Shalmanese

a) The added mass helps keep the temperature stable and the sugars in the onion from burning and turning bitter. b) It takes so damn long you might as well do a big batch to make it worth your while

Scum on stock is caused by liquid protein leaching out from the bones into the water and THEN coagulating to form a mat which floats over the top of the stock. If you roast the bones, the proteins have already coagulated so tehy don't leach out into the water. Personally, I find skimming has an appreciable difference on the clarity of the stock but little affect on the taste. It's just protein after all.

Set menus give you greater consistency with inventory, labour and timing which leads to less waste all around and lower prices for everyone at the cost of less flexibility.

Assuming the pans are just metal and don't have some high tech coating on them, they last fine up until a significant fraction of their melting point. Easily past 1000F (The exception is tin lined copper which I assume you don't have). The main worry is not about the pan but what happens to stuff IN the pan. Oils and other things can form gunky residues at high temperatures which can make the pans difficult to clean.

It's no biggie. I stock up whenever I make a trip down to the ID. I just found it puzzling as those were two things which were almost ubiquitous at supermarkets in Australia so it was a bit disconcerting not being able to find them anywhere you go.

The Safeway in the U-district has silken tofu, 2 for $3. Looked reasonably fresh too. I snagged some today but I don't know what the quality will be like. I'm finding the lack of coconut cream anywhere outside the U-district to be puzzling. Plenty of coconut milk but no cream in either QFC, Whole Foods or Safeway that I've checked. Also, pre-ground and mixed five spice powder has been hard to find. It was fun making my own for the first time but it was odd that nobody sells it. Puff pastry with real butter and that comes in flat sheets rather than folded up would also be a huge boon.

I'm lucky enough to be living 3 blocks away from a great greengrocer who is on my way home from College. Usually, I see what meat is on special and buy that and then start thinking about what to do with it. I also tend to anchor my cuisine in a certain region for the week as it allows me to buy things like herbs and use them repeatedly that week. Finally, on the bus ride home, I usually finalise the exact recipe and figure out all the things I need and pick them up on the way home and cook it that evening. I try and keep the pantry stocked fairly diversely so I can whip up almost anything with just a few fresh ingredients. Last week, I wanted to make cornbread so I got a litre of buttermilk and anchored my cooking in the south. This week, I ground up some fresh five spice powder and bought some cilantro so it was very much asian cooking. The coming week, I still have some cilantro left over and I bought some fresh pork so it's going to be mexican/latin american.

It might be the Orville has some sort of liner in the package to diffuse the microwave heat. Even in a rotating carosel, there are still going to be hot and cold spots. Adding such a lining seems like a good idea.

My old oven in Sydney could stay rock solid at 50C. Generic Braun model but it was great at LTLT cooking.

A metric cup is 250 mL which is about 5.7% bigger than an imperial cup.

Nobody dines exclusively on 10 course tasting menus. If you're a wine lover then in the course of your day to day dining, you'll have plenty of experience in how wine tastes with different foods because you're forced to. As for developing over 2 to 3 hours, if you make it a habit of drinking while cooking then you get plenty of experience at letting a wine develop over a long braise. I guess my point is there certainly are legitimate reasons why you would want to stick to a single variety but in the course of everyday dining, the oppurtunity to open 1 bottle of wine vs 6 bottles of wine is 10:1 so why not make the most of the times you can open 6 bottles to open 6 different ones?

Without the tomatos and the wine, isn't it just a roux thickened brown stock?

Do buffets where you are not charge for excessive wastage? The ones I'm familiar with always charge a certain amount per 100 grams of wasted food.

Here is a guide to making ricotta.

From the restaurant perspective, I think another reason is that it requires a certain amount of critical mass before it becomes economic to do full wine pairings. Assuming you're pairing 8 - 10 wines with a meal, you can only really do half glasses of any wine or the customer is going to get unpleasantly drunk. Which means at the end of the day, if you only get 2 or 3 people opting for the wine pairing, you're going to be throwing away a lot of expensive bottles of wine. Even if you get a lot of customers, you're still going to be on average throwing away half a bottle per wine which only becomes worthwhile if you're moving a lot of bottles. Maybe it's just a cultural thing where it's just not a custom in Europe which makes it difficult to start one.

I still don't get it. Maybe it's the restaurant/home cooking dichotomy but in general, I reverse engineer it by first working out how many bottles of wine to be consumed and then what they are. If you need 2 bottles of wine for a party, then you get a adaptable red and an adaptable white, simple enough. What I guess I don't understand is if you figure out you need more bottles of wine, what the rationale is for ever getting 2 of the same bottle. If you need 6 bottles of wine, why not get 6 different ones and match them to courses? It's the same as the "small plates" idea with food. Sure, it can be taken too far or executed poorly but more variety is usually a good thing and at least adds a little special something to the night. But unlike multi-course dinners where the effort of putting it on rises with each additional course, multiple wine pairings takes almost no more effort than going with 1 or 2 wines over the night. To me, it sounds like a no-brainer.

It depends on what you can get away with I guess. Wine comes in a somewhat inconveniently large serving size. Often the only reason you're offering two wines with the meal is because your group can only drink two bottles worth of wine. So when you have a slightly specialer occasion when you're doing more courses for more people, it can be fun to play around with per course pairings or something similar. I see it as more something fun because you don't get to do it often.

Nobody *makes* espagnole a la Escoffier anymore so I think it is safe to retire the old definition of demi-glace in favour of the more common, modern usage. Demi-glace = stock reduced to sauce consistency Glace = stock reduced to more than sauce consistancy.

How so? I've found that when brining shrimp (as an example of something with a short brining time) that if you brine too long, it's way too salty. Brining time, in my opinion, is a balancing act. Or are you simply saying that at some point it's just not gonna get any saltier, despite the fact that it may be too salty at that point? ← Imagine a dry sponge soaking up water. If you only put the sponge in water for a brief time, the the amount of water soaked up depends on the time it was immersed. But after some point, it's going to stop soaking up additional water and it doesnt matter how long you leave it in.

600 grams for 4 Litres of water is a 15% salt solution. Foods should be approximately salted to 3% as a rule of thumb. As a general rule, 3% brines are agressive, 2% brines are reasonably mild. I can't imagine what a 15% brine would taste like, it's more of a wet cure than a brine at that point. Instead of futzing around with weights, I find it far more convenient to put your meat in a container and then keep on topping it up with a 2L kettle until the meat is submerged, recording how much water went in. Then just measure out 2% of the weater weight and dissolve it.

So I was watching a show focusing on 2 chefs from Canada, Domonique and Cindy Duby who used an espresso machine to make a Pineapple & Muscovado Consomme and it occurs to me that such a device would actually work pretty well for producing all sorts of quick and unconventional consommes. The main appeal seems to be that the relatively quick extraction should prevent many of the volatile top notes from floating off and the coffee filter should stop any particulate matter from dropping through, giving a fast, intense and clean flavour profile. As to what to extract, I don't know. Something with a lot of volatile oils like lemon zest or lemongrass would certainly be a good candidate. What about those fried shallots you can buy from an asian grocer? Would they work? Beets? Keller makes a beet powder so you could run something similar through. Or you could try for a traditional Beef Consomme by frying some beef mince until completely cooked and dried out, grinding it into a powder and then running it through the machine. I don't know how fat would affect the process though. I have no idea if any of this will work but it seems like a potential new fun tool to play around with. Thoughts?

Larousse is an encyclopedia and OFAC is a science book. They should complement each other.

Just make sure to start it early enough so you are finished eating before midnight. These things can have a tendancy to stretch out. Alternatively, you could start fairly late and have an interlude in the middle to ring in the new year before going back for more food. As for critiques of the menu: Why tomatos? What sort of tomatos can you get now? It seems like a very heavy menu. Pasta AND Steak AND Duck? Pasta with butter and then both meats with red wine? All followed by cheese and then chocolate? This is going to get very stodgy. You need to lighten things up a bit. It's also pretty seafood heavy. And the seafood as well is also heavy. I would cut out a lot of the fat (salmon, duck, butter, cheese), add in some greens and fruit and light dishes. Maybe replace the bisque with a broth, turning gravlax into a salmon salad and putting it on after the pasta and choosing either steak or duck. Change the dessert to something fruit based or at least something with less cream & eggs. The EGCI course on menu planning is also an excellent resource.

A 10:1 reduction means 250mL is reduced down to 25mL which is roughly an ounce. That sounds about right. Don't forget that home stock is usually a bit more concentrated than store bought stock in the first place so you have to factor this into the reduction. You can use demi diluted as stock but the flavours are a bit muted due to the long cooking time neccesary to reduce and it seems like a waste of time and effort to reduce it down only to dilute it back up again. I just used demi for sauces and leave stock as stock. Either make 1 batch of demi for every 2 - 3 batches of stock or decant off 1/3rd your stock to make demi and keep the rest undiluted. Depends on how often you use demi compared to stock. HKDave: 2 cups of Demi is 20 cups of stock. I have no idea how you can use that much demi so fast or how you find the time to make that much in the first place. 2 cups of demi would last me 3 months.

Wow, that looks amazing. Do you have the recipe?