Chris Amirault

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What recipe/method do you use, Chris?

It's early December, so I'm starting to think about the multiweek process leading up to New Years cassoulet. I've already made the Toulouse sausages a while back on a charcuterie frenzy, and I've been eyeing ducks around town to get the confit going. I also am starting to weigh the crumb/no crumb decision, thinking that this might be a good year to try the crumbs. What about y'all?

Well, the gauntlet has been thrown. Prawncrackers, that's a recipe that I need in Recipe Gullet! I'm always looking for new ways to use chorizo.

Welcome to the eGullet Recipe Cook-Off! Click here for the Cook-Off index. Tis the season for croquettes! Perhaps you never noticed that these breaded and fried bundles of minced or mashed food, bound with egg or thick sauce, were utterly cross-cultural. Though invented by the French, who lend transliterated variations of the term "croquette" to Dutch ("kroket") and Spanish ("croqeta"), they hail from a number of other countries/traditions, including Philipino, American Southern, and NY Jewish -- or so we surmise from this topic on salmon croquettes. They can be filled with anything from vegetables to ham to salmon, so dietary constraints aren't an issue. Finally, since we're hitting holidays (and the holiday party season), they make for great seasonal appetizers when the crowds arrive. As always, we're raising a pretty big tent here at the eG Cook-Off. As far as we're concerned, New England cod cakes and German "Meat Cakes" both qualify. Our quick snoop through the recipes suggest that two different binding agents -- a thick white sauce on the one hand, or potatoes on the other -- dominate, but we're eager to learn more. So what are you molding, breading, and frying?

I think jayt90's right: it's likely to improve them, not harm them. Of course, in the name of science, you should do a test run of both and compare, natch.

Welcome, Chilehead! Clearly your chile palate is more refined than mine: I couldn't mark a difference between habanero and scotch bonnet, period, much less in an elixir as complex as this one. Update: the IB/homemade comparison suggests that the recipe above is a pretty damned good approximation. I suspect for fruit complexity in the IB than in my version. I will also note that a Caribbean friend going through chemo right now reports the sauce's curative power. Godhead, indeed!

So you want smallish items that can be kept at a warm temperature in a chafing dish without significant degradation of the food, yes? If that's so, I'd be worried about lamb chops, pasta, and so on, overcooking or drying out. A few things that might not be too terrible by hour three: stuffed mushrooms a curried squash soup served in, I dunno, onion cups or hollowed apples devils on horseback (click here for a version) jambalaya, biryani, naw mai fon, or another rice 'n' stuff dish macaroni & cheese cassoulet or another bean dish (this one's not awful)

Elie, what would you compare the texture and mouthfeel of that pureé to? Not puréed potatoes, I'd imagine. Applesauce?

I'm not familiar with that particular Boar's Head item. What are the features you want to recreate?

Ditto that. I heard the word "trichinosis" every time I ate a pork chop as a child.

That is remarkably helpful, particularly the part about the rapid hand motion. I wouldn't have thought to ask about that very useful detail. Thanks!

Three quick anecdotes. Growing up, my paternal grandfather was a Gloucester fisherman, and when he'd come back from Georges Bank with a haul, sometimes we'd eat supper at their house. My grandmother would place the fresh cod in a 350F oven for at least an hour and then serve it. Everyone loved it. When I was a younger, I dated a woman who had me over to her mom's house after a few months for Sunday dinner. Her mom bought what was, for her, an expensive center-cut beef round roast, and -- yep -- cooked it at 400F or so for nearly two hours. After the meal and alone in the car, I told my girlfriend, "Man, that was overcooked." She got very angry with me very quickly, saying, "That wasn't overcooked. It was traditional. That's the way they make it back home in the Old Country." When I first saw fresh broccoli in a store as a child, I thought that it was unripe, because it wasn't grey. These all make me wonder about the relationship between tradition, high cooking temps, and long cooking times. Perhaps part of the problem here is investigator bias: I've lived in Yankee New England nearly all my life, after all. But I'm wondering if there isn't something more generally applicable to the idea that overcooked food is somehow homier and more authentic than, well, not-overcooked food. What do you think? edited to reduce hyperbole -- ca

I'm eager to hear recommendations for cocktails that benefit from grapefruit bitters. I'm thinking that a Bennett Cocktail would hit the spot. Other ideas?

Just the sort of bad seeds that would be carrying around laptops and talking on their cell phones.

So help this addled right-coast diner denizen. What makes a roadhouse a roadhouse exactly? ETA, and then remove, a Patrick Swayze joke.

Just a note to say that great eG Forums topics like this one wouldn't be possible without the financial support of the Society's sponsors and donors. As a member of this non-profit organization, your contributions pay for forum upkeep, the eG scholarship fund, and many exciting Society projects in the works. I know I speak on behalf of all of us in eG Society management and volunteer staff in saying thank you for your support! If you're not yet a donor, there are many ways to contribute. Click here for a list of ten ways that you can help the Society. Now back to the food -- and thanks!

Just a note to say that great eG Forums topics like this one on Ah Leung's trip wouldn't be possible without the financial support of the Society's sponsors and donors. As a member of this non-profit organization, your contributions pay for forum upkeep, the eG scholarship fund, and many exciting Society projects in the works. I know I speak on behalf of all of us in eG Society management and volunteer staff in saying thank you for your support! If you're not yet a donor, there are many ways to contribute. Click here for a list of ten ways that you can help the Society. Now back to the food -- and thanks!

Actually, I think that the point of the book is that we all shouldn't merely just make do. That's one of its strengths to me: take your food and its preparation seriously, and you'll be rewarded on your plate and in your mouth. The entire section on salting is a good case in point. The section on veal stock is there to make a similar case, because veal stock is, for Ruhlman, the ne plus ultra of refinement. He singles out beef stock, whose bones "result in an unpleasant bone-gelatin flavor," as inferior and unrefined. There's nothing wrong with making the case for superiority and refinement, of course. But we shouldn't confuse it with making a more inclusive case for making the best you can do with what you have. It's an important distinction, particularly if you're thinking about giving this book to someone who can't source the ingredients. Who wants to feel like they're making do with second-rate ingredients on the one recipe in the book?

Thanks, John. I didn't add any more vodka and strained it tonight, finishing it with some Vietnamese burnt sugar syrup in my fridge. Made a fine Pisco Sour with it tonight. As for scale, I use a My Weigh KD-600, which just has 1g units. Good enough for this sort of thing, at least in these quantities.

I was snooping through the Mountain Rose catalogue that came with my order of bitters ingredients, and I spied these "organic flavorings." Ever since reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, I've been aware that the "natural" in "natural flavorings" doesn't usually mean what I used to think it means, referring instead to a highly industrial product. But "organic flavorings"? Here's what the US FDA's Code of Federal Regulations has to tell us on the subject of artificial and natural flavoring: I can't find anything about "organic flavoring" there or elsewhere, though I would guess that we're talking about derivatives from organic items on that natural list above. Or is this just a marketing trick that hasn't been FDA-ed yet?

Woke up this morning and noticed that the rinds soaking for John's grapefruit bitters recipe were barely covered. I used a cup of vodka, and I'm tempted to add more. I'm also tempted to let it sit more than 12 hours. Resist? Give in?

Boy, despite their shared interests in "set it and forget it" cooking, a few different internet searches suggests that there's not a lot out there to bridge the wide gap between the crock-pot traditionalist and molecular gastronomist. Does anyone have experience with crock pots that maintain steady temperatures within, say, +/- 5 degrees (as checked by a probe thermometer)?

Nancy, what's the benefit of this over a sieve? If it's just going back and forth... I'm not sure I get the difference.

Yet another reason -- as if Chicagolanders need another -- to drink liquid only at the Violet Hour.