Shalmanese

I do. And on the note of protected species, shark fin & birds nest are also always prepared as soup.

A discussion on ortolans had me thinking, I've only ever seen one recipe for ortolan, the one where they drown them in brandy and then roast them and eat them under a hanker chief. What other ingredients are there where, 90+% of the time, they're only eaten in one type of preparation? And for those, do actual variation recipes exist? I would love to see alternative recipes for ortolan.

I'm normally not a big fan of crying out that Season X was better but this was a challenge I really wish had been in Season 6. *All* of the reinterpretations looked kind of boring and uninventive to me. I would have loved to have seen what Jen, Kevin or the V brothers would have done in a challenge like this.

On pg 94: "So if you’re using 75 grams of egg yolks to make the recipe, you need 35 grams of vinegar, because 75 grams times 47% equals 35. But say you only have 65 grams of egg yolks. How much butter should you use? This is where the scaling percentage really simplifies things. Just multiply the same 47% for vinegar times the actual weight of egg yolks available—65 grams—to get the answer: 30.5 grams of vinegar" I'm pretty sure that should say vinegar, not butter.

Can I ask how you're currently indexing the books? OCR? Crowdsourced labor? In house teams? A combination of the above?

Thick for roasting, thin for stirfrying & sauteeing.

Having a backup source of heat to make up for inadequate stoves can be a huge help. Either one of those sunbeam electric skillets or a portable induction hob would be nice.

I once heard that grated zucchini lightens up meatballs and, once I tried it, I've never gone back. You can't pick out the flavor in the finished meatball but it lends an ethereal, cloud like lightness to it.

Most kitchen utensils, you need just one of. Peelers, can openers, graters etc. Having two might be nice but it's not exactly going to rock your world. There are other utensils where, once you get a second one, it actually changes how you cook. For me, a short list would include: Thermometers - It's nice to have multiple probe thermometers so you can measure the progress of two different things at once. Also useful for deep frying if you want to keep tabs on both the oil & food temperature. Tongs - Having two tongs allows you to lift hot objects out of a pot. Especially useful if you're steaming something on a plate. Grinders - One for spice, the other for coffee Blender bowls - Useful if you're making multiple sauces/salsas What else would you suggest?

It's interesting, having seen the original Australian show, how similar many of the tactics were on this one (series of crap dishes followed by the judge going back and shouting at the participants, one participant being sent home to cook a different dish in their home kitchen).Someone should make a youtube clip that shows those scenes side by side.

Risotto

This seems like a pretty obvious missing niche in the market. While I have no problem butterflying my own chicken, many people are daunted by the process and pre-butterflied chickens would open up a range of new recipes to them.

Untreated, Botulism has a mortality rate of 40 - 50% but, from your own cite, proper treatment reduces that to 5 - 10%. Still, even taking the most dire numbers you can throw out, you are about as likely to die of botulism from duck confit as you are driving to the store to buy the duck (assuming your store is 1.25 miles away)*. * median of 110 cases of botulism per year with 25% being food related. 50% mortality rate means roughly 13 deaths from food related botulism per year, assume 350M population of the US means you have a 3.7 per 100M chance of dying of botulism. Driving Fatalities are ~ 1.5 per 100M miles, thus, it's the equivalent of driving 2.5 miles. cites on request

Passionfruit juice concentrate at a mexican grocer. I don't really know what to do with it yet but it's an intriguing ingredient.

To put things into perspective, there are roughly 30 cases of food-borne botulism reported in the US every year with about a 10% fatality rate. This means you're more than 20 times more likely to die from being struck by lightning than from a bad batch of confit. If you're really paranoid, store your confit in an air tight container so you can detect offgassing and don't feed confit to babies.

The real problem is seafood is still predominantly a wild food and this is not going to be sustainable for much longer. Look at the American diet 200 years ago as far as meat goes. It was vastly more diverse including everything from turtle to bear to pigeon. Now, we have the "Big 3" of meats, chicken, beef & pork with everything else pretty much being a rounding error. Someone in Moonen's place could have made a similar argument back then and it has been tragic the species that were brought to the brink of extinction due to overhunting. However, looking at it in hindsight, it's often hard for people in the current age to imagine what the big deal was back then.

Simon Johnson: http://www.simonjohnson.com.au/store/default.aspx for all of your ridiculously overpriced but esoterically essential foodstuffs.

You could normalize for this by cooking the same weight using both methods and then pureeing them and adding water to make up the difference in the roasted version.

How many drinks do you and your girlfriend have in a night? 10? 20? I just don't see how squeezing fresh juice for 4 or maybe even 6 cocktails is that much of a pain. It's sorta like saying that cracking an egg every time you want an omelet, scrambled eggs or a fried egg sandwich is a pain. Getting sticky juice everywhere and cleaning out the juicer is mildly annoying. Also, variation in juiciness often means I'm left with 3/4 of a lime.

I haven't owned a pairing knife or other small blade for about 5 years now and I don't really find myself missing it. Is it really an essential knife in the chef's arsenal? What do you really do with one? I haven't ever fluted a mushroom in my life and that's about the only thing which it seems like a pairing knife is completely necessary.

Approximately forever.

It is my understanding that koshered poultry is salted, not brined. That is, a surface coating of dry salt is used to draw out moisture rather than an immersion in liquid salt water which adds moisture. Is that not how it's done now?

It was interesting to me how this proves that raw speed at prep turned out to be such a good predictor of cooking ability. Greatness at cooking is not all about wild bursts of creativity. It's about hammering in the basics so hard that you become a ridiculously efficient ninja at them.

10 for $1 at my local mexican grocer in the Mission, SF.

I've never tried the can, although I did have one of the "vertical roasters" at one point. As I recall, it did result in good skin. With the can, is the beer supposed to flavor the chicken, or is the point just to have the chicken sitting upright? The can is mostly to keep the chicken upright and also to form the base of a gravy. I've tried with all sorts of flavored liquids but I can barely distinguish the difference between them. This is mostly because the can barely even begins to boil until the chicken is nearly done. I've tried pre-boiling the liquid before it goes in the can and that did help but it became logistically tricky. So far, apple juice seems to have been the most successful as far as gravy quality goes.