Chris Amirault

Great interactive graphic of the hamburger on the Wall St Journal website: click.

Gumbo, especially if you consider all of the ingredients in your andouille and tasso separately. Not sure you'd get to 30, but....

Doesn't the cold water simply and briefly reduce the temperature of the water? It doesn't have the same effect, for example, of lifting the noodles out and into an ice bath. So you're just cooking the noodles at a lower temperature. Maybe this method is a combination of lore and practicality at a time when turning down the heat (over, say, a wood stove) would be a bigger chore than tossing in a cup or two of water to maintain temps around 95C/200F.

It does in this book, for many of those who have actually read and used it.

Someone's misquoting the book. It doesn't say that ice baths have no point. It says, correctly, that ice baths don't immediately halt the cooking process. The book is filled with references to ice baths, btw, so they clearly think they do something. Just to be clear about the rest of what you're claiming: you believe that he and his team of researchers don't know what they're talking about and that their experimental measurements of temps and times are thus fraudulent? They're consistent with my experience and half-assed experiments, I should add; what did your experiments tell you?

It's important to distinguish between Hawaiian/luau food and tiki food. One can pretty reasonably claim a link to indigenous, authentic cuisine of Hawaii; the other is an invention largely of Donn Beach (born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt), Vic Bergeron, and a large, unacknowledged group of Cantonese chefs working for them who essentially defined tiki food. As someone who has researched the early menus of their restaurants, I assure you that there wasn't much poi, if any, but there were pupu platters aplenty. You could decide to do a mashup of both, of course, but I submit that it's worth recognizing the difference.

That would be my point exactly. Which is that cookbooks shouldn't include a range of preparations, some of which exceed some people's ability to obtain the needed ingredients or tools? That would toss out some of the most important cookbooks of the last decade or two, including everything by Thomas Keller, the Alinea & Fat Duck books, all of the Chez Panisse cookbooks, and Ruhlman & Polcyn's Charcuterie.

The book is simply too big for generalizations. Sure, there are a lot of multi-step dishes. But some are pretty simple and fast. Once you've made that cheese -- which takes about ten minutes of attention -- that mac & cheese is a 15 minute, one-pot meal.

I'm planning to use the coffee stirrer/cocaine spoon I got at Tokyo Disney, Mickey Mouse head and all.

I'd go one step further and say that many of us are the ideal readers for this project, and as such it feels like a dream come true. It is certainly appropriate to imagine other readers who, for perfectly legitimate reasons, don't feel the same way.

+1. I guess I'd rather relax with practical, correct information about the food and techniques I'm using, knowing that, in the end, I'm going to come out with a superior product. I mean, heck, if fried chicken, macaroni & cheese, cole slaw, and cornbread aren't relaxing, I don't know what is!

The point about coming off as a sycophant is a good one. It's hard not to sound like an awestruck teen at first -- until you start actually using it. Then you realize that, like all authors, they made decisions, and some of those decisions you agree with more than others. (I haven't found any that I disagree with.) I wish the cheese weren't as salty; I would dial back the temp on that brisket, that sort of thing. The problem with reviewing it is that one of the main ways you frame a book is using its scope. The scope of this is so massive that there's simply no foothold for such a critique. It's why the references to rotovaps seems forced: they're in there, but they aren't the whole thing.

Is the comment about all but one meat recipe cooked SV accurate? I don't have my copy handy, but that seems wrong. If it isn't, that's a smart observation. I guess I don't get the anxiety part. As someone who got a review copy early on, I certainly understand feeling overwhelmed when you crack the package open and start confronting its scope. But I guess when I am confronted with a ton of stuff I don't know, I feel an eager appreciation for all I can learn, not, well, anxiety about the ton of stuff I don't know.

Forgot two different bottlings of McCarthy's Oregon Single Malt Whiskey, which everyone should have in their cabinet.

Tx for the heads up. I usually dump into a bowl on the scale, so I think I'm ok -- but I guess we'll see!

Well, this situation wasn't tenable: After having several avalanches of those stupid, non-stacking Glad containers, I've decided on these rather space-age stackable containers. Will report back.

To Jenni's point above, my dish is chana masala.

Sorry: work issues, a trip to Chicago, and the big Modernist Cuisine Q&A got in the way of my tea! More this week, promise.

I can't believe you use those horrible corn starch chemicals...

There were six of us at dinner and it was a side that everyone loved. A double batch provided about a cup of leftovers. Posted from my handheld using the Tapatalk app. Want to use eG Forums on your iPhone, Android or Blackberry? Get started at http://egullet.org/tapatalk

Chris, what are the perks of your status in those two places?

Here? Cool.

I'm going to make the mac & cheese tonight when I get home (to serve with some pulled pork sandwiches and a few other things), so I thought I'd share a tweaked version of the ratios in the book. We found that it was a bit too salty, and I wanted a stronger cheddar component. I also tweaked the techniques a bit. Whisk & simmer 100g water 75g (wheat) beer 10g sodium citrate 4.5g salt 1.25g iota carrageenan Grate and combine over low heat: 140g aged gouda (was 200g) 145g aged cheddar (was 80g) Stir until melted/emulsified. Pour into container; bring to room temp; freeze. Just before serving, pull it from the freezer and grate/shred 160g. Boil over high heat: 300g water 100g macaroni 1g salt [down from 2.4g] Don't drain it. When pasta is al dente, add cheese and heat through until smooth and combined. I then put it in a Le Creuset au gratin pan, topped it with seasoned breadcrumbs, and let it sit until the broiler for a couple of minutes. Oh, and, yes, that's dried macaroni, not fresh.

This morning, we were running late, but I wanted to have breakfast out with my daughter. So I called Phoenix Square Restaurant, one of hundreds of non-chain restaurants here in Rhode Island, just down the hill from our new house. When we got there, Bebe and I sat down at the counter, and immediately our two bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches arrived with two waters and a black coffee. "Here's yours, sweetie," said the server, giving Bebe the over-hard sandwich. (I like my yolk runny.) Thing is, I hadn't mentioned anything about how we like our egg sandwiches in the call. At that moment, I realized we were regulars. We're regulars at two other places in the state: Lucky Garden, a Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in North Providence, and Sun & Moon Korean Restaurant in East Providence. We don't get extra food or reduced checks in any of these places. But our girls have grown up going to these places and we know that we'll be treated well, have great food, and enjoy the relationships we've developed there. How about you? Surely you're a regular at some places in your area. What are they? What do you get from being a regular there?

The SVS one sold out already. I just got an email from them to that effect.