Shalmanese

Revel is one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle so I'm glad you got to experience it!

It's so interesting seeing how far you've come in just 8 short years! I remember giving a bunch of tips to some guy a long time ago about how to do a tasting menu but I had no idea until now that it was you! :D.

I suppose my usual practice of licking the tip until it's clean isn't approved by any of the food safety guides?

They are tongs. Once you've cut the watermelon, you're also meant to use the same device to get the watermelon slices out of the rind. Check the youtube video I posted earlier.

Watermelon cutter

If you haven't eaten it in the last two years, what makes you think you would have eaten it in the next two years if it didn't suddenly call your attention by puffing up? A brand new block from the store has the benefit of tasting exactly the same while also not being potentially dangerous.

There's no way I could imagine the average person could not 100% reliably tell a century egg from a regular egg in a blind tasting. The intense sulfurous aroma and taste are a hallmark of century eggs and is extremely obvious.

To be fair, all sous vide stuff smells kind of gross coming out of the bag. If it smells vaguely bloody and organy, that might just be the juices that have leached out but not congealed due to the low heat.

Wouldn't adding a silica gel pack when you seal fix condensation problems?

Not content with merely adding peas to your guacamole, the New York Times now wants you to make a pho with Broccoli and Quinoa. The internet is, predictably, not amused.

Ah, I'm a big fan of the giant chunks of fruit approach so we might be looking for different things in our jams. My feeling is that I can always make my jam more pureed with judicious application of a knife but never less.

If you're in the Bay Area, check out emmy's jam. They're by far the best jam I've had. Frog Hollow is also pretty good and also easier to find. Inna is solid and probably my 3rd favorite local jam.

It's meant to add emulsifiers so the cheese doesn't break. If you have sodium citrate, you can just use that directly. Otherwise, you can add it a bit of American cheese, velveeta or other high meltability cheese.

Just how many places in this country is Shaoxing wine truly unavailable anymore? It's bizarre that recipes still promote the use of sherry in Chinese recipes without even mentioning that the original version would have used Shaoxing.

The Chinese name for the dish is 糖拌西红柿. Might be more of a Northern thing or maybe it's one of those homestyle snacks that everyone knows how to make but they wouldn't think to serve or talk about it to a guest?

One other common Chinese dish is tomatoes, cut into wedges and then sprinkled with sugar. Served immediately, you get the crunch of the sugar against the tomatoes but if left for 15 minutes, the sugar draws out the juices and you get a tomato syrup. In the west, tomatoes are treated like a vegetable and paired with salt but in China, it's more often thought of as a fruit and paired with sugar.

He never said fresh ground corn. He's using dried corn grits and fresh, whole corn kernels from corn on the cob. I do it all the time when I make polenta to amplify the corny flavor (although I use frozen, fire roasted corn from Trader Joes).

Why not buy them pre-smashed? It's not like sugar goes stale on you.

What's the large rock sugar used for? I know the smaller ones can be used to sweeten tea but I can't really think of a practical use for a palm sized shard of sugar.

They look like Mexican Piloncillo sugar.

I've been devouring All Under Heaven as I'm a sucker for regional Chinese cuisine and the book definitely doesn't disappoint. Can't wait to pair it with Land of Fish and Rice next week!

You don't even want to know what they do to those poor sodium ions at the Kosher Salt plant! Open your eyes, people!

I would consider encasing it into some kind of transparent, food safe epoxy resin so that the lemon merely becomes a presentation item and never directly comes in contact with the food.

All Under Heaven is my everything! I've been obsessed with regional Chinese cooking, especially the regions of China that don't get much attention in the West. I love how much of a deep cut this is of Chinese cooking. There's so much stuff in here that I'm dying to try.

Appreciate the shoutout! Quite cool seeing your name in print :).