Shalmanese

Looks good but some suggested pricing would be good. I have no idea where you're trying to position yourselves in the market. I'll make sure to say hi if I ever see you guys anywhere .

Wagyu Ribeye, twice cooked chips, aioli.

Am I the only one who does wedge cuts? Instead of cutting straight down, I cut towards the centre of the onion, like spokes on a wheel. Then I can get a uniform, fine dice without ever having to draw the knife towards me.

What is the other direction the grain runs in? as far as I can see, meat is a bundle of fibres and the grain is only in the direction of the fibres.

Duck fat is "free" if you're willing to do a bit of work. Buy 2 whole ducks, carve out the breasts and the legs render the trimmings and roast all the bones in the oven until well browned. You should get about a pint of duck fat from the trimmings and bones combined. You can then make a stock out of the bones and confit the legs with the rendered duck fat. Once you use up the confitted legs, you have a pint of wonderful, aromatic duck fat to use for cooking. Due to the economics of the situation, 2 whole ducks actually end up costing less than 4 duck breasts and with just a couple of hours of work, you not only get the 4 breasts, you get 4 confit legs, a pint of duck fat, a wonderful duck noodle soup from the broth and a duck gizzard & crackling salad.

Governor Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, in an attempt to raise awareness of the recently proposed bill in congress to alter the eligibility requirements for food stamps, recently spent a week living on a budget of exactly $21 per person for food to see what it was like to live on food stamps. You can see the menu for his efforts here which actually looks to be some pretty decent food. I was wondering what sorts of things egulleters could come up with that would fit a $21 per person, per week budget.

Yogurt works well as a low-fat alternative.

Heres something else I thought of. Lots of cooking books and shows will instruct you on the importance of mise en place and how you have to get everything anally arranged into neat glass bowls before you're even allowed to turn on the stove. I think mise en place is essentially for restaurant cooking where you need to bang out 300 covers in an hour and I think mise en place is great for amateur cooks who are approaching a recipe for the first time. For everyday cooking though, who has time to actually do mise en place? Personally, once I get a feel for a recipe, I can pretty much figure out when I should be doing what. For example, say I'm doing a beef stew, then I'll cube and salt the meat while I'm heating up the oil in the pan. Once the meat is broken down, the pan should be hot enough so I start searing the meat. While I'm searing the meat, I'll start breaking down the mirepoix. While I'm doing this, I'll be turning the meat and pulling the wine, stock, tomatoes, flour etc. from various places. Once the meat is done, I'll start sweating the mirepoix while I dice the garlic. Once I add the garlic, I'll start chopping my tomatoes. Add in the flour, tomatoes, wine, stock etc and set it in the oven. By doing it this way, I can keep everything on a single chopping board and never have to transfer anything. If I'm running a bit behind, I can just take the pot off the stove and give myself a breather. I know some people prefer to cook ultra-organised and others prefer to cook chaotically and my preference has always been that I love the rush of the kitchen where I'm doing multiple things at once.

Something which hasn't been mentioned is that another great base for pan sauces is the marinade you used to marinate any sort of meat. You have to be careful though as most marinades are too salty to use straight as a pan sauce so you have to dilute it with a more neutral base. I made oven baked chicken last night and made what wasn't strictly a pan sauce but had the same idea. In a pan, I very lightly sauteed some garlic and then added in the buttermilk marinade with paprika, garlic salt, pepper and tabasco. I then added some cornstarch to stabilise it and whisked in yogurt until I got the flavour level to what I wanted it and finally mounted some butter to finish. Marinades are great because they have a lot of the meat protein suspended in it so you get added rich, meaty flavour. The only thing is the texture will end up a bit gritty as the protein will coagulate out which is not a big deal for rustic home cooking but you can always pass it through a sieve if you want a smooth, restaurant quality sauce. If you have a very thin marinade, then another thing you can do is to add the marinade to a hot pan a tablespoon at a time, continually deglazing the pan and then letting it evaporate and caramelise. This helps brown the ingredients in the marinade, especially the sugars and leads to a richer, darker sauce.

So pretty much all of your standard steaks, ribeye, sirloin, NY strip, tenderloin are sold cut across the grain. The only notable exceptions are skirt, hanger, flat iron and a few other steaks. The problem is that if you buy say, a 1" ribeye and cook it, then once you slice it vertically, you're eating a whole bunch of 1" muscle fibres. Instead, assume you had the same 1" ribeye cut with the grain and cooked it. Then, if you slice it on the plate against the grain, you're only eating fibres as long as the slice, probably 1/8" or less. This should result in much more tender meat. When we cook roasts, we slice it this way, each slice is essentially a very thin cross section which turns out very tender. Why then when we cook steaks do we do the opposite?

I made a flat iron steak over the weekend. Rubbed it all over with home-made chilli powder and let is sit overnight. Then cooked it in plenty of oil and butter while basting. Had it with some roasted asparagus (truffle salt, pepper, EVOO, parmesan) and first of the season tomatoes. Topped it all off with a balsamic-honey glaze. One thing with flat iron steak I've just discovered is that you seem to have to let it rest longer than most other steaks. I cut into it a bit prematurely and there was a LOT of juice running out. My theory is that because it's cut with the grain, the muscle fibres are longer so they take longer to relax.

Pasta with Pea Puree is one of those dishes you can strip down to the ultra-minimalist version (peas, water, salt) for a really phenomenally clean dish but also a blank slate you can build on (add 2 or 3 of onions, shallots, garlic, butter, white wine, chicken stock, parmesan, mozarella, bacon, proscuitto, potato, truffle etc.). I also like to sautee some leeks and peas in butter as a side for the standard meat & 3 veg.

Here's one I've always found particularly odd. You read everywhere that the reason you make a roux is that if you add raw flour to a liquid, you need to cook it about an hour to "cook out" the raw flour taste. Before I found out about this, I had been using flour and water slurries all the time and never noticed any raw taste. And Beurre manie is raw flour kneaded into butter and I don't see how that could do anything to remove that raw taste. Frankly, I think the "raw flour" thing is a myth unless someone else is willing to claim otherwise.

I don't see what the problem is. Chocolate is already a mix of ingredients already. As long as you throughly mix it, it's just going to get you a unique blend. The tempering temperatures are going to be different from either of the originals but it doesn't make it untemperable.

Here's somewhat of a culinary heresy: The best steaming is done in the microwave. Add 1/4" of water to the bottom of a container, fill it up with vegetables and let it rip on high for 3 - 5 minutes. They come out brilliant green, tooth tender and with better flavor IMHO than stovetop steamed vegetables.

I had leftover roast pork once (It was only once, I swear!). I seperated the skin from the fat from the lean and first rendered the fat bits until they were getting crispy. Then added in the skin to crisp up and then finally tossed in the lean bits to brown slighty. Swirled in a bit of sherry vingar off the heat and a tiny bit of spicy mustard, whisked to combine and then poured it over some greens. Lovely pork salad that totally did justice to the pig.

we had a great wine which was from the coast of france and the vineyards actually grow in crushed oyster shells. The minerality came through very strongly and it was a wonderful wine.

Yum, I love ANZAC biscuits but I've never made them before. I'll have to try them with some maple syrup to americanise them.

That doesn't look very much like it, sorry. If you click on this PDF, the item is no 1208 on the menu. Seafood & Bean Curd Hot Pot.

That might be true for water but it seems like, for ice-cream, most of it isn't frozen, only the seed crystals are frozen and the ice-cream is meant to fully firm in the fridge. If it were the same as water, then an ice-cream bowl chilled to -10C would need to be 8 times the mass of the ice-cream in order to fully freeze it.

Congrats Wendy, reminds me of my time in Hong Kong, living with no oven. By the time I got back, I just wanted to roast!

For me, it's the opposite, knowing exactly what ingredients went into a dish, I am constantly tasting it and being blown away by the depth of flavour from such simple techniques. One recent example I remember was making split pea soup with a ham hock, I would go into the kitchen every 20 minutes to give it a taste and emerge with a dopey grin because it was just so damn good.

Quite frequently when I go to a Chinese restaurant with my parents, they will order a seafood hot pot (hai xian huo guo) which is served in a clay vessel. It has white fish, shrimp, scallops, squid, tofu, greens, shittake mushrooms and possibly some other stuff in it as is served with a thick, pale sauce. I want to recreate this dish at home, does anyone have a recipe for this that they like?

I think we can safely say that The Supreme eG Baking and Pastry Challenge has died a natural death! ← Any chance you can revive it Kerry?

I think lentils are also used. Aren't kidney beans a new world plant? They might not have made it to China until very recently.