Chris Amirault

Pedrissimo, that looks great! I will say that one advantage of the Bradley is that you can smoke a ton of stuff all at once, which is crucial for the weekenders like me! Abra, thanks for the post. I think I'm going with a combination (a.k.a. using up the pucks that fell on the ground and that I now can't distinguish....

Went back to Minh Hai, a Vietnamese restaurant on Park Ave in Cranston. It's not one of those pan-Asian places a la Apsara, Galaxy, etc. etc. in town. Rather, they focus entirely on Vietnamese food (though, of course, they do have bubble tea; mine was fantastic). I've reported on their great pho here. My eight-year-old and I ordered goi cuon, the fresh spring rolls with shrimp, which were excellent, though the peanut sauce was a bit too salty for my taste. Lulu got the Com with chicken, which was marinated grilled chicken with lemon grass and their "special rice" (cooked with chicken stock), and that was solid. I got the stuffed squid, muc don thit; they had clearly been frozen prior to cooking and were off texturally but the flavors were excellent. The highlight was the dau hu xao ca tim, tofu with eggplant and onions in a spicy plum sauce. This was absolutely fantastic in every way, and bodes well for future visits.

I'm about to do three of the recipes in the smoking section, one I've done (the turkey breast) and the other two I haven't (whiskey-glazed smoked chicken and hot-smoked duck ham). Does anyone have experience with these? In particular, I'm wondering about what kind of wood to use (I've got hickory, alder, and apple and want to smoke all of the birds together) and about the glaze.

I'm going to go get it when it's out in paperback, but meanwhile I read a few chapters in Borders yesterday while waiting for my daughter and her friend to finish watching "Over the Hedge." Specifically, I focused in on the Ray-Ray and Emeril chapter, because I was hoping that Ruhlman wouldn't beat up those two in the same no-longer-entertaining way. Hell, even Bourdain is having second thoughts about that. In that chapter, Ruhlman makes a distinction between restaurant chefs and television chefs, and expresses what I'd call his admiration for those two as TV chefs. It's clear that he has a great deal of respect for Lagasse and Ray (perhaps increased by his own tenure on PBS?) as hard-working, intelligent people. He also wants the reader to know that Emeril did great work in his restaurants and that Ray never has claimed to be a chef. All in all, it's hard to slam either of them after reading this stuff, which forces me, I think, to have a more considered understanding of E&R's, and Food TV's, impact on cooking, eating, and food in the U.S.

Looks great, Pam. Can you give us the proportions on that lime dressing? I can never get it right.

Lots of good tips here. I'll add that keeping things very cold is crucial, below 40F at the very most. In addition, any recipe that refers to using ground butt or shoulder may assume that you've got the thick layer of fat on it -- an erroneous assumption for most pork produced in the 21st century. You may want to add additional fat (back fat, in particular) if so.

Speaking of availability of product, I just found this dusty bottle in the back of a local liquor store: It still has the ATF labels from many years ago: Any idea how old this bottle must be? It's age seems somehow appropriate to me.

What Abra said. Did the trick for my peperone!

During a heatwave, I walked into my 2-10 pm job at Friendly's as a busboy/dishwasher and found out that the two 6a-2p busboys never showed up and that my shiftmate had just quit. So I spent 12 hours in 100F heat bussing, washing dishes, and scraping food while being yelled at by the waitstaff.

Sam (or anyone), I have a Sitram stainless skillet and a Calphalon non-stick griddle. Thoughts on which I should use? Or should I do a side-by-side and find out?

Sandy, feel free to do so here!

Not for everyone. Surely you've heard that some cooks like to be challenged by a dish, ingredient, or method? Makes perfect sense to me: I'd rather eat raw flesh than cook over gas. As for risky behavior that threatens to ruin food, check out the dry curing done over on the Cooking from Charcuterie topic.

You might want to check out the ice cream, etc. cook-off. There are more eG Forum ideas in the initial post as well.

That's a thing of beauty, Sam. What's the diameter of that pan?

Russ's post makes me think about relative levels of sugar in those peas: fresh-picked sweeties versus frozen bland berries.

Cook-Off XXIII: Crêpes.

Every now and then since December 2004, a good number of us have been getting together at the eGullet Recipe Cook-Off. Click here for the Cook-Off index. For our twenty-third Cook-Off, we're making crêpes. There's been an intense push for a crepe cook-off for many months, and we've finally arrived! While usually considered to be French, crêpes have made their way into lots of other cuisines and, in some cases, were there long before the French ever showed up. A definition from wikipedia, s'il vous plait: In addition, there are banh xeo, the Vietnamese crêpe, banh chiao, the Khmer version, dosas from India -- heck, I think you could make the argument that injera is something of a crepe. So far on eG Forums, we've got a General topic devoted to crêpe fillings, a Pastry & Baking topic devoted to crêpe technique, a topic on Japanese crêpes (which are pretty eclectic, let me tell you), another on injera, and a topic and recipe devoted to mille crêpes. I also found this charming pictorial how-to, which would suggest that you need neither a fancy crêpe pan nor one of those T-thingies to push the batter around. Let's see some crêpes, folks!

Do tell, WHS. What made the recipe so great, do you think?

Interesting -- I've gotten mixed reviews from folks who've eaten at Blaze and the new Gracie's. (And it's green mold on my peperone!)

I must say my charcuterie life is a breeze with this Grizzly. I cut up more pork butt on Sunday and, last night, ground it up and mixed it with the KA, then stuffed it pronto with the Grizzly. A night in the oven to get cookin', and I now have about five pounds of sopressata in the curing chamber downstairs. Looked a little smeary even though I was uber-careful about temps -- but I wonder if it's the milk powder and not smeared fat. We'll see soon enough....

So how would you describe the franchise model?

Seems wicked cool, in more ways than one -- but given the fact that a little bit of care and room in your freezer can get you well within the proper range, I don't really see the need for the expense.

Thanks, folks! I just measured it, and it's the newer 3/8" one. Having said that: when I read the Folse recipe, he mentioned cutting stuff up into dice by hand if your grinder plate is too small, so every time I found a smallish piece of pork during the grinding, I tossed it into the grind bowl. I think that I'll do that more often in the future, to vary the definition a bit -- maybe even dice up a pound or so of the butt and toss that into the bowl, to have even more. I did both, actually. At first, I didn't need to use my hand, but the casing didn't slip off as smoothly after a while. I also like having it stuffed loosely, so that I can move things around more easily. Buy it. Buy it now. It's fantastic, a breeze to set up, use, and clean. The combo of the KA grinder and the Grizzly is just the ticket, man.

So I took another crack at the andouille using a modified version of Ron's recipe: 5 lb pork 1/2 lb fat 1/2 c minced garlic 2 T cayenne 3 T salt 1/8 c black pepper, coarsely ground 2 T dried thyme 1 t curing salt #1 I forgot to add 1 c of ice water. Here's what it looked like after having been chilled and seasoned: The KitchenAid grinder parts (with the coarsest plate) spent the night in the freezer, assembled. I fed the grinder with my hand in a latex glove to keep it cool, which seemed to work really well. After the grind, we're holding at 32F. And, mixing with the KA to get the primary bind (with a frozen bowl and paddle): Still nice and cold: Time to get the 5# Grizzly stuffer out! I mounted it with four screws onto a piece of particle board. That's not going to be enough; I need to have some way to secure it to my rolling island or, better yet, a table, because it slides around when you're cranking it. Also, the place where the sausage feeder tube attaches to the canister drips liquid, which makes me think I should insert a piece of plastic under the plate at that spot. I put a thin coating of the Petrol Gel along the edge of the plate that pushes down on the meat in the cannister. I froze the canister, but, in the end, I don't think it made that much difference. Unlike, say, the KA bowl, it isn't thick enough to hold the cold. Threaded the casings (which I had rinsed and soaked overnight) onto the feeder tube -- and then (doh!) had to squeeze them around the black feeder tube lock before installing it on the cannister. Here's the cannister with 5+ pounds of meat. I did have about a cup or so left over, but I just stuck it in the fridge while I stuffed this batch. Given that my KA capacity is about 5.5 pounds, having this cannister hold just that size works fine, but, honestly, reloading it was a cinch. Then I started cranking, and... ... well, to say that this system is better than the KA is an absurd understatement. What used to take me about 45 minutes of frustrating labor now takes -- no exaggeration -- five minutes of easy cranking. I had to pause to remember to snap the photo because it was so easy. Here are the filled casings before being tied off. After tying them off (in uneven lengths; gotta work on that) and poking them with a pin to reduce air holes, I tied them to the Bradley rack and hung them to dry out a bit on the Ikea rack. One thing I did notice using these Butcher & Packer casings is that they appear to be a lower quality casing than the ones I've been getting at Whole Foods. If you look carefully, you can see these little white lines. Based on what I read above (thanks to whomever wrote it!), I'm convinced that those lines are indeed blood vessels to the intestinal lining. There aren't too many of them, and I could care less, but it was a difference that I noticed. Then I hung them in the Bradley, to smoke at about 180F using a combination of hickory, alder, and apple (basically, the leftovers from some previous smoking). I expected they'd be in there about four hours, but they reached 150F after just under two hours, so I grabbed them and gave them their ice bath. If you look closely, you'll notice not only that they hardly have the dark smoky color that a good andouille needs, but they also have little pockets of liquid here and there.I don't know what that's about; maybe those were air pockets I didn't find with my pin, and they collected liquid? The finished result. Ron's right: they taste fantastic, have great definition, and are exactly what I'd hope for in a good andouille -- with a bit less smoke. Next time, I'm cold smoking them to keep them away from 150F as long as I can.

I think I've found the perfect combination, which I used yesterday while I was setting up today's sausage-o-rama and last night's Thai dinner: Dansko clogs and New Balance cross-trainers. (I've got simian-width feet.)