Shalmanese

If it's lamb, you could make a White Bean & Mint puree with lots of garlic and olive oil. The good thing is you can serve it warm or cold and both are delicious. Either soak and cook some white beans or just use well washed canned ones.

One thing I've never seen mentioned about probe thermometers is that often the probe acts as an excellent conductor and will heat up the meat immediately adjacent to it and give spurious readings. I got sick of seeing underdone meat so my new procedure is to now stick a thermometer 3/4 of the way to the centre of the meat, wait until it comes to temp and then push it in a further 1/4 of the way and watch the reading drop a good 10F and let it come up to temp again.

Jesus, people are way too paranoid about food safety these days. There's 2 risks you need to watch out for: Bad microbes in the food and toxic byproducts from said microbes. Now the crockpot is going to bring everything up to 165F so you don't need to worry about any microbes still surviving the cooking process, all you need to worry about is that any extant microbes won't reproduce enough to leave toxic byproducts. And it's hard to see how they could in such a short span of time unless you smear raw chicken juice over everything in the morning. Think about it this way, you cook a batch of soup and serve the entire family. Do you immediately split the soup into serving size containers and chill before you even start eating? no, you let it linger in the pot for 3, 4, 6 hours, maybe even overnight. And it's not just you, billions of people around the world do this and have been doing this for thousands of years. If you want to be double super certain, then you're best bet is to try and minimize any initial microbial colonies so here's what you should do: Finish at least the last half hour of cooking the gumbo in the crockpot and do not remove the lid. You've now created a sterile environment. Tape the lid shut firmly against the pot and stash the entire crockpot in the fridge overnight. Heat up the thing the next day and only untape the lid half an hour before serving to check seasonings etc. By doing this, you've minimised any microbial contamination and I guarentee you're food will be completely safe.

Beans in the Chili and sugar in the corn muffins... oh my.

Every fresh made french fry I've ever made is so different from frozen that it's hard to compare the two. I've had fries from places where it's immediately obvious that they were cut and cooked by hand and its a completely different taste.

I think it was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Cite that Japan is hunting endangered whales? As far as I know, the only whale they hunt is the minke which is currently not listed as endangered.

I've heard you have to use hot stock/cold roux, cold stock/hot roux, hot stock/hot roux and cold stock/cold roux and it can end up amounting to a holy war in some circles. Onion skins is a classic stock technique for adding colour without flavour.

So can University Seafood

Theres no market for one yet .

Amazon was selling the Salton yogurt makers for $10 so I figured why not. I've made yogurt once before but something about my OCD nature combined with a digital probe thermometer makes the entire exercise more bother than it's worth. The Salton has the benifit that I can just plunk the damn thing on the counter and forget about it. So far, I'm on my 3rd batch. First one was whole fat organic milk, 1/4 cup of milk powder and Mountain High yogurt as a starter, brought up to 185, kept for 5 minutes, cooled to 100 and in the yogurt maker for 7 hours. Second time, I tried normal grocery store milk, same process and kept for 12 hours. Side by side tasting of the 7 hour organic and 7 hour conventional revealed some more sublte and nuanced flavours in the organic but it was pretty much obliterated by the tang of the yogurt so I'm going to stick to conventional milk. Third time was conventional milk, brought up to 100F and dumped straight into the yogurt maker for 10 hours. I think about 10 hours is the sweet spot for me, just enough tang to make it interesting without overwhelming the toppings. My next trial is to just dump milk straight from the fridge into the maker and let it run an extra 2 hours or so to compensate. It would be great if it could be made truly that easy. Oddly enough, I got the gummy texture problem on my first and 3rd batches but not my second. I can't think of any particular factor that would explain that but I don't mind. It's kinda interesting how it feels in your mouth as there's a slight chewiness there. Kind of like the texture of wheat gluten, only not as extreme. So far, I've been going through about half a quart a day, largely thanks to some excellent jam I've been making at the same time. Also next on the agenda is some dried rose petals and rose water and honey mixed in with the yogurt while it sets to see what happens. Does anyone know how many generations a starter can last? The salton manual said 4 or 5 but I've heard reports that the starter only gets better with age. Also, the yogurt maker seems like a great place to keep a sourdough starter and since I have a 6qt pot now, I can finally make the no-knead bread. Best damn $10 I ever spent. edit: Alton puts the honey in with the yogurt but every recipe I've seen here adds sweetener afterwards. Is there any harm in flavouring the yogurt while it's fermenting? What if I were to mix some jam or vanilla in at the start?

Is there any particular reason you have an aversion to plastic? I have a braun model I got from amazon. The base is metal but the walls are plastic. So don't get braun if you want all metal I guess.

fish stock is so damn easy to make I don't know why you would use veal stock on fish. Stock is one of those things you think would actually be better bought than made. Professionals have the advantage of better technique, consistent quality, larger batches and a ready supply of bones. There seems to be nothing to stop them from making a stock far superior to a home cook except maybe pricing concerns. Maybe when the original eGCI article was written, the commercial stock market (heh) was pretty dire with only Swansons et al. but both Trader Joes and Whole Foods sell a perfectly acceptable, organic, low sodium stock suitable for everyday use as well as gourmet no sodium frozen stocks and demi-glaces which seem pretty high quality to me. If you want to go even better, there are dedicated restaurant supply websites which sell stock catering to the high end restaurant trade. The only stock I make nowadays is crackling stock which is so streamlined it's suitable for small batch, a la minute cooking. You can make the entire stock in the time it takes for a chicken to roast and have it ready for the gravy or you could save up scraps and scale it up as far as you want.

If you weren't a foreigner I would take your statement as an insult.But often people pay Japanese prices most of them Aussies who like to show off ← I too would like to know what you found so insulting about that comment.

Your best bet is probably still the suppliers listed in this thread. Everything I've read suggests the easiest way is still just to just grow your own.

Are you talking about the duck press they use at La Tour d'Argent?

The difference is in the heat transfer. With dry frying, you're applying intense heat to a relatively small area of the food and relying on constant stirring for heat distribution. In fact, dry frying is probably closer to blowtorching than anything else.

I dry fry green beans all the time. It takes about 20 minutes to get them really soft with brown bits on them but then I hit them with a combo of thinly sliced garlic and balsamic vinegar for balsamic glazed green beans. One thing you have to watch out for in dry frying is that there's very little contact between the food and the pan so there's very little thermal transfer and it's very easy to overheat the pan. This is especially bad if you're using teflon or other non-stick pans and requires quite a bit of finesse with the heat to do properly. I've found a good technique is to flick a couple of drops of water into the pan ever minute or so. You want the water to make a particular sound as it's evaporating. If it's too quick, take your pan off the heat, if it sits there, you need more heat.

When making curries or stews, I let it sit for about an hour on a VERY low simmer without stirring it so the fat rises to the top and can be skimmed off. I used to stir every 15 minutes or so and the fat would always stay emulsified and be eaten. Now, I often am skimming away as much as a cup of fat with little noticable effect on the flavour. Interestingly enough, it seems like adding more fat at the beginning encourages the soup to "break" and the fat to rise. More fat at the start encourages better browning and more even cooking as well so it's a double bonus.

Apart from ICA, is that the last professional chef left on Food Network?

I got one of these as well, should be arriving soon.

I almost always forget to add my shot of fresh herbs at the end when I'm doing asian cooking. It's only when I start washing up that I notice the little pile of prechopped cilantro/spring onion/mint lying forlornly on the chopping board.

What are people's opinions of the waring cloverleaf design compared to the round design? It's almost impossible to figure out from their website what the differences between blenders is but my old landlord had a round waring with a removable bottom and I just bought a cloverleaf model (50th anniversary). So far, I haven't put it through it's paces yet but I like how it's much easier to scoop out the sides with a spoon.

True, the zeal for turkey leftover recipes in the food press is overblown but that doesn't mean it's illegitimate to want to do something creative with turkey leftovers. Simply treat them as you would any other leftover food. One of the best soups I have ever made was an adaptation of the Thai Chicken Soup from The Cooks Book using leftover turkey. There's plenty of leftover recipes that take advantage of the natural cooked state of turkey. Turkey pot pie, Turkey fried rice, Turkey wraps, Curried Turkey Salad etc.

I've always been taught to score the flesh of the fish so a) seasoning penetrates deeper into the meat. b) the fish cools faster and more evenly.