Chris Amirault

2c jasmine rice with 2 c water, soaked for 5 hours: Into the Ultra Pride: After 12 minutes, smooth as silk: A little over 3c: The colors are a bit off, but here's what it looked like when I placed ~1/2c of the batter into a well-peanut-oiled cake pan that had been prewarmed in the steamer: After 5 minutes of steaming: I kept oiling the surface, ladling over the top, and resteaming, until I ran out of batter and was left with this big cake: The layers peeled pretty easily, it seemed: Used half the batch in a simple dish with greens, basil, green peppercorns, garlic, onion, shallot: A few notes: -- The batter was, and thus the noodles were, a little bit too thick. Next time, I'd add a touch more water, to allow the batter to spread more effectively. -- 5-6 minutes is too little in the steamer for this set-up, as the center of some of the layers didn't cook through. (The cake pans are thick Chicago Mettalic pans, which may be the culprit.) Next time, 7-8 minutes at least, and a poke in the belly to check. -- I now know why industrial fresh rice noodles are so oily: without a lot of oil, pulling these things apart is a real pain in the keyster. I'm not sure that I'm going to be making these every weekend, but given the sporadic availability of fresh rice noodles here in town, I think that, with a few tweaks, this is a manageable process using the Ultra Pride. Most of the time is unattended, save for the noodle separation just before cooking. And, though I'm a biased reviewer, they definitely seemed like they were more tender and less rubbery than the storebought ones.

I have this year's batch hanging in the basement now and thought I'd share a few tweaks. (The cure followed the Bertolli ingredients I mentioned above.) The first involves the bellies I'm using. I have been buying bellies from a nearby Chinese market for years now; they get their outsanding pork from a farm in New Hampshire, and, after lots of frustration trying to order Niman bellies through Whole Foods, I've switched whole hog, so to speak. Thing is, the skin-on bellies are in thick strips: After a little agita about this, I realized that these slabs are actually a very good size for the uses I have for this product. I can slice it lengthwise on the Hobart for wrapping; I can cut it into lardons, dice, you name it along the short side. It's also easier to hang evenly than the big slabs, and I came up with a neat technique using two holes through the skin: Hung it this weekend and I'm hellbent on at least 20 days aging, so in 3-4 weeks I can report back.

I realized that I didn't post any photos of the food at the ceremony itself. It was catered; I took mediocre notes and so will just do my best to describe what's here. Pre-meal snacks: Rice with sauces, including raita: More rice, plus a beet and coconut dish that I really loved: Stews and idlii: Coconut rice in the foreground, regularly served at the end of meals: The dosa line and chef: My first two (of four) plates: Rice pudding, fresh fruit, and those burnt sugar and coconut treats: The ceremony stage, with fruits and sweets:

I'm going to be giving fresh rice noodles a go following this recipe. The rice is soaking as I type, the Ultra Pride grinder is good to go, and I'm trying to figure out how to do the steaming given the equipment I've got. Any ideas, warnings, etc?

You're welcome, kayb! Did you poach the pork beforehand and use the stock, or just add cubed raw meat?

I think it's in your drink's story, in the sell. Given the broad range of techniques that contemporary bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts are using, you can do just about anything as long as you make the case that it's "modern." Avoid sour mix, artificial grenadine, and non-Coke sodas and all other inventions of the modern industrial age but outside, I think, the intended meaning of "modern" in this context."

Thanks for the post, Peter! It does help to put the comments in this topic into a more understandable context. Which four recipes did you make? What can you tell us about them?

Talked to both the Ritenhouse distributor and a store owner about price, and no one here has a good explanation for why it's still so cheap from the source. Demand is high enough to bump it over Beam, that's for sure....

I agree. There was little in there worth returning to, and the ingredient lists are often wildly skewed toward Western tastes and products (I'm talking to you, hoisin sauce).

I've gotten a response from a local liquor distributor who's going to make some connections. However, the complications of getting basic questions answered is a bit mysterious. Is this a professional association or a secret society?

I was at a beverage industry event the other day and someone brought up the possibility of establishing a chapter (?) of the US Bartenders Guild. Does anyone have any information about this organization? What's the purpose of local USBG guilds in the 21st century? I went online but wasn't sure what to make of it from that information.

I heated the three containers but not the main container. Good idea.

I'm finishing off a Zojirushi bento I made this morning with brisket, mashed potatoes, sweet & sour cabbage, and pickled beets. Besides being tasty, it's also hot. I put everything in the containers warm-to-hot this morning and the food retained the heat pretty well.

Steven, did you see Skor bars? Both Heath and Skor are made by Hershey but -- in a classic late 20thC story -- twasn't always this way. Heath was an independent British candy company, and Skor was Hershey's attempt to battle with them when Heath was bought by Leaf. Of course, later on down the road, Hershey bought Leaf, meaning that both bars were in the Hershey line. I wonder if they've pushed Heath off the shelf and given the space to Skor....

From the story:

I've not had the other two, but the S&C blows Appleton 12 out of the water.

No problems in RI.

Red Vines, Heath bars, and Pay Days. I miss seeing Zagnuts on the shelf....

No such thing as a dumb question. Why starting with Imperial Shrimp?

Rona is right: hzrt8w's home cooking tutorials are a great place to start. There are lots of other topics in the China cooking & baking forum to check out, so snoop through there; I can see you've already found the pictorial guide to Chinese ingredients. If you're use to sauteed meat and two veg and are just starting out with many of these ingredients (various tofu products, vegetable starches, shaoxing, conpoy, pork belly, Chinese pickles, on and on), simply buying them and cooking with them will teach you a lot. How well versed are you in fundamental Chinese cooking techniques? Do you know how to steam, braise, deep-fry, and use a knife and a wok? If not, I'd grab Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking and read it, as you'll be able to get an excellent grounding in technique while making her recipes. Finally, I daresay that many of us here will do our level best to help out! Pick a recipe you're interested in, get the ingredients, and start documenting. We'll lend a hand!

Making the Bernaise veal tonight, and it smells fantastic, but I was surprised that there's no liquid at all. Anyone care to comment?

I was making a birthday drink for a friend who likes sweet-ish whites, and thought of Janet's idea. I just tried this with a Toad Hollow Risque sparkler, made in France using the methode ancestrale, which apparently results in a lighter, sweeter wine. Then I split into thirds the usual ingredients for an Aviation (with violette), put them at the bottom of three glasses with a Luxardo cherry, and poured the Risque over the top. They got raves, in part because the wine released the violette and maraschino in the nose. I wouldn't recommend that wine for most champagne cocktails, but here it is a good choice.

Mitch was proposing one score based on adding up the individual scores. IIRC Zagat doesn't give one accumulated score; they list scores by food, decor, and service, right? I haven't used a Zagat guide for years....

That's it. Man, it was good.

I've signed on as a cocktail contest judge, and that experience has made it clear that an add-em-up point system like the one Mitch proposes doesn't work. It's what we're using for this contest, and it's driving me crazy. Pretty drink, nice explanation, tastes like crap: I need to be able to give that libation a low score, but using the scale, I can't fairly do so. Ditto for Mitch's restaurant scale: Using that scale, you would have to give a luxe joint serving utterly original junk 10s in all categories except the one that would lead most other raters to give the place no stars at all. Rating scales can be built to take that sort of thing into account. For example, you could assign an overall rating based on the lowest category score, which solves the luxe junk problem but doesn't solve what we might call the Imperial Palace problem: given the wine list, Sifton would've been required to give that place a bottom-rung rating.