Shalmanese

I'm surprised in all of this, nobody mentions "beer can chicken", in which you roast the chicken upright using a can & 2 legs to form a tripod. This method produces legs & breasts cooked to the desired doneness and uniformly crispy skin without any need to rotate.

I make my chicken stock by boiling with just bones to begin with. Then, after straining and defatting, I throw in a fine dice of vegetable and cook it at a rolling boil for ~ 1 hour or until it's reduced by 3x before straining again. That way, you get the freshness of the vegetable flavor as well as a super concentrated stock suitable for freezing.

Next time, halve your salt level to a 3% brine. That way, you can brine them near indefinitely (or until they start rotting at least).

A Gyuto is a western style knife so you use pretty much exactly the same techniques.

In a perfectly insulated vessel, no matter how small a flame you have, water will eventually boil. The steady state temperature is achieved when the rate of heat loss from the pot equals the rate of heat input. I have a hunch that the pan you're using is too good. It's not being inefficient enough to cool down the water. Try getting the cheapest, paper thin stainless steel pan you own, fill it close to the top, leave it uncovered and try the same experiment. See if that's better.

Building on that, is it possible to make spring onion confit?

Cassoulet Lasagna from scratch Prepping fresh fava beans Pho

We ended up going to Keystone Restaurant Supply

I've never been able to make any kind of juice that's anywhere near as economical as store bought, not-from-concentrate.

Yes, I'm curious as well. How did the dinner go?

the 5F is just a handy rule of thumb. What I meant was that time based metrics for resting were just as illogical as time based metrics for roasting. Meat is rested once the core reaches a peak temperature. Waiting for it to go down at least 5F means a) You can be certain it really did reach the peak b) any error that might have come about from placing the probe not exactly in the core.

I rest until it drops 2C/5F from it's peak temperature. Anything else is an illogical rule of thumb. We have thermometers people, lets use them correctly.

I don't like lamb fat, mainly because of it's high melting point which makes it taste waxy in anything but piping hot food. Lamb cracklings, on the other hand, are food of the gods. I love them with salt, cumin & szechuan peppercorn. Render out the fat, strain out the bits, dust the bits with the spice mixture and scarf while still warm.

Congrats Janet! You deserved it!

Pretty much everything that's not obviously not food safe is effectively food safe at this point. Enough people have stored food in rubbermaid containers that, if they were dangerous, enough people would have died already to have caused a massive uproar and recall.

A friend of mine asked me to outfit their entire kitchen for them so I'm looking for a good cookware store where I can just run through and pick up everything they need for reasonable prices. They live in Sunnyvale so the closer to that, the better. But anything from between Palo Alto to San Jose would be OK.

One trick I like to use to get even more color & flavor our of the saffron is, after grinding, to mix it with 1 oz of vodka, heat it in the microwave until boiling & then let it steep for 1/2 an hour. The alcohol in the vodka helps pull out even more of flavor.

The reason for wanting to do this is to stretch myself. I don't want to get to the end of school and be in exactly the same place as the other students. I am a lot older than the typical 17/18 yr old school leaver so this is a do or die career move for me. Look, I understand this desire, I really do. But I'm here to tell you that this is not the right way to do it. There are other ways to distinguish yourself: sophisticated balancing of flavors, proper cooking times & temps, correct seasoning, showcasing ingredients etc. Unless you have these down, people won't even care what sorts of weird and wacky menus you've dreamt up. I don't know if you've ever watched top chef but, even with chefs of that calibre, they're still regularly dinged for improper seasoning even thought it seems like the most basic of things.

Sorry, I rubbed red curry paste on all the meat sides of the pork and left the fat side clean, with a towel on top to dry it. Before searing, I scraped off the curry paste and used it in a satay sauce. The roast was a huge success, the fat cap on the original loin was ~1/2 an inch thick and, at the end of the cooking, it was probably only 1/6th of an inch. I think the pressing was a huge help and something I intend on exploring more.

I'll be staying in Palo Alto for the next two weeks and I'm wondering if there's been any updates since the last time this thread was posted. I don't have a car so, ideally, it would be places in downtown palo alto, within a mile of the caltrain station.

The Man who Ate the World by Jay Rayner (Food Critic for the Observer, Top Chef Masters Judge) is a story about his quest to travel the world to find "the perfect meal". Much more about fancy restaurants than street food but a gripping read nonetheless.

Jamie's goal was and always has been to reform the eating habits of the entire town. He started from the schools and now he's moving to the broader community.

Cooking Issues did a segment on turkey and concluded that, even using sous vide, turkey got worse the longer it was cooked past ~1 hour.

Every time I have leftover roasted lamb, I do a southwestern lamb fried rice. Render the fat from the lamb, spring onions, jalapenos, cooked & cooled rice, cumin, ancho chilli, corn, avocado, lime and then toss the lamb in at the last minute and let it warm up from the residual heat.

It seems like a way too protein heavy menu to me. The only carbs I see are the risotto & toast. There also seems to be very scant vegetables. As far as flavor goes, it's jumping all over the map. Individually, each course might be good but it's hard to see how it all ties together. The shift from curry to licorice flavors, to me, seems especially dissonant and I don't think I would enjoy that leap. There's also a lot of clashing styles on the menu. Half the stuff on there seems to be re-interpreted comfort food and the other half seems to be clean, modern flavors. I think if I ate that menu, if you could pull it off technically, I would have a pleasant meal but it's hard to imagine that I would be wowed by it. You mentioned that you're a second year culinary student. I would say you need to pare back and simplify. There's a lot of good ideas in your menu but the problem is that there may be too many good ideas and each one is fighting to stand out.