Shalmanese

I just made some and the taste is sensational. Chopping mushrooms by hand was a major PITA, next time, machine all the way. I used onions because I had no shallots and used a mixture of a full bodied red wine and some dry sherry instead of the port. I also didn't use cream as I was concerned if the dairy would hasten it going off. A small amount was put in a glass jar to be kept in the fridge while the rest is in an ice-cube tray under plastic wrap. I thought the amount of flour in the recipe was a bit excessive, I wasn't a fan of the excessively gummy texture. I guess I'm treating it more as an ingredient rather than a condiment. A condiment has to be edible pretty much as it is without further manipulation whereas with an ingredient, you want maximum flexibility. Have you tried adding beef demi-glace to it? It seems it would complement the flavour well and add a bit more body requiring less flour. I'm planning to use some on a roast chicken tomorrow and I think it would also serve as an interesting garnish for some of Bourdain's mushroom soup which is also in the near future. Eating some plain on a piece of toast, these are the things I think it would naturally pair with: Onion Confit Liver Pate Roasted bell peppers full bodied cheese rare roast beef

The tradition at our house is to always add Chinese seaweed and chinese greens to our wonton broth.

A few rather idiosyncratic traits when I roast: I roast 2 chickens but remove the breasts of both birds. I don't think roasting is the best way to treat breast meat so that gets frozen and is usually used in stirfrys later in the week. If I do roast the breasts, they inevitably get chopped up and added to something else. Chicken ceaser salad for example. The hot schmaltz for the chicken goes in the salad dressing, no arguments. The flavour of the chicken adds a huge amount of body to the dressing and makes it taste amazing.

Well, the traditional accompiament to miso is daikon. Perhaps some of the sweet, tender root of the daikon as a base to the cake?

The correct answer is that the Kim Chi went bad about a week before she gave it to you. ::ducks and runs::

If you have any staple meals in your house that can freeze easily, make a batch for 12 or 20 instead of 4 and freeze the rest in meal sized portions. a month from now, take one out and re-heat and it will seem like new. Works well for soups, pasta sauces, braised dishes etc. Some things like muffins can be kept edible in the freezer for a suprisingly long time so making large batchs ensures your kids will always have a treat to munch on if they've been good. Also, if you trust your oven/slow cooker, you can prep a dish at night, start it cooking in the morning when you go to work and then have dinner on the table 10 minutes after you walk through the door.

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?