Shalmanese

Good magazine has a wonderful interview with Elisabeth Paul over her research at Noma on using blood. Apparently, it's chemically quite similar to egg white, although with far more iron and a metallic taste) and that it can be used to foam meringues and flavor ice cream. It's a really interesting piece about taking a very old fashioned, dying ingredient and figuring out novel ways to breathe new life into it.

While Top Chef is no Bocuse d'Or, the quality has improved immensely since the first couple of seasons and the chefs who make it late into the season are legitimately some of the best young chefs in America. But all of the contestants were talking about the commercial impact that Top Chef brings and it's undoubtedly true that becoming a star on Top Chef helps you open up restaurants and fill tables far better than the Bocuse d'Or or any other culinary competition.

I'm looking forward to the inevitable "I didn't learn how to make a single dessert for this show" moment and the even more mind boggling "I didn't prepare any desserts for the finale" moment.

You're basically making a lactic acid pickle which means you want the ingredients completely submerged so you don't get competition from other bacterias and molds.

The Bold Italic did a similar concept bringing a 4 year old to the French Laundry

Another plug for Eat Your Books! It's a great way to keep everything organized. Whenever I get a new cookbook, I'll find recipes that look interesting or I want to try and stick a post-it note with the name of the recipe on the page so it's sticking out the top. Whenever I'm in need for inspiration, I'll pick out 2 or 3 books at random and quickly riff through the post-it notes until I find a dish or two that look good and go out and buy the ingredients.

There are certainly a lot of great reasons to eat local but there's also a lot of bad reasons that don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. For me, personally, it's more important to support high quality food than it is to support local food. For a lot of foods, the two happen to co-incide but I think it's misguided to be ideological about localism.

For books about a specific cuisine, I have them ordered geographically from west to east on the shelf. For books about a technique, I have them ordered from "light" (steaming, salads etc.) to "heavy" (braising, grilling). For general food interest books, I have them arranged alphabetically by author.

I've heard good things about NE Lobster Market, Shanghai Dumpling & Yi Yuan Szechuan. A bit further afield, Daly City has some excellent filipino food.

Millbrae has some really great Chinese restaurants, especially Dim Sum and Szechuan food. HK Flower Garden is an always reliable Dim Sum choice.

Cooks Illustrated reviewed Solar Cookers in 2007 and rated the Sun Oven as "Not recommended" and the SOS Sport Oven Solar Cooker as "Recommended with reservations".

Rice is particularly vulnerable to B. cereus which is a nasty bug.

Shouldn't a mix of FD hot sauce powder and maltodextrin vinegar produce deliver that effect?

I wonder what coconut cream would be like in the freeze dryer?

Oh man, SO is great. Their chicken wings are as good as everyone says.

You finish cooking the pasta in the sauce so it absorbs some of the flavor and leaches out some of the starch to thicken the sauce.

Hi Eric, One major limitation to countertop appliances is that they're restricted to pulling at most 1800W out of a wall socket. This can be too wimpy for a lot of applications where they would otherwise excel (like countertop deep fryers). How does the Palate do dealing with the power limitation and does it limit what you can do?

I ran into these guys last year at Techcrunch Disrupt and got really excited because the concept fundamentally makes a lot of sense. In traditional cooking, you're usually controlling the first derivative of the heat source and you're stuck as a human thermostat constantly fiddling with knobs to try and keep the heat even. The big change in thinking with precision cooking is to shift to controlling the variable directly and using a machine to automatically adjust. First came thermostatically controlled ovens and the ability to "bake at 350F" instead of adding or removing coals. Then came the electric deep fryer that allowed you to fry at a precise temperature without messing with big pots and candy thermometers. Next came the SV machine that allowed poaching at a controlled temperature. Searing is the only heat source we have left that hasn't made this shift from "cook over medium high heat" to "cook in a 400F pan" (outside of niche products like Accusteam Griddles). When I'm searing a steak, I'm constantly trying to balance between not having the oil smoke and heating the pan hot enough to get a good sear. When I'm searing something with a sugary glaze, it's a pain to find the exact right heat level to cause browning without unsightly black spots. When I'm slow cooking onions, I constantly have to find the right heat level so the onions don't burn. All of these are problematic because the changes in the food being cooked cause radical swings in temperature that are difficult for a human to control. Sure, it's expensive and clunky but all first generation products necessarily are. Immersion circulators dropped from $1000 to $200 in the span of 3 years as they gained mass market adoption. The reason why I'm excited is because I want to see recipes with "cook over medium high heat" become as obsolete as "bake on gas mark 5".

There's not really a recipe, you want to get a liquid up to about 30 brix (30% dissolved solids) with the majority of it being sugar. Some alcohol can also be used in place of sugar to control texture and a small amount of invert sugars (corn syrup) can help with the texture. Simply freeze, put in a blender and blend until it forms a slushy texture and then freeze again. The easiest way to check (if you don't have a baume meter) if you're at the right sugar concentration is to just freeze and check the texture. If you make a mistake, thaw, adjust and freeze again. If it's dry and powdery, let it thaw and add more dissolved solids. If it's soft and slushy and weeping, add more water/fruit juice.

I've always just frozen it solid, then used a blender to puree. The quality is pretty good with a high powered blender. With a granita, you don't need any tools more sophisticated than a fork.

I've always been interested in the idea of making sorbets purely via the natural sugars in the fruit instead of adding sugar. Have you considered sorbet making?

Well, yes, you need to add additional water to replace the ice melt.

IMHO, not enough people know about the real/fake wasabi business that you get a useful answer. Instead, ask if they have "freshly grated" wasabi to get a much more reliable answer. Restaurants that serve real wasabi generally grate it in front of you as the show is as much part of it as the product.

Serious Eats debunks that the bone flavors the meat. Instead, the reason why bone in cuts are better is because the meat close to the bone is delicious, with all sorts of fat and connective tissue and other yummy bits. While I like cooking a roast bone-in, I find for steaks, it tends to be a pain in the ass since the steak shrinks when cooked but the bone stays the same height, making it difficult to get even browning. Also, the area closest to the bone on a T-bone or a pork chop cooks slower and ends up still raw. What I tend to do is to take the bone off and cook it separately, usually roasted in the oven.

Do you pound the breasts? I've always found that pounding drastically increases tenderness.