Shalmanese

Another experiment, this time with a pork loin roast. I brined the roast, then poked holes in the fat cap, rubbed it with red curry paste and pressed some paper towels over the fat side to try and draw out some of the moisture. When it came to cooking, I started it off in a cold pan with another, weighted pan on top of the roast, pressing it down. The roast is still in the oven but I think this is one of my more successful attempts. The holes vs scoring gave the top of the roast a more attractive appearance. The weight pressing seems to have helped render significantly more fat out. I'll wait until the roast is out of the oven to give a final verdict.

Thank you kalypso! That was absolutely the most enlightening post I've read on this whole thing and clears up a ton of unanswered questions.

I don't get it. Why couldn't Jaime have had an optional salad like the burger crew?

A new technique I've discovered: Slice about 1 lb of mushrooms and add it to the pot with half a bottle of red wine, some salt & pepper. Let it come to a boil and then reduce down, add 2 tbsp of oil/butter just before the wine is dried, cook until the pan is completely dry and then continue frying for a couple of minutes. These mushrooms absorb the entire concentrated flavor of the red wine and, when you bite into them, it's a burst of amazingly concentrated red wine flavor. It's like nothing else I've ever eaten before, the experience is so strange I'm not even sure if it's good or not. All I know is that it's intense and it's something you definitely should try out if you have some leftover wine from the night before.

To be fair, it's the first ingredient on this list that counts for the most. Sure, many of the following ingredients may have scary names but they're present in largely trace amounts in the food and are often unfairly demonized. People have the mistaken assumption that "from scratch" = healthy but it's very easy to make something equally if not more unhealthy from scratch. The chicken nuggets were made from real, actual, white meat chicken, unlike the awful nuggets that Jamie faced in his British television show. He acknowledged this as a brief aside during his mechanically separated chicken demonstration but I thought it was slightly disingenuous as the disclaimer was easy to miss. That being said, I think the show is absolutely amazing and bringing an important focus on the problems with the food industry in a real visceral way. That it's on ABC is huge. The foodie elite have known about this issue since forever but all the Michael Pollan's of the world can't replace the visceral impact of what Jamie is doing on television. I wish him all the luck in the world!

Coconut cream does an admirable job in many circumstances if you're fine with adding an asian twist to it. A thin veloute does a good job of mimicking the texture of heavy cream in savory contexts. Egg whites sort of do the same job if you're using it as whipping cream in a dessert. You mentioned cow's milk, have you considered using a goat's milk cream? Ultimately, if you want the closest thing, you're probably going to be stuck with non-dairy creamer which is not abysmal but pretty close to it.

Exactly, cryovac in warm water is maybe 3 minutes slower than a microwave but you don't end up with icky cooked pieces of fish.

There's not much in saliva that's not in water and, of the stuff that is in saliva, none of them seem like good candidates for either a chemical reaction or a catalyst. Your best bet is either real carbonation or figuring out some way of keeping free water from the reactants until they hit your tongue.

Do them a la minute, 2 pans with 4 fillets each. Seriously, don't worry about timing, 5 minutes of cooking time is nothing and you want about that much time to get plates cleared and glasses refilled etc. Also, plates shouldn't be cleared until the last eater has finished eating so you can get a head start on the next course and wait for the lingerers to finally finish pushing the food around their plate.

If I could jump in on this, I'm in SF right now on business and I have one night free for dining for personal pleasure on this trip which is tomorrow night. I want it to be something memorable but not overly fancy or stuffy. I'm staying in Hayes Valley but I'll be coming back on the Caltrain so anything in SOMA would also be good. Any suggestions?

My family is from Dongbei and I grew up eating traditional Dongbei dishes. It's not a cuisine that receives much publicity. A short summary: Wheat rather than rice dominates, man tou are Chinese steamed buns and they're pretty popular. Quite a bit of overlap with Korean cuisine Chinese saurkraut is popular and many people have their own fermenting vats at home. Pickling is popular due to the long winters Pork is the most common meat, beef is reserved for muslims. Those are some charecteristics I can identify off the top of my head, I haven't been back to that region for about 5 years now.

Ugh, I would not buy one. I don't want a cookbook that's a bag of recipes, the reason why I buy cookbooks vs looking for recipes online is that I'm looking for a solid, consistent voice that will guide me in the right direction. Unless there's an editor out there who both has excellent taste and is willing to make hard choices and say no to people, all that's going to come out of it is a watered down, mediocre product. Unfortunately, I'm skeptical that you could find someone willing to play the politics necessary to offend people, especially for free.

I live about 10 minutes walk away from a supermarket but only 100 yards away from a greengrocer so my general strategy is to see what meat is on sale that week and structure the menu around that. I'll buy the meat and come home and portion it out, maybe start marinating some pieces of it etc. Then, when I need to cook it, I can usually cobble together something from inspiration.

Not only does the amalyse need to denature, you also need to heat it high enough for the starch granules to burst and thicken the creme. For corn starch, this happens at around 90 - 100C.

Alcohol hitting a cold glass should increase the viscosity so, yes, I'm guessing there would be more left from the rinse.

What are the ingredients in the marinade? I'm of the opinion that it should be fine. It's hard to really damage a meat with marinade unless there's something super aggressive in there (yogurt, lime juice, vinegar etc.)

my refurb waring blender is still going strong after 2 years.

Another tip is that, initially, the sauce will taste slightly harsh and one dimensional. As the beef cooks and the flavors marry, the sauce will become more rounded & nuanced. Experienced curry cookers can easily extrapolate what the finished product will taste like from the initial test but, if this is your first time, don't be alarmed that it's not as flavoured as you imagined and try and doctor it at the beginning.

While it's properties as a spice cannot be ignored, I think a large part of the puzzle can be ascribed to historical accident. Pepper went from something prized & highly sought after to something relatively inexpensive in a relatively short amount of time. As a result, it became the default spice to add a bit of downscale luxury to a dish for the middle class. This, I think is why the western palate has grown accustomed to pepper as a default flavor in food. Personally, I think that while pepper is great and I use it a lot, there are a number of other flavor pairings from around the world that I also frequently draw upon for the same role that pepper plays. Salt & Szechuan Peppercorn, Tabasco, Cayenne, Gremolata, Fish Sauce & Japanese Furikake are all things I've used to give a similar boost.

This is weird, acetic acid behaves as if it has a lower boiling point than water. The fumes start coming off at sub-boiling temperatures. I know when making balsamic reduction that a low heat reduction will make a sweeter product and a high heat reduction will make a more sour product which suggests that boiling is counterproductive. I would try and get your hands on some food grade, high percentage acetic acid and just rectify your solution rather than try and reduce it down.

There are two types of brines, ones which you brine to equilibrium and ones where you brine under equilibrium. A 3% salt solution allows you to keep meat in it indefinitely as the meat will never get more than 3% salt which is close to perfectly seasoned. Brines of 5% or more, while faster, require you to pull the meat after a certain point of the meat will become over salted. Oddly enough, most cookbook authors seems to prefer higher percentage brines even though they're markedly less user friendly. After 36 hours, here's a simple tip to figure out if your brine is ok: Take some of the brining liquid, boil it and then taste it. If it's nicely seasoned, your duck is fine. If it's unpleasantly salty, so will your duck. A possible solution to rescue the legs might be to do a traditional style confit as the oil will pull some of the salt out of the legs.

I've decided to buy myself an IR Thermometer as a new toy and, looking through Amazon, it seems like there's a range of price points & temperature ranges. What is the maximum practical temperature that one would need an IR Thermometer for?

If they're not bleached, do the red onions stain the cocktail? If so, is this a desirable or undesirable effect? One possible way of preserving the color may be to reuse the pickling liquid over a couple of batches, adding extra vinegar & salt to top up until the color stabilizes.

If you get a decent sized bunch of rosemary & tie the stems together at the end with kitchen twine, you can use that as a basting brush on the meat to infuse it with a subtle rosemary flavor without it being overwhelming. Near the end of the cooking, throw the brush on the fire. (this works great if you can find a rosemary bush growing somewhere near you).

While there's lots of love given to the french fry, I think the humble potato chip is the best deep fried potato dish for the home kitchen. Unlike the fry, potato chips can be done in a single fry that takes less than 5 minutes. And while it's hard to best restaurants & fast food chains who put a lot of pride into perfecting their french fry, a properly fried potato chip is easily miles ahead of the store bought version. However, while lots of sites will give you a single recipe for potato chips but it's hard to find any in depth discussion about them. Do you deep fry or oven fry or even microwave fry? Starchy, Waxy or All Purpose Potatoes? Mandoline or hand cut? Washed or unwashed? If you wash, how carefully do you dry? What oil temp do you prefer to fry at? How done do you like them? What do you like to season them with after they come out of the fryer? I've always preferred starchy potatoes, hand cut so there's some variation in the thickness of slices. I've not found any great benefit to washing and not washing makes the logistics of it so much easier. My technique for frying is somewhat unconventional. I'll heat the oil up to 375F in a pan on high heat and then deliberately overload the frying to bring the temp all the way down to around 250F or so. While constantly swirling the oil to make sure the slices don't stick together, I'll let the temp start slowly climbing while I start to cut the next batch of potatoes (this is where not washing helps). Once I start hearing the sizzle die down, I know that all the moisture has been cooked out of the potatoes and, if I timed it right, this happens just as the oil has climbed back up to 350F and just started the brown the edges of the chips. If you time it right, you can get this down to a repeatable process that significantly simplifies the frying process. While I enjoy the variation in textures of hand cut, homemade chips, I think my favorite texture chips are the ones which are crisp on the outside and just a tiny nugget of soft potato in the middle. That's something you'll never get with commercial chips. Seasoning is salt & pepper, ground fine in a spice grinder and then some sort of spice mix on top. Last night, we did plain, sumac, curry powder, cumin/ancho & soy/lemon (both powdered). One intriguing tip I've noticed researching potato chip recipes today was to brine the chips in vinegar for a few hours before frying for natural salt & vinegar chips.