Shalmanese

If you buy wet-aged, cryovaced meat or if you freeze your own meat & defrost it, you're often left with a pool of raw, red meat juice. Almost everyone I know throws this stuff away and I've never read a single cookbook that talks about it in any way. But this is ridiculous! That meat juice is liquid fond and it should be cherished. The main problem is that liquid fond almost instantly coagulates into a rubbery mass and becomes difficult to work with. Over the years, I've tried a couple of different techniques to effectively utilize it. One technique that works decently if I'm doing a stew or something is to toss onions with it just before they're about to hit the pan. The juice coats the onions and browns into a rich, meaty undertone. Another that requires a bit of patience is to pour it into a pan with some hot oil and then don't touch it until all the water has evaporated and it's starting to brown and stick to the bottom of the pan and to then deglaze the pan. If you even prod it a little bit with a spatula, the entire thing clumps into a ball and becomes unworkable. A 3rd way of using it if you have a lot (I can usually get a cup or so from a leg of lamb) is to simply heat it at a high boil for 20 minutes and then strain it for a rich, meaty stock. This is great if you want to boost the volume of gravy for a roast. But I'd love to hear if anyone else is utilizing this ingredient and if there are superior techniques for working that flavor into foods.

Why not just make ice from boiled water?

This is the home screen of your iPhone. (from here)

You guys are forgetting something even if the potato thing were true chemically. Let's say you have a liter of water that's salted at 4% and you want to bring it down to 3%. That means you need to remove 10g of salt. Assuming there's no magic process that can make potatoes more salty than the ambient water, for potatoes to be at a 3% saltiness with 10 grams of salt would require 333 grams of potatoes. In other words, One or two slices aint gonna cut it. You would have to add 1/3rd your quantity of soup in potatoes to fix a mild oversalting. If the effect exists, however it's occurring, it's not because the potatoes are sucking in salt in prodigious quantities. Perhaps the starch is making it taste apparently less salty, perhaps it's a pure placebo effect. But the math doesn't work out for it to be removing the actual salt ions.

I also thought pots de creme tends to be leaner, made with whole milk or half & half compared to the heavy cream of creme brulee.

Wha? Soup that is perfectly seasoned when warm tastes oversalted when eaten at fridge temperature. Heating it back up returns it to being correctly seasoned. Am I the only one this happens to?

One thing that's always puzzled me about cookbooks is that they regard "brown" as one single unifying phenomena and reduce it down to a single instruction of "brown the meat and then...". But browning is a non-trivial thing to do and slight variances in technique lead to very different types of browning. Yet, I've never seen a discussion on the intricacies of browning anywhere. Depending on whether you have fresh meat vs previously frozen, washed vs unwashed, beef vs pork vs chicken vs lamb, pre-salted vs salt just before cooking vs unsalted vs brined, unmarinaded vs non-sugar marinade vs sugar based marinade, cooked dry vs cooked in oil vs cooked in butter, high temp vs low temp, pan seared vs broiled vs grilled vs roasted. Each of these results in a distinct browning pattern. Fresh, unwashed, just salted meat seems like the gold standard for TV cooking. It develops a brown, slightly splotchy, non crusty exterior. Pre-salting it an hour or so before cooking draws out more protein and leads to a more even exterior. Meat which has been frozen, washed, brined or otherwise had the outside layer of protein juice washed away stays grey for much longer and eventually browns by the outside layers dehydrating and crusting over. Meat cooked in butter develops a richly dark brown, even all over crusty surface. Non-sugar based marinades both wash off the exterior protein layer and also add in more funky reactions. Sugar based marinades will carbonize in too high a heat and lead to patches of black areas. Roasting meats at a low temperature for a long time leads to a leathery, brown crust which is different from roasting at a high temperature for less time which leads to a thin brown crust. Broiling or Grilling, especially something with skin tends to lead to small circles of black with the brown. To get optimal browning requires a consideration of all of these characteristics and how well they integrate into the recipe you're making. Until I started paying attention to all of these variables, it was a struggle to produce dishes that had good browning on them and I'm still struggling to master the art. It would be good to have some guidance over the different types of browning and how they fit into good cooking.

There's one still left on 15th st, up around 70th.

That's what I thought. Why would companies oversalt a product if they could just optimally salt it. It's not rocket science.

You keep hearing stories about certain canned foods have ungodly amounts of sodium in them and how they should be avoided in favor of more healthy alternatives but this doesn't really make sense for me. The sodium in food primarily comes from salt. If I add "excess sodium" to a dish, it doesn't taste better, it just tastes oversalted. Even with a tweaking of all the other flavor components, it doesn't really rein in the oversalting, just pushes the other tastes higher as well. In my experience, food has an optimum salting quantity & there's not much range on either side. How is it that prepared foods can be that much more high sodium than their home made equivalents?

Oops. Savour specialty foods. 2242 NW Market St.

I happened to be walking by Savour in Ballard on it's opening day and decided to check it out. They've definitely managed to stock quite a few eclectic food items. I picked up a case of Q tonic water which I hadn't seen elsewhere and there was a bottle of muscat vinegar that looked interesting but was unfortunately, unpriced at that point. The owners are actively looking for things to stock so if you have an idea for an interesting & unique food product, they're open to looking for it. I think Ballard is definitely taking it's place as a foodie heaven in Seattle with Trader Joes, Ballard Market, Savour & that baking store I always forget the name of all within a few blocks of each other. Not to mention restaurant row & bars galore.

Whole foods, De Laurenti's, Market spice, World spice, Big John's PFI, Savour in Ballard. edit: Also consider looking online. Saltworks has free shipping until the end of the year. I was looking for some Maldon sea salt and it was $6.50 at saltworks compared to $12+ at De Laurenti's.

eh

Are you open to doing any sort of molecular gastronomy? You can make flavoured "sand" using tapioca maltodextrin. At this point, I think you have too many soft, stewey textures together. Can you make the england/scotland/morroco course something else? Maybe a tiny morsel of perfectly fried fish on some fat cut fries?

I don't buy your premise. A quick Google search reveals 6000 hits for "Thomas Keller" vs 600 hits for "Chef Keller 9000 hits for "Grant Achatz" vs 1200 hits for "Chef Achatz

I would switch to cambro instantly if they made any square containers smaller than 2 qt.

One of my new rules is I refuse to deal with graduated sets of anything anymore. Other people might be organized enough to keep them in their perfect russian doll order at all times but I can't. The flimsy glad containers are great from a shape perspective but I can't get over how cheap they feel to me when I'm handling them.

Beth's is exactly the same as how you left it.

The downside of a 5% brine is you have to be diligent about timing. Put it in too long and it will be too salty, not long enough and it will taste bland. With a 3% brine, you can leave it in for a week and then cook it and it will turn out perfectly seasoned.

How much room do you have in your kitchen & how often do you plan on cooking asian food? Asian cooking seems to demand a disproportionately large amount of pantry space as it relies so heavily on the dried, fermented & preserved. I estimate I cook maybe 10/1 non-asian to asian but my pantry is evenly divided between asian ingredients & everything else.

I want to make a gingerbread creme brulee tomorrow for a party. I've infused the cream with the dominant spice flavors of gingerbread but it doesn't pop like I want it to so I want to add in some of the toasted breadiness as well but without affecting the texture of the cream. What would be the best way to add "bread" flavor to cream without having starch leech out? Would the same principle apply for other starch/liquid infusions?

I don't know. I don't think I could ever wax as lyrically about any of these foods as I could about lobster or a really fine piece of otoro.

If they genuinely can't cook, then they're not going to get far post Top Chef but they weren't going to get far anyway. If they're good cooks, then they can plausible say that top chef style cooking is not a good indicator of how well they would do in a restaurant and back that up by solid cooking post Top Chef. I think the ones worst off by this were the ones who had genuinely odious personalities (or were portrayed that way). That's something a potential business partner is going to take more credence of as opposed to failing to cook an 8 course meal for 400 while balanced atop a moving train with 3 dozen pidgeon eggs & a capuchin monkey.

Serious eats ran a fascinating series of experiments on the effect of salting on burger texture. Their conclusion was that salting only the surface of the meat led to a loose, crumbly texture while salting before grinding lead to more of a sausage texture.