Shalmanese

I've discovered anecdotally that I'm usually somewhere between 3 - 5x faster than most of my friends in prep in the kitchen.

Grind and then run through a fine meshed sieve. You'll find that the grit comes from the hard husks which contribute nothing to the flavor. I normally grind ~6 months worth of peppercorns at once and keep the rest whole. Also, toast before you grind for deeper flavor.

It was only 2 of us this year for thanksgiving and I was cooking so I did a scaled back Thanksgiving dinner: - Seared Duck Breast, "Green Bean Casserole" Salad, Cranberry Gastrique The Salad was a riff on green bean casserole: Snow Peas, Enoki Mushrooms, a thick creamy dressing thickened with yogurt and garnished with fried shallots. - Duck Legs stuffed with Apple, Walnut & Bacon stuffing Deboned out two duck legs and stuffed it and roasted it over the rest of the stuffing as dressing. - Duck Custard, Cranberry, Parsley Made a simple duck stock with the bones, mixed it with beaten eggs and steamed. Topped with drops of cranberry gastrique and parsley oil for a christmassy color scheme.

If you want to just walk into a store and get a knife, the Shun 8 inch chef's knives would probably be your best option. You can buy them from Sur La Table/Williams Sonoma/Amazon. Walk into a store and play with one and see what you think. I also have a friend who distributes them. PM me if you want his contact details.

It's meant to look that way. Gelatin in stock thickens when it's cold.

It seems like every one of their functions can be performed better by a better knife these days. Are there any circumstances where owning a Wustof of Henckels knife is the right choice or are people only recommending them due to the reputation they established 20 years ago?

I've never handled a ceramic knife before and I keep on hearing that they're very sharp but most people think a Wustof is "very sharp". On the scale of Foschner - Wustof - Shun - Custom $1000 Japanese Magic Knife, how sharp would an off the shelf Kyocera ceramic knife be?

If it's confit in the bag, then it's sterile and there will be no bacteriological decay. In France, confit is often deliberately aged for as long so you should be fine.

If significant advances in knife metallurgy happens, you will hear about it in a place that's not a shopping catalog.

Those of you who get it know what I'm talking about. It's that particular hunger you get in the pit of your stomach that can only be satisfied by meat. You can be full and still have meat hunger. You can try and eat anything else in order to sate that hunger but it's ineffective. The only way to fulfill meat hunger is to go eat some meat, the more primal the better. So, does anyone else share the same experience?

Nothing really interesting happens until all the liquid has boiled away. They key is to get that one as quickly as possible while not burning the onions. One thing I've tried that helps significantly is to cook the onions just until they weep all of their juices, then strain the juices into a separate, wide pan and reduce over medium heat. If you let it reduce down enough, you actually get this incredibly intense onion jus that wouldn't be out of place in a fine dining restaurant. After it's reduced 90%, add the onions back in and do the slowcooker thing.

Thomas Keller's Carrot Soup goes through a rather large number of carrots for a small, concentrated volume of soup that should freeze well. You need a juicer though.

I've informally observed that the cooking world is divided into oven mitt people and side towel people as the tool of choice when handling hot items from the oven. I am, personally, 100% a side towel person. I have towels hanging on my oven, hanging on my apron when I cook and scattered around the kitchen. It's so engrained in me now that I couldn't switch to oven mitts if I tried. What type of person are you? Why did you choose it? What are the pros & cons of each approach?

There's going to be 3 spice stores within a quarter mile of each other now. Marketspice, World Spice & now Penzeys.

Just dunk in a LN2 bath. Don't be such a pussy.

The irony was that one of the critiques at the judge's table was that the steak was cut too thin. The correct strategy on Top Chef has always been to produce competent, safe food for the first phase of the challenges until the chaff had fallen away and then cook for your life to keep up with the other talented chefs. It's just a pity that this season, phase one has lasted all the way up till the finales.

This happens a lot in many countries where the bastardized version becomes so popular that the originally authentic version now becomes inauthentic. I suspect that if a Japanese-Italian restaurant served a carbonara without cream, the diners would complain about how it was not what they were expecting. Similar to how you couldn't get away with not serving a fortune cookie at the end of an American-Chinese meal despite there being no fortune cookies in Chinese cooking.

The way I see it, there are two main ways a dish can come about which I'm going to term the "evolution" way vs the "intelligent design" way. A dish that is evolutionary develops slowly, over time within a community. Small variations are made through the process of trial and error and either are rejected as inferior or accepted and integrated into the mainline of the dish. A dish that is "intelligently designed" is created, out of whole cloth by a cook. They may have influences but they don't have any direct lineage. By saying that a dish is authentic, I interpret it to mean that it's firmly in the mainline of an evolutionary process. If I eat an inauthentic dish and I dislike it, it's unclear whether my dislike is with the concept of the dish or this particular execution. After I eat an authentic version of the dish, I can confidently say that many people, in many places liked this dish so my dislike of it boils down to some core dislike of the basic concept.

They just announced on the Top Chef Blog that the finale is going to be held in Singapore! What an exciting location totally wasted on a pack of uninspired competitors .

Glad you liked it!

As someone who was born in that region and grew up eating that food at home, if you give me a sample menu, I can point to some things which are excellent. I don't know if they would serve it in NY but a classic down-scale Dongbei dish in China is a giant pile of braised pork neck bones which are brought along with a pile of disposable gloves and plastic drinking straws to help suck up the bone marrow. Dumplings are a must try as is Chinese saurkraut (suan cai). The chicken & mushroom stew is excellent, as well as anything with lamb in it. There's a dish of stir fried potatoes where, if made right, tastes a lot better than it sounds.

Do you have any evidence that infants are especially sensitive to alcohol? True, they weigh less but they also eat less so they should consume about the same amount by bodyweight. The amount of alcohol left in typical food, after all the dilution from other ingredients tends to be less than 1%, not something that I would be especially worried about. One effective way of reducing the alcohol content is to cook it longer with just the wine. For example, if the recipe says to add a cup of wine and simmer for 5 minutes before adding a cup of stock, instead add a cup of wine and simmer until it's been reduced by 3/4 and then add a cup & a half of stock. If you reduce by 3/4, then the alcohol must be reduced by at least 3/4 since it is preferentially boiled off.

Roasted Red Pepper Sauce is one I make quite often when I want something red, thick and chunky but not tomato based. The base of the sauce consists of broiling some red peppers and then removing the skin, then finely dicing half and pureeing the other half in a blender. It's a flexible base which you can take a number of different directions. I almost always throw some basil in, it's great with pan seared chicken breast fanned on top, bacon works well in it, I've tried recently broiling some cherry tomatoes in the same pan while I wait for the peppers to cool and adding that into the sauce and that works wonders as well.

The correct unit of measurement should be the effective Watt (or BTU for imperial measurements) which is the stove output * efficiency. Not all the heat from your stove will go towards cooking your food so you can't simply use your stove rating. Gas burners are going to be less efficient than electric or induction. A simple way to measure this would be to put your desired pan on the burner and fill it with 1L of ~20C water and measure how long it takes to raise the temperature from 30C to 40C (starting at 30C ensures you don't need to take into account the initial heating of the pan). It requires ~42,000 J to raise 1L of water by 10C so divide that by the time to get the watt rating (eg: 42s = 1000W, 21s = 2000W). Multiply that number by 3.4 if you want the BTU.

Is there any other use for arborio rice other than risotto?