Shalmanese

Or you could just concentrate on flavour as much as possible and then add in some powdered gelatin in the end if you don't have enough body. Seems to work well for me.

I'm very sceptical about your time calculations. Did you factor in the time taken to plant, water, weed, pick and can all your vegtables? Did you factor in water, fertilizer or garden equipment costs?

I've found high end food and fashion web sites to be some of the most atrociously designed I've ever seen.

Hmm... odd, restuarant portions go up as supermarket portions go down. Wonder why that is?

Oh gawd, where to begin? Every time you touch a piece of meat to hot metal your fucking with nature. You think nature designed us to eat some 300+ different chemical compounds, at least a dozen or so known to be carciongenic and none of them encountered in a normal human diet more than 300,000 years ago? What about leaving foods deliberately to ferment(beer), rot (dry aged beef), denature (hard boiled eggs) or the myriad other chemical processes we use to manipulate raw ingredients into something that tastes pleasing. The cancer "epidemic" is a direct result of us living longer. Put simply, we've run out of other things to die from so the only things left are cancer and heart diesese. We're not talking about proteins or genetics or anything complicated. Fats are just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, arranged in a fancy shape. And a carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom. Theres no such thing as "organic carbon". Saying frying at 375 in peanut oil is good enough because that's how we've always done it seems prematurely short sighted. Who knows what sort of chemical reactions we can get going at 500C or 700C or above? And sure, I absolutely adore EVOO and butter and bacon fat and tallow and lard and all manners of lovely, flavourful fats. But at the same time, I also like the idea of a clean fat that lets the subtle elements of the food being fried shine through. I love stock too but I don't hesitate to use water when it's needed.

Yes, but in this case, its the impurities specifically that we want to get rid of. In terms of deep frying, it helps to think of oil as cookware rather than as an ingredient. How about packaging 100% poly unsaturates in a one way valve, flexible airtight bag. That way, Assuming you store it away from light (opaque bag) and heat(in the fridge) and oxygen (airtight), rancidity should be drastically reduced and the health benifits would make it easier to market. Why not have a high smoke point? It gives you more uses out of the oil before it degrades, it allows for crisper searing and sauteing and gives you more leeway. In addition, it can be engineered to be completely flavourless so you have more control as to what flavours you want to introduce into the food.

Bitter would indicate that you roasted for too long. You want brown but not black.

As a corrolary, I grew up eating northern chinese food and have never, as far as I've recalled, put sugar in any dish.

Whats wrong with synthetics? A chemical is a chemical is a chemical. It doesn't matter where it derives from. Synthetic vanilla essense is exactly the same as the "natural" stuff down to parts per million and, by logic, tastes exactly as good. Synthetic salt would be exactly the same as normal, un-iodized salt again down to parts per million. Fat, as a molecule is slightly more complicated than either of them but not signficantly so. The fact that they have managed to make olestra yet not some of the presumably much simpler fats is odd. And grapeseed oil is not the be all and end all by any means. It has a smoke point around the 450s which means that avocado oil beats it in the smoke point department and still contains about 5% saturated which could presumably be removed in synthetic fats. But looking at grapeseed now has me confused as to how exactly saturation relates to smoke points. I originally thought that highly saturated fats would be more stable at high temperatures due to the close chemical bonding but it seems this is not the case.

It seems to me that with all the wonders of food science, one thing glaringly missing is tailor made fats and oils. Why haven't food scientists come up with a synthetic fat that is absolutely tasteless and has a smoke point that approaches the theoretical maximum (in fact, a fat with a smoke point higher than the boiling point would be a major advance and open up an entire new style of cooking). Or maybe a 100% poly unsaturated oil for the health nuts.

My gripe is that while organics can certainly be of a higher quality than regular foods, they are almost certainly guarenteed to be vastly overpriced for the quality increase due to the number of people who buy it for moral reasons. Thus, I rarely ever find organics to be worth the price premium.

My advice for buying a stockpot is to find the biggest one your oven can comfortably accomodate. I've tried stovetop stocks, pressure cooker stocks and oven stocks (although not microwave) and for number of minutes in the kitchen/litre of stock, oven seems to win by quite a significant margin. I put it on high heat on the stove until it comes to a boil and then keep it at a steady 80 - 90C simmer in the oven and leave it overnight without the fear that the flame goes out on my stove and fills my house with gas. It also seems to discourage evaoporation which means theres more flavour in the stock and less wafting through the air.

I think you misuderstand me. Lets take the example of carbonara for instance, the "authentic" carbonara contains some sort of preserved meat, eggs, parmesan, pepper, spaghetti. It also doesn't contain cream or onions or a dozen other things which the non-authentic versions have. Now, presumably carbonara didn't give birth fully formed. It originated from another dish or an idea and was gradually tweaked over the centuries until we have the "authentic" carbonara we have now. Now, I don't have to know the reason why cream or onions were rejected or why a certain technique is used to cook the eggs but I can know that hundreds of cooks before me have made this recipe and they ended up agreeing that this particular incarnation of carbonara is the one that should be made. Now, with foods that are recent, we don't have this guarentee. It might be good but it hasn't gone through this tweaking and changing that only history can bring to it.

Okay... I admit that maybe someone up there DOES like me. The creaminess of the rice, the rich silkyness of the pork, the sheer decadence of butter and parmesan... its something I sorely needed. Who cares that I only get 4 hours sleep tonight, it was SO worth it.

argh, Argh, ARGH!!! It's freaking 4am, I have a freaking plane I need to be on tomorrow, there are people coming over while I'm gone so the place needs to look at least presentable... so what demon of a craving decides to hit me at this particular juncture in time? Freaking RISOTTO of all things. Sure, risotto, 30, 40 minutes cooking max, no hard steps, eat, sleep, doable you say, a veritable novice at this whole torture-yourself-with-food-thing! Well, that would be fine if it were so. Sure, I have chicken and beef stock in my fridge, and it's GOOD stock too, home made, slowly simmered, lovingly reduced to almost a demi-glace and intensely flavoured. But, no, I don't feel like the standard beef or chicken stock based risotto. No, what I really want is a rich, hearty pork stock based risotto with the meltingly tender meat gently shredded and folded in at the last moment. And by god, when I wan't something this bad, I HAVE to have it otherwise it's insomnia for the next 3 hours. So, as I'm speaking, pork spare ribs are roasting away in my oven, until they are all brown and golden. Then, into the pressure cooker for 20 minutes to get all that ambrosial goodness into the stock and another 40 minutes of gentle stirring and other activities that should be reserved for people in a more cognizant state of mind. I can't beleive this freaking brain of mine could hate me so much.

Heres my take: An Authentic version of a dish is one that has existed in some incarnation of other for an unspecified but long period of time, at least 1 generation. Over that period of time, it has continued to be cooked and refined and cooked again and evolved with every cooking. Every ingredient is in there for a reason and every ingredient left out was also left out for a reason, the dish is safe because it's been tasted and tweaked by 100 people. That sense of history, to me, is what defines an authentic dish.

If you really must pour grease down your drain, wait until it's cold and then chop it up into pieces and flush it with cold water. That ensures it stays solid the entire trip to the treatment plant.

My take on it is this: Each culture has a unique set of values and pre-conceptions which reflect on everything from their art to their palate. An "adapted" dish is one that has taken the inspiration from one particular culture but has then moulded it or changed it to suit our particular pre-conceived preferences and notions about food. This might be similar to, say, translating Dante from the original italian into english or doing a remake of "The Office" set in New Jersey and with an American cast rather than a british one. An "Authentic" dish, on the other hand, comes across intact and allows us to understand a culture of food that is different from out own. In this sense, The notion of uncooked fish in Sashimi would be authetic since it conveys something which is unfamiliar to the classical western palate. But each dish can contain authentic and adapted notions and I don't believe it to be an either/or type scenario. There is always a degree of authenticity. However, it's quite hard to talk about authentic and unauthentic in terms of the American palate since America lies at such a unique crossroads of the culinary scene that almost every culinary notion has been absorbed into it. The quest for authenticity is a worthwhile pursuit in culinary enlightenment but I think it's flawed to seek authenticity for authenticity's sake. Logically, adapted food must, on average, taste better than authentic food, for if authentic food did taste better, there would be no need to adapt. If it were not for adaptation, then Italian cuisine would be missing the pasta that originated from China and tomato that originated from America and would be much poorer for it.

Here in Sydney, I'm blessed to have a source of Australian Wagyu beef straight from the farmer for $69AUD/kg for rib eye filets which works out to be something like $24USD/lb. I can't believe it took me this long to try it but... OH... MY... GOD... this meat is something else out of this world GOOD! Pan seared, cooked rare, simple sides, no sauce. Literally, the texture of the meat was like butter. However, the unique structure of fat in Wagyu leads me to believe that there is more to cooking it than any normal steak. When the steaks came out of the pan, there was a quite a large puddle of fat that had rendered out of the steaks and any fat that has escaped the steak is lost tenderness IMHO. So, I've been thinking about this a bit and wanted to bounce a couple of ideas around. With your Wagyu, or any other steak for that matter, you want to achieve two things, a centre that is perfectly rare, and an outside that is browned and charred. However, what you want minimise as much as possible is any meat that lies between these two extremes, since this is the meat that will have all it's fat squeezed out of it and taste bland. So, your goal is to somehow get a steak that is perfectly rare all the way through with just a thin band of extra well done on the outside. Now, if you had a steak homogenous in temperature, then theres no avoiding the inevitable gradient of cookedness from the outside to the in. But, if you could somehow control the temperature gradient of the meat, then it would be possible to fine tune the degree of doneness through the meat. So, drawing inspiration from the "reverse griddle" idea that Alinea is throwing around, bring the steak to room temperature or to as close to the melting point of the fat as possible. Then, "cold cook" the meat by placing it on a previously frozen block of metal or granite. Then, straight from the cold surface to a blazing hot pan. The outside might take slightly longer to char but, if done right, the amount of rare meat should extend perfectly almost to the outer rim. In addition, the fat being rendered from the meat ended up almost deep frying the meat rather than pan searing. As fat can only get to a certain temperature, the meat was less brown than I had hoped before I had to take it off the heat. While the purpose of a griddle pan is to wick away the fat and properly char the meat, I don't really like using them. However, it occurs to me that the same effect could be achieved by tilting the pan while cooking so the fat all accumulates at the bottom. Has anyone tried this method? Any thoughts or am I completely on the wrong limb here?

The perfect Tomato, plucked straight from the vine and eaten in the garden, still warm. Kobe Rib Eye steak, served rare Ice cold home made lemonade on a blazing hot day Truffles Grade A sashimi tuna, served with some real wasabi and very good soy Sauteed foie gras A whole X where X is pig/lamb/cow. And by whole, I mean EVERY part of the animal, organs, brain, bones used for stock, rendered fat used for cooking etc. A meal cooked by Ferran Adria Creme Brulee Varmint's pig.

Not as well as I had hoped unfortunately. The toastlets became stale after only a single day in the pantry, I think it would be something to do with the high surface area and the high humidty we had that day. Maybe holding them in a 60C oven would work. Even with rapid plating, by the time I got them on the table, some of the more liquid ones had already started to eat through the coating and were getting soggy. In the end I did: Pea & Mint Puree - Not very good this one, try as I might, although I got an intense colour, I couldn't get any discernable flavour from this. Raspberry sauce - This was very intense, very sweet, guests loved it. Mushroom cream - Reduced down the soaking liquid from some shitakkes and mixed it with some cream which had been used to simmer sauted button stems, was a hit, the cream was very intensely mushroomy. Onion Confit - I ended up ditching the mashed potatos at the last minute given how long serving was taking, I was using a smaller syringe this time and the onion refused to go through so I just piled it on top. Not a bad decision as it did provide a bit of contrast to the other dishes.

My first exposure to what I guess is now termed the "avant garde" movement in cuisine was via a New Scientist article about Heston Blumenthal and some of the work he was doing in the Fat Duck around 1999. The first thought that struck me was "Wow, this stuff is absolutely amazing" but this was quickly followed by the second thought "Waitasec... you mean it took us 400 freaking years before someone thought to try this?" While almost everybody who reports on your work seems to focus on the foams and the jellies and the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, it seems to me that much of your fundamental innovation could have been achieved in any reasonably equipped kitchen in the last 200 years. Why is it, do you think, that chefs have been reluctant for so many years to perform even the simplest of experiementations with these ingredients that they work with every day to see if they can ever behave in ways that would surprise them.

No, those certainly can come into play, but that's also ignoring the fact that people, in general, have more money, more access to a wide variety of ingredients, good food has become cheaper when eating out or eating in and some choices, say, supermarket tomato vs vine ripened have nothing to do with time pressures. Someone had to be the first person to buy Walmart pap bread instead of real bread from the local bakery and someone had to be the last person to switch over from bakery bread to Walmart pap before the bakery became uneconomical and shut down. Now both of these people understood what real bread tasted like yet chose to go for the Walmart pap, My question is why? And, more importantly, does the reason you provide make sense if you scrutinize it carefully?

This is exactly the kind of phenomena I am talking about. Misty eyed about the past full of pleasant moments in the kitchen and food as an integral part of your life, I see a fundamental inability to understand just exactly how the other half live. Theres this inability to comprehend how much apparently the Walmart masses care so little about food. And this vein has been running through the entire thread. Either posts sneering about "look, these poor fools, they buy Hamburger Helper! how stupid of them" or "Oh, these poor unfortunate people, they buy Hamburger Helper due to the evil corporations foisting it on them because they never learned how to cook real food. How unfortunate for them". Not anyplace in this thread or even much on the board has the sentiment "These people might know about good food, they might even know exactly how to make it. But, making a rational decision, they choose Hamburger Helper all by themselves because they have different priorities from most egulleteers and they are simply making the most rational choice given their particular priorities. In fact, a lot of this thread reminds me of the spate of political threads (not on this board) pre-election which were basically just a dumping ground for Democrats saying "Gee, these Republicans sure are dumb, they even think Saddam was linked with Osama, HaHa stupid republicans". No effort was made by either side to really connect or understand the other side and the shocked reaction of the Dems clearly highlighted just how out of touch they were with the political mainstream. I think, by forming such an insular community such as egullet, posters can similarly lose touch with the culinary reality and form a distorted world view of the culinary scene. Events happening in the world will seem inexplicable and bewildering from the foodie perspective and there is the tendancy to ascribe trite explainations to phenomena and then hold it as gospel, unable to be questioned. So far, in this thread, I've already heard the "It's the evil marketers" argument and the "It's because people are too poor" argument. I'm not neccesarily saying their wrong, but to be taken as inherently true without discussion or argument can be dangerous.

Sure, suspend it in a water bath at the exact temperature I want the lobster to be poached at and leave in there until the internals reach the same temp as the poaching liquid. I'm not sure what you mean but I can gently press my fingernail into a spice and then carefully dust what sticks into the vinagrette. Is that fine enough? Well, I'm willing to wager my palate is almost certainly more sensitive than my diners and that a good home cook's palate might very well be more sensitive than mine. It doesn't matter if Daniel or whoever has a more sensitive palate than mine since as long as we are both more sensitive than the diners, we will produce results that are indistinguishable. In addition, I have the added advantage of actually knowing the diner personally. What might be perfectly seasoned for Daniel might be too bold or too wimpy for my diner and I can adjust for this while he cannot. Heres, the thing, I don't believe a tiny pinch of sea-salt can make the difference from ordinary to ethereal. Good to slightly better maybe, very good to ethereal, but not in 1 step from bland to ethereal. the process of seasoning is in gradual refinement. Given the basic vinagrette; red wine vinegar, EVOO, salt, pepper, mustard, I can take a taste and instantly know which ingredients I need to tweak. I believe I can, given the limitations of my ingredients, make a vinagrette that is perfectly balanced for my application. Any addition or subtraction of material would deteriorate the quality of my vinagrette. And I also think that this is not a hard skill to learn. I fail to see, how given the same ingredients, Daniel could make an ethereal vinagrette while I could make merely a very good one. Jinmyo: Thats very interesting, could you go into more detail? what is wrong with their previous 99 attempts? the salt? the miso? the temperature? How would you rate, say, their 1st, 10th, 50th and 100th effort against a skilled japanese housewife who learnt making miso shiru on their mothers knee?