Chris Amirault

I don't understand. How do ice cubes keep it sharp?

How interesting that you bumped this up. I recently got a vintage induction cooktop (yes, you read that right) at a yard sale for $5 and was going to clean it up and see what's what this weekend. I don't really know anything about it nor what I'll be doing with it (assuming it works). But for big holiday meals and party prepping, it seems useful. I guess, anyway. What sorts of things can this do more effectively than my trusty electric rangetop?

Yeah, me too. It's best to remember that you're one of many people putting stuff down there, and unless you've hung a laminated copy of the dos and don'ts at the sink and trained everyone to follow it obediently you're likely to end up with who knows what going down there. Then you get to clean out the lemongrass, beef sinew, and broken shards of shot glass....

Electric is also very rural, at least in New England where there's not as much propane, it seems, as other regions. There's no gas line to our new house, and we chose not to pay the $10K we didn't have to put one in. Given how much I love my electric stove, it's the best $10K I've never spent.

1 oz pineapple syrup? Is that classic 2:1 demerara pineapple syrup or something else? Seems... too much.

abadoozy, I've had exactly the same issues, and I have a few photos of burnt dishes to prove that something's amiss -- either my understanding or these calculations....

Kerry, that's a great story. Got me thinking about my parents.... What temperature and time do you use for the wings? Do you sauce them in the bag? Usually just 60C for, what, 1-2h. That seems to do the trick. As for seasoning, the 6 year old likes salt, pepper, and thyme, so....

I've cooked on both; different houses have had new and old gas and old and older electric. I'm a two-time convert: I drank the gas Kool-Aid as a 20-something and, lately, have converted back to electric. It seems clear that both work well enough, and you have to learn quirks and benefits of whatever you've got. But, for me, I care most about what I've got when I'm doing the big power tasks: bringing a few gallons of water to the boil is a key example. On a quality home gas unit, that took me two or three times longer than the 1970s-era Thermador electric I have now. So help me think about this, Dave. What is it about the electric ranges that delivers the power on superhigh?

Anna, I couldn't agree more. I'll add that, for parents, it's a great way to get proteins into young bodies. I usually make a batch of chicken wings for my 6 year old for lunch: I cook them in 8-10 wing bags in the SVS, chill them, then broil them as needed. Also, I often have a blander kid protein ready to go when I decide to make a spicier version for the adults.

Welcome, Zachary. And we agree about balance, which is why I said that you want to "layer and direct" flavors, not "balance" them. In this very forum, bostonapothecary is responsible for my jettisoning balance from my vocabulary, in fact.

I don't think that anyone is proposing anything remotely like that. There's no question that high-quality metals play a role in effective cooking. But they just don't play that important a role for most people -- including restaurant chefs, the vast majority of whom haven't built batteries filled with expensive copper pans.

The information in MC focuses not merely on the conductivity and thickness of pans but on other factors, and includes rigorous and pretty convincing experiments about what happens when you think about, say, burner size.

Burner area/diameter is a far more crucial element for even cooking on a stove top than thickness or material. That is to say, my relatively inexpensive Sitram set does me just fine, and spending the cash on Mauviel is a waste of money.

I wish I were affluent. That book was the result of my combining every family gift for all winter holidays in 2010-11. (Chamber sealer was Father's Day/birthday in advance, in case anyone's wondering. ) However, you can't argue that most people don't have $450-600 to drop on a cookbook no matter how they direct their meager disposable income. Maggie, where did you get the 90% number?

Over in the "Cooking with Modernist Cuisine" topic, we've been sharing a lot of tips and ideas that are "modernist" by some measure or another. However, there's no question that most of those tips and ideas apply broadly to all cooking, not just composed plates with reimagined dishes manipulated with powders and rotovaps. That is to say: as many of us have discovered, there's a lot that traditional cooking can learn from this modernist stuff. I'm someone who devotes a whole lot more time to rustic dishes, charcuterie, and speedy family dinners than to multicourse meals filled with el Bulli and Alinea references, and I can tell you that using modernist techniques is changing the way I do just about everything. I suspect I'm not alone, and that many of us have changed the way we approach basic cooking. So I thought we could share those ideas here. Here's my first one. Giving cured products time for the salt and sugar to diffuse throughout the meat produces a much better product. That's obvious for things like hams aged for months, but for me the case in point is bacon, which I've been making for years following Ruhlman & Polcyn simply by giving it a day to dry out a bit after curing. This last time, following The Modernist Cuisine recipe for house bacon, I let the bacon rest for 10 days in a 40F curing chamber after it was done curing, to allow that diffusion to take place. This bacon is, by far, the best I've ever made, and I'm convinced that the extra time spent is the reason.

A blog entry by Erik Ellestad (eje here) on Thad Vogler.

Oooh: an electric griddle.... That's very interesting....

Welcome, Carlton! As a professional photographer, as you as blown away by the photography as this lay reader is?

So Hennes is over here cooking bacon at 225F for 5 hours. That got me wondering about ideal bacon cooking techniques. Me, I think I'm going to make bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches for the fam tomorrow night. I'm thinking about 200F during the 8h work day, perhaps between two Silpats and pressed with a sheet pan. You?

I dunno -- report back. There are so many expressions that it's hard to keep track. I've had a few -- the "Rocks" is tasty enough -- but haven't gone back...

Not here, not yet. How much?

Equipment costs for bakeries in particular involve massive up-front outlays of cash. Also true if you go high-end on coffee and espresso machines....

But that doesn't hold water when you're waiting 10 minutes for them to brew your remarkable coffee at Intelligensia in Chicago while munching on a dry scone, or sipping a weak cup of joe to cut through one of the creamy, delicious tarts at St. Honoré Boulangerie in Portland. High quality stuff in both places, but on the other side of the fence only.

It happened all over Chicago and Portland, and it happens here in Providence too. So here's a theory. Imagine that I'm a small business person, tough, gritty, trying to make my baked goods/coffee dream work. Down the street I have competition: the dumbass who's selling mediocre baked goods/coffee -- an affront to my sensibilities, of course -- but, yeah, I'll begrudgingly admit it, they sell pretty great coffee/baked goods. I call them "the competition." Working with them would be insane to me. I mean, really: to the business owner it's two different skill sets, two different business models, two different up-front equipment investments.

"Enhance" as opposed to "hide/obscure." I believe -- and I think I'm not alone here -- that most classic cocktails seek to bring the spirit into a compelling relationship with other ingredients. This is distinct from the desire to mask the qualities of the spirit in many of the drinks that, at least in my burg, people have come to think are "cocktails." S'all.