because the "oven heats up the house". I've always been puzzled by this because I've never really noticed a significant increase in temperature with the oven on vs not turning the oven on. Even with the oven at 500F, the front panel is cool enough to touch.
So am I just not very temperature sensitive? Is my oven exceptionally well insulated? Is it only badly designed ovens that heat up the kitchen?
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Hrmm.. it seems what everyone seems to be dancing around is the fact that meat begins to have significant chemical changes from about 55C to about 70C. In fast cooking, this would normally correspond to going from Rare to Well Done with a subsequent loss in moisture. Thus, it seems logical that the optimal way to stew is to raise the meat to around 65C which corresponds to medium rare and then leave it there until all the collagen dissolves into gelatine.
Using a temperature probe and a low oven seems like it should produce the best, albeit longest cooking stew. Can a stew be overcooked? that is, the meat is too tender that it feels unpleasantly mushy? If not, then I would suggest putting it in a 65C - 70C oven the night before and letting it cook for over 20 hours unattended to achieve the most succulent stew. Since the meat never gets above medium rare, you can get away with using cuts relatively low in fat since you don't need as much fat to lubricate the strands. Anybody willing to try?
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Keep hunting!
Tim, your website has been promising an online store for over a year and a half now. Is this ever going to happen?
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There's a new thrill in putting down what are perceived as food snobs, isn't there? The dining room described does not resemble the Chez Panisse I've been to. Maybe if Alice Waters had just shut up and we had continued out downward spiral towards crappy food, we'd all be a lot better off.
It's probably a lot of fun to put down the culinary extremists but from the travelling around our great country that I've done, the much bigger problem is the way the average American eats. And looks as a result of this "diet". We've got a long way to go and I think describing the flavors one gets with a box of Tuna Casserole from aisle 6 is much funnier and more worthy of parody than someone who insists on fresh vegetables.
I don't think he has a problem with genuine, honest-to-god foodies per se. I think what he is railing against is people who view food as just another tickbox on their "must appreciate" list. It's not so much that they enjoy good food in that they feel that they need to have good food and, thus, become absurdly picky about the minutae of bottled water. And he does have a point there, when we pick ice cubes like we used to pick doctors, you get this enormous sense that we have an entire class of absurdly wealthy people who have nothing to do with their days.
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Surely when we've reached the point where we're fetishizing sodium chloride and water, and subjecting both to the kind of scrutiny we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist, it's time to admit that the relentless questing for that next undetectable gradation of perfection has stopped being about the thing itself and crossed over into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless.
Bah, you can lampoon the hell out of everything else but stay the hell away from my collection of gourmet salts. I *can* taste the difference and it *does* matter.
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"American Parmesan"
"Californian Burgandy"
"Canadian Balsamic"
et cetera et cetera...
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Oh, and a 4th point which I alluded to earlier: Food back then wasn't about carbs and phytochemicals and fad diets, food was about tasting good. Is it high in saturated fats? who knows? who cares! it makes for a damn tasty burger so thats what your going to get. Is it low carb? You gotta be kidding me, it's not low anything! Just eat the damn thing or get the hell out of my restaurant!
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I've been mulling over this for the course of the day and it's really struck something with me. What does it mean to be retro? Sure, you can slap up a bunch of furniture and play old music, but it seems much deeper to me. Theres a big psychlogical aspect to retroness, in essence, it's performance theatre as well as food. Retro hearkens back to the "good old days" that we imagine food was like. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but we get this feeling that there are some things which were done much, much better back then. I think I've managed to distill 3 things which I consider to be pure "retro"
1) Restaurants have become pansyfied. The rise of "the customer is always right" meant that restaurants lost a key part of their personality in order to appease the 1% of customers who are constantly whining. There was no more crude joking, the food had to be cooked exactly like how it was described on the menu, servers became "professional" and "polite" rather than idiosyncratic and slightly eccentric. The key goal for the floor manager was "to not make a scene" and shovel on all assortment of free goodies to keep the peace.
My image of a retro restaurant revels in it's individuality. From the moment you walk in the door, you should get the feeling that not only does the restaurant not need your business, but that you should feel priveledged that the restaurant deemed you worthy enough to allow you to patronise them. If you want a special order, sure, you might get it, but only because the chef is in a good mood today or likes your shirt. Not because they want you to "feel like you are a valued part of the integrated dining experience" or some crap. Conversely, if your an asshole, then you get booted out, no fuss. It doesn't matter if your going to tell all your friends what a horrible place this is, chances are your friends are assholes too and there are more than enough people dining here that we don't need your business.
No matter how your business is actually doing, if you can convey that attitude, then I think people will flock in droves. Because they're now part of an exclusive club, not one accessed by riches or good looks, but by being a good guy, and everyone wants to think they are a good guy.
2) A retro restaurant should be intensely personal. Not only do the servers know you, but the chef recognises you every time you walk in the door and knows that you just had a baby girl 3 months ago and thinks that she looks really cute. Everyone is made to feel like a regular as soon as they enter and theres an active sense that everyone there takes a genuine interest in your life.
Since the rise of supermarkets and chain malls, we've lost our sense of the working class acquantaince. Of all the people you directly interact with, either you know them personally via your web of friends or professional contacts, or they are an anonymous minimum wage labourer who you care nothing about. The butcher, baker and candle-stick makers are a dying breed and it seems like we are desperate to cling onto them. They still might exist in fancy suburbs where such things are still thriving. But they are probably disappearing from the lives of most of your customers. But you can always trust the burger guy.
3) Again, with the rise of suburbanisation, we've lost a sense of community. Part of us craves the small town feel where everyone knows your name and you can stop a random stranger on the street for conversation without seeming wierd. If you could make your burger joint in which random strangers can strike up a conversation, then I think you'll have an instant hit. Start introducing people to each other, offer a snippet of data to get them started and then just watch it roll. "Hey Ed, Joe here was just showing me some pictures of his baby girl, she's the cutest thing I ever laid my eyes on, show em the pictures Joe". It doesn't matter that Joe and Ed have never met before and that Ed might be a liberal gay man and Joe a Christian Conservative. For that 5 minutes, they might trade pleasantries about the pictures and then talk a bit about football or whatever. Relatively mundane stuff, but such a random encounter seems so rare today that it will be something special for the both of them.
I think if you could achieve any of these 3 things, you'll be successful, if you achieve all 3 of them, well, hell, I might fly all the way from Australia to eat one of your famous burgers.
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I don't steel, I figure I'm willing to live with sharpening more often just so I don't have to steel the damn knife every time I pull it out.
I sharpen maybe once every 3 months on a whetstone.
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The cheesemonger had a wheel of delightful perinoco studded with truffles which I just had to have.
So I made some fresh pasta tossed in a bit of brown butter, salt and just a dab of pepper and then topped generously with truffled cheese. Mmm... the taste of it was fantastic and it's an incredibly economically affordable way to revel in the taste of truffles.
Not as good as the real thing obviously but for $2 a plate, I'm not complaining.
I love that cheese, and I never thought of using it on pasta like that. Yum. ...Next time I buy some, will do!
Mmm... any hints on how else I could use it? I'm definately getting more.
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How big do you plan to eventually grow your business? Manual grinding and hand cut chips are fine for home use, but if your spending 5 hours every day just grinding burger meat, then it's pretty hard to make money.
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I believe theres a similar prejudice in europe against corn since it's pig food.
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The cheesemonger had a wheel of delightful perinoco studded with truffles which I just had to have.
So I made some fresh pasta tossed in a bit of brown butter, salt and just a dab of pepper and then topped generously with truffled cheese. Mmm... the taste of it was fantastic and it's an incredibly economically affordable way to revel in the taste of truffles.
Not as good as the real thing obviously but for $2 a plate, I'm not complaining.
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If you only have 1% of skim milk, then you can just up the butter to get a better mouthfeel.
Burger helper
in Restaurant Life
Posted
If your this tired now, you better not disclose your location to egulleteers, otherwise your arms are going to fall off
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