Shalmanese

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?

Success with the microwave! Although it is a rather tedious process, it can produce wonderful results. First of all, You need to disable the roating plate on the microwave. I tried a couple of different ways from using tea-towels to dinner plates to cups but I found the best way for me is to simply invert your carousel. Next, you need to find out where your microwave hotspots are. I did this through a process of fairly haphazard trial and error but, looking back, the easiest way would be to use all the little scraps left over from the making of the bubble toast to evenly layer the top of the carousel and then to turn on the microwave to high for... maybe 30 - 40 seconds. The spots that are hard and starting to brown are your hotspots and you can mark them with an unobtrusive mark to remember them. Next, you need to place your bubble toast directly on dead centre of the hotspot. A tiny shift means lopsided toast. I only did one toastlet at a time but I don't suppose any more should be a problem. I ran a 1150W microwave on high for 35 seconds, flipping the toasts over quickly at the 20 second mark and I get just hardened, barely any browning bubble toast. I think if I were to want a browner version, I would finish them in the oven since the MW produces very inconsistant browning. Another worry is that all the MW energy not going into the toast is going to damage the MW so I leave it off for 3 - 5 minutes for every toast I make. I've done about 14 now in an hour, with experiementation and I've gone through a bag of bread already. After you make some of these, you wont need breadcrumbs for a good long while. The crusts, baked at 60 - 70C for a good hour or so, then crushed by hand and sieved make excellent bread crumbs.

Now, this is what I don't understand. Given a recipe and the same ingredients, how can David produce a "better" vinagrette than you? A vinegrette is essentially tossing a bunch of ingredients into a vessel and whisking until an emulsion is formed. I don't see where anything but pure mechanical action comes into this. Okay, sure, sometimes herbs and the like vary subtly in intensity and it's concievable that you might have to add a pinch more salt at the end of a recipe or something, but it's not like a vinagrette goes from bland to wow back to bland with tiny difference in an ingredient. When I make a vinagrette, I can generally taste which element needs a boost and I can taste when balance is reached. I'm guessing that the main reason his vinagrette was better was simply a matter of ingredients, sea salt, aged balsamic, good olive oil, etc. Not a matter of technique.

Many words have been spilled in egullet and other places about the dumbing down of the American palate. Supermarket tomatos instead of vine ripened, prime beef that would be a good choice at best in the old days, parmesan in a can at a myriad other examples. Economic theory would suggest that as a person's general buying power increases, they should spend a greater proportion of their income on "luxury goods" and less on basic neccessities of survival. And that has happened to a certain extent with the spread of chains like Whole foods and Trader Joes. But, at the same time, theres the corresponding opposite trend of relentless price paring, no matter how it affects quality. It seems that if the past 50 years have taught us anything, it has taught us the vast majority of people seem to prefer cheap food over good food. Now, I see two possible explainations for this: The first and the one seemingly most preferred by egulleteers is that these people simply don't have the sensorary memory to appreciate good food. They grew up on homogenised crap and they never knew anything else. If only they were exposed to truely good food, they would see the light and come flocking to the banner of all things holy and pure. The other explaination is that a vast bulk of people simply dont care what they put in their mouths. They might be able to taste the difference between a good tomato and a poor one but their not willing to spend the buck a pound difference. Food just isn't an as life dominating obsession to them as it is to us. They might certainly gush over a well prepared meal, cooked with care, but they aren't willing to modify their lifestyle so they can cook such a meal every day. Sure, real mac and cheese tastes fantastic, but Kraft mac and cheese is cheap and fast to make. Now, personally, I'm more leaning towards the second one although I do admit there are a couple of cases of the first. My reasoning is that there simply aren't enough converts who have found the light and come in all glassy eyed drooling at the mouth. Everyone who is a foodie becomes one at a relatively young age and those that don't are pretty seem to fall squarely in the cheaper at any cost crowd for the rest of their lives. The reason I feel this is important to bring up is that almost too often, egulleteers seem to implictly assume that good food is to the benifit of all and should be brought about and damn the costs. Preserve out artisinal farmers and bakers, encourage fresh produce, decry pesticides and gentic engineering, by force or government fiat if neccesary. I think theres a fundamental disconnect between those who can't possibly imagine a life without good food and those who can't possible imagine what all the fuss is all about and this disconnect is counter-productive if we wan't to get real discourse between the two groups going. Your thoughts?

My local butcher sells 3 chicken carcasses for $1 or 6 for $1.50. Make a big lot of stock with them then just pull the meat off the bones and use it for chicken soup or something similar. I can easily get 1 kilo of meat from the 6 carcasses and it's usually the good stuff too, breast, thigh, oyster etc.

Oh, yes, for anybody that cares, a thin slice of toast, some chicken liver mousse and onion confit on top is simply divine. The sweetness of the confit cuts through the body of the mousse perfectly.

Did you roll before or after you cut? I always cut after I roll because my theory is that it seals the edges so the moisture is unable to escape. I also had a rather embarrasing failure the other day where I managed to ruin a whole 16 bread slices in one go in the oven because I didn't bother doing a test run first. Yes, getting the toast in the toaster is a bitch. Don't try and turn the toaster on the side without cleaning out the crumb tray, it catches fire :P. I HAVE successfully done one in the oven before a long time ago but apparently I was unable to duplicate it this time. I have also successfully done it in a hot skillet. My theory is that a) You require heat from both sides to really do it reliably, with heat from only one side, instead of turning to steam, the moisture is absorbed by the other side of the bread. When I wen't to flip my bread squares over, the other side was a mushy mess. b) the heat source wasn't intense enough, radiant heat decreases rather rapidly with distance, the fact that the toaster coils are so close together outweights the power of a broiler. c) something is wrong with the bread. Upon recollection, all my bread samples have been from the fridge and a few days old, perhap fresh bread has different properties. Upon some further thought, it occurs to me that the microwave might actually be the perfect cooking medium. It provides even heating and has the desireable property of heating the water only first and then browning the bread. I suspect you might need to put something underneat that can wick away water like a dishtowel or a paper towel or even suspend it on a platform. Unfortunately, I'm all out of bread, anyone else willing to try?

I think we both agree with the basic mechanics of talent, what we seem to disagree is just exactly how hard and rare it is to get it "right". I contend that, even at a 4 star level, the making of the food is easy enough for the top 1% of the population of cooks to be indistinguishable since every one of them can make it perfectly at least as often as they don't. On the other hand, you contend that nobody or a very few people can ever make it perfectly and it is possible to distinguish and rake each individual chef. French Laundry Menu Nobu Menu Grammercy Tavern Menu Restaurant Gordan Ramsay All, I think are safe to say are solidly four star. I wouldn't be crazy enough to attempt a full french laundry menu in a home kitchen simply because it's very much geared to be a restuarant menu and not a home one. But, looking through it, I don't see any that would be any that would not the theoretically unachiveable by a skilled home cook due to lack of technique. Maybe some due to lack of equipment and some due to lack of manpower, but all the food there seems to be using the same skills any halfway competant chef already knows how to do well; boiling, poaching, frying, sauteing, steaming etc. I admit there are certain professions within cooking which technique is highly praised and hard to earn, sushi making, pastry work, decorative vegtable carving just off the top of my head. And to be sure, there are entire menus which are very technique driven like the menu at El Bullii. But I think the very fact that these can be singled out indicates to a greater or lesser extent that most other forms of cooking don't have this unique form of apprentice/journeyman/master type skill curve. In addition, I think a lot of a chef's training goes not so much into the quality of their food preperation so much as their speed and efficiency. A 10 cook restaraunt serving 200 covers a night int 4 hours equals only about 12 minutes worth of attention to any single diner. Add in the fact that the kitchen inevitably suffers peaks and lulls and you might not expect more than 5 minutes of actual personal contact with your food. Certainly, when you add that sort of time pressure, then skill becomes important and it's possible to seperate the wheat from the chaff. Looking at some of the 4 star menus, I can see several examples of dishes that are accessible even to me. Take cerviche from the Nobo menu, it's just fish and a marinade, given equal access to ingredients and equipment as well as a little bit of training at Nobu, I'm convinced that I could make a Nobu cerviche indinstinguishable in a double blind test from one made by any Nobu cook. Or take any of the mains at Grammercy Tavern. Slightly more difficult to be sure, but a roast is a roast and the ideal roast isn't all that difficult technically to achieve. With a temperature probe, it's practically trivial. So while I admit that a talent home cook probably couldn't do a slavish copy of the el bulli or french laundry menus, it doesn't mean they can't do 4 star full stop. By choosing a menu that plays to their strengths, I think it can be done by a determined enough home cook.

I would be wary of using garlic since it appears to cook faster than onion and might burn and get bitter. IMHO, roasting garlic and then mixing with onion confit when appropriate would be the best way to do it.

I'm interested, do you think it was the 12 course or the 12 people that did you in? It seems to me that with such tiny courses, it gets quite fiddly making for 4 and 12 would be a relief in some instances, but in other courses, just the prep for 4 is driving me mad and I don't know if I could handle 12.

You have me at a disadvantage here since I am possibly the most music unaware person in the world. But, as I understand it, the mere technical reproduction of a musical work is trivial and, thus, musically uninteresting. I could feed sheet music into my computer and it would give me an accurate rendition of what a piece should sound like. The job of a classical musician or orchestra is to interpret the work and to cast their own mark upon it by subtly altering the mood and tempo of a piece to achieve a desired effect. In this case, the craft of music is to be able to play the piece competently, the art of the piece lies in both the original composer of the piece putting down the notes as well as the orchestra interpreting the notes. However, in a restaurant, the last thing you want is art in your line cooks, once the recipe is set, you don't want your cooks "intepreting" your work. Consistency is key, theres an objective "perfect", platonic version of your dish and the line cook's job is soley to produce an as accurate copy of such dish as possible. This is why I say the process of cooking itself is a craft. The art lies in the menu design, the timing, the plating etc. And, like all crafts, it's not a matter much of any inherent genius but more a matter of hard work and mindless repetition. And I don't believe that the line cooks at The French Laundry have much of anything that a talented and experienced home cook does not. Sure, the home cook might have less fancy equipment in the same way that a musician might only have access to a piano rather than an orchestra. But all that means is that you should be aiming for piano solos rather than orchestral works. Are piano solos inherent inferior to orchestral works? Well, yes, any orchestra can perform a piano solo but a lone pianist can't perform an orchestral work. But does it mean that you can't possibly produce a "four star" musical experience from a piano solo? I would argue not. How can a great piano soloist connect with 2,000 wildly different people by playing the same thing for them all in Carnegie Hall? Would it be better if he or she played for each one in person on the mediocre baby grands in their respective houses? ← To choose a different artisitc endeavour, lets change focus to poetry. Now, your given 2 choices: one is a poem read to you that comes from a famouse poet, Wordsworth or Blake, say. It's a poem thats been read a hundred thousand times to a hundred thousand people and will be read to a hundred thousand more after you have died. It's a good poem, an excellent poem. The other is a poem written by a talented but amatuer poet. Except this poem was written especially for you by a person who knows you intimately. It is read to you and only you only once, and then the poem is burned and never recited again. It draws upon all of your personal experience, your sense of place and being and contains subtle humour that only you could appreciate. Now what I'm trying to argue is that, even though the second poem might not have the mastery of words and the finesse of a true genius, if the poet is halfway competent, it has that ability to connect with the core of our being and communicate to us on a much deeper and more personal level. This, is the inherent advantage that I think a home chef has over a restaurant chef.

Well, in theory Britas should last about as long on Vodkas as they do on water so several tens of litres at least can be filtered through before the activated charcoal runs out. Divide that by $20 or so for the filter and thats only pennies per bottle.

So you figure basketball is an art and cooking is a craft? If so, how do you figure that? ← No, basketball is a competition which is another thing altogether. In basketball, your performance depends as much on the opposing team as it does on yours inherent skill. True, it takes a Thomas Keller to concieve of something like salmon ice-cream cones, but the ability to churn out 150 or 200 of exactly the same cone every night and have a consistent product is something that doesn't require genius as much as it does dedication and mindless repetition. It's this that I think home chefs are perfectly capable of doing if they wanted to put in the effort. RETREVR: I think a skilled home cook again has the advantage in the "transcends craft to art" arena. How much can a restaurant chef connect with you on a personal level if he's served the exact same dish 1000 times before to 1000 wildly different people? Every bite you've eaten, even the entire course of the meal, is something hundreds before you have repeated down to the smallest details in the arrangement of sauce. But when you eat at a persons home, the menu, the plating, maybe even some of the dishes, they didn't exist before you got there and will never again exist when you have left. You become a collaborator in your meal experience. Every dish is geared specifically towards YOU, your individual foibles, your food memory, signifcant events in your life, all of these can be shaped and massaged into the food by a skilled chef and leave a result much, much richer than a restaurant menu designed to placate a thousand yet satisfy none.

i do think it needs to be pointed out that a lot of us home cooks benefit from extremely low expectations on the part of our diners--something that is not shared by someone going to a 3-star restaurant. i do wonder why people seem to be so hesitant to credit the talent aspect of this discussion. it's kind of funny, really. if we were a bunch of playground basketball players, i don't think we'd hesitate to say that kobe bryant can do things that we can't. if we were living room cellists, we wouldn't be afraid to admit that rostropovich was capable of more than we were. good cooks can be made, but i'm afraid truly great chefs--like great writers, great musicians, great athletes--are born. and then to be able to realize their ability, they must work, work, work. combine innate talent, years of practice and an absolutely unshakeable drive and seriousness of purpose--that's what it takes. to think that we should be able to equal that in our spare time is ludicrous. ← I think it's misleading to try and compare cooking to basketball or music. Although there are certainly artistic elements in the menu planning, the pacing and the presentation, at it's core, Cooking is a craft, not an art. The meat is either perfectly medium rare or it isn't, the oil is either exactly 375 degrees or it isn't, theres either exactly enough salt or there isn't. The reason Keller and the like are considered to be 4 star restaurants is not because they have any super-ordinary skill in the technical aspects of cooking.

Given how well bacon pairs with onions, I'm sure bacon fat would be perfect with onion confit.

What do you mean used to? I just did the exact same thing with beef suet last night. The tallow is destined for some very lucky potato chips on saturday. Fuck health nazis.

I can certainly understand the theory, sear on the outside, low, slow heat on the inside. The same effect can be achieved by pan searing the roast or putting it in a blazing hot oven and then dropping the heat to 65C once a crust has formed. Given enough time, the roast will remain a perfect medium rare indefinately.

Simple, just add roast duck to your menu once a month and you get lots of nummy duck fat for confits, roast potatos etc.

I was reading the French Laundry thread the other day and what struck me was that even Thomas Keller can't consistently produce a 4 star experience in his own kitchen each and every night. A particularly telling remark was that one of the posters remarked how all the dishes were technically competent but there was some indefinable spark of magic lost in all the rush. And THAT, I think, more than anything else elevates a 3 star to a 4 star experience. In this sense, I actually think the home cook has a huge advantage, the resteraunter is cooking for anonymous faces in a relatively sterile enviroment. The home cook, with a much more intimate knowledge of the guests, is far better placed to insert humour, irony, in jokes, personal likes and dislikes as well as ambiance into a meal. I don't think technical perfection and skill is as much a factor at that level. I've certainly cooked fairly sophisticated meals where each component managed to come out with just the right oomph and the entire combination was suffused with this glow of everything going right, not often, maybe not even 1 in 100, but it's certainly happened. Thomas Keller may be able to do it more often but, by then, it just becomes a numbers game. IF you can not majorly screw something up and IF you create a menu drawn on your unique perspective and knowledge of the guests and IF the guest are appreciative and in the right frame of mind and IF that magic spark that permeates all good parties is there, then I think it's not only possible to provide a 4 star experience, but to go beyond that and leave fine dining behind in the dust.

For the life of me, I can't remember. I have a habit of midnight experiments. Lets see... I think I was out of crackers and I really wanted some smoked salmon, cream cheese and cracked pepper on a thin cracker late at night. I improvised and that was the result. it completely surprised me so I tried to do it again and I found I could do it consistently. It was quite a cool discovery and, in some small way, I kinda knew how Ferran Adria feels every day :D.