Shalmanese

Did you rest the beef before you cut it? There shouldn't be a pool of juice on the plate like that.

One thing which I've found helps immensely is that I usually buy whole chuck roasts and cut them into cubes myself. Inevitably, theres a whole lot of fatty trimmings left over. I dice those trimmings finely and then render them out into the pan first to get a good 1/4" of beef fat. Remove the cracklings and then sear the beef in the rendered beef fat. Because there's so much fat in the pan, the beef browns perfectly (no flour on the beef). Once the beef is browned, you can drain most of the fat off and saute some onions/garlic and then throw in some flour to make a roux. Just before serving, you can scatter some of the cracklings over the top of the stew to get a nice crunch*. I also do a mix of vegtables in early and vegtables in late. That way, you get a nicely flavoured broth but also some non-mushy ones. If you want to go all Thomas Keller about it, you can discard the first batch of vegtables after they've given up their flavour. Just put the beef on the bottom and then put one of those flat steamer trays before adding the top layer of vegtables. You can then very easily scoop the old veggies out after they're used up. *I admit, I've never actually gotten this far as cracklings have a mysterious way of disappearing from my kitchen when I'm standing around. I imagine it would be a lovely garnish though.

Soy sauce has no fat in it. Is there a maltodextrin that can powderise water based liquids or is it soy with fat added?

Wow, cool! I always wanted to know more about you since we seem to share a lot in common (young, male, go to the same college). I'm interested in seeing what parts of Seattle you can show me that I haven't yet discovered. PM me if you want to do something together this week. I'm also out of school and in the mood to do some serious cooking.

Wow, how did I miss this thread till now? I was a huge fan of the Zkitchen idea when it was first annouced and I'm thrilled it's taken off like it has. It's clear from the menus and comments that BryanZ really just understands food and everything is centered around that. Reading the menus and seeing the dishes, it's very easy to see why this was paired with that, why a decision was made to cook something this way. The mechanics of the cooking become revealed by their execution and you're left thinking "of course, this is the obvious way to make this dish". This is something I see rarely enough, even with top flight restaurant chefs that it's clear Bryan has some major talent. I would love to make it up there some day. Durham is pretty far away from Seattle (although not as far away as Sydney is to Durham I guess) so we'll see if that's practical anytime soon. I have to admit, I'm vaguely jealous at what Bryan's managed to do. I had wanted to do something similar for a long time but was never crazy enough to make the leap. I'm glad he had the initiative and dedication to go for something like this. I wouldn't worry too much about whether NC is ready for this. I think, once you get over an initial level of apprehension and puritanism about food, then it becomes just about the flavour and execution and theres very little differentiating traditional from hypermodern food except that both can taste really good when made by a skilled chef. You're not running a 50 seat restaurant that depends on customers to keep the lights on. I'm sure there are enough people in the area willing to sit down and put anything in their mouths as long as they know it will be good. Promotion is going to be difficult but there are some really innovative ways you could go about it. The art museum suggestion mentioned above is great. What are the decent wine stores in the area? Make friends with the owner there and tell him about the concept. I'm sure he has lots of regular customers who would die to try something like this. Have you thought about doing a couple of luxe menus? I would love to see what you could do with foie and truffles. PS: What is Soy Sauce powder?

In the southeast of china, they also have very small, intensely sweet shrimp. Usually it is just served with a soy dipping sauce at the beginning of the meal. You could certainly look for other recipes from that region for further inspiration.

An Interesting NYT article on super-premium vodkas.

Hrmm... This is rather a different approach but what about serving them with a soft boiled egg and have "asparagus & ham soldiers". You could drop just a tiny bit of minced orange peel into the egg before serving. I forget whether you have access to an immersion circulator but if you just keep the eggs in there at temp, this should be an easy dish to make. I would actually make some noodles out of the cucumbers and make a nest to place the shrimp in. You mentioned you had a hobart slicer. Peel & cut each cucumber in half, scoop out the seeds and then slice them thinly. You can then marinate them in something to get some added flavour. You won't get that crunch you get from sliced cucumber but I guess you could put another layer below to get some more texture. A shrimp chip may work but it may overwhelm everything else. BryanZ came up with a really good way of splitting eggshells. I can't remember what it is though, hopefully he'll pop in. I guess you would want a finely textured, neutral bread for this. I don't see what's wrong with just a standard, good quality white bread. Fried in duck fat or butter would be ideal. The rest of the dishes sound great.

What did they serve it with?

Short wide ramekins are nice if you like a higher ratio of crispy sugar to custard and it's what restaurants tend to use. I just use the standard ramekins because they're more versatile.

I use miso in chicken stocks to give it a boost.

Goddamn it, I would have jumped at this if I was still in Aus . Eastern Suburbs, a buck. Damn.

Uh, no you aren't. Unless you are cooking in a 30+% salt solution (which is beyond the saturation point for NaCl), your not going to get a 105C boiling temperature at sea level (~ 50 grams of salt per litre of water per 0.5C increase in boiling temp). What you described is certainly not standard braising which involves first bringing both sauce and meat up to a boil and then putting it into a 100C+ oven to ensure that the food is kept at a simmer at all times. Your approach might work but I very much doubt it. The breakdown of collagen in meat does not happen to any appreciable extent below 60C and meat becomes cooked past medium rare at 65C. The problem sous vide solves is in keeping the meat between 60 to 65 degrees long enough for the collagen to dissolve. The inherent variablity of the oven means that there is no way to achieve this reliably. You are either going to end up with undercooked and potentially dangerous food or the functional equivilant of a braise which is NOT the same as sous vide. It is but so far you've shown no evidence of understanding the physics and chemistry behind sous vide cooking.

You seem to be misunderstanding one of the main benifits of sous vide cooking which is that it allows you to cook things for extended periods of time at sub-boiling temperatures. If you're doing sous vide solely at boiling temps, then it's exactly the same as airless braising but thats not the point of sous vide.

I don't think any debate is enhanced by the widespread belief of dubious facts. Theres a lot of legitimate arguments about ethical eating but also a lot of specious arguing and I think it's a disservice to the pro-ethical food lobby to be arguing using factually false data.

I would either serve them from most subtle to least subtle or serve them geographically. From the dragonfruit that I've had, I would serve them first since they are almost tasteless.

There was no ban

I've used it to make "duck rice". I had a pot used to render duck fat with little bits of brown still on the bottom. Threw in some rice, some duck jelly and enough water to cover. Made the most fragrant, aromatic rice I've ever tasted.

No, sous vide is not just braising in a small pot. Sous vide is poaching something at sub-boiling temperatures in a fully airtight vessel which does not allow for the escape of aromatic gasses which produces a chemically and physically different product.

I was once in the possession of a recipe for the worlds sexiest chocolate mousse. Unfortunately, one evening, I absentmindedly left the stove on simmer to braise some lamb shanks and returned to find my kitchen ablaze! Thinking quickly, I dashed to my secret hiding spot to retrieve my precious recipe but, alas, it was all but consumed by flame. Grabbing the remenants and dashing outside as the kitchen collapsed around me, I found that all but the last step were consumed by the fire! The sole remaining fragment in my possession reads thusly:

So theres been a lot of talk in the last few years of "food miles", eating locally and 100 mile diets. Some of the supposed benifits of eating locally is that you become more in tune with the seasons, you support your local community, you eat fresher food and just general all round feel goodness. Now all of these are certainly valid claims and I am not disputing any of them. However, the chief claim that the "food mile" movement is making is that eating locally helps the environment through lowering the use of oil. On the face of it, this sounds fairly intuitive but I wasn't convinced so I decided to dig a bit further and try and answer the question does the choice to eat locally decrease the amount of carbon emitted and it seems like the answer is no. I wasn't able to find any good figures for containerised shipping but I did manage to find this graph which shows the Ton-Miles per Gallon for Truck, Rail and Barge shipping. Now assume that the typical surburban family drives a 25 Miles Per Gallon vehicle, lives 2.5 miles from their nearest supermarket and buys 20 pounds of groceries in the average shopping trip. So on one round trip, they will travel 5 miles and use 0.2 gallons of petrol to transport 0.01 tons of groceries. Going with the 514 Ton-Miles per Gallon for inland barges, that same barge could move 0.01 tons of groceries 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel. Even if you assume container ships are the same efficiency as inland barges, you could move that 20 pounds of groceries exactly halfway around the world by ship for the same amount of fuel as it takes for you to go to the store and back. If you buy 40 pounds of groceries rather than 20, then it's a quarter of the way around the world. If you live 5 miles instead of 2.5 miles, then it's once around the world. If you drive a SUV which gets 12.5MPG and you live 5 miles away, then it's twice around the world. You can fiddle around with the numbers all you like but the conclusion seems inescapable, where your food comes from is less significant than how you choose to get it. The math is even more disturbing when you look at exactly what eating locally actually means. For most people, that means buying as much of your food as possible from farmers markets. However, you can't get everything from farmers markets so it's likely that you need to still make the same amount of trips to the supermarket to get all of the other stuff you need. Your trips to the farmers markets then become an added fuel expenditure on top of your existing supermarket trips. In addition, farmers markets are usually further away that supermarkets, just by virtue of there are less of them so thats an even bigger fuel cost. But how the goods get from the farm to the market is also an important consideration. Your typical farmers market has many small farmers from within a 100 mile or so radius individually shipping in small amounts of good via cars and small trucks. Lets say the average farmer ships in 500 pounds of produce from 50 miles away in a 10MPG truck. This means they consume 5 gallons of fuel to ship 1/4 of a ton. Now the prototypical "lamb from New Zealand" and "Cherries from Chile" were probably moved via truck to the nearest port in huge containers and then shipped via sea to one of the US ports before being trucked to a central distribution centre and then on to the local supermarket. Even if you assume the goods travel 5000 miles by barge and 500 miles by truck, it would still only take 4.5 gallons of fuel to transport that same 1/4 ton. If you happen to be living in a port city (Every large city except Chicago), then the distance from the port to your supermarket is even closer and even less fuel would be used. Now, does this on the face of it means that eating locally is crap? Of course not, all of the previous reasons to do with freshness, seasonality and supporting local farmers are still valid. But what is total crap is the idea that somehow eating locally is good for the environment through the decrease in carbon emissions from shipping. While the idea has immediate intuitive appeal, if you peer at the actual numbers, the reality is that modern containerized shipping and distribution has become so efficient that it's only really the last few miles that are important.

So I've been wondering, every time you freeze and defrost meat, theres always some cell rupturing and juice leaks out. The only time I've seen anybody mention it is to tell me to discard this meat juice. However, I've been playing around a bit with it and I'm convinced theres a huge amount of flavour locked in there which has a lot of potential if it can be harnessed correctly. As far as I can tell, meat juice consists of protein and water. If you cook it, the protein will clump up into an insoluable lump. If you let the water dissolve, then the protein mat will start to brown very easily. If you taste the browned meat juice, the flavour of it is pure essence of browned meat and tastes like the charred surface of a steak. The problem is that the texture of just the protein is mildly offputting. It's sort of rubbery and squeaky. The second problem is that the mat seems to be completely insoluble. I haven't figured out a good way to integrate this flavour into a sauce. I've tried buzzing it with a hand blender and that gives somewhat acceptable results but theres still a mildly gritty texture to the sauce. As far as I know, I haven't read about anybody else trying to use this meat juice but I really want to capture that flavour.

I quite like Bengal Tiger which is just north of there on Roosevelt and 65th but I'll definately give Taste of India a try and compare.

One tip I've picked up is to schedule in an "interlude" before the main course. It gives people a bit of time to digest the first few courses and it gives you time to do some serious a la minute prep for the main dish. My standard dinner party format is: Amuse/Entree Soup Salad *interlude* Main Fruit Dessert Chocolate Dessert Soup and Salad are both generally very easy to prep ahead (small tip: Make your dressing and put it in a squeeze bottle) and the amuse can be made just before the guests arrive. Desserts are also easy to pre-prepare generally so I like have something thats made to be served right then. Duck breasts, seared scallops, risotto etc.

a) Does the original stock taste bland? If so, you probably should reduce it before clarifying. b) Did you salt correctly, stupid I know but it could be the cause.