Shalmanese

After looking at a bunch of recipes, I'm deciding to go with a version that's even more involved than Keller's if you can believe it. I'm using beef short ribs & I reduced the wine down into a syrup with the aromatics except at that point, I threw in only the browned beef bones into the braising liquid and topped it off with beef stock. This has been on the stove for 3 hours now. The next step is to strain out everything, brown the rib meat and then have the rib meat braise in the enriched stock at 70C overnight. From there, I'll rejoin Keller's recipe except to use glazed onions & carrots rather than just boiled. I'll report back in 2 days with how it all turns out.

Snorlax, that is just too adorable!

Here's an excellent use for a dozen eggs: Egg yolk only homemade pasta with saffron, lemon zest & basil leaves sandwiched into the pasta. A drizzle of olive oil, sea salt, pepper & Goat Cheese sprinkled on top. Angel Food Cake with Peach Brown Sugar Ice Cream

At a talk that nathanm presented at UW, he mentioned a curious device called a steam griddle which I've never heard of before. They sound curiously effective. They claim a response rate of 2 or 3 seconds so you can put cold food on it and it will almost immediately come up to temp. Additionally, they seem to provide completely even heat. Has anyone had experience with one? What are the pros & cons?

Interestingly enough, the average income of a bon apetite subscriber was higher than a gourmet subscriber. 88K vs 81K.

Was wolfgang puck the first to lead the fine dining revolution to Las Vegas? Surely that deserves to be on the list.

There are times when you'll make a recipe for the first time and tastes fantastic but every subsequent attempt to capture the magic of that first time turns out something pedestrian. Not bad by any stretch, but just missing that magic zing. Despite many futile attempts at tweaking the recipe, somehow the magic combination is gone. I have two recipes that fall into this category. The first is the Bang Bang Noodle recipe from The Cooks Book. The first time I made it, I was pretty much eyeballing it and making a bunch of substitutions willy nilly. When I tasted it, it was the best noodle dish I had ever tasted. Every other attempt since then has been servicable but I can never remember exactly what I did to make that first time taste so special. The second dish is an accidental fish soup. I was poaching some cod filets and threw a bunch of stuff into the poaching liquid. I know I had corn on the cob, lemongrass, limes, probably fish sauce but I can't remember what else. It wasn't until later that night when my roommate commented on how delicious the soup I left on the stove was that it occurred to me to taste the left over poaching broth. The random assortment of goods I had thrown in without any measurement had managed to morph into an amazing soup. Because I had no idea what or how much of anything I had thrown in, I still, to this day, have not managed to replicate that soup. What are your stories of dishes that you've never been able to recreate?

It seems like there are certain mandatory scenes that appear in any food travel show about a particular city. For example, no show about Tokyo would be complete without a scene from Tsukiji fish market. And every scene follows the same rough script: The host appears bleary eyed and announces that it's 4 o'clock in the morning, we get to see some chunks of big, seriously expensive tuna being carted off somewhere, there's a quick montage of all the exotic seafood for sale, a shot of the host walking in a discussion about the importance of quality in Japanese cuisine and to cap it off, a shared meal with the fishermen at one of the mom & pop diners lining the market. edit: There is a comment about how the market smells clean and not at all like fish. What are some other tropes you've noticed in food travel tv?

"Excellent sir. Lobster stuffed with tacos"

This thread is prompting me to ask, what is the state of fine dining in Asia? In the US or Europe, if someone wanted to find the "best meal" in any given city, the consensus is usually pretty clear & easy to find. In addition, if you wanted to find the "best X meal" (seafood, japanese, farm-to-table, vegetarian etc.), this would also be relatively easy to ascertain and largely uncontroversial. However, I don't have any idea whether this is even remotely similar in Asia. I read in jayrayner's latest book that, in Japan, the very best restaurants are secret affairs that require an introduction to even get in the door and you have to be found worthy of eating there. Such restaurants tend to seat only a dozen or so people and are run by a single chef. Conversely, I've taken several trips to China with my family and we ate very, very well as we always had local friends who helped arrange everything. The "finest" dining experiences we had were always in private dining rooms of massive restaurant palaces that served 20 - 30 impeccably tasting courses. Is there a level of fine dining above this or is this the fine dining paradigm in China?

Mmm... I have a quart of lovely lamb stock in the freezer so I'm looking forward to this one. One thing that was great about living in Australia was all the different cuts of lamb you could buy. My preference is for either neck or shoulder but in Seattle, the only things I can get reliably are leg of lamb, blade steaks & shanks. Shanks are excellent for braising whole but I don't really consider that a stew as it's not diced up into pieces. Blade steaks are decently succulent but they're cut too thin to get large meaty chunks. Legs tend to be too lean and devoid of connective tissue to make a truly unctuous stew. The best compromise I've found is to buy a whole leg of lamb, carve out most of the large muscles & use them for kebabs or other fast cooking techniques and then use the trim for lamb stew. edit: The quart of lamb stock in my freezer comes from the fat trimmed off the last leg of lamb which I cooked using the crackling stock method. From that previous leg, I made a dozen kebabs, 1 gallon of lamb red curry & 1 cup of lamb demi-glace.

Also, I know we've had this discussion before but the standard 3:1 or 4:1 oil:vinegar ratios recommended by most cookbooks taste ridiculously oily to me. I always make my dressings at a 1:1 or 1:1.5 ratio which seem far more in balance.

A lot of asian and especially chinese salads involve no oil. They're used to dress sturdier vegetables though like cabbage, carrot, bean sprout, tofu & noodles. I think as you move away from leaf salads, the options for no-fat dressings increase.

I grate both ginger & galangal straight from frozen. I rarely ever use the fresh version anymore as grating from frozen is far more convenient.

I want to put another plug in for crackling stock which is an amazingly efficient way of using left over fat trimmings to produce a rich, brown stock.

popcorn

No ceviches but both Ashley & Jen made scallop crudos.

Poach the chicken until tender, let cool on the counter. Score the skin in large, rectangular shapes and then put in the fridge uncovered, skin side up for 24 hours or until the skin looks slightly leathery. Sear in a hot pan, skin side down for 3 - 4 minutes, flip over to the other side and cook until warmed through. Rest, cut along your score lines and serve each diner a small piece of perfectly cooked chicken.

Was making tzatziki today which involved draining both yogurt & salted cucumber. I combined the yogurt whey & the cucumber juice with just a few drops of lemon juice for an insanely refreshing drink. Now that I've found a good use for the whey, I think I'm going to be draining all my yogurt from now on. PS: No need for fancy cheesecloths, a doubled over paper towel inside a sieve works perfectly.

Also, salted black beans work unreasonably well with shellfish. Clams, Oysters, Cockles & the like. It's very common to see this preparation in Chinese restaurants.

Delancey's does reservations for 6 or more so if you can rope in another person, you can score a res and come when you may.

I thought there was some big to do about the CIA books not using weight measures, or maybe that was the previous version? My copy of Bo Frieberg's The Professional Pastry Chef uses weights also.

There are two techniques I use to juice poms depending on the yield to effort ratio: The fastest way I've found is to just cut them in half and squeeze them by hand as you would a lemon, I get reasonable yields very quickly. The slower way is a way I learned on egullet where you cut them in half and then bang on them with a wooden spoon over a bowl of water. The seeds fall out and everything else stays in the fruit. From there, I give it a could of quick blends in the blender and then mash the mixture through a sieve.

Back to the grenadine topic, I've been wondering whether putting a shallow plate of pomegranate juice in the fridge overnight might be an effective way to make grenadine without sugar or boiling. It would be much more intense that normal grenadine & hopefully have a purer flavor. When fresh pomegranates come into season, I'm going to try it. edit: I have a mini fridge which I use for beer & ice only so I don't have to worry about flavor contamination.

Has nobody really said a thing about Delancey's yet? I went there with a bunch of friends last weekend. Ordered every pizza on the menu. Definitely quite a few steps up from any other pizza joint in Seattle & even the resident New Yorker approved.