Shalmanese

There's only a couple of tablespoons of butter in butter chicken anyway and some older recipes have no butter in them. The name comes from how the cooking process makes the chicken "buttery", not the butter in the sauce.

I heard on the Cooking Issues podcast that, apparently, the way they roast meat at Manresa is to constantly pull meat in & out of a 500F oven. The logic behind this is that it provides a large impulse of heat to the surface but low, gentle heat to the interior, leading to a well developed crust but a low temperature gradient. Has anyone heard anything more about this technique or tried it? The theory seems pretty sound to me and I'm going to attempt it for my next roast.

After making stock, a significant amount of stock is left in the porous voids of the bones after straining. Has anyone tried using a chamber vacuum in a rigid container to maximize stock yield by depressurizing stock bones?

I think the anti-beans in chili comments came from the customers.The Texans. They know what they are talking about. The chefs simply catered to the tastes of the region. Smart. Yes, but remember, the one that lost was the sweet mole-inspired one. Not the one with the three kinds of beans. The crowd got to pick the favorite but the judges got to pick the least favorite. It's almost certain that the two bean recipes were excluded from winning as the rabid anti-bean contingency would have torpedoed their chances but, as long as they tasted good, they were safe from the bottom.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. I'd love to figure out a way to get a taste of some of that kind of beef in the US.

accuracy is about external consistency, precision is about internal consistency. If you had a scale that always read 10 grams over, then you would have an precise but inaccurate scale. If you had a scale that sometimes read 5 grams over and sometimes 5 grams under, you would have an accurate but imprecise scale.

Why not just do a simple double blind experiment and find out? It would be cheap to do and you could tell if, for *your* palate, you could taste the difference. I would do a square test: Buy multiple milks, have someone else pour out two samples of each and label them randomly. Your task is then to arrange them in order of most tasty to least tasty. If you put two samples of the same milk next to each other, that means there's a clear separation in quality, if the two samples end up at different points, that means psychological and statistical variance is responsible for the perceived taste difference.

I'm trying to find out more information about meat from animals that are killed far older than standard and what the effects of age are on both flavor and tenderness. Such meat is rare to find through conventional channels as the goal is to kill animals young to decrease cost. About the only exception I can think of are stewing hens. In addition, the USDA seems to regard young beef as a plus, with regulation that makes beef over a certain age ineligible for higher grades. However, I've heard stories from other countries where beef from specially reared old animals is not only more flavorful but also more tender than young steer. In addition, with modern cooking techniques like Sous Vide, it should be possible to counteract some of the toughening effects of age and result in a superior product. Does anyone have stories of cooking meat from old animals?

No, all basting does is slow down the stall. The stall only ends when sufficient free moisture has escaped the meat.

I really don't understand the timeline for this episode. They were shown shopping at whole food before sundown on Day 1 and judging happened after sundown the next day so they had more than 24 hours in the middle. Everyone was shown to be awake in the morning the next day so what the hell was everyone doing for the rest of that day? Also, Chili is not a complicated dish, I don't get why it would take a team of 3 chefs an entire night to make it. At the very most, they could have had 1 person awake and two people sleeping in shifts which would have made everyone well rested at the end of it. Loved the quickfire idea though.

That doesn't answer my question.

Every mashed potato recipe I've seen has dictated a single type of potato, either floury or waxy, depending on the desired result. Has anyone tried using a combination of the two to get something that meets in the middle? Is there a difference in cooking time between the two? Anything else I would need to know if I were to try?

What could complicate this discussion is that there's at least 3 types of basting: basting with liquid, basting with 212F fat and basting with hot fat and each of these has a different effect. The Modernist Cuisine excerpt is clearly talking about basting with hot fat which means that it's purported effects are going to be invalid for the other two. The original purpose of basting appears to have been motivated by the mistaken belief that liquid would be absorbed into the meat, making it juicier. This does not work by the original mechanism and it appears that most basting with liquid does more harm than good. If you're basting with fat from the drippings, there's also two different conditions, one is that the drippings contain a mixture of liquid and fat and that the entire mass is at the boiling temperature of water, the other is that most of the liquid has evaporated off and the fat is now in the process of deep frying the drippings. This is the fat MC talks about as being optimal for basting.

Also, Chuck is 100% meat while short ribs are about 20 - 30% bone.

You could do a range of 6X C eggs to demonstrate both the effect of heat on protein and the value of precise temperature control. If you have a rotovap, you could try something like fracitional distilling to show off the different range of volatiles in flavor. If you have a chamber vacuum, you could make a rapid infusion or watermelon "meat". I also wouldn't neglect the role of the microwave in modernist cuisine either. If all you're going after is eye-catching and novelty, that's fine but, IMHO, such demonstrations have a negative effect on people's understanding of modernist cuisine and give them the impression that it's all just weird for the sake of weird. Demonstrating fundamental principles in an entertaining way would be a better way to go IMHO.

It's slightly harder to get a hold of and it may require the butcher to custom cut it but you want the whole, boneless short rib. Short ribs either come english cut or flanken cut so you have to tell your butcher not to do either. You can then roast the ribs of make stock. edit: this is a whole short rib: http://www.leosfinefood.com.hk/meats/frozen-beef/frozen-australian-beef-short-rib-whole.html . You want to take the bones off that.

The filter only has to be as fine as the smallest thing you're filtering out so I wonder if you could use one of those coarse plastic mesh bags (like the kind they use to bundle onions or lemons) to squeeze the pulp out and leave the stones. Just load up a bag and twist to squeeze into a large pail until only the stones remain in the bag.

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of this show? Amazon only has the first season on DVD.

We did a heritage turkey this year and the flavor was good but I don't know if it was worth triple the price of the kosher turkey I normally get (plus, this was the first year we ever ran out of turkey since it was only 12lbs). Sadly, we didn't have time to pre-salt it which would have added a little bit more oomph but it still came out excellent. The method I always do to great success is to whip a stick of butter with some finely chopped sage, garlic, rendered turkey fat, S&P and stick it under the skin and then whip another stick of butter with just S&P&turkey fat at rub it all over the outside + cavity. Loosely stuff the cavity with more sage, whole garlic cloves and lemons and then roast, leg side up for an hour before flipping to breast side up. I took the bird out when the breast hit 125 and let it coast up to 142, took off the legs, put them back in the oven until they hit 150 and they coasted till 160. I find every year, I'm cooking turkey lower and lower. 142 for breasts was fantastic but I could even see it going a hair lower. This was the first year I did the double cook method for legs and it made it so much easier for everything to be on temp.

Once you've eliminated bad technique, the only thing that improves knife skills is practice and grinding those pathways into your muscle memory. First, make sure you have a sharp, comfortable knife, it's impossible to build a good foundation of knife skills if you're fighting the knife the entire time. At the minimum, buy a new $25 victorianox and use that as a benchmark of minimal acceptable sharpness. If the knife you're using is any less sharp than this, you're not learning anything useful. Next, read the eGCI Knife Skills class and practice your cuts. If you have someone knowledgeable who can watch you, they can correct some subtle deficiencies in form. But then, after that, instead of taking a cooking class, find the best restaurant in the area and volunteer to work for free as a prep cook for a week. After you're 10th case of onions, you'll have your technique down far more effectively than via any class. There are some very good technique based classes and I can imagine bread being one of them but fresh pasta is not rocket science to make and, again, just make it 4 or 5 times and you'll pretty much have it down. The problem with most regional cooking classes is that, if you have a single day, about the most you can practically do is babysit a bunch of people through cooking 3 recipes, max. That's not a very broad or deep exposure to a culture. For the cost of a day long class, you could instead buy the seminal cookbooks of that cuisine, eat several times at the best ethnic restaurant to dial your palate in and then enough ingredients to cook a dozen dishes from your cookbook. For the price of a week long class, you could afford to fly to that region for a week and eat whatever you want. Learning to be a good cook is far more expensive in time than in money and there are not many easy shortcuts for trading money for time. Unfortunately, for cooking instruction, time is what's most expensive to provide so they're actually a poor fit. Read voraciously, experiment ceaselessly and always look for ways to improve.

It seems so. Here's a photo of a US Nickel (1.95mm) side by side with a Australian 20 cent piece (2.50mm): The 20 cent piece feels noticeably thicker and it's quite easy to distinguish by feel alone. If I only had a US nickel, I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to determine whether a piece of metal was 0.05mm thicker or 0.55mm thicker. Alternately, standard 20lb printer paper has a thickness of about 0.1mm so you can make a stack of 20 sheets and another stack of 25 sheets and use that as comparison.

In any case, I would not try to cook any low temperature food using a regular thermostat. They are highly inaccurate. dcarch There is ultra-precise SV which is useful for precise temperature over extended periods of time like 48 hour short ribs or 63C eggs. But there's also ghetto sous vide which is still useful. For example, toss a chicken breast into a 70C oven with a probe stuck into it and take it out when the core reaches 65C. It won't be perfectly uniform but it will still be 95% as moist and succulent as the SV version. At the very least, it should be useful as a resting box to keep meats warm while you prep everything else.

Can you crank it up to max and record what the max temp is? According to the tech specs, it's 120F which is a shame because it's just a hair too low for versatile low temp cooking. If it could hit 125, it would at least be safe for meat cooking. Still, it might be useful for steaming fish. The advantage of this over a Sous Vide machine is that you wouldn't have to bother mucking around with plastic bags, you could just set a plate of food in there and let it steam.

A cooking class is geared at the pace of the average student so if you're significantly above average, you're unlikely to get much out of it. Cooking classes are either short courses geared towards dilettante amateurs or degree length courses geared towards working professionals. The economics of it make it very hard to provide offerings for anyone in the middle. If you're approaching something as a complete novice, like a new technique or a new cuisine, cooking classes may be helpful. But if you possess a medium degree of cooking skill, most classes are probably not going to be too useful compared to just learning on your own. Far better than a cooking class is to hook up with a clan of equally knowledgable cooks. That way, you're teaching each other and at a personalized pace. Bonus is it's far cheaper and more fun to book.

With respect, this seems like hogwash. Even assuming that one can accurately compare the thickness of a coin to the thickness of a piece of cookware, a nickel is only 1.95 mm thick. The thickest American coin is the half-dollar at 2.15 mm. There is no American coin that can be profitably compared to 2.5 mm cookware. An Australian 20 cent coin is exactly 2.5 mm thick, so is the British 2 pound coin. Alternately, 2 dimes are 2.7 mm thick so if it's noticeably thicker than a nickel and just a bit thinner than 2 dimes, it's 2.5 mm.