Shalmanese

Holy crap that's a beautiful cooktop. Unfortunately, the interface leaves something to be desired and the limitation of 4 pans max renders many of it's potential advantages moot.

FWIW, Cooks Illustrated just did an article on tater tots. Theirs involved freezing a sheetpan and then cutting cubed tots IIRC.

Why is there no 3.0 mm copper cookware?

Also, I'd be curious to hear from anyone who's experimented with cooking bolognese sous vide. It seems like a dish that might benefit from gentle cooking. My biggest issue with bolognese is that it's an involved enough process that you probably want to make a large batch and yet evaporation and concentration of flavors seems integral to the process. When I scale a bolognese recipe, I usually try to do some out of band reduction, reducing the red wine down by 1/2 in a separate pot for example, to try and mimic the concentrated and reduced flavors of a true bolognese.

I've never found ground beef to be able to stand up to the long cooking times of bolognese. I far prefer to use whole cuts which are braised until tender and then shredded.

ScoopKW wasn't kidding. The thing came in an origami of boxes: Steal of the century!

Thanks! Just bought a copy. What a screaming deal!

Apples, cured pork product (salami, prosciutto, etc), sharp cheese (cheddar, manchego, etc.) and grainy mustard. There's something about that combination that wins me over every time.

Sear it at a moderate temperature in plenty of butter. Don't overcook it.

I like my fingerlings dry. IMHO, fingerlings are some of the best potatoes to soak up an abundance of sauce from a braised meat or a steak. More dryness means they can soak up more sauce without becoming soggy.

If it's dry, that means it's cooked at too high a temperature but if it's tough, that can't mean anything else except that all the connective tissue hasn't fully dissolved yet. Badly overcooked will be as dry as sawdust but will crumble at the lightest touch as there's no connective tissue left. If it's still tough, it could still benefit from further cooking.

Because our food preferences are largely guided by food safety. Beef & lamb is primarily unsafe due to e.coli which only resides on the surface so if you can cook the surface, the meat is generally safe. Pork used to have trichinosis which is why it was recommended to be cooked well done but is now fine with a pink center. Chicken suffers from salmonella which penetrates the entire muscle tissue which is why it should be cooked until completely done. Duck does not have the same salmonella problems and so can be served more rare.

Let's get some thermodynamics out of the way just to clear up some pseudoscience bullshit. The oft-repeated wisdom that big cubes dilute less is thermodynamically unsound. You need to remove N joules of energy from a drink to reduce it K degrees. Those N joules come out of the ice in two different ways, specific heat (warming) and latent heat (melting). Two blocks of ice at the same temperature will have the exact same latent and specific heat capacity, regardless of geometry. However, smaller ice cubes will give up all of their specific heat before giving up latent heat whereas bigger ice cubes will have a core that does not get warmed and so will actually melt more into your drink. Another way of thinking about it is that the center of a giant ice cube in your drink is likely to be >0C, insulated by the outer layers which means it isn't cooling optimally and melting more than it needs to. There are a couple of other effects that are worthy of consideration as well which can complicate the picture unless properly handled: 1. smaller ice has greater surface contact with the glass, warming the glass faster than big ice. 2. Any ice protruding out of the drink is going to be warmed by the ambient air as well as the drink, potentially leading to faster warming, especially if there's vigorous swirling that can lead to evaporative cooling. 3. Smaller ice is more delicate to handle as it gets warmer faster so if it sits around, it more quickly rises to 0C. 4. Big ice cools less efficiently which means it's going to take longer to reach equilibrium. If you're drinking a drink before it's reached equilibrium, it's going to be warmer and less dilute with big ice. Furthermore, if the bartender lady wanted a gin & ice with less dilution, rather than buying $5 ice-cubes, she could just start with colder gin! Ultimately though, the entire standard way of making cocktails makes very little logical sense. Ice serves as both a chilling and diluting agent in cocktails and precisely controlling one means you lose control of the other. In the same way that Sous Vide separated time from temperature in savory cooking, I'm hoping that ultimately, cocktails will treat water as another ingredient and start from pre-chilled ingredients from which a measured amount of chilled water is added to bring it to the correct dilution. Also, for a $5 block of ice, I'm disappointed that there are visible bubbles in it.

I brown the meat over high heat, take out the meat, dump in the onions with a good sprinkle of salt turn the heat to low and rely on the residual heat in the pan to start cooking the onions. Once the onions have exuded their juices, I rely on the onion juice to deglaze the pan and then turn the heat back up to high to cook the onions. Once the pan dries up again, I add in the garlic and other more delicate aromatics. I find this way allows the sugars from the onions to mingle with the fond and get a second cooking, leading to even more maillard while being safe from burning.

You should probably figure out a way to slice it if you're buying a whole ham. Nothing like suffering from thick, improperly sliced ham for an entire year because you don't own a meat slicer/slicing knife.

Virtually every cooking show admonishes you from crowding the pan when searing meat, claiming it causes the meat to steam instead. However, I've found an equally bad problem for me is undercrowding the pan. Nowadays, when I'm searing something, I aim for about 80 - 90% pan coverage to get a superior sear. My hypothesis is that the parts of the pan not covered by the meat end up getting too hot which can cause the oil to break down and acrid flavors to come out. Furthermore, for the same quantity of oil, crowding the pan causes the oil to rise up further, giving you more of a shallow fry vs pan sear effect. It's true you could just use more oil with less food like restaurants do but it can get tricky dealing with the excess fat. What do you find works best for you regarding how crowded a pan should be?

Chipoltle, Asagio, Hickory...

IMHO, if someone is not going to buy modernist cuisine because they can get some of the recipes online, they've kind of missed the point of Modernist Cuisine.

Growing up, we had a family rice cooker that we used daily but I can't justify the space of one in my tiny apartment so I've gone back to cooking it in a pot. It's not a huge deal and I don't miss it at all.

I was taught the traditional Chinese way of cooking steamed rice which is rice and water only, never any salt. But all of my other culinary education has taught me that correct technique involves salting everything. I salt pasta water, I salt bread, I salt mashed potatoes, I even salt western rice dishes like risotto and pilaf. Steamed rice stands out as a singular exception to this rule. Apart from tradition, is there any reason to continue not salting my rice or would my food improve if I salted it like every other food I eat?

The food choices we make outside of the kitchen have a far greater impact that the food choices we make in the kitchen. Even cutting your meat consumption by a tiny amount is going to dwarf any savings from running the oven an extra couple of times. A lb of meat takes roughly 10 lbs of carbon to produce. This is the equivalent of 8 kWh or running a full size oven at full blast for about 2 hours or a stove burner on high for about 6 hours.

Does that mean that the self cleaning setting could be used to make a really mean pizza? Yes, some people hack their self-cleaning oven for the purposes of making pizza.

Also, Miso paste can really enhance a squash flavor without being overly dominant on it's own.

Well, there you go. Last I looked you could get their entry level 240mm gyuto for $60 something. I would still generally look to a knife that's made for professional use rather than a brand like Kai, wich is export only, made for the Western consumer market. If you check out the knife discussions at foodieforums.com you'll get more up to date information than what I have. Mean time the Fujiwara carbon steel knives remain a good value, direct from Japan http://japanesechefsknife.com/FKHSeries.html Unfortunately a lot of the bargains from a couple of years ago are now priced over $100. I never made the claim that the Wasabi was the best knife of 2011 but that it replaced the Tojiro as the value champ. It's not the best steel in the world but I challenge you to find a better knife under $50.

This is going to sound really apathetic, but I just don't have the motivation in this case to buy the bricks (about USD10, here). The arrangement is temporary, and my boyfriend's parents really don't have a problem with it, but actually find it amusing. I don't want to know how much a brick house costs at $10 a brick. Around here, bricks cost 30 - 50 cents a piece and they'll often just give you a couple for free if you're only asking for 1 or 2. It's Denmark! Everything is shudderingly expensive! On the other hand, the food is delicious, the people are friendly and it has a great social security system. In that case, anything with thermal mass which can survive heating/cooling can be used. If you have any cast iron pans, you can store them in your oven as long as it never goes about 400F.