Shalmanese

When I was small, we used to freeze fruit juice in special molds that would turn them into iced lollys. The water freezes but the sugar solution stays liquid. If you suck really hard on them, all the flavour gets sucked out and your left with essentially pure ice. It's certainly a low-tech way of doing it but I imagine children have been doing this since refridgeration was invented.

Your not meant to refreeze not because of health, but for quality. Every time you freeze, the ice-crystals make tiny punctures in the cell walls. If you freeze too many times, all the liquids from the cells will leak out.

Some scallops are treated with Sodium Triphosphate which aids water retention, allowing retailers to sell more scallop for the same price.

What about a sabayon?

Ugh, the tone of the author of that piece was just obnoxious. It seemed like he knew nothing about good food at all. I would add: 51) Cook "THE meal". The one where you go all out, sparing no expense and ambition to cook a meal at the very limits of your technical ability. Foie, truffles, caviar, good wine, the whole lot. 10, 12, 20 courses, as many as you can handle. And all with a close set of friends who you've known at least 20 years. And at the end of your 10 day marathon of cooking and 6 hours of eating, you feel like you just climbed mount everest and survived to tell the tale.

I think it will appeal to the whole foods/trader joes crowd who feel vaguely guilty from all the trendy magazine food sections screaming that they are a bad person if they touch the evil, mass-produced hoi polloi food yet can't be bothered learning how to actually cook.

no. a vinaigrette is by nature an unstable emulsion, not intended to last for more than 5 or 10 minutes. ← I don't know how I did it but somehow I managed to make a thick, sludgy, almost plastic emulsion of a vinagrette with a stick blender that lasted for several weeks in my fridge.

The best vinagrettes I've ever made was using the fat from the bottom of a pan of roasted chicken. The depth and roundness of flavour was incredible.

No matter how much I try it, I still HATE it. I cannot imagine getting over this at all. ← Nobody has to feel guilty about hating cilantro. It's a genetic thing. Some people's tastebuds are just wired in such a way that cilantro tastes soapy.

Our oven is a blanco and I've found it to be very accurate. The broiler is incredibly wimpy though. We have an ilve rangehood and it's performed quite well.

Of course most restaurants don't salt properly, they haven't cooked for you for many years and got to know your particular salt tolerances so it's impossible for them to salt it properly. They might be able to do a good enough job for 80 or 90% of the people who fall in the middle of the bell curve but, fundamentally, your getting the same meal as everyone else even though your tastebuds differ.

I suppose it's different strokes for different folks. I love and crave those carbonized bits, and I generally prefer my steaks to be very crusty on the outside, and nearly raw in the inside. I wish I could figure a way at home to give that kind of char to a steak without taking the middle outside of barely rare territory. ← If you can't get a steak to carbon black on the outside before you've reached barely warm in the middle, you've: a) not got a thick enough steak b) not got a hot enough pan c) not got enough conductivity between the steak and the pan.

Back before the broadband boom, we wen't to a restaurant in Southbank in Melbourne which was the ultra-trendy hip yuppie place to be seen back then. Anyway, the toilet was so small that opening the door would trip the IR sensor for the hand dryer, but, quite bizarrely, on the wall next to the sink, there was a convenient telephone jack provided. Presumably for the client who wanted to dial in with his laptop and check his email while on the can. You just don't see that attention to detail anymore today.

Nah, that's just your typical borderline OCD. Obsessed is when you start bringing a range of salts so that you can pair your salt with your food. After all, it would be terribly gauche to put Jurassic salt on sea food because you left the Hawaiian red at home.

So what in particular are your gripes with the current oven? What have you tried cooking in it?

Uh, more like 10 minutes per side instead of the usual 3 - 5.

I've become a convert of the Fat Guy approach to cooking steaks. Make sure you have thick steaks and cook them in lots of butter at medium-low heat for a longish period of time. You get a beautiful crust and the meat comes out medium rare every time.

On the one hand, you could be fairly open about taking notes and have the kitchen be aware that your experience that night might go out to a rather wide audience and keep them on their toes. On the other hand, you could pretend to be an obnoxious boor talking on their cellphone during dinner and have the kitchen think your an uncultured slob. I know which route I would take.

I haven't been able to find very detailed information but, taking as a rought rule of thumb an oven consuming about 500 - 1000W to maintain temperature, Your looking at about 10c/hr or maximum a buck to keep it running for a day on electricty. Probably much less since slow cooked foods are cooked at much lower oven temperatures which don't leak out as much waste heat.

McDonald's pioneer use of cheese as an edible glue.

I also tend to buy my meat and veggies at smaller markets so my supermarket grocery cart is always rather idiosyncratic. Especially since I stock up on pantry items that go on special. So a typical basket might have 2 sticks of butter, a 5kg bag of sugar, 6 bags of popcorn, a bottle of cream, a bottle of milk, 6 bags of frozen peas/corn, 3 bottles of mustard and a bag of potatos. One time that was particularly memorable was when the supermarket had onions on sale at ridiculously low prices and I wanted to make some onion confit. Rolling up with an entire supermarket cart half filled with onions makes people give you some strange looks.

Electric ovens and electric stoves are two completely different things. Most people I know prefer gas stoves but electric ovens. What exactly do you want out of your oven? Do you want it to heat up fast? Do you want it to be accurate? Do you want it to not drop in temperature when you put something in? Do you want a beefy broiler? Personally, the only beef I have with my oven is the broiler is incredibly wimpy. Apart from that, I've been very impressed with the accuracy. Personally, I don't much see the point in an oven that can heat up fast. All ovens are made from metal and basic laws of physics means that the walls of the oven can only heat up so fast. It doesn't matter how hot the air in your oven is, if you open the door, your going to suffer a massive temperature drop unless your entire oven is pre-heated.

I don't have a M&P so I put them in a little plastic baggie and whack it really hard with my knife sharpening stone. Perfect coarse grind every time :D.

My Kiwi sorbet gets rave reviews. It's a bit of a bitch straining all the seeds out but makes for a much nicer sorbet. The texture is incredible, thick and sticky.

What the hell are ramps?