Shalmanese

I think the "knives will chip" argument is complete bunk. It's not a goddamn washing machine in there, any movement is going to be minimal at best. And this is for an item who's designed purpose is to impact things with large velocities and force. There probably are good reasons for not putting good knives in the dishwasher but this seems like a just-so story.

I freeze ginger and grate it into the pan with a microplane, without peeling.

Cook's Illustrated's series of books were great for me because they devote a large chunk of each recipe to explaining why it works and what they tried that didn't. Cookwise, On Food and Cooking and later, Modernist Cuisine appealed to my food science bent of understanding what was going on so that I had a framework to improvise and adapt from.

If you're not measuring, then it's impossible to figure out the hydration percentage but I've found hydration percentages to be largely useless, except as a starting point anyway. At the end of the day, you're after a certain dough texture and that's going to vary by hydration depending on the humidity of the kitchen and a few other factors. Once you've made bread enough times to know what texture corresponds to what hydration, then you can do it largely by feel. One thing to watch out for is that your dough will become stiffer over the course of half an hour as the flour autolyses. Just barely mix together a dough you think is too wet, let it sit for 30 minutes, then add the yeast and salt and knead.

Seems like a waste to heat it up since you lose the raw milk flavor. Yogurt might be good.

Cooks Illustrated covered this in their March 2008 issue. They rubbed a whole chicken with 1 tsp of baking soda and 1 tbsp of kosher salt and let it air dry overnight. They claim the alkaline environment broke down more cell walls, allowing more water to evaporate during the air drying and also enhanced browning. Too much though can lead to a bitter taste.

Most home cooks seem to prefer oven mitts or hot pads when removing hot items from an oven but I don't think I've ever seen them in a restaurant setting. It was my impression that restaurants just use kitchen towels to handle everything. Is this correct?

I believe nakji wins the prize for worst kitchen when she was living in Vietnam. No hot water, single gas burner.

Some of these preparations are way too involved and, IMO, are better suited to the all important third date (or "money shot" date, as I like to call it). Also, another thing to take into account is that the OP is in New Zealand and the seasons are exactly reversed. If you want to really honor Italian cuisine, find some great ingredients and present them with minimal manipulation. If I were you, I'd go for a main course of bistecca florentina with some of your amazing NZ grass fed beef. A simple salad of seasonal vegetables to accompany it, some shaved asparagus, maybe some fennel, maybe some nuts. For the preceding course, find the best produce you can at the market right now and figure out how to make a soup out of it. Focus on layering and purifying flavors rather than following any specific recipe. And for a starter, get some great bread and grill it simply with some good olive oil and top it with something else good for a simple bruschetta. Could be the standard tomatoes if you can find some great ones but it could be anything else, maybe some fava beans, or some great capsicum. The essence of Italian cuisine is to not have too much of a plan when you go shopping and then to construct flavors around what's opportunistically found. All in all, if it's taking you more than maybe 20 minutes per course of active kitchen time, then it's probably too involved. Simple, simple, simple.

It looks like you have ample outdoor space so I'd try and take advantage of that. A good grill can turn into a serviceable oven and if you dig a firepit, you can do rotisserie or kabobs. A wok burner will let you get a good sear on foods and then you can use electric skillets or slow cookers to cook food the rest of the way.

I downloaded both the sample and the full document and had no problem reading it on my ipad (although page turns were slow). You have to double click on the page so only a single page is showing for it to fill the screen. Personally, I was hoping for a bit more text. Apart from what was in the sample, the rest of the book is pretty much just a listing of pretty straightforward french classics. There's the occasional sous vide thrown in a few places but apart from that, all the recipes are very staid and traditional. I have plenty of cookbooks with the same dishes in them and I didn't feel like this one added significantly. For $5, I'm happy with my purchase but I'm much more looking forward to the "childhood" menu they're currently serving.

IMHO, orange wine is a horrible name for this. If they called it copper wine, they could charge an extra $10 a bottle.

I thought the same thing. Maybe it was a metaphor for the "shattered" dreams of Chefs who presented an awful mess. In my years of cooking steaks I've never heard of the "triple-sear" method. They started with rubbery -looking ribeyes that were cut too thin, then they mucked it up with that oddball cooking method-sear on a barbecue, (with a fire that was too hot and needed dousing with bottled drinking water), chuck the steaks in a vat of bloody water, re-sear on an indoor grill then mace the devils in the oven. No wonder Fearing got a medium-well steak. And speaking of Fearing, he had that sh**-eating grin on his face when he chastised the Chefs with his biting criticism. Sort of "I'm smiling. I'm making you think your dish was great. It sucked, but I'm still smiling at you." I loved it. The triple seared steaks were mentioned on the top for being perfectly cooked. The conventionally seared steaks were on the bottom for a lack of consistency (and also cooked on the too hot fire). The method makes sense, it's a great way to develop a lot of complimentary maillard flavors and the rapid cooking and cooling allows for more time on the grill without the interior overcooking. Also, this seems completely basic but why the hell wouldn't you triple and quadruple check the judges plates to make sure that every single one of them was perfectly on point? Screw it if the diners get overcooked or undercooked food, the judges should get the 4 out of the 200 where not a mistake was made. It baffles me that the judges plates could be so inconsistent, some steaks were overdone, others were underdone, some gratin was cooked through, others were raw which meant they must of come from completely different sheet trays. Maybe one of the requirements that wasn't shown was that judges would get plates at random chosen by the producers. Otherwise, I can't imagine how that could have happened. Also, why did nobody think to sous vide the steaks? Once they said 200 steaks, all perfectly medium rare, I was thinking, wow, this was kind of a gimme for sous vide. With 200 steaks, you don't even need to bag them, you could just cook them all in a oil or butter bath the day before, chill them and then just mark them off on the grill before service.

I think this is illegal under US law. I think this is incorrect. No cite to statutes or case law handy, but it is generally a state by state answer, with the exception that the deduction cannot reduces the person's pay to below the federal minimum wage. From: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/paycheck-deductions-uniforms-cash-shortages-29554.html It appears what I was saying was only valid in California.

I think this is illegal under US law.

I bought it for a couple of reasons: 1. Consistency when rising dough, I live in SF and like to keep my house unheated so room temp can go as low as 55F. A known temperature leads to a known doubling time 2. I want to be able to experiment with different proofing temperatures and their effect on the dough. 3. Yogurt making requires a higher temp than dough proofing and it's great to have a single box to do both. 4. Yogurt consistency is also dependent on proofing temperature and I want to be able to experiment with different textures. 4. It should be an excellent place to put chocolate that you want to keep in temper if you want to enrobe a few dozen truffles for example 5. Cranked to maximum, it serves as an acceptable holding cabinet for roasted meats, meaning I can let meats adequately rest without the outside cooling off too much and I can make sure I take my time getting all the sides ready and keep the meat ready to serve. Really, #5 was the biggest selling point, I've been wanting to figure out an acceptable holding cabinet situation for a while and this seems to fit the bill.

Got mine today. When empty, it stabilized at 91F when set to 90F but once I loaded it with some yogurt and dough, I measure the air temperature as 83F but the yogurt and dough are both 87F (this is after 2 hours in the proofer so everything should be stable).

Yeah, I was going to say it would seem much simpler just to get the butcher at the store to cut it on their bandsaw. Also, how do you wrap & store half a turkey in your freezer?

Most places I've been to are willing to split a wine tasting for you if you ask. I did a single tasting split between 3 people once and found that was the perfect amount of wine.

Assuming I'm making a 70+% hydration french boule and I'm looking for a crackling crisp crust and large, airy crumb, is it better to develop the gluten through agitation, autolysis or both? I largely avoided baking bread for a couple of years due to being sick of all the kneading. I was dimly aware of the entire no-knead movement but never jumped on the bandwagon. Now that I got a brand new mixer, I have a hankering to make bread again and, reading up on everything, I find a lot of words written but very little hard, solid science about what's going on behind the scenes. I'm trying to understand exactly how autolysis, kneading, folding and proofing interact with each other to produce the perfect loaf.

The entire point of fermentation is to allow the yeast to grow right? Doesn't that mean a bread dough with half the amount of yeast mean that you just have to wait an extra doubling time to get the yeast back to the original level? Sure, the bread will rise slower but the end effect should be the same right? Or am I misunderstanding something about bread science?

Would it be possible to set up a rotisserie?

I'm guessing it's mL, not cL. 30 mL ~= 1 oz.

One I just figured out today: If you're preparing a braise/pot roast for the oven, wipe down the sides of the pot with a pastry brush dipped in water. This way, the sides are clean and far less likely to burn in the oven, reducing off flavors and also making it easier to clean.

As a very general rule, cooking speed goes up as the square of the thinnest dimension. A much better way of doing it though is to rely on physical signs of doneness, not time. For egg dishes, you want it to be slightly jiggly in the center but not liquid when you take it out of the oven. For baked goods, you can use the toothpick test and for meats, a digital probe thermometer.