Shalmanese

The taste will be affected but it's perfectly safe. Even if you defrosted it to refridgerator temperatures and then froze it again, it would be fine from a food safety perspective.

Check the accuracy of your thermometer. Next time, take it up to 160 and drop a bit of it into cold water. If it doesn't form a hard crack, then take it up another few degrees and try again.

unless the surface tension and viscosity of liquid nitrogen matches that of the product you're putting into it, you would not be able to make perfect frozen spheres, and if you cant do that, then i dont see a point. secondly, from experience, when i freeze portions, even though my mold isnt round or oval in any way, i get perfect ravioli because the outer layer is gelled first and then the liquid inside disperses against the sides of the gell evenly so you get a perfect sphere, reguardless of if your frozen shape was spherical. hope that makes sense... ← Doesn't your second point conflict with your first? The whole point of freezing them is that they dont need to be perfectly round. Then again, caviar might work differently to ravioli in this respect. I was thinking more in terms of freezing a batch pre-service and then just being able to drop them all into the alginate solution at once which would help speed up service.

← Fair enough, I'm still sceptical though. Have you tried cutting through a bread roll? Or disassembling a quail? Those knife blades just seem wrong for so many tasks. I'm hoping to be pleasantly proven wrong though.

Hrmm... what about dropping liquids into LN2 to freeze them before spherification? Would that help with service?

I've had a bit of a think about why I dislike them so much and this is what I've come up with. Of the people I admire in the molecular gastronomy movement, the thing that stands out is their restraint. It's very easy to just decide to go crazy and throw out all the rules willy nilly but what that leads to is crap food. Only those able to deliberately break from tradition in a carefully chosen and clearly superior way can really demonstrate mastery of the rules. These utensils strike me as rule breaking for the sake of rule breaking. As oraklet says, the design of tableware has been a gradual process of refinement for very specific reasons. Unless you can demonstrate a very good reason to break from that tradition, I would be hesistant to try and introduce something radical. Have you actually tried sitting down and eating a meal with these utensils? How do they feel in your hands. I'm worried that if I sat down at a place like yours and found the utensils clunky, the thought going through my head would be "If this guy is so concerned about cool looking utensils that they don't even work right, whats my food going to taste like?" Just my thoughts.

Bar dining is something I love when visiting America which doesn't seem to exist in Australia. It's great for the solo diner, even for tasting menus and I've never felt that I've recieved substandard service.

Ugh, I hate them and the Global comparison has been made before and that may be part of them. But it's more the lines. The blade portion of the knives look far too short and the forks and spoons look too wide. I dunno, it's just vaguely disquieting. Plus, they look like a bitch to clean. Your going to get stuck on crud and maybe even rust into those little holes. However, it looks like I'm in the minority here.

It sounds like you are talking about your Saucier wheras CI is specifically testing saute pans in which the sides SHOULD go up at a 90 degree angle. Even with a saucier, a better but probably more expensive design would be to have the cladding thin out as it goes to the edge rather than stop abruptly. Kind of like this (yellow is cladding): Reviews are targeted towards a specific audience. If you are not part of that audience, then you should take this into consideration when reading a review. In this case, CI is targeting towards people who have either gas or electric stoves and want to process small to medium quanitites of stuff. You have an induction stove and need to occasionally process large quantities of stuff so their review is not going to be in line with your experience. This is not a fault of the review.

Yup, essentially just miso soup added to risotto.

Think about the concentration of flavour you get in a typical marinade and how much flavour permeates the meat. Now imagine if you got that marinade and diluted it 30 times with salt water and how much flavour would then permeate the meat. It's the same sort of deal. The solution is to use the minimal amount of brine possible to flavouring ingredients to maximise flavour concentration. This is tough for whole chicken as you have to deal with the cavity but for stuff like pork chops and chicken breasts, my favourite solution is to just make a really salty and slightly watery marinade to use a zip top bag. You get all the benifits of brining without diluting any of the marinade flavour. Usually, I prefer to use soy sauce or fish sauce or some other flavouring ingredient to bring in the salt. For whole chickens, I don't bother with flavouring the brine since the flavouring wont permeate the meat enough to bother anywy. Instead, I just make up some flavoured butter and slip it under the skin.

Try Salami, Granny Smith Apple, Farmhouse Cheddar and Grainy Mustard on Sourdough.

Good memory . Here is where I detail my Miso Based Risotto of Zucchini, Kangaroo & Orange Zest. It works really well and it's much easier to make than a stock based risotto.

Oh man, I completely forgot about this. But I still abide by this philosophy and I'm slowing but steadily approaching My Mount Everest. Every time I attempt it, I think I'm there but there's always something bigger and more ambitious around the corner.

Sure, the falk are great but the test was specifically of "budget saute pans" and falk is decidedly not budget. I have to say though, without seeing any of the pans, the CI judgement doesn't sound entirely stupid. 3/4 of an inch on the rim of the pan has no disc? If that was a 12" pan, then only 75% of the cooking area is covered by the disc, the other 25% is completely unprotected and thats unacceptable. Especially in a saute pan where it should be easy enough to get the cladding to go all the way to the edge. I wager the other saute pans on the reccomended list had bottoms that had far better coverage. Again, I've not seen the pans so I don't know if the CI description is valid but it's certainly a legitimate reason to trash a pan.

I've heard good things about Torquay and the Great Ocean Road area in Victoria. Lots of small, high end places catering to the tourist trade. Work is pretty seasonal but it sounds like a pastry chef with talent would be in high demand. The surfing there is world class. Maybe you could do Great Ocean Road in the summer and then work the snowfields in the winter or something. edit: Another alternative might be the blue mountains which is far away enough from Sydney to have a small town feel while still having quite a few sophisticated, high end joints catering to city people in the know. Beaches are a bit far away though, about 2 hours by train.

I was waiting for him to retort back with "Yeah... well... Your a plank!"

As an Australian, I've had to content myself with getting American TV shows like this off the internet and it's not often that I can see one with the ads still intact. As a result, I think I burst out laughing for almost 5 minutes straight when I found out that FoA was sponsored by Lipitor! I can't think of a more perfect marriage.

Just use about 80% bittersweet, 20% powdered sugar to approximate semi-sweet.

Send a letter detailing your complaints. It's worth a shot.

How is mexican sofrito related to the italian soffrito and why are the recipes so wildly different?

The credit card bill just came back. Final spending: Food: $980 Drinks: $440 Plate Rental: $70 Misc: $100 Total: $1590 Food came in right on budget. Drinks were way over what I was expecting and, in the end, it turns out I bought far too much alcohol. We only drank about 9 of the 14 bottles of wine and about 1/2 the spirits and all the beers I think. I also bought way too much juice and not enough fizzy drinks (by choice). Heres how the food costs break down: Truffles 60gm - $130 Cheese - $110 Lamb 3 racks - $60 Chocolate 1kg - $50 Duck 6 breasts - $40 Wagyu Mince 1.5kg - $30 Oysters 24 - $30 Lamb Shanks 6 - $25 Wild Mushrooms - $20 Wagyu Brisket 2kg - $15 Ceviche 1.5kg - $15 For the yanks, 1 AUD ~= 0.75 USD so food came out at $750, drinks $330.

With your love of old kitchen gadgets, you should check out this infomercial hawking old cooking wares.

Yes, Wagyu has a lot more fat that other types of beef but the fat is of a healthier kind. More polyunsaturated fats and less saturated.

Intentions: Endearing. Recipe: enchanting, dismaying, hilarious. Description: Priceless. And is the comparison from real life? You gotta love a guy who tries so hard to make cornbread. Your soy-milk and olive oil concoction was fairly OK, but the truffled pecorino was the only "appropriate" cheese? What else did you HAVE? Tripe Brie? Candied Swiss? Next week: Grits. Batten down the hatches. ← I have some bleu cheese, some brie, cream cheese, fontina and butter in my cheese draw at the moment. I guess I could have used the fontina but my thinking process was that the truffle cheese better get used up before it looses all its fragrance. And dockhl I actually DO have some duck confit left in my fridge. I had completely forgotten about it 6 months ago and frankly, I'm a bit scared to open it up and see what it's become.