Shalmanese

What's most baffling to me is how some chefs utterly fail to understand that foams dilute flavor. Foams are great for intensely flavored applications where you want to make it more subtle without adding filler like water but, about half the time, I see recipes which include a foam of an already subtle flavor. Such applications are possible but require incredibly sophisticated technique. Often, when it's actually done, the foam ends up tasting like nothing at all.

Shepard's pie!

The key to cracking on the counter is to use your fingers to modulate the force, not the stroke. Too many people attempt to hit the egg onto the counter with just the right velocity and end up with either a broken egg or not enough cracking. Instead, hold your fingers about 25% up the egg shell and then hit it against the counter with convincing force. Your fingers will hit the counter hard and You'll get perfect crack every time.

I did some experiments around fat-free oven roux a few years ago on eGullet:

Incidentally, it's always kind of crazy to be reminded that meat is quite often cheaper than vegetables at a supermarket.

I just did a dinner for 42 people in December. It's not too daunting if you approach it the right way. The key is to provide enough dishes that any one on it's own is not daunting. Roasts are your friend (Costco is also your friend), we did a smoked brisket, a crown roast of pork and a slow roasted leg of lamb. Focus some attention on making a memorable rub/stuffing/marinade for each one and you can get 50% of the your calories taken care of in about an hour's worth of kitchen time. We did a roasted zucchini & mussel soup to start off with which everyone raved about. Then 3 or 4 different salads, each of which was relatively easy to put together. For the meats, we paired it with some sort of starch; lentils, mashed potato, white beans etc. Finally, we finished off with 4 desserts. I wouldn't bother with chafing dishes, just pre-slice and serve family style and let people help themselves. We had 3 or 4 vegetarians and the range of options meant that they were happy but if you're 30% vegetarian, I would consider doing some sort of tofu style dish to make it seem meaty.

One of the things they say is the mark of a good chef (at least in the European tradition) is the ability to edit and pare down the number of elements on a plate. The urge to pile on different ingredients inevitably leads to confusion and conflict. This appears to be less true in Asian cooking where it's not uncommon to have recipes that call for 30 or 40 ingredients. What are some recipes that call for an extremely large number of ingredients while still tasting good?

My go-to dish is spaghetti with peas. At it's most simple, it's just dried a lb of dried spaghetti & a bag of frozen peas which are cooked through and then blitzed into a coarse puree and seasoned with S&P. Incredibly cheap.

The initial amount of water will not affect cooking time very much although it will affect cooking temperature.

I want to make some Bahn Mi and I'm trying to find a source of Vietnamese Baguettes. Something close to the mission would be ideal.

One very traditional chinese way of cooking noodles & dumplings is to put the noodles/dumplings into boiling water, wait until it returns to a rolling boil and then adding a cup of cold water to the pot. This process is repeated 2 or 3 times and then noodles/dumplings are declared done. Does this have any effect on the final texture of the noodles or is purely a timing thing?

If you poked some slits in the brisket, would that accelerate brining time?

It's an interesting question, I asked it on the Cooking Issues forum: http://www.cookingissues.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=2579 to see if anyone is willing to do an experiment.

It's impossible to overcook polenta so just keep it cooking until service. Braised meat can either continue simmering or be allowed to cool down to room temp and then gently be brought back to the simmer. What are some good ways of holding vegetable sides? Those are what I find I have the most trouble with.

Is there a significant difference in taste between fresh roasted peanuts and those that have been stored? I notice that when I bother to roast my own, the peanuts taste significantly better than store bought but I'm not sure if that's because of the cooking or the type of peanut I'm buying. Also, I love the tiny, asian style peanuts with the old man on the front.

Take peach Eat peach

It also serves as a surprisingly good stock substitute when stock is the base note. For example, I was recently making lentils and didn't have any stock so I subbed in miso instead. Tasted 95% the same.

I like roasting in pans/skillets whenever possible. The bottom of a good skillet is thicker than 99% of all roasting pans out there and the structure inhibits warping and burning. Using a skillet also allows you to size the pan to fit the protein, minimizing evaporation of pan juices and preventing the pan from burning dry.

Having been a gas snob all my life, a few years of working with electric (even crappy old electric) has made me pretty much ambivalent. One of the unsung joys of electric is that the heat does not travel up around the sides of your pans. With gas, the sides above the fill line would often get overly hot and cause food stuck to it to burn.

Occasionally, I will create a dish in which I cook pasta directly in the sauce. The sauce is usually pretty brothy to start out with but the starch from the pasta converts it into a rich, creamy sauce. It's a technique that I've never seen in a recipe book or described anywhere but it makes a lot of sense to me. Does anyone else do this? What are some great applications?

Hollandaise and Bernaise sauce.

Differences in the power of the stove and the quantity of water used will also affect how long it will take to bring eggs to the boil, also changing the consistency of the results.

Graters before microplane were garbage. Cast iron was better in the good old days.

I distinctly remember a common cold appetizer that's common in Chinese restaurants is cucumbers with roasted peanuts in a spicy oil and I want to recreate it at home. Searching Google isn't producing any hits, does anyone have a recipe?

In Australia, it's mandated that nutritional packaging should have a per 100g/100mL listing as well as a per servings listing. This makes it incredibly easy to figure out the percentage fat/carb/protein in a given food and I don't know why they don't do that here. For example, it's pretty easy from a glance to distinguish between the 33%, 35% & 40% whipping cream in Australia. It's pretty much impossible here.