Chris Amirault

Well, that sounds to me like a call to action. What might we all be able to rig up to get a sense of, say, flour's emulsifying powers?

A fish starter is interesting, as is a citrus soufflé ending. I'll snoop through Wolfert's Southwest France and see what pops up.

To these good posts above, especially Ah Leung's, I'd add only that many stores may carry the better shaoxing wines behind the counter because they are technically alcohol not cooking liquids.

Homemade only, Doc, for sure. But that cranberry fool might just resemble something I already make. It's very powerful, though, a bit too.... And grapes are a fine idea, Susan, one I hadn't considered, stupidly.

Yes, they are indeed bay leaves. It was a good deal! The two batches finished up last weekend and turned out great. I let them hang a bit longer than I have in the past, so they're quite a bit more firm. The batch made with the aromatics has turned out fantastically. I made a bit batch of naw mai fon with it and we all noticed a difference. I can see how it wouldn't be the right choice in every situation, but it's wonderful.

I'm planning on a cheese course as part of one of my holiday dinners, which will involve, I believe, a Tomme Levezu, a Bleu de Basque, a Fougerous, and a Garottxa, with possibly a fifth added. I'm fiddling with beverages (sherry or sauternes are the two candidates so far), but I'm more interested in the accompaniments for the cheese plate. Right now, I'm thinking that I'll probably just purchase crackers instead of making them, which means I'd like to have a few interesting counterpoints. I know I'll have some hickory smoked almonds thanks to my Bradley smoker, and I may also place down some very thin slices of aromatic lop yuk, a cured Chinese bacon of sorts that can be served raw. I'm looking for a few other items to have with the cheese: a chutney, say, or perhaps some onion confit. Thoughts?

Makes sense. I got the duck broken down and made stock, duck ham, lots of fat, and, eventually, confit. I had to add a bit of smoked turkey fat to the duck fat, but that seems to have added a great new dimension to the confit. I overcooked it a bit -- that is to say, I didn't undercook it a bit, in preparation for the additional cooking in the cassoulet. Beans on the way.

That and the point about cold butter, which I've known as a technique but never understood. Anyone make any headway on that list of emulsifiers?

Here's the link directly to the food critics. In the Zagat-style blurbs, Bruni is referred to as “the George Bush of restaurant reviewers: He’s a little man in a big job who got lucky but has never acknowledged the need to learn on this big job," Sietsema is "a joke," but Peter Meehan comes out on top:

OK, but why does that emulsion create an emulsion with the rest of the sauce ingredients?

That's On the Edge Cutlery, which must have added this recently. About two years ago I called there and they told me only the shop in North Attleboro did it -- which has since closed.

From what I've been reading about this, the question is likely not the ingredients but the method: if you're really whisking those first few drops of grapeseed oil into the other ingredients, you should be able to thicken it with the rest of the tablespoon.

McGee to the rescue. On sausages: On those butter-finished sauces, I think that the same principle applies as with mayo: start with a small amount of butter to break it up and disperse it, and then you can add tremendous amounts -- as long as the temp stays below 135F/58C.

I wonder if this is a way to think about the emulsion in a sausage's primary bind: water, protein, and fat....

So how are the components (egg, oil, rice) of this emulsion interacting?

What's in garlic that supports emulsion? A quick snoop around wikipedia suggests that lecithin is a surfactant, which lowers the surface tension and allows for more even spreading when you spray on that oil. Sorry, scott123! Just trying to use a familiar example to start. Those all seem like really good questions to me. Is there any way to find out the answers? I'm snooping around to find out, but, honestly, I don't have the information at hand.

Elie, I'm planning to use that exact recipe for the exact same purpose (cassoulet on New Years Day, in fact). Can you give precise details on your tweaks of the recipe?

We live in an era when the conversation between science and cooks is more vibrant than ever before, a conversation that has been alive and well here on eG Forums for years. Though fascinating, most of those conversations have been buried in topics on other matters -- on sourdough starters, say, or poultry handling -- making their insights hard to find. It seemed to me that topics devoted explicitly to specific concepts and their useful application might be lively, interesting ways to learn, so... Welcome to the first "Better Cooking Through Science" topic. The purpose of this series will be to talk, ask, and learn about an important concept in food science, how that concept functions in specific foods and recipes, and what you can and should do in your own cooking to incorporate those insights into better practices. If it works, we can all figure out how to tackle seemingly challenging scientific knowledge and bend it to our uses! There are several resources we can bring to these conversations. The two that I will turn to most often (and that thousands of others turn to regularly) are Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Shirley Corriher's Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed. I would urge anyone who's interested in these matters to grab a copy of each book, if you don't have one already. In this inaugural topic, I thought we could focus on emulsions. While mayonnaise is a well-known example, many don't realize that butter, cake batter, milk, cream, and even many sausages are emulsions as well. Lots of cooks are familiar with emulsions as the frustrating mess that results when a sauce breaks just as dinner is to be served; I have a sad memory of watching asparagus spears reveal their embarrassing nakedness as hollandaise cracks into slime and slithers onto the plate. So what is an emulsion? As Corriher states, it's "combination of two liquids that ordinarily do not go together" -- what McGee calls "the container and the contained." These "basically unstable" concoctions, McGee writes, require that cooks both form the emulsion and then "prevent the emulsion from being undone by the basic incompatibility of the two liquids." Corriher writes that an emulsion requires three elements; I'll use mayonnaise as an example: 1. one liquid that gets obliterated into billions of tiny droplets by whisking (such as oil); 2. a second liquid that doesn't dissolve into the first and that stays around and between all the droplets (such as lemon juice, vinegar, water -- even a scant tablespoon is crucial in mayonnaise); 3. an emulsifier that keeps the droplets from ganging up to form bigger drops like the bad guy in Terminator 2 (such as egg yolks). The emulsifiers in egg yolks are lecithins and proteins, either of which would do the trick; having both makes egg yolks super-emulsifiers. The egg yolks dissolve and coat the oil so it remains in separate droplets that stay suspended in the water. And elbow grease is a decided plus: the smaller the droplets, the more likely it is that they'll not go to the trouble of coalescing into larger ones and break the sauce. In addition, says McGee, smaller droplets "also produce a thicker, finer consistency, and seem more flavorful because they have a larger surface area from which aroma molecules can escape and reach our nose." So why, when making an emulsion, should you add item 1 in droplets to start but then later can dump in gobs at a time? As McGee explains, "When little or no oil has yet been emulsified, it's easy for large droplets to avoid the churning action of the whisk and collect at the surface." Later, though, you can add it more quickly because "the existing droplets work as a kind of mill, automatically breaking down the incoming oil into particles of their own size. In the last stages of sauce making the cook's whisk need not break up the oil drops directly, but has the easier job of mixing the new oil with the sauce, distributing it evenly to all parts of the droplet 'mill.'" That's a quick -- and perhaps, in parts, inaccurate, so correct away -- overview of the basics of emulsions, and it barely covers the rudiments of preparing them: start with droplets; more whisking is better than less; that tablespoon of water in mayonnaise is really important. But there's so much more to discuss, such as temperatures, sauces breaking and being recovered, other emulsifiers, oil separation in gravies and gumbos, and the like. I know that my own current questions move away from liquid emulsions, for example. Over in the charcuterie topic, I've been trying to figure out how to achieve the sausage emulsion known as a "primary bind" with regular success, and experimenting with temperatures has answered some questions and raised others (click for an example of that battle). How do emulsions of solids differ from those made from liquids? What role does the addition of ice water have to this emulsion? And how does the heat generated by paddling affect the bind? So: care to join me in figuring out what these emulsions can teach us?

But this person I know is making a few dozen decisions, unknowingly, involving temperatures, hygiene, contamination, etc.; he could kill me without even knowing he was doing it. That teenager works for a corporation that has dummy-proofed everything and would have to make a conscious decision to defile my food. And, of course, what teenager would ever do that sort of thing? But I digress.

From what you've written, it seems that you could ask for it unheated, yes? Maybe they think you don't want it cold.

They're a version of bird chiles: click.

I think that ain't sort of mafé, edsel. Looks like the real deal.

Jensen, I really do hope you'll grab that recipe and share it with us. Susan, I think that's an excellent question. Time to take one for the team...?

Bird chiles work just fine, as would habaneros. I wouldn't worry too much about blistering out all of the other subtleties with those two, as they tend to sit above the other flavors. Something like and ancho, however, wouldn't seem to work as well, as it would get a bit muddy in there -- but who knows?

That looks great, Milagai -- and I've never seen chives before, but that makes a lot of sense to me. Susan, the two links above have a few examples on the spices. I agree with Milagai about the cinnamon, and would also say that thyme, allspice, clove, bay, and cumin -- in the appropriate combinations -- would work. Fiddle, please, and report back. Meanwhile, I have seen a few recipes that call specifically for chunky peanut butter, and the processing that produces brands like Skippy tends to make the stew creamier.