Shalmanese
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Posts posted by Shalmanese
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I suppose then that you consider Doug Adams to be a bottom feeder? If so I would strongly disagree.
You may not like Katsuji but I don't think it's fair at all to imply Doug Adams has any animus towards Katsuji. From the show, his quote was "It's like having a brother. Man, I love you but I want to punch your face" which seems pretty affectionate to me.
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I decided to start cooking Offal! I just bough a whole chicken. Inside the chicken there is a package with the heart and liver. Is it OK to cook this heart and liver medium rare? What about Salmonella?
Is it OK to use the chicken heart and liver that comes with the whole chicken or should I buy chicken heart and liver separately?
Technically, salmonella is an issue for offal but you need to weigh this against how offal tastes awful when cooked above pink. The biggest concerns come from cook-chill applications like Chicken Liver Pate, where you should take the temperature to ensure pasteurization. For items eaten hot, there's a risk of salmonella and children and pregnant women should be wary but it's an equivalent magnitude risk as eating a medium rare burger or a soft cooked egg. If you have Sous Vide equipment, you could cook to pasteurization while still ensuring pink creamy interiors but, IMHO, you want good browning on livers & hearts which is hard to get from already SV cooked foods.
Yes, you can use the hearts and livers that come inside a package of chicken, that's what they're there for.
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Thanks for the suggestions. Gives me a good place to start. The consistency of the orange syrup is closer to honey, but it sounds like reducing them both down to known concentrations based on temperature is the way to go.
Are you candying in pure sugar or a sugar/corn syrup mixture? If it's sugar/corn syrup, you're able to get to higher concentrations while keeping in liquid, which sounds like what you have. If so, then I'd do a straight 1:1 sub in a marshmallow recipe.
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Regardless of the starting concentration of the syrup, if you bring it up to a boiling point of 235 - 240F, it will reach the soft ball stage which is 85% sugar.
As for final volume, if the original syrup is liquid at room temperature, it's probably somewhere between a 1:1 and a 2:1 syrup which means you're evaporating about 20 - 30% of the water to get to softball stage. So take whatever existing marshmallow recipe you have and add 20% more syrup than the combined weight of sugar/water in the recipe and you should be roughly in the ballpark.
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Electric deep fryers suck in the home for two reasons:
1. Home circuits are limited to 1800W which means anything plugged into your standard 1 phase power plug is going to be underpowered and slow to recover
2. For home deep frying, because you're dealing with such a small amount of oil relative to the food, the best strategy is to overheat the oil before putting in the food and then relying on the temperature drop to get you to the correct temp. Electric models work the same way commercial fryers work where you start at your target temp and then recover from the drop which takes a long time.
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Why not do it in the food processor so you can first use it to chop up the cheese, then use the feedtube to ensure a steady stream of pasta water?
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Not really. If you read what I have pointed out several times, and if you read Physics 101, slicing is horizontal work, it take no horizontal force to work against vertical force (atmospheric pressure).
I am more than happy to keep explaining.
dcarch
If this were true, things would stick to a mandoline if you rotated it 90 degrees and potatoes would fall off knives if you just held it sideways.
Atmospheric pressure pushes on all sides equally (well, almost, there's a slightly higher pressure on the top side due to gravity but it's miniscule).
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Dave Arnold has talked about 3D printed food and how hard it was for him to find legitimate uses for it. Anything you want to make more than a dozen of, you're better off making a mold rather than 3D printing it and you're limited to single textured pastes. It's not the fundamental shift in cooking the food 3d printing people are hoping for.
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I'm not crazy about the cream idea because I think cream may dull the flavor a little bit. Italians would say it's sacrilegious to add cream.
I can't imagine 2 tbsp of cream would be enough to alter the flavor. I suspect the cream is mainly there to add lecithin and seeding points for the emulsion. Adding Sodium Citrate or Lecithin as a sub for cream would probably work equally as well.
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Cooks Illustrated recommends cooking the pasta in a scant amount of water to maximize dissolved starch and to add 2 tbsp of heavy cream to aid emulsification.
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The sediment is just protein particles and won't be an issue so long as you follow proper handling procedures with the stock.
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Starch is certainly part of the story. Potatoes stick much more than other watery veg. Around 8 minutes into this video, you can see Heston using water and potato starch to put up wallpaper. Granted, he's using a lot of starch.
On an off topic note, anyone know how to embed YouTube videos on the forum? (EDIT: Thanks Martin!)
The video uses cooked starch which gelatinizes. Uncooked starch performed completely differently.
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I think I hunt down a source for donkey meat but the elephant is going to be a bit trickier...
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Oh, don't get me wrong. Aaron is totally an unredeemed, arrogant douchebag.
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I've found Keller to be someone who takes his French training religiously and doesn't do much to question the orthodoxy.
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A Romesco sauce is a traditional Spanish sauce made from bell peppers.
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"-----Also RE dcarch's comment about there not being many ways to keep noise down in a room - there are quite a lot, ----"
Let me put it in another way. Yes there is very effective way to cut down noise, but there is a problem you cannot change.
In the science of hearing and acoustics, the problem is that our hearing sensibility is logarithmic in response.
Our hearing can detect a change in sound level every 3 dbs; however, every 3 dbs, it represents a 100% in acoustic power. In other words, if you manage to lower the noise somewhat, you need to cut the noise energy by 100%.
In reverse, 1 watt of power can give you acceptable music loudness, why do you need a 500 watt amplifier? because 2 watts is a little louder, 4 watts, slightly louder, 8 watts, 16 watts, 32 watts ----------.
The factors I mentioned are the most effective, but not practical ways to control noise in a restaurant environment.
dcarch
Restaurant noise is a strong feedback look though, as diners in a loud restaurant will shout to be heard, making the overall noise even louder. So even small changes in design can have big changes in the resulting sound level.
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And if I were ever wavering in that hope, his douchebag, cowardly refusal to go head-to-head with her in the challenge (even after telling her, "I can cook you under the table, bitch") sealed the deal with me. I mean really, Aaron, you said you can cook her "under the table," but you don't even have the balls to try to prove it? Too bad your balls aren't as big as your mouth.
I would hope that lesson in baseless bravado would shut him up. But somehow I doubt it.
Katsuji may talk a lot but he's never petty or arrogant or hateful or disrespectful. I get a kick out of him.
As opposed to Aaron, who can't possibly pack his knives and go soon enough for me.
I don't see why his choice was cowardly. First of all, your experience as a viewer is informed by editing and the "I could cook you under the table" comment was cut in a way to make it seem hugely significantly. For all we know, Aaron might have told everyone in the house at that point that he could cook them under the table and legitimately not remember his supposed "beef" with Kerryann.
Secondly, regardless of anything else, this is still a game and it's still legitimate to try and play it smartly. Nobody knows what can happen during a head to head challenge and weaker chefs send much stronger ones home all the time. Aaron is still smart in picking who he perceives as the weakest chef to maximize his chances.
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Stocks were originally developed in restaurant settings where a single stock would be made in industrial sized quantities and used for multiple recipes within a single cuisine. People have adapted stocks for home use wholesale, without examining the difference in context. Personally, I find the use of traditional French stock in a dish gives it that kind of restaurant style sami-ness that I find unpleasant.
Instead, I make my stocks with meat, onions & garlic only to produce a neutral flavored stock that's adaptable to a wide range of circumstances (If I have other alliums like leek greens, I will throw those in as well). I find it rare that I want the rounded mirepoix flavor of a traditional French stock in a dish, instead, I far prefer to amplify the already existing flavors of the dish. For example, if I'm making a pumpkin soup, I'll simmer the pumpkin guts in the stock before straining and adding to the dish. If I'm making a corn soup, I'll simmer corn husks briefly.
I've also been experimenting with moving away from stocks. Some dishes, I actually find water more appropriate or white wine or vermouth bloomed with gelatin. Other times, I'll figure out if there's a way to extract liquids intrinsic in the dish
For example, I made a meatloaf today where I first microwaved whole mushrooms covered for 10 minutes to extract their moisture, then chopped and squeezed the mushrooms to pull out more moisture before sauteing. For the mirepoix, I used a food processor to chop to deliberately break as much of the cell structure as possible, then salted and let the mirepoix sit for 10 minutes. The liquids squeezed from the mirepoix was combined with the mushroom juices and yielded about 3 cups of liquid. About 1 cup was used to moisten the meatloaf and the other 2 cups were turned into a gravy with flour, butter, vermouth, gelatin, anchovy paste and black pepper.
Not only did this process halve the time required to saute the vegetables since you didn't have to wait for all of that liquid to evaporate off, the resulting gravy was clean and bold with a distinct mushroom flavor.
Another technique I've been experimenting with is starting ground beef in a cold pan and cooking it over medium heat until it's grey and soupy, then pouring it into a strainer and letting the liquid drain out before adding it back to a hot pan over high heat. The meat ends up much better browned and the leftover cup of liquid is defatted and used in place of a stock when deglazing the pan.
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You can also put a strip of paper towel across the opening. In practice, I've not found a huge use for chamber vacs. If you're doing sous vide with a liquid, I prefer using ziplocs over vacuum sealing anyway. If you're prepping stuff for storage, most of the things you want to prep are either completely dry or mostly liquid. Mostly liquid stuff does fine in a ziploc using displacement which is a lot faster than vacuuming.
The one area it would be helpful is if you wanted to freeze a lot of meat with marinade which I never do. In that case, you can also freeze the meat first, then seal after it's frozen.
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Choose the option that you're comfortable paying. Kaseki varies seasonally so there's no set menu. The higher priced menus will have more exotic ingredients and possibly more food.
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The lifetime of a stone is how long it takes for the center to completely wear away. This should be unaffected by flattening as the material taken away is the sides that get relatively less use.
Also, flattening by grinding two stones results in a concave/convex surface. Grinding with 3 stones against each other results in a perfectly flat surface. In practice, this ends up not really mattering that much. Alternately, you can just glue sandpaper to a sheet of glass and grind against that to achieve perfect flatness.
edit: Also, I've never known a home knife sharpener to completely use up a stone. Even if you sharpen every week, it takes a long time to wear away an entire stone.
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This may be super obvious to others but I just figured out tonight that the circulator is also an excellent tool for defrosting meats. Set the circulator to 4C/40F, put your meat in the bath and when the bath temperature goes above 4C/40F, that's when you know your meat is fully defrosted.
The combination of circulation and heating defrosts the meat faster than just putting it in standing water while, at the same time, making sure it doesn't go above the danger zone. I did this using the Anova 1 and it took about 30 minutes to defrost some chicken thighs. I imagine, with the Anova 2, it will be even easier since you can remotely monitor the temperature on your phone.
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As you said, it's mostly arbitrary and based on tradition so feel free to do whatever you like if you're inventing a new drink. Drinks on the rocks stay cold longer at the cost of dilution. Long drinks are typically served on the rocks as you're expected to drink them slower and dilution impacts the drink less. Drinks involving carbonation are served on the rocks as there's no other practical way to chill them. Drinks that are carefully balanced should be served up so they don't fall out of balance as they sit.
Apart from these very broad guidelines, do whatever the hell you want.
Cleaning Out The Liquor Cabinet: Pictures of Some Older Bottles
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted
You could probably sell the Canadian Club to a Mad Man enthusiast for a hefty chunk of change.