Shalmanese

I dunno, it has kind of a seductive, come hither look to it. It seems to be using it's wingtips to cover just about where it's nipples would be if it was human. A tied up naked chick baring it's breasts to me, whats not to like?

Tastewise (farmed rabbit at least), rabbit tastes closest to chicken.

Heh, I thought you guys would be talking about this excellent food blog also entitled Fire & Knives.

I believe that you need to use waxy potatos if you are going to whip them. Yukons would have too much starch which burst out when you whip them and form a gluey potato. Waxy potatos can stand up to far more abuse and produce a silky mash.

Seriously, f**k the vegetarians. America needs a big, macho man restaurant for men who live meat, fat and heart attacks and lots of em.

I think if you want to increase the bidding, put up wither a sample menu or a menu from a past event (play around in word a bit to fancy it up) as well as a couple of photos from a previous event. My thinking if I were to bid in an auction would be that the chef cooking for me would be average to above-average at best. Knowing that I'm being cooked for by an exceptional chef would push up my bidding significantly.

That doesn't look like fat to me, it looks like fine suspended particles. If you really want to get rid of it, you could make a consomme but, personally, I wouldn't worry about it. It's just extra protein and it'll add flavour.

Has anyone tried pre-heating the pizza stone and then working it over with a blowtorch to get the stone ultra-hot? I imagine that would allow you to replicate the crispy bottom effect.

What about trying different types of desserts? Instead of making a chocolate chip cookie, maybe do a 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 peanut butter cookie. I know dried apricots here are about 1/3rd the price of dried cranberries. Use walnuts instead of almonds. Buy whole nuts and grind into nut meal instead. If you traditionally cook with booze, then maybe consider switching to something else. In the end, your butter/sugar/flour/eggs contribute about 80% of the bulk but only about 20% of the cost of a baked good. It's far more effective to cut from the "other" category.

I know your at the stage where you are commited to an excellent product but have you sat down and thought about how much this is all going to cost and what your going to have to price stuff as to make a profit? It may well turn out that a "casual" burger at your place would cost comparable to a sit-down meal. I know quality counts and all that but you have to also realise that most people are unwilling to pay that much. Especially if your in a out-of-the-way location. Then again, your rent is minimal and you have no staff costs so you can probably afford to build up business slowly and organically.

I just suck out the marrow and then use the marrow bone as a straw to suck up the sauce... It's nature's utensil.

In the future of dining thread, MX Hassett said: In this instance, the balance of power clearly lies with the chef and the diner defers their interpretation of the dining experience into the chefs hands. On the other hand, many chefs have horror stories of "sauce on the side, sub chicken for turkey, no butter, steamed, not grilled, gluten free" diners who are determined to control all aspects of the dining experience and shift the balance of power over to the diner. Now, I don't want to debate the relative merits of each and which is better because thats been hashed over many times before in this thread. However, I would like to ask: 1. Has the balance of power shifted noticably in the recent past and 2. Where do you predict it will go in the future? I would say that, in America at least, the balance was pretty firmly within the realm of the chef during the 80s with torturously convulted towers and snooty degustation menus. However, since then, it's slowly but steadily shifted towards the diner. In part, it lies in an increased culinary sophistication on the part of the diner, flashy gimmicks with no substance is harder to pull off these days. However, I'm not convinced this trend will continue for much longer. In some ways, I feel that we are suffering from an overreaction to the previous generation and have shifted things too far in the other direction. Ultimately, diners will acknowledge and respect the expertise that a good chef has and trust their judgement more and more, while still retaining their own sense of what tastes good. I might be rather optimistic in my opinion and would love to hear what others think. As an additional note, how does the Food Media fit into this? Has their power grown or shrunk over the years and what do you think will happen to it's influence in the future?

They work really well for pizza toppings. Because you can keep the slices the same width and adjust the width for different toppings (cut more watery stuff thinner), you end up with uniformly cooked toppings.

A giant basket of perfectly ripe assortment of berries would do it for me.

I suppose discreetly bringing the plate up and licking all the sauce off is out of the question? Oh well, this is why I like eating at home better.

There's always seemed to be a dichotomy to me between the people who cook well at home and only occasionaly go to great restaurants and those who regularly go to great restaurants but never touch the stove. Is it truly possible to admire and appreciate good food to the fullest extent if your unfamiliar with the basic principles of cooking? On one hand, nobody expects a music lover to know how to play an instrument or a art critic to know how to paint, it's perfectly normal in those fields to be able to judge the merit of a work without knowing the technical details. On the other hand, I simply can't imagine how one could fall in love with food without a grounding in it's making. I think, it's not neccesary for one to be a good cook or even a regular cook, but there are certain things which one needs experience with to in order to really understand food. What is stewing, braising, grilling, sauteing. What are the different cuts of meat and how do they behave when you cook them. How does salt, pepper, lemon juice, chilli, sugar and spice alter foods? How does an egg turn into scrambled eggs, custard, hollandaise, mayonnaise, omlettes. How do you make a good stock. How is bread made. Without this... sense... of what food is and how it is transformed, it seems to me that any understanding about taste is deeply impoverished. However, an argument could be made that only people who don't know how to cook can really appreciate food. After all, if the purpose of good food is to delight the senses, then shouldn't the senses reign supreme? With knowledge of food, there is the risk of technical detail obscuring the actual experience of eating. We become enamoured more with those who can manipulate and transform food rather than what ends up on the plate. In my mind, this also contains some merit. I think that the reason why many chefs seem disproportionately enamoured with offal is not because it tastes fantastic, but because it's so difficult to work with that getting it to taste good is a major accomplishment. It may the mark of skill in a chef who can cook offal well, but does that neccesarily mean it should be appreciated? In the end, I'm conflicted. I think that the many "foodies" who flit from restaurant to restaurant in the search of the next hedonistic experience are ultimately missing something deep and fudamental about eating that can only be experienced by cooking it. But at the same time, the measure of if food is good should ultimately fall down to whether it looks, smells and tastes good and nothing should distract from that.

Sure, why not. If you can get a cheap supply of dry ice. Personally, I find that simply suspending it in the sink full of cold water and changing the water 3 times is enough to cool it down. I don't see the danger in leaving it to cool for a whole *gasp* 1 hour to cool. However, if you absolutely must have cold stock right this instant, then dry ice would work, just watch out for splashback. Oh... and you might get fizzy stock...

Right, OK, you certainly seem to know your stuff (or, at least managed to name the right names. PM me the actual math if it's not classified because I'd be interested to look over it). However, the question you were asked to solve is not the same problem that ADNY faces. ADNY can't order a poisson distribution of dough, ultimately, it has to condense down to a single estimate. And you still haven't addressed the other points I raised, namely: 1. It doesn't scale down well. The information gathering resources are so onerous it overwhelms the benifits. 2. You cannot get below the noise floor. No matter what you do, there is no theoretical way to get below the noise floor. Even if you knew the perfect distribution ahead of time, it's impossible. And since the noise floor is very high, theres very little meaningful information you can extract with any method. 3. Theres not much point anyway. Everything can be dumped off as specials. 4. You don't have the information neccesary to build a statistical model. A dish may be on the menu for a month or so. You can't do anything meaningful with 30 sample points. Think about airline bookings, the airlines essentially have the same problem, they need to book enough seats so as to fill a plane yet not so much that they overbook. They can run a billion statistical tests over it yet overbooking is still reasonably common. What makes you think a restaurant can do any better?

For the most part, theres no real secret to making good burgers. Probably any half competent chef could make an excellent, unadorned burger if they put their mind to it. The problem is that good burgers a) cost more, b) take longer to make c) are more unhealthy for you and d) have greater variation in quality so most people don't go to the effort of making a truely great one.

Ask your butcher for beef tallow or beef suet. You might have to render it yourself but it's the best possible fat (short of horse tallow which is illegal in the US) for fries. I wonder if you could get some suet, freeze it, shred it very fine and then mix it with your ground meat to make some ultra juicy burgers?

Lots of restaurants use SCM software to a certain extent but it's not as useful as you think. 1. SCM doesn't scale down well. It's a major pain to enter into the computer every morning what the weather is like and whether your restaurant was reviewed and a whole bunch of other factors that affect your turnout. If your changing menus every day or week, then you also need to enter that into a computer every time. 2. The variation is huge. It's not uncommon to get an entire dining room which, for no reason all of a sudden discern they are enamoured with a usually, not very popular dish. The quality of your forecast is inherently limited by the variation in your data. Theres no point in using more techniques more sophisticated than your noise level. 3. Restaurants have an amazingly efficient way of dealing with excess capacity in the form of "daily specials". As a result, theres not much incentive to pare stock down to the bone. 4. Small restaurants just don't have enough data to do proper SCM. You really need to be shifting in the order of a million units a day before the benifits really start kicking in. It's certainly used but there are very good reasons why sh*t still happens all the f*cking time.

Are those words even allowed to go next to each other in the English language?

From everything I've read, chocolate under 90F = fudge consistancy, chocolate above 94F = out of temper, chocolate b/w 90-94, melted but in temper.

With a bain marie, you heat water to a simmer and suspend the chocolate in air and rely on the steam to warm the chocolate. With this method, you heat the water ONLY up to 94F (about tepid) and place a stainless steel bowl directly in the water and rely on the liquid to heat up the bowl. It's true that a marble slab would probably be affordable, the problem is a) it looks like it requires a few months of hands on training to master the skill and b) I don't need more bits of kitchen equipment at the moment.

I'm planning on making chocolate truffles in the near future so I've been reading a bit about chocolate tempering. Now, as far as I understand it, as long as chocolate is already in temper (like most chocolate that you can buy), keeping the chocolate liquid, but in temper is simply a matter of heating it to between 90F and 94F. Conventionally, this is either done by suspending over a pot of simmering water or by using a microwave. But that always seemed rather illogical to me, if you want something to get to, and stay at 94F, then why would you use something hotter. Whats wrong with simply getting a large water bath, heating it to exactly 94F and then suspending the chocolate in the water until the chocolate comes into equilibrium with the water? First of all, it allows you to keep the chocolate at a stable temperature for longer, the water has a huge amount of thermal inertia so it can keep within the 90-94 band. Secondly, you don't have the problem of steam condensation like with a bain, water at 94F is less than body temp and wont steam. Finally, as long as you have a good digital thermometer, keeping the water in range is very easy. Just have a large pot of boiling water on hand and just pour some in and stir if it starts dropping. Is there some hidden flaw with this technique that I am missing? It seems eminently sensible for the home cook who cant afford marble slabs and $10,000 tempering machines.